Such calls are, I believe, ill advised. But there is probably an avenue here for Democrats to use this to their advantage.

I understand why McConnell and the state of his health have become such an idée fixe, here at what looks to be his final act. First of all, McConnell is basically the Final Boss of a couple recent trends: the spate of disappearing lawmakers who have made news over the last year or so, and the country’s growing negative feelings toward the gerontocracy and the perception that too many aging and infirm lawmakers are clinging to power long past their sell-by date.

But there are deeper layers of anger and resentment on display among those looking to shove McConnell out the door. He achieved mythic villain status during the Obama era, when his strategy of total obstruction, and the belief that the GOP must never give the president a win, was so total that it abrogated Washington norms. The parallels you can draw at this moment between McConnell shielding his health status from public view and his refusal to give Merrick Garland a hearing and insistence on leaving a Supreme Court seat empty are extremely obvious. Moreover, as Democratic voters search for “fighters” in their party to replace lawmakers deemed to be too accommodating to Trump, they are essentially beseeching their own to adopt the tactics that McConnell deployed to maintain and increase his party’s power.

The passions of the public, driven in equal measure by vindictiveness and projection, have lately become Beshear’s problem, as calls mount for him to do some undefined thing to force the issue itself. And this isn’t just coming from the social media randos (though it is coming from them): Former Illinois Congressman Adam Kinzinger recently took to Threads (which is still a website, apparently) to say, “I think the Governor of Kentucky has every right and responsibility to either see Mitch or declare the seat vacant.”

Folks, just some friendly advice here. Before I make demands of a Democratic governor of a red state to do something that’s likely to put state Republican lawmakers in a hysterical fury, I like to check on whether or not it’s likely that the governor will end up impeached. In this case, Republicans occupy 80 of the 100 seats in the state House (where you need 51 to impeach) and 32 of the 38 seats of the state Senate (where you need 26 to convict). So this maybe isn’t the best time for Beshear to bully his way into McConnell’s hospital wing like some righteous commando. Unless, that is, you want us to be down one blue-state governor (and one promising Democratic presidential candidate).

Beshear seems to know what he’s doing, in any case. In an appearance on Bloomberg TV, he shot down the idea of his calling a special election, saying that those who “are really pushing I think are under the impression that a Democrat in Kentucky might be able to win that election. It’s been since 1992 that we had a Democratic senator in Kentucky.” He also noted that McConnell missing votes while the seat goes unoccupied “might not be a bad thing.”

“McConnell hasn’t been there to vote on the SAVE Act, which would tear voting rights away,” said Beshear. “He hasn’t been there to vote to support this war on Iran that this president started and shouldn’t be continuing ... not having Mitch McConnell show up isn’t necessarily a bad thing because he certainly doesn’t show up to help the American people.” In the meantime, the governor has called on McConnell to either disclose his health status or resign. That, I think, covers all the bases as far as what Beshear can and should be doing. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a role for other elected Democrats to play in harnessing the passions of their base and channeling them to a larger purpose.

The McConnell affair is emblematic of many pernicious aspects of Trumpism: The lack of transparency is part and parcel of a party that centers lies and obfuscations in its politics; the clinging to power by corrupt means reflects the party’s larger desire to suppress the vote and dodge the Constitution. Echoing Beshear’s commentary on how good it is for the country to have McConnell out of commission, and thus unable to cast destructive votes, would be a great way for Democrats to highlight how important it is to evict other GOP senators from their perches. And this is maybe the best time for Democrats to talk about McConnell’s toxic legacy—we all know that when he does pass, those who’ve had a front-row seat to his vicious power-mongering will feel the urge to not speak ill of the dead.

Most of all, this is a moment when Democrats should respect and make use of what seems to be a deep vein of anger toward McConnell among their base. I think this whole episode is stirring a lot of recollections: the memory of Democrats fruitlessly trying to entreat Republicans into the policymaking process even as McConnell urged gridlock; the remembrances of McConnell controlling the makeup of the Supreme Court even as it becomes more apparent that Democrats will need to be similarly radical. I think it’s possible that the weird way McConnell’s camp opted to go into hiding may contribute to the GOP’s destruction in the midterms. But it will only work if Democrats make it clear that the obsolete politics of bipartisan comity, which McConnell took it upon himself to destroy in order to bring rack and ruin to the Democrats, will die with him.

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

Some New New Republic Newsletter News:

The New York Times reports that Musk plans to spend $100 million to $120 million to help Collins, as well as other Republican candidates in close Senate races. Collins, who recently got a new Democratic challenger in former state Senator Troy Jackson, has an uphill battle to keep her seat in the blue state of Maine.

In addition to Maine, Musk’s super PAC, America PAC, plans to spend money in Alaska, Iowa, Ohio, and Michigan, all states with Senate contests where Democrats are polling well. The super PAC is also considering investing in the Senate races in Georgia, North Carolina, and Texas, and is already backing House Republican candidates in California, Wisconsin, and Washington.

America PAC is reportedly coordinating with major conservative organizations outside of the Republican Party, including the Sentinel Action Fund and the Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity. Musk’s organization plans to utilize its funds to knock on voters’ doors before November.

While Musk’s efforts successfully got President Trump elected in 2024, his political work since then has backfired. His money and public appearances in Wisconsin’s Supreme Court election last year ended up costing conservatives the race, and possibly even broke the law. After initially swearing off politics, he’s now back with a vengeance to back his old friend Trump.

But with more than a year of bad press from his Department of Government Efficiency’s decimation of the federal government, Musk’s name is mud with voters. Democrats will be only too happy to point out when he backs their opponents, and he’s going to have to resist his desire to make public appearances unless he wants a repeat of Wisconsin.

NOTUS asked Moreno Friday whether Republicans should move to replace Representative Max Miller on Ohio’s ballot, after gruesome allegations surfaced that he had physically abused his ex-wife, Emily Moreno.

“I don’t know,” the senator told NOTUS.

It’s not clear what about this situation has Moreno so mystified. Moreno’s own daughter accused Miller of throwing hot water on her body, holding a gun to her head, and breaking their two-year-old daughter’s collarbone. Earlier this week, Emily Moreno filed for a new restraining order against Miller, alleging that he’d physically grabbed one of her attorneys and used a profane slur.

If that doesn’t elicit the strongest condemnation, what does the Ohio senator care about?

Moreno’s not alone in his total apathy. Other Republicans—including the entire Ohio Republican delegation—have remained disturbingly silent on the allegations.

Reagan McCarthy, a spokesperson for Moreno, hit back at questions about Moreno’s continued support for his former son-in-law. “While we won’t dignify this baseless attacks by Democrats and their media allies, Senator Moreno will not speak on active litigation involving his family,” McCarthy told NOTUS in a statement.

Trump on Friday dismissed concerns that Iran was likely responsible for a cyberattack against Minnesota’s municipal water systems, instead blaming state officials. The president did not provide any evidence for his claim.

Shortly after, Walz fired back.

“Trump knows exactly who is responsible for this attack, and knows that other states were hit too,” Walz wrote in a post on X. “This is what modern warfare looks like, and it further illustrates there’s no plan to win a war with Iran.”

In the last week, at least seven states have reported cyberattacks against their municipal water systems, according to the FBI. Though the attacks haven’t been definitively attributed, federal and state officials say they carried trademarks of Iranian hackers.

Still, Trump ranted wildly during his Cabinet meeting at Camp David, asserting that Minnesota was to blame for the attack. “You know who’s behind it? Minnesota. Because they’re grossly incompetent. I think the governor’s behind it. I don’t think there was an Iranian cyberattack,” Trump said.

The Trump administration has long targeted Minnesota and its large immigrant population, due to the president’s blatant Islamophobia. The president has continued to pursue fraud allegations against Minnesota officials in a transparent effort to punish Democrats and antagonize immigrants.

At a Cabinet meeting hosted Friday at Camp David in Maryland, Trump was asked by a reporter whether the “Anti-Weaponization Fund” created by his settlement with the IRS, which set aside $1.776 billion for anyone who felt politically prosecuted by the government, was actually dead and, if it was, why the Department of Justice wouldn’t put that in writing.

“Well, it is dead, but you know, I wish it weren’t, to be honest with you. I think people were horribly treated, horribly abused,” Trump said. “I’d like to see them compensated for the pain. They lost their families. They committed suicide, many people committed suicide.”

Trump on the weaponization fund: "It's dead, but I wish it weren't" pic.twitter.com/2S4pyKt5xm

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 31, 2026

So just to recap: Trump doesn’t want the slush fund dead, despite past claims from the Department of Justice that the fund isn’t moving forward.

Trump was also asked about whether he was willing to waive the settlement’s provision that he, his family, and his businesses would be protected from all IRS audits in the future in order to have acting Attorney General Todd Blanche confirmed. He dodged the question, only saying Blanche “should be confirmed forthwith.”

All of this points to Trump trying to hold on to the IRS settlement even after federal judges have ruled against it. It raises the question of whether he’s still going to try and implement the fund secretly—and validates the Republican holdouts who are refusing to confirm Blanche until they get some answers.

As an aside, Trump’s claim that the fund is necessary due to suicide among January 6 insurrectionists is rich. On Thursday, New Jersey Governor Mike Sherill proclaimed July 30 “Brian Sicknick Day,” in honor of the Capitol Police officer and Garden State native who died from his injuries one day after responding to the Capitol riots. Four other police officers who responded to the riots committed suicide within seven months.

Yet Senator Susan Collins, who recently voted to give ICE $70 billion in funding with zero reforms, is now trying to mitigate the issue as a liability or even turn it in her favor. And I fear this is something that Democrats—who almost certainly must defeat Collins to win the Senate—have to take seriously.

Collins told Semafor in an interview that she’s personally secured a new commitment from ICE to require all agents to wear bodycams going forward. “By the end of August, body-worn cameras will be deployed nationwide,” Collins said, emphasizing that this is “by my request.”

Collins’s effort to take credit for this is ridiculous. She voted for the aforementioned no-strings-attached $70 billion, which will supercharge ICE’s paramilitary operations in countless awful ways. She also voted against an amendment in early June that would have required bodycams. The commitment she’s secured from ICE is a joke in comparison to all she’s done to empower it.

But it’s absolutely possible that Collins’s bodycam gambit—and other tricks she might cook up—could nonetheless soften this issue’s impact on her reelection effort. Democrats cannot let that happen.

Here’s why this is a concern: It’s exactly the sort of tactic that has made Collins a wily, resilient survivor in the Democratic-leaning state of Maine. Gestures just like it have persuaded many Mainers that she’s independent of the national party and Donald Trump and, importantly, that she fights for the state.

Collins will say, in other words, that after this horrific ICE shooting, she aggressively represented Maine’s interests and directly took on the Trump administration to do so. Again, it’s preposterous. But note this: There are already examples of local press coverage crediting her with securing ICE bodycams. The headline from one Portland-based outlet reads: “Collins says ICE agents will start wearing body cameras by end of August.”

If you want to know how Collins keeps getting reelected in a state that Donald Trump lost by seven points in 2024, one that no Republican presidential candidate has carried since George H.W. Bush in 1988, take a gander at those press clippings for a clue.

To be fair, Maine Democrats are pushing back hard on Collins’s ploy. “Collins’s support handed ICE $70 billion with no guardrails,” the campaign of Democratic challenger Troy Jackson told me in a statement. “If she wants credit for a bodycam headline this week, she can start by explaining why she voted to fund ICE with a blank check and zero accountability attached.”

What’s more, Democrats assure me they take seriously the need to prevent Collins from turning the tables on ICE in any way. They say Collins is already in deep trouble on inflation and health care, issues that will drive the race. They doubt Collins can use ICE bodycams to establish her independence in the face of those other overwhelming problems. Even if she tries, they say, it will only remind people of her votes to empower ICE.

But the worry here is not that Collins can suddenly campaign aggressively to transform ICE into a uniformly winning issue for herself. She’ll still have to tiptoe around it. What can happen, however, is that she starts citing the securing of bodycams in a longer litany of things that demonstrate her willingness to take on Trump on Maine’s behalf.

Put it this way: It’s not hard to imagine ads from the Collins campaign addressing ICE appearing on Mainers’ televisions before Democratic ones do. Such an ad would not be all about ICE. But it might highlight her move on bodycams as a bullet point among others establishing her “independence.”

The problem is that preventing this might require Democrats to put real money into their own ads attacking her over ICE. They may still do this; earlier this year, the Democratic-aligned Senate Majority PAC launched $2 million in ads targeting Collins this way. But that was months ago, and the latest ICE shooting has galvanized Mainers anew. Top Democrats tell me no decision has been made on whether to run ads on this going forward.

All of which has bearing on the interminable argument among Democrats over how hard to lean into ICE and immigration. Democrats should stick to kitchen table issues instead, we keep hearing, since voters care about them more (or worse, they should avoid immigration entirely because it automatically favors Trump). But the Maine race underscores why this sort of advice is mostly useless.

Look: Even if you accept that economic issues matter more to voters than ICE does, surely Collins shouldn’t be given free rein to cite ICE bodycams as a signifier of her fighting independence, with little or no Democratic paid media pushback. It would be perverse if Collins ads mention ICE before any Democratic ads do.

This issue is ripe for taking on aggressively. A new CNN poll finds that Americans say ICE makes our cities less safe by a 20-point margin. It finds that only 39 percent approve of Trump’s handling of immigration, versus 61 percent disapproving—a 22-point deficit. Among independents, that’s a staggering 34–66.

That’s not all. A recent Fox News poll finds Democrats essentially even with the GOP, 50–49, on which party would do a better job on immigration. And on the issue the new Strength in Numbers and Verasight poll also finds Democrats almost tied with the GOP. While other polls still put Republicans ahead, public opinion is plainly moving in Democrats’ direction.

Jackson, the Democratic challenger, is for abolishing ICE, and it’s unclear how that will play with moderates. But it’s good that he’s already willing to take on ICE very aggressively. Midterms are referendums on the party in power. Trump and ICE are both hideously unpopular. Democrats should proceed as if that presents an opportunity—because it does.

Collins knows she’s on defense. After the recent shooting, she announced she’d privately gotten Trump to agree to end ICE vehicle stops—which he promptly upended by continuing them. Yet Collins—a resourceful politician—quickly came back with this new bodycam ruse. This time the administration may help her pull it off by delivering on bodycams—and letting her take credit for it.

It’s plausible—or even likely—that Democrats will figure out how to foil this scheme. Still, the problem is absolutely worth worrying about and thinking through right now. As we’ve already seen, Collins is very, very good at this sort of political alchemy. Democrats should think seriously about putting real money into thwarting it.

Speaking at a Cabinet meeting at Camp David, Trump dismissed officials’ concerns that a cyberattack on municipal water systems in Minnesota was the work of Iranian hackers.

“I don’t think so. I think I blame it on Minnesota, because they’re grossly incompetent,” Trump said.

“I would blame it on Minnesota and the governor, the corrupt governor of Minnesota,” Trump continued, referring to Governor Tim Walz. “They like to say, ‘Oh, it’s Iran!’ Iran should be so lucky. Iran’s got bigger problems than worrying about Minnesota.”

Trump: "We heard in Minnesota there was a cyberattack and they blame it on Iran. I don't think so. I blame it on Minnesota because they're grossly incompetent. Iran's got bigger problems than worrying about Minnesota." pic.twitter.com/y1Mr6jjgaY

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 31, 2026

But Trump offered no evidence to support his claim, apparently motivated not by facts, but by sheer pettiness.

Federal and state officials said earlier this week that the cyberattack was probably the work of Iranian hackers, but they have not definitively determined who is responsible. They also cautioned that the hackers could simply be posing as Iranians in order to escalate the conflict between the two countries, though former intelligence officials said this was unlikely.

If the hackers were hoping to ratchet up the tensions between the U.S. and Iran, they failed by picking a state that Trump has designated as an outlet for his blatant Islamophobia.

As reporters moved to exit the Cabinet meeting, Trump resumed his ranting about Minnesota.

“I think that Minnesota is behind it!” he declared.

“You know who’s behind it? Minnesota. Because they’re grossly incompetent. I think the governor’s behind it. I don’t think there was an Iranian cyberattack,” Trump continued. “I think that Minnesota ought to get its act together. It’s one of the worst-run states.”

The president teased that his administration was planning “massive future things having to do with corruption” in Minnesota. The Trump administration has continued to pursue fraud allegations against Minnesota officials in a transparent effort to punish Democrats and antagonize immigrants.

A federal judge flamed the government during a hearing Thursday, noting that Justice Department attorneys had failed to provide evidence “justifying” the Defense Department’s decision to class the AI company as a national security risk, or Donald Trump’s subsequent order barring federal agencies from utilizing the company’s services.

California-based U.S. District Judge Rita Lin literally spelled out the questions she would ask the government’s attorneys via a legal notice earlier this week, but the DOJ still failed to impress. Lin remarked at the outset of the hearing that, “if anything, it seems like the record in some ways has gotten worse for the government,” according to the Law & Crime network.

In May, Lin blasted the government for the “Orwellian” way that Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth attempted to sever ties with the AI contractor after Anthropic refused to grant the Pentagon unrestricted use of its AI bot, Claude, for military purposes.

At the time, the president and Hegseth claimed that Anthropic had gone “WOKE” for arguing that Claude could not safely or reliably be used for “autonomous lethal warfare and mass surveillance of Americans.”

“Having reviewed the record that the parties have submitted on the cross motions for summary judgment, it appears to me to be largely the same as the record that I assessed at the preliminary injunction stage,” Lin said Thursday. “I don’t see additional evidence from the government really justifying what it did.”

She added that she found it “really troubling” that the Trump administration was taking a position that “seems at odds to me with the First Amendment,” in “threatening to take away contracts from anyone who might do business with them” by “labeling them as subversive.”

Lin even posed a hypothetical question: whether it would be constitutional for the government to terminate “every defense contract with anyone who’s ever publicly criticized President Trump.”

When DOJ lawyers hedged, Lin said, “I’m surprised that you can’t give a yes to what seems to be an easy question.”

The finalized plan, published by the State Department on Friday, requires visitors from a select list of countries to put up a bond of $10,000, $15,000, or $20,000, which would be paid back when their B1 or B2 visa expires. The pilot program for the bonds was introduced last year, and affected 50 countries.

Most of the affected visas last about three months, but some of them are for 10 years, meaning that visa holders wouldn’t get their money back for a decade, American Immigration Council senior fellow Aaron Reichlin-Melnick noted. The move is guaranteed to further hurt the U.S. tourism industry at a time when it is already struggling thanks to Trump administration policies.

During the World Cup this summer, the Trump administration suspended the bonds for anyone who had a ticket to one of the games. But many fans still were unable to attend, including the relatives of some of the players, thanks to a separate travel ban and other visa restrictions.

Trump’s immigration policies have cost the country billions of dollars in tourism and also caused prices of goods and services to go up for Americans. U.S. visa policies have also hurt international student enrollment and in turn led to a big drop in revenue for universities and colleges. Now that this visa bond program is being finalized, the U.S. is set to only further suffer economically.

The 84-year-old Republican senator has not made a public appearance in weeks, ever since he was rushed to the hospital after being found unconscious at his Washington, D.C., home on June 14. Since then, McConnell’s office has refused to provide any meaningful updates on the exact state of the senator’s health, the reason for his extended hospitalization, or if and when he plans to return to Capitol Hill.

Beshear has until this Monday, August 3, to call a special election so Kentucky voters can choose a new senator in time for the midterms. Under Section 152 of the Kentucky state Constitution, a special election to fill a vacant seat must be called at least three months ahead of the vote—and since the midterm elections are set for November 3, Monday is exactly that three-month cutoff.

Kentucky’s law on Senate vacancies, House Bill 622, which was passed in 2024, is still legally untested. It eliminated the governor’s ability to appoint interim replacements for vacant U.S. Senate seats and mandated that any vacancy be filled by a special election, but as there are several competing legal provisions, it’s not yet clear what would happen in the courts.

Although Kentucky traditionally votes Republican at the federal level, Beshear, a Democrat, has been elected twice as the state’s top dog. A special election might just give Democrats a chance to send another one of their own to the Senate.

Beshear has repeatedly called on McConnell to justify his absence from Congress or to step down in time for Kentucky voters to choose a replacement. If the senator does not retire earlier, he will leave the Senate at the end of his term in December.

“I am addressing this letter to Senator McConnell under the assumption that he is capable of reading and responding verbally, and not incapacitated by means of consciousness or cognition. If the Senator is unable to respond for either of those or other conditions, consider this letter a demand for his Senate staff to be honest and transparent with the people of Kentucky,” Beshear wrote Monday in a letter to McConnell obtained by CNN.

McConnell’s office has only released two unconvincing photos of the senator alongside his wife, Elaine Chao, since his hospitalization. The latest statement from the senator’s office, released on July 27, said that McConnell would not yet be returning to his legislative duties in Congress, but he was “looking forward to getting back to the Senate and to Kentucky.”

McConnell’s ongoing absence has caused a stir among D.C. lawmakers and political commentators alike—from rumors that the Kentucky senator was brain-dead to pointed questions from MAGA-aligned allies, to a missing-person poster taped outside the Russell Senate Office Building.

Chief of staff Susie Wiles made a rare appearance on Capitol Hill Wednesday to implore top Senate Republicans to pass the wildly unpopular voter restriction bill ahead of the midterm elections.

“This was her attempt to say to [Senate Majority Leader John] Thune and [Senate GOP Whip John] Barrasso [that] ‘A lot is stalled in the Senate. SAVE/reconciliation ... nominations ... what can we do?” a person familiar with the discussion told Politico via text Thursday.

Wiles was also interested in discussing efforts to end the filibuster, a Trump priority that the upper chamber has repeatedly rebuked. The stalled succession of acting Attorney General Todd Blanche was not mentioned, multiple sources told Politico.

The discussions were “candid” but not immediately productive, according to the unidentified source.

“Thune basically said: I want to move the president’s agenda whenever it has the votes,” they added.

Wiles’s visit has been interpreted as a deliberate attempt by the White House to smooth over ruffled feathers and keep the president’s political priorities on track—particularly after White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt put Thune on blast last week, sharing with reporters during a White House press conference that Trump’s patience was “running out” on the SAVE Act.

“He wants to see as much of the SAVE America Act passed by the August recess,” Leavitt said at the time. “He knows that’s what the American people want to see passed.”

Thune was quick to hit back, bluntly stating that the caucus simply didn’t have the votes.

That timeline would offer Senate Republicans just five more business days to pass the controversial legislation, which promises to ban mail-in voting and institute new voting policies that would require voters to prove their identities via either a birth certificate or passport in order to access the ballot box.

“You can’t show how high the importance of this issue is to the president other than bringing in Susie,” a former Trump adviser told Politico. “If there is an ability to land it, the president is certainly putting pressure on Susie to land it. It’s still an uphill battle.”

In a Thursday memo review by The New York Times, Brooks Broeke, the director of the volunteer program, announced a “temporary pause” on the tour program for the first time in five decades.

The move follows a Times interview with Sandy Weiswasser, an 87-year-old volunteer tour guide who spoke candidly about Trump’s takeover of the Kennedy Center.

“This place used to be really thriving and busy and crowded,” Weiswasser said in the interview published Monday. “Now it’s a black hole.”

Before the memo announcing the pause was circulated, three volunteers expressed concerns that the Kennedy Center would target the tour program in retribution for Weiswasser’s interview.

The Kennedy Center has become an outlet for the Trump administration’s shocking pettiness. Trump previously tried to close the Kennedy Center for two years for “renovations” after multiple artists canceled their performances in response to his proposed name change. After Trump’s name was scraped off the wall, the building’s facade has remained concealed by a massive tarp.

Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt told the Associated Press in an interview published Friday, “I don’t think that we should federalize the elections at all.

“I believe that is a state issue. The states should control their own elections. Should we make sure they’re done fairly and U.S. citizens are voting? 100%. I think there’s broad agreement with that,” Stitt said, ahead of the National Governors Association meeting in his state this weekend, where he will turn over leadership of the organization to Maryland Governor Wes Moore, a Democrat.

Stitt noted, “It is weird that in a swing state, in a certain county, it takes them a month to count the votes. So rightly, you should be questioning some of these things.” However, he also said he trusted the leaders of those states “100 percent.”

“I don’t think we should federalize that. Because then you’ve got a pendulum swing. What about the next guy gets in office and the next guy and the next guy? The system that we have with 50 different states is the right system,” Stitt said. But he also came out in support of Trump’s voter ID bill.

“Now, the SAVE America Act, making sure that we know who’s voting, I think that’s a very legitimate thing to do,” Stitt said.

Stitt isn’t entirely on Trump’s good side. During the last NGA meeting in Washington in February, he had to persuade the president not to exclude two Democratic governors from a White House meeting, and Trump ended up criticizing his performance and calling him a “RINO” for his efforts. In October, Stitt also called out Trump’s decision to deploy the National Guard to places like Illinois.

“We believe in the federalist system—that’s states’ rights,” he said at the time. “Oklahomans would lose their mind if Pritzker in Illinois sent troops down to Oklahoma during the Biden administration.”

As states wrap up their primary elections and gear up for the general election in November, Trump is taking drastic steps to engineer a favorable Republican outcome, including demanding voter rolls from states and severely restricting mail-in voting. Statements like Stitt’s aren’t enough—after all, Oklahoma has already agreed to hand over its voter rolls to the Trump administration. Republicans have to actually fight to safeguard the vote from Trump overruling the will of the people.

But this fracas is more than mere entertainment. It’s a full-blown scandal, as President Trump’s real interests here have become clearer, notably via a Truth Social message he posted late Thursday morning. It’s raw sewage even by his standards, and if the Democrats retake the House, this matter has now jumped to the top of my list of grounds for impeachment. It should provide the basis for the first article Democratic Representative Jamie Raskin and his Judiciary Committee draw up.

It all has to do with the slush fund. The fund, you’ll recall, was the result of a settlement in a mind-bending legal proceeding in which Trump sued himself: That is, the president of the United States sued the Internal Revenue Service, seeking $10 billion for the (admittedly illegal) leak of some of his tax returns back in 2019. In May, Trump’s Justice Department, led at the time by Blanche as the acting attorney general, settled the suit between Trump the president and Trump’s IRS by establishing a $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” fund, whose moneys were to go to parties Trump deemed to have been wronged by the deep state—starting of course with Trump himself. It also included a shocking clause granting Trump, his family members, and his companies immunity from prosecution for any tax-related crimes they may have committed before the date of deal.

In other words: Blanche created a nearly $2 billion slush fund for Trump to steer money to anyone he wants—and granted him and his kids broad immunity from potential federal prosecution. One observer called it “a breathtaking abuse of the tax and legal system.” Raskin put out a 10-point memo on why the deal is “unconstitutional, illegal, and a fraud on the court.” In June, a federal judge blocked the fund’s creation, so it’s on hold for now and probably headed, one supposes, to the Supreme Court.

Around that time, amid the public outcry, Blanche said that the fund would not go forward. He told Congress that the department would put that in writing. But it never has. That’s the holdup with Cornyn and Tillis. If they get it in writing, presumably they would still vote for Blanche.

So that’s when Trump stepped in Thursday morning, when it looked like Blanche’s nomination might be dead, and “truthed” (and boy, it was the truth for once, all right): “Todd Blanche is a STAR, and everyone knows it! He has the potential to go down as one of the Greatest Attorney Generals of All Time. However, John Cornyn, of Texas, and Thom Tillis, of North Carolina, both of whom I refused to Endorse, and whose political careers have been ended by my action, are refusing to vote for this Great Nominee, who will remain, in any event, as Acting. Remember, both Cornyn and Tillis voted for Merrick Garland, and others, too numerous to mention. I have no objection to temporarily withdrawing Todd’s name, if they do not do the right thing, and putting him back after Cornyn and Tillis are out of office.”

What Trump is saying here is obvious. The slush fund and probably especially the immunity are far more important to him than Blanche is. And anyway, Blanche, whose servile lickspittleism makes predecessor Pam Bondi look like a paragon of independence, can stay in the job more or less indefinitely as acting A.G.

This morning, around 7 a.m., Trump “truthed” again. The fund isn’t for me, he insisted. Rather, it’s for the people who raided the Capitol and banged cops’ heads in; it’s for “the great American Patriots who were hunted down like dogs and whose lives were unfairly and illegally destroyed by the Crooked Joe Biden Administration.… Perhaps there has never been a group of people treated so badly in our Nation’s history.” He’s almost surely lying about himself. But even if he’s not, sending $1.8 billion in taxpayer dollars, received in the corrupt manner this money was received, to convicted January 6 insurrectionists is without question a high crime in and of itself.

Once again, as with so many other things Trump has done, it’s inconceivable to imagine any other modern American president even thinking this up, let alone doing it. Suing himself; then installing a spineless yes-man—his former personal lawyer, no less—as acting attorney general, who then agrees to a settlement including nearly $2 billion in taxpayer money plus an immunity grant; then being willing to sacrifice said A.G.’s confirmation in order to preserve the fund and the immunity claim. It defies belief.

It’s hard to say how many articles of impeachment the Democratic House might come up with. Indeed, Raskin and his committee’s biggest challenge will be deciding which high crimes and misdemeanors not to pursue. There’ve been dozens, hundreds, and they just can’t plausibly bring an indictment of 100-plus counts. They’re going to have to keep it to some number that the public can digest and buy into.

But the slush fund and immunity grant sure look like count number one to me. Unless of course five members of the you-know-what decide it’s all legal. If that happens, the House Judiciary Committee might look at impeaching them, too.

Cornyn has refused to support Blanche’s nomination over Trump’s cushy settlement deal with the IRS, which granted protections for the president’s family against audits and established a nearly $1.8 billion slush fund for so-called victims of political weaponization. 

But in an angry social media post, Trump insisted the issue was personal. 

Cornyn “never had a problem” with the fund “until after I decided to Endorse and Support his Republican Primary opponent in Texas,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. 

Trump claimed that his MAGA allies deserved financial compensation because they’d been allegedly targeted by the federal government. “Millions of people agree with me, as was proven in my landslide Presidential win, where this was a major subject of debate, and so did John Cornyn, until he lost his Election to an opponent that I Endorsed.”

Trump endorsed Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who cheated on his wife, was impeached by his own party on corruption charges, and illegally targeted his donor’s enemies as state attorney general, among other transgressions. 

Trump has claimed that he defected from Cornyn due to the senator’s “disloyalty.” Now he’s demanding the senator he betrayed fall in line.  

The Senate Judiciary Committee postponed the vote to advance Blanche’s nomination, after Cornyn and Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina made clear that they would not support him. Even if he’s not confirmed before the Senate’s August recess, Blanche will continue to serve as acting attorney general. But it would be a humiliating blow to the president, who is clearly losing his grip on party members. 

Trump checks in with his top fundraiser, Meredith O’Rourke—whom he’s warmly nicknamed his “princess of darkness” for her “killer” instincts—almost nightly, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.

The calls touch on a number of Trump’s financial interests: He routinely asks O’Rourke who has donated, who has not, and the size of individual contributions, and he frequently presses her to ask for even more.

O’Rourke is more than happy to play the part, regularly invoking the president’s name—she refers to him as “the boss”—while pushing prospective donors to sign larger checks.

“This is very important to the president. He’s asked me to call you and ask you for this donation,” O’Rourke has been known to say, according to the Journal. Or she might drop that “the boss wants this money.”

Among the donations that O’Rourke has recently secured are $50 million from Softbank for Trump’s presidential library, $25 million from Apple for his White House ballroom project, $10 million from Meta to a Trump-aligned super PAC, $10 million from Microsoft, and $5 million from Amazon.

Trump has been in office for 18 months. Within that same timeframe, he has also raised more than $800 million, in no small part due to O’Rourke’s resolve. She has worked with Trump since 2016 and “absolutely has the president’s 100 percent trust and respect,” according to Brian Ballard, a top Washington lobbyist and former colleague of O’Rourke’s who spoke with the Journal.

Her loyalty and hard labor have been duly repaid: O’Rourke is firmly entrenched in Trump’s inner circle and has been tasked with shouldering some of the Trump family’s bigger projects. She has flown with U.S. officials aboard Air Force One, joined the board of the National Park Foundation that oversees Freedom 250, and was recently appointed as a director at Trump Media & Technology, the parent company of Trump’s social media platform, Truth Social.

Patel’s FBI has taken a new and dangerous step in its quest to root out alleged voter fraud—tracking down the IP addresses of people who register to vote online.

According to a new report from Axios, the FBI recently requested and obtained the IP address of someone who went online to register to vote in South Carolina. This move is a massive overreach by the Trump administration into local election processes.

“It’s not typical for the FBI to be calling state election officials … and conducting a fishing expedition to see private voter data,” a former senior Justice Department official told Axios. “It’s not typical and it’s not appropriate.”

Although an IP address cannot reveal a person’s exact identity, it does show the user’s geographic location, service provider, and the network they’re using. In the context of voting, an IP address could indicate the state and country a person is registering from.

Axios also spoke with a longtime election official in York County, South Carolina, Alan Helms, who said he had never seen this kind of election interference before.

“It is not common” to get a request like this, Helms said. “In my tenure as an election official, going on 20 years, that is the first interaction with law enforcement.”

If the FBI continues pursuing voters’ IP addresses, the fallout could extend far beyond any one state—42 states, plus Washington, D.C., currently allow some form of online voter registration.

The move to track down voter IP addresses is just the latest in President Trump’s ongoing mission to make it harder for Americans to vote ahead of the upcoming midterm elections. Trump has sued 30 states and D.C. in an attempt to obtain state voter rolls. In the past month alone, the president has attacked mail-in voting, repeated his ridiculous claims that the 2020 election was “stolen” in a prime-time national address, and attempted to shove his signature voter suppression bill, the SAVE America Act, through Congress. Since the start of his second term, he has mobilized government agencies—including the Department of Justice, the Department of Homeland Security, and now the FBI—to request voter registration lists, ballots from previous elections, and access to voting equipment.

Inside Washington

Can Dems exploit the tension between Trump and Republican senators? 

Cracks are starting to show in the Republican trifecta: Senate Majority Leader John Thune and President Donald Trump are growing frustrated with one another, as Trump demands the Senate pass the unpassable SAVE Act. Two Republican senators—Thom Tillis and John Cornyn—may have just blocked Trump’s nominee for attorney general, Todd Blanche. In the chaos, Democrats see an opportunity for both midterm success and legislative victories. 

Asked whether Democrats are taking advantage of their increasingly fractured opponents, Senator Tim Kaine said, “We are trying to on things like war powers. Some of the Republicans who’ve been most at odds with Trump have signaled an openness to working with us on those issues.”

On Thursday, the Senate voted on a resolution to curb Trump’s war on Iran—Democrats’ thirteenth attempt at a war powers resolution, including one that passed in late June. At 49–50, this vote failed, but Democrats picked up three Republican votes from Senators Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and Rand Paul. Senator John Fetterman was the only Democrat who opposed the vote. 

“It’s actually pretty typical to see members of a president’s party distancing themselves from him as midterm elections approach, especially when that president is unpopular,” said Seth Masket, a professor of political science at the University of Denver. He compared it to how Democrats acted in 1994, refusing to give President Bill Clinton what he wanted. Trump is a somewhat unique case because he endorses so heavily in Republican primaries, striking fear into members of the conference. “He’s proven that he can end careers, so they’re pretty fearful of him,” Masket said. “But now that we’re past the primaries, that loses some of its power.”

Some Democrats say that Republicans splitting over the Iran war and fighting over the SAVE Act—Trump’s controversial voter ID bill—reflects well on Democrats. “That’s going to be the contrast that will be on people’s minds when they go into the voting booth,” Senator Andy Kim said.

But, he emphasized, Republican disorganization only helps blue candidates at the polls if Dems can stick together and project unity. He pointed to Senate Democrats’ front against the National Defense Authorization Act, which they blocked in mid-July due to concerns over Iran. “Because of the Republicans fracturing, I think it’s more important than ever to show our unity,” he said. “Otherwise they might be able to push forward on things like the supplemental [funding request] or a [budget] reconciliation 3.0.”

Masket emphasized that there’s almost no partisan legislation Democrats can actively advance while in the minority. So it becomes a waiting game. “Democrats are happy to watch their opponents destroy themselves and don’t really feel like lending a hand one way or the other,” he said.

Senator Richard Blumenthal is hoping Dems can ride the conflict in the GOP to a midterm win. “We need to continue to drive home the message about not just Republican disarray, but profound disrespect for the law, which is outraging the American public, and should advance energy and turnout in the upcoming election,” he said, before reiterating: “It’s all about the elections.”

—Emma Janssen  

Outside Washington

Data center backlash is bipartisan. But is it starting to get bluer?

As Michigan’s much-anticipated primaries on August 4 draw near, most people are watching the Senate matchup between progressive front-runner Abdul El-Sayed and establishment favorite Haley Stevens. Many are also keeping an eye on the 7th district House race, which has become a last-minute vehicle for moderate angst, going by a recent Axios report. But the state legislature is worth watching, too, and a particularly hot topic right now is data centers, which Michigan granted a tax exemption to in bipartisan legislation passed in 2024. One characteristic of data center backlash so far is the way it has united people across the political spectrum. Many have wondered whether this can possibly last in today’s hyperpolarized political environment. 

The Detroit Free Press asks state legislative candidates where they stand on the issue, and while this is hardly a rigorous statistical analysis, the responses do indeed hint at an emerging partisan gradient. A quick rundown: The paper talks to one Republican and one Democrat (Douglas Wozniak of the 24th Senate district and Jason Hoskins of the 7th Senate district, respectively) who think data centers are a fact of life now and the state risks falling behind if it doesn’t host them. The paper identifies 10 Democrats and two Republicans who want more guardrails. (Some, like Democrat Natalie Price, want to see data centers pay property taxes and meet certain environmental standards. Republican Roman Gaskey wants a “closed-loop system that recycles water.”) The paper then finds two Democrats—Rick Silva of the 9th House district and Sean Carlson of the 13th Senate district—who want a full one-year moratorium until government can catch up and figure out how to regulate, and one (Crystal Bailey of the 5th House District) who just wants no new data centers, period. 

Last month, Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer, who has supported data center construction, was caught on microphone saying, “We’re used to people saying ‘f—k no,’ and then doing it anyway.” (Whitmer is not seeking reelection, but there is speculation about her making a run for the White House in 2028.) 

Elsewhere:

• A map of Africa presented by the U.S. State Department at a conference in Brazil this week mislabeled every country it featured. After images made it to the internet via AIDS expert Emily Bass’s LinkedIn and Substack posts, Reuters started asking questions. Reuters reported Thursday that a watermark on the map “⁠signals it was made with OpenAI tools.” The State Department blamed the affair on a “team member who ​hastily changed the slide deck before the event.” 
• In case you missed it: The Guardian profiles Wisconsin gubernatorial hopeful Francesca Hong, the democratic socialist currently leading the Democratic pack for the primary on August 11. One of her opponents, Mandela Barnes, suddenly dropped out of the race on Thursday. The piece explores how free childcare, one of Hong’s signature policy proposals, “started winning U.S. elections.”
  
  

—Heather Souvaine Horn

The Ideas Factory

The Roosevelt Institute publishes a report titled “Building Up in 2029: How to Make Green Statecraft Durable.” The report takes a more optimistic view than some, with the institute’s Todd N. Tucker emphasizing in the introduction that while the climate crisis is already “harming Americans” and policies “are moving in the wrong direction … somewhat ironically, the Trump administration has shown what an [Inflation Reduction Act] 2.0 might look like, by both exposing the IRA’s vulnerabilities and breaking glass on new tools of economic statecraft that could be beneficial for green priorities.” The report outlines possibilities for a “Project 2029,” in contrast to the Heritage Foundation’s far-right “Project 2025.”

The Groundwork Collaborative releases a statement on Thursday’s Bureau of Economic Analysis report, which found slowed (1.5 percent) growth and 3.7 percent year-over-year inflation. “Today’s report,” said Alex Jacquez, Groundworks’ senior vice president of policy, advocacy, and research, “is a snapshot of an economy under a ceasefire that no longer exists.” The press release also argues that “the economy isn’t as strong as even the modest headline suggests,” since “AI investment continued to prop up the economy” and “consumer spending continued to lose momentum.”

On Monday, August 3, New America holds a virtual event 6 p.m. to 7 p.m. titled “The Next Generation of Voters,” focusing on “the systems that reinforce America’s gerontocracy, the structural reforms that could change them, and what young voters actually want out of US politics.” Speakers include The Age Divide authors Oscar Pocasangre and Dustin Wahl. 

—Heather Souvaine Horn

In Closing

Good week: Francesca Hong

Hard to deny it was a pretty good week for Hong, the democratic socialist candidate for governor of Wisconsin who vaulted to the head of the polls this week. A prominent opponent also dropped out. The primary is August 11.

Bad week: Todd Blanche

Among many contenders, we give the nod to Blanche, who may become the first A.G. nominee voted down by the Senate since 1925; Donald Trump revealed (in?)advertently that he cares more about his slush fund than he does Blanche.

—Michael Tomasky

Political Trivia Question of the Day

The A.G. position was not always intended as being independent of the White House. Who was the A.G. in fairly recent American history who established that precedent and made it the standard to which all A.G.s should aspire? Hint: He followed a world-class sleazeball. (Sign up for The Blue Book to find the answer in tomorrow’s newsletter.)

Ramaswamy was supposed to speak for half an hour at the libertarian student group’s national convention but had to end his remarks after only 14 minutes due to backlash from the crowd. The heckling started the moment he took the stage and continued as Ramaswamy was pressed on issues like Israel, and as he took shots at the less than friendly audience.

“The truth of the matter is, you know no matter what happens in whichever direction we go, people in my generation have already made it. We’re gonna be fine. It’s going to be your generation that pays the price. That choice belongs to you,” Ramaswamy said, nearly being drowned out by boos.

Vivek Ramaswamy is booed offstage after telling Ohio crowd, 'The truth of the matter is, people in my generation have already made it. We're gonna be fine.' pic.twitter.com/Ptm3KHwXY2

— FactPost (@factpostnews) July 30, 2026

“We don’t want to hear your bullshit talking points. You’re a political cretin, and you need to get the fuck out of here,” one audience member yelled to Ramaswamy at one point.

Ramaswamy also said that the real divide in America was not between Democrats and Republicans but “winners and whiners.” He responded to one heckler by saying, “You want to give a speech? … Well, you can get on when they give you a slot, alright? So, until they do, you can sit down.”

It’s not the first time the former presidential candidate has drawn a backlash from his own party’s base. In December 2024, he caught MAGA’s ire after saying that companies prefer the work ethic of foreign employees over the laziness of American ones.

While the speech was part of the YAL national convention, and not necessarily representative of all of Ohio, Ramaswamy is not polling well in the governor’s race. A New York Times/Siena University poll has him dead even with Democratic nominee Amy Acton. This speech is certainly not going to help him, even when presented in full.

🚨 Ohio

By request here is the full 14 minutes that Vivek Ramaswamy lasted on the stage at Young Americans of Liberty Conference, at Xavier University yesterday.

It's very important that you watch, and hear for yourself the revisionist history he has and still is selling… pic.twitter.com/aDDp9zqELQ

— The Constitutionalist 🇺🇸 (@WeWillBeFree24) July 30, 2026

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

It’s been a while since we checked in on Donald Trump’s use of government power to silence networks that displease him, and there’s a new development. ABC just put out their challenge to the Federal Communications Commission’s vile efforts to punish it by going after its broadcasting licenses. And something funny happened. Trump’s own tweets and declarations have become evidence of his corrupt intent to use the FCC as a weapon of censorship. And this captures something really essential about Trump’s open corruption and whether our institutions are capable of constraining it.

So we’re talking about all of it with one of our go-to people on these things, University of Michigan law professor Leah Litman. Hey, Leah, always good to have you on.

Leah Litman: Glad to be back.

Sargent: So at the center of this sordid story is FCC Chair Brendan Carr, who’s one of Trump’s most slavishly devoted accomplices. Whenever Trump gets upset about networks telling the truth about him, Carr is right there in the background. In the spring, Carr launched an early review of broadcast licenses at eight TV stations owned by ABC, which is a network Trump hates because of Jimmy Kimmel and other things. Leah, can you just bring us up to date on this, and what Carr is really all about?

Litman: Yeah, so Carr has been basically attempting to use the Federal Communications Commission’s power over these media companies in order to get them to ensure there is favorable coverage for the president, and coverage that the president likes. And sometimes he does this by threatening to review licenses that allow these companies to distribute their programming onto other channels. Other times he uses the FCC power by threatening investigations into the companies that might impose regulatory sanctions on them.

And so this is not the first time this has happened. You know, we saw, for example, the FCC kind of try to coerce Disney to cancel Kimmel. We saw them trying to strong-arm CBS to cancel Colbert. And they do this, again, by threatening the agency’s regulatory authority to award benefits or impose punishments on companies that are subject to their control.

And these agencies, particularly the FCC, have huge power, right? If they don’t grant licenses, that’s the end of the company. They don’t have business anymore.

Sargent: Yeah. And we should note here that the FCC claimed that its review of the broadcast licenses of these stations was about looking at their DEI policies. And I think we know that’s bullshit, right?

Litman: Yeah, I mean, I don’t know what this administration thinks DEI stands for. You know, on our podcast, we’ve joked that it’s “dicks, ex-husbands, imbeciles.” In light of the diarrhea—it’s “diarrhea for everyone, because of incompetence,” right? Like, I don’t know. But they kind of use that word as their go-to for saying, we don’t like something that you’re doing, and so we are just going to target you.

Sargent: Yeah. There’s almost like a Soviet quality to it. It’s like they really just say it, and they’re visibly full of shit, and they know it. And that’s part of the exercise of power.

Litman: Yes, indeed. We can just toss this label out and use that to go after anyone we want.

Sargent: And there’s nothing you can do about it. So ABC put out its formal response to the FCC’s review, and it’s scathing stuff. I’m going to read one line. ABC says, “The retaliation against ABC is a signal to every media company in the country: Accommodate the administration’s view of what news coverage should look like, or pay the price.” Leah, that’s the plain truth, isn’t it?

Litman: No, absolutely. And I think the president has taken this approach to many different regulatory initiatives or prosecutions. You know, he’s tried to indict, for example, former FBI director James Comey, New York Attorney General Letitia James. And it’s clear that those prosecutions also serve as a warning, right? Like, do our bidding, or stand down, or you will face the penalty.

And so this attempt to bully ABC is just another example of that. I think another manifestation of this is the president’s litigation against different media companies. He sues them for running a story that he doesn’t like. And here he’s leveraging the immense power of the federal government to serve the same purpose.

Sargent: Now, here’s the really good part. In order to show that the FCC is trying to punish ABC for its “content and its viewpoints”—punish it for its reporting and its speech—ABC cites one of Trump’s own tweets, in which Trump says this directly.

The tweet says: “Why is it that ABC and NBC Fake News, two of the worst and most biased networks, aren’t paying millions of dollars a year on license fees? They should lose their licenses for their unfair coverage of Republicans.”

Now, NBC doesn’t seem to be a part of this right now, but you get the point. There, Trump said openly that ABC should be punished for what it says about Republicans. And ABC is now using this against Trump. Can you tell us what ABC has to establish here to push the FCC off its back, and whether there’s a real chance that citing something like this thing here works?

Litman: Yeah, so one of the claims that ABC is making is that the administration is targeting them for exercising their First Amendment right—for deciding what to publish and what to air. And so if the administration, if the federal government, is targeting someone because of views they express, because they don’t like the viewpoint they express or the content that they are publishing, that is a violation of the First Amendment.

And so because the reason for the enforcement action, the reason for the investigation, could potentially make it unconstitutional, ABC is trying to establish why this investigation or review of the licenses is happening.

Sargent: And could this work? I mean, there you have ABC citing Donald Trump saying, in his own words, they should lose their licenses for their unfair coverage of Republicans. Could that be effective for ABC in making this argument?

Litman: I would certainly hope so. And these kinds of arguments have been effective, at least in the lower federal courts, where there’s a big OMG, he admitted vibe to a lot of what the lower courts are doing. In cases challenging the president’s revocation of temporary protected status, lower courts said, this is unconstitutional, it was driven by racial discrimination, because look at the vile racist smears you—the president—directed at Haitian nationals. This has also come up in the cases challenging the ban on transgender service members.

Look at all the awful things that the president has said about transgender individuals. This has also come up in some other First Amendment cases, challenging the president’s and administration’s rescission of federal grants to organizations that were engaged in advocacy that the president didn’t like. And lower federal courts have often pointed to presidential statements and effectively presidential admissions that, of course he was retaliating against them, of course he was doing this because of an individual’s race, of course he was doing this because of some impermissible reason.

But the big question is: Is the Supreme Court ever going to allow that to happen? Because, of course, the Supreme Court said that the president’s awful statements about Haitian nationals were not overtly racial—they excused that racial discrimination. And they have allowed the administration to implement the ban on transgender service members, despite the horrific smears and transphobic statements. And so there’s right now, I think, a disparity between lower federal courts saying, the president said what he said, we can’t ignore that, and the Supreme Court saying, no, actually, we can and we will, and we’ll just pretend it didn’t happen.

Sargent: Well, I want to come back to the Supreme Court in a sec, but first, ABC’s filing goes on to quote numerous other examples of Trump making this threat explicit, especially during the 2024 campaign. In one case, he says ABC is corrupt and the FCC “ought to take away their license.”

In another, he says, “ABC should lose its license because of what they’ve done.” So here you have Trump blurting out on Truth Social, and even in one case at a campaign rally, that he wants to weaponize the FCC against the network to censor it. It was basically an open campaign promise: Elect me and I’ll censor ABC. And now he and Carr are trying to do that. Right?

Litman: Yes, no, absolutely. But so too was the president’s promise for a “complete and total shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” And yet when the challenge to the president’s travel ban—that applied to individuals from several Muslim-majority countries—reached the Supreme Court, the Supreme Court said, well, we’re not actually sure if campaign statements are even relevant, and in any case, we’re just going to say there is a reasonable, non-racial, non-religious reason why the president might have done this.

Now, of course, they relied on the fact that that was an immigration policy where the president receives additional deference. But I am not at all convinced that they would take even, again, this specific promise to do the very specific thing that his administration is now trying to do, for a very specific unconstitutional reason, seriously and literally, and actually hold him to that, even though they absolutely should.

Sargent: Point taken on the Supreme Court and how corrupt it is and so forth. And we should note here that Leah Litman wrote a very good book about that. So check it out, folks. It’s all about the Supreme Court. What’s the title again?

Litman: Lawless: How the Supreme Court Runs on Conservative Grievance, Fringe Theories, and Bad Vibes.

Sargent: Well, there you go. That sums it up pretty neatly. But I want to ask you, though—I’ve got to think that administration lawyers would prefer that Trump hadn’t said this stuff explicitly, right?

Litman: Of course. They have to be desperately begging the people around him to shut down his phone and tell him to shut the F up, because it’s making their jobs that much harder. It’s hard to say, well, of course we should presume that the government is acting normally. There is this presumption of regularity that courts traditionally afford to the federal government, and that administration lawyers will often invoke.

But that’s just supposed to be a presumption. And you should be able to rebut that presumption if you have an administration and a president just outright saying, of course, we’re doing this for unlawful reasons, here’s what we’re doing.We’re not actually following these processes and procedures, I just promised to penalize ABC because I didn’t like them.

Sargent: One last question about the Supreme Court. I’ve got to think they’re going to be a little more sensitive here, because it’s First Amendment and it’s broadcast licenses. It’s so clear. As opposed to something like TPS, which, you know, the president has a lot of power over immigration and so forth. And it feels to me like the Supreme Court might—let’s hope, anyway—want to be a little more solicitous of the First Amendment rights of news organizations than they might be in other cases. No?

Litman: I mean, perhaps. On the other hand, this is the Supreme Court that often protects the First Amendment rights of some but not others. You know, it has said, for example, nonprofit corporations, they have a First Amendment right not to disclose their donors, in part because when they disclose their donors, their donors are heavily criticized for contributing to right-wing organizations that are accused of racist, homophobic behavior.

The court has not, let’s say, protected the rights of union organizers to exercise their free speech rights to actually organize people and register people for unions, even though it has protected the rights of the mega-rich to donate near unlimited amounts of money to elections.

So, yes, in principle, this court does care about the First Amendment. In principle, of course, it should care about news organizations’ ability to publish material that they decide to publish. There are a host of right-wing news organizations that publish all sorts of crap that you would hope, right, they would recognize they don’t want to allow litigation for. And yet this court has time and time again found a way to be selective in whose rights it’s protecting, even when it purports to be applying some general principle.

Sargent: The Supreme Court really does like big corporations.

Litman: Yes, they do. And ABC is a big corporation, so it has that going for it!

Sargent: I want to try to get at a key thing about Trump’s corruption here. The open and explicit nature of it really is a critical piece of it, in the sense that Trump wants it known that he will, in fact, use the FCC to bully networks whose reporting displeases him.

This is both a demonstration of his power to his base—like, look, I can do this openly, because I can—but it’s also an explicit signal to many institutions in this country to bend the knee to him. He can’t let go of the open and explicit nature of this. It’s central to his whole project. But now, at least to some degree, it’s backfiring. Can you talk about that?

Litman: Yeah. So I want to first talk about how it is central to his project, and how doing it openly very much seems to be a feature in their eyes. You know, it’s partially a way of normalizing the conduct. If they do it all the time, if it happens all the time, if they flood the zone with B.S., it’s harder to stop or challenge any of it. But another important part of it is the signaling. We are talking about, as we said, ABC, a big corporation.

There aren’t always going to be big media entities with the resources of ABC that are making a calculus about whether they can or should publish a story that might upset the administration or the president or someone in his circle. And so they will look at the kind of retaliatory campaigns that the president is openly engaged in and openly threatening against these companies, and have to make a calculus. Are we in a position to potentially fight that, if the eye of Sauron turns its gaze on us? And some will make the calculus of no. So yes, the openness of this is a big part of the story, and also part of the problem.

I do hope that it is also part of what allows us to push back against Donald Trump, because it is much easier, I think, to organize opposition when you can point to, “look at what he is doing, look at what he is saying.”

Obviously, right, you can’t allow a president to do that—just imagine how that power could be used. And so hopefully, right, the openness of it will also make counter-organizing, counter-political opposition easier. And hopefully it will also make legal challenges easier, as we were talking about. Because when the president admits he has an unconstitutional motive, that should matter under the law. It really should.

Sargent: It really should. And I think it is backfiring, at least to that degree. So I think there’s a big question here about whether Trump is succeeding or not in cowing the news media. And there’s a lot of fatalism out there about this. And I get that, right? You look at The Washington Post, what happened there. You look at CBS News, what’s happening there. And there’s a lot to be kind of despairing about. But I think the story is generally a decent one, though, that aside, because the American news media is just really big and sprawling.

Litman: It’s diffuse.

Sargent: Yeah. And it’s robust, it’s energetic. And I think I’m seeing some of the most aggressive reporting right now on Trump that I’ve seen in, I don’t know, in my lifetime. What do you think of that? What’s your sense—is he succeeding or is he not succeeding? And where do you think this particular thing is going to go?

Litman: Look, he’s succeeding in some ways. I’m sure there are some stories, right—some turns of phrase—that we are just never going to see, because organizations make the calculus that it’s not worth it. On the other hand, you’re absolutely right that the American media landscape looks very different than, let’s say, the media landscape in Hungary, where there are fewer organizations and therefore easier to control and take over.

Here there are some big media institutions, including some like ABC or The New York Times that have opted to fight back against Trump when he targets them. The New York Times successfully quashed some subpoenas that had been directed at it over its reporting about the president’s use of the Qatari Force One, you know, the jet gifted to him. And there are also a bunch of independent media organizations that have been more faithful, in a lot of ways, to the aggressive reporting even earlier in the administration.

So I think that the media landscape is, you know, concerning in some respects. Obviously the consolidation of several big media entities into the hands of some Trump supporters is not a good development for democracy. But it’s not maybe quite as dire as people might think, at least if you are conscientious enough to ensure you are getting a media diet that includes a lot of independent media and media that hasn’t been taken over by Trump allies.

Sargent: And where do you think this is going to go with ABC? What’s your gut tell you?

Litman: I think ABC will be able to push back the threats against its licenses. I just do.

Sargent: And what will that look like, basically?

Litman: I think either the administration will fold—you know, if ABC, for example, gets a favorable court hearing, or some initially favorable judicial decision—or they will get a favorable judicial decision and the Trump administration will opt not to appeal it, because they just don’t think it’s one of their better cases.

And there have been lots of examples where they have elected not to appeal unfavorable lower court rulings. So even though they’ve had a bunch of success in the Supreme Court, they haven’t taken all of the cases they have lost in the lower courts to the Supreme Court. So my guess is that will be how this episode resolves.

Sargent: And if that happens—which I think it will as well—it will be a huge deal, not least because Trump himself keeps drawing attention to his own corrupt motives. Leah Litman, always great to talk to you. Thanks so much for coming on. That was great stuff.

Litman: Thanks for having me.

It won’t; Scotland quickly score once, twice, three times. The score is 4–0 by the time the referee whistles for the Michelob ULTRA Hydration Break to take place. It’s 5–0 at halftime; Puerto Rico scores a consolation goal before the second hydration break, but the Scots hang three more in the final minutes as the game finishes 8–1. As the game ends, bored spectators streaming out, the camera briefly flashes on the luxury boxes. A grinning Gianni Infantino, the FIFA commissioner, mugs obscenely with the Saudi king and other potentates. History, of a kind, has happened.

If you see nothing wrong with this, you’re probably either one of Infantino’s staffers or a blood relation. Certainly, Infantino thinks such a display would be amazing. According to The Times of London, the FIFA chief is working closely with Thrive Capital’s Joshua Kushner (brother of Jared Kushner!) and JP Morgan on a proposition that would all but radically transform the men’s and women’s World Cups as we know them, and not coincidentally shovel millions into his acquisitive little mittens. The proposal—now roundly condemned by virtually everyone who’s heard about it, including Britain’s new prime minister—involves creating a private company that would control the World Cups. Each of FIFA’s 211 national member associations would have a financial stake, estimated at around $20 million each. The Times estimates that the company would be valued at around $20 billion.

The report makes for wild reading. Now, stop for a moment. Think of how quickly and quietly this whole thing went from “consultations” to a set of signed, nonbinding agreements. This isn’t an idle contrivance, set for a slow burn; banks like JP Morgan and people like Kushner don’t engage in that kind of deal. This is a fast-moving plan of action, set in motion before anyone outside of FIFA’s holiest of holies in Zurich even knew what was going down.

Suffice it to say: It’s a spectacularly bad idea. The pressure to expand the World Cups, to play them every other year, or even annually, would be immense. The arm twisting to turn them into something that would make college bowl season look staid and decorous would be even greater.

We already know this, because Infantino is not a creatively corrupt schemer. He’s running the same playbook from his failed 2018 SoftBank-Saudi deal. The reason he thinks he can pull this off now is because he thinks he’s suddenly obtained more room for success: a friendlier political environment, working with investors who are cozy with Trump and a compliant FIFA Congress of 211 federations full of staffers eager to get their hands on cash that’s dangled in front of them.

Naturally, FIFA is no stranger to tawdriness. It closely resembles an international scandal factory with a sideline in soccer tournaments. This is hardly the first critique of the organization that’s been penned. But Infantino’s latest grift offers us the opportunity to do more than critique. Now is the perfect moment to imagine something better for international soccer than anything FIFA and its gang of thieving jabronis can offer the sport.

Let’s be clear about what FIFA actually is: It may say it’s a tax-exempt Swiss nonprofit, squatting on around $15 billion in World Cup revenue, but it’s brazenly acting like a for-profit rights holder. This is why this cockamamie idea is even possible! FIFA wouldn’t be selling the tournaments themselves; they’re creating a subsidiary that would do that dirty work because it controls the tournaments’ commercial upside, thus giving Infantino and his cronies the cover necessary to pretend like they’re doing this for the good of the sport.

Reading this—let alone writing it—makes anyone feel like they need a shower, which is why we need to talk about the sport-washing elements driving this scheme. Every mechanism that makes a privatized World Cup possible—and more profitable—is also one that FIFA uses to sanitize the reputations of some of the seamiest regimes imaginable. If you expand the tournaments, you increase the number of billion-dollar hosting rights up for auction. If you hold the World Cups every couple of years, or even annually, you’ve instantly multiplied your leverage. This isn’t a thought experiment: Infantino’s already said that a South American suggestion to expand the World Cup to 64 teams from this year’s 48 will “definitely” be considered. Shareholders who stand to reap a financial bonanza from this kind of expansion will always keep pushing for more, more, more, regardless of what it demands from host countries bidding for the action.

We know what that cost looks like. Qatar’s 2022 World Cup was built on the bodies and blood of a horrific labor system that human rights groups say killed hundreds, if not thousands, of migrant workers. Under pressure, Qatar rolled out meager labor reforms, but Human Rights Watch’s global initiatives director said at the time that those changes came too late and were either too weak or too narrow and weakly enforced to help those workers. A year after the World Cup, Amnesty International found that even that pitiful progress had mostly stalled out.

It wasn’t for a lack of money; FIFA had that. It had its haunches scooched on roughly $6 billion of World Cup revenue. It simply chose not to create a remedy fund, and turned its back on the misery its greed caused. This is not a resource problem, it is a priorities problem. FIFA will always prioritize money over morality, and privatization will not change that; it will simply add shareholders with hands out demanding that the priorities be ever more profitable.

This is not limited to construction workers. For the last three years, FIFPRO, the global players’ union, has told FIFA ever more stridently that the playing calendar is physically unsustainable. A FIFPRO workload report found that 54 percent of the 1,500 players it monitored recently were burdened by excessive or high playing demands. Last year, the union recommended that playing seasons be capped at around 55 matches; this came in the wake of a growing group of elite players exceeding 69 or 70 matches in a single season.

FIFA merely shrugged, expanded the Club World Cup to 32 teams, and played it in the punishing heat of an American summer. FIFPRO said that decision came without putting further player workload safeguards in place, showing a marked disregard for players’ mental and physical well-being, and in keeping with the fact that FIFA’s promised working group on player health had gone nowhere for years. FIFA’s disregard drove the union and some of Europe’s top leagues to file a formal complaint with the European Commission, arguing that the playing calendar violates competition law. Spain’s Rodri, the Golden Ball winner as the top player in this World Cup, said that players came close to striking over this.

This is the same organization that wants to sell off stakes in the same tournaments driving that workload. Do you think investors are going to want fewer games? Of course not! And if you put the spotlight on the women’s game, it tells the same story from a different direction. “Everyone watches women’s sports,” according to a popular T-shirt, and it’s true: 50,000 people jammed into the 2024 Women’s Champions League to watch Barcelona beat Lyon 2-0; 38,000 saw Arsenal beat them the following year. You wouldn’t know it by the lack of investment that FIFA puts into the women’s game, coupled with the embarrassing, ham-handed objectification it routinely engages in during its ceremonies.

Let’s be real: If FIFA won’t fund player safety or gender equity now, when it has $15 billion in its accounts, there’s absolutely no version of a privatized FIFA Forward Enterprise, accountable to Jared Kushner’s kid brother and JP Morgan rather than to the players and supporters, that funds them more. That’s not how this works. Investors don’t invest in properties to slow them down!

This is why people are reacting like this, and why on Thursday morning, UEFA took the drastic step of pledging a World Cup boycott if this squalid enterprise moves forward. And if UEFA can boycott the World Cup, then we can imagine something even greater: a World Cup, and a sport, without this scabrous institution.

Imagine this, instead: a restructuring of soccer’s finances around redistribution instead of extortion. In this world, wealthy federations like England and Spain help subsidize the sport’s development, using their cash from domestic broadcast revenues to underwrite federations that can’t afford academies, referee development, or basic youth infrastructure. Picture a virtuous cycle of money moving sideways inside the sport, instead of disappearing into the pockets of shareholders.

Hosting and tournament-expansion decisions ought to carry stringently enforceable labor and human rights standards that have independent oversight, not the kind of tissue-thin pledges that Qatar made once we were all paying attention. And the sport needs a governing institution that has actual checks and balances, not a pathetically compliant assembly of 211 members eager to have their votes bought in exchange for their silence and complicity.

There’s one thing worth protecting here; it’s not FIFA’s revenue stream, and it’s certainly not Gianni Infantino’s post-FIFA career. It’s what the World Cups do: getting a few billion people, for one glorious month, to care about players and countries that they’ve never thought about before. That’s beautiful beyond any price, and it has nothing to do with whether Thrive Capital has a piece of the action.

Gianni Infantino and his minions want this decided in their sleazy fashion, by a Congress with every financial incentive not to ask questions, let alone disagree. The people who actually make the World Cups—and soccer—matter, players and supporters most of all, must have their say before this happens. Already, they are.

In the name of all that matters, all that is beautiful about the simplest game, Gianni Infantino and FIFA have disgraced this sport for far too long. For the preservation of all that’s good about it, they must go.

Netanyahu called Kirk a “lion-hearted friend of Israel.” Right-wingers variously blamed the “progressive-liberal left” (Milei) and “radical Islamists” (Netanyahu) for his death. Donations poured in to Turning Point USA, Kirk’s right-wing youth organization. The small-donor support excited MAGA leadership. For 13 years, only elite megadonors—libertarians, Birchers, the Heritage Foundation—had kept TPUSA in business. Finally it had popular support from young conservatives, whom it purported to speak for and who, now, would surely support Trump.

In The New York Times, Ezra Klein helped canonize Kirk for a more moderate audience, admitting to having “envied” him as “one of the era’s most effective practitioners of persuasion.”

On it went. Flags were hung at half-mast. First Amendment protections were even suspended in Kirk’s honor. Hundreds of enemies of Kirk’s Christian nationalism, including Jimmy Kimmel, were censored, suspended, or fired for telling jokes or for grieving insufficiently.

And there was that moving pop dirge: We are Charlie Kirk, his courage our own / Together unbroken, we’ll make Heaven known.

But privately MAGA wasn’t together, and it wasn’t unbroken. And today, Turning Point is not what it once was. Its events, featuring charmless pundits like Jack Posobiec and Blake Neff, are lackluster.

What’s more, as Trump’s star has fallen with the young, Kirk’s MAGA-aligned organization is struggling to hold onto its power over young hearts and minds. “Young voters are conflicted over the war in Iran and how the Epstein files were handled,” Andrew Sypher, Turning Point’s chief field officer, admitted to the Times in April. “The headwinds we’re facing now are anti-Trump.”

But it’s not just the young. The right is broadly a wreck.

Essentially, “e pluribus Charlie Kirk” gave way to MAGA struggle sessions over Kirk’s legacy. Would Kirk, the poster boy of Christian nationalism, have stuck with Trump as he backed Israel right up to the current war with Iran? This has been hotly debated among right-wing influencers all year.

Ben Shapiro seems to believe Kirk was a thoroughgoing Christian Zionist who would have supported, as Shapiro does, Trump’s war in Iran. Right-wing podcasters Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson, as well as former Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene have said otherwise—that Kirk was killed just as he was standing up to neocon Turning Point donors who thought his support for Israel was waning.

The isolationist MAGA splinter group America First, which broadly includes Owens and Carlson, now saturates the right-wing airwaves. On any given day, you can now hear former Trump stalwarts, many of them close friends of Kirk, shivving the president. Megyn Kelly called Trump “grifty.” Carlson called him a “disloyal to the United States.” Theo Von called the Trump administration “fucking terrorists.” Owens called him a “genocidal maniac.”

Joe Rogan and Andrew Schultz, who once plumped for Trump on their popular podcasts, now regularly disparage him. And of course MAGA booster Greene left Congress and MAGA, and then, just last month, quit the Republican Party altogether.

Finally, on Wednesday, maximalist MAGA zealot Alex Jones called for Trump’s immediate impeachment. At the time of Kirk’s assassination, 93 percent of Republicans approved of Trump. Today, 78 percent do. Only one in five is “enthusiastic” about the rest of Trump’s final term.

And then there’s Nick Fuentes, the neo-Nazi and Kirk’s longtime rival from the far far right. With Trump’s strength diminished, and Kirk gone, “young people right now are looking for someone to follow, like they followed Charlie,” Jonathan Coon, a TPUSA chapter president, told the Times. “Fuentes [is] enticing to some of them.”

If that’s so, the midterms might get weird. Fuentes is urging his culty followers, the Groypers, to sit out the election or vote for Democrats. (“The liberals were right,” he has said.)

The mudslinging has left few reputations unsullied. Owens, Shapiro, and Erika Kirk are all deeply disliked by voters, according to a recent poll by Overton Insights.

Owens, who has regularly attacked both Shapiro and Erika Kirk, is the least unpopular. She’s at -23 percent. Erika Kirk (-26 percent) and Ben Shapiro (-27 percent) are doing even worse. Within the GOP, according to the same poll, Republicans dislike both the pro-war Shapiro and the antiwar Owens.

Erika Kirk gets positive marks with Republicans (+41 percent), but, after its autumn heyday, TPUSA has quietly struggled under her leadership. Some Turning Point leaders have resigned. One said the organization’s “mission and purpose have been lost.” TPUSA’s All-American Halftime Show at the Super Bowl, at which Erika was a no-show, was widely considered a bust.

Ben Shapiro’s media empire is doing even worse. The media company he co-founded, The Daily Wire, has “irrevocably collapsed,” as The Washington Post summarized popular opinion. Reduced traffic, massive layoffs, and expensive gambles in the entertainment business now threaten to put it out of business.

The terrible truth is that assassinations of charismatic leaders enfeeble political movements at least as often as they galvanize them.

After the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, ties between civil rights groups and organized labor frayed, which stymied economic reform. After the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, the peace process in Israel essentially ground to a halt.

It’s not just losing the leader that hurts. It’s the Game of Thrones aspect of it all, the squabbling among apostles. Maybe the Christian nationalists need a new verse to their battle hymn. We were Charlie Kirk, his courage was our own / But how can we, divided, now make Heaven known?

Surviving Bundists and their descendants came together in other socialist organizations, and so perhaps it shouldn’t surprise that the tremors of a party formed in the nineteenth century resonate with today’s left. As Zionism gained traction in cities and shtetls, the Bund condemned the oppression of Arabs in Palestine, lamenting that “Zionists have built all their hopes on stripping away the political rights of Palestine’s existing Arab population, who constitute the oppressed majority … and on forcing them from all positions of power.” The Bund published Palestinian voices in its newspapers and denounced the Pandora’s box of chauvinism that Zionism had pried open. Women were equal participants in Bundist affairs during an era when gender parity was vanishingly rare, even if they were subject to the condescension of male comrades. Bundists and their fellow travelers in the United States organized against anti-Black racism: After the 1908 race riots in Springfield, Illinois, Yiddish newspapers called for demonstrations and pooled money for victims; meanwhile, Black newspapers, such as The New York Age, committed extensive coverage to the anti-Jewish pogroms erupting across the Russian Empire. The Bund supported liberation movements throughout the world, resisting a rising tide of fascist governments, land wars, bigotry, and apartheid.

While the Bund was primarily active in pre-1945 Europe, the wails of its epoch haunt the present in Molly Crabapple’s new history, Here Where We Live Is Our Country: A Story of the Jewish Bund. Crabapple begins her inquiry with her great-grandfather, the teenage Bundist Sam Rothbort, who may have been involved in the shooting of a plunderous police officer in his native Volkovysk and transformed from a scrappy rebel to a mournful painter and sculptor after he passed through Ellis Island. Though he died before she was born, Crabapple takes the buried past as “a guide for our contemporary moment, in all its horror and possibility, in all its repression, courage, and loss.”

Crabapple is perhaps best known as a visual artist, the creator of striking illustrations and lithographs from the Occupy Wall Street protests. She’s also a dogged reporter who has worked in combat zones. She sees a precedent for today’s progressive firebrands in the example of Jewish freedom fighters who opposed prejudice, tyranny, and class stratification in their home countries, without seeking solutions in nationalism and the colonization of distant lands. Anyone, anywhere, she suggests, can tune themselves to the wavelength of revolution.

From its early days, the Bund put principle before power. As factory strikes roiled turn-of-the-century Russia, the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party attempted to gather Marxist revolutionaries into a cohesive bloc. Their Second Congress, held in 1903 between Brussels and London, was pivotal—Lenin consolidated control, and the Bolsheviks, who wanted immediate revolution, split from the more gradual Mensheviks. But this summit sidelined another group: the Bund, which, in spite of having 30,000 members at the time (compared to a few thousand Bolsheviks and Mensheviks combined), received just five delegates out of 51. And so they walked out, a decision that did not give them much of a say in the future of Russian politics, Crabapple admits. Yet it’s evidence of a faction that rejected bad compromises and was willing to organize outside of the electoral system.

And organize they did. By 1906, when Russia tempered the long-standing absolutism of its monarchy with a parliament, the number of Bundists in the empire had swelled, by some accounts, to 40,000—as the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks grew at even faster rates. Membership in the Bund plummeted in the early 1910s, and, after the Bolsheviks assassinated the royal family, they liquidated the Russian Bund, suppressing the political activities of its members unless they joined the Jewish Section of the Communist Party. Yet with the restoration of Polish independence in 1918, the Bund became a social force in Poland. They printed their own Yiddish-language publication, the Folkstsaytung. They opened the Medem Sanitorium in Warsaw to treat needy children for tuberculosis—an institution that offered kids a chance to edit their own newspaper and elect representatives from their ranks to participate in self-governance; corporal punishment, too, was outlawed in this facility, during a period in which much of Europe treated flagellation as an ordinary aspect of child-rearing. Women founded an organization, YAF, that pushed for equal wages and free childcare, established day-care centers, and circulated information about birth control.

Among the tenets of the Bund was a commitment to improving the political situation in their home countries—whether in Central and Eastern Europe or new havens in the United States and even Palestine—instead of seeking to establish a Jewish state. They were neither assimilationist, religious, nor supremacist; they believed in secular Jewish culture and in ending a legacy of persecution without inflicting the same subjugation on others. The problem with Zionism, the Bund believed, was not necessarily Jewish emigration to Palestine—if you must go there, why not just try and live alongside Arabs?—but the desire for Jews to reign over others. “The most important condition for a peaceful life together, for the entire population of Palestine, is the renunciation of the Zionist plan to rule the land against the will of the majority,” the Bund declared in a 1929 resolution. Meanwhile, it was becoming harder for Jews to imagine living anywhere: Many fled to Palestine because the United States effectively stopped the flow of Jewish immigrants with the Johnson-Reed Act in 1924.

The Bundists predicted that Zionism would perpetuate a cycle of imperial brutality: “Zionism drew its vital juices from defeats and catastrophes,” wrote the Bundist Emanuel Nowogrodski in his history of the Polish Bund, written before his 1967 death and published posthumously in 2001. Nowogrodski was a general secretary for the Bund’s Central Committee until World War II, a position he relinquished because he was visiting New York when Hitler invaded Poland. (His wife, Sonia, stuck in Warsaw, became a leader of the underground until she was murdered in Treblinka.) For Crabapple, the fiery, foreshortened life of Sonia Nowogrodska is an inspiration, not just a tragedy: She ran a soup kitchen out of the Bund’s headquarters until it was bombed, when she restarted operations around the corner. Here Where We Live Is Our Country denies any narrative defined by victimhood, particularly one that suggests hopelessness as an essential theme of Jewish existence.

This feels more surprising than it should. Crabapple proceeds from a refreshing assumption that Jews were agents of history and not mere casualties of its worst tendencies, that the footprint of anti-Zionists in the twentieth century was robust and central to Jewish history at large, and that exclusionary notions of Jewish identity were already outdated a century ago. In her book, Jewish forbears are models for anti-colonial fervor and action: staunch souls who, while fending off starvation, disease, overcrowding, and lethal violence in the Warsaw Ghetto, found space and energy to support Gandhi and the cause of Indian independence. Isolated from the world, the Bundists sent telegrams praising Gandhi’s Quit India campaign, a push for Indian self-determination that was sparked by the martial law that Britain instituted to maintain order while it fought the Nazis. No matter that the Brits, like the Bund, were battling Hitler—the Bundists knew that their allies were the colonized, marginal, and exploited.

In the interwar period, the Bund had made a place for itself in the civic fabric of Poland, teaming up with the Polish Socialist Party, with whom in 1926 they reluctantly supported a coup by socialist leader Jozéf Piłsudski, who had dreams of a pan-ethnic Poland yet ended up being a vindictive authoritarian—Piłsudski even dissolved Parliament in 1930, jailing his political opponents. The Bund and the Polish Socialist Party grew closer in the subsequent months, their fates bound by a shared enemy. The Polish Socialist Party also understood antisemitism as a serious threat, even as its members became more embattled and, after the 1939 Nazi invasion, increasingly unable to aid Jewish compatriots.

The Jews were confined to ghettos, most famously the Warsaw Ghetto, which Crabapple describes with devastating eloquence:

People slept everywhere, in corners, hallways, cellars, curbs. The streets were so crowded it took an hour to walk five blocks. You shoved through peddlers, scammers, and feral skeletons who would snatch the bread out of your hands and eat it even while the crowd showered them in blows. The horses had all been slaughtered, so former professionals yoked themselves to rickshaws.

Crabapple builds grand, gritty set pieces for the dozens of pages she devotes to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the largest Jewish revolt against the Nazis during World War II. She compares the effectiveness of the Jews to the success of so many guerilla combatants who use their superior knowledge of terrain to humiliate foreign armies. When the Nazis tried to burn the ghetto, the Jewish Combat Organization burned Nazi factories. They donned stolen German uniforms and cloaked their footsteps at night with rags fastened to their feet. Crabapple digs into the fates of the Bundists who helped helm the rebellion, their extraordinary efforts to cling to life, hiding beneath floorboards and fleeing through sewers, and their self-sacrificing deaths.

She also chronicles Zionist atrocities toward Jews in Palestine who strayed from the party line. Crabapple writes of Labor Zionists under the British mandate who kidnapped and sexually abused Jewish women if they had romantic relationships with Palestinian men. She explains how, in March 1948, after David Ben-Gurion called for a draft of Jewish refugees in Europe (people who had no formal connection to Israel, a country that would not exist for two more months), officials in displaced persons camps fined, blacklisted, and denied rations to refugees if they refused to enlist in the Haganah, a pre–Israel Defense Forces military. Crabapple tells of a refugee camp in Ulm, Germany, where residents beat the elderly parents of Jews who wouldn’t sign up for the draft. The Bundist newspaper Unzer Shtime expressed shock “that Jews, the standard victims of Fascism and terrorism, would be capable of the kinds of violence Zionists in the camps exercise toward their Bundist and other non-­Zionist political rivals.” Chaim Weitzmann, later the first president of Israel, described Zionism’s biggest enemy, back in 1903: This indomitable foe was not the Cossacks carrying out pogroms or the ethnonationalists scapegoating Jews or the empires that pit minorities against one another; it was the Bund.

In the United States, the Bund was never at the center of Jewish life. In certain ways, this reflects the group’s guiding ethos. Instead of mapping the same vision they had in Eastern Europe onto the U.S., they coordinated their own experience as Jewish Socialists with the melting pot of a country that was hardly free of antisemitism but also did not target Jewish immigrants for mass butchery. Bundists were a major presence in the Workmen’s Circle, a social justice organization that provided mutual aid—including health insurance and elder care—to socialists across the U.S. and Canada. Bundists headed major unions, such as the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, became leaders in the Socialist Party of America, and helped collect donations for Jews back in Europe. One of the Bund’s major American fundraisers, Meyer London, became a congressman who represented New York’s Lower East Side. Crabapple offers an overview of the Bundists who fled Europe, but there are more detailed surveys of the Bund outside of Europe, such as David Slucki’s The International Jewish Labor Bund After 1945: Toward a Global History. Crabapple’s main interests are the threads that link her back to the old country, where the Bund experienced both its glory days and its gravest challenges.

What she does astonishingly well is reframe a decisive, often misconstrued period of European Jewish life, restoring a sense of diversity and complexity to the conversation. Bundist Marek Edelman, a leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, wrote an invaluable book about the resistance in 1945, which was not sold in Israel or published in Hebrew until 2001. It’s no mystery why: The nation furnished a narrative that such a monumental insurrection was enacted nearly exclusively by Zionist youth militias. Crabapple reorients this tale toward the truth, gifting her readers a compass for their exploration of the past, and a rallying cry for battling the oppressors of now.

The U.K. “has no future” if it cannot “restore the natural world on which we rely for our food, water, and clean air,” said Chris Hinchliff, who is among the members of Parliament pressing the government to release the full report, rather than a shorter, redacted version. Even that version, which was obtained by The Guardian’s Fiona Harvey, “paints a devastating picture of severe food shortages, price rises, migration, political destabilisation, and possible war, resulting from the collapse of ecosystems, fuelled by the human-induced climate crisis and over-exploitation,” Harvey wrote.

Meanwhile, massive wildfires in France and Spain have been forcing hundreds of thousands of people to evacuate—and prompting forthright countermeasures from governments. In Spain, Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said the fires were effects of the “climate emergency.” For the second year in a row, the prime minister responded to ferocious wildfires by calling on political parties across the ideological spectrum “to reach an agreement, a State pact, to address the climate emergency.”

As if to validate the U.K. spy chiefs’ report in real time, food production in Europe is already suffering from the extreme heat of recent weeks, which has been “sucking soils dry.” France’s maize harvest is the lowest in 50 years; across Europe, nine million tons of grain have been lost. Such losses are of particular concern for the U.K., which imports much of its food.

The U.K. report is notable for highlighting not only climate change but the related problem of biodiversity loss and collapsing ecosystems. For example, scientists have warned that continued logging and high temperatures are pushing the Amazon rainforest toward an irreversible shift into a savannah. That would drive further climate chaos as the Amazon transforms from an absorber into an emitter of carbon.

Aides to former Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer twice quashed plans to release the U.K. report, Harvey reported, allegedly for fear that the climate-denying Reform UK Party would attack Labour for putting climate concerns ahead of the cost of living. Climate denial persists in the U.K. media as well: Even as wildfires scorched Europe, the front page of the Rupert Murdoch–owned Times (of London) featured a rant against the net-zero-emissions goal that scientists say is essential to preserving a livable planet. And across Europe, most news outlets are still not reporting that climate change is what is driving these fires and heat waves, even as the outlets illustrate their stories with “fun in the sun” images of people at the beach. “The pictures do not convey the severity of the moment Europe finds itself in,” observed Al Jazeera English.

Andy Burnham, who replaced Starmer as prime minister on July 20, has yet to speak publicly about the buried report or climate change in general. He has said, however, that he is open to approving increased drilling for oil and gas off Britain’s coast in the North Sea. This, as the smoke from wildfires in France and Spain—and in Scotland, in the U.K.—is estimated to cause “well over 100,000 excess deaths globally,” according to Dr. Theodore Keeping of Imperial College London.

Covering Climate Now’s 89 Percent Project spotlights the reality that 80 to 89 percent of the world’s people want their governments to take stronger climate action. In this summer of smoke and fire, the public is waiting for their politicians and their press to respond. “Voters are much more tuned into this than most of our [elected] representatives are,” author George Monbiot said on the U.K.’s Channel 4. “And indeed than most of the media is.”

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

If you haven’t heard of the Freedom 250 Grand Prix, that’s probably because you’re distracted by the Iran war, or the 60 or so people that Immigration and Customs Enforcement has killed during the past 18 months, or the 33 arrests, prosecutions, and investigations of Trump’s political enemies thus far by the Justice Department, or the outrageous self-enrichment that has allowed Trump to increase his net worth by roughly $3.5 billion. Or, if you’ve been following my coverage of the pending sale of the Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building, perhaps you’re worried about the threat to New Deal murals by Ben Shahn, Philip Guston, and Seymour Fogel in that building—which also figure in the Freedom 250 Grand Prix story, because the Cohen is on the Grand Prix route too.

It’s hard to imagine a worse place than the National Mall for an Indy 500 race. Apart from the National Gallery, the National Archives, the Air and Space Museum, and the Cohen building, the Freedom 250 Grand Prix route will roar past the National Gallery’s outdoor sculpture garden, the Museum of the American Indian, the Hirshhorn, Frank Gehry’s Eisenhower Memorial, and the National Museum of Natural History. The National Museum of American History, which contains Francis Scott Key’s Star-Spangled Banner and the Revolutionary war–era Gunboat Philadelphia, is one block away. The gunboat, an extraordinary thing to see, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, even though it isn’t precisely a “place.”

These facilities are bracing for potential damage from vibrations. At the National Gallery, I’m told certain artworks have already been moved away from the side of the building facing the racetrack. Chris Abanavas, a press officer there, declined to confirm that but said in a written statement that the museum “has conducted a vibration study and based on those results will take any precautions necessary to ensure the safety of our staff, visitors, art, and facilities during the race.” Oy.

The race is the brainchild of Bud Denker, president of the Penske Corporation, which owns the Indianapolis 500 Speedway, and Erik Shanks, chief executive of Fox Sports, which will broadcast it. They sold Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy on the idea, but Congress wouldn’t agree to a route that would zip past the Capitol. So in January, Denker shortened the route to keep it off the Capitol grounds and Trump signed an executive order authorizing Duffy to “take steps to ensure that all permits, approvals, and other authorizations as are necessary … are issued and granted as expeditiously as possible.” Lisa Delpy Neirotti, professor of sports management at George Washington University, told CNN: “It’s easy to pull off because they have an executive order that they can basically do what they need to do to get this thing done. If they had to go through public hearings, if they had to go through a lot of other hoops, it would not be enough time.”

The big hoop to jump through is Section 106 of the 1966 National Historic Preservation Act, about which I wrote last week. Section 106 regulations do include protections against vibrations, typically from construction or buses or subways. As expected, the Trump-controlled Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, or ACHP, last week endorsed a drastic curtailment of Section 106 regulation. But that’s a proposed regulation that must be published in the Federal Register, and on which the public must be given 30 days to comment before it can be made final. There’s no way the scaled-back Section 106 rule will be in effect when the race takes place on August 22 and 23.

And even the new rule might well require a Section 106 review of the Freedom 250 Grand Prix, because the entire Mall is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and so, individually, are the National Gallery, the National Archives, the Cohen building, the Hirshhorn, the National Museum of Natural History, and the National Museum of American History. There are also some outdoor items on the Grand Prix route that are listed independently on the National Register, including Man Controlling Trade, a 1942 statue by Michael Lantz outside the Federal Trade Commission; the 1882 Temperance Fountain; and a statue of Civil War General Winfield Scott Hancock.

Sara Bronin, who chaired the ACHP under President Joe Biden, told me: “You wouldn’t want to see some of these things topple over because of the rumblings and the vibrations.” In the case of the Ben Shahn frescoes in the Cohen building, already there are cracks in the plaster. David Olin, a GSA preservation contractor, told a GSA tour group in March, “There is active cracking in the wall substrate and there is active cracking in the plaster”—just from everyday wear and tear—“slowly and systematically undermining the aggregate within the plaster.”

Did the Trump administration go through the required Section 106 process? Only half-assedly. The National Park Service consulted in March with the DC State Historic Preservation Office, describing the route (1.7 miles), the number of turns (seven), and the necessary installation of barriers, grandstands, pedestrian bridges, and so on. The National Parks Service saw “no adverse effects” under Section 106. It made no mention of the museums along the route and what’s contained inside them. Neither was there any consultation with the National Trust for Historic Preservation. That isn’t required in every case, but it’s expected when there are obvious complications, as there are here.

In an April 21 letter, the DC State Historic Preservation Office more or less said, Godspeed with all your semiquincentennial plans, just make sure to secure the necessary permits and clean up afterward. For its part, the General Services Administration said in a written statement: “Out of an abundance of caution, GSA reviewed the proposed route for potential impact to our nearby assets and identified no areas of concern. Like millions of other Americans, we fully support the patriotic celebrations happening in our Nation’s capital, including the Freedom250 Grand Prix.”

There’s zero evidence that the National Park Service or any other government agency considered the possible impact of vibrations. That fell to Mary Okin, assistant director of the Living New Deal, who raised it with specific reference to the Cohen building. “It has become clear to us,” Okin wrote in a July 27 letter to the National Park Service and other agencies, “that this event would include substantial potential for adverse effects due to vibratory impacts likely with sound waves in excess of 130 [decibels] during the race.” That level of vibrations, she wrote, is “well above normal street traffic and even [goes] beyond those of jackhammers, pile drivers, and even freight trains.”

“Like many others,” Okin continued, “we question the necessity and cost of this event.” But if it must take place, Okin urged the installation of temporary sound barriers and monitoring of the frescoes by a conservator during the event. “I’m very concerned not only about the buildings but the collections [and] the outdoor sculpture,” Michelle Arcari Rose, a former associate general counsel at the National Trust, told me. “Why would we risk any of that just for a Grand Prix at a place that is just patently not appropriate?” An email I sent to the Freedom 250 press office went unanswered.

Ordinarily, when construction work takes place near a protected historic property, consideration of vibrations’ effect precedes the groundbreaking. If damage is detected, the work comes to a halt while mitigation methods are applied. But there is, of course, no chance that the Freedom 250 Grand Prix will be brought to a halt if there’s damage to the Shahn murals, the Wright brothers’ plane, General Winfield Scott Hancock, or anything else along the route.

Look, I’m no expert on the impact of vibrations on museums. But I do know that museums keep track of vibrations created by mere footfalls. According to one study, a noise level above 80 decibels can cause damage to certain historic artifacts. The noise level at an Indy 500 race is closer to 140 decibels, which is roughly equivalent to standing next to a jet engine.

The usual standard for measuring vibrations is “peak particle velocity,” or PPV, which is the maximum speed at which ground vibrations move molecules. A 2012 memorandum of agreement among the ACHP, the National Highway Administration, and state historic preservation officers for Kentucky and Indiana, concerning a bridge built over the Ohio River, stipulated that the maximum PPV during construction should be 0.20 inches per second. That same level was required in 2009 when the Coast Guard was building a new headquarters at the former site of St. Elizabeths mental hospital in Washington, D.C. No such requirement is imposed on Trump’s Indy 500 car race.

The Freedom 250 Grand Prix is supposed to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Let’s hope it doesn’t end up smashing the case that contains it in the National Archives’s Rotunda for the Charters of Freedom.

Only three Republicans—Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, and Rand Paul of Kentucky—crossed the aisle to vote with Democrats to advance the measure. Again. Mitch McConnell didn’t show. Again. And Democratic Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania voted with Republicans against the measure.

Again.

The final vote was 49–50 to vanquish a resolution out of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that would have instructed the president to withdraw U.S. troops from Iran, blocking him from military action in the country without congressional approval. The resolution only needed a simple majority to pass, but Fetterman tanked it.

Although Fetterman initially ran his 2022 campaign for a Senate seat with a progressive mask, his M.O. since entering office has been the exact opposite. He is one of the most outspoken supporters of Israel in Congress, he supports the deadly and expensive campaigns against Iran and Lebanon, he voted with Republicans to confirm Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, and he has become increasingly aligned with President Trump on a host of other issues.

The House of Representatives has now passed two separate war powers resolutions, and for a moment there it looked like the upper chamber might join them, but the Senate (and one senator, in particular) continues to hold out. This was its thirteenth vote on a resolution to end the Iran war this year.

These resolutions are only growing in importance as the war spreads, with the U.S. resuming airstrikes and Iran launching missiles at targets across the Middle East. Just Wednesday night, U.S. Central Command struck dozens of Iranian targets for the first time in days, following Iran’s attacks on American military sites earlier this week.

Two separate federal appeals courts rejected the Trump administration’s bid to detain immigrants—many of whom have lived in the U.S. for years without a criminal record—without a hearing. The rulings mark the administration’s fifth and sixth consecutive losses on the case.

In a 2–1 ruling by the Wisconsin-based Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, the majority found that the government could not refuse bond hearings to undocumented immigrants who were already living in the U.S. In executing its mass detention policy, the government had been improperly applying a rule meant to apply to immigrants “seeking admission” at the U.S. border. 

Earlier Thursday, there was a 2–1 ruling by the California-based Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which similarly found that the government had misconstrued decades-old immigration laws to justify its actions. The majority opinion was written by Trump appointee Judge Daniel Bress.

These rulings follow the same logic as decisions from the Atlanta-based Eleventh Circuit, the New York–based Second Circuit, the Colorado-based Tenth Circuit, and the Ohio-based Sixth Circuit. Only two federal appeals courts have sided with the Trump administration’s mass detention policy as it inevitably makes its way to the Supreme Court. 

Mass detention isn’t merely a step along the way to achieving Trump’s goal of mass deportation: It’s also the goal. 

Where we go from here is anyone’s guess. UEFA, which oversees European soccer, has already unanimously voted to boycott all subsequent FIFA tournaments if the measure passes. Those tournaments very much include the 2030 World Cup, which is set to partially be hosted in Portugal and Spain—and would mean 11 of the top 20–ranked nations in the world would miss out on FIFA’s premier competition. CONCACAF, which oversees soccer in North and Central America and the Caribbean, voted to “reject” the sell-off hours later. If the backlash grows, Infantino’s presidency—or even FIFA—could be destroyed.

How we got here is much clearer, however. The 2026 World Cup, hosted primarily in the United States, was a lesson in avarice for the already power- and money-hungry Infantino. Hobnobbing at every opportunity with the president and his cronies, Infantino came away with a clear lesson: Though he is plenty corrupt and greedy, he wasn’t being corrupt and greedy enough. Modeling both his public persona and his leadership of FIFA increasingly on Trump, Infantino is now making a move that could remake the centerpiece tournament of global soccer—and make him and his allies fabulously wealthy.

FIFA, not Trump or America, may have been fully responsible for the 2026 World Cup’s most irritating quirks: the commercial breaks disguised as pauses for “hydration”; the championship rings; the god-awful halftime show; and, of course, the insanely inflated cost of everything. Infantino may be an evangelist for soccer’s power as a force for harmony, togetherness, and collective prosperity, but in practice everything always comes back to the bottom line. For FIFA and its bald president, the United States was an unmissable opportunity to line pockets, and no potential source for revenue was missed. Even the grass on the pitch for the final was sold by the square.

There were howls of outrage at Infantino’s brazen profit seeking throughout the tournament. FIFA is ostensibly a nonprofit, but Infantino holds onto power by distributing its revenue to its 211 member nations—many of which are allowed to spend it with minimal, or even nonexistent, oversight. For Infantino, the 2026 World Cup was a once-in-a-generation opportunity to deliver the goods for his clients, as the World Cup is never held in a nation this wealthy and hypercapitalistic. But it also was an opportunity to put his own spin on the World Cup. For Infantino, the World Cup is a luxury experience, one available only to oligarchs and autocrats. It seems clear Infantino increasingly sees himself as the latter—the god emperor of global soccer.

For all the deserved grousing about that Americanization—and about Infantino’s cozy, obsequious relationship with Trump—the World Cup was largely a success, at least from Infantino’s perspective. His refusal to speak out when teams were harassed and a Somali referee was literally prevented from entering the U.S. may have been pathetic, while FIFA’s decision to reverse a red card for U.S. striker Folarin Balogun was astonishingly corrupt, even by the organization’s standards. But the outcry that followed those incidents never fully subsumed the competition, which was largely excellent and was, by financial metrics, the most successful (i.e., profitable) in history.

One way to read Infantino’s decision to partner with Kushner to quite literally sell the World Cup is that he now feels untouchable. His critics hit him hard and repeatedly during the tournament, but it did not change the fact the World Cup is bigger than any controversy or criticism. Recognizing this, Infantino decided that no one can lay a glove on him because he—not FIFA—owns the World Cup. He is behaving like a king, even more so than usual.

Another, however, is that Infantino is tired of his critics and wants to cement his status as the god emperor of global soccer. On Monday, a day before the announcement that he planned to sell a portion of the World Cup to private investors, he released an extraordinarily petulant 15-slide statement on Instagram aimed at his detractors.

“Sorry that the matches are now over and sorry that you missed all that joy and togetherness. Sorry that you were so consumed by hate and criticism that you missed it all,” the FIFA president posted on Instagram. “To those behind their pens and papers, behind their screens spreading hate and false rumours, I want to say that while you are sitting behind, we at FIFA are on the frontlines organising, working hard, and delivering ‌the best show in the ‌world.” Infantino is a wealthy and powerful adult, but this is the pose of a 15-year-old who overheard their supposed “friends” picking on them at a school dance. Of course, it also sounds like Trump, who increasingly appears to be Infantino’s hero, idol, and model.

The backlash from UEFA—which has waged a proxy war against Infantino for years—should have been predictable. The argument against privatizing the World Cup is obvious and simple: It makes no long-term strategic or financial sense. Owning the World Cup, all of it, is what gives FIFA power. Trading that to investors for a one-time windfall makes no sense at all, especially if those investors respond by depreciating its value by staging more competitions (which seems likely). FIFA, moreover, does not need the money. The 2026 World Cup made at least $15 billion, which is more than enough for it to live off. The only argument for selling off a chunk of the tournament is that it will make the leaders of corrupt federations—and likely Infantino himself—a sizable chunk of change now.

Ultimately, that’s how we got here. Infantino spent June and July jetting around the U.S., rubbing shoulders with every member of the Trump administration he could. The lesson he took was not just that he was leaving money on the table by not being more venal, but that there would be no consequences for engaging in more blatant corruption. After all, Trump has turned America into his personal piggybank, and no one is stopping him. How hard could it be for Infantino to do the same thing with the World Cup?

“The Administration has openly and repeatedly called for the revocation of ABC’s licenses, because it dislikes the content and viewpoints expressed on ABC network programs,” ABC wrote in a fiery 119-page regulatory filing to the agency.

The filing is the latest in a legal battle between the television network and the FCC, which abruptly moved to review the licenses of eight ABC-owned television stations in April. The agency initially claimed that the review was related to ABC’s diversity and inclusion hiring policies, though it came shortly after Jimmy Kimmel made a joke about President Trump that Trump didn’t like. The federal government had never before demanded such a vast review of a major television network’s licenses.

ABC’s latest filing called out FCC Chair Brendan Carr by name and made clear that this fight isn’t just about the Disney-owned network: “The retaliation against ABC is a signal to every media company in the country: accommodate the Administration’s view of what news coverage should look like or pay the price.”

“Across the government, regulatory and contracting carrots and sticks have been trained on other disfavored speakers,” the filing continued. “The tools vary; the objective does not: a media industry too fearful of official reprisal to report the news freely.”

Carr has rejected accusations of censorship, despite the sledgehammer he’s taken to the free press since the start of Trump’s second term.

“Look at the results so far,” Carr bragged at the Conservative Political Action Conference in March. “PBS, defunded. NPR, defunded. Joy Reid, gone from MSNBC. Sleepy-eyes Chuck Todd, gone. Jim Acosta, gone. John Dickerson, gone. Stephen Colbert is leaving. CBS is under new ownership, and soon enough, CNN is going to have new ownership, as well.”

Still, despite it all, Carr claims he doesn’t view the FCC as “the speech police.”

Luckily, as ABC outlined in its filing, the network has received a massive outpouring of support from viewers, current and former FCC officials, advocacy groups, and political leaders on both sides of the aisle—including warnings from conservative Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch and Senator Ted Cruz. The FCC’s website has been buried in public comments supporting ABC and offering passionate defenses of the First Amendment and local television.

This latest filing may not change Carr’s approach, but it could rally the rest of the industry—and the public—before the FCC makes its next move.

The program is called “Freedom Haulers” and promises to cover training costs and offer signing bonuses to veterans who sign up. In a post on X Thursday, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy claimed that trucking jobs paid up to six figures, leading with “🚨ILLEGALS OUT, VETERANS IN🚨” and a flashy patriotic video. 

🚨ILLEGALS OUT, VETERANS IN🚨

Our new campaign, FREEDOM HAULERS, is reclaiming America's highways and putting Vets in the driver's seat

✅ Make up to six-figures
✅ Flexible schedule
✅ Medical benefits
✅ Training costs covered
✅ Sign-on bonuses

Get on the road in a few… pic.twitter.com/j5vBCE49PO

— Secretary Sean Duffy (@SecDuffy) July 30, 2026

Veterans who recently drove large military vehicles as part of their duties can skip the normally required skills test for a commercial driver’s license. Others who are still on active duty can attend a commercial driving school for their final six months of service. The GI Bill will also fully cover commercial driver’s license training, and will even pay for a housing allowance during this training in some cases. 

Trump spoke about the plan two weeks ago at a Pennsylvania rally, railing against “illegal alien truck drivers who are just killing a lot of people—they can’t read signs, a lot of them are on drugs or alcohol, and they shouldn’t be driving these things.”

About 20 percent of all truck drivers in the U.S. are immigrants, according to the AP, but only 5 percent, or 200,000, have what are called non-domiciled licenses, which are issued by states to people who are legally authorized to work in the U.S. but do not have a permanent legal residence or domicile in that state.

Roughly 200,000 immigrants had their commercial licenses revoked in March, preventing them from driving semi-trucks, buses, and tractor-trailers despite passing tests and meeting the legal requirements to drive. Immigrant groups believe that many truck drivers are being targeted because of their ethnic backgrounds, such as Sikhs, who often wear turbans as part of their faith and make up a large portion of the trucking industry. 

Meanwhile, operating a military vehicle is different from operating a commercial vehicle, and some veterans may breeze to a CDL job without having the necessary skills, posing a danger on the road.  

During the outdoor event, Collins was asked to respond to reports that David Alan Scheer II, his son-in-law, has shared Nazi and antisemitic material online, including posts from the white nationalist hate group Patriot Front.

“You know, we’ve fully addressed that,” Collins said. “But Jon Ossoff refuses to disavow these Democrat socialist movements in our country—as a matter of fact he embraces them.”

Collins launched into a rant about all the things he felt Ossoff needed to answer for, without holding himself to the same standard. The Republican representative indicated he would take another question, but then abruptly excused himself.

“Listen, thank you. I appreciate y’all’s time. I appreciate you coming out this morning. Thank you very much,” Collins said, before he quickly departed.

Mike Collins abruptly wrapped up a press conference instead of answering questions about his close ties with a prominent neo-Nazi propagandist pic.twitter.com/tYEGzxBnq3

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 30, 2026

Although Collins claims to have “fully addressed” his son-in-law’s actions, his prior response was far from a condemnation. “Nobody speaks for me, and I don’t speak for anybody else,” Collins told reporters last week. He also removed a photograph featuring Scheer from his campaign’s website.

Speaking of Collins’s website, the candidate found himself in hot water earlier this year after he published fake endorsements from several local officials.

After the Senate Judiciary Committee postponed its scheduled vote on whether to advance Blanche’s nomination for attorney general Thursday morning, due to Republican opposition, the president made it clear that he cares a whole lot more about his $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” than Blanche’s future.

“Todd Blanche is a STAR, and everyone knows it! He has the potential to go down as one of the Greatest Attorney Generals of All Time,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post Thursday. “I have no objection to temporarily withdrawing Todd’s name, if they do not do the right thing, and putting him back after Cornyn and Tillis are out of office.”

The vote was postponed thanks to Senators John Cornyn of Texas and Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who have refused to vote “yes” on Blanche’s nomination over concerns about the status of Trump’s settlement with the IRS, which gave an IRS audit immunity deal to Trump and his family and created the nearly $1.8 billion slush fund for aggrieved Trump allies who feel that they’ve been attacked for supporting the president. Although Blanche testified publicly that the fund is not “moving forward,” staffers in the Justice Department and White House continued to promise Trump allies some form of payment after the fact.

Cornyn has repeatedly requested written confirmation from the Justice Department that the fund is dead. Without a statement in writing—as well as limits on Trump’s IRS audit immunity deal—he and Tillis are sticking with “no.”

But rather than kill the fund for good, Trump says he’ll wait them out. Blanche can be replaced. The slush fund, apparently, cannot.

“I thought we were pretty close to landing the plane last night, but this morning there’s been some more complications,” Cornyn told reporters Thursday. “I think if this were just between me and Todd Blanche, we would have worked this out. But apparently he’s getting some pushback from higher ups at the White House. I don’t know who, but this doesn’t need to be this hard.”

“We want to make sure that it remains dead, and that the president isn’t given any immunity from future audits that the ordinary taxpayer would not enjoy,” Cornyn clarified to CBS News.

Although both Cornyn and Tillis are set to leave office in January, their outspoken pushback serves as further evidence of the growing cracks in Trump’s grip on congressional Republicans.

“POTUS is mistaken if he believes concerns about the provisions in his tax lawsuit settlement are limited to me and Senator Tillis,” Cornyn posted after Trump moved to sideline Blanche.

UEFA announced Thursday that the organization of 55 national associations “will not participate in FIFA competitions” going forward. The decision comes shortly after FIFA President Gianni Infantino threatened to cut funding from teams that don’t get behind his moneymaking scheme.

“We unanimously and unequivocally reject FIFA’s proposal to transfer ownership interests in the World Cup and other FIFA competitions to private investors,” the statement said.

Last week, FIFA announced the creation of the FIFA Forward Enterprise, or FFE, which is expected to raise up to $4.2 million in the next year by “carefully selecting long-term investors who will purchase minority, non-controlling interests in FFE.”

Critics immediately decried the decision to sell stakes in the World Cup, which is managed by FIFA, a nonprofit organization. The move could potentially earn Infantino tens of millions of dollars.

“This model has no place in the world of football,” UEFA said in its statement. The group said it would continue to boycott so long as Infantino’s proposal “stayed alive.”

Shortly after UEFA’s decision, the Confederation of North, Central America and Caribbean Association Football released a statement saying its 41 members had also rejected FIFA’s proposal.

CONCACAF membership had “expressed deep concerns about the lack of due process surrounding the proposal, the artificially short deadline imposed, and the absence of any review or approval by the relevant FIFA governance bodies,” the statement said.

“In addition, the need for private equity investment to fund new and existing FIFA Forward programs following the most profitable FIFA World Cup in history was questioned.”

Infantino reportedly held investor discussions with members of the Trump administration. The move came amid mounting concerns over Infantino’s relationship with Trump, after the U.S. president openly bullied FIFA into lifting a red card against a player on the U.S. men’s soccer team.

In addition, FIFA reportedly stated that once the approval was granted, the investor group would be led by Thrive Eternal, a venture capital firm run by Joshua Kushner, the brother of Trump’s son-in-law Jared who is under investigation for alleged corruption.

This story has been updated.

On Thursday, the Senate Finance Committee voted down an amendment to a tax procedure bill that would have prevented the IRS from making any tax audit immunity deals with a sitting president, their family, or any connected entities. It also would have effectively killed Trump’s IRS audit immunity deal and required the Treasury Department to report any related agreements to Congress. 

Every Republican on the committee voted against the amendment, including Senators Bill Cassidy and John Cornyn, who will be leaving the Senate at the end of this year after being defeated in GOP primaries by Trump-backed challengers. 

Cornyn and Cassidy have vocally opposed Trump’s settlement deal with the IRS, which not only would give the president, his family, and his businesses protection from audits from the IRS, but also calls for the creation of a nearly $1.8 billion slush fund for anyone who claims to have been victimized by “political weaponization” from the federal government. Cornyn in particular has vowed to vote against Todd Blanche’s nomination for attorney general until he gets a written agreement that the slush fund is dead and the IRS audit immunity deal is narrowed in scope (so as not to apply to future filings).  

But their opposition to the settlement seems to end at actually taking any legislative action against it. 

The amendment vote was forced by Democratic Senator Ron Wyden, the ranking member on the committee, and was supported by every Democrat on the committee. The amendment failed by a 14–13 vote.  

“Our office has received more than 7000 messages from constituents expressing their opposition and anger,” Democratic Senator Maria Cantwell told Bloomberg Law. “We need to make clear to those law-abiding citizens that the well-connected are not above the law and they don’t get a free pass when it comes to compliance with our tax laws.”

Other Republicans on the committee claimed that approving the amendment would have doomed the bipartisan bill altogether. It’s a package of changes to tax procedures, including collections, processes, and administration. Republican Senator Mike Crapo, the committee’s chair, said “this is not the place” to resolve the settlement. 

“If this bill were to become the vehicle where this issue is resolved, it would achieve basically making this bill a partisan bill,” and that “would turn this bill into a bill that has a much dimmer future for becoming law,” Crapo said. He and his fellow Republicans haven’t offered any other solutions to Trump’s unprecedented and outrageous IRS settlement, though. 

Despite the billionaire technocrat’s pledge last year to stay out of politics, his America PAC is planning to direct its efforts toward door-knocking, direct mail, and digital advertising, sources told Axios Wednesday.

“America PAC was an essential partner for our historic GOTV operation in 2024, and their return for 2026 is a huge boost for Republicans across the country,” James Blair, Trump’s senior political advisor told Axios.

“We will again outsmart our opponents and ruthlessly execute our mission for the GOP between now and Election Day,” he added.

The news of Musk’s return to politics came alongside reports that his company SpaceX had landed a $1.6 billion military contract.

It’s not clear how much Musk plans to spend, but given the $288 million he personally poured into Trump’s reelection effort, the number is expected to be high.

America PAC has a history of using shady means to drum up the conservative vote.

During the 2024 presidential election, America PAC launched a series of digital ads using the image of Trump’s assassination to invite people browsing Google to “register to vote.” In key battleground states, users were directed to a very different page, prompting them to enter their phone number, address, and age. Once complete, users were then greeted by a “Thank You” page, with no actual link to voter registration in sight.

The information collected from user responses to this ad campaign informed the PAC’s canvassing efforts in those states. So, in effect, collecting private data that went right back to the Trump campaign.

Musk also waded into murky legal waters with his direct mail scheme. In Georgia, residents received partially pre-filled absentee ballot applications from Musk’s America PAC, in violation of state law. Members of the Georgia State Elections Board voted to issue a formal letter of reprimand to Musk’s America PAC—but it seems that nothing happened after that.

And Musk’s door-to-door efforts weren’t exactly a breeze. Canvassers reported that the app they used was buggy, and some even exploited its technical issues to fake door knocks. Other canvassers said they were tricked and threatened as part of Musk’s get-out-the-vote efforts.

If Musk’s America PAC is really coming out of dormancy, then Americans can expect even more misleading ads, illegal mailers, and chaotic canvassing efforts.

At the annual International AIDS Conference in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, this week, the U.S. State Department unveiled a map of the African continent with every single country mislabeled. Nigeria drifted into the Sahara Desert, landlocked and lost; Mozambique was relocated to the eastern Horn of Africa; and the Ivory Coast, somehow, found itself nowhere near a coast. The map also included a country with no name, while Cameroon, dutifully included in the list of countries, got no real estate on the map at all.

The map was revealed about halfway through a presentation about the State Department’s new international health agreements. It was supposed to depict opportunities for Annual Program Statements by country in Africa, as part of the implementation process for remaining AIDS prevention programming after President Trump and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency dismantled USAID last year. According to an analysis by Reuters, the map contained an artificial intelligence watermark which identified it as made by OpenAI.

Presentation attendees—including high-level officials representing several of the mislabeled countries—took screenshots of the map and posted them online. Photos posted by journalist and AIDS expert Emily Bass were shared across LinkedIn, with one post garnering about 40,000 views, Reuters reports.

“The U.S. government’s failure to catch this error before displaying the slide at the top international AIDS conference in the world, in a session that featured the Director General of Nigeria as an invited guest, is not only disrespectful to African collaborators, it’s also a significant tell,” Bass wrote on Substack. “As this session made clear in so many ways, the U.S. Department of State Bureau of Global Health Security and Diplomacy is redrawing the map and rewriting history.”

Matt Petit, who focuses on geopolitics and AI at the Atlantic Council, called the map “beyond embarrassing” in a post on LinkedIn. “Whoever created and approved this slide did not know where countries in Africa are and did not care to check their work.”

In a statement following the presentation, the State Department claimed “full responsibility for the confusion and misrepresentation it caused for attendees, including our African partners.” It went on to blame a staff member for hastily changing the slide deck before the session began. Despite the embarrassing moment, the department said it remains “committed to fighting AIDS.”

Maybe a map that can’t identify a single African country says more about America’s AIDS diplomacy than a briefing ever could.

Inside Washington

Epstein survivors ask senators to vote “no” on Blanche 

Republican holdouts on Todd Blanche’s confirmation to the position of attorney general are mostly focused on stopping Trump’s $1.8 billion slush fund for alleged victims of government overreach. But survivors of sexual abuse at the hands of Jeffrey Epstein are fighting against Blanche for an entirely different reason.

“My message would be that if you have a daughter, or you have a son, or you have grandchildren, put them first because Todd Blanche isn’t gonna put them first. He puts himself and the president first. That’s it,” Sharlene Rochard, a survivor of Epstein’s sex trafficking, said about senators who will vote for Blanche’s nomination. 

Survivors have heavily criticized Blanche’s handling of the Justice Department’s Epstein investigation—in particular, releasing files that included the names of Epstein’s victims, not investigating and prosecuting perpetrators, and giving preferential treatment to Epstein’s collaborator, Ghislaine Maxwell, they say. On Wednesday, survivors and advocates railed against Blanche’s nomination at the launch event for the “Donald J. Trump and Jeffrey Epstein Memorial Bookmobile,” a mobile exhibit of the Epstein files created by Defiance.org and the Institute for Primary Facts. The bookmobile is intended to bring the Epstein files to voters, particularly those in red states, as it travels across the country. After the morning event, the group decamped to Capitol Hill and went office to office to hand out copies of the Epstein files to senators.

The Senate Judiciary Committee was scheduled to vote on Blanche Thursday morning, but Republican committee Chair Chuck Grassley announced at the end of the day Wednesday that it would be postponed. Blanche has a razor-thin margin; just one “no” vote would sink his nomination. GOP Senators Thom Tillis and John Cornyn, the main holdouts on Blanche, have said they’re more concerned about his position on President Trump’s $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” than on his attitude toward the Epstein files.

“I’m focused on other issues,” Cornyn said Wednesday when I asked if he had a message for the Epstein survivors. “It’s a terrible tragedy, but that’s between them and the attorney general.” 

Cornyn and Tillis have asked to see Blanche confirm, in writing, that the slush fund is dead in the water. Without that written confirmation, Cornyn said Wednesday, he is “not prepared to vote ‘yes.’”

Some Democrats are optimistic that their Republican colleagues’ opposition could end Blanche’s chance to be attorney general. “But I’ve seen this movie before,” Senator Richard Blumenthal told me. “I have no great optimism that they will act to do the right thing.” Senator Ron Wyden, at least publicly, was more hopeful. “We think we’ve got a real shot at winning,” he said after the bookmobile launch, at which he spoke. “I think [Republicans] are really rattled. They ought to be!”

When asked about the Epstein survivors’ opposition to Blanche, Tillis tried to paint a positive picture: “I just talked to some of the Epstein survivors,” he said. Alongside Democrats on the Judiciary Committee, Tillis had pushed for Blanche to meet with survivors, which Blanche then did on July 16. “Keep in mind: Blanche is the first person, official, senior official from the DOJ since 2007 that’s met with them. That’s something to build on.” 

Jena-Lisa Jones, who grew up in Palm Beach County, Florida, and was abused by Epstein when she was 14 years old, wasn’t impressed by the meeting. “He asked to speak to the survivors, and it was a very last-minute thing, which I think was to cover his own—pardon my French—ass,” she said. “I think it was a waste of our time and, unfortunately, a joke.”

Rochard, for her part, had no interest in attending the meeting with Blanche. “The reason I chose not to go is because it felt forced,” she said, as though Blanche just wanted “to check a box.” She also pointed out that the meeting was just one hour long, while last year, as deputy attorney general, Blanche spent nine hours over two days with Maxwell, Epstein’s accomplice and convicted sex offender. Shortly after that meeting, Maxwell was transferred to a minimum security prison.

As for Cornyn and Tillis, Jones told me: “We hope that they stand with us and vote ‘no,’ but the way things have played out and how our government runs, anything can happen.”

—Emma Janssen  

Outside Washington

About those gas stoves … 

Remember the gas stove war of 2023? Studies had been steadily emerging for years showing that gas stoves were leaking harmful substances into homes, and in January of that year, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission’s Richard Trumka Jr. told Bloomberg that the government could potentially regulate the devices. Conservatives immediately lost it, falsely claimed the Biden administration was going to “ban all gas ovens,” and started tweeting out “Don’t Tread on Me” and gun rights memes with stove images subbed in.

Now, an update on all that: The Washington Post on Wednesday reported the striking results from a pioneering study led by a Case Western professor: Replacing the gas stoves of people suffering from asthma quickly reduced the number of asthma attacks. The finding comes after the Trump administration canceled the study’s $18 million grant, torpedoing the intended sample size: Researchers could only replace 85 stoves instead of the intended 1,200. Nevertheless, the Post’s Jake Spring reports, “removing the gas stoves relieved the participants’ asthma so much that the results were clear even with only 85 of them, according to two scientists who reviewed the methodology but were not involved in the study.”

The gas stove culture wars are far from over. Last month, a conservative group succeeded in getting a constitutional amendment guaranteeing a “right to natural gas” on the ballot in Colorado—voters will decide on that in November. (Also notable: Back in 2023, 29 House Democrats joined Republicans in a bit of political theater, passing a bill to block a federal gas stove ban that was not in fact being proposed.)

Elsewhere:

• The incident revealed last week, in which OpenAI’s large language model “agent” broke out of its “sandbox” to hack a random company, was worse than initially reported: The agent actually targeted four other companies, too.
• Across the country, budget shortages, driver shortages, and declining public school enrollment are threatening the iconic yellow school bus, The Guardian’s Eric Berger reports. Related, in case you missed it: The Washington Post’s report last week on the rising number of public school closures in recent years. 

—Heather Souvaine Horn

The Ideas Factory

KFF finds Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) enrollment numbers down after “several years of rapid enrollment growth.” The likely culprit: expiring subsidies, which dramatically raised people’s premiums. The GOP decided in late 2025 to let the subsidies expire rather than renew them.

The Center for American Progress releases a report by Gréta Bedekovics and Devon Ombres on the status of state laws resembling the currently stalled federal SAVE Act. These laws require “Americans to provide proof of their citizenship, chiefly a passport or birth certificate, to register to vote or stay registered.” Fourteen states already have laws like this, and more are considering bills or ballot measures. 

Data for Progress crunches the numbers and finds that, perhaps contrary to prevailing wisdom, “compared with a Democratic candidate who rejects outside PAC money, Democratic candidates who take money from AIPAC, AI companies, cryptocurrency companies, and pharmaceutical companies perform significantly worse against a Republican candidate averaged across all funding sources.”

In case you missed it: The Groundwork Collaborative and the Century Foundation find that back-to-school supplies and “lunchbox essentials” are set to cost families “close to $400 more per kid” this year, due to rising prices. “Nearly half of all parents report cutting back on other expenses to make room in the budget for back-to-school expenses, or worse, taking on debt.”

—Heather Souvaine Horn

In Closing

Here’s Why That’s B.S.  

What’s the deal with Mitch McConnell’s health?

Political Trivia Question of the Day

The Senate continues to weigh Todd Blanche’s fate. It’s rare indeed that the Senate has voted down a president’s attorney general nominee. It last happened nearly a century ago. Who was it? (If you know the answer to that, we’ll be impressed!) 

 Meanwhile, an easier question: A fairly recent president nominated two people in a row who were forced to withdraw their nominations. Who were they, and why did they withdraw? The reason was the same in both instances. (Sign up for The Blue Book to find the answer in tomorrow’s newsletter.)

Kennedy told USA TODAY in an exclusive interview that he’s launching a new cooking series called The Real Food Show Thursday in order to spread the Trump administration’s new Dietary Guidelines for Americans, which go all in on meat and dairy.

The show will include celebrity chefs and highlight Kennedy’s favorite fermented foods, including kimchi, yogurt, and sauerkraut. The first episode, available on the Department of Health and Human Services website, features chef Andrew Gruel making “Crispy Salmon Cakes with Apple, White Bean & Green Salad.”

The show comes after Kennedy inverted the food pyramid to prioritize full-fat dairy and protein at every meal, as well as vegetables, fruits, and whole grains. He’s pushed beef tallow and butter over seed oils, which he demonizes despite the fact that they are associated with lowering the risks of cancer and cardiovascular disease.

Meanwhile, the government is dealing with several food-related crises, from a parasite outbreak on produce that causes explosive diarrhea to a salmonella scare affecting eggs in Texas. The New World screwworm, a flesh-eating parasite, has infested cattle in Texas and spread to other states, causing an estimated $1 billion in damages. Many of the issues with tainted food can be traced back to last year’s decision to slash a federal-state partnership responsible for overseeing food contaminants.

Why is Kennedy directing his attention to making cooking videos instead of managing these real problems? One reason could be that Kennedy has reportedly “checked out” of his job and barely attends meetings, showing up to work at 10 a.m. only to leave around 4 p.m. He seems to care only about overhauling dietary guidelines and pushing an anti-vaccine agenda. The latter has led to a 35-year record high for measles cases in the U.S.

Kennedy should not have his job, but the only heat he’s getting from President Trump is that he’s not going after childhood vaccines hard enough. As long as he remains a Cabinet secretary, Kennedy will be spending his time doing influencer-type stuff instead of safeguarding the health of Americans.

President Donald Trump’s inner circle “seemed surprised” by the Republican pushback to Blanche’s nomination, MS NOW reported Thursday.

The Senate Judiciary Committee was scheduled to vote on whether to advance Blanche’s nomination Thursday morning. But late the night before, the committee postponed the vote, after Republican Senators John Cornyn of Texas and Thom Tillis of North Carolina made clear that they would not support Blanche.

Earlier Wednesday, the president had suggested that Blanche’s confirmation was a sure thing.

“All I can say is Todd Blanche is outstanding, and I thought it was pretty routine because he’s so good,” Trump said. “He just wouldn’t find a better person.”

The two GOP lawmakers have demanded that Blanche put into writing that Trump’s so-called “Anti-Weaponization Fund” is actually dead. Blanche had declared the fund was dead in June, but staffers at the Department of Justice and White House have continued telling MAGA allies they could still expect to receive some form of payment.

Even if he’s not confirmed before the Senate’s August recess, Blanche will continue to serve as acting attorney general. But it would be a humiliating blow to the president, who is clearly losing his grip on party members.

Economists were expecting a gross domestic product growth rate of 1.8 percent, but thanks to President Trump’s Iran war, disastrous tariffs (including new tariffs levied on more than 50 countries last week), and cuts to government spending, we are, once again, not doing as well as Trump claims.

“Americans are feeling gloomy: consumer confidence remains in the doldrums as households worry about rising costs,” The Economist reports. “Although annual inflation slowed to 3.5 percent in June from 4.2 percent in May, thanks largely to a temporary fall in petrol prices, renewed fighting has since pushed oil prices higher again.”

Regular gasoline came in at an average of $4.22 a gallon in the second quarter, a dramatic increase from less than $3 a gallon before the U.S. and Israel began the war on Iran in February. Now that the shaky U.S.-Iran ceasefire is dead, Americans are bracing, once again, for painful prices at the gas pump.

These latest figures reaffirm that the main concern right now for Americans is cost—of just about everything. Even Fox News recognizes that voters are unhappy with Trump’s economy and want “major change.” And by “major change,” we do not mean more tariffs.

Plus, the Federal Reserve opted to hold interest rates steady for a fifth consecutive meeting on Wednesday. New Fed chairman Kevin Warsh acknowledged that there’s no quick fix to ease the cost of living, telling reporters there is no “magic wand” to bring prices down. In other words, Americans are getting the worst of both worlds: an economy that’s slowing down while prices keep climbing.

But of course, in Trump’s own words, he “doesn’t think about Americans’ financial situation” when making decisions about the war in Iran.

But the diary entries reveal something else. During President Trump’s first term, when Katie Miller was then-Vice President Mike Pence’s communications director and involved in the White House’s response to Covid-19, she appeared quite close with the director of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases. 

Fauci provided regular medical advice to the Millers, counseling the family after Katie tested positive for the virus in 2020 while she was pregnant, when her husband had Covid-19, and when her newborn child had a medical episode, NOTUS reports. 

“I am calling katie frequently to check on her couple time per day. She is very anxious about getting very ill since she is 10 weeks pregnant. Tonight she had an anxiety reaction. I calmed her over the phone,” Fauci wrote in his diary on May 9, 2020. Fauci wrote in another entry how he called the doctors treating Miller’s child directly to discuss the baby’s medical care. 

Senator Rand Paul released over 1,000 pages of Fauci’s diary Saturday, and quite a few of those entries showed the extent of Fauci’s interactions with Miller before they were later redacted. NOTUS compared pages before and after the redactions, and found that many of the suddenly redacted passages concerned the Millers’ relationship with Fauci, with the original documents mentioning Katie 56 times, while the redacted version mentioned her just 37 times. 

Katie told NOTUS not to publish details of her child’s medical history, claiming that Paul published them without her permission. She also said that despite her regular contact with Fauci during the pandemic, she thought at the time that he was “incredibly self-centered and sought to promote himself above the good of the people.”

“He was not my doctor. He was not my friend. He was a work colleague who called me for work purposes, and in the course of a phone call, you would discuss other things,” Miller said to NOTUS. 

Fauci describes Katie Miller in his diary as someone who he saw as an ally to help deal with Pence and Trump while the Coronavirus Task Force was active. 

“katie Miller is great (tough, smart,but great),” Fauci wrote on March 25, 2020. He also spoke to her multiple times while she was traveling to her parents’ home in Texas later in October that year, after her husband tested positive. 

“Am on phone frequently with katie and Stephen,” Fauci wrote on December 31, 2020.

But since then, Katie has blasted Fauci frequently online, accusing him of caring “more about virtue signaling than science” and causing “decades of harm” to children with his leadership of the government’s response to Covid-19. She now speaks often about not vaccinating her youngest child on her podcast.

It’s highly hypocritical how she and her husband are now trashing a dedicated public servant and medical professional who went out of his way to help them during the Covid-19 pandemic, when they dealt with the same fears of the virus as every other American. Now the Millers are happy to pile on and blame Fauci for the failures of the Trump administration’s Covid-19 response.  

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 confronting the limits on his power in fresh ways, and it’s rattling him badly. His inner circle is leaking word that he’s frustrated at his inability to force Iran’s hand, and he’s seeing some of his most corrupt designs crash and burn on many fronts at once.

Yet there’s something sobering about it all. Placing limits on Trump has required immense effort. Paradoxically, the more he’s thwarted, the more dangerous he’s becoming. And in constraining Trump, our institutions are still on a knife’s edge, with the endgame still too murky to predict.

We’re trying to make sense of all these strange dynamics with Talking Points Memo editor at large David Kurtz, whose excellent newsletter delves into this stuff regularly. David, always good to have you on.

David Kurtz: Hi, Greg, good to be with you.

Sargent: So let’s start with a very visible and jarring failing: Trump’s effort to jail former FBI director James Comey, based on his social media posting of seashells arranged to spell “86 47.” We just learned that Secret Service agents who questioned Comey about this were ordered to quickly send a summary of the interrogation to Trump himself, which shows how intently and corruptly he’s controlling DOJ. David, can you explain what happened here and why it’s important?

Kurtz: Sure. It’s really a remarkable series of filings in the Comey case last night, where they’re making a claim that this is the second vindictive prosecution of him—meaning that Trump has directed DOJ to go after him because he’s one of Trump’s political foes. And so this is the politicization, the weaponization of DOJ that we’ve all been covering for so long.

And what makes this especially remarkable is how difficult it is to make a vindictive prosecution claim. But here you have so much evidence, right? It goes all the way to Trump aboard Air Force One, tracking the investigation in real time, getting reports from Secret Service as he’s returning to the U.S. from Europe. You just don’t get that kind of evidence in these sorts of cases.

Sargent: So Comey’s lawyers are trying to say, we have smoking gun evidence that this prosecution is a vindictive one and therefore should be thrown out. And the smoking gun evidence is that Donald Trump is micromanaging the prosecution of Comey in real time, demanding to know exactly what happened in these interrogations as they happen.

Kurtz: I mean, we could do like a whole semester seminar on the many reasons that this is so messed up. And it really comes down to: prosecutors have an obligation under the law to conduct prosecutions in the public interest and in the interest of justice. And that goes beyond even sort of complying with whatever the policy directives of a particular president are.

They can set broad policy parameters, but they’re not supposed to be directing individual prosecutions. And they’re certainly not supposed to be conjuring up prosecutions as bogus as this one out of thin air—or for any reason, frankly, in order to target political foes for any reason that goes to their personal interest, to their political interest, and isn’t in the interest of justice.

And I know that may sound, in the year of our Lord 2026, maybe a little pie in the sky. But up until this point, in the 250-year history of the country, it has not operated that way, with a few rare exceptions like Watergate, which are hugely scandalous, but frankly which don’t come near to how bad this is.

Sargent: Yeah, and it looks to me as if this revelation is yet another sign that this prosecution is likely to really fall apart. And on that front—on the front of Trump becoming more and more aware of the limits on his power—The Atlantic had this interesting report on his deliberations over Iran.

A senior official says Trump is frustrated by his failure to get Iran to budge, to the point of wanting to order a heavier attack on Iran. But he and his advisors decided against it because it could further deplete our weapons stockpiles. And David, get this: Trump told advisors that he fears that an escalation could cause a global economic meltdown and, quote, “turn me into a Hoover,” as Trump put it.

That’s a real admission. He doesn’t have the power to force Iran’s hand, and he’s acknowledging that Iran has leverage over the global economy. And it’s, of course, because of what he did, right?

Kurtz: Yeah, it’s because of what he did. And there’s no clear way out of this box canyon for him. And it is a quagmire. And Iran continues to have cards that it can play to keep him at bay. And I think what he’s describing there is, in part, acknowledging that, right? That there is a limit as to what he can do, and Iran has him in a box.

So, I think what’s interesting, Greg, is it’s hard to look at all of these data points and see a single common thread. I think there’s some things—in this case, it’s like a geopolitical limitation he’s running into. In other instances, it’s like the limits of the powers or the abilities of his people.

In other cases, he does run up against limits in the law. But you’re right, there are an increasing number of examples where we see him bumping up against the limits of his powers. And it’s, after a year and a half of feeling like we were watching a rogue or renegade president sort of trammel all limits, it’s good to see that there may be some limits to that that will hold, at least for a time.

Sargent: And making this even more buffoonish on the Iran front, these revelations about Trump holding back because he knows he can’t really force Iran’s hand come even as he just said to Fox News the following: “We are going to beat the effing shit out of them, and we will be hitting them hard. They’re going to get a beating.”

David, Donald Trump has managed to degrade his own threats so badly through repetition that Iran no longer seems to fear his mightiness. What do you make of that?

Kurtz: Well, Greg, this all comes after—didn’t we declare victory in this war like a month or two ago? I mean, we’re just at a point where I think one of the dynamics of the whole Iran fiasco has been that it’s revealed the perils of trying to narrate this kind of conflict through a president when the president is like a Donald Trump.

Because every week, every day, for the six months this has been going on, there’s a new line from the White House, a new declaration that peace is at hand, or a new declaration that we’re about to bomb them back to the Stone Age. And it really feels like it is as mercurial and unpredictable as Trump’s personality itself.

And so, taking a long view on it, I think it’s been an ongoing conflict this whole time. There’s been ebbs and flows to it, but I don’t think it really matches in any way what we’ve heard from the White House in terms of an accurate description, a reliable narration of what has happened. And so, I hope we’re at a point now where they see some of those limits and take those into account.

But I’m afraid that we’re in just an ebb that could very well—as you suggested a moment ago—that in some ways he gets more dangerous the more he gets boxed in. And you could see a lashing out, even if it has global economic consequences, even if it’s not going to be effective in advancing U.S. interests, which this hasn’t been, even if he really can’t knock Iran back on its heels in the Strait of Hormuz.

Like, there’s a million ways here in which this could still go wrong. And the way this has been so erratic and unpredictable and in fits and starts the whole six months we’ve been engaged in this, I think it’s just representative of him and the underlying strategy that epitomizes him. It’s an extension of this personality, is what I’m trying to say.

Sargent: Yeah, it absolutely is. I think to me the most representative thing is that it was only a few weeks ago, or maybe a month ago, that Trump threatened to obliterate Iranian civilization entirely, meaning he threatened to eliminate Iran’s 91 million people from the face of this earth. And that didn’t force Iran’s hand. And so now he’s saying, I’m going to blow up a bridge. Right? And so it’s like, do you remember what you yourself said just a month ago, and how comically ridiculous it sounds for you to make this new threat now in relation to that one?

But still, I agree with you a hundred percent, because when he talks about bombing, all of Iran’s power plants, as he’s been saying lately, that would be a threat of a massive war crime and serious atrocities. And it’s not hard to see him going down that road if he can’t force Iran’s hand, just in order to appear like he’s doing something. And of course, Iran will just absorb the pain that is inflicted on its own people, and it won’t do anything.

Kurtz: Yeah, I think there’s one way of looking at this that I think is actually a helpful prism, which is that it is one long, ongoing negotiation. And if you see it as a negotiation in which war is one of the negotiating techniques—in which escalation, de-escalation of the violence is part of the negotiation—it all makes a little more sense. But the problem with Trump is that he sees negotiation as a zero-sum game. He’s got a very limited understanding of it. You know, for the “art of the deal” guy, it’s kind of remarkable how little he understands.

And part of it too, as you suggest, is that it’s not just Iranian interests versus U.S. interests. It’s like this triangulation of Iranian interests, U.S. interests, regional interests, Trump’s own personal political interests. And there’s no way for him to sort of do a 3D chess move on any of that. I mean, this is beyond his capability. It’s beyond how he even thinks, right? Negotiation for him is a zero-sum game. And I think the longer Iran holds out, the harder it is for him to figure out how to make sense of it, given the prism he looks at this through.

Sargent: Absolutely. So here’s another one. Trump’s acting director of national intelligence, Bill Pulte, who’s about to get replaced, spent his final time in his job tweeting boastfully about how he’s fired huge numbers of intelligence officials and so forth. But as it turns out, no one can figure out who exactly he fired and whether that’s close to accurate.

We should note that Pulte is the person who previously used his federal housing agency perch to fabricate pretext to prosecute Trump critics like Adam Schiff and so forth. Those have all failed pretty badly as of now as well. And now here we are with Pulte boasting about taking on the deep state in ways that might not even be real. Talk about revealing the limits on Trump’s power. Can you explain this one?

Kurtz: Yeah, this has a few different layers to it. We know that Pulte was put in place as acting DNI while they worked on getting Jay Clayton confirmed. He was confirmed this week, so Pulte will soon be done. And Trump, I think, both publicly and reported privately, was saying that he wanted Pulte to knock heads while he was at DNI, right? Trump has generally been very skeptical of U.S. intel. He’s been particularly skeptical of DNI. And I think he sees it as a seat of the deep state. And so he wants to purge that.

Now, there’s been a fair amount of reporting that Pulte was doing that, but this most recent reporting suggests that part of it may be performative. Which speaks to what the incentives are that Trump puts in place for people to do the things that he wants them to do—or at least to pretend to do the things he wants them to do. It has a very “emperor with no clothes on” sort of vibe to it.

Sargent: And I think I saw in Politico that Pulte might be in line for a Cabinet slot. So he’s going to get rewarded for feeding grist to the MAGA circus, even if it’s not real grist.

Kurtz: Yeah, that’s right. And it’s not out of character, in the sense that none of the mortgage fraud cases were real mortgage fraud either, right? Which is what he was drumming up around Adam Schiff and Letitia James and others. So it is consistent with his MO to this point.

Sargent: OK, and here’s yet another one. He’s seeing his schemes collapse on other fronts as well. Huge numbers of ICE arrests of protesters are not ending with convictions. That’s an area where Trump is abusing his power most flagrantly, perhaps. You’ve written on this. Can you talk about this one?

Kurtz: Yeah. So there have been a number of examples, in LA, in Chicago, in Minnesota, where it seemed clear that the White House was directing sort of a maximal response to protesters who were protesting ICE in their cities—either at raids themselves or at ICE facilities within those metro areas. And the charges that DOJ brought were in some cases way over the top, in other cases utterly unsupported by the evidence.

And in a few cases were brought on the basis of either misstatements or outright falsehoods by agents who were bringing the charges. So there’s like a whole array of things happening there. But those have slowly melted away. Sometimes charges were reduced from felonies to misdemeanors, other times they were dropped outright. In some cases, both.

Sargent: So let’s tie all this together. Trump is running the most imperial, most corrupt presidency in modern memory, and it’s not even close. No president has abused his powers the way Trump has. And yet in key ways he really is being constrained, and he’s really angry about it. But that, again, paradoxically, means the areas where he wields less fettered powers are ones we really need to worry about. What’s your overall reading here? Are we holding him back or not?

Kurtz: I think it is a very tenuous moment, where in some areas I think we’ve seen some modest success. I think how things go in the November elections will really dictate how much more he’s able to run amok over the last two years of this term. At the same time, Greg, I am really cognizant that we only know what we know, and that this administration has done myriad things to reduce transparency and accountability and ready access into what they’re doing and how they’re doing it.

I’m thinking about things like the high-seas strikes on drug smuggling boats. I’m thinking—you talk about areas with unfettered power—I’m thinking special operations activities around the globe. I’m thinking other military actions or activities we might not know about. And I’m not suggesting some dark, hidden conspiracy, I just mean we don’t know. And so while we are trying to gauge how well things are going, I suspect that we may be spending the next several decades unearthing things that happened during this period that we just didn’t know about.

And at the same time, Greg—and I think this is kind of what you were getting at—you know, in the example, for instance, of these vindictive prosecutions, in a lot of ways the damage has already been done. You know, let’s say Comey succeeds again in making this one go away. He’s had two come up now, and there’s other people who have been subjected to this. Abrego Garcia’s case has succeeded on a vindictive prosecution claim in Tennessee.

But the turmoil, the emotional cost, the financial cost to people of this—and I think this is really key, Greg—the sense that it creates of fear in the populace, of fear in other officials, and fear in people who would oppose Trump. That’s real damage, right? And it’s real damage that’s done to the institutions of government that are being abused. It’s going to take us decades to recover from.

So in a lot of ways, what we’re seeing are him bumping up against limits, but around his feet—if we’re going to visualize this—it is the litter of institutions that he’s kicked over, and of people that he’s trammeled, and of sort of basic civil liberties that we’ve long valued as sort of fundamental to who we are. And all of that, I think, he has laid waste to, to one degree or another, in a way that will take some time to recover from.

Sargent: I just want to try to salvage one optimistic note from all this, while acknowledging everything you just said is right there. I can’t help but feel like there’s a pattern of resilience that we’re seeing. The backlash to ICE that we saw in places like Minnesota and Chicago—huge numbers of people banded together in really creative and unexpected ways to defend immigrants against heavily armed paramilitary goons at great risk to themselves.

Lower court judges are doing tremendous fact-finding work—I know you agree with this one—and they’re really putting a real record out there for us, a factual record of what this administration is doing on front after front after front. People are not being dissuaded by these buffoonish efforts to prosecute ICE protesters. People are going out there at great risk to themselves, putting their necks out there to try and defend the country.

And I think nobody’s going to be dissuaded by Trump’s efforts to persuade everybody that voting can’t work. Nobody’s going to be persuaded by that. I think we’re going to see tremendous turnout in the midterms. We’ve seen this in two dozen special elections, huge outpourings of political energy. I really hate to sound Pollyannaish, but it seems like there’s a pattern of resistance and resilience that’s worth talking about.

Kurtz: No, I agree, Greg. And I think you’ve probably seen the same thing I have, which is that sort of in the depths of things a year ago, I think people started to feel a sense of hopelessness and a sense of that he was kind of running the table. And what I’ve noticed is that each setback, each reversal, each time he’s been at least halted, if not outright stopped, it has energized folks.

I think it’s given people a sense that there are avenues here towards protest, towards resistance, towards pushing back, and just sort of living our civic lives in a full way, that makes a difference. And people feed on that. And so I think it can build on itself as well.

Sargent: I agree a hundred percent with that. David, really well said. Folks, stay in the game. We can win this. We really can, I promise you. David Kurtz, really, really great to talk to you. Folks, if you want more of David Kurtz, make sure to check out his daily newsletter over at talkingpointsmemo.com. David, great to have you on.

Kurtz: Great. Thank you, Greg.

There was always a quiet, and sometimes not-so-quiet, queer subtext to Rice’s novels, but the show—which was called Interview With the Vampire for its first two seasons, after the title of the first novel, and is now called The Vampire Lestat, after the title of the sequel—brings that same-sex eroticism to the surface. The series is bloody and horny, devastatingly sad and riotously funny, deadpan and melodramatic. It can take new viewers a moment to adjust to the fact that every dial on this show is turned up to 11. It’s an immersive experience of excess, a feast for and an attack on the senses.

In the murky, endless swamp of the streaming landscape, you might happen upon a program as singular as this one and be tempted to say you’ve discovered a hidden gem. You wouldn’t be all that wrong, at least about the “hidden” part. Lestat airs on AMC and on its subscription streaming app AMC+, a service dwarfed by juggernauts like Netflix and Prime Video. And the series isn’t even the biggest draw for its own service, which is anchored by the Walking Dead franchise. From a marketing standpoint, it can’t be a great idea to change your title two seasons in. Regardless, not a lot of people had access to the show, and, of those who did, not a lot watched it.

But what’s special about this drama is the intensity of its niche. Spend any time on social media talking or reading about TV, and you’re likely to encounter the show’s committed fans, nearly feral in their advocacy for this under-watched treasure. TV critics love it, too—the second season appeared on over 20 year-end best-of lists in 2024. So, addressing both the plurality of readers who have never heard of this crazy show and the thin sliver of readers who would gladly take a stake through the heart for it, I say: There’s nothing else like The Vampire Lestat on TV, nothing that can consume you quite the way it does. 

For two seasons, it was built around the titular “interview” Louis gives to intrepid, endangered journalist Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosian, doing his best Anthony Bourdain). Louis (Jacob Anderson) related the whole torrid story of his entanglement, affair, and multiple criminal monstrosities with Lestat (Sam Reid) from the steely blandness of a Dubai penthouse in the present day. One of the show’s signatures, then, relying on Louis’s voice-over narration but also his expansive sense of time, was the nesting style of its flashback structure. For instance, at one point in the second season, the narrative moves back and forth between Lestat co-founding the Théâtre des Vampires coven in Paris in the eighteenth century and Louis’s experiences with the group after World War II, and between Louis telling these stories to Daniel in Dubai in the present and Louis telling these stories to a younger Daniel in San Francisco in the early 1970s. Never jarring, the striated layers of time form a dense and luxurious texture for what is both an intimate romance and an epic adventure.

Now that the show has begun adapting Rice’s second novel in the series, the narrative voice has shifted from Louis to Lestat, and it’s not a small shift. Where Louis could be full of quietly simmering mourning or rage, Lestat is loud and upset. By the end of the second season, all the narrative threads were essentially tied up, so, in order to reproduce the show’s sense of chaotic temporality, we move forward again in time. The opening scene of The Vampire Lestat is a secret auction, sometime in the future, that reveals two important twists. First, apparently there’s been some sort of massive global catastrophe brought on by Lestat, leaving Louis with a limp and Louis’s ex-lover Armand (Assad Zaman) with a rather dashing eye-patch. And second, Lestat is a rock star now. This season’s voice-over narration consists of a series of vinyl albums recorded by Lestat that tell us how it all went down from his perspective.

Historically, TV shows have a hard time representing art within a work of art. In other words, it’s difficult, when you’re already working hard at making a good piece of TV, to then set yourself the task of creating a second, different work that functionally exists within your TV production. Aaron Sorkin’s Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip is a famous failed attempt at this—the behind-the-scenes drama about an SNL-like sketch comedy series face-planted by including scenes of dismally unfunny sketches that we viewers were supposed to understand to be cutting-edge, urbane comedy. 30 Rock got around the problem by making its show within a show deliberately bad: TGS With Tracy Jordan was so preposterous that it got a laugh whenever we saw it on-screen. If you can’t make two good TV shows simultaneously, then make one of them a joke.

True to its more-is-more ethos, The Vampire Lestat has decided to pursue both strategies in its depiction of Lestat’s career in rock and roll. Many of the songs Lestat sings are bad. Lyrically, they can tend toward the cringeworthy—there is a higher-than-average amount of nonsense syllables in these tracks—and musically, they sound a little bit like lost T. Rex B-sides. Their energy is appealing, but it’s hard to imagine cuing up the soundtrack on Spotify. So, to some extent, Lestat is meant to appear a bit ridiculous, so long-lived that his creative juices are not especially fresh. (How else to explain a full-on glam rock revival touring in the mid-2020s?) Daniel roasts him about this, and a rival vampire gang tells him one of his songs sucks. (He begrudgingly agrees.) Is it possible that Lestat has simply hypnotized his audience into liking him?

And yet, there’s Reid’s stage presence. Writhing and growling and glaring and surfing through the crowd, Lestat may be singing songs that sound as if they were written for a rock star on a TV show, but he’s embodying every bit of rock star charisma you might hope to see in real life. In fact, as a promotional stunt for the release of the new series, Reid performed a show in character at New York’s Beacon Theatre, and, by all reports, the crowd’s Beatlemania-style response felt real. It’s rare, in this sort of prestige narrative drama to say that a selling point of the show is its sense of spectacle. In previous seasons, those spectacles have been spectacles of sex and violence and, occasionally, theatrical performance. This season, it’s the close-quarters grinding intensity of a killer club show.

All of this takes place in the wake of the release of Daniel’s book, the record of his two-season interview with Louis. Technically, Daniel’s bestseller has outed the vampire community to the world, but most still believe it to be a hoax. So Lestat’s act manages to be both an ultimate reveal of his true self and, for many if not most of his audience members, an expertly crafted bit. That tension between the performed self and the real self is at the heart of this season’s story, especially for a character who is always putting on a show. The arrival of Lestat’s mother, Gabriella (Jennifer Ehle)—whom he turned into a vampire, and with whom he murdered his entire family, and who is also his lover—turns a kaleidoscopic lens onto the character and the question of why nobody, it seems, can ever let him go.

Watching The Vampire Lestat and thinking about its devoted fandom, I’ve been reminded of another underseen AMC program that’s attracted a surprisingly committed following. The Terror was a stand-alone series (the first of a three-season anthology) about a fictionalized nineteenth-century Arctic expedition to find the Northwest Passage. It is an incredible show, filled with compelling performances from a who’s who of British television actors and built around a bizarrely compelling mythology that invokes questions of imperialism, repression, and masculine fragility. The show was a moderate success, but never a big deal. It is, however, a big deal to the attendees of Terror Camp, an annual conference born from the show. With academic presentations on subjects from race and nationalism to Arctic exploration literature, it is a uniquely passionate, positive event. The fans, many of whom are nonbinary and drawn to the drama’s fluid presentation of gender, call themselves “Cold Boys.”

There’s been a lot of discussion in critical circles this year about the rise of “toxic” fandoms: viewers who have harassed the stars of Heated Rivalry online, for instance, or fans of The Pitt who castigate the series’ writers for not focusing enough on the characters’ personal lives. But the idea of fandom is community. Lots of communities we don’t call fandoms get toxic or even violent. The beauty and glory of a small, passionate fandom—like that of The Terror or of The Vampire Lestat—is that it takes this massive, mainstream medium, and it builds a pocket of appreciation and connection for the people inside it. If Lestat hasn’t attracted a massive national audience, that also means that its own invested audience has the place to themselves. This third season, coincidentally and on purpose, is in some ways about that. Sure, being a superfan of the rock star Lestat might kill you, but being a part of the Lestat fandom might well bring you to life.  

Following the passage of a Texas law that requires governing boards to review academic programs—one of several state laws based on Trump’s January 2025 executive orders against “gender ideology” and diversity, equity, and inclusion—Texas A&M is subjecting course titles, descriptions, and syllabuses to an opaque review process to decide which courses will go forward and which will be canceled. For the coming fall semester, 45 courses were referred from an initial review committee to the university president’s office for a final decision, of which 31 were approved as “exceptions,” eight were approved under conditions of specifying or removing reading materials, and two—an English course on “LGBTQ Literatures” and a Women’s and Gender Studies introduction to “LGBTQ Studies”—were denied outright and removed from the curriculum.

A similar process is unfolding at Auburn University, where faculty received a form referencing Alabama legislation that bans public universities from teaching “divisive concepts,” again based on anti-DEI directives from the Trump White House. When a sociology course on “Crime and Justice in America” drew the ire of conservative website 1819 News and then Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville (“ZERO REASON taxpayer funds should go to teaching our students to HATE law and order. Woke indoctrination has NO PLACE in Alabama or our taxpayer-funded universities”), the sociology professor was removed from the course. Unlike Texas A&M, where the president ultimately makes the decision, Auburn puts the onus on faculty to self-police their courses to remain in compliance with a state law forbidding the teaching of “divisive concepts.” As the Chronicle reports, an Auburn geosciences professor said of the course surveillance forms, “in terms of feeling like you are free to do your job—following scientific rigor, academic rigor, all of that—instead you have to think about the political ramifications of what you’re doing.”

Surveillance and censorship of faculty is not confined to large, land-grant universities or Southern states. At West Point, Tim Bakken, the academy’s longest-serving law professor, has brought a lawsuit against his employer for its adoption of Trump administration directives that, Bakken claims, “chill and suppress speech and censor viewpoints that might be contrary to the views” of West Point, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, and Trump. The Washington Post recounted a chilling scene in which Bakken arose in a faculty meeting to speak against the policy of requiring faculty members to get administrative approval for giving talks and publishing their work. “Stop talking,” said a deputy department head who outranks Bakken, “and sit down.”

It would be tempting to think all of this is nothing more than the shoe on the other foot. Between 2015 and 2020, conservatives fomented a national panic over the idea that left-wing college students and professors had turned universities into places of censorship and ideological intolerance. After Yale students protested against a professor over her response to a campus-wide directive about offensive Halloween costumes, The Wall Street Journal editorial board called them “little Robespierres”—a reference to the French revolutionary whose eighteenth-century Reign of Terror led to some 17,000 executions. In 2021, New York Times columnist Brett Stephens compared a ham-fisted bias training at Smith College to Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution in China, whose violent purges resulted in death tolls estimated between one and two million.

Centrist commentators embraced such right-wing characterizations of students and faculty as coddled authoritarians who couldn’t live with speech they didn’t like and would resort to violence to stop it. Jonathan Chait, writing for New York magazine, compared campus “political correctness” with Marxist authoritarianism, adding, “American political correctness has obviously never perpetrated the brutality of a communist government, but it has also never acquired the powers that come with full control of the machinery of the state.” For Chait, the college campus was an experimental window into a dark future, a place where “the p.c. left can muster the strength to impose its political hegemony upon others” because of its institutional dominance.

At the time, many of us argued in response that although left-wing college students and faculty could be wrongheaded and intolerant, most campus free speech controversies were either actual debates involving speech on all sides—with ordinary social consequences—or debates about access to platforms, not access to free speech as such.

But we also saw unfolding a greater and more dangerous threat to free speech. By pushing hyperbolic portrayals of the campus left as budding murderous authoritarians, the right was normalizing grounds for its own exercises in violent repression. Surveillance and attack-dog organizations, like Turning Point USA, created “watchlists” to publicize (and sensationalize) professors’ statements and courses, leading to intimidation and death threats. Armed, reactionary militia groups began taking up the mantle of defenders of free speech and “Western values,” turning up at campus events with the aim of provoking students and left-wing agitators into violence.

All of this amounted to a twofold assault from the right on free speech itself, albeit one couched as a necessary response to left-wing overreach: First, portray the critical but protected speech of a left majority on campus—student protests, open letters, denials of speaking platforms—as suppression of free speech akin to authoritarianism; then, with that bad-faith characterization as an excuse, rachet up efforts to silence those students—through threats of violence, if necessary—and claim to be defending free speech.

It’s clear now, if it wasn’t then, that the right was always the biggest threat to free speech. The MAGA-pilled Republican Party has moved at the federal and state levels to censor the very content of what professors can teach and students can learn. In some cases, the Trump administration has gone even further to silence speech. A Tufts University student was arrested by masked federal agents, detained for weeks, then forced to “self-deport” for writing a pro-Palestinian column in the student newspaper; a Georgetown professor was arrested and jailed for also expressing pro-Palestinian views.

No exaggeration is necessary here. We can now see the difference between students contesting speech—that is, open debates about the value of certain speech on campus—and real authoritarian suppression of speech, because the latter is happening every day in America. No longer are we using censorship as a metaphor for when a marketplace of ideas picks winners and losers, nor authoritarianism as a hypothetical. The MAGA right has the power to legislate and otherwise enforce censorship on campus, and that’s exactly what it’s doing. Of course, this Trump-led crackdown on free speech extends well beyond campus too. ICE protesters have been arrested and in some cases imprisoned. Vice President JD Vance fueled a witch hunt that led to more than 145 people being fired for protected speech criticizing Charlie Kirk, the Turning Point USA leader who was murdered. Journalists have been barred from the halls of power in Washington, subjected to federal investigations, and even arrested and charged with bogus crimes. And so on.

It wasn’t very long ago that the right at least pretended to care about First Amendment freedoms. That pretense is out the window. The MAGA assault on free speech is unlike anything we’ve seen since at least the McCarthy era, but it’s also the kind of slow-building political story that we can too easily lose track of amid the daily chaos of the Trump administration. The story is now too big to be ignored: The Republicans are against liberty. They do not believe in freedom. They are enemies of the First Amendment, on and off campus.

Compared to the open battle the agency engaged in last year, ICE appears now to be attempting to maintain a lower profile. And yet the agency has also arrested and detained more people in recent months than at any time since Trump returned to office. Recent data released by ICE shows that in June, it hit a high—1,300 arrests on average each day. That record was then topped in July, which saw 1,474 average daily arrests over just the first 11 days of the month. “This reverses a trend we saw since the early fall where overall arrest numbers had actually remained fairly consistent or declined,” observed Austin Kocher, assistant research professor at Syracuse University. “The purported shift in ICE tactics—from the manic Kristi Noem months that cost the lives of two U.S. citizens to the less spectacular tactics under Markwayne Mullin—has effectively led to more arrests without as much popular backlash.”

There is a difference between a change in ICE tactics and a change in the number of people whom ICE has detained and deported, and understanding the reason for the latter requires us to look beyond ICE for answers. ICE’s purported shift was remarked upon over the winter, when Bovino was benched after immigration agents killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. More recently, when immigration agents killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Texas and Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Maine within days of each other, ICE was briefly suspended from traffic stops. But immigration agents themselves have long known—or at least, some of those whose words have made it into the legal record have known—that despite public outcry over ICE operations, not much beyond appearances has really changed. “They just changed the name,” one agent said in a deposition, when questioned about “Operation At Large,” the high-profile nationwide operation last year. “We’re doing the same thing just with a different name.”

In addition to proceeding as usual under a slightly altered brand, ICE is now working in even closer collaboration with other federal agencies in order to increase arrests: arresting people who allegedly overstayed visas at airports, with the help of TSA data; and arresting people whose children were previously in migrant shelters, based on tips shared by the Office of Refugee Resettlement. But ICE has been able to arrest and detain more people not only through these kinds of agreements with other federal agencies and offices. Its reach has also been broadened by local, county, and state law enforcement, a network of collaboration that goes back to the agency’s founding, and which has become only more sprawling since ICE was formed. Today, ICE’s partnership with the criminal legal system is fully activated in service of the mass deportations agenda.

The sight of singular terrifying raids can sometimes conceal the more fearsome routine violence of anti-immigration law enforcement. This winter, at the height of ICE’s operations in the Twin Cities, about 3,000 immigration agents were on the streets. “At the same time, the number of arrests in Minnesota during that operation was less than half the number made through the Miami field office over the same period,” said Silky Shah of Detention Watch Network, in an interview this month with Kelly Hayes of Truthout. The Miami ICE field office continues to make the most arrests in the country, averaging about 120 each day. “There is so much collaboration happening between ICE and local law enforcement,” Shah explained, in Florida but also Louisiana, Tennessee, and Texas, where local police, county sheriffs, and state troopers have explicit agreements with ICE, part of what’s known as the 287(g) program, in essence allowing “local law enforcement to act as de facto ICE agents with minimal training,” as journalist Jessica Pishko has reported. In those places with 287(g) agreements, Shah said, “the scale of enforcement is much greater, without the same level of spectacle.”

Former ICE officials acknowledge how working with state and local law enforcement can boost arrests. “What you’re seeing in Miami is a by-product of a substantial immigrant presence,” former ICE acting Director John Sandweg told CBS News. “You’re also seeing higher levels of cooperation between state and local agencies and ICE.” At the same time, state and local opposition to ICE has been critical in slowing the expansion of detention camps, in demanding new protective policies, and pushing local and state agencies to sever 287(g) agreements—even in Florida. Last year, Key West officials voted to end the city’s 287(g) agreement after pressure from local advocates. In response, Florida’s attorney general threatened to remove those officials from office. Miami’s new mayor, a Democrat, pledged to end the city’s 287(g) agreement, made in June 2025. But after seven months in office, she has so far refused to use her power to introduce a proposal to do so to the City Commission, while the commission has stalled. The fear instilled by such agreements between local law enforcement and ICE reaches not only immigrant communities but clearly their elected representatives, as well.

Immigrants rights and justice groups have long drawn attention to the entanglement of immigration enforcement and the criminal legal system. Law scholars have dubbed this “crimmigration” law, “the new creature of legal imagination and policing reality,” as César Cuauhtémoc García Hernándezas characterized it in 2015. Because this overlap has been growing for so long, it tends not to grab the attention of those who aren’t themselves snared within it. Someone’s neighbors or co-workers, who might see a raid in progress, can’t so immediately observe a sheriff taking someone from a routine traffic stop to immigration detention. They won’t know when local police email an ICE field office to confirm that someone ICE is looking for is in their custody awaiting arraignment. Such routine policing has made the criminal legal system an ideal tool for a mass deportation regime seeking to more quietly entrench itself in everyday life.

While that police work may not be drawing public notice, the administration has not been quiet about its plans. Homan and Miller were clear during the 2024 Trump campaign: They would turn to local police to carry out mass deportations. When that campaign was underway, I spoke with Meghan Maloney de Zaldivar, now the vice president of advocacy at the New York Immigration Coalition, about how racist and xenophobic rhetoric from Trump, Miller, and Homan (among others)—rhetoric like “criminal aliens,” “invasions” at the border, and “the worst of the worst”—creates permission for police. “The people who work within those forces now feel like they don’t have to restrain themselves, and take it upon themselves to take that initiative,” Maloney de Zaldivar explained in 2024. “That message is sent to those folks that they have the power and the backing of the White House to use their authority to take out that racism and hate on immigrants in their communities.” With or without explicit 287(g) agreements, city, county, and state law enforcement still get the message: If your mayor or governor doesn’t have your back, Trump does.

Whatever political and propaganda value there was in ICE storming into communities has perhaps been drained. It is as if someone advised the mass deportation crowd that if that’s what they really want, it’s better achieved without witnesses. Or, worse: It’s as if those elected Democrats who don’t oppose ICE per se but merely want it to produce better optics, got their wish—see the calls to have ICE unmask and identify themselves, without fundamentally questioning the agency’s mission. This is what is meant by “Abolish Trump’s ICE”—not “Abolish ICE”—as some Democratic candidates have campaigned. It is too soon to know just what, if anything, has changed at the top of ICE, other than that Noem’s replacement at the Department of Homeland Security hopes the press will look away. But we must not confuse what we aren’t seeing day in and day out with an institutional turn away from Trump’s signature promise: to ethnically cleanse the United States, using federal law enforcement. We must not ignore how the police around us day in and day out are marshaled in service of that campaign.

This summer, I write from Brooklyn, where I live close to several immigrant communities, including one now in need of urgent defense, and where our elected leaders may soon be tested. How will they respond to the possible mass deportation of Haitians, those who have been stripped of their legal status by the Trump administration? “[Forty thousand] New Yorkers are going to be losing their protections, their work authorization and their legal protections today, and it is just gutting,” said New York Immigration Coalition CEO Murad Awawdeh in an interview with The City Reporter on Monday. New York City’s still-new Mayor Zohran Mamdani believes in abolishing ICE (and has told the president he believes so), even as Tom Homan routinely threatens to flood New York neighborhoods with immigration agents.

But critically: ICE is not the only problem. The city and state’s sanctuary laws, meant to bar local police from cooperating with ICE, are only as powerful as the people holding police to account, as Spencer Ackerman wrote in his Forever Wars newsletter on Tuesday. The commissioner of the New York Police Department, Jessica Tisch, at least theoretically answers to the city’s mayor, but in practice, the police hold immense power to set their day-to-day agenda, city officials be damned. “On one level, it’s important to compel Tisch to prove herself and the NYPD capable of noncooperation,” Ackerman writes. “But on another, more human level, noncooperation can hardly be sufficient against a lawless, violent deportations force empowered by the Supreme Court to racially profile.” Are we Miami or are we New York? Is “noncooperation” even enough?

As the horror of Trump’s mass deportations campaign has become part of daily life, it has only become easier for state and local Democrats to oppose ICE. One would think they have even stronger ground to contest ICE when it comes to their collaboration with state and local police. When will they?

This shouldn’t just be a strategy for one Senate race in Montana. Democratic leaders, strategists, and ultimately voters need to start regularly backing independent candidates in very red places, at least for the next few election cycles. This may not work. But we should test every possible approach to keep politicians nominated by today’s radical, antidemocratic Republican Party out of power, and running independents has real potential to do just that. 

The reality is that Democratic candidates simply can’t win races in many states and districts right now. (And the same is true for Republicans in very blue areas.) It’s hard for Democrats to accept this reality because they remember the exceptions to this rule. Alabama’s Doug Jones, Montana’s Jon Tester, Kansas’s Laura Kelly, Louisiana’s John Bel Elwards, West Virginia’s Joe Manchin, and Kentucky’s Andy Beshear are among the Democrats who have won in very red areas over the last decade. But those are outliers, usually with some specific explanation. (Manchin and Tester were incumbents who had first been elected in less polarizing eras. So had Beshear’s father, Steve. Jones’s Republican opponent was accused of sexually assaulting underage girls.) The overwhelming majority of Democratic candidates in those states and other red places lose. 

These candidates aren’t losing simply because they are too liberal. (Tester lost his 2024 reelection bid, and Manchin almost certainly would have been defeated if he had run as a Democrat for another term two years ago.) Democrats who take conservative stands, such as opposing abortion rights, run all the time and still lose in red states. 

What’s plaguing them is the label Democrat. Today, much more so than in the past, many voters and therefore entire districts and states almost never will back a candidate from the opposite party, no matter their policy stands. The party brands eclipse any individual. Swing voters exist. But their ranks are small. So both parties can win statewide races in Michigan or Wisconsin, but Republicans almost always win in Kentucky, as do Democrats in Massachusetts. 

But shunning the party label seems to help shake up this state of affairs. In 2022, Never-Trump former Republican Evan McMullin ran for a U.S. Senate seat in Utah as an independent, even though he was as critical of MAGA Republicans as most Democrats. He lost by 10 percentage points. Two years later, an anti-MAGA candidate who ran as a Democrat lost by 30 in a Utah Senate race. Nebraska’s Dan Osborn, a mechanic and union leader, ran for the Senate in 2024 and lost by seven. In that same election, Kamala Harris ran 20 points behind Donald Trump, and in Nebraska’s other U.S. Senate race, a Democratic candidate lost by 25 to a Republican. In both McMullin’s and Osborn’s races, the Democratic Party didn’t really run anyone, allowing the independent candidates to get all Democratic votes without having to use the party’s label. Osborn is running again this year and effectively tied in polls against Republican incumbent Pete Ricketts. 

In Montana, polling also suggests the value of an independent candidacy. The Democratic-leaning firm GQR released a survey this week showing the Republican Alme at 41 percent, the independent Bodnar at 27, and the Democrat Bankhead at 21. (There is a Libertarian candidate getting a small percentage of the vote too.) If the independent Bodnar is not included in the poll, Republican Alme leads 44–40 over Democrat Bankhead. But if the Democrat Bankhead is not included, the independent Bodnar has a 44–40 lead over Republican Alme. 

We are talking about a fairly small advantage—independent Bodnar leading by four, while Democrat Bankhead is down by four. This poll alone does not give assurance that the independent Bodnar would certainly win, that the Democratic Bankhead would certainly lose, or that Bodnar would do better than Bankhead against the Republican. But the long record of Democrats losing Montana and other red states and the better showings by independents in other states in that region make me think that Bodnar would be the superior candidate. And one thing is for certain: Having them both run guarantees a Republican victory. 

I would normally be reluctant to ask a candidate to stand down. Bankhead ran in a competitive primary and won. She has earned the right to be on the ballot and force Bodnar and Alme to beat her. We aren’t in normal times, though. A Senate without a GOP majority could be a critical bulwark against Trump, most notably in stopping the appointment of more ultra-right-wing judges. If one of the conservative judges on the U.S. Supreme Court dies or suddenly can’t serve because of health reasons, I want a Trump nominee to get confirmed only if he can win the votes of some non-Republican senators. So Senate seats really, really matter right now. Bodnar has committed to not joining the Senate Democratic Caucus if elected. But he will not join the GOP, either. More importantly, he would not be an automatic vote in favor of Trump’s agenda, as outgoing senator Steve Daines is and Alme likely would be, as well. 

There are four real shortcomings to this independent strategy. First, it may never work in actually defeating a Republican candidate in a red state. McMullin and Osborn were the more liberal candidates in their races and tacitly backed by the Democratic Party. And that likely limited their ability to appeal to stalwart Republican voters, the majority of the electorate in red states. Bodnar, who is backed by Tester and other prominent Democrats in Montana, will also likely be seen as essentially a Democratic candidate by many Montana voters, complicating his path to victory. 

Second, if Osborn and/or Bodnar make it to Washington, they won’t be full-fledged Democrats. If 49 Republicans, 49 Democrats, and Osborn and Bodnar are elected to the Senate this fall, the Republicans would likely remain in charge of the chamber and determine the agenda, because JD Vance would be the fiftieth GOP vote. And Osborn and Bodnar would probably try to cast high-profile votes with Republicans and against Democrats to solidify their independent bona fides. Think of Manchin or Kyrsten Simena—but maybe worse. These senators would be formally independent from the Democratic Party. 

Third, this strategy weakens the party in the long term. In pursuing this course in Utah, Nebraska, and now potentially Montana, Democrats are essentially announcing that their party brand is toxic and can’t win in certain states. That’s certainly true right now. But that admission reinforces that weakness. This is not how a confident party would act. It also denies the party opportunities to get stronger in red states. Perhaps Nebraska’s Osborn would win fewer votes by running as a Democrat, but he might convince more union workers or mechanics to join the party if he were running under its banner. 

Same for Bodnar. “His candidacy is entirely focused on one short-term win—and if what he’s doing becomes the norm, there might be no rescuing the party from the wreckage,” former Tester aide Nick Perkins wrote in a recent TNR essay. 

Fourth, I suspect that this independent strategy will unfairly prop up white male candidates and diminish women and people of color. McMullin, Osborn, and Bodnar are white men. Bodnar is attempting to push aside a female candidate in Bankhead. McMullin, Osborn, and Bodnar’s supporters likely assume they can win over Republican voters in part because of their race and gender. I worry that liberal-leaning women and people of color in the South or West who seek broader support for their independent candidacies won’t get it and that women and people of color who win Democratic nominations will increasingly get shunted aside for white male independents. 

That, I admit, is a lot of shortcomings. This strategy is kind of sexist and racist, weakens the Democratic brand, and will at best send Joe Manchin types to Washington. But I still want to see this independent experiment tried widely. And that’s partly because of where I live. Here in Kentucky, Democratic candidates just have no chance. Beshear aside, Republicans win virtually all statewide races by 15 percentage points or more. But on policy, this is not an ultraconservative state. Voters rejected recent ballot initiatives designed to outlaw abortions and create an expansive school voucher program. Voters in the state’s rural areas truly hate the Democratic Party, though. I suspect we can have semi-competitive elections and occasional victories by non-Republicans only if alternative candidates are running as independents instead of Democrats. 

In Montana, Bankhead, the Democratic candidate, insists she won’t drop out by the August 10 deadline.  And the state’s Republican secretary of state says that the Democratic Party would have to choose another candidate if she left the race. But ideally, the party would replace Bankhead with someone who isn’t really running and essentially concedes the Democratic vote to Bodnar. Even if all that happened, the Republican Senate candidate not winning in Montana, which Trump carried by 20 points in 2024, is a long shot. 

It’s a shot worth taking, creatively and yes, independently. A Senate with Seth Bodnar in it will be 1 percent less pro-Trump—and we need every percent we can take to fight our authoritarian president. For now, a winning Democratic Party will be one that tries to win in a few less places. 

Welcome to the era of Late-Stage Trumpism. The “personalist” aspects of Trumpian rule—the shaping of much of the government and even the physical capital of Washington, D.C., around one man’s relentless self-dealing and self-aggrandizement—have all started imploding, in a collapsing supernova of venality and megalomania.

The CNN poll finds that only 34 percent of Americans approve of Trump’s job performance, matching the low point he hit after inciting a violent insurrection on January 6, 2021. Here are some striking findings on his personal traits and obsessions:

• 73 percent say Trump is not in touch with the problems that ordinary Americans face daily; only 27 percent say he is.
• 66 percent say Trump does not put the good of the country over his personal gain; only 34 percent say he does.
• 62 percent say Trump is not an effective world leader; only 38 percent say he is.
• 57 percent say Trump does not have the stamina and sharpness to serve effectively as president; only 43 percent say he does.
• 64 percent say Trump has gone too far in pursuing his personal business as president; only 31 percent say this has been about right.
• 61 percent say Trump has gone too far in undertaking projects to remodel the White House and other Washington landmarks; only 32 percent say he hasn’t.

That’s remarkable. Note that the poll uses very benign language to describe Trump’s unilateral razing of the White House East Wing to build a ballroom for himself; his plans for a triumphal arch in the capital; the festooning of his name (and even enormous totalitarian images of his face glowering down on us) at various locations in D.C.; and much more. Even so, a huge majority disapproves.

What’s more, note that huge majorities don’t just disapprove of Trump’s use of the presidency to enrich himself; they also see that Trump is putting his own interests before those of the country, an even more damning construction on his conduct. Large majorities see him as out of touch, failing on the world stage, and lacking in the basic mental fitness required to serve.

“We have seen massive collapses of support for presidents—like Richard Nixon in the midst of Watergate and Lyndon Johnson as the Vietnam War overshadowed his domestic agenda,” Corey Brettschneider, an expert and podcaster on presidential power, told me. “What’s different here is the widespread recognition of Trump’s unprecedented corruption, narcissism, and putting of personal greed over the public interest.”

So what does this say about Late-Stage Trumpism? Consider a related development: On many fronts, Trumpian rule is descending into displays of malice that are unbearably cheap, petty, and venal.

To wit: Trump’s acting Director of National Intelligence Bill Pulte is now boasting about firings of ODNI insiders that may not have actually happened. Feeding the MAGA base even with made-up “deep state” purgings may be good enough these days. Pulte gained renown for using his federal housing agency post to fabricate pretexts for prosecuting Trump critics. Most of those efforts have gone belly-up, yet Trump is now seriously considering him for a Cabinet post. To get such a big promotion, all you need these days are personal loyalty and a willingness to supply MAGA with bread and circuses.

Meanwhile, Trump is now reportedly overriding determinations by his own agencies to deny disaster aid to blue states. Trump grew so angry about the failure of his renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool that prosecutors are now throwing the book at a former Olympian for supposedly tampering with the project. Yet a key witness dramatically undercut the case by testifying that damage preexisted his contact with it. And the whole country watched—or cringed—as Trump tried to transform our 250th anniversary into a celebration of himself while almost nobody came.

None of this is to minimize the damage that Trump is doing on many critical fronts. But even there, a Late-Stage-Trumpism vibe is taking hold: Note how Trump’s ever-escalating threats to obliterate Iran entirely don’t seem to be breaking Iran’s resolve. We’re simultaneously getting inundated with nonstop trivialities and pratfalls, all of them direct outgrowths of Trump’s personal obsessions and pathologies, even as he’s cratering by just about every personal polling metric you can think of.

All this has bearing on the national debate that’s underway over what a post-Trump MAGA movement and GOP will look like. In a recent conversation with me, political theorist Alan Elrod cautioned against overinterpreting Trump’s decline, noting that the waning of Trumpism as a “personalist project” doesn’t necessarily mean the broader “reactionary project” he represents is sunsetting with him.

It’s a crucial distinction to keep in mind. And no one should see any of this as a sign that the midterms or the 2028 presidential race will be easy. Nonetheless, if Trumpism as a personalist project is sunsetting, it’s an important, noteworthy development in itself.

For one thing, as Damon Linker aptly points out, the GOP will struggle to evolve out from under Trump’s personal shadow, especially when the 2028 succession battle gets underway:

Then there are the inevitable humiliations Trump is sure to bestow on anyone daring to run to succeed him. The sitting president will be acting as a 24/7 insult comic at rallies and on social media, blasting the party’s nominee for kicks, shits, and giggles.

“As long as Trump is living and/or sentient,” Linker concludes, the GOP “will be stuck in the Trump era.” What’s more, Republicans may also struggle to disentangle Trump’s personalist failings from the failures of the broader reactionary project.

Note that due to war, tariffs, the shredding of international alliances and commitments, and the violence of Trump’s mass deportation agenda, Trump has squandered a trifecta of traditional GOP advantages on the economy, immigration, and national security (the CNN poll reveals this very clearly, as well). Protectionism, draconian immigration restrictions, and the “America First” rejection of multilateral alliances and institutions are among the key pillars of right-wing authoritarian nationalism. It’s at least possible Trump will leave them all badly discredited.

Finally, it’s just heartening to see the American people so overwhelmingly reject the trappings and degradations of personalist rule as a development in and of itself. That was not at all preordained. With a little luck, we’ll look back on this as a crucial tell, as an enduring sign of our democratic resilience.

When asked about the conspiracy during a White House press conference Wednesday, Trump claimed that he “understood” why there was pressure to keep Mamdani away from the event, telling a reporter that the victims’ families were “very unhappy with the mayor.”

“I think they’re having a hard time with Mandami,” Trump said, pronouncing the New York City mayor’s name wrong. “The people having to do with—anybody having to do with 9/11 right now, on the victims’ side, and there’s a lot of them, they’re very unhappy with what’s going on in New York.”

The conspiracy appears to have come from a New York Post headline, published on the Sunday edition’s front page, that claimed “thousands of 9/11 families” wanted Mamdani banned from the ceremony.

But that’s not true: The Rupert Murdoch–owned paper cited a Change.org petition launched by Giovanni Galante as the origin point of the startling figure. But Galante, who lost his wife Grace Catherine Galante in the attacks, didn’t have the signatures to back up that claim.

The petition argued that Mamdani’s reluctance to condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada”—which pro-Palestinian activists have used as a universal call for Palestinian liberation from Israeli occupation—should disqualify him from attendance, as it suggests he does not “share American values” with the victims’ families.

The petition has since accrued 42,000 “verified signatures,” though that simply means the electronic sign-offs were conducted by a person rather than a bot. It does not ensure the signatures came from New Yorkers—let alone the families of the nearly 3,000 people who died during the Al Qaeda terrorist attack.

In an interview with Popular Information, Galante said that no such list actually existed.

“We don’t have a list,” Galante told the independent digital newsletter.

Even the Post story contradicted its headline’s wild claim, reporting that the petition had “collected over 1,100 signatures in a little over a week, including from at least 300 victims’ families.” But the Post interviewed just three sources who lost a family member during the attack and also signed the petition.

In reality, the 300 figure reported by the Post was also the result of guesswork based on the petition’s popularity.

“We all know each other, so … think about it. If you know 10 people and they give it to 10 more people they know that lost. That’s how we got the 300 number,” Galante said. “I don’t go through the list and look at the names.”

Nonetheless, the story was quickly cannibalized by right-wing media, finding plenty of air time across Fox News’s myriad properties and even spreading to CBS News.

“Thousands of 9/11 victims’ families are asking New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani not to attend this year’s solemn remembrance ceremony,” CBS reported Monday before issuing a retraction.

Mamdani, meanwhile, has no plans to stay away from the event.

“I will proudly honor the families, the survivors, the first responders forever impacted by that horrific terror attack by standing alongside them at this year’s 9/11 commemoration, reaffirming that we will never forget the solemn day felt by all of us who call this city home and, frankly, by all of us who called this country home,” Mamdani said.

In a statement to CBS News, the 9/11 Memorial & Museum noted that it had “intentionally worked to keep the commemoration free of politics. Government officials from across the political spectrum have attended the ceremony simply to bear witness.”

The president revealed plans for a $22.5 billion renovation of Dulles International Airport at a press conference on Wednesday afternoon alongside Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby.

“This is all about the Dulles Airport.… It’s considered one of the worst airports anywhere in the world. We’re gonna make it maybe the best, with some hard work and some good thought process,” Trump said to open the presser. He described the plan as a “major, and long overdue, renovation and reconstruction of Washington’s really horribly thought-of Dulles International Airport.”

Trump plans to add over five million square feet of newly renovated space, replacing the airport’s C and D concourses and constructing a multistory above-ground parking garage connected to them. He wants a new air train and new restaurants and lounges. Mock-ups of the renovation also feature Trump’s classic gold styling throughout the airport.

Trump claims the airport’s renovation will be bonded and thus not need federal funds, with participating airlines paying for the whole project. “Cost was no object, unfortunately or fortunately,” he said.

“It’s gonna be so efficient. Right now it’s totally inefficient,” he continued. “Between the trams and the Star Wars thing … elevated buses, nobody knows what’s going on, it’s a real mess.”

Regardless of how good or bad you think Dulles is, the level of priority this project has taken on—much like the White House ballroom, the Kennedy Center, the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, and Trump’s desired “Triumphal Arch”—is very questionable given the state of the war on Iran, the economy, and upcoming midterm elections. Especially at that price. Construction is expected to begin next year.

Sean Duffy says the redevelopment of Dulles will be bonded at $22.5 BILLION pic.twitter.com/YCQ8ny3U9r

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 29, 2026

The New York Times reports Wednesday that major Republican donors have so far refused to spend money on Paxton’s campaign, where he is polling behind James Talarico, who could be the first Democrat Texas sends to the Senate since 1993. Those donors had spent money in the state’s Republican primary, which placed a spotlight on Paxton’s extramarital affair and criminal charges over alleged state securities fraud.

After Paxton narrowly secured the GOP nomination following a runoff with incumbent Senator John Cornyn, these donors’ opinions haven’t changed, especially since the attorney general has been seen traveling with his lover and now has been accused of committing voter fraud.

Two of the GOP’s biggest money committees, the Senate Leadership Fund and MAGA Inc., haven’t spent any money on Paxton’s campaign despite President Donald Trump backing him. It’s become an open secret that each is waiting for the other super PAC to pony up millions of dollars, according to the Times. The former is run by people close to Senate Majority Leader John Thune and who backed Cornyn in the primary, while the latter is run by Trump advisers.

“Somebody is going to have to spend big money,” Dan Eberhart, an oil executive raising funds for Paxton, told the Times. “We’ll see who blinks.”

Other national Republican groups plan to spend money on other Senate races in Ohio and Kansas, even though those races aren’t as close as Texas. As of early July, Talarico has nine times as much cash in his main campaign account as Paxton does, and has already spent $12 million in ads. He also continues to rake in money from wealthy Democrats in places such as Chicago and Martha’s Vineyard. Will Trump and the GOP step up to bail out Paxton?

The Department of the Interior asked Congress for an additional $10 million to cover portions of the Freedom 250 event, including the state fair, a prayer event, and a massive July 4 fireworks display that tried to break the world record (but has still not been recognized by Guinness three weeks after the fact).

Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley, the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies, told The Washington Post Wednesday that the administration had initially presented the funding need as part of a broader stopgap funding measure for the whole government. It asked for an unspecified amount of funding “to recoup costs associated with support of events celebrating America’s semiquincentennial,” according to Merkley.

But that only raised questions about the administration’s spending habits—particularly since Trump’s One Big Beautiful Act set aside $150 million last year specifically to cover the semiquincentennial’s expenses. Most of that financial support was redirected to Freedom 250, a Trump-backed public-private partnership that largely replaced the congressionally created bipartisan America 250 group that was organizing the historic anniversary celebration, according to the Post.

But that’s not all the money that went into funding the president’s highly politicized, poorly attended 250th celebration. In June, Trump officials diverted roughly $90 million away from the National Park Service, utilizing entry fees to some of the country’s most popular parks—such as Yellowstone and Yosemite—to fund anniversary-related projects.

Private donors also contributed a significant sum to the event: Freedom 250 has accepted donations from corporate sponsors that are currently doing business with the Trump administration, including Palantir, Boeing, Chevron, Lockheed Martin, and more, according to the Freedom 250 website.

Administration officials offered up more details about the new funding request in a follow-up meeting with Merkley’s office, clarifying that they needed the money to cover routine National Park Service costs incurred during the events.

But the Department of the Interior offered a different reason entirely to the Post. When reached for comment, the agency claimed that the funding was needed to address heightened security needs in light of recent threats leveled at the president, citing the Ultimate Fighting Championship event held on the White House lawn in June and the assassination attempt during the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in April.

“Given the elevated security threats against high-profile events in Washington, D.C. … an elevated security posture was needed to ensure the safety of the public at these events. This funding would help address the expenditures associated with the elevated security posture,” the department wrote in an email.

In a letter to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum shared with the Post, Merkley wrote that it is “unacceptable to ask the American people to bail out Freedom 250.”

Fauci continually pleaded the Fifth rather than answer invasive questions from Senate Republicans who accuse him of a cover-up with the Covid-19 pandemic, and Moreno flipped out.

“Who the fuck do you think you were for doing that? It is a total disgrace what you did to this country, and then my Democrat colleagues are standing there defending you,” Moreno said. “You may have had a 50-plus year legacy of public service, but it ends in total and complete disgrace.”

It’s harsher language than anything Moreno has said about Miller, who has a long list of alleged abuse against his ex-wife, Moreno’s daughter Emily. Miller allegedly threw boiling water from a skillet onto Emily Moreno’s chest, scalding her; put a gun to her head; pushed her against a wall, hitting her head; and fractured their two-year-old daughter’s collarbone and bruised her shoulder. Several people on social media quickly pointed this out.

Senator Moreno seems more concerned with scoring political points against one of the GOP’s favorite punching bags than he is with defending his daughter. Miller not only denies the allegations against him, but he claims Emily is lying, has bipolar disorder, is stalking him, and is trying to damage his reputation. Miller and Emily Moreno’s daughter even told her mother, according to court documents, “Daddy kill you.”

Cornyn was approached by CNN’s Manu Raju in the Senate halls on Wednesday after news that his morning meeting with Blanche had been canceled.

“So, are you a ‘no’? Are you a ‘no’ tomorrow if this comes to a vote?” Raju asked. 

“Well, [Senate Judiciary Committee Chair] Grassley tells me that we need to know by four o’clock this afternoon whether the markup is still on. So we’ve still got a little time,” Cornyn responded. “And hopefully they now recognize the seriousness of this, and will be responding.” 

“But if it stands as it is now … right now, would you vote ‘no’?”

“I’m not prepared to vote ‘yes,’ lemme put it that way,” Cornyn said. 

Cornyn, along with Senator Thom Tillis, has been demanding written termination of Trump’s $1.776 slush fund to help his allies. Tillis told Semafor on Wednesday that there’s “no daylight” between himself and Cornyn on the anti-weaponization fund’s termination. 

Even one Republican “no” vote would effectively kill Blanche’s nomination, as he needs the support of all 11 Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee to move forward, assuming every Democrat votes ‘no.’ All Blanche has to do is deliver a written statement assuring them that Trump’s fund is dead—and yet he’s refusing. 

“We’ve still got what, about another five or six hours?  That’s plenty of time to resolve this,” Cornyn continued. “There’s no real need to have a meeting if they will just produce the documentation that we’ve requested—and that he testified to under oath during his hearing.”

“Sir, you’ve been incredibly clear with what you would like Todd Blanche to do … for days now,” another reporter asked. “What do you think the holdup is here?”

“Beats me. Maybe they think I’m just going to give up or, you know, go along, but they’re mistaken.” 

John Cornyn’s demands for written language to kill $1.8B anti-weaponization fund have NOT been met as meeting with Todd Blanche scrapped ahead of key committee vote tomorrow. Blanche has til 4p to respond, or vote could be delayed.

“I’m not prepared to vote yes,” Cornyn told us pic.twitter.com/qLBnXOCkLr

— Manu Raju (@mkraju) July 29, 2026

The Department of Justice accused Comey of threatening the president’s life when he posted a photo of seashells to his Instagram account last year, arguing that the message the shells spelled out—“86 47”—would be interpreted by any person “familiar with the circumstances” as a “serious expression of an intent to do harm to the president,” according to Comey’s indictment.

But on Tuesday, Comey’s lawyers argued that the entire case should be moot due to Trump’s personal involvement in Comey’s questioning, according to a motion to dismiss first reported on by The New York Times. According to government documents handed over to Comey’s team, Trump told Secret Service agents who interviewed the former FBI director to send their notes to Air Force One for Trump’s personal review.

The Secret Service questioned Comey by phone hours after he shared the protest message on Instagram on May 15. Despite being informed by a Secret Service agent that the telephone interview would likely suffice, Comey agreed to further questioning in Washington. “From that point forward, high-level DOJ and White House officials (including the President) involved themselves in the investigation,” stated Comey’s attorneys.

The Secret Service chose to monitor Comey the next day on his drive to Washington despite lacking a warrant—a decision that was noted by at least one agent as, legally, a “bad idea” since there was no “imminent danger to life” that could justify the warrantless surveillance.

They did so at the behest of the “number three” person at the DOJ, according to the legal document. That individual is not named in the memo, but the number three person at the DOJ is the associate attorney general, a position that was not filled by a Senate-confirmed official at the time of Comey’s surveillance. The agents tailed Comey and his wife even as they visited the grave of their deceased son, according to the filing.

A government document obtained by Comey’s team revealed that “POTUS was requesting a copy of the interview notes to use in his 6 p.m. press conference.” One Secret Service agent described the interview as “a hot topic on the plane,” noting that Trump was “very interested,” according to the Times.

Trump has been very public about his contempt for Comey since the FBI director led the investigation into Trump’s ties to Russia following the 2016 presidential election. Trump fired Comey in the midst of that probe, prompting a follow-up investigation by Comey’s predecessor, special counsel Robert Mueller, that determined that Russian influence in the 2016 election was “sweeping and systemic” and found substantial (if non-prosecutable) evidence that Trump had obstructed justice by firing Comey.

In another section of the legal filing, Comey’s attorneys revealed that the Trump administration attempted to prove the lethality behind Comey’s “86” post by questioning Sammy “The Bull” Gravano, a notorious gangster who was at one point the underboss in the Gambino crime family and was personally responsible for at least 19 murders. Gravano apparently confirmed the term’s violent definition, though he noted that a “gangster would never use that term” because it was too obvious to law enforcement.

In the hours following Comey’s post, the Secret Service instituted a new policy that redefined “86 47” as a formal threat to the president’s life. However, the agency rolled back the change by the day’s end and returned to “business as usual” as the policy shift resulted in an overwhelming number of potential leads that lacked “threatening language,” according to the filing.

Comey has denied the accusations, claiming that he was only familiar with the term via restaurant slang, where it contextually means to remove an item off the menu.

Peter Navarro, who is currently serving as a senior counselor to President Donald Trump, whined to C-Span Wednesday that Fauci had interrupted his hydroxychloroquine business at the height of the pandemic.

“I had a million doses of hydroxychloroquine in warehouses … that I was trying to distribute to hospitals, and he got the FDA to stop me from doing that,” Navarro said. “Thousands of people could be here in this country right now alive if I had been able to distribute that, take that to the bank, that’s what the science says.”

Extensive clinical trials have repeatedly debunked that hydroxychloroquine—an antimalarial drug predominantly used to treat lupus—could have been an effective treatment for Covid-19. The FDA revoked the drug’s emergency use authorization during Trump’s first term after emerging data made clear that it did not treat or prevent Covid-19 but instead had the potential to create dangerous heart palpitations, cause liver or kidney damage, and cause serious gastrointestinal upset.

But six years later, Republicans are apparently still choosing to ignore the science.

In the midst of grilling a Fifth-pleading Fauci on Capitol Hill Wednesday, Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson insisted that ivermectin—a drug used to treat heartworm in livestock, which was touted during the pandemic as another miracle cure—“worked.”

“When it comes to ivermectin … it works,” Johnson said, proceeding to wave a stack of papers while claiming that there were dozens of studies proving the efficacy of ivermectin against the coronavirus.

To this day, the FDA has only approved some ivermectin tablets at specific doses for human use, though their application is limited to treating parasitic worms. The FDA page on the matter still warns against the use of ivermectin to treat Covid-19, asserting that “currently available clinical trial data do not demonstrate that ivermectin is effective” against the virus.

Furthermore, the FDA notes that taking ivermectin—or any drug dosed for an animal—can be dangerous, and that the agency has received “multiple reports” of hospitalizations after people have attempted to self-treat themselves with the drug.

The survivors gathered for a press conference at the National Mall Wednesday to launch the Donald J. Trump and Jeffrey Epstein Memorial Bookmobile, which will carry bound copies of all 3.5 million files to communities across the country throughout the midterm elections.

As part of their launch, the survivors delivered printed copies straight to lawmakers’ offices, according to Miles Taylor, a former Trump official turned activist now involved with the bookmobile.

The survivors took copies of the files to members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which is set to vote on advancing acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s confirmation on Thursday.

Speaking at the press conference, the survivors urged against confirming Blanche, who only recently met with survivors after months of dodging victims and their demands for the Department of Justice to keep investigating. That meeting did not go well.

“A vote for Todd Blanche is a vote against justice,” Elizabeth Stein, an Epstein survivor and anti–human trafficking educator, said Wednesday.

Blanche previously tried to downplay the Epstein files’ thousands of redaction errors that exposed the names of survivors while concealing the identities of alleged perpetrators.

Blanche’s confirmation is already in jeopardy at the hands of his own party. Two Republican lawmakers are refusing to approve Blanche unless he puts in writing that Trump’s “Anti-Weaponization Fund” is actually dead.

Comey was charged with allegedly threatening violence against President Donald Trump in April with an Instagram post of numbers spelling out “86 47” in seashells. On Tuesday, Comey filed a motion to dismiss the case, and in that court filing, his lawyers listed some drastic steps taken by the authorities.

The Department of Justice spoke to former mafia boss Salvatore “Sammy the Bull” Gravano in an attempt to prove that the “86” in Comey’s post was an allusion to murder. But Gravano’s interview didn’t help their case, as he pointed out that real organized crime figures would think using the term was too obvious.

Gravano also suggested the FBI should contact former federal prosecutor and judge John Gleeson for his opinion on the term, only for Gleeson to say, “The claim that ‘86’ is mafia jargon for ‘kill’ is preposterous.” Gleeson, who prosecuted notable organized crime cases, said that in thousands of hours of debriefings and conversations with mobsters, he had never heard the term used that way.

Federal agents also used emergency cell phone tracking, which doesn’t require a warrant, to monitor Comey’s location while he was driving from North Carolina to Virginia shortly after he made the post. That location tracking is only supposed to be used in extreme situations, such as an “imminent threat to life or limb.”

No such emergency existed, and one Secret Service agent later said in a memo that “we did not believe that anyone’s life was in immediate danger and legally it was a bad idea to ping the phone.”

Trump fired Comey in 2017 over the federal investigation into Russia’s involvement in the 2016 presidential election, and has targeted the former FBI director in his second term as president. This case against Comey has fallen apart several times already, and has only recently been revived by acting Attorney General Todd Blanche. It seems destined to fail yet again.

Jones based his demands on Trump’s war on Iran, which many on the MAGA right were opposed to from the start, viewing it as yet another endless foreign war—a pattern Trump ran on ending.

“The big issue is how to stop Trump. And we have to have Congress go for the war powers. They’ve tried three times to vote on war powers—they’re supposed to authorize a war. This is a war; they’re getting the draft ready. If this isn’t a war, nothing’s a war. I mean, this is absolutely out of control,” Jones said in a video posted on Tuesday afternoon. “And so I’m calling for it right now: Twenty-Fifth Amendment, impeachment, whatever needs to happen to get this front and center, to get control of our country.”

Jones went on to allege that Trump is preparing for a boots-on-the-ground invasion of Iran, a line in the sand for many in the “America First” wing of MAGA.

“They want us in a total war so they can censor and take our freedoms, nationalize everything, and push us aside with AI—total liability, immunity, and protection. This is a disaster. We are facing tyranny, but the public’s awakening,” he continued. “We’ve got to come together and transcend left and right, and we have to say no to an expanded war that will definitely destroy the economy and kill a bunch of our troops. They’re preparing a massive ground invasion. It’s all confirmed. This is going down right now.”

BREAKING: Alex Jones Calls For Impeachment Of President Trump For Attempt To Reimplement The National Draft & Launch Total Ground Invasion Of Iran!

"The Big Issue Is How To Stop Trump! 25th Amendment, Impeachment, Whatever Needs To Happen To Get This Front & Center!"

Americans… https://t.co/zaIGbDAfpz pic.twitter.com/Ar6bUYdq4p

— Alex Jones (@RealAlexJones) July 28, 2026

While this announcement is historically uncharacteristic for Jones, the internal MAGA split on the Iran war has been brewing for some time.

“How do we 25th Amendment his ass?” Jones wrote back in April after Trump warned that “a whole civilization will die tonight,” referring to Iran. “WAR CRIME ALERT!!—Trump on Iran: ‘A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. The definition of genocide is destroying an entire civilization/people! Trump literally sounds like an unhinged super villain from a Marvel comic movie. This IS NOT WHAT WE VOTED FOR!!!”

Inside Washington

The wildfire fighter who just might flip Montana 

Smoke jumper and union organizer Sam Forstag, running in a shocking dead heat against Republican Aaron Flint in the fight for Montana’s 1st district according to the latest poll, just became one of the most progressive candidates in the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s Red to Blue program. On Tuesday, the DCCC added Forstag along with four other candidates to the program, which lends support to Democratic candidates in competitive districts.

Forstag, DCCC chair Suzan DelBene said in a statement, “puts his life on the line to protect his neighbors and community from wildfires. Deeply committed to Western Montana, Sam is the kind of authentic, dynamic leader that working people want fighting for them in Washington.” Forstag became the official Democratic candidate after winning the primary on June 2.

The other candidates added to Red to Blue on Tuesday include Arizona state Representative Amish Shah in Arizona’s 1st congressional district, Pia Dandiya in Florida’s new 22nd congressional district, Iowa state Representative Lindsay James in the 2nd congressional district, and Jake Johnson for Minnesota’s 1st congressional district. That brings the number of Red to Blue candidates to 30.

Forstag now joins Randy Villegas, who is running in California’s 22nd congressional district, in representing the party’s insurgent left in the DCCC’s program. The DCCC originally endorsed Villegas’s moderate opponent, Jasmeet Bains, stirring up controversy and claims that the party was protecting moderates. A similar scene played out in Maine’s 2nd congressional district, where Matt Dunlap, the state auditor, won his June 9 primary over DCCC-backed State Senator Joe Baldacci, who was featured on the Red to Blue list. After his win, the DCCC added Villegas to the Red to Blue program. But the DCCC hasn’t yet done the same for Dunlap.

Forstag is backed by progressives like Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, but also has the endorsement of a handful of Republican former electeds in Montana. He’s also supported by former Democratic Senator Jon Tester, who won the district in 2024 despite losing the state. The district, established in 2023, includes liberal college towns Bozeman and Missoula. In recent years, tens of thousands of Washington, California, Colorado, and Oregon residents have moved to Montana, which some think could make the state more liberal—although the jury’s still out.

In the general election, Forstag is facing Aaron Flint. Flint is 46, and Forstag is 32; whoever wins the election will be the first non–baby boomer to represent the state in Congress in three decades. Both Flint and Forstag attended the University of Montana, and both served as student body president. Forstag went on to fight fires and now is vice president of the National Federation of Federal Employees Local 60, representing around 800 U.S. Forest Service workers; Flint joined the National Guard and now works as a radio host.

While Forstag highlights his endorsements from progressives, Flint campaigns against them: “AOC, Mamdani, and Bernie want to flip the House and turn the US socialist. Eliminate private property, ban pickups and fossil fuels, put men in little girls’ locker rooms, and re-open the borders for illegal aliens and deadly drugs,” Flint’s website reads. 

The two are vying to replace Republican Representative Ryan Zinke, who took the seat in 2023 after a brief, rocky tenure as secretary of the interior under President Trump’s first administration. (Zinke resigned his post at the Interior Department after 18 federal investigations—most of them ethics-related—were initiated against him in under two years.) Zinke and Trump quickly endorsed Flint when he registered to run.

Polling suggests a tight race. Forstag and Flint each have 44 percent of the vote in an Impact Research poll of 500 likely voters conducted in late June. Libertarian candidate Nick Sheedy was supported by 5 percent of respondents, and 6 percent remain undecided. Another poll, from early May, showed Flint up five points against Forstag.

Flint is hoping to ride the state’s red tendencies to victory, and he very well may: The seat is still rated “likely Republican” by the Cook Political Report. But, if Forstag pulls off a victory, it will be a win for both the DCCC and its progressive critics, who are eager to prove that candidates like Forstag can appeal in rural, redder areas.

—Emma Janssen  

Outside Washington

AI deepfakes enter a Connecticut judicial race 

The Democratic primary for probate judge–yes, for probate judge–in Bridgeport, Connecticut, has taken a disturbing turn. Attorney Mark Bradley, challenging incumbent Paul Ganim, recently released a campaign video that “appears to use artificial intelligence to create synthetic versions of Mayor Joe Ganim and Probate Judge Paul Ganim, complete with fake voices delivering dialogue neither man actually spoke about raising taxes and stealing money. The videos seem to be created using still photos, one of which appears to have been used without permission from CT Insider’s archive,” CT Insider’s Jordan Nathaniel Fenster reports. Contacted by Fenster, Bradley didn’t deny that the video was synthesized with AI and included fake quotes, but claimed “nothing in the messaging of my ads are false or misleading.” Make of that what you will.

Fenster notes that while state lawmakers have debated a bill to regulate AI-generated campaign videos, they haven’t actually passed one.

Elsewhere:

• A shocking new poll from Texas Public Opinion Research has Democrat James Talarico up by five percentage points over Republican Ken Paxton for the U.S. Senate seat, at 45 percent to 40 percent. Even more surprising, the Texas Tribune’s Gabby Birenbaum reports: “TPOR’s poll found Talarico leading among voters who do not have a college degree—a group that has consistently favored Republicans in Texas and across the country—and dominating among independents, less than a quarter of whom said they planned to vote for Paxton.” Caveat: This poll is something of an outlier, particularly in the cross-tabs. A New York Times/Siena poll previously found an eight-point advantage for Paxton among voters without a college degree. Birenbaum fairly notes that, while formally nonpartisan, TPOR is headed by Democratic strategist Luke Warford. 
• Civil Eats’ Rebekah Alvey looks at which Trump-era funding cuts, specifically, have made the current cyclospora outbreak—the “largest in history,” causing thousands of cases of “explosive diarrhea”—harder to fight. Surveillance cuts come out looking particularly foolish.
• Stateline’s Nada Hassanein reports on the troubling rise in preteen suicides, and discusses experts’ recommendations at both the personal and political levels. These experts aren’t sure what’s driving the uptick, but Covid-19, sleep disruptions, education trends, lack of unstructured outdoor time, and social media (and general media) use are all floated as possible factors.

—Heather Souvaine Horn

The Ideas Factory

Public Citizen releases a “legislative guide to bolstering resilience and promoting affordability through state resilient home retrofit grant programs.” These policies, the organization says, could help homes withstand wildfires and storms and limit property insurance costs. 

The Southern Environmental Law Center is suing the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on behalf of Alabama Rivers Alliance, Black Warrior Riverkeeper, Healthy Gulf, Ogeechee Riverkeeper, and Savannah Riverkeeper over two natural gas pipeline projects recently greenlit via a “federal permitting process they say allows major natural gas pipeline projects to avoid detailed environmental reviews and adequate public input,” the Alabama Political Reporter reports.*

In case you missed it: Earlier this week, Open Markets Institute published a report on how consolidation in the container shipping industry has led the U.S. to rely on “container cartel of six foreign carriers not only to stock store shelves and support businesses, but increasingly to provide military sealift capacity during national emergencies,” in the words of Arnav Rao, the institute’s transportation policy analyst. “That should ring alarm bells for anyone who cares about economic resilience, national security, or fair competition.”

—Heather Souvaine Horn  

In Closing

Book of the Week: America’s Middle East: The Ruination of a Region by Marc Lynch

WHY NOW: The book came out late last year, but between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to Washington on Tuesday and the continued chaos of Trump’s war on Iran, Lynch’s arguments are going to be on a lot of minds this week. 

THE GIST: Lynch, Lisa Anderson neatly summarized in Foreign Affairs, “argues that the heady ambitions of the unipolar moment permitted American policymakers, Democrats and Republicans alike, to pursue the imposition of a U.S.-centric order without the resolution of the central conflict in the region—that between the Israelis and the Palestinians.” 

CRUISING THE INDEX: Lynch, a professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University and longtime blogger, covers a lot of ground in this sweeping—and cutting—summary of U.S. policy in the Middle East since the 1970s. Although the book was published shortly before the U.S. began an all-out war with Iran, Lynch covers the U.S.-Israeli strikes in the early summer of 2025 as part of the Trump administration’s larger effort to reshape the Middle East. His attention to the role the U.S.-Israeli relationship played in those efforts is particularly bracing.

TNR’S QUICK CRITICAL ASSESSMENT: Lynch persuasively argues that U.S. efforts to shape the Middle East have failed on both policy and humanitarian grounds. He’s particularly persuasive on the latter. “It took me a long time to accept the ultimate core of the problem, but after decades of close observation it became unavoidable,” he writes in the preface. “What America doesn’t seem willing to accept is that people in the Middle East are actually human beings. US actions over decades suggest that it does not consider Arab or Muslim lives to matter as much as American or Israeli lives.” As the U.S. and Donald Trump drag out a senseless war on Iran with well-documented civilian casualties, this argument will likely resonate with a lot of readers.

—Alex Shephard

Political Trivia Question of the Day

Since 1980—that is, the last 12 presidential elections—how many times has the Democrat carried Florida, and when? (Sign up for The Blue Book to find the answer in tomorrow’s newsletter.) 

* This newsletter originally misstated the name of the organization filing the lawsuit.

In his final order, Nevada Chief District Judge Andrew Gordon dismissed Patel’s lawsuit against Jim Stewartson, finding that he did not have “personal jurisdiction” over the internet commentator.

Gordon’s order put an end to a legal saga that began long before Patel was ever made director of the FBI.

In June 2023, Patel filed a complaint that Stewartson was smearing him online by calling him a “blatantly incompetent chud” and a “Kremlin asset” who plotted to “overthrow the government” on January 6, 2021.

Initially, Stewartson didn’t respond to the lawsuit, which led to Patel winning a $250,000 default judgment in August 2025. Stewartson challenged the default judgment on the grounds that he had no meaningful ties to Nevada, where the case was filed, and declared that Patel was a “googly-eyed Kremlin bitch” and, again, a “chud.”

Stewartson celebrated the final order, which referenced his comment in a footnote. “I’d like to commend the judge for including ‘googly-eyed Kremlin bitch’ in his ruling,” Stewartson wrote on X Tuesday.

“PSA: Now that my case is settled, you are free to refer to @FBIDirectorKash as a ‘chud,’ a ‘googly-eyed Kremlin bitch,’ and a ‘traitor’ without fear of legal repercussions!” he wrote in another post.

Following President Donald Trump’s lead, Patel has filed six defamation lawsuits against journalists in just seven years. Patel recently filed a $250 million lawsuit against The Atlantic for reporting on his excessive drinking at work.

“It is my Great Honor to endorse Amir Hassan, who is running to represent the fantastic people of Michigan’s 8th Congressional District!” Trump wrote on Truth Social Tuesday night. “From bravely fighting for our incredible U.S. Navy, to protecting his Community as a Federal Law Enforcement Officer, Amir has served our Nation with distinction, and will bring that same Fighting Spirit to the U.S. Congress.”

To Trump’s MAGA base, though, it was an egregious error by the president to endorse someone with a seemingly Muslim name, even though, per his campaign website, Hassan “recently reaffirmed his commitment to Christ, stating ‘Jesus Christ is his Lord and Savior.’”

“No way. What does it profit a man to gain the whole world but lose his soul? No political gain is worth insulting our Christian faith. 🚫 No Muslims in America 🚫 No Muslims in office,” one Trump supporter wrote in a reply on Truth Social.

Another Truth Social supporter asked, “What has happened to you?”

“Have you lost your mind, endorsing Muslim candidates? Don’t we have enough of them in Government already?” wrote user ConitaDrew. “You are not the man that I voted for three times, you have no wisdom whatsoever where Islam is concerned, you are arming people or wanting to arm people ‘Turkey’ that hate us and Israel, that someday will come for us.”

“Honestly??? Why????” posted kimberlee2922, who describes herself as a “Proud Conservative.” “Do you think there are already too many foreigners in congress??? Don’t you think enough is enough at this point????”

Hassan was actually born and raised in Flint, Michigan, his campaign website states. But that’s not local enough for some Trump supporters.

“YOU ARE BEING MISLED, President Trump! This guy is a snake in the grass. Muslim and never voted for a republican in his whole life. Moved to Michigan last summer and immediately filed to run for office. Thank you for your attention to this matter!!” wrote JoniMarieForLiberty.

According to the Michigan Voice, Hassan is a Muslim. He’s also a Navy veteran who was stationed at Guantanamo Bay and a former federal law enforcement officer who calls himself an America First Republican. He claims to have “zero tolerance for extremists who pervert Islam into something evil,” and “believes Israel is our strongest ally in the Middle East.” But apparently that’s not enough for Trump supporters.

This most recent blunder comes amid growing calls for Martin’s resignation after The New York Times’ report on the party’s internal dysfunction and general lack of funds.

“Schedule B supporting Line 29 of the Detailed Summary Page discloses a disbursement for ‘Misdisbursement—seeking return of funds’ totaling $28,860.92,” DNC senior campaign finance and reviewing analyst Jack Baisden wrote in a July 8, 2025, letter to treasurer Virginia McGregor. “This transaction appears to be related to an apparent unauthorized disbursement of Committee funds. Although the Commission may take further legal action regarding this apparent improper use of Committee funds, any further clarifying information that you can provide will be taken into consideration.”

The fraudulent request was made in February 2025, and fulfilled by a staffer who no longer works for the DNC. Just $7,000 of the $28,860.92 has been recovered.

“The DNC takes seriously our duty to protect the funds provided to us by millions of patriotic Americans chipping in to fund our mission,” spokesperson Mia Ehrenberg said to NOTUS. “This was a one-off mistake that was promptly caught and addressed, and no similar issues have occurred since.”

It’s hard to view this situation as just a one-off in the context of the greater chaos within the DNC. Various politicians and both national committees have been hit with fraud and embezzlement scams over the years. But Martin’s DNC falling prey to this one wouldn’t feel so ridiculous if they weren’t already $18.5 million in debt and dealing with a report from the Times detailing Martin’s paranoia-driven July outburst, in which he threw a phone at an aide. Multiple notable voices have called for his resignation since, and that doesn’t take the drama around the DNC’s lack of transparency over the 2024 autopsy into account.

This has all been very embarrassing. Martin can’t raise money, can’t keep money, and can’t unite the base under the “big tent” he likes to talk about. While his term is up in 2029, it certainly seems that his days as chairman are numbered.

The former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases was subpoenaed to testify before a Republican-led Senate committee regarding his handling of the Covid-19 pandemic.

But he won’t—instead, Fauci invoked the Fifth Amendment in his opening statements.

Fauci remarked that Kentucky Senator Rand Paul—who issued the subpoena and has repeatedly called for Fauci’s arrest—has an “obvious obsession with calling for my prosecution.” Paul posted hundreds of pages from Fauci’s pandemic-era diary to his website over the weekend, summarizing the unredacted collection through a conspiratorial slant and with a pink pen, which Fauci said was “aimed at embarrassing and intimidating” him.

“The only conclusion I can reach is that the sole reason he is calling me before this Committee is to prompt me to say something, anything, that could vindicate his repeated public pledges that I end up, in his words, ‘behind bars,’” Fauci said, adding that he is following his attorney’s advice by pleading the Fifth.

Mere moments into the hearing, Paul had one of Fauci’s attorneys, David Schertler, thrown out of the room after he attempted to speak on behalf of his client.

“Let the record state that Dr. Fauci will still have the advice of the other half a dozen attorneys that he brought along today,” Paul remarked after Schertler was removed.

In a written statement shared ahead of the hearing, Schertler argued that Paul displayed an “intense and seemingly pathological” obsession with Fauci that began during a July 2021 Senate HELP Committee hearing. At the time, Paul claimed that Fauci was responsible for the deaths of millions of people and had orchestrated a cover-up. Fauci, in turn, said that Paul “had no idea what he was talking about, and if anyone was lying it was him.”

“Chairman Paul’s public crusade against Dr. Fauci can only be described as an obsessive vendetta,” Schertler continued. “It triggers what the Supreme Court has called a ‘basic function’ of the Fifth Amendment—‘to protect innocent men … who otherwise might be ensnared by ambiguous circumstances.’”

Fauci has testified before Congress countless times over the course of his 38-year career atop the health agency. He advised seven U.S. presidents over that time, and oversaw research on a range of issues including HIV/AIDS, ebola, influenza, zika, and finally, the coronavirus.

Paul charged Fauci with lying to Congress during a July 2023 hearing on Covid, though the issue was eventually wiped away via a pardon issued by former President Joe Biden.

But Republicans haven’t paid any heed to that pardon. On Tuesday, House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer warned Fauci that the pardon would not cover his latest congressional hearing.

“Americans are still reaping the consequences of Dr. Fauci’s actions,” Comer told Fox News. “Biden’s pardon doesn’t cover Dr. Fauci’s testimony this week and if he continues to lie, he must be held accountable.”

This story has been updated.

The president’s displeasure with Thune has been brewing for some time, as the senator stands squarely in the way of Trump’s voting rights–suppressing SAVE America Act. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters last week that Trump’s patience with Thune was “running out,” and Trump himself told a Georgia rally crowd to call Thune directly regarding the SAVE America Act that same day. And on Monday, Trump strangely demanded that Thune pass a “full and deep throated” SAVE America Act.

“John Thune should not allow the United States Senate to ‘leave town’ until it passes The Save America Act or, far better still, TERMINATES THE FILIBUSTER, where Republicans can then quickly pass everything they ever dreamed of, including a full and deep throated SAVE AMERICA ACT, the Budget, and the ever looming Debt Ceiling disaster, 1929!” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “The Dumocrats will do it on day one, and can’t believe how lucky they got with this Senate leadership. Remember, stupidity always brings LOSING & DEATH!”

Thune has yet to flinch, making Trump’s private comments even more believable.

“If somebody can show me how we get an outcome, how we get a result, how we get an answer to this, I’m all for it.… But if we are going to be sitting here in endless quorum calls, I don’t know if that’s in anybody’s best interest,” Thune said to reporters on Monday. “We could stay here until Christmas, Democrats aren’t voting for this. I’m just telling you.… And Republicans are not getting rid of the legislative filibuster.”

It’s unclear how long Thune’s resistance can last. Trump is absolutely desperate to get the SAVE America Act through, and he’ll be even more so as he approaches the end of his second (and hopefully final) term. Thune’s moderate Senate allies, such as Thom Tillis and John Cornyn, are outgoing, while the majority of the party willingly capitulates to whatever Trump demands, and will likely continue doing so.

Politico reported Wednesday that Trump blocked aid to New Jersey, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and New York after regional Federal Emergency Management Agency offices and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration determined that all four states met the requirements for receiving aid due to a record-breaking blizzard in February.

The news outlet viewed emails between federal and state officials in addition to more than 150 pages of documents sent to FEMA by state officials. Presidents have the final say on granting federal disaster aid, but it’s rare to deny requests from state governors after FEMA determines that the estimated damage goes beyond preestablished levels.

“I can’t think of a time a declaration was denied” for a state that met FEMA and NOAA standards, a former FEMA official anonymously told Politico.

There have been 69 snow-assistance requests that met FEMA standards since President George W. Bush, and all but one have received presidential approval—including during Trump’s first term. The lone exception was a New Mexico request in 2016 that was under investigation for mishandling FEMA funds.

The four states that requested aid this year were seeking a total of $227 million in assistance to take on unexpected snow removal costs.

The Trump administration has denied any wrongdoing, claiming the aid denials were not political. In a statement, White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said that “there is no politicization to the president’s decisions on disaster relief.”

Trump handles disaster requests “with great care” to ensure state aid is used “to supplement—not substitute, their obligation to respond to and recover from disasters,” Jackson added.

But earlier this month, Trump administration officials admitted in court that the White House has deliberately canceled clean energy funding to states that didn’t vote for him in the 2024 presidential election. The president has also withheld childcare funding to blue states. Trump doesn’t seem to believe he has an obligation to help citizens of the U.S. under his charge if he perceives a slight against him.

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

Donald Trump just unleashed a barrage of unhinged threats toward Iran in a new interview with Fox News. He threatened to bomb all Iran’s bridges and power plants, and said explicitly that the entire population of Iran might soon be without electric power.

There’s a temptation to dismiss moments like these as bluster. But we can’t let ourselves lose sight of what exactly he’s threatening to do, just how sociopathic these threats really are, and just how terrible it is that the media is now largely numb to them.

This all comes as some MAGA figures are warning against escalation in some surprising new ways as well.

So we’re trying to make sense of it all with former State Department official Emily Horne. Emily, always good to have you on.

Emily Horne: Thanks, Greg, for having me.

Sargent: OK, so we’re in this weird holding pattern where Trump has held off on escalating and he just keeps making all these threats, and he keeps saying Iran is desperate to talk to him.

Yet at the same time, the reporting indicates that in reality the Iranians are not in any rush to talk to Trump at all. Emily, can you sum up the situation as of now?

Horne: The TLDR on that, to use bureaucratic terms, is that Iran has all of the leverage and all of the momentum at this moment in the conflict. I think they’ve shown that there’s a real willingness on their end to pass the cost of this war to the Iranian people, which, as terrible as that is, is a major asset for them. They are not particularly troubled by their own people’s suffering. And that, plus their control of the Strait of Hormuz, gives them a lot of incentives to maintain the status quo, and a lot of leverage over the status of negotiations.

They also continue to have a nuclear program, because Trump walked away from the JCPOA in his first term. So no matter what Trump has said at various points in Trump II about obliterating Iran’s nuclear program, again, that is something that Iran has as a bargaining chip, and they have been very clear that they’re going to control the direction of the conversation moving forward.

Sargent: Why is it that they don’t seem to fear Trump escalating, exactly?

Horne: I think part of it is that, again, they have the leverage here. As you and I have talked about before, this is an existential conflict for the IRGC. Many of them have lost family members, have already suffered greatly; they have already inflicted a great deal of suffering on the Iranian people.

And so there’s a tremendous sunk cost that has already been absorbed by the IRGC in this conflict. And from their perspective, maintenance of the status quo is fine by them—as much as that continues to put Trump in an impossible position, because again, he just doesn’t have a lot of leverage at this point.

But also, their strategy has been working for them. They don’t just control the strait, they are able to inflict a great deal of pain on the broader Middle East region, including by attacking tech infrastructure like data centers, attacking desalinization plants in Kuwait and other Gulf countries, attacking civilian infrastructure across the Middle East. And that again sends a signal that it is Iran’s momentum at this point in the conflict, not the U.S.’s.

Sargent: Well, in that context, let’s check out something Trump just said on Fox News. He starts by saying, I could knock out all the power plants, then it keeps going from there. Listen to this.

Donald Trump (voiceover): I could knock out the power plants within one day. All of their power plants would be gone. And I let ‘em know that, you know, with negotiations. They say, look—people want me to do that. I think about 91 million people without power, without bridges, with that to live. And it’s a very, very delicate balance. So I think we have a very strong position right now. They know I’m going to do that if they don’t make a deal. The bridges are going to be gone. Literally, in less than a—I would say in two hours, most of the bridges, the major bridges, will all be gone. And the power plants in one day.

Sargent: Emily, I could be wrong, but I think this might be the first time that Trump has explicitly said not only that he’d knock out all the power plants, but also clarified that he really means knocking out electricity for all of Iran’s 91 million people. He said that. And that would be like a humanitarian catastrophe of unthinkable proportions. What would actually happen if he did that?

Horne: So if Trump were to follow through on his threats to attack Iranian civilian infrastructure like power plants en masse, then you would likely see an immediate and mass humanitarian crisis that would affect at minimum tens of millions of people. Remember, Iran has a population of almost 91 million people, many of whom are outside of the center capital of Tehran.

And so the power grid in Iran is already deeply stressed. Power plants and desalinization plants—which are so critical to Iran’s ability to function, with their limited access to freshwater—those are already deeply stressed as a result of this war.

You would likely see a collapse of Iran’s already stressed health system because of those effects, when you have tens of millions of people who are dangerously dehydrated, don’t have clean water to drink; diseases and waterborne illnesses will be spiking as sanitation is failing.

You would likely see supply chain disruption from all sorts of civilian infrastructure destruction, including things like damaged roads, which would probably cause a spike in food prices. There are already millions of people internally displaced within Iran. The latest estimate that I could find is from April, and that estimates 3.2 million people.

The humanitarian crisis already is so dangerous that tens of thousands of Afghan refugees—who fled Afghanistan to find safety from the Taliban and other terrorist groups in Afghanistan by going to Iran—are now returning to Afghanistan. That’s how bad the current humanitarian crisis is. And so you can only imagine how much worse it would quickly become were Trump to undertake these strikes that he is threatening.

Sargent: I just want to make one other point about this. I think in the West, in advanced democracies like ours, we think to ourselves, OK, knock out a power plant, it could just get back up and running pretty quickly. But that really isn’t the case here. It would sort of depend on what exactly Trump did. But if he really decided to make good on his threat—and again, he said this on the air on national television—if he really decided to knock out power for 91 million people and really demolish a whole lot of power plants, it would take probably months, if they were lucky, to get them back up and running. So we’re talking about a humanitarian crisis that would extend for months and months and months, right?

Horne: Absolutely. Probably years, probably generations, in fact—especially if you’re widening the aperture to talk about things like the effects of having tens of millions of people turned into refugees in their own country. I mean, that’s tens of millions of lives that are permanently disrupted. And the ripple effects of that are absolutely staggering to comprehend.

But I also want to make another point here, that what he is proposing is a war crime under both international humanitarian and human rights law, and importantly under U.S. law.

Sargent: It really would be. And I think another point to get out about this is that Trump is talking about knocking out power for all these 91 million people as if to kind of say, I’d be reluctant to take such a step. The tone is as if he’s being humane by saying that. But I really want to underscore this aspect of it.

In saying this, he actually stated straight out that knocking out power for 91 million people is something he’s giving serious consideration to. Listen to that clip. At the end, he says, I will do this if Iran doesn’t do my bidding.

Now, I think a lot of reporters hear this and say, he won’t do it, that’s a lot of bluster. But I don’t think that’s the right way to react. We should be saying, it’s unfathomably sociopathic that he’s even considering it, and an American president shouldn’t be talking this way. What do you think?

Horne: Well, as with so many things with the second Trump administration, multiple things are true simultaneously. So again, I cannot be clear enough about this: what Donald Trump is talking about here would be a violation of the Geneva Convention. Intentionally targeting civilian infrastructure like power plants—universally, human rights attorneys and organizations like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International agree that threatening electricity, water, health care, other civilian infrastructure is a war crime. So that’s point one.

Point two, I think, yes—maybe someone on his staff got to him and made him realize that what you’re talking about is something that would be enormously disruptive to a country of 91 million souls, in addition to being outright illegal, and that that would have devastating humanitarian consequences that the United States, under your leadership, would be responsible for.

But then there’s also a third part here that I think is important to call out, which is, you know, Trump has threatened many times during this conflict—as recently as a week ago—to bomb civilian infrastructure like bridges and power plants and desalinization plants. And there have been strikes that have hit, reportedly, some Iranian civilian infrastructure, that have caused some disruptions to things like water supplies to Iranian villages, but nothing at the scale of what he’s talking about.

He hasn’t really done it. And the more that he talks about it but doesn’t do it, the more he sends a signal to the Iranians, but also to the global community, that he is all bluster—that there is no strategy here other than going on Fox and Friends and bragging about how big his bombs are. Which, I’m sorry, that’s not actually a strategy. And it’s certainly not going to be effective against the IRGC when, as we talked about before, they have most of the leverage in our current state of play.

Sargent: Even this is alarming as well, because the logic of it doesn’t lead to a good place. Donald Trump doesn’t want to end this whole thing in humiliation—that’s the big thing we know about this. It’s been reported that he’s urged his own advisors to find some way, any way at all, for him to be able to say that he got more out of Iran than Obama got during the nuclear negotiations of 2015.

And the idea that that’s what’s motivating him is just completely unthinkably loony. But putting that aside, Trump does not want this to end with him looking bad. He wants to walk out either looking incredibly strong and powerful, or with a world historical victory, or with some combination of that.

And so if he keeps opening the door to these really heinous war crimes, I fear that if Iran keeps kind of poking him and stringing him along, there may come a point at which he’s willing to do it. Is that unreasonable?

Horne: That’s the question. And I don’t know that anyone knows the answer to it, to be honest. Look, I think a week ago, this is what he was threatening to do. And the conditions were, as he wrote on social media on July 22—which, incidentally, was the day of the dignified transfer of four Americans who had been killed in the conflict, at Dover—he wrote on Truth Social that any time Iran shoots at a ship in the Strait of Hormuz, the U.S. will bomb and destroy one bridge or power plant in Iran.

And now, a week later, he’s going on Fox and Friends and saying that instead it is, we will bomb civilian infrastructure in Iran if there’s not a deal. And he’s not specifying what he wants in that deal. But if you listen to the full clip, he immediately starts talking about how Iran can’t have a nuclear weapon.

Now, I’m always very reluctant to zoom in on any one particular Trump talking point and say, that’s it, that’s the new strategy—because frankly, most of the time, I don’t think he knows what the hell he’s even talking about. But it is kind of a tell to me that a week ago he was talking about Iranian missile or drone attacks on ships in Hormuz, and now he’s talking about Iran’s nuclear program and not talking about the Strait of Hormuz.

And that says to me, maybe his attention has moved on, maybe he’s gotten bored, maybe there’s a part of him that realizes that he can’t do anything meaningfully to change Iran’s dominance of the strait without incurring very serious U.S. military costs—that this war is incredibly unpopular, and it’s a real albatross around his neck as Republicans approach midterms. And he’s got to figure out a way to tie a bow on this that makes it look like there’s something he can claim as victory, to your point.

Sargent: Yes, and that’s not going to be easy. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with Trump Tuesday. Many MAGA figures are upset about this, fearing that a meeting will push Trump into escalating, and they don’t want Trump to do Israel’s bidding. Steve Bannon told Politico, “All of Trump’s most ardent non-Israel First supporters are furious.” Bannon called it a disaster for America First.

Curt Mills of The American Conservative called it “DEFCON 1” and warned that Bibi will “argue for the essential logic of escalation.” And meanwhile, new polling shows a large chunk of MAGA turning on the war. What do you make of all that, Emily?

Horne: Well, one, I think it’s really important to note that a big chunk of that strain of MAGA that you just identified is coming at this from a really virulent and ugly antisemitic place. And we need to be really precise about separating out what is legitimate criticism of the Israeli government—and in particular Netanyahu’s approach to this conflict—versus something that does veer into a really, really ugly place that none of us should want to go. So I want to draw that distinction there.

But that aside, I think it’s really telling that there is not agreement within MAGA, within the Republican Party, on the best way out of this own goal that is Trump’s Iran war, his forever war, really. And even Trump alluded to this himself in his Fox interview this morning, where he talked about how there are elements of the Republican Party that want this to be over and done with, as midterms are approaching and everyone’s aware of how wildly unpopular this war is—how, as members of Congress are going back to their districts for August recess, they’re going to be getting an earful about gas prices and forever wars and politicians who are focused on the wrong thing.

And that there’s a continual hawkish wing that wants this war to just keep on going until, question mark, because again, there’s no strategy here. Nobody knows what Trump’s endgame is or what the strategy is. They’re clearly just making it up as they go along. And the only answer that they have for “the bombs haven’t worked so far” is more bombs.

And I’m sorry, but it’s pretty darn clear at this point that you cannot bomb your way out of this war, that Iran is not going to give up its nuclear program because of air pressure, that they’re not going to relinquish control of the Strait of Hormuz because they’re getting attacked from the air.

I think the only things that are ultimately going to get to a resolution on the nuclear issue are, one, what we already had—an agreement like the JCPOA that includes international monitoring and inspection to enforce its terms—or two, a big honking ground war that commits a lot of U.S. troops in perpetuity to a Trump-Iran war that I do not think anybody, even Donald Trump, has the appetite for.

So it’s really hard to see how this ends, but the best-case scenario is something like a return to the status quo that Obama had for us. You know, I was in the White House when the JCPOA was being negotiated, and we got a lot of criticism for it at the time from a lot of different voices in the Republican Party. And it’s really fascinating now to hear a lot of those same voices—maybe not in their outside voice, but in their inside voice—starting to come up with something that, boy, sounds an awful lot like the deal that we all had ten years ago.

Sargent: Yeah, that is pretty funny. To your point about how we’ve got to be precise about what MAGA is actually motivated by here—it’s worth saying that MAGA certainly doesn’t care about Iranians and whether they suffer through a humanitarian catastrophe or not. They have their own set of reasons, which you alluded to, for not wanting an escalation here.

I think there might be some elements of MAGA that are genuinely not for foreign entanglements and so forth, but a lot of it is really polluted with ugly sentiments, as you said. All that aside, when they hear Donald Trump talking about knocking out bridges and knocking out power plants, they too—meaning MAGA, again for their own reasons—I think probably say, shit, man, we’re really headed for an escalation here.

Horne: Look, and it is Americans that are paying the price for this war. I mean, obviously the Iranian people, as we have talked about at great length, are suffering tremendously. But this war has cost American taxpayers more than a hundred billion. It’s driven up energy prices. It’s contributed to global instability that is making everything more expensive. And last week the Trump administration went to Congress asking for another $350 billion to keep it going.

Meanwhile, our missile stockpiles have been massively depleted in a scarily short period of time, which leaves us incredibly vulnerable for the possible wars and conflicts of the future. And this bomb-and-hope strategy that Trump keeps on touting on Fox and Friends—it isn’t a real plan.

Iran’s already survived months of American bombing campaigns. And I see no evidence that more airstrikes, or bigger airstrikes, are going to eliminate their nuclear ambitions, or force them to surrender the Strait of Hormuz, or dislodge the new regime that is in place in Tehran. The only thing that more bombs are going to do is prolong this war, further destabilize the Middle East, and continue to drive up costs for everyday Americans.

Sargent: And paradoxically, I think that that dynamic actually points to the real possibility that he does end up bombing things like bridges and power plants. He may get it into his head that it’s the way the bombing was happening that essentially wasn’t forcing Iran’s hand. And it can’t possibly be that Iran can’t be bullied into this, for reasons that are intelligible if you actually put yourself in their heads, right? He can’t think that way. So he can only think, I need more force. And I just think we can’t really rule out the possibility that he makes good on some of these threats to start destroying infrastructure.

Horne: Unfortunately, I suspect that you may be right about that. We can’t rule it out. And one dangerous element that we haven’t talked about in this conversation is that Trump has systematically weeded out any military advisor who is capable of telling him, Mr. President, that is not going to achieve the impact that you hope it will, or, that’s not a good idea.

All of those people who are capable of speaking truth to power and speaking from their years of military experience have been forced out of our armed forces, or are essentially in hiding, because they know that to challenge the king is to end your career and possibly invite a whole host of retribution on your head. It’s an incredibly dangerous scenario where no one can tell the mad king that his decisions are not good ones.

Sargent: Boy, it’s really grim when you put it like that. Folks, if you enjoyed this, make sure to check out Emily Horne’s Substack. It’s called Spin Class. Emily, always a pleasure to talk to you. Thanks so much.

Horne: Thanks, Greg.

“Some,” she writes, in disbelief, “cry!!” Some fish for details, trying to suss out whether LaBarge was raped. “Imagine,” she writes, “asking someone, casually, as if it were the ultimate salacious detail. They think it is their business, that it is information they are entitled to.” Sylvia Plath called these people “the peanut-crunching crowd” in her poem of death and resurrection, “Lady Lazarus.” In drafts of this book, LaBarge writes, she tried holding off, leaving the big story until the end—but that was “too coy”—and she tried not telling it at all, subsuming it as criticism or philosophy. In the finished version, she neither hides what happened nor accedes to demands for salacious detail.

What happened is this: In the days before Christmas in 2009, when LaBarge was in her mid-twenties, she and her family were renting a house on a “low-lying coral island in the Atlantic Ocean where the waters are cyan, turquoise, azure blue and the sand is the finest pink-flecked white.” Eight men broke in and held the family hostage for seven hours. They had been watching Mrs. Doubtfire when it happened, and the movie, absurdly, continued to play as they were lying there, until, eventually, one of the men switched it off, putting on, instead, a CD of hymns, liturgical chants, and songs for a death mass. “He doesn’t want anyone to be able to hear us,” LaBarge realizes, “when we XXX or XXXX or XXXXX or X.”

Whole pages unfold like this, details marked with X’s, lines blacked out. These gaps are a refusal to perform what Plath called “the big strip tease” for the detail-hungry gawker, but they are also the gaps in a glitching memory. “I did not hear them coming,” LaBarge writes of the men as they broke in. “Maybe I heard them coming. I did. I did not.” She remembers being hurt by a therapist who left a detailed email unread for too long and then responded with too little, but when, in the process of writing this book, she looks back at her inbox to confirm her recollection, she sees that, actually, the therapist had sent a long and loving response in less than 24 hours. She remembers the layout of the vacation home on the island, but when she looks for it later, she can’t find a house that matches.

But certain things stick. As Fauré’s Requiem plays, while she lies on the floor with her family, it begins to sound, to LaBarge, like “a family death mass. The End.” As soon as she thinks this, she “cannot not think this.” This is a memoir about what happens after The End—what happens when you feel like you’ve died, and what happens when you go on living anyway, about how trauma repeats and reverberates. “It might change your life, you might survive, and then what?” LaBarge asks. What happens, that is, after a resurrection? LaBarge is not religious, but she is fascinated by Jesus, by his encounter with Mary Magdalene in the garden after he rises from the dead, just as she is fascinated by Plath’s nine-lived Lady Lazarus, by Jimmy Stewart’s George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life—all stories of people who live on after death; who die, but not quite (“But I already died,” LaBarge tells a friend who warns that hard partying will kill her, “almost, I mean, almost”).

“We survive, we do,” LaBarge writes, “but The End comes again and again, comes at surprising times, unbidden and with great force, summoned by images, asides, happenstance, like an errant punctuation mark—why does this sentence have two colons?—that splits time, kaleidoscopic, in multiple directions at once.” Trauma estranges LaBarge, or me, or you, or any person from oneself; it makes grammar, syntax, and form strange. Dog Days, a fusion of memoir, criticism, psychoanalysis, and even scientific theory, makes this stuttering sensation its structuring principle, as the book changes forms and perspectives, doubles back. It is less about what happened to her than how she might tell it; about the mysterious, alchemical process of writing, the transubstantiation of living into language.

After The Incident, LaBarge recalls talking to a friend of her mother’s on the phone. The friend tells her it is “an amazing story,” that she can write about it and get rich; other writers, after all, have done that, capitalizing on the worst things that ever happened to them. “I remember thinking that’s crazy,” LaBarge writes. “No way will I ever write this story.”

And yet, of course, here it is, in our hands. “Why do some of us need to take notes, try to piece things together, want to know what it all means?” she wonders, and she wonders, too, what is the cost of all this. She quotes a Lorrie Moore story about a writer whose child has renal cancer. “Take notes,” her husband tells her. “We are going to need the money.” She takes notes, this writer, but she cannot think of what is happening—the illness, the cost of care—as a story. The story ends with a blunt demand: “There are the notes. Now where is the money?” LaBarge, taking her own notes, wants to know what the price is, what is the value, of the worst thing that ever happened to you. She is aware that “the non-fiction writer has a Faustian bargain with the page, which promises meaning if life—sometimes her own—is adequately harvested for experience.” This is what writers do; they try to transform life into “words, sentences, paragraphs, make it last forever.”

Perhaps what LaBarge recoils from, then, on that phone call, is not the writing but the story. Trauma is “a narrative problem because there is no story”—it is an absence, endlessness, a derangement of action and consequence—but at the same time, she writes, “I do not believe there is anything language cannot do.” Trauma, LaBarge suggests, is not unwritable or unreadable, “in spite of the constant emphasis on the ‘unspeakable’ aspects of trauma.” The problem is the demand to make the experience of trauma neat, narrative, acceptable. She quotes the historian Paul Fussell, who wrote in The Great War and Modern Memory that “we have made unspeakable mean indescribable: it really means nasty.” This is the obverse, in some ways, to the problem of the peanut-crunchers; there are things people do not, really, want to know.

LaBarge is a stunningly talented critic and a gifted close reader, a practice that becomes central to her life in the years after That Awful Thing That Happened. She seeks comfort in stories “in which it seems as though something undefinable is missing, has been lost, in which there is some shapeless hole to be filled,” but she also searches the world for portents, a way of fending off fear. The trees scold her, and birds follow her, screeching ominously. She inexplicably hears classical music on the escalator down to the tube station and thinks it is trying to tell her something. She sees people she knows on the street, spying on her, but they dissolve into unknown faces on a second look.

Dog Days lends itself to exactly this kind of paranoid reading, not only describing but enacting the magical thinking of trauma survivors. In an extended analysis of Nabakov’s short story “Signs and Symbols,” about exactly this tendency to search for meaning, she asks, “What does it mean that the mother accidentally drops three specific playing cards to the floor, the knave of hearts, the nine of spades, the ace of spades?” A handful of pages earlier, she has recounted a tarot card reading someone did for her. “The card turned up for me—was it the Page of Wands? The Two of Coins? The Fool?” These are cards that speak to change and chaos, chance and possibility, innocence and exposure. What does it mean?

La Barge writes that she reconceived this book “at least three times before starting and at least three times as it unfolds.” She tries writing it straight, she tries writing it beautifully, she tries not writing about The Thing at all. “I think,” she writes, “that if I see it plotted out correctly I will know, that gut feelings, and the container will give meaning to chaos or at least hold it in place.” It is an alluring and impossible idea, that the narrative problem of trauma can be solved, that order can be restored. She wants to know “how to accept this and move on without losing my mind or the part of me that believes in humanity, safety, hope, ha, right, trust, intimacy, connection, bodily integrity, justice, compassion. How did I ever believe in so many fake and stupid things, and how do I continue in a world of people who still do?”

This search takes the form of a search for a form; the book is a restless experiment in ways of telling, by turns hectic and languorous, echoing the dilations of time LaBarge experiences in the wake of That Christmas. She details the drafting of the Schedule of Loss—the “official title for what must be given to an insurance company or any kind of court or tribunal issued with loss compensation. Laptop, clothes, jewelry, books, dignity, mind.” She recounts her newly sleepless nights and faltering memory, her investigation into one of the hostage-takers’ whereabouts, her obsessive search for a way to make sense of a world she can no longer see in the same light. She writes digressively, essayistically, about the moon and the stars. Part of the book takes on a screenplay-like form, with lines and stage directions (“It sounds like a movie!” those she tells the good story to often say, grotesquely—and yet, LaBarge does think to herself, surveying the wrecked aftermath of the house on the unnamed island in the Atlantic, that it looks like a film). Trauma is a narrative problem because it does not have a story’s beginning-middle-end; The End goes on and on. It scrambles chronology as the book scrambles form and perspective.

“I do not remember some things that happened in the first person,” LaBarge writes, “I only remember them in the second, third, omniscient, limited.” The book, fittingly, moves between these modes; LaBarge is sometimes Daughter, sometimes Sister, sometimes I. She breaks into second-person address toward the end of the book. “You remember a friend telling you” about someone else who was also robbed at gunpoint on the same island in the Atlantic, a startling sign that even the most singular experiences are shared. “You read books about domestic abuse, child abuse, veterans with PTSD, survivors of genocide,” she writes, “and feel guilty for identifying even vaguely with their terminologies, though you cannot find any others to learn about your own experience.” This guilt is natural, but unhelpful. “You prefer empathy to individualism.”

The movement to You reflects the distortions of traumatic memory that LaBarge describes, and it also reflects what she comes to see as the collective, interpersonal nature of trauma. While trauma feels profoundly isolating, in attempting to make sense of it, she finds herself always in association with other people, both as she searches for ways to understand her experience through the stories of others and because, when she does tell this story, it is always being told to someone else. This move into the second person, then, is an extension of her method of processing trauma through art, literature, and film. “If you”—yes, you!—“can’t see, for instance, that you’re already dead, that you died with six-year-old Hind Rajab, shot to death with 335 bullets as she waited hours in a car, surrounded by dead family members, for the paramedics to arrive,” LaBarge writes, “then you have to stay here, in the old world,” the world of linear time, of a knowable self, of a good story.

The alternative, for LaBarge, is to choose not to be “singular, individual, alone, in spite of this state so profoundly defining the experience of trauma.” Instead, one might choose to be radically connected to others, to listen to their stories and to see oneself in them. Language, LaBarge writes, “is representational but it is also relational.” It is, fundamentally, a means of communication, and the limits of what it can do are the limits of “what can be heard, what can be tolerated, what can be borne by both teller and told.” We have a duty, she seems to say, to listen and to witness, to choose not to seal ourselves off, alone. This is the path out of the old world, into the new. The End. And then what?

When I was a Federal Trade Commissioner, I learned that, as exciting as I thought my job was, most people don’t think about corporate consolidation. The word merger does not get the heart thumping. Media merger sounds like you’re stapling a document. 

So let me try something different: If you watch CNN, if you watch John Oliver or Bill Maher or White Lotus or House of the Dragon, if you fall asleep on your couch to hours of Friends or Guy Fieri or Anthony Bourdain or Turner Classic Movies or Rick and Morty, if you’ll admit for the purposes of this essay you’re actually snoring to 90 Day Fiancé and Naked and Afraid and Sister Wives, or even if you’re waiting around for Shark Week: Your screen time will soon come under new ownership.

Or rather, it might. That wannabe owner is centimillionaire David Ellison, son of centibillionaire Larry Ellison, and he is the new CEO of Paramount Skydance. Which means that last year he bought CBS News, 60 Minutes, The Daily Show, CSI, Survivor, The Good Wife, Dexter, Star Trek, Yellowstone, Landman, BET, MTV, Showtime, the CW, South Park, and Spongebob Squarepants. He paid $8 billion for them. Now he wants to buy Warner Bros. Discovery for $110 billion—13 times what he paid for Paramount. 

The problem is that David Ellison does not have that money. So he’s borrowing it. Not him personally. No, he wants to make the new, combined company take on $79 billion in debt. 

According to The Wall Street Journal, Larry Ellison allegedly informed White House officials that a Paramount takeover of Warner Bros. would result in an overhaul of reporting at CNN. In a possible preview of what’s to come, 60 Minutes has seen an exodus of senior reporters; correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi claimed she was pushed out for “refusing to sanitize accurate reporting.”

Democrats have denounced the merger. Just recently, 12 Democratic state attorneys general sued to stop the transaction, and it is now on hold until as late as June of next year. Yet if you focus on the fact that it’s Democrats suing Trump-aligned Republicans, you see only half the story; the fight can look like politics as usual. When you focus on the money, however, you see a looming economic calamity. 

I’m not the only one who sees it. In April, over a thousand people from across the entertainment industry wrote an open letter calling for the merger to be blocked. They also focused on the economics, warning that the deal would result in “fewer opportunities for creators, fewer jobs across the production ecosystem, higher costs, and less choice for audiences.” There are now well over 5,000 signers to the letter. Yet the impact of the deal on the people who actually make film and television remains out of focus. 

So, last month, alongside the Writers Guild and other groups opposed to this merger, I went on a listening tour of three cities that it would hit the hardest—Los Angeles, New York, and Atlanta. At each stop, we focused little on politics but far more on the workers “below the line”—an industry term for all the writers, actors, and blue-collar workers who never make the top billing on a movie poster. 

I heard anger and despair. I saw glimmers of a broader coalition that might one day fight corporate takeovers. And I experienced Paramount’s bizarre attempts to smear us. 

II.

People think “Hollywood” is rich, glamorous, and famous. It’s Oprah and Ryan Reynolds. It’s an Ozempiced executive lunching poolside with George Clooney. 

The reality? “Hollywood” is the 20 people who apply to be their waiter. “Hollywood” has no pool and, often, no health insurance. And for years now, “Hollywood” is not just in Hollywood, or even Los Angeles—it’s in New York and Jersey City; it’s in Atlanta and Savannah; it’s in Nashville and Baton Rouge and Kentucky and Miami. 

The vast majority of people who work in film and television are not studio executives, nor are they famous actors. They are, overwhelmingly, blue-collar workers, freelancers, and small businesses. And they are in free fall.

According to the Future Film Coalition, a grassroots organization that helped organize the meetings, L.A. county has seen almost one in three of its film jobs disappear. Half the sales that used to happen at the nation’s top film festivals now do not happen. More than half of documentaries now made do not make any money. “A decade ago, the casual conversation between peers would be: What are you working on now?” said an actress at the Los Angeles town hall. “Now it’s: Are you working?”

The decline came from multiple causes, including a Covid-era collapse in productions, a race to the bottom on tax credits, and the writers’ and actors’ strikes giving studios an excuse to run those shoots abroad. The people we met understood that. But they couldn’t stop talking about the waves of layoffs that had followed waves of mergers. 

Adam Conover—the only above-the-line actor who spoke at any of the meetings—told a dizzying story about the life and death of his investigative comedy series, Adam Ruins Everything. 

He had pitched the show to Discovery, Comedy Central, TNT, TBS, and truTV, among others; truTV bought it because their new president wanted to compete with Comedy Central. “We employed about 100 people for the time we shot the show, and then countless contractors, caterers, et cetera,” Conover said. “We manufactured television for five years here in Los Angeles.” Another 100 people worked in an office building in midtown Manhattan cutting the show’s ads and setting its marketing strategy. 

Then AT&T bought truTV’s parent company, Time Warner. AT&T put truTV, TNT, and TBS under one manager, who then called Adam, fired Adam, and fired every person working for the show. Then AT&T sold all those channels and merged them with Discovery, which put the channels under new management that fired the guy who fired Adam. 

Now Paramount, which bought Comedy Central, wants to buy all those channels, which would combine most of the channels that competed to buy the show in the first place.

“Hollywood is what it is,” Conover reflected, because people could “sell something into an open market, sell an idea, then employ hundreds and thousands of people underneath them—that created the media ecosystem that caused America to be a cultural power in the world, and created all the wonderful media that we love. And it’s about to die.” 

Paramount, of course, had a different take. “Generally, we are very empathetic to the folks in Hollywood,” their top lawyer, Makan Delrahim, told the Los Angeles Times a few days before the town hall. “But this transaction will actually create more and better and exciting jobs.” Other mergers may kill jobs, Delrahim seemed to be saying. But David Ellison and David Zaslav—the CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery—have no intention of firing people.

We held our town halls at the Lumiere Cinema in Los Angeles, the Writers Guild headquarters in New York, and the Plaza Theater in Atlanta. Each room was filled with people who had been fired by Ellison and Zaslav. 

There was the writer in Los Angeles laid off by Paramount after Ellison bought it. She was late on rent. “I don’t have any prospects. My severance has run out. Unemployment is about to run out,” she said. But she insisted that she was happier now because of how poorly she had been treated since Ellison took over.

There was the writer in New York who was developing a show with Charlize Theron about a mom and her trans teen in the Texas Panhandle. That writer, Jacob Tobia, was fired the moment Zaslav took over Warner Bros. and became the CEO of the company Ellison is now buying. “They didn’t even allow me to complete my contract or finish revising the pilot script before they made the decision,” Tobia said. “It was axed mid-revision. They paid me out and told me essentially to go away.”

Writing for film or TV may sound cushy. Maybe it once was. Now, an L.A. expat in New York explained, “There’s no jobs at the bottom of the rung anymore.” The entry-level position in writing—the writers’ production assistant—has been eliminated. So the people working the next rung of jobs are really working “two jobs, for $20 an hour, in Los Angeles.” 

The living wage in L.A. is around $30. Local Starbucks baristas make $20. 

III.

Any gauzy mirage we may have had of life in the industry was wiped away in Atlanta, where our meeting was dominated not by writers or actors but by about a dozen members of Local 479 of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, the union that represents the technicians and craftspeople who work behind the camera or between takes. 

Unlike the Writers Guild, IATSE’s national leaders have never called for the merger to be blocked. As I introduced myself, each person was careful to tell me that they were there to speak for themselves, not their union. 

A tightly wound thirtysomething named Roger Thacher stood waiting near the popcorn station. He had a beard and wore glasses, an olive-green baseball cap, and a black, orange, and green Hawaiian shirt—his old crew’s “Friday uniform,” he was quick to note. “Otherwise I look wildly unprofessional.”

Roger gave me a sad smile. He thanked me for holding the event. He told me about his work as an assistant prop master. “That laptop behind you, that smartphone in her hand?” he said, gesturing to my colleague who was sitting at a nearby table. “I’m the guy who makes sure those have green screens. I’m the guy who tracks the amount of water in every glass that shows up in the shoot. I’m the invisible job behind the invisible job.” 

But he seemed to be holding something back.

When the event began, I called on him in the audience. He stood and explained that he had joined the industry in 2017 and joined IATSE one year later. Business was booming then. “Many of us wondered how sustainable all this could be,” he said. 

“Our fears were realized after the last big Disney consolidation,” he said. He had been working on a Hulu show that was shooting at a local college 10 minutes east of Atlanta. “Then Disney finished their acquisition of Hulu—100 percent—and suddenly, our job moved across the border to Canada.” 

He paused, then went on: “I used to shave my head for set to look clean for my work. My last day on a union job was the day we lost our first child to miscarriage. After a month,” he said, his voice breaking, “I noticed I was getting a little fuzzy up there. So I decided to have a little bit of fun—I’ll let it go until I work a union show again.” 

Roger took off his hat. Long black hair fell over his shoulders. 

“My hair is now down to the middle of my back. And I have a beautiful son at home who is 13 months old.” 

He considered himself lucky; he had worked in another industry before. “I knew I would be OK,” he said. But he couldn’t say the same for his friends. “I hosted dinners for colleagues who lost 80 percent of their salary. I helped friends pack up and leave the state because they couldn’t afford their house.” 

An older woman named Laurie Garner spoke a few minutes later. She stayed seated. She had worked in film and TV in Atlanta since the early 1990s, mostly in the art and prop departments. Her IMDB page lists credits from Watchmen, Atlanta, The Hunger Games, and Pitch Perfect, among dozens of others. This was a craftsperson who was recruited for the most prominent productions in Georgia.

Garner’s voice was unsteady; the right side of her face was limp. “I cannot afford health insurance because I have no work,” she said. “I haven’t worked since 2024, on Stranger Things.” That year, the Art Directors Guild suspended its job training program, telling applicants in an email that “we cannot in good conscience encourage you to pursue our profession while so many of our members remain unemployed.”

CEOs often say they won’t do mass layoffs after a merger—they’ll just fire the underperformers. When I think about that, I think about a filmmaker named Christalyn Hampton who was in the back row of the Plaza. She wore dreads under a black Falcons hat. Her documentary about a local abortion clinic, The Devil Is Busy, had just been nominated for an Academy Award.

“Even though I was recently nominated for an Oscar, it’s not like jobs are flowing in for me,” she said. “A lot of my documentaries about social justice? There’s no place for those. The mandates in a lot of these industries are true crime, cults, and celebrities.” 

Paramount’s financing for the merger illustrates this dynamic. When you’re $80 billion in the hole, you don’t ask yourself: How am I going to tell an amazing story? You ask yourself: How the hell am I going to pay these guys back? And how can I absolutely guarantee that this next show will make money? You don’t take risks. You play it safe. And people like Christalyn Hampton are out of work, and her ideas about social justice won’t make it to your screen. 

Toward the end of the session, a set decorator named Jamie Rosegren stood up in the front. She was the business agent for Local 479, although she too clarified that she was speaking for herself. Her union had 5,400 members; around 2,000 were in arrears because they had no work. “Now that people don’t have that work, they don’t know what to do with themselves,” she said. “We’ve seen more suicide. We’ve seen larger instances of depression among our crew.” 

Atlanta was the home of Ted Turner’s media empire, which had merged with Time Warner, then AOL, then AT&T, then Discovery—each one generating another round of layoffs. The Paramount merger would be merger number five. Ethan Tussey, a Georgia State professor, told the crowd Turner properties used to employ 8,000 people in Atlanta. Now, it was less than 3,000. 

IV.

Monday morning after our town hall at the Lumiere, a three-screen independent theater in Los Angeles, I drove to KCRW’s studios at Santa Monica College for an interview with Kim Masters, an institution in entertainment reporting. Masters played a clip of a CNBC interview with Ellison in which he said the deal would be “good for the creator economy” and “good for Hollywood.”  

I told Masters that Ellison’s math did not work. And it doesn’t, on a couple of levels. According to Ellison, the deal will generate “$6 billion in synergies”—Wall Street’s word for the cost cuts that follow a merger, usually in the form of sweeping layoffs. Yet Ellison insisted that most of the savings would not come from layoffs. “Nobody believes that,” said NYU professor Scott Galloway. “It’s going to be difficult to cut billions in snacks.”

The bigger picture doesn’t work, either. Paramount is promising to make payments on $79 billion in loans, promising to stop spending $6 billion elsewhere—while also promising to put more movies in theaters than any studio has ever done in modern history.

My children tease me with something they call “monkey math.” I, the pedant, fall for it every time. It goes like this. I’ll be driving them to school or making sure they brush their teeth, and one of them will say: “Papa, what’s two plus two?”

I grimace, lower my head, and say “four.”

“No!” they scream, overjoyed. “It’s 22!” As I start to say, “No, it’s no–,” they holler, “It’s monkey math!”

Ellison is trying to convince people two plus two is 22. Fitch has downgraded his company’s credit to junk status.

Masters and I talked about the deal for about 25 minutes, touching on its impact on labor, on Paramount’s purge at 60 Minutes, and the legal cases against the merger. Then she seemed to get a little uncomfortable, and she asked me one last question. She had also read the L.A. Times interview where Paramount general counsel Delrahim touted “more and better and exciting jobs.” 

But she had noticed a different part, where Delrahim said that our coalition was engaged in a “fearmongering” political campaign and that “some of these people are trying to inflict harm on this transaction really because of their own antisemitic views.”

What did I think of that? I called it what it was—a distraction, and a curious one from a man representing a company whose takeover bid was backed by $24 billion from the sovereign wealth funds of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Abu Dhabi. 

That was a Monday. That Thursday, a frothy New York Post article cited “a source involved in the merger” who said that the coalition trying to block it was “completely driven by antisemitism and socialism.”

It’s all fun and games until you fire 6,000 people while earning $21.2 million a month.

V.

Another thing I learned at the FTC is that while a particular merger fight in a particular industry may feel existential to the people in that industry, it can be hard to get people outside of it to notice, let alone to care. 

In 2023, for example, FTC staff blocked a pharmaceutical company’s effort to maintain a monopoly over treatments for Pompe disease, a horrific genetic condition that kills children before their first birthday. If you google the case, almost all the coverage comes from the finance and pharma trade press—and the white-shoe law firms litigating similar deals. 

And so it caught my eye when a soybean grower and cattleman from Iowa, Lance Lillibridge, posted this message on Facebook in May:

As a farmer, watching the proposed Paramount-Warner Bros. merger debate sounds awfully familiar. A handful of dominant firms get bigger, independent businesses lose leverage, and the people actually creating the product get squeezed harder and harder. Farmers have lived this story for decades through consolidation in inputs and retail. Now more industries are starting to see the same thing happen to them.

A few days after I saw the post, I interviewed him alongside Kirby Dick, an Emmy- and Polk-award winning documentarian, for the Organized Money podcast. I wanted to know—how did he make these connections?

For Lance, it was all pretty straightforward. His wife is physically disabled from multiple sclerosis, so he spends a lot of time with her watching movies and television shows. “Back when I was a kid, there was a lot of different things to watch—today it’s all about crime. It’s all about who killed who on the farm,” he said. 

“We’ve got that same thing going on,” he said, about farmers. Farmers like Lance used to have a dozen different companies to buy seed from; now they have two. If there was very little seed choice, there were “no choices in where you get your fertilizer from, who’s manufacturing it.… The consolidation is tremendous and crippling. The fertilizer companies are making more off an acre of land than we are right now. And that’s disgusting.”

On July 13, California Attorney General Rob Bonta stood on a hill in front of the HOLLYWOOD sign and announced a lawsuit, on behalf of himself and 11 other state attorneys general, to block the Paramount-Warner merger. The law enforcers called out Paramount’s monkey math, arguing that the takeover would mean fewer movies for higher prices, and would also lead to higher cable bills. The next day, the Writers Guild announced its own lawsuit to block the merger on the grounds that it would collapse key labor markets for its members. A third lawsuit, filed the same day by a company shareholder, alleged that the Ellisons had effectively bribed President Trump in order to secure his approval of the merger. 

Soon after that, a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order barring the company from merging for two weeks, then extended the order for two weeks; then Paramount agreed to delay merging until next June unless the court issues a ruling before then—a stunning reversal for a company that was so confident the deal would sail through regulatory approvals. 

Billionaires usually get what they want. They get the government they want, the health care they want, and they break the laws they want, so long as they make the right donations or crypto investments.

This case asks: Maybe not this time?

As for next time, I’m still thinking about my conversation with Lance Lillibridge—and documentarian Kirby Dick’s reaction to hearing the anger and hopelessness on independent farms across the country. I had just shared what it was like to watch fourth- or fifth-generation farmers break down in tears because their business was going bankrupt, or because they were scared that a powerful supplier would learn that they had spoken to an FTC commissioner.

Lance had just talked about how he was shielding his 20-year-old son, who was set on going into farming, from their family’s financial difficulties: “He doesn’t really have an interest to do anything else.” 

Something about those scenes clicked for Kirby. “I don’t think people see this issue this way,” he said. “They see it as either a complex issue or something that’s not related to them personally.” 

He chuckled and added: “When you started describing that, I sort of just leaned in, like, Where can I get my camera? How can I cover that?”

Judge Katherine Menendez granted the preliminary injunction after concluding that Minnesota’s ban was likely preempted by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s exclusive regulatory authority, a position that the agency had forcefully advanced in the lawsuit alongside the two best-known brands in the nascent industry, Kalshi and Polymarket. While Menendez noted that at least some of the contracts offered by the companies fall outside the CFTC’s jurisdiction, she opted for a broad injunction for now and emphasized that the final judgment may be different.

Monday’s ruling is not the end of the legal battles surrounding prediction markets. Other jurisdictions have had some success in regulating or restricting Kalshi, Polymarket, and similar companies. But it is a striking testament to the prediction market industry’s success in regulatory capture—and the need for more concrete restrictions from Congress.

Kalshi, for its part, took a victory lap after the ruling. “Minnesota was the first state to pass a law banning prediction markets, and a court prevented it from being enforced less than two months later,” a company spokesman told reporters yesterday. “Today’s decision makes it clear: States cannot ban things that they don’t have jurisdiction over.”

Kalshi’s celebratory defiance is par for the course these days. The modern age of gambling began in 2018 after the Supreme Court struck down a federal ban on sports betting on Tenth Amendment grounds. Sportsbooks like DraftKings and FanDuel are largely regulated at the state level, following the long-standing tradition of regulating gambling as a public health matter. More than two dozen states now allow betting on sports in some capacity.

Prediction markets also allow customers to wager money on the outcome of future events. Instead of placing a more traditional wager against a sportsbook’s odds, customers at a prediction market effectively bet against one another. In practical terms, they buy an “event contract” that predicts a binary outcome for an event—say, for example, that the Los Angeles Dodgers will win the 2026 World Series—within a certain period of time.

If the Dodgers secure a threepeat this October, the contract’s seller would pay the buyer the amount specified in the contract. If the Chicago White Sox win the Fall Classic instead, the contract’s buyer gets nothing. Contracts can be bought and sold on prediction markets, with prices fluctuating depending on the market’s perception of an event’s likelihood. In that sense, prediction markets can somewhat resemble derivatives markets for publicly traded stocks.

Prediction markets justify their existence in a number of ways. One is by claiming to offer some otherwise unobtainable insight into the future. “Our markets reflect accurate, unbiased, and real-time probabilities for the events that matter most to you,” Polymarket claims on its website. “Markets seek truth.” Kalshi, for example, says that its “inflation and federal [interest] rate forecasts have been more accurate than economists, pundits, and traditional news outlets over the past year.”

Another increasingly common justification for a prediction market’s existence is that it allows customers to “hedge” their futures on specific outcomes. “For example, if you have student debt and are worried about relief not passing, you can purchase a contract and get a payout even if it doesn’t pass,” Kalshi claims on its website. “If you’re worried about the economic fallout of the government shutting down, you can place a trade to hedge against it.” This resembles the role that derivatives often play in financial markets: allowing large funds to “hedge” their stock purchases.

For that reason, prediction markets are currently regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, a federal agency that oversees the nation’s derivatives markets. The Biden-era CFTC sought to use its rulemaking power to broadly forbid prediction markets from taking bets on sports-related events, but the change in administration produced a much friendlier regulatory landscape.

Michael Selig, the CFTC’s current chairman, is a Trump appointee who previously worked for crypto companies and prediction markets. He wields immense power over the regulatory process as the commission’s sole member at the moment; Trump has declined to put forward nominees for the other vacancies. The New York Times reported earlier this summer that, under Selig’s watch, the CFTC went from bringing roughly 80 enforcement cases against the crypto and prediction-market industries in the Biden era to just two as of this June.

In its latest rulemaking proposal last month, the CFTC laid out plans to allow prediction markets to offer contracts on all but a few sports-related predictions. Among the handful of proscribed contracts would be those involving player injuries and fights and ones involving officiating calls. Some critics, including the National Football League, urged the CFTC this month to substantially narrow the types of contracts that could be offered, arguing that allowing them would be against the public interest.

The CFTC rule, if adopted, would entrench vast amounts of potential income for prediction markets. Fortune magazine reported this month that Americans spent roughly $166 billion on sports betting in 2025, which was “more than the entire U.S. movie, music, book, and museum industries generated in revenue combined.” Kalshi and Polymarket have also followed the lead of sportsbooks by trying to integrate themselves into the four major North American sports leagues. MLB and the NHL have already struck bargains with them, while the NBA and the NFL have been more skeptical.

One big problem for prediction markets is that they are uniquely vulnerable to insider trading. Part of this stems from their decentralized nature. Because a sportsbook is the counterparty to any customer’s winning bet, it has a strong interest in ensuring the integrity of any game or contest on which it takes wagers. Prediction markets, on the other hand, have no inherent interest in the underlying fairness of an event because they make money through transaction fees.

The other part of the vulnerability is that prediction markets take bets on what is essentially nonpublic but theoretically knowable information. Nobody can know who will win this year’s World Series until it takes place and the outcome is revealed to all observers simultaneously. A prediction market bet on, say, whether OpenAI will go public this year is theoretically knowable, albeit by only a handful of people in the world.

This makes prediction markets a uniquely dangerous mechanism for corrupt self-dealing. U.S. military strikes against Iran earlier this year often saw large upticks in bets placed on specific days, possibly reflecting bets placed by people in U.S. military or political circles. Federal prosecutors brought charges against a U.S. soldier in April who allegedly used classified information about the military raid to capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro to place bets on Polymarket, leading to a $400,000 windfall. Earlier this month, NPR reported on how campaign staffers betting on their own races has become a scourge—and the somewhat limp efforts of the industry to curb this activity. The White House even had to place Gabriel Perez, the president’s longtime teleprompter operator, on unpaid leave earlier this month while it investigates more than $100,000 in prediction market bets that he made.

The CFTC’s pro–prediction market pivot also has its share of critics. Among those who spoke out against the recent proposed rule were Christopher Dodd, a former Connecticut senator who authored the 2010 financial reform law that expanded the CFTC’s regulatory authority. “At the time Congress passed Dodd-Frank, we were well aware of existing federal laws ‌regulating gaming,” the former lawmaker explained in a formal comment in the rulemaking process. “We had no intention of amending those laws.”

A future Democratic administration may be able to remedy the problem when it retakes control of the CFTC in the future. But a more concrete solution may be needed from Congress to constrain or prohibit an inherently problematic business model. Kalshi reportedly spent more than $500,000 on lobbying in just three months earlier this year, while traditional sportsbooks and gambling associations have spent close to $1.5 million across the same period. In other words, Americans’ losing bets are being used to ensure that Americans keep betting—and losing—for years to come.

Both sides’ perspectives are ahistorical, too caught up in the current Mamdani-Sanders-AOC moment. Numerous progressives have won in swing states and districts in the past. Neither El-Sayed nor Hong would be the first progressive candidate to win in the Midwest. Ocasio-Cortez wouldn’t be the first president with a left-wing background. These primaries are a real fight over which faction controls the Democratic Party today. But they shouldn’t obscure the success of progressive candidates years and even decades before anyone had ever heard of Claire Valdez or Ilhan Omar.

What makes this debate complicated is that there are not precise definitions of progressive, leftist, or other such ideological terms. And what constitutes progressive or leftist politics changes over time. Many progressive politicians were not supportive of same-sex marriage in 2002, but virtually all progressive politicians hold that stance today. So, for this article, I looked at politicians who were described or self-identified as progressive or very liberal during a given campaign and their results.

Let’s go back 20 years. “An unabashed progressive takes aim at a Senate seat in Ohio,” was the tagline of a November 2005 piece in the leftist publication In These Times. The author is Chris Hayes, who went on to greater fame. The “unabashed progressive” is Sherrod Brown, then serving in the House. Brown is considered a traditional Democrat now. But back then, his opposition to the Iraq War and deep skepticism of the North American Free Trade Agreement and other international trade agreements put him firmly on the Democratic left. “If a bedrock economic populist like Brown can win in a red state, it will explode the post-Clinton conventional wisdom that anything resembling ​‘class warfare’ is a non-starter for the Democrats,” Hayes wrote. Among those who praised Brown in Hayes’s article was Bernie Sanders, then Vermont’s congressman.

Brown ended up winning the Ohio Senate race in 2006—against a two-term incumbent—by 12 points. “I ran a very outspokenly progressive campaign, standing up for the middle class, taking on the drug companies and the oil companies.…  And I think that that campaign shows that you can win in moderately conservative states as progressive Democrats,” Brown told NPR in November 2006.

Two years later, a man described by another In These Times writer as an “unflinching progressive” won Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, and other states across the Midwest. Again, today we don’t think of Barack Obama as being particularly leftist. But in 2008, being a strong opponent of the Iraq War, a critic of the death penalty, and a skeptic of the Israeli government—all positions he held in his rise in Illinois politics—were very much on the party’s left. Obama’s 2007 voting record was the most liberal of any senator, according to National Journal.

And it’s not just those two. In 2012, Tammy Baldwin, who had been a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, was elected to the Senate from Wisconsin. Andy Kim won reelection in 2022 in a competitive district in New Jersey, even though his opponent attacked him for being a member of the Progressive Caucus. Ruben Gallego, elected to the Senate in 2024 from Arizona, was a member of the Medicare for All and Progressive caucuses during his House days.

Adam Bonica, a political scientist at Stanford University, found that from 2016 to 2024, there were 27 successful U.S. House campaigns in swing districts by candidates whose ideology was left of the average Democratic politician. Georgia’s Raphael Warnock and Pennsylvania’s John Fetterman won Senate races in swing states even though voters perceived them as fairly progressive, says Bonica, citing the Cooperative Election Study, in which voters themselves rank candidates on a seven-point ideological scale. (Sadly, Fetterman has changed his stripes since then.)

Progressive candidates at times obviously lose, including Brown in his 2024 reelection bid. And it’s true that there are far more centrists and more moderates than progressives representing swing districts and states. But that’s in part a screening effect. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee tend to encourage centrist politicians to run in swing areas, direct donors to give money to those candidates instead of their progressive rivals, and often endorse those moderates in primaries. So the number of moderate nominees in swing areas is much larger than those who are more progressive. But moderates and progressives win at similar rates, according to Bonica’s research. What really matters is incumbency—progressive and moderate Democratic candidates tend to lose to Republicans in office, but win open seats or when they are the incumbents.

“El-Sayed and Hong as a test of whether progressives can win swing states gets it backwards. They’re a rare case where the choice is actually on the menu. Whether they win will track the national environment and each state’s lean. Parties are electable, not candidates,” says Bonica.

So what’s being tested in Wisconsin and Michigan is not whether a person who has a history of progressive activism, has called themselves a progressive, or has a very progressive voting record can win in a swing state. That’s already happened. Often. Hong is trying to do something unique, in that there isn’t a record of self-identified democratic socialists winning in swing states. That could be tougher, as some polls show voters in Wisconsin and other states are very skeptical of socialism.

And Hong and El-Sayed, if they win their primaries, will be trying to win a general election after the media and their opponents have spent months casting them as “very progressive” and they themselves have, in some ways, embraced that label. That’s often not the case for successful progressive candidates. During the 2008 Democratic presidential primary, Obama did not run as the most unabashedly progressive candidate, instead positioning himself as the young outsider who might inspire the country. In 2012, Baldwin was unopposed in the Wisconsin Democratic Senate primary. Gallego left the Congressional Progressive Caucus before his Senate run. In contrast, Hong has courted the left-wing vote among Wisconsin Democrats. El-Sayed has campaigned with Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders. So it is possible that, while a person with a progressive history can win, a person who fully leans into progressivism during the primary will have trouble pivoting to the general election and assuring voters that they aren’t too liberal.

On the other hand, numerous Republicans have run as full-throated conservatives during primaries and then won in swing states in the general election. That’s what Marco Rubio did in 2010 in Florida, and what Donald Trump did nationally six years later. And both Hong and El-Sayed (and other progressives, such as Ocasio-Cortez) these days are running more on fighting high costs and billionaires than the broader ideology of socialism. They are winning voters who probably don’t fully understand or support socialism’s tenets.

We don’t know if El-Sayed or Hong will even make it to the general election. But either way, their candidacies shouldn’t be considered some make-or-break moment for progressive politics in America. Progressives have already won in swing states, including in presidential elections. What we’ll learn in the next months and years is whether swing states will accept today’s version of progressivism, one led by self-described socialists (Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez, Mamdani). You might say no. But I was covering politics in 2004, and not many people imagined Senators Brown and Baldwin and President Obama. America’s voters often progress more quickly than we expect.

That is still very much the biggest story in the country. The president is waging two destructive wars—a literal one in the Middle East, and an economic one pretty much everywhere else—while jailing political opponents, detaining and deporting hundreds of thousands of people, attempting to interfere in the upcoming midterm elections, and musing—maybe joking, maybe not—about running for an unconstitutional third term.

But for Axios founders Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei, that’s old news—a status quo that no longer raises alarm among the Beltway punditry. There’s a new political threat brewing in America, and it’s just as frightening as Trump: There are reds under Democratic beds. The democratic socialists have arrived, and they’re the left’s equivalent of MAGA. And the Democratic establishment may well succumb to these unhinged insurgents, just like the Republicans before them.

In the newest iteration of their “Behind the Curtain” column, which is ostensibly devoted to big trends in politics and economics, Allen and VandeHei warn about what may be in store for the Democratic Party. “Party transformations follow a predictable six-stage evolution—recoil, squint, rationalize, submit, amplify, and purge,” they wrote Tuesday. “Each stage has language you can hear long before you see it in the votes. Republicans just finished the full cycle. Democrats might be starting it.”

Sounds scary! But here’s the evidence Allen and VandeHei provide:

• All three candidates New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani endorsed won their June 23 House primaries, defeating two incumbents: Brad Lander over Rep. Dan Goldman, Claire Valdez over Brooklyn’s borough president, and Darializa Avila Chevalier over Rep. Adriano Espaillat—the Congressional Hispanic Caucus chair, backed by House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.
• Sit with that: A Jeffries-endorsed incumbent lost to a democratic socialist. That’s Stage 4 machinery switching on, with the primary electorate punishing the establishment side of the fight.
• It’s not just New York. In Colorado, 29-year-old democratic socialist Melat Kiros toppled 15-term Rep. Diana DeGette, who leans progressive.

Wow, it’s not just New York City—a young democratic socialist also won in Colorado!

Four primary victories for the 435-member U.S. House of Representatives. That’s the sum of the argument here. But Allen and VandeHei nonetheless insist that Democrats are in the dreaded “Stage 3” of this entirely made-up “party transformation” scale: The Democrats are rationalizing their takeover by the socialists. “Now listen to the language: ‘It’s not socialism, it’s affordability’ is the left’s ‘It’s not the tweets, it’s the judges,’” they wrote.

It’s worth taking a moment to remember what those Trump tweets were, back in the day: sexist attacks on news hosts Megyn Kelly and Mika Brzezinski. Racist digs at entire nations and the Obamas. Ridiculous accusations of “wiretapping” and voter fraud. And he never stopped, of course. There were threats of state violence: “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.” Incessant lies that the 2020 election was “stolen.” Today, we’re subjected to a daily deluge of brain-dead AI slop—and, yes, the usual racist, sexist garbage.

But we’re supposed to worry that socialism is masquerading as affordability?

One problem with the suggestion that these candidates don’t really care about affordability—that they must have an ulterior motive to, I don’t know, force everyone to be vegan?—is that they are all Democrats, and the party has been very clear about communicating its top election message this year. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer—hardly a leftie—talks about affordability all the time, as does New York City’s biggest loser in those recent primaries, Hakeem Jeffries. The House minority leader over the weekend unveiled his caucus’s closing argument for the midterms, summed up thus: “Fighting for an Affordable America.”

Are these establishment Democrats rationalizing their takeover by Jacobins, or are they—like the democratic socialists in their party—simply pushing talking points that any sensible politician would, given Americans’ enduring anger over rising costs? After all, Trump won in 2024 on an affordability message too.

There are currently two members of the Democratic Socialists of America in Congress: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (elected in 2018) and Rashida Tlaib (elected in 2022). Lander is not a member of the DSA, though Valdez, Chevalier, and Kiros are. Increasing their ranks to five is a big deal, but it’s not exactly a revolution. (Interestingly, Abdul El-Sayed, a progressive who may become Michigan’s Democratic nominee for Senate next week, said in a debate on Monday evening, “I’m not a socialist, I’m a capitalist who knows how capitalism works.”)

But the big problem with Allen and VandeHei’s attempt at a “conceptual scoop” isn’t that it makes a terrible case for a trend. It’s that the founders of one of the biggest political outlets in the country still don’t understand Trump. His cult of personality is so strong that it has easily withstood multiple accusations of rape and sexual assault, a long-standing and deep friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, the pillaging of the federal government to benefit himself and his family, and the destruction of countless families across the country. He is sui generis.

That incontrovertible truth is rather inconvenient if you are in the business of dreaming up columns that depend on false equivalences between the country’s two major parties. For Allen and VandeHei, a handful of candidates who have found success in large cities with young demographics and who are pushing ambitious but hardly fascistic policies like Medicare for All and divestment from Israel are basically analogous to Trump and his actual fascism. That is not an insight; it’s a troll. But it does raise an important question about Axios’s leaders themselves: Are they genuinely fearful of the democratic socialists’ plans to ensure all Americans have health care and stop genocide, or are they just not horrified by what Trump has done to this country? Here’s what scares me: that Allen and VandeHei would say “yes” to both.

Perry Bacon: I’m Perry Bacon. I’m the host of Right Now on The New Republic. I’m joined by Jonathan Guyer. He’s the program director at the Institute for Global Affairs. He’s also been a great writer about foreign policy for a long time, most notably at The American Prospect and at Vox, and he has a new piece out about AOC that we’ll get into in a bit. But Jonathan, welcome. Thanks for joining me.

Jonathan Guyer: Great to be with you, Perry.

Bacon: So the piece you wrote recently, that we’re going to talk about, is called “AOC Meets World,” and it was in Foreign Policy very recently. So give us an overall sense of what made you decide to write about AOC’s foreign policy? I think there’s obvious reasons, but what made you kind of want to write about her in terms of foreign policy context?

Guyer: I think she represents this leftward tilt of the Democratic Party, and also—I don’t want to say the failure, but the ambiguousness of the left’s foreign policy. I think the left, and a couple of the experts in the piece said this, has not always had a great strategy when it comes to foreign policy. It’s been a big question mark. And I think if you talk to people in and out of Washington, they’ll say, I don’t really know what AOC’s foreign policy is. Which is, I don’t think, entirely correct. I think she has a pretty developed worldview. She’s taken a lot of positions on Gaza, on Latin America.

But the impetus for this piece is, I think she is really dipping her toe into world affairs. She spoke at this major foreign policy conference in February, the Munich Security Conference, which is where the contenders for the next primaries go and sort of strut their stuff. Gretchen Whitmer was there, a number of other muckety-mucks.

So the idea that this was her first time there—and my reporting showed that she’d been invited before in 2020, decided not to go. She’s really associated with this DSA grassroots push to take care of her constituents in New York, focus on domestic policy.

But I think, as we’ve seen with the Democratic Party over the past decade, you can’t really separate domestic policy and foreign policy. You and I have had a lot of these conversations over the years. You can’t separate them. The way America conducts itself domestically reflects its role in the world.

So I think part of this piece was trying to figure out, how does one of the shining stars of the Democratic Party, the most popular or among the most popular possible candidates for the next presidential—how is she figuring out who she is? And it’s not like she fell out of a—what is it—a coconut tree, like Kamala said.

Bacon: Yeah, I was going to say.

Guyer: She has a very developed worldview, AOC. It’s just, she’s, I think, a really all-star politician, carefully messaging and developing strategies and talking with some very intelligent people. But obviously, there’s a lot we can get into here.

Bacon: So the thing that struck me by you saying is—we’ve had this sort of, I don’t want to say new left, but this sort of more developed progressivism, that started with Sanders’ 2016 campaign and grows from there. That has mostly been focused, I would argue, on domestic politics—Medicare for All, anti-billionaires, anti-plutocracy. I would say the first seven, eight years of that was really focused on that.

But I would argue in some ways now, the leading issue, or one of the leading issues of that, is a foreign policy issue. I would say the war in Gaza. And it’s a critique of both the Republicans, but also it’s a critique of the Biden administration and centrist Democrats. So I don’t know if the left has a foreign policy vision. It certainly has a vision on that foreign policy issue, I would say. You agree?

Guyer: I would even broaden it a little bit, in that the domestic issues that AOC is most associated with, like you say—fighting against the oligarchy, she joined this tour with Bernie Sanders. Climate, Green New Deal. Immigration. Obviously, a member of the squad who pushed back, part of that resistance in Trump 1.0. Those are actually global issues. None of those are really domestic alone.

And I think there’s been this kind of job of the great monks of Washington foreign policy to cordon off domestic and foreign policy—and this has been going on since the Cold War—and saying to the young guns like AOC and many others, Hey, leave foreign policy to us. We’re the experts. And I think what she does when she goes to Munich is she takes all of these dynamics that have been a big part of her career—as youngest member of Congress to be elected as a woman, someone who is part of that kind of Democratic contender who ousted an incumbent and represented all this—and said, Hey, fighting the oligarchy is part of foreign policy, and is part of the reason we have a Trump presidency for the second time. That’s part one.

The second part is, I think on Gaza, she’s largely been consistent. I went back—one of her first interviews, I think she wasn’t even elected yet, she had just won the primary—was on PBS, and she described a massacre of Palestinians in Gaza, and obviously setting in the structural dynamics, what’s been happening in Gaza, has been an occupation and violence for several decades. So she kind of said this and got incredible pushback, and also wasn’t really fully briefed on it. I think she had the right message, but couldn’t explain it right to a TV audience. To her credit, she was a newly minted contender, and so forth.

So part of this piece was trying to figure out, how did she go from there to now, where I think she has a pretty developed point of view on Gaza and has gotten a lot of flak from the right, a lot of flak from the left. But I’d say if you look at her messaging over time, it’s been pretty consistent.

So when she warns of famine in Gaza in 2024, when she’s put out some very strong criticism of the Biden administration or the Trump administration, or when she goes to Munich and calls what’s happening in Gaza a genocide—it’s not really part of this new left moment. It’s part of a progression over time, where she has been trying to bring in some of these principles towards US foreign policy. And I think, as we know, principles and US foreign policy don’t always mix, for worse, I would say.

Bacon: I want to separate out a little bit what the left is doing and what AOC is doing—those are related—and then come back together a little bit. So I do see Gaza as a seminal issue of left foreign policy right now. Do you agree?

Guyer: I do, yeah. And I think it’s like a new Vietnam, and a litmus test, and there’s only one right answer, I would say, for the left and for the new generation of DSA contenders who are trying to shape not just domestic policy, but foreign policy.

Bacon: And a related question—there’s a piece in The New Yorker about the Biden foreign policy. And so I think you’re also seeing this issue, but I’m curious what you make of it, is what I perceive as an effort almost to say that Jake Sullivan, Jon Finer, the architects of Joe Biden’s Gaza policy, should be disqualified from membership in Democratic leadership in the future. They shouldn’t get these big jobs in the future. That’s my sense of what’s going on.

Talk about that a little bit, in terms of what the left is trying to do about the people who were involved in Biden’s foreign policy.

Guyer: Absolutely. So I’d say this even came from Brian Schatz, the senator from Hawaii—I think he said something like this, and others have said that. I think a lot of the grassroots organizing groups—and there’s a whole left quotient of kind of Project 2020-whatever that’s going to shape the next presidency—are saying, We have to get rid of these advisors who enabled some of the most heinous war crimes of this century so far, that were done with US weapons and US leadership backing the Israeli government headed by Netanyahu.

And I think what we’re seeing at the same time are the Biden personnel, the senior leadership who had been involved in Middle East policy since the Obama years—secretary of State Blinken, Jake Sullivan, many of their kind of top lieutenants—and this is my analysis here—seem to be saying, This was really President Biden’s decision. We were trying to figure out the best way to manage this and work with Israel under all these constraints.

But I would say—and this isn’t uniquely AOC—but this changing US public opinion, changing views of the MAGA right, changing perspectives of Israel and the world, actually has totally changed the way that I think the next president could deal with Israel, could deal with Palestine and the Middle East. So those old constraints have fallen by the wayside, but we’re seeing many Biden alumni doing a bit of reinterpretation and saying, “We did the best with what we had,” and so forth.

It’s a really contentious moment. And if you look at who’s advising AOC, it is not these people. It is a lot of the strongest critics of the Biden administration—namely Matt Duss, who’s someone who writes sometimes for The New Republic and has been a Bernie advisor—

Bacon: Has been here on this show. Yeah.

Guyer: —and so forth. I figured. Yeah, exactly.

Bacon: And to come back to—I guess I’m going to ask you, as a person who follows foreign policy: Jake Sullivan was probably—the national security advisor is rarely the same person twice. The secretary of state is rarely the same person twice. So Tony Blinken was not likely to be secretary of state in 2029, no matter what.

So what are we really talking about here in terms of who is not going to get a job, who would’ve otherwise? Because I don’t think those two people would’ve got those jobs even if there wasn’t a Gaza policy.

Guyer: I think we’re talking about two things, Perry. One is the Biden legacy, which is really important. This was a guy who, when it came to economic populism, was trying to be the next FDR, and this Gaza tragedy threatens to upend the entire Biden legacy. So we’re going to have memoirs from the former president, from Tony Blinken, from other senior advisors coming out this fall, and they’re all going to be grappling with, what does that mean?

But spinning it forward, what we saw in the Obama years is everyone kind of moved up a notch. Blinken, Sullivan—they were all kind of deputies, and then they became the principals. And there’s a huge possibility that Mr. Sullivan could be the next secretary of state, could be a UN ambassador.

Bacon: You think still?

Guyer: Depending on who’s the—you know, if it’s a very traditional Democrat, if it’s a Gavin Newsom—

Bacon: Josh Shapiro, yeah.

Guyer: Exactly. But if we have a Jon Ossoff, or, who knows, any number of progressives—people are angling. And this is the off-season, everyone’s favorite game of not just who are going to be the next presidential contenders, but who are the advisors and who’s in good standing. When I interviewed Mr. Sullivan several years ago, before Biden even was the heir apparent, he hadn’t even chosen which candidate. He was advising Klobuchar. He was advising Biden. It was kind of different times.

So we’re still way before that consolidation, and it actually gives the Democrats a really unique moment right now, with the midterms coming up, to say, big picture, conceptually, what does this party represent foreign policy-wise? Because a year and a half from now, there’s not going to be time to deal with these nitty-gritty issues. It’s going to be a bruising fight to take the White House.

So right now, you’re seeing the biggest grand strategy questions of, should the US be a moral force for good? Should we go into some sort of more realist tack? Should we focus more on the Western Hemisphere? These are pretty big questions that don’t actually get discussed a whole lot. But I do think people like the mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani, with the clarity he speaks with on Gaza, has forced a discussion, among others. But there is a real foreign policy debate happening among Democrats, which is not always happening, right?

Bacon: Not at all. And so it seems to me AOC’s foreign policy—if I was just watching the speech in Munich, or the speeches in Munich, I get the idea. The idea is that the oligarchy and the authoritarianism and the democratic decline we’re seeing around the world is in part tied to economic policy around the world that is rewarding—the decline of the middle class is helping, around the world, is helping lead to oligarchy, dictatorship.

And so therefore, we need to address the economic conditions around the world if we want to address the... In other words, the democracy threat that Biden talked about a lot is also about oligarchy, and you have to fight the oligarchy to restore democracy. Is that essentially what we’re talking about here?

Guyer: Yeah. That’s a big part of what she talked about in these couple different kind of Q&A sessions. I think that message irked some on the left, that thought it was a little bit too black and white, good and bad. But on the other hand, many people thought this was a really strong message. I interviewed this former head of the Center for American Progress and Obama ambassador Patrick Gaspard, who is now advising Mamdani, and he actually said, “Look at this other moment from her time in Germany.”

She was in Berlin. She was speaking to a more centrist group at a university forum, and someone challenged her on Gaza, saying, This is a pro-Israel party platform you’re speaking with. What are you doing here? And she said, “If we don’t go together, we all fall apart. We have to unite the left, the liberals, the kind of social left.” And so that was another message that might’ve gotten lost in all of...

It’s tough to be AOC. You’re a lightning rod for every piece of racist vitriol, every misogynistic racist. Some of the criticism has very little to do with the substance. But on the substance, I thought that was another interesting foreign policy message—we don’t need a moral purity test, we need to unite to beat the Republican Party in the next election.

Bacon: So I think Biden would’ve agreed we need a big tent, and that’s the kind of—he was trying to unite people around the world. I think the point where I think it’s different is, I don’t think Biden necessarily would’ve said the cause of authoritarianism is wage stagnation, oligarchy. Or maybe he said that, but it was at the 2020 front.

I think at the beginning, he was saying the cause of authoritarianism was, like, people not respecting democracy, people like Putin, people like Trump. I think he was more individualistic and less—AOC is making—I’m not sure Biden would necessarily forcefully disagree with it, but I think AOC’s making a more class-based foreign policy point than Biden would’ve. Is that correct?

Guyer: That’s right. And she declined to do an interview with me for this profile. But I spoke with a lot of people around her, allies, advisors, and so forth, and that kind of working-class foreign policy was something people kept coming back to. And it’s something we’ve seen from other members of the squad. I think it resonates a lot. Graham Platner has now been fully disgraced, but what he represented was, is there a working-class foreign policy here?

The other thing I would add, Perry—and it’s something that is, I think, a distinction from the Biden administration—was she was drawing connections between all these different theaters of war, and saying, what the US is doing in Venezuela or Cuba, Gaza, Europe—these are all connected. We can’t separate these out when the US is using economic sanctions as a tool of first resort. That connects Iran to Venezuela.

And there’s a bigger story that she’s telling that I think Democrats have long struggled to make, because—not to dumb it down—but foreign policy is complicated. It’s hard to tell one big story. And I think the US has such an entrenched military-industrial complex, so many bases and drone strikes and all this stuff, it’s hard to imagine a world where the US is an unambiguous force for good. And I don’t think she’s actually saying that. She’s trying to narrow where there’s things that can be changed, and parallels between these different conflicts.

Bacon: So I, as someone who liked AOC and maybe is biased toward her, thought the coverage of her speech was very fixated on, did she use the right foreign policy code words on Taiwan and so on. Do you think she is someone who needs a lot of training in this area?

Or, in my view, she’s being policed by the foreign policy establishment that doesn’t agree with her and is looking to police her gaffes on the code words, because they don’t agree with her broader vision? What do you think?

Guyer: No, I agree with you.

Bacon: Could be both, by the way.

Guyer: And I’m not trying to be a cheerleader for her, as a kind of—

Bacon: I know you’re not. Yeah.

Guyer: —a reporter. I want to weigh all the different criticisms, left and right, speak with all the people around her, understand how she came out at this place. But yeah, I think there was a real emphasis on the supposed gaffes—the ums and uhs that she said in an answer were all written out in The New York Times, and I don’t remember the last time ums and uhs from other members of Congress.

I think on the substance, a lot of it was pretty mainstream—which was maybe that’s the hard thing to grapple with. But some of the experts I spoke with who work at places like MoveOn basically were like, This is a big deal. They have a Latina woman in her 30s on this stage in Munich, where it’s really largely white men who have dominated the foreign policy sphere. And she does threaten them.

But the other point I think you’re making is, she doesn’t necessarily have the traditional credentials of, let’s say, an Elissa Slotkin, who was in the CIA, or some other prominent lawmakers who work on foreign policy. But digging into her background, I found that she actually has a lot of the markers of true geopolitical intelligence.

She spent time in Niger as an undergraduate, doing homestays, understanding how US development and humanitarian assistance really works. That’s what she studied at university. She has a sense of foreign policy that is not wholly untraditional. It’s just that there is a certain cabal that kind of determines what the national security leadership ought to look like, and she hasn’t exactly fit that mold, let’s say.

Bacon: You mentioned—you interviewed Matt Duss, we mentioned him earlier. So Matt Duss was an advisor to Bernie Sanders and his campaigns. He was close to the Biden people for some period, and then broke away even before Gaza, is my impression. So talk about who is around her. They’re not necessarily the sort of people who served Clinton, Obama, Biden, but who’s around her in terms of foreign policy?

Guyer: So her chief of staff, this guy Mike Kaska, comes from Bernie’s office. So that’s one thing to note, is she’s within these kind of progressive circles. Matt, who now runs a progressive think tank in DC, has gathered experts. He’s primarily a Middle East guy, but has brought in China and other foreign policy experts to have a kind of a kitchen cabinet around AOC.

But one of the most interesting things that I dug into was her foreign trips. She’s gone on a handful of congressional delegations, and one that really stood out was a trip she did to Latin America that was done with one of the major Latin America-focused progressive think tanks. And these are guys—I keep saying guys, but obviously I’m meaning that more broadly—who focus on how economic sanctions really affect people, how they damage the lives of people in Cuba and Venezuela, and not your typical hyper-security-focused think tanks. This is much more human-centric, human-focused.

And when she went to Latin America—I spoke with a number of Latin Americanists who said she didn’t just meet with the US Chamber of Commerce or the kind of economic chieftains that members of Congress tend to meet with. She met with grassroots leaders. She met with Indigenous organizers. She met with the kind of folks doing politics that reflect how she did politics in New York and the way that she came up.

So I found that to be a kind of interesting detail, and I do think it represents the kind of—you know, spinning it forward—what AOC and a number of other representatives are trying to do, which is, at this moment in US politics, where you have an imperial presidency, she’s trying to make connections with Lula in Brazil, with progressive leaders throughout Latin America, similar to what she was doing in Germany—finding liberals and leftists who she can work with, the Green Party, social Dems, and forging these connections in a way that isn’t exactly your typical mano-a-mano, let’s say, way that members of Congress tend to interact when they go abroad.

Bacon: As I read this piece, I was reminded of something. I’ve been doing this for a long time. So I wrote a piece in late—early 2006 about a famous Democratic politician, and who he was meeting with and how he might run for president. His name is Barack Obama, obviously—a similar kind of piece to what you did, talking about who’s around him and so on. And I generally liked what President Obama did, but in office, he, I think, adhered to the blob’s points of view a lot, ultimately.

And his foreign policy—the things he talked about as a candidate, opposing the Iraq War, being different—in office, I would argue, he was a fairly standard Democrat on foreign policy. Do you think AOC is vulnerable to that same kind of thing if she became president? Ultimately, she would appoint the Jake Sullivan types and be 88 percent the same as President Shapiro or Buttigieg would be?

Guyer: I think this is maybe the core question, Perry, and I don’t totally explore it in this piece, but I have some thoughts. I think one of the things you’re identifying is the gap between President Obama’s message and his policies. I think his message was pretty remarkable—going to Cairo to give a speech and end the war on terror and the war on Islam and so forth, and hiring someone like Samantha Power, who is an expert in genocide and US failures in foreign policy, and giving all these people like Ben Rhodes the ability to shape policy.

But at the end of the day, as we saw over those eight years, the people who held the Cabinet positions, the Hillary Clintons and the Robert Gateses—and now we’re going probably way far back for some of our viewers here, but you and I know this history really well—these were really traditional, bipartisan members of the blob. And I think this is where the rubber hits the road. It’s really hard to change US foreign policy.

It’s not just the State Department or the Pentagon. It is all these entrenched institutions, and it’s trying to have a reckoning with the architecture of American military bases abroad, the way that big institutions work, and this other whole dynamic, which is the allure of power, and the allure of wanting to be respected and liked by peers of both parties, and by projecting US leadership, whatever that means, in the world.

But I think since President Obama, a lot has changed in Washington. We’ve seen the fracturing of the Republican Party and a new movement—probably most aptly represented by JD Vance, and there’s a lot of questions around it—but of a kind of a more restrained, less militaristic Republican Party. Lot of debate to have around that, of course. Not trying to cheerlead anybody. But this is kind of categorically different, that you have a President Trump who’s run on populist perspectives that basically says we need a ceasefire in Gaza, to the left of President Biden. It’s surprising.

So I think one of the main challenges that Obama faced, and that the next president will face, is having the bureaucrats, the people that can actually make government work—and not to fall into the deep state fantasy of President Trump, but you got to maintain this whole massive US bureaucracy of thousands of appointees, of entire military and intelligence and all of this, and I don’t think you can just unwind it.

So I think if AOC, or whomever the next Democratic president, wants to really change US foreign policy, you do need some insiders who can change stuff, but it can’t just be the message. The message is one part of it, but you also have to figure out the actions. And I guess that’s what a whole lot of Democrats are trying to figure out in the off-season.

Bacon: Two final questions. I guess in writing the piece, I think there’s an answer to this question, but do you consider her a likely presidential candidate?

Guyer: I do, but I’ve also heard rumors that—what if Senator Schumer doesn’t run again, that maybe that would be a better call. She is super popular. I think she represents what Gen Z wants in Democratic politics. I think the Mamdani wave here in New York puts a lot of wind in her sails, and I think she has a lot of cred to take on what Trump represents beyond Gaza and Middle East policy and Western Hemisphere policy, but on some of these core domestic policies we talked about—with wildfires burning, with immigration crackdown and all this stuff. She comes in with a lot of credibility to change the game.

But I don’t know. It’s going to be a bruising two years, and I think we’re also going to have to see—everyone always says this is going to be the midterms that’s about foreign policy. But if this midterms is indeed about foreign policy, I think we’ll get more clues on who the next Democratic nominee might look like.

Bacon: That builds my final question, which is: is this Democratic primary upcoming, is it like most of the Democratic primaries I’ve covered—the exception being 2007, when who voted for the Iraq War was a big issue? In general, it’s not been a big issue in Democratic primaries. But right now, I would argue, if you go to Michigan, El-Sayed’s opposition to the war in Gaza and Stevens’ votes is an issue. I’m not sure if it’s a huge issue, but it’s an issue. A lot of the leftist candidates are saying, We should spend money here at home and not on bombing people abroad, and I think that has become the way to talk about Gaza.

But I am curious—the Gaza war, there’s still things happening in Gaza. Obviously, the war in Iran is happening right now. And I think it’s hard to know, but do you really think, when we’re talking about the South Carolina primary in November 2027, in the months before that, are we going to be talking about foreign policy? Or are we going to be back to talking about affordability and housing? Is foreign policy going to be a big part of the mix, a small part of the mix, a medium part of the mix? What do you think?

Guyer: No, so I would argue, Perry, that it is absolutely going to be part of the mix, and for the simple reason that I filled up my car yesterday and it was $70 for a tank. And foreign policy is often in the rarefied realm of the experts and, by design, doesn’t usually involve the people.

But gas prices, supply chains—our polling with the Institute for Global Affairs shows that, I think it’s something like 78 percent of Americans are hurting economically, and they associate it with the Iran war. So every day this war that isn’t a war keeps going, people experience it.

Bacon: No, I was saying, like, in the next—hopefully the Iran war will not be happening in November 2027. So assuming the Iran war is not happening, then is there other—I assume gas prices always matter, but foreign policy beyond gas prices, will it be part of this primary process, do you think?

Guyer: So I’m from Michigan, and I think that it is a huge debate right now. You have a very robust Arab American, Muslim American community. You have a huge Jewish community that faced this heinous terrorist attack earlier this year. And it is the conversation people are having, and it’s very divisive.

I don’t have a crystal ball about what’s going to be happening two years from now, but look, we have a president who has pursued some very reckless wars. And we could say Venezuela has gone somewhat well, but it does seem like we could stumble into Venezuela 2.0, Cuba, these strikes on boats throughout the Caribbean. These are all these tipping points that could happen that just remind voters how central foreign policy is.

And again, just to bring up our polling at IGA, most Americans don’t think the Iran war has made them any safer. This is a hugely unpopular war. We don’t have boots on the ground, but we do have US troops dying. We have a new figure from the Pentagon that some six hundred US service members have been injured, and—I don’t have the number in front of me—more than a dozen have been killed. This stuff really resonates. This is not abstract.

And I think the question will be, who’s going to seize the mantle? Is it going to be Vance or Rubio, with a strong message that resonates with voters? Or will AOC or Chris Murphy or other Democrats, whether more progressive or more traditional, have a better story to tell? Because I think the Biden story of foreign policy, that we are going to build back better worldwide, is not resonating for folks. So that’s why this AOC message that I’ve been reporting on does have some interesting kernels, but we’ll see how it develops.

Bacon: Jonathan Guyer, great piece in Foreign Policy. The piece is called “AOC Meets World.” And I recommend everyone read it and check out Jonathan’s other work. Are you on Bluesky? On Twitter? Where do people find you?

Guyer: I’m on Twitter. I have a really old handle. It’s MidEastXMidWest. Probably need to update that. But yeah, I’m on Twitter, writing for all sorts of spots. And check out the Institute for Global Affairs, where we’re trying to get the pulse of how Americans view foreign policy.

Bacon: If you want to read a piece that will interest you and maybe outrage you, Jonathan wrote this great piece about Samantha Power in New York Magazine in 2024. It was a great piece.

Guyer: Oh, thanks. Yeah, 2024, I believe. So basically been trying to find the people and personalities that capture all these tensions in US foreign policy. So thanks for having me, Perry. Great to see you. It’s always great to chat with you.

Bacon: Thank you. Bye-bye.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez isn’t ruling out a 2028 presidential run. And part of running for president is communicating your vision on foreign affairs. Jonathan Guyer, a longtime journalist who is now the program director at the Institute for Global Affairs, wrote a recent piece in Foreign Policy about Ocasio-Cortez’s foreign policy ideas. In the latest edition of Right Now, Guyer discussed his reporting, where he interviewed more than two dozen people about Ocasio-Cortez’s perspectives on the world. He described her vision of a “foreign policy for the working class,” the experts she is consulting, world leaders she has met with, and countries the congresswoman has traveled to. Guyer also explained why he thinks foreign policy will be at the center of the next Democratic presidential primary. He argued that the fissure over foreign policy between the center-left and left wings of the Democratic Party, most notably on Israeli-Palestinian issues, will endure. Those who advised President Biden on foreign policy may have a hard time getting top jobs in the next Democratic presidential administration if a progressive like Ocasio-Cortez wins, Guyer predicted. One of those advising Ocasio-Cortez is Matt Duss, who has made several appearances on Right Now to discuss what a progressive foreign policy might look like in practice.

After 2026, the government will stop providing billions in subsidies to insurance companies that keep premiums low for Medicare prescription plans, known as Part D, Trump administration officials told The Wall Street Journal Tuesday.

Roughly 25 million people have Part D plans, and the average monthly payment was roughly $36 in 2026. Medicare recipients will learn of their new rates in the fall, right around the midterm elections, in which affordability is sure to be a key issue.

A Trump administration official told the Journal that 25 percent of Medicare enrollees would see their premiums stay the same, 30 percent would see an increase of less than $10 to their monthly bill, and 45 percent would see a monthly increase of between $11 and $20.

Note: The Trump administration has already overseen a price increase for some 700 prescription drugs covered by Part D plans.

The administration official claimed that the subsidies had encouraged insurers to raise rates, and that there would be other means of keeping premiums low. If not, there were other affordable options, the official said.

But Americans are already struggling under the weight of rising prices. Health insurance premiums have drastically outpaced the growth of employee paychecks, a strain that is only compounded by the growing cost of groceries, climbing utility bills, and elevated oil and gas prices.

Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed he would not cut Medicare funding, though his One Big Beautiful Bill is set to reduce the program’s funding by an estimated $500 billion over the next eight years. Earlier this year, the president admitted he believed it was “not possible” to keep paying for Medicare, although the White House removed a recording of those remarks after posting them.

Conservative columnist Ross Douthat is leaving The New York Times to join the storied broadcast magazine in a new role, 60 Minutes executive producer Nick Bilton announced Tuesday.

Douthat has served as one of the Times’ principal conservative voices for more than two decades, writing for the daily’s opinion section since 2009. His latest book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, was published in 2025.

Despite being an early skeptic of Donald Trump’s politics and popularity, Douthat has since downplayed the president’s authoritarian and fascist tendencies while attempting to rationalize Trump’s behavior.

He has also criticized Democrats for their “resistance” showcases, spurring condemnation from those on the left that Douthat has been incorporated into a sort of “anti-anti-Trump” persona among the American intelligentsia, apparently ready to castigate Trump’s critics even as he himself scrutinizes the president and his policies.

Douthat will join the show alongside author Sebastian Junger, CBS News correspondent Trevor Phillips, and filmmaker Gianna Toboni, according to Bilton.

Bari Weiss, the founder of the pro-Israel blog The Free Press and a former New York Times opinion columnist herself, has changed seemingly everything at CBS News since she was tapped to run the fabled network late last year. Weiss was appointed despite the fact that she had never worked in broadcast, lacked traditional reporting experience, and had also never run a major news operation.

Under Weiss’s stewardship, CBS News has killed critical stories in order to save face for the Trump administration. In December, Weiss pulled the plug on now former correspondent Cecilia Vega’s 60 Minutes segment investigating the result of Trump’s mass deportation program, focusing on Venezuelan immigrants who were deported to El Salvador’s notoriously brutal CECOT mega-prison.

The network has also lost a cadre of veteran journalists, ranging from Vega to 60 Minutes’ veteran executive producer Bill Owens and the program’s de facto face Scott Pelley.

In March, Weiss attempted to install another questionable commentator in the show’s lineup—wellness influencer and Epstein pen pal Peter Attia—though his job offer was quickly revoked.

As several well-wishers eulogized the former senator at the Washington National Cathedral, Trump could barely hold his face up and keep his eyes open. It didn’t take long for him to start dozing off, occasionally blinking to try and hide his drowsiness.

Trump, face drooping heavily, is struggling to stay awake at Lindsey Graham's memorial service pic.twitter.com/E0SzRm87s2

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 28, 2026

Trump is out 💤 pic.twitter.com/xeQcm5fDXM

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 28, 2026

Trump is fighting nuclear war against wokeness pic.twitter.com/PnOdJn8l5k

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 28, 2026

At certain points, Trump even started tilting his head as he was falling asleep.

this is elder abuse pic.twitter.com/dkaZ0ZGkof

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 28, 2026

All of this took place shortly after Trump delivered his own eulogy, in which he went off-script and made fun of Graham a little, with all of his friends and family present, and reminded the audience about the time he publicly shared Graham’s cell phone number. All of that was probably much too tiring for the 80-year-old Trump, and he decided to take a little rest.

Canadians are boycotting travel to the United States in record numbers, costing the U.S. economy upward of $3.3 billion, the Canadian government reports. Tourism is at an all-time low this July, dropping more than 30 percent in year-over-year declines for the first time since 9/11.

“Following the change in the U.S. administration in early 2025 and the implementation of America First policies, Canadian travel sentiment shifted abruptly,” the report states.

According to a recent Pew Research Center survey, the number of Canadians willing to describe the U.S. as a “reliable partner” has dropped from 83 percent in 2022 to only 35 percent today.

No mystery here: Since the start of Trump’s second term, he has levied massive tariffs on Canadian goods, threatened Canadian sovereignty, and repeatedly insulted the Canadian people. Just last week, Canada rescinded its invitations to U.S. officials for the grand opening of the Michigan–Ontario Gordie Howe Bridge, days after Trump imposed new 50 percent tariffs on a wide range of Canadian goods and blamed the country for wildfire smoke drifting across America’s northern border. Trump’s threats to turn Canada into the “51st state” and references to Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney as a “governor” only add insult to injury.

But actions have consequences. As Canadians sour on the prospect of visiting the U.S., the American people are losing tourist dollars to the tune of $3.3 billion.

“In response to these measures and threats to Canadian sovereignty, provinces, territories, and Canadians from coast to coast to coast have stood together, taking the necessary actions to support our economy and defend our workers, farmers, businesses, and families,” Prime Minister Carney wrote in a statement following the latest round of tariffs. “In all circumstances, Canada will work relentlessly and take any measures necessary to build our strength at home and to support Canadian workers, farmers, businesses, and families.”

If only President Trump could say the same.

Over the weekend, Marc Rosenblum, who serves as executive director for the Office of Homeland Security Statistics, announced he would end his decade of service at the DHS, Wired reported Monday.

“I’m sad to suspend my career in public service and leave my amazing team,” Rosenblum wrote in a LinkedIn post. “But it will come as no surprise that I’m thrilled to end my relationship with the current administration.

“Between the war on immigrants, the war on feds, and the war on facts (not to mention the crazy war in Iran and the brazen corruption), I just need a change,” Rosenblum wrote.

Rosenblum spent years working to improve transparency at DHS, and spearheaded efforts to publish information on immigration arrests and deportations for the first time. But after the Trump administration launched its sweeping deportation efforts, DHS stopped publishing data on ICE detentions, Customs and Border Protection encounters, and deportations—gutting the department’s transparency and undermining accountability. Rosenblum told Wired that he and his co-workers had faced “a challenging and often hostile work environment.”

In his LinkedIn post, Rosenblum said he was taking a month off, but looking forward to taking up a new role that would “actually align with my values and those of most other Americans.”

Graham’s funeral drew TV personalities, top lawmakers, and foreign heads of state, including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy. Yet Donald Trump didn’t hesitate to veer wildly off course from his pre-written remarks while recalling Graham’s life before the elite crowd, pushing back on one critical detail: Graham’s popularity.

“Virtually everyone—Republican or Democrat—liked Lindsey,” said Trump before jumping from his script. “Well, not everybody. But it sounds good. Not everybody. He was a tough cookie, OK? I have to be—I have to veer from this for a second.

“He was a tough cookie, Darline, but he was beautiful,” Trump added, addressing Graham’s younger sister and temporary legislative successor, Darline Graham Nordone.

Trump takes issue with the Lindsey Graham eulogy he's reading: "Virtually everyone liked Lindsey. Well, not everybody. But it sounds good. I have to be honest. I have to veer from this for a second." pic.twitter.com/L5JwAXxWi0

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 28, 2026

Graham passed away on July 11 after what his office described as a “brief and sudden illness.” The next morning, a preliminary medical report found that Graham had died from a tear in his aorta due to the hardening of his arteries.

During his brief remarks before the mourning crowd, Trump acknowledged that he and Graham had become close friends during his time in politics, fondly recounting the time he publicized Graham’s cell phone number during a heated debate during the 2016 presidential election.

“He said, ‘I had that number for 20 years.’ His phone totally—I don’t know what he did with it. But it exploded. That was the beginning of friendship in a way,” Trump said. “But it was Lindsey who had the last laugh, because while I blew up his phone for one day, we became great friends and Lindsey did not stop calling me for the next 10 years.”

He also reminisced about Graham’s warmongering, sharing with the assembly that Graham “never saw a war he didn’t like.”

“He felt in his bones that our destiny is to win, and that his job was to do everything he could to ensure our enemies would lose,” Trump said.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit affirmed a lower court’s decision Tuesday, arguing that a Democratic lawsuit challenging Trump’s mail-in voting executive order was premature. This result could have disastrous implications for the upcoming midterm elections: Not only does Trump’s executive order direct the Department of Homeland Security to create a national citizenship registry list, but it also orders the U.S. Postal Service to withhold mail-in ballots from states that don’t share voter registration data with the federal government.

“Cheating on mail-in voting is legendary. It’s horrible, what’s gone on,” Trump said while signing the order in March. “Democrats want to use it for cheating.… I think this will help a lot with elections.”

In reality, mail-in voting is proven to be a secure and reliable method used by hundreds of thousands of voters across the political spectrum. The president himself has voted by mail in recent elections—but it’s OK when he does it, he says, “because I’m president.”

This new ruling from the D.C. Circuit comes only one day after Trump’s Department of Justice asked the Supreme Court to weigh in on the issue, calling the Democratic legal challenge “premature” and “hypothetical” because Trump’s executive order hasn’t yet been entirely implemented into DHS or USPS policy.

The administration’s language is reflected in Tuesday’s D.C. Circuit court ruling, which argues that the Democratic plaintiffs are concerned with “the lawfulness of proposed actions if implemented on the threshold of the upcoming federal election,” rather than actions that have already happened. In other words, Trump’s executive order might be breaking the law, but the court isn’t comfortable saying so until it’s too late.

“If the defendant agencies take steps to implement the Executive Order in a manner that violates federal law or the Constitution, Plaintiffs can promptly seek relief,” the decision says.

Trump’s attack on mail-in voting goes hand in hand with the SAVE Act, a massive voter suppression bill Trump is trying to ram through the Senate this week. These increasingly desperate attempts to stop Americans from voting underscore the fact that the midterms aren’t looking so good for Republicans—and Trump likely knows he can’t win without cheating.

The Steady State, a group of former national security and intelligence officials, has called for an independent probe into a three-page CIA note on China titled “Sensitive PRC Reporting from 2018-2020.” The document’s date and author are redacted, and it’s not clear where the memo came from within the folds of the CIA.

An analysis by the group found that it “departs in both style and format” from CIA drafting culture, and does not include the tell-tale signs of a CIA review.

Yet Trump directly quoted the file during his national prime-time address on July 16, ignoring its dubious origin.

“In mid-2018 the Chinese Communist Party’s policy was to leverage all domestic and foreign elements that were opposed to the U.S. president in an effort to reduce the U.S. president’s votes and make him resign or prevent his re-election,” Trump read from the document. “Isn’t that nice?”

Over the span of his 25-minute speech, Trump repeated thoroughly debunked claims that there was interference in the 2020 presidential election, and that the intelligence community had intentionally withheld information from him during his first term about China’s attempts to undermine U.S. election integrity.

Trump leveraged the CIA memo to implore the Justice Department to “fire those involved in the cover-up” and “file criminal charges if appropriate.”

But former intelligence officials have been wary of the document’s narrow perspective and thin context, suggesting that it could be a response to a targeted request from someone within the administration, MS NOW reported Tuesday.

Steven Cash, executive director of The Steady State and a former CIA and Department of Homeland Security official, told the digital news organization that he planned to send a letter Tuesday to top lawmakers about the note’s “anomalies.”

“It is particularly dangerous when intelligence products are presented piecemeal to the American people,” Cash wrote. “Confidence in the Intelligence Community is predicated not only on what it ultimately knows, but on the integrity of how its work is produced and presented.”

The released diary entries start from December 2019, right before the Covid-19 outbreak, and continue to December 2022, when Fauci left his position as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Paul released over 1,000 pages from the diary as part of an investigation into the origins of Covid-19, which Paul claims came from a laboratory leak in Wuhan, China.

The diary doesn’t have any kind of smoking gun on Covid’s origins, but it does show an inside view of different moments of the pandemic, as well as how Trump mishandled it. Fauci wrote glowingly about how he met Trump on January 29, 2020, in the White House Situation Room, and the president told him, “Anthony, you are really a famous guy. My good friend Lou Dobbs told me that you were one of the smartest, knowledgeable and outstanding persons he knows.”

“He then stayed for 20 minutes and asked most of his questions of me. I was surprised and very pleased and the deputies were clearly stunned and impressed,” Fauci wrote. He added that Trump thanked him after the meeting, telling him, “We are counting on you.”

Fauci’s entries show how Trump’s actions over the course of the pandemic quickly changed his mind. After a March 2020 press conference, Fauci complained about how Trump “wasted the opportunity to just focus on the relief package and went into his diatribe against previous administrations.”

Later, in August, Fauci wrote that he had a hard time explaining to Trump that increased testing did not increase Covid cases.

“All in all it was a manifestation that he is desperate and still does not understand the pandemic. Very interesting encounter,” Fauci wrote.

In November, Trump was angry at Fauci for a Washington Post report where Fauci said that Joe Biden’s campaign was “taking [the pandemic] seriously from a public health perspective,” while Trump was more concerned about the economy and reopening the country. Trump called Fauci and let loose.

“Tony, I really like you, and you know that, but what the f—k are you doing? You constantly drop bombs on me. Everybody wants me to fire you, but I am not going to fire you, you have too illustrious of a career, but you have to be positive,” Trump said on the call, according to Fauci.

“I like you but so many people, not only in the White House, but throughout the country hate you because of what you are doing.… And that f—ker Biden. He is so f—king stupid. You are 10 times smarter than he is. I am going to kick his f—king ass in this election. I will win by a landslide. Just wait and see.… Tony, you have to be positive. I do not want to keep you off TV, but when you are out there, you have to be positive.”

By March 2021, as vaccines became publicly available, Fauci called Trump an “obnoxious adolescent.”

Looking at these diary entries, it’s obvious that Fauci was simply trying to do his job in the face of an obstinate president, and wasn’t the devious or negligent mastermind that conspiracy theorists in the Republican Party make him out to be. They should be more concerned that Trump is back in power and can’t be trusted if a new pandemic arises.

FIFA announced Tuesday that it would create the FIFA Forward Enterprise, or FFE, a new business entity, to raise up to $4.2 million in the next year by “carefully selecting long-term investors who will purchase minority, non-controlling interests in FFE.”

Critics have decried the decision to sell stakes in the World Cup, which is managed by FIFA, a nonprofit organization. The move could potentially earn Infantino tens of millions of dollars.

To make matters worse, Infantino reportedly held investor discussions with members of the Trump administration, The Times reported Tuesday. The move comes amid mounting concerns over Infantino’s relationship with Donald Trump, after the president openly bullied FIFA into lifting a red card against a player on the U.S. men’s soccer team.

In addition, FIFA reportedly stated that once the approval was granted, the investor group would be led by Thrive Eternal, a venture capital firm run by Joshua Kushner, the brother of Trump’s son-in-law Jared who is under investigation for alleged corruption.

FIFA said that it planned to expand football development funding to more than $10 billion, “subject to approval by FIFA Member Associations.”

The UEFA Europa League immediately released a statement outright rejecting the proposal.

“This crosses a line that football’s governing institutions should never cross,” the statement said. “UEFA takes it extremely seriously. So should every National Football Association. So should every stakeholder: leagues, clubs, players, supporters, governments and everyone who cares about the future of the game. The soul and governance of football are not assets to trade—especially with zero transparency as to who gains financially.

“None of us are the owners of football. It is not FIFA’s to sell,” the statement said.

Inside Washington

A lot of Dems don’t like DNC Chair Ken Martin—but he’ll probably stay 

Recent reports about Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin’s temper and alleged financial mismanagement might not end Martin’s tenure, due to his strong relationships with DNC members and support from the Democratic establishment. But the reports do seem to have opened the floodgates for his critics: Many strategists and politicians suddenly have lots to say about Ken Martin.

Over the weekend, new details emerged about the DNC’s debts and financial troubles, casting doubt on Martin’s ability to fundraise and budget; The New York Times also reported that he is paranoid and anxious, and threw a phone at the desk of an aide in early July.

“The question is not whether or not Ken should go, the question is how much longer can we afford to keep him, because this is not sustainable,” said David Hogg, the president of Leaders We Deserve, on Monday. Hogg was a vice chair of the DNC during the first half of 2025, but stepped away from the role in June 2025 after tension between him and Martin.

Hogg pointed to concerns about Martin’s ability to fundraise for the party, particularly in light of a recent Supreme Court decision that makes party political spending all the more important. The Republican National Committee has $128 million in cash on hand; meanwhile, the DNC has $16 million on hand but is $18 million in debt. This June, the Supreme Court ruled that political parties can both coordinate with candidates and raise unlimited funds. In the aftermath of that ruling, political party fundraising is more important than ever. 

A March decision by the Federal Communications Commission also increased the importance of political party fundraising. According to federal communications law, candidates for office are entitled to purchase campaign advertising on television and radio networks at a cheaper rate than outside groups. In March, the FCC expanded that benefit to political party committees acting in coordination with candidates—meaning that every dollar raised by a political party can go further to buy ads for candidates.

Martin pushed back on the idea that he had failed at his fundraising duties in a Substack post last week. “We are converting the cash we raise into electoral assets: more people, earlier organizing, better technology, and stronger state parties,” Martin wrote. “That answer may be unsatisfying to people who believe the purpose of a political party is to accumulate the largest possible bank balance until the final days before an election. But a party is not a savings account. Its purpose is to build power.”

Hogg didn’t suggest a specific name for who he’d like to see replace Martin. “There’s a lot of people I can think of that, at a minimum, would not put the organization $2 million in debt,” he said. On Sunday, longtime Democratic strategist James Carville suggested that Hogg should succeed Martin; Hogg didn’t comment in time for publication. 

Hogg is far from the only Democrat who’s lost faith in Martin. On Monday, politician and strategist Rufus Gifford weighed in against Martin on Substack. Gifford was deputy campaign manager for Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign and finance chair for Biden’s presidential reelection campaign. 

“At this point, I think there is no saving Martin’s chairmanship,” Gifford wrote. “He is a good man with good intentions but simply not meeting this critical moment.”

Some Democrats on the Hill have spoken out against Martin, too. In an X post on Sunday, Representative Sam Liccardo called for Martin’s resignation. Representative Veronica Escobar wrote, “There are a number of great democratic leaders who can very competently, brilliantly and strategically lead the DNC. And they’re all women.”

Despite the public anger against Martin, he still seems to enjoy strong support from the people who elected him in the first place—DNC members, many of whom are state party chairs and vice chairs. One longtime Democratic strategist told The New Republic that Martin has served those members well by funneling money toward their state parties. “He did what every good politician should do, which is fulfill the promise of their election to their electorate,” the strategist said. “The problem is, there are less than 500 people who elect the DNC chair, who has to represent 80 million people who vote Democrat. And the overwhelming majority outside that 500 do not think Ken Martin is doing a good job.”

That strategist, like Hogg, pointed towards Martin’s fundraising woes as the most concerning aspect of his leadership. Martin won the chair over then–Wisconsin state party Chair Ben Wikler, who had the support of major donors like Reid Hoffman and Alexander Soros. After beating Wikler, Martin denied that he had to mend relationships with the donors who had supported his opponent: “I don’t have any repair work to do,” he told The New York Times. “If they want to talk to me, they can come talk to me.”

“It’s not [donors’] job to reach out to him. It’s his job to reach out to them. Basic job,” said the strategist on Monday. “And that was his quote the day after he was elected, and then we’re shocked that he can’t fundraise?” 

Not everyone is convinced that Martin should step down. Micah Sifry, a writer and organizer who covers the DNC extensively, said he viewed the recent reporting on Martin with “skepticism,” and contrasted Martin’s tenure with that of Jaime Harrison, who chaired the DNC from 2021 to 2025. Harrison, Sifry said, “didn’t do much to strengthen state Democratic parties, and he did diddly-squat to support local organizing by Democrats.” In comparison, Sifry suggested, Martin’s financial decisions, organized on the principle of sending money out to state and local efforts, make more sense.

Martin received an important vote of confidence on Sunday, when House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries affirmed his support for the chair. “What we’ve seen over the last 18-plus months is that Democrats have won every single meaningful election up and down the ballot across the country during that period of time, and we look forward to our continued partnership,” Jeffries said. 

Jeffries’s endorsement is a strong signal for Martin’s future as chair. But then again, Jeffries himself has struggled to consolidate Democrats, particularly those on the left—this election cycle is testing Democratic divides in more ways than one.

—Emma Janssen

Outside Washington

The new normal 

In addition to new headlines of potentially record-breaking wildfires in France and Spain, there remain an estimated 122 active fires in northwestern Ontario, Canada, 90 active wildfires in British Columbia, Canada, and 90 “large” fires in the United States. If you want to read recent analysis of how we got here, and what to do about it, you’ve got a lot of options. 

Earlier this month, Chip Barber, the director of natural resources governance and policy at the World Resources Institute, penned a piece about the policy changes that could help in this era of worsening wildfires. Modern policymakers could learn a lot from Indigenous fire management, he wrote. But another piece of the puzzle will be “changing political and economic structures that have made fire catastrophe more likely.” He pointed in particular to how many fires are deliberately set due to “agricultural expansion” driven by “global demand for soy, beef, palm oil, and wood.” For other analyses of the fires, you could try The New York Times reporter Chico Harlan’s piece about how “record-setting heat waves and dry conditions” set the stage for Europe’s fires; climate researcher Zeke Hausfather’s review of the “forest mismanagement” narrative on Canadian wildfires; UCLA researchers Mitchell J. Hung and A. Park Williams’s study, released earlier this summer, about the uptick in California fires; or the Public Policy Institute of California’s Bradley Franklin and Kyle Greenspan on how federal cuts endanger the state’s progress on wildfire prevention.

Elsewhere:

• Question of the week: Why has Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer waded into the hotly contested Senate primary to endorse Haley Stevens over Abdul El-Sayed, barely a week before voting day, after 690,000 Michiganders have already voted by mail or absentee ballot, and when almost all polls show El-Sayed leading Stevens—some recent ones by double digits?
• Newsweek compiles a map of what it deems the most important counties in the Texas Senate race. The publication is particularly intrigued by Starr, Cameron, Webb, and Maverick counties, which have often voted Democratic but in which Trump’s share of the vote increased dramatically between 2016 and 2024. For context: In 2018, Democratic Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke got 71 percent of the vote in Webb, 72 percent in Maverick, 77 percent in Starr, and 63 percent in Cameron.

—Heather Souvaine Horn

The Ideas Factory

Tuesday at 11 a.m. California time (2 p.m. Eastern), the Public Policy Institute of California holds a virtual event about more sustainable crops for the imperiled but vital farmland of the San Joaquin Valley. Speakers include the think tank’s Letitia Grenier, Caitlin Peterson, and Bradley Franklin, along with Geoffrey Vanden Heuvel of the Milk Producers Council, Sustainable Conservation CEO Josette Lewis, and public policy mediator Dave Ceppos.

At 1 p.m. E.T. on Tuesday, the Bipartisan Policy Center hosts a virtual event titled “Aging of America: Improving Long-Term Care, Nutrition, and Housing for Older Adults.” Participants include Lisa Harootunian, a managing director at BPC; Rani E. Snyder, president of the John A. Hartford Foundation; Alison Barkoff, a George Washington University professor and former acting administrator and assistant secretary for aging at the Administration for Community Living; Kim Fitzgerald, CEO of Cathedral Square; Tim Getty, regional nutrition manager at the Heritage Area Agency on Aging; Beth Kowalczyk, CEO of the Ohio Association of Area Agencies on Aging; and Robert Blancato, executive director of the National Association of Nutrition and Aging Services Programs.

On Wednesday from 9:30 to 10:30 a.m. E.T., the Center for American Progress holds a morning event with Senator Catherine Cortez Masto “on the urgent need for accountability and commonsense immigration policies, for Nevada and the nation.” Following Cortez Masto’s keynote remarks, America’s Voice Executive Director Vanessa Cárdenas will moderate a panel featuring First Focus on Children President Bruce Lesley, Somos Votantes founder Melissa Morales, and American Enterprise Institute senior fellow Stan Veuger.

—Heather Souvaine Horn

In Closing

Four Questions For: Daniel Drezner, foreign policy expert

Interview by Grace Segers  

Q: Who are you, and what are you working on right now?

A: I’m the academic dean and distinguished professor of international politics at the Fletcher School at Tufts University, and also the author of the Substack newsletter Drezner’s World.

Q: What foreign policy story do you believe is underreported right now?

A: The slow-motion destruction of the U.S foreign policy machinery. Between military and civilian purges, it’s tough to appreciate the human capital loss in places like the State Department, the Department of Defense, and the intelligence community.

Q: Who is the smartest foreign policy voice in the U.S. government right now?

A: This is like asking me who is the tallest baby, in that I’m not sure the answer is all that useful. There are some smart people in this administration, but they seem wedded to the whims of an immature leader. So I’ll say it’s someone in Congress—Mark Kelly or Chris Murphy.

Q: What keeps you going in these difficult times?

A: The notion that even with the current administration of dunces, this country still has many inherent strengths and values that a competent administration could use to advance U.S. interests and traditional U.S. values.  

Political Trivia Question of the Day

What was the biggest Electoral College landslide in U.S. history? We mean most lopsided, not the highest number of votes. (Sign up for The Blue Book to find the answer in tomorrow’s newsletter.) 

Nixon Giovanni Pérez Paz and his wife, Glendy Marisol González de la Cruz, were found gagged with their hands and feet bound, showing signs of physical trauma, St. Louis Public Radio reports. Their 14-month-old daughter, Giovanni, was found crying next to her mother, with signs of dehydration. She’s now recovering in a medical center.

“I felt that they took the thing I wanted most,” Rolando Pérez Paz, Pérez Paz’s brother, told STLPR. “I felt a huge pain because it was my brother, my sister-in-law—people that wanted to work, to fight.”

Nixon Giovanni Pérez Paz and Ronaldo were driving to their roofing jobs in April 2025 near their home in Overland, Missouri, when they were stopped by ICE agents, who emerged from an unmarked car and pulled them out of their white work van. The agents told them that there wasn’t a warrant for their arrests but that they were being detained for lacking legal status.

González de la Cruz initially stayed in Overland, giving birth to their daughter last year and working two manual labor jobs to support the couple’s three children. But financial pressures mounted, and she was afraid she would be detained and separated from her children despite an active asylum case, organizers with St. Louis immigrant rights group Fuerza, which she was working with, told STLPR. So she decided to self-deport to Guatemala with her children to join her husband.

The couple was reported missing in Guatemala on July 20 after attempting to register a motorcycle in a nearby town, Rolando Pérez Paz told the radio outlet. In the last few months, the family struggled with money and had trouble with violence and the federal government—issues that had led them to seek asylum in the U.S. in the first place.

An ICE spokesperson told the radio outlet that Nixon Pérez Paz had two convictions for drunk driving, but STLPR did not find any court records to confirm that account. The spokesperson also said that Nixon Pérez Paz had an open container charge in Palm Beach, Florida, in 2010, but prosecutors had dropped that.

“If immigration hadn’t picked up my brother, my sister-in-law would still be alive, and the children wouldn’t be going through this sorrow,” Ronaldo told the radio outlet. He’s now caring for his three young nieces but doesn’t know how to explain their parents’ deaths to them.

“Unfortunately, immigration—the [U.S.] government—doesn’t see that. It makes no difference to them.”

President Trump claimed this week that he’s talking to Iran “right now,” but Iran’s foreign ministry has fervently denied that claim, saying it’s not interested in direct negotiations. When asked about the contradiction on Fox News Tuesday, Trump struggled to explain.

“We hear that you’re talking right now with leaders on Iran,” Fox News’s Brian Kilmeade said. “But Iran has come out publicly and said, ‘We’re not talking to the U.S.”

“Well, they just came out and said ‘We are talking’ a little while ago,” Trump interrupted. 

“So could you tell me who you’re talking to, Mr. President?” 

“For some reason, we can be in the midst of a beautiful discussion, and they’ll come out and say, ‘We’re not talking’ or ‘We didn’t discuss nuclear.’ Well, that’s all we discussed, because they’ll never have a nuclear weapon, they understand that,” Trump said, avoiding answering the direct question. “We’ve had some very good talks.” 

He then went on to change the subject entirely, instead discussing recently deceased Senator Lindsey Graham’s insistence upon an Iran deal—surprising, if true, given the late senator’s violent, hawkish approach to foreign policy. 

“He was very much a hawk … [even] he was somebody that said it was a good time to make a deal.… Lindsey liked war, to be honest with you.”  

It does not inspire confidence when the president can’t confidently say who he has been in contact with while supposedly trying to negotiate an end to his increasingly unpopular and expensive war. This conversation came after a recent pause in violence in the region, and ahead of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to the White House on Tuesday—in which he most likely lobbied Trump to start bombing Iran again. 

KILMEADE: We hear that you're talking with leaders from Iran. But Iran has come out publicly and said 'we're not talking to the US'

TRUMP: Well, they just came out and said we are talking

KILMEADE: So could you tell me who you're talking to?

TRUMP: We've had some very good… pic.twitter.com/bAqKISTbjU

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 28, 2026

The president is reportedly losing faith in his health secretary’s ability to slash childhood vaccines. The issue came to a head during a May lunch at Trump’s National Golf Club in northern Virginia, when Trump pressed Kennedy as to why he wasn’t doing more to probe the (widely debunked) tie between vaccines and autism. At the time, Trump told Kennedy point blank that he believed the secretary “had the yips,” The Wall Street Journal wrote Monday night, citing sources familiar with the conversation.

The topic reared its head again at a mid-June meeting between the two men in the Oval Office, during which Trump lamented that Kennedy simply wasn’t doing enough.

Trump reportedly believes he has given Kennedy ample time to prove himself, and is disappointed that Kennedy hasn’t made more progress.

Practically every conversation between Trump and his health secretary circles back to the vaccine conspiracy, reported the Journal. The president has shared with his aides that he believes Kennedy will be a failure if he fails to produce results.

In fact, lobbyists and Department of Health and Human Services staffers suspect that Trump will replace Kennedy with Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services chief Dr. Mehmet Oz, likely after the midterms, the Journal reported.

Trump regularly turns to Oz for health policy advice, even on issues that have nothing to do with Oz’s agency. Oz, in turn, makes sure Trump gets his way every time.

The president’s priorities on the matter have since been made clear: HHS must do more to peel back the federal guidelines for the childhood vaccine schedule, reducing the number of shots given to children.

Sources who spoke with the Journal suggested that the president is all in on the anti-vax conspiracy, sharing that Trump expects to see autism rates drop as a result of the decreased inoculations.

Limiting vaccine access was a core tenet of Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy Again” agenda—until White House advisers pressured him to lie low, fearing that his rabble-rousing, anti-science ideology could further harm Republican odds come November.

Already at issue at the ballot box: the price of food, the price of oil, the price of water, the price of energy. Yet Republicans have failed to offer a resonant message to keep their party in power. Instead, Trump started an inexplicable war with Iran that has exacerbated the already astronomical cost of living. He has also slashed taxes for the wealthy and stalled the mechanics of Congress by strong-arming his allies into supporting his wildly unpopular voter suppression bill, the SAVE Act.

Meanwhile, Kennedy is running HHS with practically zero relevant experience. He has not worked in medicine, public health, or the government—rather, he is guided only by a pocketful of conspiracies that America’s foremost health experts have already thoroughly debunked, and his off-the-wall notions about health have thus far proved disastrous for the agency.

Kennedy has transformed HHS, replacing independent medical experts on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s vaccine advisory panel with a hodgepodge of vaccine skeptics. He also overhauled the child vaccination schedule without notifying his staffers, a decision that could potentially affect vaccine access and insurance coverage for millions of American families in the coming years.

As a reminder: Since their invention, vaccines have proven to be one of the greatest accomplishments of modern medicine. The medical shots are so effective at preventing illness that they have effectively eradicated some of the worst diseases from our collective culture, from rabies to polio and smallpox—a fact that has possibly fooled some into believing that the viruses and their complications aren’t a significant threat to the average, health-conscious individual.

The Atlantic filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit Monday, arguing that Patel’s suit did not  “plausibly allege” that the magazine had published any of the challenged statements with actual malice. 

“Complaint fails to state a viable defamation claim against Defendants,” the filing said.

Journalist Sarah Fitzpatrick had reported in April that Patel was known to drink to excess, delay time-sensitive operations, behave erratically, and was often unreachable, raising concerns about whether he was a national security risk. Patel filed the lawsuit alleging the article was “replete with false and obviously fabricated allegations designed to destroy Director Patel’s reputation and drive him from office.”

In response to the latest filing, the FBI’s Rapid Response account on X posted its own rant Monday night against the publication, seemingly on behalf of its director. 

“The Atlantic spends its days propagating false narratives because it has zero interest in any form of real journalism. It adds no value to society except as the leading slop rag of the day,” the FBI wrote. The account then proceeded to rant about several of the FBI’s recent “historic wins.”

Is it normal for a government agency to get down in the mud for its beleaguered director? In Trumpworld, maybe. 

The Atlantic also filed a motion to stay discovery, except for Touhy requests, allowing the publication to seek factual discovery—documents and depositions from key individuals—from the FBI and Department of Justice.

“If Director Patel did not want to face this process, he should not have filed this suit,” editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg said in a statement.

DeWine said in an interview with CBS Monday that Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations against the Haitian community would be bad for Ohio’s economy and that of Springfield in particular, where many Haitians have settled. 

“These are people who have helped Springfield really come back,” DeWine said to CBS, explaining that Haitians have filled jobs and opened businesses where the economy once struggled. “The Haitians who are living there and employed there, they came there to work, and they came there because there were jobs that were not being filled by other people.”

DeWine also noted that Haiti’s security and political situation is still unstable, with gangs controlling large parts of the country and the capital, Port-au-Prince. The State Department has warned Americans not to travel there, and DeWine described the country as being in “virtual chaos” with “no semblance of government.”  

“Haiti is hell today. So you’d be sending people … back to hell,” DeWine said. “Very few of these Haitians will voluntarily go back to Haiti. If they have to leave, they’ll go someplace else. They want to work. They want to support their family. They don’t want to go back to Haiti.”

To the Trump administration, none of this matters. White House adviser Stephen Miller is excited about the prospect of deporting Haitians. He has claimed that Haiti is safe “for Haitians” and celebrated the Supreme Court’s ruling allowing the administration to end Temporary Protected Status.

“We can finally remove these Haitian illegal migrants,” Miller said.

More than 300,000 people are set to lose those protections this week, and many of them are among the 12,000 to 15,000 Haitians that live in and around Springfield. Back in 2024, President Trump spread a racist rumor that the community was “eating cats and dogs.” Now, Ohio’s economy could suffer a $400 million loss, and people are in danger of being sent to a war zone because of Trump and his administration’s racist deportation policy. 

Netanyahu is meeting with Trump at the White House on Tuesday for the first time since February, when he ensured the U.S. was ready to go to war with Iran. The Israeli prime minister had spent months lobbying the White House, and Trump’s aides did little to dissuade the U.S. president from joining in on the attack. Now Netanyahu may ask for more.

Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon told Politico that the anti-interventionist sect of Trump’s allies, who brand themselves as “America First,” aren’t happy.

“I think all of President Trump’s most ardent non-‘Israel First’ supporters are furious,” Bannon said. “Netanyahu has had twice as many visits to the White House in 18 months as Churchill had in all of World War II—with every one of them a disaster for America First.”

Netanyahu is visiting the U.S. for the seventh time since the beginning of Trump’s second term.

The meeting comes amid growing frustration between the two allies, as Trump and Vice President JD Vance have become more publicly critical of Israel and its continued aggression in Lebanon.

The meeting also follows Trump’s nascent nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia, which he has claimed is contingent on the country signing onto the Abraham Accords in order to normalize relations with Israel. Only it seems that the Trump administration has no idea how to enforce that, given that the deal is already signed.

“I am addressing this letter to Senator McConnell under the assumption that he is capable of reading and responding verbally, and not incapacitated by means of consciousness or cognition. If the Senator is unable to respond for either of those or other conditions, consider this letter a demand for his Senate staff to be honest and transparent with the people of Kentucky,” Beshear wrote Monday in a letter to McConnell obtained by CNN.

McConnell has been in the hospital for a whopping 43 days with no explanation. He has not said what exactly is ailing him or when he will return. He hasn’t even spoken directly on camera, leading to speculation that he is verbally incapacitated after being found unconscious in his Washington, D.C., home. All he’s done is post two very unconvincing photos in which he is sitting and smiling blankly with his wife, Elaine Chao.

His office last released an update on Monday, writing in a statement (first person, in McConnell’s voice) that he wouldn’t return to Congress anytime soon, but was “looking forward to getting back to the Senate and to Kentucky.”

In an accompanying statement, the Office of the Attending Physician noted that doctors were meeting with McConnell every day. That wasn’t enough for Beshear.

“Even the attending physician’s written statement does not discuss your actual condition, including whether you can speak, reason, or carry out your duties as a senator. I understand anyone’s desire for privacy, but when you run for office and serve as one of a state’s two US senators, you willingly abdicate much of your personal privacy,” Beshear wrote. “As Governor of the state you serve, I am calling on you to directly and verbally address the people of Kentucky and provide proof of your capacity to serve, or resign.”

Beshear also urged Senate Majority Leader John Thune to press McConnell’s office for some real information in an effort to “be honest and transparent with the people of Kentucky.”

While the language in Beshear’s letter is strong, it likely won’t do anything. McConnell, like every member of Congress, can essentially go on paid medical leave for as long as he wants. The fact that our elected officials don’t really have to prove that they can walk, talk, and think coherently—while we still pay them—is disgraceful. Maybe Beshear should just pay McConnell a visit himself, and bring a camera crew with him.

The jarring news came by way of a Trump-style X post early Tuesday, in which acting DNI Bill Pulte wrote that “in addition to the Historic DECLASSIFICATIONS (Transparency!) by the President, we are, this morning, Executing a 5th and Near Final Round of TERMINATIONS, an approximately 30% Staff Reduction from Weeks Ago.”

Pulte took over the office on June 19 following Tulsi Gabbard’s sudden exit. Gabbard had previously claimed she fired 500 people—also about 30 percent of the agency’s workforce at the time—during her 16-month stint at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

“The Intelligence Community must protect the American people, NOT the political whims of the bloated and corrupt elite class,” Pulte added.

It is unclear just how many employees Pulte has laid off at ODNI—an office created in the wake of 9/11 to improve communication between America’s powerful national security agencies—but earlier this month, The Washington Post reported that 200 ODNI employees had been laid off or reassigned since June 1.

The fifth layoff announcement came two days after Pulte released a batch of recently declassified documents detailing threats by foreign governments to influence prior elections—most notably, the 2020 presidential cycle.

Pulte, who also serves as the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, was a shocking choice for the job. The law requires national security experience for the position, but the 38-year-old came into the role with none—a failure that actually shut down negotiations in Congress last month as Democrats refused to entertain rumors that Donald Trump would nominate Pulte to take over ODNI in a more permanent capacity.

Yet Pulte’s time at ODNI will soon be up: His nominated successor, Jay Clayton, is expected to be confirmed by the Senate Tuesday night. Clayton will also enter the role with zero national security experience, and, like Pulte, has seeded doubts about the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.

Thom Tillis and John Cornyn, who hold Blanche’s future in their hands, are particularly concerned with the status of President Trump’s $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund,” a controversial move to provide financial assistance to anyone who feels they’ve been attacked for supporting the president. Cornyn noted in Blanche’s most recent confirmation hearing that even though Blanche claimed the fund was dead, there was no written agreement to actually kill it.

Now, he’s demanding it in writing.

“What I want is the written document to say the same thing he did in his sworn testimony in front of the Judiciary Committee, and, as you recall, what he said is the weaponization fund is dead. He said the audit immunity basically doesn’t extend to parties beyond the lawsuit, and it doesn’t also extend to future actions by federal agencies other than the IRS,” Cornyn said on Monday. “That’s what we’re trying to get them to agree to, which is again what his sworn testimony was. So I don’t know why they’re—I don’t know why they’re so reluctant to do that when he’s already sworn to it.”

Tillis, too, said he wants changes to the settlement agreement with the IRS, which created the $1.776 billion slush fund and gave the Trump family immunity from future IRS audits.

Tillis previously threatened to block Blanche’s nomination unless he met with survivors of Jeffrey Epstein. Blanche did so earlier this month, but survivors said the meeting was “demoralizing,” as Blanche continued to avoid answering their questions.

“It just felt like more political posturing and using survivors the way that we’ve been used as political pawns,” Epstein survivor and anti-human trafficking educator Elizabeth Stein said at the time.

Cornyn and Tillis’s “no” votes would effectively kill Blanche’s nomination, as he needs the support of all 11 Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee to move forward. As of right now, it looks like he won’t get it. The Senate Judiciary is planning to vote to advance Blanche’s nomination on Thursday.

According to court documents, a grand jury witness for the government said that the pool was damaged before Hearn even approached it. NBC News reports that this witness was the only person who testified about damage to the pool.

Hearn, who has pleaded not guilty, maintains that “the condition of the Reflecting Pool was the same after I stepped away from the water as it was before I got there,” and that he only touched a part of the pool’s detached coating. President Trump claims that vandals used a knife or blade to cause a “gash” in the pool’s lining, but has no evidence to back up his claim.

Hearn has been charged with destruction of property, a felony, and accused of causing $1,000 worth of damage to the pool. His lawyers question the evidence behind that claim, noting that the alleged cost is the necessary threshold to charge him with a felony. At least three other people have been charged with misdemeanors related to incidents at the pool.

Hearn’s lawyers said that the government’s main witness testimony “established that the pool had substantial preexisting damage requiring repair before any alleged conduct by Mr. Hearn.”

“The government’s only witness on that element testified that the property was already deteriorated, that the identified repairs would have been needed even without Mr. Hearn’s alleged conduct, and that he could not quantify any loss caused by that conduct,” they continued. “Consequently, the grand jury’s indictment of Mr. Hearn is hard to explain. Mr. Hearn needs to learn whether the grand jury was properly instructed that the charge required him to have caused over $1,000 in damages, when the testimony failed to establish that he caused any damage at all. So does this Court.”

It would seem like the government’s case may soon fall apart, just like the pool lining, which was likely damaged by President Trump in the first place.

Florida Republicans totally changed the state’s districts earlier this year to create more GOP-held U.S. House seats. Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the onetime Democratic National Committee chair who has been in the House since 2005, is among those whose district has been redrawn. So instead of running in the now Republican-leading 25th district that she currently represents, the congresswoman is seeking another term from the 20th district in South Florida, which is heavily Democratic. But the area that now comprises the 20th district has long been represented by a Black House member. So the 20th district primary has turned into a battle over race and ideology. Several Black candidates are running and blasting Wasserman Schultz for pursuing a seat that could be held by a Black person at a time when Republicans are diminishing Black representation throughout the South. One of those Black candidates is Elijah Manley, an educator. In the latest edition of Right Now, Manley discussed both his candidacy and the divides within the Democratic Party. He criticized Wasserman Schultz for past votes for military aid to Israel, said the Democratic Party needs more fighters, and described himself as a progressive in the mold of Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The primary is August 18.

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

The Trump administration has quietly let it be known that it will not block the extradition of Andrew and Tristan Tate to Britain, where they’re set to face new criminal charges of rape and sex trafficking. This is dividing MAGA, with most MAGA figures rapidly distancing themselves from the Tates, who are big MAGA manosphere superstars, and other MAGA figures defending them. Yet there’s another layer to the story that matters for Democrats and liberals. The Tate brothers’ travails highlight a failing on our part. We all overread the meaning of Trump’s 2024 successes with young men, and as a result, we’ve hamstrung ourselves in winning them back now.

Moira Donegan, a columnist for The Guardian, has a good new piece arguing that we have to break out of that rut. So we’re talking to her about all of it today. Moira, nice to have you on.

Moira Donegan: Thank you so much for having me, Greg. It’s great to be here.

Sargent: So let’s start with who the Tate brothers are. Why are they so important in the MAGA manosphere and MAGA universe? And what is it that they reflect about Trump’s successes with young men?

Donegan: Yeah, so the Tate brothers are really a pair of influencers. Andrew and Tristan Tate are brothers who grew up in the U.K. And Andrew had a career as a professional kickboxer before a star turn on the British reality TV show Big Brother.

But he was kicked off of that show for his alleged treatment of women. And that really became a jumping-off point for the brothers, who became far-right, anti-feminist, anti-woman influencers, as well as running an online pornography business. And they parlayed that into a really pretty massive following, and into some connections with the American right.

And I think in 2024 in particular, the Donald Trump campaign tried to harness what is known as the manosphere—this kind of network of often very popular, far-right, anti-feminist, sort of ideologically misogynist content creators who have achieved a pretty widespread degree of popularity with young men and teenage boys. And the MAGA movement’s courtship of Andrew and Tristan Tate was really the sort of centerpiece of that project.

Sargent: All right, so the Tate brothers were just arrested in Miami, and the U.K.’s prosecution service says they face seven counts of rape, three counts involving sex trafficking, three counts of assault, and 19 related to porn. The Trump administration has quietly announced that it won’t intervene, which means they are going to get sent back.

But that’s not all. Many people around Trump are abandoning the Tates now, including Donald Jr., Barron Trump, Alina Habba, Candace Owens, and many more. Given all this, it’s likely that Trump has signaled to his loyalists that the Tates are now finished in MAGA world, right? Moira, what do you make of all this?

Donegan: Well, it’s a real 180 from where we were just under a year ago. Because last year, the Tates were actually under house arrest in Romania, where they had headquartered their sort of porn camgirl empire, and where they were accused, once again, of sexual violence and sex trafficking.

In that case, members of the Trump administration, then sort of newly restored to power, leaned on the Romanian authorities quite heavily to allow the Tates to leave the nation of Romania, to be released from house arrest, to be released from their travel ban, and to escape the prosecution there. That Romanian investigation has since really ground to a halt, right?

And this is also kind of a revival of the British charges, because these incidents that the Tates are being prosecuted for now in the U.K. stem from actions they allegedly took between 2010 and 2017. That British investigation had been further hampered—a sort of civil review indicated that there was widespread police misconduct in that case, right?

So what you have seen now is these old charges being revived, after the Tate brothers had been protected both by police malfeasance and by the Trump administration’s intervention in these other jurisdictions.

Sargent: Right. So it’s not like Trump is shy about intervening on behalf of the Tates. By the way, you do have some in MAGA standing by the Tates. Tucker Carlson says the Tates are getting prosecuted because they “criticized Israel.” One Republican congressman, Abe Hamadeh, opposed extradition, describing the prosecution of the Tates as lawfare. Prominent MAGA influencer Vincent Oshana called the charges politically driven.

Moira, I think the key thing here is that Tucker and these others are actually speaking to a real existing constituency with this stuff. There’s still a bloc of young men out there who in some sense see Trump, or at least some around him, as kind of MAGA establishment sellouts, right? They’re allied with Israel, they’re going to war for Israel, they won’t stand by the Tates when they’re getting prosecuted for rape. They’re total establishment squishes, basically, right?

Donegan: You know, I think it’s really interesting to see who is lining up behind the Tates even now, in 2026, and who is throwing them overboard after sort of sticking their necks out for them in 2025. The MAGA coalition is big, and it’s always been more internally contradictory than I think the conventional media narratives about it have given credit for, right?

So MAGA, the far right in America in general, really has unified a bunch of different interests, a bunch of different styles of conservatism, around, among other things, a real contempt of women—anti-feminism, misogyny, male supremacy, and male domination. These have been a glue that has held together a lot of different strands of conservatism, right?

But of those different strands, Tate’s style of vulgar, aggressively sexual, lewd, promiscuous masculinity is not the sole style. I think it is closest to Donald Trump’s personal preferred style of masculinity—the sort of tight clothes, fast cars, and sort of sexual braggadociousness. That does seem Trump to me.

But there’s other elements in the coalition that are looking for a more, you know, puritanical rather than prurient form of sexual politics. I’m thinking, of course, of Ben Shapiro, the far-right Jewish but, quite sexually staid, we might say, influencer, who has tried to make his mark on the MAGA coalition. I’m thinking of JD Vance, who is trying to position himself as a sort of emissary between Silicon Valley and the Christian far right.

And I think as we look to the post-Trump reordering of this coalition, you’re going to see these kinds of masculinity come into question. Not because any of these guys or these forces on the conservative right are suddenly rediscovering the value of women’s dignity and having some sort of woke feminist awakening, but because their preferred style of masculinity, their preferred sort of aesthetic of power, doesn’t really have room for guys like the Tates.

Sargent: I think it’s worth reviewing some history here just for a second to get at what you’re saying. So Donald Trump wins in 2016, and in a very big and famous moment, he insults Hillary Clinton’s looks from behind during a debate. So he abuses Hillary relentlessly, misogynistically. It’s just disgusting all the way down. Same happens in 2024. He abuses Kamala Harris, only there’s not just misogyny, there’s also racism thrown in.

And so back to 2016 for a sec—remember, the “grab ‘em by the you-know-what” video broke, and that actually got a certain demographic kind of excited about Trump. And so I think that the group of men, the constituency that Tucker is talking to and the others who are defending the Tates, is worth dwelling on for a sec.

What is this group? This is a group that saw Trump say “grab ‘em by the you-know-what,” that saw Trump insult Hillary, that saw Trump insult Harris, and thought, a violent misogynist—that’s what I want. That’s what they really want, isn’t it?

Donegan: I think there is a section of right-wing populism in America that has really succeeded in casting anti-feminism and ideological misogyny as a kind of anti-elite sentiment, right? After the 2010s—when women’s workforce participation, their cultural visibility as leaders and consumers and arbiters of culture, was sort of at its peak—there was an effort in these online spaces, particularly targeting young men, to cast feminism as sort of the ideology of the elites, to cast the corporate overlords who were screwing over the working man as a bunch of women.

You see this glossed sometimes in vernacular parlance as “HR lady” politics, right? The sense of Democrats, of corporate elites, of the wealthy, of the credentialed, as being both, girls—and girls in the sense of scolding, unfun, maternal figures who are telling you to clean your room.

And Donald Trump positions himself as a vindication of masculine prerogatives, somebody who would not tell men to cultivate virtues, but would encourage them to sort of signal and embrace their own vices. This sort of male id was really at the center of that style of right-wing populism.

I think now, a decade into the project, that notion is wearing a little thin, right? Because people are sort of waking up to the reality that not only are their corporate bosses and overlords not exactly women in anything like a majority or even preponderance—the masculine far right has been in power, with the Biden interregnum excluded, for that past 10 years.

I think people are looking at their own pocketbooks, at the price of gas, at the state of the country, and saying, well, I’m not really sure that these guys have done such a good job either.

Sargent: So let’s talk about what’s really going on with young men right now. Republican pollster Mitchell Brown told The Washington Post that men under 40 are the most at risk for Republicans at this moment. That group was important for Trump in 2024. So that’s a real sea change, for men under 40 to be deserting Republicans. It goes to kind of the core of what you said earlier, which is that now that people are getting a glimpse of, you know, manosphere governance, it’s not looking so good right now.

But I think it’s also clear, though, that Democrats got overly spooked by Trump’s success with that group. They decided that he had tapped something deep and enduring and essential about the current generation of young people in America, especially young men. I think all the talk about finding a Democratic Joe Rogan was symptomatic of that sense of being spooked. How do Democrats get out of this?

Obviously, they have this opportunity right now. Young men are realizing, holy shit, we made this huge mistake. This guy’s trying to send us to war. He’s making our economic situation even more precarious. He promised us that we’d be really economically powerful. And so how do Democrats break out of that weird rut that they’re in, where they just keep deciding that Trump has tapped something essential, and speak to the young men who really are now in play?

Donegan: It goes to the heart of how you interpret the 2024 election, right? Either the 2024 election was a historically bounded and contingent moment about a global backlash to incumbent parties and to rising inflation, or the 2024 election reflected a sort of permanent cultural shift that revealed an implacable truth about America. I think in the months immediately following that election, a lot of people put their money on the latter, and are now sort of coming to understand that maybe it was more like the former.

You know, these young male voters did shift pretty dramatically to the Republican Party in 2024. But the drama of that shift indicates to me now, as we look towards the 2026 midterms, that perhaps that shift was a little shallow. Perhaps the commitment to a far-right Trumpist MAGA vision was less firm than a lot of people initially said.

I do think you’re right, Greg, that the Democrats really got spooked after 2024 about men. They took the lesson that, you know, they ran Hillary Clinton in 2016 and lost, they ran Joe Biden in 2020 and won, and then they ran Kamala Harris in 2024 and lost. And they took this lesson that their own party was not sufficiently masculine.

I should say, this is not a uniform assessment within Democratic Party operatives. It’s not exactly an ideologically coherent assessment within Democratic Party operatives. You see people from the left, right, and center of the Democratic Party all trying to make the party a little more masculine, trying to recruit more manly men, trying to court male voters.

But there is this sort of over-identification, I think, with the Republicans’ theory of the case—that, only white male candidates can win, and only white male votes are really worth getting. And I think you see that in a few of the missteps that the party has made over the past few months, such as—I’m sorry to say it—the selection of Graham Platner in Maine, who was chosen by a small but influential group of Democratic Party strategists who felt very strongly, and I think many of them still do, that the party needs white male candidates and really will not be able to govern, or be worthy of governing, until it collects more white male voters.

Sargent: Just to reiterate, this Republican pollster told the Post that men under 40 are the most at risk for the Republicans right now. That’s really an amazing sea change, I think. And importantly, this comes as Donald Trump is doing things like holding the big fight on the White House lawn and sending Pete Hegseth out there to engage in these hyper-masculine, almost cartoonishly grotesque displays of machismo, and talking about blowing things up and stuff.

None of that’s working to hold on to this group. Because this group that was seduced, maybe temporarily, by the masculine displays of Donald Trump during the 2024 campaign and so forth are seeing, my God, this guy isn’t really doing anything for us, and there’s a real world we have to function in, right? I mean, isn’t that the size of it?

Donegan: I think that’s a decent explanation. I think these guys are seeing that they’re not actually being elevated in their own status by this hyper-masculine style in governance, right? They’re not getting better jobs. They’re not able to afford homes. They’re not able to consume in a way that makes them feel comfortable. They’re not as secure about the future, right?

The thing about making these promises that you’re going to restore this fantasized past of prosperity and male domination is you can’t actually deliver that if you don’t have cultural competence or policy competence. And those are things that have never been in particular abundance in the Trump administration.

Sargent: So just to close this out, Moira, and bring this back to the Tate brothers for a second—what would you recommend that Democrats say right now about what’s happening with the Tates? And more broadly, what would you like to hear Democrats saying to young men that will kind of create a sense that they represent a better vision of masculinity than the one Donald Trump has tried to foist on the country and so forth? How would you advise Democrats to proceed right now?

Donegan: I think Democrats should describe Trump and Tate’s style of masculinity for what it is, which is bigoted, cruel, and stupid. Donald Trump started his national political career by calling Mexicans rapists. Now, a decade later, he intervened to import an alleged rapist, Andrew Tate, from house arrest in Romania into the United States.

He is putting immigrant families in detention and terrorizing our cities. And he himself has been alleged to have committed sexual misconduct by no fewer than two dozen women, one of whom he was just ordered to pay $5 million to. This guy is lewd, he is pathetic, he is violent, and his is a kind of masculinity that reveals its own inadequacy by victimizing others.

I think there is abundant room to point out that Donald Trump isn’t just morally offensive, he’s kind of transparently insecure in a way that undermines his own claims to male domination—and to put forward an alternative vision of masculinity that has a little bit of self-respect.

Sargent: And we could add, Donald Trump’s vision of masculinity won’t do anything for young men in the real contemporary world.

Donegan: It certainly hasn’t so far.

Sargent: Right. It certainly hasn’t. And I think maybe a vision like the one we’re talking about here would be premised on the understanding that what happened in 2024 was not the deep cultural shift that certain pundits discerned. And on an understanding that when Tucker Carlson goes out and defends the Tate brothers, he’s speaking to an extremely tiny constituency in the United States, right?

Donegan: I think it would be a little bit naive to say that the constituency that is pro-Tate, that is ideologically misogynist, that is really committed—I don’t think that’s an imaginary group of people. They’re definitely out there. But I think the people who are buying that right now might not buy it forever. I think there’s a lot more people, including young men in this country, who are ready for something different.

Sargent: Moira Donegan, that’s really well said. Thank you so much for all this.

Donegan: Thank you so much for having me, Greg.

Once she was legally able, she quickly got a new one with the right gender marker. It cost her $50, and she had to get a letter from her physician vouching for her, which felt strange. But it helped her be “one step closer to living life as my true self,” she said.

“I thought I was in the clear,” she added with a laugh. She ended up being wrong. This February, the Kansas legislature rushed through an emergency measure, Senate Bill 244, that not only blocked transgender people from changing their driver’s licenses to reflect their gender but also applied it retroactively, invalidating any state driver’s licenses and birth certificates with gender markers that differ from sex assigned at birth. It also mandates that people use the bathrooms in government buildings that align with their sex assigned at birth and allows people to sue if they feel someone in the bathroom with them is violating the law. Governor Laura Kelly vetoed the measure, only to have the legislature override it.

Kelly warned that it would “cost Kansas taxpayers millions of dollars to comply with this very vague legislation.” Her prediction has now come to pass: Transgender Kansas residents have had to shell out money for gas to drive to DMVs and secure new licenses, take days off of work to deal with it, and even contemplate the steep costs of moving out of a state in which they no longer feel safe.

After the law passed, Kelly assumed she would likely have at least until the summer to get her ducks in a row and change her license. New state laws typically take effect in early June. But then she got home from work on February 25 to find a letter from the state telling her that her license would be revoked as of February 26 if she didn’t change the gender marker. It also said that driving without a valid license would be potentially punishable by jail time. “I read it two or three times. I’m like, ‘Am I missing something?’” she said. She wasn’t: The law, passed February 18, offered no grace period, invalidating licenses as of February 26.  

She had to act immediately—she works at four different clinics around Kansas City, one of which is a 20-minute drive from her home. She knew she needed a valid license to get to and from work. She also knew that the potential cost of being arrested and serving jail time would have far-reaching consequences—it would likely get reported to the state medical board, putting her professional license and, therefore, her career, at risk. “The panic started to set in,” she said.

Her partner was able to drop her off and pick her up at work the next day, and then the following day, a Friday, she had off from work. But she knew she needed to be able to drive to work the following week. The DMVs in Kansas don’t take walk-ins, and all of the appointments in her area were full that Friday. The closest she could find was an appointment in Lawrence, an hour away. Her partner had to work, so her retired mother-in-law drove her there and back. “It was definitely an extra cost to her,” she said. She also had to track down her birth certificate and her name-change paperwork.

In the end, she was able to get a new license the same day. It cost her about $20, less than she was expecting given that she paid about $50 for a new one after she changed her name. She also had to take a new photo. “It felt more like a prison mug shot,” she said. “I was basically being forced to do this against my will and paying for the privilege of it.

“The whole process felt very accusatory,” she added, “[as if] we were being retroactively criminalized for something the state had approved and stamped.” Normally, a driver’s license is taken away from someone who’s broken a law. But she hadn’t done anything wrong.

Having a license with the wrong gender marker has meant not just friction but fear. In May, Kris Ripper, a trans woman living in Kansas, was pulled over by a police trooper who asked for her license. After explaining that she had changed her gender marker to male due to the law she was allowed to go on her way, but she later got a letter saying she had missed a court date for a charge of driving without a valid license, a misdemeanor punishable with up to six months in jail. Although her case was eventually dismissed, Kelly thinks of it often, especially on her drive to one of the clinics that takes her past a sheriff’s office and detention center that also has a particularly low speed limit. “I sweat bullets every time I drive by there,” she said. It’s always in the back of her head, no matter which clinic she drives to for work: “Am I going to get pulled over and thrown in jail today?” She drives under the speed limit just to be safe. “It feels like I’ve got a target on my back,” she said.

She’s also gotten “a lot of invasive questions, a lot of invasive security measures,” she said. On a recent trip back home from Florida, she got flagged by the TSA scanner and had to get a pat-down in her groin area. It “caused a lot of extra distress,” she said. “I ended up going to the restroom and crying for a few minutes.” She’s rethinking her desire to travel both domestically and internationally and is considering avoiding it for a while. She feels “hemmed in,” adding that it “makes you just want to stay home and hide from the world sometimes.” On a day-to-day basis, she tries to go about her life not thinking about being trans until someone at the liquor store questions her ID or a bouncer looks askance at it, asking if it’s really her. What if one of them tries to confiscate it, believing it’s fake? “You don’t realize how often you use and need your driver’s license,” she said. “It’s a huge burden.”

Transitioning can feel like “a never-ending marathon,” she said, an endless string of tasks from name-change paperwork to medical intervention. Before this, she felt that she had finally gotten close to the finish line. “It’s really, really discouraging to take a step backward.”

Many trans Kansas residents feel like they can’t stay in the state with this law in effect. “This was the final straw on a lot of trans people in Kansas,” said Matthew Neumann, executive director of the LGBTQ Foundation of Kansas. He gets three to five requests every week from people asking for help with moving. That isn’t a cheap thing to pull off. After Senate Bill 244 passed, his organization started helping people with relocation costs for the first time, covering safety deposits and first month’s rent, typically about $500. But he knows there are many other costs they’ll face—he estimated people need $2,000 to $3,000 each. “We wish we had the funds to just move people,” he said. It’s frustrating when he has to turn someone down or tell them they have to wait. “That could be devastating to somebody, to keep them from moving.”

Susan (a pseudonym) moved to the U.S. over a decade ago after “meeting a girl online” and falling in love. She’s been living in Kansas ever since. She loves the state’s natural beauty. “The Flint Hills grew on me,” she said. “The sky is incomparable.” Her wife, meanwhile, is a lifelong Kansan. The two live in the house her wife grew up in. “This is her home,” she said. The two of them have built a close-knit community that they consider chosen family.

“As much as I love Kansas, Kansas does not love me back,” Susan said. For many years, Kansas springs have meant the same thing: The legislature debates anti-trans laws, and she and her wife contemplate moving away from the home they’ve built. But when Senate Bill 244 passed this year, she says, “That was kind of our hard line.” Susan was never able to change her license gender marker—it’s far harder to do as a green card holder—but the bathroom part of the bill is forcing them to move. Even though the law only impacts government buildings, the general public doesn’t always know that. “There have been a couple instances of me trying to go into a restroom and being told that I’m not allowed to be there,” she said. Even weightier is knowing that getting arrested—even if it doesn’t end in a charge—could lead to her green card being revoked.

If the November midterm elections result in big Democratic congressional wins, they’ll move within the U.S., to a blue state with strong trans rights protections. But if not, they’ll leave the country altogether. No matter which they choose, they’ll be leaving behind their family and “starting fresh,” Susan said.

They are selling her wife’s childhood home to enable the move. They’ve been fortunate to find affordable options in other states, and Susan works remotely, which means she can keep her job after they relocate. But the costs of renting a U-Haul and actually moving will be hefty, reaching several thousand dollars. They’re trying to get rid of as many of their belongings as they can before they move, selling some to defray the costs. The process has been stressful, as has helping her wife prepare for what it’s like to move to an entirely new place. They are “trying to think of all the positives of moving so that the stresses of it don’t hurt so much,” she said.

“If they weren’t trying to whittle away my rights every year, we would absolutely stay here,” she said. “This has become home.”

Kansas is home for Charley too, and he’s determined to stay. He’s lived in the state most of his life and loves being able to see endless sky from the top of a hill or watch the Milky Way from his back porch. “I love the grasses and the way they turn red in the fall,” he said. In 2022, he changed his gender marker on his driver’s license and passport, paying hundreds of dollars in fees to get it completed and spending a year on the effort. After Trump was reelected in 2024, he changed his birth certificate too. It was “a relief to have things match how I present,” he said. “It just makes life simpler to have it all match what people expect to see.” He had been following Senate Bill 244 as it was debated, and before it passed he got his license with the correct gender marker on it renewed, costing him about $23.

But then Charley saw a copy of the letter being sent to people saying their licenses were no longer valid, posted online late at night before bed. “I’m like, ‘Oh shit, I’m going to wake up tomorrow morning and my license is not going to be valid,’” he recalled. Luckily his boss was understanding, allowing him to take a half day off work to get driven into town by a friend so he could get his license changed, paying another $8. Before he went into the office, he gave himself a fresh haircut and wore a shirt that displayed his biceps. “I scowled into the camera when they took my picture,” he said. “I deliberately went in just as masculine as I could get.”

It was only later that he learned that many trans people haven’t received letters from the state; now he regrets acting so quickly. He’s left in a situation where his license doesn’t match his birth certificate. He’s insulated from a lot of the effects—he doesn’t tend to get carded due to age, and he’s started using his passport in airports instead of his license—but it does pop into his mind when he passes police while driving. “It’s just a little extra anxiety,” he said.

He’s contemplated moving somewhere else, but Kansas is the first place he really put down roots, buying a house he’s put not just money into but “a lot of my heart,” he said. “I am not going to lose my house, I am not going to lose my job for this,” he said. He has a secure financial situation and a community of chosen family. “I might as well fight it here where I’ve got a foundation under me.”

“They can pry it from my cold dead hands,” he said. “And they’re kind of trying.”

Like Charley, Neumann also hasn’t received a letter from the state even though he changed the gender marker on both his birth certificate and license. For a while after the letters started going out, he would go on the state’s website daily to check whether his license was valid or not. When we spoke in late June, it still was. The situation has led to “mass confusion,” he said. “The emotional damage was really, I think, their goal towards the trans community. That fear, panic, confusion.” For him personally, it means that when he visits a specialist doctor, an 85-mile drive he does three or four times a month, he’s started driving well under the speed limit just in case. “You’re always waiting for that second shoe to drop,” he said.

Anytime he drives to his doctor’s office and has to use the bathroom on the way he knows he could get in trouble depending on where he stops. His physical therapist accepts Medicaid and Medicare; does that make it a government building, and does that mean he’s breaking the law when he uses the men’s room there? He’s already anticipating problems when he needs to use the bathroom at his child’s volleyball games at her public high school, technically a government building. “I’ve received threats,” he said, people referencing their guns.

“This didn’t just go away because they passed a law. This is our lives,” Neumann said. “It’s still here, and it’s still affecting us.”