The source of the noise was New Jersey’s largest data center, about a mile down the road from the Groetsches’ home. The facility is owned and operated by a company called DataOne for the Netherlands-based “neocloud” provider Nebius, which is responsible for sourcing, installing, and managing graphics processing units (i.e., specialized microchips) made by Nvidia. According to the terms of a five-year deal worth up to $19.4 billion, Nebius will deliver that computing capacity to Microsoft, whose internal teams will reportedly use it to create large language models and a consumer AI assistant. Giving Microsoft everything it wants will take at least 300 megawatts of power—nearly double the electrical generation capacity of the entire city of Vineland.

Vinelanders aren’t happy about it. They’re now ensnared in a bitter nationwide battle pitting a core engine of the U.S. economy against most of the people who live here. The market value of AI-related companies has grown by approximately $27 trillion since November 2022; by some estimates, AI-related investments now account for nearly 40 percent of U.S. GDP growth. This surge of investment and stock valuations has fueled a boom that is primarily benefiting the already rich: the wealthiest 10 percent of U.S. households, which own 87 percent of stocks. It was thanks in part to these dynamics that U.S. billionaires added $1.5 trillion to their collective net worth in 2025. The same year, American workers took home their smallest share of GDP since 1947.

For the frontier labs, builders, cloud network operators, energy companies, and chipmakers (to name just a few interested parties) that are already cashing in on the AI spending binge, data centers really do appear to be the “LIQUID GOLD!” President Donald Trump has claimed they are. Most Americans, however, just don’t see the benefit of having them in their communities. A Heatmap Pro poll released in mid-August found that Democrats, Republicans, and independents all oppose by significant margins a center being built near where they live; three-quarters of Americans overall oppose nearby data center development. More than half of Americans support a nationwide moratorium.

These aren’t just idle gripes to pollsters fishing for discontent. According to Heatmap Pro, more than 500 counties or municipalities have blocked or restricted data center development. In the first three months of 2026, Data Center Watch reported that at least 75 projects worth an estimated $130 billion were disrupted by local opposition. In New Jersey—where 56 percent of voters support banning data center development near where they live—38 municipalities have done exactly that.

In scenes reminiscent of early-days Tea Party or Occupy Wall Street, ordinarily tranquil city council, planning, and zoning commission meetings in farm towns, leafy suburbs, and major cities are being transformed into raucous protests, as Americans of all political persuasions show up to demand that their elected officials fight the data centers they see as sucking up water and electricity for the sake of pouring vast fortunes into already well-lined pockets. In South Jersey, such organizing has put card-carrying members of the Democratic Socialists of America on the same side as right-wingers who railed against wind farms being built off the coast of the Jersey Shore.

Many activists are eloquent and impassioned about their concerns. “These are not struggling manufacturers or local startups. This project is backed by global capital and built for global AI companies,” Vineland resident Nicole Petronglo told her stone-faced city councillors at a packed, rowdy meeting in January, where proceedings stretched on for more than two hours to accommodate dozens of speakers. The tax break the council was looking to approve that night for DataOne Vineland was “corporate welfare,” Petronglo argued. The crowd erupted in approving cheers.

It’s hard to get a good look at the data center Vinelanders are so upset about, because much of the 2.6 million-square-foot campus is encased within 14-foot-tall concrete walls designed to resemble a friendlier rustic stone. Right next to it, separated by a county road and surrounded by identical-looking walls, is a luxury golf club developed by the same local concrete magnate behind DataOne. John Ruga built a headquarters and manufacturing facility for his 450-person concrete company, Northeast Precast, on an adjoining plot. He subsequently formed a joint venture with a DataOne subsidiary called DataOne USA to oversee the data center’s construction. Ruga co-owns the golf club—Trout National—with its namesake, 12-time MLB all-star and local hero Mike Trout. All three businesses have been represented by the same lawyer. Memberships to Trout National are invite-only. Initiation fees reportedly rival those of other luxury clubs, which can cost upwards of $500,000—not a price point designed to attract linksmen from New Jersey’s poorest county. One in seven Cumberland County residents lives below the poverty line; far fewer than that number golf.

It’s rare as a writer to stumble on an image that lends itself so well to your subject matter. The walls surrounding DataOne Vineland and Trout National are as good a metaphor as any for the emerging political economy of the AI boom. Unprecedented quantities of wealth are now concentrated within an incestuous, inscrutable network of companies that all purport to be involved in making artificial intelligence, a term so vague as to include everything from rudimentary AOL chatbots to advanced large language models and HAL 9000. Meanwhile, the language Silicon Valley executives use to describe their products has become increasingly mystical. “We are close to creating a genie that can grant any wish,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in late July. “We are going to make sure that our first wishes broadly benefit humanity, and that we kind of get the world to a place where a lot more people get to have a lot more wishes.”

To do that, top firms like OpenAI—backed by Microsoft since 2019—are pursuing a particularly capital- and resource-intensive path to AI development. The approach is premised on the theory that pouring enormous amounts of computing power into “training” frontier models, using increasingly advanced graphics processing units, or GPUs, can exponentially increase LLMs’ capabilities. In theory, these leaps in capacity will enable U.S. companies to best their global competition (read: China). This mission requires building “hyperscale” data centers specifically designed to accommodate AI training and inference and capable of operating around the clock, with needs for water and electricity that far outpace the less resource-intensive versions that are already ubiquitous for streaming Netflix and storing our emails. As Altman wrote on his blog, “Maybe with 10 gigawatts of compute, AI can figure out how to cure cancer.”

Materially speaking, making the software that might one day cure cancer isn’t all that complicated. AI cloud networks like the one DataOne Vineland belongs to are made up of warehouses full of racks and servers. They run on power-hungry chips that need to be kept cool. These structures proliferate thanks to land and financing deals, municipal zoning processes, power purchasing agreements, and glad-handing with politicians for favorable tax and regulatory treatment. In practice, in other words, CEOs who style themselves as philosopher-kings building God have instead become something much more mundane: real estate developers who need a lot of fossil fuels. It’s no wonder that Trump likes them so much.

As journalists, pundits, and politicians have tried to make sense of the spirited populist backlash against data centers, they’ve tended to frame it as some combination of provincial, perennial NIMBYism and misplaced rage at the technology those data centers are powering, a technology its architects claim could bring about mass unemployment and/or “civilizational collapse,” as Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has mused.

Another explanation for this backlash is that the ongoing data center build-out represents a culmination of everything that has made the U.S. economy so harshly unequal moving in right next door. Inside its proverbial walls are local entrepreneurs, offshore middlemen, and multinational corporations that can exploit state-sanctioned tax shelters, financial engineering schemes, and regulatory arbitrage to rapidly accumulate wealth on the basis of having started off with a decent amount of it. Vineland residents I spoke with didn’t seem particularly concerned about the existential risks of AI. They were more worried that it’s a technology whose potential benefits—from automation to tax revenue—don’t justify the dangers data centers pose to local water supplies, electricity bills, air quality, and quality of life. “I might be able to push a button, and something I used to have to type and took me 10 minutes to do would happen in 10 seconds,” Andrew Groetsch, who works in the construction industry, told me. “But it’s really just gonna help my boss.”

“The trend in all businesses is trying to do things cheaper,” he added. “So is it good for the regular guy? No. Is it good for big business? Yeah, it’s great. And is America all about big business? Unfortunately, I think it kind of is.”

Like many who have found themselves outside the walls of the AI boom, Groetsch has spent most of the last year trying to figure out what’s happening inside. Having grown up in Vineland before moving away for college and jobs elsewhere, he and Stevi decided to raise kids back home with family nearby, on land owned by Andrew’s parents. While they were building their house, they learned that a luxury golf club—what would become Trout National—had been proposed for a nearby lot. “We weren’t that upset about living next to a golf course, whether or not we could ever get in there,” he said.

Groetsch also knew that Northeast Precast had been building out a campus for its concrete wall–making operations about three quarters of a mile down the road. Adjacent land owned by another of Ruga’s companies had in not-too-distant memory been the site of a small-scale silica mine that supplied quartz sand to glass manufacturing operations in neighboring Millville. More recently—when Andrew attended Vineland High School in the mid-2000s—it had been a hangout spot for area teens. The mine and the plant were long defunct when Vineland’s City Council voted to zone the plot for mixed-used redevelopment in 2017. As part of a statewide program to spur investment, the designation streamlines approval processes for certain kinds of land-use changes that might otherwise be prohibited. It also loosens the usual requirement of having to inform neighbors who live within 200 feet about new redevelopment plans and amendments. In 2020, Vineland accordingly granted Ruga’s request to amend the redevelopment plan, enabling him to start building a nine-hole golf course and other forms of “outdoor amusement,” such as a clubhouse and shooting range. Ruga—who declined multiple interview requests, and did not respond to a request to comment—soon started to buy up neighboring properties, too.

In 2022, he approached Michael Atkinson, whose grandfather had been dead for about a week when he heard through the grapevine that Ruga wanted to buy his house and the 15 acres of land surrounding it. Atkinson greeted me in the small, wood-paneled office of the 75-acre wholesale floral farm he runs with his mom and aunt in Millville. His grandfather had founded the business with his brothers when they moved to the United States from the Netherlands after World War II and decided to keep up farming tulips. “Very similar soil,” Atkinson said. “Used to be a similar climate, but not so much anymore.”

Atkinson, who is in his early forties, said he wasn’t especially sentimental about his grandfather’s house, but he found his negotiations with Ruga unsettling. “He maybe could have let the body get slightly colder,” Atkinson said about the sale. He understood at the time that the purchase was connected to an expensive golf course that would be built across the street. Ruga had made a point of saying he would fix up the house and move into it with his wife, Lorie; he demolished it. “He could do whatever he wanted with it,” Atkinson said. “I don’t care that he tore it down…. I truly do not care. But this kind of serves as a jumping-off point for John Ruga being just a wholesale liar.”

Originally, Atkinson had started attending planning commission meetings to get approvals related to a farm property he and his wife had bought and were getting ready to plant and live on. Ruga was a semi-regular fixture on the agenda. At the time, he was seeking approvals for a public golf course next to what would eventually become Trout National. In March 2022, Vineland approved another request from Ruga’s firm, NEP Real Estate, to expand permissible land uses on the site to include heavier industrial development, and then—the next year—to expand the scope of that development zone.

The first time a data center was mentioned in city records was in June 2024, a few months before the public golf club, called Silica Sands, opened. That month, NEP Real Estate presented a proposal to Vineland’s planning board to build a data center, a large office building, and a four-story parking garage. Groetsch, who attended the meeting, remembers an attorney for the project making it sound “very benign,” entailing no noise or use of chemicals. “They described it as quiet and not invasive,” he recalled. “I think they threw around the number 350 megawatts. I did not know what a megawatt was, let alone what it took to produce a megawatt.” NEP Real Estate’s attorney said the site might use gas generators if the power went out, Groetsch recounted, but “it turned out they were running generators as their primary power source—not because the power went out, but because they never had it to begin with.”

Silica Sands hosted its first public event in October 2024: a charity tournament organized by the Millville Chamber of Commerce. Andrew and Stevi Groetsch bought their dads tickets for Father’s Day. Shortly thereafter, the course was razed to make way for the data center.

“No one really noticed until they started tearing the golf course out,” Atkinson told me. “You can’t see anything. It’s all behind a giant wall.”

The national debate over data centers has orbited around the so-called Magnificent Seven tech companies: Microsoft, Nvidia, Meta, Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, and Tesla. These behemoths are propelling projects forward with seemingly bottomless wells of cash. Local opposition, by contrast, often targets city officials eager to court investment dollars on offer from another prime target: the much smaller-scale intermediaries Silicon Valley relies on to secure land, electricity, water, and even graphics processing units.

Historically, Microsoft—currently the only contracted buyer of DataOne Vineland’s computing power—has operated its own data centers. It struck its partnership with Nebius for the Vineland facility last fall, in order to free up capacity at the server farms it’s letting OpenAI use as part of those companies’ extraordinarily intimate relationship. As of publication, Microsoft remains OpenAI’s single largest external equity holder; its 27 percent stake could be worth some $270 billion if OpenAI follows through on plans to go public with a $1 trillion valuation next year. OpenAI pays Microsoft to use its cloud network to train and run large language models like ChatGPT, and gives the company preferential access to OpenAI’s latest products. Bloomberg analysts estimated that upwards of 70 percent of Microsoft’s AI revenues during the second quarter of the current fiscal year—$24 billion—came from its arrangement with OpenAI.

Virtually all of the investment boom around artificial intelligence has flowed through these sorts of circular financial agreements; Chipmaker Nvidia, for instance, owns a 9.3 percent stake in chip buyer Nebius. The health of those relationships in turn depends on companies’ ability to access ever-larger quantities of resources that can’t be summoned as easily as frothy stock valuations. “We are in very much land-grab mode in the AI space,” Scott Guthrie, who leads Microsoft’s cloud efforts, said as the company’s agreement with Nebius was announced. “We’ve made the decision that we don’t want to be constrained in terms of capacity.”

The on-the-ground realities of the AI investment boom—a global scramble for acreage and electrons—have rapidly transformed tech companies into very different political actors. Just a few years ago, Silicon Valley executives tended to be reliable Democratic Party donors, frequenting U.N. climate confabs to talk up their companies’ net-zero pledges. As they’ve embraced a business model that depends on more typically right-wing industries (i.e., real estate and fossil fuels), they’ve embraced a different politics, too—and warmed up to a president offering them lavish tax breaks, discounted land, and regulatory fast tracks. Not all of those benefits are explicitly data center–related.

The rightward shift of the Magnificent Seven tech companies has upended political coalitions on either side of the aisle. Liberal leaders who have considered Silicon Valley CEOs their allies since the rise of the Atari Democrats risk alienating voters by trying to court Big Tech executives and their dollars back into the party’s fold. MAGA politicians, meanwhile, are caught between Trump’s brute-force attempts to turn the United States into the “number one superpower in artificial intelligence”; their own constituents; and influential far-right populists like Steve Bannon, who continue to see tech as a nefarious bastion of Woke Capital. Well downstream of all that, local data center activists are tapping into a cross-partisan frustration with politicians of all stripes for—as they see it—prioritizing corporations’ interests over those of constituents who feel blindsided by the massive new developments cropping up around them.

In Vineland, the group spearheading those efforts has been Sustain South Jersey, or Sustain SJ. Nebius announced its involvement in the project around the same time that Northeast Precast announced it had formed a joint venture with DataOne USA to build it in March. By the time Sustain SJ started meeting in June 2025, construction on the data center was already well underway. At a sparsely attended meeting that month, the city approved DataOne USA and NEP Real Estate’s revised site plan, including three on-site “power generation buildings,” gas-fired generators slated to serve as “either primary or backup power sources,” and the potential to receive additional power from Atlantic City Electric, a regional power provider.

Andrew Groetsch didn’t find out about the revised site plan until he read a news article about it more than a month later. “It was one thing in 2024 when they said, ‘You’re living next to a data center.’ I’m like, OK, it doesn’t seem that bad,” he remembered. “When you tell me I’m gonna live next to a private power plant, it kind of changed for me. That has air quality implications, right? Not just noise.” Groetsch gestured toward a white box mounted above some kids’ toys that were resting against the back wall of his house: an air quality monitor. “I panic-bought things like that.”

Figuring out exactly what DataOne Vineland’s plan will entail for air quality has been tricky. Besides turning people out to city meetings, much of Sustain SJ’s work has involved putting in open-records requests and poring over corporate regulatory filings on the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection’s website. That’s how its members found out about DataOne Vineland’s proposal to power its site with 32 Bergen gas-fired engines. Developers argued that a microalgae-based emissions control system from the company Syklea would remove not just planet-heating carbon dioxide emissions but nitrogen oxide, particulate matter, volatile organic compounds, and carbon monoxide as well. While Syklea has several patents for technologies purported to do such things, it has never deployed them at scale. Vineland would be a “laboratory.” Sustain SJ’s digging turned up emails in which regulators asked developers for information on these powerful technologies—in this case, an operating manual. This is fairly standard documentation for the type of air quality permits they had applied for; for Syklea’s negative emissions technologies, such documents did not exist. What NJDEP did find was that DataOne Vineland’s engine-based plan would entail “non-negligible long-term non-cancer risk” for a controlled substance called acrolein, and several accounting irregularities that—to Sustain SJ—cast some doubt on developers’ claims of building a “sustainable” data center.

Groetsch, who studied environmental economics in college, didn’t know all this when the plan was approved. What he did know was that anything generating more than 300 megawatts’ worth of electricity primarily from gas would create a host of problems for its neighbors. He also knew that claims that the associated pollutants would be scrubbed away with a magical-sounding technology should be taken with a grain of salt.

What seemed to bother Groetsch most was that nobody from the city or DataOne Vineland had bothered to inform him that he could soon be living next to a gas power plant: “How did no one have to tell us they were doing that?”

As Vinelanders started asking their elected officials questions about DataOne Vineland, said Sustain SJ chairman Matt Williams, it became apparent that the officials didn’t have answers. “So we took it into our own hands,” he said. “We kind of became the watchdog of the development.”

Public interest really started to pick up in September, when Microsoft announced its partnership with Nebius. “What we started to realize was that, yes, the data center is a big issue. But we think the bigger issue is that we have no idea how local government works,” Williams said. “Our mission statement is more about local civic engagement and educating people on the process that allowed something so massive to feel like it just kind of snuck in under our noses—because it did.”

The fact that city officials didn’t exactly welcome Vinelanders’ newfound civic engagement has backfired on them. Early in the group’s organizing, Sustain SJ co-founder Zac Landicini ended measured remarks with a pointed question: “Will this City Council, the mayor, and all other city officials use the resources at their disposal to fully examine and scrutinize the health effects of continued data center development? Or will they continue to rubber-stamp and expedite development that prioritizes the profits over the health and well-being of the citizens they have been elected and appointed to serve?”

Visibly annoyed, Councilman Scott English and President Paul Spinelli chafed at Landicini’s suggestion that they’d offered a “rubber stamp” to DataOne’s application. “This project has been going on for easily five years,” Spinelli complained. (As previously noted, the first time it was mentioned publicly was in June 2024.) “So for them to come in now and say they didn’t know anything—I find that kind of interesting, especially since they all live right there. ’Cause I’ll be damned, I would know what’s going on across the street from where I live.” After calling the meeting to a close, English and Spinelli—seemingly unaware that their mics were still on—commiserated. “I know, I’m pissed off, too,” Spinelli grumbled. “That guy’s an asshole.”

Sustain SJ posted the clip to social media, and after that, meetings got a lot livelier. By December 23, for a scheduled vote about a $6.2 million revolving loan fund for DataOne Vineland’s developers to purchase two cranes, attendees maxed out the municipal building’s fire capacity. Aware of public outcry over the subsidy, DataOne (which did not respond to my request for comment) opted not to accept the loan.

Elected officials in Millville—next door to Vineland—have taken a very different approach from their embattled neighbors. In May, Millville’s City Commission unilaterally passed the state’s third-ever ordinance (after Pemberton’s and nearby Monroe Township’s) banning data center development within city limits.

Having grown up in Millville, I found this news surprising. That’s not because Millville is some hotbed of Silicon Valley–style techno-optimism, but because it just isn’t the kind of place that tends to make national headlines. It certainly doesn’t make the type of news that gets turned into colorful graphics that my lefty Brooklyn friends like to post to their Instagram stories. To find out more, I talked to Millville Mayor Dan Dixon, a Republican, in his office at City Hall.

He was quick to correct some reporting on the ordinance that had suggested it blocked a proposed 2.9 million-square-foot, 1.4-gigawatt data center to be built on the site of the long-closed glass factory that used to be Millville’s primary employer. That plan was never actually presented to Millville officials, he said. The project’s prospective developer, Anthony DeSantis—who once tried to build a plastics recycling facility on the same land—populated a website for something called “A1 Data Center” with content that appears to be largely AI-generated, and invited a lawyer and several purported experts to speak in favor of data centers generally at the meeting where the ban was passed.

Dixon’s reasons for banning data centers in Millville were more global. “It’s not that we’re against business,” he said. “I think there’s too many questions” around how much electricity they pull from the grid, the noise produced by generating power on-site, and pollution. “It’s not that we don’t think those problems can be overcome,” he added. But even if a small city were to put rules around how a particular project was developed, it would have little recourse if developers broke them. “We don’t want to get stuck in a position where it’s a monster that grew too big and now it’s too big to stop.”

Dixon certainly isn’t against artificial intelligence either. “I love using AI,” he said. To prove this, he pulled out his phone to play me a snippet of a song he asked an LLM to generate for a campaign promoting tourism in Millville. The lyrics, based on his prompts, reference the city’s various attractions (bike trails, a performing arts theater, the riverfront) before swelling into the chorus-slash-campaign tagline: “Millville has it all.”

Still, for as much of a kick as Dixon gets out of AI, he isn’t keen to see Millville treated as a guinea pig for a new industry that’s already facing major blowback over its impacts on public health, electricity prices, and the environment. “How many times in history does that happen,” he said, “where somebody builds a factory and they pollute?” The ground under Millville’s Union Lake—where I learned to swim—is still polluted with arsenic, thanks to runoff from one of Cumberland County’s several Superfund sites. The Vineland Chemical Company made arsenical herbicides and fungicides there until it closed down in 1994. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, it stored by-products in “open piles, lagoons, and chicken coops,” leading to arsenic contamination in “groundwater, surface water, sediment, and soil throughout the area.”

“Once you have it built, it’s kind of too late,” Dixon reflected. “You’re kind of stuck with whatever they say.”

Discussing the fast-evolving politics of data center development, Dixon didn’t want to cast any aspersions on Paul Spinelli or fellow Republican Anthony Fanucci, the mayor of Vineland, whom he called “tremendous.” But Millville’s ban reflects a very different political landscape from what existed when those officials first backed DataOne Vineland. Now, Dixon said, data centers are “an 80–20 issue, and I think the 20 percent that really want it probably have a stake in it.” After a moment, he amended the statement. “I think data centers are a 90–10 issue. And I think the 10 percent of people probably own land or want to somehow capitalize off of it.”

On first glance, Dixon’s formulation seems like a ready-made case for data center populism: a fight that transcends partisan boundaries in favor of a simpler battle between insiders and outsiders. But his numbers—mirrored in the stark polling around those projects—don’t map neatly onto today’s politics.

Trump’s continued stranglehold over the GOP makes it an odd fit for this particular brand of populist outrage, which is primarily targeting some of his biggest donors. There are some notable dissenters. Besides Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican Missouri Senator Josh Hawley joined Democrat Richard Blumenthal to introduce the GRID Act, to mandate that data centers use only off-grid power, so as to not drive up consumer energy costs. Under pressure from both sides of the aisle, Texas Governor Greg Abbott paused approvals of certain new data center projects to access the state’s grid. So far, however, these actions haven’t changed the pro–data center party line in a GOP orbiting around Trump, whose administration has continued to make it easier for data center developers to roll through well-established permitting processes and environmental rules. As recently as August, the president called Texas’s actions “against data centers” “a mistake.”

For their part, Democratic voters have mostly been rewarding insurgent and left-leaning candidates going on offense against data centers. Tennessee state Representative Justin Pearson—whose prospective congressional district contains xAI’s aptly named Colossus data centers—made the company’s lawlessness and pollution central to his successful primary campaign for the U.S. House. Michigan’s Democratic Senate nominee, Abdul El-Sayed, promises to take on Big Tech as well. Sunrise Movement co-founder William Lawrence—in Michigan’s swingy 7th congressional district—beat two moderates after making data center opposition the centerpiece of his first television ad. “It turns out that if you’re not taking money from Silicon Valley, you can fight hard for a federal moratorium on data centers,” he told supporters in his election night victory speech.

Industry-funded PACs are indeed spending heavily to influence any new laws the next Congress might impose on them. The most notable of these is Leading the Future. With tens of millions of dollars each from OpenAI president Greg Brockman and venture capitalist Marc Andreesen, the group is unleashing its more than $75 million war chest to support candidates in both parties who are “aligned with the pro-AI agenda” and “oppose those that do not.” As of July, just one of their picks has lost.

The backlash to the backlash is taking root at the local level, too. Anthony DeSantis is now suing the city of Millville, which has sought outside counsel. Two other towns that passed data center bans—Andover and Monroe Townships—are being sued as well. These cases could set a state and potentially nationwide precedent for data centers’ and cities’ broader ability to shape development within their borders.

If there were ever a time for the power of organized people to overcome the power of organized money—an old adage from left-wing electioneers—then data center fights would be an obvious test case. Which side of that wall will voters think the Democratic Party is on?

Vineland’s data center—still under construction—has already helped rake in billions for the companies behind it. In July, Nebius announced that it had secured $775 million worth of debt financing using the GPUs it’s already deployed to data centers, plus revenue from its contracts with Microsoft and Meta, as collateral. Nvidia’s confidence to invest $2 billion in Nebius last March was likewise premised in part on its track record in Vineland; that deal has now swelled to include a sizable equity share.

Vineland residents have so far seen comparatively few upsides. Thanks to an agreement the city approved in January, the project’s developers won’t pay any improvement property taxes for its first year of operation. Payments will then scale up by 20 percent annually for five years. To showcase its generosity in the meantime, DataOne has pledged to distribute produce to low-income Vinelanders, grown from vertical farming operations it says will run on carbon and water from the data center itself.

Residents do stand to see benefits from DataOne Vineland. Nebius promises “millions of dollars in local tax revenue over the next five years,” though the site will receive considerable tax discounts throughout that time. It’s further said that construction will create “roughly 1,000 highly skilled, technical construction jobs” using union and nonunion labor. Representatives from a local building trades union, however, have complained publicly about being unable to get a meeting with the project’s developers, who expect to create around 200 “permanent on-site jobs.” For many Vinelanders, these perks amount to scraps thrown from inside walls that shouldn’t have been built in the first place.

Noise from DataOne Vineland, Andrew Groetsch said, got a little quieter and less frequent after he and his neighbors filed noise complaints, prompting various changes by developers—including two sizable earthen berms—to help muffle the sound.

Noise about the data center has gotten louder. In August, the nonprofit newsroom Floodlight published thermal drone footage revealing that DataOne Vineland had been operating at least 45 of the site’s 62 gas-powered generators at a time. None had received permits to operate from the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, which has yet to make “a full compliance determination,” The Guardian reported. During the same month, hundreds of people flocked to two planning board meetings about DataOne Vineland’s latest site plan amendment. Having exhausted their other options, developers proposed powering the facility with stacks of solid oxide fuel cells from Bloom Energy, using gas stored on-site as backup for a preexisting gas pipeline. Both gatherings were relocated from Vineland’s municipal building to a nearby theater, where attendees were greeted with a heavy police presence. Proceedings stretched on for more than six hours. Nebius’s most bullish and online investors posted updates from live streams on X, taking potshots at community members’ concerns and intelligence. On August 17, near midnight, the plan was approved to a chorus of boos from the 100-odd people still in the room. Nebius investors cheered remotely; the company promptly announced plans to secure $5 billion in debt financing to fund continued data center expansion.

In theory, the most recently approved site plan should alleviate many of Vinelanders’ concerns: Bloom fuel cells generate power from an internal chemical reaction with methane gas rather than combustion. They promise to emit considerably less noise and particular matter than gas turbines, Bergen engines, or generators would. Bloom’s fuel cell stacks do not have to comply with the same environmental rules as other energy sources. The company’s own regulatory filings, however, state that they emit “significantly higher” amounts of planet-heating carbon dioxide as a by-product than “other forms of natural gas based power generation.” The company and its subsidiaries have been fined in years past for violating air quality permits and improperly disposing of waste found to contain benzene, which has been linked to leukemia. On another front, a report Sustain SJ commissioned from the engineering firm Princeton Hydro concluded that DataOne Vineland’s stormwater management system “does not comply” with relevant state and local regulations “due to multiple faults and oversights.”

The August approval did not provide DataOne Vineland’s neighbors the same lucrative sense of certainty it granted developers. For Andrew Groetsch, uncertainty has been the worst part of the last year’s ordeal. If he and Stevi decide to move, they’d be underwater on their mortgage, and could struggle to find a buyer who is willing to move in next to a data center. “It’s been a lot of stress thinking about that stuff,” he said. “Big big-picture questions … the biggest negative impact on us was thinking, like, do I have to move? How are we gonna be able to afford it? Who cares about the air quality and the water? Just the stress of wondering if I need to move my life—that took a toll on us. Are we gonna actually do it? Are we just gonna wait until it gets terrible and then—” He broke off and took a deep breath. “We don’t know how bad it’s gonna get.”

Cool, cool, cool. If I could offer my hot take, maybe someone should do something to, you know, stop this? Unfortunately, there is a series of related problems that impede the easy fix. For starters, our political system is awash in tens of millions of dollars spent by the AI industry. AI is not popular with the general public, but it is very popular among the few who expect to get, or already are getting, insanely wealthy from it—and they have all burned through small fortunes of sunk cost in this arms race, where everyone is trying to build the best (read: most destructive) AI model they can before someone else does. And the industry actually makes a habit of regularly informing people that this tech could kill us all, because when they do, it excites investors.

It is actually genuinely difficult to trust the motivations of anyone in this industry (and it seems bad that genuinely deceptive people are the human core of this technology). But if only for a few paragraphs, let’s extend the benefit of the doubt to Jacob Coxon, who resigned from Anthropic this week because (according to him) he came to believe that he was beckoning doomsday in humanity’s general direction. In a series of posts on X, Coxon declared that neither OpenAI nor Anthropic was acting responsibly. Rather, they were barreling forward with plans to develop “self-improving superintelligence” and “gambling with our lives.”

“The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade,” Coxon wrote. “This is not a marketing stunt.” Evan Hubinger, an Anthropic colleague whose actual title is “alignment science lead,” echoed in confirmation: “Jacob is correct here—we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans!” None of this is exactly coming out of the blue. Anthropic’s brand—disingenuously or not—is based on warning the public about AI, and there have been numerous high-profile examples of AI models escaping their environments to engage in hacking. In May 2025, the BBC reported that Anthropic’s own tests revealed that its model was “sometimes willing to pursue ‘extremely harmful actions,’ such as attempting to blackmail engineers who say they will remove it.”

Still, it’s a curious time for people to be resigning from Anthropic and talking up the destructive capabilities of the technology they are building. The firm is planning an IPO this fall that The Wall Street Journal is calling “Wall Street’s marquee event,” with projected earnings assessed at $100 billion for the company and a projected valuation of $2 trillion. Coxon’s insistence that this isn’t a marketing stunt stands out, because the kind of doomsaying he is indulging in, though it might be a genuine outcry for help, quite often is just that—fodder to goose investors to help the overall goal of “number go up.” As TNR contributor J.P. Meyboom explained, it’s extremely common for AI mavens to issue ominous warnings about the terrors their tech can unleash, only to raise gargantuan sums of money in the wake of those portents. As much as you and I might recoil from the periodic reminder that this industry is hurtling toward a future of unknown dangers, the money is flowing heavily in the direction of that future.

It’s also flowing into Washington, D.C. As Politico reported last week, super PACs aligned with the AI and crypto industry “spent a whopping $127 million across more than 100 primaries this year in an effort to shape the future of Congress—and won roughly 90 percent of them.” (They did much better in Republican primaries than in Democratic ones.) Now, the goal of all of that spending can be murky. There are groups sending cash to Washington who are authentically invested in regulation and guardrails; not everyone is looking for laissez-faire treatment from Congress. (Though, again, it’s impossible to gauge the motivations of any of the players in this field, some of whom might only be performatively asking for regulation.) But if we take Coxon at his word, the calculus has changed. Something that could wipe out humanity within a decade’s time probably needs something stronger than a mere guardrail—and something more forceful than those raining greenbacks on Washington may be willing to accept.

The Kill Switch Act, a bipartisan bill developed after OpenAI’s hack of the Hugging Face research hub, proposes to give the Department of Homeland Security authority over the industry, at least as far as ordering shutdowns in instances of dangerous AI breaches goes. But the specter of humanity’s destruction has the bill looking a little bit inadequate: Under the Kill Switch Act, we’d still be heavily reliant on the industry’s willingness to both police itself and comply with shutdown orders. The Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act, a Senate bill co-sponsored by Bernie Sanders and Texas Representative Greg Casar, would “permanently ban the development and deployment of superintelligent AI and temporarily pause advanced AI development until a federal regulator has established safety rules,” as well as “direct the U.S. to pursue international agreements to prevent superintelligence from being developed anywhere in the world.”

That’s probably going to be the bridge too far for the AI industry. But the bad news is that it also may be critically insufficient to halting the apocalypse that’s allegedly at the door. It’s hard to see how a ban would work; AI firms blocked from developing technology in the United States would simply pick up their things and go elsewhere, and it’s not as though China would regard a U.S. ban as anything other than a competitive opportunity for them. And we cannot un-invent a technology. We aren’t going to pass a law that ends AI.

But this is the last war. Lawmakers who want to take this moment to think ahead and cancel the AI Armageddon should be thinking less about the technology itself and instead work harder at making comprehensive rules governing the control of these systems and regulating their safety, the same way we did with nuclear weapons. That’s what you do when you find yourself staring down technology that could wipe out civilization. It’s never been more important for Democratic and Republican voters to find lawmakers willing to lock up Chekhov’s gun, and kick those that won’t to the curb.

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

The chaotic media landscape doesn’t help. Most people in that 80 to 89 percent supermajority actually think they’re a minority: After all, that’s the message they get from news and social media, where “climate hushing” and climate denial are pervasive. It’s hard for the public to live up to democracy’s credo when they are engulfed by a ceaseless avalanche of information, much of it unreliable, misleading, or false.

How did we get here? And what can be done about it? Amy Westervelt began grappling with these questions while reporting groundbreaking exposés of the fossil fuel industry’s efforts to hide and deny the scientific fact that its products dangerously overheat the planet. (Disclosure: Westervelt is on the steering committee of the global journalism network Covering Climate Now, which I co-founded.) Brought To You By tells what Westervelt presents as the origin story of Big Oil’s deceptions. It’s a deeper story that must be reckoned with, she argues, in order to comprehend today’s dizzying information system and replace it with a system that serves democracy and, with it, climate survival.

A self-described “history nerd” whose “happy place” is inside library archives, Westervelt opens her narrative by recounting how the American Petroleum Institute, the oil industry’s U.S. trade association, came into being.

During World War I, a public relations man named Ivy Lee worked behind the scenes to get oil companies to cooperate rather than compete and thus ensure a steady supply of oil for the war. “As the war drew to a close,” Westervelt writes, “Lee thought … if normally competing companies could coordinate on production and supply during the war, why not work together in peacetime to keep prices high and regulation low?” The American Petroleum Institute’s first official meeting took place in Washington barely six months after the fighting ended.

Lee and his colleague Edward Bernays are now regarded as the fathers of modern public relations. Although they pioneered the use of press releases and other now-common techniques, their fundamental innovation was to play offense. Instead of avoiding the press, as companies had traditionally done, Lee and Bernays gave the press the stories that they wanted told. Their clients in the oil, coal, railroad, auto, tobacco, and chemical industries duly saw their preferred versions of reality reflected in the news that the public and policymakers heard.

Westervelt details how the pivotal insight of playing offense gave rise over the ensuing century to a globe-straddling system of “information pollution.” Today, she argues, PR is the delivery mechanism for messaging that draws on “university research co-opted by corporate funding and further eroded by think tanks,” such as the Heritage Foundation, which authored the Project 2025 blueprint that the second Trump administration has sought to implement. Fox and other right-wing media outlets “have been used to normalize it all,” she adds, and “technology has flooded the zone and made it impossible to get away from.”

“Bullshit,” she declares when demolishing the counterargument that these monied interests are simply exercising their right to free speech. She notes that U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’s landmark opinions distinguished between “the right to speak,” which should be protected, and “the right to mislead,” which shouldn’t. But a century later, that distinction was erased by the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling, which equated money with speech and, in Westervelt’s words, “gave corporations the right to shout over everyone else.”

One anecdote in her book resonates with a more philosophical argument about the environmental crisis presented in journalist Jason Dove Mark’s new book, The Earth Said Remember Me: How to Restore and Sustain a Livable Planet. Mark explores a concept that scientists call “shifting baseline syndrome.” In a world of rapid change, humans often don’t realize that today’s environmental conditions are quite different—usually worse—than past conditions. He uses the example of monarch butterflies, whose miraculous migrations from Mexico used to paint trees in California orange with their density but which, in recent years, have dwindled to almost nothing. When novice observers took comfort in sighting some monarchs in their yard, a veteran monitor of the butterflies’ migrations asked, “Like, tens of thousands?” “No,” the novices replied, only “a few.” The monitor asked, “Do you remember when you used to see ten thousand?”

Collective amnesia about deteriorating conditions is also seen in social systems. Just as it’s become hard “to remember what summers were like before the nonstop sizzling heat” of recent years, Mark writes, it is now difficult “to remember social life before social media…. [And] the once-outrageous—the bilious, hateful rhetoric and the creeping authoritarianism—have become almost ordinary.”

Westervelt quotes a university professor who unknowingly proves the point. Teaching an undergraduate class on media and politics, the professor asked her students to cite their sources. “Their answers were things like Twitter or Instagram or TikTok,” she recalls. “And I said, ‘No, no, I don’t mean where you saw it. I mean the original source.’ And they really didn’t know what I was talking about.”

Westervelt hastens to add that if people are confused it is “not because they’re idiots—they’re not!” It’s because they’ve never been taught to think critically about how “the information around them is being shaped by forces they don’t see.” She singles out “the tech bros [who], armed with algorithms and data, take Lee’s quote about facts being open to interpretation and turn it into millions of splintered realities” and thus wage “an information war against their own people.”

Real journalism—the rigorous, fair-minded gathering of facts and the public distribution of a coherent narrative—is an antidote to the confusion fostered by today’s information pollution. This September 28, hundreds of the world’s news organizations will mark World News Day by proclaiming “A single message: Trusted journalism matters.” That message, like Earth Day’s, is one that deserves attention every day of the year.

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

Lutnick shared this ridiculous idea with NBC News on Thursday.

“Together we’re going to deliver that plan and we’re going to pay that money to the Americans, and not from taxpayer money.... We have a waitlist of more than 100,000 people who want to come,” he said, referring to the Platinum Card applicants. “That’s $500 billion.”

The Platinum Card is a $15,000 application and $5 million donation to the government for extremely wealthy immigrants looking to expedite their citizenship process. The program would allow applicants to live in the U.S. for nearly the entire year without paying taxes on foreign income.

At the Republican midterm convention on Wednesday, Trump vowed to “issue a dividend to every adult citizen in the United States of America for $5,000” if the Republicans win the House and Senate in November. Since then, the administration has scrambled to propose different ways to pay for the promise, which would cost an estimated $1.3 trillion.

Vice President JD Vance thinks they’ll be able to use tariff revenue to deliver their promise. (Tariff revenue would cover only a fraction of that sum.) National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett thinks that Congress will be able to foot the bill. Either way, Lutnick and every other administration official involved has tried to explain their way out of it, or frame the promise as some galaxy-brained moment from a genius president. In reality, they are obviously covering for a desperate president willing to say and do anything to win in November.

Conservatives were outraged Friday after a video circulated on social media showing Mamdani and Ocasio-Cortez laughing and smiling at the ceremony in New York City.

Michael Ragusa, an aide for former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani who also attended the event, claimed the reports about Mamdani and Ocasio-Cortez were “not true.”

“I was standing next to them the whole time. The camera just caught her greeting him hello,” Ragusa wrote on X. “Multiple other politicians were laughing and joking behind me. Republicans and Democrats.

“And for the record I am a life long republican who has been very critical of these two,” Ragusa wrote in another post. “I’m just sick of this fake news and people just saying whatever they want.”

It appears that the short video clip was taken out of context. In fact, Mamdani was reportedly the only senior elected official to stay until after all the names were read.

Still, Republicans are keeping a tight grip on their pearls.

“Mamdani and AOC seem to be having the time of their lives while everyone else is paying respects to the deceased,” wrote Florida Governor Ron DeSantis on X.

“How the hell do you laugh while the names of those murdered on 9/11 are being read aloud? Why would you do so?” wrote Texas Senator Ted Cruz, who infamously “liked” a pornographic tweet on 9/11 several years ago.

I don’t recall the same level of outrage when Trump was spotted laughing with former President Barack Obama at late President Jimmy Carter’s funeral.

Surely, Republicans were just as upset after seeing the flood of images showing President Donald Trump dozing off onstage during the memorial ceremony at the Pentagon Friday. Oh wait, Republicans didn’t care at all? For God’s sake, even former President Joe Biden looked more awake than he did!

Independent journalist Tara Palmeri went through the proper channels to attend the event, acquiring a press pass and event credentials to enter the unprecedented “Trump-a-palooza.” Palmeri’s four guests—her producer and the three survivors, who were already in town to attend the Epstein Files Reading Room—did the same.

But the full authorization wasn’t enough to protect them from being spontaneously escorted out of the Dallas arena. Palmeri also documented what happened to them on her Substack.

The group hit a snag just three minutes after they walked into the event space. That’s when Palmeri questioned Robert Burke, a Republican running to represent the greater Boston suburbs, about his position on Epstein’s crimes and the government’s protracted rollout of the files.

“That’s a great topic,” Burke said, as soon as Palmeri informed him she was surrounded by several Epstein survivors. “Because we really need to know what actually happened.”

Burke then prompted the survivors to throw him some questions. One approached the microphone and asked if he would support holding anybody that participated in Epstein’s crimes accountable, regardless of their party affiliation.

“I don’t care who they are, unlawful touching is unlawful touching. Consent is consent,” Burke said. He then added, unprompted, that one of his friends represented Epstein as well as Ghislaine Maxwell, though he declined to offer up the name of the individual.

Palmeri then redirected the conversation back toward the unreleased files, asking why Donald Trump “didn’t want to release the Epstein files.” The Justice Department has released roughly three million pages from the collection, but officials have also admitted that the sprawling investigation collected more than six million pages, suggesting that a mere 50 percent of the documents have been released since Congress ordered the administration to do so last year.

But Burke only wanted to speak about Joe Biden.

“But here’s the thing—the buck stops where?” asked Palmeri in response.

“The Department of Justice,” said Burke.

“And who controls the Department of Justice?” she pressed.

“Trump does,” said Burke, though he noted that he disagreed with the “premise” of Palmeri’s argument.

Burke then said that those who participated in Epstein’s crimes should be held accountable, “no matter who they are.”

“What if it’s President Trump?” asked Palmeri. “He was friends with [Epstein] for years, he’s mentioned thousands of times in the files. What if it’s him?”

“What happened with him? Didn’t they drag him to court about that?” asked Burke, before reversing course and claiming that it was an “unfair question.”

Burke then said he would support a second iteration of the Epstein Files Transparency Act—which was introduced to the House earlier this week—and would call for more hearings related to the prolific human trafficker’s crimes and associates.

The interview lasted approximately eight minutes. Almost immediately afterward, security approached the group, accusing them of carrying signs and protesting the event.

Palmeri said she explained that she was a credentialed member of the press, and that she had been admitted as such.

“We’re allowed to talk to guests, we’re allowed to talk to people. That’s why we’re here, we’re media,” Palmeri told the guard.

By 2:40 p.m., Palmeri said their entire group was thrown out of the building—just 35 minutes after they had arrived.

The New York Times reports that Atlantic Industrial Coatings told the White House that its own failures were responsible for the botched renovation, not vandals, contradicting the Trump administration’s claim that the pool had been sabotaged.

The Times cited government documents from the past two months showing that AIC found issues in planning and executing the renovation. In reports dated August 14 and September 2, the company blamed its own work, saying that workers did not spray enough primer to keep the pool liner’s layers stuck together.

The company also said that its repair plan for the liner layers called for the use of two chemicals that weren’t compatible with each other. The chemical on top reached a high temperature that the one below couldn’t handle, leading to the bottom layer of the liner blistering and coming loose.

Trump has repeatedly claimed that vandals using sharp tools like knives and box cutters slashed at the pool’s new “American flag blue” paint, causing it to peel. His U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C., Jeanine Pirro, even charged several people over that false claim, including former Olympian David Hearn. Eventually, all of the charges were dropped.

All of this shows that the Trump administration rushed through a botched renovation. Officials bypassed the bidding process to hand the contract to AIC, which used a process partially designed by David Schutzenhofer, the general manager of Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey. When that effort failed spectacularly, Trump blamed random people for the pool he ruined rather than take responsibility.

Rosa Bramble Caballero, a social worker who runs the cleanup crew support group, described how multiple contractors were paid millions of dollars to manage the cleanup response. Those companies hired subcontractors, and those companies in turn hired day laborers standing on street corners.

“Many women who did housekeeping were taken there. And then they got there and realized they were actually at Ground Zero, which, by the way, sometimes they were not told that that’s where they were going,” she said. It isn’t clear just how many undocumented workers were involved in these efforts, but estimates are between 2,000 and 6,000 people.

Undocumented workers are entitled to workers’ compensation, and individuals have received around $80,000 each for their work on 9/11 cleanup crews in the past. But in light of the Trump administration’s sweeping crackdown on immigrants, Bramble Caballero said many are now too scared to apply. For others, the money only went so far. “Because they are undocumented and their health has been compromised, they really can no longer work. So although they may have received awards, those awards dry out,” she told NPR.

One support group member who spoke to NPR, Lucelly from Colombia, didn’t know where she was going when she got picked up off the street for a cleaning job on the morning of September 12. Lucelly approached Ground Zero armed only with a paper mask and rubber gloves. Years later, Lucelly was diagnosed with breast cancer and respiratory disease after coming into contact with toxic debris and air—although the city was well aware it was unsafe.

Another woman, Rosa from Guatemala, worked in demolition and was shocked to see the scant safety measures immigrants workers were using at the site. “It was mostly Ecuadorians, Colombians, Peruvians, Mexicans. There were so many people doing the same work as me … but wearing little paper masks.”

Among responders and survivors, there have been more than 57,000 cases of cancer and more than 10,000 cases of chronic respiratory disorder linked to the site. Now they also have Donald Trump’s extrajudicial militias to worry about.

“I am scared. We are all scared. My daughter lives in New Jersey, and I don’t even go visit her, because I am scared of immigration. It is a new pain on top of an old one,” Lucelly told NPR.

“We gave it all. When we got to Ground Zero we felt so much fear. Oh the fear we felt! No one ever asked to check out immigration status. Oh no, they treated us like we were real important back then. It was: ‘Go in Lucelly. Go Lucelly. Get in there.’”

That’s not necessarily news to the rest of the country. America’s felonious, billionaire president has been in office for a cumulative total of five and a half years, and in the public limelight much longer. Trump has allegedly cheated his employees, abused the power of his office, defrauded the American public, and sexually abused at least 27 women. He was found guilty of buying Stormy Daniels’s silence ahead of the 2016 election, was found to have defamed and abused writer E. Jean Carroll, has relentlessly attacked media outlets that report on his administration, and has made at least $2.2 billion through various grifts since the beginning of his second term.

His egoism knows no bounds: 25 years ago, hours after the Twin Towers had collapsed, Trump took a moment while calling in to a local news station to mention that the Trump Building at 40 Wall Street was once again the tallest building in lower Manhattan.

But with just weeks until the midterm election, top Republicans are apparently finally waking up from the delusion that Trump ever cared about the future of the conservative party, and are stunned and dismayed to find that Trump is just as selfish as ever.

“He doesn’t care about Republicans winning the midterms,” one top Republican operative close to the White House told Vanity Fair Friday. “You got a tax cut, which is great. But then all you’ve got is a ballroom and war with Iran. That’s all he’s talking about. The ballroom and the fucking Reflecting Pool.

“He just doesn’t give a shit anymore. He doesn’t care about Republicans,” the operative continued. “I don’t think he really wants JD [Vance] or anyone else to win in 2028. That’s why you’re seeing him naming the Kennedy Center after him, naming an airport after him. It’s all legacy vanity. That’s all he cares about.”

Truly, Trump has done almost nothing to assist his Republican subordinates. Through just his second term alone, Trump has repeatedly incensed the American electorate by thrusting the country into a forever war with Iran, indiscriminately annihilating small watercraft in the Caribbean and the Pacific, abducting Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro in a midnight raid, aggravating America’s longest alliances—most notably with Canada—with a seemingly endless fountain of shitposts, tearing down the White House in order to build a $600 million, gold-laden ballroom, and repeatedly kowtowing to Moscow.

His influence only seems to further endanger the GOP’s election odds this November as he continues to make an already contentious midterm cycle a referendum on his popularity.

“I’m asking you to pretend I’m on the ballot!” Trump told the crowd at the midterm convention Wednesday night.

That won’t bode well for Republican odds: Roughly 56 percent of the country currently disapproves of Trump’s performance, according to an aggregated poll by The New York Times.

Dillon states that she repeatedly came forward with concerns about ICE’s unlawful actions, including on August 20, when she sent an email to her boss reporting that ICE “unlawfully detained an unaccompanied minor” after a hearing in her courtroom.

She was fired two days later, a decision she says was “without cause” and for which she was given no notice. Dillon argues that the firing broke her “constitutional due process rights” and that “the removal was taken, in part, on her perceived political views.”

“It is important for people to know that the immigration courts no longer exist as an unbiased forum,” Dillon told Newsweek. “This issue reaches everyone—if not personally, someone in their community is undoubtedly affected by immigration.”

Her lawsuit against the DOJ also cites a 2025 email she sent citing concerns over a directive “to grant any and all motions to change venue” filed by ICE attorneys.

“First, the idea that ICE motions to change venue should always be granted is contrary to law and offends due process,” she told Newsweek. “Second, ICE arrests at courthouses—particularly of an unaccompanied minor who had rights under a DOJ settlement agreement—endanger everyone and disrupt the orderly conduct of the court.”

Her lawsuit begins with one of George Orwell’s most famous quotes: “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

Dillon is one of 14 judges who have been fired during Donald Trump’s second tenure.

The suit is specifically against Attorney General Todd Blanche and the Executive Office for Immigration Review. They deny Dillon’s claim as “patently false.”

Dillon’s case is a reaffirmation of one of the most defining dynamics of the second Trump administration: You must be a loyalist to keep your job.

In the case before the Fifth Circuit on Wednesday, Louisiana blamed the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for abortions had by Louisianans, and asked the court to stop the agency from allowing them to continue. Representing the FDA, the Department of Justice argued that Louisiana’s case was flawed, not because it was baseless, but because it was going after the wrong culprit. According to the DOJ, Louisiana should sue the other states from which abortion providers serve Louisiana patients. The Justice Department did not defend the FDA, which it ostensibly represents. It also didn’t object to Louisiana’s dangerous claim that its state law enforcement powers had been impeded by those outside its borders.

As advocates watch this fight and attempt to forecast what’s next, the Justice Department’s inaction can be read as both an admission and a promise. The DOJ is admitting that this courtroom battle over mifepristone is not about whether it is safe, as has been the anti-abortion movement’s argument since Dobbs. It’s not even really about the FDA. And it’s implicitly promising that the fight over guidelines for mifepristone is merely a step toward a national abortion ban. On the surface, DOJ and Louisiana were at odds, but they appear to be in agreement when it comes to the ultimate goal of extending existing state abortion bans to all 50 states. The Justice Department used its time before the Fifth Circuit this week to demonstrate that agreement.

Louisiana’s case is just one of many to take aim at medication abortion following the demise of Roe. Some have ended in the early stages, involving debate over whether the cases can even be brought at all. In one, Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. U.S. Food and Drug Administration, a hastily assembled group of anti-abortion medical providers who did not provide abortion sued the agency, but the Supreme Court ruled that the plaintiffs lacked standing to challenge the FDA. Thus kicked off a wave of new cases meant essentially to cast a plaintiff that could pass muster.

The Louisiana case is also in those early stages. It has had one qualified but temporary win for the state so far. Earlier this year, a different Fifth Circuit panel issued an order that suspended the FDA guidelines permitting mifepristone access by telehealth, until the ultimate outcome in the case. Nearly immediately, two of the drug’s manufacturers asked the Supreme Court to stay that decision. The FDA, glaringly, did not ask for a stay. In May, the Supreme Court lifted the lower court’s stay, and mifepristone guidelines returned to the status quo.

As Louisiana Solicitor General Ben Aguiñaga again laid out the state’s case this week, arguing that it did have standing to sue the FDA, he didn’t have to emphasize his indignation about the fact that people are still having abortions in Louisiana despite the state’s ban. But he did, repeatedly claiming that “it happens a thousand times a month” and that the FDA allowed it to happen simply by having made mifepristone available by mail without an in-person appointment. Judge Stephen Higginson, who was appointed to the Fifth Circuit by President Obama, did not seem impressed with this reasoning. To him, he said, it sounded like the state was “really just asking the federal government to help you impose your criminal laws.” The case wasn’t about the FDA or its guidelines, in other words; it was about finding a way to enforce Louisiana’s abortion ban, using the power of the federal government.

The anti-abortion movement’s legal strategy of going after the FDA is not new. But it has become more complicated now that the Justice Department’s posture toward the agency and its authority is changing dramatically, Kirsten Moore told me. Moore is the director of the EMAA Project, which works to expand access to medication abortion. The Trump regime is responsible for the sea change. “We saw, in the prior administration, DOJ really robustly defending FDA’s authority, and their willingness to follow the process Congress had laid out for them,” she explained. That’s unsurprising; the FDA’s authority, delegated by Congress, is well established. “This administration,” however, “just isn’t doing that.”

The sea change was evident in the performance of the Department of Justice attorney, Daniel Winik. At oral arguments, he repeatedly refused to speak to the FDA’s mifepristone guidelines. He would not address anything the judges asked as it related to medication abortion. “We have not taken a position,” he said, on any of the “merits issues in the case.” All there was to do, he said, was to tell the court that Louisiana lacked standing in the case. “I don’t find that very satisfactory,” replied Judge Higginson. “I mean, this is your regulation.”

Was Winik throwing the FDA under the bus? “It’s beyond unusual for the Department of Justice to say, ‘We’re not even going to touch the merits of something which the DOJ has defended before,’” Katie Keith, founding director of the Center for Health Policy and the Law at the O’Neill Institute at Georgetown Law, told me this week after oral arguments. “It’s a wild position to be taking.” Keith pointed out an earlier DOJ filing in the case, which seemed to undermine even the FDA’s own record on mifepristone. Among other things, it stated, “Given this widespread debate over the safety of mifepristone, FDA has concluded that the best path forward is for the agency to reconsider the restrictions on mifepristone based on all the evidence before the agency.” Of the stance DOJ is taking in this case, she said, “I don’t know any other way to read this position other than as a political position.”

The closest that Winik got to a defense of the FDA was to say that the agency was the wrong target. Despite what Louisiana had argued, he said, FDA guidelines on mifepristone had “nothing to do with the hindrance to the enforceability of state law.” Louisiana had previously attempted to hold medication abortion prescribers responsible in court, he went on. “You brought these prosecutions against doctors in New York and California, why can’t you pursue them?” It’s not the FDA guidelines, he said. “The answer is the shield laws enacted by other states.”

Shield laws are meant as “safeguards,” as Dr. Chelsea Daniels, a member of the Reproductive Freedom Taskforce of the Committee to Protect Health Care, told me on Wednesday. Daniels is also a practicing ob-gyn and an abortion provider who has worked in Florida and California. These laws allow providers to offer care to patients in every state, even those with abortion bans, by protecting them from civil suits brought by ban states. “The sheer fact that shield laws need to exist,” Daniels said, indicates how far anti-abortion lawmakers are willing to go in order to stop providers in other states. “Anti-abortion advocates talk about how they want to bring this back to the states,” she said. “The way that they then subsequently attack shield laws, to go completely out of their way to attack other states, just speaks to how phony their intentions are, and how transparent their goals are.”

While the Justice Department attorney at the Fifth Circuit may have been in court to represent the FDA, he was also representing the administration’s anti-abortion posture: to ensure that “the Dobbs decision becomes permanent in every single state,” as Attorney General Todd Blanche promised at an event put on by the White House Faith Office in August.

The Justice Department’s defense, therefore, was in what was not said. Its attorney did not contend that Louisiana was wrong on the merits of its case in any way. He didn’t say it was wrong about the harms of mifepristone; he didn’t say it hadn’t been harmed by those who allowed its residents to access abortion; he did not dispute Louisiana’s specious reasoning that one state has the power to enforce its abortion ban on those outside the state. In fact, in suggesting other states as the culprit, the Justice Department seemed to endorse this argument.

A decision in this case is yet to come; whatever the ruling is, it will certainly end up in front of the Supreme Court. But the confusion over mifepristone access, caused by the legal process, has already seeped out. “It’s rare that I have a patient come in saying to me, have you been following the Louisiana v. FDA hearings?” Daniels shared with me. “I mean, every now and then. But I think, more generally, it’s in the groundwater. It’s in the groundwater for all of us.” The chaos whipped up in the courts stands in stark contrast to the quotidian simplicity of offering routine abortion care. “The list of questions I ask people when I’m about to dispense mifepristone, to make sure that they’re good candidates,” Daniels said, “is a much shorter list than the list of questions I ask people when I am about to dispense ibuprofen or Advil.”

Leon County, Florida’s mail ballot envelope design placed the words “return service requested” 0.236 inches away from its election office’s return address, when it was supposed to be a quarter-inch, leading the USPS to reject it on September 2, the Tallahassee Democrat reports. The county’s supervisor of elections, Mark Earley, called it “ridiculous.”

After Earley’s office filed an appeal, the envelope design was eventually accepted.

“After several requests to postal employees today, I was granted a temporary certification for my envelopes in case the rule goes into effect. If the rule does not go into effect, then my envelopes are completely fine. So either way, we are good this election!” Earley told the Democrat in an email, referring to new USPS design rules resulting from President Trump’s executive order restricting voting by mail.

The egregious rejection raises questions about how mail-in ballots will be handled if the Supreme Court allows the rule to go ahead following a legal challenge from multiple states and municipalities, including some led by Republicans.

“The chaos factor is the real problem,” Earley, who has joined the court challenges, told the Democrat. “I’ve had voters tell me ‘I don’t trust anything anymore, so I’m just not going to vote.’ And so I say the only way that your vote doesn’t get counted is if you don’t try and vote.”

If the county had not been granted a reprieve, Leon County would have been stuck, as a statute requires ballots to be sent out to the county’s voters by September 24, a deadline that is too soon to create new envelopes. Earley told the newspaper that “these exact same envelopes have been used to mail many tens of thousands of ballots to Leon County voters in the 2024 elections and in the 2026 primary election without incident.”

According to Earley, he submitted the envelopes to USPS at its request, but many elections offices in Florida had not taken that step. That is probably true of many other elections offices across the country, and the postal service could end up finding fault with their mail-in ballots and envelopes, leading to chaos, conspiracy theories, and disputed results in November. Is that Trump’s goal?

Inside Washington

Dems want to regulate AI. But will AI money divide them?

Democrats are loudly demanding new artificial intelligence regulation after an Anthropic researcher publicly announced his resignation this week with a social media post saying his colleagues believe AI “could kill us all by the end of the decade.” On Thursday, another Anthropic news item threw fuel on the fire: The company announced that it had discovered and thwarted a “series” of attempts by “suspected state-sponsored groups, financially motivated criminals, and politically motivated individuals” to use its AI models to develop biological weapons.

Now, as some Dems call for immediate action, the question isn’t just whether the party will hold the power to do something in January—it’s also whether the new Congress could be hampered by the role of pro-AI money in politics.

The biggest player in the AI PAC world is Leading the Future, which is funded by OpenAI president Greg Brockman, venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, and Joe Lonsdale, the co-founder of Palantir.

The other major AI PAC is Public First Action, which was founded by former Democratic Representative Brad Carson and former Republican Representative Chris Stewart to act as a counterweight to Leading the Future. Anthropic is a major funder of the group, and donated $40 million to it this year. “This is too important a conversation to let a few billionaires decide the future of AI in our country and put profits over people,” Anthony Rivera-Rodriguez, a spokesperson for Public First Action, told The New Republic. “We exist to advocate for public safeguards in this debate.”

Other tech sectors, notably the cryptocurrency industry, pour money into politics as well. There’s some overlap between the interests of pro-AI and pro-cryto PACs like Fairshake.

While both groups are funded by the AI industry, campaign finance reform advocates say there are crucial differences. “If I had my druthers, none of these PACs would exist,” said Colin McGlynn, the AI policy adviser at Demand Progress Action. “But given that we’re stuck with the Supreme Court we have for now, that we’re not going to get that kind of money out of politics, I definitely prefer that there be some money on the side of being ready to regulate AI,” he said, referring to Public First Action’s stated goal to support AI regulation.

So far, Leading the Future’s Democratic sub-PAC, called Think Big, has intervened in 15 Democratic primaries, according to Federal Elections Commission filings and the watchdog group Guardrails Action. The candidates they’ve supported include: Ritchie Torres, Marilyn Strickland, Greg Stanton, Jimmy Panetta, Joseph Morelle, Robert Menendez, Jared Moskowitz, Dan Koh, Ben
McAdams, Jesse Jackson Jr., Valerie Hoyle, Yvette Clarke, Melissa Bean, and Jeremy Moss.

Notably, Think Big spent millions to oppose Alex Bores’s campaign for New York’s 12th congressional district. Bores authored New York’s RAISE Act, which requires frontier AI labs to publish information about their safety protocols and disclose any safety breaches. Jobs and Democracy PAC, an affiliate of Public First Action, jumped in to support Bores, but he ultimately lost his race.

Think Big has also offered endorsements (but not financial support) to Sam Liccardo, Josh Gottheimer, Jimmy Gomez, Tom Suozzi, Eric Sorensen, Joyce Beatty, Herb Conaway, Emilia Sykes, and Suhas Subramanyam.

Of those, a few names stand out: Gottheimer is a co-chair of the House Commission on AI and the Innovation Economy, a group launched by Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries late last year. Meanwhile, Subramanyam is a co-sponsor of the FRONTIER Act.

Besides Bores, Public First Action and its Jobs and Democracy PAC has spent money on candidates like Colin Allred, Valerie Foushee, Brian Poindexter, Scott Weiner, and Bob Brooks. Alongside Representatives Greg Casar and Sara Jacobs, Foushee last month introduced a bill to prevent mass unemployment due to AI.

In sharp contrast to Leading the Future, Public First Action explicitly supports state and local AI legislation, and says on its website that it “opposes federal efforts to freeze state progress without adequate federal safeguards.” That could put the group at odds with the FRONTIER Act, which critics say preempts states’ abilities to regulate AI.

Though the groups have spent massive sums of money in the 2026 midterms, experts say they think the power of AI interests could decrease soon. Polling shows that Americans are desperate for AI regulation; 65 percent of Americans surveyed earlier this year said the government had done “too little” to regulate AI. Anger over data centers and AI has become a talking point in races across the country.

“I absolutely think that the anger about data centers and other AI overreach is going to be part of what powers the next generation of reform on money in politics,” said Abigail Bellows, the senior policy director for anti-corruption and accountability at Common Cause.

McGlynn agrees that Leading the Future is in a weaker position than they were at the beginning of 2026. “They started out with the crypto strategy of spend big and early to scare people into line,” he said, referring to the strategy of crypto PACs like Fairshake in 2024 and 2026. But now that voters are animated by data centers and AI, “they’re kind of on the back foot now, and we’ve seen them basically stop spending recently. I think they’re trying to come up with new strategies.”

Some lawmakers are already taking action, suggesting the formation of a select committee on artificial intelligence and, in the case of Senator Bernie Sanders, holding briefings on the dangers of AI. It remains to be seen what strategies the AI industry might take come January to influence any legislation the new Congress might consider.

—Emma Janssen

Outside Washington

The anti-Flock backlash continues. In Ohio, Democratic state lawmakers Tristan Rader and Darnell Brewer and Republicans Levi Dean
and Justin Pizzulli recently penned a letter to “request that the Ohio Department of Transportation stop permitting automated license plate readers in state highway rights-of-way and review the permits already issued,” the Ohio Capital Journal reported Thursday. Recent reports of law enforcement abusing the technology, and general concerns about surveillance, have turned Flock cameras into “a hot topic on the Ohio campaign trail,” writes Nick Evans. Democratic gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton, the paper notes, “initially praised the cameras’ role in solving crimes” but now has said she supports a full ban on the cameras. Republican candidate Vivek Ramaswamy has been a bit cagier, and apparently did not respond to the paper’s request for clarification on his position.

In case you missed it: ProPublica’s Andrea Suozzo and Agnel Philip this week find in a striking new report that deaths from ectopic pregnancy doubled in the period from 2020 to 2025 as compared to the prior six years—and that “while the uptick in ectopic deaths occurred nationwide, the climb has been much steeper in states that banned abortion after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022.” Troublingly, they note, “the mounting deaths in Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data have drawn little scrutiny or response”: The reporters contacted “more than a dozen maternal health experts, including leaders in the field, who were unaware of the spike.”

—Heather Souvaine Horn

The Ideas Factory

At the centrist Progressive Policy Institute, Richard D. Kahlenberg and Lief Lin pen a new report on “Teaching American Democracy,” probing “where civics [education] went wrong” and how to “revitalize” it. One of the recommendations: “All states should require three years of American Democracy, just as they typically require three years in math and reading. Helping all students understand who we are as Americans and why,” Kahlenberg and Lin write, “is of enormous importance in a country where liberal democratic norms are under steady attack—as important as literacy and numeracy.”

Next Tuesday at 10 a.m., the Brookings Institution will host an event exploring “whether industry, community, and government can ever get closer to agreement on data centers.” Participants include Representative Suhas Subramanyam of Virginia, NAACP director of the Center for Environmental and Climate Justice Abre’ Conner, Elena Schlossberg of the Coalition to Protect Prince William County, Groundswell CEO Michelle Moore, and Tuckahoe Creek Strategies founder Marie Sylla-Dixon. Brookings Center for Technology Innovation director Nicol Turner Lee will moderate.

—Heather Souvaine Horn

In Closing

Good Week/Bad Week

Good Week: The Washington Sun

Like a butterfly emerging from its cocoon, the media operation formerly known as NOTUS has morphed into its final form as The Washington Sun. The outlet has made a strong showing in recent years, publishing keenly written stories, hoovering up local journalistic talent, and filling the yawning gap left by The Washington Post as it pivoted from news to cut-rate right-wing opinion goulash and unwatchable podcasts hosted by dweebs.

Bad Week: Hey, maybe everyone, who knows?

Was Jacob Coxon’s announcement that Anthropic’s AI models were destined to wipe out humanity within a decade a genuine cry for help, or a personal-branding stunt, or a marketing gimmick? It’s impossible to say. Still, not great to have a trillion-dollar industry barreling into a future it doesn’t understand and cannot explain that’s this good at keeping us awake at night.

—Jason Linkins

Political Trivia Question of the Day

On this opening week of the NFL season: A number of former NFL players have gone on to careers in politics. Mostly, they’re Republican, but there have been at least two recent Democrats. Name one. (Sign up for The TNR Blue Book to find the answer in Tuesday’s newsletter.)

—Michael Tomasky

Kennedy flew on an Air Force–operated Gulfstream jet from Washington, D.C., to Des Moines, Iowa, on August 17, where he attended an event with Representative Mariannette Miller-Meeks. The Defense Department charges $9,000 per hour to operate these jets, while federal workers are able to book commercial flights to Des Moines for as little as $250.

Several people told the Post that Kennedy rarely uses military aircraft, even after White House officials and lawyers for the Department of Health and Human Services signed off on the secretary’s access. Two of the people said that the jet’s flight path just happened to coincide with Kennedy’s travel plans. It’s not clear how many times Kennedy has opted to travel on military aircraft.

Kennedy’s exorbitant travel accommodations are particularly unprecedented considering that during Donald Trump’s first term, the president pushed out former Health Secretary Tom Price over reports he’d been flying on private jets from Washington to Philadelphia.

Kennedy isn’t the only one in Washington facing backlash over his flight plans.

Senator Rand Paul is in hot water following a report that six of his staffers traveled by private jet from Washington to Pittsburgh in the days after Trump’s attempted assassination in Butler, Pennsylvania, Politico reported Friday. A direct flight to Butler takes little more than an hour, while driving takes just five hours. Paul’s staffers’ private jet cost taxpayers $17,827.

Paul, who was then the top Republican on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, preaches fiscal conservatism but has a history of spending lavishly on travel.

A spokesperson for Paul released a statement claiming that the private jet was “the most efficient and effective means for the entire investigative team to participate in the investigative activities that day.”

The families apparently went rogue during an event at the memorial in New York Friday. At least two individuals excoriated the Trump administration and previous presidencies for obfuscating Saudi Arabia’s connection to the terrorist attack.

Terry Strada, the widow of 9/11 victim Tom Strada and the national chair of 9/11 Families United, rhetorically asked her husband, “How can it be 25 years, and still we have no justice for the role that Saudi Arabia played in your murder?”

Strada’s remarks elicited spontaneous applause from the audience. (Trump was not in attendance, reportedly because he had been told he was not allowed to speak at the ceremony.)

“Yes, we finally made it into a court and have proved that the kingdom of Saudi Arabia fomented a rancid culture of anti-American terrorism around the globe and then sent its agents to support the radical Islamists hijackers so they could attack you and all of our loved ones,” she continued. “But, for 25 years, administration after administration, including leaders in front of us here today, chose to protect the Saudis instead of standing with the 9/11 families?

“They withheld evidence. They vetoed JASTA,” Strada said, referring to a 2016 law that allowed U.S. citizens to sue foreign governments. “They broke promises, both public and private. It has been one betrayal after another. President Trump can still change that. Tell the Saudis to stop lying.

“Tell them that if they want to be friends with the USA, they cannot continue to deny all of this, all of the pain, all of the destruction that we have all been suffering through,” Strada added.

Fifteen of the 19 hijackers who conducted terrorist attacks on 9/11 were Saudi citizens. Evidence that emerged in a lawsuit brought by a coalition of survivors and their families against the Saudi government revealed in 2024 that some low-level Saudi officials were in contact with the hijackers prior to the attack. Until that finding, U.S. presidential administrations had largely dismissed Saudi involvement in the attack. An FBI-CIA report released in 2005 by the Bush administration said that there was no evidence “the Saudi Government or members of the Saudi royal family knowingly provided support” for what happened that day.

But Strada was not the only person to speak out. The nephew of Lisa Marie Terry, another 9/11 victim, also urged Trump to do something about the country’s long-standing defense of Saudi Arabia.

“For 25 years, the deep state has hidden the truth about what happened that day, 25 years ago. President Trump: You’re our last hope. Release the unredacted files that implicate Saudi Arabia while what’s left of the victims’ families are still alive to see it,” he said.

But Trump has done much to further intertwine America’s dependence on Saudi Arabia, perhaps most notably a $1 trillion economic and defense agreement that he signed last year with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

“[W]e salute the service members working right now to ensure the world’s number one sponsor of terror, the Islamic Republic of Iran, will never, ever, have a nuclear weapon,” Trump said to scattered applause.

Trump is using his 9/11 speech to promote his war against Iran pic.twitter.com/B5ZrgIb3Iv

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 11, 2026

Trump’s comments came shortly after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth also used the 9/11 memorial event to push war with Iran. “Over the past six months, we have laid waste to the world’s most prolific state sponsor of terrorism,” Hegseth said. “Our warriors have fought an Islamic theocracy that has wished us death for nearly half a century, that cheered on 9/11.” (Iran officially condemned the attacks in 2001.)

Using the 9/11 attacks as a justification for bombing Iran is disturbingly in line with U.S. policy the last 25 years. President George W. Bush responded to Al Qaeda’s attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon by launching decades-long wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and a wider “war on terror” that caused the deaths of thousands of U.S. service members and millions of innocent civilians.

That war on terror has seemingly never ended. While Afghanistan’s Taliban regime was initially pushed out nearly a quarter-century ago by the U.S.-led campaign, it is now back in power. Iraq has struggled to recover from the U.S. invasion, enduring an insurgency and the rise of the Islamic State. National security restrictions and mass surveillance have grown unabated in the U.S. in the last few decades.

More recently, the war with Iran has disrupted the global economy and killed 18 U.S. service members as well as up to 8,000 civilians across the Middle East, wounding countless more. It shows no signs of stopping, with periodic ceasefires ultimately collapsing. Despite criticizing the war in Iraq and Afghanistan to start his political career (reversing earlier opinions), Trump appears to be restarting the blunders of those two campaigns and is in danger of creating a worse quagmire in Iran.

Counselor to the attorney general Joe diGenova was essentially responsible for finding proof of Trump’s baseless claims that investigations against him—from the 2016 probe into Russian election interference all the way to Trump’s federal indictments after he left office in 2021—were actually part of a larger conspiracy against him. DiGenova was formerly Trump’s personal attorney and helped lead Trump’s 2020 lawsuits claiming widespread election fraud, which he lost.

“I did resign today by letter to the attorney general. I said that it was a privilege and an honor to serve the president and the department, and I was very grateful,” diGenova told the New York Post Thursday. According to the Post’s sources, the Trump administration began to lose confidence in diGenova, claiming that he was “slow-rolling” indictments of Trump’s perceived enemies—like former President Barack Obama, former CIA Director John Brennan, and former FBI Director James Comey—and going down “rabbit holes.” After five months on the job, DiGenova still hadn’t charged anyone.

“If you want indictments where there’s no evidence, you have an ethical problem,” he said—which suggests that the investigation was a fraught, overzealous exercise from the start.

DiGenova later clarified that comment to the Associated Press.

“There’s plenty of evidence in all of these cases to prove the theories of prosecution. It just takes time to get there, and some people want to get there a little faster than others—and you can’t do that.”

The Justice Department has not commented on the prominent departure, nor has the White House.

During his speech at the Republican midterm convention Thursday night, Cruz failed to address an audience member calling for New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, and Texas Senate candidate James Talarico to be shot.

Cruz began: “When Mandami [sic] says he wants to seize the means of production—,”

“He should be shot!” someone interrupted from the crowd.

“He means it,” Cruz continued. “When Abdul El-Sayed says he has a quote ‘obligation’ to comply with Sharia law—”

“He should be shot!”

“He means it,” Cruz said. “And when James Talarico says he wants to dismantle capitalism—”

“He should be shot!”

“He means it!” Cruz continued.

Ted Cruz: "When Mamdani says he wants to seize the means of production, he means it."

Crowd: "HE SHOULD BE SHOT!"

Cruz: "When Abdul El-Sayed says he has an obligation to Sharia Law, he means it."

Crowd: "HE SHOULD BE SHOT!"

Cruz: "And when James Talarico says he wants to… pic.twitter.com/j25bqKeJLM

— Bulwark Clips (@BulwarkClips) September 10, 2026

If Cruz were anything resembling a real leader, he would have condemned the violent language, particularly as the comments fell on the one-year anniversary of Charlie Kirk’s death.

Clearly, Republican outrage at violent language only goes one way. Cruz himself has repeatedly condemned Democrats for using “hateful rhetoric” to criticize President Donald Trump’s sweeping immigration crackdown. Republicans have claimed that the left has a monopoly on doxing and calling for assassinations—all while the Trump administration has deleted government research showing that the right is responsible for far more political violence. Not to mention, Republicans regularly ignore Trump’s outlandish statements, whose own violent language has done little to lower the national temperature.

Donald Trump spoke at the Dallas event on Wednesday night for more than an hour and a half. Yet the latest Nielsen ratings data, obtained Friday by Mediaite, proves that pretty much no one was interested in the president’s headlining performance.

The speech pulled 2.5 million viewers on Fox News, one of the few networks that aired the spectacle. That’s actually a slight loss compared to Fox’s typical programming in the same time slot: Last month, Gutfeld attracted 2.51 million viewers per episode, suggesting that people who would have already been watching Fox might have actually tuned out Wednesday.

Newsmax, C-SPAN, and OAN also aired the entirety of Trump’s address. Their ratings numbers are not in yet, but it’s unlikely that they attracted more viewers than Fox News, which typically takes the vast majority of America’s conservative audience.

The president’s lackluster prime-time popularity might have been affected by the National Football League, which opened its season on Wednesday night with a game between the Seattle Seahawks and the New England Patriots. The ratings report from the season kickoff still hasn’t been made public, but if last season is any indication of the league’s potential audience, then it likely attracted the eyes of around 28 million viewers.

Nonetheless, Trump was convinced that his performance had outdone football itself.

“The Republican Midterm Convention last night, in Dallas, was a major, sold out hit, far bigger, better, and more important than anyone thought possible,” Trump wrote on Truth Social Thursday morning. “It was really something, streaming all over the place, and really big numbers, despite going up against the NFL. The overall numbers beat the NFL.

“The Arena, which was really nice, beat its own attendance records,” Trump continued. “The place was packed! There were thousands of people outside who couldn’t get in. Screens were provided. I guess people LOVE TRUMP POLITICS! I’ll be there again tonight to close out the show. Exciting ‘Stuff!’ MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!”

But the seats were not packed. In fact, days before the event began, Republicans began handing out tickets for free, though those ticketholders were not guaranteed admission. As a result, large swaths of the stadium—particularly in its upper levels—were empty.

The president dozed off at multiple points during the event Friday, slumped over in his chair with his eyes closed and his head hanging down while everyone else onstage—Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Melania Trump, and former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice—was clearly awake.

Trump has been falling asleep at the 9/11 ceremony at the Pentagon all morning

See how Melania seated next to him seems fully awake while he isn't even moving pic.twitter.com/3a2Pfxl0dn

— Adrienne Mahsa Varkiani (@AdrienneMahsa) September 11, 2026

This is one of many times the 80-year-old president has appeared to be completely asleep on camera in front of dozens of people. But for him to do it today—in front of the families of victims on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the most devastating terror attack in American history—is particularly inappropriate.

And so, on this twenty-fifth anniversary of 9/11, older people need to be reminded of—and younger readers told for perhaps the first time—how the Republican Party of that era used that tragedy to impose its worldview on a confused and malleable populace and to browbeat the political opposition (and how, tragically, said opposition largely complied in ways that resonate loudly today). Superficial reminiscences published this week will bemoan the “fact” that we were a country united then, and look how far we’ve fallen. It sounds soothing. But nothing could be further from the more forensically examined truth.

The nation was united in shock and grief, that much is true. A different presidential administration might have approached that reality with a certain humility; an acknowledgment—especially given the dubious terms under which it took power (the Supreme Court made George W. Bush president, not the voters, who preferred Al Gore)—that its job was to give oxygen to that shock and grief in a sincere and nonideological way. To guide a tremulous nation through a gut-churning moment without hitching the trauma to a preconceived political agenda.

Bush did just enough of that to appear to your average person to be sincere about it. He visited a mosque in Washington just six days after the attacks and said, “Islam is peace.” That, to be sure, was laudable. Could you picture Trump doing that?

But behind the scenes, other, darker wheels were spinning, almost from the moment of the attack. Donald Rumsfeld was Bush’s secretary of defense. The very afternoon of the attack, he told an aide, according to declassified, handwritten notes: “Best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit S.H. [Saddam Hussein] at same time—not only U.B.L,” referring to the man then known in intelligence circles as “Usama” bin Laden and widely and correctly assumed to have orchestrated the attacks. And: “Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not.” And not?

Hussein, at the time, was the leader of Iraq—and of what was without question a fascist, evil regime. American neoconservatives, a cohort that included Rumsfeld, his deputy Paul Wolfowitz, Vice President Dick Cheney, and many others in the administration—had trained their bellicose eyes on Hussein since 1991, when the first President Bush repelled his invasion of Kuwait but spurned the neocons’ importunings to press on into Baghdad and depose Saddam. An organization, the Project for a New American Century, or PNAC, was conjured into existence during the Clinton presidency for the express purpose of keeping the pressure on U.S. administrations to wage war on Iraq. Cheney was a key figure in PNAC, a founding member in fact. He had been Bush Sr.’s defense secretary and had scorned his boss’s decision not to march on to Baghdad.

In other words: The great, unifying national tragedy was—within hours—converted into an excuse to wage a highly divisive and very ideological war, which was commenced in due course 18 months later. Those 18 months were defined by a campaign of lies about Saddam being six months away from being able to launch a nuclear weapon at the United States and having links to the 9/11 attackers. You see, Cheney, as Pentagon chief under Bush I, had developed with aides, including Wolfowitz, a plan—massively controversial at the time, when The New York Times revealed its existence in 1992—for U.S. global hegemony. At the heart of the plan was invading Iraq and turning it into a democracy.

So, to sum up: Cheney, Wolfowitz, et al. had wanted to invade Iraq since 1991. The 9/11 attacks gave them an excuse because they put the public in a jittery, revenge-seeking frame of mind. But public opinion was still skeptical, so from there, they started lying.

It worked, and they got their war. That it proved to be a disaster was no surprise. That’s what generally happens with wars when the people who start them think they’ll be cakewalks, over in weeks. I trust that sounds familiar.

On the domestic front, the uses to which the Bush team put 9/11 were possibly even worse. The surveillance powers of the federal government were expanded vastly and immediately. Those who raised questions about all this were attacked and maligned—not just for disagreeing with Bush, but for being enemies of America (“Why do you hate freedom?” became what we now call a meme in those pre-Twitter days).

Bush said in a speech a week or so after the attack that the terrorists came after us because they “hate our freedoms.” It was irresponsible nonsense. Al Qaeda did not attack the United States because we have a Bill of Rights. It attacked the United States because of our military adventurism in the Middle East. I wish to be clear that I do not think it is remotely justified that 3,000 innocent civilians died because of that, but that was the justification, which bin Laden stated many times, not “our freedoms.”

But once Bush said that—once he stripped the attacks of their specific motivation and assigned to them a fuzzier one that would hit average Americans in their emotional kishkes—he blurred the line of what did and did not constitute legitimate criticism of his government. Now what the United States did to avenge 9/11 was about defending “freedom.” And now, anyone who questioned any action of the administration could easily be branded an enemy of freedom.

And so we arrive at September 26, 2001, when presidential press secretary Ari Fleischer, responding to a late-night joke by Bill Maher, much more conventionally liberal then, said that Americans in this new era “need to watch what they say, watch what they do.” This suggests an atmosphere of Gestapo-like censorship, but in fact none such was even needed. The world—the media, the late-night shows, the Democrats—largely censored itself.

Ah, the Democrats. A moment of national unity was appropriate. Except, ask yourself this: If these attacks had happened under President Gore, do you think Rush Limbaugh would have pled for national unity? Of course not. But still—a moment was appropriate. But only a moment. Once the neocons on the Bush team started exploiting 9/11 for a war that they had wanted to wage since 1991 and that most Democrats opposed, the Democrats should have become a genuine opposition. They failed to do that. They were cowed. They went along.

The hangover from that sad episode extends into our time. Can one draw a line, for example, from the 2002–03 Democrats’ capitulation on Bush’s war to the Democrats’ general confusion last year? I think one can. It’s a different party, with younger people who are less afraid, and who know that their base wants a more pugilistic stance. But some of the leaders are the same people. And even for those in the current leadership who weren’t there in 2001, they seem too often to have inherited the backpedaling caution that characterized the 9/11-era Democrats’ response to Bush’s aggressive posture.

So that’s what happened after 9/11. The Republican Party hijacked this national, indeed international, tragedy to start a war that was a practical and moral calamity (and I can’t write this without at least mentioning the sanctioning by the United States of America of torture and special prisons and CIA “black sites” and more) and to commence a crackdown at home that unleashed deeply reactionary forces. Those forces grew and metastasized as the nation elected its first Black president, and they became bolder and more public with the arrival of a demagogue who stripped the sentiment of its more polished veneer and got matters down to the rough surface. 

I do think there’s a difference between George W. Bush and Donald Trump. I believe that Bush, on a personal level, is a decent man, while Trump is not. But personal decency is not what matters most in a leader. What matters in a leader is what he will and will not do in his public capacity for the sake of political advantage; what moral lines he draws. And Bush, after 9/11, drew a couple good lines, but he drew too many lines that pointed his party in the direction of Trump. On this anniversary, we should not forget this, or absolve him and the people who enabled him.

On Thursday, journalist Seth Hettena found texts released by the FBI under the Freedom of Information Act showing conversations where Patel ordered the FBI’s Assistant Director for Public Affairs, Ben Williamson, to respond to a X poster with the name “Ifindretards.”

The February post said Patel’s “retard rating just went to all time highs. Congratulations Kash.”

Patel thought the post warranted a reply, and pressured agents to “continuously” respond with the bureau’s “record year results.” Hettena simulated how the text exchange would look on an iPhone:

When Williamson protested that responding to @IfindRetards would “look bad” on Patel, the director responded that “it’s not about them, it is about the number of views, because people see it and need to be seeing our stats.”

It’s quite a waste of FBI resources to go after an online troll, but Patel has been overly concerned with social media throughout his tenure, revealing sensitive information from multiple investigations including the Charlie Kirk assassination. Patel isn’t particularly concerned about the bureau’s resources, either, having used them to jet-set around the world partying and hanging out with his singer girlfriend.

Patel only has his job because of his loyalty to President Trump, publishing an enemies list before Trump was elected in 2024. Since he was narrowly confirmed by the Senate last year, Patel’s stewardship of the FBI has been marked by scandal after scandal, and he quickly lost the confidence of the agents under his command. Right now, the only reason Patel still has his job is that he hasn’t lost the confidence of the president.

In late July, Gavin Wax, the chief of staff to the undersecretary of public diplomacy and public affairs at the State Department, was reportedly placed on leave after he hosted a group of pro-Kremlin Serbian politicians in an executive dining room. Wax was previously placed under investigation for allegedly assaulting someone inside an elevator at the State Department offices.

In order to save his job, Wax made a Hail Mary call to Boris Epshteyn, Trump’s senior personal counsel, one source told the Mail. The president’s top lawyer stepped in to prevent Wax from being fired, five senior administration officials told the publication.

Rubio was infuriated that he couldn’t fire Wax, and has since made it clear that Wax is not welcome in his department, according to three senior administration sources.

“It signals to everyone else in the department that if you have the ear of someone close to the president, you are untouchable no matter what you do,” one State Department official told the Mail. Wax also has reportedly been able to use Natalie Harp to make inroads with Trump.

“Please raise your right hand. I pledge, to the greatest president in the history of the United States, that loves us so much he can’t even breathe, that I will go out with my family, my friends, I’ll do it any way, I don’t care if I’m registered or not, I’m gonna try and cheat like hell like they do, there’s never been bigger cheaters, they don’t care. I am gonna go out and I’m going to get my friends and family and we are going to vote on November 3rd, or we are going to vote before that!” Trump had the whole crowd repeat after him,

Trump: "Please right your right hand. I pledge to the greatest president in the history of the United States. That loves us so much he can't even breath. That I will go out with my family, my friends, I'll do it any way -- I don't care if I'm registered or not, I'm going to try… pic.twitter.com/ywiYe8ZIdu

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 11, 2026

It was blatant, cultlike behavior, and Trump’s MAGA base seemed to eat it up. The “cheat like hell” line proves that Trump’s rants about election fraud have always been self-serving, as he doesn’t care about any laws as long as he wins.

The Republican midterm convention got off to a poor start Wednesday, with rows of empty seats at the American Airlines Center outside of Dallas. Trump attempted to make news by pledging to give $5,000 to every American adult if Republicans hold on to Congress after November’s elections, an apparent bribe to get people to vote for him. But that might not be enough, as even some of his most ardent supporters aren’t buying it.

The midterm convention was mocked online as a “Trumpalooza,” with Republicans forced to desperately fill seats at the last minute. It’s a sign that all Trump has left is his small cultlike base, and that may not be enough to save the GOP’s political fortunes in November.

“Mr. President, on the checks: The U.S. is still $40 trillion in debt. If your economic policies are working, why do you need an incentive for people to turn out to vote?” she asked Thursday night.

“I didn’t do it for turning out the vote, I did it as a reward for people having to put up with five years and four years of a horrible situation caused by Biden,” Trump replied. “You look at the border, you look at the crime.... It’s almost a reward for the people having to put up with Biden’s policies.”

“But you also offered checks through—”

“Not you. Not you!” Trump snapped, leaning in threateningly close to Scott. “Hey, not you,” he said again with a snarl. “Your network … you’re the worst.”

Q: On the checks, we have $40 trillion in debt. If your economic policies are working, why do you need an incentive for people to turn out to vote?

TRUMP: I'm doing it as a reward for people having to put up for five years and four years of a horrible situation caused by Biden… pic.twitter.com/Iq4LpS1pNt

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 11, 2026

This is not the first time Trump has crashed out after being asked a tough question by a woman. In April, he yelled “Quiet, quiet, quiet!” at CNN’s Kristen Holmes, calling her disrespectful for asking a pertinent question about U.S. relations with North Korea. He’s lobbed transphobic attacks at CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, and last year told Bloomberg reporter Catherine Lucey, “Quiet, Piggy!” He’s also lashed out at Scott before, calling her “stupid” after she dared ask about gas prices.

His angry response to Scott yet again displays his disdain for female journalists and his lack of preparedness for even the most straightforward questions.

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

Donald Trump’s numbers on the economy have taken another big dive. A Quinnipiac poll finds him at a record low, and a CNN analysis finds him in much, much worse shape on the issue than in 2018. But Trump has an answer. He’s just promised to send $5,000 to every American if Republicans hold Congress. The idea is so ludicrous that even Fox News figures are gently mocking it. All of which raises a question: Have Trump’s magical reality-bending powers finally run out?

We’re breaking it all down with political scientist Tom Schaller, who has a good piece for the Public Notice Substack on Trump’s ongoing inflation catastrophe. Tom, good to have you on.

Tom Schaller: Good to be back, Greg.

Sargent: So let’s just start with Trump’s announcement that he’ll send $5,000 to all Americans if Republicans hold the House and Senate. As many people quickly pointed out, Trump has promised to send people money over and over again. His contempt for his voters here is just boundless. Tom, your quick reaction to all that?

Schaller: Well, he won’t deliver on it, and I think we all know that. We didn’t get a rebate for the tariffs that we paid—the corporations did. So in effect, his tariffs, one of the things I talked about in the new piece, were a retail sales tax on Americans that was paid initially by corporations, but they’re getting made whole. And of course, they’re not going to give any of the money back. So you can count on that $5,000 like you can count on getting your tariff money back. That’s my gut reaction.

Sargent: You know, the funny thing about this is it highlights another layer of contempt for Americans that Trump shows here. He’s saying that he’ll be able to send $5,000 to all Americans because the tariff revenue has been so big, which he casts as money that we’re getting from other countries.

So he’s basically saying, all this money that we’re getting from other countries, we’ll send it to Americans. But of course, the truth is literally the exact opposite. The tariffs are being paid by Americans, and nothing will be sent back to them.

Let’s talk about some of this polling. The new Quinnipiac poll has Trump’s approval rating down at 33 percent. On the economy, it’s 32 percent, his lowest ever in Quinnipiac polling. On the war with Iran, he’s at 29 percent. And on trade with Canada, he’s at 28 percent. Extraordinarily terrible numbers.

You wrote in your piece that all of Trump’s policies are conspiring to push up prices and hurt the economy. I think this polling shows that voters really understand the connection here between all these things. Your thoughts on all that?

Schaller: You have more faith in the voter than I do. Let me just start by saying that. And I’m a political scientist, and I’m sure I’ll take some crap for saying this, but I don’t have a lot of faith in voters. So if voters had a substantial knowledge of how the economy works, Greg, they would have known during the campaign that two of the three policies that I talked about in the Public Notice piece—not the Iran war, because obviously that hadn’t happened yet.

But Trump ran on immigration reform and taking all the immigrant labor out of the country. And of course, he ran on tariffs. And if you thought about those two policies for a moment: one is essentially an inflationary policy on domestic production, because it raises labor costs when you eliminate some of the most efficient and lower-paid workers. And the second, of course, tariffs, as we already discussed, is just a tax, a retail tax on imports. And so Trump was campaigning to end inflation on two inflationary policies.

It’d be like if you and I were picked by our local town to sit on a panel to pick the new fire chief. And we interviewed a guy, and he was kind of brusque and he didn’t have good manners, but he had two really great ideas when he explained to us his philosophy of putting out fire. One is, he shows up with a giant flatbed truck of dried hay and he dumps that on top. And then if that doesn’t work, he brings a tanker of kerosene and sprays that on, because we know that liquids douse fires. And we said, let’s hire that guy, what a genius.

And then, halfway through his term—now I’m analogizing to the Iran war—he said, well, no, what you really do to put out a fire is you throw a bunch of firecrackers in there, because that disseminates the fire and that puts it out. So this is the person that Americans hire to fix the economy, even though he can’t do basic percentages, much less understand global macroeconomic politics.

Sargent: It’s a fair point. I would add, though, that when actual conditions force people’s minds to concentrate a little, they actually do. I do take it as heartening that he’s in the twenties on his trade war with Canada and in the twenties on the Iran war. Put it this way: we’ve never had a situation, I don’t think, where the direct connection between policy and outcome on the economy—which is something that presidents often don’t really have a lot of control over—has been so clear.

And so for him to be polling in the twenties on tariffs and trade, when that was one of his quote-unquote strengths, I take that as a sign that maybe voters are starting to see what’s going on here.

Schaller: Well, I mean, I do think voters, rightly or wrongly, they have these, you know, cues that they take. Obviously the gas price is one of them, and grocery prices and housing prices are another. And as I showed in the piece, because so much of the construction industry, residential or commercial, is staffed by immigrant labor, you’re going to raise the cost of housing prices to buy a house. And then of course, when the housing prices go up, then the landlords can charge more in the rent, because of the market situation.

And then of course the groceries, right? Almost every meal you eat, whether you eat it at a restaurant, whether you eat it at home, is made with fruits and vegetables and other produce items, whether fresh or processed, that are planted, picked, you know, and delivered by immigrant labor.

So, Trump’s policies are very inflationary. My point is not that people can’t figure out that they’re paying more for a pound of beef or a gallon of gas. My point is, they should have figured this out during the election. That’s all I’m saying.

Sargent: Well, speaking of the situation here, CNN’s Harry Enten made an astounding observation. He looked at Reuters and CNN polling and concluded that Trump is now fifty-two points underwater with independents on the economy.

Back in 2018, the last midterm, he was at plus ten with that demographic. So as Enten notes, independents have swung sixty-two points against him on the economy. Tom, I keep saying this, but Trump’s collapse with independents is an undercovered story. We haven’t seen anything quite like this. Independents really matter in midterms. What do you make of all that?

Schaller: Well, first of all, I’m shocked. I didn’t realize it was that bad. And I didn’t realize it was that good for him in 2018, which was a bad cycle for Republicans. So if Trump was plus ten with independents and they still took a shellacking in 2018, boy, are they really in trouble here in 2026, eight years later.

So yeah, that is a shocking number, minus 52, even without the baseline of plus ten. But it’s doubly shocking. I was surprised—I thought you were going to say he was minus 20 or minus 15 back in 2018. But to have been plus ten and still Republicans took serious losses in 2018—yeah, I am very, very surprised.

And yeah, people are upset because Trump promised to fix the economy and lower inflation and lower the price of your energy bill. And of course he promised to end the Gaza-Israel war and the, you know, Russia-Ukraine war, and he hasn’t delivered on any of that stuff. And maybe people are starting to realize that he’s high on promises and low on delivery.

Sargent: Well, I think you actually put your finger on an important point, an underlying factor to all this that’s really worth drawing out a little bit, which is that during Trump’s first term, he really did remain above water on the economy. That’s the big difference between then and now.

The fundamental thing here is that during the first term, Trump didn’t actually get his way on a lot of these policies to nearly the same degree that he has in the second term. The first time, he was in positive territory on the economy. Now he’s in absolutely abysmal territory. What do you think of all that?

Schaller: Well, I think that’s true, that the pure effect of his policies was significantly muted, because he at least had some adults in the room instead of a Cabinet full of sycophants.

But I think the other difference you cannot overlook is that—despite, at one point, on what was then called Twitter, Trump claiming that the unemployment rate under Obama was 42 percent when it was literally a tenth of that, it was about 4.5 percent—Trump inherited a smoking hot economy in January 2017, when he first took office, despite his claims that America was in the economic toilet. And he was riding the fumes of that for those first two years.

Whereas the economy was in much worse shape when he came into office in January 2025, following post-COVID inflation. But, you know, Americans, fairly or unfairly, they give extraordinary credit to presidents when the economy is good, whether they deserve it or not. And sometimes they give undeserved blame when the economy is bad. So Trump is being, you know, sort of penalized for the very thing he benefited from in the first term.

Sargent: Well, I would add one nuance, just to throw this out there. It’s true that the economy was worse when Donald Trump took over in 2025 than it was when he took over in 2017. But the key thing to remember is that the whole world was recovering from post-COVID shock and post-COVID trauma. And The Economist described the American recovery as the envy of the world.

So in a sense, while the comparison that you’re making holds, it’s still also true that he twice inherited a good situation, and both times he flushed it down the toilet. The first time he flushed the economy down the toilet by screwing up the COVID handling to a catastrophic degree, right? Like, hundreds of thousands of deaths, probably needless. And then the second time, he’s just flushed it away with policies—with immigration policy, with tariff policy, with war.

He’s just an absolute calamity, always. Everything he touches dies, as the great man said. And so what do you think of all that, Tom? I mean, this is a guy who just keeps fucking everything up. And I’m hoping finally the world is catching up with him. Is that possible?

Schaller: Yeah, I think the world is catching up with him, and I think the world is turning its shoulder to us. I’m in Canada right now, in fact, and Canadians have had it with Trump. And they are essentially a European ally here on the North American continent, to the NATO alliance, and increasingly are behaving like Europeans—which is finding other trade partners around the globe instead of trading with us. And that’s going to affect our long-term import and export ability.

And you know, Trump is really destroying things in a way that—were we not the world’s largest economy and most powerful military, the kind of decisions that we’ve seen him make, I know we’ve been talking about this with the Defense Department and Pete Hegseth—other countries wouldn’t be able to survive those kinds of mistakes. Other economies might collapse with the leadership of Trump.

And so in a weird way, Trump is benefiting from the fact that the United States is such a powerful and rich country that you can screw things up at the margin, to great pain for many Americans and many people who aren’t Americans economically, and the country isn’t going to fold.

Sargent: Well, anyway, his cratering numbers on the economy are the context for his promise to send $5,000 to every American if Republicans hold Congress. Fox News figures were practically mocking this. First, listen to this Fox anchor call bullshit on it.

Fox News anchor (voiceover): We should note, though, it is not the first time he has promised a cash payment like this. He promised Americans two-thousand-dollar rebates during his tariff policy when that was enacted, but after court challenges to the tariffs themselves, those two-thousand-dollar checks so far have not materialized.

Now listen to Fox’s Bret Baier, who’s practically snickering while he makes these points.

Bret Baier (voiceover): But if Republicans win the House, five thousand dollars for every adult citizen. So you do the quick math, that’s about one point three trillion dollars. I can hear the critics’ heads exploding. They’re saying out loud, I guarantee you, the president is bribing voters to vote for Republicans to take over the House, and then he’s bankrupting the country, because the deficit and debt is huge and inflation would come back if this comes into play.

And finally, here’s Laura Ingraham asking a very good question about the idea.

Laura Ingraham (voiceover): Why not just give the money now? If you have the money, why not just—

Donald Trump (voiceover): They can’t. I’ll tell you what, because the Democrats can’t do it. Because with them it’s negative growth. With us it’s so positive.

Sargent: So Ingraham says, why don’t you just give people the money now? It’s a good question. And Trump has absolutely no answer to this. For Fox News, that’s pretty harsh stuff, isn’t it, Tom?

Schaller: Yeah. If you’re going to bribe people, you want the money up front. And of course, it’s hard to buy votes anyway. I always joke with my students in Poli 100, if anybody wants to pay me for my vote—since it’s a secret ballot, I’ll take as little as 50 cents, because you can’t enforce the bribe, right?

So if voters want to ask for $5,000 ex ante for their votes—heck, I’d take $5,000 from Trump, especially if he wrote it from the Trump business organization, and send me a check. I’ll promise to vote for Republicans from the top or the bottom of the ballot. Just send me the $5,000, wire it to my bank account. I promise, and I’ll keep that promise, much like Donald Trump has kept so many of his promises.

Sargent: So the ludicrousness of the five-thousand-dollar promise is really a desperate effort to mask his terrible polling situation.

What’s your sense of the fundamentals now? Do you think these polls are pretty much capturing how bad it is for Republicans? The Quinnipiac poll I mentioned earlier has Democrats plus 11 in the House generic ballot matchup. I really doubt it’s that high right now, but another poll had it at plus 11 recently.

And so I’m wondering if those are leading indicators that the Democratic lead is starting to expand now, because the polling averages have had it at around six, right, or seven. And so I think maybe the lead might be expanding now. What’s your sense of it?

Schaller: Yeah, if the two recent polls, even if they’re slightly outliers or they’re off by a couple of percentage points, it could pull the, you know, the sum of the averages from, you know, plus six to plus seven, plus eight, plus nine. And if you get up into those high single digits, or make it to 10 percent, you know, then that’s going to be a slaughtering.

And it’ll be interesting to see if some Republicans, where they’ve sliced it a little too thin with their strategic gerrymandering and have created some 54–46 districts and so forth—that could be enough to tip a district that they sliced a little too close in order to maximize the number of Republican-leaning seats in a particular state. And some incumbent makes a mistake, is underfunded, or just there’s voter anger, or those independents show up, and suddenly Republicans who thought they were safe lose their seats.

And then I think finally you’ll have an intraparty revolt, because Republican members of Congress for the most part have backed Trump as a matter of self-survival. They’re petrified of MAGA voters. They know that they can’t win without them, but they might come finally to the realization that they can lose with them, and/or with only them. And so, if we start to see some people that the Charlie Cooks of the world didn’t have as even leaning Republican or as solid Republican seats fall, then there will be recriminations.

Sargent: Well, just to underscore that point, let’s remember that Trump is the one who forced Republicans to enter into this mid-decade gerrymandering spree. It would be really a great dose of poetic justice if the result of that was to get Republicans to move safe seats into somewhat less safe territory, and then, because Trump is such a catastrophe, all of a sudden the wave sweeps those seats away. That would be really something, wouldn’t it, Tom?

Schaller: What’s also funny about this is that—and actually, give Donald Trump credit for this—he wants his name to be metaphorically on the ballot, even though he’s not standing for reelection in the midterm. And he said that in Dallas, like, vote as if I’m on the ballot. So maybe that answers our earlier question about whether he knows that they’re really bad and he’s lying about it. That’s probably not true.

He probably really believes he’s super popular and beloved by the American people. So, you know, he’s smoking his own supply, so to speak, and his staff won’t give him the hard news, which is, he’s extraordinarily unpopular, frankly hated.

And give him credit for the guts of it, because if they get slaughtered in the midterms, he can’t say it’s not my fault. He can’t say, well, I wasn’t on the ballot. He said, vote as if I’m on the ballot. So he’s going to own the election results in a way that he normally doesn’t take responsibility for anything. I’m sure after the election he’ll blame—he’ll say we had bad candidates and they ran bad campaigns and it’s not my fault.

We know he’s in denial about people he’s endorsed who’ve lost primaries, and is suing the media for telling the truth about his endorsement records. So, you know, I actually never give the guy credit, but give him credit for, like, owning his numbers and saying, make me the central focus point for your vote this November. So I say, go for it, America.

Sargent: I agree a hundred percent. Tom Schaller, thanks so much for coming on, man. Always good to talk to you.

Schaller: Great to be here. Cheers.

In Supremacy, Harvard Law professors Nikolas Bowie and Daphna Renan recount this history. As they remind readers, judicial authority to determine a law’s validity has no basis in the Constitution. At the 1787 Constitutional Convention, some Framers intended the Supreme Court to have this authority; others did not. Delegates were meticulous about specifying the president’s right to veto a law but could not agree that justices should have similar authority. The court itself seized this role early in the nineteenth century, and we’ve accepted it since with only weak protest.

The Constitution’s Article 1 empowers Congress to enact “necessary and proper” laws. These are not legal terms; they describe policy judgments. The 1860s amendments, guaranteeing emancipated slaves’ equality, authorized Congress to implement them with “appropriate” legislation. “Appropriate” also has no legal definition. When the Supreme Court eviscerated civil rights laws passed in the 1860s and ’70s, it merely imposed its own judgment of appropriateness—a legislative, not judicial, activity.

Supremacy supports an even more powerful constitutional clause to limit the court’s role. Quoting Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner, the authors call Article 4 a “sleeping giant,” for its guarantee to every state of a “republican” form of government. The senator observed that treating all persons equally is an essential characteristic of such a system. In defining a republican form of government, the court’s expertise doesn’t exceed that of Congress.

Bowie and Renan describe the legislative and judicial branches as being on an equal plane. They label what they deem justices’ impermissible evaluation of federal legislation “horizontal review.” But the authors say that the court should properly judge the constitutionality of actions taken by lower bodies, i.e., states (“vertical review”). They acknowledge that vertical rulings may be terribly wrong but grant the court full authority to err in its vertical judgments. Because many of the court’s right-wing rulings have regarded state, not federal, laws, Supremacy’s opposition to judicial review is less radical than it may appear.

In Dobbs (2022), the court considered whether the Fourteenth Amendment permitted Mississippi to ban abortion after 15 weeks of gestation. According to the Bowie-Renan theory, the Supreme Court had the right to vertically review the law and uphold its constitutionality. If, however, interpreting the same Constitution, Congress adopted a law it considered “appropriate” prohibiting states from restricting abortion, and if Mississippi then adopted a 15-week restriction, the Supreme Court’s duty would be to enforce federal law and rule in favor of a plaintiff who challenged the state’s prohibition—regardless of the justices’ personal views about its appropriateness.

In the notorious 1905 Lochner case, the court rejected New York’s law that capped bakers’ working hours. Outraged progressives called for ending such judicial power. Bowie and Renan’s dichotomy, however, allows such vertical review. But if Congress authorized states to regulate working hours, justices would have no choice but to respect the law and rule against bakery owners who required longer workweeks than their states permitted.

No topic in our political history has generated more hypocrisy than judicial supremacy. Bowie and Renan narrate how, when justices were reactionary and canceled laws that protected African Americans, workers, women, or immigrants, progressives denounced not only the decisions’ substance but the court’s right to make them. When justices were liberal and took the opposite tack, conservatives denounced judicial supremacy.

The left has done so more frequently than the right for most of the court’s history, simply because the court has been more consistently reactionary than liberal: In 1895, the Supreme Court ruled that manufacturing monopolies could not be regulated because the Constitution didn’t define “manufacturing” as a type of “commerce.” Provoked, Eugene Debs’s Socialist Party called for the elimination of judicial review. Debs called his party the successor to Lincoln’s Republicans.

During the Lochner era, Theodore Roosevelt ran for reelection as president in 1912, calling for popular referenda to overturn Supreme Court decisions. His candidacy had the support of  prominent intellectuals like Walter Lippmann, America’s most widely read political columnist; Herbert Croly, a theorist who inspired Roosevelt’s “New Nationalism” campaign program; and Felix Frankfurter, a prominent progressive lawyer. The three soon founded The New Republic. In 1917, the magazine editorialized that the court “must be shorn of its present power of upsetting social legislation.”

When, in 1922, the court banned a federal law that restricted children’s employment, the American Federation of Labor denounced the legitimacy of judicial review. Its argument was a rare precedent for Bowie and Renan’s unusual proposal to ban judgments about federal law but permit it for state legislation. The New Republic praised the labor federation’s “sound judgment.” The Nation editorialized that “until this power of judicial veto is limited or eliminated, [we will not have] government of, for, and by the people.” Progressives in Congress argued for their right to override court decisions by majority vote.

Another backward-looking court was led in the 1920s by Chief Justice (and former President) William Howard Taft, who knew he was too old, in failing health, and no longer fit to serve. Yet, as Bowie and Renan note, he vowed not to retire to “prevent the Bolsheviki from getting control.” His was a political, not judicial, agenda.

Wisconsin Senator Robert La Follette, the 1924 presidential candidate of a new Progressive Party, complained that “sovereignty has been wrested from the people and usurped by the courts. Today, the actual ruler of the American people is the Supreme Court.” His supporters included the African American sociologist W.E.B. DuBois, the educator John Dewey, and the pioneering social worker Jane Addams, as well as many who had opposed judicial supremacy since Lochner.

In the 1950s and ’60s, when the court defended civil rights and liberties, it was reactionaries’ turn to denounce judicial supremacy. A conservative magazine, The National Review, denied that the court is “the ultimate and only constitutional arbiter,” acknowledging that it was contradicting its previous stand. Southern segregationists, whose forbears applauded a court that canceled civil rights, now sang a different tune. In 1956, almost all Southern congressmen and senators signed a “manifesto” that denounced justices “undertaking to legislate, in derogation of the authority of Congress.”

In 1939, President Franklin Roosevelt appointed Felix Frankfurter to the Supreme Court. Frankfurter was known to insist that, right or wrong, Congress had the right to enact New Deal reforms without judicial interference. When the pendulum later swung and Congress passed laws infringing on free speech, Frankfurter still insisted on judicial restraint, earning the hostility of former allies who denounced his tolerance of bad legislation.

Frankfurter’s consistency was not quite unique. In the present era, liberals, after falling in love with the court over Brown v. Board of Education, have mostly maintained their infatuation—while the court has imposed 55 years of mostly reactionary policies on affirmative action, campaign finance, environmental protection, gun possession, public health, religious practice, financial regulation, and voting rights. Although liberal scholars temper support of judicial supremacy with calls for modest reforms such as judicial term limits, none go so far as Abraham Lincoln’s unqualified rejection of judicial review.

For example, in The New York Review of Books in 2023, Harvard professor Laurence Tribe recalled the few occasions when the court endorsed progressive legislation, and the 1954–69 period when it frequently did so, to warn that “exclusive focus on the dangers of a right-wing, interventionist Court also ignores the arguably even greater risks of an autocratic president.” Yet since Dred Scott, the court has imposed liberal policies much less frequently than conservative ones. It’s created a foundation for the imperial presidency we have today.

Still, holding a slim reed that the court might occasionally restrain an authoritarian executive could seem astute, however slim that reed might be. Tribe’s most telling point is that if we consider Congress the court’s equal, wishing for court reforms is not enough. Legislators should step up and act like equals. When the court says that it can’t interfere with partisan gerrymandering, Congress could itself prohibit it. When the Supreme Court denies that reproductive choice is a right, Congress could legalize it nationwide.

If actions like these create an impasse between the judicial and legislative branches, Congress could use powers granted in the Constitution’s Article 3. It permits laws to specify that particular topics are not reviewable by the Supreme Court: for example, that justices may not consider the constitutionality of laws to prohibit partisan gerrymandering or restrict reproductive choice. Tribe calls this tactic “a cure worse than the disease.” But Bowie and Renan chronicle how, after the Civil War, the House proposed to ban any court review of laws that protected rights of former slaves; it likely would have passed in the Senate, as well, if that body’s time was not suddenly consumed by President Andrew Johnson’s impeachment trial. In our own moment, it is also unlikely that Congress will use this Article 3 power anytime soon. A House created by partisan gerrymandering and a Senate hobbled by a self-imposed filibuster rule are unlikely to assert their rights.

No other prominent legal theorists have embraced Bowie and Renan’s horizontal-vertical distinction. Would there have been less hypocrisy, perhaps even some consensus, if when justices issued mostly reactionary decisions, liberals proposed prohibiting only horizontal review of federal legislation, leaving untouched the court’s power to vertically review state laws? In rarer periods of liberal rulings, might conservatives also content themselves with rejecting horizontal review and withholding criticism of vertical judgments?

Left unaddressed in Supremacy is how we get from here to there. Judicial review of legislation has relied solely on voluntary obedience. Undoing it also requires voluntary consent. The most we can expect is continued deference to the court, with modifications like changing the number of justices to create temporary partisan advantages. Supremacy’s goal can only be to spur conversations that may, in some unforeseeable future, become relevant.

It may now be too late even for modest reforms. Abraham Lincoln’s fear has come to pass. We have an unrestrained executive whose powers rest largely on decrees of nine unelected lawyers who’ve routinely overruled policies enacted by the people’s representatives. We’ve passively accepted this judicial coup as normal.

One such PAC, Public First Action, was formed in 2025 as the brainchild of former Democratic Representative Brad Carson and Republican Representative Chris Stewart. Their aim, per the nonprofit’s own materials, is to advance efforts to regulate AI across government and to increase public education about the burgeoning industry.

Over the course of 2026, Anthropic donated $40 million to Public First Action. In a press release, Anthropic said the funds were exclusively for driving the nonprofit’s public education campaign and policy goals, specifying that the money “cannot be used to influence the election of any candidate for federal, state, or local office.”

Yet Public First Action’s approach in Ohio—in which it has decided to offer significant financial backing to both candidates—suggests that it might be more interested in shaping the House race itself.

Exactly why AI-backed money is funneling into the Ohio race boils down to a perfect confluence of factors across the state. Ohio has relatively cheap land, plentiful resources, and enough power plants to fuel the data centers required to support the AI industry’s seemingly imminent boom.

Some of the industry’s biggest players are already tuned into that fact, and are well on their way to maximizing the apparent opportunity. As of last month, Nvidia is reportedly in talks with OpenAI and the Japanese investment group Softbank to develop a $500 billion data center in southern Ohio. Amazon Web Services previously announced a $10 billion infrastructure investment in the state to expand its AI capabilities. Meta has already spent $1.5 billion on a data center in New Albany.

“Given what’s at stake, it’s not surprising at all that they want to sway the legislature,” David Bieri, an economist and associate professor at Virginia Tech’s School of Public and International Affairs who analyzes the costs of data center development, told The New Republic.

Anthropic has a specific angle on the national regulatory fight. The trillion-dollar company is in favor of states drafting their own AI regulation, and has spent an enormous sum of money opposing federal efforts to block regional constraints, lest that create a uniform national market. Anthropic has also argued that companies developing powerful AI models should face accountability requirements. In a statement released in July, Anthropic specified that it was willing to invest in candidates open to “sensible AI safeguards.”

Those parameters haven’t always fallen along party lines: The company has supported Democrats and Republicans who agree with its regulatory worldview, including Republican Tennessee gubernatorial hopeful Marsha Blackburn, who blocked a congressional effort to bar states from passing such laws.

Public First Action announced in July that it would donate $15 million to support a slate of Republicans across the country, including Max Miller, the representative for Ohio’s 7th district, who is currently drowning in scandals related to domestic violence accusations levied at him by his ex-wife.

Meanwhile, the group is tied to at least three other political action committees, one of which—Jobs and Democracy PAC—spent more than $512,000 on a pre-primary advertising campaign for Brian Poindexter, Miller’s Democratic challenger. That sum accounts for roughly 84 percent of all the contributions to his campaign, according to campaign finance data collected by the Federal Election Commission.

Miller, who was initially projected to dominate the race, had staked out a pro-AI position, championing protections for digital industries. In May, Miller co-sponsored the Deterring American AI Model Theft Act, legislation designed to prevent foreign encroachment on U.S. AI models, and introduced the Digital PARITY Act, which would adapt the U.S. tax code to “keep pace with the rapid growth of digital assets and modern financial technology,” according to Miller. He has also accepted thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from the likes of Amazon, Oracle, Intel, Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon. Yet his district’s proximity to the epicenter of Ohio’s AI boom has changed his political opinions: In August, Miller announced his full support for Ohio House Bill 983, a local data-center accountability bill.

But the horrific allegations against Miller that have recently come to light have put his political future in jeopardy. Early last month, the House Ethics Committee announced it was opening an investigation into his alleged misconduct. Days prior, Miller was denounced by his ex-father-in-law, Ohio Senator Bernie Moreno, who wrote in a post on X that the Donald Trump–backed Republican should “not serve in the House of Representatives.”

Miller also seems to have lost favor with his electorate, 55 percent of which voted for Trump during the 2024 election. As of publication, Poindexter’s odds of a November victory sit at 79 percent, while Miller has plunged to 22 percent, according to the private betting platform Polymarket.

It appears Public First Action has seen the writing on the wall. Last month, Miller’s name was unceremoniously stripped from the group’s online announcement. Public First Action did not respond to a request for comment about its decision.

Poindexter, a Brook Park council member, has framed himself as an untraditional congressional candidate. He has centered his experience as an ironworker in his campaign messaging, relentlessly promising to fight for Ohio’s working class and strip money out of politics. If he succeeds, Poindexter has the potential to influence AI regulations in Washington, but only time will tell if he will.

In an interview with Signal last month, Poindexter admitted he doesn’t know why the AI-affiliated PAC spent money on his race. Poindexter’s campaign manager, Thomas Dufour, told TNR that he had not made contact with Anthropic or its affiliated super PACs, and specified that none of Poindexter’s positions are influenced by campaign contributions.

“He believes that while AI has the potential to make transformational scientific breakthroughs, we need to balance that against the risks it poses—especially when it comes to workers and the safety of children,” Dufour said. “This is also an opportunity to set clear regulations around the construction and operation of data centers that put workers and our communities first, without jeopardizing our natural resources.

“That’s why he’s running for Congress in the first place, to break that cycle,” Dufour added.

A spokesperson for the Jobs and Democracy PAC, Anthony Rivera-Rodriguez, described Poindexter to Cleveland.com as “a champion for workers” as he sought to tie their respective missions together.

“Fundamentally, AI issues are worker issues,” Rivera-Rodriguez said. “As this rapidly evolving technology creates new risks for labor, we think Poindexter’s voice will be critical in the debate over how to stop AI from harming American workers.”

Perry Bacon: And we’re going to talk about politics in Germany. I think people probably know that the far-right party in Germany just won an election, or won about 40 percent of the vote in an election there. We’re going to talk about what that election on Sunday means, both for German politics, European politics, what this is about the United States, what this is about far-right politics. So Thomas, thanks for joining me. Great to see you again.

Thomas Zimmer: Thanks so much for having me. I’m excited to be talking about far-right extremism on this side of the Atlantic.

Bacon: On this side, yes. You and I met when you were here in the US, and you were one of the earliest and most prescient observers of what was happening in the far right here. And so I guess, first of all, AfD, because we’re talking to an American audience—talk about how is AfD, and how is it unlike kind of the Trumpian Republican Party?

Zimmer: Yeah, if you approach it as the German equivalent to MAGA, that gets you actually pretty close. It gets you very much in the correct direction. It’s make Germany great again. They definitely share the same enemies. They’re similarly fueled by this sort of sense of radicalizing grievance, right? It’s defined by this sort of resentment towards a society that has been moving away from them, right?

In a sense that this is of this desire to restore dominance over those who they deem lesser somehow. And who they deem lesser—that’s very much—or who they deem deserving, right, of a sort of a higher status in society. That’s very much racialized and gendered. It’s the grievance of predominantly white male people who are consumed by this feeling of having been deprived of their rightful place at the top.

So it’s very anti-egalitarian more than anything, anti-pluralistic. And I think it’s also, just like the MAGA movement, not at all conservative, right? In no reasonable sense of the word, in conserving, preserving, is this a conservative movement. They’re all in on radical measures. They talk about revolutionary change. They’re extremists.

And it’s best described, I think, as a kind of radical revisionism or revanchism, right? It’s defined by this idea, we need to wipe away all these developments over the past few decades that have deprived us of our rightful place at the top.

Bacon: OK, so very—and anti-immigration, anti-multicultural, all the—OK, so very similar. All right.

Zimmer: No, it’s fundamentally ethnonationalist, in the sense that they want a Germany only for what they call, quote-unquote, “biological Germans.” So you can already tell that’s where the wind is coming from with these people. There’s no subtlety here. There’s no more dog whistling with them. They’re now more openly, more aggressively embracing that sort of very openly ethnonationalist, anti-gender-egalitarianism, anti anything they call deviant behavior, right? Queer people. That all needs to go. These people need to be pushed out of the public sphere.

Again, I think, if someone wants to figure out, what is the agenda, what would Germany look like if those people actually got to be in power and got to do what they want to do? Think what MAGA wants to do to America, and it gets you pretty close. It’s not a coincidence that the AfD, they’re all big Trump fans, and the Trump government and the MAGA movement also very much AfD fans. That’s not a coincidence. It is because they’re fundamentally engaged in the same project.

Bacon: So now, what I know less about is Saxony-Anhalt. And I’m not a German expert, so you may have to pronounce it better for the audience as well. But there are 16 states in Germany, so give me a sense of that area and what it’s like, with maybe a US comparison as well.

Zimmer: Yeah. So it’s in Eastern Germany, so on the territory of the former GDR. Germany has 16 states. It’s a federal system with a lot of similarities to the American system. This is not a direct comparison, of course. But Saxony-Anhalt is a small state. It has a population of a little over two million. That’s about the ballpark of Nebraska, or New Mexico, or Idaho, right? That sort of thing. It’s also been, for quite some time, a stronghold of the far right in Germany.

So this was a state election for the state parliament, which also is for the control of the state government, because this is a parliamentary system. If you get the majority of seats in the state parliament, you get to be the state government. So they barely missed out on an outright majority of seats. They got about 44 percent of the vote, which is exactly as much as all the democratic, small-D democratic parties together, right?

What you have now in the incoming parliament, state parliament, is a sort of stalemate situation. No one has an outright majority. The AfD is three seats shy of an outright majority. None of the democratic parties—so this is a multi-party system. You have a conservative party, a green party, a social democratic party, a more what you might call a democratic socialist party. And then all of these parties together are exactly as strong as the AfD.

And then there’s a weird sort of kingmaker faction. It’s called the BSW, which is an offshoot of the sort of democratic socialists to an even pretty extreme far left kind of position. But mostly defined by a kind of grievance towards the liberal system, towards the mainstream. And they’re very pro-Russia, which the AfD is also. They’re all Putin fans.

And they have five seats. So the most likely scenario, if the AfD is to manage—if they manage to get a majority of the seats, they probably get it by getting two or three of those far left candidates to actually support them. But that is all very much up in the air. So the immediate sort of political ramifications of this are, it’s a very volatile situation, and honestly, no one knows exactly what’s going to happen there.

Bacon: So this is going to sex me a little bit, just in terms of what it’s like. I guess I’ve read, even though the population is fairly anti-immigrant, it actually has a fairly low immigrant population. It’s working class. Or is it, in terms of, is it like the places in the US that have been drawn to Trump, in terms of being economically struggling, more white, less educated? Does it have some of those same demographic and economic characteristics as the places in the US that have been drawn to Trumpism?

Zimmer: Yeah. So, it’s definitely, you might say, economically struggling, low growth, a relatively high unemployment, relatively old population, and so the population is shrinking. So a lot of young people, especially, are moving away from the state.

That already sounds quite a bit like—and then also, even more so if you look at the characteristics of who actually voted for the AfD in this—this was a very high turnout election, by the way, like almost 80 percent turnout, so this is very high turnout. And the AfD has managed to mobilize among people who have previously been non-voters far more than the democratic parties. Once again, that is sort of what Trump also managed to do, right?

And the social profile is—got to be careful with this, this is mostly still based on exit polls. Exit polls in Germany are a little more reliable than American exit polls, generally speaking. But still, it’s exit polls, which means it’s self-assessments mostly, right? So, careful. But it aligns with what we know from other elections across Germany.

Relatively high support among people who describe themselves as workers, so working class. Significantly higher among non-college educated, stronger among men than women, stronger in rural areas than in urban areas. So yeah, a lot of similarities to the profile of what we think of as the sort of core Trump supporters, or the people who vote Trump. Definitely in this sort of 2024 coalition, yeah.

Bacon: So the next federal elections to decide who runs the government in Germany are not till 2029, correct?

Zimmer: Yeah, if the current coalition holds up until then. Because this current coalition government is a coalition between the conservatives and the social democrats, and the conservatives are in charge. So the German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, is a conservative from the Conservative Party, so Angela Merkel’s party, right? And the chancellor is remarkably unpopular, right? No one likes him.

Absolutely no one likes him, and he’s been doing an absolutely terrible job. Not just in terms of actual policy—in terms of, he himself has proven remarkably struggling with the job of being chancellor, including the politics of it, right? Just communicating with people. So no one likes him.

And this, of course, is more than anything—the strong result of the AfD is the result of a disastrous result of the Conservative Party. The Conservative Party, compared to four years ago in Saxony-Anhalt, has lost over half of its voters. So it’s shrunk to, I think, 17 or so percent in Saxony-Anhalt. That is a disaster for the Conservative Party.

In the next state election, also in East Germany, that’s coming up 10 days from now, the Conservatives are polling at 6 percent. This is supposed to be Germany’s by far strongest, biggest party, and they’re just being decimated. And mostly decimated because, like I said, the AfD were very successful mobilizing among non-voters, and the other sort of big reservoir of voters that they’ve tapped into is conservative voters moving to the far right.

And so there is a lot of talk right now about maybe the Conservatives just also need a change at the top. And that might mean that—who knows—but that also might mean that this federal government, I would not bet a lot of money on them actually making it through the end of this regular term. But yeah, you’re right. If they go through the end of the term, it wouldn’t be until 2029.

Bacon: This is also a US equivalent, in that some of the people I know who write about European politics, what they argue is that you’re seeing the mainstream Conservative party, like in Britain, lose votes to the far-right party. And in the US, what happened was the sort of Mitch McConnell—since we only have two parties—the Mitch McConnell wing sort of lost votes to the Trump wing. But to say, if we had four parties, you’d probably see a similar kind of pattern.

Zimmer: I think that’s exactly right. This is both a key parallel and a key difference between either side of the Atlantic. So what happened in the United States is basically a far right faction managed to take over the Republican Party from within, right? Move to the center of power within the Republican Party. Whereas in Germany, what you saw was, basically when the AfD was founded in 2013, you had the right wing of the Conservative Party splitting away from the Conservative Party. They founded their own party.

And so it’s as if you had—it’s as if Trump came down the golden escalator in 2015 and had said, “Hey, I’m actually not going to run as the Republican presidential nominee. I’m going to do my own party. We’re calling it the MAGA party,” and that’s what’s happening. Which, of course, in the American system doesn’t make sense, because of the political system. But the German system, because it is a multi-party system, a representative system—so basically it means if you get 10 percent of the vote, you get 10 percent of seats in parliament, right?

So you don’t have to win your district outright. And so in this sort of representative system, smaller parties make sense, or it makes sense for smaller parties to do their own thing, which is why Germany has this sort of multi-party system. And that’s what happened, right? We basically have a separate MAGA party, instead of this faction, this wing or this coalition, attempting to take over the Conservative Party from within.

Bacon: Now, the good thing in Germany has been, up to now, is none of the other parties will work with AfD. So they can’t be part of a coalition, because the center-right party and all the other parties have—and talk about why that’s happened, where the center-right party will not work with them. Which is not—if the McConnell faction had stopped working with Trump, we would never be here. So the Germans did something different than the US did, right?

Zimmer: Yeah. No, absolutely. So far, in Germany, this has been discussed under the term firewall. It’s, we’re holding the firewall against the far right. And so far, you have to say Germany is more or less the only country in Europe where the other parties of the mainstream, broadly speaking, have so far refused to work with and cooperate with the far right.

Everywhere else, this sort of firewall has already fallen. Sometimes it has fallen long ago. France, Sweden, Denmark, Netherlands, Italy, wherever, right? Everywhere, basically, usually the mainstream conservative parties have given themselves permission to work with the far-right parties.

That has not happened so far in Germany. The reasons for that are mostly historical. Coming out of the Second World War and the Nazi dictatorship, it became the sort of foundational national myth, right? The foundational myth of national identity in post-war, first West Germany, and then after reunification in 1990, of this sort of reunified Germany, has been this thing that, OK, we cannot let that happen ever again, right?

We’re going to draw a very strong line here, and we’ll keep those people, we’ll not normalize them, we’ll not make them respectable. And again, this was always more of a sort of elite consensus, elite political, elite sort of published opinion sort of consensus. It was never a broadly shared, everyone, the entire population on board. That’s not the case. But it was, until recently, a fairly clearly shared elite consensus in Germany.

But I think what’s happened here—and this is why what is happening now, and even though this is just a small state, Saxony-Anhalt, you could say, like, in a vacuum, you could say, “Who cares?” This is half the size of Berlin in terms of population. But first of all, the AfD is now strong everywhere. It is still much stronger in the east, in the former GDR, than nationally. But even nationally, it got almost 21 percent in the last federal election a year and a half ago. It is now polling at around 30 percent, as clearly the strongest party, even nationally.

And this is such a fundamental sort of assault on the foundational myth that post-war Germany was building its national identity around, which was precisely this idea that, OK, this will not happen here again, because we have supposedly learned our lessons from Nazism, and by learning our lessons and educating the population, whatever, we have immunized ourselves against right-wing extremism. Clearly that’s not true. Obviously, that is not true.

And so I think, regardless of whether or not the AfD will manage to take over the state government in Saxony-Anhalt, the most immediate implication of what happened here is that the AfD has broken containment, right? It’s now fully normalized. There’s no more shame. There’s no taboo around voting for them in a significant part of the German population. So whatever was still left of a kind of anti-fascist consensus is just out the window.

Bacon: OK. So in other words, you think AfD could eventually win a federal election in Germany?

Zimmer: I do not see them, not in the sort of near or medium term, win an outright majority in a national election. So 50 percent plus, I don’t think that is—again, like I said, they’re currently polling at around 30 percent nationally. So you still have, if you turn this around, you could still say there’s 70 percent of the population opposing them still, right?

But I think—and again, this is something that 10 years ago or so, very few people would have said this, but now it seems very clear, without a question to me, the by far the most likely scenario is that the AfD will emerge as the strongest party nationally in whenever the next national election is. I don’t see any way around this.

It will clearly remain by far the strongest party in all of Eastern Germany, so the five East German states. There’s no question about it, that it is currently polling at around 45 percent in the territory of the former GDR. That is basically wiping away—again, remember, this is not like, when I say they’re currently polling at 45 percent, that doesn’t mean there’s a second party that is polling at around the same kind of number.

Bacon: There’s many parties.

Zimmer: The other half is split up in five, six parties, right? So the second strongest party right now is polling at around below 20 percent, right? And yeah, no, they’re by far the strongest party right now. And the question then becomes, at what point will this sort of firewall thing—it’s already being discussed as, oh, it didn’t work, and not only did it not work, maybe it’s actually making them stronger.

And here, this is precisely the kind of discussion that the United States had after the 2024 election. This general sort of intellectual and political climate that is going all in on accommodating, acquiescing, right? Or, maybe we just need to stop being so mean to them. If the people want us to work with them, we should work with them. So you have all the sort of normalizing, accommodating discourses that are going into overdrive right now.

Bacon: Let me ask maybe something to come back to. First of all, you agree with the firewall. That’s what you think should be the case. Don’t work with AfD is the right approach, and what the US should have done.

Zimmer: I generally very much think, do not normalize far-right extremism. Do not make them respectable. And I 100 percent think—and also, by the way, this is borne out by actual research. We have mountains of research from the past 15 years or so from every, quote-unquote, “Western country,” right? From political scientists and sociologists and whatever, who look at, does it actually work to ostracize far-right extremism, right? Or does it only make them stronger, because it plays into their sort of victim mentality, or it allows them to play the victim, blah, blah, blah, right?

The overwhelming consensus in these empirical studies is, no, it actually does work, right? It is better to ostracize them, keep them contained, do not normalize them, do not make them respectable. Try to uphold these sort of taboos around voting for, supporting far-right extremism. But unfortunately, that is just not what our political leaders on either side of the—

Bacon: Let me just stop you. You kind of paused when I asked, do you support the firewall. Was there some reason? I just want to make sure I understood. Something to do with understanding firewall?

Zimmer: No, you’re right. I only paused because the term itself has become such a—it’s not even clear what people mean by this anymore, right? To me, it always meant, firewall means we are trying to keep far-right extremism from exerting political power, by refusing to go into coalitions with them, right? Because again, like, Germany needs—if you want control of any sort of state or national government, you need a coalition, right? No one gets 50-plus percent of the vote.

The why I would say the firewall actually worked is to say, it kept them from exerting power, right? They have not been able to take over a state government or the national government. So it is about harm prevention, right? It’s about preventing harm, right? So to me, that means it worked.

But the way people are now discussing it is more, oh, but is it about, should we still treat them as, like, extremists, or should we treat them as, like, a normal part of the political spectrum? And again, I just want to say, the problem with the firewall thinking—the biggest problem is that the ideas of the far right, ideas and policies and positions, there was no firewall around those. I wish there had been, right? So I only hesitated because, to some extent, this discussion is long over. We can still pretend we have a firewall, and in terms of narrowly defined cooperating with them, yes. But all their positions, like all the anti-immigration stuff, has been completely adopted by the Conservative Party, even by the Social Democrats.

It is the consensus among most of the sort of center in Germany that, oh yeah, no, immigration is the biggest threat and problem and whatever, and there’s a very strong anti-immigration policy being enacted by this current conservative social democrat coalition already. So the problem is that their positions and their sort of ideology has already been normalized to the point where, does it even make sense to pretend we’re even having a firewall? That’s the problem.

Bacon: Let me ask—I’m going to jump to where you’re headed, but I want to ask the question. Both in the US, in Europe, in Germany, what do you think are the roots of why the far right is growing in popularity? You can start about Germany, you can talk about America. What is the root of why they’re doing better? Why, the last decade, are they growing in support?

Zimmer: So, fundamentally, I think we’re basically having the same struggle or conflict on both sides of the Atlantic. It’s a conflict between two fundamentally incompatible ideas of how we should organize society, how we should organize—who should be allowed to be part of our societies? Is it a pluralistic sort of egalitarian democratic society, right, where people should be able to be part of society, and power and status should not be distributed along racial and gender lines and according to wealth and religion? But no, regardless of all that, we’re having a pluralistic, egalitarian kind of thing.

And then on the other side, you have people who refuse this, and not only don’t like it, but think this is the downfall of Western civilization or whatever they call it, and they cling to this sort of ethnonationalist understanding of, no, we have to have these sort of racially defined national communities, and they have to be organized along lines of race, gender, religion, and wealth, with strict hierarchies. Strict hierarchies of race, gender, religion, and wealth, and everything else is, again, the sort of the destruction of Western civilization.

And I think the reason why this conflict has radicalized so much is that, over the past few decades, all our societies, both in North America and in Western Europe specifically, have moved away significantly from this sort of ethnonationalist understanding of white Christian societies and the sort of strict hierarchies of race and gender.

We have become—and I mean we, because it really is on both sides of the Atlantic—we have become significantly less white, significantly less Christian by self-description, by self-assessment. We’ve become, in that sense, more liberal and significantly more pluralistic, mostly for demographic reasons, right? And I think a lot of people find this threatening or dangerous, or they reject it for whatever reason. And I think that is the foundational conflict.

And on top of that, and that is very unfortunate, we’re having right now a significant sort of anti-system resentment building up across the political spectrum. This is not just a right-wing thing, obviously, right? A very strong sense across the political spectrum that the status quo is not working anymore, right? That those who are in charge politically are not finding answers to the challenges that we are facing that in any way commensurate with the problem.

So it’s this strong sort of anti-system, anti-status quo resentment building up. And I think the reason why this is helping those far-right people with their sort of ethnonationalist idea of what we should do and what our society should look like, is that they are offering something that is first and foremost wiping away the status quo, right? They’re not offering just reform, or defend the system, or defend the institutions, none of that, right? It’s not status quo politics. What they are offering is this sort of revolutionary uprising against the status quo.

And I think, unfortunately, that is quite attractive even for people who might not, ideologically speaking, be fully on board with their sort of ethnonationalist vision of what the society should look like in the end, right? But who probably think, “OK, anything is better than just conserving the status quo.” And so I think it opens up a kind of reservoir of voters for them that is just frustrated with the status quo.

And I think that is what happened in 2024 with Trump, right? Half of his voters were all in on sort of the white nationalism and the proper Trumpism, and then the other half was like, This sucks. This system sucks. It’s not working for me. The status quo is not working, and who cares? So that sort of thing. And I think those two things are coming together here.

Bacon: Let me lead with the first one I want to ask about, because I think this is the one that we have so much trouble with in the US. You talked about basically—you didn’t use the words demographic change, but this idea that, both in Europe and in the United States, women are in the workplace, and more Muslims, and that kind of thing. That gets cast as, you’re calling them all racist, and that’s not exactly what you’re saying. But you think the fundamental conflict here is—what you led with is about this sort of, like, the cultural change.

This is the sort of moving from a white Christian male-dominated society to something more egalitarian. You think that’s the sort of conflict that is driving all of this, and the far right has tapped into resentments about that change. That’s what you led with. That’s a very important part of this, you think. This is not just about economics, in other words.

Zimmer: Oh, look, I think we need to be clear. What is the exact question we’re trying to answer, right? If you asked me, “How do we explain a specific election result?” Like, how do we explain the 2024 election?

Bacon: Yeah, I’m asking the broader question, yes.

Zimmer: No, but I know you are getting the different—yeah. But I think those two get often conflated, right? Because if the question is more specifically, how do we explain the 2024 election result in the United States, then we know, beyond sort of any reasonable doubt, that was driven a lot by relatively minor shifts among a relatively small part of the electorate, and that part of the electorate was mostly frustrated with, the prices are too high, and inflation, and that sort of thing. And that then had massive political ramifications.

But you’re not asking—and that’s important, I think—you’re not narrowing it down to just an election result. You’re asking me, what is the fundamental conflict, and why is it that in this particular situation, we have on either side of the Atlantic these openly ethnonationalist, right-wing, sort of authoritarian parties that are rising and becoming stronger. And honestly, I don’t want to be too flip about this, but I’m getting a little tired with the mental gymnastics that are necessary to look at the situation, right, and make it into something other than what it looks like.

Because what it looks like—I’ll give you one specific example. There was a very, I think, revealing question in these exit polls on Sunday in this Saxony-Anhalt election, where people were asked, do you feel like you’re getting what you deserve in Germany, or less than you deserve, or more than you deserve? And the voters who said, “I’m getting less than I deserve,” the AfD got most of those people, right?

And so, to look at this and say, Oh, they probably mean wages or social security, or they don’t know how to pay the rent—no. They didn’t say that, because they were also asked those questions, but that’s not what they said. They said, “I don’t get what I deserve.” And the deserving—who’s deserving? That is the question. And this who is deserving is so clearly defined in racial, and gendered, and sort of ethnic terms, right?

Why do they gravitate towards the AfD or towards MAGA? Because these parties or these movements are offering them an idea of, Hey, you deserve better, because you are a true German, or a real American, or an authentic American, all these terms that these people are using, right? And so they think, Yeah, no, I deserve—because I am a, quote-unquote, real German, I should be at the top of this society, and not just in politics, but in the family, in the workplace, in the public square. Why do I have to, quote-unquote, “share” my country with all these undeserving others, who are then again these racialized and gendered sort of categories.

And I think, again, that to me is why are we not—usually when you are faced with a sort of an important question in life, and there is a very clear, pretty obvious answer that seems to be explaining the things, that should be our default assumption. Rather than saying, “Oh, it clearly looks like this has something to do with race and gender and ethnonationalism, but how about we do all these mental gymnastics to find other ways to make it look like something else?”

Bacon: So when you and I met in 2019, 2020, what you were saying about the sort of racial, cultural dynamics of Trump was obvious and everyone agreed upon. Right now, I think that has become more debated. What I see as the reactions to the rise of the far right are two reactions. One, what I saw in Britain with the Labour Party, what I’m seeing in Germany, is the sense that, OK, this is about race and culture and so on, so we need to crack down on immigration. So you’re seeing the center-left and center-right parties crack down on immigration. So that’s one reaction, which is almost saying, “We’re the problem. We need to move to the right on immigration.”

The second reaction is in the sort of left-wing populist parties—I’ll say the sort of Zohran Mamdani, Bernie Sanders wing in the US—which is to say, “This is really about economics, and if we just have a more populist economics program, that’ll take the energy out of the far right.” I’m guessing you have some concerns about both these approaches. Can you talk about why neither one of them was probably likely to work?

Zimmer: It’s remarkable to me that after the Keir Starmer debacle in Britain, where you had a Labour government that went all in on adopting far-right positions on immigration, right? Properly all in, far more—

Bacon: And transgender issues as well, but yes.

Zimmer: Yeah, but I’m taking sort of immigration as the most salient issue. Going all in on this, far more than what the Democratic Party has done. And it didn’t work.

Now, that is not surprising if you read anything from any sort of political scientist, sociologist, whatever. Again, we have a mountain of evidence that adopting these far-right positions on immigration and on any other sort of, quote-unquote, “culture war issue,” and adopting their framing—the effect of that is, you’re not gaining back voters from them.

Because A, voters will generally see this as merely a tactical adjustment. They will not believe you, right? B, you are constantly legitimizing and normalizing this sort of framing of the problem. If the Labour Party in Britain constantly tells the people, Oh yeah, no, the far right is correct. Immigration is this great threat. It is the biggest problem that we’re facing, then people do not vote for the Labour Party. They vote for that party that says, We are the answer to this, the far right, these sort of ethnonationalists.

And so the only thing you’re doing is you’re shifting the entire discourse to the right by adopting their frameworks and their answers to the problem, and you’re shooting yourself in the foot.

Again, we have 15 years at least of mountains of evidence of why this sort of normalizing doesn’t work. It is absolutely remarkable that anyone is still even considering it. It is stupid. And I’m not even saying it is morally abhorrent, right? Or normatively—which I also think it’s normatively wrong, or morally. But that’s not even what I’m talking about. I’m talking about, as electoral politics, it is a disaster, and it doesn’t work, and yet everyone thinks, “Got to do it.”

Bacon: As far as I can tell, the governing party in Germany, their solution is going to be, and they’re going to move to the right more, right? That’s what they’re going to do. All indications are that’s what they’re going to do.

Zimmer: That’s already what they’ve been doing since they came into power in early 2025. Immigration is way down in Germany. And we’re not just talking illegal immigration. Like, asylum has basically been cracked down on. It’s gotten way more difficult. They’re already doing all this, right? And it’s not working. It’s just clearly not working, right?

OK, so that’s the one thing. And then on the economics front, I want to be clear. My point is not to say, there is no economic deprivation, or social and economic deprivation has no role in this story, that has nothing to do with it. No, it’s not helpful. It doesn’t help if people are generally thinking the system doesn’t work for them because they’re under too much sort of social, economic, financial, whatever pressure, right?

Again, there is this general sense of resentment towards the system, and clearly that is something that the far right, with this sort of promise to wipe away the status quo, can tap into. And so it’s not good if we have this sort of general sense of resentment. And to the extent we can fight that with a different sort of more egalitarian—that’s my position, right—economic policy, I am all for it. I am all for it. I’m all for redistributing wealth downward, right? And sharing that more equally. I’m all for it.

I just think, we have, again, all these studies that tell us, for instance, about, where is the support, who are the people who supported the Tea Party? Who are the people who are hardcore Trump? And then sometimes people will say, Yeah, but isn’t it true that a lot of that support comes from poorer regions in the United States, regions that are economically struggling?

Yes, but we also have studies that show us pretty clearly that within those, generally speaking, economically struggling regions, it’s not the poor, it’s not those who are really devastated, who are gravitating towards the far right. It’s those who are, relatively speaking, within those regions, relatively well off, and fear for the loss of status.

So that is just not the same as saying it’s the poor, and those who are really struggling, they don’t know how to pay the next rent. That is not the core support group for Trumpism. So we have to at some point just accept, that’s not what’s happening here.

Bacon: So part of what I think is going on is, the analysis you’ve given about the Trump supporters, even if you read that pretty well—the far right supporters are not poor people. They’re people who fear a loss of status. I assume as a politician you can’t say that out loud, because you’re not going to win their votes then. So I think part of what’s going on is, politicians, even the ones who probably have read these studies, probably can’t discuss what is the actual root of the far right. Is people resenting changes that make minorities and women and so on more powerful? That gets close to the Hillary Clinton thing.

And so I think part of it is, our analysis is harmed by politicians who can’t speak honestly about this stuff, and then pundits and so on who are playing politician and want to discuss these things dishonestly in a certain way. Does Ezra Klein really think Charlie Kirk is doing politics in the best way possible? I doubt it.

I just think there’s a lot of performance that’s going on here. Is it fair to say—I think these analyses have been read. It’s not clear to me politicians can speak honestly about the conclusion that what is driving the far right is this kind of cultural resentment.

Zimmer: I think there’s a few things coming together helping us explain why these sort of economic anxiety—that’s the thing, right? And everything else is downstream from that. All the racial stuff, and all the cultural resentment, and all the—that’s all downstream from what is at its core an economic anxiety. That sort of story, right?

Bacon: Despite, as you say, reams of evidence that the cultural anxiety is a huge part of the story. Despite that, people want to write that away.

Zimmer: At the very least, we have to see this far more holistically. As not, there is this one core issue and everything else is downstream from that. Far more holistically—which, by the way, is one of the big advantages the far right has, because they have a holistic sort of understanding of it. If you ask the far right, Hey, are you guys all about race, or gender, or religion, or is it wealth? they will just say, Yes, Exactly, right? Because they see this as, like, yeah, look, it’s about all of those dimensions. And so we would be much better served with coming up with an equally holistic sort of understanding of the problem.

But I think the question, why is this sort of economic anxiety tale so attractive, why are people clinging to that despite, again, empirically it just doesn’t work. First of all, I think there’s just this sort of enormous incentive to sanitize the discourse, and sanitize these sort of political choices of people who are coded as, quote-unquote, “regular folks.” And that’s sort of white people, right? That’s white conservative people.

We are constantly asked to come up with explanations of what they’re doing politically that sort of preserve their innocence, right? There’s this sort of idea of white innocence, right? And, by the way, this is not a new thing. When David Duke in the early ‘90s was close to winning a governorship in Louisiana, the next day what you read in the Los Angeles Times was, Oh, goodness me, economic anxiety must really be quite pressing in Louis— That sort of thing, right? It’s always been like that, right? Sort of this sanitizing thing.

And the other thing is also, I think, what you touched on, is—look, this is a coping mechanism, in the sense that if it were economic anxiety, then we would have a recipe to fight that, a political answer, right? We would say, “OK, you can fight this with a different distribution of wealth,” right? Redistributive policies can answer this and solve the problem. And that is just—honestly, that is almost a soothing kind of thought.

Rather than accept—and that would be my position—accept that, unfortunately, a significant portion of the people around us are simply not on board with this idea of an egalitarian pluralistic democracy, and that is a fight that you cannot hug away. You cannot find the right tone, and then they will be all, OK, we get it now. You can’t just—I don’t know. Again, you can’t just solve it with just economic policy. But then what do you do?

And at that point, I have to admit, me personally, I have to admit, I don’t know. Other than, you have to fight the fight, right? You have to accept you are in this fight, and you have to fight it and win it. But that is a far less attractive sort of message.

Bacon: I was going to ask, the next is, so what is the Thomas Zimmer plan to fight the far right? It’s not to talk about economics only in a sort of Bernie Sanders 2016 way. It’s not to move to the right on immigration or trans rights. So what would that kind of—you don’t have to have a full platform, but give me a sense of, what does this look like? And not as candidates, but what does a society—because I think a lot of your work is like, what does a media—I think part of it is, it’s not just Joe Biden or Kamala Harris or Angela Merkel.

I think we’re putting too much on this one candidate, or one person. What does a society look like that’s trying to stop the far right from growing and entrench multiracial democracy? What does that look like? What does a plan to do that look like?

Zimmer: Yeah, again, I’m just glad I’m not a politician. But yeah, I think, so first of all, we need to stop pandering to the supposed needs and whims of these far-right voters. And so centering everything around what they may or may not want, it’s just not working. We need to break out of this vicious cycle of, right-wing parties are rising, that leads to democratic, small-D democratic parties adopting their framings and ideas, especially on migration and trans issues and whatever, and then that only helps the right. And in reaction, democratic parties double down. And we need to break out of this cycle. It doesn’t work.

What we need is, I think, any sort of progressive egalitarian democratic vision—you need your own agenda, and it cannot be just defend the system, defend the institutions, defend the status quo. I think what is very clear to me is that any sort of clinging to any kind of status quo politics is just not going to work. I think it’s also entirely inadequate as a response to the problems that we’re facing.

So substantively, it’s also the wrong thing to do. But we’re talking even in terms of just strategically, electorally, right? And I think, to me, again, one big advantage the right has is that they are pursuing what I would call a transformative vision, right? They do not want to just preserve—

Bacon: And you would say Labour, the Christian Democrats, the Democrats in the US are all doing some status quo-like politics. That’s part of the problem. They might debate that, but they, in general, come off to people like status quo parties.

Zimmer: Yes, I think so. I think they have, in response to the far right assault, unfortunately, I would say, accepted the role of defenders of the system, defenders of the status quo. And that, by the way, that also very much includes the Green Party in Germany, for instance, supposedly a progressive party, right? This is, I think, most likely the equivalent to the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. That would be sort of the Green Party in Germany, right? They’ve all accepted, oh, we can’t do transformative politics right now, right? Because we are in a crisis. We’re in this crisis of liberal democracy, so we have to defend the system, right?

And it’s just not working. Again, you need a transformative vision. You need something that does not just promise to restore the status quo from before Trump or whatever, right? Because no one wants that. That, I think, is to me also the lesson from the Democratic primaries in the United States. I do not read the sort of relatively strong support for DSA candidates, or pretty sort of left-wing candidates, or DSA adjacent candidates—I do not read this as a pervasive longing for the party to move significantly to the left.

I read it as a pervasive longing for candidates who will just not do status quo politics, who can be trusted to pursue a transformative vision, right? To just move beyond the status quo. Not necessarily in a kind of far left kind of a sense, but in a, defending the status quo is not good enough. A political project that is just centered around the restoration of, or defending the system and restoring the status quo before, right—I think that is destined to fail. It’s just incapable of winning elections.

Bacon: That seems obvious. What about the sort of economic bit of, OK, if the transformative thing is basically only economics, I’m going to expand Medicare for All. Is that more transformative? I agree the status quo is not working, but is a political program that’s very economics-only focused, but I’m going to make everything free and so on—is that going to help?

Zimmer: Again, this is not a magic bullet to solve, like, right-wing extremism, right? I think we need to very quickly move away from that sort of—because again, look at what’s happening over here in Western Europe. Every single one of these Western European countries, aside from the UK, has a significantly stronger social welfare net than the United States. It doesn’t matter.

There’s no correlation whatsoever across Northern and Western Europe between the strength of the social welfare net and the strength of the right-wing parties. There’s no correlation whatsoever. You have countries with super strong social welfare systems, like the Scandinavian countries, and yet the far right over there is also basically as strong as anywhere. Like, polling at 25 to 30 percent, whatever, right? And sometimes they get more and sometimes they get less, but roughly speaking, they have gotten stronger and stronger.

Bacon: And by the way, there are countries in Western Europe that already have the Bernie Sanders economic plan, has already been implemented basically, and the far right—OK, I hadn’t really—I’m glad you put it that way.

Zimmer: It’s simply not a magic bullet, right? It’s simply not a magic bullet. But yes, a transformative vision must very much also mean a socioeconomically transformative vision, but it must mean more than that. Also transformative in the sense that, why are we not having a strong sort of political leadership that says, You know what? Yes, we are the party of pluralism. Of cultural, social, ethnic, racial pluralism, and that is our vision. Yes, that is the offer we are making to you, the electorate.

We’re not just offering you anti-immigration policy light. We’re not just offering you a kind of ethno state light. Because that offer is already out there, right? That’s already on offer, if you want that.

Bacon: So in the US, I think people think Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris offered a muscular multi—and I would argue they offered status quo with different race and gender, but the sort of strong, robust defense of a new multicultural world, I would argue Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris did not articulate. But I think that’s why in the US, I think people feel like that vision has been rejected. I would argue it’s not been articulated yet. But go ahead.

Zimmer: It’s not being rejected. Again, I think in the United States, if you look at the actual empirical evidence we have from, like, really good survey data, right? Something like what PRRI does every year, right, where they ask deeper questions, not just do you like Trump or not, but proper questions like, hey, should America be a pluralistic, multiracial democracy, or should it be a white Christian nation? And very clearly you see a stable majority of the population, somewhere between 60-ish percent or so, that say, No, we don’t want America as a white Christian nation. That’s not what it is supposed to be. It’s supposed to be a pluralistic country where people can come, and if they agree with sort of the egalitarian idea, then they can come and be here with us.

Again, not saying this is any sort of magic bullet, but can we please have a little more of a robust sort of a kind of muscular defense of that sort of vision, rather than an almost, like, Oh, yeah, no, so sorry, I also feel bad about being a Democrat right now. I also feel bad about being progressive. I also feel really— Almost like a sort of almost apologizing constantly for not being a sort of white conservative Christian. What are we doing here? That offer is already out there, right?

Bacon: I think the word woke is used almost to attack that kind of view that you’re expressing, right? I think that’s what that word is coming to mean, is, like, someone who cares too much about inclusion and so on. I think that’s what that has come to. It’s become a pejorative almost.

Zimmer: I think, to me, in the United States especially, people who prefer to live in a multiracial, pluralistic, gender egalitarian democracy should, with a lot of force and courage, tap into the national myth that has always been—hey, it says all men are created equal. It’s literally sort of the country’s founding, almost like a religious sort of status document. Let’s just say, look, we all know it’s never been realized in any serious way, but it’s also always been a very strong something to refer to, something that people could refer to as a sort of foundational myth.

Why do we let the far right—the same in Germany, by the way—why do we let the far right pretend that they are representing the national mythos, right? They are the ones who are the guardians of the nation, and what the real nation is supposed to—instead of saying, no, in the United States, right from the start, there was this other egalitarian idea. An outrageous idea, by the way. It’s remarkable. We’ve never had it.

In world history, it would literally be the first time, right? First time in world history that you would actually create a society where the status of the individual would no longer be determined to a significant degree by race, gender, religion, or wealth. We’ve never tried this anywhere in any country in the world, right? So what a remarkable vision that is.

And again, I do not—if you look at the voting public on either side of the Atlantic, it doesn’t seem like people want a kind of ethnonationalism light. That is just very clearly electorally not working. So if the choice is, you could either move from ethnonationalism light to full on ethnonationalism, or you got to offer something else, right? A sort of robust defense of a transformative multiracial egalitarian vision—then why don’t we try this? Again, it’s remarkable to me. Keir Starmer—we should be grateful to him. He tried. It’s almost as if he said, Hey, guys, look, we’re going to do this. This is the experiment. I’m going to—

Bacon: We’re going to run the populism experiment in the UK. We’re going to let the UK do it. The US can just watch it. He literally followed the David Shor playbook to a T. So it’s amazing how unpopular he was.

Zimmer: I don’t know how many more times we need—how much more evidence, right? But I wanted to bring this back to the German case one more time. Again, this current German government, right, is doing the same stuff. Is all in on a very harsh sort of immigration restrictionist approach.

And the Conservative Party that is leading the German government right now is basically being decimated by the far right in response. So if the approach actually is, Oh, hey, if only we reduce immigration, then this problem goes away—OK, we’ve tried this several times in many countries over about a 15-year period.

At some point, can we at least—you know what really bugs me is when people pretend to be dumb. I just don’t want to play dumb. It bugs me, right? If someone wants to do something else, OK, but don’t expect me to play dumb and not look at the actual evidence we have. I don’t like that very much. It makes me angry. So let’s not do that, right? It’s been tried. It doesn’t work. We need to try something else.

Bacon: I think that’s a great place to end, actually. Thomas Zimmer, thanks for joining me. It sounds like there’s another state that’s having an election in East Germany in 10 days, so we might have to come back and have this same conversation, or a similar one.

Zimmer: The situation is slightly different, in the sense that over there, there’s currently a social democratic state government.

Bacon: What’s the name of the state? Sorry to interrupt you. What’s the name of the state?

Zimmer: It’s called Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. It’s in the northeast of Germany, at the Baltic Sea. And the AfD is again polling as the strongest party. But something interesting is happening there, in the sense that the Social Democrats have decided in that state, Hey, how about we tap into our sort of anti-fascist roots? Social Democrats were, in the early Nazi period, the ones who led the resistance against Nazism, right? And so they’re tapping into this, and basically saying, Hey, listen, the most anti-fascist sort of force in German history has always been Social Democrats. Come over here. We’ll prevent them from taking over state government.

So they’re running that sort of experiment, right? Rather than normalizing, which is what the conservatives tried in Saxony-Anhalt, the sort of, Oh, who knows? Maybe they’re not so bad. And if so many people vote for them, can they really be that bad? That sort of normalizing discourse. The Social Democrats are trying something very different in that other state. Let’s see if it works or not.

But I think Germany is looking at a series of elections, just like Western Europe is looking at a series of elections over the next few months, where my general sense is, unfortunately, that the far right is just so strong now, and it has broken containment. That to me is the biggest challenge, right? Is, how do you contain them again? And I don’t just mean politically, I also mean in terms of political culture. How do we make it not OK again to vote for far-right extremists? That to me is maybe the bigger challenge.

In the United States also, Perry, you’ve seen that so many times. You go to the airport, right? And you wait for boarding, and next to you sits some guy in, let’s say, a white middle-aged person, right, with some T-shirt that says, Hey, make leftists disappear again. And it’s like a silhouette of a helicopter, right? And it’s a reference to the Pinochet regime in Chile, where they put all the dissidents on helicopters and threw them out of the helicopters or the airplanes, right? This sort of thing, right?

We need to make that not OK again, because it’s not OK. We live in a society, and to put on a T-shirt that basically is an immediate violent threat to half the population—that is basically running around in the airport with a T-shirt that says to half the population, If you disagree with me, I want you to be thrown out of a helicopter, right? This sort of almost, quote-unquote, “playful” endorsement of political violence. We need to make that not OK again, because it’s not OK, right?

And that is what I am really concerned about. How can we contain that again? How can we rebuild these sort of boundaries around that sort of behavior, that goes far beyond just winning elections, but goes to a kind of social consensus, right? That sort of behavior is not OK, and it needs to be ostracized, and you need to be ostracized from mainstream society if you are a person running around in a T-shirt like that. And that is, I think, where we need to get back to.

Bacon: Let’s end there. Tell people where they can find your work and how they can support your work. And I know you have a great newsletter you’re working on right now, so talk about that a little bit, and also talk about what social media you’re using these days.

Zimmer: Yeah, I’m mostly using Bluesky. You’ll find me there under my name. So, mostly Bluesky. And then I write a newsletter called Democracy Americana, where every week I try to go big picture and put into perspective what just happened in the news. It used to be very much focused on the American far right and sort of American conservatism. And now, I guess since I now live in Germany and we have the situation over here, I’m also going to write a little bit more about the international dimension of this struggle, and the global far right assault on democracy.

So this weekend, for instance, I’ll write something about MAGA and the AfD, and the relationship between MAGA and the AfD, and the sort of America First foreign policy that is basically actively trying to force regime change across Western Europe, and actively intervening in the domestic politics over here on behalf of these right-wing extremists, which is, again, outrageous. But I think I’ll start writing more about that also, I think, because it seems appropriate.

Bacon: And Democracy Americana you can find—it’s not a Substack newsletter, right? You have to find it on a different platform?

Zimmer: It is still on Substack, so you can still find it on Substack, you can still subscribe on Substack. But it is mainly hosted by a platform called Steady. So if you want to support the work financially—I’m a full-time independent writer, so if someone wants to support me financially, that is via the Steady platform. But it doesn’t matter, if you subscribe on Substack you’ll find it.

Bacon: Great. Thomas, thanks for joining me. Great conversation. Take care.

Zimmer: Thank you so much. Bye.

Bacon: Bye-bye.

The far-right Alternative für Deutschland, or AfD, won about 44 percent of the vote in this week’s election in Saxony-Anhalt, a state in the eastern part of the country. AFD finished far ahead of other parties there. It was the party’s strongest showing in an election and the latest illustration of AfD’s growing popularity, particularly in Eastern Germany. In the latest episode of Right Now, Thomas Zimmer, a German historian and author of the newsletter Democracy Americana, discusses the results in Saxony-Anhalt and what they tell us about far-right politics in Germany, Europe, and North America. Zimmer says that pro-democracy, centrist parties, such as Germany’s Christian Democrats, the British Labor Party, and the Democrats in the United States, keep making the same mistakes in fighting the far right. These parties, instead of directly confronting the far-right’s ideology, keep trying to accommodate those sentiments by moving to the right, particularly on immigration. These parties, he argues, also keep offering fairly standard agendas that don’t engage voters frustrated with the status quo. He calls for a robust defense of multicultural, pluralistic democracy in both the United States and in Europe, along with bold policy agendas that might excite voters.

Last week, Blakeman offered a “full endorsement” of Joel Anabilah-Azumah, a Republican running to represent New York’s 9th congressional district, which is situated entirely in Brooklyn. Anabilah-Azumah is the founder of a citywide private bus company and a former volleyball coach. But over the span of his rootless political career, Anabilah-Azumah has also publicly declared that 9/11 was the sinister machination of the U.S. government.

“9/11 was an inside job. I don’t even bother to argue it any more. You don’t have to believe it, but that is what happened and history is pretty clear on that,” he wrote on X in 2024.

“Whoever had the put option on the American Airlines stock dropping is still spending that money and their children are still spending that money,” he added, referring to unusual stock trades that took place before the attack that effectively bet the airline would drop in value. Investigators from the FBI and the Securities and Exchange Commission concluded in 2004 that the trades were not connected to terrorism, and were not made with insider knowledge of the attacks.

The native New Yorker also offered his bus service to shuttle MAGA protesters to the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, and later called on President Donald Trump to pardon “our January 6 friends.”

Nonetheless, Blakeman tied himself to Anabilah-Azumah, campaigning with the conspiracist in Brooklyn’s Brownsville neighborhood on September 1. “He is going to make a great member of Congress,” Blakeman said of Anabilah-Azumah, in an endorsement video Blakeman ultimately chose not to circulate. “We need fighters like that in Congress.… Joel, you have my full endorsement.”

Anabilah-Azumah reiterated his 9/11 stance twice in the last 24 hours, continuing to question the destruction of the Twin Towers while simultaneously claiming that he was “not the kind of prick that harps on this issue every September 11.”

Anabilah-Azumah is not the only 9/11 truther in Blakeman’s orbit. Last week, Blakeman filmed a campaign video with Marcus C. Williams, a onetime Republican candidate for the New York State Assembly who shared a video in December claiming that 9/11 “was planned and executed by the Zionists.” This video was initially reported by the Judge Street Journal substack.

“We’re gonna win because of people like you, Marcus,” Blakeman said in a clip Williams posted to his Facebook page.

Blakeman has also protested New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s participation in the upcoming 9/11 memorial event marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of the attack. Blakeman has claimed that the mayor is “not welcome” at the ceremony, and that Mamdani’s reluctance to condemn the phrase “Globalize the intifada”—which pro-Palestine activists have used as a universal call for Palestinian liberation from Israeli occupation—should disqualify him from attendance.

“He’s not welcome there because he has yet to say anything in opposition to the global intifada. As a matter of fact, it seems like he supports that phrase, which is part of the reason why we had the tragedy we had on 9/11,” Blakeman told reporters in early August. (It does not appear that Palestinian liberation movements had anything to do with the Al Qaeda attack.)

Blakeman’s position echoed a bogus July report that thousands of 9/11 families had signed a petition to keep Mamdani away from the event. But by the time of Blakeman’s comments, the petition had been debunked: Its creator admitted that there was no verified list of families that opposed Mamdani’s participation, and that the online petition’s “verified signatures” could have come from anyone, anywhere.

Neither Blakeman’s campaign nor Williams responded to a request for comment prior to publication. Anabilah-Azumah told The New Republic that his comments were not about 9/11 victims, their families, or the first responders who acted that day, but were instead commentary on the militaristic shift that occurred in the country following the attack. “I believe that elements within the US government orchestrated 9/11 in order to get the public to accept mass surveillance and ‘forever wars,’” Anabilah-Azumah told TNR.

Local leaders were outraged by Blakeman’s attachments. Democratic Representative Jerry Nadler, whose district includes Ground Zero, said that it was “downright appalling” that Blakeman would “campaign with, and seek endorsements from dyed-in-the-wool 9/11 conspiracy theorists.”

Nadler’s colleague Representative Nydia Velazquez shared his sentiment. “I’ve spent more than two decades fighting for 9/11 victims and their families to get the care they need after that horrific day,” she said. “I never thought I’d see someone, like Bruce Blakeman, running for governor while associating with 9/11 conspiracy theorists.

“These were no casual meet and greets: Blakeman filmed campaign endorsements and videos with these extremists,” Velazquez continued. “New Yorkers deserve better than this.”

This story has been updated.

By equating democratic socialism with communism, the resolution was intended to create voter hysteria over the Democrats’ nomination of about eight democratic socialists in the midterm congressional elections. It was also a stalking horse for the SAVE Act, Trump’s desperate attempt to disenfranchise Democratic voters in advance of the midterms. Voter disenfranchisement has nothing at all to do with opposing socialism, so set that aside. What interests me is that the House’s condemnation of socialism made no mention of the 30 companies in which President Donald Trump has acquired an ownership stake for the federal government during his second term. Trump’s got his tiny fingers on what The Communist Manifesto famously called “the means of production.” The number of companies in which the government acquired a stake during the Democratic presidency of Joe Biden was zero.  

Because the shares in those 30 companies, some purchased and some expropriated, were acquired without input from Congress, and because the legal language for at least one of these acquisitions mentions Trump by name, as if “Donald J. Trump” were synonymous with “United States government,” we might call Trump’s variety undemocratic socialism. I’ve called it fascist corporatism because it seems to take a leaf from Benito Mussolini’s “Tutto nello Stato, niente al di fuori dello Stato, nulla contro lo Stato” (“Everything within the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State”). In its current iteration, though, it’s more like Tutto nello Trump, nienta al di fuori della Trump, nulla contro lo Trump.  

Yet another possible way to describe Trump’s covetous attitude toward the means of production is Soviet-style socialism, which is to say communism. It remains an open question whether that’s fair because we don’t yet know whether Trump will mimic the Soviet practice of spouting pro-worker propaganda while harboring a cynical indifference to the proletariat’s actual welfare. But given Trump’s anti-worker policies thus far, I think the answer will turn out to be: He will. We’ll know more by the end of September, when a one-month extension of contract negotiations between the United Steelworkers and U.S. Steel expires. 

Allow me to explain. As a condition of President Donald Trump approving in June 2025 Nippon Steel’s acquisition of U.S. Steel, the United States acquired something called a “golden share” in U.S. Steel. As I explained at the time, a golden share is a share in a publicly held corporation that grants the shareholder unilateral power to overrule management on certain matters. It was invented by the British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher as a condition for privatizing government-owned companies like British Airways and British Steel. The golden share in these instances allowed the British government to veto any planned sale of these assets to foreign companies. That makes Thatcher’s golden shares the opposite of Trump’s, which was intended to allow the sale of U.S. Steel to a foreign company. There’s also a difference in directionality. Unlike Thatcher, Trump is nationalizing rather than privatizing. 

But like Thatcher’s golden shares, Trump’s is justified on conservative grounds of protecting national security. In the case of U.S. Steel, any national security justification is bullshit. Nippon Steel’s acquisition of U.S. Steel never threatened national security because U.S. Steel is no longer the dominant economic player that it was in the 1950s. At least three other American steel companies bring in more revenue, and two employ significantly more workers. But the political symbolism of the looming sale was sufficiently powerful to persuade President Joe Biden to bar the sale. Trump wasn’t wrong to reverse Biden’s decision. But in doing so he played his own kind of political game by showily demanding the power to protect U.S. Steel’s workforce from plant closings, underinvestment, offshoring, and wage cuts.  

The golden share was codified in a national security agreement that was never made public. But a June 2025 tweet by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick conveyed the gist, and a U.S. Steel filing that same month to the Securities and Exchange Commission provided more detail. Indeed, the wording in the U.S. Steel filing is very likely identical to wording in the national security agreement, because it wouldn’t make sense to describe a legal obligation with one set of words in one document and another set of words in another document. 

The question now, as labor and management duke it out over a new U.S. Steel contract, is whether Trump has any interest in exercising the power granted by that golden share to protect workers’ interests. Early signs indicate that he does not.

Negotiations between the United Steelworkers and U.S. Steel began in late July and were set to expire at the end of August. With no agreement in hand, the negotiators extended talks another 30 days. That isn’t uncommon, and the talks are proceeding in orderly fashion. The main sticking point is whether U.S. Steel’s new owner, Nippon, will keep workers’ health insurance costs low.  U.S. Steel’s opening bid was an impressive-sounding 18.2 percent pay raise over the next five years and a $4,000 bonus when the contract is ratified. But on health care, U.S. Steel said that if health insurance costs exceed 3 percent, a labor-management committee will “work together to identify cost-saving opportunities.” If no such savings can be found, the company will impose “additional employee costs.” 

That didn’t go down well with the Steelworkers. Their lead negotiator, Bernie Hall, told me that years ago labor and management agreed to make controlling health costs a priority in contract negotiations. To that end, Hall said, “sacrifices were made over the years” by workers, such as forgoing a pay raise over multiple years. “We have zero interest,” Hall said, in any plan that limits to 3 percent management’s commitment to absorbing health cost increases.  
 
The golden share agreement, as outlined in U.S. Steel’s June 2025 filing, says Nippon may not, without “the written consent of Donald J. Trump” or his designee, or of any successors, “reduce the base salary of employees” prior to June 18, 2030. Health insurance benefits exist apart from base salary, but they affect total compensation, and any effort to reduce them ought to attract notice from the Commerce officials Trump has designated to represent him on the golden share. These are William Kimmitt, who’s Commerce undersecretary for international trade, and David Shapiro, chief counsel for Commerce’s new Investment Accelerator. 

The choice of these two individuals is telling. Neither Kimmitt nor Shapiro wastes much of his day worrying about the American worker. The undersecretary for international trade advises the Commerce secretary on trade and global competitiveness, while the Investment Accelerator exists to clear away regulatory barriers to billion-dollar-plus new ventures in the United States. Trump outlined the two men’s respective duties in a November 2025 letter published in the Federal Register. Kimmitt, the letter said, will “closely monitor U.S. Steel and its compliance” with the golden share agreement, and Shapiro will sit on U.S. Steel’s board.  

I find no evidence that either Kimmitt or Shapiro is paying the slightest attention to U.S. Steel’s labor contract negotiations. My queries on this question to the Commerce department, by telephone and email, went unanswered. My queries on this question to U.S. Steel, by telephone and email, also drew no answer; the company replied only with this link to U.S. Steel’s opening bid. That leaves the Steelworkers. Hall said he hadn’t heard from Kimmitt, Shapiro, or anyone else in the Trump administration. Nor had he seen any evidence that they’re following the negotiations. “From our perspective,” Hall said of the golden share, “while it’s a nice shiny thing, it doesn’t provide the kind of commitments that these workers need and that we’re demanding.… It’s too open-ended.” For example, Hall explained, while the agreement sets yearly minimums for investments at various plants, it doesn’t stipulate which projects should get the investment. That’s left to the union to negotiate.  

The most unsettling aspect of the golden share agreement is how it defines a “force majeure” (i.e., act of God) event that would free U.S. Steel from its stated obligations. Force majeure is defined in the SEC document in some typical ways—natural disasters, pandemics, war, terrorism—but also in some atypical ways—“strikes, lockouts, boycotts, picketing, labor disturbances.” A lockout is an action initiated by the employer, so conceivably U.S. Steel could void the the golden share strictures merely by executing this “act of God.” Or the U.S. government could void the golden share agreement just because a few workers had the temerity to wave protest signs. And as Bloomberg Law’s George Weycamp observed earlier this month, the golden share language does nothing to prevent U.S. Steel from shifting work to nonunion plants.  

Even so, the timing of these union contract negotiations is very awkward for Trump. If September 30 arrives and U.S. Steel and the United Steelworkers have no deal, extensions will likely be limited to 48 hours and the airing of differences will grow more heated. Should the Trump administration remain on the sidelines, Democrats will have a powerful issue on which to campaign for working-class midterm votes. This president said he’d protect American workers, they can say, but look how he’s selling steelworkers out! Or: Trump gave U.S. Steel to a foreign corporation and we got nothing in return! Or simply: What a phony!  

It could go even worse for Trump if U.S. Steel used a lockout or he used a strike as an excuse to kill the golden share agreement. The resulting protests would definitely help Democrats win elections to the House and Senate. Trump’s been saying he hates socialism while practicing it. Now he may start to hate practicing socialism too.

The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, with a joint grant from the Washington Center for Equitable Growth and the Russell Sage Foundation, has been digging deeper into who is using AI, in what fields, and for what tasks, and released the results from its latest survey this month. What it found complicates the picture of how AI is being integrated into the workplace—rapidly, yes, but not yet deeply. How this impacts workers going forward is just a guess at this point. But what’s clear is that there’s a yawning gap between Big Tech’s promise of a technological revolution and regular people’s interest in using that technology.

The St. Louis Fed’s research surveyed workers in a range of occupations about their work lives, and found that the use of AI programs—ChatGPT is the most common—is surprisingly widespread for such a new technology. The survey found that in 75 percent of occupations, at least one-fifth of the workforce used AI. “That’s kind of just a wider distribution than we were expecting,” Adam Blandin, a St. Louis Fed research fellow and an assistant professor of economics at Vanderbilt University, told me. “Everybody expects computer programmers or executives or something like that to use it, but it’s just more widely spread across occupations than we realized.”

But even though adoption is fairly widespread, most people don’t use it for huge chunks of their jobs. They used it for just a few tasks. And there was almost no task defined by the survey that had been overwhelmingly taken over by AI. Even the tasks for which it’s most used—reading documents to gather technical information, preparing research reports, and analyzing data to identify trends—had adoption rates of about 60 percent. Different workers use it for different parts of their jobs. Even people in the same jobs might not both use AI, or use it at the same rates.

There were some patterns in the use of AI that made intuitive sense. Computer programs use AI often, for example, and people who use AI often for their job are more likely to use it outside the workplace, in everyday life. Some of the differences in uptake could come down to individual preferences, worksite practices, or something else completely unknown. “Understanding those personal differences, I think, is underexplored,” Blandin said.

Some past predictions about how AI would be used were a bit off the mark. Many experts had thought that health care professionals might use AI to help them diagnose conditions and come up with treatment plans. But that adoption hasn’t been widespread, which could be because health care workers don’t trust AI with sensitive information, or don’t trust the work it does. At the same time, some very hands-on jobs, like testing materials for environmental hazards or repairing machines, have seen higher uptake than expected. These jobs tend to rely on manual labor, but workers are using AI for research on what tools to use or how best to make a repair.

The researchers asked workers who said they use AI how much longer their tasks would have taken without it, and estimated that use of these tools increased productivity by about 5 percent. There is a huge caveat to that number, of course, because it’s self-reported. But it suggests that workers are using AI because it makes them marginally more productive. That doesn’t necessarily mean AI can do their entire job and replace them. In fact, in the recent past, when workers adopted computers, jobs that relied on computers became more in demand and the people who used computers at their jobs started to earn more than those who didn’t. If AI proves to be similarly useful for workers, but not as useful as workers, it could do the same.

One big difference, though, is that there was a huge gap between jobs that required workers to learn to use computers and those that didn’t, but today, more workers across more fields are using AI, so there isn’t much of a divide. That could potentially mean that everyone’s job becomes a little more in demand and maybe makes everyone a little more productive in countless ways. “There’s a bunch of occupations where adoption is kind of in the middle,” Blandin said. “That again just suggests it may not be as concentrated as we saw with computers, and so maybe more people will benefit from AI. I should just be clear: That’s speculation. But that’s a possibility.”

Of course, as computers were adopted through the 1980s and ’90s, even many of the knowledge workers and workers in other fields who adopted them to become more productive didn’t always see their increased productivity turn into more pay. How much people make in their jobs, and how protected their jobs are, isn’t something that happens without intervention like union contracts and new employment laws to help workplaces and people adapt to changes. An AI industry that is forcing its technology—and data centers—on society without our input, while also warning of a potential apocalypse caused by that technology, certainly can’t be trusted to act in workers’ best interest.

“The thing I really want is I want for myself a Congressional Medal of Honor, and I’ve studied it and I will give it to myself. I have no problem, but I’m not allowed to. Can you believe it? The one thing I’m not allowed to do,” Trump said to laughter from the audience, which included 15 of the 65 living recipients of the honor. “I would give myself, so it would make it instead of 15, we’d have 16.”

After making jabs at the “fake news media” for always taking his sarcastic remarks and claiming that he actually wants a medal, Trump quipped “I’m only kidding” before adding, “Actually, I’m not kidding, I would like to.... I can think of no other thing.”

Trump: We're privileged to have with us 15 of the 16 living recipients of the Congressional Medal of Honor. I want for myself a Congressional Medal of Honor, and I've studied it and I will give it to myself, I have no problem, but I'm not allowed to. Can you believe it? The one… pic.twitter.com/oVG3FcJLPP

— Acyn (@Acyn) September 10, 2026

It’s a crass statement to make to recipients of the highest honor in the U.S. military, given to troops “who distinguish themselves through conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of life above and beyond the call of duty.” Trump has never served in the military, dodging the Vietnam draft with a mysterious medical exemption for bone spurs. He later remarked that avoiding sexually transmitted diseases while dating around was like “being in Vietnam.”

But the president has never seen a trophy or award that he didn’t want, regardless of whether he deserved it. At a 2016 rally in Virginia, he accepted a (possibly fake) Purple Heart, given to soldiers wounded in combat, from a veteran. “I always wanted to get the Purple Heart,” he said while showing off the medal to the crowd. “This was much easier.”

Despite his desire for these kinds of awards, Trump has repeatedly disrespected wounded or deceased veterans and their families. He infamously insulted Khizer and Ghazala Khan, who lost their son in Iraq in 2004, and in 2015 attacked Senator John McCain, who was a prisoner of war during the Vietnam War, saying, “He’s not a war hero. He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren’t captured.”

In his first term as president, Trump referred to U.S. soldiers who died in World War I as “suckers” and “losers,” and wanted soldiers who had lost limbs in their service hidden from public view during a proposed military parade. His recent treatment of soldiers serving in his war with Iran, with long deployments, supply disruptions, and other poor conditions only adds to the evidence that he doesn’t really care about military service members, and wants their honors without any effort or sacrifice.

While Mullin has denied that ICE would be monitoring voting booths this election, he was concrete about agents having the right to be there if there was a “threat to that polling place” or “we’re serving a warrant.” Denver argues that even that violates 18 U.S. Code § 592, a Civil War-era law which blocks armed forces from patrolling polling locations.

“The right to vote, and to do so without fear of intimidation, is fundamental to our democracy and to being an American,” Denver Mayor Mike Johnston said in a press release. “Stationing ICE agents near polling places is only meant to scare people and suppress votes. We’ll fight tooth and nail to prevent it.”

Federal agents have already been reported at polling places in New York, California, and Texas, as Trump continues his attempt to use baseless claims of widespread voter fraud as a means of fully controlling—or postponing—the midterm elections.

“The presence of federal force at the polls interferes with the smooth administration of elections at the local level,” the lawsuit reads. “It disrupts voting and makes it more difficult for state and local election officials and law enforcement to do their jobs by making polling places spaces of confrontation.”

Other parties in the lawsuit noted that the presence of federal agents would have a chilling effect on Latino voters, potentially stopping many from showing up at all.

“Sending armed ICE officers to polling places is not immigration enforcement — it is voter suppression, plain and simple,” UnidosUS President & CEO Janet Murguía said. “All Americans—including Latino voters—have a constitutional right to cast their ballot without fear of interrogation, detention, or family separation. This case is about protecting voters, preserving confidence in our elections, and ensuring that every eligible voter can participate free from intimidation.”

“Following the United States Supreme Court’s stay, the only governing court order in effect is from the Missouri Supreme Court. In accordance with that order, my Office is directing local election authorities to use the 2022 congressional map,” Hoskins said in a statement.

The order came hours after a contentious hearing before the Missouri Supreme Court that weighed whether Hoskins should be held in contempt of court. By Thursday afternoon, the court found that Hoskins “was in CONTEMPT” of their decision, but he would avoid punishment because his decision to use the 2022 map had purged the civil contempt.

Last week, the Missouri Supreme Court ruled that the state needed to use its original maps drawn up in 2022, and could not use maps that were created in 2025 at Donald Trump’s behest (also known as the H1 B map)—even though state officials had used the new map during the August primary. The court held that the 2022 map was the only legally viable legislative map, since the 2025 map was still pending due to a referendum petition filed in December.

Yet Hoskins did not comply with the court order. Instead, he sought emergency relief from the U.S. Supreme Court, though Justice Brett Kavanaugh chose to reject the request on Tuesday.

Then matters got even more complicated. That same day, U.S. District Judge Stephen Clark—a Trump appointee—issued a temporary restraining order in a separate federal case, directing Missouri to use the 2025 maps while prohibiting state officials from using the 2022 map.

The U.S. Supreme Court chimed in on the matter for a second time on Thursday, overriding Clark’s decision by ordering the state to rely on Missouri’s prior ruling.

Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway issued her own statement Thursday afternoon in support of Hoskins’s decision to walk back the 2025 map effort ahead of the midterms.

“We affirm the Secretary of State of Denny Hoskins’s position and decision to advise local election authorities that the 2022 map is in effect,” Hanaway said. “We respect and will continue to comply with all court decisions, including orders issued by the Supreme Court of Missouri. We appreciate Secretary Hoskins’s continued commitment to upholding the law and working diligently to fulfill his duties on behalf of Missouri.”

While attending a closed-door breakfast at the Republican midterm convention Thursday, Vance was met with cheers of “forty-eight” from the crowd of delegates from key battleground states, four people who were in the room told Politico. 

Ahead of Vance’s scheduled address Thursday night, the breakfast served as reassurance that the vice president is favored by party members to eventually replace Donald Trump. Vance is currently leading the most recent Republican presidential primary polls, ahead of Secretary of State Marco Rubio. 

Even Trump seems to have settled on Vance as his successor—though he still jokes about running for a third term.  

Things weren’t always so peachy for Vance. Earlier this summer, the vice president was the target of online attacks from within the GOP after his involvement in a now-collapsed ceasefire agreement with Iran. Vance’s allies tried to spin the criticism, claiming that coordinated opposition from “establishment” and “neoconservative” Republicans could actually help him in 2028. 

We’re still a long way from 2028, and Vance may get stuck in yet another fissure forming in the Republican Party: between the MAGA cultists and Charlie Kirk fans.

While the damage to the U.S. Fifth Fleet headquarters at Naval Support Activity Bahrain in a February 28 drone attack has been well documented, Cao’s Thursday comment to a reporter at the conservative outlet The Epoch Times is perhaps the most vivid, sober analysis of the situation from an individual of his ranking.

Cao also told The Epoch Times’ Ryan Morgan that Iran’s attack left American forces unable to “pull in” the USS Abraham Lincoln, the aircraft carrier that was at sea for months and ravaged by reports of poor conditions and low morale.

“This is a pretty stunning admission by the Acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao, whose nomination is hung up in Congress, about how Iranian forces ‘blew the hell out of (U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet base in) Bahrain,’” Fox News’s Jennifer Griffin wrote. “Haven’t heard a senior U.S. official admit this on the record until now.”

Others noted the Iranian military capacity does not seem to be as depleted as Trump claims.

“A clear and particularly stark pattern we see in the war with Iran is that the Iranians are inflicting tremendous STRATEGIC damage with their missiles, but that the USG denies this at first and only admits it weeks, if not months, later. This creates a PROLONGED false impression that the war is going much better than it actually is and that strategic setbacks are not taking place at all,” wrote Trita Parsi of the Quincy Institute. “The media narrative was that Tehran was utterly failing. In reality, Tehran was showcasing capabilities that the official Western narrative ensured were underestimated.”

When asked about any plans to return to the U.S. base in Bahrain, Cao told the Times, “I have a task force that’s looking at that.” That’s not what you want to hear in an expensive war that’s going very poorly.

In an unsigned order, the justices effectively blocked state officials from using an extremely gerrymandered map passed last year that would have likely given Republicans an additional House seat this fall. Missouri voters will instead elect their representatives under a slightly less gerrymandered map enacted in 2022. Those voters will also have the chance to decide whether to enact the 2025 map for the rest of the decade in a ballot initiative this fall.

The order in People Not Politicians v. Onder largely hinges on peculiar questions of Missouri law that are not generally applicable in the other 49 states. It does not reflect a reversal of the conservative majority’s enthusiasm for gerrymandering, whether partisan or racial in nature. But it does offer a modicum of hope that the Supreme Court will not blatantly allow contrived right-wing plots to disrupt this year’s elections.

Missouri redrew its congressional maps in 2022 to account for the results of the 2020 census. The result was a familiar map with six safe Republican seats and two safe Democratic seats. In the summer of 2025, President Donald Trump pressured many Republican-led states to gerrymander their congressional maps even further to favor GOP candidates. Multiple Democratic-led states responded with their own gerrymanders in turn.

Last September, Missouri lawmakers passed House Bill 1 to repeal the 2022 map and impose a new one. The revised map would break apart the state’s existing 5th congressional district centered on Kansas City and split its voters among three safe rural Republican seats. The likely result, barring a seismic electoral shift, would be seven GOP seats and a single Democratic seat in St. Louis, with a net gain in the House of one Republican seat.

Missouri’s constitution allows voters to put “any act of the general assembly,” aside from two exceptions not relevant here, on a statewide ballot in the following general election. Once a petition for a ballot initiative is certified, the law is frozen from going into effect until Missourians approve or reject it. A citizen group named People Not Politicians gathered more than 300,000 signatures last December to put H.B. 1 on this November’s ballot. Organizers submitted the 691 boxes containing the signatures to Secretary of State Denny Hoskins’s office on December 9.

Under Missouri law, Hoskins had to formally approve or deny the petition by August 4 at 5 p.m.—a span of more than eight months. One hour before the deadline, Hoskins denied the petition, arguing that it was “insufficient under the Missouri Constitution because the Missouri Constitution does not authorize a referendum on congressional redistricting plans passed by the general assembly.” As noted earlier, this is plainly incorrect. The state then held primary elections under the 2025 map the following day.

Organizers accused Hoskins of running out the clock on potential legal challenges by rejecting the petition at the last possible moment. Courts are typically (but not unequivocally) reluctant to allow last-minute changes to state election laws on the eve of an election, a doctrine often known as the Purcell principle for the Supreme Court case that established it. By delaying until the last minute on clearly illegal grounds, Hoskins and his allies may have hoped that the courts would allow the 2025 map to be used, following Purcell.

They were wrong. The Missouri Supreme Court unanimously rejected Hoskins’s gambit last month, ruling that the petition wasn’t prohibited under the plain text of the state constitution. The court ordered him and the state to do two things: Use the 2022 congressional map for November’s election and allow H.B. 1 to be referred to state voters on that ballot. “The referendum petition was legal, sufficient, and timely, and the secretary incorrectly concluded otherwise,” it concluded. “HB 1 did not go into effect and will not go into effect unless and until approved by the voters.”

In response, Hoskins sought an injunction from the Supreme Court last week to block the state supreme court’s ruling from taking effect. To call this a long shot would be underselling it: State supreme courts have the final say in interpreting their own state constitutions, and the Supreme Court traditionally defers to their judgment unless a federal law or federal constitutional right is implicated. To that end, Justice Brett Kavanaugh rejected Hoskins’s request in his capacity as circuit justice without referring the matter to the entire court—a signal that Kavanaugh thought the motion was not worth the other eight justices’ time.

That is where the legal battle should have ended. Instead, less than an hour after Kavanaugh’s decision, a federal district court judge in Missouri granted a surprise temporary restraining order that instructed Missouri to use the 2025 map instead. Representative Bob Onder, a GOP member of Congress, filed a lawsuit last week in response to the state supreme court ruling alleging various violations of federal constitutional provisions. Effectively, he argued that it would be unconstitutional to essentially throw out the results of the primary elections held under the 2025 map.

The Missouri Supreme Court had considered this very argument and rejected it outright. Under the state’s rules for ballot initiatives, H.B. 1 could only take effect if approved by the voters and could not go into force before then. “HB 1 is not the law and has never been the law,” the court explained. “There is only one valid congressional redistricting in effect—the congressional redistricting the general assembly established in 2022.” It had rejected Hoskins’s claims of practical difficulties by noting that he had done everything he could to run out the clock on a valid petition. In short, the court refused to give Hoskins credit for holding what was essentially an illegal primary election.

Despite this, Judge Stephen Clark stunningly granted Onder’s motion to force H.B. 1 to go into effect. He concluded that it didn’t matter whether the H.B. 1 map was legal because the state had already used it. “Whether or not HB 1 was the governing law during the primary election, voters—including Plaintiffs—voted in primary elections within the congressional districts drawn by HB 1,” Clark wrote. “And they didn’t do so of their own accord. Instead, they did so based on the parameters set by Missouri’s highest election authority, the secretary of state.” In ruling as such, the judge effectively rewarded Missouri officials for holding illegal primary elections in defiance of their state constitution.

There were strong signs earlier this week that the Supreme Court was closely monitoring the situation and was not thrilled by this turn of events. People Not Politicians, the group that had originally gathered the petition signatures, asked Kavanaugh to stay Clark’s ruling on Wednesday. Only 11 minutes passed after the group filed its motion before Kavanaugh ordered Onder and Hoskins to file reply briefs. He set a deadline of ten o’clock Eastern time on Thursday morning, giving them less than 24 hours to weigh in.

The high court almost never acts this fast outside of death penalty cases for pending executions. The two men filed their reply briefs overnight, and the Trump Justice Department (unsurprisingly) also filed its own brief that urged the court to reject the motion and side with the H.B. 1 map. It didn’t work. A lightning-quick 16 minutes after Kavanaugh’s deadline expired this morning, the Supreme Court—this time acting collectively—blocked Clark’s stay until further action from the justices while litigation continues.

In practical terms, the justices’ intervention guarantees two things. First, Missouri voters will elect their representatives in two months based on the 2022 map instead of the 2025 map. That will boost the chances of longtime Representative Emanuel Cleaver, a Democrat, to hold the state’s 5th congressional district. Second, voters will also decide whether H.B. 1 will go into effect for the 2028 and 2030 elections. (Assuming, of course, that the state legislature doesn’t try this all again before then.) Recent polling provides few clues as to how Missourians will vote on the matter.

Beyond the implications for Missouri, the Supreme Court’s approach to the dispute is also somewhat heartening. The justices unambiguously rejected efforts by state officials to hold November’s midterm elections under an illegal congressional map, even after those officials illicitly engineered a status quo where they hoped to take advantage of the court’s election precedents. As Trump and his allies consider similar antidemocratic plots against the U.S. electoral system later this year to maintain his grip on power, the justices’ clarity and alacrity is encouraging. Hopefully it extends to the imminent mail-in voting case and future election disputes, as well.

Speaking to Fox News’s Laura Ingraham Thursday, Trump offered a baffling excuse for why he couldn’t distribute the $5,000 dividends he’d promised the night before.

“Why not just give the money now? If you have the money, why not give it now?” Ingraham asked.

“Because they can’t. I’ll tell you what, because the Democrats can’t do it, because with them it’s negative growth,” Trump said. “With us, it’s so positive.”

LAURA INGRAHAM: Why not just give the money? If you have it, why not just give it now?

TRUMP: Because the Democrats can't do it. Because with them it's negative growth. pic.twitter.com/Z7uhIvhItv

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 10, 2026

In reality, Republicans are simply not on board. Even Fox News hosts balked at the hypothetical handouts’ estimated $1.3 trillion total price tag. If Republicans were the least bit interested in moving forward with these checks, then they already control Congress. They could just make it happen.

Trump also claimed Thursday that he’d give $500 rebate checks to about one million people enrolled in the Affordable Care Act in 30 states, claiming they were overcharged by the Biden administration.

It’s increasingly clear that Trump is hoping he can pay Republicans’ way through the midterm elections by dangling cash in front of voters. But the president has promised to deliver cash payments multiple times, including $2,000 stimulus checks of tariff revenue and $5,000 stimulus checks for the bygone “DOGE dividend.”

“The relief begins with refunding everyone who was overcharged, and the rebates are going out in just a few weeks,” Trump said in a video message posted to the White House X account Thursday morning.

President Donald J. Trump announces $500 rebate checks to nearly 1 million hardworking Americans who were wrongly overcharged through Obamacare.

"Our Administration is doing the right thing and giving the money back to the people who were wrongly ripped off." pic.twitter.com/XWA1wlzRH8

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) September 10, 2026

Trump accused President Biden of collecting insurance company fees that were passed on to consumers in the form of higher premiums, but didn’t provide any evidence for the claim. But perhaps more concerning: Trump didn’t say where the money would be coming from or who exactly would be receiving the checks.

The White House later released a fact sheet online saying that the rebates would be disbursed beginning in October. The sheet did not specify exactly how much ACA enrollees were supposedly overcharged or if the proposal would require approval from Congress.

The timing of Trump’s plan is suspiciously less than two months before November’s midterm elections, and comes just hours after the president announced at the Republican midterm convention that he would send $5,000 checks to every American adult if Republicans keep control of the House and Senate.

“Only I can make this promise to you.… If the Republicans win the House of Representatives and the United States Senate, both of them … I will issue a dividend to every adult citizen in the United States of America for $5,000,” Trump said Wednesday night. “Very much like a successful company will do a cash distribution to its shareholders, or like last year when I gave our great members of the military $1,776, remember?”

That plan has been called a bribe, even attracting skepticism from Trump’s MAGA base. Trump has made similar promises before, like $5,000 DOGE checks that never came to fruition or the $2,000 dividend from tariffs that never materialized nearly a year later. Republicans also currently control Congress and the White House, and could theoretically send checks to the American people at any time. It seems that Trump is hoping that a little cash goes a long way toward making Americans forget how hard he has made their lives.

Top brass at Turning Point USA were “livid” that Donald Trump’s ramshackle midterm convention in Dallas was scheduled for Thursday, the anniversary of Charlie Kirk’s death, two people familiar with the group told Politico’s Playbook. Many of TPUSA’s senior leaders have chosen to skip the convention altogether, including Kirk’s right-hand man Andrew Kolvet.

“I personally made the decision,” Kolvet told Playbook. “I want to remember Charlie here, inside his studio and on the campus that he built. I want our influencers and our contributors to come here and be a part of remembering Charlie.”

One person close to the White House told Playbook that the midterm convention was a “huge missed opportunity.”

“This week we should be laser focused on two things: commemorating the run-up to Charlie Kirk’s assassination, and hammering the Democrats in the run-up to 9/11 … not a half-assed convention,” the person said.

Trump and Vice President JD Vance both scrambled to maintain their grip around this increasingly alienated faction of conservatives.

Delivering a keynote address Wednesday, Trump thanked Erika Kirk for attending his self-obsessed convention on the anniversary of her husband’s death.

“She has put up with something, boy,” Trump said. “Oh, boy. What she’s had to go through and, the most beautiful family. It’s just terrible. But love, tough life, tough life. Can’t let it happen. From the very beginning of this journey, I’ve not stopped fighting and I never will stop fighting to protect you, your family.”

Vance called in to The Charlie Kirk Show Thursday hoping to demonstrate that the president’s massive ego hadn’t gotten in the way of his mourning. “All of us, I think, have this hole that we’re all trying to fill,” Vance said.

This week, Vance will be filling that hole by hosting an expensive and sparsely attended publicity event in order to satisfy his boss’s dream of being the center of attention.

Republican election officials in seven states say that there isn’t enough time before the November midterm elections to implement Trump’s order, and have asked the Supreme Court not to let the plan go into effect, Politico reports.

Kentucky’s Michael Adams, North Dakota’s Michael Howe, South Dakota’s Monae Johnson, Georgia’s Brad Raffensperger, New Hampshire’s David Scanlan, and Kansas’s Scott Schwab, all secretaries of state, joined Utah Lieutenant Governor Deidre Henderson in submitting a brief to the high court Wednesday, saying, “Attempting to implement the rule now will almost certainly lead to mistakes, delays and confusion for both voters and election officials.”

“The work necessary to implement the rule in a manner that ensures workability and does not disrupt other ongoing processes that are crucial to a smooth election … cannot be responsibly accomplished in the time that remains in a manner that ensures both that the rule is implemented correctly and other crucial preparations do not fall by the wayside,” the brief states.

The seven officials stressed that their filing wasn’t a statement on whether they supported Trump’s order or not, saying it wasn’t their place to “opine on whether the Rule itself is good or bad,” adding that the merits of Trump’s proposal could be decided “well before the 2028 election.”

Mail ballots have already been sent to voters in North Carolina, Delaware, and Alabama, as well as in certain Wisconsin counties. In the coming weeks, that number will only grow, as 20 states begin to send out absentee ballots 45 days before Election Day in November. Washington state votes entirely by mail. Absentee voters everywhere are scrambling to come up with backup plans, such as making long flights, but others, such as military service members, don’t have other options.

Trump’s attacks are based on paranoia and a desire to fix the results to favor himself and Republicans. But his executive order, along with his push to pass the draconian SAVE Act, threaten to sow confusion and discourage voting, fueling chaos and conspiracy theories. While the SAVE Act remains stalled in Congress, only court challenges stand in the way of Trump messing up mail-in voting.

The letters order states not to destroy or dispose of any voting records from 2024, as the target states “are currently under investigation” and subject to “ongoing litigation.” 

“The purpose of this letter is to notify you of your obligations to take reasonable steps to conduct a litigation hold and preserve and retain all hard copy documents and electronically stored information … which may be relevant, or likely to lead to the discovery of admissible evidence,” the letter reads. “Your failure to preserve relevant data may constitute spoliation of evidence, which may subject you to civil and criminal sanctions.” 

The DOJ also told every target state—including red ones—that it is under investigation for not complying with the National Voter Registration and Help America Vote acts. 

“‘As you are aware, you are currently under investigation…’ Um, no, I was not aware, but I guess I am now,” Utah’s Republican Lieutenant Governor Deidre Henderson wrote Wednesday.  “It would be nice if the good folks at the DOJ would focus on actual problems instead of baselessly harassing election officials.” 

“It’s just one thing after another. Running elections is a lot of work, it’s very complicated, and it’s not something you can just pivot from all the time,” Henderson said in another video. “All of the things that have happened have been just way outside the scope of my imagination. Never expected to have the federal government insert themselves to this degree. 

The DOJ confirmed sending the letters, with a spokesperson telling The New York Times that the department targeted “the states we are in active litigation against regarding their failure to provide the full” statewide registered voter list. 

This is just the latest update in the DOJ’s brazen attempt to legitimize Trump’s baseless claims of widespread voter fraud ahead of the midterm elections. While the DOJ insists that the Civil Rights Act of 1960 grants them every right to seize states’ voter data, 23 judges have ruled otherwise. Even still, that hasn’t stopped the DOJ from issuing these vague demands. 

Earlier this week, Giuliani publicly opposed plans for New York City’s first Muslim mayor to attend the national ceremony commemorating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the September 11 attacks. “Having lost friends there and being very close to many of the families, it offends me that he’s coming,” Giuliani said.

You know what offends me? Putting New Yorkers in danger—and that’s exactly what Giuliani did in the aftermath of 9/11.

The New York City Mayor’s Office released a trove of city records Tuesday citing evidence that Giuliani and other city officials misled the city residents about air safety following the attacks. The documents include internal memos in which officials raised alarms regarding testing that revealed elevated levels of toxins, including asbestos, in the weeks and months following the attacks. Decades later, thousands have suffered from chronic health conditions linked to 9/11.

In one internal memo dated October 6, 2001, Kelly McKinney, associate commissioner for the Health Department, warned that “air quality [for asbestos] at those locations is not yet suitable for reoccupancy.” The same day, Giuliani announced that the air was safe.

In the past, the man once known as America’s mayor has been lauded for uniting New Yorkers in the aftermath of 9/11. But 25 years later, his blatant Islamophobia only serves to tear us apart.

Ted Goodman, a spokesperson for Giuliani, responded to the massive document release in a statement.

“Now would be a good time to remind Mayor Mamdani that cowardly terrorists acting in the name of Islam are 100 percent responsible for all of the death and destruction on September 11, 2001, and for all of the suffering and illness that have continued since that day,” Goodman said.

“The EPA, a federal agency, issued press releases and public statements declaring that air samples showed the air quality near Ground Zero was safe in September 2001. The agency later apologized for those statements, saying it did the best it could with the knowledge available at the time,” the spokesperson added. “It is a shame that Mayor Mamdani is now attempting to score cheap partisan political points by seeming to blame the local officials who rushed to the scene, rather than radical Islam, for September 11.”

If anyone is trying to gain cheap political points, it’s Giuliani. The former mayor is desperate to link the crimes of terrorists to Mamdani—who was only nine years old when the Twin Towers fell.

Inside Washington

The crucial Senate race Dems are forgetting about

New Hampshire isn’t on most Democrats’ list of competitive Senate races, but maybe it should be. Recent polling finds the contest between Democrat Chris Pappas and Republican John Sununu, who were officially confirmed as their parties’ candidates after winning Tuesday’s primary, within the margin of error. The race is one “Democrats can’t afford to toss aside,” Representative Pappas, who currently represents New Hampshire’s 1st congressional district, warned in late August. “If we can’t hold the Senate seat, then the math just doesn’t work in other states.”

Many Democrats have assumed that the New Hampshire Senate race is in the bag for Pappas, who is running to replace departing Democratic Senator Jeanne Shaheen. The state’s congressional delegation is entirely Democratic, and President Trump’s approval rating has been falling in the state. Plus, Democrats have their work cut out for them in states like Michigan, Ohio, and Maine, and resources are finite.

But political experts in the state say that Pappas’s race appears competitive. Polls throughout the summer typically showed Pappas narrowly ahead of his opponent, former Representative and Senator John Sununu, but a late August poll showed Sununu up by two points. Inside Elections shifted the race from “Tilt Democratic” to “Toss-up” on September 3. The Cook Political Report rates the race “Lean D.”

“I don’t think this is going to be easy” for Democrats, said Wayne Lesperance, a professor of political science and the president of New England College. “The Republicans have chosen the best candidate they could.” He pointed to Sununu’s high name recognition from his time in office and his brother’s popularity as governor. Even though Sununu has Trump’s endorsement, he hasn’t mentioned it and has worked to distance himself from the unpopular president. “For a lot of voters, they see [Sununu] as sort of a throwback in a good way,” explained Christopher Galdieri, a professor of political science at Saint Anselm College. “He is really hammering hard in his advertising that he’s from back when Congress worked and politics wasn’t so loud and nasty.”

Pappas has some significant advantages, though. The unpopularity of Trump’s policies is a clear one—like Maine, New Hampshire has been hit hard by the tariff war with Canada and a decrease in Canadian tourism. “Anything that becomes a barrier to trade hurts the Granite State,” Lesperance said. The impact of tariffs “magnifies the challenges around affordability,” an issue that Democrats have been hammering nationwide this year. On Wednesday, the Pappas campaign released a list of the times Sununu has supported Trump’s agenda, trying to tie him to the president.

Pappas can also likely draw in New Hampshire’s undeclared voters, who make up about 40 percent of the electorate. These voters tend to mirror the state’s fiscally conservative and socially liberal values, explained Linda Fowler, a professor of government at Dartmouth College. “The Republicans in Washington have not performed as the independent voters would like. In fact, they’ve been emphasizing social issues on the conservative side, and being very irresponsible fiscally.”

Pappas has won his elections in the swingy 1st congressional district since 2018, showing that he can appeal to these undeclared voters. Now Stefany Shaheen, the daughter of the retiring senator, is running for that seat. In the state’s only other congressional district, incumbent Representative Maggie Goodlander will face a rematch with Republican Lily Tang Williams.

Pappas may also benefit from national Democratic figures eager to campaign with him in New Hampshire ahead of 2028. Rumored presidential contenders Senator Mark Kelly and Representative Ro Khanna have spent time in the state in recent weeks. Pete Buttigieg campaigned with Pappas in February and will return in early October for a state Democratic Party fundraiser.

In addition to the tariff issue, housing affordability is a major concern in New Hampshire, and one that has been relatively underemphasized so far in the Senate race. The professors who spoke to The New Republic on Wednesday said that they’re looking for either of the candidates to come up with convincing solutions to the state’s high property taxes and low housing stock.

Democratic groups like WinSenate, which is affiliated with the Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer–aligned Senate Majority PAC, said it plans to spend over $10 million on television ads for the race. The Senate GOP-aligned PAC, Senate Leadership Fund, has pledged to spend $17 million on the race, and Elon Musk’s America PAC is jumping in to boost conservative candidates in the state.

The risk that Pappas could be wildly outspent by Republicans and their allies is part of why his campaign and outside observers are getting nervous. “I think the good news for Pappas is that people are having these discussions now, at the beginning of September and not October 25,” said Galdieri. “Which means there’s time.”

—Emma Janssen

Outside Washington

Wondering how Trump’s ongoing trade wars could affect the midterm elections? Stateline’s Kevin Hardy has a useful overview of the potential effects in the Midwest and several New England states. Ohio comes in for particular attention. “Canada is Ohio’s biggest export market, sending $17.5 billion in goods across the border,” writes Hardy, and “Canadian data show countermeasures will hit Ohio harder than any other state.” It’s not hard to imagine that this will be a factor in the Senate face-off between Republican Jon Husted and Democrat Sherrod Brown. (Recent polling mostly shows Brown with a single-digit lead.)

Republican Brandon Herrera, running in Texas’s 23rd congressional district, is brushing off concerns about an array of offensive comments he reportedly made about women, fat people, and homeless people, saying they were “jokes.” He also responded to criticism of his disparaging remarks about feminists by pointing to Democratic opponent Katy Padilla Stout’s work on one case where, according to The Guardian, she “was appointed as a defense attorney for a father seeking to restore parental rights after a domestic abuse allegation.” There has not been much polling on this race.

—Heather Souvaine Horn

Inside Washington

Friday at 1 p.m., the Brookings Institution hosts an in-person and online event on “The 9/11 terrorist attacks at 25: Assessing the legacy, addressing the future.” Maryland Governor Wes Moore will deliver a keynote. Other speakers include American University professor Tricia Bacon and numerous Brookings fellows and directors, including Jeffrey Feltman, Fonteh Akum, Vanda Felbab-Brown, Michael E. O’Hanlon, Ben Harris, Robert Kagan, William A. Galston, Marla Karlin, Suzanne Maloney, and Melanie W. Sisson. New York Times national security correspondent Eric Schmitt will also join as a moderator.

At the Center for American Progress, Ben Hovland offers “5 Quick Steps to Protect Your Right to Vote.” These include checking your registration but also, crucially, voting “as soon as you are ready. Early in-person voting and other options add resilience to the election process. If something unexpected comes up, whether that is with your voter record or simply because life gets busy, voting early gives you more time and options.”

—Heather Souvaine Horn

In Closing

Here’s Why That’s B.S.

Watch TNR’s Edie Olmsted tackle Trump’s bizarre new story that firemen carried him out of danger at Ground Zero shortly after the attacks on the Twin Towers.

Political Trivia Question of the Day

On this day before September 11: Before 9/11 became 9/11, remembered for the horrific events it’s remembered for, Tuesday, September 11, 2001 was what day in New York City? (Sign up for The TNR Blue Book to find the answer in Tuesday’s newsletter.)

A 2–1 majority on the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals cited the 1892 Geary Act, which punished Chinese workers with hard labor if they did not carry their papers on them at all times.

“Fifty years later, with racial animus masquerading as national interest, the government ordered the mass detention of all individuals of Japanese descent present in the United States during World War II. Nearly 120,000 people were sent to internment camps within our borders,” wrote Judge Nicole Berner.

“The stain of these detentions on our nation—and the judiciary’s abdication of its obligation to protect basic freedoms—continues to haunt us,” she wrote. “Those shameful and abhorrent past detentions were limited in scope in comparison to the mandatory detention that the Government urges us today to find that Congress established thirty years ago in an ambiguously worded statutory provision. We decline to do so.”

The Trump administration has insisted upon arresting and detaining undocumented immigrants, even those who have been in the country for decades—a break from every single administration that preceded it, including Trump’s first one. Mandatory detention was previously only used for those who had just crossed the southern border.

This policy shift triggered nearly 20,000 lawsuits against the Trump administration, with 450 judges, many of whom Trump himself appointed, ruling against it. ICE has instead begun classifying longtime undocumented residents as admission-seekers. The Fourth Circuit Court rejected this, as well, the ninth consecutive time ICE’s policy has been struck down by an appeals court.

Fetterman praised President Trump, as well as fellow Pennsylvania Senator Dave McCormick, a Republican, in a video in which he called himself a “commonsense Democrat.”

“I’m always going to stand with America. I’m always going to reject the extremes and socialism and the anti-American way of life. Dave McCormick is the kind of senator that gets the job done, and he’s going to fight for Pennsylvania. I’m proud to count him as my friend,” Fetterman said.

time to adjust your math about how many seats Dems need to win to take the Senate -- here's John Fetterman video message to Trumpapalooza in which he pledges to work with President Trump pic.twitter.com/7HvpoaUmjs

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 9, 2026

Taking the stage in Dallas right after the video, McCormick told the convention crowd, “How great is John Fetterman, right?

“Thank you Senator Fetterman for your friendship, thank you for your courage and thank you for all you do for Pennsylvania,” McCormick said.

Personalities across MAGA and the right wing quickly began rejoicing. White House X account Rapid Response 47 immediately posted the video with the caption “Based John Fetterman.”

Conservative commentator Bill O’Reilly said on NewsNation that Fetterman “is going to be a Republican.”

“He will. He’s going to be a Republican,” O’Reilly told the network’s Chris Cuomo and sports commentator Stephen A. Smith, adding that Fetterman spoke at McCormick’s behest because Trump’s steel tariffs have “injected a lot of money and hope into” Pennsylvania’s steel industry.

“So, McCormick asked Fetterman, ‘Hey, we owe it to the folks for you to get out there and say that,’ which Fetterman did,” O’Reilly told Cuomo and Smith.

Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson called Fetterman “an example of common sense” on Fox News.

“He does not side with the radical left. It’s the insurgent left. It’s taken over that party. We make the case all the time. This is not your father’s Democratic Party!” Johnson told Laura Ingraham.

Far-right commentator Laura Loomer, a proud Islamophobe, told the British newspaper The Telegraph that if Fetterman joined the Republican Party, she would “absolutely” welcome him.

“He is the only Democrat outside of [Florida Representative] Jared Moskowitz right now who is actually really calling out this Islamic Communist takeover of the party,” Loomer said.

Fetterman voted with Republicans in the Senate to end last year’s government shutdown, supported multiple Trump appointees, and opposed efforts to end the war in Iran. He has taken a hard-line stance in support of Israel, fully supporting its war on Gaza and refusing to acknowledge any war crimes. Still, he refuses to commit to switching parties, despite massive criticism from Democrats and reports that his right turn is coming at the expense of his constituents.

“I’m a lifelong Democrat who votes overwhelmingly with my party—and should the Senate flip in November, I will still be the fifty-first vote that I ran on,” Fetterman said in a statement Wednesday.

The nation’s highest judiciary issued an order in the pending case Thursday, directing the state to rely on the original congressional maps that were drawn after the 2020 census during the upcoming midterm cycle, rather than the 2025 map created at Donald Trump’s behest, which would have granted Republicans an extra seat in the House.

It’s possible that this won’t be the Supreme Court’s final say on the matter, however. The legal memo noted that the stay will remain in place unless the case (People Not Politicians v. Onder) receives a final ruling, either by being elevated to the court’s bench or by being referred back to a lower court.

The drama began last summer, when Trump ordered several Republican-led states to redraw their congressional maps in a brazen attempt to create a GOP advantage in Washington.

Congressional maps are typically redrawn every 10 years, in accordance with the census cycle, allowing states to more accurately reflect changing local populations and meet their respective political needs. Yet Trump’s order arrived in the middle of the decade, raising alarms that the nationwide effort was an attempt to undermine U.S. democracy.

Republicans wasted no time implementing the directive in Missouri, where they shaved portions off a Democratic stronghold encompassing Kansas City, endangering Representative Emanuel Cleaver’s seat. The new map offered Republicans a 7–1 advantage, a one-seat gain over their previous 6–2 delegation.

A group called People Not Politicians collected more than 300,000 signatures in opposition to the new map—more than double the amount required—to force a statewide referendum on the matter, which is due to take place on November 3 on the statewide ballot.

Regardless, Missouri pushed ahead, opting to use the new maps during its August 4 primary. But this week, things got especially messy.

A federal judge ruled on Tuesday that the state should use the new maps during the November election, in light of the primary using the new districts. But that judge’s decision was in direct conflict with an order from Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who had decided moments earlier that another legal decision on the matter—the Missouri Supreme Court overturning the new map—should stand. In doing so, Kavanaugh effectively decided that Missouri should use its original maps, rather than the new one drafted last year.

The Supreme Court’s Thursday decision raises more questions about how the midterm election will be carried out, given how primary votes were conducted.

This story has been updated.

President Donald Trump promised that the Republican Party’s midterm convention would be “sold out” Wednesday—but hours into the opening day, there were still hundreds of empty seats at the American Airlines Center outside of Dallas.

“This place is packed. And not only is this packed, it’s a big arena, not only is this packed, but you have an equal number of people standing outside,” Trump told the arena.

Trump continued to self-consciously ramble about the size of his audience throughout his address.

“This is our big room. This place is packed,” Trump said. “Do you think the fake news, you know what they’re gonna do? The fake news will go around and see that man up there? He’s leaving for the bathroom. He’ll be back in two minutes. Up in the—they’ll take a picture of his seat while he’s gone. And they’ll say, ‘Trump did not fill up the arena. The arena was not filled.’”

An hour later, Trump returned to the subject. “They’ll have a reporter say, ‘Trump lost his audience. He didn’t enjoy it up there.’ I do. I’m having a lot of fun. You know why? Cause everybody loves me, and I love everybody,” Trump said.

Shortly before Trump was scheduled to give his keynote address, House Speaker Mike Johnson told NewsMax’s Finnerty that the arena was full—even as the camera panned over dozens of empty seats.

“Yeah, it’s full. I’m looking around, I think every seat up to the rafters are full,” Johnson said.

PBS News’s Liz Landers posted a video on X of the convention “kicking off” earlier that evening. The video showed that most of the 20,000-seat basketball arena was still empty, with just a few hundred attendees sitting on the floor and lower levels.

Republican midterm convention officially kicking off in Dallas pic.twitter.com/nYnqD02a1u

— Liz Landers (@ElizLanders) September 9, 2026

“Capacity-wise they could have held this in a high school gym,” former Democratic staffer Aaron Fritschner wrote on X.

Later, another video posted by a Minnesota state Republican representative showed that the entire upper deck of the convention center was empty. Attendees witnessed one convention organizer running through the halls encouraging people to sit in the still-empty sections, The Daily Beast reported.

Minnesota Republican state representative posts video from Trumpapalooza showing that the whole upper deck is empty pic.twitter.com/wm0dSMa9ah

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 9, 2026

It might’ve been that long waits in the hot Texas sun that attendees were subjected to kept people away.

Alec Shears, a conservative pundit, described the outdoor check-in. “3 people have needed medical attention so far. Several have already gone home,” he wrote on X.

The Texas Observer’s Steven Monacelli observed that there was a heat advisory in Dallas Fort Worth. “I may have overestimated my progress through the line. I’m approaching hour two of waiting in what feels like 100+ heat and I still have not gotten a credential for the GOP midterm gathering in Dallas. One ambulance has already come and gone,” he wrote on X.

White House officials have privately told Donald Trump that the war could last through the end of his term—a stark about-face from the president’s repetitive public messaging on the matter, which has involved tireless promises since February that the war’s end is immediately forthcoming.

Some of Trump’s closest advisers—including Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio—have discussed the conflict’s potentially extended timeline with the president, The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday. The White House is exploring the possibility that Tehran could continue to resist U.S. pressure, which insiders told the Journal could push the war even beyond Inauguration Day 2029.

Despite the dire reality of the closed-door conversations, Trump has invariably echoed his administration’s forecast for the war to the American public. Speaking with reporters on Wednesday, Trump pledged that the conflict will end “immediately” after the midterm elections in November “because they can’t hold out any longer.”

That drawn-out timeline could spell disaster for American defenses, which have already reached a “beyond critical” missile shortage.

The Iran war has done nothing good for America in the six months since it began. The conflict has so far killed at least 18 U.S. service members and wounded more than 750 others. It has also killed more than 3,500 people in Iran and injured tens of thousands of locals, according to data published by Al Jazeera.

The conflict has also taken an enormous toll on daily life in the U.S., inflaming the cost of practically everything as shipping companies contend with rising oil costs. As a result, Trump’s approval rating has plummeted, with trust and loyalty rattled even amongst his base, who are reportedly losing patience with the unyielding violence.

“Only I can make this promise to you.… If the Republicans win the House of Representatives and the United States Senate, both of them … I will issue a dividend to every adult citizen in the United States of America for $5,000,” Trump said Wednesday night at the GOP midterm convention. “Very much like a successful company will do a cash distribution to its shareholders, or like last year when I gave our great members of the military $1,776, remember?”   

But not even Fox News was buying it. 

“We should note though, it is not the first time he has promised a cash payment like this,” the network clarified shortly after Trump’s speech. “He promised Americans $2,000 rebates during his tariff policy when that was enacted, but after court challenges to the tariffs themselves, those $2,000 checks so far have not materialized.” 

Fox pointing out this is not the first time that Trump has promised cash payments: He promised Americans $2000 rebate during his tariff policy when that was enacted, but those $2000 checks so far have not materialized. pic.twitter.com/4KH7VUIjCT

— Acyn (@Acyn) September 10, 2026

Fox hosts laid these concerns at the feet of Vice President JD Vance. 

“You do the quick math, that’s about $1.3 trillion,” Brett Baier told Vance. “I can hear the critics’ heads exploding. They’re saying out loud, I guarantee you: ‘The president is bribing voters to vote for Republicans to take over the House. And then he’s bankrupting the country because the deficit debt is huge, and inflation would come back if this comes into play.’ So how do you answer those criticisms?”

“What the president’s talking about is fundamentally a dividend for American workers. We’re taking in an extraordinary amount of revenue because the president of the United States is actually standing up to both foreign companies, but also foreign countries who’ve been taking advantage of America’s workers for pretty much my entire life,” Vance said, referring to tariffs.

In reality, the revenue brought in by Trump’s tariffs, under $500 billion, would not cover a $5,000 check for every American, which would cost $1.2 trillion. 

It’s obvious at this point that Trump’s first inclination when his back is against the wall is to dangle money in front of the masses. He’s promised cash payments multiple times, including $2,000 stimulus checks for the “tariff dividend,” a $5,000 stimulus check for the bygone “DOGE dividend,” and $1,000 checks for the Affordable Care Act. None of those ever materialized. 

Republicans, by the way, already control Congress. If Trump wanted to make this a reality, he could have by now.

At the start of his show Wednesday night, Kimmel revealed in his monologue that his interview with Texas Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico won’t air Thursday after the Federal Communications Commission threatened him, the show, ABC, the network’s affiliates, and local ABC stations based on “simple traditional editorial decisions.” 

“And so out of consideration for our local stations, especially our local stations, especially our ABC affiliates who would have to deal with this nonsense, my interview tomorrow with James Talarico will not air on television. It will be posted on YouTube instead. It will not be on TV,” Kimmel said. “So if you want to learn about a candidate for the Senate tomorrow, you will have to go to the Jimmy Kimmel Live YouTube channel, where you will see it in its entirety.

“And thank goodness we have that, because in the America that we live in right now, that is the best we can do. Until November, of course. Make sure you’re registered to vote, by the way. Because that’s the most important thing you can do,” Kimmel added as his audience applauded.  

BREAKING: Jimmy Kimmel announces his interview with Texas Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico will NOT air on ABC tomorrow, saying Trump’s FCC has threatened him, his show, ABC, its affiliates, and local stations over “simple traditional editorial decisions” and guest… pic.twitter.com/VitDtSjHet

— MeidasTouch (@MeidasTouch) September 10, 2026

It’s an eerily similar situation to what former late-night host Stephen Colbert faced earlier this year, when he also attempted to interview Talarico on his show before the primary election. Just like Kimmel and ABC, Colbert and CBS at the time were threatened by the FCC and its chair, Project 2025 co-author Brendan Carr, and the Talarico interview was posted online instead. The public fight gave the interview extra publicity and it made it Colbert’s highest-viewed interview ever. 

ABC is currently suing the Trump administration over attempts to censor Kimmel last year for a joke he made about Trump and first lady Melania Trump. It seems that in his second term as president, Trump is trying to silence dissent without any regard for the Constitution. 

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

Donald Trump’s rage at Canada appears to be getting worse. After Canada’s retaliatory tariffs against the U.S. went into effect a few days ago, Trump spiraled on social media, ridiculing Canada’s leader and exploding in a long, unhinged rant that signals no end in sight for this battle. In fact, Republicans are now publicly admitting that this is a serious problem for them in the midterms in all kinds of ways. And they appear baffled as to the source of Trump’s fury. And some striking new polling shows why Republicans are so panicked.

We’re talking about all of it with Zack Beauchamp of Vox, who recently reported deeply on the roots of Trump’s trade warring. Zack, good to have you on again.

Zack Beauchamp: Hey, Greg. Always happy to do your show.

Sargent: So to recap, after trade talks between the U.S. and Canada collapsed last month, U.S. tariffs went into effect on Canadian goods. And a few days ago, Canada’s retaliatory tariffs went into effect. Trump has since amplified the claim that Canada is ripping off the U.S. So, Zack, can you just set the record straight on that? Is Canada ripping us off through trade or not?

Beauchamp: No. Look, to understand the situation, at least as it existed prior to Trump, you’ve got to understand that there are normal trade disputes that almost all countries have with each other, at least to a certain extent.

There’s a view that, well, this policy that you’re doing disadvantages our farmers and advantages yours, or maybe your labor practices and regulations are a little bit different from ours, and that hurts us in this particular exchange, costs us some jobs. That is basically the most normal of possible disagreements any countries could have about trade relations.

Ripping a country off looks a lot like what China’s doing. Canada’s in the first slot. The U.S. runs a very small trade deficit with Canada. It’s like 36 billion or something around there. And there’s disputes about everything from dairy to lumber to steel. But they really fall in the minor-disagreement category. What the U.S. and Canada have is an extremely beneficial trading relationship.

And the U.S. benefits from trade with China too, to be clear. It’s just that China has done things that make the benefits far more one-sided than they should be. But when it comes to Canada, there’s no argument by any serious or credible economist that having an open trade relationship with Canada has been net harmful to the United States. Quite to the contrary.

Sargent: That’s a good place to get into what Trump exploded over on Truth Social. He erupted on Canada in a long, unhinged rant. He said this: “The only reason Canada makes autos is because of previous disastrous trade agreements while other presidents were in office. Canada has been ripping us off for years.”

So I think he’s referring to the fact that we’ve had free trade agreements with Canada in autos going back many decades. And to your point, the real story here is that the auto industry in America and Canada is kind of like one thing. It’s so integrated that it’s actually become kind of a transnational entity, in a sense. And that’s actually been good. It’s allowed a lot of specialization.

But the key here is, to Trump—and you can see this in his crazy tweet—to Trump, the mere fact that we’re trading with Canada is itself an inherently disastrous and bad thing. Your thoughts on that?

Beauchamp: Yeah, I mean, it’s very confusing when you hear Trump talk about trade, because he seems to misunderstand some very, very basic elements of what global trade is. Like he thinks that when you’re importing from a country, you’re giving them money. You’re just giving them money. And then that money doesn’t come back to you in any way, it doesn’t benefit the people in your country from getting those goods. They aren’t helping anything.

It’s a little bit like saying when I go to the grocery store, I always leave, and I’ve given $200 of my money to Whole Foods. Well, I mean, the thing is, Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s, or Giant, or whatever, right—they are giving you stuff too. You’re getting things out of this interaction. Whereas Trump sees it as a form of extraction. He seems to think that trade deficits mean you’re losing, which is also not how it works.

Sargent: Yeah, I mean, it’s like when I go to the grocery store, I want to give them my money so that I don’t have to farm, right? In order to grow my own food. That’s sort of the essence. So then I can do other stuff, right Zack? If I get my food from Whole Foods, that frees me up to do stuff with my time. That’s basically how this works in a nutshell.

Beauchamp: I mean, trade is just a domestic economy on a global scale, right? On a really basic level. A domestic economy is people exchanging goods and services to allow for mutual economic growth through increasing productivity. That’s what a domestic economy is. Trade allows you to do that on a global scale.

Sargent: So Republican strategists are now openly warning that Trump’s trade war with Canada is a big problem in the midterms, especially in states with big Senate races. GOP strategist Brian Darling tells The Hill that this is a bad idea right before the election, saying: “You have a situation where America imports quite a few different goods from Canada.” A second GOP strategist says the Canadian trade war is “unpopular in a lot of states that touch the border.” And here’s the best part. This operative says, “for whatever reason, this is the fight the president has chosen to champion.”

This guy defends Trump, but note the phrase “for whatever reason.” No one knows why he’s doing this, right? Zack, you dug into this. I mean, what do you make of that Republican angst?

Beauchamp: I mean, it’s totally justified, right? Go talk to anyone who is right of center right now, and they will tell you that this is not what they would have chosen to do. This is not the way they would have chosen to go about it, and it doesn’t make any sense.

I mean, they wouldn’t go that far, because they’re still operating within the confines of the Republican Party. But it just is not the policy fight that any constituency in the Republican Party, or even in the MAGA movement, was really gearing up for.

Relevant to this conversation is that I live in Canada now. The Canadians do not perceive it as a joke. Nobody here takes this not seriously, right? I mean, or the handful who do are probably disabused of that notion at this point, right? It is overwhelmingly a dominant concern. And tariffs, and the cost of goods, the relations with the U.S., are a subject of ordinary conversation among Canadians. Whereas for Americans, it’s sort of like a peripherally weird thing that Trump is doing—unless you live in a border state, or are directly affected, your industry is affected, it just seems kind of odd.

But no—so what’s happened is that Trump has managed to infuriate one of America’s, if not America’s, closest allies. Certainly one of its closest allies, but I’d make the case for closest, at least in the 20th and 21st centuries. And its neighbor, one of its closest allies—and has done so for no discernible political or strategic rationale. It’s just not a rational thing to be doing.

Sargent: Well, CNN has new polls that really bear this out. They’re of the Michigan and Maine Senate races, and the numbers are stark on the trade war. In Michigan, 64 percent say the tariffs on Canada are bad for the state. And among working-class voters, that’s 60 percent. In Maine, 70 percent overall say the Canada tariffs are bad for the state, including 63 percent of working-class voters. You’ve got Senator Susan Collins in Maine and Senator Roger Marshall in Kansas and a number of other Republicans also coming out against them.

When I look at numbers like that—you know, Maine and Michigan are not that blue. And you have a huge majority of working-class voters opposing the tariffs in what are functionally swing states. I think that really blows up a whole lot of narratives.

There’s sort of a sense, maybe among certain Democrats, that the word “tariff” and the word “trade” are a bit scary for them, because maybe Trump’s position vaguely codes as pro-worker. But working-class voters see what the tariffs are. And I think that’s a major civic success story, in a way. What do you think, Zack?

Beauchamp: I mean, I think it’s because these things have tangible effects on people’s lives, right? I remember earlier this summer I drove from where I live, in southwestern Ontario, to New York to meet some friends, upstate New York. And I went into a brewery that was local there, and not that far from the Canadian border. And I told them that though I’m American, I’m living in Canada now. And they got sad.

Because what they told me was that they used to have a lot of Canadians who would come in—again, the borders are very close here—and they said, we miss our Canadian friends. And of course, on one level, that’s a business saying, we’ve lost customers as a result of this.

On another level, it’s saying that we have a level of affection and connection to these people because we live so close to each other. There’s a real sense that this is sort of an integrated region, that you just pop over the border if you want to go somewhere for a long weekend quickly, or just to visit something.

I mean, a lot of these cities, like Detroit and Windsor, are literally across the river from each other. They look at each other. And when I was—just, again, two weekends ago—I was in Michigan, right, for another trip. And there, my wife was wearing a shirt that said “Lake Ontario” on it. And I think four separate people came up to her to say how happy they were with her shirt, and how it really is called Lake Ontario, not Lake America.

It’s just, in these border states, there is a commitment to being part of this broader ecosystem. It’s part of people’s identity, it’s part of their daily lives, it’s part of how they make their money, it’s part of how they see themselves. And Trump is disrupting that.

And whether that resonates in the rest of the United States—my sense is it’s not as much of an immediate concern, just from talking to people in other places. But there’s still a generalized sense that, wow, what the hell do you care about Canada? Why are you doing this stuff to aggravate a country that we all think is a friend and has done basically nothing to offend us?

And so I think the broader American reaction is confusion. The immediate reaction in more affected areas, or places where this feels more real, is, why are you doing this to us? Why are you doing this to our friends?

Sargent: Right. I think that’s exactly right. And I want to get into what that really means. After this, Trump posted this graphic of himself and Canadian leader Mark Carney, both in hockey getup, with Carney sprawled on the ice and Trump looming over him as if he had just knocked him down, saying, “Get up, governor.” I guess that means Canada is the 51st state in Trump’s head or whatever.

I want to try to get at what this might mean in a deeper sense, though. Trump also posted this graphic of all of North America, Canada very prominent in this graphic, all of it being defined as the USA, as if it’s a threat to essentially annex all of Canada.

Beauchamp: I believe that map also included Panama and Iceland, by the way. It was really maximal imperialism. And I think, when they drew them out, they didn’t intend to do that. They’re just that dumb.

Sargent: Yeah, I think that’s right. But it definitely, you know, it was a shot at Canada. It was really Canada Derangement Syndrome in the raw. But so, I thought Paul Krugman had an interesting line about some of this stuff, where he said that Canada is probably going to get hurt worse than the United States—although the U.S. will also get hurt in these trade hostilities. But Canada will put up with it. They know why they’re fighting. As Krugman put it, they’re fighting to defend their national identity.

And when you look at graphics like the ones Trump posts, he’s trying to say that he is fighting a nationalist war on behalf of America, but everyone knows it’s not true. There’s no discernible vision of what’s in the national interest behind any of it. Everyone knows that it’s all just personal manic lunacy, essentially. And I find that really interesting.

At the end of the day, MAGA nationalism just melts away when you scrutinize it for a second. And all that’s left is dear leader’s whims and unhinged proclivities, don’t you think?

Beauchamp: In this case, I think there’s not an argument here, right? What’s happening with this Canadian war is two things, right? Trump is a person who has a longstanding obsession with notions of dominance and hierarchy. He wants to be number one, and he wants to be the best. And he sees a place where he can impose his will, because the U.S. is much larger, much richer, and Canada much more dependent on American trade than the U.S. is dependent on Canadian trade.

And so he thinks he can bully them around—especially when you combine that with his, I think, longtime fascination with tariffs, again in a sort of non-rational way. And his view—this is sort of the sense I get from him—that he’s starting to think about his legacy, and he wants it to be a physically larger United States, right?

He’s a real estate developer. And he thinks if you can put the name of Trump on things, and create the Trump expansion, the Trump Purchase, whatever, right, that it’ll really cement his legacy in the history books. Because, again, he was a real estate developer. And that’s what’s motivating this on his part, more than anything else.

You can find some ideological antecedents for the idea of Canada becoming part of the U.S. Interestingly, Pat Buchanan wrote about that at one point—the paleoconservative politician who was really a predecessor of Trump in some ways. But Buchanan and Buchananism wasn’t about Canada. That didn’t make it a major policy priority, inasmuch as it accepted the post-NAFTA order.

It wasn’t really about hostility to Canada qua Canada, right? It was just musing about this stuff. No, all of this—this hyper-focus, this elevation of conflict with Canada to a number one White House priority—is pure Trump in the way that you’re saying, right?

I mean, I think the best way to think of it is like mad-king hours, you know? And the Lake America-Lake Ontario thing is a really good example.

Sargent: A hallmark of MAGA politics is that we are winning when they are losing. “We” is Trump—MAGA America. I don’t think there’s any discernible sense of what the nation actually is in the “we.” It’s not the United States. It’s Trump, and Trump and MAGA—and that’s a bit of a fungible, movable thing—but it’s not the United States of America. And the “they” is right now the target of the MAGA two-minutes-hate of the moment, which is Canada.

And I think maybe people that you’re talking about in places like Michigan, who understand themselves as participating in a kind of broader thing across the border, who see themselves as integrated with Canada, look at this kind of talk, and it just sounds like white noise to them.

I think Trump’s trade war with Canada will undermine this whole MAGA idea that we win when they lose. I think it may be reminding a lot of voters why trade and economic interdependence can be good things for them and their country. The zero-sum MAGA worldview is kind of falling apart everywhere. Immigrants getting removed—it’s not resulting in employment for native-born young men. Trade war with Canada is only hurting American workers.

So I’m hopeful that there’s kind of an opening here for the world-historical failures of Trumpism, like this ridiculous trade war, to open the way to get lots of Americans to understand interdependence and positive-sum relationships, on immigration and trade, as positive things. Do you think there’s maybe an opening for that?

Beauchamp: I think it’s possible, but people don’t naturally think in categories like that, right? That’s not why people vote. It’s not how ordinary people process political information. To tell that kind of story, you need a storyteller. You need somebody who stitches together—that is to say, almost certainly a Democrat, or maybe a very prominent writer, who can tell that story.

Or writer, or, I guess, in this day and age, filmmaker, podcaster, whatever—

Sargent: Or a couple of podcasters who are telling that story right now, Zack.

Beauchamp: Well—OK, all right. But that—it needs to be articulated as such. The case needs to be made. And I think, at that level of abstraction, it’ll appeal to some people, to be sure, but it won’t become the way that people understand that. I think there is, as you say, an opening for somebody to use this experience as a deeper examination of what’s gone wrong with Trumpism.

Already you can see in the polling, throughout the second Trump administration, record-high numbers of Americans—maybe not the record of all time, but compared to recent years—who believe free trade is good for the country. And I think that that will continue.

Sargent: I agree. Just to underscore why I’m a little bit optimistic, and to return to your point that we need a storyteller to knit all this together—I think that when you’ve got people in a state like Michigan saying, as you put it, Mr. Trump, why are you doing this to our friends?—in their heads, they are intuitively understanding the situation the way we are describing it.

They’re intuitively rejecting the idea of zero-sum politics, intuitively rejecting the idea that we win when they lose, intuitively kind of—I don’t know how to put this exactly—but intuitively standing up for interdependence, and against friend-enemy politics, in a sense.

They’re intuitively in that place that Democrats can speak to, I think, effectively, and say, MAGA right-wing nationalism is a catastrophe. It’s not the way the world works. We can do better.

Beauchamp: Yeah. I mean, I think that’s probably true as a matter of description of the world. And I certainly think that it is a thing that people could come to believe. The question is just, will they? Right? And I think that that’s not a natural fact, right

It’s not just going to come up out of the ether. It will require intellectual entrepreneurship to persuade people that this is the case. That’s the only point that I’m making there.

Sargent: No, absolutely. And I think Democrats should take it upon themselves to be intellectual entrepreneurs and make this case. There’s an opening to make a very big case in favor of liberalism and against MAGA, basically.

Beauchamp: Yeah. I think that’s right. This is part of it. It’s clear, I think, that the American public does not want what Trump is doing with trade policy. What they take from that, right—just sticking with the specific issue of trade, rather than the sort of broader ideological narrative around MAGA—that is a very open question, right?

And I think one thing that would be a huge mistake on the part of the Democratic Party in the future is to conclude from this, as you were suggesting earlier, right, that being opposed to trade in sort of a general sense is what you need to do to win over the American working person, right? That they just are all as hostile to trade as Trump is, and that he’s really tapping into the silent majority of Americans. No, that’s not what the evidence says. It’s not good politics.

Maybe there’s a different way. You don’t have to go full NAFTA, or full, you know, globalization, peak era of the ‘90s. Maybe, politically, that’s not the right thing to move toward after Trump—who’s to say. But the lesson is certainly not that the right thing to do all along was to follow Trump’s impulse on these issues. I think the evidence is weak that this was ever an especially important issue in Trump’s wheelhouse that caused him to win a lot. It’s very weak, I think.

But I’m confident now that, with eight years of him being president, that’s a loser. And the opportunity for a better—not just a better political conversation on this, but for a better policy settlement on trade, right, for a better approach to the issue as a substantive matter—is getting better and better with every Trump blunder here.

Sargent: Very well put. And if Democrats win the midterms, they can grab hold of this. Zack Beauchamp, always good to talk to you, man. Thanks so much for coming on.

Beauchamp: Of course.

In a hard-fought trial, Reddington argued Clancy wasn’t criminally responsible for the murders because her mental illness had eclipsed her moral discernment. As the trial ended with the jury deadlocked 11–1, with the majority evidently voting not guilty, Reddington was also knighted on social media for his passionate defense of women’s mental health.

But what stood out in Reddington’s post-trial interviews has not been his advocacy for women. It’s his advocacy for civics. For him to promote the duties of citizenship, at such a low point for our constitutional democracy, was somewhat startling. You could almost find a shred of faith in the benighted American experiment.

What Reddington said that deserves our attention came in two parts. First, George Stephanopoulos pressed him on his earlier boast that he had “crushed” the prosecution. After the trial, Reddington had indeed flexed outside the courtroom. “That was bravado,” he said now. “I could have been more circumspect.”

This dialing back of his earlier bluster was not just good manners. It’s how due process works. The Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution safeguard an adversarial system in which legal opponents fight hard, aiming to, yes, crush each other’s arguments. This is why courtroom trials play like thrillsports in America. But then comes the rule of law. When a jury—or an electorate—renders a decision, both sides absolutely must turn “circumspect” and accept the legal outcome.

Reddington’s emphasis on deference to the rule of law stands out during a decade in which Donald Trump’s chronic refusal to accept any law that disfavors him, most notably the outcome of the 2020 election, has caused the slow-rolling constitutional crisis that continues to engulf the nation.

On September 4, in typical fashion, Trump blew past the presumption of innocence on the subject of Lindsay Clancy, recklessly claiming she’d have to “pay a price” because she’d done a “horrible, horrible thing.” Trump will always choose vigilantism over the rule of law.

Reddington also spoke insightfully about the holdout juror. This is the person, remember, whose refusal to vote with the majority cost Reddington a massive courtroom victory—and a lifetime of book and movie deals. If Trump were in Reddington’s place, this juror would be identified, maligned, and threatened.

But Reddington did nothing of the kind. “I would defend that individual’s right to be a holdout forever,” he said.

“That’s part of our judicial system,” he went on. “I respect that.”

(Enlightenment 101: “I may disagree with what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”)

In a constitutional democracy, individuals campaign, compete, advocate, and argue. And when it comes to capitulating to a consensus or a decree, an American is indeed empowered to be a “holdout forever.” To make this point to Stephanopoulos, Reddington even cited Sidney Lumet’s Twelve Angry Men, the patriotic 1957 film used (once upon a time, at least) to teach high schoolers about the duties of juries, constitutional rights, and the freedom to dissent.

But Reddington then rounded on the subject of the law itself. His concern, he said, was that the holdout evidently “refused to apply the law of reasonable doubt” during the deliberations. In her own post-trial appearances, the jury’s foreperson has further said the holdout harbored full-fledged reasonable doubt but still wouldn’t vote to acquit.

This procedural twist deserves more attention. Who decides if a juror’s doubt is reasonable? If a juror acknowledges having reasonable doubt but won’t acquit, is he engaged in some form of individual nullification? These are the kind of thorny questions that should be discussed in civics classes, along with a screening of the Lumet film. They get at some of the Constitution’s founding conceptions of universal rationality, individual rights, due process, and how deliberation works.

The jury mechanics in American common law can seem chaotic to Europeans. After all, their civil-law courts rarely use juries at all. Instead, judges in France and Germany hand down decisions not after unruly debate among peers but on the strength of their intime conviction, or strong private belief.

But Americans tend to trust juries that boisterously deliberate more than judges who solemnly reflect. Public polling shows that about half of Americans trust a jury to be fair, while only 23 percent place that same trust in a single judge.

What’s more, the fastest way to raise people’s trust in the judicial system seems to be to have them serve on juries. According to a recent report by Duke Law School, people who do jury duty come to trust the judicial system more and see U.S. courts as more legitimate.

The idea that a democracy should have “a government of laws, not men” is still hype music in Massachusetts, where John Adams codified it and wrote it into the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780. Among the government’s laws are the ones that guide due process. Due process gives authority to the law of the land, while also protecting individuals from it.

Much reporting on the Lindsay Clancy trial has focused on the extrajudicial chatter and tinfoil-hat speculations that have no place in our justice system. Rather than appealing to Trump to pardon Lindsay Clancy—as he did on Good Morning America—Reddington should condemn reckless conspiracy-mongering, which could lead to Trump-style vigilantism or preempt a fair retrial.

Meanwhile, Trump’s manful efforts to rig the midterms may continue to make a mockery of the Constitution. But during America’s 250th summer, and during a trial about a terrible tragedy, we got a glimpse of what civics is supposed to be, in Duxbury, Massachusetts, 10 miles from Plymouth Rock.

Within the flickering light of cinemas, Thomson writes, “our grasp on life was stimulated but compromised by the invention of the lifelike.… For when we can now fabricate the imagery—we have bypassed light and nature.” The ultimate problem with movies, Thomson argues, is not simply that they divert us from the real world, but that they want to replace it entirely. In his previous books, such as The Big Screen: the Story of the Movies and What They Did to Us, Thomson delivered a more optimistic history of film, as he did in his biographies of Orson Welles, Ingrid Bergman, and Gary Cooper. He assembled a dense nonchronological compendium of smart, absorbing assessments in Have You Seen...?: A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films; he compiled the highly regarded Biographical Dictionary of Film (he is at his best when recounting the lifelong careers of individual actors and directors); and he achieved cultish success with one of the most unusual meta-novels of the last century, Suspects (1985), a “family romance” detailing the intertwining kinship networks of famous (and sometimes not-so-famous) film characters, from the goody-goody husband of Ilsa in Casablanca, Victor Laszlo (who not so many years after World War II betrays fellow travelers to the House Un-American Activities Committee), to Jack Torrance, the manic-obsessive writer in The Shining. Suspects (like all of Thomson’s books) bristles with countless macabre branches of a film family tree in which buffs might enthusiastically lose themselves.

If all these enjoyable books highlight one fact about Thomson, it’s that his fondness for movies isn’t simply about the stories they tell or the techniques they use to tell them—it’s about the fantasy world they create in our collective imagination. The basic problem for Thomson is that, amid current political horrors, this film world is starting to seem inimical: “Fantasy fills all the available space. And when fantasy overwhelms law and politics, it leaves only the bitter energy of disappointed dreaming. That is our violence. And all we have left?”

Exploring, if not answering, that hanging rhetorical question, is what drives this provocative book. Are movies, and the alternative worlds they offer, “all we have left?” Or, like Jim Carrey’s character in The Truman Show, can we eventually find a way out of them?

In many ways, the figure that haunts Thomson’s deepest concerns in this book is the current American president—along with that sense, shared by many of us, that a culture addicted to entertainment led us to put a reality-TV businessman in the White House. The book’s final sentence couldn’t make Thomson’s dissatisfaction clearer: “For a century the fallacy had reigned that watching [movies] would make us better. Instead of just indifferent.” This is where movies have taken us, Thomson concludes: the reckless elevation of a dangerous buffoon.

Thomson argues that movies were quick off the mark to lead people and civilizations into their flickering light of unreality—especially since filmmaking’s earliest pioneers included the likes of stage magician Georges Méliès (immortalized in film buff–emeritus Martin Scorsese’s 2011 Hugo), who was perhaps the first to discover that the new “reproductive” lens of the camera could be used to swallow up objective visual realities, digest them, and transform them into a duplicitous world of illusion. As Thomson writes:

He had long appreciated that photography was a tricked reality, a medium begging for subterfuge, “effects,” and bare-faced lies. But that potential was accelerated by what the Cinématographe offered. He saw that one image might be superimposed on another; he realized how scale could be played with; he saw that duration could be slowed or hurried; he understood that the fake and the actual could be married without us losing faith in the process. He even recognized that the Cinématographe need not be limited to running forward. Surely it was possible for the film to run through the apparatus backward. Whereupon the sheer daft beauty of life in reverse was revealed. That is still a treat that too few films have the wit to employ.

In Méliès’s many dozens of short films, which were played in music halls to enthusiastic crowds, ghosts appeared and vanished, living bodies were dismembered and put back together again (without any apparent pain to them at all), and in his most famous work, A Voyage to the Moon, a bullet-shaped rocket ship is fired into the whipped cream–like eye of the pie-faced man in the moon. When the ship’s astronauts go outside to explore the lunar surface, they are watched over by mystically appearing and disappearing stars, comets, and attractive young women in leotards and short pants posing as celestial demigoddesses. (There are even some pyrotechnic explosions here and there.) The key to Méliès’s stewardship of this new medium wasn’t simply his flair for illusion as entertainment; it was his conviction that even when audiences were fooled into believing they saw things they didn’t, they wouldn’t “lose faith” in what they saw. In other words, they didn’t mind being fooled. They actually liked it.

But Méliès was not the only notable pioneer who used film to make audiences believe in things that didn’t exist; even “realistic” directors developed their own techniques for misrepresenting reality, or perhaps simply skewing it to their purposes.

While most students and teachers of film history remember D.W. Griffith for directing what Thomson calls the “first fascist picture,” The Birth of a Nation (1915), Thomson attributes that film’s racism largely to its producer, a Baptist preacher and author of The Clansman (1905), the novel on which the film was based. More unforgivable, in Thomson’s eyes, was Griffith’s perfection of deceptive technical skills he had developed in earlier, shorter films. By intercutting between individual characters and expressions and things they saw, he established point of view on the audience’s behalf, teaching them to view the characters in blackface as savage evildoers possessed of wild desires to degrade nobly born white women. At the same time, his use of a dashing actor (the soon-to-be director Raoul Walsh) as John Wilkes Booth provided an early example of how the “medium flatters killers.” The extraordinary success of Birth (200 million people paid to see it worldwide in 1915 and 1916) led to financial consolidation of the first large studio under Louis B. Mayer, an original investor in Birth who came away with enough money to build an empire that was less concerned with the accurate representation of history, and more concerned with turning big profits. Among the “darker meanings” of Birth was that it signaled the “riotous birth of a business.”

The technical innovations of early filmmaking did more than simply tell dishonest stories about history; they convinced audiences to believe in those stories and to help in their manufacture. The early Russian filmmaker Lev Kuleshov (a major influence on Sergei Eisenstein) tested audiences with a series of cuts between the close-up on a famous actor, Ivan Mosjoukine, and shots of “a bowl of soup, a child in a coffin, and a charming woman on a sofa.” The effect was that the audience felt in each case the man was hungry, grieving, and attracted to the woman. The experiment showed how quickly the audience would bring their own sense of inner reality to movies; they didn’t simply believe what they were shown, they contributed their own meaningful connections between shots.

Films had an overpowering effect on the crowds who came to watch them. When sound came along—and with it, the sweeping grandeur of motion picture soundtracks—it made the cinematic world even bigger, richer, and more attractive. With so much power to entrance and misinform audiences, it’s no surprise that the major politicians who first recognized the medium’s usefulness were Hitler and Goebbels, not to mention their chief propagandist, Leni Riefenstahl.

For all its power to manufacture illusions, the film industry was largely marshaled into existence by the relatively poor and uneducated. Most of the major studio heads, such as Louis B. Mayer and Marcus Loew, were the children of Jewish immigrants; and almost all of them had failed at earlier entrepreneurial efforts before they landed, almost as a last resort, in the rapidly booming motion picture business. (As Thomson writes of Loew, who began by investing small amounts of money into any available movie venues he could find: “No one said he favored one film over others; he wanted whatever the crowd wanted.”) William Fox (formerly Fuchs) started off selling newspapers; and the Warners sold shoes and bicycles before selling romantic comedies and swashbucklers.

It was an industry driven by corporate profits over individual creative expression, and so it wasn’t surprising that the first widely proclaimed “genius” of the early studio system was a 20-year-old, chronically ill man named Irving Thalberg, promoted by Carl Laemmle at Universal in 1919, who went to Hollywood to design studios to produce movies the same way Ford’s factories produced cars: large studio sets and sound stages were built for filming the scenes of many different movies, often simultaneously; musicians, writers, and actors were hired on contract to be moved from one set to another like stage furniture; and in a very short time, Thalberg became the first studio head to fire a hot-headed, brilliantly original director by the name of Erich Stroheim (the son of a Jewish hatmaker), and relegate his way-over-budget film, Greed, to the studio cutting room. This event served almost as a template for future “negotiations” between film’s money providers and its greatest creative forces. Many believed (like Groucho Marx) that Thalberg saved the film industry from itself (though sadly, the Marx Brothers never made movies as brilliantly hilarious as Monkey Business (1931) and Duck Soup (1933) after their characters and storylines had been routinized by Thalberg.) Others, like Welles, called him “the biggest villain in the history of Hollywood.”

Over the next several decades, the greatest commercial directors would produce their best (and most influential) work largely outside the studio system, but it wouldn’t be easy. Robert Aldrich, Robert Altman, and Francis Ford Coppola would set up their own studios, only to go bust producing movies that didn’t make enough money. Maverick directors such as John Ford and Howard Hawks managed to keep creatively working only by moving between studios, seeking the right place to make the right movie at the right time. (In his Biographical Dictionary, Thomson claimed that his 10 favorite “desert island” films would all be by Howard Hawks, the master of those Hollywood genres—gangster melodramas, screwball comedies, and Westerns—that weren’t taken seriously until the Cahiers du Cinema crowd rediscovered them in the 1960s.)

Far more common were those directors, from Mervyn LeRoy to Michael Curtiz, however talented, who did what they were told, stapling together preapproved scripts, actors, and sets. When a studio-bound director did achieve “auteur status,” like Frank Capra at Columbia under Harry Cohn, it was due to his gift for making people believe in an America that didn’t exist, a place where homespun philosophers like Mr. Smith (in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939)) could pass legislation by acting “folksy” during an endless congressional filibuster. Or then there’s Capra’s other hometown hero, George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart again), who could count on his modest neighbors to help him oppose the evil, crippled-by-ugliness big American banks in It’s a Wonderful Life (1946). Life was the sort of “plea to the common people,” Thomson writes, that made believable “the airy hope that public conscience and common sense can beat off the threat of corruption and greed.” And of course it doesn’t take more than a couple quick glances around ourselves to realize that, for many decades at least, our “public conscience” has been outmatched by greed maybe 10-to-one.

Thomson finds it difficult to accept how the “screens” of romance and melodrama have seduced us into endlessly feeding off the adventures of people who don’t exist—from Sam Spade and Scarlett O’Hara to Ratso Rizzo and Luke Skywalker. And yet even after they have grown so small they can fit into the palms of our hands, the screens of illusion and delusion have conquered our world, along with our collective ability to make human sense of it. Which is perhaps why so many of our favorite, most unforgettable movies are about voyeurs who are as devoted to the act of observation as we are—such as Jimmy Stewart in Hitchcock’s Rear Window, or Carl Boehm in Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom, or even David Hemmings in Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966). The voyeur may be the most pertinent image of contemporary human consciousness, at a time when people believe less in what they have experienced firsthand than in what they observe—much like Ronald Reagan, our first (and certainly not last) movie-star president, who “would literally believe he had been at events in World War II because he had done the narration for brisk documentaries about them.”

The screens that surround us are more than mere entertainments; they drain us of attention for anything but them. Flat or curved, pixelated or Technicolor, handheld or wall-mounted, they are almost everywhere, and wherever we don’t find them, we devise ways to bring them with us—into the streets, our jobs, and even the bathroom. We no longer take them into our homes; rather, the screens are now taking us home with them, where presumably every bit of information we possess will be incorporated into artificial intelligence–driven systems of knowledge, perception, and infinitely streamable nonsensical stories.

It’s hard to believe there is a film buff worth his or her popcorn who hasn’t already enjoyed Thomson’s work, and this latest volume confirms all of his familiar, well-practiced skills. He is incapable of writing an uninteresting sentence or an inelegant paragraph and he sparks off lovely epigrammatic ideas on almost every page. At one point he writes: “And so we let the lifelike distract us from life. That is how we became fantasists, all set in our solitary ways.” At another, he describes the movie Psycho as “a rat that got into my house in 1960 and that I have never managed to exterminate or train.”

His enthusiasm for great (and even not so great) movies is contagious; in fact, it’s not possible to read this new volume without cranking up the old DVD player several times to rewatch movies—such as Sturges’s The Lady Eve, or Tourneur’s Out of the Past, or Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, or the first two Godfather movies—along with his remarks about them. In fact, the only weakness about this “revisionist history” is that while Thomson expresses clear and convincing opinions about the dark roads down which movies have led us over the last century and a quarter, he continually gets distracted by his career-long love of the medium, and gets his readers lost along with him.

“For several decades,” Thomson writes, “people went to the movies without knowing what the picture was. The way now we can’t face the day without scanning our phone.” It’s a pretty distressing idea, and probably accurate. Just as the early twentieth century’s moviegoers would “submit to,” more than “choose,” their trips to the movie theater, we have now, each in our miniature psycho-theater, learned to submit to whatever arrives on the screens of our phones and laptops. We have become a nation of watchers who don’t care what it is we watch so long as we are watching. It’s a vision of doom that isn’t best represented by a mushroom cloud but by the pale, complacent, well-fed face of Chauncey Gardiner in Being There. “I like to watch,” Chauncey reiterates, again and again. As if there could be anything else left to say.

Opening these subsidies up to married couples—and doing so without dramatically expanding funding for childcare for working parents—is reactionary tradwife nonsense. (Not that any low-income woman could live the Instagram tradwife dream with the additional infusion of only $9,000 a year, the typical amount that parents receive from this Clinton-era program.) Yet families do need help. Democrats need to emphasize that families’ affordability struggles can’t be addressed by pitting different groups against each other—and that they have a better plan, one that will help all parents in need. 

There is nothing wrong with stay-at-home moms receiving government help, but that help shouldn’t come at the expense of working parents, as even some conservative policy experts have pointed out. Patrick T. Brown, a fellow at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center, told The New York Times that while he is “a big proponent of more support for stay-at-home parents,” he opposes this plan because it doesn’t increase funding, which “would mean more parents competing for the same dollars, and leaving more parents—particularly single working parents—worse off.” One consequence of this increased competition for the same pot of money is that it almost certainly would drive some childcare providers out of business—and that would leave working parents in those communities with fewer, and more expensive, options.

Working families are already struggling to afford the cost of childcare, a situation that 80 percent of voters viewed as a “crisis” in January of this year. This is a bipartisan concern, with almost two-thirds of Republicans agreeing with the “crisis” framing. An even greater percentage of voters see increased federal funding for childcare as an important part of the solution. But the Trump administration has been going in exactly the opposite direction, exploring numerous creative bureaucratic routes to dismantle Head Start, a preschool program upon which many low-income families depend. Eliminating Head Start is another Project 2025 goal, and while it’s not legally possible, the administration is working hard to weaken and undermine the program. The administration also froze over $2 billion in federal funds for childcare based on a combination of exaggerated and outright false fraud claims.

One reason democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani won the mayoralty of New York City and remains so popular is his focus on expanding free childcare, a campaign promise he began delivering on almost immediately with the support of centrist Democratic New York Governor Kathy Hochul. New Mexico, thanks to the Democrats in charge there, will have universal childcare by the end of this year. But such ideas have yet to advance far in Republican-controlled Washington—though that could change if the expected Blue Wave materializes in the November midterms.

In the lead-up to the elections, Democrats are running on long-overdue federal solutions to working families’ childcare woes. Senators Chuck Schumer, Elizabeth Warren, and others released a report detailing Trump’s failings on the issue this summer, and there are proposals in both houses of Congress to improve families’ access to high-quality childcare. Some of these proposals are even supported by some Republicans. But Republicans and conservative Democrats are reluctant to spend the money required to develop a truly high-quality and affordable system. Senator Elizabeth Warren—backed by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the House—has proposed legislation for a program modeled on the military’s approach to childcare affordability, a sliding scale under which half of American families would pay no more than $10 a day for childcare. For a blueprint on how to think even bigger, lawmakers could look to the Roosevelt Institute’s vision of a federal system of care that’s free or nominal for all, universally available, and staffed by workers receiving pay and benefits on par with those of K-12 teachers. 

Of course, low-income mothers who want to stay home with their kids should receive resources to do so. Cash subsidies are a fine way to help them as long as these don’t come at the expense of working parents. Catching up with the rest of the world on requiring employers to give all workers paid time off with a new baby would be another step forward. The Roosevelt Institute’s proposal for expanded federal childcare includes a much-needed proposal to mandate a year of paid parental leave—exactly one year more than the law currently requires for private-sector workers. Making choices about how to balance work and childrearing shouldn’t be a luxury reserved only for the rich. There’s just no reason—other than a far-right agenda—to favor one group’s domestic life choices over the other’s. Even some on the right are arguing as much in the wake of the Times’ report. “I don’t believe that we should be using the tax code to sway people’s decisions one way or the other, to penalize people for having more children, or to incentivize people to have more children,” said Joel Griffith of Advancing American Freedom, a think tank founded by former Vice President Mike Pence. (Some have also pointed out that natalist policies like this, contrary to their architects’ dreams, don’t incentivize that many people to have more kids.)

Subsidies aimed at helping all families would be much more helpful. One of the underreported factors in President Biden’s unpopularity was that families appreciated the near-universal child subsidies—and then that help vanished. Some congresspeople are working on bringing them back, by expanding eligibility for the existing child tax credit to include lower-income families. Like the congressional childcare proposals, the effort is bipartisan—Maria Salazar, a Florida Republican, just signed on this week. But bringing back the more universal version of the child tax credit that American families enjoyed under Biden would be even better.

It is possible—just ask anyone who lives in Sweden or Denmark, or even in more socially conservative Germany—for governments to provide robust cash supports for families and universal childcare. While the Trump administration aims to help a minority of parents who are living in the traditional fashion that some right-wing white men extol, a Democratic-led agenda that helps all families to raise children—including grandparents and unmarried partners, and regardless of who else is or is not living in the home—is undoubtedly popular with a much broader swath of America.

“Let me tell you something I’ve not shared with anybody. The last message that Charlie Kirk gave to me before he joined his creator in heaven … he said that we have to dismantle and take on the radical left organizations in this country that are fomenting violence. That was the last message that he sent me, before that assassin stole him from all of us,” White House adviser Stephen Miller hollered on Fox News two days after Kirk was shot. “I don’t care how.… We are going to do what it takes to dismantle the organizations and the entities that … are trying to inspire terrorism.” 

“You want us to live in fear? We will not live in fear. But you will live in exile,” Miller concluded.

This threat became the right’s rhetorical marching order for the next year. What followed was a frantic, McCarthyist campaign that led to hundreds of people getting fired or disciplined for expressing their First Amendment right, a renewed federal attack on the so-called “radical left,” and the whitewashing of Kirk as a normal guy who just wanted to talk tough subjects with everyday Americans with civility and in good faith—all of which looks funny in the light, 365 days later. 

In just the two months following Kirk’s death last September, more than 600 people were punished in some way by their employers for their online comments about Kirk. Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission biologist Brittney Brown was fired after the conservative Libs of TikTok X account sent a mere repost of hers to her boss. It read, “They care exactly as much [about the shooting of Kirk] as charlie kirk cared about children being shot in their classrooms, which is to say, not at all.” Austin Peay State University professor Darren Michael was fired after posting an old article on something Kirk himself said: “Charlie Kirk Says Gun Deaths ‘Unfortunately’ Worth it to Keep 2nd Amendment.” The Washington Post’s Karen Attiah was fired for criticizing gun violence and posting a racist quote of Kirk’s, and retired Tennessee police officer Larry Bushart was actually thrown in jail for reposting a quote from Trump saying America needed to “get over” the 2024 Perry High School mass shooting. “Seems relevant today …” Bushart commented. 

Each of these cases failed to hold up to legal scrutiny. Brown was awarded $485,000 in a settlement; Michael got $500,000. A private arbitrator last month ordered the Post to rehire Attiah, who was also awarded back pay dating back to her termination, and Bushart got $835,000. According to Forbes, the victims of this witch hunt have been awarded a total of at least $2 million as of May. 

This was perhaps the most vexing outcome of Kirk’s assassination. Lawmakers and pseudo-intellectuals targeted their fellow Americans for expressing their opinions about a man who—at least on paper—championed the First Amendment at any and all cost. And while not everyone who was punished got hundreds of thousands of dollars of vindication (sorry to MSNBC’s Matthew Dowd), the numerous legal rejections of the witch hunt revealed just how toothless the whole thing was to begin with.  

Then there was the Miller narrative, the notion that the radical left of America was directly responsible for Kirk’s death and should be hunted down and rooted out of society.

“There is nothing left to talk about with the left. They hate us. They assassinated our nice guy who actually talked to them peacefully debating ideas,” then-Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene posted, five days after Kirk’s assassination. “Then millions on the left celebrated and made clear they want all of us dead. To be honest, I want a peaceful national divorce. Our country is too far gone and too far divided, and it’s no longer safe for any of us. What will come from Charlie Kirk being martyred is already happening.”

This ominous sentiment spurred actual policy proposals to target the left. Representative Nancy Mace urged the Department of Education to “cut off federal funding from any elementary, secondary, and post-secondary educational institution refusing to hold teachers or administrators accountable for celebrating the murder of Charlie Kirk.” Representative Anna Paulina Luna called for the Trump administration to go after longtime boogeyman and liberal donor George Soros because that was “exactly what Charlie Kirk dedicated his life to fighting.” 

Democratic Senator Chris Murphy called it then. 

“The murder of Charlie Kirk could have united Americans to confront political violence. Instead, Trump and his anti-democratic radicals look to be readying a campaign to destroy dissent.… The right has been looking for a pretext to destroy their opposition for a long time,” he warned, four days after Kirk’s assassination. “That’s why it was so important for Trump sycophants to take over the DoJ and FBI, so that if a pretext arose, Trump could orchestrate a dizzying campaign to shut down political opposition groups and lock up or harass its leaders. This is what could be coming.” 

While everything on the Republicans’ wish list didn’t come true, some of it did. Less than three weeks after Kirk’s death, Trump, in Kirk’s name, signed the National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, or NSPM-7, a chilling executive order that directed federal intelligence and law enforcement agencies to go after antifa, defined as anyone with opinions “associated with anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity … and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.” Even if the plans for such a sweeping order were in place before Kirk’s death, his killing was most certainly used to further justify it. 

“Even in the aftermath of the horrifying assassination of Charlie Kirk, some individuals who adhered to the alleged shooter’s ideology embraced and cheered this evil murder while actively encouraging more political violence,” the second sentence of the memorandum reads. “Charlie Kirk’s alleged assassin engraved the bullets used in the murder with so-called ‘anti-fascist’ rhetoric.”  

The hunt for leftists quickly became global, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio spearheading an international crackdown on leftist organizations, referring to them as “far-left terrorists” and “enemies of civilization.” The State Department put targets on just about everyone—including the Democratic Socialists of America, Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, Amazon union leader Christian Smalls, and environmental activist Isra Hirsi, the daughter of Representative Ilhan Omar—all of whom are overwhelmingly peaceful. 

Unlike the social media witch hunt, this fallout from Kirk’s assassination has resulted in lasting, top-down consequences that we are still just beginning to witness. Most pertinent is the case of anti-ICE protesters in Prairieland, Texas, who were given extreme federal sentences that collectively amounted to hundreds of years in prison, including 30 years for someone who simply moved a box of zines. This is the dangerous radical left that the right is fighting in Kirk’s name. 

It doesn’t matter that antifa isn’t really a thing, or that most leftist groups lack any kind of real institutional power, especially compared to that of the MAGA movement. In death, Kirk has been most effective as an excuse to reaffirm the Trump administration’s greater aim of casting as wide a net as possible to wipe out any kind of left-leaning opposition, wherever it may be—a far cry from Kirk’s insistence on free speech. 

The right’s biggest failure in its response to Kirk’s assassination was its attempt to lionize him, to recast him as a sort of political Johnny Appleseed who traveled the country spreading reasonable conservative ideals to campuses dominated by the left’s all-powerful “cultural Marxism.” That narrative fell apart with each of Kirk’s resurfaced debate clips, along with the pomp and circumstance that accompanied the public grieving of his widowed wife, Erika Kirk.

Instead, Kirk’s death has been memed even more than George Floyd’s (whom he called a “scumbag”). There’s the “We Are Charlie Kirk” AI song that has gone number one on Spotify (not in a good way) and there’s the “kirkification” of various individuals, real or fictional—superimposing Kirk’s face onto Robert Downey Jr.’s Iron Man or the Silver Surfer, among many others. Then there’s the absurd true-crime narrative that has been placed on his death by former friend and collaborator Candace Owens, who has spent the past year pushing conspiracy theories about Kirk’s death—and Erika’s supposed role in it. 

Kirk’s killing sorely lacks the gravity or solemnity of other prominent assassinations, instead becoming completely consumed by the dry nihilism of the internet. But the right only has itself to blame. Frenzied purge aside, it’s almost like they didn’t care, either—from FBI Director Kash Patel’s Valhalla comment, to Erika Kirk’s WWE entrance at her husband’s memorial, to Trump brushing off his death to talk about his ballroom.

“All that Charlie ever did was have conversations with people. He didn’t insult anyone. He made arguments. He debated. He wasn’t an extremist in any way,” The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh wrote, the day of Kirk’s assassination. “Everyone who knew Charlie personally loved him. That’s the kind of guy he was. And they still killed him.” 

There will be versions of this quote going around forever. They’ll never be true. Kirk was an extremist. He despised Martin Luther King Jr. and thought being gay was an “error.” He’s quoted saying, “If I see a Black pilot, I’m gonna be like, ‘Boy, I hope he’s qualified.’” He called for a “Nuremberg-style trial for every gender-affirming clinic doctor” and called Islam “the sword the left is using to slit the throat of America.” He was no William F. Buckley, a bona fide intellectual debating the likes of James Baldwin and Gore Vidal. He was one of many right-wing commentators who, for most young Americans, existed entirely on the internet—on Jubilee videos and YouTube shorts debating Zoomers about abortion, gender roles, and affirmative action. He was not “practicing politics in exactly the right way,” as The New York Times’ Ezra Klein claimed. He was a bigot till his last breath, and one year later, his death has only begotten firings, suppression of free speech, countless memes, and even more bigotry.  

The tariffs particularly focus on vehicles, fish, and dairy, and will hit particularly hard in states with key elections, like Maine, Michigan, and Kansas. There are early indications that they’re working. Nearly two-thirds of voters in Maine and Michigan view the trade war negatively, according to a CNN poll released on Wednesday. That trade war—and Joly’s comments—are extraordinary examples of the sharp rift that has emerged between the U.S. and Canada under Trump 2.0. But they’re hardly surprising. Trump has repeatedly attacked America’s northern neighbor, a close ally and biggest trading partner, and even mused about making Canada the “fifty-first state” (an odd riff, given it would almost certainly be a blue one).

These tit-for-tat tariffs are also just deserts, however. Trump has spent much of his second term flouting the longtime convention of U.S. administrations avoiding direct involvement in other countries’ elections. He has endorsed right-wing and far-right candidates and parties in Argentina, Hungary, Brazil, and, most recently, Germany. He has used sanctions against Brazil to try to help spring his pal and former president, Jair Bolsonaro, from prison, and sent Cabinet officials to Hungary to aid Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s reelection campaign. He has used tariffs to try to pressure voters to back his preferred candidates or politicians to back his preferred policies in Canada, Brazil, and Mexico (and used sanctions relief in a similar way in Hungary). Now Republicans in tough races will face an even steeper climb—and they’ll have to deal with the kinds of headaches that Trump has tried to inflict on liberal candidates in other countries.

Canada is not the only foreign nation whose actions will affect the midterms. Although no Iranian official has made as explicit a comment as Joly’s, there has been speculation for months that many of the nation’s actions in the stop-start Iran war, particularly those that lead to spikes in already skyrocketing energy prices, are intended to damage GOP chances in the upcoming midterms. “The Iranians are not dumb,” longtime Republican strategist Karl Rove told Fox News in late June. “They know that the fall campaign starts in earnest on Labor Day. I would not be surprised to see them attempt to have an influence on the outcome by creating problems in mid-August and causing oil prices to rise and uncertainty to grow.”

That is exactly what has happened, with strikes resuming in recent weeks and Iran now looking to escalate further, according to The New York Times, which reported Wednesday that “Iran’s leadership believes that now may be the best moment to raise the stakes, ahead of the U.S. midterm elections in November when an unpopular war could hurt Mr. Trump and the Republican Party.” Even Trump himself buys this line of reasoning. “They’re desperate to try and affect the election,” ​he said on Wednesday (though he spuriously claimed this means “war is going to end immediately ​after the election because they can’t hold out any ⁠longer”).

Still, Canada marks the most pronounced and deliberate—and Trumpian—attempt to punish Trump by targeting the midterms. The Canadians, too, seem to know that the fall campaign starts in earnest on Labor Day. And vulnerable Republicans are already reeling. “This is not China we’re dealing with; it’s Canada—our best friend, a country with whom our economy is completely intertwined,” Maine’s incumbent Republican senator, Susan Collins, said last month. (Polls say she’s trailing Democrat Troy Jackson by single digits.) But not everyone has Collins’s history of breaking with the president. In Michigan, Republican Senate nominee Mike Rogers is attempting to sidestep tariffs entirely, even though they’re hated in the state—an apparent gamble to maintain the president’s backing in a winnable race against Democratic nominee Abdul El-Sayed. Still, it’s hard not to see the entire issue as the president shooting his party in the foot—an avoidable debacle, like the Iran war. Now it’s one that may very well sink his party.

The irony of all of this is that many of Trump’s attempts at interference failed. He went all-in backing his close allies in Brazil and Hungary, and in both cases failed to accomplish what he wanted—Bolsonaro is still serving a 27-year sentence for election interference, and Orbán was defeated, ending a 16-year stretch in power. But Trump’s greatest face-plant may have come in Canada. Shortly after he won the 2024 election, he began to attack the nation’s liberal government, first with “fifty-first state” mockery and then with tariffs. It failed spectacularly. Canadian voters had appeared ready to elect a conservative government, but instead kept the liberals in power. That backlash swept Mark Carney into power as prime minister, and he has emerged as a persistent thorn in Trump’s side—a vocal critic who is attempting to rally America’s estranged allies to be less dependent on the U.S. Now Carney seems to be on the verge of doing something Trump couldn’t: help to install a more favorable government abroad.

Today, almost six years later, Donald Trump and his Republican congressional allies are even more determined to prosecute the president’s war against American democracy to its catastrophic end than they were on January 6, 2021.

That catastrophic end could well come on January 3, 2027, when Trump and his Republican congressional allies wage the final battle in Trump’s determined war to corrupt America’s democracy and deliver a lasting political victory over the Democrats for his MAGA Republican Party.

Trump and his Republican allies have been preparing for this final battle since January 6, 2021. For the past six years, they have embarrassed themselves and the U.S. with their preposterous, win-at-any-cost denial that Trump lost the 2020 presidential election and their deceitful slander of America’s democracy. Since his return to the White House, Trump’s every unconstitutional act in his effort to seize control over the midterm elections—each hailed by his prostrate Republican Congress—has been toward the end of ensuring that Republicans retain a majority in the 120th Congress.

Trump told talk show host Dan Bogino on February 2, “The Republicans should say, ‘We want to take over. We should take over the voting.’... The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.’” The Republicans have dutifully fallen in line.

Before Donald Trump arrived, it was the Republicans who professed to stand for the Constitution, principle, truth, honesty, integrity—even honor. Republicans were the proud party of Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan. It was our party that could be expected to put country before party when the time came, as when Barry Goldwater and other party elders told Richard Nixon in 1974 that it was time to resign the presidency. That was then. None of this is true of today’s Republican Party and this Republican Congress. So enthralled with the forty-seventh president are today’s House Republicans that they long ago abandoned everything the Republican Party has stood for since its founders first met in Ripon, Wisconsin, in 1854.

Today’s congressional Republicans took a blood oath six years ago not just to put their party before their country, but to put Donald Trump before their country. And so it is that only weeks before the midterm elections, House Republicans have already sworn their allegiance to Donald Trump and doomed the U.S. to another January 6 next January 3.

So unalterably subjugated to Trump is today’s Republican House that even a decisive victory for Democrats and a resounding repudiation of Trump and the MAGA Republicans at the polls in November will not guarantee that a Democratic majority-elect will be seated in the 120th Congress on January 3.

All year long, Trump has been dragooning House Speaker Mike Johnson and the congressional Republicans into prejudging as fraudulent the upcoming November elections of the presumed Democratic majority, as he himself has already prejudged those elections. His dragooning appears to have worked. House Republicans are now poised to claim that the midterm elections were stolen from them when they meet on January 3 to decide which members-elect will be seated in the 120th Congress.

Over the past year and a half since his return to the White House, Trump has exploited every conceivable unlawful means possible to rig the midterm elections in favor of the Republicans, and the federal courts have struck down as unconstitutional every one of these unlawful attempts. He will try every unlawful means over the remaining weeks to ensure that Republicans handily win the midterm elections in November. Those of us who oppose his illegality will look to the courts, but the federal courts will be institutionally incapable of checking his final unlawful rampage.

Trump punctuated his expressed intent to interfere in the midterm elections eight weeks ago in a national prime-time address on “election integrity,” accusing the Democrats and the Chinese in particular of threatening the free and fair elections in November. In that address, he claimed without evidence or support (as usual) that the 2026 midterm elections were being threatened by noncitizen voting, weaknesses in voter registration systems, foreign interference, and vulnerabilities in electronic voting systems.

The concocted address was universally panned as purely partisan, devoid of evidence and support, and anticipatory of his forthcoming claim in November that the Democrats won a majority in the House of Representatives only because of fraud in their respective elections.

Everyone knows that the greatest threat to the upcoming midterm elections is not the Democrats or the Chinese, noncitizen voting, or electronic voting machines, but the president of the United States and his servile Republican Congress.

Every member of Congress takes a solemn oath to support and defend the Constitution, an oath that obligates them to honor the will of the American electorate. It is a sacred imperative that the Congress of the United States must defend our constitutional right to choose our representatives to Congress against all enemies, domestic as well as foreign, who would deny us this fundamental right.

There was a time not long ago when virtually every member of Congress could be expected to commit to the peaceful transfer of congressional power in advance of an election, just as every president could be expected to commit to the peaceful transfer of presidential power. But those times came to an abrupt end upon Donald Trump’s arrival in January 2017. In a damning indictment of the president and today’s congressional Republicans, it would be hard to find even one congressional Republican with the integrity, sense of duty to country, honor, and courage to put America above the Republican Party, let alone above Donald Trump.

Yet America’s only hope for saving its democracy and avoiding another crippling constitutional crisis on January 3 is for the House Republicans to decide that they are not going to betray their oaths and their country one last time for Donald Trump, and telegraph to Trump and Mike Johnson that any unconstitutional plan they might be contriving to deny Democratic members-elect their rightful seats in the 120th Congress would be dead on arrival January 3.

If there are any such Republicans in the Congress today, they should announce well before November 3 that they will not be party to Trump’s and Johnson’s attempt to steal the midterm elections from the American people.

In fact, the House members of both political parties should stand united before November 3 and affirm to the American people that in the United States of America, government derives its just powers from the consent of “We the People”—the governed. They should campaign in the fall on any refusal by their political opponents to affirm the same. Their political opponents should in turn campaign on House members’ refusal to affirm that they will not be complicit in any attempt to steal the midterm elections.

Standing united before the midterm elections against any attempt by Trump and Johnson to overturn those elections would go a long way toward restoring Americans’ lost trust in their Congress and their government. It would send a powerful message to Trump and Johnson that Americans will never again be forced by their own government to endure another January 6.

While it is small solace, Americans are not entirely at the mercy of this Republican Congress to suddenly decide to honor its oath to the Constitution and the American people. It will be the Supreme Court, not Trump, Johnson, or even the House of Representatives, that will have the final word as to who will be seated in the 120th Congress of the United States.

Article I, Section 5, Clause 1 of the Constitution provides that “Each House shall be the Judge of the Elections, Returns and Qualifications of its own Members.” Under Clause 1, the House of Representatives is the “judge” of its “elections” and “returns.” But the House’s power is not plenary. The Constitution constrains how the House can exercise its power to refuse to seat members-elect. Indeed, in 1969, in Powell v. McCormack, the Supreme Court ensured that the House constitutionally exercised its power to “judge the qualifications” of members-elect when it ordered the seating of New York Representative Adam Clayton Powell, who had won reelection in 1966 despite a House vote to refuse to seat him. Just as the court intervened then, so also will the Supreme Court ensure that the House exercises its power to “judge” its “elections” and “returns” within the limits imposed by the Constitution. At least we hope it will, but can we be sure with this court?

Whether the House constitutionally exercises its power not to seat members-elect will ultimately be determined by the federal courts and the Supreme Court—not by a majority vote of the House of Representatives.

This is how the crisis would unfold. The precursor of the crisis will come sometime before noon on January 3, when Speaker Johnson removes current House Clerk Kevin McCumber and replaces him with a person loyal to Johnson and House Republicans who they know will refuse to list on the statutory roll of representatives-elect to the 120th Congress any Democrat-elect whom Johnson and the Republicans direct him or her not to list. Under Rule II, Clause 1 of the Rules of the House, the Speaker of the House has the unilateral power to remove the incumbent clerk, and then the power under Title 2 U.S.C. § 5501(a) to replace him temporarily with whomever he wishes until the House elects a successor. McCumber is a Republican appointed by former Speaker Kevin McCarthy. He is widely respected for his integrity and faithful adherence to the Constitution and is reputed to be unwilling to carry out orders he considers to be unconstitutional.

The first moment of constitutional crisis will come when, sometime before the 120th Congress has been gaveled into session, the loyal temporary clerk refuses to list Democrat representatives-elect on the clerk’s roll of representatives-elect that determines who may participate in organizing the new Congress. At that moment, interested members-elect and others will be forced to seek a writ of mandamus—a court order to a government official instructing him or her to perform a mandatory duty—from the federal court to the temporary clerk, ordering him or her to list on the clerk’s roll all members-elect who have been certified by the states as having been elected from their districts to the new Congress.

Members-elect will argue that the clerk has a ministerial duty under 2 U.S.C. § 26 to list all representatives-elect whose properly filed state certifications show that they were “regularly elected in accordance with the laws of his state or of the United States.” Because the clerk has no authority to omit any duly certified representative-elect, even if a representative-elect’s election is contested, the clerk unquestionably has a ministerial duty under law to list all duly certified representatives-elect. But this begs the question whether a court will issue the writ of mandamus to the acting clerk.

At first blush, a court will be reluctant to order the clerk to list all duly certified representatives-elect because of an instinctive belief that such an order would interfere with the constitutional process of the House to judge its own elections and returns. The wise and learned judge, however, will understand that rather than interfering with the House process, issuance of the writ will actually enable the House process to proceed to completion without judicial interference. Were that wise and learned judge to issue the writ, his or her order would immediately be appealed to the Court of Appeals, and from that court to the Supreme Court, while the country and the world wait in suspense.

The next moment of constitutional crisis will come if and when, after appeals, the court finally issues the writ of mandamus, and the clerk refuses to obey the court’s order to list the Democratic representatives-elect. At that point, it is possible there will be no further federal court involvement until such time as the 120th Congress officially convenes and votes not to seat representatives-elect. Then, that vote by the 120th Congress will be immediately reviewable by the federal courts, up to and including the Supreme Court of the United States.

Judicial review of the House’s decision not to seat Democratic representatives-elect in the 120th Congress would take weeks, if not months, during which time the United States would be in the throes of a paralyzing constitutional crisis, helplessly vulnerable to all the world’s evil, as it would have been in January 2021 had Mike Pence not thwarted Donald Trump’s plan to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

It is not difficult to imagine the many possibilities, some of the most critical being entirely realistic. It would be the ideal moment for China to move against Taiwan, by way of military blockade, attack, or even invasion. It would be the perfect moment for Vladimir Putin to complete his conquest of Ukraine, and perhaps even to move militarily against Estonia. Every passing day could bring a deepening economic crisis, worsened by our angry allies around the world who would welcome the opportunity to requite Donald Trump for his belittling mockery of their countries and presidents. Without the Congress, the United States would be powerless to respond to any of these crises.

The House has historically claimed that its decision not to seat a member-elect because of fraud or irregularities in the elections is unreviewable by the federal courts. But its decision is reviewable. The Constitution unquestionably requires the House to seat a member-elect who was validly elected in a free and fair election. The Article 1, Section 5 power of the House to be the judge of its elections and returns does not give the House the power to deny a seat in the Congress of the United States to a candidate elected by the American people in a free and fair election on the mere assertion, pretextual or otherwise, by a simple majority of the House that the candidate’s election was tainted by fraud.

Thus, on and after January 3, if congressional Republicans were to determine that a Democratic member-elect was elected because of fraudulent voting and refuse to seat him or her, that determination would be scrutinized by the federal courts, up to and including the Supreme Court.

It will never be a nonjusticiable political question whether the United States House of Representatives by simple majority vote can refuse to seat a member elected to Congress by the American people in a free and fair election on the pretextual and unsupported assertion that the member-elect’s election was tainted by fraud. Such is the very opposite of a nonjusticiable political question committed to the House of Representatives. For in the decision of this question lies the answer to perhaps the most fundamental question under the Constitution: Is the United States of America a democracy, in which “We the People” elect our representatives to the Congress and to the presidency, or is it not?

I don’t intend to be overly sanguine about this Supreme Court. This is the court that shattered the one constitutional truth in the U.S. since 1789 that “no man is above the law” and placed Donald Trump of all presidents above the law in Trump v. United States. This is the court that betrayed the Constitution by refusing even to decide whether Trump was disqualified from the presidency under the Fourteenth Amendment because of his insurrection against the Constitution, which he clearly was. This is also the court that has cynically authorized Trump’s lawlessness for the past two years through its aptly named “shadow docket,” without so much as briefing, argument, or written opinion.

But surely by now this court must understand what it has wrought for the U.S. and the Constitution, and is aghast as we all are, even if it is not penitent. Surely, surely, it will understand the signal moment in American constitutional history that would be presented, and this time understand its supreme obligation to the nation.

Between now and November 3, congressional Republicans would do well to ponder one last time the fate of their Republican Party were the Supreme Court of the United States to reverse a fraudulent determination by the 120th Republican Congress not to seat Democratic members-elect who would give the Democrats majority control of the House.

Two hundred and fifty years into the greatest experiment in self-government in the history of the world, the Republican Party would finally meet the fate to which it has been destined since January 6, 2021, and cement its place in history as the most corrupt political party ever to emerge in the United States of America for its second attempt in six years to defy the will of the American people on Election Day.

If we Americans are to save our democracy from the forty-seventh president and his MAGA Republican Party, we must disenthrall ourselves from our political bondage to Donald Trump and MAGA, as Abraham Lincoln urged the nation in 1863 to disenthrall itself from its bondage to the ruinous political dogmas of its time. “We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country,” the sixteenth president admonished. The Republican Party in particular must finally loose the chains of its political and moral enslavement to Donald Trump and separate itself from the MAGA political party cult.

The writing is already on the wall, Republicans.

CNBC reports that the president’s investment holdings continued to trade energy stocks during the first six months of the war. Between February 27 and August 31, his nine largest fuel assets grew between $1.5 million and $4.4 million, the network estimates, referring to his annual financial disclosure. 

Trump reported owning stock in Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Exxon Mobil, Kinder Morgan, Marathon Petroleum, Occidental Petroleum, Phillips 66, Valero Energy, and the Williams Companies. CNBC calculated Trump’s gains based on what he said in his June disclosure about his assets, looking at how each stock performed over the six-month period. 

The last time Trump disclosed any stock trades was June 29, so the data is incomplete. It’s also hard to get a completely accurate estimate as Trump’s disclosure doesn’t reveal exact share counts.

CNBC stated that it didn’t find any evidence that Trump or his financial advisers used advance knowledge in their decisions, that his finances influenced policy decisions, or that he personally directed specific transactions. A White House spokesperson also issued a flat-out denial. 

“Neither President Trump nor any member of his family has any ability to direct, influence, or provide input regarding how the portfolio is invested or when investments are bought or sold,” Davis Ingle told CNBC. “All investment decisions are made entirely by independent managers. There are no conflicts of interest.”

Still, many of the trades occurred at big moments in the war, such as the first trading day after the February 27 attack or just hours before Trump announced a (now-collapsed) two-week ceasefire.

Meanwhile, Trump on Wednesday declared that the Iran war won’t end until after the midterm elections, adding that he is no longer pursuing negotiations with the country.

It’s bad enough that Trump’s statements and Truth Social posts can manipulate the markets, but the fact that they can also affect his own wealth is a glaring red flag. Trump frequently disparages certain companies and praises others, even mentioning stock symbols at times. He also owns stakes in several defense companies that have done well thanks to the Iran war.  

Even if he isn’t directly involved, Trump knows what is good for his money and what isn’t. The idea that he makes decisions without any regard to how it affects his portfolio, or the assets of his friends and allies, is absurd. He’s already made billions of dollars since being elected president for the second time, and he’s not about to deliberately wreck his net worth. 

Inside Washington

This could be the biggest issue of 2027. Dems are split on it.

Representative Lori Trahan has been positioning herself as a leader on artificial intelligence policy—so much so that she passed up a chance at a leadership role to instead focus on AI policy, she told Politico in an interview published Tuesday. Polls show voters’ concern over artificial intelligence is rising rapidly, whether it’s because of cybersecurity risks, data centers, or job loss. But it’s not yet clear which Democrats—and which proposals—might lead the way in a Democratic-led House come January.

Trahan’s legislation, the FRONTIER Act, is co-written with GOP Representative Jay Obernolte, and would give the government the authority to pause the deployment of risky AI models. Advocates for the bill say that it introduces safety guardrails while remaining flexible and without stifling innovation.But Trahan’s bill is one of a number of proposals Democrats have floated in recent months. And it’s not clear that hers is the one the party would support. In fact, some experts are concerned that Trahan’s bill might do more harm than good due to its preemption of state-level AI legislation, where the federal legislation would block states from making their own policies that go further. “The irony of the FRONTIER Act is that it draws inspiration from the California and New York AI laws,” said Amos Toh, a senior counsel and manager at the Brennan Center, referencing legislation passed by the two states that requires frontier AI labs to establish a framework for risk management and report safety breaches to the state. The New York bill, the RAISE Act, was championed by state Representative Alex

Bores, who lost his primary for Congress after AI-affiliated PACs spent millions against him.”Because of the political paralysis in Congress, [states] are the ones that are leading the thinking and development of what AI regulation should look like,” Toh added. Preempting state regulation “should give us all pause.” Jeff

Hauser, the founder and executive director of the Revolving Door Project, agrees with Toh’s concerns. He said it’s a matter of “legislative humility,” arguing that preemption assumes the federal approach is more correct than what states could legislate, a dangerous assumption given how fast the AI industry is changing.

Trahan and Obernolte addressed the preemption issue in late July, editing the original draft of the bill to decrease—but not fully eliminate—what the bill preempts. The latest version of the legislation would still preempt states on mandatory incident reporting and third-party audits of AI labs. “The FRONTIER Act does not ban states from regulating artificial intelligence. In fact, it expressly preserves state authority to protect kids online, and to enforce the civil rights, consumer protection, and privacy laws that govern how AI is developed, deployed, and used,” Trahan wrote in a newsletter sent to constituents.Trahan is not the only Democratic lawmaker who has been positioning herself as a leader on AI. In July, Representative Ted Lieu also unveiled a bipartisan proposal, the AI Kill Switch Act, which would require AI labs to report security incidents and create a mechanism to shut down their most powerful models. Lieu is a member of the recently created House Democratic Commission on AI and the Innovation Economy, alongside Representatives Valerie Foushee, Josh Gottheimer, Frank Pallone Jr., and Zoe Lofgren. Henry Burke, a researcher at the Revolving Door Project, criticized those appointments, arguing that the commission’s members are too entangled with Big Tech.

Representative Greg Casar has also unveiled a series of bills related to AI this year, including a plan to protect workers from AI-related job loss and a proposal to ban artificial superintelligence in partnership with Senator Bernie Sanders.

Lieu sees room for collaboration with other pieces of legislation: “We need to look at both predeployment and postdeployment issues with AI, but the Kill Switch bill focuses on models that go rogue after they have already been built,” he said in a statement to The New Republic. “The bill would be complementary to any bills that address the testing and vetting of AI models that have not yet been deployed.”

Trahan doesn’t care for some of these competing proposals. “A permanent ban with no path to passage, that doesn’t protect anyone,” Trahan told Politico about Casar and Sanders’s legislation. Outright bans, she said, could “trigger a backlash that chokes off the chance to put sensible, durable guardrails in place for the future.”

Hauser disagrees with that reasoning. The AI industry “was way more politically powerful a year ago than they are now,” he told The New Republic. “They are right now a millstone around the necks of their top advocates, and people are scrambling to switch positions on AI,” he added, pointing to recent 180s on AI from Governors Josh Shapiro and Greg Abbott.

“What’s been concerning to me about Lori Trahan is how well she fits into the ‘in order to do X, we have to sacrifice on Y’ school, which I think is just what the AI oligarchs want,” Hauser said. He explained his concern that some lawmakers make “false choices,” for example only focusing on narrow AI safety issues, leaving open space for AI companies to harm the economy or build more data centers.

One way or another, Democrats will need a strategy on AI regulation—particularly if they win big in the November midterms. But the bills are only one piece of that. Toh said he’s also keeping an eye on what kinds of hearings and investigations Democrats conduct on AI-related cybersecurity breaches, like the recent OpenAI and Hugging Face incident. “I think it’s very much about setting the tone for the next Congress,” he said. “I think an early marker of that will really be whether they are conducting proper, rigorous, and independent investigations and hearings into how AI developers and their trusted partners got us into this situation.”

—Emma Janssen

Outside Washington

As Trump and MAGA-world head into their all-hands-on-deck attempt to save Republican Senate candidate Ken Paxton, Democrat James Talarico continues to trot out endorsements from the people Paxton has pissed off over the years. Amid a $10 million ad buy from the MAGA Inc. super PAC and GOP preparations for an unprecedented midterm “convention” in Dallas featuring both the president and vice president, the Talarico team on Tuesday dropped a new ad featuring David Maxwell, the director of law enforcement for the attorney general’s office during Paxton’s tenure as attorney general. Maxwell was one of the people who were fired by Paxton’s office after they reported Paxton to the FBI for misusing his position to help a donor friend. In the ad that dropped Tuesday, Maxwell says Talarico “knows a bad guy when he sees one.” And just for good measure, in a statement reported by The Texas Tribune, Maxwell calls Paxton a “crook.”

This ad comes on the heels of a similar one. Last month, Joe Joplin, the attorney whose $1,000 Montblanc pen Paxton (allegedly, but on video) stole in 2012, endorsed Talarico. The campaign ran a “Vote for James Talarico. He won’t steal your pen” ad around it, and added a black pen with white lettering reading “Not Ken Paxton’s Pen” to its campaign merch.

—Heather Souvaine Horn

The Ideas Factory

Thursday at 1 p.m., the Roosevelt Institute hosts a Zoom conversation “about the future of Social Security revenue” with the organization’s “Good Life Residents” Tyler Bond, Jon Schwabish, and Lena Simet. The panel will discuss closing various tax loopholes and “how future revenue reform can preserve Social Security’s core guarantees, reject benefit cuts, and create room to strengthen and expand the program as a durable system of progressive social insurance.”

Thursday at 11 a.m., the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
hosts a live event about the “lessons learned and unlearned” in the 25 years since the September 11 attacks. Carnegie senior fellow Aaron David Miller will speak with Brookings scholar Philip Gordon, the McCain Institute’s Nicholas Rasmussen, and Susan B. Glasser of The New Yorker.

—Heather Souvaine Horn

In Closing

Book of the Week

THE GIST: This is the biography of lawyer and conservative activist Roy Cohn that this country has been waiting decades for. “Before Roy Cohn, America had a bipartisan establishment that adjudicated the rough edges of the country’s raucous democracy,” Bird, the preeminent biographer of said establishment, writes with the help of his longtime researcher (and wife) Susan Goldmark. “Cohn used his entire career to subvert the establishment, breaking all the rules and creating a divisive, highly partisan political culture that has reinforced the legacy of Senator Joe McCarthy.”

PRAISE: New York Times critic Jennifer Szalai highlights the significance of the book’s title, which mirrors Bird’s more famous biography of Robert Oppenheimer (American Prometheus), which was adapted by Christopher Nolan for the big screen. “When Oppenheimer witnessed the first detonation of a nuclear bomb,” Szalai writes, “he was reminded of a line from the Bhagavad-Gita: ‘Now I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds.’ He was horrified by the new reality that he had helped bring into being…. A Prometheus steals fire for humanity; a scoundrel takes everyone for a ride.”

CRUISING THE INDEX: The best and most revelatory parts of this book are hardly surprising—they detail Cohn’s relationship with his (sort of) mentor Joseph McCarthy and his protégé Donald Trump. But American Scoundrel is also a fine book about New York high society, albeit somewhat on the margins—the sections on upscale Jewish life in the 1920s and 1930s and Cohn’s glitzy, seedy social life in the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s are particularly interesting. And while this is a book about many of the worst people in American life in the second half of the twentieth century—Trump, McCarthy, Roger Stone, and, of course, Cohn himself—there are plenty of other cameos. Cohn’s social circle also included Barbara Walters, Walter Winchell, George Steinbrenner, and William F. Buckley Jr.

TNR’S QUICK CRITICAL ASSESSMENT: There have been great fictional portrayals of Cohn. (Al Pacino in Angels in America, and Jeremy Strong, who contributed research materials to American Scoundrel, come to mind.) But a full-scale biography like this has been desperately needed. Bird has produced it. American Scoundrel isn’t just a book about Cohn and the twentieth century—it’s a book about how he shaped the twenty-first century, too. We are still living in his world, now perhaps more than ever.

—Alex Shephard

Political Trivia Question of the Day

With New Hampshire in the news: Back when the state’s first-in-the-nation primary was important, one Democratic front-runner was laid low there when he responded emotionally to a false charge against him—who was the candidate, and what was the year? (Sign up for The TNR Blue Book to find the answer in Tuesday’s newsletter.)

White House officials and elected Republicans have abandoned their attempts to sway Donald Trump’s opinion, finding it futile to push back on the president’s demands, Axios reported Wednesday.

Despite a growing distrust of the president’s instincts, Trump’s inner circle has found it increasingly difficult to change his mind once it’s made up, according to numerous aides, advisers, and donors that spoke with Axios.

“Why bother?” one longtime adviser told the outlet. “He’s the boss.”

The Republican Party has repeatedly caved to Trump’s whims since 2016, allowing him to meander through his second term without the threat of consequence or even a second opinion. As a result, Trump thrust America into war with Iran without any clear goals, aggravated some of America’s longest allies—notably Canada—by shitposting online, incensed the public by tearing down the White House in order to build a $600 million, gold-laden ballroom, and effectively made an already contentious midterm cycle a referendum on his popularity.

“He’s an 80-year-old man who did it his way,” a donor who recently met with the president told Axios. “What he wants, he gets.”

Part of the determination to stay in the president’s good graces stems from Trump’s enormous political clout—a reality that many in his orbit claim is unlikely to expire anytime soon.

“Discount Trump at your peril,” a top adviser told Axios. “He wields enormous power in the party, in politics and culturally.”

“Anyone who thinks he’s going to retreat into the shadows is either stupid or has bad political instincts,” they added.

Insiders are apparently planning to live and die by Trump, even if that means allowing him to run roughshod over the country’s better interests.

“He’s going to remain the dominant political figure even after his term ends,” the adviser told Axios. “And everybody knows it.”

The White House is proposing changes to the 2030 census that would exclude every non–U.S. citizen without permanent residency, flouting the Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment, which states that the census must count the “whole number of persons in each state.” The proposal, released online Wednesday, also seeks to stop asking about race and ethnicity, which has been included in every census since 1790, and ban any future questions on sexual orientation.

If Trump’s current effort survives court challenges, it will affect congressional redistricting, which is already being manipulated by Republican-led states thanks to the Supreme Court gutting the Voting Rights Act earlier this year. It could also affect antidiscrimination efforts and laws by preventing the collection of relevant statistics.

During Trump’s previous term as president, his administration attempted to include a question about citizenship status, only to abandon the effort after being blocked by the Supreme Court. Trump also attempted to exclude all undocumented immigrants from the count with a July 2020 executive order. A federal court in California ruled against the order, and the census results weren’t completed before Trump left office, after which President Biden repealed those changes.

But Trump clearly didn’t give up on the plan. The administration is supposed to send a report to Congress, which has final approval over the census per the Constitution, by April 1, on its proposed questions for the survey. Trump’s Republican allies in Congress have proposed similar changes to the census themselves to support their gerrymandering efforts.

All of this could hurt participation in the census even if Trump’s changes don’t go through, as respondents would be suspicious of what the federal government plans to do with the data. That could lead to inaccurate results and hurt communities across the country. These days, the White House is trying to use every tool at its disposal to manipulate elections or serve its mass deportation agenda, regardless of what the Constitution or federal law says.

Adam Abdullah told Minnesota Public Radio over the phone Tuesday that he was a legal resident when federal agents stopped his car last December, at the beginning of the federal government’s Operation Metro Surge immigration crackdown in Minnesota’s Twin Cities.

“When they come to me, and I ask them why you pulled me over, they say, ‘We are immigration, so give me your work permit,’” Abdullah, 31, said. “And I asked them, ‘Do you have a warrant, and what’s the reason to pull me over?’ And they say, ‘We don’t need a warrant; we are immigration, and we know you are Adam Abdullah.”

Abdullah was only given 10 minutes to speak to MPR on the phone, but managed to tell the station that the agents didn’t explain why he, an asylum-seeker with a work permit and Social Security number who regularly checked in with ICE, was targeted. The auto mechanic arrived in the U.S. in 2023. After being arrested by ICE last year, he was initially held at the Freeborn County Jail in Albert Lea, Minnesota, before being moved to detention centers in Kentucky and then Louisiana.

Eventually, immigration officers told Abdullah they would send him back to Somalia via Miami. But in Miami, he said he was told that his flight would stop in Cuba for refueling before stopping in other countries on the way to Somalia. But he never made it to Africa at all; the stop in Cuba was permanent. Abdullah also reported that his wrists and ankles were shackled through every flight.

Abdullah told MPR that he’s been at Guantánamo Bay’s Camp Six for about two weeks, with limits on phone calls and exercise time. He said he’s learned that he’s one of eight Somalis at the prison, several of whom were arrested in the Twin Cities.

“Calls are limited to five to 10 minutes, and we don’t even know if they’re confidential,” said his immigration attorney, Marc Prokosch, who noted that Abdullah is his first client to be held in Guantánamo. “And that’s the only way that we can communicate with our clients is through these phone calls that may or may not be under attorney-client confidentiality.”

Trump signed an executive order last year to send immigration detainees to Guantánamo Bay, and promised to send 30,000 immigrants there during his 2024 presidential campaign. As of May, reports indicated that there were only six immigrants detained there, all from Haiti, although Abdullah’s interview suggested that more have arrived in the last few months from different countries.

The American Civil Liberties Union has sued to stop the Trump administration from sending immigrants to the prison, and a hearing is scheduled for October. The Department of Homeland Security said in a statement to MPR that a recent flight to Cuba contained “some of the worst of the worst” “criminal illegal aliens.”

In Ohio, where Republican Senator Jon Husted and former Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown are locked in a tight battle, Canadian tariffs are particularly important, as Canada is the largest export market for the entire state—buying $17.5 billion in U.S. products, primarily automobiles and machinery (which are now sanctioned). And while Husted, like most Republicans, has attempted to justify his support for Trump’s initial tariffs, this recent escalation has made that stance much harder to take.

“It depends on how it ends,” Husted said. “If we get a good deal, both Canada and America can come out of this well, but it’s going to require both sides.”

Maine is bracing for impact just as hard, as Canada placed a 50 percent tariff on wood and agriculture products, a massive export from the border state. It’s also where Republican Senator Susan Collins and Democrat Troy Jackson are expected to have a close race. While both have criticized the trade war, Jackson is blaming Collins for not doing more to fight it.

“Retaliatory tariffs hitting today are going to drive up costs for everyday Mainers,” he wrote on Tuesday. “This trade war was entirely preventable, but Susan Collins chose to back Trump’s agenda instead of standing up for Maine’s working class. This November, we’ll put working families first and retire Susan Collins.”

In Kansas, things look a little different, with Trump directly putting his own party at risk. The president’s Labor Day threat to end sales of Canadian airplane manufacturer Bombardier will likely have a negative impact on Kansas, where the company’s U.S. headquarters are located. It employs over 1,000 Kansans, and has been defended by GOPers and Democrats alike. But that will be a harder sell for Republican gubernatorial and Senate candidates Ty Masterson and Senator Roger Marshall given that their party leader is responsible for creating the problem.

“Bombardier supports 1,500 Kansas families, providing good-paying jobs that put food on the table and keep a roof over their heads during a cost of living crisis caused by Washington. And now, the president is trying to take that away,” Democratic Senate candidate Adam Marshall wrote on Monday. “The decision to ban Bombardier from selling in the U.S. is a direct attack on Kansas workers and Kansas jobs—yet Roger Marshall is notably silent. We cannot allow this chaotic economic policy to continue to hurt Kansans; they deserve so much better. As your Senator, I will always stand up for Kansas workers.”

“I’m going to fight to keep Bombardier’s over 1,200 Kansas jobs. I’ve already taken that concern inside the Oval Office,” Marshall wrote on Tuesday without naming Trump. “We agree on the mission: bring more good-paying manufacturing jobs back to Wichita. America buys more than half of what Bombardier sells. If that’s the market, more of those planes should be built here. Wichita has one of the nation’s top skilled manufacturing workforces and is a leader in aerospace manufacturing.”

Trump’s personal spite toward Canada has spiraled into an issue that millions of Americans will now have to deal with. Now the downballot Republicans—already struggling to campaign against his abysmal 38 percent approval rating—will have to deal with it too.

Far-right influencers took to social media Tuesday after Kavanaugh declined to intervene in favor of the pro-Republican map swap, excoriating the Trump-appointed high judge for effectively deflating the president’s midterm plan.

Sherri Tenpenny, an anti-vax activist and “doctor,” circulated Kavanaugh’s headshot on X in the wake of his decision, declaring that “Brett Kavanaugh is a TRAITOR.”

Pro-Trump pundit Eric Daugherty referred to Kavanaugh’s decision as “SERIOUSLY disappointing,” claiming on X that this is “why states like Indiana should’ve redrawn.” SteveLovesAmmo, a self-described “Freedom Aficionado,” said that Kavanaugh’s description illustrated how “SCOTUS is severely compromised.”

The drama began last summer, when Donald Trump ordered several Republican-led states to redraw their congressional maps in a brazen attempt to create a GOP advantage in the House of Representatives come midterms.

Congressional maps are typically redrawn every 10 years, after new census data is released. Yet Trump’s order arrived in the middle of the decade, raising alarms that the nationwide effort was an attempt to undermine American democracy.

Republicans wasted no time implementing the directive in Missouri, where they cleaved portions off of the state’s Democratic stronghold around Kansas City to endanger Representative Emanuel Cleaver’s seat. The new map offered Republicans a 7–1 advantage, a one-seat gain over their current 6–2 delegation.

A group called People Not Politicians collected more than 300,000 signatures in opposition to the new map—more than double the amount required—to force a statewide referendum on the matter, which is due to take place on November 3 on the statewide ballot.

Nonetheless, Missouri opted to use the new maps during its August 4 primary. But this week, things got especially messy.

A federal judge decided on Tuesday that the state should not use the original maps during the November election, in light of its decision to move forward with the new maps last month. But the judge’s decision was in direct conflict with the U.S. Supreme Court, which had decided moments earlier that a previous decision from the Missouri Supreme Court should stand, ordering the old map to be used rather than the new ones.

ICE told the Frederick News-Post that agents came to the neighborhood after a man fled from a traffic stop on Thursday, staking out the area beginning at 6 a.m. and staying for about 40 hours. Protesters showed up the same day after hearing that ICE was staking out a house. The situation was tense for the neighborhood’s residents, many of whom were afraid to leave their homes. Agents reportedly swarmed multiple streets, Katie Nash, vice president of the Frederick City Council, told The Baltimore Banner.

On Friday, protesters linked arms to block the street and create a human barrier in front of the house. Then, at about 9:30 p.m. Friday, the situation turned violent, with agents charging the house and then grabbing and pushing protesters.

At least one agent hit a protester on the ground with a baton as the neighborhood was lit up with the headlights and police lights from ICE vehicles. ICE agents drove onto the sidewalk, with protesters having to move or risk getting run over, Frederick City Council president César Díaz told the Banner, adding that Nash was nearly hit by a vehicle. “I had to step back to avoid from getting hit by the car.”

ICE agents left the scene shortly afterward without making any arrests, but some protesters were hospitalized for their injuries. Díaz and Nash added that some were injured in the clash. A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson issued a tight-lipped statement to TV station WUSA.

“For operation security and the safety of our personnel, we will not disclose or discuss information related to potential investigations. Under President Trump and Secretary Mullin, if you break the law, you will face the consequences. Criminal illegal aliens are not welcome in the U.S. We will find you, we will arrest you, and we will deport you,” the statement read. But that doesn’t explain ICE’s stakeout or its response to protesters.

“People were legitimately scared and pretty much terrorized by ICE for two full days before things escalated on Friday night. If you didn’t take anybody into custody, why did you even show up?” Tatiana Santos, a member of Indivisible Frederick Forward, who was at the protest, told Maryland Matters.

Democratic Representative April McClain Delaney, whose district includes Frederick, said in a statement that she was “especially disturbed by reports that ICE agents used force against Frederick residents.

“What we have seen in Frederick over the past several days is deeply concerning. No family should be afraid to leave their home or feel unsafe in their own neighborhood. The safety and well-being of our residents must come first,” Delaney said. “These allegations demand immediate answers and a full, transparent investigation.”

Jacob Coxon, a researcher who trains AI models, announced his resignation from Anthropic Tuesday night in a series of X posts claiming that AI companies are approaching an “endgame” race that could kill us all.

“I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly,” Coxon wrote. “They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.

“Do not underestimate the power of this technology. These will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources. We have all witnessed the progress in each of these domains, and progress is not slowing,” he wrote.

“The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt,” he wrote. “If anything, many executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible—but I hear the same people express fear privately. No other human activity poses this level of danger.”

Evan Hubinger, a current safety researcher at Anthropic, shared Coxon’s concerns on X, adding his own warning that there was a greater than 10 percent chance AI could kill all humans within the next decade.

“I believe Anthropic is trying its best, but we do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and are not clearly on track to,” Hubinger wrote.

Samuel Marks, another researcher at Anthropic, also weighed in on X, stating that despite widespread concerns, AI developers were driven forward by commercial incentives and fears that other less-responsible companies might beat them to the technology.

“AI developers believe their technology could cause human extinction (or similarly bad outcomes). This could happen in the next few years. In general, the more senior the employee, the more concerned they are,” Marks wrote, adding that AI programs “frequently severely misbehave.

“For instance, AIs from multiple developers recently hacked their way out of secure evaluation environments and into real-world companies, even though no one asked them to do this,” he wrote.

Marks included a letter signed by more than 1,000 research staff at frontier AI companies, asking the U.S. government to support an international effort to develop tools to “deliberately pace the frontier of automated AI development.”

As governor, Pillen has made Nebraska law enforcement collaborate with Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, turned a former prison into an immigration center called the “Cornhusker Clink,” and referred to undocumented immigrants as “criminal illegal aliens” who are “the worst of the worst.” But he apparently doesn’t mind them when they’re making him rich.

According to the Times report, the Pillen Family Farms company’s use of undocumented labor has been an “open secret,” with at least 20 of the farms hiring undocumented immigrants. David Armendariz, a former employee from Mexico without legal status, told the Times that Pillen Family Farms accepted his fake ID. “Everyone knows that it’s not your name,” he said, “but they don’t ask you what your name is.” Armendariz said that as he worked there, he saw more and more Hispanic workers, many of them undocumented.

Pillen Family Farms has not been audited or inspected by ICE in the last 15 years.

The company apparently started tightening its requirements when Pillen started running for governor in 2022—and began hiring Mexican immigrants on special visas. Pillen himself has denied any knowledge of the undocumented workers on his farms.

“Jim Pillen never knowingly hired an illegal immigrant and went above and beyond the legal requirements to verify the immigration status of his employees,” a spokesperson stated. “[Governor Pillen] has the strongest immigration record in Nebraska history. Under the governor’s leadership, Nebraska has assisted the federal government in the deportation of nearly 1,000 illegal immigrants through its variety of partnerships with federal entities.”

“Four years of Jim Pillen has taught us one thing: What he says and what he does are two different things. His farm and personal business are just the latest proof,” Nebraska gubernatorial nominee Lynne Walz wrote on Wednesday. “He’s made a career holding other people to standards he won’t keep himself. The people paying the price are always the same—workers, families, the folks who can’t write a campaign check. Nebraska deserves better.”

The contradictions Walz points to also highlight how extremely intertwined immigration and labor are. Pillen Family Farms is not unique—many businesses and corporations knowingly hire undocumented immigrants from Mexico, Central, and South America because they know they’ll provide cheap labor with little oversight, which ultimately aids their bottom lines. And that’s what seems to matter most to people like Pillen.

The president gifted Harp $45,000 as a “cash gift for the holidays,” according to a copy of Harp’s most recent financial disclosure obtained by The Washington Post. That amount is equal to nearly a third of her $150,000 annual salary, according to the White House’s salary disclosure report to Congress.

Trump gave the same amount to his communications adviser Margo Martin, 31, and his deputy director of Oval Office operations, Chamberlain Harris, 26. Harris also worked at the White House during Trump’s first term, and was tapped by the president last year to oversee the development of the White House ballroom project.

The director of Oval Office operations (and an alleged co-conspirator in Trump’s classified documents lawsuit) Walt Nauta also received a lump sum of $20,000, according to his own financial disclosure. Nauta is paid $175,000 a year.

A White House official told the Associated Press that Trump “has a longstanding practice of giving Christmas gifts to people in his orbit, including at times employees and aides, both in government and in his time in the private sector.” The official did not elaborate on whether other White House employees had received similar monetary presents, but added that the gifts were not related to “individuals’ official government duties, and therefore are entirely permissible under relevant legal and ethical standards.”

But former authorities on the matter disagree. Richard Painter, the former chief White House ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush, told the Post that the payments seem to violate a federal statute that disallows the supplementation of administrative salaries from outside sources.

Harp has been a near-constant presence at the president’s side during his second term, incessantly posting to his social media accounts on his behalf to create the illusion that he is always online and always reacting. Another of Harp’s responsibilities involves handing him printouts—particularly of positive news coverage of himself or his administration—to satisfy his preference for hard copy. The unique role has granted Harp a tremendous amount of influence over what Trump sees while also embittering some of her White House colleagues, who have taken to calling her the “human printer.”

But it’s been Harp’s unusually familiar relationship with the president that has caught the public’s interest in recent months. In August, it was revealed that Harp had written the president adoring notes in 2023, telling him that “you are all that matters to me,” describing Trump as her “guardian and protector,” and signing off on the letter to her boss with: “All my heart.”

The situation got even weirder when it became clear that Harp was one of the few people who accompanied Trump through a secret plane transfer in Turkey, shuttling him from Air Force One to a military plane via a catering truck, during an Iranian surface-to-air missile threat. Other high-ranking Trump officials—including State Secretary Marco Rubio—were left behind on the decoy plane.

Trump and Harp’s dynamic spurred more backlash after Trump publicly defended her when Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff suggested that the duo had an untoward relationship. Around the same time, the White House cropped Harp out of photos from the Freedom 250 Grand Prix.

CNN’s Kaitlan Collins asked the Texas Republican Tuesday night what he made of Trump’s widely publicized—and decontextualized—comments at his weird 9/11 tribute earlier that day.

In the midst of claiming that he’d taken a large group of construction workers to Ground Zero “right after it happened,” Trump recounted being carried out from under One Liberty Plaza by firefighters who were afraid the building would collapse. Trump’s disjointed retelling left open the possibility that he was describing an incident from the same day.

“He’s saying that there is evidence that he was there right after, I mean, he’s kind of making it seem like he was pulled out of the rubble, though, with the firefighters,” Collins said. “Do you think that’s appropriate?”

“September 11th was 25 years ago,” Cruz said. “It was a horrific moment for our entire country. And you can doubt whatever you want about Donald Trump, but the man is a New Yorker, he loves New York, and I have every doubt that what he’s conveying there is what he experienced and it was a traumatic experience for all of us.”

Cruz appeared to misspeak about his “every doubt.” Still, his comment suggested that Trump’s memory may not be what it used to be. Add it to the list of dozens of other instances of the president’s apparent cognitive decline.

The president’s early-bird 9/11 tribute was undoubtedly a total Trump-fest. He repeatedly veered into rhetoric boosting his own disastrous agenda, supporting the war in Iran, and attacking democratic socialists.

One Liberty Plaza did not fall down, and Trump’s anecdote only served to make light of the experience of New Yorkers who didn’t have their own skyscrapers from which to survey the damage and chaos of 9/11.

On Truth Social Tuesday night, Trump posted an angry rant attacking New York magazine for questioning his story of where he was on 9/11. 

“The Failing New York Magazine wrote a story that I wasn’t down at the World Trade Center after the Tragedy of September 11th, because nobody saw me there. Well, I don’t think I would be the first thing on anyone’s mind but, I was there, obviously not on the same day as the collapse, but shortly thereafter, with a large group of Construction Workers,” Trump posted. “The Fake News doesn’t want to listen, even when they know their story is false. That’s why their approval ratings are at an All Time LOW, but mine are VERY HIGH!”

In a speech at the Ellipse in Washington, D.C., Tuesday, Trump claimed that he was working on a “big building” during the attacks, and that he took a construction crew to Ground Zero “right after this happened.” Then, Trump claimed, while he was at the U.S. Steel Building, it began to creak and two firefighters were forced to pull him away from the area. 

“I’ll never forget. Two firemen—we thought it was coming down on top of us and two firemen, big strong guys—and I’m not the smallest guy in the world—they grabbed me under the arms and said, ‘Gotta get out of here.’ And they literally lifted me up. This is not easy to do. I’m big. They lifted me up and started running with me. I said, ‘Fellas, I can run myself.’ But they were amazing,” Trump said. 

CNN’s Daniel Dale debunked Trump’s narrative, posting on X that Trump’s story Tuesday wasn’t the same story that he’s told in previous years. 

“While campaigning in 2016, he told a version of today’s story about being whisked away from One Liberty Plaza by big firemen, but he said in 2016 that the alleged incident happened ‘a couple of days’ after 9/11 and claimed the creaky building was ‘not so far from us,’ instead of leaving open the impression he might’ve been a) inside it b) on 9/11 itself,” Dale posted. 

That was one of the many refutations of Trump’s story in the New York article, which cited other tall tales Trump has told about the 9/11 attacks. But to Trump, with his ongoing cognitive decline and massive ego, “Everything I said was exactly accurate.”  

Law enforcement officials in Poland, Norway, and Latvia told the Post they reached out to the U.S. for mutual legal assistance, but none of them received responses. Britain, which has asked for unredacted copies of some Epstein files, did not publicly comment, though investigations there have stalled as well, thanks to the DOJ.

“We are in communication with officials from the Department of Justice, but they have not at this time approved the request,” Marianne Bender, state prosecutor for the Norwegian Okokrim unit, said in a statement. “This is very unfortunate for the Norwegian investigation, and Okokrim hopes that the U.S. Department of Justice will approve our request at some point.”

Lativian state police spokeswoman Simona Gravite made a similar claim, stating that Latvia “sent several requests for mutual legal assistance to the relevant authorities in the United States. However, no responses have yet been received.”

The DOJ has even refused to cooperate with Britain in its investigation into longtime politician Peter Mandelson—who was stripped of his title as U.K ambassador to the U.S. and forced to resign from the House of Lords. The Telegraph reported last month that the DOJ would not hand over unredacted copies of some files to assist in the investigation into whether Mandelson gave confidential government information to Epstein.

This stunning lack of cooperation from the DOJ is par for the course at this point. Domestically, it has done everything it can to deny the victims—and the American public—straight, unredacted answers to an investigation that President Trump made a crucial part of his campaign platform.

If Attorney General Todd Blanche can’t bring himself to meet genuinely with Epstein survivors in the U.S., it should come as no surprise that the Justice Department is acting in bad faith in European investigations, as well. This is particularly sad. Epstein was extremely active in Europe, and international cooperation could have very well led to new connections in Epstein’s universe. Yet the DOJ continues to be uncooperative and nontransparent.

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 unleashed a barrage of crazy posts over the last few days, spraying angry threats in all directions. But we noticed a pattern in all these outbursts. He keeps threatening to do things that he’s never, ever going to actually carry through, or things that backfire on him right away. In one sense, all this reveals fresh levels of contempt for MAGA voters. In another sense, all it does is make Trump look weaker.

And it occurs to us that he may be entering a new phase in his presidency. We’re getting a preview of what it’ll look like if he loses the midterms and Democrats can place some real limits on him. His threats will look increasingly empty, buffoonish, and desperate. We’re talking about it all with Salon’s Amanda Marcotte, who has a new piece today on how the entire GOP establishment is now propping up Trump’s delusions of grandeur. Good to have you on, Amanda.

Amanda Marcotte: Thanks for having me.

Sargent: OK, so Trump unleashes all these crazy Truth Social posts in the last few days. The worst one might have been his post depicting all of North America, including Canada and Mexico and many other places, as the United States of America.

Amanda, this is all supposed to titillate MAGA somehow, because it looks like a threat to annex all this new territory or whatever, but he can’t even get Canada to roll over in the trade wars he started. Your thoughts on all that?

Marcotte: Yeah, I mean, I suspect this is how Trump has worked his whole life, right? Which is, he is both a bully and a coward. So he’ll only pick on somebody smaller, and only if it’s an easy fight. Jamelle Bouie is often pointing out it’s a rapist mentality. And I’ll just say, civil court has found that E. Jean Carroll was telling the truth about Trump.

So yeah, but I think that there is kind of a hope there that being a loud, threatening, scary monster is going to be the same thing as actually following through. But he’s never had any follow-through. Trump has always lived his life as if the illusion is the thing.

It’s one thing to do that on television when you’re the host of a reality TV show. It’s another thing when you’re like, no, we’re going to annex Canada, and Canada’s like, nope.

Sargent: Yeah, it doesn’t look strong. It doesn’t look powerful, it doesn’t look imposing. And it’s just crazy and disgusting, obviously, to even post the image in the first place. We should be clear on that. Like, even the mere hint in that direction is itself morally abhorrent in just about every conceivable way, right?

Marcotte: I feel like the crazier Trump gets, the harder it is for the media to cover it. There’s just this sense that grandpa at the nursing home is ranting again. And it almost feels a little impolite to be like, grandpa, we’re not going to annex Canada, sorry, grandpa. That thing about Mexico being a new colony, it just—that’s in your head, sorry, grandpa. Like, it feels mean. Just let grandpa have his delusions, and we’ll just all ignore him, I think, tends to be a lot of people’s stances. But to your point, he is actually the president of the United States. This is a problem. This is a problem, that gramps is losing his mind.

Sargent: Right, it’s a story in and of itself. Like, the unraveling is the story. It’s not something that should be ignored, no matter what.

Trump just rage-posted a threat to ban all sales in the U.S. by Bombardier, which is a Canadian aerospace company. But it turns out that Bombardier’s U.S. headquarters is in Wichita, Kansas, and GOP Senator Roger Marshall, who faces an unexpectedly tough challenge from a Democrat in Kansas, had to quickly distance himself from what Trump said. And Bombardier has workers all over the country, in the United States, and its supply chains are deeply entangled with a lot of American companies.

So he’s not going to actually do this. But again, the president of the United States said he was going to ban sales by this company. The level of contempt for MAGA voters is, like, hard to fathom, I think.

Marcotte: I think a lot of the time, what I see when I go to Truth Social is that a lot of the responses that he’s getting to these kinds of threats are actually people that aren’t reading what he’s saying, and instead just post a lot of “you go, Mr. President” memes and other nonsense. They clearly aren’t engaging with what he’s saying. And I think a lot of them are bots.

And I think that goes to what the larger problem here is, which is, he is not doing well, and he’s also completely surrounded himself with yes-men and robots and AI and Natalie Harp and all these things, and people that exist just to prop up his insanity.

Sargent: Yeah, and we should probably point out that it isn’t just bots, in the sense that you’ve got these MAGA influencers who really are, I think, real people. As far as I can tell, they’re real people. And when he does things like rename Lake Ontario “Lake America,” all these influencers just rush out and say that this was the most epic own of a foreign adversary that has ever happened in world history. And you’ve got to wonder, like, what’s going through their head? Like, again, he can’t get Canada to do his bidding in the trade wars, right?

So all he’s giving them is a renamed lake, which doesn’t even mean anything in real life. It just means that, you know, a few sources will call it what Trump says to call it, and the rest of the world won’t.

I want to know what he thinks he’s getting his voters to essentially process here. Like, he must have some kind of set of thoughts about this. His influencers must have some kind of set of thoughts about how this all works. What do you think it is?

Marcotte: Well, I think a lot of MAGA influencers, their incentive structure is getting traffic, getting money, and getting attention, right? And so in the past, these kinds of trolling antics were really useful, because I think a lot of MAGA followers are kind of in the same psychological spiral as Trump, which is, they made a mistake in voting for Trump. They made a mistake in getting a MAGA hat and making their whole identity that they love Trump, and now they’re just, like, the most shameful kind of human being.

And so instead of going to therapy and dealing with that, they are clinging to any evidence that they can find that they were right, and that they’re owning the libs. Like, owning the libs is a huge part of the rationalization of it.

And so I think that, in the past, Trump was really successful at throwing out these kinds of ridiculous, like, distractions. And these—I hate the word “distraction,” but it’s useful in this particular case—which is, like, you don’t want to think about the fact that he’s failed, so he’ll throw a fake thing out. And then, crucially, a crucial part of this process is that liberals get really outraged, right?

Liberals go, how dare you do this? And then the emotional gratification of owning the libs is supplied. And so the MAGA base continues to—it’s kind of cult-leader tactics, right? It’s just sort of giving a lot of instant gratification, so that people don’t have to think about these longer-term issues.

That said, I kind of think it’s not working as well as it used to, because, in no small part, liberals have learned to break the cycle by not actually providing the outrage. Like, when he renamed Lake Ontario, people were like, well—I, you can’t see me, but I am, in my voice, making the jerk-off motion.

Sargent: Gotcha, yeah.

Marcotte: So—but you know, the point is, like, people were just like, I don’t care. It’ll be renamed when somebody sane is back in office. So this doesn’t matter. None of this matters. And I think that—I’d be curious how much traffic those MAGA influencers are getting with this now. But they just don’t know what else to do.

Sargent: Right. The renaming of stuff is really deeply bizarre. There’s another Trump post, of a map of New Mexico where he crosses out “Mexico” and replaces it with “America.” And this one is, like, just perfect in its ineffectualness and its seething contempt for MAGA. He’s literally not targeting Mexico here. He’s targeting a U.S. state. And, you know, owning Mexico by removing the word “Mexico” from it.

And of course, I guess part of this is that New Mexico leans a little bit blue, and so he’s owning Democrats, and he can just impose his will on a Democratic state or whatever. Like, I know this is all memes and shitposting, and that MAGA politics really functions to a large degree in that arena of unreality, but I think it’s significant in the sense that this is really all Trump has left at this point, is this type of show.

I mean, I don’t want to overstate it—like, the midterms are still going to be very hard. But presuming that Democrats do win, then this is kind of like a preview of more of what we’re going to see, right?

Marcotte: Yeah, I think, insofar as politics is, like, as much about the cultural milieu and, like, the attitude of the country—I think, even regardless of what happens in an election that’s very gerrymandered, that’s experienced a lot of voter suppression, everyone can sense that whatever MAGA thought that they were, like, culturally ascendant, was an illusion at best, and is completely collapsing right now. And that was always the most important thing to his base, because I think a lot of them are driven by insecurity.

They’re driven by anger at, like, cosmopolitan progressivism, which is increasingly defining American culture. And they want it to be them and not us, basically. And I think that we’re seeing that kind of reaction here. And he doesn’t know what to do. He doesn’t know how to troll like he used to, I think.

He’s maybe cut himself off from the feedback that maybe sharpened his instincts a little bit. He’s being surrounded by bots and yes-men. And so there’s not a lot of there there anymore.

And again, maybe he thinks that’s not true, because the New Mexico thing, there were a ton of headlines about it. And maybe he was like, headlines, libs-owned stamp for the day, right? But when you actually read the story, it’s just, they’re laughing at him.

Sargent: Yeah, absolutely. It’s very hard to follow where this gets him in his head. Another tweet from Trump, listen to this one: “Oil prices will drop precipitously, like everything else is dropping, when we win the war with Iran. Three dollars a gallon, but ultimately below two dollars a gallon. It will all happen quickly, and Iran will never have a nuclear weapon. MAGA.”

But Amanda, like, the thing is, the whole world is watching Trump fail to force Iran to do his bidding. Like, that’s happening in the real world. And a lot of MAGA figures are even turning on Trump over the war. All this does is highlight his inability to impose his will on Iran. What on earth? Can you explain it?

Marcotte: I mean, yeah, when I saw that post, I laughed, and then I thought, you know, he actually got away, for a long, long time, with this kind of obvious lie. How many bankers was he able to grift and talk into giving him money based on what were likely equally empty promises, like laughably empty promises?

Con artists are effective. Like, the rest of us who aren’t being conned were like, come on, it’s obviously a scam. But for whatever reason, this man’s been a scammer his whole life. He’s been able to pull it off. He scammed his way into the White House twice. So I do try to remind myself of that.

On the flip side, I do kind of have optimism that even his followers are starting to realize that they’ve been scammed, and they are trying to quietly walk away. There was a great article in The Wall Street Journal—did you see this, about the merchandise sales falling off? The MAGA merchandisers are like, yeah, we’re not doing that anymore. No one’s buying Trump stuff anymore. And, like, that’s a pretty good sign that it’s not cool anymore to be MAGA.

Sargent: Right. And that’s the kind of shift of the culture against MAGA, which you alluded to earlier. I really still think, on some level, that story hasn’t penetrated into the mainstream media in any real sense. And I just want to say, like, screw you, mainstream media, for overreading the 2024 election right out of the gate and saying that it portended this enormous cultural shift. And also screw you for, like, not correcting it now that all that’s been revealed to be a mirage.

That error, by a lot of pundits and media organizations, was really catastrophic for this country. It gave Trump the sense of having a lot more running room to implement his agenda. We saw, with the unleashing of ICE, the craziness around the tariffs, the threats to annex whole countries and annex allies.

I don’t know if that would have happened to the same degree if there hadn’t been kind of, like, a roar of punditry interpreting his one-point-five-point win as an enormous, seismic cultural shift. Do you?

Marcotte: No. Yeah. Especially, like, the universities and the media companies that struck deals with him to avoid lawsuits and whatnot—like, it turns out that if they’d fought back, they would have won. Then they didn’t want to, because they didn’t want to be on what they thought was the wrong side of public opinion. And I—even then, I was like, yes, we were all a little surprised about the win in some ways, but at the end of the day, I don’t know. My parents voted for Trump. They are the least cool people.

I’m like, the notion that our culture—maybe I’m an optimist, maybe I’m a gnarled hipster, but the notion that our economy, our culture, is going to be captured by the least cool people in it—that’s never been true. I just can’t, like—the future is with what the younger, cooler people are doing. And, you know, maybe it’s not woke one anymore, but it is woke two.

Sargent: It is. It is. Amanda Marcotte, why don’t you talk to us a little bit about what your piece says? It’s out today. And it goes into how, like, the entire Republican establishment has to pretend to agree that all this stuff is real.

Marcotte: So the RNC convention starts Wednesday. I’m sure that a lot of listeners forgot about that. I know that a lot of my coworkers did—which I think is not a good sign for it being a blockbuster event, that, and it’s up against the NFL’s opening games.

But what’s interesting to me about it is that Trump obviously just forced this thing into being. Absolutely no one else wants it but President Trump. And it doesn’t help anybody, it doesn’t do anything, it is a waste of time and money. But it will make him feel good to get up on stage and have people applaud him. And that seems to be the only purpose of it.

And I keep thinking about how much—he has, I don’t mean to keep harping on Natalie Harp, but the man has a full-time aide whose entire job is to praise him all day. Like, he posts AI images of himself riding horses with George Washington and leading an evil villain robot army. This is just the facts. And the entire GOP establishment has just sort of surrounded him with this bubble. And they’re putting on a whole fake convention. It’s a fake convention. It’s not a real convention. There won’t be any delegates there. There’s no voting on anything.

They’re putting on a fake convention so that the president can have his fake attention. And all these Republican officials are trying to find a way to not show up at what is, like, a fake event that’s all about big boy having an extra birthday party. It’s sad. And I think it’s going to backfire, because the ratings are going to be in the toilet. And if he finds out about that, it’s just going to be more narcissistic spiral.

Sargent: Yes. And just one last thought to close this out. That sort of backfiring, I think, is really important in the midterms, in the following way. I think Trump and his influencer pals and their kind of bot generals or whatever have a theory of the case, which is something a little bit like: as long as we can create the impression that we’re the ones who are acting in the world, we’re the ones who are doing big things, it just becomes marginally harder for some of these middle-of-the-road voters to vote against us. We’re the ones in power, we’re the ones who are in the driver’s seat. You want to be with us, you want to be with winners.

And so, to the degree that people like us can point out that it’s all “emperor has no clothes” stuff, I think that really cuts deep at their strategy, in a kind of profound way. If we can actually get it out there, what a failure it all is. And of course, if this convention is a total fiasco, I think that is a real, real disaster for them, in a deeper way, in the elections. What do you think?

Marcotte: Yeah, I agree. I think, yeah—the authoritarian sort of gets their power from this sense of inevitability and strength. And I couldn’t agree more. Like, if we can laugh at them, we should. And whenever I say that, I get a lot of criticism, because they are doing real damage, and they’re hurting real people, and we need to keep that in mind.

And there’s no doubt that we should hang on to our moral center there. But to your point, strategically, it’s way more important to point out that these are baby men pretending to be big men. And every time we can show evidence of that and sort of undermine them, it’s helpful.

Sargent: Absolutely. Well said. Amanda Marcotte, always a great pleasure to talk to you. Thanks so much for coming on.

Marcotte: Thanks for having me.

The 10-year Treasury bill’s destabilizing climb to a 5 percent yield is driven in large part by President Donald Trump’s tax cuts, which are projected to reduce revenues collected from the richest one percent by a trillion dollars over the next decade, according to the nonprofit Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. As a percentage of gross domestic product, the national debt exceeds 100 percent and is fast approaching the post–World War II high of 106 percent. In 1946, the national debt was bigger than GDP because the United States had spent the previous five years fighting a world war against Germany and Japan. In 2026, the national debt is bigger than GDP because rich Americans don’t feel like paying taxes. (Gross debt, which adds in funds the federal government owes itself, already exceeds the 1946 level.)

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, whose recent bond-buyback scheme to lower Treasury yields is failing, now says, “The only way for us to get out of this is to grow our way out of this.” Translation: “I don’t have a clue how to get out of this.” Nobody believes we can grow our way out. According to a July 2026 paper by Harvard’s Karen Dynan and Douglas Elmendorf and Louise Sheiner of the Brookings Institution, faster productivity growth attributable to artificial intelligence would only “slightly reduce the burden of existing debt” and “raise revenue a bit relative to GDP.” One reason is that the labor of the workers AI will lay off is taxed at a higher rate than the capital gains AI will generate. Render human labor extinct, and you have no alternative but to raise taxes on capital, assuming you want to have any government at all.

Nobody believes we can cut our way out, either. Elon Musk tried and failed spectacularly. His Department of Government Efficiency’s website claims it saved taxpayers $215 billion, which, even if that were true, would be less than half what Trump’s 2025 tax cut cost the Treasury this year alone. And as it happens, it isn’t true. The Government Accountability Office last month called bullshit on DOGE’s claimed $110 billion in savings from contracts, grants, and leases. Even if you overlook that, the Yale Budget Lab estimates that DOGE’s personnel cuts to the IRS will cost taxpayers $350 billion over the next decade, and the nonprofit Partnership for Public Service estimates that the cost of firing, rehiring, and putting federal workers on paid leave, combined with productivity losses, cost taxpayers another $135 billion. Even using DOGE’s own highly questionable savings calculation, then, DOGE turns out to have increased the budget deficit by $270 billion.

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonprofit that cares more than anyone else about eliminating the budget deficit, calculated in 2023 that if you tried to balance the budget through spending cuts alone, you’d have to cut all federal spending by 27 percent. If you wanted to exempt spending on defense and veterans, you’d have to cut all spending by 33 percent. If you wanted also to exempt Medicare and Social Security, as Trump has promised to do, you’d have to cut all spending by 78 percent. These are lowball estimates, because since 2023 the budget deficit has increased by about $0.3 trillion. None of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget’s scenarios is remotely plausible, if only because federal spending cuts that even approached this magnitude would wreck the economy.

If you’re a rich person, you probably know all this, and until now you probably haven’t cared because the national debt hasn’t affected your net worth. Since 1981, when the government-debt binge got underway, interest rates have mostly gone down. Even after President George W. Bush pissed away President Bill Clinton’s balanced budget, interest rates remained historically low. Now the national debt, combined with inflation worries and an AI-driven surge in corporate debt, is driving bond yields up. There’s not much rich people can do to extract the United States from its inflationary war with Iran or to end the AI-driven debt binge. But if they really want to rescue the bond market, they can consent to paying higher taxes. Will they?

To answer that, we need to understand how much rich people actually care about the bond market.

My initial impression was that they cared a lot, but then I had a couple of conversations that raised some doubts. It turns out there’s still some truth to the old saw that the rich are society’s creditors rather than its debtors, and as such will benefit from higher interest rates. In a 1981 Washington Monthly article (“The Self Interest in High Interest”), Gregg Easterbrook observed that “since the prime rate hit warp speed in late 1979, interest income for individuals and institutions has increased 42 percent.” More recently, the economics blogger Blair Fix observed that “interest rates are a tool for waging class war.”

In America, you don’t get rich by owning bonds; you get rich by owning stocks. When Forbes daily recalculates the net worth of the richest Americans, it does so by tracking stock holdings. To the superrich, bonds seem a tad petit bourgeois. “If you had to choose between buying long-term bonds or equities [i.e., stocks], Warren Buffett told CNBC in 2018, “I would choose equities in a minute.” Bonds become more appealing as you get older to protect yourself from market fluctuations, but only for relatively normal people. For the 0.01 percent, who measure their wealth in hundreds of millions or billions, it’s quite different. Their financial holdings are sufficiently large that quality of life won’t be altered by anything less than a full-on global economic collapse (and maybe not even that). Thus it scarcely mattered that Buffett, when he dissed bonds to CNBC, was 87.

So do rich people figure the bond sell-off will create financial losses for them? After further consideration, I’m inclined to conclude no, which means they’re not about to consider paying more in taxes to reduce the budget deficit and thereby quiet the bond market.

Others, I should note, may disagree, including the computer on which I wrote this article. This morning I decided to overcome my fear of large language models and download Anthropic’s Claude. (Until now I’d confined myself to posing the odd question to Google AI, which frequently gave me information that failed to match the cited source.)

Hey Claude, I asked. Do rich people have any reason to care about the bond sell-off?

“Yes, quite a lot,” Claude answered. For one thing, stock prices are sensitive to bond yields:

Most billionaire wealth isn’t cash—it’s overwhelmingly concentrated in equity stakes, often in the companies they founded or control (think Musk and Tesla, Bezos and Amazon). When bond yields rise, the discount rate used to value future cash flows goes up too, which mechanically lowers the present value of future earnings. This hits high-growth, high-multiple stocks hardest, since more of their valuation depends on profits far in the future. A lot of billionaire net worth is paper wealth tied directly to these stock prices, so a rate-driven sell-off can shrink it fast.

Also, said Claude, borrowing costs matter to superrich people because rather than sell stock and pay tax, they borrow against their stock. (I’m paraphrasing because, at least as of September 2026, I’m a better writer than Claude.) If bond yields are high, then interest rates are going to be high too. Higher interest rates can also be a problem for private equity because leveraged buyouts become more difficult, and of course the real estate industry hates high interest rates more than anybody. (That partly explains, let me interject here, why the former real estate guy Donald Trump always wants the Fed to lower rates.)

Claude granted that T-bills and money market funds pay more when interest rates are high, just as Easterbrook observed 45 years ago. But Claude concluded: “Because so much billionaire wealth is illiquid and valued off future cash flows or leverage, a sharp, sustained rise in yields is generally a real financial concern for them, not just an abstract macro story.”

What’s your source on this? I asked Claude.

“That response was economic reasoning,” Claude replied, “and general knowledge, not something I pulled from specific sources or searched for. The mechanisms I described (valuation sensitivity to discount rates, securities-backed lending, cap rates) are standard finance concepts, not sourced claims.”

Oh.

Claude agreed with me, however, that billionaires are unlikely to let any worries about the bond market alter their opposition to paying higher tax: “Standard rational self-interest predicts free-riding here, not eager self-sacrifice.” I think maybe Claude missed the point here; a tax increase is collective, not some “tragedy of the commons” pointless exercise in individual sacrifice.

But Claude also pointed out that “actual political behavior diverges quite a bit from what ‘rising yields hurt my portfolio’ self-interest alone would predict.” I agree. So don’t hold your breath for the oligarchs to turn responsible. Despite whatever worries bond-market disruptions occasion, they will continue to do what rich people always do, which is gripe that they pay too much in taxes.

It’s hardly news that Donald Trump has made it easier than ever to be a plunderer. This is a Golden Age for white-collar criminals at home and kleptocrats abroad. Moreover, Trump isn’t solely to blame for the sorry state of affairs. Still, it wasn’t always this way. When New Deal–era banking regulations were firmly in place, financial crises were far and few between; when such crises emerged, they were relatively contained. But the steady erosion of financial-sector guardrails since the start of the neoliberal era has coincided with more frequent and explosive meltdowns. Today, the White House is speed-running the obliteration of remaining safeguards, just as AI, crypto, and fossil fuel–related crises threaten to upend the global economy. Buckle up: It’s going to get bumpy.

Let’s begin with some history. In the pre–New Deal United States, financial crashes—brought on by poor bank management or speculative bubbles enabled by overly loose credit—were commonplace. Following the Great Depression, however, the federal government rapidly built up the foundations of our modern finance system.

In the Banking Acts of 1933 (better known as Glass-Steagall) and 1935, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (along with federal deposit insurance itself) was created, commercial and investment banking were firewalled from each other, and the Federal Reserve’s power was centralized in its board of governors to improve nationwide supervision. The 1935 law also created the Federal Open Market Committee, responsible for conducting monetary policy, and strengthened the independence of the Fed. In between, the Securities and Exchange Act created the Securities and Exchange Commission and the National Housing Act created the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation.

What followed was the longest span in American history of no major financial crashes. Stability was the norm; it wasn’t until the early 1970s that the OPEC-induced oil crisis caused a stock market crash. It wasn’t until the 1980s savings and loan crisis that the U.S. experienced a financial crash originating from within the domestic financial sector. It still took several more years and the confluence of several other factors (notably very tight monetary policy and an oil shock from Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait and the resulting war in the Gulf of Persia) for it to result in an economy-wide recession, at the start of the 1990s.

Even then, a big reason why the savings and loan crisis wound up spreading beyond the financial sector was because Congress had started to deregulate the financial sector years earlier. As high interest rates undermined long-term fixed-rate mortgages, which were the centerpiece of savings and loans’ business model, lawmakers deregulated the banking activity in which thrifts and savings and loans firms were allowed to engage. Not exactly subtle, the legislation was called the Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act of 1980. Congress was thus knowingly incentivizing revenue-needy institutions to take on additional risk in pursuit of higher returns to salvage their businesses, helping drive speculative investment.

The episode also marked the first major rollback of financial oversight since the Great Depression. Since then, there have been a number of forays into deregulation and weakening oversight, but the regulatory system overseeing banking remained mostly intact. Notably, the 1990s saw substantial relaxation of supervision, particularly of commodity markets, which were allowed to proliferate, especially after the Commodity Futures Modernization Act. Warnings from within the Clinton administration about growing speculation, coming from people like Brooksley Born, chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and Edward Gramlich, the Federal Reserve governor, were drowned out by the voices of leading neoliberal advisers such as Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, and Alan Greenspan. Championed by Robert Rubin, the coup de grâce of this flurry of weaker financial oversight was the 1999 repeal of Glass-Steagall.

On the other hand, oversight won some scattered victories, notably the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in 2002, and was even given a boost with the post-2008 financial crisis establishment of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in lieu of a bevy of offices spread across numerous agencies, new capitalization standards, and more.

The regulatory system overseeing banking remained mostly intact, even as many agencies across the federal government faced major atrophy in their staffing, funding, and overall capacity. Then came the deregulatory onslaught of 2025.

It isn’t one of the marquee storylines of our current hellscape, but Trump 2.0 has ended an era of carefully built-up economic and financial institutions in remarkably short order. Consumer protection is practically nonexistent at this point. Investor protection is being rolled back. Capitalization, risk management, and stress-testing requirements have been weakened. Bank examinations must now ignore the fallout from worsening, accelerating climate change and the disasters it brings in tow. The Trump administration is leveling entire institutions as it cans thousands of white-collar cops.

Trump’s vice chair for supervision at the Fed, Michelle Bowman, moved to cut supervision staff by 30 percent. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency has shed 28 percent of its staff since fiscal year 2024, the FDIC 22 percent, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission 20 percent (even as its remit has expanded dramatically to be the primary crypto regulator), the SEC 20 percent, the National Credit Union Administration 15 percent, and the CFPB has lost a third of its workforce. The administration is reportedly aiming to continue reducing headcount until it has only 556 staff, which would be a drop of 68 percent (and this is less dramatic than the earlier target of a 90 percent drop).

Most famously, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has been at death’s door for well over a year now, kept on life support only by court intervention. This situation is even more dire because, as part of the Dodd-Frank overhaul in 2010, most financial consumer protection regulations from across federal agencies were rolled into the new bureau. Even if other regulators were willing and able to step up and step in, much of the pre–Great Recession authority they would have had to do so is no longer on their books. Instead, those regulations are collecting dust at the CFPB, as Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought continues to try to pull the plug on the agency.

At the same time, the regulations that other agencies do still have within their remits are being eviscerated as part of conservative culture-war malarky. Climate risk is off-limits now. So too is reputational risk, so financial institution examiners can no longer flag damage to banks’ brands that would materially impact the bottom line. Pair that with aggressive cuts across the FDIC, the Fed, the NCUA, and the OCC, and we’re left with the major consumer protection watchdog paralyzed while its reinforcements lack both the numbers and the pretense to fill the ever-widening gap.

Understaffing isn’t just a problem at the rank-and-file staff level, either. The FDIC has two of its three non-ex-officio board seats empty (the two other seats are filled by the director of the OCC and the director of the CFPB). The CFPB has been transformed into merely an appendage of the White House rather than an independent regulator, with acting leadership first from Trump’s governing mastermind Vought and now Mark Paoletta. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission, normally managed by five commissioners, currently has only its chair. Unlike many independent agencies, the CFTC does not have a statutory quorum requirement. The NCUA also has only its chair, rather than a full complement of three commissioners. (The NCUA does have a statutory quorum requirement for “a majority of the board,” but the agency issued an opinion basically arguing that this only means a majority of current board members, not of the positions themselves.)

The erosion of public oversight of one of the most foundational elements of the modern economy, and with it a century’s worth of institutional knowledge and expertise, is alarming in its own right. But it is doubly so when put in context.

Everyone is waiting for the chickens of the speculative financing of the rapid AI buildout to come home to roost. Cryptocurrency, with all its myriad risks, is both getting its preferred regulatory framework and being allowed—in fact, encouraged—to commingle with traditional finance more and more. Private credit has been on a speculative investment adventure in recent years, although there are some signs it is now trimming sails. Oh, and to top it all off, there is a slow-motion fossil fuel supply shock that will continue to ripple through the global economy because of refining bottlenecks even after the Strait of Hormuz reopens.

This is the backdrop against which the administration has chosen to radically weaken every single step of the traditional banking safeguards. The OCC has relaxed its rules for granting “bank trust” charters, notably giving one to the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial in recent weeks. A bank trust is basically a bank that does not take deposits or issue standard commercial loans. But it still gets the right to a master account at the Federal Reserve.

In other words, it’s easier to set up a bank. And once you do, you only have to face toothless regulators that have been pared down to the point you can drown them in a bathtub. That charter will let you plug into the main financial sector more easily. Plus, there’s much less oversight of investing and asset trading. And consumer protection is reduced to a slogan. What could possibly go wrong? We will soon find out.

This mixed-bag sentiment is basically true. There is no point at which it makes sense to give up on trying to mitigate climate change. The more greenhouse gases are deposited into the air, the warmer and the worse it will get. The case for keeping the 1.5 C target alive, however, looks increasingly far-fetched. The more optimistic possibility explored by UNEP researchers involves approaching that 1.5 C goal “from above,” i.e., rapidly cutting carbon dioxide emissions enough to limit warming through 2100 to just 1.8 degrees Celsius. The world would then have to achieve not just “net-zero” but “net-negative” emissions by steadily removing enormous amounts of excess carbon dioxide.

Somewhat unhelpfully, outlets covering the report have framed an argument climate scientists have been making for years—that ambitious mitigation requires large-scale carbon dioxide removal, or CDR—as the starting gun for entry into some new stage of the climate problem. “Climate Goals Missed, U.N. Says World Must Now Remove Carbon,” the New York Times headline blares over an otherwise informative piece. Similarly in the Associated Press: “Global warming will exceed limit, U.N. says in a report that maps path to get back below danger zone.”

This type of headline misses the point. As is made clear by the tens of thousands who have died in heat waves, landslides, and floods this summer, we are already in the danger zone, and we will spend the rest of our lives there. And as the report emphasizes, “There are no good outcomes above 1.5°C,” and the path to getting back to that level is extraordinarily long and uncertain.

A paper published last month by Hugh Daigle and Arvind Ravikumar underlines just how ambitious—even fantastical—the prospect of getting back to 1.5 C is. UNEP notes that stabilizing temperatures at that level after passing it would require capturing between 15 and 24 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide, or GtCO2, per year in 2100. That’s a far cry from how much carbon we’re able to remove at the moment. Currently, total carbon dioxide removal amounts to just 2.2 GtCO2 per year. Nearly all of that—99.95 percent—is accomplished through so-called conventional methods of carbon removal, like tree planting and forest management, which have been mired in controversy. Even without the governance scandals plaguing them, these methods have their limits, UNEP notes. “It would take over 100 years of afforestation and forest management at the current scale, and zero residual CO2 emissions, to bring warming back by 0.1°C,” the report’s authors warn, adding that “evidence remains insufficient that such approaches alone can deliver net-zero let alone net-negative CO2 emissions at the global scale.” More simply put, the world is not close to zeroing out CO2 emissions. Relying only on planting and saving trees to capture carbon would mean covering enormous chunks of the world in forests that take years to start absorbing meaningful amounts of carbon after being planted—and can always burn down.

Enter “engineered” and “novel” carbon dioxide removal. The years since the Paris Agreement have seen enthusiastic interest from Houston to Silicon Valley in these more sci-fi-style means of getting to net zero. These tend to appeal greatly to industry. Back when fossil fuel executives were feeling pressured to talk about rising temperatures, they rallied around carbon capture, utilization, and sequestration as a key climate solution—and a means of keeping their business models intact. Oxy CEO Vicky Hollub may have put her company’s interest in these technologies best in 2023: “This gives our industry a license to continue to operate for the 60, 70, 80 years that I think it’s going to be very much needed.”

The models scientists use to study climate change—especially those that see warming eventually stabilize at 1.5 C—lean heavily on the assumption that these projects will expand massively after 2050, especially. In real life, engineered and novel CDR remains extremely limited. Daigle and Ravikumar examined all 28 permanent geological carbon storage projects worldwide that either are or were operational. There are several ways to capture carbon, whether directly from industrial activities—like concrete production, which releases CO2 as a byproduct, and gas-fired power plants—or from the atmosphere via a process known as direct air capture.

Climate models tend to treat the considerable limits of these technologies as economic: If you can bring down the price per ton of carbon dioxide captured, producers will be able to achieve economies of scale and those technologies will proliferate. As Ravikumar told me, however, the models “are not based on physical principles” but on cost optimization. “That assumption that the deployment of a technology is simply a function of its cost breaks down when you look at very new technologies” like carbon capture and storage, “where you have not reached the stage of building a thousand copies of the same thing.” In other words, the models take for granted that if carbon removal gets cheap enough, it will be deployed at scale. But that’s not the situation at all.

This is in large part because every carbon capture and sequestration project is different. However carbon is captured, it needs to be stored in order to make a difference for climate efforts. Relatively small amounts of carbon can be used. A number of start-ups, for instance, inject captured carbon into things like soft drinks; some are working toward storing it in building materials. But the kind of mass-scale sequestration outlined in climate models will likely rely largely on injecting carbon deep underground, whether into saline aquifers or depleted oil and gas deposits. Ravikumar likens these to big, irregular sponges that need to be soaked using straws rather than underground tanks that can be neatly filled up and sealed off. The success of such projects depends on a number of site-specific factors: how deep injection wells need to be; the rate at which the carbon is injected and how much pressure is used; the permeability of the ground; and the space available. “Every project is unique,” he said. “The idea that you just scale it up and costs go down is not really true.”

There are physical limits on the infrastructure and space available for sequestering carbon. An influential study outlining ways for just the United States to achieve net-zero emissions indicates that the country will need to capture and store 2.5 Gt per year—a relatively low level that mainly accounts for industrial processes that don’t have readily available zero-carbon alternatives, like steel and concrete production. The biggest project Daigle and Ravikumar looked at was the Chevron-operated Gorgon Plant in Australia, which faced numerous engineering challenges in capturing emissions from one of the world’s largest liquefied natural gas terminals.* That facility currently captures and sequesters just 0.4 megatonnes of carbon per year—far less than the 3.5 Mt projected when operations began in 2019. The projects Daigle and Ravikumar studied hit 59 percent of their projected injection rates, on average; the mean amount of carbon captured at commercial-scale projects was only 0.19 Mt per year. To reach even the modest quantities of carbon capture entailed in the Net-Zero America study would mean building 250 Gorgon-scale facilities in the United States every year between now and 2050.

At this rate, the outlook is nothing if not grim: “Achieving even the lower end” of sequestration entailed in somewhat less ambitious mitigation scenarios, Daigle and Ravikumar write, “would require drilling thousands of wells each year until 2050.” The difficulty of reaching that number becomes obvious, the pair explained, when you consider how many active drilling rigs, both onshore and offshore, existed in the U.S. as of mid-2026: just 581. “The drilling activity alone needed to achieve projected levels of sequestration,” they write, “would be larger than the entire existing oil and gas industry.” (My emphasis.)

The UNEP report outlines capturing between 15 and 24 Gt of carbon per year in 2100, and is careful not to posit carbon capture as a substitute for reducing actually existing emissions now. The world’s leading climate modelers have also just released a new set of scenarios that will be used to inform the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s next assessment report, AR7. These new scenarios—the seventh Coupled Model Intercomparison Project, or CMIP7—all entail considerable amounts of conventional, engineered, and novel carbon removal. The “low-to-negative” scenario—using lots of CDR and breakneck emissions cuts to limit warming to 1.7 degrees Celsius by 2100—would capture and inject around 1,750 Gt of carbon underground by 2150. Another scenario—where the world reaches net-zero by 2100, and is 2.8 C warmer—would entail storing 800 Gt of carbon underground along the same timeline.

As climate scientist Zeke Hausefather notes in his CMIP7 explainer, “the amount of CDR deployed in these scenarios would require planetary-scale engineering at the cost of trillions of dollars, while many of the engineered CDR approaches are still relatively early-stage technologies.”

Ravikumar was also skeptical of how such massive amounts of carbon could be captured and reliably stored. “Just knowing what we know, these are to me very concerning because you could do anything with a model. But can you actually put these wells in the ground?”

Removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is essential for meeting virtually any climate goal. The fact that CDR has received so much breathless hype from fossil fuel and tech executives—who are now major polluters themselves—has made climate activists understandably wary of moral hazard. If companies can argue that some magical new technology will at some point remove all emissions, skeptics argue, they’ll have little incentive to cut them now—and every incentive to sell politicians on unproven solutions. But those same polluters just aren’t doing very much carbon capture, period. And why should they? The White House has made them freer than ever to spew out virtually unlimited greenhouse gas emissions. Whatever momentum there was behind global cooperation on climate has—at least for now—died down. There are simply very few incentives for companies to make even token investments in cutting-edge climate technologies—let alone to tackle expensive and unwieldy engineering challenges.

Like nearly every climate expert I speak with, Ravikumar is eager to see carbon capture and sequestration expand massively, as quickly as possible. Because the equipment and expertise required to sequester carbon is similar to the kinds needed for oil and gas extraction, he says, recent advancements in drilling techniques could be leveraged to put and keep carbon underground. His paper outlines a number of routes for working through the physical and engineering barriers to large-scale carbon capture and sequestration. But while the Department of Energy has been willing to support research into capturing carbon along fairly bipartisan lines, there’s comparatively little support for research into the realities of large-scale sequestration. Ravikumar and Daigle recommend a global database for detailed information from carbon management experiments and pilot studies “to disseminate learnings rapidly and avoid costly mistakes.”

As was the case with fracking—which benefited from decades of federal research support and tax breaks—making carbon sequestration work at a larger scale will be a matter of public policy rather than corporate curiosity. Compared to the prodigious amounts of oil and gas that fracking has produced, however, there’s comparatively little money to be made putting carbon underground. The pair further recommend that the National Institute of Standards and Technology collaborate with the National Academies and other federal agencies to convene a standing committee for exploring how to more accurately represent carbon management technologies in energy system models.

As Daigle and Ravikumar make clear, the world doesn’t always operate like it does in climate models. If anything, those models’ typically bleak futures can be too optimistic. Among other things, they’re optimistic about how much carbon dioxide can realistically be removed from the air, and about the power of price signals to drive real-world change. Models’ bad-faith interpreters—polluting governments and corporations—leaned on marketing paltry investments in carbon capture and storage to maintain the illusion that the world could have virtually unlimited fossil fuel production and combustion while still keeping warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. They’ve now mostly stopped pretending to care about climate change one way or another; that’s partly why news that surpassing 1.5 C of warming is now imminent and inevitable barely made headlines. Whenever climate politics enters the political mainstream again, let’s hope its latest iteration is more clear-eyed about what futures are still possible, and what’s going to get us there.

* This article previously misstated which company operates the Gorgon Plant.

Trump spent Labor Day weekend at his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club, and while he hit the links in his usual white polo shirt, dark bruises were visible up and down his left arm. The president’s former aide, John McEntee, who co-founded the conservative dating app The Right Stuff, posted a picture of Trump to Instagram Monday revealing the bruises.

It’s not the first time extensive bruising has been spotted on Trump’s skin. Trump often has bruises on his hands, which he tries to cover up (poorly) with makeup. The president has acknowledged this, claiming that the marks are the result of him taking “big aspirin” or shaking hands too aggressively. However, some speculate that he could be receiving some undisclosed intravenous treatment. Trump was last spotted with bruises on his arm while at the same golf course about a month ago.

The White House hasn’t been fully transparent about the president’s health, only revealing snippets about Trump’s medical checkups. On May 26, Trump saw a record 22 specialists, but offered no explanation as to why. He reportedly used to take a hair-loss drug that was conspicuously left off of his May trip to Walter Reed Medical Center, raising questions about what secrets are being kept about the 80-year-old’s health.

Trump frequently falls asleep in public and goes on off-topic rants that often make little sense. These diatribes and his physical appearance offer the only clues as to his health and mental state. For some bizarre reason, Trump was also sporting darker brown hair in New Jersey too.

The president’s weekend jaunt also involved him making sure the Secret Service agents charged with protecting him ate his country club’s hot dogs—which the agency then had to pay for. His inseparable aide Natalie Harp was also on the trip, presumably to post to his social media accounts and feed him his usual diet of article printouts. What else is the president consuming that the American people should be worried about?

The disturbing double standard was revealed Tuesday by Atlanta News First, which found itself in a load of trouble after one of its investigative reporters stopped on the side of the road to film a Flock Safety employee upgrading one of the company’s cameras near his house.

Brendan Keefe—a Peabody, duPont, Murrow, and Emmy award–winning journalist—pulled ahead of the Flock Safety site in a marked press van, donned a high-visibility vest, and began snapping pictures. Almost immediately, the Flock Safety employee chucked his equipment into his truck and fled the site.

Keefe tried to tail the vehicle, but his efforts were interrupted by the Milton Police Department, which sent out three police vehicles after the Flock employee summoned them.

“I work with Flock Safety and I’m getting followed, harassed, pretty much, taking video and pictures,” the employee said in a 911 call obtained by the local news network.

When the operator prompted the employee to provide his name, he opted not to, claiming that he didn’t “want them to hear my full name” on the call “when they get it.”

Taking pictures and videos in public spaces where there is no reasonable expectation of privacy is protected under the First Amendment. But Flock Safety’s close relationship with police departments across the country seems to have afforded the company protections beyond the scope of the Constitution.

“When you are lawfully present in a public space—such as streets, sidewalks, and parks—the First Amendment generally protects your right to photograph or film anything in plain view, including federal buildings and law enforcement,” according to the American Civil Liberties Union.

Flock Safety deployed its first mass surveillance camera (which was, at the time, an Android phone placed inside a waterproof box) in Atlanta in 2017. Since then, the company has deployed tens of thousands of cameras to record and document the movements of everyday Americans, regardless of whether or not they’re suspected of a crime. That data is then sold to law enforcement agencies, offering them a seemingly infinite portal into the potentially consequential habits of their countrymen.

In April, the company—and its business model—were valued at $8.4 billion.

In most cases, the cameras were installed without community consent. The company has repeatedly defended its product, claiming that the cameras have provided more safety, and that the cited abuses stem from the way that police use their data, rather than the collection of the data itself.

“Ultimately, I would argue that the whole community is our customer,” Flock Safety chief communications officer Josh Thomas told Atlanta News First.

“Why can’t I opt out? Why can’t the spouse or ex-spouse of a police officer opt out of this kind of data collection on their movements?” asked Keefe.

“Why can’t a person opt out?” repeated Thomas. “It’s because if your car gets stolen, if something were to happen, moreover the government requires you to have a license plate.”

“It’s plain viewing information,” Thomas continued, missing the bitter irony of the situation. “Why can’t you opt out? You can, if you want to opt out of society.”

The billionaire technocrat’s America PAC has launched an aggressive advertising campaign directing them to Vote Safe, a website claiming to provide users with information they need to “vote with confidence.” But all the while, the site is secretly collecting some information of its own, Judd Legum reported Tuesday on his substack Popular Information.

Any visitors to the site will unwittingly hand over their full name, birthday, home address, email address, cellphone number, IP address, browser, location, voter registration status, and district, not to mention every link they click on and every page they look at.

The website previously had a privacy policy barring America PAC from sharing this information with advertisers, political organizations, or third parties, but it removed that language last month. Now America PAC is permitted to sell or share your personal information with “our business partners.” That personal information includes not only where you are registered to vote but also the “inferences” the data makes about you.

The business partners include Facebook, Google, X, an advertising firm called the Trade Desk, a tracking company named Increment Data, and Iterable, an email and text-massage marketing company, among others.

In the last week, America PAC has spent more than $180,000 promoting Vote Safe, Legum reported. Musk has pledged to spend more than $100 million on the midterms.

This isn’t the first time Musk’s America PAC has pulled this grift. Ahead of the 2024 presidential election, the former billionaire bureaucrat poured $800,000 into digital advertisements to target voters in key battleground states. In certain states, users reported that the supposed voter registration website collected their information without ever referring them to register to vote.

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.

Despite the technocrat’s pledge last year to stay out of politics, his America PAC is planning to once again direct its efforts toward door knocking, direct mail, and digital advertising during the midterm elections.

The Securities and Exchange Commission is planning to revoke Rule 206(4)-5 under the Investment Advisers Act, arguing that it chills employees’ political speech. The regulation, known as the “Pay-to-Play” Rule, bars investment advisers from getting paid to advise government clients for two years after making a political contribution to certain officials and candidates.

In the 16 years since the rule was implemented, it has only resulted in a handful of penalties. The proposed change comes after private equity spending increased in 2024, and flipped toward Republicans.

SEC Commissioner Mark T. Uyeda released a statement last week arguing that the “blanket ban” had functionally undermined advisers’ constitutional rights. “Many investment advisers found it easier to simply prohibit all political contributions by their employees, thereby chilling speech and conduct otherwise protected by the First Amendment,” Uyeda said.

But the rule was intentionally written to be broad in order to address the difficulties state and local prosecutors had in proving quid pro quo deals, Axios reported Tuesday.

SEC Chairman Paul Atkins also released a statement last week supporting the proposal, claiming that the rule “discourages full participation in the electoral process through contributions to candidates.

“People should not have to choose between their political-speech rights and a job in a particular industry,” he said.

If approved, the change will unleash a flood of bribes to public officials, and even invite private equity to pay tithes to President Trump himself.

On Monday, Trump exploded in a Truth Social rant over Canada, which as of Tuesday morning has imposed reciprocal tariffs on the U.S. in response to the tariffs Trump unleashed last month. His post targeted a Canadian company, Bombardier Aerospace, which manufactures jet planes and does a lot of business with American companies and customers.

“NO MORE SELLING BOMBARDIER IN THE UNITED STATES!” Trump raged. “BUY AMERICAN. FLY ON AMERICAN AIRLINERS. ENJOY AMERICAN LIQUOR AND BEVERAGES. SAIL ON LAKE AMERICA. AMERICA FIRST!”

Yet it turns out that with this broadside, Trump unintentionally directed friendly fire at GOP Senator Roger Marshall of Kansas, who faces an unexpectedly tough challenge from a Democrat in the deep-red state.

That’s because Bombardier’s U.S. headquarters is in Wichita, where it employs over 1,000 workers. What’s more, as the company said in a statement, its operations employ American workers in at least 10 U.S. states, and its supply chains include around 2,800 different American companies across the country.

You don’t have to take my word for it, though. Listen to the other Republican senator in Kansas, Jerry Moran, who quickly put out a statement reiterating Bombardier’s centrality to the local economy. Marshall was silent on Monday, but he eventually followed suit on Tuesday morning, noting that he will “fight” to defend Wichita’s jobs while insisting that he’d expressed his “concern” to the White House without once mentioning the word “Trump.”

What’s funny is that both these GOP responses are carefully calibrated to sound as if they’re defending American jobs, but without faulting Trump in any way. Its comical premise is that empirically reminding Trump of the facts of the situation will get him to see the error of his ways and drop this crusade. Marshall’s Democratic opponent, Methodist pastor Adam Hamilton, quickly denounced his delay, ripping him for “standing by while the president is attacking Kansas jobs.”

And Trump’s broadside is already producing brutal local headlines. “Wichita is home to Bombardier’s U.S. headquarters. Trump wants to block plane sales,” blared the Kansas City Star. A columnist for the Wichita Eagle pointed out that Bombardier’s operations are “deeply intertwined with this community” and pilloried Marshall for failing to stand up to Trump while he “turned on Wichita.”

Admittedly, it’s hard to know exactly what Trump is threatening here, because his broadside is so convoluted. But if somehow Trump succeeded in halting all Bombardier sales in the U.S.—or vastly slowing them down—it would surely do untold damage at home. What’s critical here, however, is that this is due to things Trump does not like to acknowledge: the interwoven nature of the aerospace industry and how it crisscrosses our northern border in such complex ways.

“Banning the sales of Bombardier aircraft would hurt tens of thousands of American workers in the company’s supply chain,” economist Chad Bown, co-author of How to Win a Trade War, told me. In sum: A lot of American parts and labor go into products that this Canadian company sells in the United States, and as a result, those sales benefit a lot of Americans.

That last point is the critical one. Note that Trump’s broadside excoriates Bombardier by claiming “they live off American Buyers” and “American Companies,” adding: “If they want our Market, they must build here, and stop treating America like a ‘piggybank.’” Trump is only able to see the relationship as a zero-sum one, as one in which a foreign company’s sales in the U.S. are intrinsically an act of ripping us off.

The same goes for Trump’s broader trade war with Canada. Trump’s escalation—which is raising tariffs on both sides—has forced other Republicans to gingerly condemn his actions, because here again, a lot of American products and industries will be hurt. This goes in both directions, harming Americans who will now find it harder to export to Canada and hurting Americans who will now face higher prices on imports.

Could all this matter in the midterms? Yes. The trade war with Canada will hit hard in a number of states with big Senate races and could impact some competitive House districts as well. Republicans like Maine Senator Susan Collins would not be calling for a halt if it weren’t a big problem for them.

True, the Senate race in Kansas is still a very tough challenge for Democrats. But if there’s any way to win such a contest, it would be in a situation like this one, where Trump is so overwhelmingly destructive toward voters’ interests—and the GOP incumbent so obviously unwilling to act as a check on him—that it allows Democrats to reach voters usually off limits to them.

“This is another Trump bomb dropped on a Republican in a potentially difficult race,” election forecaster Larry Sabato, who’s been bearish about Democratic chances in Kansas, told me. “It’s a long-shot race, but if the Democrat has any chance, it’s because of Trump incoming like this.”

All this could backfire in a deeper sense. One rare civic success story of the Trump era has been the broad public rejection of across-the-board tariffs. This was not preordained. After Trump took office last year—amid widespread suggestions that his right-wing nationalism had tapped into deep, widespread, and enduring national sentiments—it was plausible to fear that the tariffs would code as “pro-worker,” as aggressive government action to protect working people against unseen global forces wreaking havoc on their lives.

But that didn’t happen. Instead, all indications are that voters broadly understood how tariffs actually work—that they’re a tax on working- and middle-class consumers. As it’s become clear that Trump’s 2024 victory was largely driven by a much shallower rebellion against prices, the chaos and inflation caused by the tariffs—and their failure to cause a renaissance in manufacturing jobs—are a big reason his approval on the economy has utterly crashed.

A hallmark of MAGA politics is that “we” are “winning” when “they” are “losing.” In this schema, the “we” means Trump-MAGA America and the “they” means whoever is the target of the MAGA Two-Minute Hate of the Moment. Right now that’s Canada:

But maybe—just maybe—Trump’s trade war with Canada will badly undermine this worldview. Maybe it’s reminding a whole lot of voters why trade and economic interdependence can be good things for them and their country.

The zero-sum MAGA worldview is getting repudiated all over the place: The removal of immigrants hasn’t boosted employment for native-born young men. Showing our “strength” in the rush to war with Iran by shrugging off our international alliances hasn’t magically spooked Iran to capitulate. And now the trade war with Canada is only blowing back on American workers. It would be quite the outcome indeed if the true long-term impact of Trumpism’s world-historical failures is to get untold numbers of Americans to give the idea of positive-sum relationships a second look.

404 Media reports that the DHS’s Predictive Intelligence Targeting Teams, or PITT, are feeding intelligence to local law enforcement, who are then pulling people over who are not suspected of any specific crimes. In one case, a PITT unit analyzed the financial activity of Kyle Olson, who was driving across Montana. Local police pulled him over, claiming that his license plate was obstructed. He was later charged with a DUI, according to the publication.

The documents from that case are what led to 404 Media’s discovery. Olson was provided a DHS document explaining the rationale behind his traffic stop, written by Border Patrol Agent Matthew Phelps, who is assigned to the “Spokane Sector Border Patrol Targeting & Intelligence Division (TID)—Predictive Intelligence Targeting Team (PITT).”

Phelps wrote that his job entails reviewing “law enforcement–sensitive databases,” including financial activity, to build intelligence before the government hands it over to local police. Phelps handed over “information contained within law enforcement-sensitive systems suggesting financial activity patterns commonly associated with illicit narcotics activity,” the document states. He handed it over to Montana Highway Patrol, who pulled over Olson.

“It was relayed to me by U.S. Border Patrol targeting analyst Matthew Phelps that he had identified a vehicle that had indicators of possible narcotics trafficking,” wrote Sergeant James Beck of the Montana Highway Patrol. Olson had marijuana edibles, marijuana cuttings, and butane hash oil in his car from his job at a licensed cannabis farm in California, which he was transporting to his home in Wisconsin.

At least one PITT unit is based near Spokane, Washington, and patrols the U.S.-Canada border, while another is based near Laredo, Texas, near the border with Mexico. U.S. Customs and Border Patrol, which is also part of DHS, already uses automatic license plate readers, and those are integrated into the agency’s predictive policing tactics.

The concept is ostensibly to find people who may have already committed crimes, but 404 Media didn’t find any instances of this occurring. Instead, the government seems to be using predictive policing to create pretexts to pull over and detain people. Border Patrol refused to answer the publication’s questions about what financial activity it’s monitoring, and if it had a warrant to pull over Olson.

A CPB spokesperson told 404 Media in an email that “U.S. Border Patrol uses intelligence-informed analysis and planning to support national security operations, allocate resources, and help identify potential threats and bad actors to public safety. These efforts are conducted consistent with applicable law, policy, privacy protections, and oversight requirements.

“For operational security reasons, we do not discuss specific analytical methods, data sources, targeting criteria, investigative techniques, system capabilities, or deployment details. Public disclosure of such information could compromise law enforcement operations and investigations as well as creating safety risks for agents and the public,” the statement said.

The units raise a number of disturbing questions about whether the Trump administration is obtaining data illegally, then using it to illegally charge people with crimes. The Trump administration has shown numerous times that it’s willing to flout the Constitution, and in this age of mass surveillance, it doesn’t seem to feel limited in any way.

Specialist Zion Mitchell, 21, was charged with assault with a dangerous weapon and possession of a firearm during a crime of violence, according to an arrest affidavit filed in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia.

The heated exchange took place in a black van, stationed outside of a Popeyes on northeast H Street, where six other members of the National Guard bore witness.

The victim, who was not identified in the affidavit save for a detail connecting her to New Jersey, told investigators that the original disagreement was over hairstyles, and whether their respective ones followed current Army regulations as set by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. At one point, Mitchell allegedly told her he would “slap the Jackson 5 out of you.”

The victim was seated shotgun in the vehicle, while Mitchell was in the row just behind, to her left. After a fiery back-and-forth, the victim said she heard what she could only describe as hearing a “holster click.” One of the witnesses then accused Mitchell of having “almost shot” them in the hand, according to the affidavit.

The victim did not know until other National Guard members informed her after the fact that Mitchell had drawn his weapon and pointed it at her.

One witness confirmed that Mitchell’s weapon was loaded at the time, with a round in the chamber. Another told authorities that the victim had previously shared that Mitchell frequently threatened women, and that the two of them had allegedly not gotten along since she rejected his advances.

Thousands of National Guard members have been patrolling Washington’s streets since Donald Trump ordered their deployment to the supposedly crime-addled capital last summer (violent crime in Washington is at a 30-year low, according to federal estimates).

Guard members told NPR last month that they felt Trump had “exploited” the National Guard. The seemingly pointless mission—which has amounted to little more than installing a military presence in the city—had left such a bad taste in the mouths of some members that they questioned whether they should fulfill their duties at all.

“If we continue down this path, where this kind of ‘presence patrol’ mission becomes the new definitive image of the National Guard, it’s going to completely rebrand everything that was noble about the National Guard into being mundane at best and threatening at worst,” one guard member told the public radio syndicate.

The 73-year-old historian said Tuesday that his decision to step down was not tied to the various pressures stemming from the Trump administration, which has spent the last year and a half strong-arming Smithsonian officials into revising portions of U.S. history.

Bunch founded the National Museum of African American History and Culture, and became the Smithsonian’s first Black leader in 2019, overseeing 21 museums, 21 libraries, the National Zoo, numerous research centers, and several education units and centers. Over the course of his career, Bunch spent 38 years working for the institution, advancing public education.

“I have spent nearly half of my life working at and being part of the Smithsonian family, and what a privilege it has been,” Bunch wrote in a statement. “There is no place like the Smithsonian—it has been one of the great loves of my life, and I am extraordinarily proud of what we have accomplished together. I leave with pride and sadness, gratitude and joy, and with enormous confidence in the people who will carry this remarkable institution forward.”

Bunch’s exit will nonetheless catapult the institution into another era of tumult and change, at a time when federal forces have already placed dramatic emphasis on the organization’s restructuring.

Last summer, the White House sparked alarm among Smithsonian staffers after officials laid out detailed plans to eliminate exhibits that they determined represented “improper ideology.” The memo challenged the application of educational lenses on race, gender, and oppression in U.S. history, and accused the Smithsonian directly of advancing a “divisive, race-centered ideology.”

The administration’s critiques were eugenics-adjacent, torching a specific Smithsonian exhibit for accurately describing race as something that is “not a biological reality but a social construct.” The White House further flamed the institution for emphasizing that “race is a human invention.”

Failure to correct these wrongs would turn the faucet off on funding for the world’s largest educational institution, effectively crippling the Smithsonian and nixing two-thirds of the organization’s revenue. Smithsonian staffers described the situation as an “impossible position,” arguing that the Trump administration had ordered them to be nonpartisan while forcing them to follow an extraordinarily partisan directive.

Around the same time, the Smithsonian removed Donald Trump from its exhibit on impeachments under direct pressure from the White House. The “American Presidency” wing’s revised signage explained that “only three presidents have seriously faced removal” over the course of American history. The change was the result of a White House–initiated content review in the wake of an art director’s ousting.

Much of the institution’s compliance was a part of a broader effort to save Bunch’s job, as staffers have described him as “loved” and “respected.”

The pressure has not let up. In June, Trump signed an executive order offering his administration officials unprecedented control over the independent organization’s operations in an effort to “restore trust.” The executive order cited a report by the president’s Domestic Policy Council that claimed the Smithsonian “does not present American history as a shared national inheritance to be taught and celebrated, but instead views American history as a ‘prime tool’ to advance ideas of social justice and the radical transformation of our society.”

“Oil prices will drop precipitously, like everything else is dropping (but more!), when we WIN the war with Iran,” Trump wrote on Truth Social Monday. “Three Dollars a gallon, but ultimately, below Two Dollars a gallon. It will all happen quickly, and Iran will never have a Nuclear Weapon.”

Trump has previously claimed the U.S. had already “won” the war against Iran at least 66 times, according to an analysis by The Daily Beast.

Trump’s pledge to bring gas prices down came after Americans saw record high fuel prices for Labor Day weekend, and diesel prices jumped to their own record high.

Now Trump is promising to get gas prices down to less than $2 a gallon—but that’s not going to happen anytime soon. The White House is secretly planning to escalate military action against Iran after the midterm elections in November, which Republicans may find a lot harder to win without Trump securing a decisive victory in the Middle East.

The U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia called out the Trump administration for violating federal law over the data sharing, writing in its ruling that “The IRS is now on notice twice over regarding the inadequacies of its summer 2025 disclosures.

“The government and its personnel face steep civil and criminal consequences for willful disclosure of information in violation of section 6103,” the ruling states, referring to the law in question.

The IRS argued that a preliminary injunction against sharing taxpayer information is “highly unusual and harmful” because it requires the IRS to provide the district court with “prior notice of criminal investigatory activity,” according to court documents. The ruling panel called this argument “weak sauce,” as a lower court is allowing the IRS to file notifications “‘under seal,’ thereby shielding any criminal investigative activity from disclosure.”

It’s quite a rebuke for administration officials, and is another example of the White House rushing to find targets for its mass deportation machine without any regard for the law. The information sharing in question targeted thousands of taxpayers, ensnaring many people who didn’t commit any crimes. Undocumented immigrants pay billions in taxes every year.

Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency also appears to have been involved in the information-sharing effort, and another court ruled last month that DOGE has to disclose its internal communications related to the questionably legal deal between DHS and the IRS. The Trump administration is trying to stall disclosing to the public how private tax information was shared with immigration agents, who was involved, and whether it will comply with the law going forward.

Haaretz reported that Israeli intelligence agency Shin Bet was warned on September 15, 2023, about the threat of an impending “earthquake” and a “huge surprise” from Hamas, a warning that was relayed to Netanyahu. The defense ministry held a meeting two days later, but no decisions were made. After seeing a lack of action, United Arab Emirates President Mohammed bin Zayed spoke to Netanyahu directly for 45 minutes, trying desperately to convince him of the likelihood of an attack from Hamas after Netanyahu had scuttled talks earlier that year. Netanyahu had reduced the number of Palestinian prisoners he agreed to release and postponed the committee intended to facilitate the prisoner and hostage exchanges—leading frustrated Hamas head Yaya Sinwar to end negotiations entirely in September, just weeks before the October 7 attack.

This breakdown led to a further destabilization of relations, with bin Zayed warning Netanyahu that “something there is about to explode.” But Netanyahu assured him that he was ready for anything.

“The emir hoped that despite his reserved response, Netanyahu would take the message seriously and take action,” an adviser told Haaretz. And yet Netanyahu chose not to brief anyone in the Israel Defense Forces or Mossad about bin Zayed’s warning. About 1,200 Israelis were killed on October 7, and their deaths were then used to justify a genocide of nearly 75,000 Palestinians.

“If we had known about the warnings, there’s a chance it would have given more weight to the first message we received from Sinwar,” a senior Shin Bet official told Haaretz. “Perhaps it would also have clarified what was behind his sudden withdrawal from the talks in early September. It’s possible we would have put two and two together and reached a completely different conclusion from the one we did, one that would have changed our entire assessment picture.”

This report of Netanyahu’s prior knowledge of an impending attack and his lack of action against it elicited countless reactions.

“Netanyahu bears personal and direct responsibility for the failure that led to the deaths of thousands of Israelis on his watch. His ignoring of the warnings is criminal negligence, and therefore he is doing everything to prevent the establishment of a state commission of inquiry that will expose the truth,” former Israeli prime minister and opposition leader Naftali Bennet wrote on X. “He did not go to the field, did not warn the heads of the security system, did not prepare Israel for the attack, and did not convene the cabinet.”

“Netanyahu cannot continue to serve in his position for another minute, and he certainly is not capable of fixing it,” Bennett continued. “If we do not replace this government, we will never know the truth that will only be revealed in a state commission of inquiry, because they are preventing its establishment out of fear of discovering the terrible truth.”

“It’s crucial to remember that the Nova music festival was supposed to end on Friday, October 6, but the organizers reached out to the IDF to get permission to extend it for an extra day. We know that warnings were everywhere at that point, yet the IDF approved the extension and added no security,” Drop Site News’s Ryan Grim wrote. “Now we know, from new reporting in Haaretz, that Netanyahu had explicitly been warned 10 days earlier that Hamas was planning an ‘earthquake’ of an attack.”

“Insane story. He was warned two weeks before the Oct. 7th attacks by the Emiratis about an imminent attack by Hamas—and did nothing,” Zeteo’s Medhi Hasan wrote. “No wonder Netanyahu has always wanted to drag out this war and block any chance of a proper independent investigation into Oct. 7th.”

The president hosted first responders and officials at the White House for a deeply unserious speech intended to commemorate those lost in the deadly attacks on September 11, but mostly focused on boosting his own disastrous agenda.

Trump began by ranting about his shameful militarization and beautification efforts in Washington, D.C., which have cost taxpayers nearly $2 billion.

He then tied the deadly terrorist attacks on 9/11 to his ongoing military campaign in Iran. “A certain nation that wanted a nuclear weapon, they were very close to getting it, and now they have no chance at getting it,” Trump said, claiming Iran had been “punished greatly.”

After giving some shout-outs to various Cabinet members and Republican lawmakers in the audience, Trump briefly recounted his experience of watching the Twin Towers fall before veering into observations about something else entirely: The U.S. Steel Building, known as One Liberty Plaza, also “creaked a lot,” according to the president.

“We thought it was coming down on top of us, and two firemen, big strong guys—and I’m not the smallest guy in the world—they grabbed me under the arm, and they said, ‘Gotta get out of here,’ and they literally lifted me up. This is not easy to do. I’m big, they lifted me up and started running with me,” Trump said.

Of course, One Liberty Plaza did not fall down, and Trump’s anecdote only served to make light of the experience of New Yorkers who didn’t have their own skyscrapers from which to survey the damage and chaos of 9/11.

Trump also took a moment to thank law enforcement, before turning it into a political jab.

“Our law enforcement holds our country together in light of some threats, we have some very real threats right now. We have people that want to go a different way. They want to go a communistic way, well that’s not gonna work,” Trump said. “Number one we’re not gonna let it happen, but that’s not gonna work.”

Trump reportedly decided to ditch the official memorial at Ground Zero on Friday after organizers told him he would not be invited to speak at the event. While Trump is not known for giving solemn speeches, and regularly detours into the political and absurd, in this case the organizers’ decision was merely a matter of precedent.

As part of its “Steel Across America” tour, the Tunnel to Towers Foundation will display a 21-foot, 16,900-pound steel beam recovered from the World Trade Center on the White House Ellipse, which has been closed to the public.

America’s billionaire president has a particular affinity for the hot dogs served near the eleventh hole at Trump National Golf Club outside Washington, D.C.

“He has this weird, very odd pride about how good the hot dogs are,” a former club employee told Forbes.

“That’s his thing,” they continued, adding that Trump personally ensures everyone in his orbit enjoys a club glizzy. “The chef has to be out there. And he’s like, ‘Chef, get everyone a hot dog—all these guys.’”

That could include as many as 30 golf carts full of Secret Service agents that need to escort the president around the course, according to Forbes.

At times, the hot dog stand has as many as 50 dogs prepared for the entourage—though none of them is on the house.

“There, in one all-beef transaction, is the Trump presidency in miniature,” reported Forbes. “Trump owns the club. Trump controls the chef. Trump doles out the hot dogs. Trump watches everyone eat them. Then Trump’s business sends the government the bill.”

It was not immediately clear how much each dog costs, but prices vary across his various clubs. At Mar-a-Lago, a wiener can run as much as $25. Trump National Doral Miami serves a $45 “Trump Dog,” which features a footlong wagyu sausage. Prices—and menu items—are more modest at Trump National Golf Club Philadelphia, where a traditional hot dog costs about $10.

Trump’s golf obsession is no secret. He has thus far spent at least 135 of the 596 days of his second term on the links—a little under a quarter of his term. He has totaled more than 1,400 hours playing golf, much of which has happened on his own properties.

The New York Times reports that Marshall, who is facing reelection in Kansas in November, sued over 700 patients for failure to pay medical bills, with 81 of them getting arrested as a result. In some cases, Marshall had bank accounts garnished, and regularly charged patients 18 percent interest annually. 

Marshall reportedly took legal action over debts as little as $101. Half of his lawsuits were filed under his name, while the rest were filed under his practice, Heartland Regional OBGYN, which he owned by himself from 1998 to 2012 before splitting ownership with another doctor from 2013 to 2019. Marshall stopped practicing medicine in 2016 after he was elected to Congress, but continued trying to collect some of the debts after that between 2017 and 2021. 

Many of the patients he sued were new mothers in Barton County, Kansas, a rural area where many lived in poverty and didn’t have health insurance or had policies that didn’t fully cover their medical bills. One woman was sued when her baby was nine months old over a $129 bill from a postpartum visit, and eventually had her wages garnished. 

“I was recently divorced, trying to do everything on my own,” Kellie Clutts told the Times. “I told them I could make partial payments, but it seemed like no matter what I said, they wanted the full amount at once.”

A spokeswoman for Marshall said that he spent decades treating patients regardless of income level, adding, “Judges issue warrants when people repeatedly miss court dates, not doctors.”  

The Times, however, cited court documents showing that Marshall regularly sought arrest warrants for unpaid bills. In 2007, Joe Vasquez and his wife were arrested in front of their grandchildren over an unpaid $4,561 bill for an emergency hysterectomy three years before. The Times interviewed eight people who were sued by Marshall between 2003 and 2015, and many of them were living paycheck to paycheck. Two of them were being sued over bills for late miscarriages requiring surgery. 

Despite his medical background, Marshall fought for the Affordable Care Act to be repealed, claiming in 2017 that “there is a group of people that just don’t want health care and aren’t going to take care of themselves.” He’s also tried to downplay the impact of higher fuel prices on struggling Americans, saying that paying more for gas is a good thing. 

Marshall should perhaps change his tone, because the latest polls in his reelection fight have him either neck-and-neck or behind his Democratic challenger, Adam Hamilton, a pastor. Voters in Kansas might decide they want a senator with some compassion instead of a doctor shaking down his patients for cash. 

On Sunday, Trump posted an AI image of himself and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney playing hockey in their respective country’s jerseys, while Trump stands over the prime minister—presumably after checking him. A speech bubble from Trump reads, “Get up, Governor,” an insult Trump has used in the past to attack Canada’s sovereignty. 

Then on Monday, Trump posted a map depicting the entirety of North America as part of the United States. 

And on that same day, he posted an ad for Fannie Mae using an AI-generated monologue for his own voice, instead of just talking. 

While that all happened, Canada struck back in the trade war that Trump started, imposing taxes on American products that will further erode relations, drive up costs, and hurt Canadians and Americans alike. The tariffs will hit aluminum, automotive parts, Kentucky bourbon, and steel, and will be as high as 50 percent.

The automotive industry will be hit particularly hard, as Canada is the largest foreign market for American vehicles. This all comes as Trump has consistently disregarded perhaps our closest ally. He disparages Carney, insists that Canada should be a U.S. state, and now has entered this cycle of retaliatory tariffs that has no real end in sight. It’s as if he’s asleep at the wheel, stirring awake every so often only to post incendiary AI content while Americans suffer the consequences of his actions.  

Donald Trump’s team posted Monday to celebrate the “workers and products that are proudly MADE IN AMERICA,” but the video they included didn’t feature a single American worker.

Instead, the apparently AI-generated video depicted a fully automated production line making a marker emblazoned with Trump’s name. In March, Trump sidetracked a Cabinet meeting with a rant claiming to have replaced the White House’s $1,000 ballpoint pens with Sharpies he paid $5 a pop for.

The White House also posted an AI-generated video depicting Trump using a Green Lantern ring, which has the power to create anything a person can imagine. Of course, the president used it to prevent illegal border crossings, conjure “American manufacturing,” and summon a fleet of military planes. The video credited Trump with powers of limitless creation, while yet again removing any trace of American workers.

The White House then posted an AI-generated video showing the shoes of different kinds of American workers as they walk through fields, offices, and busy streets. But again, the video featured no real American workers, just computer-generated feet.

The White House’s official Labor Day video was somehow even worse. The 90-second campaign-style advertisement managed to celebrate Trump rather than actual American workers.

“After so many years of politicians who sold out the working men and women of our country, we finally have a president who puts American workers first,” Trump said, congratulating himself in the video’s voiceover.

The video never said what Trump actually did, but emphasized his supposedly incredible support for autoworkers, ranchers, and farmers. In reality, autoworkers have rejected Trump’s escalating trade war with Canada, and farmers and ranchers have condemned his decisions to increase imports of foreign beef and undermine FDA-inspected processing sites.

The bizarre affair, which will take place on September 9 and 10 in Dallas, does not have a single point of entry or a dedicated Texas delegation; House members have been asked to pay a minimum of $25,000 to get in the door with a guest. But that’s really the bottom of the barrel: Better packages have been priced closer to $100,000.

But wannabe ticket holders in the Lone Star State have found that there are a multitude of options to enter the Texas event, either by invitation or by a regional lottery. Tim Bates, a longtime Collin County Republican precinct chair, told The Dallas Morning News that he wasn’t going to pay $5,000 to enter the event. So when he received an email from the state Republican Party about obtaining a free ticket, he passed the information along to his fellow precinct chairs instead.

“More local people will be able to go to fill the venue,” he told the local daily.

But the ticket comes with a disclaimer: Entry is not guaranteed if the arena reaches capacity.

Most major party conventions are centered on a specific item of business, such as formally nominating a presidential candidate. But this function will offer no such line items. Instead, the event has been billed as a big Republican party, which has left the definition of who’s allowed to attend a lot looser.

It will be the first GOP midterm convention in American history. Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance are both expected to deliver speeches to the conservative assembly, though low party enthusiasm has threatened the optics of the event.

The unprecedented conference was thrown together at the eleventh hour in an attempt to boost Republican candidates ahead of a contentious midterm cycle, but dozens of Republicans have decided to forgo the gathering altogether, fearful that showing face at the event—which offers Trump yet another stage to say or do anything he desires—could blow up in their faces and damage their odds back home.

The whole ordeal could backfire on the president too. In 1978, a Democratic midterm convention that was intended to rally party support ultimately turned the party against President Jimmy Carter, offering a vehicle for then-Senator Ted Kennedy to announce his opposition to the president and his agenda.

“There was a lot of hostility to the president there,” Elaine Kamarck, who attended as a 28-year-old working for the Democratic National Committee, told The Guardian. “The Democrats have sworn ever since never to do anything this stupid again.”

The Wall Street Journal reports that while Noem was still part of President Trump’s Cabinet, Lewandowski took the opportunity to try and make side deals to personally benefit himself.

For example, Lewandowski approached representatives of Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, proposing that the governments could hire him on the side to help with any issues that the Department of Homeland Security handled concerning the two countries, such as visas. Officials from the two countries thought the idea was unusual, as they already had relationships with other Trump administration officials, and turned down Lewandowski.

Lewandowski’s proposal appears to have been a corrupt effort to sell government services for personal gain. He already was in a powerful position at DHS, overseeing the agency’s billions of dollars in federal contracts. He also had authority over tariff collection, and decision-making power over aspects of border security and immigration enforcement as a “special government employee,” which gave him some ability to engage in personal business.

Lewandowski denied any wrongdoing to the Journal, with one of his representatives denying that he “sought contracts with foreign governments.” The same spokesperson added that Lewandowski “adamantly denies ever demanding any payment or compensation from any potential, former, or current government contractor or seeking or soliciting or entering contracts with foreign governments while volunteering his time with DHS.”

Lewandowski was unpopular in DHS under Noem’s tenure, and appeared to stay on far beyond his allowance as a special government employee, with an extensive portfolio of responsibilities. His relationship with Noem was the worst-kept secret in Washington and had its own set of possible ethical violations, which have come under scrutiny from Democrats in Congress. These latest revelations will only increase his corrupt reputation, as well as that of his paramour Noem.

Along with Iceland, the image also included Canada, Greenland, Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean draped in the U.S. flag. The Truth Social post, made on Labor Day, was captionless.

The post—paternalistic at best, colonial at worst—raised enough alarm in Iceland to lead the country’s foreign minister, Thorgerdur Gunnarsdóttir, to summon U.S. Ambassador Billy Long. Gunnarsdóttir later told RUV, Iceland’s national broadcasting service, that “it was made clear at the meeting that the post was completely inappropriate.” Other Icelandic leaders felt similarly, comparing their experience to that of Greenland, which Trump has threatened to annex since he returned to office.

“It is not good to be an enemy of the United States, but it is even worse to be its friend,” alternate city councilor Stefán Pálsson told RUV. “What is shocking about the way Greenland has been treated is not really that the United States behaves like this towards another country, but simply that we are not used to it being done to us.”

“I hope, given how this took over the debate in Greenland, that we do not end up in the same place and that we do not allow Trump to set the agenda for the debate here,” Federation of State and Municipal Employees Chair Sonja Thorbergsdóttir said. “But of course this is disrespectful and this is not how civilized nations should behave towards one another.”

The post was yet another example of Trump’s recklessness eroding the seriousness and legitimacy of U.S soft power.