Journalist Pablo Manríquez asked multiple GOP senators about the president’s comments about 90 minutes after he said them—plenty of time for members of Congress to react.

“What do you think of Donald Trump saying he doesn’t think about the finances or the financial situation of the American people?” Manríquez asked Senator Cynthia Lummis.

“Did he say that? I don’t have a comment about that, mostly because I think he actually does care,” she replied with a laugh, claiming that the president didn’t mean something he doubled down on publicly.

Republicans already being pressed on Trump’s comments:

PabloReports: What do you make of Trump saying that he doesn’t think about the financial situation of the American people?

Senator Lummis: Did he say that? I don’t have a comment because I think he actually does care. pic.twitter.com/BzptOHbOc9

— Acyn (@Acyn) May 12, 2026

Senator Roger Marshall, also smiling, refused to answer as well, claiming he didn’t know the “context” of the comment. And Senator Susan Collins stated she didn’t see the president’s comment at all.

Republican senators already dodging questions on Trump’s statement:

PabloReports: Any comment on what Trump said? He said he doesn’t think about the finances of the American people.

Senator Roger Marshall: I would have to find out the context. I’m sorry. pic.twitter.com/FoFfmoZZs6

— Acyn (@Acyn) May 12, 2026

Another Republican reluctant to comment on Trump’s statement:

PabloReports: Any comment on Trump saying he doesn’t think about the financial situation of the American people?

Senator Susan Collins: I didn’t see that. pic.twitter.com/wGqJAmiHyt

— Acyn (@Acyn) May 12, 2026

For the record, Trump’s comments were crystal clear.

“When you’re negotiating with Iran, Mr. President, to what extent are Americans’ financial situations motivating you to make a deal?” a reporter asked Trump before he left for China on Tuesday, alluding to the skyrocketing inflation caused by the fallout from the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran and Lebanon.

“Not even a little bit,” Trump said. “The only thing that matters when I’m talking about Iran is they can’t have a nuclear weapon. I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation, I don’t think about anybody. I think about one thing: We cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon. That’s all. That’s the only thing that motivates me.”

Trump traveled to China Tuesday for a two-day summit with President Xi Jinping, accompanied by more than a dozen American entrepreneurs—including his own son—each hoping the president will clear the way for them to make even more money.

Among those aboard Air Force One Tuesday were the president’s son Eric Trump and his wife, Lara. While the White House has claimed Eric is attending the trip in a “personal capacity,” isn’t this the exact same thing Trump railed against former President Joe Biden doing with his son Hunter? 

As executive vice president of development for the Trump Organization, Eric Trump has helped to net lucrative real estate deals across Europe and the Middle East that directly benefit his father. Eric and Don Jr. recently merged their publicly traded golf course holding company with Powerus, a Florida-based drone company, with the goal of filling the gaps left by the Trump administration’s ban on Chinese drones. They also recently won a government contract of an unknown value.  

The Trump Organization does not currently have any upcoming real estate projects in China, but during Trump’s last term, China and its state-owned entities paid a whopping $5.5 million at vacation properties owned by the president’s family—far more than any other country.

Other CEOs who are planning to travel with Trump include Tesla’s Elon Musk, Apple’s Tim Cook, BlackRock’s Larry Fink, and Boeing’s Kelly Ortberg, as well as officials from Meta, Visa, Mastercard, Citi, Goldman Sachs, Blackstone, GE Aerospace, Cargill, and Illumina. The group also included CEOs from major semiconductor manufacturers Qualcomm, Micron, and Coherent. 

As a precondition of their selection, each company was tasked with developing a “tangible ask” that promised a concrete outcome, one source familiar with the matter told Reuters. For example, Musk is reportedly looking to acquire $2.9 billion of equipment to build solar panels and regulatory clearance for Tesla’s self-driving assistance system in China, the world’s largest auto market. 

Reva Goujon, a geopolitical strategist at Rhodium Group, told Reuters that aside from Boeing and Cargill, which are involved in purchase agreements, the rest of the cabal of wealthy entrepreneurs is there to deliver demands on critical input supply. “This could help the U.S. administration’s messaging that to even ​be able to discuss a board of investment, China needs to be a reliable investment partner and not weaponise supply,” he said. 

Also included in Trump’s caravan is director Brett Ratner, who directed Melania’s Trump’s vanity-project documentary that turned into a box office flop. Ratner will spend his trip scouting locations for Rush Hour 4, which was greenlit at Trump’s demand, according to the New York Post.

It was the bureau chief’s first time back on Capitol Hill since The Atlantic published multiple bombshell reports detailing how Patel’s alleged substance abuse and his unexplained absences had alarmed officials in and out of the agency.

But the topic was apparently still too hot for Patel to handle come Tuesday. In one particularly heated exchange with Senator Chris Van Hollen, Patel resorted to a barrage of lies and mockery in a futile attempt to deflect from his issues.

“You have publicly denied those allegations and filed a defamation lawsuit, so today as you testify before Congress, is it your testimony that those allegations are categorically false?” asked Van Hollen.

“Unequivocally, categorically false,” Patel said.

“So there have been no occasions in your tenure when FBI personnel were unable to promptly reach you?” pressed Van Hollen.

Patel insisted that federal employees have been able to reach him at any hour of the day. But the line of questioning flew off the rails when Van Hollen asked for confirmation that there had been “no occasions when [Patel’s] security detail had difficulty waking or locating” him.

“Nope, it’s a total farce, I don’t even know where you get this stuff, but that doesn’t make it credible because you say so,” Patel deadpanned, slowly blinking his eyes.

“I’m not saying it, Director Patel, it’s written and documented—” Van Hollen said, when Patel interjected: “You are literally saying it.”

“No, I am saying that these are reports, Director Patel,” Van Hollen clarified.

“Unlike baseless reports—the only person that was slinging margaritas in El Salvador on the taxpayer dollar with a convicted gangbanging rapist was you. The only person that ran up a several thousand–dollar bar tab in Washington, D.C. … was you,” Patel said, referring to when Van Hollen visited Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland constituent who was mistakenly deported to El Salvador’s mega-prison by the Trump administration last year, to advocate for his release.

“This is the ultimate example of hypocrisy. I will not be tarnished by baseless allegations … by the media,” Patel shouted.

“Director Patel, come on. These were serious allegations that were made,” Van Hollen said. “The fact that you mention that indicates you don’t know what you are talking about.”

WOW -- Patel snaps at Van Hollen and attacks him with debunked smears, saying, "the only person that was slinging margaritas in El Salvador with taxpayer dollars with a convicted gang-banging rapist was you" pic.twitter.com/CFNpGOU7YU

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 12, 2026

The man who pledged to fight for unseen Americans by lowering prices and ending endless wars isn’t doing either, and remained adamant that he’s still on the right path forward when asked about it on Tuesday.

“When you’re negotiating with Iran, Mr. President, to what extent are Americans’ financial situations motivating you to make a deal?” a reporter asked Trump before he left for China on Tuesday, alluding to the skyrocketing inflation caused by the fallout from the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran and Lebanon.

“Not even a little bit,” Trump said, shockingly out of touch even for him. “The only thing that matters when I’m talking about Iran is they can’t have a nuclear weapon. I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation, I don’t think about anybody. I think about one thing: We cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon. That’s all. That’s the only thing that motivates me.”

Trump on Iran War:

Reporter: What extent are Americans’ financial situation motivating you to make a deal?

Trump: Not even a little bit. I don't think about Americans’ financial situation pic.twitter.com/TJ94pGpqD8

— Acyn (@Acyn) May 12, 2026

ABC News’s Karen Travers asked Trump to clarify his comments. The president doubled down.

“Did you say earlier that the only thing that matters to you when it comes to Iran is the nuclear weapon? You’re not considering the financial impact of this war on Americans?”

“The most important thing by far, including whether our stock market … goes up or down a little bit—the most important thing by far is Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon,” Trump replied.

“What about the pressure on Americans in crisis right now? What they’re paying for food—”

“Every American understands.… They just had a poll, like 85 percent … they understand that Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon. If Iran has a nuclear weapon the whole world would be in trouble. Because they happen to be crazy,” Trump said. “When it’s over, you’re gonna have a massive drop in the price of oil.… Oil is gonna drop, the stock market’s gonna go through the roof, and truly I think we’re in the golden age right now.”

Reporter: Did you say you're not considering the financial impact of this war on Americans?!?!?!

Trump: The most important thing is Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon.

Reporter: What about the pressure on Americans right now?

Trump: EVERY AMERICAN UNDERSTANDS. They just did a… pic.twitter.com/B27qXqisZr

— Acyn (@Acyn) May 12, 2026

These are gift-wrapped, made-for-midterm-attack-ad comments, and the political sphere reacted as such.

“Another absolutely horrendous quote that will be shoved down Republicans’ throats during the 2026 midterms,” podcaster Tommy Vietor wrote.

“If it wasn’t the the post world war 2 order and our whole damn democracy at stake you’d really have to laugh,” The Bulwark’s Tim Miller opined on X.

“Trump just admitted what we’ve known all along,” Representative Adriano Espaillait commented. “He does not care that Americans can’t afford to live.”

As of May 12, nearly every poll shows that the majority of Americans oppose the war on Iran.

At a lunch with Senate Republicans Tuesday, Secret Service Director Sean Curran offered up a detailed outline of how the agency planned to use the $1 billion Republicans requested to implement “security adjustments and upgrades,” including those related to the ballroom’s construction. 

The White House said it wants $220 million for hardening security at the White House, including “bulletproof glass, drone detection technologies, chemical and other threat filtration and detection systems.” Republicans’ request had specified the money could go to “above-ground and below-ground security features” as part of Trump’s so-called “East Wing Modernization Project.”

A gentle reminder: Trump originally pitched that his ballroom would cost just $200 million total, which is less than the hardening costs alone. The funding for Trump’s ballroom was originally sourced from a cabal of private donors—many of whom had hefty government contracts. Now it will drain $1 billion out of taxpayers’ wallets, as well.

The request also contained another $180 million for an entirely new visitor screening facility and $100 million for security at high-profile events—ostensibly held at Trump’s behemoth venue.  

In addition, it contained another $500 million to specifically bolster the Secret Service, including $175 million for Secret Service training “in the modern threat environment, $175 million to improve security for protectees, and $150 million to fund the Secret Service’s “work to country drones, airspace incursion, unmanned systems, biological threats, and other emerging threats through investments in state-of-the-art technologies.”

The original budget was proposed as part of a $72 billion package to fund agencies under the Department of Homeland Security, including ICE and Border Patrol. The Secret Service was already appropriated $3.5 billion in fiscal year 2026, a $192 million increase from 2025. 

Trump’s 2022 suit targeted former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and former FBI Director James Comey (amongst others), claiming that they had participated in a broad racketeering conspiracy to create false allegations that his 2016 presidential campaign was tied to Russia. A district court dismissed the case in January 2023.

But the frivolous legal attack wasn’t just struck down in court—it also netted Trump and his personal attorney, Alina Habba, a nearly $1 million sanction. In November, Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals Judge William Pryor Jr. upheld the fine and noted that “many of Trump’s and Habba’s legal arguments were indeed frivolous,” echoing a lower court’s findings that Trump had made a “malicious prosecution claim without a prosecution” and a “trade secret claim without a trade secret.”

It’s been half a year since then, and on Tuesday, the Eleventh Circuit declined another opportunity to rehear Trump’s case.

Six of the 12 judges on the panel were Trump appointees. None of them sought a vote to rehear the case.

The next stop on this component of Trump’s retribution campaign would be the Supreme Court, if Trump intends to push the legal case to its very end. It’s unclear how the nation’s highest judiciary would vote, though in the last handful of weeks the court has made some wildly controversial decisions related to gerrymandering and voting rights that lawmakers, political commentators, and even members of the court have argued placed Trump’s interests above the parameters of the law.

Makary is resigning from the agency after clashing with President Trump over vaping and other policy decisions, and his possible firing was reported last week by The Wall Street Journal. Trump was reportedly upset that Makary wouldn’t approve menthol, mango, and blueberry vape flavors from Glas because they would appeal to young, underage users. Trump promised to “save vaping” on the 2024 campaign trail.

Trump refused to say whether he fired Makary Tuesday, telling reporters on the White House lawn, “I don’t want to say, but Marty’s a great guy.

“He’s a friend of mine, he’s a wonderful man, and he’s going to be off, and the assistant, the deputy, is taking over temporarily, until we find—everybody wants that job. It’s a very important job. Marty’s a terrific guy, but he’s going to go on and he’s going to lead a good life,” Trump said. “He was having some difficulty. You know he’s a great doctor, and he was having some difficulty, but he’s gonna go on and he’s gonna do well. Everybody wants that job. Everybody.”

Q: "Did you ask Marty Makary to resign, sir? Or did you fire your FDA commissioner?"

President Trump: "Well, I don't want to say. But Marty's a great guy…He's going to be off, and the assistant—the deputy is taking over temporarily…Everybody wants that job." pic.twitter.com/8PJF9UTEjj

— CSPAN (@cspan) May 12, 2026

Makary was also criticized privately by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who questioned his management skills and was considering scaling back his role last year.

Under Makary, the FDA has faced heavy criticism for seemingly embracing anti-vaccination policies, and many staffers have left the agency or been laid off. The turmoil at the agency has alarmed pharmaceutical executives, public health experts, and medical professionals.

Trump has shaken up health care positions in his administration lately, naming former deputy surgeon general Erica Schwartz to head the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and nominating Fox News contributor Dr. Nicole Saphier as surgeon general last month.

Schwartz appears to be a conventional choice, while Saphier appears to fit the conservative MAGA mindset. Which direction will Trump go in for his next FDA commissioner?

This story has been updated.

In a court filing last week, Leo Garcia Venegas said that on the morning of May 2, an unmarked SUV blocked him in his driveway at his home in Silverhill, Alabama. Before Venegas could produce his REAL ID proving his citizenship, two ICE agents pulled him out of the truck he was driving and arrested him. In the filing, Venegas said he was driving his brother’s truck because his broke down.

When ICE approached the truck, Venegas, remembering his previous arrests, tried to quickly prove that he’s a citizen, but the agents didn’t give him a chance even though he was holding his ID.

“Still without asking me a single question or issuing any lawful commands, the officers pulled me out of my car, tackled me to the ground, and shackled me around both my arms and legs,” Venegas said in a sworn declaration. “The officers did not listen when I said I was a citizen and they showed no interest in looking at my Alabama Star ID, even though it is a REAL ID issued only to people who can prove their lawful status.”

Venegas’s declaration said that he was shackled for 15 minutes while the agents digitally verified his identity, but he said they didn’t ask him any questions.

“At no point prior to physically detaining me did the officers ask me any questions about my identity, my citizenship, or my immigration status,” his court filing said. “They did not ask me to step out of the car. They did not even look at my ID before using physical force against me even though I had it in my hand.”

Venegas is the lead plaintiff in a class action lawsuit against DHS over their immigration enforcement policies, and he was detained twice last year in raids on construction sites he was working at, despite having his REAL ID both times. That may be on purpose, as a DHS official said in a declaration as part of Vargas’s lawsuit that “REAL ID can be unreliable to confirm U.S. citizenship.”

Bizarrely, DHS denies detaining Venegas, saying in a statement that “Leonardo Garcia Venegas was NOT detained last week. On Saturday, May 2, ICE conducted a routine vehicle stop on a car registered to an illegal alien. After Venegas’ identity was established, he was released.”

In October, a ProPublica investigation found that ICE had detained at least 170 U.S. citizens in raids or at protests, in some cases blatantly violating the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution by using excessive force and detaining people without probable cause. The agency has also been caught lying about the U.S. citizens they’ve detained and how they have treated them. Venegas alone has had three bad interactions with ICE. How many others are suffering?

Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair Gen. Dan Caine and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth were questioned about their half a trillion dollar funding request for the Iran war at a Senate Appropriations hearing on Tuesday, two weeks after Trump told Congress that the conflict was “terminated.”

“General Caine, the president has claimed on several occasions over the past couple of months that the war is over, the conflict has been concluded. What were the goals of the U.S. conflict in Iran, and have we achieved them?” Senator Dick Durbin asked.

The general couldn’t offer a straight answer.

“Well, sir, I’m gonna be mindful of my need to maintain trust with a variety of stakeholders in the job that I’m in, which includes you, the American people, the Joint Force, and the president.… Only our political and civilian leaders set the national military objectives,” Caine replied, refusing to answer the question directly. “I’ll defer to the secretary and the president on other strategic objectives, but that’s what we’ve been focused on, sir.”

Durbin: "The president has claimed on several occasions over the last few months that the war is over, that the conflict has been concluded. What were the goals of the U.S. conflict in Iran and have we achieved them?"

Gen. Caine: "I'll defer to the secretary and the president." pic.twitter.com/9dzVLnJjNW

— The Bulwark (@BulwarkOnline) May 12, 2026

“Do you feel that the situation in the Strait of Hormuz indicates a victory on our side?” Durbin continued.

Caine once again deferred to the president, refusing to call upon his years of military expertise to give a simple judgment call on a question the entire world knows the answer to.

“Sir, only political leaders decide victory or defeat, and I’ll leave it to them to opine on that. They are the ones who invoke or stop the use of military force.”

“Well, let me put it in strictly military terms,” Durbin said. “Can you explain to the American people, who are facing these gasoline and diesel oil prices, what is going on in the Strait of Hormuz, where Iran—which was attacked by us—seemingly has the Strait of Hormuz at a standstill, with 1,500 tankers waiting for either permission or peaceful circumstances to navigate?”

“Militarily, it’s a case where Iran is choosing to hold the world’s economy hostage through their use of military power across their southern flank,” Caine replied. “And so I would encourage Iran to reconsider that. And I would encourage those allies and partners who have an opportunity to come assist with that tactical problem to do so.”

That answer certainly does not indicate victory.

Durbin: "Do you feel that the situation in the Strait of Hormuz indicates a victory?"

Gen. Caine: "Only political leaders decide victory or defeat. I'll leave it to them to opine on that…It's a case where Iran is choosing to hold the world's economy hostage." pic.twitter.com/EoI5hefx8l

— The Bulwark (@BulwarkOnline) May 12, 2026

Brian Driscoll was a decorated FBI agent with 18 years at the agency under his belt before he was offered the bureau’s number two job at the beginning of Donald Trump’s second term. A clerical error would ultimately place Driscoll at the top of the agency, making him the bureau’s acting director—an oversight that wasn’t corrected until the Senate confirmed Kash Patel at the end of February.

Driscoll wasn’t keen to take the reins of the FBI but told CNN Tuesday that he agreed to take the job after he was informed it was between him and a political appointee.

Yet as the weeks bore on, the questions he fielded from incoming Trump officials began to concern him. They inquired about his political affiliations, who he voted for, when he began supporting Trump, and if he supported a Democrat in recent elections.

Patel was more blunt. The onboarding wouldn’t be an issue so long as Driscoll wasn’t active on social media, didn’t donate to the Democratic Party, and didn’t vote for Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 election, Driscoll recalled Patel saying.

“It made the hair on the back of my neck stand up,” Driscoll told CNN.

Driscoll met with Patel after the latter had been confirmed. Patel flatly said that “the FBI tried to put the president in jail and he hasn’t forgotten it,” Driscoll recalled.

The issue came to a head two weeks after Trump’s inauguration. When the White House demanded the names of some 6,000 bureau staff who were involved in the January 6 probe, Driscoll refused, sparking accusations from then–Justice Department official Emil Bove that there was “insubordination” among the FBI’s leadership.

Driscoll said that when he confronted Bove about the need for a list, Bove blamed it on “cultural rot in the FBI.”

“I was telling them this is wrong,” Driscoll told CNN.

Driscoll was fired months later, in August, but the purge hasn’t quieted down for those left behind at the bureau. The agency, according to Driscoll, is still focused on punishing or removing any FBI agents who could be perceived as threats to the president’s agenda, at the White House’s behest. That includes sacking employees who were involved in investigating the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021, as well as employees involved in Trump’s classified documents probe.

Driscoll is one of three former senior FBI agents who have sued the Trump administration for firing them as part of a “campaign of retribution.” That lawsuit is ongoing.

During a meeting of the Senate Appropriations Committee’s defense subcommittee regarding the Pentagon’s outrageous $1.5 trillion dollar budget request, Graham became visibly frustrated when speaking about a CBS News report from the day before that Pakistan had quietly allowed Iranian aircraft to park at its military bases, potentially to shield them from U.S. airstrikes.

Graham pressed the Joint Chiefs of Staff chair, General Dan Caine, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on whether they believed that was consistent with Pakistan’s role as a mediator between the U.S. and Iran. Both military leaders refused to weigh in.

“I don’t want to get in the middle of these negotiations—” Hegseth said, and Graham exploded.

“Well, I do! I want to get in the middle of these negotiations!” he said.

“I don’t trust Pakistan as far as I can throw ’em! If they actually do have Iranian aircraft parked in Pakistan bases to protect Iranian military assets, that tells me we should be looking maybe for somebody else to mediate. No wonder this damn thing is going nowhere!”

a frustrated Lindsey Graham to Hegseth and Caine: "No wonder this damn thing is going nowhere!" pic.twitter.com/LEdIGxuiRZ

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 12, 2026

Graham indicated Monday that his beef with Pakistan was mostly related to his loyalty to Israel. “If this reporting is accurate, it would require a complete reevaluation of the role Pakistan is playing as mediator between Iran, the United States and other parties,” he wrote on X. “Given some of the prior statements by Pakistani defense officials towards Israel, I would not be shocked if this were true.”

It’s not clear what statements he was specifically referring to, but Pakistani officials have strongly condemned Israel’s continued strikes in Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran.

Pakistan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs denied CBS’s reporting in a statement, calling it “misleading and sensationalized.”

“The Iranian aircraft currently parked in Pakistan arrived during the ceasefire period and bear no linkage whatsoever to any military contingency or preservation arrangement,” the statement said. “Assertions suggesting otherwise are speculative, misleading, and entirely detached from the factual context.”

Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Asim Munir, the leader of the Pakistani military, have emerged as key negotiators through the extended and tenuous ceasefire. A resolution to the talks remains out of reach, as Trump declared Sunday that the latest terms Iran offered were “TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE!”

There wasn’t even supposed to be a contest, thanks to independent populist Dan Osborn running for the Senate. The Nebraska Democratic Party planned to endorse his candidacy this year due to his strong performance in 2024, when he came within seven percentage points of defeating incumbent Republican Senator Deb Fischer and outperformed Kamala Harris’s 21-point loss to Donald Trump in the state.

But then 79-year-old pastor William Forbes entered the race. While Forbes is a registered Democrat, he’s voted for Trump three times and attended a Republican training event earlier this year. Nebraska Democrats were understandably worried, so now retired pharmacy tech Cindy Burbank is running against Forbes.

Burbank said that if she wins the primary, she’ll drop out and endorse Osborn so he has a clear field to take on incumbent Republican Senator Pete Ricketts, whose family is worth billions. Not surprisingly, Republicans are crying foul, calling Burbank’s candidacy a coordinated and unfair means to prop up Osborn.

Republican Secretary of State Bob Evnen tried to kick Burbank off the ballot in March, but she successfully sued to stay on. Burbank also paid the filing fee for a third-party candidate, Mike Marvin, of the Legal Marijuana NOW Party.

Osborn is an Omaha union leader who became popular during a 77-day strike at a Kellogg’s cereal plant in 2021, catapulting him to fame and his strong showing in 2024. A former registered Democrat, he ran as an independent that year in part due to the party’s struggles to convince voters in the Great Plains, and pledges not to caucus with either party if he wins this time around. He’s behind Ricketts by only one percentage point in recent polling.

“The national Democratic brand is toxic among voters in states like Nebraska in the sense that it’s very much identified with the coastal liberal elites on a whole host of issues,” Mark P. Jones, a political science professor at Rice University, told USA Today. “Nebraska Democrats are adopting this sort of plan B strategy, which is to not run a Democratic candidate at all.”

Will Nebraska voters be able to figure out what’s going on? If Forbes wins the primary, he could siphon away votes from Osborn in November and help Ricketts to victory. If Burbank wins, Nebraska Democrats have to get the word out that she’s supporting Osborn. All of this could easily go wrong.

On Tuesday, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, or PEER, filed a lawsuit against the Department of the Interior in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, following unanswered Freedom of Information Act requests filed back in February for records regarding the public funds being used for Freedom 250—the organization overseeing everything from setting up the Grand Prix around the National Mall to Trump’s independence arch. The Department of the Interior never responded to the requests, and now PEER’s lawsuit claims that our money is being used with “with no transparency, no accountability, and no guardrails.”

“America’s 250th anniversary celebration is supposed to be an occasion for strengthening public trust in our democratic institutions, not eroding it,” PEER’s executive director, Tim Whitehouse, said in a statement on Monday. “In contrast, Freedom 250 is a privately managed slush fund.… It epitomizes what is wrong with politics today.”

PEER alleges that the Trump administration is using Freedom 250 to redirect $100 million in taxpayer funds from America 250 without congressional approval, mix private funding and public taxpayer money without oversight, sell “access to President Trump” for up to $2.5 million, solicit foreign donations, and more. PEER also accuses the DOI of pressuring workers to use Freedom 250 branding in their official email sign-offs, which could violate the Hatch Act.

The Trump administration has yet to comment on the lawsuit.

All three of the court’s liberal justices dissented against Monday’s order, but Justice Sonia Sotomayor penned the counterargument. In five concise pages, Sotomayor flamed her conservative colleagues for the ruling, arguing that it was “inappropriate” for the court to alter the state’s voting lines mere days before the primary. She noted that Alabama had already been found to have violated the Fourteenth Amendment by intentionally diluting the votes of its Black voters.

“The Court today unceremoniously discards District Court’s meticulously documented and supported discriminatory-intent finding & careful remedial order without any sound basis for doing so and without regard for the confusion that will surely ensue,” Sotomayor wrote in her dissent, noting that the decision will “cause only confusion as Alabamians begin to vote in the elections scheduled for next week.”

The high court’s order will allow Alabama’s GOP leaders to redraw electoral boundaries, offering a path for the party to eliminate one or both Democratic seats in the House and potentially imperil Democratic Representative Shomari Figures.

The ruling was made possible by the court’s decision to gut the Voting Rights Act late last month.

Black voters in Alabama had fought for years to have their voices heard, navigating the legal system to carve out another Black-majority voting district in the red Southern stronghold.

“We are witnessing a return to Jim Crow. And anybody who is alarmed by these developments—as everybody should be—better be making a plan to vote in November to put an end to this madness while we still can,” NAACP National President Derrick Johnson said in a statement to the Associated Press.

Perry Bacon: I’m Perry Bacon. I’m the host of the New Republic show Right Now. I’m joined by two great political scientists. Hakeem Jefferson is at Stanford University. Jake Grumbach is at the University of California, Berkeley. It’s afternoon for them, just barely—they’re on the West Coast. I’m glad they’re joining us today.

These are two people I really enjoy talking to, but we’re talking to them at a time that’s not that great. Literally about an hour ago, Tennessee voted to eliminate their majority-Black congressional district. You’re seeing Alabama, South Carolina, a bunch of states talking about doing that after the Supreme Court ruling last week further gutting—almost invalidating—the Voting Rights Act. We’re going to talk about the fallout from that and what it means for Black representation. Thanks, guys, for joining me.

Hakeem Jefferson: Glad to be here, Perry.

Bacon: Hakeem, just talk about that first of all.

Jefferson: Out of the gate, man. Out of the gate. Go ahead.

Bacon: The question I want to ask you all specifically is: Alito, Roberts, and the Supreme Court are basically saying that Black people are Democrats, so gerrymandering is about partisanship, and so it’s fine if we get rid of all the Black congressional districts because those are just Democrats, and the Republicans won the majority in those states, so they get to draw the lines. Why does it matter that Black representation goes down in these states?

Jefferson: Thanks for having us, again, Perry. Jake had some insights that I thought were just right on the money in the piece he wrote—so I’ll let Jake talk about the foolishness of the court’s thinking when it comes to partisanship and race, given what we political scientists and the broad public know about the overlapping nature of partisanship and race in the U.S. I’m going to let Jake set the groundwork for that.

But at the top: The Voting Rights Act is perhaps the most effective—if not one of the most effective—pieces of legislation in the country’s history. The post–Civil War amendments were meant to enshrine these rights for Black folk. But across the American South in particular, there were these attempts to burden the franchise for Black people. The Voting Rights Act comes along and helps to ensure that Black people get to enjoy access to the ballot without the burdens that lots of local jurisdictions tried to put in front of them.

I’ve been reading this work by political scientist Katherine Tate. She, early on, was thinking about: What’s the reason we might care about Black political representation? What does it matter?

So we have these expectations that Black representatives—who descriptively represent Black constituents—might have preferences, might have priorities that differ from their white counterparts. We might expect, for example, that if Black representatives have life experiences that align with Black constituents, they might prioritize issues related to criminal justice. We might remember, for example, the leadership that many Black representatives had in the aftermath—this will sound long ago—of Trayvon Martin’s death at the hands of George Zimmerman. It was Black representatives who really put out the clarion call about whether a young Black man wearing a hoodie should confront death in the way that Trayvon did.

We might have expectations that Black members of Congress are going to be better advocates for issues like criminal justice or for various redistributive programs.

You see in the Senate, for example, Black women holding Secretary Kennedy’s feet to the fire when it comes to access to vaccines or Black maternal health.

We might expect that descriptive representation comes with some substantive purchase. So the decline of Black representation is not only a slap in the face to the progress made for multiracial democracy, but we might worry that it will come with some substantive declines for issues that Black folks care about and that matter to them materially.

Bacon: Let me follow up on one question. Today, the district that was eliminated is in the Memphis area. The representative’s name is Steve Cohen. He is not Black. So talk about that—just help explain why that’s a loss as well.

Jefferson: So when Congress passed the Voting Rights Act, we talk about Black folks having the right to select representatives of their choice—that choice needn’t be a descriptive member of the group. It’s often the case that Black folks who are voting for members of Congress, given residential segregation and the like, perhaps that choice would be a Black representative. But sometimes the choice is to have somebody who has substantive priorities and interests that are aligned with theirs.

In the context of American politics—I’m sure Jake’s going to lay out even more eloquently—that means, for many and most Black folks, having the opportunity to vote for a Democratic politician and having substantive numbers such that their support for that candidate can get them over the finish line. But it’s a really good opportunity for Jake to lay out even more clearly the way that partisanship and race are so intertwined in American life.

Bacon: Go ahead, Jake.

Jake Grumbach: Great to be with you guys. Thanks, Perry, for organizing this conversation. Always great to be along with a friend and collaborator—and, unfortunately, at an inferior school slightly to myself—Hakeem Jefferson. But otherwise, excellent to see you.

Just to continue on Steve Cohen in Tennessee as a candidate of choice of a racial minority group—that is central to Voting Rights Act Section 2, which just got cut in Callais by the Supreme Court. The idea of a candidate of choice—it can be like a proxy. It’s more likely to be a member of that racial minority group. But Steve Cohen is a long-serving, popular representative with a majority-Black constituency. He’s an Eastern European Jewish guy in ethnic background. But you should quickly YouTube him.

Bacon: Just hear his voice.

Grumbach: Yeah. That dude is Memphis. You could be like, “Oh yeah, 8Ball & MJG, and Three 6 Mafia, and Steve Cohen.” It actually—

Jefferson: He spent time around some Black people.

Grumbach: Yeah. He’s a candidate of choice in this way of the Black community of the district.

But taking a step back here—Hakeem spoke about the Voting Rights Act as one of the most effective pieces of legislation in American history. It’s also the culmination—like Hakeem mentioned—of the enforcement of the Reconstruction Amendments after the Civil War: the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. Thirteenth Amendment: ban on slavery. Fourteenth Amendment: equality under the law, which is really codified in the Civil Rights Act of 1964—

Jefferson: And importantly, birthright citizenship.

Grumbach: And birthright citizenship! The Fourteenth Amendment says, unlike the Dred Scott decision of the Supreme Court before the Civil War, which said Black people can never be citizens, this says you’re a citizen when you’re born in the U.S. And citizens and all people on U.S. soil are entitled to equality under the law, to due process, jury of your peers—your people have to be able to serve on juries too. That sort of equality under the law, which was violated by Jim Crow—eventually the Civil Rights Act of 1964 ends that.

The Fifteenth Amendment is no ban on voting on the basis of race or previous condition of servitude. And the Jim Crow voting laws violated that.… The 1965 Voting Rights Act—the crown jewel of the civil rights movement—actually enforces the Fifteenth Amendment, and to some extent the Fourteenth Amendment as well.

That said, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 has different sections. Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act was the pre-clearance section. This said: Former Jim Crow areas—counties and states—if you’re going to change your voting laws or redistrict, you’re going to have to pass that through the U.S. Justice Department. At the time under Obama when this is being litigated, it’s Eric Holder as attorney general. He gets to say, You’re thinking about changing your voting laws? Is this going to suppress votes? Is this some small version of Jim Crow? You have to review this with us.

The 2013 Shelby County Supreme Court decision ends Section 5 with a similar logic. John Roberts says basically: Racism’s over, Section 5 is done, no more pre-clearance. We see a wave of election law changes by state legislatures and the changing of voting procedures—purges of voter rolls. The things you know as voter suppression in the 2010s come after the Shelby County decision.

But then Section 2: the vote dilution provision. That’s mostly about redistricting, and it’s been interpreted in subsequent judicial opinions. There’s a standard, and that standard is what we talked about—racial groups, particularly racial minority groups, have the ability to select their candidates of choice, and they’re not blocked from voting, registering to vote, and then voting for those candidates of choice. And then the district system is not set up in a way to constantly have a racial majority group—usually white people, but it depends on the place—block those candidates of choice through overwhelming voting against them, either at the primary or general election, such that those candidates of choice of the racial minority group get to be in office. That is the standard of Section 2. The Supreme Court in Callais ended that.

What are the long-term ramifications of ending Section 2 here, when we think about redistricting? Partisan gerrymandering—a state legislature who controls districting—this is very unique in the U.S. system. State governments draw districts and determine voting laws for the most part within the Voting Rights Act, whatever the Supreme Court says is allowed of something like the Voting Rights Act, which is Congressional legislation and the Constitution. That’s unique—around the world, it’s usually the national government that regulates voting and elections and districting, not states. But states do it.

Partisan gerrymandering has long been legal. You can actually say, We are setting up this map to maximize the seats from my party and minimize the seats of the other party. The only thing you couldn’t do is racially gerrymander. If in that partisan map, racial minority groups are a coherent community that vote cohesively for candidates of choice, that repeatedly choose candidates that they support in majorities—those candidates have to be able to take office. You can only partisan-gerrymander so much.

The Voting Rights Act Section 2 blocks the extent to which you can gerrymander, by saying, Black, Latino, Asian American, Native Americans in cohesive communities have to be able to elect their candidates of choice. With that falling away, what we now have—especially in the South—is that you can fully do Republican gerrymanders without having to think about the many hundreds of thousands and millions of Black voters electing their candidates of choice. This allows more extreme Republican gerrymanders, and it’s going to allow more extreme Democratic gerrymanders in blue states.

That’s the outcome, and the biggest casualty is Black representation. For the parties, it’s going to mildly help Republicans, but Democrats can gerrymander more effectively too, now, so it’ll even out a little. The big casualty is Black representation—to some extent Latino representation in other parts of the country, but mostly Black representation in the South is the casualty here for the long term.

Bacon: Let me follow up on the blue state part. I don’t think I fully understand. Explain how blue states could reduce Black representation. Is that what you’re saying? Explain that a little bit.

Grumbach: Yeah. In blue states there’s less racially polarized voting because the racial groups tend to vote more similarly. There are still racial differences in voting in blue states, but in a state like Illinois, Black and white libs—they vote more consistently. There are still big differences, like Hakeem said—different priorities. But it’s not as different as when you go to a Deep South state, where it’ll be 90 percent of white people vote one way, 90 percent of Black people vote another way.

In a state like Illinois or California or Massachusetts—Black people in Martha’s Vineyard—that is not how racial voting works in the Northeast or West Coast or Midwest. That’s not how Detroit looks. Even in the South—urban white people in Atlanta are not voting 90 percent against the Black people, and Black people are not voting 90 percent against those.

What I mean there is: If you wanted to maximize the number of blue seats in a state, what you want to do is get every [district] to have 51 percent blue voters and make the Republican voters have no ability to set seats. What that does is chop up cohesive racial groups more than you otherwise would.

It’s nothing as significant as the hit to Black representation in the South. But we will see a little bit of an increased ability—we’ll see how Democrats play this and how the maps end up. But the idea that now you don’t have to worry about racial minority groups just opens up the types of maps you can draw on the basis of partisan goals.

Bacon: So the Supreme Court is ignoring race, or prioritizing partisanship? … Are they pretending race doesn’t exist, or are they saying party is the thing that divides us today?

Grumbach: That’s right. Hakeem alluded to this. A big part of the logic of the ruling is they’re saying: To prove vote dilution under the Voting Rights Act, it’s going to be a near-impossible standard. You’re going to have to say, in places where it’s just Democrats or just Republicans, we have to find that the white and Black people and Latinos and Asian Americans and Native Americans vote systematically differently—including in general elections.

In the South, that’s basically saying you have to hold constant control … and find systematic racial differences in voting even within the same party, in places that are very polarized by party and also by race, like in the Deep South. That’s basically going to say: You found the two white libs in some Deep South county that tend to vote with the Black people in a Democratic primary, and because they’re voting with the Black people, we have to ignore all the 90 percent of white people voting against the Black candidates, because they’re from a different party.

The logic is wacky, but you can see where it comes from. Their theory is that somebody votes on the basis of race or on the basis of party, right—and that historically, there are partisan forces and there are racial forces. But this is a pretty common misconception. In people’s own development of their own politics—when you were growing up and coming of age politically and deciding which party do you think represents you more—maybe there’s a lower-level office, you don’t really know what the comptroller does, but you see a “D” or an “R” next to their name—how did, in adolescence, you come to think of which party represents you better? It has something to do with race, civil rights, the legacies of the parties representing different racial groups. Race and party are not this separate thing. Race drives how the parties organize themselves and how people identify with the parties.

It’s not a “control for party” story—it’s that party is a mediator, or an intermediate step between [race and voting behavior]. For that reason, this “control for party” thing—sadly, I, like other political scientists, have really played into that—is a fundamentally problematic and just fallacious way to think of the process of partisanship and race throughout history, or within individual decision-making models.

Jefferson: We see it in all the structural ways that Jake has laid out in terms of vote choice. We also see it when we try to explain party ID. If you were to run some attitudinal models and you’re just trying to explain variation in Black partisanship or white partisanship, on either side, you’re going to see relationships between that partisan outcome and racial attitudes.

In the case of white Americans—imperfect though it may be—one of the things that will consistently help you explain white support for the Republican Party or for the Democratic Party is what they think about Black people. What we scholars call their racial resentment attitudes. And on the side of Black folks, one of the consistent predictors of Black support for the Democratic Party is identity centrality—that is, how important is being Black to their identity?

It provides some empirical support for this point that Jake was making.… People sometimes try to oversimplify Black support for the Democratic Party, as though Black folks aren’t making a real, calculated choice here between two imperfect options. But when many Black folks think about their support for the Democratic Party, it is because they perceive that, though imperfect, it is the party that most advances Black interests.

We’ve seen declines in the level of Black support for the Democratic Party. But these Black folks still aren’t overwhelmingly running to identify as Republicans. If anything, they’re putting the Democratic Party ID on ice, because many of them—especially some young people—are concerned that the party is not advancing Black interests. We can’t think about partisan choice, or outcomes related to partisan choice, without thinking about race—even as the Supreme Court in all of its decisions these days wants to convince us that race doesn’t matter. All of the survey evidence and the like that we have would suggest otherwise.

Grumbach: In the Trump era … it wasn’t not surprising that Trump got more Latino voting. He got maybe 45 percent of the Latino vote. It’s not not surprising that Black support for the Democratic Party in 2024 is at 90 percent, whereas for Obama it was in the mid-90s. There are some fluctuations. And it is interesting that white support for Trump is at 60 percent, whereas in some elections white people supported Republicans at the high 60s. But think about a 60–40 election. If a president won 60–40, you’d be like, That’s the landslide of the century.

A 20-point gap? … The levels of actual racial sorting in the electorate are actually high in raw terms. Even though it’s interesting that the presidential candidate who said Mexicans aren’t bringing their best and were criminals and rapists got a solid 45 percent of the Latino vote—that’s important to understand. At the same time, 55 to 45 is a big gap. It’s still a very racially sorted electorate.

And furthermore, what Hakeem said that’s so on point is: Even if there was a little bit of de-racialization in the electorate, with racial groups not being quite as sorted into the parties as before, it’s still very sorted. Racial attitudes are more predictive now than ever. Latinos who voted for the Republican Party recently tend to be the racially conservative Latinos. The most predictive thing for naturalized immigrants that became U.S. citizens and now vote—the most predictive survey question is the racial resentment index.

Saying, Hello, new Asian American voter, naturalized Latino American—what is the most predictive attitude? It’s: Do you think Black people are poorer than white people because they’re lazier and don’t work as hard, or because of discrimination? Your answer to that question is the most correlated with your vote choice. Racial attitudes are more related to vote choice, even as groups change.

And when people are shocked by that and saying, But more Latinos voted Republican in 2024 than before, so it’s not about race—I’m like, You haven’t met a lot of people of color if you’ve never heard people of color say other people of color are lazy. Especially a different group of color. I’m like, You’ve never been in the barbershop. That is just so central to how people organize their thoughts about society—even people of color.

Jefferson: Totally.

Bacon: Looking forward, I want to drill down a little bit. It is likely the case that we’ll have a House majority that the Democrats control in November. We’ll also have Tennessee have zero Black representatives, South Carolina maybe with zero, Alabama down to one, Louisiana down to two. So what does it look like?

On some level, it’s better.… Black people support a Democratic House—let’s put it that way. On the other hand, Black representation will go down. So Hakeem, talk about that: If we have a Democratic-controlled Congress that has fewer Black members, no James Clyburn in leadership, but it’s still a Democratic majority Congress—what is the difference? How is it different than it would be if … Section 2 were still in place?

Jefferson: One of the things that we know from the descriptive representation literature—not to hawk the book again, but I’ve been reading it, so it’s top of mind, but it’s a little dated now, and I don’t have evidence from more recent years about this. One of the things that Tate observes in this work, Black Faces in the Mirror—which is, talk about relevant, about Black representation—one of the things that she observes in the second part of the book, where she’s thinking about Black evaluations of Congress, is that Black people have slightly more positive views when they’re represented by Black electeds.

I want to caveat that by saying I don’t know if this holds up in the contemporary era. But that’s what we know from the descriptive representation literature: People perceive institutions as more legitimate, as fairer, as more likely to give them outcomes that they desire, when they have descriptive representatives.

I do want to caution—this is a group of us who like some complexity and nuance—that descriptive representation isn’t the end-all, be-all of what people need. It is not the case that mere descriptive representation gives good material outcomes. I live in Palo Alto, not too far from San Francisco, with a district attorney who is a Black woman who very proudly supports tough-on-crime policies and the like.

But what we will observe is a continued decline in Black people’s perception of the legitimacy of political institutions—namely Congress—as their representation declines. And at some level we’ll observe this in the levels of advocacy we observe.

Bacon: Is your family in the Clyburn district?

Jefferson: Yes.

Bacon: What does that look like? Whether you like Clyburn or not, he is a Black voice for that community. What do you think the impact of that loss is? He is likely to lose—potentially his seat is gone as well.

Jefferson: I have so many memories of Jim Clyburn being very present. His sister-in-law, for a small time, was my piano teacher. I quit piano, though. He was recently on campus, and he and I took a photograph together. The way that this stuff works on the ground is people just know the guy. I don’t think that people are following all the machinations of what he’s up to, but they perceive—and I think they’re right about it—that they’ve got a powerful representative who has a drawl that is familiar to them, who just by sense of his similarity has their interests at heart.

I think we forget that people contact their members of Congress for any number of things, and the perception that one can be in touch, that one can reach out when they’re struggling with the ordinary stuff of life—I don’t know that we have great evidence of this empirically, but you might expect that that declines when the person is different from you, even if that person has otherwise similar preferences.

Symbolic representation and descriptive representation—we shouldn’t put all of our weight on it. But we know the way that people think about their citizenship, the way that people think about their place in a broader polity, is in part a function of how much they see themselves represented in the governing bodies of society. A Congress that has fewer Black representatives—fewer people who look like Jasmine Crockett or Jim Clyburn—is a Congress that will have an even tougher time convincing Black folks that it’s a legitimate political institution that is advancing democratic goals. Small-d democratic goals.

Bacon: So we’re in gerrymandering season right now. Jake, are you back?

Grumbach: I’m back. I want to talk about Black representation, on Hakeem’s last answer.

Bacon: Say it again?

Grumbach: My iPhone overheated, but I would love to jump in on Black representation.

Bacon: Sounds good. Then we’ll move on to something else. Go ahead.

Grumbach: When we think about the Congressional Black Caucus and Black representation in Congress right now, we have to think about the triumphs and the serious limitations.

So the triumphs first. On my mom’s side of the family, my grandfather was the editor of the Chicago Defender—the preeminent Black newspaper [in the] mid-century. Getting Thurgood Marshall onto the Supreme Court under LBJ was the triumph of his life. Reporting on it and being a hack hounding LBJ and the Democratic Party through the Black press to get Thurgood Marshall on the court—that was everything.

And Black congressional representation represented the end of American authoritarianism and apartheid in the South—to have majority-Black areas, states that are 30, 40[-plus] percent Black, get their first Black representation since Reconstruction, since the northern Union military under Lincoln occupied the South and said, You have to allow Black voting for those 12 years. This is a triumph.

To this day, that generation in my family is very interested in descriptive representation—and it is a triumph. They remember the days before that, where even Bill Clinton in 1992 going on Arsenio [Hall] was a big deal. It was so new to be represented as your whole person in that way. Culturally, linguistically, the idea that Black people are human beings too and deserve representation—this was so basic, such a triumph.

And then I’ve got to say the limitations, though. Like Hakeem said, descriptive representation is not a perfect predictor. Clarence Thomas was a key figure behind the rollback of Black representation, period.

It’s not a perfect predictor. It’s actually quite an imperfect predictor. And the Republican Party has changed a lot. They know this, and they’ve run an increasing number of MAGA Black candidates that Black people do not vote for, but it scrambles the brains of descriptive representation differently.

Second, young Black Americans are not as interested in descriptive representation as the Boomer and Gen X generations were—and beyond that, the Silent Generation and returning Black veterans. That’s in part because they see the parity in representation. Now, Black representation in Congress is proportional to the Black population. It’s a triumph. But it has not delivered material equality. The racial wealth gap is greater than it’s been in centuries.

This is the precarity of the Black middle class—the fact that the 2008 financial crisis destroyed half of Black family wealth. Things like war and imperialism that young Black Americans see, and they see a similar logic of racial hierarchy in imperialism and colonialism around the world. This is a reason why age polarization in Democratic Party primaries is big among Black voters. Young Black voters and older Black voters vote very differently in Democratic Party primaries, and we need to listen to these young Black people who were very central in Black Lives Matter and have a different orientation. It’s a different wave of Black politics.

The third thing is—we have to be real about this—the Congressional Black Caucus … Black Representatives are 10 of the 15 oldest members of Congress. They have very serious health issues, and they do not have successors. Even if the Voting Rights Act Section 2 stayed and they had these Black districts, many of these members of Congress—I don’t know what happened. There is not a generation lying in wait that they have cultivated, and it’s in some cases become a very personalistic fiefdom in a safe district that is not always aligned with the interests of the Black community more broadly.

Black Americans are the most—you’ll get this twisted, because people try to do this bait and switch in punditry; they’ll say white self-described liberals or white Democrats are sometimes to the left on policy issues of Black Americans. But it’s only if you subset white people. Like, If you pull out the leftmost white people, they are somehow to the left of all Black people on average!

But if you actually look at racial groups in the U.S., Black people are the leftmost on every issue—criminal justice on downward. We have to remember this—Paul Frymer’s book, Uneasy Alliances, was about this; Black people being a captured constituency in the Democratic Party. That’s why swing voters are doubly valuable in these states. But a Black voter whose choice is Democratic Party or bust is not a credible threat to the party in the same way.

This is a thing where we actually have to demand the most from Black representatives and not give them a pass because of descriptive representation. This is a moment where, with gerontocracy and with aging leadership and a new authoritarian moment, we have to ask these representatives to really step up.

Jefferson: And step down.

Bacon: We’re in a gerrymandering festival right now where Virginia moved to make eight of nine districts Democratic, even though it’s a closely divided state. Florida’s going to be 24–4 [Republican]. Tennessee will be 8–0 or 9–0 [Republican]—I’ve forgotten which one.

Are we saying that a Democratic-gerrymandered state and a Republican-gerrymandered state—are we saying that what happened in Tennessee is different than Florida or Virginia because they’re killing off Black districts specifically and targeting them? Is that qualitatively different for you all than what’s happening in, let’s say, Montana—if they gerrymandered an all-white Republican state, or a Democratic state—is this fundamentally different because of the majority-Black districts and the history we’re talking about?

Jefferson: This is more in Jake’s wheelhouse, but I’ll just say this quickly: We signed on—what feels like a long time ago—to public letters. We led public letters in support of legislation that would just weaken this ability to do this gerrymandering, period. No one thinks that this is good for democracy to have this kind of gerrymandering happening, whether it’s happening from Democrats or Republicans.

So I just want to put it on the record that my own politics—and if I recall, because Jake signed on and helped to lead the letter-writing campaign to convince Democrats to advance this legislation—Perry, I think that we’re in a bad equilibrium for democracy. This kind of tit-for-tat, what game theorists would have expected. I’ll just put it on the table: I don’t think that the argument is that any form of this is good for democracy. But I’ll let Jake take the particulars of the question.

Grumbach: So HR 1—that big democracy reform in the Democratic Congress, the post–AOC Squad election [in] 2018 comes in. Their first piece of legislation—that’s why it’s called House Resolution 1—was a democracy reform: the John Lewis Voting Rights Act stuff, stopping voter suppression, more resources for election security, and a ban on partisan gerrymandering. Because Congress can just say, No state can draw districts in a partisan way that’s unfair to voters of both parties. That’s obviously good.

But without that, you don’t want one-sided warfare. An arms race where both sides are doing it gives an incentive for both sides to say, “Let’s both stop this with new rules on both of us.” So still support that—that’s coming back into the agenda. At the same time, I will say, yes, there’s something different historically.

Partisan gerrymandering is incredibly consequential. Some post-Dobbs decisions that allowed states to ban abortion—those abortion bans in some states are only sustainable because partisan gerrymandering gives a minority of voters, typically in more rural areas, the ability to set the majority of the state legislature over the will of a pro-choice majority of voters in order to ban abortion. That’s an example of the consequentiality of partisan gerrymandering. It makes policy in the state more out of step with the will of the majority. Very important.

At the same time, there is something—given the long struggle over American democracy—that has been centrally about Black representation and voting rights. Black Americans have been the vanguard. Any push for democracy in the U.S.—the vanguard has been a Black democracy movement.… The Voting Rights Act Section 2 benefits all types of groups.

Just like the Civil Rights Act benefits white women and all types of things. Black American movements … if you survey Americans, the only constituency who place a priority on things like voting rights and the rules of the game of democracy as an issue in and of itself—not just to get better gas prices and stuff—it’s Black Americans.

There is something really special and really consequential about ending that Voting Rights Act triumph of Black representation that paid off. This is no ordinary love. Sade was like—these Black movements were really about—it’s not an ordinary movement. It’s actually a movement that translates into gains in democracy and equality for everyone, and that’s a kind of unique thing in world history. That’s why every movement around the world emulates the Black American civil rights movement of the mid–twentieth century.

Jefferson: As Jake was talking, I was thinking about a conversation that Jake and I had just this past Friday in person, where we were thinking about the magnitude of the efforts to undermine and to walk back this kind of progress that we know is targeted at weakening Black political power.

We’re in an industry and a discipline that at times has seemed to lose focus on that as the objective. Political scientists have often fallen prey to these arguments about, Does voter ID do this thing, does it affect turnout of that thing? The bigger goal has always been to undermine Black political power. Of course, we hear some scholars, often scholars of color and Black scholars in particular, using that language to describe these efforts, small though they sometimes seem.

But what this moment really forces me to think about is how to talk about what it is we’re observing. Jake is exactly right—this is such a clear attempt to undermine Black political power. When we think about it that way, asking, Does a voter ID law impact turnout? just seems like the wrong question. The attempt to suppress Black turnout in the first place is part of a larger package of a long-standing attempt to undermine Black political power. If anything, I hope the moment gives to scholars and practitioners a different vocabulary—maybe an old vocabulary—to describe what these folks are up to.

Bacon: Let me close with this subject. You both talked about this idea of Black political power, and we are watching a Supreme Court, an administration—we’ve had five years of this. The question I’m getting at is: It’s not that I don’t view this as a partisan project at this point, if only because I watched so many universities eagerly kill off any diversity initiatives they had—they seemed like they almost wanted to, on some level. I watched how many liberal columnists were eager to attack Ibram Kendi and pile on.

If you all are saying we’re seeing a pushback against Black political power, isn’t that going to win, because it includes all white Republicans and most white Democrats? Or a lot of white Democrats. I’m concerned that all racially conscious policy is being eliminated, and I don’t see that ending, because it seems like that is supported by all Republicans and many Democrats.

Jefferson: We’re in a long winter. This is a long winter of racial backlash at all levels, across any number of institutions. And Perry, you’re right to put your finger on it that yeah, you see a lot of white liberals who might push back against the most egregious forms of this racial backlash. But we should be attentive to the places of agreement between otherwise liberal white people and white conservatives when it comes to race—so often in the language of racial preference, or racial advantage, or the perception that Black folk and other racial minorities are getting goods they shouldn’t get.

What it demonstrates is what Black people and people of color broadly know, if only by way of experience, which is that race is one of these peculiar areas where things like liberalism can fall by the wayside. It does mean that you’ve got this weird coalition of folks who are at least on the fence about how explicit the remedies for racial oppression ought to be. That does make me nervous. If we were to advance legislation in Congress, most white Democrats would support legislation that protected Black civil rights and Black voting rights. But it is telling that among the white public, race is this area where you see some degrees of compromise that might worry us.

Grumbach: Thinking about the ups and downs in history of this—including since the Voting Rights Act—is very instructive. The Civil Rights Act—in the ’70s, the stories of the attempt to actually integrate schools, including in the North through that implementation, was different than the Civil Rights Act in theory—Black people can join the schools.

That’s one. Then we had actual affirmative action and affirmative action debates, including quotas and actual saved spots—like the equivalent of handicapped parking spots, but for Black people or for women or for Native American individuals. That was battled over. Then it wasn’t quotas—that was ruled unconstitutional. It became about: Can you take into account things like racial experience, identity-based experience in a setting—getting into schools or jobs or things like that, or preferential contracting in public contracts?

All of these things have been battled over. The thing that we mistook is: There are some things that won’t backslide that far. Sure—affirmative action, you can try that, that’ll fall back, whatever. The basics of the Voting Rights Act, especially Section 2—that was not something I had on my bingo card. Whereas we had seen a lot of backlash to the equivalent of much more materially substantive DEI—essentially real affirmative action.

In this racial backlash that we’re in—this anti-wokeness, and all this stuff within firms, within law schools, all types of institutions—the first thing is that whatever racial progress was made in 2020 has rolled back. That’s one thing, and I think that’s a big thing. We didn’t know—I didn’t think—it would backslide this far.

Jefferson: Yeah, I was about to say: Who’s included in this “we”?

Bacon: Are those things related, though? Once you have … like, isn’t John Roberts and Alito saying, Oh good, since white liberals no longer care about diversity anyway, we can go a little further? I know they want to just strike the Voting Rights Act down—they’ve wanted that their entire lives. They’re not denying that. But—

Jefferson: I will say—but Jake, one second—’cause Jake and I agree on about 98 percent of everything, so we need a little bit of friction here. And so I’ll gin up some friction only to say that this is the natural, logical end state. All of this is about power—which I know my brother Jake understands.

The DEI walkbacks, the fights over all this stuff in places like the ones we inhabit—universities—the fight over the 1619 Project. I’m not saying anything that Jake doesn’t already know. But all of those fights—sometimes as silly as CRT, as silly as they appear—they’re about discursive power, they’re about social power, they’re about power in the boardrooms.

And the Voting Rights Act and the like are just about a different domain of power. But for me, the through line is that this is always a question of who gets to wield power in a given domain. And so when we see all these white folk—including some white liberals—saying, Yeah, get rid of all this talk about diversity and all this stuff about Black people and all this, it’s a logical next step that they are not as on board as we might want them to be with the ascension of Black political power.

And there’s nothing that enshrines the right of Black people to wield political power in this country more than the Voting Rights Act. And so this is just a natural end state of this hellscape of trying to advance white political power at the expense of Black political power. That was my ginning up a fight with my brother Jake, who agrees with everything I just said, of course.

Grumbach: Yeah, I would say to this—I like that take. I think one is—I do think in woke 2.0, understanding that people of color—like, I think this is a conversation we’ve also had, Hakeem—you can define white politics as including non-white people too. In this way, that’s one way to square that circle. And I do think it’s worth thinking about that.

And I also think in this—like, the white liberal in mind I think you’re painting is the one that symbolically was supportive of some stuff that was convenient but doesn’t actually want any material changes to anything, and has a signaling sort of thing, a sign of In this house, blah blah blah, but doesn’t actually want to live next to Black people, doesn’t want to have their kids go to school with Black people, doesn’t want to do all that.

I also think, when we think this through, that has taken over. Where I’ve seen, actually—when you go to different parts of the country, those places that are much more racially sorted, like I talked about—those blue areas where our viewers and listeners tend to be in metro areas—when you get outside there, I saw what it was. When you go to places in the Deep South, where if it’s not MAGA and it’s political, it’s all Black people. And you see a white person—that white person is in a different place. It’s just really interesting. And I’ve come to more recently think how different it is.

I’m from the Bay and live in the Bay Area—and how different that politics is, where white politics is very clear in those areas, and you’re betraying white politics by going there—in a way that in these sort of liberal metros, it’s not the same. So it’s just a broader context of where we’re at now.

Jefferson: I think that’s right, Jake.

Grumbach: And building—and these, how these coalitions are built and things like that, and how we understand these racial coalitions—I think that’s just important. And I think right now, racial politics—the real thing is racial politics is just incredibly predictive.

There are some ironies of this time period. The racial resentment index—you talked about that the Democratic Party got more left on a lot of things over the 2010s. Race being one of them, and civil rights. But also, to some extent, Biden was more pro-labor and things like that. And affluent white liberals voted in larger numbers in the suburbs. It’s a very interesting thing.

And there’s a lot of signaling and not substantive depth to this. But also—it’s just, we’re in a fascinating, uncertain moment. This wasn’t to push back on anything Hakeem said, as much as to just say: the future is going to be very interesting.

Jefferson: I agree with you on this.

Grumbach: Electoral politics is very volatile, and we don’t even know how—to the extent they’ll do some real backsliding on these next elections going forward, and we don’t know the districts yet.

And Louisiana—like Perry said earlier—Louisiana is canceling an ongoing election with tens of thousands of votes already cast, to redraw its districts, eliminate a Black district, and redo the election with less Black representation. This is so volatile. I want to send that message too—we have a lot to do.

Jefferson: I agree. And an image that I saw yesterday that heartened even this skeptical and cynical soul is in Tennessee, where you saw images of all of these white folks marching—I believe it was up the statehouse steps and that sort of thing. I think this point about volatility is so key, Jake—we just don’t know how this stuff is going to play out.

One of the things that I will say is, it’s so interesting to observe—you’re talking about some of this older leadership and the like, in these different periods of American history. It is so interesting if we think about the march that got us—at least played an important role in getting us—the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Another feature of the Black politics canon that we’ve both alluded to is just the way that political incorporation has changed the nature of how Black politics is expressed. And I already hawked Katherine Tate’s Black Faces in the Mirror, but the other book that I’m looking at on my desk is her book From Protest to Politics—what it means that Black people and Black political elites have been so incorporated into party politics, and how it just changes the nature of the way that Black people demand rights.

And so that’s all to say: the Supreme Court just undermined, just defamed the crown jewel of the civil rights movement—the 1965 Voting Rights Act. If we were at a different period of time, Black political elites would have responded, I think, differently. You would have seen a much more animated response. And I think one of the things that has really stood out to me is that—and of course, I’m exaggerating perhaps for effect—but what stood out to me in the aftermath of this severely consequential decision from the court, that is so about race and Black political power, is just the weakness of Black political elites in this moment. You just don’t—and maybe I’m looking for something that mirrors the—

Bacon: What do you mean?

Jefferson: Here’s what I mean, Perry—and maybe I’m looking for something that mirrors more the moment out of which the Voting Rights Act came, and maybe that’s a foolish thing to look for. But I think I’m looking for something, and I’m just at my core an ordinary person out in this political world. I think I do want greater expressions of anger and calls for mass political organizing, and for a political project. And maybe I’m looking for that from the wrong people—perhaps this is the role of ground-level activists and not the work of Hakeem Jeffries or the Black Caucus.

But I think I’m looking for something, Perry, that just sounds different, that sounds more urgent, that sounds like it understands how critical this is. And again, I’m not saying that they haven’t expressed anger, disappointment, disbelief. But I think I am looking for something that sounds the alarm a bit more than what I’ve heard—and perhaps I’ve just missed it. But I think I am looking for something that sounds a little more like: this is a five-alarm fire emergency, and we should all be in the streets like yesterday. I think that’s what I’m looking for.

Bacon: I know we’re getting to the end here, and Jake’s got to go, but let me make two points in response to that. The first one is—and I think Jake got at this a little earlier—the Black politicians are now embedded fully in a Democratic Party hierarchy, and the Democratic Party decided the last five years that talking about race is bad. They decided there was a backlash to BLM—not sure if that’s there. They decided that Kamala lost in part because she’s Black. So I think that’s part of it—the—

Jefferson: Political incorporation, yeah.

Bacon: Yeah. And the other part is, I would distinguish between—Fair Fight Action, Black—there are groups, Sherrilyn Ifill—if you distinguish between—when I look for Black leadership today, I don’t listen to Kamala Harris and Barack Obama. I’m not sure—that was maybe too blunt, but in a certain sense, or Clyburn. The people who can speak on Black interests in a more direct way are often not prominent Black members of the Democratic Party.

Jefferson: And that is telling, I think. I think that’s a telling point, Perry. I’ll let Jake give the last word.

Grumbach: No, I think—I’m in no huge rush—but Hakeem, I think that was so on point. What it speaks to me is the civil rights movement. Yeah, we think of Martin Luther King in his 30s—but that’s pretty young. And also it’s a student group—it’s SNCC, exactly. And students, whether it’s Freedom Riders from the North or Southern students who went to rural Black schools and Rosenwald schools in the rural South—this is a different youth-led movement. And now the relationship between youth and protest politics is very different. There was a youth-led movement the past few years. The Democratic Party and liberal institutions joined in crushing it. It is a signal that that style of youth politics—that may be unwieldy and is not incorporated into these institutions—is not friendly.

And the—the movie Selma makes LBJ seem like such a hard-ass: This damn Martin Luther King again. And that’s partially true. But it is this symbiotic relationship where—Obama said it too—”Pressure me,” right? Politicians have a different role than movement leaders. And I think we’re in a moment of social media, nationalized politics, and a different relationship between youth and social and institutional trust that really needs to be rectified. I think older generations in institutions need to think hard about: you want to come down on this protest because you don’t like it here, but you’ll need youth protests very soon to protect institutions like the Voting Rights Act.

Then the last thing I’ll say: in this new era of nationalized politics and social media, where people do not think in terms of their district representative in the same way—except the older ones, like Hakeem’s point about Clyburn being around—that’s true. I’m from San Francisco, where Nancy Pelosi—it’s, yeah, you don’t really think—for me, Nancy Pelosi is not like she’s Frisco like me—like, I really think of her—

Jefferson: Let me flex—I’ve been to the Clyburn fish fry. I’m telling you.

Bacon: That is a flex. I like it.

Grumbach: And what I’m saying is there’s a different relationship to district representation across the board now, which demands new institutions.

So the Voting Rights Act Section Two going down is absolutely the biggest deal—tragedy, period—for Black representation. But there already was writing on the wall that we needed a new model of representation that’s about coalitions, not your individual district representative. And that’s because in national parties, when you’re in the minority—I talk about Ketanji Brown Jackson as this. This is the Ketanji Brown Jackson theory here: she is probably the most brilliant Supreme Court justice maybe ever—certainly in my lifetime—reading these dissents. Does her role on the court actually matter compared to some replacement in the six–three minority? Yeah, her dissents are so fire, but it would really be different if you had a five–four majority she was on.

So it’s become more true that it’s not about the individual representative. Ruth Bader Ginsburg retiring—she’s an inspiration to women and second-wave feminism. That’s not a big deal if you actually lose Roe and you actually just lose, right? It’s the same in state legislatures and in Congress. And for that reason, we need a new model that will be faithful to all coalitions—a one-person, one-vote standard, like the Voting Rights Act is about. But in this new era—the Voting Rights Act was in a different, depolarized era where there were Northern pro-civil rights Republicans. This is not the era anymore.

A new model will be about the one-person, one-vote standard in coalition—something like proportional representation that says it’s not about just being represented by an individual. We need to think about percentages of Americans—Americans want this direction, that direction. That would actually make Black people not a captured constituency within the Democratic Party, but actually pivotal in coalition. Say, we actually on this issue can coalition here, on this issue coalition there. That would be a different model that would match the times we’re inside. Encourage everybody to think about reforms Congress can do—like multi-member districts for proportional representation—to break out of this idea that your personal representative is the main thing, when actually what matters is who controls the levers of government right now.

Bacon: It’s a great conversation. I have three threads of other conversations I want to get into, but we’re going to stop here. We need to get Deva Woodly, for sure, because I think she has some good insights on what we’re talking about here. Hakeem is at Stanford—he’s on Bluesky, though, if you want to hear some great insights about politics and race and the connections. I think Jake is on both X and Bluesky, and also writing a lot for the Adam Bonica blog—what’s that called?

Grumbach: Data for Democracy.

Bacon: Data for Democracy. Which is an excellent data journal, yeah. With Bonica. And generally, just a lot of writing.

Grumbach: Thanks so much, Perry.

Jefferson: May I just flag one thing, Perry, for your audience? On May 18th—I’ve been talking a lot about Katherine Tate’s work—on May 18th it’ll be available for streaming on Zoom while it happens, 4:00 p.m. Pacific Time. I’ll be in conversation with Katherine Tate, who literally wrote the book on Black representation—why it matters and the like—and Corey Fields, who has done some really amazing work thinking about Black Republicans. And so if you’re interested in that, just Google—I’m sure it’s easy to find—”Black Politics and American Democracy, Stanford.” You should be able to find it. I’ll send the link to Perry so that he can add it to the comments. All right.

Bacon: Thanks, guys. See you soon.

Jefferson: Thanks, Perry. Be well.

Grumbach: Take it easy.

During a hearing at the House Appropriations Subcommittee Tuesday, Undersecretary of Defense Jules Hurst faced a brutal fact-check on the Pentagon’s supposedly $29 billion war.

Late last month, the Pentagon testified that the estimated cost of the war so far was $25 billion. Now Hurst claimed it would cost $24 billion to replace and repair the U.S. munitions stockpile alone.

Hawaii Representative Ed Case pointed to a CSIS report from April 21 that estimated the aggregate unit cost of replacing and repairing seven precision systems to be $25 billion.

“Does that sound about right? I mean, you’re projecting everything at [$23 billion],” Case said.

“That number sounds a little high for me, for that stage of the war,” Hurst said.

Case asked how much it would cost to replace the 39 aircraft that have been reportedly lost since the beginning of the war. Hurst said that “repair on aircraft is something that it is very hard to calculate” but that an estimate had been included in the total cost. One might imagine it would be wildly expensive to “repair” planes that have been completely destroyed.

Hurst said that the estimates for the cost of fuel were included in the Pentagon’s operations and maintenance cost, but not the cost of repairing U.S. military bases in the Middle East.

“We have a lot of unknowns there, we don’t know what our future posture is gonna be. We don’t know how we construct those bases, and we don’t know what part our allies or partners could pay into our MILCON costs,” Hurst said.

At least 16 American installations across eight countries have been struck as part of Iran’s retaliatory strikes against the U.S. and Israeli military onslaught. It was previously reported that 13 U.S. bases in the Middle East had been rendered all but uninhabitable, forcing U.S. military service members to work remotely from hotels and office spaces.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics released its monthly report Tuesday showing that inflation rose to 3.8 percent in April, a higher rate than wages, which grew at 3.6 percent. The price of oil is a big reason why, as it is up more than 70 percent since January thanks to the Iran war. As of Tuesday morning, the average national price for a gallon of gas is $4.50.

The worst is still yet to come, though; the full effect of high gas prices will not affect everything else for a few more months, according to Citigroup, who told its clients Monday that “energy costs likely would not start to feed through to core goods prices for at least a few more months.”

Meanwhile, a new CNN poll shows that 70 percent of Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of the economy, with 77 percent of Americans (and a majority of Republicans) saying that the cost of living has gone up in their community. Only a third of Americans approve of how Trump is helping the middle class, 26 percent of Americans approve of his performance on inflation, and just 21 percent do on gas prices.

According to the poll, Democrats are trusted more on the cost of living, helping the middle class, and inflation. But on the economy overall, almost a third of Americans don’t trust either party. Trump and his fellow Republicans may be in trouble during November’s midterms (barring the effects of redistricting), but Democrats will have to show that they can fight to improve Americans’ economic conditions.

The women, along with Congress members and other witnesses, will be offering testimony at a House Oversight field hearing regarding just how Epstein was able to secure a deal that allowed him to leave jail for hours at a time during his 13-month sentence for soliciting prostitution, even as allegations of his abuse of underage girls gained steam.

“For some reason, they allowed a predator to go loose for many, many years,” Florida Congresswoman Lois Frankel said. “Probably hundreds of young women were sexually abused because of the way this case was handled.… This is an opportunity really to put some focus back where it started.… Maybe to get some answers from some of the folks as to why this miscarriage of justice occurred.”

The hearing, organized by House Democrats, is set to begin at 10 a.m.

Representative Jen Kiggans appeared on Richmond-based radio commentator Rich Herrera’s show Monday to discuss the state’s hotly contested congressional maps. But the since-deleted interview flew off the rails when Kiggans emphatically concurred with Herrera after he referred to Jeffries as a slave.

“He spent $20 million-plus on our redistricting debacle we had. He now is talking about … firing our Supreme Court justices,” Herrera said of Jeffries. House Majority Forward, a nonprofit connected to Jeffries, spent roughly $40 million on the redistricting effort.

“If Hakeem Jeffries wants to be involved in Virginia politics, then I suggest he … leave New York, move down here to Virginia, run for office down here, you can represent us,” Herrera continued. “If not, get your cotton-picking hands off of Virginia.”

“That’s right. Ditto. Yes. Yes, to that,” Kiggans replied.

The term “cotton-picking hands” is heavily rooted in the history of U.S. slavery, literally referring to the Black men, women, and children who were forced to pick cotton.

Kiggans is up for reelection in November. One of her opponents in the race, former Representative Elaine Luria, wrote Monday evening that “the racist comments proudly endorsed today by Jen Kiggans … are disgusting and beneath any elected official.”

“I grew up in the South. I know what these racist dog whistles mean,” Luria added.

The number two House Democrat, Minority Whip Katherine Clark, called on Kiggans to resign shortly after clips of the interview were made public.

In a statement on X, Kiggans claimed that she did not agree with the host’s remark and that it was “obvious” she was responding to the larger argument about Jeffries’s involvement in the redistricting effort. She argued that the nationwide political rebuke was “precisely what’s wrong with Democrats.”

“Every lie and distortion is intended to distract from getting their hats handed to them and the Virginia Supreme Court’s clear message: stop trying to rig our elections,” Kiggans wrote. “Democrats are trying to destroy Virginia’s court because they disagree with it. THAT is the real danger to our country.”

By Tuesday morning, the radio interview had been taken off Apple Podcasts, as well as the host’s YouTube channel.

Kiggans’s comments come at a volatile time in U.S. history. Late last month, the Supreme Court effectively gutted the Voting Rights Act by ruling that Louisiana’s congressional maps amounted to unconstitutional racial gerrymandering since they included two Black-majority voting districts.

This story has been updated.

Trump posted more than 55 times in just three hours on Monday night, unloading a ton of conspiracy theory content targeting former President Barack Obama, peppered with videos of Black people causing mayhem.

Trump’s onslaught began by claiming that Obama had attempted a coup and boosting a call to “arrest Obama the traitor.” He then posted months-old coverage of Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s claims that the Obama administration had pushed the “lie” that Russian President Vladimir Putin preferred Trump over Hillary Clinton to win the 2016 election, which was something Putin has openly admitted.

As Trump continued to post, his allegations got increasingly outlandish. The president shared posts claiming that Obama made $120 million from Obamacare and accusing Obama of “the most heinous crimes committed in American history,” including wiretapping Trump Tower. Other posts mentioned figures such as Senator Mark Kelly, Clinton, and Jack Smith, but Obama’s name appeared over and over again.

After about half an hour of nonstop posting, Trump interrupted his screed against his political enemies to share a video that appeared to show young Black people stealing from a convenience store. “This is why the convenience store chain ‘Wawa’ is closing stores one after another,” the post read.

Then Trump posted another video that purported to show a Black woman working for DoorDash picking up an order, only to be discovered eating the food in her car. “Always scheming,” the post read.

The president also shared a video of a Black man purposefully knocking over a waiter’s tray in a restaurant. “I wouldn’t call him a man,” the post read. “A real man would never disrespect another person like this. I’ll call him what he is, a POS!”

Trump resumed his political posting, sharing a video in which right-wing lawyer Mike Davis called Obama a “demonic force.”

This wouldn’t be the first time Trump’s social media spiraling has taken on racist overtones as he targets Obama. In February, the president shared a video on Truth Social that ended with a short clip of the Obamas’ laughing heads superimposed on the bodies of apes.

Trump continued his deranged posting into the night, and then resumed it when the sun came up. He posted Tuesday morning about a fictional “Federal Victory Note” currency that had his face on it, an AI-generated meme about “Hakeem ‘Low IQ’ Jeffries,” and another AI image of Obama, Joe Biden, and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi swimming in a sewage-filled Reflecting Pool.

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

The cult-like defenses of Donald Trump have taken a truly creepy turn of late. Trump fell asleep at an event and the White House’s spin in response went truly off the rails. Trump floated an insane proposal involving Venezuela that drew a deeply strange defense from a spokesperson. And in one telling moment, the spokesperson was so eager to fluff up Trump that she accidentally delivered a harsh talking point against him. But when you watch all this madness, you can sense something dark underneath it. All these sycophants are plainly aware that Trump is going to be passing from the scene very soon. And it’s very hard to see what’s going to fill the vacuum within the GOP and the right wing that this will leave behind.

Virginia Heffernan, a writer for The New Republic, has a great piece that plumbs deep into the MAGA psyche for clues to the state of our country. So we’re talking about all this with her today. Virginia, nice to have you on.

Virginia Heffernan: Good to see you again, Greg.

Sargent: Let’s start with an extraordinary exchange on Fox News. The screen is showing oil prices soaring while an anchor asks White House spokesperson Anna Kelly to comment on high gas prices. She launches into this.

Anna Kelly (voiceover): Let me be very clear. Iran has been incredibly decimated, militarily. Their navy is at the bottom of the ocean. The ballistic missiles are destroyed. Their production facilities are demolished. Now they’re being totally crippled economically by the weight of Operation Economic Fury. So the president is not in a rush. He has all the cards at his disposal because he knows that Iran is getting weaker and weaker by the day while the United States is getting stronger and stronger.

Sargent: So note how spokesperson Anna Kelly says Trump is not in a rush—he’s not in a rush over these gas prices. Virginia, what I find so striking here is that the instinct is to go full cult and portray Trump as wielding total mastery over events, and accidentally she creates a potent talking point against him. Your thoughts on that?

Heffernan: We’ve talked a lot about a dictator and how he was going to be a dictator on day one. But he’s a king now. He’s an emperor. It’s something more than a dictator, because a dictator is trying to figure out how to govern. But an emperor who—any word against him constitutes what the Anglo-Saxons used to call lèse-majesté. You know this expression? It’s like the Thai king still—lèse-majesté is a particular offense of “injured majesty” against the king. It’s exactly the opposite of American principles of free speech, so much that saying anything—saying oil prices are going up, or saying that Trump fell asleep, or even registering the evidence of our own eyes—is seen as wrong.

Sargent: Well, I’ll tell you, I love the distinction between dictator and emperor, but I’d probably go with “despot” in the end.

Heffernan: Yes. Tell me what despot buys you that the other words don’t.

Sargent: Despot sort of conveys this ailing, angry, sunsetting figure. And the ailing despot image seems to capture him at these weird events where all his sycophants have to suck up to him while he’s falling asleep.

Heffernan: This sounds a lot like a late-stage cult, like the Moonies, when originally you have Reverend Moon making claims about the world that are somewhat liberating to participants. And then soon after he just feels persecuted.

Then you just turn entirely to: We have to protect the leader. “No kings”—maybe “no despots,” “no tyrants” is the right thing for us to be thinking right now, because—he’s not talking about building a wall. He’s not talking about outrageous policy, women’s reproductive rights. He’s so far beyond that. The ship has sailed—even whatever he ran on last time. He’s not even talking about trans figures and athletes in sports. He’s talking about himself and his own majesty.

Sargent: Right. I want to bear down on the fact that there’s a serious situation underneath that weird Fox News moment. Trump and the GOP are getting some redistricting wins and those are serious. But the underlying brutal situation remains.

Trump can’t seem to get Iran to agree to a deal. The Strait of Hormuz remains closed. That’s having a crippling impact on the global situation. By every indication, Trump and the GOP are poised to pay a major political price for that. Can you talk about that? Anna Kelly has no way to explain the actual situation that makes any sense to anybody.

Heffernan: You think of Pam Bondi, RIP, who responded to quite meaningful exposure of Trump along every axis by saying, “The Dow is at 50,000, right?” It just doesn’t track. The defense is always either to attack the questioner—we see Pete Hegseth do this on Iran—and when there’s no excuse for Iran, they just say, The Manchurian Candidate, he is the finest man I’ve ever known. He is magic. He can do no wrong. If he did it, it’s right.

Sargent: Trump apparently fell asleep at an event on Monday and Reuters had this absolutely crushing image of him—eyes closed—that was tweeted out by a Reuters reporter. The official White House rapid response feed responded: “He was blinking, you absolute moron.”

The rage is the thing here, Virginia. I mean, it looked like he was asleep—he falls asleep all the time, there’s no way they can spin their way out of that—but either way, note how Trump’s propagandists are really keenly aware that any hint of Trump as sunsetting or weak or enfeebled just instantly cracks his mystique, and they just have to lash out furiously at anyone who dares to point out what everyone can see at the end of their own nose, which is that this guy is on his way out.

Heffernan: Sometimes I think—I’m just incurably hopeful about the future. I do trust the American people. I just trust them to find their way out. Not because we’re intrinsically decent, but because we are just bad at being governed by a despot or an emperor that doesn’t have popular support. We don’t even want to handle a single casualty in Iran. Bless us for that. The American people hate that war. They hate rising oil prices, and that contempt is now splashed all over Trump.

Sargent: You’re putting your finger on an important point, which is that the American people are reacting badly to the trappings of despotism and tyranny and all the visuals of it. The ballroom is a really good example of this. The Washington Post poll on this—taken before and after the recent shooting incident—found the ballroom to be deeply unpopular.

It’s opposed by 56 percent of Americans, supported by only 28 percent. Independents opposed it by 61 to 18. Working-class Americans by 54 to 28. And moderates by 64 to 16. To use your understanding of this—they’re trying to make us submit to the ballroom as almost a symbolic capitulation to his imperial and dictatorial presidency.

And people are just reacting badly to it. The imagery of Trump tearing down the people’s house, the White House, and replacing it with a monument to himself is triggering for a lot of people on a deep level.

Heffernan: Yeah, it’s funny. A friend of mine from high school who—he triple-Trumped, as they say—he was MAGA, he’s been MAGA for a long time. I started to see him, as many of us do our friends, in a red cap on Facebook, and I thought, He’s gone.

Sometime recently, he emailed me and said when he saw the destruction of the East Wing, he knew that something was gravely wrong. And he is now trying to repent, and he started something called Christians Against Trump in Florida.

You probably know the story of Ozymandias. It’s told in a Percy Shelley poem called “Ozymandias,” and it conjures this really powerful image of a statue where it’s just two legs standing, and the pedestal says, “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair”—but the statue is broken. The head is off. I think of that with Trump all the time.

This is a guy saying, I’m going to annex another state, I’m going to build a ballroom, I’m going to build an “Arc de Trump.” I am the greatest, biggest, all-powerful Oz—or all-powerful Ozymandias. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair. And his head has rolled off.

This isn’t just the emperor with no clothes. This is an emperor, absolutely rotten, his brain. It’s just terrible to imagine what’s going on in his brain. It seems tragic. If this were a family member, he would really have to be sort of sidelined from public events. I know he doesn’t drink, but it just looks like a brain on fire and in trouble.

Sargent: So you brought up Trump’s new proposal, or whatever you call it, to do with Venezuela. I want to talk about another weird moment on Fox News involving that. Anchor John Roberts reports on a conversation he had with Trump about Venezuela. Then he asks spokesperson Anna Kelly about that. Listen.

John Roberts (voiceover): I was talking to the president this morning. It was just before the Oval Office event. He kind of surprised me a little bit, because he said, “John, I just want to tell you, I’m very serious about this. So you could talk about this. I’m serious about beginning a process to make Venezuela the fifty-first state.”

Now there’s a rich history in this nation of taking territories and absorbing them into the United States. Puerto Rico is one that people talk about. But this would be the first time in my knowledge that a sovereign country was ever invited to join the United States of America. How would that work?

Anna Kelly (voiceover): Well, John, I won’t get ahead of what the president was comfortable sharing with you as far as those plans go. But look, this is a president who is famous for never accepting the status quo.

Sargent: This seems like a really perfect example of what you’re talking about. Basically, Fox News—who’s obviously very, very loyal to Trump, a major Trump booster—is dancing around what’s obviously the elephant in the room, which is that this guy has completely lost it in just about every way and is completely unfit for this job.

So it’s brought up very delicately. And then of course Anna Kelly has to respond in a way that invites everyone to just pretend not to notice how crazy this guy is. Can you talk about that? I found that to be a really extraordinary exchange.

Heffernan: It is, and you almost—I wouldn’t say feel sorry for—but I remember when NXIVM was breaking up and you just saw that there were these hangers-on who still gazed at Keith Raniere, the cult leader of the sex cult NXIVM, gazed at him the way Nancy Reagan used to gaze at Reagan. I will say, a lot of them are women. They gaze at him and block and tackle for him.

It really just brings together the last gaspers in a cult who are still staying to the very end. But there are these people who have left MAGA—including Tucker Carlson, including Ashley St. Clair, this younger person who was involved with Turning Point, had a baby with Elon Musk—who are explaining what it looks like when you snap and when the lights come on and you say, I can’t do this anymore. That is very, very useful for people just to provide an example of what it might look like if you could—this is from the MAGA base—change your mind.

Sargent: Well, I want to bring up some of the mockery that met that exchange between John Roberts and Anna Kelly. One person tweeted out an image of a North Korean propagandist talking about dear leader and just drew the likeness directly to what Anna Kelly had said there. Norm Ornstein, the congressional scholar, said, “The mental decline is accelerating.”

I just find this moment to be so indicative of where we are, because everybody can see that this is absolute madness and that this guy has no business being president and talking that way to the country or the world. Yet that contrast between that obvious unfitness and the total maintenance of cult-like support for everything he says we saw from Anna Kelly is just really disorienting on some level.

Heffernan: I think that’s absolutely right. There were still some people when Keith Raniere went to prison—right near me, Brooklyn House of Detention, which is now closed—that stood outside beaming up with flashlights and singing support to him. There will be people who are still with him to the end. But it is, as you say, absolutely unnerving to imagine they’re still here for him.

But when we think about the 30-plus percent who still say some version of they approve of him, we can’t mix them up with the real Smithers types—you know Smithers in The Simpsons, “Somebody down here loves you!” who absolutely loves Montgomery Burns? I don’t think the 30-plus percent who approve of him are that glued to him. Maybe they are rattled by people who are glued to him because it’s so self-abasing. It’s humiliating.

Why would someone stand by him? You think of the Mike Pences of the world that stand by him until they’re cast aside and vilified. And the humiliation—it must be this crazy double consciousness where it used to seem manly to support him and now it seems pathetic.

Sargent: You wrote about this figure who was deep in the MAGA cult who left, who escaped the MAGA cult. What does it say about MAGA that there are all these escapees who are getting away from it and getting out from under it on the one hand. And just to close out, what’s going to become of MAGA when Trump is gone and there’s this gaping hole at the center of it all?

Heffernan: There’s just not a lot of people to pick up the pieces. Ashley St. Clair left MAGA. She was right in the center of it with Turning Point. She had a baby with Elon Musk. And after she was creamed with revenge porn with Grok. She just blew the lid off it and really showed how the sausage was made with MAGA, and that it wasn’t cool and that it wasn’t interesting to be anti-trans.

It just looks hopeless. It looks tired. It’s been around 10 years now. It’s not witty. It’s not complicated and cool to be anti-woke. There are no heirs to this. There are no heirs to this. And even the older people, the Tucker Carlsons are breaking with it ideologically. I just don’t think there’s much left, will be much left.

Sargent: And so we have an end-stage cult.

Heffernan: We have an end-state cult with the leader and some glazed-eyed people around him trying to desperately tell a story of why the emperor deserves to be treated with abasement and deference by everyone else—but we’re not buying it.

Sargent: I will say the glazed-eyes thing is real. Anna Kelly has it. Karoline Leavitt has it. Senators like Katie Britt have it when they talk about Trump. These are U.S. senators. People who were elected to statewide office.

Heffernan: It’s an increasingly narrow band of people who are capable of this—I’d say almost like a tradwife style of deference to the patriarch. I love that we’ve seen that Americans cannot tolerate this. We have a low tolerance for suffering for someone because we think he has divine powers. We’re really, really not very good at it.

Sargent: I want this to be a positive story and I hope it ends positively. Virginia Heffernan, awesome to talk to you. Thank you so much for coming on.

Heffernan: Greg, great to talk to you too.

That could be a problem, because new research by the People’s Parity Project, or PPP, finds that half the business court judges in the United States are former corporate lawyers. In seven states, more than 90 percent of business court judges are former corporate lawyers. Only a small fraction of these judges have any experience representing workers or consumers in need.

That’s one reason why critics say these courts are perceived as biased in favor of corporations. Though several states are rushing to adopt business court systems, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ended its state’s pilot program last year, after a new progressive majority took office. One justice warned that the program resembled a “two-tiered” court system.

Business courts are often characterized as the ideal venue to settle disputes between businesses or between owners of a business. They’re intended to be quicker and more efficient; the same judges handle the cases from start to finish. Some proponents argue that the faster process makes litigation easier for small businesses, which may lack the resources of larger corporate litigants.

In many states, however, the jurisdiction of business courts extends much further than disputes within or between businesses. Maine has a “business and consumer” court that is staffed by two judges with experience representing corporations and employers, who rule on lawsuits filed by consumers who claimed they were wronged by a corporation’s product or service.

North Carolina’s business courts have very broad jurisdiction. The chief justice only has to designate a case as “complex” to assign it to the court. Recently, these complex cases have included a defamation case, a class action lawsuit by hospital patients over the privacy of their medical records, and the state’s lawsuit against TikTok over whether the app is addictive. The chief justice also assigns North Carolina’s Superior Court judges to the business court; our research found that all nine judges were former corporate attorneys.

Many business courts were explicitly intended to be staffed with lawyers with experience in corporate law. A lawyer who helped design Arizona’s business courts said their intention was to get judges with “strong backgrounds in business litigation”—though they didn’t want the court to be perceived as “pro-business.” Elsewhere, the lawyers who proposed Michigan’s business courts listed one goal as “attracting and retaining businesses.”

PPP’s new report found that 100 percent of business court judges in Arizona, Delaware, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, North Carolina, and Tennessee are former corporate lawyers. In Delaware, where the prototype for business courts was created centuries ago, the appellate courts are also dominated by judges who spent their legal careers representing employers and corporations. The state’s “Court of Chancery” and the body of law that it developed is the reason why so many big companies are headquartered in Delaware.

But after Delaware courts ruled to undo billionaire Elon Musk’s lavish compensation package from Tesla, some of those companies began leaving the state. Texas established its own business court, filled it almost entirely with corporate lawyers, and courted companies to reincorporate there. Delaware’s state legislature, which is controlled by Democrats, responded to this so-called “Dexit” by making their laws even friendlier to corporate executives.

Texas explicitly requires business court judges to have experience either representing businesses or serving as a judge in civil court. These judges are also appointed by the governor, even though the state constitution requires that judges be chosen by the voters.

In neighboring Oklahoma, lawmakers also established a business court with appointed judges. But the state Supreme Court struck down that law in 2025, because the Oklahoma Constitution says that judges must stand for election.

Oklahoma’s judges are appointed and then run in “retention elections,” in which voters decide whether to keep them in office. Republican Governor Kevin Stitt signed a bill creating a business court with unelected judgeships. Stitt claimed, “I saw court systems in other states playing politics with people’s businesses.” He also called for judges with “business experience” to fill the courts.

Republican lawmakers don’t want business court judges to be accountable to voters like other judges. In North Carolina, the chief justice has assigned an unelected “special” Superior Court judge, chosen by the legislature, to the state’s business court.

Why do corporations need a separate judiciary, staffed by former corporate lawyers, that is unaccountable to voters? This raises obvious concerns about preferential treatment for corporations. And these concerns have kept some states from adopting business courts.

In July 2025, just a few months after Musk spent tens of millions of dollars in the Wisconsin Supreme Court election, the court’s new progressive majority ended its state’s pilot business court program. The program had encountered opposition from judges and attorneys, including a former corporate lawyer who asked, “How does the public not look at this without believing that the court is putting its thumb on the scales of justice in favor of business? ... Why don’t injured parties and those that have been denied their civil rights get the same treatment?”

When the previous conservative majority maintained the pilot program in 2022, Justice Ann Walsh Bradley warned that it was sending a message: “Businesses with large claims deserve special treatment, entitling them access to the most efficient, fair, and cost-effective treatment available in the court system.” She argued that everyone is entitled to the best justice the courts can provide and said that Wisconsin’s judges had no problem handling complex business cases.

Voters in Nevada, which is making a big push for companies to reincorporate there, could soon vote on a constitutional amendment to establish business courts. Lawmakers have passed an amendment creating a court with judges who would stand in retention elections, rather than the nonpartisan, contested elections that other judges endure. They must pass the amendment again before it goes on the ballot for voters to decide.

These states could ultimately regret rushing to adopt business courts. These unelected business court judges may, like the U.S. Supreme Court, start putting corporations over workers, consumers, or concerned shareholders. This is particularly a concern when states, such as North Carolina, confer broader jurisdiction on business courts.

These courts are hearing lawsuits filed by workers or consumers, as well as challenges to crucial state taxes. Voters should demand judges on these courts with diverse experiences. If these courts are hearing cases involving workers, they must include judges who spent their careers doing something besides defending employers.

Research has shown that judges’ backgrounds matter when it comes to how they rule. Our recent report found that judges in Connecticut who previously worked as corporate lawyers or prosecutors were more likely to evict people. Another study found that the same judges are less likely to rule for workers. And a 2022 study found that former public defenders were “less willing to render extremely long sentences tantamount to life in prison.” Professional diversity is important, especially when it comes to judges.

Business court judges shouldn’t be drawn exclusively from the ranks of large, powerful corporate law firms. If that’s what lawmakers really want, they should say that explicitly. And they must ensure that the jurisdiction of these courts is sharply limited and doesn’t sweep in lawsuits involving workers or consumers.

Voters in Nevada and other states where lawmakers are exploring the creation of business courts should take a close look. The public should understand what these judges do and how they’ll be chosen. These courts are sweeping the nation, and we should at least talk about how to do it right—and what the consequences are for getting it wrong.

It’s tempting to write off such utterances as just another deranged aspect of Trump’s second term, but religious zealotry has proved a useful tool of control for military leadership going back centuries, says Jasper Craven. His book, God Forgives, Brothers Don’t: The Long March of Military Education and the Making of American Manhood, examines the ways in which brutality and blind loyalty within the armed forces have informed our traditional notions of masculinity.

In fact, Craven writes, early nineteenth-century West Point superintendent Samuel Thayer believed that “Christianity could serve as a powerful binding agent for his military project, an easily imported belief system that would at once form resilience and motivation in his boys and help them elide the major moral questions at the heart of the burgeoning imperial project to which they belonged.”

During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, Craven and I discussed the tensions between morals and manhood within a military context.

Lorraine Cademartori: Did the Hegseth speech surprise you?

Jasper Craven: None of this surprises me. Pete Hegseth is the perfect embodiment of many of the different threads and histories that I have been tracing for the last three years as a part of book research. Religiosity has been core to military training since the founding of this country. We see from the earliest days of American military education—mandatory chapel, fire and brimstone sermons—and then most concretely with the founding of the U.S. Air Force Academy just after the Second World War: a strong evangelical subculture that has permeated the upper ranks of the military and is largely oriented around America’s supreme firepower. Obviously, the last two and a half decades have been marked by what President George W. Bush, in the days after 9/11, called a “crusade.” There is rhetoric that has long pervaded our military involvement in the Arab world. This is just the latest example in a long history.

L.C.: Is the framing of this war as “end times” a new development?

J.C.: [It] is definitely a ratcheting up of this rhetoric. I see it as a result of the fact that the American public and the American military at this point is very wary of conflict.… At this point the stakes must be ratcheted up to motivate the mission. When it becomes this existential, I think Hegseth and his deputies hope that it will animate the men fighting below them.

L.C.: Right—you say in the book that “since America’s founding, military brass have painstakingly developed and refined a military curriculum that breeds loyalty, teaches obedience, and constructs violence, all the while convincing the public that conflict is a hardwired male instinct.” But the Founding Fathers had a fair amount of reticence toward the idea of even forming a military academy, or establishing a quasi-professional fighting force, correct?

J.C.: These are people who endured a frustrating, and at times abusive, occupation by the British monarchy. The rebellion itself was a rejection of such tactics and such power. At the same time, this paradox forms in which the only way out of occupation is amassing of military power by the colonists. This tension has really marked America profoundly in the centuries since.… The Founding Fathers were generally really focused on ensuring that the soldier was never elevated above the citizen.

L.C.: Eventually the Continental Congress votes to fund West Point in 1802. It sounded like there was a fair amount of back-and-forth about a vision of education of this “fighting elite.”

J.C.: There are a series of scuffles culminating in the appointment of Thayer as superintendent to West Point [in 1817] that demonstrate the push-pull over what a military officer should look like. Thayer’s major nemesis, and also his former frat brother at Dartmouth, is Alden Partridge. [Partridge] offers, in his time as West Point superintendent, a more gentle approach, at least by military standards. He spares [cadets] the worst punishments and has a more relaxed approach toward military education.

Thayer is someone who, through his experience in the War of 1812, watches in disgust as the men below him demonstrate incompetence, don’t always listen to his orders, sometimes defect. He wants obedience, and he believes very strongly that only a quasi-authoritarian environment can breed the right kind of soldier. Thayer imposes dozens and dozens of new rules that strictly limit cadet behavior. He brooks no dissent. He’s in charge for a fair amount of time, and I think his ethos disseminates [within the military] through the years.

L.C.: One of the core arguments in your book is that the military has been profoundly effective in reaching out to children—young men, younger than 18, particularly through Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps programs, and through the growth of military academies. Tell me about this ecosystem.

J.C.: Yeah, there’s a really interesting fight that plays out in the early twentieth century, in which military leaders and superintendents of military academies come to feel existentially threatened by the public school system, and by public school teachers, many of them women, pacifists, Quakers. This line of messaging emerges that viciously derides the female influence on the young American schoolchild. The military takes a number of actions to inject mandatory military trainings into public middle schools, especially in New York—which was where their power is concentrated, thanks to the allyship of corporate figures, like J.P. Morgan, who believe that creating obedience in young schoolchildren has an added benefit of [preparing] them to serve in corporate environments.

[But] back in those days, people like John Dewey were making the argument that the best way to create peace is to establish, among children, the possibility, and to show them how it can be done, and they will be the great agents in changing this violent mindset of humanity. I think the military understood that, too, and that’s exactly why they fight to control boys at such an early age.

L.C.: You even came to this book through reporting on youth in the military, at Valley Forge Military Academy and College in Pennsylvania—where cadets suffered widespread abuse and trauma.

J.C.: I’d been been covering the military and veterans’ issues for a while when I started investigating the Forge for Mother Jones, but that work helped me illuminate for the first time the pedagogy that pervades the Pentagon, pervades military training—and really this network—that maintains real power. I mean, there are 5,200 JROTC and ROTC programs in America. Seeing the raw, mutant, violent strains of masculinity that were leading to terrible abuse at Valley Forge made me want to write a book that could forcefully push back against this enduring idea that the military is this perfect catchall system for lost boys. Really, it just creates more dysfunction.

L.C.: There have been periodic attempts at reform, going back to well into the nineteenth century. I was struck by the tale you relate in the book of Oscar Booz, a West Point cadet who died from chronic hazing in 1900, but who never told on his abusers, and many others. [Among other abuses, Booz was forced to chug Tabasco sauce, resulting in tuberculosis in his larynx, and to participate in the academy’s underground fight club.] The top brass often say the right things when these tragedies occur, but nothing changes. Is that because the model is simply irreconcilable with reform?

J.C.: To inculcate loyalty, to motivate violence, you need to use pretty harsh tools, and I’ve lost count of the times military school leaders have, in the face of severe hazing scandals, or cheating scandals, or administrative corruption allegations, pledged to end hazing, to reform these programs, to impose accountability—to fully embody the very pure ideals that these places claim to live up to—but it’s never happened, and I don’t think that’s an accident. Creating these perilous conditions is vital to establishing a man’s desire to get out of them: to secure power, to secure validation. I think that is what’s most effective at forcing men to engage in really risky, violent, traumatic behavior.

L.C.: How did you reach the conclusion that “American masculinity is predicated on the wobbly assumption that man is violent by nature”?

J.C.: There are a number of underlying principles that Americans are in broad agreement with as they relate to American manhood. The subtext of many of these principles is very dark and fatalistic and violent. Sacrifice, for instance, is this big idea that you see many self-help gurus or manosphere figures preaching about: Man is expected to protect his family and to protect this country should threats arise. That is the pinnacle of American manhood.

But it’s incredibly devaluing for man’s lot to essentially be there to take the arrows that may rain down upon him in some imperial battle. And so to justify that, what needs to be argued is that man is violent, that it is man’s inherent duty to fight and to kill. We continue down a violent path toward male validation that is playing out in so many of the domestic crises that this country is seeing today, whether in school shootings or domestic abuse or the opioid epidemic or anything else. I mean, military service is now the number one predictor of violent extremism in America. And it just doesn’t have to be that way.

L.C.: Circling back to the beginning of our conversation—do you take anything away from the number of anonymous complaints? Does it tell you anything about the state of the military internally?

J.C.: Things are very fraught at the Pentagon now. I do think there are a lot of enlisted and officers who deeply value the political neutrality of the military, who have no interest in waging more war in the Middle East, who recoil at the idea or the actions of militarizing the southern border and deploying the National Guard into American cities. The problem is this abiding mentality of loyalty. I just look to the history of the American military, and I see situations in which gross war crimes were being committed, in which constitutional violations were occurring, and most people in the military sit idly by or participate in those activities. That’s due to a number of factors, including that there is also a long pattern of whistleblowers standing up and not seeing their issues heard or remediated. But I really wish that there were figures out there who were forcefully pushing back against what’s occurring. It makes you question all of this rhetoric that those who serve in the military are the most courageous among us. I’m not seeing much courage from people with skin in the game right now.

L.C.: Had you heard that Valley Forge Academy is graduating its last high school class this month?

J.C.: I do think that the story of Valley Forge is instructive, because what you can see is that when cadets break from the expectations foisted on them to be stoic, to endure unrelenting abuse, that space can really open up for reform. I mean, the reason that Valley Forge is in dire straits is because cadets and their families have relentlessly been voicing concerns for many years.… You can see tangible impact from them coming forward. They have had to subvert the ideology that has been drilled into them. And there is something that is very touching and beautiful about that.

At the same time, the ideology is very well funded, and it will take a lot to undermine it forever.

The problem was that the U.S.–Mexico border wasn’t where anyone thought it was.

Years earlier, an American irrigation company had cut an unauthorized cutoff in the Rio Grande, leaving a loop of U.S. land south of its new course. Under treaties governing the boundary, artificial shifts in the river could not move the border. The legal boundary between the countries remained the same, and now cut through a dried-up riverbed—over which Rio Rico then expanded. So while the town was founded on Mexican land, its growth inadvertently moved it across the invisible border.

No one noticed for years. When the error was finally uncovered by an American geography professor in the 1960s, American officials were forced to confront a peculiar reality: A town that had long functioned as part of Mexico was, in fact, straddling the border.

The two governments eventually negotiated a fix. A 1970 treaty restored the river as the boundary, and in 1977, the United States formally transferred the land under Rio Rico to Mexico. The map once again matched the lived reality—but the law does not move as easily as the river does.

In the decades before the correction, children had been born in Rio Rico on American soil. One of them, Homero Cantú Treviño, later entered the United States and faced deportation for overstaying his visa. His defense was straightforward: He was not an undocumented immigrant at all, but a U.S. citizen by birth.

The Fourteenth Amendment guarantees citizenship to everyone born on American soil and subject to American jurisdiction: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” Cantú’s claim forced the government to confront a question that now sits at the center of Donald Trump’s attempt to restrict birthright citizenship: What does it mean to be “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States?

For advocates of a narrower interpretation—right-wing immigration restrictionists, in the main—birth on U.S. soil is not sufficient. That’s the case that the president and his legal team made recently before the Supreme Court in Trump v. Barbara: Children born in the U.S. to undocumented immigrant parents shouldn’t get automatic citizenship because they aren’t really integrated into the nation and subject to its jurisdiction. The Fourteenth Amendment applies only to those fully subject to American authority, they argued.

Rio Rico would seem to have provided a near-perfect test case for that position. The town was governed in practice by Mexico. Its residents lived under a different sovereign, and the U.S. exercised no real authority over them. If “jurisdiction” is understood as something more than a formal abstraction, it is hard to see how it applied here. And yet, the U.S. declined to take that path.

Cantú’s case made its way through the immigration system. The Board of Immigration Appeals supported him only on narrow grounds. But in reviewing the case, President Jimmy Carter’s attorney general, Griffin Bell, went further. He acknowledged the unusual circumstances but declined to draw a limiting principle from them. Birth on U.S. soil remained the decisive fact. Cantú was granted citizenship, as was everyone else from Rio Rico who could prove birth on U.S. soil.

The episode presented an unusually clean opportunity to redefine the scope of birthright citizenship. If there were ever a case in which the U.S. might have insisted that geography alone was insufficient, this was it. The gap between sovereignty and governance was clear and undeniable, but the government chose not to draw that line.

The reason is not hard to see. Once introduced, such distinctions are difficult to contain. If jurisdiction depends on the degree of control exercised by the state, then every marginal case invites a challenge. How much control is enough? What kinds of authority count? And how are those judgments to be made in situations where the facts are less clear than they were in Rio Rico? These, no doubt, are some of the questions the Supreme Court is wrestling with as it decides how to rule on Trump v. Barbara in the next month or two.

The appeal of restricting birthright citizenship lies in its promise to align legal status with ideas about allegiance and authority. But as Rio Rico demonstrates, reality is messier. Sovereignty can be formal or practical, jurisdiction can be partial, and the relationship between the two can shift over time.

So a simple rule has its advantages. For most of American history, that rule has been that birth on U.S. soil confers citizenship. That sometimes produces results that can seem counterintuitive in edge cases. But it has the virtue of clarity. And it avoids the need to adjudicate degrees of belonging.

Only after I moved in and tried to fall asleep on the first night did I realize why I was able to rent the place so easily: It was a few blocks down the street from a fire station, and the trucks passed under my window whenever they responded to a call. It took me about a month—a painful, exhausting, bleary-eyed month—to get used to it. Now I can sleep through almost anything.

I think about that fire station whenever I stumble across one of President Donald Trump’s social media posts during his second term. Gone are the days when his 140-character remarks on Twitter would shape the news cycle, in the late 2010s. Now it is easier to tune out the long jeremiads that he cranks out on Truth Social, which also might be the least readable social media website in internet history.

Trump’s social media rants these days are so frequent and so voluminous that it is rarely worth paying them any specific attention. But his Mother’s Day post about the Supreme Court is a notable exception. The president gave a surprisingly frank assessment of his view of the Supreme Court—and how he expects personal loyalty from the justices that he appoints to it.

In the lengthy post, Trump criticized two members of the high court for voting in Trump v. Learning Resources, the case that nixed his purported ability to impose hundreds of billions of dollars in tariffs under a Cold War–era emergency powers law. The Supreme Court held 6–3 that Trump had exceeded the powers laid out in the statute.

“I ‘Love’ Justice Neil Gorsuch! He’s a really smart and good man, but he voted against me, and our Country, on Tariffs, a devastating move,” Trump wrote. “How do I reconcile this? So bad, and hurtful to our Country. I have, likewise, always liked and respected Amy Coney Barrett, but the same thing with her. They were appointed by me, and yet have hurt our Country so badly!”

It would be hard to find a better example than this of Trump’s thinking that the justices that he nominated to the high court should be personally loyal to him. Justice Brett Kavanaugh, his third appointee to date, was among the dissenters. There were six justices in the Learning Resources majority; four of them did not warrant a mention here. Trump did not even bother to criticize Chief Justice John Roberts, who actually wrote the opinion.

Naturally, that partial silence was not out of respect for the court. Trump obviously does not hold the three liberal justices in high regard. Last month, for example, in another social media post, he described Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson as “low IQ,” an insult that he typically reserves for Black lawmakers and officials. Chief Justice John Roberts has also been frequently criticized by Trump in the past, but received a less harsh treatment after his rulings for Trump in the disqualification case and the immunity case.

Instead, Trump focused on the two justices he appointed who ruled against him. “I’m working so hard to, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, and then people that I appointed have shown so little respect to our Country, and its people,” he continued. “What is the reason for this? They have to do the right thing, but it’s really OK for them to be loyal to the person that appointed them to ‘almost’ the highest position in the land, that is, a Justice of the United States Supreme Court.”

Two things stand out here. One is that Trump implicitly admits that, by siding with him, Gorsuch and Barrett would not be doing “the right thing.” So deeply ingrained in American culture is judicial independence that even Trump himself, the arch-heretic of American civil republicanism, must acknowledge it. The other is that Trump drops the pretense and explicitly demands loyalty from them.

Trump’s demands for personal loyalty are no surprise 10 years after his first rise to power. The Russia investigation, which consumed the first half of Trump’s first term, exploded into public view after Trump demanded personal loyalty from then–FBI Director James Comey and then fired him after he didn’t receive it. So highly does Trump prize loyalty that he has packed his second-term Cabinet and key federal agencies with loyalists who often place his personal whims above ethics, the public interest, and the law itself.

But it is still striking to see him demand it from Supreme Court justices—and, by extension, from a coequal branch of government—simply because he appointed them. If this is his public thinking about the justices, it casts doubt on whether any second-term Trump appointee can be trusted to place the national interest or the law ahead of Trump’s personal and political goals.

Kevin Warsh, who is currently awaiting a Senate confirmation vote to be the next Federal Reserve chair, told lawmakers last month that he would “take [his] responsibility to be an independent leader of the Federal Reserve very seriously” and assured them that Trump had never “asked [him] to predetermine, commit, fix, [or] decide on any interest rate decision in any of our discussions, nor would I ever agree to do so.”

That under-oath answer would be more reassuring if Trump hadn’t spent the last year waging a war against Fed independence and specifically demanding that interest rates be set to his liking, at his whim. His administration has launched pretextual investigations into both Jerome Powell, the outgoing Fed chair, and governor Lisa Cook. Trump tried to fire Cook from the Fed last summer despite statutory for-cause removal protections; the Supreme Court blocked her removal pending its decision on the merits later this term.

Trump desperately wants the Fed to lower interest rates to help boost his chances in this year’s midterm elections. He wants it so badly that he has tried to destroy the Fed’s independence—a load-bearing pillar of American monetary hegemony—just to achieve it. Now his nominee is asking Americans to believe that Trump does not want personal loyalty from him—even as Trump demands it of Supreme Court nominees who are unambiguously independent from him.

If Trump is willing to demand personal loyalty from Supreme Court justices, what about his lower court nominees? Senate Democrats have asked Trump nominees for federal judgeships whether they believe Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election. On multiple occasions, they have merely responded that Biden was “certified” as the winner—an evasive response that flatters Trump’s conspiracy theories about the election, defies the will of the American people, and suggests a lack of independent judgment.

“Democrat Justices always remain true to the people that honored them for that very special Nomination,” Trump continued in his Truth Social post. They don’t waver, no matter how good or bad a case may be, but Republican Justices often go out of their way to oppose me, because they want to show how ‘independent’ or, ‘above it all,’ they are.”

This would surely be news to Democratic presidents. Both of Obama’s confirmed Supreme Court nominees voted against him in a 2014 case on his recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board. Justice Elena Kagan sided with the court’s conservatives on blocking Medicaid expansion requirements in the landmark 2012 case on the Affordable Care Act’s constitutionality. I have personally never looked at the three current liberal justices in quite the same way since they voted to overturn Trump’s disqualification from the Colorado presidential ballot two years ago in Trump v. Anderson.

I’m sure that the Supreme Court’s liberals would vote against Democratic presidents more frequently if the Supreme Court had a liberal majority. More daylight would inevitably emerge if those justices were frequently asked to constrain adventurous efforts to stretch law and precedent by liberal legal activists and Democratic presidents. But this is a conservative Supreme Court with a conservative supermajority, so those opportunities are few and far between.

If anything, Trump should be thrilled with his treatment by the Supreme Court these days. During his first term, the court was much more willing to constrain Trump in key cases—keeping Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals on the books, blocking a citizenship question for the 2020 census, allowing a New York grand jury to subpoena his financial records from his accountant, and so on. Back then, I noted, he seemed to assume that the court was closely aligned with him even when it very clearly wasn’t.

Now the reverse is true: The Supreme Court has given him nearly everything that he has wanted over the last two years—and he still isn’t satisfied. This is the same Supreme Court that just boosted his party’s midterm chances earlier this month by demolishing what’s left of the Voting Rights Act. He should be thanking Gorsuch, Barrett, and the other conservative justices for saving his political career in 2024. Had they and their colleagues simply upheld the Constitution that year, Trump would have been barred from running for a second term and instead stood trial for his crimes. Every public and private act he has taken since then stems from those fateful decisions.

From there, Trump once again recounted the scope of his 2024 electoral victory—which was middling at best—and expressed dismay that the court would likely soon strike down his birthright citizenship executive order. It is unclear whether he has any personal insight into the court’s decision-making. Leaks from the high court are increasingly common these days, and past presidents have occasionally received a clandestine heads-up about key rulings from friendly justices.

Either way, Trump said his prediction was “based on what I witnessed recently by being the first President in History to attend a Supreme Court session,” which is a fair assessment of how the Trump v. Barbara oral arguments went. Trump’s attendance, he complained, “was not even recognized or acknowledged, out of respect for the position of President, by the Court—Something which did not go unnoticed by the Fake News Media!”

“Well, maybe Neil, and Amy, just had a really bad day, but our Country can only handle so many decisions of that magnitude before it breaks down, and cracks!!!” he continued, in what can be interpreted as either a prediction, a threat, or an act of desperation. “Sometimes decisions have to be allowed to use Good, Strong, Common Sense as a guide. A negative ruling on Birthright Citizenship, on top of the recent Supreme Court Tariff catastrophe, is not Economically sustainable for the United States of America!”

One does not need a high opinion of the conservative justices to think this reasoning won’t work, at least not on some of them. Beyond the extralegal plea for “common sense” as the basis for immorally denaturalizing millions of Americans, the United States has also had birthright citizenship for the last 150 years. It could hardly be “economically [un]sustainable” if this country also became a global superpower in that timespan.

What Trump’s rant does underscore is how he thinks about the court and its place in American society—not as a neutral arbiter of constitutional law but as a Pez dispenser to give him easy wins. In fairness to Trump, the court failed to disabuse him of his notion when it defied the Constitution on his behalf in 2024. But even these justices appear to have some limits—at least for now—as shown by the tariffs ruling that he despises.

This rhetoric must also be held against any nominee he puts forward in a role that requires any sort of institutional neutrality, whether at the Federal Reserve or a federal district court somewhere in Florida or Texas. The president has made clear once again that he expects reciprocal favor from anyone he installs in a high government position. This is not a new siren blaring across our political landscape, but Americans cannot afford to sleep through it.

Early last week, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed into law a gerrymander so that Republicans could win as many as four additional seats. Three days later, Tennessee Republicans seized on the U.S. Supreme Court’s Louisiana v. Callais ruling to eliminate the lone majority-Black congressional district in the state. On Friday, four Virginia state Supreme Court justices, three appointed by the state’s legislature when both houses were controlled by Republicans, invalidated a ballot measure that could have resulted in four additional seats for Democrats through redistricting. Later that day, Louisiana Republicans, also taking advantage of Callais, presented new maps that will almost certainly result in the defeat of one Democratic member of Congress there. Five days; 10 seats; zero votes from members of the public.

Adding immediate context only makes it worse. Florida voters approved a ballot measure in 2010 that explicitly bans partisan gerrymandering. The all-Republican Florida Supreme Court is almost certainly going to let the redistricting stand anyway. In contrast, a clear majority of voters in Virginia, more than 1.6 million people in total, backed the redistricting that four judges wiped away. Voting had already started in Louisiana but has now been suspended. The South, a region with a long history of discriminating against Black Americans, is now rushing to eject from Congress Black members elected by Black citizens.

Then broaden the picture further. We have an authoritarian president who ignores laws and core democratic values. He knows that the party in the White House often loses a ton of House seats. He knows that trend is particularly likely to continue if the president is unpopular, as Trump is now. And he knows that a Democratic House might force him to actually follow the law. So instead of taking steps to become more popular or accepting defeat, he ordered Republican officials to start gerrymandering districts to ensure a party totally under his thumb keeps control of the House. And the plan is working. Republicans have won themselves on net from six to eight additional seats in these gerrymandering fights.

A lot of nonpartisan analysts and even a few Democrats are trying to downplay these redistricting gains by Republicans. Some argue that Trump is so unpopular that Democrats will still win the House. Others even claim that the redistricting will result in Democrats winning more seats than they would have otherwise because Republicans have spread out their voters too much.

Perhaps. But some estimates suggest that the Democrats will need to win the national popular vote by at least four percentage points to carry the House. That’s a lot. Remember that Trump’s 2024 victory, which was covered by many pundits as some dramatic shift in American politics, was by 1.5 percent over Kamala Harris. It would be terrible if Republicans lost the popular vote 48 percent to 52 percent but remained in control of the House. Or if Republicans won 226 seats or below—meaning their majority was retained only because of the Trump-ordered redistricting.

I don’t mean terrible in a Democratic sense, but in a democratic sense. Trump would have escaped accountability (electoral defeat) and a check on his power (a Democratic-controlled House) by rigging the election rules. And that rigging would have been an entirely partisan project, with GOP state legislatures and governors driving the process while judges appointed by Republicans somehow always determined that the law aligned with the GOP’s preferred outcome. Democrats would be essentially punished for having created independent redistricting commissions in Virginia and other states over the last decade.

But let’s say that Democrats win the House in November. Trump would get the punishment and constraints that he deserves. But that wouldn’t make what’s happened over the last year, particularly over the last week, less of a democratic crisis. We have a Supreme Court whose rulings, such as Callais, almost always align with the Republican Party’s priorities. We have a Republican Party that is constantly trying to shield itself from voter accountability. And where that party is popular, such as the states in the South, it wants to completely silence the political voices of anyone who opposes it. We have a political system that allows and really encourages parties to constantly change district lines and other procedural rules to gain electoral advantage. That system also gives judges virtually unchecked power to overrule the decisions of officials and the public.

And because Republicans have gutted majority-Black districts, the new Democratic majority would almost certainly have fewer Black members and fewer members elected largely by Black voters. This gerrymandering fight is essentially forcing the Democrats to spend more time campaigning for the votes of upper-income white suburbanites and less courting African Americans, who on average have lower incomes.

What do we do with this reality? There are increasingly far-fetched proposals, such as moving up the mandatory retirement age for Virginia’s Supreme Court judges, that could address the GOP gerrymandering advantage in 2026. A Virginia Democrat told my colleague Greg Sargent that the party isn’t going down that path. I wasn’t wild about that idea, but I concede that in the short term Democratic Party officials have to violate democratic norms because Republicans are.

But the permanent solutions are much harder. Creating a Supreme Court that isn’t totally biased toward the Republicans will require a Democratic trifecta that either adds justices or severely curtails the court’s powers. A Democratic trifecta that enacts proportional representation is necessary to permanently weaken today’s Republican Party. The authoritarian tendencies of GOP states in the South can’t be addressed by elections alone—since Republicans will win most of those. There may need to be general strikes and other labor action, and ultimately, LGBTQ people, African Americans, professors, and others whose rights are endangered by Southern legislatures may need to move north. To have news organizations, business groups, and other parts of our civil society who will directly state that the Republicans are the ones eroding democracy will almost certainly require the creation of a completely new civil society, because our current nonpartisan organizations seem to prefer continued democratic decline over being accused of “taking a side.”

First, though, we need to recognize the severity of our problems. Reassuring ourselves that the last week or year wasn’t that bad if the Democrats win the House is the same mistake that U.S. democrats (yes, small-d) made in largely moving on from Trump’s 2020 contesting of the election because Joe Biden won and was inaugurated. Or after Democrats did pretty well in the 2022 elections and everyone wrongly assumed Trump wouldn’t run and win in 2024. We have a democratic crisis. That can’t be solved by Democrats winning every election. They can’t—and it wouldn’t really be a democracy if they did.

We need a total change of our electoral and political structures so that a political party led by an authoritarian won’t have the chance to win 10 seats in a week without any member of the public voting and the chance to win an election while finishing four percentage points behind in the popular vote. That won’t be easy, but the last week is the latest illustration that such massive changes are the only way to make America democratic again.

NBC News reports that even though the UFC is paying for the event and tickets are technically free, sponsorship packages, including ringside seats, are going for $1 million-plus, with BBC Sport putting them as high as $1.5 million. Neither the White House nor the UFC has said where the sponsorship money is going.

Trump is personally selecting most of the 4,000-plus spectators for the event, to be held on June 14, which happens to be his eightieth birthday.

“I’m going to make a lot of enemies because it’s impossible to get everyone tickets,” Trump told NBC Friday in a telephone interview.

Trump will likely reward people who have given him political or business favors in the past, or those who are willing to pay up to attend. White House communications director Steven Cheung told NBC that Trump was splitting up his tickets among administration staffers, military servicemembers, and VIPs. The last group could include anyone Trump wants, including members of Congress and foreign dignitaries.

“I get calls, texts or emails every day—a few times every day,” Cheung, a former UFC spokesperson, said of the ticket requests he and other White House staffers are getting. UFC’s own president and CEO Dana White said last month that he only had taken about 200 tickets for himself and gave the rest to Trump, while TKO controls another 200.

An unnamed Trump adviser told NBC that the event is “his show, and it’s being treated that way.”

“The process has been absolute chaos,” the adviser said. “It’s hard to overstate how many requests have come in, but there is no doubt the people President Trump wants there will be there, and those he does not will not be.”

The president and CEO of UFC parent company TKO Holdings, Mark Shapiro, said in an earnings call earlier this month that the company expected to lose as much as $30 million on the event.

Knowing Trump, he’s going to take whatever money he can from the fight, and Republicans in Congress will work to ensure that there is no transparency (possibly in exchange for tickets). The spectacle will essentially be a circus, trading off the presidency, with Trump as a monarch watching people fight for his amusement in the octagon or to get a seat by his side.

The Virginia Supreme Court ruled Friday that the proposed maps were essentially invalid because state Democrats did not follow proper procedure. In Virginia, the General Assembly is required to pass a constitutional amendment not just once, but twice. The first vote must be conducted during a regularly scheduled legislative election, while the second vote has to take place after, before the question is put to voters.

The court ruled last week that, although state Democrats complied with those regulations, the timeframe in which it was conducted was compromised since early voting on the matter was already underway. The party’s unsuccessful counterargument turned to long-standing decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court, which has held that even if early voting is underway, an election does not happen until Election Day itself.

Virginians narrowly passed the referendum last month, despite a 2020 state policy that relegated redistricting to 10-year intervals aligned with the national census. Roughly 50.3 percent of the state voted in favor of redrawing the voting map, giving their representatives a chance to squeeze more Democratic seats into the U.S. House at midterms.

The new maps were expected to alter the state’s congressional split to overwhelmingly favor Democrats, switching from a 6–5 split to 10–1.

“The Court overrode the will of the people who ratified the amendment by ordering the Commonwealth to conduct its election with the congressional districts that the people rejected,” wrote lawyers for Virginia Democrats and the state’s Democratic Attorney General Jay Jones, in a statement obtained by the Associated Press. The attorneys added that “the irreparable harm resulting from the Supreme Court of Virginia’s decision is profound and immediate.”

The judicial decision was a major setback for the national liberal party, which had placed enormous weight on Virginia to offset successful Republican redistricting efforts in other areas of the country, such as Texas and Florida. The Supreme Court filing is an act of desperation as the party grasps for various solutions to offset the national Republican advantage heading into the midterm election cycle.

On Saturday, lawmakers met with Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries to discuss other potential solutions in the wake of the Virginia decision, including a bank-shot proposal to redraw the state’s congressional lines anyway.

During an appearance on Fox News Monday, White House spokesperson Anna Kelly was asked to explain Trump’s thinking about high energy prices.

Kelly claimed Trump was “clear-eyed” about the rising gas prices, adding that Iran had been “incredibly decimated” militarily and “totally crippled” economically.

“The president is not in a rush—he has all the cards at his disposal, because he knows that Iran is getting weaker and weaker by the day, while the United States is getting stronger and stronger,” she said.

White House spokesperson Anna Kelly on high gas prices: "The president is not in a rush" pic.twitter.com/aD4TGRpJGL

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 11, 2026

Kelly’s insistence that Trump is in control of the disaster he created in the Middle East is at once both deluded and damaging.

Shackled by sycophancy, Kelly insisted that Trump maintains a mastery over world events, including the economic disruption that is hurting Americans. He could end our suffering with a snap of his fingers, but he’s “not in a rush.” In reality, Trump’s demonstrated inability to strike a deal with Iran after more than two months shows just how out of control this situation has become.

Meanwhile, the average price of gas in the United States reached more than $4.50 per gallon Sunday, according to the AAA motor club. U.S. households are expected to pay at least $876 more on gas this year than last year, according to Democrats on the House Ways and Means Committee.

But speaking in the Oval Office Monday, Trump claimed that there was no cause for concern, because gas prices would “drop like a rock” as soon as Iran relinquished its grip on the Strait of Hormuz.

It’s not clear this will be anytime soon, as reports suggest Trump has spoken hyperbolically about the extent of destruction in Iran. A recent CIA analysis suggested that Iran could survive another three to four months under the U.S. military blockade without experiencing severe economic hardships. The president has also overstated the damage to Iranian military assets while the Pentagon has downplayed the extensive damage to U.S. military assets.

Pierce was a business partner and friend to Epstein for nearly a decade, helping him invest in the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase while emailing him about women. In 2012 Pierce told Epstein, “I had a great time with the girls. Hope they had fun too. Thanks.”

Also that year, Pierce sent Epstein dozens of pictures of a Ukrainian woman named Anastasia, writing that “Ukraine is now my favorite country,” after Epstein asked him to “take photos and find me a present.”

In 2018, Pierce emailed Epstein about how he had “a boat in Antigua full of amazing Ukraine’s finest” waiting for him.

This is the man who was cutting the ribbon for the golden statue at the president’s resort last week.

The Pennsylvania Democrat appeared on Bill Maher’s Club Random podcast Monday, laughing alongside the “anti-woke” comedian as the pair mutually praised Donald Trump’s “honest” treatment of the press, including an instance in which the president called a female journalist a “piggy.”

“The things that he says aloud, the way he just voices his interior monologue—there is something not exactly psychologically normal about someone who just voices their interior monologue—but it gives him an authenticity that no one else can possibly match,” Maher said.

“I saw his interview with Norah O’Donnell after the shooting, the next day, and she quotes the assassin who called him a pedophile, Hitler, whatever he called him,” Maher continued, referring to the attack on the White House Correspondents’ Dinner and taking a moment to suggest that Trump is not a pedophile. “But his reaction immediately was, to her, ‘You’re a terrible person.’ And he didn’t just think it—like any politician, that’s exactly what they’re thinking. He just says it.”\

“It’s at the same time horrifying and also kind of like, refreshing. It’s shockingly—the honesty, as someone who loves honesty and has made my career about it as much as I could, it is—there’s some level of it where you tip your hat and you go, ‘Wow, total honesty,’” said the longtime political satirist.

Amused, Fetterman responded: “Yeah, the ultimate—‘Quiet, piggy.’ That’s the president of America.”

Bill Maher gushes over how “refreshing” Donald Trump’s “honesty” is with reporters and John Fetterman responds: “The ultimate: quiet piggy. Hahaha, yeah!” pic.twitter.com/cBrq3juuxg

— Marco Foster (@MarcoFoster_) May 11, 2026

Trump routinely insults reporters in order to evade their questions. The moment Fetterman referred to took place in November, when Trump ended a line of questioning about the Epstein files by barking at a female Bloomberg News reporter, “Quiet! Quiet, piggy.”

Fetterman has displayed a penchant for Trumpian politics since he moved to Washington, despite the fact that he ran on the progressive ticket. Since Fetterman entered office in 2023, he has sided with Republicans dozens of times, frequently leveraging his position to advance Trump’s agenda.

He also voted to confirm several of Trump’s Cabinet selections, including Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin as well as the last Homeland Security chief, Kristi Noem, who was transferred to work in a relatively unknown section of the government in March following a string of embarrassing scandals.

Since Trump’s behemoth budget bill passed last July, setting in motion nearly $187 million in cuts from SNAP over the next 10 years, 3.5 million people have fallen off SNAP rolls nationwide. The law requires able-bodied adults between ages 18 and 64 without dependents to work 80 hours a month, or 20 hours a week, to qualify for SNAP benefits.

Arizona has moved rapidly to comply with Trump’s new requirements, increasing the amount of documentation individuals must produce and bolstering the review process. The result: As of March, there had been a 50 percent decrease in the state’s SNAP enrollees compared to just a year earlier—the largest drop-off in the country—including 200,000 children.

In the rush to enforce these new requirements, it seems many eligible Americans have also been pushed off the program.

Following a months-long paperwork back-and-forth with state employees, Tiffany Hudson, a single mother of two young children, decided to show up in person to the state Department of Economic Security office. Despite being exempt from the new work requirements, Hudson said she’d stopped receiving her $600 in SNAP benefits three months ago.

“It’s been really hard. We’ve been going to food banks every week,” Hudson told NBC News. “We’re eating less, we’re eating more frozen stuff.”

After waiting for hours to speak with an employee, she was told she needed to provide more documentation, as well as a written statement from her father clarifying that a birthday gift she’d received over Zelle was not a recurring payment.

Inside the Arizona Department of Economic Security, increased requirements have placed a strain on the employees charged with processing SNAP applications after 400 people were laid off in July. Part of Trump’s “beautiful bill” required states to keep their payment error rate below 6.6 percent or be forced to pay for a portion of SNAP benefits themselves. Arizona’s error rate was 8.8 percent in fiscal year 2024, and projected to be around 10 percent in fiscal year 2025. The state could face up to $208 million in costs if it doesn’t lower that rate this year.

Meanwhile, the Arizonans who are getting kicked off their benefits are turning to donations to survive. St. Mary’s Food Bank, the largest in the state, reported a 12 percent increase in demand across Arizona. Milton Liu, head of St. Mary’s, told NBC News that demand has already increased as much as 25 percent over the past year in some rural counties. He expected that number will only continue to grow.

This latest show of fealty, led by California Representative Darrell Issa, would have Trump’s 2019 and 2021 impeachments “expunged as if such Articles had never passed the full House of Representatives.”

“An impeachment is basically an indictment and it’s an indictment that you can’t really be acquitted from. If you are impeached by the House, famously, ‘Where do you go to get your reputation back?’ is the question,” Issa said to Fox News Digital. “And that’s sort of a problem that we’re dealing with, which is that the president was wrongfully accused, the evidence is now out that there was withheld information and false information, but where do we go to unring this bell? And the answer is we go back to Congress and we go to the House floor and we have a vote.”

The president was not wrongfully accused on either count. There is a wealth of evidence to confirm the first article of Trump’s 2019 impeachment, which came after he tried to convince the Ukrainian government to give him some damning dirt on Joe Biden ahead of the 2020 election. There is a transcript of Trump personally requesting it. As for his second impeachment, the president most certainly incited an insurrection on January 6, 2021. Yet GOP House members are acting as if they have some moral obligation to strike the impeachments from the record.

Even more confusing—both of these impeachment attempts failed spectacularly, and Trump came out of them stronger, winning reelection in 2024. Isn’t that a more compelling story to Republicans than trying to rewrite history with a symbolic expungement for someone who never faced consequences?

“We’re going to take off the gas tax for a period of time, and when gas goes down, we’ll let it phase back in,” Trump said in a phone interview. It’s a tacit admission that the effects of the Iran war aren’t going away anytime soon.

Gas prices have gone up 50 percent since the war started February 28, and cost an average of $4.52 per gallon in the U.S. as of this writing. As long as Iran (and the United States) block transit to and from the Strait of Hormuz, those prices will stay high. Pausing the federal taxes on fuel would amount to 18.4 cents less per gallon of gas and 24.4 cents less per gallon of diesel, but doing so requires an act of Congress.

Republicans in Congress are already working to carry out the president’s wish. Senator Josh Hawley and Representative Anna Paulina Luna said Monday that they plan to introduce bills in the Senate and House, respectively. If they’re successful, pausing the gas tax would cost the federal government half a billion dollars per week, money that pays for highway maintenance and other transportation projects.

Meanwhile, a peace deal with Iran is far away. Trump said Monday that the current ceasefire was on “massive life support” after he rejected Iran’s latest proposal as “TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE” the day before. If the ceasefire ends and the U.S. resumes strikes against Iran, that would only send oil prices even higher, wiping out whatever temporary relief Americans get from the tax pause.

Trump’s poll numbers are already historically low. Does he think he can fool the American people with a temporary measure?

The Cultural Landscape Foundation, a nonprofit organization focused on increasing “support and understanding for cultural landscapes,” filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., Monday against the Department of the Interior and the National Parks Service, alleging the Trump administration broke federal law with the new paint job.

The lawsuit states that since the pool is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the paint job was subject to a review under law. The organization is seeking either a preliminary injunction or a temporary restraining order to prevent more blue paint from being added.

The group’s president and CEO, Charles Birnbaum, said in a statement that the blue paint “is more appropriate to a resort or theme park,” adding that the bottom of the pool has been grey since its construction in 1924.

The lawsuit comes on the same day as a New York Times report that found Trump’s renovation of the pool will cost more than seven times the $1.8 million he originally estimated. The Interior Department said Friday that it now plans to pay $13.1 million to a Virginia firm, Atlantic Industrial Coatings, which Trump chose because it worked on his Sterling, Virginia, golf club’s swimming pools.

Last month, the company was awarded a no-bid contract by the Trump administration, which claimed that renovating the pool was so urgent that delaying it would cause “serious injury” to the government, but wouldn’t say why. The government has also said that Trump wants to get the project done before America’s 250th birthday celebrations on July Fourth. The contract gives Atlantic Industrial Coatings a 20 percent profit margin.

This is just another example of Trump attempting to remake Washington, D.C., in the aesthetic of his real estate properties. He is also getting sued over his proposed golden arch and White House ballroom. With a compliant Congress and Supreme Court, it seems Trump will end up leaving his permanent stamp on the nation’s capital.

The decision—which nixes a complicated idea, discussed over the weekend by Democrats, to replace the state Supreme Court and get the case reheard—is likely to anger rank-and-file Democrats who had hoped the party would respond aggressively to the ruling, which has made it more likely that Republicans hold the House this fall.

The decision also contrasts sharply with moves undertaken by many GOP state legislatures in the South, who are aggressively gerrymandering their states with wild abandon to erase decades-old majority-majority seats from existence, after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a key Voting Rights Act protection against racial gerrymanders.

“As a practical matter,” Virginia’s state Senate Majority Leader Scott Surovell said in an interview, the move “would not be capable of being implemented” given the “time frame.”

The decision effectively kills off hopes of getting back the four House seats that Democrats had moved into their column by pulling off a victory in last month’s referendum, which redrew the state’s House map. Last week, the state Supreme Court struck down the new map, wiping away that potential four-seat gain.

But over the weekend, many Democrats were heartened by an idea, floated by The Downballot, that could potentially save those four seats. The idea was that the Virginia legislature and governor could lower the retirement age of the state Supreme Court judges to remove them, replace them with new judges, and then get the court to rehear the case and decide it in their favor, restoring the lost map.

Yet Surovell insisted in an interview with The New Republic that the plan is unworkable. He cited a May 12 deadline set by the state Department of Elections for having congressional maps entered into the state’s election system. That’s necessary in order to be prepared for the congressional primaries set for August 1, for which early voting starts in mid-June.

That May 12 deadline would not leave enough time to execute the end run, Surovell said. The tactic would involve state legislative votes lowering the retirement age for judges followed by a new hearing of the case and other associated procedural arcana.

In a revelation that will dismay a lot of Democrats, the problem appears to be that the voting system has not been updated recently enough to make faster entry of the new maps possible (it’s currently being updated). If this ends up costing Democrats the House—which is unlikely but not impossible—the recriminations will be severe.

“Because the technology is so old, it takes a lot of time to input new districts into the computers, to ensure that people are assigned the correct ballots and that voting is not completely chaotic in November,” Surovell told me.

Democrats were taking the option of retiring judges seriously. Over the weekend, The New York Times reported that top Virginia Democrats had discussed the plan with House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries. Those discussions were inconclusive.

But Surovell told me he’s discussed the situation with Jeffries and with Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger. And Survovell confirmed that in the conversation with Jeffries, he ran through all these obstacles.

The loss of those four Virginia seats will unquestionably make it harder for Democrats to win the House, though success is still probably likely. According to calculations by G. Elliott Morris, under the most likely scenario for GOP gerrymandering, Democrats now must win the national popular vote this fall by nearly three points to win the House. Under a doomsday scenario in which Republicans gerrymander to the fullest extent possible, Dems would have to win the popular vote by four points. The Times’ Nate Cohn similarly calculates it at four.

It’s plausible that Democrats could still win one or two of those four Virginia seats anyway, despite losing the new map, if things go well this fall. But at the very least, the failure to go nuclear to get those four House seats back means the Democrats’ margin for error in winning the House is substantially tighter.

Surovell said that practical considerations weren’t the only thing motivating the decision not to exercise the retirement-age tactic. “Wiping out the entire Supreme Court is an incredibly extreme step to take over a decision you don’t like,” Surovell said.

When I pointed out that the president of the United States has commanded multiple GOP states to maximally gerrymander precisely in order to hold power while his approval rating hovers in the 30s—itself a rather extreme move—Surovell acknowledged the point. But he added that Democrats had successfully passed a hard-fought referendum to redraw the map under fast-moving circumstances. “We went through this referendum to try to protect American democracy,” Surovell said.

Still, many Democrats will look at this situation and note that Republicans keep finding ways around procedural obstacles, while Democrats keep getting stymied by them. After the U.S. Supreme Court killed the protection against racial gerrymanders, it took Tennessee only a few days to wipe out a Democratic district by carving up the Black population in Memphis.

In Florida, Republicans promptly rushed through a map that eliminated four Democratic districts, having zero qualms about it even though it faces substantial legal challenges. Republicans in other Southern states are expected to quickly follow suit, which could give Republicans a net gain of five seats—or possibly six or seven—in the redistricting wars.

When I asked Surovell about this takeaway—that Republicans keep finding ways around obstacles and Democrats don’t—he rejected the premise, noting that the successful referendum resulted in the expenditure of around $100 million. “I don’t think that was insignificant,” Surovell told me, adding that it’s still likely that Democrats will win two of the four lost seats.

Virginia Democrats still plan to appeal the ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court. But Surovell confirmed that even a good ruling would be unlikely to impact this cycle, due to that May 12 deadline. Of course, Virginia and many other Democratic states can redistrict next year in order to offset GOP gerrymanders, and do so in time for the 2028 elections. So, hey: There’s always next cycle, right?

White House deputy chief of staff and Homeland Security adviser Stephen Miller has aimed to rewrite U.S. immigration policy since his early days in Washington as a Senate aide. But even atop his perch within the Trump administration, Miller’s schemes have experienced myriad setbacks.

Thus far, the president has dismantled the Border Patrol strike forces that Miller had campaigned for, turned on former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem for effectively following Miller’s orders, and handed the reins of America’s deportation program back to law enforcement officials, reported The Atlantic Monday.

The White House insists that Miller’s place within Trump’s entourage has not changed, and that he remains a steadfast and widely respected adviser to the president.

“The President loves Stephen,” White House communications director Steven Cheung told The Atlantic in a statement. “And the White House staff respects him tremendously.”

But behind the scenes, Trump’s language about the immigration aide is changing. The president has privately joked that Miller’s “truest feelings” are too extreme for the public, and reportedly thinks that sometimes Miller takes things too far, according to presidential advisers that spoke with the magazine.

Trump reportedly disagreed with Miller’s description of Alex Pretti—one of two U.S. citizens shot and killed by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis this winter—as a “domestic terrorist,” and acknowledged afterward that U.S. policy needed to shift as a result.

Miller has framed immigration as an “invasion.” He has advocated to end habeas corpus for immigrants; promoted large-scale raids at workplaces, churches, and neighborhoods; threatened the futures of immigrants who do not “self-deport”; and encouraged the White House to invoke the Alien Enemies Act to deploy troops to the U.S.-Mexico border. He has leveraged his position within the administration to advance American warmongering abroad, pushing the White House to bomb boats in the Caribbean when a plan to invade Mexico fell through.

What is not clear is how long Trump will keep Miller, and his violent ideologies, around. Miller’s influence on his pet project, immigration, is already waning.

“I think the president knows very, very well what he can go to Stephen for, and what he probably shouldn’t tell him if he doesn’t want to get an earful,” one former administration official told The Atlantic. Another adviser was more blunt: “The president knows who he is, period.”

Since Noem was ousted, the power structure has shifted, with Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin and border czar Tom Homan taking the lead on U.S. immigration policy in Miller’s place.

“The new secretary is listening to Tom Homan and [Border Protection Commissioner] Rodney Scott before he is ever listening to Stephen Miller,” a senior administration official told The Atlantic. “We just have law enforcement in charge.”

Without Noem to muck up the agenda, Miller’s direct involvement with the agency no longer seems necessary.

“The entire White House has to worry less about cleaning up after DHS with new leadership in there,” one White House official said.

In December, Axel Sanchez Toledo was violently arrested by police officers after he called 911 to request a welfare check on his 4-year-old daughter after hearing she’d fallen sick while staying with his ex-girlfriend, The Marshall Project reported Monday.

Sanchez Toledo greeted two officers from the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office with his girlfriend and their infant son. One of the officers took Sanchez Toledo’s ID and retreated back to the patrol car. When he returned, he accused Sanchez Toledo of being undocumented, and said he was being detained for ICE.

Police body camera footage obtained by The Marshall Project showed Sanchez Toledo take off running. The two deputies pursued him, shocking him with a Taser, and kicking and tackling him while his girlfriend sobbed. As Sanchez Toledo was pinned to the ground, he moaned: “Please, guys, I’m not a criminal,” insisting he had documentation. (His lawyer confirmed to The Marshall Project that he had a pending asylum case.) “I don’t want to go,” he begged.

“Too fucking bad now!” one deputy screamed.

Sanchez Toledo was charged with resisting arrest. Those charges were dropped on April 29. He currently remains in ICE custody.

The officers who arrested Sanchez Toledo were part of the sheriff’s office 287(g) Task Force, through an agreement that grants state and local law enforcement to operate with federal immigration powers in return for reimbursements and other incentives.

Of the 1,500 officers at the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office, only 150 are deputized to make immigration arrests. But between September 2025 and March, they have been responsible for arresting 60 immigrants per month, the highest arrest rate in the state, and have received almost $1 million for their work, according to The Marshall Project. More than 1,100 law enforcement agencies across the country have signed 287(g) agreements.

These bleeding boundaries between state and local enforcement, combined with Trump’s sweeping deportation efforts, are actively putting people in danger.

The family of a Virginia woman who died after she was allegedly assaulted by her partner are claiming the woman was afraid to report her domestic abuse to the police over concerns she’d be detained over her immigration status, according to NBC Washington. The Tahirih Justice Center, a nonprofit that supports immigrants fleeing gender-based violence, told the outlet that 76 percent of its clients were afraid to go to the police.

Law enforcement’s collaboration with federal immigration enforcement has eroded many immigrants’ sense of safety and their reliance on the police. In another story, one asylum-seeker told The Washington Post she’d been contacted by a man who assaulted her at a previous job. But since immigration agents had raided her workplace and started sweeping up neighbors, she said she wouldn’t consider calling law enforcement if anything happened to her.

Trump was joined by Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator Dr. Oz, Republican Senator Katie Britt, philanthropist and maternal health advocate Olivia Walton, principal deputy assistant secretary for health Dr. Dorothy Fink, and others at the White House Monday morning to announce the “Moms.gov” website, a new tactic in the Trump administration’s campaign to convince American women to have more babies.

Trump is about to hit REM sleep on camera in the Oval pic.twitter.com/0zJp86Iuls

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 11, 2026

It was the president’s first public event of the day, beginning at 11 a.m, and he appeared to doze off with his eyes fully closed multiple times while the people behind him spoke. It is becoming a regular occurrence for the president to take a little nap during an event, the most recent instance being just last week.

Trump is napping in the Oval Office again pic.twitter.com/OdUEFHmPtJ

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 11, 2026

This isn’t some late-night Situation Room meeting or some three-hour Cabinet meeting. This is the president’s first scheduled event of the day. Even if he’s not completely asleep, he certainly is not fully present. Capable presidents don’t fall asleep at 11:30 a.m.

On Monday, Anna Gomez sent a letter to Disney CEO Josh D’Amaro warning that the TV network is under a “sustained, coordinated campaign of censorship and control” from the White House, The Wall Street Journal reports. She added that FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr has weaponized the agency to pressure “a free and independent press and all media into submission.”

Gomez’s letter said that the FCC’s recent demand that Disney apply to renew broadcast licenses for eight of the local TV stations it owns, its probe into the ABC talk show The View, and its decision to reopen a complaint into how ABC moderated a 2024 presidential debate between Trump and Kamala Harris were “not a series of coincidental regulatory actions.”

Under Carr, the FCC has also taken action against late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel for making jokes about Charlie Kirk, the president, and first lady Melania Trump, which even forced Kimmel off the air for days last year. 

“The goal was clear: use regulatory pressure to force his removal from the air and send a message to every other broadcaster about the cost of critical coverage,” Gomez wrote in her letter. 

The FCC has been after Disney and ABC, among many other TV networks, as part of Trump’s vendetta against media outlets that criticize him. In December 2024, ABC paid Trump a $16 million settlement after he sued the network for defamation, and Gomez pointed out how Trump redoubled his attacks in the following months after  his second term as president began. 

“That settlement did not buy you peace,” Gomez wrote. She added that “you cannot buy this Administration’s favor. For the right price, you can only borrow it. And the price always goes up.” 

Gomez also wrote that she plans to use “every tool available to me as a Commissioner to shine a light on what this FCC is doing to curtail press freedom and to hold this process to account at every step.”

Last week, Disney accused the FCC of violating its First Amendment rights, in a legal filing. The network has hired an experienced Supreme Court litigator, Paul D. Clement, who served as solicitor general in the George W. Bush administration. This suggests that it plans to fight back against Trump’s attacks. Judging by Gomez’s letter, other news networks need to follow suit in order to protect America’s free press. 

Hundreds of thousands of people who bought into the Trump Organization’s “T1 phone” last summer are still waiting to receive their devices, with no refunds in sight.

The Trump-branded phone was launched in June 2025, promising early adopters that they would receive the gimmicky gadget by September that year for a $100 deposit. Yet eight months later, loyalists still have nothing to show for their blind faith in the Trump family business, with no advertised release date on the Trump Mobile website.

“Hey, Trump supporter here,” one man said in a viral TikTok video. “This one goes out to Don Jr. and Eric … where the fuck’s my phone? I ordered three, no, four gold Trump phones in the summer.”

An estimated 590,000 buyers bought into the promise, supplying the Trump Organization with a cash influx of about $59 million total. But customers shouldn’t expect to get their money back anytime soon. After ordering a phone for tracking purposes, NBC News was met with various delays and excuses from the company’s customer support hotline when asking where it was. Though the company’s recently updated terms hints customers may be entitled to a refund, Popular Information reported that the hotline is unresponsive on the matter.

“600,000 people got the Trump phone. Scratch that. 600,000 people ordered the Trump phone, put $100 deposit down on it, and never got it,” posted an X user identified as MAGA Cult Slayer. “So where’s the $60 million Donnie?”

Interested buyers can still donate their hard-earned cash to the Trump family, however, as the Trump Mobile website is still accepting enrollees into their apparently nonexistent phone program.

It’s just the latest in a long string of controversies—and disappointments—surrounding the phone.

Originally, Donald Trump Jr. told podcaster Benny Johnson that the phones would be “built in the United States of America.”

“We have to bring manufacturing back here,” Don Jr. said at the time.

But within weeks of the site’s launch, all made-in-America language had been scrubbed from the product descriptions. Instead, the phone would be “designed with American values in mind,” and there would be “American hands behind every device”—strange marketing promises that could effectively mean anything.

The Verge found that the move away from American production wasn’t the only change made since the phone previewed last year: The advertised screen size of the Trump phone also dropped significantly, changing from a 6.78-inch screen to 6.25 inches, and initial advertisements listing the phone’s RAM at 12 gigabytes suddenly showed zero RAM specifications whatsoever.

The Financial Times’ deep dive into Stephen and Katie Miller offered a troubling look into how the man who’s been waging a white supremacist crackdown on Latino immigrants ended up with a wife who goes on racist rants and urges women to have babies.

One passage mentions Stephen Miller’s only other publicly known relationship besides Katie, with a “light-skinned conservative Latina,” according to Jean Guerrero, author of Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda.

“He liked her a lot more than she liked him.… She was embarrassed to be seen with him, and didn’t want people to know he was her boyfriend,” Guerrero told the FT. The anonymous woman did not speak further with the publication when contacted.

While some online argued that this spurning could explain Miller’s hatred toward undocumented Latino immigrants, the FT piece noted that Miller expressed racism long before his Latina girlfriend was trying to avoid him in public.

Former classmate and friend Jason Islas told the FT that Miller called him one day in 1998, before the two started high school, and told him they weren’t friends anymore because he was Mexican. In high school, Miller’s yearbook quote came from Teddy Roosevelt: “There can be no 50-50 Americanism in this country. There is room here for only 100 per cent Americanism, only for those who are Americans and nothing else.”

“A kid being cruel to another kid is not that interesting,” Islas said. “What is interesting is that he continues down this path—clearly that’s calcified into something deeper and more powerful and menacing. He has this idea of how America should look, how power should look. It’s very Trumpy, and it’s very fascist.… It’s bound in aesthetics. He believes that the category of people who have rights, who are true Americans, look a certain way.”

Donald Trump unleashed a flood of AI-generated slop on Truth Social Sunday evening to cheer on his own flailing presidency. While Trump may have declined to publicly reference the fact that it was Mother’s Day, the president did share 10 posts from “Women for Trump.”

“I’m a Trumplican,” read one inscrutable post. 

“Trump’s the Real Deal! A True American Badass!” read another. 

Three separate posts declared Trump the greatest of all time, or “GOAT.” Another post included an AI-generated image of Trump’s face being added to Mount Rushmore. Yet another post urged the country to “BUILD THE BALLROOM.” Trump added a comment to this one: “It is going up fast!!!”

Trump shared posts from other sycophantic bots, with names such as Trump’s Army and Extremely Stable Genius. In addition to sharing posts that insisted on his own greatness, the president also shared posts bashing Democrats and former President Joe Biden. He also reposted a call to “arrest poll workers that cheated in elections.”

After boasting about receiving “Excellent Poll Numbers,” Trump shared another post claiming CNN hailed him as surpassing Ronald Reagan to become the the “most beloved president among Republicans.” It’s unclear what poll numbers he could’ve possibly been referring to, as Trump’s approval ratings have sunk to new lows. While one 2021 poll found that Trump was more highly regarded than Reagan, it’s doubtful he would be today. 

This torrent of crap didn’t come out of nowhere. Earlier Sunday, the president declared on Truth Social that Iran’s counterproposal to end the war was “TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE,” posted a screed claiming conservative members of the Supreme Court owed their loyalty to him, and shared his ongoing efforts to fix the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. He opined that Democrats “must fail” and complained about having to pay back billions in revenue after the Supreme Court struck down his illegal tariffs.  

Trump previously posted about Mother’s Day weekend, but only as an excuse to tout gains in new job numbers—after tanking job growth to practically nothing in 2025. 

Trump’s affinity for self-aggrandizing AI slop wouldn’t matter so much if he were just someone’s elderly relative posting on Facebook. But the president of the United States is clearly more interested in leading his own fan club than he is in, well, governing. 

Kelly told CBS’s Margaret Brennan Sunday that it was “shocking how deep we have gone into these magazines.”

“We’ve expended a lot of munitions,” he said. “And that means the American people are less safe. Whether it’s a conflict in the western Pacific with China or somewhere else in the world, the munitions are depleted.” 

These comments triggered Hegseth, who promptly took to X to make that known. 

“‘Captain’ Mark Kelly strikes again. Now he’s blabbing on TV (falsely & dumbly) about a *CLASSIFIED* Pentagon briefing he received,” Hegseth wrote on Sunday evening. “Did he violate his oath…again? @DeptofWar legal counsel will review.” 

While Hegseth emphasizes that Kelly’s report came from a classified congressional briefing, it’s not like the U.S. wasting munitions in this war is some big secret. In fact, Kelly even reminded Hegseth that it was something they discussed very publicly just days ago. 

“We had this conversation in a public hearing a week ago and you said it would take ‘years’ to replenish some of these stockpiles. That’s not classified, it’s a quote from you,” Kelly replied. “This war is coming at a serious cost and you and the president still haven’t explained to the American people what the goal is.”

We had this conversation in a public hearing a week ago and you said it would take “years” to replenish some of these stockpiles. That’s not classified, it’s a quote from you. This war is coming at a serious cost and you and the president still haven’t explained to the American… https://t.co/q3wX9AjRzO pic.twitter.com/5q7Gg81Xtg

— Senator Mark Kelly (@SenMarkKelly) May 11, 2026

This beef was incited months ago, when Hegseth had Kelly censured and tried to reduce his pension after he appeared in a video message  with other former servicemembers in Congress advising military personnel to refuse to follow illegal orders from the Trump administration. A federal appeals court last week appeared unlikely to allow Hegseth to punish Kelly for that basic statement, perhaps fueling the defense secretary’s current campaign against his fellow veteran. 

On Truth Social Sunday, Trump complained about Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer forming an elections task force led by former Attorney General Eric Holder, alleging that it would “no doubt try to suppress Republican voters, and interfere in our Elections.”

“The Democrats are totally unhinged and we will not allow them to threaten the integrity of our Elections,” Trump posted. “During my Historic Election in 2024, when I won every single Swing State, and decisively won both the Electoral and Popular votes by wide margins, the Republicans had an Election Integrity Army in every single State to preserve the sanctity of each legal vote. We will be doing the same again in 2026, but it will be much bigger and stronger. All Americans should have their voices be heard by casting a vote. Be assured this Election will be fair! President DONALD J. TRUMP.”

Trump’s words are odious, considering the actions that he and the Republican Party have taken already to interfere in the midterms and beyond. They’ve pushed for mid-decade redistricting that disenfranchises Democrats and Black Americans, they’ve continued to spread election-denial conspiracies from 2020, and they’ve installed people who support those conspiracies in local governments and election boards across the country.

Meanwhile, Americans’ faith in elections will only weaken. Rumors of ICE being deployed to the polls will grow, thanks to Republicans like Steve Bannon, frightening many people of color away from the polls. Democrats will have to come up with not only a legal strategy but a forceful one that ensures elections remain free and fair.

During an interview on Full Measure, host Sharyl Attkisson pressed Trump about his allegations that someone had stolen from the country’s gold reserve at Fort Knox. 

“What happened to the audit of Fort Knox?” Attkisson asked. 

After a long pause, Trump replied: “Which one are you talking about?” 

Attkisson gently reminded Trump that shortly after he reentered office, he and Elon Musk both discussed auditing Fort Knox. In fact, they both cast doubt—without providing a shred of evidence—on whether the more than 4,600 tons of gold was still there at all. 

“Well, we wanted to go and knock on their door—Fort Knox, very thick door—and to see whether or not we have any gold in there. Cuz uh, we take a look at, it’s a very interesting question, yeah?” Trump said. “We played with that. I wonder if they left the gold in Fort Knox, cause they steal a lot.”

“No need to really do that though?” Attkisson asked, as if speaking to a child. 

“Well, I don’t know, I think that it’s uh, I do want to go to Fort Knox sometime, I want to see if the gold is there. Which I’m sure it will be,” he said. 

ATTKISSON: What happened to the audit of Fort Knox?

TRUMP: Which one are you talking about?

ATTKISSON: You and Elon Musk talked about auditing the gold

TRUMP: We wanted to go knock on the door and see whether or not we have any gold in there. We played with that. I wonder if… pic.twitter.com/7ZYem7h9g3

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 10, 2026

Trump appeared to have no memory of spreading rumors about the missing gold at Fort Knox, and to be unable to really commit to them just a year later. This comes as concerns over Trump’s mental acuity have been mounting, and the president has insisted he’s aced all three of the dementia tests he’s been forced to take.  

In a lengthy Truth Social rant Sunday, Donald Trump railed against justices he appointed to the nation’s highest judiciary, wondering how he’s supposed to “reconcile” rulings that he claimed were ideologically opposed to his agenda.

Trump called out Justices Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett by name, whining that “they were appointed by me, and yet have hurt our Country so badly” by ruling against his tariff proposal. The Supreme Court deemed Trump’s “liberation day” tariffs illegal in February, throwing not only the White House’s wildly controversial economic plan but also the primary driver behind the administration’s foreign policy agenda, out of whack.

He blamed the fallout of his illegal tariffs on the bench’s decision, claiming that the Supreme Court—rather than the judgment of his own office—had cost the country $159 billion by putting the U.S. in a position to “pay back to enemies.” Trump further lamented that the justices should have specified that the U.S. did not need to pay anyone back for his office’s failure, and he did not seem to understand why the court could not have done so.

“With certain Republican Nominated Justices that we have on the Supreme Court, the Democrats don’t really need to ‘PACK THE COURT’ any longer,” Trump continued. “In fact, I should be the one wanting to PACK THE COURT! I’m working so hard to, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, and then people that I appointed have shown so little respect to our Country, and its people. What is the reason for this?

“They have to do the right thing, but it’s really OK for them to be loyal to the person that appointed them to ‘almost’ the highest position in the land, that is, a Justice of the United States Supreme Court,” Trump wrote.

He baselessly claimed that justices appointed by Democratic presidents have “always [remained] true to the people that honored them”—a bold-faced lie that is regularly disproven, including in cases this year.

The sudden anxiety about his apparently fragile judicial loyalties appeared to be spurred by the court’s highly anticipated decision on birthright citizenship, a constitutionally protected right that Trump has attempted to dismantle since the moment his second term began. The court’s decision is expected to be released sometime in June.

Trump recalled his visit to the Supreme Court last month to sit in on the birthright citizenship hearings—a choice that made him the first sitting president in U.S. history to watch in person while the bench worked. He said that based on what he saw, he believes the court “will be ruling against us on Birthright Citizenship, making us the only Country in the World that practices this unsustainable, unsafe, and incredibly costly DISASTER.”

“I don’t want loyalty, but I do want and expect it for our Country,” Trump wrote.

He then specified that he has other ways of enacting his tariff agenda that are “far slower” than the plan deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, and suggested that the judiciary should step outside of their job and their oaths of office to consider what’s “good” for the country rather than what’s illegal.

“Well, maybe Neil, and Amy, just had a really bad day, but our Country can only handle so many decisions of that magnitude before it breaks down, and cracks!!!” Trump continued. “Sometimes decisions have to be allowed to use Good, Strong, Common Sense as a guide. A negative ruling on Birthright Citizenship, on top of the recent Supreme Court Tariff catastrophe, is not Economically sustainable for the United States of America!”

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

After the Virginia Supreme Court struck down a new redistricting that gave Democrats additional House seats, Donald Trump celebrated the outcome. In so doing, however, he accidentally revealed that he and Republicans expressly reserve the right for themselves to play by their own rules and rig elections in their own favor unilaterally. In truth, the only chance Trump and Republicans have of salvaging the midterms is extreme cheating, as a remarkable new poll shows. But what are friends of democracy supposed to do in a world where one party is openly rigging the game and the other isn’t? Where are these gerrymandering wars really headed?

We’re talking this over with Ari Berman of Mother Jones, the great reporter on voting rights. Ari, good to have you on.

Ari Berman: Hey, Greg. Great to talk to you. Thank you.

Sargent: So in Virginia, Democrats had succeeded in passing a redistricting referendum that added an additional four congressional seats to the Democratic column. The state Supreme Court struck that down. But instead of talking about the ruling, which is unfortunate, let’s look forward. Ari, Democrats will probably still win one or two of those four seats in Virginia. Meanwhile, Republicans are redistricting in several southern states where they might get, I don’t know, five seats extra. What’s the overall math right now? Can you just boil it down in really simple terms?

Berman: I would say Republicans are probably going to net about five seats from redistricting at the end of the day—possibly more, maybe less—but they’re ahead right now in the gerrymandering arms race because of what the state Supreme Court in Virginia did and because of what the U.S. Supreme Court did last week.

Sargent: What looked like a wash is going to be a small Republican advantage. Five seats—that’s unfair, it shouldn’t have happened, but that’s surmountable for Democrats, right?

Berman: In a wave election, it’s definitely surmountable. It just gives them less margin for error in terms of the map. They are going to lose one or two seats in Virginia. The map is going to be more difficult for them in Florida because of the new gerrymander—not insurmountable, but more difficult. In some of these southern states, these districts that they’ve had for decades in certain places, like Tennessee, for example, where they broke up Memphis—those are no longer going to exist. They’re going to have to put Republicans on defense in some new places and they’re going to have to expand the map.

Sargent: Let’s talk about what Donald Trump tweeted about the Virginia ruling. He said this: “Huge win for the Republican Party and America in Virginia. The Virginia Supreme Court has just struck down the Democrats’ horrible gerrymander. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN.”

Ari, Donald Trump has literally commanded numerous Republican states to gerrymander to the maximum extent possible. He’s sponsored many primary challengers to Republicans who refuse to go along with that. Here he is celebrating the fact that Republicans get to gerrymander and Democrats don’t. His explicit position is that elections should be rigged in the GOP’s favor. Your thoughts on that?

Berman: Trump was just celebrating this week the fact that he ousted all of these Republicans in Indiana who were opposed to gerrymandering. So it’s very clear that under Trump, the Republicans are an openly pro-gerrymandering party. He’s been pushing maximum gerrymandering everywhere in unprecedented ways.

What the Virginia Supreme Court ruling showed and why it made people so angry is it feels like there’s two sets of rules. It feels like Republicans are passing all of these gerrymandered maps that, A, are not approved by voters, and B, are then upheld in court. And Democrats introduce a map that is approved by voters and then is struck down in court.

It’s a total double standard. Democrats already have to face a higher bar in places like Virginia and California because voters have to approve their maps. Then even when they’re approved, in the case of Virginia, you have courts retroactively throwing out millions of votes in a way that they have not done so far in places like Texas.

Sargent: I want to underscore the double standard here a little further. Democrats in numerous states now have gone to the voters and put the referendum before them on whether they want to redraw maps in the middle of the decade. That is a hard thing to do, but they respected the voters enough to go ahead and do that. There you really have this incredibly glaring difference that—I don’t see how we can continue to avoid talking about that.

Berman: No, you can’t make any kind of false equivalence here. In Florida, for example, Ron DeSantis openly said that Florida’s prohibition on partisan and racial gerrymandering was unconstitutional. He basically is now daring the courts to strike down what is enshrined in Florida’s constitution. That is far more blatantly unconstitutional than whatever minor technical errors may have occurred in Virginia—there’s obviously debate about whether there were even any technical errors that occurred in Virginia.

Take the fact that Louisiana just suspended an election altogether. Forty-two thousand people had already voted and they suspended the election so they can eliminate possibly one or two majority-Black districts. The process has been completely different in all of these red states. They have not only not been approved by voters, but they have broken so many different norms in terms of how they’ve gone about this process.

Look at the backdrop between Virginia and Tennessee this last week. In a matter of basically three days, Tennessee Republicans dismantled a majority-Black district that had existed for decades. In fact, Memphis had had its own congressional district since 1923. So it had existed for basically 100 years. They split it into three—no opportunity for anyone to weigh in. Virginia, this took months. Voters had lots and lots of time to weigh in here. To me, the vote by the voters in Virginia should have been the end of the discussion,. The [state] Supreme Court should have said, Even if we have some minor qualms with the process, voters approved it and we are going to defer to the voters.

I think that would have been the sound interpretation of the Constitution, but also the sound way of looking at the national environment. One party is doing everything they can to rig the system and the other party has a hand tied behind its back in the effort to try to counteract it. And I just don’t think that’s fair.

Sargent: It’s absolutely not fair. However, Democrats are still favored to win the House. Not that that makes all that OK. A new Marist poll has Democrats up 10 points in the generic House ballot matchup, 52 percent to 42 percent. Among independents, that’s 49 to 37—12 points. A 12-point spread among independents. That’s indicative of wave stuff.

Now in fairness, the polling averages, averaging all the polls together, only have Democrats up five points in the generic ballot. So Marist may be an outlier, but it could also be an early indicator. Plus-10 is a bit more consistent with these lopsided Dem wins we’ve been seeing in special elections. What’s your reading of the House battle right now and on that front?

Berman: I would lean more towards your interpretation, Greg. The battleground is going to be bigger than people are thinking based on how these special elections are going, based on the fact that Democrats are making inroads in what had been previously red states like Iowa and Ohio. Some of these GOP gerrymanders are not as secure as they think. In Florida, in Texas, some of these maps were very hastily drawn.

Texas, for example—it was based on Trump’s numbers in 2024. Trump has regressed a lot from 2024, particularly among some core supporters like Latinos. There’s two separate discussions here. One is, can Democrats still win the House? I think the answer is yes. And then the second thing—are we going to have an optimally fair election in November? And the answer is no. Right now we have a situation where so many things that would have previously been illegal are now legal.

I think particularly about the fact that all of this mid-decade gerrymandering and then dismantling of all of these majority-Black districts across the South that we’re going to see—southern states are now doing things that would have been illegal under the law, at least back to the 1980s and possibly earlier than that. We are going back 40 years in terms of what is legal under the Voting Rights Act.

I really worry about how far they’re going to take that in this kind of environment and what it’s going to mean for representation more broadly. You can have a situation where, yes, Democrats win the midterms, but at the same time, the midterms were a lot less free and fair than they should have been.

Sargent: A hundred percent. So let’s look at the out years now. This state of affairs in which one party is openly, explicitly, gleefully declaring that it plays by its own rules no matter what, it gets to rig elections, and the other party doesn’t—that is going to absolutely require Democrats to start redistricting more aggressively next cycle in time for the 2028 elections.

I reported recently on a new analysis from Fair Fight Action which found that Democrats can net an additional 10 to 22 seats on top of the current map for themselves if they redistrict aggressively in numerous states. Twenty-two may seem like a lot and a lot depends on how many state legislative races and state legislative chambers Democrats flip in these elections. But generally speaking, that’s what’s going to have to happen. The U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling is going to open the door to even more gerrymandering by Republicans next cycle, and Democrats will have to respond in kind.

Berman: Democrats have no choice. It’s about fairness, at the end of the day. It’s about making national elections fair. And the only way that national elections are fair is if the parties play by the same set of rules. A lot of Democrats were devoted to good government when they got power. That was defensible at the time. But what it meant is that in a lot of states, Democrats are playing by one set of rules, Republicans are playing by another set of rules.

Democrats are bound by things like independent commissions when Republicans can just gerrymander as much as they want. That is leading to unfair outcomes. It is leading to an unfair race for the U.S. House. I believe Democrats have to maximize their power by whatever means necessary. And they particularly have to look to the state level, because that’s where all of these battles are being fought.

We’re going to hear a lot about the race for Congress this year. Obviously that’s critically important in terms of holding Trump accountable. At the same time, most of these battles are going to be fought in the states. And Democrats have a tremendous amount of opportunities in a lot of these states. You wrote about it—Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Michigan, Nevada. There’s all of these places where Democrats could potentially get trifectas and they could redraw the maps for 2028.

It requires something of a long-term strategy. I think about Wisconsin, for example, which you wrote about. Wisconsin was a place in the early to mid-2010s where it seemed impossible that Democrats would ever have any power. They were shut out of the governor’s race. The state Supreme Court had a huge conservative majority. The legislature was super gerrymandered. It was one-party rule.

Well, Democrats won the governor’s mansion. They won a bunch of seats to get a progressive majority on the state Supreme Court. They struck down the gerrymandered state legislative maps. Now they could flip both chambers of the legislature. That to me is a roadmap of what Democrats need to do everywhere, which is figure out how to maximize power so you play by the same set of rules as Republicans do.

Sargent: Let’s just be really clear about what the Democratic position actually is, because they constantly get accused—absurdly—of hypocrisy for wanting to gerrymander despite opposing it themselves. Here’s the Democratic position: Neither side should gerrymander because it’s bad. It disrespects the opposition’s voters and allows lawmakers to protect themselves from accountability. But even though gerrymandering is bad, if Republicans insist on maximizing it, Democrats have to do the same. Otherwise, they are acquiescing to a system in which one party is playing by a different set of rules.

Now, people like you and me, Ari—good government liberals and so forth—had long been hoping that there was a path to mutual de-escalation. The whole premise of the commissions is that if you invite Republicans to try and do something that’s mutually fair, then maybe it de-escalates the hardball on both sides. But they have just said, fuck that, no way. They’re openly threatening to maximize their own gerrymanders after the Supreme Court ruling. Such hopes of mutual forbearance are dead. That’s all there is to it.

Berman: The only way reform works is if it’s on a national level and applies equally in all states. It can’t be a situation where only blue states do it and it’s essentially unilateral disarmament. We tried that. It didn’t work. It didn’t lead to more fairness. It led to one side being given a blank check and the other side having one arm behind their back.

I think Democrats have learned this lesson. I still worry about what an endless gerrymandering arms race will mean. It will lead to more partisanship, more polarization, less competition. But the alternative is worse, which is that Republicans just gerrymander in all these places, they have a perpetual lock on the U.S. House and on state legislatures, and Democrats have no way to fight back.

At the very least, I believe that this gerrymandering arms race, while incredibly destructive for American democracy, has woken Democrats up to the need to be as aggressive as Republicans in trying to maximize power, and also realizing they can’t wait on the courts to save them. The U.S. Supreme Court’s not going to save them, and even state Supreme Courts are often major impediments. In Virginia, they controlled the governor’s mansion and the legislature, but they didn’t control the courts. We saw the impact of that. That’s why state Supreme Courts are so important.

There are really important state Supreme Court elections this year in North Carolina, in Georgia. Democrats, when they think about the states, they also have to think about those places where either governors appoint state Supreme Court justices or state Supreme Court justices are elected, because that’s a critical part of making the system more fair.

Sargent: Well, I want to bring up something that Graham Platner, the Democratic candidate for Senate in Maine, tweeted in response to the Virginia ruling. He said this: “I’m old enough to remember when Republicans in Ohio just ignored court rulings repeatedly and did it anyway.”

Now, that’s something of a bombshell, Ari. He’s not exactly saying that in Virginia Democrats should simply ignore the courts, but he’s floating that as an option. I take him to be saying that we are now inevitably going to enter into a period of procedural total war and Democrats have to be willing to do whatever Republicans do in those fights. That’s kind of a bombshell, right, from a major Democratic Senate candidate?

Berman: But I think it makes sense because Republicans are not bound by any kind of norms in this fight. They have not respected any kind of procedural process to stop them. When there was a primary in their way, they just canceled the primary. When there are laws that prohibited mid-decade gerrymandering, they just repealed them. When there were state constitutions they didn’t like, they just said, let’s just say this is unconstitutional. That’s what they’ve done in all of these places. I don’t get why Democrats are just going to say to the Virginia state Supreme Court, we’re going to allow you to nullify a vote that was held by three million people.

The difference here in Virginia is that the voters weighed in. I keep harping on this process because it gives it a legitimacy that doesn’t exist in all of these other states.

Sargent: In California, where Democrats were able to add five seats, they also went to the voters. So they keep going to the voters. Republicans don’t do that. Let’s close on the comic relief—or maybe it’s not all that funny. The SAVE Act is a really disgusting piece of voter suppression legislation. Trump and other Republicans have openly and explicitly said they have to pass the SAVE Act in order to hold power at a time when Trump is really, really unpopular. Listen to GOP Congressman Roger Williams’s answer about the SAVE Act.

Roger Williams (voiceover): Well, I would hope not. It’s pretty easy to vote for something like this. I mean, we want the right people voting. I don’t know—the Senate acts in different ways from the House. We pass some good legislation. We send it to them. So let’s see what they do with it.

Sargent: So isn’t that something? He said, “we want the right people voting.” Again, Ari, unintentionally revealing. Your response to that?

Berman: That’s just a dog whistle that goes back many, many years. I can think of so many segregationists in the Jim Crow South saying the same thing: We want the right people voting. In this week in particular, it’s just revealing that so many things that we thought were of the past have come back really with a vengeance. It’s indicative that when they say they only want certain people to vote, they really do mean it.

Sargent: Yeah. Just to close this out: A lot of people will point to these results and say, OK, Democrats need to win more than a majority to win the House, so they just have to moderate or they just have to adopt more popular positions, that type of thing.

Yes, Democrats have to adopt popular positions, but we don’t need to choose between these two things. There should be a two-track approach here. One is try to adopt the most popular positions and execute the best politics possible, best political strategies possible. But on the other, you’re going to have to enter into procedural maximalism here. Otherwise, you perish. Isn’t that the essence of this?

Berman: Winning elections aren’t enough if elections themselves aren’t fair. Whatever they can do to level the playing field and make it so that both sides are playing by the same set of rules—to me, that has to be the guiding light of the Democratic Party going forward.

Sargent: Agree 100 percent. I hope Democrats follow that advice. Ari Berman, great to talk to you. Thanks so much for coming on.

Berman: Great to see you, Greg. Thanks for having me.

But here’s something that’s wrong with them that predates Trump. They have no solutions to anything. As we’re witnessing at the moment, Donald Trump has no idea of anything to do about inflation and gas prices. The last three Republican presidents have left office with the economy in a shambles. On education, the environment, you name it—no solutions. They don’t even bother. Newt Gingrich at least used to bother to pretend, back when he was speaker, with all his New Agey, Tofflerian mumbo-jumbo. In his day, Paul Ryan did terrific cosplay as a wonky “ideas guy.” But now they don’t even do that.

On no issue is this more obvious than on health care. They railed against Obamacare. They spent years vowing to repeal it and replace it with something better. They never could repeal it, despite more than 70 tries. And that’s a good thing for many reasons, but mostly because they never had anything to replace it with. Conservatives once acknowledged that lack of health care coverage in this country was a problem, for which they promoted free-market solutions. But now they don’t even do that. They ostracized Mitt Romney, the last guy who tried. If you don’t have health care, in Republican world, that’s your own lazy fault.

All of which brings us to what’s happening with Obamacare right now. You’ll recall last fall’s government shutdown. That happened in part because expanded Obamacare subsidies signed into law by Joe Biden after the pandemic were set to expire at the end of 2025. Democrats wanted to renew them, and Republicans did not.

Now—you could argue that these subsidies were meant to be temporary, and so ending them was justifiable. It’s not a crazy point. On the other hand, millions of people came to depend on them. They couldn’t afford to buy coverage on the Obamacare exchange without those subsidies—which may mean that the original subsidies weren’t generous enough to persuade people to buy coverage. In any case, many Democrats and health care advocates argued last fall if the subsidies were ended, the cost of premiums would spike, and millions of people would drop their health care coverage.

Well … guess what happened? For openers, I refer you to this Wall Street Journal headline from March 19: “Millions of Americans Are Going Uninsured Following Expiration of ACA Subsidies.” The article reported: “Nearly one in 10 people who had Affordable Care Act plans last year dropped health insurance altogether, after premium costs rose sharply because of the expiration of federal subsidies, according to a new survey.”

Since that article ran, states have been reporting on their exact enrollment numbers for this year. In Georgia, for example, more than half a million people—all of them faced, remember, with higher gas and grocery prices—have decided to forgo coverage. The Georgia Recorder reported on April 20: “The 37% enrollment drop—from 1.5 million Georgians in January 2025 to 950,000 as of April 17, 2026—dwarfs any previous decline in the state since the launch of so-called Obamacare health insurance plans in 2014.”

While some of that drop happened before the subsidies expired, the lion’s share of it came after. It means that if you make more than $64,000 in Georgia, you have to pay full sticker price for health care, which in turn means that “for some Georgians, the cost of premiums more than tripled,” according to the Recorder. And while the numbers are more dramatic in Georgia, this is happening all over the country. It will, in addition, have a lot of knock-on effects. For example, hospitals will have to provide more uncompensated care, which leads to things like less money to invest in equipment and technology, which leads to worse care.

And taking a longer historical view: What has Obamacare done for Georgians? Has it made them feel the crippling weight of the chains of socialism that they are now forced to drag around with them? Well, I suppose some may feel that way. But in point of fact, from 2013 to 2016, the number of uninsured Georgians dropped by 537,000, which was 29 percent. The story was similar in two neighboring states. In Alabama, the uninsured dropped by 32.5 percent, and in Florida, by 34 percent.

In other words, Obamacare, with all its flaws, has done the main thing it promised it would do. It reduced the number of uninsured Americans dramatically. And in contrast, we might ask: What have Trump and the Republicans done with respect to Americans’ health care?

Next to nothing. A number of Republican governors and state legislatures did eventually bow to reality and accept the federal money they received from buying into Obamacare and opening state-run exchanges. Even so, 10 states still refuse to do so. Georgia is one (although it has accepted a partial expansion). Of the others, six are—guess what?—former states of the Confederacy. Then there are Kansas and Wyoming and, oddly, Wisconsin, where the state legislature is run by extremist nutsos.

And the president? His big health care calling card is TrumpRX.com, a website where people can buy certain drugs at a discount. It’s not awful. But as KFF points out in a fact sheet, the website offers discounts on 43 drugs. How many prescription drugs are patented in this country? Around 24,000. Plus, there are already other websites and online pharmacies that offer similar discounts and that list more drugs. So TrumpRX is like paving one pothole on a road littered with them. Meanwhile, Trump is throwing millions of Americans off their insurance plans because they can no longer afford them, while he’s telling them that gas prices are going to be high for a little while because of this pointless war that he started and is losing, and they just have to deal with it.

We tend to assign these actions by Republicans to cruelty. And it’s true. A lot of what they do is just heartless. For example, Texas limits eligibility for Medicaid to families living below 15 percent of the poverty level, meaning that a family of three earning more than—get this—$4,098 annually is not eligible for any benefits. The states that have opted into Obamacare all cap eligibility at 138 percent of the poverty level, and the feds pick up most of that tab. The states that haven’t bought in set their own levels. Texas is the lowest, and it’s just mean.

However, I wonder just how much stupidity factors in here too. These people must be dumb as rocks if they can’t see how this cruelty hurts their states economically. And even those who aren’t that stupid worship a man who pridefully knows nothing about public policy. That’s its own kind of dumb, and it’s arguably more insidious than even Trump’s addled incuriosity. They know better, and they do it anyway.

The end result is that people will go without health care, and some will die. OK—I guess cruelty wins. But man, it’s close.  

As someone with a 2-year-old son who likes to play pirates—and who spends a lot of time writing about the shifting maritime order under the Donroe Doctrine—I decided to take the president at his word. Let’s review what has happened over the past nine months in foreign policy through the lens of piracy.

On September 1, 2025, the Pentagon launched “Operation Southern Spear,” a campaign of airstrikes and interdictions in the Caribbean Sea—ostensibly targeting drug cartels and smugglers from Venezuela. It has since expanded to Ecuador’s Pacific Coast, where local fishermen have been killed, kidnapped, and tortured. The death toll is over 170 people so far.

Then, on January 3, 2026, U.S. Special Forces abducted Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, in an operation that killed over 100 people, and replaced him with Delcy Rodríguez—a fellow Chavista, though presumably a more pliant one. Following negotiations in Caracas geared at opening up the country’s energy sector to foreign investment, Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum flew home with $100 million in gold—for domestic refiners.

On January 30, the Panamanian Supreme Court revoked a decades-long concession held by the Chinese shipping company CK Hutchison at the Balboa and Cristóbal container terminals. This ruling was widely interpreted as a capitulation to diplomatic pressure from the U.S., resulting in the dispossession of CK Hutchinson’s port infrastructure—which was handed over to the Danish firm Maersk.

The U.S. has also been running a similar playbook in Peru, over the port of Chancay.

Then, on February 28, Trump launched “Operation Epic Fury,” resulting in a near-immediate strategic loss. Amid a fragile ceasefire, a bizarre new maritime status quo has emerged. Iran charges tolls for safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz, and the U.S. Navy attempts to interdict any ship that has filled up at an Iranian port—while simultaneously threatening to sanction entities that pay the toll.

From what it seems, the U.S. is using a diverse and flexible set of military, legal, and political tactics, including murder, torture, abduction, coercion, and theft, to intentionally disrupt maritime trade flows—forcing rival capital out, while trapping allied capital in.

Still don’t think so? Check out this map showing just how many tankers are lining up at American refineries. It’s a pretty remarkable coincidence that Western supermajors are dipping their toes in Venezuela and capitalizing their investments in Guyana while the U.S. keeps Hormuz blocked.

All this sounds pretty piratey and out of character for a nation state, right? In the Captain Phillips/Pirates of the Caribbean/Muppet Treasure Island sense of the term, yes. But Trump’s comparison ultimately distracts from a simple fact: This is how empires have always acted.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Spanish empire used the same interdiction tactics in the Mediterranean against the Ottomans, while mired in conflict with the Netherlands over South American port access—all while constantly fending off pirates (many of whom were privateers).

In those days, as today, piracy was not one thing. It could be an act of political rebellion. It could be a survival strategy. It could be directed by rival powers. (It could even be all three at once.) Another thing that hasn’t changed is that the label “pirate” has always been selectively applied within the context of great power struggle between maritime empires.

In the Netherlands, Piet Hein is a national hero. In Spain, he is remembered mostly as a pirate.

Viewed in this light, Trump’s remark wasn’t unique because of its seeming honesty. Rather, its rootedness in a common misbelief about piracy has offered us a rare insight into how an imperial power in decline rationalizes its own violent actions—which are progressively unjustifiable under international laws.

Earlier in the week, the U.S. put out a statement in defense of Panama’s “sovereignty” against Chinese “economic pressure” and asked allies to join a multilateral “Maritime Freedom Construct” with the goal of unblocking the Strait of Hormuz. Then on Friday, Trump’s piracy quip revealed that the global maritime order is just lofty rhetoric obfuscating the persistence of a centuries-long status quo.

The truth is that the empire has always behaved like the “pirates” we’ve been taught to fear. Because the pirates of yore, much like the “narco-terrorists” of today, are how empire has always justified its barbarism, its murder, its torture, its abduction, its coercion, and its theft.

Pirates, of course, have a colorful way of articulating the same dog-eat-dog vision of power: “Fifteen men on a dead man’s chest, yo ho ho and a bottle of rum!” Trump has a more blunt way of characterizing his high-seas misadventures: “To the victor go the spoils.”

Still, there is at least one area McPhee has returned to multiple times in his work: the nature and fate of American wilderness. Several of his most popular books recount adventures off the beaten track (near Glacier Peak in Washington, through the North Woods of Maine, down the Salmon River in Alaska) and follow characters who are trying to eke out an existence in the kind of untamed places (the Pine Barrens of New Jersey) that most readers might drive past, preferring the comforts of civilization. Four of these books—The Pine Barrens (1968), Encounters With the Archdruid (1971), The Survival of the Bark Canoe (1975), and what is arguably McPhee’s masterpiece, Coming Into the Country (1977)—have just been collected by the Library of America in a single volume with the fitting title John McPhee: Encounters in Wild America.

McPhee has rejected the label of “environmental writer.” He once told The Paris Review: “I’m a writer who writes about real people in real places. End of story.” But this canonizing collection shows him as a significant contributor to the environmental literature that has piled up since the modern environmental movement began in the 1960s.

The dominant tone of such writing is elegiac. Something vital has been lost, is still being lost, in a terminal process of impoverishment, and we’re urged to wake up and act before it’s too late. This tone is certainly present in McPhee’s “wild America” books, in which people he speaks with make grim prognostications about a blighted future “fifty or more years hence”—meaning now—as dams and jetports threaten to efface entire landscapes. McPhee went to the Pine Barrens, he wrote, “because I found it hard to believe that so much unbroken forest could still exist so near the big Eastern cities, and I wanted to see it while it was still there.” As it happened, the supersonic jetport planned for that location never materialized. There was no such twist of fate for Alaska: As a reader today, it is impossible to go through the three sections of Coming Into the Country, originally published as a book in 1977, without fixating on references to the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. The pipeline only started pumping oil from Prudhoe Bay to the Valdez Marine Terminal that same year (on June 20, 1977), meaning McPhee’s book is a final dispatch from a place that was about to irrevocably change.

Coming Into the Country and its companion volumes stand as environmental history, offering insight into how we’ve come to inherit our patchwork of faltering ecosystems. But his books hold up as more than just history, because they illuminate underlying attitudes that remain prevalent and politically influential today. With remarkable clarity, McPhee shows us how “wild America” is contested territory—the subject of an ongoing and possibly unsolvable disagreement. What even is the wilderness? What is it good for? These questions have never been more fraught than they are right now.

McPhee has often attributed his own interest in wild places to childhood summers spent at Keewaydin, a canoe-tripping camp in Salisbury, Vermont. He started going there in 1937 at the age of 6, “and to this day,” he wrote in an essay more than 60 years later, “I do not feel complete or safe unless I am surrounded by the protective shape of a canoe.” Keewaydin sparked a lifelong appreciation for fishing and backcountry river journeys. (McPhee is less keen on hiking, though he has done his fair share of that too.) He quotes Thoreau in his books—another avid canoer—and has confessed to admiring Edward Abbey’s feral classic Desert Solitaire “very much.” In Coming Into the Country, McPhee explains to a woman that he likes “places that are wild” and has been “quickened all my days just by the sound of the word.”

Here, for example, is McPhee reflecting on a region of Arctic Alaska, in what is now the Kobuk Valley National Park:

What had struck me most in the isolation of this wilderness was an abiding sense of paradox. In its raw, convincing emphasis on the irrelevance of the visitor, it was forcefully, importantly repellent. It was no less strongly attractive—with a beauty of nowhere else, composed in turning circles. If the wild land was indifferent, it gave a sense of difference. If at moments it was frightening, requiring an effort to put down the conflagrationary imagination, it also augmented the touch of life. This was not a dare with nature. This was nature.

If there’s a better description of the ambivalence that wild places can invoke—the fluttering feelings of repulsion and attraction, fear, exhilaration, even awe—I’m yet to read it anywhere. Whether McPhee intended to or not, he earned a place alongside the likes of Rachel Carson, Peter Matthiessen, Annie Dillard, and Barry Lopez, writers who, in scrutinizing our relationship with the natural world, have helped us to better understand ourselves. 

Despite his affinity for nature, he is committed to journalistic objectivity. He might have a personal “bias,” he told The Paris Review, in favor of the environmental movement, but as a reporter he aspires to be scrupulously impartial. This means holding his opinions close to his chest (except in rare asides about, say, lazy tourists who dare to use a float plane to breach the Maine woods with aluminum canoes), and it also means “struggling to present both sides.” 

Those “sides” are rendered with notable vividness in McPhee’s books. On the one side are people who are variously categorized, either by McPhee himself or by the characters he speaks with, as conservationists, ecocentrics, ecophiles, and “druids.” They love nature as it is, advocate for the listing of more protected land under the Wilderness Act, and say things like: “We’re going to have to live in close harmony with the Earth. There’s a lot we don’t know. We need places where we can learn how.” That judgment is uttered in Coming Into the Country by John Kaufmann, a National Parks Service planner with a passion for wilderness (and McPhee’s good friend). Another outspoken representative is David Brower, first executive director of the Sierra Club. McPhee describes Brower as “the sacramentarian of ecologia americana,” and he is the titular figure in Encounters With the Archdruid.

On the other side, then, is the Bureau of Reclamation, planning new dams along the Colorado River. And the Kennecott Copper Corporation, patenting claims in the Cascades. And any other business interest led by “the drill and the bulldozer.” The people on this side speak a language of economic utility and resource extraction. They say things like: “You can’t avoid change. You can direct it, but you can’t avoid it.” Some of them affirm to McPhee that it is they who are the real conservationists, with conservation, in their understanding, based on the concept of “maximum use.” A memorable representative would be the developer who accompanies McPhee on a tour through the Pine Barrens, fantasizing a central business district to replace all the trees. “I hope I don’t start to cry,” he says. “This is a planner’s dream.”  

This might seem like an obvious binary, even a crude one. But McPhee is too skilled a writer to reduce anyone to stereotypes. No perspective is presented as unreservedly right or irredeemably wrong. There is not even really a split into two clear sides: It is more like a spectrum. The final part of Coming Into the Country profiles off-grid homesteaders near the outpost of Eagle, Alaska. While many of these loners want the wild to be left wild—it is why they moved there in the first place: “I get so high being out in the woods it is like doing acid,” one man says—they also want a kind of libertarian freedom to mine, trap, and build private dwellings as they see fit.

Coming Into the Country is a compendium of conversations and arguments about wilderness. In Encounters With the Archdruid, this discourse is baked into the book’s structure: The three sections show David Brower sparring, in turn, with a mineral engineer, a property developer, and a cattle rancher who also happens to be the commissioner of reclamation. These sparring matches take place against a backdrop of wild landscapes, and they concern a potential mine site, a real estate plan for an untrammeled island off Georgia, and one of those dams slated for the Colorado. As McPhee makes clear, though, what is being discussed each time is the same fundamental conflict. Every argument in any of his nature books is, at heart, an argument over opposing worldviews. Should the wild be left intact, both as a safety net for us and as an inviolable birthright for future generations? Or is every corner of the country a valid source of materials, to be harvested or extracted for potential gain right now? 

We live in a moment of overwhelming noise. The Trump administration operates with a strategy of flooding the zone. A proposal for sulfide-ore copper mining in the headwaters of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness of Minnesota. Plans to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling. A rollback, by the (ironically named) Environmental Protection Agency, of the landmark “endangerment finding,” which had concluded greenhouse gases pose a serious threat and require federal regulation. It can be difficult to focus on any one thing. But to read McPhee is to be reminded of the bigger picture. What is happening in all these cases, and countless more at the moment, is an aggressive assertion of one extreme interpretation of wilderness—the wild as a bonanza of resources up for grabs—over all others.  

There is another way in which McPhee’s books hold up too, and it has to do with style. A great deal has been written over the years about the “extreme lucidity,” as Robert Macfarlane once put it, of McPhee’s sentences, his spare and unshowy use of language: “The lake is smooth. The far shore is indistinct in rising mist.” He is celebrated for his story structure, known for producing narratives that loop around on themselves in unexpected ways. He is also obsessed with detail. So many details. It is not uncommon for McPhee to spend hundreds of words analyzing the behavior of the loon, for instance, or thousands of words—page after page—on the involved process of constructing bark canoes from scratch. “He carves their thwarts from hardwood and their ribs from cedar. He sews them and lashes them with the split roots of white pine. There are no nails, screws, or rivets keeping his canoes together ...” And so on.

To a modern audience with ever-diminishing attention spans, there is something almost radical about McPhee’s level of detail. His pace is deliberate, unhurried. His patience is inexhaustible as he artfully arranges his collection of facts. I recognize how a reader might find the writing dull in parts, even boring; and yet I find it very moving.

One of the roles of a writer is to pay close attention to the world. In doing so, a writer sees patterns that others might otherwise miss. McPhee’s attention is so close that it borders on devotional. Nothing escapes his notice. Nothing is too small or too big for consideration, from a cranberry bog to Denali. For its comprehensive vision, its meticulous accuracy (every line fact-checked), his work is virtually unrivaled. It harkens back to a type of slow, immersive journalism that barely exists anymore—to our detriment. What writer today would move to backcountry Alaska for months at a time just to take the measure of local life? What magazine or publisher would fund it? Coming Into the Country remains a benchmark for what nonfiction writing can achieve when a master craftsman is given the luxury of space and time and support.  

A man in the book tells McPhee, “When you are writing about nature, you are writing about God, and it cannot be put into words.” There is truth in that, I think: Language has its limits. But perhaps McPhee comes as close as anybody has in the past half-century of writing about wild America.

“It was in those moments where I would see, Wow, we’re both Christian, but we’re moving through the world in completely different ways,” recalled Linnea, who is a member of her university’s branch of the progressive faith network United Protestant Campus Ministries.

As a faithful Christian and young woman who identifies as queer, Linnea is among a relatively small number of Gen Z Americans who are both religiously affiliated and politically progressive. Gen Zers are less likely to identify as Christian than older generations, and less likely to regularly attend church, according to the most recent Census of American Religion by the Public Religion Research Institute, or PRRI. Progressive Christians thus have the burden of convincing ideologically aligned young people that worship is a meaningful way to engage in society.

In the current political climate, the term “Christian values” is often equated with conservative values, both by those who support that ideology and by those who do not. The Trump administration’s efforts to embed Christian nationalism—the belief that the United States was founded on and should be governed by Christian principles—into the fabric of the federal government have further cemented this perspective into cultural consciousness. Polling has also shown that Americans who identify themselves as adhering to or sympathizing with Christian nationalist beliefs remain overwhelmingly supportive of Trump.

Progressive Christians don’t necessarily like to align themselves with any particular political term—to them, they are simply following Christ’s teachings. However, there is a distinct ideological difference between them and their conservative or Christian nationalist counterparts—which makes “progressive” a clean shorthand for the way they apply their religious beliefs to everyday life.

“Jesus was also executed by the government in the street and called us, multiple times, not just to love our neighbors but to stand in deep and profound solidarity with the most oppressed amongst us,” said Lizzie McManus-Dail, the pastor of Jubilee Episcopal Church, a church in Austin, Texas with several LGBTQ members. “That, I think, is the deepest and truest heart of Christianity, but it is certainly not what Christianity has become synonymous with in a country where the government is openly trying to make this a Christian nationalist nation.”

Recent civil action by church leaders in opposition to the Trump administration’s policies has placed a spotlight on Christians who believe the tenets of their faith are not in line with the actions of the president, and of the Republican Party as a whole. After thousands of Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers were installed in Minneapolis earlier this year, local Christian pastors—along with other faith leaders—took an active role in community organizing. Late last year, Christian clergy were also among those arrested for protesting ICE crackdowns in Chicago.

These types of activities by church leaders may appeal to civically minded, progressive young people looking for community. But data suggests that if any Gen Zers will be more inclined to attend church because they consider Christianity to be in line with their values, that increase would not have a significant statistical difference in church attendance among the younger generations.

“I think it might happen at the margins, but I don’t think it’s going to be happening en masse because of the other larger secularization trends that have emerged with younger people,” said Melissa Deckman, the CEO of PRRI and the author of a book on Gen Z political participation.

The church’s treatment of LGBTQ Americans writ large is a major factor in whether a young person identifies with a particular religion. According to a 2024 survey by PRRI, 60 percent of unaffiliated Americans under 30 say that they left their religious tradition because of its teachings regarding LGBTQ people. Fewer than four in 10 LGBTQ individuals identify as Christian; they are also twice as likely to identify as religiously unaffiliated as compared to straight people.

“There’s still a perception among many younger people that religion equates with negative treatment of LGBTQ individuals, despite the fact that a lot of these progressive clergy you see being arrested are really, frankly, far more affirming of LGBT individuals,” said Deckman.

Although they are a relatively small portion of Christians, LGBTQ Christians are, anecdotally, on the forefront of building relationships with other like-minded individuals. Many of the queer people Linnea encounters on campus have “religious trauma,” having grown up in households that held fast to a very rigid and conservative theology. But she’s trying to challenge those negative associations: She recalled working with church leaders to plan an event in protest when the CEO of a conservative Christian organization spoke at the City Club for Cleveland in January.

“We wanted something that was both very gay and very Christian, because … we’re just tired of it being seen as things that can’t coexist, because the voices of Christian nationalists are so loud right now,” Linnea said. Even though she can get “bogged down” with anger that Christian language can be used to discriminate against LGBTQ Americans, she believes the best strategy to counter that messaging is being vocal about the intersection between her values and that of her faith.

“I think the much more fruitful and helpful way that I frame it in my discussions with especially other LGBTQ people, is just that I have a very earnest desire for queer people to be able to feel safe in religious spaces like these,” said Linnea.

Some collegiate Christian organizations have become havens for LGBTQ students in the wake of the shuttering of diversity, equity, and inclusion offices in universities across the country. Carl Thomas Gladstone, the executive director of ZOE Progressive Christian Life on Campus, a network of progressive Christian campus communities, gave the example of “glitter blessings” on National Coming Out Day or Trans Visibility Day, where students can receive a blessing with glitter similar to one they might receive with ash on Ash Wednesday.

Gladstone said these sort of events aim to form relationships regardless of beliefs, and “bringing our whole selves as practitioners of a progressive Christianity to those moments, not to convert, but just to speak honestly about how we are present.” The message for students becomes: “You are wonderfully made and loved. Know that today, and put some amazing glitter on your forehead.”

Young people who grew up in the Christian faith are more likely to remain connected to church than those who were raised religiously unaffiliated. The overwhelming majority of Christian Gen Z teens follow the same religion as their parents, according to PRRI polling.

Even those who feel isolated from their faith may eventually return to it. Mick Atencio, the program and development director of the LGBTQ faith organization Q Christian Fellowship, grew up in the evangelical church. Atencio was isolated by the homophobia and transphobia apparent in its teachings but nonetheless was still drawn by the “centrality of Christ in faith” in the evangelical tradition.

“I couldn’t really let go of Christ,” they said. “So it was never really a question of, ‘Do I leave,’ but, ‘How do I reconcile this,’ and, ‘Where do I find the community that I’m looking for?’”

The basic trajectory of one’s life also plays a significant role. It is a common trend to see younger people stay away from church but then return to their faith community once they begin having children at a later age, said Deckman. This pattern has been observed by Lauren Grubaugh Thomas, who is the pastor of Holy Companion Episcopal Church in Sterling Ranch, Colorado. Her congregation is formed of several core families, many of whom are millennials who began having children in their thirties. Grubaugh Thomas said that many of her congregants are LGBTQ individuals who began “tentatively” returning to church as they got older, and felt safe to attend a “queer-celebratory parish in a county that historically has been a dangerous place for the LGBTQ community.”

“Something people have said quite clearly is, ‘I’m now looking for a church, having had no interest for some time in being part of a faith community. Now that I have children, I want to be in a community with shared values,’” she said, quoting what she has heard from members of her church. “I want my kids to have an experience of community, and for those values to be ones that I align with today, and I want my kids to be raised in and to have other adults who love them and are showing up in their lives.”

This dovetails with what research has shown about why people raised in the church stay faithful; polling shows that the reasons are generally not political but instead are spiritual. Eighty-seven percent of people ages 18 through 29 who attended religious services said they do so “to feel closer to God,” according to a PRRI poll.

But for those who aren’t raised by religiously affiliated parents, it may be harder to see church as a potential source of community. In 2025, PRRI found that only 39 percent of adults between ages 18 and 29 identified as religiously affiliated, remaining steady from 2024. Since 2013, young women in particular have grown less likely to affiliate with a particular religion, a trend led by nonwhite women. Only one in five young men and women reported attending church each week.

Attendance also is influenced by partisan affiliation: Recent polling has shown that Gen Z Republicans are more likely than their Democratic counterparts to attend church, and are more inclined to believe that participating in religiously affiliated events is an important way to build social connections. Gladstone, the executive director of ZOE, noted that the general public understanding of campus Christian ministry is synonymous with conservative faith groups like Campus Crusade or InterVarsity Christian Fellowship.

Progressive Christians believe that creating connections between like-minded young people and local churches can help counter some of the narratives around Christianity in American life. Parishes participating in local social justice activity could, potentially, encourage young people to see the church as a haven both for community and activism. But for Christian leaders, the ultimate goal is not attendance—it is offering a different vision of Christianity altogether.

“I think protests can attract young progressives who aren’t involved with the church. But that’s not the foremost reason we do it. The foremost reason we do it is because that is what Jesus compels us to do,” said McManus-Dail.

Perry Bacon: Good afternoon. I’m Perry Bacon. I’m the host of The New Republic show Right Now. I have two great guests today. Seth Masket is a professor at the University of Denver in political science. Mark Schmitt is the director of the Political Reform program at New America. But they both have some interesting projects going on. So Seth, you’ve got a book and a Substack. Tell everybody about what you’re doing first.

Seth Masket: Yeah, a couple of things going on. I just started a new Substack newsletter that’s called the SMOTUS Report—that’s “Seth Masket of the United States.” We just had a big launch earlier this week. I’m looking for supporters, so I’m hoping people will be interested.

But basically, the focus there is about U.S. politics, parties, campaigns, and a lot of other things, all with an eye toward the health of American democracy, which is obviously under a lot of strain right now. And on that topic, I have a book coming out next month called The Elephants in the Room. The book is a look at how Republicans ended up nominating Donald Trump for a third consecutive time in 2024, how a lot of people in the party’s leadership were actually quite uncomfortable with that decision but had no way to move voters in a different direction.

Bacon: And Mark, talk about the Political Reform [program]. Is it still called that? I’m forgetting what you guys call it.

Mark Schmitt: We have layers, so now there’s a section called “Democratic Futures.” I like a nice, straightforward name like Political Reform, even though it always makes people say, “How is that going?”

We’re still doing our thing. We’re putting out a lot of material right now about why proportional representation is a timely response, particularly with the Supreme Court ruling in Callais that really guts the Voting Rights Act. We’ve been harping on this for years, but there’s suddenly a recognition of: OK, maybe that is the answer. You’re seeing it from journalists, from conservatives as well. So we’re trying to take advantage of that moment.

Bacon: Because even my nerd friends don’t always know—explain what proportional representation is, very briefly.

Schmitt: Proportional representation would be where you have congressional districts to have multiple members of Congress. You might create one district in Georgia that has five members, and then voters would rank—a candidate who got maybe 25 percent of the vote would have one of those congressional seats, depending on how it was allocated.

There’s super-nerdy different ways—party lists, things like that. I sometimes just nod along when people talk about the variations. But the essential idea is that you would create a model of representation that’s proportional to the share of support that candidates and parties actually get.

Right now, we’re moving in the complete opposite direction, where Tennessee becomes a completely one-party state, Florida’s pushing in that direction. Republicans in California—Donald Trump got more votes in California than any other state, and they’re totally unrepresented elsewhere in the state. Same with Democrats in Texas and Florida.

Proportional representation would change that, and would also enable newer parties to emerge on the scene. If a Green Party, Libertarian, Working Families Party engaged in that system, they could have enough seats in Congress or the state legislature to have some real leverage.

Bacon: Alright, we’re going to get to our topic today, which is 2028. We’re starting a little early, and it’s a little lighter than usual. What I want to do is an exercise that I told these guys about. Defining who is running is always complicated, because people are hiding their intentions or maybe pretending to run but not really going to run.

But we have one metric, which was that the National Action Network—the nonprofit group Al Sharpton runs—had a conference about a month ago, and it sounds like Sharpton invited people who he thought might run for president, and 10 people showed up. I think that’s a good proxy for 10 people who are aggressively signaling they are running. We’ll talk about some others later.

So I’m going to go through these 10 with Mark and Seth. Seth, as he noted, has written about primaries—he has a great book about the 2020 Democratic primary. And Mark has actually, unlike the two of us, worked in a primary. He was a senior adviser for Bill Bradley back in 2000. So these guys—

Schmitt: Perry, that gives me very limited credibility. A campaign that won zero primaries and is almost completely forgotten! Any young person who comes and you engage with, I have to do all the background. It was an interesting experience—I spent time in Iowa and New Hampshire—but James Carville I am not. And I’m happy about that.

Bacon: So what we’re going to do is go through the 10 people who went to the Sharpton event and talk about them, and then talk about a few others. I’m going to start out—it’ll be alphabetical. The first person is my governor, actually—Andy Beshear, of Kentucky. What I want to do with each one of these people is talk about what they’re doing to position themselves, then talk about maybe what their strengths are and what their weaknesses are.

Beshear kind of ran for vice president in 2024 for about three weeks when Harris was choosing between him and Tim Walz and Shapiro. Right after the election, he wrote this op-ed in The New York Times where he basically said, “I’m from Kentucky, I’m in a Trump state, but I won, and I also won while being pro-LGBT and pro–abortion rights and pretty liberal.” I thought that was a signal that he was going to run as the most progressive of the moderates, for lack of a better way to say that—the most progressive of the mainstream candidates.

Since then, he’s gone in a different direction. I would say he’s running in the moderate lane—we’ll get into lanes in a second—in the sense that pretty much every speech he gives now, he says Democrats should not speak in “faculty language” and not use big words. President Obama said something similar this week. I find this eye roll–inducing, but I do think it’s a way to signal you’re not too leftist, you’re poking at the group. Beshear is planning to try to win the Biden 2020 primary vote, which is Black and white moderates—that’s my sense of what he’s trying to do.

His strengths are: This is a state that Trump won by 30, 33 points in 2024. Beshear has by far the strongest electability credential—way better than Shapiro, Whitmer. This is a very red state that he won. And the weakness, the big weakness, is—I don’t love the phrase “attention economy,” it’s become a cliché—but in a primary where you have to raise money and break through in debates, Beshear might be a little too—he’s a nice guy—too dull, to put it bluntly. So that’s my assessment. Mark, what do you think?

Schmitt: I think that bit is right. He’s a little bit like Michael Bennet in 2020 in terms of personality—just not super [exciting], in my exposure to him. You’ve obviously had infinitely more exposure.

It was fascinating how unabashed he was about trans rights and other issues—not occupying that socially conservative lane—which actually, in terms of the Democratic electorate or even of people willing to vote for Democrats in November, I don’t think that really exists. So I thought that was really smart.

Like you, I’m a little tired of the scolding. I said yesterday, in response to Obama’s thing about not using faculty language: I don’t think the problem is that Democrats use big words. It’s that they construct these complicated logics in the comms shop that are like, For the cost of the war, we could be providing you healthcare—they’re like, We have to pivot to what we think people care about, instead of just saying, Hey, this war is really stupid. That was sometimes the problem with Kamala Harris’s language, too—it wasn’t faculty language, she’s not talking about Pierre Bourdieu. She gets tangled in these logical things that get her in knots. I’m a little annoyed about that.

And he’s telling a story about his electability, but he’s not showing it. He’s the classic candidate who can get elected governor of Kentucky but could jump into a Senate race and lose 60–40. There’s a whole litany of people with that history—much less a presidential race. So somehow he has to actually show that as well as tell it.

Masket: Mark, let me join you on being annoyed by what Obama said—Obama is literally a law professor and constructs these very beautiful, ornate speeches and won twice by majority votes. On Beshear—he strikes me as, some of what you were talking about, Perry, the pure electability candidate. Electability is, as we’ve written about, a very fraught area, and it overlaps with a lot of other things, including assumptions about race and how people vote, and assumptions that you need a white candidate if you’re really going to win. I think those are highly suspect conclusions.

But this is someone whose main appeal is that he can win in a red state—more so than any of the other electability candidates. For people who really don’t care what the Democrat stands for and just want to make sure the Republican doesn’t get the White House, you can see the appeal for someone like that.

I can’t help thinking that at least some of that is due to the fact that Kentucky has odd-year elections—I just wonder, would he win that race if it was during a presidential election where Donald Trump was running? I’m not sure he does. But it’s a claim. It’ll get him some attention.

I think we’ve often seen some version of this candidate in the past. Was it Schweikert in Montana, whose main appeal to Democrats was that he was a Democrat who won in Montana?

Bacon: I think it was Bullock. In 2020.

Masket: Yes. We’ll see how that goes for him. I think you’re right—there are limits to how far this can take him.

Bacon: Next person is Cory Booker. Seth, I’ll let you lead our conversation about Booker.

Masket: Booker is an interesting guy. You’d think he ran well in 2020—he hit a lot of the right marks if you think in terms of lanes. He’s potentially the candidate who could win a lot of Black support but also reach out to a lot of white voters.

That year, Black voters were already really in the tank for Joe Biden on pure electability concerns. Maybe Booker would have a better shot at it this time around. He’s interesting in that he sometimes runs moderately, mainstream, but is able to project a lot of strident passion against some of the things Trump is doing. He had the 25-hour filibuster. I’m sure no one remembers it anymore, but he could bring that up.

Also, for what it’s worth, he got married late last year. The last time he ran for president was right around the time he announced his relationship with Rosario Dawson. That’s his signal that he’s running.

He’s interesting in that he’s a combination of really strong principled stances and some feel-good internet pablum. I don’t know if he’s ever hit quite the right note in there. But he’s well known, well liked by a lot in the party, and he’s got a shot at being a real player here.

Bacon: Mark?

Schmitt: I feel like he might have passed his sell-by date a little bit. He’s capable of being very inspiring—I’m just not feeling like he has the thread right now. He jumped on that stupid thing about cutting taxes for everybody, along with Katie Porter and a couple others—that was just embarrassing. No taxes if your household is less than $100,000 or something like that, which really, given what we’re going to need to do in terms of taxes, means we’re just going to grind it out more on the middle rich, unless we’re willing to really go after the billionaires. Anyway, that gets into policy complexity, which is probably not the biggest thing that plays.

Booker has one strength: He’s one of those politicians who goes anywhere and talks to anybody, in the way that Mamdani is. There’s real value in that right now—not parsing out, micro-targeting, but just getting in there and showing up in an unfriendly audience and listening. I feel like he’s got a little of that gift. Might help.

Bacon: Next is Pete Buttigieg—so I’ll let you start, Mark.

Schmitt: I’m not sure where to go on that.... He’s like Obama in terms of ability to articulate a viewpoint and get people going. And he has real credentials now, which—mayor of South Bend was not. I think he’s super impressive.

Weaknesses—maybe a little too slick, maybe will never appeal to the left as a former McKinsey guy—maybe there’s an internal resistance. People will say being gay is a weakness—it’s not going to be a weakness in a Democratic primary. And probably not with that population of people who are willing to vote for Democrats at all. So that doesn’t concern me at all, aside from the justice of it. I’ll be interested to see where he goes.

Masket: He drops out of the 2020 race like the morning after the South Carolina primary, and I think about five minutes later he planned to run in 2028.

Schmitt: Five minutes before! I think it was always 2028.

Masket: Haha. You’re right.

Bacon: That’s a good point.

Masket: But it’s important to remember, when he was running back then, he was a kid. And he did shockingly well in that race, honestly. He didn’t come that close to toppling Biden, but he was a real presence. He stayed in until roughly the bitter end. He was very good at debates. As we’ve seen since then, probably his main strength as a candidate is going on Fox News.

He is very good at speaking to conservatives and speaking to conservative voters in a way that makes it sound very common-sense to articulate a center-left set of policies and beliefs, and he’s completely unflappable about that. That’s an important skill. I don’t underestimate his skills as a campaigner. The fact that he’s actually done some campaigning last year in Iowa—which is not going to be one of the Democrats’ first states, but he wanted to show up there anyway. He’s pretty ambitious about this, and he’ll be a major name.

Bacon: The thing that came out in 2020—there was a lot of debate about whether he was a strong candidate with Black voters, and you do have to do well with Black voters to win the primary. But I think we should suspend that. Joe Biden, as one of you guys was saying, was a very strong candidate with Black voters for a variety of reasons. Kamala Harris and Cory Booker, who are Black, didn’t do well among Black voters against him either. So I would suspend that.

Another question I have: You have a bunch of candidates saying, “I’m electable.” Pete has done a good job going on Fox News. His approval ratings are pretty good among Republicans. That said, Shapiro and Beshear are able to say, I’ve actually won Republican votes, and Pete can’t say that yet. It’s all theoretical for him. But he’s got a good case, he’s got charisma—I agree with what you said.

Schmitt: There’s also a different generation of Black leadership even since 2020. Back then, everything ran through Jim Clyburn—really old. There are four new Black senators—like Alsobrooks and Lisa Blunt Rochester—and it’s a different world of Black politics.

Bacon: Next person. I’m going to let Seth start. Ruben Gallego was there. I didn’t really think about him for 2028 until recently, but he is exploring the waters. What do you think about Ruben Gallego, the senator from Arizona?

Masket: He’s an interesting candidate. He’s had a range of stances—he was considered pretty far to the left before he ran for Senate. Now he is, again, a candidate whose main appeal is that he can win in a swing state.

He potentially stands to, as a Latino candidate, win back some of the Latinos that went Donald Trump’s way in 2024. That may be happening without his help, but he does stand to benefit from that. It’s notable that when he ran for Senate in Arizona in 2024, he ran seven points ahead of Kamala Harris.

Bacon: That’s pretty good.

Masket: That’s pretty solid. He has some cachet in that way and some ability to run strongly in those states.

Bacon: Mark?

Schmitt: I think the same. He’s one of a bunch of candidates who seem to be experimenting a bit, moving from point to point. He’s also been more sympathetic to the administration on immigration enforcement than some of the others—which, in a funny way, is part of his appeal to Latino voters, in a super-complicated way. He’s toned down some of that a little bit.

I want to wait and see. In terms of weaknesses, when you lift up the blanket over his relationship with Eric Swalwell, I don’t—it’s one of those where you want a really good background look.

Bacon: Booker and Pete have been on the national stage for a while. It would be hard for them to change their views on much. Gallego can make it up as he goes along on some level—he won’t seem like a flip-flopper as much because we don’t really know as much about him.

Right now, he seems to be running populist economics—he’s talking about big companies being broken up. He’s been more conservative on immigration. He says the party’s too woke. There might be an opening for somebody who’s more on the left on economics and on the right on social issues. I think that’s what the Matt Yglesias crowd would like. So I think that’s an interesting potential play.

The next person is Kamala Harris—Mark, I’ll let you start with Kamala Harris.

Schmitt: I was a little surprised when I saw how well she does in polls, but really shouldn’t be, because that’s like the classic—when I was a kid, every year Ted Kennedy would be at the very top of the polls, Al Gore for a while, people like that. I like her a lot. I thought she ran about as good a campaign as she could. But I don’t think the Democratic Party’s going to have confidence in her, even understanding how much she was screwed by Joe Biden.

Bacon: You think she has a mass electability problem, basically?

Schmitt: Yeah. She also has a little bit of a communications problem. Again, it’s not faculty lounge language, it’s just making things too complicated and too nuanced, and trying to appeal to what people seem to want to hear rather than just saying what she thinks—or even just seeming like she’s saying what she thinks. Pete Buttigieg certainly always seems like he’s saying what he thinks, even if it all comes out of a memo.

Bacon: That’s what I was thinking.

Schmitt: I just don’t really have that confidence. And it’s too bad, because she was given a thankless job and she did it as well as she could.

Masket: Yeah, it’s interesting—this belief has fallen down a little bit on the Republican side, but for Democrats there’s been this very long-standing belief that you only really get one shot at the brass ring. If you run for president and then lose, the party’s not interested in you anymore. They haven’t gone with a previous loser since Adlai Stevenson in ’56. I think that’ll be an important tradition for a lot of Democrats.

There’s a real mix within the Democratic Party about why she lost in ’24. I think there’s a fair number of people in the party who say, Look, that was just going to be a tough year no matter who the candidate was. People were angry about the economy. We got a lot of the blame as the incumbent party. A good many also feel like she underperformed—it had something to do with the way she campaigned or who she was. That’s going to work against her, and really hamper her.

I’m honestly surprised she’s still considering it. I certainly understand—you get the taste of it, you want to run—but we saw this with Al Gore, we’ve seen this with other candidates, where they express some interest in trying to run again and get politely nudged out.

Bacon: I’ve been surprised ... what I expected Harris to do was to pretend to run for president for a long time—that makes your book sales go up, makes you seem more relevant—and that’s what I assume is going on still: She’s going to pretend to run, but in early 2027 she’ll magically decide not to run, when she was never really intending to run the whole time. That’s my assumption.

That said, her book was a little bit more critical of Biden than I expected, and she’s been a little bit more pro-Palestinian than I expected. Some of the moves she’s made are the ones you would take if you’re trying to address your previous problems and actually run again. So that is the one place where I’ve been surprised. But ultimately, like Mark said, these polls are just reflecting name ID—she would have a hard time winning, and it’d be a very tough race for her.

I’m going to move to Mark Kelly, which is another person who I would not have guessed after the election. He was on the VP list too. And the case he’s got, again, is he’s won a hard swing state, and Arizona is a place where Harris lost. So that’s the appeal of him, that’s the strength.

He’s also done a pretty good job—Trump has attacked him personally a couple of times, and he made the most of that. He’s a veteran. That helps. An astronaut—that helps. He’s got some personal credentials as the electable white man who can beat Trump or JD Vance.

The weaknesses are—I’ll be honest—I’m not totally sure what Mark Kelly’s voice sounds like. When I say that, I mean I’m not sure that he’s made much of an impression as a senator. He semi-ran for VP when Harris got the nomination and didn’t make much of an impression either. He won Arizona, but I’m still not actually sure he’s that impressive a politician. Seth, go ahead.

Masket: I agree with you. Kelly in some ways is a clear electability candidate in that he’s proven he can win in a swing state and do well there. It also helps him that he’s essentially a martyr of the Trump administration—that he’s been not just insulted, but they’ve actually tried to court-martial him and prosecute him. Trump essentially accused him of treason. So he’s got that.

There is, among some Democrats—I don’t know if you’d want to call it a lane or anything like that—but a good pitch for a candidate who doesn’t have particularly strident stances but appears fairly combative, a fighter, someone who’s willing to stand up for his party and push back strongly on some of Trump’s excesses. He’s been very good on that front. But I agree—we don’t know much about his voice. I don’t know how much that really matters. Not an especially well-known, well-loved, dynamic candidate that way.

Schmitt: Yeah. I’ve heard his voice. It’s deep. It’s—

Bacon: I was joking a little bit, but he’s not—

Schmitt: Beshear has a slightly unimposing voice. Not that we should get into stuff like that. But part of it with Kelly too is—take that Elissa Slotkin thing about “fight or fold” being the divide among Democrats. Everybody’s going to be on the “fight” side. But he doesn’t have to prove it. He doesn’t have to overemphasize it, because it’s all right there. He can just do other things, which might be an asset. But who knows?

Interesting that there are two states—we just talked about two senators from Arizona, and then there are two senators from Georgia, both relatively new, who also are potential candidates. It’s interesting that both those swing states have produced real national stars already.

Bacon: Next person is Ro Khanna. He’s obviously running for the Bernie vote, where he’s taken every progressive stand on every issue, from “abolish ICE” to “Schumer should resign” to “there’s a genocide in Gaza.” These are all sincerely held views, I’m sure. But he’s running in that progressive lane, trying to inherit the Bernie vote.

The strength of that: There is clearly a part of the party that wants that candidate. And in some ways, unlike the people we’ve talked about, he has a very distinct part of the electorate he can appeal to—in a way that ... all the people we’ve talked about are fighting for the same voters on some level. So he’s got that.

Weaknesses: He’s a House member, he’s got really low name ID, and it can be hard to break out of that. If AOC runs, it could just be really hard for him to win many progressive votes. I don’t know if she’s running or not.

Ultimately, my sense is that the progressive bloc of the party—while being closer to where my own views are—is not a majority, so having those stances might not be the right way to win the nomination. But he’s done a good job getting out there. He’s also willing to do an interview everywhere. That’s a credit to him as well. Mark?

Schmitt: I don’t really understand Ro Khanna very well, despite observing him for a long time. And there’s a question—Bernie has been a dominant figure for the last several elections in a way that we don’t really appreciate. Was that about his positions, or was it something unique to Bernie? I don’t think we really know, but just adopting his positions doesn’t really do it.

But you’ve also touched on—it’s funny, you mentioned it in relation to Kamala Harris and obviously in relation to Khanna. Democrats’ relationship to Israel is going to be a very significant dividing lane. That’s moving really fast, and I’d rather be on the more pro-Palestinian side. Just in cold political terms, not personal terms, it’d be better to be on that side.

But there are going to be a lot of donors and a lot of electeds who are going to be very resistant. That’s choosing a fight in a really significant [way], and thinking now about what that fight is going to look like two years from now—I don’t know where that’s going.

Masket: Another important divide within the Democratic Party right now is: What do we do with tech billionaires? This is a population with a lot of money. It’s become increasingly influential and has swung very hard right in recent years.

As the congressman representing Silicon Valley, he’s one of the few Democrats who tech folks are actually still pretty comfortable with. He can speak to that crowd, he can get support from that crowd, which I think cuts both ways. That makes him in some ways look like a stronger general election candidate, as someone who could have access to that money and that support.

Bacon: He seems pro-business and pro-innovation in a certain way.

Masket: At the same time, that might make him a little toxic to a fair amount of folks on the left who really want to push back on AI and on tech’s role in politics right now.

Bacon: Let me follow up on something Mark said. Mark, make your point, and then I’ll ask.

Schmitt: He can also make a pitch as a guy who understands AI, and if we think AI is going to be this big, world-changing challenge—which maybe it is, maybe it isn’t—he gets it. He can play both sides of that, as he has in his career. He was originally just a Silicon Valley candidate challenging a very old, established member of Congress whose name I don’t remember anymore. But the tech side is interesting.

Bacon: Mark, you said something about the idea being that Bernie Sanders won those votes, not generic progressive X. That’s an important distinction. That said, we have a lot of evidence—Zohran Mamdani—that in primaries there’s some number of progressive people.

You’re saying there’s a gap between the people who vote for any progressive and the people who voted for Bernie Sanders. Do you think there’s a big gap or a small gap, or just a gap to consider?

Schmitt: I think they’re different. Being Bernie Sanders connects with people in a way that was not just the bundle of his positions. There is that phenomenon of supposed Trump-Sanders voters.... I don’t know how much of that there is, but you can get how. Both of them, especially original Trump, have a very non-politician [appeal]. It’s hard to imagine—[Sanders] is the chair of the Senate Budget Committee—but he has a very non-politician appeal. Sometimes—like Mamdani’s progressivism—sometimes progressivism has an appeal just because it’s coherent.

Bacon: Yeah.

Schmitt: It doesn’t have to be your worldview, but it’s a worldview, and it’s coming from somewhere, and it’s not just telling you what you want to hear.

Bacon: Next person is Wes Moore. I’ll let you talk, Seth, in part because I know less about Wes Moore than I do some of the others. Hopefully you’ve studied him a bit.

Masket: I was going to say, I don’t know much about him either. He’s in some ways the opposite of Mark Kelly, in that he’s a very good public speaker. He is very engaging, he gets people very passionate. He’s good at going on a wide range of TV shows and venues and just speaking very inspirationally.

I don’t have a sense of how well-loved he is generally among Democrats. He’s from Maryland, which isn’t a particularly competitive state. He’s still pretty young, as far as I understand. But he’d be an interesting candidate to watch—and an enjoyable one to watch as he develops his speaking.

Bacon: Mark?

Schmitt: I live 500 feet from the Maryland border, but that doesn’t really mean anything. He’s not super visible, even in my world. He’s super impressive. He could turn out to be almost like Obama in the way he connects with people. But I don’t really have any idea. There are some complicated questions about his personal background that could be—

Bacon: Questions about his military service, right? Exactly what he did—

Schmitt: Military service, when he was there, yeah. I tried to figure that out one evening and I couldn’t really even figure out what the actual charge is.

Bacon: One thing I would say is—Harris, Booker, and Wes Moore are not just Black, but have fairly similar ideologies. They’re not leftist, they’re not hardcore moderates. Only one of them, and maybe zero of them, are going to do well. Their plans are going to be: win some white moderates, win some white progressives, and do really well in the heavily Black states in the South. That plan has worked for Joe Biden and Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. It’s a good plan—but only one of them can have it work.

Schmitt: All three also have academic parent backgrounds. Wes Moore’s mother worked at the Annie E. Casey Foundation in Baltimore—

Bacon: Funny.

Schmitt: —involved in [child welfare and social policy]. Booker is definitely from an upper-middle-class family or a middle-class family. I can’t remember what his parents [did].

Bacon: Kamala’s dad was a professor.

Schmitt: Yeah.

Bacon: JB Pritzker—I do know a lot about him. But I’ll let you start, Mark.

Schmitt: He’s managed to be super popular as governor of Illinois, which is quite an accomplishment given that state’s history. He seems to just always hit the right note in relation to Trump. He could be a very formidable candidate. He’s one of those who seems like he’s just saying what he thinks, with a little bit of, Hey, I got all the money in the world, so I can say what I think attitude—which doesn’t really hurt. Lots of potential.

Bacon: One question I want to ask you, Mark—specifically, Steyer is having this problem in California—from my understanding, progressives—he’s got the most left-wing positions—progressives are nervous about supporting a billionaire. It sounds like that’s a barrier to Senator Warren or Bernie Sanders endorsing him.

Pritzker is trying to appeal to, maybe not the hardest left, but certainly a progressive part of the party. Is being a billionaire inherently going to be disqualifying? I’m curious what you think.

Schmitt: First, I think being an inherited billionaire—like FDR—is probably less—

Bacon: Is that what Pritzker is?

Schmitt: Yeah, it’s the hotels and all that. He was involved in the business, but it’s really not his—his family story is actually very tragic and very moving. So I feel like that’s different from Steyer, who was in this private equity business for most of his adult life.

Steyer’s also actually doing really well. It’s no surprise that Warren doesn’t endorse him, because she’s still got her student in the race. I’m less concerned about that.

Bacon: OK. Seth?

Masket: I’m really curious how this will play on the suspicion-of-billionaires divide in the Democratic Party right now. I think there are a fair number of people, particularly in Illinois, who are saying, Yeah, he’s a plutocrat, but he’s our plutocrat. And he handles that pretty well. He doesn’t run from it. He just keeps saying, This gives me the freedom to say some things that others can’t. He’s been, I think, quite good at that.

He has been way more outspoken than most prominent Democrats from the beginning of Trump’s second term—specifically calling out ICE activities when they were threatening Chicago and things like that—and he’s the one, at least rhetorically, standing up very strongly in those circumstances. So I think that gives him some legitimate credential. I agree with Mark—he could be a formidable candidate.

Bacon: What’d you say earlier, Mark? ... One of you said, basically, there’s a person whose liberalism is in the fighting and not necessarily in the positions. I don’t know if Pritzker’s for the wealth tax or for Medicare for All. I don’t think he’s likely to be the most policy-left. But I do think he’s [a fighter]. On the social issues, he is actually fairly good on transgender rights, ICE, the things that—those sort of left social issues.

Masket: It’s hard for me to believe that Medicare for All is going to be the thing we’re going to be fighting over—

Bacon: I was using it as an example—

Masket: —for the 2028 presidency given what we’ll have gone through.

Bacon: So the final person who was at the Sharpton event, and somebody we’ve referred to already—Josh Shapiro.

Masket: Man, I wish it had been my line, but I heard someone refer to him as Baruch Obama, which is such a great line. He is a very skilled public speaker. A lot of people see him as an Obama-like presence, but also Jewish, and also can win Pennsylvania. He was obviously a close second in the vice-presidential sweepstakes in 2024—who knows what would have happened if he’d been the choice. It would have probably been the same result.

The fact that he is literally a victim of political violence—his house was attacked and burned—that’s a selling point for him among Democrats. But he’s got a complex set of stances on Israel. He’s been generally much more sympathetic to Israel than a lot of other prominent politicians.

I think he sensed the wind changing on that and has followed along. But that will be a tough issue, and it will come up a lot for him—that will be the first issue people want to ask him about, simply for being outspoken on it and for being Jewish. It’ll just be an extra challenge for him.

Schmitt: Yeah, I agree with that. I don’t have any strong views about Shapiro. I found Shapiro’s little digs at Harris to be unseemly. But whatever.

Bacon: He might be the most willing of the people we’ve named to actually attack the left in a more aggressive way than the other people. He seems much more anchored in moderate politics in Pennsylvania—not just on Israel, on other issues too. If it comes down to him and Buttigieg or something like that, I’d be curious if there was an anybody but Shapiro on the sort of progressive end. He might be in that territory. You can get past that—Biden actually did a good job of being progressive-friendly enough to where people were fine with him. I don’t know if Shapiro can pull that off. We’ll see.

Schmitt: Not if Israel remains a central issue.

Bacon: If he takes his current stand on it, I would say, yeah. Let’s do two more people, and then I’ll broaden it out. So the person we haven’t mentioned yet, who I think had a scheduling conflict and couldn’t come to New York, is Gavin Newsom, who is very obviously thinking of running for president. Seth, talk about Gavin Newsom.

Masket: I’ve seen this among some people on the left that he rubs them the wrong way. But also he’s been, I think, a success in California. Importantly, a lot of Democrats have talked pretty harsh stuff about Donald Trump over the last year and a half. Gavin Newsom is one of the few who can actually claim to have achieved something.

He actually pushed back on redistricting. He engineered a redistricting in California to counter what Trump pushed for in Texas and essentially neutralized that. He’s someone—even in a party that is not in the majority nationwide—capable of doing some real actions and changing national politics to a good degree. He deserves some credit for that.

Beyond that, I have no idea what his appeal will be like. He loves being pugnacious, loves doing lots of TV—that’ll probably help him. But he’ll always be confounded by the fact that a lot of people worry a Californian is not going to be electable nationwide. They tried with Kamala Harris—a whole different set of circumstances there.

Bacon: Mark?

Schmitt: Ronald Reagan would have something to say about that.

Masket: Wasn’t a Democrat, but yeah.

Schmitt: No, I know. Yeah. I have trouble getting past just a personal aversion to Gavin Newsom. I’ll cop to that.

Bacon: Which means that he’s too slick-looking, he doesn’t seem trustworthy?

Schmitt: Yeah, just something about his manner or whatever. He has been a good governor, and the redistricting was great, and he’s basically continued a line of policies—that started with Jerry Brown—that have really helped California stand out from the country in many ways.

But what I’ve noticed is just this intense experimentation, which I sort of [respect]. There’s the period where he was tweeting in Donald Trump’s voice, as if that would be funny. There was a period where he was going on every right-wing podcast that he could find, or the looksmaxxers and stuff like that. Which is funny, because that might be part of my aversion.

I respect the try-anything approach right now to American politics. That’s probably a good idea. But it reinforces the idea that this is a guy who stands for nothing.

Bacon: I was going to say something like that too. He’s done pretty well this last year. He started off with, Let me have Steve Bannon on my podcast—that got huge backlash. Then he became super partisan: Trump is terrible, fighting him—the redistricting. He is reading the room, and he seems to adapt in a certain way. That’s a skill, even though we’re saying it may mean he has no core. So—

Schmitt: Just don’t make it so obvious. Don’t make it so obvious what you’re doing.

Bacon: Yes. The other thing about electability is, my friends in pundit world, we sort of study who did better in Arizona than Kamala, or who did better in Michigan. What are those scores called? G. Elliott Morris writes about these scores—there’s a debate, I can’t remember the term now. But anyway, basically how well you do above the average Democrat. I think it’s the WAR score, what some of these guys come up with.

Anyhow, that’s how my nerd friends think. My friends in real life think any white guy is more electable than any non–white guy. Gavin Newsom’s still a white guy, and I think he might do better than Elissa Slotkin on electability, unfortunately, because he is a man and she isn’t. That’s not a good way to see the world, but we might be entering a phase—Democrats have run two women, those two women both lost—and we may have to wait 20 years to have another female nominee. That would advantage someone like Newsom, who’s a loudmouthed white guy.

The other person is AOC, and I’ll let Mark start.

Schmitt: That’s only the second woman we’ve talked about. It’s AOC.

Bacon: You’re right.

Schmitt: We’ve only talked about Harris, and now we’ll talk about AOC a little bit. I’m a big fan of AOC, but also of just: just run, don’t wait, just go for it, which is in some ways what Obama did. It would be fascinating if she did it. She’s an extraordinary communicator. She knows when to hold back from the farthest left—people expect her to be a little further out than she is. She’s got a grounding in common sense and can talk to people and explain things in ways that make sense to them. I’d love to see her try it.

Bacon: Now, you said candidates are different and so on. I would argue pretty much everyone who voted for Sanders in 2020 would vote for AOC, and pretty much no one who didn’t vote for Sanders would vote for her. We have a replay, in a certain sense. That’s one where I say the lanes do seem clear. I have a hard time seeing AOC breaking out of the Bernie vote. But I’m curious what you think about that.

Schmitt: Yeah, I disagree with that on two sides. There is a certain Bernie vote that was a little more like a Trump vote—a certain white guy, more or less working class, the Graham Platner types.

Bacon: That’s a good point.

Schmitt: That’s very different from AOC’s appeal. And then I think there’ll be a lot of feeling like, if you see AOC over a period of time, you’re going to feel like, OK, I heard about her, I thought she was a little nuts, but she makes perfect sense. She could go well beyond the Bernie constituency.

Bacon: Seth?

Masket: So AOC—it’s remarkable, she’s still so young. She’s 36 right now. She’s barely eligible to run for president. She has been for almost a decade now a lightning rod for the Democratic Party—she is the sort of avatar of everything Republicans hate about the Democrats. And she’s played that role pretty well.

It’s really useful to have someone like that in the House. Nancy Pelosi played that role for many years. I would generally caution against nominating your lightning rod for president. Hillary Clinton ran into some problems for that reason as well.

She could probably pull it off—she is one of the smartest strategists in the Democratic Party right now. She’s very gifted with that. She could also have a very substantial role in the House leadership going forward if she wanted that career. I don’t know if she does. But she knows what she’s doing there and could really be an impressive legislative leader going forward.

I would hate to lose her in the House for a presidential run. But I agree with Mark—there’s a certain sense of, Let’s just see what happens. It would be an interesting race to follow—whether she could make that sell to people outside New York.

Bacon: We covered the 12 I was going to cover. So now I’m going to—

Schmitt: Hold on—I want to ask you a question about AOC.

Bacon: Sure.

Schmitt: Do you think she should run against Schumer? Would she be in a stronger position if she does run against Schumer, or if Schumer retires?

Bacon: Schumer’s behavior—

Schmitt: Oh, I’m getting a little mixed up, because that would be ’28 also.

Bacon: My perception is that Schumer is acting like someone who’s not going to run for another term. At that point, AOC would have a better chance of winning a Senate seat, obviously. I don’t think the Wall Street crowd is going to be eager to have Senator AOC, so it’s not going to be a cakewalk, either. I anticipate her running for the Senate. There’s a potentially open seat there. You become a senator and you wait and then run for president later. That’s what I expect.

But if we’re in an attention economy and we’re in a place where being skilled as a communicator is the most important thing, she’s obviously better than most of who we’ve talked about. And about her appeal—I think she would do worse with the Graham Platner vote. I think she’ll do better with young Latinos and African Americans compared to what Sanders did in 2020 and 2016, obviously.

So my round robin—this is the end. We’re going to end here by saying: I’m going to give a list of a bunch of people, and if you guys are interested in any of them, we can talk through them, or just bring them up. Rahm Emanuel is going everywhere and doing pretty much everything—I don’t know who’s going to vote for him. I’m certainly not going to.

Chris Murphy has been early—I think he’s really named himself. Elissa Slotkin has gone to New Hampshire and done some of the hinting about running. Stephen Colbert pretty much announced himself to Barack Obama the other day. That was funny—I think there might be room for an outsider person, and he’s going to be unemployed soon.

Jon Ossoff is getting a lot of buzz in Georgia. Raphael Warnock would also be a pretty good candidate as well. And Gretchen Whitmer—as a two-term governor of a swing state—she is not acting like she wants to run, but it’s relevant that she’s a two-term governor of that state. The gender thing we talked about earlier might apply to her.

Anybody—any of those you guys want to talk about, or anything else you want to mention about this process as we’re getting to the end here?

Schmitt: Murphy’s interesting to me. When you think about somebody like him, a lot will depend on if the Democrats take the Senate. He’s really good at some of the oversight stuff, he’s on good committees. He’ll be able to elevate his profile enormously, and that’s a variable we haven’t talked about. If the Democrats don’t win the Senate and the only side with subpoena power is the House, then that’s where Ro Khanna or AOC could have a huge impact.

Bacon: Seth?

Masket: Yeah—similar feelings about Rahm Emanuel, because I still don’t understand how he has won some elections before. We talked about being that candidate who has relatively moderate stances but is seen as a fighter. His whole thing is pure belligerence. Some of that is directed against the Trump administration, and that would help him. But it’s also against everyone.

I don’t think he’ll win a lot of friends nationally among Democrats there. It would be an entertaining one to watch. In that sense, I look forward to it.

Bacon: Any dark horse among either the people I named or anybody else that you all think we should name in this conversation?

Masket: I think Ossoff is undervalued as a candidate here. Right now he’s been making a pretty good name for himself. He’s done a lot of national media lately, and he’s honed a very strong message. Arguably that’s just a way to raise money nationally for his Senate reelection bid.

But it wouldn’t surprise me if he was thinking seriously about a presidential run in ’28, maybe in ’32. Maybe he’s thinking about being a VP candidate. But anyone who’s won two Senate races, I’d say, automatically puts themselves in the “presidential material” category. And he’s getting the name recognition for it.

Schmitt: Yeah, of the ones that you named, that’s the one I would point to. And also, it’s not just what candidates think they’re going to do. It’s people coming to them and saying, You should do this. That could be donors, it could be other leaders. And I’m seeing people say that—not necessarily people with that level of influence, but it certainly happened for Obama when Harry Reid said, You should do this. It’s not just in his own head. The encouragement that different candidates are going to get will matter a lot.

Bacon: Last question. People are describing this as a very wide-open race, so let me ask it this way: Have we named the Democratic nominee in this discussion? We’ve named and discussed about 20 people. Do you think it’s so wide open that we’ve missed them among the 20, or do you think it’s wide open but within a certain range of people we’ve discussed here?

Masket: We have probably named the nominee. But I agree—it’s wide open in a way that it hasn’t been in a very long time. There is no obvious heir apparent. The last president and vice president went out in an unpopular way, and it’s not clear who they would even be supporting at this point if it came down to that.

One thing I think we might want to think about—I don’t like thinking about this—but Graham Platner may well be a senator a year from now. And yeah, he’d be a first-term senator, but he’s this come-from-nowhere populist, and that—

Bacon: Isn’t [James] Talarico the better answer to this question than Graham Platner, if that’s where you’re going?

Masket: Possibly.

Bacon: Well, Talarico may not win—he’s got a lower chance of winning.

Masket: He could win. But yeah, could go either way. But suddenly Platner could be the big sensation that everyone’s got their eyes on, who can win over some conservative voters. The Nazi tattoo business might get lost in the noise there. But he would not be that much less experienced than Barack Obama was when he first ran for president.

Schmitt: Well, Barack Obama had whatever years in the Senate—

Masket: Legislative experience, yeah.

Bacon: So Mark, did we name the person in this, or not?

Schmitt: Odds are we have. I don’t think Platner would. I would think it’s more likely that people just try to imitate Platner. So Josh Shapiro starts talking like Platner without the Nazi tattoo, rather than him being the candidate. But I also think so much terrible stuff could happen in the next two years that could totally scramble things.

Bacon: Yeah.

Schmitt: Somebody could emerge either out of Congress or out of a courageous stand they take within the military or something like that who suddenly appears on the stage. I don’t know. It’s not like the last two years of the Bush administration where we just floated downstream into disaster. It’s just going to be much more dramatic.

Bacon: And with that, we’ll close this off. Thank you guys for joining me. Tell everybody where they can find your work—Mark and then Seth—where they can find you on social media, on websites and things like that.

Schmitt: I’ve got newamerica.org—go to the Political Reform program. We’re putting out a bunch of stuff recently, some of which I’ve written, some of which my colleagues have written. I’m on Bluesky as mschmitt9, and I do post on Substack occasionally. I’ve got a bunch of drafts sitting there, so maybe they’ll go up soon.

Bacon: And Seth, you’re going to be doing a lot of stuff. Let’s talk about the book stuff.

Masket: Definitely. You can always find me on Substack—again, the name of the newsletter is the SMOTUS Report. You can find that at smotus.substack.com. I also have this book coming out next month called The Elephants in the Room. It’s about the Republican nomination of Donald Trump in ’24, and how the party got to that point. I’ll be doing a number of events to promote the book, and you can watch for that. There’s also a link to buy it if you want to preorder it on my Substack site.

Bacon: All right. Great conversation. Good to see you guys, and thanks for joining.

Schmitt: Nice talking to both of you. Thanks.

Masket: Thanks, Perry. See you, Mark.

We are already in the midst of the 2028 Democratic primary fight. No one has formally declared their candidacy, but former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Representative Ro Khanna, and others are traveling around the country and being fairly overt about their aspirations. In the latest edition of Right Now, University of Denver political scientist Seth Masket and Mark Schmitt, director of the political reform program at New America, look at the strengths and weaknesses of the likely candidates. They specifically analyzed the potential campaigns of Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Khanna; Governors Andy Beshear, Wes Moore, Gavin Newsom, JB Pritzker, and Josh Shapiro; Senators Cory Booker, Ruben Gallego, and Mark Kelley; former Vice President Kamala Harris; and Buttigieg. Their big conclusion is that the 2028 race has no clear front-runner and is more wide open than the 2008, 2016, or 2020 primaries were. And they said there is plenty of room for someone not currently taking obvious steps for a 2028 run, such as Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff. Masket also discussed his new Substack newsletter on the 2028 race. His book on the 2024 GOP primary will be released next month.

In saying this, Fetterman gestured at a certain theory of our moment: Not everything Trump does is rooted in megalomania and dictatorial abuses of power. Trump can be right sometimes. Trump-obsessed Democrats who won’t admit this squander a chance to appeal to the Reasonable Middle. Similarly, when Trump started pushing the project last fall, some centrist Democrats ridiculed calls for the next Democratic president to tear it down, calling it a “distraction.”

Well, if opposing Trump’s ballroom carries echoes of TDS, it turns out some Republicans are afflicted with TDS too. Punchbowl News reports that some Senate and House Republicans are balking at the ballroom project, now that the White House has demanded that its security be funded with $1 billion in taxpayer money:

Some of these skeptical Republicans feel the ballroom is just too politically toxic right now, especially when Trump said for so long that it would be paid for by private funds. Trump’s approval ratings are in the 30s. Gas is $4.55 per gallon. Trump can’t yet find a path to victory against Iran.

Republicans tell Punchbowl that the ballroom funding faces obstacles in the House, in part because it’s a tough vote for vulnerable House Republicans. As one put it: “A first-year poli-sci major would know not to ask members to take this vote, and we hope the speaker does too.”

All of which should prompt us to revisit the ballroom-as-distraction theory of the moment alluded to above, and ask: Why is Trump’s ballroom so politically toxic that Republicans in tough races are fearful about voting for it?

In the wake of the shooting incident, pro-Trump and right-wing personalities pushing for the ballroom thought they’d struck propaganda gold. Many of them excitedly smeared Democrats who oppose the project as tacitly encouraging the assassination of Trump. At a meta level, the real MAGA game here was to get Democrats to equivocate in the face of MAGA rage, to bully them into genuflecting before Trump’s plan to build a Caesar-like monument to himself at the center of the nation’s capital—and by extension submit to his broader dictatorial project.

In a sense, at moments like these, MAGA is at bottom asserting the power of fascist lies to remake political reality itself—and force Trump’s enemies to fear that they must adapt to MAGA-dictated reality or perish. Which of course must mean wholesale capitulation to Trump.

The Fetterman mode of politics cynically plays dumb about those deeper and more sinister intentions. Similarly, those Democrats who warned that the ballroom was a “distraction” from kitchen table issues effectively hand-waved away those darker intentions, proceeding as if they don’t carry big stakes for our civic well-being and democratic future.

But they do, and fortunately, most Democrats appeared to grasp those stakes, continuing to vociferously oppose the ballroom even after the shooting incident. They plowed right through MAGA’s fog of bullying propaganda and emerged on the other side unscathed. Result: The MAGA assault quickly dissipated and unceremoniously went poof. It’s a nonfactor now—a big nothing.

Indeed, a Washington Post poll taken before and after the shooting incident found the ballroom to be deeply unpopular. It’s opposed by 56 percent of Americans and supported by only 28 percent. Independents oppose it by a whopping 61–18, working-class Americans by 54–28, and moderates by 64–16. Importantly, the Post polling done after the incident showed no clear shift toward support for the project, another sign that MAGA propaganda around it fizzled.

It’s not clear, of course, whether most ordinary voters oppose the ballroom merely because they want the president to focus on material things or because it represents a massive abuse of power suffused with Nero-level megalomania. It’s probably some of both.

After all, to build the ballroom, Trump bulldozed large swaths of the White House—which belongs to the American people—without congressional approval. A judge temporarily halted the project, but Trump used the shooting to try to browbeat him into rubber-stamping it. The White House withheld the names of some well-heeled donors to the project, including some with business before the government. Trump’s fundraising for the ballroom has created new avenues for the wealthy to pay tribute to him, as part of his effort to transform the presidency into a massive Bribe Delivery System.

The ballroom should also be viewed alongside other Trumpian projects—the planned Triumphal Arch, the renaming of the Kennedy Center after himself, and the stamping of his face on our passports. As Bill Kristol notes, taken with all those other things, Trump’s plan to transform the People’s House into an “emperor’s palace” symbolizes a “broader effort to replace a republican regime with an imperial one.”

Understood in that context, MAGA efforts to bully Democrats into supporting the ballroom look more like an attempt to strong-arm them into capitulating to that bigger imperial project. And when Democratic strategists say the ballroom is a “distraction,” they’re putting their heads in the sand about all these larger implications.

But the Post poll suggests that the ballroom has proven to be one of those things that breaks through to lower-information voters in unpredictable ways. If it’s true, as Derek Thompson says, that the smartphone is imperceptibly, indelibly transforming our politics, the ballroom might illustrate the point: With those dramatic and shareable images of Trump’s White House East Wing demolition, this saga has unexpectedly captured something larger than itself.

In fact, the deeper subtexts of the ballroom tale—the corruption, the megalomania, the careless Gatsby-esque destructiveness, the Trumpian imperium—are surely a key reason it has broken through. It’s creating the type of meaningful moment in our politics that offers surprising political openings to the opposition.

There’s been some talk about what Democrats running for 2028 should propose to do with the ballroom once Trump moves on. Here’s an idea: Pledge to convert it into a monument to American democracy—and all the struggles that have been fought on its behalf. For good measure, let’s throw in an exhibit about January 6. That’s just one thought—if you don’t like it, come up with another one. Democrats: If even Republicans are now running from the ballroom, surely it signals an opening for the ambitious among you to get very creative in response.

Disappointingly, Harris largely ducked what was—and is—the fight of the Democrats’ lives: the court’s wholesale elimination of the party’s ability to govern. The conservative bloc, through what I would charitably describe as chicanery, has locked down American life for the foreseeable future. They essentially possess veto power over any legislation or executive order not to their liking, and they are now moving in the direction of stripping Democratic voters of their electoral power. This is an existential crisis that affects every Democrat running for federal office, and as we barrel toward the midterm elections and then into a presidential campaign, it’s incumbent on Democrats to explain how they will confront this challenge. Or to put it another way: How will they change the Supreme Court? Because it cannot persist in its current form.

Naturally, if you ask Roberts, he will tell you this is all overblown. This week, he whinged about the public’s low opinion of the court, saying, “I think they view us as truly political actors, which I don’t think is an accurate understanding of what we do.” As The New Republic’s Matt Ford noted, it’s hard to see what a hypothetical high court filled with avowedly naked partisans would have done differently than these allegedly non-political actors, whose every move is laser-focused on delegitimizing and eliminating the GOP’s political competition.

The Roberts court has dismantled the Democratic Party in a number of ways. One was its 2024 ruling in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, which did away with a judicial doctrine known as Chevron deference that allows the executive branch to respond nimbly and autonomously to laws passed by Congress. Its elimination essentially allows the high court to undercut the actions taken by the administrative state to carry out laws. This is specifically bad for a party that actually uses the federal government to facilitate policy, rather than using the federal government to destroy the federal government.

But the Supreme Court has put its finger on the scale for Republicans in even less ambiguous ways in recent years. The conservative majority’s embrace of what’s known as the “major questions doctrine” has added a new layer of imperviousness to its reign of Calvinball terror. That doctrine, which is a very recent invention of the conservative legal movement, allows the justices to overturn a federal regulation if they believe Congress didn’t “speak clearly” enough when authorizing it. If you’re wondering what that means, well, it means whatever a majority of justices think it means: Over time, the major questions doctrine has allowed the justices a wide range in applying subjective and malleable criteria to rule against regulations.

The Supreme Court, by the way, has never applied the major questions doctrine to a Republican president’s actions—though Roberts, Amy Coney Barrett, and Neil Gorsuch did contend in a concurring opinion that it should have been applied to Trump in the recent case that struck down the president’s tariff regime. In every other instance, the major questions doctrine has provided a facially neutral jurisprudential scheme to derail Democratic presidents. Democrats have also, in recent years, been sabotaged whenever the court issues a shadow docket ruling, whereas lately those unsigned rulings keep siding with Trump. As Ford recently noted, leaked Supreme Court memos have shone a new light on how the conservative justices’ shadow docket dabblings have gone from being “a simple administrative mechanism [to] a major roadblock for progressive governance.”

As if kneecapping the Democratic Party’s ability to govern isn’t enough, the court’s ruling in Louisiana v. Callais has effectively eliminated the safeguards in the Voting Rights Act that ensured the rights of Black Americans to participate in electoral politics. Ford wrote that the ruling all but ensures that “Black representation in Congress will … plummet, further tilting the House map in favor of the GOP.” True enough, within days, Republican-controlled legislatures began the process of dismantling majority-minority districts.

To Ford’s mind, Democrats find themselves facing some pretty stark choices to confront a Supreme Court that has gone to such lengths to annihilate their party: “Since the Supreme Court as currently constructed cannot be trusted to protect the egalitarian republic that, as Kagan noted, Union soldiers and civil rights activists fought and died to build, sufficient justices must be appointed to it to remedy the problem.”

To pack the court, or not pack the court? This is a question that Democrats have been at pains to avoid. And to be fair, they may have other options besides the nuclear one. They could engage in jurisdiction stripping to limit the court’s ability to interfere with liberal governance. They could reform the court in other ways beyond simply nominating four new justices to turn the tide: Pete Buttigieg has floated the idea of a 15-member court split among conservatives, liberals, and ostensible neutrals. Other lawmakers have proposed we simply abolish lifetime appointments.

I could spend several more paragraphs sketching out solutions to end the misrule of an illiberal court, but the time has come for Democrats to step forward and announce what they plan to do about it. The party is no longer on a collision course with the Roberts court—the collision has happened; the wreckage is in the road. To do anything, now or in the future, Democrats will have to undo the grievous harms that imperil their party’s ability to function. In these upcoming election cycles, if Democratic candidates don’t have serious ideas of how to solve this problem, then they are not serious Democratic candidates.

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

As Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. prepares to wean the country off mental health medications, U.S. Health Department officials explored last week whether the department had the ability to ban certain treatments within a class known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, better known as SSRIs, Reuters reported Friday.

That class of drugs includes Zoloft, Prozac, and Lexapro, which have been approved for public use for decades. People familiar with the conversations did not reveal to Reuters which drugs the Trump administration is in talks to restrict.

HHS spokesman Andrew Nixon denied the report, declaring in a statement that Kennedy’s department “has not had any discussions about ​banning SSRIs, and any claims suggesting otherwise are false.”

Yet the writing is on the wall. Kennedy blamed the country’s mental health crisis on medication earlier this week, announcing at a daylong mental health summit that America is suffering from a “dependency crisis driven by overmedicalization” of mental health and wellness. Kennedy also unveiled new policies that he said would rein in the prescription of the widely used drugs, though he explained that while he intends to steer America’s health institutions away from prescribing psychiatric medications, those currently on them should not stop doing so.

Kennedy has railed against the use of mental health medication for years, even going so far as to spread falsehoods that antidepressants and other medications are the real underlying reason for school shootings and mass murder (as opposed to a lack of adequate gun control).

A 2026 study published in the medical journal BMJ Mental Health found that roughly one in six U.S. adults are currently taking antidepressant medications—an uptick from previous decades. Between 2005 and 2008, just 11 percent of people above the age of 12 were using the mood stabilizers, according to CDC data.

The American Psychiatric Association lists SSRIs as the first option for depression as an evidence-based treatment.

“There are a lot of prescriptions because there are a lot of folks with illnesses that can respond to these medications,” including depression and several anxiety disorders, Dr. J. John Mann of the New York State Psychiatric Institute told Reuters. “Restricting use of these medications is not justifiable medically.”

In a letter sent Thursday to Paramount Skydance, Freedom of the Press Foundation and Reporters Without Borders demanded to see internal documents, alleging that there was “credible concern that Paramount leadership has offered, solicited, or effectuated a corrupt exchange: more favorable coverage of the Trump administration and its allies in exchange for favorable treatment by Trump administration antitrust and media regulators.”

The groups warned that since taking over Paramount, Ellison had “wielded the company to benefit Trump and cater to his preferences,” and had promised to do the same to CNN if given the chance.

Referring to a story The Guardian reported in November, the letter said: “Ellison reportedly raised the possibility that Paramount would include CNN in the purchase, then implement the CBS playbook: transforming CNN’s programming and firing anchors and commentators Trump dislikes.”

Following the Ellison takeover of Paramount, and the installation of Bari Weiss as CBS News editor in chief, there has been a talent exodus from the network, including Anderson Cooper, longtime 60 Minutes executive producer Bill Owens, CBS News producer Mary Walsh, and CBS Evening News producer Alicia Hastey. 60 Minutes host Sharyn Alfonsi will also reportedly exit her role at the end of May after clashing with Weiss.

Trump has repeatedly railed against CNN and lashed out at its stable of journalists, claiming the network is “fake news.”

Republican Governor Kay Ivey immediately signed into law the legislation, which would redraw the state Senate map and allow for new congressional primaries in the state if the Supreme Court lifts an injunction against drawing new congressional maps before 2030. Voters had already begun casting ballots in this year’s primaries.

Protesters filled the state Capitol on Friday, shouting their disapproval of both bills, and at one point, debate was halted in the House.

“And I know we are going to redistrict here at some point, and we are going to look at some of the census data, and you are going to look at some of the people in this room, you are going to look at me in the face, you are going to shake my hand, say everything nice, and you are going to redraw my district so I can’t come back,” Democratic state Representative Chris England, who is Black, said during the debate. He and other Democrats brought up Alabama’s legacy of segregation and voter suppression.

But Alabama Republicans weren’t deterred. “Alabama now stands ready to quickly act, should the courts issue favorable rulings in our ongoing redistricting cases,” Kay said in a statement after signing the legislation. 

The move comes on the heels of the Supreme Court’s decision last week in Louisiana v. Callais, which gutted the Voting Rights Act and spurred Republican-led states across the South to begin redistricting procedures that would dilute majority-Black districts. But Alabama Republicans’ congressional effort may run afoul of that ruling, according to the ACLU of Alabama, which said in a statement that it was planning a lawsuit.

“For several years now, the court has been consistent: Alabama violated the 14th Amendment by intentionally discriminating against Black voters in its congressional and legislative maps,” ACLU of Alabama Director JaTaune Bosby Gilchrist said. “The Callais opinion even agrees.”  

The road trip, filmed “over the course of seven months,” was fodder for an upcoming reality television show called The Great American Road Trip, Duffy revealed Friday. The series was launched in partnership with Fox News, and is set to be released on YouTube in the lead-up to America’s 250th birthday.

But not all 50 states will get airtime. Instead, Duffy’s multimonth trip hit just eight states—most of them conservative bastions—as well as the nation’s capital: Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Florida, Texas, Arizona, Montana, Massachusetts, and Washington, D.C.

In a promotional interview on Fox News Friday, Duffy confessed that the trek was his idea.

“I wanted to lean in to America’s 250th birthday,” Duffy said, reminding the panel that he and his wife, Rachel Campos-Duffy, met on a road trip for MTV’s Real World spinoff, Road Rules: All Stars, in 1998.

“And so over the course of seven months we just kind of found these moments where I might be able to do some work, take the kids with me, do a road trip—and our motto is, ‘To love America is to see America.’” Duffy continued, “There’s so much to see in this beautiful country.” (He later clarified on X that the series “was filmed in short, one to two day production windows—such as weekends and the kids’ spring break.”)

oh my god -- Sean Duffy on Fox & Friends this morning announced that he spent parts of *7 MONTHS* (more than half a year!) on a roadtrip with his family to celebrate America's 250th anniversary pic.twitter.com/ix5Nzft3MX

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 8, 2026

Campos-Duffy said the straight-to-streaming family vacation emerged out of a prompt from Donald Trump, who urged his Cabinet to find ways to celebrate America ahead of the 250th anniversary.

“We thought we were going to do it on our iPhones and just do little reels, but then we started talking about it and we were like, ‘Let’s go back to our roots! Let’s do this one for free, we’ll put it onto YouTube, we’ll let the whole country see it,’” Campos-Duffy said. “Just one more family says, ‘Load up the car and let’s go spend time together, let’s make these memories, let’s see America during her birthday year.’

“Then we said we’ll have done something wonderful,” she added.

Preempting criticism of the major outing, Campos-Duffy claimed that the rest of America is living in a “PornHub world.”

“This is really wholesome, good family stuff,” she said.

Sean Duffy's wife, Rachel-Campos Duffy, on the 7 months her family spent on a roadtrip while Sean was supposed to be working as Transportation Secretary: "I'm gonna be really honest. We live in a PornHub world. This is really wholesome good family stuff." pic.twitter.com/YK8LS2NhYV

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 8, 2026

The couple urged American families to do the same, insisting that 2026 is the perfect year to explore the nation—though exactly how Americans are supposed to afford it is not clear.

The cost of oil and gas is through the roof due to the ongoing war with Iran. The average cost of gas nationwide is $4.54 per gallon, with large swaths of the country pushing $5 a gallon, according to the American Automobile Association’s price tracker. That’s about 50 percent higher than before the war started. In some areas of California, such as Mono County, fuel costs are well above $7 per gallon.

Analysts have predicted that high prices are probably here to stay at least through the end of 2026 as the war drags on. Last month, Energy Secretary Chris Wright posited that costs could climb even steeper before the midterm elections.

This article has been updated to clarify the amount of time Duffy spent filming the series.

On Friday, The Washington Post reported that FEMA significantly decreased the amount of hazard-mitigation grants to Democratic-led states last year. From February to June 2025, the agency awarded $91 million per month, before reducing that to just $3 million a month for the rest of 2025. While the agency appeared to reverse course,  approving grants worth $760 million in March after facing legal scrutiny, Colorado and California have still received barely any money since last summer. 

California has only received $830,000 from FEMA since July 2025. Colorado has not received anything, according to the Post’s analysis.

Experts say this is a deliberate and targeted decision. 

“There’s a pattern—a state like Colorado is repeatedly being denied FEMA aid and others like California are waiting on FEMA money that’s already been approved,” the Carnegie Endowment’s sustainability, climate, and geopolitics research assistant Debbra Goh told the Post. “Hazard-mitigation funding is designed to help communities prepare for the next disaster. Without it, communities are rebuilding into the same risk.” 

Much of this funding delay is also due to former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s aggressive policy requiring that she personally sign off on any FEMA aid over $100,000.

“Communities still have damaged park facilities, fenced-off trailheads, and patched-up roadways that wash out in heavy rain because permanent work cannot move at full speed without the promised federal reimbursement,” California Governor Gavin Newsom said last month. “Schools still wait for dollars to rebuild facilities and classrooms that burned or were heavily damaged.​”

Colorado Representative Joe Neguse noted that the delays also come in the face of evolving environmental issues. 

“Climate change is a five-alarm fire—literally—for our state.… We’ve already had a number of fires, and I anticipate this year could be the most difficult fire season we’ve had in some time. And unfortunately, right now, we find ourselves at a time when the administration has no regard for the communities that it is supposed to serve,” Neguse said. “[Colorado is] entitled to the same relief that folks in Kentucky and South Carolina and other Republican states have been able to access.”

While the Trump administration claims there is “no politicization to the president’s decisions on disaster relief,” its past actions would suggest otherwise, as Trump denied disaster aid to blue states last October.

In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Louisiana v. Callais ruling, states in the South are rushing to eliminate their majority-Black congressional districts. Tennessee passed legislation to do that on Thursday, and it could happen soon in Alabama, Louisiana, and South Carolina too. Jake Grumbach and Hakeem Jefferson, political scientists at University of California, Berkeley and Stanford University, respectively, say that the Callais ruling and these states’ subsequent gerrymandering isn’t just a story about electoral politics. They argue that we are witnessing a sustained attack on Black political power, particularly in the South, the region where the majority of Black Americans live. Jefferson explains why Blacks (and other minority groups) often gain particular benefits by being represented by someone from that group. Grumbach says that the Supreme Court is being disingenuous in suggesting that partisanship and race are distinct from one another, so it’s therefore OK for states to create districts based on party. In reality, particularly in the South, racial and partisan attitudes are deeply intertwined. So gerrymandering by party is effectively gerrymandering by race, as well.

Trump’s displeasure with Makary has been well documented. Last week, the Journal reported that the president became frustrated with the commissioner because he refused to approve blueberry, mango, and menthol vape flavors from manufacturer Glas because they’d be too marketable to young and underage users. This complicated Trump’s campaign promise to “save vaping,” as well as his effort to win back the youth vote.

Recent polling shows Trump sitting at a dismal 24 percent approval rating with Gen Z, having lost virtually all of the gains he made with that bloc in 2024.

Makary is a top MAHA advocate, but many conservative lobbyists will be happy to see him gone. Marjorie Dannenfelser, the president of the anti-abortion organization Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, has been calling for Makary’s firing since December, citing his decision not to impede the approval of a generic abortion pill. Former Senator Rick Santorum last week lamented that Makary “immediately fired the best leaders at the FDA, replaced them with anti-Trump leftists who hollowed out FDA, harmed patients, stifled innovation & drove bio-tech to China then lied about it.”

Trump has yet to publicly comment on Makary’s job status.

This story has been updated.

In a filing Friday, the TV network said that the FCC’s latest probe into the TV show The View created a “chilling effect” on free speech by punishing political content the Trump administration disagrees with.

“Some may dislike certain—or even most—of the viewpoints expressed on ‘The View’ or similar shows. Such dislike, however, cannot justify using regulatory processes to restrict those views,” ABC said in the filing.

The FCC set its sights on The View after a February episode with Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico of Texas. The agency questioned whether the show was exempt from the equal time rule, which requires news broadcast stations to give equal time to political candidates. According to ABC’s filing, the FCC ordered the company’s Houston station KTRK-TV to file a request with the agency asking if the show qualified for an exemption from the equal time rule.

The network claimed that this went too far; The View received an exemption in 2002 which had not been challenged once in the following 24 years. It called the demand to file for a new exemption “unprecedented, beyond the Commission’s authority and counterproductive to the Commission’s stated goal of encouraging free speech and open political discussion.”

Two weeks ago, the FCC asked to review the broadcast licenses of eight ABC stations years before they are set to expire, after late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel made a joke about Trump and first lady Melania Trump that angered the president. While the network’s Friday filing doesn’t mention that, it seems to have influenced their new posture against the administration.

In December 2024, ABC paid Trump a $16 million settlement after he sued the network for defamation. Now they appear to be gearing up for a long court battle against the administration that could go to the Supreme Court. ABC is retaining experienced Supreme Court litigator Paul D. Clement, who served as solicitor general under President George W. Bush. It appears that they won’t give in to the Trump administration any more.

Jeury Concepcion, 19, told NBC New York he’d been victim of a violent wrongful immigration arrest in the Bronx’s Norwood neighborhood earlier this week. In a video of the incident, a masked federal agent can be seen running up behind Concepcion with his gun drawn. Concepcion stopped and appeared calm, as more masked agents pulled up in an unmarked car.

Two federal officers then pushed him to the ground, and a third rushed over to help place him in handcuffs as he struggled facedown on the sidewalk. Another agent, wearing an “ERO” (Enforcement and Removal Operations) vest, kept bystanders at bay. Cellphone video showed that Concepcion was bleeding out of his head as ICE agents put him in their vehicle.

During the ride, the officers finally asked Concepcion to show ID and his cellphone. Only then did they realize they had arrested the wrong person. Concepcion said he was born and raised in New York.

Concepcion said he was dropped off at a park he was unfamiliar with and was later reunited with his mother, who took him to the hospital where he needed four stitches. Concepcion has visible cuts and bruises on his face, and is also suffering from a concussion, he told the outlet.

Another man was arrested as part of the ICE investigation in Norwood. A separate video shows agents chasing and tackling the man, who the agency claims is an undocumented immigrant.

This is the kind of wanton violence that President Donald Trump’s immigration enforcement crackdown has unleashed on citizens and noncitizens alike. Speaking at a security conference in Phoenix Tuesday, White House border czar Tom Homan threatened to “flood” New York City with ICE officers, while New York Governor Kathy Hochul promised to pass new protections for immigrants.

Rubio told reporters in Rome Friday that his meeting with the pontiff was “very positive,” but mentioned that they did discuss the Iran war and America’s point of view.

“We had a very good meeting,” Rubio said, according to CNN’s Alejandra Jaramillo. Rubio also said he expressed to Leo “the danger that Iran poses to the world.”

Donald Trump revealed Thursday evening that he had instructed Rubio to bring up the matter, apparently uninterested in settling a boiling feud between his administration and the Catholic Church.

“I just said, tell the pope very nicely, very respectfully, that Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon,” Trump said. “Also tell the pope that Iran killed 42,000 innocent protesters who didn’t have guns, who didn’t have weapons. Tell that to the pope.”

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

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

Rubio’s meeting with Leo ended in an awkward gift exchange that seemingly left the pope speechless. In a not so subtle gesture, the pope gave the Trump administration representative a pen made of olive wood as a de facto olive branch, dubbing it a “plant of peace.” Rubio, in turn, gave the pope a tiny crystal football while acknowledging that the pope—a well-known Chicago White Sox fan—is more of a “baseball guy.”

The Vatican put out a statement after the meeting, referring to the talks as “cordial” but noting that “there followed an exchange of views regarding the regional and international situation, with particular attention to countries marked by war, political tensions, and difficult humanitarian situations, as well as to the need to work tirelessly in support of peace.”

In a statement, Democratic state Attorney General Jay Jones called out the court’s decision as “putting politics over the rule of law.”

“This decision silences the voices of the millions of Virginians who cast their ballots in every corner of the Commonwealth, and it fuels the growing fears across our nation about the state of our democracy,” Jones said. “My team is carefully reviewing this unprecedented order and we are evaluating every legal pathway forward to defend the will of the people and protect the integrity of Virginia’s elections.”

Senator Tim Kaine criticized the timing of the state’s Supreme Court ruling, saying, “If the Virginia Supreme Court had legitimate concerns about this referendum, the time to stop it would have been before three million Virginians cast their ballots.

“The U.S. Supreme Court eviscerates the Voting Rights Act in a lawsuit brought by a January 6 extremist and Southern states race to craft backroom deals disenfranchising minority voters and candidates. Meanwhile Virginia voters choose to stand up against national disenfranchisement only to see their votes cast into the trash by a 4–3 ruling,” Kaine added.

Meanwhile, Republican-led states across the country continue to gerrymander following President Trump’s demand for mid-decade redistricting and the Supreme Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act last week. Most of those actions took or are taking place without state referendums, basically forcing through new congressional maps that disenfranchise Democrats and Black Americans.

One polling expert, Zachary Donnini of VoteHub, projects that barring any more court orders, nine Republican-led states will have successfully redrawn their maps this year, as opposed to one Democratic-led state. Thanks to a conservative-controlled Supreme Court, the GOP is stacking the deck and denying Black people representation.

Court filings obtained by the Daily Mail revealed that Emily is attempting to change their custody situation due to Miller’s “dangerous physical behavior” while their 2-year-old daughter was present. Moreno stated that Miller hit her during a custody exchange with their daughter in February, bruising Moreno’s arm and torso, as shown in photos obtained by the Mail. Moreno also claims that Miller threw a pot of boiling water on her in 2024 while their daughter was present.

Moreno also told the court that Miller “regularly speaks to me in an inappropriate, aggressive and demeaning manner, which is not in the best interest of our child.”

Miller and Moreno separated in 2024 and divorced in 2025.

Miller has faced similar accusations in the past. His ex-girlfriend, former White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham, 49, alleged that he pushed her against a wall and slapped her after she accused him of cheating in 2020.

Miller blames his congressional colleague and former father-in-law for his current legal issues, and is framing his ex-wife as “malicious” due to her alleged bipolar diagnosis.

“It is unfortunate that @berniemoreno continues to fund and enable his daughter’s malicious campaign to ruin my life despite his knowledge of her mental health issues,” he wrote Friday on X. “Bernie, this must be distracting from your job. These antics harm your own grandchild. Anytime you want to put a stop to this, you can.”

Senator Moreno has yet to publicly respond.

In the court’s majority opinion, Alito claimed that the kind of racial discrimination that had prompted the creation of the Voting Rights Act no longer existed.

“Black voters now participate in elections at similar rates as the rest of the electorate, even turning out at higher rates than white voters in two of the five most recent Presidential elections nationwide and in Louisiana,” Alito wrote.

He was citing a friend-of-the-court brief submitted by the Department of Justice, which relied on a statistical methodology that is not preferred by experts in determining statewide voter turnout. The brief calculated Black and white voter turnout in Louisiana as a proportion of the total population of each racial group over the age of 18. This is generally considered a suboptimal method because it includes people who can’t vote, including noncitizens and people with felony convictions.

Experts typically prefer to consider voter turnout as a proportion of the citizen voting age population, or the eligible population. Using this methodology, The Guardian determined that Black voter turnout in Louisiana only exceeded white voter turnout in the 2012 presidential election.

Using the DOJ’s data, Alito also elided the fact that the racial voter gap is actually widening. In the three most recent presidential elections since Barack Obama was on the ballot, Black voter turnout has trailed white voter turnout, according to The Guardian’s analysis. In Louisiana, the disparity grew wider between 2016, 2020, and 2024.

Kevin Morris, a researcher at the Brennan Center for Justice, said that Alito’s claim is “simply not factual,” and that the turnout gap had “exploded” over the last three years.

Michael McDonald, a leading expert on voter turnout who teaches at the University of Florida, told The Guardian that relying on this “misleading” methodology was purposeful. “If I wanted to manipulate the numbers in a way that was favorable to the government’s interest, I would be using voting age population,” McDonald said.

“They had to fudge how they’re calculating the turnout rate to get there, and they’re not even taking into account margin of error, and all these other methodology issues about the current population survey to arrive at that number,” he said. “Someone knew what they were doing.”

The Supreme Court’s ruling on Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act has opened the door for redistricting efforts across the country, as Republicans rush to redraw Democrat-led districts, many of which have majority-Black populations.

The president exploded at a Black female reporter Thursday who dared to question why he was so focused on his expensive Washington vanity projects while the rest of the country struggles to fill their gas tanks, deriding the query as “stupid” and the reporter who bothered to ask as a “horror show.”

“Mr. President, you are here against the backdrop of war in Iran. Why focus on all these projects right now when gas prices soar?” asked ABC News’s Rachel Scott.

“You know why? Because I want to keep our country beautiful and safe. Beautiful also,” the 79-year-old said.

Trump then went on to complain about the state of the nation’s capital, claiming that several iconic monuments—such as the Washington Monument and the Reflecting Pool—are “disgusting” and covered in dirt. Cleaning the landmarks, Trump said, would cost approximately $2 million.

“You probably don’t see dirt, but I do,” Trump told the reporter. “And that’s not what our country is about. Our country is about beauty, cleanliness, safety, great people. Not a filthy capital.

“Such a stupid question, if you ask me,” Trump continued. “We are fixing up the Reflecting Pond at the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument, and you say, ‘Why are you fixing it up?’ Because you can understand dirt, baby, better than I can, but I don’t allow it.

“This is one of the worst reporters—she’s with ABC Fake News, and she’s a horror show. She’s saying, ‘Why would you bother fixing this up?’ Why would I bother taking 11 or 12 truckloads of filth out of the water in front of the Lincoln monument?” Trump said, turning to his entourage to mock the reporter while misstating the name of the site. “A question like that is a disgrace to our country.”

Reporter: Why focus on all these projects as gas prices are soaring?

Trump: Such a stupid question. You can understand dirt better than I can baby but I don’t allow it. pic.twitter.com/uqzR1uqSoI

— Acyn (@Acyn) May 8, 2026

Elsewhere in Washington, Trump is building a “Triumphal Arc,” destroying some 13 historic buildings on the grounds of former psychiatric hospital St. Elizabeths in order to expand facilities for the Department of Homeland Security, and constructing a 90,000-square-foot ballroom that is likely going to cost taxpayers $1 billion (against his initial promises that it wouldn’t cost more than $200 million, and that it would be entirely funded by private donations).

Meanwhile, the cost of oil and gas is through the roof due to the ongoing war with Iran, which is costing the U.S. roughly $1 billion per day, according to initial estimates by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. The average cost of gas nationwide is $4.54 per gallon, with large swaths of the country pushing $5 a gallon, according to the AAA’s price tracker. That’s about 50 percent higher than prices were before the war started. In some areas of California, such as Mono County, fuel costs are well above $7 per gallon.

Analysts have predicted that the high prices are probably here to stay, at least through the end of 2026, as the war in Iran drags on. Last month, Energy Secretary Chris Wright posited that costs could climb even steeper before midterms.

Roth was peeved because Mayor Zohran Mamdani filmed a video celebrating Governor Kathy Hochul’s embrace of a tax on pricey second homes in New York in front of a building (developed by Vornado) containing a penthouse owned by hedge-fund billionaire Kenneth Griffin. Griffin bought it in 2019 for (sit down) $238 million, which made it at the time by far the most expensive single residence ever bought in New York.

I could maybe see an argument against Mamdani specifically singling out one person in that video. Griffin himself was quick to point out that Hizzoner “seems to have forgotten that the C.E.O. of another American company was assassinated just blocks from where I live in New York,” referring to Brian Thompson of United Healthcare. There are a lot of wackos out there. Although if God forbid someone shot Griffin tomorrow, it would not be Mamdani’s “fault,” any more than right-wing anti-government rhetoric was responsible for Justin Mohn shooting and then decapitating his federal-worker father in 2024. Only killers pull triggers. You’d think the people who preach at us constantly about personal responsibility would agree with that.

But let’s get back to Roth. What a crybaby. What he refuses to understand, or at least to admit, is: Nobody hates him personally. (a) Nobody cares enough about him to hate him personally, and (b) odds are he’s a relatively nice man and a good father and all that. This has nothing to do with hatred of individuals.

What millions of Americans hate is the extreme concentration of wealth and political power in the United States. Back in March, a New York Times analysis of donations in the 2024 election campaign found that just 300 billionaires and their families made a staggering 19 percent of all contributions to federal campaigns. That was more than $3 billion all told, either directly or through political action committees. The money helped elect Donald Trump, of course, but also new senators like Montana’s Tim Sheehy, who raked in $47 million from billionaires in his win over Democrat Jon Tester.

This is sick. This is not democracy. These people have no sense of limits, no sense that democracy requires that restrictions be placed on their power. Or maybe they do recognize that fact and have contempt for it, in which case it makes them opponents of democracy.

“I have the right to spend whatever I choose to promote what I believe,” David Koch once wrote, criticizing the landmark 1974 law that sought to impose caps on campaign expenditures. Fuck you. No you don’t. I mean, you do, right now, under the current laws of the United States, where the Supreme Court has held that money is speech and as such needs to be as “free” as speech is. You may think I’m referring to the infamous Citizens United decision of 2010, but actually the court initially made this holding in 1976’s Buckley v. Valeo, which came long before campaigns were so awash in lucre. That year, the average Senate race cost $595,000. Adjusted for inflation, that would be around $3.8 million now. In 2020, Senate races averaged around $30 million.

Koch is wrong. Money isn’t speech. Money is money. The difference is easily provable with the observation that all of us can speak equally but we cannot spend equally. If Koch and I are standing in the town square advocating for opposing candidates for mayor, I can speak on behalf of my candidate as endlessly as he can. That’s speech. But his ability to hand his preferred candidate $100 bills is rather more infinite than mine. That isn’t speech. It’s money. It corrupts the process. Someday, this will be obvious to a different Supreme Court.

You’d think these people would be satisfied with the way things are, so heavily stacked in their favor. But they aren’t. They want more. They always want more. This year, billionaires who want to keep AI free of any restrictions or regulations are pouring eye-popping sums into the midterms: Leading the Future, a pro-AI super PAC founded by venture capitalist Marc Andreesson and OpenAI president Greg Brockman, has amassed a war chest of $140 million. Their goal is to defeat candidates like Alex Bores in New York, who vows to lead a charge to regulate AI if he gets to Congress, and to promote candidates who’ll lie back and let them do what they want.

Why are they so hot on AI? Well, it’s pretty simple, isn’t? More AI means fewer human employees, with their oh-so-burdensome salaries and benefits and occasional illnesses. Claude Anthropic can’t agitate for a union. More AI means they get richer. The millions who lose work? Well, that’s progress. If they lose work, it’s what they deserved for not keeping up with the times. (Fancifully, some AI evangelists claim to support universal basic income as a solution to the mass immiseration their products will cause. But we know exactly which side they’ll be on if Congress ever takes up such a measure.)

These people have to be stopped. They need to be taxed at higher rates, of course. And their political power has to be curbed. In fact, that has to be a defining issue in the 2028 Democratic presidential primary race.

Every Democratic candidate needs to be asked: What will you do to rein in the political power of the billionaires? They may not be able to do as much as we’d like, given the Supreme Court, but how they talk about it—whether they’re angry or sanguine, whether they convey alarm or spew out a bunch of stupid happy talk about being able to work with everyone—will tell us a lot about their character and their worldview.

It’s kind of a “price of entry” issue. That is, the price of being taken seriously as a candidate, whatever their other positions, is that they recognize this state of affairs for the five-alarm fire it is. If something isn’t done about this, by 2030, those 300 billionaires will account for 40 percent of all federal campaign spending. Or 50. And what remains of this democracy will be dead.

By the way, the other “price of entry” issue? It’s that the candidates will use every ounce of political capital they have to kill the Senate filibuster if they win control of Washington in 2028. Not reform it. Kill it. The filibuster in any form means continued paralysis, dysfunction, and a certain drubbing in the 2030 midterms that will return control of one or both houses of Congress to the GOP. No filibuster means passing 10 or 15 or 20 bills that make people’s lives better and stop monopolies from being able to rip people off the way they can now. It has the potential to revolutionize politics. Any Democrat who doesn’t see this at this point can’t possibly be taken seriously.

Kvetch away, Steven Roth. But maybe in the meantime, pause and give a little thought to what is required for a healthy democracy to function. Reflect, perhaps, on the fact that this country experienced its greatest growth, its golden era, when a third of the workforce was unionized, when the top marginal tax rate was 90 percent, and when corporations generally understood that they had a commitment not only to shareholders but to community stakeholders.

Finally, as you reflect with justifiable pride on your own success, devote at least a few moments to the elements of public infrastructure—the roads, the rails, the computer networks that were all initially developed by the government—that helped make you so rich. If you and your class don’t want to be hated, stop doing things people hate.

Commentators across the conservative spectrum expressed their distaste for reports of a one-page plan to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and enforce a temporary 30-day peace agreement until a larger deal is reached. 

“This would be a terrible deal. I hope the terms of any deal would be significantly stricter: No enrichment, ever. HEU to us stat. No more proxies. Turn on the internet,” said Hugh Hewitt, the conservative commentator who called the disastrous invasion of Iraq “one of the wisest” decisions made by former President George W. Bush. “President Trump never gives up leverage. Why would he start now with #Iran on the ropes?”

“If this regime remains in place, they will do all they can to continue moving forward with their agenda, funding terrorism, developing nukes and ballistic missiles,” Zionist Organization of America head Morton Klein told The Hill. “And if they’re so desperate for a deal, as President Trump keeps saying, why are we in a position to dictate to them what the deal has to be? I really don’t understand this.”

The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board felt similarly. 

“It will be essential for Mr. Trump to hold firm, knowing that Iran has no need for domestic enrichment other than for a bomb, and that he can’t count on a change in regime behavior over time, a mistake Mr. Obama made,” they wrote on Wednesday. “He also can’t trust a future President to reimpose strict limits later. Mr. Trump has been unique in his willingness to confront Iran. The task in any deal is to secure full nuclear dismantlement while Mr. Trump is still in office. If Iran won’t do it, the President will have to make good on his threats.”

“If the Axios report is close to accurate, the Iranian regime will survive, the Iranian people will face even more extensive brutality, and the Israeli government could fall in the October election.  A disastrous result,” pro-Israel neoconservative and Fox News host Mark Levin wrote on Wednesday, making no mention of the death and displacement that this U.S.-Israeli war has already brought to thousands of Iranian and Lebanese civilians. “I also know that future presidents will not take military action to enforce an agreement, based on our past history and internal opposition, which will only grow worse given the evolving nature of the Democrat Party and the influences of the Marxists-Islamists.” 

While this supposed peace deal could certainly be another bluff to settle the markets, it’s also wholly possible that Trump has realized—as prices soar, civilians die, and Iran comes no closer to surrendering—that this war was a grave mistake. Yet this cadre of conservative voices would rather see even more violence than any kind of peace. 

While speaking to the press outside of the White House on Thursday, Trump was asked if the ceasefire was still on despite the recent exchange of fire in the Strait of Hormuz. The U.S. and Iran traded attacks, with Iran reportedly attacking three U.S. warships with missiles, drones, and small boats, and the U.S. bombing an Iranian oil tanker and other targets in the coastal areas of Bandar Khamir, Sirik, and Qeshm Island. Trump said the ceasefire is still in place, but then went on a disturbing tack.

“They trifled with us today, we blew ’em away. They trifled, I call that a trifle. I’ll let you when there’s no cease—you won’t have to know. If there’s no ceasefire, you’re not gonna have to know, you’re just gonna have to look at one big glow coming out of Iran. And they better sign their agreement fast,” Trump said.

Q: After today's strikes, is the ceasefire with Iran still on?

TRUMP: Yeah it is. They trifled with us today. We blew them away. If there's no ceasefire, you'll see one big glow coming out of Iran. They better sign an agreement fast. pic.twitter.com/eXphPfXtt0

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 8, 2026

Trump then said that peace talks were going “very well, but they’re going to have to understand, if it doesn’t get signed, they’re gonna have a lot of pain. They’re gonna have a lot of pain. They want to sign it, I will tell you. They want to sign it a lot more than I do.”

Does “one big glow” refer to a nuclear bomb? It would have to refer to a massive bombing campaign, at the very least. Fox News reports that the U.S. struck several empty Iranian oil tankers Friday, suggesting that Trump is hoping bombs will coerce Iran into ending its closure of the Strait of Hormuz.

Trump could be alluding to using nukes, or just talking big to try and intimidate Iran’s leadership. So far, though, Trump has not made any visible progress on ending the war, and the world economy continues to suffer as a result, with fuel prices staying high. Nuking Iran would only make things catastrophically worse.

Four justices on the seven-seat court bench voted in favor of overturning the high-stakes legislative effort, while three justices voted against doing so. The justices ruled that the Virginia legislature’s Democratic majority did not follow proper procedure in approving the referendum to redraw the commonwealth’s congressional maps before sending it to voters and, in doing so, “placed the cart before the horse.”

Voters narrowly passed the referendum last month. Roughly 50.3 percent of the state voted in favor, giving their representatives a chance to squeeze more Democratic seats in the U.S. House before midterms. The referendum passed despite a 2020 state policy that relegated redistricting to 10-year intervals aligned with the national census.

The new maps were expected to alter the state’s congressional split to overwhelmingly favor Democrats, switching from 6–5 to 10–1.

The president, in turn, was thrilled.

“Huge win for the Republican Party, and America, in Virginia,” Donald Trump posted to Truth Social shortly after the news broke. “The Virginia Supreme Court has just struck down the Democrats’ horrible gerrymander.”

The decision comes two days after FBI agents raided the business office of L. Louise Lucas of Portsmouth, a senior leader in the Virginia Senate who played a key role in the redistricting effort. Sources that spoke with The New York Times claimed that the search was related to an investigation that began under former President Joe Biden, examining potential corruption tied to Lucas’s businesses.

Friday’s ruling effectively puts an end to the most watched redistricting effort in the nation, though it’s not the only attempted redrawing that has kneecapped Democratic hopes to gain more seats in Congress. In neighboring Tennessee, lawmakers approved a new map Thursday that will give Republicans all nine seats in the House, squeezing out the state’s last Democratic district and carving up the only majority-Black congressional district in the Big Bend State.

This story has been updated.

Patel ordered more than two dozen former and current members of his security team, as well as several information technology staffers, to submit to polygraph tests, two people familiar with the matter told MS NOW Thursday. The director was described as entering a “panic mode” in order to save his job after humiliating media reports described Patel’s temper tantrums and disappearing acts.

Speaking to host Nicolle Wallace on MS NOW’s Deadline: White House Thursday, Carol Leonnig, an investigative journalist for the outlet, explained how Patel’s actions had reverberated throughout his agency.

“This is sending a real chill through the FBI,” Leonnig said. “But even more worrisome to them, Nicolle, is the way in which Patel has not agreed to meet with lots and lots of other operational leaders in the bureau.

“This worries people because there’s a regular sort of line of threats and investigations that the bureau director needs to be briefed on, and needs some input on, of course. There are some decision points that he must be involved in, and this is worrying them.”

In response to the reports, Patel has walled himself off from some senior bureau leaders, and refused to meet with operational leaders this week, raising concerns that the director may be out of the loop. A spokesperson for the agency denied that Patel had withdrawn from meetings to MS NOW. He has also sued The Atlantic over the original story about his behavior and is reportedly investigating the journalist who wrote it.

Speaking to press outside of the White House Thursday evening, Trump was asked if he had been briefed on the virus, and after calling the ABC News reporter who asked the question “fake news,” he said that yes, he had been. The reporter then asked what the president had learned in those briefings.

“Well, I think you’re going to be told everything, and you already have, uhhh, it’s very much, we hope, under control. There was the ship, and I think we’re gonna make a full report about it tomorrow. We have a lot of people, it’s a lot of great people are studying it. It should be fine, we hope,” Trump said.

The reporter then asked if Americans should be concerned that the virus was going to spread.

“I hope not. I mean, I hope not. We’ll do the best we can,” Trump responded.

Q: Have you been briefed on the hantavirus?

TRUMP: Yes I have

Q: What have you learned?

TRUMP: Ahhh -- it's very much we hope under control

Q: Should Americans be concerned it's going to spread?

TRUMP: I hope not. We'll do the best we can. pic.twitter.com/6Kjz1Tw33M

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 8, 2026

Trump’s answer didn’t inspire a lot of confidence, especially considering how badly he handled the Covid-19 pandemic in the last year of his first term as president. His Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., happens to have laid off all of the cruise ship inspectors in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Vessel Sanitation Program last year. The Trump administration also cut funding to study the hantavirus last year.

Trump has not given any detailed information on how he’s going to handle the recent outbreak. Let’s hope that this virus somehow gets contained, because if it spreads in the U.S., we’ll have an even worse pandemic.

In a 2–1 decision, the Court of International Trade determined the president’s global tariff—announced in February after the Supreme Court rejected his “Liberation Day” tariffs—is unlawful due to his misrepresenting Section 122 of the Trade Act. Trump tried to claim that the phrase “balance-of-payments deficits” in the law is the same as a “trade deficit.” It is not, the court ruled.

“It is clear that Congress was aware of the differences in the words it chose,” the majority opinion explained. “The Government argues that in today’s world, the current account is the proper component for identifying a balance-of-payments deficit.… Problematically for the Government, and as discussed herein, Congress in 1974 identified the settlement, liquidity, and basic balance deficits as ‘balance-of-payments deficits.’”

It is unclear what the next steps are, although the tariffs were set to expire near the end of July.

Trump’s second loss came as a federal judge stated what we all already knew—that Elon Musk’s DOGE “blatantly used” race, gender, sexuality, and other markers to decide which grants and opportunities to kill.

“Treating Black civil-rights history, Jewish testimony about the Holocaust, the oft-forgotten Asian American experience, the shameful treatment of the children of Native tribes, or the mere mention of a woman as a marker of lack of merit or wastefulness is not lawful,” U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon wrote. The decision is a win for nonprofit organizations that had been under threat of or had already lost funding due to the DOGE cuts.

Trump has yet to comment on his legal defeats.

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

The Washington Post is reporting that internal intelligence findings indicate that Iran can survive Donald Trump’s naval blockade for at least three more months before economic hardship really bites. That means the war could go on longer than we expect. If so, that’s a political catastrophe for Trump and the GOP. Trump’s advisors are reportedly worried right now that the political blowback over the war is worsening for them, and there are signs Trump’s allies are turning on him at this moment. Fox News hit Trump with a crushing graphic that demonstrated soaring gas prices, with one Fox anchor declaring that those prices are giving Americans “heartburn.” We think the political fallout from all this could last much longer than people expect. So we’re digging through all of it with New Republic staff writer Timothy Noah, who’s been writing well about how Trump’s policies are screwing working people. Tim, good to have you back on.

Tim Noah: Thanks for having me, Greg.

Sargent: Let’s start with this Fox News segment, which was flagged by the tireless Aaron Rupar. In huge numbers on the screen, it had the latest national average prices at $4.55 per gallon, showing that this is up from $3.15 a year ago. Now listen to this exchange between a Fox anchor and Energy Secretary Chris Wright.

Reporter (voiceover): And what about people’s concern about gas prices? They’re seeing numbers that give them some heartburn and some heartache and it’s hard for a lot of people to figure out how they’re going to stomach this for much longer.

Chris Wright (voiceover): It is. And of course, it’s been tough for our administration as well. This is an administration—the first Trump term and the second Trump term—all about lowering energy prices and an incredibly successful record in doing that. So when President Trump looked at the tradeoffs of going into Iran right now, he knew—his sort of beautiful record of just constantly pushing down energy prices, gasoline headline prices as well. But Iran has roughly a thousand pounds of uranium enriched to 60 percent.

Sargent: Tim, that stuff about Trump’s great energy record is just made up. But that aside, that’s terrible spin. Wright admits this is hard for people and says, well, Trump knew this would undo his great achievement. Your thoughts?

Noah: This is, I think, the first time Donald Trump has called for sacrifice, and Republicans in general don’t do well with calls for sacrifice, particularly in the context of a war that’s already quite unpopular—was unpopular on the day it began. Yes, terrible politics, but they are caught between a rock and a hard place. They can’t win this war overnight on the one hand and they can’t endure an elevation of gas prices.

Sargent: We are going to be in a situation where these prices are going to persist in a major way for weeks, if not months, right?

Noah: Yes! Once you’re talking about all sorts of shortages—you’re not just talking about auto fuel, you’re talking also about jet fuel. And suddenly the administration is very worried about that. You’re also talking about agricultural products. You’re talking about all sorts of things.

To undo the damage of that—it’s not going to happen overnight. That’s going to be incredibly damaging to Trump. Remember that when Joe Biden was running for reelection, inflation came way down months before the election and inflation was still held against Biden in that election.

Sargent: Absolutely. That’s a major finding in political science as well, which is that it’s the direction of the economy months before election day that sticks in people’s minds. Now to switch—The Washington Post reports that a secret CIA analysis that’s been given to administration officials concludes that Iran can survive the American blockade of the Strait of Hormuz for at least three to four more months before facing serious economic difficulties.

One U.S. official tells the Post that the Iranian leadership has gotten increasingly confident that they can outlast U.S. political will. Now again, Tim, even if this war ends in five minutes, these leaks are damning in two senses. First, they badly undercut Trump’s public spin about how close to collapse Iran is. Second, they show that a lot of insiders want the public to know that what Trump is saying to the public isn’t true. What do you make of all that?

Noah: To me, the most amazing thing about the Post report was that something like 75 percent of their missile launchers, they still have. I thought to myself, How could that possibly be? But they were obviously much better defended than we knew. So yes, they could continue for months. One index I find intriguing is the stock market.

The stock market seems to be the last entity in the United States to actually believe what Donald Trump says about the war being on the verge of being over. I don’t think anybody else believes him, but the stock market does. It keeps surging every time there’s the vaguest hint that this war may end soon. Now, if it finally penetrates the stock market’s thick skull that this war isn’t going to end soon, we’re going to see the opposite reaction. We’re going to see stocks go down, and that always sends Trump into a panic—and the Iranians know that.

Sargent: The Iranians do know that, for sure. There’s another component to all this as well. Jet fuel prices are about to get much worse, driving up airfares. The Wall Street Journal reports that Trump’s advisors are increasingly worried that the GOP will take a hit in the midterms from these rising fuel costs. They really want the war to end in order to have time for prices to be coming down before the elections.

Tim, what would have to happen? What would the timeline have to be for prices—meaning both jet fuel and gasoline—to really come down before the elections to the degree that Republicans would need? Is that even possible?

Noah: I think it’s already too late. I don’t know precisely how many months it would take, but let’s be maximally optimistic and say it takes four months. Well, this is May, that takes us into September, with the election just two months away. Say it takes two months—that’s still very close to the election. I think they’re already screwed.

Sargent: Well, one analyst of gas prices is even more pessimistic about this, telling Axios that gas prices are going to remain high even if the war ends. This analyst says that he expects it to take one to three months for prices to come down one-third of where they’ve risen to. Then he says the next third might take three to six months. We’d finally, in this analysis, get back to prewar prices by late 2026 or early 2027—after the midterms.

The problem seems to be that even if you end the war in a day or two, the oil markets are still in serious turmoil for a long time and it all has to sort itself out. Can you talk about that?

Noah: This is literally a commodity that moves by ship. It’s not like the internet, which is what we’re used to thinking of as commerce. Oil moves very slowly. It moves by ship, then it needs to be refined, and then it can be distributed as a final product. That’s a process of months.

Sargent: Yeah, absolutely. By the way, it’s worth reminding everyone that Trump constantly—and I mean constantly—says that once the war ends, prices will come right down. But if this does end up taking longer, as it does look like it’s going to, Trump will be on the hook for yet another broken promise. It seems like what they refer to as a wicked problem to him.

Noah: It’s a trap he walked right into. Everybody told him he was walking into a trap. His advisors were saying, If you start a war with Iran, they will close the Strait of Hormuz. Analysts have been talking about this scenario for decades. But he had this delusion that he was able to win wars quickly from the air. And that was what he told himself about Iran. Everybody told him he was wrong. But he refused to believe them. He believes what he wants to believe. And now he really has damaged seriously Republicans’ midterm chances.

I often think of Trump as a kind of saboteur. He’s certainly been a saboteur of government. Now he seems to be bored with sabotaging government and is instead sabotaging the Republican Party itself.

Sargent: The comparison with Venezuela is really interesting because Trump has said publicly that he expects the Iran situation to go the same way the quick in-and-out in Venezuela did. That’s just such a crazy way to think about the situation. Iran is a country of 90 million people, and for all sorts of deep cultural reasons and important geographic facts that can’t be just altered with Trump’s magical lying powers—all these things were just going to conspire to make this much harder than Venezuela was. And he wouldn’t hear of it. He just wouldn’t.

Noah: You know, this is a war that every president, starting with Jimmy Carter, has contemplated, and they have all ruled it out due to essentially the same set of facts.

Sargent: And one of those presidents actually painstakingly negotiated a very complicated peace deal that will actually prove, I believe, to be better than whatever Trump emerges with at the end of the day. I’m talking, of course, about the Obama nuclear deal.

Noah: Yes, that’s going to be their next problem—they’re going to have to justify this war based on whatever nuclear deal they get in the end, because they won’t be able to say they achieved regime change. They did not, just as they did not in Venezuela. So they’ll have to justify it based on the nuclear deal. And as you say, at best, they’re going to get what Obama got, and probably they will get less.

Sargent: Secretary of State Marco Rubio just said the other day that our aims have been achieved, the aims of the war have been achieved. It’s just absolutely preposterous, just nonstop bullshit from them in every way. They’ve just told us so many different versions of what their endgame or their end goals were. There’s just no way that they actually achieved their war aims. There’s no way to spin that.

Noah: It’s like—you will probably remember, I can’t—who was the politician who during the Vietnam War recommended we declare victory and go home? Now that’s a serious policy.

Sargent: Absolutely. Well, just to take the larger view here, it seems like a lot of what we’re seeing is structurally going to screw over Trump’s own constituencies. Let me just go through the list here. Rural and exurban Americans drive more, so they’re going to be paying more for gas. Farmers are getting hit by rising fertilizer prices and other higher costs. The tariffs hit a lot of lower-income consumers, which means a whole lot of Trump voters.

And you had a good piece on this new study finding that mass deportations aren’t actually resulting in more jobs for native-born workers—if anything, they’re resulting in some job losses for those American workers. Now you take it all together and it seems like a perfect storm of really bad and damaging policy for Donald Trump’s America, not to mention the rest of us. Is that overstating it?

Noah: I think that’s stating it very well. The only caution I would advise is that Donald Trump ran in 2024 having served as president during a terrible, terrible public health crisis that he made considerably worse, arguably lost the 2020 election because of that. And then in 2024 was held harmless for Covid.

I have never been able to figure out—including in the press, whenever there was a comparison of Trump’s record with Biden’s, reporters were always saying, Well, we must exclude the final year because of Covid. And I remember saying, why exclude the final year? Covid was really bad in large part because Trump handled it so badly.

Sargent: That’s absolutely crazy. That was one of the greatest public policy debacles ever—certainly one of the biggest ones in modern times.

Noah: In terms of body count, I can’t think of anything to compare it to.

Sargent: So, Tim, just unspool this for us. Let’s say the war ends, I don’t know, in a week or in a month. What happens over the next six months?

Noah: Well, I recognize that the map is not friendly to Democrats in the midterms on the Senate side. But we also have to take into account Trump’s own declining popularity. It has only gone in one direction since Inauguration Day, and that’s been downward.

But for a long time, it was going downward very slowly. Now it’s going downward a bit more quickly. I just don’t see how that doesn’t make trouble for the Republicans if they have Trump with a considerably lower approval rating than he has now.

Sargent: Well, his approval on the economy is so in the shitter, and there’s so much economic distress out there. That’s the sort of thing that, if anything, could get you to the point where Democrats can win in some of these very tough statewide races and pull out the Senate just by one seat—kind of a miraculous outcome.

But even if the war ends in, I don’t know, days or a week, you don’t think he gets a bump? How do you see it playing out?

Noah: It’s bad. I think his approval rating goes down no matter what. First of all, the war isn’t his only problem. He’s got 12 problems as bad as the war. There’s the rule of law problem. There’s the Fed problem. There’s a number of problems. There’s a personnel problem. At the moment, he’s got an FBI director who hands out bottles of bourbon as souvenirs. He’s going to have to get rid of a lot of his appointees, and that’s going to be embarrassing for him.

Sargent: It looks to me like there is just such an enormous pileup of problems that it’s very hard for him to get out from under all of it. The House looks like it’s basically gone for Republicans unless they can gerrymander like 20 states, although I doubt that.

But it does look to me like the House is probably gone and the Senate is certainly in play. Tim Noah, always great to talk to you. Thanks for coming on.

Noah: Thank you, Greg.

Carlson isn’t the only one on the right speaking this way. Before he was killed, Turning Point USA co-founder Charlie Kirk warned Trump against war in Iran and was critical of Israel’s war in Gaza. On the more normie side of MAGA world, podcaster Theo Von has been speaking out against the war with Iran, often with visible emotion and distress at the killing of children there. No matter what you think of these characters otherwise—and Carlson is a loathsome scoundrel, to be clear—the crescendo of voices like theirs on the right should serve as a warning to the Democratic Party not to ignore or sideline its own antiwar leaders.

After all, Carlson’s antiwar opinions are shared by many across the political spectrum. Multiple recent polls have found that the Iran war is just as unpopular as the nadirs of the Iraq and the Vietnam wars, with around 60 percent of Americans saying the decision to use military force was a mistake—including one in five Republicans. Relatedly, Israel’s war against Gaza has caused a historically significant shift: More Americans now view Israel unfavorably than favorably, including 57 percent of Republican voters under age 49.

“The real remaining strong pro-Israel constituency is over-50 Republicans,” Matt Duss, the executive vice president at the Center for International Policy and a former adviser to Senator Bernie Sanders, told The Washington Post this week. “That’s not a durable political coalition.”

Despite this, leading Democrats are dithering. If opposition to this war, and to all wars driven primarily by our relationship with Israel, doesn’t quickly become central to Democratic messaging, we can expect Carlson—or someone very much like him, such as former Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene—to emerge as the antiwar candidate in the 2028 presidential election.

There’s a clear hunger among the Democratic base for a dramatic change in foreign policy. Four in five Democratic voters disapprove of Israel, while more than 90 percent oppose the Iran war. So it’s no surprise that candidates who firmly denounce war and refuse money from AIPAC, the powerful pro-Israel lobbying organization, are attracting support partly on that basis. Graham Platner, an antiwar and anti-genocide oyster farmer, is the presumptive Democratic nominee in Maine’s Senate race. In Michigan’s Democratic primary for Senate, Abdul Al-Sayed, a staunch Israel critic, is running neck and neck with Haley Stevens, a pro-Israel congresswoman, and state Senator Mallory McMorrow, who eventually came around to rejecting AIPAC and accusing Israel of genocide.

But the party leadership has not been meeting the moment. In late February, as Trump made daily threats to bomb Iran, Democrats on the House Foreign Affairs Committee reportedly tried to delay a vote on a war powers resolution. “The preferred outcome of many AIPAC-aligned Senate Democrats, according to a senior foreign policy aide to Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer, is that Trump acts unilaterally, weakening Iran while absorbing the domestic backlash ahead of the midterms,” reported Capital & Empire’s Aída Chávez, who cites sources saying that House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries was not whipping votes for the resolution. Four days after that article, Trump launched his war.

Schumer and Jeffries have since criticized it, of course, and backed efforts to pass a war powers resolution. They might call this “leading from behind,” but it looks more like belatedly jumping on the bandwagon. After all, both of them were supportive of Trump’s bombing of Iran last summer. Several weeks prior, Schumer even taunted Trump for not bombing Iran hastily enough.

In fact, Schumer has a history of jonesing for this conflict. Back in 2015, he criticized the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, President Obama’s landmark deal with Iran, for allegedly not doing enough to curb Iran’s nuclear ambitions. In announcing his “no” vote, Schumer wrote that “there is a strong case that we are better off without an agreement than with one.” Trump agreed, and promptly ripped up the deal during his first term. Fast-forward to today, and Trump is now attempting to convince Iran to sign a deal similar to the JCPOA—after spending tens of billions of dollars and killing thousands of people.

Schumer deserves a share of blame for that outcome. And of course he remains a staunch ally of Israel, despite its genocide in Gaza: He was not among the record number of Senate Democrats who voted last month to block arms sales to the country.

These leaders represent the tired quiescence of the Democratic Party to the American war machine—essentially the same argument Carlson is making about the Republican Party—which makes it hard for them to capitalize on Trump’s disastrous mistake with convincing moral fervor.

Even worse, they’ve been slow to embrace their own party’s antiwar candidates. Schumer, brilliant talent scout that he is, recruited Maine Governor Janet Mills to run for Senate against Republican Susan Collins and supported her against Platner. (Mills failed to compete in polls and fundraising, and dropped out last week, at which point Schumer endorsed Platner.) In the Michigan race, Schumer endorsed Stevens, who was booed for being too pro-Israel at the Michigan Democratic Convention last month.

The views represented by Schumer and his fellow centrists must not be allowed to prevail in the party in 2028. Democrats have already lost one presidential election for being too supportive of Israel and war: In 2024, voters punished Kamala Harris for the Biden administration’s role in Israel’s genocide. According to polling from the Institute for Middle East Understanding Policy Project, Gaza was the number one issue for Biden 2020 voters who voted for someone other than Harris in 2024. Many of them voted for Trump, believing, as Carlson did, that he was genuinely antiwar, while those who couldn’t stomach voting for Trump simply stayed home.

Yet the Democratic establishment is still trying to suppress obvious truths. The Democratic National Committee is refusing to release an autopsy of the 2024 election that shows what even Harris herself, in her campaign memoir, has acknowledged: that Gaza was an important factor in her defeat. Just a couple days ago, DNC Chair Ken Martin was still making lame and incomprehensible excuses for keeping the report under wraps, even as Harris reportedly tells donors that the DNC should release it.

That election demonstrated that voters will punish the incumbent party for unjustifiable wars. Trump’s war with Iran and his failure to rein in Israel in Gaza are huge liabilities for the Republican Party, in the midterms and in 2028. But we shouldn’t underestimate the Democrats’ capacity to compete with Trump in turning Iran and Israel into losing issues for themselves. If the leadership—and donors—successfully push an insufficiently antiwar nominee, an Israel hawk like Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, for example, or a milquetoast candidate unable to articulate a clear critique of either Biden or Trump policy, like Kamala Harris or outgoing California Governor Gavin Newsom, voters may look elsewhere.

You do not have to hand it to Tucker Carlson for his recent critiques. You don’t even have to listen to him. But Democratic leadership should take the full-throated antiwar sentiment on the right as a warning to heed their own party’s antiwar voices. Otherwise, they may indeed be handing Carlson and his fellow antiwar rightists something more significant: our future.

But the Trump administration doesn’t want excellent civil servants. It made that plain last year when it pushed out Dave Lebryk, fiscal assistant treasury secretary, who at last year’s Sammies ceremony won the highest honor, “federal employee of the year.” Lebryk was cashiered for denying Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency access to the government’s payment system. (That’s also what won him his Sammie.) 

Indeed, Trump doesn’t seem to want civil servants at all. Last year he either fired or harassed into quitting 317,000 of them, and this year he’s poised to reclassify 50,000 more as “at will” employees with no civil service protection. White House budget director Russell “Project 2025” Vought famously said in a 2024 speech, “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains.” The only reason Vought would ever show up at a Sammies ceremony would be to scribble down license plate numbers like a police detective at a Mafia funeral.

In light of all this, it’s hardly surprising that attendance was way down at this year’s Sammies ceremony, according to Meryl Kornfield of The Washington Post. Participation was also down among the federal agencies that nominate employees for Sammies. In 2024, 70 agencies nominated about 500 federal bureaucrats for Sammies. In 2025, 65 agencies nominated about 350. This year, 39 agencies nominated about 140. Several Cabinet members explicitly refused to participate in the survey, and many others declined more quietly. “There was nervousness about nominating anyone,” Max Stier, chief executive of the Partnership for Public Service, told The New York Times’ Elizabeth Williamson, “nervousness about accepting, a culture of fear and subbasement morale.” 

Last year, the Partnership awarded 19 Sammies; this year, only four. I’m going to withhold their names because I don’t want to put a target on their backs. 

Fear may not be the only factor driving down the number of Sammies awarded this year. Another reason may be that there are 317,000 fewer civil servants to choose from. Conservative rhetoric to the contrary, the civil service isn’t that big; it’s only about 2.1 million people, which is significantly fewer than there were 50 years ago. The total went down because about half those people worked for the Defense Department, which downsized after the Cold War ended. Even so, the three defense agencies—the Defense Department, the Veterans Affairs Department, and the Homeland Security Department—today employ the majority of civil servants. Civil servants at non-defense government departments—the departments where Musk and Vought concentrated their bloodletting—number only about 725,000. That suggests that in the last year we lost somewhere between one-third and one-half of all non-defense civil servants.

Were some of the 317,000 fired civil servants incompetent? With a sample that large, there’s bound to have been some clock-watchers and dumbbells. But all available evidence suggests that it wasn’t the incompetents who got targeted, but rather the smarter, harder-working, and more dedicated employees, who weren’t afraid to get in Musk’s and Vought’s way. Incompetents tend to be compliant and try not to draw attention to themselves. If I’m right, then the one-third-to-one-half of all civil servants fired last year included a disproportionate number of Sammie prospects. It’s a terrible brain drain for the country—and, whether he knows it or not, for Trump. As my colleague Grace Segers reported last month, one reason (among many) that the conflict with Iran is going so badly is that the experienced staff who would normally help manage it are no longer there. 

Last year, Michael Lewis published Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service, an excellent anthology of profiles of stellar civil servants that originated as a Washington Post series under the stewardship of opinion editor David Shipley (who quit rather than adhere to Jeff Bezos’s policy that the Post publish only opinions with which Bezos agreed). As best I can tell, all of the government workers celebrated by Lewis and Co. still seem to be in the employ of the federal government, and one of them, Jarod Koopman of the IRS, actually got promoted last fall to acting chief tax compliance officer. (To read my Democracy review of Lewis’s book, click here, and to read my 2022 celebration of public servants in TNR, click here.) 

Or maybe Koopman got kicked upstairs. In Lewis’s anthology, Geraldine Brooks wrote about Koopman’s derring-do as director of the IRS’s Cyber Crimes section. Among the achievements Brooks celebrated was the prosecution of one Dread Pirate Roberts, a 29-year-old drug dealer named Ross Ulbricht. But the day after Trump was re- inaugurated in 2025, he pardoned Ulbricht, saying on Truth Social, “The scum that worked to convict him were some of the same lunatics who were involved in the modern day weaponization of government against me.”  So much for excellence.

The Pulitzer Prize for public-service journalism was awarded earlier this week to a different Washington Post series about civil servants, this one focused on how they’ve been abused under Trump. After the pieces ran, the FBI raided the home of the principal author of the series, Hannah Natanson. If that’s what happens to big-time journalists who write sympathetically about civil servants, you can imagine what happens to the civil servants themselves. The price these days of winning a Sammie would appear to be too high. If you’re doing the people’s work effectively, best to keep quiet about it and to ask your friends and colleagues to clam up about it too, until the present Cultural Revolution in Washington ends.

The chief justice rose to the court’s defense during a legal conference on Wednesday. “I think at a very basic level, people think we’re making policy decisions, [that] we’re saying we think this is what things should be as opposed to this is what the law provides,” Roberts said, according to NBC’s Lawrence Hurley. “I think they view us as truly political actors, which I don’t think is an accurate understanding of what we do. I would say that’s the main difficulty.”

While Roberts reportedly acknowledged that people have a right to criticize the court and its rulings, the chief justice also claimed that the court’s decisions were not political in nature. “We’re not simply part of the political process, and there’s a reason for that, and I’m not sure people grasp that as much as is appropriate,” he told the audience.

Let’s start by clarifying the terminology here, since it matters more than it might seem at first glance. There is a strong tendency in American parlance to use the term political in a purely pejorative sense, often with the implication of unsavoriness, partiality, or even a whiff of corruption or bias. Sometimes people use it when they actually mean “partisan,” or merely to describe something that expresses an opinion or viewpoint with which they disagree.

Politics is merely the term for how we order our lives and our society. In its broadest sense, everything is political. Where you buy groceries or clothes can be a political act. Paying (or not paying) your taxes is a political act, as well. Voting and speaking out are obviously political acts, but they are not the only forms of political expression. Abstaining from politics—by which people often mean electoral politics and civic participation—is also itself a deeply political choice.

This negative connotation of politics is so deeply ingrained that it’s not worth challenging people about it in passing conversation. When someone says, “I don’t want to talk about politics,” for example, what they often mean is “I don’t want to be disagreeable in a social setting.” That’s perfectly fine. But sometimes people think “politics” is just what other people are doing or saying, while their own views and beliefs are “common sense.”

The problem is that Roberts appears to be transposing that popular understanding onto the three branches of the federal government. In his apparent view, Congress and the presidency—the elected branches—are engaged in the grubby, sordid, and demeaning day-to-day work of politics, which he describes as the “political process.” The Supreme Court, on the other hand, serenely stands above the fray in its marble palace in Washington, D.C.

Some legal scholars have described this worldview as “judicial self-aggrandizement.” In 2023, Georgetown University law professor Josh Chafetz argued that the justices “hold themselves out as a pure, reason-based alternative to the messy business of the ‘political branches’” as a means to empower themselves. “In the judges’ presentation, it is not the courts taking power for themselves; the courts are simply neutral conduits for the law, which happens to limit the powers of the other institutions,” he explained.

There are strong echoes of this in the Roberts court’s jurisprudence. The chief justice and his colleagues, particularly the conservatives, have often treated electoral politics as inherently corrupt and self-serving. They have even done so while removing constraints on actual corruption, making the American electoral system less responsive to the public, and imposing subjective judicial vetoes across the nation’s policymaking apparatus.

In a line of cases starting with 2016’s McDonnell v. United States, for example, the court has all but recognized a First Amendment right to pay-to-play politics by narrowing federal bribery laws to only “official acts” in their most literal form. The justices could have upheld the conviction on narrow grounds while signaling that more innocuous gifts, like taking someone out to lunch, would not qualify. They chose otherwise.

Two years ago in Snyder v. United States, the conservative majority also decriminalized “gratuities”—bribes given to state and local officials after an official act is performed, instead of before it—because it feared that the law could criminalize “gift cards, lunches, plaques, books, framed photos, or the like.” It cited no cases where federal prosecutors had done that, nor did it reckon with the actual facts of the case. Instead the high court relied on amorphous federalism concerns, even though Congress had tied it to officials who spend federal funds, and it second-guessed Congress’s intent over the plain text of the statute.

This freewheeling approach only applies to the other branches. In 2015, the Supreme Court upheld a Florida law that bars elected judges and judicial candidates from personally soliciting campaign donations. If Congress had passed an identical law that imposed the same restrictions on congressional and presidential candidates, I have little doubt that it would be struck down by this court in a heartbeat on First Amendment grounds.

Courts are special, Roberts instead wrote in his majority opinion. “Judges are not politicians, even when they come to the bench by way of the ballot,” he wrote. “And a state’s decision to elect its judiciary does not compel it to treat judicial candidates like campaigners for political office. A state may assure its people that judges will apply the law without fear or favor—and without having personally asked anyone for money.”

The message from all these rulings is that Americans have no right to expect honest services from other government officials. They should not assume that lawmakers, governors, or presidents will ever act in the public interest, exercise their best independent judgment, or conduct themselves with any sense of civic integrity. Nor should Americans count on the law to punish public officials for misconduct. If ordinary people want to get something out of their government, they should tip early and tip often.

Even then, you might be out of luck. The Supreme Court has spent the last 20 years making America nearly ungovernable. This trend can also be traced to the court’s self-aggrandizement, particularly when it comes to Democratic presidents. Thanks to the court’s embrace of partisan gerrymandering since 2019, most Americans no longer live in competitive House districts. The lawmakers who are elected are increasingly extreme figures who can pass purity tests in primary elections, where any remaining competitiveness takes place. Combined with the gutting of campaign finance laws, this means that lawmakers—and particularly GOP lawmakers—are beholden not to the voters but to well-funded special interests who can tip a primary race (early and often) one way or the other with super PAC money. Congressional dysfunction is not entirely the Supreme Court’s fault, but it has made it nearly impossible to fix.

Even if Congress were more functional, the Supreme Court has given itself free rein to second-guess the legislative branch’s judgment and discretion. The “major questions doctrine” mainly curbs executive policymaking, but it substantively narrows Congress’s power, as well. To survive its vague and subjective terms, lawmakers must pass new laws for new circumstances instead of allowing existing laws to be applied in novel ways. The Supreme Court has only ever applied this doctrine to Democratic presidents; half of them refused to use it to strike down Trump’s tariffs despite the clear opportunity to do so.

Take, for example, how Justice Samuel Alito wrote about the Clean Water Act in a 2023 case. Congress enacted the CWA to clean up pollution in the nation’s waterways and protect them from further despoiling. It was the will of the American people, expressed through their legislature, that these waterways be protected. Congress has not repealed the CWA or amended its scope more narrowly. Alito, however, thought differently. The law, he complained, imposed “crushing consequences” on “property owners” for often “mundane” violations like “moving dirt.”

His own policy preferences led him to sharply narrow the scope of waters protected by the CWA. “Congress, the majority scolds, has unleashed the EPA to regulate ‘swimming pools and puddles,’ wreaking untold havoc on ‘a staggering array of landowners,’” Justice Elena Kagan wrote in a separate opinion that castigated Alito’s framing. “Surely something has to be done; and who else to do it but this Court? It must rescue property owners from Congress’s too-ambitious program of pollution control.”

Time and time again, this court has killed off public policy decisions for reasons that appear driven by the court’s own sentiments rather than the law itself. Scalia, I noted recently, described the Voting Rights Act as a “racial entitlement” during oral arguments in a 2013 case. When the court heard a challenge to the Biden administration’s student debt relief plan in 2023, Roberts questioned at oral arguments whether it was fair to provide relief to college students but not to a hypothetical small-business owner’s loan—and whether that perceived unfairness should factor into the court’s decision.

Nor is it hard to conclude that the justices’ policy preferences are warping their procedures. Starting with Roberts’s own intervention in an Environmental Protection Agency case in 2016, the conservative justices have routinely used the shadow docket to freeze progressive policies and, especially in Trump’s second term, accelerate conservative ones. They spent the entire Biden administration affirming nationwide injunctions from federal courts in Texas, only to nix them as an option for lower court judges a few months after Trump returned to power.

To describe the cumulative effect of the court’s rulings, especially in recent years, is to lose confidence in it. One cannot reasonably claim to be a nonpolitical force in American life when habitually tilting the scales of American power in favor of the rich, the powerful, and the corrupt. Nor can you extract the court’s work from the extrajudicial forces that have shaped it.

Six of the court’s nine justices sit there because their predecessor timed their retirement to ensure an ideologically compatible replacement. Roberts himself owes his seat to a conservative legal movement that spent decades identifying potential nominees who could bring a particular ideological vision to the high court. They worked hard to elect senators and presidents to bring that vision about. Their labors have paid off.

Just last month, for example, Thomas gave an hour-long speech at a law school in Texas where he described American progressivism as an existential threat to our constitutional order and fundamentally incompatible with the Declaration of Independence’s values. He attributed to it the worst horrors of the twentieth century, including the Nazi conquest of Europe and the injustices of Soviet and Maoist dictatorships.

His historically illiterate remarks validated every mote of skepticism that anyone left of center might have toward the high court. Indeed, Roberts’s challenge isn’t that Americans misunderstand the Supreme Court; it’s that a growing number of them understand it all too well. Americans are bound to obey the court’s rulings as a matter of law, but they are not obligated to respect or have confidence in an institution that does not respect them or the Constitution.

For many years, there were moderate and liberal court watchers who defended the Supreme Court as an institution even as it drifted further and further to the right. I myself argued against adding more justices during the first Trump administration. Expanding the court, I reasoned, was a temporary solution at best that would not address the underlying factors that were fueling the court’s growing legitimacy crisis.

I have deeply regretted that stance ever since the Supreme Court held, two years ago, that presidents can commit crimes in office—a blasphemous and indefensible reading of the Constitution and a betrayal of our nation’s fundamental principles. Since then, I have concluded that expanding the court and breaking the conservative justices’ grip on American society is not only a necessity, but a moral imperative. Thanks to Roberts and his colleagues, I am far from alone.

The pro-democracy community is sounding the alarm that we desperately need judicial reforms. The reproductive rights and gun safety advocacy communities have also recognized this, in the wake of devastating losses when the Roberts court stripped women of rights to bodily autonomy and ordained that the Constitution effectively renders elected leaders powerless to stop school shootings.

One group, though, has been largely silent on the court’s direction and how to fight it. It is time for the progressive economic policy community to make court reform a “must do” governing priority for them too. No economic agenda is complete without a plan to fix the courts, because the same broken courts that are dismantling multiracial democracy are also a major structural obstacle to reining in corporate power and delivering economic relief for working Americans.

It’s not just that the Supreme Court is protecting President Trump. It is also standing in the way of any meaningful economic reform. Just like Chief Justice Roberts embarked on a decades-long crusade to dismantle the Voting Rights Act, under his leadership the court has also steadily worked to entrench our K-shaped economy. Citizens United flooded our politics with corporate money, making it harder to pass the laws that would curb corporate power in the first place.

For workers and consumers who try to fight back in court, the Roberts court has also spent decades systematically making it harder to enforce the existing laws on the books—including raising the bar to bringing antitrust suits, blessing fine-print forced arbitration clauses that deprive workers of their day in court, and gutting the class actions that once allowed ordinary people to pool their claims against powerful corporations. A recent National Bureau of Economic Research working paper tracked every economically significant Supreme Court case from 1953 to the present and found the partisan gap in pro-wealthy rulings has grown to 47 percentage points by 2022, up from near zero in the 1950s. 

And we don’t just have a Supreme Court problem. The lower courts have also blocked hundreds of billions of dollars in relief for working families before it ever had a chance to reach them. For example, courts threw out the Federal Trade Commission’s ban on noncompete clauses, which would have freed 30 million workers to change jobs and boosted wages by over $400 billion over the next decade. They blocked the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s crackdown on credit card late fees, handing card companies an estimated $10 billion in profits. Courts blocked or defanged rules on nursing home safety, overtime pay, medical debt, and more. None of it ever came into effect.

Corporate lawyers have mastered this playbook. Thanks to forum shopping—filing in the single most favorable district court—combined with the ability of single judges to grant nationwide relief, individual lower court judges in regional courthouses have become de facto veto-holders over national policy. Indeed, in all of the examples above, a single Trump-appointed judge in Texas, acting alone, was able to issue an order that blocked pocketbook relief for millions of working-class Americans across the country. 

The result is a judicial system in which monied interests increasingly use courts as the tool of choice to block any attempt to limit corporate rent-seeking and abuse. NYU’s Institute for Policy Integrity tracked over 2,300 major federal rules issued since 1996. They found that courts struck down major rules only about one-tenth of the time in the 1990s but now invalidate over half.  

For some, a call to rein in the courts might seem counterintuitive at a time when it often feels as if rulings from brave district judges are the only thing keeping the rule of law from fully unraveling. But the data suggests otherwise: The Supreme Court has sided with the Trump administration 80 percent of the time on emergency shadow docket rulings, often with no explanation at all. And courts have let Trump administration policies take effect while cases wind through the courts about 70 percent of the time. The judiciary is not saving us. It needs saving.

In fact, alarm bells are going off inside the judiciary itself. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson has accused her colleagues of “Calvinball jurisprudence,” with one rule: “This Administration always wins.” She’s not alone. Last October, The New York Times surveyed federal district court judges and found dozens willing to speak out: One compared their court’s relationship with the Supreme Court to “a war zone”; another called it flatly a “judicial crisis.” 

So what do we do?

Anyone who cares about a fair economy should demand that their elected leaders have a clear, specific plan for court reform. No policymaker can credibly promise working-class Americans economic relief without a plan to prevent courts from blocking its delivery. And don’t accept promises of a “commission” or “task force” as an answer. That’s D.C.-speak for I feel no urgency, and in this moment, no urgency is itself a policy choice.

As for specific reforms, on the Supreme Court, there are at least three serious options, which are not mutually exclusive: Use Congress’s constitutional authority to strip it of jurisdiction over certain categories of cases, adopt a supermajority requirement for constitutional rulings, or expand its size with staggered term limits—after which justices could continue to hear cases in the lower courts, preserving the life tenure required by the Constitution. If we expand, go big. Don’t just stop at three or four seats, which continues the cycle of high-stakes partisan battles. Go to 20, 30, or 50 seats, with justices hearing cases in randomly selected smaller panels. At that scale, no single nomination becomes a constitutional crisis, and no justice is a famous politician in robes. Do the same for the courts of appeals.

On forum shopping: Create a specialized circuit for challenges to federal rules of national scope like the noncompete rule, or a nationwide lottery to assign such cases. This is a fix that could be genuinely bipartisan, since Democrats objected when Texas judges blocked President Biden’s policies and the right now objects when blue-district judges are blocking President Trump’s.

On regulatory litigation, reform the Administrative Procedure Act. The APA was written in 1946 to ensure federal agencies followed fair procedures. It has since been weaponized by corporate lawyers into a tool for killing policies on procedural technicalities, while relief like wage increases and consumer protections never reaches the people it was designed to help. When an agency acts within the statutory authority Congress granted it, courts should defer to those policy judgments. Congress wrote the law. Congress delegated the authority. Unelected judges shouldn’t get the last word. 

The reproductive rights, gun safety, and pro-democracy communities recognize that court reform is a prerequisite for their agenda. The economic policy community is still catching up. Callais is a reminder that this is the same fight. You cannot have a democracy that delivers for working people without courts that allow democracy to function.

Court reform is not a boutique legal argument. It must be a governing priority.

The suit argues that the ban, House Bill 752, is both unconstitutionally vague and discriminatory, under the Fourteenth Amendment, and “presents transgender Idahoans with an impossible choice: they can either use a restroom that does not align with their gender identity and risk severe physical and psychological harms, or continue to use restrooms in public in accordance with their gender identity and risk a criminal record and imprisonment.” Through the stories they tell in the suit, the plaintiffs demonstrate that the ban presents an even broader and more insidious risk. In cases where the ban does not result in arrests and imprisonment, it could still turn transgender people into objects of routine suspicion, normalizing surveillance and questioning by police and the public alike, and granting such stigma and harassment the imprimatur of the law.

There is little doubt that the ban, one of many anti-trans bills taken up by the Idaho state legislature in this year’s session, was meant to criminalize the mere presence of a trans person in any public bathroom in the state, including restrooms in private businesses, with penalties ranging from one to five years in jail or prison. “If you’re trans, this creates a crime for who you are,” said state Senator James Ruchti, who opposed the ban. Those supporting it claimed that transgender people do not exist, that trans women specifically are “men” and “need to be treated as such.”

The Idaho case offers a particularly clear example of the animus behind these laws, as well as how expansive their harm can be. The ban is not confined to the bathroom; it extends to nearly every facet of public life. “H.B. 752’s shadow will endanger my ability to operate effectively in my job,” said Amelia Milette, one of the plaintiffs, in a statement provided by Lambda Legal to The New Republic. She is 50 years old, has lived in Idaho for her whole life, and has had her job for nine years. “In my role, I travel to multiple offices and locations, so I can’t anticipate what restrooms I’ll have access to on a daily basis. If I don’t have access to a restroom I can use safely and without disruption while working with a client, I will have to interrupt my work to find one and I may encounter confusion and discrimination.” Diego Fable, another plaintiff, also risks repercussions in his employment. The 32-year-old, who has lived in Idaho for 10 years, plans to move out of state if the ban goes into effect; he could keep his job, but if he becomes an out-of-state worker, his employer will classify him as a contractor, a designation that will affect his benefits and job protections.

Employment issues, Milette said, “are just the thinnest edge of what is on the horizon for transgender individuals, like me, in Idaho.” The ban also risks isolating an already isolated community. While living in Idaho, Fable has “enjoyed hikes put together for the queer community,” he said in a statement to TNR, as well as “birding every day in Boise’s vibrant parks and green spaces.” In anticipation of the ban going into effect, he said, “I’ve begun scouting bathrooms I pass by, recently, but I fear how others would respond if I were to use the women’s restroom in a public park as a transgender man. It would be safest to stay home—which sounds pretty miserable for me. I would rather be out enjoying the birds as I always have, without all this extra anxiety foisted on me by this law.”

The complaint highlights how quickly the law was foisted on Idaho, as well as the disingenuous rhetoric of the bill’s sponsor, state Representative Cornel Rasor, who claimed that the bathroom ban “extends” what he called “proven biological sex protections,” while also claiming that it protected “privacy, safety, and dignity, especially for women and girls.” At the same time, as the complaint summarized, “several legislators referred to transgender people as presumptively criminal, used harmful and inaccurate stereotypes, and speculated that legislators would commit violence if their family members encountered a transgender person in a sex-designated space.” As state Representative Dale R. Hawkins had said at the time, “If someone followed my daughter into a shower room, my family would have to come visit me somewhere because I wouldn’t be waiting for police.” (Meanwhile, the legal challenge notes, a number of law enforcement organizations in the state, such as the Idaho Chiefs of Police Association and the Idaho Fraternal Order of Police, opposed the bathroom ban, on the grounds that it would put officers in “impossible situations” and would be “difficult to enforce.”)

One thing the debate over the ban made clear was that some Idaho lawmakers have no qualms about making trans people feel afraid. Nor do they appear the least bit embarrassed to put their threats on the record. Openly pledging to engage in vigilantism, as Hawkins did during a hearing in the state legislature, is now apparently just part of the lawmaking process in Idaho. It would be fair to ask why, when such people are willing to take the law into their own hands, they believe a law is needed at all. For a lot of transgender people in Idaho, explained Kell Olson, counsel and strategist at Lambda Legal, “if they comply with the law, then they are likely to be seen as violating the law—because they are going to look like a man in a woman’s bathroom, or vice versa.” As the law has been set up, the only way for a trans person to comply would amount to forcing them to unmake themselves, in public, subject to humiliation and exposed to danger. It is as if the law itself is secondary; what lawmakers really want is the stamp of the purported democratic process to elevate violent rhetoric and threats against a community that already faces an extreme deprivation of rights.

“When you pass a law as if trans people don’t exist, the only way it will work is if transgender people go away altogether—disappear from society—and that’s what this law is calling for,” Olson said. When Republican state Senator Brandon Shippy called transgender people “a myth,” when he stated that “we have to keep reminding ourselves that there is no oppressed community that we’re dealing with here,” it sounded like he was describing the future he intended the law to bring about: one in which trans Idahoans either go back in the closet or leave the state. Those who brought this challenge refuse that unjust choice.

That did not happen, and for three hours, media members stood around wondering where the hell the two leaders of the largest countries in the Western Hemisphere were.

At 2 p.m., NewsNation reported that Lula had left the White House after meeting with Trump for about two hours. “This was a meeting that was supposed to be opened up,” host Nichole Berlie said. “But that did not happen.... We’ll have to see what the White House says.”

NewsNation reporter Kellie Meyer, stationed outside the White House, said it may have been Lula who was responsible for the secrecy.

“The president of Brazil said he wanted to wait until after the two met to then meet with the press in front of the cameras,” Meyer said. “They had lunch, and now we learn that he is leaving. He will speak to the press at the embassy, but he won’t be doing it here alongside President Trump. We do know that the two didn’t quite see eye to eye coming into this meeting, so maybe it is no surprise that they may not be going in front of the cameras.”

Lula is a leftist, and he and Trump have had an unsurprisingly contentious relationship over the years. Trump has repeatedly expressed support for Jair Bolsonaro, the right-wing former Brazilian president who was convicted of planning a coup in order to remain in power.

In July 2025, Trump imposed 50 percent tariffs on Brazil in order to pressure Lula’s administration to drop the charges against Bolsonaro. Lula stuck to his guns, however, and Bolsonaro was sentenced to 27 years in prison in September. The Supreme Court deemed American tariffs against Brazil (and everywhere else, for that matter) unconstitutional in February.

Shortly after Trump implemented the tariffs, Lula decried the weakening American democracy during his address to the U.N. General Assembly.

The drama’s not over, though: Bolsonaro’s son Flavio is running for president this year, and will look to free his fascistic father if he wins. Lula is also running for a second term, despite being 80 years old.

While Trump and his team are often late to their scheduled White House events, having the meeting behind closed doors after telling the press it would be open is significantly stranger.

After an afternoon of silence, Trump released a vague and surprisingly short statement on Truth Social at 2:22 p.m.: “Just concluded my meeting with Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the very dynamic President of Brazil. We discussed many topics, including Trade and, specifically, Tariffs. The meeting went very well. Our Representatives are scheduled to get together to discuss certain key elements. Additional meetings will be scheduled over the coming months, as necessary.”

Earlier reports suggested the meeting would be focused on organized crime groups in Latin America. Speaking to reporters in Portuguese at the Brazilian Embassy, Lula said the two men had discussed organized crime, critical minerals, and trade. Lula also said he jokingly told Trump not to reject the visas of any of Brazil’s soccer players before this summer’s World Cup, and that Trump laughed.

The Associated Press reports that the revocations could begin as early as Friday and would apply to about 2,700 passport holders. The AP first reported about the plan in February. The department plans to expand it in the future to those who owe as little as $2,500 in child support payments. That would increase the number of people who would lose their passports by thousands.

It’s an expansion of an existing policy that applies only to people who renew their passports. Now, the Department of Health and Human Services will notify the State Department of all past-due child support payments of more than $2,500, and anyone in that group will have their passports revoked.

“We are expanding a commonsense practice that has been proven effective at getting those who owe child support to pay their debt,” Assistant Secretary of State for Consular Affairs Mora Namdar told the AP. “Once these parents resolve their debts, they can once again enjoy the privilege of a U.S. passport.”

Anyone who loses their passport under the program will be notified that they can’t travel overseas, and would have to apply for a new passport once their debt is settled. Any American overseas when their passport is revoked will have to get an emergency travel document from a U.S. embassy or consulate.

In February, after the AP first reported on the planned program, the State Department said it had “seen data that hundreds of parents took action and resolved their arrears with state authorities since news broke that the State Department would start proactively revoking passports.”

“While we can’t confirm the causation in all of those cases, we are taking this action precisely to impel these parents to do the right thing by their children and by U.S. law,” the department said.

The program may bring benefits to families who haven’t received child support, but has the added dimension of aiding President Trump’s proposed voter ID law, the Save Act. That bill would require more stringent forms of identification, such as passports and birth certificates, at the polls. Currently, the Save Act is stalled in Congress, but if it passes, many Americans who owe child support could be left without the ability to vote.

President Donald Trump scrapped “Project Freedom” on Tuesday, just two days after unveiling it, after Saudi Arabia and Kuwait expressed concerns and cut off U.S. access to its air bases and airspace.

Under Project Freedom, the U.S. military planned to escort shipping vessels through the Strait of Hormuz, a key trade passageway that has been closed since the U.S. and Israel began striking Iran in late February.

But a few days and phone calls later, the Gulf countries changed their minds. They lifted the airspace restrictions Thursday afternoon, according to multiple U.S. and Saudi officials who spoke to The Wall Street Journal.

Saudi Arabia and Kuwait had reportedly worried if they helped the U.S. with Project Freedom, Iran would retaliate by striking the Persian Gulf, and that the U.S. may be unwilling or unable to come to their defense after the fact. The Journal called the diplomatic fracas “the biggest dispute in Saudi-American military relations in recent years.”

Adding to the national embarrassment was the fact that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio were gloating to press about Project Freedom just hours before Trump tabled the plan.

“As a direct gift from the United States to the world, we have established a powerful red, white, and blue dome over the strait,” Hegseth said in a press conference. “American destroyers are on station, supported by hundreds of fighter jets, helicopters, drones, and surveillance aircraft, providing 24/7 overwatch for peaceful commercial vessels.”

It’s not exactly clear why the Gulf countries changed their mind and agreed to support the plan.

Project Freedom will now see U.S. aircraft and naval destroyers attempt to protect commercial ships from Iranian drones and missiles as they try to sail through the Strait. It doesn’t sound like the most relaxing boat ride.

In a special session, the Tennessee state House of Representatives voted 64–25–3 to approve the new map, which had only been released to the public the day before. Every Democrat voted against the bill along with Republican Representatives John Gillespie and Mark White, whose districts include parts of Memphis divided in the new congressional map. Three other Republicans abstained.

During and after the vote, protesters filled the crowded chamber, shouting and using loud horns. Democratic Representative Justin Jones burned a Confederate flag after leaving the House chamber. Democratic Representative Justin Pearson’s brother, KeShaun Pearson, was arrested by Tennessee State Troopers during the legislative session.

⚡️ WATCH — JUST NOW — 99% white Tennessee House Republicans pass a racist 9-0 map stripping majority Black Memphis of congressional representation pic.twitter.com/OYwTWZK2i1

— The Tennessee Holler (@TheTNHoller) May 7, 2026

The Senate later passed the new map 25–5, with every Democrat voting against the bill except state Senator Charlane Oliver, who protested the vote by standing at her desk, unveiling a banner reading “No Jim Crow 2.0, stop the TN steal.”

WATCH: The racist Republican map stripping Memphis of representation passes the senate 25-5 — with Senator Charlane Oliver standing on her desk in protest

(From WSMV) pic.twitter.com/DcRLiD20Cu

— The Tennessee Holler (@TheTNHoller) May 7, 2026

The new map comes after the Supreme Court gutted the landmark Voting Rights Act last week, allowing racial gerrymandering to take place. It now heads to the desk of Republican Governor Bill Lee, who will sign it into law.

An irrelevancy from the moment he belatedly ended his campaign in July 2024, the former president has kept a low profile since leaving the White House. And for good reason. His arrogant insistence on running for reelection rather than making a dignified exit from office doomed his party and the country. Perhaps no single decision played a larger role in Donald Trump’s return to power.

But Biden could never resist the limelight, and now he’s back to haunt the Democrats. Last week, he waded into two primaries, endorsing candidates who had worked for his 2024 campaign and who asked for his support this year. As Semafor’s David Weigel has observed, Biden nostalgia is also creeping into other races, particularly California’s cramped gubernatorial primary, where the ascendent Xavier Becerra regularly touts his service as Biden’s secretary of health and human services.

Biden, battered by post-pandemic inflation and hounded by concerns about his age and health, left office with an abysmal approval rating in the high 30s. To the extent that he’s seen a postpresidency bump, it’s mostly thanks to comparisons with his disastrous successor: 51 percent of voters told a Harvard CAPS/Harris poll that Trump was doing a worse job than his predecessor, compared to 49 percent who said he was doing better. Still, there isn’t exactly a mass reconsideration of Biden’s presidency underway: A Newsweek poll this month found just 44 percent of voters viewed him favorably.

Biden is unpopular—so what? Trump is the president now. Even if there were something to gain from relitigating 2024, the focus now is on the horrors the current administration is unleashing on a daily basis. With immigrants, LGBTQ people, protesters, judges, journalists, federal workers, and others under assault, plus trade wars and literal wars being waged around the world, there are far more pressing issues that demand Democrats’ attention in this midterm election cycle and beyond. The past is an afterthought, as it should be.

But Biden’s sudden reemergence can’t be so easily waved away. It makes him a potential issue in every election, and not just primaries. That’s a problem for Democrats more broadly, even if his support is helpful to some of them. A year and a half after the end of his presidency, he is not only deeply unpopular but a reminder of what a great many voters did not like about the party in 2024. His presence risks undercutting the party’s best message, which is that Trump’s policies are causing a massive spike in everyday costs, and neuters a pretty good one, which is that Trump’s mentally unfit for office.

The Democrats have absolutely no reason to talk about Biden—but if he keeps popping up in races, they’re going to have no choice but to do so. It’s a conversation that no one is ready for.

Last month, the pollster Elliott Morris looked at how voters view both parties and—surprise—found that they really don’t like either of them. If Republicans came off worse, it was hardly surprising given that they control all three branches of government. Voters hated Democrats only somewhat less: 30 percent viewed the party “very unfavorably” compared to 42 percent who felt that way about the GOP.

Still, it was a good poll for Democrats for a couple of reasons. The first is that voters’ primary criticism of the party is far from fatal. Democrats and Democratic-leaning voters were mad at the party for not doing enough to fight Trump, but most said they planned on voting for the party anyway. So they were disaffected, but still on board. And that criticism of the party’s weakness can likely be addressed if and when the Democrats retake one or both chambers of Congress this fall, which would endow them with oversight powers they currently lack.

The second is that independents like Democrats a lot more than Republicans—three times more, in fact. But they had unique concerns. Per Morris:

Two specific themes show up that don’t appear in the Democratic column: The first is a lingering Biden grievance: independents in our open-end repeatedly cite the party “lying about Biden’s health,” keeping his campaign going “far too long,” and “anointing” Kamala Harris as the nominee without a competitive process. The second is a leadership vacuum complaint—variations on “lack of leadership” and “I don’t know what they stand for.”

This is good news too, in a way, because these are easy concerns to address. To win back the trust of these voters, Democrats can simply acknowledge that Biden was too old for the job and that he held on too long. That doesn’t mean embracing conspiracy theories about Biden’s health or even denigrating his administration’s accomplishments. It does, however, require being honest about his age, his disastrous decision to run for reelection, and his even more disastrous refusal to end his campaign until it was too late—as well as the broader party’s failure to force Biden’s hand in time to allow for a competitive primary. There can be no equivocation here, no hemming and hawing to placate party elders.

Biden may be broadly unpopular, but he remains popular among Democrats. The Newsweek poll found that 85 percent of Democrats view him favorably. This creates perverse incentives. It means his support—or, as in Becerra’s case, ties to him—can be an asset on the campaign trail. But touting his endorsement or regularly praising his presidency is a poison pill. It suggests that the party hasn’t really changed, that it hasn’t learned any lessons from the debacle of 2024. If Democrats want to run on the economy and concerns about Trump’s mental and physical fitness, why would they embrace someone who oversaw a huge spike in inflation and whose presidency was undone by similar concerns about his fitness?

The counterargument is that none of this really matters when compared with the Boschian nightmare that is Trump’s second term. Voters don’t like Biden, but he’s not the president—and they really hate the president. The list of things that they care about more than Biden is long. There’s good reason to shrug off concerns about his reemergence.

But candidates will not have that luxury when they’re asked on the campaign trail or on the debate stage about Biden—something that is significantly more likely if the former president keeps making endorsements. Democrats should be talking about other things, but Biden’s reemergence will make it harder for them to do that. And every minute spent talking about Biden is one less minute spent talking about inflation, the Iran war, ICE, and so on.

Do Democrats need to engage in a mass Maoist denunciation of Biden? Obviously not. But they do need to make it clear that they’re not stuck in the past. Biden isn’t ready to move on, but Democrats need to.

CNN reports that the administration wants to use the money to pay for legal costs, invoices, and asset sales resulting from its closure of the aid agency last year. Congress originally appropriated $1.2 billion of the funds to go to international development, and the rest to go to programs that take on malaria, tuberculosis, maternal and child health, nutrition, global health security, HIV/AIDS, and other world health issues.

Taking away that $2 billion could lead to 121,000 preventable tuberculosis deaths and 47,600 preventable deaths from malaria, according to estimates from the Health Security Policy Academy. It could also lead to 22.9 million children under 5 losing critical nutrition, and 5.7 million women losing safe places for childbirth, according to a CNN source.

This would add to the rising death toll resulting from the closure of USAID. As of November, an estimated 762,000 people have died because of USAID cuts, including over 500,000 children.

The Trump administration told Congress last month that it has reserved over $19.1 billion of USAID funds to shutter the agency. Democrats are demanding that the White House “put the funds to their intended use to save lives and advance U.S. interests as directed by Congress last year.”

“The Administration should immediately begin using these foreign assistance funds to deliver results for the American people. There is no reason for this FY25 funding to be withheld to cover the wasteful costs this Administration has incurred because it chose to dismantle USAID,” 17 Democratic senators wrote in a letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Director of the Office of Management and Budget Russell Vought, and acting USAID administrator Eric Ueland.

At least 10 crewmembers aboard a Disney Magic cruise were detained by ICE after the ship docked in San Diego late last month, according to immigrant rights groups. The federal agents “stormed onto the vessel” following the five-day trip, wrote The Independent on Wednesday.

While disembarking the ship with her family, passenger Dharmi Mehta said she was stunned to see the ship’s head waiter led away with his hands zip-tied behind his back.

“We got to know him fairly well,” she said at a news conference Tuesday. “He had actually been serving us probably 45 minutes to an hour before he was in restraints.”

Mehta witnessed crewmembers being taken into custody while still wearing Disney uniforms and without their belongings. She said the head waiter had told her he had two daughters, and he was excited to see them once ashore. She called the experience “disheartening and unsettling,” and expressed concern about what would happen to the staff.

The harbor police department told a local NBC outlet it had no part in the raid.

Two days after the raid on the Disney cruise, immigrant rights groups said four crewmembers aboard the MV Zandaam, operated by Holland America, were captured by ICE.

“This is not an isolated incident,” Benjamin Prado of the advocacy group Unión del Barrio said at the Tuesday news conference. “It has become a growing pattern, not only here in San Diego, but throughout this country.”

Prado alleged that the crewmembers were being denied due process and access to their national consulates, crimes the Trump administration has been accused of before.

ICE has alleged the detained individuals are suspected of serious crimes. On Wednesday, spokesperson Sandra Grisolia sent CBS the following:

“HSI San Diego arrested twenty-three crewmembers from multiple cruise ships at the Port of San Diego as part of Operation Tidal Wave. The arrests targeted individuals suspected of involvement with Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM), based on information received from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. The arrestees were transported to Los Angeles for processing, and their visas were revoked.”

A confidential CIA analysis delivered to policymakers this week found that Iran can survive three or four months of the U.S. military’s blockade before facing more severe economic hardship, The Washington Post reported Thursday.

Iran also retains significant ballistic missile capabilities, three U.S. officials familiar with the report told the Post.

Despite weeks of bombing by U.S. and Israeli forces, Iran still has 70 percent of its prewar stockpile of missiles and 75 percent of its mobile launchers, one official said. Iran has also been able to recover its underground storage facilities, repair damaged missiles, and assemble new ones.

The analysis suggests that Iran can survive the U.S. blockade for another 90 to 120 days, casting serious doubt on Trump’s repeated claims about Iran’s supposedly crashing economy.

“They’re failing,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office Tuesday. “They’re currency is worthless, their inflation is probably 150 percent, the real number is 150 percent, they aren’t paying their soldiers, they can’t pay their soldiers, their money is worthless.”

In fact, Trump has been claiming Iran’s economy is in shambles for weeks. “I think Iran is in very bad shape. I think they’re pretty desperate,” he said last month, a week after the blockade was first installed.

The White House has touted the combination of the U.S. military blockade on Iranian ports and the so-called Operation Economic Fury, a series of sanctions on Iran, as rendering serious damage to the country’s economic situation.

But “it’s nowhere near as dire as some have claimed,” one person familiar with the CIA’s analysis said of Iran’s economic situation. Tehran has been storing its oil on tanker ships that would otherwise be empty, they told the Post.

Another U.S. official suggested that Iran could extend its economic resilience even further by smuggling oil through overland routes. “There’s a belief they could begin moving some oil via rail through Central Asia,” the official told the Post.

This news comes as Trump has paused Project Freedom, the U.S. military’s plan to help ships travel through the Strait of Hormuz, after losing the support of Saudi Arabia.

The embattled facility—which has cost the state of Florida $1 million a day to run—has been beset with allegations of unsafe living conditions, abusive treatment, and protests from Native American groups over its environmental harms. Now the facility that was framed as a huge success by President Trump and Governor DeSantis may collapse in failure.

Homeland Security officials have also deemed the facility too costly to keep running, according to a federal official who spoke with the Times, although no official decisions to close it have been made.

Part of this failure can be attributed to Trump leaving DeSantis without any federal funding for the facility’s construction. While the federal government promised to reimburse Florida for hosting the detention center, no payments have yet been made. The swampy location, cruelly touted by Trump as a buffer for detained immigrants, also made it harder for workers to get supplies, sewage—and themselves— to and from the center. And while there has been no official announcement, the closure of Alligator Alcatraz would be an embarrassing development symbolic of the changing public opinion of Trump’s widely unpopular immigration crackdown.  

The Department of Homeland Security and DeSantis’s office have yet to comment on the report. 

Weeks after Donald Trump stressed to his party that passing that voter restriction bill was the “most important thing” they could do, Senate Republicans have shelved the legislation entirely, unable to bypass the Democratic filibuster that stands in the way of its potential passage, Punchbowl News reported Thursday.

Republicans have tried and failed to pass the SAVE Act multiple times. The latest iteration suggested numerous amendments to the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, including line items that would have abolished mail-in voting, required voters to bring proof of citizenship and proof of residency to register to vote, required voter ID, and mandated voter roll purges every 30 days—an enormous bureaucratic task that would have placed undue burdens on local election officials.

Nonetheless, Trump demanded that his caucus figure it out. In March, Trump insisted that the bill would “guarantee the midterms,” and that there would be “big trouble” if Republicans failed to force it through Congress. The president also said that the SAVE Act was such a tremendous priority that it “supersedes everything else,” threatening to veto all other bills until the SAVE Act made it to his desk.

But a lot can change in two months. Now, even the bill’s most ardent proponents are viewing the SAVE Act as a lost cause, pointing to vote-a-rama held in the Senate last month that failed to get even 50 votes in support of the bill, with four Republicans joining Democrats in their opposition.

Tabling the SAVE Act is expected to anger the party’s base, and could spark renewed calls to scrap the filibuster—something that the bulk of the GOP, and especially its leadership, does not want to do. The issue has raised tensions between Trump and Senate Majority Leader John Thune, who has thus far resisted Trump’s pleas to ax the long-standing, minority-power rule.

“I completely understand my colleagues who want to maintain the filibuster. We all want to maintain the filibuster, honestly,” Republican Senator Ron Johnson told Punchbowl. “But I know the Democrats won’t. That’s the only division here.”

The wide parameters of the SAVE Act emerged out of unfounded right-wing conspiracies that undocumented immigrants were overwhelmingly participating in U.S. elections, despite the fact that undocumented immigrants (along with legal, non-citizen residents) cannot vote.

Trump already tried and failed to implement voter ID in June. At the time, a federal judge excoriated the president’s efforts, arguing that adding layers of difficulty to the voting process would only serve to harm eligible voters by adding significant barriers before they can cast their ballots.

Trump unveiled Project Freedom on Sunday, revealing the U.S. would help ships travel through the Strait of Hormuz. On Tuesday, he suddenly announced the plan had been immediately put on hold in the hopes of finally cutting a peace deal with Iran.

But Trump only called it quits after Saudi Arabia barred the U.S. military from using its air bases or flying through its airspace, two U.S. officials told NBC News Wednesday.

Officials in Saudi Arabia were surprised by Trump’s announcement of Project Freedom, and not in a good way, the officials told NBC News. Leadership responded by telling the U.S. military it could no longer fly aircraft from the Prince Sultan Airbase, or fly through Saudi airspace to support the effort.

Trump spoke with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, but to no avail, the U.S. officials said. As a result, Project Freedom has been put on hold while the president scrambles to restore access to critical airspace.

When asked whether Project Freedom had come as a surprise, a Saudi source told NBC News: “The problem with that premise is that things are happening quickly in real time.”

Meanwhile, a White House official said in a statement that “regional allies were notified in advance.”

U.S. allies weren’t the only ones caught unaware by Trump’s changing plans. His own Cabinet members were singing the praises of Project Freedom just hours before the president chucked it in the waste bin.

CBS News reports that Democratic Representatives Dave Min and Raul Ruiz, as well as Senator Peter Welch, have sent letters to over a dozen of the people Trump has pardoned or given some form of clemency, investigating whether they received the clemency “through intermediaries, financial contributions, or other forms of influence.”

The letters note that many of Trump’s pardons have gone to his allies, and the lawmakers asked pardon recipients for contracts showing how much money they paid to lobbyists, social media influencers, lawyers, and others to persuade Trump.

The lawmakers said in the letters that Trump’s pardons and clemency are “depriving victims of compensation and justice,” pointing out an analysis from California Governor Gavin Newsom’s office that found the president’s actions nullified almost $2 billion in recovered money from Medicare and tax fraud, as well as victim repayment.

If the recipients of the letters don’t “respond, they run the risk of highlighting themselves—of being the subjects of future congressional investigations and creating more of a target on their backs for potential further criminal prosecutions,” Min told CBS. He added that Trump’s pardons send the message that people can “get around the justice system,” which “gets to the heart of what is wrong with America right now under this administration.”

Democrats are investigating pardoned financial criminals like Changpeng Zhao, who made billions from cryptocurrency before pleading guilty to money laundering, and Trevor Milton, who was sentenced to four years in prison for securities and wire fraud charges in 2023 for defrauding investors with his electric truck company, Nikola.

Milton owed millions of dollars to his victims, and he’s one of many pardoned by Trump who are now off the hook for the restitution they owe. But since Democrats don’t control Congress right now, they don’t have subpoena power, so these letters carry little—if any—legal weight. In the meantime, Trump can collect rewards from all of the people he has pardoned.

According to the London Stock Exchange, traders bet over $500 million that oil prices would drop on March 23, just 15 minutes before Trump announced he’d be pausing his planned attacks on Iran’s power centers. On April 7, traders bet $960 million on oil prices falling. A few hours later, Trump announced a temporary ceasefire. Ten days later, Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi went on social media to state that the Strait of Hormuz was open—and traders bet $760 million on falling oil prices just 20 minutes before he did. On April 21, traders once again somehow had the awareness to bet $760 million that oil prices would fall just 15 minutes before Trump announced a ceasefire extension.

All signs point to someone with insider knowledge using this erratic war to enrich themselves—something the Trump administration has been accused of multiple times.

In January, an unknown Polymarket user bet on the U.S. invading Venezuela and Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro being forced out of leadership by January 31, betting more than $33,000 while the odds were only at 6 percent. That trader made $400,000 in less than 24 hours. It was later revealed that the user was a U.S. soldier who was part of the raid on Maduro, and he was charged with “unlawful use of confidential government information for personal gain.”

And last year, Trump proclaimed on Truth Social that “THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!! DJT,” a mere four hours before announcing a 90-day pause on most retaliatory tariffs except for those on China, causing stocks to shoot up.

Observant Americans shouldn’t get their hopes up regarding any actual consequences coming from the probe, as it’s being led by a compromised, biased Justice Department.

Betting on the success or failure of political candidates has effectively become commonplace in the industry, NPR reported Thursday, with campaign staffers making thousands of dollars from their respective candidates.

One staffer working on a statewide campaign in the South told NPR how an external poll, shared prior to its release with their team, launched a wave of internal bets in support of their candidate. Internal campaign data showed their candidate faring worse than the external poll, but that didn’t matter.

“Myself and others started placing bets before that poll came out,” the staffer told NPR on the condition of anonymity. “And then, sure enough as soon as that poll came out, the stock went up and everybody made money.”

There’s apparently no shame in the game, despite recent attempts by online prediction markets to curb the behavior. In late April, the prediction market Kalshi—better known for sports betting—banned and fined several political candidates after a company probe found they had bet on themselves.

“Because you have all this information and knowledge that isn’t publicly available yet, it’s almost foolish not to bet on it before it’s made public,” the staffer said.

The practice has raised questions about the ethics and legality of campaign betting, and what has become known as “political insider trading.”

The process is as easy as can be imagined: An insider will become privy to nonpublic polls related to the campaign, and use the unreleased odds from the polls to inform their bets on sites like PredictIt or Polymarket. If the new poll indicates better odds of success than the odds on the website, they’ll buy low with what’s known as an event contract—knowing that the poll, once released, will raise their candidate’s favorability.

“The most I’ve ever made is thousands,” the staffer told NPR.