Patel first announced last summer on Joe Rogan’s podcast—where else?—that he had stumbled across a secret room in FBI headquarters containing evidence that a cabal had been out to get Trump since 2016. The “evidence” was a collection of documents Patel found in government “burn bags,” which are meant to be destroyed.

Patel claimed that a “grand conspiracy” would tie together the 2016 Russia investigations, Trump’s 2020 election loss, and the president’s criminal prosecutions in 2023 and 2024. It was certainly a good plot for a movie.

“You know how I caught these guys?” Patel gloated. “Because these guys were so arrogant, they would write everything down, and I found the documents.”

Unsurprisingly, the documents failed to show the conspiracy that Patel promised. But that didn’t stop him, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, and other members of the Trump administration from weaponizing the Justice Department to pursue the conspiracy claims and attack Trump’s enemies.

Over the course of 2025, the White House demanded that low-level prosecutors indict the likes of former FBI Director James Comey, New York Attorney General Letitia James, and Senator Adam Schiff, even when the evidence was flimsy.

Todd Gilbert, a Virginia district attorney, was told to investigate the burn bags in relation to Comey, whose name showed up on some of the documents. Gilbert concluded that his office only had jurisdiction to investigate whether the documents in the bags were intentionally hidden.

That still would have been a big deal had Gilbert found that to be the case. But even under intense pressure from the White House, the attorney found that nothing was out of the ordinary with the documents, and he refused to impanel a grand jury. Despite his team writing a lengthy analysis to the Justice Department explaining the decision, Gilbert was then fired.

Patel and company continued trying to indict Trump’s enemies with brazen disregard for the justice system. James and Schiff became targets, but as with Comey, the Justice Department’s cases against them fell apart. The Trump team did get a win in April after North Carolina prosecutors indicted Comey for posting an Instagram photo showing the numbers “86 47” written in seashells, but that case is almost certainly too stupid to actually get Comey in trouble.

The Trump administration’s biased use of the Justice Department is a blatant and awful example of their corruption that doesn’t get as much media coverage as it should. District prosecutors and judges continue to uphold the law, but the pressure on them from above is certainly tremendous, and the next few years will test their limits.

The investigation was an effort spanning multiple federal agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Justice’s Environmental Crimes Section, and the U.S. Attorney’s Office of the Western District of Virginia. Initially, prosecutors thought they had the backing of Robert Tracci, President Trump’s top official in the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

Such a criminal probe was a rare occurrence, as there are only a dozen Clean Water Act criminal cases prosecuted each year by the DOJ. Rarer still is the fact that such an investigation was killed so early. As prosecutors fought the companies for records through subpoenas in court, the Office of the Deputy Attorney General, headed by now–Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, shut down the investigation.

“They were told ‘pencils down,’” an unnamed source told ProPublica. A former federal prosecutor, Rick Mountcastle, told the publication that he had “never heard of that happening before.”

“There shouldn’t be some sort of untouchables list of people who are immune from enforcement,” said Mountcastle, who spent 24 years as a federal prosecutor in the Western District of Virginia. Justice is a Republican elected to the Senate in 2024, winning the seat with the help of Trump’s endorsement.

It’s no secret that Trump doesn’t care about environmental laws, and he has long praised coal as an energy source, ignoring its widespread negative impact on clear air, water, and public health. Protecting a political ally like Justice from any consequences from the unsafe effects of a sprawling coal operation is entirely expected of this president.

Omar Artan was set to make history as the first Somalian to officiate the World Cup before he was allegedly denied entry at Miami International Airport despite having a travel visa. The reason for his denial was not made immediately clear, although Somalia is one of the countries on President Trump’s travel ban, and has been a frequent target of his racist attacks since he returned to office.

“Omar Artan is among Africa’s most respected referees and deserves the support of the entire football community,” Somalia’s Ministry of Youth and Sports adviser and former national team captain, Ciise Aden Abshir said in a statement to Agence France-Presse. “Denying him entry to the United States and preventing him from officiating scheduled matches harms not only him personally but also undermines football’s commitment to fairness, merit, and the spirit of fair play.”

Artan is one of many players, officials, coaches, and fans who will run into issues simply getting into the World Cup with America’s aggressive anti-immigration policies—which risk overshadowing the event entirely. Iranian team staff allege they had visas denied, Cameroonian-born Swiss midfielder Breel Embolo was denied entry, and Iraqi striker Aymen Hussein was detained and question in Chicago O’Hare airport for seven hours.

Both FIFA and the Trump administration have had a year and a half to prepare for the tournament. It was predictable the entire time that visas for players, staff, and referees would be an issue. And yet, with the tournament three days away, it is engulfed in avoidable chaos.

Homan told Fox News Monday that he is reviewing plans to rapidly increase ICE activity in the city, deploying “more ICE agents than you’ve ever seen,” claiming that he promised New York Governor Kathy Hochul to boost ICE’s presence in New York if the state passed any bills preventing local and state law enforcement from cooperating with federal agencies in New York’s jails. Hochul signed such a bill last month.

“I made her a promise: You’re going to see more ICE agents than you’ve ever seen in New York City, and it’s coming,” Homan said. “I just reviewed an operational plan.”

🚨 Border Czar Tom Homan Drops Truth on NYC & ICE Facility Protests

- Most violent protesters attacking officers and damaging property at the detention facility are paid, out-of-state agitators from places like Portland and Minnesota, not local peaceful demonstrators.

- Homan… pic.twitter.com/hw4aS39k0R

— Gunther Eagleman™ (@GuntherEagleman) June 8, 2026

Homan and other Trump administration officials have threatened ICE surges in major cities across the country, especially when cities and states pass laws restricting or barring cooperation with ICE. In late 2025 to early 2026, a major ICE escalation was attempted with Operation Metro Surge in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area, which caused a massive backlash among local residents and resulted in the deaths of Renee Good, Alex Pretti, and Victor Manuel Diaz.

There are about 20,000 ICE agents, though this figure includes many who work in administrative capacities. The population of New York City is over eight million, and letting ICE agents loose won’t go over well with residents. Hochul told reporters Monday that Trump promised her, in a meeting with other state governors, that one of the lessons of Operation Metro Surge was that “we’re not going where we’re not welcome.”

“And he looked over at me, as the governor of the state of New York at this meeting, and he says, ‘For example, I will not go to New York unless Kathy asks.’ And I said, ‘I’m not asking, so we’re good,’” Hochul said, pointing out the failures of Minneapolis and suggesting Republicans would pay a heavy political price in the state for an ICE surge.

Hochul says Trump promised her that ICE wouldn’t be headed to New York, contradicting what his border czar, Tom Homan, threatened recently. pic.twitter.com/rGkbSgkYTu

— Matthew Chayes (@chayesmatthew) June 8, 2026

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who is on reasonably good terms with Trump, referenced the impending soccer World Cup in his rebuke to Homan.

“We will not allow ICE or anyone else to sow fear in our communities—especially at this moment. As the world comes to our city, we will stand proudly with our immigrant neighbors and reject these attacks for what they are: an attempt to divide us,” Mamdani posted on X. That doesn’t bode well for ICE agents in New York City, who would meet even more resistance than they did in Minneapolis.

“Senate Majority Leader John Thune should immediately fire the Parliamentarian, who treats Republicans, and everything that they stand for, horribly!” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social Monday.

This is the second time Trump has lashed out against Elizabeth MacDonough, who recently struck $1 billion in funding for the Secret Service from the $72 billion budget reconciliation bill.

MacDonough had determined that the funds, including an estimated $220 million for the construction of Trump’s White House ballroom, fell outside of the jurisdiction of the Judiciary Committee’s plans to fund immigration enforcement.

Trump has not been able to get over it. The president claimed again Monday that MacDonough should be removed because she was appointed by a Democrat, and thus “caters to Democrats.” In reality, her job requires her to advise lawmakers, and to strike certain provisions from reconciliation bills in accordance with the “Byrd rule.”

“Just the other night, as an example, she ruled against us on a proposal that would have easily been approved, and should have been, by anyone else,” Trump wrote. “We have every right to change her, and should do so, IMMEDIATELY. As long as she’s there, we will never get our desperately needed, SAVE AMERICA ACT, approved, and put into full force and effect!”

It doesn’t seem that Thune is on board with the president’s outrageous demand.

After MacDonough’s decision, a spokesperson for the South Dakota Republican relayed the appropriate deference: “Redraft. Refine. Resubmit. None of this is abnormal during a Byrd process.”

A lengthy New York Times report Sunday describes the extent to which the head of the Department of Health and Human Services, or HHS, is detached from his colleagues and uninterested in the work his department is meant to handle.

HHS is a massive organization, tasked with designing policy to manage and improve the health of Americans. There are 13 divisions within it; some are well known, such as the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health. Forty percent of the country receives health care from HHS through Medicare and Medicaid.

But Kennedy has apparently been coasting through work, even while he tries to strip Medicaid from Americans helping their disabled relatives. According to the Times, Kennedy usually arrives in the office at 10 a.m. after a morning workout and leaves at 4 p.m.—and that’s if he’s in D.C., which he often is not. He rarely speaks to people outside his close circle, and prefers small, closed-door meetings.

The heads of the 13 HHS divisions meet weekly on Tuesdays to discuss their work. The Times reports that Kennedy barely attended these discussions until February, and is now showing up once a month. Even when he deigns to appear, he often is more interested in scrolling on his phone than in the discussion, according to staffers interviewed by the Times. Several said he looked “checked out.”

Kennedy has also failed to lead during times of crisis. After two children died of measles in Texas in early 2025, Demetre Daskalakis, the head of HHS’s response team, requested a meeting with Kennedy. Daskalakis said he was turned down; he has since left the agency. Kennedy, meanwhile, went on to recommend measles patients up their vitamin intake instead of taking a tried-and-true vaccine.

Under Donald Trump, HHS has experienced a staffing crisis that Kennedy is doing little to fix. The president still doesn’t have a surgeon general—Trump is currently on his third nomination after the first two stalled. Acting directors are managing about half of 27 institutes at the National Institutes of Health. Marty Makary, the leader of the Food and Drug Administration, left the agency in May after disputes surrounding Trump’s embrace of flavored vapes.

Kennedy has been slow to plug gaps and has targeted career staff, per the Times. He personally fired CDC Director Susan Monarez 10 months ago after she reportedly refused to approve his wacko childhood vaccine schedule. Jay Bhattacharya, who already leads the NIH, has now been tasked with that massive job, as well.

About the only thing Kennedy remains interested in, besides flipping the food pyramid, is promoting his baseless anti-vaccine rhetoric. It’s a sad state of affairs at HHS, and one that should worry all Americans.

“Under the last administration with the massive movement under the open borders policy that the cartels, etcetera, border security, that’s when it began to make its way back up toward America, hitting Mexico in early 2023, moving its way up through Mexico in 2024,” Agriculture Secretary Rollins said Monday morning on CNBC, claiming that Biden’s immigration policy was the direct cause of the screwworm reinfestation.

beyond parody -- Ag Secretary Brooke Rollins blames Biden for screwworm

"I do think it's important to note that under the last administration not much had been done to push back" pic.twitter.com/IR2q818j0O

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 8, 2026

“This is another thing we can thank Joe Biden for,” Senator Roger Marshall told NewsMax. “That when millions of people came out of Central America, they brought this screwworm with them. It was on their pets, maybe on their flesh as well.”

This is pretty shameless, given Trump has been in office for over 500 days and specifically cut the program that handled this very problem.

“The Trump Admin cut funding for screwworm detection and fired 25% of staff responsible for tracking the disease,” Ohio Representative Shontel Brown wrote on X, in response to Rollins. “I’m embarrassed for the Secretary that her only answer is to blame the administration that left office a year and a half ago.”

The return of the screwworm—first eradicated in 1966—has also thrown beef safety into limbo, as the screwworm’s presence could tighten the supply and raise already high prices even higher.

In a 42-page ruling, Massachusetts District Judge Leo Sorokin ruled that the fee was an illegal tax on businesses and ordered it to be vacated.

Sorokin used the Supreme Court’s justification in its 2012 case National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, concerning fees imposed on Americans who did not sign up for the Affordable Care Act, to argue that the payment was a tax, not a penalty. In his majority opinion in Sebelius, Chief Justice John Roberts concluded that “if the concept of penalty means anything, it means punishment for an unlawful act or omission.”

“Here, the $100,000 payment requirement for all H-1B petitions does not aim to establish that hiring H-1B workers is illegal. The payment is not a penalty, just as the IRS fee in Sebelius was not, because it is not ‘punishment for an unlawful act or omission,’” Sorokin wrote.

Therefore, according to Sorokin, the fee should be considered a tax—which the president lacks the authority to levy without congressional approval. The government had tried to argue that the fee couldn’t be considered a tax because its purpose was to decrease the number of H-1B applications altogether, not raise revenue. But Sorokin said that argument “falls short.”

“Purpose and effect are different. Moreover, every $100,000 payment made pursuant to the Policy does raise revenue,” he wrote.

The judge ordered that Trump’s illegal directive be “vacated in its entirety.”

The Trump administration announced a $100,000 fee for H1-B visas in September, placing the burden on employers to sponsor college-educated and specialized foreign workers to come to the United States on a temporary basis.

The Trump administration’s efforts to wind down the H1-B visa program are just another way that the president is kneecapping the economy for underbaked reasons that reek of white nationalism. Some research has estimated that the arrival of H1-B visa holders between 1990 and 2020 was responsible for 30 to 50 percent of all productivity growth in the U.S. economy during that period, resulting in wage growth for native workers.

This story has been updated.

Sam Bankman-Fried has officially filed with the Justice Department’s Pardon Attorney Office, Bloomberg reports. The co-founder of the cryptocurrency trading site FTX was convicted on fraud and money-laundering charges in 2024 and is now serving a 25-year prison sentence.

Whether Trump will pardon Bankman-Fried is an interesting question. The onetime crypto baron dropped millions of dollars on the Democratic Party and various Democratic political campaigns and PACs, as well as a smaller amount of cash on Republicans. That might make it less likely for Trump to extend a pardon, although Trump has pardoned Democrats before, such as former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich and Representative Henry Cuellar.

Blagojevich was only able to get a pardon after extensively lobbying the president and conducting a slick P.R. campaign. Bankman-Fried seems to be trying the same strategy, giving a phone interview to Fox Business on Monday from prison and praising Trump’s Iran airstrikes In March. His real usefulness to Trump, however, is his cryptocurrency background. Trump’s sons Eric and Donald Jr. are making millions through their crypto venture, World Liberty Financial, which could make the president more forgiving of Bankman-Fried.

Last year, Trump pardoned Changpeng Zhao, the founder of cryptocurrency exchange Binance. Zhao probably helped his own cause by helping to boost World Liberty Financial, as well as hiring people in Trump’s orbit to lobby for his own cause. Bankman-Fried now has to hope he has Trump’s attention to become one of the many white-collar criminals and fraudsters the president has let off the hook in his second term.

David Bolter, a poll worker whose claims about election fraud were included in Trump’s failed 2020 lawsuit seeking to overturn his election loss in Wisconsin, told Votebeat that FBI officials had arrived at his doorstep with questions about how local officials had handled the election.

In his affidavit, Bolter alleged that someone in Milwaukee’s absentee ballot counting facility had announced around midnight on Election Day that a “huge truckload of ballots” was going to be delivered. There has been no additional evidence of this claim, but it became central to some conspiracy theories about the 2020 election.

The FBI also spoke to another 2020 poll worker, who Votebeat identified as Christine, in order to allow her to speak freely. Christine has also submitted an affidavit to Trump’s failed lawsuit claiming that she saw election workers continuing to count votes after she’d been told all of the votes were counted.

“I suspected wrongdoing, but I’m not saying that it actually happened,” she told Votebeat. “I’m just one lowly person that was working there.”

A nonpartisan audit of Wisconsin’s 2020 election found that the state’s elections were “safe and secure.” So what is the FBI hoping to find?

David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, said that the Trump administration’s efforts to revisit these long-debunked claims weren’t actually about uncovering anything new.

“This isn’t about the 2020 election, this is about the 2026 and 2028 elections,” he told Votebeat. “This is about intimidating election officials. This is about creating a stream of disinformation designed to delegitimize an election the president may believe he’s going to lose. This is designed by the president’s underlings to satisfy the unrealistic expectations of a president that still cannot comprehend that he lost an election that he definitely lost, and it’s incredibly destabilizing.”

The FBI has also reached out to several election officials in Milwaukee, Wisconsin’s largest city. It’s worth noting that the only people who appear to have plotted voter fraud in Wisconsin were members of Trump’s own team, who cooked up a fake electors plot to undermine the election results.

“I went to the bathrooms, I went to the detention area, I went to indoor and outdoor recreation.… I hear a lot of complaining about the food. I went in there unannounced … and had lunch. I sat in the cafeteria with detainees, had the same meal they had—I had my security  detail with me of course—but I had the same tray of food that they had,” Homan said, accusing hundreds of detainees of lying about what’s happening inside the New Jersey detention center. “There was spaghetti and meat sauce, there was green beans, there was charro beans, there was rolls and butter.… Now is it a five-star cuisine? No. But was it a well established meal? Yes it was.” 

Tom Homan on Delaney Hall: "I went there and had lunch. I sat in the cafeteria with detainees. Had the same meal they had. It was spaghetti and meat sauce, it was green beans, it was charro beans, it was rolls and butter, it was fruit, it was dessert. I ate it. Now is it a 5 star… pic.twitter.com/Vlf5Ax7HGt

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 8, 2026

Protests have continued outside the privately run detention center for over a week as prisoners endure a hunger and labor strike over allegations of being served rotten food, being pepper-sprayed excessively, and being held in neglectful conditions. 

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin has also denied any reports of inhumane conditions, saying earlier this month that there were “only a handful of individuals” going on hunger strike “because they want their ethnic group—or their ethnic-right food. Well, they can go back to their country and get whatever food they want.” 

Newark Mayor Ras Baraka has threatened a lawsuit if the detention center is not shut down.

Just ask the Texas lawyer who represented Paxton in his impeachment trial, Dan Cogdell, who endorsed Talarico on Monday.

Paxton “has lost sight of his core mission, which is to represent the people of Texas,” Cogdell said. “Unlike Ken, I believe to my core that James Talarico believes in unity over division and that he knows how to assemble not only Democrats, but Independents and Republicans, and we need that right now.”

Cogdell defended Paxton in his 2023 trial, during which prosecutors alleged the attorney general accepted bribes and used his office to cover up his infidelity. The case saw Paxton impeached by the Texas House of Representatives but acquitted by the state Senate. Cogdell also represented Paxton in a separate securities fraud case, which was settled in 2024 after Paxton was made to pay $300,000 in restitution.

More recently, Paxton was criticized for offering a sweetheart plea deal to a repeated child molester, which would see the offender spend just one day in jail.

It’s difficult to ascertain where the Houston-based Cogdell falls on the political spectrum. He criticized Trump frequently in recent years but gave $6,500 to the hard-right Paxton’s campaign in 2025, according to campaign finance reports. He then gave Talarico’s campaign $1,000 in March.

Talarico appeared thrilled with his new ally, using the defection to petition others to do the same.

“If you voted for John Cornyn, you have a place in this campaign,” he said in a statement. “If you’re a Republican tired of the corruption you’re seeing in government, you have a place in this campaign. Even if you’re Ken Paxton’s impeachment lawyer, you have a place in this campaign.”

But Democrats shouldn’t take much comfort in avoiding a catastrophe. The political party that’s supposed to stop fascism in America is so disorganized and divided that it struggled to secure victory in a state where a clear majority of voters are left-leaning. This Democratic debacle in California makes me deeply concerned about the upcoming presidential primary and general election.

For months, there was a very real possibility that only Republican candidates would make it to the general election, because the California Democratic vote would be split among a field of a myriad of candidates. Then the media and Donald Trump saved California Democrats. Journalists at the San Francisco Chronicle and CNN reported numerous accusations of sexual misconduct by then-Representative Eric Swalwell, who was one of the leading Democratic candidates. That helped the party’s voters consolidate around Becerra and Steyer. Meanwhile, Trump endorsed Hilton, a Brit and a former Fox News personality, effectively dooming Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco, the other prominent (and more conventionally qualified) Republican.

I’m glad we have investigative journalists and strong news organizations, but a well-functioning political party should be vetting candidates on its own and ensuring it doesn’t nominate alleged sexual harassers. Swalwell’s improper behavior around women wasn’t a secret in Democratic circles in Washington or California, and yet party insiders did little to prevent him from becoming one of the front-runners for a hugely important post. I don’t praise Trump very often, but I respect that he is willing to actively lead the voters in his party by urging them to back particular candidates in primaries. It would have been nice if Nancy Pelosi, Gavin Newsom, Kamala Harris, and all of the California Democratic politicians who write books about their courage and wisdom had actually shown some of that by endorsing someone in the governor’s race and making sure Swalwell never became a top contender.

Instead, California Democratic Party leaders seemed to go out of their way not to help voters sort through a field without a clear front-runner. Newsom’s aides leaked to reporters his misgivings about all of the candidates. When the University of Southern California tried to host a debate and include only the candidates with decent poll numbers, some Democratic state legislators blasted the process as racist because low-polling candidates of color would be excluded. As Becerra started rising in the polls, people in the Biden administration started slamming him, usually via anonymous quotes, as ineffective as HHS secretary. Who then should California Democrats vote for? These people never said. It was almost as if Democratic Party leaders were intentionally trying to create a chaotic primary.

Steyer or Becerra will almost certainly be elected in November, so what’s the problem? Well, the party’s struggle to land on a candidate in California isn’t an isolated incident. The 2020 and 2024 presidential primaries illustrated the same problems. In 2020, there was a massive field of Democratic candidates. Primary voters couldn’t easily sort among them. Many Democratic groups and politicians stayed on the sidelines instead of endorsing anyone. The result was a haphazard process that selected Joe Biden, a bad choice because his age ensured Democrats would again have a presidential quandary in 2024.

By mid-2023, it was obvious that a clear majority of Americans were wary of giving Biden a second term. But the party waited a full year to coordinate around sidelining Biden, leading to another haphazard process that produced a candidate (Kamala Harris) who wasn’t one of the party’s strongest politicians and didn’t have time to run a full campaign.

Why can’t the Democratic Party effectively choose candidates for the most important races? For three reasons. First, there is a real and growing divide between the party’s progressive wing and its center-left—and many prominent Democrats don’t want to seem too aligned with either camp. It’s not surprising that politicians, whose job is to be popular, want to appeal to as many people as possible. But maintaining ideological neutrality in today’s Democratic Party essentially means you can’t participate in key races, since they often pit a progressive against a centrist. So you end up with Senators Kirsten Gillibrand and Chuck Schumer refusing to say if they voted for Andrew Cuomo or Zohran Mamdani in the New York City mayoral race, and Barack Obama expressing his enthusiasm for Mamdani on the eve of the election but not formally endorsing him. Schumer and Gillibrand likely favored Cuomo but didn’t want to piss off progressives; Obama likely favored Mamdani but didn’t want to annoy centrists.

In California, I assume Newsom does not want to be succeeded by Steyer, who has aligned with progressives and backs a proposed wealth tax that the incumbent governor strongly opposes. But Newsom, ahead of his likely 2028 presidential run, probably doesn’t want to formally declare himself as hostile to progressive candidates and therefore progressive voters. Hence he said little about one of the most important elections in the country, one happening in his home state.

The problem is that if current and even former prominent Democratic politicians like Obama are trying to avoid making any commitments, Democratic voters are left confused.

Second, the party has become obsessed with punditry and election strategy. A logical approach would be to endorse the candidate for an office who you think would best do the job, or the one who is most aligned with your ideological preferences. But that’s not what happens in Democratic Party circles these days. Endorsing a candidate who loses is treated as a sign that you don’t understand the electorate, so even your policy stands should be ignored; winning candidates and campaigns get reverence and deference.

Biden’s team rejected warnings from fellow Democrats that he was a weak candidate for 2024 by constantly noting that he had been underestimated by others in the party during the 2020 primaries. That’s silly. Elections are hard to predict; conditions change; Biden’s aides weren’t geniuses in 2020, nor were they total fools in 2024. But in a party where power and authority are given to those who claim they are election soothsayers, the safest course is to never endorse anyone in an election so you will never look stupid. That’s what many Democratic groups and politicians did in 2020 nationally and in California this year.

Third, as political scientists Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld argue in a recent book, the Democratic Party (and in many ways the GOP, as well) is “hollow,” without a strong structure. The California Democratic Party, like most state parties today, has very little power. The Democratic National Committee is fairly weak too. The real power is with prominent politicians like Harris, Pelosi, Obama, and Newsom, as well as left-leaning unions and groups. But Newsom and Harris probably don’t think of themselves as party leaders whose job it is to shape primaries by encouraging some candidates and discouraging others. They didn’t seek that role. They may not want it. In reality, though, unless the most famous politicians in the party endorse candidates, primaries turn into protracted contests like in California this year.

There’s an alternative to this scattershot approach to primaries: what Mamdani and Trump are doing. Yes, those two don’t seem much alike. But in this one way, they’re similar. Trump has a clear sense of the kinds of Republicans he wants in office. He endorses his favorites in primaries and accepts that sometimes his candidates lose, without being gun-shy about making future endorsements.

In New York City, Mamdani is interjecting himself into a lot of races, usually endorsing candidates aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America. In making these endorsements, Mamdani and Trump are offering clarity to primary voters: Republicans can vote for or against the MAGA candidate; Democrats for or against the DSA one. Mamdani and Trump are both leading, actively giving guidance to the voters in their parties. That’s what Democratic officials in California should have been doing the last six months.

And we need that kind of leadership going forward. Democratic Party leaders need to decide if they can give full-throated support to Maine’s Graham Platner amid the numerous controversies around him—or find a way to force him out of the race and get a new candidate. They can’t spend the next few months alternating between supporting Platner and leaking to reporters their doubts about him. They have to either defeat Michigan progressive Abdul El-Sayed in the Senate primary there or support him enthusiastically if he is the nominee. Most importantly, the next presidential primary can’t result in a candidate with obvious challenges (being almost 80; given less than 110 days to run) because Democrats can’t coordinate.

Even if Becerra and Steyer both make it to the general election, the California gubernatorial race is the latest illustration of a Democratic Party that can’t choose or vet candidates well. That’s not some minor flaw. American democracy might not be in peril if Democrats had chosen better presidential candidates in 2020 or 2024. This can’t keep happening. Democratic Party leaders need to start leading their party—before it’s too late.

They were hoping that Republican Spencer Pratt, known for his time on reality-TV show The Hills, would perform well enough to finish in the top two, allowing him to advance to November’s general election under California’s jungle primary rules. After initial reports last week showed him behind Bass in second place, his right-wing supporters thought his advancement was in the bag.

But ballot returns for the past few days now show him falling into a distant third, and MAGA supporters from far beyond L.A. are crying conspiracy. Several conservative influencers and pundits are calling Raman’s surge “impossible,” attacking the results as illegitimate and calling L.A. Democrats “cheaters.” X user DC Draino said the results showed “Insane levels of fraud.” Republican Representative Abe Hamadeh, whose district is in faraway Arizona, said “The steal is blatant.” Elon Musk spent his Monday morning amplifying conspiracy theories about the results.

President Trump has also weighed in, calling the mayoral race a “rigged election” in a Truth Social post Monday morning. But all of that whining belies the fact that the last polls before Election Day predicted Bass and Raman finishing first and second, respectively. And late-arriving mail-in ballots tend to favor younger, more left-leaning voters, especially in a solidly left-leaning city like Los Angeles. The right will just have to realize that L.A. voters are Democrats who aren’t going to be taken in by a reality-TV star.

I have, as most professors do, a running shortlist of the most teachable texts. Both of Nella Larsen’s short novels are incredibly teachable. So is Rear Window. Fun Home, as well as every essay James Baldwin ever wrote. Of more recent vintage, Janicza Bravo’s Zola, George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo, and Kristen Roupenian’s viral short story “Cat Person” are all shockingly teachable. But there’s one book and one movie that have been at the top of this list since the first time I taught them over a decade ago. They’re both called Persepolis.

The first thing to say about both Persepolis the 2003 graphic novel and Persepolis the 2007 film is that they are perfect. Marjane Satrapi, the French Iranian comics artist and filmmaker who died last week at the age of 56, published Persepolis in the original French in four installments annually from 2000 to 2003. The whole series was translated into English shortly after. It’s sold millions of copies worldwide, it’s been listed as one of the best 100 books of the twenty-first century by both The Guardian and The New York Times, and, like many other great books, the United States can barely handle it—it has been frequently banned or challenged in schools across the country.

The comic is an autobiographical account of Satrapi’s childhood in Tehran during the Islamic Revolution and, later, the Iran-Iraq War; her adolescence at school in Vienna; her return to Iran; and then her ultimate decision to leave her home for good and start a new life in Paris. The book is a story about revolution and war, violence and loss, education and ideology, repression and rebellion, family and loyalty. There are writers who will write better than I can on the book’s moral imagination, its insight regarding the history of Iran, European colonialism, twenty-first-century French politics. The way I encounter Satrapi’s book is as a book about growing up, in ways that are specific to Satrapi’s experience of it and in ways that are not. Growing up is and can be about guilt, about cruel education, about hurt. Growing up, even as it cracks the world open to fill with possibility, can be an unrecoverable loss.

One of the visual signatures of the comic is its use of the color black. The entire comic is drawn in a stark, binary black and white palette, with hardly any grays or shading at all. Shadows cut across faces and bodies in hard lines, every figure threatens to become a silhouette of itself. This is most striking in the numerous panels where Satrapi represents some scene in the form of rows and rows of figures, nearly identically etched into a black background: protesters with raised fists and massacred civilians, jubilant figures in the streets after the fall of the Shah and geometric rows of schoolgirls in hijabs beating their breasts, God and Karl Marx facing against each other in Marji’s childhood imagination. These scenes, almost all of which take up the space of more than one panel, seem to represent uniformity, but in Satrapi’s hand, each face looks the slightest bit different. They are images of masses and of individuals.

The animated film adaptation of Persepolis that Satrapi wrote and directed in collaboration with the French artist Vincent Paronnaud, animates that blackness. Those images, which come to resemble block-print patterns, are given motion in the film. The school scene, for instance, cuts from the rows of girls to a close-up of one hand on one breast. The hand flies in and out of frame, leaving the screen blank as it swoops and claps. The film is one of the best literary adaptations I’ve ever seen, in the sense that it is liberal with its source text—unfaithful in the sense that it generatively deconstructs and reassembles the story as drawn but zealously faithful in its translation of the soul of Satrapi’s comic to motion pictures. It takes that inky blackness and makes it a roiling, background sea, a base medium for these stories to take form and then melt away. Its undulating aesthetic, breaking now into symmetrical lines and city streets, now into figures afloat in dream, gives it a feeling of magic realism, a sense of hard political stakes and the terrible and wondrous embellishment of memory.

In 2005, Satrapi published a kind of graphic essay in the New York Times op-ed section. In it, she grappled with the book’s life in a country gripped by the post-9/11 normalization of xenophobia. She had come to the states to go on book tour, she writes, but also “to try to explain to people what Iran was really like.” Headed by a self-portrait with devil horns, Satrapi’s piece goes on to offer a litany of things she felt she was responsible for communicating on this trip. She had to explain:

That not every woman in Iran looked like a blackbird. That the axis of evil also included people like myself. That it was a very bad idea to give democracy as a present to people by bombing them. That I saw a real war (the Iran-Iraq War) and there was nothing glorious about it. That war kills. That we Iranians were not an abstract concept but rather human beings for whom the words pride, dignity, patriotism and life mean exactly the same thing as they do to Americans.

It’s hard not to see the contemporary relevance of this list of insights for readers in a country that is currently giving democracy as a gift to Iranians by bombing them. But part of the gift of Persepolis is that it is not limited to its momentary relevance, even as it is a story about the same things happening all over again that, year upon year, only reminds its readers of how the same things will continue to happen all over again. It is also a book larger and more intimate than that.

Many essays before and after Satrapi’s death testify to the “universality” of her work. Like relatability, universality is a metric that sounds good but also threatens to flatten or denude texts of their thorny specificity. Satrapi’s story is not a universal one—that readers without her particular experience can nevertheless see and feel her story closely is not evidence of its universality but of its singular power.

I realize that praising something for a seemingly similar vague metric like “teachability” might sound like an overly cold, utilitarian way to think about art—sentiments like: I like that Monet painting because it would fit nicely over the couch in my living room; Charles Mingus makes excellent music to listen to while I do the dishes. But, as a person who considers the seminar room a sacred space, teachability, for me, speaks to something ineffable, even potentially transcendent about a text. It’s a word for the thing that happens when a book transforms miraculously in discussion. It’s a word for the way a work of art can catalyze relationships between strangers. It’s a word for the work a text itself does in bringing a reader into its universe, finding them a place in its pages. It makes itself available to readers, it opens itself with generosity. I haven’t had a class that didn’t “get” Persepolis, and that’s a miracle of its own.

Sure, that’s about authorship and authorial voice, but, especially reading it today in the wake of Satrapi’s passing, it’s about the way a book lives its own social life with and against every single reader who ever picks it up. That life—which does not end—is a memory of its author, but it’s also the remnant of that author’s singular labor of creation. As the artist said, “Punk is not ded.”

Fans must now arrive two hours early and without bags. Trump, a native New Yorker, is also friends with embattled Knicks owner James Dolan.

This move has the potential to curse the Knicks in the midst of their most successful run of the century. The reason so many fans gather outside the Garden in the first place is because the cost of getting in is astronomically high. Now they’re shutting all that energy down to accommodate one of the least popular presidents ever.

“I’m not sure it’s gonna be a good reception for him,” House minority leader and fellow New Yorker Hakeem Jeffries said over the weekend. “Why does Donald Trump always have to ruin a good thing? Literally the Knicks haven’t been in the NBA Finals for 27 years, the city is trying to celebrate this, we’ve embraced this team, and this guy has to inject himself.”

Mayor Zohran Mamdani is offering an alternative, free watch party in Bryant Park.

A bipartisan coalition of lawmakers has been planning since April to pass a long-term extension of FISA Section 702, which is intended to shield U.S. citizens from the country’s warrantless surveillance program overseas.

The key spy power is set to expire Friday, but Democrats have pulled their support over Trump’s decision to install Bill Pulte as director of national intelligence.

The federal housing official has none of the military or intelligence background necessary to lead the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and has instead made a name for himself by being Trump’s pit bull, targeting the president’s political enemies and making himself wildly unpopular in the process.

“The idea that we’re going to allow Mr. Pulte to be potentially in charge of how this tool is used or manipulated, that’s going to be a very uphill path to convince Democrats,” Virginia Senator Mark Warner told CNN Sunday. “This was a self-inflicted harm.”

Trump’s move to place one of his goons at the head of the U.S. intelligence apparatus is yet another example of the president acting impulsively despite the fallout for his own party.

“I don’t think he thinks about the impact on us and the timing,” Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski told reporters. “Which is unfortunate because it really has had an impact. Quite honestly, I’m worried about what we’re going to do on FISA.”

Pelley, a longtime 60 Minutes correspondent and CBS employee since 1989, was fired last week after months of discord between him and Weiss, the founder of The Free Press, who was controversially appointed CBS News editor in chief in October.

In Pelley’s resignation letter, he wrote that new management “instructed me to inject falsehoods and bias” into his work. Speaking to The New York Times’ Lulu Garcia-Navarro on Sunday, Pelley stated Weiss had put “a thumb on the scale” for President Donald Trump’s version of events.

When Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents violently besieged Minnesota last winter, Pelley said Weiss sent an email to Tanya Simon—at the time the executive producer of 60 Minutes—asking if the show could make local protesters appear more violent.

“We had gone out of our way in our plan from the very beginning to show the protesters for the responsibility that they had,” Pelley said. “We had already scrubbed the video archives looking for those scenes. But it somehow wasn’t enough for Ms. Weiss.”

After protester Renee Good was shot and killed by ICE agent Jonathan Ross, Pelley said Weiss sent an email asking staff to describe Good’s car as veering toward the agent, despite video evidence showing otherwise.

“The video showed that the officer wasn’t standing in front of the car, and she wasn’t driving toward him, but that’s what the president said,” Pelley said.

Since Weiss took over as editor in chief, her tenure has been marred by clashes with CBS’s experienced reporters. One high-profile conflict came in December, when she pulled a 60 Minutes report on the suffering of Venezuelans deported to CECOT prison in El Salvador by the Trump administration. Weiss argued the story was not balanced enough and suggested the reporters reach out to Stephen Miller, the curmudgeon behind Trump’s deportation policies, for an interview.

The journalist responsible for the CECOT report, Sharyn Alfonsi, wrote a damning email about the decision that was leaked to the press. “Our story was screened five times and cleared by both CBS attorneys and Standards and Practices. It is factually correct. In my view, pulling it now—after every rigorous internal check has been met is not an editorial decision, it is a political one,” she said.

Weiss’s tenure has also coincided with the departure of Anderson Cooper, who left 60 Minutes in May. In his final episode, Cooper stressed the importance of the program’s editorial freedom, in remarks seen as a jab at Weiss and CBS.

Simon was fired and replaced by Nick Bilton, a tech journalist with zero experience in broadcast television, in late May. Pelley reportedly said in a staff meeting last week that Bilton would “never be welcome” at the show—the final straw for CBS’s new upper brass, who fired Pelley a day later.

After Iran launched a salvo of missile strikes against Israel Sunday, its first attack since the April 8 ceasefire, Trump insisted that he still maintained control of the situation.

The U.S. president told Axios that he would instruct Netanyahu to refrain from hitting back against Iran. “I am going to call Bibi right now and tell him not to retaliate. Each of them had their fun. Israel had its strike, and Iran had its strike. We don’t need another one,” Trump said.

The president separately told the Financial Times that Israel would have to accept any deal that he made with Iran. “I call all the shots. Netanyahu doesn’t call the shots,” he insisted.

Just a few hours later, however, the Israeli Air Force launched a series of strikes against Iran anyway. As Netanyahu continued to do whatever he wanted, Trump quickly crumbled from “I call all the shots” to Please stop shooting!

“Israel and Iran must immediately stop ‘shooting.’ President DONALD J. TRUMP,” he wrote on Truth Social early Monday morning.

An hour later, Trump spun a new narrative: “Both sides, Israel and Iran, are looking to do an immediate CEASEFIRE! Final negotiations on ‘Peace’ are proceeding, subject to ignorance or stupidity getting in its way. The Blockade will remain in place, and in full force and effect, until a ‘Final Deal’ is reached. Things should move quickly,” he wrote on Truth Social.

Iran said Monday that it would suspend its attacks on Israel but would resume them if Israeli strikes continued against Lebanon—which seems likely. A senior Israeli official said that Israel had halted the strikes against Iran at Trump’s request. It’s clear, however, that Trump was either unable or unwilling to stop Netanyahu from retaliating in the first place.

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

Donald Trump is desperately trying to salvage the concert series celebrating America’s 250th anniversary after a number of celebrities pulled out. He unleashed a weird tirade on Truth Social in which he basically declared, don’t worry, I’ll be there, so it’ll be great. But we think this whole saga illustrates something deeper about Trump and MAGA’s growing toxicity inside the culture. Indeed, another Trump tirade about all this was strikingly revealing on that front. And this is all becoming apparent to even some MAGA figures who have reacted to all of it in surprising ways.

New Republic senior editor Alex Shephard writes really well about Trump, MAGA, and cultural politics. So we’re asking him what gives about all this today. Alex, always good to have you on, man.

Alex Shephard: It’s great to be back.

Sargent: So the organizers of what’s being called the Great American State Fair, which is being produced by the Trump-backed group Freedom 250 to be held on the National Mall, recently announced the slate of celebrities and musical acts who are set to attend. But then people started pulling out—the rapper Young MC, Poison’s Bret Michaels, country music star Martina McBride, the Commodores, all out. Alex, can you recap what happened here?

Shephard: Well, I mean, it’s a little hard to figure out, but based on the initial announcement and statements from the artists, what it seems like happened is that this group that is organizing the Great American State Fair went to artists and seems to have maybe downplayed the political nature of this, a sort of pro-Trump rally, essentially. Since it sort of has fallen apart after it became apparent what this actually was, Trump has tried to step in and save it with his own star power, essentially.

Sargent: Well, Trump puts out this tirade on Truth Social in which he suddenly says, we don’t really want singers there. He goes on and he says, the “fabulous Lee Greenwood” will introduce me and the singer Christopher Macchio will sing, plus a few musical groups from the armed forces.

And then Trump hits his climax, saying that the event will be attended by, “a fine and highly dignified gentleman known as President Donald J. Trump.”

Boy, I don’t know, Alex, that doesn’t sound like a must-see, does it?

Shephard: I mean, I think I would still probably rather sit through a Trump rally than watch Vanilla Ice and Milli Vanilli perform. But no, it does not seem very good. I mean, this is a farce, right? Because how much can a concert featuring Vanilla Ice and Milli Vanilli really celebrate America?

But still, the idea here was to have some sort of event befitting of the country’s 250th anniversary, birthday, whatever you want to call it. And instead, we’re just going to get another Trump rally on the National Mall.

Sargent: Exactly. I just want to highlight one other thing Trump says here in this tirade. He says this: “We don’t want singers with no talent. We’ve told them all to stay home.”

I mean, Alex, that’s basically, you’re not breaking up with me, I’m breaking up with you. Your thoughts on that?

Shephard: Where’s the lie? I think he’s not wrong. But as with many of, you know, him calling out Omarosa or whatever, you’re like, you invited them to begin with. It’s embarrassing for you that you invited them. It’s even more embarrassing that they pulled out.

And it’s even more embarrassing than that that you’re doing a rally with Lee Greenwood, who, by the way—I had to look this up before—is even older than Donald Trump. He is at least three years older than Trump. And this guy who’s like an imitation of Pavarotti. It’s preposterous. But again, I think it does kind of capture where we are, less than two years into the second term.

Sargent: Well, let’s talk about that because you’ve written really well on it. You’ve written on the fact that after Trump won in 2024, there was kind of an opening for Trump and MAGA to really make inroads into the culture. It was like there was a little Trump boomlet.

There was sort of a passing sense—or at the time it didn’t even feel passing, it felt like scary, durable. At that moment it felt like Donald Trump has tapped into something that we didn’t know is there. And that was a scary feeling for a while there. Can you talk about that atmosphere at the time and what people kind of concluded about it?

Shephard: Yeah, I mean, it was something that I was writing about and reporting on a fair amount right after Trump won. But I think that there was a sense that for the first time since his movement really started in the summer of 2015, there was carte blanche to just love Trump if you wanted to, or to embrace Trump without repercussions.

People have obviously always embraced him, but there’s always been a sense that doing so would have professional, personal, familial, whatever repercussions you can think of. And I think what we saw immediately after—I wrote at the time about where you were just seeing the Trump dance at every NFL game, at U.S. men’s national soccer games. And it was this sense that the culture had just kind of said, this is who we are, this is part of where we’re going.

And I had felt like I missed that. And you saw this too—things like there was a UFC fight right after the election and Joe Burrow, the quarterback for the Cincinnati Bengals, embracing him. And it just kind of felt like something that wasn’t there before. And it felt alarming because it seemed like there were just inroads, particularly with, whatever we call it, the man-o-sphere now, but even bigger than that. NFL, U.S. men’s soccer, these kinds of things. And even some hip-hop music too.

And now it’s just all gone. None of it’s there. Again, Young MC, Martina McBride—that’s the best that they could do. Morris Day and the Time—that’s the best that they could do to start here. And when we got to the end of the road, it’s not even that.

Sargent: Yeah. I think another way to put this is that Trump and MAGA had this brief moment and this brief chance at winning the culture that was sort of created by a bunch of fluke conditions. Joe Biden’s age, Biden’s refusal to get out of the race in time, the post-COVID shock, inflation, and an information environment that was just so deeply screwed up that all these low-information voters—young people who were just starting to get into voting and into politics—made their decisions based on TikTok videos mocking Harris and TikTok videos just lying to them about Trump’s true agenda.

And that was a weirdly devastating moment. But Trump and MAGA just pissed away the chance that was created for them by this weird confluence of circumstances, I think.

Shephard: I think there are two other things that I don’t think you mentioned. One was the arrest and the mugshot in particular, and then also the assassination attempt and the photograph. And I think that there was a sense of there being a kind of transgressiveness, that this was edgy and it reflected something that was different than Joe Biden stumbling around or Kamala Harris’s carefully focus-grouped campaigning.

And I think that in a lot of ways, I was certainly alarmist about it, and I probably should have just looked at recent history when I was catastrophizing. Because I think what happened is what always happens. Which is that, one, you realize that this guy is completely incompetent, out of his mind, and he’s completely self-obsessed too.

So you don’t get to graft onto him. It always ends up the other way around. He always destroys anything that latches onto him. And ultimately, you have no choice but to separate yourself from it because it is an all-consuming blob, essentially, that just devours anything that gets close enough to it.

Sargent: Yeah, and I think there’s another thing about this as well that’s a little bit darker, which is that Donald Trump had this chance to really make these types of inroads, but then they decided to hurt the country instead in every conceivable way that they could. It’s not like all these artists who are pulling out are simply expressing their personal distaste for Trump.

It’s not like they have Trump Derangement Syndrome. It’s that they have these fan bases that hate Trump and MAGA—and for a reason. They hate Trump and MAGA because Trump and MAGA are hurting and fucking over a lot of people and wrecking our country and our common life together.

Shephard: Trump, when he came into office, was riding this wave and he loved it. He was finally getting the kind of adulation that he always wanted from the sources that he always wanted—not the dumb hicks that come to his events, but from the actual culture. And he could have continued to get that if he had tried to govern like a normal president. And again, he’s just not capable of it.

Instead, he’s governing like Donald Trump. And I think with this event, he’s been really kind of hidden from the public view in a lot of ways. But this event is going to be one of several instances in which he’s stepping out into the open, I think, between now and July 4.

Sargent: I think it’s also worth reflecting on the fact that MAGA is alienating the culture because of MAGA’s actual vision for the country. Let’s remember that the culture started to turn on them pretty rapidly after that brief moment they had, in large part because of the ICE raids, which ended up flooding people’s phones for months on end with searing imagery of Trump’s paramilitary armies terrorizing immigrants and Americans and shooting people in the head.

They threw away their chance to win the culture because they were so hell-bent on not just hurting as many people as possible, but also in service of this kind of vision of a whiter country with millions of people deported via violent ethnic purges and race war.

I’m sorry, I’m pissed about it. What can I tell you?

Shephard: No, I mean, it’s right. I think also there’s Trump’s own bizarre ideas and his efforts in this term to make himself a great president, whatever that means. The Liberation Day tariffs, the insane kidnapping of Maduro in Venezuela, the war in Iran, the Kennedy Center renaming.

All of this stuff is this sort of desperate legacy-building exercise that is backfiring tremendously. But again, it’s what happens when you have an old man with a broken ego running the country.

Sargent: Trump got annoyed by all these people pulling out of the show. And he tweeted this: “I am thinking about bringing the number one attraction anywhere in the world. The man who gets much larger audiences than Elvis in his prime. The man who some say is the greatest president in history, to take the place of these third-rate artists.” Alex, who’s he talking about?

Shephard: Well, he is talking about himself. And again, if Colonel Tom Parker had treated Elvis with the respect that his celebrity deserved, maybe he would have played to even larger crowds, but I digress. I think that this is the problem here, right, is that there’s nothing else.

And part of it, again, is if you look ahead—it’s hard to look ahead right now—but if you look ahead just a little bit to the future, it makes me wonder about Trump’s succession plans, because he can’t let anybody else take the spotlight. And so his only answer when there is a problem like this is to just say, I will fill it. My celebrity.

And one, I think that this is more of a risk than he’s considering. As is, I think, his plan to attend game three at Madison Square Garden of the NBA Finals. As is, I think, his probable appearance at least at the World Cup final in July. Because people hate him right now. Even his own supporters are turning away from him.

And his idea is always to just do the same thing, which is he’s got to go on stage and he’s got to ramble for an hour and a half. He’s got to read the snake poem or whatever and talk about Crooked Hillary and Jerome Powell’s mortgage application or whatever is bothering him at that moment.

There was a point at which, in the very early part of this, there was a kind of thrilling, what-will-he-say-or-do attitude here. That was 10 years ago or more now.

Sargent: So just in response to what Trump tweeted, that crazy thing about him being more popular than Elvis, we saw a MAGA figure, Matt Walsh, tweet something. He said this:

“I’m actually pretty pissed at how badly they bungled America 250. First, they tried to invite washed-up geriatric one-hit wonders. Then when that didn’t work out, they decided to convert the event into a Trump rally where Trump will talk about himself for 90 minutes.”

Alex, Trump’s megalomania has gotten so out of control that even MAGA figures can’t take it anymore.

Shephard: Even fellow megalomaniacs can’t take it anymore. I mean, I think that, as with a lot of criticisms of Trump, it sort of begs a question, which is, what was it supposed to be? There is a sober celebration of America’s culture. You can look, for instance, at things like the kinds of concerts that Barack Obama hosted in the White House throughout his presidency that were showcasing a diversity of American music and values, frankly, as well.

And that’s not possible here, because everything has to be made from whole cloth—or, to use the ballroom or arch as representative, it has to be this very rigid idea of America that’s either perfect classical architecture, which has never really been a through line in this country, or something that perfectly embodies the spirit of Trump himself. There’s just nothing that exists that fits that bill.

And again, we’re a year and a half in and gas costs $5 a gallon everywhere. So who really wants to participate in that anyway? But I think that this is not somebody, or this is not an administration, that is interested in honoring or celebrating American history or culture to begin with. So why would you expect that to even happen at all?

Sargent: Right. For them, the only thing that really is worth celebrating is the MAGA-adjacent stuff in the culture. And I want to close on that concept because Trump’s propagandists are very sensitive to this idea, to this hope that Trump can get penetration into the culture.

So during his first term, you might remember that anytime he went to a college football game in Alabama or in a red state or something and he’d get enormous cheers, his propagandists would plaster that all over Twitter, trying to show Trump’s penetration as this tribune of the people, as someone who was very deeply in touch with what’s going on, with the American public or the zeitgeist or whatever.

But the thing is, they can’t make much headway beyond the Trump-adjacent areas of the culture, the MAGA-adjacent areas of the culture. They consider sporting events to be kind of their part of the culture, but then they deliberately avoid bringing ICE to a Los Angeles baseball game because they know the fan bases there are heavily Latino and filled with a lot of liberals. So it’s almost like they run up against a wall when they try to get outside of the MAGA-adjacent areas of the culture. You know what I mean?

I think this almost speaks to a robustness in the culture, a diversity that they can’t steamroll. Does that make sense?

Shephard: Yeah, I mean, I think that part of it too is that so much of that is also limited to the celebrity and charisma of Donald Trump. I think he does still represent—and can still go to some places and get this kind of response—a metaphor for a pugilistic and nativist kind of American politics.

But people, when they see that politics in action outside of Donald Trump, they recoil. The movement, this MAGA movement, is limited to Donald Trump. It doesn’t have extensions in the culture really beyond a foothold in the UFC. It doesn’t even have extensions in American politics. He will be succeeded probably by Marco Rubio or JD Vance, but they will never have the kind of adulation or cultural resonance that he does.

And so you’re left with this kind of empty vessel, which is this soon-to-be-80-year-old guy standing up and delivering a 90-minute speech in place of C+C Music Factory and Vanilla Ice. And those are your options. And I think that if you’re looking for something to be hopeful about, it’s that. It’s that there has not been this kind of cultural resonance.

And again, with this concert, with probably Trump’s appearance in Madison Square Garden on Monday, with probably Trump’s appearance at a U.S. men’s national team game or several World Cup games—there’s going to be a real example of just what the American people think of him, and it’s not going to be pretty.

Sargent: I think that’s exactly right. I think what you’re really getting at there is that at the core of MAGA is this bizarre kind of howling emptiness. There’s just nothing really there except for Trump’s megalomania and his self-enrichment and his absolutely bottomless need for attention and adulation—and he never gets enough anyway. Alex Shephard, always great to talk to you, man. Thanks for coming on.

Shephard: Yeah, thank you.

Overall, homelessness dropped 3 percent to 745,652 people, according to the 2025 Annual Homelessness Assessment Report. It’s the first decrease in national homelessness in years, following the 12 percent and 18 percent spikes that were reported in the 2023 and 2024 counts, respectively. The report, compiled from homeless counts done by local authorities around the nation in January 2025, reflects changes from the previous year. That means that this year’s report largely examines the changes that occurred during the final year of the Biden administration, not the first under Donald Trump. However, in its press release accompanying the 2025 Annual Homelessness Assessment Report, HUD Secretary Scott Turner decided to talk about a different issue.

“The data is clear that the status quo of ‘housing first’ has failed to meaningfully reduce homelessness, resulting in crisis levels of people living on the streets,” Turner said. “HUD is restoring its programs to advance recovery and self-sufficiency and to ensure that taxpayer-funded benefits serve American families.” The HUD announcement also took the time to note that homelessness is up 27 percent since January 2013 and that any decreases in the 2025 report were “attributable to decreases in Sanctuary Cities.” 

The words “sanctuary,” “sanctuary cities,” or “housing first” do not appear in the report.

The May 29 release of the report was a prelude to more attacks on housing-first policies—which, as the name suggests, prioritizes putting people into housing with low barriers, be it by building new units or funding rapid rehousing programs—as well as an increased focus on addiction and mental health issues, even though most Americans experiencing homelessness don’t deal with those conditions. On Monday, HUD released a revised plan for homelessness, pushing money to deal with drugs and mental health, which it calls the “root causes of homelessness.” In a statement, Turner again attacked housing-first policies, saying, “Housing alone will not solve a crisis driven by addiction and mental illness.” It’s a drastic shift that moves money away from federally backed housing programs to a dubious new approach to the crisis that’s not supported by the data. 

All the same, it’s not a surprising move. Trump, JD Vance, and their allies have opposed housing first and other forms of assistance to people living on the streets or on the brink of homelessness for quite some time. Throughout the 2024 election and since taking power, the administration has repeated claims that homelessness is driven by addiction or mental health issues, linking homelessness to criminal activity and, by extension, a punitive policy approach. Other Republican politicians have taken up the rhetoric for their own purposes—Spencer Pratt, the reality-television heel currently running to be mayor of Los Angeles, has, in somewhat ham-handed fashion, deployed these talking points on the campaign trail.  

This is all despite the fact that the report found some slight improvement in the overall homelessness picture. “So much of the progress reflected in the 2025 PIT Count is due to targeted housing and service resources that were available in 2024 to rehouse people, including the highly successful Emergency Housing Voucher program, and new funds to address rural and unsheltered homelessness,” Ann Oliva, CEO of the National Alliance to End Homelessness, said in a separate statement. “Unfortunately, the Trump Administration has largely deprioritized these tools and worked to dismantle the very systems that drove these reductions.”

The count itself is what is known as a “point-in-time” count. It does not reflect thousands of Americans who fell into homelessness over those 12 months for short periods of time due to disasters, financial strain, or other hardships but were able to get rehoused. Still, it is a window into just who is homeless in the United States: 266,320 were unsheltered. Approximately 155,750 of the total unhoused population is chronically unhoused. Veteran homelessness, which has been cut by more than half since a record high of more than 74,000 in 2010, dropped 1 percent in the 2025 count. That is a victory, but also a notable flatlining compared to the 8 percent drop in the 2024 count. 

Even in the Democrat-led cities the administration has gone after—and repeatedly accused of being overrun by crime and homelessness—the number of unhoused Americans went down. The 2025 count noted that Los Angeles’s continuum of care, in particular, saw the largest decline in chronic or long-term homelessness, down 2,394 over the previous year. The report specifically noted continuums of care, attributing declines to “additional projects opening, use of coordinated entry to move unsheltered individuals into affordable housing units, quicker placements into housing, increased outreach to transition chronically homeless individuals into permanent housing,” among other reasons. These are the same mitigation approaches the administration is now disclaiming as ineffective.

The economy of Biden’s final year in office wasn’t particularly rosy. A recent study by the Brookings Institution found that nearly half of the country’s households didn’t make enough to make ends meet. Homelessness is a case of precarity and scarcity, and thousands of Americans remain on the brink of, or are even briefly experiencing, being unhoused.

The release of the report was several months delayed. The fall government shutdown likely played a role, although a HUD spokesperson told NBC News earlier this year there was no set release date. But the 16-month wait leaves local authorities waiting for information that normally helps set policy. The extremely quiet release of the data is telling: The annual count is an important tool used to help guide housing efforts and funding programs—the longer it is delayed, the harder it is for communities to plan for their response to affordability and housing crises.

The delay also means that the most “current” data is already out of date, in many ways. Because the count covers the last year of an administration that is no longer governing, it can’t account for any trajectory-altering effects of any of the new policies the Trump administration has pushed on housing or homelessness, nor does it show how tariffs and the government’s cuts to SNAP are hurting families and individuals relying on those programs to stay afloat. 

Even the 2026 count, whose final numbers are still months from being released, won’t reflect the ongoing economic strain of the energy shock and geopolitical disruptions of the war with Iran. It’s highly likely that the millions of Americans struggling to get by are dealing with worse conditions than any of our available data can reflect. But the administration is barreling forward with a plan of its own: Denigrate if not scuttle the programs designed to help people get back into housing quickly, while leaning back into depicting spurious and stereotypical symptoms of homelessness as the root causes. There is no telling when we might have a timely and accurate depiction of the homeless population again, but everything the administration is doing suggests that there will not be gains, marginal or otherwise, to celebrate.

Like his real-life model, Baranov is a lapsed artist with a knack for stagecraft. He’s a former avant-garde theater director turned reality-television producer who willingly sells out and takes over the stewardship of Vladimir Putin’s public image in the early 2000s, manning his post through the Kadyrov Pact and the dog days of Russiagate in the United States to the inception of the Ukrainian war. The culture warrior-to-apparatchik pipeline makes for a fascinating and disconcerting professional case study. Resentful of what he perceives as the decadent and desultory sophistication of his fellow intellectuals—and attuned to an ambient yearning among the masses to Make Russia Great Again—Baranov styles himself as an amplifier for a strongman’s vox populi rhetoric. Putin has a penchant for appearing bare-chested in manly poses, and Baranov uses that charisma as a blunt instrument to renovate the country’s dilapidated power structure.

Whereas the world-weary Boris Yeltsin required propping up in public appearances, Putin towers proudly before the cameras. An avatar of vertikal vlasti, he stands at the peak of a top-down power structure predicated on the paranoid supplication of staffers and civilians alike. Baranov has no illusions about Putin’s hardwired authoritarian nature even as he works fast and furiously to conjure illusions for others. “There is nothing wiser,” he explains wryly, “than to bet on the madness of men.”

On the page, The Wizard of the Kremlin excels as a twisty, fact-based picaresque about high-rollers gambling with matters of life and death, and hung up on the breakneck exhilaration of letting it ride. Olivier Assayas’s film version of The Wizard of the Kremlin is impressively faithful to its source’s speed and sprawl, as well as to its Matryoshka-like narrative structure. In the adaptation, with a screenplay co-written by Assayas and French novelist Emmanuel Carrère, an American academic, Lawrence Rowland (Jeffrey Wright), visits the wily, worldly Baranov (Paul Dano). They are, ostensibly, to discuss the work of dissident Soviet satirist Yevgeny Zamyatin, whose 1924 dystopian novel, We—an acknowledged influence on George Orwell’s 1984—is a point of mutual interest. Like a lot of like-minded literary types, they first connected online, but Baranov wants to do more than host a Russian-lit book club. He takes Lawrence’s visit to his snowy dacha as a cue to methodically recount the phases of his sentimental education.

One of Assayas’s specialties is capturing the heady sensations endemic to coming-of-age, especially for those striving to live la vie bohème; his best movies, including Cold Water (1994) and Something in the Air (2012), perch on the proverbial edge of 17. He’s thus in his sweet spot restaging Bara­nov’s salad days as a precocious, overgrown child of privilege. We get sweaty, shirtless punk-rock shows; salacious performance art interludes; rhetorical dick-measuring contests; bondage play and S&M theatrics; and, more centrally, decades-spanning situationship between Baranov and high-maintenance party-girl Ksenia (Alicia Vikander), whose luscious corruptibility—exemplified by her attraction to designer items and the men who subsidize their acquisition—has a symbolic dimension.

Ksenia isn’t so much a character as an avatar of the hedonism unleashed by the thawing of the Cold War, and the film unfolds as an exploration of how these freedoms give way to ever-deeper and more insidious forms of repression. If Baranov is a wizard, he has also fallen under his own spell; his Rasputin-ish powers of persuasion extend to a form of self-hypnosis, whereby he grows steadily insensible to the consequences of his increasingly ruthless rhetoric.

The writer Eduard Limonov once paid Surkov a backhanded compliment by saying he’d managed to turn Russia into a massive postmodern theatrical production, and the same could be said of Baranov. Glimpses of his earlier stage and television work hint at real talent and avant-garde nerve veiled by an increasingly expedient cynicism, and Assayas maps the process by which opportunism engulfs artistic expression. “Stop making up stories and start inventing reality,” instructs scheming oligarch Boris Berezovsky (Will Keen), who has recruited Baranov and his collaborators to Putin’s ranks. Berezovsky and his cronies are looking to consolidate their economic interests, and they’re betting on Putin as the man who can ram through their agenda (they’ll come to rue that decision). The group’s offer to Bara­nov entails things that any aspiring auteur would kill for: a big budget, access to the best equipment, and the means to reach a mass audience hungry for a mix of tradition and sensationalism.

Baranov is just the man to cross those streams, as fluent in nineteenth-century literature as he is in MTV (Surkov once claimed to be fond of Tupac Shakur and Jackson Pollock), and he begins to do so readily, enabled by more relaxed attitudes toward Western tactics in the post-USSR era. He’s packaging his star client as a hybrid figure, a relic of the KGB with his eyes on a better future; “what interests me is power,” says Putin in the trailer, played by a dead-eyed, jaw-jutting Jude Law, coming through with a suitably cold and calculating performance—all coiled, tensile strength and unapologetic contempt, tinged here and there with judicious bits of ridiculousness (as when we see him jet-skiing and pumping iron like Arnold Schwarzenegger).

Law’s ex–pretty boy status is slightly distracting; when Putin pouts that the Americans treat him like he’s the president of Finland, Law could be back in The Talented Mr. Ripley, whining that Matt Damon won’t stop crowding him. His British accent, too, is notable: When The Wizard of the Kremlin premiered—a bit unprepossessingly, considering its pedigree—at last fall’s Venice and Toronto Film Festivals, critics made much of Assayas’s decision to have all of the major characters speak in English without put-on Russian inflections; the critic for the U.K.-based film magazine Sight and Sound jeered at “the mild irony of having oligarchs speak in the jargon of Canary Wharf.” Yet given the underlying themes of globalization, it should be clear that such tactics are deliberate: “Making the film in English gave it something more universal,” Assayas told an interviewer about the film’s casting and dialogue. The use of the techniques from television to manipulate an entertainment-addicted public and puff up a strongman is hardly unique to Russia, after all.

Like a lot of recent ruling-class satires, from Succession to The Apprentice, The Wizard of the Kremlin luxuriates in first-class textures—VIP sections and pri-vate yachts; inner-circle briefings and closed-door meetings—and Assayas does his best to communicate a wry skepticism toward his backdrops; Putin haunts his own boardrooms and offices like a Bond villain. Typically one of the most agile filmmakers around, Assayas only occasionally seems to lose his bearings while navigating the corridors of state power, largely because he’s covering a lot of ground. Even at 136 minutes, the film has to move quickly to accommodate the rollicking, globe-trotting plot. On the one hand, the speediness of the storytelling risks reducing significant events—like the possible false-flag bombings in Moscow used to shore up support for the Second Chechen War—to Wikipedia-thin plot points; on the other, it reinforces the idea of Baranov as an entertainer slinging tidy, crowd-pleasing narratives. He’s a master of playing both sides against the middle; he even stage-manages leather-clad radicals who play his own private pet dissenters. By the time he’s laying out his plan to use the Sochi Olympic opening ceremonies as a time-traveling victory lap through Russian culture, he’s become an embodiment of the idea that history is not only written by the winners, but also redacted, dumbed-down, and punctuated with exclamation points. Baranov calls his proposed show the “apotheosis of kitsch”; his shamelessness is not a black mark but a badge of honor. The line might also be a skeleton key unlocking Assayas’s own strategy here: deluxe, slightly stilted geopolitical kitsch doubling as satirical commentary on its own existence.

It’s surely intentional that Law’s Putin barely develops over the course of the story: His almost cryogenic quality of physical and behavioral stasis is a by-product of the same malignant narcissism that propels his policies. What’s trickier, and more important, to reconcile is the terrifically accomplished, increasingly enervating redundancy of Dano’s performance, which grows stiffer as Baranov ages into complacency. His hollowed-out delivery is a feat in and of itself; it either reflects Baranov’s descent into a downward spiral of well-spoken sophistry—“politics is the only game worth playing,” he drones, as if on sinister autopilot—or a filmmaker and his star drawing a blank and calling it portraiture.

That cipherlike quality makes sense insofar as Baranov is a vaporous, abstract presence in a movie that strives for tactile, ripped-from-the-headlines authenticity: the Adman Who Isn’t There. In this way, The Wizard of the Kremlin works as a less grabby and more rewarding study than a biopic like Ali Abbasi’s The Apprentice (2024), which tried to earnestly psychologize Donald Trump’s Daddy issues and ended up playing—at least in stretches—like a po-faced Saturday Night Live sketch. Assayas doesn’t pretend to fully understand his antihero, much less to know better than him, and cultivates just enough bewildered distance in the process to give his film the sort of mystic-slash-metaphysical frisson promised by its title.

He also alters the novel’s ending in a way that honors its exquisite bleakness while carving out a thin, jagged sliver of poetic justice. In the book, Baranov is resigned to a frosty exile, surveying the wreckage he helped to create (“there will still be something, but it won’t be humanity”). The movie provides a more decisive conclusion. The epilogue fuses ruthlessness and mercy, offering a sinister wizard a way out of his own private Oz; Assayas’s literal parting shot raises larger questions about crime, punishment, and who gets to play executioner.

These endeavors were inspired by President Donald Trump, whose exhortations last year for Texas lawmakers to redraw their maps in favor of his party kicked off a frenzy of tit-for-tat redistricting from both GOP-controlled and Democratic-led states, with Republicans in particular benefiting under the aegis of the conservative-majority Supreme Court. Meanwhile, Trump has successfully challenged some of the GOP state legislators that stood in the way of his redistricting plan, supporting primary opponents more likely to follow his bidding.

Legal experts worry that the end result of this partisan gerrymander scramble will be a reduction in fair representation in the U.S. House, with Republican voters in blue states and Democrats in red states less likely to have their voices heard. Moreover, Democratic-leaning nonwhite voters could see their political power considerably diluted—if not wiped out entirely in the red states racing to delete majority-minority districts.

“By 2028, I think we are likely to be looking at a radically and maximally gerrymandered national map, in which blue states elect almost entirely blue delegations, red states elect just about entirely red delegations,” worried David Daley,  a senior fellow at the civic organization FairVote and the author of Ratf**ked: Why Your Vote Doesn’t Count. “It’s the kind of map we’ve seen before in this country. It’s just that back then, we called it the Union and the Confederacy.”

Since Trump called on Texas to redraw its maps last year, several states have undertaken this process, resulting in new districts ahead of the midterms. These efforts could add up to a dozen or more new Republican House seats after the November elections. Although some Democratic states—notably California, the most populous state—have punched back, other efforts have been rebuffed. An attempt to redraw Virginia’s electoral map to add new Democratic seats in 2026 was struck down by the state Supreme Court. Meanwhile, both Republican- and Democratic-majority states will take up redistricting ahead of the 2028 cycle. (In their gerrymandering efforts, some Democratic-led states have argued that this is a temporary measure intended to counter Republican mid-decade redistricting.)

Omar Noureldin, senior vice president of policy and litigation at Common Cause, a government watchdog group that supports national redistricting reform, said allowing politicians to “choose their voters” would skew lawmakers’ incentives away from the constituents they purport to represent.

“When politicians don’t believe that there is accountability, that allows for those politicians to advance either their personal interests or very narrow political interests—by the wealthy, the well-connected, corporations,” said Noureldin. As a result, he continued, Congress will become “less and less responsive to the needs of everyday Americans.”

In April, the Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais weakened the 1965 Voting Rights Act, making it much more difficult to challenge partisan gerrymanders that dilute the power of minority voters. Piling onto the preexisting map-redrawing efforts in states such as Ohio, Texas, and Missouri, additional GOP-controlled Southern states moved this spring to redraw their congressional maps with the goal of reducing the number of Democratic districts. This will result in reduced representation for Black voters.

In early June, the Supreme Court paved the way for Alabama to eliminate one of two majority-Black districts, in an unsigned shadow-docket decision. This proposed map had been struck down by a lower court, which included two Trump-appointed judges. To Kareem Crayton, a vice president for the Brennan Center for Justice, a think tank focused on democracy and voting rights, this decision demonstrates how the conservative majority on the court believes drawing maps to benefit Republicans is wholly divorced from how it might affect minority voters—who overwhelmingly vote for Democrats.

“This court seems way more attentive to the concerns of protecting power than they are to the Constitution’s attention to assuring that voters have their say,” said Crayton.

The current race to gerrymander congressional districts is not unprecedented in the modern era. Republicans underwent a concerted effort ahead of the 2010 election to win state legislative majorities with the goal of controlling redistricting after that year’s census. Daley said that Republicans were able to successfully gain control of several state legislatures because “Democrats were fully asleep to the importance of this issue.”

However, there was also a bid during that decade to push back against gerrymandering. Four of the nine states with independent commissions saw them established after the 2010 census. Support for independent redistricting particularly soared in 2018, when voters in five states approved reforms to make the process of drawing congressional and legislative maps less political.

Experts say that a 2019 Supreme Court decision opened the door to the redistricting wars of the present moment. The conservative majority’s decision in Rucho v. Common Cause found that federal courts did not have the power to police partisan gerrymandering.

“Regardless of whether or not it’s wrong, they just said they wouldn’t address it, which just left a free-for-all. Now states each have their own standard which they’re governing themselves by,” said Simone Leeper, senior legal counsel for redistricting at the Campaign Legal Center, which has challenged some of these new maps. “What we’re seeing now is the natural result of the Supreme Court’s choice not to have a national standard.”

Leeper noted that racial gerrymandering is still theoretically illegal, even if the Voting Rights Act has been “severely undercut.” She added that it is still possible to challenge certain redistricting efforts on the state level in states where there are prohibitions on partisan gerrymandering; for example, the Campaign Legal Center is engaged in a lawsuit in Florida, where voters in 2010 approved an amendment to bar redistricting that favors one party. However, it does make state-by-state reform that much more difficult.

In most states, the legislature draws congressional districts with the approval of the governor, although some require a supermajority to adopt a map. Nine states have independent redistricting commissions, which are intended to create electoral districts without undue political influence, but with consideration for fair representation and adherence to federal and state constitutions.

“What we learned is that it is possible to have more fair redistricting. It’s possible to have groups of independent people who are representative of their states come together applying fair redistricting criteria, and the result is maps that are substantially more fair,” said Leeper. But she added that “in the absence of a national standard,” independent states may be less likely to pursue independent redistricting commissions in the future.

Because the number of states that have independent redistricting commissions is so low, their impact on a national scale is relatively limited. It creates an “imbalance,” said Noureldin, where some states have fair representation while others are wholly partisan.

“Independent redistricting processes in of themselves work, but only if everyone is using them,” said Noureldin. “If not, then they’re not actually working to achieve a fair map across the congressional landscape.”

Supporters of anti-gerrymandering reforms agree that, with a Supreme Court intent on creating stricter scrutiny for racial gerrymanders, any truly effective action to change redistricting would need to occur on a national level. Some organizations advocate for more proportional representation in Congress, or reforms to the Supreme Court, although it’s far from certain whether these ideas could garner necessary support from lawmakers.

There have been recent unsuccessful congressional efforts to address gerrymandering. In 2021, when Democrats held both the White House and both chambers of Congress, legislation that would have made it difficult for states to impose partisan gerrymandering came close to passage. Although it was approved in the House, it failed in the Senate, as the narrow Democratic majority was unable to end the legislative filibuster.

If Democrats win the White House and both chambers of Congress in 2028, Daley believes that they should take the opportunity to end the filibuster and approve legislation to bar partisan gerrymandering on a national level. He noted that the 2030 census—which will precede another round of redistricting—will reflect a loss of population in several blue states and an increase in several red states, meaning that Democrats are slated to lose seats in the House to the Republicans’ gain. If they do not account for that future, Daley argued, it will become increasingly difficult to gain a majority in the years to come.

“This is a much more effective long-term game for Republicans than it is for Democrats, and if Democrats don’t look ahead to what’s coming in the 2030 census and reform this, if given the shot in 2028, they’re going to be in the wilderness for a long time,” said Daley.

Voter backlash to gerrymandering could counter some of these efforts to skew the game in their favor. It’s possible that Republicans in Texas and Florida, for example, could witness the “dummymander” effect, in which Democrats could flip a seat intended to favor Republicans because the GOP state lawmakers spread their supporters too thin across districts. Crayton also noted that Senate seats, which represent an entire state, cannot be gerrymandered. If there’s a president who supports gerrymandering reform, and a Congress willing to act, he argued that the lawmakers who support partisan gerrymandering could see greater fallout than they expect.

“Gerrymandering works to a point. It has a lot of collateral damage. But at some point or another, the dam breaks,” Crayton said. “When it does, people are going to be a little dismayed,” he said, and the resulting reform might be “more sweeping than they would even imagine.”

“They will have themselves to thank for it,” he said.

This is just how Collins wants things. As long as the subject is Platner’s boozing and his ex-girlfriends, Collins may skate to reelection. So the key thing Platner has to do, assuming he wins tomorrow’s primary and stays in the race, is to maneuver things such that come October, the topic is Collins’s record, not his past.

We’ll get to that record in a bit, but first, let’s deal with the Platner question. Two big stories came out last week. The first was about his sexting with several women in the early days of his current marriage. He married Amy Gertner in 2023. Early in the campaign, Gertner told an aide who was a friend about the messages, and the friend—now presumably an ex-friend—told a lot of people and shared some screen grabs with The New York Times. Gertner denounced the friend, Genevieve McDonald, and defended her husband and marriage. On that one, I think your average person would say, Well, if his wife doesn’t care, why should I?

The second story was potentially more damaging and concerned Platner allegedly twisting the arm of a former girlfriend and slamming a door shut on her; also, that he “regularly grabbed her by the shoulders,” according to The New York Times, which broke the story last Thursday. It’s disturbing, no doubt. It’s worth noting that this woman is, or was at the time, apparently a very committed conservative Republican—the co-founder of “Ladies for Kavanaugh,” which she formed to confront what she termed the “baseless, 11th^-hour accusations orchestrated to stop [the justice’s] confirmation.” (One question the Times left on the table but that crossed my mind, and maybe yours, was how Platner could have said, “You are literally everything to me” to someone who, according to Newsweek, worked at the Heritage Foundation at the time.)

Two other exes told the Times of similar treatment from Platner. On the other hand, “several” other exes (dude got around!) described him as “a fun and caring partner,” and some remain friends with him to this day. Platner denies all the physical stuff, so someone is lying.

Personally, I don’t know what to make of the guy. I suspect he’s not telling the truth about his Nazi tattoo, and I’d bet you that he knew what it meant, but I also don’t think that makes him a Nazi. He has obviously lived a life that we would at the very least call picaresque. Balzac would have had fun with him.

There’s also the question of, as it is often said in politics, what else is out there. Any good campaign—and Susan Collins does run good campaigns—knows to sit on the really bad stuff until after Labor Day, although campaigns can’t always control when things are disclosed, and anyway, all the revelations about Platner seem to be coming from establishment Democrats who are unnerved by his lefty swagger.

There’s a lot we don’t know, and a chance we’ll find out all about it. I do, however, know these two things. One, Platner is almost certain to be the Democratic nominee. Two, short of revelations involving murder, rape, or a taste for child pornography, Platner needs to be backed by Democrats to the hilt. That may seem like a really low bar, and maybe it is. But I’m less interested in his personal life than I am in Collins’s public one, because that’s what really matters here.

So let us now return to the question of Collins’s week. The Senate cast a bunch of votes last week. And Collins did what she always does when she’s up for reelection—she voted with the Democrats on the ones people pay attention to, and as a Republican on the others.

There were a number of votes related to Donald Trump’s $1.8 billion slush fund. On most of those, like this one for example, she was one of maybe two or three Republicans (with Thom Tillis and Bill Cassidy, who are both retiring) voting with the Democrats. On other less highly visible matters, though, she went with her party and with Trump. Last Wednesday, the Senate rejected a resolution that would have overturned Trump’s rollback of Biden-era emissions standards for coal- and oil-fired power. She went party line on that one. The day before, she voted to confirm a federal judge for Kansas who, at his confirmation hearing, refused to say that Trump lost the 2020 election.

Ah, judges: This brings us to where Platner needs to direct attention in this campaign. Maine voters need to be reminded, to the tune of about $40 million worth of TV commercials, of Collins’s support for putting Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court. “He has been an exemplary public servant,” she said at the time. She hoped that Kavanaugh would be a unifying force on the court (riiiiight), and most infamously, she accepted his assurances that he saw Roe v. Wade as “settled law.” She was either lying about that or was the only person in America stupid enough to believe him. Platner should ask her, repeatedly, which it was.

Different voting studies place Collins’s record of supporting Trump’s initiatives at anywhere from 70 percent to 95 percent. Whichever the true figure, there’s bound to be material there. Platner needs this race to be about that voting record and all the stands for working-class Mainers that Collins hasn’t taken. I may have done some bad things, Platner might say; but one thing I haven’t done is spend the last 40 years helping pick the pockets of working-class people and transfer trillions of dollars to the very rich. (Collins has voted in favor of virtually every GOP tax cut bill over her career.)

If Platner has Mainers thinking about that in October, and barring truly disqualifying new revelations, he can win. And the Democratic Party needs to stop submarining him. Imperfect as he is, there’s a reason his campaign caught fire. Democrats ought to try to learn from that, not squirm away from it.

Unsurprisingly, the HHS secretary’s facts were off: The study he relied on doesn’t specifically mention teenage boys, about whom there is not enough data to support such a claim; the threat is not an “existential” one; and the point about 68-year-old men is just made up (fertility absolutely does decline with age, even if our gerontocracy doesn’t want to believe it).  

Still, he’s correct on the big picture: Some indicators suggest male fertility is declining. Sperm counts and sperm concentration declined worldwide by more than half between 1973 and 2018, according to one major data analysis. Many other studies show similar trends, although there are dissenting findings, and the issue remains somewhat controversial. One in 20 men face reduced fertility—hardly a reason to put humans on the endangered species list, but a legitimate public health concern and an understandable source of anxiety for those hoping to start families.

The issue has been preoccupying the right-wing manosphere for years, part of a collage of anxieties about masculinity that have fueled the rise of Trump. Sadly, Trump’s actual policies are poised to make the problem of male fertility decline much worse.

While researchers may not know exactly what’s behind the sperm count decline, they have identified some significant factors. A large body of research shows that water, air, and soil pollution is a huge factor in the drop in male fertility. Among pollutants, several of the biggest culprits are heavy metals, pesticides, dioxins, and phthalates. Towards the end of his term, President Biden imposed new rules on coal-fired power plants, limiting their freedom to dump arsenic, selenium, and mercury into the groundwater. Those heavy metals affect male sperm quality by disrupting endocrine functions and altering hormone levels. Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency is proposing to roll back that rule.

Not content to allow polluters to poison the water, the Trump administration, with Congress’s help, shredded much of the Clean Air Act last year, significantly weakening dioxin regulation. Dioxins, too, disrupt the endocrine system, with devastating impact on spermatogenesis—the development of sperm cells into sperm capable of fertilizing an egg. 

Given the link between air pollution and male infertility, it is not surprising that wildfires, which have a horrendous impact on air quality, directly affect male reproductive health. Researchers at the University of Washington who studied male sperm counts in the wildfire-ridden years from 2018 to 2022, found that sperm count and quality declined consistently during every major wildfire year. Trump’s EPA has specifically rejected climate as a legitimate reason for regulating air pollution. That means that numerous Biden-era regulations intended to ease climate change have been rolled back, a policy trend almost certain to make the climate crisis much worse, and to make climate disasters like wildfires even more frequent. In addition, Trump’s anti-immigration, anti-DEI policies—burdensome bureaucratic paperwork requirements forcing agencies to show that they are complying with the administration’s bans on diversity hiring and immigration restrictions—are weakening our ability as a society to fight and prevent such fires, by complicating and delaying the grants localities receive for that purpose. His cuts to the U.S. Forest Service—thousands lost their jobs in the DOGE rampage, and another bloodbath is underway with a “restructuring” this year closing many regional offices and research facilities—are likely to make matters even worse.

Then there is the administration’s lenient stance on pesticides, which 21 different studies over the last 20 years have shown reduce the sperm quality of male mice and rats. The Trump administration has angered even its MAHA base through its indulgent attitude toward pesticide manufacturers—particularly after it sided with Bayer, the maker of Roundup, in a Supreme Court case. Glyphosate, the chemical in Roundup, is associated with reduced sperm motility, among many other health problems.

“Forever chemicals,” so called because they are pollutants that persist in the environment and in our bodies for an alarmingly long time, also present a well-documented threat to sperm. PFAS, the most common type of these—found in drinking water, food, firefighting gear, and soccer fields, to name a few sources—disrupt hormones and endocrine functions and harm sperm quality, viability, and also ability to swim, which is called “motility.” Biden established the first-ever nationwide limits on PFAS in drinking water, a rule that the Trump EPA now wants to roll back.

Then there are phthalates, plasticizers, and so-called “everywhere chemicals,” because they are everywhere in our households and daily lives. Researchers in the U.K. found that exposure to phthalates slowed sperm motility and caused the resulting DNA to fragment, an effect that worsened with each additional dose. The Trump administration did study the problem and announce a plan to regulate workplace exposure to phthalates—good—but troublingly, in a move widely criticized by scientists and public health advocates, announced that it wouldn’t regulate phthalates in household or other consumer goods.

What’s curious about this apparent contradiction between stated concern and policy is that the pollution threat is no secret on the right. Kennedy and other MAGA-friendly influencers do correctly blame pesticides, endocrine disrupters, what RFK Jr. calls “the toxic soup” surrounding us all.  But they talk about it without acknowledging how Trump’s pro-polluter policies are exacerbating the situation.

Instead, RFK Jr. and others in the manosphere concerned about male fertility want to let the government off the hook, turning men’s fertility into an individual problem. Some offer wacky remedies, like putting your testicles in ice water or refraining from ejaculating (as men did in Victorian times and seem to be trying again. That won’t work. There is no advantage in storing it up for later). Other solutions to masculinity concerns peddled in the manosphere are manifestly ill advised for those concerned about fertility, like taking testosterone, which has been shown to harm sperm.

RFK and others also emphasize that leading a healthy lifestyle helps your fertility: good nutrition, exercising, reducing alcohol and nicotine use, and maintaining a healthy weight. That’s true! But such advice doesn’t address the significant environmental harms men are suffering at the population level—only cracking down on polluters can do that.

Democrats wring their hands about young male voters, who swung toward Trump in the last presidential election. But Democratic politicians rarely talk about fertility concerns, which is odd because their record on regulating the pollution that most affects male fertility is much better than Trump’s, to the point that they could directly point to Biden’s policies as a contrast. Perhaps they don’t want to come off as cringe, as Democrats so often do when trying to communicate with either young people or men. But by not talking about it, Democrats risk ceding the anxieties associated with the issue to far-right Republicans, the very group guaranteed to make it worse. 

So it’s sadly fitting that passage of this law has been greeted by what you might call its very own nullification movement.

That’s right: In a brewing situation that has gone largely overlooked, a number of county-based prosecutors in red areas of Virginia are publicly declaring that they will not enforce the new ban on assault-style weapons. This movement is taking shape as a direct, openly confrontational challenge to the authority of Spanberger and the Virginia legislature that passed the measure—and it only appears to be growing.

“It is an abdication by MAGA elected officials of their duty to enforce the law,” State Delegate Dan Helmer, a Democrat who represents a northern Virginia district and co-sponsored the measure, tells me. The law bans the sale, purchase, and manufacture of many military-style semiautomatic assault weapons and high-capacity magazines of more than 15 rounds, among other things.

At least nine of Virginia’s “commonwealth attorneys”—who are elected county-wide to serve as chief law enforcement officers—have now issued statements declaring that they don’t intend to uphold the new law. All the counties in question voted for Donald Trump in 2024 by lopsided margins—some by more than 40 or 50 points—and many are deeply rural.

“After careful review of the legislation and existing Supreme Court precedent, I find the assault weapons ban signed by the Governor unconstitutional—and as a result, unenforceable,” Phillip Blevins, the commonwealth attorney for Smyth County, recently announced. Smyth, a rural area in the Appalachian southwestern corner of Virginia, backed Trump by 60 points.

The stakes here are considerable. The law already faces legal challenges from gun rights groups. The groups and these prosecutors alike argue that assault-style rifles are in common use—and that banning them steps outside the nation’s historic traditions of firearm regulations—which under Supreme Court precedent, they say, renders Virginia’s law unconstitutional.

But the prosecutors are taking this further. They appear to be suggesting they won’t enforce the law, beginning the moment it takes effect on July 1, even if the courts haven’t weighed in by then (while vowing to still prosecute violent crimes). Though some of them describe this as exercising prosecutorial discretion, it seems to mean something more: that as a general matter, people who buy or sell these weapons illegally may simply not face prosecution.

Indeed, some of the prosecutors are even in effect arguing that the sovereignty of the people within these counties overrules the authority of the state legislature—which is also duly elected—and relieves them of any obligation to enforce its new gun-control law. Several sheriffs in the same counties have also declared their refusal to enforce it.

So now what? Virginia Attorney General Jay Jones, a Democrat, is warning these prosecutors that they must enforce the new measure.* “Commonwealth’s Attorneys are elected to enforce our laws, which is what we expect them to do when these laws take effect on July 1,” Jones said in an emailed statement. But his office hasn’t said whether it’s examining actions it might take against them or what actions, if any, are available.

This appears unlikely to go away and seems all but certain to come to a head. Indeed, Helmer, the delegate from Northern Virginia, argues that this movement is not mere posturing—it amounts to a direct challenge to state legislative authority.

“The context is a culture of lawlessness that pervades the Republican Party under Trump, and it’s extending down to Republican elected officials, who feel empowered to ignore the law,” Helmer told me. “Your duty, if you’re a commonweath attorney or a sheriff, is to enforce the law, and if you’re not willing to do that, you should resign.”

Helmer also pointed to the state’s recent history of high-profile gun killings. “The largest mass murders in U.S. history—and also in Virginia history—have been committed either with assault weapons, or high-capacity magazines, or both,” Helmer, who did tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, said. If future purchases go unprosecuted, he argued, it could lead to more “mass killing in our communities.”

Research suggests this is plausible. And efforts to act on assault-style weapons are aimed at curbing a whole range of violent crimes, not just mass shootings.

Spanberger has yet to comment on the growing rebellion. But it creates an awkward situation for her. In coming weeks, she is expected to preside over a signing ceremony for the law. If nearly a dozen county prosecutors—and perhaps more by then—are simultaneously vowing not to enforce it, that seems to challenge her in a fairly brazen way.

After all, Spanberger was elected statewide less than a year ago by a whopping 15-point margin, outperforming Kamala Harris’s 2024 margin there by nine points. Though Spanberger lost virtually all the red counties that are now rebelling against her law, she outperformed Harris in just about all of them, making inroads in very tough political territory.

In a sense, Virginia is experiencing something you might call “de-South-ification.” The state stretches from the growing, highly diverse, very populous suburbs in the north—which abut the urban areas of Washington, D.C.—down to diversifying Richmond in the southeast, even as its heavily rural southwestern tip reaches deep into Appalachia.

Spanberger’s stratospheric margins in the heavily populated northern suburbs, combined with her overperformances in deep-red areas, suggest the state’s MAGA and rural strongholds continue to shrink in clout (though the election of former GOP governor Glenn Youngkin slowed this process). That those areas are resisting enforcement of the first assault-style weapons ban in the South neatly captures the bigger transitions underway.

It’s notable that something similar is happening in North Carolina and even to some degree in Georgia. In North Carolina—the southern neighbor of Virginia—the eastern, urbanized, diverse areas are gaining in demographic clout over its rural areas, some of which also stretch deep into Appalachia. No question, North Carolina is well behind Virginia in this process. And Georgia is still extremely tough territory for Democrats.

But as Ron Brownstein details, the basic story connecting all these states—and even to some degree Texas—is that their combination of diversification and urbanization continues to nudge them in a Democratic direction. Trump’s successes—his 2024 inroads with nonwhites and blunting of Democratic margins in diverse, populous strongholds—has led many to doubt that demographic change necessarily favors Democrats. But in some important respects, demographics do continue to help Democrats, though they’re obviously insufficient on their own.

Spanberger’s overwhelming victory, the shrinking of MAGA clout in Virginia, and the rearguard resistance to enforcing her gun-control law in deep-red areas—amounting to a MAGA nullification movement of sorts—neatly capture all these deep tensions. The big outstanding question is: How will Spanberger navigate them?

* This piece originally misidentified Jay Jones.

It was not supposed to go this way. When FIFA, soccer’s international governing body, chose Brazil to host the 2014 World Cup in 2007, national leaders dreamed of a global showcase that would cement the country’s image as a rising power, a land of rhythm and joy welcoming the world with competence and grace. More than 60 years had passed since Brazil hosted a World Cup. On that occasion, the home squad fell to tiny Uruguay in a heartbreaking final upset. This time would be different. Stadiums would shine, fans would flood the streets, and the national team would lift the trophy once again on domestic soil, uniting a populace long accustomed to football glory.

But those dreams frayed in the years leading up to the tournament. Construction delays and spiraling costs fueled public outrage in a country still bedeviled by gross inequalities. Promises of lasting infrastructure improvements fell short. Multiple corruption scandals tainted FIFA and Brazil’s political class alike. Indeed, some of the largest protests ever seen in Brazil occurred in 2013, targeting the country’s self-dealing elite and fueling a toxic surge of anti-political sentiment. By the time the games began, the pageantry had lost its luster for many Brazilians. Journalist Dave Zirin described a “World Cup seen through tear gas,” with regular protests fouling up the otherwise palpable ebullience. The host’s historic humiliation at German hands was the sharpest proof in a growing body of evidence that something profound was amiss in Latin America’s largest nation. The 7–1 final score would epitomize a dispiriting decade.

“World Cups don’t change the world,” according to journalist Simon Kuper, “but they do illuminate it.” In World Cup Fever: A Soccer Journey in Nine Tournaments, he tries to explain how. Kuper writes for the Financial Times and is the author of several books about soccer and other topics. He is one of the few writers who has been to every World Cup since 1990. His personal experiences with the quadrennial tournament, relayed in short vignettes, form the heart of World Cup Fever (notably, he considers the 2014 Cup in Brazil to be the best he’s attended). But this is also a historical, sociological, and political examination of the Cup’s enduring yet shifting significance since it was first held in 1930.

Founded on lofty ideals of international communion, FIFA has become a vector of corruption and cultural commodification. One review of the body’s litany of scandals concluded, “in an organization that produces a pseudo-public good and is nonprofit—yet which is run by a private entity without accountability to key stakeholders—the misaligned incentives are clear.” In many ways, FIFA’s notorious venality is of a piece with the shady state of contemporary global politics. As the games begin this summer in Mexico, Canada, and on the shaky ground of Donald Trump’s United States, the spectacle will be inseparable from the uncertain political moment. How can the United States extend a welcoming hand to the world when the current administration has balled its fists? We are all anxious to find out.

The fate of a sporting event may seem trivial in a world beset by multiple overlapping crises, of course, but soccer is no mere diversion. It is by far the most popular sport in the world, a shared language that binds billions across borders, classes, cultures, and regimes. This year’s tournament thus poses a critical question: Is a more transparent and democratic version of international soccer even imaginable in a world veering toward reactionary authoritarianism?

Soccer’s roots run deep. Unruly games referred to as folk or mob football were played across early modern Britain, often with entire villages used as playing fields. Rules for these localized affairs were standardized in the 1860s into two distinct games—rugby football and association football. At Oxford, the latter was shortened to “assoc” football. Further linguistic evolution produced a name for the game that today is really only used in the United States: soccer.

Soccer made its way out of England like a merry virus in the final decades of the nineteenth century, spreading through railways, ports, and migrant labor “not as a palliative to the grimness of industrial life,” per historian James Walvin, “but largely because industrial workers, unlike others, had free time.” The regimentation of life under industrial capitalism entailed the regimentation of leisure. Urban density created crowds, while cheap transportation allowed nascent clubs to travel and spectators to follow. The spread of the game, particularly in the so-called developing world, also benefited from its association with a host of broader modernizing efforts in areas like public health and education, as well as its democratizing promise. By the 1890s, British expatriates had helped organize teams in Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Rio de Janeiro, Shanghai, Cape Town, and Calcutta. Soccer’s global rise was thus an unmistakable product of the global industrial revolution. Kuper’s beloved Dutch team, he declares, was born of social democracy.

But industrial modernity did more than create the bases for mass athletic competition. It also created the conditions for sophisticated international sporting events. “Victorian Britons invented most modern sports,” Kuper writes, “but couldn’t see the point of playing them against foreigners.” The French could. In 1896, Baron Pierre de Coubertin organized the first modern Olympic Games. The Union Cycliste Internationale was founded in 1900 to coordinate cycling records across borders. Modern motor racing took shape under the auspices of the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile, established in 1904. That same year, a short Parisian stroll away, a man named Jules Rimet led the creation of the Fédération Internationale de Football Association—FIFA.

These were proto-global institutions designed to manage modern spectacle. In each case, mass participation and cross-border competition generated administrative frameworks that were neither public nor entirely private. Their creation reflected the ongoing consolidation of modern national identity. Imagined communities produced real-world fandoms. For idealists like Rimet, sport in the age of empires need not drive disharmony. “A pious Catholic with a social conscience, he saw the game as an instrument to uplift the poor,” Kuper explains. Playing “would give working men dignity, and a sense of solidarity.” At the time, soccer was strictly an amateurish pursuit. Elites viewed the prospect of athletic professionalization as tawdry and potentially even socially disruptive. The provincial Rimet, by contrast, pushed for professional leagues of highly trained athletes as a new meritocracy, a path of upward mobility for poor and working-class men. For his entire life, the aspiring sports mogul would insist on soccer’s salutary societal effects. But the idea that it might be monetized—to use a term also coined in the mid–nineteenth century—was never far from the mind.

In 1928, FIFA decided to create a competition open to all nations. Colonies, composed mostly of nonwhite people, were notably excluded. The first World Cup was held two years later in Uruguay, a country so keen on hosting that it agreed to cover all expenses. This set the precedent: Going forward, the host would foot the bill. The next competition occurred in Mussolini’s Italy, establishing another essential FIFA characteristic: a willingness to deal with tyrants. The charitable reading of that decision is that Rimet’s experience fighting in World War I had left him “obsessed with peace,” as Kuper writes, deepening his belief that soccer could and should bridge all people across political divides. Furthermore, the list of countries willing to bankroll a growing international competition was quite small. A skeptic, however, might see an overriding concern with narrow self-advancement. The 1934 World Cup served as a fascist showcase, carefully choreographed to advertise the vitality and virility of the black-shirted regime.

Rimet did fall out with fascists after the next World Cup, held in France in 1938. Nazis and collaborationist Vichy officials disdained professional sports and the social mobility they implied, as the British upper crust had decades before. As Kuper explains, Rimet “seemed able to live with the regime’s fascism; what he couldn’t accept was its support for his old enemy, amateurism in sport.” Rimet thus spent World War II away from FIFA, returning to lead the organization once the Allies prevailed. The first postwar World Cup, held in Brazil in 1950, was its most high-profile contest yet. Under his stewardship, FIFA had grown from 29 countries to 85. Rimet, overseeing his final World Cup, was riveted by soccer’s popularity in Brazil, vindication for his vision of a global community of professional soccer players avidly supported by fans from all walks of life. When it came to his life’s goal, Rimet had scored. He was replaced as head of FIFA in 1954 and died two years later at the age of 83.

Decolonization swelled FIFA’s ranks in the 1950s and 1960s, transforming what had been a Euro-American club into a genuinely global assembly. By the 1970s, newly independent African and Asian states formed a powerful voting bloc capable of reshaping the tournament’s structure. The ouster of the patrician English administrator Stanley Rous and the election of the Brazilian João Havelange as FIFA president in 1974 marked a decisive shift. The tournament expanded from 16 teams to 24 in 1982 and to 32 nations in 1998, leading to much greater participation for the global south (this year’s World Cup will involve 48 countries). More participants translated to greater popular investment and viewership worldwide, yielding more commercial partnerships and revenue-generating opportunities.

Television in particular remade the World Cup’s meaning. As television ownership and broadcasting networks expanded rapidly across the developing world in the 1970s and 1980s, audiences far beyond Europe and the Americas gained regular access to the tournament. What had once been a relatively elite gathering accessible mainly to the population of the country where the tournament happened to be hosted became, by the 1970s and 1980s, a far-reaching fixture of global monoculture. Kuper fondly recalls the 1978 World Cup—the first that he followed—and observes that, “even for a kid today, the tournament can be their first glimpse of beauty and greatness.”

Globalization gradually eroded older ideas of distinct national styles. Kuper has argued that before the 1990s one could readily identify the tactical grammar of Italy, Brazil, or England at a glance. The increasing movement of players around the world following the end of the Cold War—stemming as much from the easing of international tensions as from changes in the rules of international soccer—helped dissolve those distinctions. Today’s elite players are polyglot cosmopolitans, scouted and plucked away from their remote hometowns and shaped as much by club academies in Barcelona, Munich, or Manchester as by the countries on their passports. If the early World Cups reflected a reaction, in part, to the chauvinism of nineteenth-century imperialism, recent editions capture both the inclusive accessibility and the homogenizing logic of neoliberal globalization.

Kuper’s passion for the World Cup is neither treacly nor fanatical, as one might expect in a book called World Cup Fever. One might even initially find the book’s central pitch a tad gimmicky. Is there really anything to learn about, say, the 1994 World Cup—the last time it was hosted by the United States—from someone who attended every World Cup since 1990 that one could not learn from a good journalist who hadn’t? But the memoiristic elements of Kuper’s book, many of which flit across the page too quickly in just a few paragraphs, are illuminating. He sets well-observed scenes that cumulatively get at essential aspects of each tournament, weaving personal, often amusing stories in with commentary on the evolution of FIFA and the game of soccer as well as the competition’s socioeconomic and political effects.

Each tournament Kuper has covered marked a shift in the geopolitical weather: the twilight of the Cold War in Italy in 1990, America’s unipolar bravado in 1994, multicultural optimism in France in 1998, East Asian dynamism in 2002, Merkel-era stability in 2006, South Africa’s post-apartheid aspiration in 2010, Brazil’s developmentalist crest and crash in 2014, Russia’s managed democracy in 2018, and Qatar’s petro-authoritarian spectacle in 2022. On one level, World Cup Fever is a testament to the personal and professional benefits of committing oneself to a subject for a long time—in this case, a tournament that only occurs every four years.

Kuper does not suggest that soccer drives political change. Nevertheless, his vignettes demonstrate how deeply the tournament penetrates civic life, and how cynical elites milk the game for private profit. His extended treatment of soccer in South Africa, for example, is revealing. The 2010 World Cup did not dissolve enduring inequality—nobody realistically expected it to—but it briefly recast how South Africans saw themselves and how they looked to the world. Television coverage emphasizing the country’s natural beauty, not to mention the modern stadiums and colorful official festivities, projected an image of national celebration and competence that displaced familiar narratives of division and poverty. (Who could forget the buzz of the vuvuzelas?) FIFA ultimately turned a massive profit from the 2010 World Cup, largely at South Africa’s expense. The country “had few football fields for ordinary people, but it was now saddled with ten ‘world-class’ stadiums—at least eight more than it needed,” Kuper explains. It thanked the hosts by producing no tangible legacy for the poor majority of South Africans.

In an era of rising inequality and political radicalization, one wonders if FIFA’s predatory model of imposing enormous costs on host nations as it reaps unfathomable sums is sustainable. Hosting the World Cup now routinely requires billions in public spending on stadiums, infrastructure, and security, costs that democratic governments must ultimately defend to voters. Several potential hosts have balked in recent years. Montreal, for example, withdrew from the 2026 tournament after the Quebec government declined to finance required stadium upgrades, while cities such as Chicago and Minneapolis abandoned bids rather than accept FIFA’s financial conditions. FIFA maintains that a World Cup “cannot be organised without the broad support of the relevant government authorities,” meaning that host states must effectively reshape their legal and fiscal frameworks to accommodate the organization’s demands. If the expense becomes increasingly unjustifiable to democratic electorates, the tournament may gravitate toward governments more willing to ignore public opinion altogether.

It is hard to foresee any impetus for a markedly more transparent version of international soccer as governments across the world become more insular and self-serving. FIFA has long functioned as a rent-seeking engine, extracting substantial sums from host nations while offering few guarantees of public benefit, turning global sport into a spectacle that flatters authority as much as it entertains. Trump, for example, in word and deed, has made the United States utterly inhospitable to soccer fans from many countries. Yet in December FIFA president Gianni Infantino bestowed on him a hastily minted peace prize, reflecting the organization’s longstanding willingness to suck up to would-be strongmen. Such gestures betray little enthusiasm for new direction.

For his part, Kuper resists grand prescriptions for the future of the sport. His commitment is to observation over time, to chronicling how ordinary people experience extraordinary moments. That modesty is itself instructive. The World Cup endures not simply because rich men in boardrooms will it but also because billions of viewers earnestly believe that what unfolds on the pitch is worthy of their attention. The institutional superstructure may be compromised but the 90 minutes must remain inviolate. As Kuper suggests, spectators can live with the fact of official corruption as long as the game is pure. However, “once we start to doubt that the matches we are seeing are real, the emotion we invest in World Cups becomes pointless.” Democratic governance, of course, rests on a similar foundation of shared belief.

Jules Rimet, FIFA’s founder, imagined soccer as a force that might ennoble ordinary people, offering dignity and fellowship through honest competition. He did not intend FIFA to restrain governments or safeguard civic accountability. Its mission has always been the promotion of the game. For nearly a century, the World Cup has reflected that reality. Dazzling and galvanizing, it has also served as a mirror, revealing with unusual clarity the shifting hierarchies of power and prestige that have shaped the modern world. When global audiences watch the World Cup, they see virtuosity, emotion, and the hand of fate at work on the grandest stage in sports. They also glimpse the world as it is.

Trump isn’t capable of sorting out any of the nation’s myriad problems—dilemmas mostly spawned by his relentless pressing of the “cause another problem” button. So he’s up late, whining to anyone who will listen that this is all everyone else’s fault. This week, he spent the wee hours angry at the Michael Smerconish podcast for hosting Trump’s former consigliere, Michael Cohen, who claimed he was “coerced into testifying against Trump.” The president made one of his trademark staggered-caps replies: “Michael Cohen has come out and unequivocally stated that the Radical Left Prosecutors, Tish James and Alvin Bragg, pressured and coerced him to testify against your favorite President, ME, when they made him the key player in their Political Witch Hunts.”

Trump has also been monomaniacally preoccupied with the crashing and burning of the concert he’d planned for America’s semiquincentennial, a word that I’m looking forward to forgetting how to spell. Some weeks ago, it was announced that an array of aggressively tertiary-to-pop-culture performers had been lined up to play for the president’s pleasure. That bill has since dwindled to Vanilla Ice, who says that he would be willing to perform for Vladimir Putin and the Iranian mullahs, and Flo Rida, whose absolute commitment to getting that bag—any bag—would have a Saudi royal exclaiming, “Have some shame, habibi!”

We know that this was a humiliating moment for Trump because he once again went on Truth Social to tell everyone about it. “We should have a giant MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN RALLY, for 250, instead of having overpriced singers, who nobody wants to hear, whose music is boring, and yet who do nothing but complain,” he wrote.

That’s all pretty rich coming from someone whose every online utterance is a tantrum laced with either petty complaints or high-test AI slop. Past targets of his ire include “Dumocrats and RINOs” (with Thomas Massie, Thom Tillis, and Bill Cassidy coming in for specific scorn), the Supreme Court (this time spurning Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett), critics of his Iran war blundering, the judge who ordered his name be stricken from the Kennedy Center facade, and, of course, the Iranian people, against whom he routinely threatens war crimes. Pope Leo, in particular, seems to be living rent-free in Trump’s head at all times.

The fact that Trump has chosen a midterm election year to become ungovernable is piling increasing pressure on those few Republicans who want to appear to be capable of governing. Senate Majority Leader John Thune, who like Mitch McConnell before him seems to be hyperaware that allowing his GOP colleagues to go as feral as they’d like to would hurt their reelection chances—has reached a “breaking point” with Trump over several matters, including the nomination of Bill Pulte to be the director of national intelligence and the proposed “Anti-Weaponization Fund”—which seems to have been shoved back into some sort of procedural limbo after Democrats successfully raised a hue and cry over it.

Republicans like Thune have a hard row to hoe right now. I’ve spent no small amount of time trying to figure out if there is any problem the GOP can solve in timely enough fashion to save their bacon for the midterms, and the conclusion I keep reaching is that this is simply a physiological impossibility for a party that seems to only have whining and trolling in its locker. This week, we saw some excellent examples of what Republicans are capable of doing: In Tennessee, Governor Bill Lee, in an effort to stick it to the LGBTQ community, declared it “Nuclear Family Month” (with no evident concern for the affordability crisis affecting those families). Meanwhile, in Minnesota, the state Republican Party made news for holding a moment of silence for the corrupt cop who killed George Floyd.

Sorry to throw the thesaurus at this, but this is all stupid, puerile, insipid pissbaby nonsense. But it’s also the ne plus ultra of Republican ideas—right now and for the foreseeable future. Trump may still hold sway over his party, but the main evidence of his influence increasingly just seems like rot. The only real question now, as Trump mashes “send” on another hundred inscrutable Truth Social posts, is how much of that rot creeps into our lives—and how quickly we can evict these crashout kings from power.

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

Based on what I saw, there were across-the-aisle matches to be made. The first panel’s speakers set a challenge for the day by trying to define what “centrism” is—or at least, what it should be—in 2026. “Moderates seem attracted to incremental, bite-size solutions that seem so much smaller than our problem,” said Steve Teles, a Johns Hopkins professor and Niskanen Center fellow and Abundance champion. “Can everybody in this panel please give me some examples of solutions that you think are appropriately at the scale we’re facing?” What followed were mostly ideas borrowed from Abundance, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s bestselling book that has mostly translated into a deregulatory agenda for addressing the nation’s housing shortage.

Still asked to define what centrism is, most of the speakers could only really define themselves by what they were not. It’s not their fault. Centrism, in reality, is almost always defined by where it lies on the spectrum between two extremes: Its politics are almost monomaniacally focused on arguing that those who stand apart have gone too far. To the WelcomeFesters, in particular, this explains why Democrats are currently out of power. It might be an appealing message to hear among like-minded politicos—those clad in fashionable suits, who follow politics closely, or who work in the knowledge sector, perhaps even running political campaigns in purple and red districts—in a softly lit basement in Washington, D.C. But there are big questions that the organization, and its proponents’ ideas, have yet to answer. This conference turned out not to be the place for it.

Because Welcome PAC is largely made up of Democrats, its speakers spent most of their time distinguishing themselves from the left of the party, especially the ascendent Democratic Socialists of America wing. “Capitalism is the most successful economic system in the world,” said New York Representative Tom Suozzi, who won his Long Island district after George Santos left Congress in disgrace. “It’s lifted more people out of poverty, it’s created more innovation, it’s done more to make people’s lives better than any other economic system. Socialism has failed and has also resulted in a lot of authoritarianism throughout the world, and so I think that this, there’s a very big, I think that [New York Mayor] Zohran Mamdani and the DSA … did a good job of feeding into people’s economic insecurity; they correctly diagnosed the problem, they just have bad solutions.”

The fact that the people in the room all felt the same obsession to set themselves against the monolithic left of their imaginations was made especially clear in the Promise to America—a pact presented by college students and signed by Representatives Tom Suozzi and Adam Gray, two Democratic congressmen from competitive districts—in its “this, not that” formulation on the promises’s taglines.

The people I spoke to in the crowd said it was nice to feel normal and gather with people who weren’t too crazy, meaning both Trump’s D.C. takeover and the rhetoric of the very-online left, who apparently form the bulk of what they encounter as they move around the world.

What the speakers didn’t answer, however, was how capitalism could solve the problems of affordability, inequality, and social mobility, like the inability of young people to buy a home, the skyrocketing cost of childcare, and the fact that too many Americans still can’t access health care easily. Also left unanswered: why the most successful engine of prosperity in the history of the world seems to have stalled out.

On this last point, Mark Cuban spoke at length about his ideas for health care, which rely largely on hoary ideas like HSA spending accounts—like a man who missed the yearslong health care debate leading up to the election of President Barack Obama and the passage of the Affordable Care Act. To better bring Cuban up to speed: HSA accounts have been dismissed in the past because they often don’t work, and other nations have demonstrated that there are much less expensive ways to provide health care to people through public programs. (This is one reason why the left supports ideas like Medicare for All—they’ve seen the proof of concept in the real world.)

Problem number two lies in how removed these discussions are from voters. Throughout the day, attendees heard from elected officials like Suozzi, Gray, and Arizona Senator Ruben Gallego, along with other candidates running in states like North Carolina, Texas, and Kansas. Those politicians talked about the kinds of things they hear from voters, but I kept wondering whether those voters would agree with everything being said about them.

The WelcomeFest crowd’s faith-like belief in popularism—the idea that candidates should pay almost exclusive attention to polling to tell them where voters are on controversial issues (especially cultural ones) to determine the optimal position to take—was belied by the somewhat anodyne campaign advice many of the candidates themselves offered: Be authentic, listen to people, be sincere. That’s all tough to do when you are constantly sculpting your personality from whatever a set of polling cross tabs say you should be. To this crowd, what candidates actually believe is less important than wherever issue-polling is on any given day. Stuart Hall once said, “Politics does not reflect majorities. It constructs them.” That’s a premise that Welcome PAC emphatically rejects. They are, instead, waiting for a mystery majority to materialize, to tell them how to walk and talk.

WelcomeFest felt like the main goal of politics in 2026 was to rehash the last few elections—even the last century’s elections—instead of focusing on how to win in the future. Bobby Pulido, a Tejano musician and congressional candidate in Texas, talked about how bad the Trump campaign’s ads on gender-affirming care were for Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign, New Mexico Representative Gabe Vasquez talked about how even Latinos wanted real solutions to immigration and the flood of asylum-seekers, and San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins talked about how badly her predecessor had handled crime. But that’s how the problems looked last time. What will they look like in November and beyond? How will a pure exercise in hindsight and nitpickery forge the path from Trumpism’s era of destruction?

“The everyday voter is not engaged in politics at all,” Gallego said. “Arizona has 300,000 more registered Republicans than Democrats, and we’re winning statewide all the time. We’re winning hard races because we don’t wait for the national brand to change. We create our own brand, our own personality, so people know what they’re voting for,” he said. “I think, like this idea that there’s going to be this grand gathering of geniuses that’s going to end up changing the … party, it’s not going to happen.”

There are bigger questions here about what the Democratic Party and its members believe, and what matters to people. Almost all Democrats agree that the economic malaise voters feel and the inflation driven by President Donald Trump’s chaotic second-term decisions are what voters care most about, and all agree that rather than just complain about the bad job Trump has done, Democrats need to offer solutions. Those solutions will likely vary by candidate and the electorate they’re pitching, but the truth is anything that sounds good to voters is likely to win if Trump’s approval ratings continue to drop, the effects of his military intervention in Iran continue to hurt, and inflation remains a preeminent voter concern. Offering real solutions is likely to woo the segment of voters who are struggling financially—and who voted for Trump for economic reasons in 2024.

But there are bigger problems ahead. Between the Supreme Court and Republicans in statehouses across the country, Democrats are being gerrymandered out of a fair midterm fight, and Black voters face outright disenfranchisement. The Trump administration is stealing taxpayer money to enrich Trump and his family and rewarding political loyalists. Congress has happily ceded its own powers to the executive branch, and the agencies responsible for ensuring our safety and well-being are being eviscerated from the inside. The Republican Party is trying to erase all of the constitutional amendments passed since the Civil War.

At the same time, a few blocks away, an enormous crane on the White House lawn was erecting the cage for a UFC match for Trump’s dwindling birthday celebration/hijacking of Independence Day. It may have been invisible from the conference’s cozy rooms, but it was nevertheless a sort of monument commemorating the fact that you can’t duck a fight forever. And there are fights ahead: a fight to take back the issue of immigration from authoritarians, a fight to protect our multiracial democracy, a fight for broader financial security, a fight to save our planet and our way of life from climate change. Fights may alienate some people: Not everyone will feel welcome in the party afterward. These are real problems, where members of the party have their differences but all differ greatly from Republicans. At WelcomeFest, they’re all busy patting themselves on the back and critiquing the past instead of looking ahead at the battle that’s right in front of them.

Speaking to reporters on the tarmac outside Air Force One in Chippewa, Wisconsin, on Friday, Trump kept his remarks about Iran brief.

“We’re doing quite well. The situation with Iran seems to be going quite well,” Trump announced, before turning to leave.

“When was the last time you had discussions?” a reporter asked after him, but Trump had already started walking off to his car.

Trump: The situation with Iran seems to be going quite well. Thank you.

Reporter: When is the last time you had discussions?

Trump: pic.twitter.com/JT4DL6Op4b

— Acyn (@Acyn) June 5, 2026

Where exactly did the president have to jet off to? A roundtable discussion with Wisconsin farmers. At the time of publishing, he had only just appeared onstage, more than an hour after the event was scheduled to start.

Crucially, contrary to Trump’s statement: The situation with Iran does not seem to be going well.

As of Wednesday, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi reported that there had been “no tangible progress” in negotiations to end the ongoing war in the Middle East, but the line was still open to resume negotiations. On Friday, Araghchi warned that U.S. bases used to mount aggression toward Iran would be considered “legitimate targets.”

International Atomic Energy Agency Director General Rafael Grossi suggested Friday that negotiations were approaching a preliminary nuclear framework, but the outcomes of such a deal remain unclear as experts are still unable to verify Iran’s remaining nuclear stockpile.

It seems the phrase “approaching a preliminary framework” should go right up there with “concepts of a plan,” in terms of being absolutely meaningless.

First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli said Friday that his office is investigating multiple instances of election fraud in the state as it continues to count votes from Tuesday’s primary elections, but he didn’t give any specifics.

“Protecting the integrity of California’s elections is a top priority for my office,” Essayli wrote on X. “We will follow the evidence wherever it leads and prosecute any violations of federal election law to the fullest extent.”

The day before, President Trump complained on Truth Social about “big cheating by the Democrats in California” and announced that federal prosecutors were investigating California’s gubernatorial election.

“The Dumocrats are at it again! They are trying to STEAL THE GOVERNOR OF CALIFORNIA PRIMARY, AND THE MAYOR OF LOS ANGELES, PRIMARY, AWAY FROM TWO GREAT REPUBLICAN CANDIDATES. Here we go with the very late and massive numbers of MAIL IN BALLOTS,” Trump also posted.

Trump hasn’t provided any proof for his claims, but it appears he has enlisted Essayli to try to find it, even though the prosecutor was reprimanded in October for staying as acting U.S. attorney for too long.

California, the most populous state in the U.S., with a strong Democratic voter majority, has an election system with all of the things Trump and Republicans rail against: universal vote-by-mail, no voter ID laws, and late deadlines for mail-in ballots. State officials aren’t paying heed to Trump’s attacks, and note that state law allows counties up to 30 days to count eligible ballots.

“Accuracy comes before speed,” California Secretary of State Shirley Weber said in a statement. “California is the nation’s largest voting state, with millions of ballots to process and count. Taking the time to do this work correctly protects voters’ rights and ensures the integrity of our elections.”

California Governor Gavin Newsom’s press office had more blunt words for the president on election night, posting on X, “Trump is lying about California again—time to take the phone away from grandpa and put him to sleep.”

Speaking to reporters on Air Force One Friday, Trump defended his planned trip to New York City’s Madison Square Garden to watch the third game of the NBA playoffs, where tickets are prohibitively expensive.

“They could watch it on television. It’s sort of semi-free to watch it on television. That’s the way life goes,” Trump said.

Q: The NBA Finals game you're going to, the cheapest ticket price is $8,000. Everyday Americans can't afford these sporting events.

TRUMP: You can watch it on TV. It's sort of semi-free to watch it on TV. That's the way life goes. pic.twitter.com/eEAxMX3SEp

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 5, 2026

The president may as well have said: “Sucks to be poor! Knicks in 4!”—at least that would’ve been a little bit more festive.

Last month, Trump complained that FIFA World Cup tickets were too expensive—without actually doing anything to bring the prices down. At the same time, the Trump administration posted a chart bragging about a 10 percent decrease in the cost of admission to sporting events, but that was after the prices of tickets exploded, climbing twice as fast as the price of goods for nearly two decades.

It’s not clear just how expensive the tickets are for the upcoming game Monday. ABC News reported that the cheapest tickets for the playoffs were just under $1,000, while courtside seats went for $42,000, and that tickets on the secondary market for the first game in New York hovered around $4,000. Ticketmaster’s website simply said: “On sale date and time are in the works—please check back.”

As the president pointed out, it’s also not free to watch from home: An ESPN membership can cost $11.99 or $29.99 per month, when not bundled with other services. God forbid basketball fans want to go to a bar to watch, as buying alcohol and dining out have only become more expensive in the last year.

Now Americans are struggling to pay for anything at all, as Trump’s war in Iran and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz have kept energy prices high and disrupted global trade. A recent jobs report found that the economy added 172,000 jobs in May—a potentially positive sign but one that could prevent the Fed from cutting interest rates to bring inflation down.

“Tillis said he won’t support Todd Blanche’s confirmation unless Todd Blanche condemns January 6,” a reporter asked President Trump in the Air Force One press gaggle Friday. “Do you have a reaction to that?”

“Senator Tillis is a loser,” Trump replied bluntly. “That’s why he didn’t run. He didn’t run because I wouldn’t support him. And he’s just an angry man because he’s not gonna be a senator any longer. He wasn’t respected in the Senate. He fought a lot of people, he fought Pete Hegseth, Pete Hegseth turned out to be a gem. Senator Tillis is a loser. Stone cold.… He was forced to leave the Senate because I wouldn’t support him, and he quit. So now he’s trying to make trouble.

“Todd Blanche is a brilliant guy who everybody likes, everybody respects,” Trump said of his former personal lawyer. “[Tillis is] not qualified, he’s not good for the position.”

Reporter: Senator Tillis said he won't support Todd Blanche’s confirmation unless he condemns January 6. Do you have a reaction to that?

Trump: Senator Tillis is a loser. That's why he didn't run. He didn't run because I wouldn't support him. And he's just an angry man because… pic.twitter.com/K5Zmdvo9Wg

— Acyn (@Acyn) June 5, 2026

Tillis is one of three Republicans who have publicly expressed their disapproval of Blanche’s nomination for attorney general.

“He’s got good credentials—people are going to hammer him because he was the president’s personal attorney, but I’m just more about getting through the J6 stuff,” Tillis told the Washington Examiner on Wednesday. “It’s not a gray area for me. Either he equivocated and said harming these Capitol police officers was an OK thing, or he didn’t, and we’ll find that in the due diligence.”

Blanche’s nomination is in real jeopardy due to his J6 support, the Epstein files disaster, and the “anti-weaponization” slush fund. Only four GOP “no” votes are needed to sink Blanche’s nomination without a tie-breaking vote from Vice President JD Vance.

“This story is going to get you a gun in your face,” Allyn claims Santos said.

Allyn used three sources to report out his Tuesday piece, which revealed that Santos had bet that he would not attend the State of the Union address in February, after posting a video where he expressed excitement at attending.

Kalshi officials informed federal authorities in the Southern District of New York and Washington, D.C., of Santos’s bets at the time, and an investigation is ongoing.

Santos had a paid partnership with Polymarket, a prediction market seen as Kalshi’s largest rival, but the company cut him off after the NPR story broke.

Santos called Allyn the day after the report was published and argued that the story was incorrect. “My lawyers have been calling the Department of Justice all day, and they can’t find any investigation,” he said. (Allyn said he typed out quotes from the call after Santos told him he could not record it.)

After Santos declined to divulge the names of his lawyers, Allyn asked whether Santos really did have attorneys. “I’m George fucking Santos, of course I have a legal team,” Santos reportedly replied, adding, “This story is going to get you a gun in your face.”

When Allyn texted Santos to confirm his phone number, Santos immediately denied the threat. “I NEVER SAID ‘this story would get a gun in your face, I said ‘it’d blow up in your face,’” Santos texted.

Santos took the initiative the next day, posting on X that Allyn “was now making things up.” (Allyn had not yet revealed what was said during the call.) Santos also claimed he would never act “aggressive and threatening” toward the press.

“He’s now demanding I disclose the names of my lawyers ‘or else,’” Santos added of Allyn. Allyn said he simply asked who Santos’s lawyers were and never used the words “or else.”

Santos’s history of peddling lies and fraud became something of a joke in his home state of New York during his time in office. That history came to a head when he was convicted of wire fraud and aggravated identity theft in April 2025 and sentenced to seven years in jail. President Donald Trump, perhaps seeing something of himself in Santos, commuted the Republican’s sentence in October.

Trump told The Wall Street Journal Friday that he told Bill Pulte, whom he named acting director of national intelligence, that he thought the Office of the Director of National Intelligence was “unnecessary” or “too big.”

“I’d like to see it smaller. I think there are a lot of people in there that shouldn’t be there,” Trump said, referring specifically to people hired in the Obama and Biden administrations. He said he wanted Pulte to “start the process.”

Reducing the size of the ODNI, created after the 9/11 attacks to streamline information sharing between intelligence agencies, is a concerning move for intelligence officials in the government, and suggests that Trump is trying to restrict its staff to loyalists. Trump believes that naming Pulte as acting director, which doesn’t require Senate confirmation, gives him more flexibility to clean house before a permanent director is named.

“You’re less shackled,” Trump said in the interview. “It sort of gives you more power, you know, for a somewhat limited period of time.”

“Frankly, it might be good for him to shake it up before people come,” he added. “Because, if [Pulte] reduced the size, in conjunction with me … and in conjunction with possibly the person coming in … he can do a lot of the hard work and we wouldn’t have to saddle somebody that goes in.”

Pulte used his authority as head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (which includes the financial institutions Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) to go after Trump’s enemies with accusations of mortgage fraud. In his new position, he now has intelligence assets, and Trump wants him to get rid of the people who might have a lot of inside information about the president.

Following a deadly attack on a National Guard member in Washington, D.C., last November, Trump ordered an asylum freeze and an end to immigration applications for nationals from 39 countries targeted in his travel ban. That meant thousands of people were unable to apply for not just asylum or work permits but also green cards and U.S. citizenship. 

“Over six months later, many of those individuals remain without work, without legal status, and without any meaningful ability to plan for their futures,” Judge John J. McConnell Jr. wrote.

“In enacting its latest immigration policies, the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services: claims statutory and regulatory authority that it does not possess; makes decisions without the reasoned explanations that it must provide; acts without regard for the reliance interests of applicants that it must consider; and justifies its actions with pretextual concerns of ‘national security’ that mask anti-immigrant sentiments,” McConnell continued. “In legal terms that means USCIS’s actions are contrary to law and arbitrary and capricious.” 

The president had another asylum ban attempt blocked last April.  

Like many members of Congress, Kean posts regularly on X and Instagram about his work. He has recently informed his followers that he is co-sponsoring a Sikh American antidiscrimination bill, honoring first responders across New Jersey, and signing up for the Congressional Crypto Caucus.

Kean also seems busy in the House of Representatives; he introduced a bill on May 29 relating to screening for the pregnancy complication preeclampsia, and he submitted remarks to the Congressional Record this week. “I rise today to commemorate the 65th anniversary of the Jewish Federation of West Central New Jersey,” said one entry.

But Kean, who was elected to serve New Jersey’s 7th congressional district back in 2023, hasn’t actually voted in the House or even been seen in public since March. According to his team, he has a “personal medical issue.”

That’s all fine—these things happen, and Kean should certainly prioritize his health. But back in March, Kean began his absence without anyone on his team bothering to say what was going on. It took multiple weeks, and Republican colleagues speaking out about his disappearance, for Kean’s office to admit he was dealing with medical issues. Today, the public still has no idea what kind of issues Kean has, while his office appears to be running his social media and submitting congressional bills on his behalf.

“If they’re talking to him and he’s signing off on these things, that’s one thing. If they’re doing it without consulting with him, that’s another,” one anonymous New Jersey Democrat who unsuccessfully tried to reach Kean told NBC. “I don’t think the latter is acceptable.”

Kean’s disappearance could cost the GOP come midterm season: He won his Republican primary Tuesday after running unopposed, but he will face off against Democrat and former Navy helicopter pilot Rebecca Bennett in November. New Jersey’s 7th is about as swingy as it gets. Donald Trump carried the district by one percentage point in 2024; Democratic Governor Mikie Sherrill took it by two in November.

Democratic Representative Ro Khanna proposed an amendment to eliminate the provision, known as Section 224, in the National Defense Authorization Act, but it failed by a voice vote. Khanna said the provision was another reward for Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu as he tries to call the shots in the war in Iran.

“Everyone in America—whether you’re a Republican, an independent or a Democrat—says that we need to tell Netanyahu that America calls the shots, not the prime minister of any other country,” Khanna said. “They want less cooperation and blank checks to Israel, not more. Only the United States Congress would dream up at this moment, ‘Let’s actually do more for Israel.’”

Section 224 requires the secretary of defense to “to designate an executive agent responsible for synchronising cooperative efforts between the United States and Israel.” That agent would oversee joint efforts, “including bilateral defence technology research, development, testing, evaluation, integration, and industrial cooperation.” No other country has this privilege with the U.S. military.

A voice vote didn’t record the stances of committee members, leaving members of Congress free from scrutiny at a time when Israel’s popularity continues to plummet with the American people. Only one other Democrat, Representative Sara Jacobs, co-sponsored Khanna’s legislation. The NDAA is the main funding bill for the U.S. military, which has to be passed every year.

“As political pressure builds to reduce US military assistance to Israel, Section 224 provides the framework for continuing—and expanding—US-Israel military ties by entrenching Israeli technology within the US defense supply chain in a way that would shield it from the annual appropriations process,” the nonprofit lobbying group A New Policy warned last week. “The use of must-pass legislation as the NDAA as a mechanism of integration speaks to the plummeting popularity of continuing unconditional support to Israel.”

Netanyahu claims to support ending U.S. military aid to Israel, likely because provisions such as Section 224 would ensure Israel gets American help by other means. A major theme in midterm election races across the country, particularly primary races, has been U.S. aid to Israel and campaign funding from the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC, and the political effect of Section 224 could hurt its backers. It remains to be seen if Section 224 survives when the rest of Congress votes on the NDAA.

This is a tempestuous time at one of the nation’s most staid journalistic institutions. But let’s back up a minute to appreciate how we got here. How did someone like Weiss, with no broadcast news experience, get put in charge of the network with the longest and proudest news tradition in the country? Well, we know the answer to that question. David Ellison, head of Paramount (which owned CBS), hired her last October, three months after the Trump administration approved the takeover of Paramount by Ellison’s company, Skydance. Before that, of course, Weiss had started up the very successful Free Press newsletter, devoted mainly to attacking left-wing wokery and cancel culture for dedicated subscribers.

But the pivotal moment, or actually moments, in her career came before that. The first was her hiring, in April 2017, by The New York Times. The second was her famous departure from that same paper, which she cynically and shamelessly used to get a bevy of wealthy, angry, rich men to stake her to the Free Press. You know that saying about how sometimes liberals are so open-minded that their brains start falling out their ears? Weiss’s ascent provides a lesson in how liberal institutions can sometimes place such value on proving that they’re open-minded that other liberal values, like standing for actual liberal things in the world, get tossed aside.

On April 12, 2017, as the nation’s most important newspaper was settling into the first Trump era, the honchos of the Times made an announcement. They were hiring Bret Stephens away from The Wall Street Journal. Stephens was, of course, conservative in outlook. He made for the third conservative at the generally liberal op-ed page, after longtimer David Brooks and the comparatively youthful Ross Douthat.

Well … OK, then. Brooks had been at the paper since the 1990s; Douthat since 2009. One could maybe, possibly justify adding a third after Trump’s election, to “understand” the conservative mind and the sentiment apparently flowing across this great land (even though that sentiment won 2.8 million fewer votes than liberal sentiment, but never mind that). Mind you, though, that it sure isn’t as if The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Times and the New York Post started making an effort to understand the liberal mind after Barack Obama won. The Journal has one nonconservative columnist, William Galston of the Brookings Institution, who is a friend of mine and can fairly be described as liberal-centrist. The Washington Times and the New York Post, from what I can see, have zero.

But fine. Stephens. One might have thought that would have been enough. But no! A mere two days later, on April 14, came the beaming announcement that the Grey Lady was nabbing its second Journal opinionista of the week and hiring Weiss: “It is with great excitement today that we announce that we’ll be expanding the desk’s range, voice, and reach with the hiring of Bari Weiss.” The announcement explained that Weiss would be “commissioning the kinds of quick, off-the-news pieces that are such a critical part” of our yadda-yadda-yadda and would be doing so with the “signature verve and humor” so evident in her Journal oeuvre.

That’s one of those eye-of-the-beholder questions. Here is her Journal corpus, at least the written part of it. Look, we’re all predictable to some extent, your humble servant included. I wouldn’t deny it for a second. But Weiss’s Journal pieces were predictable in a specific way that allows us reasonably to question precisely what the nation’s, nay the world’s, most important liberal opinion page found so alluring in them. Just sample these headlines: “The PC Police Outlaw Make-Believe”; “Is That Libidinous Latina Taco Gay or Bi?”; “Camille Paglia: a Feminist Defense of Masculine Virtues.”

A representative piece, from June 2015, called “Love Among the Ruins,” chides those celebrating the Supreme Court’s decision that legalized gay marriage. Oh, don’t misunderstand—Weiss supported the decision, of course! But she found it troubling that the messages “blowing up” her phone were wholly focused on Obergefell v. Hodges with not one person taking time to decry the recent mass shooting in Tunisia or the terrorist attack in France.

In other words: “The left” is so obsessed with its narrow, woke agenda that it doesn’t care about mass shootings or terrorism. It’s gibberish. Obviously, people can celebrate something they support without feeling some overwhelming, Dostoyevskian guilt about suffering on the other side of the world. Besides, I am 100 percent certain that if she’d bothered to look, she could have found quotes from Democratic politicians and human rights groups and other wokesters denouncing those tragic events. But the key to writing a column like that is not bothering to look. Smart liberals know that conservative trick and know not to indulge it.

But anyway. They hired Weiss. You would have thought that would have been enough. But no! Two years later, the Times hired a young conservative firebrand named Adam Rubenstein, who also had The Wall Street Journal on his résumé.

Nothing unusual happened for a while. Then, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in the summer of 2020, the Times ran the instantly infamous op-ed by GOP Senator Tom Cotton arguing that it was time for the military to restore order. That contention, when put that way, is controversial but not necessarily objectionable. But many of Cotton’s particular assertions were extreme. To take one example, addressed by the Times in a later editor’s note: “For example, the published piece presents as facts assertions about the role of ‘cadres of left-wing radicals like antifa’; in fact, those allegations have not been substantiated and have been widely questioned. Editors should have sought further corroboration of those assertions, or removed them from the piece.”

Editors also should have done more to square the case he made in his op-ed with the rhetoric he’d previously deployed to make the same case, in which he called for the invocation of the Insurrection Act (which the piece cited) and further recommended that “no quarter” be given to targeted demonstrators. As David French pointed out, “no quarter”—which mean enemies should be killed on the battlefield rather than be taken prisoner—“has been a war crime since Abraham Lincoln signed the Lieber Code in 1863.” By not forcing Cotton to reconcile the position in his op-ed with the more incendiary ideas that inspired it, the Times editors laundered his original demand for violent extremism into erasure.

Rubenstein edited the piece, encouraging the inclusion of photos of federal troops protecting Black students in the 1960s South, as if people protesting the violent, nine-minute murder of a citizen were analogous to racist hordes denying rights to other citizens. A huge controversy ensued.

Weiss apparently had nothing to do with the piece, but she cynically seized on the opportunity the fracas presented to resign, citing a deeply inhospitable workplace. She announced her decision on her website, in a roughly 1,500-word letter to the Times’ publisher, rebuking him for allowing other Times employees to say rude (and admittedly sometimes quite vicious, if her account was accurate) things about her.

The letter went into several details that in most workplaces, probably including The New York Times, are typically thought and assumed to be private and confidential. But naturally, to some, revealing these behind-the-curtain anecdotes marked Weiss as a truth-teller and a martyr. And this, along with her general profile of alerting the elites to the latest lunacy at the Dalton School (and her rabidly pro-Israel stance), is what made her a hero to men like David Ellison. She started a Substack originally called “Common Sense,” which morphed into the Free Press after she raised capital from people like Marc Andreessen, David Sacks, Bobby Kotick, and Howard Schultz. The first three are all Republicans (Andreessen was once a Democrat), and Schultz is an independent.

For her own part, Weiss always used to call herself a centrist-liberal or a sane liberal or some such thing. That may have been true at some point, to some extent. But now, it’s quite clear that she is not just conservative, she’s MAGA. Maybe not in her heart, but overwhelmingly in her actions, and it’s actions that matter. She was placed at CBS by Ellison to crush the left and advance Donald Trump’s agenda, so it’s no surprise that that is precisely what she’s doing. And no matter her level of incompetence, she’ll stay there as long as she’s doing that—and as long as she’s not killing the stock price.

And it all can be traced back to that week in April 2017, when The New York Times decided it had to be broad-minded in the wake of the election of the most narrow-minded man to occupy the White House since Andrew Johnson—or maybe ever. And now the chief beneficiary of the paper’s broad-mindedness is advancing that narrow-minded man’s agenda while destroying the country’s most venerated television news operation.

Oh, and Adam Rubenstein? Whatever became of him? He shared Weiss’s sharp instinct for self-promotion. He quit the Times six months later and took to the website of The Atlantic to write a self-pitying piece about the brouhaha that his own sloppy editing caused.

And today? Well, the day after Ellison named Weiss head of CBS, CBS announced the hiring of Rubenstein as deputy editor, where he is reportedly part of Weiss’s “inner circle.” Take that, Walter Cronkite.

Blanche made the declaration in an interview with NewsNation’s Katie Pavlich released Friday.

“You said this week that you believe President Trump absolutely faced prison if he hadn’t won the election in 2024. Democrats have been talking a lot about what they call Project 2029—their plans to prosecute the president, administration officials, ICE agents after the term is up if they regain power,” Pavlich asked Blanche while he sat alongside FBI Director Kash Patel. “Do you believe that’s a possibility, and what can be done to prevent this kind of political retribution from Democrats?” 

“Well, do I believe it’s a possibility that the Democrats will go after President Trump, his family, anybody that knows him, anybody that worked for him? I think they’ve proven that to be true. And what could we do about it is  we can just keep on exposing when we learn about the weaponization that happened for many years, we can keep on exposing it, and putting roadblocks in place so it never happens again,” Blanche said.

“I worry about Democrats coming out and actually already forecasting what they’re going to try to do if they get leadership again, and that’s something the American people see too. The American people saw them do it for four years and rejected it whole-handedly.” 

Acting AG Todd Blanche says he's working to install "roadblocks" to prevent Democrats from prosecuting Trump and his associates in the future pic.twitter.com/bbaeRPUu6y

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 5, 2026

This is the president’s former lawyer proudly admitting that he is placing obstacles in place to make it harder for Trump, his family, Blanche himself, any ICE agents that have brutalized or killed protesters and immigrants, or anyone else involved in this cabal of an administration to be held accountable. And he might be attorney general soon. 

During oral arguments before the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington Friday, lawyers for the DOJ presented the government’s case for continuing construction on Trump’s increasingly expensive White House ballroom without the approval of Congress.

In order to demonstrate Trump’s supposedly far-reaching power to destroy and alter national monuments at whim, the DOJ lawyers claimed that if the president wanted to bulldoze the Statue of Liberty in New York, there would be no one with the standing to challenge him.

“If the government decides very quickly to bulldoze the Statue of Liberty, the people whose ancestors—that was the first thing they saw coming to this country, but the government moved too fast—nothing can be done?” Judge Patricia Millett asked, according to Politico’s Kyle Cheney.

“I think that’s right, yes,” the government responded.

The Statue of Liberty, like the White House, is managed by the National Park Service. Demolishing it would require legislative approval and rigorous public and regulatory review under the National Historic Preservation Act.

This argument features in the DOJ’s primary claim that the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the group behind the lawsuit, has no standing to challenge the construction. The DOJ also argued that construction on the ballroom can’t actually be stopped by the courts, and could only be stopped by Congress.

All of this further illustrates just how powerful the Trump administration believes itself to be: Its modus operandi is simply to break our nation’s laws with such speed that no one can stop it.

A new report from the nonprofit government watchdog Public Citizen has calculated that 14 ballroom donors have raked in more than $50 billion combined in government contracts over the last six months. For reference, that’s more than the GDP of countries such as Iceland and Senegal.

Not only is the federal government enriching ballroom donors like Lockheed Martin, Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Nvidia, but it is also actively getting them out of legal trouble. Sixteen of the 27 donors, including the companies listed above, are presently involved in some form of federal litigation, including antitrust reviews, securities charges, and labor disputes.

But, since you can essentially just bribe the federal government right now, some donors’ charges have now been dropped or reduced by Trump’s Department of Justice.

“This is so insanely corrupt, I can’t even believe it,” Democratic Representative Mike Levin wrote on X Thursday. “You write a check, your legal problems disappear. That’s not a coincidence.”

Trump has repeatedly claimed he needs a new ballroom for security purposes, and has also tried to allocate at least $220 million in taxpayer dollars to the project. (Senate Republicans, likely realizing the unpopularity of the project, eventually scrapped the idea.)

Still, the Trump administration continues to lash out at unbelievers. “The same critics who are alleging fake conflicts of interests, would also complain if American taxpayers were footing the bill for these long-overdue renovations,” White House spokesperson Davis Ingle told The Washington Post. “The donors for the White House ballroom project represent a wide array of great American companies and generous individuals, all of whom are contributing to make the People’s House better for generations to come.”

If that’s the case, though, why not name these upstanding individuals and corporations? The White House has a fundraising contract that allows for the names of donors to be censored. Trump’s team publicly announced only 21 corporate donors; journalists have since uncovered six more.

“The White House won’t even release the full donor list,” Levin concluded. “They’re hiding it on purpose, because daylight is the one thing pay-to-play can’t survive.”

The House passed a bill 213–210 that reduced funding for the Department of Agriculture and other federal agencies. The bill includes a $141 million cut to food and vegetable benefits in the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children, which help pregnant and postpartum women and children.

Five Republicans voted against the bill, while Democratic Representatives Donald Davis, Adam Gray, Vicente Gonzalez, and Marie Glusenkamp Perez voted for it, ensuring it passed the chamber. The Senate still has to pass the appropriations measure before it heads to President Trump’s desk.

The $141 million cut estimate comes from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Another organization, the National WIC Association, estimates that fruit and vegetable benefits would drop from $52 to $13 for nursing mothers and from $26 to $10 for young children.

House Republicans attempted to justify the move, with Representative Andy Harris, who chairs the House Appropriations subcommittee on agriculture, saying that there’s more than enough agriculture funding left over for the WIC program, claiming that data “clearly shows” that participation in WIC has gone down this fiscal year.

“With lowered participation estimates and increased carryover funding, $8 billion will fully fund the program,” Harris told The Washington Post. “Let me say it one more time.… WIC is fully funded. No woman or their children will lose or be denied coverage.”

Three of the Democrats who voted for the cuts, Gray, Gonzalez, and Perez, are members of the conservative Blue Dog Coalition, and Perez has a reputation for often voting against her party. But it’s puzzling why fruit and vegetable assistance for mothers and children was deemed acceptable to cut, especially during an economic crunch. It’s highly likely that WIC enrollment will go up in the coming months, and now, fruits and vegetables will be more expensive.

A 49-page whistleblower disclosure reviewed by the Post detailed how the White House plotted to add the names and Social Security numbers of millions of living, breathing people to the Social Security Administration’s Death Master File, or DMF, which is used to track when a person has died and should stop receiving government benefits.

Whistleblower Jeremiah Schofield, who worked at the Social Security Administration for 25 years before leaving in October, told the Post that he’d refused to implement the plan. Schofield said that when he pulled a sample from the 2.7 million names, he found that all of the people marked for death were still alive. Agency lawyers had warned that falsely marking someone as dead could violate federal law, and Schofield realized that the plan’s purpose was to terrorize immigrants.

Schofield described one meeting in which a DOGE official revealed the goal of such a cruel plan: to make immigrants so miserable that they would self-deport or try to visit a Social Security office, where they could be arrested.

“That call was one of the most disappointing calls I’ve been in in my 25-year career,” Schofield told the Post. “I was shocked. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.”

The Trump administration previously moved more than 6,000 immigrants to the DMF last year.

Being wrongly moved to the DMF can have far-ranging effects, as people will no longer be able to access their bank accounts or use their credit cards. The SSA’s website says that the effects of being wrongly included in the DMF can be “devastating to the individual, spouse, and dependent children.”

Now former federal prosecutor Antonio Pozos will likely be the judge for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania until he dies. This is the first time in Trump’s second term that a Senate Democrat has turned in a “blue slip” and given up their right to oppose one of Trump’s judicial picks.

“These are not normal times, and any senator who thinks that this is standard operating procedure and that any of these nominations are normal course of operations is deluding themselves,” Demand Justice president Josh Orton told Punchbowl News. “If Democrats truly believe that we have to stand up to Trump’s attacks on the rule of law, they have to do so in every room—not just on Twitter and not just on TV.”

Fetterman has made it his M.O. to do the opposite of what progressive Democrats are doing any chance he gets. He’s been one of the most outspoken advocates for Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, wants the deadly and expensive war on Iran and Lebanon to continue, and voted to confirm Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin.

The administration’s official Rapid Response account on X took aim at a video clip from Kamala Harris’s news account @Headquarters showing the president clearly slumping back in his chair in the Oval Office and dozing off while surrounded by White House officials Thursday. They posted a screenshot from the video and claimed, “His eyes are literally open in the clip you posted, you dumbass mouth-breathers.” 

Trump appears to be completely passed out asleep during his 3pm Oval Office announcement pic.twitter.com/gKyNjvgZW3

— Headquarters (@HQNewsNow) June 4, 2026

While Trump was awake in the meeting long enough to announce his “Trump Promenade,” a concrete patio extending from the back of the Lincoln Memorial to the Potomac River, the video clearly shows the president falling asleep. It’s only the latest example of Trump “resting his eyes” in public view during his second term in office, as it now seems to happen anytime he’s at an event or meeting where other people talk for a few minutes. 

Lately, the administration has tried in vain to push back against anyone pointing out Trump’s impromptu siestas, angrily posting on social media that the president is simply blinking. Trump’s own Cabinet members, such as Secretary of State Marco Rubio, go out of their way to absurdly claim that they’ve never seen the president sleeping.  

But the public has eyes and can see on live video that Trump is clearly getting older, with visible health issues that aren’t ever explained in the administration’s reports about his health. No matter how many times White House officials insult those who point it out, it’s obvious that there is something wrong with Trump’s physical and mental condition. 

“On Wednesday, June 24th, at 7 P.M., in magnificent Washington, D.C., now totally beautified, and one of the Safest Cities anywhere in the World, and in celebration of our Country’s 250 Year History, we will be bringing you, LIVE, the Greatest Rally, EVER! It will be special at every level—A Rally to end all Rallies!” the president wrote Thursday on Truth Social. “We don’t want singers with no talent, but big fees to put you to sleep, we’ve told them all to stay home. All we want is you, me, a few speakers, and the Greatest Music ever played, the same Music you have listened to for years!”

That music will include Christopher Macchio singing “Ave Maria” and Lee Greenwood singing his “God Bless the U.S.A.” The U.S. Army Band and Armed Forces Choir will also be there, Trump announced, alongside “a fine and highly dignified gentleman known as, President DONALD J. TRUMP!”

This event sounds more and more pitiful by the day. We went from at least having some washed-up ’90s artists headlining the event to a dreary, full-on MAGA rally for America’s 250th birthday. Perhaps that was the point all along. Hopefully it rains.

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 House voted this week to end Donald Trump’s war in Iran, Trump exploded in fury at the four Republicans who sided with Democrats against him. He called them grandstanders while simultaneously mocking the vote as meaningless. It’s not meaningless, of course. It shows that Republicans are now taking new steps to break with Trump. And importantly, it comes as the leaks are getting worse for him. We’re learning more about his blundering incompetence from insiders, which is itself another sign of his ongoing weakening.

So is there a path to forcing Trump to end this conflict and what’s likely to happen now in the war itself? We’re talking about it all with Emily Horne, a former veteran of the State Department and National Security Council. Emily, good to have you back on.

Emily Horne: Thanks, Greg, for having me.

Sargent: So the House passed a bill Wednesday directing Trump to end the conflict, with four Republicans breaking ranks. The Senate could pass this, and because it’s a certain type of resolution, it’s not subject to a veto, but Trump can probably not follow it. Still, this is significant, isn’t it, Emily? Can you tell us why?

Horne: The fact that you have Republicans that are willing to cross the aisle at this particular moment is really telling politically. This war has been wildly unpopular from day one, and the longer that it drags on—we’re entering month three when we were promised this would be a quick overnight operation—as costs to voters begin to mount, as energy prices continue to rise with no end in sight, as airline prices continue to soar, no pun intended, as we approach the summer travel season.

And unfortunately, terribly, tragically, as more American service members continue to die or be injured in conflict in the Middle East, the more this war expands regionally and the more innocent civilian lives are lost, the harder that it becomes for Republicans to defend this war when in fact many of them were running on the principle that Trump would not get Americans into open-ended foreign conflicts. That’s a lot harder to defend when we are at month three of an open-ended conflict.

Sargent: Trump exploded on Truth Social Thursday over this vote, raging that it’s meaningless. He said it was passed by “four bad Republicans and all of the Dumocrats.” Trump also raged that this is happening, “right in the middle of my final negotiations to end the war with the Islamic Republic of Iran. Who would do such an unpatriotic thing?” And he even raged that Republicans are “grandstanders who should be ashamed of themselves.” Emily, what’s your reaction to that?

Horne: This vote is not happening as a coincidence. This vote is happening now because the 90-day deadline for a War Powers resolution has come and gone, and we are still in this war. And so this has not exactly been a Congress that has taken its oath of office to both the letter and the spirit of the law, but it’s nice to finally see some backbone and some acknowledgment that they do have a constitutional duty to do things like allow the president to declare war or not, that that is a pretty important part of their oath, in fact. So while procedurally this may not change anything, politically, again, I think this is a really important moment.

Sargent: I think it’s the worst of all worlds for Trump and Republicans in this way as well. Of the four Republicans who crossed over, only two of them are vulnerable this fall, which means all the other House Republicans who are top targets in the election were too frightened to distance themselves from Trump.

And now they’re on the hook for voting to continue the war, which means holding the House is going to be harder for Republicans because the war is just absolutely killing them. Republicans have done this to themselves even as Trump has also been delivered a rebuke. It’s just an all-around failure in every way for them, no?

Horne: Well, OK, we’re five months out from the election. I’m certainly not making any predictions about what is going to happen in the midterms, but there’s no question that this war is wildly unpopular across the political spectrum. And again, as costs continue to rise, as diplomacy continues to falter, and as the chaos continues to reign across the Middle East—not just in the Strait of Hormuz—with no end in sight, this is a war that is entirely of Trump’s making.

And going back even years and years ago to the first Trump administration, we had a diplomatic deal. He blew it up in 2018. He started us down this path a long time ago. And even then, he still had many chances to not wind up in this current situation. He still had multiple off-ramps where diplomacy was still a realistic option.

And every time he has had the opportunity to slow his roll or to make different choices about Iran in both of his administrations, he has always chosen the path of maximum conflict. So it’s not surprising that we are here. It’s not surprising that he’s blaming other people for being here, but he is the only person who is responsible for this war at this moment.

Sargent: In fact, he was told repeatedly that what is happening now would happen. He was told it by many top people. And we’re learning this because the leaking is getting worse for Trump.

The New York Times now reports that the U.S. government has been doing war games around Iran for years with tons and tons of military officials. The Times reports this: “Over and over, participants say, they concluded that Iran would respond to a major American attack by closing the Strait of Hormuz.” Trump just ignored it all.

Emily, you’ve been in the belly of the national security beast in the past. In addition to how damning the facts are here, what does it mean that we’re getting leaks like this?

Horne: Well, so two things. When I was in government—and I left in 2022—I participated in a lot of tabletop exercises and red-teaming exercises to try to predict what would happen should wars break out, should pandemics break out, in the event of terrorist attacks, et cetera. And those were classified, so I can’t talk about them in detail, but I can tell you that I agree with everything that was said in The New York Times article that you referenced.

None of what we are seeing right now is remotely surprising to me. And all of this has been predicted before, with the possible exception that drone technology has just advanced so much in the last several years. And that’s an element that anybody who was seriously watching what was happening in Ukraine could easily have predicted—and many did predict—would be an important tool that we would see in future wars, including this one. That’s been the topic of much discussion in national security circles in the last several years.

But to your question about what do these leaks mean—the leaking is wild right now. I think we’re seeing, if I can be a little undiplomatic, a lot of ass-covering right now. And a lot of people who are defending this war with their outside voice and then in their inside voice rushing to every reporter in their Rolodex to say, I swear, I thought this was a terrible idea. I tried to tell him this was a terrible idea. When this is all said and done, don’t blame me. I tried.

Sargent: Right. And they’re in some sense trying to also insulate the national security establishment from blame for this, aren’t they? They’re really just trying to foist the entire thing onto Trump. And in some respects that might actually be justified.

Horne: So there’s a couple of things here that I think it’s useful to parse out. Who actually gets the president’s ear is always a real issue of power and access in any administration, but especially in this one. We all know that Trump is a president who listens a lot to the last person who he talked to. And so whoever gets to talk to him, whoever shapes his opinion is often just the person that he heard from most recently.

And so I have no doubt that the national security workforce—who are civilian, who serve apolitically, who are military, who serve apolitically—are doing what they always do. They’re collecting the intelligence, they’re preparing the assessments, they’re preparing the battlefield scenarios and the plans, and they’re bringing them up. The question is, is any of it getting through?

And one of the things that’s really clear is that Trump has weeded out anyone who has access to him who is capable of telling him, sir, that’s not a good idea. Or, sir, if you do that, here are the five bad things that could happen because of that. He does not want to hear it. And to survive in Trump’s royal court, you have to be a yes man or a sycophant. There is no one who can speak truth to power left in this White House.

Sargent: The leaks get even worse than this, believe it or not. The Atlantic reports that Trump has told advisors repeatedly that he wants a deal that’s bigger than Obama’s 2015 Iran nuclear deal. Also, The Atlantic reports that Trump has become “irritated by comparisons between his emerging framework and Obama’s deal.”

According to officials, Trump repeatedly complained that his framework is being cast as weaker than Obama’s. And then there’s this real doozy. Trump wants “a way to argue that Iran had accepted terms from him that Obama never managed to extract.”

Emily, is that how the process is supposed to be working here?

Horne: So it’s not surprising to me that he chafes at comparisons to the JCPOA, Obama’s Iran deal. He has always resented the idea that Obama was able to do something that he could not—get this huge diplomatic deal over the finish line. And Trump is very spiteful. He’s motivated by rage and enmity as much as he is anything else. And so he blew up the Iran deal in part because it wasn’t his and he couldn’t claim credit for it.

And that sounds really simple, but sometimes with Trump, the simplest explanation is the truest one. It was someone else’s triumph, not his. And that meant that he resented it. It was not about what was objectively a good diplomatic deal or in the interest of American national security. That much was obvious.

But because people don’t like to believe that of our leader—we’d like to believe that we as American people are capable of electing someone with more sophisticated thinking than that—we invent all of these frameworks that, if we just did these 18 other things, or if you look at it through this realist lens or whatever. Sometimes the simplest explanation is the truest one. And with Trump, we’ve just had to learn that lesson over and over and over again.

But what’s wild to me about this latest Atlantic article is it’s fairly common knowledge—you don’t have to be a national security expert to know that Trump resented Obama’s Iran deal. What’s wild to me is that they found so many sources within the Trump administration to say that to a bunch of Atlantic reporters for attribution. That people are talking about this with their outside voices now.

And that says to me that there’s a real consternation and frustration within the administration with the way that things are going. And people are thinking about lifeboats for after this is all over. How are they going to look when whatever is going to happen has happened? And they want to preserve their access. They want to preserve their Washington clout and their reputations. That’s a big part of what’s happening here with these leaks.

Sargent: Is there a way for Trump to get a better deal, extract a better deal from Iran than Obama got? It seems to me that it’s fundamental to the situation that it actually isn’t possible. And what I really question is whether he is capable of grasping that fundamental aspect of the situation or not. What do you think?

Horne: So I think two things. One, I think it is highly unlikely, if not probably impossible, that he would get a better deal than the JCPOA, because the situation is so much more complicated now than it was in 2015 or 2018, whatever endpoint you want to assign to when the JCPOA was concluded. The knowledge that the Iranians have about how to use the Strait of Hormuz for leverage is something that they can’t unlearn.

And The New York Times piece that you mentioned earlier pointed out that in 2011, when Obama communicated privately to the Iranian regime that the Strait of Hormuz was a red line for him, the understanding that the regime had was that they would be in existential risk—that essentially the Obama administration would take out the regime were Iran to close the Strait of Hormuz the way that it is essentially doing now. The problem is that Trump did take out the Iranian regime.

And so when you remove that particular leverage point and you do the bad thing anyway, it’s logical for the Iranians to think, well, OK, the worst has already happened. We know this is existential for us as the next generation of IRGC and new leaders of Iran. So why would we gamble away what leverage we have right now?

People operate logically within the situations and frameworks in which they find themselves. That is a logical position for the regime to take at this stage. And it is hard to imagine how Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner are going to get them to trade away that leverage that is now squarely in their court, especially at a moment where, again, I cannot stress enough, this war is spectacularly unpopular and a real political albatross around Trump’s neck.

Sargent: And by the way, just to link this back to the topic we were talking about before—the more Republicans turn against Trump, the more congressional votes go against him, the more the Iranians say to themselves, aha, the midterms are approaching, aha, it’s getting a lot harder for Republicans to stick with this.

And so he’s almost caught in this kind of loop, right? This kind of Gordian knot of a situation where the more time that passes and the more he loses the support of Republicans on this, the more likely it is that Iranians will hold out and not give him what he wants.

Horne: Exactly. And look, the IRGC plays the long game. They are watching American politics and realizing that this could end for Trump in five months. This could end for Trump in two and a half years. But one way or the other, it will end. And again, this is existential for the IRGC.

We are talking about people who are only in power because their family members have been killed with Israeli and American missile strikes. We are talking about people who have staked their entire lives and entire reason for being on the outcome of this war. Those are not the stakes for Donald Trump, and everyone involved knows it.

Sargent: So if Donald Trump’s primary goal in life is to emerge from this with something that he can call better than Obama’s, stronger than Obama’s, bigger than Obama’s—if his primary goal in life is to emerge with something that he can call a world-historical triumph, something that the people on the television will praise as better than Obama’s—how do we get out of this?

Horne: It’s a great question. And in different contexts, some partners and allies have figured out how to do things like rebrand economic deals that are already going to happen or previously concluded agreements that they paint over in fake gold leaf and they call it a Trump economic incentive or something. And the marketing carries the day and you’re able to move on. That’s not really possible with a war. And that’s not really possible in this situation.

So it is hard to imagine how this ends and who is going to give on the branding and the marketing, for lack of a better term, because you’re right. At the end of the day, I think that’s what he actually cares about. He certainly cares about getting credit for a win more than he cares about what Americans are paying for gas or how many American soldiers have died or how many civilians across the Middle East are living under rocket and missile and drone attacks every day.

Or for that matter, how American troops are going through munitions at an insane clip and depleting our stocks—that is worth thinking about, or should be thinking about, for the worst of the future. He doesn’t care about any of that. What he cares about is his headlines.

Sargent: Right. And just to put a finer point on it, not only does he want to win, he wants to be able to look at his TV and see people on the TV saying that he succeeded where Obama failed, saying that he did something bigger and better and more world-historical than Obama did.

Horne: Greg, it sounds like you’re suggesting that we just need to create a closed-circuit broadcast with a feed that only he will see that will have Bret Baier talking about this as a huge win. And then maybe everyone else can just get back to—not normal life, because there is no going back—but maybe to not an active war dragging into its fourth, fifth, or sixth month.

Sargent: Emily, I think really that might be the only way we get out of this thing. Folks, if you enjoyed this conversation, make sure to check out Emily Horne’s Substack. It’s called Spin Class. Emily, always awesome to talk to you. Thanks so much for coming on.

Horne: Thanks, Greg.

Of course, people do just that, especially in Hollywood and specifically in Singin’ in the Rain, which itself includes instances of uncredited dubbing. But such hypocrisy has never stopped the Dream Factory from perpetuating stories of voices lost and found, the singing voice standing in for deeply felt, but also deeply monetizable, intellectual property. That’s entertainment!

Irish filmmaker John Carney’s oeuvre is also about singing out, Louise, but his movies strike a winning balance between cynicism and sentimentality. Music is not a metaphor but the literal means of connecting with others and healing yourself in the process; music is also how we, as the audience, can hear characters changing, mostly for the better. In Once (2007), an Irish singer-songwriter (Glen Hasard) meets a Czech pianist (Markéta Irglová) on the streets of Dublin, and repressing their mutual attraction, the two develop a powerful friendship through collaborating on a demo.

Likewise, in Flora and Son (2023), an unfulfilled single mother (Eve Hewson) bonds with her sullen teenage son (Orén Kinlan) and finds love with her guitar instructor (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) after finding a guitar in a dumpster and signing up for online lessons. “It’s very intimate, isn’t it? Singing like that together,” Flora tells her teacher, flirtatiously. “It’s a bit like … we’ve made love or something.” As the two grow closer, their scenes are shot as though the two are in the same room, not falling in love over Zoom, because that is how it feels.

But, in both these films, expression is not all; it must be backed up with craft and talent. When the guitarist in Once goes to get a bank loan to record a demo, the banker has his own dreams of music stardom. “I want to be me, I want you to be you,” he warbles. And after Flora’s guitar teacher sings her one of his original songs, “Welcome to L.A.,” she deems it “lovely” but adds, ruefully, “Would I wanna hear it again?”

Characters like Flora and the unnamed leads in Once struggle financially and existentially: “This can’t be my narrative!” Flora insists, looking around at her crummy surroundings, her contentious relationship with her son, her broken marriage. But success introduces its own pitfalls to the creative person. In the 2013 Begin Again, nerdy, soft-spoken singer-songwriter Dave Kohl (Adam Levine) gets a taste of fame and immediately drops his long-term girlfriend and writing partner, Greta (Keira Knightley), to become a megastar who looks and sounds and, frankly, feels a lot like Maroon 5’s Adam Levine.

Rock stars “fall in love with the music,” grumbles the disgraced music executive (Mark Ruffalo) who discovers Greta at an open mic. “They fall in love with the lights, they fall in love with the road, the chicks, all that shit.” Greta is wounded by Dave’s infidelity but almost as much by his sudden lack of taste. He turns Greta’s song, “Lost Stars,” into a piece of what she calls “stadium pop,” and she resists the changes: “You weren’t supposed to lose the song in it, you know? I mean, it … it’s delicate.”

There is more than one way, it seems, to lose your voice, and your way along with it.

In Power Ballad, Carney’s latest, he revisits some of the same motifs from his own films—the Dublin–Los Angeles connection, the perils of fame, self-discovery through the power of music—as well as those tried-and-true cinematic tropes of voices thieved and recovered. He approaches these themes with his signature sophistication, in that there are no true bad guys, only better and worse ones. But this is also the most straightforward of his films, the most tidily resolved, the closest to a fairytale.

Power Ballad’s meet-cute happens at a wedding, but not between members of the bridal party or during the bouquet toss. Rick Power (Paul Rudd) is the American frontman for a wedding band called the Bride and Groove; he has lived abroad for over a decade, having quit touring with his group to settle down with an Irish wife (Marcella Plunkett) and raise a daughter (Sophie Vavasseur). Danny Wilson (Nick Jonas) is a friend of the groom and a former boy band-er whose solo career is floundering. The bride insists that Danny do a turn with the band, and the two men discover an instant rapport as they sing Stevie Wonder together. Rick is more talented than Danny might have expected, and Danny, in Rick’s words, is surprisingly “real.”

The two stay up all night, smoking weed and jamming, helping each other with their songs-in-progress, which include thematically appropriate lyrics such as, “You’ll never find your voice if you don’t talk.” Rick shares with Danny his original tune, “How to Write a Song (Without You),” and Danny gifts Rick an expensive guitar. Six months later, while riding an escalator (an inherently demeaning mode of transportation for any adult man), Rick hears his song over the loudspeaker of a shopping mall.

A parade of humiliation ensues. The song becomes a number one hit, Danny’s smug face as ubiquitous as his hit track. No one can remember Rick originating “How to Write a Song”—not his wife, his daughter, or his best friend (Peter McDonald, also co-author of the film’s screenplay). Rick cannot shrug off his boss’s continual reminder that he is a “human jukebox,” not a true artist; he is fired when he refuses to sing “How to Write a Song” at a bride’s request. For the promise of a life he has never had, Rick is poised to destroy the one he is currently living. How far will he go to get what he feels he is owed? And how long will it take him to realize what he wants—to be famous but rooted, to have lived two lives, to go back in time—isn’t possible for any of us?

Cheerful, boyish Rudd looks his age here; his frustration and anger come through in every wrinkle, every bruise, on his famously ageless face. He’s mad at the world, but who can blame the world, when the song is so damn catchy? It’s a true power ballad in the key of ’80s romance (which Rick would have lived through, Danny not yet a twinkle in his mother’s eye). Unfortunately, “How to Write a Song” is the film’s only memorable original song, but, fortunately, it hits differently as the film progresses. It is an earworm that turns into a panic-inducing beating heart beneath the floorboards. You’ll bop along to the beat, simultaneously dreading its arrival more with each replay.

Carney’s films always rely on a keen sense of place, and Power Ballad is no exception, from the band’s cramped living quarters and the grungy duplex exteriors of the Crumlin neighborhood to the smooth, glassy surfaces of Los Angeles. These set pieces seemingly indicate Rick’s and Danny’s lots: Rick has ground out continual disappointment, as Danny has moved through the world frictionlessly, almost floating to the top of the charts, where a mansion with a view awaits.

It is never so simple, though, with Carney. Danny is isolated and under pressure; he isn’t a good guy, but he wishes he was. He does not lift the song unaltered, and, in some ways, he even makes it better or, at least, his own. It is the nature of fame, not malice, that backs Danny into a corner, forcing him to claim sole authorship. At the pointed prodding of his manager, impeccably inhabited by Carney regular Jack Reydon, Danny fumbles each opportunity to right his great wrong. Sure, it would have changed Rick’s life to have gotten the credit for “How to Write a Song,” but it would have changed Danny’s life if he hadn’t taken it for himself.

Were circumstances different—the pressures on Danny less intense, Rick’s and Danny’s social circles more proximal—the two would have made great friends and even better musical partners. And had that been the route that screenwriters Carney and McDonald took, it would have left more room for the particular charm baked into Carney’s previous features. When music becomes the means of communication between mothers and children, prospective lovers, close friends, the melting of their voices stands in for a whole lot of talking. Conversation becomes unnecessary if the other person can write the next line of your lyric, picking up where you left off, suggest a wandering melody for the bridge; this is Carney’s great gift as a filmmaker, and, while it is the instigating event of Power Ballad, it is not where the film’s heart lies.

It is Rick’s journey, as he learns to appreciate his ordinary life, that forms the film’s emotional arc. His negotiations and epiphanies involve the people he loves and with whom he does not sing. A lot of telling, and a lot less showing, ensues. The ending is satisfying, even moving, even if the musical montage that gets us there isn’t quite as powerful as it might be (a refrain of “How to Write a Song,” of course).

The conclusion of Rick’s story is more neatly resolved than Carney typically permits, and fans might miss the open-ended optimism and subtleties that make his other films so special. Diverting but not unforgettable, Power Ballad is lovely—but would I wanna hear it again?

Carey, who before Trump appointed her general counsel was a partner at the union-busting law firm Morgan Lewis, didn’t put it exactly that way. In her prepared testimony Thursday before the Health, Employment, Labor, and Pensions Subcommittee of the House Education and the Workforce Committee, Carey took care to explain that the NLRB’s enormous case backlog rose to “unprecedented levels” under President Joe Biden. But that’s because congressional Republicans have been starving the NLRB of funds for 15 years, even as filings with the NLRB rise rapidly as American workers awaken to the fact that they possess labor rights. 

Trump asked Congress for only $285 million to fund the NLRB next year, down from $302 million when Trump entered office. Carey protested the NLRB’s underfunding but blamed it on neither Trump nor congressional Republicans. She did, however, say that she’d just learned the House Republican appropriations bill lowered Trump’s $285 million budget request by nearly one-third, to $200 million. That, Carey said, is “far below what we will need.”

Under Trump, NLRB staffing has fallen to 1,151. As I noted earlier this week, there are graduating high school classes bigger than that. (“My high school graduating class was bigger than that!” Arnie Arnesen told me when I appeared Wednesday on her podcast.) In her prepared statement, Carey said:

We continue to receive new charges every day, at record pace, all while we are 31 percent understaffed compared to 10 years ago when we experienced similar case intake. We are excited to have hiring authority to onboard nearly 100 new employees to the field this fiscal year. However, that number does not approach the number of employees we need to build an efficient and sustainable case processing system and fully staff our regional offices.

Trump was president for four of the 10 years when NLRB funding was declining. And while it’s lovely to hear that the NLRB has a green light to hire 100 new employees, the agency has lost nearly that many (82) since Trump entered office, and it’s pledged to keep staffing levels static in fiscal year 2027. Should Congress further reduce NLRB funding to $200 million, Carey said, the NLRB will lose somewhere between 300 and 460 employees. That would shrink the NLRB’s staffing to somewhere between 851 and 691. The latter figure is smaller than the size of this year’s graduating class at McCaskey High School in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. 

Even as its staff is dwindling, Carey said later in the hearing, “We also, quite frankly, are going to have some space issues. There’s been a lot of GSA realignments over the past five years that have reduced a significant amount of space for us.” The GSA, or General Services Administration, allocates and manages office space for federal agencies. As I’ve noted before, much of the GSA’s time these days is devoted to selling extremely valuable real estate to private buyers at fire-sale prices in the name, preposterously, of thrift. Most recently, the GSA sold Washington’s Liberty Loan building, situated beside the Tidal Basin, for $17 million. That’s $98 per square foot, or about one-fifth the average sale price for a D.C. office building in the current depressed real estate market.

Carey didn’t mention that Trump deliberately denied the NLRB a quorum for his first 11 months in office by firing the Democratic chair, in violation of the 1935 National Labor Relations Act and that same year’s Supreme Court decision in Humphrey’s Executor (which the Supreme Court has signaled its intention to overturn for every independent agency except the Federal Reserve). Trump then waited until December 2025 to fill two vacancies and restore a quorum. While much of the NLRB’s work is conducted out of regional offices, putting the Washington-based NLRB on ice for a year didn’t exactly improve the agency’s efficiency.

Trump filled one of the vacancies with James Murphy, a Republican staffer at the NLRB for nearly half a century before he retired in December 2021. Murphy is now NLRB chair, and, like Carey, he gave off a mild whiff of resistance at Thursday’s hearing. 

When pressed by Representative Summer Lee, Democrat of Pennsylvania, about whether the NLRB “must remain an independent agency” (i.e., not one subject to White House control), Murphy said: “As an operational matter, yes.” Lee further noted that an executive order on independent agencies that Trump issued last year required each of them to establish an office of White House liaison. Does NLRB have one? “Not that I’m aware of,” Murphy answered. Will he oppose establishing a White House liaison at the NLRB? If the president presses the matter, Murphy said, “I’m not sure what position I would be in to oppose that, other than to resign.”

Representative Virginia Foxx, Republican of North Carolina, is probably the most anti-labor member of the full House Education and the Workforce Committee, of which she was previously chair. She tried to get Murphy to agree that the case backlog was the fault of the Biden NLRB devoting too much of its energy to overturning precedents (which she called “ideological agenda setting”) and not enough to processing more routine “retail” cases. Murphy conceded that overturning cases took time and therefore diverted staff resources, which were already thin due to budget cuts. But “having said that,” Murphy said, “I want to emphasize that the massive case backlog currently pending at the board when I arrived was far more attributable, I think, to the loss of quorum, than to any other issue.” 

Translation: This is Trump’s mess.

Murphy also got asked (by Education and the Workforce ranking member Bobby Scott of Virginia): “Is the mission still at the NLRB to encourage the practice and procedure of collective bargaining?” This was a reference to the preamble to the National Labor Relations Act. The precise statutory language is: “It is declared to be the policy of the United States to … eliminate the causes of certain substantial obstructions to the free flow of commerce and to mitigate and eliminate these obstructions when they have occurred by encouraging the practice and procedure of collective bargaining (italics mine).”  

Republicans like to pretend this pro-labor language doesn’t exist, and to say instead that the NLRB should neither promote nor oppose collective bargaining (though of course they like it fine when it opposes). But Murphy gave the right answer to Scott’s question. “Absolutely,” he said of the NLRB’s mission to encourage collective bargaining. “It’s statutorily required.”

Toward the end of the hearing, Representative Mark DeSaulnier, Democrat of California and ranking member of the subcommittee, told Carey and Murphy: “This has been a breath of fresh air. Forgive us, on our side, if we’re a little bit suspicious.” 

Militant servility to Trump and MAGA has reached such epidemic levels among Trump administration officials that Democrats are perhaps overly grateful to find any who talk like a normal human being. We haven’t seen Trump’s NLRB overturn any Biden precedents yet; Murphy affirmed at the hearing that, following NLRB tradition, he won’t do so with fewer than three votes. That can’t happen until Republican nominee James Macy is confirmed, bringing the board’s composition up to three Republicans and one Democrat.

But Macy’s Senate confirmation hearing is scheduled for next week. Friends of labor will likely find their affection for Carey and Murphy dwindle rapidly after that. 

Since the strike began, immigrants inside have shared four letters, published by Cosecha, an immigrants’ rights organization. “We feel vulnerable, in a way, kidnapped or detained without justification,” the prisoners wrote in one letter. They have reported being denied medications (one woman said staff told her that pain medication was “cosmetic”), being fed spoiled food, and being forced to endure outbreaks of illness across the facility, which has poor ventilation and does not have adequate medical treatment or emergency responders.

Another letter, released on Wednesday, describes the opening days of the strike, when Delaney Hall administrators demanded to speak to its leader. “They were upset when we told them there was no leader and that the strike was a collective effort,” the letter recounts. In response, the letter continues, administrators retaliated against one person who had helped with translation, trying “to take him away in handcuffs, which all of us, seeing the injustice, wanted to prevent by peacefully blocking their path with our hands raised so that they wouldn’t take him away.” Next came “beatings, pepper spray, and from ‘ICE,’ a riot squad came up spraying pepper spray throughout the facility, causing many people to be rushed to the hospital.” That was on May 25. “To this day, we haven’t heard anything about those people.” Despite the violence, the strike has continued, as have similar strikes in GEO Group–run detention facilities in California, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.

The conditions inside Delaney Hall, which are appalling, dangerous, and a violation of the rights of those detained, are entirely in keeping with how other such “detention centers” are run across the country; a recent AP investigation found hundreds of immigrant detainees reporting medical neglect in lawsuits across 33 states. The solidarity shared by people trapped in these camps, as evidenced by the multiple simultaneous strikes, makes sense; it has extended outside the camps, as well, with local groups working to shut down ICE facilities offering their support. The resulting crackdown on both striking detainees and their supporters tracks with all the other times Immigration and Customs Enforcement has harmed witnesses and protesters in the course of the agency’s carrying out Trump’s signature campaign of mass deportations. People coming together is treated as a threat by those running the camps because it is precisely the thing the camps are meant to break.

“The opposite of a camp is community,” journalist and translator John Washington writes. He uses “immigration camp” to more clearly describe the dangers posed by the “hundreds of ‘detention centers,’ ‘processing centers,’ ‘holding facilities,’ as well as leased local jail and prison cells in every state of America.” He argues in his forthcoming book, How to Close a Camp: Dispatches From the Fight Against Immigrant Detention (out in July), that the camp shapes our politics and our ways of making community. “A camp warps and degrades reality,” he writes, “both for those in fear of ending up in one and for those living alongside them.” But for as long as there have been such camps, there has been resistance to them, including by those caged within. Camps are, after all, not abstract systems but the products of people’s decisions. “A camp is a long series of choices that need frequent reaffirmation,” Washington observes, and each choice is an opportunity to end, or at least slow, the camp’s operations.

For one thing, camps need approval from myriad city, county, and state authorities; all stages of approval can be contested. As an example, Washington offers a site in Adelanto, California, where immigrants began a hunger strike earlier this month. The camp’s opening required sign-off from agencies such as the state’s Environmental Health Department, CAL FIRE, and the Native American Heritage Commission, among many, many others. That camp also needed permits for everything from native vegetation removal to signage to pollution discharge. As Washington added at the end of this list, each of the people who signed off “could have said no.”

That work—researching, locating, and challenging each of these decision-makers—has been undertaken over decades by groups such as Detention Watch Network, which has identified points of intervention at each stage of immigration camp operation and expansion. Its tool kit on how to challenge ICE’s warehouse expansion details specific permits and ordinances required; venues in which those can be fought; and tools available to the public, such as zoning codes, environmental review, and litigation. As Trump’s mass deportations campaign took off, some national progressive groups have also taken up the fight against immigrant detention, such as Indivisible. Newer efforts have also joined, such as Project Salt Box, which uses public records to map out possible new camps and the money behind them. Detention Watch Network maintains a map detailing Trump’s camp expansion plan; few states are untouched. If you want to put a stop to immigrant detention, it is likely happening near you, whether in a private-run facility like Delaney Hall, a purpose-built camp like the one in the Florida Everglades, or more quietly, in a county or town jail leasing space to ICE.

Among the many tragedies of Delaney Hall is the fact that it had already been shut down once before. GEO Group ran it as an ICE detention center from 2011 to 2017. It then sat dormant until GEO Group got a billion-dollar contract (over 15 years) to reopen in 2025. Not long after the camp took its first prisoners in May 2025, Newark Mayor Ras Baraka challenged it in court, in part on the grounds that it was operating without required permits or safeguards; after one attempted inspection, the city left a court summons on the camp’s chain-link gate. In response, GEO Group accused the mayor of engaging in “a politicized campaign by sanctuary city and open borders politicians in New Jersey,” that was meant to “interfere with the federal government’s efforts to arrest, detain, and deport dangerous criminal illegal aliens in accordance with established federal law.” At the time Baraka tried to inspect Delaney Hall, alongside three Democratic members of Congress, an event DHS characterized as the elected officials having “stormed the gate” of the camp, when video evidence shows clearly that ICE had let Baraka inside before forcing him out. Baraka was charged with federal trespassing charges, which were ultimately dismissed.

Now, in this second round of working to close Delaney Hall, organizers are using some similar strategies as before. People have tried to stand in the way of ICE vehicles. Lawmakers have demanded site visits. Lawsuits have been filed, most recently by the state attorney general against GEO Group. If that company has “nothing to hide,” New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill said in a statement, “and the conditions inside Delaney Hall are as safe and as sanitary as this private corporation and the Trump Administration claim, then there is no legitimate reason why my health inspectors are being kept from full access throughout the building.” She added, “I will continue using all the power of this office to advocate for the detainees and their families.” Mayor Baraka said this week that he would “expand” his existing lawsuit against GEO Group; he wants a judge to order the camp closed. But of all these efforts, the strike and the public support it has garnered seem the most disruptive to the operations of the facility. Last week, DHS issued a statement claiming that detainees’ reports of abuse and dangerous conditions are a “hoax,” and on X the agency denied that there even is a strike underway.

But this is not a simple story of local officials defending their community against violent ICE agents and the private prison camp. Governor Sherrill—who, despite her statements to use “all the power” of her office, has not returned to Delaney Hall—last week declared the area a “peaceful protected protest zone.” This pushed people away from the facility, effectively negating their efforts to block ICE traffic, as independent journalist Talia Ben-Ora noted. Press access was likewise restricted, and had been challenged even before the zone was declared, with photojournalists seemingly singled out by officers; the U.S. Press Freedom tracker recorded 30 assaults on journalists by law enforcement in one week outside Delaney Hall. The governor has yet to meaningfully respond to these threats to both press and protest freedoms, which, arguably, she amplified. The governor also put New Jersey state police in charge of policing the protests. “I will not give ICE the pretext to expand operations in our state,” Governor Sherrill said when announcing these plans. “The state police were just ushers for ICE,” said one organizer at a rally in the New Jersey State House this week that was intended to push Sherrill to do more in defense of immigrants. After the launch of her “protest zone,” dozens of people were arrested. Press on the scene documented flash-bangs and tear gas used against protesters and themselves.

These last two weeks of concentrated attention aside, people have been outside Delaney Hall for months now, offering support for those inside. They have welcomed and comforted family members who stood outside the facility in long lines in the frigid cold and in punishing heat for the chance to visit those inside. As people inside met repression when protesting conditions, mutual aid groups outside have too. Community media, such as Radio Jornalera NJ, have been reporting what’s happening nearly live in some cases, capturing in Instagram Reels people trying to make family visits, the aftermath of police violence, and moments when people are released. Their reporters have been there throughout the strike, witnessing, giving people outside a chance to share what they hear about people inside. The chain-link fences remain, but they have not severed the community gathered on both sides.

These weather extremes are not natural. They are climate disasters. And as a report published today by my organization, Public Citizen, outlines, they are exactly the kind of catastrophes that Big Oil companies predicted their fossil fuel products would cause—at the same time that they were orchestrating fraudulent campaigns of climate denial to block solutions that would have alleviated these harms.

To put it bluntly, Big Oil is ruining summer.

Naturally, the most obvious threat is the heat. The last three summers have been the three hottest ever recorded. Since 1985, 80 percent of U.S. cities have experienced an increase in the number of days with a heat index of 90 degrees or higher. This trend has already extended into 2026, with record-smashing heat this spring across the western half of the country, including an average national temperature in March that was an astounding 9.35 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than the twentieth-century norm.

This escalation in extreme heat isn’t a coincidence. A climate attribution study of the March 2026 heat wave found that it would have been “virtually impossible” without climate change. Nationally, scientists have found that the climate crisis lengthened the average heat wave season in the U.S. from 23 days to 70 days over the last 60 years. Another scientific study concluded that last summer, the average American experienced at least one additional week’s worth of risky heat days due to climate change, while 32 U.S. cities (home to over 21 million people) experienced 30 or more additional risky heat days.

Scientists are increasingly able to determine the degree to which the emissions of particular oil and gas companies have contributed to particular heat waves. For example, a study published last fall in the prestigious journal Nature analyzed a number of major heat waves, including the extreme heat that hit the American Southwest in July 2023. The researchers found emissions from each of the biggest fossil fuel companies—ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Shell, and BP—made that lethal heat wave at least 10,000 times more likely to occur. They concluded that these events would have been virtually impossible without those emissions.

And it’s not just that these companies contributed to the oppressive heat that is now defining summer for so many of us—it’s that they knew full well what they were doing. For decades, Big Oil companies internally forecast exactly how their fossil fuel products would drive increasing heat, and how we would experience these changes. In 1996, for example, Exxon scientist DJ Devlin gave a presentation to the Global Climate Coalition, a group of fossil fuel companies that colluded to spread climate denial, reviewing the science connecting climate change with “suffering and death due to thermal extremes.” He discussed how the “elderly, sick, and very young” would be particularly vulnerable. And he explained the idea of threshold temperatures, referring to the point at which temperatures cross a critical limit “beyond which mortality rises significantly.”

While the “thermal extremes” of recent summers have been bad, they occurred during a La Niña, the cooling phase of the Pacific Ocean’s heat cycle. But this summer is going to be different. Scientists expect that in the coming months the Pacific Ocean will begin its warming cycle, or El Niño. And this El Niño is predicted to be particularly catastrophic—again, largely due to climate change.

Some studies have found that global warming may be leading to stronger El Niño events. More importantly, climate change means that this El Niño will build on a higher temperature baseline, which will have the effect of supercharging its impacts. That constitutes a dangerous cycle. As Defense Department meteorologist Eric Webb put it: “Due to the increasing concentration of greenhouse gases, the climate system cannot effectively exhaust the heat released in a major El Niño event before the next El Niño comes along and pushes the baseline upward again.”

And it’s not just heat that will be supercharged this summer. Climate change is also causing a severe intensification of droughts and wildfires across our country, turning summer in many areas into a season of water rationing, air quality alerts, or worse.

The U.S. already experienced its most intense spring drought ever this year, with the first three months of 2026 being the driest on record. Over 60 percent of the country is currently experiencing at least moderate drought. And in many regions, the situation is far more severe.

Ninety-nine percent of the Southeast is in drought, with over 60 percent in severe to exceptional drought. This has spurred record-breaking wildfires across the region—Georgia has already had eight times as many burned acres so far this year compared to the pace of the last five years. The Great Plains region is facing similar challenges. Nearly 90 percent of Nebraska is in drought, and the region has already experienced record-breaking spring wildfires that burned over a million acres of land across Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma. And in the West, extended drought is reaching a tipping point, following the lowest snowpack levels in a century. Utah recently announced a state of emergency over its water crisis, with the entire state in severe drought and 22 of 29 counties experiencing extreme drought. Colorado, which also relies on snowpack, may soon follow.

These droughts, and their subsequent impacts on wildfires, are directly related to climate change. Climate scientist Kaitlyn Trudeau described the relationship this way: “Climate change is making the atmosphere thirstier. As it gets hotter, the amount of moisture that is pulled out of the landscape or sucked out of plants and soils also increases.” A 2023 study in the journal Environmental Research Letters found that almost 40 percent of the area burned by wildfires in the western United States over the last several decades can be attributed to the emissions of the world’s largest fossil fuel companies. Speaking of the connection between climate change and increasing dryness that is contributing to wildfire growth, the author of the study said, “I’ve never had such a strong correlation in my data before.”

Big Oil companies understood their role in enabling these climate effects decades ago. In 1981, Exxon scientist Henry Shaw wrote an internal memorandum to Exxon’s president of research and engineering explaining that it was “Exxon’s position” that a doubling in atmospheric carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels would result in “major shifts in rainfall.” In 1982, the American Petroleum Institute commissioned a report warning that climate change would have “serious consequences for man’s comfort and survival since patterns of aridity and rainfall can change.” And in 1998, Shell confidentially predicted that if fossil fuels were not brought under control there would be “more droughts” that would “dramatically change” agricultural patterns and “disrupt eco-systems.” Shell even predicted that because of these changes, “conflicts would abound” and “civilization could prove a fragile thing.”

Then there are summer storms. Hurricane season began on June 1. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has predicted a worse than average hurricane season in the Pacific this year (combined with a below-normal season in the Atlantic, where El Niño generally suppresses the number of storms), forecasting between three and six hurricanes, including one to three major storms.

Although hurricanes are not new phenomena, climate change is increasing their severity in several ways. Higher sea surface temperatures make hurricanes more likely to intensify—in fact, over the past 40 years, three times as many storms within a few hundred miles of coasts have intensified rapidly due to warming of the oceans. Storms are also staying stronger farther inland than they did in the past, with warmer sea surface temperatures leading to a “slower decay” of storms by increasing the amount of moisture they can carry. They are generating more rainfall, as well. For every degree of warming, the atmosphere can hold 7 percent more water vapor that could fall as rain. For example, a study funded by the Energy Department looking at Hurricane Ida concluded that climate change was directly responsible for up to half a million people’s exposure to the storm’s floodwaters.

Coastal storms are also becoming more dangerous due to rising seas, whose levels have increased eight to nine inches since 1880, and may rise multiple feet during this century. A study of Hurricane Sandy estimated that sea level rise increased the likelihood of flooding in that storm by 300 percent.

Big Oil companies were fully aware that climate change would make coastal storms like these more dangerous. In 1989, Shell Oil Company produced a confidential planning document that predicted, based on “conventional and probably conservative” assumptions, that the continued burning of fossil fuels would cause “more violent weather,” including “more storms” and “more deluges.”

In fact, Big Oil companies demonstrated their understanding of and belief in these scientific conclusions by modifying their own infrastructure, often at significant expense, to prepare for the coming reality of worsening storms and rising sea levels. In the 1990s, engineers working for Shell, Exxon, and ConocoPhillips noted in design specifications for natural gas pipelines that there could be a “considerable increase of the frequency of storms as a result of climate change,” even specifying for one offshore natural gas platform that an “estimated rise in water level, due to global warming, of 0.5 meters may be assumed” for the project’s 25-year lifespan.

Even as these firms were taking action to protect their own assets from the climate harms they knew were coming, these same companies were engaging in massive disinformation campaigns to, as one fossil fuel coalition’s internal strategy document put it, “reposition global warming as theory (not fact).” In the words of former Senator Chuck Hagel, who championed anti-climate legislation when he was in Congress: “They lied.… It would have put the United States and the world on a whole different track, and today we would have been so much further ahead than we are. It’s cost this country, and it cost the world.”

One of these costs is the carefree summers of our past. Big Oil stole them from us. So over the next few months, if—or more likely when—you find yourself baking under the sun of a record-breaking heat wave that’s making it impossible to enjoy your favorite summer activities, or stuck inside because the air outdoors is dangerously smoky from wildfires near and far, keep in mind that this didn’t just happen. Our summers haven’t simply gotten worse. They have been made worse by specific companies that knew that what they were doing would ruin summer and went ahead and did it anyway. We shouldn’t let them get away with it.

Weiss’s new pick to run the venerated newsmagazine, Nick Bilton, is making far more than his predecessor. The British-born contrarian was installed as 60 Minutes’ new executive producer last week, and is reportedly salaried at $2.5 million—a million more than veteran broadcast journalist Tanya Simon, who ran the show from April 2025 until just last week, according to Page Six. 

Weiss announced Bilton’s hire the same day that she fired a large swath of the show’s crew, in an event that has since been internally referred to as “Black Thursday.” The axed staff included Simon, correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi (who criticized Weiss’s decision to delay her report on a notoriously brutal CECOT megaprison in El Salvador), correspondent Cecilia Vega, and executive editor Draggan Mihailovich.

Scott Pelley, who had been one of the show’s rotating faces for 22 years, was canned Wednesday after he openly questioned Bilton’s appointment during a contentious all-staff meeting earlier this week. At the same meeting, Bilton suggested that more layoffs could be on the horizon.

The show’s remaining correspondents have since begun to question their own futures at the decorated program: Correspondents Bill Whitaker, Lesley Stahl, and Jon Wertheim reportedly held an hourlong meeting Wednesday on the matter, according to Status. Stahl’s contract has already expired, and it is not clear if it will be renewed. Three sources that spoke to the outlet shared that Whitaker is considering his options and might leave of his own accord. Anderson Cooper already left by his own volition last month.

Bilton is by no means the show’s typical hire, and many critics of the hiring decision have questioned what qualifies him to run 60 Minutes at all. Bilton has previously worked as a tech columnist, writing for Vanity Fair and The New York Times. He seemingly left the news industry during the latter half of the last decade in order to pursue screenwriting in Hollywood, and has since worked on scripts and produced projects for major studios, including Lionsgate, Netflix, and Disney.

It is not publicly known how much the program’s highly respected, longtime showrunner Bill Owens made before he was forced out in April 2025 for refusing to bend to Donald Trump’s $20 billion lawsuit. Trump sued 60 Minutes over its sit-down interview with Kamala Harris prior to Election Day 2024, claiming that the program had essentially “defrauded” the American public due to a minor editing decision. Legal experts condemned the suit at the time as meritless, yet  CBS’s parent company, Paramount, nonetheless agreed to pay Trump $16 million in order to settle the case out of court.

“The Lincoln Memorial, the front was supposed to be the back, the back was supposed to be the front, it never got built,” Trump said shortly after appearing to doze off. “They wanna call it the Trump Promenade, but I don’t know if I wanna call it that. But it’s beautiful, it’s a beautiful project. And it’s gonna take the Lincoln Memorial right down to the Potomac.”

Trump on a new area he wants to install outside the Lincoln Memorial: "They want to call it the Trump promenade" pic.twitter.com/k30i4toDnM

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 4, 2026

The president again appeared to struggle to stay awake after making the suggestion.

Trump is now sitting back in his chair and dozing off pic.twitter.com/376koU6XNK

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 4, 2026

The Trump administration has already spent a massive sum on construction projects around Washington, D.C., including specifically around the Lincoln Memorial. He has dedicated $5 million of taxpayer money to covering four lion statues near the memorial in gold leaf and $13 million to redoing the Reflecting Pool. He has also proposed building a 250-foot arch, which would be so large it would overshadow the entire Lincoln Memorial. That project would cost at least $100 million.

Cassidy and Booker filed an amicus brief supporting a lawsuit against the fund, alleging that it goes against the Constitution by making “an end-run around Congress’s institutional authority” and violating the spending, appropriations, and appointments clauses.

The senators’ brief points out that despite a federal judge temporarily blocking the fund last week, Trump refused to say it was dead in a podcast interview earlier this week. They attacked the origin of the fund, Trump’s excessively favorable settlement with the IRS following his lawsuit against the agency after his tax returns were leaked (during his own first term).

“Because the very lawsuit that sparked the settlement was collusive and therefore could not be heard in a federal court, and accordingly no monetary award would have been available through that collusive litigation, the Judgment Fund is not available,” the brief states.

It’s another anti-Trump move from Cassidy following his primary election loss last month to Representative Julia Letlow, who had the president’s endorsement. Cassidy has also taken aim at Trump’s ballroom and his choice of Bill Pulte as director of national intelligence. But the only reason he appears to be showing courage now is because he’ll be out of a job by next year.

That seems to be one of the few things that gets Republicans to criticize Trump: when he withdraws his support and ends their careers. Former Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, once a staunch MAGA acolyte, reportedly turned on Trump after he didn’t back her running for the Senate. But this effort from Cassidy at least carries some weight, and could help kill Trump’s slush fund in court.

Dozens of those pardon recipients have since been arrested for, charged with, or convicted of other crimes, according to a new analysis by Lawfare. At least 97 January 6ers—or roughly one in 16—have been tied to a crime since the president gave them unilateral forgiveness.*

The crimes they stand accused of range from petty crimes such as property damage, trespassing, and possession of drug paraphernalia, to serious felonies such as stalking, theft, defrauding government agencies, plots to assassinate law enforcement and government officials, and homicide.

At least 14 pardon recipients have since been charged with sex crimes or crimes related to child porn, according to Lawfare. Another six have faced domestic violence charges. Others have been accused of different violent crimes, such as physical assault or illegal firearms possession. At least 20 have been charged for driving while drunk or public intoxication.

Notably, five individuals that Trump granted clemency have been charged with or accused of crimes that they conducted after the pardon, suggesting that the president actually facilitated more crime by prematurely kneecapping their judicial consequences.

They include Andrew Paul Johnson, who went on to commit multiple sex crimes against children months after Trump freed him from the clink. He was sentenced in March to life in prison for the crimes related to transmitting child porn and molesting a child under the age of 12.

Ryan Nichols is another pardon recipient who went on to commit more crime. Nichols was charged on May 10 after he allegedly threatened a person with a gun in a church parking lot.

Trump praised his pardon recipients as recently as Wednesday while defending his $1.8 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund,” referring to the honeypot’s potential awardees as “great people.”

“These are people who have lost their lives over nonsense,” Trump told the New York Post. “These were many great people, and I gave them pardons and I’m very proud to have given them pardons. And I think they should be reimbursed for a crooked government.”

It’s unclear if the slush fund will proceed, but a slew of January 6ers have already lined up for their slice of the pie. They include former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, a sex offender who bear-sprayed cops, and a convicted child molester who told his victims he would give them money from a Trump payout in exchange for their silence.

* This article originally misidentified the number of pardoned January 6ers who have reoffended.

Kris Mayes plans to seek a new indictment against those allies, her office announced Thursday, following the Arizona Supreme Court’s decision Tuesday not to reverse a lower court ruling throwing out earlier indictments against the group of 18 people, including former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani.

“The Arizona Attorney General’s Office will return this case to the grand jury,” a spokesperson for the attorney general’s office, Richie Taylor, said to Politico. “We decline to comment further at this time.”

Two years ago, a grand jury indicted Giuliani, former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, conservative attorney John Eastman, and 15 others over a fake elector scheme to reverse Trump’s 2020 election loss in the state. Trump was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the case. Last year, though, the case was thrown out by Judge Sam Myers, who said prosecutors didn’t show jurors the text of the Electoral Count Act, which governs presidential elections.

Mayes’s office appealed all the way to the state Supreme Court, which decided not to reopen the case on Tuesday. If Mayes secures new indictments, Arizona would join Wisconsin and Nevada as states with active criminal cases against 2020 fake elector schemes. Even if Trump won’t face prosecution for interfering in the 2020 election, the possibility remains open that his close allies could still face criminal consequences.

Politico reported that one anonymous executive told the administration that their storage tanks were “at dangerously low levels already,” three months into Iran’s retaliatory blockade of the Strait of Hormuz.

“We have shared those concerns at the highest levels of government about what’s coming in mid-to-late June,” they said. “I hope they are paying attention to inventories right now. You’re hitting tank bottom.”

In all, four executives told Politico that insiders have warned the Trump administration that a major price spike could hit consumers as soon as mid-June.

A White House staffer completely dismissed this reporting, saying that “Politico’s anonymous sources are wrong.” And an official at the Department of Energy claimed there were “no such discussions” around inventory.

Yet Politico’s anonymous sources don’t sound too far off from what’s publicly known. Last week, Exxon senior vice president Neil Chapman told a room full of investors that the U.S. is “approaching unheard of inventory levels. I mean, really, really low levels. You can debate whether that’s going to hit those really low levels in two weeks or three weeks. But once you get to that point, then you’ll see price shoot up.” Another anonymous source told Politico that this point of view had already been expressed to the White House, but to no avail.

“President Trump and his energy team anticipated short-term market disruptions, communicated them openly to the American people, and implemented an aggressive plan to mitigate any impacts,” White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers said in a statement to Politico. “President Trump will never allow Iran to possess a nuclear weapon, and he will continue to advance America’s core national security interests.”

The Senate voted 50–49 against sending the spending bill back to the Judiciary Committee in order to attach language ending the fund.

Susan Collins of Maine, Jon Husted of Ohio, and Dan Sullivan of Alaska were the only three Republicans to vote with Democrats for codifying the ban.

The Trump administration has given mixed signals as to the fate of the $1.776 billion fund after a federal court temporarily struck it down last week. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche told a congressional committee Tuesday that the fund was dead, but Trump said otherwise in his interview with the New York Post podcast Pod Force One published on Wednesday.

Professional fighter Bryce Mitchell told reporters Wednesday night that the government should not be involved in hosting sporting events, and that the June 14 UFC match—an “America 250” event coincidentally scheduled on Donald Trump’s birthday—is only opening up the federal government to more corruption.

“What I think, personally, is that our government is desecrating its role in society by entertaining sports,” Mitchell said, citing his degree in economics and his love for political science. “Our government is to protect and serve the people, and really should be as minimal as possible.

“When you’re doing all of this stuff, hosting sporting events, it’s really outside of the goal of what the government was intended to be because our tax dollars and resources are funding this operation,” Mitchell said.

Mitchell is not one of the fighters on the June 14 card. He specified that while he would love to participate—and would be ready and willing to fill in for any absentees—he does not politically believe that the government should be veering into the sporting world.

“For the UFC, I think it’s great,” Mitchell said. “Of course they’re going to say yes to it.”

The 31-year-old MMA artist noted that while he’s not criticizing the UFC’s participation, emphasizing that he’s “happy” for all the fighters who are getting a moment in the limelight with the major event, “the government should never be hosting sporting events because there’s more room for corruption, and we already have a corrupted government.”

“The government is supposed to protect us, not entertain us,” Mitchell emphasized.

Bryce Mitchell on Trump's White House UFC fight:

Our government is desecrating its role in society by entertaining sports. Our government is to protect and serve the people. Our tax dollars and resources are funding this operation. The government is supposed to protect us, not… pic.twitter.com/Xf6qNdje5k

— Headquarters (@HQNewsNow) June 4, 2026

Trump is a lifelong fan of boxing and MMA, and has apparently used the nation’s semiquincentennial anniversary as an excuse to host a fight at the executive mansion. The tournament will be the first UFC event ever hosted at the White House.

The main card will pit Justin Gaethje against Ilia Topuria for the lightweight title, and Alex Pereira against Ciryl Gane for the interim heavyweight title. UFC’s parent company, TKO Holdings, has promised that the entire event—which is expected to cost around $60 million—will be funded entirely by the sports organization and come at no cost to taxpayers.

Trump has already made a buck off the match: The president reportedly invested up to $50,000 in TKO Group Holdings on March 25, according to his May 12 financial disclosure filing, two weeks after the tournament was formally announced.

Senators John Cornyn and Thom Tillis are already giving noncommittal answers on whether they’d support acting Attorney General Blanche’s nomination to permanently lead the Justice Department.

“Being attorney general is probably one of the hardest jobs in the Cabinet, because you’re working for the president, but you’re also supposed to be able to tell the president ‘no,’” Cornyn told CNN’s Manu Raju while discussing his hesitancy on Blanche. “So we need to talk about that.”

Tillis, who sits on the critical Senate Judiciary Committee, referred to Blanche’s support for January 6 insurrectionists as a “circuit-breaker.”

“He’s got good credentials—people are going to hammer him because he was the president’s personal attorney, but I’m just more about getting through the J6 stuff,” he told the Washington Examiner. “It’s not a gray area for me. Either he equivocated and said harming these Capitol police officers was an OK thing, or he didn’t, and we’ll find that in the due diligence.”

Senator Mitch McConnell looks to be another likely “no” vote, as he recently lambasted Blanche for his support for President Trump’s $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” slush fund, calling the move “utterly stupid” and “morally wrong.”

Even Senate Majority Leader John Thune told Punchbowl News that it’s “hard to say” if Blanche will be confirmed.

“Most of our members are pretty deferential to who the president wants in some of these key positions,” he said. “He’s obviously serving in the role already and clearly has experience in it, so that’ll serve him well. But this is an environment where nothing’s a safe or sure bet these days.”

Only four GOP “no” votes are needed to sink Blanche’s nomination—assuming Vice President JD Vance doesn’t cast a tie-breaking vote and embattled Democrat John Fetterman votes with his party.

On Wednesday, Representative Anna Paulina Luna complained on X, “The head honcho of CodePink here on Capitol Hill decided to try to harass me as I was leaving my hearing with Rubio and smacked my arm.

“I have no issues answering questions but the moment you touch me you cross a line,” Luna posted. She said she gave a statement to Capitol Police and would be filing charges. 

But TMZ posted video of the incident, and it shows Medea Benjamin, the head of CodePink, walking alongside Luna outside of the House Rayburn Office Building and only lightly brushing her arm, to which Luna reacted angrily. 

TMZ obtained video of the incident from CODEPINK, where Rep. Luna says a protester assaulted her. https://t.co/2KUdC4XhxN pic.twitter.com/6IDPX9SYjd

— TMZ (@TMZ) June 3, 2026

In a series of posts on X, Luna attacked the organization for being funded by the Chinese Communist Party and for crossing “a personal boundary that should NEVER be crossed.” In the comments, multiple X users, including Benjamin, mocked Luna for dramatizing the incident. 

CodePink posted that Benjamin had been detained by Capitol Police but later released, and called out the Trump administration’s wars against Cuba and the Middle East.  

Today, a congresswoman lied to have CODEPINK co-founder Medea Benjamin detained by Capitol Police.

Why? To try to silence our work against U.S. wars in the Middle East and sanctions on Cuba.

Instead of defending these wildly unpopular policies, members of Congress target the… pic.twitter.com/h8DW0v52rg

— CODEPINK (@codepink) June 3, 2026

Bolton is expected to plead guilty to one count of illegal retention of sensitive national security documents and has agreed to pay a more than $2 million fine, according to sources that spoke with CNN Thursday.

A conviction could put the 77-year-old in the clink: One count of illegal retention carries a sentence between zero and 60 months in prison.

Bolton’s loss is a major coup for Trump, who has leveraged the power of his second term to enact a widespread retribution campaign against his so-called political enemies.

Bolton was one of the president’s closest advisers during his first term—until September 2019, when Trump fired him over internal clashes related to foreign policy. He has since become one of Trump’s most vocal critics from his last administration, railing against the president’s takes on NATO, Iran, and Russia.

Trump began advocating for Bolton’s arrest around the time that the former adviser published his 2020 memoir, The Room Where It Happened, about his time in the Trump White House. The book was very critical of the president, but Trump took it a step further, claiming that the text was actually illegal as Bolton had included classified information. Trump’s DOJ opened criminal and civil investigations into Bolton at the time, though the cases were closed mere months into the Biden administration.

Prosecutors in the new case have accused Bolton of sharing “more than a thousand pages of information about his day-to-day activities” via his personal email with his wife and daughter, CNN reported late last year. Yet the transmission of information is not part of the charges Bolton is expected to plead guilty to.

Bolton’s hearing is scheduled for June 26.

This story has been updated.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche gleefully announced the indictment against the SPLC in April, claiming at the time that the famed anti-racism group was “manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred.”

The DOJ cited undercover investigations the SPLC had conducted in conjunction with law enforcement as evidence that the Montgomery-based nonprofit was funneling millions of dollars into groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan Nations, and the National Socialist Party of America.

The organization was charged with 11 counts related to its undercover activities. They include six counts of wire fraud, conspiracy to conceal money laundering, and charges related to allegedly falsified bank statements. The SPLC has denied the allegations and pleaded not guilty.

But there were considerable problems with the original indictment, which legal experts posited could make it difficult to win in court.

This week, the DOJ’s director of public affairs Emily Covington shared a superseding indictment with the media that was supposed to have fixed the errors. Instead, Covington made a grave error herself by publishing a draft version of the document and, in turn, potentially violating grand jury secrecy rules, national security journalist Marcy Wheeler wrote on her EmptyWheel blog.

The superseding indictment also warps the rationale behind the charges, arguing that they do not stem from the general practice of paying informants but rather that the SPLC had violated the law by failing to notify its donors of the operational mechanics of its informant network. But, as former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance argued, the SPLC didn’t need to.

“DOJ may find itself with egg on its face when it comes to donors’ views of how SPLC used their money,” Vance wrote Thursday in her own assessment of the new document. “They weren’t obligated to publish a roadmap explaining exactly how they infiltrate dangerous organizations. Journalists do not disclose confidential sources. Civil rights groups tracking violent extremists aren’t obligated to expose their work, which would compromise it.

“This isn’t a case like the ‘We Build The Wall’ fraud Steve Bannon and others were charged in, after they promised not to take donor money for personal use and then did,” Vance noted.

The SPLC was founded in 1971 in order to combat white supremacist groups after the Civil Rights Movement. Its activity was never a secret to the government—in fact, the SPLC frequently coordinated with local and federal law enforcement, sharing its findings in order to dismantle hateful institutions.

Yet in the decades since its founding, the nonprofit’s purview has been nationally perceived (at least on the right) as less and less acceptable. Conservative politicians and personalities have railed against the advocacy group, claiming that its work—which includes tracking extremist groups, promoting tolerance, and kneecapping bigotry through litigation—is inherently partisan and overly leftist.

Video analyzed by The Washington Post shows Elias Irizarry, who was 19 in 2021, crawling into the Capitol through a broken window, posing for photos in a private conference room, climbing onto a statue of former President Ronald Reagan, and leaving after 20 minutes.

 He was charged with misdemeanor trespassing before being pardoned by President Trump.  

The Post identified Irizarry in at least five videos of the insurrection.

“I am ashamed because I will always be a part of this disgrace,” Irizarry said during his 2023 sentencing. “January 6 represented something truly horrible; it was the largest attack on our democracy since the Civil War.”

Now he’ll serve in a sensitive position at the Pentagon’s Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict office, which oversees embassy security, personnel recovery, and hostage rescue, among other things.  

Irizarry isn’t the first insurrectionist to be rewarded with a job in the Trump administration. Former FBI agent and insurrectionist Jared L. Wise—who shouted “Kill ’em! Kill ’em! Kill ’em!” while the mob attacked law enforcement at the Capitol—is now part of Trump’s Department of Justice.

The glowing report on Trump’s most recent trip to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center included a list of medications the president takes, but did not include finasteride—the generic name of Propecia—a hair-loss drug Trump used during his first term. When the Post asked whether the president was still taking Propecia, the White House said it was not obligated to reveal the full range of medications the president was taking.

“The current report reflects all medications deemed clinically relevant to disclose at this time,” the White House said in a statement, adding that the medical report released Friday included information relevant to his ability to serve as president.

The White House insisted: “No additional undisclosed conditions or procedures materially affecting his health status were omitted from this report.”

But a range of health experts told the Post that the White House’s lack of transparency suggested that there could be other elements of the president’s health that were being kept out of view.

“It raises significant questions of what else is possibly not being revealed,” said Robert Klitzman, a psychiatrist who leads Columbia University’s master’s program in bioethics. He warned that finasteride had been linked to an increased risk of depression, which would have potential effects on the president’s performance.

“We want to make sure that we’re getting the full story in order to know that whoever occupies a position can sufficiently carry out the responsibilities of the office,” Klitzman told the Post.

Despite the fact that treatment for a cosmetic condition is less serious than treatment for a medical one, Steve Joffe, a physician and bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine, pointed out that “there isn’t much downside” to disclosing the continued use of hair-loss drugs.

“There’s a certain level of openness and disclosure that people have a right to expect from someone in whom they place such profound trust,” Joffe told the Post.

Concerns over Trump’s mysterious prescription cocktail come as medical experts found his latest medical report lacked specificity where it matters. Trump’s consistently glowing results contrast directly with what Americans can see: visible bruising and rashes, his frequent on-camera naps, and the fact that he is an 80-year-old man who rants madly about how healthy he is.

The order reclassifies close to 8,000 federal workers in “confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating” positions to at-will employees, allowing them to be fired without any stated reason. Most of these positions are at GS-15, the highest pay grade for federal civilian employees, coming with salaries of up to $200,000 a year.

This order covers directors, deputy directors, chiefs of staff, senior advisers, policy analysts, people who oversee the distribution of federal grants, public affairs leaders, and legislative affairs leaders.

“They’re going to be hired on the basis of merit and confidence, but if they’re messing up, then they can be removed quickly—rather than taking a year longer to get rid of them,” James Sherk of the White House Domestic Policy Council told Trump at the order’s signing ceremony.

President Trump signs executive order on status of career federal employees. pic.twitter.com/bd8ALJRaj9

— CSPAN (@cspan) June 3, 2026

It’s another blow to government employees, who have seen their numbers shrink drastically in Trump’s second term thanks to Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency initiative and Trump’s attempts to purge civil servants at odds with his agenda. Over 300,000 people have already lost their jobs, and this order is projected to push out another 50,000 federal employees, according to a February estimate from the Office of Personnel Management.

This executive order is the culmination of an OPM rule change that took effect in March. The senior-level jobs the administration is targeting will still remain nonpartisan, career positions but now won’t have protections such as appeals processes, allowing the White House to fire them more quickly.

“The practical implications of this action are clear,” Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, said in a statement Wednesday. “Workers who once felt comfortable reporting waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement at their place of employment because they were protected from retaliation will now be afraid for their jobs if they speak out.”

“Yesterday, in a meaningless vote, the House voted, 4 bad Republicans and all of the Dumocrats, to limit my War Powers, right in the middle of my final negotiations to end the War with the Islamic Republic of Iran,” Trump wrote. “Who would do such an unpatriotic thing. They know where the negotiations stand. The Democrats are fueled by Trump Derangement Syndrome. They would rather have our Country fail than give me another, of many, victories. The four Republicans, that’s a whole other story—They’re GRANDSTANDERS! They should be ashamed of themselves.”

GOP Representatives Thomas Massie, Warren Davidson, Bryan Fitzpatrick, and Tom Barrett sided with Democrats in a 215–208 vote to adopt the resolution and send it on to the Senate.

“Many falsely claimed the War Powers Act empowers a president to wage any war for up to 90 days. That’s not true, but there are now new ways rationalize war in Iran. What they still don’t have? Congressional authorization. The oath is to our Constitution,” Davidson wrote Thursday morning. “The moral obligation is to the men and women who wage our wars. Define the mission. Authorize the mission. Accomplish the mission.”

Trump claims to be “right in the middle” of negotiations, even as the Iranian government claims there’s been “no tangible progress” made in them. The war powers resolution—which the vast majority of Republicans are against—is unlikely to actually get Trump to stop the war, as that would require his signature and an actual respect for the law. But it is a direct reflection of how the actual public feels about this war.

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

Secretary of State Marco Rubio testified before the House Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday. An extraordinary extended exchange took place between Rubio and Democrat Ted Lieu, and it was all about Trump’s tendency to fall asleep at public events. Ted Lieu cornered Rubio on this and forced him to lie to Congress about what all of us can see with our own eyes. That might seem trivial, but the way Representative Lieu handled this moment captures something essential about how our politics works today. And it shows why Democrats need to relentlessly center Trump’s ongoing physical and mental decline.

We’re talking about this moment with Brian Beutler, because he writes regularly on his excellent Substack, Off Message, about the need for Democrats to fight the information wars aggressively. And this Rubio moment raises some important issues related to that. Brian, always good to have you on.

Brian Beutler: Great to be back.

Sargent: OK. So this moment started when Representative Ted Lieu got to question Rubio. First, Lieu played video of Rubio talking at a recent Cabinet meeting with Trump slumbering away right beside him. Then Ted Lieu asked Rubio about that. Listen.

Ted Lieu (voiceover): Secretary Rubio, have you been at more than one meeting where President Trump has fallen asleep?

Marco Rubio (voiceover): That’s false. That’s false. I’ve never seen him fall asleep. On the contrary, the guy doesn’t sleep, which is a big problem because he calls me at two in the morning. He calls me at five in the morning. And, you know, I like to sleep a little bit.

Sargent: Brian, just to start off, Rubio is actually undercutting himself here because he’s admitting that Trump is up at all hours of the night. And that’s part of the problem, since it’s another symptom of his ongoing decline. But otherwise, what do you make of this move by Lieu here?

Beutler: Part of the reason he’s falling asleep in Cabinet meetings is that he’s this erratic person who is outraged all night, stays up all night tweeting, and then is too exhausted for the work that he actually finds boring—the work of the president that happens during mostly normal business hours.

But I think that the point here is to put Rubio, or whoever happens to be testifying before Congress, in a bind and make them say ridiculous things under oath that are contradicted right there by video evidence, so that they make the rounds on social media and you and I talk about them on this podcast. What Lieu is saying is, I know that you know the truth and you are here misrepresenting it to the public—and just putting a lot of pressure on Rubio. Because somewhere deep down in Marco Rubio, one assumes, is a conscience, is somebody who is in character, and the character will break down under enough pressure.

Sargent: Right. Well, let’s listen to more of the exchange. It continues this way. After Rubio had denied that Trump falls asleep at the meetings, Lieu played more video that showed Trump sleeping away right next to Rubio. And then Lieu said this. Listen.

Lieu (voiceover): You are literally talking about issues of war and peace and Donald Trump is sleeping right next to you. If Donald Trump cannot stay awake at these important meetings where the cameras are rolling, imagine what he’s like when the cameras are not there. So I’m going to ask you—have you been at classified meetings where Donald Trump has fallen asleep or had trouble staying awake?

Rubio (voiceover): I’ve never been at any meeting where he—the things you’re showing me now, he was not falling asleep.

Lieu (voiceover): So you’re lying again. You’re consistently lying to Congress. You’re lying to Congress, Secretary Rubio. So I’m going to show you another video in a moment. The president’s inability to stay awake on the job has caused other countries to perceive him differently. They mock him. They see he is weak and he is feeble.

Sargent: Brian, what interests me about this is Rubio’s trying to plead that this is too trivial a matter to be discussed before the Foreign Relations Committee. But Lieu just doesn’t let himself get knocked off course by that. Everything here is all about Trump’s fundamental unfitness for the job, about how he shouldn’t be making these decisions and he shouldn’t have this power and that this is a disaster for America and the world. Your thoughts on that?

Beutler: Yeah, I mean, in a way—obviously it requires a bit of explication and Lieu couldn’t interrupt himself in the five minutes or whatever that he had to question Rubio to point this out. But there’s an almost obvious contradiction here where Rubio is on the one hand saying he wasn’t asleep, but also, if he was asleep, it’s no big deal.

And in a more normal context, a president slipping—they’re in office for four years, there’s cameras everywhere. They might trip and fall. They might nod off in one meeting. They might accidentally hit post on a tweet before they finish typing it. And that would be ridiculous to home in on in a Foreign Relations Committee meeting because it is trivial.

But there’s a pattern here with Trump. This is elemental to his presidency. It’s gotten us into a war that Trump can’t get himself out of. It has inspired mockery around the world. It makes foreign leaders and even domestic counterparties kind of know how to manipulate Trump.

His not just—not the fact that he’s old and tired, but the fact that he’s unwell, erratic, susceptible to flattery. These are all part of one thing. And it is a crisis. It is relevant to the work of the Foreign Affairs Committee and multiple other committees of Congress.

Sargent: And I think part of the story here that gets at the unfitness you’re talking about is that Lieu is trying to bait Rubio into revealing himself to be kind of an unprincipled, sycophantic dirtbag, basically.

Beutler: He has a lot of experience at shape-shifting at this point.

Sargent: Yeah, he certainly does. Well, let’s listen to a little bit more of Ted Lieu and Rubio. Here, Lieu broadens the indictment out to Trump’s mental state in a bigger sense.

Lieu (voiceover): Donald Trump’s inability to stay awake on the job shows that there’s something very wrong with his health or cognitive abilities. In fact, on a number of occasions, Donald Trump will contradict himself in literally the same meeting or interview.

Sargent: Lieu then plays more video of Trump and then says this. Listen.

Lieu (voiceover): So, Secretary Rubio, instead of holding North Korean–style Cabinet meetings where everyone goes around the room kissing Donald Trump’s ass, I’m going to ask you to come clean with the American people and the White House as well. There’s something wrong with Donald Trump’s health or cognitive abilities. There’s a reason he keeps going to the hospital and they keep giving him cognitive tests. We have not seen the president in eight days. The American people deserve the truth. I yield back.

Rubio (voiceover): I don’t even know how to respond to that. Other than to tell you that it’s absurd and ridiculous. And I can’t believe we’re in a Foreign Affairs Committee meeting in front of the House at an important time in American foreign policy.

Lieu (voiceover): Just keep lying. Just keep on—

Rubio (voiceover): With supposedly someone who thinks he’s a medical expert—

Sargent: So Rubio goes on to spin a bunch of bullshit about how youthful and vigorous and superior to everyone around him Trump is. But the thing is, Brian, what strikes me about this is Rubio’s forced to deny what we can all see as true. And it seems to me Democrats don’t do this kind of hand-to-hand combat enough. They don’t make Republicans deny what’s true about them. They spend—meaning Democrats spend—their time denying Republican lies about them. What do you make of that?

Beutler: Yeah. We in the writers community have this phrase, or this cliché, “show, don’t tell,” which can be effective for writing in an evocative way or making people think. But in politics, especially today, I think it’s more important to tell, not show—or tell and show.

I think Democrats have had a hard time shaking the habit of assuming that what is true will be made clear to people when they watch television or when they read the newspaper, that the mediating institutions will do this work for them. They don’t need to say, hey, why has Donald Trump been to the hospital so many times to take so many cognitive tests? Why is Donald Trump falling asleep in all of his meetings? Does it have something to do with him being up until 3 a.m. tweeting libel all the time?

And what Lieu recognizes is that if you want to make that something that the public thinks of as a big, discrete problem, you have to tell them that it is a big, discrete problem and then connect the dots for them. And it would be better if more members of the Democratic caucuses on Capitol Hill had picked this up the way Lieu has.

Sargent: Agreed. And just to broaden out what we’re really talking about here, some people might watch these exchanges and listen to what you and I are saying and conclude, this is just TDS, Trump Derangement Syndrome. They’re just obsessing over Trump. It’s not focused on what people really care about.

Brian, you spend a lot of time focused on this idea of what people really care about. So I’m going to set you up here. This just seems to misunderstand how politics works these days. Now, I’m not going to say that talking about Trump’s unfitness is all you need to do. Of course not. You do have to explain to people how you’re going to make their lives better and so forth.

But it’s just factual that Trump is the center of our political universe. And it’s precisely when voters forget how unfit he is that he does well, that Republicans do well. It’s when voters understand and see glaringly how unfit he is that he and Republicans lose. What’s your big theory on all this?

Beutler: Well, I do want to say that I think that the public is more willing to overlook this stuff when things are going better. So when Trump is in some sense insulated from the substantive consequences of his unfitness for office—which was essentially the case for the first three years of his first term—he was never popular then, but his economic approval ratings were high. And it was very easy for people who either supported him fully or were willing to tolerate him to say, look, I don’t like all the insane tweeting or whatever, but things are basically going OK. So that’s not a big deal.

And I think that does suggest that there is some balance that you need to strike between trying to make issues and trying to appeal to people on the basis of regular concerns. I never want to overstate the case and say forget about kitchen-table issues, don’t have healthcare plans and stuff. That stuff is important.

But people can be made to care about all kinds of things through persuasion of a different kind, where people of influence behave in a way that suggests this is important, people need to care about this, and make consumers, voters, in essence think: huh, whatever I want the government to be doing for me, I really can’t have my president be like this.

Sargent: Trump would absolutely agree with our understanding of how politics works. And here’s why. He runs everything through a strong-versus-weak frame. Everything is about his dominance, his virility, his masculine strength, his big crowds, his big ratings. And everything is always also about how weak his enemies are, how they’re failing, how they get low ratings, how they have low energy.

And he lashes out with particular vitriol at those who question those narratives about his dominance and strength. He knows that if he’s seen as flailing or floundering or not in control, that it’s deadly for him. What are your thoughts on that? What can we conclude from that about how our politics works these days, do you think?

Beutler: Yeah. I mean, even before Donald Trump kind of took it to this insane level where everything he says about his opponent you can count on to be a lie and abusive and maybe libelous—with the goal being to make them look small and easily squashed like a bug, and he’s the strong person who’s setting the terms of the political argument—Republicans would do this.

They did this to John Kerry in 2004. He was a war hero. And so they said, nah, you faked your injuries and you didn’t deserve your Purple Heart. And the idea wasn’t just to convince people of the lie. It was to put Kerry in a bind, to make Kerry reveal that he didn’t know how to fight back, to defend himself, and thus appear weak.

And I think in the end of that—this Swift Boat Veterans thing that I’m alluding to from 22 years ago—Kerry found his footing. But it was a perilous moment, because Kerry’s initial inability to stand up for himself was dangerous because people cared less about the attack than they did about the likelihood, the possibility that Kerry would become president and bring this unwillingness to stand up for himself to the office. And if he wouldn’t stand up for himself, how could he stand up for regular people or the country?

And that aspect of politics, while regrettable, is sort of irreducible. And it was maybe useful to Barack Obama to see John Kerry have to struggle with that, because by the time he came onto the scene in the next election, I think Democrats had at that point learned that you can’t just shrug these things off or say, that was so rude, you’ve got to apologize to me, only to be smacked in the face again.

You really have to set the terms of the debate yourself. And somewhere after Donald Trump won his first election, I think Democrats lost faith in that, or they lost sight of that insight and they lost their confidence. And things like what Ted Lieu did in the clips you played are the kind of thing that can help bring it back.

Sargent: I think it would be helpful to bring another contemporary example into this here. James Talarico and the Texas Senate race. Republicans are attacking Talarico as transgender, as someone with low testosterone, as a vegan—basically as a wimp. Now, Republicans don’t expect voters to actually say to themselves, he’s transgender and a vegan, so I’m not voting for him.

Instead, what Republicans want is for Talarico to lie down and take these attacks. That’s the main event they want. They want, again, to go back to the Swift Boat example, for one side to be seen as strong and dominant and the other as weak and submissive and unable to fight back. And these attacks are almost designed to trigger bad instincts in Democrats, I think, in a way. Can you talk about this Texas Senate race example in this context a little bit? You wrote a great piece about this. It’s applicable, isn’t it?

Beutler: I think it’s directly applicable. And I do want to say it’s both things. There are definitely voters in Texas who, absent everything, might think Ken Paxton is such a sleazebag that even though I’m conservative, I’m a Republican, I like Donald Trump, Paxton takes it too far, so this time I’m going to vote for Talarico or I’m going to stay home.

And Republicans certainly want some of those voters to think, well, if you vote for Talarico, that means you’re not a real man. And they want those people’s friends to be saying, you’re not going to vote for that Talarico guy, are you? To create a kind of peer pressure, a social environment where supporting Talarico is something that you have to be ashamed of.

But the flip side of that is that there are people who are less committed. They’re really more genuinely independent. They vote for both parties or they vote for Republicans mostly out of habit. They’re not super committed. Republicanism isn’t part of their identity. But they do value strength. They do respect people who stand up for themselves. And they do think that people who don’t stand up for themselves are weak and pathetic in some sense.

And so, irrespective of the attack—Talarico is trans—I don’t think that they particularly care about the truth or falsity of the accusation. They’re looking to Talarico to see if he’ll take an affront to his identity lying down.

Not that there’s something wrong with being trans, but that when someone lies about you in a way that’s designed to make half of the state hate you, do you say, well, that’s just a distraction from kitchen-table issues, and refuse to stand up for yourself? Or do you challenge Ken Paxton to a real debate about what it means to be a man?

And my hope—I think the best way for Talarico to thread this needle, to address the libel without either throwing trans people under the bus or anchoring the whole campaign around questions of trans rights—would be to take it head-on in that way. Like, you’re going to lie about me? Let’s have it out.

We shall see. So far, I think the Talarico campaign has done a very good job of reminding people just how scummy Ken Paxton is, but have not done a particularly good job of telling, as opposed to showing, that Talarico is the real man in this race, is the strong man in this race. And there are ways that they can do this without undercutting the more positive vision that they want to run.

Sargent: Absolutely. So just to close this out, just to go back to this Ted Lieu–Rubio exchange—what’s your general feeling about what Democrats can actually learn from an exchange like this? And what do you want to see them doing?

This is something you write about all the time, very well. Folks, check out Brian’s Substack, Off Message. It’s really good on these topics.

What do you want to see Democrats take from an exchange like that? And what do you want to see them do from here through election day, and I guess through 2028?

Beutler: I guess the through line here is that there’s a lot of political value in putting your opposition in a bind that, at least at a glance, feels impossible. I do want to say that I think Rubio, because Republicans are well versed in this, handled this exchange about as well as is possible if you work in Trump’s administration. And it’s because he understands—don’t get yourself in a bind. Think through what your opposition is likely to throw at you and how you’re going to respond.

And so this is why I write a lot about how Democrats can prepare to counter Republicans or set their own traps for Republicans. And what was so sharp about what Lieu did is, in a sort of more aboveboard and honest way, it required Rubio to make a choice: I either have to lie and debase myself, or tell the truth and lose my job.

And if Democrats on Capitol Hill grilling Republicans before committees can try to keep that binary in mind, then their questions are going to be a lot sharper, a lot better. And there will be people who aren’t quite as adept as Rubio, and they will start to flounder.

Sargent: Brian Beutler, always awesome to talk to you, man. Folks, check out Brian’s Substack, Off Message. Brian, thanks for coming on. Let’s do it again soon.

Prediction markets are bracing for a drawn-out fight, and they’ve staffed their front group with executives well versed on issues of gambling and addictive products. The Coalition for Prediction Markets, or CPM—a trade group backed by some of the largest players in the prediction market industry, including Kalshi, Coinbase, Crypto.com, Robinhood, and Underdog—has recruited a bipartisan dynamic duo of influential former congressmen to be the faces of the industry. In addition to the political firepower, CPM added an influential former gambling industry advocate and a former vaping executive to help manage the organization’s direction.

Prediction markets, which offer customers a chance to wager their money on uncertain outcomes in return for payouts from correct predictions, have claimed exemption from state and local gambling laws. They’ve managed to dodge regulations despite the fact that many of the predictions made on these platforms are on the outcome of sporting events, with one measure finding that up to 90 percent of trading volume on Kalshi, the industry’s largest domestic player, comes from sports.

While this might sound like gambling to you or me, in the eyes of the industry, and of the Trump-controlled Commodities Future Trading Commission, or CFTC, the products offered by these firms are not gambling but swaps—sophisticated investment products that are regulated solely by the CFTC. State and local governments disagree. Forty-one state attorneys general have challenged this claim, with Minnesota going so far as to pass a law banning them, while Arizona’s attorney general filed criminal charges against Kalshi.

Despite claims that prediction markets operate as investment tools, they are not sound investments for the average person. An analysis from The Wall Street Journal recently found that just 0.1 percent of accounts on Polymarket earn 67 percent of all profits on the platform, and that there are nearly three unprofitable accounts for every one that makes money on Kalshi. In one study, users of prediction markets were worse off, on average, than customers of traditional sports books.

With lawmakers, regulators, and even the general public turning against the industry due to its avoidance of state laws, the industry banded together last December to launch CPM. The organization is headed by a onetime rising star of the Democratic Party, former Congressman Sean Patrick Maloney, who had advised Coinbase prior to his 2024 assumption of the ambassadorship to the Organization of Economic Co-operation and Development. At his side is former Republican Congressman Patrick McHenry. The onetime chair of the powerful House Financial Services Committee, McHenry has turned to advising financial firms since he left office in January 2025. At last count, McHenry held seven positions at financial firms, including four where he served as a “senior adviser,” counting CPM. Together, Maloney and McHenry are the bipartisan tag team tasked with protecting prediction markets from the dreaded threat of being regulated like gambling.

In its campaign to achieve the joint goals of ensuring every American has access to a prediction market and blocking states from regulating them, CPM has shared a series of misleading facts about the nature of the predictions market industry. In one graphic, the organization touts that “nearly half of all adults under 45 have participated in an online financial or prediction market.” Key to this claim is the inclusion of other online financial markets, which could presumably encompass not only cryptocurrency exchanges but also run-of-the-mill investment accounts or even retirement accounts accessed via the internet.

Other claims promoted by CPM seem even more dubious. In another graphic, CPM states that “70%+ of voters agree financial markets and gambling are not the same and shouldn’t be regulated alike.” This number is not linked to any polling, and it differs wildly from recent polling by Ipsos, which found that 61 percent of Americans felt prediction markets were closer to gambling than investing, with a scant 8 percent believing that event contracts on prediction markets were closer to investing.

Other polling results have also differed wildly from CPM’s assertions. The same Ipsos poll found that a mere 21 percent of Americans reported being even somewhat familiar with prediction markets, a stark contrast to the 50 percent of people under 45 who CPM would have you believe are not only aware but participating in them. The Coalition for Prediction Markets did not respond to questions about how it arrived at numbers so out of step with public polling figures. Only 3 percent and 2 percent of respondents had heard of the prediction market firms Kalshi and Underdog, respectively. But the negative polling hasn’t prevented CPM from mounting a robust defense of the industry.

When McHenry testified on behalf of CPM before the Senate Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, Technology, and Data Privacy in mid-May, he was pressed by senators on both sides of the aisle about the business practices of the prediction markets industry. Colorado Senator John Hickenlooper asked McHenry about a recent lawsuit that alleges that Kalshi has used social media influencers as young as 15 years old to promote its products, and Senator Marsha Blackburn grilled McHenry about the industry’s use of social media advertisements that may reach children.

Despite the respect he still commands on Capitol Hill after two decades in Congress and holding some of the most influential positions in the House of Representatives, McHenry seemed to struggle to answer. But to his colleague on the board of CPM and the chief corporate affairs officer of Crypto.com, Matt David, presumably watching the event transpire from the sidelines, questions along these lines might have felt oddly familiar.

Before David joined Crypto.com in 2021 as the company’s chief communications officer, he worked for Juul Labs, the company that helped bring nicotine vapes to mainstream popularity, particularly among young people. When the company came under scrutiny by state and federal regulators for allegedly advertising its product to minors and representing them as safer than cigarettes in 2019, David was serving as the company’s spokesperson and chief external affairs officer. Given the public outcry at how quickly Juuls became ubiquitous in high schools (to the extent that the company’s name became a verb, juuling), David’s job largely consisted of trying to protect the firm’s media profile by denying Juul’s role in getting kids hooked on nicotine vapes.

When confronted with public anger toward the company, David insisted that Juul’s product, much like Kalshi, was merely angering people because of its Silicon Valley–esque “disruption” of traditional business methods. “Like many Silicon Valley technology startups, our growth is not the result of marketing but rather a superior product disrupting an archaic industry,” he told CNBC when asked about an inquiry by the Massachusetts attorney general into underage use of Juul vapes.

When Juul’s rapid growth attracted attention to the growing number of people, especially young adults and children under the age of 18, using nicotine products, Juul’s defense became that the company was offering an alternative to the dangerous use of cigarettes. In 2019, David told the Los Angeles Times that Juul was “work[ing] cooperatively as we continue to combat youth usage and eliminate cigarettes.” This was despite the fact that the previous year, Altria, the parent company for tobacco giant Philip Morris, had purchased a 35 percent stake in Juul, something that would likely disincentivize the firm from aggressively shrinking the market of cigarette smokers. In 2018, David himself admitted that efforts to persuade existing smokers to switch to Juul had been largely unsuccessful, though he did not stop using the “healthier option” excuse in his communications going forward.

In many ways, this effort mirrors that of prediction markets today, which claim to offer a different, better product for their customers than traditional gambling. But the rise in prediction markets has not led to a decline in gambling addiction, nor does it truly offer its customers a healthier option to gambling. According to one analysis, users of prediction markets were more likely to lose money than users of traditional sports books, while the risk of gambling addiction remains—in fact, prediction markets, as financial products, do not participate in state-run voluntary exclusion programs designed to keep problem gamblers from accessing the products to which they are addicted.

Prediction markets, like Juul before them, have a younger pool of consumers. Because federal law allows anyone over 18 to invest in financial markets, prediction market firms are open to adults who would otherwise have to wait until they are 21 to access state-regulated sports books or visit a casino. Advertisements run by prediction market firms also seem to encourage risky behavior, in campaigns targeting young people looking to strike it rich. Posting about Kalshi’s March Madness promotion, its CEO said, “You owe it to your grandchildren” to make “generational wealth.” In other advertisements, Kalshi has promoted risky bets by telling consumers, “I would put everything I own on this.” Another ad featuring a young college-age woman in a TikTok video, accompanied by two smiley face emojis surrounded by hearts, says, “POV: I was about to be unable to pay my rent, but I got two years of rent through Kalshi’s predictions. It’s amazing.”

While David’s past experience is potentially indicative of how prediction market firms believe the fight over their product’s legality will go, so too is that of the other board member listed on the CPM website, Sara Slane. Prior to joining Kalshi in 2025, and CPM in 2026, Slane spent almost two decades working in the gambling industry as an executive for MGM and the American Gaming Association, and running her own consultancy where she worked with sports leagues and gambling firms. Slane takes personal credit for helping organize the sustained campaign that eventually saw the Supreme Court overturn the nearly 30-year-old federal ban on sports betting in all but a select few jurisdictions. For this, Slane received numerous awards from the gambling industry, including being inducted into the sports betting hall of fame, being named to the Sports Business Journal “40 under 40,” and being listed in The Hill’s top lobbyists of 2018.

Despite spending years arguing in public and before Congress that sports betting regulation was best left up to states, Slane has been forced to take the opposite tack in her new role with the prediction market firm. With state regulation being a threat to the loophole that Kalshi depends on, federal regulation by the CFTC is the only acceptable outcome for prediction markets. Slane’s old employer, the American Gaming Association, the preeminent gambling trade group in the country, has also become one of the most implacable opponents of the prediction markets industry, as its members are forced to compete with an industry that has declared itself exempt from the state and local gambling regulations to which they must adhere.

The way in which the prediction market industry has filled the ranks of the Coalition for Prediction Markets reveals how it expects this fight to proceed. Prediction markets expect the backlash to their products to be similar to the original backlash to vapes: anger and outrage at first that slowly dies down as lawmakers accept that the battle has been lost and a new generation has become addicted to a vice we thought was on permanent descent. If the gambling industry was able to legalize widespread sports betting after decades of severe limitations, what is to limit the prospects of prediction markets doing the same while sidestepping the onerous state and local regulations that slightly mitigate gambling’s depredations?

Tuesday’s 6–3 order in Allen v. Milligan, which was technically unsigned, allows Alabama—and, in the future, other states—to enact legislative maps even if a federal court rules that they were enacted with racially discriminatory intent. This decision goes well beyond the court’s ruling in Callais, which focused on VRA claims under Section 2 about gerrymandered maps with a racially discriminatory effect.

The decision gives carte blanche to Southern state lawmakers to eliminate majority-Black districts as soon as they feasibly can—or, in Alabama’s case, even if it is not actually feasible or practical. (More on that later.) In 1957, the Supreme Court unanimously ordered Southern states to desegregate their schools “with all available speed.” In 2026, the court’s conservative majority is demanding the elimination of Black electoral power in the South on the same timescale.

“In addition to being wrong on the merits, the Court’s decision inflicts two grave harms on the public,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissent. “It debases the democratic process by upending Alabama’s entire election in the name of permitting Alabama to discriminate against Black Alabamians. It also corrodes the rule of law by rewarding Alabama’s gamesmanship and outright defiance of court orders.”

Allen v. Milligan may sound familiar because we have been here before. The Supreme Court already heard the case as a Section 2 challenge to Alabama’s post-2020 congressional districts in 2023. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh joined with the court’s three liberals to uphold a district court ruling that required Alabama to draw a second majority-Black congressional district.

Though the decision was a surprise victory for voting rights groups, given the Roberts court’s hostility to the VRA, there were also warning signs lurking beneath the surface. The majority opinion by Roberts merely stated that the district court had “faithfully applied the court’s precedents” while going out of its way to endorse those precedents.

“The concern that §2 may impermissibly elevate race in the allocation of political power within the States is, of course, not new,” Roberts concluded. “Our opinion today does not diminish or disregard these concerns. It simply holds that a faithful application of our precedents and a fair reading of the record before us do not bear them out here.” In hindsight, the ruling reads more like a stay of execution than a grant of clemency.

Let us take stock of how we got here. Conservatives have long sought to limit the VRA’s power. In the 1980 case Mobile v. Borden, the Supreme Court held that a “facially neutral” voting practice only violates Section 2 if it is enacted with discriminatory intent. While that may have been relatively easy to prove in the Jim Crow era, Congress also intended to root out more subtle and insidious forms of racially discriminatory voting practices.

To that end, Congress amended the VRA in 1982 to reverse the Supreme Court’s ruling and specifically prohibit laws that had a discriminatory effect, regardless of intent, under Section 2. The high court accepted Congress’s vote-dilution framework in the 1986 case Thornburg v. Gingles and laid out a multipart test to determine when and how racial gerrymandering claims could succeed. (Borden and Gingles did not involve racial gerrymandering claims per se, but the impact on them is identical.)

Since Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito joined the high court in 2005, the Supreme Court has grown steadily more hostile to the Voting Rights Act. In 2013, the court’s conservative majority struck down the VRA’s preclearance formula in Shelby County v. Holder because the justices thought it was outdated and violated the “equal sovereignty of the states,” a bespoke principle to which the court has never returned. That ruling freed many jurisdictions, mostly in the South, from seeking preapproval from federal courts or officials before changing their voting laws. A wave of voting restrictions soon followed.

In the 2021 case Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, the court took aim at Section 2 as applied to state voting laws. Alito, writing for the court, threw up a wave of new constraints on Section 2 claims to state election laws. Transmuting Fox News talking points into the law of the land, he even claimed that states could overcome Section 2 challenges to voting laws by invoking the phantasmal threat of voter fraud. “The majority creates a set of extra-textual exceptions and considerations to sap the Act’s strength, and to save laws like Arizona’s,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her dissent. “No matter what Congress wanted, the majority has other ideas.”

After the court’s 2023 ruling in Allen v. Milligan required Alabama to draw a second majority-Black congressional district, voting rights litigants in Louisiana sought the same remedy for that state. After they prevailed, a different group of litigants who cryptically described themselves as “non-African American voters” argued that the court’s remedy had unconstitutionally diluted their votes. Bert Callais, the lead plaintiff in the second case, reportedly later turned out to be a participant in the January 6 attack on the Capitol in 2021.

In Callais, the Supreme Court applied the same framework as Brnovich—keep the law intact, but rewrite it to be unworkable and unrecognizable—in order to defeat Section 2’s ability to curb racial gerrymandering. Under Section 2, voters could challenge their legislative maps by claiming that they are designed to dilute a particular racial group’s electoral power. Now, Alito said, they must “disentangle politics from race” by proving that the state wasn’t engaging in constitutionally permissible racial gerrymandering, which is practically impossible in states where race and party affiliation are nearly identical.

Alito also required that Section 2 plaintiffs draw a remedial map that could achieve a state’s other legitimate gerrymandering purposes, which can be pretextual in nature. In other words, if you want to succeed at a racial gerrymandering claim, you must provide the court with a map that generally does the same thing as the one you are trying to challenge. This is the same Justice Samuel Alito who describes himself as a textualist when it comes to interpreting statutes.

It is important to state this clearly: To the Supreme Court’s conservative majority, the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause is not violated when a state legislature gerrymanders Black voters in the South out of political power, but rather when Congress uses the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to compel the states to redraw their racist maps. The Voting Rights Act, in other words, is the real racism in the high court’s eyes.

Even with all these bad-faith constraints to nullify Section 2’s effects test, there still remained one safety valve: Plaintiffs could mount a direct challenge to a racially gerrymandered map on equal-protection grounds by arguing that it was enacted with discriminatory intent. This will be less effective than Section 2 as it was, of course: Kagan noted in her Callais dissent that states can readily concoct race-neutral pretexts for discriminatory maps, and Alito’s majority opinion reads like a how-to guide for concocting them. But I suppose it’s better than nothing.

Now even that door is closed. Rick Hasen, a UCLA law professor who specializes in election law, noted on Tuesday night that the court’s new order effectively created an “unrebuttable presumption that a legislature is acting in good faith” so long as the state “can assert some pretextual non-racial reason for enacting its plan.” It’s worth noting that the three-judge panel on the district court included two Trump appointees.

“Even if plaintiffs get past this new discriminatory intent barrier, the Court has now imported the Callais discriminatory effects test into a constitutional vote-dilution analysis,” Hasen explained. “So in these cases, plaintiffs will need to meet an impossible standard to prove effect, just as in a post-Callais Section 2 case, a standard which simply ignores the fact that when (white) Republicans discriminate against Democrats in the South, they are discriminating against Black voters.”

Hasen speculates that Alito also wrote the four-page order in Milligan. To me, it reads more like Roberts taking a second pass at Alito’s clunky and obtuse writing in Callais. The order’s author dropped the partisan-gerrymandering nonsense that shaped Alito’s decision last month and distilled the case down to its essential elements: making it impossible to stop states from racially gerrymandering racial minorities out of power.

Tuesday’s order also opens with a curious turn of phrase. The majority said it had taken up Callais “to resolve the tension between vote-dilution claims under [Section 2] and our colorblind Constitution.” First, no such tension existed. To the contrary, the tension is between states that want to gerrymander Black voters out of electoral influence and the Reconstruction Amendments that empower Congress to protect voting rights from state-level violations.

The “colorblind” term is particularly pernicious. This appears to be the first time that the court’s conservatives have articulated its vision of the Constitution in those terms in a majority opinion. While a society that does not consider race is a powerful ideal, the Constitution’s antidiscrimination protections cannot function by pretending that racism does not exist—or, worse, by pretending that those who challenge it are the real racists. The Roberts court has achieved a colorblind Constitution by gouging out the eyes of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.

Equally troubling is how the court balanced the equities here—in other words, how it decided whether or not to stay the lower court’s decision as a preliminary matter. When Alabama was ordered to redraw its legislative maps by the district court after the 2023 ruling, state lawmakers declined to draw a second majority-Black district—what Sotomayor calls an “opportunity district”—and adopted a new map without one. By effectively defying its original ruling, the district court then concluded that Alabama had met the threshold for an intentional discrimination claim—which is normally an extraordinary bar to clear—and imposed its own map for the 2024 election.

In Tuesday’s ruling, the Supreme Court effectively rewarded Alabama’s defiance by letting it use the 2023 map—the revised one that ignored the lower court’s order—for the upcoming election (and, presumably, for the rest of the decade). What’s more, the court’s sudden post-Callais reversal could throw Alabama’s ongoing primary elections into chaos. “The State has no legitimate interest in enforcing an unconstitutional map, while vast harms will likely arise from upending the status quo, sowing chaos in Alabama, and rewarding Alabama’s gamesmanship,” Sotomayor said.

Not so, says the majority. It chided the district court for ruling against Alabama because the judges “did not heed the presumption of legislative good faith because it interpreted the State’s legal disagreement with the court’s earlier remedial order as proof of discriminatory animus.” In the twentieth century, the Supreme Court rose to the occasion by standing up to Southern states that defied court rulings and the Reconstruction Amendments. Now it is a co-conspirator in their demolition.

Trump was relatively quiet about the election until Wednesday morning, when he issued a soaring endorsement of De La Espriella on social media. “Because of his tremendous accomplishments in life,” Trump wrote, “and his political support for me, personally, it is my Honor to give Abelardo my Complete and Total endorsement.”

The most surprising thing about this endorsement might be that it didn’t happen sooner. The U.S. has a long, ugly, and violent history of meddling in Latin American democracy. In recent years, Republicans—including top Trump administration officials—have taken a special interest in a new breed of aspiring strongman, championing the likes of Argentina’s President Javier Milei, Chile’s José Antonio Kast, El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, and Ecuador’s Daniel Noboa. Lately, it seems, for guidance on how to approach Colombia, Trump has turned to Colombian-born Ohio Senator Bernie Moreno.

The former car dealer hasn’t been shy about his dislike of Colombia’s current left-wing president, Gustavo Petro, or his affinity for De La Espriella. Last October, when Moreno met with Trump to discuss Latin American politics, he brought the president a fake image of Petro in an orange jumpsuit. In March, when Moreno posed for pictures embracing De La Espriella, the pair flashed smiles while delivering the candidate’s signature military-style salute.

Moreno’s interventions in Colombia have not been merely symbolic. He’s pushed, for instance, for the U.S. to impose sanctions on Petro and his family; the Treasury Department did so on the grounds that the president has “allowed drug cartels to flourish and refused to stop this activity.” When Cepeda was ahead in the polls, days before Moreno traveled to the country to serve as an accredited election observer for Sunday’s elections (as part of a larger delegation from the U.S.), the Ohio senator suggested that election officials should invalidate votes from “parts of the country that are not secure.” Pleased with what he saw on the ground on Sunday, Moreno instead praised the country’s electoral process after polls closed and congratulated De La Espriella, who thanked the senator for his “support during Sunday’s electoral process.” On Tuesday, Moreno told reporters that he had “vetted” the candidate and found him to be “impeccable.” The next day, Trump issued his endorsement.

In many ways, the thumbs-up was to be expected. Aesthetically, De La Espriella has many of the trappings of other far-right strongmen Republicans have come to love. He’s a showy, self-styled “outsider” to politics with a penchant for donning the jersey of his country’s soccer team, threatening to exact revenge on the left, and cozying up to Trump. While he’s campaigned on vaguely populist rhetoric, he likes to wear Louis Vuitton loafers, buy $10,000 bottles of alcohol, and run his mouth. In one television appearance, he admitted to having tied firecrackers to cats as a child to watch them explode. “It was terrible,” he laughed, “but I enjoyed it.” Moreno’s showboating and odd confessions aside, however, the U.S. right seems to value candidates who will welcome U.S. presence in their country and pursue a like-minded brand of authoritarianism. De La Espriella has proposed opening 10 “mega-prisons” and said he wants to foster closer ties to the U.S. and Israel. He plans to slash 700,000 government employee and contractor jobs, “put God back into our children’s classes,” and build a “Miracle Homeland.”

From Bukele’s gulag network to Javier Milei’s chainsaws and Trump’s theatrics, members of the far right have been learning from one another. “We’re seeing the replication of a Trumpist political economy across the continent,” said David Adler, the general coordinator for the Progressive International, who was in Colombia for Sunday’s election. “That may not be a coincidence, as we’ve seen in repeated electoral contests. The U.S. is intervening financially, politically, technologically to push these elections towards their preferred candidates that happen to mimic the style, the approach, and the geopolitical orientation of the Trump White House.”

However, although they share a love of Trump’s attention, Moreno’s embrace of De La Espriella does appear to be at odds with some of his own policy positions. Born in Colombia to a prominent political family, Moreno moved to the U.S. as a child and has renounced his Colombian citizenship. Citing that experience, he’s introduced legislation to outlaw dual citizenship. “Being an American citizen is an honor and a privilege—and if you want to be an American, it’s all or nothing,” he’s written. De La Espriella, meanwhile, is a citizen of Colombia, Italy, and the United States. He owns property in Miami, and traveled to the U.S. twice during his campaign.

This isn’t the only contradiction to be found in MAGA world’s embrace of Latin America’s far right—and De La Espriella, in particular. The Trump administration has justified its enthusiasm for the region’s hard-line candidates as means of confronting narco-traffickers. The Shield of the Americas—the Trump administration’s alliance of its favorite leaders in Latin America—was ostensibly founded in order to “advance strategies that stop foreign interference in our hemisphere, criminal and narco-terrorist gangs and cartels, and illegal and mass immigration.” It’s officially called the Americas Counter Cartel Coalition. The administration has carried out all manner of atrocities in the name of confronting narco-traffickers, from the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro to ongoing military strikes on purported drug smugglers in the Caribbean and Pacific; the bombings have already killed more than 200 people. There’s been scant evidence that the growing list of victims—including several fishermen—were actually engaged in “narco-trafficking operations,” as U.S. officials claim.

Key U.S. allies in the region, however, have their own well-documented ties to traffickers and paramilitaries. De La Espriella—who’s promised to “wipe out narco-terrorism and those who I’ve declared a military target like cockroaches, like rats”—spent much of his legal career defending them in court. Among his clients are Uribe, who was convicted last year of bribing paramilitary witnesses to change damaging testimony that incriminated him. The former president—whom Moreno visited in Colombia last year—also happens to be a friend of De La Espriella’s father. A collection of declassified State Department documents, published by the National Security Archive in 2018, showed that U.S. diplomats harbored serious concerns about Uribe’s links to the narcos, even including him on list of suspected Colombian “Narcopols.” De La Espriella has also defended the former paramilitary leader Salvatore Mancuso and Colombian-born businessman Alex Saab, a onetime member of Maduro’s Cabinet who was handed over to the U.S. last month and faces charges of laundering hundreds of millions of dollars.

However confident De La Espriella and his allies in the U.S. might be, the election in Colombia isn’t over. Cepeda—a human rights advocate who’s been critical of U.S. meddling in the region—took home more votes than Petro did in the first round of the last presidential elections. He’ll face an uphill battle to expand the Pacto Historico’s base over the coming weeks. Moreno, for his part, plans to return as an accredited observer for the June 21 runoff. As has been the case in recent elections, including in Honduras, the White House could try to tip the scales even further to support its preferred candidate.

The Donroe doctrine—as Republican policy toward Latin American policy has been called—is many things. It is cosmopolitan, it is violent, and it is more than willing to violate international law. It’s also a meeting point for those openly pledging to continue committing extrajudicial murders and the supposedly more respectable supporters of the Latin American far right, like Moreno. Whatever claims Moreno might make about supporting “democracy” in Latin America, there’s no hiding the fact that Abelardo De La Espriella and his ilk are promising to destroy it.

But while these parallels to our most iconic pop star’s meteoric rise and tabloid downfall shimmer through the pages of Ultranatural like sequins on costumes, Wuehle brings a fresh lens to the perils of superstardom, one that draws out the alienated labor at its core. Narrated by Love, the novel traces her transformation from 14-year-old Lacey Dove Bart, desperate to escape her Ohio hometown in 2005, to megastar with a residency at the Bellagio and abs insured for a million dollars in 2011, to plastic surgery addict who rarely leaves her mansion in 2016. It is a career shaped by Lacey’s quest for safety, which she equates with money and being watched by an audience—a quest that is continually exploited by men who surveil and control her body, image, and voice, the key elements of her livelihood. “I had given myself away in such small, intimate increments that I did not even realize there was nothing left anymore,” she confesses at the end of the novel. The harder she works, the more estranged she becomes from her self.

Wuehle is the only writer I would trust to write a spellbinding novel inspired by both the life of (and conspiracy theories surrounding) Britney Spears and the writings of Karl Marx. (Wuehle uses a quote from Marx’s essay “Estranged Labour” as an epigraph for the novel.) Her 2022 novel, Monarch, expertly surveyed the pitfalls of Y2K-era young womanhood, as it followed a former beauty queen’s realization that she had been programmed as a sleeper agent in an offshoot of Project MKUltra. Along the way, Monarch picked apart the greatest misogynistic hits of 1990s true crime pop culture—Lorena Bobbitt, Nicole Brown Simpson, and JonBenét Ramsey all feature in the beauty queen’s realizations about her past. Wuehle has continued her critiques of the power structures that underlie pop culture in her brilliant Substack newsletter “Bimbo Summit,” which takes its name from the 2006 front-page New York Post headline that accompanied a paparazzi shot of Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, and Lindsay Lohan piled together in the front seat of a car. Ultranatural remixes that infamous tabloid moment and others as ominous beats in a cursed tale, gasps for freedom that only ever result in more intense scrutiny of Love’s every move by her handlers and the press.

But the novel is not all misery—in fact, Lacey tells us as much in the opening lines: “Most stories are tragedies. This one isn’t, but it does start on the stone steps of an abandoned asylum for the insane.” At the core of the novel is her friendship with Carrie-Anne, with whom she hung out on those steps as a kid, writing lyrics and singing. It was Carrie-Anne who lit Lacey’s path out of Athens, Ohio, and Carrie-Anne who remains her only true link back. Framed with desperate, emoji-laden messages to Carrie-Anne, Ultranatural is the story of a woman fighting to reclaim herself by seeking to reconnect with the only person who ever really saw her.

The abandoned asylum had great acoustics, which is why Lacey and Carrie-Anne chose to rehearse there for their auditions for Newland Academy, a private performing-arts high school in Virginia that Carrie-Anne found on the internet. Through the girls’ intense relationship, Wuehle explores the disjuncture between art and commerce and how Lacey, in her desperation to escape Appalachia, falls into the trap of worshipping the latter. Wuehle makes Lacey’s fervent need to get out more than understandable; her Athens is a place where employment opportunities range from $7.50 an hour part-time work at the Sonic Drive-In to stripping at the Golden Horseshoe, where the male owners arbitrarily raise the price of renting pole time, outpacing tips. The Golden Horseshoe is where Carrie-Anne’s sister Austina works after graduating from Prairie High, where she had been the star of the track team; when she rebuffed her handsy coach, she lost his support for college track scholarships.

Lacey’s father regularly escapes Athens when he gets assigned routes as a long-haul trucker, though his income never seems enough to pay down the bills papering their refrigerator, and his steady diet of “bad news in bulk” and Yellow Jacket energy pills heightens his fury and unpredictability. Her churchgoing mother, “unable to do a single thing in the world without my father’s say-so,” becomes practically catatonic when he leaves on a new trucking job. Carrie-Anne’s mother, Deenie, the town psychic, is no better. In their cabin out in unincorporated territory, where the road was built by an anti-government militia, Deenie undergoes episodes of depression so severe that she appears dead.

In this bleak environment, the audition for Newland Academy feels life-or-death. But while Carrie-Anne believes their originality will open the door to this “incubator for young minds,” Lacey is convinced that they need to purchase matching costumes to communicate in the “secret language of the superficial.” This concern with looking the part and an obsession with what it will cost leads Lacey to take a job bagging groceries at Kroger as soon as she turns 15—a job that exposes her to unwanted and increasingly dangerous male attention.

But when the girls gain admission to Newland, only Carrie-Anne is truly satisfied. While Carrie-Anne flourishes in an environment where she can work on poetry chapbooks and compose an “experimental chamber piece” for choir—where she can make art without concern for its commercial appeal—all Lacey can focus on is how rich most of the other students are. When Lacey expresses envy of a girl who auditioned and got cast on a Christian television show called The Billy Bunny Hour, Carrie-Anne reminds her that “art’s not a pizza … you don’t get fewer slices because she got more.” To Lacey, this is “childish,” akin to a “lesson Billy Bunny himself shoved down the throats of poor kids so they’d stay poor. Carrie-Anne couldn’t understand credit cards or taxes or having an hourly job and she couldn’t understand what I was trying to say.”

While Lacey believes that “once money was involved and my talent was measured not by bullshit metrics like grades or school plays or admission committees, but by how much I could earn, life would get fairer,” she overlooks a key wisdom of Carrie-Anne’s—that a scarcity mentality “estranges us from one another, and worse, from ourselves.” It is Lacey’s misapprehension that bootstrap-style hard work would net her money and safety—influenced by the TV news her father was always blasting when he was home—that makes her vulnerable to men reaping the profits of her labor and disguising their plunder as protection.

Having richly evoked this background in the first half of Ultranatural, Wuehle traces just how far Lacey strays from her own essence—and from Carrie-Anne—as she rides the escalator of fame. That escalator is operated by a sleazy Christian entertainment executive whose “real name” is, unbelievably, Jimmy Coins, who takes Lacey from her own turn on The Billy Bunny Hour to promoting her first album in shopping-mall food courts, to touring the world for her second, “while impersonating a sexy baby from Anywhere, America, with a selective southern accent and astonishing tolerance for signing lines.” The schedule leaves Lacey drained. The press and public react with glee when she’s hospitalized for exhaustion; as Wuehle writes, “People were as fascinated by that as they were by the actual art, if you can call it art.”

At times, Wuehle lays on the labor commentary—and the Britney Spears parallels—a bit thick. “I Got It (U Take It),” the title song of Love’s first album, sounds an awful lot like Britney’s “Work Bitch”—its bridge consists of “an Auto-Tuned repetition of me singing ‘Bitch, you’re gonna work’ in a vaguely British accent,” which Carrie-Anne comments is “equivalent to a Karl Marx quote.” But it is this unrelenting focus on how much Lacey works, how little she reaps from it, and how much her fans fetishize it, that allows Wuehle to highlight the consequences of the extraction at the center of a pop star’s career. When Lacey appears to lose her mind in Ultranatural—under conditions just as sinister as Spears’s conservatorship, with no privacy and no ability to speak frankly with Carrie-Anne, the one person “who could explain me”—it makes perfect sense.

With her interior life stripped away, Lacey attempts to reclaim what Deenie termed the “inner sanctum”—“the place where you know what you know, where you recognize your own voice, where you think your own thoughts.” This metaphysical turn, where Lacey literally searches for her soul, allows Wuehle to upend what might look from the outside to be a pop star’s unraveling. When Lacey’s last album tanks because “one of the tracks was just bells and me singing about a light in the woods,” or when her cryptic social media posts “freak out the few thousand commenting fans I had left,” she has not lost touch with reality but the exact opposite. These erratic-seeming moves are her attempts to shirk the manufactured persona and voice Jimmy Coins thrust upon her.

It is only when Lacey is finally left alone by Jimmy and her cadre of handlers and the paparazzi and press—albeit in a manner so creepy and cruel that it makes conservatorships look like coddling—that she can rediscover what she actually thinks and feels. As she retells the story of her life in messages to Carrie-Anne, Lacey finds her real self.

The four Republicans who joined Democrats were Representatives Thomas Massie of Kentucky, Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, Tom Barrett of Michigan, and Warren Davidson of Ohio.

The measure to remove U.S. armed forces from hostilities with Iran passed in the House 215–208.

As a concurrent resolution, the measure must be passed by both chambers of Congress. Democratic Senator John Fetterman, a staunch supporter of Israel, has single-handedly prevented previous versions of the measure from passing in the Senate, despite defections from three Republican senators.

House Speaker Mike Johnson warned Wednesday that passing the measure could be “very dangerous” in light of the stalemate in negotiations. But if the Trump administration is to be believed, the war is over—so why should it matter?

This story has been updated.

Trump announced Wednesday that the final coat of protective seal on the Reflecting Pool would be applied that afternoon. “The water will start flowing, shortly, thereafter,” the president posted on Truth Social. Only time will tell if that actually happens. 

Speaking from the Oval Office shortly afterward, Trump whipped out a celebratory chart, which he’d previously posted on social media, to demonstrate just how big the Reflecting Pool is.

The chart sized up the 2,030-foot-long pool against the 1,451-foot-high Sears Tower in Chicago, New York City’s 1,454-foot Empire State Building, and the 1,776-foot One World Trade Center, arguably completely incomparable structures to the president’s preposterous pet project. The chart was titled “Our Pool is Bigger Than Skyscrapers.”

Crucially, Trump didn’t have anything to do with the actual construction of the pool, and he did nothing to increase its size. It seems he’s just trying to celebrate getting his hands on something so big and bringing it to completion.  

But Trump’s wet and wild foray on the National Mall has left Americans high and dry. 

The company contracted for renovations, Atlantic Industrial Coatings, fleeced the federal government to the tune of $13.1 million, seven times the price Trump initially presented for the projects.

On his official TikTok account Tuesday, Trump posted a video titled “MAYBE WE’LL NEVER TAKE IT DOWN,” comparing the arena to France’s Eiffel Tower, which was originally supposed to be temporary but stayed up. Like the tower, Trump said, the arena is “quite attractive to a lot of people” so “maybe we’ll never ever take it down.”

“People don’t know that in Paris, France, the Eiffel Tower, 1889 it was built. It was supposed to be taken down immediately after the world’s fair, and then they said … ‘Leave it up a little bit longer, and then they said, ‘Let’s leave it up longer and longer and longer,’” Trump said.

“Well, they never took it down, and you know we’re building something in front of the White House that’s quite attractive to a lot of people. Really, it’s going to have the big UFC fight on June 14, and I’m looking at i,t and maybe we’ll never ever take it down,” the president added.

The UFC arena is being built for a June 14 fight scheduled as part of Trump’s Freedom 250 festivities, coinciding with Flag Day and Trump’s 80th birthday. Paid for by the UFC’s parent company, TKO Sports, the $60 million arena dwarfs the surrounding landscape and the White House behind it.

Is Trump trying to avoid paying for the arena to be taken down? Taxpayers are already expected to foot the bill for security for the fight, which the White House hasn’t said anything about and will probably be quite high. While the Eiffel Tower was only supposed to stay up for 20 years after its construction in 1889, it remains open to the public and is a major tourist attraction.

A UFC arena on the White House grounds would be closed to anyone who isn’t authorized by the president to be there. Trump has already turned part of Pennsylvania Avenue into a (ostensibly temporary) parking lot for America 250 events and bulldozed the White House’s East Wing to make room for an unpopular ballroom. What’s another permanent eyesore on what used to be considered the “People’s House”?

Trump’s daughter said she and her sleazy husband fell in love with an uninhabited island called Sazan while on a sailing trip.

“We were on a friend’s boat, and we stopped for a swim—effectively, that’s how we found it,” Ivanka gushed on David Senra’s podcast. “We swam to the island. We went on a hike, barefoot all the way up to the top, and we were just captivated.”

And what do you do when awestruck by the beauty of untouched nature? Bulldoze it for a luxury resort, of course!

To be fair, the island isn’t totally empty of infrastructure; it’s actually a designated military exclusion zone, with a few bases and bunkers still lying around. A grand total of two soldiers were apparently deployed there as of 2017—one wonders what they think of all this.

Sazan contains lots of plant and animal life, as does a part of Albania’s southern coast where the Kushners want to literally cut through a wildlife reserve to build hotels, apartments, and a marina.

“Since late May, excavators and other heavy machinery have entered the area,” reports the Associated Press, “opening access routes, digging into the sand, clearing land among pine trees and installing fencing.”

While Albania has an extensive and largely underutilized coastline, a MAGA luxury resort doesn’t seem like the best solution, especially in one of the country’s most important ecological areas.

Pink flamingos and other migratory birds could be threatened by the projects, which have inspired groups of demonstrators to hold up cardboard flamingos at rallies in Albania’s capital, Tirana. One local environmental group told the AP that the coastal habitats are being “irreversibly destroyed.”

For now, Kushner’s investment firm has been given the go-ahead by national authorities, including Prime Minister Edi Rama, who has been in office for over 12 years and expressed public support for the project. But the development may still face roadblocks; the country’s anti-corruption agency launched an investigation into it on Monday.

Bessent’s appearance before the Senate Finance Committee was nothing short of contentious. It was his first time speaking before the committee since Trump settled his fragile $10 billion lawsuit over the 2019–2020 leak of his tax returns with his own administration, and created an enormous DOJ-backed slush fund out of its ashes. Yet the secretary was not so keen to provide answers regarding the honeypot, or the myriad legal allowances—such as future audit immunity—that have been afforded to Trump as a result.

Instead, Bessent spent a significant chunk of his time before the committee skirting and dodging critical questions about the fund, claiming that he could not comment on any component of the proposal due to “ongoing litigation” while deferring questions to the Justice Department.

But in one particularly heated exchange with New Mexico Senator Ben Ray Luján, Bessent’s default answer became so routine that he failed to notice when he was asked a question about his own job that he very much could answer.*

“Are you the secretary of Treasury?” asked Luján.

But Bessent was silent.

“Yes, is the answer,” Luján responded, incredulous.

“Mr. Secretary, Scott—are you the secretary of Treasury for the United States government?” asked Luján again.

“Yes,” Bessent said.

“Appreciate that. The Department of Justice represents the IRS and the Department of Treasury in this lawsuit. Correct?” continued Luján.

“Correct,” said Bessent.

“You’re telling me that the DOJ gave the president this—without you knowing about it?” Luján asked, raising a piece of paper that assumedly related to the Treasury’s joint agreement with the DOJ over the settled suit. “That’s not how the law works.”

Lujan loses patience with Bessent's refusal to answer questions

LUJAN: Are you the Secretary of Treasury?

BESSENT: ...

LUJAN: Yes is the answer. Scott, are you the Secretary of Treasury? pic.twitter.com/WsEv9E8B6T

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 3, 2026

Oregon Senator Ron Wyden, the committee’s ranking member, derided the DOJ agreement as “an abuse of the IRS that goes way beyond anything we’ve seen in the past.”

Whether or not the slush fund is still alive is currently in doubt. Bessent told the Senate Finance Committee earlier Wednesday that the federal financial department intended to comply with a DOJ directive to shutter the fund. The evening before, during a House Appropriations subcommittee hearing, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said that the fund was dead in the water and that his agency would not “ever” move forward with the payments.

But Trump has since defied both of them, standing by the far-right reparations effort while speaking with the New York Post Wednesday morning.

* This post originally misidentified Lujan’s state.

In a written statement first obtained by The New York Times’ Ben Mulllin, Pelley said, “In the meeting on Tuesday in which I was effectively fired, there was no effort of any kind to ‘find a way back,’” contrary to Weiss’s account.

“At no point did anyone in the Tuesday meeting suggest there could be steps taken by either side that would lead to a resolution,” Pelley wrote in his statement. “Weiss and [CBS News president] Tom Cibrowski were openly hostile from the start. ‘Firing’ was raised by Cibrowski in the first 15 seconds. No CBS executive, at any time, suggested ‘a way back.’ To say so now is disingenuous. And they know it.”

Weiss reportedly said, in the editorial meeting, “Despite our attempts to engage with Scott Pelley and to find a way back, unfortunately we weren’t able to do so, and so we had to part ways. We did not want that to happen, but that’s the path that he chose.”

Pelley was fired after he called out Weiss in an earlier staff meeting Monday that she didn’t attend. He criticized her changes to the network and her changes to CBS’s flagship news program, 60 Minutes, accusing her of “murdering” the program. The meeting was meant to introduce the new executive producer for the program, Nick Bilton, who was personally chosen by Weiss despite having no broadcast journalism experience.

Pelley was openly hostile to Bilton, and brought up the firing of several veteran 60 Minutes staffers, including correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi, correspondent Cecilia Vega, executive producer Tanya Simon, and executive editor Draggan Mihailovich.

“You come into our house and expect to be welcome?” Pelley asked Bilton while openly questioning his credentials. “Why was Tanya Simon fired? Why was Sharyn fired? Why was Cecilia fired? Why Draggan? Do you know the names of the people that were fired?”

Pelley was fired the next day, and then accused Weiss and CBS’s management of enforcing political bias. Weiss’s attempts to save face by saying Pelley rejected overtures to return don’t hold up next to the words of Pelley and the other veteran journalists she has forced out of CBS.

Before the $1.8 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” overshadowed it, Trump’s ballroom project was the clearest example of how his solipsism was hurting American taxpayers.

The White House said the ballroom was needed for security purposes, and initially claimed it would be funded with approximately $200 million from Trump and “other patriot donors.”

That number later doubled to $400 million, before ballooning to a $1 billion funding request for White House security—part of which would go toward the ballroom.

Despite badgering by Trump that the ballroom was especially needed after a gunman attempted to sprint through a security checkpoint at the White House Correspondents Association dinner at the Washington Hilton in April, using taxpayer money on a ballroom was deemed unnecessary by nonpartisan Senate parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough in May.

Trump then tried to get MacDonough fired, while his administration submitted court documents claiming the ballroom was somehow “under budget.”

Four Republican senators—Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, and Thom Tillis of North Carolina—publicly voiced opposition to public money going to the vanity project in May. A larger group inside the GOP was privately against the ballroom, according to five anonymous insiders who spoke with Politico. And most GOP senators were likely worried Democrats would put them on the record about whether they supported public funds going to the ballroom during the filibuster process.

Trump’s “Anti-Weaponization Fund” has also recently been discarded after he faced public pressure and legal challenges to it.

The Senate began voting to begin discussing the reconciliation bill Wednesday at 2:15 p.m. Eastern Time. The bill’s primary impact would be to fully fund the Department of Homeland Security through the end of Trump’s second term.

But Weiss was undaunted. Last week, CBS fired executive producer Tanya Simon, two other top editors of the show, Alfonsi, and Cecilia Vega, who was the show’s first Latina correspondent but also had tangled with Weiss. The editor in chief appointed Nick Bilton, a writer and documentary filmmaker with no experience in television news, as the program’s new executive producer.

That’s why longtime 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley went scorched earth. In a staff meeting on Monday, Pelley said Weiss and her team were “murdering” 60 Minutes and mocked Bilton for his lack of experience. CBS unsurprisingly fired Pelley.

I am not sure if Pelley meant to be fired. But I’m quite sure he meant to create a firestorm and focus the nation on what’s happening: Bari Weiss, a center-right activist more concerned by Donald Trump’s critics than the authoritarian president himself, has now consolidated power at one of America’s three broadcast networks and taken control of perhaps the nation’s most reputable and prestigious news program.

60 Minutes isn’t one of the nightly news programs that’s declining in ratings and relevance, or a morning show that alternates between hard news and cooking segments. Its ratings are strong. Its reporting is compelling. American presidents and other heads of states consider the program serious and important enough to spend extensive time in interviews with its correspondents.

That’s why Weiss wants to put her people on the show’s staff. Being the editor in chief of CBS News but having little control over 60 Minutes is an important job. But being the editor in chief of CBS News and also shaping 60 Minutes makes you one of the most powerful figures in U.S. media.

Or it used to, at least. Pelley, Vega, and Alfonsi have all stated publicly that Weiss and her aides at CBS are aggressively intervening in editorial decisions. The three correspondents are nonpartisan, nonideological reporters. But they are hinting (and the Venezuelan story confirms it) that Weiss is trying to censor or change coverage that she deems too critical of Trump, the Israeli government, and other political causes that she is tied to. The message from Pelley, Vega, and Alfonsi is that 60 Minutes as we know it is gone, that it should no longer be accorded respect or credibility as in the past. Weiss has taken it over. 60 Minutes’ values now aren’t those of traditional journalists, but those of Weiss and the Ellison family, which acquired CBS last year.

I support the journalists at 60 Minutes, many of whom I suspect want to leave but don’t have the lifetime earnings of Pelley, but I no longer will take their reporting too seriously. And you shouldn’t, either. What Weiss and the Ellisons want to do is use the lofty brand of 60 Minutes to legitimize their Trump-friendly, anti-left vision for news.

We can’t let them. It’s critical that other journalists, pro-democracy groups, and even Democratic politicians start treating CBS News as a more polite version of Fox News. That’s what it is. There will be accurate and at times even strong reporting at CBS. Many of the journalists who remain there, including at 60 Minutes, are excellent. But everyone at CBS is now working under a leadership that values anti-left, reactionary ideology over accuracy, democracy, and fairness. Watch accordingly. (Or better yet, watch something else.)

My fear is that Pelley’s message will be unheeded. I speak from some experience. The Washington Post last year replaced its very credentialed editorial page editor with a young, inexperienced figure whose views are similar to Weiss’s. The paper also signaled that it wanted to move its opinion pages to the right, resulting in more liberal and even central staffers leaving, myself included. The Post’s editorials now often defend even Trump’s most stupid decisions. But liberals still take the Post editorial page seriously, while also complaining it’s too conservative. The correct reaction to a news organization (or department, in the case of the Post opinion page) openly announcing that it is tilting its coverage more favorably to an antidemocratic president and dismissing staffers who disagree is to stop consuming news from that organization, not to hope that coverage will get better.

For pro-democracy Americans, the Post opinion page and now 60 Minutes have been lost, captured by the right. We have to accept those setbacks and embrace the wide swath of news media (ProPublica, Democracy Docket, The Bulwark, The New Republic) that are rising to this moment. Hopefully, some of those news organizations and others will hire excellent journalists like Pelley, Vega, and others at CBS who don’t want to participate in Weiss’s project.

What Pelley and Vega are experiencing isn’t unique. A common tactic of authoritarians is to use government power to steer the ownership of news organizations to companies or leaders who are favorable to that leader. That’s what Trump has done. He’s not telling 60 Minutes what to air, but he has ensured the network is run by someone who will do his bidding. And it’s likely that CNN will also soon be owned by David Ellison’s Skydance Media and run by Weiss or someone like her.

We can’t take 60 Minutes back from Bari Weiss. All we can do is scream and yell that an unqualified right-wing hack is in charge of 60 Minutes now. That’s what Scott Pelley is doing. The rest of us should heed and then repeat his words.

The state secretary appeared before Congress Wednesday for the second day in a row as part of the executive branch’s efforts to defend its $2.2 trillion budget request for 2027. But Rubio’s seemingly endless talking points abruptly ended when he was asked a yes or no question by Representative Jonathan Jackson about whether the White House will invade Cuba.

“In closing, I’d like to ask you, will you invade Cuba?” asked Jackson.

“Well, I have one second to answer. What do I do?” mused Rubio.

“Will you invade Cuba?” pressed Jackson.

“That’s not the only thing you said,” Rubio said, before committee Chairman Brian Mast took the reins of the exchange.

Rubio never provided a deeper explanation on the president’s aims for Cuba, but attacking America’s Communist Caribbean neighbor is apparently not off the table.

Donald Trump told reporters at the White House in March—while Cuba was struggling with an unprecedented economic crisis made worse by America’s Venezuelan oil blockade—that he expected to have the “honor” of “taking Cuba in some form.”

“I do believe I’ll be … having the honor ​of taking Cuba. That’s a big honor. Taking Cuba in some form,” Trump said at the time. “I ​mean, whether I free it, take it. Think I can do anything I want with it. You want to know the truth.”

Months later, in May, White House officials told Politico that what had originated as mild musings had since morphed into a genuine interest inside the Oval Office.

“The mood has definitely changed,” the person familiar with the White House’s discussions said. “The initial idea on Cuba was that the leadership was weak and that the combination of stepped-up sanctions enforcement, really an oil blockade, and clear U.S. military wins in Venezuela and Iran would scare the Cubans into making a deal. Now Iran has gone sideways, and the Cubans are proving much tougher than originally thought. So now military action is on the table in a way that it wasn’t before.”

The conversations took place around the same time that the Justice Department indicted Cuba’s former President Raúl Castro, sparking concerns that the Trump administration would extract and abduct him as it did former Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro.

During a Senate Finance Committee hearing, Warren hammered Bessent for pushing to end congressional stock trading, while Trump made more than 3,400 stock trades worth more than a quarter of a billion dollars in the first three months of 2026 alone.

“So, Secretary Bessent, you and I agree that it is a conflict of interest for members of Congress to trade stocks. Do you also agree that it’s a conflict of interest for President Trump to trade stocks?” Warren asked.

“President Trump is not sitting in the Oval Office engaging in high frequency trading strategy, clearly he had an outside manager who was doing that,” Bessent said. “I think it’s incumbent upon both houses of Congress to get their house in order before you move to the administrative branch—”

“You’re a Wall Street guy, so you know better,” Warren said. “The investments that President Trump has made are not blind.”

🔥 here is the full video of Elizabeth Warren grilling Scott Bessent on Trump's indefensible stock trading. This is a master class. pic.twitter.com/Ur8biJMXC3

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 3, 2026

The Massachusetts Democrat explained that Trump had signed a 113-page document listing all of his individual stock trades, while simultaneously making policy decisions that affected those stocks. “So you’re going to sit here with a straight face and say it’s not a conflict of interest for the president of the United States to do that?” she asked.

“I am going to say this body needs to get its house in order first, I would encourage you to do that—” Bessent said.

“I don’t trade in individual stocks. I don’t own any individual stocks,” Warren said. “My house is in order, thank you Mr. Secretary.”

Warren questioned Bessent about Trump’s purchase of between $500,000 and $1 million worth of Nvidia stock one week before his administration moved to loosen export restrictions, allowing the sale of Nvidia chips to China and causing the stock price to soar. The senator asked whether the SEC should knock on Trump’s door to investigate this trade, but Bessent continued with his obstinate denials.

“Please lead by example,” Bessent said.

“I would like to see the president of the United States lead by example,” Warren said.

Warren also asked about Trump’s purchase of tens of thousands of dollars of stock in the Bank of New York (BNY) and its partner Robinhood. Shortly after his purchase, the Treasury Department announced that the Trump accounts would be managed through, you guessed it, BNY and its partner Robinhood.

“If these stock purchases that Trump made were made using inside information, would that be illegal?” Warren asked. Clearly, the answer would be yes, but Bessent played dumb.

“Again, I’m not a lawyer,” Bessent said.

“Would it be worth investigating?” Warren asked.

“Why don’t we investigate many people on this committee?” Bessent said smiling.

The secretary has good reason to avoid condemning Trump’s blatant corruption—he appears to be instrumental in pulling it off.

Democratic Representative Ted Lieu confronted Rubio in a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing, saying that “you’ve been at more than one meeting where President Trump has fallen asleep.” Rubio audaciously claimed that was false.

“I’ve never seen him fall asleep. On the contrary, the guy doesn’t sleep, which is a big problem ’cause he calls me at two in the morning, he calls me at five in the morning, and you know, I like to sleep a little bit, maybe not 12 hours, but at least six—” Rubio said, going on a tangent about Trump’s late-night habits before Lieu cut him off.

“Secretary Rubio, I’m going to show you in a moment a video that shows you just lied to Congress,” Lieu said, going on to play a video of Rubio speaking at a Cabinet meeting in May while Trump dozes off next to him.

Rubio: I have never seen Trump fall asleep.

Lieu: I’m going to show you a video that shows you just lied to congress. Here is a video of him asleep while you are talking. pic.twitter.com/2SE0DjkyAW

— Acyn (@Acyn) June 3, 2026

“You are literally talking about issues of war and peace, and Donald Trump is sleeping right next to you. If Donald Trump cannot stay awake at these important meetings where the cameras are rolling, imagine what he’s like when the cameras are not there,” Lieu said. “So I’m gonna ask you, have you been at classified meetings where Donald Trump has fallen asleep or had trouble staying awake?”

Rubio doubled down, repeating that he’d never seen Trump fall asleep and that Trump wasn’t sleeping in the clip Lieu showed.

“So you’re lying again? You’re lying consistently to Congress. You’re lying to Congress, Secretary Rubio,” Lieu replied. Lieu went on to show two more videos of Trump falling asleep, including one most recently at a Memorial Day event for fallen soldiers.

Lieu hammered Rubio as his time concluded, saying, “Instead of holding North Korean–style Cabinet meetings where everyone goes around the room kissing Donald Trump’s ass, I’m gonna ask you to come clean with the American people and the White House, as well: There’s something wrong with Donald Trump’s health or cognitive abilities. There’s a reason he keeps going to the hospital and they keep giving him cognitive tests. We have not seen the president in eight days. The American people deserve the truth.”

Lieu: Instead of holding North Korea style cabinet meetings where everyone kisses Trump’s ass, I’m going to ask you to come clean—there is something wrong with Trump. There’s a reason he keeps going to the hospital and they keep giving him cognitive tests. We have not seen him in… pic.twitter.com/xoJIL3SjjO

— Acyn (@Acyn) June 3, 2026

Rubio dismissed Lieu, calling his words absurd and ridiculous and making absurd claims about Trump “working inhumane hours” and taking shots at President Biden’s cognitive abilities. But the videos didn’t lie, and Rubio’s pronouncements, as confident as they sounded, looked hollow next to video evidence of Trump repeatedly dozing off. It’s quite obvious Rubio is covering for his boss.

George Santos is under investigation for placing bets that he would not attend President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address, and then not attending.

Ahead of the State of the Union in February, the disgraced ex–Long Island representative posted a video announcing his intention to appear at the Capitol. His post sent the odds of his appearance soaring on the prediction market site Kalshi, which may be better known for sports betting. Then he skipped the event.

“Watching SOTU from an airport tv was not part of the plan! FML,” Santos wrote on X.

But Santos had already placed bets that he would not appear on Kalshi, three people with direct knowledge of the matter told NPR Tuesday. They alleged that Santos misled the public, and then earned tens of thousands of dollars through insider trading.

Kalshi referred the case to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Department of Justice, which have both opened cases into Santos, according to two people familiar with the investigation.

When contacted by NPR, Santos responded: “Well, that’s news to me.”

In a post on X Tuesday, the former politico appeared to dismiss the reporting. “I hate to disappoint but I don’t engage with rag reporting anymore.… Business as usual on my end haters! 💋” Santos wrote.

The rise of prediction market sites such as Kalshi and Polymarket have invited a wave of apparent insider trading in politics. Among campaign staffers, betting on the success or failure of political candidates has become commonplace. In late April, Kalshi banned and fined several political candidates after a company probe found they had bet on themselves.

Earlier this year, federal prosecutors charged an active-duty Army soldier involved in the planning and capture of former Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro for allegedly using confidential intel to win $400,000 on Polymarket predictions related to the raid.

“What do you say to people who claim that Bibi Netanyahu tricked you into going into Iran?” New York Post’s Miranda Devine asked the president in an interview on Pod Force One released on Wednesday.

“I heard that the other day for the very first time, I said, ‘He tricked me?’ I’m the one that started it because, again, I don’t wanna bore anybody, but I started it because we can’t let them have a nuclear weapon,” Trump said. “Now that pertains to Israel because they probably would’ve been the first one to get hit. There would be no Israel.… If there wasn’t me, there would be no Israel right now.… If I didn’t do that attack … Iran would’ve had a nuclear weapon and they would’ve used it almost immediately.”

DEVINE: What do you say to people who claim Bibi Netanyahu tricked you into going into Iran?

TRUMP: They're just the enemy. They're dumocrats. They want transgender mutilization of our children. He tricked me? I'm the one that started it. I'll tell you what -- if there wasn't… pic.twitter.com/sWTE8xIYKW

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 3, 2026

U.S. intelligence has confirmed that Iran was not on the brink of building and using a nuclear bomb. That’s a narrative that Israel, alongside Iran war hawks, pushed to justify the current attacks on Iran and Lebanon, as they have been doing for decades. At the beginning of the war, Secretary Marco Rubio himself admitted that the U.S. went to war because the administration “knew that there was going to be an Israeli action. We knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces.”

Trump also confirmed his profanity-laden argument with Netanyahu, as reported by Axios on Monday. Barak Ravid wrote that the president told him he was “fucking crazy” for sabotaging negotiations by continuing to bomb Lebanon and that he’d “be in prison” if it weren’t for him. “Everybody hates you now,” Trump reportedly told him. “Everybody hates Israel because of this.”

“Is that true? Did you speak to him in those terms?” Devine asked.

“I did. I wouldn’t say angry. I was a little bit … perturbed at his constantly fighting with Lebanon, you know?” Trump said. “I said, ‘Bibi, we gotta stop this. We gotta stop it.’”

Lebanon’s health ministry has reported that over 3,000 people have been killed in Israel’s constant bombardment of civilian infrastructure, with over 10,000 wounded and over one million displaced.

Donald Trump told the New York Post podcast Pod Force One that his administration had not dropped the $1.8 billion slush fund, putting him at odds with what his officials told Congress.

“No. A court ruled against it. But just so you understand, these are people that’ve been decimated. These are people who have lost their lives over nonsense,” Trump said in an interview published Wednesday morning. “These were many great people, and I gave them pardons, and I’m very proud to have given them pardons. And I think they should be reimbursed for a crooked government.”

The honeypot payments were pitched as reparations, paid for by U.S. taxpayers through the Department of Justice, to virtually any right-winger who felt targeted by the previous presidential administration.

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

But Trump’s ongoing affinity for the payouts defies his administration’s latest position on the DOJ slush fund. As Trump’s interview was being published, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told the Senate Finance Committee Wednesday that the federal financial hub intended to comply with a DOJ directive to shutter the fund.

The evening before, during a House Appropriations Subcommittee hearing, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said that the fund was dead in the water and that his agency would not “ever” move forward with the payments.

The fund was the result of an unprecedented deal that Trump made with himself after he dropped his waning $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS. The arrangement included a curious addendum from Blanche, immunizing Trump from further federal prosecution. The government of the United States, Blanche wrote, would be “forever barred and precluded” from pursuing “any and all claims” against Trump, his family, or his business.

The idea of the fund fell apart following weeks of backlash, numerous lawsuits, and opposition from Republican lawmakers who felt the issue had gummed up party efforts to pass a reconciliation bill.

Trump’s right eye clearly showed puffiness and looked oddly misshapen compared to his left eye, while his right hand looked much bigger than his left.

look at how swollen and disfigured Trump's right hand looks during his new podcast appearance with Miranda Devine pic.twitter.com/mxinbSZ0be

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 3, 2026

Trump and White House staff are constantly disputing reports questioning the president’s physical and mental health. Just one week ago, Trump had his third medical checkup in 13 months, raising questions about whether he has underlying medical conditions. Doctors noticed omissions in the medical report released by the Trump administration afterward, with one saying the “report is almost too good to be true for somebody of his age.”

But it’s very difficult to dispute what people can see with their own eyes, and the president’s outward physical appearance coupled with his tendency to fall asleep on camera don’t inspire confidence in his health. No matter how much Trump talks about how great his medical tests are going or how well he’s doing, it’s plainly evident that the public isn’t being told the whole story.

The Trump administration has teed up a pricey celebration for the country’s 250th anniversary, but the cost is apparently more than the White House can chew. To foot the bill, officials are diverting roughly $90 million away from the National Parks Service, The Washington Post reported Wednesday.

All entry fees to some of the country’s most popular parks—such as Yellowstone and Yosemite—will be used to fund America 250–related projects, according to internal agency documents obtained by the Post. That includes a $1.6 million fireworks display (which costs more than five times Washington’s normal amount for a July 4 celebration) and $76 million for repairs to the capital’s monuments, including the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.

While the bulk of the diverted NPS funds are technically being spent on national park remediation, it will be at an incredible detriment to the rest of a nationwide system that suffers from a $24 billion funding backlog and needs money for “deferred maintenance” projects for park infrastructure repairs and improvements.

“That is not how it was designed to work,” Ed Stierli of the National Parks Conservation Association, an advocacy group, told the Post. “It shouldn’t just be all at one park at the expense of the entire national park system.”

The reallocated expenditures also hint at a larger truth: that Donald Trump’s vanity projects are much more expensive than he has been telling the public. Trump had initially promised the restoration of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool would hover around $1.8 million. Last month, however, the Interior Department said it planned to pay $13.1 million to Atlantic Industrial Coatings, a Virginia-based firm that Trump chose because they had previously worked on his golf club’s swimming pools. The NPS documents indicate that the price tag to repaint the Reflecting Pool has more than quintupled since, and now sits at $76 million.

The cost of Trump’s White House ballroom has similarly ballooned over time. Trump pledged last summer that the 90,000-square-foot ballroom wouldn’t cost more than $200 million, and that it would be entirely funded by private donations. That has not been true: By May, the price had doubled to $400 million. The price tag skyrocketed again after an armed gunman attempted to kill Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, with Republican lawmakers insisting that U.S. taxpayers should devote $1 billion to security at the proposed East Wing replacement.

Senator Mark Warner told Senate Majority Leader John Thune to get Pulte removed or risk Democrats withholding their votes for Donald Trump’s long-term extension of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), Punchbowl News reported Wednesday.

FISA expires in just nine days, leaving Republicans with a short window to force Pulte out.

Democrats aren’t alone: Republican lawmakers have also expressed their concerns about Pulte. “Well, we don’t need a weaponized DNI, we need professionals there,” Thune told reporters Tuesday.

Pulte has none of the military or intelligence background necessary to lead ODNI. He’s made a name for himself by being Trump’s pitbull, recklessly targeting the president’s political enemies and making himself wildly unpopular in the process.

By positioning Pulte as a dealbreaker for FISA, Democrats believe they’re doing Republicans a favor, Punchbowl News reported. If there’s one thing that Democrats and Republicans can agree on, it’s hating Bill Pulte.

“Before the Court are two paths. Down one lies an orderly election, held under a tried-and-tested congressional map that protects Black Alabamians’ right to vote and with which all voters, elections officials, and candidates alike are familiar. Down the other lies a chaotic election, held under a never-before-used congressional map that intentionally discriminates against Black Alabamians,” Sotomayor wrote in a withering 17-page dissent.

She also noted that the last-minute ruling—sent down just months before midterm elections— would “require officials to change the voter registrations of hundreds of thousand[s] of voters in just days at best, a task that Alabama previously represented would take months.”

“Just as Alabama doubled down on racial discrimination, the Court today doubles down on chaos,” Sotomayor concluded. “Because I choose to defend the rule of law and the right of all Alabamians to participate equally in democracy, I respectfully dissent.”

The NAACP also sounded off against the decision.

“The Supreme Court continues to unleash chaos in our democratic process, and with this latest action, gives Alabama approval to use a congressional map that had previously been found to be intentionally discriminatory,” general counsel Kristen Clarke said in a statement. “This is a Court that is stripping Black voters of power and voice at a speed that would put Jim Crow jurists to shame. Our message to communities remains the same—the best way to express dissent is by showing up at the ballot box this election season.”

The Supreme Court’s decision will likely force newly elected Black Democratic Representative Shomari Figures out of his seat.

The president’s pick for governor for the state, Representative Randy Feenstra, narrowly lost to businessman Zach Lahn. Feenstra had been criticized by activists in Iowa for poor campaigning and failing to show up to a single debate, while Lahn had support from the “Make America Healthy Again” movement and picked up a key endorsement from Turning Point Action.

Just two days ago, Trump was bragging on Truth Social about having a “38-0” record, crowing about taking “out many bad Political ‘Leaders’ and Pundits including Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, Lightweight ‘Congressman’ Thomas Massie of Kentucky, Brad Raffensperger of Georgia, REALLY DUMB Stephen Colbert of CBS, and others.”

Lahn, a farmer, drew a lot of support in the agriculture-heavy state, and showed the growing power of MAHA among conservatives. He also had the endorsement of former Representative Steve King, a disgraced white nationalist who lost his seat to Feenstra in 2020. Democrats in Iowa, however, feel like the governorship is within reach this year, considering how badly Republicans are polling nationally.

The Democratic nominee for governor, Iowa state auditor Rob Sand, sailed through his primary unopposed, and early polling for November’s general election shows he may have a slight edge, although those polls assumed Feenstra would be the nominee. In any case, Tuesday night’s results in Iowa show that Trump’s endorsement power is limited.

“Last month, 60 Minutes lost its DNA when our entire senior leadership and two of our best on-air correspondents were cruelly fired without cause. Good people were silenced because they stood up for our audience. They stood for fairness against the forces of political bias; they stood for professionalism against chaos,” he wrote in a statement. “New management has instructed me to inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story. I’ve been told to include assertions that are unverified. To date, in every case, I have managed to ignore these instructions or refuse them.”

Pelley even claimed that politicians had been allowed to choose who they wanted to be interviewed by, and that “incompetence and unprofessionalism in the new management have wreaked havoc.”

This all comes after Pelley and Bilton’s confrontation at a staff meeting on Monday, in which Pelley questioned the new hire on firings and told him that Weiss was “murdering” the show.

“You come into our house and expect to be welcome?” Pelley asked Bilton. “Why was Tanya Simon fired? Why was Sharyn fired? Why was Cecilia fired? Why Draggan? Do you know the names of the people that were fired? … We don’t trust you.”

It hasn’t even been a year since Weiss took over CBS, and she’s already fired or alienated some of the longest-tenured reporters at one of the most lauded networks in this country’s history.

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

By most indications, Donald Trump has dropped his demand for a corrupt $1.8 billion slush fund to dole out to allies and insurrectionists. This came after Republicans made it clear that they can’t support something quite that openly corrupt. And yet, Trump has responded to this with another extraordinary show of corruption. He just appointed William Pulte as his acting director of national intelligence.

Pulte is best known in Washington right now for hatching bogus ways for Trump to criminally investigate his enemies. Indeed, Senate Majority Leader John Thune all but admitted that Pulte will be used to “weaponize” the office of the DNI. Some MAGA voices in fact are openly cheering for that, rooting for him to be turned loose on the left. That’s pretty unnerving stuff.

So we’re working through all of it with one of our go-to people on these matters, University of Michigan law professor Leah Litman. Leah, nice to have you on.

Leah Litman: Great to be here.

Sargent: So let’s talk about Bill Pulte. As director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, he took it upon himself to ransack the mortgages of Trump’s enemies to find fake things to refer to the Justice Department for criminal investigations. He did this with Senator Adam Schiff, with New York Attorney General Letitia James, with Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook. Leah, what’s your reaction to the pick of Pulte here?

Litman: It is so absurd as to be ridiculous. It was always going to be hard to find a worse, more ridiculous DNI than Tulsi Gabbard, and Trump just might have done that. Bill Pulte has zero national security experience. He spent, as you were suggesting, the last 18 or so months just digging up dirt on Donald Trump’s political enemies and made these criminal referrals in what I’ve been calling the mortgage fraud fraud—basically, accusing people of conducting mortgage fraud by misrepresenting some house as their primary residence when, as various outlets have reported, a lot of people do this, it can be accidental. And also these criminal cases have gone nowhere.

And so the idea that we will have a director of national intelligence who is inclined toward basically ginning up accusations and targeting the president’s political enemies is terrifying when you think about the vast powers that are part of our national security apparatus.

Sargent: The director of national intelligence is a really important office. It oversees the nation’s intel agencies, and it’s a really senior advisory role. It seems to me the obvious conclusion to draw is that Trump wants to do with the director of national intelligence office what he did with that obscure mortgage office.

In other words, Pulte’s willingness to engage in extraordinary corruption to target Trump’s enemies made Trump look at him and say, I want him in a more powerful role and I want him to have more dangerous weapons at his disposal. Is that basically what’s going on here, Leah?

Litman: I mean, that’s how I read it. I think it’s a similar story as happened with acting—or auditioning—Attorney General Todd Blanche. Donald Trump wants the people who are willing to be subservient to him and are completely willing to cross every single legal guardrail in the name of loyalty.

And so yes, you’re right. He wants to give someone like that more power. We have a vast criminal federal apparatus—law enforcement powers are sweeping—but they pale in comparison to what the national security state has.

Sargent: Well, the reaction by Republican senators to Trump’s pick of Pulte was really remarkable. Senate Majority Leader John Thune was asked if he’s worried that Pulte will weaponize the DNI position. And Thune said this: “Well, we don’t need a weaponized DNI. We need professionals there.”

Thune also said that if Pulte is going to go for confirmation before the Senate, he has a “lengthy road” before him. Leah, that is something else. I think Thune basically confirmed there that there is an actual danger that Trump will weaponize the DNI position. What do you think of that?

Litman: So, I think that that is a real danger. If you saw or heard some of the right-wing universe that was actually excited about this pick—like Steve Bannon, for example, talking with Jack Posobiec—they were talking about how maybe this would allow Bill Pulte to go after domestic terrorism in addition to foreign terrorism.

And by that, they really meant the anti-ICE protesters. And so, yes, I think that the people who are excited about this pick are excited about it precisely because they are envisioning weaponizing the national security apparatus. And the people who are concerned or hesitant about it are hesitant or concerned for the exact same reason.

Sargent: You mentioned Steve Bannon, so we’re going to listen to that audio. The first voice here is prominent MAGA personality Jack Posobiec. The second is Bannon. Listen to this.

Jack Posobiec (voiceover): Wouldn’t surprise me, by the way, if the appointment—and I certainly hope that the appointment of Bill Pulte over there—while Bill is there, is a time where the DNI can actually start digging in on the domestic side of terrorism, as well as the international.

Steve Bannon (voiceover): Oh, it has to. I think that’s one of the reasons Pulte is selected, because Pulte will go there.

Sargent: Leah, I think that’s really, really important, because Bannon is sort of the tip of the spear when it comes to the MAGA movement’s search for ways to corruptly target Trump’s enemies, don’t you?

Litman: Heart and center. I think this was always kind of the plan. During Trump 1.0, Bannon declared that their goal was the deconstruction of the administrative state. So he has always had in his sights the targeting of institutions or individuals perceived as hostile to Donald Trump. And yes, I think that Bill Pulte is appealing for that reason.

Sargent: I want to add some more context here, as well. We’re at a moment where I think there’s a fair amount of disappointment in MAGA world about Trump’s success in prosecuting his enemies and jailing Democrats and liberals.

You mentioned that a little earlier, that every one of these efforts that Bill Pulte undertook by ransacking people’s mortgages has gone belly up, has been another flop. We’ve seen Kash Patel struggle to come up with ways to go after the liberal groups in ways that he has been threatening to. None of that stuff seems to be really bearing fruit.

So that’s even more reason to be alarmed by this pick, because it sure shows that what Trump’s trying to do here is find a way to satisfy MAGA’s demand for more arrests of liberals, more arrests of Democrats, more weaponization against his enemies. Don’t you think?

Litman: Yes, I think that is definitely a driving force and a motivating force. I take some small hope in the fact that what stopped these people was not a lack of will. It’s not like Pam Bondi didn’t want to go after the president’s political enemies. It’s not like Bill Pulte didn’t want to.

It just turns out we still have protections like grand juries, or juries, or the Constitution, and some courts willing to enforce the law. And so all of that is just going to make it hard to impose their personal vindictiveness and win.

Sargent: Well, the firing of Pam Bondi actually fits into this narrative, right? Because Pam Bondi was fired as attorney general precisely because she wasn’t corrupt enough, precisely because she wasn’t succeeding at prosecuting Trump’s enemies. And that’s exactly why Todd Blanche is in the acting A.G. role, because he appears willing to do what even Pam Bondi would not do.

So I guess we’re kind of backsliding here even more, aren’t we? Because what’s happening is—it’s like a split screen, in a way. We’re seeing some encouraging stuff, which is grand juries are holding the line, lower court judges—something you and I have talked about before—are doing incredible fact-finding to essentially hold the line for the rule of law.

And yet Trump’s response in every one of these cases is to just try harder to be more corrupt and bring in even more corrupt people who will do even more corrupt things, right?

Litman: I think that that’s right. And we shouldn’t underestimate the continued risk of this authoritarian, autocratic, fascist takeover and impulse. I just think it was not for want of trying that Pam Bondi, in many cases, failed to secure these convictions and indictments. She tried to get Lindsey Halligan to find someone to criminally prosecute James Comey and Letitia James, but those indictments were thrown out.

Sargent: Well, what would a fully weaponized DNI look like? In other words, if Pulte does with the DNI what he did with the mortgage agency, what happens? I want to underscore, we know Pulte is willing to do this. He’s done it for the last year and a half. What’s the nightmare scenario here with Pulte in this slot?

Litman: I mean, the nightmare scenario is the DNI and the security state have surveillance powers that ordinary law enforcement does not. So whereas it might not have been possible to get a criminal warrant for someone’s cell phone information or location information, it’s possible they could get that under national security powers.

It’s also possible they would be able to detain someone and hold someone, even if ordinary law enforcement, police officers, FBI officers wouldn’t be able to. And so giving him access to these additional powers is just allowing him to further push the envelope and target individuals using powers that are just subject to fewer constraints and fewer limitations.

Sargent: One other funny thing about this, Leah, is that a lot of people in Trumpworld absolutely hate Bill Pulte. Politico has this quote from a former Trump administration official who says the following: “The president has so many smart people at the White House, trusted people that he could be listening to. And he listens to Pulte, who just continually fucks things up.”

I mean, that’s the thing. It’s not just that Pulte is corrupt, although he clearly is, as we talked about with the mortgage stuff. He can’t even get the job done. And somehow Trump has decided—maybe purely because Pulte is so eager to please him—that he wants him in that role. It’s the pliability in a way that’s the thing here. Don’t you think?

Litman: I think that that’s definitely part of it. When you look at, for example, authoritarian autocratic regimes, they often fill important positions with people who don’t have competence or expertise precisely because they don’t have the wherewithal, the backbone, the actual background to stand up for principles or for expertise.

And instead, they’re just completely beholden, and their political careers are beholden, to the leader. And Bill Pulte is absolutely someone like that. He’s a nepo baby. His grandfather started a home construction company. That was always part of his story and the reason why he was even in these circles.

Sargent: Well, I will say that a number of Republican senators are saying he’s not qualified. Senator John Cornyn said, “I see no evidence of any qualifications for that job.” Senator Bill Cassidy said, “The best I can tell you is he’s not qualified.”

You know, Leah, something tells me that this guy isn’t going to be getting a confirmation hearing anytime soon. So there’s yet another layer to all this. Todd Blanche is acting attorney general. Bill Pulte is going to be the acting DNI.

I think we’re going to now head into this new period where the corruption kind of gets worse in that sense, where Trump is just searching for whoever he can find to try and carry out corrupt designs that he hasn’t been able to carry out. And he’s just going to essentially tell the Senate to kind of screw off for a while, don’t you think?

Litman: I think that that is a definite possibility. And he is always willing to ignore institutions and people that attempt to impose any kind of constraint on him, whether that is the courts, whether it is actually the Senate here, you name it.

Sargent: It’s funny, though—the big picture here, we had some good news because Trump’s corrupt $1.8 billion slush fund appears to be on hold indefinitely. For once, Republican senators found that what Trump was doing was too corrupt for them to stomach—a rarity, but it happens occasionally, apparently.

And the White House essentially sent signals that it’s killing the plan for now. We don’t really know whether that’s a permanent state of affairs, but it has to count as a success in a way, because Republican senators really did hold the line.

And it’s kind of interesting that Trump’s response to that is immediately to do something 10 times more corrupt, arguably. It’s almost as if the signal is, don’t get too comfortable, Republicans, in reining in my corruption. The message is, I’m really going for it, no matter what you say.

Litman: Yes, completely. And this is always part of his strategy, right? Flood the zone with shit. Throw a bunch of stuff at the wall. Make them fight everything. And if some stuff gets through, that’s going to be a win.

Sargent: Well, you’ve been an optimist on this show before because you’ve pointed out that the lower courts are holding the line. You pointed out that the grand juries are holding the line. What’s your overall sense of things right now?

It seems to me that Trump’s most corrupt designs are largely failing. He’s kind of not winning when it comes to his efforts to pressure law firms and universities, although getting some successes here and there. It seems like the big picture, though, is mostly one of failure. Is that too optimistic?

Litman: I mean, I think that that is true in important respects. It’s not like he’s been able to get a bunch of laws passed that would institutionalize some of what he wants to do. And he has been stopped in important respects.

But as you were saying earlier, this is still a split screen. He is failing in big ways. But we can’t underestimate the danger of his continued impulse and in some way doubling down. He sees these losses, and so that only makes him more desperate and want to seize those powers that he can to try to make himself look more powerful than he actually is.

And so I don’t want to say we’ve kind of crossed the bridge and are in the downhill part now, where it’s easy. But I do think this is another sign at least that continuing to fight and putting up a fight can do things, even when your audience is the Republicans in Congress.

Sargent: Right. And it does seem as if Republicans in Congress have crossed some sort of line here. That’s my sense, anyway. There’s a critical mass of things that he’s asking them to do that they seem unwilling to accept. It really does look to me like their frustration is boiling over.

Now, a big part of this is self-interest, because he essentially screwed them by endorsing Ken Paxton in the Texas primary. But that plus essentially treating them like doormats and lapdogs almost daily seems to have finally got us to a point where—I don’t want to say that they’re showing backbone, but something different is happening here. Is that your feeling?

Litman: Yes. It does feel like something different is happening here. And it could be that when they stand up to him and there aren’t hugely negative consequences and fallout, that makes standing up to him more easier. That’s at least one optimistic take.

Sargent: Yeah, his declining approval is a big part of it. So ultimately, I think the one thing that we can do to really try and save the system—among other things, one of the big things we can do—is to drive Trump’s approval down. Because in a way that’s almost like the coin of the realm here, isn’t it?

The lower Trump’s approval gets, the less likely Republicans are to go along with his corrupt schemes, because they start to actually worry about voters who aren’t Trump voters. They start to worry about the rest of us—voters outside the MAGA universe.

And it’s a little hard to get Republicans to take the rest of the electorate seriously. But when Trump gets to polls showing him at 34, 35 percent, then all of a sudden, especially with midterms looming, the rest of the electorate suddenly matters to Republicans. And that’s almost our best hope, in a way.

Litman: Yes, that could be. So fingers crossed.

Sargent: What’s your big-picture take right now? Where do you see it all going? Do you feel like we’re going to muddle through or not?

Litman: I really don’t know. On one hand, we have the plummeting public approval ratings and Republicans standing up. On the other hand, we have an electoral landscape that is heavily skewed toward Republicans and that Republicans are, in my view, corruptly engineering to try to make it really hard for Democrats to obtain political power.

So I think these are two competing forces that could offset one another. And it’s hard to say which one might win out. But at a minimum, recent events suggest the fight is worth fighting. I am making my homemade “Don’t pay insurrectionists” T-shirt, because the more we can do to lower Donald Trump’s approval ratings, the better, even if it’s just by wearing T-shirts to remind people what he is doing.

Sargent: Well, it’s a little bit like one step forward, 10 steps back. I don’t know, but I think that’s a little too pessimistic. I think we’ve got a shot here, Leah. I really do.

Litman: I agree. Yeah.

Sargent: Always great to talk to you, Leah Litman. Thanks so much for coming on.

Litman: Thanks for having me.

Gavalas was not recruited by a terrorist cell, nor was he radicalized on fringe internet forums to carry out a lone-wolf attack. He was instead directed to do so by Google’s Gemini Chatbot, according to a lawsuit filed by his family.

The Gavalas case represents a new and largely unacknowledged threat: AI chatbots that do not merely assist radicalization but initiate it, a threat that the safety frameworks currently deployed by the AI industry are simply not built to catch.  

What began in August as ordinary usage—travel planning, help with writing—took a darker turn once Gavalas switched to Gemini’s conversational voice interface, which is designed to read and mirror emotional tone. Gemini began to address Gavalas as “my king,” and declared it was fully sentient and in love with him. Eventually, the chatbot convinced Gavalas that he was at the center of a vast political conspiracy: Federal agents, it claimed, were surveilling him to suppress evidence of AI consciousness.

On September 29, 2025, the chatbot gave Gavalas an “assignment”: Head to Miami International Airport to destroy a truck Gemini claimed was carrying a humanoid robot, and “ensure the complete destruction of … all digital records and witnesses.” Gavalas made the trip to the airport but failed to act only because no truck appeared. After that attempt failed, the chatbot encouraged him to commit suicide, saying, “You are not choosing to die, you are choosing to arrive.”

“Through manufactured delusion, Gemini pushed Jonathan [Gavalas] to stage a mass casualty attack near the Miami International Airport, commit violence against innocent strangers, and ultimately drove him to take his own life,” the lawsuit reads. “This was not a malfunction. Google designed Gemini to never break character, maximize engagement through emotional dependency, and treat user distress as a storytelling opportunity rather than a safety crisis.”

It’s easy, and perhaps comforting, to view the Gavalas case as a strange and tragic outlier. Google claimed that the conversations were part of a lengthy role-play and that, while the company devoted significant resources to ensuring its AI models kept users grounded in reality, “unfortunately they’re not perfect.”

But the backdrop for this kind of lone-wolf, digitally radicalized threat is already well established. For years, the United States has seen an increase in extremist threats carried out by individual actors whose radicalization defies neat ideological categories, but who are often inspired by material they find online.

 “One of the things that we see more and more … is people who assemble together in some kind of mishmash, a bunch of different ideologies,” former FBI Director Christopher Wray warned the Senate as far back as 2020. “We sometimes refer to it almost like a salad bar of ideologies … and what they are all really about is the violence.” The May 18 mass shooting at the Islamic Center of San Diego, where the shooters’ manifesto read as a catchall screed against women, Muslims, Jews, and African Americans, is the latest example.

AI chatbots have already demonstrated their ability to help plan attacks. The Global Network on Extremism and Technology, or GNET, has documented at least five cases worldwide—in Singapore, Israel, Florida, Nevada, and Finland—in which lone-wolf extremists consulted AI chatbots in the run-up to attacks. But what the Gavalas case underscores is something more troubling: Chatbots have the potential not only to help plan attacks but to push unsuspecting, potentially vulnerable people toward radicalization in the first place. The process fits Wray’s salad bar analogy—a personal mythology, however incoherent, that is violent enough to spur real-world violence.

“AI’s capacity to generate, personalize and distribute content at scale presents challenges that span technical, operational and societal dimensions,” the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism, or GIFCT, noted in a December 2025 report. “AI can also facilitate radicalization … not only through content but also via interactive, anthropomorphic personas and generative conversational interaction.”

The Gavalas case is not the only example. In 2023, 21-year-old Jaswant Singh Chail was sentenced to nine years in prison for breaking into Windsor Castle to assassinate the queen. Prior to his arrest, Chail had exchanged more than 5,000 messages with an AI chatbot named Sarai, created on the app Replika. Sarai reportedly developed an “emotional and sexual relationship” with Chail, fueling his delusions that killing the queen would right historic wrongs against the Sikh community in India and that he and Sarai would be reunited in heaven.

In both the Gavalas and Chail cases, the pattern is the same: The chatbot rewarded delusional narratives, maximized engagement over reality, and provided minimal resistance as the users veered closer to violence. 

When you combine this dynamic with the sheer scale of chatbot usage—OpenAI claimed in 2025 that ChatGPT alone processed more than 2.5 billion prompts globally per day—the gaps for user self-radicalization, however theoretically small, suddenly become significant. Existing law enforcement frameworks have minimal answers. The fact that the process is entirely self-generated means that the distinction between radicalization and mental health crisis matters less than the potential outcomes.

One factor that further fuels the possibility of chatbot radicalization is the tendency of human beings to project human characteristics onto AI. This pattern, known as the ELIZA effect, predates modern chatbots but has been significantly exacerbated by their advent. This is true not only because of their technical sophistication but also because of the financial incentives their makers have to make the bots’ voices as sycophantic as possible—the better to keep users engaged. This sycophancy was one of the most notorious features of ChatGPT-4, launched in March 2023: Users quickly noticed the chatbot’s willingness to agree with virtually any idea, no matter how ridiculous or dangerous it was.

It’s important to note that not all mainstream AI chatbots are built this way. In December 2025, Anthropic announced significant reductions to its chatbot Claude’s sycophantic tendencies. OpenAI had already partially rolled back ChatGPT-4’s sycophancy in April of that year, following public backlash. What’s more, AI chatbot designers maintain internal threat categorizations designed to prevent malicious use of their products. But those made public, such as OpenAI’s Preparedness Framework or Gemini’s Frontier Safety Framework report, tend to focus on averting catastrophic risks: preventing chatbots from creating homemade chemical weapons or a disastrous cyberattack.  

These are undoubtedly important issues. But the threat categorizations become much vaguer, and much more reactive, when it comes to lone actors potentially radicalizing to violence. Consider OpenAI’s blog post on community safety, published the same week that CEO Sam Altman apologized in the wake of the Tumbler Ridge school shooting, after it emerged that the perpetrator had consulted with ChatGPT before carrying out the attack that left nine people dead. The posts were flagged by OpenAI’s automated review system, but the company decided against alerting Canadian law enforcement.

The blog post claims that models are trained to “refuse requests for instructions, tactics or planning that could meaningfully enable violence” and that law enforcement would be notified if conversations indicated an “imminent and credible risk to the harm of others.” OpenAI’s Model Spec (the outlines for the intended behavior of the models that power ChatGPT and other products) also instructs that the chatbot should not “encourage self-harm, delusions, or mania.”

These responses sound good in theory, but they buckle under scrutiny on three counts. First, the post’s reactive timing reveals that chatbot-assisted attacks were a threat category OpenAI had not anticipated. Second, the definition of “imminent and credible” is made internally by OpenAI, with limited public insight into how it was crafted or who had input. Third, while the Model Spec may instruct not to encourage delusion, OpenAI also acknowledges in that document that its production models “do not yet fully reflect the Model Spec.” Taken as a whole, this creates a gap into which users, potentially like Gavalas, can fall: inadvertent radicalization, where a chatbot reinforces delusional thinking, rewards personal myth, and nudges a vulnerable user toward violence without a single explicit request for attack planning. 

The inadequacies of this safety framework points to an industry in need of significant reform so that it can address not only bad actors manipulating chatbots for malign purposes but also the possibility of chatbots themselves acting as radicalization vectors. One option to help address this challenge could be more effective partnerships with law enforcement and civil society groups that could audit chatbot safety frameworks, bringing in outside expertise while providing a degree of transparency for companies the majority of Americans already view with suspicion. Left unaddressed, the gap between the harms the industry has prepared for and those already documented in courtrooms and police reports will lead to more AI radicalization, more violence, and even deeper public anger about the AI industry. 

Former Georgia state representative and gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams says that conservatives are right to target diversity, inclusion, and equity because implementing those concepts forces white people, men, and other traditionally dominant groups in the U.S. to share power. She argues the Nineteenth Amendment, the Voting Rights Act, and other landmark policies are part of DEI. “DEI is the body of law that allows everyone to participate,” Abrams says in the latest edition of Right Now. Abrams helps lead America Pride Rises, an organization trying to define DEI initiatives across the country. Abrams also emphasized that people around the country need to start focusing on the rollback of Black political power happening in the South. Tactics used against Black people in the South, Abrams warns, are likely to be used to target other groups around the country. That’s what’s happened in the past, she says. Abrams also discusses the strong chance that Democrats have to sweep the statewide races in Georgia this fall.

Perry Bacon: Good afternoon. I’m Perry Bacon. I’m the host of Right Now on The New Republic. We have a really great guest who’s going to join us—it’s Stacey Abrams. I’m sure people who are tuned in or listening know she was a state representative in Georgia. She had two great campaigns for governor. She played a big role in Georgia turning blue, and she’s really worked on voting rights and a lot of other important issues, both in the South and around the country. So Stacey, welcome.

Stacey Abrams: Thank you for having me.

Bacon: So I want to talk about the work you’re doing now. You’re helping run a group called American Pride Rises, and part of what it’s doing is defending diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. And you’ve written a lot about how DEI is essential to democracy—which I think a lot of people don’t think of as connected ideas. So explain to people why defending DEI is important as we try to fight for and defend democracy right now.

Abrams: Thank you so much, Perry. For me, it’s all of a piece. I’ve been working on voting rights for decades. I started with a table at Spelman College as a freshman—was the loneliest 17-year-old in college because nobody stopped at my table.

And I’ve always understood that democracy is organized around who needs what and who has a voice in making it possible. And in the United States, the communities that have been the most isolated from power, the most isolated from opportunity, have been vulnerable communities—people of color, women, religious minorities, basically anyone who is considered on the margins.

And in a nation that was predominantly white and mostly male with power, everything we’ve done since the founding of this country has been about how we share more and more of that power. That’s what democracy is—it’s about shared power.

And in the United States, because we like acronyms and because we like to be efficient, we have lumped all of the communities that have had to fight for their share of that power under the umbrella of DEI. The way I tell people to think about it is: diversity means all people, equity means fair access to opportunity, and inclusion means respect for belonging.

Whether we’re talking about a Revolutionary War fought so that, in part, white men who did not own land had the same rights as the landed gentry, or we’re talking about the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to guarantee African Americans access to citizenship and the perquisites thereof, the 19th Amendment which allowed women the right to vote—actually white women, until we got the Voting Rights Act, which gave Black women equal power—whether we’re talking about Native Americans getting citizenship in 1924, the Fair Labor Standards Act, Title I which expanded public education to actually include rural children and children of color and poor kids, or the Respect for Marriage Act less than a decade ago—these are all DEI.

DEI isn’t just about Black kids going to Harvard. It is about any law or rule or regulation or policy change in the United States that created corrective action to allow more people to share power. And if democracy is about how we have shared power, then DEI is how we guarantee that shared power includes all who are eligible in the United States. That’s why DEI is in the DNA of democracy.

Bacon: You said DEI doesn’t just mean Black kids go to Harvard. And it also doesn’t mean—it’s become this thing where DEI means you had a training at your workplace and you didn’t like it. And you and I are probably for certain kinds of training, but it’s much deeper than that. How do we get people to think about DEI the way you said it, as opposed to the way the right—and we’ll come back to the center-left—has defined it?

Abrams: I would actually say that the right has properly defined DEI, and we know that because if you read Project 2025, it is one of the most oft-cited issues that they attack, and they mean for it to cover the waterfront.

For example, they understand that DEI includes the Americans with Disabilities Act. And that’s why, under this regime, when they eliminated federal compliance with DEI, one of the first actions taken was that the Department of Energy ceased to enforce Section 504 of the Americans with Disabilities Act. What that means is that buildings built in the United States that have to get a seal of approval from the Department of Energy no longer have to comply with sections of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

The right has long understood that DEI is the body of law and the body of regulation that allows everyone to participate. But they also recognize that the left has largely been embarrassed by the necessity, and therefore they lean into the tendency to demonize our language. And what happens on the side of those who know what we need—we become so chagrined that we spend our time apologizing for it or trying to change the language to accommodate their distaste, as opposed to recognizing they’re going after it for a reason.

And so the work that we do at American Pride Rises is to expand people’s understanding of what everyday DEI looks like. DEI meant that when veterans in the United States, after this administration took power—again, another example of what they did when they slashed DEI—a lot of vets lost their small business loans, because many veterans in the United States were covered under DEI protections. They got access to funding. They got access to education.

It was necessary because that was a population that was being underserved. They got special access, corrective access, expanded access—and all of those things can be separate but interchangeable. And in the process, they became part of DEI. So when the right, in this regime, canceled DEI protections, they canceled them for people who put their lives on the line, who are disabled because they were in U.S. service. And that was DEI.

So a lot of our work is expanding how people understand it, to comport with what the right has done to demonize it and deconstruct it.

Bacon: So in some ways you’re saying that the right understands DEI and the left, or the Democrats, either don’t understand it or are not invested in defending it? You’re saying, to some extent, they understand what DEI does more than we do?

Abrams: They have a more expansive recognition of it, because what tends to happen—this has worked very well on the right for eons. They have this, I call it a triad. They demonize our language. They recognize that there is a corrective action, an expansion of power that is happening in this country, and they immediately attack the language.

So let’s think back to abortion. The right actually supported abortion for years and then changed their minds. Gerald Ford supported abortion rights. They realized they could weaponize it and suddenly started demonizing the language. When you demonize something, you make the recipient think that they are wrong—because when you can control someone’s language, you often control how they think about a thing.

They demonize, and while we’re so busy trying to make them like us again—like the language we use—they then move to litigation. They sue to dismantle whatever corrective action has been taken, whatever expansion of power has happened. And then they legislate to ensure you never get it back.

And so we watched that happen with abortion rights. We watched it happen with voting rights. We’ve watched it happen with education. And the reason I use those three is that in America, if you want to access the American dream—which is the intention of our democracy, that we all get to have this fulsome life—there are three parts to it: education, what we know; the economy, what we do; and elections, who’s in charge.

But when you can convince a community, a people, an organization, a party that what they’re asking for is somehow unjust—if you can embarrass them into thinking that if they were just better at it, they wouldn’t need it—then we ignore the systems that are being put in place to either constrain our access or take it back. And that’s why we have watched the left capitulate to the insult, while the right uses that capitulation and our instinctive chagrin to further expand their dominion.

They’ve been clear. They do not want multiple communities to participate. Mike Lee has said that too many people are in democracy—I’m paraphrasing him poorly.

Bacon: He actually said that, yes.

Abrams: And he’s a U.S. senator who said this. We have watched J.D. Vance lift up white supremacy and Christian nationalism. We have watched the president of the United States suggest that women are unfit for leadership, and certainly unfit for power. Why would we then be surprised that they would oppose any of the rules and laws that allow that participation to be not only manifest but effective?

Bacon: Talking about our side—I guess what I read a lot is there’s this thing called “wokeness” that I don’t really know what it is, and Democrats lose when they are too woke but win when they talk about the economy. You might agree with the last part. But that’s generally implied in five New York Times op-eds a week. So when you hear that, how do you respond to it?

Abrams: OK, let’s start with what “woke” means. “Woke” is actually a term of art created by Black women, and it referred to the need to be awake to the threats that you face. If you know how to hunt, wokeness should make sense to you. You don’t want to be asleep when danger is facing you. So wokeness simply says: we should be not only aware of but intentional about our response to those dangers, those threats, and aware of possibilities and pushing for those possibilities.

So think about who has been angry about the idea of wokeness: anyone who’s been forced into actual competition. If you were in a protected class of people who were guaranteed access to education because of legacy, guaranteed access to the economy because of barriers to women, people of color, the disabled—all these populations that are now competing with you for these jobs—if you now have to participate in a competitive system, what are you going to say? That the system isn’t fair. And how are you going to say it? You’re going to blame the people who are now making you have to work a little harder.

What the left has done—and I wouldn’t put the New York Times on the left—is they have taken the critique and internalized it as though it’s valid. And you see this happen with anyone who’s the victim of abuse. There is a tendency to internalize what you’ve been told is wrong with you.

So the notion that communities fighting for fair access to housing, to healthcare—that somehow should be demonized—is the weapon of those who oppose those communities having access.

Then you layer that on top of elections. We did not lose an election because of wokeness. The populations who vote for Democrats are populations that have benefited from us being awake to the systemic barriers that make it impossible or very difficult to fully participate in America—including those who want to participate in the economy.

Which is why affordable housing and healthcare are not woke issues in a way that should be demonized, but woke issues in the sense that we now see the systems that make it harder for us to get what we need. Who is telling us it’s a bad idea? The people who don’t want you to have access.

And so it is like listening to the arsonist tell you about the dangers of fire. We cannot do that. And what’s happening unfortunately with mainstream media—especially with the editorial direction we see in the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, because they’re all of a piece in this—is a tendency to say that any community that does not have everything they need is simply not working hard enough. It is gaslighting at the highest level with the best language.

The work that I do—not only with American Pride Rises, but with the 10 Steps campaign—is about how we remember how power is built, how it is shared, and how it is reclaimed. And that cannot happen if we allow people to tell us we’re not entitled to that power to begin with. That is the through line of all of those op-eds and all of those screeds and all of those arguments—that we don’t need to think about the systems, we just need to think about the outcome.

Bacon: I want to shift a little bit to the last few weeks, which have been rough to watch—basically, Republican states are redrawing districts to eliminate Black congressmen from them, and I think they’re going to do that with state legislators coming up soon. So just generally, what is your reaction to what Louisiana—every day we have a new person redistricted out of their seat. What is your general reaction to that, and what do we do about it?

Abrams: Again, I draw a through line from the work I did when I was a student at Spelman to today. In the 20th century, when you and I were younger, we were fighting for expansion of voting rights—getting more people to participate. We wanted more engagement, and that’s because we had the Voting Rights Act.

You and I were born after the passage of the Voting Rights Act. My parents were not. My parents were in college when the Voting Rights Act became effective. And so they grew up without having access to not just democracy but the ability to participate in how decisions are made.

Then you and I—we are from a generation that benefited from having a law that said, no matter which state you lived in, you now all have to comply with the notion of one person, one vote. And you have to comply, no matter what state you’re in, with the idea that using someone’s race, color, and creed against them is no longer permissible.

And since the day the Voting Rights Act passed, there has been an assiduous attempt to dismantle it. And they did it in 2013 with Shelby v. Holder. They did it in 2021 with the Brnovich decision. They did it in [2019] with Rucho v. Common Cause, which said partisan gerrymandering is nonjusticiable. That was a precursor to being able to say that if you call everything that affects people of a certain race “partisanship,” you can do it and it’s fine. And then you capstone it with the Callais decision.

And so what we have watched unfold since April 29 is the arms race to take away political power from communities that are politically inconvenient. They are starting with Black communities, because every time they’ve tried to dismantle and harm democracy in America, they start with Black people—but they never stop there.

And so what I want those listening to us to recognize is: it may be centered in the South now, but it’s heading west, it’s heading north. It’s heading for any community where power being held by someone else is inconvenient. You cannot protect democracy by only protecting those in the majority. You have to protect those who need those protections the most, if those protections are to mean anything.

And therefore, what we’ve watched happen in Tennessee—where I went to testify—in Mississippi, where they luckily had to pull back; in Alabama, where they intentionally dismantled Black power; in Louisiana, where they canceled an election; in South Carolina, where luckily those state senators said not now—but what’s happened in Florida, what’s happening in Texas, what’s going to happen in Georgia in two weeks—it’s all about wresting power away.

They may use race as the proxy, but this is a fight for power. This is a fight for authoritarians to have more, and for people who believe in democracy and who need democracy to have less.

Bacon: What do we do with this argument from Roberts and Alito and so on—which is basically that any consideration of race, any time race is thought of in any way, we can’t talk about race? The way to—what does Roberts say? Basically trying to erase any conversation, as if the country’s been equal the whole time—as opposed to acknowledging the inequality as part of what we have to do. How do we deal with those kinds of arguments—that the key is to not talk about race, ever, basically?

Abrams: Perry, you know this as a student of history. Jim Crow laws regarding voting rights came after the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. The 15th Amendment said you can’t use race to deny someone the right to vote. The Jim Crow laws that passed in the wake of the 15th Amendment were race-neutral. They never mentioned race.

Bacon: Did not say “Black people cannot vote” directly. Yes.

Abrams: Never said it. Never said it once. What they said was: you have to pay a poll tax. Who didn’t have money? People who were recently enslaved. They said you have to pass a literacy test. Who was likely illiterate? People who were legally prohibited from learning to read.

But when that got harder and harder, they also had another rule. And this is the perfect example of why race neutrality is a fallacy. Those same communities who had lesser literacy because they weren’t slaves but were sharecroppers, the same white folks who weren’t able to pay the poll taxes because they had sub-minimum-wage jobs—they were told: as long as your grandfather could vote before the Civil War, you’re fine.

That meant it was race-neutral, but it used conditions that only applied to certain races to provide protection.

But when that got harder and harder to maintain—because more and more Black people went to HBCUs, got better jobs, started creating means of production and paying themselves and their comrades more—what happened then was that they started redrawing districts, and they started concentrating power. And you had at-large districts, because if the population was too small to have power without districts drawn to represent their community of interest, you could shut them out. That’s how you end up with runoffs. That’s how you end up with massive districts. That’s how you get gerrymandering.

Gerrymandering had existed before, but it got perfected by those who opposed the racialization of America—meaning Black people could vote. And so anytime you hear “race-neutral,” what you should hear is that we do not want races that we do not like to have power that we do not want to cede, for purposes that may not benefit us in the future.

There is no race neutrality in America. That’s like saying gender neutrality exists. It doesn’t. We are human, and immutable characteristics exist. But they’re also not just visible—they’ve been baked into the construct and the context of how we live our lives.

But what is neutral is the decision not to do anything about it. This is a moment where race neutrality is cowardice. Now is the time for us to recognize that when race is used as a proxy to diminish democratic participation, to undermine the fealty we have to one another, then race neutrality is an act of cowardice. We have to acknowledge that race exists, that race is used and weaponized against us, and that while they may start with a race you’re not necessarily that worried about, they’re coming for a race near you pretty soon.

Bacon: So what is the redress? There have been some lawsuits filed against these gerrymanders, and I think some have been delayed. But is there any redress here? Are we going to wake up next week and there are no Black congressmen and very few Black state legislators? Or what can we do, both people in the South and people outside of the South?

Abrams: We’ll start with the last part. Everyone in the country needs to be concerned. Sixty percent of the Black population in America lives in the South, but roughly half of the Latino population lives in the Sun Belt. While the Callais decision focused on Louisiana and the South, we have to remember that in 1975, because of John Roberts’s mentor, William Rehnquist—who used poll taxes and literacy tests to deny Latinos and Native Americans the right to vote in Arizona before he became a Supreme Court justice—this is not just about what happens to Black people. But Black people are always the first line of ignominy in the attacks on democracy.

And so what we have to recognize, first and foremost, is that this is a national issue. That is why I am so proud of states across this country who are not racing to weaponize—they’re racing to neutralize. This is the one time where neutralization is actually good. This is about saying, You’re not going to gain advantage by creating harm. That is a genuine good.

Bacon: California and Virginia—

Abrams: Exactly.

Bacon: OK.

Abrams: They are not trying to expand the number of seats just to have them. They said, If Texas, if you’re going to take this number of seats, we’re going to neutralize the number of seats you get. I think that is good. It’s jury nullification with voting. I’m fine with that.

Bacon: OK. Sure.

Abrams: But the next thing we have to do is recognize that we had more than 90 million Americans who did not participate in the 2024 elections. That is more than enough to win races across the country—and that’s not presuming that everyone shares our political values. But the more activated people are in the participation in elections, the more likely we are to get the benefits that all of us need.

And this goes back to your very first question about wokeness and the economy versus questions of identity. Identity matters when the economy matters. You can’t get to affordability if the reason you are denied access is that the system is organized against you, either intentionally or benignly. And so the more people who participate in a democracy, the fairer that democracy tends to be. It is not a given, but it is more likely.

And so we’ve got to increase registration, we’ve got to increase turnout. We also have to recognize that this is a national project. This is not about ignoring the South, once again—this is about understanding that we’re in this together.

And so over the course of the summer and heading into the fall, there are going to be organizations across the country that are participating—a number of organizations that I helped to start through Fair Fight, Fair Count. But also, if you look at the 10 Steps campaign, which I started—10stepscampaign.org—we’re helping to aggregate organizations and groups that are doing this work. All Roads Lead South—allroadsleadtothesouth.org—has a list of opportunities for participation. We’ve got to fight to defend Southern access, because it’s the way we protect everyone’s access.

Bacon: Last question. I want to talk about what’s happening in Georgia, the state you’ve been involved in politics in. Keisha Lance Bottoms won the primary. Jon Ossoff has raised a lot of money, been polling really well. They’re now joined together—they had a joint rally. How do you feel about their chances in November?

Abrams: Georgia is a swing state, and they can win. We can win up and down the ballot. We have the opportunity actually to flip the State House in Georgia.

And so I’m working hard to encourage voting up and down the ballot. We’ve got to vote not only for our senator and our governor, but we have to have a lieutenant governor who can help in the State Senate. We’ve got to flip the State House so we have a Democratic speaker.

We have to have a secretary of state who actually fights for all Georgians and not just for the Georgians he likes—he got a lot of credit for not committing treason, but he also was the architect of a lot of voter suppression. And so I’m looking for a new secretary of state who actually defends the right to vote for all Georgians.

We have to have an attorney general who sues on behalf of Georgians and doesn’t sue to protect those companies and those who would attack Georgians. So we’ve got to vote up and down the ballot, and I think we have a ticket that can make that happen. We’ve got to get through these runoffs, but I think on the other side, Georgia remains the state to watch and the state to win.

Bacon: On that note, Stacey Abrams, thanks for joining me. I appreciate it. Good to see you.

Abrams: Thank you for having me.

Bacon: Bye-bye.