But in Lovelace v. Lee, the court declined to step in at Alabama’s request. The case is important for three reasons. First and foremost, it appears to be the first successful constitutional challenge to a specific execution method since the Eighth Amendment’s ratification in 1791. Jeffrey Lee, a death-row prisoner who was convicted of killing two people in 1998, filed a federal lawsuit last year to challenge Alabama’s plan to execute him via nitrogen hypoxia. Alabama adopted the new method in 2018; Lee argues that it would violate the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

Nitrogen-hypoxia executions are fairly simple in theory. Earth’s atmosphere is roughly 78 percent nitrogen and 20 percent oxygen, with trace elements rounding out the remaining two percent. Humans have evolved to breathe large amounts of nitrogen, and we can do so indefinitely as long as some oxygen is present. Alabama’s plan is to simply subtract the oxygen—or, more accurately, to place a mask over Lee’s face so that he only breathes pure nitrogen until he dies.

The state has already killed seven death-row prisoners by this method; Louisiana also executed a man via nitrogen hypoxia last year. Three other states have authorized the method. Proponents describe it as relatively simple and largely painless, even compared to lethal injection. Justice Sonia Sotomayor described it differently in a dissenting opinion last year:

Take out your phone, go to the clock app, and find the stopwatch. Click start. Now watch the seconds as they climb. Three seconds come and go in a blink. At the thirty-second mark, your mind starts to wander. One minute passes, and you begin to think that this is taking a long time. Two . . . three . . . . The clock ticks on. Then, finally, you make it to four minutes. Hit stop.

Now imagine for that entire time, you are suffocating. You want to breathe; you have to breathe. But you are strapped to a gurney with a mask on your face pumping your lungs with nitrogen gas. Your mind knows that the gas will kill you. But your body keeps telling you to breathe.

Sotomayor said that the death-row prisoner in that case would “immediately convulse,” “gasp for air,” and “thrash violently against the restraints holding him in place as he experiences this intense psychological torment until he finally loses consciousness” before finally dying about 15-20 minutes later. The justice’s description also assumes that everything goes as planned. Unsurprisingly, Lee asked the court to let him be executed by firing squad instead, which can be virtually instantaneous when done correctly.

A federal district court judge in Alabama rejected those claims, citing the high threshold for execution-method challenges laid out by the Supreme Court in the 2015 case Glossip v. Gross. (More on that later.) The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals reversed that ruling and instead that there would be a “substantial risk of serious harm,” then asked the district court to consider whether Lee’s firing squad recommendation would be viable. The district court concluded that it would be and entered judgment in Lee’s favor.

In its appeal to the justices, Alabama claimed that the ruling amounted to “the first-ever permanent ban on a legislatively enacted method” in American history. The Supreme Court itself has never explicitly held a specific method of execution to be unconstitutional. Though the justices have suggested in passing that the Eighth Amendment forbids certain medieval methods of execution, such as breaking someone on a wheel or burning them as the stake, the high court have never before compelled a state to abandon its preferred option.

Instead, execution methods have changed over the years largely due to public pressure and criticism. Hanging was the most common method of execution in the 19th century, but it was often administered by unskilled amateurs. A competent hangman would ensure that the prisoner’s neck snapped at the first drop. More common outcomes were grisly scenes of strangulation or, in rare cases, decapitation.

By the early 20th century, states began to experiment with alternatives. New York carried out the first execution by electric chair in 1890 after the Supreme Court rejected the prisoner’s Eighth Amendment challenge. Electrocution was billed as a more scientific and humane method of execution in the early 1910s, but the reality was far more grim. In the late 1990s, the state of Florida carried out multiple executions with an unreliable electric chair, including at least one where a prisoner’s head burst into flames.

After the Supreme Court agreed to hear an Eighth Amendment challenge to Florida’s use of electrocution, Governor Jeb Bush called a special session of the state legislature to switch to lethal injection. A three-drug cocktail developed by an Oklahoma medical examiner in the 1970s soon became the most widely used method of killing death-row prisoners in the late 20th century. This form of lethal injection was explicitly sanctioned by the Supreme Court in the 2008 case Baze v. Rees.

Things fell apart a few years later. The European Union imposed an embargo on drugs for executions in the United States in 2011 amid pressure from death-penalty abolitionist groups. Many pharmaceutical companies had already largely cut off the flow in previous years. With no U.S.-based manufacturers of certain key drugs, death-penalty states began to rely on unfamiliar chemical cocktails. This haphazard improvisation led to a series of botched executions in the mid-2010s, including one in Arizona in 2015 where a prisoner survived for almost two hours while gasping for air after the injections.

The Supreme Court ultimately heard a challenge to Oklahoma’s use of the controversial sedative midazolam in the 2015 case Glossip v. Gross. They were not as receptive to the Eighth Amendment argument as abolitionists had hoped. At oral arguments, Justice Samuel Alito asked whether it was “appropriate for the judiciary to countenance what amounts to a guerrilla war against the death penalty,” which had “reduced” states to using less reliable drugs like midazolam. That hostile mindset was reflected in the court’s final opinion, which Alito wrote.

In the American constitutional order, the government has powers and the people have rights. When the former conflicts with the latter, the latter must generally prevail unless the government has an exceedingly good reason for doing something. The government’s mere desire to enact a preferred policy is typically not enough to overcome a person’s constitutional rights.

Alito apparently disagrees. In Glossip, he subordinated a prisoner’s right to be free from cruel and unusual punishment to the state’s desire to kill prisoners. Because the death penalty is constitutional, he reasoned, “there must be a constitutional means of carrying it out.” Alito borrowed this flawed reasoning from Chief Justice John Roberts, who first expressed it his three-justice plurality opinion in Baze. Glossip marked the first time that a majority of the court embraced it.

In his own concurrence in Baze, Alito had warned that the court “should not produce a de facto ban on capital punishment by adopting method-of-execution rules that lead to litigation gridlock.” In Glossip, he turned that policy preference into constitutional law. To win the “guerrilla war,” Alito also required death-row prisoners to provide courts with a “substantially” less painful alternative method to be killed when challenging a state’s chosen option an Eighth Amendment grounds in the future.

That requirement also came from Roberts’s plurality opinion in Baze, where the chief justice laid out a hard-to-overcome standard for challenges to execution methods. “To qualify, the alternative procedure must be feasible, readily implemented, and in fact significantly reduce a substantial risk of severe pain,” Roberts wrote. Showing marginal improvements in safety weren’t enough. Only then would a state’s refusal to adopt the alternative method be sufficient to suspect a desire to inflict cruel and unusual punishment.

This is a threshold plainly designed to produce a specific outcome: leave constitutional challenges theoretically intact, but make it effectively impossible for them to succeed. You can see echoes of this approach in later decisions written by Alito. Earlier this month in Louisiana v. Callais, for example, the conservative justices erased the last vestiges of the Voting Rights Act by imposing bespoke hurdles. In effect, they elevated a state’s interest in partisan gerrymandering—a fig leaf in some states for eradicating Black electoral influence—above the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.

Alito even required VRA plaintiffs to produce maps to achieve a state’s stated redistricting goals when they accuse that state of racial gerrymandering, echoing his earlier demand in Glossip for death-row prisoners to describe their preferred way to die when challenging an execution method. There is something deeply unseemly about the Supreme Court forcing litigants to argue against their own interests if they wish to defend their constitutional rights. It smacks of deterrence by humiliation.

Moreover, this case was procedurally irregular, to say the least. The Supreme Court’s shadow docket typically works by hearing arguments for interim relief. (Justice Brett Kavanaugh has even argued that it should be called the interim docket.) In other words, the court’s shadow-docket rulings almost always involve preliminary injunctions and temporary restraining orders. Final judgments by lower courts are generally resolved by the court’s merits docket—which until ten years ago was just “the docket.”

Alabama’s challenge was different. Steve Vladeck, a Georgetown University law professor and expert on the shadow docket, warned the justices in a friend-of-the-court brief that the state was asking for something more significant this time. “Alabama’s application wears the familiar costume of a ‘state-on-top’ death penalty application—where a State asks this Court to vacate a lower court’s temporary stay so that an execution may proceed,” he wrote.

“But the relief it actually seeks is far more extraordinary—the evisceration of a federal court’s final equitable judgment,” Vladeck continued. The Supreme Court has a long history and well-established set of precedents for handling last-minute appeals from death-row prisoners. Indeed, until the mid-2010s, that was the most significant work it performed on what we now describe as the shadow docket. Since Alabama was asking the court to “effectively set aside a final judgment on the merits,” Vladeck explained, they were really asking for summary reversal, which the court handles through its normal petition-for-certiorari process.

The justices did not explain the reasoning for their decision in Thursday’s order. Alabama’s procedural misstep is significant enough, however, that it would not surprise me if the six justices who voted to deny the state’s request did so entirely for the reasons Vladeck described, regardless of their thoughts on the underlying merits of the lower courts’ rulings. Since the justices didn’t explain themselves, however, that would be only speculation on my part.

You might wonder why I spent so much time describing execution methods if this is simply a procedural outcome. I admit that the court may ultimately overturn the district court’s ruling on the merits docket; that, too, would not surprise me given the court’s post-Kennedy approach to capital punishment. Surely there is another bespoke rule that they could craft to ensure that the state of Alabama can kill people without hindrance that would not repeal the Eighth Amendment altogether.

But that brings me to the third and final thing that’s revealing about this case: three justices still would have sided with Alabama. Alito, along with Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, indicated in the court’s order that they would have granted Alabama’s motion to stay the lower-court ruling. Since we’re talking about an execution here, that is also effectively a judgment on the merits—Jeffrey Lee could hardly retain counsel or continue appeals from beyond the grave.

As I’ve noted before, the Roberts Court is almost institutionally hostile to death-row prisoners. It treats the capital-defense bar as almost inherently suspect, as evidenced by Alito’s affront to the “guerrilla war” that death penalty opponents once waged. Again, nobody wrote any opinions in this matter so we can’t say for sure why they voted the way that they did.

That doesn’t stop us from drawing some reasonable inferences. For Roberts, Kavanaugh, and Justice Amy Coney Barrett, their skepticism of death-row inmates has limits and Alabama’s plea to suffocate this particular prisoner to death apparently found them. For the court’s other three conservative justices, there appears to be almost nothing that they are willing to prioritize over a state’s desire to kill someone.

The UFC is hosting its America 250 celebration on Sunday, June 14—Donald Trump’s 80th birthday and Flag Day—on the White House’s South Lawn. But in an unexpected turn of events, bugs are likely to be the major opponent during the executive mansion’s first ever cage match.

University of Maryland entomologist Michael Raupp told Axios Friday that the odds of a winged invasion during Sunday’s festivities was 100 percent.

“This event is going to draw a big crowd,” Raupp said. “But guess what? There are going to be even more bugs joining.”

The swarm will include midges, mayflies, stoneflies, caddisflies, winged beetles, “a whole cadre of night-flying moths,” mosquitos, and possibly biting black flies. The buzz will also serve as a banquet for bats that feed on small, flying insects.

The unfortunate reality of the grounds has not been lost on UFC President Dana White, who told Boardroom that he had encountered a “holy shit” level of gnats during a visit last month to the White House’s recently renovated Rose Garden (an artifact of Jackie Onassis’s gentle touch that Trump has since paved with concrete).

“The amount of gnats that were flying around, I’m like, ‘Holy shit’,” White said.

“As soon as I got on the plane, I called my head of production and said, ‘Let me tell you about the gnat situation.’”

Fighters in the octagon will be lit by an enormous, five-ton lighting rig that includes more than 175 square feet of LED lighting—a setup that White observed would be the perfect magnet for all sorts of flying insects.

Beyond that, the bugs could cause a sticky problem between fighters. “In your nose, in your mouth while you’re trying to fight,” White noted while lamenting the complicated nature of outdoor events. He added that his team was considering installing large fans around the cage to keep the bugs away from the action. Those in attendance, however, are unlikely to find similar reprieve.

Mother Nature has other challenges in store for Trump’s birthday bash, as well. Washington is expected to be hot and muggy this weekend, with possible thunderstorms on Sunday evening that could affect the 8 p.m. main card.

White has told reporters that the show will go on, no matter if there’s rain, snow, or “even lightning.”

“You guys all played sports when you were growing up,” White said Wednesday. “Whenever there was lightning, you’d sit the lightning out. When it was over, you played. That’s what we’ll do.”

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine was briefed on the plan last month before briefing President Trump himself. But Trump apparently put the plan on hold given the high potential for U.S. casualties and increased Iranian aggression—a massive risk for his political standing in the midst of a widely unpopular war.

“It would be insanely difficult to fish through those tunnels and all the barrels,” an anonymous source told CNN. “We’d have to set up a massive presence. Essentially, we’d have to invade.”

An invasion would most certainly ensure an Iranian response, either economically—through the continued closing of the Strait of Hormuz—or militarily, by continuing to attack U.S. allies in the region, like Israel and the UAE.

Republicans on the Senate Armed Services Committee first killed an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act, proposed by Democratic Senator Elissa Slotkin, that would have prohibited using Pentagon funds to deploy the military to seize ballots, voting machines, voter rolls, or any other election materials. The NDAA is the fiscal year’s main funding bill for the military.

After that effort failed, Slotkin proposed another amendment that would have required the Pentagon to notify Congress if troops were deployed to polling places for any reason other than repelling “armed enemies of the United States.” But even that was too much for Republicans on the committee.

“I introduced these amendments to protect our free and fair elections from military interference,” Slotkin told MS NOW. “It’s deeply concerning that none of my Republican colleagues on the committee voted to include it.”

Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal agreed, calling the committee’s party-line votes a worrying sign for November’s midterm elections.

“Republican opposition to barring use of federal troops at the polls is deeply alarming, signaling this extreme step is part of Trump’s agenda to suppress voting,” Blumenthal said. “I’m fearful about it portending illegal domestic deployment of our military.”

Last year, Slotkin was among several Democratic members of Congress who urged members of the military not to follow illegal orders from the Trump administration, and she said that her amendments included language reaffirming that.

“I introduced these amendments to protect our free and fair elections from military interference and intimidation, and importantly, to protect the military and service members from the exact kind of illegal orders I warned about last year,” Slotkin said to MS NOW.

President Trump always claims fraud whenever Republicans don’t perform well in an election, and his allies in the Senate don’t seem willing to check his worst impulses. Refusing to pass what would seem to be obvious affirmations of existing laws suggests that these Republicans would let Trump use the military to overturn elections if he wants.

Scaffolding has gone up around the storied performance venue to remove the “Trump” part of the “Trump Kennedy Center” name, which President Trump changed without congressional approval late last year. A judge ruled the decision illegal last month and rejected the administration’s bid to reverse the division on Friday.

“The Kennedy Center’s organic statute makes crystal clear that the Center is to be named for President Kennedy, and it cannot bear any other formal name or public memorial based on the Board’s unilateral say-so. Congress gave the Kennedy Center its name, and only Congress can change it,” U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper wrote.

Trump has been particularly hostile toward the lauded cultural center, from firing all of its board members and replacing them with sycophants to slapping his own name on the building. His takeover led to dozens of artists dropping out of planned performances, which in turn led ticket sales to plummet.

Donald Trump’s name is being removed from the Kennedy Center right now

Via @DCNewsNow pic.twitter.com/2gjJnoj5zW

— WABJ - Washington Association of Black Journalists (@WABJDC) June 12, 2026

The oil tanks in Cushing held an inventory of just 21.6 million barrels Friday, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. That’s a little more than half of the 40 million barrels they usually store. When they hold less than 20 million barrels of oil, Cushing’s tanks are effectively empty, with only largely unusable sludge remaining.

The extended closure of the Strait of Hormuz has pushed the reserves in Cushing toward operational stress levels, where they will be unable to fulfill the demand for oil.

Cushing isn’t the only place in the United States where oil reserves have been affected. Gas inventories have fallen 5 percent below where they were a year ago, and U.S. diesel stockpiles have hit their lowest level since 2003.

The full shock of the present energy crisis has been dampened by the world’s oversupply of oil—but that could be about to change, as stockpiles drain around the world. If the oil markets get dry enough, the volume of oil won’t be great enough to produce the pressure needed for pipelines. Within a month, the world’s oil market could enter the danger zone, CNN reported Friday.

Earlier this week, industry officials warned the White House that gas prices could spike yet again due to rapidly diminishing inventories, which could be wiped out in a matter of weeks.

Maybe Trump could fill some of these tankers with the 100 million barrels of oil he claims to have miraculously moved through the strait without Iran noticing.

Change at the investigative weekly program has been rapid and corrosive. Late last month, Weiss simultaneously fired executive producer Tanya Simon, correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi (who criticized Weiss’s decision to delay her report on the notoriously brutal CECOT mega-prison in El Salvador), correspondent Cecilia Vega, and executive editor Draggan Mihailovich. That same day, she appointed Nick Bilton—a former Vanity Fair columnist with no television broadcast experience—to lead the venerated newsmagazine.

The following week, Scott Pelley—the de facto face of CBS News—was canned after he openly questioned Bilton’s appointment during a contentious staff meeting.

Former staffers of the investigative news program have since sounded off on Weiss’s chaotic takeover and her heavy hand in restructuring the show.

“We have to acknowledge that 60 Minutes needed a bit of a facelift, and there were potentially positive ways to improve the program, but it’s the way they have gone about it,” one former staffer told Variety. “You don’t give a facelift with a fucking machete.”

Rome Hartman, who worked as a producer on the show for 25 years, lamented the figurative arson of his “professional home,” and speculated that the show would only continue to decay under Weiss’s and Bilton’s direction.

“Scott wasn’t shouting at him or physically intimidating the guy—he was doing exactly what he should’ve done in the best tradition of the best 60 Minutes correspondents,” Hartman told Variety. “And if Nick Bilton is such a snowflake that he can’t possibly tolerate a voice of challenge—and if Bari Weiss has to hide behind his skirts—that does not speak well of how he’s going to run the place or how she’s going to run the place.”

But she may not be running the place for much longer at all. CBS’s parent company, Paramount Skydance, is pursuing a merger with Warner Bros. Discovery—a monumental industry shift that could see Weiss’s brief tenure atop the network come to an end, according to 30-year 60 Minutes correspondent Steve Kroft.

“I have a feeling that Bari will not be overseeing 60 Minutes for very much longer. I think once the deal gets done with Warner Bros., people will demand that she be let go or move into another position,” Kroft told Variety. “Everything she’s touched has turned to shit. Everything she’s touched has gone colossally wrong. And I don’t think she’s showed any talent for this position. She’s only fulfilling other people’s agendas.”

That’s what the WNO alleges in a lawsuit against the center, filed Thursday in federal court. According to court documents, the WNO and the Kennedy Center had a contractual relationship for nearly 15 years, in which operas were held at the venue in exchange for the center providing support services for the WNO, including managing donations.

With the Trump administration’s takeover of the center, however, many of those services—including marketing, fundraising, and administrative tasks—ended in late 2025. When the WNO complained to the center, instead of fixing the issues, the center’s governance proposed ending the relationship in January 2026.

The WNO then asked the center to return its $17 million in funds, which the agreement states belong to the WNO. But despite being contractually obligated to return the funds, the center still hasn’t returned them to the opera, and now the WNO is suing to get that money back.

All of this comes as a judge denied a last-minute appeal to keep Trump’s name on the center Friday. Now Trump may follow through on his stated desire last month to hand over control of the center to Congress. Will he follow through or try to defy the ruling?

The intrusive topic has won his mind in all sorts of inappropriate settings: He has deflected from the Iran war and inflation concerns by fixating on the renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, pivoted to renderings of his construction projects during an Oval Office meeting with Mark Rutte that was intended to focus on global alliances and security issues, and interrupted a January meeting with oil executives about Venezuela’s future to mention his $400 million ballroom, an idea so inspiring that he stopped the conversation and walked to a window to muse about its construction.

A prominent clinical psychologist has signaled that the tireless obsession could be a warning sign of cognitive decline.

Dr. John Gartner, a former assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University Medical School, told The Daily Beast Thursday that the president’s repetitive verbal ramblings are symptomatic of something much graver.

“Tangential speech is one of the diagnostic criteria for dementia,” Gartner told the Beast.

“What he’s obsessed with is a function of malignant narcissism. He’s obsessed with things that reflect glory on him,” Gartner continued. “He’s changing Washington, D.C., to Trump D.C.”

That could include any number of projects: Trump has also (impermanently) plastered his name on the Kennedy Center and proposed a 250-foot “Arc de Trump” in the nation’s capital.

An analysis by The Washington Post in April found that, by that time, Trump had invoked his ballroom in roughly a third of his public remarks, far outpacing any mentions of his supposed policy priorities.

But Gartner mentioned that Trump’s rants would only “go downhill from here.”

The White House, in response, insisted that Trump is in immaculate condition.

“If it quacks like a duck, it may actually just be a Democrat hack doctor,” White House spokesman Davis Ingle told the Beast in response to Gartner’s assessment.

Yet something must be unusual about the president’s condition. Last month, Trump’s examination at Walter Reed Medical Center involved 22 specialists, breaking the previous record held by George W. Bush, who once saw 10 specialists in one go.

The White House has not elaborated on exactly why Trump needed so many doctors. Trump officials told the Post that the unconventionally large medical team allowed for a “complete and preventive evaluation” of the president. White House physician Sean Barbabella commented that the assessment found Trump in “excellent health.”

One of the Trump voters, Annette Dombrowski—is about to lose her job at an Ohio manufacturing plant because its billionaire, Trump-supporting owner, John Paulson, is outsourcing domestic jobs to China, something Trump has promised time and time again to prevent. 

“I actually have panic attacks. I’ve had a couple this past week, and I get very emotional over it. I don’t want to work anymore, but I can’t afford to retire,” Dombrowski said. 

“Obviously, President Trump is immensely wealthy. He has been wealthy since he was born,” MSNOW’s Alex Tabet posited.

“Yep.”

“Do you think he understands?”

“No. He hasn’t lived it to understand it. He sees it, he has not lived it. He needs to live it. Wear the clothes, wear the shoes, wear your Walmart clothes, wear your Walmart shoes, do your thrift thrift store shopping. Don’t eat steaks.  I don’t get to go out to dinner,” Dombrowski continued, growing emotional. “It’s not an overnight thing, but it’s been two years now. You said you’d bring down the grocery prices … I must be the most angry person in my grocery shop, because I buy the same things every week, and I see it jump every week. It is not every couple months, it’s literally every week.” 

Morning Joe interviewed 3-time Trump voters who have become disillusioned: "It's been two years now. You said you'd bring down the grocery prices. I must be the most angry person when I grocery shop."

"He's backtracked on every single pitch point he had during his election ...… pic.twitter.com/Il9HuH4BiN

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 12, 2026

Morning Joe also featured another three-time Trump voter, truck driver Chris Tackett. 

“When President Trump said he wasn’t going to start foreign wars, when he said he was going to bring down prices, did you believe him?” Talbot asked Tackett. 

“Yeah. I mean, his first term … I think he held true to everything that he said he was gonna do. I think he fought for everything he said he was gonna fight for. This time around, I haven’t seen it,” Tackett said. “He’s backtracked on every single pitch point he had during his election.… All we heard was ‘drill drill drill’ during the election, now all we’re getting is drilled into the dirt with these prices. I voted for Trump all three terms, [but] to be honest with you, I’m not a big supporter of him at this point.”

“If you could talk directly to President Trump, what would you tell him right now?”

“Get it together, man. The average American is struggling to make ends meet right now, and nobody wants to hear the war [in Iran] is almost over. Nobody wants to hear it’s going to get better. You’ve had a year to make it better at this point. Make it better.”

The most recent consumer price index has inflation at its highest rate in three years, due to President Trump’s widely unpopular, very expensive war on Iran. Even still, Trump claims that the numbers are great, and that he loves inflation—even as Dombrowski and other people who voted for him struggle to afford things he can have any moment he wants, like steak.

The Texas Republican has become a vocal critic of the president since he lost his primary runoff last month to the Trump-backed favorite in the race, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.

In an interview with The New York Times published Friday, Cornyn flamed Trump’s influence in the race, lamenting that Trump apparently “couldn’t resist” the temptation.

“If he would do that to me, he would do that to anybody,” Cornyn told the Times. “There’s never going to be good enough for him, other than 100 percent, you know, slavish adherence to whatever he wants. But obviously that’s not what the senator’s role is supposed to be, especially in terms of checks and balances.

“If that’s the way friends treat you, you wonder about his enemies,” Cornyn continued, referring to a post-race social media note in which Trump wrote that the Lone Star conservative would “remain my friend for a long time.”

Cornyn’s race was a gamble and a loss for the GOP: one of the most prolific fundraisers, Cornyn had done much to support other Republican candidates over the course of his 24-year legislative career, bringing in more than $400 million for auxiliary races.

The lost cash flow, paired with Trump’s waning popularity and dismal economic offerings, could bode poorly for the Republican Party come November, according to Cornyn.

“It’s going to make things harder, certainly more expensive in Texas, and make it harder around the country,” Cornyn said, adding that Trump would regret his actions. “I don’t say that with any sort of desire for vengeance; I just think that’s the way it’s going to be. He’s going to have the most miserable two years of his life in the last two years of his term, I think, because I think November is going to be a disaster.”

The Ohio Organizing Collaborative, which promotes voter registration and voting rights, was targeted by over 100 agents who showed up at the homes of the organization’s leadership and employees, seeking electronic devices and in some cases carrying subpoenas. The bureau also had a search warrant for the organization’s Cleveland office.

“They had agents all across the state going to civil rights leaders’ and community leaders’ doors intimidating them, coming and demanding that they talk about literally anything they would ask,” Prentiss Haney, an OOC board member, told MS NOW. The agents “asked them if they’re committing voter fraud, just on their doors, in front of their houses with their children, and just following them to work and school.”

Haney told the Cleveland Plain-Dealer that the agents who approached the organization’s staff at their homes in Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati, Dayton, and Youngstown didn’t have warrants, calling their approach “just straight-up intimidation tactics.” He said the OOC is not involved in voter fraud in any way.

“It was terrifying,” Haney said. “I’ve never seen this sort of force from a federal agency against regular people, regular Ohioans, who are helping people participate in elections.”

The FBI and the Department of Justice have not commented publicly about the raid or any investigation into the OOC, but Democratic Representative Shontel Brown, who represents Cleveland and much of northeastern Ohio, said in a statement that she was “alarmed and outraged by reports that Trump and Kash Patel’s FBI has raided the Ohio Organizing Collective in Cleveland.”

“This appears to be a blatant effort to suppress and deny the vote of people in Northeast Ohio. These raids must end immediately,” Brown said on X.

The FBI’s raids bring to mind the right-wing smear campaign in 2009 to bring down ACORN, a national organization that also advocated for voting rights, among other efforts aimed at low-income Americans. Even though investigations found that ACORN staff broke no laws, the organization lost almost all of its funding, depriving many communities of a valuable organization and hurting voter registration. Thursday’s raids seem aimed at depressing voter registration and creating panic about nonexistent voter fraud in a state where Democrats stand to make gains in November.

“The terms that Iran leaked out to the Fake News have NOTHING to do with the terms that were agreed to, in writing,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social, on the 105th day of a war that was only supposed to last two weeks.

“What they said, including their weak and pathetic statement on having a deal, bears no relation to the truth. Very dishonorable people to deal with. With them, there is no such thing as dealing in good faith. AMAZING!” he wrote. “Also, their totally rebuffed Drone attack last night against Indian Ships leaving the Hormuz Strait is TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE. They better get their act together, and FAST!”

IRNA, Iran’s state news agency, reported earlier Friday that the memorandum of understanding established a 60-day ceasefire that the country could use to negotiate retaining some of their enrichment capabilities. They also reported that Tehran would receive compensation for the damage incurred by U.S. and Israeli attacks.

Vice President JD Vance also directly contradicted IRNA’s reporting in a post on X, insisting that Iranians “are not receiving any cash, and no funds are being released simply for signing a deal or attending a meeting.”

Trump announced Thursday that a deal had been agreed upon by “all parties involved” and would be passed very quickly, but it’s looking increasingly like peace is still very far away. Israeli officials indicated Thursday they were not aware of any deal, and now Iran has presented conditions that the president says he never agreed to.

But if you can’t have lions, six UFC fights are the next best thing. Granted, UFC fighting is very popular in the United States and across the world. I’ve read various accounts this week contending that UFC fighting has supplanted hockey as the fourth-most-popular sport on television, behind the big three of football, baseball, and basketball. I’ve also read that its popularity may have peaked; here’s a 2025 piece by a sportswriter who has followed “combat sports” for 15 years, showing that the number of matches is in steep decline. “The United States, long the backbone of [mixed martial arts], has seen a sharp decline in activity,” wrote John S. Nash. “In 2009, more than 6,266 professional fights took place across the country. This would be the pinnacle for American MMA contests. By 2024, that number had dropped to just over 3,027—a 52 percent decrease.”

Still—it’s popular. Fine. But guess what’s strikingly, overwhelmingly not popular? The idea of hosting such fights at the White House, on grounds we tend to associate with understated, democratic solemnity. A poll released Thursday found that just … wait for it … 16 percent of Americans considered it appropriate to hold MMA cage matches on the White House grounds. Meanwhile, 46 percent opposed. Even among Republicans, only 31 percent considered it appropriate. Yet a narrow plurality of Republicans in the survey backed the event, by said 31 percent to 22 percent.

Democrats opposed it by huge margins, 75 to 5 percent. Independents were strongly against it too, by 45 to 11 percent. So once again, it’s Republicans—no; specifically, it’s MAGA Republicans, because they’re undoubtedly that 31 percent—who are way out of step with what real Americans think. Yet they—Trump, his lackeys, and all those Soviet-style propagandists on Fox and Newsmax and One America and elsewhere—will of course spend the entire weekend equating men beating each other to a pulpy mass on hallowed civic ground with “real” patriotism.

It’s sickening. Oh—and it’s also, as we’ve come to expect with Trump, deeply corrupt. First of all, the cost of constructing the arena is around $60 million. Supposedly UFC is picking up that check, but with Trump, who really knows? We taxpayers will undoubtedly be on the hook for something. Meanwhile, the chief sponsor—surprise, surprise!—is Crypto.com. There are in addition figurines of some of the featured fighters. There’s apparel—garish T-shirts running $40. Over at TrumpStore.com, somewhat to my surprise, I didn’t see any merch specifically tied to the event, but you have to believe that Trump’s short-fingered hand is dipping into some till or another here. A lawsuit filed by the group the Public Integrity Project to block the event from taking place (it’s pending as I write) states that UFC set up a for-profit entity to manage this event, which is selling seating packages that cost up to $1.5 million—and that Trump previously bought $50,000 worth of stock in TKO, UFC’s owner.

Out in the real world, Trump is being reduced to impotence by a bunch of dictators who are even more reactionary than he is. He’s about to cut a “deal” with Iran that sounds like it will be little more than an extended ceasefire. It will, many experts fear, compare unfavorably to Barack Obama’s 2015 accord, which Trump tore up in 2018. Trump may achieve what Obama achieved, in terms of getting Iran to agree not to enrich uranium at anywhere close to weapons-grade levels. But as I’ve noted several times, the thing to watch is how much money Trump agrees to transfer to Iran. Which in a sense is fine; it’s Iran’s frozen money. But when Obama agreed to give Iran $1.7 billion, right-wingers screamed that it was capitulation and even treasonous. Iran now wants up to $24 billion. We’ll see how Mr. Art of the Deal fares.

But even if he does strike a decent deal, he’s already done enormous damage to the U.S. economy, the global economy, and American prestige and power projection. To sane observers in the United States and across the world, he looks like exactly what he is: a weak and hollow and insecure man who started a needless and counterproductive war out of nowhere because it looked “tough.”

But inside his little MAGA cocoon on Sunday night, he’ll be a manly man, presiding over watching other manly men spill each other’s blood for the leader’s greater glory. It’s the most undemocratic pageant one could imagine, a fact that—given that scant 16 percent support—the people know in their bones. In fact, this is exactly what fascism is: grotesque, violent spectacle that repulses most of the population but drives the fervent worshippers to a frenzied state and tries to bully its way into being synonymous with what it means to be a real American.

It’s all made worse by the fact that Dear Leader will be embarking upon his ninth decade of life that night, and that six in 10 Americans believe he lacks the mental sharpness to serve as president. So that’s the not-so-secret meaning of this event. I just wonder if Vegas will establish odds on whether he’ll fall asleep.

MY NOVEL IS OUT!: Buy my new novel, Killing Baby Hitler, out this week from O/R Books. “Fabulous in every sense,” says Kurt Andersen. “Savagely funny,” says Molly Jong-Fast. They’re right!

U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema in the Eastern District of Virginia issued a preliminary injunction against the president’s slush fund, but said she was willing to drop the case altogether if acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent signed a document under penalty of perjury saying they would not move forward with the fund.

The judge gave Blanche and Bessent one week to provide their sworn testimony.

Last week, Blanche insisted publicly that “we are not moving forward with the fund,” and claimed it wasn’t necessary to release a document reversing the DOJ’s position. It turns out Blanche’s pinky promise won’t be good enough.

Staffers in the Justice Department and White House have reportedly been telling the president’s MAGA allies they can still expect to receive some form of payment, and Trump has continued to talk up the fund, later telling NBC’s Meet the Press he and Republicans thought it was a “great idea.” (Spoiler alert: They did not.)

Trump’s fund had attracted the attention of some of his most notorious allies, as well as one top DOJ official.

This story has been updated.

Luckily for us, he has a plan to keep the products that are making him rich from wiping everyone out. Amodei suggests the government should “have the power to block or deter deployment” of models it deems too risky. He calls for frontier large language models to be subjected to technical testing and auditing, workplace protections against AI-related job displacement, coordination among “allied democracies” against “adversaries,” and limits on the use of LLMs’ use in warfare and for domestic surveillance. Anthropic has previously suggested that a pause on frontier model development might be worthwhile, but—for now—impossible, as it might allow “the least cautious actors catch up technologically.” Like OpenAI’s progressive-coded “New Deal,” Amodei’s vision contains plenty of nice-enough-sounding ideas that are unlikely to be implemented so long as Donald Trump is in the White House and our political system is being pumped full of donations from Amodei’s fabulously wealthy, openly reactionary colleagues in Silicon Valley. Amodei, of course, laments the lack of global coordination on these issues, and the disconnect between the scale of the problem at hand and the pace of policymaking: “We now, globally and collectively, need to activate a slow and rickety policy apparatus to deal with risks and opportunities that are going to compound surprisingly quickly from here.”

As a climate reporter, I find Amodei’s admonitions eerily familiar. For decades, scientists have warned about the enormous dangers posed by continuing to burn fossil fuels that deposit greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and warm the planet. Once policymakers seemed to be taking those concerns seriously, the companies whose products have fueled global warming—and that backed efforts to downplay its importance—started to ape those scientists’ warnings, laying out their own plans for a “transition” to a vaguely defined future known as “net-zero.” Ahead of U.N. climate talks in Paris in 2015, for instance, Saudi Aramco, Shell, and other major fossil fuel producers announced their “collective support for an effective global climate change agreement.” Many backed the implementation of a global carbon tax that there was no practical means of implementing, especially given that a foundational premise of what became the Paris climate agreement was that its goals would be nonbinding. The companies poured millions into academic institutions that lent credibility to the idea that fossil fuel companies would play a leading role in the transition to a fossil fuel–free world.

These moves weren’t all cynical theatrics. In the lead-up to U.N. climate talks in Glasgow, in 2021, a few European producers released somewhat plausible-sounding plans to start actually scaling back their oil and gas operations and invest in renewables. That was seemingly out of a fear that governments might actually start requiring them to do that, but also because there were a few greenish areas—like carbon storage—that aligned well with their expertise and core business model. Governments never did enforce a global energy transition, and most of those lofty industry climate plans have been walked back. Throughout that saga, at every level of government, even the allegedly more climate-conscious oil and gas companies continued to lobby against laws and regulatory proposals that weren’t to their liking.

The regulatory proposals from Anthropic and OpenAI are different from polluters’ net-zero plans in meaningful ways. It may be the case that Amodei, at least, really does believe the scary stories he tells about Anthropic LLMs creating biological weapons and defying their creators. Unlike fossil fuel CEOs, Amodei and Altman have been among the loudest voices broadcasting the existential risks their products pose. However, genuine or not, Amodei and Altman’s philosophizing about the allegedly mystical properties of their products enables them to cast themselves as guided by some deeper, more altruistic purpose because of their access to a special kind of knowledge that endows them with a power nobody else has: If they’re the only ones who truly understand the awe-inspiring powers of Claude and ChatGPT, then who else could possibly know how to regulate them and avert dystopia?

The truth is that there’s a business imperative for the likes of Altman and Amodei to avoid talking about the middle ground between the techno-futurist utopia and/or existential threats promised by artificial intelligence—all squishy concepts in their own right. Increasingly advanced large language models may well turn out to be massively important for the businesses that can afford to automate enormous numbers of the entry-level programming jobs and administrative positions. They could at once help advance some genuinely exciting medical breakthroughs and create a generation of kids who never learn to read or think for themselves. Scammers might figure out new ways to trick your grandparents into signing away their life savings as governments automate warfare and make manual tax preparation a thing of the past. These are all transformative developments in their own right. They pose novel dangers that governments ought to take seriously. They do not add up to a new god.

Recent headlines, moreover, lend some credence to the idea that AI developers are on the verge of acting more like normal corporations. Companies that have rushed to embrace LLMs are running up unsustainable bills on their token usage, i.e., monetized units of usage that users pay for based on how compute-intensive and numerous the tasks are that they’re asking LLMs to do. Results have been mixed, and, for now, automation remains an expensive and (human), labor-intensive task for many firms. In response to such concerns, OpenAI has signaled that it will start lowering its prices to compete with Anthropic.

The most important difference between oil and gas producers’ climate pledges and AI companies’ recent policy proposals is that the world does not run on large language models. Fossil fuels are the foundation of modernity. As the now monthslong closure of the Strait of Hormuz has shown, abruptly cutting off supplies of coal, oil, gas, and the many products derived from them is economically disastrous. And whereas few people on earth can remember life without fossil fuels, just about everyone can recall—perhaps fondly—a world before Claude and ChatGPT. Despite their best attempts to convince the public and policymakers otherwise, these companies are neither too big to fail nor too magical for regular people to understand.

That’s not a case for pulling the plug so much as for seeing through the religious bromides that Amodei and Altman use to describe their companies. Anthropic and OpenAI’s products should indeed be subject to stringent regulations. Their billionaire CEOs are just that: executives with a financial interest in a regulatory regime that preserves their business model and future earnings. Like their counterparts in the fossil fuel industry, it’s their prerogative to try to convince policymakers and the public that they have a good-faith interest in our collective well-being. But no one should mistake them for philosopher kings building a god. Dario Amodei and Sam Altman have some doctrinal differences, but they are both—above all—wealthy men who want to keep getting wealthier by selling their products however and to whoever they want.

“Jamie Raskin, a Loser in Life, who worked endlessly during my First Term to impeach me, and failed miserably, wasting the Country’s money, time, and effort, will guaranteed be trying to do it again, despite one of the most successful Presidencies in History,” Trump posted.

“He spent time on the Unselect Committee of Political Hacks and Thugs, and was rebuffed on that, just as he has been rebuffed on Impeachment, and many other things. If Biden didn’t give him a pardon, he’d be in jail right now! Something should be done about people like this who do bad things, but always come up on the short end because of their illegal or unscrupulous behavior, and hurt our Country in the process,” Trump added. “I agree with Mark Levin when he says to, EXPEL THE BUM.”

Trump was responding to a post on X from conservative commentator Mark Levin calling for Raskin’s expulsion, claiming the Maryland congressman was “already leading a plot to impeach the President if the Democrats take the House.” Raskin has long been a thorn in Trump side, serving on the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol, and supporting both congressional attempts to impeach Trump during his first term.

Raskin responded to Trump’s post on MS Now’s All In With Chris Hayes Thursday night, saying the president “is obviously having nightmare flashbacks about impeachment.”

“There’s a very easy way to not get impeached. Stop committing impeachable offenses. Stop committing high crimes and misdemeanors. Don’t go to war and usurp the powers of Congress to declare war,” Raskin told Hayes, saying that Trump should stop defying Congress and the Constitution.

Chris Hayes: The president is rage posting about you. He calls you a loser in life, and he's mad that you wanted to impeach him.

Jamie Raskin: There's a very easy way to not get impeached. Stop committing impeachable offenses. Stop committing high crimes and misdemeanors. pic.twitter.com/KkTFDx8xsY

— Blue Georgia (@BlueGeorgia) June 12, 2026

The post comes as Trump and his allies are working on a plan to expunge Trump’s previous impeachments from the record, even though that isn’t constitutionally possible. But that won’t stop Trump, as he can’t accept the idea that he could ever do anything wrong. Not only does he want his record to reflect that, he also wants to punish anyone who tries to hold him accountable.

“Here in Washington, D.C., there’s a Democratic primary for mayor. One of the two leading candidates, Janeese Lewis George, is running a Zohran Mamdani campaign—focused on socialist policies,” Trump was asked at a Thursday afternoon press conference. “How would you feel if she emerged victorious?”

“Well I wouldn’t like it. Maybe we’ll take back Washington and run it on a federal basis,” Trump responded bluntly. “We won’t put up with it. We’re not gonna lose our businesses.”

Q: Here in Washington DC, there's a Democratic primary for mayor. One of the two leading candidates is running a Zohran Mamdani campaign focusing on socialist policies. How would you feel if she wins?

TRUMP: Maybe we take back Washington and run it on a federal basis. We won't… pic.twitter.com/H3E69bXzdW

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 11, 2026

Lewis George responded on X.

“We are not going to get ICE off our streets or protect Home Rule by fearing this President. Threatening DC because you do not like how our residents vote is an attack on democracy itself,” she wrote. “The people of DC elect the Mayor of DC. And they want someone who will stand up to Trump.”

While the extent of Trump’s threat is unclear, he is no stranger to “federal takeovers” of the nation’s capital. He instituted one last summer, which current Mayor Muriel Bowser largely cooperated with. As for home rule, Trump would need 60 Senate votes to end it—something he’ll likely never have in this term.

Donald Trump tapped Jay Clayton, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, on Thursday as his pick for Tulsi Gabbard’s permanent replacement. It was a shocking about-face for the typically stubborn commander in chief: Trump had earlier this week doubled down on his temporary pick for the job, real estate developer Bill Pulte, though his nomination quickly became a headache in Congress.

Lawmakers argued that Pulte’s appointment, even just as acting DNI, was effectively illegal, as his resume lacked requirements for the job that had been written into the law.

To prevent Pulte becoming permanent DNI, Democrats blocked efforts to renew FISA Section 702, a statute that allows federal agencies such as the NSA and the CIA to surveil people without warrants, which is set to expire Friday.

Clayton rose to the top of a second round of considerations to, in part, “quell all the bitching,” one administration official told Politico Friday.

Other Hill staffers speculated to the publication that Trump may not have understood—or cared about—the tight timeline that Congress was facing with regard to the FISA section renewal. The whole ordeal may have just been another irritant to a president that has little interest in the office.

Trump has “always hated the ODNI role,” one Capitol Hill aide told Politico.

If he passes muster with the FBI and the Senate, Clayton will enter ODNI with zero relevant experience in national security. He has previously worked as a partner at Sullivan & Cromwell, providing counsel on corporate crisis management. He was also an adjunct professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s law school. He was similarly handed his role atop the Southern District of New York without any prosecutorial experience.

Yet Clayton has passed countless litmus tests proving his loyalty to the MAGA movement. He has seeded doubt in America’s election integrity, defended Trump’s $1.8 billion taxpayer-bankrolled slush fund for the president’s aggrieved political allies, and unquestioningly done the president’s bidding in the Southern District of New York.

Former Attorney General Pam Bondi tasked Clayton with probing Jeffrey Epstein’s social connections—so long as they tied back to former Democratic President Bill Clinton, former Obama administration adviser Larry Summers, and Democratic donor Reid Hoffman.

A measure to expunge Trump’s 2019 and 2021 impeachments likely wouldn’t be considered until after the midterm elections, people familiar with the matter told The Wall Street Journal Thursday night.

“It should be done because I did nothing wrong,” Trump told the Journal. “It was a rigged deal—it was a whole rigged situation.”

Experts said that the resolution would have little legal weight considering that the Constitution has no mechanism for expunging impeachments, and Republican lawmakers noted that it wouldn’t be easy to get enough support to pass the bill.

The president’s plan to erase his impeachments gained new momentum in April, after the Trump administration published new documents related to his first impeachment that MAGA claimed undermined the credibility of the witnesses.

In a show of fealty, California Representative Darrell Issa introduced legislation to have Trump’s impeachments “expunged as if such Articles had never passed the full House of Representatives.” Issa has claimed the president was “wrongfully accused” of the crimes that had him impeached.

House Speaker Mike Johnson has taken up that mantle this time around. “I think it makes a lot of sense the more the evidence comes out, the more we know they really were sham impeachments,” he told the Journal. “They make a very compelling case that it should be expunged from the record, because it was a hyper-partisan attack job.”

Johnson said that wiping Trump’s impeachment record was “not an order of first priority” but it was a priority all the same.

In the case of his 2019 impeachment, there is a literal transcript of Trump’s phone call to the Ukrainian government demanding they dig up dirt on Joe Biden ahead of the 2020 election. As for his second impeachment, the president most certainly incited an insurrection on January 6, 2021.

Issa’s measure has attracted 23 co-sponsors, but not every Republican seems interested in getting on board. Representative Don Bacon of Nebraska, who is retiring, suggested it was political suicide for his party. “Maybe they’ve given up on holding the majority? It’s silly. What happened is history.”

But his impeachments are clearly still a sore spot for the grievance-addled president. On Thursday, Trump posted a lengthy screed attacking Representative Jamie Raskin, who led the House’s legal effort to impeach the president in 2021.

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

CNN reports that Donald Trump is “furious” because his bombings of Iran this week were not portrayed by the media as strong and powerful. He’s apparently “frustrated,” according to CNN sources, who are clearly leaking out of concern for his mental state. On another front entirely, Trump is smashing new records in the polling. He’s reaching new thresholds on inflation. Thanks to Trump, Democrats may now be leading Republicans by a key polling metric for the first time in many decades.

We think these stories should all be connected to each other. The rage and frustration over Iran is basically rage and frustration over his political situation, because the former is causing the latter. He’s in a political bind we don’t think we’ve ever seen before.

So we’re parsing through all this new data and new Trump lunacy with Democratic strategist Christina Reynolds, who has worked on a lot of midterms and can explain how all this is playing on the ground. Christina, thanks for coming on.

Christina Reynolds: Thanks for having me.

Sargent: So let’s start here. CNN polling analyst Harry Enten made a point I haven’t heard before. He said Trump is the only president ever to hit a net approval on inflation of negative 50 points. And he’s done this in many polls. Listen to Enten.

Harry Enten (voiceover): Inflation net approval: minus 50 points or worse. Fifty points underwater or worse. Total polls per president. Trump in 2026—already at least eight polls in which his net approval rating on inflation or the cost of living is negative 50 points or worse. Every other president in every other year, the answer is zero.

Sargent: So just to reiterate, in eight polls, Trump has hit a net approval on inflation of negative 50 points. No other president has ever done that. Christina, I don’t think I’ve seen polling quite this bad on the economy for a president ever! As long as I’ve been following politics! Maybe something under George W. Bush? I don’t know. What do you think?

Reynolds: I don’t think it was this bad. I worked at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in ’06, and we took back the House. Bush was certainly not a popular president at that time. But these are numbers that I would send back to the pollster and say, Can you double-check? I don’t know that I’ve seen numbers this bad.

Republicans have an even bigger problem than those numbers. They have a president who absolutely wants credit for fixing everything. He believes his own spin, certainly, but also he believes he’s taken action and should get credit for that action. That happens with a lot of politicians, but this president is especially guilty of that. He is not going to fade away into the background, which Bush did largely in 2006. He is not going to let the Republicans go out and shift the conversation.

Not that they would be able to shift the conversation. When inflation is growing higher than your wages, voters understand that. They know it. They live it. You can’t convince them things are better when they’re literally not. But Trump is not just going to go out and talk about things and remind voters of that—he’s going to go out and talk about his ballroom. He’s going to go out and talk about the reflecting pool, as he did in Wisconsin when he went to one of the most vulnerable Republicans. So this is a huge problem for Republicans. It’s not just the polling number, it’s what Trump’s going to do because of the polling number.

Sargent: You raise a really interesting point there, which is that Donald Trump isn’t being at all accommodating of the situation that Republicans find themselves in. They’ve urged him to try to talk about the economy in a way that makes it look as if he understands what people are going through and makes it look as if he’s doing stuff. But he won’t do that, because it makes him look like a failure.

Since everything has to always be about his lionization, his glorious greatness, he just says, I don’t care about inflation, or, Affordability’s a hoax. There’s no sensitivity or awareness of the situation the rest of his party is in, in any sense.

Reynolds: Absolutely not. That is counter to George Bush. It’s counter to what Nancy Pelosi did when she was House Speaker and understood that some people were going to speak out against her. As long as she had the votes, she was OK. There’s some level of what gets the party, what gets the values that you support where you need to go. And Trump is about what gets Trump where he needs to go. It’s a huge problem for Republicans.

You heard it in the “I don’t care about the midterms” comment. You hear it in everything that he does. If I was a Republican, I would want him to take a back seat on things outside of maybe fundraising. He’s doing the exact opposite. If you’re a Republican and you’re forced to stand up there and praise him for gold-plating the White House, that’s a pretty tough campaign ask.

Sargent: That’s really interesting. By the way, Harry Enten also notes that, according to his calculations, Democrats are more trusted on inflation than Republicans for the first time since the 1970s. Enten also notes that Trump is the only president to ever hit 80 percent disapproval on gas prices. Eighty percent disapproval on gas prices! Trump is just crushing records all over the place. I swear I have not seen numbers like this, ever.

Reynolds: No, me neither. It’s pretty impressive when you think about it. It also is a sign that you can’t pull the wool over voters’ eyes on things like this. Everyone goes to the gas station. Everyone has to deal with the prices going up because of gas prices.

You can’t fool them. Trump talking the way he does and acknowledging that it’s OK, but it’ll get better, doesn’t help them now. He’s really leaving Republicans in a rough spot.

Sargent: It’s really extraordinary. So all this is key context for what’s coming next. CNN’s Dana Bash reports that sources are saying Trump is, quote-unquote, “furious.” Why? Because after Trump struck Iran this week, the media didn’t view his action as powerful enough.

Dana Bash also reports that Trump is “frustrated” that Iran didn’t seem to be taking the strike seriously. Amazing.

So now Trump is saying that he won’t strike Iran again because they’re now close to a deal. He says—maybe by the time people listen to this, there will be a deal. Maybe not. I don’t think so, because he’s now talking about this weekend. But put that aside. I want to focus on the connection between Trump’s rage and his terrible polls.

The reason Trump is angry isn’t just because Iran won’t do his bidding. It’s that by not doing Trump’s bidding and keeping the Strait of Hormuz closed, Iran has him cornered. It’s driving up prices, destroying his numbers, and destroying GOP midterm hopes. The anger and the polling are connected in that sense, right, Christina?

Reynolds: Absolutely they are. His frustration is coming out in what voters are understanding. It’s one of the reasons he can’t stop talking about things that are incredibly unpopular.

He is just clinically unable to move on because of that rage and that frustration, because it didn’t go the way he assumed it would go. So we are stuck in a war that people didn’t ask for, that we proactively started. But we are domestically stuck with higher gas prices and everything that stems from that.

That’s all because he didn’t get what he wanted, and no one is giving him credit for what he thinks he should get credit for. I am a little baffled as to what he thinks he should get credit for at this point, but no one is giving him any credit. They are giving him, rightly, the blame. He can’t handle that.

Sargent: I think that’s exactly right. He’s in a rage because the media is portraying him as being fundamentally ineffective and unable to resolve the very situation that’s creating the high prices.

By the way, even if he gets a deal—I don’t know, by the time people listen to this, or on the weekend, whenever—even if he gets one, those prices, especially on things like energy and gas, are going to stay up for a long time. As someone who’s worked on midterm elections, how do you anticipate the impact of this playing out on the ground in all these races over the next few months? What’s it going to look like politically?

Reynolds: It’s going to look like a few things. We’re going to see more retirements. We’re seeing that at every level of the ballot, where Republicans are choosing just not to run again in this environment. We’re going to continue to see voters open for a change in surprising places, voters who understand—maybe it’s not forever, maybe we rent some seats for a little while—but they see it’s not working.

Where we have candidates that are out there talking about issues that matter versus a candidate that is forced to talk about a ballroom or to praise a war that they’re not that into, you’re going to continue to see voters give a chance to those candidates.

I think we’re running better candidates, and we have candidates who understand their districts and are willing to take a chance. One big difference in the shift that I’ve seen from 2002 and 2006 to 2018 and now—there’s some power in looking at Donald Trump getting elected for people who are not traditional politicians to say, Maybe I can give it a try. Maybe I can offer something different, or I can connect better with my community. That means we see some interesting candidates out there who offer something different. Different is good in a change electorate.

It’s going to make for some challenging elections for Republicans that they’re not expecting. What also happens in those places, when we expand the field—you have candidates that aren’t used to hard races. You have candidates who got a little lazy.

They have not done their constituent services, they have not gone out and had a tough campaign schedule, versus a candidate that’s new, that’s trying again, that has the fire in their belly. I can tell you which candidate I’d rather work for every time in that scenario.

Sargent: I want to pick up a little bit more on that because we have a piece up at NewRepublic.com right now about American Bridge, which is a Democratic group. They’re investing $50 million in trying to expand the House map. The Senate map as well, but let’s focus on the House for now.

They’re trying to expand the House map by really going into some very difficult districts traditionally for Democrats—ones that lean Republican by four or five, six, seven, eight, that kind of thing. Some of these are in North Carolina, some of them are in central Pennsylvania, some are in Iowa.

But Democrats, not just American Bridge, but as a party generally—it now looks like there’s a new level of commitment to going into harder races, to contesting tougher places and really trying to shake loose whatever can be shaken loose. That’s what happens, right, in an environment like this? If you go contest these races in hard places, things happen. Funny things happen. Surprising things happen.

Reynolds: You expand the field at a time like this because we look at what’s happened since Trump got elected. Since Trump got elected, Democrats have flipped 30 state legislative seats, Republicans have flipped none. Democrats have overperformed in the elections that have happened—a variety of special elections, state legislative elections. Democrats have overperformed in 85 percent of those seats. That number in 2006 was about two-thirds. We’re overperforming all over the place.

You’re going to see it at the House level, you’re going to see it at the state legislative level, where we’re looking for where we can play. Where they have an incumbent that has gotten lazy or is standing with Trump too much against the interests of their people. They have an electorate that’s just a little tired of what’s happening or is particularly impacted by the economy, by gas prices. Ag communities are great examples of this.

You’re going to see this more and more, where organizations, campaigns expand out, and we’re going to pick up some of those seats. The Republicans also have to try and expand their map. And they’re not ready for that. They don’t have the message for that, to actually reach and connect with voters.

Sargent: Fascinating. To bear this all out, we have this new Emerson poll. It has Democrats leading in the generic House ballot matchup by 10 points, 50 percent to 40 percent. That’s 50–40.

Now the polling averages have it a little tighter—50PlusOne, they have it at six points, the average is 49 to 43. But this 10-point poll makes me think that the average could start to widen as well. And if Democrats are up at seven, eight, nine points, you’re looking at a wave.

Where do you think it is right now? Do you think it’s closer to six or do you think it’s closer to 10? And where do you expect the spread to end up this fall?

Reynolds: I am usually a pragmatist, maybe a pessimist. But I think this is going to be a wave election. We spend a lot of time talking about very few candidates, and we miss some of the amazing candidates who are running in races down the ballot.

We have a lot of phenomenal women running around the country who are working-class candidates who’ve been really in their communities. We have a number of people who are doing surprising things on the state level. We have some phenomenal candidates.

Between the environment, between the precedent, and between what Trump’s going to be able to do and how little they are going to be able to control that, and how much they’re going to have to walk with him off that cliff—I feel good about where Democrats are.

One of the reasons that generic ballot is at 10 points right now is we are reminding people—and one of the reasons, most importantly, that Democrats are winning on inflation—is we are reminding people that we understand that costs are important, that there is work that government can do, important work, to help make things a little bit easier for families. Trump is not doing that at all.

That’s part of how he won: communicating with voters and telling them he understood. Now he has moved on to ballrooms, to wars they didn’t ask for, and [saying] these price increases don’t matter.

Sargent: And you’re talking about House candidates when you talk about these working-class women around the country?

Reynolds: House candidates, state legislative candidates, in some cases gubernatorial candidates. They don’t get as much attention as Senate candidates, but there’s some really great candidates out there doing great work. And that’s going to make a difference, too.

Sargent: It’s very similar to 2018, where Trump’s first election just brought in this whole new class of public servant just out of nowhere. We’re seeing a new wave of it right now, and it really is heartening stuff to see.

I want to flag something else from the Emerson poll. In the generic House ballot matchup, Democrats are leading the GOP among independents by 15, 45 to 30. Now, how important are independents in midterm elections? What do you make of that number?

My sense is a lot of what we’re seeing now is making it possible for Democrats to have conversations with certain constituencies and types of voters that they couldn’t really reach before. They’re more attuned to listening to what Democrats have to say now.

Reynolds: That’s exactly it. I think that number is huge and hugely important. More and more, people are finding themselves unaffiliated. They are deciding, Maybe I’m not connected to either party. Some of this is the divisiveness, some of this is the way we paint both sides. Count me as someone who—I don’t love where the Democratic Party brand is right now. But I’m not as worried about it because each candidate is running their own race on Democratic values, and those values are incredibly popular. That’s why we’re appealing to independents right now.

Sargent: Well, it’s sure looking really good right now, Christina. Tell us, what could go wrong?

Reynolds: Haha. Lots of things. We never know what’s going to happen in the world. We never know how things are going to change and what voters exactly are going to care about. Will there be massive world events? Will there be natural disasters and things like that, all of which throw a campaign off its axis a little bit? We never know that.

But I feel very good about the fact that we have a class of candidates across the country and up and down the ballot who know how to talk to voters, who have an agenda that they can sell. This is not just “Trump stinks.” Those messages, those ads write themselves. He keeps giving us content. That’s out there. But we have to provide something positive for voters. And I actually think we’re doing that.

I feel good about that. We keep laying the groundwork, we keep supporting those candidates. And—gosh, I’m not usually an optimistic person, Greg—but we’re doing what we need to do, and voters understand where the world is right now, and they need change.

Sargent: It’s really got the same nose-to-the-grindstone feeling that 2018 had.

Reynolds: It does. It very much does.

Sargent: Christina Reynolds, on that note—we don’t usually end on a positive note around here, so let’s grab this opportunity while it’s there. Christina, awesome to talk to you. Thank you so much. Come back, please.

Reynolds: You too. Thanks so much.

I’d begun to wonder when we’d see a third when I learned that the House Armed Services Committee last week adopted an amendment to this year’s defense authorization bill restoring collective-bargaining rights for civilian workers in the Defense Department, and that the same language last year cleared the House as part of that year’s defense authorization bill before the Senate stripped it out in House-Senate conference prior to final passage. Clearly the legislative politics surrounding labor rights are shifting in labor’s favor.

Having said that, I advise you not to get too excited. The first of these labor bills, introduced by Representative Jared Golden, Democrat of Maine, would restore collective-bargaining rights to all federal workers; like the defense authorization amendment, the Protect America’s Workforce Act would reverse a couple of union-busting executive orders (here and here) from President Donald Trump. But after clearing the House in December, 231–195, it’s going nowhere in the Republican Senate. The second labor bill (text; summary) was introduced by Representative Donald Norcross, Democrat of New Jersey (who also sponsored the defense authorization amendment). The Faster Labor Contracts Act would make it easier for newly established union locals to win their first contract. But after passing the House on June 9, 230–193, Norcross’s bill faces similarly dismal odds in the Republican Senate.

Even if the Senate managed to pass one or both bills, it wouldn’t matter, because the dependably anti-labor Trump (who, bafflingly, increased his share of the working-class vote from 51 percent in 2016 to 56 percent in 2024) would veto it. Norcross’s defense authorization amendment, if it clears the House again, will attract less notice, and Trump might not bother to veto an entire Defense bill over a labor provision. But my guess is he won’t have to, because the Senate will likely strip it out again before it gets to his desk.

I can’t tell you how to get a pro-labor bill through the Senate. But to get one through the House, it seems pretty clear that, so long as Republicans are in the majority, you must avoid the Education and the Workforce Committee. None of the three pro-labor bills under discussion cleared that committee, which is so anti-labor that every time the GOP retakes the House, Republican leaders change its name from “Education and Labor” to “Education and the Workforce” because the very word “labor” disturbs their sleep.

The defense authorization amendment bypassed Education and the Workforce because it lacks jurisdiction over the military. December’s bill to restore collective-bargaining rights to all federal workers and this week’s bill removing management obstacles to negotiating union contracts both got to the House floor by discharge petition, a parliamentary procedure by which any House member may collect signatures to force a vote on a bill bottled up in committee. Once that member has acquired 218 signatures (i.e., a majority), they can bring the bill to the floor.

Organizing a workplace can be a pyrrhic victory if management refuses to agree to a contract. Bloomberg’s Robert Combs calculated in 2022 that it took 465 days on average to negotiate a union contract, and that was when we had a pro-labor National Labor Relations Board. It almost certainly takes longer now. According to the nonprofit Economic Policy Institute, Starbucks baristas in Buffalo have been negotiating a contract for 1,645 days, and Amazon warehouse workers in Staten Island have been at it for 1,532 days.

There isn’t much a union can do about such management foot-dragging except file an unfair labor practice complaint with the NLRB, and if a Republican is in the White House, the NLRB won’t likely be very responsive. Even under Democratic administrations the NLRB lacks statutory authority to level meaningful penalties. The Faster Labor Contracts Act would amend the 1935 National Labor Relations Act to require that employers begin negotiating a labor contract within 10 days of a union election. If 90 days pass without an agreement, the matter will be referred to a mediator, and if the mediator can’t hammer out an agreement within 30 days the matter will be referred to a binding three-person arbitration panel. Getting a bill like that to the House floor was no small accomplishment.

Labor bills aren’t the only measures that are moving through the House by discharge petition these days. As Trump’s popularity plummets, Johnson is losing control over his caucus, resulting in the House turning into a sort of discharge-petition rager. There have been 23 in this Congress, of which nine have been successful. That’s an excellent batting average. One discharge petition was used to compel Trump to release the Jeffrey Epstein files. Another was used to pass a Ukraine aid package. What’s unusual about the labor discharge petitions is that they cross an ideological boundary. Republicans don’t intrinsically oppose releasing files about child predators or containing Russian aggression. But they do intrinsically oppose labor unions. Now a breakaway Republican faction is challenging that.

Five Republicans signed the discharge petition to bring the Protect America’s Workforce Act to the House floor. They were: Representatives Nick LaLota and Michael Lawler of New York; Representatives Brian Fitzpatrick and Robert Bresnahan of Pennsylvania; and Representative Don Bacon of Nebraska. All except Bacon represent blue states. That was a year ago. In March and April, all five signed the discharge petition for the Faster Labor Contracts Act, joined this time by two red-staters: Representatives Max Miller of Ohio and Riley Moore of West Virginia. And in the final vote, these seven Republicans were joined by 13 more. In both last December’s bargaining rights bill and this week’s union contract bill, 20 House Republicans voted for a pro-union bill. That tells me the December vote was not a fluke. When more than one-third of the Republican House caucus casts pro-union votes, even though few of these members supported labor rights in the past, that’s news.

Notably, this latest vote is about something the business lobby cares about a lot more than it does about whether federal workers organize; federal workers don’t work for private employers. The Education and the Workforce Committee website (controlled by the Republican majority) posted a list of objections to the Faster Labor Contracts Act from business leaders: “an unconstitutional taking,” “a rushed floor vote,” “undermines the principle of voluntary agreement,” and so on. Meanwhile, the committee’s ranking Democrat, Representative Bobby Scott of Virginia, took to the floor to praise the bill for “making the right to organize real, not theoretical.”

In the end, it didn’t matter what the Education and the Workforce majority thought. The bill cleared the House anyway. Those 20 pro-union Republican votes aren’t yet able to make much difference. But they’re a sign that labor solidarity is starting to undermine partisan solidarity. Senate Republicans, take heed.

And then there’s Elon Musk. In the ranks of the billionaire exhibitionists, there’s no one who tries harder or squeaks louder. In 2022, Musk bought Twitter, later renaming it X, and promptly set about turning it into an online mess hall for right-wing lunatics; by 2024, he was posting on X an average of 60 times a day and sometimes up to 40 times every hour. At any given moment on X, Musk can be seen posting with the sweaty eagerness of a teen in the first flush of puberty: On a recent sampling, his feed included a signature mix of self-promotion (plugs for Grok, X’s in-house AI chatbot; the satellite internet service Starlink; and the self-driving Tesla), competition-targeting shitposting (a tweet claiming ChatGPT, OpenAI’s rival to Grok, is “pretending to be ‘unbiased’” scored the Musk retweet), C minus memes (a graphic showing four descending pairs of increasingly bloodshot eyes superposed with the words “Alcohol,” “Weed,” “Cocaine,” and “Monitoring the Situation”), transphobia (“People can pretend or dress up all they want and that’s fine, but they can’t force their mental illness to be my new reality!”), and white nationalist race panic (an approving “100” emoji slapped over the top of a tweet from a verified account claiming that “if White men become a minority, we will be slaughtered”), along with countless variations on the classic theme of middle-aged white guy whining about the state of the world today. A smattering of cruel and lazy jokes about trans people, some indignant quote tweets of garden variety racists like Stephen Miller and British far-right activist Tommy Robinson, a stray “Hmm” or “Troubling” in response to tweets about things like tech regulation, fertility rates, or anti-white racism? In Muskworld, that’s called a Monday.

Musk’s presence on X can often feel like performance art—one of those continuous “bits” that have turned much of social media into a form of digital vaudeville. But where most extremely online victims of internet brain damage emote into the void, Musk is the rare oversharer who’s managed to turn the “based” and “epic” style of memeverse comedy into something more tangible. Dogecoin, the meme coin that has historically soared in value whenever Musk has tweeted about it, eventually became the inspiration for DOGE, the Big Government slash-and-burn operation that Musk led at the start of Donald Trump’s second term. In 2023, Musk committed $100 million in seed money for a new STEM-focused school in Austin that he chose to name the Texas Institute of Technologies and Sciences, or TITS: Every thumbnail on tits.academy, the still-unrealized university’s home page, now takes visitors to an “About Us” screen headed “Take a look at TITS” that includes an embedded YouTube video of Rick Astley’s 1987 pop classic “Never Gonna Give You Up”—an online prank of ancient vintage known as “rickrolling.” In August 2025, Musk announced a plan to launch a fully AI-simulated software company that could supplant all the functions and products offered by Microsoft; he called it “­Macrohard.” LOL! Not content with sitting on the world’s largest personal fortune, Musk seems desperate to be taken seriously as a comedian, too.

Maybe there’s something else at work here. According to the authors of a new book, Musk’s transformation into a hyperactive super-troll expresses a serious purpose. “Musk’s online persona,” write Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff in Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed, is often “misunderstood. Critics see immaturity or malice; fans see relatability or authenticity. Both fail to see that, in Muskism, trolling is infrastructure.” The point of these outbursts is for Musk to gauge whether he can bypass the ordinary institutions of grown-up accountability—the media, elections, quarterly earnings reports—and affect outcomes in the world of money, politics, and popular belief through the sheer force of his own personality. They are a stress test of society’s tolerance for the Muskian worldview.

“Muskism” is the name that Slobodian, a historian, and Tarnoff, a technology writer, give his worldview: a kind of techno-maximalism in which autonomy for individuals and for nations is only achievable through an ever-deeper fusion between human and machine, and can best be guaranteed through the adoption of technologies offered by Musk’s own companies. Just as Fordism was “the operating system of the twentieth century,” Slobodian and Tarnoff contend, Muskism might provide the basis for a new consensus about economic and social life, the Fordism of our time. After all, Fordism, like Muskism, once seemed an intimate reflection of one man’s personality (The Washington Post defined it in a 1922 article as “Ford efforts conceived in disregard or ignorance of Ford limitations”). Only later did it come to mean the belief in mass production and standardization on the factory floor, high wages, and mass consumption as the chief motors of industrial growth. The clarifying and unsettling argument at the heart of Muskism is that, in a deglobalizing and increasingly digitized world, Musk’s vision of the future might win out. But is it possible to separate Muskism from Musk?

Musk may need no greater reason to post than that it flatters his ego. He currently has 240 million followers on X—more than double the following of the second most popular account, that of Barack Obama. This grants him a kind of insurance against failure whenever he tweets, even for his weakest stuff. The “Monitoring the Situation” meme above, for instance, generated more than 900,000 likes, a return out of all proportion to the quality of the material presented—proof, if ever we needed it, that meritocracy in America is dead.

Online ubiquity is also a moneymaking tool. Musk has long been a master of what Slobodian and Tarnoff call “financial fabulism”—the art of extracting ever-higher valuations and capital commitments from investors through confidence, showmanship, and a compelling view of the world to come. When raising money for online business directory Zip2, his first company, in the mid-1990s, Musk covered a normal PC with a big case and wheeled it around to venture capitalists to make them think his software ran on a supercomputer. Zip2 was still losing money when Compaq bought it for $307 million in 1999; Musk walked away with $22 million, and a valuable lesson in the power of his unstinting belief in the future. Musk has channeled this gift for financial fabulism into the digital world, which has compressed and supercharged the feedback loop between words and money. In 2018, he tweeted: “Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured.” The market missed (or ignored) the weed joke in “420” and took him at his word; the company’s stock price jumped nearly 11 percent by the end of the day. In January 2021, he added #bitcoin to his bio on Twitter (as it was then known), and the cryptocurrency surged 20 percent within an hour. The shocking immediacy of cause and effect online, coupled with his embrace of Twitter, helped make Musk “as close to a free-money perpetual motion machine as you’ll ever see in finance,” Bloomberg columnist Matt Levine has written.

But Slobodian and Tarnoff see in Musk’s online presence a deeper expression of his idiosyncratic vision of the future. From the mid-2010s onward, Musk became convinced that humans and machines were becoming one, and that success—for Musk as an entrepreneur, for humanity as a species—would involve accelerating this fusion rather than resisting it. Musk has often warned of a Terminator-style apocalypse from rogue artificial intelligence, but his solution is “not less technology, but more,” Slobodian and Tarnoff write: The risks inherent in the digital cognitive revolution mean we should “merge with AI,” Musk argued in 2016.

Under Muskism, the path to salvation lies in human-machine symbiosis. All of Musk’s juvenile foolery over the past few years—the insults, the weak memes, the hyperactive posting, the alliance with Trump, the dadly insistence that “I am become meme,” even the bit with the chainsaw at CPAC—stems from this “cyborg turn,” as Slobodian and Tarnoff call it. This turn, they write, “did not mutate out of one man’s cyberpunk delusions, but out of a bipartisan consensus about where America needed to direct its brightest minds and deepest investments.” Modern Musk—the man as empire, the man as meme—is an embodiment of online culture. Or as Slobodian and Tarnoff put it, he is “a hypervisible indicator species for the consequences of fusing the economy ever more tightly with the digital world.”

Whether the future synthesis of human and machine emerges in perfect or imperfect form, few people will benefit from it more than Musk himself. His companies are building much of the infrastructure—the rockets, robots, satellites, collective intelligence networks, and brain-computer interfaces—that will shape the fusions to come. When he left his self-described political “side quest” in Washington last year, he explained that it was to return to his real quest, which is to build the future world of “humanoid robots and digital superintelligence,” to seed our “future machine descendants.”

Slobodian and Tarnoff’s analysis of Musk’s cyborg turn is reassuring and discomfiting at the same time: reassuring because it suggests an intelligible strategy at the heart of Musk’s actions, making him an outlier at a time when most big decisions in politics—kidnapping Maduro, bombing Iran—seem guided by nothing more than the uncut essence of poster brain; discomfiting because, well, it also suggests we’re all about to become replicants welded to a Tesla bot or a SpaceX nozzle.

Mechanization of the human is the logical end of a sequence of fusions that have defined Musk’s career. Social media has allowed him to merge, in some way, his own intelligence with the hive mind, to become one with the scroll. With SpaceX, he engineered a marriage of firm and government, grafting his enterprise onto the state, taking over some of the state’s functions, and exploiting its guarantees for private gain. While many in Silicon Valley profess to dream of liberation from the state, of wholesale exit from its mess of obligations and compromises, Musk’s business interests have pushed in the opposite direction, toward an ever-deeper coupling of public and private: His ultimate goal has always been power over the state rather than freedom from it.

All technology businesses in the digital era arguably free-ride off the state—the internet and its foundational infrastructure, after all, were funded by DARPA, the Pentagon’s R&D arm. Yet few entrepreneurs have been as skilled at piggybacking off public resources as Musk has. Zip2 used GPS data from military satellites, for example, while Musk’s late-1990s online payments company X.com—which would later become PayPal—rested on the federally insured stability of the U.S. financial system. SpaceX—founded in 2002, now valued at $1.55 trillion, and preparing for a public offering that early reports suggest could become the biggest IPO in history—is perhaps the company that has benefited most from government resources.

Speaking at Stanford the year after he launched the company, Musk acknowledged that NASA had already done the hard work “by spending the money to develop some of the fundamental technologies,” and now the door was open for the private sector to swoop in, build on those state-funded foundations, and monetize the gains. Twenty-three years later, SpaceX is firmly enmeshed with U.S. infrastructure. “By 2025, SpaceX accounted for 95 percent of all orbital launches in the United States and more than half of all launches globally—a position that made the Pentagon, NASA, and other government agencies deeply reliant on Musk,” report Slobodian and Tarnoff.

Timing was key to this success. Musk founded SpaceX right as the United States launched the global war on terrorism, which collided with the neoliberal mania for privatization and outsourcing to create a bonanza for corporate defense contractors. But SpaceX’s elevation into an indispensable arm of the modern military, not only in the United States but for countries abroad, also reflected Musk’s real business acumen. Satellites had been around for decades when Musk announced plans for what would become Starlink, a satellite internet service, in 2015. Slow speeds were always a barrier to greater adoption of satellites for global communication. Musk’s solution was to bring the satellites closer to the ground, putting them into low Earth orbit—around 342 miles up, versus 20,000 miles in the air for traditional geostationary satellites. The only catch was that orbiting so close to Earth required a lot more satellites to ensure quality of connection. The result? Starlink now has more than 10,000 functioning satellites in orbit, around two-thirds of all active satellites: The fusion of SpaceX to the state has led the way, quite naturally, to the company’s colonization of the heavens.

Tesla is yet another Musk vehicle that has benefited from state largesse. Musk did not create the company, but he invested in it and took over as CEO in 2008—right at the launch of the first federal tax credit program for buyers of electric vehicles; the company was saved from almost certain death by a $465 million Department of Energy loan awarded a year later. That loan helped Tesla survive the lean years that followed the collapse of the clean tech and renewables sector in the early 2010s—the result of the “shale revolution,” which touched off a surge in U.S. oil and gas production.

But the real reason Tesla prospered through the downturn—eventually becoming the world’s leading EV automaker, a title it relinquished to Chinese firm BYD earlier this year—was that Musk insisted on sourcing and assembling as many of the company’s critical production inputs in-house rather than relying on the global market. At a time when manufacturing consensus was in favor of free trade, offshoring, and global supply chains, Musk seemed to have already begun to anticipate a deglobalizing, post-Covid world by embracing “vertical integration.” The real innovation here was the construction of the first Gigafactory in Sparks, Nevada—what Musk envisioned as a “truly gargantuan factory of mind-boggling size”—that allowed Tesla to make its own lithium-ion batteries. (Since then, fresh Gigafactories have sprouted in Buffalo, Shanghai, Berlin, and Austin.) When the world awoke, a few years ago, to a reality of reshoring, export controls, tariffs, and emerging trade blocs, Tesla was relatively insulated; Musk had built Tesla for a world in which self-reliance, rather than reliance on others, would become the key to survival.

Musk’s fantasy of the future, the authors of Muskism propose, is “a fantasy of the factory,” stripped to its leanest and trimmed of human encumbrances. In 2016, Musk first mentioned his goal of creating an “alien dreadnought”—a factory with no human workers at all. Macrohard is perhaps the first serious attempt at realizing that goal: a company that relies for labor on AI agents. He’s not alone in this ambition: AI’s incursion into labor markets has already begun, and the dream of a fully post-human economy can be felt in every giddy LinkedIn post about the leaps in “productivity” that technologies like Claude Code are now making possible. Under Muskism, humans can either become obsolete or fuse with machines, becoming one with the factory itself.

The sheer number of countries and institutions that rely on Musk’s technologies gives him a bullying leverage that he seems unafraid to flex. For many countries, the exercise of sovereignty brushes up against the whims of a single, unpredictable, and often quite petty man. In March 2025, Musk boasted that Starlink is “the backbone of the Ukrainian army,” and that “their entire front line would collapse if I turned it off”; when the Polish foreign minister, in reply, warned that his own country would be forced to look elsewhere for Ukraine if Starlink was an “unreliable provider,” Musk spat back, “Be quiet, small man.” Exchanges like this highlight the real problem for Muskism as a social project, which is that Earth is a place populated by humans not named Elon Musk, and that many of them disagree, often quite fervently, with his views and methods. Not everyone wishes to be transformed into a widget on the floor of the Muskian factory of the future.

Humans are Musk’s greatest enemy, the source of his keenest humiliations and most obliterating rages: Who could forget the world’s richest man, on the verge of tears, telling Fox News in March 2025 that Minnesota Governor Tim Walz was “a creep,” and “a huge jerk,” all because Walz made fun of Tesla’s plummeting stock price at the height of DOGE-driven chaos in Washington? Empathy, Musk famously once said, is the “fundamental weakness of Western civilization.” That seems untrue, and Musk’s own direct involvement in politics has shown that a lack of empathy is no model for government.

Slobodian and Tarnoff trace Musk’s attempts to correct a listing culture, to rewrite society’s operating code and clean it of the real bugs in the system: people. Twitter had helped propel Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and #MeToo; under Musk, its replacement, X, would reinstate a public square built on precontamination hierarchies of class, gender, and race. Large language models promised a future of objective truth and universal information, but were trained on leftist propaganda; Grok would be refined in “post-training” to reflect Musk’s own anti-woke biases and priorities. The state was overrun with illegitimate claims on the public purse; DOGE would empower a set of very young software engineers to swiftly terminate grants and contracts and lay off public servants en masse.

And yet, here we find ourselves today: On X, there are still as many jokes about Nazis as there are Nazis; Grok is not a serious competitor to ChatGPT or Claude; and DOGE accomplished little more than causing chaos and inflicting misery on federal workers. Its outcomes may have satisfied MAGA ideologues such as Russell Vought, whose express wish was to dismantle the federal bureaucracy by making working conditions unpleasant (“When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work”). And in the midst of his DOGE spree, Musk seemed to share this wish, brandishing a chainsaw on stage at CPAC and bragging about cuts. But if, as Slobodian and Tarnoff argue, Musk had imagined DOGE as a program through which “engineers disciplined society like a factory floor,” it was a failure. Because, as they write, “society is not a factory.”

Musk presents an intriguing contrast with Trump, his on-and-off-again political ally. Both are inveterate posters, both often sound deranged, both have a lot of money (Musk has considerably more, but much of it is illiquid, since it’s mostly held in stock in his companies). Trump is sui generis, a freak of nature whose coalition seems unlikely to survive his departure from the White House (assuming he ever leaves it). Vestiges of Trumpism will survive, but actually existing Trumpism? Only Trump can carry the brand. His interests are superficial: What animates him is a desire to enrich himself and elevate the status of his clique, even at the expense of America’s general welfare and standing in the world. That’s not a political realignment; it’s kleptocracy. And yet, despite all his shortcomings, despite his leaden approval ratings, Trump has twice been elected president. Musk spent less than six months in Washington before he was forced to skulk back to the Gigafactory. The argument that Muskism asks us to take seriously is that Musk, though less charismatic and less popular than Trump, is more symbolic of our era.

Amid institutional breakdown and the overpoliticization of everything, Musk’s companies, his words, and his dogmas might represent a durable shift to a new common sense, a new model of political and economic order. Trump has pioneered a style, but Musk is a master of infrastructure, and the future is always shaped by matter rather than manner. The liberal international order is effectively dead, popular faith in institutions across the democratic world has cratered, and in the United States, the Trumpian wrecking ball has done serious—perhaps lasting—damage to the Constitution and the stately old politics of checks and balances. Muskism offers a set of solutions and arguments suited to the fragmented, paranoid, and militarized world in which we now find ourselves: Independence seems more appealing than integration at a time when multilateralism is at a historic ebb; genocide and wars of choice have normalized the exclusionary thinking and antipathy to empathy on which Musk’s businesses thrive; multipolarity and the return of great power competition invite a deepening fusion of technology and the state. Muskism is a tool kit for a world where concentration matters more than cooperation, where control trumps trust.

Still, a future defined by all-out Muskism is not inevitable. It’s not hard to imagine a greater role in years to come for a detoxified version of Muskism, characterized by a turn away from supply chains and globalization, a deepening digitization of daily life, and government by meme. But Muskism-lite is not the Muskian way; the insults, the trolling, and the inhumanity are inseparable from Musk’s way of doing business. There is little utopian promise in the future he portends; the Musk-led tech industry’s vision of collective life is a weird amalgam of sports, speculation, and collective dissolution into the jaws of the machines. Many people, as Musk himself has discovered in recent years, do not want this. Muskism may be one version of the future, but cyborgian oblivion is not our only choice.  

“The problem for Democrats is that most people see great things about California and about New York, but they don’t think of them as places where government is functioning well,” he said. “The taxes are relatively high, and it’s not obvious that people are getting anything extra for it.” He asked how Democrats could make outcomes better for people in these high-tax states.

The reason this statement rang my bells is that I moved to New York almost three years ago, and taxes were a big reason why. My then partner—now husband—and I decided to move here from Arkansas. That’s right: We wanted to pay more taxes. And I’ll tell you why.

It is true that New York and California have some of the highest income tax rates and estimated share of personal income residents pay in all taxes when property, sales, and local taxes are taken into account. I’m not sure what evidence Yglesias was considering when he said it wasn’t clear what people were getting from their high taxes—or what benefit he specifically thought those taxes were failing to deliver. But then, it’s not always easy to evaluate what bang we’re getting for the buck. How do we measure the effectiveness of the government? These are the questions I found myself asking.

On one level, people experience their taxation in a personal way: There is an amount of money withheld from our paychecks or paid to their state finance departments (or refunded to them) every spring. That is also, usually, how they experience government services, or services largely subsidized or regulated by the government: who decides their county or city’s operations, how transparent are they, how reliable are their utilities, what is a trip to the DMV like? For the most part, they’re only paying individual taxes and living in one state at a time.

Indeed, most people spend the vast majority of their lives in one state, and they’ll spend their working lives paying only one state’s income tax. People don’t make interstate moves that often: The Harvard University Joint Center for Housing Studies calculated in 2020 that about 13 percent of Americans move each year, and only about 14 percent of those moves are across state lines. Most people stay local. Of the people who move, most move for personal reasons having to do with jobs and family—or the chance to buy a new home instead of renting. Which is to say: Most people can’t make a real assessment on what they’re getting for their taxes on an individual level because they lack the information needed to make informed comparisons.

My husband and I lived in my home state of Arkansas together for a little more than five years; like most people, we decided to move for a number of reasons. One was that we could no longer stand the South’s blazing hot summers and were worried about climate change, so we looked for more climate-resilient places to live, which mostly led us up north. We wanted to live somewhere near an Amtrak station with frequent service, near mountains, and we really wanted to buy an older home that we could comfortably afford. We also wanted to leave the South for political and cultural reasons. We landed in central New York.

All that being said, if I had to name the catalyst for the move, it was when I had to write a check for my 2022 Arkansas state income taxes. I was self-employed for most of my time in Arkansas, which meant I frequently owed some amount of taxes at the end of the tax year, and in the spring of 2023 that amount was a little more than $7,000. That was, coincidentally, the amount that the state would soon be giving to individuals who wanted to use tax money to send their children to private school under the newly passed LEARNS Act.

The LEARNS Act gave almost anyone, regardless of income, taxpayer money to use toward private school tuition. I realized the same amount of money I was sending to the state could be used by someone with more money than I had to send their children to a school that promoted teachings I disagreed with, while also robbing the public school system of funds. I simply decided that I didn’t want to live in a state that used its tax dollars—my tax dollars—that way. I wanted to move to a place where my taxes were spent more in line with my values. Even if it meant paying more.

It was a clarifying moment. We had lived for years in a very rural part of the state that looked different even from where we live now, near New York’s dairy country. We often had to take our own trash to the dump, our roads fell into disrepair after the slightest winter storm, and the county often relied on private help to fix them. There were knock-down, drag-out fights over even small amounts of tax increases that funded things like my local library. There was no county-funded animal shelter, and animal control was spotty at best, which meant stray and abandoned animals were everywhere, and my husband and I, dog and cat lovers, spent thousands of our own money to rescue animals, spay and neuter pets for people who couldn’t afford it, and send homeless pets to friends around the country.

Getting even basic information about services, and service interruptions, from the county government or local utilities was difficult. I once FOIA-ed information about county water shutoffs from my local water utility and got a large folder with handwritten records. When the pipes burst at my house—for complicated reasons I won’t go into—I called to ask if the water company could shut my water off so that I could have it fixed, and the person I spoke to told me—and I am deadly serious—to find my water meter and “just stick a screwdriver down there.”

I have spent many years complaining about rural Arkansas only because I loved living there and think my neighbors deserve better. But when we finally left the second time, I realized how stressful the daily indignities of life there had been. We live in a place now where things just work. The roads are plowed in winter, they’re repaired in the spring, the local utilities text and email us when there are service interruptions and they repair them quickly, we have a well-funded library system.

Across the board, the services and benefits I get for my tax money outstrip what I got from my former state. I regularly receive booklets in my mailbox with reports from the county government and the county schools. We live near a city, Utica, with a beautiful train station with services that can get us to most places in the country, and the DMV is in that train station and is one of the quickest, politest places I have ever been. Utica, which has a third of the population of Arkansas’s state capital, Little Rock, is served by a public transit system that provides nearly three times the annual rides that Little Rock’s does. Hourly wages are higher here, and the safety net provides to those in need better.

Moving to New York was the good kind of culture shock. My husband and I are constantly asking each other, “Is it just me, or are the vibes here just … better?” The answer is yes. Together, we have lived in four cities across three states; separately, you can add four more cities and three more states to that list. They vary in their level of taxation and politics, and we have developed a personal metric for assessing the quality of a place, which we call the Potts-Suarez Theory of County Dumps. How easy is it, and how much does it cost, to get rid of your household trash?

In Arkansas, we resorted to piling our own trash into our 2003 Subaru Forester and taking it to the dump on Saturdays, usually spending about $20 a week to do so. Many people in my home county simply burned their own trash in their yards, violating an ordinance to do so because it’s easier and cheaper. In New York State, our trash and recycling services cost half that amount and are reliable, and when we have to make a trip to the county eco-station to dump hazardous waste—we are DIY-ing much of our old house, including removing lead paint—it is open more hours, well organized, clean, and well staffed.

Obviously, this is a very silly and subjective measure. But there are some data points hinting that it’s not just us. The states that rank higher in health outcomes tend to be more progressive states with a higher tax base, while those at the bottom are across the low-tax, low-wage South. Maps look similar for educational attainment, food security, and median income. A recent study ranking states on overall measures of well-being found New York and California in the middle, while the states at the top were a mix of high- and low-tax states, number one being Minnesota, and states at the bottom included much of the mid-South, like Arkansas. Surveys that try to assess happiness find similar results. New York and California are also some of the least affordable states to live in in the U.S., but the supply-side housing folks ought to know that some of that is because the supply is outpaced by demand: People want to live in these states.

Some of my problems are particular to the South, which, as my colleague Perry Bacon Jr. wrote last month, has long been antidemocratic and especially focused on disenfranchising Black citizens. “Whether the United States overall is a liberal democracy or can become one again, the states in the South are at best electoral democracies and are veering toward electoral autocracies,” he wrote, and he details the ways those states restrict freedoms of their residents and liberal voters’ abilities to shape their own cities and communities.

There is, at base, a set of questions each state, or city, or country, has to organize itself around. How can we form a community? How do we create a good life for the people who live here? Most people don’t truly have any way to assess how their own communities are answering that question compared to others. There are very few objective measures on which we can rank states on how nice it is to live there—and they would be imperfect at best because different people value different things. Taxes are one objective measure, but taxes have long been framed as a burden weighing on people, not as an investment we’re all making so that the place we’ve chosen to live is as good as it can be.

Viewed as an investment, the basic level of taxation can fund the services that free up time and energy for its residents to work, care for their families, enjoy their leisure, make art, and build cool things together because they’re less worried about basic things like how hard it is to dispose of the household trash. States that don’t invest in their public infrastructure and well-being are shifting the burdens to individuals.

The great things about California and New York are inextricable from these states’ tax systems. But the vast majority of political writers who question taxes in places like Washington, D.C., New York, or California—or who hold up places like Texas as an example of housing abundance, have never seen what that looks like for the people who live in those places on a daily basis. The lack of taxes, the lack of investment, can take the form of all manner of imposition, from a county dump that is too expensive for people to use to inadequate reproductive health care, to never knowing if your vote will be counted. From 30,000 feet in the air, these can look like separate issues. At ground level, they’re all born from the neglect that comes in the lack of real investment. I know exactly what I’m getting from my taxes in New York. And I suspect other low-tax boosters know what they’re getting too, which is why they haven’t moved en masse to places like Arkansas.

By those standards, college sports is currently the world’s most lucrative workout club. A state judge in Texas ordered the NCAA earlier this month to reinstate Brendan Sorsby, a quarterback at Texas Tech University who has admitted to placing bets at sportsbooks on, among other things, his own team at a previous school.

The NCAA had refused to reinstate Sorsby while it conducts an investigation into the scope of his gambling policy violations. He then sought a temporary injunction that would allow him to continue playing in 2026 and “clarify” his status before he would have to apply for the NFL’s supplemental draft later this summer. The judge sided with Sorsby; the NCAA has vowed to appeal.

Sorsby’s case is far from the only legal battle that the NCAA has found itself in in recent years. But the lawsuit speaks volumes about the constitutional crisis in which collegiate athletics now finds itself—and the shortcomings of the NCAA’s solutions. As long as it resists treating athletes like workers, these problems will only get worse.

The most recent crisis for college sports began in April when Texas Tech announced that Sorsby, who had transferred there from the University of Cincinnati in January, had entered an inpatient treatment facility for gambling addiction. NCAA rules prohibit student-athletes from placing bets on collegiate or professional sports.

Sorsby is far from the first athlete to be embroiled in a gambling scandal since 2018, when the Supreme Court struck down a federal ban on sports betting and paved the way for its widespread legalization by states. But his case may be the most egregious one on record.

According to court documents filed in May, Sorsby wagered more than $90,000 on online sportsbooks over a four-year period. He used accounts registered to friends and family members to evade detection by sportsbooks and school officials. His claims of addiction are also hard to dispute: In an 18-month span while attending Indiana University, for example, he reportedly placed a minimum of 2,900 bets on various sports.

“It became a habit for me to bet,” Sorsby told the NCAA in a statement, according to ESPN. “My betting became a compulsion which made it virtually impossible to resist the constant notifications I received from betting apps. I lost complete control of my addiction. I now realize the apps controlled me and I did not control them.”

The news outlet reported that Sorsby placed at least 40 bets on Indiana University football while playing for the school. The bets were small amounts—ranging from a single dollar to slightly more than $100—but each represents a massive ethical breach. While major sports leagues have adopted a wide range of rules on sports betting over the past few years, none of them allow players to bet on their own sport, let alone their own team.

According to court documents reviewed by The Athletic, Sorsby also claimed that he had “never placed any bets on any Indiana football game that I participated in or that I reasonably expected that I could have participated in.” At the time, he noted, he was on Indiana’s scout team “with several quarterbacks ahead of me on the team’s depth chart” and “no reasonable chance that I would play.” Sorsby reportedly claimed that he had never used nonpublic information when placing the bets—which is both unverifiable and extremely hard to believe.

None of this mattered under the most recent version of the NCAA’s ban on sports betting by student-athletes. Current rules prohibits student-athletes from placing bets on any sport that the NCAA sponsors, even at the amateur or professional level. The NCAA voted last November to restore its ban on betting in professional sports after federal prosecutors charged multiple NBA players and coaches for their alleged roles in illegal gambling operations.

NCAA athletes who violate the organization’s gambling policy can face permanent loss of eligibility. Under NCAA rules, Texas Tech declared Sorsby ineligible after the NCAA opened its investigation into him in April. The school claimed the right to request Sorsby’s reinstatement to restore that eligibility on his behalf.

In a lawsuit filed against the NCAA in May, Sorsby claimed that he faced imminent and irreparable harm if the organization did not reach a decision on his eligibility soon. The deadline to apply for the NFL’s supplemental draft is later this month, which would be his last chance to play in the league for its 2026 season. If the NCAA does not reach a decision until after that deadline, Sorsby argued, he could face the loss of both his final year in college football and an entire year in professional football.

Judge Ken Curry agreed and granted Sorsby’s request for a temporary injunction, concluding that he was likely to prevail at trial. Curry also scheduled the trial date for February 8, 2027—two weeks after the 2026 college football season ends. As a result, even if the NCAA were to ultimately prevail on the merits, Sorsby will already be out of college athletics. (The judge, for the record, did not attend Texas Tech as an undergraduate or as a law student.)

Legal disputes between the NCAA and college athletes aren’t uncommon. Ole Miss quarterback Trinidad Chambliss successfully challenged the NCAA’s decision to deny him a sixth year of eligibility, for example, in Mississippi state court earlier this year. But the Sorsby ruling struck the college sports landscape like a thunderbolt because it called into question the NCAA’s basic ability to sanction players for egregious policy violations.

“The NCAA strongly disagrees with the court’s ruling in Sorsby’s case and is deeply concerned about the damaging, far-reaching and broadly destabilizing ramifications of this outcome—which undermines and corrupts the integrity of sports,” the organization said in a statement after the ruling was issued.

The university is not a party to Sorsby’s lawsuit, but has expressed a strong interest in having him play in the upcoming season. Sorsby was among the most highly sought players in the transfer portal this spring. Texas Tech struck a NIL deal with him in January that could bring the fifth-year quarterback roughly $5 million for one season of play.

“I’ve heard the word ‘integrity’ used a great deal in the last 48 hours,” Texas Tech athletics director Kirby Hocutt said in a statement on Wednesday. “As someone who has dedicated his career to college sports, I, too, believe integrity is central to our industry’s success. I also think integrity applies on more than one front. The integrity of sport matters. So does the integrity of how we treat a 22-year-old who sought help, entered residential treatment, and is working every day toward recovery. These two things don’t have to be in conflict.”

Hocutt’s voice appears to be a solitary one. There are widespread reports that other schools and conferences may try to collectively punish Texas Tech for the scandal by refusing to schedule games against them at all levels, effectively freezing its athletics program out of competitions. Texas Tech has responded by threatening to pursue litigation if the other schools try to hold the school accountable for enabling Sorsby’s tactics.

College football coaches and officials were openly horrified by the prospect that a court would require a player who admitted to betting on his own team to play in the upcoming season. “As someone who grew up reading about the Black Sox Scandal, and seeing what happened to Pete Rose and just understanding how bright that line seemed to be in all of American sports, I’m stunned that there would be a question at the court level that this is acceptable,” Scott Stricklin, the athletic director for the University of Florida, told ESPN.

It is hard to not draw comparisons to baseball’s own gambling scandals, which had a seismic impact on the sport itself and led to fundamental changes in how it operates. The Black Sox scandal, in which several Chicago White Sox players helped gamblers fix the 1919 World Series, led Major League Baseball to create a commissioner’s office with far-reaching powers to regulate the sport’s integrity.

Baseball had other advantages that the NCAA lacks. Thanks to a controversial 1922 Supreme Court ruling, Major League Baseball enjoys a free-standing exemption to federal antitrust law. Other major sports leagues are also exempt from antitrust law to some degree by the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961, which allows teams to collectively negotiate television deals without fear of anticompetitive charges.

The NCAA, on the other hand, has faced a decade of legal struggles precisely because it lacks an exemption. The greatest blow came in 2021 when the Supreme Court unanimously upheld a lower court decision that found some of the NCAA’s compensation rules violated federal antitrust law. That ruling opened the door to the NIL era, where players can be compensated semi-indirectly for the use of their name, image, and likeness rights. During oral arguments and in the ruling itself, justices sharply castigated the NCAA for its long-standing opposition to compensating players while reaping millions of dollars in profits from their labor.

“Nowhere else in America can businesses get away with agreeing not to pay their workers a fair market rate on the theory that their product is defined by not paying their workers a fair market rate,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in a concurring opinion. “And under ordinary principles of antitrust law, it is not evident why college sports should be any different. The NCAA is not above the law.”

The NCAA evaded legal scrutiny for so long for a variety of reasons, but at least partly through sheer inertia and its byzantine structure. While the NCAA has a governing board and a president—currently Charlie Baker, the former governor of Massachusetts—it is also a largely decentralized organization. Individual schools wield significant power through the various conferences that also oversee college sports, like the Southeastern Conference and the misleadingly named Big Ten Conference. Many of those schools are also public universities, which means they are governed directly by state governments to varying degrees.

As a result, it is hard to even describe the NCAA as a sports “league” in any meaningful sense. One crucial difference between NCAA sports and professional leagues is the absence of collective bargaining, which sets ground rules between players and owners. Instead, college athletes are free to accept NIL money and transfer almost at will. Sorsby, for example, is currently facing a lawsuit from the University of Cincinnati over a $1 million exit fee in his NIL contract that the quarterback has not yet paid since refusing to play in last year’s bowl game and transferring to Texas Tech.

To “save” college sports from the daunting threats of antitrust enforcement and a robust market for athlete compensation, the NCAA and colleges are doing something unthinkable these days: asking Congress to pass legislation. One bipartisan proposal, the Protect College Sports Act, was drafted by Texas Senator Ted Cruz and Washington Senator Maria Cantwell. It would impose new restrictions on transfers and eligibility that strongly favor schools and constrain student-athletes.

Some of college athletics’ top voices, such as former Alabama football head coach Nick Saban, embraced the bill earlier this month during Senate hearings. But significant obstacles remain. The SEC—the conference, not the financial regulator—and the Big Ten said they opposed the bill, in statements earlier this week. Though their reasoning was vague, the bill would prevent conferences from breaking away from the NCAA to form a more lucrative “super league” of top schools. It would require them to potentially share more broadcast revenue with other schools.

The NCAA also has not yet endorsed the bill. ESPN’s Dan Murphy noted last month that it lacks one of the organization’s main demands: to bar athletes from being classified as employees, which could open the door to collective bargaining. It would be fitting if the NCAA missed out on vital legal protections because it wanted to preserve its original sin of uncompensated labor.

A collective-bargaining agreement would’ve been helpful in the Sorsby case. When major-league players cheat and gamble, they are punished by the procedures laid out in their collective-bargaining agreements, with no role for meddling state judges to override things. Saban lamented during this week’s hearing that “right now in college football we have no rules.” He’s right, but it may be even more accurate to say that the NCAA hasn’t been playing by any rules all along.

Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington, a progressive watchdog organization, filed a Freedom of Information request with the DOJ, and in response, they were told that the DOJ “did not locate the case you have cited” within the DOJ’s Civil Division’s case management system.

“We have further inquired with Civil Division staff in the Office of the Assistant Attorney General, and they have advised that they are not aware of any responsive records within the Civil Division pertaining to the case you have cited. Accordingly, we have located no responsive records,” wrote Brian Flannigan, division counsel for records and information in the DOJ, in a response letter.

Trump, his sons Donald Jr. and Eric, and the Trump Organization sued the IRS in January for $10 billion in damages over the leak of their tax returns by a former IRS contractor during Trump’s first term. A settlement was reached last month that created a $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” fund for anyone who believes they were unfairly prosecuted for their political beliefs, essentially the president’s allies who were prosecuted under the Biden administration. As part of the settlement, the IRS also pledged not to audit the Trump family or businesses now or at any point in the future.

The case of the president essentially suing an agency in his own government was controversial enough, but the settlement was heavily criticized, not only for the creation of a slush fund for Trump to disburse to his allies, but also for protecting the Trumps and their assets from ever facing scrutiny over their taxes.

The fact that the DOJ claims to have no records relating to communication about the settlement suggests that either it is lying or negotiations were conducted outside of the legal bodies that should have handled them. All of this is yet more proof of Trump using the presidency to settle grievances, enrich himself and his family, and disregard the law at the same time at the expense of the American people.

Trump will likely financially benefit from this deal due to his investment in its parent company, TKO Group Holdings. While conservative media has sold this as “cage fights for diplomacy,” the actual agreement mostly sees the UFC partnering with the State Department’s “sports diplomacy” programs at the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. That program is responsible for “citizen exchanges” and other cultural events but spent more than $52 million last year—giving the UFC a major leg-up compared to other sports leagues.

The MOU also comes just three days before the UFC fight night on the White House lawn on Trump’s birthday.

“UFC is the world’s leading mixed martial arts organization. As an American-founded organization, the UFC has grown into a major global sports platform, reflecting U.S. leadership in modern combat sports promotion, athletic performance standards, and international event production,” the State Department wrote in a press release. “Its events are broadcast worldwide and contribute to the United States’ broader cultural and sports influence through professional competition and athlete development.”

Nowhere in the press release was Trump’s investment in the UFC mentioned.

While the UFC has certainly gained serious traction over the years, it is not without its blemishes—White has been criticized for years for making millions upon millions of dollars while his union-less, battered fighters often need second jobs to keep the lights on.

The Israeli government is not aware that a finalized deal has been reached, an official told the country’s Channel 12, and it’s unclear where the Iranian government stands. Fars, a semiofficial news agency affiliated with the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, quoted an “informed source close to Iran’s negotiation team,” who said that “no text for a preliminary memorandum of understanding with the United States has been approved.”

Axios, citing unnamed sources, reported that Iran and Qatari mediators believed they had come up with a written agreement Wednesday that the U.S. would accept. Those sources said that Iran told different countries on Thursday that an agreement was reached in principle but was still waiting for Iranian leader Mojtaba Khamenei’s final approval.

Trump announced on Truth Social Thursday afternoon that the deal had been approved by “the United States, Israel, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, Turkey, Pakistan, Bahrain, Kuwait, Jordan, Egypt, and others.” He made things even weirder shortly later in the Oval Office, saying that a signing ceremony could take place with Iran this weekend in Europe, which he would not be able to attend due to the planned UFC fight on the White House lawn Sunday.

“The [Strait of Hormuz] will be open as soon as we sign, which could be soon, very soon, maybe over the weekend in Europe. I won’t be able to be there, but, uh, [JD Vance] will be there, vice president, and some of the people, [Steve Witkoff] did a great job, [Jared Kushner],” Trump said, mentioning the people he had tasked with negotiating with Iran.

Trump says the Iran deal signing ceremony will happen this weekend in Europe but "I won't be able to be there"

(the UFC fight at the White House is Sunday) pic.twitter.com/K5tvLgLuqP

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 11, 2026

Does this mean a deal is imminent, or is Trump just blowing hot air again? From what the president is saying, it’s either done or very close, but there’s no clear confirmation from Iran, and U.S. ally Israel doesn’t seem to be aware of anything, either. For the sake of international stability, one would expect everyone to be on the same page. But unfortunately, this is how Trump has chosen to operate.

The president’s nominating process to replace Tulsi Gabbard took a sudden right turn Thursday when he named Jay Clayton, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, as his permanent director of national intelligence.

“Few people anywhere in the Legal Community are respected at the level of Jay. I encourage the United States Senate to confirm Jay as soon as possible,” Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social.

Clayton has previously worked as a partner at Sullivan & Cromwell, providing counsel on corporate crisis management. He was also an adjunct professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s law school. He was handed his role atop the Southern District of New York without any prosecutorial experience, and seemingly does not have any relevant experience to run America’s national security operation, either.

The president had initially tapped Bill Pulte, a national real estate developer serving as the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, to temporarily serve in Gabbard’s stead. But Pulte—who similarly had no relevant experience for the job—became a point of contention with lawmakers, who argued that his appointment, even just as acting DNI, was effectively illegal as his résumé lacked requirements for the job that had been written into the law.

To prevent Pulte becoming permanent DNI, Democrats blocked efforts to renew FISA Section 702, a statute that allows federal agencies such as the NSA and the CIA to surveil people without warrants, but that is set to expire Friday.

It is not yet clear how Clayton will change opinions—or the written requirements. Why the White House singled him out as an exceptional candidate to satisfy the administration’s agenda is far less murky.

Clayton has passed countless litmus tests proving his loyalty to the MAGA movement. He has seeded doubt in America’s election integrity, claiming as recently as Monday that there is a “deep problem with voting in America.” He has also defended Trump’s $1.8 billion taxpayer-bankrolled slush fund for the president’s aggrieved political allies, arguing with CNBC last month that Trump was entitled to “recourse” after a government contractor leaked his tax returns.

“Anybody whose tax returns have been intentionally leaked should have recourse against the government,” Clayton said.

And Clayton unquestioningly did the president’s bidding with regard to his appointment to the SDNY, probing Jeffrey Epstein’s social connections—so long as they tied back to former Democratic President Bill Clinton, former Obama administration adviser Larry Summers, and Democratic donor Reid Hoffman. Later, Clayton was handed an additional Trump administration priority in overseeing the investigation into Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, despite his dubious financial ties to the cases.

It is not clear how quickly the Senate will move to confirm Clayton’s confirmation. Among other steps, Clayton still has to fill out a detailed questionnaire, undergo an FBI background check, and sit for a public hearing before the upper chamber conducts its final vote.

This story has been updated.

It’s still unclear who made the markings, or how. The administration has yet to formally respond.

Reuters photographer Nathan Howard captured a photo of the apparent tracing.

The slogan “8647” has two parts: “86”—originating in restaurants and meaning to nix or cancel—has developed a broader slang usage for cancelling something. In some cases, it has been used to refer to killing or disappearing someone. “47” refers to Trump’s status as the forty-seventh president.

This appears to be an impressively clandestine act of protest right in the middle of preparations for President Trump’s garish “Freedom 250” festival, which begins next week with the already collapsing “Great American State Fair.” The FIFA World Cup Fan Zone also began drawing visitors to the National Mall on Thursday, just in time to see the message.

The president in a post on Truth Social suggested that the two countries had come to an agreement.

“Discussions and final points have been, in both concept and great detail, approved by all parties involved, including the United States, Israel, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, Turkey, Pakistan, Bahrain, Kuwait, Jordan, Egypt, and others,” Trump wrote.

“The Naval Blockade will remain in full force and effect until this Transaction is finalized—Time and place of the signing to be announced shortly,” he added.

The markets immediately reacted to Trump’s announcement: Stock indexes soared and oil prices plummeted.

The Trump administration’s negotiating strategy with Tehran has promised peace deals week after week to no avail. The wildly unpopular Middle East conflict is currently in its fourth month.

U.S. forces had already bombed Iran through two consecutive nights this week in the White House’s latest attempt to force Iranian leadership into negotiations to end the war. The attacks occurred despite the obvious risks of escalation.

“If we need to negotiate with bombs, we will negotiate with bombs,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Wednesday. “We will strike them hard tonight and hopefully Iran makes a good decision.”

The development comes in the immediate wake of a violent threat Trump made against Iran earlier Thursday, in which he pledged that the U.S. would strike Iran “VERY HARD TONIGHT” and would further take control of Iranian oil assets and infrastructure, including Kharg Island.

Negotiators worked through Wednesday night in Tehran to iron out the specifications of the peace deal, which both Qatari and Iranian leadership believed would satisfy the White House’s expectations, reported Axios. Insiders that spoke with the publication said that the new plan narrowed in on three main issues: focusing on the mechanism for releasing Iran’s frozen assets, arranging to reopen the Strait of Hormuz during a 60-day ceasefire period, and creating a roadmap for negotiating Iran’s nuclear program during the ceasefire.

This story has been updated.

The Atlantic reports that staffers in the Justice Department and White House are still telling Trump allies that they will get some form of payment, looking at ways to activate parts of the slush fund and alternative methods of compensating Trump loyalists at the same time, even though last week, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said publicly that “we are not moving forward with the fund.”

The DOJ has refused to put the fund’s demise in writing, even after being pressed by a federal judge on Wednesday. When asked why they were refusing, DOJ lawyers replied, “I don’t know,” suggesting that work is going on behind the scenes. Judge Richard Leon warned the administration that if they say the fund is dead, they had better not be lying.

Inside the administration, officials are reportedly divided on whether the fund will come to fruition. Anonymous sources told The Atlantic that the administration is continuing to work on the fund quietly, hoping the objections will dissipate and the story will leave the news cycle.

“Trump didn’t want to fight this out in public,” one DOJ official told the publication. Blanche’s nomination as attorney general is already facing opposition from some Senate Republicans, like Thom Tillis and John Curtis, who are threatening to hold it up to ensure the Anti-Weaponization Fund is officially killed. The fund faces legal challenges, as well, with Republican Senator Bill Cassidy joining his Democratic colleague Cory Booker in a court filing supporting a lawsuit against the fund.

A White House official told The Atlantic in an email that “any speculation about potential future actions is just that—speculation. President Trump remains committed to addressing Biden-era weaponization.”

As the midterms approach, the fund will be politically toxic for Republicans, and Democrats will certainly be using it as campaign fodder. The Trump administration has to know this, but will it take the safe option and kill it, or try to keep its efforts hidden until after November?

Industry officials have already warned the White House that the prices could spike yet again due to rapidly diminishing inventories, reported The Washington Post Thursday.

Since the beginning of the Iran war, commercial and government inventories have supplemented gas consumption across the U.S. The reserves have allowed prices to hover around $4.50 per gallon for the last four months—but that could change very quickly, according to oil and gas executives, who are often loath to make such alarming predictions.

“We’re sounding the alarm on these inventories going to record lows,” American Petroleum Institute CEO Mike Sommers told Fox Business. “We have to solve this problem in the Strait of Hormuz.”

Some inventories could be wiped out in a matter of weeks, according to the Post—just in time for summer holidays.

“I have absolutely no doubt the White House—from the president on down—is fully aware of the nearly universal alarm among oil companies and analysts about the direction of travel for oil prices this summer,” Bob McNally, a former Bush administration energy adviser, told the Post.

Yet Trump has been remarkably cavalier about the rising costs. With inflation at a three-year high, Trump stunned reporters, lawmakers, and voters alike on Wednesday with just four words: “I love the inflation,” he said.

“I love it,” he insisted, pledging that oil prices will drop “like a rock” when the war ends.

But the end of the war seems to be nowhere in sight. U.S. forces bombed Iran through two nights this week, part of the White House’s latest strategy to force Tehran to make a deal, despite the obvious risks of escalation.

“If we need to negotiate with bombs, we will negotiate with bombs,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Wednesday. “We will strike them hard tonight and hopefully Iran makes a good decision.”

Meanwhile, Trump’s allies aren’t so sure that their political movement will weather the brewing economic storm. The far-right populist rode the 2024 campaign on vehement promises of affordability; through his presidency, he swore that Americans would see lower utility bills, cheaper groceries, and more American-based jobs. But that hasn’t been the case.

Instead, as millions of Americans struggle with the rising cost of living and companies contend with rattled supply chains, the president’s inner circle fear that it might be too late to fix the problem for Trump’s midterm-dependent acolytes.

“Whether it’s peak inflation or not, it doesn’t matter,” one former Trump administration official told Politico. “The die has been cast in terms of how people are looking at the economy.”

“Earlier this morning, Pentagon occupants were notified ‌of ⁠a potential air quality issue, prompting immediate precautionary safety measures and evaluation. Subsequent testing confirmed no hazard exists, and normal operations have ​resumed,” ​chief Pentagon ⁠spokesman Sean Parnell said. “We express our sincere appreciation to the first responders ​for their swift actions to ensure ​the ⁠safety of all personnel.”

Parnell had originally reported there was an “air quality issue necessitating precautionary measures.” Floors two through five in corridors four through seven were closed down, and the Arlington Fire Department’s hazmat team was also present.

This story has been updated.

Trita Parsi is reportedly being targeted by the White House for his frequent criticisms of the Iran war. Parsi, a Swedish citizen born in Iran who holds U.S. permanent residency, co-founded the National Iranian American Council and the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a foreign policy think tank.

To some in the Trump administration, Parsi’s criticisms—and his push for diplomacy with the Iranian government—suggest more than a dissenting opinion. The administration has used immigration law against critics of its foreign policy, notably with college students who protest against U.S. support for Israel in its massacre of Palestinians in Gaza.

Parsi has for years been accused by some Iranian Americans of promoting the Iranian government’s interests, with many Republicans echoing those criticisms. Far-right influencer Laura Loomer, who has a lot of influence in the White House, called Parsi “a mouthpiece for the Iranian regime” who pushes “pro-Iranian regime talking points,” in an April X post. In May, Loomer wrote that Parsi’s “days in our country are numbered.”

Loomer may have been involved in getting two Iranian women detained earlier this year after she claimed they were related to deceased Iranian military commander Qassem Soleimani, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio and others may still be taking her advice.

The State Department under Trump has detained other critics, as well, including doctoral student Rümeysa Öztürk, who wrote an op-ed column about Gaza, and Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate whom the administration is still trying to deport over his role in protests on campus against the war in Gaza.

The Quincy Institute is preparing to “cover the legal costs to prepare for—and if necessary—fight a deportation attack on Trita,” according to a memo obtained by The Free Press. If the administration pursues deportation against him, it would be a chilling attempt to disregard the First Amendment and send the message that anyone less than a full citizen of the U.S. does not have the right to free speech.

The president is reportedly “pissed” and “increasingly frustrated with everyone” surrounding him—though the drama seems to be a mess of his own creation.

The pressing issue started last week, when Donald Trump suddenly appointed Bill Pulte—a real estate developer serving as the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency—to run U.S. national intelligence in place of the outbound Tulsi Gabbard.

Democrats and some Republicans on the Hill immediately opposed Pulte’s appointment and were quick to point out that the PulteGroup heir would come to the job with zero national security experience, a direct violation of the law, which specifically requires a director of national intelligence to have “extensive” national security experience.

Lawmakers have accused Trump of nominating Pulte for his own personal benefit: “The apparent motivation for his elevation is the demonstrated willingness of Bill Pulte to search government databases for alleged dirt on President Trump’s chosen political enemies,” House Democratic leadership wrote in a statement Thursday.

At risk thanks to Pulte’s nomination is the imminent expiration of FISA Section 702, a statute that allows federal agencies such as the NSA and the CIA to surveil people without warrants. That statute is slated to expire Friday, but Democratic leadership has indicated it won’t vote to renew it “without meaningful reforms,” emphasizing Pulte’s recent promotion in its demands.

Senate Republicans expected Trump to find an off-ramp on the matter—House Speaker Mike Johnson even visited the White House Tuesday to discuss it. But they were wrong.

Trump was irate with “everyone, from his own team to the Senate,” a MAGA-world operative close to the White House told Politico Thursday, highlighting Senate Republicans’ opposition to Trump’s $400 million White House ballroom, his $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund, and the general disregard for Trump’s desire to fire Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough after she identified procedural problems in the SAVE Act.

“He’s pissed, and people are not recognizing the level of pissed that he is,” the operative added. “He does not like being put in a box. When you put him in a box, then Trump’s going to blow the box up.”

The message was received loud and clear. One senior GOP staffer described Trump’s recent moves to Politico as “a middle finger to Congress.”

Trump is also furious that his preferred candidate for Iowa governor, Representative Randy Feenstra, lost his primary last week. “He’s really angry about this Iowa endorsement—like really, really angry,” a White House ally told Politico. “He’s really angry that his consultants and people pushed him to do that.”

“Cecilia Vega and her team were indeed working on a report for CBS examining the impact of the U.S. sanctions on my work and personal life, including developments in the U.S. courts,” Albanese wrote on X Thursday morning, confirming reporting from Zeteo. “I am sorry they were punished.”

Vega was fired by CBS head Bari Weiss at the end of May, along with Sharyn Alfonsi—who lambasted Weiss’s decision to push back her report on the notoriously inhumane CECOT megaprison in El Salvador—executive producer Tanya Simon, and executive editor Draggan Mihailovich.

The timing of Vega’s firing is extremely questionable given that Weiss and CBS owner David Ellison are staunch Zionists aligned with the Trump administration. Albanese has been sanctioned by the United States, has had multiple European countries call for her resignation, and has faced a wave of personal attacks online for her Palestinian advocacy.

Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office Wednesday, Trump brushed off a bleak inflation report finding that America’s annual inflation rate had reached its highest levels in three years.

“The numbers were great. You know what I really love? I love the inflation,” Trump said.

Speaking on the phone with the New York Post later that day, Trump claimed he’d been taken out of context. “I love the inflation numbers because of what I’m talking about,” he said.

“The numbers are going to be phenomenal because what’s showing is that despite the fact that we’re in a war, the numbers are much lower than anticipated, and when we’re out of that war, the numbers will be at lower numbers than they were even before it started,” Trump claimed.

Inflation is not any lower than anticipated. Last month, a group of economists surveyed by Bloomberg estimated the consumer price index would rise to 3.9 percent. The Organization for Economic Cooperation raised its prediction up from 3 to 4.2 percent. Per Wednesday’s Bureau of Labor Statistics report, the current inflation rate is 4.2 percent.

Still, Trump attempted to repackage the fastest-growing inflation in three years as better than it could’ve been and a sign of good things to come. That’s not good enough for Americans who are struggling to pay for gas, rent, and groceries because of a reckless war with no end in sight.

Trump also dismissed Democrats who’d criticized his gushing over high inflation.

“They’re so bad,” Trump said. “I was talking about inflation numbers that will be so good as soon as the war ends. The numbers will come way down, that’s what I’m talking about.

“I’m always taken out of context,” the president continued. “My inflation numbers will be very low as soon as the war—they’re already very low, but they’ll be very low, because you know the energy brings them up a little bit, because we have to stop Iran from having a nuclear weapon.”

Of course, that doesn’t even begin to qualify as being taken out of context. It was Trump who elided the actual context of the question: the current inflation rate. Not future numbers, or predictions, but the painful reality that Americans are literally paying the price for Trump’s wildly unpopular war. Was he concerned? No, he was delighted.

If anything, the president’s baffling remarks have handed Democrats a winning message for the midterm elections: Trump loves inflation, and thinks that anyone whose struggle to make ends meet should thank him that things aren’t worse.

The Brown University professor chuckled about that scene in the film, a story of a working-class Bostonian who mocks a Harvard graduate student as likely to take Wood’s interpretations as gospel only to drop them the very next year. After all, as a Harvard Ph.D. from working-class Concord, Massachusetts, Gordon Wood had been both of these types and more, while keeping a professorial distance from all. No one could say whether, when he repeated the story of how former House Speaker Newt Gingrich handed out copies of his Radicalism of the American Revolution to new members of the Republican caucus, he had been bragging, trolling, or just reading the room.

The prolific historian of early America burst onto the scene 60 years ago with an essay in the field’s flagship journal titled “Rhetoric and Reality in the American Revolution.” Two schools of interpretation had been battling for some time: “neo-whigs,” who saw the patriots as motivated by “constitutional principles,” versus “progressives,” who saw them as motivated by profound socioeconomic change, for all their rhetoric about liberties. Wood, who had been reading up on social theory, brilliantly arbitrated that debate, maintaining that declining opportunities inspired men to fear what changing imperial politics could do to them and their status as provincial Britons. The Revolution had been conservative in its impulses, even if it had unanticipated radical results. Historians needed a “behaviorist” approach that saw revolutionary rhetoric as “psychological” reality.

In his own way, Wood opened up the understanding of the Revolution to feelings as well as thoughts, to ideology as well as theory. Meanwhile, he was revising his Harvard doctoral thesis, which became The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787. Published in 1969, this pointillist, essayistic yet comprehensive study tracked how understandings of political structure, including the very idea of constitutions, changed under the pressure of revolutionary war and the formation of state governments. An American revision of classical and seventeenth-century English republicanism informed the fledgling republics. In 1787, experience moderated the democratic spirit of ’76. Wood discovered a remarkable knack for explaining how ideas could be new and old, innovative and conservative, at the same time—and how creative political thinking advanced best under the sometimes self-deceiving cover of restoration.

Out of irrationality could come a higher rationality, though not without ironic results. For example, John Adams’s tough-minded insistence that constitutional structures had to reflect the existence of social classes, including aristocrats and plebes, in order to balance them, made him “irrelevant” when enough Americans agreed to disagree, or at least to stop talking about, whether such classes did or should exist.

Wood exaggerated Adams’s unpopularity, but in doing so drove home the sobering point that American republicanism, tending toward Herrenvolk democracy, would have a lot of trouble dealing with the relationship between economic inequality and political power. The course of the 1780s led toward a Madisonian “science of politics” that saved the nation from revolutionary excess yet sought to bury rather than reflect or address economic conflict in its schemes of federalism and representation, creating an American political tradition that couldn’t deal honestly with class or money.

With this flourish, the 35-year old assistant professor performed an acclaimed scholarly triple axel, fashioning a learned interpretation of American origins that seemed to have something for everyone, which was no easier in 1969 than today. At great length and sophistication, he’d offered something to those inclined to celebrate the Constitution, something to those who criticized it, and much to those looking for some way between. The republic, simply put, was moderate yet innovative, advanced and yet caught up in self-deception. Some of the founders were brilliant, yes, but maybe only slightly more so than Gordon S. Wood, who figured out what they knew, what they did, and what they had barely perceived.

Wood caught and rode a wave of sophistication about the workings of ideology. In his hands, disembodied “thought” became culture and politics and made history. One could see it happening in obscure and popular pamphlets, in the plays and newspapers, and in the letters of politicians of the late eighteenth century. Tracing ideological struggle was heady stuff, and the late 1960s and 1970s came to represent something of a golden age for American historians, especially intellectual historians who could claim to explain the motives and worldviews informing critical events. Wood continued to endear himself to scholars with essays that plumbed how understandings of conspiracy and “interests” and “disinterestedness” shaped the debate over the ratification of the Constitution. These turned out to be brilliant middle chapters of his 1991 Pulitzer-winning triptych, The Radicalism of the American Revolution, a work that expanded his interpretation of the emergent American ethos chronologically while keeping republicanism and its tribulations at the center.

“Monarchy” characterized a late colonial era that believed in hierarchy. Social changes undermined those hierarchies in a radically reformative cultural process—“republicanism”— that informed the break from England. Meanwhile, the rise of capitalism further undermined social structures that had never really take strong hold in colonies with more available land and less inherited wealth. Work came to be valued more than lineage; representation in formal, legislative politics mattered more with kings and their appointed governors thrown out. All this dwarfed putative differences between north and south, east and west. The result: The early republic was a society in which democracy and capitalism arose and reinforced each other, much to the disappointment of more rigorously republican politicians who had seen themselves as disinterested men of virtue.

To many readers, Wood had seemingly accounted, in beautiful, measured prose, for both what was radical about the Revolution and why many revolutionaries proceeded to fight for more—or less—of it. One could read Wood as a critic of emergent democracy or even, on the other hand, of capitalism.

Yet as Alfred F. Young, a careful critic, wrote at the time, Wood had not so much distilled the radicalism of the Revolution as magnified it to encompass all of early American history. That sheer interpretative ambition turned out to be an Achilles’ heel. War and violence dissolved in Wood’s egalitarian upsurge. So did settler colonialism and slavery. In the introduction, Wood insisted that it didn’t matter whether political revolution caused or just reflected the social or cultural revolution, and that because it didn’t matter, we should simply credit the radicalism of the revolution for “the anti-slavery and women’s rights movements of the nineteenth century and in fact all our current egalitarian thinking.” This “in fact” made for strange rhetorical alchemy as he continued to stress how exceedingly different late–eighteenth century people were from later Americans.

By the new century, Wood had already begun to complain publicly about a tendency to judge eighteenth-century Americans by what he deemed “presentist” standards. A tense divide over his sometimes enigmatic work and persona ensued, especially among liberals and leftists. Wood’s tendency to lump all Americans together greatly irked a generation of social historians who made regional, class, and urban-rural differences their bread and butter and who worried much less than he did about how to pull American diversity and conflict, not to mention imperial reach, into a common national story. (In a tone-perfect illustration of Wood’s changing reputation among academics, in the 1997 film, Will Hunting first baits the graduate student with the above précis of Wood on radicalism, only to interrupt his predictable response: the regurgitation of a social historian’s comment on how Wood “drastically underestimates the impact of social distinctions predicated upon wealth, especially inherited wealth.”)

Worse, there were very few women, Black people, or Indians in his expansive, transformative, century-long radical revolution. How radical could that be, then? Yet Wood stuck to his guns, even doubling down. It remained “anachronistic” to ask why the patriots didn’t end slavery even as they complained about their political enslavement. Slavery was never questioned until the revolutionaries began to question it, he argued. Those folks simply weren’t part of the American conversation then: The founders didn’t think or talk about them, didn’t consider them as a subject of politics. This explanation held less water when his own definition of revolutionary politics had expanded to include almost everything else besides race and sex.

Wood laid a foundation for a distinctive, genteel kind of “founders” history: one that keeps a quiet distance from uncritical flag-waving by emphasizing at every turn how different the eighteenth century was, still while insisting that everything good about the United States emanated from the founding, even if ironically and unintentionally. Too aware to ignore the threat that alternative histories posed to his mountain of scholarship, he slammed those that bid to take down founder worship, to add other groups to the pantheon of founders, or to dwell on the inegalitarian aspects of what the founders created. He issued a few occasional mild dissents against ahistorical constitutional originalism, but punched left a lot harder and more often than he punched right.

In books like Empire of Liberty, his 2009 entry in the Oxford History of the United States series, and his career-summing Power and Liberty: Constitutionalism in the American Revolution (2021), Wood foregrounded the most optimistic and forward-looking revolutionaries, like Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine, whose understanding of the Revolution as a transformative event in world history seemed to prove his case. His admiration for “the revolutionary generation”—which had once been a minor, more implicit theme in his scholarship, mitigated by the vast distance he discerned between their world and ours—swelled when he confronted those who identified strongly against a past construed as backwards and racist. Republishing the many review essays he wrote for venues like The New Republic and The New York Review of Books, he added afterwords that cast further aspersions on historians who forwarded their “preoccupation” with race, class, and gender, or failed to preserve the requisite balance and appreciation for the Revolution, where Americans go “to refresh and reaffirm our nationhood.”

Yet after the brouhaha over The 1619 Project, in which he participated as an often-quoted critic, Wood good-naturedly admitted just how much that controversy demonstrated what had been missing from the histories his generation had written.

Americans remain stuck with a revolution we rightly perceive as both radical and conservative. For all his insistence on our revolution’s beneficence and singularity, Gordon Wood helped us see that revolutions are as confusing and contradictory as they are compelling in retrospect and prospect. Their true measure is the never-ending debate over how and whether they remade reality—or just rhetoric. Like a number of our best historians—and politicians—he insisted we hang on, for dear national life, to the rhetoric. “To be an American is not to be someone but to believe in something. And of that something most important is the belief that all men are created equal,” he wrote in a 2019 essay. As it was natural for him to suspect the Revolution’s critics, it’s somewhat tragic that his appreciation of revolutionary minds grappling with possibility could be appropriated for causes he did not fully endorse. No doubt, he appreciated the irony.

NOTUS has reported that Connecticut, Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, Oregon, and North Carolina—the last of which Trump won in 2024—have all declined to send a representative to the president’s 16-day fair on the National Mall. Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Washington remain undecided even as the fair begins just two weeks from now.

Each state is supposed to have a 600-square-foot themed booth with a representative or official sent by state leadership. With these states declining to send one, the administration has decided to pick their own. Multiple states said they had no knowledge as to who was chosen to represent their homes or why.

Other states noted the hefty price attached to the event. Michele Walker, the comms director of the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources, told NOTUS her state would have to spend a minimum of $100,000 on travel, hotels, and their themed booth all together.

“We decided early in the process that we do not have the capacity to participate,” Walker said. “Our limited resources are focused on America250 events across North Carolina.”

This news comes just a week after nearly all of the first wave of musical performers—from Young MC to the Commodores—dropped out as well. This lack of enthusiasm only reaffirms that this “Freedom 250” event, unlike the educational America250 commission, is just a birthday party for Trump.

On Truth Social Thursday morning, Trump posted that the U.S. military “will be hitting Iran (Whose Navy, Air Force, Radar, Anti Aircraft, and all other forms of Defense, together with most of its offensive capability, are GONE!), VERY HARD TONIGHT.

“At some point in the not too distant future, we will be taking Kharg Island, and other oil infrastructure points, and assume total control of their Oil and Gas Markets, much like we have with Venezuela, which is working out brilliantly for both Venezuela and the United States of America. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP,” the post read.

Trump’s threats are an alarming escalation, especially considering he previously claimed the U.S. and Iran are close to a deal to end the war. Publicly announcing plans for such an attack also carries risks, as it puts U.S. troops in harm’s way and gives Iran time to prepare countermeasures. Trump could also be bluffing, thinking that the specter of a ground invasion of Iranian territory will force concessions.

That seems to be in line with what he told Fox & Friends Thursday morning. Trump was asked about the post, and complained about media coverage of Iran, claiming the country has been decimated but that news outlets such as The New York Times, CNN, and The Wall Street Journal say that it’s doing well.

“They’re dying to make a deal. They want to make a deal so badly,” Trump said. “We dropped $250 million of bombs on them last night, the whole thing is crazy. And they’re really in submission, they just don’t know it yet.”

Trump on Fox & Friends: "They're dying to make a deal. They want to make a deal so badly. We dropped $250 million of bombs on them last night. They're really in submission. They just don't know it yet." pic.twitter.com/XKW5CGc1CU

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 11, 2026

Trump’s daily accounts of the war with Iran are increasingly incoherent, and it’s tough to tell what’s real and what isn’t. Anything could happen Thursday night, and in the meantime, the world will be watching with uncertainty as a man with visible cognitive decline has his finger on the trigger.

Trump announced Wednesday that he’d directed the military to conduct a “secret mission” to support the flow of energy through the essential trade passageway—as he struggled to justify the U.S. economy reaching its highest annual inflation rate in three years.

Speaking on CNN that night, Connecticut Representative Jim Himes, who serves as ranking member on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, dismissed the president’s claim.

“A lot of that is just flat-out untrue,” Himes said.

CNN: What do you know about what he's saying that Iran didn't until right now didn’t know that we're taking millions of barrels of oil. And this 100 million barrels that Trump says he's actually helped get through the strait.

Himes: A lot of that is just flat out untrue. Let's… pic.twitter.com/IamnOmqSfB

— Acyn (@Acyn) June 10, 2026

“And remember the record here, right. This war was going to be over in a couple of days. For the last three months the Iranians have been two or three days, or maybe a week or two weeks away from striking a deal,” Himes said. “So, let’s just agree that the president has precisely zero credibility on anything that he says about the Iran war.

“But look, you don’t need to be an intelligence expert to understand that in the Strait of Hormuz, you’re not moving anything in secret. With a good pair of binoculars on either coast you can see what’s happening.”

Himes isn’t the only one calling B.S. on the president’s claims: Energy Secretary Chris Wright appeared not to have a clue what Trump was talking about, either.

When asked about the 100 million barrels of oil during a House committee hearing Wednesday, Wright appeared confused and said he was “unaware” of the operation.

“I do not think the president is lying, I think the president is talking casually about our efforts to stop the flow of Iranian oil,” Wright claimed, though Trump was clearly talking about oil that had made it out of the strait, not oil that had been blocked.

The president’s latest examination at Walter Reed Medical Center on May 26 reportedly involved 22 specialists, reported The Washington Post. That puts Trump at a dozen specialists beyond the previous record held by George W. Bush, who once saw 10 specialists in one go.

The White House has not elaborated on exactly why Trump needed so many doctors. Trump officials told the Post that the unconventionally large medical team allowed for a “complete and preventive evaluation” of the president. White House physician Sean Barbabella commented that the assessment found Trump in “excellent health.”

“The involvement of multiple specialists reflects a comprehensive, multidisciplinary evaluation consistent with best practices for executive-level medical care,” the White House said in a statement.

Nonetheless, the figure has contributed to yet more intrigue about Trump’s health as he nears his 80th birthday.

“It is an extraordinary number,” Jonathan Reiner, a longtime cardiologist for former Vice President Dick Cheney, told the Post. “What specialties do they represent? Why so many?”

Trump is the second-oldest man to ever serve as America’s commander in chief, and his increasingly erratic behavior has sparked global concern in recent weeks about his stability and judgment. The 79-year-old has spent hours at Walter Reed Medical Center on multiple occasions over the last nine months, fallen asleep during more than a dozen critical meetings, seemed lost and disoriented around foreign heads of state, frequently slurred his speech, and appeared with discolored and bruised skin on several occasions.

His behavior has also grown increasingly erratic, as he has thrown cheap and petty insults at members of the press, challenged long-standing U.S. alliances, and even taken jabs at the pope.

The American public is apparently wising up to Trump’s age: A Washington Post–ABC News–Ipsos poll released last month found that 59 percent of Americans do not believe that Trump has the mental acuity to lead the country.

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

Donald Trump’s latest claims about the Iran war are lurching wildly in different directions. He just claimed that he loves the inflation it’s creating for reasons that remain impenetrable. He also insisted that he’s about to attack Iran again as retaliation for them shooting down a U.S. helicopter while simultaneously claiming Iran has been totally defeated. It’s all gotten so absurd that his own advisors are struggling to defend his stances, as one extraordinary exchange in Congress with Energy Secretary Chris Wright reveals.

The situation’s moving rapidly and Trump is dramatically confusing matters with his unchecked derangement. So we’re trying to pin down what’s really happening with Ariane Tabatabai, a former Defense Department official under Joe Biden who’s now at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. Ari, nice to have you on.

Ariane Tabatabai: Thanks for having me, Greg.

Sargent: So let’s quickly summarize. Earlier this week, Trump was saying a deal with Iran was imminent within a day or two. Then a U.S. helicopter was shot down. Trump said Iran did it. He launched limited strikes to retaliate. He’s now also said Iran is taking too long and that it will pay the price.

Then on Wednesday, he vowed to escalate hostilities again, saying, “We’re going to hit them hard again today.” By the time you all listen to this, he may well have attacked again—or not. Ari, can you recap where we are here?

Tabatabai: That’s the perfect summary of where we are. We’ve had two parallel tracks that have been ongoing. One is on the diplomatic front, where the United States and Iran have been negotiating on how to sustainably end this conflict and kind of pave the way for further negotiations on other issues of interest, including Iran’s nuclear program, which is one of the main reasons why we’re in this conflict to begin with. We can come back to this.

Then there’s a second track, the military track, where—we’ve had ebbs and flows in this conflict over the past week, as you described. The most recent thing that happened that seems to have led to this latest round of escalation is that the Iranians evidently shot down an Apache helicopter. After that happened, the president had this Truth Social post and said that he was going to be targeting Iran again. He did.

There’s been reporting over the past 24 hours that we even may have struck some Iranian water supplies. I should pause here and let folks know—this is a country that has deeply struggled with water shortages and droughts, and they’re about to enter very, very hot months over there. So if that is actually the case—it seems like U.S. Central Command has neither said yes or no—that would be pretty troubling, in addition to some of the other things we’ve seen over the past few months in this conflict.

But nonetheless, we’re in this new round of escalation that is not only leading to a tit for tat between the U.S. and Iran, but is also again spilling over into other places in the region, including Jordan, Kuwait, and Bahrain, all of which house U.S. forces on their soil.

Sargent: Just to clarify for people, Trump is very clearly saying that he’s going to escalate now. And by the time people listen to this, that may have happened or it may not have happened.

So it’s in this context that Trump told reporters that he loves inflation. The new inflation numbers just came out. They’re devastating for Trump. It’s over 4 percent now. He was asked about this, and he segued to saying that the U.S. has secretly been removing millions of barrels of oil from Iran. We’ll get to what that means in a second. But first, let’s listen to Trump.

Donald Trump (voiceover): You know what I really love? I love the inflation. You know why? Because as soon as this war is over—you know, I can say it now. Something you didn’t know. Do you know we’ve been taking out millions of barrels of oil? Nobody knows it. You know who doesn’t know about it? Iran—until right now.

Sargent: Now, why Trump said the part about loving inflation is a little hard to understand, but with the secret removal of millions of barrels of oil, he seems to mean the U.S. is escorting ships carrying oil out of the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran is keeping closed. Ari, can you shed any light on this?

Tabatabai: It’s really hard, as you know, to make sense of what the president might be trying to say here. He does have a tendency to use verbs for other verbs. It’s really hard for me to say exactly what he meant. I think there’s a few different ways to read the statement.

Yours seems like the right one to me, which is that what is in essence happening is that the U.S. Navy is conducting freedom-of-navigation operations, allowing for tankers to cross the Strait of Hormuz. Obviously Iran has been holding the Strait of Hormuz at risk for weeks now and preventing the oil flow from happening. I think this is the plausible explanation.

There are a few questions to me here, though. One of the key questions is—we’re talking about this diplomatic track that seems to be slowly but surely maybe progressing. It’s clearly not going as fast as Trump would like. These things tend to take time. And again, we’re just a few months away from the midterms. But the surest way to reopen the strait would really be to get a deal, right?

Otherwise we’re going to be spending a lot of money sending assets to the region that are just going to make sure that these tankers are able to move and to get the oil back on the market. That seems like a really interesting use of these very expensive assets. And that is not even counting the human lives that are at stake here. Thousands of people have died throughout the region since this war started.

We’ve had U.S. service members who’ve been killed or injured in this. Of course, our bases and other infrastructure are being targeted throughout the region. So this is putting a Band-Aid on one of the many issues that is cascading out of this conflict. And it is not a sustainable Band-Aid. It is one that we can maybe continue for a bit, but ultimately there needs to be a more sustainable solution here.

Sargent: Well, Trump on Truth Social just announced, in quotes, this secret operation to escort tankers and ships through the strait. He said this: “Today I am pleased to announce that this effort has resulted in more than a hundred million barrels of oil making its way through the strait and into the open market. This wildly successful effort is because the United States of America controls the Strait of Hormuz, not Iran.”

So obviously Trump is absolutely desperate to make it look as if he’s in total control of the Strait of Hormuz and the situation more broadly. But what I’m having trouble understanding is what he means.

He is saying with total—well, clarity’s obviously the wrong word—he is saying what he thinks he means to be that this is actually happening; that a hundred million barrels of oil has been transported out of Iran through the strait because the U.S. is escorting them and that oil has gone onto the open market. Does the U.S. control the Strait of Hormuz? How real is any of this?

Tabatabai: It doesn’t.

Sargent: Is the oil being transferred? Is it happening? Do we know?

Tabatabai: I don’t know. And if it is happening, is it happening on the scale that he says it is? I don’t know. Again, this is somebody who talks about drug prices going down 600 percent. So if you’ve bought any Advil recently, you should really be getting some money back.

I think some of this is hyperbole. He’s not known for being precise, to say the least. It might be that there is some oil that is making its way into the market. We’ll see that in the days to come, we’ll be able to fact-check that. I don’t have that information. The piece where he talks about the control of the Strait of Hormuz is clearly not real. If it were real, then we would not be in this situation to begin with.

It’s part of this narrative that he has about this conflict where he keeps talking about Iran’s military being completely destroyed. Last year, after the summer operations against Iran’s nuclear program, he said that basically their entire nuclear program had been obliterated. And that was not the case, because we’re here again.

And by the way, Iran still has several hundred kilograms of highly enriched uranium on its soil. That is very troubling. Iran still has military capabilities. It’s not 100 percent of what it had at the beginning of this conflict, but it’s not nothing, which is why they were able to shoot down an Apache just a couple of days ago.

And the piece that is really something folks should understand is that we, the United States, are spending billions and billions of dollars sending very expensive, sophisticated weapon systems—munitions, missiles, platforms—to fight what was, even before this war, not a particularly sophisticated military. Iran’s military is not China’s military. It’s not even Russia’s military. They weren’t known for having large, expensive platforms.

This was an unequal war. And even without those sophisticated capabilities, Iran has been able to really create this dilemma for the United States. And we’re here several months later, when the president had said that this would be a war that would be over pretty quickly. So all of this to say, this is just another one of these statements in this conflict that are probably not going to stand the test of time.

Sargent: Probably not. We should note, by the way, that the headlines on the inflation spike are really tough for Trump. The Washington Post says this: “Inflation heats up to highest point in three years, fueled by Iran war.” New York Times: “Inflation jumps as Iran war intensifies price squeeze.” Politico: “Inflation surges to three-year high as Iran fighting drags on.”

Ari, the reason I’m highlighting these is that they directly tie the worsening inflation to Trump’s war. Everybody understands that this is what’s happening. It’s a real rarity that presidential responsibility for the state of the economy is so clear. Your thoughts on all that?

Tabatabai: Look, I’m not an economist, but I also have to go get gas every day—well, I don’t get it every day, but I have to get gas. I see the prices keep going up. And again, we’re really in the depths of the midterm season at this point. We’ve had primaries throughout the country.

Folks are really feeling the hurt of this conflict in a way that other foreign policy decisions don’t necessarily make the results known as much for everyday people. People, when they go to get gas or purchase groceries, they can directly feel the impact of this war. That is not generally the case with foreign policy issues.

So it’ll be really interesting to see, if this conflict continues, how it shapes people’s attitudes as we go into November. My organization, the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, has been doing some polling on the attitudes of Americans about this conflict. It is not a popular conflict, as you can imagine. Republicans, of course, are more supportive than Democrats and independents, but it is by and large a pretty unpopular conflict. This is probably adding to Trump just wanting to get a deal done really quickly.

This is something that many of us in the analytical community had said for years—once you start a conflict, you don’t always end it on your terms. You rarely end it exclusively on your terms, because the adversary gets a vote as well. And he’s discovering that in real time now.

Sargent: You’d think he’s discovering it. He’s certainly acting as if he’s entirely won and then he lurches towards saying that retaliation’s necessary. It’s all very opaque.

I want to get into how hard all this is to defend. Let’s listen to an exchange in Congress where Representative Emilia Sykes questions Energy Secretary Chris Wright.

Emilia Sykes (voiceover): Do you feel like your positions and policy statements are in line with President Trump?

Chris Wright (voiceover): Yes, I hope so.

Sykes: Do you love inflation?

Wright: I love ending Iran’s ability to have a nuclear weapon. I think that’s existential for us.

Sykes: That was not my question. Do you love inflation, yes or no?

Wright: I love ending Iran’s—

Sykes: That is not my question. Do you love inflation, yes or no?

Wright: No, I would prefer lower inflation.

Sykes: You would prefer lower inflation. Do you know that your boss, essentially, President Trump, just stated that he loved inflation?

Wright: He’s an entertaining, hyperbolic guy who’s done tremendous leadership.

Sargent: Note how absolutely terrified Wright is of appearing to differ with Trump in any way at all. Now listen to this exchange about all that oil that Trump says the U.S. is transferring out. Sykes plays audio of Trump making that claim, and then this happens.

Sykes (voiceover): So why would the United States be taking out millions of barrels of oil from Iran?

Wright (voiceover): Well, it’s essential that we prevent oil sales from generating revenue for Iran to spend to develop nuclear weapons—

Sykes: Mr. Secretary, I understand this might be an uncomfortable line of questioning and you don’t want to do it, but you are not answering my question. So I’m going to ask you again and I’m going to hope that you will answer it honestly. Did you know that the United States was taking millions of [barrels] of oil from Iran?

Wright: I’m unaware.

Sykes: So do you think that the president is lying based on the audio that you just heard? And I will send it to you in case you say you didn’t hear it.

Wright: No, I do not think the president is lying. I think the president’s talking casually about our efforts to stop the flow of Iranian oil.

Sargent: That is some mysterious stuff. As far as I can tell, parsing it—it’s really convoluted and crazy—but I think Energy Secretary Chris Wright admitted that Trump basically made the stuff up about the oil being transferred out and said he thinks what Trump really meant was that the blockade, the U.S. blockade, was keeping the oil from getting to the market. Can you make any sense of it?

Tabatabai: I don’t know if I can. It does point to a much larger issue, which is again how we ended up where we are now, which is that this administration is really lacking in people who are both knowledgeable of issues and willing to stand up to the president or give him advice that he may not necessarily like. And that is such a fundamental part of what these Cabinet positions are supposed to be.

They’re not supposed to be yes-men who just stand there and say, Yes, sir, you’re correct about everything you’re doing. They’re supposed to bring their best expertise of their agency or department they represent, and they’re supposed to help the president make a better set of decisions. And that has not happened, which is how—

We’ve talked about the Strait of Hormuz. I can tell you that for years and years, folks who’ve worked on this Iran portfolio in different agencies and departments have known that this would be a possibility—in fact, that it was a very likely outcome of a conflict.

It seems like that viewpoint was not represented, which is how we’ve now had multiple administration officials, including the president himself, say, No one knew that this would happen. No. Everyone who’s worked on this issue knew that this would happen. It is really troubling that he’s not hearing folks tell him things that he wouldn’t necessarily want to hear.

Sargent: Just to pick up on the point you made there, here Chris Wright very visibly does not think of his job as telling the truth to the president or to the American people. He clearly understands his job as being sycophant to the president. It’s very clear.

Tabatabai: It’s really telling that if—I keep thinking about this, having served in a Democratic administration—if this was the way that some of my former bosses had responded to folks on the Hill, Republicans on the Hill, the other party, I don’t think we would have heard the end of it. There would have been impeachment processes.

Yet this is how the administration treats Congress—an atrophied Congress that has frankly not stood up to this administration, even as it’s made bad decision after bad decision on a host of issues, for things that we’re going to be really paying the price for for years to come.

We’ve talked about the implications for people’s paychecks every day and their gas and groceries and so on. But there’s the longer-term cost of these conflicts that we’re not seeing quite yet. There’s the support from allies and partners and our international standing, which sounds like this interesting concept that only academics care about, but it is not.

Our ability to have a good story to tell internationally is how we get a lot of things done that directly impact people every day. We’re going to be paying the price of these facilities that are being targeted, of these defense systems that we’ve spent billions and billions of dollars buying that are now being damaged and destroyed. We’re going to potentially see huge implications for recruitment and retention in the military.

There’s so many things that are going to be happening in years to come that are directly stemming from the actions that the administration is taking. Congress should care more. It should be playing more of a role. And it is just not doing that right now.

Sargent: Just to finish this out, what’s going to happen now? Granted, we don’t know whether by the time people are listening to this, Trump will have bombed Iran again. Maybe he will have completely obliterated it by tomorrow as he’s been threatening to do by the time people listen to this. Maybe not. But understanding that things are in, let’s say, flux, what is the most likely set of scenarios to unfold from here?

Tabatabai: I think what we’re going to see is escalation, kind of a steady-state situation, and then we’ll keep moving forward that way. It’s clear to me that President Trump is ready to move on from this conflict. He has Cuba on his radar. He keeps saying the midterms don’t matter, but they clearly do.

He’s just stuck here, because on the one hand, Iran again gets a vote. On the other hand, any deal with Iran will be problematic for him—will be extremely divisive within his own base. He obviously doesn’t care what Democrats or independents think, but he cares what Republicans think. Many Republicans will be very opposed to any deal with Iran.

Then you have the additional challenge of—we’re degrading Iranian military capabilities, but this is not a country that needs a ton of sophisticated capabilities. They can keep doing this for a while. This is not a democracy that is going to have to respond to its people because gas is expensive. This is an authoritarian regime that is going to be able to continue this for as long as it needs to. Frankly, it probably benefits from it, because it has cover to crack down on dissent, for example, and to continue to have an external enemy to point to.

For Iran, winning is not about winning militarily. It’s about standing up and not losing to the United States. And that is a really bad recipe here for a situation that continues in a way that is problematic for all of the people of that region who have to live with the missile attacks and drone attacks and unpredictability, frankly.

Sargent: It’s going to get a whole lot worse for Americans and even worse for people over there, unfortunately. Ariane Tabatabai, it was really good to talk to you. Thanks so much for coming on.

Tabatabai: Thanks so much for having me.

The letter is a remarkable statement of what prosecutors fear: that the public may lose trust in the justice system, or that their own career has lost its credibility. But it’s significant less for the set of concerns expressed than the fact that they were expressed at all. Things must be especially bad, in other words, for federal prosecutors to call for the serious scrutiny of the public.

They are that bad and worse. Federal prosecutors hold a lot of power, which is one reason why the Trump administration has leaned so heavily on them to defend its dirty work. While technically U.S. attorneys work for the Department of Justice and not for the president, such distinctions feel quite hollow when the acting attorney general pledges his loyalty and affection to Donald Trump so openly—“Thank you very much, I love you, sir,” Todd Blanche said at a DOJ press briefing in April. No wonder Blanche was officially nominated this week to stay in the job. Before all this, he was best known as the president’s personal attorney. No wonder it seems like DOJ lawyers serve in that role too. Mercifully, some of them are not very good at hiding it.

We know how badly some federal prosecutors are performing for the administration for a few reasons. For one, when they fuck up—misleading a grand jury to get an indictment, say, or ignoring a judge’s orders (including orders to comply with previously ignored orders)—federal judges sometimes let us know. Over the past 18 months, a number of federal prosecutors have engaged in apparent misconduct egregious enough that federal judges have rebuked and moved to discipline them. The cases involved may vary in substance—the parties range from hospitals providing gender-affirming care, congressional candidates, and detained immigrants to anti-ICE protesters—but together they tell a story about injustice, influence, and the limits of using the law against its enforcers. It’s often a frustrating story, in which even the most blistering judicial opinion or the most successful exposure of misconduct cannot undo the damage already done by federal prosecutors. But the record each rebuke leaves could be valuable, illustrating what was done to thwart or slow the damage.

Judges are understandably critical when their own orders have been undermined, sometimes flagrantly, by the federal government. When U.S. District Judge Mary McElroy chastised federal prosecutors in a case demanding private medical records from trans children, she framed their actions not as regrettable errors but as an abuse of power. “The United States Department of Justice (“DOJ”) possesses immense prosecutorial authority and discretion,” the judge began a May 14 order. “As citizens, we trust that federal prosecutors, when wielding this awesome power against a state, a company, or certainly against vulnerable children, will play fair and be honest with its counterparts and the judiciary. DOJ has proven unworthy of this trust at every point in this case.”

This admonition followed federal prosecutors’ attempts to go around McElroy, who had quashed a subpoena for medical records, by getting a federal judge in Texas to issue its own subpoena. Their efforts were just one twist in the Trump administration’s ongoing campaign against gender-affirming care for young trans people. DOJ has been crucial to the administration’s attempts to paint hospitals that provide such care as engaging in fraud and thus worthy of investigation, even as judges swat them down. Such failures are not (or not only) the mark of people who don’t know how to do their job. In her order, Judge McElroy singled out the most senior prosecutor among them, “who sat silently by as his counterpart, a junior attorney who has been practicing law for approximately six months and had no relevant information, was forced to answer questions about DOJ’s blatant disregard for the proper course of negotiations.” Judge McElroy found that prosecutors had “misled” the court and “misrepresented and withheld information,” and last week she referred those prosecutors to the court’s discipline committee. (The Department of Justice had already said the judge’s allegations were “without merit.”)

The administration’s attack on transgender rights is far from the only arena in which federal prosecutors have run afoul of judges when pushing the administration’s goals. Trump’s racist “law and order” campaigns, in which federal troops and agents flooded cities such as Washington and Memphis, have also relied on federal prosecutors willing to bring criminal charges that would typically be the purview of local prosecutors. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro was for a time the face of this campaign, after her office in turn flooded federal courts with sketchy cases in which grand juries refused to return indictments while those charged sat in jail for days. “It’s not fair to say they’re losing credibility. We’re past that now,” said Judge Zia Faruqui, in a hearing on a case that Pirro’s office dismissed after holding a defendant for nearly a week. “We’re acting like this is all normal,” the judge remarked. “What’s to prevent people from just getting rounded up off the streets?”

Where federal prosecutors have really shown their eagerness to follow Trump’s mission has been in his campaign of mass deportation, as well as in the project of criminalizing those who oppose it. Across the country, Justice Department lawyers have helped keep immigrants in detention longer, interfered in lawful efforts to return them, and attempted to paint dissent to mass deportations as terrorism. But these prosecutors have also demonstrated their ability to routinely fail in their part of this mission. Hundreds of judges have ruled in favor of immigrants who filed habeas petitions in order to gain release from immigration detention camps, and dozens of indictments against protesters and observers in cities such as Chicago and Minneapolis have been tossed.

These might be the cases that have most reliably elicited pushback from federal judges. “In immigration-related cases alone, hundreds of federal judges, who were appointed by every president since Ronald Reagan, have issued thousands of orders against the Trump administration,” as Madiba K. Dennie pointed out at Balls and Strikes. “At least 44 of the judges to rule against the administration in mass-detention cases were appointed by Trump himself.” In February, Judge Laura M. Provinzino of the U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota held a Department of Justice lawyer in contempt, penalizing him with a $500 fine for each day the government failed to return a detained immigrant’s identity documents.

At least one Justice Department attorney, working for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Minnesota, broke decorum to complain about what such cases were reportedly doing to their well-being. “The system sucks. This job sucks,” said one prosecutor, Julie Le, on an immigration case earlier this year, when U.S. District Judge Jerry Blackwell demanded to know why immigrants he ordered released were still held. “I wish you could hold me in contempt so that I could get 24 hours of sleep.” This was just a few weeks after federal immigration agents shot and killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis.

It’s rare to get such an unvarnished look at one of these prosecutors. But we will soon get more, in a case that offered some of the most egregious examples of their questionable conduct. Last October, six people were indicted in connection with a demonstration outside an immigrant holding facility in Broadview, near Chicago. Federal prosecutors accused them of conspiracy to impede an immigration operation, after an unmarked federal vehicle slowly drove toward them and others who were part of the demonstration. Transcripts in the (now former) Broadview Six grand jury proceedings began to be released this week, after U.S. District Judge April Perry ruled they could be made public, following the collapse of the government’s case. “I have never seen the types of prosecutorial behavior before a grand jury that I saw in those transcripts,” Perry said last month. In this case, we saw something even more rarely aired in public: the responses of federal grand jurors to the claims of federal prosecutors, and the prosecutors’ attempts to get an indictment even after some jurors refused.

The prosecutors’ alleged misconduct in the case is striking in how unbothered they are by potential consequences. On the record, federal prosecutors appeared to openly violate the grand jury process, seemingly handpicking jurors who sided with the government’s version of events. They improperly spoke to grand jurors outside of court, personally vouched for the strength of their case (something that is expressly forbidden), and convened multiple panels of jurors until one returned the indictment the government wanted. “Are you actually presenting any new actual facts or just a different viewpoint on your side?” asked one unnamed grand juror, not long into the government’s second such attempt. The assistant U.S. attorney, Sheri Mecklenburg, answered: “I’m feeling the skepticism already. Are you going to be able to listen with an open mind?” The juror was direct. “I heard this case like last week and I thought it was a crock of shit then and I still think it is.”

“OK. Thank you for your opinion for everybody,” Mecklenburg said. “Have a good evening.” There was then some cross-talk, and Mecklenberg told the juror, “Excuse yourself.” The grand jury foreperson said, “We have to remember we’re recording, as well.” Mecklenburg apologized and said they’d continue. “And thank you to those of you who are staying with an open mind.”

That exchange happened in October last year. The United States Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Illinois only dropped the case a few weeks ago, however, once it seemed likely that their conduct before the grand jury would be exposed in court. It was this case that prompted the former federal prosecutors in this office to make their public statement, hoping that the public would be activated. These transcripts show: They already were. Their voices had been silenced, but they are no longer.

Game-time temperatures at many of the host venues in the U.S. and Mexico are projected to be higher than during any previous World Cup, according to new scientific studies. (The 2022 World Cup was hosted by Qatar, but its desert heat was offset by shifting the tournament from summer to winter and holding matches in air conditioned stadiums.) Climate change has increased the number of extremely hot summer days in 14 of the 16 cities hosting matches during the 2026 Cup, the scientific nonprofit Climate Central found. Perhaps most at risk is Miami, which “now experiences roughly two additional weeks of extreme June and July heat compared to the 1970s,” Climate Central’s Ben Tracy reports.

In anticipation of the exceptional heat, FIFA, the international governing body of soccer, has taken the extraordinary step of ordering referees to enforce a three-minute break halfway through each half so players can rest and hydrate. Nevertheless, the heat could be so intense, especially in Miami, Dallas, Houston, Kansas City, Guadalajara, and Mexico City, that players’ performance—how fast they can run, how many minutes they can play—is projected to suffer at 97 of the 104 total matches. “It has such a huge impact on the way you play,” former pro footballer Marisa Abegg told Tracy. That, in turn, has implications for the flow of play and the outcomes of matches: Teams that rely more on speed or endurance, for example, will potentially be disadvantaged.

Spectators, too, will suffer. Eleven of the 16 venues are open-air stadiums where spectators will endure the full wrath of the prevailing heat and humidity. Health experts warn of increased risks of heat stroke, dehydration, and kidney failure. In response, some stadiums are adding cooling stations, misting tents, and additional medical staffing.

So, a friendly request for our fellow journalists on newsrooms’ sports desks: Acquaint yourselves with the abundant science behind these warnings, via the links in this article. And mention that science occasionally in your reporting and commentary. To ignore climate change would omit crucial context that fans will find useful for understanding why their favorite teams and players excelled or languished during this World Cup.

There will be plenty of opportunities to make the climate connection. Commercials will occupy two minutes and 10 seconds of each hydration break, but, for TV and radio commentators, it will be easy enough during the remaining 50 seconds of airtime to note that these breaks are taking place because, thanks largely to global warming, players are enduring some of the highest temperatures in World Cup history.

A full account of the climate connection would include not only what climate change is doing to the Cup, but also what the Cup is doing to climate change. A Guardian article described how this year’s tournament is “on track to be the “most polluting” World Cup ever, with total greenhouse gas emissions hitting nearly two times the historical average.” The Guardian notes various “FIFA own goals,” including the association’s decision to increase the number of competing teams from 32 to 48. Most impactful, however, was FIFA’s decision to name three different host nations, rather than the usual one. And since Mexico, the U.S., and Canada are large land masses, teams and spectators traveling to and from venues must travel long distances by air, a notoriously carbon-intensive means of transport. Finally, in what The Guardian calls a sponsorship deal “that looks like it was concocted in a greenwashing laboratory,” FIFA in 2024 “signed a four-year partnership deal with Aramco, the state-owned Saudi energy behemoth that is the largest corporate greenhouse gas emitter on Earth.”

In short, there are plenty of climate angles for journalists to explore while covering the 2026 World Cup. The same was true of the Winter Olympics earlier this year, and in 2022, and of the 2024 Summer Olympics. In each case, most coverage was disappointingly silent on the climate connection to these globally beloved sporting events. The next 39 days will reveal whether the 2026 World Cup will be any different.

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

“It’s a new morning in America—fresh, vital,” the voice declares.

The working-class shopper looks up to see a besuited, skeletal, extraterrestrial figure—a politician, it seems—delivering a speech on the TV.

“The old cynicism is gone,” the alien politician insists. “We have faith in our leaders. We’re optimistic as to what becomes of it all. It really boils down to our ability to accept. We don’t need pessimism. There are no limits.”

Director John Carpenter’s 1988 film They Live depicts a society taken over by sinister yuppie aliens. They speak of Lamaze classes and blue corn tortilla chips and retain power by keeping the human population passive and pliant.

The alien politician in this scene serves as a stand-in for Ronald Reagan. After all, Reagan’s most famous campaign ad included the memorable refrain, “It’s morning again in America.” The yuppie aliens, then, might be viewed as hard-line Reaganites.

Yet the politics of the yuppie defies easy categorization. In his fascinating new book, Yuppies, historian Dylan Gottlieb provides a cultural and political biography of the young urban professional. Far from an ancillary historical actor, Gottlieb argues, the yuppie helped fundamentally remake American cities, American politics, and American society in the cutthroat 1980s and beyond.

After springboarding out of the Ivies, yuppies invaded urban spaces, often ending up in New York and working at a Wall Street investment bank, an insurance firm, a law firm specializing in corporate transactions, or as some other cog in the postindustrial, increasingly financialized economy. The prototypical young urban professional worshipped at the altar of meritocracy. They had “made it,” so why couldn’t others? With their fancy embossed diplomas, supposedly eclectic and refined tastes, gaudy salaries, and penchant for ostentatious fitness, yuppies worked diligently to demonstrate that they belonged at the top of the heap.

As their bank accounts grew—evidence of their merit, surely—yuppies raided “up and coming” (and established) neighborhoods, which subsequently turned into yuppie playgrounds. New apartment buildings, sushi restaurants, art galleries, corporate-sponsored marathons, and other yup-nip cropped up in New York and elsewhere, satisfying yuppies while alienating and displacing others.

This transformation of urban environments reflected and shaped broader political and economic shifts. Notably, yuppies helped change the face of the Democratic Party and liberalism by supporting younger, meritocratic, and technocratic candidates, such as Colorado Senator Gary Hart over the old-guard New Dealers who had run the party since the 1930s.

The yuppie-backed New Democrats anticipated and facilitated the rise of what Bill Clinton termed the “New Economy,” driven by high-paying information, technology, and finance jobs and propped up by low-wage service and retail labor. That economic arrangement, for which the yuppies served (and possibly still serve) as poster children, helped widen the gap between the rich and poor and author the dislocations that define today’s American city—namely extreme unaffordability and houselessness.

Recent decades have seen a glut of histories tracing the rise of the right. Although these studies all approached the subject in different ways, as the historian Julian Zelizer observed in 2010, they all rested on the notion that a conservative order “rose” in the late twentieth century while a liberal one “fell.” Since then, scholars such as Lily Geismer, Brent Cebul, and now Dylan Gottlieb have delivered useful correctives to “rise of the right” narratives by writing incisive books about twentieth-century American liberalism. Taken together, their studies have shown not how liberalism and the Democratic Party imploded in the final decades of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, but how they evolved and adapted to structural developments.

As Geismer noted in 2016, organized labor functioned as the beating heart of the New Deal coalition, the electoral base on which Democrats relied from the 1930s through the 1970s or so. Amid deindustrialization and waning union membership, labor lost its luster, and the knowledge worker began to supplant the factory worker as the Democratic Party’s ideal voter. For Democratic leaders and pundits, the factory worker symbolized a bygone era—the post–World War II moment of mass production and widely shared prosperity. The knowledge worker, on the other hand, gestured toward an exciting new economic order predicated on tech, finance, service, and inequality.

Geismer examined the political lives of knowledge workers in her magisterial 2015 book Don’t Blame Us, concentrating on so-called suburban liberals along Massachusetts Route 128. Gottlieb’s Yuppies supplies a sequel of sorts, the “first social history of financialization,” in his words. If the knowledge worker represented the faceless technocratic expert behind the New Economy, the yuppie served as its highly visible and divisive mascot.

Gottlieb’s story begins with the “unshackling of Wall Street” in the Carter and Reagan years. Deregulation helped make the finance industry more lucrative and thus more appealing for recent college grads, particularly those coming from elite institutions. Banks also recruited aggressively on Ivy League and Ivy-plus campuses, while business schools worked in tandem with investment firms to develop a pipeline of young, exploitable, entry-level analysts (and future MBA students). As a result, Gottlieb documents, a “massive wave of yuppies” hit investment banks during the 1980s. Whereas only 3 percent of Wharton seniors went into investment banking in the late 1970s, 34 percent of the graduating class of 1987 did.

Once they arrived in New York City, the finance capital of the world, these yuppies often encountered harsh working conditions, especially during the chaotic mergers and acquisitions boom of the 1980s. Yuppie lawyers who joined Skadden, Arps, Meager, and Flom, the country’s most profitable law firm in the ’80s, “work[ed] longer hours, under closer managerial oversight, on smaller and less intellectually demanding piecework, with less meaningful training, all for narrower chances of promotion to partner.” Still, most yuppies toughed it out in the city, in part because of the allure of urban living.

The yuppies needed the city, and the city needed the yuppies. New York had taken a beating in the 1970s. A fiscal crisis had brought the city to the brink of bankruptcy and prompted cuts in essential services—police, fire, sanitation, and beyond. These cuts intensified many of the city’s existing problems and made New York an increasingly unlivable place. Yuppies, many believed, could save the city. But the city had to burn first.

As Gottlieb illuminates, the “urban renaissance” offered by the yuppies—the sidewalk cafés, the packs of joggers, the leafy avenues of renovated brownstones—required the “urban terror” of harassment, displacement, and even arson. On Manhattan’s Upper West Side; in Hoboken, New Jersey; in Park Slope, Brooklyn; and elsewhere, speculators at first employed less incendiary methods to remove poor, working-class, and even middle-class tenants to make room for yuppies. When they failed to evict these tenants through quasi-legal means—exploiting rent-control loopholes, for instance—they resorted to “steadily escalating harassment.” If these methods proved ineffective, they turned to the torch.

Deadly, deliberate fires engulfed many parts of New York City and its adjoining areas in the 1970s and early 1980s. Hoboken’s proximity to Manhattan—a feature that marketers emphasized with almost comedic glee—made it a prime target for arson. A January 1979 fire intentionally set at a Hoboken apartment building killed 21 people and permanently displaced 130 others. With buildings destroyed, owners collected insurance payouts and sold the land for development. And once sites in newly desirable neighborhoods were razed, new buildings sprang up within a couple of years, commanding pricier rents. Hardly anyone would face serious repercussions for the arson-for-profit wave that swept over the city in this moment.

As urban terror unleashed an urban renaissance, yuppies ran wild. Training for road races—marathons, half-marathons, and the like—emerged as a favorite yuppie pastime in New York City and beyond, no doubt because it reflected and reinforced the meritocratic myth. “Personal discipline, delayed gratification, obsessive time management, constant self-analysis, long-range planning,” writes Gottlieb, “were just as vital to marathon training as they were to the cult of individual performance demanded by law firms and investment banks.”

Taste—in more than one sense—served as another key site of yuppie exploration and expression. In the 1980s, marketers identified, and brands aggressively targeted, a growing “yuppie market”—a distinct class of consumers with large disposable incomes who privileged “premium” goods. Through their consumption—again, in more than one sense—yuppies could demonstrate their discernment, particularly in the realm of food and beverages. Here, Gottlieb explains, drawing on Pierre Bourdieu, yuppies could “turn … economic capital into social and cultural capital.”

For example, ordering and consuming sushi, the “iconic food of the 1980s,” “required one to have facility with chopsticks, comprehend dozens of foreign-language terms, and tolerate the consumption of raw fish.” By satisfying these requirements, yuppies could prove that they had earned their spot atop the social hierarchy.

Though often understood as an “apolitical demographic” or even one affiliated with the Reagan right, yuppies played a central role in cleaving the Democratic Party from its “traditional power bases of organized labor and the urban political machines that had powered the New Deal coalition.”

Though Gary Hart ultimately failed to secure the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984 (or 1988 with his ill-fated Monkey Business campaign), he encapsulated an emerging yuppie political ethos that blended “traditional liberalism and conservative austerity.” Hart also foreshadowed the Democratic Party’s reorientation toward professional-class voters and Wall Street, the echoes of which we’re still hearing today. As Gottlieb illustrates, a young congressman named Chuck Schumer, who represented the yuppie utopia of Park Slope, actively sought (and received) sizable contributions from investment banks in the early 1980s. He was ahead of the curve. The rest of the party soon followed suit.

Democrats continue to bicker over the shifts that yuppies engendered. The party’s left wing calls for severing ties with Wall Street and Silicon Valley and resuscitating some version of the Reverend Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition. More moderate and conservative Democrats—including neo-yuppies such as Pete Buttigieg—seem perfectly content to accept donations from Wall Street, to prioritize professional-class voters, and to gravitate toward the political center (whatever that means). As John Carpenter exclaimed in 2020, “I made They Live back in 1988, and nothing has changed!”

In the third decade of the twenty-first century, however, the yuppie dream is fading. Attend the correct schools, develop the correct “skills,” and work your way into the correct professional circles, the pitch went, and you too can enjoy the perquisites of yuppie living. But the inheritors of the New Economy, millennials and zoomers, got a raw deal. The promise of the New Economy foundered on the shoals of the Great Recession. Economic uncertainty, growing wealth inequality, and forever war have fueled right-wing authoritarianism at home and abroad, and yuppie liberalism has proven wholly incapable of stemming the tide. The intensifying threat of automation and the increasing casualization of labor have wiped out promising entry-level jobs. Meanwhile, soaring inflation, stagnant wages, and rising home prices have severely diminished the quality of life for many young Americans.

Amid these formidable challenges, the Democratic Party may need to pivot once again—away from yesterday’s yuppies and suburban liberals and toward the growing numbers of downwardly mobile Americans (young and old alike) whose disillusionment and desperation reveal the limits of yuppie politics as usual.

But with hours before the first kickoff, there are problems afoot. FIFA’s ticket inventory remains vastly undersold (due in large part to its exorbitant prices), hotel block bookings have been canceled due to low visitorship, and other superlatives have all but overtaken any event excitement: This World Cup is expected to be the most expensive, the hottest on record, the most emissions-producing, and, potentially, the one that will be remembered for anything other than the game.

For months ahead of the tournament, international human rights groups and U.S. civil society organizations alike had been sounding the alarm over the impending human rights nightmare that awaited, largely (if not entirely) perpetrated by the principal host: the United States, where most of the record 104 games will be played, including the final.

Far from keeping politics out of play, the Trump administration has wasted no opportunity to use this global stage to debut a new American image, on the eve of the nation’s 250th anniversary, one that is exclusive, exclusionary, and vainglorious. As many had already anticipated, the political tenor of the U.S.-hosted World Cup is set to eclipse the tournament itself.

“The prospects of this World Cup being remembered for reasons other than football are very high, and it should be that way,” said Shaista Aziz, co-founder of The Three Hijabis and a member of the U.K.-based Stop Trump Coalition’s “Football Against Fascism” campaign.

But that doesn’t seem to be of particular concern to the tournament’s presiding host and FIFA head Gianni Infantino’s close friend, U.S. President Donald Trump, who stole the spotlight at last year’s Club World Cup and quite literally refused to leave the stage. Trump has already playfully rebranded this World Cup as the “MAGA-FIFA World Cup,” with FIFA’s passive consent, and rights advocates and fan groups expect him to host the event accordingly.

The official FIFA fan zone in Washington, D.C., for example, will be co-organized by Freedom 250, a project by the Trump administration to celebrate the nation’s semiquincentennial, which is also the organizer for the “America is Back” rally on June 24 at the same location on the National Mall, in which the president will be the headliner.

“Trump and the MAGA project are going to stamp themselves all over this tournament to burnish MAGA via soccer,” said Nicholas McGeehan, program director at the rights group FairSquare. “And given the power of the game and the way it’s going to be broadcast around the world, it’ll be effective.”

It’s not the first time that the World Cup has been used for soft-power purposes, but seeing it done so flagrantly has rights advocates no less concerned for its consequences, not only in host cities but also abroad.

Looming over the proceedings is the fact that the U.S., aided by Israel, is actively at war with Iran. The fact that Iran is competing in the World Cup hosted by its aggressor will not be lost on anyone, but hostilities that take place during the tournament might.

“This cannot be used as an attempt to sportswash Donald Trump’s regime, and indeed all of [its] horrific foreign policy interventions (or lack of interventions),” said Aziz, who is particularly concerned that the tournament will be used to veil Israel’s ongoing assault on the occupied West Bank and Lebanon—as mega sporting events have been utilized as cover in the past—with the support of the U.S. “There should be no normalization of [it] in relation to this World Cup.”

While Trump has previously stated that “fans from all over the world will be welcome,” few have ever actually believed that the first ever World Cup in which the host nation is at war with a qualified nation will be as hospitable as advertised.

Currently, Iran’s national team has only been issued visas under express warning by U.S. officials that they do not “abuse this system to sneak terrorists into the United States under false pretenses,” while key staff have been denied entry. The team must also leave U.S. soil on the same day as their matches. The Football Federation Islamic Republic of Iran now says that its ticket allocation has been revoked, effectively stranding fans who already paid to see their country compete.

The Trump administration’s unfriendliness has also extended to other tournament participants: Two players—one from Switzerland and one from Morocco—had their visas denied until the eleventh hour, and one source alleges that the latter’s refusal was due to his father’s appearance (particularly his beard). Meanwhile, an Iraqi player was questioned for seven hours at Chicago O’Hare Airport upon arrival for the tournament, and the Iraqi team’s photographer was denied entry due to “vetting concerns,” according to a spokesperson for U.S. Customs and Border Patrol. Moreover, both the Senegalese and Uzbek teams were forced to undergo unusually strict security protocols when they arrived in the U.S.

Most recently, FIFA referee Omar Artan, from Somalia, was denied entry into the U.S.—after being detained for 11 hours at Miami International Airport and repeatedly questioned about whether he’d ever met anyone from the Al Shabab militant group—just days before the start of the tournament, despite having a valid travel visa. Somalia is listed among several countries on the Trump administration’s travel ban list—which has also shut out fans from competing nations Haiti, Iran, Senegal, and Ivory Coast. FIFA initially left Artan, who was named Africa’s best referee just last year, high and dry before finally providing him with some “behind the scenes” support.

Fans from Scotland, too, have reported last-minute changes to their travel permits to the U.S., moving from “approved” to unauthorized within a week of the tournament’s opening game. One Scottish fan, in fact, had his visa revoked an hour before his flight. Acting Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security Lauren Bis explained more recent rejections as, simply, “the Trump administration is enforcing immigration laws.”

At this point, fans are more than comfortable referring to the U.S. as a regime, as most decisions determining who is welcome and who isn’t appear to be at the whim of the administration in the moment.

“This World Cup won’t be remembered as ‘the most inclusive World Cup,’ but as the World Cup that actually kept the world outside,” said Andrea Florence, executive director of the Sport and Rights Alliance.

It may surprise people to know that this was meant to be the first ever human rights–focused World Cup in the tournament’s history, one in which specific human rights metrics were applied to the bidding evaluation process. Nine years later, “we’re still having this conversation,” said former Australian National Team captain and broadcaster Craig Foster, in a virtual press conference recently held by the Sport and Rights Alliance.

Given how quickly FIFA abandoned its own human rights policy—which, if it worked in the first place, would have been deployed to protect players and support staff from harassment by the host’s immigration enforcement agencies—it’s hard to believe that the global sports body’s commitments ran particularly deep. “FIFA has said, ‘We will conduct football in the way that Trump sees fit,’” said Foster. “Anything that is not consistent with what Trump thinks is right in the world places you at risk.”

Perhaps the most worrying thing for fan groups and rights advocates is that they have no idea what to expect at this tournament, in terms of what the rules are and how consistently they’ll be applied.

Take, for example, the role of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the most contentious element of the tournament’s security apparatus. The Department of Homeland Security has assured that every agency will be on-site at the stadiums but that they are not expected to be deployed for immigration enforcement—messaging that contradicts what DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin told CBS News only last month: “ICE always says immigration enforcement. We’re always going to do that. But we’re not there for solely that purpose.”

“ICE has never been known to color inside the lines,” said Jennifer Li, director of the Center for Community Health Innovation at Georgetown Law. “We know that ICE will be at stadiums, period. The question is whether ICE will actually be conducting enforcement operations [there].”

How roles between law enforcement agencies will be delineated is also unclear.

“We don’t know,” said Julia Roig, one of the lead organizers for No ICE in the Cup, a group of civil society members across the political spectrum who are organizing actions around the tournament for community safety. “That’s kind of the nature of the threat right now—to keep everybody distracted and feeling fragmented with the chaos.”

FIFA has offered little more than a boilerplate statement in response to fears about fans entering the host government’s hostile human rights environment. “Any journalist should attempt to get FIFA staff to say the word ‘ICE’ out loud,” said Minky Worden, director of global initiatives at Human Rights Watch, who was also in the press conference. “They won’t do it, and that means that they are not addressing the direct risks to fans, players, journalists, communities, and workers.”

Between American overreach and FIFA’s abdication of any responsibility over its own event, said McGeehan, “this is, quite obviously, the most problematic World Cup in history.”

FIFA does have a grievance mechanism to report on human rights abuses, but Worden said it’s very poorly publicized. What’s more, said Florence from the Sport and Rights Alliance, “it’s not functional.” Abuse reports are handled internally by FIFA, which may not have capacity to address the issue and may also choose not to, especially if it involves FIFA itself.

“It’s a World Cup without rules, without any commitment from FIFA,” said Ronan Evain, executive director of Football Supporters Europe, at the same press conference. “Once you arrive in the U.S., you’re on your own.”

It’s fallen to local activist organizations to fill the vacuum left by FIFA. Danny Navarro, the D.C.-based content creator behind the TravelFutbolFan Instagram account, has been giving guidance to visiting and local fans, as well as informing them of the political overtures of the tournament.

“Best-case scenario is no one gets detained or deported from a soccer match, [or] we don’t have anyone dying at the stadium,” said Navarro. “That’s probably the best I’m hoping for.”

The onus, then, is on the fans to keep themselves safe. “Fans have to come ready and absolutely not depend on FIFA, because FIFA is not there to protect them,” said Navarro. “FIFA is there to make money, end of story.”

But local community groups have their own contingency plans—which have been battle-tested over the last year.

In the U.S., “we do not suffer from a lack of civil society oversight or nonprofit organizations,” said Li, who also leads Dignity 2026, a coalition of civil society organizations across labor, sports equity, and civil rights, coordinated through Georgetown Law’s O’Neill Institute.

For the past few years, Li has been helping organize local stakeholders in host cities to prepare for the tournament. “We actually have a robust, rich culture of grassroots groups across all these cities, who have a good idea of what they want and what they need, and what are the missing pieces from their cities.”

In lieu of any real assurances from FIFA on the safety of fans and local communities, civil society organizations have stepped in to effectively absorb the occasion of the World Cup into their battle-worn rapid response infrastructure. Volunteer immigration lawyers across the country are standing by, including at airports, ready to avail themselves to traveling fans in need of legal support. A mass Know Your Rights effort is also underway, both digitally and on-site in and around stadiums in World Cup host cities, to inform fans of their constitutional rights, for instance via the Immigrant Legal Resource Center’s campaign distributing wallet-size “red cards” for fans and community members to carry in case they are confronted by law enforcement.

“Local supporters and civil society organizations feel like we have a duty to help educate and welcome people into our cities during this tournament and, with that, to help them stay safe,” said Bailey Brown, president of the U.S.-based Independent Supporters Council, or ISC, a collective of North American soccer supporter groups and a member of Dignity 2026.

Brown also directs fans to Frontline FC, a joint effort by ISC and Dignity 2026 that connects visitors to “fan embassies” in host cities and provides city guides created by local soccer fans to visitors. The site also provides Know Your Rights information for visitors and workers, as well as important local and national hotline information, including what visiting fans need to know about immigration enforcement, encampments or unsheltered community members, and emergency medical needs.

No ICE in the Cup has also organized a series of trainings, on Know Your Rights, de-escalation, and political violence and repression in host cities in the lead-up to the tournament. During the tournament itself, the organization will be hosting watch parties in friendly restaurants and other locations across the country to establish safe zones for fans to gather. “We want it to be a celebration,” said Roig.

Realistically, fan groups and civil society organizations have virtually no ambitions for this tournament beyond protecting as many people as possible. “We’re talking about mitigation—not even prevention—at this point,” said Li.

Trump has previously stated that “reasonable” protest would be permitted during the tournament, but what is considered reasonable is as mutable as anything else in this tournament’s planning.

The ambiguity has left a lot of room for doubt, especially without any assurances from FIFA that fans and tournament participants will have their right to protected speech honored. (FIFA only recently restored its anti-racism and anti-discrimination campaign messaging after quietly removing them for last year’s Club World Cup.)

Germany’s sporting director has already warned the squad against making political statements at this tournament, encouraging them to keep sports and politics “somewhat separate”—a notable departure from their collective political gesture in Qatar four years ago, in protest of FIFA’s threat to sanction players for wearing “OneLove” armbands.

“Four years ago, we didn’t have a climate in Qatar whereby if athletes made a statement during the World Cup, [they] would be removed from the country or publicly attacked by the president of that country,” said Foster, the former captain for Australia. “That’s certainly the case now.”

“For these foreign athletes, I do not expect them to be as vocal, especially if they’re having to play here in the States,” said Navarro. “I think it’s more important for them to just show up on the field and let the football do the talking, because that’s just gonna be more meaningful, perhaps, than speaking out.”

There are other ways for players to protest too, whether that’s by wearing pins with political messages or petitioning FIFA for stronger safety measures against extreme heat.

As for fans, no one expects their compliance, even with Trump’s veiled threat of deploying the attorney general to police them. “Resistance looks different for everybody,” said Navarro, who anticipates acts of defiance as discreet as bringing a reusable, collapsible water bottle to the games.

But we should also expect more verbose displays of resistance, as well. Protest is already somewhat of a World Cup tradition, and advocacy groups expect this tournament to be no different.

“We are [watching] this World Cup at a time when dissent is being cracked down on in ways we’ve not witnessed before in the West—ways that Western nations lecture so-called ‘third-world countries’ [about],” said Aziz. “This is the backdrop, but without a doubt, people will protest.”

“Trump understands the power of spectacle to influence his project,” said McGeehan of FairSquare. But, try as he might to curate it in his favor, the spotlight won’t only be on Trump—and when it is, he cannot guarantee adulation (despite his belief to the contrary).

All of which raises a question: Are these really plausible pickup opportunities for Democrats? The selection of these seats, it turns out, is backed up by some detailed internal polling and research. The findings shed light on the party’s perennial debate about how to win back various working-class and Trump-curious constituencies—and offer reasons for cautious optimism.

The research into these places—which was conducted by the Democratic firm BlueLabs for American Bridge and described to The New Republic—tells a somewhat complicated story. To start with, the most eye-opening finding is that a lot of voters in these red places blame Trump and the GOP for their economic woes.

To gauge this, American Bridge modeled a target universe of voters in these regions, using survey research, vote history, and other techniques. This voter universe includes people souring on Trump (they voted for him but now disapprove), people deemed highly persuadable (not rigid partisans), and people who describe themselves as in some sense economically vulnerable.

The pollsters then asked these pools of voters if they see the economy worsening and who they blame for it. The answers they got back from four states are striking:

• In Iowa, 58 percent of these targeted voters see the economy worsening and blame Trump for it, and 56 percent blame the GOP.

• In Michigan, 63 percent of these voters blame Trump, and 61 percent blame the GOP.

• In North Carolina, 51 percent of these voters blame Trump, and 48 percent blame the GOP.

• In Pennsylvania, 54 percent of these voters blame Trump, while 57 percent blame the GOP.

Drilling down further, the findings are very similar among that pool of voter groups within the specific House districts (all of which Trump won in 2024) that American Bridge is targeting in these states. Among them: two in Iowa (the 1st and 2nd), two in Michigan (the 4th and 10th), one in Ohio (the 7th), one in Pennsylvania (the 8th), and four in North Carolina (the 3rd, 5th, 9th, and 11th).

So what do these voters want? Well, among the targeted constituencies in these districts, the testing found, a certain type of economic messaging resonates. It blames insurance companies and other conglomerates for high medical and prescription drug costs and hits big corporations for price gouging and tax avoidance. It blames Trump and Republicans for allowing these things to happen. And finally, that messaging vows that Democrats will crack down on them.

Similarly, regions hit hard by Trump’s tariffs and Iran-war-related costs are very responsive to arguments about those things. Among targeted voters in Iowa’s 1st and 2nd districts, for instance, one message that resonates hits Republicans for backing Trump’s tariffs and his war with Iran, arguing that they’ve hiked grocery and energy costs and hurt farmers who export goods. In short, what appears to work is a populist economics that centers villains, hits Trump and Republicans for enabling them, and pledges action.

All this is backed up by public polling. The latest Economist/YouGov poll has Trump’s approval on the economy and inflation in the twenties. And a new analysis from The Argument finds Trump’s net approval deeply underwater in many red states (minus eight in Iowa and Ohio; minus 18 in purplish North Carolina) with competitive Senate races in them. As Paul Krugman documents, the real conditions of the rural economy are so bad that even rural voters disapprove of Trump’s stewardship of it.

Our debates over Democrats and the working class have gotten somewhat scrambled by Graham Platner’s Senate run in Maine. (Despite deeply troubling revelations about his Nazi-like tattoo and alleged violence toward women, he easily won the nomination Tuesday and Democrats appear committed to him.) Platner works as an oyster farmer, served in combat, prominently displays those tattooed arms, and speaks an effective language of left populism that’s rooted in his personal struggles to get by.

Yet Platner’s somewhat more privileged backstory (his father is an Ivy League grad and lawyer), while not detracting from his pro-worker bona fides, also highlights a phenomenon that’s explained well by Noam Scheiber. The “working class” is a complicated entity these days. It can’t be simplified into “those without a four-year college degree,” though for polling purposes it’s useful and the educational divide does remain significant in determining social outcomes.

Nor does the “working class” map neatly onto the mid–twentieth century picture of the predominantly white, heavily male industrial working class that—bafflingly—remains a touchstone in our political debates. The working classes—for the purposes of our politics—span all kinds of people. They arguably include everyone from conventional “hard hat” and manufacturing workers, to professionals pushed into retail work, to exurban Trump-backing owners of ailing local construction or plumbing businesses, to immigrant home care workers, to denizens of the gig economy, and many other categories.

The American Bridge approach seems designed to take stock of all these constituencies. It reaches people who voted for Trump but aren’t at all committed to him, people who drift between the parties (Trump made inroads with such groups in 2024), and people who are getting hammered economically (a quite large and varied group these days).

Meanwhile, in some of these districts, Democrats are fielding candidates who have biographical roots in this multifaceted working class and are familiar with its struggles. In Iowa’s 1st district, Christina Bohannan is a law professor but grew up in a trailer park. In Michigan’s 10th, Christina Hines, a former prosecutor, has relatives who are autoworkers. In North Carolina’s 11th, in Appalachia, Jamie Ager is a fifth-generation farmer.

Note that one of American Bridge’s ads, in Iowa’s 2nd district, features a personal trainer who voted for Trump in 2024. He comes across as representative of gig economy workers, and he now feels betrayed by Trump as he struggles under the weight of war-fueled inflation. As American Bridge president Bradley Beychok said in an emailed statement, working-class voters of all kinds are “pissed” over everything from higher healthcare and grocery costs to gas prices, and “this fall they will make their voices heard.”

Economic discontent has plainly widened the possibilities for Democrats in surprising ways. As Lauren Egan reports for The Bulwark, even the Senate seat of GOP incumbent Cindy Hyde-Smith in Mississippi is no longer a pipe dream for Democrats, as rural hospitals teeter toward closing and soybean farmers get clobbered amid Trump’s carnage.

So the potential for a very, very broad midterm map looms large. Democrats should be contesting territory everywhere. And they appear to be doing just that. Because in an environment like this, the truly unexpected can happen—and it can happen in some very unexpected places, too.

Democratic Representative Emilia Sykes grilled Wright during his testimony before the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, asking him if he loves inflation. Dumbfounded, Wright said that he loved Iran not being able to get a nuclear weapon, only for Sykes to press the question until Wright finally answered that he prefers lower inflation. Sykes then pointed out that Trump stated earlier in the day that he loves inflation.

Wright tried to put his best spin on Trump’s answer.

“He’s an entertaining, hyperbolic guy who’s done tremendous leadership, and on balance, he’s driving inflation down—” Wright said before Sykes cut him off, suggesting that Wright doesn’t love inflation, but Trump does. Then, Sykes asked Wright if he was aware that the U.S. was taking millions of barrels of gasoline from Iran.

here's the full clip of Rep. Emilia Sykes's brilliant line of questioning that made Chris Wright squirm by confronting him with the completely unhinged comments Trump just made in the Oval Office about inflation and the war in Iran pic.twitter.com/iDlG7Mk84P

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 10, 2026

Wright didn’t seem to understand, only for Sykes to press him again and then play audio of Trump claiming to be taking out “millions of barrels of oil.” Sykes then asked if Wright was aware of the U.S. seizing Iranian oil.

Wright finally replied that he was not, and Sykes then asked him if he thought the president was lying.

“Oh, no I do not think the president’s lying. I think the president’s talking casually about our efforts to stop the flow of Iranian oil—” Wright started, before Sykes cut in, asking if it was appropriate to speak casually about war in which 13 U.S. military servicemembers were killed.

After Wright defended Trump’s manner of speaking and said the country was better for it, Sykes laid the problem bare.

“[Trump] is clearly keeping you in the dark about what he is doing in Iran, and now you are sitting here in this committee unaware that the president just made an announcement about millions of barrels that they have taken from Iran and stated in that very, very clearly, people don’t know but now we get to know, but unfortunately, he sent you here and you didn’t know it. What is your response to that?” Sykes asked.

Wright paused, and said “I’m very proud to serve with president Trump. He’s been tremendous leadership in a time of great stress right now. I’m proud of what he’s doing, proud to be part of the team.”

Trump later claimed on Truth Social that the “secret mission” in Iran meant that more than 100 million barrels of oil had passed through the Strait of Hormuz, not coming from Iran directly. Still, it’s clear the energy secretary has no idea what’s going on.

Trump seems to be either experiencing cognitive decline, or keeping his Cabinet in the dark. In either case, it’s hard for the public to know exactly what’s going on when Trump’s advisers have to adapt their public comments on the fly to go with whatever incoherent thing the president has just said.

Perry Bacon: This is The New Republic show Right Now. I’m the host, Perry Bacon. I’m here Wednesday morning after the primaries happened in Maine—very interesting. Graham Platner has been capturing the attention of the nation. And so I’m joined by Billy Kobin. He’s a reporter at the Portland Press Herald. Portland, of course—Portland, Maine, is the other Portland, we’ll call it. Billy, thanks for joining me.

Billy Kobin: You bet, Perry. It’s the original Maine.

Bacon: It’s the original Maine. That’s good to know. So I guess first of all, I’ll start in the broadest terms possible. If you had told me last June that Janet Mills, the two-term governor of Maine, would run for the Senate and lose by 50 points to someone named Graham Platner, I would have had some questions.

Ultimately, this is a big thing that happened here, right? A big surprise. Even though Graham’s been leading for a while, stepping back, this is a weird thing that’s happened, right?

Kobin: Yeah. It’s worth putting it in that context. It was last August that I got this initial email from some guy named Joe Calvello—realized that he has ties to Zohran Mamdani, he’d been working in PR for Fetterman. I think then the Fight Agency came up, Morris Katz came up. But that initial email was like, I have this guy named Graham Platner, he’s from Sullivan, Maine—which those of us here in Maine know is a small town. I think the email had a small typo in it. It just didn’t come off as, Oh wow, this is the super-polished guy.

But at the same time, there were whispers already that the New York Times was doing a piece—a profile of this new candidate in the race to try to unseat Susan Collins. You had that sense of something’s a little different here. Jordan Wood was the only one in the race at that point. He’s this former Capitol Hill operative who worked for Katie Porter of California, actually, and then is from Maine. He was the only one in the race really at that point.

Bacon: But we assumed Mills was running, or at that point it was rumored that Mills might run, and she was the big dog in the race, so to speak, right?

Kobin: Exactly. But then this guy—all of a sudden, within a day, he had all this national press. And we were only in August. Mills was still two months away from getting in, but we thought at the time maybe she’s going to expedite the timeline, maybe she’s going to speed things up, try to jump in now. And no, it didn’t come until October. And by that point, Graham had rally after rally after rally. That was huge. He had Bernie Sanders come with him.

So again, like you said, I think it’s worth stepping back and thinking: wow, in August we were just getting introduced to this guy for the most part, and now we expected him firmly to win yesterday, despite anything else happening controversy-wise.

Bacon: You said something interesting—that the press came. So what came first? The national press came and the big crowds came? Or did the big crowds come and then the national press? It was interesting the way you framed it. Did the press get there first, in a certain way?

Kobin: Yes. Press first. And to specify, it was on an embargo last August.

Hey, I’m going to give you an interview on a Monday with Graham over the phone, and then Tuesday morning, 5:00 a.m., you can post it. Everybody respected that embargo, too. The New York Times followed it. The Press Herald followed it. I was at the Bangor Daily News actually at the time, the other statewide paper in Maine, so I followed it. Everybody followed it.

But what was interesting too is his website went live that Monday, probably as a shell. And we noticed that and were like, Should we break a story on this guy? And then we were just like, There’s nothing really on the website. So it’s just funny again how small-scale it felt at first.

But then, as soon as those first stories came out on a Tuesday morning in the second or third week of August, people really started latching on. And then Labor Day, the rally came with Bernie and Troy Jackson, who’s running for governor in Maine. And by that point, people were all in on the Graham train.

If you’re a progressive really wanting to beat Susan Collins, you felt, Gosh, finally, this is somebody who’s a little more down-home, aggressive, isn’t trying to play nice and say she’s done some good things for Maine. We’ve got to just replace her.

He was trying to say, No—she’s voted with Trump most of the time. Let’s not keep giving her credit for trying to play nice at times or be in the middle at times. We’ve got to call her out. And I think that obviously resonated with a lot of voters—not just Democratic voters, but independent voters.

Bacon: What was the initial—you interviewed him. It sounds like you interviewed him before he announced. What was the initial interview like? How long was it? What’s he like at the beginning?

Kobin: Yeah. Over the phone. I would say pretty authentic-sounding. I called him, and he—

Bacon: You had never heard of Graham Platner before, right?

Kobin: People who did had known him because of the oyster company that he runs, because he had been featured in a few Down East magazine or food-related features. And then Jared Golden actually had mentioned him in a newsletter, a news release one time—as in, Hey, I’m meeting with some fishermen, and this is this guy. But it wasn’t a politics-focused reference. It was Jared Golden just meeting with somebody.

So you notice the voice right away—the gruff voice. You see a photo of him and you’re like, Yeah, wow, he looks like he was created out of a video game for this exact purpose. He’s doing kettlebell swings in his launch video. He’s by the water.

But no, that phone call with him was probably not super long. He gave me however much time I wanted, which I probably only took 15 to 20 minutes, because I knew I wasn’t going to write a 2,000-word launch. It’s not really fair to do that for every candidate at first.

But I asked him about policies. Healthcare came up, and he brought up right away how he had served overseas. He’s a veteran. Joe Calvello’s initial pitch email was four or five paragraphs, and it mentioned he’s a veteran who feels like the system has been fine for him in terms of VA healthcare but has not really helped people who didn’t go overseas and fight wars and come back pretty broken.

So he brought that up. He said, “I feel like it’s so stupid how I had to put my life on the line just to get a good healthcare setup in this country, and how is that fair?” And then he mentioned he and his wife live in Sullivan, and they’ve struggled to start a family, and they feel like they’re lucky that they have a house—but again, a lot of it came thanks to being a veteran, getting those loans, that assistance. He said friends of his had worked multiple jobs, were struggling.

And then what I also remember is he did mention, “I have friends who are Trump supporters, and I talk to them, and we share a lot of the same worries about these economic issues.” So right away in that first interview, he was trying to say, Look, I understand people. I’m not going to bash everybody. I’m going to welcome them, hopefully, to build that support.

But he wasn’t trying to be a Jared Golden type who’s like, Yeah, I’m going to vote with Republicans and piss off the libs. I think some people took that initially as, Oh my God, he mentioned he has Trump fans. Is he going to be this more centrist-right Democrat who tries to beat Susan by running to the middle? No, it was more of the obviously populist, Bernie Sanders lane. But: I grow up fishing on the water. I have plenty of friends who are conservative. That’s what I remember from the interview.

Bacon: Did you think when you were talking to him, “This guy’s going to win”? Or did you think, “Who knows”? What did you think?

Kobin: Yeah, it was the “who knows” part, because again, you’re thinking about it at such an early stage of the race still. We only had a few names in. We didn’t have Mills in. And you had a feeling that another one or two figures in Maine would jump in the race. And you didn’t think that Graham would crowd out everybody—which is basically what happened, apart from Mills getting in the race in October. Everybody after Graham felt like kind of an afterthought, which is the impressive nature of [his campaign].

Bacon: Let me ask—is it that Graham crowded out people? Because it looks like you have nine people, five viable candidates running for governor. Did Graham crowd out people, or were those people afraid of Susan Collins and therefore ran for the easier race?

Kobin: Good question. I think it was more of the latter. Not so much afraid of Susan Collins, but also thinking of Mills, right? People value relationships in a smaller state.

Bacon: Oh, sure. Yeah.

Kobin: Yeah. A rural state where Janet grew up here—she knows a lot of lawmakers.

Bacon: Once it became clear she was running for Senate, they didn’t want to run against her. That makes sense.

Kobin: Yeah. Not the year to do it. And people who are younger especially could accept that, Hey, six years from now I’ll probably have a better shot on the Democratic side, because hopefully we’re in office. If they’re in office, Mills might only—she’ll be really old, so they could just wait another six years and then try to succeed her, or run in a primary against her if she really wants another Senate term.

So it was mostly thinking about how the Blaine House—which is the governor’s mansion—is wide open. Obviously Mills is not going to be there; she’s termed out of office. So if I’m a top Democrat, I’m going to think about that race much more than the U.S. Senate race. Or I’m going to think about Jared Golden’s race all of a sudden, later on in the year. But at that point, Jared was still running for the U.S. House, so really the Senate race was the most high-profile challenge in terms of trying to unseat an incumbent.

Bacon: So once he starts campaigning, I assume you went to some of the events. Who’s at the events? What’s the crowd like?

Kobin: Yeah, it was definitely younger. And you could tell people were all in right away, seemingly. I remember going—I think Brunswick had one of the first rallies, or Belfast—and it was at a brewery. Pretty commonplace, and Maine loves its breweries. So you got a lot of—I don’t know, just people who you could tell were younger. But then among the older crowd, it was like, Yeah, we’ve been here a long time. We’re tired of running race after race against Susan Collins and not beating her. This guy seems like he’s it.

So there wasn’t doubt. I went to this Portland rally, and it was raining out, but it was still overflowing—part of the crowd was outside in the rain, part of it was under the open garage section of the brewery. And it wasn’t a huge speech he would give. He would just say the typical: Billionaires are selling us out. We’ve got to fight back against the oligarchs and billionaires. This system has been so rigged against us. It’s time to stop pretending that things will change in a moderate fashion. We need to totally upend this.

He would say a lot of the same lines, and people would clap. It’s not like the speeches were all that different early on—obviously you want to give the same refrains so people start to associate you with certain things. But yeah, everybody there was cheering, clapping, getting shirts, grabbing signs.

And then the other quick thing to note: I wrote a story, I think last October, right before the first Reddit-related controversies rolled out, about how he signed up 11,000 volunteers in about two months. And that was probably a sign that this is one of the biggest, most impressive campaign launches in Maine history—or at least in modern Maine history. Things were a little different in 1900.

He signed up 11,000 people. Obviously that number kept growing; now it’s 15,000. We don’t have a way of necessarily always verifying that count from the campaign. But I think it was a sign early on that people really want to help out—they want to pass out yard signs, they want to canvass, start knocking on doors in different counties.

So he pointed to the fundraising total as, Hey, Janet, if you want to get in the race, by all means feel free. But I’ve got this huge setup already, and I’ve got this campaign team that’s worked in New York City for some big-time names, has ties to these other candidates throughout the country who have generated a lot of buzz before. So if you want to challenge me, good luck. I’m in it.

Bacon: Let me jump forward. So this last month—Mills has dropped out, he’s the presumptive nominee. And I guess these stories about the sexting, the text messages to women during his earliest marriage, and then the New York Times story. I guess first of all I’ll ask: what was it like for you? Because the stories of last month mainly were national organizations writing stuff. And you all, I assume, have to cover it, but it’s not your story. So what’s that like?

Kobin: Yeah, it’s tough. You always want to have everything first, exclusively, no one beating you to anything. And yet this race early on—I would say I expected that. You have that acceptance and maturity of being like, look, there are going to be national outlets that get things that we do not at the state level. And that’s fine.

A lot of it is sourcing and just people feeling more comfortable, I think, with going to a national platform and getting it out in front of as many eyes as possible. We do a good job at the state level—both the Press Herald and the Bangor Daily News. I’ve worked for both.

We’ve had scoops here and there on the race. But if you’re somebody who has claims about a candidate and they’re not good, I can understand why you want to go to the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal.

Bacon: I guess a tricky question to ask you, but I assume these two stories were not totally—were they totally “oh my God” to you, or did you have some inkling these things might be out there?

Kobin: We had an inkling. Multiple state outlets—the BDN and Press Herald are probably the two most usually well-sourced, and then Maine Public, the NPR station, has two political reporters. So you have people on the ground here who do hear these things.

And I remember the tip was weeks and weeks ago—I don’t remember the exact time. It was like, he was featured in the “Are We Dating the Same Guy?” Facebook group, and it was apparently a photo of him and somebody just saying, “Yeah, I dated him, and he seemed to maybe be dating somebody else at the time.” And so that’s like a common, like group where, women might talk about guys who are maybe slimy and just dating.

And when you hear that, you think, OK, that’s not good, but that’s a personal thing in a way. This could be in the past. Candidates have plenty of past transgressions, and not everything is going to rise to the level of a story.

And so I think my colleague had been calling around different names—names of women were out there—and it was clear that nothing on the record was going to come right away. But then I wasn’t surprised once I heard that, first of all, the Wall Street Journal and New York Times had confirmed a story of sexually explicit text messages sent to other women.

That was the first domino. And then quickly it became apparent that the former girlfriends were going to talk, or they’d already spoken. And unfortunately, we can’t always get them on the record, because they’ve spoken to the national outlet and probably given them the assurance that you’re the only one I’m talking to.

But the interesting thing about the Wall Street Journal and New York Times story—a full weekend ago—on the sexting that his wife was aware of and had flagged to the campaign: I think that really comes back more to Amy, his wife, telling Genevieve McDonald, the now-former political director, who’s well-known in Maine political circles as a former state representative and consultant on a lot of things.

I think that did probably come through somebody on the campaign who had told a reporter about that, but off the record. And then it took months of—OK, Genevieve said she’s not talking on the record to the Wall Street Journal. So again, sometimes national reporters keep expanding the net in DC, and they get somebody to say, Yes, I’ll tell you this on background. You can’t use my name, but I’m not going to tell that to the state newspapers. I’m just going to tell you because this is not a good look for the campaign but I’m fine with a national outlet getting it.

It’s always interesting thinking through those dynamics. And I think you’re limited at times naturally by which outlet you work for.

Bacon: And then what you all did, partly from what I was reading myself, is you went out and talked to people in Maine about those stories. And what did you—it’s hard to say what does Maine think collectively—but give me a sense. Because it became a narrative where you all had to cover those things in reaction.

In some ways, what I was looking for was not what is the New York Times reporting, but I went to the Maine websites to see what do people in Maine think about this stuff—because ultimately in an election, the voters are the most important voices. So what did you hear from voters?

Kobin: Really that we don’t care. We’re upset about the coverage and the framing, if anything. And Graham is still our guy

Obviously there are clear concerns that undecided and Democratic voters who are maybe a little older—or just of a certain “I prefer my candidates have no baggage at all” persuasion—have. So they’re going to have those concerns.

They said, I don’t like this about Graham. I wish he were more forthcoming last August when he launched his campaign. Like, couldn’t you have pictured a: Hey, I’m Graham. Now that you’re getting to know me, my wife and I would like to share a few things about what I’ve done in the past, because my opponents I think are going to dig it up and use it against me. I’d like to get you, the Maine voter, to know me early on and know that I’m not a perfect person by any means.

Some people felt like, why didn’t he just let us all know—rather than try to have all these things come out over the past few months, where it was story, and then a few months pass, and then another story, and then a few months pass.

So I think that was the negative reaction, including among some Democratic voters who were like, I might vote for Mills on Tuesday, or I’ll vote for David Costello, or I’m not going to fill in a bubble on the Senate section of Tuesday’s ballot.

But most people, as the results again confirm, were like, No, I’m sticking with Graham. Look at who is in the White House. Look at these other candidates around the country who have proven examples of past behavior that are not good, and yet they’re still winning elections. I am not going to let one series of stories totally change my opinion of this guy who is not perfect and had not been serving in higher office.

So there was that anger, too. Mainers feel pretty independent, and if they feel like somebody from out of state is coming after them—somebody being a collective, national—

Bacon: The national media, I’m going to say.

Kobin: Yeah. They feel like this is unfair. And they wrote letters to our paper, too—letters to the editor saying, “Shame on you all,” “The Press Herald—”

Bacon: Oh, geez.

Kobin: —for repeating these stories on the front page. I always like getting that criticism, though. I think it shows that people are reading and caring.

Bacon: That’s good. Yeah.

Kobin: So I think it was interesting to see—including some older voters and younger voters who were like, Stop making this into a huge “bombshell.” These are only past things, and some of them are claims rather than proven examples of what he did.

Bacon: Let me ask two final questions. I guess the first is—there was a lot of, I don’t know if this is national or in Maine, but I read a story in Politico and one in Bloomberg in the run-up to this saying, “If Platner does poorly in the primary, then Democrats can force him out of the race, and by July 13 can nominate somebody else.”

I always thought that was hard to see happening. But does last night—in that he got over 70 percent, he did pretty well—you think that’s over? You think he’s almost certainly going to be the candidate in November?

Kobin: I would say yeah, 98 percent, right? It’s over. And then you want to leave that 2 percent open as a skeptic who could think, “What if something happens?”

Bacon: Something, yeah.

Kobin: What if something else comes out that is crazy, or what if—just any unexpected—

Bacon: If he committed an actual crime that was very clear, that’s obviously different. Yeah.

Kobin: But otherwise, yeah, after last night, I was like, “OK, we had already been viewing this as a November battle between Graham and Susan for weeks now.” I think this past week was just, if anything, a reminder that every candidate has to keep campaigning. You can’t take anything for granted. You have to constantly work to win over voters. You can’t expect them to just anoint you right away—you’ve got to keep interacting with them.

And then I had this thought while driving back from Bangor last night—more than two hours—just a random thought: maybe yesterday was actually good in a way for Graham, to have more of a primary night party that was like, Hey, look, we’re still winning. Because in late April, we’d have been like—

Bacon: Yeah, you wouldn’t probably even really—

Kobin: Yeah, it benefited from needing national press here. So in a way, maybe it’s a good thing. And then on the flip side, it’s obviously not such a good thing that he’s had to deal with Democratic doubts from U.S. senators who are getting national attention because they have a pretty big platform on Capitol Hill with Capitol Hill press.

So obviously the next few months are going to be, all right, you’ve got to defend yourself against these constant attacks from Republican groups who are spending big already to say, Hey, how could you trust this guy? If he’s done all these things in his past and then told us about them now, you’ll never know what’s going to come out once he’s in DC if you elect him. So I think he’s smart. His campaign team is smart. They know that you’ve got to be prepared for more. And yeah, we’ll see what happens.

Perry Bacon: So I saw one of—I think there was a Collins spokesperson who responded to Graham’s speech, and they used the words “angry.” The quote had, “Maine voters are not looking for angry rhetoric,” was part of it. And I hadn’t thought of it before. I’ve liked a lot of what Graham said, but Graham is painting America as dominated by an oligarchy.

It’s a negative speech. It is a Trump, Bernie Sanders, the country is falling apart, we need to fix it kind of speech. And Collins does tend to be more of a “we can all work together.” She probably smiles more than Graham does. I don’t know much about Maine, but does Graham need to be more positive in a certain way, or do you think he’s speaking to the moment right now?

Kobin: I think the latter—speaking to the moment. I think some of this comes from past races. And I was in Kentucky with you in the past—I wasn’t always in Maine. But in 2020, there was that widespread sense of, OK, Sara Gideon and Democrats are not really sure on the ultimate strategy. It feels like there’s some disagreement on how to beat Susan.

And some of it was, when you run against her, you need to note that in a way you might try to do what she does by winning certain projects for Maine, and you’ll work with the other side at times. So Susan has done some good work, but she’s a Republican, and we need a change, and we can’t keep having Republican control of the Senate.

And then after 2020, when Susan won again by way more than the polls said, you had Democrats who were like, Look, stop. Stop giving her credit. Stop playing so nice. Stop pretending like everything is good. That’s a bit of an exaggeration, but stop pretending everything is fine in this country and that we just need to slowly keep chipping away, because we’ll get Trump out of the White House.

Obviously, Trump came back to win in 2024 when people thought there was no way he was going to win a second term. And then Democrats, in the same vein of this Maine race, felt maybe we just had to tell people, There’s no way you’d let this guy back in the White House. But look what happened.

So I think people are like, Oh yeah, we should be careful not to go against Maine’s sensible side—New England being very engaged and civic and polite. We need to always do that. But no, Graham said, No, we don’t need to keep acting so neat and expecting that change will happen incrementally. He feels differently, and a lot of his supporters feel that way.

The first attack ad, real quick too—that he put out, I think after Mills had dropped out of the race—was definitely going after Susan hard. And again, it had that tone. And I heard a longtime political pundit in Maine who had beaten Susan Collins in the ‘90s in a race for governor—which was the first race that she lost, when she ran for governor of Maine—he was like, “You know what? At first glance, this might seem a little rough around the edges and intense to have that negative tone, but I think he’s onto something with this strategy.”

And it’s a well-thought-out plan—both in speeches and in ads—on Graham’s part, to get a little more aggressive. And then of course, over the next few months, we may see some more softening of ads at times that are focused just on Graham, as in, Hey, I’m a person. This is me. I’m not perfect, but this is where I’m from—Sullivan, Maine. So there’s probably going to be that mix of more positive, lighter ads that focus on him, and then the more negative, aggressive ads that say, Hey, how is this country working for you if prices are going up and Susan and Republicans are continuing to vote mostly with Trump and let him do whatever he wants to do?

Bacon: Should be interesting. I’m fascinated by this race, so I’ll probably have you on again. Billy, good to see you. Thanks for joining me.

Kobin: Likewise. Thanks, Perry. See ya.

Bacon: Good luck reporting this week. Bye-bye.

Kobin: Appreciate it.

FBI Director Kash Patel alleged that the group of arrestees, aged 21–28, “engaged in a coordinated campaign of violent, criminal acts,” including threatening notes, spray-painting “Intifada” and “Free Palestine” on people’s homes, breaking windows, and “throwing glass jars filled with chemicals while children slept inside.”

The defendants, most of whom studied or worked at the University of Michigan, were indicted by a grand jury in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan. They face various charges, including federal counts of conspiracy to transmit threats, witness intimidation, and destruction of property to prevent seizure. The indictment alleges the group crossed the line into criminal activity in order to get the university to divest from Israel. They face between five to 20 years in prison.

A group of protesters coalesced around the courthouse that the eight defendants were taken to on Wednesday afternoon.

This is the most recent crackdown on pro-Palestinian advocacy from the administration.

“I’m sure in 50 years, the [University of Michigan] will be putting statues up to [the protesters] and saying how much they appreciated their courage in retrospect,” Michigan student James Johnson told MLive. “But right now, they’re being very cowardly at the very least.”

The eight charged are:

• Ahmet Kerem Korkaya, 28, of Milwaukee
• Alexander Matthew Sepulveda, 23, of Chicago
• Amatullah Aliasgar Hakim, 21, of Ann Arbor
• Colin Hunter Weger, 24, of Ann Arbor
• Jonathan Hongru Zou, 22, of Ann Arbor
• Mariam Muhammed Odeh, 24, of Dearborn
• Paige Elizabeth Feyock, 26, of Ann Arbor
• Zainab Aliasgar Hakim, 23, of Canton

While Wright testified before the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, Democratic Representative Suhas Subramanyam asked him about a post he made in March on X “that the U.S. Navy had successfully escorted an oil tanker through the Strait of Hormuz to ensure oil remains flowing through the global markets.”

“Was that true?” Subramanyam asked Wright, who admitted it was not.

“No. That was in error. It was not tweeted by me, but it was by my team that misunderstood something I said, but I take responsibility for it,” Wright said. Subramanyam then asked what he said to his team that was misunderstood.

SUBRAMANYAM: You tweeted in March that the US Navy had successfully escorted an oil tanker through the Strait of Hormuz. Was that true?

CHRIS WRIGHT: No. pic.twitter.com/Xd9QVmfNnv

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 10, 2026

Wright claimed that he said at a talk in Colorado that the U.S. would restore oil flow from the Strait of Hormuz. Subramanyam then questioned Wright’s claim on Tuesday that traffic is rising “meaningfully” through the strait. What that actually means was a point of contention between Wright and Subramanyam, as Wright would not give any specific numbers about how many barrels of oil were flowing.

Oil prices plummeted and stocks jumped soon after Wright’s erroneous post in March, which he deleted after sending the markets into a tailspin.

The oil that is leaving the Persian Gulf these days isn’t thanks to the U.S. Some of it may be due to oil tankers turning off their transponders, or through other means, such as a Saudi pipeline that flows east toward the Red Sea port of Yanbu. Meanwhile, the Strait of Hormuz remains under Iranian control, and peace talks between Iran and the U.S. seem to be stagnant despite Trump trying to claim that a deal is close.

In a post on Truth Social, Trump claimed that last month, he’d directed the military to conduct a “secret mission” to support the flow of energy through the essential trade passageway.

“Today, I am pleased to announce that this effort has resulted in more than 100 MILLION Barrels of Oil making its way through the Strait, and into the Open Market,” Trump wrote.

“More than 200 Commercial Ships have safely traveled through the Strait. This wildly successful effort is because the UNITED STATES of AMERICA CONTROLS the Strait of Hormuz—NOT Iran,” Trump wrote. “Their military is defeated, and their economy is lost. It’s over for Iran!”

Trump’s sudden announcement came as he struggled to justify the U.S. economy reaching its highest annual inflation rate in three years—and the president’s impulsive social media posts haven’t helped the situation. It’s not clear whether Trump is actually telling the truth. His administration has a history of lying about this exact thing, and the president has a penchant for using the war with Iran to try to manipulate the stock market.

Trump’s claim is already failing the smell test. When asked about the 100 million barrels of oil Wednesday, Energy Secretary Chris Wright appeared confused and said he was “unaware” of the operation.

Ohio Representative Emilia Sykes pressed Wright on whether he thought Trump was lying. “I do not think the president is lying, I think the president is talking casually about our efforts to stop the flow of Iranian oil,” Wright said, though clearly Trump was talking about oil that had made it out, not oil that had been blocked.

Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office, Trump divulged more details about the operation.

“You know we’ve been taking out millions of barrels of oil. Nobody knows it. You know who doesn’t know about it? Iran until right now,” Trump said. “We took out, the other night, 22 ships, late at night with no lights because they don’t have any radar because we blasted the crap out of it.”

It’s no secret that some ships have been able to exit through the Strait of Hormuz. Last week, a U.S. defense official told CNBC that the U.S. was coordinating with ships seeking passage through the Strait of Hormuz, but was not escorting vessels. Lloyd’s List Intelligence reported last week that roughly 40 ships stranded in the Persian Gulf have been able to exit the strait.

The numbers Trump is claiming would indicate clandestine energy flows of a far larger scale, but it’s worth noting that before the U.S. attacked Iran, an average of 20 million barrels of oil passed through the Strait of Hormuz every day. That means the transit of more than two billion barrels of oil has been stalled in the 103 days since the U.S. and Israel first launched military strikes against Iran.

This story has been updated.

Wright appeared before the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology to discuss oil shocks from the Iran war—but one particular exchange with Representative Gabe Amo put a spotlight on the unconstitutional use of his office.

At issue was nearly $8 billion in Biden-era grants for clean energy projects that the White House gutted in October. Democrats have described the canceled grants as politically motivated retaliation by the Trump administration against liberal areas of the country.

Amo quoted from a lawsuit filed against the Department of Energy, citing that the “primary reason” clean energy grants were funded or not funded in October 2025 was whether the grantee was “located in a blue state.”

“The court rightfully found that you violated the Constitution. The only meaningful difference between the seven projects that won in court—and the hundreds of others—is that those plaintiffs sued,” Amo said. “So, Secretary Wright, my question is simple: When will you restore the funding for all the projects that were wrongfully terminated?”

Wright appeared visibly irritated by the question.

“Number one, you haven’t read the document or misinterpreted the document. We did not involve politics in the decision-making of our review process. Hands down, did not,” Wright said.

“What about the outcomes, Mr. Secretary?” pressed Amo.

That’s when the niceties ended, and the profanities began.

“The court ruling you read—was a choice of announcements of some of the awards … not made by our department. No decisions, no decisions were made on politics,” Wright said. “It’s bullshit.”

Amo then called for a note on parliamentary procedure, incredulously questioning if the committee was OK with “promoting language like that from witnesses.”

“Watch your language there, Mr. Secretary,” drawled Committee Chair Brian Babin.

Amo then tore into Wright. “Here’s the problem with your administration. You’re willing to huff and puff when it comes to showing up in front of Congress when your audience of one is paying attention. But the fact of the matter is, my constituents—and the constituents of people across this Congress—are struggling because of your decisions. And yet you want to use language like that, act out of hand, behave poorly, so you can prove that you have loyalty to the president,” Amo said.

“That’s not how this works,” declared the Rhode Island lawmaker. “Do your job.”

Chris Wright crashes out and calls Rep. Amo's line of questioning "bullshit," which prompts the Republican committee chair to tell him to "watch your language" pic.twitter.com/CsdTX7drSo

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 10, 2026

“They ripped me off the plane, dozens of officers treating me like El Chapo.… They’ve arrested me for a felony, what’s called ‘terroristic threats,’ simply because I said that if the jury did not find Karmelo Anthony guilty, that we the people will deal with justice,” Lang said, in a phone call posted on his X account, suggesting that his call for extrajudicial mob violence against a Black teenager was somehow reasonable.

I just got an update from Jake Lang who was arrested by DOZENS of DPS/ Texas federal police officers who ripped him off the plane, hand cuffed and drove him away WHILE HE WAS STILL ON THE TARMAC!!!

Jake has been charged with class 3 “Terroristic Threats” for saying if the jury… pic.twitter.com/xkrigG2Apt

— Jake Lang - January 6 Political Prisoner 🇺🇸 (@JakeLang) June 10, 2026

“This is two-tiered persecution against the white people of this world. We are under attack, and what they’re doing to me they want to do to all of us,” Lang continued.

Lang—who is in the midst of an unserious Senate campaign in Florida—was also arrested earlier this week in Texas for trespassing in Frisco City Hall while protesting the same trial. One in 16 pardoned January 6 insurrectionists have been arrested again for other crimes.

A new report released Wednesday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics found that America’s annual inflation rate had reached its highest levels in three years. Later, in the Oval Office, a reporter asked Trump whether the new inflation numbers concerned him. The president presented his own pathetic spin.

“No, I love it. The numbers were great. You know what I really love? I love the inflation,” Trump said.

Sorry, what?

Reporter: Are you concerned, Mr. President, about the latest inflation number which came out this morning?

Trump: No, I love it. I love the inflation. pic.twitter.com/vktX6C9lbk

— Acyn (@Acyn) June 10, 2026

As Americans are struggling to afford gas, food, electricity, and medical care, Trump suggested that the high prices would be good for “after the war.”

“You know, we’ve been taking out millions of barrels of oil. Nobody knows it. You know who doesn’t know about it? Iran until right now,” Trump said. “We took out, the other night, 22 ships, late at night with no lights because they don’t have any radar because we blasted the crap out of it.”

Trump indicated that clandestine oil flows were why crude prices were below $100 per barrel. But if that was ever really a secret, Iran certainly knew about it—because Trump had posted about it earlier in the day.

Trump has made it clear he cares more about oil companies than average Americans, who aren’t likely to buy the president’s sudden pivot after he’s spent the last few years railing against inflation.

Donald Trump had strong words for the GOP’s youth connection last July, two months before Kirk was shockingly assassinated at a Turning Point USA event at Utah Valley University. At the time, Trump reportedly berated Kirk for allowing one of his college rallies to turn into a grieving session over the Epstein files, according to details of an upcoming book by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan published in The New York Times magazine Wednesday.

“Trump had called Kirk and scolded him” for providing a venue for young people to slam former Attorney General Pam Bondi and the larger Trump administration for failing to release the files, reported the Times.

Kirk, by virtue of his position leading the youth Republican movement, could see that the Epstein files had become a divisive issue for young voters. He urged the White House to change course on the matter, but they would not relent.

Trump was not shy in expressing his frustration with his aides. He reportedly told them that he was “very unhappy” with his famed supporters, raging against the likes of Kirk as well as former Fox News hosts Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly, all of whom had demanded the admin “come clean” about Jeffrey Epstein.

Eventually Donald Trump Jr. and Vice President JD Vance joined the choir, urging the White House to change its position and pressure the Justice Department to release more files, reported the Times.

The Epstein Files Transparency Act was signed into law on November 19, legally requiring the unmitigated release of all documentation related to the child sex trafficking investigation. It has been nearly seven months since then, and the federal government still has not released everything it has on Epstein. No one has been arrested in connection to the crimes, either—beyond Epstein’s longtime criminal associate Ghislaine Maxwell, who was arrested in 2020.

Through the National Park Service, the Trump administration has submitted plans that call for construction taking place 20 hours a day, in two-10 hour shifts, in the hopes of finishing the project within two or three years, before his term ends. In order to speed up completion, Trump plans to use concrete clad in granite instead of the natural marble and limestone used for other monuments in Washington.

The planned site for the arch, across from the Potomac River from the Lincoln Memorial, is only 3,000 feet away from Reagan National Airport, on a flight path within the airport’s main approach and departure corridor. Because it’s so close to the airport, a preliminary review by the Federal Aviation Administration said the arch would need to be lit with red obstruction lights.

The arch will be an estimated 250 feet high, much higher than Paris’s famous Arc de Triomphe, which is 164 feet high. Cranes used to construct the arch may be as high as 320 feet tall, creating a hazard for planes near the airport, which could be flying at 500 feet of altitude. The FAA is currently working on a full review of the project.

Trump isn’t seeking any approval from Congress for the project, which hasn’t gone over well with Democrats on Capitol Hill, as the president also hasn’t sought approval for his White House ballroom, repainting the Reflecting Pool, or other construction projects.

“Running through all these incidents is an inexplicable disregard for legal process,” Senator Richard Blumenthal, the leading Democrat on the Senate’s permanent subcommittee for investigations, wrote in a letter Tuesday to the National Park Service.

Military veterans have sued to stop the arch, citing the lack of congressional approval, and warning it would obstruct views of Arlington National Cemetery. But Trump doesn’t care, seeing all of his pet construction projects as his presidential legacy, as opposed to the well-being of Americans.

“We hit ’em hard yesterday. We’re gonna hit ’em again hard today, in case you don’t turn on your television set,” Trump said in the Oval Office while signing a $70 billion bill to fund immigration enforcement. “And we’ll see what happens with a deal. We were really close to a deal, but they keep tapping us along, they keep playing us for suckers.”

The U.S. launched military strikes on Iran Tuesday—just one day after Iran shot down a U.S. helicopter—further fraying the ceasefire. Iranian state media reported Wednesday that among the targeted facilities were two large water reservoirs in Hormozgan, on the coast of the Strait of Hormuz. The attack threatens to plunge thousands of Iranian civilians into a water deficit as the hottest months in the region approach. This is yet another attack on civilian infrastructure in Iran that serves to collectively punish civilians and risks worsening their already war-torn conditions.

“In a region already facing extreme heat, chronic water scarcity, and a rapidly warming climate, the loss of drinking-water infrastructure is more than physical damage,” Iranian environmental expert and Virginia Tech geophysicist Manoochehr Shirzaei told The New York Times. “It threatens the health, resilience, and daily survival of entire communities.”

Nearly 2,000 civilians have been killed in Iran since Trump started the war, according to the Human Rights Activists News Agency.

Graham Platner won Maine’s Senate primary as expected. But the various controversies around him have Democrats deeply concerned about his general election prospects. In the latest edition of Right Now, Billy Kobin, a political reporter at the Portland Press Herald, says that voters in Maine that he has interviewed are not too concerned about the new revelations about Platner’s personal conduct. In fact, some are angry at the national and local press covering those issues. Looking forward to the general election, Kobin says that he expects Platner to continue to lean into populist rhetoric and sharp attacks on incumbent Susan Collins, whose past Democratic opponents have tended to soft-pedal their criticism of the longtime senator.

“Congress’s top bathroom sheriff, Nancy Mace, was on the ballot,” McBride commented to Axios. “And while all of the votes have not yet been counted, she’s in a respectful 5th place. I don’t like to punch down and I believe in the politics of grace, so I’ll just say, Happy Pride, Nancy.”

McBride was elected to represent Delaware’s sole congressional district in 2024, and subsequently became Congress’s first openly transgender lawmaker.

Mace, meanwhile, couldn’t keep her head above water in her GOP primary, failing to advance to a runoff in a loss that will cap her turbulent, rollercoaster career. Mace’s term in Congress ends in January.

She was initially considered a favorite in the race until her popularity was suddenly kneecapped by several scandals, chief among them her political rebuke of Donald Trump in order to release the Epstein files last year.

In an interview published before the primary, Mace recognized that while she had likely tossed the president’s support by pushing to release the files, she also didn’t have any regrets, describing herself as an “independent conservative” and ardent MAGA candidate.

“That’s the sole reason I didn’t get the endorsement, because I voted to release the Epstein files, and I’m okay with that,” Mace told Politico. “I’ve worked very hard to expose pedophiles, and child rapists, and sex trafficking in my state, and will continue to do it regardless of the outcome of the election.”

She ultimately placed last—far behind Trump’s pick, Lieutenant Governor Pamela Evette, who came in first with nearly 29 percent of the vote just two weeks after receiving his endorsement. Mace has already backed South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson in the runoff, despite the fact that she accused him of protecting alleged child sex abusers earlier this year.

The sudden request from Patrick Davis, the assistant attorney general for legislative affairs, concerned his colleagues because he’d been charged with liaising with Congress in order to  set up the president’s slush fund, according to two administration officials who spoke to Politico. 

“[Davis] has relationships with the senators, and it was a very tough time for him to back out,” one of the officials told Politico. “In a very fraught moment, with legislative affairs and stuff with the Hill, DOJ needed to have the head of leg. affairs involved.”

Davis’s potential claim to taxpayer dollars relates to his prior work as Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley’s top investigative counsel for the Senate Judiciary Committee. Davis was one of dozens of congressional aides whose phone and email records were quietly subpoenaed during the investigation into alleged Russian interference, following the 2016 presidential election. Davis only discovered the subpoena years later. 

“It felt like a violation, not simply on a personal level, but more importantly of the separation of powers given the nature of our oversight work,” Davis previously told The New York Times. 

The two administration officials told Politico that Davis didn’t have a valid reason to recuse himself because the fund hadn’t been formally set up, and Davis would have been useful in preparing acting Attorney General Todd Blanche before he appeared on Capitol Hill to answer questions about the fund.

“It was a hard issue and he just didn’t want to deal with it and didn’t want to be there to address the difficult conversations,” one official told Politico. “The thing was a cop-out.”

A DOJ spokesperson told Politico that Davis had temporarily recused himself “out of an abundance of caution,” and it was later determined that the recusal was not necessary for “a number of reasons.” 

Earlier this month, Blanche confirmed that plans for the fund are dead, but he and Trump have continued to rave about the idea. 

New reporting from The New York Times reveals that while the Cabinet remained staunch in their public defense of Trump, there was chaos behind the scenes last year over Trump’s deep connections to the sexual predator. Vance played a large role in the internal discord, as he seemed to be the loudest voice pushing “the darkest theories about Epstein and a cabal of predators hidden within the country’s ruling class”—leading White House chief of staff Susie Wiles to call him a major conspiracy theorist.

When Trump’s Cabinet learned that The Wall Street Journal was set to publish its story on Trump’s birthday letter to Epstein, the team met in the Situation Room to discuss their options. Vance pushed for the administration to fully release the files quickly, suggesting that they have Epstein co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell either do an interview with Tucker Carlson or testify before Congress. In Vance’s mind, this would solidify Trump’s alibi and secure confidence with their MAGA base—which happened to care very much about the Epstein files. Both plans were struck down, and the team pointed out that Maxwell would want something in return.

“Pardoning Maxwell, a trafficker of young girls, would create a huge P.R. problem,” communications director Steven Cheung argued.

“We can’t offer Ghislaine Maxwell anything,” said White House deputy chief of staff James Blair. “A, I don’t know why we would. And B, if we give Ghislaine Maxwell any sort of break whatsoever and then she turns around and says nice things about us, or says nice things about us and we give her a break, it will undermine the entire point of her saying good things. That will feed the conspiracy theory, period. If there’s nothing for her to say that hurts us, we shouldn’t have to offer her anything.”

The report makes it abundantly clear that there was no consensus on how to handle the political tsunami of the Epstein files, as it also details the falling out between former Attorney General Pam Bondi, former FBI Co–Deputy Director Dan Bongino, and FBI Director Kash Patel. The drama between them came to a head after a tumultuous few months in which Bondi went from claiming she had Epstein’s client list sitting on her desk to handing out big white binders to MAGA influencers, to then claiming there was essentially nothing new in the files.

“You fucked this thing up from the start,” Bongino screamed at her, a day after the DOJ memo claiming there was nothing more in the files to be released. “The way you’ve been talking about this—that dumb fucking charade with the Epstein files, the ‘They’re on my desk’ nonsense, all the promises to the folks out there.”

While it’s unclear where Vance stands among Trump and the rest of the Cabinet now, it’s clear that he’ll have to answer for the internal decisions made last summer for the entirety of his political career.

Republican Representative Rob Wittman of Virginia was asked by Meidas Touch outside of the Capitol Tuesday about House Speaker Mike Johnson’s rumored plans to cut Social Security, and he immediately tried to pretend he couldn’t answer the question. Wittman grabbed his phone and started an imaginary conversation, with his phone screen clearly showing that he wasn’t on a call.  

Rep. Rob Wittman (R-VA) faked a phone call for roughly 90 seconds after being asked about Speaker Mike Johnson’s comments regarding potential Social Security cuts.

The phone's screen remained visible, with his cheek inadvertently tapping different parts of the display. pic.twitter.com/y3ST5AX651

— MeidasTouch (@MeidasTouch) June 10, 2026

Wittman fully committed to his bit, ignoring follow-up questions and pretending to discuss a fictional appointment while walking by cars for over a full minute. When his “call” ended, he proceeded to leave the Capitol grounds. It’s not the first time Wittman has faked a phone call to avoid speaking with reporters, as he did the same thing to Drop Site News reporter Julian Andreone last week. 

Oh hey! He did this to me & @DropSiteNews last week! https://t.co/lR40fjKNw1 pic.twitter.com/kGs69cL9Ec

— Julian Andreone (@JulianAndreone) June 10, 2026

On Monday, Johnson said in a radio show appearance that “entitlement programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and things like Social Security” need to be “adjusted and fixed,” which appears to indicate that cuts are coming. 

Ken Martin, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, attacked Johnson on X, saying, “Republicans have a plan to cut Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid—after already passing the largest healthcare cut in history. Higher costs, less healthcare. That’s what Republicans are running on this November.” 

In response, Johnson accused Democrats and the media of fearmongering, claiming that Republicans are the only ones doing anything about fraud and abuse. But the GOP’s record, particularly during President Trump’s second term, shows that they have no misgivings about cutting programs like Medicare or Social Security. If they retain control of Congress after November, those cuts are almost certainly coming. 

Trump wrote on Truth Social that the U.S. trade deficit had “widened by the most in nearly 34 years,” linking an article from six months ago that said that the trade gap had increased 94.6 percent to $56.8 billion after exports tumbled in November. As of April, the trade deficit is even wider at $55.9 billion.

A widening trade deficit is not a good sign for Trump’s economy, especially considering the president’s vow to erase it altogether. So how did the post end up on Trump’s timeline?

It’s not clear where the mistake was made, but Trump’s previous statements suggest that he doesn’t understand what a trade deficit is.

The president has described the trade deficit as a “loss,” even though it simply indicates that one country spends more on goods from another country than that second country spends on goods from the first. Economists say that having a trade deficit is not an inherently bad thing, because the U.S. simply can’t and shouldn’t make everything. But Trump has insisted that a wide trade deficit means the U.S. is being taken for a ride.

It appears this misunderstanding may be more widespread throughout the administration. Last month, the DOJ suffered a resounding legal loss because it misrepresented Section 122 of the Trade Act: It claimed that the phrase “balance-of-payments deficits” in the law is the same as a “trade deficit.” It is not, a court ruled.

There’s also a simple explanation for Trump’s post: The president is days away from turning 80 years old, prone to having senior moments, and may have gotten confused.

If that’s the case, then the post is still concerning. Trump uses his social media to speak to Americans on a global stage, make wild threats against foreign countries, manipulate the stock market—and apparently also post outdated information about the U.S economy.

In either case, someone take this old man’s phone away, please.

The UFC is hosting its America 250 celebration on Sunday, June 14—Donald Trump’s 80th birthday. It will be the first ever cage match on the White House lawn, but even the organization’s biggest celebrity fans seem to be backing out of the historic event.

So far, the guest list includes first lady Melania Trump, Donald Trump Jr. and his new wife Bettina Trump, Ivanka Trump and her husband Jared Kushner, and Eric and Lara Trump, according to insiders that spoke with the New York Post.

Ringside seats for nonmilitary personnel are exclusively invite-only. The president has reportedly invited 1,000 guests to the event, while UFC CEO Dana White and TKO CEO Ari Emanuel have been allocated 200 tickets each.

But A-listers are reportedly skipping this card. Many of White’s famous invitees, such as Adam Sandler, Jared Leto, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, and Mario Lopez, are reportedly dodging the visual, reported Vanity Fair. White also invited Guy Ritchie, Tom Brady, and Jason Statham, though their representatives have not responded to inquiries about their possible attendance.

Part of that could boil down to cost. While watching the fight from screens at the White House Ellipse will be free to some 85,000 members of the viewing public, ringside attendance is exclusive to military and VIP tickets. And invitees might not want to shell out for it.

That latter category has been bundled into “ultra-premium” packages that cost as much as $1.5 million. The deal includes access to multiple UFC events, reserved seating on the White House lawn, VIP receptions, and floor tickets to UFC 329, which pits Conor McGregor against Max Holloway for the second time on July 11.

Luck does not seem to be on the president’s side for his multimillion-dollar birthday extravaganza, either. The whole kit and caboodle could get rained out: Washington is expecting showers Sunday evening.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported on Wednesday that the consumer price index rose 0.5 percent last month, with energy costs accounting for 60 percent of that increase. The annual inflation rate is at 4.2 percent—the highest since April 2023.

“Americans are getting squeezed financially by inflation that’s back at a three-year high,” Navy Federal Credit Union chief economist Heather Long told CNBC. “The frustration for many Americans is that so many of the basics are up in price right now—gas, food, electricity, and medical care are all clear pain points that are above 3 percent inflation. Ending the war in Iran will help to moderate inflation, but the worst is likely still to come for rising food prices.”

Trump, for his part, has claimed that Iran will “pay the price” for not making a deal. But it’s clear at this point that Iran is willing to draw this conflict out so that American’s pockets hurt more and more every day. It’ll be a difficult sell to midterm voters with inflation at a three-year high and a cost-of-living crisis that was already dire—two issues Trump ran on solving. And it’s entirely his fault.

CNN: INFLATION TOPS 4% FOR FIRST TIME IN THREE YEARS AS OIL PRICES JUMP pic.twitter.com/icTIIyDLJq

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 10, 2026

Early Wednesday morning, MS NOW host Joe Scarborough mentioned the report on his show, Morning Joe. Less than an hour later, Trump attacked Scarborough on Truth Social, calling him “one of the most inaccurate detailers of truthful facts on television.”

“His serious case on Trump Derangement Syndrome, often referred to as TDS, has made him a laughing stock among those who know what is going on in the ‘Wonderful World of Television,’’’ Trump posted.

Scarborough’s show was still going on after Trump dropped his post, and the hosts called him out for basically confirming the Times’ reporting that mentioning Epstein triggers the White House.

“Sometimes I go talk to you in the White House, and we disagree on things, but nothing deranged here, sir, unless you’re deranged,” Scarborough said to Trump. “If there’s any derangement, it would have to be on your side of the relationship, because I’m not deranged. Not about you. I just state the facts, and maybe that makes you deranged.

“Ohhhh, that actually sort of affirms the reporting that this is something you cannot mention around the president of the United States,” Scarborough added. “We just read what Maggie and Jonathan wrote about Epstein. Is that what that was?”

The Times article is a detailed look at how Trump’s inner circle met in the Situation Room to handle each development regarding Epstein and the government’s files on the billionaire sex offender. Shouting matches, arguments, efforts to get different officials fired, and clashing strategies are all outlined in the article, which is based on reporting from the forthcoming book Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, by reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan. The main thesis of the article is that Trump could not make the public forget about Epstein, no matter what he did, and he continued to prove that Wednesday morning.

Hours after the United States and Iran exchanged their latest series of military strikes Tuesday night, Trump insisted yet again that Iran’s military was all but destroyed.

“Iran’s Military is a complete and total mess. Much of it, like their Navy and Air Force, doesn’t even exist anymore—They have been completely defeated. Iran is all talk and no action,” Trump wrote on Truth Social Wednesday morning.

“The Bully of the Middle East is DEAD!!! They’ve taken too long to negotiate a deal that would have been great for them, now they will have to pay the price!!!”

It’s not evident that Iran’s military has been defeated. U.S. officials said Iran downed a U.S. Army Apache helicopter Monday using a drone. It is not clear if the drone attack was deliberate, as Iran has not yet claimed responsibility for the strike. Tehran said it responded to U.S. retaliatory strikes with 21 attacks against American military targets in the Middle East.

Trump has been insisting for weeks that Iran’s military capabilities have been obliterated—despite reporting suggesting Iran has been rebuilding its arsenal. Now even Fox News is starting to doubt the president’s word about Iran’s military capability.

Trump’s warning that Iran would “pay the price” caused the price of oil to rise 2 percent, after the strikes had already caused stock futures to slide sharply. In a subsequent post, Trump touted the effectiveness of the U.S. military blockade and insisted that energy was flowing through the Strait of Hormuz.

“The Fake News Media refuses to report how EFFECTIVE the U.S. Naval BLOCKADE is, the most successful Blockade in the history of Naval Warfare. NOTHING GETS THROUGH unless we want it to. IT IS A STEEL WALL! Iran is doing ZERO business, not paying their military, or any of their bills, and quickly becoming a FAILED NATION! Lots of oil is getting out.” Trump wrote.

But it seems that the president’s lies about the war may be finally catching up to him.

The House GOP eked out $70 billion in funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection Tuesday evening through the budget reconciliation process, bypassing the need for any Democratic support. The Secure America Act’s final vote was 214–212. The president is poised to sign the bill into law Wednesday.

The final draft of the bill grants $38 billion to ICE, $26 billion to CBP, and $5 billion for additional contingency costs that are to be doled out at Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin’s discretion. It is expected to fund Trump’s aims of one million yearly deportations through the end of his term.

The package is the result of a four-month stand-off between Democrats and Republicans on the issue of regulating the two violent and apparently unbridled agencies. That issue was sparked nearly half a year ago, when federal agents shot and killed two U.S. citizens during an ICE crackdown in Minnesota: Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

Liberal lawmakers argued that agents should be mandated to meet the minimum standards expected of other law enforcement agencies, such as requiring them to identify themselves, operate without masks, and obtain judicial warrants before forcing their way onto private property.

That was apparently too great an ask of the Republican caucus, which vehemently opposed the measure and, ultimately, found a way to force the funding package without its Democratic colleagues.

But even this stopgap may not be enough to avert another potential government shutdown: Both parties will need to work together in the coming months to pass government funding measures by a September 30 deadline. Otherwise, they risk stalling federal options mere weeks before a fateful midterm election—a threat that both parties are attempting to use to their advantage.

Yet the massive spending bill is effectively supplemental funding: Last summer, Congress provided nearly $140 billion in immigration enforcement funding for the two agencies via Trump’s One, Big, Beautiful Bill Act. That virtually tripled ICE’s budget, jumping its appropriations from roughly $9.6 billion to $30 billion (at cost to programs such as Medicaid, which was gutted in the same stroke).

Prior to Trump’s second administration, the annual budgets for both agencies totaled about $17 billion.

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 really, really, really unpopular. This week brings a barrage of new polling that shows him tanking horribly by a whole host of different metrics. It’s no accident that this comes as Trump and his propagandists are spinning wildly to erase what everyone saw in New York on Monday night, which is that he was booed relentlessly, thunderously, and mercilessly. Nobody understands better than Trump and MAGA that perceptions of his unpopularity are lethal. Right now they’re feeding on themselves and driving him into a worsening downward spiral.

We’re parsing through all of it with Grant Wiles, the VP of data and polling at NextGen America, the youth mobilization group, which has its own polling showing that Trump has completely lost the culture. Grant, good to have you on.

Grant Wiles: Great to be here.

Sargent: So Trump was at Madison Square Garden on Monday night. He was loudly booed twice. Here’s what the second one sounded like.

[Audio of loud, sustained booing]

Sargent: And here’s what Trump had to say afterward about his reception.

Donald Trump (voiceover): It was certainly amazing. It was—I think mostly cheers. It was loud and it was very enthusiastic.

Sargent: OK, Grant, numerous news accounts said he was booed. The Times called them “loud and raucous boos.” The Washington Post described “loud jeers.” The AP said he was “booed loudly.” But to Trump it was great. Your reaction to all this?

Wiles: Yeah, I think we’re just witnessing our president in real time experiencing the cognitive dissonance publicly of seeing that the vast majority of Americans simply do not like him. It’s why we see many artists pulling out of the 250 event on the National Mall.

He’s gone from somebody who prided himself on his ability to have successful friends who he can brag about, to a situation where nobody wants to really be affiliated with him.

Sargent: You know what’s funny—Fox News recognizes how lethal this moment at Madison Square Garden really was. Fox, for instance, according to Matt Gertz, who flagged all this for Media Matters, had a chyron up about this saying he got a, quote-unquote, “mixed reception,” which is a really generous way to put it.

Then Fox’s Brian Kilmeade said that it was “mixed.” “There were people cheering,” he said. And he blamed the boos on the security.

And then Fox’s Lawrence Jones tried to explain away the booing by saying: “You don’t expect anything different from the same crowd that voted for Mamdani.” So I guess Fox’s Lawrence Jones did hear the booing.

What do you make of that? I think really what this means, Grant, is that Fox News really understands on a very visceral level that the escalating perceptions of Trump’s unpopularity are themselves deadly for him. What do you think?

Wiles: Yeah, I’m just glad my paycheck doesn’t rely on deluding the president into thinking that everybody likes him, because it’s getting increasingly difficult in this day and age. Whenever we see anyone break with this trend or this delusion that they’ve conjured up for him, bad things happen to them. They lose Republican primaries, their opponents get endorsed, they lose their jobs, they get replaced.

Any number of things can happen to somebody who fails to prop up that delusion and maintain it really delicately for our president. But the reality is American people aren’t so easily deluded anymore. They know who he is.

Sargent: I’ll tell you, Fox News knows this as well as anyone because, for instance, their pollster often finds pretty bad news for Trump, finds pretty damning stuff about his popularity. And Trump tends to react by demanding very loudly and angrily that Fox fire its pollster. So Fox News knows that they’re in this position where they have to tell the despot that his popularity is soaring, that nothing that he’s hearing about his unpopularity is real, as they did here.

I think maybe Fox and Friends, which is the morning show that I just quoted from, really does try to puff up Trump, maybe in a way that the polling outlet at Fox News does not. So that schism is itself kind of interesting. You know what I mean?

Wiles: Yeah, we know he spends a lot of time watching TV and reacting to these folks who are talking about him on TV. And it’s getting increasingly difficult, slash impossible, for them to even spin his latest approval or favorability ratings in any way that’s remotely positive. Because we’ve seen a steady decline since he took office in 2024. And there’s been almost no upticks since.

Sargent: So let’s get into some of the new polling that’s just out. It’s really bad for Trump. The new Economist/YouGov tracking poll has Trump’s overall approval at 35 percent of Americans versus 60 percent who disapprove. That’s 25 points underwater. His approval on the economy is 29 percent to 63 percent disapproving. On inflation, it’s 24 percent to 68 percent.

So on the economy and inflation—the most important issues to voters right now—he’s in the twenties. And on inflation, fewer than one in four Americans approve of his performance. That’s bad, right?

Wiles: Yeah, I think it’s important to note at the same time that just because he’s down doesn’t mean we should take this for granted. Last cycle we saw billions of dollars being poured into a PR campaign to support him and prop him up. And the normalization of Trump happened at every level of the ballot, where people felt like, maybe he’s a businessman, the economy is an issue, we should potentially trust this person.

And even though we’ve seen since then that that has been proven wildly false and to not be a good idea, it doesn’t mean that once the Republicans spin up their machine again, they won’t have a lot of forces naturally working on their behalf again. So from our perspective, we want to make sure that people actually vote and they have the ability to vote and are equipped to vote, understand how, and that we can turn this disapproval and dissatisfaction with the administration into tangible election results.

Sargent: Just to build on what you’re saying a little bit, there’s tremendous institutional investment in propping up Trump, basically. Fox News is an enormous organization. It’s an enormous propaganda outlet. There’s going to be hundreds and hundreds of millions spent, maybe a billion dollars, by outside groups between now and election day, trying to push up those numbers, trying to take the edge off his disapproval.

So yes, there’s a whole enormous barrage coming that’s going to be designed to just drown out all this stuff we’re seeing. That said, these numbers are very bad. And I guess it’s on Democrats to make sure that those perceptions of Trump actually stick through the election, right?

Wiles: Yeah. And more importantly, I think Trump and Republicans have seen how unpopular they are, and they’re laying the groundwork to actually rig these elections through voter suppression—the SAVE Act, the newest version of the SAVE Act. The Supreme Court ripping up the Voting Rights Act and the power of Black voters, and through redistricting and gerrymandering. To them, voter participation itself is an act of resistance.

We’ve looked at analysis of what the SAVE Act would do, and it would target the main ways young people register to vote, which is 70 percent of them register at the DMV or online. Young people move twice as often as other demographics and less than half of them have passports. So there was a very concerted effort to restrict the voting rights and eligibility of young people in this country. And it’s just one of many things we’re focused on at NextGen.

Sargent: I think it’s worth just saying here that this effort to suppress the vote of young people is really telling in one sense. The inroads that Donald Trump made with young voters in 2024 was one of his big success stories. It was one of the Republican Party’s bigger public opinion and political success stories of the last couple of decades.

It was a really big deal, and it led to a whole lot of talk out there about how a new coalition was coming into being behind this new working-class, Trumpified Republican Party. And so now all the data shows us that every last little bit of his gains among young people is just gone. Every last little bit’s just gone.

And so now they’re at the point where they’re coming up with new ways to suppress the vote of young people. And Trump is furiously raging at Republicans, demanding that they pass this voter suppression thing in time to save them for the midterms. That alone is a big story and tells us a lot.

Wiles: Yeah. I mean, we looked at Yale’s poll that they conducted in the spring, and they looked at every demographic on the generic ballot between last fall and this spring, and every single demographic has shifted on the generic ballot towards Democrats through significant numbers, often.

Granted, there are the least gains among the youngest parts of the electorate, specifically the 18 to 22 range, but there are massive gains in the 23 to 29, 30 to 34 ranges. And we’re seeing that reflected across the space.

Sargent: Right. So you’re basically talking here about really big gains for Democrats among some of these young voter groups. I just want to return to some of the polling. The Economist/YouGov tracking poll that I mentioned earlier—we should note here—is not an outlier.

A new Reuters survey also has Trump’s approval at 35 percent. The New York Times average of polls, which is pretty conservative and takes in a lot of data, has him at 38 percent. That’s really bad, especially for a polling average. He’s probably in the mid-thirties. He’s now, at the very least, firmly in the thirties, right?

Wiles: Yeah, there’s no doubt about it. We did an analysis of all of the polls in 2025 that we could possibly get our hands on and found similar information. His polling averages have been trending down the entire time he’s been in office. There’s no sign of stopping at this rate. And he continues to do things that are deeply unpopular with the American public and very little to actually benefit them, if anything. And so people are wise to that. They know that the economic situation is tough. They’re experiencing it.

We just conducted focus groups and young people were saying just how difficult life has been from an economic standpoint and just culturally. One person said, Trump ruined my high school years, ruined my college years, and now is ruining the rest of my twenties.

And that is emblematic of how young people are feeling when a lot of them didn’t really know much about him until the 2016 election, even though he was quite normalized at the time. They’ve come a long way in their journey on experiencing what life is like under Trump. And for them, it’s economic anxiety.

Sargent: Well, I’ll tell you—what I think you’re getting at there is the degree to which Trump is this kind of malevolent, destructive force in American life at this point. And I want to close on that. First, I just want to talk about an interesting new poll from The Argument Substack. What they did is look at Trump’s net approval state by state.

I’m just going to cite a few examples. Trump is eight points underwater in Ohio. Eight points underwater in Iowa. Ten points underwater in Texas. Eighteen points underwater in North Carolina. Those are all states Trump won, and those are all states with serious Senate races in them. Now, of course, winning in those states for Democrats will be very hard. But still, Trump now looks like a truly big drag on Republicans in all these places. Again, places that are pretty red. Your thoughts on that?

Wiles: Yeah. I mean, Republicans are in the really unfortunate situation of having to defend the president’s record while him himself not being on the ballot. We’ve seen that he often is the driving force of a lot of new Republican voters to the polls. But when he’s not on the ballot, like we saw in 2018 and 2022, the Republicans that are have to deal with the consequences and defending his horrible record.

So as you pointed out, he’s underwater, disapproval rising in those states. Even when you look at the same data that folks are referencing on the generic ballot, you’ll see that there are really tight races in Texas, in Ohio.

This is not a pipe dream. Texas is very much in play this year, and this is a real election with a strong candidate. And Trump decided to intervene at the last second to put Paxton up. And being someone from Texas, I think that’s a horrible idea. They’re going to regret this decision.

Sargent: Well, speaking of the Texas Senate race, there is a new poll this week—a new independent poll from the Texas Pulse—that finds James Talarico, the Democrat, three points ahead of State Attorney General Ken Paxton, the Republican. It’s 47 percent to 44 percent with Talarico in the lead.

Now, nobody’s going to pretend here that Texas is easy. A shit ton of stuff can still go wrong. It’s an incredibly hard state to win. But I think it’s probably worth focusing a little bit on what you just said, which is that if Texas is going to be winnable, it’s because of Trump in two ways.

Trump is deeply underwater in Texas of all places. And number two, Trump forced Republicans to nominate Ken Paxton, who is absolutely a weaker candidate in just about every conceivable way than incumbent Senator John Cornyn is. So there you have Trump’s toxicity really kind of represented in two dimensions, don’t you?

Wiles: Yeah, and you also have a candidate who’s even more unpopular than Trump, believe it or not. Ken Paxton has a very low approval rating. He has a million issues as a candidate. And that’s even before you take into account that he’s on the hook for defending Trump’s record.

It’s going to be a very tough race for them. It’s going to be a very tough race for us. But I feel much better with Talarico as a candidate than I do with Paxton.

Sargent: OK, well, I want to close on this point that you made earlier. NextGen America, your group, recently released some research. I want to focus on one of your findings, which was that you found highly negative views of Trump as a person and as a cultural phenomenon, with many discussing Trump as someone who’s really wrecked our political and social life. Can you describe those findings?

They seem to me to get at that point I raised a little earlier, that he’s really this kind of malicious and profoundly destructive force in American life right now. And I think that that is really what we’re seeing in some of these public displays of rejection of him and so forth. What did you find on that front?

Wiles: Yeah, one of the most striking takeaways I had from that focus group that we just ran with Tulchin Research—they were Bernie’s pollster in 2020, a really highly respected pollster in the space—we found that Trump’s brand is so damaged compared to the last time we talked to young people.

He’s not getting the same benefit of the doubt or credibility as a businessman as he was at the start of his term or in 2024. Young voters have fully seen who he is, and they don’t like it. One of them called him, “a malignant narcissist who was out for himself and the powerful.”

And in both the groups we ran, for young men and young women, they were asked for gut reactions to Trump. They offered up words like horrible, infuriating, predatory, criminal, an egotistical loser, con man, cult leader. The list goes on. But there was pretty much uniform agreement that he’s had a really negative effect both on the culture of this country and on the policies that affect their daily lives, specifically regarding the economy.

Sargent: Amazing stuff. You made a point earlier I just want to really finish out on, which is there’s almost like a double-whammy effect here. On the one hand, Donald Trump’s not on the ballot in this fall’s midterms, which means he’s not going to be seriously getting out that sort of low-information, low-engagement voter that really only Donald Trump can get. It seems like he may be the only figure in American life who’s really able to mobilize those constituencies on that kind of level, with that kind of juice. So you have that on the one hand—he’s not there bringing out his own voters.

Yet at the same time, because of the structural ways in which midterm elections work, his increasing toxicity, his increasing unpopularity, his disastrous policies are weighing down on the party in power, because in midterms, what happens is voters turn out against the party in power. And so it’s like a two-layered effect here of Trump toxicity, in a way, isn’t it?

Wiles: We’ve seen this pattern in presidential years where Democratic support is often overestimated. In addition to the margin-of-error effects, we saw polls consistently finding Democrats doing better than they actually did. We call that polling error. And when you look at the midterm elections—2018, 2022—we saw the opposite happen, where Republicans were getting overestimated on the congressional ballot. And so it’s very possible that this trend continues in 2026 and that Democrats are actually stronger than they look in reality on these polls.

But we’re not taking anything for granted. We want to make sure that people are equipped to vote, they know how to vote, their rights are protected, and that very harmful legislation like the SAVE Act never gets passed.

Sargent: I’ll say, Grant Wiles, that the pieces are all in place here to win a really tremendous midterm victory, but the forces arrayed against that happening are going to be considerable. We’re talking about a billion dollars and an enormous crush of voter suppression. And God knows what they’re going to try to do with the military and ICE. Bottom line is, it’s not going to be easy, even though Trump is an utter disaster for his party. Grant Wiles, awesome to talk to you. Thanks so much for coming on.

Wiles: Thanks for having me.

It’s been heading in this direction for a long time, but it came into stark relief when White House aide Stephen Miller accused Democratic Texas Senate candidate James Talarico of being transgender. “He’s clearly transitioning into a female,” Miller said. “When Talarico goes in for a blood test, when he gets a physical, blood doesn’t come out. Soy milk comes out.” This followed attacks on Talarico by his opponent, Ken Paxton, who called him “Six-Gender Jimmy” and “James Tala-freak-o.” Fox host Jesse Watters called him a “gay vegan.”

To set the record straight, Talarico isn’t transgender, he isn’t gay, and he’s not even a vegan. Also, unlike Paxton, he isn’t a scandal-plagued attorney general who narrowly avoided indictments for securities fraud and bribery. Paxton let a child predator off with one day in jail and no sex offender registration because he was an influential Republican. Paxton has been involved in multiple cheating scandals, but to Republican strategists, the fact that Talarico once ate a meatless breakfast wrap and doesn’t promise to eradicate transgender people makes him less of man.

Accusing Democratic politicians of being transgender or transgender allies has deep historical parallels with Nazi Germany. Nazis routinely accused political opponents of being Jews, having Jewish blood, or being “friends of the Jews.” Today, Republicans use transgender people in the same way. They present 0.5 percent of the population as simultaneously a dire threat that is destroying the country and pathetically weak and disgusting. They promise that only when “those” people and all their supporters are gone will the country truly be great again. Indeed, both Project 2025 and the Republican legislative agenda, Project 47, bear eerie similarities to the past.

Republicans offer a vision of manhood that is meant to look like a parade of Aryan Übermenschen but instead comes across as a depressingly absurd circus sideshow. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth does push-ups and pull-ups badly, while bench-pressing what appear to be fake plates. His performative masculinity in his speeches makes it clear why he was forced out of the National Guard before he could be promoted beyond the rank of major. Secretary of Health Robert F. Kennedy Jr. promotes all-beef diets, raw milk, and shooting up on steroids, while looking and sounding like a Tom Waits outtake.

For a group that actively reviles gay people, the Republicans and their influencers are surprisingly averse to women. Fascist influencer Nick Fuentes has a lot to say about women, despite being a virgin, never having been in a relationship, and insisting that “having sex with women is gay.” Manosphere influencer Andrew Tate argued that any sex with women strictly for “feeling good” without the possibility of procreation is “super gay.” He has also suggested that “true alpha” men shouldn’t waste their time with women for physical release. Meanwhile, Tucker Carlson has promoted getting a suntan on your scrotum and perineum as a way to increase testosterone for “real men.”™

Even Alabama GOP Senator Tommy Tuberville recently got in on the “it’s gay to have a girlfriend” narrative. He declared on Fox News, “They’re now called the socialist, globalist Democrats, and it’s just unfortunate.… They’ve left their base of middle-class and union workers, and now, their new girlfriend is illegal aliens and women.”

This cavalcade of over-the-top performative hypermasculinity ends up looking a lot more like Mike Judge’s 2006 film Idiocracy than anything depicted by Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl. Idiocracy captures this current trend, with characters who are moronic describing the one average-intelligence, non-moronic human of “talking like a f-g.”

In the movie, President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Camacho (played by a jacked Terry Crews) is a pro wrestler who randomly sprays the air with machine-gun fire during his State of the Union speech while promising to fix everything. The character highlights how a society stripped of critical thinking elevates leaders who perform “strength” over those who possess actual competence. The performance of power has become the definition of power.

Idiocracy—which, remember, came out 20 years ago—depicts a trashed White House with a destroyed East Wing, inhabited by a cadre of unqualified idiots and in-laws working for a “five-time ultimate smackdown champion” and porn star president. In the real world, the East Wing is a smoldering wreck, Jackie Kennedy’s Rose Garden is reduced to an outdoor strip-mall food court, and an Ultimate Fighting Championship fighting ring is being built on the grounds to honor a president long associated with World Wrestling Entertainment and Jeffrey Epstein.

Idiocracy repeatedly highlighted how frighteningly dumb over-the-top masculinity was and what it would look like if it came to power. The answer was a society that thought it was a good idea to water your crops with a sports drink (Brawndo), leading to famine. According to the movie, this world where famine was a result of stupidity wasn’t supposed to exist until 500 years in the future. But today in real-life America … well, have you seen the price of groceries lately? 

Performative masculinity relies on emotional reactivity. Whenever the future society in the movie faces a problem, their instinct is to shoot a gun into the air or scream, mimicking an angry toddler. Now, anytime something doesn’t go President Trump’s way, he threatens to have people imprisoned via angry rants on Truth Social, occasionally coating the walls of his home in ketchup in a fit of rage.

Poe’s law is an internet adage stating that without a clear indicator of the author’s intent (like a winking emoji or tone indicator), it is virtually impossible to distinguish a parody of extreme views from a sincere expression of those views. Today, I’m not sure how you could parody how the United States has descended into a form of performative weirdness that was considered too over the top just 20 years ago.

Perhaps the saddest part of this for me is remembering how masculinity used to be idealized in movies. I grew up with The Right Stuff and Chuck Yeager as the pinnacle of what an American man should be. He was portrayed as unpretentious, honest, confident, intelligent, competent, brave, calm, and dedicated to his wife. He stole the show in a movie that was theoretically about the Mercury Seven astronauts. Today, that form of masculinity seems positively anachronistic.

More’s the pity.

When Congress enacted the Voting Rights Act at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, it gave communities the tools to combat these kinds of racial harms. Section 2 of the act outlaws state and local governments from enacting voting rules that result in racial discrimination. One of the undersung aspects of the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Louisiana v. Callais—for which there has been much hue and cry over the way it’s paved the path for right-wing state governments to draw majority-minority federal districts out of existence—is that it cuts away at this protection for local governments, as well, rendering it “all but a dead letter,” as Justice Kagan laments in her dissent.

While the media has focused on Callais’s impact on Congress in the 2026 midterms, its darkest mark will be on local governments. Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act has been most frequently applied to address and remedy local electoral practices, not state ones. Its use heralded diverse school boards and city councils where national minorities, by virtue of being local majorities, can govern.

Through this phenomenon, diversity develops twice over. First, through representational diversity and second, through institutional diversity. Minorities can see themselves represented on school boards, county commissions, and city councils. And they can harness that representation to institute local governments that do not look like state or national government. These more representative governments are more likely to become local laboratories willing to conduct policy experiments or try alternative governance approaches that the broader polity dismisses or ignores. This is why diversity at the level of individuals and institutions cultivates a rich democracy. Callais endangers these sites of local democracy by hollowing out Section 2 protections.

But back in 2018 when Tyson filed his lawsuit, Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act was still intact. We can look back in time to see its salutary effects. Tyson told a “tale of two districts,” where—unsurprisingly—a ceaselessly homogeneous school board had harmful consequences for the Richardson school district. Elementary schools where at least 70 percent of the students met grade level in two or more subjects were two-thirds white—and the vast majority were not economically disadvantaged. By contrast, the lowest-performing elementary schools were predominantly made up of Black, Latino, and economically disadvantaged students. Atop the startling peak of disparity was the 60-point achievement gap between the district’s highest-performing school, which was predominantly white, and its lowest-performing school, which was predominantly Latino.

These racial inequities did not go unnoticed by the Black and Latino voters of Richardson. And yet, Richardson’s school board remained persistently white for one reason: the district’s voting practices. While white students constituted a minority in the district’s schools, white voters still comprised a majority of the district’s population. These demographics, combined with an at-large, district-wide voting scheme where every voter in the district voted in every school board election, meant that minority voters would never succeed in electing a candidate of their choice. The minority vote would always be diluted against the white vote. 

The school board—whether under the threat of ongoing litigation or by a genuine change of heart—agreed to end this pernicious status quo. In 2019, Richardson Independent School District settled. As part of the settlement, the district moved toward a single-member district voting model. Specifically, it instituted an electoral scheme that allows voters within a predefined border to elect a board member to represent them—similar to congressional districting. Two of the five single-member districts in Richardson were drawn to ensure that Black and Latino voters were the majority. Voters from these districts later elected Regina Harris, the first Black woman, and Debbie Rentería, the first Hispanic person, to serve on the school board.

Richardson was not alone in making this kind of change. In response to immigration and changing racial demographics, the late 2010s saw a spate of lawsuits across school boards in North Texas alleging violations of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Many of these districts settled and moved to electoral systems that gave voters of color greater voice in their representation. Grand Prairie Independent School District, which has a majority-Hispanic student population, gained two Hispanic seats on its previously all-white school board following one of these lawsuits. Likewise, Carrollton-Farmers Branch, a majority-Latino district, secured its first Hispanic board member in over 20 years.   

The Callais decision threatens to upend this progress. Callais began with the 2020 census, which found that Louisiana’s Black population had grown to nearly one-third of the state’s population. Despite this shift in the racial makeup of the state, Louisiana legislators voted to keep the state’s congressional district the same as the decade prior—with five majority-white districts and one majority-Black district. After a Section 2 lawsuit was filed against the state, a federal district court mandated that Louisiana redraw the map with a second majority-Black district to comply with the Voting Rights Act. In response, Louisiana changed its map by moving Black voters to create two majority-minority districts to reflect the census results, which involved, by definition, looking at voters’ race. Plaintiffs—describing themselves as “non-African-American” voters—challenged this new map as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. 

The Supreme Court agreed. In doing so, it raised the bar of what constitutes a Section 2 violation. Previously, to prove a violation of Section 2, a plaintiff needed to satisfy the three-part test established by the 1986 Supreme Court case Thornburg v. Gingles to show that a voting rule has discriminatory effects on minority voters. Callais contorted that test. While the court stopped short of holding that only intentional racial discrimination violates Section 2, the new evidentiary demands it has placed on would-be plaintiffs create that requirement in practice. After Callais, a plaintiff would need to prove that the redistricting cannot be explained by partisan affiliation. Because voting preferences often correlate with race, controlling for party affiliation and proving racial intent is a near-impossible feat. In more concrete terms, Black voters tend to vote Democrat and white voters tend to vote Republican. If a Republican-led state legislature gerrymandered Black constituents out of a vote, it would be extremely challenging to attribute this action to racial animus as opposed to partisan gamesmanship. 

Callais’s logic applied downstream to local politics makes electoral changes—like the ones in Richardson—impossible to imagine. Many local governmental bodies, like school boards and city councils, employ the same at-large electoral system that Richardson used. Half of Section 2 cases were brought against at-large electoral systems to push them toward single-member districting in an effort to undilute minority voting power. Now these localities face less legal pressure to change. Even more discouraging, districts like Richardson might revert to electoral practices that disfavor minority voters—and foster the achievement gaps that Black and Latino voters aimed to fix by winning a seat at the table.

This will have devastating consequences for local politics. In the eight years since the Section 2 lawsuit was brought, Richardson has seen an increasingly diverse school board that added an African American Studies course for its high schoolers—even as Texas and national politics moved in a more conservative direction. While neighboring school districts descended into the culture wars and banned books about gender and race, the district took a more measured approach. Richardson is a parable with a simple lesson: When local governments look like the populations they govern, they can make policies that accurately reflect local preferences instead of parroting national or state politics. This makes Americans feel closer to the government that serves them most closely. Callais dismantles the legal mechanism that makes this form of democracy possible, and we are all worse off for it.

Kathy Roberts Forde, a journalism professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, says that it’s critical that journalists and media organizations stop pretending that there is a neutral way to cover the news that expresses no underlying values. A “view from nowhere,” the term that journalism expert Jay Rosen uses, is misleading (journalism requires making decisions on what to cover and how) and empowers people who use this neutrality standard to attack all journalism as biased. In the latest edition of Right Now, Forde argues that today’s journalists are covering authoritarianism in America and should model their coverage after the reporters who covered a previous era of authoritarianism: the Jim Crow South. She says that Black journalists and news organizations in that era covered the news accurately but did not deny their underlying goals for a more equal and just America. Forde, co-editor of Journalism and Jim Crow: White Supremacy and the Black Struggle for a New America, also discusses Bari Weiss’s leadership at CBS, NBC’s Kristin Welker’s interview with President Trump, and the rescheduled White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

Perry Bacon: I’m Perry Bacon, the host of Right Now on The New Republic. Great guest today. Kathy Roberts Ford is a professor of journalism at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and she’s been a frequent guest. We’re going to talk about some of the questions about—she writes about journalism and its connection to democracy, and we’re going to talk about that and a few things that happened in the news the last few weeks. Kathy, welcome. Thanks for joining me again.

Kathy Roberts Ford: Oh, so great to be here, Perry. Appreciate it.

Bacon: So I want us to talk first about the 60 Minutes story, which has become personalized in a certain way—it’s Bari Weiss versus Scott Pelley, and those are important people in the journalism world. But what I want to ask you is: What should we think of 60 Minutes, this venerated news program, having its top producers and three correspondents leave in the same week, a new person put in charge who doesn’t seem to know much about television news?

How should we think about that in the democracy context, as opposed to the Bari Weiss versus Scott Pelley framing?

Roberts Ford: Yeah, I really like the way you’re framing that, Perry. I think it’s really easy for those of us observing to fall into the personnel drama and the personal drama of it all …

And not just Scott Pelley, but all of the employees and producers and folks at 60 Minutes. It’s really personal, and it’s incredibly hard, and there is all that drama and deep personal experience. But at the end of the day, what matters most here is that CBS News and 60 Minutes are being recruited into the federal administration’s authoritarian project. And that’s really a huge problem for the news today and the press writ large.

60 Minutes has incredible symbolic value among journalists in this country and among the older generation of news consumers, because it has such a very old lineage and an incredible reputation for doing really hard-hitting, elite public affairs journalism with a focus on politics—and not just politics, but a strong focus on and access to some of the most powerful political operators and players and leaders in the country’s history.

So when you have these mergers and the ownership being used by the federal administration as a way to control CBS News and 60 Minutes—with Bari Weiss installed there, and the new executive producer, I’ve forgotten his name—

Bacon: Nick Bilton.

Roberts Ford: Yeah, that’s it. This is a recruitment and an attempt to capture independent, hard-hitting, truth-telling journalism that holds power to account—for the service of what I view, and maybe many of your audience does too, as an authoritarian project.

Bacon: Let me—you said CBS is being used in service of the authoritarian project. Connect the dots here a little bit. Donald Trump is not calling CBS and saying, Air this and not this. And if you listen to Scott Pelley, what he seemed to be saying was that Bari Weiss interjects to make programming a little bit more pro-Trump than it would otherwise be. So talk about how exactly Trump connects to what CBS does each day.

Roberts Ford: Yeah. I think certainly in the 60 Minutes context, what we’re understanding—or at least what we think we know from the witnesses and those who are in the middle of it, reporting out—and I think the most recent revelations in the New York Times daily podcast interview with Scott Pelley—by his account, what we have learned or think we know is that Bari Weiss was asking 60 Minutes to change its coverage of the ICE raid in Minneapolis.

And that in fact Bari Weiss asked 60 Minutes to make the protesters look more violent—make the point that Renee Good’s car was driving directly at the ICE officer, which, based on the evidence that many of us have seen, does not seem to be accurate. So there was an attempt to match the narrative coming out of the federal administration—that the Minnesota protesters, and Renee Good and Alex Pretti, were in fact being terrorists, in their words.

Bacon: Yes.

Roberts Ford: That may not have been Bari Weiss’s point—the terrorist thing, exactly—but there did seem to be, according to Scott Pelley, an effort to change the narrative and shape it so it fit the Trump administration’s narrative more closely.

Bacon: You said 60 Minutes has a lot of respect among the older audience particularly. I think that’s correct. So talk about network news in this era, because I think one thing I do want to emphasize is: Why is network news important?

My guess is a lot of people, particularly under 40, do not consume 60 Minutes this week, any of the Sunday shows, any of that stuff. Does that stuff—do we in the media think—are we in the media and people who are over 40 thinking about 60 Minutes too much, one? And do these shows still matter at all, two?

Roberts Ford: Number one, they’re incredibly symbolic to the older generation, and they matter in the political sphere.

Because no matter what the reality is about viewership, it does matter to politicos and policy areas—being on these shows and having public discourse happen through the mediation of broadcast news, and in particular 60 Minutes, and cable news, of course. I do think also that our information ecosystem—it may not be that we have viewers tuning in to 60 Minutes, but we do have clips that are circulating broadly all over social media.

And it may be that the outrage algorithms feed them into certain audiences’ feeds more readily, but this is still a really powerful way in which these broadcast news programs get circulated. They still have—I think—and we don’t have a really great way of measuring yet how they circulate—

Bacon: They have impact. They set the agenda. The pure ratings are not a good way to think about these shows.

Roberts Ford: I agree.

Bacon: Let me ask—I wrote last week after this happened that she’s very wisely trying to turn CBS into a polite version of Fox News. And then I read another piece saying what the real goal is is to make it anodyne—the political pieces less hard-hitting—turn 60 Minutes into CBS This Morning, which is a very good program but is not as hard-hitting and not as investigative.

So what is your sense of what she’s trying to do with CBS? Do you have any assessment of that? Because I think Fox News, but lighter—there are elements of that, but that’s probably not exactly right.

Roberts Ford: I am really not sure. I think it’s still too early to tell. I think the fact that you’re having this framing disagreement with someone else who’s a really close watcher of the news is indicative that we’re not quite sure exactly what’s playing out and how, and what the outcomes are going to be. But the stakes are high—I think we know that much.

And when you have the independence of news organizations and a program and journalists like 60 Minutes being dismantled in this way, it’s not a good sign and is in fact something that we should be concerned with.

I’m very interested in—I think we in America, as news consumers, do not have a very good understanding of the U.S. experience with authoritarianism in this country. We have long experience with it. It just wasn’t at the federal level—it was at the state level. And this is what happened across the U.S. Southern states after Reconstruction.

You had overthrows of legitimate, elected state governments. You had violent overthrows in many states by the party of white supremacists—Democrats. But what you got at the end of the day was racial authoritarianism and these Jim Crow orders, one-party rule. You had authoritarian governance at the state level.

And the press—the white Southern newspapers that were aligned with the Democratic project—they were part of building that. They were active political players.

Roberts Ford: Yeah. And when we think about the authoritarian project today happening at the federal level and some states—

Bacon: Some of these same states from before, in some ways. Yes.

Roberts Ford: Yeah! We have to understand: The press is not simply a referee. The press is not a neutral bystander. The press is not simply a chronicler. It’s not just calling balls and strikes. It is a political player.

Even those press institutions that don’t want to be connected to a project of any kind—either a MAGA project or a pro-democracy project—they want to somehow stand apart from it. But none do, at the end of the day. The press has First Amendment protections so it can be that fourth estate—it can play its role in public discourse and in public life.

And so it’s a dream—it’s an absolute fantasy to imagine that the press isn’t itself a political player. It’s something we need to account for and think really carefully about: think about in what ways certain norms and professional standards of the press can be inadvertently not up to the charge of the moment? Which is what I think the press should be doing—a kind of pro-democracy journalism. What that means is incredibly contested. We haven’t quite figured it out yet.

Bacon: We’ll get back to that.

Roberts Ford: You do it well. Other institutions do it well. But a lot don’t.

Bacon: So the Southern analogy—the post-Reconstruction analogy—is interesting: The Southern newspapers participated in the political project of white supremacy. They were not—the owners of those papers were not necessarily picked by the government, right? How were they—how did the owners—what was the line between the governors in the Southern states and the politicians and the newspapers? How did that compare to today? Were they formally aligned, informally aligned, not at all aligned? Did they have the same goals, or were they working in concert? How did that work?

Roberts Ford: Yeah. In many cases, they might have had a formal alliance with the Democratic Party—

Bacon: The Democratic Party in the South, just to be clear.

Roberts Ford: Yeah, the Democratic Party in the South during this period—

Bacon: The early period, like nineteenth century—the racist party.

Roberts Ford: Not today’s Democratic Party at all, to be clear to everyone. But it was largely just coalitional. These were collaborative projects, in which politicians—governors, state legislatures, representatives, and senators to the U.S. Congress—worked with business leaders. And, by the way, newspaper editors and their owners were business leaders.

They worked collaboratively together on a single political project. Not that their interests were always closely aligned, but they were broadly aligned. And they worked really proactively together on all kinds of projects that built authoritarian rule in the South and that excluded a huge portion of the population—Black Americans.

Bacon: You were referring to the media wanting to be neutral, and it made me think of that Jay Rosen phrase, “the view from nowhere.” A lot of news outlets want to say, We don’t have ... our ideology is nothing. We just cover the news. “All the news that’s fit to print” is a version of that—that’s the New York Times slogan. And I guess the point you’re making is: Covering the news is inherently a political act.

How you cover it is a political act. And the question is, are you going to be MAGA, pro-democracy, something else? Your point is that news organizations in some ways have to think about their own values and what values they’re espousing—not necessarily partisan values, but democratic values.

Roberts Ford: Yeah, democratic values. There’s room enough in this world of news, the news ecosystem in the United States, to have some partisan news organizations. But when that partisanship leads to disinformation, spreading disinformation; when it leads to ginning up violence, political violence of some kind, or giving a permission structure for political violence; when it leads to any of the things that we understand to be—

Bacon: Democracy-eroding or—

Roberts Ford: Yeah. Trying to undermine democracy. Trying to dominate certain groups within the United States political body or the public. When it’s actively doing things that are harmful to the public good and to the creed of the Declaration of Independence, or when they’re against the rule of law—all these things tear us apart, and neutrality doesn’t serve us.

And a bothsidesism kind of journalism—journalism that has a pretense toward being objective and detached and removed and calling balls and strikes—we need a journalism that is covering the power structure and covering what actors are actually doing and what they get out of a conflict.

Bacon: And again, I think people always think that means partisan, but in reality, in most small cities, there are a few business owners who have a lot of control. It doesn’t matter what party they’re in—there’s often a power structure in cities or states, and that’s what we want the journalists to be policing. And you would say they should police the Democratic versions of that, capital D, and the Republican versions of that too. Journalism should be scrutinizing the powerful—all powerful people, right?

Roberts Ford: Yes, all powerful people. And this is also part of the problem with the journalism that we live with today—so much of it is corporatized. Especially broadcast and cable news—it’s owned by major corporations that have other … tech companies, digital platform companies, entertainment companies. And the news itself is not a big moneymaker.

So what this means is the ownership—these big conglomerates that own these news companies—they have other interests that they’re trying to protect in a federal environment, a regulatory environment, against litigation. And some organizations are beholden to shareholders too.

This allows the powerful to exercise levers of control and recruitment in order to shape what the news actually covers, instead of there being true independence in a journalistic outlet. And this is why having truly independent journalistic outlets really matters—and we don’t have a lot of them.

Bacon: It’s worth knowing that the people who own CBS—one of the Ellison family—one of the people involved in the Ellison family was a big donor to Biden in 2024. So part of what’s going on is it’s not clear that they’re archconservatives so much as they are people who know the government in charge has power, and they’re trying to make the news coverage more favorable to the government in power because of the corporate financial interests.

I think what you’re getting at is the financial interests are driving this as much as the ideological. Those are related, but the financial interests are driving a lot of what’s happening here. The media companies that are so big and want to make themselves bigger—skewing the coverage for Trump may help them get mergers, which is where the real money comes from.

Roberts Ford: That’s exactly it. And right now, two of the biggest dust-ups we’ve seen with CBS News have to do with mergers from their parent company. You had the Skydance merger with Paramount, back last summer, and Trump was suing CBS at the time for however many million—I can’t remember how much—over the Kamala Harris edited interview, which he was calling election interference. And Paramount just wanted that to go away. And so there was a settlement.

Bacon: And the journalists were not happy about that, but as you say, the journalists have a very small financial piece of the company, and they’re not a profit center.

Roberts Ford: That’s right. Not a profit center.

Bacon: They’re often a profit loss, even. Yes.

Roberts Ford: Exactly right. The news oftentimes is getting subsidized by the highly profitable other arms of these conglomerates.

I think the lesson for us all is that we need very different ways to finance news in this country. News is a public good—it’s meant to serve the public good, meant to serve democracy and the people at large, hold power to account, cover governments, and help us do the work of being democratic citizens.

And preferably help us be democratic citizens in a multiracial democracy, where everyone has equal access to protection of the law and equal access to voting and political power and economic opportunity—all of that. And yet that’s not what we’re often getting.

Bacon: I want to switch topics a little bit. There was an interview that NBC News’s Kristen Welker, the host of Meet the Press, did with the president. And it went viral because the president stormed off the interview—which actually lasted a long time if you watched it, about half an hour before he leaves. But anyway, he said two things. One, he said, “Meet the Press is crooked. So is ABC, CBS, and CNN.” So CBS apparently has not sucked up enough, it seems. And then he says at the end, “A country can never be great with a dishonest press.”

What do you think about the president of really any country calling the leading four networks crooked and saying the press is dishonest? How should we think about that—really the president of any country, on some level?

Roberts Ford: Yeah. We’ve seen this in other countries that have been in the ascendancy in terms of authoritarian power—attacking the press, attacking universities, attacking the judiciary, attacking law firms, attacking all the institutions of accountability and truth-telling and knowledge production, institutions that truck in some form of fact-based reality and reason-making and decision-making and collective work together based on those values. To have the leader of a country attacking those very institutions is a classic authoritarian move. It’s part of a very classic authoritarian playbook, and it’s dangerous territory.

We’ve been here for quite a while. We’ve been here since Trump 1.0, and here we are again, Trump 2.0, with these attacks on the press that have only, it seems to me, accelerated. And this administration has been, even more recently, able to recruit or gain some type of leverage over different news institutions.

Thank goodness there are still plenty it doesn’t. We have a robust, critical, independent press in this country still. But these are long-standing, highly respected news organizations that are being attacked in these ways—and individual journalists too, especially women and especially Black women, which we all have watched with deep consternation and outrage.

Bacon: Connect the—you said earlier the media reaction to these kind of comments has generally been to say, We are neutral, we are not biased. And to play into the thing you were talking about earlier: The media’s reaction to him calling us biased is to emphasize We have a view from nowhere, we are not biased. What would be an alternative reaction from the press when it’s attacked?

Roberts Ford: Yeah. How do we think about what the press can do better?

Bacon: I don’t know if it’s a matter of coverage, as much as the rhetorical argument. He’s saying, You are biased. Their reaction is to say, We have no views, we are objective. And you’re saying that’s not going to be that helpful. What is maybe an alternative response to that?

Roberts Ford: One thing Kristen Welker did was she fact-checked him in real time—and then her network came up behind her and also provided a contextual fact-check after the interview. And that’s not enough, though.

Bacon: The thing is, he said something like, Kristen, you’re a liberal crazy, and she said, No, I’m not. What should she have said? Not I am a Democrat, not I am a Black woman. What would a useful response be—“My role here is not to be partisan, my role is...” what? Because I don’t think she had a good active response to that.

Roberts Ford: What do you think she should have said, Perry? I think that’s a really hard thing.

Bacon: I’m not criticizing her at all. I’m just trying to think about the—

Roberts Ford: No, I know you’re not. I don’t know what she could have said other than, I am simply attempting to cover the factual record and the shared reality, and provide the American people with— But all of that takes so much to say. And the ad hominem isn’t going to be really effective here, obviously—No, you.

Bacon: I guess—forget about the live thing. I think there’s something to say, which is: “You’re saying we are biased toward Democrats, but we are not biased toward parties. We are biased toward facts, democracy, holding the powerful accountable. We do have values, and those values often mean we’re going to criticize you. But we also asked Joe Biden hard questions, and we criticized him a lot, too.

Roberts Ford: That would be a great response if you could get all those words into a conversation with Trump. He was just speaking over her, as he always does.

Bacon: But when news executives are asked in forums where it’s not people like Donald Trump, they often still lean into this sort of, “We have no views, we are...” And even in slow-motion forums, they reflexively go into this neutrality language that I think is damaging.

Roberts Ford: They do, and it doesn’t work.

Bacon: It doesn’t work. It is not appealing to anybody.

Roberts Ford: It’s not. And it’s not accurate, is it?

Bacon: It’s not accurate. It might be—there are some places that want to just publish the facts. I think that’s probably true. Some AP stories are just recitations of what is happening. And I think that’s what the push is for—you cover a speech, Barack Obama said X, Mitt Romney said Z. But I think that’s not really journalism. That might be news in a sense, but that’s not really journalism.

Roberts Ford: It’s news of a certain kind, and of an older period, it seems to me. “He said, she said”—politician X said this, and politician Y said this, and they’re on two different sides, and we need to cover this conflict between the two of them. But oftentimes what’s more important is the stakes of the conflict, not the conflict itself—and weighing the evidentiary basis of the two different arguments in that conflict.

And I do think that this kind of journalism that tends toward the profoundly neutral and detached often misses the importance of the stakes and the importance of naming the structures. What is really going on here in this disagreement? And that requires a kind of interpretation that sometimes takes reporters outside their comfort zone. But I do think that what is necessary in a moment of authoritarian threat is exactly that.

Bacon: In the period you write a lot about—the Reconstruction, post-Reconstruction period, the Jim Crow period—there are Black newspapers and Black editors who are obviously writing in contradiction to what the Southern government was saying. There’s also, at some point, The New York Times and the big institutions start covering the civil rights fight, and probably with certain values—they are saying, in some ways, that the South is being racist and dictatorial. So there have been periods in which the media has expressed some values, right?

Roberts Ford: Yeah, of course.

Bacon: And so we want to get back to that—is that the idea?

Roberts Ford: Yes. And during the late nineteenth century and across the twentieth century, up through the moment of the Civil Rights Movement, you had a very active Black press that was doing pro-democracy work. The Black press was very clear on documenting the facts—everything that happened, events, issues, et cetera. But its framework was also—

Bacon: Jim Crow’s bad, slavery is bad. Lynchings are bad.

Roberts Ford: Yeah. But also: We are working to build American democracy. We are working to ask the country and the states to live up to the promise of the democratic creed, to what self-governance actually is, and to inclusive citizenship.

And that means access to the courts, access to justice, equal treatment under the law. It means inclusion—not segregation, but inclusion. It means not being made to be economically subordinate, having economic opportunity. It means all these things that citizenship means for us. It’s not just about voting. It’s about everything that makes us American and gives us access to—

Bacon: And the news outlets actively said that in their coverage. I have not read a lot of Black newspapers in the ’40s, but—

Roberts Ford: You probably have, actually. The Black press was—it was so much. Not every single one, but collectively, when you look at the Black press from the late nineteenth century all the way to the moment of the Civil Rights Movement and throughout the Civil Rights Movement, the Black press was leading the way on doing a kind of journalism that many white Americans and white newspaper leaders believed was biased.

Bacon: Sure. And it was biased for democracy and for the rule of law, right?

Roberts Ford: Yes. And it was very clear on calling out the self-dealing and the corrupt practices of the United States’s exclusionary federal and state-level approaches to citizenship for Black people and people of color and other groups.

Bacon: Where do you see that kind of journalism today?

Roberts Ford: The New Republic. But truly—you do it incredibly well, Perry. You know that. But also, I think ProPublica does an extraordinarily good job. I think a lot of smaller places are doing it best. I think we see it on Substack—there’s just a lot of great work being done there. And you see it in pockets on television news, cable and network, as well. But I think the really best stuff is coming from progressive news outlets. The Guardian, I think, does a really good job.

Bacon: And this is, you think, tied to the corporate ownership of most other outlets?

Roberts Ford: Oh, yeah. Don’t you?

Bacon: I don’t know. I think there are two issues. There’s the corporate ownership, but I think it’s also just the norms in the news. I assume the Black press in the 1940s would not necessarily have been read by—. The media’s in this moment of wanting to reach everyone, and every outlet should reach everyone.

I assume the Black press in the ’40s was not trying to reach white pro-segregationists. They didn’t assume that was necessarily their target audience, and they weren’t trying to have the Black readers and the white segregationists equally like the paper. And that’s the current goal of most news outlets.

Roberts Ford: That’s for sure. But let me tell you—the white segregationists, those in power, did read the Black press because they outlawed it all over the place in the South. Which of course is another major First Amendment violation that was allowed to stand.

Bacon: Yeah. The actual goal of journalism—they seem to be defining neutrality as Do we have equal approval ratings among both parties? And not even parties—

Roberts Ford: Yeah. Which is—

Bacon: Let me do two more things, and we’ll close out here. The first is the White House Correspondents’ Association has decided to have their dinner again—I think it’s going to be next month. The dinner got—there was an attempt of violence against the president, and the dinner was canceled. But I wanted to ask you what you think about this dinner overall. I’ll admit I’ve gone to it before—I went to it last year, in fact, when I think about it.

It’s considered a prestigious thing to be invited from your organization. There are senators in the room. But I get the critique that it’s a celebration of insiderdom, and it’s even weirder when you have a president who, as I said, calls the media dishonest almost daily. So how do you view this dinner and the role of it?

Roberts Ford: I have complicated feelings about it, and I think probably a lot of people do. On the one hand, it’s an organization that has historically overseen how the press pool works in the White House. And of course, the White House has now infringed on that historic role and is now choosing the White House press pool in certain ways. So that’s a problem—a significant problem. Some of its power has been removed from it.

And yet here it is acceding to Trump’s demand, really, that there be a follow-up dinner, and that it be held at the hotel of his choosing—I think the Waldorf Astoria—and that he be allowed to make comments, which he has already previewed. At the first dinner, there were going to be nasty comments about the press, and now will they or won’t they be? We don’t know.

Bacon: But the press is holding a dinner where the president who hates the press can attack the press. It’s a very strange dynamic.

Roberts Ford: And I’m not a fan of that. I’m not a fan of there being this big gathering. The White House Press Association says—it seems to me like it’s too easy to view it as, OK, this is a form of keeping our access and building good relationships with our authoritarian-minded president. We need the access, so we’re going to do these things, and he’s asking for it, and so yes, we’re going to do it.

That may not be fair—it probably isn’t fair. The White House Press Association talks about this dinner as promoting the First Amendment, celebrating the First Amendment, celebrating the role of the press in democracy. They raise money for scholarships for students to study journalism. So there’s some good there.

But there seem to me to be other ways to do that. It doesn’t have to be this dinner. There will not be a comedian there because—my goodness—the comedian might possibly roast Trump or say something—we all know the history of that.

Bacon: Last thing. How do you view Graham Platner running for Senate in Maine? The New York Times did a story—

Roberts Ford: Yeah, the primary is today, I think.

Bacon: Yeah, the primary is today. The New York Times did a piece about the various accusations, or how he treats women. It was a well-reported story—I’m not trying to criticize it. How do you think the press should cover a candidate like this? Because it’s not just the treatment of women. A lot of his Reddit comments—he has no—you can’t cover his record because he’s never held office before.

He’s voted in public, but he’s never held office. How do you think we should—it seems like a lot of voters like him because he’s gruff and because he’s an outsider, but I wish I knew what he would do as a governing person. It’s nice to know if they were on the City Council or something.

How do you view what the press should do? Because if you remember Zohran Mamdani—whatever you thought about him—was a state representative at that point. You could see his record. He had run campaigns. Having somebody who’s come from nowhere and is now running for the U.S. Senate is actually a very challenging thing. How do you think the media should think about covering him?

Roberts Ford: I think it’s really hard. He’s an insurgent candidate. He doesn’t have the record that you speak of. And vetting candidates is what the press does—it’s a significant role for the press to play. I certainly don’t criticize the press for doing this kind of work. Why would one? It’s an important role.

But I do think the same scrutiny that is being given to Platner’s candidacy—it’s a really important one. That Senate seat is a really important one. It’s important for the Democratic Party, but whatever one’s political orientation, if you care about elections and their being fair and open, we want there to be scrutiny of all candidates. And so for me, it’s a little bit about proportionality and even-handed scrutiny.

And also, stories could be a little—some of the stories about these matters could also describe what’s at stake, what he says his policies are going to be. I don’t know if they should only be about the vetting—the Reddit comments, the tattoo, the Nazi symbol tattoo received while he was in the military, the sexting. I don’t know.

Bacon: I like what you said, in part because we’ve had a few House members in either very red or very blue districts who miss work, don’t show up—one in New Jersey was missing for a few weeks—and we don’t cover them at all because they’re not in a contested race. But in reality, I think it’s important to say they all get a vote in Congress too. And so I wish we spread the attention.

We get a lot of attention to Talarico in Texas or Susan Collins. There are a few members in Kansas we cover extensively. But in reality, even though South Carolina is not a swing state, the governor of South Carolina—who will be basically nominated today, because that’s when the primary is—influences the six or eight million people, whatever the population of South Carolina is. That person has a lot of power, and we should probably cover them too.

And I do worry if we cover only swing states because they matter for the electoral map. But most people—you live in Massachusetts, I live in Kentucky—most people don’t live in swing states. And so it might be worth covering the politicians well who are going to keep getting reelected but still have a lot of influence.

Roberts Ford: Yeah. Agreed. And I think we should be deeply concerned not only about who is going to be in office in the federal government, but also who’s in office at the state levels—and what are they up to? What are they doing?

We have, as I said at the top of our time together, states that are deep into their own authoritarian projects, and they’re working collaboratively with the federal government. What’s going on? What can we expect? In what ways are people’s freedoms being curtailed? And what are the justifications or manipulations being handed out to voters that allow voters to accept that?

And to me, it seems like there’s a kind of bait and switch. I don’t want to say that voters are being truly manipulated, but you’ve got a lot of oligarchs, a lot of people of extraordinary wealth—the billionaire class and more—who have some access to political power, and they’re running as if they’re on a populist platform with populist policies.

And we don’t really see much in the way of economic reforms, efforts, policies meant to help everyday people with inflation. We don’t see policies trying to address wealth inequality. And instead, what we’re getting is the Voting Rights Act being gutted, tariffs, and another war—without these being things that people are being consulted on.

Bacon: I’ve written a lot about how the big organizations—The New York Times, the Post—should have more people at the state level covering politics, particularly the states you’re talking about. But I think that collides with the neutrality problem.

If you have a bunch of reporters covering Alabama’s government for a while, it would make the Republicans look worse because they’re in charge, and the Republicans in Alabama are not doing a lot of good things right now in terms of solving problems, as you say. So I think part of it is the neutrality project and also the corporate project.

There’s not a ton of corporations in Alabama. The Bezos types who want to cover Silicon Valley—there’s a lot of money there. A lot of the big problem with the news organizations is that a lot of funding is concentrated in D.C., New York, and San Francisco, because that’s where the financial wealth is. You can have events, you can raise money, you can charge a very high subscriber price. But in reality, those places are—what, 5 percent of the American population?—but they have 25 percent of the journalism spending, or something like that. That’s a real thing to think about.

Roberts Ford: Yeah, it’s a huge thing to think about. And in the meantime, local journalism is just in such retrenchment. We’ve had hedge fund companies and corporate entities that have gutted them. People seem more interested in national news than in their local news. And this is a real problem for local self-governance and state-level governance, as well.

Bacon: Are you in the area where the Boston Globe would be the paper, or is there an Amherst paper that’s bigger?

Roberts Ford: We have the Daily Hampshire Gazette, which is a very historic newspaper, and it’s hanging on.

Bacon: Is it owned by Gannett or Knight Ridder, or is it independent? How’s it structured?

Roberts Ford: It’s in a smaller ownership body. Regional.

Bacon: Good. I think this was a great conversation. Thanks for joining me, as always.

Roberts Ford: Thanks for having me. Good to see you.

Bacon: Take care.

Roberts Ford: You too.

In Gerontocracy in America, law professor Samuel Moyn argues that nothing about this novel arrangement is level, perfect, or even good. Rather, it represents a radical, historic skew. The boomer beneficiaries of “the great aging” have blocked the natural order and flow of time with fantasies of an eternal prime and the hoarding of resources away from the more deserving, increasingly restless young. Where the old once had the decency to plop expeditiously off the generational conveyor belt, they now selfishly just keep going, like some fast-breeding army of geriatric Energizer Bunnies. The result, argues Moyn, is systemwide social arteriosclerosis. A nation once “oriented to innovation and problem-solving” has devolved into one “increasingly built around caretaking and compassion,” where

a future focused on what to become next—collectively, not just personally—is being foreclosed, life reduced to a mass project of eking out a little extra in the face of the inevitable death of has-beens as they exert continuing control.

It is a safe bet that the AARP will not be promoting Gerontocracy in America to its 38 million members. Its depiction of the great aging as an orgy of elder egotism is so dark that it casts a shadow on the very medical advances that enabled it (and which happen to be among the heaviest fruits of the lost “innovation society” the book pines for). Moyn assigns blame not just to the high-profile octogenarians who are its public face, but also millions of middle- and working-class retirees who remain in the labor market (usually against their wishes) and donate to candidates who promise to protect their embattled interests.

For Moyn, returning the country to a state of vigor and dynamism requires questioning every widely held assumption about aging, life extension, and death. Only then can we overthrow the gerontocracy and “realize our collective aspiration to innovation,” while also achieving “intergenerational equity.” It is time, apparently, to refresh the tree of liberty with the blood of geezers—even if the majority are themselves only scraping by in an increasingly unequal society whose punishments can be most brutal on the old.

The size and relative health of today’s senior cohort may be new, but gerontocracy—a power structure systematically weighted by age—is very old. Max Weber assessed the link between age and leadership to be one of the “foundations of human politics across space and time,” Moyn observes, and not just in the elder-venerating cultures of Asia. The Oracle of Delphi instructed the Spartan lawgiver Lycurgus to vest power in a council of men 60 and older. This drew praise from Plato—but not Aristotle, an early critic of gerontocracy—and inspired councils throughout history, including the U.S. Senate. Moyn censures Cicero for hyping the inherent wisdom and virtues of being old, and bemoans the influence of Old Testament authors who described gray hair as “a crown of glory.” The early Christians made matters worse by naming their church leaders presbyteroi—Greek for “old men”—as did the early Americans, who used the English translation—alderman—for the New World’s representative democratic figure.

Jean-Jacques Fazy put forward the idea that elder veneration was a cover for corrupt rule in his 1828 pamphlet Gerontocracy: The Abuse of the Wisdom of Elders in the French Government. For Fazy, as for Moyn, the problem with gerontocrats was not just their age or wealth, but the proclivity to reactionary politics that age and wealth cultivate together. “Skittish of progress, with a bias that old men have for rest, the agitation that arises around them tires them out, and their priority is to guard against it,” Fazy wrote of the doddering blue bloods who dominated the French Parliament after the Bourbon restoration.

The nineteenth was Moyn’s kind of century, bursting with youthful impatience and responsive to Fazy’s call to generational arms. Rapid industrial change and surging democratic energy combined to drain the old of their prestige; in 1893, Émile Durkheim observed that the old had become “pitied more than feared.” Nowhere was this truer than in the brattiest of the adolescent republics, where the youth charge was led by Progressives like Herbert Croly, Walter Weyl, and Walter Lippmann, who named this magazine The New Republic because, Moyn quips, they “didn’t want an old republic anymore.”

In Moyn’s telling, the old were already regrouping for a counterattack by World War II, more than half a century before “the longevity revolution” had a name. As their numbers grew with the gallop of modern medicine, the old began voting en masse in primaries, steadily amassed wealth and social power, and invented a new social class bolstered by what Moyn describes as the best-funded lobby in history, the AARP. The result is a gerontocracy whose “ravaged and wrinkled face” can be seen across our politics, from statehouses to the Oval Office.

The fact that our officials have been getting steadily older since 1990 merely reflects a bigger problem, Moyn argues—“the elder power behind the thrones.” The numbers are indeed striking. Ninety percent of House seats are decided by primaries in which seniors vote at six times the rate of those under 34. In 1968, only 15 percent of votes were cast by voters 65 and older; in 2024, the median age of the American voter was 65. (In New Mexico, it was 71.) Special elections and primaries are dominated by voters who have “aged more than their fair share,” Moyn writes, who typically favor lower taxes and oppose development projects that might threaten real estate values. The enthusiasm and discipline they demonstrate at the polls are no autumnal flowering of democracy, but a wintry “parody” and “subversion” of it that has “modeled civic participation” at the cost of “closing off the collective future even as their own deaths inexorably approach.”

Such passages invite one to imagine a white-haired mob gathered in fury outside Moyn’s Yale Law School office, re-creating the “Eldsters” riot that opens Make Room! Make Room!, Harry Harrison’s 1966 dystopian science-fiction novel of generational warfare, resource scarcity, and climate change (better known to most people by its 1973 film adaptation, Soylent Green). Moyn proposes a staggered program of political disenfranchisement and mandatory retirement similar to the policies that inspired Harrison’s Eldsters to mobilize. At its center is a kind of democratic death panel, empowered to restore electoral balance through weighting ballots by birth year. This is not a new idea, and 37-year-old Brandeis professor Douglas Stewart floated an extreme version of it in a 1970 New Republic article advocating ending eligibility to vote at age 70. Echoing Fazy, Stewart argued this was justified by the inclination of the old toward “greed, cowardice, resentment over the cheats of life … and the consequent desire to punish somebody for it.” Moyn regretfully concedes that cutting voters off at 70 is probably too “radioactive” in the United States—a country that tends to “romanticize” one-person, one-vote—and instead floats a compromise in which ballots decline in value as voters age. The average age of officeholders, meanwhile, could be pushed downward with age limits, term limits, and mandatory capacity testing. If the DMV can do it, why not Congress?

It’s a fair question, as are Moyn’s exasperated rhetorical questions about why we still have a Senate—the “most glaring holdover of elder councils as the first human form of rule”—at a time when many other democracies have moved away from the bicameral model, either rendering their upper chamber largely toothless, as in Britain, or doing away with it altogether, as in Sweden, New Zealand, and Denmark. But age is hardly the main problem with the U.S. Senate. Would the body be less worthy of destruction were it dominated by replicas of 44-year-old Katie Britt, and purged of the 84-year-old Bernie Sanders? The urgent problem with the Senate as an institution is not the age of its members but the absurd structural overrepresentation of rural states at the expense of states where most Americans actually live.

Nor is age really the issue with another of Moyn’s targets, the Supreme Court. Moyn presents his ideas for reform with a reminder that Franklin D. Roosevelt’s abandoned court-packing plan called for one new member for every justice over 70. But the oldest member on the court at the time of FDR’s plan was an 80-year-old Louis Brandeis, widely regarded as one of the most important liberal justices in the country’s history. The problem with the court is the ability of corrupt and ideological supermajorities to hold the country hostage. Again and again, listing off ages turns out to hold little explanatory power: Donald Trump is 80, but Stephen Miller is 40, JD Vance only 41, and Pete Hegseth 46. Youth is hardly a guarantee of public virtue or progressive politics. And while there is truth in Moyn’s charge that older voters skew (small “c”) conservative, he is too dismissive of the potential to balance their power by mobilizing more young voters. There is ample recent evidence that strong left candidates and politics can drive youth turnout to match and even overwhelm the old at the polls. Attacking universal franchise is the other side’s game.

Is the longevity revolution really the determining factor of our democratic dysfunction, or is it a secondary phenomenon that tracks, with so many others, onto deeper and more fundamental structures of power?

Moyn dutifully nods at these questions, as he nonetheless races along to make his case for the salience, if not primacy, of age as a new social class. In the modern gerontocracy, he believes, the old are more than just a subset of the ruling class; they have subsumed the ruling class itself. In this analysis, Moyn largely waves aside distinctions between the working class, middle class, and the rich, in favor of counting the number of candles on the birthday cake. “Class is real; age is also real, helping make class what it is. If capitalism is gendered and racialized, it is also gerontocratic,” he writes. “Old Americans are disproportionately rich.”

It would be more true to say that some old Americans are very rich, while the rest are living modestly or struggling. Moyn frequently zooms past such nuance. Consider his treatment of the widening generational wealth gap: The median wealth of 65-plus Americans is 47 times that of the 18–34 cohort. It’s a striking number—average wealth in the United States peaks between the ages of 65 and 74 at over $400,000—but it’s much less striking when you remove the top 20 percent of senior households, which together control nearly 90 percent of senior-held wealth. When the country clubbers and stockholders are sliced from the equation, what gap remains is almost entirely attributable to home equity accrued on modest homes purchased in the middle and late decades of the last century. These purchases were possible because of the young family–oriented welfare state politics that Moyn is nostalgic for, putting him in the awkward position of blaming middle- and working-class people for the perfidy of aging in place with a single asset.

That asset increasingly does not even guarantee basic security. A report by the National Council on Aging found 80 percent of senior-led households “are unable to weather a major shock, such as widowhood, serious illness or the need for long-term care,” and nearly half “lack the income needed to cover basic living costs.” More than 40 percent of seniors with home equity still pay a mortgage, putting them “in a similar, and sometimes more precarious, financial position than a typical 45-year-old worker with a steady income,” the report concludes. Moyn’s assertion that “the golden years are gilded” in our gerontocracy will be news to 12 million seniors who spend a third or more of their limited income on housing, same as any Gen Z barista.

Himself a comfortably middle-class Gen Xer, Moyn acknowledges but mostly avoids the reality of deepening elder poverty. “For sure, poor old people exist; rich young people do, too,” is a typical evasion. A failure to appreciate the prevalence of senior precarity haunts Moyn’s complaint against the older workers he accuses of clogging the labor force. His contention that old people are refusing to make way for future leaders—“a gerontocratic crisis of succession on the scale of American society itself”—for example, focuses on the retirement age of men and women atop the Fortune 500. “The average hiring age of corporate leadership at the top American companies … has risen dramatically from forty-six to fifty-five in the past two decades,” he writes, punctuating these numbers with reference to the HBO Max drama Succession, which also provides the book’s epigraph (a character’s lamentation: “I’m bored, working for this dictatorship of dying men”). The elite focus carries over into the book’s discussion of America’s aging professoriat. Balzac’s archetypal old miser Félix Grandet is “alive and well in America today,” writes Moyn, with “a side hustle at Yale.”

The issue of Ivy League professors holding on to tenured positions well into their seventies may strike Moyn as a serious problem—the academy is his habitat—but it’s hard to see anyone thinking it cracks the top-thousand crises facing the country. More urgent is the phenomenon of exploding executive compensation amid falling wages, declining labor power, and deepening inequality. But Moyn approaches these worthy targets only to drop more bombs over the age of society’s worst actors. Obscene corporate salaries and self-serving stock buybacks are concerning mainly for their “direct implications for the fusion of age and class inequality in America today.” If inequality has spiraled along with the rise of aging executives, Gerontocracy in America suggests the latter is somehow driving the former. But does anyone really believe that younger CEOs, or the hedge fund founders they increasingly serve, are any less greedy than their older selves? Is Bill Ackman, 60, more public-spirited or less ideologically driven to generate profits than Warren Buffett, 95?

Even if the exercise of tracking CEO ages were not absurd, a CEO’s reasons for reigning longer have little to do with the reasons most older people are remaining in the workforce past retirement age. While CEOs may choose to “hoard” jobs and status—driven by vanity, ego, and addiction to power—they are a tiny portion of older Americans. More typical is the senior citizen who is forced to take on a new job just to survive and pay or prepare for emergency medical debt. All of these workers must be shaken from employment rolls argues Moyn, beginning with the repeal of the Age Discrimination in Employment Act, the 1967 law that ended mandatory retirement ages and that Moyn considers “one of the AARP’s most consequential and toxic achievements.”

Once forced into retirement, clearing the lanes of advancement for the worthy young, Moyn argues, the old must be stopped from “spending their way to a compliant political order.” As with a weighted system that reduces the power of elders’ votes, he proposes campaign finance reforms that stop them from using their savings and pensions to reinforce a gerontocratic government “bought and paid for by those who are up in years.”

It is true that old people dominate contributions to campaigns. (They are also systematically preyed upon and scammed into recurring donations by the biggest Democratic and Republican fundraisers, which Moyn does not mention.) Yet again, however, the numbers fail to convince. The country’s 61 million seniors account for around half of federal campaign contributions, most of them small online donations. Meanwhile, the country’s more than 900 billionaires alone account for nearly 20 percent of all money in federal politics. Even factoring in the collective lobbying might of the AARP, the old do not compare as a force to the dark money spigot opened by Citizens United, the democracy-destroying ruling issued by a conservative majority in 2010, when Chief Justice John Roberts was a sprightly 54 years old—still a decade from enjoying the senior discount at McDonald’s. Though Moyn makes sure to take a (justified) swing at the piñata of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s decision not to retire while Barack Obama was president, the closest he gets to mentioning Citizens United is an age breakdown of the megadonors it enabled. The biggest spender of the 2024 cycle may have been 55-year-old Elon Musk, but Moyn finds more meaning in the ages of Timothy Mellon (84) and Miriam Adelson (80), both of whom provide a “stark reminder of how the gerontocracy of private means is laundered into the gerontocracy of government policy.”

Nowhere does the book’s argument feel more forced. Is Adelson’s current dotage more relevant than the billions her late husband was allowed to amass in his prime, or the Roberts court ruling that allows her to spend it on politics? Moyn’s efforts to explain every aspect of our corrupt politics through the lens of age here begins to verge on mania. When he starts bemoaning the lack of public data on the average age of AIPAC donors, the reader begins to wonder if maybe grandpa isn’t the only one who needs a nap.

As well as systematically reducing the power of the senior vote, Moyn would deploy more surgical tools to “overthrow the housing kingdom of the older set.” After raising and dismissing the possibility of age quotas for certain ZIP codes, he settles on a laudable basket of tax reforms that would reverse decades of organizing victories by (mostly well-heeled) seniors. In place of homestead exemptions and property tax limits in the mold of California’s Proposition 13, seniors would face an age-weighted but progressive regime that would fall hardest on those with “highly assessed … second or third homes.” If these failed to disincentivize elder house hoarding, Moyn proposes lowering the boom with a housing death tax, proceeds from which would be used to fund new housing.

When these proposals take aim at the wealthiest, it’s hard to argue with them. When aimed at ordinary seniors, they require heavy doses of sweetener. And here Moyn envisions a grand bargain: As a reward for “dying broke, as property and resource transfer is incentivized or forced,” seniors will be sent forward into a “new utopia” of “socialism for the old.” In the book’s final pages, Moyn recognizes that elder hoarding is, in most cases, not driven by greed, so much as “the foreboding intuition that there will not be enough to avoid the indignities of the last stage of life.” Addressing this reality with a safety net is a moral requirement, but is mostly described as a pragmatic measure, required “if only to keep the threat of gerontocracy at bay.” Elsewhere he argues for “guaranteed care until their last breath—if only to convince them to go along with an inspiring rejuvenation of society.”

On the subject of making retirement an enticing prospect, Moyn returns with open arms to Cicero, the villain of the book’s early chapters. The Roman did untold damage by romanticizing the wisdom and virtue of the old, but for Moyn there’s propaganda value in his idealized vision of a quiet retirement dedicated to gardening and reflection. With time to think and no pressure to work, the old can develop a healthier relationship with their impending demise, which will, Moyn hopes, result in fewer expensive late-life medical interventions.

This is the last and arguably most severe of the book’s many provocations. It is also one with a pedigree as ancient as gerontocracy. The ancients revered the old, but they also understood that the good life had natural limits. In Greek myth, Tithonus learned the folly of eternal life accompanied by eternal decline. Jonathan Swift updated this lesson with the Struldbruggs of Gulliver’s Travels, who showed this folly was really a kind of hell. In keeping with the book’s actuarial approach to intergenerational justice, Moyn’s hero on this point is the late bioethicist Daniel Callahan, who proposed that late-life health care be limited to home care, rehabilitation, and palliative care for people older than 80. He doesn’t explain what this would mean in practice: denying a hip replacement? Cutting off diabetes treatment? Leaving people to die, when long used and well-studied interventions are available? Instead Moyn likens Calla­han to a modern version of Seneca, the Roman poet and philosopher who observed the fine line between extending life and extending death once decline sets in. For his slaughtering of sacred longevity cows, Moyn holds that Callahan’s thinking remains “indispensable” for “integrating a better understanding of mortality into the public imagination.”

Late-life and death aren’t easy conversations, and Moyn deserves credit for not flinching from them. But the ageist bravado he brings to a subject as delicate as the length of a human life is jarring. We should assault dynastic concentrations of old money—in both senses of the phrase—and rewire society’s broken relationship to mortality. But we can do so in a way that acknowledges the value of every life, at every stage. Whether he is or not, Moyn gives the impression of being incurious and even insensitive to the immense meaning that a couple of more years with one’s family and friends might hold at any age, or why people cling so tightly at the end.

We can only learn so much from a book that understands and scolds the old as fundamentally a housing and labor problem—to be managed with compassion “if only” to protect the ideal and feed the churn of the go-getting “innovation society.” Cicero may have overstated them, but there has always been truth in ancient saws about white-haired sagacity. The old know what it is to be young, while the young do not know what it is to be old. And if there’s a cautionary lesson in the distilled wisdom of contemporary deathbed regrets, it is against the lie of ceaseless hustle.

On Monday, Artan was turned away at customs at the Miami International Airport, after border officials reportedly questioned him about, among other things, the Islamic insurgent group Al Shabab. The Trump administration has waged a bitterly racist campaign against Somalis and Somali Americans in recent months. The nation is on the president’s travel ban list, and President Donald Trump has called Somali Americans “garbage” and said “they’re all crooks.” The Trump administration, it seems, determined it would not allow a World Cup principally hosted by the United States to provide a showcase for a Somali—even if he earned his place; even if he really wasn’t there to represent his country.

Just last year, Gianni Infantino assured fans that none of this would happen. “There is a lot of misconception out there,” the FIFA president said in August. “Everyone will be welcome in Canada, Mexico, and the United States for the FIFA World Cup next year.” That tune has changed: When the Artan news broke, a FIFA spokesperson shrugged off the fact that one of its handpicked referees had been denied entry to participate in a tournament where “everyone will be welcome.” FIFA, the spokesperson said, is not involved in host-country immigration processes, including visa adjudications, and has been informed by authorities that Mr. Artan’s status will not be changed at present.”

Welcome to the 2026 World Cup, a Frankenstein’s monster of a tournament, stitching together the rot of FIFA with the ruin of its principal host nation. With kickoff a day away, there are many reasons to despair—or just to tune the whole thing out. But there are also reasons to be hopeful. Donald Trump poisons everything he touches, as does Infantino. But the competitive spirit of the World Cup, in spite of it all, can be remarkably resilient—an often poignant, sometimes magical spectacle that often reminds us that there are many things that vulgarians like Trump and Infantino simply can’t desecrate.

At the moment, the vibe is bad; there is very little magic and almost no poignancy. Instead there are the stories, like Artan’s, bubbling up as the World Cup approaches. The United States has denied visas to Iranian officials, detained Iraq’s star striker Aymen Hussein for seven hours at Chicago’s O’Hare airport, and has denied entry or put up significant hurdles for many fans who are citizens of nations that aren’t subject to the administration’s travel restrictions, like Jordan and Scotland.

If you have followed U.S. politics in any capacity since Trump returned to the White House last January, you have probably spotted Infantino lurking. He was at the inauguration and has popped up at Trump’s side in the Oval Office and on state visits—he even donned a red Trump hat at a meeting of the president’s absurd, fantastically corrupt “Board of Peace”—where he pledged to spend tens of millions building soccer stadiums in Gaza, a tin-eared, inhumane gesture even by Infantino’s depraved standards.

The conventional wisdom at the time was that Infantino was playing the long game. Sucking up to Trump would be humiliating for most, but Infantino is a virtuoso at ritual self-abasement—indeed it might be his only real talent. The prevailing theory was that Infantino was attaching himself like a barnacle to America’s gormless and corrupt president for the sake of the World Cup. By June—which is to say by now—the effort would pay off in the form of a tournament that ran smoothly, the way he wanted it.

To accomplish this, Infantino went so far as to create the single dumbest and most ridiculous award in the history of humanity—the fantastically absurd “FIFA Peace Prize”—which he bestowed on Trump. A month later, Trump sent U.S. troops to kidnap the president of Venezuela; a month after that, he started a war with Iran, a World Cup qualifier. Infantino, of course, doesn’t care about national sovereignty or human suffering; he certainly doesn’t care what kind of a person leads World Cup host nations. He does care that he—and by extension FIFA—gets what he wants from the tournament. And if that requires a warmonger to be the first—and let’s face it, likely only—recipient of a FIFA-branded award, so be it.

It can be credibly argued that Infantino debased himself for little in return. The lead-up to the tournament has been pure chaos and dysfunction. FIFA has known—or at least should have known—that there would be travel issues related to the tournament from the moment Trump won the election in 2024. (In fact, some of these concerns were apparent when Joe Biden was president.) Infantino may have hoped that all of that face time with the president would smooth things over. They haven’t, and there’s clearly no plan B. Put Infantino down as another fool in a long line of them that gambled that the president might care about anything other than himself and lost.

That said, there’s really no evidence that Infantino is troubled by any of this. He doesn’t care if a Somali ref isn’t allowed to officiate for racist reasons or if the Iranian team isn’t allowed to stay overnight in the United States—its base camp is in Tijuana. He doesn’t care if tickets to even inconsequential group stage matches are going for $1,000 or more. In fact, the absurd cost of the tournament to fans is the other major crisis of the 2026 World Cup. But for Infantino, the checks keep clearing. So he’s not losing sleep.

It is scandalous all the same. Fans are being priced out of participation. Many fans who might be willing to risk the perils of visiting the United States right now are staying away due to the insanely high cost of tickets. Although FIFA has bent a little in recent days, releasing more tickets and allowing prices to fall somewhat, it’s too late for many fans from outside the U.S.

For Infantino and FIFA, that’s just fine. Their real goal is to rake in as much cash as possible from the 2026 World Cup, and that’s exactly what is happening: The organization is set to make as much as $14 billion from the tournament. And for Infantino, it’s crucial that it does. He is running for reelection, and his presidency is dependent on doling out tens of millions’ worth of boodle to each of the 211 national federations that make up FIFA. For Infantino, it doesn’t really matter if the World Cup is chaotic or controversial. He just needs that money pump to run thick and green.

And make no mistake, the cash is flowing. But very little of it is trickling downward. The money’s not helping players, teams, or officials. It’s not benefiting fans or lowering the cost of transit to the venues. It hasn’t created exceptions for people traveling from nations like Somalia or Iran. For a select few, this will be the most lucrative World Cup ever. The only cost to Infantino is that he had to spend 18 months fawning over a moronic president who doesn’t care a lick about soccer.

But for the World Cup, this isn’t novel. Mussolini’s Italy hosted the second tournament ever, after all. FIFA’s history of corruption and bribery is only slightly shorter than that of its ties to authoritarian regimes and states. The U.S. is hosting the 2026 World Cup more or less because an FBI investigation into the awarding of the 2018 and 2022 tournaments nearly destroyed FIFA—it’s basically a make-good, an apology for the fact that Qatar more or less bought a World Cup that had been earmarked for the United States.

What’s more is that the lead-up to the World Cup always tends to be the moment we choose to reflect on its flaws and the corruption of its governing body; when we have the opportunity to assess the often dire human cost of holding this tournament in the first place. The 2010 and 2014 tournaments, held in South Africa and Brazil, were riven by protests over the high cost borne by developing nations who spent billions to host a tournament while millions lived in poverty. The 2018 World Cup was a transparent soft-power plot devised by Vladimir Putin of host nation Russia, sandwiched conspicuously between its invasion of Crimea and, four years later, Putin’s attempt to seize all of Ukraine. The 2022 tournament in Qatar was marred by the host nation’s abuse of the migrant workers who built its stadiums, whom it essentially treated as slave labor, as well as its oppression of women and minority populations.

By now, the World Cup follows a recognizable pattern: a wave of controversy and media scrutiny in the weeks leading up to kickoff that ebbed the moment the goals started coming and the talented nations started advancing. The World Cup is so big—and still, in spite of everything, so glorious—that it’s hard to focus on anything else once it starts. The competitive narratives eventually overwhelm. It seems this familiar trajectory is once again locked in. World soccer’s biggest blackguards eventually benefit from the fact that the actual soccer is riveting.

Will this year’s tournament break the cycle? There are some reasons to believe it might. In addition to all of the issues we have heretofore covered, climate—Houston and Miami are both hosting several games—will certainly be an issue. And what happens if there’s an outbreak of measles or another preventable infectious disease, thanks in part to the policies of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy? What if, God forbid, some kind of tragedy strikes? The English media, in particular, has latched onto a mass shooting in Kansas City that wounded nine because it occurred five miles from the team’s hotel. This is America, after all—there will undoubtedly be gun violence in host cities during the tournament.

Oh, and let’s not forget: Donald Trump is president of the United States. Past World Cup hosts have felt powerful incentives to keep controversy and chaos to a minimum during the tournaments. The leaders of South Africa and Brazil wanted to showcase their nations and their economies; Putin wanted to rehabilitate Russia’s reputation after Crimea; and the Qataris wanted to use the tournament to make powerful friends. They wanted something from the World Cup, in other words.

Naturally, Trump has the monomaniacal desire to be bathed in a positive light, but he doesn’t need anything specific from this tournament—no quid you could offer for him to stake pro quo of being on his best behavior. To expect a man who is so thoroughly in crashout mode to straighten up and fly right for a month and a half without doing something controversial, destructive, or stupid—maybe even from doing something that ticks every box at once—is to insist on the physiologically impossible. There is little to be done about the fact that the defining feature of this tournament will be a vainglorious and corrupt president.

But it’s still the World Cup. As embarrassing as it is to admit, I got goosebumps writing that sentence. When the tournament starts, many of us will remember everything we love about it. And there is a lot to love.

A (likely) last dance for the sport’s greatest ever player (Argentina’s Lionel Messi) and its, I don’t know, eighth or ninth best (Porgual’s Cristiano Ronaldo), the 2026 World Cup will feature wunderkinds like Spain’s Lamine Yamal and players currently playing at their peak, like England’s Harry Kane. Although the French arguably arrive with the best team for the third consecutive tournament, it also feels more open and unpredictable than recent World Cups. I think seven teams—an unusually high number—have a reasonable and more or less even shot of winning: France, Spain, Argentina, England, Brazil, Portugal, and Germany—roughly in that order. (If Yamal is fully healthy, I would flip Spain and France.)

Want a dark horse? There are plenty: Colombia, Norway, Ecuador, and (of course) Turkey come to mind. Feeling patriotic for some reason? The United States Men’s Team is not bad! Want to have fun picking a random country? FIFA expanded the tournament from 32 to 48 teams, mostly for craven profit-seeking reasons, but that also makes it fun! Uzbekistan, Haiti, Cabo Verde, even small but mighty Curaçao… take your pick.

Mostly though what’s to love is the World Cup. All of that soccer—104 games in 39 days—means that there will be a lot of joy and a lot of chaos (the good kind). Trump can ruin the Knicks. He can ruin the White House. He can ruin America. But he can’t really lay a glove on the World Cup. Over those 104 games there will be a lot of reminders that there are a great many things in the world that can’t be tainted, perverted, or corrupted by money and power. There will also be a lot of reminders that the world looks rather different from how he describes it. The diversity of the World Cup—which has only grown with the expansion of the tournament—is and always has been its real strength. The tournament is a celebration of what makes nations unique, just as it is a reminder that people from all over the world are basically and fundamentally the same. At its best, it’s a celebration of togetherness and diversity that undercuts every tenet of the president’s agenda.

There is no real way to separate the two facets of the World Cup, no way to celebrate its magic without coming into contact with its corruption. There’s no avoiding Trump or Infantino. But that is ultimately the tournament’s real power. It’s not simply a global pageant of diversity and togetherness, just as it isn’t simply an event wholly corrupted by autocracy and greed. The World Cup is, and always has been, a reflection of the world as it is right now. That world is, in many ways, broken. It’s hateful and mean. It’s ruled by those who pursue wealth and power and trample on anyone in their way. But it’s not wholly or irredeemably broken. That wealth and power only goes so far; try as they might, Trump and Infantino can only do so much to this beautiful game and the delight of watching this esteemed competition. The lion’s share of these rich rewards belongs to everyone else. It’s there for the taking, if you’ll have it.

According to the pair, the past century or so of scholarship in many different fields has proven just how wrong early economic thinkers were in their basic assumptions about how people think, how they interact with each other, and how societies grow and address human needs—and that should make us question the basics of almost all economic thinking. We should throw it all out, they say, and replace it with a new set of ideas they call market humanism. To do so would upend the neoliberal assumptions that have driven federal policymaking on both the right and the left for the past 50 years, and place human well-being and advancement at the center of our government’s economic policy.

I spoke with Hanauer about his work, the book he and Beinhocker are currently writing, why they think our concepts of economics should be replaced by something new, and how this “comically ambitious” project can be achieved.

[This interview has been edited for length and clarity.]

Who did you all write this for? Who are you hoping reads this, and what do you hope that they do with it? Is it policymakers, is it lawmakers, is it candidates?

Eric Beinhocker and I are writing a book on all this stuff. We have a manuscript, but it’s 500 pages long, and it’s not done, and the world is on fire. We think we have something important and novel to say, so we scrambled to put together—we call it a booklet—aimed at the kinds of people who care deeply and think deeply about these issues, and that is policymakers, political candidates, policy professionals, journalists, people who take this stuff quite seriously.

Part of your thinking is that the failures of neoliberalism have led to this rise of right-wing authoritarianism, but that’s not the only thing they led to. There has been a renewed interest in socialism and democratic socialism. I’m wondering if those are part of what you’re talking about, or if you see those as insufficient responses.

Oh, definitely insufficient responses. I think we need to rip economics down to the studs. Economics is the operating system of the world, and it affects us in ways that we can both describe, and sometimes in ways that we are unaware of. It affects our culture, it affects our norms, it affects our sensitivities, it affects … the information that is around us, and how we see it, and how we process it. We have lived under, in my view, a paradigm that has produced a lot of toxic consequences because it was both based on a bunch of assumptions about how the world works that were never true, and it was weaponized to advance the interests of a very small group of people. Neoliberalism creates a permission structure for the worst kind of people doing the worst kind of things.

When you say rip economics down to the studs, I’m thinking about how it’s been a really long time since I’ve read The Wealth of Nations, but you know, Adam Smith conceived his theories partly because he thought that it would make the world better for more people. We had an economic system before neoliberalism. I’m wondering why we can’t just go back to that?

Because we’ve learned so much. I mean, there are elements of Keynesianism embedded in market humanism, for example, the commonsense notion that if nobody has any money, who will buy the stuff, correct? But Keynes, for example, didn’t have a twenty-first-century way of understanding what innovation was and where it came from. And he didn’t understand markets as complex adaptive systems, and didn’t have an alternative to GDP as a measure of welfare—and had not disentangled what Homo economicus was and implied relative to Homo sapiens, and what those differences imply with respect to policy. Keynes was more right than Milton Friedman, but both relied on an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century understanding of the dynamics of human social systems, and I just think that the scholarship around this stuff has come a long way. We can now harness that scholarship and organize it into a coherent, internally consistent framework, which pretty accurately describes economic cause and effect in a twenty-first-century way.

So you’re not getting rid of a lot of the useful components of economic theory, which is money and markets themselves?

No, no, no, no. I mean, we are getting rid of some economic concepts which are not useful, but of course, money is an important social technology to enable markets to work, and markets, I would argue, are one of the most important social technologies human societies have ever created—but not for the reasons that the neoliberals tell you, which is that they are efficient allocators of scarce resources. That is not true. It’s just factually incorrect. What markets are, they are evolutionary systems in which effective businesses, which you can think of as organisms, compete to fill niches against organisms that are also trying to compete to fill those niches. What they enable is groups of people, people who are unrelated to one another, to cooperate at scale to solve complex problems.

Solving human problems is what prosperity truly is. If you redefine prosperity as solutions—effectively the accumulation of solutions to human problems—then you can quite easily see that markets are evolutionary systems designed to solve problems, or should be. If they are well managed, they are designed to solve problems.

The reason I think socialism is inadequate is: first, a political reason, which is, if you poll socialism outside of New York City or Berkeley, it’s a dead loser, and I want to win. And if you take the word seriously, it doesn’t mean what people think it means. It means state ownership of the means of production. While socialism answers one economic question—which is, “How should we distribute our prosperity?”—it has nothing to say about how we generate future prosperity, and that’s why I believe that Bernie Sanders is not a socialist, he is a market humanist. He just doesn’t know it, right?

I can see how this would remake how people think about policy decisions and remake how they think about longer-term decisions about how to set things up in a lot of different fields and markets. But I’m wondering if you have ideas on how to translate this into retail politics? Is this something that candidates can use to pitch a whole different idea of economics to voters?

Well, we’re in dialogue with a lot of candidates who are loving it.… So take Graham Platner, obviously, [he] is having a few issues right now, but if you focus on [his] narrative message, which I friggin love, all of it comes from this place of: “You have been screwed. This is unfair. We can have it better.” But the economic context that he is working within codes every single thing he wants to do as bad for the economy. If you look at the empirical evidence, everything he wants to do is actually good for the economy. I mean, there is a reason why GDP growth rates went from 4, 4.5 percent to 2 percent a year as soon as the neoliberals took over. Their policy agenda wasn’t good for growth, it was bad for growth—other than the bank accounts of the very rich.

Here is a fact that animates a lot of our work. By a margin of about two-to-one, Americans believe that the purpose of economic policy is to grow the pie, not to cut it up differently. What that means is that if you do not have, as a political party, a compelling theory of growth, then you cannot durably lead. The Democratic Party hasn’t had a theory of growth in 50 years. For 50 years, Republicans have been saying, “We can grow the economy,” and Democrats have been saying, “We can make the economy fairer.” And the consequence of that extraordinarily stupid strategic decision was two things: The first is that you lost the debate two-to-one every time you did it, but worse, you ratified their theory of growth. And that’s why Republicans consistently outpoll Democrats on the economy. If the economy is the most important thing to most people by a long margin, that is not a great strategy. You have to own growth. And here’s the good news: All of the empirical evidence says we do, you just have to not believe the neoliberals. Now you get to make an argument that not only will we have a fairer economy that more fully includes everyone in it, but it will also grow faster for everyone.

When you think about neoliberalism and Friedman-ism, it’s had a 50-year head start. And so, is this kind of a long project about explaining something new to people, and do we have time for it? Because you said the world is on fire right now.

You know, Monica, I have been writing about this for 15 or 20 years. I can only do what I can do. I do not believe it is possible to build an economy that reasonably includes the majority of citizens in it, and can address other challenges like climate change, without getting rid of neoliberalism. The three challenges of our age are inequality, climate, and democracy, and neoliberalism is terrible for all three of those things. If we want to have a world that I think all of us would like to live in, you better change the operating system that defines how that world works, by ripping economics down to the studs. You may be right, this may all be for naught. We may be too late.

I don’t know if we’re too late. It’s a big task, I think.

Just to be clear, I am aware of the fact that this is comically ambitious. Comically ambitious. But you know, you have to start somewhere, right? Somebody has to throw down and say the emperor has no clothes. There is a better way.

Democrats are nervous about Platner, and they should be. In a must-win Senate race, voters have nominated a high-risk, high-reward candidate—one whose downside seems much clearer than his upside. That said, all is not lost. Platner has a very strong chance of winning this seat. These last few weeks could end up being much ado about little.

Why am I optimistic about Platner? First and foremost, all indications are that this is poised to be a very good election year for Democrats overall—the best for the party since 2018. Democrats have done very well since the start of 2025 in special elections for state legislative and congressional seats across the country, as well as the statewide races in Virginia and New Jersey. Trump’s approval ratings are terrible. As data analyst G. Elliott Morris wrote earlier this week, this election is shaping up to be one where stalwart Democratic voters turn out at higher levels than their Republican counterparts, new voters favor the Democrats, and more voters swing from Republican to Democrat than vice versa. In this environment, Democratic candidates are the favorites in toss-up states like Michigan and even more so in places that lean slightly Democratic, like Maine.

In “wave” elections, as 2026 is likely to be, politicians from the president’s party often lose even if they are, like Collins, well-established figures. If you want to know what Platner’s biggest advantage is, it’s that he is a Democrat running in 2026.

And despite the recent headlines, Platner is a strong candidate. Trust me on this: He is. I know that he has a tattoo of a symbol that had been associated with the Nazi police, he’s written juvenile things in Reddit posts, and has at times misstated details of his personal background. At the same time, he has connected deeply with voters in Maine, who have crowded his events around the state. At a time when many Americans hate traditional politicians and crave outsiders, Platner perfectly fills the bill. For a party desperate to connect better with men, gun owners, people who work in blue-collar jobs, and residents of rural areas, Platner potentially appeals to all four blocs.

Mills getting 20 percent of Tuesday’s vote after suspending her campaign makes Platner look weak. But the broader story of the primary is that Platner was so thoroughly defeating Mills, the twice-elected governor recruited by the national Democratic Party for this Senate seat, that she stopped running to avoid the embarrassment of a double-digit loss. That’s impressive.

Perhaps Collins is essentially unbeatable. She’s successfully won reelection in 2008 and 2020, two other strong years for Democrats. Maybe Mills, given the right circumstances, might have appealed to some middle-aged and elderly women who will now vote for Collins. But it’s entirely possible that Platner expands the electorate by getting people who would never vote for Mills, Collins, or any traditional politician to back him.

There is some evidence that Collins’s act of frequently claiming to be “concerned” with Trump but largely voting for his policies is wearing thin in Maine. In 2017, 67 percent of Maine voters approved of Collins, compared to 27 percent who disapproved, according to Morning Consult. But in a Morning Consult survey conducted last year, 41 percent of Maine voters approved of her, while 55 percent disapproved. That’s a massive downward spiral. Other surveys also show that more Maine residents disapprove of Collins than approve of her. At a time when anti-Washington and antiestablishment sentiment is very high, being a 73-year-old who has served in the Senate since 1997 hurts politically. Collins can’t run against the status quo—she is the status quo.

And politicians who seem like permanent fixtures in their states often eventually lose. Everyone thought Bob Casey would be the senator for life from Pennsylvania, but the pro-Trump surge of 2024 defeated him.

Besides that, there’s abortion rights and Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. As my colleague Michael Tomasky noted earlier this week, Collins defended her critical 2018 vote for Kavanaugh by hinting that he told her he would not vote to overturn Roe v. Wade. Kavanaugh did exactly that four years later. Platner has something Collins’s Democratic opponents in 2008, 2014, and 2020 didn’t: a clear illustration of the dangers of Collins’s loyalty to the Republican Party. He can and should hammer Collins for backing an anti-choice judge—as well as for either stupidly believing his promises to her or misleading voters about Kavanaugh’s intentions. That’s an issue that could really help Platner with moderate women.

None of this guarantees a Platner victory. He will need to tame at least two other forces beyond Collins and the Republican Party. First, Platner has to get the center-left wing of the party fully behind him, pumping millions into his campaign and rallying centrist voters on his behalf. That’s not a given. Many centrists disagree with his anti-billionaire, anti-Israel, populist views. And centrists have a more craven reason not to like Platner: If a Bernie Sanders acolyte like him wins a critical Senate race in a tough state, it will be harder for centrists to keep claiming that Democrats can’t nominate progressive candidates for key races in purple states or for president.

Ultimately, the party’s center-left wing must decide if it wants to unify around Platner to defeat Collins or would prefer to keep a reelected Collins around rather than embolden the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. Remember: If the party’s centrists sink Platner, they will likely be sinking their own chances to take back the Senate itself—and with it the chance to hold Trump accountable and thwart his authoritarian agenda.

With so much at stake, I hope the center-left will choose to embrace Platner rather than doom themselves to prove a point about party purity. I am not confident it will. In 2022, the party establishment invested little in Mandela Barnes, a progressive who won Wisconsin’s Senate primary over centrist objections. Barnes ended up losing by one percentage point. A unified party standing behind Barnes would probably have put him over the top.

Centrists should immediately abandon this ill-conceived idea that Platner withdraw so the state’s Democratic Party can choose his replacement. Tens of thousands of Maine residents chose him as their nominee. He won fair and square. And I can’t imagine an idea more likely to annoy a wide cross section of voters than a Democratic Party that propped up Joe Biden despite his declining faculties and then anointed Kamala Harris without a primary going through the same process again in Maine, essentially choosing a new candidate while bypassing the will and input of Maine voters. Centrist Democrats had months to win this primary. It was their choice to put up the lifeless Mills. The primary is over. It’s time to unite around the nominee.

Platner will have to deal with a mainstream media that will be hostile to him, particularly The New York Times, America’s most important outlet because so many other news organizations mirror the Times’ coverage. Such is the life of a progressive Democrat: The Times, in both its editorials and news coverage, tends to be more skeptical of progressive Democrats like Platner than it is of centrists. The paper was in some ways Zohran Mamdani’s toughest opponent in his mayoral campaign last year. And the mainstream media likes Collins. She is a fairly conventional politician—not an antidemocratic, anti-media radical like Trump. At the same time, she is a Republican, so reporters get the nonpartisan/bipartisan cred they crave by covering her favorably. Platner and his team must be prepared for news outlets to exaggerate all of his shortcomings and downplay Collins’s.

Against Susan Collins, there are no guarantees. It’s possible that even a young, experienced, energetic, scandal-free candidate could not beat her. Guess what? We’ll never know. To accomplish one of the hardest tasks in U.S. politics, Maine Democrats have nominated a man with little experience and many red flags. Graham Platner can win, though. And I think he will.

The White House Correspondents’ Association told its members in an email last week that only the White House press pool was allowed, with other outlets barred from the White House grounds unless the UFC gives them press credentials, The Washington Post reports.

“The WHCA has been pushing back on this, but we have been told there will be various Secret Service access points across campus and that the [White House North Lawn] is being used as a staging area for the fighters and UFC filming zone, and the [White House] is standing firm,” WHCA President Weija Jiang wrote in the email.

Jang also said that the UFC was only allowing a “very limited number” of journalists to be on the South Lawn during the fight. Other journalists would have to watch the fight on viewing screens at the Ellipse Park outside the White House or at the JW Marriott hotel. Reporters won’t be able to access their work spaces, the White House briefing room, or “Pebble Beach,” an area on the lawn used for TV appearances during the fight.

“If you have not received a UFC press credential, you will need to utilize other public spaces in the area for any live shots,” Jiang wrote in the email.

The move is very unusual, as the White House has historically handled press credentialing for larger events. But a circus on the White House lawn is also unprecedented, with taxpayers footing the still-untold bill to entertain an audience full of Trump’s friends, the UFC’s guests, and military personnel, who have to pay their own way. The whole thing is an expensive spectacle for Trump’s birthday.

A new ad released Tuesday by the dark-money organization Citizens for Sanity depicts the Texas Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico wearing a dress similar to Julie Andrews’s in The Sound of Music. The ad, first obtained by the right-wing outlet The Daily Caller, is entirely AI-generated. It features the fake Talarico singing the song “My Favorite Things,” though the lyrics have been replaced with crass lines about transgender people.

Citizens for Sanity is closely linked with President Donald Trump and one of his top advisers, white nationalist scumbag Stephen Miller. The group possesses millions in dark money, and has garnered attention for racist advertising backing MAGA candidates.

Citizens for Sanity released ads that ran during the 2022 World Series claiming Latino immigrants were “draining your paychecks, wrecking your schools, ruining your hospitals [and] threatening your family.” Another video speaks about a “radical left-wing love affair with criminals” while displaying images of violent crime committed by Black Americans.

Reporting by The Guardian and Documented revealed that Citizens for Sanity is a part of the Conservative Partnership Institute, the workplace of many former Trump officials, which The New York Times has described as a “nerve center for the right wing.”

Many states across the political spectrum are attempting to regulate or ban the use of AI in political advertisements due to its misleading nature.

The good news is that if this is all that MAGA’s got, Talarico will be just fine. The progressive Democrat’s record is squeaky clean, especially when compared to his Republican rival Ken Paxton’s long history of scandal.

Paxton cheated on his wife, was impeached by the Republican-controlled state House on corruption charges, and helped donors by targeting their enemies as state attorney general. Last month, his office offered a sweetheart plea deal to a repeated child molester that would see the offender spend just one day in jail.

In a meeting at the White House, Trump indicated that he would not nominate a replacement for Bill Pulte, the wildly inexperienced housing official he appointed as acting director of national intelligence.

Pulte’s appointment prompted Democrats to pull their support for a long-term extension of FISA Section 702, which is intended to shield U.S. citizens from the country’s warrantless surveillance program overseas. Seven Senate Republicans also voted against the FISA extension last week.

The key spy power is set to expire Friday, but Trump made it clear that he felt no need to acquiesce to Democrats’ demands, people briefed on the meeting told Politico. 

The Democrats “have taken a hostage,” Johnson told reporters Tuesday. In reality, Trump’s reckless actions and total disregard for his own party have put FISA into jeopardy.

Pulte has none of the military or intelligence background necessary to lead ODNI, and has instead made a name for himself by targeting the president’s political enemies and making himself wildly unpopular in the process.

Tillis called out Republicans pushing Trump’s vote-suppressing SAVE Act, saying the party has devolved into a “circular firing squad” over the controversial legislation.

“The real problem I have is that the president (and a few of our members?) forced us to take two more unsuccessful votes for the SAVE Act at the expense of our most vulnerable members in cycle,” Tillis wrote in the letter obtained by Punchbowl News. “The road to holding our majority is already difficult.… We cannot afford any more unforced errors like this between now and November.”

Tillis also railed against Republicans supporting the president’s “Anti-Weaponization Fund,” a $1.776 billion, taxpayer-funded handout for any Trump supporter who felt targeted by the Biden administration.

“We missed an opportunity to remove a political albatross (the 1776 fund) from around the necks of our colleagues who are in cycle,” Tillis said. “Instead, we added weight to that albatross by having 41 members vote to protect the program.”

This letter from Tillis comes just days after he set off Trump after his refusal to confirm Acting Attorney Todd Blanche until he disavows the January 6 insurrectionists.

In an interview with ABC News, Trump said, “Somebody’s going to have to build all that infrastructure: new bridges, new this, new that, new power plants. You know, they’re talking about a trillion dollars, probably more. And you know that’s why we’ll probably get involved in rebuilding, right, helping them rebuild.”

Asked if that would be like the Marshall Plan for Iran, Trump responded, “Yeah, but, we’ll get half their oil.”

While the Iranian government is demanding funds for reconstruction as part of a peace deal, the country would almost certainly reject hands-on U.S. involvement as well as any deal that hands over its oil. The two countries have not had diplomatic relations in nearly 50 years, and the Iranian economy is hampered by U.S.-led economic sanctions. Any deal would have to address those stumbling blocks before a hint of U.S. involvement in rebuilding Iran.

But Trump sees dollar signs anytime he gets the opportunity to build something. He has spent much of his second term planning a new White House ballroom, a “triumphal arch” on the Ellipse in Washington, D.C., and a takeover of a public golf course in the district. Iran probably looks like a golden opportunity for his business interests, as well as his family members.

Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, has been eyeing redevelopment projects for Gaza for months, and he’d probably be involved in Iran too. But considering that Iran’s leaders are even more hostile to the U.S. than they were before the war, Trump getting to rebuild Iran is wishful thinking.

The GAO found that ICE’s expedited contract award and construction negatively affected the acquisition and planning of the country’s largest detention center, located on the U.S. Army base at Fort Bliss, resulting in millions of dollars in wasteful spending.

The Army spent up to $11.5 million on detainee services for an empty facility between August 1 and August 15 alone, according to the report. When Camp East Montana’s 1,600 detainees eventually arrived, the Army continued to pay the full cost for its capacity of 5,000 inmates.

By the time ICE took over the facility in October, the Army had paid an estimated $423,000 for meals it did not need. In keeping with the Army’s contract, ICE continued to pay the amount for a full capacity: roughly $7.1 million between October 1 and March 12.

More disturbing than the waste, however, are the horrific conditions at the facility. Despite the extra millions being poured into Camp East Montana, the facility’s former contractor, Acquisition Logistics LLC, which had no experience in detention services, still failed to provide a clean, safe environment for detainees.

ICE reports found food service issues and that the contractor had failed to conduct required daily cleaning of dormitories—with some officers offering detainees cookies in return for cleaning their own spaces—resulting in unsanitary conditions. The contractor also did not meet health services requirements: It failed to provide tuberculosis skin tests, comprehensive health assessments, or treatment plans for detainees with HIV or diabetes.

In some instances, the failures at Camp East Montana proved deadly. In February, ICE issued a discrepancy report for the death of a detainee whose death was ruled a homicide by asphyxia. The contractor had failed to provide use of force and death reports to ICE, and evidence was “missing or destroyed,” the GAO report found.

In March, ICE issued another discretionary report concerning the suicide of a detainee in January, who did not receive proper monitoring. After exhibiting suicidal risk factors, the detainee was kept in a medical holding room, not a suicide safe cell, and was left unattended. The contractor also failed to respond to ICE concerns that there were no vision panels on the door to maintain line of sight.

The report mentioned another particularly disturbing incident in January when a contracted security guard lost their loaded firearm in the facility—and as of March, the weapon had not been recovered.

The GAO’s report confirms everything we’ve feared about Donald Trump’s concentration camps. It is a stark warning about the administration’s plan to proceed with the construction of even more megaprisons to hold immigrants—despite ongoing legal challenges, local pushback, and a federal watchdog investigation.

According to the timeline released by the U.S. CENTCOM, Iran downed two pilots operating a U.S. Army AH-64 Apache helicopter around 5:33 p.m. E.T. Trump was on his own helicopter on the way to Manhattan to share a VIP box in Madison Square Garden with his billionaire friend James Dolan at 7:02 p.m. The pilots weren’t rescued till nearly 30 minutes later.

One would think that the president would be made aware of a successful attack on a U.S. helicopter shortly after it happened, which would mean Trump found it more important to be at a Knicks game than to worry about the search for missing Americans.

Trump did seem to know about the attack after the Knicks game ended, telling media that the pilots were “fine” and that a report would be out the next day.

Even if he somehow wasn’t aware before he flew to the Knicks game, that poses bigger questions, like: Who is calling the shots if not the commander in chief?

“I have just been informed by our Great Military that last night the Iranians shot down one of our highly sophisticated Apache Helicopters while patrolling over the Strait of Hormuz,” Trump posted Tuesday afternoon, implying he was unaware of the attack for over 12 hours. “There were two pilots involved, both are safe and uninjured. Nevertheless, the United States must, of necessity, respond to this attack. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP.”

The new expiration date for the Old Age and Survivors Insurance fund, or OASI fund, is three months earlier than what the SSA projected last year. The change comes as a result of President Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill,” which was passed in July 2025. The bill lowered the ordinary income tax rate on Social Security benefits, which supports the funds.

Seventy-one million people receive monthly Social Security payments. The AARP, a nonprofit representing older Americans, determined that Social Security provides 43 percent of seniors with a majority of their income. 

“Congress needs to act,” AARP CEO Myechia Minter-Jordan wrote in a statement. “Americans have worked hard and paid into Social Security their entire lives, and they deserve to count on it when they retire. No family should see any cuts to what they’ve earned in Social Security.”

Social Security isn’t being scrapped anytime soon, but the OASI fund provides it with a serious amount of its money; if the fund is allowed to expire, 12 percent of retirement benefits will be lost. Social Security for one person would be cut $500 per month, on average, and in 29 states, losses would be even greater, according to research from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

Congress can move money around to fill the funding gap and even combine the OASI fund with other funds. But merging funds just means taking money directed toward one set of recipients and giving it to another—certainly not a permanent solution.

While Trump has promised both on the campaign trail and in office not to cut Social Security benefits, his largest policy bill is poised to do exactly that. His administration is also pursuing legislation that would cut off disabled Americans from their SNAP benefits, after abandoning similar plans last year due to media backlash.  

Lesley Groff told members of Congress that she believed the massage appointments she made for Epstein were for massage therapists and not the women and girls he was exploiting, CNN reports. She called Epstein a master manipulator who kept his crimes a secret from her, saying that he didn’t sexually abuse her. Both Epstein and his partner, Ghislaine Maxwell, allegedly told Groff not to associate with their friends and colleagues, insisting that their business wasn’t her concern. 

Groff has been saying this since 2021. Back then, her lawyers announced that she had “never witnessed anything improper or illegal” and was “heartbroken” for Epstein’s victims. 

But Epstein survivors thought Groff’s words Tuesday were a cop-out. Many of them had told the FBI that Groff was the person they’d call to reach Epstein and schedule massages. Epstein would abuse women during those massage sessions, they said. According to emails from the government’s Epstein files, Groff also booked Epstein’s domestic and international travel. She was listed as a potential co-conspirator as part of the non-prosecution deal Epstein cut in 2008 with the federal government.  

“One of the hardest parts for survivors is hearing the people who were closest to Epstein claim they saw nothing,” Sharlene Rochard, one of Epstein’s victims, told CNN. “That doesn’t match my experience. Survivors deserve answers, not claims of ignorance.”

The Justice Department on Tuesday accused the EEOC of pressuring “employers to engage in race-based decisionmaking” and enforcing guidelines that “contemplate liability based on disparate effects alone, without regard to an employer’s likely intent.”

“[The EEEOC] creates a near insurmountable presumption [that] unlawful discrimination exists where there are any differences in outcomes in certain circumstances among different races, sexes, or similar groups,” the DOJ press release reads, mimicking the language commonly used by conservatives to attack any kind of program intended to address centuries of racial discrimination.

The DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel attacked the EEOC’s consideration of “disparate impact,” holding employers liable for discrimination when policies disproportionately harm people of a certain race, ethnicity, or gender.

Now employers can use aptitude tests, criminal background checks, and other potentially problematic tools without fear of being charged with discrimination.

This story has been updated.

Iran, who qualified for the World Cup way back in March 2025, had their entire ticket allocation yanked away on Monday. The tournament begins on Thursday. It is unclear who made the decision, which leaves thousands of Iranians excited to watch the matches in person, many of whom had already booked flights and hotels, completely hung out to dry.

“Many Iranian football fans, relying on the officially announced process, had already made the necessary plans to attend the matches,” the FFIRI, Iran’s soccer federation, said in a statement. “Depriving Iranian supporters of access to their lawful and official allocation of tickets is an action contrary to the spirit governing international competitions and the principle of equality among participating countries.”

While the FFIRI did not specify who revoked their tickets, its statement certainly pointed to the U.S. The federation asked FIFA, the international body in charge of the World Cup, to stick to “principles of neutrality, fairness, and established regulations” and said the issue “raises serious questions about the interference of non-sporting and political considerations in the organization of the world’s biggest football event.”

Iran having a normal tournament was never going to be easy. Its men’s team protested the national government, which has killed protesters and restricted human rights, by refusing to sing the national anthem at the previous World Cup in 2022. Some members of the women’s team tried to seek asylum in Australia during the Asian Cup in January.

Iran’s base camp was moved from Arizona to Mexico in May due to American unease and fear from the Iranian team that they would not be able to acquire U.S. visas. The Trump administration finally awarded visas to all players last week but rejected some staff members’ applications.

Iran is scheduled to play its first two matches in Los Angeles, the first against New Zealand on June 15, and the second against Belgium on June 21. They will then head to Seattle to take on Egypt on June 26.

Hopefully the U.S., Iran, and FIFA can work something out, and everyday Iranians will get to rightfully attend the tournament. But with sadistic American leadership as well as FIFA president Giovanni Infantino’s fealty to Donald Trump, Iran has a tough road ahead both on and off the pitch.

In a letter Monday to Assistant Attorney General Colin McDonald at the DOJ’s Fraud Enforcement Division, Vance relayed allegations that Walz and Ellison had “repeatedly failed” to address fraud in Minnesota’s social services.

The allegations were sourced from a 205-page report published Monday by House Oversight Committee Republicans, who claimed that Walz and Ellison were aware of “credible, systemic fraud concerns” since as early as 2019, and that Walz’s administration went to “great lengths” to keep it quiet.

A closer look at the actual report found that those “great lengths” included regular “check-ins” and one Department of Health Services employee who brought up concerns of contract noncompliance, was found to be “disruptive,” and was placed on investigative leave.

In a letter to Vance sent alongside the report, House Oversight Chair James Comer urged the vice president’s team “to direct the appropriate executive branch agencies to conduct a thorough review of all of Minnesota’s social services program integrity measures, oversight processes, reimbursements, and enrollment from 2019 to the present.”

Vance shared his letter to social media, announcing that he’d passed the allegations onto the DOJ. “Minnesota state officials are not above the law, and if they facilitated fraud, lied under oath about what they knew, or harassed and intimated [sic] whistleblowers, they must face justice,” Trump’s “fraud czar” wrote.

But the right-wing fervor over fraud allegations in Minnesota is a fabrication designed to punish Democrats and antagonize immigrants. The claims stem from a video by Nick Shirley, a White House–favored propagandist, who tried to expose Somali immigrants for allegedly using childcare centers to steal public money. Despite uncovering no actual evidence of fraud, MAGA made his video go viral, and the feds followed soon after to Minneapolis. In reality, Minnesota has previously investigated and prosecuted improper payments to childcare services, as well as unrelated high-profile fraud prosecutions involving other Minnesota social services.

Ellison called the referral a “political stunt.”

“It is deeply troubling to see official powers and public resources diverted away from serving the people and instead aimed at pursuing political adversaries,” Ellison said in a statement. “That is not what government is for, and it diminishes public trust in our institutions.”

Ted Kittila, who used to work for Trump’s social media venture Truth Social, was sued in federal court for $120 million for alleged fraud, civil conspiracy, and extortion on behalf of agents of the Kurdistan Regional Government in Iraq, The Daily Beast reports.

According to court documents, the regional government was seeking to acquire surveillance software in the U.S. A Kurdish spy said that he was seeking to buy $11 million of surveillance equipment from a spyware contractor, Ben Jamil. But the spy alleged Jamil couldn’t prove the system worked, so he asked for his $360,000 deposit back, which Jamil refused. Then the spy hired Kittila to sue Jamil.

Jamil in turn sued the spy for $460 million in a separate action, and is seeking $120 million from everyone involved, including Kittila. He claims that Kittila and the others are using a criminal contempt motion, rare in a civil case, designed to stop him from discussing the case outside of court. He thinks that Kittila sought the order to spare the KRG and himself from embarrassment over the scandal.

“If he’s a prominent and important lawyer, connected to important people, why would he want to have the world know?” Kittila told The Daily Beast

Kittila has ties to Trump beyond Truth Social. He worked with Republican operatives to investigate the Biden family, and was employed by the Republican National Committee to sue the Delaware State Election Commissioner for access to voter rolls. For nearly three years, Kittila also worked for the KRG, which has been accused of human rights abuses, including violence against political opponents and journalists.

Kittila’s work on the spyware case came at the same time he helped Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee investigate President Biden and his son Hunter for the latter’s business deals, which allegedly involved foreign influence peddling. Now it seems that his own foreign business dealings are in the spotlight.

“Tell me what credible allegations exist that warrant a formal federal investigation [in California],” Beck asked Essayli.

“Number one, election fraud is not a theory. It is a real thing. Election fraud happens every year,” Essayli replied. “California is a fraudster’s paradise.… Almost anybody can register to vote in the state of California. You don’t have to have a Social Security number, and you don’t need a driver’s license number.… Then California has done universal vote-by-mail, which means if you’re on the voter rolls, you’re gonna get one mailed to you whether you want it or not.

“They put millions of ballots out into the mail, into the ether. The voter rolls are dirty.… Dead people, people who’ve moved, convicted felons, are also receiving ballots,” he continued, before criticizing “ballot harvesting,” a basic ballot collection method practiced by both Democrats and Republicans in California. “I expect people will be charged.… We have set up a tipline. I’ve set up a dedicated email.… We are looking for any sort of widescale conspiracy, if you will.” He then told Beck that election fraud charges would be coming in “one to two months.”

“If anyone knows anything … if you’ve witnessed anything … if you saw someone collecting ballots in a suspicious way, or doing something odd with ballots, we wanna know about that.”

Essayli railed against voter registration methods designed to increase access and participation, presented zero actual evidence of voter fraud, and then invited an infamously fanatical MAGA public to deputize themselves and go after the fraud that only exists because their guy lost in L.A.’s mayoral race. This election fraud script is the Trump administration’s favorite play. It’ll only come up more as midterms approach, as Trump and Vice President JD Vance have already spread baseless claims of election fraud in California.

“I’m not saying it’s rigged, I’m saying it stinks to high heaven, and everybody knows that,” Johnson said to a gaggle of reporters Monday evening. “Let’s remove the appearance of impropriety—what a concept. Let’s have votes on an election the day of the election.”

CNN correspondent Manu Raju asked Johnson what evidence there was to support his vague complaints. Unsurprisingly, the Louisiana politician couldn’t provide a whiff of it.

“Look, some of these efforts are so diabolical and so far upstream it’s impossible to prove,” Johnson said. “But I think everybody knows instinctively something is wrong here.”

RAJU: But what evidence is there to prove the California election is rigged?

MIKE JOHNSON: Look, some of these efforts are so diabolical and so far upstream it's impossible to prove. But I think everybody knows instinctively that something is wrong here. pic.twitter.com/gJIYChtG0X

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 8, 2026

The incumbent mayor of Los Angeles, Democrat Karen Bass, advanced to the general election with 34.3 percent of the vote on Monday. A progressive Democrat, Nithya Raman, beat Republican Spencer Pratt for second place, with 28.5 to 25.8 percent. Raman will now take on Bass in the general election, in a leftist-versus-moderate clash similar to last year’s New York City mayoral race.

The battle between Raman and Pratt is what Johnson was moaning about. Pratt, a former reality-TV personality, led early on Monday before Raman took the lead as more mail-in ballots were processed.

Pratt offered some typically Trumpian fearmongering by alleging that the homeless were illegally voting for Raman. The president himself also claimed, again without evidence, that the vote was “crooked.” Even longtime Republican legislators like House Majority Leader Steve Scalise are baselessly insinuating voter fraud.

It is strange that Republicans are unable to accept that they lost a mayoral race in one of the bluest cities in the country. Then again, this is the party whose leader attempted to stage a coup after losing a presidential election, who kicked off a mid-decade gerrymandering war in order to consolidate power, and whose disciples have literally tampered with voting machines in order to hijack elections. With the GOP desperate to cling to power, and lacking the morality to accept defeat, the midterms should be a ball.

After getting loudly booed by attendees at Madison Square Garden, Trump was spotted snoozing in his box seats next to Knicks owner James Dolan and his granddaughter Kai Trump.

DONALD TRUMP HAS FALLEN ASLEEP AT THE NBA FINALS IN MADISON SQUARE GARDEN. pic.twitter.com/rFrW6c4cME

— CALL TO ACTIVISM (@CalltoActivism) June 9, 2026

It seems that a tense Game 3 between the New York Knicks and the San Antonio Spurs wasn’t enough to pique the president’s interest. It’s not particularly surprising, considering that Trump has repeatedly been seen dozing off during press conferences, bill signings, and Cabinet meetings, among other apparent instances of cognitive decline.

Trump’s nap came amid his highly disruptive trip to Midtown at the taxpayer’s expense and New Yorkers’ apparent dismay.

Authorities closed 10 blocks around Madison Square Garden to traffic and pedestrians ahead of Trump’s arrival. The Secret Service and TSA, along with the NYPD, heightened security protocols at MSG. Attendees were forced to arrive hours early, and without any bags. And perhaps worst of all, the New York Knicks were forced to cancel their rambunctious watch party outside the stadium.

Clearly the vibes were off: The Knicks lost by four points, ending a 13-game winning streak.

Anant Ambani, 30, is a member of the richest family in India, and his family’s energy business was in the White House’s crosshairs as part of President Trump’s tariffs against India. But when Trump Jr. visited India in November, he met with Ambani and everything changed.

Ambani wined and dined Trump Jr., taking him to the family’s private zoo and performing a Gujarati folk dance together. Only four months later, a Texas start-up aiming to build the first major oil refinery in 50 years in the U.S. announced it had received a nine-figure investment from the Ambanis’s company, Reliance Energy. The deal was facilitated by Trump Jr., who secretly bought a stake in the new venture, ProPublica reports.

Prior to Trump Jr.’s involvement, the Texas company had failed several times to raise money, missing deadlines and rebranding again and again. Its founder had been repeatedly sued for fraud and had a history of bankruptcy. But with Trump Jr.’s help, America First Refining not only secured funding from Ambani but has also met with investors from foreign countries such as Saudi Arabia.

One foreign government official told ProPublica that the company’s team said they were backed by the Trump family, and that an investment would open doors in the White House. That appears to be accurate, with President Trump gleefully posting about America First Refining’s oil refinery project in March.

Reliance Energy also paid the Trump Organization $10 million as a “development fee” in 2024, although no project has ever been announced. Ivanka Trump was a guest at Anant Ambani’s lavish wedding that year, and Anant’s father, Mukhesh Ambani (worth close to $90 billion), attended Trump’s second inauguration.

In February, the Ambanis’ efforts paid off for all of India, with the country striking a trade deal with the United States. Reliance, meanwhile, got a license to buy Venezuelan oil. After the Iran war, India got an early sanctions waiver to buy Russian crude oil.

All of this goes to show that in Trump’s second term, it’s impossible to tell when Trump’s personal business ends and U.S. policy begins. It’s increasingly apparent that cutting deals with and paying money to the Trump family means that you’ll get benefits from the federal government.