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 glad 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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, he has at times misstated details of his personal background, and has behaved toward women in such ways that many Maine voters probably would not want him to marry their daughter. 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.

Vance went on Fox News to carry water for the baseless theory after Republican Spencer Pratt was defeated by progressive Los Angeles City Councilmember Nithya Raman, who will face incumbent Karen Bass in the general election.

“They are still counting the votes [in California]. Do you trust this election?” Fox News host Jesse Waters asked the vice president on Monday night.

“Fundamentally the problem here with this whole thing is: How is it that you had Karen Bass was in first place, Spencer Pratt was in second place, and then this other woman was in third place. You would expect these mail-in ballots to kind of meet that same basic pattern,” Vance said. “But somehow we find ourselves in a situation where number one—they’re still receiving ballots, not just counting ballots. And number two—the way they’re coming in just so happens to work out such that the Republican is getting kicked out of the final two, so it’s a Democrat-versus-Democrat runoff.

“That seems pretty shady to me, especially when you add on top of the fact that in California you are prohibited from asking for somebody’s identification before they vote,” he added.

JD Vance says it's "shady" for California to count all of the legally cast ballots pic.twitter.com/zCjQ5yRgvA

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 9, 2026

This is the vice president of one of the most corrupt administrations in history talking about what’s “shady.” Los Angeles has over two more million more registered Democrats than Republicans. It is also common knowledge at this point that liberal and progressive voters are more likely to vote by mail than conservatives, especially since President Trump has wrongly railed against it as corrupt for years. Now, Republicans are reverting back to this tired argument because their chosen candidate lost—not because of fraud, but because voters rejected him.

“You mean when they had the camera on me? I thought it was very good, yeah. It was certainly amazing. It was, I think, mostly cheers. It was loud and it was very enthusiastic,” Trump said Monday night.

Here’s what really happened.

When the jumbotron at Madison Square Garden showed Trump during the National Anthem, the stadium erupted into loud deafening boos.

Trump, shown on camera during the national anthem, is booed loudly at MSG pic.twitter.com/NkWE4xsE2Z

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 9, 2026

The second time they showed him, the boos were even worse.

Second time it was worse. https://t.co/0OcOSG3qNS pic.twitter.com/HJ4R8JstlM

— Olga Nesterova (@onestpress) June 9, 2026

And it wasn’t just Knicks fans in Madison Square Garden: At a watch party in Bryant Park, the crowd burst into jeers when the broadcast showed the president.

Trump isn’t just getting booed inside of MSG, he’s getting booed all across NYC

Video: AP pic.twitter.com/9mOBEAZ71J

— Acyn (@Acyn) June 9, 2026

Still, Fox News tried to claim that the audience at MSG burst into cries of “USA! USA!” for Trump. In reality, the crowd was cheering for a group of New York City firefighters, and started to loudly boo moments later when Trump appeared on-screen.

Trump was even booed as he drove away from the stadium.

Trump gets booed and heckled out of New York City as he departs Game 3 of the NBA Finals. pic.twitter.com/IrBowW97qp

— MeidasTouch (@MeidasTouch) June 9, 2026

It seems that Knicks fans weren’t at all thrilled at the president’s visit, which disrupted the perfect vibes in New York City. But still Trump refused to own up to just how much everyone hates him.

Also, the Knicks lost by four points, ending a 13-game winning streak.

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

Over the weekend, Donald Trump erupted in crazed fury at NBC’s Kristen Welker on Meet the Press. What enraged him is that she dared to ask him for evidence to back up his many lies, in this case about elections in California allegedly being rigged against the GOP candidates. But we think this episode deserves a deeper deconstruction. A big reason Trump is so angry, we think, is that the MAGA online disinformation universe has been unable to entirely reinvent reality and use propaganda to inflate the GOP candidate’s strength into something it isn’t. In a sense, then, this saga is really about the failures of MAGA propaganda.

So we’re talking about all of it with Gil Duran, a tech writer who’s based in California and tracks all this stuff. Good to have you on, Gil.

Gil Duran: Thanks for having me.

Sargent: So in two big races in California, the GOP candidates are struggling as the votes get counted. In the Los Angeles mayoral race, Democratic incumbent Karen Bass leads, and progressive candidate Nithya Raman has pulled ahead of Republican reality TV star Spencer Pratt for second place and a chance to go to the general election.

In the California governor’s race, Republican Steve Hilton is vying with Tom Steyer for second place. Gil, can you just tell us a little bit about Spencer Pratt and Steve Hilton and why the online right is so heavily invested in them?

Duran: Sure. Steve Hilton and Spencer Pratt are right-wing D-list celebrities who are desperate enough for attention to run for office in California, where they have virtually no chance of winning. Both of them have backgrounds mostly as entertainers.

Spencer Pratt was a reality TV star, a sort of villainous character on a show called The Hills for many years. And Steve Hilton has a political background in the U.K. where he was an advisor to David Cameron, but most recently since coming to the United States has been a Fox News host.

And he went from being a guy who was sort of what we would have considered a moderate Republican to being a complete right-wing lunatic during his time at Fox News. I know this because I actually met with Steve Hilton when he moved to the U.S. in 2014 and he was a totally different guy than he was a few years later on Fox News.

And so both of them are trying to parlay their status as sort of right-wing low-level celebrities into political office in California, but that’s not very easy to do.

Sargent: Just to be clear, what this means for Spencer Pratt is that if he gets edged out of second place by the progressive, Nithya Raman, then he doesn’t get to go to the general, correct? And so what’s really at stake here is, as the votes get counted, it’s really possible Spencer Pratt gets knocked out of contention. Is that what the situation is?

Duran: Yeah, and it looks like it’s pretty certain that he’s now knocked out of contention. In the LA mayor’s race and in the California gubernatorial race, the top two vote-getters get to go to the general election. And in the gubernatorial race, it looks pretty clear that Steve Hilton will probably be in the general election. He’s edging out billionaire Tom Steyer for votes. Looks like Steyer is going to come in third place. So it’ll be Hilton versus Becerra. You’ll have a Republican and a Democrat in the gubernatorial race.

But the LA race is nonpartisan. And LA is heavily Democratic by voter registration—LA is 52 percent Democratic voters compared to 19 percent Republicans. So with Spencer Pratt running with the MAGA endorsements as the right-wing reality TV guy, it’s not a big surprise that he wouldn’t make the top two. In fact, the polls showed him in third.

What happened though is that in California, the early votes tend to be the more conservative ones. And so there was this idea that maybe he would make it, and that turns out to be a false prediction or false assumption. And most people familiar with the process knew that was a likely outcome.

Sargent: So that’s the context for Trump’s blowup with NBC’s Kristen Welker. Here’s what happened. Trump first lied his ass off about the 2020 election being rigged. She challenged that. Then he brought up the California races and said those are also rigged. Kristen Welker challenged that as well. She said, look, your candidates—meaning the two Republicans we’re discussing here—look, they’re doing well. And then Trump said, well, no, they’re not. They’re dropping fast. And Trump meant by this that they’re dropping fast as the votes are getting counted. Listen to how it went south from there.

Donald Trump (voiceover): They’re dropping fast because it’s a rigged election. Let me tell you, it’s four days and they aren’t even close to coming up with—

Kristen Welker (voiceover): But that’s how they count the votes in California.

Trump (voiceover): You know why they’re doing that? Because they’re cheating on the election.

Welker (voiceover): What, do you have evidence to support—

Trump (voiceover): All I have to do is look. All I have to do is look. And I listen. And I listen to people. And let’s see what happens.

Welker (voiceover): But sir, that’s not evidence. That’s how they count the votes in California.

Trump (voiceover): Do you think it’s appropriate—Do you think it’s appropriate that they have an election and five days later, they’re nowhere close to picking—

Welker (voiceover): State and local officials acknowledge they are slow. They’re urging the votes to be counted quickly.

Trump (voiceover): No, they’re crooked. Just like you’re crooked. Your press is crooked and Meet the Press is crooked.

Welker (voiceover): To be fair, I’m not crooked, but—

Trump (voiceover): Really? Well you play right into their hands. You’re either crooked or you’re stupid.

Sargent: So according to Trump, Welker is crooked because she won’t simply accept Trump’s word that the elections are rigged. Note how Welker said, what evidence is there of rigging in the California races? And Trump said, all you have to do is look. In other words, he gets to dictate what reality is. He doesn’t have to show any facts or evidence. Your reaction to all that?

Duran: Well, this is typical Trump. He’s been doing this for years and years. He tries to create his own version of reality and insist that other people agree with it. The main enemy, the main challenge that Republicans have in California is called simple math.

There was a very low likelihood that Spencer Pratt was going to make it out of the LA mayor’s race to the general, out of the primary. And Steve Hilton has a better chance of making it to the general in the gubernatorial race, but he has zero chance of winning the election, because the Republican Party is only 25 percent of California voters, whereas Democrats have like 45 percent. So you don’t really have a math that adds up to a Republican victory.

But this is important to Trump because Trump’s brand is about winning. He can’t accept that his party and his politics are so unpopular in California. So in order to maintain his winning image, he creates this counter-reality in which it’s all because of fraud on the part of the Democrats and that he would have actually won. He said actually in 2020 that he would have won the race if Jesus had been allowed to count the votes, whatever that means.

But he’s long been on this idea that the only reason California is a Democratic state is because of cheating. And there’s zero evidence of that, but they are continuing to push this mythology because the reality is too painful to face—which is that, as Arnold Schwarzenegger said in 2007, the California Republican Party is dying at the box office.

Sargent: Right. I think that Trump is clearly much more angry about the Spencer Pratt situation here. I believe he’s separately already said that the election is rigged against Spencer Pratt. And as you say, it looks like Spencer Pratt is less likely to get into the final round, whereas Steve Hilton really could. And so what Trump is really raging over here is that as the votes are getting counted, the candidate that Trump endorsed is not getting into the final round.

Duran: The earliest returns are always the most conservative because conservatives vote on election day because they’ve been taught that vote by mail is evil. And so in the early returns, you always see a more conservative trend. But as the votes are counted—which in democracy you have to count the votes—those Republican margins slim down and the Republicans often fall into a much lower place.

And so what Trump is doing is exploiting this simple, very well-known mechanism. We all knew that the Republican numbers go down. [He’s exploiting it] to create a false narrative for the MAGA audience, to continue this kind of complaint of fraud and thievery that he’s so fond of. That’s all it is. It’s a very simple mechanism. You take the early returns, you claim that any deviation from those early returns is evidence of a crime of some kind. And that’s pretty much it.

He doesn’t believe it. I don’t think most Republicans believe it. This was also being pushed by Ron DeSantis and other Republicans. But they know that people in their audience will believe it. And that’s how they keep this flame of aggrieved Republican anger going—that everywhere they look, there’s fraud, even California’s being stolen from them. And it’s just completely bunk.

Sargent: Well, let’s listen to a little bit more of Trump and Kristen Welker. It really goes off the rails after that exchange we heard earlier. Listen to this.

Trump (voiceover): Your elections in this country, we’re like a third-world country. Your elections are crooked and you’re crooked and Meet the Press is crooked. And so is ABC and CBS and CNN. You’re one-sided, crooked networks. Let’s call it quits because I’ve had enough. Thank you, darling. Have a good time.

Sargent: Gil, I’ll tell you, fascists really hate it when you challenge their absolute right to dictate reality, don’t they?

Duran: Definitely. That’s one of the 10 main points of fascism. It’s called unreality. You create a complete opposite reality for your followers so they don’t know who or what to believe. As Hannah Arendt said, the ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction no longer exists.

And so that’s what they’re doing here. They’re creating a situation where their followers are in a constant state of panic that everything is being stolen from them. And Trump really can’t handle the reality. And by storming out, he assured that those false claims got a lot more attention than they would have otherwise. He creates this drama around it.

Now, they had been arguing before that about the weaponization of government. He was just angry that he wasn’t getting his way. But they clearly sought to create the idea on social media that the celebrity of Spencer Pratt—where he was being pushed by right-wing accounts with AI videos and tech billionaires like Sergey Brin and Joe Lonsdale, right-wing tech billionaires funding his campaign—that he really had a chance of victory, that he was going to win.

And they often do this. He’s going to win no matter what, even though it doesn’t really make sense to people familiar with LA politics. And so when that expectation they’ve built up gets upset by reality, they have to attack with a fake narrative. They can’t accept that they were dumb or that they made a false promise. It has to be someone else’s fault that they lost.

Sargent: You mentioned that Spencer Pratt is an enormous online presence and that he’s pumped really aggressively by the online right. Let’s talk a little bit about that. Renée DiResta, who’s a researcher on disinformation, laid out some of this on her Substack.

The basic story here is that he’s just everywhere on X, Elon Musk’s X anyway, and on TikTok. He’s a fixture. He’s got over a million followers on X. And there are all these AI videos going around casting him as Batman and Karen Bass, the Democratic incumbent, as the Joker, according to DiResta, that got more than five million views.

And so this is really a creation of the extremely online fascist MAGA right, isn’t it? He is a creation of these influencers.

Duran: Definitely. No one was really paying too much attention to Spencer Pratt before this election, but actually he popped his head up because his home burned up in the fires. And there he started gaining an online following for being this sort of angry right-winger condemning the Democratic government, because there was a big fire that burned everybody’s homes.

Well, California has a lot of natural disasters. So do Republican states. You generally don’t see everybody blaming Republicans when there’s a disaster there, but in California, it always gets politicized. So he kind of made himself a political figure by dramatizing his own experience losing his home in the fire. And that was just enough to give him sort of enough of a profile to step into the void of being the right-wing sacrificial lamb in the LA mayor’s race.

Because generally what you have in California is Republicans run for governor or for mayor of LA knowing they won’t win. So you end up getting an attention hound whose job is just to put on a show and create some spectacle of a fight and try to cause as much damage as possible and bring in Republican and right-wing money to really just screw with Democrats—because they’re not going to win. They’re really just screwing with Democrats. So they hope, I guess, that it’s a Hail Mary pass—maybe people will be angry enough or enthused enough about a Republican candidate who’s popular online to win.

What they find, however, is that being viral online is not necessarily the same thing as being popular in the real world. Twitter especially, and TikTok to some degree, create these alternate realities where you think these things are really big and everybody’s talking about them, but most people have very different concerns about their city.

They’re not on TikTok or Twitter all day. They don’t know what Spencer Pratt just tweeted or what Elon Musk tweeted about him. And so when that reality hits, they’re very upset because they gin themselves up into believing that this candidate’s going to win.

And what they’re all going for really is the model that Trump set when he won. He sort of became the biggest character in American politics using Twitter, also came from a reality TV background like Spencer Pratt, and was able to become president. But just because you can do something once doesn’t mean you can always do it.

And even before Trump, we had Arnold Schwarzenegger, who was the last Republican governor of California, who only became governor because he was a world-famous actor. And so he was able to do it. But then that was the last Republican we ever had. Arnold left with like a 27 percent, maybe less, approval rating. So even if you do win, it can be bad news.

So they tried to make fetch happen. They try to create what DiResta calls the “red mirage”—this idea that a Republican’s about to win California. Everybody knows it because it’s happening on X and TikTok. But when the votes get counted, it turns out that virality is not the same thing as votes, and they lose. And so then they immediately pivot to calling it fraud because they are sore losers and big man-babies in reality.

Sargent: And Donald Trump essentially imbibed what’s going on in the right-wing bubble on this. He internalized this picture of Spencer Pratt as this very powerful figure within the context of Los Angeles politics. And so you can kind of see his eruption of fury at Kristen Welker as his bubble bursting. He looks at the situation, he says, well, this can’t be happening. He can’t be falling behind in real life because the online universe told me that he was going to win.

So that’s what’s really going on here with this whole Kristen Welker confrontation, I think. It’s Trump’s bubble bursting and him wrestling with the reality that his candidate is not actually going to become the mayor of Los Angeles.

Duran: And this is very personal for Trump because the idea that he won the 2020 election—the lie that he won the 2020 election—is a central part of his mythology now. There was no way he could lose. He was supposed to be the winner. Yet he lost. And that’s this unresolved issue that we’re all going to have to deal with at some point, because Trump seems to believe that he’s owed for that, maybe owed an extra term.

And if you remember 2020, I seem to recall Trump was arguing that the vote should stop counting at a certain time, like the day of the election, while he’s ahead. So he has a very childlike, corrupt view of what politics is. He should always win, is basically his fascist argument. And there are people who agree with him—a very small number of people in the country—but that’s the audience he has to keep behind him because other people are starting to peel off as it becomes more and more unpopular.

Sargent: Spencer Pratt is also the candidate of at least some tech people. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Duran: Definitely. We’ve seen this rightward shift in Silicon Valley—overt rightward shift. I would argue there’s always been some right-wing politics there. But whenever you get a spectacle like this of a right-wing type of person running for office, you can now count on the billionaires of Silicon Valley to throw in money and try to make it a real thing.

So Spencer Pratt had money from Sergey Brin of Google, who’s now pretty much a right-winger. Joe Lonsdale of Palantir, who’s completely off the charts, far right—recently called for public executions in the United States. And so you can always count on having them throw in some money.

On the state level, a lot of the right-wing tech guys got behind the candidacy of Matt Mahan, the mayor of San Jose, who was trying to run as a moderate. People weren’t buying that. So we can expect the right-wing tech money now to go behind Steve Hilton if he makes the general. Again, they’re not betting on victory, they’re betting on disruption and chaos and providing a beachhead where Trump can continue to make his claims about the obsolescence of the democratic process.

Sargent: So how does this all unspool from here? Basically, the most likely scenario is that Spencer Pratt gets bumped out of contention for LA mayor and Steve Hilton goes on to the general for governor and most likely loses at the end of the day to Xavier Becerra, right?

Duran: Definitely. Steve Hilton is almost guaranteed to lose to Becerra, who’s not a particularly strong Democrat, but California is so Democratic that even if Becerra were dead, he would still beat Steve Hilton in a general election. I mean, there’s just no path really for Hilton to win.

Pratt—it seems mathematically impossible for him now to regain the second slot. So he probably won’t be in the race. He has said that if he lost, he would move out of Los Angeles, which is a pretty loser thing to say.

You don’t really hear people who want to be the mayor or want to be the governor say, I’m going to move out of the state. You’re supposed to act like, I’m going to stay here no matter what and continue to work to help my community, and then run again in four years when your challenger is unpopular if they win.

Again, they’re going to fold up their tents and go on to the next thing after this. Steve Hilton is probably just trying to get on another show on Fox. His was canceled because no one was watching it. So this is for him an audience-building exercise more than anything.

Although there was a piece in the Financial Times over the weekend where these three Brits said, it’s amazing that he’s the front-runner and he’s had this major political turnaround. These are people with no idea of California politics. He’s just simply the guy who’s desperate enough for attention that he’s willing to lose the governor’s race to get it. And that’s exactly what’s going to happen.

Sargent: Well, I sure hope so. Gil Duran—folks, if you enjoyed this, make sure to check out Gil’s new book. It’s coming out in mid-August. It’s called The Nerd Right: Silicon Valley, Fascism, and the War on Democracy. Gil, always great to talk to you. Thanks for coming on.

Duran: Thanks for having me.

So it comes as a shock to learn that Tuvalu’s government is heavily invested in fossil fuels, as revealed by an investigation published on May 28 by the global news agency Agence France-Presse. The Tuvalu Trust Fund, the nation’s largest financial asset, according to AFP, “has invested in coal mining, gas exploration and the world’s largest crude oil refinery,” reported correspondent Steven Trask, referring to the Jamnagar petrochemical complex in India.  

Income from the fund helps pay for government programs in Tuvalu, but it’s unclear how aware government officials were about the investments. Since 2022, the Tuvalu Trust Fund, which was first established in 1987, has been operated by Mercer, a consulting firm based in New York, which told AFP it did not comment on its clients’ portfolios. Presented with AFP’s findings, a spokesperson for the trust said it would review the fund’s holdings and continue “to seek to minimize its exposure to fossil fuel reserves and carbon emissions.”

AFP’s exposé points to a jaw-dropping conflict in an investment portfolio for a nation that is quite literally disappearing as a result of climate change. It is also public-minded journalism at its best. It holds power to account. It reveals surprising information about two vital, often overlooked issues: sea level rise and fossil fuel production. It notes the implications not only for Tuvalu but for the broader world. And it accomplishes all of this at a time when some news outlets, especially in the U.S., are retreating from the climate story, as a recent white paper by Covering Climate Now, or CCNow, shows. AFP is demonstrating the value of staying the course.

In the U.S., National Public Radio also offered fine climate reporting recently, airing a 19-minute podcast on May 24 that challenged the notion that the Trump administration’s hostility to climate action makes progress impossible. Julia Simon, NPR’s climate solutions correspondent, shared audio from the Santa Marta conference to illustrate what’s happening outside the U.S. Then it was off to Denver to hear about a city program to heat and cool buildings more sustainably. Then to Massachusetts, where volunteers plant carbon-absorbing “pocket forests” on abandoned land. Citing one of the studies behind CCNow’s 89 Percent Project, Simon concluded by reporting that “80 percent of people worldwide … want stronger climate action from their governments.”

That widespread public sentiment makes what happened next all the more head-scratching: Four days later, NPR fired its climate editor and disbanded its climate desk. “Today, I was laid off by NPR,” Neela Banerjee, the head of NPR’s climate desk, posted on LinkedIn. She added, “The climate desk no longer exists separately but has been folded into the National Desk.” In other words, NPR still plans to cover climate change but without the focus and expertise provided by a dedicated team. Simon remains on staff.

NPR’s climate desk was shut as part of broader budget cuts management said were necessary after Congress voted last year to eliminate federal subsidies for public media. But NPR’s “commitment to climate journalism has not changed,” NPR spokesperson Juliet Barbara said, in a statement to the Climate-Colored Goggles newsletter. NPR “has not eliminated our Climate team,” she added, “we have reorganized our newsroom.” Nevertheless, it’s hard not to conclude that NPR saw dedicated climate expertise as nonessential.

At a time much of the planet is broiling in unseasonable heat, with worse to come this summer, that is a grievous misreading not only of the climate crisis but of the public’s interest in tackling it. CCNow’s white paper identified a number of news outlets—AFP, along with The Guardian, The New York Times, CNN, AP, and more—that are bucking the trend of deprioritizing the climate story. Most of them employ a climate team because it makes for more informed, engaging coverage. But what’s more important, the white paper found, “is that top management conveys to the respective newsrooms that climate coverage matters.” NPR’s management has conveyed precisely the opposite message, a loss for its newsroom and for millions of listeners and readers who deserve better.

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

But, with last week’s primary results still being counted, the state is now reeling from one of the most unpredictable primary elections in recent history. For the past six months, Californians have witnessed a parade of gubernatorial candidates who have vied to replace Gavin Newsom as the state’s next governor. In what many have called a turbulent election, the primary has seen everything from the cataclysmic downfall of Representative Eric Swalwell to the close race between three candidates from across the political spectrum—Xavier Becerra, who experienced a historic rise from among the last to being the front-runner; Steve Hilton, a wannabe Trump in California with the blessing of the Trump himself; and Tom Steyer, a billionaire and political outsider who courted progressive voters with his vision of environmentalism.

Several other candidates, including Elizabeth Warren acolyte Katie Porter and former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, fell short. This was the most expensive election in California history, with $316 million spent. Two hundred million of that came from Steyer tapping his personal war chest, along with a myriad of corporate donations for Becerra and Hilton.

In any case, Californians will have to wait a few more days for the primary dust to settle, and then it’s on to November to decide on who will replace the presumably presidential primary–bound Gavin Newsom and sort out the myriad challenges he’ll leave behind: skyrocketing costs of living, a lack of housing, an increasing number of climate change–driven wildfires, and the constant animosity of the Trump administration.

With Becerra already called as one of the candidates, and Hilton leading by several percentage points over Steyer, it looks as if the final showdown will be between Becerra and Hilton. If so, Becerra, the sole Democrat in the race, will likely take the state. Why that matters nationwide is that Becerra, like many veteran Democrats, is a poster child for much of the Democratic leadership—experienced but moderate. While I would like to give Becerra a chance to prove himself, as he stands, he will be much like—well, Gavin Newsom.  

Becerra has a deep résumé. He is the former secretary of health and human services under the Biden administration, a former state attorney general, and former member of Congress who represented the heart of Central and East Los Angeles. As state attorney general, he defended DACA and the Affordable Care Act during Trump’s first term and sued the administration over fracking. The son of Mexican immigrants, who grew up in Sacramento, he was the first in his family to attend college when he enrolled at Stanford University.

On paper, his portfolio would make him an ideal Democratic candidate—experience in both Sacramento and Washington, from a working-class background, the son of immigrants. After Swalwell, the first mainstream Democratic contender, fell from grace, Becerra positioned himself as a steady choice for many Democrats. And it paid off: By late May, polls showed Becerra leading beyond the other contenders by a safe margin, beating back earlier fears of a Republican shutout from earlier in the election.

Becerra’s rise can also be understood in the context of the state’s racial politics. Back in March, Becerra protested the exclusion of himself and other candidates of color from the ABC7-USC debate. As he said in an open letter to USC’s President Beong-Soo Kim: “My father used to tell me of the days when he would encounter signs posted outside establishments that read ‘No Dogs, Negroes or Mexicans Allowed.’ USC’s actions may not seem so transparent. But, you have deliberately chosen to selectively filter the voters’ view of the field of gubernatorial candidates in what all observers characterize as a wide-open race.”

The move helped cement his connection to Latino politics in the Golden State, where 41 percent of California’s population is Latino. Communities are not monoliths—as the 2024 election demonstrated, the Trump campaign received a significant number of Latino votes. But Becerra, who is the first in his family to attend university, who fought against ICE in his time as attorney general during the first Trump administration, and would be the first Latino governor and governor of color in California history since Romualdo Pacheco in 1875, does appeal as someone who understands the immigrant experience at a time when immigrants are under attack.

At the same time, Becerra’s emergence as the front-runner brought a wave of corporate backers. If money talks, then Becerra can be expected to give lip service to Chevron, Meta, Uber, and PG&E. It’s no wonder Becerra has received the most scrutiny for his anticipated catering to groups that inflame issues important to many California Democrats: climate change, the rise of AI, and affordability.

Becerra described this as pragmatism—as he said in one debate statement: “You need Chevron. I need Chevron. My people of the state of California need Chevron … Chevron wants to give me a check, that’s—that’s their prerogative.” While he cited his lawsuits against oil companies and his support for green energy, he said in the end that Chevron remains an important employer to the state. But it is worth noting that Chevron’s contribution to a Becerra PAC was the first time it had donated to a California gubernatorial election in a decade. 

David Dayen of The American Prospect has noted how the final days of the primary were defined by Becerra’s corporate backers. In his article on Becerra’s inaction on pharmacy benefit managers, or PBMs, Dayen pointed out that as attorney general Becerra sought to rein in PBMs. He rolled back his stance once appointed to the Biden administration (in parallel with his change of heart on the single payer option).

Becerra’s rise, to Dayen, has been a credit less to his talent as a policymaker than to a lack of accountability from the California Democratic Party. While Becerra proposed seizing patents for medication made with government research as a means of cutting down on pharmaceutical price gouging during his time as state attorney general, he later backtracked on the plan when he became health and human services secretary. “Governing matters less than internal power positioning,” said Dayen. 

This accounts for the potent challenge mounted by Tom Steyer, the billionaire former head of investment group Farallon Capital who used his personal fortune to combat climate change and take on the oil industry. As Joe Hagan outlined, in his profile of Steyer for Men’s Journal back in 2017, Steyer seemed nothing like a billionaire in his lifestyle or interests. That may be why he has enjoyed some success in an era when billionaire is a dirty word. Steyer has enjoyed endorsements from some key progressives, including former U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich and Representative Ro Khanna.

A Becerra-Steyer matchup may offer a more interesting election than a race between Becerra and right-wing blowhard Steve Hilton. But, based on the current AP results, we are likely facing a November election between Becerra and Hilton.

California was doomed to have a chaotic election. In 2009, Republican state Senator Abel Maldonado authored what would become Proposition 14, a measure that would amend the state constitution to create the current open primary system. Then-Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger championed the measure as a staple of his legacy and in 2010 promoted Maldonado to be lieutenant governor.

At the time, some pundits viewed the measure as a means of preventing extreme candidates from winning an election. Others saw it as a system that limited the power of third parties to compete in the jungle primary. But what stands out most of all is the fact that, in California at least, it was a solution in search of a problem: Before 2010, most elections—save the explosive recall election of Governor Gray Davis—were relatively tame.

As The New Republic’s own Timothy Noah previously noted, California’s electoral problems are down to the stagnation of the state Democratic Party, which has changed very little since the Clinton years. As Republicans have moved increasingly rightward as part of capitulating to Donald Trump, their importance in state politics has dwindled to a few conspiracy theorists and as foil to Gavin Newsom. Whoever the next Democratic governor is, they would do the party a favor by eliminating the open primary. 

California Democratic politics have been increasingly defined by the party’s centrism, which has become more deeply rooted even as the state’s biggest problems—affordability, environmental devastation, the seemingly intractable housing crisis—have become equally entrenched. There are no outside forces strong enough to shake this status quo. Few have challenged the main Democratic establishment at the statewide level. Since 2006, no Republican has been elected to statewide office. The Democratic Party in California has maintained a steady grip on statewide policy to the point that many within the party seem mostly concerned about maintaining its monopoly. And moderate Republicans fleeing MAGA’s corruption in tenuous alliance with the Democratic Party’s center have only more deeply instilled the party’s corporate bent, seen most vividly in the way state Democrats tend to cater to major business interests like Silicon Valley.

As Dayen put it to me: “I think the party has generally evolved a mild antipathy to governing, which is poisonous in the current environment where voters are disappointed at the lack of follow-through on campaign promises. Wanting to be liked more than wanting to get things done creates a slow, painful toxicity that emerges in approval ratings of the Democratic Party.”

Outside the governor’s race, some challenges to the established order have bubbled up. The Los Angeles mayoral race has received the most attention for the fact that former reality-television fixture Spencer Pratt channeled anger over the L.A. wildfires and slung AI campaign videos left and right to become the first major Republican mayoral challenger in decades.

But it is not only challenges from the right that are rocking city politics. Nithya Raman, a onetime ally of incumbent Mayor Karen Bass, entered the race against her, blasting her former colleague for her handling of programs supporting the city’s significant unhoused population. 

Elsewhere, anti-establishment figures are doing more than merely rattling some cages. In San Francisco, State Senator Scott Weiner will face off against City Supervisor Connie Chan to replace Democratic legend Nancy Pelosi. Although Chan received endorsements from both Pelosi and former San Franciso Mayor Willie Brown, she finished second in the primary. Weiner, a Democratic state senator with a long track record of authoring legislation on issues ranging from LGBTQ+ rights to housing, has received praise as the brains behind the No Secret Police Act, which required federal agents to demask, and one of the earliest bills to regulate artificial intelligence (it was vetoed by Newsom). Since then, Weiner has authored several AI regulation bills that have been signed by the governor, and some speculate his state legislation being a template for federal oversight on AI.

East of the Bay Area in Sacramento, Representative Doris Matsui of California’s 7th congressional district has faced a significant challenge from Sacramento City Council member Mai Vang. Matsui and Vang will face off in the November election, in what will be a standoff between different generations of the Democratic Party—in some ways a microcosm for party politics writ large. Matsui is part of a family political dynasty that began when Robert Matsui was elected to California’s 3rd district in 1979. Until his death in 2005, he worked on legislation that included blocking the privatization of Social Security to shepherding the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which offered redress to Japanese Americans formerly incarcerated in camps during World War II. That same year, Doris, his wife, ran successfully for his seat in a 2005 special election. Since then, Doris Matsui has been a longtime advocate for women’s and LGBTQ+ rights.

But while in previous years Matsui’s reelections have been relatively calm and certain, this year the race has been contentious. Vang and Matsui have attacked each other on a personal level, often pointing to their generational differences. Matsui has been criticized for her age (she is 82) and her slow response to ICE’s predations. Vang, who was elected to the City Council in 2020, has been criticized for lacking the experience needed to serve in Congress.

As with the governor’s race, money played a crucial role in this election. Matsui raised $1 million to Vang’s $600,000, and Matsui later took out a $1.4 million loan to finance her campaign (Matsui’s second husband is billionaire Roger Sant).  

The Sacramento Bee ultimately endorsed Vang after Matsui declined to speak with the paper’s editorial board. In the board’s words: “Mai Vang embodies today’s Sacramento. Doris Matsui does not. The Bee endorses Vang for a much-needed and historic changing of the guard for Sacramento in Washington.” The Bee’s Robin Epley also accused Matsui of platforming Zachariah Wooden, a college student running as the Republican, in order to pull votes away from Vang.

When I asked Dayen what he saw in this primary, he described it as an important moment where a lack of strong leadership left many voters uncertain about their future—a sentiment with which The New Republic’s Perry Bacon concurred. “I think there is a strain of restlessness in California,” Dayen said. “The governor’s race didn’t have a locked and loaded establishment figure for the first time in 20 years. The late redistricting unsettled the House races to a degree, and there’s a real questioning of what it takes to win in swing-district territory.” However, as demonstrated by the wealth of support for Becerra from companies like Chevron and Meta, Dayen says the influence of corporations still influences state politics: “The money thrown around continues to frustrate public desires.”

For decades, Californians have seemed to want calm and easygoing elections, preferring familiar faces to firebrands. And they’ve largely gotten their wish, even at the top of the ballot in this current cycle. As longtime Los Angeles Times columnist George Skelton put it, Becerra offered something that has, with some exception, dominated California politics: “Nothing flashy, just plain but comfortable.”

But what remains are the underlying problems—environmental disasters like wildfires, rising housing costs, and anxiety over the AI industry, to name a few—that have plagued California residents and have made life anything but calm and easygoing. And while challenges to the status quo have been more a trickle than a flood, it’s a warning sign to those who’ve clung to power in the established order that they must start delivering solutions. At some point, something’s got to give—or else MAGA’s next Golden State savant might successfully convince voters to give them the reins. Democratic leadership should pay attention to the rumblings out west; California will be a bellwether for what could happen to the party across the nation.

* This article has been updated.

The exchange concerned Trump’s most cherished goal of remaking the White House—the people’s house—in his imperial and garish image.

Recall how we got here. Last September, with no congressional authorization and no completed legal process, the administration simply got up one day and started taking a wrecking ball to the East Wing. It was only days until the structure was completely demolished. By the time the National Trust for Historic Preservation sued in December, the East Wing was gone, and large-scale excavation for the 90,000-square-foot ballroom was well underway.

By the time of last Friday’s argument, three million pounds of steel rebar were in the ground, and the structure was beginning to rise above it.

Let’s talk about that argument. The D.C. Circuit is commonly considered the second-most-powerful federal court in the nation. Given the court’s sophistication and the personal importance to Trump of the project, the administration sent its version of the A-team. Yaakov Roth is a senior official in DOJ’s Civil Division, with a résumé that includes a clerkship for Justice Antonin Scalia and extensive appellate experience.

The most active questioner on the panel was Judge Patricia Millett. In the course of pressing Roth on the administration’s standing argument, Millett dropped the hypothetical bombshell that crystallized the administration’s position.

“If this were the Statue of Liberty,” Millett asked, “the people whose ancestors—that was the first thing they saw coming to this country—but the government moved too fast; nothing can be done by them to challenge it?”

Roth’s answer: “I think that’s right, yes.”

Roth’s answer was not a mistake under pressure. He had thought through the implications of the administration’s position and understood that Millett would be quick to exploit any inconsistency and use it to unravel the administration’s case.

Millett had simply followed the logic to its destination and asked him to confirm it. He did, as he had to. The only check, he allowed, would be Congress—which would have to pass a law that Trump could veto, requiring two-thirds to override.

Millett then named this attitude that she had extracted from Roth: “Move fast and break things, and then nobody has standing.” Roth conceded that was essentially correct.

That is the administration’s playbook for a series of recent high-handed moves: the $1.8 billion slush fund for January 6 defendants, the systematic destruction of presidential records, the collusive settlements with Mike Flynn and Steve Bannon, and now the ballroom rising on the demolished White House East Wing. Not that they acted lawfully, and not that they aren’t injuring the interests of the American people—but that nobody can do anything about it.

In each of these examples, the administration follows the same two-step. First, neuter Congress: Anything requiring legislation to stop faces a certain presidential veto, and the two-thirds override is a mathematical fantasy as long as enough Republican members remain terrified of Trump’s one remaining real weapon, the threat to come after them. Second, neuter the courts: Argue that no one has legal standing to challenge what is being done, that the injury is too generalized, too abstract, too aesthetic to cross the Article 3 threshold pertaining to standing. Congress can’t act. Courts can’t hear it. The bulldozer rolls with no brakes.

There is nothing inherently improper about an administration’s invocation of standing doctrine. The requirement that plaintiffs show a concrete, particularized injury before federal courts will take up their claim is a valid constraint, rooted in Article 3, and courts across the ideological spectrum have enforced it against litigants of every stripe. The constitutional design is that federal courts are not a substitute for legislative action.

But the administration has taken its reliance on standing to a new low and used it to bypass legal accountability for a series of issues of intense popular concern. It has combined aggressive standing arguments with bare-knuckles intimidation of Republicans in Congress. The result is a pincer movement that leaves the public—the people who overwhelmingly object to a $1.8 billion giveaway to January 6 defendants, who feel in their bones that the White House belongs to all of them, who do not want their government shredding documents that belong to the people—with no branch to turn to and no courthouse door that will open.

The White House is the most universally recognized symbol of the national government. Its relatively modest, neoclassical structure stands in harmony with the Capitol and the Supreme Court up the hill. It is the building that millions of schoolchildren visit, that Americans call “the people’s house.” It’s the antithesis of the gaudy ornateness of Trump’s imperial design.

The power of the Millett hypothetical is that it smokes out where the administration’s argument leads. Can the executive lay waste to the Statue of Liberty? Damn right, says Roth—and even if it’s a rank violation of the executive duty to take care, nobody can stop it because nobody has standing.

There is a profoundly un-American quality to Trump’s ballroom makeover. He is in effect trying to crown himself emperor—cowing Congress and parrying court action with aggressive standing arguments pressed all the way to the Supreme Court. It is a gesture of deep contempt for the country whose most beloved building he is trying to remake in his own image.

An administration lawyer told the judges in the second-most-powerful court in the country that no court can stop a president who moves fast enough from destroying the White House or the Statue of Liberty. The administration is counting on paralyzing the courts and the Congress, and ultimately on the public’s apathy. The recent slush-fund debacle showed that’s a losable bet. The formula is public pressure, judicial accountability, and Republicans made to own it at the polls. The first part is up to us.

The case is a dispute between Colorado education officials on one side and the Archdiocese of Denver, local Catholic parishes, and Catholic parents on the other. (For simplicity’s sake, I’ll refer to them as the state and the plaintiffs, respectively.) Colorado is one of a growing number of states with a universal pre-K program, or UPK. Voters approved it on the ballot in 2020, state lawmakers enacted in 2021, and it went into effect in 2023.

When lawmakers enacted the UPK program, they required the Colorado Department of Education to adopt an equal-opportunity rule for participating preschool providers. The rule adopted by the department requires them to “provide eligible children an equal opportunity to enroll and receive preschool services regardless of race, ethnicity, religious affiliation, sexual orientation, gender identity, lack of housing, income level, or disability.”

This requirement is problematic for some preschool providers in the state. Among them is the archdiocese, which oversees 34 Catholic preschools in Colorado. In 2023, the archdiocese formally requested a religious exemption from the equal-opportunity rule to allow it to “admit only families who agree with the Catholic Church’s teachings, including on gender and sexuality,” according to the parish’s petition for review. Colorado education officials denied that request, noting that the rule flowed from a state law requirement and that they had no power to override the state legislature.

The plaintiffs have good reason to expect a favorable hearing at the high court. In recent years, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has greatly expanded access to public funds and programs for religious organizations. Most free exercise clause cases have historically involved discrimination against specific religious groups, such as the Amish or Jehovah’s Witnesses. The free exercise clause, the court’s conservatives have more recently claimed, also protects religious organizations from discrimination against religion in general terms.

In the 2017 case Trinity Lutheran Church v. Comer, for example, the justices ruled that denying an “otherwise available public benefit” to a religious organization because of its religious nature violated the free exercise clause. In 2019’s Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue, the court held that states could also not block students from using state scholarships at private religious schools. And in 2022’s Carson v. Makin, the court applied similar reasoning when striking down a Maine law that restricted its tuition assistance program to “nonsectarian” schools.

The plaintiffs argued that Colorado discriminated against them in this situation by declining to grant them an exemption from the state’s equal-opportunity rule. “Here, there is no question that the parish preschools are otherwise eligible for UPK funding,” they told the justices in their petition, quoting from Carson. “And there is no question that those preschools have been excluded from that benefit ‘because of their religious exercise’—namely, their religiously motivated policies related to sex and gender. So, under Carson, the exclusion should have been ‘subjected to the strictest scrutiny.’”

Not so, says Colorado. In the lower courts, the state countered by claiming that there was no discrimination at all. “Carson does not apply to this case because UPK does not exclude religious schools,” they told the justices in their reply brief. “Indeed, UPK welcomes them in a program where public funding turns not on providers’ secular or religious character, but instead on providers’ compliance with UPK’s equal-opportunity requirements.”

While the plaintiffs say that the rule is an affront to American religious pluralism, the state implicitly disagreed. “UPK’s equal-opportunity requirements,” Colorado explained, “ensure that all Colorado parents—Catholic parents as well as same-sex parents—know that their children will not be turned away, because of their protected-class status, from the publicly funded preschool that best meets their families’ needs.”

Colorado also pointed to language in the court’s recent ruling in Mahmoud v. Taylor, which involved religious parents’ opt-outs to LGBTQ-related materials, that explained that “the government is generally free to place incidental burdens on religious exercise so long as it does so pursuant to a neutral policy that is generally applicable.” That phrasing refers to the Supreme Court’s 1990 ruling in Employment Division v. Smith, which represents a major hurdle in this case for the plaintiffs.

Smith involved two Native American men who alleged that the state of Oregon had infringed upon the First Amendment’s free exercise clause by denying them unemployment benefits for using peyote, which has spiritual significance for some tribal nations. The Supreme Court rejected their claim, instead holding that the free exercise clause could not be invoked by itself to challenge what the court described as “neutral laws of general applicability.”

Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the court, noted that the state’s ban on illegal drug use was not aimed at punishing a specific religious act, but rather applied to all people equally. If Americans could invoke religious beliefs to exclude themselves from such laws, Scalia warned while quoting precedent, the effect “would be to make the professed doctrines of religious belief superior to the law of the land, and in effect to permit every citizen to become a law unto himself.”

The high court’s ruling prompted Congress to enact the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993, or RFRA, which created a statutory pathway to challenge free exercise clause violations by the federal government in federal court. But the Supreme Court struck down provisions of RFRA that sought to extend its scope to actions by state governments on federalism grounds in a 1997 case, so RFRA does not affect Colorado’s actions here.

As I’ve noted before, conservative judges and legal scholars have frequently criticized the Smith ruling for constraining free-exercise challenges. That makes it something of an outlier for the court’s conservative majority, who often invoke Scalia’s writings on statutory and constitutional interpretation as a lodestar.

The closest that the court’s conservatives came to overturning Smith so far was in the 2021 case Fulton v. City of Philadelphia, which involved Catholic social services programs and adoptions to same-sex couples. Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote a concurring opinion, joined by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, that criticized Smith’s approach while also arguing against what would replace it, at least in the view of that case’s plaintiffs.

“I am skeptical about swapping Smith’s categorical antidiscrimination approach for an equally categorical strict scrutiny regime,” Barrett explained, “particularly when this Court’s resolution of conflicts between generally applicable laws and other First Amendment rights—like speech and assembly—has been much more nuanced.” She suggested that there would be “a number of issues to work through if Smith were overruled,” and—crucially—concluded it was not necessary in Fulton because Smith did not actually apply.

In their petition, the plaintiffs asked the Supreme Court to revisit whether Smith should be overturned, but the court declined to do so when agreeing to hear the case. Instead, the justices limited the questions presented to two other ones raised: whether “proving a lack of general applicability under [Smith] requires showing unfettered discretion or categorical exemptions for identical secular conduct,” and whether “[Carson] displaces the rule of [Smith] only when the government explicitly excludes religious people and institutions.”

The Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals, for its part, declined to apply Carson at all because the state did not make a practice of treating religious schools differently from secular ones. “The Department did not exclude faith-based preschools from participating in UPK,” the three-judge panel explained. “Indeed, they welcomed and actively solicited their participation. The only relevant limitation on any preschool’s participation is the nondiscrimination requirement, which applies to all preschools regardless of whether they are religious or secular.”

More importantly, as the state noted, “Colorado’s law, as written and as implemented, does not allow for any exceptions from its equal-opportunity requirements.” Since there are no exceptions, the state continued, Smith applies because the law is neutral and generally applicable. The plaintiffs tried to circumvent that point by emphasizing a Colorado official’s testimony that the state might consider exemptions if a preschool requested a preference for “gender-nonconforming children” or “children of color from historically underserved areas.” That willingness, the plaintiffs claimed, meant that the law wasn’t as ironclad as the state had averred.

But the Tenth Circuit put little stock in this argument or the official’s testimony. The official in question, the court noted, was responding to hypothetical questions and still noted that the preferences could only be given “as long as there wasn’t discrimination that was aligned to the [non]discrimination provision.” No such exemptions had ever been given, the panel noted, and concluding otherwise “would require that we invert a clear reading of the Department’s regulations based not on their language or operation, but a series of hypotheticals posed unexpectedly to one witness at trial.”

It is no surprise that the court’s conservative majority agreed to hear this case. The justices have a long history of second-guessing Colorado’s antidiscrimination laws and policies, dating back to the Masterpiece Cakeshop dispute over a baker’s refusal to bake a wedding cake for a same-sex couple in 2012. In 2018, the court concluded that the state’s Civil Rights Commission had abandoned neutrality when some of its members criticized the baker’s religious beliefs. Three years ago, in 303 Creative v. Elenis, the court also ruled in favor of a Christian web designer who sued the commission so she could deny services to hypothetical same-sex couples on free speech grounds.

Indeed, the plaintiffs’ filings play into the conservative justices’ preconceived notions about allegedly defiant lower courts and allegedly bigoted state officials. They describe Colorado’s approach to the equal-opportunity rule as a “thumbing of its nose at the rule of Trinity Lutheran, Espinoza, and Carson” and claim the state is intentionally excluding “those with traditional religious beliefs about marriage,” which will likely resonate with at least some of the court’s conservative justices.

“This Court promised in Obergefell that religious groups would be protected when they dissent from secular orthodoxies about marriage and sexuality,” the plaintiffs argued in their petition, referring to the landmark 2015 ruling on marriage equality. “The Free Exercise Clause simply cannot do that important work—which this Court has described as ‘at the heart of our pluralistic society’—if it can be so easily evaded.”

There is a certain amount of irony in these appeals to American pluralism. To rule in the plaintiffs’ favor, the justices would have to conclude that a state cannot require UPK providers to provide their services to all Coloradoans equally, even when it requires providers to each operate according to the same rules. What could be more hostile to a pluralistic society than that?

I encountered Coles in the spring of 1979, when, as a Harvard junior, I took his wildly popular lecture course, Soc. Sci. 33: Moral and Social Inquiry. Coles was a campus celebrity, profiled the year before on the cover of The New York Times Magazine and not especially admired by his academic colleagues because he lacked “rigor.” (Coles returned the disdain by heaping scorn on the social sciences for being too abstracted from the meat and gristle of everyday life.) Drawing on an eclectic and compelling reading list—George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier, Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee and Walker Evans, essays by Simone Weil, short stories by Flannery O’Connor—Coles urged his votaries to lead lives that made moral sense. He didn’t tell us exactly how to go about it, but he made clear we would find no spiritual refreshment on Wall Street.

Coles also warned his compatriots on the political left against ideological complacency. A veteran of social movements regarding civil rights, Appalachian poverty, and migrant farmers, Coles told the Harvard Crimson in 1968 that “I’m very worried about the dangers of a kind of political activity that ignores the ironies and ambiguities of life, including political life.” For example:

The [predominantly Black low-income] people in Roxbury—regardless of what the leaders of SDS or I have to think about it—want to get into the system rather than leave it. The families I work with want to be able to get better service at the Boston City Hospital, they want garbage collection more frequently, they want better heating, they want welfare workers who will help them out. They are not going to take to the streets in order to storm the Winter Palace—there is no Winter Palace to storm.

In his excellent Coles obituary in The Boston Globe, David Shribman writes about Coles’s devotion to what he called “in medias res,” a literary term that describes a narrative that begins in the middle of the story. (The phrase is Latin for “into the middle of things.”) Coles was drawn to studying life “in the midst of trouble.” His first experience doing so was in 1960, when he witnessed a tiny Black girl named Ruby Bridges enter an all-white elementary school in 1960 on the authority of a federal judge’s desegregation order.

“I happened to see this little child going into a school in New Orleans,” Coles later recalled, “at the age of six, in the first grade, and I thought to myself: I’d like to know that child. I’d like to know what’s happening to her.” Coles spent months meeting with Ruby regularly, “rather puzzled at how normal and stoic and strong she was, going through this kind of living hell. Two hundred people waiting at 8:30 in the morning to tell her they were going to kill her.… Twenty-five federal marshals taking her into that building.” Ruby’s father lost his job, and her grandparents, who lived in a small Mississippi town, feared that they would be lynched. Coles figured it was only a matter of time before Ruby would “start developing symptoms and get in trouble.” But she didn’t.

One day Ruby’s teacher told Coles she’d seen Ruby, as she walked past yet another fist-shaking crowd of angry white segregationists, pause to say something. When Coles asked Ruby what she’d said, she explained she’d recited a prayer: “Please, dear God, forgive them, because they don’t know what they’re doing.” The result of that conversation was Coles’s five-volume series, Children of Crisis. “Ruby had a will,” Coles wrote later, “and used it to make an ethical choice: she demonstrated moral stamina; she possessed honor, courage.”

Religious faith was hugely important to Coles, a practicing Catholic. He wrote about faith often, and these passages were usually the first to get cut out by editors. I know this because Coles told me so himself while I was editing an op-ed I’d assigned him for The New York Times. It was his response to my cutting, in fact, a passage about faith. In that instance, it was for space (I swear!), but he didn’t believe me, and maybe he was correct not to. Coles later tried to help make Dorothy Day a saint by telling the Vatican that his wife, Jane, had prayed to her and was healed in some way. At the moment, though, Day is designated only a “servant of God.”

But I digress.

After Ruby Bridges, Coles’s next in medias res experience was one that’s gone largely unmentioned in his obituaries, which is a shame because I find it his most interesting. “He was [the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s] resident shrink,” an Atlanta-based reporter named Pat Walters said in that long-ago Times Magazine profile. “When people got to the cracking point, he was there for them.”

Coles worked in Mississippi for SNCC during 1964’s Freedom Summer, probably the most dangerous campaign of the entire Civil Rights Movement, led by the fearless and brilliant Robert Parris Moses. Northern college students, most of them white and middle or upper-middle class, were recruited to travel south to register voters, teach African American children math, reading, and Black history, and organize an integrated alternative slate of delegates for the 1964 Democratic convention. Almost immediately, three civil rights workers—Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, both white and from New York, and James Chaney, Black and from Mississippi—were killed. The murder went unpunished for half a century, when one of the surviving killers was finally convicted, though only of manslaughter.

Coles’s role in Freedom Summer is documented in Thomas E. Ricks’s superb 2022 book, Waging a Good War, which examines the Civil Rights Movement from the perspective of military strategy. In many ways, the movement’s logic was just as brutal. When Goodman, Cheney, and Schwerner were killed, Ricks reports, Coles, who had known them well, was stunned to realize that although Moses and the other leaders grieved their deaths, they also saw it as a moral victory. “They were realizing that they’d succeeded,” Coles would recall. “Because this became cover stories in the newsmagazines. And the president of the United States was having something to say. So they had won.” Black people had been dying for a long time in Mississippi, Coles realized, and “no one noticed or cared.” Now people would care.

Ricks is right; this nonviolent movement was, in fact, waging war. Coles would later diagnose students with “battle fatigue,” with signs of “exhaustion, weariness, despair, frustration and rage.” To Coles, these young civil rights protesters were “in a war and exposed to the stresses of warfare.”

As Coles recalled in a 1983 oral history, he didn’t feel he had much to teach the (almost entirely Black) veterans of the Civil Rights Movement about how to cope, “because they knew a hell of a lot more about that than I did.” Instead, he was steered mostly to minister to the middle- and upper-middle-class white kids, because “having gone to Harvard, and being a product of what I am,” he knew better what they might need. Some of these kids, he said, “were arrogant, protected by their ignorance and arrogance, to be blunt about it. And some of them were protected in the best sense of the word … by a kind of earnest good will. Some of them were a bit show-offy, some of them were naïve and presumptuous, but so are we all, Black and white.” Such novelistic complexity is characteristic of Coles’s observations; in his writings, nobody is ever reduced to a “case study.”

One of the young idealists Coles encountered in Mississippi turned out to be notably sinister: Dennis Sweeney, who two decades later would assassinate his mentor, the civil rights activist and future congressman Allard Lowenstein (also in Mississippi that summer). Coles examined Sweeney after a dynamite blast to figure out whether he needed to see a doctor. “I heard him say some things and made an immediate diagnosis. I said to my wife on the phone … ‘I think he is schizophrenic.’” Coles hoped that Sweeney’s strange behavior had been brought out by stress, and that it would recede. “But then I noticed that it didn’t, totally.”

In another disturbing incident related by Coles, “some students went to see a doctor because they had been injured by one of these incidents with Klan elements or whatever. And the doctor called the Klan in, and they got hurt more.”

The parents of these white college kids, Coles recalled, “were frightened out of their minds.” Coles was told to talk to one female student whose father was a psychoanalyst in Chicago. “She didn’t seem too depressed to me. She said that the only problem I have is that my parents are calling me all the time.” Coles volunteered to phone them, and when he did the father told him she’d had a depressive episode when she was 12. “I said, oh, now she is 20.… I just talked to her and she seemed fine.” Then the man’s wife came on the phone and said she thought it was her husband who was depressed. “He is very worried,” she said. “Worry is not depression,” Coles answered. “And you have every reason to worry. I can’t tell you not to worry. You should worry. So should we all.”

It is perhaps an unusual psychiatric practice to advise your patients to worry, but then Freedom Summer was an unusual event that occurred in the real world, not in anybody’s imagination. When you’re in medias res it doesn’t make sense not to worry. Ruby Bridges was perhaps spared by being too young to worry. But Coles perhaps sells short his own bravery. In that 1978 Times profile, the late civil rights leader Julian Bond recalls:

He was a model for grace under the pressure of those days. We had one fellow demonstrating against us who’d been accused and acquitted of bombing a synagogue; a real hater, this guy. Coles [whose father was Jewish] just patiently drew him out and the guy burst out in tears one day and sobbed to Bob that his mother always hated him and somehow he was getting back at her. I know it sounds theatrical, but he had this special way with people.

One of Coles’s favorite poems, I remember from his class, was Stephen Spender’s “The Truly Great.” Coles would have hotly disputed that he was a great man, but I feel comfortable stating he was one of those who, as Spender writes,

fought for life,
Who wore at their hearts the fire’s centre.
Born of the sun, they travelled a short while toward the sun
And left the vivid air signed with their honour.

Requiescat in pace, Dr. Coles, and safe travels.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- Homan… pic.twitter.com/hw4aS39k0R

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

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

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

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

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

— Matthew Chayes (@chayesmatthew) June 8, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 8, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This story has been updated.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 8, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alex Shephard: It’s great to be back.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shephard: Yeah, thank you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* This piece originally misidentified Jay Jones.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reporter: When is the last time you had discussions?

Trump: pic.twitter.com/JT4DL6Op4b

— Acyn (@Acyn) June 5, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 5, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Acyn (@Acyn) June 5, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The president had another asylum ban attempt blocked last April.  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 5, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Headquarters (@HQNewsNow) June 4, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Emily Horne: Thanks, Greg, for having me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Horne: Thanks, Greg.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Translation: This is Trump’s mess.

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

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

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

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

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