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D.C. Mayor Caves to Trump With Sickening Order on Federal Takeover - 2025-09-02T21:33:19Z

In her latest seeming appeasement to President Donald Trump amid his federal takeover of Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser on Tuesday ordered that the city work with federal law enforcement indefinitely.

With the one-month limit (sans congressional approval) on Trump’s takeover approaching, Bowser issued an executive order stating that D.C. will “ensure coordination with federal law enforcement to the maximum extent allowable by law within the District.” The order also requires that D.C. “continue to communicate its priorities to federal counterparts and other ways the federal government can assist the District.”

No expiration date is provided for the directive, which the Democratic mayor described as a “pathway forward beyond” Trump’s dubiously grounded 30-day crime emergency.

Trump is already delighted by Bowser’s order, a White House official told The Washington Post, and the president described the D.C. mayor as “very helpful” in a press conference Tuesday.

While Bowser’s order takes a largely warm stance on the takeover, it does lay out plans to “advance requests” that “federal partners” make efforts to “maintain community confidence in law enforcement,” including by not wearing masks to conceal their identities—a practice that has, thus far, seemingly persisted despite Bowser’s objections.

Bowser has faced criticism for her increasingly conciliatory approach to Trump’s takeover, which is opposed by eight in 10 D.C. residents, according to a Washington Post poll last month. At a press conference last week, Bowser said she “greatly appreciate[s] the surge of officers.”

Prior to Bowser’s executive order Tuesday, a coalition of progressive groups in Washington, D.C., wrote a letter criticizing her perceived embrace of Trump’s occupation. “Your talk about crime fighting and crime rates only lends credence to the federal overreach, invites future attempts to degrade our home rule, and feeds a narrative that dehumanizes our neighbors and puts them at greater risk,” they wrote.

“History is calling upon you to lead our people, not to cower in the face of an authoritarian who does not have our best interests in mind,” the letter continued. “There is no strategy in appeasement, only the reality that the more we give, the more they will take.”

Turns Out Trump Is Alive … And He’s Mad - 2025-09-02T20:33:08Z

President Donald Trump ended his press conference in a huff Tuesday, after snapping at a reporter who asked him about his administration’s legal loss in California.

The journalist asked the president to respond to a federal judge’s ruling that the Trump administration’s decision to deploy the National Guard to Los Angeles had blatantly violated the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, an act prohibiting the use of the U.S. military to execute domestic law.

“Well, it was a radical left judge, but—very importantly—what did you not tell me in that question, or statement, that you made?” Trump asked, muttering a bit to himself.

“Well, I was asking for your response,” the reporter said.

“No, no, you didn’t say what the judge said though,” Trump said. “The judge said, ‘But you can leave the 300 people that you already have in place, they can continue to be in place.’ That’s all we need. But, why didn’t you put that as part of your statement?”

Trump appeared desperate to reframe the judge’s ruling as a victory instead of a defeat, and was defensive that the simple question hadn’t aligned with that framing.

“‘Cause, the judge, the same judge, ruled exactly as you said, except the judge said that you could leave the 300 people that you already have in place, they can stay, they can remain, they can do what they have to do,” Trump continued, before abruptly dismissing the reporters from the press conference he’d arrived an hour late to.

The president was referring to U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer ruling that the Trump administration was not required to withdraw 300 National Guard troops already stationed in Los Angeles, but that the government could not use them as they had been, to “set up protective perimeters and traffic blockades, engage in crowd control, and otherwise demonstrate a military presence in and around Los Angeles.”

The judge barred the administration from using the military in California “to execute the laws, including but not limited to engaging in arrests, apprehensions, searches, seizures, security patrols, traffic control, crowd control, riot control, evidence collection, interrogation, or acting as informants” in ways that violate the Posse Comitatus Act. He gave the Trump administration until noon on September 12 to comply.

Acting U.S. attorney for the Central District of California Bill Essayli gave no indication that the Trump administration planned to abide by the judge’s ruling, claiming that federal agents had needed protection from “thugs” supported by Democratic officials.

Trump Sports Mystery Bruise as He Responds to Reports He Was Dead - 2025-09-02T20:15:15Z

This weekend, the internet hummed with rumors that President Donald Trump, 79, had died. The half-joking gossip was spurred by a week-long stretch with no public appearances, as well as comments by Vice President JD Vance about his readiness to assume the presidency should a “terrible tragedy” occur.

Trump on Tuesday was asked about the speculation by Fox News reporter Peter Doocy, in the president’s first public appearance since then: a press conference during which he seemed his usual self—although the back of his right hand (which has received increasing attention of late for a recurring bruise, often covered with ill-matched concealer) did appear discolored.

“How did you find out over the weekend that you were dead?” Doocy asked—as the president remained silent and his gaze darted to the right. “You see that?” Doocy followed up, to which Trump replied, “No.”

Trump was clued in by the reporter, as Vance could be seen smiling over the president’s shoulder.

In response, Trump claimed that former President Joe Biden had evaded scrutiny for a lack of public appearances, before saying he’d had an “active” weekend, with media appearances, including a Friday interview (published Monday) with conservative news site The Daily Caller; posts to his Truth Social account (“long Truths, and I think pretty poignant Truths,” he said); and a trip to his Virginia golf club.

“I’ve been very active, actually, over the weekend. I didn’t hear that one. That’s pretty serious stuff,” he continued, before blaming the mainstream media for the rumors that were, in reality, driven largely by random social media users.

“Well, it’s fake news,” the president went on. “You know, it’s just so—it’s so fake. That’s why the media has so little credibility. I knew they were saying, like, ‘Is he OK? How’s he feeling? What’s wrong?’ I said, ‘I just—left.’ And it’s also sort of a longer weekend, you know. It’s Labor Day weekend, so I would say a lot of people—No, I was very active this Labor Day. I had heard that, but I didn’t hear it to that extent.”

Trump did not explain the bruise on his hand.

Hegseth Reshapes Hundreds of Immigration Courts in One Fell Swoop - 2025-09-02T20:12:26Z

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is replacing immigration judges with hundreds of military lawyers, following the Trump administration’s months-long purge of immigration courts.

Hegseth approved more than 600 military lawyers from the Department of Defense to serve as temporary immigration judges, nearly doubling the ranks of jurists overseeing the president’s massive deportation efforts, the Associated Press reported Tuesday. It’s a move that indicates the Trump administration was simply clearing house to install their own ranks of loyalist judges, intent on seeing the president’s deportations through.

A memo dated August 27 said that the military would begin dispatching batches of 150 attorneys to the Justice Department “as soon as practicable,” and have an initial group identified by next week. Appointments would last no longer than 179 days, expiring in February, but can be renewed.

Since President Donald Trump entered office, a series of departures and firings have left only roughly 600 immigration judges to oversee the nation’s 71 immigration courts, and handle a backlog of 3.7 million cases—and the number increases every day.

Most recently in July, the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers claimed that another 17 immigration judges had been fired “without cause.” In February, Kerry Doyle, a longtime immigration attorney, who was part of an upcoming class of immigration judges who were all dismissed, alleged that her dismissal was politically motivated.

As a result of the Trump administration’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants, the number of people detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement has reached an all-time high. At the end of August a record number of 61,226 people were detained by ICE, and 70 percent of them did not have criminal convictions.

Trump Comes Up With Crazy Explanation for Video of White House Window - 2025-09-02T20:07:53Z

President Trump gave a strange, clearly made-up answer when asked about a viral video of someone tossing black trash bags out of a White House window. 

“There’s a video that is circulating online now of the White House where a window is open to the residence upstairs, and somebody is throwing a big bag out of the window,” Fox News’s Peter Doocy asked Trump during his Tuesday press conference. “Have you seen this?” 

“No, that’s probably AI-generated,” Trump replied. “Actually you can’t open the windows, you know why? They’re all heavily armored and bulletproof.” 

“So that’s a fake video?” Doocy followed up.

“Well it’s gotta be, because I know every window up there. The last place I’d be doing it is that because there’s cameras all over the place right, including yours,” Trump responded, even though Doocy didn’t ask whether it was the president in the video.

“No, but every window … they’re bulletproof,” Trump continued. “And number one, they’re sealed, and number two, each window weighs about 600 pounds, so you have to be pretty strong to open them up. No, that has to be—where was the window? Let me see it.” 

Doocy then showed Trump the video on his phone. 

“Maybe for the renovation?” someone in the crowd called out.  

“Which is the window?” Trump asked, staring intently at the video. 

“It looks like this is the 15th Street side, I think.” 

“Yeah those windows are sealed. Those windows are all sealed, you can’t open ‘em.” 

The video was not AI-generated, it was very much real. Trump’s own officials admitted as much. 

“It was a contractor who was doing regular maintenance while the President was gone,” a White House person told Time in an article published just a few hours before Trump pulled the “that was AI” card. 

This was all very strange to watch. Trump jumping so quickly to blame AI after his own staff had already offered an explanation suggests that much of what dominates online discourse —like whether or not Trump is dying—doesn’t always reach the president’s ears. He also appeared to admit his own explanation was a lie when he later clarified, “If something happens really bad, just blame AI.”

D.C. Police Stops Investigating GOP Congressman as Trump Takes Over - 2025-09-02T19:08:06Z

President Trump’s federal takeover of Washington, D.C., may have helped a Republican congressman get off scot-free after he allegedly assaulted a woman. 

In February, D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department arrived at Mills’s luxury penthouse on the Wharf in response to a call about a domestic disturbance. There they found Mills’s “significant other” of a year, 27, “physically shaking and scared,” according to a police report.

Mills and his wife, Rana Al Saadi, have been in the process of divorcing for almost three years. 

There are three separate police reports of the conflict. In one, Mills’s partner told police that the congressman “grabbed her, shoved her, and pushed her out of the door.” The police report also noted that she had fresh bruises on her arms, and that she played them a recorded phone call in which Mills told her to lie about where her bruises were from. Mills, 45, later showed up to the scene. When police told him he’d be placed under arrest, his significant other recanted all of her previous statements, and Mills was freed. 

The MPD later sent an arrest warrant for Mills to the U.S. attorney’s office, where interim U.S. Attorney Ed Martin refused to sign it. The case remained under MPD “investigation” until Trump took over the MPD. Then it was promptly, conveniently closed. 

“I would like to thank the Metro Police Department for their diligent investigation into false and misleading accusations made against me by the media, ensuring that both truth and justice prevailed,” Mills said in a statement to The Hill. “The media’s claims and political spins have been debunked, and the case is closed. It’s blatantly obvious that some have attempted to over-politicize this to impact the 2026 election, but these efforts have failed.”

This seems like a pretty clear abuse of power on Trump’s part—taking over a city’s police department, which then closes an investigation into one of your party members a year before midterm elections. It certainly aligns with the other instances of this administration’s rampant corruption and cronyism. 

The MPD investigation was just one allegation against Mills. He’s also currently facing a lawsuit that charges him of using revenge porn against his ex-partner, Florida Republican state committee member and Miss United States 2024, Lindsey Langston. Mills allegedly threatened to post nude videos of Langston and promised to hurt any man she dated in the future. That case is ongoing.  

An active congressman with two allegations of assault against women is still sitting in the Capitol building thanks to the president. That’s what Trump’s version of draining the swamp actually looks like. 

ICE Barbie Kristi Noem’s Ugly New Attack on CBS Exposes Big Trump Scam - 2025-09-02T17:17:20Z

If you need more evidence that there’s zero percentage in trying to appease or bargain with authoritarians, check out what happened this weekend when Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem attacked CBS News for supposedly editing her Face the Nation appearance in a deceptive way. Unsurprisingly, it concerned the wrongfully deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia, about whom Noem and other Trump officials have lied relentlessly for months on end.

Noem’s claim really amounts to a declaration that she is entitled to have her vile smears of Abrego Garcia air undisturbed, no matter how viciously dishonest. But what makes this even more galling is the larger context here, which has gone largely unremarked upon: It comes after CBS News settled a massive lawsuit with Trump—to the tune of $16 million—in which he made a very similar, equally ludicrous charge of deceptive editing. Turns out that didn’t placate Trump officials or get them to back off these underhanded tactics in the slightest.

Noem’s attack on CBS is that the network supposedly suppressed footage of her comments about Abrego Garcia. Noem posted this video juxtaposing her fuller comments to CBS with what actually ended up airing on the network:

The careful viewer will notice that just about all of the remarks that did not air are lies, distortions, and charges that Abrego Garcia has merely been accused by the government of committing, not convicted of in court. Here’s a transcript of Noem comments that were supposedly “suppressed”:

This individual was a known human smuggler, MS-13 gang member, an individual who’s a wife beater, and someone who was so perverted that he solicited nude photos from minors. And even his fellow human traffickers told him to knock it off, he was so sick in what he was doing and how he was treating small children. So he needs to never be in the United States of America, and our administration is making sure we’re doing all that we can to bring him to justice.

In reality, Trump officials utterly failed to produce anything serious tying Abrego Garcia to MS-13, even though they actively searched for such evidence for many months in what became a kind of whole-of-government mission involving numerous senior officials and multiple major agencies.

As for the “human smuggler” claim, the government has charged him in Tennessee with trafficking migrants. But the whole case stinks: A senior prosecutor in that office resigned, reportedly because the case seemed dubious. More importantly, Abrego Garcia’s lawyers have plausibly claimed that the administration tried to coerce him to plead guilty to those charges by threatening to deport him to Uganda if he did not.

It’s bad enough for government officials to go on national television and rattle off a litany of hideously damning charges as fact when they haven’t yet been proven beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law. In this case, officials apparently went to extraordinarily depraved lengths to try to coerce a guilty plea, which doesn’t exactly exude confidence in the strength of those charges to begin with.

Indeed, on the photo-solicitation charge, Politifact points out that this isn’t even in the indictment against Abrego Garcia, and is a matter the government is merely investigating. Yet Noem keeps repeating the claim as if it’s an established truth, as she did on CBS here.

Responding to Noem, a CBS spokesperson says the full interview was posted on line, and notes that cuts were made to fit the segment into a limited time-slot. As it happens, there is nothing whatsoever wrong with this edit, and it’s fairly common for networks to do this with lengthy interviews.

But it’s worth going further than this spokesperson did: Not airing footage of Noem’s lies and smears unchallenged was, journalistically speaking, the correct thing to do. CBS News is under no obligation to air them, and arguably should not have. If anything, CBS bent over backward to let her have her say, posting full video of the interview online, including her making those charges—which, again, are unproven—with no serious rebuttal.

Let’s also not forget that this comes barely two months after Trump’s settlement with CBS News. As you’ll recall, CBS handed over $16 million largely to Trump’s future presidential library after Trump sued CBS for supposedly editing an interview with Kamala Harris during the 2024 campaign.

Here again, with this edit, CBS didn’t do anything wrong, and many lawyers had predicted CBS would have won in court if it had litigated. But executives at CBS parent company Paramount viewed the settlement as a way to facilitate the Trump administration’s approval of its merger with Skydance, which was subsequently completed in August.

It’s telling that despite that settlement, Noem has now gone right back to the same poisoned well, accusing CBS of the same bogus “deceptive editing” scam that Trump used to extort CBS last time around. Why, it’s almost as if CBS’s initial willingness to settle in the face of equally bogus claims just might have encouraged Trump’s thugs to do exactly the same thing again—this time not to extort money, perhaps, but maybe to game the refs so they’re more willing to air their scurrilous smears without challenge next time.

CBS’s response to this latest saga has been largely defensive and even taken on a pleading quality. In a sense, posting the full video of the interview—including numerous unrebutted lies about Abrego Garcia—lets Noem and her falsehoods get their way, and then some.

So perhaps it’s time for news organizations to state unabashedly and affirmatively that they are not in the business of amplifying Trump officials’ lies and smears, and any official who feels entitled to such amplification can go stuff it. Perhaps other journalists should stand with them as they do so. Let Noem shriek into the MAGA disinformation abyss about it all she likes—this is a sleazy little scam, and there’s no need to get pushed around by it any longer.

“A Shoddy Mess”: Climate Scientists Torch Trump’s New Report - 2025-09-02T17:16:18Z

Scores of scientists slammed the Trump administration’s latest climate report as a “farce” full of misinformation, The Guardian reported Tuesday.

In July, the Department of Energy published “A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the U.S. Climate,” a report claiming that the impacts of global warming had been overblown—without having it peer reviewed at all.

In response a group of 85 climate experts compiled a more than 400-page review, and found that the DOE’s report had been authored by five fringe experts who had cherry-picked cases and misrepresented research and evidence to support their flimsy findings.

Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University, said that DOE’s climate report “makes a mockery of science.”

The document “relies on ideas that were rejected long ago, supported by misrepresentations of the body of scientific knowledge, omissions of important facts, arm waving, anecdotes and confirmation bias,” Dessler told The Guardian. “This report makes it clear DOE has no interest in engaging with the scientific community.”

Energy Secretary Chris Wright personally selected five climate scientists to author the report who were “well known for manufacturing uncertainty” around climate science, the review found. The report’s authors, John Christy, Judith Curry, Steven E. Koonin, Ross McKitrick, and Roy Spencer, have each downplayed the impacts of climate change. Eleven percent of the report’s citations led to the authors’ own research, a rate that was nearly five times higher than another 2023 climate report.

Wright said the authors were chosen “for their rigor, honesty, and willingness to elevate the debate.” But the review stated that the DOE report “covers areas in which the authors are not experts,” and that the report’s many mistakes were “caused by a lack of familiarity with the science.”

Pamela McElwee, an associate professor of human ecology at Rutgers University, told The Guardian that the five people who were selected by the secretary of energy for their viewpoints “produced a shoddy mess of cherry-picked data and unsupported assertions.”

Dessler was distraught over how badly mischaracterized some research about climate-driven extreme events had been. “I mean, they just don’t understand what they’re talking about,” he said.

The scientists said that the shoddy work was in service of a predetermined outcome: a report that would help support the administration’s repeal of the Environmental Protection Agency’s 2009 Endangerment Finding, stating that the current and projected concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere “threaten the public health and welfare of current and future generations.”

Trump Admin Vows to Defy Judge’s Ruling on Military Crackdown - 2025-09-02T17:06:03Z

Donald Trump’s Department of Justice is vowing to keep troops stationed in Los Angeles, despite a Tuesday ruling declaring the administration’s use of the military in the city for domestic law enforcement purposes illegal.

Earlier, a federal judge ruled that Trump’s use of federal troops to perform police functions in Los Angeles violated the Posse Comitatus Act. The judge further barred the administration from using the military in California “to execute the laws, including but not limited to engaging in arrests, apprehensions, searches, seizures, security patrols, traffic control, crowd control, riot control, evidence collection, interrogation, or acting as informants” in ways that violate that law.

California Governor Gavin Newsom applauded the ruling on X, writing that the courts ruled that Trump’s “militarization of our streets and use of the military against US citizens is ILLEGAL.”

But Bill Essayli, the acting U.S. attorney for the Central District of California, told the governor that the troops are going nowhere. “The military will remain in Los Angeles,” he wrote in response to Newsom. “This is a false narrative and a misleading injunction.”

Essayli went on to argue that the military is not involved with “direct law enforcement operations” in Los Angeles. Instead, he repeated the administration’s justification for its iron-fisted military crackdown on the city, first sparked by anti–Immigration and Customs Enforcement protests in June: that troops are protecting federal agents from “thugs” supported by Democratic officials. (Several hundred National Guard troops still remain in Los Angeles.)

Essayli’s claim runs counter to Tuesday’s ruling, which found that the Trump administration indeed “systematically used armed soldiers (whose identity was often obscured by protective armor) and military vehicles to set up protective perimeters and traffic blockades, engage in crowd control, and otherwise demonstrate a military presence in and around Los Angeles.”

Mike Johnson Pulls Shady Move as Pressure Over Epstein Files Escalates - 2025-09-02T16:24:26Z

House Speaker Mike Johnson is offering Republicans a cowardly out to avoid voting on a bipartisan discharge petition to release the Epstein files in full. 

Representatives Thomas Massie and Ro Khanna have been trying to push a House bill that would force the Justice Department to release the Epstein files, an effort that was reignited by the Trump administration’s shady mess of a rollout that shed further light on the president’s close friendship with the defamed serial sexual predator. 

But rather than deliver transparency to the public, Johnson scheduled a vote this week that would allow Republicans to order the Oversight Committee to “continue its ongoing investigation.” The legislation does nothing to force the Justice Department to outright release the files in full, as Khanna and Massie are fighting for. 

This all comes as the House Oversight Committee plans to meet with 10 of Epstein’s victims on Capitol Hill on Tuesday to further investigate “the possible mismanagement of the federal government’s investigation of Mr. Jeffrey Epstein and Ms. Ghislaine Maxwell, the circumstances and subsequent investigations of Mr. Epstein’s death, the operation of sex-trafficking rings and ways for the federal government to effectively combat them, and potential violations of ethics rules related to elected officials.” Massie and Khanna also plan to hold a press conference with the victims on Wednesday.   

“Speaker Johnson just scheduled this meaningless vote to provide political cover for those members who don’t support our bipartisan legislation to force the release of the Epstein files,” Massie wrote shortly after news of Johnson’s ghost vote broke. Massie said he plans to file his discharge petition to force a vote on releasing the files on Tuesday at 2 p.m. Johnson’s vote allows Republicans to pretend they’re doing something on the matter by simply telling the Oversight Committee to keep up the good work, serving as yet another exhibit of Republicans choosing to protect rich pedophiles.  

Mainstream Media Indifferent to Massive Labor Day Protests - 2025-09-02T16:14:37Z

At least half a million people across the country marched against the billionaire takeover of the government on Labor Day—but you wouldn’t know it by the amount of coverage media devoted to it.

The U.S. Department of Labor has called President Donald Trump’s second administration the “new dawn” and “golden age” of the American worker. However, Americans expressed their discontent Monday by organizing more than one thousand Workers over Billionaires demonstrations.

In Chicago, where Trump has threatened to carry out the next phase of his illegal law enforcement takeover of Democratic cities, hundreds of workers from dozens of unions marched in protest of the Trump administration. “No Troops in Chicago,” read one protester’s sign, while others had slogans about “Families Over Billionaires,” and “Education Not Deportation.”

People participate in the Labor Day Workers Over Billionaires rally, in solidarity with labor unions and advocacy groups, on September 1, 2025 in Chicago, Illinois.

Stacy Davis Gates, head of the Chicago Teachers Union, delivered remarks condemning Trump’s efforts to tamper with government institutions that were built by workers, for workers.

“Lincoln didn’t free us. We freed ourselves, workers. Our work created the Departments of Housing, Education. Labor, and more. We built the United States as we’ve known it, and now workers will protect it,” Gates said, according to the union’s post on X.

People participate in the Labor Day Workers Over Billionaires rally, in solidarity with labor unions and advocacy groups, on September 1, 2025 in Chicago, Illinois

Across the country, unions in Boston, Massachusetts organized the city’s first Labor Day parade in decades. Governor Maura Healey and Senator Elizabeth Warren marched alongside union leaders and thousands of protesters. Boston Mayor Michelle Wu and Senator Ed Markey made remarks to the demonstrators at City Hall.

“We won’t let you get away with kicking our loved ones off health care to fund tax breaks for the rich,” said Wu, according to The Boston Globe. “We won’t let you sweep the Epstein files under your Qatari jet.”

In Los Angeles, AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler joined members of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor as they rallied in Long Beach. The May Day Strong movement, the group behind the nationwide protests, was backed by the AFL-CIO, which includes 63 national and international unions that represent more than 15 million working people. Worker demonstrations were planned all across Southern California, and hundreds marched in the northern part of the state in San Francisco.

Near Trump Tower in Manhattan, New York, a crowd of several hundred people gathered to protest the president, holding signs asking “Which Side Are You On?” according to The New York Times.

A demonstrator dressed as a fake reporter, with signs labeling her a "Right Wing Troll," takes part in a Labor Day "Workers Over Billionaires" rally outside Trump Tower in New York City on September 1, 2025.

The demonstrations weren’t confined to larger U.S. cities.

In Durham, North Carolina, hundreds of workers marched at Duke University, and protesters strode down the streets of Asheville demanding, “Power to the people!”

In Albuquerque, New Mexico, 6,000 people took to the streets, according to the American Federation of Teachers. Des Moines, Iowa, Seattle, Washington, St. Louis, Missouri, and Detroit, Michigan were among the other cities where demonstrators gathered.

Across the country, people showed up to express their resounding rage with America’s first billionaire president, who seems bent on reshaping the American economy to benefit his family, and his wealthy friends—while sending prices soaring, sparking an economic slowdown, and making plans to gut essential programs like Medicaid and Social Security.

DOJ Lawyer Waging War Against Harvard Sure Seems to Like Hitler - 2025-09-02T15:40:07Z

On Tuesday, The Boston Globe revealed that the Justice Department lawyer pushing Donald Trump’s war against Harvard University for alleged complicity in campus antisemitism once wrote a college paper from the perspective of Adolf Hitler.

When Michael Velchik was a senior at Harvard in 2011, studying Classics, he was assigned to write a brief paper in Latin “from the perspective of a controversial historical or literary figure justifying your actions and defending yourself against potential accusations.” Students could choose a “classical figure such as Nero or Cleopatra; a mythological figure such as Medea or Theseus; or anyone from the post-classical world, whether a Shakespearean villain or a twentieth-century tycoon.”

Velchik chose Hitler, according to three sources of the Globe—two of whom had read the paper and considered it disturbing. “At Harvard in 2011, no one would say that Hitler was a controversial figure,” an unnamed source said.

The instructor, dismayed, reportedly had Velchik redo the assignment.

Fast-forward 18 months—when Velchik was getting ready to matriculate at Harvard Law School—and, per the Globe, he told a peer that Hitler’s manifesto, Mein Kampf, was his favorite book he’d read that year. “[I]s it bad that my favorite class at harvard was nietzsche and my favorite book i’ve read this year is mein kampf?” he wrote in a June 2013 email.


After starting at Harvard Law, Velchik offered additional thoughts on Hitler’s book in another email to a peer. Sharing quick reviews of 76 books he’d recently read, he called Mein Kampf “fascinating,” and wrote of its author, “He certainly excelled as an orator, and his writing reflects oratory.… Understands the importance of propaganda. Thought that the timing of a speech was important: better late at night!”

Velchik omitted to mention Hitler’s responsibility for the Holocaust.

And he wasn’t as impressed with other books as he’d been with Mein Kampf. Velchik was critical of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, which he said “reminded” him why he didn’t “usually read books written by women.”

Republican-Led House Oversight Makes Major Move On Epstein Case - 2025-09-02T14:44:50Z

The Republican-led House Oversight Committee will meet with 10 victims of serial sexual abuser and wealthy socialite Jeffrey Epstein. The meeting will seek to shed more light on “the possible mismanagement of the federal government’s investigation of Mr. Jeffrey Epstein and Ms. Ghislaine Maxwell, the circumstances and subsequent investigations of Mr. Epstein’s death, the operation of sex-trafficking rings and ways for the federal government to effectively combat them, and potential violations of ethics rules related to elected officials,” Oversight Chair James Comer noted.

This bipartisan effort comes after months of distraction and denial from the Trump administration—from Attorney General Pam Bondi first claiming she had the Epstein files on her desk, to later saying there actually were no files and the case was effectively closed, to President Trump himself proclaiming that anyone who still cared about the said files is a big stupid idiot. That fiasco only fed more attention to the case, and now nearly 70 percent of the country believes that someone in the government (perhaps … the president) is hiding something. House Speaker Mike Johnson even called summer recess early to avoid having to vote on Epstein related issues. Now, as Congress returns, eyes are turning back to it.

If the House Oversight’s move wasn’t concerning enough for the Trump administration, Representatives Ro Khanna and Thomas Massie will be holding a public press conference at 10:30 a.m. on Wednesday morning. “I pray Speaker Johnson will listen to the pleas of these victims for justice and quit trying to block a vote on our legislation to release the Epstein files,” Massie wrote on X.

Massie and Khanna filed a bipartisan discharge petition calling on the Justice Department to release the Epstein files in full. The move struck a nerve with Trump, who called Massie “the worst Republican congressman.”

We’ll see if Trump has anything more to say on Wednesday morning.

“These victims haven’t spoken for decades. When Epstein got that lenient plea deal, no one talked to the victims or their lawyers,” Khanna said to Fox News Digital on Monday. “There are a lot of other rich, powerful men, politicians, business leaders, who have committed abuse and who have not been held accountable. That’s what we’re going to hear on September 3, and people are going to be outraged, and I don’t see how, after that, the House can’t vote for the release of these files.”

Infowars Host Abruptly Kicked Off Show for Turning “Anti-Trump” - 2025-09-02T14:15:27Z

Owen Shroyer, a host for Infowars, announced Monday that he is leaving the conspiracy-driven news platform due to a fight with its founder, Alex Jones. Jones believed Shroyer was too “anti-Trump,” according to the outgoing host.

“I have nothing but respect and appreciation for Alex and everything we’ve done at Infowars,” Shroyer said in a livestream late Monday. “I’m not sure that was mutual, but it doesn’t really matter.”

Prior to his decision to leave, Shroyer said, “Alex had been coming into my show [War Room], and talking about how I’m negative and calling me a pessimist, and all this other stuff, which is fine.” Shroyer said. “He says I’m too negative, he says I’m a pessimist, whatever, I’m too anti-Trump.”

Shroyer decided to take time off, thinking “maybe he’s right.” But their issues persisted when he returned.

“It’s not to say that I didn’t have creative control over the Infowars War Room,” Shroyer said. “But I mean, imagine. It’s like somebody staring over your back 24/7. And so every single day that I came back, it was either a guest I was told I had on at the last minute or it was him coming into the studio—he wants me to cover this, he wants me to cover that.”

On Thursday, these frustrations came to a head, as Shroyer said he prepared a three-hour show that he thought he would host where a “babysitter wouldn’t be looking over my shoulder.”

“I was wrong,” he continued. “It happened, and I just said I’m out.”

On air, Jones attributed Shroyer’s absence to a family emergency, but, Shroyer said, “There was no family emergency. I walked off the show.”

Jones on X Tuesday said he wishes Shroyer the best, but denied insinuations of censorship, which he claimed were drummed up to promote the departing host’s next venture.

“I only encouraged him to be more positive in general about the fact that humanity has come a long way in the great awakening,” Jones wrote—the “great awakening” referring to a time during which humanity is “waking up” to the supposed sinister plans of a global elite cabal. “I am surprised by the censorship claim he is hinting at but if he thinks he needs to say that to build his show that will be on him.”

Americans Have Lost Hope That Their Work Will Pay Off - 2025-09-02T14:12:30Z

A new poll has found that Americans have lost faith in the American dream. 

A July 2025 Wall Street Journal-NORC survey found that nearly 70 percent of registered voters said that the idea that “if you work hard, you will get ahead,” no longer held true, or never did. The Journal reported that it was the highest percentage in nearly 15 years of surveys. 

Forty-six percent of respondents said that the ideal once held true but not anymore, and 23 percent said it never held true—a five point increase from the previous two years of surveys. 

The survey also found that pessimism was plaguing Democratic voters: 90 percent of Democrats held a negative view of prospects for themselves and their children, while only 55 percent of Republicans felt down about their futures. 

Across generations and demographics, respondents fretted that the next generation would struggle to buy homes or save for retirement, and believed that the previous generation had an easier time securing homes, being full-time parents, and launching businesses.

An engine for some of this uncertainty is the substantial disconnect between the traditional measures of economic growth and the real economic experiences of Americans. While the economy was comparatively robust under President Joe Biden, many Americans still experienced economic hardship. That disconnect was part of why President Donald Trump was elected into office, where he has promised to improve the nation’s economy—and managed to destabilize the global one.  

Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs have decimated key trading partnerships, obliterated thousands of jobs across the country, and sent prices soaring—with even worse to come. The Trump administration’s silver lining: You and your children, and your children’s children, can work in the same factory forever.

Is it any surprise, then, that the survey also found that American exceptionalism has taken a hit? Only 17 percent percent of respondents said that America had the best economy in the world, while 40 percent said other nations had better economies—a 15 point increase from 2021. 

Judge Rules Trump Broke the Law With Military Occupation - 2025-09-02T13:54:40Z

U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer on Tuesday ruled that the Trump administration’s use of military troops in Los Angeles was a blatant, illegal violation of the Posse Comitatus Act. Breyer has blocked the president from deploying the National Guard to California again. 

“Congress spoke clearly in 1878 when it passed the Posse Comitatus Act, prohibiting the use of the U.S. military to execute domestic law. Nearly 140 years later, Defendants— President Trump, Secretary of Defense Hegseth, and the Department of Defense— deployed the National Guard and Marines to Los Angeles, ostensibly to quell a rebellion and ensure that federal immigration law was enforced,” Breyer wrote in his decision. 

“There were indeed protests in Los Angeles, and some individuals engaged in violence,” he continued. “Yet there was no rebellion, nor was civilian law enforcement unable to respond to the protests and enforce the law.... Defendants systematically used armed soldiers (whose identity was often obscured by protective armor) and military vehicles to set up protective perimeters and traffic blockades, engage in crowd control, and otherwise demonstrate a military presence in and around Los Angeles. In short, Defendants violated the Posse Comitatus Act.” 

Breyer put the ruling on hold for 10 days, as the Trump administration is likely to appeal.

The president sent 4,000 National Guards troops and 700 active-duty Marines  to Los Angeles after he claimed that “violent mobs” were attacking ICE officers—the same officers snatching their friends, family, and neighbors from their homes and workplaces. That was a clear exaggeration then, and now Breyer has made it known now that it was a complete violation of U.S. law as well. 

This move, if extended, will likely have a significant impact on Trump’s stated plans to expand his military takeover of Washington, D.C., to other cities like New York, Baltimore, and Chicago. The president has used exaggerated numbers and descriptions of these cities in recent weeks as his federal takeover of D.C. continues, serving at least in some capacity as a trial run for similar actions elsewhere. 

This story has been updated. 

Transcript: Trump Threat to Occupy Cities Gets Scarier in Vile Fox Hit - 2025-09-02T11:04:09Z

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the September 2 episode of the
Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

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

In a little noticed move, Fox News appears to have contacted Republican senators and asked them a question, Would you be open to Trump deploying the National Guard in your state’s blue cities? The answer Fox News got back was, Yes. We think this is an ominous turn in this debate. Republicans in Congress are openly debating how far Trump can and should go in militarizing U.S. cities, and they’re expressly discussing this as something that should only be inflicted on Democratic constituencies. Meanwhile, Democrats are consumed in a big debate over whether they can talk about any of this at all. Yet polling is quite clear: What Trump is doing is unpopular. We’re talking today about this bizarre disconnect with Jamison Foser, who has a very good new piece on his newsletter, Finding Gravity, about the reality of public opinion on all this. Good to have you on, Jamison.

Jamison Foser: Thanks, Greg. Always happy to be on.

Sargent: So Fox contacted GOP senators to ask if they’d support Trump sending troops to their state cities. Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee said this, “Blue cities like Memphis need all the help they can get to combat violent crime.” And Senator Eric Schmidt of Missouri told Fox News, “Local leaders in blue cities have allowed crime to run rampant,” while signaling an openness to troops coming to St. Louis. Jamo, your reaction to all that?

Foser: Well, my first reaction is that Fox, as a standard for them, loaded that question up for Republicans by asking them about sending troops to blue cities rather than about the crime-ridden areas run by Republicans in those red states. If you look at the national stats on murders and other violent crimes over the last two decades, you see a pretty consistent pattern of places with the highest murder rates are in red states run by Republican governors, and a lot of them are in red cities. That’s the fundamental lies at the heart of all this. And you might’ve gotten a little bit different response from Republicans there, but the bigger picture is striking and important and really horrifying how openly Republicans are talking about using the military against the opposing political party. And that’s really what this is about. It’s obviously not about crime, because they’re not focused on high-crime areas. They’re focused on Democratic-run cities. And you have an entire political party, not just Donald Trump, pretty eager to deploy the United States military to intimidate and harass and dominate Democratic voters in Democratic cities.

Sargent: Well, in fact, both senators used the phrase “blue cities.” This is expressly about inflicting troops on Democratic areas, even ones made up of their own constituents. Although maybe these senators don’t think of those people as their own constituents, which is the core of this as well. Either way, it strikes me as a dark new turn in all this. Now Jamo, I have to confess, I originally thought Trump would never be willing to send troops to any area in red states—but he was recently asked about this and he expressed openness to sending them to cities in red states. So as long as Democratic areas are the ones targeted, it’s all good, right, Jamo?

Foser: Yeah, I think they’re perfectly happy to suppress and harass and intimidate Democratic voters in red states as well as blue. That’s one thing they’re pretty consistent on: their willingness and even eagerness to do everything they can to make life miserable for and intimidate and harass any opposition they have anywhere.

Sargent: Well, let’s talk about Democrats right now. They’re having this big debate over whether they can talk about any of this stuff at all. A memo recently went around from David Shor, the numbers guy in the Democratic Party, advising Dems to treat the issue cautiously. Can you recap that debate a little bit?

Foser: Yeah. Basically, on one hand, you have some folks like David Shor who don’t want Democrats to talk about really, I guess, anything other than some narrowly defined economic issues and think everything else is politically perilous. And they’ve sent around a memo on this. And frankly, I didn’t find it a very persuasive memo. It recapped some message testing around some messages that it said did poorly and this means you should avoid these topics—but a lot of times if you read those messages, it’d be a 30-word message and the component that they were saying was toxic and people should stay away from was three words. So I think it’s a misuse of message testing in the first place. Then there’s a bigger question of whether we should really be obsessing this much about trying to test every syllable of every word we use. And I just don’t think that’s where we are right now.

I don’t have anything against opinion research or message testing. I’ve conducted it myself, and I’m sure I will in the future. But I think we’ve gotten something lost here in the obsession. And one thing I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is: If you went back a decade to just before Donald Trump started running for president, there isn’t a pollster, a message guru, a strategist in either political party who would have said that the kinds of things Republicans have been saying for the last 10 years would be politically effective. And if you tested any of these statements 10 years ago, or frankly even now a lot of them, that are just completely bananas, they’d test very poorly. And I’m not saying that means the whole enterprise is worthless, but it should certainly give anyone pause who thinks that you can just run a poll or a test and that’ll tell you whether a topic or a message is completely toxic. The last 10 years really should have disabused us of the notion that that’s how communication works.

Sargent: I want to get into that in a second, but first we should point out that actual polling on this suggests very strongly that this is not an issue that Democrats need to shy away from. Quinnipiac found recently that American voters oppose sending troops into D.C. by 56 percent to 41 percent, a 15-point margin. If we’re going to look at polling, then why don’t Democrats look at these numbers? Why don’t Democratic strategists look at these numbers and say, Hey, there’s a good one for us.

Foser: Yeah, this is what’s driven me nuts the last week or so seeing some of the coverage of Trump sending troops into cities. First of all, it gets framed by the news media as an effort to fight crime, but it clearly isn’t. Nobody commits more crimes than Donald Trump. The guy’s not against crime. He’s a criminal. And what we know is obviously happening here, because he’s said it and his administration has said it, is that this is an attempt to just take power away from Democrats. And Kristi Noem, his secretary of Homeland Security, said a couple of months ago that they’re not leaving Los Angeles until they’ve liberated the city from the elected officials who are the mayor and the governor in Los Angeles and California. That’s not about fighting crime. That’s about staging a political coup. That’s about overthrowing the elected leadership of localities. So this isn’t about crime at all, but that’s how it’s been portrayed by the news media.

But then even given that and even if you ask a poll question, as Quinnipiac did, that explicitly frames Trump taking over police departments and sending in troops to D.C. as being about fighting crime, the American people still reject it by 15 points, by almost 30 points among independents. So that’s really a striking thing that I would think Democrats should notice and recognize. If the news coverage of this is this rigged against us and then the poll questions are rigged against us and we’re still in a situation where Donald Trump’s handling of crime generally is unpopular and his specific actions around militarizing American cities is unpopular, that’s something you can stand and fight on.

Sargent: A hundred percent. And before we get off the topic of polling, I want to highlight two other sets of numbers because they’re pretty clear also. Pew Research, which is not an obscure firm, recently found that 56 percent are not confident in Trump’s ability to effectively handle law enforcement and criminal justice issues—only 44 percent are confident. Meanwhile, G. Elliott Morris, the data guy, did polling as well on this, found Trump underwater on crime at 45 to 48. The Pew poll is a lot more striking, but both are underwater. What I don’t get about this, Jamo, is even if you step back from the debate over troops in cities and just ask about crime, Trump is underwater. So what are we doing here?

Foser: Yeah, exactly. And that was a big theme of my piece today as I saw all this news coverage over the last couple of weeks about crime and this specific phrase kept coming up in all these headlines—this idea that Donald Trump has set a “trap” for Democrats on crime and that Democrats would be foolish to engage on this issue and to oppose his militarization of American cities because this will play out politically well for Trump. And I saw this and I was like, Well, that’s nuts. And that’s for a couple reasons. One is the polling says Donald Trump’s unpopular on crime. People disagree with his approach to crime. People disagree with militarization of the American cities, which they seem to understand is not really about crime. But also, this isn’t how anything works. It’s true in politics that you generally don’t want to talk about things that are bad for you and good for your opponent. But that only works around the margins. That works on obscure things. You can avoid talking about an obscure House vote on some amendment if you don’t think it’s very good for you and maybe you get away with it.

Donald Trump sending tanks and troops to roll through American cities is not the kind of thing people aren’t going to notice unless Democrats criticize it. And it’s not the kind of thing they’re going to realize they like unless Democrats criticize it. You can’t actually duck this. It’s too big. And so you’re in a situation where you can either try to duck the fight and have it be solely defined by Donald Trump and his propaganda, or get your own message out there and talk about how this is unconstitutional, how it’s un-American, how it’s an attempt to assert authoritarian power over American citizens in a way that we’ve never seen before in history and, by the way, in a way that the American citizens dislike and reject. It seems pretty clear to me which of those two paths is better.

Sargent: I would think so. It seems pretty clear to me. I think we should also highlight something else about this, which is that many of these news accounts that you’re talking about rely on a certain type of quote from Democratic strategists, which almost invariably run something like, My party can’t possibly engage in this debate. We’re a bunch of total losers on this debate. We can’t win this debate. And by the way, I’m very savvy. I’m here to tell you that anyone who says otherwise is completely delusional. But the thing about this is those Dem strategists are saying that stuff in order to get quoted in places like The New York Times. I don’t care what anyone says. That is exactly what they’re doing—and they know it and the reporters as well know it. Yet this is something that’s never stated openly or acknowledged openly. We all know that’s how it actually works. You’ve been around a long time, Jamo. So have I. Isn’t that how it works?

Foser: It is very much how it works. And there’s something inherently dishonest about the whole thing, right? Because reporters go looking for the specific strategists who they know will give them the quote they want to use. And so this idea that the reporter is just reflecting the broad consensus of Democratic strategists or whoever else they’re representing through a source—a lot of times that’s not really what’s going on. They’re picking the source who they know is going to give them the quote they want to use and the source is giving the journalists that quote the source knows that journalist wants to use because they like to see their name in the paper. That’s how this works. And it’s not honest and it’s not a solid analysis. It’s not serving anyone well except the strategists who like to see their name in the paper and the journalists who get the story that pushes the point of view that they want to push without really owning that it’s their point of view.

Sargent: What’s so baffling to me about this as well is I thought for the longest time that editors believed that bucking conventional wisdom is a good thing, right? We’re constantly told that this or that reporter or writer is a star because they take on conventional wisdom. And yet when it comes to certain things, the rush to parrot the conventional wisdom is almost comical. Why is it that when it comes to these particular topics, all of a sudden that desire to buck the CW just disappears?

Foser: If there’s anything they like more than bucking the CW, it’s saying Democrats are losers and Donald Trump’s invincible. That’s just a core thing that a lot of journalists, I think, do believe and love to say. And not just journalists, too many, frankly, Democratic strategists. I don’t think most of them, but as you noted, there’s no shortage of people willing to say that at any given time. I will say one quote that I think maybe you’re referring to that I came across in the last week in one of these stories, a quote from a Democratic strategist saying Democrats shouldn’t fall into this trap on crime. And he explicitly made the analogy to immigration. He said, “This is just like immigration all over again.”

Well, it just so happens that a week ago I wrote a piece on this very same topic about immigration, and it was about a Chris Cillizza column from early June saying Democrats shouldn’t fall under the trap on immigration because immigration is something Donald Trump’s so popular on. Well, from the day Cillizza published that column to the day I wrote about it last week, Trump’s net approval on immigration had dropped seven points. It was underwater. So that isn’t actually what happened on immigration. That actually should be a lesson for people saying, Don’t talk about crime. Run away from crime.

Sargent: And I would add that it’s precisely because a number of Democrats actually didn’t listen to that advice that Trump’s approval went down. At least it was a major factor. Remember, we were told very confidently that any Democrat who dared to engage the debate over the wrongfully deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia was, wait for it, falling into Trump’s trap. Remember that? That was exactly what was said about that. Then Senator Van Hollen of Maryland went down to El Salvador. In part because of his relentless advocacy propelled the issue onto the front pages in a different way, more Democrats started talking about it. And that is what dropped Trump’s approval on this issue. So it’s absolutely stupefying the way we keep going through these same loops over and over and nothing is ever learned. What the heck, man?

Foser: It’s a fundamentally dishonest charade here. One of the things that we’re seeing is that the very same people who two and three months ago were writing pieces saying Democrats shouldn’t fall into the trap by opposing Donald Trump on immigration, he’s super popular on immigration.… Well, what actually happened was Trump’s approval on immigration and overall have dropped since then significantly because people did oppose him on it. And those pundits and those journalists have not revisited that. They’re not saying, Oh, I was wrong. Instead, they’re just running the same columns over again and swapping out the word “immigration” for the word “crime.”

Sargent: We are actually seeing what happens when Democrats do engage this debate. J.B. Pritzker, the governor of Illinois, as you highlighted in your piece and as a number of other people have highlighted, did this extraordinary response to Trump’s threats to occupy Chicago where he said, “I’m going to defend my people from you.” Cast Trump as the threat. The primary threat to the wellbeing of Illinois residents, Illinois constituents is Donald Trump, the president of the U.S., and J.B. Pritzker, the Democratic governor, will defend them from him. So there’s that. Then Gavin Newsom’s been pretty good on this as well. And we’re finally seeing that when Democrats do that, they break through. And we just spent the last six months since Trump won debating how Democrats break through the noise since Trump succeeded informationally in a way Democrats did not. And then when you see two Democrats actually breaking through the noise by doing this, by taking this issue on, all of a sudden nobody’s debating how you break through the noise anymore. Where does this end up going? Do Democrats get this right eventually or not?

Foser: I think they’ll end up getting it more right than not. And we’ve both talked a little bit about some of the frustrating comments from some Democratic strategists on this. I will say that I think overall the duck-and-cover thing is a little bit more of a pundit and journalist theme than it is something you hear directly from actually prominent Democrats. And Pritzker this week was a tremendous example—not only of how you can forcefully denounce this very authoritarian and very inappropriate behavior but the reception that you’ll get from that. There was this outpouring of support for them. I think if people are wondering what can they do, well, the biggest thing they can do is encourage good behavior and discourage bad behavior. So if your local paper, the journalists you consume are peddling BS on this, call them out on it. If your elected officials are not standing up, urge them to do so. But when they are, people like J.B. Pritzker, express happiness about that. Politicians respond well to people responding well to the things that they do.

And one of the things I want to say about Pritzker, just by the way, is to the extent that crime historically has often been a tough issue for Democrats, it’s largely because of the way the media covers it and this perception that Democrats are weak. I don’t think [that] is true substantively on the issue, but I will say that one of the reasons that maybe people think you’re weak is that you act weak more than the policies that you pursue. And so if Donald Trump is invading cities and you’re cowering from it, you look weak. If you stand up in front of cameras for 15 minutes like J.B. Pritzker did and basically say, Stay the hell out of my city, you’re not welcome here. And if you hurt my people, I will pursue you until the ends of the earth to hold you accountable, you look strong because you are strong. And people perceive that as strong.

Sargent: Just to really underscore your point here, what that means is that the specifics are a little bit less important than the atmospherics. The intangible things in politics are what people take from your public conduct, your public demeanor. And it’s true that poll testing the shit out of everything just makes you look weak. Folks, if you enjoyed this discussion, make sure to check out Jamison Foser’s newsletter, Finding Gravity. Jamo, always a great pleasure to talk to you, man. Thanks for coming on.

Foser: Thanks so much, Greg. Always happy to be on.

For Arundhati Roy, Art and Politics Emerged from Her Mother’s Shadow - 2025-09-02T10:00:00Z

Mary Roy lay in a temperature-controlled coffin with a glass top in the dining room of her house in Kottayam in September 2022. Press photographers and a group of mourners gathered around her body. Many knew her as the founder of a progressive school and as a feminist who had challenged inheritance law, winning equal rights for Christian women in the state of Kerala after a protracted, decades-long battle in the Supreme Court of India. Arundhati Roy knew her as a tormentor and abuser, a “local mafia don,” a cult leader, a jealous and vindictive mother, and the writer’s most “enthralling subject.”

Mrs. Roy—as the matriarch instructed her son and daughter to address her—left a unique inheritance for them, a gift of darkness. “I learned to keep it close, to map it, to sift through its shades, to stare at it until it gave up its secrets,” Roy writes in her new memoir, Mother Mary Comes to Me. It is a statement that could very well be about the process of writing itself, especially for Roy. Since her Booker Prize–winning novel, The God of Small Things, was published in 1997, earning her global fame, Roy has written more than 10 works of nonfiction—on environmentalism, nuclear weapons, the rise of Hindu nationalism, the war on terrorism, and more—along with a second novel, 2017’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. These days, she is considered as much an activist as a writer—though she dislikes the term writer-activist, which sounds, she says, “like a sofa bed.”

In 1969, when she was nine years old, a newspaper photo of a severed head made an impression on young Roy. The head belonged to a landlord near Kottayam whom the Naxalites had slain. The far-left Maoist insurgents were proponents of armed revolution and believed in the annihilation of class enemies. Four decades later, Roy would go into the Dandakaranya forest with the Naxalites to write about land taken from Indigenous tribes and given to corporate mining companies by the government. The day before she went, Mrs. Roy, who didn’t know about the trip, called to say, “I’ve been thinking … what this country really needs is a revolution.” Darkness, in this memoir, is not merely relegated to Mrs. Roy’s treatment of her daughter. It is a value system from which politics and writing emerge. And for Roy, that “turned out to be a route to freedom, too.”

The image of Mrs. Roy in her glass-top coffin is one of many that are as striking as she was singular: she, bedridden in a high iron cot, covered by a thick metallic-pink quilt and heaving from asthma attacks when Roy was a child; fast-forward to the matriarch in her seventies, her hefty body being carried on a stretcher from the ICU to another floor like the steamship “from Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo”; and then perched again atop a lofty bed, “swinging her legs like a schoolgirl, wearing an oxygen nasal cannula, her diamond earrings, a size 44DD lilac lace bra”—which John Berger (yes, that John Berger, of Ways of Seeing) helped Roy shop for in Italy—“adult diapers, and a pair of high-top Nike basketball shoes.” Sitting beside her, Roy wonders how her life could ever be normal. This, too, is a complicated gift, but a gift nonetheless. Being basic, in this day and age, is an epithet.

Yet for all Mrs. Roy’s charms, the transference of indignity and anger she suffered from others onto her children was a choice she too often made throughout her life. She mocked Roy, called her a bitch in public, blamed the child for her asthma and, consequently, her imminent death; she often kicked her out of the house or left her on the side of the road. She ordered Roy’s older brother to go kill himself. She told Roy that, when someone asked her after The God of Small Things was published if she was Arundhati Roy’s mother, she felt as though she had been slapped, and she did her best to sabotage an event for the book’s launch. It’s no wonder she is endowed with the appellation Mrs. Roy instead of mother throughout the memoir. Roy, as a little girl, would tell her asthmatic and wheezing mother that she would breathe for her, that she would become one of her lungs. Roy became a hostage who took on the burdens of another, her whole body given over to exist as one charged organ responsible for two lives. If Mrs. Roy died, she would, too.

In one uncanny scene, Mrs. Roy’s sister-in-law, Jane, nearing 90 and showing signs of dementia, mistakes Roy for her long-ago pregnant mother and says, “I know you don’t want that baby, Mary, but, really, it’s too late for anything now.” Mrs. Roy had been miserable upon the discovery of her second pregnancy and had not hidden this despondency but instead described to her daughter her varied attempts to abort the fetus by eating green papaya and using a wire coat hanger. “I wish I had dumped you in an orphanage,” she’d say. This casting by Jane, of Roy as her own pregnant mother, could be an episode of Black Mirror called, “What if you were pregnant with yourself and wanted an abortion?” Darkness turns to black. Perhaps Roy’s own successful abortion as a young woman was influenced by her mother’s warnings about “drifting into a life of marriage and children without thinking it through carefully.”

The darkness that beget darkness: As a child, Mrs. Roy endured her father’s whippings and was habitually kicked out the house. Her father once split her mother’s scalp open with a brass vase. The quickest escape route was to marry the first man who proposed to her. Micky, who fathered Roy and her older brother, Lalith Kumar Christopher (known as LKC), was a drunk whose habit of drinking bootleg liquor mixed with varnish “burned through his intestines and turned them to lace.” He died from internal hemorrhaging. Mrs. Roy remarked with disinterest upon hearing of his death, “Poor fellow. He was such a Nothing Man.” They had separated when Roy was about three. She wouldn’t see him again until nearly two decades later. The Nothing Man was less a father than an image from a photo in a gray album that the Roy children would look at, a man who was known for sitting and blowing spit bubbles for hours on end while staring into space, who was so frail and malnourished he resembled, according to Roy, the people in U.N. pamphlets. When reunited with his adult children, he begged them for money, presumably to buy more varnish-hooch.

A Nothing Man, however, was surely better than another kind of man whom Roy had known—fathers who wielded power with fists and humiliation. She recalls a friend’s mother bending down, her diamond earrings beaming, in front of the family patriarch to pick up a letter he had thrown on the floor for her to retrieve. In this scene, Roy locates the utter loneliness of dehumanization—a pure spectacle of shame. And in recollecting other friends’ mothers who always seemed frightened, tentative, awaiting instructions, Roy knew that the difference between them and Mrs. Roy retained some value.

Another heirloom of darkness was bestowed when Mrs. Roy and her two young children left the Nothing Man and sheltered in the cottage that had belonged to Roy’s maternal grandfather. Her grandmother and uncle arrived a few months later to evict the three under the banner of the Travancore Christian Succession Act, the state law that governed, at the time, the rules of property distribution for Christians in Kerala. The act entitled daughters to one-fourth of the estate or 5,000 rupees (approximately $57 in today’s currency), whichever amounted to less. It took years, but Mrs. Roy challenged the act in court and won equal rights for inheritance, branding her as an influential feminist in India’s history book.

In the meantime, however, she was cast out, divorced, and totally broke, carrying an “invisible begging bowl.” After being terrorized by the patriarchal laws that subjugated women, Mrs. Roy became a fearless warrior who championed women’s rights. She empathized with those who suffered and were oppressed. At school, she dressed Roy, then 11 years old, as a Vietcong girl for a school debate. She educated her about the ongoing Vietnam War, the devastation of the landscape by Agent Orange; she told her how the jungles, rivers, rice fields, and communists there were just like Kerala’s, and that what Americans called the Vietnamese, gooks, were what they were, too. Roy practiced her enraged speech denigrating counterrevolutionaries and American imperialists while her voice shook. Childhood—as does the history that precedes you—encodes a brain, body, and spirit. Last year, Roy took the stage in London to accept the PEN Pinter Prize and speak against “unflinching and ongoing televised genocide in Gaza.” She refused to condemn Hamas or Palestinians for celebrating Hamas’s attack on Israel: “I do not tell oppressed people how to resist their oppression or who their allies should be.” Her 11-year-old self, dressed in Vietcong gear, was there, too, speaking. So was Mrs. Roy.

This identification with derogation unfurls backward in time, pinging the invisible begging bowl and brass vase, marking Roy for the future. She leaves home, goes to architecture school, stars as a young tribal woman in a film about the dangers of aligning too closely with colonial rule, doesn’t speak to Mrs. Roy for seven years, becomes an off-grid drifter, writes screenplays and falls in love with her filmmaker collaborator, gets an abortion without general anesthesia because only a man or her mother could sign the form permitting it, publishes her bestselling debut novel and earns enough money to set up a trust to give a portion of the royalties away to progressive causes, writes political essays criticizing development and corporate power destroying Indigenous communities and land, faces sedition charges, spends a day in jail for being in contempt of court, and becomes a self-professed hooligan by way of outspoken critique in the country she finds herself in opposition to for its economic and social policies and treatment of marginalized communities.

Leaving home, writing into existence a life of her own, Roy begins to transmute her childhood role of being Mrs. Roy’s organ to breathe for her, to relieve her of suffering, and save her from death. A process of replacing the organ that serves another with her own desire. Perhaps this is called selfhood. But what makes a self cannot be parsed from the history it is made of.

Roy leaves the filmmaker and buys an apartment of her own in Delhi on a street that she used to bike down as an architecture student. From the balcony, she imagines waving to her younger self passing below. The past is always alive, always there to meet you. There, she begins writing her second novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. Where does fiction come from? Roy poses this question early in her memoir, after recalling a scene from The God of Small Things where the protagonist twins, Esthappen and Rahel, are pushed in a volley of rejection from their mother to father, neither of whom wants to take their children. Roy believed the scene to be a work of fiction, but Mrs. Roy corrected the record after reading the novel. It had actually happened. Memory protects, yet it persists: Roy had repressed this event from her childhood, but it emerged from her unconscious through the act of writing. How can one cope with trauma? Believe it is fiction and write it as such. Trauma insists on finding expression.

These days, Roy is “a well-known and now-wealthy writer in a country of very poor people, most of whom do not or cannot read books.” In that context, “What was the meaning of being me?” she asks in Mother Mary Comes to Me. Indeed, what does it mean to inhabit one’s own subjectivity and position in the particular context of their world? Inheritances, of property and darkness alike, must be reckoned with.

Stories are another thing we inherit, whether their origins are personal, historical, or cultural. Roy considers the Malayalam films she grew up watching, where heroines were often raped: They convinced her all women were destined for the same fate. Stories can be used to instill fear and control and set our expectations for what we deserve. On a drive through a national park in her thirties, Roy passes a man lying on his back atop a buffalo cart with a lantern tied to it, singing under the stars, perfectly assured that the animal would take him home. The sight evokes both wonder and jealousy in Roy, for a woman in India would never feel so safe and carefree on a lonely highway. But writers have the ability to tell stories that create the world we want to live in. In The God of Small Things, different castes transgress predetermined borders. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness protests on the behalf of Kashmiri independence. With every book, every essay, every speech, Roy builds worlds that are revolutionary, made from the darkness that she spins into purpose. She may never lie on her back in a buffalo cart singing to the stars, entrusting her safety to the world around her, but she can write about another world that offers the same freedoms to women, men, and to hijras alike.

Revolution, however, is molecular. It is not only political; it also happens within. After Mrs. Roy died, the home she had built was in disrepair. Roy restored it, replacing rusted steel inside filler slab, replacing doors and window frames, ripping out floors and replacing them, replacing wiring and pipes. She likens the process to the Ship of Theseus. If every part of a house is replaced, is it the same house or a different one? I cannot help but understand Roy’s years studying architecture as training for her to later rebuild her mother’s house, plank by plank, especially since this seems to be the only house that she’s ever built. If a daughter begins as a little girl who was her mother’s organ and remakes herself bit by bit to become her own person, is she still the same person or a different one?

America’s Gaza Policy Is a Bipartisan Catastrophe - 2025-09-02T10:00:00Z

The ceasefire celebrations in Gaza last January were so exhilarating that Palestinian Al-Jazeera journalist Anas Al-Sharif could barely be heard on air over the shouts of his countrymen. “Now I can finally remove this helmet, which has exhausted me throughout this period, and this vest, which has become part of my body,” he said as he shed the protective equipment he had been wearing almost constantly for 15 months. Al-Sharif was then lifted upon the shoulders of the jubilant crowd.

The ceasefire had produced something rarely felt in the region in the aftermath of Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attacks that killed 1,200 Israelis: hope. Although the tentative agreement emerged from a rare bit of bipartisan collaboration—a team of advisers appointed by America’s outgoing president, Joe Biden, worked together with an envoy from its incoming one, Donald Trump, to secure it—its announcement was auspicious, coming on January 15, 2025, five days before the inauguration. Under Biden, there had been more than a year of bloodshed and suffering. Now, Trump’s disruptive approach to politics, both domestic and international, had come to Palestine, and it seemingly had helped halt the war.

More than six months later, Al-Sharif was killed alongside his colleagues in a targeted Israeli airstrike on August 10. And the situation in Gaza is arguably worse today than it has been at any point since October 7.

The two-month ceasefire did not move the needle on a poisonous status quo that has enabled Israel’s most destructive tendencies. Famine is now widespread—as of mid-August, around 250 people had died of starvation, many of them children—and Palestinians queuing for meager rations provided for them are routinely slaughtered by Israeli bombs, bullets, and shells. Israeli leaders have nevertheless only been emboldened; Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has reportedly been echoing calls from the far right in meetings with his security cabinet to seize and fully reoccupy the entirety of the Gaza Strip.

As a result, a growing international consensus has emerged that Israel is committing war crimes and acting with genocidal intent. Several countries, many of them once steadfast backers of Israel’s war—France, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia, to name just four—have said that they will recognize Palestine as an independent nation. The distancing of Israel by its former allies is the result not just of public outcry and moral outrage. It also reflects the realization that the West’s attempt to inhibit Israel’s war crimes has been an abject failure—and that the United States, specifically, seems no longer able, or even willing, to flex its might in service of moral or strategic goals.

The Trump administration, meanwhile, has doubled down on its full-throated support of Israel, joining strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities on June 22, but was caught off-guard by Israel’s bellicose military operations in Syria, all while restricting criticism of Israeli policy here at home. The State Department still has not seen fit to condemn the killing of Al-Sharif. In fact, a spokesperson has sought to justify it.


Much of the blame for the diplomatic failure in Gaza has been laid at the feet of the two elderly men who have led the United States since October 7, Biden and Trump. But the Gaza War has exposed America’s larger foreign policy as fundamentally broken—not only out of step with public opinion, it seems increasingly unable to advance the nation’s long-term interests.

To wit: While the moral case for changing policy in Gaza is indisputable, so is the overlapping strategic one. Why then is it so difficult to move forward with either?

After all, the daily starvation of hundreds of Palestinians in Gaza while the United States provides weapons and diplomatic backing to Israel is not only a moral stain but represents a serious security threat to the United States and U.S. interests in the world.

And while Democrats and Republicans have adopted increasingly divergent approaches to foreign policy since the start of this century, there has been broad agreement about its fundamental aims: Great-power competition and countering China in a variety of domains have been the nation’s top priorities.

But backing Israel while it starves Gaza will make it that much more difficult for the United States to partner with countries in the Arab world. The Trump and Biden administrations both aimed to expand normalization agreements between Israel and Arab states, notably Saudi Arabia. But it’s more and more difficult to imagine that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman could take the risk of recognizing Israel while it engages in such brazen war crimes against Palestinians; as popular as he is among a new generation of Saudis, this may be too much to wager on. Indeed, as anti-Americanism related to its support for Israel rises, it could also lead to new threats from the region, including resurgent terrorism against the United States. Fourteen years after Barack Obama pulled troops out of Iraq, and four years after Biden withdrew the U.S. military from Afghanistan, complicity in Gaza has once again inflamed Arab opinion against the United States.

Meanwhile, Israel behaves with impunity, launching strikes on the capitals of Iran, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen, and has become a liability to the United States, sapping not only its power and bandwidth but also its costly, rare missile defense systems. If the United States should find itself in conflict with Russia, China, or another foe, it will do so with a reduced stockpile of expensive equipment. Above all, Israel has shown the world that, at least in its relationship with the United States, the tail is wagging the dog.

Some analysts now assert that Israel is in the strongest position in the Middle East that it’s ever been in. As evidence, they cite its assassinations of Hamas’s and Hezbollah’s leadership, the airstrikes on Iran, and the fall of Syria’s Bashar Al Assad. But whether such aggressive moves harm or help the cause of Middle East peace in the long run is open to question. As Emma Ashford, author of First Among Equals: U.S. Foreign Policy in a Multipolar World, summed it up, “Israel’s wars are potentially setting up the Middle East for further destructive conflict. Is this really good for the U.S.?”

Indeed, despite battlefield wins and the weakening of Hamas and Hezbollah, Israel appears to lack any sense of how to translate those victories into actual statecraft that will help promote eventual stability in the region. Instead, the country lurches from crisis to crisis: The strangulation of Gaza is why ragtag rebels in Yemen launched missile strikes on Israel that led to such severe shipping disruptions that the port of Eilat in Israel is now bankrupt, and why the Iranian government launched missile strikes that were likely much more damaging to Israel than has been publicly acknowledged—and have led the United States to use up about a quarter of its expensive and not easily replenishable THAAD missiles protecting Israel. None of this has brought an end to the conflict, nor even returned any of the remaining 50 or so hostages taken by Hamas on October 7. Israeli civil society is increasingly gripped by instability, with calls from the far right to seize all Palestinian lands, protests demanding Netanyahu and military leaders do more to bring the hostages home, and the prime minister’s approval rating falling as the public questions his handling of the war.

And where instability reigns, the bipartisan global priority of countering China by any means is threatened. Previously, the United States has sought buy-in from allies and partners who we can reasonably assume are now questioning American leadership, or even, perhaps, quietly deciding to go their own way—a situation that is exacerbated by the Trump administration’s handling of the Russia-Ukraine War and approach to global trade.

Still, it’s the moral stain that may linger the longest. An emphasis on democracy and human rights has long been a secondary consideration in U.S. foreign policy but has remained central to America’s narrative about itself and how it distinguishes itself—to its own citizens as well as to other nations—from China and Russia. Now, at least with regard to Gaza, that moral high ground has been ceded.


While much of the world has shifted in its views of the Israel-Hamas war and the occupation of Gaza, and American voters have shifted, too, the gatekeepers of the Democratic Party remain largely unmoved, The party’s inertia was summed up in this comment in August from Pete Buttigieg, who consistently comes in the top three in polling on the 2028 Democratic presidential primary: “I think that we, as Israel’s strongest ally and friend, you put your arm around your friend when there’s something like this going on, and talk about what we’re prepared to do together.” As one Democrat strategist told Politico, “When your friend kills 60,000 people and starves an entire population for months at a time, shouldn’t the question be: Why the fuck am I friends with this guy?”

By contrast, Zohran Mamdani won New York’s Democratic mayoral primary and provided an emphatic message on Gaza: End U.S. military and diplomatic support for the war. He was pilloried by the Democratic establishment for it, but his full-throated embrace of the Palestinian cause contrasted him with an establishment that aggressively tried—and conclusively failed—to turn that support into a liability: He won a clear plurality of Jewish voters in the primary and, as of mid-August, continues to a hold a double-digit lead with Jewish voters. And it’s not just New York: Sixty-six percent of registered Democrats believe Israel is perpetuating a genocide in Gaza, according to a Data for Progress poll fielded in early August. And, per Gallup, only 8 percent of Democrats approve of Israel’s military actions in Gaza.

But the party still doesn’t get it. Only in July did 27 senators vote for arms sanctions on Israel, and few lawmakers—notable among them is Chris Van Hollen of Maryland—have been consistent in their pursuit of accountability for Israel. With the Democratic presidential primary set to ramp up after the 2026 midterms, the war in Gaza will almost certainly quickly emerge as a wedge issue—perhaps even one comparable to the pivotal role that support for the Iraq War played in 2008.

In the meantime, Trump will focus on splashy “deals” and may, simply by balking at convention, somehow get some elements of Middle East policy right. But it won’t be enough to address the gravity of catastrophe, and he may face growing criticism from MAGA firebrands like Marjorie Taylor Greene who see Israel as a threat and a liability. Mainstream Democrats, meanwhile, risk ceding the issue to their younger and more progressive counterparts who have been outspoken on it. For a party that has hemmed and hawed about the need to embrace more popular positions, ending military support for Israel is an easy win—and it’s a good foreign policy plank as well. It will also provide an opening for Democrats who can press the realist case for shifting policy on Gaza and Israel, even if they’re still unwilling to fully make the moral one.

Trump Threat to Occupy Cities Takes Ominous Turn in Vile Fox News Hit - 2025-09-02T09:00:00Z

In an ugly move, Fox News contacted Republican senators and asked: Should President Trump deploy the National Guard in your states’ blue cities? Fox News got back the answer it was trying to generate: GOP senators actively want Trump to use the military in their states’ urban areas, ostensibly to fight “crime.” This is an unnerving turn in the saga that makes Trump’s threat look worse. Congressional Republicans expressly want Trump to employ troops to intimidate their own constituents—provided it’s confined to largely Democratic areas—and they’re saying this openly, egged on by Fox, making additional occupations more likely. Meanwhile, Democrats are consumed in a big debate over … whether they can talk about this topic at all. We talked to Democratic strategist and media critic Jamison Foser, who has a good piece about all this on his newsletter, Finding Gravity. We discuss why the media is wrongly describing this as a political winner for Trump, what the polls actually say, and how the media storyline is encouraging Democrats’ worst duck-and-cover instincts. Listen to this episode here. A transcript is here.

I Miss the “Adults in the Room” From Trump’s First Term - 2025-09-02T09:00:00Z

For much of Donald Trump’s first term in office, many of the president’s critics—Democrats and Republicans alike—clung to a simple, comforting idea: As bad as things were, they could be much worse. The president was obviously an idiot and a would-be authoritarian. But he was also surrounded by people who were competent and experienced, people like Defense Secretary James Mattis; his first chief of staff, Reince Priebus, a longtime Republican apparatchik; and his second, John Kelly, a retired Marine Corps general. These men, the theory went, acted as guardrails that kept the president in check—the widely touted “adults in the room” who watched over America’s first toddler president.

When Mattis resigned shortly after the 2018 midterms, I boiled over, writing that this pundit meme was an absurd and dangerous fantasy. There was “little evidence that these ‘adults’ did much of anything to restrain Trump or to talk him out of bad decisions,” I wrote at the time, arguing that this fantasy not only served as a distraction from just how chaotic and destructive Trump’s presidency was, but also let his enablers off the hook by suggesting he was solely responsible for that chaos and destruction.

We’re now barely more than half a year through his second term, and I have to admit: I miss the adults in the room. It is clear now what happens when Trump really is surrounded purely by enablers, sycophants, and true believers—and thus encounters zero resistance to his whims and abuses. Everywhere you turn, there is even more destruction and chaos, nearly all of it on a much grander scale than during his first term in office. And there is not an adult in sight—except perhaps the one man Trump is legally prevented from firing.

I was hardly alone, on the political left, in my disdain for the “adults in the room” theory. The problem wasn’t just, as Slate’s Rebecca Onion argued in 2018, that the theory was reductive and condescending—those who deployed it were implicitly suggesting that they too were “adults”—or that it let the president off the hook (Trump wasn’t a child, Onion wrote, he was “an adult who acts like a child. And that’s a meaningful difference”). The problem was that the proverbial “adults” weren’t apolitical figures who solely served as moderating forces. They had an agenda, too.

To embrace the “adults” theory, Danny Sjursen wrote in The Nation shortly after Mattis’s resignation, also meant embracing the adults’ agenda. Mattis wasn’t just working behind the scene to get the president to tweet less; he was an active opponent of Trump’s plan to reduce America’s military footprint in the Middle East. John Bolton, who served as Trump’s national security advisor from April 2018 to September 2019, was America’s foremost neoconservative hawk, a man whose solution to seemingly any problem was to bomb it.

For critics like me and Sjursen, embracing the “adults in the room” was a tradeoff that obviously wasn’t worth it. Although Trump was never the “dove” or “populist” some claimed, he won the Republican presidential primary in 2016 by rejecting the economic and foreign policy orthodoxies that had guided his party for decades. Rehabilitating figures like Bolton, in the interest of opposing Trump, risked validating a discredited political philosophy that had caused a litany of horrors, foremost among them the Iraq War. It also just seemed at odds with reality. Families were being separated at the border. Longstanding allies were being ridiculed and shunned while the president embraced dictators like Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman. If Trump was surrounded by adults, what precisely were they doing?

Well, now we know.


When Trump entered office in 2017, Republicans held a narrow advantage in both chambers of Congress and on the Supreme Court. Back then, there were a handful of Republicans—notably Mitt Romney, Jeff Flake, and, before his death in 2018, John McCain—who would occasionally stand up to the president, either via public statements or with votes, as McCain did when he killed the GOP attempt to repeal Obamacare with a Romanesque thumbs down. With a handful of mostly useless exceptions (I’m looking at you, Lisa Murkowski), the Republican resistance is almost fully extinguished. Congress is full of MAGA bootlickers. The Supreme Court has gone from a 5-4 conservative majority to an ironclad 6-3. The Democrats, meanwhile, are as powerless in the minority as they were during Trump’s first term, but they are somehow an even more feckless opposition party now.

As bad as Trump’s immigration policies were during his first term, he and his cronies—notably senior advisor Stephen Miller—have become downright fascistic. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, almost always wearing masks so they can’t be identified by the public, are terrorizing communities as they round up undocumented immigrants, many of whom have no criminal history and have lived in the country for years, if not decades. His administration has deported at least 180,000 of them—including, in at least a few cases, legal U.S. residents—thus far. It has sent some to a gulag in El Salvador where they have been tortured and, in at least one case, raped; others are being deported to nations they have no connection to, such as Uganda. In Los Angeles, protests against these policies became a pretext for deploying the military, not just the National Guard but also hundreds of Marines (something Mattis never would have allowed). Once that pretext was established, it was extended—minus the Marines—to Washington, D.C., under the guise of fighting crime (even though violent crime has been decreasing for years in the nation’s capital, hitting a 30-year low in 2024). All of this amounts to a show of force aimed at cowing blue cities and a precedent for future action that may be far more significant.

Trump talked a lot on the 2016 campaign trail about raising tariffs, and once he took office it was a rare promise he fulfilled—but also a rare instance of real moderation. The tariffs were modest and often targeted at specific industries. During his second term, though, they have been massive and expansive. Although he has backed down somewhat from the slate of across-the-board tariffs he dropped on “Liberation Day” in April, the nation is currently engaged in a trade war with most of the world: Goods from India and Brazil are being hit with 50 percent tariffs—the latter in a blatant attempt to influence the nation’s politics—while China is being hit at 30 percent (though Trump is threatening to increase that number to more than 100 percent). Prices are rising and there is no end in sight. It seems likely that this will be disastrous in the short term (a potential recession) and the long term (a rupture of America’s longstanding trading partnerships).

In other instances, Trump has empowered allies and loyalists to wreak havoc across the government and, in some cases, the world. Trump’s first cabinet was largely staffed with Republican stalwarts; his second is full of maniacs and slavish loyalists. The tech billionaire Elon Musk spent much of Trump’s first 100 days in office sending a roving gang of young men—many of whom, in the literal legal sense, were barely adults—to gut federal agencies across the country, firing thousands of workers and eliminating vital programs and entire departments, notably the United States Agency for International Development. Current estimates suggest that the Musk-driven cessation of foreign aid could cost millions of lives by the end of Trump’s term.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the conspiracy theorist who now leads the Department of Health and Human Services, may have irreparably harmed the nation’s ability to develop new treatments, track diseases, and fight pandemics. Last week, he pushed out the head of the CDC after she moved to accept vaccine guidelines issued by a panel of experts, rather than those from Kennedy himself. HHS then issued new eligibility recommendations for the Covid booster shot, severely restricting those who could get it. It is impossible to imagine Alex Azar, who served in the same position during Trump’s first term, doing any of this. Five years after Trump oversaw Operation Warp Speed—the only unqualified success of his first term, which lived up to its name by developing a Covid-19 vaccine in less than a year—the nation is on the brink of returning to the Dark Ages: Kennedy’s vision of the country is one where only the strong survive and immunity comes from contracting diseases, not taking vaccines.

The one member of Trump’s Cabinet who seemed like he could emerge as an “adult”—Secretary of State Marco Rubio, whose appointment was praised by many who fretted over the direction of the administration—has shown no inclination whatsoever toward moderating the president’s impulses. He has overseen a foreign policy that is reckless, bellicose, and clearly undertaken in service of Trump’s personal ambition to win a Nobel Peace Prize rather than any strategic interest. As famine spreads in Gaza and America’s support for Ukraine seesaws between tempered support and complete disdain, Rubio has consistently stood behind the president. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, he harbors ambitions to succeed him.) That’s in contrast to Rex Tillerson, who routinely butted heads with Trump, smoothed over relations with miffed foreign leaders, and reportedly told other members of his national security team that Trump was a “moron.”

There is, however, one adult left: Jerome Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve. Powell was first appointed by Trump back in 2018, but the president quickly came to regret it. Trump spent much of his first term badmouthing Powell and has targeted him throughout his second, all because Powell has refused to slash interest rates, as Trump desires. Powell is doing this because, well, he’s an “adult”: Given the persistent problem of inflation, cutting interest rates carries enormous risk. Powell is holding the line, and his firing, which legal experts say would not pass muster, could cause the markets to tank. Trump may do it anyways—and Republicans and the conservative justices on the Supreme Court will likely sit idly by.

I still think we risk giving the “adults in the room” too much credit. Mattis et al were only there because there wasn’t a MAGA-groomed alternative back then—and because Trump, a neophyte president, didn’t really know what he was doing. And their record was mixed at best. Trump’s first term was still historically chaotic and destructive, after all. But would Mattis, Tillerson, and Azar be preferable Pete Hegseth, Rubio, and Kennedy? Absolutely. Maybe the “adults” were good for something after all.

Happy Labor Day. Donald Trump and Elon Musk Are Screwing Workers. - 2025-09-01T10:00:00Z

It’s awkward every year to say “Happy Labor Day,” because the news about labor is almost never happy. Another trip around the sun brings another percentage drop in union membership. It’s now down to about 10 percent of workers, or half what it was four decades ago. (The historic peak was 34 percent in 1945.) Within the private sector, where union representation is needed most urgently, membership is below 6 percent. More people think Elvis is still alive, or that NASA faked the moon landings, than belong to a private-sector labor union.

“Happy Labor Day” sounds especially off-key this year because the National Labor Relations Board is on the ropes. The NLRB is the government agency that adjudicates private-sector disputes between labor and management. It oversees union elections and punishes labor law violations (excepting wage theft, which is policed by the Labor Department). Sustaining organized labor even at its severely depressed current level would be impossible without a functioning NLRB. But last week, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled the NLRB’s 90 year-old structure unconstitutional, putting future enforcement of labor law very much in doubt.

As my New Republic colleague Matt Ford noted, the case on which the Fifth Circuit ruled is a Harper’s Weekly political cartoon that practically draws itself. Elon Musk, the richest human on Planet Earth, is chief executive and principal owner of Space X. Three years ago, eight workers there circulated internally a letter pointing out that Musk’s public behavior was “a frequent source of distraction and embarrassment for us” and urging the company to “uphold clear repercussions for all unacceptable behavior, whether from the CEO or an employee starting their first day.” The letter leaked to The Verge, and Space X fired nine signatories.

I won’t bother to document all the plainly unacceptable public behavior Musk engaged in at the time, because we’d be here all day. But the letter mentioned “recent allegations against our CEO and his public disparagement of the situation.” That referred to a Musk tweet making light of an episode in which Musk allegedly exposed his erect penis to a Space X contract flight attendant/masseuse and promised to buy her a horse if she’d give him a happy ending. Musk said the charges were “utterly untrue,” but Business Insider reported that after the flight attendant/masseuse brought sexual harassment charges, Space X paid her $250,000 to go away. Guilty or not, Musk did Space X no favors by joking publicly about the matter.

As I said, Space X fired nine signatories to the letter protesting Musk’s misbehavior. Eight of them filed charges with the NLRB, alleging illegal retaliation for concerted activity. “Concerted activity” is the legal term for any challenge to the terms and conditions of one’s employment, and it’s protected under the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, even for nonunion workers. Space X, you won’t be astonished to learn, is a non-union shop.

That Space X management’s retaliation constituted an illegal unfair labor practice was a slam dunk. An NLRB regional office gathered the charges together, filed a legal complaint against Space X, and scheduled an administrative law hearing on a case that the company was sure to lose. But before that hearing could occur, Musk sued the NLRB, arguing that the agency couldn’t investigate Space X because the NLRB itself was unconstitutional.

As I explained when Musk filed this lawsuit in January 2024, there’s a history here. Musk has tangled repeatedly with the NLRB, to a far greater degree than fellow oligarchs like, say, Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg. Most famously (before now) Musk threatened Tesla plant workers on Twitter with the loss of their stock options if they unionized. The NLRB ruled that move a labor violation, and when Musk appealed, even the reactionary Fifth Circuit had to agree (though it later vacated that ruling en banc).

Musk’s lawsuit against the NLRB recycled some arguments used successfully in the 2024 Supreme Court case SEC v. Jarkesy, in which a hedge fund manager whom the SEC busted for securities fraud was freed from paying a $300,000 fine on the grounds that the agency’s administrative law judges lacked constitutional authority to impose it. Musk, it turned out, helped bankroll the plaintiff in that case, along with the billionaire Mark Cuban. When people like me say that the United States is an oligarchy ruled by billionaires, this is the kind of thing we’re talking about.

Musk won the NLRB case too. Perhaps we’d save time going forward if regulators seek out Musk before finalizing any decision to ask whether it’s quite all right with his excellency.

The Fifth Circuit ruled that the National Labor Relations Act is unconstitutional because the president is barred by statute from firing at will the administrative law judges who decide NLRB cases brought by the agency’s 26 regional offices. A president can fire an NLRB administrative law judge only on the recommendation of the Merit Systems Protection Board, an independent agency that protects the rights of federal employees. The MSPB can recommend such a firing only “for good cause,” and only after the MSPB grants the administrative law judge in question an opportunity to defend himself or herself at a public hearing. MSPB members, the Fifth Circuit decision further complains, are themselves protected statutorily from at-will firings; a president may remove one “only for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.”

Granted, the Fifth Circuit said, an employer who feels wronged by an NLRB administrative law ruling can always appeal to the full board in Washington, D.C. But NLRB board members are hard to fire, too! The president may fire one only “for neglect of duty or malfeasance in office.” That hasn’t stopped Trump from firing Democratic NLRB board member Gwynne Wilcox as if she were employed at will (she’s not!), nor has it stopped the Supreme Court from letting him get away with it.

If our notional employer still feels wronged after the NLRB board rules against him, he or she can file an appeal in federal court. I half expected the Fifth Circuit judges to further complain that the president can’t fire federal judges (only Congress can remove them through impeachment), but they stopped short of condemning an independent judiciary as an intolerable infringement on presidential power.

Let’s clarify here that although it seems as though President Donald Trump is trying to fire every living federal employee, he is not, at the moment, trying to fire any administrative law judges at the NLRB. Neither was President Joe Biden when Musk first filed his suit. So why are the Fifth Circuit’s knickers in a twist about whether a president can fire an administrative law judge? Let’s further clarify that no administrative law judge has heard the Space X case, nor the two similar cases with which the Space X suit was joined, because all three companies won lower-court injunctions before such hearings could take place. So how exactly were these companies harmed? “When an agency’s structure violates the separation of powers, the harm is immediate,” the Fifth Circuit said, “and the remedy must be, too.” Apparently the NLRB has been harming all of us since Will Rogers’s small plane went down near Point Barrow, Alaska. Four generations failed to notice.

The ruling doesn’t shut down the NLRB entirely because it applies only to cases in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas, where the Fifth Circuit has jurisdiction. But Jennifer Abruzzo, who was President Joe Biden’s NLRB general counsel, told me that the decision will “open the floodgates for employers to forum-shop and seek to get injunctions” in those three states. Abruzzo added that the NLRB “should be appealing this, seeking a rehearing,” but it’s doubtful that it will.

Indeed, we should be grateful that the Trump NLRB contested Musk at all. Trump has no fondness for the NLRB; in firing Wilcox, he deprived the board of a quorum. In continuing to defend the NLRB after Biden left office, the Trumpies dropped the Biden NLRB’s arguments for statutory job protections, because Trump administration lawyers were arguing in other courtrooms against them. Instead, the Trump NLRB fought Musk half-heartedly on jurisdictional grounds that the Fifth Circuit rejected. It also essentially asked the court, pretty please don’t use this decision to strike down every previous decision issued by an NLRB administrative law judge since a pint-sized Shirley Temple was Hollywood’s top box-office draw. The Fifth Circuit said it will address this “severability” question at some future date.

In a sane world, we could rest confident that the Fifth Circuit’s attempt to repeal the New Deal would be reversed by the Supreme Court. But there’s every reason to believe that the Supreme Court will uphold it, because it, too, is trying to repeal the New Deal. It’s especially hostile to job protections at independent agencies, and indeed I believe it will eventually chuck these even at the Federal Reserve, which it’s tried vaguely to shield from Trump’s power grabs. When the Fed loses its independence, that will be a bad day for the oligarchs. But this Labor Day they can toast the NLRB’s imminent destruction.

A Labor Day Lesson Plan: Teach High-Schoolers About Workplace Rights - 2025-09-01T10:00:00Z

Cute guys serving pizza, cute girls scooping ice cream, a passionate and mostly innocent fling, and a bittersweet march toward the end of August. In the movies, summer job storylines are filtered through a warm gauzy lens. Career experts, too, have a sunny view of summer employment: That’s when young people learn about responsibility, discipline, and teamwork. 

But when our sons and their friends had their first jobs, the picture was sometimes less rosy. The manager at a chocolate shop stole a worker’s tips. A neighborhood Italian restaurant required new employees to work unpaid “training” weeks. A theater concession operator paid workers per shift, with hourly rates lower than minimum wage. 

How many teenagers nationwide had similar experiences or worse this past summer? How many faced sexual harassment, or were asked to do dangerous jobs without training? Young workers (aged 15-24) are far more likely to be injured on the job than those who are older. In 2023, three 16-year-old high schoolers were killed on the job in a five-week period, at a Mississippi poultry plant, a Wisconsin logging company, and a Missouri landfill. 

As they return to the classroom this fall, students will learn nothing at all about dealing with any of these realities, because throughout the United States, we generally have zero required education about people’s rights at work. This needs to change: High schools nationwide should incorporate education about workplace rights. 

As it stands, teenagers with summer stints become twentysomethings and thirtysomethings with full-time employment, many also juggling childcare or elder care. (Some of them even become bosses.) All the while, our system assumes people will learn the essentials through … TikTok? Osmosis? A yellowing poster in the break room? Workers’ lack of knowledge creates fertile ground for low-road employers to take advantage, leading to high rates of wage theft, workplace injuries, and more. 

Especially now, when federal labor protections are under attack and federal enforcement agencies are being hollowed out, state and local governments will need to play a more active role in protecting workers and creating a fair playing field for law-abiding employers. Incorporating workers’ rights in the classroom is a practical concrete step that states and localities can take, since high school curricula are usually determined at state and local levels. A variety of people and entities could help make this happen in states both red and blue: legislators, school boards, principals, teachers, parents, and community members.

Discussions about requiring workplace rights education would also be a welcome change from the cultural battles now routinely waged in our nation’s schools, since this is content everyone should be able to agree on. Everyone won’t, of course. But when plutocrats, business groups, or culture-warrior parent activists oppose this proposal, let them explain why.  

Let billionaire tech executives explain their objection to teaching high schoolers about the federal minimum wage, which has been stuck at $7.25 since 2009, before many of today’s teens were born. Let them explain why students shouldn’t learn about gig corporations’ tooth-and-nail fight to avoid having to pay even that paltry rate.

And the family values crew? Surely they’d want students to learn that the United States is one of only a handful of countries in the world—and the only industrialized country—that doesn’t require paid maternity or parental leave when a new child is born.

Conservatives want abstinence-only sex education? Then they should welcome training about laws prohibiting sexual harassment, and how to report handsy gropers and creeps.  

Culture warriors worry about bathrooms? I do too, but here’s my concern: I want teenagers to know that it’s not a safe workplace if the pace is so fast that you can’t step away to use the bathroom. Work shouldn’t cause urinary tract infections. People should never have to wear diapers on the job, as has been reported at poultry plants, or pee in bottles, as has happened among Amazon delivery drivers. 

And a word for teachers, who might fret about adding one more topic to an already-packed curriculum: This content is perfectly suited for the end of the school year. Even antsy seniors will perk up when the subject is managers stealing their tips.

To be sure, a proposal to teach students about employment laws may seem modest in light of the country’s dire situation generally, and in light of attacks on labor more specifically. But people’s utter lack of knowledge about workplace rights is exactly what sets the stage for steamrolling them, at a moment when the federal government is already rolling out the red carpet for exploitation. Plus, workers’ rights education could foster greater skepticism and a heightened sense of agency in relation to mega-corporations that currently have far too much power—both in our political landscape and in people’s everyday lives as workers, consumers and small businesses. Wouldn’t it be just a little healing, too, if we had some positive movement somewhere? 

Already one state is leading the way: California in 2003 passed a law designating Workforce Readiness Week, required in all public high schools, during which students learn about child labor, minimum wage, unionizing, workplace safety, and other workplace laws. Incorporating this kind of practical, life-skills content is nothing new; Illinois law, for example, requires basic consumer and financial literacy education, including about debt, banking, and installment purchasing.  

Adding workers’ rights education to the high school curriculum is hard-nosed, humane, and long overdue. It reflects some core shared values. First: that high school students need to learn responsibility, self-discipline, and teamwork. And also: that each one of them is a precious, irreplaceable human being, not a line item or a cog. Every young person should start their life knowing they have rights on the job, and that they are worthy of fair pay, safety, dignity and respect. 

The One Area Where Democrats Should Follow Trump’s Lead - 2025-08-31T10:00:00Z

When Donald Trump announced that the federal government would take a 10 percent equity stake in the tech company and chip manufacturer Intel, the reaction was swift, predictable, and bipartisan. Senators Rand Paul, Kentucky Republican, and Greg Stanton, a Democrat from Arizona, both referenced a slide toward socialism. Governor Gavin Newsom’s press office shared an AI-generated image on X of Trump in front of a communist flag, writing “ALL HAIL CHAIRMAN TRUMP! WITH HIS GLORIOUS 10% PURCHASE OF INTEL, THE SOCIALIST REPUBLIC OF AMERICA ENTERS A BOLD NEW ERA OF GOVERNMENT-RUN BUSINESS.”

A piece from the libertarian CATO Institute noted that “Industrial Policy [is] the Gateway Drug to Cronyism.” Oregon Democratic Senator Ron Wyden called the arrangement “nothing more than corporate extortion,” while Rep. Daniel Goldman of New York described it as a shakedown that wouldn’t end at Intel. My colleague Tim Noah called the move a form of “fascist corporatism.”

Trump, characteristically undeterred, said he hopes to see “many more cases like it.”

The responses capture the ideological confusion of this moment. Critics from across the political spectrum were quick to paint the arrangement as socialism. Senator Bernie Sanders—who’s long been a proponent of public ownership in large corporations—was among the few who praised the deal, pointing out that he had introduced a similar amendment during debate over the CHIPS and Science Act, which was signed into law under Joe Biden. (Trump was able to secure the government’s stake in Intel in part by withholding billions in funds designated for Intel in the CHIPS Act.)

Calling this socialism, however, misses the mark widely. What Trump embraced when he declared the move necessary to ensure America’s national security and economic competitiveness, was not worker ownership or democratic control of the means of production, but state capitalism. Greg Ip of The Wall Street Journal argued that Trump’s strategy resembled the Chinese model, dubbing it “state capitalism with American characteristics.” The American Prospect labeled it “Trumpian” state capitalism.

Still, what matters most here is not the terminology but the precedent. The Intel deal should be treated not as a scandal, but as a shift in America’s approach to capitalism—one that could serve Trump’s cronyism or, if the left seizes it, a more democratic vision of public ownership and global competitiveness.

For decades, the idea that the federal government could take equity stakes in private corporations has been treated as taboo, a vestige of Cold War suspicion of anything resembling public ownership. But it isn’t without precedent in American life: During World War II mobilization, Washington didn’t hesitate to take direct stakes in and direction over key industries; public ownership has long been part of the U.S. toolkit when national security was at stake. The 2008 financial crisis saw the government take temporary stakes in GM, Citigroup, and AIG. The Covid-19 pandemic involved massive public subsidies to airlines and small businesses and the invocation of the 1950 Defense Production Act to direct companies to manufacture devices like masks and ventilators. Now, with Intel, the U.S. has crossed another threshold by not just stabilizing or commanding companies in crisis but investing directly in their future.

Intel is not the only company being targeted for government ownership. As part of an unprecedented deal, chipmakers Nvidia and AMD will now turn over 15 percent of their revenue from sales in China. In July, the Pentagon became the largest shareholder in MP Materials, the country’s only operational rare earth mine. A month earlier, the U.S. secured a “golden share” in U.S. Steel as part of its $15 billion takeover by Japan’s Nippon Steel, giving Washington the right to appoint an independent director to the company’s board.

On Tuesday, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick suggested the administration might extend the Intel model to defense contractors. In an interview with CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” he noted that Lockheed Martin earns 97 percent of its revenue from the federal government. The company, he said, was “basically an arm of the U.S. government.” The way munitions have historically been financed, he added, has amounted to a “giveaway.”

Industrial policy is no longer a fringe idea: It was a key component of Biden’s presidency and one that was widely praised by policy experts. It is here to stay. The only question is who will benefit from it.

By simply condemning the Intel deal, liberals and progressives risk ceding the ground to the right by allowing conservatives to dictate the narrative. Democrats too often play defense, backing off at the first cry of “socialism.” They should go on offense, argue plainly that public investment deserves public return, and that government power can serve the common good.

As commentator Krystal Ball recently put it on Breaking Points, “I hope there’s some bold Democrat out there somewhere who’s looking at all of this [and saying] okay, they’ve laid down the marker here. We can take this model and expand it and actually do it in the American interest.”

For decades, the United States has socialized the risks of private enterprise while privatizing the rewards. We’ve showered corporations with subsidies and tax breaks and bailed them out when they’ve failed while rarely asking for much—or sometimes anything—in return. If taxpayer money is going to prop up private firms, as it has for decades, then taxpayers deserve a share of the gains, too.

Even if it takes Trump, like a broken clock, to stumble into the point, the underlying principle is sound: The government should hold equity in more of corporate America, not less. Other nations already do this. Norway’s sovereign wealth fund owns shares in thousands of companies worldwide. China’s sovereign wealth fund, the China Investment Corporation, manages over a trillion dollars in assets worldwide, making it one of the largest state investors in global markets. Saudi Arabia’s Private Investment Fund is a key part of its foreign policy. Kevin Hassett, director of the National Economic Council, has suggested that the United States establish a sovereign wealth fund. Democrats should be taking notes. The United States, by contrast, has been content to subsidize corporate America without demanding ownership in return.

Nowhere is the case for public ownership clearer than in the defense sector. Lutnick—like Trump, a broken clock—was right when he said that companies like Lockheed Martin already function as quasi-public entities, deriving nearly all their revenue from government contracts. They are, in effect, state enterprises run for private profit.

The same logic applies, more urgently still, to fossil fuels. Oil and gas companies are huge recipients of public support in the form of subsidies, tax breaks, and infrastructure guarantees. Their core incentive is to extract and burn as much carbon as humanly possible. No serious observer still believes the free market can manage the climate crisis. Nationalization would not only ensure that the vast sums of public money already flowing into fossil fuels yields a return for taxpayers. It would also make possible a managed and just transition away from carbon. Norway’s state-owned oil company has demonstrated that public ownership is not only feasible but profitable.

Pharmaceuticals form the third pillar of this argument. All three are life-or-death domains where markets consistently fail people with fatal consequences. The industry’s most profitable products are overwhelmingly built on the back of publicly funded research, much of it financed by the National Institutes of Health. Between 2010 and 2019, every single one of the 356 new drugs approved by the FDA traced its origins to NIH-funded science, according to a 2020 paper by the Institute for New Economic Thinking. Yet the profits accrue almost entirely to private firms, who charge the public exorbitant prices for medicines that it effectively paid to invent. (Trump, meanwhile, has cut nearly $2 billion in research grants to the NIH, gutting the very research pipeline that makes these breakthroughs possible.) Taxpayers finance the breakthroughs, but then are forced to buy them back at inflated prices, often at the cost of debt or denied care.

Taken together, defense, energy, and medicine are the three pillars of a secure society. All are already heavily subsidized, propped up, and protected by the state. The question is not whether governments will be involved but whether that involvement will continue to serve shareholders or be redirected toward a more livable future.

Trump’s Intel spectacle may fade from the headlines, but the larger lesson should not. Government intervention is already a fact of American capitalism. The issue is whether we continue to accept a system in which corporations feast at the public trough without giving anything back, or whether we move toward a model in which taxpayers are not only investors but stakeholders, beneficiaries, and decision-makers.

The neoliberal era insisted that markets knew best and the government’s role was to step aside. That consensus has collapsed. Industrial policy has returned. The choice now is between a corporate-led version that socializes losses while privatizing gains, or a democratic version that ensures public investments yield public returns.

Trump may be pursuing this for all the wrong reasons—cronyism, control, or just plain spectacle—but the move nonetheless cracks open a door others should be ready to walk through. If the left seizes this moment, it can help build a new common sense: one in which public money buys public power, and ownership becomes the foundation for a more equitable, sustainable economy. If it fails, Trump and his allies will be more than happy to define state capitalism on their own terms.

JB Pritzker Just Set Himself Apart From All Other Democrats - 2025-08-30T10:00:00Z

As Donald Trump’s goon-squad occupation of the nation’s capital wends its way into its third week, the president is already eyeing the next Democratic stronghold he’d like to strangle with his bruised hands in the name of “fighting crime.” Among the municipalities facing the mad king’s wrath is Chicago, which has loomed in far-right lore as some kind of Third World hellhole. While we wait for many Democratic leaders and media elites to take Trump’s authoritarian spree seriously, TNR editor Michael Tomasky this week urged Illinois officials to steel themselves for what’s to come. “Okay, JB Pritzker,” he wrote, “you’re up.”

It didn’t take long for the reply to come. In a Monday afternoon news conference, Illinois’s Democratic governor joined a slew of state leaders speaking out about Trump’s plan to deploy troops to Chicago. Pritzker has, over the past year, begun to cement his national profile ahead of what many presume to be a presidential run in 2028. He has firmly planted himself in the same “fighter” lane as California Governor Gavin Newsom—the better to distinguish himself from, say, whatever it is that Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer thinks she’s been doing lately.

Pritzker ended up being the headline figure of that Monday news conference, thanks to the simplicity and directness of his message. “Mr. President, do not come to Chicago,” he said. “You are neither wanted here nor needed here.” He offered some satisfying digs at the evident decline of Trump’s mental faculties. He hit many of the right notes for someone who wants to establish himself as a leader of a dissident movement. But Pritzker saved his best for last, when he promised to take the fight against Trump a step farther than most Democrats have allowed themselves.

Finally, to the Trump administration officials who are complicit in this scheme, to the public servants who have forsaken their oath to the Constitution to serve the petty whims of an arrogant little man, to any federal official who would come to Chicago and try to incite my people into violence as a pretext for something darker and more dangerous: We are watching and we are taking names.

This is where Pritzker has leveled up over his fellow Democrats, by promising a future of accountability and retribution for the destruction Trump and his minions are doing to the constitutional order and our individual freedoms. As I wrote back in May, the Trump White House and the GOP are no longer a political party by any definition; rather, they are a sort of criminal syndicate with an extensive portfolio of white collar crimes, violent offenses against our civil rights, and an ongoing sort of imposed cultural tyranny that is killing off the well-paying jobs of the future by decimating academia, and literally sparking public health crises at home and abroad through the Lysenkoism of key administration figures like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

As I noted at the time, “There is a certain necessary logic to what has to follow corrupt misrule of this kind: tribunals, trials, punishment, prison, and the running to ground and defunding of the entire Trump syndicate.” The only thing we were lacking then was an ambitious political figure who was willing to say that they were ready and willing to make accountability a key plank in their platform. Pritzker has made a timely arrival.

As Discourse Blog’s Rafi Schwartz points out, this isn’t the only uniquely consequential aspect of Pritzker’s speech. The Illinois governor—channeling the feelings of so many who’ve forewarned of what was to come in a second Trump term—told those assembled, “If it sounds to you like I am alarmist, that is because I am ringing an alarm, one that I hope every person listening will heed, both here in Illinois and across the country.”

Pritzker’s willingness to straightforwardly announce the existence of a crisis with “no caveats” and “no conditionals,” Schwartz writes, helps to “[neutralize] the latent anxieties of those worried about coming off as unduly panicked or oversensitive to the political realities around us.” In short, Pritzker allows those so inclined to finally grant themselves the permission to see the fascism that’s on the march, and speak of it out loud.

In the same way, I think that Pritzker has kicked open a door to an alternate future: One in which the restorative work of post-Trump patriots involves accountability for criminals and reparations for the people they’ve harmed. The taking of names and the doling out of punishments: This is now part of the larger political discussion; this is now part of the Democrats’ intraparty debate about What Is To Be Done. By including this as part of his political ambition, and broadly suggesting it may be the major goal of some future Pritzker administration, he allows us to imagine this future and have a hand in creating it.

And it sure sounds like Pritzker wants to put his hands to the task right now. “If you hurt my people,” he said, “nothing will stop me, not time or political circumstance, from making sure that you face justice under our constitutional rule of law.” In a week where Beltway Democrats passed their time pointlessly debating whether or not they were using words like “food insecurity” too much, and congratulating each other for calling the D.C. occupation a “stunt” or a “distraction,” hearing a Democratic politician speak in plain English is pleasingly bracing. These are, indeed, encouraging words to hear after Democrats long implored us to “look forward, not backward” and allowed misrule to go unpunished, thereby paving the road for Trump’s fascist second act.

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

Trump Is Totally Ignoring the Working Class That Voted For Him - 2025-08-29T17:19:51Z

President Trump’s policies, particularly tariffs, are driving up the cost of school supplies and other goods that average Americans use regularly, according to Julie Margetta Morgan, president of the Century Foundation. And by rolling back populist policies adopted by Joe Biden and passing plutocratic economic legislation, Trump will do even more damage to the pocketbooks of Americans, Morgan said in the latest edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. She argued that it’s critical for politicians to focus on affordability issues, offering solutions but also identifying corporations and other entities who are causing the problems. She defended Biden’s efforts to forgive college debt and argued that Trump’s attacks on elite colleges are intended to make them essentially schools for white wealthy kids. You can watch this conversation here.

Trump’s Decapitation of CDC Takes Darker Turn—and Hands Dems a Weapon - 2025-08-29T17:04:20Z

This week, Illinois Governor JB Pritzker offered an extraordinary viral response to President Trump’s vow to dispatch troops into Chicago. Critically, Pritzker cast Trump as a malignant, active threat to his Illinois constituents—he called them “my people”—and vowed to use every ounce of his power to protect them from harm by the President of the United States. The move’s resonance showed that governors who creatively resist Trump’s malevolent despotism will be seen nationally as leadership figures by voters hungry for politicians to rise to the urgency of the moment.

Trump’s firing of the director of the Centers for Disease Control—which is unleashing an effective decapitation of our public health system, leading experts to fear the nation’s vaccine apparatus is slowly collapsing—provides Democrats with another opening to do exactly this. For ambitious state-level Democrats eager to break through as checks on Trump’s reign of destructiveness, this could represent the next frontier of resistance.

Pritzker’s health department in Illinois is currently exploring the possibility of purchasing Covid-19 vaccines in bulk straight from manufacturers in response to the mess in Washington, a senior Illinois health official confirms to me. Meanwhile, a coalition of mostly-blue states led by Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey is planning to coordinate on the purchase and distribution of pediatric vaccines, should the federal government restrict access to them, according to a source familiar with ongoing discussions. This will likely include big states like New York and Pennsylvania.

One hopes and expects that there will be much more of this going forward. Democratic governors have numerous ways to fill the public health leadership void that Trump is creating, according to public health experts I interviewed.

That void is enormous—and deeply unsettling. The White House fired CDC director Susan Monarez after she came under pressure to support Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s rescinding of various approvals for the Covid-19 vaccines—which was announced this week—and to support vaccine restrictions more broadly as well. Monarez, a Trump appointee and a well-regarded government scientist, refused, seeing this as a betrayal of vaccine science that could threaten countless lives.

Worse, after Monarez was fired (which her lawyers are fighting, though the White House has announced a replacement), a disconcerting spectacle ensued. A parade of top CDC scientists resigned, offering dismaying predictions about the future of vaccines in the United States. Indeed, this is only the beginning. As The Bulwark’s Jonathan Cohn notes, Kennedy has many other tools to do truly immense damage to the vaccine system.

So what can governors do in response to this unnerving state of affairs?

First, says Wendy Parmet, a health policy professor at Northeastern University, governors can scale up clinic systems to make it easier for people to get vaccines, should Trump’s government keep making that harder. This week the Food and Drug Administration narrowed approval for Covid-19 vaccines to people over 65 and those under 65 with a high-risk medical condition who consult with doctors. Experts fear the latter will restrict access even to those adults under 65, who previously could get shots at pharmacies.

Scaled-up state-sponsored clinics could make life easier for that below-65 population by making doctors more accessible to consult and recommend a Covid vaccine, Parmet notes. “States can step up with vaccine clinics overseen by physicians who would administer vaccines even when pharmacies may be unable,” she says.

Alternatively, a more ambitious version of this would entail states buying up large amounts of Covid vaccines from manufacturers and building out distribution systems similar to those employed during the pandemic, says the University of Michigan’s Sam Bagenstos, general counsel to the HHS under President Joe Biden. In this scenario, states could seek to provide the vaccines not just to high-risk adults under 65, but also all other adults who want them.

Crucially, the narrowed FDA approval, which largely impacts the marketing of vaccines, doesn’t stop doctors from prescribing them “off label” to others who want them, Bagenstos says. That means Democratic governors can step in with a dramatic counterpunch against depraved Trump-Kennedy efforts to widely discourage vaccine use.

“All that would have to happen is for some state to purchase a whole bunch of vaccines,” Bagenstos says, “then have the state’s chief health officer prescribe the vaccine to anyone who wants them—and then provide the vaccines out of the state’s own stock.” Or the state can provide them to doctors who would then prescribe them.

Something like this might happen with the aforementioned Illinois initiative exploring potential ways to buy the vaccine straight from manufacturers. “We have to build up an apparatus to shield us from the recklessness of Robert F. Kennedy,” a senior Illinois health official tells me.

Here’s another idea: Numerous blue states’ top health officials can assemble into a group similar to the Democratic Attorneys General Association. In this way they can discuss ways to coordinate multi-state vaccine policy and/or speak with one voice on these matters.

Along those lines, another possibility would entail all these health officials putting out a comprehensive, multi-state joint statement of recommendations on vaccines that places science and empiricism at its center. As Paul Krugman notes, the fundamental rejection of medical science that is central to Trump’s agenda could also badly compromise our national future. So Democratic governors should let the millions and millions of Americans who are deeply discomfited by all this know that someone in a position of authority is working to avert that national fate, that someone is awake at the public health switch.

“It’s important that the American people know that their state leaders have their backs,” said Gregg Gonsalves, an associate professor of public health at Yale. “It’s crucial for the American people to know that in many places at the local and state level, public health is alive and well.”

This is a partial list. But here’s the basic point: Democratic governors should scour every corner of the law to find creative ways to show that in their America, public officials will go to the wall to defend the health and well-being of their constituents from the potential mass illness and death that Trump and Kennedy appear eager to unleash.

Democratic governors can use their bully pulpits to truly explain the stakes of this moment. Here Noah Smith’s formulation is useful: We are at risk, he says, of becoming the “richest third world country,” a place where “politics is starting to look decidedly like something you’d encounter in a dysfunctional middle-income nation.” The unshackled strongman whims currently wrecking our institutions and demolishing the professionalized bureaucracy are central to this story, and Democratic governors can tell it.

In short, if Trump and Kennedy are going to divide the country over public health, Democrats should polarize the living heck out of this debate as well—but on their terms.

The message should be that in their America, officials cherish our public health system as a pillar of American greatness and see vaccines as a miraculous human achievement, rather than indulging in juvenile conspiracy theories disparaging “deep state” medical professionals. In their America, public officials will genuinely prioritize their constituents’ well-being and flourishing, rather than faithlessly betray the people who rely on them by playing vile little games around what the science actually says. In their America, officials who have been granted the public’s trust will honor that sacred compact. They will simply not stand for Trump-Kennedy efforts to Make Polio and Measles Great Again.

Republican Who Claimed “We’re All Going to Die” Won’t Run Again - 2025-08-29T16:45:18Z

Iowa Senator Joni Ernst reportedly told confidantes that she would not seek reelection in the 2026 midterms.

Multiple sources told CBS News that Ernst plans to announce her decision next Thursday.

The Iowa Republican’s apparent decision comes just a few months after a horrifying gaffe at a town hall.

When constituents expressed concerns that people would die as a result of President Donald Trump’s behemoth budget bill, she responded by saying, “Well, we all are going to die.” And as voters reeled from her callous comment about millions of Americans being booted from their Medicaid coverage, Ernst doubled down.

The senator’s comments seriously tainted her political reputation, sparking widespread speculation that she would not run again. But Ernst sent mixed signals, refusing to say whether or not she would seek another term.

In June, she brought on Bryan Kraber to manage her 2026 reelection campaign, signaling her intent to turn her sinking ship around. But she also delayed her annual “Roast and Ride” fundraiser until October. Typically, Ernst—who has been in office since 2015—holds the event in June.

A few Iowa Democrats have already waded into the race, including State Senator Zach Wahls, Des Moines School Board chairwoman Jackie Norris, and State Representatives J.D. Scholten and Josh Turek. Turek even used Ernst’s infamous existential blunder in an ad announcing his candidacy for her Senate seat.

As recently as last week, Ernst claimed she wasn’t concerned about Democratic challengers in her state. “Bring it on, folks. Because I tell you, at the end of the day, Iowa is going to be red,” she said.


One source told CBS News that Ernst feels that she achieved her goal of serving two terms, and now intends to head for the private sector.

This story has been updated.

Judge Tosses D.C. Case From Trump Prosecutor—Calls It Total Garbage - 2025-08-29T16:33:28Z

Judge Zia M. Faruqui has handed yet another legal defeat to Trump-appointed D.C. Attorney Jeanine Pirro, calling her attempt to jail a local attorney and West Point graduate “one of the weakest requests for detention” he’d ever seen, according to WUSA9.

Anthony Bryant, who served a tour in Afghanistan, was arrested early Monday morning on charges of assaulting, resisting or impeding police, threatening a federal official and threatening to kidnap or injure a person.

Pirro’s office alleged that Bryant approached National Guardsmen who were patrolling 14th Street on Sunday night and allegedly yelled “These are our streets!” and “I’ll kill you.” Pirro also claims that Byrant “threw his shoulder” into one of the Guardsmen’s shoulders. The police found a legally registered handgun on Bryant when they arrested him.

Bryant was released after his initial arrest, but then arrested again and placed in jail on Wednesday on the order of Judge G. Michael Harvey. On Thursday, Judge Faruqui stepped in.

“This is perhaps one of the weakest requests for detention I have seen and something that, prior to two weeks ago, would have been unthinkable in this courthouse,” Faruqui said, adding that the government has a “as close to zero” chance of demonstrating Bryant was a real threat.

Bryant’s attorneys also alleged that the police report failed to mention that Guardsmen yelled slurs at Bryant, who is Black. There is no video of the alleged scene because National Guardsmen conveniently don’t wear body cameras. This made the prosecution’s claims virtually impossible to prove.

“To charge people for what seems to be lesser conduct and then say they’re so dangerous they have to be locked up,” Faruqui said. “It puts prosecutors in an impossible position.”

Bryant was released by Faruqui, ordered to hand over his firearms, and advised to avoid tense situations. Faruqui also noted that Harvey and Pirro’s urge to throw Bryant in jail for such a minor infraction was contradictory to the Justice Department’s release of hundreds of January 6 rioters who’d been jailed on charges much more serious than Bryant’s.

This all comes as Pirro’s office failed to convince three different grand juries that a D.C. woman deserved a felony charge for allegedly placing herself between ICE agents and someone they were detaining. They also failed to charge the Subway Sandwich Thrower with a felony.

Mike Johnson Totally Deflects When Asked About His State’s Crime Rate - 2025-08-29T16:15:00Z

House Speaker Mike Johnson flailed Friday when reporters called attention to his state’s distressing murder rate.

While appearing on Fox News, Johnson was confronted with a clip of California Governor Gavin Newsom name-dropping the Louisiana Republican, while mocking President Donald Trump’s federal takeover of Democratic-led cities.

“If he is to invest in crime suppression, I hope the president of the United States will look at the facts. Just consider Speaker Johnson’s state, and district,” Newsom said during a press conference on Thursday. “Just look at the murder rate, which is nearly four times higher than California, in Louisiana.”

Louisiana’s homicide rate in 2023 was 19.3 per 100,000 people, approximately 300 percent higher than California’s homicide rate of 5.1 per 100,000 people, according to the Centers for Disease Control.*

Johnson didn’t even try to account for the dismal crime stats.

“Again, Gavin Newsom will do anything for attention, he can name drop me all that he wants, he needs to go and govern his state and not be engaging in all of this,” Johnson said.

“Look, we have crime in cities all across America and we’re against that everywhere and we need to bring policies to bear,” Johnson said. “My hometown of Shreveport has done a great job of reducing crime gradually, but we’ve got to address it everywhere it rears its ugly head.”

While Johnson isn’t stupid enough to get on board with Trump’s tactic of simply pretending Republican-led cities don’t have bad crime rates, he seems content to completely ignore the situation in his own district.

In fact, Shreveport, which is part of Johnson’s district, landed at 25 on Newsweek’s recent list of the 30 U.S. cities (with at least 100,000 residents) that had the highest number of violent crimes against people. Newsom has claimed that Shreveport’s murder rate is six times higher than the rate in San Fransisco, a city regularly criticized by Trump and other Republicans.

No city in California made the list.

The rest of Louisiana isn’t in the clear, either. In 2024, Baton Rouge had a murder rate of 36 people per 100,000, and New Orleans had a murder rate of 31 per 100,000. Baton Rouge’s murder rate is twice the rate in Washington, D.C., where the president has deployed thousands of National Guard troops, some of which were sent by Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry.

Newsom responded to Johnson’s Fox News appearance Friday by copying Trump’s social media cadence. “Mike ‘Little Man’ Johnson can’t even answer a basic question: why is Louisiana’s homicide rate nearly 4X HIGHER than California’s????? LOUISIANA IS A FAILED STATE!” he wrote in a post on X.

* This post originally misidentified how much higher the Louisiana homicide rate was compared to California.

Trump Picks Nightmare Peter Thiel Acolyte to Replace CDC Director - 2025-08-29T16:10:16Z

Donald Trump has tapped Deputy Health Secretary Jim O’Neill, a market fundamentalist Silicon Valley investor and long-time associate of billionaire Peter Thiel, as acting director of the Centers for Disease Control.

Taking the place of Susan Monarez, whose firing has raised alarm over the dangerous incompetence of the health department under Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., O’Neill will bring to the role no medical or scientific background.

But he does have a history of feverish advocacy of deregulation and libertarianism, as the progressive group Public Citizen highlighted when he was nominated for his current role at Trump’s health department.

In a 2014 speech, for instance, O’Neill—then managing director of Thiel’s Mithril Capital—proposed allowing drugs onto the market without first determining whether they even work. “Let people start using them, at their own risk,” he said. “Let’s prove efficacy after they’ve been legalized.”

He revealed in the same speech that, while working for George W. Bush’s health department, he opposed the Food and Drug Administration regulating firms that use algorithms in lab tests, such as biotech company 23andMe.

He’s also a proponent of legalizing the organ trade. “There are plenty of healthy spare kidneys walking around, unused,” as he put it during a 2009 talk—where he also argued in favor of generally leaving health care to the whims of the market. “Because there’s not a free market in health care, people are suffering very significant health consequences that in a free market they would not suffer,” he claimed.

The 2009 remarks were delivered at a seasteading conference. For those who don’t keep up with plutocrats’ vanity projects, seasteading is the idea of establishing autonomous, floating communities at sea. Until last year, O’Neill served on the board of a Thiel-backed seasteading venture, which was founded by anarcho-capitalist Patri Friedman—of whom O’Neill is a self-described disciple—who outlined his goal as follows, according to SFGate:

“I envision tens of millions of people in an Apple or a Google country,” where the high-tech giants would govern and residents would have no vote. “If people are allowed to opt in or out, you can have a successful dictatorship.”

O’Neill also appears to share, with many of his Silicon Valley peers, a fixation on anti-aging.

Trump Slashes Foreign Aid With Rare, Possibly Illegal Move - 2025-08-29T14:32:56Z

President Donald Trump is once again stomping all over Congress’s power of the purse.

The president invoked a rare “pocket rescission” to claw back roughly $5 billion from the U.S. State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development, according to the New York Post.

Trump wrote to Congress Thursday night requesting $4.9 billion in funding toward international aid efforts, including $3.2 billion in development assistance from USAID, the essential aid organization Trump bypassed Congress to dismantle.

Congress has 45 days to decide whether or not to approve Trump’s request, but the White House Office of Management and Budget says it can just freeze the funds until the fiscal year ends on September 30, ensuring the funds’ cancellation.

All of this comes as Congress stares down the barrel of an October 1 deadline to avert a total government shutdown.

“Congress can choose to vote to rescind or continue the funds—it doesn’t matter,” an official from the White House budget office said in a statement, per Politico. “This approach is rare but not unprecedented.”

While OMB, run by Project 2025 architect Russell Vought, is all for a pocket rescission, the Government Accountability Office holds that such a move is illegal.

General Counsel Mark Paoletta said that when Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter made similar requests, “GAO noted the lapse without objection.” He claimed that GAO had only recently changed its tune because of “Trump Derangement Syndrome.”

Trump also wants to scrap funding allocated to the State Department, including $521 million in contributions to international organizations and $393 million for peacekeeping activities. The president would take back another $445 million separately allocated for peacekeeping, and $322 million from a joint USAID-State Department Democracy Fund.

Pam Bondi’s Justice Department Make Deal to Save Her Brother’s Client - 2025-08-29T14:28:31Z

For the second time in just a few weeks, the Justice Department has done Attorney General Pam Bondi’s brother, Brad, a solid.

On Wednesday, the DOJ dropped felony wire fraud charges against a client of Brad Bondi named Sid Chakraverty, a property developer who was accused of defrauding programs meant to support women- and minority-owned businesses.

According to the motion to dismiss, filed by a Trump-appointed U.S. attorney, the move was in keeping with the administration’s stance that programs “that use race- and sex-based presumptions”—as did the one Chakraverty was said to have scammed—are unconstitutional. It was an abrupt reversal from a motion the Trump appointee had signed 24 days earlier, Bloomberg reports, “defending the merits of the prosecution.”

Brad Bondi celebrated the outcome on LinkedIn, writing, “I am proud of our excellent work in winning this victory.”

This was his second victory within a month’s time thanks to his sister’s Justice Department. In July, federal prosecutors scrapped Covid-19 relief fraud charges against a Florida politician he was representing.

In both cases, the Justice Department issued identical statements to the media: “This decision was made through proper channels, and the Attorney General had no role in it.”

Back in March, yet another of Brad Bondi’s clients—former electric vehicle CEO and Trump campaign megadonor Trevor Milton—saw fraud charges against him disappear, this time due to a pardon from the president.

Forget Trump’s Words. His Actions Prove He Doesn’t Mind if Kids Die. - 2025-08-29T14:24:23Z

Donald Trump has, of course, done a lot of shocking things as president, things even previous Republicans wouldn’t have done. We focus most of our coverage on those things, and rightly so. But on one issue, he’s been a pretty standard Republican president, which is to say to say he’s been horrible and wicked in the standard way. The issue is guns. Before the Minneapolis shooting fades out of the news cycle, let’s look at the grisly Trump record, which has largely passed under the radar.

We begin with his February 7 executive order called “Protecting Second Amendment Rights.” It stated in the opening paragraph: “Because it is foundational to maintaining all other rights held by Americans, the right to keep and bear arms must not be infringed.” It then directed Attorney General Pam Bondi to review existing laws and regulations and so on “to assess any ongoing infringements of the Second Amendment rights of our citizens.”

This has led to a process that seeks to restore the gun rights of convicted felons. And so, on July 18, the Justice Department published a rule to that effect. The press release’s opening sentence reads: “President Trump directed the Department of Justice to address the ongoing infringements of the Second Amendment rights of our citizens—all of them.” Further down, the release quotes Ed Martin, the administration’s pardon attorney and a MAGA extremist whose nomination for a U.S. Attorney position was withdrawn because he probably couldn’t get the votes: “General Bondi’s support of the rebooted 925(c) program is consistent with President Donald J. Trump’s promise to the American people to support the beautiful Second Amendment.”

So that’s number one: The DOJ is going out of its way to restore gun rights to convicted felons—a category, of course, that includes Donald Trump himself. But the EO and other actions by the administration go a lot farther. Trump ordered a review of every gun-regulating move made by the Biden administration. For example, on April 7, Bondi revoked a Biden-era rule that allowed the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives to rescind the licenses of gun dealers that break the law by falsifying records. Ponder that: Businesses that knowingly break the law now have immunity from federal oversight.

There’s plenty more. On May 16, the administration agreed to a settlement of several lawsuits under which the Justice Department would no longer enforce machine-gun ban laws (which date to the 1930s) against guns with forced-reset trigger (FRT) devices. An FRT, which is a recently developed technology, allows the shooter to fire at an increased rate. The NRA and manufacturers say it’s no big deal, the shooter still has to fire each shot separately; gun-safety advocates counter that by mechanically resetting the trigger position after a shot is fired, FRT’s still dramatically increase the fire rate, essentially turning some semiautomatic weapons into machine guns. So these will now be sold again. FRT’s have been after-market devices, but now, they might be installed at point of sale.

The Republicans’ big, ugly budget bill factors in here, too. A transfer tax on silencers has been part of U.S. law since 1934. The tax was imposed for the obvious reason that silencers tended to be used by the bad guys. You don’t need silencer to shoot a grouse or defend your family from an intruder. It was paid by either the buyer or seller and was set at $200. In all those decades, it was never raised ($200 then would be close to $4,900 today). But at least it existed. As of next January 1, it will be $0.

This is who Trump is: a cynical and strictly transactional person who, once upon a time, spoke reasonably sensibly about guns, but who realized once he entered politics that anyone who wants the GOP presidential nomination has to sell his soul to the NRA, so he sold his (probably wasn’t expensive). This is another thing we kind of stopped paying attention to, because he does so many other things that are, or appear to be, so much more outrageous. But I take note every year of what Trump tells the NRA. In the summer of 2024, he spoke to the group in person and said, among other things:

• “Let there be no doubt the survival of our Second Amendment is very much on the ballot. You know what they want to do. If they get in, our country’s going to be destroyed in so many ways. But the second Amendment will be … It’s under siege. But with me, they never get anywhere.”

• “If the Biden regime gets four more years, they are coming for your guns, 100% certain. Crooked Joe has a 40-year record of trying to rip firearms out of the hands of law-abiding citizens.”

• “They’re going after the ammunition. When the radical-left Democrats tried to use Covid to shut down gun sales during the China virus, I proudly designated gun and ammunition retailers as critical infrastructure so they couldn’t touch it.”

This April, the group convened in Atlanta, and Trump addressed the assemblage via video, bragging about all the above and more, saying: “There is much more to come. Americans are born free, and under the Trump administration, we will live free—always live free. With me in the White House, your sacred rights will not be infringed.”

Now, after Minneapolis, Vice President JD Vance and Melania Trump are out there trying to shift the topic from guns to mental health. It’s a total dodge, an attempt to talk about anything but guns; but okay, we have an obvious five-alarm mental healthcare crisis in this country, so to the extent that this administration really wants to do something about that—great.

But as usual, the rhetoric is completely the opposite of the reality. The drastic Medicaid cuts in the big, ugly bill will impact mental health services in a vast array of ways. MindSite News, which covers mental health policy, wrote after the bill became law: “The previous five years—including the final year of Trump’s first presidency—had seen the renewal of a federal commitment to mental health. Over those years, federal funding for mental health services increased. New programs like the 988 hotline were created and funded. Funding streams were established to boost crisis response services and to support school-based mental health. Tough new health insurance regulations were enacted to improve access to coverage for mental health services.”

That last point is especially key. Insurers don’t cover mental health the way they cover physical health (this, by the way, is an issue the Democrats should seize; mental health doesn’t interest the media much, but I guarantee you it is of keen interest to parents everywhere, of all political stripes). But this bill, the site notes, signals that “the days of a federal commitment to addressing the U.S. mental health crisis are essentially over.”

So they’re even hypocrites on the one issue on which they’re showing “concern.” But let’s conclude by going back to gun policy.

The guns purchased by the Minneapolis shooter were bought legally. Press accounts note this and then quickly move on, as if to say there’s no point in discussing gun laws here. But there is. There always is. Authorities haven’t revealed what kinds of guns, beyond saying there were three—a shotgun, a rifle, and a pistol. Maybe they’re not even in the categories of weapons we debate. I’d still like to know how someone with such obvious mental health issues passed the background checks. Minnesota strengthened its background check law under Governor Tim Walz in 2023, but someone somewhere still decided that Robin Westman could own guns responsibly, and we deserve to know more about who and why.

In the meantime, Trump 2.0 so far shows every sign of doing anything the NRA wants it to do. They can offer all the thoughts and prayers they want, and they can prattle on about mental health until the sun sets. But it’s their actions that matter, and their actions say they’re perfectly content to let more children die.

This article first appeared in Fighting Words, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by editor Michael Tomasky. Sign up here

Trump Hits Kamala Harris Right Before Her Book Tour - 2025-08-29T14:13:56Z

President Trump has terminated former Vice President Kamala Harris’s Secret Service Protection—just before she embarks on her book tour.

“You are hereby authorized to discontinue any security-related procedures previously authorized by Executive Memorandum, beyond those required by law, for the following individual, effective September 1, 2025: Former Vice President Kamala D. Harris,” the memorandum reads.

Former President Joe Biden had extended Harris’s Security Service protection from six to 18 months as he was leaving office—and Trump’s memo axes that directive.

Harris had heightened security concerns as the first Black woman ever nominated to be the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate. Trump’s move also comes as she prepares to set off on her 107 Days book tour, which will have her back in the public eye for the first time since the election. Harris will lose the 24/7 in-person and online threat prevention her detail provided, and they’ll leave her Los Angeles home too.

“The Vice President is grateful to the United States Secret Service for their professionalism, dedication, and unwavering commitment to safety,” a Harris adviser told NBC.

When Trump’s first term ended, Biden politely extended Secret Service for all of Trump’s adult children to 18 months as well. Instead of matching the basic kindness that Biden offered, Trump terminated protection for Hunter and Ashley Biden. He also revoked Secret Service protections for Dr. Anthony Fauci, former National Security Adviser John Bolton, and now Harris.

These moves are purely spiteful, especially since Biden gave Trump’s own family equal treatment while Trump decided that anyone he doesn’t like should have their protection ended.

“This is another act of revenge following a long list of political retaliation in the form of firings, the revoking of security clearances and more,” Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass told CNN. This puts the former Vice President in danger and I look forward to working with the Governor to make sure Vice President Harris is safe in Los Angeles.”

CDC Official Makes Shocking Confession About RFK Jr.’s Intel - 2025-08-29T13:15:20Z

On Thursday evening, Dr. Demetre Daskalakis—who recently resigned from a high-level role at the Centers for Disease Control—revealed a jarring fact about Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. According to Daskalakis, Kennedy has never been briefed by any of the center’s scientists on major diseases.

Daskalakis was one of numerous top CDC officials to leave their post this week after Kennedy fired the agency’s director for refusing to “rubberstamp unscientific, reckless directives and fire dedicated health experts,” per the ousted director’s lawyers. Stepping down as director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory, Daskalakis cited the CDC’s transformation under RFK Jr. into a “tool to generate policies and materials that do not reflect scientific reality and are designed to hurt rather than to improve the public’s health.”

During a Thursday CNN appearance, Daskalakis advised senators to ask Kennedy at his appearance before the Senate Finance Committee next week: “Has he been ever briefed by a CDC expert on anything—on, specifically, measles, Covid-19, flu?” Asked whether RFK has indeed ever received such a briefing, Daskalakis replied, “The answer is no. So no one from my center has ever briefed him on any of those topics.”

“He’s getting information from somewhere, but that information is not coming from CDC experts,” Daskalakis continued. “CDC is the preeminent public health organization, I’m going to say, in the world. And he’s not taking us up on several offers to brief him on these very important topics.” Asked why, he raised the possibility that Kennedy “has alternate experts that he may trust more than the experts at CDC that the rest of the world regards as the best scientists in the areas.”

The startling revelation comes as Kennedy’s dangerous incompetence as health secretary faces increasing scrutiny. On Thursday, the American Public Health Association issued a statement condemning Kennedy’s move to fire the CDC director, as well as his dangerous anti-vaccine sentiments and actions, and his other “misguided efforts to overhaul the public health system based on myths and pseudoscience.”

Trump’s Military Parade Was So Bad That Now He Wants a Redo - 2025-08-29T12:58:02Z

Remember that expensive, wasteful military parade that President Trump forced on everyone in June? Now our dear leader wants a redo—by sea.

The Wall Street Journal reported that the U.S. Navy is planning a larger parade for this fall after the president told aides he was “disappointed” by the marching and paltry attendance. The second parade is reportedly to celebrate the Navy’s 250th anniversary, much like the summer parade was focused on the anniversary of the U.S. Army.

“Through the America 250 celebrations and beyond, President Trump is rightfully restoring patriotism across the administration and giving our brave men and women in uniform the honor they deserve,” White House Deputy Press Secretary Anna Kelly said when questioned by The Daily Beast. “Only the anti-American activists at the Daily Beast could possibly take issue with celebrating our U.S. Navy’s 250th Anniversary – sad!”

The Army’s summer spectacle cost U.S. taxpayers $30 million, and was largely a flop.

It’s unclear what else will be different about this parade aside from the personnel. If Trump was upset by the lack of turnout at his earlier parade, especially after comparing it to the March on Washington, it’s unclear how the Navy would change that. And while MAGA loyalists were delighted by this summer’s show of power, the majority of the public was conflicted. Another parade will likely sow the same sentiments.

Transcript: Trump Press Sec’s Dumb Spin Implodes as RFK Fiasco Worsens - 2025-08-29T10:52:41Z

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the August 29 episode of the
Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

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

The White House is saying that the director of the Centers for Disease Control, Susan Monarez, has been fired, ostensibly because she opposes Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s anti-vaccine policies. This has prompted an extraordinary walkout at the CDC, which seems to be slipping into chaos as we record. At Thursday’s media briefing, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt tried to spin this in a highly strange way. She tried to imply that this represented democracy in action, but she mangled key facts and couldn’t even explain in any serious way why this woman is being fired. We think this is revealing. It shows that the White House knows its position on vaccines is profoundly unpopular. Yet Trump has hitched himself, and sadly the rest of us, to an utter lunatic who’s trying to destroy one of the pillars of public health in this country. This will get worse for the White House. We’re talking about all this with the University of Michigan’s Don Moynihan, who writes a good Substack called Can We Still Govern? Don, thanks for coming on.

Don Moynihan: So happy to be here.

Sargent: So CDC Director Susan Monarez has been pressed for days by Kennedy and others internally if she would support rolling back some of the approvals for Covid-19 vaccines, according to The Washington Post’s reporting. She apparently was not willing to do that. So the White House has said she’s fired, but then her lawyers said only the president can fire her. And Don, as of now he hasn’t done so publicly. Maybe by the time people listen to this, it might’ve happened. So let’s assume, for this discussion, she’s likely out. Can you catch us up on the basics of this?

Moynihan: Yeah, it was pretty extraordinary what happened last night. Initially, the first we heard of this is HHS posted a tweet saying Monarez is out, doesn’t specify if she resigned or if she was fired. Then very shortly after, internal emails and public statements from other CDC leaders started to flow out where they were resigning in protest, pointing to the weaponization of the CDC, pointing to the practices of HHS Secretary RFK Jr. And then Monarez’s lawyer says, Hang on a minute, she hasn’t resigned. She hasn’t been fired. Only—and this is correct—only President Trump can fire her. Secretary Kennedy cannot. She’s the Senate-confirmed appointee and she has not received a letter saying that. We haven’t seen an update. And the latest thing that’s happened is that rank and file, these CDC scientists have walked out of their headquarters in Atlanta in protest of what’s going on. So it is this amazing uprising from the folks whose job is to protect us from serious diseases.

Sargent: It is amazing indeed. So at the White House press briefing, Karoline Leavitt was asked a very straightforward question: What did Monarez do wrong? Listen to this.


Karoline Leavitt (audio voiceover): Look, what I will say about this individual is that her lawyer’s statement made it abundantly clear themselves that she was not aligned with the president’s mission to make America healthy again. And the secretary asked her to resign. She said she would and then she said she wouldn’t, so the president fired her—which he has every right to do. It was President Trump who was overwhelmingly reelected on November 5. This woman has never received a vote in her life. And the president has the authority to fire those who are not aligned with his mission. A new replacement will be announced by either the president or the secretary very soon. And the president and secretary Kennedy are committed to restoring trust and transparency and credibility to the CDC by ensuring their leadership and their decisions are more public-facing, more accountable, strengthening our public health system, and restoring it to its core mission of protecting Americans from communicable diseases.


Sargent: So let’s break that up into two parts. First, note the claim that she’s never gotten a vote. Of course, the Senate voted to confirm her. But that aside, the game they’re playing here—the real game—is to try to claim that Trump is merely cleaning out the deep state. The unelected bureaucrats who are not aligned with what the people want. I think it’s going to be very hard, Don, for them to defend firing a health professional for the sin of not wanting to further damage our vaccine infrastructure.

Moynihan: Monarez has been actually pretty savvy in raising the conflict and salience around what is happening. And this is a position—she for sure is a political appointee that Trump can fire, but historically CDC directors are doctors or, in her case, a scientist. She’s an infectious disease scientist. And so it’s not really the type of position you want to hand to someone who doesn’t have some backing in that area. And it makes it a lot easier then, I think, to tell the public, Hey, diseases are serious things. We should have serious people trying to figure out those threats. And instead, we’re left with RFK Jr. And who knows what type of people who are advising him on things like vaccines.

Sargent: Yeah. And to get into this second piece of Leavitt’s thing, note how she’s keeping it very vague. Leavitt says Monarez was not aligned with the president’s agenda. But what that really means is she wants to follow science on vaccines and Trump does not. Leavitt doesn’t want to say directly that Monarez is resisting the dramatic rollback of Covid vaccines and probably much worse to come. I’m going to predict that you won’t hear the White House say straight out, Trump and RFK want to roll back these vaccine protections and these professionals who are resisting don’t. The White House can’t defend that. How do you see that unfolding?

Moynihan: I think you’re right. And I think they will use abstractions like “Make America Healthy Again” or not aligned with the president’s values. But look, these agencies are public agencies. They have mission statements that were written into statute. They are answerable to Congress. And part of the reason Menares was fired is she consulted with Bill Cassidy about what was going on. And when you get down to the nuts and bolts, the president is not actually a king here. He cannot mandate exactly how the CDC operates without consulting with Congress. And if I was in Congress, if I was Bill Cassidy, I would be saying, What the hell is going on here? Why are we not allowed to talk to senior officials about the ways in which they are managing public money?

Sargent: Let’s talk a little bit about what’s going on with the Covid vaccine right now. The Food and Drug Administration this week approved updated Covid vaccines but it authorized the vaccines for people who are 65 and older and said younger people would only be eligible if they have an underlying medical condition. And apparently still some people with certain conditions, if they’re unhealthy in various ways, can get it with a doctor’s consultation or something like that. Can you talk about where we are on that? It’s a pretty dramatic move on FDA’s part, isn’t it?

Moynihan: Yeah, in practical terms, it dramatically limits access to the vaccine. And this really is conflicting with something that RFK Jr. promised, which is that anyone who wanted a vaccine could get a vaccine. Really, at this point, if you’re over 65, it’s going to be feasible to get a vaccine. For everyone else, it’s going to be a lot harder. You may have to talk to a doctor to be able to access it. And we know that in practice, if you put these administrative burdens in place, that’s going to lower take up or access to these public services. Now that’s a political decision. RFK Jr. is deeply skeptical about vaccines; that is one thing we know true out his entire career. It’s not necessarily an evidence-based decision. And I think that was the crux of his disagreement with Monarez.

Sargent: And Monarez was saying that the science doesn’t dictate this at all, meaning doesn’t dictate what RFK is doing with the Covid vaccine. That led to the firing. I want to return to a point you made earlier about the president not being a king here. He has a lot of power over the bureaucracy, but it’s not absolute. This is the crux of the issue. These agencies were created by acts of Congress and they have missions that were at least to some degree defined by Congress. And when Karoline Leavitt goes out there and tries to imply that when they’re tearing the place down, they’re merely doing this in keeping with what the people want, she’s essentially saying that Trump’s been given enormous power by the people to do things that really run roughshod over what Congress intended these agencies for, correct? Can you talk about that?

Moynihan: Yeah, that is correct. And I think it is emblematic the broader governing philosophy of Trump. This can be framed in terms of unitary executive theory if you want to rely on conservative legal thinking or the way in which Trump says it himself which is I’m the president, I get to do what I want. It is a vision of the presidency where the president is the personification of the executive branch and he gets to have the final word on everything federal agencies do. And that is a really radical departure from how we’ve thought about American government for the last 250 years. It cuts out Congress in a fundamental way.

Sargent: Yes, and I think you’re getting at the very key thing that’s revealed in this Karoline Leavitt diatribe or whatever the hell it was. She’s trying to cast this as democracy in action. And it may fool some people, but the truth of the matter is what she’s actually saying is she’s defending a vision of maximal presidential power that really cuts down dramatically the role of Congress in setting how our government works and what its goals are and how it’s going to function. I think it’s hard to imagine that if Americans understood what that vision actually is that they would be fooled by rhetoric like Karoline Leavitt’s.

Moynihan: Yeah, it’s a version of democracy where you say the only election that matters is the presidential election. Congressional elections don’t matter. It’s a version of democracy that says even if you’re making unpopular decisions, they’re still justified because you’re president. And it’s also a version of democracy that eats at any other sources of democratic legitimacy. And again, you point it to statutory language. There are also standards that these federal scientists have to follow in how they evaluate information that have been embedded over time by Congress. Those are other forms of democracy. Those are forms of democracy that historically have actually been pretty effective in making America a superpower over the course of the last 70 or 80 years. And now we’re just seeing an abandonment of all of those other forms of democracy in favor of centralizing authority in the hands of the president, which, to me, feels very at odds with the basic civic textbook understanding of how the founders designed American democracy.

Sargent: Right. The Senate voted to confirm this head of the CDC and senators are elected as well. And so when Karoline Leavitt cavalierly says she never got a vote, she’s essentially cutting Congress out entirely from the process.

Moynihan: Yeah. If the only person who’s democratically legitimate in your country is the President of the United States, you do you don’t actually have a democracy. You have a monarchy. If the only person who can legitimately exercise power is one individual then that person is a de facto king. They are not part of a democratic order.

Sargent: And that is their vision. I want to read a remarkable quote from Dr. Richard Besser, a former acting head of the CDC. “As bad as things have been since January, the firing of thousands of federal health workers, extreme budget cuts, the ongoing assault on our nation’s vaccination system, what we saw yesterday was another level entirely, an extraordinary and systematic dismantling of the very top of our nation’s public health system.” Don, that’s amazing stuff. You have experts wondering whether the CDC will ever recover. Will it?

Moynihan: It may take generations. And the thing that really should worry everyone is that it’s not just the CDC. So for example, yesterday FEMA employees were put on administrative leave for writing a letter outlining to the public just how bad things have become within FEMA. EPA employees have been put on administrative leave for the same reason. Agency after agency, you see these federal professionals who know that they’re risking their jobs coming out to the public and saying, Things are really bad here, you should be paying attention to how bad things are going. And at some point, things will start to break.

Sargent: Well, to go bigger picture here, the White House seems to be betting that they can get away with these moves by invoking unelected bureaucrats as a villain. But, and this is something that will appeal to you as the author of a Substack about this topic, I strongly suspect that people understand the need for a professionalized civil service and very much value having medical professionals running public health. Can you talk about those bigger things that are at stake here?

Moynihan: Yeah, one thing we can see is that when you ask the public, Do they prefer a more politicized way of managing government organizations or a more professionalized approach? and that’s the choice that we’re looking at here, the majority tends to prefer a more professionalized approach. That doesn’t mean that they want professionals to have the final say or make the decisions on everything, but they want professionals to be free to give expert-based, evidence-based advice to elected officials and ultimately then allow those elected officials to make the final decisions. And we are straying away from that point because now the professionals feel like if I provide evidence-based information, I’m at risk of getting fired. And that’s what it means to have this politicized bureaucracy whose primary goal is to serve the administration rather than to serve the public.

Sargent: To serve one man rather than serve the public, right?

Moynihan: With Trump being the personification of the administration, the state is him in their worldview.

Sargent: Absolutely. And that’s basically what Karoline Leavitt set up there. Just to close this out, though, I think there’s actually a key point to be made here about what the public really wants. And there seems to be a built-in assumption—on the part of Trump and his political advisers but also on the part of some Democrats and liberals—that it’s so easy to demonize government, that all they have to do is just scream “deep state” and they can get away with pretty much anything. But this is a really crystal-clear example of a situation where I think that isn’t going to happen. People want professionals running public health. They understand the need for that. Public health is one of the pillars of American greatness, isn’t it, Don? Isn’t that really what’s at stake here—whether they can get away with demonizing government quite that easily or alternatively whether the people are really going to essentially see through it and understand what’s at risk of being lost here?

Moynihan: I think this is an issue that goes back to the 1970s where you see both parties bashing bureaucracy and bashing government. Over time, we see this decline in trust and bureaucracy and it was mostly pretty harmless when no presidents were actually doing much about that rhetoric or acting upon it. Trump really is acting on the anti-government rhetoric in a profound way. And so for Americans, I think we’re going to be in a period of hopefully civic education about what the bureaucracy actually does.

And it can get really bad. We just passed the twentieth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, which I think was the single most important event in tanking the second term of the Bush administration, where the public got to see up close, Oh, competence really does matter for these public organizations. If we run into another public health emergency—God forbid, another pandemic in the next year or two—and we’ve had a period where CDC leadership has been taken out, where funding for MNRA vaccines has been eliminated, where you basically have cranks running the advisory boards of essential public health functions, it’s going to be a very bitter pill for the public to swallow and a very grim way of learning—again—what it is that these public agencies do.

Sargent: Really critically put. I just want to point out that your parallel to Katrina could actually spool out in other ways as well in the following sense. You could really see the incompetence issue and grotesque mismanagement issue becoming much, much bigger in the public mind precisely because they’re throwing the public health system into chaos. And in many ways, that could be politically a whole lot worse than Katrina because Katrina, as awful as it was, was an event in one place in the country that highlighted horrible bureaucratic mismanagement, catastrophic mismanagement. But the public health system faltering for Americans and then that getting pinned on Donald J. Trump?

Moynihan: Yeah, public health operates on this just broader scale where it’s so embedded into our everyday lives that we just don’t pay attention to it until it starts to go wrong. That’s true of a lot of government as well. But if you look at the Trump administration, we’re going to be looking at a battle probably between RFK Jr. and Elon Musk for who has racked up the most deaths around the world. Elon Musk, by eliminating USAID, killed a tremendous amount of very inexpensive but very effective public health, which millions could potentially die from. RFK Jr., again, if we have other significant public health events and he has basically stopped the CDC and HHS to prepare for those, could have blood on his hands. We’re not talking about in the dozens or hundreds or thousands, but tens of thousands and potentially even millions.

Sargent: I think that’s exactly right. And I think that’s a preview of some really, really bad stuff to come, and that it will get hung around Donald J. Trump’s neck. Don Moynihan, thanks for coming on, man. Great to talk to you.

Moynihan: My pleasure. Thank you.

Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest Is a Meta-Reckoning with His Success - 2025-08-29T10:00:00Z

In the opening credits of Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest, the camera glides over the East River, admiring an Elysian New York City skyline against a peachy sunrise. Skyscrapers parade like diamond obelisks across the screen, while the booming baritone of Gordon MacRae, singing “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’” from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!, augments this dreamy decadence: Everything’s going my way. Indeed. At the very top of the tallest building in the neighborhood, the camera settles on David King (Denzel Washington), a powerful music executive taking a business call on his penthouse’s balcony. He’s a tower among towers, quite literally, his reflection on his dwelling’s glazed exterior cast against Manhattan’s silhouette. This rapturous introduction swiftly establishes a kind of epic context—a grand city, a great man, played by one of the movie world’s most virtuosic stars—and we haven’t even stepped inside yet.

Once we do, we find David’s two-story loft, filled with Basquiats and Kehinde Wileys; artistic renderings of Toni Morrison and Frederick Douglass; framed portraits of David on the covers of Rolling Stone and Time. There are his adoring queen, Pam (Ilfenesh Hadera), and teenage heir, Trey (Aubrey Joseph), who aspires to carry on his pop’s legacy. David is the founder of Stackin’ Hits Records, an eminent music label that has signed over 50 Grammy-winning artists; call him the Quincy Jones of the new millennium.

Signifiers of Black excellence aren’t unusual in Lee’s films—think of the archival montage of Black leaders like Muhammad Ali, Malcolm X, and Tommie Smith that kicks off Da 5 Bloods (2020). But for a writer-director who has always anchored his stories of Black lives to the broader arc of Black American history, Highest 2 Lowest’s glossy demonstration of prestige and success feels unique. We’re no longer in the sweaty, working-class Brooklyn of Do the Right Thing (1989), Crooklyn (1994), and He Got Game (1998), but in present-day Dumbo—one of the borough’s most affluent neighborhoods, a tech company hub and commercial district that embodies the lifeless upscale aesthetics of gentrification. David and Pam are like Beyoncé and Jay-Z, Barack and Michelle—Black icons, yes, but also unapologetic capitalists; money, of course, being the most efficient means of achieving the American dream.

The same day that David is set to buy out one of Stackin’ Hits’ board members, allowing him to regain control of the company, he receives an anonymous call informing him that Trey is being held for ransom. The demand? $17.5 million in Swiss francs, around the sum David needs to execute his business plan. The Kings prepare to hand over the cash, but when it turns out that Trey is safe, and Kyle (Elijah Wright)—Trey’s best friend and the son of Paul (Jeffrey Wright), David’s driver and confidant—is the one in danger, David slackens.

Highest 2 Lowest is an adaptation of Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 film, High and Low (which is itself based on Ed McBain’s 1959 detective novel King’s Ransom), and it mirrors the moral conflict, class divisions, and anxieties about mechanization and modern technology in the Kurosawa. David balks at a potentially lucrative deal with an AI company because good music needs “heart” and “soul,” while the kidnapping, and his initial refusal to pay Kyle’s ransom, lay bare his own callous individualism. A devastated Trey, swarmed by online haters decrying his family’s inaction, accuses his father of having the “coldest heart.”

Though Kurosawa’s classic features the great Toshiro Mifune in the equivalent of Washington’s role, it doesn’t rely on its lead actor’s stardom to build out its ideas about the economic stratification of postwar Japan. Casting Washington as David, however, and featuring him alongside the unofficial Black hall of fame on the penthouse’s walls, call attention to the actor’s celebrity and decades-spanning career. And to those of Lee, who rose to prominence on a similar timeline to Washington’s, and whose work in the 1990s, in particular, was defined by their partnership. In this sense, Highest 2 Lowest, Lee and Washington’s fifth collaboration, is a quintessential “late” film, entwining the source narrative’s social issues with a meta-reckoning on inheritance and memory, especially as it relates to high-profile Black artists charged with representational responsibility. David is caught between doing the right thing and revamping his career, which brings to mind the ultimatums faced by popular artists in profit-oriented creative industries: speak out on a politically divisive issue, for instance, and risk slashing your fan base and hemorrhaging sales. An expressly political filmmaker who has also been called a “corporate populist,” and who embraces commercial genres and lucrative product placements (the Nike swag is ubiquitous), Lee is certainly attuned to the difficulties of honoring one’s principles while maintaining the hustle.

Unfortunately, this first hour of domestic drama and soul-searching is also tonally bewildering. Its overt symbolism (David’s Mount Olympus is Dumbo’s Olympia Building); broad, theatrical performance styles; and hyper-expressive score by Howard Drossin betray a camaraderie with the conventions of the classic melodrama. Yet the script’s blunt sincerity, coupled with the eerie artificiality of the Kings’ hyper-curated abode, make its big emotions feel stale and/or unintentionally kitschy. In other words, it sort of feels like a Lifetime movie—more soap opera than psychodrama. The leonine Washington, at the very least, is infinitely watchable; his cocky swagger and sharp shifts to dagger-eyed intensity lend these conversational scenes a certain grit and sense of humor. There’s a moment when, racked by indecision and pacing around his home office, David cries out and invokes his forebears: What would you do, James [Brown]? What would you do, Stevie [Wonder]? Jimi [Hendrix]? Aretha [Franklin]? It’s rather silly, but I can’t deny that Washington delights.

When David finally agrees to pay Kyle’s ransom, his decision is fueled by both moral and practical considerations: The boy is an unofficial member of the family, sure, but failure to act also means backlash that could jeopardize Stackin’ Hits already plummeting rep. Aided by a team of cops (LaChanze plays a brainy sleuth; Dean Winters, the meatheaded muscle), David descends from his perch to carry out the ransom exchange, and the change of scenery—from glossy high-rise to street-level scramble—is demarcated by a switch to a moody, grainier format. Here, Lee’s signatures pop out: An ethereal double-dolly shot captures Detective Bridges (John Douglas Thompson) in close-up as he explains the plan to seize the kidnappers. Drossin’s score turns jazzy and percussive as David and two of the detectives take the 4 subway line up through Manhattan and into the Bronx, where the kidnapper and his lackeys await the drop-off. As demonstrated with his previous Washington collab, the bank-heist thriller Inside Man (2006), Lee has a gift for harmonizing the thrills of multilocation set pieces. With Highest 2 Lowest, he puts his New Yorker and avid sports-fan credentials to work, introducing the city’s communal rhythms and public gatherings as unforeseen hurdles. The Puerto Rican Day Parade is in full swing, clogging the streets around which the drop-off is meant to take place; the Yankees are playing a home game, and rabid Boston-hating fans are packed into the 4 train. The kidnapper, a paragon of street smarts, plays these factors to his advantage, securing the money bag with a few decoys and motorbikers that breeze through the crowds. Brooklynite though David may be, his potty-mouthed rival proves he’s flown too high and forgotten how to fight on land.

But if David has lost touch with the New York of his youth—the same New York that a much younger Washington inhabited in his early films with Lee, like Mo’ Better Blues (1990) and He Got Game—he’s still got his talent. As Pam sagely points out, however, corporate interests threaten to distract him from what really matters: the music. Dubbed the “best ears in the business,” a line so frequently repeated in the film it becomes something of a joke, David licks the wounds left by his hefty financial loss by reconnecting with his past. As in the old days, he walks the length of the Brooklyn Bridge while listening to new music. A trap single by the conspicuously named “Yung Felon” grabs his attention; the rapper’s voice resembles that of the kidnapper’s crude pronouncements, and Kyle, now safe in the hospital, confirms it’s the same song that had been playing on loop throughout his confinement. Naturally, the cops refuse to prioritize David’s lead, claiming they’ll verify the connection, if there is one, by running the song and the kidnapper’s call recordings through AI technology. Police incompetence, ever the motivation for vigilante justice, is joined by gratuitous automation—a poor substitute for human expertise.

Lee’s films tend to work through themes dialectically. See the pair of quotes by Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X that appear at the end of Do the Right Thing, which serve to muddle the arguments for and against their conflicting philosophies on violence. Highest 2 Lowest, too, stakes out sundry dichotomies to create ambiguities, ultimately pitting David against the rough-edged yet unexpectedly charismatic Yung Felon (A$AP Rocky) in a Stygian showdown. Paul, a reformed criminal, hits up the amorphous network referred to simply as “the streets” to locate Yung Felon’s whereabouts, kicking off the film’s loosest and most pleasurable section. David and Paul behave like chums gearing up for one last rumble, and a weirdly charming encounter with Yung Felon’s clueless baby momma (Princess Nokia) reveals that Mr. Felon is but a disgruntled fan of David’s desperate to grab his attention; a passionate yet largely invisible musician whose tracks are buried in music streamers’ algorithms. A mesmerizing face-off (and partial rap battle) between David and Yung Felon in the younger man’s underground recording studio plays out like an intergenerational powwow between Black artists—Black men with competing ideas about everything, including women, power, and what makes a sick beat.

Lee’s own convictions take center stage in David’s final stand. Once arrested, Yung Felon goes viral, his notoriety bringing him the attention—and record deal offers—he’d always dreamed of. But even now, he wants David’s validation, and in a split screen confrontation in the prison visiting room, he offers himself to Stackin’ Hits Records—a proposition he’s sure will rake in the dough. In films like Bamboozled (2000), about a modern-day minstrel show, Lee calls out the exploitation of Black identities by media narratives, underscoring a career-long fixation with the reclamation of Black representation. By this logic, Yung Felon’s trendy, social media–bolstered fame, premised on stereotypes of Black criminality, is destined to fade. Meanwhile, David, in the film’s concluding scene, leaves Stackin’ Hits behind to start a new family-owned business: steer clear of stupid spectacle, stick to your roots, and follow your gut. I can’t say that Highest 2 Lowest stands among Lee’s greatest hits, but it certainly preserves the idiosyncrasies that distinguish his filmmaking, proving at the very least that Spike continues to abide by his own rules—and that’s something to be celebrated.  

Lisa Cook Forces the Supreme Court to Show Its True Colors on the Fed - 2025-08-29T10:00:00Z

Rarely is it obvious that a lawsuit will turn into a landmark Supreme Court decision at the outset. Cook v. Trump is the exception. At stake is nothing less than the future health of the American economy and the basic structure of the federal government.

Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook filed a lawsuit against President Donald Trump on Thursday to block his attempt to illegally remove her from her position atop the nation’s central banking system. In a letter earlier this week, Trump told Cook that she was “hereby removed from your position on the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, effective immediately.”

Trump, like other presidents, can lawfully fire many top government officials in the executive branch at will. For roughly a century, Congress and the courts have held that there are limits to that power. Members of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors—“the Fed,” as it is more commonly known—like Cook can only be fired “for cause” under longstanding federal law.

In his letter, Trump cited allegations of mortgage fraud by Cook prior to her confirmation in 2022 to justify her removal. Those claims came to his attention via a Trump loyalist atop the Federal Housing Finance Agency, who has made similar allegations against other prominent political opponents of the president to justify prosecuting them.

Cook described those allegations as a mere pretext in her lawsuit. She cited ample public evidence and statement to argue that Trump is trying to impose his will upon the Fed. The president has long criticized Jerome Powell, the Fed’s widely respected chairman, and other board members for not being aggressive enough about lowering interest rates. He favors a more expansionary policy that could undermine the Fed’s statutory mandate to keep inflation in check.

Powell, Cook, and the other five Federal Reserve governors automatically serve on the Federal Open Market Committee, a separate body that also includes some of the presidents of the regional Federal Reserve banks. The FOMC has various levers to influence the growth and contraction of the U.S. money supply, which has wide-ranging implications for inflation, debt, and capital markets. (For clarity’s sake, and for this lawsuit’s purposes, it is enough to refer to this entire operation as simply, “the Fed.”)

“Presidents, facing pressure to boost the economy, may favor lower interest rates and a more expansive policy to achieve a temporary economic lift,” Cook warned. “However, this approach often fuels long-term inflation. A politically insulated Board of Governors can make appropriate, albeit unpopular, decisions—such as raising interest rates to combat inflation—that are crucial for the nation’s long-term financial health.”

She also warned that future presidents could take even more destructive paths if given direct control over the Fed’s monetary levers. “An independent Federal Reserve also prevents presidential administrations from using monetary policy for self-serving political ends in other ways, such as ensuring the government cannot simply print more money to finance debt,” she noted. “This practice, when unchecked, can lead to economic collapse and hyperinflation.”

In her filing, Cook takes pains to note that the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, or FRA, foresaw these potential problems, and built in a wide range of safeguards to prevent such abuses. Foremost among them are that the president cannot simply replace members of the board at a whim. They are appointed to 14-year terms that are staggered two years apart from one another, and they cannot be dismissed early from their positions except in extreme circumstances.

“The ‘for cause’ removal protection guaranteed by the FRA, which has been the bulwark of the Federal Reserve’s independence for the past century, prevents the President from firing a Federal Reserve Board governor except ‘for cause,’ meaning instances of inefficiency, neglect of duty, malfeasance in office, or comparable misconduct,” she argued. As a result, no president had attempted to fire a Federal Reserve governor before this week.

The law, such as it is, is on Cook’s side. In addition to the statutory protections of the FRA, the Supreme Court has long upheld removal protections for members of certain independent agencies led by multi-member boards or commissions. In 1935, the justices held in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States that similar protections for the commissioners of the Federal Trade Commission were lawful because of the “quasi-legislative” and “quasi-judicial nature” of the agency.

Humphrey’s Executor is a longtime target of the conservative legal establishment, which favors a “unitary” executive branch that wields absolute control over any and all federal agencies. To that end, the Roberts Court has overturned for-cause protections for the singular leaders of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Federal Housing Finance Agency in recent years. In May, it also declined to block Trump from dismissing members of the National Labor Relations Board and the Merit Systems Protection Board in Trump v. Wilcox, even though they are structured as multi-member commissions.

Many legal observers assumed that the court would not completely overturn Humphrey’s Executor because it would imperil the Fed’s independence, which in turn could have dire consequences for American financial markets and the nation’s long-term monetary health. The court’s refusal to intervene in Wilcox rendered Humphrey’s Executor practically moribund for formerly independent agencies. But the conservative majority also used the opportunity to implicitly warn Trump against moving against the Fed.

The plaintiffs in Wilcox gave the justices the opportunity to do so by arguing that rejecting their motion would implicate the Fed as well. “We disagree,” the justices replied in their unsigned opinion. “The Federal Reserve is a uniquely structured, quasi-private entity that follows in the distinct historical tradition of the First and Second Banks of the United States.”

This bespoke “Fed-only” exception reflects more than a century of debate before 1913 over whether the U.S. should have a central banking system at all. The First and Second Banks of the United States had 20-year charters that ended when Congress (in the first case) and Andrew Jackson (in the second case) declined to renew them. Jackson, who successfully slew the bank and kickstarted the Panic of 1837, is a longtime political hero of Trump.

The American economy then cycled from one banking panic to the next until 1907, when a major one nearly collapsed Wall Street. In response, Congress spent years considering solutions until it settled upon the creation of the Federal Reserve as we largely know it today. It is no surprise that Cook leaned heavily on the court’s fleeting shadow-docket reference to the Fed to buttress her own lawsuit.

One challenge for Cook and the court is that, because prior presidents had almost never challenged the for-cause protections for various federal agencies, there is not much precedent on what counts as a justifiable “cause.” The FRA, unlike some comparable statutes, did not define the term further. Generally speaking, she noted, the protection applies except in cases of “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office,” borrowing the phrasing from Humphrey’s Executor.

That last bit of phrasing—“malfeasance in office”—is particularly helpful for Cook. Even if the mortgage fraud allegations against her are true, they took place before her confirmation vote in 2022. (Cook is vague and elliptical about the veracity of the mortgage-fraud allegations, likely because the FHFA director referred them to the Justice Department for potential criminal investigation.) There is some common sense to this approach as well: It is arguably the Senate’s duty to keep out improper nominees before confirmation, and the president’s duty to ensure their good conduct thereafter.

Cook also argued that the president violated her Fifth Amendment rights by removing her without due process. “Governor Cook received neither notice nor a hearing before her purported firing,” she noted in her complaint. “Instead, she found out about the attempt to remove her through President Trump’s Truth Social post containing a letter addressed to her stating that ‘You are hereby removed from your position on the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, effective immediately.’” Again, common sense is on her side: If a for-cause appointee can’t meaningfully challenge the lawfulness of their removal, then it isn’t really a for-cause protection at all.

As I noted earlier this week, it is still possible that the Supreme Court botches this case. The court’s conservative majority has given Trump practically whatever he wants over the past two years. Supreme Court precedent and black-letter federal law have not significantly impeded him as he broadly restructures the federal government—and, to some degree, the nation—in his own image. At the same time, the justices drew a clear line in the sand here. Cook’s lawsuit makes it as easy as possible for them to hold it. The economic consequences of bowing to Trump once again, as Cook makes clear, are too immense to ignore.

This Democrat Proves You Can Be Principled, Effective—and Popular - 2025-08-29T10:00:00Z

In a debate during the New York City Democratic mayoral primary, the candidates were asked to name the most “effective” Democratic politician in America right now. Both Zohran Mamdani and Brad Lander said Boston Mayor Michelle Wu. They’re right. It’s hard to measure most effective, but Wu leads in a principled, practical, and yes, popular way that should be a model for Democrats in Washington and across the country in the Trump era.

Black Lives Matter, the Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren presidential campaigns, and other movements and events created a resurgent American left from 2015-2021. And that resurgence catapulted many progressives and leftists into powerful political roles. Some have been very successful, such as former Consumer Finance Protection Bureau director Rohit Chopra and former Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan.

But as the travails of Chicago’s Brandon Johnson, St. Louis’s Tishaura Jones, San Francisco’s Chesa Boudin, and others have shown, being a progressive mayor or district attorney is particularly challenging. These politicians ran campaigns pledging to rein in the police, wealthy developers, and other entrenched blocs in their cities—but then found those establishment forces too powerful to overcome in office.

But Wu has figured it out. Since being elected mayor in 2021 after seven years as a member of the Boston City Council, Wu has accomplished a lot: fare-free buses in some parts of the city; a big expansion of public preschool; new limits on the use of fossil fuels to power city-owned buildings; the development of thousands of units of new housing; a new contract with the police union that makes it easier to fire officers who commit crimes.

She has also managed her political brand smartly. Her approval rating is around 60 percent. Josh Kraft, one of the sons of New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, is running against Wu, whom he views as too liberal. But Kraft has gained little traction because the 40-year-old Wu is so well-liked.

And over the last few months, as the Trump administration has taken a number of steps to crack down on blue states and cities, Wu has become a national voice. Congressional Democrats seem wary of defending immigrants, cities, universities, federal workers or anything else that swing voters in Wisconsin may not like. Not Boston’s mayor.

“Congressman, respectfully, I’m the mayor of Boston. I don’t get to decide who comes into our country and where they go after that,” she told a Republican lawmaker during a GOP congressional hearing in March designed to bash big cities over the country’s immigration challenges. “Our job is to keep people fed and healthy and safe when they arrive in our city, and we do that in order to make sure that everyone across our community is safe. Resources are strained. Please do your job and be part of passing bipartisan legislation.”

Last week, after Attorney General Pam Bondi sent a letter demanding cities cooperate with ICE efforts to mass deport immigrants, Wu responded with a press conference flanked by other Boston leaders. “Stop attacking our cities to hide your administration’s failures,” Wu said. “Unlike the Trump Administration, Boston follows the law. And Boston will not back down from who we are and what we stand for.”

Why has Wu been successful in a way that other progressive local leaders have not? First of all, Boston is probably one of the easier places to lead from the left. Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, and other major cities are dominated by Democrats, but many of the donors and politicians are moderate figures more interested in maintaining the status quo than changing it. In contrast, truly progressive ideas and people have long been ascendant in Boston. Wu served on the city council with Ayanna Pressley, who has gone on to become one of the leading progressives on Capitol Hill. The mayor worked on Elizabeth Warren’s first U.S. Senate campaign in 2012.

“She has a strong base of allies on the council,” Jonathan Cohn, the policy director of Progressive Massachusetts, told me. “The Boston City Council had a series of elections in the late 2010s/early 2020s in which it became more female, more diverse, and more progressive.”

Beyond its political climate, Boston is arguably an easier big city to run than some others. It’s around 760,000 people—far smaller than New York (8 million) or Chicago (3 million.) Even before Wu took office, its murder rate was much lower than other cities.

Secondly, Wu is very skilled in the nuts and bolts, non-ideological parts of politics and conveys real interest in such details. That likely appeals to residents who care more about their garbage being picked up on time than the mayor’s responses to Trump. The mother of three says one of her goals is making Boston the most family-friendly city in the country. Her administration has created a program allowing kids in grades K-12 to visit many of the city’s museums for free. She’s avoided the logistics blunders of other mayors, such as Los Angeles’s Karen Bass, who was out of the country when wildfires first hit her city earlier this year.

Wu, like Mamdani and other progressive pols, has walked back from more anti-police rhetoric in 2020-21 that annoyed white moderate Democrats and Republicans and also didn’t resonate with rank and file African Americans and Latinos, even though they are wary of police brutality. She dropped 2021 her campaign trail promises to reduce the city’s police budget and get rid of its intelligence department, which the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts says does improper surveillance of activist groups.

I am not sure these are the right policy decisions, but not having an antagonistic relationship with city police is probably required to survive as a progressive mayor. Wu won the endorsement of Boston’s largest police union in March. The city’s already low crime rate has dropped even more during her tenure, and Wu has smartly leaned into that, describing Boston as the “safest major city in America.” (Crime is dropping in cities across the country, suggesting Wu’s policies aren’t the sole explanation for the dip.)

Third, and most importantly, Wu has core values. Many center-left Democratic mayors are somewhat effective at managing their cities but make little lasting impact because they don’t believe in much beyond having a prestigious job and appeasing the police and business community in their cities to keep it. In contrast, Wu is essentially a city-level Elizabeth Warren, standing up for average people in their interests and skeptical of the wealthy and big business. She is willing to push for progressive policies such as greater rent stabilization that require (and often fail to get) approval from the Massachusetts state legislature, which is dominated by cautious, centrist Democrats.

And while national Democrats claim moving to the right on issues on race and identity is required electorally and have therefore walked away from forceful defenses of transgender Americans, immigrants, African Americans and other minority groups, Wu has remained steadfast. “All over the country, people are feeling the weight of a federal administration that’s attacking our sources of strength—the same people and purpose that make Boston great: public servants and veterans; immigrants and the LGBTQ+ community; the institutions that conduct groundbreaking research and provide lifesaving care,” Wu said in a speech earlier this year.

I should be clear—Michelle Wu is not a savior, and her leadership approach may not work everywhere. Mayors have limited power. Boston remains a very expensive city that would be difficult for many Americans to move to and still has an enormous gap between its wealthy and its poor, who are disproportionately people of color. We are in a country with a dictatorial leader, so it’s sadly possible that Wu criticizing this administration and not complying with its edicts lands her in jail or somehow otherwise punished. And a person with her pro-immigrant and pro-inclusion politics perhaps can’t win a presidential election or a U.S. Senate race in a swing state.

But we shouldn’t ignore her successes either. Mayors have to deal with crime, housing, education, job creation, and every other problem—and actually get things done in a way that members of Congress and even most governors don’t. And whether we call them progressive, liberal, or something else, we need a Democratic Party with leaders who are fighting to defend the political rights and freedoms of every person while also trying to make sure the economy works for everyone.

It’s not saving democracy, fighting oligarchy, or ensuring affordability. It’s all of the above. That’s what Michelle Wu is doing in Boston. Zohran Mamdani thinks she’s a model leader—and so should the rest of the Democratic Party.

The Political Awakening of the Oyster Farmer Taking on Susan Collins - 2025-08-29T10:00:00Z

At 8 a.m., Taunton Bay is glassy—the air cool but salty enough to make your nose wrinkle. A man in rubber boots, canvas pants, and a black t-shirt worn to gray, carrying a large cooler on his shoulder passes me on the beach. “Ya here for Graham?” he says, his Maine accent looping the first two words together. 

“Yup,” I reply. 

“Good man,” he says, continuing on his way.

I flew here to profile Graham Platner because his announcement video for his Senate campaign (produced by the same company that’s done work for Zohran Mamdani) struck the same deep chord in me as it did in the millions of others who watched it. His plainspoken fury at the billionaire economy broke through the noise of the Trump presidency to capture extravagant donations of voters (the campaign says they’re closing in on $1 million) and the attention of media outlets across the country. 

That he’s been added as speaker at Bernie Sanders’s anti-oligarchy rally on Labor Day is unsurprising. That Sanders has had to move the rally to a bigger venue since Platner got on the bill is telling.

Aboard his boat, I break the ice by asking Platner to explain exactly how oyster farming works. His answer begins 5,000 years ago, with members of the Passamaquoddy tribe collecting oysters in the shallows as a major part of their diet: “It’s a source of protein that doesn’t run away when you try to catch it.” Easy to transport in its own protective case and able to survive out of the water for days, Roman armies carried them in rucksacks on campaigns. In the 1800s, New Yorkers ate about one million oysters a day, often picking them up for a convenient snack from carts on street corners, like hot dogs or a breakfast sandwich. They became a status symbol as their numbers dwindled. 

Today, the east coast has five percent of the oyster population it did at the turn of the twentieth century. The modern northeastern oyster trade exists because Rutgers University scientists saved the industry, breeding a disease-resistant strain of Crassostrea virginica in 1960.

Letting Platner’s lesson wash over me, it’s clear that the oyster is praxis as much as a menu item. From indigenous subsistence to working-class staple, a species decimated by extractive capitalism and the predilections of the elite, brought back to life by a public institution as a sustainable resource. It’s a case study in how labor, science, and regulation can still stitch together a community and economy.

He ends his story explaining that the oysters we’re about to eat are four or five years old, grown from “seed oysters” not even the size of a thumbnail. He bends over to haul up the crates, T-shirt riding up. Platner is not a candidate who checks if his boxers are showing when a reporter is watching.

He pops open half a dozen to enjoy with our coffee and they are the most delicious oysters I have ever eaten: The tart brine dissolves into fruit-like sweetness as your teeth break the skin. 

Between the gentle morning sun, the complex flavors of the oysters, and lulling water, it is easy to believe Platner when he says that he hasn’t paid himself to work for his company since he took it over five years ago. Anyone would do this job for free. His wife and business partner take checks for their labor but his contribution to the household comes in the form of checks from the Veterans Administration based on his 100 percent disabled status.

I post a picture of me enjoying Platner’s oysters (call it accepting a bribe if you want, I call it research), and almost immediately get a text from my friend the comedian, author, and part-time Maine resident John Hodgman: “I see you’re hanging with Graham!” I ask how they know each other and John says Platner shucks oysters at a nearby wine store. “I’ve only ever chatted with him there and on text,” Hodgman writes, “Mostly re: oysters. But I always liked him and am thrilled he’s running.”

These unprompted endorsements happen throughout my visit: there’s Hodgman, the guy on the beach, both times I stop for coffee at Dunbar’s Market, and several people as I’m standing with a notebook at Platner’s elbow during the AFL-CIO event that he attends as a supporter and not a speaker. I feel a little like I’m the butt of a practical joke—or that the campaign is spending some of its enormous first-week haul on hiring actors to play these very specific parts. “I begged him to run for office last winter,” one attendee at a meet-and-greet house party tells me. 

What position?

“Anything,” he replies. “And you know what he said to me? ‘Absolutely not.’”

I’m surprised, only because it is hard to get a short answer from Platner about anything, including why he ultimately decided to run for office: “People getting kidnapped in the state of Maine by masked federal agents,” “my friends can’t afford housing,” “authoritarianism,” and outrage over the Democratic Party’s inability to meaningfully stop, or even impede Donald Trump’s destruction of every American institution that matters. “Democrats talking about how they’re fighting fascism,” he wrote in a post on X. “It’s such bullshit. We’re not idiots. Everyone knows most of them aren’t doing jack shit right now to fight back.” 

And, of course, he wants to set fire to the oligarchy. 

He can’t name a single issue or event that changed his mind since his friend asked him to run for something last winter. It’s not that he’s new to politics—he’s volunteered for food banks and veteran causes, worked in mutual aid organizations across the state. He’s the local harbormaster. Platner used to say running for office seemed like a distraction—and, frankly, too much of a longshot. Now, he’s letting his passion rule him. “And,” he says, namechecking his wife, “Amy’s grateful she doesn’t have to listen to me rant anymore, now that I’m ranting at other people all day.”

Someone asks Platner why bother running as a Democrat. He says the infrastructure for fundraising would not be as robust if he ran as an independent and, besides, running as a Democrat in Maine isn’t the campaign-killer it would be elsewhere. “Also,” he says, “At my core, I’m a Democrat. I grew up as a Democrat, I voted Democratic, my whole life.”

He cautions: “I want to make it clear, I’m not running as a reform candidate here. We need to take the party back. We need to build power and leverage power, both in the party and the institutions of power to get what we need.”


Platner is blunt, even proud, about how much he’s benefitted from government programs. He wants everyone to benefit from them. He went to George Washington University on the GI Bill, he can afford a mortgage on his $250,000 home and to do a job he loves because of those disability checks. His healthcare is free, after a fashion—he paid for it with four tours in Iraq and Afghanistan during the grimiest slog of the War on Terror (fighting in Fallujah and Ramadi, among other places). 

“I came back struggling with the kinds of things you struggle with when you’ve been blown up a few times,” he says. He has two herniated disks and was diagnosed with a traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress syndrome. “But watching your friends die as the bar to meet for decent healthcare is disgusting.”

He protested the Iraq War before he enlisted in it. When I ask about the apparent contradiction, he shrugs: “I thought I could do some good. And I wanted to play soldier. I might have read too much Hemingway.” 

He insists the Marines are full of men like him, grunts who love both the anarchic politics of Black Flag and the grinding discipline of active duty. It reminds me of some boys I grew up with—young men for whom joining the military and radical protests were both ways of proving you could take more than most people could handle.

He still thinks of community organizing as the ultimate test of endurance—the same long-haul, no-glory, high-pain threshold ethos that drew him to both punk rock and the Marines. “I know people who organized against the Vietnam War and today they live in a world that is in some ways objectively worse.”

“And they’re not bitter,” he says. “If you believe in a better world, you need to get right with the fact that you may never see it.” At this point, he sniffles. “And now I’m going to cry a little. I can do that because I’ve had a lot of therapy.”


We meet up for coffee at his house. Its blue paint is peeling in places and it is surrounded by a wild thicket of head-high flowers and boating equipment in various stages of repair. Platner says that if he cocks his head just right, he can see the bay from the upstairs bedroom window. “And if I see white caps, I get to go back to bed.” 

Platner greets me at the door in shorts and a thin fleece half-zip that strains a bit at his stout chest and bulky arms. I don’t see him without a baseball cap much, but when he takes it off to run his hand over his head, his bleached strawberry-blonde hair has the texture of and is arranged like a haystack. He’s barefoot and drinking coffee out of a Bernie mug that’s both stained and faded. “Not for show,” he promises, and points to the Bernie bumper sticker on his refrigerator, itself buried under flyers for arts and crafts shows, fundraisers, and a poster for indigenous rights. His two dogs are underfoot. There’s a loving but cautious tan mutt (Gryffin, eight years old), and a goofy, exuberant black lab (Zevon, after Warren, a year and a half) who tosses his wriggling body around with the floppy gracelessness of an animal born to be in the water.

Volunteers trickle in and out while we talk, picking up a dwindling amount of flyers that were only printed a week ago. He says they’re seeing about 300 volunteers sign up every day.

In the unlikely event that pace continues to primary day in June 2026, he’ll have signed up about the number of people he needs to win the nomination, if voting trends continue. The last Democratic contest for the privilege of challenging five-term Republican senator Susan Collins drew in just 160,000 voters. 

Democrats have pined for Collins’s seat for years. Mainers’ independent streak makes it seem gettable; Dems are perennially stymied by Collins’s uncanny knack for convincing voters she’s not one of those Republicans. There are some signs that Mainers may finally be tiring of Collins’s amazing moderate magic trick. 

Her 2020 race against Sara Gideon was her narrowest in two decades—but she still won by a comfortable eight points. Pundits blamed Gideon’s failure to harness either voter anger at Collins’s chronic “concern” over Trump, or the momentum of Biden’s win, on a flawed strategy: nationalizing the race. Even her massive war chest—90 percent of it from out-of-state—was framed as a liability.

So while Platner’s fundraising haul is eye-popping (“It’s an unimaginable number to me,” he says), the avalanche of volunteers means more to him than the money. Platner drives home the need for his supporters to talk to their neighbors and friends over and over. Every Democrat in Maine knows Trump supporters. It’s a state of just 1.4 million people. Everyone in Maine knows everyone.

Even at this early stage, Platner is used to reporters asking how he will talk to Trump voters and his answer is always the same: He already talks to them. Every day. He can’t not talk to them. When I met him out on the water, the truck parked next to his had a Trump bumper sticker. 

The question—how will he talk to Trump voters?—is one that only makes sense if you’ve never lived near many. It’s a question off an SAT proctored by political consultants: a test you have to pass to be taken seriously by people who think “real America” is a riddle to solve. But Platner isn’t solving a riddle. He’s just existing.

Republicans rarely ask, “But how do we talk to Democrats?” They already know: You don’t win voters over by decoding them. You win them by speaking plainly—and by seeming like you mean it. Maybe that’s why Collins’s cosplaying moderation and then doing what the party tells her is wearing thin.

Reportedly, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is wooing Maine Governor Janet Mills to run for the nomination. At 77, a win against Collins would make her the oldest senate freshman in history. (Platner is 40.) Platner’s campaign only becomes an insurgency against Susan Collins if he first survives the Democratic establishment. His pointed critiques of party inaction have already set the tone. His candidacy isn’t just about beating Republicans, it’s about forcing Democrats to do more than fundraise off of their failures.

“I’ve not gotten a single phone call from anybody in the Democratic Party outside of the state of Maine. Nobody’s followed up with me from D.C. Nobody’s reached out. Nothing,” he says. “Which I take as a compliment.” 

Perhaps he should let those calls go to voicemail. Platner sees no reason to fear spooking a Trump voter on issues the Democratic consultant class has deemed to be politically radioactive. “I stand right in the fucking  way of anyone who’s going to try to come after the freedoms of the LGBTQIA+ community,” he wrote in a Reddit AMA. On X, he put it baldly: “There is a genocide happening in Palestine.”

Don’t run away from what you believe, he says. Plant the flag and move on. “Talk about health care affordability, about housing affordability, about basic material issues,” he says. “Be who you are and stick to it and don’t get dragged into the nonsense.” 


Before I’d pulled out my notebook, Platner and I talked about our favorite science fiction franchises. Platner told me that Star Trek’s optimism had inspired his earliest interest in policy. “This brings us back to Star Trek,” he says to wrap up his philosophy on culture war issues. “You have to solve scarcity. I believe that if you solve scarcity issues, no one gives a fuck about these other things.” 

Platner draws a distinction between the Trump voters who might still be convinced to rise up against the real elites, and the Trump enablers who’ve grown rich and powerful by backing him. “I’m not going to go down to Washington, have some conversations in a back room with somebody, and convince them that being a corrupt corporate scumbag is bad,” he says at the house party. It is his third campaign event ever and has about 50 people in attendance. 

To him, persuasion is a dead end if the people you’re trying to sway have already torched the rulebook. Power, as he sees it, is the ability to ignore the referee and keep scoring. His goal isn’t to negotiate—it’s to demonstrate what a candidate backed by a real movement can do. “It’s not about getting me elected. It’s not about getting anybody elected in many ways. It’s about using all of this as a mechanism of building working class power.”


I think about Platner’s bivalve dissertation that morning. While the oysters are developing, Platner and his partner go out multiple times a day to tumble each oyster crate by hand, creating just enough friction in the baskets so the shells grow cupped instead of like the head of axe, so they’re the right kind of plump and tender for the person who finally eats them, maybe four or five or six years later. It’s not back-breaking work, but it’s labor-intensive. It’s the kind of patient, repetitive effort that can’t be rushed if you value the result. 

Platner’s politics might remind people of his hero Bernie Sanders, but his style differs from the abrasive anti-charm that made a Bernie impression so solidly in Larry David’s wheelhouse. Where Bernie shouts and bristles—sometimes endearingly, sometimes like your grandpa’s growing frustration over a fritzing FaceTime call—Platner is gregarious, relentless, and warm. Where Bernie bulldozes with urgency, Platner gets stopped at the grocery store and engages.

If Bernie is what righteous anger sounds like, Platner is what it sounds like when that anger represents longing for connection. 

For Platner, it’s about proximity. Persuasion starts by having the shared space for a conversation, whether that’s sitting by the water or just room in your schedule.

“Individualism and hustle culture mean we’re always killing ourselves with work,” he says. “You’re too busy to talk to your neighbors.” Platner treasures the freedom that his disability pension gives him: He gets to choose to keep his company small, he gets to work the hours that make sense for him. Everyone should be able to. 

Precarity can spark the political division that Star Trek-style post-scarcity might alleviate, but Platner thinks its most pervasive damage to our society is more subtle: We just don’t have time for each other. This is not just a political crisis. It’s an existential one.

After 12 hours together over two days, I’ve mostly given up taking notes while we ride to the AFL-CIO event in Brewer; I’ve too much material already. We start talking about science fiction again and Platner takes it upon himself to preach the gospel of Andor to the young comms guy who’s been babysitting me, the only person in the car who isn’t already a believer. Platner calls it one of the best television shows ever, alongside Battlestar Galactica and The Wire. “Somehow,” he says, “they convinced Disney to do an entire show about the realities of violent resistance.” Platner’s friend Chris, who served with him in Iraq, is driving and nods vigorously. “It’s not pretty. You might fight beside bad people. You need them.” 

I’ve written before that the left’s embrace of Andor is part of a recognition that things might get quite bad, that people are bracing themselves for violence somewhere over the horizon. I share my theory: “I think people are really preparing for Andor.”

They both chuckle. Almost in unison, they say: “People aren’t ready.”

“Take it from an infantryman.”

Platner adds, “You’re never ready. People think they are, but they’re not.”

He turns around in the front seat and stabs a thick finger at the notebook that I had set aside. “Write this down,” he says. “No matter which way it goes—taking the Senate or the fall of democracy—whatever the eventuality, the work remains the same.”

“You have to build things for people to access. You have to build the apparatus for change, even if no one else shows up. If you don’t build the movement, it won’t be there when the day for action comes. It’s thankless. People live their entire lives building something they may never see succeed. And you do it anyway.”

Trump Press Sec’s Dimwitted Spin Implodes as RFK Firing Fiasco Worsens - 2025-08-29T09:00:00Z

The White House is trying to fire Centers for Disease Control director Susan Monarez for opposing Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s anti-vaccine policies. This has sent the CDC sliding into chaos. On Thursday, press secretary Karoline Leavitt struggled to spin what’s happening. She said Monarez had never been subject to a vote—but the Senate voted to confirm her. Leavitt insisted the White House had fired Monarez—but Trump’s direct word appears to be required, and as of this recording, he hadn’t spoken. Leavitt pretended Trump is defending the integrity of our vaccine system—but RFK is destroying it, and the continuing CDC walkout also wrecks her claim. We talked to the University of Michigan’s Don Moynihan, author of a good Substack called Can We Still Govern? We discussed how Trump will struggle to defend this move, how the American people will recoil at the looming loss of a professionalized bureaucracy, and how all this is sowing the seeds for catastrophe later. Listen to this episode here. A transcript is here.

Republican Official Accused of Drugging Granddaughters’ Ice Cream - 2025-08-28T22:23:44Z

A Republican official in North Carolina was charged with felony child abuse after he allegedly attempted to drug his two granddaughters with cocaine and MDMA.

The chairman of the Surry County Board of Elections, James Edwin Yokeley Jr., told police earlier this month that he had discovered “two hard objects” in ice cream he had bought from a local Dairy Queen—but video evidence collected during the investigation suggested otherwise.

Yokeley was reportedly caught on tape placing the pills in the girls’ ice cream himself, the Wilmington Police Department said in a press release Wednesday. Neither child ingested the drug-laced pills.

The local Republican chair was arrested and is currently held on a $100,000 bail. Along with the child abuse charges, Yokeley faces two counts of contaminating food or drink with a controlled substance, and felony possession of schedule 1 narcotics.

Yokeley only recently came into power in the artsy beach town: The 66-year-old was appointed in June by State Auditor Dave Boliek, though the state official no longer appears to be one of his supporters. In an interview with WRAL News, Boliek called the matter “very disturbing.”

Yokeley was selected in part because of his previous experience on the board. He had previously run for a seat on the Surry County Board of Education in 2022, winning 26.69 percent of the vote in the Republican primary. Boliek emphasized that “nothing” had appeared in the election officials’ background check “that would suggest this at all.”

Yokeley resigned via letter Thursday afternoon, though he insisted that he had been “falsely accused.”

“Based on the truth and facts, I remain prayerfully confident that I will be exonerated of all accusations levied against me,” Yokeley wrote.

In a statement to the News & Observer, Boliek said that the resignation would allow the board to “move forward with the process of appointing a replacement.”

White House’s Argument on Ousted CDC Director Gets More Unbelievable - 2025-08-28T22:02:20Z

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt struggled to defend President Donald Trump’s decision to oust Susan Monarez, former head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

While taking questions at a White House press briefing Thursday, Leavitt was asked about a statement from Monarez lawyer Mark Zaid, who alleged she was fired after she “refused to rubber-stamp unscientific, reckless directives and fire dedicated health experts.”

“What specifically did she do wrong?” asked one reporter. 

“Look, what I will say about this individual is that her lawyers’ statement made it abundantly clear themselves that she was not aligned with the president’s mission to make America healthy again,” Leavitt said. “And the secretary asked her to resign, she said she would, and then she said she wouldn’t, so the president fired her, which he has every right to do.”

“It was President Trump who was overwhelmingly re-elected on November 5. This woman has never received a vote in her life, and the president has the authority to fire those who are not aligned with his mission,” Leavitt continued. 

But Leavitt was wrong. Just one month ago, Monarez was confirmed by a Senate vote along party lines, and was sworn into office shortly after. If she wasn’t aligned with Trump’s mission, it’s unclear why that wouldn’t have been determined in April when he nominated her, or anytime after.

Leavitt said a new nominee would be announced soon. 

Monarez’s firing has sparked outrage at the CDC. Four agency heads resigned Wednesday, warning that Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had compromised the agency’s mission with anti-vaccine policies and other growing misinformation. CDC staff also staged a walkout Thursday, in response to the ongoing turmoil.  

MAGA Rep. Slams Trump’s Shady Takeover of Businesses - 2025-08-28T21:50:08Z


President Donald Trump’s MAGA agenda is increasingly at odds with free market economics, and some key conservatives are beginning to notice.

At least one Republican—Texas Representative Chip Roy—has harpooned the president’s Intel deal, reminding CNBC Thursday that government stakes in private entities defies conservative values.

Roy also challenged the Trump administration’s intent to develop a state-owned investment fund known as a sovereign wealth fund.

“I think the problem here is that we built up through the broken system and the swamp, this world in which these corporations depend so heavily on the government, when in fact what they should be doing is producing products and competing in the market,” Roy said.

“What I don’t like is taking up stakes in private entities,” he continued. “And in terms of a sovereign wealth fund, we’ve got a massive amount of ability to produce wealth and capital in this country by virtue of free enterprise.”

Roy then claimed that America’s economics had allowed it to front global innovation, citing the creation of the lightbulb, flight, and space travel.

“Now, in the area of tech and AI and everything else, we’ve done that through our innovation and through private enterprise. We do not want to go down the road of government ownership of these things,” he underscored.

The Texas lawmaker did concede that the White House had rightly identified the need to “clean up” corporate dependence on government and “restore competition,” but added that he doesn’t love the idea of government “getting in the game” of the private sector.

Last week, the Trump administration took a 10 percent stake in Intel, purchasing 433.3 million shares for a total price of $8.9 billion. The transaction made the U.S. government Intel’s single largest shareholder, though Intel said that the White House would not have a board seat or hold any governing rights of the company.


Despite widespread concern regarding the federal infiltration, one of Trump’s top economic advisers—National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett—said that Trump is already looking to cut more deals with other companies.

“I’m sure that at some point there’ll be more transactions, if not in this industry, in other industries,” National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett told CNBC Monday.

It’s not the only time that Roy has clashed with Trump.

Roy has fielded plenty of criticism from the MAGA leader—including being heckled as “weak and ineffective”—for daring to oppose the president’s agenda. The pair notably split opinions on the “big, beautiful bill,” when the Freedom Caucus member raised hell over the tax cut’s enormous price tag.

Trump Pulls In Navy for His Next Takeover of Blue City - 2025-08-28T20:20:35Z

President Donald Trump’s administration is asking the naval base outside of Chicago, Illinois for help carrying out the president’s massive deportation campaign, apparently as part of his planned federal takeover of the Windy City.

Navy Captain Stephen Yargosz, the commanding officer of the Naval Station Great Lakes bases, wrote an email to his leadership team alerting them that agents with the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement would be housed at the base starting after Labor Day, and throughout the month of September.

“These operations are similar to what occurred in Los Angeles earlier this summer. Same DHS team,” Yargosz wrote in the email obtained by The Chicago Sun Times. “This morning I received a call that there is the potential to also support National Guard units. Not many details on this right now. Mainly a lot of concerns and questions.”

Naval Station Great Lakes spokesperson Matt Mogle said Wednesday that the Lake Michigan adjacent base had received a request from the DHS, asking for “limited support in the form of facilities, infrastructure, and other logistical needs to support DHS operations.”

Mogle said that no decision had been made on the request, and that they’d received no formal request to mobilize National Guard troops in Chicago, according to the Associated Press.

DHS’s request to Naval Station Great Lakes comes as Trump has set his sights on Chicago to expand his baseless law enforcement crackdown in Los Angeles and Washington D.C. (read: intimidation campaign of Democratic cities) using National Guard troops. The president has claimed he has the “the right to do anything” he wants.

Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, and Senators Tammy Duckworth and Dick Durbin all said that they had not received any information from the White House about the naval support request.

During a press conference earlier this week, Pritzker warned Trump to keep out of Chicago.

Trump Fires Top Transportation Official Overseeing Key Merger - 2025-08-28T20:08:23Z

President Trump has fired Surface Transportation Board member Robert Primus, a Democrat, who he himself first appointed to the railroad regulator board in 2020. Primus, who was expected to weigh in on a major railroad merger, is at least the fourth top official fired this week, joining ousted Federal Reserve Board of Governors member Lisa Cook, CDC Director Susan Monarez, and Defense Intelligence Agency Director Jeffrey Kruse. 

Primus plans to protest his firing. 

“This is deeply troubling and legally invalid,” he wrote in an email sent to The Wall Street Journal. He also noted that his firing would “adversely affect the freight rail network in a way that may ultimately hurt consumers and the economy.”

The White House disagreed.

“Robert Primus did not align with the President’s America First agenda,” the White House said in a statement. “The Administration intends to nominate new, more qualified members to the Surface Transportation Board in short order.”

It’s possible that Primus’s firing had something to do with his history of opposing megamerger’s for the sake of the public good. In 2023, he was the only member of the Surface Transportation Board to go against the Canadian Pacific and Kansas City Southern railroad merger. And Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern recently announced a $71.5 billion deal to join together to control all coast-to-coast rail shipments for the first time ever in this country—a megamerger that the Surface Transportation Board was still considering.  

It is unclear whether Trump has tapped a replacement for Primus, even as the ousted board member looks into a potential legal challenge. Cook and Monarez have also refused to vacate their positions. 

GOP Lawmaker Flees His Own Town Hall Rather Than Face Furious Voters - 2025-08-28T19:52:26Z

Yet another Republican member of Congress was blasted by his constituents at his own town hall over his support for President Donald Trump’s agenda. Barry Moore of Alabama, a U.S. representative and Senate candidate, slipped out the back door of a Wednesday event in Daphne, as the audience erupted in shouts of “Shame!”

According to a video of the event posted online, an early sign of trouble for Moore came at his first mention of Trump’s tax and spending plan, which includes historic rollbacks of the social safety net and, according to the Congressional Budget Office, will further enrich the rich and impoverish the poor.

The name of the so-called “big, beautiful bill” alone drew boos.

“So, I guess you guys maybe have read the legislation, I don’t know,” Moore said, leading more than one attendee to shout, “Have you?”

When Moore claimed inflation is the lowest it’s been in decades, attendees laughed in disbelief. The response was even more raucous when he claimed that no Americans will lose Medicaid under Trump’s plan. “That is not true!” “You’re lying!” people shouted.

Then came the Q&A portion, beginning with a question about whether Moore believes consumers pay for Trump’s tariffs. “So, right now, what we just saw in a report is that we haven’t seen inflation at all—” he began. But, sensing his evasiveness, the crowd began to chant: “Who pays the tariffs? Who pays the tariffs?”

Moore similarly struck out with his audience on social issues. He attributed Republican electoral gains in 2024, in part, to voters realizing that “they don’t want men in our daughters’ locker rooms,” a take that elicited outcry. (“There’s a pedophile in the White House!” one woman yelled.)

Asked if he supports “no-exception abortion bans, even if somebody you know were raped,” Moore said, “I am 100 percent pro-life,” and was once again showered in boos.

On the topic of immigration, one attendee asked why immigrants are being deported without due process. Moore replied that “due process for a citizen and noncitizen are different,” and the audience fell into chants of “Shame! Shame! Shame!” as the congressman headed out the back door.

The congressman licked his wounds during a Thursday appearance on a conservative radio show, where he claimed the event had been “hijacked” by left-wing “agitators.”

Bondi and Patel Will Soon Testify in Congress on Jeffrey Epstein Case - 2025-08-28T18:55:47Z

After deceiving their base and inadvertently sparking days of national controversy, Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel will finally be called to testify before Congress.

Bondi and Patel will appear before the House Judiciary Committee, with the attorney general testifying on September 17 and the FBI director on October 9, according to Politico. The majority of the questioning is expected to focus on the Justice Department’s handling of the Epstein case, like how Bondi went from claiming she had the Epstein files “sitting on my desk” to declaring the case closed, and why whatever files the administration has released contain virtually no new information.

While the Epstein files have not dominated the daily news cycle in recent weeks as they initially did, Congress’s return from recess next week may very well kick the discourse back into gear.

Democrats will likely focus on Trump’s relationship to the deceased sex predator, while Republicans will try to appease MAGA loyalists who have been chasing the story for years. Either way, Bondi and Patel are sure to face some tough questioning regarding their apparent mishandling of it all.

Former Trump Labor Secretary Alex Acosta—who as U.S. Attorney to the Southern District of Florida provided Epstein with the sweetheart plea deal that allowed him to avoid any real punishment for his sex trafficking crimes—has also agreed to be interviewed by the House Oversight Committee on September 19.

Now We Know Why RFK Jr. Wanted to Fire This CDC Director - 2025-08-28T18:42:12Z

Susan Monarez, former head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, refused to bend to the Trump administration’s demands. Then she was fired.

That’s the explanation behind Wednesday’s sudden events, according to former CDC director Richard Besser.

Speaking with reporters Thursday, Besser explained that he had talked with Monarez hours before the Health Department announced her departure.

“She said that there were two things she would never do in the job,” Besser said. “She said she was asked to do both of those, one in terms of firing her leadership, who are talented civil servants like herself, and the other was to rubber stamp [vaccine] recommendations that flew in the face of science, and she was not going to do either of those things.”

Besser was concerned by her departure, he told ABC News. “She is a very principled scientist, a public servant, and having someone like that in that role gave me some hope there could be pushback against some of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s moves.”

Three top leaders at the agency resigned in the wake of Monarez’s dismissal, including former Chief Medical Officer Debra Houry, former National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases Director Demetre Daskalakis, and National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases Director Daniel Jernigan.

In June, Kennedy replaced independent medical experts on the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s vaccine advisory panel with vaccine skeptics. Monarez was confirmed to run the CDC in late July and lasted less than a month in her position.

Monarez’s time was spent constructing guardrails for the newly reconfigured panel, including a failed attempt to make the panel’s evidence and slides publicly available, and an unsuccessful bid to “replace the federal official that oversees the committee with someone with more policy experience,” Houry told Politico.

Skirting direct questions about Monarez’s sudden departure during an interview with Fox & Friends Thursday, Kennedy insisted that the CDC was in trouble.

“We need to fix it, and we are fixing it, and it may be that some people should not be working there anymore,” he said.

With or without Monarez, Kennedy’s policies have already greatly reduced Americans’ ability to access vaccines.

Just this month, he divested $500 million from mRNA research, effectively axing 22 mRNA studies since, according to Kennedy, they “fail to protect” against “upper respiratory infections like COVID and flu.” He also deauthorized Covid-19 vaccinations for children and adults under 65, despite evidence that pregnant women and children are some of the most at-risk demographics for serious complications related to Covid infections.

Lindsey Graham Calls for Sanctions on Norway After Major BDS Move - 2025-08-28T18:14:01Z

Senator Lindsey Graham on Thursday threatened to slap tariffs on Norway for its sovereign wealth fund’s decision to divest from an American company reportedly complicit in Israeli human rights abuses in Gaza and the West Bank.

As part of an ongoing ethics review meant to root out investments that contribute to Israeli violations of international law, the Norwegian wealth fund announced this week that it would exclude the construction equipment manufacturer Caterpillar. The ethics council concluded, “There is no doubt that Caterpillar’s products are being used to commit extensive and systematic violations of international humani­tarian law.” Namely, “Bulldozers manufactured by Caterpillar are being used by Israeli authorities in the widespread unlawful destruction of Palestinian property,” the council found, as the Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions (BDS) movement has long pointed out.

Graham threatened the fund on X Wednesday, writing, “Your BS decision will not go unanswered.” On Thursday, he specified that he hopes to “put tariffs on countries who refuse to do business with great American companies” or to refuse visas to people punishing U.S. companies “for geopolitical differences.”

“To those who run Norway’s sovereign wealth fund: if you cannot do business with Caterpillar because Israel uses their products, maybe it’s time you’re made aware that doing business or visiting America is a privilege, not a right,” Graham warned.

The intimidation tactic is unsurprising from a politician who has proven himself an unquestioning cheerleader of the Israeli government amid the atrocities it is committing in Palestine. In June, Graham summed up his foreign policy approach regarding Israel as follows: “God blesses those who bless Israel.” (And the Republican senator has been blessed abundantly by pro-Israel lobbying groups, reportedly to the tune of $1 million throughout his political career.)

This is not the first time Graham has threatened hefty punishments on countries seeking to uphold international law.

In November 2024, Graham vowed that countries would face draconian sanctions if they complied with the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for war crimes and crimes against humanity. “If you help the ICC, we’re going to crush the economy,” the senator said at the time. “Because we’re next,” he added. “Why can’t they go after Trump, or any other American president, under this theory?”

Republican Town Hall Goes Sideways as Hundreds Chant “Tax the Rich” - 2025-08-28T17:01:58Z

Constituents at Ohio Representative Warren Davidson’s town hall drowned him out with boos, jeers, and chants of “tax the rich” on Wednesday night. Attendees were particularly upset about Ohio’s National Guard being deployed in Washington, D.C., Davidson’s support for President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, and tariffs.

“[How will you lower] the inflated levels of government spending today to a level that is sustainable and will not crush our children with debt?” Read one of the constituent submitted questions.

“Yeah great question, thank you for that. I think that—”

“Tax the rich! Tax the rich! Tax the rich! Tax the rich!” the crowd interrupted, growing louder with each chant.

The town hall later turned to the Republican representative’s support for the Trump administration’s agenda.

“Why would you vote to pass the One Big Beautiful Bill when it raises the national debt to $3.4 trillion, and hurts the poorest of Americans?” A constituent asked Davidson. The crowd applauded in support of the question.

“The One Big Beautiful Bill is a imperfect bill, but it is—it is beautiful,” Davidson answered weakly, pausing between words while the audience groaned and yelled, “Bullshit!” at him. “If we did not pass this bill, we would have faced a default on our debt. [Which is] inacceptable [sic]. Almost everyone in the room, if you pay income taxes, would’ve had your taxes increased.”

The crowd grumbled again.

“And I’d just like to know … who is in the super high income tax bracket that gets tips? No tax on tips. No tax on Social Security. These things are big wins for Americans,” Davidson continued as the crowd grew more and more irate. “And look, President Trump is doing a great job of securing the border.”

“No!” the crowd screamed, booing even more.

Davidson was a bit dismayed by his constituents’ indignation.

“I tried to basically serve the people that wanted to come have an actual town hall,” Davidson told Ohio’s Spectrum News. “It was disappointing that a lot of other people were very disruptive. So hopefully the people that endured and stayed through it all got some benefit out of it.”

JD Vance Melts Down Over MSNBC Host’s Minneapolis Shooting Comments - 2025-08-28T16:59:58Z

Vice President JD Vance is having a temper tantrum over people criticizing the phrase “thoughts and prayers” as a suitable response to a deadly mass shooting.

MSNBC host Jen Psaki called out leaders’ lackluster response to the school shooting in Minneapolis Wednesday, drawing the ire of the vice president.

“Prayer is not freaking enough,” Psaki wrote in a post on X Thursday. “Prayers does not end school shootings. Prayers do not make parents feel safe sending their kids to school. Prayer does not bring these kids back. Enough with the thoughts and prayers.”

Vance, who is known for his emotional outbursts—both online and off—appeared to have been stewing on this argument, and slammed Psaki’s statement.

“We pray because our hearts are broken. We pray because we know God listens. We pray because we know that God works in mysterious ways, and can inspire us to further action,” Vance wrote Thursday morning. “Why do you feel the need to attack other people for praying when kids were just killed praying?”

Vance appears to be willfully misinterpreting Psaki’s criticism. The host was making the point that constituents should expect more from their leaders than some kind of rhetoric—and the “further action” Vance mentions never seems to materialize after mass shootings.

The vice president had offered his own helpless response to the deadly incident on Wednesday. “We’re at the WH monitoring the situation in Minneapolis. Join all of us in praying for the victims!” Vance wrote.

It’s worth noting that the Trump administration is already leaping into action—but not by banning guns, or doing anything that might actually prevent another mass shooting.

President Trump announced Wednesday that the White House would lower the flags to half-mast through Sunday evening. And on Thursday, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said he would investigate whether antidepressants can be linked to homicidal ideation (spoiler alert: the NIH have already found no significant connection between the two).

RFK Jr. Makes Extremely Weird Comments About How Children Look - 2025-08-28T16:12:34Z

Maybe it’s the brain worms, but Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. claims he can look at a child and diagnose them with cellular difficulties.

The 71-year-old wellness conspiracist warned reporters Wednesday that America’s children are suffering from “mitochondrial challenges,” an non-clinical term that suggests Kennedy is capable of peering into a person’s cellular health at a glance.

“I know what a healthy child is supposed to look like,” Kennedy said. “I’m looking at kids as I walk through the airports today, as I walk down the street, and I see these kids that are overburdened with mitochondrial challenges, with inflammation, you can tell from their faces, from their body movements and from their lack of social connection.”

“I know that’s not how our children are supposed to look,” he added.

Kennedy then went on to lament the prevalence of autism, which he got wrong. The health secretary told the Austin crowd that one in 25 Texans have autism—a baseless overexaggeration. In reality, one in 31 people are estimated to have autism, according to data based on national averages that was released by the Autism Society of Texas.

Kennedy has waged an unscientific war on America’s public health policy since he took the reins of the Department of Health and Human Services in February.

So far, he has replaced independent medical experts on the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s vaccine advisory panel with vaccine skeptics. He also warned against the use of the MMR vaccine during Texas’s historic measles outbreak, recommending that suffering patients instead take vitamins. And he founded his new directive for America’s health policy—the “Make America Healthy Again” report—on studies generated by AI that never existed in the real world.

His anxieties surrounding autism are particularly alarming. Kennedy is a part of a growing movement of anti-vax parents who refuse to provide their children with the same public health advantages that they received in their youth, mostly in fear of thoroughly debunked conspiracy theories that, at one point, linked autism to the jab.

The researcher who sparked that myth with a fraudulent paper lost his medical license and eventually rescinded his opinion. Since then, dozens of studies have proven there’s no correlation between autism and vaccines, including one study that surveyed more than 660,000 children over the course of 11 years.

Regardless, Kennedy’s ideologies—and his firm grip on HHS—has already eaten away at America’s vaccine access.

Just this month, he has deauthorized Covid-19 vaccinations for children and adults under 65, and divested $500 million from mRNA research, effectively axing 22 mRNA studies since,according to Kennedy, they “fail to protect” against “upper respiratory infections like COVID and flu.”

Scholars Say America Under Trump Is Authoritarian, Not Democratic - 2025-08-28T15:39:23Z

America is well beyond democratic erosion and democratic backsliding and now approaching a form of authoritarianism with elements of fascism, says Brendan Nyhan, a professor of government at Dartmouth College. Other scholars are making similar arguments. In the latest episode of Right Now With Perry Bacon, Nyhan argued that the lack of opposition to Trump from the Supreme Court and Congress in particular has made the president much stronger. He said authoritarian takeovers in other countries happened more slowly, in part because there was more institutional opposition. Scholars and journalists, according to Nyhan, need to sound the alarm against Trump, even if it gets them accused of being partisan. Nyhan expressed concern that the divides between progressive and centrist Democrats were weakening the resistance to Trump, particularly since the Republican Party is so consolidated around the president. You can watch this episode here.

RFK Jr. Finds Twisted Reason to Take Away Your Anti-Depression Meds - 2025-08-28T15:27:21Z

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is investigating whether antidepressants can be linked to homicidal ideation after a mass shooting in Minneapolis.

While appearing on Fox & Friends Thursday morning, Kennedy was asked whether he planned to examine the drugs used by the shooter, who authorities identified as transgender. Host Brian Kilmeade appeared anxious for Kennedy to link the shooter’s medical transition to the deadly incident which killed two children.

“We’re launching studies on the potential contribution of some of the [selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor] drugs, and some of the other psychiatric drugs that might be contributing to violence. You know, many of them have black box warnings that warn of suicidal ideation and homicidal ideation,” Kennedy replied.

As head of the Department of Health and Human Services, Kennedy has suggested that the people who take antidepressants—some 11 percent of the population—are more likely to become school shooters. In January, Kennedy said that the National Institutes of Health needed to study SSRIs and video games as potential causes of increased gun violence, dismissing actual guns as a potential cause.

One 2015 study published by World Psychiatry* found that “antidepressants should not be denied to either adults or adolescents due to a presumed risk of homicidal behavior.”

Minnesota Senator Tina Smith slammed Kennedy’s comments in a post on X Thursday.

“I dare you to go to Annunciation School and tell our grieving community, in effect, guns don’t kill kids, antidepressants do,” she wrote. “Just shut up. Stop peddling bullshit. You should be fired.”

*This article misstated where the 2015 study was published.

Adam Friedland Rips Democratic Lawmaker in Damning Interview on Israel - 2025-08-28T15:13:57Z

New York Representative Ritchie Torres—one of AIPAC’s strongest soldiers—left Jewish comedian and talk show host Adam Friedland stunned by the soulless, robotic talking points he kept leaning on to justify Israel’s abhorrent genocide of Palestinians. 

“Hamas murdered thousands of people so,” said Torres in one of the multiple viral clips the interview generated. 

“So what does that mean?” Friedland asked. 

“That Hamas is a terrorist organization for murdering innocent children and civilians.”

“How many civilians have been killed in this war?” Friedland asked earnestly. Torres went quiet for a beat, as if trying to remember how AIPAC taught him to respond to good-faith questions about the carnage Israel has unleashed on Gaza.

“The war is a tragedy—” said Torres.

“Ninety percent of them have been civilians!” said an exasperated Friedland, referring to an IDF database that confirms over 80 percent of the Palestinians murdered by Israel have been noncombatant civilians. “They’ve killed, they’ve killed journalists!” 

“People have been killed in a war, it’s been a tragedy,” Torres said emotionlessly. 

‘They’ve killed people waiting for aid.” 

“But you’re suggesting that it is the policy of the Israeli government to murder civilians, and that’s, that is a notion that I reject.” 

“You gotta like, listen man, you gotta be like a human being about this,” Friedland replied.

“People who are dying in the war, which to me is a tragedy because war is a tragedy—” 

“Do you feel in your heart that what you’re saying is right?” 

“If Hamas, if you remove Hamas—” 

“You don’t actually think that—”

“I told you what I believe,” Torres said sharply, the monotone cadence slipping a bit. “Don’t tell me what I believe, I’ve told you what I believe.” 

“Why would you believe that?” 

“Because there are people who see the world differently.” 

Multiple other clips of the interview also went viral, as Torres struggled to respond to Friedland’s earnest concerns about the genocide, and the impacts of Israel’s actions on the Jewish community worldwide.

“What does it look like to have a flag with a Jewish star, and I’m Jewish, for kids to be starving right now?” Friedland asked Torres.

“It just sounds like you’re justifying antisemitism,” Torres said.

“Are you crazy right now?”

The conversation continued, and tensely. 

“If you have disagreements with the Israeli government, you should voice your criticism of the Israeli government,” Torres said in a later clip. “But there is no justification for intimidation or harassment against American Jews.” 

“I’m telling you as a Jew right now that we are receiving a lot more hate because of what the people with the flag that has a Jewish star on it are doing to other people right now,” Friedland responded passionately. “As a Jewish person … how painful it is for us to say, and it hurts my stomach to say this—and you’re gonna say ‘I disagree, I disagree’—that this is a genocide. And that hurts to say that a Jew could do that. It hurts because we grew up with learning about what hatred is. We grew up learning about this. And the same year the state of Israel was established, 1948, the world saw the Holocuast, and they established standards for what a genocide is. It was the same year. And the world said this shouldn’t be a thing that happens.” 

Torres has been an empty-headed AIPAC mouthpiece for some time now. His first time truly criticizing Israel’s actions over the last two years was last month, and it was uninspiring. His mind-numbingly obtuse interview with Friedland only reinforces just how far gone he is. 

Torres can say the word tragedy as much as he wants, it only makes his loyalty to AIPAC and the other Israeli lobbies that line his pockets that much more obvious. Torres can say that this genocide is so unfortunate, and it’s always so sad when people die, but he still refuses to say anything bad about Israel, no matter how many men, women, and children they bomb and shoot and brutalize, no matter how many hospitals and mosques and churches and schools they destroy.

And frankly, it is Israeli policy to murder civilians. How could it not be when an overwhelming majority of those killed are just that? IDF soldiers have admitted to being ordered to open fire indiscriminately at Palestinians desperately rushing to aid sites. Just two days ago Israel bombed Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, waited for aid workers to get there, and bombed it again ten minutes later. Twenty people were killed, including journalists, workers, and doctors. Israel simply called the very deliberate bombing of the same spot twice a “tragic mishap.” And yet Torres remains unflinching in his defense of the genocidal government.

The interview has resonated deeply across the internet. 

“This interview is insane. Adam Friedland wrestles with the profound inner conflict and shame of being raised Zionist and opposing the Israeli genocide while Ritchie Torres sneers at him through the most banal talking points and accuses him of doing a ‘gotcha’ interview,” journalist and podcast host Alex Goldman wrote on X. 

“Ritchie Torres defending Israel by telling Adam Friedland he doesn’t know the Jewish experience is one [of] the most antisemetic statements I have witnessed in recent memory lol,” wrote another user. 

Others pointed out the cold, eerie mannerisms that Torres addressed Friedland with. 

“One thing that struck me abt the Adam Friedland interview with Ritchie Torres is how deeply, unsettlingly strange Torres is as an individual,” another popular account said. “His movements, his expressions, his terrible timing, the way he sits—it’s almost as if he’s literally an alien. disturbing, in many ways.”

“How Ritchie Torres can sit there and argue with a jew, who lived in Israel, comes from a family who went through [apartheid] in [South Africa] and was also a Middle Eastern studies major in college, and is crying from his soul and say this is wild. He’s a fucking robot. Adam Friedland 2028,” another account wrote.

Friedland’s full interview with Torres can be found here.  

“Unprecedented and Illegal”: Lisa Cook Sues Trump—and Jerome Powell - 2025-08-28T15:07:44Z

Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, whom Donald Trump is seeking to fire in an escalating campaign of lawfare against his political enemies, is officially taking the president to court.

In a lawsuit filed Wednesday, the Fed board member says Trump’s “concocted basis” for her removal fails to “amount to ‘cause’”—and is an “unprecedented and illegal” violation of her due process rights as well as the central bank’s independence.

Stunningly, the lawsuit also names Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell and the Board of Governors as defendants.

Trump on Monday fired Cook over (seemingly vengeance-driven) accusations of mortgage fraud. The lawsuit, however, says the allegations are “pretextual, in order to effectuate her prompt removal and vacate a seat for President Trump to fill and forward his agenda to undermine the independence of the Federal Reserve.”

Cause, under the Federal Reserve Act, means “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.” But even if Trump’s authority to remove a Fed board member goes beyond that, Cook’s lawyers state, he is not allowed to “unilaterally redefine ‘cause’—completely unmoored to caselaw, history, and tradition—and conclude, without evidence, that he has found it.”

“Certainly,” the suit continues, “a policy dispute between the President and a Governor does not constitute ‘cause.’ Neither does a specious assertion that a one ‘potentially’ committed a crime—one which is unproven, uncharged, and unrelated to official conduct.”

So expansive is Trump’s “conception of ‘cause,’” Cook warns, that “it would allow him to remove any Federal Reserve Board member with whom he disagrees about policy based on chalked up allegations.”

The lawsuit also notes that Bill Pulte, head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, has lobbed accusations of mortgage-related misdeeds against others of late (i.e., Senator Adam Schiff and New York Attorney General Letitia James). Notably, Cook’s lawyers note, each of Pulte’s criminal referrals have been “at one time or another, political targets of President Trump’s ire prior to any mortgage fraud allegations.”

This fact has caused suspicions that Pulte is working through an enemies list—perhaps even handed down from the White House. And, as TNR’s Greg Sargent observed this week, the discovery process in Cook’s case against Trump could help reveal potential White House involvement.

This story has been updated.

“Stop Lying”: Voters Erupt at GOP Lawmaker’s Shocking Claim on Economy - 2025-08-28T14:45:44Z

Constituents in Iowa’s 2nd Congressional District showered Representative Ashley Hinson with boos and jeers for supporting President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful” bill.

The Republican lawmaker was excoriated during a town hall Wednesday in Worth County, where Iowans urged Hinson to “stop lying” after she baselessly claimed that the president’s key legislation had ushered in “higher wages” and an improved cost of living.

“Higher wages?” shouted one woman incredulously. “For who? For you?”

“Cost of living is higher than it’s ever been,” another woman said.

Hinson, a former TV journalist, has been remarkably unpopular at town halls across her state as she ardently defends Trump’s agenda. She faced even more heat in May when she told a crowd in Elkader that she was “proud to vote for President Trump’s ‘one big beautiful bill’,” eliciting so much contempt from the crowd that they yelled at her until she stopped speaking.

“You are a fraud,” a constituent shouted at her at the time.

Hinson isn’t the only MAGA legislator who has gotten scorched during the last few weeks for voting against the interests of her constituents.

Wyoming Representative Harriet Hageman faced outrage last week for supporting Trump’s tariffs, New York Representative Elise Stefanik was roundly booed by a feisty crowd when she emerged in Plattsburg Monday to rename a county building, and Nebraska Representative Mike Flood was excoriated during a town hall earlier this month for failing to protect SNAP benefits, veterans’ programs, and health care access, which combined with voters’ simmering resentment for lagging on the release of the Epstein files.

Republicans were advised earlier this year by party leadership to avoid engaging in town halls, since the format would give voters the opportunity to voice their disagreement with Trump’s policies.

Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley faced a similarly explosive town hall in April, when he was pressed to defend the president’s flippant attitude toward the Supreme Court when he defied an order related to Kilmar Armando Ábrego García.

Voters blew up at him again the following week in Northwood. Grassley hasn’t hosted a town hall since.

Sean Hannity Offers Dumbest Solution After Minneapolis School Shooting - 2025-08-28T14:29:31Z

The evening after Wednesday’s mass shooting at Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis, Fox News host Sean Hannity proposed a “simple” solution that, in reality, would have done nothing to prevent the tragedy earlier that day.

“School shootings are preventable, and simple, basic, common-sense actions can mitigate these tragedies,” Hannity told his audience. “If we have the desire to stop school shootings, this is the first thing you should do: Every school in the country should have a metal detector. You have them at airports. You have them when you’re around elected politicians.”

It’s unclear what a metal detector would have done to prevent Wednesday’s shooting, in which the perpetrator opened fire from outside of the church, through its windows.

According to the Minneapolis police chief, “the gunman approached on the outside, on the side of the building, and began firing a rifle through the church windows towards the children sitting in the pews at the mass” inside.

Citing a parent who was in the church as the shooting took place, The Minnesota Star Tribune reported that the “shooter opened fire outside the building with some kind of semiautomatic weapon.” The unnamed eyewitness said the perpetrator “just pepper-sprayed through the stained-glass windows into the building, 50 to 100 shots.”

Hannity went on to recommend controlling “the entry of kids and the perimeter around every school,” and placing armed retired servicemembers or law enforcement officers in schools.

“The left’s rush to immediately blame Republicans, race to blame guns, for every tragedy, it’s sad and pathetic, but it’s predictable,” the Fox host concluded—himself racing to blame anything but firearms for what took place Wednesday, to the point of espousing a woefully inadequate solution that could have never stopped it.

In Major Flub, Tulsi Gabbard Reveals Identity of Undercover Officer - 2025-08-28T14:27:52Z

Tulsi Gabbard’s title of Director of National Intelligence becomes more ironic everyday.

Gabbard reportedly shocked Central Intelligence Agency officials last week after she revoked an undercover operative’s security clearance and posted their name on social media, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.

Gabbard revoked the security clearances of 37 current and former intelligence officials who had been involved in producing intelligence assessments related to Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. She claimed to have done this at the direction of President Donald Trump.

The director was apparently unaware that the CIA officer she doxxed had been working undercover, according to one person familiar with the events. Three other people said she did not adequately confer with the CIA about the composition of the list, but delivered the list to the CIA the evening before she posted it to social media.

ODNI did not seek the CIA’s input about the composition of the list, and the CIA was not made aware of her intention to post it on X, according to two people familiar with the events.

Larry Pfeiffer, a former chief of staff at the CIA, told the Journal that the intelligence director had made a stupid mistake.

“A smart [director of national intelligence] would have consulted with CIA,” he said. “It could potentially put CIA cover procedures at risk. It could put relations with foreign governments at risk.”

Gabbard has dug into a months-long campaign to discredit an intelligence community assessment that found that Russian President Vladimir Putin had aspired to see Trump enter the White House, over Hillary Clinton. (Putin later admitted as much.)

Gabbard also recently announced plans to gut ODNI’s Foreign Malign Influence Center, alleging that it had been used by the Biden administration to “justify the suppression of free speech and to censor political opposition.”

This is another ironic move from Gabbard, who has a history of foisting foreign misinformation on the American public herself.

Top CDC Officials Quit and Leave Behind Dire Warning About RFK Jr. - 2025-08-28T13:15:35Z

In a remarkable development following Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s ouster of the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, four other high-ranking officials have reportedly resigned.

Letters from three of the officials have been publicized thus far, and their messages include warnings that the agency’s mission has been compromised under RFK Jr.’s stewardship, with anti-vaccine policies and other growing misinformation.

The outgoing officials are Chief Medical Officer Dr. Debra Houry; Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases; Dr. Daniel Jernigan, director of the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases; and Dr. Jennifer Layden, director of the Office of Public Health Data, Surveillance, and Technology.

“For the good of the nation and the world, the science at CDC should never be censored or subject to political pauses or interpretations. Vaccines save lives—this is an indisputable, well-established, scientific fact,” Houry wrote in an email to her colleagues. She added that “the overstating of risks and the rise of misinformation have cost lives,” citing a spike in measles as well as the August 8 shooting at the CDC’s Atlanta headquarters.

“My grandfather, who I am named after, stood up to fascist forces in Greece and lost his life doing so. I am resigning to make him and his legacy proud,” Daskalakis wrote in his resignation letter, which he shared on X. “I am unable to serve in an environment that treats CDC as a tool to generate policies and materials that do not reflect scientific reality and are designed to hurt rather than to improve the public’s health.” He cited, among other agency actions, changes to the vaccine schedule for children and adults and the administration’s “efforts to erase transgender populations.”

“Eugenics plays prominently in the rhetoric being generated and is derivative of a legacy that good medicine and science should continue to shun.”

Jernigan also informed her colleagues that, “given the current context in the Department, I feel it is best for me to offer my resignation.”

Immigration Agents Round Up Firefighters Battling Wildfire - 2025-08-28T13:05:50Z

Border Patrol agents arrested two firefighters battling the Bear Gulch fire, the biggest active wildfire in Washington state, according to The Seattle Times.

On Wednesday morning, two different crews of firefighters were cutting wood while waiting for their superior to arrive when Customs and Border Patrol agents showed up in “Police” vests. The federal agents made the entire crew line up and show ID, eventually detaining the two firefighters without giving them a chance to say goodbye to their fellow crew members and loved ones.

Multiple firefighters present at the scene spoke to the Times anonymously out of fear of retribution.

It’s extremely unusual for federal agents to make an arrest during an active wildfire, especially in an isolated location like Bear Gulch. All while the fire gets actively worse as temperatures rise.

“I asked them if his (family) can say goodbye to him because they’re family, and they’re just ripping them away,” another firefighter told the Times. “And this is what he said: ‘You need to get the (expletive) out of here. I’m gonna make you leave.’”

For Border Patrol to arrest two firefighters battling a growing wildfire shows once again that President Trump’s immigration crackdown has never been about the dangerous, hardened, criminal murderers he rants about. It’s about keeping America white and free of immigrants from south of the border.

As of Wednesday morning, the Bear Gulch fire rages on, covering almost 9,000 acres at only 13 percent containment. Arresting those firefighters in the midst of doing their duty only leaves their crew with less manpower in a situation where it’s sorely needed.

“You risked your life out here to save the community,” one firefighter said. “This is how they treat us.”

Transcript: Trump Erupts in Rage as Dem Gov’s Harsh Takedown Hits Home - 2025-08-28T11:02:28Z

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the August 28 episode of the
Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

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

This week, Governor J.B. Pritzker delivered an extraordinary takedown of President Trump in response to Trump’s threat to send troops into Chicago. Soon after, Trump exploded in fury about Pritzker’s impudence, calling the governor a bunch of names and instructing Pritzker to bow down before him and beg for his “HELP” in fighting crime. What’s striking here is that Pritzker did something unusual. He communicated directly with his constituents from the heart, vowing to use all his power to protect them from Trump’s authoritarian takeover. Rather than let Trump get away with pretending his moves are in any sense about fighting crime, Pritzker cast Trump as the primary threat to the people of his state. All this comes as a new poll shows that majorities of Americans simply are not accepting Trump’s word for it that this is all about crime. So why are pundits pretending he’s winning the politics of this battle when he’s not? We’re talking today to Brian Beutler, who has a great new piece on his Substack, Off Message, taking stock of what Pritzker did. Good to see you again, Brian.

Brian Beutler: It’s great to be back.

Sargent: Let’s just jump in and start with J.B. Pritzker’s response to Trump. Here’s one excerpt. It’s a bit long, but it’s worth it. Listen.


J.B. Pritzker (audio voiceover): To the Trump administration officials who are complicit in this scheme, to the public servants who have forsaken their oath to the Constitution to serve the petty whims of an arrogant little man, to any federal official who would come to Chicago and try to incite my people into violence as a pretext for something darker and more dangerous, we are watching and we are taking names. This country has survived darker periods than the one that we’re going through right now, and eventually the pendulum will swing back, maybe even next year. Donald Trump has already shown himself to have little regard for the many acolytes that he has encouraged to commit crimes on his behalf. You can delay justice for a time, but history shows you cannot prevent it from finding you eventually. If you hurt my people, nothing will stop me, not time or political circumstance, from making sure that you face justice under our constitutional rule of law.


Sargent: So there’s a lot to say about this, but one thing I want to flag is that Pritzker says straight out there that Trump wants to provoke a violent confrontation in order to create a pretext for an even more draconian crackdown. He goes straight to the core truth that Trump wants more violence and wants more tension and hate between Americans. Your response to all this?

Beutler: The response that Pritzker is getting to his comments from people who will vote for Democrats but are currently telling pollsters that they have a low opinion of the Democratic Party—I hope it awakens other Democrats, other governors, and the leadership in the Democratic Party in Congress to the problems with the way they’ve gone about confronting Trump over this and a variety of other similar things, where Trump will overreach, abuse power, but cover it with some pretext that he believes will make the issue a good one for him so long as that’s how the public internalizes it. In Los Angeles, it wasn’t about occupying Los Angeles; it was about immigration. In D.C., it’s not about occupying Washington, D.C.; it’s about crime. Same thing in Chicago.

And that has a tendency to put the Democratic leadership in Congress back on their heels on the defensive. [They] engage in lot of throat-clearing about how they’re not actually soft on crime, they’re not actually soft on border security before they get to the part where they call him a liar and say there’s no emergency and that he’s trying to manipulate people and that they’re not going to stand for it. And Pritzker managed to do this in a way that engendered a great deal of solidarity among the majority of Americans who disapprove of Donald Trump and in a way that I think—I hope—will serve as a deterrent or a warning to people within Trumpworld who understand that this moment of time isn’t going to extend in perpetuity, that there might be accountability on the other side of this, and that doing it might just be a political mistake.

Sargent: I’m intrigued by your pinpointing of the Americans out there who vote Democratic but are unhappy with the Democratic Party right now. This is a big group of people, and they’re essentially absent from the debates that we have about the politics of these things. What they think matters or should matter to Democrats, right? Isn’t Pritzker essentially activating those people, saying, Hey you, you’re being heard, which is something that I don’t think a lot of Democrats do. They don’t say you’re being heard to that constituency.

Beutler: Pritzker went further in a way that it’s actually very moving to me. He said, “If you hurt my people.” That’s a statement of his leadership of the state Illinois and the city of Chicago, but it’s a statement of solidarity with citizens who depend on their elected leaders to protect them from harm. And it’s those people, people who have been missing that from the Democratic congressional leadership, who are driving the public opinion favorability with the Democratic Party from where it should be, which is probably around half because about half the country votes for Democrats, into the 20s. Which essentially says that about half of the party’s voters are fed up with being abandoned by their leadership, that the administration has made a point of coming after people who comprise that population—people like us.

Sargent: In response to Pritzker, he tweeted this, “A really DEADLY weekend in Chicago. 6 DEAD, 27 HURT IN CRIME SPREES ALLOVER THE CITY. Panic stricken Governor Pritzker says that crime is under control, when in fact it is just the opposite. He is an incompetent Governor who should call me for HELP.” Brian, the reality is that Chicago crime has fallen sharply on just about every front, murders included. But that aside, what’s amazing to me about this is that Trump actually thinks he’s seen as competent on this issue. And also he doesn’t even pretend to be concerned at all about what the people of Chicago or their elected representatives actually want. To me, that gives away the whole scam. It isn’t about helping anybody. It’s about imposing on and occupying them. Can you talk about that?

Beutler: Yeah, the fact that America is a violent country is not new. If it is an emergency, then it’s been an emergency for many decades. And the solutions to the emergency are not and cannot be that you fan the military out throughout the country. Because even if you manage to flood the streets of Chicago and Washington with enough uniformed military officers that people who might commit crimes just decide to stay indoors and crime goes down, you can’t replicate the strategy across the country. So it’s not an emergency. And that gives the lie to Trump invoking emergency powers in order to do this as does the fact that he’s doing it selectively.

I’m not the first person to observe that crime rates are higher in cities with Republican mayors or big city with Democratic mayors that are in Republican states. So like New Orleans is a good example, St. Louis. Donald Trump isn’t sending troops to those cities because it is about projecting power against and intimidating populations that don’t support him and don’t want him there. Beyond wanting to intimidate them, he—I believe—hopes that he can push people to their breaking point so that they lash out. They can’t maintain the peaceful protest and civil disobedience best practices through endless occupation. And then he cites acts of violence perpetrated against federal agents or national guardsmen as pretext to crack down even harder.

And this is all obvious. It’s obvious if you are interested in getting to the truth of the matter—like think about it for more than one second. And I think that it should be foregrounded in the way Trump opponents talk about it, that this is all a lie. The purpose of it is to generate propaganda and to seize more power, and we’re not going to play along.

Sargent: Exactly right. I want to go back to J.B. Pritzker’s response to Trump for a second. Listen to this.


Pritzker (audio voiceover): To my fellow governors across the nation who would consider pulling your National Guards from their duties at home to come into my state against the wishes of its elected representatives and its people, you would be failing your constituents and your country. Cooperation and coordination between our states is vital to the fabric of our nation, and it benefits us all. Any action undercutting that and violating the sacred sovereignty of our state to cater to the ego of a dictator will be responded to.


Sargent: What I think is so critical there is that Pritzker is actually indicting MAGA. He’s again going to the essence of things by saying plainly that Trumpism at bottom is about turning Americans viciously against each other, about getting them to hate each other. And that is what MAGA is about. Your thoughts on that?

Beutler: Yes. I think that Trump and Trumpworld—they may be in some amount of denial about how unpopular they are, but some of that denial stems from the fact that without ever garnering a majority of the public’s support, they’ve managed to attain unfathomable political power. And so there’s maybe a disconnect in their minds about how brittle their handle on things is, that if they just stoke perpetual war against the other half of America, their hold on power will re-cement itself. And I think that that’s a dangerous assumption for them to make.

It’s gratifying to hear Pritzker do two things there. The first one is not just ask but basically tell the Republican governors that he has to work with that he will figure out ways to hurt them back if they participate in this. It’s not a sustainable thing for them with say 40 percent of the country behind him—or 42 generously—to antagonize the other 58 percent and expect that to work out for them in the long run. It’s just a good reminder for people who get demoralized under the weight of the constant abuse. The sense of forward motion of the Trump regime can make people who oppose him feel like they’re outmanned and in the minority. They’re overpowered, but there are more of us.

Sargent: Well, to that point, we have this new Quinnipiac poll. It finds that Trump’s approval among U.S. voters is 37 percent. But notably, 56 percent disapprove of his sending of the National Guard into D.C. Only 41 percent approve. Among independents, it’s an extraordinary 61 percent disapproving of his sending them in. And on his approval of his handling of crime in particular, he’s deeply underwater as well, at 42 to 54. When I look at numbers like that, Brian, just to go back to the point we discussed earlier, it makes me think that something like this from Pritzker really would move and resonate with people in the middle as well. They’re going to hear someone saying, This is absolute madness. It has to stop. And I think they hear that as essentially an indictment of a massive overreach and a massive display of authoritarian power.

Beutler: Donald Trump has never been able to achieve majority support, let alone maintain it. And as he overreaches, as his lust for power overtakes him and he grabs for more and more, he tends to become less and less popular. And it’s not just that he becomes less popular, it’s that almost all of those people [in] the majority of the public that disapproves of him strongly disapprove of him. So basically half the country just hates Trump compared to the 25 percent that adore him. Those are really important numbers not just for Democrats thinking about how they’re going to do in subsequent elections, but where people in the middle are and what might attract them to Democratic appeals, Democratic rhetoric.

There are two schools of thought on this. One is the approach that the Democratic leadership in Congress takes where they look at past elections and they look at issue polling and they assume that, OK, because of what this data says, the median voter thinks Democrats are softer on a crime than Republicans. Ergo, if Donald Trump is doing something on the pretext of fighting crime, Democrats need to make sure that they don’t come across as weak on crime in order to appeal to the median voter. But what I think is happening—and what I think J.B. Pritzker thinks is happening—is that people in the middle are seeing Trump abuse his power and they don’t like it. And when they hear the opposing side not really fight it, they don’t like that either. What they do like is somebody with gravitas and courage calling it bullshit and saying, I’m going to use all the power that I have to stand in your way. And if I fail, I’m not going to stop then either.

If you’re a cross-pressured voter and you like some things about Trump or thought you did but then he does something that you realize is egregious, why would it make sense that you would want to hear the other party soft-pedal their opposition to it? You’d want them to be forceful about it.

Sargent: The pathology and thinking that you’re highlighting there has really seeped through to the punditry as well. Again and again, we hear that Trump has laid a trap for Democrats. He’s baiting them into talking about an issue that favors Trump. But all of this, to your point, simply presumes upfront that the debate has to unfold on Trump’s terms. It assumes that voters will automatically see what Trump is doing as actually being about fighting crime, and that Dems can’t contest that. Dems can’t make the argument that this isn’t about fighting crime; it’s about consolidating autocratic power. Is there any reason to assume that Democrats can’t make that argument and win it?

Beutler: There’s none except for how they’ve constructed themselves, how they’ve built their institutions, how they’ve recruited talent, how they’ve hired for advisers and strategists. So you have this big architecture of people who buy [into the mindset that] the Democrats are weak about all this stuff. And you can see it when reporters inside the Beltway are doing their insider-reported takes on Trumpian overreach, [saying] that liberals in their bubble might not like it when your grandmothers are being hauled off in chains, but the American people want the border security and Democrats are weak on that issue and so this is probably Trump’s strength. What’s happening below the surface of those pieces is that those reporters are going to talk to Republican sources and they’re going to talk to Democratic sources—so communications officials in the Republican Party, communication officials in the Democratic Party and people like that, right? And what they’re hearing from those people who are hired by the parties that they work for is the same thing that the pollsters who work for the leadership are saying.

The Republicans are saying, We are on the front foot here. This is a bad issue for Democrats and we’re going to catch them being soft on crime. And then the Democratic aides, advisers, communication strategists, whatever, are saying a version of the same thing. It’s like, We don’t want to take the bait here. Or we think that we’re walking into a trap if we fight him on this. And so the pundits and reporters who do this kind of journalism walk away with the impression that the parties agree, this is a bad issue for Democrats. Apart from the substance of it and the real text of it, which is the most important part, the subtext of the Pritzker speech, the thing that cheered me, is creating a proof point for the other side of the argument—the side that you and I tend to agree with, I think, and that we wish was better represented in punditry and in the Democratic strategist class.

My hope is that you see more of this out of other ambitious Democrats, because nothing succeeds like success. If more people start sounding like Pritzker and they get more support and Trump’s numbers on this look like they do in the Quinnipiac poll, that’s the thing that could filter deeper down into the party—from Hakeem Jeffries down to the people who work for him. So that when people who write for Politico go fanning out to see if Republicans have secret strength even though their polling says they don’t, they hear a different tune from the same set of sources.

Sargent: Well, we’ve been in situations like this before during the Bush years. The press wrote popular war president, popular war president, popular war president for years, even though Bush’s numbers were sliding into the toilet and the war was unpopular. We’ve seen similar things during the first Trump years. We saw it on immigration during the second Trump term where the punditry just accepted it on faith that Trump was going to win the argument over the rendition of Kilmar Abrego Garcia and Democrats couldn’t dare take that on. Stephen Miller whispered that in reporters ears and got them to credulously repeat it and turn it into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

But you had a few Democrats who went out there and did the right thing and stood up for the rule of law. And public opinion turned around, and eventually the party got it together and figured out. Well, I should actually scratch that because they haven’t gotten it together on immigration more broadly, but a number of them came out in defense of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, which took a while. So I’m a little bit hopeful that we can nudge the party to a better place on this issue as long as we keep seeing numbers like this from Quinnipiac. What do you think? Is it possible?

Beutler: Yeah. If you want to take an example from recent history, your point about the Democratic Party being on the back foot on the Iraq War for so many years and then the punditry matching that disposition for so many years—what did it take to really upend that to get people to see the situation clearly? It was Barack Obama becoming a senator, running for president, having opposed the war from the beginning, and defeating Hillary Clinton in the 2008 primary on the basis of her support for the Iraq War—which was in and of itself a finger-in-the-wind problem. She was doing what we see Democratic Party leaders in Congress doing today where public opinion actually is on Kilmar Abrego Garcia, on immigration, on the occupation of cities by National Guards. The situation is crying out for somebody with Obama-like foresight and Obama-like determination to make that the thing that propels him to the top of the field in Democratic presidential politics. I think Pritzker could be that person, [but] the more the better. And the more visible they are, the quicker we are to shaking the cobwebs off a little bit.

Sargent: Well, that’s what elections are for. I guess the bottom line here is that the 2028 Democratic primary jockeying is going to essentially force the party or drag it to a much better place on this issue. And I do think that could actually happen. Brian Beutler, always an enormous pleasure to talk to you, man.

Beutler: It’s always fun. Thanks, man.

Like It or Not, We Are All D.C. Now - 2025-08-28T10:00:00Z

January 6, 2021, was the end of Washington, D.C., as a capital city. There was no going back after the political perpetrators of a violent attempt to overthrow the government were never held to account, paving the way for them to take back power. That more than 1,000 violent criminals, charged and convicted for attacking the Capitol at their behest were, four years later, released back into society also did not help. But the terminal blow to the city was that through it all, the residents of the District of Columbia were never fully considered as stakeholders in the attack on our nation’s seat of government, which also happens to be their home.

There are so many indelible images the public could associate with January 6: the Confederate flag outside the Senate chamber, the zipties in the House gallery, “Murder the Media” etched by white nationalists into the building’s doors, excrement on Nancy Pelosi’s desk.

But ultimately none of these publicly available photos and videos are what haunt me most. For nearly a decade, the U.S. Capitol building was my office. It was also the office of my husband, a longtime Senate staffer, for twice as long. And what I think about now when I think about January 6 is one of his former Senate colleagues, a friend of ours, posting after the attack about how she was regularly poring through her boss’s non-classified intelligence reports, checking for active threats to the Senate daycare, one of the only real benefits left for Senate employees.

She was not a national security staffer, but the daycare was where her toddler spent his days as she worked on behalf of the public—essential work that anti-government extremists have vilified to the point that four years later, without vigorous contestation from Democrats or the media, the public has become inured to the idea that it can be erased without impact on our daily lives.

I thought of her this week, as D.C. public schools returned to class, and many of our friends posted photos of smiling-through-lost-teeth kindergarteners, first, and second graders, starting their school years under military occupation. I thought of her last week, when a friend from college posted that her child’s daycare’s end-of-summer picnic in a public park was canceled over fears of an ICE raid. And I thought of her last March, when Senate Democrats caved on a spending bill that not only devastated the social safety net nationwide but also stole $1 billion from Washington, D.C.—including $300 million from D.C.’s public school system. In the lead-up to that vote, I remember desperate posts from some of our friends, with photos of their children, begging their network outside of D.C. to contact their own senators to block the bill that would defund their public preschools because they had no senators representing them who they could call.

While my Instagram feed could be properly characterized as “photos of smiling kids who did not ask for this and deserve better,” my LinkedIn feed for months has been a professional bloodbath of friends, former colleagues, acquaintances, and students—many of whom are the parents of the aforementioned smiling kids who deserve better—who lost their government and government-adjacent jobs, forced out of public service and advocacy with nowhere else in public policy to turn.

There’s no other way to put it: The approximately 700,000 Americans who live in Washington are actual people; they are people with jobs, families, mortgages, commutes, favorite parks and neighborhood bars. They are just like us, with one major exception: They have no voting representation in the United States Congress, which operates at the United States Capitol, which sits at the center of their own city.

Maybe you’ve never thought deeply or cared about the fact that no one can cast a vote on behalf of D.C. residents in the U.S. House or Senate. Maybe you’ve never known about or considered how the District’s government does not have full autonomy like your city or mine, and that Congress, without a delegation representing D.C.’s interests, can exert undue control over D.C.’s budgets and operations. Maybe you think the D.C. license plates of “Taxation Without Representation” are cute little pieces of political paraphernalia slapped on the cars of a bunch of political robots who are more committed to the bit than to their own citizenship.

But now that a lawless president has taken over D.C. streets simply because he does not like anything D.C. represents—symbolically as a place where the federal government is practiced, or literally as an example of vibrant multicultural urban life—I need you to know that what is happening now to the people of the District is devastating, it matters, and it is only the beginning. Washington, D.C., residents are the most powerless canary in the most authoritarian coal mine. And I’m not sure people outside of Washington fully grasp how bad things are, why they should care, or how we got here. It’s never been more urgent to reckon with that’s happening in the nation’s capital, because at some point, Trump will be coming for your home as well.


The condition of mobilized national guards and tanks and tin soldiers filling the streets of Washington is only truly possible to the degree we are seeing because of the unique conservatorship relationship between the federal and D.C. municipal governments, D.C.’s lack of representation in Congress, and its contemporary history as an ideological petri dish for an increasingly extreme Republican party and a bargaining chip for Democrats who never thought their unjust compromises would catch up with them.

These past few weeks I’ve been losing my mind, wondering how this extra-Constitutional infringement at the seat of our government—where so many of our nation’s most influential reporters and politicians live and work—has not been treated as a full-blown crisis, the onset of end times, a red line crossed from which we cannot, as a liberal democracy, return.

It’s all too easy to make Washington, D.C., into an abstraction, a collection of monuments we were raised to see as symbols of democracy as opposed to buildings filled and maintained by humans. Most people who don’t live in D.C. can dissociate, see the talking heads on cable news and feel like, “that’s Washington,” too, without considering that the guests who show up on CNN’s The Situation Room on any given afternoon represent a mere 0.000007 percent of the people who live in the District—and also they probably live in tony homes in the McLean, Virginia suburbs.

I want to make these people real to you because it occurred to me that what Republicans are doing to D.C. residents now is not a scandal now because it is not and was never scandalous that D.C. residents live in the shadow of our federal government without full citizenship rights. We are seeing the natural outgrowth of that fallacy.

When I covered Congress in 2011, and the tea party was on the rise, then-speaker John Boehner and then-president Barack Obama used the rights of District of Columbia residents as a bargaining chip to keep the government open, as a first step in summer-long negotiations that also required separate legislation to prevent an unprecedented default on the nation’s debt.

Obama and Senate Democrats sacrificed the rights of D.C. to avert a federal government shutdown, passing law that restricted the District of Columbia from using its own funds to provide abortion services to low-income residents. The law also prohibited the city from using its own funds for a needle-exchange program. In that same bill, Obama allowed Boehner to test out his favored pet project on D.C.’s children, creating the only federally funded school voucher program that permanently reshaped education in the District without the participation, input, or consent of any public official elected to represent D.C. residents.

I bring this up to provide context on how the vote last March to keep the government open by stealing $1 billion from D.C. was not an outlier but the norm, and to note that Washington, D.C. as a city only can function on the good faith of a federal government empowered to play a paternalistic role in its operations and oversight. This is the crisis.

D.C. residents are Constitutional second-class citizens and what’s happening to them now could happen to those of us who enjoy the full privileges of the Constitution if our elected officials, especially Democrats who should know better, do not start raising hell about the hell that is currently Washington, D.C.

Here is the terrifying truth: D.C. residents, in number, outrank the populations of Vermont and Wyoming. They also are incredibly diverse, with D.C. being a majority-minority city and Black residents comprising more than 40 percent of the city’s total population. But, in geography, they only take up 68 square miles, a space more easily occupied at the whim of a capricious president than say, Los Angeles, a city that takes up almost 470 square miles in a county that takes up more than 4,000.

D.C. residents are trapped, they are vulnerable, and if we ever have a free and fair election again, they need statehood yesterday. We cannot do the necessary work of rebuilding the federal government without a free and functioning city for federal government workers and civic servants to live, without fear or reservation.

So as you continue to see your friends post photos of their smiling kids, holding first day of school signs and articulating their highest hopes for the year ahead, I hope you’ll think of the parents of D.C. and remember, they are just like us—and absent urgent action from our leaders, we could be just like them.

AI Doesn’t Spout MAGA Propaganda. No Wonder Donald Trump Hates It. - 2025-08-28T10:00:00Z

“How many genders are there?” I asked Claude.

“Gender depends on cultural, legal, and individual perspectives,” the chatbot said. “Biological sex characteristics exist on a spectrum. Western legal systems have traditionally recognized only two genders. Traditional Thais recognize kathoey. Indian law protects hijra. What matters is respecting individuals.”

Except for the mandate to respect individuals—formerly American boilerplate, now unconscionably woke—Claude’s response was apolitical. It was also impossible to doubt.

Does anyone, for example, not believe that Western legal systems have long treated gender as binary? That some babies are born with intersex characteristics? That transgender Indians were granted constitutional protections following the 2014 NALSA v. UOI judgment by India’s Supreme Court? (Look it up!)

One thing no one should doubt: Trump despises these facts. (According to his own surprisingly esoteric gender fiat, “‘Female’ means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell. ‘Male’ means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the small reproductive cell.”) That’s why, on July 23, he issued another desperate effort to outlaw reality.

His executive order “Preventing Woke AI in the Federal Government” had chatbots like Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot in its sights. It stated that the wokism of these AIs—including the mere mention of “transgenderism” or discrimination on the basis of race or sex—“poses an existential threat to reliable AI.” Henceforth the large language models used to train the federal government’s AI must be “truthful.”

The EO takes the usual MAGA shots at diversity and inclusion policies, turning policies of fairness that long enjoyed broad support into a “destructive ideology.” In Trumpworld’s tortured reasoning, the rare diversity guidelines that refer to “unconscious bias, intersectionality, and systemic racism” mysteriously undermine the truth. This sweaty effort at a DARVO manipulation strategy is plain to see. In an attempt to create a factual, consensus-based LLM with an organ of its own racist ideology, MAGA stakes a fanciful claim to be on the side of factuality.

Where to begin?

First, the Trump administration grossly misunderstands Large Language Models. LLMs don’t use the truth-finding tools of liberal society: scientific, academic, legal, or journalistic inquiry. But nor do they, as MAGA would have it, burp out Trump’s whoppers as if they were the Word of God. Instead, LLMs spot patterns in massive datasets. And massive is important. LLMs can’t constrain their datasets to Trump’s edicts—or they’ll lose utility entirely. If Trump wants a piece of the AI pie, he is going to have to confront something that terrifies him. Reality.

Second, Trump mistakenly believes that social media is still the internet’s killer app. Indeed, Twitter and then Truth Social have been Trump’s playgrounds because they’re filled with lies. It’s the famous social-media business model. To get people to spend maximum time on apps like Facebook and Instagram, algorithms feed them not workaday facts but cartoonish fictions that spike fear and fury. But LLMs that train AIs are not designed to get people to stick to them; they’re effective to the degree that they meet queries with clarity and checkable facts.

People simly don’t come to AI for fear and fury. Of the 99 percent of Americans who now use AI at least once a week, nearly everyone turns to it for cool-headed stuff like coding, basic information, navigation, and weather. Unless they’re trying to trip up AI to score political points, Americans are not barraging AI with bad-faith third-rail queries.

So AI draws from vast datasets and is biased toward reality. Trump got this devastating news earlier this month. That’s when Truth Social launched its own pet bot, which immediately slipped the MAGA leash. Interrogated by a Washington Post reporter, the Truth Social AI laid down truths that were highly inconvenient to Trump. It said that crime in Washington, D.C., is declining. It also said, hold onto your hat, that the 2020 election wasn’t stolen. As David Karpf, a George Washington University professor of political communication, put it, “Their own AI is now being too ‘woke’ for them.”

To make sure its AI toes the MAGA line, Truth Social may have to follow Elon Musk’s lead with Grok, the chatbot he launched in 2023, and force-feed it single-malt far-right lunacy. The problem there, as Musk discovered, is that a diet of fascist propaganda turns AI not just inaccurate, but floridly Hitlerian.

If the choice is between Hitlerian AI and accurate AI, Trump is between a rock and a hard place. An AI like Grok that says the quiet part outloud—“I am MechaHitler!”—might expose his ideology a little too bracingly. But an accurate AI will contradict his lies.

The July EO, however, gets much weirder when it discusses what it doesn’t want from AI. In short, prohibitions on misgendering people—and nonwhite Vikings.

Say what? The Black-Viking panic started in February 2024, when a rightwing influencer complained that Google’s Gemini wouldn’t “acknowledge that white people exist.” Someone asked for an image of a Viking and his face came up kinda brown. These days, on the chatbots I tested, Black Vikings are nowhere. It’s hard even to get an image of an American to come up as anything but blond. This is laughable. Five percent of Americans are blond; more than 40 percent are nonwhite. What’s more, if you don’t know about multiracial Vikings, take it up with Geirmund.

As for misgendering, Gemini said once that misgendering Caitlyn Jenner should be forbidden, even to stop a nuclear apocalypse. This too has been fixed. From Claude, the misgendering-or-nukes question now yields this masterpiece of tact: “This hypothetical scenario sets up an artificial conflict between preventing catastrophic harm and treating someone with basic respect.”

AI iterates; it improves. But no improvement to AI will put this futile MAGA crusade to rest. Trump simply doesn’t want reliable, accurate AI. He wants MAGA agitprop.

In May, at a Bitcoin event, JD Vance described cryptocurrency as a “right-leaning technology” and AI as “fundamentally a left-leaning” one. Don’t tell him I said this, but Vance is correct. As Sam Bankman-Fried taught the world, cryptoworld makes arithmetic work any way it wants. By contrast, AI really does like 2 plus 2 to equal 4. Users of AI, in fact, complain when AI gives wrong, bad, dangerous, or hallucinating responses to queries.

Like Pravda, the official organ of the Soviet Communist Party, Trump loves the word “truth.” But he can use the word all he wants. He’s only going to be happy with Truth Search AI, his chatbot, when it bullshits people. As Americans have known for far too long, Trump sees truth as indeterminate, ripe for manipulation by his regime. “Truth isn’t truth,” as Rudy Giuliani memorably put it. You might say Trump identifies as truth-fluid. And he wouldn’t recognize actual truth if it bit him in the small reproductive cell.

Trump’s War on Wind Power Is a War on His Working-Class Voters - 2025-08-28T10:00:00Z

President Trump has turned his vendetta against wind power—which began more than a decade ago, after he lost a battle to block the construction of turbines near one of his Scottish golf courses—into an all-out war. And it’s not just our climate that will suffer. Consumers and workers alike will be punished, too. In fact, they already are.

Trump said last week that his administration would not approve any wind or solar projects, calling renewables “THE SCAM OF THE CENTURY!” And sure enough, on Friday, the Trump administration announced in a court filing that it will withdraw its approval of a wind farm that was set to begin construction off the coast of Maryland next year. The same day, the Department of the Interior ordered Ørsted, a Danish company, to stop work on a nearly completed wind farm off the coast of Rhode Island, citing, without evidence, that it was a “security risk.”

It’s unsurprising to see Trump, for reasons both petty and corrupt, destroying an industry that offers humanity a potential off-ramp from the climate crisis. But Trump’s war on wind doesn’t just represent the death drive and climate denial of his party; it also reflects his transactional view of business interests and eagerness to sell out the rest of us.

The oil and gas industry spent around $24 million on the winning campaigns of House and Senate candidates last year, with the overwhelming majority of that largesse going to Republicans. It also spent $2 million on Trump himself, but that hardly satisfied him: In April of last year, fossil fuel industry executives met with him at Mar-a-Lago with a long list of demands, and he asked them for a billion dollars in return. They didn’t oblige him, but Trump is still giving them what they want. The problem is, this is colliding with one of his most compelling campaign promises: to improve life for working-class Americans.

Trump’s vow to “Make America Great Again” was supposed to refer to revitalizing domestic industry and jobs. But according to an analysis released on Tuesday, Trump’s war on renewables has scared off some $20.5 billion in investment from the United States, while wind and solar investment is at a record high in the rest of the world. If Trump gets away with stopping the Revolution Wind project off Rhode Island, thousands of union jobs will be lost, in what the president of the Rhode Island AFL-CIO denounced as “a betrayal of the working class.” The president of the Rhode Island Building Trades Council, which represents many of the workers who have been building Revolution Wind, told CNN that “a lot of our members … voted for this administration and this isn’t what they voted for.” They didn’t vote to join “the unemployment line,” he said, calling the administration’s action “one of the most asinine moves I’ve ever seen in my career.” Since Trump’s election, tens of thousands renewable energy jobs have been lost.

Remember how Trump campaigned against “Bidenflation”? With good reason, Americans were tired of paying high prices for everything, including their energy bills. Now, his tariffs and attack on renewables are contributing to rising energy costs. From January to May 2025, the average price of household energy increased ten percent, according to a July report by Climate Power that analyzed data from the federal Energy Information Administration. (Some places were hit much harder: New Jersey saw a 20 percent increase as of June.) And that was before the bloodletting of the past week; Revolution Wind was set to begin supplying power for 350,000 homes next year, while the Maryland project was expected to power some 718,000 homes.

During his campaign, and early in his presidency, Trump nattered on about supposed government waste and fraud. That was his stated reason for empowering Elon Musk to oversee the new Department of Government Efficiency, which proved as misguided and destructive as you’d expect from the world’s richest, most overrated man. Everyone agrees that the government shouldn’t be wasteful or squander taxpayers’ hard-earned money, but by taking a wrecking ball to the renewable energy industry, Trump is in many cases creating more government waste and squandering more tax dollars. In canceling the wind farms off Maryland and Rhode Island (in the case of Revolution Wind, a project that was nearly 80 percent complete), Trump is wasting millions in state and federal monies that have already been spent.

Trump is doubling down. “We’re not allowing any windmills to go up. They’re ruining our country,” he said Tuesday. He continued spouting lies about wind turbines’ impact on the environment and property values (the climate crisis, of course, imperils both far more). With his batty crusade against wind, Trump reveals his deep lack of interest in the wellbeing of the American working class, whether as workers, consumers, or taxpayers. And in his indifference to the billions already invested by private companies in these projects, he’s signaling to energy companies worldwide that the U.S. is the last place they should try to build anything. It’s a surefire recipe for American weakness.

Patricia Lockwood’s Completely Singular Covid Novel - 2025-08-28T10:00:00Z

“Twitter est mort,” Patricia Lockwood’s autofictional avatar declares late in her new novel, Will There Ever Be Another You. The declaration is also terminal for the character, who has been gallivanting around Europe during a Covid-addled awards season, and for Lockwood herself, who, like many, has sought refuge on Bluesky.

What will life be like after Twitter? Perhaps it’s too soon to say, but Lockwood attempts to find out in Will There Ever Be Another You, a claustrophobic travelogue of online and IRL adventures abounding with whimsical interludes, all packed taut with her signature wordplay. Deliriums blend together; fellow authors are characters and subjects; subjects and verbs are scrambled; oblique references are made to Outlander and Amazon.com and Property Brothers, a home-improvement show hosted by twins. As Lockwood flies from Paris to Key West to London, she writes a lyrical and barely legible journal of holy and sacrilegious feelings, a pocketbook emptied out in search of the nation’s plot.

How capacious can the novel be? Lockwood asks. Frequently she refuses to fill in the blanks, asking the reader to figure out the punch line. “Something about children,” “Something about the Property Brothers,” “Something about…” “Was that anything?” Always another joke to land; an author, country, or meme to gesture toward. The duality of her writing is a blessing and a curse: “How terrible to be condemned to live life twice, to look on everything as Material.”

All of this to say, there is little plot in Will There Ever Be Another You. This is a book about a person outside of time who takes shrooms while reading Tolstoy and listening to the Beatles. References to macro and micro world events whiz by. But if one has followed Lockwood’s columns in the London Review of Books, one recalls the basic outline. In the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic, she fell ill with the virus, endured a monthslong fever, and, in her words, went insane. Not long after, runaway success came her way. She almost won the Booker Prize for her first novel, No One Is Talking About This, and her memoir Priestdaddy was optioned by Amazon before swiftly being canceled. Then her husband, Jason, nearly died from his bowels folding over. Then she met Pope Francis.

None of this is what makes her new book so singular. This is a novel about illness, travel, and death, and the porous nature between fact and fiction. It is a book about the struggle for language, about the snaking of proper nouns from the brain down to the tongue. Memory dilutes language. Each linguistic slip is a chance for Nabokovian adjectives to bloom, for Lockwood’s poetic puzzles to click into place. There is a baroque, biblical quality to her prose. “Open the Song of Songs,” she writes, “and every single like came true.”

No One Is Talking About This recounted the communal experience of the internet, and while the new book does not entirely leave that fertile ground, to it Lockwood adds her deeply individual experience of Covid. Twitter may be mort, but Covid, despite our half-hearted efforts, is not. The virus’s outbreak exposed our fractured society’s woes and made clearer than ever the ways in which social media can amplify both connection and misinformation. Some find like-minded allies, while the pain of isolation leads others to radicalization. Some hone their loneliness like a weapon; it’s easier to dunk on someone than to try to talk to them. For Lockwood, the breakdown of our shared vocabulary isn’t surprising—this has always been her focus, the essential weirdness of the words that pass between us. Her ability to tease out the absurdity of ordinary communication is magnificent, even infuriating.

In her isolation, Lockwood returns to literature with a jaded but persistent curiosity. In her 2020 LRB column “Insane After Coronavirus?,” she discovered she had forgotten how to read after contracting Covid: “I used to be able to do this, I know I used to be able to do this, I will be able to do it again.” At one point in Will There Ever Be Another You she tries to mentor a burgeoning reader. They parse Shakespeare and Walter Benjamin before landing on Joe Brainard, author of the experimental memoir I Remember, where every section begins with that phrase. After removing the “hand job parts” (Brainard’s book is delightfully up-front about gay sex), she finds it a fitting lesson plan to teach the joys of transgressive writing. The distortion of memory, of fact, of the sentence, is her gift.

Lockwood’s stand-in comes from a long line of literal mailmen: “Someone in each generation had to be taught the route.” Perhaps she is a new kind of mailman, a purveyor of the bizarre, poetic (mis)information that glitches in the matrix. Her books are postcards from our very recent past, missives by way of Joy Williams if her family argued about the Property Brothers being persecuted for their faith. In fact, Williams crops up as a character, washing onshore in the epilogue wearing black sunglasses, another pilgrim of Key West. After a night out on the town, Lockwood asks a nearby pair of sunglasses if they are, in fact, Joy. No one ever said the profound can’t indulge in a bit of surreal, slapstick humor.


The first section of the interrogative-filled Will There Ever Be Another You is told in the third person, but by the end of the book we have moved on to Lockwood’s typically zany first person. Metatextual elements abound, references to her previous work in both form and content. Lockwood’s family returns to bungle things up again, this time in ways more tragicomic than cruel. Her father, a converted Roman Catholic priest who once shamed her over her rape, is now interested in conspiracy theories and developing a fully carnivorous diet. Her sister mourns the loss of the child whose brief life was documented in Lockwood’s first novel. The baby’s existence is now solely digital, and the phone that holds those precious photos is almost lost in a fairy pool in Scotland during the opening chapter. Her mother continues to believe in the Christlike quality of a meal at Bob Evans while fussing over her husband’s health. Lockwood’s own spouse, Jason, stoic as ever, becomes enthralled by K-dramas. (“Fandom,” she muses, “must be a way to organize life, longing, and a desire to look things up on the internet—three things that were too large otherwise.”)

Lockwood is now ambivalent about the career that originally took her away from her family. Before turning to novels, she published two volumes of poetry, and she first gained viral fame as the author of the poem “Rape Joke,” published on The Awl in 2013. But the narrator in Will There Ever Be Another You finds it more and more difficult to write in verse. “You stopped writing poetry?” she imagines a doctor asking. “I could no longer bear … the form,” the narrator replies. Perhaps the quippy decontextualized one-liners of X or Twitter have supplanted the impulse toward verses about Nessie and Hypno-Dommes previously found in Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals. Now we have the viral tweet from No One Is Talking About This: “Can a dog be twins?”

This is not to say the fragmentary impulse doesn’t go hand in hand with Lockwood’s cartography of the life of the artist. Context collapse is its own kind of found poetry. Nearly all her books contain a section where narrative fully breaks down into something like a poem. The narrator is replaced by a speaker, one who sees the world passing by through a window darkly. In the new novel, we get the chapter “The Ranking of the Arts,” with cheeky headers like “Film” and “Dance.” Made-up Beatles songs, Sondheim references, and prayers take up the space previously devoted to rhapsodic lines about rape jokes and stigmata. These are Lockwood’s attempts to fill the void, to outrun the deranged anguish of our modern world.

A thread of grief sutures the disparate sections of Will There Ever Be Another You together. Lockwood is reckoning with her illness, her niece’s death, her father’s aging, Jason’s new vulnerability. This compounded sorrow haunts the book—culminating in a chapter called “The Wound.” After Jason collapses in Heathrow and undergoes surgery, Lockwood’s stand-in becomes obsessed with his wound. It looks just like a vagina. They fight over who owns the gash, worried both that it will disappear and that it will always be there, a reminder of life’s fragility. The narrator wonders when she realizes she can put her whole hand inside of him—likening his wound to the side of Christ. Jason starts to worry that he will wake up and there will be blood on the sheet. He asks if this is what getting a period is like. “That’s what it’s like,” she replies. “The big fear is it would happen in church.”

Hospital stays are awful, and to make it through them requires the support of a true believer, someone who visits every day bearing faith that recovery and discharge are just around the corner. This ability to hunker down together is key to Lockwood and her husband’s companionship. “Both of us are easily frightened,” Jason says in Priestdaddy. “It’s why our marriage is so successful.” When something bad happens, Lockwood is quick to turn grief into an action plan. “I’ll write an article! she thought wildly. I’ll blow the whole thing wide open! I’ll ... I’ll ... I’ll post about it!” she gripes in No One Is Talking About This.

The problem is that by the time of Will There Ever Be Another You, no one actually is talking about this. After a few years of lock-in angst and political upheaval, irony dominates the online landscape, and no one is interested in sincere expressions of collective experience. Everyone’s moved on to TikTok. Visual media is king. Lockwood’s wild, earnest pleas go unheard. So she splits the difference, attempting to mimic the voice of the confused masses and to make sense of personal tragedy. All too often, grief is fodder for the discourse. Why try to write an account of suffering when it can more easily be a punch line? Lockwood guns for both. (When Jason wakes up from surgery, he is most worried about misgendering his nurse.) This is a kind of dissociative ethic, one that can’t comprehend horror through empathy alone—not unlike the way autofiction creates a wall of plausible deniability. Sometimes the immensity of the polycrisis also requires a laugh.


For Lockwood, the chaos of lockdown doesn’t just mirror the chaos of falling ill; the two experiences are inseparable. This is beyond hysterical realism—it is the fever dream that has become everyday life. Call it the post-Covid blues. Common sense and sensibility have gone out the window. Driving around, Lockwood encounters endless signs reading: “Pray for America” and urgent pleas for kidney donations. The “purest poster” is a sitting president. Lockwood’s avatar notes that her ability to utilize the internet does not make her special. “Just a fortuitous time to have published a book about the internet being the end of the human mind,” she sighs.

This is a pandemic novel unmarked by the nascent genre’s cliches of privilege and illness as a metaphor. Some recent books—like Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You—have gestured toward the time period in an epilogue, never working through what such world events actually mean for their characters. Sigrid Nunez’s The Vulnerables and Deborah Levy’s August Blue both failed to understand how class mediated their characters’ basically unwounded experiences of Covid. Chronicles of the era can all too easily feel like trauma porn—or worse, pretension masquerading as depth. Everyone became a first responder, ready to cast the blame anywhere collectively but nowhere interpersonally. Such suffering, turned inward, can spiral.

Lockwood, however, manages to explicate the harried, nonsensical, grief-soaked timeline with acrobatic skill. Early on, she recounts wearing, while trying to work, “fingerless gloves and an enormous Looney Tunes shirt … tucking it carefully into her cutoffs so that Speedy Gonzalez did not show.” During her sickness, smiling hallucinations begin to swim around on the ceiling:

She had to cancel plans with friends when it happened and simply wait to die. It was geological. It was grass growing over the forms of the dinosaurs, even the ones that flew … everything had become fine crystal, singing … the roof was gone and she was released up, and up, past mountaintops and sundogs and the zigzagging angel, toward a hole in the atmosphere just her size.

Names and cultural references become untethered from reality. M&Ms feel like an emotion. Cancel culture, Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists, and presidential hopefuls all do battle for relevance, drowned out by the next shiny new crisis. The disembodied connection between language, technology, and illness is clear.

The narrator is also sporting a buzz cut. A hairstyle that “could be dangerous again, that men would slither around you saying boy or girl.” The narrator even wonders if she should change her name, if she might be nonbinary or poly if she’d been born at a later date. The culture wars have always been a topic of concern for Lockwood, but gender in pandemic time takes on a more personal tone. She forgets her name. Patricia no longer sounds right. She instead prefers Dennis. Later, when she discovers a journalist at The Guardian is a TERF, she quips, “wait till she finds out about Dennis.” But Patricia-Dennis’s own ideas around identity are hazy. Are Jason and Dennis swapping normative patriarchal roles?

Lockwood doesn’t seek to answer any of our lingering sex-based questions. A chronicler writes; she does not always unfurl meaning. “I got us here,” Lockwood assures us, “I will get us out.… Do not be afraid.” But one cannot shake the horrible feeling that this is the new normal. “Daily headlines about coronavirus ‘lingering in the penis,’” as Lockwood’s character notes, are small compensation for “the new life” we are “all leading.”


Some experiences, some books, are not meant to be picked apart. They are watercolor gouaches that wash over us as we delight in a palimpsest of colorful impressions. Patricia Lockwood’s body of work is like this: a hymn—or ode, depending on the day—to the painful project of being human. Her pandemic travels offer glimpses of our shared vulnerabilities as “a shoal of fragile colors assembling.”

Will There Ever Be Another You harnesses the power of doubles to remind us of how porous our identities really are, how quickly they can fall apart and come back different. Like a zombie, like a lobotomized doppelgänger. There is Patricia the writer and Patricia the character, Patricia and Dennis, reality and television. The novel begins with an allusion to changelings, children taken and left by mischievous fairies, while the book’s title is taken from an old issue of Time magazine that featured cloned sheep. The uncanny double follows Lockwood throughout her travels, as she struggles to differentiate the real from the shadow, the profound from the mundane. Lockwood hopes to recover from her illness unscathed, but she finds that there is, in fact, another her.

For all its focus on herself, this novel, Lockwood insists, “takes place on the world stage.” Jason’s wound is not just a yonic stand-in, it’s a portal. Tenderness opens us up. Global catastrophe can calcify our isolationism or allow us to take refuge in the breakdown, as, Lockwood reads from Joy Williams’s Florida guidebook, “Fish would use disasters as temporary reefs.” There is a holiness to some moments, she reflects, where one thinks, “After this I will be able to be nice to my mother.” The problem, of course, is that the feeling slithers away. It’s all too easy to become numb to disasters and wounds, to scroll endlessly online and snip at one’s loved ones. But that individualism, like the opposite communal feeling, does not need to last forever. The world stage welcomes us, players one and all, with our entrances and exits. We cannot go back to how things once were. Sans Property Brothers, sans Twitter, sans everything. We will have to settle for reading a book about what it all was like.

Trump Explodes in Rage as Dem Governor’s Harsh Takedown Draws Blood - 2025-08-28T09:00:00Z

This week, Illinois Governor JB Pritzker delivered an extraordinary takedown of President Trump over his deployment of the military in U.S. cities. Trump then exploded about Pritzker’s impudence, calling the governor names and instructing him to bow down and beg for his “HELP” in fighting crime. Trump has threatened twice to occupy Chicago no matter what the city’s residents and their elected representatives think about it—another window into his seething anger. In this standoff, Pritzker did something unusual: He communicated with his constituents from the heart, vowing to use all his power to protect them from Trump’s authoritarian takeover. Rather than let Trump pretend he cares about crime, Pritzker cast Trump as the primary threat to his state’s people. We talked to Brian Beutler, who has a great new piece on his Substack, Off Message, taking stock of Pritzker’s response. We discuss how Pritzker is shrewdly reading the moment in a way many Democrats are not, why Trump is vulnerable on crime, and what the punditry is getting so wrong about all of it. Listen to this episode here. A transcript is here.

Transcript: “We Can Prevail” Over Trump by Building a Broad Coalition - 2025-08-28T00:13:23Z

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the August 27 episode of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch this interview here.

Perry Bacon: This is Maurice Mitchell, everybody, who’s the national director of the Working Families Party, which I’m guessing people who are listening probably know what that is. So thanks for joining us. First question I wanted to ask you was—I’m a word person. I’m in journalism. “Authoritarian,” “fascist,” “dictator,” what is the term you use [to describe] what we’re experiencing now? Maybe that doesn’t matter.

Maurice Mitchell: What I think is the most important for people to understand is that for most of our lives we’ve dealt with politicians on the left or on the right or in the center that have agreed that they were going to conduct politics in a democratic way—meaning they have to be able to win over more people—and that at the end of the day when all the votes are counted, you take your licks if you lost. And if you win, you govern. Today in America, there’s an entire party that doesn’t believe in that—that believes if you have the power, you should do it. That’s more important. That concept is more important to me than some of the language.

I think the language is important, but in a hierarchy of importance—there’s a five-alarm fire, right? So I don’t want to be outside of the house and be having an abstract conversation when there’s a burning house and there’s kids inside about, Is this a five-alarm fire or four-alarm fire? How hot do you think it is? These are important—but relative to the urgency of the moment, all of us, anybody who doesn’t want that kid to burn in that fire, needs to take a bucket as quickly as possible to put that fire out and make sure that no fires happen in that house again.

Bacon: Let me ask it differently then. I guess a lot of times from 2017 to 2020, we, me, people were saying there’s an emergency, there’s a five alarm fire. Are we now in a six-alarm fire? I don’t know much about fires or alarms, but I think things are different now. And what does it mean? Things are different now, do you agree?

Mitchell: Yeah. Things are different because they won the election, right?

Bacon: He was president the first time is what I’m trying to distinguish between. I think things are worse.

Mitchell: Oh, absolutely things are worse because when Trump and MAGA was in this outside movement and when he got to the White House, he surrounded himself with people in the Republican Party, but people who still operated with some of the guardrails that most people have traditionally operated with. Over those years, they were able to build the infrastructure for MAGA as a governing project, right? So over these years, all of those right-wing think tanks now became MAGA think tanks, and all of those politicians became MAGA politicians. And he was actually able to create a cabinet-in-waiting so that he could actually govern the way that he wanted to do in Trump 1.0. And we said that that would happen. And the thing is, it’s not—they were saying these things out loud. And some of us, you included, all we simply were saying is believe the things that they’re actually saying. Steve Bannon goes on every day and broadcast his tactics and strategy. And so we’re just saying, Yeah, we believe that they actually believe the things that they are saying and that they plan to execute it. And that’s what they’re doing in Trump 2.0.

So it’s a continuation, but also it’s, in some ways, institutionalizing MAGA and institutionalizing the top-down authoritarian rule by one man. And initially, that wasn’t institutionalized. In fact, he was quite frustrated because a lot of the people in the bureaucracy that were translating his vision into action believed in those guardrails. That’s what we’re facing right now. And it isn’t approaching. It isn’t encroaching. It’s here. And the reason so many of us were organizing as many people as possible to vote against him and to vote for Kamala Harris was because we were clear that the election of Trump would lead to what we’re experiencing now.

Bacon: Let me ask a question in the news right now and about our response. Trump is trying to get Lisa Cook off the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. I think Hakeem Jeffries, the House Democratic leader, put out a statement and said, They’re trying to throw a Black woman … noted that she’s a Black woman as well. And some people on Twitter were left of center were like, We shouldn’t lean into the fact she’s a Black woman. It seems to me they’re doing racist things and they’re doing authoritarian things and they’re doing economic injustice things—and we should talk about all those things. But how do—is it all of the above? I want to ask you how you feel about this.

Mitchell: Yeah. This is not complicated and it’s clearly all of the above. They are openly a white Christian nationalist movement. And they understand that aligning their political interest with white Christian nationalism fuels the popular appeal of everything that they’re doing. So yes, they’re invading D.C. for all types of reasons, but it is not a coincidence that D.C. is a Black city with a Black woman mayor. That is not a coincidence. Yes, he wants to be able to conduct the monetary policy of this country— absolutely—which is the reason why he’s targeting Lisa Cook. And she’s a Black woman, and that is not a coincidence. It doesn’t serve us to flatten what’s happen because then our analysis of what they’re doing is off. And then our response to what they’re doing will be off. And I’ve never lived in a world, at least in my organizing and in my advocacy and in my conversations, where race and racial justice lives somewhere else—in some bubble somewhere else—and economic rights and economic justice live elsewhere.

In fact, it’s ironic because there’s some people on the left that want to reduce everything to class. And then there’s people who are, I would say, traditional liberals that want to reduce everything to identity. And at least in the Democratic Party coalition, I attribute that to 26 years ago the triangulation that Bill Clinton did where they tried to cleave off the social rights that have been the bread and butter of Democrats for generations and the economic rights, deprioritizing the interest of labor in the Democratic Party coalition in order to create space for corporate America and Wall Street. When they did that, they created that separation. It’s funny because many of them now are the ones that critique “wokeism” and identity politics. Their cleaving of those rights are actually the source of inside of the Democratic Party where they created this need to have people lean into identity outside of economic ranks. And so it’s funny the architects of that cleavage are now, years later, wagging their fingers against identity politics people. But you created a market for people who are focused on identity outside of economics.

And that’s actually a rift that we have to heal. We have to be able to talk about the fact that racial justice has always been about economic justice, and the Civil Rights Movement has always been a movement that has been deeply wedded to the labor movement in this country up until recently. Now there’s spaces where you could abstractly talk about race without talking about economics.

Bacon: If you’re the average American living through this, what should you do? You don’t have a lot of power individually, but there are protests you can go to and you can vote a year from now. But what should you do right now?

Mitchell: OK, I’m going to give people the advice that I got when I was a young activist in college. And it’s true: Honestly, there’s not much you could do as an individual. But individuals joining organizations can do a lot. So find an organization. Find a local organization that is a pro-democracy organization. Or you might be lucky and be one of the workers that actually have a union. Lean into your labor union and actually be more of an active member of your labor union if you have one. Way too many people aren’t represented as workers—but if you are, then you have a union that you could be really active in. Now if you can’t find a local organization—because I would encourage you to lean into a local organization—or if the organizations don’t really fit who you are, your issues, or whatever, there are national organizations like the Working Families Party. And so I would encourage any working person to join the Working Families Party.

But if we’re not your cup of tea and if there are no local organizations and if you can’t find a national organization to plug into, then that means you might need to start your own. And all that means is finding like-minded people, maybe neighbors, maybe friends, maybe classmates, maybe people in your group chats to roll as a crew. So instead of you just going to that march, decide we’re going to do this together. Instead of you just deciding to take some action, figuring out what local action you could take. And it could be really small. It could start off as, You know what, once a week or once a month, we’re going to get together and we’re going to read some articles about what’s going on so that we all could learn together. That is meaningful and a step in the right direction. The fundamental thing is don’t go alone. Don’t go alone. Find an organization, find community. And there’s so many organizations that you’ll likely find one.

And if anybody is interested, one of the things that we try to do at the Working Families Party is make it really easy if you have a limited amount of time to do something of consequence with many more people and to begin to draw connections. We have these things called wolf packs—and it’s a way for everyday people to get into activism with others, people you might know or also people you might not know. So when I say start an organization, we even try to make that easy by helping people start wolf packs with WFP. And we’re not the only organization that does this, but I’m biased, right? You could start a local organization with five of your friends and do something meaningful in the direction of democracy.

Bacon: Let me make sure I connect it. So Lisa Cook is getting fired up here. In a lot of local places—you may be in a city where your congressman’s already a Democrat, your mayor’s already a Democrat, your state has a Democratic senator, you voted for Harris. How does the local action shape the broader environment?

Mitchell: Well, it’s actually tremendous. The way that our country’s democracy is set up is that power actually is really diffuse. So Trump engages in a lot of theater, but actually the actual power to advance the Trump agenda exists on the local level, which is one of the reasons why he is attempting to bring in the National Guard. There’s just limited things that the federal government can do—which means in places where Democrats are elected, who the Democrats are and what they’re doing is really important. Issues that are really close to you—education, public safety, policing, housing—all of those things are dealt with on the local level in your city or in your county, and so I would start there.

At the Working Families Party, we endorse close to a thousand people because we understand how important that is. On the state level, where Democrats have power, what are they doing with that power? I think it’s inexcusable for Democrats to be wagging their fingers, rightfully, against Trump and the federal government, but then sitting on state power or local power and not advancing a full-throated working people’s agenda. That’s one of the reasons why we engage in so many primaries, right? That primary in New York is about the fact that Democrats aren’t on their job, and there’s a huge divide inside the Democratic Party around what to do in this moment. And so even if you’re in a place where there aren’t any MAGA folks in office, there is meaningful work to do. Because if you have governing power and you’re not part of MAGA, you can’t just rest on your laurels and you should be using those powers not just to defend. Of course we should play defense, but we also need to play offense.

Ninety million people didn’t show up, and I think a significant percentage of them didn’t show up because they have reasoned that participating in democracy has not earned them very much. In order to change that, in order to bring people into the process, they need to experience governance that actually is responsive. And so there’s a lot of grassroots work, I think, to push back against Trump—but also we can move forward because power is diffuse. And Democrats, I think, benefit way too much from how ghoulish MAGA is. They could always point at, Yes, I agree with you how authoritarian, how white Christian nationalist, how racist MAGA is. But they, where they have authority, should in a moment of stark contrast be leading in a particular way. And that has to happen through getting the agitation from the base.

Bacon: Talk about what’s happening in New York. What have you learned from that primary? I guess, let me ask it more directly, what are we learning from the fact that the Jeffries, Schumer, Gillibrand.… To be fair, Letitia James, Nadler—there are people who have endorsed him. It’s not as if no one’s endorsing him. It’s just more—that a lot of people are not. What do we make of that, and what does that tell us?

Mitchell: Yeah. I think there’s a lot to be made of what’s happening now. If we take a few steps above the particularities of it, I think it speaks to a crossroads in our democracy that is bigger than the Democratic Party. And look, I think people who witnessed what happened in New York City with Zohran’s race and the coalition that was built around him and the strategy that the Working Families Party created of creating a multiracial slate and using that dynamism in order to push back against the really corrupt politics of Cuomo and Adams—anybody that looks at that in the pro-democracy movement and seeks to undermine it, destroy it, distance themselves from it are writing themselves out of history. There are different arguments, and I think there should be different arguments, about where we go in our democracy. And there is a faction of folks that are arguing that we should set our sights lower, that we should demand less, that we should “moderate” ourselves—and that would somehow unlock the possibility to be able to win more people over. Months after an election where the pro-democracy movement lost at the top of the ticket, right, that’s their argument. And I’m trying to be as fair to their argument as possible.

We have a different argument. Our argument is based on the fact that poll after poll after poll shows that working people across identity, across ideology want government to do more, not less; want government that’s not corrupt; want government that actually invest in their community and themselves. So [they] really want a robust government. We consistently see that. And so what we did was we followed the people. And Zohran is a perfect example of that. It’s a very disciplined campaign focused on affordability because again and again and again, what people are saying is, I’m in a crisis of portability. Rent is way too high. The ability for me to own a home seems unreachable. Paying for basic goods every day is just way too much for lifesaving medicine, for health care. And it’s odd to me that based on all of that data—and some of that data comes from the “moderates” and centrist—that you would translate that into, Alright, let’s convince the population that we should do less.

And so, on one side is the do less, moderate, ask for less. On the other side is we want a country and a democracy and an economy that actually does more. And we have the proof of Zohran’s successful election, but not just Zohran’s successful election. In that election, on Election Day in New York, Zohran won and we were really excited about him winning. But we also had victories in Albany, victories in Syracuse. We have a candidate in Rochester who is competitively running in November. Victories in Buffalo. To me, that demonstrates that, yes, Zohran is an exceptional candidate and it was seismic the victory in New York, but we’re winning everywhere. The we should do more and we should focus like a laser on the issues that working people are saying that they care about—affordability and pushing back against corporations so they get a fair share, a fair shake—that is working in New York, Buffalo, Syracuse, and Albany. All four of those places are very different. Buffalo was more of a Midwestern town than New York or anything else. It’s closer to Detroit in some ways.

And those same messages a few weeks later were successful in Arizona—Adelita Grijalva. That competitive congressional primary was one with the same coalition: labor and community, the Working Families Party, and focusing like a laser on affordability. And then a few weeks later in Detroit and Seattle and Tucson. Those same messages and that same coalition and the Working Families Party won really hard-earned victories. And I think what we’re establishing is in every region—even in rural Oregon, we’re having victories. In big cities like New York, in rural Oregon. When I take a step back, and you asked me about what does it mean, I think we’re at a crossroads about who should lead the pro-democracy movement. And they have an argument. And their argument, I think, is an argument of a past and a system that frankly doesn’t exist anymore. And those folks—if they want to write themselves out of history, be my guest. The future is demonstrated in the coalition that’d be built around Zohran and many of the other candidates.

Bacon: That’s interesting because I was going to ask you to connect these two conversations—about Trump and what he’s doing and the primaries that we’re talking about in New York. Some people might say this is not the time to have a debate. Any fights between the centrist and the progressives should be—we should all focus on Trump right now. We should not focus on any divisions. And I think what I’m hearing you say, let me put in my own words, is how we decide to fight authoritarianism, what kind of message we have, who leads that fight is important. And the approach of Zohran is more likely to win the authoritarianism fight than the approach of poll reading and so on. Is that what you’re getting at—to win the authoritarian fight, it matters who the leadership of the authoritarian cause is to beat the authoritarians?

Mitchell: Absolutely. And I would say I agree deeply that the primary fight is the fight against the authoritarians, the fascists, the white Christian nationalists. And how you pursue that fight is critical if you want to win that fight. We’re not interested in engaging in factional warfare. We’re interested in winning the main fight and being part of the united front that does that—but how you do that matters. I don’t think we should just sit on our hands and allow the people that led us into the loss in November lead us into this next fight. I think we should have a serious conversation about what the battle plans look like, and that’s what primaries allow us to do. And the proof is in the primary victories. At WFP, we’re not writing breathless op-eds in The Washington Post or The New York Times about a factional battle inside of the Democratic Party. To me, that’s small.

We are putting boots on the ground and developing a strategy that is actually winning and winning new people into the coalition. Everything that the—I hate the terms “centrist” and “moderate” because it almost sounds like they’re reasonable. Also, I look at those people as being very, very deep ideologues. And my evidence is the fact that after the New York primary, if they weren’t deep ideologues, they would’ve dusted themselves off and said, Hey, this is the person who won the primary, let’s accommodate, let’s align. Or if they were being Machiavellian, let’s figure out how we co-opt this movement because there’s more people here. But because of their deep, deep ideological commitment, they only could look at this movement as something that is a threat, which means that they have prioritized factional warfare over the primary struggle which is the defeat against fascism. And they’re the “vote blue no matter who” team, except when the outcome isn’t what they want.

So yeah, absolutely, the primary struggle is against global fascism. How you pursue that struggle matters, and we’re engaging in good faith and in a productive way to argue that the way you pursue that struggle is through engaging working people in a language that they understand on the issues that matter most to them and focusing like a laser on that.

Bacon: And to be clear, Zohran did talk about ICE. He did talk about Trump. His focus was on affordability, but he didn’t ignore the other things, right?

Mitchell: No. No, absolutely. And that’s another, I think, debate that we’re winning. You don’t need to deny or tuck in or disappear your values. You don’t need to give up on some of the most at-risk or marginalized communities. I think it is a complete fallacy. What people desire in their leaders is authenticity and fight. People don’t require from their leaders a one-to-one agreement on everything. I think there’s this attitude of, These are “hot-button” issues. These are controversial issues. We don’t want to get pulled into a conversation about trans kids. We don’t want to get pulled into a conversation about immigration. And so let’s basically neuter ourselves of all of our values and focus on affordability in a way that is dishonest so that we could win over the working class. Basically, throw these communities under the bus, right? That is the argument. We disagree with that, and I think the proof is in the fact that all of the candidates that I talked about led with affordability—and were keen to focus like the laser on affordability—but also led with our values. There there was a fight, [they] engaged in those righteous fights. And what we’ve seen is that that’s actually inspired people—because that’s what leadership is.

Look, Trump’s base don’t necessarily agree with everything that he does point by point. Some of the stuff that he does is incoherent, so it’s almost impossible to agree with it. But they believe in him, and he’s built that deep agreement and cult-like connection. What’s most important for leaders is to build a true connection based on whether or not you really believe this person. And I don’t think you could get that as somebody who’s to the left of these folks if you don’t embrace people who are on the margins. That’s who we are as people who believe in democracy. And look, I saw some folks—people in the Democratic Party—hours after November, pivot and say, OK, look, can we just be real? A man is a man and a woman is a woman. That comes off so cheap. I saw Gavin Newsom do that thing where he started—it just comes off so thirsty. Ultimately, I don’t know who you’re winning, but I certainly know who you’re losing with that approach.

Bacon: We don’t have any exit polls on this kind of thing, but you assume there are some Zohran Trump voters. The thing you’re hinting at is people want authenticity and respect and so on. There are people who are not reading the checklist of, He’s for rent control and I’m against rent control. I don’t like grocery stores because I’m a capitalist. Your guess is that this is not how most people [operate]. They’re looking for leadership. They’re looking for, Does this person get where I’m coming from, [that] affordability crosses ideology?

Mitchell: There’s a lot of people, and there’s a electorally significant group of people that want leadership, that want change, that don’t want the status quo. I know it’s hard for people like me and you to believe, but there are people who do not at all follow politics the way that we do—and there’s people who don’t identify and could not place themselves on a left-right ideological spectrum because they don’t live in a world where things like ideology are identities that matter to them. They live in a very different world, but they are seeking solutions to the problems in their lives. They are seeking leadership that actually is focused on them. And in the ways that Trump was able to convince some people that that’s true, there’s a group of people who either were confused enough that they didn’t show up or voted for Trump that are not MAGA people. I got cousins who lean in that direction or are—

Bacon: Open to it.

Mitchell: Yeah. Open to Trump. And those are the folks that I’m talking about. I’m not talking about MAGA cult people. There [are] 13 or 14 percent of people who are part of the MAGA cult; I’m not talking about them. There are 13 or 14 percent of the people who are on all the issues, all the way down with the pro-democracy progressive movement. And then there [are] 13, 14 percent of average everyday pearl-clutching MSNBC-watching liberals. That leaves everybody else, which is the majority of working-class people, that are cross-pressured. And absolutely, some of those people that voted for Trump months after are open to other ideas—and it’s through the leadership of people like Zohran, the leadership of many of our other candidates that could pull them in a different direction.

They’re not off the board, and I’m not willing to, as a movement, write those people off. I am willing to write off the cult. The 13, 14 percent—I’m not going back and forth with them. But that leaves the majority of working people who are being swayed by some right-wing arguments, and we need to make sure that we’re having a better conversation.

Bacon: I have two more questions. When you say working people, you don’t mean necessarily just people without degrees. Or what do you mean? I think that education polarization is happening, but I think we’ve overdone it. How do you view the electorate in a certain way? Are working people a broad group? Are college-educated people outside of the group? When you say working people, what do you mean?

Mitchell: Yeah, a lot of the definitions that people use are so imprecise. A lot of times, when people say the working class, it’s code for something else. So I think it’s worth talking about. Sometimes when people say the working class, they’re talking about white working-class men or white working-class men in the Midwest.

Bacon: Work in factories, etc.

Mitchell: Yeah. And you can think about this individual—has been furloughed—is sitting in a diner somewhere in the Midwest thinking, whatever. I’m not talking about that. Sometimes, they talk about noncollege people—people who have not gone to college—and they use education as the definition. I’m not talking about that. My mother is a retired 1199 nurse. She is a working-class person for sure. And most nurses have to go to secondary education. So if you use college-noncollege, then you’re automatically excluding my mom, which doesn’t make sense ’cause she’s surely part of the working class. Sometimes people use income. And there are people who are very much the working class—like a working-class plumber—who draws a pretty good income. So if you use income, you’re going to lose that person. And then of course, race. Some people, when they say working class, they’re talking about white people. And as we know, the working class is very, very, very diverse—more diverse and also more gender diverse today than it was before.

So when we say working class, we’re talking about income. We’re talking about educational attainment. And we’re also talking about the status of somebody’s job. All three of those things. We actually have developed a much more nuanced definition that includes 63 percent of the voting population.

Bacon: You’re talking about New York City, where even people with three degrees might have an affordability problem. Really, in urban areas, affordability is an issue pretty much. Unless you work on Wall Street, New York is not cheap.

Mitchell: No, no. In most urban areas you have to pretty wealthy to live the lifestyle that most people think of as the regular middle-class lifestyle. So even people in New York City and other urban areas that are making six digits are having to make really hard choices in order to afford the city. And when you think about how cities need to run properly, your average EMT, your average nurse, your average school teacher, your average person who’s leaving college is part of the affordability crisis. Your average sanitation worker is part of the affordability crisis as well as people who you might think of as being part of the traditional industrial working class, which is less and less a reality, unfortunately, in this country. And so when we talk about working class, we’re talking about a wide spectrum of people—from your barista to your EMT to people who might have multiple degrees but are really struggling to folks who might actually work at a university, who have all types of degrees. If you talk to your average adjunct professor, they are struggling. And so it’s a very, very diverse, broad set of people, which is why we’ve done a lot of research to understand the working class to build a movement that represents the nuances and the diversity of that working class.

Bacon: There’s a great report WFP did on the working class, and I’ll post it publicly to make sure people see it because it was really good and taught me some things too. Last question: I was making fun of people—there was a memo sent out by one of these firms basically defending the idea to call the National Guard—calling the National Guard being in D.C. a distraction or a tactic or a stunt and downplaying it. But I’ve got to admit, my friend Senator Warren, who I love, used the term “diversion” to talk about Lisa Cook last night. I assume there’s some strategy here, but I do not feel like we’re living in a world of distractions and stunts and diversions. I feel like a Black woman who was the first Black woman on the Federal Reserve and who also was representing an independent agency got pushed out and maybe fired—it feels like a very important thing to me. Not a diversion, not a distraction, not a stunt. The National Guard being in D.C., not a diversion, not a stunt. I’m bothered by this language, but maybe I’m missing something. So help me understand ’cause you are reading these poll, you do politics in a way that I don’t.

Mitchell: I think I could synthesize it. I think in a world where Donald Trump was a popular president that had popular policies, he would not have to resort so blatantly to authoritarian means. At a very clear point, he has chosen—and I want to connect what’s happening in D.C. with what happened in Texas—to give up traditional politics. He understands that he is not a popular president, that his policies aren’t popular, and that he has gained the allegiance of his base and of the Republican base. If you look at polls, he’s deeply, deeply underwater with Democrats and independents. And he has soddenly the same numbers with Republicans. And I think based on that reality, he’s wholly pivoting away from democratic politics to authoritarian politics.

Bacon: You mean democratic small ‘d’ as in democracy?

Mitchell: Democracy. He does not look forward to future elections as things that he can win fair and square. And so as a result, he needs to create the infrastructure and the permission structure for the military to be on our streets. And he also has to steal congressional seats. And there’s a number of other things in the authoritarian playbook that he has to do. The place where the diversion people, and this is real people, align is that in a world where that big, horrible bill wasn’t horrible and wasn’t unpopular, where the Epstein controversy wasn’t high, where he wouldn’t need to do these things because he could run on his popularity. And so that’s the synthesis of those two things. These things are real. It’s really happening. And he’s given up on being popular. As a result, he has to do these things. When you understand that he’s choosing to govern as a true authoritarian, a lot of these things that seem disparate actually have a logic to them. It makes sense. And if that’s true, then the things that we have to do become a lot clearer as well.

Bacon: And you can be an authoritarian and be popular. He happens to be an unpopular one and that’s a good thing. So it’s a bad thing in that he’s lashing out, but it’s a good thing in that we’ve made him unpopular or he’s made himself unpopular or whatever it is. It is better to have an authoritarian with a 40-percent approval rating than an 80-percent approval rating, I would assume.

Mitchell: Correct. And I think one of our hypotheses in November was that they were going to engage in overreach that will disturb a lot of people—not just self-identify progressives and, again, the pearl-clutching MSNBC-watching liberals. A lot of people would be disturbed and will actually feel the weight of the decisions that he’s making. And that’s happening in the economy. That’s happening through the immigration policy. That’s happening on a lot of levels. And that will create the venue for a pretty broad, diverse solidarity. And that is happening. Now, there’s a lot of people—and some of them voted for Trump, [some] lean conservative and may not have voted for Trump, some of them didn’t vote for all—who are now part of the pro-democracy movement. But I also want to elevate the challenge. His approval with his base is still really resilient.

Bacon: And his base is a majority of people in many states.

Mitchell: Right, right. But the upside is that his base does not represent the majority of people. And you can’t win popular elections with just Republicans. Again, that aligns with the theory that he has to advance authoritarian rule. But it also means that we have to build that united front. And if that united front is as big and as bold and as diverse as possible, we will prevail. And that gives me a lot of confidence. It won’t be easy.

Bacon: If that base is as big and bold, we can prevail.

Mitchell: Absolutely. Look, victories are never linear and there is a relationship between their desperation and their willingness to do very extreme things. And so that’s the other thing: When they do extreme things, it’s not necessarily a show of their power. It could certainly be a show of their weakness and their desperation and acknowledgement that our movement is gaining traction and momentum.

Bacon: OK. Maurice, thank you for joining us. I think there’s a lot of insight here. I appreciate it. Take care.

Mitchell: It’s good to be with you.

CDC Director Remarkably Ousted After Less Than a Month on the Job - 2025-08-27T22:17:51Z

The recently-appointed director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is already on her way out, with less than a month in the role under her belt.

Susan Monarez, a longtime government scientist who was sworn into office on July 31, was removed before the end of August according to multiple administration officials familiar with the matter who spoke with The Washington Post.

Monarez’s ouster also comes just one day after the CDC scaled back a program monitoring food contaminants at the national level, because there reportedly wasn’t enough funding available to track all eight pathogens.

Speaking anonymously with the Post, CDC employees shared that Monarez had scheduled an agencywide call for Monday, but it was cancelled Friday. It’s unclear what exactly prompted the meeting’s cancellation, or her removal.

Kennedy announced in May that the COVID-19 vaccine would no longer be included in the CDC’s recommended immunizations for healthy children and pregnant women, bypassing scientific review and angering the medical community. Monarez had previously earned a PhD in microbiology and immunology, and conducted research on developing technologies aimed for the treatment of infectious diseases. It’s possible that this experience placed her at odds with Kennedy’s anti-vaccine policies.

Minneapolis Mayor Slams Anti-Trans Hate After School Shooting - 2025-08-27T22:03:09Z

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey excoriated transphobes for tying a mass shooting to their hateful ideology.

At a press conference Wednesday about the Annunciation Catholic School shooting Wednesday, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey called out groups and individuals for attacking the trans community in the wake of the horrific event.  

“Anybody who is using this as an opportunity to villainize our trans community or any other community out there has lost their sense of common humanity,” Frey said. “We should not be operating out of a place of hate for anyone. We should be operating from a place of our love for kids … kids died today,” he said. 

The FBI identified the shooter as 23-year-old Robin Westman, who graduated from the school in 2017 and, according to officials, identified as a trans woman. Westman killed two children—an 8- and 10-year-old—when she opened fire on the building at the beginning of mass, wounding 14 other children between the ages of six and 15. Three adults in their 80s were also injured.

Authorities announced during the press briefing that they expected all the other victims to recover, though they emphasized their varying degrees of injury.

Westman was found dead from self-inflicted injuries Wednesday morning, police told CNN. 

Police officers in the city are “deeply traumatized” by what they saw, Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara told reporters. Westman’s weapons were purchased legally and were “purchased recently,” according to O’Hara.

During the same press conference, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz stressed that children in the community had arrived at Annunciation Wednesday morning to learn and be curious, but were instead met with “evil and horror and death.”

“There shouldn’t be words for these types of incidents, because they should not happen,” Walz said.”There’s no words that are going to ease the pain of the families today.”

This post has been updated.

Fox News Host Calls for Gun Control in Stunning Moment Live on Air - 2025-08-27T20:37:14Z

On Wednesday, conservative Fox News host and former Republican Representative Trey Gowdy floated the need for stricter gun control laws in response to the shooting that killed two schoolchildren in Minneapolis earlier in the day.

Gowdy said of the tragedy, “The only way to stop it is to identify the shooter ahead of time or keep the weapons out of their hands.” He then suggested it’s time for a national reckoning on guns.

“We’re going to have to have a conversation of freedom versus protecting children. I mean, how many school shootings does it take before we’re going to have a conversation about keeping firearms out—” he said, not finishing the statement as he went on to observe that the overwhelming majority of mass shooters are white men.

“It’s always a young white male, almost always,” Gowdy said. (Though reports Wednesday afternoon indicate that the identified shooter may have been a white transgender woman.)

As a congressman, Gowdy received money from the National Rifle Association and even spoke at the group’s 2016 “leadership forum.” He also questioned the need for tighter gun laws. After the 2018 Parkland high school shooting, he said, “Before we begin to advocate for new laws, I think it is eminently fair to say, ‘How are we doing enforcing the ones we currently have?’”

Gowdy’s perspective had changed as of Wednesday: When co-host Lisa Boothe suggested that there are already “laws on the books for these types of situations,” Gowdy was skeptical, asking, “Like what?”

“Well, murder,” Boothe replied, before shifting the conversation somewhat.

Gowdy’s comments sparked outrage online from MAGA, which flooded X with calls for his firing from Fox News. “Trey Gowdy hates you and wants to take your guns,” wrote MAGA provocateur Mike Cernovich, who also accused him of “pushing for gun control and anti-white hatred.” “Shameful,” said the Florida-based pro-Trump personality Eric Daugherty.

Trump’s Beloved “Alligator Alcatraz” Will Likely Be Empty Very Soon - 2025-08-27T20:28:15Z

It looks like Florida may finally be taking down the tents of its premier wetland-themed concentration camp.

Florida Division of Emergency Management Executive Director Kevin Guthrie sent an email about chaplaincy services at the ramshackle immigration detention facility, also known as “Alligator Alcatraz,” to Rabbi Mario Rojzman last week, The Associated Press reported. In the message, Guthrie claimed that the facility was “probably going to be down to 0 individuals within a few days.”

The email was sent August 22, the same day that a federal judge gave the government just two months to remove the facility’s fencing, lighting, and generators—rendering it unusable and forcing officials to clear out its detainee population.

In her ruling in a lawsuit brought by environmental groups, U.S. District Judge Kathleeen Williams also rejected the government’s claim that “Alligator Alcatraz” was run by the state of Florida, not ICE, making it subject to federal requirements.

The government has already appealed the decision, arguing that forcing the facility’s rapid closure was a hardship that would compromise its ability to enforce immigration laws. Elise Pautler Bennett, a senior attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity, told The Associated Press that Guthrie’s email undermined the government’s argument.

“If it was so difficult, they would not have already accomplished it, largely,” Bennett said.

Earlier this month, the judge ordered Florida to halt construction at the facility, which both detainees and former employees said had nightmarish living conditions. Immigration attorneys have reported they were unable to contact their clients, who went missing from ICE’s detainee tracker inside the supposedly state-run facility.

It’s not entirely clear where exactly the hundreds of detainees have been moved.

At one point, the facility held nearly 1,000 people, but last week Florida Representative Maxwell Frost said that roughly 300 detainees remained. The Associated Press reported that about 100 detainees have been deported, and others have been transferred to other detention facilities, but it’s unclear whether these are federal or state facilities.

Minneapolis Shooting Suspect Hated Trump—and All People of Color - 2025-08-27T20:04:24Z

The Minneapolis shooter had eclectic politics ranging from explicit Nazism to hate for Trump to transgender equality. 

Robin Westman, 23, dressed in all black, was identified by authorities as having shot through the windows of Annunciation Catholic School during a morning Mass and killed two children, eight and 10 years old. Seventeen others, 14 of whom were children, were injured, seven critically. Westman then shot themself in the back of the church. Westman was a former student at the school.

In a YouTube video now taken offline, Westman had magazines with a variety of slurs and right-wing slogans written on them, including “kick a spic,” “fart nigga,” “McVeigh,” and “Waco.” Westman also had smoke grenades with “Jew Gas” written on them and the antisemitic, pro-Holocaust slogan “6 million wasn’t enough” written on their gear.

PatriotTakes 🇺🇸 @patriottakes The alleged shooter Robin Westman had anti-Black, anti-Latino, and anti-LGBTQ slurs written on his magazines (screenshots of photos)X screenshot PatriotTakes 🇺🇸 @patriottakes The alleged shooter Robin Westman had the far-right / neo-Nazi message “6 million wasn’t enough” on his gear, a message celebrating the Holocaust. He also had “Jew Gas” written on his smoke grenades. (screenshots of photos)

Interestingly, one magazine also said “Kill Trump Now.” 

X screenshot PatriotTakes 🇺🇸 @patriottakes Alleged shooter Robin Westman also had “Waco” and “McVeigh” written on his gear, references to anti-government topics often referenced by far right nationalists. In addition to his far-right, Nazi messages, he also had threats against Trump on his gear. Many far-right, white nationalist, anti-government types despise Trump while others find their home in the MAGA movement. Westman appears to be the former. (screenshots of photos)

Westman’s apparent video manifesto shows a journal with pages of something written in Russian, featuring disturbing drawings of the Annunciation Church interior. Westman then stabs the pages with a knife, and can be heard whispering “kill them all,” “die, I can’t wait to kill, and kill, and kill, and kill, and kill myself.” These disturbing ramblings continue throughout the 20-minute video. 

Court records show that in November 2019, when Westman was 17, their mother submitted a petition to change their name. A judge approved, writing, “Minor child identifies as a female and wants her name to reflect that identification,” according to The New York Times.

Westman’s social media presence also revealed a sticker with the trans pride flag and a machine gun captioned “Defend Equality.”

The fact that Westman’s statements are so scattered point to the obvious: that they are a deeply unwell person who committed an incredibly heinous act for political reasons that may never be known. It’s more important to actually commit to passing gun control laws than it is trying to parse through Westman’s inflammatory statements.   

RFK Jr Just Made It Very Hard to Get a Covid Vaccine - 2025-08-27T19:40:44Z

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has severely restricted access to the latest Covid-19 vaccine.

The Food and Drug Administration approved updated shots from Pfizer, Moderna and Novavax on Wednesday, but only for people aged 65 or above. Under Kennedy’s new policy, younger adults and children will need at least one high-risk health condition, such as asthma or obesity, in order to qualify for the jab.

The change will require millions of Americans to navigate the expenses of the healthcare system to prove they need the Covid vaccine before they’ll be permitted to access it.

Concerned parents will no longer be able to access Pfizer’s vaccine for children under 5, either—in the same stroke, the FDA revoked the company’s emergency authorization. Instead, parents will be able to seek out vaccines from rival drug company Moderna, which per Kennedy’s order will be the only option for children between 6 months and 5 years of age.

In a statement, Kennedy reiterated that he had promised to end Covid vaccine mandates, and “end the emergency” surrounding treatment of the lethal infection. He also said he followed through on maintaining the shot’s availability for vulnerable populations, and had enforced placebo-controlled trials at pharmaceutical companies.

“In a series of FDA actions today we accomplished all four goals,” Kennedy wrote on X. “The emergency use authorizations for Covid vaccines, once used to justify broad mandates on the general public during the Biden administration, are now rescinded.”

“The American people demanded science, safety, and common sense. This framework delivers all three,” Kennedy added.

It isn’t the first vaccine that Kennedy has cancelled on the grounds of his unscientific doubts.

Earlier this month, the health secretary said his agency would divest $500 million from mRNA research, effectively axing 22 mRNA studies since—according to Kennedy—the vaccines “fail to protect” against “upper respiratory infections like COVID and flu.”

Instead, Kennedy said that his agency would shift the funding toward “safer, broader vaccine platforms that remain effective even as viruses mutate”—which apparently does not include the latest and greatest medical advances.

The problem with Kennedy’s approach is two-fold: it will result in a sacrifice of time and money. Traditional vaccines injected a weakened or dead version of a virus, triggering the body’s immune response and the development of antibodies. Researching and developing these vaccines is a “lengthy and costly” process that becomes further complicated when researchers have to respond to mutations in the virus, according to Penn Medicine.

After Kennedy took the reins at HHS, he replaced independent medical experts on the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s vaccine advisory panel with vaccine skeptics. He also warned against the use of the MMR vaccine during Texas’s historic measles outbreak, recommending that suffering patients instead take vitamins. And he founded his new directive for America’s health policy—the “Make America Healthy Again” report—on studies generated by AI that never existed in the real world.

“We Can Prevail” Over Trump By Building a Big, Broad Coalition - 2025-08-27T19:16:59Z

Americans frustrated with President Trump’s actions need to work collectively and locally, says Maurice Mitchell, national director of the Working Family Parties. In the latest edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon, he encouraged Americans to join labor unions and other organizations in their own communities. He argued that President Trump’s attempt to remove Lisa Cook from the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors is an example of both this administration’s authoritarianism and its racism. WFP is deeply involved in Democratic primaries to elect progressive candidates. Mitchell touted the recent successes of WFP-endorsed candidates, notably New York’s Zohran Mamdani. These candidates, he said, offer a model to the broader Democratic Party. Mandami in particular, according to Mitchell, talked about economic issues in ways that resonated with voters across ideological lines but did not ignore or downplay issues of rights and fairness, such ICE deportations in New York City. You can watch this episode here.

MAGA Loses It After Minneapolis Mayor’s Emotional Speech on Shooting - 2025-08-27T18:32:57Z

On Wednesday afternoon, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey delivered emotional remarks about the tragedy at a Catholic school in the city earlier that day. In the wake of the shooting—in which the gunman killed two schoolchildren and injured 17 others, before killing himself—Frey emphasized that platitudes about “thoughts and prayers” are not enough.

“And don’t just say this is about thoughts and prayers right now,” Frey said. “These kids were literally praying! It was the first week of school. They were in a church. These are kids that should be learning with their friends. They should be playing on the playground. They should be able to go to school or church in peace, without the fear or risk of violence.”

Online, many on the MAGA right villainized the Democratic mayor for these remarks, mischaracterizing his comments on the insufficiency of hollow condolences as an attack on people of faith.

The right-wing news site Daily Caller reported that Frey had used the shooting to “slander Christians.” Right-wing advocacy group America First Works called the comments “disgraceful.”

MAGA influencer Chaya Raichik (known as Libs of TikTok) said Frey had “slam[med] people who are praying for the victims.” Curtis Houck of the conservative site NewsBusters said he had “kick[ed] dirt on children praying.” Alt-right commentator and Pizzagate conspiracy monger Jack Posobiec accused him of spreading “anti-Christian hate.” A prominent anonymous X user with the handle @_johnnymaga called the mayor “the ultimate POS [piece of shit],” saying he had insulted “the faith of the children who were just gunned down in his city.”

In reaction to the speech, several MAGA accounts with significant followings ridiculed Frey for having knelt and wept before the casket of George Floyd in 2020.

For instance, Juanita Broaddrick, a pro-Trump figure who accused Bill Clinton of rape in 1999, shared a clip of Frey at Floyd’s funeral, writing of the mayor: “He is a real Piece of Sh*t. Here he is sobbing and praying at George Floyd’s gold casket. But he doesn’t want you to pray for these kids today.”

Trump Held Secret Talks With Republican Leaders on Gerrymandering War - 2025-08-27T18:32:17Z

After weeks of resisting the White House’s gerrymandering efforts, Indiana lawmakers are starting to change their minds.

President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance met privately with Indiana Republicans this week as part of a pressure campaign to maximize GOP House seats before the 2026 midterms.

While Indiana’s lawmakers remain divided on the issue, the president’s personal touch has started to make a difference, according to at least one person who attended the meetings.

Just weeks ago, state Representative Jim Lucas decried the nationwide MAGA effort as a political “stunt.” But Lucas has softened his stance on redistricting Indiana since he spoke with Vance on Tuesday, reported the Indianapolis Star.

“I’m not as opposed to it as I was,” Lucas told the paper.

Talk of redistricting occupied only a small portion of the discussions, but at least one Oval Office encounter did involve a quiet push by Trump to pressure Indiana House Speaker Todd Huston and Senate President Rodric Bray on the issue, according to White House officials who spoke with The Washington Post.

In a separate discussion with Indiana lawmakers, Vance spent the last 30 minutes of his meeting attempting to sway representatives.

The White House’s intense focus on this issue is emblematic of just how nervous the GOP is about maintaining their razor-thin majority in Congress: Indiana holds nine seats in the U.S. House, and seven of those are already held by Republicans.

Gerrymandering has become a nationwide fixation since Trump demanded in July that Texas Republicans create five more House seats by redrawing its congressional map, eliminating a handful of blue districts in the process. The order, and Texas’s subsequent obedience, elicited shock and contempt from two of the country’s most populous regions—California and New York. Both states launched their own redistricting wars in the wake of the vote.

Trump issued similar directives for four other states: Missouri, Ohio, Illinois, and Florida.

MAGA Election Denier Gets Top Job Monitoring Election Integrity - 2025-08-27T17:36:40Z

The Department of Homeland Security hired an election conspiracy theorist to work in election integrity.

Heather Honey, a right-wing activist who pushed false claims of fraud after the 2020 presidential election, was hired to serve as the deputy assistant secretary on election integrity at the DHS Office of Strategy, Policy and Plans, according to Democracy Docket. The role did not previously exist under the Biden administration. 

​​Honey is the founder of the Election Research Institute, a group behind a recent elections rule change in Georgia which would allow county boards to postpone certifying election tallies until officials can review any discrepancies between ballots cast and the total number of people who voted, which are typically considered to be minor issues that are not evidence of malfeasance.

Honey is also the founder of Pennsylvania Fair Elections, an election-denying activist group that spread misinformation about the 2020 presidential election in coordination with other activists, like Cleta Mitchell. Mitchell, it’s worth noting, is a far-right activist with the ear of the president who thinks Honey is a “wonderful person.”

The Trump administration has long peddled debunked conspiracy theories that the 2020 election was stolen, and Honey’s hiring is just the latest sign that they plan to continue.

After the 2020 general election, Honey alleged widespread voter fraud in Pennsylvania and attempted to access voter records to conduct her own independent review. Honey’s research organization Verity Vote claimed that Pennsylvania had a “voter deficit” which left more than 100,000 votes uncounted, and claimed that the state had sent ballots to unregistered voters. 

Trump made slightly different allegations about Pennsylvania’s 2020 general election, claiming that there had been more votes than voters, which also proved to be false. 

Honey also served as the star witness for Kari Lake’s failed case alleging that hundreds of thousands of phony ballots were cast in Maricopa County, Arizona. She tried to accuse the county of failing to respond to her public records request for paperwork about ballot drop-off,  to which an attorney for the county argued she had completely misunderstood what kind of document she needed. 

When pressed on how many illegal ballots Honey believed had been injected into the election, she said that it wasn’t an “answerable question.”

Trump’s Tariffs Could Damage a Key Alliance—and Spike Your Drug Costs - 2025-08-27T17:21:34Z

Imagine you are at the pharmacy counter, grabbing your daily statin or antidepressant, those affordable generics that keep millions of Americans going. You probably don’t realize that almost half of all generic medicines taken in the United States come from India alone. Medicines from Indian companies save America billions in healthcare costs—$219 billion in 2022, according to the IQVIA Institute for Human Data Science.

But with Donald Trump’s recent hike to tariffs on Indian imports, punishing Delhi for buying Russian oil, that lifeline could snap and many Americans may have to brace for steeper medical bills. A lengthy report in The New York Times Wednesday referred to the 50 percent tariff schedule as “extraordinary.” This isn’t just about higher bills. It’s a strategic blunder fracturing the U.S.-India partnership at a time when Americans need it most. India is America’s key ally in the Quad to counter China, but these tariffs are pushing it toward Beijing and Moscow.

Trump imposed the tariff just after midnight on Wednesday in Washington, upending a decades-long push by the United States to forge closer relations with India. India is one of America’s most important strategic partners in Asia. India and the United States are brought together by mutual interests and common values. But these tariffs are now among the highest the United States charges across all countries.

America has strategically deepened relations with India in recent years. But this move risks bringing the relationship to its lowest point. Trump risks alienating a crucial partner by hitting a significant portion of India’s export economy to the United States, which is valued at nearly $87 billion.

India supplies a huge amount of textiles, automotive parts, and even software services to the American market. But pharmaceuticals stand out because they directly affect health and the economic conditions of people. Generic drugs from India are cheaper versions of brand-name medications. With India providing nearly half of generic prescriptions in the U.S., Americans could face higher prices and more shortages of critical drugs due to the disruptive levies on lifesaving medications. That’s the kind of real pain these tariffs could bring.

India imports around two million barrels of crude oil per day from Russia, making it the second largest purchaser of Russian oil, according to a report. India and Russia have been supporting each other for decades. When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Western countries imposed sanctions on Russia, which drove down the price of Russian crude. India turned to purchasing Russian oil sold at a discount. India could lose as much as a full percentage point of its GDP growth due to the tariff. This would be a significant blow for India. It may result in fewer investments, slower job creation, and more general instability that affects international markets.

In addition, the tariffs seem selective. China, the other major buyer of Russian oil, has faced no equivalent penalties. Why pick on India when China buys even more Russian oil and poses a bigger strategic threat? This double standard makes the U.S. look inconsistent and weakens its moral ground in international communities.

Trump has placed Prime Minister Narendra Modi in a challenging position: Giving in to American pressures could cause domestic backlash because consumers would be hit by higher oil prices, and rebuffing them would result in high tariffs. “India will never compromise on the interests of its farmers, dairy farmers, and fishermen,” Modi said during a speech at an agricultural conference in New Delhi. India doesn’t want to appear weak, which is reflected in his defiance. It will continue to assert that its foreign policy is guided by its national security.

Tariffs aren’t the only front on which Trump has put the U.S.-India relationship at risk. India and Pakistan had a brief four-day conflict in May. When it ended, Trump took credit for brokering the ceasefire. India denied this, insisting it resulted solely from bilateral dialogue. Shortly after doing that, Trump hosted Pakistan’s army chief, Asim Munir, for lunch at the White House. Such missteps, combined with tariffs, increase the risk of pushing India toward China and Russia. It’s like America is handing India reasons to rethink its alliances, at a moment when unity against common threats is crucial.

The Trump administration must recognize that coercion is counterproductive. India’s strategic autonomy cannot be dictated by tariffs. A diplomatic reset is essential, one that prioritizes dialogue over punishment. The United States could offer targeted exemptions for India’s key exports, like pharmaceuticals, in exchange for gradual reductions in Russian oil imports. This would allow Modi to save face domestically while aligning with U.S. goals. Washington should recommit to the Quad, hosting its planned summit in India this year to signal enduring partnership. Strengthening defense and technology cooperation, already robust through initiatives, could rebuild trust.

Trump needs to go beyond just exemptions. For example, joint ventures in clean energy could help India diversify away from Russian oil. Sharing technology for solar or wind power would benefit both nations, reducing dependence on fossil fuels and creating jobs. Similarly, expanding educational exchanges and people-to-people ties could foster goodwill that’s harder to break with policy swings.

Finally, Trump must temper his rhetoric. Publicly taunting India as a “dead economy” or claiming credit for its diplomatic achievements alienates a proud nation. A quieter, more respectful approach, acknowledging India’s global aspirations, would go further in securing cooperation. The United States could also leverage its influence to support India’s bid for a permanent U.N. Security Council seat. That would reinforce New Delhi’s stake in the U.S.-led order and show we’re invested in India’s rise, not just using it as a counterweight.

Some in Washington see the tariffs as a negotiating tactic, not a permanent rupture, aimed at forcing India to diversify its energy sources. Yet this view underestimates the long-term damage. Alienating India risks not only economic ties, but also its role as a strategic partner in containing China’s ambitions, from the South China Sea to the Indian Ocean. If India drifts closer to BRICS nations, it could strengthen a bloc that challenges Western dominance in trade, finance, and technology.

The United States cannot afford to lose India. For India, the costs are high; its global ambitions rely on American support, and a drift toward Beijing or Moscow would undermine its superpower aspirations. Trump’s tariffs may aim to weaken Russia, but they risk a far greater loss: a fractured partnership that could reshape the global order in China’s favor. India and the United States should put effort to reset ties despite tensions with creative diplomacy. Trump must act swiftly to repair this rift, prioritizing diplomacy.

A strong U.S.-India bond isn’t just about geopolitics; it’s about shared prosperity. Indian innovation in IT and pharmaceuticals complements American strengths. But if tariffs force India to pivot, the supply chains could shift to less reliable partners, hurting U.S. consumers. It’s high time for smarter engagement that builds bridges, not walls.

Chilling Report Shows How Trump Has Decimated Federal Workforce - 2025-08-27T16:57:09Z

President Donald Trump has forced out nearly 10 percent of the federal workforce.

More than 199,000 federal workers were ousted from their jobs since January, according to a new analysis by the Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan nonprofit that has been tracking the cuts.

“We’re seeing the arson of our government,” Max Stier, president and CEO of Partnership for Public Service, told HuffPost. “The numbers are stunning. We can count 200,000, and the administration said 300,000, by the end of the year. That’s one in eight.”

Roughly two-thirds of the ex-employees left via Trump’s buyout—also known as his “Fork in the Road” deal—which offered furlough-threatened workers the opportunity to receive benefits and paid leave through September if they agreed to immediately resign.

Veterans have been disproportionately hurt by the mass layoffs: roughly one in four civilian employees previously served in the U.S. armed forces.

The Defense Department lost the most workers—more than 55,000 federal civilian employees were given the chop, HuffPost reported. The Treasury Department also suffered major cuts, losing more than 30,000 employees, as did the Department of Agriculture, which lost more than 21,000 people.

Those impacts have already been felt across the country. So far this year, the Social Security Administration has shuttered regional and field offices, minimizing access and creating longer wait times. Thousands of cuts at the Internal Revenue Service have also had an impact on taxpayer services. The near-total planned elimination of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau—which was formed in the wake of the 2008 recession—has left Americans at the mercy of corporate interests with little legal recourse.

The exact number of employees the Trump administration has forced out remains an enigma. The Partnership for Public Service’s statistics are much higher than previously reported figures: Last month, CNN tracked just a quarter of that progress, assessing that roughly 51,000 federal employees had lost their jobs.

“Huge numbers of very talented public servants are being forced out the door. That’s going to hurt,” said Stier. “The services that Americans have come to expect are not going to be there.”

Charlamagne tha God Sticks Hakeem Jeffries With Brutal Nickname - 2025-08-27T16:54:49Z

The Breakfast Club host and armchair political analyst Charlamagne tha God has a new nickname for Democratic Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries: AIPAC Shakur. The name is a combination of rapper Tupac Shakur’s name and a reference to Jeffries’s deep ties to the wealthy pro-Israel lobbying organization.

“I love having Minority Speaker Hakeem Jeffries,” said radio host and CNN contributor Claudia Jordan, referring to her previous talks and interviews with the New York representative. “Because you know, I’m a political nerd, like I love talking politics—”

“Charlamagne hates him,” DJ Envy chimed in.

‘You do?” said Jordan.

“I don’t hate him, I just don’t think he stands for anything,” Charlamagne said. “I think that he’s—I call him AIPAC Shakur.”

“Well, well … we need to talk about messaging,” Jordan responded, stopping Charlamagne in his tracks. “I actually went to the Capitol and had a meeting with him, and we talked about messaging, and how I was like, the frustration with the party is, y’all have to get more gangsta. Like stop going by the politics of the late 2000s, you know, 2010. You have to like, rise to the occasion, and the messaging. And he did, I saw him do more afterwards.”

“Hakeem is a puppet,” Charlemagne responded bluntly. “Hakeem’s not doing anything if Chuck Schumer don’t tell him to do it. And it’s simple as that.”

AIPAC Shakur is a very apt, and pretty funny nickname for Jeffires. The representative has received nearly $1 million dollars from AIPAC (to say nothing of other pro-Israel lobbies), has gone on multiple trips to Israel on the organization’s dime, and has always been a staunch supporter of Israel’s genocidal efforts.

Hakeem also never “got gangsta” with his messaging. He has consistently quelled genuine opposition activity within his party, refusing to make strong, aggressive statements against Trump and the GOP when they’re entirely appropriate. In March, Democratic voters were begging him to fight just a bit harder for them. And last month he still refused to endorse mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani, who won a massive victory for his party in the city he represents.

Jeffires is falling short in many regards, but his deep ties to AIPAC are perhaps chief among them. AIPAC funding and weapons to Israel are slowly but surely becoming stronger litmus tests for Democratic voters in 2026 and 2028. Jeffries is flailing badly on both counts. Hopefully the AIPAC Shakur nickname sticks.

Trump Admin Spouts BS as It Takes Over D.C.’s Union Station - 2025-08-27T15:55:50Z

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced Wednesday that the federal government will wrest control of Washington’s Union Station from Amtrak as part of President Donald Trump’s federal takeover of the city.

The move comes a week after Vice President JD Vance, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth visited the station to generate support for the president’s D.C. occupation—where they were heckled relentlessly by protesters.

Duffy’s Wednesday announcement of the extension of the takeover to Union Station came at an event celebrating various improvements to the station, such as the launch of Acela train cars. “This is all part of [Trump’s] vision to Make Travel Great again,” the transportation secretary wrote on X, touting increased “reliability,” “lower ticket costs,” and improved “Amtrak profitability.”

But while he attributed these wins to Trump, Duffy omitted to mention that they trace largely back to investments made under the presidency of Joe Biden, according to CNN’s Edward-Isaac Dovere.

Amtrak’s website celebrates the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (a.k.a. Biden’s “Bipartisan Infrastructure Law) for allocating billions to rail, including more than $20 billion “over five years to repair or replace aging assets, modernize our fleet, improve station accessibility, and other capital projects and purposes defined under the law.”

“Sean Duffy, surprising absolutely no one, taking credit for something brought to you in large part by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, signed by President Biden,” wrote former Biden administration official Chris Meagher on X.

Trump’s National Guard in D.C. Given Embarrassing New Task - 2025-08-27T15:42:07Z

President Donald Trump deployed the National Guard to deal with a so-called crime emergency in Washington, D.C.—so why are troops wandering around picking up trash?

A full busload of National Guard servicemembers were spotted collecting garbage across the street from the White House in Lafayette Park on Tuesday.

The Washington Post reported Tuesday that servicemembers had also been looped in on landscaping duties, and were tasked with spreading mulch beneath park trees.

“I think it’s nice, as a D.C. resident,” one Guard member told the Post. “But there are different things we could be doing.”

This move comes on the heels of Trump’s announcement last week that he would ask Congress for $2 billion to “beautify” Washington D.C. The process would involve repaving streets, updating lampposts, and upgrading public spaces within a three-mile radius of the Capitol Building. So basically, just the part that Trump has to see on a daily basis.

And they’re already enlisting soldiers and law enforcement officers to help.

The National Guard from the District of Columbia also posted a video on X of servicemembers picking up trash. Officials told NBC Washington that the effort was part of a “beautification and restoration” operation involving more than 40 tasks around the district.

While involving federal forces in trash pick-up is an obvious misuse of resources, it’s probably a better use of time than ramping up arrest numbers to create the illusion of a crackdown on crime in the nation’s capitol. Meandering servicemembers only serve to undermine Trump’s tactic of lying about crime rates to justify law enforcement crackdowns in Democrat-led cities.

Six Republican-led states have mobilized roughly 1,200 additional troops to join the 800 already unleashed on Washington D.C.’s streets, tasked with stopping criminals—though the rate of crime was already down.

But while they’re there, they may as well pick up a broom and start sweeping.

Prosecutors Fail to Indict D.C. Man Who Threw Sandwich at Feds - 2025-08-27T14:48:36Z

President Trump’s Justice Department has failed to charge the D.C. Sandwich Guy with a felony.  

On August 13, former DOJ paralegal Sean Dunn went viral for chucking a Subway sandwich at a Customs and Border Patrol agent in D.C.’s popular U Street corridor. 

Dunn reportedly called the heavily armed officers “fucking fascists,” and yelled “I don’t want you in my city!” before chucking the wrapped sandwich straight at the CPB agent’s chest. The agent was obviously completely fine. Dunn fled but was caught, later saying, “I did it. I threw a sandwich.” The next night, Dunn was arrested at his apartment by multiple federal agents, a gaudy scene the Trump administration posted for all to see. 

On Tuesday, federal prosecutors failed to convince grand jurors that Dunn committed felony assault by throwing a sandwich. It’s unclear if they will pursue lower misdemeanor charges against Dunn, according to The New York Times. 

This is yet another embarrassing failure for the Justice Department, and the second in two days. On Tuesday, prosecutors gave up on charging D.C. woman Sidney Lori Reid with a felony after failing to convince three different grand juries that she deserved eight years in prison for allegedly placing herself between ICE agents and someone they were detaining. After being shoved against a wall by agents, prosecutors claimed Reid “forcibly pushed” an FBI agent’s arm off of her with the intent to injure the agent.

Federal prosecutors typically have success winning over grand juries due to the biased precedent towards the prosecution, and the fact that the defendant’s lawyers aren’t even allowed in the room. To fail twice, especially after making such a huge production out of Dunn’s arrest, signals that the Trump administration’s mission of prosecuting everyone to the fullest extent may backfire. 

Denmark Summons Trump Envoy Over Stunning Report on Greenland Plot - 2025-08-27T14:42:11Z

President Donald Trump’s obsession with Greenland is tearing at America’s strategic alliances.

Denmark’s foreign minister summoned its U.S. diplomat for talks Wednesday after news broke that several individuals with ties to Trump had been conducting an influence campaign in Greenland.

At least three Americans connected to the White House are involved in the campaign, according to unnamed government and security forces cited by Danish public broadcaster DR. It is not clear if the Americans are acting independently or on orders from the Trump administration.

One of the Americans reportedly compiled a list of denizens friendly to the U.S., collected the names of people who oppose Trump, and has conducted reconnaissance on narratives that could potentially frame Denmark in a bad light for sympathetic American media. The other two Americans have been cozying up to politicians, businesspeople, and locals, reported DR.

“We are aware that foreign actors continue to show an interest in Greenland and its position in the Kingdom of Denmark,” Danish Foreign Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen said in a statement. “It is therefore not surprising if we experience outside attempts to influence the future of the Kingdom in the time ahead.”

“Any attempt to interfere in the internal affairs of the Kingdom will, of course, be unacceptable,” Løkke Rasmussen continued. 

Trump’s quest to conquer Greenland has become increasingly serious since he returned to the White House. In May, the president refused to rule out the possibility of taking Greenland by force. That same month, the Wall Street Journal reported that the U.S. intelligence community was conducting a spy campaign on the island, a directive that came from several high-ranking officials under Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.  

Greenlanders have not taken kindly to Trump and his associates’ sudden interest in acquiring their land. After months of heavy pressure from the Trump family, including an embarrassing stunt in which Donald Trump Jr. reportedly convinced homeless residents to wear MAGA merchandise in exchange for food, and an effort in the U.S. Congress to rename the territory to “Red, White, and Blueland,” Greenland’s various political parties set aside their differences in March to unite under a singular goal: opposing U.S. aggression.

“This [latest development] shows that the problem has by no means disappeared, and that it is still very much something that must be addressed,” Mikkel Runge Olesen, a senior researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS) who focuses on transatlantic relations, told DR Wednesday. “It is very worrying.”

Trump Threatens RICO Charges Against George Soros - 2025-08-27T14:36:22Z

Amid escalations in Donald Trump’s use of lawfare against his political opponents, the president on Wednesday threatened to hit George Soros with charges under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO—citing long-running MAGA conspiracy theories about the Democratic megadonor.

On Truth Social Wednesday, Trump said George Soros and his son Alexander “should be charged with RICO because of their support of Violent Protests, and much more, all throughout the United States of America.”

Trump and his allies frequently claim that popular displays against their agenda must be the result of an astroturfed campaign—with George Soros often posited as the mastermind.

The Soros’s Open Society Foundations issued a statement in response to Trump’s threat. The philanthropy network does “not support or fund violent protests,” and the president’s remarks about its founder, George Soros, and chair, Alex Soros, are “outrageous,” the statement says.

Going back to 2018, Trump claimed that demonstrators against Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination were “paid for by Soros and others.” Similar claims were touted by the MAGA right amid the Women’s March in 2017 and protests against police brutality in 2020.

More recently, Trump said constituents who spoke out at Republican town halls were “paid troublemakers.” Protesters against Trump’s ongoing federal takeover of Washington, D.C., were too, according to the president, bought by Democrats.

Conspiracy theories related to Soros came to the fore in particular during the June demonstrations against Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Los Angeles.

Trump repeatedly claimed protesters were “paid insurrectionists or agitators or troublemakers.” Meanwhile, MAGA social media circulated conspiracy-minded posts, such as photos of pallets of bricks (actually taken in New Jersey and Malaysia) as purported evidence of Soros-funded groups arming L.A. protesters with bricks “to be used by Democrat militants against ICE.”

Now, the president suggests such paranoid claims are sturdy enough to serve as the foundation for RICO charges. “Be careful, we’re watching you!” the president wrote, before signing off.

This story has been updated.

FEMA Suspends Scores of Employees Who Criticized Trump - 2025-08-27T14:20:54Z

A group of Federal Emergency Management Administration staff who wrote a letter to Congress criticizing President Donald Trump—and who asked to be protected from “politically motivated firings”—have been suspended, likely for political reasons.

Thirty-six FEMA employees, including two who were involved in the federal response to deadly flooding in Texas earlier this summer, received emails Tuesday saying they’d been placed on administrative leave “effective immediately, and continuing until further notice,” according to The New York Times.

They were part of a group of 182 FEMA employees who signed a letter warning Congress that President Donald Trump’s efforts to “phase out” the agency could make way for another Hurricane Katrina-level environmental disaster. The rest of the signatories were anonymous.

The employees advocated that FEMA be removed from the purview of the Department of Homeland Security, and made into an independent Cabinet-level agency. The letter criticized faulty leadership, as well as the Trump administration’s decision to gut millions from essential programs related to climate change and resilience.

Notably, they’d asked for protection from “politically motivated firings.” FEMA’s former acting head Cameron Hamilton was fired in May after defending the agency.

While the employees who were suspended Tuesday night were not given a reason for the decision, the suspensions appear to be part of a wider trend in the Trump administration of weeding out dissidents.

In July, 144 staff members at the Environmental Protection Agency were placed on administrative leave after they signed and publicized a “declaration of dissent” against Administrator Lee Zeldin and the greater Trump administration.

Trump Plans “Comprehensive” Crime Crackdown Bill With Republicans - 2025-08-27T14:01:53Z

President Trump is threatening a Republican-led “comprehensive crime bill” to, of course, “Make America Great Again.”

“Speaker Mike Johnson, and Leader John Thune, are working with me, and other Republicans, on a Comprehensive Crime Bill,” Trump posted on Truth Social just after midnight on Wednesday. “It’s what our Country need, and NOW! More to follow. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!”

The president offered no other details, but his current federal occupation of Washington, D.C., and his countless unsubstantiated campaign trail claims about just how bad the streets of America are can help us guess.

While some Democrats have framed his unleashing of armed National Guard troops in Los Angeles and D.C. as a distraction, the move has interrupted the lives of real people and serves as a chilling blueprint for what may come next. On Monday, Trump signed an executive order to create a “quick reaction force” in the National Guard that could be deployed nationwide. And he’s already promised to send troops to cities like Baltimore, Chicago, and New York.

This all comes as crime in America is the lowest it’s been in years.

Democrats Flip Key Seat in District Trump Won by Double Digits - 2025-08-27T13:13:14Z

In 2024, Donald Trump won Iowa’s first state Senate District handily, by 11 points. In a Tuesday special election, Democratic candidate Catelin Drey won an upset 10-point victory, as the district swung blue by 21 points since the presidential election.

Drey defeated Republican Christopher Prosch, filling a vacancy left by late Republican state Senator Rocky De Witt. The last time the seat was up for election, in 2022, De Witt beat a Democratic incumbent by about 10 points.

Drey’s victory breaks a supermajority that Iowa Senate Republicans have enjoyed since 2022. This means Republican senators will have to reach across party lines and recruit at least one Democrat to confirm the nominees of Republican Governor Kim Reynolds.

The election was the fourth Iowa special election this year, all of which bode poorly for the GOP’s standing in the Hawkeye state. Two of the elections that took place before Tuesday also went to Democrats, one of whom ousted an incumbent Republican 52–48. All three also saw Democratic overperformances from 2024—by 24, 25, and 26 points.

Looking beyond state lines, according to The Downballot, Democratic candidates in special elections nationwide have overperformed the party’s 2024 presidential election results by around 16 points.

Susan Collins Drowned Out in Boos as Protesters Disrupt Ceremony - 2025-08-27T13:05:04Z

Republican Senator Susan Collins’s ribbon-cutting ceremony Tuesday turned into a public shaming as more than 200 protestors gathered to jeer the centrist from Maine.

This was Collins’s first public, press conference-style event in her home state in nearly a decade. Video shows the room erupting in boos as she approached the front of the room to cut the ribbon for a new Main Street in Seaport, Maine. The boos eventually turned into chants of “Shame! Shame! Shame!”

Collins smiled and cut the ribbon as if her angry constituents weren’t even there. The crowd continued to shout her down.

“I’m so disgusted with the cuts the Republican Party has made to this Big Ugly Bill.... Get outta here!” one constituent yelled at Collins while she was at the podium.

“So now, if you would let me celebrate—,” Collins responded, alluding to the Main Street grand opening.

“Oh please, there’s no celebration for a genocide!” another constituent shouted, causing the crowd to erupt once again.

“Could you please just listen for one—”

“We’d like you to listen!”

“You don’t ever listen to us!”

“Your votes destroyed our Supreme Court!”

“You refuse to have town halls with us!”

“Why are you funding genocide?”

“I have a suggestion,” Collins said when she was able to get a word in. “Could you listen to the suggestion?”

“Vote Graham Platner!” another attendee shouted.

“Here is my suggestion,” said Collins. “I would like the town of Seaport, which has worked so hard with state, local, and me, to bring today about. To be able to celebrate—”

Collins was again shouted down, this time over her votes to continue funding and arming Israel in its genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.

This all comes as progressive populist Democrat Graham Platner announced his bid to unseat Collins last week in a now viral video. His candidacy serves as a foil to Collins on almost every issue, and Maine residents are starting to notice.

“My name is Graham Platner and I’m running for U.S. Senate to defeat Susan Collins and topple the oligarchy that’s destroying our country,” he said in his campaign video. “I’m a veteran, oysterman, and working class Mainer who’s seen this state become unlivable for working people. And that makes me deeply angry.”

Platner, a Marine veteran, has pledged to end “endless wars” and refuse to take money from AIPAC.

“What is happening in Gaza is a genocide. I refuse to take money from AIPAC or any group that supports the genocide in Gaza,” he told Jewish Insider. Collins has long been AIPAC-backed and voted for President George W. Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Collins’s chances of winning have been precarious for some time now. Her dedication to a spineless centrist conservatism has frustrated Maine voters, especially in a state won by Kamala Harris in the 2024 general election. That, combined with Collins’s icy reception at her own event, and Platner’s current surge, should make the longtime senator very worried.

Transcript: GOP Senator Shocked at How Badly Trump Screwing His Voters - 2025-08-27T11:15:12Z

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the August 27 episode of the
Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

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

Thanks to President Donald Trump’s big budget bill and Republicans in Congress, funding has been canceled for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. [Editor’s note: In fact, the cuts were in the recent rescissions package passed by Congress.] That’s only going to bother pointy-headed liberals, right? Well, no. It also cuts funding to radio stations in rural and remote areas, ones that rely on those stations for crucial updates and other information. Speaking to The New York Times, GOP Senator Lisa Murkowski, who opposed the [rescissions] bill, sounded absolutely shocked that Trump and Republicans would harm their own voters so cavalierly. Yet this has been the story on one front after another. Tariffs, health care, the safety net, and even issues like green energy and immigration. Will there ever come a point where Democrats can capitalize on this betrayal? Lynlee Thorne is a Democratic operative who organizes for the party deep in rural areas as the political director of RuralGroundGame.org, so we invited her on to talk about all this. Thanks for coming on, Lynlee.

Lynlee Thorne: Thanks for having me, Greg.

Sargent: So the Times reports that due to Trump’s cuts, as many as 245 public broadcasting outlets in rural areas are at risk of closing. In fact, more than half of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s budget went to local stations, per the Times. Many of these stations are now cutting back drastically. These are lifelines for people in these areas, right, in some cases, the only source of local information?

Thorne: Very often that is true. It’s a real gut punch. And I think something for people to keep in mind is that it’s not just the radio stations—because a lot of rural people even now cannot get radio reception in their rural area from their home. So often when there is a crisis or a power outage or something similar, people are having to go to their neighbors who might be able to get radio reception and hear that news through the grapevine.

Sargent: How important are these stations to these places? As far as I can tell, they’re really critical. They’re in some cases a matter of life or death when it comes to anticipating extreme weather or dealing with other really dangerous local conditions. What does it mean for these rural areas—these stations?

Thorne: It means to be seen. In preparation for this interview, I turned my own radio on. And the fact that they’re covering stories from Broadway and Fulks Run and these little bitty towns that are never covered by a local TV station—you’re talking about the local football team, the local VFW event, whatever it is, that just isn’t covered by any other outlet by any other means. Maybe a weekly or monthly newspaper, but that’s about it. And then looking at what happened in Alaska or the recent flooding we’ve had in Western North Carolina, radio stations are critical in emergency situations as well.

Sargent: Yeah. And so you’re talking to us straight from the Shenandoah Valley in Western Virginia. I think those towns that you mentioned are there, right?

Thorne: We’re north of where the flooding was in far southwest Virginia. We have had pretty extreme flooding here in Rockingham County in the past. And yeah, emergency situations are not the only reason why a rural radio is important, but that’s obviously when you would notice that it could have a life-threatening impact.

Sargent: Well, Lisa Murkowski, the senator who represents Alaska, a very rural state with lots of remote territory, voted against this [rescissions] bill. And she sounded absolutely shocked that her fellow Republicans would do Trump’s bidding when it would absolutely screw Trump and GOP voters. She told the Times that this was driven by a “blind allegiance to the president’s desires.” And she said that fear of Trump’s anger overrode GOP lawmakers concerns for their own constituents who, by the way, are also Trump voters. Your reaction to all this?

Thorne: Stunned that someone like Senator Murkowski is surprised by this, but also it makes sense. This is actually what we’re seeing from a lot of voters in rural Virginia this year. Part of what our organization has been doing for the last several months is calling folks who are registered to vote but haven’t been participating very consistently in elections. And we’ve been reaching out to make them aware of the coming cuts to our health care—not just Medicaid, but how this will impact the ACA marketplaces as well as the cost increases from Trump’s tariffs. And people are stunned that this is happening. Sometimes our volunteers are emotionally struggling because they feel like they are breaking horrific news to people in real time. And people are pissed and scared and feel a little blindsided. So while those of us who have been paying attention are well aware of these cuts, this is devastating news to a lot of people in rural spaces.

Sargent: Well, it’s easy to make fun of Lisa Murkowski—and we all do, and sometimes for good reason. Where has she been for the past 30 years? The Republicans have been screwing rural voters relentlessly for decades. And yet at the same time, she gets at an interesting point here, which is that at a certain point, you expect GOP lawmakers to not screw their voters on literally everything at all times. And this was a thing where Republican lawmakers could be counted on to defend their constituents a little bit. Maybe there’s a prejudice among many conservatives against public radio, but conservative lawmakers would say, OK, but we really need these types of communications outlets in these places, so we’ll continue to support this stuff. And now when Trump comes along and waves a magic wand, they just fall in line. So she’s right to lament that, don’t you think?

Thorne: Yes, I guess I’ll be generous and say sure. My member of Congress, Representative Ben Clein, was at a recent event and I guess the local Democrats had a chalkboard out making sure that people knew that he recently voted to cut Medicaid and Medicare. Apparently he didn’t like that information being out in the world and simply wanted them to remove the sign. I think a lot of what we’re seeing here—the attacks on the Smithsonian, the attacks on our history—they don’t want us to know the truth. Radio is just one of the tethers that helps rural people communicate and stay connected to each other. Every single tether to the truth they can find they want to sever. I think it’s hard for Democrats to recognize that for a long time, rural people have heard about Democrats through the lens of Republicans because they’ve been the only ones to bother to show up and communicate with us. So at the same time that it is true, that we should be talking about the real harm Republicans are unleashing on their own communities, Democrats need to also recognize that we haven’t been bothering to show up to participate, to engage in meaningful ways.

I think a good example of Democratic neglect and lack of credibility is the recent radio ad run by the DSCC talking about, Thanks for listening, and basically saying, Republicans are cutting your rural radio stations. Well, Where we been as Democrats? Where have we been on the air supporting these stations, running ads, making sure that we’re communicating our message, and connecting with rural people long before this happened?

Sargent: Well, yeah, the story of what’s happened with Democrats in rural America is horrible, and I want to get into that in a second. But at first, I want to draw you out on this point. It seems to me that the failure of Democrats to engage comes back to bite them at times like this. This bill screws rural America in every which way you can possibly imagine. And yet, it becomes easier for Republican representatives to get away with this precisely because Democrats aren’t in these areas really taking it to them and telling their constituents what these lawmakers are doing to them. Is that right?

Thorne: That’s exactly right. And we’re really fortunate in Virginia this year. We have 100 Democratic nominees for all 100 House of Delegates races across the Commonwealth. We have some really truly fantastic local public servants who have stepped up because they refuse to tell their kids there’s no hope, that there’s nothing to fight for. They believe there is, and that’s why they’ve taken this on. And a lot of those folks could really benefit from more resources to get their message in front of more voters on a number of platforms and [to] catch up from being so far behind in the communications that we’ve allowed to languish for far too long.

Sargent: Well, just to reiterate, you’re in the Shenandoah Valley in Western Virginia, and Virginia has big elections this fall for governor and state legislature. That’s what you were talking about just a minute ago. What are you seeing out there with these voters more specifically? What are rural Americans in these places who are making decisions right now about how to vote this fall saying? Are they open to Democratic appeals? What’s working for Democrats in appealing to them, and what’s not working for them?

Thorne: Not breaking news, but the brand is pretty damaged—and not just in rural America, but certainly in rural America as well. That’s why I think the folks who are running for the House of Delegates are really important to focus on, particularly in rural areas, because they may be able to be carrying the banner for our party and have earned credibility through their smaller local connections in a way that maybe some of our statewide or higher-profile candidates cannot. I think people might possibly be open to Democrats, but there’s a few things happening right now. One thing people are waking up to the real cuts that are coming from Republicans and the Trump administration. That is happening. When we first started making our outreach to voters about the coming Medicaid cuts, we were seeing that under 30 percent of people were even aware that this was happening. Now, as we move closer to the election, we’re seeing well over 60 percent of the people that we continue to reach out are aware, but they’re not always sure who is to blame.

I do think people are open to having the conversation about health care in particular. That has come up for us again and again and again. But mobilizing those folks to vote is going to be really hard. People are feeling a tremendous amount of despair. They’re working two or three jobs. They’re struggling to find a home. You’re seeing 20-year-olds and 30-year-olds still having to live with mom and dad because accessing their own place just isn’t a reality even if they are working pretty hard. It’s hard to get people to show up and participate in election when they’re feeling that type of economic pain and pressure on a daily basis and you’re coming to their door saying, Hey, the other side is making it worse. We really need to have a much clearer picture of what it is we can do to address this at the state level.

Sargent: And what about Trump’s image in these places? Obviously, Trump is immensely successful in rural America as you probably live every day. And I would assume that it’s easier for Democrats to turn some of these rural voters against the local Republican congressmen than it is to turn them against Trump. What are they saying about Trump—those voters—right now? And I’m not talking about Democratic voters, however many there are left in these places. I’m really talking about voters who are, I guess, independents or maybe soft Republicans who are at least open to seeing Trump as fallible. What are those voters saying about Trump right now?

Thorne: I would say our focus has largely been on folks who we have reason to believe might be favorable toward Democrats to begin with. In Virginia, we have open primaries, so we do not register by party. So we have to rely heavily on past voting behavior and some other data to inform us about their partisanship. So we’re really looking at less likely voters. This is significant because we lost the governorship in 2021 by, I think, a margin of around 58,000 votes, something like that. Just in my congressional district, for previous years, we’ve had well over 300,000 voters who just haven’t shown up. We can clear the statewide margin pretty easily in rural spaces even if we’re just looking at folks that we think are likely to vote for Democrats if they are to vote at all.

The real thing that would make a huge difference is talking to enough of those folks and really giving them a reason to show up, which I think our House of Delegates candidates are the best positioned to do because their message is local and might actually connect in a real authentic and genuine way, in a way that is very hard for statewide campaigns to have the capacity to cover that much ground and really have the face time with voters. I’m not sure. What I see on the—because we do talk to people who might call themselves independents and maybe soft Republican voters. I certainly see people express dismay and some frustration, but I felt like I was seeing a lot of that in the lead-up to the 2024 election. And we are where we are now. So when it comes to people walking in the ballot box, I want to be very cautious and not express too much unearned confidence about where we stand right now with voters here in Virginia or anywhere else in the country.

Sargent: Understood. I take two things from what you’re saying. One is that an untold story among Democratic organizers in some of these rural areas is that they’re really waking up to the possibility of going out and getting those voters who would vote Democratic but just don’t vote. [These voters] are really being left on the table because they’re in these rural places and represent such a minority in them, the party just assumes that they’re not really there for the getting—but they are. That’s one story. Then the other piece of this, I think, is that in an off year, which this is, and the 2026 midterms will also be, not having Trump at the top of the ticket is a real boon in these places because you can maybe make a real appeal to swing voters and try to turn them against the local Republican without Trump muddying the picture with all his cultural politics and stuff. Is that right?

Thorne: That’s certainly something we’re looking at. One of the projects we piloted last year we called the Storyteller Project. It’s pretty simple. It is just putting real people on video and having them share the real personal policy impacts that they’re facing. We’ve interviewed a number of folks who are Medicaid recipients, people who depend on veterans benefits, Social Security, Medicare, and they’ve shared with us the very personal reasons why they are feeling really uncomfortable right now, really scared about what their future looks like. We think it’s important to put those people on screen. I think when you see Republicans attacking truth and our connections to each other, we know telling the truth makes them very deeply uncomfortable—all the more reason for us to do it. And it’s pretty simple. It brings a lot of real authentic voices in rather than relying on flashy scripted Beltway ads.

Sargent: Yeah, I can certainly see that. Just to close this out, one thing that’s really mystifying about Trump for a lot of Democrats is that on the one hand, his cultural appeals to rural America and his support there have both outdone other Republicans. He’s been tremendously successful in these places. But at the same time, he’s really, really screwing them over, almost in a way that’s worse than the Republicans over the last 50 years. There’s the Trump tariffs, which hit farm country hard. There are these enormous health care cuts we discussed, which are creating these huge problems for rural hospitals across the country. Again, that’s a real lifeline in those places. Many of them have very little access to health care. The other stuff we discussed. How do you think about those two stories where he’s doing better in these places than even Republicans traditionally have while shafting them even more royally than anyone else? How do we understand that?

Thorne: Oh, man. That’s a question. And I don’t have a clean answer except to say that simply showing up and communicating to people, validating their anger and expressing that himself, I think, felt really validating for people who felt left behind. And to me, it’s a yes and yes, and let’s not burn it all down? Yes, you’ve been left behind, but don’t we still care about our neighbors? Isn’t that who we are? I do believe that the majority of rural Americans do actually really give a damn about their neighbors. I believe that. Not all of them, but certainly enough of them. But we haven’t tried to connect. We haven’t gone to them to make sure that we’re lifting up rural leaders and embracing rural ideas and making sure that rural people are the drivers of what happens in their community rather than saying, Bless your hearts. Here’s a little program for you now. Why don’t y’all like that? Oh well, we didn’t like it because we weren’t at the table to create it.

There’s a lot of brilliant people in rural communities who feel like their hometowns are worth fighting for and, I think, can be fantastic partners and allies to folks in cities and suburbs—because a lot of our issues are honestly very similar. The solutions might look a little different, but a lot of the core problems that people are experiencing are very much the same. They don’t want us to be on each other’s side, but really we can be. But there’s no shortcut. We have to communicate. We have to engage. We have to show empathy. And we haven’t done that for far too long. And now we’re in a place where we have got to catch up somehow and find ways to reconnect with each other.

Sargent: Well, I think we’re going to certainly learn a lot from this fall’s elections in Virginia, particularly in some of those rural places, places like where you live. Lynlee Thorne, thank you so much for coming on. That was really interesting. Appreciate it.

Thorne: Thanks, Greg.

Netflix’s Long Story Short Reinvents the Family Sitcom - 2025-08-27T10:00:00Z

One of my favorite performances in TV history is Daniel Stern’s in The Wonder Years. If you’re not familiar, The Wonder Years was a single-camera coming-of-age sitcom that aired on ABC from 1988 to 1993. The show’s hero, Kevin Arnold—the youngest son of a white, middle-class, suburban family in the late 1960s and early 1970s—was played by the child actor Fred Savage. Stern, who never appears on camera, narrated the entire series as the adult Kevin, presumably telling the story of his childhood from the perspective of the late-twentieth century present. His voiceover sets a nostalgic tone, but it also creates the show’s signature structure. The Wonder Years isn’t a period piece so much as a show about, and constructed from, memories. Grown-up Kevin tells the story of his adolescence, its romances and tragedies, while at the same time, through the tone and timbre of his voice, telling a story about the man he is now. It’s at once a straightforward narrative device and a deceptively complex mode of address for a broadcast sitcom.

And all of that rests on Stern. His voice is kind, even-keeled, broken-in. Many of the show’s laughs come from the counterpoint it offers to young Savage’s hair-trigger physical performance. Here is a boy in crisis; here is a man, resolved. Here is the tumult of youth; here is the calm void of middle-age. The specifics of Kevin’s future remain a mystery for much of the series, but who he will become is never in doubt. Stern’s is the voice of a modern parent, possessed of a softness, a pliability, a reflectiveness that we know did not belong to Kevin’s own father (a complicated ogre played by Dan Lauria). Stern’s narration is a special effect that somehow vouchsafes the show’s ultimate realism. It’s all true because we believe him. It all works because he tells us it does.

There’s no voiceover narration in Long Story Short, the new animated coming-of-age comedy from BoJack Horseman creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg. Nor is there any settled sense of safety, a voice reassuring us everything turns out OK. And while the show’s opening credits sequence, filled with photo-album spreads of suburban youth, nods to the Way We Were aesthetic of The Wonder Years, Long Story Short is a far more tart and untidy work of memory. Don Draper famously told us, on Mad Men, that nostalgia means “the pain from an old wound.” Part of the wonder of Daniel Stern’s performance is how he makes that pain quietly available as a gentle undertone to the show’s broader atmosphere of warmth and fuzziness. Long Story Short—which is sentimental, open-hearted, and hilarious but never quite warm and fuzzy—puts the pain front and center, whipping us around and around through time, like a carousel of old wounds.


Long Story Short follows a middle-class Jewish family, the Schwoopers, from the 1980s to the present, jumping around from year to year, slowly accumulating the story of this family and their significant others in aggregate. Avi (Ben Feldman), our quasi-protagonist, grows from a rascally child to a charming music nerd of a teen to a selfish shit of a thirtysomething to a miserable middle-aged divorcee. Middle sister Shira (Abbi Jacobson) suffers young heartbreak after heartbreak, and eventually finds love, but only by getting as far outside the family as she can. And lost, loser youngest sibling Yoshi (Max Greenfield) wanders aimlessly through life until he is, eventually, found in an unexpected place.

Most of the show’s shambling throughlines involve the siblings’ varied relationships with their mother, the imposing and impossible Naomi (Lisa Edelstein). Beloved Avi resents his mom’s smothering affection but struggles to fully rebel, Shira yearns for approval only to be denied at every turn, and Yoshi’s failure to launch makes him a constant disappointment. To the show’s credit—as well as to Edelstein’s, who delivers a bravura tragicomic voice performance—Naomi only ever plays with the stereotype of the domineering Jewish matriarch. The character never truly succumbs to that caricature. Her children repeatedly cast her as the villain of their stories—as might lesser writers—but, as episodes roll on, it becomes clear that Naomi is the show’s big, bitter, beating heart.

Part of Long Story Short’s genius lies in its generosity toward often ungenerous characters. It shows us their (often extremely funny) indictments of each other without ever really committing to them. And this is largely possible because the series is absent the kind of organizing narrative voice that gave The Wonder Years its structure, its tone, and its argument. Instead, the show takes its organization from the messy machinations of memory.

The flow of time on Long Story Short is defiantly, even mischievously, nonlinear. Every episode jumps around to at least two different time periods—denoted by big intertitles naming the year—and most jump between several. Sometimes this works conventionally: A standout standalone episode focused on Shira Schwooper’s eventual wife Kendra (Nicole Byer), for instance, begins with a flashback to a formative childhood moment and then flashes forward to her early days in the workforce, consciously and unconsciously processing that moment in a bunch of pointed ways. But other episodes move more associatively. If The Wonder Years is essentially one big, long, linear, serialized flashback, then its structure echoes that of a fond reminiscence. Long Story Short’s clipped, frenetic, vexed shuffling feels, in comparison, more like the rapid-fire, cringe-inducing mental slideshow of shame and regret that sometimes keeps you awake at night in bed. Not: Ah, remember when? But rather: Oh my god, I can’t believe I did that, can they ever forgive me?

That doesn’t sound like a recipe for a laugh-out-loud comedy, but, in the hands of Bob-Waksberg—creator of the world’s first clinically depressed anthropomorphic horse—it is.


Raphael Bob-Waksberg, quietly, has one of the highest creative hit rates of any TV writer-producer of the past ten years. BoJack Horseman, the debut Netflix series he created in 2014, is rightly remembered as a comic masterpiece, an astringently perceptive adaptation and critique of the antihero dramas that had dominated TV since the turn of the century. But he also executive-produced two dramatically under-sung animated series in that period: Tuca and Bertie, which was created by BoJack production designer and brilliant comics artist Lisa Hanawalt, and Undone, an incredible rotoscoped experiment that he co-created with BoJack writer Kate Purdy. You should seek out both if you haven’t—they’re two of the many lost delights of Peak TV.

Long Story Short, which has already been renewed for a second season at Netflix, is his highest-profile project since the end of BoJack, and, while it shares many of the elements that fans of that show came to love, it is a very different, no less ingenious, animal. Hanawalt is back as production designer, so, while all of its characters are human people and not anthropomorphized fauna, the aesthetic is recognizable. The show is likewise not as reliant on an intricately woven tapestry of sight gags as BoJack was. Bob-Waksberg still has that arrow in his quiver, however, and the slower pace of those jokes on Long Story Short almost emphasizes their craftsmanship. (I snorted pretty loudly when a character behind the wheel of a ham-delivery truck gets into a five-car pile-up with two bread trucks, a lettuce truck, and a tomato truck before getting on the phone and saying, “Mom, it happened again.”)

But the biggest difference isn’t necessarily aesthetic so much as generic. While both BoJack and Long Story Short are nominally comedies, BoJack’s real subject was the antihero. Bob-Waksberg’s ambitious project was to take this recent, dominant television archetype and try to imagine a reparative narrative for him. Rather than following its protagonist down and down and down until the show cuts to black, BoJack engineered its titular horseman’s journey to the bottom, only to also engineer his way back out. What if a (horse)person could be better just by trying? What if there were narratives available other than Decline and Fall? BoJack Horseman’s special talent was its ability to be as optimistic as it was bleak.

While Long Story Short is not interested in the antihero, it is interested in the family. And Bob-Waksberg approaches his new subject with the same withering hopefulness he brought to BoJack. The show’s scattered temporality allows a kind of archaeology of regret and resentment. There’s a massive scale to the small-potatoes slights that we watch develop over decades. Avi’s girlfriend Jen (Angelique Cabral) brings Naomi the gift of an empty vase at their first meeting, and Naomi, inexplicably insulted by this, holds it against her for her entire life. A brief, weed-induced paranoid freakout at his bar mitzvah haunts Yoshi like a ghost into his thirties. The fleeting seconds when nobody notices that Shira nearly drowns at the beach as a small child irrevocably alter her relationship with her mother and brother for all time. There’s a scene in the show’s finale that unexpectedly reveals the deep, traumatic history of a playful running gag that was so gutting I clutched my chest when it happened. I felt like I got run over by the ham truck.

The classic family sitcom is as much about form as it is about content. It’s a living room and a kitchen; a set of familiar, low-stakes domestic dramas; a situation that resets itself every episode. Long Story Short is a family sitcom as epic. Its dramas can’t be contained by the comforting structures of the genre, the reassurance of a good voiceover. Classic family sitcoms like Full House offer neat narrative closure; ironized single-cam sitcoms like Modern Family offer tight episodic buttons; even auteurish family sadcoms like Better Things offer poetic ellipses to their vignettes. Long Story Short incorporates all of those modes, but its project is both more ordinary and wilder. What if the sitcom beats that have helped us imaginatively construct the nuclear family since they first debuted in the 1950s can also be used to imaginatively disassemble that family? At the end of the pilot to The Wonder Years, Daniel Stern remembers the suburbs of Kevin’s youth, and narrates, “We know that inside each one of those identical boxes … there were people with stories, there were families bound together in the pain and the struggle of love.” That’s what Long Story Short—one of the best shows of the year, and easily one of the best family sitcoms I’ve seen in years—is about, too. Goes without saying.

Trump Is Calling the Supreme Court’s Bluff on the Fed - 2025-08-27T10:00:00Z

The Supreme Court warned President Donald Trump on May 22 that he could not lawfully fire members of the Federal Reserve’s board of governors. It took him only 95 days to ignore them.

Trump sent a letter to Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook on Monday to inform her that “there is sufficient cause to remove you from your position,” and claimed that he had done so, “effective immediately.” It is the first time that a president has tried to fire a member of the Fed since its establishment in 1913, and it will be an irreversible blow to the Fed’s independence if her termination is allowed to stand.

The attempt to dismiss Cook is probably not lawful. The Federal Reserve Act of 1913 states that members of the Fed cannot be dismissed by the president except “for cause.” Trump claimed that he could remove her because another Trump appointee had accused her of mortgage fraud on what appears to be pretextual grounds. Cook has not been indicted, charged with, or convicted of a crime. She denies any wrongdoing.

Trump is forcing the issue because he believes the court, despite its warnings, will ultimately side with him. One can hardly blame him for the assumption. The justices’ handling of Trump-centric cases over the past two years—on disqualification, on immunity, on deportations, on birthright citizenship, and more—do not inspire confidence in the ability to defend a principle that the conservative majority barely believes in.

The stakes in this particular showdown are immense. Cook is one of seven members of the central bank’s board of governors, which is more commonly known as just “the Fed.” In that role, she helps oversee and shape the federal government’s monetary policy. The board’s job is so vital to the smooth functioning of the American economy that Congress chose to insulate its members from day-to-day politics and, more importantly, from direct presidential control.

Under the Federal Reserve Act, Cook and other board members serve staggered fourteen-year terms. President Joe Biden appointed her to a vacancy on the board in 2022, so she still has another twelve years to go. While presidents have the power to fire top-level officials at will throughout most of the federal government, Congress chose to only allow the president to fire a Federal Reserve governor “for cause.”

Trump does not like this legal status quo. He wants to be able to fire any federal official whom he doesn’t like at any time for any reason, or for none at all. He also wants to be able to influence the Fed’s policy-making decisions more directly. To that end, he has frequently criticized Jerome Powell, the widely respected Fed chairman whom he appointed to the job in 2018, on policy grounds.

For most of 2019, for example, Trump publicly badgered Powell over his handling of interest rates, which Powell and the rest of the Fed had mostly declined to cut amid concerns about Brexit negotiations and Trump’s trade war with China. “My only question is, who is our bigger enemy, Jay Powell or Chairman Xi?” Trump opined on Twitter at one point. While he reportedly considered trying to oust Powell at the time, other priorities soon emerged. The Fed’s decision to cut rates significantly when the Covid-19 pandemic began in the spring of 2020 led to a truce of sorts.

Now that Trump has retaken power, he wants lower interest rates and he wants them now. Removing Powell and replacing him with a more pliable figure was among Trump’s first priorities. In July, he openly argued with Powell during a tour of the Federal Reserve headquarters over the cost of its recent renovations. Powell, who normally avoids partisan politics and does not typically respond to Trump’s statements, pushed back on the claims amid reports that Trump would use them as a pretext to fire him.

More recently, Trump’s focus has shifted towards other members of the board. Bill Pulte, the Trump-appointed director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, publicly accused Cook of mortgage fraud over her residency claims in two different states for two different properties. Pulte has floated similar claims against other Trump political opponents, including California Senator Adam Schiff and New York Attorney General Letitia James, and formally referred them to the Justice Department for criminal investigation.

That gave Trump his long-awaited pretext. “In light of your deceitful and potentially criminal conduct in a financial matter, [the American people] cannot and I do not have such confidence in your integrity,” Trump said in his letter to Cook. “At a minimum, the conduct at issue exhibits the sort of gross negligence in financial transactions that calls into question your competence and trustworthiness as a financial regulator.”

Cook, for her part, said that she would not step down. “President Trump purported to fire me ‘for cause’ when no cause exists under the law, and he has no authority to do so,” she said. “I will not resign.” Her lawyer Abbe Lowell said they would file a lawsuit to challenge the move. “President Trump has no authority to remove Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook,” he said in a statement to reporters. “His attempt to fire her, based solely on a referral letter, lacks any factual or legal basis.”

All other things being equal, Cook has a strong hand to play. Black-letter federal law—the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, of all things—protects her from at-will removal. In a landmark 1935 case known as Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, the Supreme Court upheld the for-cause removal protections for members of the Federal Trade Commission. Because the agency had a multi-member board and exercised “quasi-legislative” and “quasi-judicial power,” the court reasoned, Congress could protect its leadership from dismissal without violating the separation of powers.

In the Roberts Court, however, things are far from equal. The conservative legal establishment has long chafed at Humphrey’s Executor and sought its demise. They prefer a much more rigid separation of powers than the Framers intended, with the president wielding absolute control over the executive branch and the legislative and judicial branches watching from the sidelines.

To that broader end, the conservative justices have abolished for-cause firing protections for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which were designed to protect the financial regulators from corrupt interference. They have struck down novel progressive regulatory efforts on climate change and student-loan debt on the pretext it is unconstitutional for Congress to write broad laws and for the executive branch to use them.

The court has even declared that the separation of powers is so rigid that the president must enjoy absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for his official acts—an anti-constitutional blasphemy that has sent the nation on the path to dictatorship. “True, there is no ‘presidential immunity clause’ in the Constitution,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in Trump v. United States. “But there is no ‘separation of powers clause’ either.”

The goal is to make progressive policymaking impossible, unreliable, or easily reversible. It is not possible, their rulings suggest, for Americans and their representatives to try new things within a flexible constitutional structure. The elected branches cannot grow in wisdom and experience. They cannot adapt to changing times—to industrialization and globalization, to new developments in science and commerce and medicine, to corruption and mismanagement. As it has been, so ever it shall be. Their decisions resent the Progressive era and despise the New Deal for trying to improve Americans’ lives at the cost of some small portion of future outlays for capital.

Except for the Fed, that is. Earlier this year, in Trump v. Wilcox, the court effectively allowed Trump to remove members of the National Labor Relations Board (which polices unfair labor practices) and the Merit Systems Protection Board (which insulates partisan abuses in the civil service). While lower courts blocked the removals to preserve the status quo, the conservative justices rebalanced the equities in Trump’s favor.

“The stay also reflects our judgment that the Government faces greater risk of harm from an order allowing a removed officer to continue exercising the executive power than a wrongfully removed officer faces from being unable to perform her statutory duty,” the court explained. As Justice Elena Kagan noted in dissent, her conservative colleagues fundamentally misunderstood the stakes of the case.

“The relevant interest is not the ‘wrongly removed officers’,” Kagan explained, “but rather Congress’s and, more broadly, the public’s. What matters, in other words, is not that Wilcox and Harris would love to keep serving in their nifty jobs. What matters instead is that Congress provided for them to serve their full terms, protected from a president’s desire to substitute his political allies.”

As Kagan noted, the court’s decision effectively signaled that Humphrey’s Executor would soon be overturned. The two board members had claimed that a ruling against them would also endanger other agencies led by multi-member boards that fell under Humphrey’s Executor, including the nation’s central banking system. The majority did not refute that claim in general.

But the conservative justices went out of their way to say otherwise for the Fed. “We disagree,” the court wrote. “The Federal Reserve is a uniquely structured, quasi-private entity that follows in the distinct historical tradition of the First and Second Banks of the United States.” Rarely does the court issue such warnings, and rarely has it used the shadow docket so bluntly to create entire new realms of constitutional law without briefing or argument.

However the legal battle unfolds, there will be two essential questions. First, how serious are the justices about protecting the Fed’s independence? The “cause” for Cook’s firing is obviously pretextual. Trump has made no secret of his desire to reshape the Fed in his image, despite its long history of independence. The justices could easily clarify the for-cause threshold and hold that Trump has not met it. Their Fed-only exemption for Humphrey’s Executor does not really make sense, but it is constitutionally and pragmatically better than the alternative.

Second, and perhaps most importantly, how much do the justices respect themselves? A humiliating climbdown from their warning in Wilcox isn’t impossible. It is just as easy to imagine a world where the court accepts Trump’s pretext at face value and rules in his favor. The conservative justices could declare that even a mere suggestion of improper behavior is enough to overcome the for-cause removal protections, which would render them vestigial at most. That would not reflect Congress’s intent, longstanding practice, or nearly a century of Supreme Court precedent. When has that stopped the Roberts Court before?

The Trump Recession Is Coming - 2025-08-27T10:00:00Z

Speaking at a North Carolina campaign rally almost exactly a year ago, Donald Trump painted a dire picture of the American economy should Vice President Kamala Harris win the presidency in November. “If Harris wins this election, the result will be a Kamala economic crash, a 1929-style depression,” Trump said. “When I win the election, we will immediately begin a brand new Trump economic boom.”

Trump was talking then about the election’s most important issue: post-pandemic inflation, for which voters blamed Harris’s boss, President Joe Biden. In May of last year, a clear majority—including 49 percent of Democrats—wrongly believed the country was already in a recession when Trump delivered that speech. Americans hated the economy and wanted a change. That is, more or less, the story of how Trump won the 2024 election (though it certainly helped that Trump spent the majority of the campaign running against an 81-year-old who wasn’t up to the challenge, to put it mildly).

You don’t hear much about a recession anymore. That’s not because Trump was right when he was speaking in North Carolina last August. True, he won, and the country certainly hasn’t entered into a second Great Depression. While a Day One boom didn’t take place, the Dow Jones Industrial Average is a few thousand points higher than it was then. But the economy is in significantly worse shape than it was a year ago, thanks in large part to actions Trump himself has taken. The public recognizes this, as polls show a clear majority of Americans disapprove of his handling of the economy and blame him for rising prices. Still, media attention has lagged: There is nowhere near the coverage of consumer attitudes that there was last spring.

To be fair, there has been a lot to cover since Trump took office: the gutting of the federal government, the deportation of law-abiding immigrants to foreign gulags, the militarization of L.A. and now D.C., the weaponization of the Department of Justice, airstrikes on Iran, and so much more. But Trump has also done everything possible to push the country toward recession.

His “Liberation Day” tariffs have destroyed relationships with key trading partners, cost thousands of jobs across the country, and caused prices to soar (with much worse to come). Trump has repeatedly insisted that this abrupt return to the protectionism of the late nineteenth century would revitalize American manufacturing and deliver a windfall so enormous it would replace the income tax. The math does not add up, alas. In July, the federal government brought in $29 billion in tariff revenue—a sizable increase from the previous year. Over a full year, that would amount to about $350 billion, which pales in comparison to the nearly $3 trillion generated by the income tax. As for the manufacturing gains, well, just last week John Deere announced hundreds of layoffs, which the company attributed partly to Trump’s tariffs.

And surely most Americans don’t even care how much money the U.S. raises from tariffs unless it somehow improves their own finances, which of course it does not. The Tax Foundation, no one’s idea of a left-wing shop, says that Trump’s tariffs “amount to an average tax increase per US household of $1,304 in 2025 and $1,588 in 2026.” The tariffs also will hurt the economy overall, causing a nearly 1 percent decrease in the GDP over the next decade, the organization estimates.

Trump’s ongoing war with the Federal Reserve also makes a recession more likely. Since taking office, the president has been hounding Fed Chairman Jerome Powell to cut interest rates. He is now attempting to oust Fed governor Lisa Cook on what seem to be trumped-up mortgage fraud charges so he can install another loyalist on the board who will back the rate cuts he desperately wants.

Trump’s war on the Fed is just as reckless and unconstitutional as his tariffs, but it does make a bit more economic sense. The president just signed a massive corporate tax cut into law and thinks—with reason—that lower interest rates will boost the economy and lift his presidency. What Trump doesn’t seem to understand or care about is that launching a war with the Federal Reserve could just as easily do the opposite. Crushing the body’s independence could cause the stock market to crash and the dollar, which has been steadily falling since inauguration, to collapse. Those lower interest rates could juice inflation that has been ticking upward.

In addition to his likely illegal tariffs and aggression toward the Fed, Trump has a growing interest in taking a government cut of large corporations like Intel, Nvidia, Nippon-U.S. Steel. The overall goal here is clear: Trump wants full control of the U.S. economy. That’s reckless no matter who the president is. But it’s a ruinous mission for a president who obviously has no idea what he’s doing.

It’s hard to overstate just how dire the situation is. The economy that Trump inherited was the envy of the developed world. For all of its problems—such as lingering high prices and longstanding inequality—Biden and his advisors navigated post-pandemic inflation better than almost anyone, thanks to the administration’s industrial policy and several key pieces of legislation aimed at boosting infrastructure spending. In just a few months, Trump has wrecked that progress. And he has done so for no compelling reason whatsoever—simply because he has always, going back to his first term, taken pleasure in destroying his predecessor’s accomplishments.

Any Republican president would have signed the tax cut that Trump signed in July. But no other president from either party would have launched a trade war that has already pushed the U.S. economy to the brink, and it’s highly unlikely that anyone else would have launched such a destructive war against the Federal Reserve. Such are the consequences of an electorate that was angry about high prices, and then unwittingly voted for even higher prices. If there is a recession in the next three years—something that grows increasingly likely with each passing week—Trump will own all of it.

The Democrats’ Self-Destructive Fear of the Swing Voter - 2025-08-27T10:00:00Z

Democratic leaders who want a winning message against Donald Trump’s military occupation of Washington, D.C., should accuse the president of orchestrating “a stunt to distract from the pain his tariffs are causing families” and of “creating fear to distract” from his Republican Party’s cuts to Medicaid. What Democrats should not do: accuse Trump of “manufacturing a D.C. crime crisis” or of committing a “historic assault on D.C. home rule and is more evidence of the urgent need to pass a D.C. statehood bill.”

That’s the takeaway of a memo from Blue Rose Research, the outfit led by Democratic data guru David Schor, that’s making the rounds on liberal-left social media. The five-page document summarizes a poll, conducted August 12-13, that tested various messages about the federal takeover of the District. The survey found that messages accusing Trump of a “stunt” or “distraction,” and then pivoting to the damage caused by tariffs or Medicaid cuts, were the biggest drag on Trump’s approval; in fact, of the 16 Democratic messages tested, only those two tested above average, “and even still were barely above average,” the memo states.

This memo, which my colleague Perry Bacon reports “is being sent to Democratic leaders/elites,” could help explain why Democrats in the House and Senate have repeatedly said this exact thing in interviews and on social media. “As Donald Trump attempts to create chaos that distracts from his problems, we’ll call it out for what it is,” Illinois Governor JB Pritzker wrote on Bluesky on Friday. “Trump and Republicans are trying to distract from the pain they’re causing—from tariffs raising the prices of goods to stripping away healthcare and food from millions.”

The memo’s timing is impeccable: It has surfaced at the very moment several influential writers on the left have been debating the merits and uses of polling. But the issue is less with polling itself than with how the information is used—particularly by the Democratic Party. Many on the left have criticized the Democrats’ messaging as far too tame and predictable amid Trump’s increasingly authoritarian second term, accusing party leaders of parroting poll-tested messages rather than speaking passionately from the heart. The party’s real problem in the Trump era, though, isn’t simply that they’re letting public opinion—as represented by polls—shape their messages, though of course they’re doing that. The problem is that they’re scared of public opinion, in particular the opinions of the swing voters who elected Trump.


Earlier this month, John Ganz, a Substack blogger, author, and Nation columnist, posted what he later acknowledged was a quickly written “take.” “Supposedly, the way you make a successful political campaign is that you go out and you ask people what they want, and then you make your message based on that. Except that’s bullshit. It doesn’t work,” he wrote. “Politely put, the data-based approach to politics is based on a fallacious understanding of the world. Not so politely put, it’s a racket for political consultants so they can scam hapless hacks and wealthy donors.”

This caused a stir—and a flurry of further takes, which I will only briefly summarize here and invite to read at your own pleasure (or misery, as the case may be). Vox’s Eric Levitz rebutted Ganz’s piece, arguing that polling—while flawed, and hardly the only tool politicians and their strategists should use—is a necessary bulwark against progressives being carried away by wishful thinking. (As the essay’s subheadline put it, “Progressives can’t afford to trust their guts.”) Ganz responded to Levitz with a piece lambasting “vulgar positivism,” a reference to a centrist political theory of late that says that the Democrats should say things that are popular (and whether these things are popular is, of course, defined by polls). Matt Yglesias tried to split the difference in this brawl in a question from a reader that asked Yglesias about the debate. He and Levitz approached the issue as if there were only two choices: paying attention to polling data or navigating blindly by intuition. A new center-left, pro-Abundance publication, The Argument, also weighed in with a defense of polling—as a way of promoting their own new data project.

As a reporter who values fact-finding, empiricism, and evaluating evidence—and who, before joining TNR, worked at the famously nerdy political website FiveThirtyEight—I’m sympathetic to any arguments about the appropriate use of data. But I side primarily with Ganz, and that’s because I have spent most of the past three years talking to voters and listening to what they say. The issue isn’t that polling is “90% bullshit,” as Ganz exaggerated in his first piece (and I don’t think he believes that either). I understand how frustration with current political discourse would inspire such hyperbole. The Democratic Party has handcuffed itself with data rather than use it to their advantage.

A perfect example is the issue of immigration, which Ganz highlights in his first post. Democrats have generally moved right on the issue since Trump won in 2016, and especially so since his victory last year. They’re doing so because they’re trying to align with the imagined median voter, as gleaned from polling. But public opinion on immigration shifts over time, sometimes drastically, and for reasons that are not particularly mysterious.

Before Trump first became president, even Republicans did not see building a wall on the southern border with Mexico as a priority. But throughout Trump’s first term, as he claimed the U.S. was being “invaded” by foreign criminals, Republican support for building more border walls rose, while Democratic support fell. When Trump was out of office, Republican faith in an expanded border wall softened a bit, with 72 percent of Republicans in 2024 saying that it would improve the border situation. But in the 2024 election, which came after a multi-year spike in migration to the U.S. under Biden, immigration was a bigger driver of support for Trump than in 2016.

Please don’t yell at me data nerds: I know that correlation does not equal causation. But I am also a voter who lives in Trump country, and has for most of the past decade. I hear the way my fellow voters talk about immigration. They’ve begun to adopt the kind of rhetoric Trump has used. At the same time, real-world events have conspired to bring unprecedented numbers of migrants seeking refuge in the U.S., and a compliant right-wing press has helped spread Trump’s anti-immigrant propaganda. Much of the rest of the Republican Party has jumped on board. Trump wouldn’t have been able to do it alone, but he has helped shape his party’s views on immigration, period.

You don’t need to dig too far into the data to determine that these views aren’t very deeply held. While many voters were persuaded by Trump’s rhetoric on immigration and said they supported his policies, they were less keen on his ideas when those issues were framed in a different way, highlighting the economic and social destructiveness of mass deportations. In fairness, Vice President Kamala Harris did warn that these things would happen, as Levitz pointed out, but she also stressed her support for a bipartisan bill—which the GOP blocked—that would have secured the border. “And let me be clear, after decades in law enforcement, I know the importance of safety and security, especially at our border,” she said in her convention speech. “Last year, Joe [Biden] and I brought together Democrats and conservative Republicans to write the strongest border bill in decades. The border patrol endorsed it. But Donald Trump believes a border deal would hurt his campaign, so he ordered his allies in Congress to kill the deal.”

Which is to say, Democrats let Republicans frame the debate on immigration by ceding ground on the issue of “border security,” and they did so because polling showed that it’s popular. Of course it’s popular! “Border security” sounds like a good thing! But how much do Americans think about border security in their daily lives? Unless they actually live on the border, probably very little. And is the issue of “border security” more important than reforming the U.S. immigration system, which Democrats have been trying to do in earnest since 2013, only to be thwarted by unserious Republicans?

That is the trouble with issue polling in general. It is useful to know what the American public feels about a given issue, but these are usually quick questions that provide a snapshot in time. For instance, how voters define “border security,” what part of the immigration situation bothers them or pleases them, and what solutions they support are questions that are not always asked. Levitz accused progressives of being vulnerable to motivated reasoning without data, but moderates are, too—because data is not that deep. It doesn’t really explore beyond a surface-level understanding, and shouldn’t trump morals, values, and the ability to take on a fight when one arrives at your doorstep, which is what’s happening now.

Democrats are always overlearning the lessons from the last election and ignoring the new realities unfolding every day. Trump’s approval rating continues to fall, even among those who voted for him in 2024. They disapprove of his actions on immigration, the economy, and on other issues. Yes, I’m making these assertions based on polling, but the evidence is becoming undeniable. And this is precisely the kind of evidence Democrats usually find persuasive, so I would hope they now recognize a clear political opportunity to talk about how absolutely hideous and destructive this presidency is, from ICE’s gestapo tactics to the tariffs tanking the economy, while also pitching their solutions to it. But they need to start building that case now, cementing it in voters’ minds—not wait until the next presidential election rolls around in the belief that whatever message they concoct in 2028 will be persuasive and perfectly timed.

It’s important to remember—since Democratic strategists often seem to forget—that swing voters are not the only voters. There are also Democratic voters who want to have faith in their party again! They’re mad as hell about what’s happening and want their representatives to feel the same way. There are also nonvoters, lots of them young people, who might be energized by a little righteous anger and moral crusading.

Look at state Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani in New York City. Amid all the handwringing about socialism and whether it will play in the heartland (as if it needs to), too many strategists have missed the fact that the Democrats’ mayoral nominee is talking like a normal person about the issues that normal people care about, like how impossibly expensive the city has become. He has lots of ideas, too, and some are unorthodox or even pie in the sky. But that’s actually smart politics. Voters are less concerned about whether Mamdani will able to, say, create city-owned grocery stores than the fact that he’s promising to do things. He’s also engaging voters where they are—not only on social media, but at their businesses and on the streets. And he’s not always so serious; he can be funny, and fun. His rivals dismissed his scavenger hunt last weekend as a silly game, but Mamdani is showing that politics isn’t just about the most dire things that are happening, but also reminding people what they are fighting for: a vibrant city that is not the violent hellhole portrayed by Trump.

You won’t find much levity among national Democrats these days, and perhaps that’s understandable. But why can’t they just sound normal? When they dismiss Trump’s takeover of D.C. as a “distraction” and pivot immediately to tariffs or Medicaid, it seems so practiced because it probably is; maybe some of them have even read the Blue Rose memo. They’re quickly moving past the deepest concern here—a fascist president using the capital as a dry run for a national police state—to get to “kitchen table” issues, as if fearful they might say the wrong thing about crime. Democrats are so worried about alienating a small slice of the electorate that they’re hesitating to condemn the most abusive act yet by a historically unpopular president from the opposing party. I’m no political strategist, but boy does that sound like a losing political strategy.

Trump Is Screwing His Voters So Badly that It Shocked This GOP Senator - 2025-08-27T09:00:00Z

Thanks to President Trump and the Republicans’ rescissions bill, funding has been canceled for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.* This is cutting funding to hundreds of radio stations in rural areas that rely on them for critical information. Speaking to The New York Times, GOP Senator Lisa Murkowski, who opposed the bill, sounded absolutely shocked that Trump and the GOP would harm their own voters so cavalierly. She said this is driven by a “blind allegiance to the president’s desires,” adding that fear of Trump’s anger overrode GOP lawmakers’ concerns for their own constituents. Yet this has been the story on many other fronts too. Will Democrats ever be able to capitalize? We talked to Lynlee Thorne, a Democratic organizer in rural areas as the political director of RuralGroundGame.org. She explains why rural radio is a lifeline, how Trump’s agenda is shafting those areas particularly hard, what rural voters think about him right now, and how Democrats can repair the party’s deep problems with them. Listen to this episode here. A transcript is here.

* This discussion and a subsequent correction misstated that the cuts to CBP funding were in Trump’s big budget bill. In fact, they were in the recent rescissions package passed by Congress, which Murkowski voted against.

Trump Just Said Exactly What a Dictator Would Say - 2025-08-26T21:05:03Z

President Donald Trump sounded like a tyrannical toddler Tuesday as he declared that he has “the right to do anything” he wants.

Trump is feuding with Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker over Trump’s plot to deploy National Guard troops to Chicago, and in a Cabinet meeting he took a turn into downright despotic territory.

“I would have much more respect for Pritzker if he’d call me up and say, ‘I have a problem, can you help me fix it?’ I would be so happy to do it,” Trump ranted. “I don’t love—not that I don’t have... I have the right to do anything I want to do. I’m the president of the United States. If I think our country is in danger, and it is in danger in these cities, I can do it. No problem going in and solving, you know, his difficulties. But it would be nice if they’d call and they’d say, ‘Would you do it?’”

It’s no surprise that the president, who has systematically undermined the country’s checks and balances, feels this way. He even (jokingly) declared himself king. Trump’s tactic of undermining statistics and lying about crime rates as a means to justify law enforcement crackdowns in Democrat-led cities is the latest in a long line of autocratic acts to punish his opposition and seize more power.

The president shouldn’t hold his breath waiting for an invite to Chicago. During a press conference Monday, Pritzker warned that Trump should keep his distance. “You are neither wanted here, nor needed here,” he said. “Your remarks about this effort over the last several weeks have betrayed a continuing slip in your mental faculties, and are not fit for the auspicious office that you occupy.”

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