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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?”
#AL01 Rep. Barry Moore tried to lie to his constituents about the higher prices they've been stuck paying, but was drowned out by chants demanding answers about Trump's trade war.
— American Bridge 21st Century (@American_Bridge) August 28, 2025
"Who pays the tariffs?! Who pays the tariffs?!" pic.twitter.com/piGlIxciyy
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.
RFK JR: I’m looking at kids as I walk through the airports today...and I see these kids that are just overburdened with mitochondrial challenges, inflammation—you can tell from their faces, movements, and lack of social connection pic.twitter.com/svfdIqAntK
— Acyn (@Acyn) August 27, 2025
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.
RFK Jr on the mass shooting in Minnesota: "We're launching studies on the potential contribution of some of the SSRI drugs and some of the other psychiatric drugs that might be contributing to violence." pic.twitter.com/e2HSIMuUwy
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 28, 2025
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.
Be Human | Season 2 Episode 10 | Ritchie Torres
— The Adam Friedland Show (@adam_talkshow) August 27, 2025
Out Now On YouTube@adamfriedland @ritchietorres #tafs #ritchietorres #adamfriedlandshow pic.twitter.com/UsFz1QT9PJ
‘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?”
How @RitchieTorres can sit there and argue with a jew, who lived in israel, comes from a family who went through appartied in SA 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 pic.twitter.com/rXMp8MPHeo
— Rob (@chudmuffin0) August 27, 2025
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.”
I’ve never seen anything like this. How is Adam Friedland making me emotional right now. pic.twitter.com/Kc01cb0ZwM
— Hispanic Shaun King (@okimstillhungry) August 28, 2025
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.)
TREY GOWDY (ex Republican REP): “The only way to stop it is ID the shooter ahead of time or keep the weapons out of their hands. We have to have a conversation about freedom vs. protecting children… how many school shootings does it take? It’s almost always a young white male.” pic.twitter.com/PwU7GY1gpS
— The Tennessee Holler (@TheTNHoller) August 27, 2025
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.
Interestingly, one magazine also said “Kill Trump Now.”
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.”
Frey: And don't just say, this is about thoughts and prayers right now. These kids were literally praying. It was the first week of school. They were in a church. pic.twitter.com/pEy8dOgr1R
— Acyn (@Acyn) August 27, 2025
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.”
Breakfast Club host Charlamagne says of Hakeem Jeffries: "I call him AIPAC Shakur."
— Ken Klippenstein (@kenklippenstein) August 27, 2025
"I just don't think he stands for anything." pic.twitter.com/BGuqattvk7
“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.
National Guard members activated for DC federal takeover seen picking-up trash https://t.co/jFGM8awBIr pic.twitter.com/nfBuEuyJgZ
— Allison Papson (@AllisonPapson) August 26, 2025
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!”
Susan Collins, who still hasn't done a town hall in decades, gets drowned out by boos this morning. #msen #mepolitics pic.twitter.com/xWbmwSmA89
— danny (@dabbs346) August 26, 2025
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—”
Whew! Sen. Susan Collins should be “very concerned”
— Christopher Webb (@cwebbonline) August 27, 2025
She showed up as the main guest at a ribbon-cutting in Searsport, Maine. It backfired.
The crowd was not happy to have her: “Shame. Shame. Shame.” pic.twitter.com/xZDe5fu5sz
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.”
My name is Graham Platner and I’m running for US Senate to defeat Susan Collins and topple the oligarchy that’s destroying our country.
— Graham Platner for Senate (@grahamformaine) August 19, 2025
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. pic.twitter.com/QZfAm528N1
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?’”
Trump on deploying the National Guard to Chicago: "I have the right to do anything I want to do. I'm the president of the United States." pic.twitter.com/CR2T6Srb5C
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 26, 2025
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.”
In Funniest Twist, Trump Now Wants to Nationalize Lockheed Martin - 2025-08-26T20:57:37Z
As the Trump administration contemplates further incursions into the private sector following its Intel deal, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said the defense industry could be in the administration’s sights.
When the administration acquired a 10 percent stake in the tech company Intel last week—a move that began with the president attempting to get its CEO fired, alleging problematic China ties—Donald Trump vowed to do more “deals like that.” This week, a top Trump economic adviser said businesses beyond just the tech sector can expect such interventions going forward.
On CNBC Tuesday, Howard Lutnick defended the move, saying it’s “fair” for the U.S. government to take stake in a business if it’s “adding fundamental value” to it.
Host Andrew Ross Sorkin chimed in with a follow-up: “What about defense companies though, secretary?” he asked. “Why shouldn’t the U.S. government say, ‘You know what, we use Palantir services. We would like a piece of Palantir. We use Boeing services. We would like a piece of Boeing.’”
“There are a lot of businesses that do business with the U.S. government that benefit by doing business with the U.S. government,” Sorkin added. “Again, I guess the question is: Where’s the line?”
Lutnick replied that there is a “monstrous discussion” to be had about potentially taking stakes in defense companies. “Lockheed Martin makes 97 percent of their revenue from the U.S. government. They are basically an arm of the U.S. government,” he added.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Deputy Defense Secretary Steve Feinberg, he continued, are “thinking about” taking stakes in military contractors.
Howard Lutnick on CNBC indicates that the Trump administration will try to partially nationalize defense companies like Lockheed Martin pic.twitter.com/dYAbZPtcwu
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 26, 2025
“Wake Up”: George Conway Issues Stark Warning About Trump - 2025-08-26T20:33:57Z
A high profile conservative lawyer is calling Donald Trump’s political strategy what it is: “authoritarianism.”
George Conway, the ex-husband of Trump’s first term adviser Kellyanne Conway, warned that Americans need to “wake up” to the Trump administration’s dangerous maneuverings, citing recent targets of Trump’s retribution campaign as evidence that the country’s typical backstops were caving to the president.
“You know, people don’t want to reach this conclusion: This is authoritarianism,” Conway told CNN Tuesday. “We have never seen anything like this in America.”
The well known attorney pointed to the FBI’s laser focus on John Bolton as an example. Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser turned vocal Trump critic, had his Maryland home raided last week by the federal bureau in what was described as a “national security investigation in search of classified records.”
Conway compared the raid to actions taken by authoritarian regimes throughout history, including the reign of Adolf Hitler in Germany and former Spanish dictator Francisco Franco.
“This is how it’s done,” Conway said. “And it may seem alarmist to Americans who enjoy … our lives here, a beautiful country, with so many things to do and so many ways to entertain ourselves.”
“It’s time for Americans to wake up,” he continued. “This is serious. Donald Trump … people may laugh at him because … he appears to be such a clown, but he’s profoundly dangerous because he has the power of prosecution. And every time he says something like this, Americans should take note.”
Bolton has repeatedly pissed off the MAGA leader since their time working together abruptly came to a close.
Over the last several years, the former national security adviser released a book about the inner machinations of Trump’s first term, claimed that Trump had become Russian President Vladimir Putin’s puppet, described the right-wing figurehead as a “fascist,” and claimed in March 2024 that Trump “hasn’t got the brains” to be a dictator.
Vanity Fair Staff Shocked by Proposed Melania Cover - 2025-08-26T20:09:44Z
Vanity Fair is gambling on its own staff in its bid to put First Lady Melania Trump on the cover of an upcoming issue.
Staffers at the legacy magazine are flipping out after Semafor first reported that the publication’s new global editorial director, Mark Guiducci, was working to woo the first lady into a photoshoot.
“I will walk out the motherfucking door, and half my staff will follow me,” a mid-level Vanity Fair editor told the Daily Mail on Monday. “We are not going to normalize this despot and his wife; we’re just not going to do it. We’re going to stand for what’s right.”
The editor added that they would rather work any other job than remain at Vanity Fair if it chooses to feature Mrs. Trump on its cover page.
“If I have to work bagging groceries at Trader Joe’s, I’ll do it,” the editor said. “If [Guiducci] puts Melania on the cover, half of the editorial staff will walk out, I guarantee it.”
But her treatment does stand in stark contrast to the publishing giant’s recent history of documenting the country’s first ladies. Hillary Clinton, Michelle Obama, and Jill Biden all appeared in Vogue while their husbands were president, sometimes more than once. President Barack Obama also graced the magazine’s cover three times, while President Joe Biden was pictured on the front twice.
Guiducci’s plan, however, did make the magazine some new fans over at Fox & Friends, where host Ainsley Earnhardt claimed that she would buy the issue multiple times “just to prove a point.”
Co-host Brian Kilmeade also advised that the unnamed editor that spoke with the Daily Mail should be rooted out and “fired,” instructing Vanity Fair staffers to be on the lookout for the disgruntled employee. “If you’re at Vanity Fair right now,” he said, “look for a mid-level editor who looks angry, and toss them out and send them to Trader Joe’s!”
Fox News Cuts Away From Trump to Cover Taylor Swift Engagement - 2025-08-26T19:21:19Z
President Donald Trump was just upstaged by Taylor Swift on his own propaganda network.
Fox News reportedly cut away from Trump’s Cabinet meeting Tuesday to report on something much more important: Swift’s engagement to Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce.
The conservative news network deemed it worthy to briefly pause its coverage of the president’s sycophantic secretaries singing his praises to deliver the news about the pop star, BBC News supervisor Courtney Subramanian posted on X.
“Your English teacher and your gym teacher are getting married,” Swift wrote in a post on Instagram Tuesday, quickly racking up millions of likes and hundreds of thousands of shares.
Online, Fox News placed Swift’s “sweet Instagram post” ahead of the live stream link to the president’s meeting.
Fox News wasn’t alone in covering Swift; several other outlets leapt to report on the story, even sending out breaking news alerts. But as a network which has thoroughly devoted itself to delivering the president’s narratives, the cut-in would likely frustrate Trump.
The president has previously held a grudge against the singer, who has proven to be a lightning rod for misogynist sports fans. Trump was so sore after Swift endorsed Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election, that he pathetically declared, “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT!” and later suggested that she was “no longer hot.”
During the same Cabinet meeting, a reporter alerted Trump to the “biggest pop culture news of the year,” and asked for him to comment.
“Well, I wish them a lot of luck,” Trump said. “No, I think he’s a great player, and he’s a great guy, and I think that she’s a terrific person. So I wish them a lot of luck.”
“Imaginary and Unfounded”: Jack Smith Finally Hits Back at MAGA - 2025-08-26T19:20:46Z
After being much maligned by MAGA for leading criminal cases against Donald Trump (until he returned to the presidency), Jack Smith is finally striking back.
Earlier this month, the Office of Special Counsel heeded Republican Senator Tom Cotton’s call to launch a Hatch Act investigation into the former special counsel, on the allegation that Smith’s efforts to prosecute Trump for mishandling classified documents and conspiring to overturn the 2020 election constituted “unprecedented interference in the 2024 election.”
Smith’s lawyers responded with a withering three-page letter to the OSC, published Tuesday by The New York Times, in which they defended Smith’s integrity and skewered Cotton’s allegations.
“The predicate for this investigation is imaginary and unfounded,” the lawyers wrote, as many of Cotton’s purported findings of wrongdoing amounted to “routine,” court-approved actions—such as requesting to exceed the 45-page limit for opening motions, proposing a trial date roughly five months after a grand jury indictment, and seeking expedited review by an appeals court.
Such “unremarkable examples,” the lawyers wrote, were in keeping with the typical duties of a prosecutor.
And while Cotton accused Smith of circumventing standard legal processes in his unsuccessful attempt to bypass a lower court and get the Supreme Court to rule on presidential immunity, Smith’s lawyers pointed out that this decision was backed by precedent in “the most analogous prior case,” i.e., the United States v. Nixon case related to Watergate.
Thus, the lawyers wrote, the OSC investigation is “premised on a partisan complaint that suggests the ordinary operation of the criminal justice system should be disrupted by the whims of a political contest. But the notion that justice should yield to politics is antithetical to the rule of law.”
DOGE Makes It Easier for Hackers to Steal Your Social Security Data - 2025-08-26T19:00:15Z
Department of Government Efficiency whistleblower Charles Borges has revealed that DOGE employees uploaded a copy of an important Social Security database containing the full names, dates of birth, and addresses of hundreds of millions of Americans onto a cloud server, making the data vulnerable to leaks and hackers.
Borges, the Social Security Administration’s chief data officer, indicated that DOGE refused to put “independent security or oversight mechanisms in place,” creating “enormous vulnerabilities.”
“Should bad actors gain access to this cloud environment, Americans may be susceptible to widespread identity theft, may lose vital health care and food benefits, and the government may be responsible for reissuing every American a new Social Security number at great cost,” Borges wrote in his whistleblower complaint.
Despite cybersecurity officials at the SSA expressing their concern, DOGE stooges said that its mission was more important than the basic safety and security of American citizens’ personal information.
“I have determined the business need is higher than the security risk associated with this implementation and I accept all risks,” said SSA Chief Information Officer Aram Moghaddassi, who previously worked for former DOGE leader Elon Musk at X and Neuralink.
This only reaffirms the well-documented concerns about the security risk that giving young, Silicon Valley-coded DOGE-bros like Edward Coristine (aka “Big Balls”) access to sensitive information on millions of Americans raises.
The White House has yet to comment on Borges’s most recent complaint.
Meet Your New Fed Chair: Donald Trump - 2025-08-26T18:55:17Z
President Donald Trump’s announcement that he’s firing Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook prompts the following reminiscence from a vanished world.
In April 1987, I was a young Newsweek reporter assigned periodically to attend the Sperling breakfast. This was a weekly Washington ritual in which reporters were herded into a basement suite of the Carlton (now St. Regis) Hotel to pose questions to some government official under the direction of Godfrey “Budge” Sperling, a Christian Science Monitor columnist whose influence was confined to this function.
On the day I’m thinking of the guest was James Miller, director of President Ronald Reagan’s Office of Management and Budget. I forget how it came up, but Miller said that Federal Reserve Chair Paul Volcker shouldn’t raise interest rates. I thought nothing of it, figuring Miller had no influence over interest rates, so who cared what he thought? And anyway, Miller had kibbitzed on this topic before. When I got back to the office, I told my bureau chief that nothing of interest had been said.
The next morning just about every newspaper in the country put Miller’s comments on Page One, even though they were disavowed by the White House press office. Respectable commentators were outraged that a White House aide would dare try to pressure Volcker a mere 19 months before the next national election!
The Fed did raise interest rates five months later, and nobody thought it had anything to do with what the Reagan White House did or didn’t want. One month after that, the stock market crashed, in what remains the largest one-day percentage drop in American history.
Yet Reagan didn’t blame the Fed. At a press conference he said the cause was a too-high budget deficit. The real reason turned out to be neither interest rates nor the budget deficit so much as automated trading, but set that aside. Reagan didn’t point fingers at the Fed, which would have been an entirely plausible target. He instead blamed himself and Congress for not lowering a deficit that was about 3 percent of the GDP, or about half what it is today. He even signaled that he might be open to a tax increase, though that didn’t happen until his successor, President George H.W. Bush, took office.
My point is not to play Reagan nostalgist, but rather to demonstrate that even Reagan, who set this country on the reactionary course of which the nihilistic end point is now in sight, respected norms for which Trump has no regard. The most important of these is that the Fed operates independently of the president and Congress.
The courts will consider whether Trump’s “for cause” firing of Cook is legitimate, and Cook may win at the district and appellate level. But she’ll probably lose at the Supreme Court, even though the high court tried to warn Trump off trying to seize control of the Fed. This is all the dress rehearsal for Trump firing Jerome Powell, and I think the Supreme Court will let him do that, too. Even before that happens, Cook’s firing is, as the University of Pennsylvania’s Peter Conti-Brown told The New York Times, “the end of central bank independence as we know it.”
Trump is doing all this even though Powell signaled last week that in September the Fed will lower interest rates (“the shifting balance of risks may warrant adjusting our policy stance”), which is what Trump wants. The reason Powell cited for doing so is the same grim July jobs report that prompted Trump to fire the commissioner of labor statistics. Powell also suggested in his speech that the only reason slowing job growth hasn’t boosted the unemployment rate is that “the sharp falloff in immigration” is shrinking the job market. Which is also what Trump wants.
Did I mention that Cook is an inflation dove? In a November speech, she said, “If the labor market and inflation continue to progress in line with my forecast, it could well be appropriate to lower the level of policy restriction over time until we near the neutral rate of interest, or the point when monetary policy is neither stimulating nor restricting economic growth.” Granted, that was before Trump started jacking up tariffs, and Cook has consistently voted with Powell.
Still, Trump calls to mind a 1960s cough-medicine commercial where a guy with a terrible cold waves a “Miami” sign by the side of a snowy highway. A beautiful woman pulls up and says, “I’m only going as far as Fort Lauderdale,” and he waves her on. Trump won’t take yes for an answer. He wants to destroy the Federal Reserve. I doubt even he really understands why.
Trump Somehow Makes His Dictator Comment Far More Alarming - 2025-08-26T17:54:55Z
President Trump continues to let America know that he has no issue with being considered a dictator. In fact, he’s embracing it.
Trump spent much of his Tuesday Cabinet meeting touting his federal takeover of D.C. and lashing out at Democratic governors like Maryland’s Wes Moore and California’s Gavin Newsom for what he thinks is rampant crime in their major cities.
“[Wes Moore] goes on television and says, ‘Oh, Trump is a dictator.’ … So the line is that I’m a dictator. But I stop crime. So a lotta people say ‘You know, if that’s the case then I’d rather have a dictator,’” Trump said in the meeting while his Cabinet members chuckled. “But I’m not a dictator, I just know how to stop crime.”
Trump: "The line is that I'm a dictator, but I stop crime. So a lot of people say, 'You know, if that's the case, I'd rather have a dictator.'" pic.twitter.com/YZlFDZs9lq
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 26, 2025
This comes just 24 hours after he claimed that the American people actually do want a dictator while speaking on his proposal to send National Guard troops to Chicago.
“A lot of people are saying, ‘Maybe we’d like a dictator,’” Trump said on Monday. “I don’t like a dictator, I’m not a dictator,” he quickly added. “I’m a man with great common sense, and I’m a smart person.”
Trump: "A lot of people are saying maybe we'd like a dictator." pic.twitter.com/2EpLkOaPZl
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 25, 2025
Trump is certainly flirting with dictatorship. He has set the National Guard loose on D.C. and L.A., criminalized flag burning, attacked his political enemies relentlessly, and consistently alluded to an unconstitutional third term for himself. He might as well just admit the obvious at this point: He certainly wants to be a dictator, and he’s not that far off from it.
CDC Doesn’t Seem to Think Foodborne Illnesses Are a Thing Anymore - 2025-08-26T17:30:06Z
The U.S. is not monitoring foodborne illnesses like it used to.
As of last month, the only federal-state partnership responsible for overseeing food contaminants at the national level has massively scaled back its operations, reported NBC News.
Prior to July 1, the Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network—also known as FoodNet—was tracking infections caused by eight pathogens, including campylobacter, cyclospora, listeria, shigella, vibrio and Yersinia, some of which are the root cause of serious or life threatening illness.
That number has now been reduced to just two: salmonella and the Shiga toxin-producing E. coli, according to the report.
A spokesperson for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a statement that monitoring all eight pathogens is no longer federally required of the 10 states participating in the food monitoring program.
“Although FoodNet will narrow its focus to Salmonella and STEC, it will maintain both its infrastructure and the quality it has come to represent,” the CDC spokesperson wrote. “Narrowing FoodNet’s reporting requirements and associated activities will allow FoodNet staff to prioritize core activities.”
A memo provided to the Connecticut Public Health Department by the CDC, reviewed by NBC, indicated that the downsized project was due to a lack of available funding for America’s food safety.
“Funding has not kept pace with the resources required to maintain the continuation of FoodNet surveillance for all eight pathogens,” the note read.
FoodNet is a federal-state collaboration that surveils food-borne illnesses for 54 million Americans. It combines the efforts of the CDC, the Food and Drug Administration, the Agriculture Department and 10 state health departments, including in Colorado, Connecticut, Georgia, Maryland, Minnesota, New Mexico, Oregon, Tennessee, and certain counties in California and New York.
Food safety experts stress that the pared down project could hold serious ramifications for America’s public health policy and make it more difficult for federal officials to respond to—or even learn of—serious outbreaks.
Furious Trump’s Firing of Fed’s Lisa Cook May Be About to Backfire - 2025-08-26T17:21:07Z
To execute his authoritarian takeover, President Donald Trump requires the devoted service of willing accomplices. He needs loyalists in strategic positions who will bend or break the law to carry out his designs, from unleashing state-sponsored retribution against enemies to illegally renditioning people to foreign gulags to occupying American cities with U.S. troops.
Trump, plainly, has become newly emboldened in recent days. But another thing that makes this moment so ominous is that his accomplices also appear to be newly emboldened. They are acting freshly unconstrained—brashly, arrogantly certain they will never face accountability no matter what they do to carry out Trump’s corrupt bidding.
Case in point: Trump’s appalling new effort to fire Lisa Cook from the Federal Reserve’s board of governors. On Monday night his anger at Cook peaked as he announced that he’s removing Cook—who has infuriated him for months by helping to keep interest rates higher than he wants—essentially declaring Fed independence a dead letter.
Yet this maneuver may yet backfire on Trump—in part because the accomplices helping carry it out have grown almost absurdly brazen in doing so.
The move appears to be illegal, though Trump may still get away with it. The law allows a president to remove a Fed board member “for cause,” which has generally meant something like a real reason grounded in actual misconduct, not a fake reason that the president pulled out of his rear end.
But Trump’s letter firing Cook claims he can do this for cause “at my discretion,” meaning he gets to declare something “cause” by simply saying so, as The New York Times’s Charlie Savage notes. The courts will decide whether the executive power includes this nearly limitless authority, and while Supreme Court precedent here is complex, a win for Trump is not at all assured.
Enter Trump’s accomplices. The “cause” he cited is the charge that Cook committed mortgage fraud, a claim manufactured for him by William Pulte, a staunch Trump loyalist who heads the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which oversees mortgage markets. Pulte tweeted “findings” that Cook has fraudulently declared several principal or primary residences for mortgage purposes.
Tellingly, Pulte has done a similar maneuver for other Trump foes like Senator Adam Schiff and New York Attorney General Letitia James, both Democrats. They’ve all denied wrongdoing, but all three have been referred to the Justice Department for prosecution.
The real question this raises is: Why is Pulte scrutinizing mortgages that just happen to belong to many high-profile opponents of Trump, and how did he come to select these targets? Experts recently told me that this use of the FHFA mortgage-fraud process appears highly suspect at best. When a Washington Post reporter asked FHFA to identify the procedural basis for Pulte to single out these targets, she received no answer.
Pulte is apparently manipulating agency processes for the express purpose of creating a pretext for referring matters involving Trump’s designated enemies to DOJ. As Georgetown law professor Adam Levitin points out, it’s probable that the only way the mortgages of three leading Trump foes could all face scrutiny is if Pulte personally ordered it. That’s an “abuse of office,” Levitin writes, and a “far greater offense” than anything Cook, Schiff, or James might have done.
Indeed, Pulte should be pressed on whether the White House was directly involved in the decision to single out those three for examination. Did someone in the White House direct Pulte to target them—and others in the future as well? Did the White House ask Pulte to search these mortgages for a pretext for DOJ referrals? If not, has the White House at least tacitly blessed Pulte’s moves? It’s hard to imagine something of this magnitude proceeding without White House approval.
Guess what: We may soon learn more on this front. Cook just announced that she’s suing to challenge her firing, and people with experience in mortgage law and governance tell me that Cook’s lawyer, well-known D.C. attorney Abbe Lowell, has a major opening in the coming litigation. He can use the discovery process to shed light on why Pulte targeted these mortgages and on any White House involvement in that.
“I’d be highly confident that Abbe is going to explore every avenue of discovery to determine what role, if any, the White House played in instigating this investigation,” Benjamin Klubes, a former acting general counsel at HUD and now a white-collar criminal defense attorney in D.C., told me. Notably, Lowell is also James’s attorney, so he’ll have two avenues to explore. “Abbe will definitely focus on Pulte’s role to determine how and why he chose these targets,” Klubes said.
If and when all this becomes the story—when Pulte’s misconduct and any White House involvement in it gets flushed out into the open—it may suddenly start looking very different from what Trump hoped.
We’re seeing a deepening sense of impunity among many of Trump’s willing accomplices. Pulte’s posting of these internal “findings” about senior officials on social media itself suggests that he feels thoroughly unconstrained. Stephen Miller recently responded to protests of U.S. troops in Washington, D.C., by arrogantly threatening to send in more military and/or law enforcement resources, in direct defiance of the city’s residents. The maltreatment of wrongfully-deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia relied on vile and corrupt public conduct by many senior DOJ and Department of Homeland Security officials, which is only getting more brazen.
Scholars of authoritarianism tell us that the existence of cadres of willing accomplices who are not just eager to bend or break laws to carry out the leader’s designs, but also come to see themselves as utterly unconstrained by any prospect of accountability, is itself a telltale sign of descent.
“The loyalists around Trump are much more open and much bolder in their authoritarianism than they were six months ago, because they’ve learned fight by fight that they can get away with it,” Harvard professor Steven Levitsky told me. “So we’re in a very dangerous moment.”
Democrats should be making it absolutely clear, right now, that anyone who carries out corrupt or illegal orders for Trump cannot count on bureaucratic obscurity to shield them from political or legal accountability later. Yes, Trump might preemptively pardon top officials who are legally vulnerable. But Democrats should pointedly pose the question: Do you really think it’s wise to count on Donald Trump to secure you from jeopardy later?
Fed Governor Refuses to Cave—Vows to Sue Trump Over Firing Attempt - 2025-08-26T16:49:38Z
Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook is suing President Donald Trump for attempting to remove her, a move that appears to be part of his crusade against the central bank.
Cook’s attorney Abbe Lowell announced Tuesday morning that Cook intended to launch a legal challenge to the president’s shocking attempt to meddle with the Federal Reserve Bank.
“President Trump has no authority to remove Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook,” Lowell said in a statement. “His attempt to fire her, based solely on a referral letter, lacks any factual or legal basis. We will be filing a lawsuit challenging this illegal action.”
Trump announced Monday that he was removing Cook “for cause,” citing unproven allegations of mortgage fraud from Federal Housing Finance Agency Director William Pulte.
Cook dismissed Trump’s attempt to fire her in a statement. “President Trump purported to fire me ‘for cause’ when no cause exists under the law, and he has no authority to do so. I will not resign. I will continue to carry out my duties to help the American economy as I have been doing since 2022,” she said.
Pulte’s allegation against Cook suggests a trend of politically motivated mortgage fraud claims, as similar allegations have been made against Senator Adam Schiff and New York Attorney General Letitia James.
It’s also worth noting that mortgage fraud would not necessarily constitute “cause” for her removal, as its entirely unrelated to her duties.
Trump has undertaken a months-long campaign to undermine the credibility of the Federal Reserve Bank, as his desire for interest-rate cuts to stave tariff-driven inflation has been met with resistance from Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell.
Powell, who has repeatedly issued grave warnings about Trump’s economic policies, has also received threats of removal from the president—something that is not within the executive’s power to do. On Friday, Powell warned that the jobs market had suffered a “much larger” slowdown than the bank had determined just a month earlier.
Trump Snubs Laura Loomer With Latest White House Hire - 2025-08-26T16:45:26Z
President Donald Trump is expected to soon place longtime loyalist Dan Scavino in charge of White House personnel matters—passing over far-right provocateur Laura Loomer, who was apparently eyeing the job.
As the previous personnel chief moves to a diplomatic role, Scavino will add “Presidential Personnel Office Director” to a resume already stacked with experiences working for Trump—from golf course manager to deputy chief of staff in his first administration.
The appointment is a snub to Loomer, whom some within the MAGA base were hoping would get the job, according to Politico. Loomer told the publication that it would be an “honor” to be chosen for the role.
The MAGA agitator already holds something of a de facto personnel role at the White House, with several of the administration’s recent staffing decisions traceable to her influence. The MAGA influencer regularly gins up campaigns against insufficiently loyal Trump officials, and even maintains a tip line where one can report Democratic sleeper cells in the administration.
Loomer has repeatedly expressed her interest in working for the president. And while Trump has reportedly considered fulfilling that wish in the past, she claims these attempts have been blocked by jealous staffers.
“I had four jobs given to me in this Trump administration that basically have been taken away from me because some of President Trump’s staff suffer from the incurable disease of professional jealousy,” Loomer recently told ABC.
“I wish I did work for the president,” Loomer said in June, during the deposition in her defamation lawsuit against late-night host Bill Maher, “but he asks me my opinions about [personnel] matters, and I give him my opinion. And so it’s an honor. It really is. But it would be an even bigger honor to be working in an official capacity in the White House.”
But, as conservative website The Free Press reported this month, White House officials are wary of Loomer, with one calling her “more trouble than she’s worth,” and questioning where the Trump loyalty enforcer’s own loyalties lie. “She used to pretty much just amplify the MAGA line,” the unnamed official said, “but now it’s pretty clear that she has her own agenda.”
Despite her unrequited desire to be brought officially aboard by Trump, Loomer says she’s intent on keeping her independent operation churning for his sake. “If I’m going to be denied access by jealous staffers … then I have to operate as my own independent agency,” she told ABC.
“Unprecedented”: Trump-Appointed Judge Rejects His Frivolous Lawsuit - 2025-08-26T16:24:21Z
A Trump-appointed federal judge just did something truly unexpected.
On Tuesday, U.S. District Court Judge Thomas T. Cullen dismissed the Department of Justice’s lawsuit challenging a Maryland judge’s two-day waiting period on deportations—and offered a scathing rebuke of the administration’s attacks on the federal judiciary.
The judge defended a previous ruling that granted immigrant detainees a 48-hour long temporary stay of removal, to provide judges with enough time to actually read their habeas petitions.
In May, Chief Judge George L. Russell III had originally ruled that the brief stay was necessary to “preserve existing conditions and the potential jurisdiction of this Court over pending matters while the Court determines the scope of its authority to grant the request[ed] relief.”
The DOJ challenged the ruling, alleging that the court had overstepped its authority, violated local court rules, and wrongly granted automatic relief to a special class of litigants.
But in his 39-page filing Tuesday, Cullen wrote that the government had gone about its grievances all wrong.
“Fair enough, as far as it goes. If these arguments were made in the proper forum, they might well get some traction,” Cullen wrote, adding, “But as events over the past several months have revealed these are not normal times—at least regarding the interplay between the Executive and this coordinate branch of government. It’s no surprise that the Executive chose a different, and more confrontational, path entirely.”
In a footnote, Cullen slammed the Trump administration’s “smear” campaign against the federal judiciary.
“Indeed, over the past several months, principal officers of the Executive (and their spokespersons) have described federal district judges across the country as ‘left-wing,’ liberal,’ ‘activists,’ ‘radical,’ ‘politically minded,’ ‘rogue,’ ‘unhinged,’ ‘outrageous, overzealous, [and] unconstitutional,’ ‘c]rooked,’ and worse,” Cullen wrote. “Although some tension between the coordinate branches of government is a hallmark of our constitutional system, this concerted effort by the Executive to smear and impugn individual judges who rule against it is both unprecedented and unfortunate.”
Cullen wrote that there was “no alternative but to dismiss” the government’s lawsuit.
“To hold otherwise would run counter to overwhelming precedent, depart from longstanding constitutional tradition, and offend the rule of law,” the judge wrote. “All of this isn’t to say that the Executive is without any recourse; far from it. If the Executive truly believes that Defendants’ standing orders violate the law, it should avail itself of the tried-and-true recourse available to all federal litigants: It should appeal.”
Federal Judge Deals Massive Blow to Republicans in Gerrymandering War - 2025-08-26T16:12:59Z
There’s some good news in Utah: On Monday, Judge Dianna Gibson blocked the state’s Republican-controlled legislature from enacting their heavily gerrymandered congressional map, declaring it unconstitutional. Instead the state will defer to the independent redistricting reform that citizens voted for back in 2018, known as “Proposition 4.”
“Proposition 4 is the law in Utah on redistricting. H.B. 2004, the 2021 Congressional Map, which was not enacted under S.B. 200 and not Proposition 4, cannot lawfully govern future elections in Utah,” Gibson wrote. “The Legislature intentionally stripped away all of Proposition 4’s core redistricting standards and procedures that were mandatory and binding on it.... To permit the 2021 Congressional Plan to remain in place would reward the very constitutional violation this Court has already identified and would nullify the people’s 2018 redistricting reform.”
Republican attempts to supersede Proposition 4 began in 2021, when they ignored ballot measures and split up Salt Lake County, the district that contains most of the state’s Democratic voters. Now that their move has been struck down, lawmakers have just under a month to bring the map up to Proposition 4 standards.
This comes as Texas and California are locked in a heated gerrymandering battle, as the former carries out a Trump-backed effort to add multiple Republican seats to the House, while the latter starts its own retaliatory redistricting effort under Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom. The results in Utah, in addition to the language in Gibson’s ruling, serve as a positive sign for those who want to bring legal challenges on gerrymandering in the near future.
You Knew It Was Coming: Trump Has Thoughts on Cracker Barrel Logo - 2025-08-26T16:04:32Z
Nobody seems to like Cracker Barrel’s brand overhaul—including the president.
Donald Trump weighed in on the culture war fiasco Tuesday, urging the Tennessee-born “old country store” to return to its design roots.
“Cracker Barrel should go back to the old logo, admit a mistake based on customer response (the ultimate Poll), and manage the company better than ever before,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “They got a Billion Dollars worth of free publicity if they play their cards right. Very tricky to do, but a great opportunity. Have a major News Conference today. Make Cracker Barrel a WINNER again.”
The U.S. leader then took the opportunity to toot his own horn, absurdly claiming that he had resurrected America from a supposedly decrepit state last year.
“Remember, in just a short period of time I made the United States of America the ‘HOTTEST’ Country anywhere in the World,” Trump noted. “One year ago, it was ‘DEAD.’ Good luck!”
The restaurant chain’s redesign stripped down its logo, removing the imagery of the old man (known as “Uncle Herschel”) and his barrel, replacing it with simple, minimalist text. The stores are expected to undergo a similar redecoration, eschewing the company’s old-timey, gold and wood-toned brand for grayer, cleaner decor that would have been on trend if it was unveiled some 15 years ago.
It took the brains of three PR firms—Prophet, Viral Nation and Blue Engine—to cook up Cracker Barrel’s $700 million transformation.
While no one seems particularly jazzed about the overhaul—the company’s stock plummeted by almost $100 million in the wake of the announcement—MAGA pundits have taken particular issue with Cracker Barrel’s rebrand.
Podcaster Matt Walsh called the effort “generic.” Fox & Friends called it “woke.” Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk was particularly chuffed—in separate posts, Kirk claimed that Cracker Barrel was “targeted” to promote “LGBTQ propaganda,” and also used the fiasco as an opportunity to fat shame, likening the new logo to an overweight woman while comparing the old one to Sydney Sweeney in her “great genes” American Eagle ad campaign.
The division wasn’t entirely partisan, however. The official X account for the Democratic party chimed in on the rebrand last week, writing: “We think the Cracker Barrel rebrand sucks too.”
The company practically apologized for its new look Monday, releasing a statement recognizing the design misstep while emphasizing that the brand had not forgotten about Uncle Herschel.
“If the last few days have shown us anything, it’s how deeply people care about Cracker Barrel,” the company posted on its website Monday. “You’ve also shown us that we could’ve done a better job sharing who we are and who we’ll always be.”
Trump’s Recruitment Plan for Military “Reaction Force” Is a Nightmare - 2025-08-26T15:20:18Z
President Trump on Monday signed an executive order to bolster his federal occupation of Washington, D.C., and create a “quick reaction force” in the National Guard that could be deployed to tamp down civil protests across the country.
Hidden in that executive order is a chilling directive to the “D.C. Safe and Beautiful Task Force,” led by White House adviser Stephen Miller to “establish an online portal for Americans with law enforcement or other relevant backgrounds and experience to apply to join Federal law enforcement entities” in support of his previous order declaring a “crime emergency” in D.C.
The order continues:
“Each law enforcement agency that is a member of the D.C. Safe and Beautiful Task Force, as well as other relevant components of the Department of Justice as the Attorney General determines, shall further, subject to the availability of appropriations and applicable law, immediately create and begin training, manning, hiring, and equipping a specialized unit that is dedicated to ensuring public safety and order in the Nation’s capital that can be deployed whenever the circumstances necessitate, and that could be deployed, subject to applicable law, in other cities where public safety and order has been lost.” [emphasis added]
The move is sure to receive a warm reception from the far-right vigilante groups that are already, as The New Republic’s Melissa Gira Grant recently wrote, nodding along to federal forces’ actions on the streets of D.C.
Grant observed, for example, that Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, in a recent interview, spoke favorably of Trump’s crackdown on the capital and urged him to call up a militia for immigration enforcement. “He should call up all of us,” Rhodes said. “Every able-bodied male in this nation, age 17 to 45 could be called up as the militia.” For Rhodes and his ilk, Trump’s Monday executive order is surely a step in the right direction.
MAGA Loses It After Trump’s Sudden Flip on China - 2025-08-26T14:42:30Z
Some of President Donald Trump’s biggest supporters are arguing that he just made a very bad move.
On Monday, the president offered a concession to China amid ongoing trade talks with Beijing, informing reporters at the White House that the administration would permit hundreds of thousands of Chinese students to continue their studies in the U.S.
“We’re going to allow their students to come in,” Trump said. “It’s very important, 600,000 students. It’s very important. But we’re going to get along with China.”
But that did not sit well with his MAGA base, who claimed that the administration would never accomplish its “mass deportation” if it allowed immigrants into the country.
“I didn’t vote for more Muslims and Chinese people to be imported to my country,” far-right provocateur Laura Loomer wrote on X. “Sorry but these immigrants from communist countries and Sharia shitholes where child rape is legalized don’t make America great.”
“Please don’t Make America China,” she continued. “MAGA doesn’t want more immigrants.”
In another post, Loomer urged Trump to “do the math,” lamenting that the country would never “get rid of the millions who came in under Biden” if it followed through on Trump’s plan.
“If we are only mass deporting 1,000 illegals each day but allowing 600,000 Chinese spies to come to our country, how can we call them mass deportations?” she wrote.
Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene was also outraged, preaching on social media that the country should not “let in” thousands of students who she claimed could be “loyal” to the Chinese Communist Party.
“If refusing to allow these Chinese students to attend our schools causes 15 percent of them to fail then these schools should fail anyways because they are being propped up by the CCP,” Greene wrote. “Why are we allowing 600,000 students from China to replace our American student’s opportunities? We should never allow that.”
America’s relationship with China has been fraught since Trump returned to office. Earlier this year, the president imposed a whopping 145 percent tariff on all Chinese goods—a threat that provoked a quick response from Beijing, which imposed a 125 percent tariff on U.S. exports in return.
China’s defiant negotiating strategy with the U.S. became an international model in May when Trump’s tariffs plummeted, proving that the country’s refusal to play the White House’s waiting game had earned them a significantly better deal.
But the U.S. leader’s economic threats have continued, nonetheless. In the same White House presser Monday, Trump curiously fixated on magnets, warning China that it must hand more over or face a “200 percent tariff or something.”
Trump Prosecutors Fail Three Times to Indict D.C. Woman at ICE Arrest - 2025-08-26T14:41:34Z
President Trump and his Justice Department have finally given 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.
This is a pretty impressive failure on D.C. Attorney Jeanine Pirro’s part. It’s not often that prosecutors are denied an indictment from a grand jury given the preexisting bias towards federal prosecution (defendant’s lawyers aren’t even allowed in the room in front of a grand jury).
In July, Reid was accused of assaulting, impeding, or interfering with federal agents while they transferred two alleged gang members into FBI custody at a D.C. jail. According to prosecutors, she recorded the agents and tried to block them from getting to one of the detainees. After being pushed 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.
The argument didn’t work in court, as Reid’s lawyers argued she was simply arrested by officers who didn’t want to be filmed, and the physical altercation occurred because of the agents.
Federal prosecutors have now refiled the case as a low-level misdemeanor.
“Three grand juries have now declined to indict Ms. Reid for felony assault on a law enforcement officer,” her lawyers, Tezira Abe and Eugene Ohm, wrote in a statement Monday night. “The U.S. attorney can try to concoct crimes to quiet the people, but in our criminal justice system, the citizens have the last word. We are anxious to present the misdemeanor case to a jury and to quickly clear Ms. Reid’s name.”
If Reid had been charged with the felony, she would have faced up to eight years in prison.
The case proves the obvious: The Trump administration is being overly aggressive, and is more focused on making brutal legal examples of people rather than actually having a punishment that fits the “crime.”
“Seeking an indictment for a third time is extremely rare and usually only reserved for the most serious of crimes,” attorney Christopher Macchiaroli told D.C.’s local WUSA9. “If a governmental entity cannot convince a supermajority of grand jurors that there is a fair probability that a crime was committed, it is virtually impossible to believe that twelve jurors in the same relevant jurisdiction could unanimously at a future date find guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, the highest standard of proof under the law.”
The charges levied against Reid are the same ones levied against Sean Dunn, the Subway sandwich thrower in Washington, D.C., who had his apartment raided by agents when he was arrested.
Reid’s outcome should be a positive sign for people like Dunn, but the Justice Department isn’t giving up on their efforts to ruin people’s lives over low-level arrests just yet. Senior Justice Department official Akaash Singh told his prosecutors to ignore the losses and criticism, and to continue to overcharge people, according to The New York Times.
Trump Continues Fascist Takeover of DC By Arresting A Veteran - 2025-08-26T14:41:07Z
A demonstrator who identified himself as a disabled combat veteran was arrested Monday after burning an American flag in protest of President Donald Trump’s latest executive order.
Speaking through a megaphone to the onlookers outside of the White House, the protester explained that Trump’s latest decree penalizing flag burning was an affront to the First Amendment.
“I fought for every single one of your rights to express yourself in however you feel that you may want to express yourself,” the protester said, in a video shared to social media.
“No president can make a law—period—no Congress can make a law infringing on First Amendment rights,” he added. “I’m burning this flag as a protest of that illegal fascist president that sits in that house!”
The protester then lit the flag on fire.
Despite Trump’s claim that burning the American flag “incites riots at a level we’ve never seen,” no such riot materialized. The protester was promptly arrested by the Secret Service.
The Secret Service released a statement that it detained the man “for igniting an object” and that he was turned over to Park Police, who said they’d arrested him for violating a statute that prohibits lighting a fire in a public park, according to NBC News.
Trump’s blatant attack on free speech built on fictitious grounds is an affront to the U.S. Constitution, and the Supreme Court, which ruled 5-4 in 1989 that flag burning was protected speech under the First Amendment.
Trump’s Attempt to Fire Fed Governor Exposes Depth of His Revenge Plot - 2025-08-26T13:35:40Z
Donald Trump’s move to fire Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook for unproven allegations of mortgage fraud is unprecedented. It also raises the troubling likelihood that the administration is using a federal agency to make its way through an enemies list.
In a shocking instance of presidential meddling with the central bank, Trump on Monday announced that he was removing Cook, the first Black woman on the Federal Reserve board, for cause. Cook, for her part, refused to step down and responded with a statement: “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.”
As Georgetown Law professor Adam J. Levitin wrote Monday at the blog Credit Slips, it’s far from clear that the allegations against Cook (of misconduct unrelated to the carrying out of her duties) can even constitute “cause.” The accusations are also quite flimsy.
But what may be most notable is how the attempted firing of Cook came about. The allegations of mortgage fraud were laid out by Bill Pulte, the MAGA director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, who claimed Cook declared two primary residences.
As Levitin observed in an earlier post calling for Pulte’s resignation, it’s unlikely that the FHFA head just happened upon the alleged fraud “in some routine audit or the like.” Rather, he wrote, Pulte likely directed Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac “to pull her application”—an unheard-of move.
Taken with the Trump administration’s evidently politically motivated mortgage fraud claims against Senator Adam Schiff and New York Attorney General Letitia James, Cook’s corrupt firing raises the troubling possibility that Pulte is working through a list à la Richard Nixon’s list of political enemies to be targeted by the Internal Revenue Service.
“Unless Pulte somehow had particular knowledge about issues with Cook’s application, which is unlikely, then one has to conclude that Pulte handed Fannie and Freddie a list of political enemies and asked for their loan files for review,” Levitin wrote. “That’s got to be how the DOJ indictment of Senator Adam Schiff and NY Attorney General Letitia James arose too.”
Republican Town Hall Erupts: “Take Your Head Out of Trump’s Ass!” - 2025-08-26T13:11:10Z
Missouri Republican Representative Mark Alford was told to “take Trump’s head out of your ass” by a constituent on Monday as he had his own town hall turn on him.
“I am pissed, and I’m pissed at you, because I have emailed you because it’s easier for me than to try to talk on the phone without profanity,” said Fred Higginbotham, a longtime Polk County resident who said he was at risk of losing his family farm. “I would appreciate you taking your father’s U.S. Constitution book, read it, study it, make your own lines underneath it, and get Trump out of office. The man is a dictator.”
Constituent: I am pissed, and I am pissed at you. The man is a dictator. He knows nothing about what he talks about. You need to take your head out of Trump’s ass. pic.twitter.com/B5m3Sx6qve
— Acyn (@Acyn) August 26, 2025
Higginbotham went on to tell Alford that he may lose his family farm because of state and federal disdain for farmers and bias towards the wealthy.
“You wanna straighten out the budget? Start taxing corporations and the wealthy like we’ve been telling you. Do you think we’re idiots? Do you think we don’t pay taxes? Do you think that we don’t have to make budgets? … You know nothing about what a working-class citizen does. Come down here … and start trying to pay your medical insurance.... You need to take your head out of Trump’s ass and start doing your representation of us!”
This isn’t the first time Alford has drawn the ire of his own constituents in a town hall. Back in February, Alford was booed relentlessly for attempting to justify billionaire Elon Musk’s power over government personnel as a completely unelected official as head of DOGE.
Alford tried to soften the blow on Monday, thanking Higginbotham for his military service and acknowledging that running a small business was “tough” and trying to explain why his office never answered constituents’ emails.
“I really want to have an open line of communication. You know, sometimes I’m even in my office, and my staff doesn’t really like this, but I answer the phone,” Alford told Higginbotham. “When I’m in the district and when I’m in D.C. If I have free time, I’m not in a committee meeting or on the House floor, I like to answer the phone because I like to hear from people like you.”
But this may have fallen on deaf, angry ears.
Alford isn’t the only Republican to face the music this month. Last week, Wyoming Representative Harriet Hageman was booed for refusing to acknowledge that Trump’s tariff war will hurt consumers and stating that inflation hadn’t gone up when it has. New York MAGA hardliner Elise Stefanik was called a “Nazi” and a sellout at her last town hall over her support for Trump and refusal to release the Epstein files. And chants of “vote him out!” rained down on Mike Flood earlier this month.
Transcript: Trump’s Fury Erupts at Many Targets as Expert Fears Worsen - 2025-08-26T10:54:49Z
The following is a lightly edited transcript of the August 26 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.
It’s becoming clear that in recent days, President Trump has reached a new level of emboldenment when it comes to his ongoing authoritarian takeover. He’s venting his rage at news organizations that displease him and threatening government retribution against them. He’s responded to multiple different high-profile Democrats and politicians who criticized him by threatening to send troops to their cities or unleashing state power against them in other ways. There’s a brazenness to Trump’s latest round of threats that crosses over into something new. Journalist and historian Garrett Graff has a great new piece on his Substack, Doomsday Scenario, arguing that we really are seeing the advent of American fascism right before our eyes. But critically, Garrett also explains that the process by which a transformation like this takes place is incremental and often hard to recognize while it’s happening—with multiple potential endpoints. So we’re going to work through all this with him right now. Garrett, thanks for coming on.
Garrett Graff: Thanks for having me again, Greg.
Sargent: I want to start with Trump’s quote about the mayor of Washington, D.C. He said this, “Mayor Muriel Bowser must immediately stop giving false and highly inaccurate crime figures, or bad things will happen, including a complete and total Federal takeover of the City!” Garrett, I want to stress here that Trump made this threat—the threat of a total federal takeover of the city—against the will of its leaders and its residents in response to speech, in response to her trying to inform constituents about the very thing he’s lying relentlessly about: the level of crime in D.C. Your response to all that?
Graff: Tweets like this from Trump, I think, are indicative of what has really worried me over the course of this month, which is we have seen this continual escalation and ratcheting up of the hostility and aggression and posture of the D.C. federal takeover in a way that, again, felt different. There was a version of this in early August where I was like, Maybe this is one of those weird performative things where they’re going to be a couple of nights of a couple of extra FBI patrols through the city and maybe some National Guard troops posted at the National Mall.
But what I think we saw over the course of last week was this rising level of aggression of the federal interference in D.C.—up to and including ICE officers and agents of this weird amalgamated federal task force of various agencies coming together to fight nondescript crime of some kind in D.C. literally shouting, Papers, please, to people getting off the metro in D.C. on their way home from work and forcing people to show ID to walk out of a transit station. We saw a 14-ton up-armored MRAP patrolling the streets of D.C. slam into and T-bone a civilian car. And now, as of this weekend—as of Sunday night—the National Guard are now authorized to be carrying weapons. We can see now that this is an occupation by the U.S. military on domestic soil that is being done to a population and not in support of them. They’ve tried to have this fig leaf of, We’re out there protecting D.C. But what you actually see in DC is deserted streets, deserted monuments, restaurant reservations cratering—because people don’t want to go out on the street and risk these interactions with the armed agents of the state that are there.
Sargent: Trump also threatened several others in similar fashion. He threatened Chris Christie. After Christie criticized his corruption of the Justice Department, Trump tweeted that the feds might investigate a matter related to the 2013 closing of George Washington Bridge lanes to punish a Democratic official. Trump said this, “[P]erhaps we should start looking at that very serious situation again?” And after Maryland governor Wes Moore criticized Trump on TV, Trump threatened to send in the military to Baltimore to “clean up crime.” He said, “I will send in the ‘troops’.” And he threatened to pull funding for the city’s Francis Scott Key Bridge after Moore criticized Trump for militarizing cities. Now note, Garrett, that in all these cases, Trump is making threats to silence those who are calling out the abuses of power, calling out the authoritarianism. It sounds to me like an open and explicit demand for acquiescence and surrender. What does history tell us about this? Is this a step down the slope? What do you think of what Trump did there?
Graff: Well, it’s not even just political opponents. And this is, I think, an important part of this. It is part and parcel again of this worldview that Trump has brought into office this time where “the state is me”—the old French king line—where it’s not just that Donald Trump doesn’t like being criticized by domestic political opponents. It’s that Donald Trump thinks that he personally and his taste should dictate what is in our museums with his attacks on the Smithsonian. He believes that his taste should dictate what is performed in our theaters with his takeover of the Kennedy Center. He believes that his taste and his personal preferences should dictate what books people should read as we have seen him go after things like the Naval Academy library.
His craziest tweet of the weekend to me was him trying to dictate that Major League Baseball immediately induct Roger Clemens into the Hall of Fame because he played golf with Roger Clemens and, boy, Roger Clemens is just a great guy. This idea that there’s one true vision for America—and it is Donald Trump’s personal vision for what our life and our culture and our society should be—is to me the most clear example of authoritarianism that we could see.
Sargent: I want to underscore, Garrett, though, that he’s directly demanding complete surrender.
Graff: Complete surrender on all fronts: in politics, in sports, in culture, in business. Part of my essay today was this insanity of Trump capitalism we have seen in the last couple of weeks where Tim Cook from Apple came to Washington D.C. to hand Donald Trump literal pieces of gold in the Oval Office to curry favor. We’ve seen Donald Trump having the government take 10 percent of Intel over because Donald Trump just believes he should have 10 percent of Intel. Nvidia is paying a literally unconstitutional export tax because Donald Trump decreed that if they wanted to sell chips to China then they had to pay this export tax of 15 percent straight to the U.S. government, which I’m sure somewhere will get laundered around to end up in Donald Trump’s presidential library like all of these other fees and fines. But this is just insanity, and it is nothing like any version of America that we have seen in modern times.
Sargent: And by the way, reinforcing your point are the threats against the media. In two separate rants on Truth Social, Trump said ABC and NBC should have their licenses revoked by the FCC. He also said they should “pay up BIG.” Now, it’s true that Trump is botching things a bit here on the specifics of how FCC licenses work, but still the threatened action is a direct response to criticism of him. He’s explicit about this in the tweets. He says this is about bad stories about him. I just can’t help but notice that there’s a real snowballing here where we’re really seeing Trump get a whole lot more comfortable with making it a lot more explicit—this demand for absolute capitulation on every front.
Graff: Yes. And again, the reason presumably he’s getting more comfortable is so far everyone is capitulating. One reason he feels that he can go after these networks and their FCC licenses is because he has pretty continually extorted media organizations since winning the presidency with frivolous lawsuits and holding up the Paramount merger until they paid what their own board of directors believe is a bribe to Donald Trump in order to get their merger through. There was reporting that what really held up the Paramount settlement with Donald Trump was the board of directors being concerned that they were opening themselves up to a future bribery investigation by a subsequent administration. And I’m not a lawyer, but one thing that I generally believe to be true is that if you believe that you are paying a bribe, you are probably paying a bribe.
Sargent: So let’s get to the points you make in your piece about incremental movement down the slippery slope. Trump signed an executive order on Monday empowering Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to establish specialized units in the National Guard that will be specifically trained and equipped to deal with public-order issues. Look, there’s clearly an effort by Trump and Stephen Miller to acclimate voters to the sight of troops in American cities. This is ostensibly to conduct domestic law enforcement, which is itself bad, but I think the real game here is to get Americans accustomed to the use of the American military against Americans. Maybe not military violence against Americans, but the use of the military to, in some sense, corral and control constituents in an American city inside the homeland. Am I overreading this?
Graff: Not at all. One of the things I was trying to do in my essay this week was we’ve warned for so long—not just in the last couple of weeks and months but the last couple of years—of the creep of Donald Trump’s authoritarianism. And I think many Americans wrongly believed that there was going to be one clear unambiguous moment, like a light switch going on or off, where everything before this moment is a democracy, everything after this moment is an authoritarian fascist regime. And of course, that’s not what it was going to be like. That’s not what Germany was like in the 1930s. That’s not what Hungary was like in the 2000s. It’s a creeping incremental process—and that there’s a blurring of lines here, there’s a norm destroyed there, a presidential diktat that goes unchallenged. And then you wake up one morning and the country is different.
And to me, writing today, Monday, August 25, that was this morning where it really feels like we are in a country that at some point in the month of August became a very different country than everything that we have known before. And that this idea of the military being used to police American cities—not at the request of local governments but over their vociferous objection and almost in spite of their objection—is a new moment.
It’s one that feels more like the British redcoats in Boston in the 1700s than it does previous incidents like we’ve seen Dwight Eisenhower calling up the 101st Airborne at Little Rock Central High School—up to and including moments like today in a press conference where Donald Trump actually was musing aloud about how he thinks some people actually do want a dictator. Some people call me a dictator, but maybe people really want a dictator. Some people really do want a dictator.
Sargent: Garrett, now that you said that, let’s play that audio.
Donald Trump (audio voiceover): As you all know, Chicago is a killing field right now, and they don’t acknowledge it. And they say, We don’t need him. Freedom, freedom. He’s a dictator. He’s a dictator. A lot of people are saying, Maybe we like a dictator. I don’t like a dictator. I’m not a dictator. I’m a man with great common sense and a smart person.
Sargent: Well, there you go. He said it. He said he didn’t want to be a dictator. He said he’s not a dictator. But he said some people want him to be a dictator. I think that’s best seen as a trial balloon, a test run, another tiny step on the incremental slope.
Graff: And you talk about America getting accustomed to the military playing a role in American cities. One of the things that I’ve been talking about over the last couple of weeks is you have to look at the bigger picture in all of this. Again, these events are not taking place in vacuums. The Texas redistricting fight, the Donald Trump musing on Twitter last week that Vladimir Putin told him that we should get rid of voting by mail and everyone has to vote in person. I have never believed that Donald Trump was going to outright cancel the 2026 election or the 2028 election. Almost every country in the world has elections. Vladimir Putin has been regularly elected president of Russia. Saddam Hussein was regularly elected the head of Iraq.
What I think we’re going to see and what I think we should be on alert for is the way that all of these Republican plots—all of these Trump plots and plans and schemes and tweets—are geared toward subtly shaping who shows up to vote in 2026, in 2028. You don’t need to cancel the 2026 elections if in every minority-heavy district in America, you just have voting day. You make everyone vote in person, and then on voting day have everyone have to run a gauntlet of ICE checkpoints and National Guard checkpoints in order to get to the polling place. Think about the way that voting looks in a country where next year there are 10,000 more ICE officers than there are in the U.S. right now. Think of what it looks like if there are 15 cities in the country that are being governed by military authorities and there are routine immigration checkpoints set up all across the city on voting day. All of this to me is about how the Republicans consolidate power around this authoritarian vision and regime and then lock in through the normal tools of our democracy—an illegitimate claim to power going forward.
Sargent: Well, I’ll tell you what, Garrett, Steve Bannon made this very plain. He recently said on his podcast exactly what we’re talking about here—that you’re damn right ICE is going to be monitoring voting places on Election Day 2026. There’s absolutely no doubt that MAGA sees what’s happening right now and is fully expecting a heavy military presence during the voting in 2026 and fully expects it to be designed to swing the election to Republicans. Folks, you can’t say you weren’t warned. Garrett was about as clear as possible there. Garrett, thanks so much for coming on, man. Harrowing stuff, though.
Graff: Thanks for having me again, Greg.
Trump’s Intel Deal: Also Very Fascist - 2025-08-26T10:00:00Z
Candidate Donald Trump explained a year ago how he intended to regain the White House. “All we have to do,” he said, “is define our opponent as being a communist or socialist.” In late April of this year Trump said: “We cannot allow a handful of communist radical-left judges to obstruct the enforcement of our laws.” Last month Trump said: “Generations of Americans before us did not shed their blood only so that we could surrender our country to Marxist lunatics on the eve of our 250th year. As president of the United States, I’m proclaiming here and now that America is never going to be communist in any way, share, form.”
I’m not the first to observe that this is strange talk from a president who keeps seizing the means of production. Trump made the Nippon-U.S. Steel merger contingent on the United States reserving a “golden share” that gives it significant control over wages, plant closings, and the like. (I kind of liked that.) In July, the Pentagon bought a 15 percent stake in MP Minerals, the only company that mines rare earth minerals here in the United States (near Las Vegas). Trump initially blocked (on national security grounds) Nvidia from selling AI chips to China, then changed his mind and said the chips could be sold but that the United States would take a 15 percent cut of all sales. He imposed the same terms on another chip maker, Advanced Micro Devices.
Now Trump has purchased a 10 percent stake in the chipmaker Intel, converting part of a grant awarded the company in President Joe Biden’s CHIPS and Science Act into equity. The arrangement has received the blessing of Senator Bernie Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist, who three years ago tried unsuccessfully to amend the CHIPS Act to require a taxpayer equity stake or debt agreement in exchange for CHIPS grants. After his amendment failed, Sanders voted against the CHIPS Act.
But Senator Elizabeth Warren, who has made clear she is not a democratic socialist—and who co-sponsored Sanders’s failed amendment but voted for the CHIPS Act anyway—does not extend her blessing. “The president just saying he wants the public to have a stake in a major company,” Warren told Reuters, “isn’t the same as having a real strategy to rein in stock buybacks, onshore jobs, and support long-term economic growth in America.”
Who’s right—Sanders or Warren?
Before I answer that question, let’s pause to savor how much Trump’s allies are squirming over this. The United States Chamber of Commerce, which is surely in a panic, is saying nothing. Over on Fox News, Trump pom-pom shaker Maria Bartiromo said, “There are definitely reasons to raise your eyebrows about this situation,” but then excused it in light of national security. (Then why is the United States now party to conveying Nvidia and AMD chips to China?)
Excusing the Intel investment as a one-off doesn’t work, not only because it’s consistent with the Nippon and MP Minerals deals, but also because Trump (who loves to undermine his defenders) said Monday, “I hope I’m going to have many more cases like it.” The ferociously obedient Kevin Hassett, director of the National Economic Council, added: “I’m sure that at some point there’ll be more transactions, if not in this industry, in other industries.” In Congress, Rand Paul excoriated the deal as a “step toward socialism,” but otherwise, as Politico’s Jonathan Martin noted Monday on Morning Joe, the silence “is deafening among elected officials.” He meant Republican ones.
You might say that a spectre haunts Mar-a-Lago, but it isn’t precisely communism. It isn’t even democratic socialism. As I’ve explained earlier, what Trump practices is fascist corporatism, which is why Warren is right to keep her distance (and why Sanders should, too).
This is a president searching under the sofa cushions for every nickel he can find because he just passed a tax cut for the rich that will double the budget deficit. That’s why he keeps imposing random tariffs; it’s why he’s shaking down Ivy League universities; it’s why he wants to sell rich foreigners $5 million “gold cards” to live and work the United States; and it’s why he’s threatening to impose a 1-5 percent tax on all proceeds from inventions for which the United States furnishes a patent. (Inventors already pay thousands in onetime fees to secure patents.)
Converting a CHIPS grant to Intel into equity has a certain appeal, because, sure, the taxpayer should get some return on his investment. But it introduces all kinds of tricky questions about how, over the long term, you regulate a business owned by the government. (When President Barack Obama had the Treasury purchase shares in General Motors to bail it out, it was understood the investment would be temporary.) And anyway, the “return on taxpayer investment” theme doesn’t apply to many of Trump’s schemes. The patent tax idea, for example, is just extortion. And in a way the Intel equity deal is extortion, too, because Trump began this negotiation by trying to get Intel’s chief executive canned. Democratic socialists don’t extort. Fascists do.
Then there’s the question of legality. A democratic socialist is supposed to pursue socialist goals through democratic means. Trump does not. We-the-people never gave Trump the power to tinker with the CHIPS Act to this extent without passing additional legislation. It isn’t clear whether Trump has the unilateral power to claim a golden share in U.S. Steel, either, or to charge a 15 percent commission on chips sales to China, or to buy a 15 percent stake in a rare-earth minerals company. Indifference to constitutional procedure is characteristic of fascist regimes.
Also, there’s the matter of personal indebtedness to Trump. The president is imposing loyalty tests on 553 corporations, and the loyalty he requires isn’t to the United States, but to Trump himself. The language of the golden share deal with U.S. Steel mentions Trump by name, which seems an open invitation for Trump to exploit his power over that corporation for personal gain. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Trump’s name in the contractual language with Intel as well.
It’s no secret that Trump is a kleptocrat; since the election, the Trump family has harvested $4.5 billion from crypto investments even though Trump may not have invested a penny of his own money. In the seven months since Trump entered office, his net worth has increased by nearly $1 billion. Trump isn’t searching under the sofa cushions exclusively for nickels to lower the deficit; he’s also searching for nickels to fatten his purse.
Trump’s incursions into the market economy play out against a background of dismantling the administrative state (with an impressive assist from the Fifth Circuit, which last week threw a wrench into the National Labor Relations Board, in effect ruling that the world’s richest person, Elon Musk, needn’t pay it any heed). It doesn’t strike me as notably communist for a leader to simultaneously disable government administration and at the same time interfere with commerce on an ad hoc basis. But regulation by personal whim is characteristic of fascist corporatism. Another characteristic is that the business community allows fascists to acquire strength under the delusion that it can appease them.
And of course, fascism has always thrived on scapegoating communists, whether communists were a real presence or not. It seems a bit silly now that communism is almost entirely a spent force. Can’t Trump and Stephen Miller find a more up-to-date epithet? But I suppose it sort of worked in 2024. So expect Trump to keep red-hunting while he nationalizes America’s corporations.
Trump’s Got Some Unconstitutional Ideas About Flag Burning - 2025-08-26T10:00:00Z
Justice Antonin Scalia was not a fan of flag-burning, which he often used as an example of the limits of government power in an open and democratic society. “If it were up to me, I would put in jail every sandal-wearing, scruffy-bearded weirdo who burns the American flag,” he often told audiences at law schools and other public appearances. “But I am not king.”
President Donald Trump disagrees with the latter part. He signed an executive order on Monday that purportedly allows the Justice Department to prosecute people for burning American flags. The White House even helpfully titled the order “Prosecuting Burning of the American Flag.” At a press event in the Oval Office on Monday, Trump touted it as a “very important” order that he hoped would end a purported scourge of flag-burning.
It will probably not accomplish that goal. One big reason is that it appears to have been written by White House lawyers to satisfy a president who wants to do something that is flatly forbidden by the Supreme Court—all while trying to pretend that it is not trying to defy the court’s precedents. The other is that it addresses a phenomenon that barely exists.
“All over the country, they’re burning flags,” the president claimed in the Oval Office. “All over the world, they burn the American flag. And, as you know, through a very sad court—I guess it was a 5-4 decision—they called it freedom of speech. But there’s another much more important reason, which is called death. Because what happens when you burn a flag is people go crazy. If you have hundreds of people, they go crazy.”
“You can do other things, you can burn this piece of paper,” Trump continued, gesturing towards a sheet of paper on his desk, “When you burn the American flag, it incites riots at a level that we’ve never seen before. People go crazy in a way—both ways—there are some that go crazy for doing it, there are others that are angry at them for doing it.”
Prosecuting someone for burning a flag is unconstitutional. By “unconstitutional,” I don’t mean that it could potentially be interpreted as unconstitutional if a court had the opportunity to rule upon the matter. I mean that the Supreme Court has emphatically held for more than 35 years that the First Amendment allows people to burn the American flag without fear of prosecution.
The “very sad” court decision to which Trump referred is the 1989 case Texas v. Johnson. Gregory Lee Johnson, a young communist activist, doused an American flag in kerosene and set it on fire outside the Dallas City Hall to protest the 1984 Republican National Convention. Local police arrested him shortly thereafter for violating a Texas law that prohibited “desecration of a venerated object.” No one was injured.
A Texas jury convicted Johnson, sentenced him to one year in prison, and fined $2,000, which would be equivalent to more than $6,000 if adjusted for inflation in 2025. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals overturned his conviction on free-speech grounds. “Given the context of an organized demonstration, speeches, slogans, and the distribution of literature,” the court explained, “anyone who observed [Johnson’s] act would have understood the message that appellant intended to convey. The act for which [Johnson] was convicted was clearly ‘speech’ contemplated by the First Amendment.”
At the time, the Supreme Court had never before considered the constitutionality of flag-desecration laws. Forty-seven other states reportedly had similar bans on the books at the time, and a federal statute claimed to prohibit it as well. (Alaska and Wyoming were the two exceptions.) To overcome the First Amendment hurdle, Texas told the Supreme Court that it had two compelling interests in banning flag-burning: “preserving the flag as a symbol of national unity” and “preventing breaches of the peace.”
In a 5-4 decision that included Scalia, the state lost on both counts. Justice William Brennan, writing for the court, found that the “national unity” argument did not outweigh Johnson’s right to free expression. “If there is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment, it is that the government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable,” he explained. Brennan also concluded that the court could not allow a state to prescribe that a symbol has one particular meaning—in this case, patriotism—and criminalize any alternatives.
On the breaching-the-peace argument, things were more complicated. In the landmark 1969 case Brandenburg v. Ohio, the court had already limited the government’s power to punish speech that advocated for violence or illegal activity unless the speech in question called for “imminent lawless action” or is “likely to incite or produce such action.” That high bar means that a state could not punish someone for writing a book about the virtues of rioting, for example, or for arguing in favor of illegal behavior in the abstract.
For this part of Johnson’s case, the court’s analysis was fact-bound. “No reasonable onlooker would have regarded Johnson’s generalized expression of dissatisfaction with the policies of the federal government as a direct personal insult or an invitation to exchange fisticuffs,” Brennan wrote. He affirmed that states retained the power to punish breaches of the peace and noted that Texas already had a separate statute that allowed it to do so.
Only a handful of Supreme Court rulings in the last 40 years caused a greater uproar than Johnson. Broad sections of the American public denounced the court’s decision. Chief Justice William Rehnquist, writing in dissent, compared flag-burning to other “evils” that a civilized society could prohibit like “murder, embezzlement, [and] pollution.” Justice John Paul Stevens claimed that the ruling “diminishes the value of an important national asset.” One survey found that 71 percent of Americans would support a constitutional amendment to overturn the ruling.
Congress responded by passing a new federal law, the Flag Protection Act of 1989, by overwhelming margins. The statute said that anyone who “knowingly mutilates, defaces, physically defiles, burns, maintains on the floor or ground, or tramples upon any flag of the United States” shall be imprisoned for one year. (This was codified as 18 U.S.C. 700(b) in the United States Code.) President George H.W. Bush said that he considered it unconstitutional after the Johnson ruling, but allowed the bill to become law without his signature by declining to veto it.
Trump apparently disagrees and hopes to enforce Section 700(b) against future flag-burners. “And what the penalty will be is that if you burn a flag, you get one year in jail,” Trump interjected. “No early exits, no nothing. You get one year in jail. If you burn a flag, you get—and what it does is—incite to riot. I hope they used that language, by the way. Incite to riot. And you burn a flag, you get one year in jail. You don’t get ten years, you don’t get one month, and it goes on your record.”
The problem is that the Supreme Court already said no. Almost immediately after the law’s passage, Johnson and two fellow protesters burned a flag in a public protest and were prosecuted accordingly. The Supreme Court, along the exact same 5-4 lines as last time, struck down the Flag Protection Act in the 1990 case United States v. Eichman. The justices were not persuaded by the Justice Department’s claims that it was merely protecting the “physical integrity” of the flag instead of punishing free expression. Though lawmakers occasionally floated a constitutional amendment in the years that followed, it never gained traction.
Trump’s executive order tries to get around Johnson and Eichman by leaning on the breaching-the-peace interest. “Notwithstanding the Supreme Court’s rulings on First Amendment protections, the court has never held that American flag desecration conducted in a manner that is likely to incite imminent lawless action or that is an action amounting to ‘fighting words’ is constitutionally protected,” the order’s preface claimed, citing Johnson.
This does not really make sense. Someone can burn a flag while inciting imminent lawless action. They could hold a burning flag aloft while telling their fellow rioters to smash a car. I suppose a group of people could agree in advance to use a burning American flag as a signal to coordinate their illegal actions, though that seems inefficient and unrealistic (and also outside Johnson’s scope since it would not be expressive conduct). But the act of burning a flag cannot itself amount to a direct call for imminent lawless action under Johnson.
Other parts of the order are similarly befuddled. The order’s substantive language, for example, is filled with caveats. “The Attorney General shall prioritize the enforcement to the fullest extent possible of our nation’s criminal and civil laws against acts of American flag desecration that violate applicable, content-neutral laws, while causing harm unrelated to expression, consistent with the First Amendment,” it declared.
This may sound bold and authoritative to a layperson but it is nonsensical to anyone who’s read Johnson and Eichman. Unless someone is using a burning American flag in furtherance of another illegal act—maybe by using it to set people or other property aflame?—it is hard to imagine a context where burning an American flag in and of itself is not expressive conduct protected by the First Amendment. Trump’s order, as written, is akin to telling someone to ignore red lights and stop signs to the fullest extent permitted by local traffic laws.
One possibility is that Trump is trying to get the Supreme Court to overturn Johnson and Eichman. The order even encourages the attorney general to “pursue litigation to clarify the scope of the First Amendment exceptions in this area.” Nobody can really blame him for thinking of the court as a Pez dispenser for favorable rulings after the last 18 months. At the same time, none of the justices have publicly signaled any interest in doing this.
The closest that any have come was when Justice Clarence Thomas, who joined the court one year after Eichman was decided, favorably cited Rehnquist’s Johnson dissent while dissenting alone from a 2003 case on Virginia’s anti-cross-burning law. He argued against the court’s decision to significantly narrow the statute. Even then, that case was an outlier in Thomas’s general approach to free-speech cases. It is not hard to guess why he might take umbrage to eight Northerners and Westerners downplaying the uniquely violent implications of burning crosses.
Of all the criticism that can be leveled at the Roberts Court in general, scaling back major First Amendment precedents is not among them. The court’s conservative majority has left the 20th century’s landmark free-speech rulings intact and applied them evenhandedly in some of the most emotive cases possible. A court that can recognize First Amendment protections for funeral protests for dead soldiers and commercialized animal-abuse footage can probably stomach a burning American flag.
There is one important catch here. Trump also directed the relevant agencies to “deny, prohibit, terminate, or revoke visas, residence permits, naturalization proceedings, and other immigration benefits, or seek removal from the United States” if there was any evidence that the non-citizens in question participated in flag-burnings. While the First Amendment theoretically applies to non-citizens, the Supreme Court’s recent approach to executive power and deportations does not give them much reassurance.
It is hard to imagine that the number of non-citizens who burn flags is that large because the number of people who burn American flags is not large, either. The phenomenon largely exists on Fox News B-roll footage of old protests. Perhaps that is why Trump is so confident that his order will end it. “You will see flag-burning stopping immediately,” he continued on Monday. “Just like when I signed the Statue and Monument Act. Ten years in jail if you hurt one of our beautiful monuments. Everybody left town. They were gone. Never had a problem after that. It was pretty amazing. We stopped it.”
There is no “Statue and Monument Act,” just as there are no riots that began because someone burned an American flag. Trump signed an executive order five years ago on the matter to prioritize prosecutions after the George Floyd protests, but there is no evidence that it led to a higher number of cases than would otherwise exist—and an executive order is definitely not an act of Congress. He thinks it worked because he stopped seeing it on TV. Flag-burning offends many Americans who see it as an attack on their national values. The same could be said for a president who issues unconstitutional orders to attack free speech on fictitious grounds.
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