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When Linnea was younger, she would attend a Christian summer camp in western Michigan, far outside of the liberal bubble of her Shaker Heights neighborhood in Cleveland, Ohio. Now a 19-year-old student at Case Western University, Linnea had grown up attending a progressive, mission-oriented Protestant church active in the local community. She remembered the summer camp as being “politically neutral,” but given its location in a deep-red region, many of Linnea’s peers had a more conservative understanding of the teachings of their mutual faith.“It was in those moments where I would see, Wow, we’re both Christian, but we’re moving through the world in completely different ways,” recalled Linnea, who is a member of her university’s branch of the progressive faith network United Protestant Campus Ministries.As a faithful Christian and young woman who identifies as queer, Linnea is among a relatively small number of Gen Z Americans who are both religiously affiliated and politically progressive. Gen Zers are less likely to identify as Christian than older generations, and less likely to regularly attend church, according to the most recent Census of American Religion by the Public Religion Research Institute, or PRRI. Progressive Christians thus have the burden of convincing ideologically aligned young people that worship is a meaningful way to engage in society.In the current political climate, the term “Christian values” is often equated with conservative values, both by those who support that ideology and by those who do not. The Trump administration’s efforts to embed Christian nationalism—the belief that the United States was founded on and should be governed by Christian principles—into the fabric of the federal government have further cemented this perspective into cultural consciousness. Polling has also shown that Americans who identify themselves as adhering to or sympathizing with Christian nationalist beliefs remain overwhelmingly supportive of Trump.Progressive Christians don’t necessarily like to align themselves with any particular political term—to them, they are simply following Christ’s teachings. However, there is a distinct ideological difference between them and their conservative or Christian nationalist counterparts—which makes “progressive” a clean shorthand for the way they apply their religious beliefs to everyday life.“Jesus was also executed by the government in the street and called us, multiple times, not just to love our neighbors but to stand in deep and profound solidarity with the most oppressed amongst us,” said Lizzie McManus-Dail, the pastor of Jubilee Episcopal Church, a church in Austin, Texas with several LGBTQ members. “That, I think, is the deepest and truest heart of Christianity, but it is certainly not what Christianity has become synonymous with in a country where the government is openly trying to make this a Christian nationalist nation.”Recent civil action by church leaders in opposition to the Trump administration’s policies has placed a spotlight on Christians who believe the tenets of their faith are not in line with the actions of the president, and of the Republican Party as a whole. After thousands of Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers were installed in Minneapolis earlier this year, local Christian pastors—along with other faith leaders—took an active role in community organizing. Late last year, Christian clergy were also among those arrested for protesting ICE crackdowns in Chicago.These types of activities by church leaders may appeal to civically minded, progressive young people looking for community. But data suggests that if any Gen Zers will be more inclined to attend church because they consider Christianity to be in line with their values, that increase would not have a significant statistical difference in church attendance among the younger generations.“I think it might happen at the margins, but I don’t think it’s going to be happening en masse because of the other larger secularization trends that have emerged with younger people,” said Melissa Deckman, the CEO of PRRI and the author of a book on Gen Z political participation.The church’s treatment of LGBTQ Americans writ large is a major factor in whether a young person identifies with a particular religion. According to a 2024 survey by PRRI, 60 percent of unaffiliated Americans under 30 say that they left their religious tradition because of its teachings regarding LGBTQ people. Fewer than four in 10 LGBTQ individuals identify as Christian; they are also twice as likely to identify as religiously unaffiliated as compared to straight people.“There’s still a perception among many younger people that religion equates with negative treatment of LGBTQ individuals, despite the fact that a lot of these progressive clergy you see being arrested are really, frankly, far more affirming of LGBT individuals,” said Deckman.Although they are a relatively small portion of Christians, LGBTQ Christians are, anecdotally, on the forefront of building relationships with other like-minded individuals. Many of the queer people Linnea encounters on campus have “religious trauma,” having grown up in households that held fast to a very rigid and conservative theology. But she’s trying to challenge those negative associations: She recalled working with church leaders to plan an event in protest when the CEO of a conservative Christian organization spoke at the City Club for Cleveland in January.“We wanted something that was both very gay and very Christian, because … we’re just tired of it being seen as things that can’t coexist, because the voices of Christian nationalists are so loud right now,” Linnea said. Even though she can get “bogged down” with anger that Christian language can be used to discriminate against LGBTQ Americans, she believes the best strategy to counter that messaging is being vocal about the intersection between her values and that of her faith.“I think the much more fruitful and helpful way that I frame it in my discussions with especially other LGBTQ people, is just that I have a very earnest desire for queer people to be able to feel safe in religious spaces like these,” said Linnea.Some collegiate Christian organizations have become havens for LGBTQ students in the wake of the shuttering of diversity, equity, and inclusion offices in universities across the country. Carl Thomas Gladstone, the executive director of ZOE Progressive Christian Life on Campus, a network of progressive Christian campus communities, gave the example of “glitter blessings” on National Coming Out Day or Trans Visibility Day, where students can receive a blessing with glitter similar to one they might receive with ash on Ash Wednesday.Gladstone said these sort of events aim to form relationships regardless of beliefs, and “bringing our whole selves as practitioners of a progressive Christianity to those moments, not to convert, but just to speak honestly about how we are present.” The message for students becomes: “You are wonderfully made and loved. Know that today, and put some amazing glitter on your forehead.”Young people who grew up in the Christian faith are more likely to remain connected to church than those who were raised religiously unaffiliated. The overwhelming majority of Christian Gen Z teens follow the same religion as their parents, according to PRRI polling.Even those who feel isolated from their faith may eventually return to it. Mick Atencio, the program and development director of the LGBTQ faith organization Q Christian Fellowship, grew up in the evangelical church. Atencio was isolated by the homophobia and transphobia apparent in its teachings but nonetheless was still drawn by the “centrality of Christ in faith” in the evangelical tradition.“I couldn’t really let go of Christ,” they said. “So it was never really a question of, ‘Do I leave,’ but, ‘How do I reconcile this,’ and, ‘Where do I find the community that I’m looking for?’”The basic trajectory of one’s life also plays a significant role. It is a common trend to see younger people stay away from church but then return to their faith community once they begin having children at a later age, said Deckman. This pattern has been observed by Lauren Grubaugh Thomas, who is the pastor of Holy Companion Episcopal Church in Sterling Ranch, Colorado. Her congregation is formed of several core families, many of whom are millennials who began having children in their thirties. Grubaugh Thomas said that many of her congregants are LGBTQ individuals who began “tentatively” returning to church as they got older, and felt safe to attend a “queer-celebratory parish in a county that historically has been a dangerous place for the LGBTQ community.”“Something people have said quite clearly is, ‘I’m now looking for a church, having had no interest for some time in being part of a faith community. Now that I have children, I want to be in a community with shared values,’” she said, quoting what she has heard from members of her church. “I want my kids to have an experience of community, and for those values to be ones that I align with today, and I want my kids to be raised in and to have other adults who love them and are showing up in their lives.”This dovetails with what research has shown about why people raised in the church stay faithful; polling shows that the reasons are generally not political but instead are spiritual. Eighty-seven percent of people ages 18 through 29 who attended religious services said they do so “to feel closer to God,” according to a PRRI poll.But for those who aren’t raised by religiously affiliated parents, it may be harder to see church as a potential source of community. In 2025, PRRI found that only 39 percent of adults between ages 18 and 29 identified as religiously affiliated, remaining steady from 2024. Since 2013, young women in particular have grown less likely to affiliate with a particular religion, a trend led by nonwhite women. Only one in five young men and women reported attending church each week.Attendance also is influenced by partisan affiliation: Recent polling has shown that Gen Z Republicans are more likely than their Democratic counterparts to attend church, and are more inclined to believe that participating in religiously affiliated events is an important way to build social connections. Gladstone, the executive director of ZOE, noted that the general public understanding of campus Christian ministry is synonymous with conservative faith groups like Campus Crusade or InterVarsity Christian Fellowship.Progressive Christians believe that creating connections between like-minded young people and local churches can help counter some of the narratives around Christianity in American life. Parishes participating in local social justice activity could, potentially, encourage young people to see the church as a haven both for community and activism. But for Christian leaders, the ultimate goal is not attendance—it is offering a different vision of Christianity altogether.“I think protests can attract young progressives who aren’t involved with the church. But that’s not the foremost reason we do it. The foremost reason we do it is because that is what Jesus compels us to do,” said McManus-Dail.

What do oranges, deep time, and the Swiss Army have in common? Very little, I would think, except John McPhee, who has written about all of them, along with Wimbledon, family doctors, and nuclear physics. A nonfiction generalist of extraordinarily wide-ranging taste, there seems to be little that McPhee hasn’t covered, or at least contemplated, during his decades-long career (he turns 95 this year) producing stories for The New Yorker, which were then repackaged into several dozen books by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.Still, there is at least one area McPhee has returned to multiple times in his work: the nature and fate of American wilderness. Several of his most popular books recount adventures off the beaten track (near Glacier Peak in Washington, through the North Woods of Maine, down the Salmon River in Alaska) and follow characters who are trying to eke out an existence in the kind of untamed places (the Pine Barrens of New Jersey) that most readers might drive past, preferring the comforts of civilization. Four of these books—The Pine Barrens (1968), Encounters With the Archdruid (1971), The Survival of the Bark Canoe (1975), and what is arguably McPhee’s masterpiece, Coming Into the Country (1977)—have just been collected by the Library of America in a single volume with the fitting title John McPhee: Encounters in Wild America.McPhee has rejected the label of “environmental writer.” He once told The Paris Review: “I’m a writer who writes about real people in real places. End of story.” But this canonizing collection shows him as a significant contributor to the environmental literature that has piled up since the modern environmental movement began in the 1960s.The dominant tone of such writing is elegiac. Something vital has been lost, is still being lost, in a terminal process of impoverishment, and we’re urged to wake up and act before it’s too late. This tone is certainly present in McPhee’s “wild America” books, in which people he speaks with make grim prognostications about a blighted future “fifty or more years hence”—meaning now—as dams and jetports threaten to efface entire landscapes. McPhee went to the Pine Barrens, he wrote, “because I found it hard to believe that so much unbroken forest could still exist so near the big Eastern cities, and I wanted to see it while it was still there.” As it happened, the supersonic jetport planned for that location never materialized. There was no such twist of fate for Alaska: As a reader today, it is impossible to go through the three sections of Coming Into the Country, originally published as a book in 1977, without fixating on references to the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. The pipeline only started pumping oil from Prudhoe Bay to the Valdez Marine Terminal that same year (on June 20, 1977), meaning McPhee’s book is a final dispatch from a place that was about to irrevocably change.With remarkable clarity, McPhee shows us how “wild America” is contested territory—the subject of an ongoing and possibly unsolvable disagreement. Coming Into the Country and its companion volumes stand as environmental history, offering insight into how we’ve come to inherit our patchwork of faltering ecosystems. But his books hold up as more than just history, because they illuminate underlying attitudes that remain prevalent and politically influential today. With remarkable clarity, McPhee shows us how “wild America” is contested territory—the subject of an ongoing and possibly unsolvable disagreement. What even is the wilderness? What is it good for? These questions have never been more fraught than they are right now.McPhee has often attributed his own interest in wild places to childhood summers spent at Keewaydin, a canoe-tripping camp in Salisbury, Vermont. He started going there in 1937 at the age of 6, “and to this day,” he wrote in an essay more than 60 years later, “I do not feel complete or safe unless I am surrounded by the protective shape of a canoe.” Keewaydin sparked a lifelong appreciation for fishing and backcountry river journeys. (McPhee is less keen on hiking, though he has done his fair share of that too.) He quotes Thoreau in his books—another avid canoer—and has confessed to admiring Edward Abbey’s feral classic Desert Solitaire “very much.” In Coming Into the Country, McPhee explains to a woman that he likes “places that are wild” and has been “quickened all my days just by the sound of the word.”Here, for example, is McPhee reflecting on a region of Arctic Alaska, in what is now the Kobuk Valley National Park:What had struck me most in the isolation of this wilderness was an abiding sense of paradox. In its raw, convincing emphasis on the irrelevance of the visitor, it was forcefully, importantly repellent. It was no less strongly attractive—with a beauty of nowhere else, composed in turning circles. If the wild land was indifferent, it gave a sense of difference. If at moments it was frightening, requiring an effort to put down the conflagrationary imagination, it also augmented the touch of life. This was not a dare with nature. This was nature. If there’s a better description of the ambivalence that wild places can invoke—the fluttering feelings of repulsion and attraction, fear, exhilaration, even awe—I’m yet to read it anywhere. Whether McPhee intended to or not, he earned a place alongside the likes of Rachel Carson, Peter Matthiessen, Annie Dillard, and Barry Lopez, writers who, in scrutinizing our relationship with the natural world, have helped us to better understand ourselves. Despite his affinity for nature, he is committed to journalistic objectivity. He might have a personal “bias,” he told The Paris Review, in favor of the environmental movement, but as a reporter he aspires to be scrupulously impartial. This means holding his opinions close to his chest (except in rare asides about, say, lazy tourists who dare to use a float plane to breach the Maine woods with aluminum canoes), and it also means “struggling to present both sides.” Those “sides” are rendered with notable vividness in McPhee’s books. On the one side are people who are variously categorized, either by McPhee himself or by the characters he speaks with, as conservationists, ecocentrics, ecophiles, and “druids.” They love nature as it is, advocate for the listing of more protected land under the Wilderness Act, and say things like: “We’re going to have to live in close harmony with the Earth. There’s a lot we don’t know. We need places where we can learn how.” That judgment is uttered in Coming Into the Country by John Kaufmann, a National Parks Service planner with a passion for wilderness (and McPhee’s good friend). Another outspoken representative is David Brower, first executive director of the Sierra Club. McPhee describes Brower as “the sacramentarian of ecologia americana,” and he is the titular figure in Encounters With the Archdruid.On the other side, then, is the Bureau of Reclamation, planning new dams along the Colorado River. And the Kennecott Copper Corporation, patenting claims in the Cascades. And any other business interest led by “the drill and the bulldozer.” The people on this side speak a language of economic utility and resource extraction. They say things like: “You can’t avoid change. You can direct it, but you can’t avoid it.” Some of them affirm to McPhee that it is they who are the real conservationists, with conservation, in their understanding, based on the concept of “maximum use.” A memorable representative would be the developer who accompanies McPhee on a tour through the Pine Barrens, fantasizing a central business district to replace all the trees. “I hope I don’t start to cry,” he says. “This is a planner’s dream.”  This might seem like an obvious binary, even a crude one. But McPhee is too skilled a writer to reduce anyone to stereotypes. No perspective is presented as unreservedly right or irredeemably wrong. There is not even really a split into two clear sides: It is more like a spectrum. The final part of Coming Into the Country profiles off-grid homesteaders near the outpost of Eagle, Alaska. While many of these loners want the wild to be left wild—it is why they moved there in the first place: “I get so high being out in the woods it is like doing acid,” one man says—they also want a kind of libertarian freedom to mine, trap, and build private dwellings as they see fit.Should the wild be left intact, both as a safety net for us and as an inviolable birthright for future generations? Or is every corner of the country a valid source of materials, to be harvested or extracted for potential gain right now? Coming Into the Country is a compendium of conversations and arguments about wilderness. In Encounters With the Archdruid, this discourse is baked into the book’s structure: The three sections show David Brower sparring, in turn, with a mineral engineer, a property developer, and a cattle rancher who also happens to be the commissioner of reclamation. These sparring matches take place against a backdrop of wild landscapes, and they concern a potential mine site, a real estate plan for an untrammeled island off Georgia, and one of those dams slated for the Colorado. As McPhee makes clear, though, what is being discussed each time is the same fundamental conflict. Every argument in any of his nature books is, at heart, an argument over opposing worldviews. Should the wild be left intact, both as a safety net for us and as an inviolable birthright for future generations? Or is every corner of the country a valid source of materials, to be harvested or extracted for potential gain right now? We live in a moment of overwhelming noise. The Trump administration operates with a strategy of flooding the zone. A proposal for sulfide-ore copper mining in the headwaters of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness of Minnesota. Plans to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling. A rollback, by the (ironically named) Environmental Protection Agency, of the landmark “endangerment finding,” which had concluded greenhouse gases pose a serious threat and require federal regulation. It can be difficult to focus on any one thing. But to read McPhee is to be reminded of the bigger picture. What is happening in all these cases, and countless more at the moment, is an aggressive assertion of one extreme interpretation of wilderness—the wild as a bonanza of resources up for grabs—over all others.  There is another way in which McPhee’s books hold up too, and it has to do with style. A great deal has been written over the years about the “extreme lucidity,” as Robert Macfarlane once put it, of McPhee’s sentences, his spare and unshowy use of language: “The lake is smooth. The far shore is indistinct in rising mist.” He is celebrated for his story structure, known for producing narratives that loop around on themselves in unexpected ways. He is also obsessed with detail. So many details. It is not uncommon for McPhee to spend hundreds of words analyzing the behavior of the loon, for instance, or thousands of words—page after page—on the involved process of constructing bark canoes from scratch. “He carves their thwarts from hardwood and their ribs from cedar. He sews them and lashes them with the split roots of white pine. There are no nails, screws, or rivets keeping his canoes together ...” And so on.To a modern audience with ever-diminishing attention spans, there is something almost radical about McPhee’s level of detail. His pace is deliberate, unhurried. His patience is inexhaustible as he artfully arranges his collection of facts. I recognize how a reader might find the writing dull in parts, even boring; and yet I find it very moving.What writer today would move to backcountry Alaska for months at a time just to take the measure of local life? What magazine or publisher would fund it?One of the roles of a writer is to pay close attention to the world. In doing so, a writer sees patterns that others might otherwise miss. McPhee’s attention is so close that it borders on devotional. Nothing escapes his notice. Nothing is too small or too big for consideration, from a cranberry bog to Denali. For its comprehensive vision, its meticulous accuracy (every line fact-checked), his work is virtually unrivaled. It harkens back to a type of slow, immersive journalism that barely exists anymore—to our detriment. What writer today would move to backcountry Alaska for months at a time just to take the measure of local life? What magazine or publisher would fund it? Coming Into the Country remains a benchmark for what nonfiction writing can achieve when a master craftsman is given the luxury of space and time and support.  A man in the book tells McPhee, “When you are writing about nature, you are writing about God, and it cannot be put into words.” There is truth in that, I think: Language has its limits. But perhaps McPhee comes as close as anybody has in the past half-century of writing about wild America.

Back on May 1, at an event in West Palm Beach, President Donald Trump quipped that the U.S. Navy was acting “like pirates” while seizing ships as part of the ongoing blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. “We took over the ship, we took over the cargo, we took over the oil. It’s a very profitable business,” Trump bragged. “We’re like pirates. We’re sort of like pirates, but we are not playing games.”As someone with a 2-year-old son who likes to play pirates—and who spends a lot of time writing about the shifting maritime order under the Donroe Doctrine—I decided to take the president at his word. Let’s review what has happened over the past nine months in foreign policy through the lens of piracy.On September 1, 2025, the Pentagon launched “Operation Southern Spear,” a campaign of airstrikes and interdictions in the Caribbean Sea—ostensibly targeting drug cartels and smugglers from Venezuela. It has since expanded to Ecuador’s Pacific Coast, where local fishermen have been killed, kidnapped, and tortured. The death toll is over 170 people so far.Then, on January 3, 2026, U.S. Special Forces abducted Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, in an operation that killed over 100 people, and replaced him with Delcy Rodríguez—a fellow Chavista, though presumably a more pliant one. Following negotiations in Caracas geared at opening up the country’s energy sector to foreign investment, Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum flew home with $100 million in gold—for domestic refiners. On January 30, the Panamanian Supreme Court revoked a decades-long concession held by the Chinese shipping company CK Hutchison at the Balboa and Cristóbal container terminals. This ruling was widely interpreted as a capitulation to diplomatic pressure from the U.S., resulting in the dispossession of CK Hutchinson’s port infrastructure—which was handed over to the Danish firm Maersk. The U.S. has also been running a similar playbook in Peru, over the port of Chancay.Then, on February 28, Trump launched “Operation Epic Fury,” resulting in a near-immediate strategic loss. Amid a fragile ceasefire, a bizarre new maritime status quo has emerged. Iran charges tolls for safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz, and the U.S. Navy attempts to interdict any ship that has filled up at an Iranian port—while simultaneously threatening to sanction entities that pay the toll. From what it seems, the U.S. is using a diverse and flexible set of military, legal, and political tactics, including murder, torture, abduction, coercion, and theft, to intentionally disrupt maritime trade flows—forcing rival capital out, while trapping allied capital in. Still don’t think so? Check out this map showing just how many tankers are lining up at American refineries. It’s a pretty remarkable coincidence that Western supermajors are dipping their toes in Venezuela and capitalizing their investments in Guyana while the U.S. keeps Hormuz blocked.All this sounds pretty piratey and out of character for a nation state, right? In the Captain Phillips/Pirates of the Caribbean/Muppet Treasure Island sense of the term, yes. But Trump’s comparison ultimately distracts from a simple fact: This is how empires have always acted.In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Spanish empire used the same interdiction tactics in the Mediterranean against the Ottomans, while mired in conflict with the Netherlands over South American port access—all while constantly fending off pirates (many of whom were privateers).In those days, as today, piracy was not one thing. It could be an act of political rebellion. It could be a survival strategy. It could be directed by rival powers. (It could even be all three at once.) Another thing that hasn’t changed is that the label “pirate” has always been selectively applied within the context of great power struggle between maritime empires.In the Netherlands, Piet Hein is a national hero. In Spain, he is remembered mostly as a pirate.Viewed in this light, Trump’s remark wasn’t unique because of its seeming honesty. Rather, its rootedness in a common misbelief about piracy has offered us a rare insight into how an imperial power in decline rationalizes its own violent actions—which are progressively unjustifiable under international laws.Earlier in the week, the U.S. put out a statement in defense of Panama’s “sovereignty” against Chinese “economic pressure” and asked allies to join a multilateral “Maritime Freedom Construct” with the goal of unblocking the Strait of Hormuz. Then on Friday, Trump’s piracy quip revealed that the global maritime order is just lofty rhetoric obfuscating the persistence of a centuries-long status quo.The truth is that the empire has always behaved like the “pirates” we’ve been taught to fear. Because the pirates of yore, much like the “narco-terrorists” of today, are how empire has always justified its barbarism, its murder, its torture, its abduction, its coercion, and its theft.Pirates, of course, have a colorful way of articulating the same dog-eat-dog vision of power: “Fifteen men on a dead man’s chest, yo ho ho and a bottle of rum!” Trump has a more blunt way of characterizing his high-seas misadventures: “To the victor go the spoils.”

There are a lot of things wrong with today’s Republican Party. They lie. They lie about how much they lie. They have handed their party and our democracy to a conscienceless kleptocrat, and they adulate him the way Russian Communists once lionized Stalin (massive, Stalinesque banners of Trump now adorn at least two federal office buildings, the Justice Department and the Department of Labor). But here’s something that’s wrong with them that predates Trump. They have no solutions to anything. As we’re witnessing at the moment, Donald Trump has no idea of anything to do about inflation and gas prices. The last three Republican presidents have left office with the economy in a shambles. On education, the environment, you name it—no solutions. They don’t even bother. Newt Gingrich at least used to bother to pretend, back when he was speaker, with all his New Agey, Tofflerian mumbo-jumbo. In his day, Paul Ryan did terrific cosplay as a wonky “ideas guy.” But now they don’t even do that.On no issue is this more obvious than on health care. They railed against Obamacare. They spent years vowing to repeal it and replace it with something better. They never could repeal it, despite more than 70 tries. And that’s a good thing for many reasons, but mostly because they never had anything to replace it with. Conservatives once acknowledged that lack of health care coverage in this country was a problem, for which they promoted free-market solutions. But now they don’t even do that. They ostracized Mitt Romney, the last guy who tried. If you don’t have health care, in Republican world, that’s your own lazy fault.All of which brings us to what’s happening with Obamacare right now. You’ll recall last fall’s government shutdown. That happened in part because expanded Obamacare subsidies signed into law by Joe Biden after the pandemic were set to expire at the end of 2025. Democrats wanted to renew them, and Republicans did not. Now—you could argue that these subsidies were meant to be temporary, and so ending them was justifiable. It’s not a crazy point. On the other hand, millions of people came to depend on them. They couldn’t afford to buy coverage on the Obamacare exchange without those subsidies—which may mean that the original subsidies weren’t generous enough to persuade people to buy coverage. In any case, many Democrats and health care advocates argued last fall if the subsidies were ended, the cost of premiums would spike, and millions of people would drop their health care coverage. Well … guess what happened? For openers, I refer you to this Wall Street Journal headline from March 19: “Millions of Americans Are Going Uninsured Following Expiration of ACA Subsidies.” The article reported: “Nearly one in 10 people who had Affordable Care Act plans last year dropped health insurance altogether, after premium costs rose sharply because of the expiration of federal subsidies, according to a new survey.”Since that article ran, states have been reporting on their exact enrollment numbers for this year. In Georgia, for example, more than half a million people—all of them faced, remember, with higher gas and grocery prices—have decided to forgo coverage. The Georgia Recorder reported on April 20: “The 37% enrollment drop—from 1.5 million Georgians in January 2025 to 950,000 as of April 17, 2026—dwarfs any previous decline in the state since the launch of so-called Obamacare health insurance plans in 2014.”While some of that drop happened before the subsidies expired, the lion’s share of it came after. It means that if you make more than $64,000 in Georgia, you have to pay full sticker price for health care, which in turn means that “for some Georgians, the cost of premiums more than tripled,” according to the Recorder. And while the numbers are more dramatic in Georgia, this is happening all over the country. It will, in addition, have a lot of knock-on effects. For example, hospitals will have to provide more uncompensated care, which leads to things like less money to invest in equipment and technology, which leads to worse care. And taking a longer historical view: What has Obamacare done for Georgians? Has it made them feel the crippling weight of the chains of socialism that they are now forced to drag around with them? Well, I suppose some may feel that way. But in point of fact, from 2013 to 2016, the number of uninsured Georgians dropped by 537,000, which was 29 percent. The story was similar in two neighboring states. In Alabama, the uninsured dropped by 32.5 percent, and in Florida, by 34 percent. In other words, Obamacare, with all its flaws, has done the main thing it promised it would do. It reduced the number of uninsured Americans dramatically. And in contrast, we might ask: What have Trump and the Republicans done with respect to Americans’ health care?Next to nothing. A number of Republican governors and state legislatures did eventually bow to reality and accept the federal money they received from buying into Obamacare and opening state-run exchanges. Even so, 10 states still refuse to do so. Georgia is one (although it has accepted a partial expansion). Of the others, six are—guess what?—former states of the Confederacy. Then there are Kansas and Wyoming and, oddly, Wisconsin, where the state legislature is run by extremist nutsos.And the president? His big health care calling card is TrumpRX.com, a website where people can buy certain drugs at a discount. It’s not awful. But as KFF points out in a fact sheet, the website offers discounts on 43 drugs. How many prescription drugs are patented in this country? Around 24,000. Plus, there are already other websites and online pharmacies that offer similar discounts and that list more drugs. So TrumpRX is like paving one pothole on a road littered with them. Meanwhile, Trump is throwing millions of Americans off their insurance plans because they can no longer afford them, while he’s telling them that gas prices are going to be high for a little while because of this pointless war that he started and is losing, and they just have to deal with it.We tend to assign these actions by Republicans to cruelty. And it’s true. A lot of what they do is just heartless. For example, Texas limits eligibility for Medicaid to families living below 15 percent of the poverty level, meaning that a family of three earning more than—get this—$4,098 annually is not eligible for any benefits. The states that have opted into Obamacare all cap eligibility at 138 percent of the poverty level, and the feds pick up most of that tab. The states that haven’t bought in set their own levels. Texas is the lowest, and it’s just mean.However, I wonder just how much stupidity factors in here too. These people must be dumb as rocks if they can’t see how this cruelty hurts their states economically. And even those who aren’t that stupid worship a man who pridefully knows nothing about public policy. That’s its own kind of dumb, and it’s arguably more insidious than even Trump’s addled incuriosity. They know better, and they do it anyway. The end result is that people will go without health care, and some will die. OK—I guess cruelty wins. But man, it’s close.  

Women Leaders and Trump 2.0 Karen J. Greenberg Tom Dispatch It’s been a tough couple of months for women officials in Washington — or, more accurately, in Trumpland. In early March (Women’s History Month, by the way), in a Truth Social post, the president fired Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, the second woman ever […]

Using some of the most transparent code-names imaginable, Akilah Hughes shared a story about working with Keegan-Michael Key (and his wife).

By Jim Mamer A few days ago (5-9-26), ScheerPost ran an article titled Gavin Newsom, A Candidate Fit for Dystopia. The title seemed curious to me because it suggested that Newsom would be the perfect candidate for a society where life is very, very bad and where most people are fearful of a totalitarian government. […]

Kate Morrissey for Capital and Main Elenilson Armando Coto Delgado believed that he would be imminently deported to El Salvador when he had a medical emergency in late April while in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Coto Delgado feared that the Salvadoran government would send him to a notorious prison called Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, […]