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President Donald Trump is obsessed these days with reshaping Washington, D.C., in his own image. He demolished the White House’s East Wing and plans to build a grandiose ballroom atop it. He wants to build a massive triumphal arch on the road between Arlington National Cemetery and the Lincoln Memorial—ostensibly to honor the troops but, according to Trump, to actually honor him. Giant banners with his face now hang from several federal buildings, and he has affixed his name to the Institute of Peace and the Kennedy Center. The U.S. Mint plans to issue a coin bearing his image, defying a statutory ban on adding living people to U.S. currency, while the State Department plans to issue a select number of passports bearing his grim visage.Of these many projects, one of them constantly fascinates me: the National Garden of American Heroes. Trump first pitched the concept of a park featuring statues of more than two hundred prominent Americans in an executive order in the tumultuous summer of 2020. It went unpursued during the Biden administration but has received new attention during Trump’s second term. Of all his plans to physically reshape the capital, this one is on the firmest footing, both legally and financially: Congress last year appropriated the whopping sum of $40 million to complete it. According to a New York Times account over the weekend, Trump now plans to place 250 statues on a piece of parkland near the National Mall used for public recreation and sports, with the first ones placed by the 250th anniversary of American independence this July.The proposed garden is a perfect window into how Trump’s presidency has largely failed. Like many of his initiatives, this one appears to have begun with something he saw on TV. Activists tore down multiple statues across the country during the George Floyd protests in 2020, typically as part of a broader reckoning over racial injustice in American history. Trump, who opposed the protests, apparently concluded that the best solution would be to build more statues.“My Administration will not abide an assault on our collective national memory,” he declared in the 2020 executive order. “In the face of such acts of destruction, it is our responsibility as Americans to stand strong against this violence, and to peacefully transmit our great national story to future generations through newly commissioned monuments to American heroes.”Trump’s list of “American heroes” is eclectic, to say the least—but not entirely as controversial as you’d imagine. Many of the statues would depict people who would undoubtedly be included if any other president had proposed this. There are astronauts like Neil Armstrong; inventors like Thomas Edison; explorers like Amelia Earhart and Lewis and Clark; and artists like Elvis Presley, Mark Twain, and Whitney Houston. A clear majority of the honorees are people that Americans first learn about in elementary school.Plenty of early Americans and colonial founders would get a plinth. Christopher Columbus—a frequent target of statue vandals, and one of Trump’s preferred selectees—gets one despite never setting foot on U.S. soil. So do early patriots like Samuel Adams, Paul Revere, and Crispus Attucks. Betsy Ross gets a statue for designing the American flag, while Francis Scott Key gets one for writing a song about it. Multiple Founding Fathers are included, as well as three first ladies. A healthy dose of Americana is also present. Johnny Appleseed, or at least the historical figure upon whom the fables were based, gets a statue. So do Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, James Fenimore Cooper, Annie Oakley, and Buffalo Bill Cody. The Wright brothers are each honored. Bob Hope, Laura Ingalls Wilder, and John Wayne are included, as well. It is fitting that this tableau includes Norman Rockwell too, since it almost seems to evoke the mid-twentieth-century cultural iconography that he helped evangelize.Statesmen abound, as they always do with things like this. Seventeen presidents are named, including the likely suspects (George Washington and Thomas Jefferson) and less likely ones (Grover Cleveland and Calvin Coolidge). Prominent Democrats like Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and John F. Kennedy made the cut, as did Ronald Reagan. Among the Supreme Court justices honored are both Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Henry Clay would get a statue, but not his fellow triumvirs Daniel Webster or (perhaps for the best) John C. Calhoun.The most striking additions, given the Trump administration’s later turns on racial justice, are the wealth of civil rights heroes. Obvious choices like Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, and Frederick Douglass are honored. So too are C.T. Vivian, a founding figure in the Black fraternity movement, and founding-era writer Phillis Wheatley. Civil rights activist Medgar Evers, Nixon impeachment leader Barbara Jordan, three Black NASA scientists depicted in the film Hidden Figures, and multiple prominent Black artists would get statues.The choices for sailors and soldiers are also better than one might expect. The Trump administration has previously paid tribute to Confederate rebels and restored honors to nineteenth-century U.S. troops who committed war crimes. No such flaws can be found here. The list ranges from celebrated generals of America’s major wars before 1945 to underrepresented figures like Prince Estabrook, a free Black man who fought at Lexington and Concord, and Grace Hopper, a Navy admiral and pioneering computer programmer. More than a few Union Army heroes are honored, while Robert E. Lee was rightfully skipped.Some choices, on the other hand, likely reflect the quirks and ideological vision of the White House aides who presumably drafted the original list. A few picks, for example, appear tilted toward honoring a particular vision of twentieth-century American conservatism. Barry Goldwater, William F. Buckley Jr., Russell Kirk, and Clare Boothe Luce get statues, as do House Un-American Activities Committee witnesses Whittaker Chambers and Elia Kazan.Anti-abortion activist Nellie Gray is honored for founding the annual March for Life. Milton Friedman somehow gets a statue, as well. Jeane Kirkpatrick, a Reagan-era diplomat who often criticized the United Nations, is among the more obscure choices. In fairness, a Democratic White House that drafted such a list would likely make choices that conservatives probably wouldn’t. William Rehnquist would be swapped out for Earl Warren in a heartbeat, for example.There is also a predilection for twentieth-century pop-culture figures that feels strangely selective on its own terms and ill fitting for the project in general. Among the Hollywood figures who would be recognized are Shirley Temple, Lauren Bacall, Ingrid Bergman, Humphrey Bogart, Alfred Hitchcock, Charlton Heston, and Frank Capra. They are accomplished actors and directors, to be sure, but one gets the impression that Trump was just naming to staffers his personal favorites from when he was a young man.In other cases, Trump’s lack of personal attention is keenly felt. Of the more than a dozen American religious figures on the list, at least eight of them are Catholic saints and clergy. Some are recognizable names like Junipero Serra, a Spanish missionary who played a major role in California’s history, or Elizabeth Ann Seton, a founding-era leader of Catholic education who became the first American saint. Others are fairly esoteric, like a Native American saint named Kateri Tekakwitha, who died roughly two hundred years before the Declaration of Independence was signed.Catholics have contributed greatly to this nation’s history, of course, but the overall composition of the selected religious leaders is a little unbalanced. Mormon leader Joseph Smith, abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher, and Black Methodist founder Richard Allen were omitted, to name a few. The only rabbi so honored is Alexander Goode, who was selected along with the other three of the Four Chaplains who died in World War II. Reading through this part of the list is like hearing someone say the greatest sluggers of all time are Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle, and Aaron Judge. Solid choices, but they say more about the fan—or, perhaps, the White House aides—than the sport.Speaking of athletes, there is a strong preference toward baseball. Lou Gehrig, Babe Ruth, Cy Young, and Roberto Clemente would be recognized, as would Jackie Robinson, who broke the sport’s color barrier. His inclusion on the list suggests that the Pentagon’s shameful move to erase Robinson’s wartime service last year was not a top-down initiative from the White House—or, at minimum, from Trump himself. Gridiron football is represented by Native American athlete Jim Thorpe and longtime Green Bay Packers head coach Vince Lombardi, while hockey gets Herb Brooks, who oversaw the Miracle on Ice team in the 1980 Olympics. Jesse Owens and Muhammad Ali also made the cut.Perhaps the single most baffling inclusion in the entire list is basketball’s sole representative. Among the planned statues would be one of Kobe Bryant, who died in a helicopter crash in 2020. The best-case scenario here is that the aides who drafted the list felt obligated to choose a basketball player after recognizing the nation’s other three top sports and couldn’t think of a better one at the time. Bill Russell died two years after the original order came out; it probably wouldn’t be too late to make a quick substitution for someone more worthy of the honor.What is most remarkable about the list is how relatively uncontroversial most of the names are. About 80 percent of the names would likely show up on a similar list drafted by the Obama or Biden White Houses. Some of the choices—naturalist John Muir, labor leader Samuel Gompers, pacifist lawmaker Jeanette Rankin, various Native American chiefs, early feminist activists, and a racially diverse group of artists—reflect a much broader vision for America, both demographically and ideologically, than is usually found from the MAGA worldview.This is not an endorsement of this project, of course. The capital does not really need statues of most of these people. More than a few of them, like King and most of the presidents, are already honored elsewhere in D.C. at their respective memorial sites. Others were good Americans who can be better recognized in other ways. My own personal admiration of former Jeopardy! host Alex Trebek, for example, does not extend to commissioning a marble or bronze statue of him at taxpayer expense.Nor do I think a statue of Trebek would be worth it if means that some of these other historical figures get one as well. The republic will be no better off if we erect statues of Steve Jobs, whose signature product has been a net negative for American society, or Sam Walton, whose company leveraged its sheer size to hollow out small towns and impoverish their residents. Trump’s original executive order described the statues as “silent teachers in solid form of stone and metal.” (You can tell he doesn’t write this stuff.) Some of the lessons they have to offer aren’t worth learning.There are other problems with this planned garden. One is that statues are hard to make, often taking years at a time. (The Times reports that they plan to get some statues in place by July 4 and add the rest by 2029.) Another one is that there aren’t enough sculptors in America who can make the kind of statues that Trump envisioned. This is not Renaissance Florence, where you can bump into marble sculptors for the Medicis while walking down the street. And even if there were, Trump’s attacks on artistic and cultural spaces have hardly endeared the nation’s top sculptors to work with him.Unlike with his other projects, Trump actually managed to get some buy-in from Congress on this one. But his insistence on personally directing things is only a hindrance from there. When Democrats retake the White House, one of their top priorities will likely be to halt Trump’s vanity projects, like the weird Arlington arch, or at least redirect them to better purposes. The White House will still need an East Wing, but the Democratic-led version will probably nix the grotesque Mar-a-Lagoesque ballroom in favor of something more befitting our nation’s republican heritage.Trump’s slapdash efforts will make it even easier for his critics and opponents to dismantle. West Potomac Park, the site that Trump hopes to transform with his heroes garden, can be put to far better use than a half-baked site for random statues of Dr. Seuss and Ernest Hemingway. Perhaps the finished statues can be redistributed to other sites if alternatives can be found. But the capital’s public space is too limited and valuable to indulge one man’s vain obsessions.When the federal government builds public spaces and monuments through collaboration and consultation, they tend to endure. The National World War I Memorial in D.C. was completed throughout Trump’s first term and opened in the first days of Biden’s presidency. When someone governs through personalist rule and tries to reshape the capital’s physical landscape in their own image, it is no surprise that their successors will treat it as an injury to our cultural heritage instead of an addition to it.It also helps that Trump’s idea already exists. In the U.S. Capitol, each state has contributed two statues of its most illustrious citizens to the National Statuary Hall Collection. Some of the statues are qualitatively better than others; a few of them honor Confederate traitors who do not belong in the Capitol at all. More than a few of Trump’s selections are already honored there, making his project even more superfluous than it already appeared to be. The congressional collection holds lessons for Trump, as well. The most enduring monuments in this country’s personal life weren’t created in such an ad hoc fashion or through arbitrary forms of governance. What can be built by fiat can be undone by fiat. For that reason, Trump’s self-absorbed campaign to reshape D.C. has only ensured that he will leave no enduring physical mark on the nation’s capital in the long run.

An Eastern Cape giant cycad in the Palm House at Kew Gardens in London is over 240 years old. It has lived most of its two centuries, since it was first transported by ship from South Africa, in a container, making it, according to the Kew Gardens website, “the oldest pot plant in the world.” A backhanded distinction, maybe, for a cycad, a type of plant that has been around for 250 million years; still, this specimen has made the best of its confines, curling toward the ribbed dome of the enormous greenhouse, propped up on crutches “like some senior citizens,” the website tactfully notes.I almost missed the titular reference in The Palm House, the latest novel from British novelist Gwendoline Riley. The narrator, a fortyish writer named Laura Miller, briefly mentions that she plans to go there with her friend Edmund Putnam and his father, to see the “ancient cycad.” It’s a living fossil, a relic of another age—and Putnam is prone to feeling that way too. “Ah, the passing of time!” he pronounces as they walk through London.Riley is wonderful with a metaphor, and often funny too: “a dark yellow sky—like iodine,” a washed-up writer’s prose like “a tip-toeing cartoon burglar,” someone peering at their phone “as if it were a dowsing rod.” She can condense character in a single gesture: a man who “haul[s] his shoulders back, like a precocious little ice skater, zooming to a halt before a camera.” She telegraphs themes in a few words’ worth of dialogue, which often goes on, not in alternating quips or monologues but in broken-up bits—not he said, she said, but he said, he said, he said, she said, she said, she said. The characters tell on themselves. Vignettes are juxtaposed; the bones of a life are present, not all the connective tissue.Still, it’s hard to call her novels subtle, especially taken collectively, since they all circle the same concerns, with narrators who are versions of one another. Her first two novels—published when she was in her early twenties—took place in Manchester, their narrators both young women in bars and bad relationships. Her next two books detoured to the United States but featured many of the same elements. In each, there are brutish fathers and magnetically hapless mothers. Both of those figures, but especially the mothers, dominate First Love (2017) and My Phantoms (2021), which were published simultaneously, to widespread acclaim, in the U.S. by New York Review Books in 2022. First Love is a devastating account of a woman named Neve’s marriage to an older man who berates and belittles her, a nauseating seat at their claustrophobic kitchen table leavened (if that’s the word) by Riley’s way with detail and character, and her narrator’s fundamental empathy for herself and others. My Phantoms delves further into the relationship between the narrator—this time a writer named Bridget—and her mother, Hen.“In all of my books so far,” Riley said in a 2017 interview, “there is a woman looking at her life and asking, ‘How did I get here? Why are things the way they are?’ with varying degrees of panic.” In that same interview Riley also said she was trying to break from this pattern in her work, while at the same time wondering, did she have to? If it ain’t broke, fixate. And yet, the aperture is slightly wider here than one woman’s Talking Heads moment. The Palm House feels more thickly peopled, the narrator’s inner life more porous. The central focus is a friendship—in setting her narrator in front of a mirror showing something other than her parents, Riley refracts her very personal preoccupations. The effect is less disturbing than First Love and My Phantoms; this new book is less acute, perhaps less substantial, but I found myself more moved by the narrator precisely because her importance is somewhat displaced. The Palm House has more of a plot than most of Riley’s novels—one that consists mostly of gossip. Sequence magazine, a venerable literary publication where Putnam is an editor and to which Laura is an occasional but long-standing contributor—has fallen victim to an attempted revamp by its corporate board. They’ve installed a young man named Simon Halfpenny, who goes by Shove. (“Yes, Shove.”) He has come to the job from a sports magazine with a sensibility that feels out of place at the rarefied Sequence; he starts writing editorials that begin, “What is it about dogs?” and “April is the cruellest month, as the poet T.S. Eliot once famously wrote.” Shove reportedly recalls Stephen “Stig” Abell, who was installed by NewsCorp as editor of the Times Literary Supplement in 2016, when Riley’s ex-husband was deputy editor. Riley has waved away the connection, but in any case Shove is a familiar type to anyone who has worked at a high-turnover media start-up whose clueless owners dreamed of disrupting the news business:He called Putnam “Ed”; Katherine “Kath”; he called Vik “the Prof.” When Vik grew a beard he shouted, “Great beard, Prof!” “Has everyone seen the Prof’s beard?” “Hey, are you a hipster now?” he shouted. “Hey, Prof, do you have a beard regime?” he shouted. “Do you use beard oil?” … Shove did not stop bellowing. About the news, about celebrities; he’d shout about exchanges he was following on Twitter. He could not be quiet. He could not sit still. In fact he would literally travel around the room on his chair, propelling himself from desk to desk, as if the room were a screen and he himself a restive cursor.“There’s always money for nonsense,” as one of the Sequence staffers puts it. Putnam can’t stand Shove, and soon quits. As the months go by, however, whenever he and Laura meet up for drinks or dinner, the narrative around his departure changes: He insists he was pushed out. He has a bit of a midlife crisis, developing, in Laura’s words, an “insistent, cloying ruefulness,” a childish conviction that the world has treated him unfairly and that even his friends don’t understand.Between the palace intrigue at Sequence we get, in typical Riley mode, memoiristic snatches of Laura’s life: a holiday to Dubrovnik with her mother and grandmother, in which the trio buys maids’ shoes, thinking them chic; her teenage stint as a groupie for a comedian, which culminates in a sordid sexual assault; her relationship with an actor “so actorly, he seemed at times to be acting the part of an actor”; her day job at a history magazine that “every other month … seemed to run a piece headlined REVEALED: NEW SECRETS OF HITLER’S BUNKER”; a portrait of the last roommate she hopes ever to have. The awful father’s appearance is blessedly brief; the mother character is still embarrassing and unsympathetic but this time she’s not quite so pathetic. After retirement she takes up Spanish, which “she speaks as if summoning dark forces; the language seems to entail for her an element of torque. Soy vegana, she might say, warningly, y trabajo en una revista de cine!” When a boyfriend leaves her, the mother goes back to the same resort in Spain they’d visited together. A waiter recognizes her, asks after the boyfriend. “I just said he’d died,” she said, “then asked for some, I don’t know, patatas bravas.” Might it be that, in their insular literary world, they are protected to some extent from really grappling with the passage of time?During Putnam’s exile from Sequence, his and Laura’s lives run gently parallel. Both their fathers pass away. They each inherit some money. They share vegetarian meals (Riley’s narrators are always vegetarian, but I don’t think that she’s marking them as wan little husks—to borrow a Joyce Carol Oatesism. The vegetarianism is certainly a marker of how these women have moved away from their upbringings, but the diet seems more practical than waifish. Though I cannot find any evidence to confirm that Riley herself is a vegetarian, militant or otherwise, I like to imagine the ubiquitous veg curries of her novels as a political commitment to normalizing plant-based eating. For his part, Putnam is a self-described “nineties vegetarian,” who finds textured vegetable protein perfectly delicious. “I’m not going to start faffing with aubergines at my age,” he says.Laura and Putnam still like to drink. As they do, they reflect on how London has changed, on the habits and ambition of those slightly younger than themselves (“gingerly sipping a half, if they come to the pub at all”; “she said it would just be, quote, a great way to skip mid-career, unquote … we wouldn’t have dreamt …”). Putnam’s periodic despondency aside, for the most part he and Laura are united in an outlook more quizzical than bitter. Might it be that, in their insular literary world, they are protected to some extent from really grappling with the passage of time? Even being fired from a legacy arts publication in London in the mid-2010s means you’ve been living in a hothouse. Nostalgia permeates the drama, along with, at times, “a peaceful sort of quiescence”—a phrase Laura uses to describe the effect that strange weather has on her, in an early vignette. Putnam acts out his pique by writing letters to the editor at the TLS and the FT, about historiography. “Are you really unhappy?” Laura asks him, at the bar.Putnam pushed out his lips for a second.“Mm…” he said.“’pparently,” he said.It is significant that his sadness truly breaks through when they visit Putnam’s father’s favorite café. He’s brought to his father’s environment, and then he does despair: “The see-saw of life just tips, doesn’t it?” he says, “and then it is downhill all the way.” And yet, I think this is the happiest book of Riley’s that I’ve read. There is here a melancholic happiness, the kind that sets in after a solo drink on a pleasant afternoon, maybe, but there is contentment, nonetheless.The parents in all of Riley’s books, as well as the husband in First Love, are models of how not to age. They are by turns or in combination embarrassing, cruel, lonely, incompetent, unhealthy, absurd, and obdurate. The Palm House is a novel about getting older under the influence of the same cautionary tales as in her earlier books, but it’s not nearly so panicky. Laura, it would seem, has devised ways to avoid the fate of turning into your mother or marrying your father: Don’t have any kids yourself; stay healthy; stay solvent; if you must keep parental contact make the visits short and the phone calls dutiful; don’t wind up with someone you hate, or who hates you, out of fear of being alone. “It seemed an outlandish fate, to trail along behind my mother,” Laura says of her mother’s boyfriend, “ignored and despised.” At one point during his crisis Laura marvels that Putnam in his 49 years, most of them spent consuming literature and cinema, had not turned up “some model for elegant survival.” Laura, one assumes, thinks she has.The parents in all of Riley’s books are models of how not to age. They are embarrassing, cruel, lonely, incompetent, unhealthy, absurd, and obdurate. And yet, Riley knows we can’t forget the pot in which the palm has grown. Both Putnam’s and Laura’s financial independence comes from their fathers dying and leaving them some real estate: Laura’s odious father’s house, on which he’d done no upkeep, nets her enough for a studio apartment, while Putnam is embarrassed by what he gets for his father’s modest home in a neighborhood where through the windows he and Laura can spy new levels of suburban luxury—“huge paintings, and pianos, and vast TV screens.” “There’ll be a great big tank in the driveway before long. Then they’ll be digging out their double-decker sex dungeon,” he says. But it means he can wait out the reign of Shove. And Laura will not have to live with roommates again: “I was free,” she says, “I was lifted-up.” So, in the way of generations, the parents provide the conditions for escaping from them. Inheritance buys children freedom, by showing them how they do not wish to be. Freedom up to a point: The studio Laura buys is across the street from a house where her mother once lived. One of her mother’s ideas for occupying herself after retirement, besides the Spanish lessons, had been to go around to all the places she’d ever lived and take photos of how the blocks had changed. Much of The Palm House amounts to Laura’s own version of that project.Our parents’ ailments, physical and otherwise, so often seem a curse hurled at ourselves—think of Lenù’s mother’s bad hip in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet (books that Bridget tries to get Hen to read in First Love). They take on mythic proportions; they make our suffering unique and all-important. The relative lightness of The Palm House comes from the way the burden of inheritance is generalized, and shared. There is Putnam and his father; there is Putnam and Laura’s friendship; there is the lively community around Sequence, which rallies to the publication’s defense. There is a jungle of potted ferns and monsteras and camellias cultivated on the patio of Putnam’s downstairs neighbor, his crush. She gets the pots off freegan sites. It’s a different sort of palm house. When the neighbor travels for work, she asks him to look after it. It won’t be hard, he says, they thrive on neglect. “But not total neglect,” he adds, “Not abandonment.”

A year ago, Senator Jon Ossoff seemed like he might be a one-hit wonder—elected in that short period from November 2020 to January 2021 when Georgia turned blue, then defeated in his reelection bid and quickly forgotten. Or if he won reelection, always outshined by his home state colleague, the eloquent Raphael Warnock, who still leads the Atlanta church that Martin Luther King Sr. and Jr. once helmed. But over the last year, Ossoff has become a Democratic star. His strong fundraising and poll numbers have made the 39-year-old the clear favorite in his reelection bid this fall, delighting Democrats who worried the party’s 2022 and 2024 struggles in Georgia suggested that the state had gone back to being red. Ossoff’s campaign ads and lines from his speeches are going viral and being borrowed by others in the party, most notably his February denunciation of what he called the “Epstein class.”And while California Representative Ro Khanna, Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear, and many other ambitious Democrats are flying to fundraisers across the country and appearing on whatever podcasts they can to drum up interest in their presidential bids, there is considerable buzz about a 2028 Ossoff candidacy—even though the Georgian has done nothing to stoke it. “The moment he wins in November he becomes a front runner for 2028,” journalist Mehdi Hasan tweeted a few months ago, along with a clip of one of Ossoff’s speeches. Ossoff recently had to publicly declare that he was not considering a presidential run, as such speculation was becoming so loud that it might have hurt his Senate campaign. How did Ossoff go in less than a decade from baby-faced documentary filmmaker who couldn’t get elected to the House to dream presidential candidate for some Democratic insiders? A combination of luck, skill, and circumstance. Ossoff’s political career didn’t look promising when it started nine years ago. He ran in a special election for a U.S. House seat in the Atlanta suburbs in early 2017. It was the first campaign for Ossoff, who had worked as a legislative aide on Capitol Hill before leading a film company called Insight. The 30-year-old candidate vastly out-raised most of his rivals and picked up endorsements from Stacey Abrams, the late John Lewis, and other prominent figures in Georgia Democratic politics. But after qualifying for a runoff, he was narrowly defeated by Republican Karen Handel. Some Democrats felt Ossoff had lost a winnable race because he didn’t have a clear message or strong platform. His defeat looked even worse after another Democrat, Lucy McBath, beat Handel in that same district in November 2018. Ossoff didn’t give up, though. That House race drew national attention, because it was one of the first elections after Donald Trump’s surprising 2016 victory. So Ossoff had cultivated a national fundraising base. He used that to run for U.S. Senate in 2020 and win a competitive Democratic primary. He and Warnock then effectively campaigned together to defeat two incumbent Republicans in the January 2021 runoff that delivered a U.S. Senate majority to Democrats. Ossoff was officially declared the winner of his race on January 6, 2021—the day of the Trump-led insurrection.At the time, Ossoff’s victory seemed as much about Abrams, Warnock, Trump, and Joe Biden as his own political skills. A backlash against Trump in the Atlanta suburbs and Biden’s popularity back then appeared to have boosted both Ossoff and Warnock. Abrams had spent years mobilizing voters in the state and convincing Democratic donors that Georgia was winnable. And having a charismatic Black candidate (Warnock) running at the same time no doubt helped Ossoff win more African American votes in heavily Black Georgia. But his Senate career suggests that Ossoff is quite savvy on his own. He seems to have started preparing for reelection from the moment he arrived on Capitol Hill, taking a number of steps that would appeal to independent and even conservative-leaning voters in Georgia. He and his aides have focused less on making national news than on being hyperresponsive to Georgia residents. Ossoff told The Washington Post that each week he calls a few Georgians who have contacted his office for help to assess how well his aides are doing in constituent service. In his committee work, Ossoff has worked with his Republican colleagues on investigating and issuing reports on government malfeasance, such as substandard military housing. Ossoff largely voted the party line when Biden was in office, but he didn’t take many high-profile stands that would paint him as super-progressive. Early last year, after Trump’s win, Ossoff took even more aggressive steps to inoculate himself politically. He supported the Laken Riley Act, an immigration bill written by congressional Republicans that calls for the detention of undocumented immigrants if they are arrested for minor crimes like burglary, even if they have not yet been convicted. He also voted for a cryptocurrency regulation bill that was favored by the industry but bashed as too light by progressives such as Senator Elizabeth Warren. In terms of policy, these are terrible votes. But Laken Riley was a nursing student in Georgia who was killed by an undocumented immigrant. Cryptocurrency companies spend tens of millions of dollars to defeat their political enemies. So those stances were perhaps politically necessary in Georgia, as Ossoff seemed likely to face one of his state’s most popular politicians: Governor Brian Kemp.Then Ossoff got lucky. Kemp was elected in 2018 over Abrams and defeated her fairly handily in their 2022 rematch. He gained a reputation as a reasonable Republican by refusing to go along with Trump’s attempts in 2020 to illegally overturn Biden’s victory in Georgia, which helped him with the state’s swing voters. Republicans in Washington were urging him to run against Ossoff. If Kemp had jumped in, Ossoff would likely be in a very hard race right now. A poll conducted by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution last April showed Kemp narrowly ahead of Ossoff in a hypothetical matchup. But last May, Kemp bowed out. Ossoff’s solid poll numbers and fundraising no doubt played a role. It would not have been a cakewalk for Kemp. But ultimately, the governor suggested he simply didn’t want to run for the Senate.At the same time, Trump spent the last year seeming to do everything possible to be unpopular, even in states like Georgia that backed him in 2024. The Economist estimates the president’s net approval in the state is -22. With Kemp on the sidelines, Trump tanking in the polls, and Georgia Republicans stuck in a tense primary with three leading candidates, Ossoff has had the perfect opportunity to position himself for the general election. And he’s taking advantage of it. On the campaign trail, Ossoff is connecting the Epstein scandal, the various ways that Trump and his allies are enriching themselves, the administration’s Medicaid cuts, high grocery and gas prices, the war in Iran, and other issues into a broader narrative of an elite led by Trump that is screwing over average Americans. In the senator’s words, there’s an Epstein class, a “Mar-a-Lago mafia,” and “government of, by, and for the ultra-rich.” While other Democrats fixate solely on affordability, Ossoff also constantly uses another word: corruption. “The Mar-a-Lago mafia has taken American corruption to spectacular new heights, but corruption in America runs a lot deeper than Donald Trump. Because how does American politics really work? It’s coin-operated. Money goes in, favors come out. It’s been running on secret money, corporate money, billionaire money. Both sides,” he says on the campaign trail. While Ossoff regularly bashes Trump, he’s trying to define the core divide in U.S. politics as a wealthy elite versus average Americans, not Republicans versus Democrats. So the senator said earlier this year, “Trump was supposed to fight for the working class. Instead, he’s literally closing rural clinics and hospitals to cut taxes for George Soros and Elon Musk.” That’s a reference to a conservative billionaire but also a liberal one. The Epstein class invokes not only Trump but also super-wealthy individuals connected to the disgraced financier, such as Bill Gates and Democrat politicians like Bill Clinton. “He knows how to write, knows how to punch up the drama. He has a way with words,” the Journal-Constitution’s Washington bureau chief, Tia Mitchell, told me in a recent episode of Right Now, the New Republic show I host. Ossoff’s approach is resonating with Democrats outside of Georgia in part because it seems a path out of the constant tensions between the party’s left and center-left. More moderate Democrats like that Ossoff doesn’t push Medicare for All, free college, or other ideas that they worry scare off swing voters. Instead, he uses Bernie Sanders–like rhetoric to advance modest ideas such as Medicare negotiating with drug companies to get lower prices for prescription drugs. More progressive Democrats appreciate Ossoff’s willingness to slam corporations and the super-wealthy. Ossoff talks about the economy constantly, as many party strategists want, but he also condemns Trump’s antidemocratic and racist tendencies in a way that excites party activists. Ossoff’s newfound acclaim among Democrats of course doesn’t guarantee anything this November. Polls show close hypothetical races between Ossoff and any of his three potential GOP opponents. Republicans will likely pump tens of millions of dollars into the state this fall, both to try to defeat Ossoff and also so Democrats have to spend money in Georgia instead of Alaska, Ohio, and other states they are trying to flip.But if he wins in November, particularly in a victory by five percentage points or more, the presidential speculation will only increase. Ossoff wouldn’t be the only Democrat who has carried a key swing state in recent years. Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer won in 2018 and 2022; Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro is likely to cruise to reelection in November; Beshear prevailed in 2019 and 2023 in one of the reddest states in the nation. Like those three, Ossoff can appeal to the party’s moderate voters by emphasizing his electability. But he probably has a better chance of exciting progressives than that trio, as well. The Georgia senator, who is Jewish, has been sharply critical of the Israeli government’s actions in Gaza. His work as a young staffer on Capitol Hill for two Black and very progressive House members (Lewis and Hank Johnson) will make it easier for Ossoff to hint to the left that he is more in line with them than his voting record suggests. And while Ossoff isn’t pushing Medicare for All or free college, his signature ideas are quite progressive: banning corporate PACs, barring members of Congress from trading stocks, and preventing out-of-state companies from buying too many homes in residential areas. Ossoff was fairly definitive in ruling out a White House run, telling MS NOW’s Jen Psaki last month, “I have zero interest in running for president in 2028.” On the other hand, many politicians have made such promises and then broken them. Ossoff basically has to say that to ensure victory in his Senate race this November. Mitchell of the Journal-Constitution covers the senator closely, and says that even if he is not running in 2028, Ossoff almost certainly is keeping that option open for the future. “There are going to be certain races that really draw national attention, and his is going to be one of them. So his star is going to rise, and if he wins, he definitely will be part of the conversation,” she said.And he should be. Democrats have plenty of presidential candidates. Ossoff needs to focus on winning in Georgia. But as Stanford political scientist Adam Bonica has argued, an anti-corruption platform has been critical to defeating authoritarians in elections abroad, most recently in Hungary. It would be great to have a candidate in the Democratic primary pushing that message—particularly if they are young, articulate, and good at winning in swing states. He should keep it to himself for now, but I hope Jon Ossoff hasn’t actually closed the door on a presidential run.

Over the last few days, the courts have contributed yet again to the ongoing American whiplash about abortion access. On Friday, a ruling from the super-conservative Fifth Circuit appeals court essentially overrode Food and Drug Administration guidelines for mifepristone, one of two drugs used for medication abortion, so that it could no longer be prescribed by a telehealth provider. Manufacturers of the drug requested that the Supreme Court intervene, and on Monday the court issued an administrative stay for one week. As mifepristone was restricted and made available again over the course of a few days, anyone just trying to get a prescription could be forgiven for not knowing whether a provider would be willing to prescribe it. This kind of confusion is useful for anti-abortion groups, for whom killing Roe was never the final goal but only a step along the way to ending abortion entirely. Or, as the plaintiffs in this latest mifepristone challenge put it in the opening line of their lawsuit, “The fight for life is far from over.”The legal challenge, brought by the attorney general of Louisiana, alongside the Christian nationalist law project Alliance Defending Freedom, argues that the FDA, by increasing access to mifepristone, is responsible for instances of reproductive coercion. The lawsuit also argues that by allowing people in a state where abortion is banned to obtain pills from providers in states without bans, the FDA guidelines interfere with the state’s sovereign laws. These claims get things more or less backward. Access to medication abortion, far from encouraging the coercion of pregnant people, has allowed those in abusive relationships, including those whose partners have sexually assaulted them, to access abortion privately, thus reducing the threat of reprisal from their partners. As for so-called states’ rights, the plaintiffs’ aim here is not to let states decide abortion restrictions or access for themselves; it’s to bring all states in line with the most restrictive laws. With this case, these anti-abortion groups are predictably trying to redefine reproductive freedom as “coercion” or “abusing women,” and genuine coercion as “states’ rights” or “protecting women.” Over decades, it’s become clear that these same groups, along with the legislators and attorneys general who share their politics, won’t rest until abortion is banned or all but banned across the country. This legal challenge demonstrates that they are willing to rerun the same arguments in the same courts over and over until they win. The Supreme Court has, in fact, already heard a case concerning FDA guidelines for accessing mifepristone with telehealth. When the same law project behind the current case, Alliance Defending Freedom, made its arguments in Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 2024, ADF failed to convince the court that the purported health care providers’ group it represented had standing to challenge the FDA’s guidelines. Though the court did not say so explicitly in its opinion, it was nevertheless clear that the group had no apparent purpose other than bringing the next big anti-abortion case to the Supreme Court after Dobbs; indeed, the group was incorporated weeks following that ruling, in a judicial district where it had no activities besides bringing the lawsuit.The truth of that earlier case was this: Mifepristone was as safe before Dobbs as it was after Dobbs. In fact, Dobbs led to an expansion of medication abortion in states where abortion was either banned or all but banned. That expansion of access was made possible in part by an administrative rule change at the FDA, permanently removing the requirement for in-person dispensing of mifepristone. ADF and other anti-abortion groups are now trying to rewrite history to cast mifepristone as a dangerous drug that the FDA is allegedly allowing to menace unsuspecting women. (It’s worth remembering that it was their own obsessive campaign to end Roe that made access to mifepristone so critical in the first place.)Following its loss in Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, Alliance Defending Freedom regrouped and took another swing at the highest court. This time, it’s joining a lawsuit with the Louisiana attorney general, representing a Louisiana woman who, “under immense pressure and fearing for her safety ... took abortion drugs that her boyfriend obtained,” as the lawsuit contends. The choice of collaborator is telling: After Roe, abortion in the state was completely banned with very limited exceptions, and no clinics there provided procedural abortion. Last year, the Louisiana state legislature reclassified misoprostol and mifepristone as “controlled substances.” Getting mifepristone through the mail, prescribed by providers outside the state, was a lifeline for pregnant people in Louisiana; it meant that they could access abortion despite the state laws. This is what ADF’s lawsuit is really about: forcing providers to abandon patients and forcing patients to continue pregnancies.That makes their new post-Dobbs argument, as seen in the Louisiana lawsuit, all the more cynical. Anti-abortion lawmakers such as Missouri Senator Josh Hawley and Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy have lately retooled their opposition to medication abortion, now blaming it for the “abuse” of women, as Garnet Henderson at the reproductive rights and justice news site Autonomy News has reported. It is in that context that an individual who says she has experienced reproductive coercion has been made the face of the Louisiana challenge. But her story aside, she may be a more desirable plaintiff for other reasons: By making her part of its case, the state argued in one filing, it was possible to supply “the standing piece that the Supreme Court found lacking in Alliance.” That is, unlike the purported group of health care providers in that case, not one of whose members had prescribed mifepristone, the Louisiana legal challenge involves an actual person who was allegedly harmed. If not for that defeat, we likely would not be seeing this rerun of a legal challenge now.As of now in this case, that alleged harm has not yet been fully considered; the dispute so far has been limited to the question of whether to block the FDA guidelines as the case proceeds. But even if ADF were ultimately to prevail here, many things about medication abortion would not change. Getting mifepristone would require an in-person appointment before prescription, yes. But it’s possible to perform a medication abortion with only misoprostol, and telehealth access for that pill remains unchanged. People who were getting mifepristone outside direct prescription, such as by ordering from overseas or through informal networks, would still have that option. A win for ADF does not make it a crime to possess mifepristone. But as we have learned in this country over decades of anti-abortion lawmaking and court-wrangling, abortion need not actually be banned for it to be difficult to get, or for people to feel afraid to try. Merely producing headlines about “abortion pills” being “blocked,” even for a day, or half a day, introduces doubt. News that a court now blocks medication abortion could make someone question whether the pills are illegal or unsafe. We’ll know more within a week about whether this particular case is the one anti-abortion groups have been hoping for: a follow-up to Dobbs that permanently blocks telemedicine access to medication abortion across the country and casts doubt on its safety and legality. Whether they win or lose, however, this is not the end for those who have already devoted 40 years to killing Roe. The extreme abortion bans that followed Dobbs—these groups’ big victory—helped make medication abortion more common. They will not stop here.

Kit Klarenberg Substack A stunning investigative report by Hebrew-language outlet Ynet has laid bare the embarrassing cataclysm not only of the US-Israeli war on Iran, but the Zionist entity’s effort throughout to end the Islamic Republic via covert and overt military and intelligence operations. Violent Mossad-orchestrated protests, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s murder, and a Kurdish invasion were intended to […]

Review of Truth and Consequence: Reflections on Catastrophe, Civil Resistance, and Hope, by Daniel Ellsberg, ed. Michael Ellsberg and Jan R. Thomas (New York: Bloomsbury, released 3/2/26) Peter Dale Scott Eager as I was to review this collection of Daniel Ellsberg’s unpublished writings, for days all my available time was spent in fascinated reading, as […]

“American Jews and Jews in general are safer in countries where everybody is treated equally under the law,” Peter Beinart tells TRNN. “The principle of Jewish supremacy, and Christian supremacy, and Hindu supremacy, and Islamic supremacy—all of those things are wrong.” Marc Steiner TRNN Amid Israel’s ongoing destruction of Gaza, its illegal annexation of land […]

Daniel Bessner, Derek Davison Danny and Derek welcome to the show Alex Zakaras, professor of political science at the University of Vermont, to talk about the history and future of radical liberalism.  The post Radical Liberalism—With Alex Zakaras appeared first on The Nation.

The post Texas Lawmakers Repeatedly Failed to Pass Legislation That Could Have Protected Residents From Deadly Floods appeared first on ProPublica.