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US presidents can carry out military operations for 60 days without lawmakers’ backing, a period that ostensibly expires today.

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the May 1 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.Public polls are starting to show that Democrats are now more trusted on the economy than Republicans are—a milestone with major implications for the elections. Strikingly, a new memo from Republican operatives just conceded this as well, while sounding a loud warning that the GOP is in danger of losing the Senate. All this is also underscored by fresh economic data. It suggests that the struggles of ordinary Americans could be getting worse.New Republic staff writer Monica Potts has been doing some really good reporting on what ordinary voters are thinking and feeling about the economy. So we’re talking to her about all this today. Monica, nice to have you on.Monica Potts: Thanks for having me.Sargent: So let’s start with the new data. GDP grew at 2 percent during the first quarter of this year, which is better than last year, but still came in under expectations. And inflation just had its biggest spike in nearly three years by one metric, driven in part by gas prices and the war. Monica, it just seems like we’re economically stuck. Is that the right way to think about it?Potts: I think so. The economy was on a path to recovery at the end of the Biden administration. I think people conveniently forget that the post-COVID era was a really unusual time and we hadn’t seen anything like it in our lifetimes, and a lot of the ways that people consumed changed. Their incomes changed. The way that we thought about what we needed and what we wanted to spend our money on changed throughout that period. And of course, inflation rose really rapidly. So things were heading back to normal, and actually a report earlier this month from economists at the Federal Reserve found that inflation might have been back to normal had we not had the new tariffs from the Trump administration and some of the other shocks to the economy under his tenure.Sargent: Yeah, well, this economy is largely the creation of one person, Donald Trump. And I want to get into that in a bit. Politico reports on this new Republican memo that shows striking findings. It’s from Americans for Prosperity, the Koch-backed group. And that’s its own story, which we’ll get to. But for now, I want to read this line from it: “Our internal polling in several battleground states and one-on-one conversations with voters show that for the first time, Democrats are more trusted on the economy and inflation.” Monica, that’s striking. Other polls have shown this as well. Trump’s 2024 victory was all about the economy and inflation, and Democrats were in just terrible shape on both due to what you talked about, the post-COVID inflation shock. How do you account for this turnaround?Potts: Well, I think that Trump was riding a long-term advantage that Republicans had on the economy—at least since Reagan, American voters have tended to think that Republicans are better for the economy, largely because of their rhetoric on small businesses, on cutting taxes, and people tend to think that that’s good. So I think that he came into office with a huge advantage on the economy that he really blew—the first few things that he did as president were to kind of squander that trust that people had. People saw right away that the things he was doing weren’t what they wanted from him. And so I think that that has given an opening for people to think about the Democratic rhetoric on the economy more and to maybe start trusting the Democratic Party more on what they say the economy needs.Sargent: It’s just kind of amazing because not only did Republicans have this deep built-in advantage on the economy that you talked about, which is largely unearned but goes back many decades, Trump also had this big unearned advantage on the economy. And I was doing some reporting up in Reading, Pennsylvania about what happened with the Latino vote there in 2024, moved towards Trump. And what I was struck by was how deeply this cultural picture of Trump as this crack businessman who builds big things and makes things happen and is an entrepreneurial spirit, how deeply that had taken hold with a lot of low-information voters. That’s just something that I think Democrats were really unable to do anything about, and yet that’s been pissed away too.Potts: Yeah, that’s right. And I think people forget that the vast majority of voters aren’t reading the really long investigative pieces that show that Trump actually wasn’t a very good businessman. I mean, you can find all of the evidence that you want to show that Trump inherited most of his wealth. He squandered it—his early successes as a builder or as a real estate person really based on his father’s work. And he was never really the businessman he portrayed on TV, but people still had this idea, this really long-held idea of him as a businessman. That was his public persona that was really ingrained. And I think that it was always going to take a lot of work to try to chip away at that. I’m not even sure the Democratic Party even really tried. And I don’t know if it would have worked if they had. A lot of people had an idea that he was a businessman. They have an idea that the country needs a businessman—or at least someone who thinks like a businessman—to run it, which is really not how the country runs, but that’s a whole other story. And so it’s kind of amazing that he really has squandered that in just a little over a year, but he has. People don’t believe that about him anymore. They think he’s making the wrong decisions.Sargent: Yeah. And also the other cultural picture of him is as the guy who fires people, who just makes things happen really quickly, you know? And so—well, here’s another line I want to read from the memo: “As it stands today, our view is that the Republican Senate majority is at risk.” Monica, I think the Senate map is still awfully hard. Democrats have to net four seats in some really tough states for them. But if there’s anything that can get Democrats there, it’s this kind of widespread economic distress. Can you talk about that?Potts: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we talked about it a minute ago, but the truth is that there was a pretty substantial number of voters who thought at the end of the Biden administration, the economy is not where I want it to be, Trump’s a businessman and he can get us back. And so that was his huge advantage with a lot of voters in the middle, a lot of independents, a lot of swing voters to the extent that they exist, and a lot of people who were upset about Biden’s economy and so who just didn’t turn out to vote for Kamala Harris, Vice President Kamala Harris. And so, I think that the fact that Republicans are in this position is completely attributable to Trump squandering that trust with voters. And I think it’s really kind of amazing because Democrats always probably had an advantage in the House—the party that isn’t in the White House has an advantage in the House in the midterms, it’s kind of one of the things you can take to the bank for the most part. The Senate map is really difficult, but if the candidates are right, if the winds are right, if we are still stuck in Iran, if we’re still stuck in a lot of conflicts globally, if tariffs are still bad, if the price of oil stays high, if inflation is up, if people don’t have faith that the economy is going to get better—you really start to see where Democrats have an opening, I think.Sargent: So let’s just talk a little more about that point you’re making, which is that Trump created this economy and Trump is the reason that Republicans are in such bad shape on it. It really is an odd situation because for the most part, presidents don’t have that much control over economies. And yet Donald Trump managed to figure out a way to really damage it in just about every conceivable way.You mentioned the tariffs, which really had an inflationary effect for a lot of people. And then there’s immigration, which I don’t think people usually connect to the economy, but that also had a negative economic effect—it’s had a negative effect on jobs by just reducing the number of immigrants in the country and so forth. And then of course there’s the war as well, which has really spiked prices and we’re really stuck. He doesn’t seem to be at all aware of the fact that he doesn’t really have a lot of leverage in this situation. He’s just tweeting that he’s got all the leverage and he’s happy to wait—I don’t know, as long as it takes—until Iran finally realizes that he’s the boss and concedes. But if I’m a Republican officeholder, like a vulnerable incumbent Republican in the House, I’m like, dude, you’ve got to stop this war already, we’re just going to get wiped out. Can you talk a little bit about how Trump did this?Potts: Yeah, it is one of the ironies of our time that people blamed Biden for the economy that was largely out of his control. A normal president who is doing what the job of a president is, is trying to create the conditions for a good American economy, for people to share in economic growth. And it’s kind of hoping that private industry takes us the rest of the way, because America very much believes in its free-market economy ideals. What Trump has done is a number of things. He enacted tariffs unilaterally, which have had a really big impact both on the price of goods in America and also the impact on our trading partners globally—which has had an effect as well, because people don’t really know what’s going to happen next with Trump. Some writers have called it the Trump chaos tax. And you could call it the chaos economy because businesses, consumers, anyone who interacts with the economy wants to have some idea of where we’re going. They want to know if it’s a good idea for them to buy a car this month, or if they should refinance their mortgage because rates are going down and they’re going to stay down. So when you’re making big decisions or even small decisions, you kind of want to have a sense of where we are in the economy. And because Trump is so erratic—he announces policies on his social media platform, he keeps changing his mind about tariffs constantly, he just started wars in Venezuela and Iran kind of overnight without taking his justifications to the American people—all of those things have both real and kind of perceived effects that become real because it changes the way people interact with the economy.Sargent: Well, related to all this, one of the things that’s interesting in this memo is it calls on Republicans to focus much more on the economy. But everyone knows at this point that Trump isn’t mentally capable of focusing on anything really, except for maybe the ballroom. But he certainly doesn’t have much of an interest in the economy. You can just visibly see that at these events that they try to set up where Trump’s supposed to refocus everyone on the economy—and you just can’t do it. But even if he were able to, he couldn’t do it effectively because of what we’re talking about here. And what’s just so amazing to me about this is that Republicans all know that Trump is no longer a credible voice on the economy, but they just have to pretend not to know that. You know what I mean? Like they have to say, we really want the president to talk more about the economy, even though they know it wouldn’t do them any good.Potts: Yeah. I don’t know why they—I feel like they still are relying on Trump to be kind of this magic interlocutor with the American people, that he has some ability to kind of sway them. But you know, some of this too is the inability of the Republican Party to come to terms with the ways that their other policy priorities do clash with the economy. You mentioned before—and I didn’t comment on it before, but I should—is that a lot of the immigration policy is hurting the economy. There was just an American Tax Fairness report that came out today that a lot of the industries that rely on Latino labor, that employ a lot of Latinos, are suffering because immigration enforcement and immigration policy is so draconian and up in the air. So all of the things that Republicans have concentrated on, that they wanted Trump to concentrate on, are also hurting the economy. And so at some point they have to say, we are actually doing this. Our president is doing this and we are doing this with our policies. It’s not just a side effect or it’s not just circumstances. It’s our policies.Sargent: Right. And I think the report you just talked about on immigration is really important because it highlights how Trumpism as an ideology is getting us here as well. Because for Trump and for Stephen Miller and for the anti-immigrant nativists around him and so forth, they think that having fewer immigrants in the country is an inherently good thing—like it’s intrinsically good, even if the negative effects on the economy persist, right? To them, it’s worth it. Like it’s so important to have fewer immigrants in the country that they’re willing to have lower job growth as a result. Like they actually kind of almost say that openly. And so there you have the ideology of Trumpism having a directly negative impact on everybody’s material fortunes basically, right?Potts: Yeah, and I think the fact that they say it openly—that the effects of their policies are having such an obvious impact on people’s lives—people are seeing it in their local economies. Local business owners are having trouble because their employees are disappearing or people aren’t buying because they’re worried about what’s going to happen down the road. That sort of makes it clear to voters in a way that nothing else possibly could have. And I think that that’s going to be hard for Republicans too, because they were trying to do kind of like doublespeak for a long time—just to say, immigrants are taking your jobs, which was part of the rhetoric from the Trump campaign at least since 2015. It’s been kind of the core of his identity. I think people have to see now that that’s not true.Sargent: Yeah, that has certainly been disproven. So just to go big picture and talk about your reporting—there’s this nugget in the memo that I want to bring up. It hails Trump’s tax cut as a landmark piece of legislation. And then like in the next sentence, admits that people’s economic concerns are really profound. Of course, that tax cut represented a massive upward transfer of wealth, which is exactly what Americans for Prosperity, the authors of this memo, wants. And so what that tells us is that people are struggling under the economy that the plutocrats want. It seems like there’s a big opening for a more populist economic program from Democrats now, right? You did some reporting on this. Is there a way that Democrats could talk about a new direction entirely?Potts: Yeah, I did reporting earlier this week on a report from Way to Win. It’s a left-leaning strategic group that does polling and kind of strategy for Democrats. And one of the things that they found was that messages that concentrated on a kind of populist economic message—saying, we need to tax corporations, we need to make the economy fairer for the working class—messages like that really did sway people. And people are open to that kind of messaging because they can see now, I think they can feel and see, that there’s an economy right now where the wealthy are looking out for each other, the tax cuts are helping the wealthy, that some of Trump’s billionaire friends are benefiting the most from this economy. And in the meantime, people are drowning in debt, just trying to pay their energy bills and trying to pay their grocery bills. And so I think that there’s an opening to say that we need to tax corporations more, corporations are treating working people unfairly. There’s a lot of polling, even in swing states, even in states that are kind of more approving of Donald Trump’s presidency than the nation as a whole—voters in those states, voters that are gettable, voters that need to be persuaded to vote for Democrats—they’re swayed by messages like that that say, you know, we need to kind of resort our economy and refocus our economy. Sargent: And it seems like there’s really an opening in another way too, which is that like everything is really in flux to an unusual degree, I think, right? Because if you sort of think about the trajectory from Reagan to now, like all of a sudden, everything’s kind of up for grabs and up in the air.We had the COVID shock and the inflationary shock of that. And that was a really profound experience for a lot of people. I think it was really disorienting and dispiriting and shook people up a lot. It allowed Trump to swoop in and do this amazing comeback or whatever. But then you have a right-wing populist—to put it in polite terms—coming in and actually doing the stuff, like doing the agenda of right-wing populism. Tariffs, immigration restrictionism, America First, pissing on our alliances and so forth. And that’s a disaster. So is there sort of a different kind of opening now to take charge of people’s understanding of these big questions that maybe wasn’t there before?Potts: Yeah, I think so. I think there’s a new kind of hunger from voters—and especially younger voters who don’t remember Reagan—to focus on workers, to think about worker power, to focus on government provision of expensive services like childcare. You know, a lot of millennials now—the youngest millennials, I think, are in their 30s almost, or are there already—these are people who are ready to buy homes and start a family, and they’re kind of seeing the long-term effects of the Reagan-era policies that concentrated power among a lot of big businesses, that diminished worker power, that diminished wages over time. And I think that there’s a new opportunity then to tell a different story about the American economy, which is one that allows for thinking about building the economy from the worker up, to think about the kinds of institutions that can be countervailing forces against big corporations, to think about refocusing political power on the working and middle classes. I think there’s a lot of people, but especially young voters, who are very hungry for that.Sargent: Yes. And the younger voters are among the constituencies that moved to Trump, just like the non-white working class. And so to those voters, maybe the right-wing populist stuff sounded somewhat credible, right? Like it’s anti-elite, it’s about workers, it’s about power, it’s about worker power in some way, even though we know that it’s sort of a sham. And so has it been sufficiently discredited? Has Trumpism, has right-wing populism—have those things been discredited enough to create an opening to do something new?Potts: I think so. I mean, at least right now, a lot depends on what happens in the next year or the next two years. And a lot probably depends on what happens with how the Democratic candidates and the Democratic Party as a whole take up the story. Because there were a lot of things that Trump said that did sound good to people. And he’s not putting his money where his mouth was. He’s not fulfilling that. And the people around Trump are traditional Republicans doing traditional Republican things—tax cuts to the wealthy, concentrating power, taking away rights from women, taking away rights from minorities, immigration enforcement that’s draconian and not in accordance with American ideals. And I think that that just really does give an opening for the Democratic Party to potentially solidify those young voters as their voters for life because they’re kind of gettable, I think, in a lot of ways now still.Sargent: I think that’s really well put. Folks, if you enjoyed this, make sure to check out Monica Potts’s stuff at NewRepublic.com. It’s great—it’s on these topics very regularly. Monica, thanks so much for coming on. We really appreciate it.Potts: Thanks so much for having me.

Several airlines have canceled flights, while the UK is relaxing fuel standards and flight scheduling rules to ease the crunch.

Low-carbon alternatives are available, and EVs, remote work, and renewable energy are already helping ease fossil fuel demand.

The post 8 Things You Should Know About Trump’s Effort to “Take Over” the Midterm Elections appeared first on ProPublica.

The Supreme Court’s decision this week to destroy what remained of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 compels us to consider structural reforms to the court itself to preserve the republic. By giving a de facto blank check to Republican-led states to racially gerrymander Black Americans out of electoral power, the court has delegitimized itself and damaged the nation’s multiracial democracy.Rick Hasen, a UCLA law professor who specializes in election law, described Wednesday’s court’s ruling in Louisiana v. Callais as “one of the most pernicious and damaging Supreme Court decisions of the last century.” Hasen, whose research was cited in Justice Elena Kagan’s dissent, is hardly a firebrand. He argued that Democrats must now “consider reform of the Supreme Court itself, a conclusion I had been resisting until the Court made this unavoidable.”I agree. On racial and political gerrymandering in particular, however, there is another important reform that a Democratic Congress and president could also implement at the next opportunity: abolishing the House’s current system of single-member districts and electing members by proportional representation instead.Article 1 of the Constitution gives Congress the power to set the “time, manner, and place” of federal elections. States administer elections within the bounds that Congress sets for them. For the first half of the nineteenth century, Congress allowed states a certain amount of discretion to devise their own electoral system, so long as it elected the apportioned number of representatives to the House. (The Senate, which would not become elected until the early twentieth century, is not at issue here.)Many states adopted single-member districts. Under this method, which survives to this day, state lawmakers divide the state into congressional districts, each of which elects a single representative to the House. Like any electoral system, this approach has some benefits—greater regional diversity, direct constituent representation, and so on. It also has some drawbacks. The most obvious of these is gerrymandering. The term derived its name from Elbridge Gerry, an early American statesman who served as governor of Massachusetts from 1810 to 1812. His tenure coincided with the 1810 census and the reapportionment of House seats that occurs every 10 years. To maintain control of Massachusetts’s state legislature, Gerry’s fellow Democratic-Republicans drew an obviously manipulated map to maintain their majority. After Gerry signed the new map into law, Federalist denunciations ensured that the practice became forever associated with his name, to Gerry’s great consternation.This is fairly rote stuff for high school American civics. What is less well known is that single-member districts weren’t the only method of electing House members in the early republic. One common alternative was known as a “general-ticket” election. Under this system, voters would cast votes for as many candidates as there were seats, and the candidates who received the most votes would be elected to those seats.General-ticket voting had problems as well. For one thing, it essentially transformed each state’s House races into a winner-take-all system, with one party often able to win an entire state’s delegation with a simple majority of votes. While Northern and Southern states both used general-ticket elections at first, the method was eventually associated with Southern states that wanted to maximize the Democratic Party’s control of Congress.Some larger states also used what were known as “plural districts.” Under this method, a single district would elect the top two candidates to the House on a general ticket. Some states, like New York and Pennsylvania, mixed plural districts in urban areas with single-member districts for rural ones. Others, like New Jersey, divided themselves into multiple plural districts.Perhaps the best example of the early republic’s patchwork system is the Thirteenth Congress, which served from 1810 to 1812. Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, New Hampshire, and Vermont used the general-ticket system, with each one resulting in one-party slates. Maryland, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania elected representatives through at least some plural districts, producing a mixture of party representation. Massachusetts, North Carolina, Ohio, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia exclusively used single-member districts, with similarly diverse results.Only in 1842 did Congress begin to standardize House elections. Until the 1920s, lawmakers would adopt a new Apportionment Act after each census to expand the House of Representatives to match the nation’s population growth. The Apportionment Act of 1842 was a milestone because it sought to reduce, not grow, the number of House seats for the first time. It also sought to constrain how each state elected its representatives.With the new act, Whig lawmakers sought to dismantle single-party rule in the South and increase their own chances of securing a House majority in the future. By this point, Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Missouri, New Hampshire, New Jersey, and Rhode Island still used the general-ticket method. Southern Democrats argued for a greater role for states in determining how federal elections could be run, but the Whigs’ reading of Congress’s election powers won out.The 1842 act was less successful than its drafters had hoped, in no small part because Democrats retook the House in the following election and seated members elected by general-ticket systems anyway. But the law hastened the country’s drift toward single-member districts. Only a few states retained statewide at-large districts into the twentieth century. Finally, in 1967, as part of a legislative negotiation over reapportionment after the Supreme Court’s “one man, one vote” rule, Congress formally forbade any other method of electing representatives to the House.This diversity of House electoral methods shows that single-member districts, though now ubiquitous, are not an intractible constitutional command. What Congress makes, it can also unmake. Democratic lawmakers in recent years have proposed bills that would require states to elect members via proportional representation instead. Proportional representation can take a number of different forms, but in the general strokes, it would allocate each state’s House delegation according to the ratio of votes that each party received.Abolishing single-members districts would re-enfranchise tens of millions of Americans who have no real opportunity to cast a meaningful vote for a House candidate. In the 2024 elections, voters in Texas cast roughly 6.2 million ballots for Republican candidates and 4.3 million ballots for Democratic candidates. Thanks to the state’s harsh gerrymander, Texas Republicans won 65 percent of the seats despite obtaining only 58 percent of the vote. Some states had even wider disparities: North Carolina Republicans won 10 of the state’s 14 congressional districts despite only obtaining 52 percent of the vote.Under single-member districts, millions of voters in each state are effectively disenfranchised by preordained outcomes in their House seats. Proportional representation’s benefits would not be exclusively felt by Democrats, of course. That same year, California voters cast nine million ballots for House Democratic candidates and 5.9 million ballots for House Republican candidates. Though Democrats only received 60 percent of the vote, they captured 76 percent of the state’s House delegation.Since many House seats are only competitive in the primary elections, single-member districts also produce more extreme candidates by insulating lawmakers from a broader segment of the electorate. Most Americans do not live in a competitive House district, giving them little influence over their own representation. Since 2010, when the GOP embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering on a national scale, the Senate has arguably become more representative than the House since its candidates must answer to a broader, more diverse electorate.A group of House Democrats introduced a bill in 2025, for example, that would require any state with six or more House seats to create multimember districts under proportional representation. For states with five or fewer House seats, members would be elected at large instead. It would also require ranked-choice voting, which is not strictly necessary for proportional representation but may be incorporated into it.I’ve called for Congress to adopt some form of proportional representation for the last few years. But reforms are particularly urgent after the Supreme Court’s malfeasance on gerrymandering. It was no surprise that the conservative justices demolished what was left of the Voting Rights Act in Louisiana v. Callais this week. But the way in which they did it suggested that the nation’s ongoing redistricting wars may have played a role.The court originally appeared set to decide that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act’s limits on racial gerrymandering were no longer needed now that Jim Crow had been dismantled and Black electoral participation had risen far above its pre-1965 levels. While that reasoning was present in the final opinion by Alito, it played a secondary role to his interest in protecting partisan gerrymandering.The Supreme Court had ruled in 2019 that federal courts could no longer hear partisan-gerrymandering claims. What was framed as a lamentable practice that courts could not solve in 2019 was now an important state interest that must be protected in 2024. “The upshot of Rucho [v. Common Cause] was that, as far as federal law is concerned, a state legislature may use partisan advantage as a factor in redistricting,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the court. “And litigants cannot circumvent that rule by dressing their political-gerrymandering claims in racial garb.”I will not claim to have any special insight into Alito’s private thinking on this case, nor that of any other justice who participated in it. But it is hard to escape the sense that Democrats’ embrace of partisan gerrymandering over the last year—driven in response, of course, to Trump’s own demands to retain power in this year’s midterms—may have played a role in how the Supreme Court framed Callais.After all, Democrats in California, Illinois, and Virginia can pursue extreme partisan gerrymandering without risk of Voting Rights Act litigation because their own states are much more racially diverse. But Republicans face an inherent hurdle when trying to maximize their own seats, particularly in the South: They can only gerrymander away so many seats before they eventually run into the majority-minority districts created through past VRA litigation. Since Black voters typically vote for Democrats in unusually lopsided margins, partisan gerrymanders tend to become racial gerrymanders, as well, past a certain point.Given the choice between the VRA and the court’s racial gerrymandering precedents on one hand, and the prospect that the GOP might face a structural asymmetry in American elections on the other hand, the conservative justices sided with the GOP. The results will be catastrophic for Black electoral representation in the South, both in the House and in state legislatures, where Congress has no power over redistricting.Proportional representation may not be the panacea for all that ails our nation’s politics. But it stands the best chance of ensuring that Americans will have competitive congressional elections no matter the state in which they live. It is indisputably constitutional, derived both from Congress’s own Article 1 powers as well as past diversity in electoral methods. And it would make it impossible for state legislatures to deny fair representation to any American because of their race ever again by making gerrymandering—whether racial or partisan—a thing of the past.

The Strait of Hormuz is still closed, and it isn’t poised to open anytime soon. Donald Trump signaled on Wednesday that he intends to keep the U.S. blockade in place until Iran cries “uncle” and says, “We give up.” The longer the strait stays closed, the less likely any sort of return to normalcy gets. Soon, this mounting human and economic disaster will crash into another climate-changed summer. Fatih Birol, the head of the International Energy Agency, warned last week that the world faces “the biggest energy security threat in history.” Surging jet fuel prices and shortages threaten everything from commercial air travel in Europe to fighting wildfires in the western United States. Making matters worse, a potential super El Niño could trigger heat waves across Asia, further increasing demand for air conditioning and, accordingly, fossil fuels. Droughts or flooding from that weather pattern could force hydropower stations to shut down or reduce output, compelling hydropower-dependent regions to increase their demand for increasingly scarce, pricey supplies of oil and gas. The combination of extreme weather and shortages of gas-derived fertilizers that typically flow through the Strait of Hormuz stands to exacerbate a looming, climate-fueled global food crisis. While the Trump administration certainly doesn’t seem too concerned about the crises its reckless, illegal war of choice is exacerbating in other parts of the world, the war is continuing to influence one of the few things Trump genuinely seems to care about: gas prices. In the U.S., they have soared to almost $4.30 per gallon. For the U.S., though, war in Iran risks a lot more than pissing off voters who are paying more at the pump. As the war drags on, more countries are souring on the idea that oil and gas are reliable and necessary ingredients for a thriving economy. The White House, meanwhile, is going to elaborate lengths to safeguard the fossil-fueled growth model its war is endangering.The Trump administration’s recent wave of foreign interventionism has arguably been impelled by its booming fossil fuel production. If the U.S. were still a net importer of oil and gas, that is, the White House might have seen the prospective closure of the Strait of Hormuz as an unacceptable risk. Well before Trump, the U.S. saw its ability to export these fuels as an essential part of its economic vision, locking other countries into dependency on its oil and gas in the name of energy security. With plenty of attractive alternatives on the table, though—and from much less petulant sources—that’s starting to look like a bad deal. Some nations are starting to chart out energy futures that depend less on fossil fuels and the U.S. Leaders from nearly 60 countries gathered this past week in Santa Marta, Colombia, to discuss getting off of fossil fuels. Part of the inspiration for the meeting was that powerful fossil fuel producing countries—namely Saudi Arabia, Russia, and the United States—have made such discussions virtually impossible at U.N. climate talks. Selwin Hart, special adviser to the U.N. Secretary-General, pointed out in Santa Marta that three-fourths of the world’s population live in countries that are net importers of fossil fuels. For every $10 increase in the price of oil, the energy consultancy Ember noted recently, net-import costs rise by about $160 billion annually. “So today,” Hart continued, “the urgency of transitioning away from fossil fuels is no longer only a climate or environmental imperative. It is a security imperative, an economic imperative, and a development imperative.”This kind of talk isn’t new: Climate advocates have long argued that ditching coal, oil, and gas can help insulate economies from fossil-fueled volatility. Wars in Russia and Iran, however, have helped underline the urgency of that message. Steep declines in the price of renewable energy—thanks largely to China—have made it much more possible for even fast-growing countries to reduce their reliance on imported hydrocarbons in key sectors like power and transportation. For the first time last year, renewables provided more power than coal worldwide.The war in Iran has helped accelerate shifts that were already underway—and confirmed any and all suspicions that the U.S. is an unreliable partner for energy security. The New York Times’ David Wallace-Wells pointed out recently that China’s solar, battery, and electric vehicle exports grew by 39 percent between February and March of this year. Its exports to India, Laos, and Malaysia more than doubled; exports to Kenya, Ethiopia, and Nigeria more than tripled. Chinese solar exports to Africa grew by 176 percent. In Australia—which imports nearly 80 percent of its gasoline and diesel—battery E.V. sales doubled compared to March 2025, and Japan’s E.V. sales nearly tripled. Climate pledges that a few years ago might have sounded like watery virtue signaling now seem to have a bit more heft behind them. At the Colombia conference, France announced a “first of its kind” fossil fuel phaseout plan, which aims at transitioning off of coal, oil, and gas by 2030, 2045, and 2050, respectively. These developments don’t amount to anything like a smooth glide path toward a clean energy future. Countries that have fossil fuel reserves are rapidly drawing up plans to tap them. Bloomberg reports that Malaysia’s Petroliam Nasional Bhd., for instance, “will reinvest a potential windfall from higher oil prices into its domestic gas fields” to try to reduce the country’s reliance on imported liquid natural gas. Many countries in Asia are boosting output from aging coal-fired power plants.Whether consciously or not, the Trump administration is resorting to increasingly desperate measures to ward off a future where its carbon-intensive products are less important. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has now spent nearly $2 billion bribing developers to ditch offshore wind projects. At the end of March, the Agriculture Department announced it was halting the Rural Energy for America Program, which has helped tens of thousands of farmers and rural business owners install solar power. Congressional Republicans want to impose an annual $250 fee on E.V.s. Abroad, U.S. officials are mounting a full-court press at the International Maritime Organization to halt plans for a quasi–carbon tax in the global shipping industry.The irony, of course, is that the Trump administration’s reckless war on Iran has imposed an implicit carbon tax that’s leagues more ambitious than anything the IMO might hope to enact. The continued closure of the Strait of Hormuz is driving up fuel and commodity prices, forcing drillers to halt production, pushing governments and consumers alike to consider lower-carbon alternatives, and endangering what not too long ago had been considered promising growth markets for U.S. companies. In attempting to cling onto U.S. hegemony and global energy dominance, Trump might be ending both.

Getting into generational discourse is not unlike diving deep into astrology: Every vague, contradictory statement feels true, especially when it’s what you want to hear. Are millennials, those born between 1981 and 1996, lazy or hardworking? Are they romantics or cynics? Are they poised to overturn the chaos in American politics, or is Gen Z going to be left holding the bag? It all depends on who you ask.But if there is one millennial archetype that the media cannot resist, it is the try-hard girl-woman. Just this spring, writer-performer Lena Dunham published Famesick, a memoir about how being the “voice of a generation” meant working her mortal, chronically ill body into the ground. And earlier this year, in Life After Ambition: A “Good Enough” Memoir, writer Amil Niazi lays out the particularities of being a Pakistani Canadian millennial in a family without money, navigating atmospheres that left no room for error. “Did those gold stars or participation trophies really warp me,” she asks, “or did the promise that anything was possible if I was ambitious cause me to self-destruct?”Looking back to the 2000s and 2010s, no one raised her hand higher or completed more extra-credit assignments than Anne Hathaway. Breaking through in 2001 with The Princess Diaries and going on to play a Cinderella figure in the 2004 Ella Enchanted, Hathaway came on the scene as the girl next door ready for her makeover montage. This positioned her perfectly to play the role of Andrea “Andy” Sachs in the 2006 film adaptation of Lauren Weisberger’s Anna Wintour–inspired roman à clef, The Devil Wears Prada. Under the unwilling tutelage of first assistant Emily (Emily Blunt), journalism grad and second assistant Andy struggles to gain the approval of Runway magazine’s Wintour-esque Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep). “This place that people would die to work, you deign to work,” scolds Runway’s fashion director, Nigel (Stanley Tucci). “And you want to know why she doesn’t give you a kiss on the forehead and put a gold star on your homework?”Here we go again with the gold stars. The Devil Wears Prada had all the favorite tropes of the 2000s: a women’s magazine writer who aspires to serious journalism; a cute boyfriend who, subsequent rewatches reveal, is a self-absorbed jerk; an older woman supervisor-mentor whose tough love inspires the heroine to be true to a new and improved version of herself. It is also relentless in its attacks on women’s bodies, with Hathaway’s character flippantly referred to as the “smart, fat girl” in the office. It’s a satire of the fashion world, fine, but it also bought into many of the pressures placed on young women at the time.The original Devil Wears Prada is a time capsule in a multitude of ways, down to the statement necklaces and the pageboy hat. The new sequel arrives after a long cultural reckoning with the toxicity of the turn of the millennium, and appeals to a demographic that is definitely older, potentially wiser, and demonstrably interested in exchanging generational nostalgia for cold, hard cash. Everyone here is slightly more understandable, more human—it would be hard not to be after 20 years of being a beloved character in a cult movie—and, as a result, the sequel never hits the unforgettably confident stride of the original.First off, it must be said: All sequels are try-hards. Sequels need to serve the fans while striving to attract a new audience; to exploit what people most loved about the original by upping the ante (but leaving room for a third installment); and, if possible, to issue any corrections for the original. The Devil Wears Prada 2 aims for all of these except, perhaps, attracting new viewers. There are too many references to the original—from Andy’s blue sweater (“cerulean”) to the warning to “never go upstairs” in Miranda’s brownstone—to suggest new fans are a priority.The film starts when Andy, now an accomplished writer for the New York Vanguard, is laid off by text—just as she is winning a journalism award. Her stirring acceptance speech on behalf of the fifth estate goes viral, attracting the attention of higher-ups at Runway. The magazine, and Miranda especially, is under fire for a poorly sourced feature on fast fashion, so Andy is brought in as their new features editor. Miranda doesn’t remember Andy—or, at least, that’s her head game of choice—and proves initially hostile to her old protégé’s return.By getting too close to the Dragon Lady herself, the movie paints Streep into a corner, never allowing her to go too big and mean nor satisfyingly soft and vulnerable.A lot has changed in 20 years: the magazine “book” that must be delivered to Miranda’s home is treated less like a biblical scroll than a DoorDash delivery, as Runway is largely digital; Miranda is no longer permitted to belittle employees within earshot of H.R. and has been reduced to hanging up her own coat, a move Streep executes with clumsy, yet regal, aplomb. Nigel is still executing Miranda’s vision without credit or approval, whereas Emily has moved on to a leadership role at Dior, one of Runway’s biggest advertisers.But it’s not just the characters or the circumstances that have shifted, but the storytelling itself. Even as Streep stole the show the first time around with her frosty performance, the first Devil Wears Prada was entrenched in Andy’s point of view and her character arc. Would Andy become one of the fashion girls—what she and her boyfriend call the high-heeled “clackers”? And was joining the so-called “dark side” at Runway smart or just sad? In the midst of Andy’s fairytale journey, Emily was her rival, Nigel her fairy godfather, and Miranda the ostensibly evil stepmother shrouded in mystique.The Devil Wears Prada 2 reserves top billing for Hathaway, but, now, the film is jointly told for and by all the leads from the original. Blunt has the most to do as a divorced mother of two who is just as determined as ever to succeed but might, this time around, want a friend too. Nigel’s long-suffering status as Miranda’s right-hand man is, unfortunately, one of the only notes Tucci gets to hit, though he plays it to the tune of some hefty screen time. (If Benoit Blanc can have a famous boyfriend cameo in Glass Onion, the second Knives Out film, why not our Nigel?)And by getting too close to the Dragon Lady herself, the movie paints Streep into a corner, never allowing her to go too big and mean nor satisfyingly soft and vulnerable. (The millennial try-hard can’t quit a toxic boomer boss. Maybe she’s born with it; maybe it’s mommy issues.) She still tosses out her cutting remarks and politically incorrect insults, but the movie is so solidly Team Miranda that it grants her both a sexy yet age-appropriate partner (Kenneth Branagh) and the gift of empathy, a trait she never exhibits in the original.To recount the plot points of The Devil Wears Prada 2 would be both dull, as exposition always is, and pointless, since no one watches these movies for narrative. The impeccably styled Hathaway, Streep, and Blunt can stride down city streets, through glamorous parties, and across helipads with the best of them, and that’s what the people have come to see. But, ultimately, the movie tries to do too much. Critiques of corporate consolidation in journalism (though film studios are tactfully never mentioned) and artificial intelligence are interspersed with various B-plots, including a budding romance for Andy, the teasing possibility of an Andy-authored Miranda Priestly exposé, and more than one crack at the frozen egg game. Some of it comes together, and some of it doesn’t. The Devil Wears Prada 2 just tries to do too much in its two-hour running time. It’s the cinematic equivalent of a cargo pant.The original Devil Wears Prada, for all its millennial blind spots, was as tight as an on-trend bandage dress, every scene working in service of a modest tale about ambition. It was a story in which women’s careerism is somehow both the hero and the antagonist—an ambivalence that the sequel resolves to resolve, once and for all. The Devil Wears Prada 2 just tries to do too much in its two-hour running time. It’s the cinematic equivalent of a cargo pant.The Devil Wears Prada 2 does one thing better than its predecessor: It explains the why behind the work.In the first Devil Wears Prada, Andy accidentally walks in on Miranda having a fight with her soon-to-be-ex-husband. Piqued beyond reason, Miranda demands that Andy get the unreleased manuscript of the upcoming Harry Potter book for her twin daughters, poised to fire her if she cannot complete this impossible task. Still, with the help of a sexy jerk in publishing, Andy gets the book, xeroxed and bound, a copy for each girl, and presents it coolly to her boss. “Anything else I can do for you?” Andy asks, a smile on her lips and an expletive in her eyes.This is the try-hard’s revenge: to overdeliver, to achieve the unachievable, so as to be rewarded with … what exactly? If she hadn’t gotten the manuscript to Miranda, she would have been fired, but because she did, a different strain of misery and self-esteem erosion inevitably follows. The first prize for the pie-eating contest, as you well know, is more pie.The Devil Wears Prada captured its millennial audience with the story of a recent graduate, a perpetual A student, still finding her way. Two decades later, these characters might still be chasing success, even the approval of others, but at least they know why they work as hard as they do. It is not just Andy and Miranda but new characters like Andy’s art dealer friend (Tracie Thoms) or the reclusive ex-wife of a billionaire (Lucy Liu) who express a keen appreciation for art and beauty. This second film is not just about fashion, then, but vision, taste, and craft in an era that values none of those things. It’s no wonder, and no accident, that one of the major set pieces of the film takes for its backdrop Leonardo da Vinci’s mural The Last Supper, a testament to artistic genius that can now be rented out for swanky events.If girl-on-girl violence is the driving force of the first film, it is a passing threat in the sequel, where the bad guys are literally bad guys.If girl-on-girl violence is the driving force of the first film, it is a passing threat in the sequel, where the bad guys are literally bad guys. The heterosexual male villains include an athleisure-wearing executive (B.J. Novak) and a space-obsessed, water-phobic billionaire (Justin Theroux) whose only endearing quality is that he thinks the model’s name is “Candle Jenner.”Theroux’s character in particular, at turns goofy and chilling, dreams of a world in which fashion magazines would not be just paperless but people-less, literally soulless. A mix of Musk and Bezos, his monologue on art without humanity is probably one being uttered in studio boardrooms all over town, as makers and even performers are making the choice to embrace artificial intelligence.But the women of The Devil Wears Prada 2 want to use their time, their effort, and their money to make things that are special and unique. If this is what it means to be try-hard, then good. To butcher a Mad Men quote: That’s what the trying is for. Even if the film itself cannot live up to its own lofty proclamations of artistic excellence, this sentiment alone is enough, I have to believe, to warrant more than the perfunctory gold star.