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Hiring as a percentage of total employment dropped from 3.4% in January to 3.1% in February.

Ukrainian counteroffensives were one reason, along with technological issues on the Russian side that have hindered battlefield communication.

The regime advanced legislation to bar unfriendly countries from the waterway and require all vessels to pay a toll.

European leaders have refused to allow the US to access to facilities and airspace for the Iran war, and have spoken of the continent’s need for self-reliance.

Films don’t come much more self-consciously provocative than Norwegian writer-director Kristoffer Borgli’s The Drama. It’s a cautionary tale about the power of gossip, designed to pique the curiosity of a social mediasphere in thrall to its gorgeous A-list stars. The sheer wattage on display is a bit blinding; putting Robert Pattinson and Zendaya together as upwardly mobile, slightly hipster-coded lovers against a metropolitan Boston backdrop is inspired bordering on diabolical. When museum director Charlie (Pattinson) chats up bookstore clerk Emma (Zendaya) in a coffee shop—he has to try it a couple of times because she’s deaf in the ear that isn’t crammed up by headphones— it’s the most nuclear-powered meet-cute in recent memory.Charlie’s a stammering Hugh Grant manqué who knows he’s landed a baddie; Emma’s slightly aggro tendencies belie a tender heart. Or do they? While on a mission to finalize the wedding menu, Emma’s maid of honor Rachel (Alana Haim) and her husband/Charlie’s best man, Mike (Mamadou Ethie), propose a risqué bonding exercise; they suggest that each member of the quartet reveal the worst thing they’ve ever done. Tipsy on her second class of caterer-subsidized wine, Emma blurts out something so mortifying that you can almost hear the needle scratching against the vinyl of reality. Not only does Emma’s story bring the lunch to a halt, it leaves Charlie—previously seen composing his potential groom’s speech as an encomium to his future wife’s kindness, grace, and sexual athleticism—with the coldest feet in Massachusetts. “I don’t want to talk about it,” he grumbles as he leads the staggering, semiconscious Emma up the spiral staircase of their apartment. To sleep, and perchance to dream of anything except his bedmate’s remembrance of things past.As it’s impossible to discuss The Drama without referring to Emma and Charlie’s own discussion, it’s better to just deal with the Elephant in the room. When Emma was 15, she explains, she planned and armed herself for a school shooting, going so far as to record an explanatory video on her laptop. The only reason she didn’t go through with it in the end was that some other local kid opened fire in a shopping mall first, putting the community on high alert and, it’s implied, stealing her thunder; the deafness in her ear was a result of target practice gone awry. This might be the first romantic comedy in history where a school shooting is used to set up a will-they-or-won’t-they.Borgli, whose previous features Sick of Myself and Dream Scenario were both made in a spirit of sadistic one-upmanship, knows he’s prodding a sensitive area; given his film’s carefully calibrated elements of emotional exploitation and cultural critique, an alternate title could be Trolling for Columbine. The reveal is worthy of the online marketing campaign positioning The Drama as the spring’s art-house conversation piece: This might be the first romantic comedy in history where a school shooting is used to set up a will-they-or-won’t-they. A bigger question is whether a movie structured around scenes of characters trying to talk things out has anything to say about its charged subject matter.Good satire has no requirement to be tasteful, or palatable. If laughter is indeed the best medicine, it’s because it doesn’t go down easily. Borgli’s reluctance to artificially sweeten his material would be admirable if the admixture were more potent overall. Despite being structured as the narrative equivalent of downward spiral, The Drama doesn’t generate much of an undertow as it goes along; the ethical murkiness coalesces atop shallow waters. Emma’s bombshell and the anxieties it catalyzes in the people around her—not just Charlie but Rachel, whose cousin was partially paralyzed in a mass shooting, and who angrily threatens to boycott the wedding—are vividly acted without being especially plausible; it’s as if the angst has been dropped onto the character’s head instead of bubbling up from within. Zendaya does what she can with the part, which is a lot; oscillating between Sphinx-like impassivity and abject sadness, she shows more range than usual. Charlie, meanwhile, isn’t even all that vividly acted. While Pattinson is a typically adroit seriocomic performer—willing and able to puncture his own penchant for intensity—his sweaty fulminating here feels distinctly like shtick. It doesn’t help that his performance is consistently punctuated by quasi-Surrealist inserts of massacres and flowers that also feel like shtick. These hallucinatory flourishes never seem to belong to the characters; they’re more transparently Borgli’s bids to place himself on the edgelord-visionary wavelength of Yorgos Lanthimos or Lars von Trier.Speaking of Lars—who remains the preeminent provoc-auteur of the last 40 years, both for the dexterity of his craft and the clockwork-Kubrickian precision of his sadism—he once scripted a pretty vicious indictment of all-American gun craziness called Dear Wendy (2005). Its tale of disaffected, retro-chic teenagers brazenly brandishing their firearms in the faces of parents and police officers wasn’t subtle, but it was funny (in the most Von Trierish touch, a juvenile delinquent’s favorite book is a copy of The Picture of Dorian Gray, from which the closing pages have been ripped out). There’s also a wry, malevolent sense of purpose in Toronto director Matt Johnson’s The Dirties (2013) about a high school cinephile who tries to get revenge on the cool kids who mocked his Tarantino-flavored AV-club project by chronicling his plans for a massacre; the mock-documentary style imbues the proceedings with mounting dread.Borgli splits the difference between pandering and pondering, which doesn’t quite add up to anything like analysis.The Drama gestures at its own sort of social commentary by having Charlie—whether earnestly or in an attempt to save face, or both—propose to Rachel and Mike that Emma’s fleeting moment of psychosis was a by-product of the country she lives in, but the observation rings even hollower than it’s supposed to. The flashback scenes of Emma’s swamp-adjacent adolescence in New Orleans might as well be taking place on another planet, but not in persuasive ways; Borgli doesn’t have the attention span to create a lived-in portrait of exurban teenage alienation. Instead, we get swift, loaded little snippets—a lonely bedroom, a hint of racialized bullying, parents as a noticeable structuring absence—that could be unreliable memories or the work of a filmmaker leaning on shorthand. The same goes for the young Emma’s shift to gun control activism as an attempt to exorcise her demons, and also her stated curiosity about the “aesthetics” of gun violence. The latter serves largely as an excuse for shots of Zendaya posed curled half-naked in bed around an assault rifle. This is not a real moment in Emma’s life; it’s a vision from the depths of Charlie’s anxious, though still horny, subconscious.Borgli likes to have his fetishism and skewer it too. At one point, Charlie flips through a gallery catalog of chicks-with-guns portraits pointedly titled Brainrot, as if placing the film’s not-so-hidden theme in plain sight. The point of such semiotic gamesmanship is to make the filmmaker look like he’s being smart about some larger, ambient stupidity; to suggest that The Drama’s own taboo tableaux are suitable for framing. Like his producer Ari Aster, whose Eddington similarly cultivated a brainrot, Borgli splits the difference between pandering and pondering, which doesn’t quite add up to anything like analysis.There was a smart idea at the center of Dream Scenario, which drew on Nicolas Cage’s recognizability in its fable about a man dealing unexpectedly with the perils of overnight overexposure. That film’s theme of cancellation surely bleeds into The Drama, which is pressurized by Emma’s fear that people—including Charlie—are talking behind her back. Both plotlines appear more personal in light of Borgli’s own confessional essay about having dated a 16-year-old when he was in his late twenties. The essay, titled “May-December,” was originally written in 2012 for the Norwegian magazine D2 but resurfaced on Reddit a week before The Drama’s release date. Like Emma, Borgli has a deeply off-putting backstory, one that he is nonetheless moved to share, to present to the public less in a spirit of confession than confrontation. The reaction to Borgli’s piece, which is adorned with unapologetic age-gap anecdotes (“She never laughed at my Seinfeld references,” he recalls of his 16-year-old inamorata) and shout-outs to Woody Allen, has threatened to surpass his film’s carefully prepared surprises. The sentiments of “May-December” manifest in The Drama at a molecular level in the supremely queasy sequence where Charlie, crashing out hard in the wake of Emma’s story, has visions of himself canoodling with her sullen 14-year-old incarnation (Jordyn Curet)—a sight gag that sticks in the collective craw. Borgli is eager to offend: He gives off all the signals of an outsider artist. But he’s pretty clearly an insider-outsider.Borgli is eager to offend: He gives off all the signals of an outsider artist. But he’s pretty clearly an insider-outsider, one who’s chuffed to be shooting in fancy environs with beautiful movie stars, and putting them through their paces in Von Trier–ish fashion. At one point, Charlie and Emma squirm through a rehearsal with a frustrated wedding photographer who keeps telling them to act more naturally when the joke is that their mutual grimaces are all too authentic.This timely but amorphous theme of “performativity” is, ostensibly, Borgli’s ace in the hole, or maybe the joker up his sleeve. If his mainstream breakthrough resembles a high-gloss romantic comedy, might it not be—he asks, wryly—in the spirit of subversion; of imitation as the insincerest form of flattery? Maybe, but for all the cringey altercations and painfully bruised facial features (and egos) that serve as The Drama’s collateral damage, it’s weirdly anodyne in the end; wherever it goes, it isn’t the proverbial there that is the destination of filmmakers spelunking for shock value.No less than marriage, dark comedy requires commitment, but Borgli traffics in opportunism. Charlie and Emma may make it, but this well-upholstered fainting couch of a movie seems unlikely to stand the test of time: It’ll crumple up and blow away before its paper anniversary has come and gone.This review originally misstated the city in which the film is set.

If the U.S. economy is headed off a cliff, better that we receive no warning in advance. That may not be the stated goal of the Trump administration, but, to borrow a term from the late MIT economist Paul Samuelson, that’s its “revealed preference.” The preference in this case is revealed by Russell “Project 2025” Vought’s determined efforts, as director of the White House budget office, to shut down two agencies created by the 2010 Dodd-Frank Financial Reform and Consumer Protection Act.Dodd-Frank was Congress’s attempt to head off another catastrophe like the 2008 financial crisis. It was the first major financial overhaul since the Great Depression, and despite commentators’ general feeling that it never went far enough, bankers hated it. Now those same bankers want President Trump to gut two significant parts of it, and he’s obliging—at the very moment that the economy is teetering like a spring breaker at Panama City Beach.The first of the two offending agencies is the Treasury Department’s Office of Financial Research, or OFR. This is a small office—it’s never employed many more than 200 people—dedicated to furnishing policymakers with the kind of detailed information they lacked during the late aughts about mostly unregulated “shadow banks,” such as mortgage companies, private equity, private credit, hedge funds, and the repurchase agreement market, or “repo.” This last provides overnight short-term loans to manage corporate cashflow. The Washington Monthly has called OFR “The Most Important Agency You’ve Never Heard Of.” Here’s a detailed summary of OFR’s accomplishments.Every year OFR sends an annual report to Congress that’s written in a typically cheerful tone that downplays financial risks. Still, the necessary information is there if you look for it. The latest report, covering the fiscal year that ended on September 30, noted that student loan defaults rose to 9 percent; that, at a time when private credit is stumbling, about 7 percent of the regulated banking system’s assets consist of loans to shadow banks; that hedge funds’ dependence on repo increased by 154 percent; and that growth in private repo (the Fed also has a repo operation) is off the charts. One conclusion I draw from this report is that I need to think a lot more about repo! It’s ballooned in recent years to $12 trillion, or more than one-third the size of the entire U.S. gross domestic product. “If large lenders suddenly decide not to roll over repo,” the report says, “borrowers, many of which are securities dealers, must quickly find other sources of financing or sell assets, which may transmit repo market stress to other markets.” To quote Harry Dean Stanton in the eponymous 1984 film: “A repo man spends his life getting into tense situations.”The financial world doesn’t appreciate seeing the federal government advertise its vulnerabilities, even sotto voce, and Republican Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, who between 2019 and 2024 collected nearly $2 million in campaign contributions from the securities and investment sector, introduced during that same time period three successive bills to abolish OFR, which he called “useless and unaccountable.” Last year’s “one big, beautiful” reconciliation bill initially zeroed out OFR’s budget, but the Senate parliamentarian ruled against that. So Vought took matters into his own hands. Having already halved OFR’s staff from 196 employees to 100, Treasury officials informed staff last month that 64 percent of the remainder will be laid off, according to reports this week by Government Executive and the Federal News Network. This was proposed in President Donald Trump’s 2026 budget, but Vought must have figured: Why wait for Congress? “As risks emerge in the financial system and cracks in the credit markets spread,” Senator Elizabeth Warren told Government Executive, “the Trump administration is gutting the office designed to evaluate financial risks in a giveaway to Wall Street. This is just the latest move by President Trump and his financial regulators to undermine financial stability and pave the way for another crash.”The other Dodd-Frank agency Vought is trying to shut off is the better-known  Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or CFPB. CFPB’s function is not merely informational but regulatory; it polices abuse of consumers by financial institutions, which is epidemic. Already Vought has reduced CFPB to what E. Tammy Kim, writing last month in The New Yorker, called “The Zombie Regulator.” (The coinage is from Seth Frotman, its former general counsel.) CFPB’s headquarters, Kim reported, “is now mostly empty,” despite repeated court interventions barring Vought from conducting mass firings. Last year, Vought tried to fire 90 percent of CFPB’s staff, but he was blocked last month by Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the D.C. District Court. Now Vought, who since firing CFPB Director Rohit Chopra has been the agency’s acting director, proposes to cut what’s left of the staff in half, from about 1,200 employees to 556 employees. The agency had 1,750 workers at the start of Trump’s administration.The CFPB’s primary purpose is to protect consumers, but when financial institutions get busy trying to lure retail customers in over their heads, that’s often a sign that the economy is headed for trouble. In 2008, mortgage companies, ravenous for home loans to package into securities, sold subprime mortgages to customers who quite obviously couldn’t afford them. The result was the worst recession since the Great Depression. At the moment, the financial industries perhaps most desperate to find new customers are private equity and crypto. Rather than examine how they got into this fix and take steps to prevent it from happening again, the Trump administration moved this week to “democratize” finance by proposing that 401(k)s be opened to investment in private equity and cryptocurrecies. The only democratization here is that of risk. If the rule is finalized, private equity and crypto will promise unimaginably high returns to nonwealthy investors who can’t weather a sharp downturn. When they go down, as I observed last September, the whole economy will go down with them.Mike Pierce, a former deputy assistant director at the CFPB who’s now executive director of the nonprofit Protect Borrowers, told me Thursday that he thinks the next financial crisis will stem from private credit, which is different from private equity but often practiced at the same firms. Private credit is in the middle right now of a sort of slow-motion bank run due partly to its exposure to software companies. With household debt right now at $18.8 trillion, or well over half of GDP, consumers are taking out “increasingly risky” loans, Pierce said, with companies “increasingly intertwined … with private credit.” He continued: “Whenever you see these boom and bust cycles, retail investors are always the last ones to get out before the bottom falls out.” To Pierce, the closest parallel to Trump’s proposed 401(k) rule isn’t the subprime crisis but the run-up to the 2000 dot-com bust, when a Super Bowl ad played Pied Piper for Pets.com 10 months before it went bust.The administration doesn’t publicize efforts to shut down OFR and CFPB because these agencies serve the interests of non-elites. If MAGA voters knew about OFR and CFPB, they might actually like them! Another reason to be silent is that you can’t sell these cuts as fiscally conservative. Closing these two agencies would have zero effect on the budget deficit because neither agency is funded by taxpayers; instead, OFR is funded by assessments on banks and CFPB is funded by the Fed (which in turn is funded by assessments on banks and by interest on securities). The only reason to shutter these agencies is because they get on the financial industry’s nerves. “The president is very focused on keeping the pieces of his coalition that are still willing to return his phone calls inside the tent,” Pierce told me. “These people have a line directly in to the senior staff of the White House. They ask for the world, and more often than not they get it.” What they want in this instance is to shut off any warning lights that might dare blink red about the economy. It’s bad for business, and if a bust is coming they’d prefer we suckers don’t know in advance. We may get crushed, but the big players will get bailed out, like always.This article has been updated for clarity.

The Supreme Court appears likely to strike down President Donald Trump’s executive order limiting birthright citizenship. At Wednesday’s oral arguments, the justices showed little interest in letting the president arbitrarily deny citizenship to untold numbers of Americans.But how the justices rule against Trump could matter almost as much as whether they do it. One dangerous possibility is that the court’s conservative members will open the door to future challenges, or otherwise weaken the prevailing interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s citizenship clause.Trump v. Barbara is, at its core, a very easy case. The citizenship clause states that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.” For the last 137 years, the consensus between Congress, the courts, and the executive branch was that anyone born on U.S. soil is automatically a U.S. citizen. The Supreme Court reached the same conclusion in the 1898 case United States v. Wong Kim Ark.There were narrow exceptions, of course. Children of foreign diplomats did not qualify, because their parents had diplomatic immunity and were therefore not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States. Neither did members of Native American tribal nations that retained their own sovereignty, though Congress later extended citizenship to all Native Americans by statute in 1924.Only under the second Trump administration has anyone seriously questioned this consensus or disputed the most natural reading of the text. I will not bother to recite once more the scholarly back-and-forth over the matter. Suffice it to say that the justices seemed largely unpersuaded on Wednesday by the administration’s claims that American citizenship actually derives from one’s innate “allegiance” at birth to their “domicile.”Ideally, the court would issue a 9–0 opinion that reaffirmed the citizenship clause’s plain meaning and confirm that the Fourteenth Amendment places questions of American citizenship beyond the scope of ordinary political debate. Unanimity is one of the court’s best tools for legitimizing its own rulings among the American public, as evidenced by the court’s unified front on desegregation in the 1950s and 1960s.That prospect appears unlikely here. At least two justices appear set to dissent from a potential ruling in the plaintiffs’ favor. Justice Samuel Alito, who is arguably the most consistently conservative member of the court, signaled his sympathy with the Trump administration throughout Wednesday’s oral arguments. At one point, he lamented that the nation had an “unusual situation here because our immigration laws have been ineffectively and, in some instances, unenthusiastically enforced by federal officials.”Justice Clarence Thomas also indicated during oral arguments that he could embrace a narrower version of the citizenship clause—one that would limit its scope to the historical circumstances in which it was enacted. Before they embraced random nonsense on allegiance and domiciles, the Trump administration initially justified the executive order by claiming that the clause only meant to extend citizenship to formerly enslaved people in the American South during Reconstruction.Overturning Dred Scott v. Sandford and securing African American citizenship was indeed one of the principal reasons for adopting the citizenship clause. As I’ve noted before, the Fourteenth Amendment’s drafters also made clear that they intended the clause’s egalitarian impact to be much more far-reaching than that.Thomas’s questions at oral argument, however, suggested that he would be willing to embrace the narrower view championed by the Trump administration. “How does the citizenship clause respond specifically to Dred Scott and answers, or changes, or corrects its answer as to citizenship?” he asked Solicitor General John Sauer, who happily claimed in response that the clause was only meant to address Dred Scott.This approach would not be out of character for Thomas. As always, he is outright hostile to precedent that he himself did not write. And he has hinted at similar views in the past. In the 2010 case McDonald v. Chicago, Thomas noted in passing that the citizenship clause “guaranteed the rights of citizenship in the United States and in the several States without regard to race.” That is a much narrower vision of the clause than the long-standing consensus.Even for the remaining seven justices, it is hard to trust that they will get things right even if they vote against the Trump administration. Justice Brett Kavanaugh, for example, has a recurring habit of writing concurring opinions that telegraph how he might decide future cases involving similar issues to the one before him. This is not unusual: More than a few justices occasionally write separately to say that they would like the court to visit or revisit a certain legal question, which signals lawyers and plaintiffs to raise it in future petitions.What sets Kavanaugh apart is his lack of what one might variously describe as guile, subtlety, or judicial propriety. When the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade in 2022, he wrote a lengthy concurring opinion where he drew a line against interstate travel bans to obtain the procedure. He then joined the court’s landmark Second Amendment decision that laid out a much more restrictive test on gun restrictions, only to opine separately on a wide range of restrictions that he would vote to uphold.Sometimes these concurring opinions have drastic consequences. In 2023, Kavanaugh joined Roberts and the court’s three liberals in a racial gerrymandering case that required Alabama to draw a second majority-Black congressional district. At the same time, however, he wrote a concurring opinion that questioned whether the Voting Rights Act could require “race-based redistricting” to remedy racial gerrymandering without violating the equal protection clause. The Supreme Court will likely answer “no,” with Kavanaugh’s help, when it decides Louisiana v. Callais later this term. That would defang what’s left of the Voting Rights Act and give states a freer hand to suppress minority electoral power in Congress.It is not hard to imagine Kavanaugh writing a concurring opinion in this case where he votes to strike down the executive order, then helpfully suggests other ways to attack birthright citizenship. In Wednesday’s oral arguments, for example, he asked whether the Fourteenth Amendment’s enforcement clause in Section 5 meant that Congress could legislate on birthright citizenship.“How much room do you think Section 5 gives, if any—and it may not be any—Congress to interpret the phrase ‘subject to the jurisdiction thereof’ or to define that?” Kavanaugh asked Sauer at one point. “Does it—is that relevant at all?” He then hinted at some alignment with the Trump administration on the wisdom of birthright citizenship in general.“Why should we be thinking about—even though, as a policy matter, I get the point—thinking about, ‘Gee, European countries don’t have this or most other countries, many other countries in the world don’t have this’?” Kavanaugh asked. He noted that he didn’t “[see] the relevance as a legal constitutional interpretive matter necessarily, although I understand it’s a very good point as a policy matter.” That phrasing is ominous for a justice who is so willing to forecast his views.Another risk is that the court will decide the case on statutory grounds instead of constitutional ones. Section 1401(a), which is also at issue in the case, repeats the language of the citizenship clause as part of a twentieth-century immigration law overhaul. In theory, the court could issue a narrow ruling that would invalidate Trump’s executive order for violating this statute while not addressing the constitutional question. Kavanaugh seemed to hint at this outcome during oral arguments when questioning Cecillia Wang, the ACLU national legal director who represented the plaintiffs. “Why would we address the constitutional issue given your argument on the statutory [question]?” he asked. “Our usual practice, as you’re well aware, of course, is to resolve things on statutory grounds.”Though this would be a victory for the plaintiffs, it would be a defeat for the country. The court would be punting the issue down the road while giving new ammunition to birthright citizenship’s opponents. It would also invite legislative campaigns to rewrite the relevant statute, which would bring additional litigation in the future and further destabilize the security of American citizenship.“I do think it would be prudent for the court to reaffirm its decision in Wong Kim Ark, where it’s a landmark decision about the definition of national citizenship in this country,” Wang told Kavanaugh. “I just think it would be prudent for the court to go ahead and reaffirm that. But, of course, we’re happy to take a win on any ground.” As a lawyer, her primary obligation is to her clients.The good news is that the narrower ruling on statutory grounds might not be feasible in this case. Part of the Trump administration’s argument is that Section 1401(a) and the citizenship clause share the same meaning. “If the court disagrees, obviously, we’d prefer an adverse ruling if the court’s going to do that on a statutory basis than a constitutional basis,” Sauer explained. But Justice Neil Gorsuch pressed Sauer to concede that he had ultimately “disavowed” this option.I’ve often noted when writing about the court that oral arguments can be an imperfect indicator of final outcomes. Justices change their minds from time to time. Majorities can shift and collapse as the hard work of writing an opinion unfolds. Dissents can gather enough support behind closed doors to become the court’s eventual word on the matter.Even assuming that there are six or seven votes to strike down the executive order, it is hard to sit comfortably. Perhaps the greatest risk of all is that the court will get too ambitious. The Supreme Court has a troubling habit in recent years of botching basic questions of constitutional interpretation, particularly where Trump is involved. 2024 saw two major cases where the court failed to apply the constitutional text in a straightforward manner. Instead, it has opted for policy-oriented or results-driven rulings.In Trump v. Anderson, for example, the Colorado Supreme Court had ruled that then-candidate Trump had been disqualified from a second presidential term by the Fourteenth Amendment’s disqualification clause. The Reconstruction-era provision forbade anyone who previously swore an oath to support the Constitution from holding public office if they “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against the United States or had “given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”When the case reached the justices, Trump and his allies advanced a host of reasons why the clause shouldn’t be applied to him: that he had neither been charged with nor convicted of insurrection, that the presidency was not among the specific offices listed in the clause, that his due-process rights had been violated by Colorado’s secretary of state, and so on.In a unanimous ruling, the court instead held that the disqualification clause can’t be enforced against federal officeholders by the states at all. This was an absurd decision on its face. States routinely enforce the federal Constitution’s age, residency, and (in the presidency’s case) natural-born citizenship requirements against candidates for federal office, and there is no evidence that the clause’s framers intended otherwise with the Fourteenth Amendment.The court’s unsigned opinion ultimately defended the ruling on pragmatic grounds. Allowing states to disqualify insurrectionist candidates, the justices wrote, could result in a “patchwork” electoral map with different states setting different rules. “Nothing in the Constitution requires that we endure such chaos—arriving at any time or different times, up to and perhaps beyond the inauguration,” they claimed. If only there were some sort of court—maybe even a supreme one—that could resolve these differences.Five of the six conservative justices (excluding Justice Amy Coney Barrett) then went even further and held that only Congress could enforce the disqualification clause through legislation, effectively ruling that federal courts could not apply it, either. There is no evidence that the amendment’s drafters intended for the clause to work this way. Indeed, the clause’s language that allows Congress to lift disqualifications by a two-thirds vote makes little sense if it can impose them with a simple majority.Since there was no chance that Republicans in Congress would pass such a law, the practical effect was to save Trump from disqualification and render the clause defunct for future federal candidates and officeholders despite the Fourteenth Amendment’s plain text. Political posturing and the court’s own prestige were foremost on the justices’ minds. “The Court has settled a politically charged issue in the volatile season of a Presidential election,” Barrett declared in her concurring opinion, adding that “all nine justices agree on the outcome of this case” and “that is the message that Americans should take home.”Things got worse a few months later when the court handed down Trump v. United States. There is no constitutional basis whatsoever for the notion that presidents enjoy absolute criminal immunity for their official acts. It is a blasphemous rejection of the basic ideals of American civic philosophy, and flies in the face of 250 years of constitutional practice and design.Chief Justice John Roberts and his conservative colleagues invented presidential immunity out of thin air. The decision is indefensible even on originalist grounds because the Constitution’s text makes no mention of presidential immunity, even as it explicitly grants limited forms of immunity to members of Congress in certain circumstances. The court’s unspoken but apparent goal was to reverse the post-Watergate dynamic of investigating presidential wrongdoing, which allegedly robbed the executive branch of its “energy.”Some critics have charged that these two rulings represent some sort of unspoken bargain with Trump, or perhaps a personal allegiance to him. A better explanation is that the court went beyond the Constitution’s text to resolve what it saw as pressing national issues along policy lines that the justices favored. Indeed, as I noted last spring, Trump’s executive order itself was likely intended to force the court to address birthright citizenship—and potentially weaken it by putting the justices’ own spin on it.An underappreciated aspect of the immunity ruling is that it is framed as a compromise of sorts. Even as Roberts lays out a complex rubric for presidential immunity that shields Trump from legal consequences, he rejects Trump’s equally nonsensical theory that presidents can only be charged with crimes if they’ve been impeached for them.“Trump asserts a far broader immunity than the limited one we have recognized,” Roberts wrote for the court, before detailing how Trump’s impeachment-first argument misread the constitutional text. “The [Justice Department] for its part takes a similarly broad view, contending that the President enjoys no immunity from criminal prosecution for any action,” he then added in the next section, as if the two arguments were on equal footing.In those cases, Trump’s extreme positions gave the court’s conservative majority the rhetorical space to frame its own extremism as moderation. Again, the most likely outcome of Trump v. Barbara after Wednesday’s oral arguments is that the court quashes Trump’s executive order across ideological lines. But the justices’ recent interpretive failures in other high-stakes, high-profile cases involving Trump mean that they have forfeited any assumption that they can properly and soberly read the Constitution’s most basic provisions. We’ll find out if they learned from past mistakes when the decision comes down by the end of June.

Since the launch of his political career more than a decade ago, President Donald Trump has always been sensitive to his approval ratings. His popularity in office has never topped 50 percent, a first for a modern president, but there has also consistently been a clear floor: Despite numerous scandals and unpopular political positions, Trump’s support has remained above 35 percent in most polls—and more often than not, above 40 percent—throughout his first and second terms.But as Trump’s war on Iran lumbers on, dragging down the stock market and hiking gas prices, several recent polls show Trump’s approval rating dropping to 35 percent or even lower. How much further could it fall? And how much could it aid Democrats’ efforts to retake Congress in November?Trump was elected in 2024 in part because of his promises to ease inflation and lower prices, but a recent poll by CNN found that Americans have a record low approval rating for his handling of the economy. Approval of his handling of immigration, which also helped propel him to the Oval Office for a second time, is also significantly lower than it was in January of last year.Much of this change is driven by increased disapproval from independent voters, particularly with regard to Iran. But Trump remains popular among his own party, which means that his minimum level of support will likely remain steady. Data journalist and pollster G. Elliott Morris estimates that the floor for the president’s approval ratings would likely hover in the 33 or 34 percent range. A recession could hurt his popularity further, or deciding to put American boots on the ground in the Middle East, but Morris doubted his approval ratings would drop much lower.“The only reason Donald Trump’s approval rating is not 30 percent today is because of Republicans, because there’s such polarization,” said Morris, who also runs the Strength In Numbers newsletter on Substack. Trump’s movement also remains strong: A March poll by The Economist/YouGov found that people self-identifying as MAGA supporters had reached a new high of 25 percent, including 63 percent of Republicans. Even as as Democrats intensify their criticism of the president, and independents sour on him, his Republican supporters remain stoutly loyal.These polling trends are in line with Trump’s first term, during which his average approval rating hovered in the high 30s and low 40s. The exception came at the very end of his term, when his approval hit a record low in the wake of the January 6 siege on the Capitol. A Pew Research Center poll found that only 29 percent of Americans approved of the job he was doing; that low-water mark was primarily precipitated by a drop in support among Republicans (which ultimately proved temporary).Trump is not unique in receiving staunch backing from his party. For the most part, his approval among Republicans has hovered between 80 and 90 percent, which is similar to Democrats’ support of Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden during their time in office, Morris noted.Still, Tim Malloy, an analyst for the Quinnipiac University poll, noted that Trump’s recent record low approval rating on the economy is a “very big red flag,” considering his historic strength on the issue. But Malloy also said that the president’s approval has consistently “bounced around.” Quinnipiac polling has shown that Trump’s approval rating among registered voters has generally hovered between 35 and 45 percent throughout his first term and thus far in his second, with few exceptions.Similarly to the January 2021 Pew poll’s finding, Trump’s lowest approval recorded by Quinnipiac—33 percent—came the week after the January 6 insurrection. (Quinnipiac also recorded a 33 percent approval rate in a poll in early August of 2017, released shortly after the Senate unsuccessfully attempted to overturn the Affordable Care Act.) Trump’s highest rating, 46 percent, came at the very beginning of his second term in January 2025.Democrats could in theory capitalize on Trump’s unpopularity in the upcoming midterm elections, when control of Congress is at stake. The party is favored to win back the House of Representatives, and has a shot at the Senate. And yet, despite Trump’s unpopularity, Democrats may be underperforming among Trump-skeptical voters. When voters are asked what party they would support on a generic ballot, Democrats only have a plus 6 margin, according to a March poll by Strength In Numbers/Verasight.Morris said that Trump’s unpopularity is due in large part to “soft disapprovers”: voters who are skeptical of Trump, yet generally vote for Republicans. But these voters—who may disapprove of the war against Iran, or Trump’s immigration policies, or rising gas prices—don’t necessarily see Democrats as a viable option.“Those people would say, if you ask them, ‘Hey, how do you like the presidency from the guy that’s, like, increasing your oil prices and maybe sending your son to war?’ And they’d be like, ‘Oh, yeah, I don’t like that,’” explained Morris. “But then you ask them who they’ll vote for, it’s like, ‘Well, I typically vote for Republicans, so I’ll probably vote for Republicans downballot, as long as their name is not Donald J. Trump.’”Some recent polling has shown that the Democratic Party has even less support among voters than Trump. A March NBC News survey found that only 30 percent of registered voters say they have positive feelings about Democrats. So even if Trump is losing ground among Republican skeptics and independents, don’t expect “soft disapprovers” to vote for Democrats in the upcoming midterms.“What we know about American political psychology is that your partisan label is the most powerful predictor of how you vote, even when general conditions are turning against the president,” said Morris.

Nate Bear Don Not Panic In his televised address last night Trump said the US was going to continuing attacking Iran for another two or three weeks and would bomb the country “back to the Stone Ages, where they belong.” More on that phrase later. But first a bit on the economics. Promising to keep […]