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Markets Are In Denial About the War in Iran
Something strange is happening in the global economy. The Strait of Hormuz—the single most important body of water on earth for global energy markets, and markets for lots of other commodities too—has been closed for nearly a month as the U.S. and Israel continue their illegal war of choice in Iran. There are few signs that it will reopen anytime soon. Some tankers are managing to trickle through. Saudi Arabia has rerouted some crude oil through its pipeline to the Red Sea. Still, an estimated 10 million barrels of a day, conservatively speaking, are trapped. Declining storage space means that Gulf oil producers are going through the onerous process of stopping drilling at wells that likely won’t be able to start pumping again for months if and when the strait becomes navigable. A single attack on Qatar’s gas facilities knocked out a whopping 17 percent of liquefied natural gas export capacities. Analysts now predict that a gas supply crisis that has so far been most acutely felt in Asia could soon spread to Europe. Poorer countries face not just higher prices but catastrophic shortages of (among other substances) oil, gas, and fertilizers critical to food production. So far, Russia has been one of the main beneficiaries of this crisis; the U.S. moved to ease sanctions on its oil earlier this month. This week, Ukrainian attacks on Russia’s oil infrastructure took out at least 40 percent of its oil export capacity.An oil researcher I spoke to, Rory Johnston, described the situation as “utter pandemonium.” On social media, energy investor Eric Nuttall put it even more starkly: “This is the worst energy crisis of our lifetimes, well beyond what any sober mind could have envisioned, with no end in sight.”To date, however, markets have been weirdly chill. As I wrote on Thursday, there’s a growing divide between seemingly obvious, formidable material realities and the oddly low “paper price” of oil that Trump has somewhat successfully tried to ratchet down with fake news. Karim Faraz, the director of energy advisory for S&P Global, described the mood on Wednesday in Houston at the Super Bowl of energy conferences, CERAWeek, as one of “irrational optimism.” As Faraz wrote on X, “The alternative is so daunting to think about, with consequences so grave, that many are choosing optimism even without a solid foundation.” Bloomberg’s Joe Weisenthal has similarly observed an eerie sanguinity. On Thursday afternoon, he noted that the places where one might expect to see signs of turmoil, like equity markets, are considerably more serene than they were after Trump announced his Liberation Day tariffs a year ago. The S&P 500 hasn’t dipped by more than 2 percent in a single trading day all month.Markets, in other words, seem to be treating the war in Iran as they do climate change. Despite all evidence to the contrary, they’re regarding a transformative crisis as a passing fad. Global warming has lately fueled the crushing heat wave that’s baked most of North America this month and worsened extreme weather events that are prompting insurers to abandon some of the world’s hottest real estate markets, such as Miami. Markets don’t seem to care. Meanwhile, the top executives gathered at CERAWeek are perfectly willing to talk about the challenges posed by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. On Tuesday, for instance, ConocoPhillips CEO Ryan Lance said onstage that “it’s a bit unstable” in the Middle East and that his company had been “pleading with the Trump administration to provide extra protection for energy assets in Qatar.” As someone who’s had to sit, at climate conferences, through a few too many cool-headed assurances by titans of industry claiming to have things under control, I’m finding executives’ tones of measured concern a bit familiar. This is an urgent and pressing issue that demands the global community work together to find real solutions, together.It is also, philosopher Pierre Charbonnier notes, “arguably the largest fossil fuel capital annihilation event in history.” Give it a few more days, and fossil fuel companies may start pledging to achieve Net-Zero Capital Annihilation by the end of the month. Predictably, the Trump administration has lurched into full-on public denial. Trump suggested Thursday that “we don’t need” the Strait of Hormuz. (We do.) Energy Secretary Chris Wright said the same day that the crisis would be “short term.” (It’s been almost a month.) He also said that prices aren’t yet driving meaningful reductions in fossil fuel usage. JP Morgan’s oil analysts preemptively disagreed with his assessment last week, writing that if Brent crude prices average out at $100 for March, the “price effect alone” would cut global demand “by about 1 million barrels per day in April—before accounting for additional losses from grounded flights in the Middle East and outright physical shortages.” The White House may not be as fully committed to denying the consequences of this crisis as it is to denying climate change. Although it won’t admit the possibility outright, it’s reportedly at least looking into what effect $200 per barrel oil could have on the economy. Another key difference between the Iran war and climate change, of course, is that, in the war, nobody really has any idea what’s going to happen. The NASDAQ Composite ended Thursday down more than 2 percent. Trump promptly announced on Truth Social that the U.S. would put off striking Iranian energy facilities for another 10 days, until April 6. Stock market index futures consequently ticked back up, and oil prices eased down. That oil markets—typically more reality-based than the Trump administration—still don’t seem to have fully absorbed this crisis doesn’t bode well for the many, many other calamities this century no doubt has in store. No one is steering this ship.
Unhappy Anniversary: One Year Since Trump’s Brutish Assault on History
On March 27, 2025, President Trump issued Executive Order 14253, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” The order provided a template for egregious assaults by the White House on the humanities, arts, higher education generally, and particularly on history. Trump has declared war on history itself, on the freedom of historians to help Americans to learn from our past. For every American who cares about the power of historical understanding to face and potentially heal divisions, about honesty in our memorials, or a host of other matters, March 27 represents the opening attack in what is already a long war with no discernible end.The order accuses today’s historians of abandoning “objective facts,” of promoting a “divisive race-centered ideology,” and of resisting America’s “unparalleled legacy … of advancing human happiness.” Whether fifth graders, high schoolers, or educated adult readers, most Americans know that the executive order’s claims about the “sanity” of the historical professions are absurd. To write and teach about difference and conflict is not “divisive”; it is no more possible to heal our nation’s divisions without understanding them than it would be possible to cure an illness without revealing one’s medical history to a physician. But despite their rhetoric, Trump and his minions are less interested in healing and unity than in propaganda and indoctrination. Recently, at a closed White House event conveniently bereft of professional historians, one of the soldiers in Trump’s hijacking of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence described the administration’s approach as “a matter of history, not politics.” We agree with those principles, so let’s get the history right. As we approach the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, our continued independence requires that we understand what has happened since 1776 (and before) and why.We might start with institutions whose missions and integrity are embodied in legislation passed by Congress: the Smithsonian Institution, the National Park Service, the National Archives, the Library of Congress, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, or NEH. These agencies have enjoyed widespread nonpartisan reputations among broad swaths of the American public, and even internationally. Historians, as well as the publics they serve, often disagree on interpretation; that is what we do. But we agree on standards and the imperative of unflinching honesty.The Trump administration has tarred the experienced professionals at these agencies with its all-purpose epithet “woke.” These historians are not, however, spreading “narratives that portray American and Western values as inherently harmful and oppressive.” To require the Smithsonian, for example, to consult with a White House devoted to the dissemination of “alternative facts” is tantamount to Thomas Jefferson being ordered to consult with King George III of Great Britain on how to craft the Declaration of Independence. At the NEH, the administration’s attack dogs, lacking a single qualification relating to the agency’s mission, resorted to using an artificial intelligence program to root out “DEI” because, according to their own sworn depositions, they had no clue what ideas the March 27 executive order actually proscribed. As historians, we invite all Americans to join in defending the work of our colleagues in federal agencies entrusted with understanding and disseminating the nation’s past honestly and transparently.As a profession and as citizens, historians must fight with our meager but nevertheless potent weapons. Ours is a beautiful and ancient craft, essential for any society’s self-understanding. Equipped with modern methods and sources, we adhere to time-tested ethical standards that no authoritarian should be allowed to profane. We have our immoral scoundrels and some inscrutable writers, but they are vastly outnumbered by trained professionals obsessed by sacred strictures of practice. Our gospels are research, evidence, clarity of expression, interpretive originality, and literary beauty. We are storytellers armed with facts; we sometimes fly like birds, but we always land on countless perches of reality. Among the most important perches are the exhibitions at our “national” sites of memory. Democracy and prosperity require free inquiry. The barbarians at our nation’s gates fear the open, curious minds inspired in universities and in public schools, as well as museums and parks. If the United States survives another century or so, how might these supposed custodians of the public trust, driven by power, greed, and the urge to destroy liberalism, be portrayed by our successors? Will they be celebrated in perplexing, pathetic gardens of heroes (monuments to their insecurity) and gigantic arches overshadowing monuments to soldiers who gave their lives for national survival? Will they be remembered in a single name chiseled all over government buildings? Or will they leave a path of ruins until finally they are stopped by democratic politics? Will the Smithsonian museums be relics of a failed American experiment, the new world’s Roman Forum, pored over by the curious and the prurient, or the revived jewels of a new twenty-second-century democracy? Will national historic parks tell troubled truths about our past as well as inspire awe? If left to Trumpist architects seeking to control American history, our fate could end up fulfilling the vision of Trump’s “1776 Commission” curriculum, which exhorts teachers to abandon critical thinking and considers patriotic education to be a matter of: “Learn it, wonder at it, love it, and teach so your students will too.” The executive order seeks to compel an Orwellian version of “truth and sanity,” in which “Saving our Smithsonian” requires museums to “remove improper ideology” or lose their federal “appropriations.” In America we argue about ideology, as well as what is ideology itself. When lies by smug propagandists become official truths, democratic culture dies. Trumpists seek to roll back what they loathe about the Enlightenment itself—the free mind seeking old and new truths through reason and under rule of law. Recall Immanuel Kant’s simple answer to “What is Enlightenment?” in 1784: “Dare to know!” he proclaimed. We need heightened forms of daring to save the practice of history in American public culture.
Trump Is Now Bribing Energy Companies With Your Taxpayer Dollars
This week, the Trump administration announced that, after having lost every single court case over its attempt to halt East Coast offshore wind projects, it will now simply pay one of the companies roughly $1 billion to abandon ship. Crucially, however, it is not just paying France’s TotalEnergies to back off—the company will now invest in oil and gas development in Texas instead. On its face, this would appear to be a pretty bonkers plan. “The deal is an extraordinary transfer of taxpayer dollars to a foreign company for the purposes of boosting the production of fossil fuels, a main driver of climate change, while throttling offshore wind power,” The New York Times’ Maxine Joselow and Brad Plumer wrote earlier this week. “It comes as the war in the Middle East has shocked global oil markets, prompting concerns about energy supplies.”So let’s break this down into what each party gets out of it.It’s not hard to see why TotalEnergies decided to take the deal. Offshore wind is extremely expensive to build, and delays and uncertainty—you know, of the sort the Trump administration has cultivated by issuing random stop-work orders—can easily make it a bad investment. Joselow and Plumer quote CEO Patrick Pouyanné as saying that they’ll still invest in renewable energy—but in the United States, specifically, “offshore wind is too expensive from our point of view.”Then there’s the Trump administration. As I wrote in early February, there was always not just a risk but a high probability that the administration’s five-nil courtroom defeat on offshore wind would goad Trump and his underlings rather than discourage them. The president and MAGA followers have a particular hatred for offshore wind (even as some of the MAGA crowd start to embrace solar). So as long as offshore wind projects are being shuttered, they can conceivably claim some kind of victory. Of course, being seen to fork over $1 billion in taxpayer money for this victory, after failing in court, could somewhat blunt the effect, making the administration appear weak and wasteful.But the administration has taken pains to present the deal as doing more than saving face. “[Interior Secretary Doug] Burgum also cited national security as one of the factors motivating the agreement,” the Houston Chronicle’s Rachel Nostrant reported. “Wind turbines, even those offshore the U.S., are potential targets for drone strikes, Burgum said.” (If this was the argument featured in the classified Defense Department report that was the basis for the Trump administration’s original pause on the projects, you can sort of see why the judges weren’t convinced.)Then there’s the matter of what else that $1 billion is buying: not just less wind power for New York and North Carolina but more oil and gas development for Texas. The North Carolina project was relatively small, projected to be able to power “around 300,000 homes and businesses starting in the early 2030s,” according to the Times. The New York one was larger, projected to power more than a million such buildings in both New York and neighboring New Jersey.The administration seems willing to screw over some people in these states while directing money to Texas instead. And that’s not a huge surprise: As I noted last week, the administration is also softening its stance on solar projects in a way that could benefit Texas—and its crusade against offshore wind or wind turbines on federal lands doesn’t hurt Texas at all, given that Texas’s substantial wind capacity is onshore, and on private lands.The money TotalEnergies is redirecting to Texas, from the limited details available right now, probably will benefit some people there, or at least one company. “One of the projects receiving the reallocated funds will be Rio Grande LNG,” the Chronicle reported, “a Brownsville natural gas export facility owned by Houston-based NextDecade.” Just last week, news broke that a project to expand Rio Grande LNG was going ahead. The money TotalEnergies is redirecting to Texas is also supposed to go to “conventional oil” development in the Gulf and shale gas.None of this is likely to put a dent in the energy crisis triggered by Trump’s war on Iran. Rio Grande LNG’s new project—a so-called fourth “train,” which lets the facility increase output—isn’t projected to be completed until 2030. Also worth mentioning: Right now, shale gas in the Permian Basin is so abundant that it frequently hits negative prices, and producers burn off the gas instead, rather than paying someone to take it—simply dumping more methane into the atmosphere. Paying someone to develop more natural gas in this region isn’t an obvious win for energy market efficiency.While this sort of deal—attack, lose, and then bribe someone to do what you want—may seem counterintuitive, particularly for an administration that championed frugality early last year, it does seem to be in keeping with the Trump administration’s negotiating strategy of late. Bombing Iran, then being caught unprepared by its control of the Strait of Hormuz, and then handing it a $14 billion windfall in eased sanctions? There are certain similarities, these days, between the administration’s foreign and domestic policy.Stat of the Week$3.59 billionThat’s the total amount spent building data centers last year, which—for the first time—makes it more than the amount spent building offices.What I’m ReadingPetromasculinity Is Eating Itself and Destroying Us AllClimate journalist Amy Westervelt pens a thoughtful essay about the oil industry, war, and authoritarianism—but also about the assumption that oil is needed for the good life: A decade or so ago I was trawling through the archive of Standard Oil of California’s (now Chevron’s) shareholder magazines and was struck by how many of them during the 1970s had been dominated by anxiety and fear—not over OPEC or access to Arab oil, but over how good Americans had gotten at conservation and efficiency. How quickly people had realized they didn’t actually need to drive so much or have such big cars or leave the lights on or crank the air-conditioning. They had realized that moderating a little bit even made their lives better sometimes—walking or biking instead of driving, being in community with their neighbors on the bus or train, saving money on electric bills. In the early 1980s, as production increased and the embargo lifted, oil executives were in an outright panic. Americans didn’t seem to be in a rush to let their new lifestyles go, what was an oil company to do? The answer was increase production, tank the price of oil to a point where people would start over-consuming again, and take the short-term financial hit in exchange for long-term gain.Read Amy Westervelt’s full newsletter at Drilled.This article first appeared in Life in a Warming World, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Heather Souvaine Horn. Sign up here.
Transcript: How Democrats Can Defeat Trump’s Identity Politics
This is a lightly edited transcript of the March 26 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.Perry Bacon: Good afternoon, everybody. I’m Perry Bacon, host of Right Now at The New Republic. I’m honored to be joined by Justin Gest. He’s a professor of policy and government at George Mason University. Justin, welcome.Justin Gest: Thanks so much, Perry. It’s great to be with you.Bacon: Justin is an author and professor who has written a number of books I want to get into, but he wrote a piece in September that I happened to catch and really want to talk about. It was part of a symposium by the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, which works on economic policies to help the working class. The piece is titled “Populist Voters Feel a Sense of Loss That Is Reshaping Democracies Around the World.” Justin and some fellow academics studied not only the U.S. but also 19 countries in Europe, really digging into the populist movement and where the appeal of populist parties comes from. I want to get into this because I think there are lessons for what we’re dealing with here in America. Let me start with this: you have an idea in the piece called “nostalgic deprivation.” Explain to people what that means.Gest: Sure, great question. Nostalgic deprivation is really about feelings of loss—a sense that you, your family, and people like you have lost wealth over the years. You may have lost social standing and status: how important you feel. You may have lost political power: how capable you feel of impacting change in your community or your country. This is something I studied very closely between 2012 and 2014, in the run-up to Trump’s first election victory here in the United States, but also in the run-up to the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom, where they decided to separate from the European Union. Both of those elections were really driven by white working-class voters who swung from the left—or from not voting at all—to the right-wing parties in their respective countries. I wanted to understand what was driving this shift in perceptions and in politics. And what I really came up with, from a lot of interviews, was this sense of loss. In this article and a number of other works I’ve written, I went ahead and tested it statistically with public opinion data. But ultimately what it comes down to is a feeling that you’re being left behind.Bacon: This sense of loss is not purely financial—talk about that. It’s not just that you lost your job, and it correlates with non-college-educated voters, but it’s not just about economics.Gest: No, it’s not purely a sense of economic loss. To be sure, many people do feel that they, their families, and people like them have lost a source of wealth or financial stability that they once had years before. The question we use in our public opinion polling to understand this is: how wealthy are people like you today? We give them a 10-point scale, and then we ask: how wealthy were people like you 25 years ago? We simply subtract the difference between where they are today and where they were 25 years ago to determine whether they feel a sense of deprivation—a sense of loss from the past. But we do precisely the same thing when it comes to social standing and political power. For political power, we ask: how powerful do you think you are today, and how powerful were people like you 25 years ago? The reason we ask about “people like you,” by the way, is that some people were children 25 years ago—they weren’t around. So we want to make sure we capture everybody. But ultimately it is a sense of collective loss of power or wealth.For social standing, it’s a little more interesting, because we give people a diagram that looks like a bullseye—like a dartboard, with concentric circles. We tell people that this is a model of society: the people on the outer rings are peripheral, they matter less in their societies, and the people in the center are the core, the center of their societies. Where would you place yourself today, and where would you place people like you 25 years ago? We asked this first in the United States and the U.K., as I mentioned—but in the study you read, we look at 19 European countries beyond the U.S. and Britain. So we’re studying this more broadly.Bacon: To be very reductive: which of the three factors drives decline the most—power, wealth, or social status—when it comes to predicting support for the far right or the far left? Is one more important, or more correlated with change, than the others?Gest: They’re all correlated. We see different trends depending on how you slice the data—by country, by income class, by region, by whether people are rural or urban. But all three are correlated with far-right voting and populist voting more broadly. And actually, that’s a really important point: they’re not just correlated with far-right voting, they’re also correlated with far-left voting. So basically we see a rush to the fringes of our political systems. It’s just that the far right has far more support—not only in the United States but also across Europe. And those three phenomena are clearly correlated with each other; they just have different effects in different places.Perry Bacon: So we’re talking about the United States and a lot of countries in Europe—all of which have experienced significant globalization and immigration. Speaking broadly, how important are those two factors?Justin Gest: I think those are really the most essential ways of understanding our politics today—it really dates back to the movement away from an industrial manufacturing economy into a more service-driven, high-technology economy, which took place across high-income countries beginning basically in the 1970s. And during that period, where we see the shift of this massive economic transformation with a lot of people displaced, is exactly the same time when we also see great demographic shifts because of the entry of immigrants.A country like the United States basically had a closed-door policy—with a few exceptions—between the 1920s and the late 1960s, when immigration reform was passed by Congress. So there wasn’t a whole lot of immigration coming into the country for decades. Beginning in the late 1960s, we opened the doors to more people coming in, and that’s when the population of the country began to embrace a lot more people of Latin origins and people of more Asian origins as well. We went from a country that had about 4 percent foreign-born to now close to 15 percent foreign-born today. And so that great demographic transformation—we’re now on our way to a majority-minority milestone where white, non-Hispanic European-origin Americans will cease to make up the majority of the country in about 20 years. That milestone, and the transformation that leads up to it, takes place at precisely the same time as this big economic change.Bacon: So these things are happening at once—economic change and demographic change—and they’re not necessarily causing each other, right? They’re just happening simultaneously. The economic change is mainly about technology and so on, right?Gest: They do have some relationship. Because while you have new technology that is automating things and mechanizing processes that were previously manual, you also have a shift offshore: more open trade regimes opening the borders of other countries to foreign investment, which led to the offshoring of a lot of American and European industry. At the same time, the same forces that opened those borders also opened them for people to move. And so people were moving into countries like the United States and Europe, which had a voracious appetite for labor in the service sector. These countries were getting wealthier, they had needs they previously didn’t have, and immigrants filled a lot of those needs. So these phenomena are separate, but also in many ways tied to the same globalization dynamic of the late twentieth century.Bacon: So what interested me about this article is that we’ve now moved to a stage where the narrative—particularly on the center-left, which is more where The New Republic sits—is that Trump won because inflation was high, and now that he’s in charge of the economy, Democrats are going to do better. And particularly, Democrats should focus on so-called affordability. In other words, we’re telling politics through this economic story. But your argument would say that we should not assume inflation and affordability are the whole of politics.Gest: Certainly not. If you look at the irony of all this—and it shows you how short our news cycles are—when Donald Trump was first elected in 2016, the narrative was that it was all culture-war-driven: that he was in office because of a backlash against immigration, driven by white identity politics seeking to reassert supremacy over the United States. And now that’s ignored, even though the Trump administration has really doubled down on a lot of these identity politics and culture-war issues—everything from DEI to the funding of universities, nonprofits, Voice of America, USAID, and so on. These things are all connected. So I think the lesson that a lot of people on the center-left have taken away is that they feel they have a better chance of winning over independents and swing voters if they’re not focusing on divisive culture-war issues and are instead trying to rally people around issues like affordability.Bacon: I guess what I’m getting at is that people are still going to consider these status and social issues. They’re still in their minds, right? This isn’t going to go away.Gest: No, no way. This stuff is hardwired. People feel a sense of loss that is really powerful and pervasive. And the other thing that’s important to emphasize, Perry, is we can’t assume that this loss is something we can objectively identify. Scholars have done research on people’s incomes, and in many cases respondents report feeling a sense of economic loss even though they’re actually making more money.And so it’s really perceptual—it’s in the eye of the beholder, a subjective sense of status deprivation, a subjective sense of loss. And that is something that—you can make people richer, you can pay them better, you can facilitate more social services to ease the transition into new economies or higher costs of living, and sometimes people still don’t feel it. That was one of the challenges facing the Biden administration when they were in power. And now those same forces are facing Trump: even when people are making more money, sometimes they don’t feel any richer and feel like they’re barely able to get by.Bacon: Now, since you mentioned Brexit and Trump winning: when the group that feels like it’s losing social status or respect sees its candidate or cause win, does that change anything? Do they feel more empowered? Does it reduce the sense of loss? Is that something you’ve been able to study?Gest: I haven’t studied it, so I can’t tell you—I’m of two minds. I do think that for people who felt a sense of lost social standing or power, particularly white working-class people, Trump has made them feel more centered. And I think a lot of this is rhetorically driven—not by delivering specific policy goals that people were desperately seeking over the years, but mostly through rhetoric. The Trump administration has proven to be masters of symbolism and symbolic politics. And that’s what a lot of culture-war politics is, politically speaking, because often you can’t legislate social status—at least not in a way that wouldn’t violate the Constitution. So my prior would be that there probably has been some remedy for them. But I don’t know—we haven’t studied it, and that’s just me speculating.Bacon: You’ve used the phrase “white working class” a couple of times. Do we have any sense of how immigrants in Europe, or African Americans, Asians, or Latinos in the U.S., experience this? Do they feel the status loss less acutely because they weren’t the high-status group to begin with? Is that the broad conclusion?Gest: Yeah. A lot of people who are of immigrant origin feel deeply indebted to their countries of destination, particularly the first generation. They feel very grateful—the memories of their countries of origin and the challenges they faced there are really fresh in their minds. And the amount of gratitude that I’ve observed in studying immigration over the decades has been really remarkable. It’s a powerful sentiment—as powerful as nostalgia. And you do see that among immigrant populations, particularly the first generation, the generation that came over. They remember what the home country was like. Many of them still think they might go back one day.Now, once you start talking about second and third generations, sentiments change, because those folks are born in the United States, born in Britain, born in France, and the sense of indebtedness turns into a sense of entitlement. They’re equal citizens—why should I feel grateful toward my country? I’m entitled to these rights.Bacon: In a certain sense they belong here.Gest: Absolutely. So it’s a different phenomenon when people are of foreign origin. But even those second-generation folks hear the stories from their parents, and I think that instills a sense of appreciation as well. And I think they know how bad it has been before.Bacon: Let me come to your conclusion here, because I thought this was very well said. You write: “For mainstream political parties, the power of subjective feelings associated with fear, loss, and exclusion create a dilemma. Technocratic solutions, policy proposals, and GDP growth alone will not restore trust among these voters. Instead, what is needed is a re-engagement with the emotional fabric of democratic life and an understanding that people vote not just with their wallets or their ideologies, but also with their sense of belonging.” That’s well said. But what does it look like in real life? I agree with you, I think—but I want to hear what that looks like on the ground. What does a sense of belonging actually look like?Gest: I think it means that people on the left have to engage in symbolic politics too. They have to be conscious of people’s desire to revere their—Bacon: —basically you’re saying center-left and center-right parties. You’re really critiquing establishment parties, not just the left one. In the U.S., that’s the left one, but in Europe—Labour and the Tories are both falling apart, right? Sorry, go on.Gest: Yes, totally. And that’s true across Europe—it’s not just Labour and the Tories in Britain. It’s the Republicans in France, it’s the Socialists in France. Center-right and center-left parties are absolutely getting decimated, just picked apart—death by a thousand cuts. And I think what this shows is that they need to engage in the politics of symbolism as well. People want their heritage to be revered. They want a sense of dignity. They want to be told that they matter. And I think for a long time, a lot of voters have believed that they’ve simply been drifting to the periphery.And so what that means, I think, is engaging that imagination and cultivating a sense of belonging, social cohesion, and collectiveness across our countries. And that’s hard right now, because the forces that are really driving politics are divisive—basically making people think it’s every man for himself. In an increasingly atomized society, that is really treacherous for solving collective action problems, redistributing wealth, redistributing power. It’s really challenging.And in a lot of ways, I always liken these kinds of political issues to a Chinese finger trap. The harder you pull to try to resist these forces, the tighter the grip on your fingers. And the only way to escape a Chinese finger trap is to embrace those forces—to allow your fingers to enter the trap in order for it to loosen so you can exit. And in many ways, I think that’s a metaphor we can use in our politics more broadly.Bacon: Let me put it very reductively. I don’t want the Confederate monuments to stay up—I think we’re right to pull them down. But I think you’re saying we need to put something else in their place. What is that? I don’t know what the symbol is—the symbol that says we’re not racist anymore, but we’re multiracial and pluralistic. What does that look like? Do you have a sense of what you build instead?Gest: It’s an interesting question. My general thought on monument questions is that we should actually be reorienting people’s attention. Look, we’re going to disagree about monuments—but I think what we both really agree on is: blank, healthcare, the cost of housing. Monument politics just takes our eyes off the ball. That’s where we get tangled up, because no one wins from these monument questions.Bacon: I guess I was asking: is there a monument we can all agree on? That’s what I’m getting at. Is there something—should the airport have something, or is there something we all agree about that we can look forward to?Gest: I think there are a lot of things we can agree about. I’ll come to that in one second, Perry—but let me just say one thing about monuments, because there’s an interesting anecdote from my own life. I was very young, in my early twenties, and I was in Germany, and I happened to stumble upon an immense amphitheater in Nuremberg. I started looking into what it was, and it was a Nazi amphitheater—built by Hitler to give grand speeches in Bavaria. After the war, he presumably had hoped he would still be in power and could give grand addresses from this amphitheater. And I was stunned that it still existed 70 years later.What was remarkable was that the German government’s approach was not to tear down this monument to Nazism. It was to let it rot. They literally let it rot—it was crumbling, covered in weeds, basically a monument to something that was extinct, left in disrepair, like the ideology behind it. And so it’s an interesting approach to the question of monuments.In terms of what holds us together: there are many things that I think are core to the American creed, to who we are as a country, that are just too easily glossed over. Almost every single person in this country today has foreign origins—everyone can trace it back. Even if they’re Native American, they’re likely of mixed heritage, with some European, Latin, Asian, or African heritage they can point to. Everyone has that in common. And almost everyone in the United States—or their ancestors—came here with some kind of dream they were chasing, a dream that their descendants continue to chase today. And as part of that dream, I think everyone also identifies with a struggle. Everyone can understand this—and this is not some kind of vulnerability Olympics where we compare who’s had it harder. The point is that we’ve all struggled in some kind of way, and we can bond over those things and identify America as that struggle, America as the work it takes.Teddy Roosevelt—who was a eugenicist, not an innocent figure in these kinds of identity politics debates—used to say that America was really the labor that you put into it: that if someone were to homestead and toil in the dirt of the country to establish and settle land, that made them American enough for him. This was coming from a thoroughgoing racist. But the idea was that you earned your way into American heritage.And in many ways, I think of it a little like the way American Express treats its members. Everyone is an equal member—you all have the right to charge expenses to your card. But on each card there’s a little line that says “member since.” And in a lot of ways, that’s what America is. Some of us have really recent dates of arrival—my father was a refugee in the middle of the twentieth century. Other people go back to the sixteenth hundreds. I was just in Jamestown on a field trip with my daughter, and they were learning about the very first American settlers and their encounters with Native Americans—and those folks were here a great deal longer than my family. Does that make them any more American than me? No. But it makes that heritage something they can talk about. We’re just different—we all come together and can break bread. And I think a lot of our politics today fails to honor those things that hold us in common and that ultimately bring us together.Bacon: I’ll finish with another idea here that I liked. You write about policies that might help deal with globalization, and particularly that “these policies must also be laden with meaning. They must recognize that identity, history, and belonging are not just cultural touchstones—they are political forces as well.” So it’s a politics of recognition. I want to stop there and ask two things. First, I think “identity” has become a negative word, and I don’t think it always has been—identity, if we’re talking about counting how many Greeks and Italians there are, yes, that’s contested. But identity itself, I don’t think is bad. So I want to talk about that a little bit, and then talk about what a politics of recognition means.Gest: Sure. Ultimately, this goes back to the rhetoric and the symbolic politics I mentioned earlier—that Trump is particularly good at, and that the left really struggles with. It’s uncomfortable. It’s about being seen. It’s about someone actually recognizing the struggle you’re going through, what your family has been through, what you’re experiencing right now. And I think understanding that and placing identity into a greater fabric of American life is the key—is how to stitch all this stuff together.And what’s really interesting is that in the middle of this identity-driven and culture-war backlash we’ve been experiencing over the last decade or so, there has actually never been a moment in American history where the racial, religious, and ethnic lines between Americans have been more blurred. The fastest-growing demographic group in the American population is people who claim more than one race—people of mixed heritage. And those folks are so precious, so special, because they’re basically at the frontier of America. They recognize in themselves that they transcend the boundaries that other people would draw between us.And I think the more that people recognize that they themselves transcend those boundaries—in myriad ways, whether it’s their professional identity, their sexual orientation, their religious identity, their geographic identity, or their hobbyist lives—the more we see that we are all basically defying the simple lines that people would otherwise draw between us. And so the irony of what we’re experiencing is that it’s almost like a last gasp of identity politics, because it doesn’t take much to scratch beneath the surface to recognize that the idea of whiteness in America—the very concept subject to so much tension in our politics right now—is itself a false concept. Because through a nineteenth-century lens, Perry, we’ve already reached the majority-minority milestone. Italians were never white. Jews were never white. Greeks were never white. Slavs and Middle Easterners were never white. And so what we’ve seen is the expansion of the boundaries of whiteness, but we haven’t seen the expansion of what it means to be an American. And I think that’s really what’s next for us, if we want to move beyond the racial, ethnic, and identity politics that we’re facing.Bacon: Let me ask a maybe naïve question at the end. Are you someone who thinks we should get rid of census racial categories? That came to mind—I’m not sure how I feel about it. Is that an important idea, or is that not quite what you’re talking about?Gest: No, it’s exactly what I’m talking about. I actually wrote a piece about this for The Atlantic a few years ago. I think we should absolutely ask people about their origins—I think everyone should have the opportunity to pick as many countries from a list as they want, every national origin they know of in their background. I don’t think we need racial categories. You can make it optional, and I think you can generally infer those racial boundaries from the national origin data anyway. But I think we really are this amalgam of a country, and rather than squeezing people into five tight identity categories, we should allow people to select all that apply—and that will reveal just how undividable we really are.Bacon: It reminds me of the Zohran Mamdani campaign. There was a New York Times piece about Zohran and his background. They implied he had checked that he was African or something on an application, and they were suggesting he was falsely claiming Blackness—but in reality he’s of many origins, as you say many of us are.Gest: That’s exactly right. He could plausibly claim to be of African heritage even if he’s not phenotypically Black. And there are a lot of South Asians who previously lived in places like Uganda, Tanzania, and South Africa. And frankly, even all of North Africa—we’re talking people of Arab or Berber descent who also classify as African. And so these categories are just terribly flawed. The best thing we can do is specify: where are your ancestors from? And even if that belies how you identify, I think we will recognize just how blurred our lines really are.Bacon: Great place to end, Justin. I enjoyed this a lot. Thanks for coming on. Good to see you.Gest: Of course. Likewise.
DOD: We’ll Take Anyone for This War. Well, as Long as You’re Not …
When countries get embroiled in a war, they usually cast a wide net for people to join the military and work to keep the ones who are already in. The United States appears to be sending troops from several Marine Expeditionary Units, the 82nd Airborne, 101st Airborne, 75th Rangers, 10th Mountain Division, and assorted special operations into the fight in Iran. At the same time, the administration is lowering standards to let more people into the military—except for those they feel are unfit to die honorably for the white, conservative Christian nation they envision. Additionally, in one prominent gaffe, the White House hinted that it might consider reinstituting the draft. This is almost unprecedented historically, with one grim but unsurprising exception.Whenever a country that relies on volunteers to fill the ranks of its armed forces gets involved in a bloody and unpopular war, recruiting success rates decrease, as does the quality of those recruits. No one wants to die for a war they don’t believe in or understand, and only people desperate for money tend to join or stay in. Such people usually aren’t the most qualified, and the quality of the people who join or stay in drops as a result.The usual short-term solutions to recruitment and retention problems are to offer pay increases, bonuses, and incentives, and to lower the standards for recruitment. The people brought in under these circumstances are frequently treated as cannon fodder. During Vietnam, “Project 100,000” brought in 300,000-plus troops who would have been previously considered unqualified due to their low IQ scores. Some commentators mocked them as McNamara’s Misfits, after the sitting defense secretary. These troops died in extraordinarily high numbers. Similarly, during the War in Iraq in the early 2000s, the Army offered massive bonuses, introduced stop-loss (allowing the military to involuntarily extend service members’ active duty), and dramatically lowered recruiting standards. Still, the recruitment and retention situation remained critical until the Great Recession made Iraq look better to a lot of people than the American job market. An even more dramatic example is found in Russia’s war in Ukraine, where they have needed to replace in excess of 30,000 to 35,000 recruits per month simply to match combat losses. (For comparison, the U.S. Army aims to recruit about 65,000 per year, in a country with nearly three times the population.) To achieve this, the Russian government and its local provinces have offered huge bonuses, often equivalent to over a years’ worth of pay. They have also lowered standards to an unbelievable degree: They now take people in their fifties with no experience and have inducted at least three serial killer cannibals who had been languishing in prison.Thus, when the Department of Defense announced on March 25 that it would raise the Army recruitment maximum age from 34 to 42 and let people with certain drug felony convictions join, it caught my attention. These are the sort of changes that the U.S. made during the worst recruiting situations from the mid-2000s during the height of the Iraq insurgency. These are not the sorts of changes a country makes when the military is having no issues finding qualified recruits. Rather, they are made preemptively to prepare for a long, bloody, unpopular war. We saw something similar before the U.S. entry into World War II, when it began drafting people during peacetime and becoming laxer with physical and medical standards. (Real-life and movie war hero Audie Murphy was five-foot-five and skinny as a rail, for example, and likely would have struggled with current physical requirements for Marines.)At the same time, in these circumstances, the military usually becomes more reluctant to kick people out. During the War in Iraq, separations for reasons of homosexuality dropped to near zero as the Department of Defense effectively stopped enforcing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” In one apocryphal story during my time in the Navy, a sailor told his captain he was gay right before a deployment, to which the commanding officer responded, “No you’re not. Now get on my ****ing ship.”At the same time that the U.S. is relaxing standards for many people to prepare for ground war in Iran, it is doing something far more unusual: forcing out tens of thousands of highly qualified service members who want to be there but who the administration believes are unworthy of the honor of serving their country. This includes women, Blacks, and transgender people. One of Hegseth’s big initiatives has been to eliminate the “shaving chits” that allow men with medical waivers to refrain from shaving all the way to the skin. The most common cause for needing a “shaving chit” is pseudofolliculitis: a dermatological condition primarily suffered by Black men. A man with pseudofolliculitis can’t shave all the way to the skin, and normally, this is not an issue. However, close shaves can result in painful weeping sores and facial scarring.Hegseth’s complete revocation of shaving chits offered thousands of Black service members an awful choice: Get clean shaven and suffer or be kicked out of the military. It has nothing to do with readiness or capability. A soldier on a shaving chit is no less effective than one who doesn’t need one. It is simply a matter of Hegseth thinking it looks unprofessional (it’s not; ask the Axis powers how much they liked fighting against Sikhs). It may also have been punishment aimed at Black Americans for consistently voting Democratic.The Pentagon has also commissioned a study that appears to have been rigged from the start, on whether to continue to let women serve in combat roles. It is unknown what the final policy will look like, but it will almost certainly set women in the military back to a place before 2015, and potentially as far back as 1993, when women were not allowed to fly combat aircraft or serve on ships considered combatant until President Clinton removed the exclusion.Finally, the most egregious example is the removal of transgender service members. They are being kicked out regardless of deployability, qualifications, performance, cost, or effects on units. The review boards set up for them are effectively rigged such that there is only one potential outcome. Officers kicked out for being transgender are being given so-called JDK discharge codes usually reserved for Communists, people who have committed treason, or those who have engaged in espionage against the United States, thereby locking them out of future jobs in defense.In court, the Department of Defense has argued it should be allowed to do this because the president and the defense secretary have the authority to claim that transgender people are undeployable, regardless of the evidence against their claim. The fact that transgender service members are the only ones kicked out for “medical reasons,” even in cases where they had been 100 percent deployable top performers, has nothing to do with readiness and everything to do with punishing a group of people considered unworthy of the respect that comes from serving in the armed forces.The closest historical parallel to what is happening to transgender people in the military is, surprise surprise, Adolf Hitler’s removal of Jewish troops from the Reichswehr and the Wehrmacht. The difference is that Hegseth’s policies on transgender people are even more draconian than Hitler’s were on Jews in the army. In 1934, those who were “half- or quarter-blooded” Jews were allowed to remain in the German military as enlisted men or noncommissioned officers, respectively. Up to 150,000 people of partial Jewish ancestry were part of the German military during World War II. Seventy (or so) “full-blooded” Jews were pushed out of the military in 1934, while over 4,500 transgender people are being forced out of the American military today. It is also worth pointing out that the only time a country excludes a group of people from the military when engaged in a war requiring massive manpower is when they do not even see those people as being valuable as slaves, cannon fodder, or bullet sponges. Only Germany in World War II resorted to this level of exclusion, and only then with “full-blooded” Jews. The Wehrmacht was more than happy to take on other “lesser” groups like Ukrainians, Czechs, Poles, and more to draw on all the manpower resources available. This should provide some context for the intentions of the administration toward transgender people going forward.The result of all this is a completely irrational recruitment and retention policy as the U.S. appears ready to plunge deeper into a bloody war that looks unwinnable on the ground. The Department of Defense is lowering standards for everyone except for the highly qualified, highly motivated people who belong to minority groups the administration despises. As a result, the military shrinks, the quality of personnel in the military drops, experience is unnecessarily lost, and the quality and size of the pool from which to draw recruits shrinks. The irony is that the people this administration despises won’t end up dying in the war it chose. It would be of some comfort to transgender people, if they weren’t well aware there are far worse things potentially waiting for them than fighting in Iran.
The Fight to Save D.C.’s New Deal Sistine Chapel From Trump
The spendthrift ways of President Donald Trump are not confined to asking Congress for more than $200 billion to keep fighting a war in Iran that he can’t figure out how to end, or to pondering Ted Cruz’s plan to reduce capital gains taxation by somewhere between $169 billion and $1 trillion. More quietly, the Trump administration has this week been conducting a fire sale of government buildings in Southwest Washington. These may soon include the Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building, which Gray Brechin of the nonprofit Living New Deal aptly calls “the Sistine Chapel of the New Deal” because of its exquisite frescoes and murals by Ben Shahn, Philip Guston, Seymour Fogel, and Jenne and Ethel Magafan.If the threat to the Cohen building strikes a familiar note, perhaps that’s because I’ve written about it previously (here, here, and here). Alternatively, you may have read about it in The New York Times or The Washington Post. (I’m not too fine a person to observe that only the Post credited The New Republic with breaking this story.) Or maybe you heard about it from the million-member lobby group Social Security Works, which has taken on this cause because the Cohen building was built in 1940 to house the (then-spanking-new) Social Security program. Earlier this month, Democratic Senators Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island and Chuck Schumer of New York wrote the General Services Administration’s acting inspector general inquiring “how GSA plans to continue oversight” of the Cohen building murals “once ownership changes hands entirely to private interests.”Meanwhile, after touring the Cohen building on Wednesday, Democratic Representative Lloyd Doggett of Texas said, “I really think we need to look at doing more to prevent it from being sold.”The GSA, the executive branch agency in charge of most federal real estate, lists 47 government buildings around the country for “accelerated disposition.” The Trump White House has been especially keen to unload four of these, all located in Southwest Washington: the Cohen building, the GSA Regional Office Building, the Liberty Loan building, and the Robert C. Weaver Federal Building. On Wednesday, the GSA announced that it had sold the GSA Regional Office Building; in addition The Wall Street Journal and the Washington Business Journal reported that the Liberty Loan building was under contract to be sold.We know the White House is eager to get rid of these four properties because in December Mydelle Wright, a well-regarded former preservationist for the GSA, stated in an unrelated court proceeding (document here) that the White House, “acting on its own and not through GSA,” solicited bids to demolish them. In response, the GSA issued a non-denial denial that you can read here. Bulldozing these four buildings would be illegal for multiple reasons, not least because the Cohen building and the Weaver building (the latter a Marcel Breuer–designed former headquarters for the Housing and Urban Development Department) are on the National Register of Historic Places, In addition, the Liberty Loan building has been designated eligible for the National Register, which also extends certain protections. Perhaps in deference to these obstacles, or maybe just because news of the planned demolition caused a ruckus in the preservation community, the Trump administration decided not to demolish but to sell.In announcing sale of the GSA Regional Office Building, GSA administrator Edward C. Forst crowed it would save taxpayers “over $200 million in delinquent maintenance and $5.5 million in annual operating and maintenance costs.” Republican Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa said in a press release that the sale “will save taxpayers over $700 million.” But neither Forst nor Ernst mentioned how much John Q. Taxpayer got for this 940,000-square-foot structure sprawling over 3.4 acres adjacent to a subway stop. There was a reason for that omission.The GSA Regional Office Building sold (to the residential developer Dalian Development) for $24.26 million. That works out to $26 per square foot, which, conservatively, represents less than one-tenth its market value. The low price reflects not only the federal government’s routinely poor management of asset disposition but also Southwest Washington’s vacancy rate, which, like that for all of Washington, is historically high. The Southwest D.C. vacancy rate stood at 16.5 percent during the last three months of 2025. Anything above 10 percent is bad. Why would the government sell one federal building (much less four) into such a terrible real estate market? Didn’t I read somewhere that our president used to be in the real estate business? Alas, the MAGA faith preaches that government buildings (and indeed all government assets) are all cost and no value. That works out very nicely for the buyer and very poorly for the taxpayer. We don’t yet know the sale price on the Liberty Loan building, but I’m guessing it was similarly low.How soon might the Cohen building get sold off? Its circumstances are different from the other three’s. The Cohen building sale was compelled by a January 2025 amendment that Ernst snuck in to a water resources bill for reasons that remain unclear. (Congress does not typically tell GSA which buildings to sell.) The amendment stipulated that the Cohen must be sold “not later than 2 years” after it’s vacated. The building is not yet vacant; some Voice of America and Health and Human Services employees remain. On the other hand: Nothing in the amendment said the building can’t be sold before it’s vacated (though that, I’m told, would play havoc with normal GSA procedures). The main obstacle to quick action, a former GSA staffer told me, is that the Cohen probably hasn’t yet gone through the consultation process with preservationists required before any sale under Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act. “I can’t say 100 percent that they haven’t done 106,” this person said, “but I can say that if they did it” without including the Living New Deal, which GSA previously certified to participate, “it would be incredibly shady and unprecedented.”I tagged along on Doggett’s tour of the Cohen building Wednesday. Also in attendance were Democratic Representative Paul Tonko of New York (“We’ve got to fight this battle hard,” he told me); Representative Teresa Leger Fernández of New Mexico (she said she’s been working on reauthorization of the National Historic Preservation Act); and assorted staffers for Democratic House and Senate members. David Olin was there too. He’s senior conservator at Olin Conservation Inc., where he’s been looking after the Cohen building murals for 30-odd years. Cohen told me last December that he was in discussions with GSA to perform a feasibility study about removing the Shahns and other artwork. That contract has not yet been signed, Olin told me Wednesday—another reason to doubt the GSA has made much progress yet on the Section 106 process. Still, Olin told the tour group, he knows enough to state that the Shahns are quite fragile and that removing them would require carving them up.This was my third time visiting the murals in the Cohen building, and, I was pleased to learn, Doggett’s second; he knew about the Shahns well before I did. Doggett showed me language he’d drafted for the next GSA appropriation: “None of the funds provided by this Act shall be available for the sale, leasing, or destruction of the Wilbur J. Cohen Building without guaranteeing the preservation of all artwork contained in the structure of the building.” When I asked Doggett whether he’d consider submitting an amendment flat-out barring the Cohen building’s sale, he said yes. If Congress can tell GSA which buildings to sell, then surely it can tell GSA which buildings not to sell.Doggett’s in the minority, of course, so his influence (also that of Whitehouse and Schumer on the Senate side) is limited. But Doggett said he was seeking out Republican support. Given that “conservatism” means “to conserve,” I’d hope there’d be some interest. Alternatively, if conservatism is about protecting taxpayers from getting ripped off, there ought to be five or six Republicans who’d oppose selling a 1,045,197-square-foot, Mall-facing building situated two blocks west of the Capitol into the sort of depressed real estate market where government buildings fetch less than one-tenth their actual value. Plus this one has the best New Deal art in Washington, D.C.
How Democrats Can Defeat Trump’s Identity Politics
You can watch this episode of Right Now With Perry Bacon above or by following this show on YouTube or Substack. You can read a transcript here. Frustration with the political establishment isn’t only about economic issues and won’t be solved simply by focusing on gross domestic product growth, inflation, or affordability. That’s the argument of Justin Gest, a policy and government professor at George Mason University. Gest has studied the rise of far-right and far-left parties both in the United States and Europe. The people drawn to those parties are not uniformly the poorest or those whose financial circumstances have worsened the most. Instead, populist sentiment springs from what Gest describes as “nostalgic deprivation”—the belief that a person’s social group has declined in wealth, respect, or influence over the past generation. So while Gest favors economic policies that help the working class, he argues that center-left and center-right parties also must connect with people’s sense of identity, history, and belonging. He calls for a “politics of recognition” that would emphasize what Americans have in common, such as largely being descended from other nations.
Transcript: Trump Erupts in Panic over Midterms as Harsh Fox Poll Hits
The following is a lightly edited transcript of the March 27 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.Donald Trump is very worried about the midterm elections. In a series of Truth Social posts, he raged wildly at Republicans for failing to pass voter suppression legislation, which is explicitly designed to prevent Republicans from losing control of Congress. Trump is right to panic. A crushing new Fox News poll finds his disapproval at record highs and his Iran War badly tanking. And yet Trump keeps talking about the war in ways that reveal zero awareness of the political problem it’s become. If the war does work against Republicans this fall, it would be a striking and heartening development. So we’re talking about this possibility with Ryan O’Donnell, the executive director for the progressive group Data for Progress, which has its own polling on the war. Ryan, good to have you on.Ryan O’Donnell: Thanks so much for having me.Sargent: So in these Truth Social posts, Trump erupted at Republicans for failing to pass the SAVE Act. This would be incredibly onerous voter suppression legislation requiring voter ID and proof of citizenship in ways that would surely disenfranchise enormous numbers of people. But Ryan, the thing is that’s deliberate. They’re not even hiding the fact that the bill is designed to keep Republicans in control of the House—which they’re now in great danger of losing—and the Senate too. The panic is very palpable, isn’t it?O’Donnell: Yeah, I mean, they clearly see the writing on the wall. They know how dangerous the midterms are looking for them. And, you know, they’ve seen what happened in 2018. And just like everything that Donald Trump has been doing recently has just been incredibly unpopular with voters. And so he’s trying to do whatever he can to save himself.Sargent: Yeah, it’s really important to look at it as like a three-part process. There’s the direct voter suppression legislation, there’s the effort to completely rig the House maps across the country in an extraordinarily corrupt way, and there’s the talk about using ICE agents at polls to intimidate and suppress voters. O’Donnell: As much as Donald Trump and the administration like to talk about how they don’t read polls and that they don’t trust them, they know exactly what’s happening. They know that this stuff that they’re doing is all incredibly unpopular. Every day they’re doing something new that’s driving them deeper and deeper into the ground. As you said, as we saw in this Fox poll, his disapproval rating is at the highest ever.Sargent: Okay, so let’s get into some specifics. Trump wants Republicans to end the filibuster because the SAVE Act can’t pass the Senate. In one tweet, he said this: “When is enough enough for our Republican senators? TERMINATE THE FILIBUSTER.” And he called for passing an end to vote by mail as part of this package, among other things. In a second tweet, he said again in all caps, “TERMINATE THE FILIBUSTER.” So it’s not even clear Republicans can do this even if they want to—they don’t seem to have enough Republican support to end the filibuster. But Ryan, I’ve got to say, the pressure seems like it’s going to keep mounting from Trump and MAGA. How do you see this playing out? I don’t feel that confident that they won’t try it. O’Donnell: It’s certainly something that Trump wants to do, and I think Republicans are very hesitant on it right now. But if they see it as their only path forward, I don’t think that Donald Trump is going to stop pushing for it anytime soon.Sargent: Yeah, I think they could definitely try it—whether it works or not is hard to say, and how it actually plays in the midterms. If it were to pass, I mean, it would be an absolute abomination. It would be absolutely disgusting morally, and terrible for the country and terrible for democracy. But it is at least marginally possible that it would hurt Republicans more than Democrats, since Democrats are highly engaged voters in midterms.O’Donnell: Yeah, that’s right. I mean, we’ve been seeing this shift ever since education polarization has taken over—basically that whether or not somebody has a college degree now says a lot about who you’re voting for. And since that’s changed, Democrats have largely become the party of midterms, which is a fairly new thing in recent American history. And so it could actually end up hurting Republicans more, but the moral issue is obviously way more important here.Sargent: No, absolutely. So in a third tweet, Trump exploded again, calling Chuck Schumer a “desperate crippled politician” who has lost control of the radical left Democrats. And again, he demanded an end to the filibuster—which is funny, because Republicans are the real problem for Trump and he knows it. O’Donnell: He’s getting more unpopular, and I do think that there’s also a possibility that more Republicans are going to start to break with him as they get to the midterms, because they know that he’s toxic.Sargent: That’s really interesting. It would be quite the poetic justice moment if his own unpopularity was what got Republicans to refuse to follow him down this voter suppression path.Let’s talk about this extraordinary new Fox poll. It finds that only 42 percent of voters support Trump’s war against Iran and 58 percent oppose it. Trump’s overall disapproval rating is 59 percent—that’s the highest ever in Fox polling for Trump in either term. His approval is only 41 percent. And this is a Fox poll. Ryan, it’s very clear that the war is politically working squarely against Trump and Republicans now. Your thoughts on those numbers?O’Donnell: They’re terrible. We find similar things—people not only disapprove of the war, but they also, even in that same Fox News poll, said that it would make the U.S. less safe going into this war. So voters aren’t just ambivalent about this, right? They’re actively opposed to it. We actually also asked a question recently about launching a war with Iran and whether it benefits Israel or the United States more. And actually more people—including Republicans—said that it benefits Israel more. And so it’s something that people just don’t want to see.I mean, people have been telling us since right after the pandemic that affordability is their number one concern. And Trump has just been doing anything he can not just to keep his eye off focusing on affordability for voters, but also actively making it worse. Like, we asked people recently too if they’ve been paying more or less for gas, and almost 80 percent of voters just this past week said that they’ve been paying more for gas.Sargent: Wow, that is really extraordinary. I think you raise an important point there that it’s not ambivalence—it’s active opposition. All this polling really strongly suggests that voters are squarely rejecting the central arguments that Trump is making for this thing. One thing on the Fox poll, by the way: his approval among independents is 25 percent, his disapproval among independents is 75 percent, and only 28 percent of independents support the war in Iran.On top of that, Ryan, Trump is underwater with non-college whites and even non-college white men. Those demographics also oppose the war. That sure looks like he’s losing his base in part over the war, doesn’t it?O’Donnell: I think it’s very clear that he’s losing the exact voters that helped win him the presidency in 2024. We recently published something about disaffected Trump voters and the people who are leaving his coalition. And what we found, after doing some modeling on our own data, is that people of color, younger voters, women, and also people that don’t pay that much attention to political news are all leaving him and are all much more likely now to say that they disapprove of him. That’s voters of color, young people—obviously he didn’t win those voters, but he was able to make significant inroads in 2024. With that falling away, that coalition is evaporating.Sargent: So not only is Trump underwater with non-college whites and even non-college white men who are his base, he’s also losing these working-class voters who he won over in 2024, right? We’re talking about young voters, non-white working class, non-white non-college, that type of demographic. The whole coalition seems to be eroding on every single level in every single way you look at it.O’Donnell: Yeah, I mean, well—tell me something that Donald Trump has done recently that people support. Whether it’s Epstein or ICE or the shutdown or Iran, he’s just bleeding, when people just want him to focus on affordability and costs here at home. And nobody thinks that that’s what he’s focused on right now. So people that used to support him are leaving him.And with regards to how this war is impacting the midterms—we did a poll recently with Zeteo and Dropsite where we asked people if they would be more or less likely to vote for a candidate in 2026 who supports the war in Iran, and 51 percent of voters were less likely to vote for someone—and that’s with only 32 percent more likely. So it’s a net [negative] 19. We also asked about a candidate for president in 2028 who supports the war with Iran—that was negative 22. And we asked about the reelection of a U.S. Congress member in 2026 who supports Trump’s supplemental funding request to continue the war in Iran—and that was negative 20. So everything about this war is not only unpopular now, but it’s making Republicans’ chances in November less and less likely.Sargent: That is extraordinary stuff right there. Now, as you said earlier, obviously the big issue for everybody is prices and the economy—that’s what’s weighing most heavily on the voters who will probably decide the midterms. But I’ve got to say, the war seems like it’s a pretty fat target for Democrats. And yet I don’t see Democrats going after it as strongly as I’d like to. I mean, they’re certainly way better than they were during past conflicts—they’ve been opposed to the war pretty much at the outset, which is itself a striking development in Democratic politics. Usually the party’s much more split in these situations. But do you think Democrats are prosecuting the case against the war frontally enough in these midterms or not?O’Donnell: I mean, I think they’re starting to make the case. And like you said, they’ve come out against it from the start, which is new for the Democratic Party. And like we saw, people like Barack Obama swept into office by opposing the Iraq War. And it is something that’s salient for voters, especially pending how long this war goes on and how much it costs. But for me, what I would like to see Democrats do more of in this moment is—you know, Trump is asking for $200 billion in funding, and there should be more discussion about this war, because it’s going on right now, and what we could be doing with that money if we kept it here. More Democrats, in my opinion, should be talking about: if we kept the $200 billion here, how much would that save you in your healthcare costs? How many people could go to college for free? Et cetera.Sargent: Right, that message polls pretty well as far as I can tell—it’s a strong one for Democrats. We had Representative Adam Smith, who’s the ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, on this show just the other day, and he said “hell no” to funding. He said no Democrat should support another dime of funding for the war. I would like to hear more Democrats saying that, wouldn’t you?O’Donnell: Me too.Sargent: Trump had a funny aside at his cabinet meeting that we can close on. He talked about oil and the stock market and the war. Listen to this.Donald Trump (voiceover): Frankly, I thought the oil prices would go up more and I thought the stock market would go down more. Hasn’t been nearly as severe as I thought. I think they have confidence in—maybe the American president.Sargent: So Trump thought that oil would go up and the stock market would go down if he invaded Iran. That’s quite an admission—he said it straight out. He thought these things would happen and he did it anyway. But that aside, this kind of shrugging off of the problem is not going to go down well with voters who are upset about the economy and costs, is it?O’Donnell: Exactly. I mean, you are never winning when you’re trying to convince people why their prices going up might be a good thing—which is what Donald Trump has been trying to do for the last couple of days. It kind of is, you know, reminiscent of when Biden was trying to really convince people that the prices weren’t bad. And I think that, you know, that obviously didn’t work out very well.Sargent: Well, we’ve got around four or five months to go until the midterm elections actually happen. How confident are you that this current dynamic and these current numbers are going to sustain themselves through the midterms, and what’s the nightmare scenario to worry about?O’Donnell: It’s a good question. I mean, the closest thing to compare it to is 2018, right? Where we had a Trump presidency and the midterms were a referendum on him. Things are looking fairly similar to 2018 at this point with regards to the numbers—in a lot of ways they crept up for Democrats in the generic congressional ballot as we went along. And so by all accounts now, I do think that Democrats are looking toward a good November. But things are even more tumultuous now than they were back in 2018 in some ways. So who knows what can happen. But traditionally, the party out of power does very well in the midterms, and I think Democrats are on track to do that.We live in a news cycle that’s incredibly short and people’s memories—they’re forgetting about things much quicker than ever before, I think. So the nightmare scenario for Democrats at this point is that Donald Trump wraps up all these incredibly unpopular things he’s doing, with many, many months to go before the midterms, and actually focuses on lowering costs for Americans and drops all of the things he’s focused on that the American public doesn’t want him to focus on right now.And also I would say that one of the reasons why Democrats aren’t overperforming on the generic congressional ballot as they should at this point is because the American public doesn’t think that they have a plan to fight for affordability either. And so the nightmare scenario is that—since Trump does have control over Congress and the presidency and can actually do something on some of these issues—if Democrats don’t show that they’re actually the ones to fight for affordability, then you could see things not ending as well as we would think at this point.Sargent: Yeah, and it doesn’t seem likely, I’ve got to say, that Trump’s going to drop all the unpopular things and suddenly focus on costs—he’s just not particularly interested in costs, as we saw from that video. Just to finish this out, one thing that I’m heartened by—and I’m curious to hear your take on it—is that you really do have a lot of strong Democratic candidates running. And this is exactly the kind of environment where even if the national Democratic Party’s image is in bad shape, which it absolutely is, voters are going to give a hearing to some of these Democratic candidates. And these are strong candidates—they’re talking a lot about costs and they seem to know how to win elections. It looks like it right now. Is that your feeling as well?O’Donnell: Yeah, I think there are a lot of really, really strong candidates out there who are talking about things in the right way. I think what we saw in our data over and over again, especially since the beginning of the Trump term, is how badly Democrats and independents who lean Democratic just wanted their representatives to fight against Trump. And that’s what we heard over and over again—it beat out everything. They just thought that the Democratic Party was looking weaker and more and more feckless. And they wanted somebody to stop all the things that were happening.Like, to your point about Donald Trump just keeps doing all of these incredibly unpopular things—the American public wants them to stop. And Democrats specifically want their representatives to fight hard enough to stop that from happening. And I think there are a lot of great candidates out there that are actually showing the will and power to do that.Sargent: Yes, it really is very similar to 2018 in that sense—Trump’s first presidency ushered in a whole wave of really, really good Democratic candidates. And I think the same is happening now. Ryan O’Donnell, awesome to talk to you. Thanks so much for coming on.O’Donnell: Thanks so much for having me.
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