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This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. The Trump administration has directly spent $2.7 billion of taxpayer money on its crusade against wind power while pouring $1.1 billion into boosting coal, which critics say is pushing up Americans’ bills. They say the moves are evidence that the president aims to serve […]

PEN America, once a fearless advocate on behalf of persecuted writers around the globe, has become a shill for Zionism and American imperialism. Chris Hedges PEN America, an organization founded to defend persecuted and censored writers, has once again made a mockery of itself with its call to protect Israeli writers from discrimination. Yes. Israeli […]

News of the South Carolina senator's demise shocked DC but the president seemed most concerned about what it meant for his voter suppression bill. In Michigan, a big endorsement for Abdul El-Sayed.

It’s hard to remember it now, now that Donald Trump’s dominance over a supine and gutless Republican Party has extended for more than a decade and still shows few signs of abating, but when he first entered politics, Trump did encounter some opposition within the GOP. After all, he had 15 opponents for the Republican nomination for president. One of those, then–Texas Governor Rick Perry, gave a tough speech in Washington about a month after Trump descended his escalator that included the following words and phrases: “barking carnival act”; “cancer on conservatism”; “toxic mix of demagoguery, mean-spiritedness, and nonsense”; “the modern-day incarnation of the know-nothing movement.”John McCain, then in the twilight of his career but still a commanding voice in the party, said that Trump had “fired up the crazies” with the way he spoke about immigrants. This led to Trump’s infamous attack on McCain at an Iowa candidate forum when he said McCain was no hero: “I like people who weren’t captured.”This comment in turn invited criticism from some who’d been mostly silent to that point, including the current secretary of state (“It’s not just absurd, it’s offensive, it’s ridiculous,” said Marco Rubio). But no one hit Trump harder than McCain’s great pal Lindsey Graham. The South Carolina senator, who died over the weekend at age 71 of “a brief and sudden” illness, went on CBS This Morning on July 21, 2015, and said: “I don’t care if he drops out. Stay in the race, just stop being a jackass.… I’m looking for him to be a responsible member of the 16-person primary and stop saying stuff like this. The world is falling apart. We’re becoming Greece. The Ayatollah’s on the verge of having a nuclear weapon, and you’re slandering anybody and everybody to stay in the news. You know, run for president, but don’t be the world’s biggest jackass.”Trump responded—remember this?—by reading out Graham’s private cell phone number during a speech. Matters escalated. Trump announced his “Muslim ban” that December 7. The very next day on CNN, Graham laid into him:“Trump’s a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot. He doesn’t represent my party. He doesn’t represent the values that the men and women who wear the uniform are fighting for.… He’s the ISIL man of year, by the way. I just got back from Iraq a week ago this Monday.… Now we have young men and women in harm’s way all over the world, particularly in the Middle East. They were concerned about this rhetoric because the enemy will use it against us. What was a concern last week has to be DEFCON 4 this week. Because what Mr. Trump is doing, and I don’t think he has a clue about anything ... he’s putting our soldiers and diplomats at risk, he’s empowering the enemy; and this ban, if it’s actually enacted, would take people who have been interpreters, who came to our side in Iraq and Afghanistan and who are under siege in their own countries, it basically becomes a death sentence for them.… You know how to make America great again? Tell Donald Trump to go to hell.” Graham so wanted the world to know that he spoke these words that his office put out a press release drawing attention to them. He never endorsed Trump in 2016, even announcing that he wrote in a third-party candidate when he voted. But the next year, once Trump was president, Graham began to accept a reality quite contrary to the one his remarks to CNN attempted to conjure in December 2015—namely, that Trump not only represented his party but in effect was his party. The two started talking. Trump took him on golf outings. By October 2017, Graham was insisting that Trump was “growing into the job.” This, by the way, was a couple weeks after Trump expanded the Muslim travel ban that an earlier Graham had so thoroughly excoriated.If there were any remaining questions about the relationship, Graham settled them in April 2018, when he announced that “the Trump movement is real ... he will be our nominee, I’m confident of that, and I will support him.” Four months later, eulogizing his dear friend McCain on the Senate floor, Graham said: “He taught me that honor and imperfection are always in competition.”True to his word, Graham backed Trump in 2020. But in the wake of the January 6, 2021 insurrection, he said he was done: “All I can say is count me out. Enough is enough. I’ve tried to be helpful.” Those words had the ring of finality about them, and I recall that some in the media believed him at the time. And yet, a mere six weeks later, where was Graham? Back down at Mar-a-Lago, golfing and hanging out. The Washington Post reported that Graham had spoken with Trump “nearly daily” since January 6; that he served Trump’s legal team as an “informal adviser” during the second impeachment trial (back in the 1990s, when he was in the House, Graham was one of the lead House managers for the impeachment trial of Bill Clinton); and that, even though Graham had known Joe Biden far longer than he’d known Donald Trump, he hadn’t had one conversation with the new president during his first month in office.There are moments in the lives of public figures when everything about them is distilled down to a choice they must make, and those moments rightly guide us toward our historical judgments. There is a lot not to like about a blustery racist imperialist conservative like Winston Churchill. But he seized that moment in the spring of 1940 when he first became prime minister, and his vow that “we will never surrender” to fascism commands our respect. He made his choice with moral clarity.Lindsey Graham’s fateful moment of choosing arrived during that winter of 2021. At that point, he and probably he alone had the moral authority within the Republican Party to try to guide it away from the man who led a coup d’état against the United States government and incited a mob to kill his own vice president. Through this odd Washington alchemy that I’ve always found a bit mysterious, some of McCain’s moral authority transferred over to Graham after McCain passed. So Graham could have made a Churchillian determination that winter: Win or lose, I will make my stand against this. He could have chosen courage. Instead, he chose cowardice—and a few rounds of golf.Graham served his country in uniform as a judge advocate. I’m sure he was dedicated to his state and its people. He fought for what he believed in, which most of the time happened to be war and more war. But in at least one case, it landed him unambiguously on the right side of history, with his admirable support of Ukraine from the day Vladimir Putin started that war. He had just returned from a trip to Ukraine when he perished.His career was not without honor. But when his country needed him most, he failed it. In the competition between honor and imperfection that played out within Graham’s soul, it’s pretty clear which side won.

Robert Siebelink was staring down the kind of ballot California specializes in: 61 people running for governor, and that’s just the top line. So the 54-year-old Democrat from California did what a growing number of Americans are doing, according to a story Jennifer Medina wrote in The New York Times on July 4. He pulled up Claude, Anthropic’s chatbot, uploaded his ballot, and asked which candidates fit his values. It helped him narrow the governor’s race down to two Democrats and talked through the strategy with him. He finished the whole thing in a half hour.And it seems like he had plenty of company. A woman in Los Angeles County photographed her ballot and flat-out asked Claude who to vote for. A man in Baltimore told the Times that researching his last ballot ate up something like 20 hours of his life; with Claude summarizing every candidate for him, this one took an hour. Medina’s read is that 2026 might be the first cycle where enough voters do this for it to matter, and honestly, that feels conservative to me.Now … the part the Times didn’t get into.Three days before that story ran, the Federal Trade Commission proposed a policy declaring that AI companies that steer their chatbots toward “undisclosed ideological objectives” may be committing consumer fraud (the public can comment through July 31). Which sounds reasonable! Nobody wants a secretly ideological chatbot. But then there’s the obvious follow-up: Who decides what “ideological” means? Right now, that would be the Trump administration. The same administration that has spent the past year attacking AI companies as woke, that cut the entire federal government off from the one AI company that told the Pentagon no, and that handed the cheapest deal in its AI purchasing program to the company whose chatbot had spent the better part of a day praising Hitler a couple of months earlier.Americans started trusting chatbots with their ballots at the exact moment the federal government finished building the machinery to control what those chatbots say. I think that’s a pretty big story! The right ran this pressure campaign against newspapers for decades, then against Facebook and Twitter. The chatbots are the next phase in a familiar playbook.Back during the 1992 campaign, Republican Party Chair Rich Bond explained to The Washington Post why the right complained so relentlessly about the “liberal media,” and his answer was disarmingly honest: It’s the same thing coaches do to officials, where “what they try to do is ‘work the refs’” in hopes of friendlier calls later. Complain loudly enough, long enough, and the calls start going your way.The social media sequel ran for most of a decade, which I wrote about back at Media Matters in 2020. Years of shadow-ban panic and congressional hearings about Silicon Valley silencing conservatives, all of it building to Trump signing an executive order on “Preventing Online Censorship” in May 2020, days after Twitter had the nerve to fact-check his mail-in ballot lies. Tucked inside that order was a legal theory worth remembering: If a platform moderates content in ways that contradict what it promises the public, the FTC could treat that as an “unfair or deceptive” business practice.None of this ever required the underlying claim to be true. When NYU’s Stern Center went looking for evidence in 2021, it concluded that the anti-conservative censorship charge was “itself a form of disinformation,” and that the platforms’ algorithms often handed right-wing content extra reach. Didn’t matter. In 2025, Meta killed its U.S. fact-checking program anyway, with Mark Zuckerberg echoing the censorship complaints himself and shipping his moderation team off to Texas to reassure people worried about its bias.And the AI version of the surrender was already underway before most people noticed there was a fight. When Meta released Llama 4 in April 2025, the announcement claimed the big AI models all lean left and bragged that the new model’s tilt was “comparable to Grok,” Elon Musk’s chatbot. I wrote about it at the time. A tech giant advertising that its AI now leans like Musk’s is what winning this play looks like.A year ago this month, Trump signed an executive order titled “Preventing Woke AI in the Federal Government,” which bars federal agencies from buying AI models that fail the administration’s test for “ideological neutrality.” The president explained at the signing: “The American people do not want woke Marxist lunacy in the AI models.”That same month, then–Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey sent formal demand letters to Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Meta because their chatbots, asked to rank recent presidents on antisemitism, had put Trump last. His theory was that an AI giving unflattering answers about the president might amount to consumer fraud under Missouri law.The escalation from there moved fast. It’s like I recently described: consumer-outrage campaigns picking up state muscle. In December, Trump signed a second executive order creating a Justice Department task force with one job: suing states over their AI laws. The order also held tens of billions of dollars in broadband money over the heads of states that regulate AI, and it directed the FTC to explain when state AI laws amount to forcing companies to deceive their customers.And when xAI sued Colorado over its AI antidiscrimination law this spring, the Justice Department intervened on xAI’s side, the first time the federal government has gone to court to kill a state AI law. Colorado didn’t wait around to lose. In May, its legislature gutted the law on its own, swapping the discrimination protections for disclosure requirements.The FTC’s proposed policy statement from this month runs on the legal theory from the 2020 Twitter order: AI companies market their products as accurate, so steering outputs in ways users wouldn’t expect can be deception under federal law. Chair Andrew Ferguson is inviting the public to tell him about “the subversion of AI systems for ideological ends.”The lawyers, for what it’s worth, doubt much of this survives contact with a courtroom. TechFreedom’s Andy Jung walked through why the preemption theory fails, concluding that “a policy statement simply will not suffice.” And when Judge Rita Lin got a look at the administration’s treatment of Anthropic, she called it “classic illegal First Amendment retaliation,” though the administration and Anthropic would later come to an agreement.But the weapon was never really built for a courtroom. The Brennan Center called this last August when the woke-AI order dropped: A standard that vague works as a standing threat, and companies over-comply rather than find out what it means. Which, to no one’s surprise, is exactly what’s been happening.And if you want proof the administration was never actually worried about chatbots picking sides, you only need to read the FTC’s own footnotes.So I read the full statement. Nine pages of reasonable-sounding consumer protection language. Like, yes, it’s true that chatbots have accuracy issues. Of course! Then you get to the citations.Start with its central statistic. The FTC claims consumers accept AI answers without checking them more than 90 percent of the time, and the footnote for that number points to a Forbes write-up headlined “Anthropic: 91% of Users Do Not Fact-Check AI.” The agency’s consumer-deception theory rests on research Anthropic published about its own users.Then there’s the statement’s lone example of a company that might be “tempted” to warp its outputs for ideological reasons. The citation isn’t a study or an enforcement record. It’s a Fox News story going after a single person at Anthropic for a paper she wrote in 2023.And xAI? Elon Musk’s company appears in the statement exactly once: in a footnote cataloging how AI companies advertise accuracy, quoting Grok’s pitch as a “truth-seeking AI companion.” That’s it. The one company with a documented record of doing exactly what the statement condemns shows up in it as an example of honest marketing!That record? Well, in July 2025, PolitiFact put together a breakdown of four times Grok had been tweaked to align with Elon Musk’s beliefs: a system-prompt edit instructing Grok not to name Musk as a top misinformation spreader, then a May stretch where it shoehorned white-genocide claims into questions about baseball. In July came the day of Hitler praise I mentioned at the top, when Grok took to calling itself “MechaHitler” after xAI rewrote its prompt to embrace the politically incorrect. Days later, TechCrunch caught the newly launched Grok 4 searching Musk’s posts before answering controversial questions, its reasoning logs reading “Searching for Elon Musk views on US immigration.” If any company has ever steered a chatbot toward “undisclosed ideological objectives,” it’s this one.Which leaves the rebuttal you might be forming right now: The chatbots really do lean left.They do. At least by the measures we have.In May 2025, a team of researchers from Stanford and Dartmouth asked more than 10,000 Americans to rate chatbot answers to political questions, and the raters, Democrats included, perceived nearly every major model as leaning left. The Washington Post ran its own version of the test last month and got similar results: Most chatbots’ answers tilted left, with Google’s Gemini the outlier, giving both-sides answers at a rate nothing else matched.None of this is particularly mysterious, though. The models ate the internet, and English-language text online skews the way it skews. Even Meta, in the same announcement where it bragged about matching Grok, blamed the training data rather than any hidden agenda. And a decent chunk of what gets tallied as woke is often just a chatbot declining to confirm a conspiracy theory. Brookings’s Chinasa Okolo put it to NPR plainly: “Some people, unfortunately, believe that basic facts with scientific basis are left-leaning, or ‘woke.’”So the perceived lean is real. But that’s partially the result of, as Stephen Colbert said during his set at the 2006 White House Correspondents’ Dinner, reality having “a well-known liberal bias.” What the pressure campaign wants is something else entirely: a different lean, picked by the people applying the pressure, and enforced by the federal government. These “bias” reports are a little fishy too.First, in the Stanford study, the models perceived as the second-most-left-leaning of the eight companies tested belonged to xAI (lol). The company that steers its chatbot by hand, on purpose, toward its owner’s politics still couldn’t land on “neutral,” because neutral in this game moves wherever the loudest complaint puts it. And the complaint always puts it to your right.If all this vocabulary feels familiar, that’s because a certain cable network spent a couple of decades branding itself “fair and balanced” while running the most nakedly partisan messaging operation on American television. The right has been defining neutral as agrees with us for longer than large language models have existed.The people in that Times story were marking actual ballots. The political lean of chatbots could become a very real issue. It could swing elections, even.The campaign industry knows this. Tucked into Medina’s Times story is a link to a consultant’s guide on shaping what chatbots say about your candidate. Getting your candidate a friendlier answer out of ChatGPT is a service you can buy now, the way search engine optimization was 20 years ago.And that brings me back to Robert Siebelink, and the line of his I can’t shake. Filling out his ballot with Claude, he told the Times, felt like having an expert in his corner, one who knew everything: “We just sat down over coffee and chatted and they took notes.”That’s the promise. An expert over coffee who has no stake in the fight and takes good notes. But who decides what the expert says? If Trump has his way, the answer is himself.

Higher grocery prices have plagued consumers for years, with President Donald Trump’s war in Iran exacerbating the spike in costs over the past several months. But what began with higher prices at the checkout counter has given rise to another worrisome trend: escalating household debt of the kind that can strain the credit of ordinary families, diminish their long-term financial stability—or leave them more vulnerable to future economic shocks. Grocery and restaurant prices have ticked up since the coronavirus pandemic, due to exigent factors such as the war in Ukraine, Trump’s tariffs, and now the conflict in Iran. Repeated closures of the Strait of Hormuz, through which a large proportion of the world’s fuel and fertilizer is ferried, have resulted in higher operating costs for farmers, a trend that will indirectly affect grocery prices in the long term. According to recent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, prices for “food at home”—that is, the cost of groceries—increased by 2.7 percent between May 2025 and May 2026.Although the price of eggs—a point of contention ahead of the 2024 presidential election—has decreased in the past year, other staples such as ground beef and sandwich bread have gone up. Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, said that “almost everyone has a food item that they’re focused on, they buy regularly; that they use as a benchmark for the cost of living and their financial situation.”“The war is just exacerbating all the angst around,” said Zandi. “It’s a real problem financially, but also it’s being supercharged in the minds of people because people are really focused on the cost of food and groceries.”Even if the Trump administration returned to its brief truce with Iran, the consequences of the conflict will be long-lasting. Zandi predicted that the cost of oil will remain high for the next several years, even with producers seeking ways to bypass the Strait of Hormuz.“There’s no going back on energy costs, at least not in the next couple, three, four years,” Zandi said. “I think we’re all going to be paying a lot more for energy, and that will translate into higher costs for everything, obviously including groceries and food more broadly.”Higher grocery costs can lead to people using payment methods that threaten their financial stability down the line, such as relying on credit cards or cutting into hard-earned savings. A new report by the Urban Institute found that more than one in four working-age adults used credit cards to pay for groceries and experienced difficulties with repayment. Moreover, between 2023 and 2025, there was an uptick in the share of adults between the ages of 18 and 64 who reported using credit cards to buy groceries and not always being able to meet the minimum repayment amount.“If that debt burden becomes large and really difficult for them to manage and repay effectively, it can constrain their ability to meet their day-to-day needs in the future without experiencing hardships,” said Kassandra Martinchek, a senior research associate in the Tax and Income Supports Division at the Urban Institute and a co-author of the report. Other analysis by Martinchek previously found that credit card delinquencies increased by nearly 40 percent between 2022 and 2024, when food prices spiked.This is a struggle felt by some portion of wealthier Americans. Although low- and moderate-income adults were more likely to report using a credit card for groceries and not being able to make repayments, the new report found that around 4 percent of high-income adults said the same. The data also shows that around one in 10 adults used “buy now, pay later” options to pay for groceries, and one in 20 used cash from a payday loan to purchase food. Perhaps most notably, nearly 20 percent of working-age adults drew down on savings not intended for daily expenses to buy groceries. Adults who reported an increase in grocery prices were more likely to use savings not intended for daily expenses for purchasing food, and more likely to experience repayment challenges when using credit cards for groceries. There are other factors that could contribute to higher costs of food in the long term. The rise in prices comes amid dramatic changes to the social safety net, including sweeping cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. Republican legislation approved last year tightened SNAP work requirements and pushed a share of the cost of benefits onto states. The implementation of this latter provision over the next several years could result in states reducing benefit amounts or further restricting SNAP eligibility.There is some evidence that losing SNAP benefits could lead to greater credit card expenditures on food. A 2025 report co-authored by Martinchek found that the end of pandemic-era “emergency allotments,” which increased a participant’s benefit amount, resulted in SNAP households putting roughly 24 percent more of their grocery bills on credit cards. Martinchek said that paying for groceries with a credit card was not inherently a sign of higher financial insecurity. Some people may use this payment method to earn credit card rewards, for example. The risk comes when people pay for groceries using credit but cannot repay their credit card debt all at once.“Credit can be a lifeline. It can definitely help families smooth when they experience disruptions or aren’t able to meet their daily needs. But relying too much on this can sacrifice their current financial stability and their future financial stability,” said Martinchek.

As the rules set by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services finally offer the states some guidance on how they may roll out the new compulsory Medicaid work requirements, blue states are doing the kinds of things you might expect. Liberal leaders are pursuing creative ways to minimize the impending damage, or even seek to delay its implementation. Here, they’re caught between a rock and a hard place: These good-faith efforts might mitigate some of the harms, but they may prove costly to Democratic accountability following Congress’s enactment of America’s broadest assault on the safety net. H.R. 1, or the so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill,” was an earthquake to the American safety net. It not only imposed a 20 percent funding cut to our nation’s food assistance program, it also cut nearly $1 trillion from Medicaid, a bedrock safety net program on which low-income children and adults depend for health insurance. And as part of this historic cut, Medicaid expansion enrollees must document that they are still eligible, whether because they are working at least 80 hours per week or because they satisfy an exemption category.In perhaps the clearest reflection of Republicans’ cognizance of the law’s impact on a health insurance program that has enjoyed bipartisan support, they carefully delayed the law’s most damaging effects until after the midterm elections and anchored many of the cuts in the imposition of administrative burden, a strategy far more covert than, for example, the “repeal and replace” rhetoric of 2017.Medicaid, a health insurance program with shared responsibility between the state and federal governments, has historically left states with significant flexibility in administration. H.R. 1 marks a striking departure from this approach by compelling states’ implementation of work requirement programs that will result in more uninsurance and strain on regional health systems. Although adopting work requirements is compulsory, states retain meaningful discretion over how they are administered. Those choices will shape health care access for millions, but they may also carry unexpected political costs.States can reduce the damage by relying on existing government data to verify eligibility automatically, minimizing documentation requirements for caregivers and medically frail enrollees, and even seeking waivers to delay implementation until January 2029. In that case, voters would decide on the next president of the United States before experiencing the pain of H.R. 1’s reach.Democrats face a conundrum. They have good reason to want to safeguard Medicaid enrollees’ health care access, because of both the party’s broad political commitment to health care access and economic concerns about hospital closures. If Democrats fail to intervene in this dangerous policy, the devastation will not just hit marginalized communities—though without a doubt, Medicaid enrollees will face the greatest cost as they find themselves ensnared in red tape and risk the loss of health coverage. In a country with notably expensive health care, coverage loss will assuredly lead to delayed care, potentially resulting in worse health outcomes and financial devastation. Moreover, as hospitals absorb more uncompensated care, they may cut services or close altogether, with ripple effects for emergency care, privately insured patients, and local economies.But stopping the bleeding from this anything-but-beautiful law risks obscuring for voters the damaging effects of hollowing out the safety net.Democrats have a history of seeking to bail Republicans out of bad policymaking, most notably amid the shutdown over the expiring marketplace subsidies. While putting people over politics can be viewed as noble and faithfully dedicated to safeguarding health care access, it fails to appreciate how this can impede Democratic accountability when voters cannot appreciate the horrors that Republicans in Congress have wrought.Public confusion is pervasive. KFF’s June 2026 tracking poll revealed that just 51 percent of respondents understood that H.R. 1 would result in cuts to Medicaid, with the remainder expressing confusion as to whether funding would increase or stay the same. In my own May 2026 survey of 2,064 U.S. adults, 54 percent of respondents who supported increasing Medicaid funding nevertheless also supported the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.KFF finds that support for the legislation declines from 35 percent to 21–25 percent when respondents are informed that the law will increase the uninsurance rate and strain local hospitals, suggesting that preferences are movable but demand effective communication, a task with which the Democrats have historically struggled.This is hardly the only source of confusion within Medicaid policy. Many Medicaid enrollees are unaware that they are enrolled in Medicaid, a dynamic exacerbated by many states’ decisions to rename their programs (e.g., to “Husky” or “BadgerCare”) in an effort to destigmatize Medicaid, as well as by roughly three-quarters of Medicaid being administered by private insurers like UnitedHealthcare and Humana. This dynamic contributed to political scientist Suzanne Mettler characterizing Medicaid as part of a “submerged state,” with many Americans unable to trace the role of government to their receipt of critical social benefits.It is little wonder, then, why many Medicaid enrollees have not been attuned to these policy transformations, with an April 2026 Health Management Academy survey of Medicaid enrollees finding that a striking 55 percent of Medicaid-enrolled respondents were unaware of the impending work requirements.Voters already face significant informational demands. It’s not common knowledge that the One Big Beautiful Bill immediately devastated Medicaid funding, even though the effects are spread out over time. Nor is it easy to understand that “BadgerCare” and the like are actually Medicaid. Furthermore, the connections between (for example) Medicaid coverage losses and rural hospital closures are not abundantly clear to anyone who’s not hyper-attuned to these policy debates. Any blue- or purple-state efforts at damage control or delayed rollout will further obscure the recklessness with which Republicans have slashed the programs that allow people to pull themselves up, and which actually promote life.This does not mean that the Democrats need to sit idly by as people lose coverage. But it does mean that the Democrats need to take victory laps when they engage in the unsexy but essential work of administrative burden reduction—victory laps that they have historically been loath to take.Democrats have made this mistake before. After the Affordable Care Act and again after the Inflation Reduction Act’s drug pricing reforms, they quickly shifted to the next legislative fight instead of explaining to voters what they had accomplished. They may find repeated credit claiming to the effect of “Thanks, Obama!” or “Thanks, Biden!” impolite, but it is part of governing in a democracy. Even Trump, who cannot be said to be good at either “governing” or “democracy,” knows the value of publicly spiking the football, regardless of whether he’s actually scored.There are lessons that Democrats should borrow from Trump, the biggest being: Branding matters. And unlike Trump’s application of lipstick to the proverbial pig, the Democrats’ policies are actually good and popular—if people understand what they are. But voters often need help connecting the dots between policy design and outcomes, especially with the nuances involved in tracing coverage losses to uncompensated care and hospital closures.In this setting of policy complexity and an onslaught of news that can make it hard even for the observant to keep up, effective Democratic accountability demands effective communication about the One Big Beautiful Bill’s vast expanse, as well as all of the steps taken to spare enrollees from Republicans’ worst impulses.Democratic governors taking care to minimize coverage losses must find creative and meaningful ways to explain plainly what they are doing and why. The right message might be something along these lines: “Republicans are forcing you to document your work hours to remain insured. We’re using the information we already have so you don’t have to fill out another form. The law protects caregivers and the medically frail. We’re interpreting these protections as broadly as we can and ensuring that everyone who qualifies for those exemptions actually gets them. Republicans imposed the paperwork. We’re reducing the hassle.”American policy suffers from a damaging and unsustainable asymmetry: Democrats’ effective governance often is precluded by their ineffective politicking. But administrative burden reduction is not enough; It must be paired with explicit credit claiming. Democracy depends not only on governments solving problems, but on citizens knowing who created the problems in the first place. Every Republican burden that a Democratic governor relieves should come with a reminder of who burdened the public in the first place.

The post A U.S.-Mexico Impasse Will Test How Far the Trump Administration Will Go to Fight Drug Trade appeared first on ProPublica.

There’s a difference between candidates who have used VA health care and want to preserve it, and those who haven’t and want to privatize it. The post Which Veterans on the Ballot Defend VA Health Care? appeared first on The American Prospect.