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The GOP Has Become a Single-Issue Party. The Issue Is Elite Impunity.
New Republic • Feb 16, 2026

The GOP Has Become a Single-Issue Party. The Issue Is Elite Impunity.

I’ve been finding it increasingly difficult to concentrate lately. There I’ll be, trying to work, or read, or eat dinner, when the intrusive thought returns: For decades, many of the wealthiest men and women in the world actively participated in the trafficking and rape of children; the powers that be knew what was happening; nobody was held accountable.Even today, few of Epstein’s enablers are facing consequences—in this country, at least. America’s legal system insists on punishing regular people harshly for even the most minor crimes—currently merely for the noncrime of being an immigrant, or being someone who looks like an immigrant to one of Trump’s gestapo thugs. But the rich and powerful spent year after year manifesting nightmares straight out of conspiracy theories, and have faced zero consequences for these depravities. Trump’s Justice Department continues redacting the names of abusers. His administration transferred Ghislaine Maxwell to a cushy minimum-security prison, where she is reportedly waited on hand and foot by prison officials. It looks increasingly likely that the president will grant this convicted teen sex trafficker clemency in exchange for her publicly testifying that Trump—whose name is apparently referenced over one million times in the Epstein files—is squeaky clean. And, with very few exceptions, Republicans in Congress are doing everything they can to protect these monsters.This story is horrifying. But it’s also clarifying. The primary purpose of the GOP has been laid bare: to shield the wealthy and well-connected from facing justice for their crimes.In fact, elite impunity seems to be the common thread in practically all the significant policy fights Republicans have picked over the last year. It’s apparent, of course, in every decision of Trump’s DOJ. Throwing a sandwich at someone in uniform? Republicans will move heaven and earth to take you down. But engaging in blatantly criminal bribery? The administration has explicitly announced it won’t prosecute corporations for these crimes, or really for any crimes at all. Elite impunity clearly defines the GOP’s positions on public health. Despite the supposed influence of the Make America Healthy Again movement on the GOP, Republicans have been working to shield pesticide makers from liability for failing to warn consumers that their products would cause cancer. Monsanto, which faces 100,000 lawsuits related to its Roundup weedkiller, went crying to the GOP for protection, and as always, Republicans responded. Though Democrats were able to remove the GOP’s pesticide liability waiver from a congressional appropriations bill in January, the Trump administration has taken up the cause and is asking the Supreme Court to step in and shield these companies from accountability for the decades they spent selling products that poisoned people.This dynamic is also apparent in the GOP’s slavish devotion to AI billionaires. The class divide on this topic is sharp—regular Americans are increasingly concerned about the potentially devastating impact of AI on their jobs and their kids’ economic prospects, and they sure as hell don’t want parasitic AI data centers raising their electricity prices and fouling their water. But the Epstein class loves this plutocracy-enriching technology, so the GOP jumped into action. Your community wants to hold AI billionaires accountable for the harmful effects—mass unemployment, suicide, cognitive decline, climate breakdown—of their products? Not while the party of elite impunity is in charge. Twice last year, Republicans in Congress tried to pass a law preventing state and local regulation of AI. Democrats were able to defeat both efforts, but in December Trump signed an executive order to bypass Congress by, among other measures, directing his government to mount legal challenges to state AI laws and withhold federal funds from jurisdictions that are regulating AI.Then there’s climate change. Millions of voters are already feeling the pain of skyrocketing home insurance rates driven by increased climate risks, and millions more are confronted each year with the staggering costs of climate disaster recovery, without any help from the corporations that created and profited from this crisis. So communities across the country have been pursuing state legislation and litigation to make fossil fuel companies pay for the damages they caused—the homes swallowed by the sea, businesses wiped off the map by inland flooding, communities destroyed by wildfires, lethal heat waves, horrific droughts, and other catastrophes. In response, Big Oil has been begging for a get-out-of-jail-free card, with the American Petroleum Institute explicitly naming Big Oil immunity one of its top priorities in 2026. Naturally, Republicans have answered the call, with the administration filing multiple legally unhinged lawsuits to try to stop states from pursuing accountability litigation and congressional Republicans recently announcing that they are crafting legislation to block communities from having their day in court.On issue after issue, the GOP has gone to the mat to shield the most powerful and wealthy individuals and entities from legal consequences for their misdeeds. Surely Democrats should be making this a central part of their messaging this year?Affordability—the Democratic establishment’s main talking point in 2026—is important: Voters are sick and tired of seeing the cost of living continue to rise. But they’re also sick and tired of seeing America’s two-tiered legal system treat the most disgusting and avaricious people in the world like they’re above the law. Democrats need to walk and chew gum at the same time here.Because I don’t think I’m the only one who’s been having trouble concentrating lately. There’s a rage building in this country against those who continue insisting on one set of rules for you and me and another for the rich and powerful. Americans are ready to tear down that system of elite impunity. Let’s make sure they vote out its party too.

Tareq Baconi’s Search for Liberation
New Republic • Feb 16, 2026

Tareq Baconi’s Search for Liberation

In June, as I was reading Tareq Baconi’s memoir Fire in Every Direction, Israel launched a series of surprise attacks on Iran. Though I was born in the United States, I have people in Iran, as well as a good many memories. For 12 days, I watched footage of fighter jets and exploding drones over and inside the narrow streets of Tehran, trading updates with family here as we texted and called with family there, until lines went silent due to outages. We were left with prayer, any agnosticism abandoned for hope.This experience is unexceptional. In his memoir, Baconi writes of his own experience of watching turmoil from afar during the Second Intifada, as a college student in London. Against the reel of quotidian life in the safety of a Western country, this historic event gets relegated to a backdrop. “The Second Intifada was raging in the background, peppering conversations here and there, appearing in headlines on the evening news throughout my university years,” he recalls. “I felt vaguely implicated and entertained inane conversations with friends. But this was nothing more than passing commentary.” Baconi was born in the Palestinian diaspora, the second generation in his family to have been so. He traces his “trained” “silence” back to his parents and their friends, a generation of Palestinians who couldn’t afford to champion the struggle for independence while living in “host” countries like Lebanon and Jordan. (Indeed, the term “host” itself indicates their disempowerment; guests can always be kicked out.)But going on to describe the tedium of his studies as an engineering major, Baconi divulges a more existential unease: “I shifted my gaze from the region, immersing myself instead in the study of thermodynamics, fluid mechanics, mathematics. I mapped fluid movement in pipes, wrote out eloquent integration sequences, grounded myself by designing intricate power plants.” As Baconi drifts from one activity to the next, his “I” hardly seems “grounded.” The cadence of these lines instead captures the alienation of witnessing the death of one’s people and destruction of one’s homeland from afar.In the long run, however, Baconi did not avert his gaze: He pivoted from engineering to international relations in his mid-twenties, focusing on the region’s geopolitics, and going on to fellowships with the European Council on Foreign Relations and Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network, where he currently serves as board president. Since Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, Baconi has been repeatedly called on to explain Hamas to the West. His 2018 academic monograph, Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance, which traces the group’s evolution over 30 years and draws on interviews with its leadership, became a go-to primer after the start of the war (alongside histories such as Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine). Baconi was interviewed by Isaac Chotiner at The New Yorker and Ezra Klein at The New York Times, and has written about Palestine regularly for The New York Review of Books. In a new author’s statement prefacing his book, he writes of the paradox that “the vast destruction of the Gaza Strip and the horrifying loss of civilian life are a painful blow to Palestinians,” and that yet “simultaneously, Palestine is back on the top of the global agenda—with growing recognition that it must be addressed.”Baconi writes of a life haunted by the loss of a homeland and the specter of freedom, but also by the masking of his sexuality and the promise of wholeness.As a political analyst, Baconi has been tasked with explaining a brutal war; in his new memoir, Fire in Every Direction, he attempts the more modest project of accounting for an individual life, teasing apart the complexities of growing up gay and Palestinian, and putting forth those stories in all their knotted joy and melancholia, rage and confusion. He writes of a life haunted by ghosts: by the loss of his homeland and the specter of freedom, but also by the masking of his sexuality and the promise of wholeness.The ghost whose presence is most strongly felt in these pages is that of Ramzi, Baconi’s best friend and crush from his adolescence in Amman. Letters from Ramzi are the soil from which the memoir grows; charmingly, these two teenage boys kept a correspondence fit for a Victorian novel. Baconi kept only his beloved’s letters and none of his own, he explains in the prologue, making Ramzi’s letters “an archived monologue, waiting to be excavated.” The memoir itself begs to be read as this lost half of the conversation, reinterpreted with the benefit of adulthood and analytic training.For Baconi, there is a “before Ramzi,” and an after. “Memories crowd my mind when I conjure that world,” Baconi writes of the house in Amman’s Al-Abdali neighborhood where he spent his first 10 years, “before Ramzi and I met.” In the memoir, that “before” is relatively brief. Ramzi’s entrance in the story ushers in the pains of adolescence and of growing up queer. The boys become friends after Baconi’s family relocates to the posher, less central West Amman. Both families are Christian, a minority in Jordan, and send their boys to the National Orthodox School. But friendship does not come naturally. On the playground, Ramzi stands by as a young Tareq is taunted for what other children took to be his nascent gayness. (A classroom bully calls him “little girl.”) But when their mothers reunite the sons outside of school, the boys connect. Over the years, friendship turns into a crush, and as the boys’ capacity for feeling grows deeper and sharper, that innocent crush turns into a tortured love.“My skin tingles writing this,” Baconi writes of a sexually tense moment in their late teens, “knowing that we were more naïve than brave.” He is on his knees, inspecting Ramzi’s “love trail” with the excuse of deciphering “a message for the prostitute” that Ramzi has shaved into his pubes. (Ramzi is headed out of town for a boys’ trip promising straight debauchery.) “Baba was less than ten meters away. Anyone could have walked in …” Yet in the moment of passion, “None of that mattered.” Before the thrill of this anticipated touch can be realized—“arm in midair, before my finger settled onto his skin”—the boys see themselves from the outside. This moment of recognition stretches time. “In a second, I saw how compromised I was. I looked up and our eyes locked. His smirk was gone, his mouth hung slightly open. His dimples had disappeared.”Baconi and Ramzi have no choice but to acknowledge the tension between them. For Ramzi, that admission sours his image of his friend—and his image of himself. “His eyes bore into mine in a way I had never seen before. They were foreign, stripped of their warmth, seeing me anew, there kneeling in front of him. Lust mixed with disgust, power. Clarity.” By the time Baconi makes a formal confession of love—in a letter, of course—all has already been said.The confession explodes young Baconi’s life. Spurned by his beloved, he is also rejected by Ramzi’s family, which has come to seem like an extension of his own. Telling his father of his feelings for Ramzi, he is not taken seriously, his attractions dismissed as the “normal” sexual confusions of boyhood. His mother takes him to a therapist who exudes a similarly gentle form of homophobia. Eventually, Baconi decides to leave the country. Instead of attending his parents’ alma mater, the American University of Beirut, he will go to London.Before describing his last night in Amman, Baconi offers a reflection on exile, tracing his family’s movements since his grandmother’s home in Haifa was seized during the Nakba, in 1948. Zooming out, Baconi situates this personal inheritance within the twentieth- and twenty-first-century history of the region. “Every generation in my family fled their homes. Every generation in Ramzi’s did, too. Our grandparents, our parents; they fled war, death, gunfire. That is our fate, as Arabs, to flee. Is it not?”And yet Baconi does not allow himself the pat comparison of likening his move to London—that is, his escape after coming out and realizing that he will not be able to become who he wants to be, should he stay—to forced migration. Mapping the twists and turns of his self-analysis, he writes: “It is easy for me to claim flight as my rite of passage, a completion of our lineage, joining millions of others in making homes for themselves in strange lands. But Ramzi’s eyes rest on me as I type these words, his admonishment burns into my back, calling on me to confront the hypocrisies, the lies we tell ourselves.” With time, the memory of Ramzi has grown into a fact-checker who refuses to let Baconi wallow in self-pity. Ramzi is “correct,” Baconi reflects: “What right do I have to speak of flight? I have survived no wars. My scars are invisible, my movement privileged.” Once a source of rejection, Ramzi now functions as the measure of Baconi’s analytic rigor, as the faculties he uses to make sense of the world in his political writing and scholarship are aimed at himself in this book. Baconi finally settles on the word “estrangement” to describe the alienation he was experiencing as a teen.It is the journey of gradual estrangement, of alienation, that I am trying to convey. The feeling of not belonging that came to permeate my days. The conviction that one must remain hidden to live. Masked, covered. The inner bifurcation, the double consciousness. The exile of the authentic self.Though many might read this young gay’s man leaving for London as an act of self-preservation, Baconi likens his pursuit of personal liberty and independence to addiction: “What I am thinking of is closer to the flight from reality that members of addiction groups invoke: the compulsion to exit one’s truth by creating an alternate one. The succumbing to the allure of a new beginning that becomes irresistible, almost existential, with time, making escape inevitable.” The metaphor is a strange one: It could be read as belittling his own experience; or perhaps, alternatively, as putting his experience into perspective, refusing to allow his individual pain to upstage his people’s. It also captures the urgency of the need to get away.Despite pulling away from the comparison between his family’s exile from their homeland and his own estrangement from his sexuality, Baconi circles back to this comparison, coming to see both in terms of the human quest for “a dignified life.” “That is my individual flight,” he goes on, “my walking away from that deathly disquiet that was sucking the life out of me. Not exile, then, but estrangement into a world that I hoped would provide a dignified life, one worth living.” His is a story of self-determination, as an individual and a people. The two are inextricably intertwined in the memoir, a radical move in the context of a war in which LGBTQ rights are often used as a cudgel to vilify Palestinian culture.In Amman, Baconi was troubled by the anti-Muslim rhetoric that plagued his Christian community. In London, he confronts blatant Orientalism from his peers. Continuing to struggle with his sexuality, Baconi sleeps with a string of women while courting an intimate friendship with a gay man who calls him “Arabia.” The nickname stresses that being accepted as a gay man will not shield Baconi from othering: To secure “a dignified life,” he will have to fight against racism and internalized homophobia.Intimacy with another Arab diasporic man is what finally frees Baconi from his self-hate, both as an Arab and as a gay man. Studying abroad in Sydney late in college, he forms a deep, multifaceted relationship with Sam, who is Syrian Australian, and who, when he was younger, traveled all over the world for his parents’ work. Baconi confides in him his history with Ramzi as well as his antipathy for the concepts of shame and honor that helped structure his childhood. Within this intimacy, Baconi can break free of his past: “I spoke of bullying, and he defanged a million past insults. I told him of shame, and 3eib, and honor, and in his wondrous capacity to reshape things, he turned them around. No longer were they sources of guilt or judgment, but signs of community, of love and protection, tradition and meaning.” Seemingly for the first time, Baconi’s connection with another man is consummated, at once cerebral and sexual. “In return for my insight,” Baconi writes of Sam, “he gave me freedom.” It is the freedom of being whole. Of not censoring parts of himself for the sake of someone else, whether mind or body.Only when Baconi discovers his calling as a thinker and writer does he truly come of age; in this story, coming out is not sufficient. A few years later, he goes back to school—to Cambridge—for a master’s in international relations, seeking to understand the region’s history as he has come to understand his own. There he meets the mentor who changes his life, “the person who has become the vehicle for all the conversations I do not yet know how to have in Amman.” Though he goes unnamed in the memoir, the scholar is the late George Joffé, a political scientist who regularly lectured at venues like the NATO Defense College, the Geneva Center for Security Policy, and the Royal College of Defence Studies in London. Staying on at Cambridge for his doctorate, Baconi treats consulting as a day job, flying weekly between London and Dubai or Doha or Riyadh for work. (Eventually, he will abandon this more lucrative career altogether, breaking from prescribed masculinity in more ways than one, letting go of the money and status he has earned through the corporate grind to pursue a truer vocation.) When Baconi comes out to his father for the second time, his father makes a more sweeping argument about Arab homophobia, projecting his own latent sentiment onto Jordanian society. “People will not accept this here. We’re backward. We’re not like you or your friends in Cambridge. This is a different world. You cannot live here anymore.” And yet Baconi is by then regularly traveling to the region for work and will later move to Palestine, eventually making a life of straddling London and the Middle East. His life is a rebuttal of his father’s error.Reading Baconi’s scholarship alongside the memoir suggests a more productive estrangement: As a scholar, he questions the central institutions and assumptions of his field. In Hamas Contained, Baconi describes how international law refuses to legitimize the Palestinian struggle for independence while failing to hold Israel accountable for war crimes and other atrocities. Much of his discussion revolves around the debated definition of terrorism and the inconsistent application of the term. Which is to say, the word terrorism has itself been weaponized. “Classifying Hamas as a terrorist organization has justified sweeping military action against Palestinians, depoliticizing and dehumanizing their struggle,” Baconi writes in his preface. “It has also prevented the possibility of viewing Palestinian armed resistance as a form of self-defense within the context of war.” Our definitions of war are outdated, he maintains: “How are civilians defined in a world where the notions of war and peace are increasingly difficult to ascertain, and where the form of warfare has outgrown the very laws that define it?”In the memoir, Baconi sheds his scholarly remove. Living in Ramallah with a British passport, he writes about Gaza:Israeli soldiers hiding behind sand dunes—cowardly and camouflaged and decked out with the deadliest technology—snipe [Gazan residents] off, one at a time, for no reason other than that they can, frightened by a Palestinian asserting their presence. And supposedly civilized nations hail Israel’s accomplishments, moronically parroting Zionist rhetoric, pretending that Israel is facing hordes of terrorists. A catchall descriptor that erases our history and justifies all forms of evil to be unleashed against us. For that is all we are in their eyes. It is all we have ever been.In many ways, Baconi’s contributions as a scholar have rested on his embracing the position of the outsider, his aptitude for reframing the conversation and calling into question its very terminology. Whereas his scholarship takes a measured tone, Baconi allows the memoir to drip with sarcasm and anger.In love and work, the memoir’s arc is triumphant. As in most first loves, the pain that young Tareq experienced with Ramzi turns out to be temporary, and by the end of the book, middle-aged, Baconi is happily married to a man. Ramzi has come to represent all that Baconi has rejected personally and professionally: Baconi learns through the grapevine that his old friend lives and works in Dubai, and has a young family—a cookie-cutter life for a man of their upbringing. He fantasizes about coming out to Ramzi for the second time, considering reestablishing contact on a trip to Dubai: “I recount that I am married to a brilliant and adoring husband, we have a beautiful home in London, and we’re getting a dog.” Ever aware of his own privilege—and fearful of neatly fitting a Western liberal fantasy, even with the context of his literal fantasy—he adds: “A swift tumble of an update—one dripping with domesticity.” His own life, he is well aware, is merely someone else’s picture-perfect. His own, perhaps, but with one glaring hole: Liberated as Baconi is—personally and professionally, emotionally and intellectually—Palestinian liberation remains to be achieved.

Trump’s New Voter I.D. Threat Is His Gravest Attack on Democracy Yet
New Republic • Feb 16, 2026

Trump’s New Voter I.D. Threat Is His Gravest Attack on Democracy Yet

What did Donald Trump mean last Friday when he wrote on Truth Social that “there will be Voter I.D. for the Midterm Elections, whether approved by Congress or not!”? We didn’t have to wonder for long, because exactly 27 minutes later, he explained it with a follow-up post: “If we can’t get it through Congress, there are Legal reasons why this SCAM is not permitted. I will be presenting them shortly, in the form of an Executive Order.”Trump can issue an executive order changing the temperature at which ice becomes water, but that won’t make it happen. The Constitution couldn’t be clearer: Presidents don’t run elections; the states do. Congress can change the rules, and it did in 1967 when it mandated single-member districts (a couple states at the time still elected members on an at-large basis). But the president has nothing to do with any of it.Why is Trump so worked up? The House passed the SAVE America Act, an ill-disguised attempt to codify voter suppression, last Wednesday. But as he well knows, it’s not going to get through the Senate—unless Republicans decide to kill the filibuster. Right now, that seems unlikely, and assuming that doesn’t happen, Trump and the GOP’s main vehicle for suppressing turnout this fall will die. Hence, the executive order threat.  The problem for Trump is that no court in the country will honor his executive order. I can’t imagine even the Supreme Court will, given how unequivocal the Constitution is on the matter. So the question is: When his executive order is shot down, what will he do?The Trump administration has done many shocking things, far too numerous for me to list. If I had to name three really bad ones, I’d go with: the rancidly political investigations of people he perceives as enemies; the staggeringly corrupt personal enrichment; the shipping people off to prisons in foreign countries, sometimes in direct contravention of judicial orders. All these are direct assaults on the core principles of democratic self-governance.Trying to prevent or subvert or nullify an election, I would argue, is on another level. We’ve had presidents and other political leaders who tried to get their foes thrown in the clink. We’ve had loads of corrupt pols, though never anyone near Trump’s operatic scale. And we have, alas, treated a lot of people very badly, from the 400,000-plus African people brought over as slaves to the millions of Native Americans we drove from their lands or herded onto reservations to the patriotic Japanese Americans during World War II.But through all those moral calamities, we’ve had elections. A federal election has never been postponed or canceled in the history of the United States. If ever one was going to be postponed, it obviously would have been in 1864. But Abraham Lincoln refused even to consider delaying it. And he was convinced he was going to lose! On August 23, 1864, he wrote this memo to his Cabinet members: “This morning, as for some days past, it seems exceedingly probable that this Administration will not be re-elected. Then it will be my duty to so co-operate with the President elect, as to save the Union between the election and the inauguration; as he will have secured his election on such ground that he can not possibly save it afterwards.”He put it in an envelope and asked his Cabinet officers to sign the envelope without reading the memo. Note how there was no question in his mind that the election would be held—even though he was sure he was going to lose. That’s how a small-d democrat behaves. Can you imagine Donald Trump doing that? Never in a jillion years, and it’s precisely that difference that explains why Lincoln is our greatest president and Trump our worst.Otherwise, every federal election in this country’s history has been held. And this one probably will be. But consider these two points. First, the mere fact that I even have to write “probably” is disturbing. Imagine, the week before the election, Trump giving a speech in which he says that “evidence” of “Democrat cheating” is so overwhelming that he has no choice but to declare martial law and delay the elections until these matters are sorted out. That might not be likely. But you know as well as I do that it is far from impossible.And second, we have to ask, assuming it does take place, under what conditions will it be held? Will we see ICE agents at polling places, as Steve Bannon wants? Other self-appointed armed thugs, showing up at polling places in Black neighborhoods, demanding to see voters’ identification cards? Remember—the entire issue is fake. There is no mass voter fraud. The state of Michigan conducted a review of the 2024 voting. About 5.7 million people voted. The number of ballots they found cast by noncitizens? Sixteen. That’s .000028 percent.Additionally, Trump said over the weekend, and has said repeatedly, that the United States is “the only country in the world” that uses mail-in voting. It’s a massive lie: 34 countries and territories use some form of postal voting. Twelve allow all voters to vote by mail, including the U.K., Germany, Poland, Greece, and Canada.Trump may not get away with this. But whether he gets away with it or not isn’t the point. The point is that he’ll try; that he feels no compunction about doing so. Also that his party and his favorite “news” organizations will back him.We’ve all seen scenes in our lives from elections around the world where intimidating armed militias stood guard at polling places, violence broke out, and more. We may be about to see them again this November. But this time, it won’t be Tanzania or Bangladesh. It will be the United States of America under Donald Trump.

You Know What? Maybe the Time Is Right for an AOC Presidential Bid
New Republic • Feb 16, 2026

You Know What? Maybe the Time Is Right for an AOC Presidential Bid

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez sure looked like a presidential candidate this weekend. She attended a policy conference in Munich that often draws potential White House hopefuls, including Governor Gavin Newsom and Senator Ruben Gallego this year. Her aides previewed her remarks to the media and told reporters who had advised her on them (former Bernie Sanders foreign policy aide Matt Duss, for one), as presidential campaigns often do. And in multiple appearances on stage, Ocasio-Cortez spoke in broad, presidential-y language, calling for a “rules-based order” and “working-class centered politics.” Should AOC run for president? Among those rumored to be considering 2028 candidacies, I’m most aligned with Ocasio-Cortez on policy. I would be more excited about her being in the Oval Office than any of the other rumored candidates. But I’m torn about whether I want her to run—and I suspect other progressives feel similarly. The big reason that Ocasio-Cortez shouldn’t run is that she has a very clear path to defeat and a much hazier one to victory. It’s easy to imagine a repeat of 2020. Ocasio-Cortez seems poised to dominate among progressive voters and younger ones, as Sanders did in 2020. So she has a very strong chance of finishing second in the nomination process. At the same time, more moderate Democrats, older ones, and/or those most concerned about a candidate’s chances in the general election might coalesce behind a more centrist figure, the way they did Joe Biden in 2020. Back then, many Democrats were worried about nominating a self-identified socialist (Sanders), a woman (Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris), or a person of color (Cory Booker, Harris), fearing those characteristics would turn off swing voters in a general election. Ocasio-Cortez is all three of those characteristics in one person—and she’s also unusually young for a presidential candidate. She is 36 now and will be 39 on Election Day in 2028. Older Democrats tend to vote at much higher rates than younger ones, so an old vs. young battle will favor the candidate of older voters—and that almost certainly won’t be Ocasio-Cortez. So the pessimist in me says that Ocasio-Cortez should skip a very difficult presidential contest, thereby avoiding a loss that would diminish her stature. Perhaps Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, whose term ends in 2028, opts against reelection, and she runs to replace him. Ocasio-Cortez wouldn’t be a shoo-in there either, as I suspect Wall Street and other more centrist forces in New York politics would strongly oppose her Senate candidacy. But Ocasio-Cortez’s odds of winning a New York Senate Democratic primary are obviously higher than a presidential primary, where she would face many other very skilled politicians and a more conservative electorate. Once in the Senate, Ocasio-Cortez could build a base of power in that chamber and perhaps position herself for a future presidential run. And if Ocasio-Cortez neither ran for the Senate nor the presidency, she would remain one of the most high-profile politicians in the country. But there’s a real case for Ocasio-Cortez to run. She really could win the primary, for several reasons. First of all, as my colleague Alex Shephard has written repeatedly, the Democratic base is now deeply distrustful of the party establishment, much more so than six years ago. Party elites running an “Anybody But AOC” operation might not defeat Ocasio-Cortez as it did Sanders. Democratic voters will be more skeptical of claims from party leaders that one candidate is clearly more electable than another. A wave of endorsements from older Democrats, as Biden received in 2020, may not be that helpful in 2028. The New York City Democratic electorate is obviously more liberal than the party nationally, but it was still telling that endorsements from prominent Democrats such as Bill Clinton and James Clyburn didn’t put Andrew Cuomo over the top in last year’s mayoral primary against Zohran Mamdani. Maine upstart Graham Platner remains a viable U.S. Senate candidate even after his Nazi-tattoo and other controversies and party leaders’ clear preference for Governor Janet Mills.Second, Democrats may be hungry for a progressive candidate in a way that they weren’t six years ago. That was my takeaway from the poll of Democratic voters that The New Republic released last week. Forty-six percent of respondents said the party’s 2028 nominee should be a progressive, ahead of those who wanted a liberal candidate (23 percent) or a moderate (32 percent). That moderate bloc would be Ocasio-Cortez’s biggest challenge, so it’s ideal for her that it appears to be only a third of the party. About a third of Democrats think the party is too conservative on domestic policy issues, while fewer than 10 percent think it’s too liberal, again aligning the base with Ocasio-Cortez. That poll was particularly favorable for her. A whopping 85 percent of Democrats said they have favorable views of the New York congresswoman, the highest of the 12 Democratic politicians that respondents were asked about. Perhaps even more importantly, only 7 percent of Democrats said they have unfavorable views of her, tied for the third-lowest among the 12. (Only 5 percent of Dems have unfavorable views of Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear and 6 percent of Maryland Governor Wes Moore, but huge blocs of respondents said they were “not sure” how they feel about those two.) Also, while 36 percent of Democrats said the party needs to nominate a man, the other 64 percent in the TNR survey think “the right woman can win.” Third, Ocasio-Cortez is not Sanders. Perhaps she has less appeal among older white voters and men than the Vermont senator. But it’s easy to imagine her running well ahead of him among Black, Latino, and women voters, particularly the younger people in those cohorts. She is charismatic in a way that the senator isn’t. Perhaps Mamdani could not win a national Democratic primary either, but I wonder if his 2025 run, not Sanders 2020, is the best analogy for Ocasio-Cortez 2028. Fourth, this could be Ocasio-Cortez’s time. Her combination of youth, economic populism, and social progressivism is a perfect contrast to Trump. But by 2032 or 2040, perhaps the country is in a different place or another Democrat has eclipsed her. It was smart for Barack Obama to run for president in 2008, even though that seemed early. Let’s say Ocasio-Cortez runs but doesn’t win the nomination. That might be bad for her personally. But for progressives like me, that still might be a good outcome. Strong challengers from the left forced Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Biden in 2020 to adopt more progressive stands. I suspect Ocasio-Cortez would have the same effect on Newsom, Pete Buttigieg, and other likely 2028 candidates who aren’t as progressive as she. In Munich, Ocasio-Cortez described what has happened in Gaza as a genocide, praised the idea of wealth taxes and condemned corporate monopolies.  Those positions are correct. They are shared by many Democratic voters. But not by most of the party’s other 2028 hopefuls. If Ocasio-Cortez doesn’t run, the 2028 Democratic primary will lack one of the country’s most powerful progressive voices. I suspect Representative Ro Khanna and other leftist candidates will run. But other than Sanders and Warren, who aren’t going to run due to their age, there is no more famous left-wing politician than Ocasio-Cortez. So put me down as undecided. I was super-excited to see Ocasio-Cortez in Munich and liked what she said. I am not fully convinced Ocasio-Cortez should run for president. But right after the 2024 election, I would have said that the Democrats definitely should not nominate a 39-year-old Latina socialist from New York City as their next presidential candidate. But from joining Sanders on the “Fighting Oligarchy” tour to endorsing Mamdani to her comments in Munich, Ocasio-Cortez keeps showing prescience and depth. Perhaps the right woman is staring right in front of us, and we should embrace her leadership.

Trump’s Sick Campaign to Gamify Violence
New Republic • Feb 16, 2026

Trump’s Sick Campaign to Gamify Violence

“They said, ‘Skeddadle!’ The word ‘skedaddle.’”Last November, during his address before McDonald’s investors, President Donald Trump—as he is wont to do during public speeches—went on one of his weird tangents. “And that plane went ‘pshh,’ like this,” he continued, diving his hand downward in an accompanying gesture. “You know, when it drops a bomb, it goes down very steeply, because that gives it a better angle, and, you know, more speed for the bomb.”It was a characteristically glib illustration for Trump, as he narrated the experience of watching military planes drop bombs on Iran. The planes were described not in terms of the damage of their payload but rather by the sound they made as they levered inexorably downward. By now, we’re used to the way the president’s mind might lock onto something loud or shiny he sees on a screen, especially if those images provoke his enthusiasm or anger. But his play-by-play descriptions of bombs bursting in air is actually something his administration and his allies have long encouraged Americans to do: view their biggest atrocities through a gamified lens. One demographic may be particularly susceptible to this kind of incitement, one for whom targeting an otherized population is viewed more as a game than as state-sanctioned violence: lonely, angry young men.During the 2024 campaign, Trump made a concerted effort to market himself to this cohort. He appeared on multiple podcasts popular in the “manosphere,” a community that promotes misogyny and (often white) male supremacy. Since taking office a second time, Trump and his allies have continued to gamify many of their policy decisions, in a campaign to encourage their audience to transfer their online anger to the real world.As they are increasingly siloed online, it becomes easier for young men to distance themselves from others, viewing all other perspectives as illegitimate or unimportant. If your experience is the only true version of reality, then other people become NPCs, or “nonplayable characters”—not individuals but mere background actors populating the scenes in your everyday life.“You’re the protagonist in the same way that a player character in a game might be,” said Adrienne Massanari, an associate professor of communications at American University.This perspective is frequently encouraged by the administration. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has given his missions names such as “Midnight Hammer” and “Southern Spear,” phrases that sound more like weapons in a game than actual military operations. (Hegseth also has a tattoo that reads “Deus Vult,” a slogan adopted by the far right that was popularized by the grand strategy computer game Crusader Kings II.) And Trump, of course, continues to enthusiastically describe military strikes with the use of sound effects, as if he were watching an action flick rather than bombs dropping on human beings.Characterizing military or law enforcement service as a video game–style activity can be an effective way to attract young men. Historically, recruitment efforts by the military have been intertwined with video game culture, encouraging this perspective—from the Army releasing its own hugely popular video game in the early 2000s to its use of esports to reach young Americans and encourage them to join up.Immigration and Customs Enforcement has enthusiastically adopted the strategy of explicitly appealing to gamers through distinct visuals and coded language. One recruitment poster shared by ICE on its Instagram account last year harkened to the video game series Halo, encouraging potential recruits to “destroy the flood.” In the Halo series, the “flood” is a parasitic alien life form and one of the primary villains of the franchise—the administration is thus comparing undocumented immigrants to an existential threat to society that must be eradicated.“It is easier to be able to dehumanize an immigrant, if you’re an ICE agent, if you view it as, ‘It’s just a game,’” Massanari said. If a man in a position of authority sees himself more as a protagonist in a first-person shooter game than someone working toward the collective good, that distance between him and his community only widens.ICE has planned a $100 million year-long recruitment push—capitalizing on the role-playing-game-obsessed, violently inclined fan base that Trump cultivated on the campaign trail. Other marketing tactics include Snapchat ads, hiring influencers and livestreamers on the far-right streaming platform Rumble, and using a geolocation technique to send ads to anyone near military bases, Nascar races, college campuses, or gun and trade shows. ICE will also send targeted ads to people who listen to patriotic podcasts or attend UFC fights. As the Young Men Research Initiative has noted, the agency is explicitly targeting young men who have fears of being economically insolvent and are anti-immigrant and right-wing.The end result may be a law enforcement culture that is more defined by a desire to exert power over the vulnerable than protect them, a perspective that has been partially shaped and encouraged by the modern internet. That shift in goal came into stark clarity on February 3, during a hearing on ICE brutality held by congressional Democrats from both chambers. Chicago resident and U.S. citizen Marimar Martinez testified about getting shot five times while following immigration agents in her car and trying to warn her neighbors.“After being at the hospital for less than three hours, I was discharged from the hospital into custody of the FBI. As we left the hospital, I was escorted out through the back in a wheelchair. I observed over dozens of Border Patrol agents waiting outside the hospital,” Martinez said. “One of the agents came up to me with his cell phone and took a photograph of me. It was the same agent who had previously kept coming in and out [of my hospital] room, and I had to repeatedly tell him to leave.“Was this the agent that shot me? Was this a trophy for him?”She also revealed that the agent who shot her, Charles Exum, bragged over text after the shooting, “I fired 5 rounds and she had 7 holes. Put that in your book, boys.”Last May, Elon Musk sulked when British journalist Mishal Husain asked him tough questions about his work at the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE—its very name a meme reference—which had been brutally slashing federal funding and jobs with minimal oversight. Musk called her an NPC and started giving her only one-word answers.“I mean, I feel you’re somewhat trapped in the NPC dialogue tree of a traditional journalist,” he said. “So it’s difficult when I’m conversing with someone who’s trapped in the dialogue tree of a conventional journalist because it’s like talking to a computer.”Musk’s willingness to refer to a woman sitting just feet away from him essentially as unreal is emblematic of how this kind of language has entered the mainstream. It’s shockingly easy for the manosphere to pick up new followers by offering a sense of community, in large part due to the overwhelming sense of isolation that many younger men feel. At least 16 percent of men under the age of 50 say they feel lonely all or most of the time, the Pew Research Center found in January 2025. And only 38 percent of men overall said they’re likely to reach out to a friend if they feel in need of support.Young men are disproportionately likely to turn to online communities to find solidarity, according to the Young Men Research Initiative, and tend to believe that the people they follow on social media are “better” than they are: wealthier, more successful, and more attractive. This can create not only a sense of distance from their peers but bitterness that they appear to have fallen behind.During the coronavirus pandemic, the sense of isolation deepened. A survey by SocialSphere conducted last March found that young men between the ages of 18 and 29 were more likely to report a loss in dating and socializing opportunities compared to young women. Of the young men surveyed who said they were significantly affected by the pandemic, 49 percent reported “feelings of isolation or disconnection from support networks,” and 48 percent said they have a “strong need to belong to groups where I feel completely accepted.”The young men who were teenagers or in their early twenties during the height of the coronavirus pandemic and may not have had sufficient peer-to-peer interaction could have instead experienced the world through screens during a defining point in their development. Social media and video games in a vacuum cannot be blamed for a rise in misogyny and racism, but the “atomized” media experience during the pandemic helped further isolate this population, said Massanari.“It made it easier to be in the spaces where … certain ideas, certain memes, certain language, would just be normalized as that’s how people talk and engage with each other,” she said.Andrew Breitbart, the creator of the eponymous far-right site, popularized the “doctrine” that “politics is downstream of culture.” For the modern young man, the more accurate assessment is that “politics is downstream of experience,” said John Della Volpe, the director of polling at the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics.“The experience for too many people, specifically too many young men, is struggle in isolation and feeling, feeling like no one has their back,” said Della Volpe. “So that you had that moment a year and a half ago where Trump and the aligned forces, you know, in the quote-unquote manosphere promised to have their back and to allow them to be the protectors and providers that they wanted to be, making them feel good about themselves.”This desire for belonging dovetails into a desire to see “strong” political figures. According to a survey by SocialSphere, 71 percent of young men said it was important to have a leader who “demonstrates strength and authority, even if it means bypassing traditional political norms.” Fringe groups, such as incels, male supremacists, and neo-Nazis, are quite welcoming to people who feel isolated in real life. “They offer this status. They offer this sense of mastery over ‘forbidden knowledge,’” said Dr. Pasha Dashtgard, the director of interventions at the Polarization & Extremism Research & Innovation Lab, or PERIL, at American University. “These toxic online communities also play on grievance. They give you someone to blame. They give you an absolution for your failure” to participate in society through, for instance, getting a job or sleeping with lots of women.Dashtgard described it as a sort of “toxic belonging”—a sense of exclusivity for people who are normally excluded.“These kinds of toxic online communities offer a sense of meaning, a sense of being part of something bigger than themselves. And they give you this kind of narrative, that … you can be a protector of a community,” he said.Belonging to these online communities can also make people more inclined to acts of violence, against both others and themselves. Community leaders will often lead other members down a slippery slope of increasingly extreme ideas, resulting in desensitization to violent imagery or the deepening of beliefs that certain groups are naturally inferior.“You start to think of yourself as part of this existential conflict, between good and evil, between my people and your people. Where we can’t coexist,” Dashtgard explained. “Where it’s a zero-sum game, and either my group destroys or dominates your group or your group is going to destroy or dominate my group.”Massanari draws a line from the “Gamergate” movement of 2014 to modern politics both online and IRL—in real life, in internet parlance. What began as a disgruntled ex-boyfriend’s lengthy rant against his former partner, a video game designer, morphed into a massive online harassment campaign against women in the gaming community. The young, white men who participated in Gamergate doxed and explicitly threatened the safety of their targets, railing against racial and gender diversity in an industry that had heretofore catered to them almost exclusively.Right-wing provocateur and Trump adviser Steve Bannon, then a Breitbart editor, saw Gamergate as an opportunity to harness the vitriol of young men who felt their position of power threatened in the gaming community, and direct that rage toward American culture as a whole. Massanari, who has written a book on the connection between the tech community and the far right, said that Gamergate helped normalize tactics of online harassment and a widespread atmosphere of conspiracism.Where the participants in Gamergate believed that societal ills were caused by feminists and “social justice warriors,” the current netizens of the online right see immigrants and transgender Americans as agents of a great replacement. The disaffected young men of today who are inculcated in these messages grew up with the internet that Gamergate built.The consequences can be severe. The shooter who killed right-wing activist Charlie Kirk last year included references to memes and to the satirical video game Helldivers 2 on his bullet casings. But this does not mean that the game should be connected to any particular ideology; references to internet culture have been rising among young, male shooters for years.Journalist Ryan Broderick noted in an interview with PBS News last year that “many young extremists that we have seen come out of the woodwork over the last few years since the pandemic see public violence as a path towards fame, towards glory, another way to go viral.” They may have an “accelerationist” viewpoint that political violence will push the country to destruction.“It is a very nihilistic, very apocalyptic view that has become more and more popular, particularly on the dark corners of the internet in the last 10 years,” Broderick said.Trump’s support among young men is far from universal. Some polls show that the majority of Gen Z men, and even a percentage of the young men who voted for him, are feeling some buyers’ remorse.It is also unfair and inaccurate to blame video games, social media, or the internet as a whole for the isolation that young men may feel, or the extremism that vulnerability can beget. Loneliness can stem from something as simple as having no outlet for difficult emotions. (Let’s also just jump ahead of whatever complaint you may have about young men not being the only ones struggling with loneliness; this is a universal issue that plagues young women as well, and indeed, Americans across all ages and genders.)Gaming communities can provide those outlets. Della Volpe said that when he talked with young men over the summer for the “Speaking With American Men” initiative, which seeks to provide research on how Democrats can reconnect with this demographic, he noticed that young men he surveyed do not feel comfortable talking about their emotions outside of “anonymized communities.”“Whether it’s politics or financial or personal, those are the kinds of conversations that clearly come up in those kinds of channels,” said Della Volpe, who is also the founder and CEO of SocialSphere.A potential cure, then, is ensuring that there are other opportunities for young men to connect with each other. Dashtgard added that “there are proven, empirically validated strategies for preventing this kind of violence from happening,” primarily by helping young people in general create offline spaces and networks where they can discuss the feelings that would otherwise lead them to online fringe groups.“Violence is preventable. This is not something that … young men are doomed to,” Dashtgard said. “Most young men are not participating in extremist groups, are not being radicalized into male supremacy. Even the ones who are consuming don’t necessarily become radicalized to it.”

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