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War. Oil shocks. A corrupt president and a scandal-ridden administration. Civil rights abuses and government violence. An immense gap between how young and old, men and women, left and right, rural and urban people view the world. A technological revolution that no one quite understands. And, underneath all that, a sense that an era is […]

After spending more than four decades studying abortion in American social, medical, and political culture, Carole Joffe was fully prepared for the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade in 2022. “Dobbs itself wasn’t that scary to me,” she says. “It was upsetting and politically outrageous, but because of our work, we knew abortion wasn’t […]

The president's sunken mind can't get out of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool he wants so badly to renovate – unless it's time for him to make life miserable for Republicans on Capitol Hill.

Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro occupies something of an intriguing position among Democrats. He represents a state that Donald Trump won twice—a state that’s both deeply divided and pivotal in deciding presidential elections. Yet Shapiro also consistently garners high approval ratings there, and polls regularly show he enjoys the support of around one-quarter of Republicans. On top of all that, he manages this while remaining sharply critical of Trump—and without pandering to MAGA voters.Case in point: In an interview with me, Shapiro confirmed for the first time that Pennsylvania will not participate in Trump’s big planned gala celebrating the country’s 250th anniversary on the National Mall. The way Shapiro is addressing this decision deserves notice. It shows that it’s possible for a Democrat to sustain enduring public support in a swing state—including nontrivial backing among voters who helped elect Trump—while casting Trumpism, appropriately, as an overwhelmingly destructive force in American life.“This president routinely makes patriotism partisan and personal—and it shouldn’t be that way,” Shapiro told me, referring to Pennsylvania’s decision not to join the so-called Great American State Fair, which Trump has described as “the most spectacular TRUMP RALLY of them all.”Shapiro said his office had canvassed opinion among many Pennsylvania businesses about Trump’s gala. Shapiro’s aides enlisted the help of the Pennsylvania Chamber of Commerce, which communicated with companies across the state, small and large alike, about whether to join the coming festivities.“None were interested,” Shapiro said. “It reflects this sad state of affairs that we find ourselves in—that the president has politicized this to a degree that businesses don’t want to participate.”Pennsylvania’s decision is significant, given that Trump’s flipping of the traditional “Blue Wall” state was pivotal to his 2016 and 2024 victories. Its deliberations over Trump’s fair had been closely held. The New York Times recently reported that Pennsylvania was “known to” be pulling out, based on unclear sourcing and with no confirmation. In contrast, CNN and NOTUS reported that the state was undecided.But Shapiro confirmed to The New Republic that the decision to withdraw is now official. In joining eight other states that appear to be pulling out (Oregon, Washington, Massachusetts, Illinois, Connecticut, Maine, Rhode Island, and North Carolina), Pennsylvania becomes the first swing state that has flipped between the parties in recent presidential races to do so. Coming after many musical artists have declined to participate, it’s another sign of how badly Trump—and his approach to this hallowed national anniversary—have alienated the middle of the country. Trump’s treatment of this moment as akin to a monarchical festival is of a piece with his ballroom, his triumphal arch, and other efforts to transform the nation’s capital into something more like a czar’s imperial court. It’s giving Democrats like Shapiro an opening to decline to participate in the president’s Bonapartist self-glorification while giving voice to a disinterested, public-spirited patriotism more in sync with the virtues of republican governance.“We don’t celebrate one individual,” Shapiro told me. “We celebrate ‘we, the people.’ Unfortunately, the president doesn’t seem to get that. He wants to make it all about himself. What’s clear is that’s not where the American people are.”When Shapiro was first elected governor in 2022, he made big inroads with rural, Trump-backing Pennsylvanians. Though data on this is sporadic, he’s managed to hold on to the support of around a quarter of Republican voters through late 2025 and early 2026. He holds a wide lead over his MAGA opponent in his campaign for reelection this year.What’s notable is that Shapiro has done this without pulling punches in his criticism of Trump. Shapiro hasn’t proceeded as if the 2024 election revealed Trump as a tribune of the people who mystically identified a deep strain of right-wing populist nationalism in the American psyche. Some (though hardly all) Democrats reacted that way, leading them to trim their ideological sails, stick to kitchen table issues, and treat immigration as a largely lost debate while seeing engagement with Trump’s ethnonationalist and authoritarian abuses as a distraction from the route back to relevance.Shapiro, for his part, has forcefully opposed Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s plans for vast detention camps in central Pennsylvania. And while some immigration activists would like him to go still further in this regard, Shapiro has reinforced prohibitions against state law enforcement asking for people’s immigration status or participating in enforcing federal immigration law.In a sense, Shapiro gives something to different elements of the Democratic coalition. Democrats who favor an “abundance agenda” cite Shapiro as a model, in that he stresses removing bureaucratic constraints to unshackle effective government and deliver concrete economic results. Yet Shapiro doesn’t treat “deliverism,” as this form of politics is sometimes called, as sufficient in itself. He’s also willing to defend immigrants while engaging ideologically with the rank ethnonationalism—and even the Christian nationalism—driving Trump’s efforts at mass violent removals. “We now have a president who tries to bring us to the lowest common denominator every single day, who attacks people who don’t vote like him, or look like him, or pray like him,” Shapiro said.And at a time when Democrats are debating how to win back Trump-supporting working-class voters, Shapiro says the answer is to bluntly inform them that Trump’s policies are, well, shafting them royally. He highlights the tens of thousands of Pennsylvanians who, his office says, have been at risk of losing food stamp benefits and the more than 100,000 at risk of losing health care access. He also points to the 300,000 people who could lose Medicaid coverage next year.“More than half of the people losing health care and food assistance come from counties that Trump won,” Shapiro told me. “He screwed over the very people that put him in the White House. He turned his back on them, and he lied to them.” Shapiro suggests that Democrats can go right into these communities and make this case to Trump voters, as he does. “I don’t rub it in their face by any stretch that their choice for president has made their lives worse,” he continued, stressing that his posture is always one of “fighting every day to make their lives better.”Asked if the decision not to participate in Trump’s gala is rooted in a rejection of Trumpism, Shapiro said it’s not. He noted that the lack of interest of businesses drove the decision, and said joining the gala would have required the state to shell out $700,000 in taxpayer money, which will instead fund celebrations throughout the state.Still, one can discern a through line linking all of this. It’s that winning the middle of the country is fully compatible with a full-throated indictment of Trump and Trumpism as truly toxic forces in American life. The ethnonationalist cruelties, the endless corruption and self-dealing, the massive upward transfer of oligarchic wealth, the displays of dictatorial self-glorification, the desecration of hallowed republican symbols in the nation’s capital—most ordinary people just want to be done with Trumpism and all its enmities and degradations already.“I think people are exhausted by his chaos, his cruelty, and his corruption—and they’re seeking something better,” Shapiro said. He looks at all the ordinary Pennsylvanians coming together across social and ethnic lines at events commemorating our 250th anniversary across the state, all motivated by simple, selfless patriotism, and he concludes: “We are better as Americans than the negativity that Trump injects into our lives.”If this approach can secure solid majority support in must-win Pennsylvania, that seems like something Democrats can learn from.

President Donald Trump surprised just about everyone in Washington, Republicans and Democrats alike, when he announced on Wednesday that he was canceling an afternoon signing ceremony for the biggest housing bill to pass Congress in decades. He’s holding the bill hostage over his unreasonable demand that lawmakers first pass the Save America Act, the Republicans’ voter suppression bill, which doesn’t have the votes to pass the Senate. As Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren, a key supporter of the housing bill, said, “He could be over here trying to claim a victory lap. And instead, he’s saying no, no he doesn’t want anything to do with it.”The fate of the bill is unclear. (It passed with veto-proof margins, but then there’s the possibility of a “pocket veto.”) But if it becomes law, more than 60 measures will take effect with the goal of increasing housing by waiving some regulations, increasing grants to communities that encourage building, updating rules on manufactured homes, and preventing large investors from buying single-family homes. Many of the provisions were big asks from the abundance movement.Proponents of these measures hope that they will increase housing supply and therefore lower prices, putting homeownership back within reach for middle-class families. But there’s a smaller provision that could be just as important. The bill includes pilot programs to address a gap in the housing market that keeps families from getting mortgages on already inexpensive homes because it’s often not profitable for lenders to issue smaller mortgages. Addressing this gap could bring the best idea of the abundance movement—that public policy should focus more on increasing housing supply—to distressed and rural communities where aging, inexpensive homes already exist.The provisions deal with “small-dollar mortgages,” defined as those less than $100,000, for homes that are often called “naturally affordable”—which is to say, cheap. They’re often priced affordably because they’re small, old, in a less expensive neighborhood, or some combination of the three. Such homes are not a big part of the market, but they could be exactly what working-class families who want to move from renting to homeownership need, especially in certain areas of the country.“These small-dollar, or low-cost, homes comprise only about 3 percent of active listings; that’s about 32,000 homes that are under $100,000 today,” said Aniket Mehrotra, a policy coordinator at the Urban Institute’s Housing Finance Policy Center​. “However, in rural areas of the country the share of active listings is greater.”Yuliya Panfil, director of the Future of Land and Housing program at the nonpartisan think tank New America, calls this “affordable housing hiding in plain sight.”  While many homes are simply too expensive for low- and moderate-income families to buy, these are well within their price range but difficult if not impossible to get mortgages approved for. “The result of these often-invisible challenges is that millions of starter homes sit in a financing no-man’s-land—too complicated for most buyers to access and too overlooked by policymakers to fix,” Panfil wrote at Bloomberg CityLab. “We are struggling to build new homes fast enough as millions of existing affordable homes quietly go to waste.”Researchers at the Urban Institute in 2018 documented the problems families face when trying to buy these less expensive homes. “Lenders weren’t originating small-dollar loans even where affordable properties existed, locking out working-class families not because of creditworthiness, but because the loan economics didn’t work for lenders,” said Alanna McCargo, a senior fellow for inclusive capitalism at the Clinton Foundation and nonresident fellow at the Urban Institute who worked on the original report. This dynamic keeps families out of homeownership, pushes them into less secure loans, or encourages them to buy more expensive homes they struggle to afford.It’s unclear what banks need in order to issue more of these loans, so the bill creates pilot programs to study and implement possible fixes, including requiring the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to study compensation rules and caps on fees to mortgage lenders to potentially encourage more small-dollar lending, and a Housing and Urban Development pilot program to increase access to these loans.But encouraging more lending isn’t the only solution. Much of this housing stock is in smaller cities far from the booming coastal megalopolises where abundance proponents live, and the homes are also aging. Even if families find willing lenders to buy an older home, the houses may not appraise or pass inspection. Families already living in them are also often locked out of financing to make necessary repairs that would enable them to put their homes on the market again and move on, freeing them up for new families to buy.The bipartisan housing bill only provides limited provisions on rehabilitating old homes, primarily for elderly and low-income homeowners, and doesn’t provide new funding for existing grant programs. “Focus on this bill is predominantly on building new housing,” Mehrotra said. “However, we have an aging housing stock in this country. The majority of our housing stock was built before 1980, which indicates that many homes are in need of repair, particularly in certain markets, like in rural areas, [and] in cities like Philadelphia or Baltimore, and so it is critical that we also prioritize home rehabilitation.” Developers are also often unwilling to renovate or rebuild older homes in neighborhoods where they can’t get their money back. Mehrotra said that proposed legislation to tackle that problem was not included in this bill but could be revisited in the future.Still, Panfil’s colleague at New America, Sabiha Zainulbhai, called the measures “exciting progress on figuring out how to unlock this critical housing supply for first-time and low- and moderate-income buyers, especially at a time when homeownership is inaccessible for a growing segment of the population.”There’s other work to be done on housing, of course, like more rental assistance for low-income families, which is a nonstarter in this GOP-controlled Congress. And while Trump sits on the housing bill, many American families have already given up on the homebuying dream because they simply can’t afford it. This bill won’t fix those problems overnight. “Implementation takes time, and families who need a small-dollar mortgage today and thousands of families already left behind by rising home prices over the past decade won’t benefit from this,” McCargo said. “But it’s a step in the right direction, and one we’ve been working toward for years.”This article has been updated to clarify the bill’s potential fate.

Donald Trump dreamed of turning the Lincoln Reflecting Pool “American Flag Blue” in advance of celebrations for America’s 250th anniversary on July 4. Instead, he got a pungent, bright green embarrassment. National Parks employees have yet to fully remove the algal bloom that sprang up after Trump’s ill-fated paint job, despite applying vacuums, hydrogen peroxide, and nanobubbles to the problem; the next step will be to drain the now-swampy basin for the second time this month and restore the blue sealant that has been floating to the surface in unsightly chunks. The Washington Post reported on Tuesday that Washington D.C.’s Department of Energy and the Environment was conducting an investigation into what killed the multiple ducks that have been found dead in the pool’s waters. It’s all a bit too on the nose. The tacky $16.4 million vanity project was carried out in part by giving a $1.7 million no-bid contract to a firm called (appropriately enough) Greenwater Services, which is owned by an already scandal-laden Trump loyalist, John J. Cafaro. On June 15, workers reported that one or two of the four algae-killing machines Greenwater used weren’t working at any given time. Trump has—without evidence—blamed the algae problem on “vandals,” alleging that anonymous hoodlums sabotaged the pool with knives and fertilizer; this does not seem to be true. Still, as of June 24, the Parks Police, National Guard, and U.S. Marshals have been patrolling the usually placid site. As of Tuesday, six arrests had been made. White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt claimed—also without evidence—that those detained included “longtime donors to the Democrat Party, to Barack Obama, to ActBlue.” Newly installed fencing around the pool is apparently meant to deter what Interior Department spokeswoman Katie Martin has called an “increase in vandalism by leftist activists.” Trump pledged to drain the metaphorical swamp. Instead, he’s created one.Algae, however, are much more than either smelly sludge or a tidy narrative device. While algae play several critical roles in freshwater and saltwater ecosystems, algal blooms like the one now bedeviling the Reflecting Pool are “a growing problem,” said marine biologist Gregory Dick. He’s the director of the Cooperative Institute for Great Lakes Research, or CIGLR, a partnership between the University of Michigan and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA. “They’re becoming more frequent as water pollution becomes more of an issue, and they grow more in warming condition,” he explained. “The Reflecting Pool is not an exception.” The government’s newfound war on algae contrasts starkly with its repeated attempts to defund the experts who protect the public against harmful algal blooms not appearing on Washington, D.C., landmarks. The Trump administration’s cuts to research funding and federal agencies like NOAA have already undermined the federal government’s essential role in monitoring, responding to, and understanding harmful algal blooms. Deeper cuts outlined in next year’s federal budget would lower the public’s defenses against those blooms just as climate change helps them proliferate.Trump’s talk of vandals and knives notwithstanding, you don’t need conspiracy theories to explain how algal blooms happen. Experts suspect that the Reflecting Pool algal bloom began as a cyanobacteria, or blue-green algae. Those generally grow thanks to abundant nutrients like phosphorus and nitrogen, warm temperatures, and calm waters. “The Reflecting Pool has those three ingredients,” Dick said. There’s no official definition for what constitutes a harmful algal bloom, and the one in the Reflecting Pool hasn’t received that designation. But they tend to give off a foul smell and are known to kill birds. Cyanobacteria produce a toxin called microcystin that can fatally poison animals and cause nausea, vomiting, and skin rashes in humans. A 2014 microcystin outbreak in Lake Erie left nearly half a million people in the greater Toledo area without running water for three days.An enormous amount of local, state, and federal resources are needed to keep the country’s waterways safe. NOAA’s Great Lakes Environmental Research Lab—which houses CIGLR—monitors and responds to algal blooms throughout the Great Lakes watershed, including Lake Erie. Researchers there use a range of technologies to keep tabs on algae in real time. Remote sensors let them track the distribution of harmful algal blooms. Buoys and remotely operated vehicles measure nutrient levels in the water, and scientists analyze physical samples to understand which species of algae are present at any given time and what environmental conditions cause them to give off certain toxins. If the scientists spot a potential threat, NOAA alerts municipal water treatment plants so that they can proactively safeguard the water sources that some 40 million people use to hydrate, cook, and shower. Algal blooms pose dangers not only to public and environmental health but to local economies that rely on revenue from tourism and fishing operations, which depend on the Great Lakes Lab to help determine when beaches should be closed down and which fish are safe to catch and sell. In spite of its crucial role in monitoring blooms, the lab lost roughly 40 percent of its staff last year. That was thanks to cuts imposed by the Department of Government Efficiency, which laid off newly hired and promoted staff and encourged federal employees to accept buyouts and retire early. The lab still hasn’t received all of the funds it was appropriated by Congress. The White House’s proposed budget for Fiscal Year 2027 also includes an 18 percent cut to NOAA’s overall budget; it would completely eliminate funds for “Ocean, Coastal and Great Lakes Research.” Funding for the Cooperative Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Studies—the technical backbone of the National Hurricane Center, which houses researchers that forecast harmful algal blooms—is also at risk.Thankfully, these sorts of proposals tend to be aspirational. The budget Congress passed last year avoided the steepest cuts to NOAA outlined in the White House’s FY2026. So far, Project 2025’s authors in the Trump administration have not been able to follow through on their pledge to dismantle and privatize the agency. But those funds remain under constant threat. What was already a bare-bones team at the Great Lakes Environmental Lab, or GLERL, pre-DOGE has had to make do with a lot less.The reduced funding has already had some very concrete effects. Some of the Lab’s autonomous sample processors—which collect samples and measure water quality—“did not go out last year because of funding delays and lack of personnel,” Dick said. “Reduction in support and capacity for places like GLERL would have big impacts on boots-on-the-ground operations” he added, endangering researchers’ ability to provide up-to-date measurements and forecasting to (among many others) beach managers, drinking-water treatment facilities, and charter boat fishing captains. Dick worries too that continued cuts will hamper researchers’ ability to understand how algal blooms are responding to rising temperatures and climate-fueled extreme weather. Cyanobacteria thrive in warmer temperatures. Heavy storms can wash their favorite nutrients into the water, fueling algal growth. Lake Superior, for instance, was long thought to be “the coldest and cleanest of all the Great Lakes,” Dick said. In the 2010s, it suddenly started seeing substantial algal blooms, following a series of 500-year storms that washed off nutrients from the landscape. Lake Superior is also among the fastest-warming lakes on earth; over the past 30 years, summer surface water temperatures have increased by five degrees.Unlike Lake Superior, the Reflecting Pool has long hosted algae. As Washington’s summers become increasingly swamplike, eliminating the algae altogether may well prove impossible. As it has stretched out over the last several weeks, the Reflecting Pool debacle has been something of a microcosm for Trumpist governance, combining handouts to inexperienced loyalists with gaudy kitsch and baseless accusations against the left. It is also about as good a summary as any for the right’s approach to a climate crisis that’s fueling harmful algal blooms the world over: When it becomes impossible to keep denying a problem you helped cause, blame it on your political enemies and try to throw them in jail.

Still, Republican leaders think that there could be enough Democratic items in the budget request to persuade Democrats to support it.

Hours after the president castigated Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., Cassidy voted to help defeat a war powers measure.