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The following is a lightly edited transcript of the June 16 episode of The Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here. Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.Donald Trump has signed a deal with Iran to cease hostilities and reopen the Strait of Hormuz. We still haven’t seen the document, but all of the reporting suggests a very simple story: Trump lost. He got nothing of any significance. Trump himself plainly has no idea what happened, as he revealed in a strange ramble to reporters. But JD Vance does know what happened, even though he’s trying very hard to sugarcoat it in a pretty revealing way.We’re really lucky to be talking about all of this with Tom Nichols, a staff writer for The Atlantic, who has a good piece arguing that Trump capitulated to Iran. Tom, great to have you on, man.Tom Nichols: Good to see you, Greg.Sargent: So let’s just sum up where we are. We haven’t seen the document, but all the reporting suggests that while the Strait of Hormuz will reopen, all that does is return us to where we were before Trump’s war. Meanwhile, they’ve punted the discussion over Iran’s nuclear program until later. And the Iranian regime has survived. So basically, Trump’s tens of billions of dollars in bombing didn’t compel Iran to do what he said he’d make them do. Tom, is that basically the size of things?Nichols: I think it’s worse than that. The bigger problem is that he counted on regime change. This was what the war was really about. So when that wasn’t going to happen, when it became clear a week or so in that this regime wasn’t going to collapse, this outcome, I think, was more or less inevitable.And the people that are now waiting and saying, Well, we need to see the details of this MOU. That’s fine. But even without knowing the details of the MOU, the Americans have been defeated here. And that pains me to say as an American. Because the regime is still intact, their nuclear material is still in their country. They’re actually politically more powerful now that they’ve flexed muscle and done some serious harm to the other Gulf states as a warning not to cooperate with the United States. There’s going to be some money going back into Iran, whether it comes through third parties or not.If you had said any of this to Donald Trump on the first night of the war, he would have said, That’s impossible, we’re going to get unconditional surrender. Well, we didn’t. And all of these things are going to happen. Without even knowing what’s in the MOU, you can know at least this much.Sargent: Right. Trump absolutely did expect unconditional surrender, even though he was told by lots and lots of different people within his administration, including the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, that that wouldn’t happen. He was told that the strait would be closed by Iran and that that would exercise leverage over the global economy and over us. Trump couldn’t fathom that possibility because he’s strong. It’s just that simple, right? He’s strong, he wins, he’s a winner, so there’s no way that things won’t go exactly the way he says they will.Nichols: It’s bitten him before and caused him problems before, but there’s this weird quirk in Trump’s personality where he really believes that saying things makes them real. That, like a child, he can sort of wish-cast things into existence. And you can play that game with domestic politics and tariffs and taxes and do some fancy dancing around where the money is in terms of things like revenue. You can bully other Republicans to agree with you. What you can’t do is do that with a war where the enemy gets a vote.Every day that Trump said they’re eager to make a deal, there’s going to be a deal, a deal is imminent—the Iranians are not Republican House members. They are a foreign country and an enemy of the United States. And there’s nothing to stop them from saying, No, there is no deal. And now that we have one, it’s not great. It’s basically an acknowledgment that the United States failed to gain any of its strategic objectives.Sargent: That seems beyond clear. So Trump talked to the media about his deal today. He blasted Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal, which unfroze tens of billions of dollars that Iran could then access in foreign accounts. Listen to Trump.Donald Trump (voiceover): It was a horrible deal for the United States. It was a deal where billions of dollars was given to Iran. It was a deal where $1.7 billion in cash was put on a Boeing 7—well, not a 757, I guess, right? But on a big, beautiful Boeing 757. They needed a Boeing 747, to be honest with you, because it was a lot of cash. $1.7 billion was taken out of the banks and given to Iran. And on top of that, tens of billions of dollars was spent. So they tried to bribe them to make a deal and that didn’t work. It never works.Tom, as far as we know now, Iran will also be able to access a huge tranche of funds under Trump’s deal too. Can you explain that? How do you respond to what Trump said there?Nichols: Well, I was a critic of the JCPOA because I didn’t like how much of it was front-loaded. But I also have to be honest and say that in the years that followed, the deal seemed more or less to work. Now Trump has wandered into a crappier version of the JCPOA, starting all over again, with the argument that they’ll get access to this money if they clear certain gates and engage in certain things. And the Iranians are just better at this than he is. I think that money is going to start coming to them again through third parties.That’s why you keep hearing Trump and Vance both being careful to say, Well, we’re not just going to give them cash. No, you’re going to open up the ability to have cash get to them with your OK. And I suspect that once people are tired of this whole process, which will be very soon, and once Trump is no longer paying any attention to it, the Iranians are going to get what they want. How soon, how much—that’s just a matter of working out the details.Remember, in the end, this was supposed to be giving the Iranian government back to its people, who would then dismantle the nuclear program, end support for terrorism, restrain their proxies, blah, blah, blah. None of that’s going to happen. They’re going to get the money one way or another.Sargent: What’s the basic difference between what Obama did with the money and what Trump is doing with the money? Do we know?Nichols: Well, without seeing the MOU, hard to say. But I would say that Obama did it without completely disrupting the international economy, blowing billions of dollars’ worth of expensive American weapons, getting some Americans killed, getting many hundreds more wounded, and then weakening the United States by forcing us to basically admit that, yes, the Iranians own the Strait of Hormuz.Sargent: Right. The bottom line here is that Trump is in some sense using the mechanism Obama used, which is a financial incentive to get Iran to cooperate with oversight of its nuclear program. Obama did this through negotiation. Trump did it through spending tens of billions of dollars committing massive war crimes, bombing an Iranian school filled with children, et cetera, to practically melting down the global economy. That’s the difference. They’re using more or less the same mechanism.Nichols: Trump blew up a lot of things, expended a lot of weapons, messed up the global economy, and now is doing it exactly the way Obama did it. And we’ll probably not get as good a deal, because now the Iranians have made sure to do things like booby-trap the uranium. Even if international inspectors get in there—and whatever Pete Hegseth says, you’re not going to have Marines in there digging this stuff out—getting inspectors in there is going to be a lot trickier than it was 10 years ago. It was just stupid and pointless.Sargent: I think there’s actually another reason for that that I want to get to in a second. But first, let’s listen to JD Vance for a second. There’s a bit of confusion about how Iran will get access to this money. It’s being described as $300 billion. JD Vance was asked about this. Listen to this.Reporter (voiceover): The Iranians are saying that they’re going to have access to a $300 billion reconstruction fund. True or false?JD Vance (voiceover): Well, that’s the sort of thing they could have access to, funded by the Gulf Coast coalition, so long as they honor their end of the obligation. I think that one of the things you’re going to see, Ed, and people have to be skeptical of this, is that the hardliners in the Iranian system will overemphasize the benefits that Iran gets while underemphasizing all the things that they have to concede and all the things they have to provide in order to get these benefits. So we absolutely are open to the Gulf Coast countries investing in the reconstruction of Iran, but only if Iran ends their nuclear program, ends their enriched stockpile of material, and is really open to an inspections and enforcement regime that gives the American people confidence they’re never going to have a nuclear weapon.Sargent: So if I understand this correctly, the U.S. will allow Iran to get access to this money if and only if Iran agrees to some kind of binding long-term constraint on its nuclear program. What you’re saying is that once the nuts and bolts really hit, when they really start to talk about this, probably Iran will be able to get access to that money fairly quickly, or at least before any final commitment is made. And when JD Vance says this money will come from other Gulf Coast countries investing, what’s he referring to there? And what’s your overall reaction to what you heard from JD?Nichols: Well, I don’t know how quickly they’ll get it. This is where I will be cautious and say that until we see this MOU—which for some reason the administration really doesn’t want to release to the public, which should tell you something right there—I don’t know how quickly it’ll get here. But basically, we’re committing to supporting the reconstruction of the country we just blew to smithereens after getting nothing.It really is staggering to have the administration claiming, We finally got a commitment not to build nuclear weapons. Look, I was never in favor of attacking Iran, but I was a real hawk on the issue of, if they ever get close to a nuclear weapon, that could actually be the trigger for war. But there was no evidence of this, and there’s been no evidence of it for 10 years, since the JCPOA.So again, we’re back to this problem that they’re going to get a lot of money, they’re going to get reconstruction support from the Gulf states that they have pounded and inflicted punishment on for cooperating with us. How does this not leave Iran—even though Iran is temporarily militarily weakened—in a strategically more powerful stance?That’s why, when you listen to that part we just listened to, Greg—where you ask JD Vance these questions and he does the Jackie Gleason thing, where he’s trying to explain his way out of it—the reality is Trump wants out. And he’s willing to buy his way out if he couldn’t bomb his way out.Sargent: Right. Obama actually ended up getting more because he had an actual deal that laid out what oversight of the Iranian nuclear program would look like. Trump doesn’t have that. He’s just now doing what Obama did, which is using money to try to get it. Nichols: And doing it without the support of the international community. Sargent: And after spending tens and tens of billions of dollars committing war crimes, destroying the global economy—Nichols: I’m not there yet on war crimes. I think that waits for an investigation. But he started a preventive war. He started a war of choice, which itself is horrific, because this didn’t even have the rationale of the Iraq War behind it. I said at the beginning of this, the Iraq War looks like it was competently lawyered up compared to this. Bush went to the United Nations, he had allies on board with at least some of it. He made a case, he put a clock on it about the inspectors. This was Trump just getting up one morning and saying, you know what, it’s time to take out Iran.Which itself is a problem when you’re talking about war crimes and crimes against humanity. But in the end, I will also say that had he toppled this regime, Greg, I would have been one of the people shrugging and saying, Well, you have to congratulate him if he managed to get rid of one of the worst, most dangerous regimes on this planet. I may not have liked the way he went into it, but I would have had to certainly congratulate him on coming out of it. Now he’s gotten the worst of all worlds. He’s taken America on a discretionary war, didn’t get what he wants. He’s going to have to pay off the bad guys so that he can get out of this. And basically he’s going to paper over his own mistake here with dollars. That’s what he’s going to do.Sargent: I think that’s basically the size of it. I just want to say one more thing about JD Vance’s strange ramble there. He’s basically admitting that Trump is using the same mechanism that Obama used—a financial incentive to get Iran to cooperate with oversight of its nuclear program. Doesn’t JD just end up making Trump look like a complete moron, given that it comes right after Trump compared his deal favorably to Obama’s unfreezing of funds to Iran?Nichols: No part of this administration communicates within itself. And what we’re seeing here—given the concerns about Trump’s health, his state of mind—JD Vance’s answer was sort of stumbling and bumbling, but within the normal range of political dissembling, if that makes any sense.Trump, I think, just doesn’t have any idea what’s going on. That’s the bigger worry—that Rubio and Witkoff and Kushner are saying, OK, we’ve got it, but I don’t get the sense that Trump himself really understands anything that’s going on here. The idea that Trump and Vance aren’t on the same page isn’t surprising at all. I really wonder how much Trump understands any of this at this point.Sargent: So Tom, I just want to close on a point you make in your piece, which is really interesting. Trump is threatening to restart hostilities against Iran if it doesn’t agree to surrender its nuclear program. You point out that Iran just won’t believe that, because Trump has shown that he wanted an exit from all this. I want to add to your point and get you to talk about this. As we get closer to the midterms, it becomes next to impossible for Trump to restart military action of any kind, let alone using any kind of ground invasion. Republicans will just not allow that to happen because it’ll utterly crush them in the midterms.So I think, Tom, what Trump has really done here is lock in a time frame that actually weakens his leverage over Iran over time. It weakens his leverage over Iran’s nuclear program over time. And Iran knows that. Am I right?Nichols: I think so. And he’s also alluded to using a nuclear weapon at one point. He said, We still have the ultimate, you know. But I just find it hard to believe—although with this administration and this president you never know—that right after Labor Day, as everybody’s going into the midterms and he’s still trying to wait for good news on the economy … remember, what he really cares about is international markets. He’s going to say we’re starting up the war again? On what pretext? And by that time, he really will have to go to Congress or do something.He surprised the country and the American people and the world by doing this when he did it. I don’t think you can go to that well twice. And I could be wrong—I just don’t believe him when he says, Well, if this doesn’t work out and they don’t behave, I’ll just start up the war again. That means he’s willing to tie down huge numbers of U.S. forces halfway around the world on a maybe while negotiators negotiate. At some point, ships have to come home. Soldiers and sailors need to be cycled through so they can do the things they need to do. They can’t just sit on ships for three or four months. I just don’t buy it.Sargent: So just to boil this down, we’re now entering the really hard part, which is the part where we negotiate over the future of the Iranian nuclear program and the nuts and bolts of that have to be worked out. And Trump has weakened his leverage going into that. And Trump has also strengthened Iranian leverage because Iran knows it can hold the global economy hostage now. Is that the size of it?Nichols: Right. And the Iranians get to appear like the aggrieved party now that they’re the ones that have lost thousands of people and been attacked. And even with a competent team that understood the issues and knows what it’s doing, trying to negotiate a nuclear program after you’ve bombed it and put it under a lot of rubble takes a long time. It’s going to take even longer here.So the idea that somehow in 60 days, sometime again around Labor Day or something, Trump’s going to say, That’s it, everything’s fixed, we’ve got it—none of that’s going to happen. This is going to be a long cold war with the Iranians, just like the one we’ve been in with them for 47 years. And Trump made it worse. So I don’t see any way out of this in a way that enhances American security anytime soon.Sargent: Utter catastrophe all around. Tom Nichols, awesome to talk to you. Thanks so much for coming on.Nichols: Thanks for having me, Greg.

There is a nonzero chance that Jared Kushner will play a pivotal and entirely accidental role in bringing down the government of Albania. Over the last several weeks, the Balkan nation has been roiled by protests stretching from the capital, Tirana, to rural coastlines and cities around the world. The demonstrations were sparked by the government’s giving the green light to firms linked with Kushner to develop a 10,000-bed luxury resort near the city of Vlorë on the Narta Lagoon and protected wildlands in Zvërnec. Kushner and Ivanka Trump also have plans to turn Sazan Island, which belongs to a national park, into a smaller coastal enclave for the wealthy. On Saturday, some 200,000 people turned out as anger spread from the Kushner project to other luxury developments. Roughly 200 protesters in northwestern Albania tore down barbed-wire fencing around the construction site of a non-Kushner-linked five-star resort on the Adriatic Coast. As one participant told Reuters, they were demanding “compensation” for 200 local families whose “land has been seized.”International coverage of the protests in Albania—a country relatively unfamiliar to many in the United States—has focused largely on the environmental concerns being raised by demonstrators, and the projects’ ties to the Trump family. The fledgling Kushner resorts threaten pristine wilderness and critical ecosystems that sustain a rare colony of the world’s largest freshwater birds, endangered Albanian water frogs, and loggerhead turtles. Among the species that stand to be affected are flamingos, whose last remaining habitat in Albania could be threatened by the developments. But the “Flamingo Revolution,” as the wide-ranging, horizontalist movement has become known, is about much more than flora, fauna, or Donald Trump. As Albania vies to become a top tourist destination and a member of the European Union, the ongoing protests aim to do nothing less than upend its political system. “At the core of this protest is not just environmental issues,” said Gresa Hasa, a doctoral researcher at the Faculty of Law and the Center for Southeast European Studies at the University of Graz. “This is a fight for freedom and democracy, and a future where the resources and the state works for all of us and not just for some of us, and where we are not excluded from our own beaches and public spaces.”In addition to halting the developments on Zvërnec and on Sazan Island, protests are demanding the resignation of Socialist Party Prime Minister Edi Rama, who’s been in power since 2013. Demonstrators have also targeted opposition leader and former Prime Minister Sali Berisha. A member of the Democratic Party, Berisha was until last November under house arrest as a result of corruption charges. “It’s called the Socialist Party of Albania,” Hasa clarified of Rama’s party, “but has nothing to do with socialism.” Both he and Berisha have been supportive of the developments in question as they look to cozy up to Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump, as a means of endearing themselves to the U.S. president. Last week, the Trump administration lifted restrictions against Berisha imposed by the Biden administration.Rama has played a more active role. He had a chance dinner meeting with Ivanka Trump and Kushner in southern Albania. Months later, the president’s son-in-law approached him in Davos about investing in his country’s coastline. Rama has championed the project ever since. Just before Trump’s inauguration, the Albanian government granted Atlantic Incubation Partners—a firm linked to Kushner’s Affinity Partners—the status of a “strategic investor.” The Narta Lagoon resort is slated to be officially developed by the Netherlands-registered Zvërnec South Adriatic Development, an offshore trust that reports have linked to Kushner, Qatari billionaires, and a string of questionable characters.  The Sazan Island project is being led by Sazan Real Estate Development LLC. A P.R. agency for that development told Al Jazeera that any investors involved in it were acting “in a personal capacity.” The strategic investor designation entitles Atlantic Incubation Partners to expedited approvals, and the Zvërnec project was officially approved to begin construction in January 2025. Demonstrations began locally at the end of May. On May 30, footage showed private guards for Albanian oligarch Shefqet Kastrati—who’s reportedly been working closely with Kushner—beating up activists protesting around the fence protecting the site of the slated development. The images only further inflamed Albanians, and protests spread rapidly.Since then, the protests have become the largest since the fall of Albania’s Communist government in 1991. Protesters’ demands reflect their long-running frustrations. Besides seeking Rama’s resignation, the Flamingo Revolution is demanding the repeal of the legal framework that allows the government to grant “strategic investor” status to developers. It’s further demanding the withdrawal of a recent initiative to offer generous tax breaks and special regulatory treatment for private development on state-owned land in rural areas. Protesters are also trying to reverse recent amendments to the Law on Protected Areas and the Law on Cultural Heritage, which they argue have streamlined investors’ ability to build on and near important environmental and cultural sites. “This project broke the camel’s back,” Hasa said. Albanians are enraged at “an economic model where political parties and businessmen are so entangled that you cannot figure out where one starts and the other ends.”Understanding why Kushner’s seaside ambitions have kicked off an uprising in Albania requires a look back at the country’s tumultuous last century. Albania was ruled from 1944 to 1985 by Enver Hoxha, who broke with the Soviet Union over what he saw as Nikita Khrushchev’s insufficient commitment to Stalinism. The country’s increasing isolation—from neighboring Yugoslavia, the USSR, and eventually China—led to mounting economic difficulties in the lead-up to Hoxha’s death and the ensuing collapse of the People’s Socialist Republic of Albania. Like many other formerly socialist countries in the 1990s, Albania underwent a period of rapid, chaotic privatization of state-owned industries as part of a transition to capitalism marked by graft, speculation, and—in Albania’s case—disastrous pyramid schemes. Among the most enduring legacies of that period is a controversial 1991 land-reform law meant to redistribute property that had been collectivized under Hoxha. The result has been decades of ownership disputes, including in coastal areas that stand to become more valuable as the country continues to court foreign tourists to its sandy beaches and lush pine forests. Residents claiming land—and without the resources to fight for those claims in lengthy court processes—have been forced to give up their parcels and move away. Conversely, enterprising developers with more cash, including foreign investors and organized crime syndicates enriched by transition-era graft, can falsify documents and contest locals’ ownership claims. These legal gray areas have made it easier for Rama to court “strategic investors” like Kushner with the promise of both cheap land and cheap workers; as Rama once bragged to prospective Italian investors, “Fortunately, here we have no trade unions.” Last week, the Democratic Party expressed support for the protests as means of confronting government corruption, and introduced legislation aligning with several of the protesters’ demands. Demonstrators, however, have continued to call for Berisha to be thrown in jail, and to express frustration with the two parties that have dominated Albanian politics and economic development since the 1990s. In recent years, smaller parties have sprouted up in an attempt to pose alternatives. Redi Muçi was elected to Parliament last year, as a member of the left-wing Lëvizja Bashkë—the Together Movement, in English. The party formed out of student protests that were violently repressed by Berisha’s government in 2011, and another wave of demonstrations against educational reforms in 2018 and 2019. As Muçi points out, popular frustrations with both Rama and Berishi have been fueled by rampant corruption and the rising cost of living in one of Europe’s poorest countries. “Practically the whole Albanian economy has been directed toward the construction industry and tourism,” he told me. “The fuel that pushes this through is money laundering from drug traffickers. What has been happening along the Albanian coastline, but also in the capital city and elsewhere, is money coming from investors that hide behind shell companies that pour huge sums of money into the country through the construction, and which has made the city of Tirana an unlivable place” as public spaces are turned into enormous private developments backed by shady investors who drive up property prices through speculation. In rural areas, especially, he added, there are “investors who come from God knows where to build these huge resorts, destroying nature and ecosystems and habitats, as well as taking away property rights for local communities.”A bipartisan push to turn Albania into a prime destination for real estate investment has seen rents skyrocket as foreign investors snap up properties for short-term rentals and glorified safety-deposit boxes, making housing prices “utterly unaffordable” for ordinary renters, Muçi said. A report from the nongovernmental organization Transform Europe found that the average price per square meter of housing in Tirana reached approximately $1,700. The average salary was less than $800; housing prices that year grew more than twice as much as wages. The combination of rising costs and low purchasing power has made Albania’s capital more expensive than Rome and Barcelona. A significant part of that, the report adds, is likely the result of money laundering: 32 percent of homes sold in 2021 were acquired by nonresidents. As of 2023, 33 percent of Albanian residencies—and more than 17 percent in Tirana—remained unoccupied.While rising tourism has been a boon to the country’s economy in aggregate, the jobs created in the tourist sector tend to be poorly paid and vulnerable to exploitation. Migrant workers making just 700 euros (around $812) a month for grueling 12-hour days in restaurants and hotels have had their passports confiscated by employers as soon as they land in Albania. Lëvizja Bashkë is pushing for the state to direct investment toward more productive sectors that can create year-round, broader-based economic opportunities and prevent the rapid emigration of young Albanians seeking better-paid job prospects abroad. Protests may already be bearing fruit. Politico noted still unconfirmed reports that Kushner’s Affinity Partners had withdrawn from at least one multibillion-dollar resort project. That may not stop the demonstrators. Rama seems worried. The European Commission warned his government to “act without delay” to stop any prospective violations of the bloc’s environmental rules—or endanger Albania’s bid for EU membership. Under mounting pressure, Rama has accused protests of being the product of foreign meddling by “enemies of Israel and Albania,” and complained that marches were causing tourists to cancel their reservations to visit the country. The image of nefarious foreign actors sowing chaos bears little resemblance to the images being broadcast from the streets of Tirana and elsewhere, of peaceful parades with areas for kids to sit and draw. “You have grassroots left-wing movements, LGBTQ+ activists, environmental movements, representatives of all four major religious communities, and conservatives,” Hasa said. “You even have individuals who are right-wing, or a little bit far right.” Muçi agreed. “In such big numbers, you have people there from all walks of life, beliefs, and ideologies,” he told me. What unites them, he said, “is this call for a new Albania—for a different kind of politics that is not the one represented by Rama and Berisha.” It’s no secret that the Trump family has been eager to make itself richer while the patriarch occupies the White House. Here in the U.S., awareness of these activities hasn’t yet made much of a dent in Trump’s grasp on power. Abroad, however, it may help bring down politicians who thought they could use that grift to their advantage. Let’s hope Americans take note. 

Abdul El-Sayed ran for governor of Michigan in 2018, emphasizing his progressive views and endorsement from Senator Bernie Sanders. He didn’t gain much traction and ultimately lost by more than 20 percentage points in the Democratic primary to Gretchen Whitmer, who was backed by the party’s center-left establishment. Eight years later, El-Sayed, now seeking a U.S. Senate seat, is running the same kind of campaign. But this time, he’s effectively tied in polls with the establishment’s favorite, Representative Haley Stevens, and could win the August 4 primary. Candidates often do better in their second bids for office. But El-Sayed’s strong performance is emblematic of broader trends. Progressives, after struggling in 2022 and 2024 in primaries against more centrist Democrats, are in the midst of an electoral revival. And they are breaking through not just in very blue areas but in purple ones, such as Maine, Michigan, and California’s Central Valley. Why? Because the Democratic establishment has made some huge blunders, and the party’s left wing has made some smart tactical adjustments. Put all of that together, and the battle for the soul of the Democratic Party is alive again, with progressives winning key primaries around the country and positioning themselves to potentially capture the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028. We’re now a decade into intense primary battles between the Democratic left and center-left, with both sides having strong and weak periods during that time. Sanders’s surprisingly strong campaign against Hillary Clinton back in 2016 reinvigorated the Democratic left and inspired a spate of other progressive challengers to more centrist Democrats. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the most prominent of the numerous Sanders-aligned progressives who defeated more centrist Democrats in 2018 and 2020. But centrist Eric Adams’s win in the 2021 New York mayoral primary was the first of a string of major defeats for progressives. Two years ago, Representatives Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman, who had been elected in 2020 as part of the initial progressive wave, were defeated in primaries by opponents who got heavy support from centrist organizations. Centrist Democrats successfully painted progressives as ignoring practical issues like crime and damaging the Democrats’ national brand by pushing overly liberal ideas. They also were shrewd in fighting the intraparty war, targeting progressives like Bush who had controversies around them unrelated to their policy stands. So how have progressives come back? In large part because of own goals by the Democratic establishment. Zohran Mamdani was greatly helped by city’s center-left backing a candidate (Andrew Cuomo) who was lethargic on the campaign trail and had to resign the governorship in shame after being accused by numerous women of sexual harassment. Graham Platner is the Democratic Senate nominee in Maine because the party establishment backed a candidate (Janet Mills) who was lethargic on the campaign trail and almost 80 years old, annoying Democratic voters who are leery of older candidates after Joe Biden’s failed 2024 run. Peggy Flanagan, the progressive candidate in Minnesota’s Democratic Senate primary, is leading in part because her centrist opponent, Representative Angie Craig, stupidly voted for a Trump-backed anti-immigration bill, angering the state’s liberals. In nearly all of these races, the progressive candidates can straightforwardly condemn Israel’s atrocities in Gaza, while centrist donors insist that the candidates they support take pro-Israel stances that are out of touch with Democratic voters. Broadly, the Democratic establishment has discredited itself with the party base, with massive electoral (2024) and policy (the Gaza war) mistakes. So endorsements from centrist leaders such as Joe Biden, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and Chuck Schumer no longer carry much weight and arguably hurt centrist candidates more than they help them. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, is so toxic in liberal circles that it tries to hide its role in backing centrist candidates, thereby limiting AIPAC’s effectiveness. A candidate such as El-Sayed can brush aside the establishment’s claims that he is unelectable in a general election because the center-left’s political acumen is no longer trusted by voters after it lost the White House, Senate, and House in 2024. “When you have 70, 75 percent of the Democratic base saying, ‘We don’t agree with what Netanyahu’s doing in Gaza,’ but you have members of your party who are still voting to send arms to that government and who are telling you that the issue is complicated, when you’re seeing children being blown up … you start to question them not only on that issue but on other issues, as well,” Mamdani adviser and longtime Democratic Party operative Patrick Gaspard told me on a Right Now episode last year. At the same time, the progressives have sown the seeds of their recent successes. They have smartly changed their rhetoric. Mamdani and numerous other progressive candidates deleted their tweets calling for defunding the police and have broadly stopped calling for police reforms. In terms of policy, that’s disappointing. The police in America deserve much scrutiny and accountability. But this shift is shrewd politics. Progressives are no longer fighting on an issue where public sentiment is against them. Leftist candidates still support Medicare for All, free college, and other big expansions of government programs, but they fixate on those ideas a bit less than a decade ago, perhaps aware that even voters who agree with those proposals doubt they will ever happen. Instead, the left these days leads with an anti-billionaire, anti-Washington populism, along with more incremental affordability proposals. Candidates such as Flanagan and California House hopeful Randy Villegas decry the growing power of billionaires and call for banning members of Congress from selling stocks. Both of those positions are extremely popular with the public. Progressives have also gotten savvier and more ruthless in their campaign strategies. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and New York Governor Kathy Hochul are as centrist as Representative Dan Goldman and even more powerful. So why did New York progressives opt against aggressive primary challenges to Jeffries and Hochul while focusing attention on taking down Goldman? Because Goldman is in a very progressive district and therefore easier to beat. Progressives, while still decrying the outsize role of money and big donors, are creating their own super-PACs, aware that they can’t win races if they are vastly outspent. Ocasio-Cortez, Sanders, and Mamdani often endorse the same candidates, creating a kind of progressive crescendo behind their choices. In Nebraska, populist candidates are running as independents, realizing they can’t win under the mantle of the Democratic Party in places where the party is super unpopular. None of this guarantees progressive success this November or in the future. Mamdani could fail as mayor. Platner could be hit by another scandal, and he and other progressive candidates could lose in November. It will still be extremely hard for Ocasio-Cortez, Representative Ro Khanna, or another person closely associated with the party’s progressive wing to win the Democratic presidential nomination. All that said, in the days after the 2024 election, when party strategists were blaming progressive causes and groups for the losses, I was deeply concerned that the Democratic Party would move decisively to the right. It hasn’t. Instead, progressives have led the fight against Trump, forced the party’s establishment to admit its failings in the Biden years, and reinvented their own strategies in winning ways. A Muslim man named Abdul, backed by Bernie Sanders and calling for a new kind of politics in America, could be the party’s candidate in Michigan. Progressives are making progress.

Monday’s batch of orders brought a rare bit of good news at the Supreme Court. The justices announced that they will hear Kian v. Florida next year, setting the stage for the court to strike down Florida’s Jim Crow–era law allowing six-member criminal juries.The Sixth Amendment requires, among many other things, that criminal trials be conducted before an “impartial jury.” In nearly every state, this jury consists of 12 members of the community where the alleged crime was committed. But in a handful of jurisdictions, states use fewer jurors to more easily secure convictions.Hamed Kian, the defendant in this case, is a chiropractor in Jupiter, Florida. State officials suspended Kian’s license in 2021 while they investigated allegations of sexual misconduct against him. Kian allegedly continued to treat patients in the years that followed, leading state prosecutors to bring five counts of practicing chiropractic medicine with a suspended license.Under Florida law, trials for capital offenses are held before a 12-person jury. Defendants who face noncapital felony charges, however, are instead prosecuted before a six-person jury. One of those smaller juries convicted Kian on all five charges. He was sentenced to one year in prison and five years of probation.On appeal, Kian sought to overturn his conviction by arguing that the Sixth Amendment required him to be tried before a 12-member jury. Forty-four states in the Union currently impose that requirement for all felony trials. Florida and five other states—Arizona, Connecticut, Florida, Massachusetts, and Utah—allow at least some trials to be held before juries with fewer than 12 members. No state allows juries with five or fewer members.In 2022, an Arizona man asked the Supreme Court to review his conviction of felony offenses by an eight-member jury on Sixth Amendment grounds. While the court declined to do so, Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh publicly indicated that they had voted to review his case. Gorsuch also wrote a solo dissent where he forcefully argued that the court should have taken up the case.Twelve, Gorsuch argued, was not some arbitrary number. By the time the Framers adopted the Sixth Amendment in 1791, their English ancestors had upheld the right to a 12-member jury for nearly four centuries. (Other accounts date the 12-member jury even further back, to around the enactment of Magna Carta in 1215.) As a result, founding-era Americans understood “the right to a trial by jury for serious criminal offenses meant a trial before 12 members of the community—nothing less.”Florida’s deviation from this legal norm came as federal troops withdrew from the South, heralding the end of Reconstruction. Kian noted that the Florida legislature first enacted a six-member jury law in February 1877, one month after President Rutherford B. Hayes ordered the military’s withdrawal. “The jury-of-six thus first saw light at the birth of the Jim Crow era as former Confederates regained power in southern states and state prosecutors made a concerted effort to prevent blacks from serving as jurors,” Kian told the justices in his petition for review.Historians have long noted that Southern Redeemers used a variety of subjective legal tests to eliminate Black civic and political participation, both at the ballot box and in the jury box. Along with this historical evidence, Kian pointed out that Black jury participation in Florida became so rare in the Jim Crow years that state newspapers treated it as remarkable and newsworthy on the rare occasions when a Black juror was actually empaneled.The Supreme Court is well aware of this general history. In 2020, the justices struck down another Jim Crow–era jury restriction in Ramos v. Louisiana. Two states, Louisiana and Oregon, allowed nonunanimous jury convictions for felony offenses. This allowed states to convict defendants even if one or two members of the jury voted to find them not guilty. (Though Oregon was not technically a Jim Crow state, it is well established by historians that the Ku Klux Klan played a key role in the restriction’s adoption in the 1930s.)Oregon’s nonunanimous jury law had been previously upheld by the Supreme Court in the 1972 case Apodaca v. Oregon. But Gorsuch, writing for the Ramos majority, rejected what he described as the “functionalist” reasoning of the Apodaca justices, where they looked to the rule’s “function” in “contemporary society.” Gorsuch instead adopted an originalist approach to require jury unanimity in all felony trials.“When the American people chose to enshrine that right in the Constitution, they weren’t suggesting fruitful topics for future cost-benefit analyses,” he wrote in his Ramos decision. “They were seeking to ensure that their children’s children would enjoy the same hard-won liberty they enjoyed. As judges, it is not our role to reassess whether the right to a unanimous jury is ‘important enough’ to retain.”When the court declined to hear the 2022 case involving juries with fewer than 12 members, Gorsuch took the same approach. “For almost all of this Nation’s history and centuries before that, the right to trial by jury for serious criminal offenses meant the right to a trial before 12 members of the community,” he wrote. “In 1970, this court abandoned that ancient promise and enshrined in its place bad social science parading as law.”That 1970 case was Williams v. Florida, where the court upheld Florida’s six-man jury law as a constitutionally permissible change to the long-standing tradition of 12-member juries. “That mistake,” Gorsuch explained, “continues to undermine the integrity of the Nation’s judicial proceedings and deny the American people a liberty their predecessors long and justly considered inviolable.”Kian’s appeal received a favorable hearing from a Florida appeals court that reviewed his conviction. At the same time, that court concluded that it was bound by the Supreme Court’s earlier holding in Williams, even though the precedent’s reasoning had been severely undermined by the court’s 2020 ruling in Ramos. The appeals court effectively signaled to the justices that they hoped to be overturned by praising Ramos, when “the light of originalism began to [peek] out from the darkness of functionalism.”Florida, for its part, had urged the justices to maintain the status quo. The state claimed in its brief that Kian had made “no serious attempt to show that overruling Williams is warranted under traditional principles of stare decisis.” Florida also warned that overruling Williams “would imperil thousands of criminal convictions in Florida and five other states that for more than 50 years have relied on its rule.” Though the state could not provide exact numbers on how many Floridians had been convicted by six-member juries since the 1970s, it noted that “roughly 5,000 criminal convictions are currently pending on direct appeal.”Those numbers would likely pose little impediment for the Supreme Court to overturn Williams when it hears Kian’s case next term, however. When the Supreme Court handed down its ruling in Ramos six years ago, the ruling took effect for future trials and those that had not yet exhausted their appeals. In a follow-up case, however, the court declined to apply it retroactively, meaning that finalized criminal convictions remained intact.It is always a fool’s errand to predict exactly how the Supreme Court will decide a case. One subtle sign of Kian’s confidence is that he and his lawyers declined to file a reply brief to Florida’s brief that urged the court not to take up the case, as if they had already said everything they needed to say. The stage is now set for the Supreme Court to further strengthen one of the great bulwarks of American liberty—in the few states, at least, that have gotten away with diminishing it for so long.

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