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In the past year, the Trump administration has worked to dramatically reduce the federal workforce and—with the support of the Republican-led Congress—slash spending on the social safety net. A move by the Agriculture Department to reorganize the agency that oversees federal nutrition programs could further complicate low-income Americans’ ability to access the assistance they depend upon to stay healthy and avoid food insecurity.As part of the larger reorganization of the Food and Nutrition Service, which oversees the nation’s 16 federal food and nutrition programs, most agency employees will be required to move to five new “hubs” across the country. The USDA is also expected to shutter most of the seven current regional offices across the country, as well as the current agency headquarters building in Alexandria, Virginia. The agency—which is also being rebranded as the Food and Nutrition Administration—will maintain a small footprint in Washington, D.C., according to the USDA.Rather than overseeing nutrition programs based on regions, the new hubs will be divided by program area, with the intention of providing support from a centralized location. The Trump administration argues that moving oversight of these programs to new hubs will make it easier for officials to connect participants across the country. USDA Deputy Secretary Stephen A. Vaden told congressional Democrats that “each hub will have programmatic experts able to assist all states in their execution of USDA’s nutrition programs.” Vaden has also said that the move “reduces duplicative management and complexity within the agency.”Perhaps the most major relocation will be that of the headquarters for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, which serves around 40 million people, to Indianapolis. But Kate Howe, executive director of the Indy Hunger Network in Indianapolis, expressed skepticism that the relocations would actually do much to help SNAP participants in her city. “We’re creating these silos of programs that will operate in a much more isolated fashion, and then the efficiencies of being in one place together will be lost,” said Howe. “I can’t imagine that having the SNAP office here will make a difference in terms of customer service. It simply seems like moving an administrative office from one place to another.”Last year, Vaden told a House committee that he believed employees based in and around D.C. would be willing to move due to that region’s flagging job market. But given that many current FNS employees are located in cities with regional hubs that will be closing, this reorganization won’t just apply to workers in the national capital area. A recent internal survey by the National Treasury Employees Union Chapter 226, which represents FNS workers, found that around 80 percent of respondents—comprising around a third of the agency’s 1,200 employees—were unwilling to relocate to keep their jobs.“They already have a regional structure in place that’s been working. There’s nothing that indicates why that’s not working,” said Doreen Greenwald, national president of the National Treasury Employees Union. “This has just not been well thought through, and is ill-conceived.”Greenwald added that it would be far more difficult for FNS employees to “uproot” themselves and their families than the USDA suggests, and warned that the reorganization could cause a “brain drain” wherein the agency could lose staff with extensive institutional knowledge. There’s precedent for this possibility: When the USDA moved the Economic Research Service and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture to Kansas City in 2019, both agencies lost more than half of their staff. Although that number rebounded, the moves resulted in a loss in both employee diversity and productivity.FNS employees often have a deep understanding of how nutrition programs are managed in their specific regions. For example, SNAP administration and access varies across states, with differences such as income requirements, benefit amounts, and even what food items can and cannot be purchased. It may be difficult to replace these employees, not only because it will take time to train up new workers but because working for the federal government is currently not a stable prospect—from repeated shutdowns to mass layoffs, to insecurity about whether a job can be relocated at any moment. The potential loss in staffing also comes amid a dramatic shrinkage in the federal workforce. More than 15,000 employees left USDA last year, accepting early retirement and deferred resignation offers.Another key program, the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, or WIC—which assists around 6.7 million people, including around 40 percent of all infants born in the U.S.—will be moved to Kansas City, Missouri. Nell Menefee-Libey, senior public policy manager at the National WIC Association, said that administration of WIC was deeply reliant on the “close working relationships” between state agencies that administer the program and FNS staff on a regional and national level. The potential loss of those federal employees could make it more difficult for state officials to provide WIC benefits, or adjust to any changes.“State WIC agencies rely on FNS staff for technical guidance to answer questions or troubleshoot issues as they arrive, for implementation of new policy initiatives, and to get federal resources out to the state level in a timely and appropriate manner,” said Menefee-Libey. Even if WIC recipients aren’t aware of the changes that are being made, she continued, they could soon feel their effects.“I can absolutely understand how it feels sort of nebulous and removed from the day-to-day lives of new parents who rely on WIC to help them raise their kids, but it really is as simple as not having the guarantee that their benefits will get loaded onto their card on time,” said Menefee-Libey. “The state agency might not have the resources that they need to pay for those benefits, because the funds aren’t being dispersed from the regional office, because they don’t have the support that they need from the national office to get those dollars out the door.”The timing of the relocations is still nebulous as the USDA continues negotiations with employee unions, but many of the regional offices are expected to close on a rolling basis as leases expire. Oversight of child nutrition programs will be moving to Dallas; emergency management to Denver; and research organizations to Raleigh, North Carolina. Retailer operations and compliance employees will move to Atlanta, Los Angeles, Dallas, and New York City. Diane Pratt-Heavner, the spokesperson for the School Nutrition Association, or SNA, raised concerns about the timing, given the “forthcoming introduction of new school nutrition standards.”“SNA is concerned that so many staff have reported that they will not be relocating,” she said in a statement. “We worry about the loss of institutional knowledge.”The reorganization also comes after Congress dramatically slashed SNAP last year, pushing more of the cost of administration and benefits onto states over the next several years. The percentage of benefit costs that a state pays will depend on its rate of overpayments or underpayments. As the Food and Nutrition Administration determines SNAP error rates on a national and state level, a dip in staffing could make calculating those rates ever more difficult.“We’re just worried about the impact on the state agency trying to rapidly scale up to meet the new federal requirements,” said Howe. “The loss of institutional knowledge at a time when everything is changing is only going to have negative impacts on people trying to access benefits, because there will be fewer trained and knowledgeable people to help them.”Ultimately, Howe sees this change as a move to make nutrition programs more difficult to obtain, particularly since the law added new work requirements to SNAP last year. She has heard from a local food pantry in Bloomington that they’ve seen a 15 percent increase in visits in the past year, which they believe is “directly correlated to the decline in people accessing SNAP benefits.”“It feels like this is part of a larger plan to reduce the effectiveness of the SNAP program, and we can’t afford that. We can’t afford to have the federal government step back from the obligation to make sure that people are fed,” Howe said.

Imagine you were buying a car, and the only thing you knew about it was the color. Not the horsepower, not the number of cylinders, not the options; none of that. Just the color. Obviously, you wouldn’t make such a purchase. You’d demand to know more, and quite rightly so. Well, voters choose candidates on the basis of scant information all the time, especially when it comes to the economic realities that obtain in this country. This is largely the Democrats’ fault. The Republicans don’t want people to know these facts. The Democrats should, but they don’t talk about them nearly enough. Now that America has freshly minted its first actual trillionaire in Elon Musk and Donald Trump has made working people’s lives far harder than they already were with his pointless, gas-price-raising little war, those of us who do know those realities need to demand of Democrats that they talk more about them.Before I get into it, let me say clearly: I’m not calling voters stupid. It isn’t their fault they don’t know this stuff—it’s, as I said, the Democrats’, and to some extent the media’s, which doesn’t talk about these things enough because they aren’t “news.” People do know in their bones that the U.S. economic system is rigged—although, as we shall see, they generally have no idea how rigged. OK. So: Let’s start with the fact that the top 1 percent of Americans now own about 32 percent of the wealth. You may know this. This one fact does get reported or mentioned pretty frequently. It’s a shocking number, though. It’s not OK, and it’s not normal. Look at this historical chart from the authoritative St. Louis Fed. In 1990, it was around 22 percent. It’s been above 30 percent since 2014. And it just keeps going up—except, interestingly, for three dips, two during George W. Bush’s presidency and one during Trump’s first term; not because they were warriors on behalf of income equality but because they tanked the economy.A pretty big chunk of that 32 percent is owned by not just the 1 percent, but the 0.1 percent. That’s about 135,000 households. I couldn’t find precise current numbers for 2025–26 on deadline, but I did find this study, from 2013, by the formidable duo of Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman. In that year, the top 0.1 percent owned about 22 percent of the wealth. Again, this is not normal. It’s not “just the way things are.” The last time the top 0.1 percent owned that much wealth was—of course—back in 1928, on the eve of the Great Depression.Trump wants to take America back to the 1950s, does he? In this one respect, we should all wish he would. From the end of World War II until the late 1980s, the top 0.1 percent owned around 10 to 12 percent of the wealth. The current madness started after Ronald Reagan’s two big tax cuts. (The famous joke about everything about the United States going bad after the Reagan presidency isn’t quite as hyperbolic as it sounds.)Now—you may consider the above information old hat. If you read someone like me on a regular basis, you’re more likely to know this sort of stuff. But people—voters—generally do not. In fact, what they don’t know is astonishing.A week or so ago, I tripped across this video on YouTube. It’s old—it’s from 2013. So the reality described in it has only gotten worse. The narrator starts like this: “There’s a chart I saw recently that I can’t get out of my head. A Harvard business professor and economist asked more than 5,000 Americans how they thought wealth was distributed in the United States.” They thought the top 20 percent probably owned around 58 percent of the wealth. Then they were asked what they thought the ideal distribution should be. They thought that ideally, the top 20 percent should own around 33 percent of the wealth. The actual distribution, in 2013? The top 20 percent owned 82 percent of the wealth. This was 2013, but in the intervening years, people’s perceptions haven’t changed much. I did find a study from this year in which researchers asked people how many times wealthier an average member of the top 10 percent is than someone in the remaining 90 percent of the population. People said about 13.5 times wealthier. The actual answer is precisely twice that, 27 times.You get the idea. So, what does all this mean for Democrats?I suppose some would say, well, a few things. First, they need to disenthrall themselves from the idea that talking about all this stuff is too “left-wing.” Undoubtedly, such rhetoric will be labeled that by Republicans and elements of the media. But so what? It’s just reality. This country is on an unsustainable economic path. It must be changed. You don’t change things by being afraid of how you’re going to be attacked. Nonconfrontational Democrats are, to be blunt, not fit for purpose.Others would contend that even if the mass of voters knew these numbers and more, they wouldn’t care; it wouldn’t move them, and they wouldn’t vote on the basis of them. I think that too is cowardly nonsense. The study I cited above, in which people’s ideal income distribution is well to the left of where they think it is and way to the left of where it actually is? (And by the way, I’ve seen other such studies, and they all show the same thing.) That suggests to me that most people would welcome a message of income redistribution. And by the way—and this too is a crucial point that Democrats need to get through their skulls—if that many people hold that view, it’s not even “left.” It’s mainstream. Democrats need to accept this and act accordingly.Also, always remember: Be suspicious of people who tell you such and such an issue won’t move voters. One question in a poll or focus group isn’t the same thing as a charismatic candidate making something the centerpiece of his or her campaign in speech after speech. And besides, no candidate has to move “voters,” generally and generically. Candidates have to persuade small, decisive percentages of voters that they will fight for their interests.So, as these billionaires become trillionaires, as their share of the wealth grows ever greater, as some of them express open contempt for democracy itself, it’s time that we demand that the 2028 Democratic aspirants be willing to say: “My fellow Americans, if you elect me and give me a Democratic House and Senate, we’re going to take some money away from the billionaires and give it to you.” How on earth is that a losing message?And while they’re at it, they need to tell Americans the economic facts of our society, over and over and over until they start to hit home. Republicans want voters to think only, “My, what a pretty red car.” Democrats have to tell them what’s in the engine.  

You know already that President Donald Trump is on a rampage to build hideous oversized structures in Washington, D.C. (the Epstein Ballroom, the Arc de Trump) and to deface existing structures using exorbitant no-bid contracts. We got some good news this past weekend when a judge made Trump take “THE DONALD J. TRUMP AND” off the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. I only wish the judge further required the president to hang the removed letters on the clubhouse portico at the Trump National Golf Club Bedminster, rearranged anagrammatically into UNHAT DAMP NJ TODDLER.What you may not know is that the Trump administration is also on a tear to unload government buildings that it’s judged to be all cost and no value. The General Services Administration, which is the federal government’s real estate arm, is selling off government real estate at fire-sale prices into a historically depressed commercial market. These prices are lousy even within the context of the post-Covid office-space glut, making the GSA look very foolish as it claims thrifty stewardship of the taxpayer dollar. I’ve been primarily concerned about the fate of the Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building, which the GSA designated last year for “accelerated disposition.” Gray Brechin, founder of the nonprofit Living New Deal, described the Cohen Building to me last September as “a kind of Sistine Chapel of the New Deal” because of its murals by Philip Guston, Seymour Fogel, Ethel and Jenne Magafan—and, most especially, Ben Shahn, whose dry frescoes along both sides of a 70-foot lobby corridor, “The Meaning of Social Security,” Shahn judged “the best work I’ve done.” (To read my earlier pieces on the Cohen building and the Shahns, click here, here, here, and here. These were followed up in, among other publications, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and USA Today.) I won’t tug your lapel too long about the Cohen, which has yet to be sold, because my subject today is those buildings that the Trump administration has sold already, most especially the Old Post Office Building, which Trump leased during his first administration and refurbished as a hotel. The Trump International Hotel became a kleptocratic vortex before Trump sold it at the end of his first term well above market value. Now Trump is poised to repurchase not just the lease but the entire building at a heavy discount, shredding whatever remains of the Constitution’s emoluments clauses as he uses the presidency to expand his fortune at a rate of $1 billion or more per year.More on that in a moment. Permit me first to update you about the Cohen building. Neither Senator Joni Ernst, Republican of Iowa, nor her staff knew that the Cohen building housed precious New Deal art before she inserted into a January 2025 water resources bill a provision requiring that it be sold off “no later than two years” after being vacated (which has not yet occurred). Such ignorance is astonishing given that the Cohen lies a mere two blocks from the United States Capitol, but I wouldn’t call it atypical of how the Republican congressional majority operates.After Ernst learned about the art, she said in a written statement: “It speaks volumes that only 2 percent of the folks who were actually paid to work at the Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building were showing up to see its murals in person.” Ernst here misconstrues a low occupancy rate attributable to GSA misallocation (the main tenants, Voice of America and its parent agency, used only a small part of the building) to be an entirely made-up absentee rate for supposed civil service malingerers. “Given that fact,” Ernst continued, “let the property’s buyer decide its artwork’s fate.” Which is exactly what the Cohen building’s defenders fear, even though the law requires that New Deal art remain public property even after the building where it resides is sold. These days we can never be sure the executive branch will pay any heed to what the law says.In recent months, various Democratic members of Congress have walked those two blocks from the Capitol to tour the Cohen building’s artworks, and we’ve seen some murmurings from Representative Lloyd Doggett of Texas and others, prodded by Alex Lawson, executive director of Social Security Works, and Mary Okin, assistant director of the nonprofit Living New Deal, about introducing legislation to block the Cohen’s sale. On April 21, Representative Chellie Pingree, Democrat of Maine, offered an amendment to an appropriations bill for financial services, general government, and related agencies requiring public release of a GSA feasibility study, initiated by the Biden administration and buried by the Trump administration, on refurbishing the Cohen building. As I reported previously, the study proposed a $1 billion green renovation of the Cohen building to make it “a flagship in the federal government portfolio,” including restoration of the murals, which “add a sense of cultural identity in the building that remains from tenant to tenant.” Amen.Pingree’s amendment to make public this taxpayer-funded study failed, as Democratic amendments tend to in the Republican-majority House. But two Republicans, Representatives Ryan Zinke of Montana and Michael Simpson of Idaho, voted with Pingree. “I was glad to see I convinced a couple of my [GOP] colleagues,” Pingree told me afterward. “I got pretty close.” It gave her hope, Pingree said, that Congress would “keep the building off the market.” I hope soon to have more to report on that. Now let’s move on to those government buildings the GSA has sold already.Three of them are in Washington, and the first two, like the Cohen, have been designated for “accelerated disposition.” In March, the GSA’s own Regional Office Building was sold (to the residential developer Dalian Development) for $24.26 million. That worked out to $26 per square foot, or less than one-tenth its market value. In May, the GSA sold the Liberty Loan Building (to Satvik “Vinny” Raj, founder and managing director of Digilent Consulting) for $17 million. That works out to $98 per square foot, which is somewhat better, but still about one-fifth the average sale price for a D.C. office building in the current depressed market. Why the government insists on disposing of these buildings at so inopportune a moment is anybody’s guess. (I’m indebted to the Washington Business Journal for details on these sales, which went unreported in The Washington Post.) The third building, which is not on the accelerated disposition list, is the Old Post Office Building. It sold earlier this month for $80 million, or $172 per square foot. Which sounds like a big improvement on the GSA Annex and the Liberty Loan building until you remember that the Old Post Office is a gorgeous Romanesque revival structure completed in 1899; that a mere 10 years ago Trump spent $200 million, or $430 per square foot, to convert the Old Post Office into a luxury hotel; and that Trump sold the hotel five years ago for a reported $375 million—and that was just for the lease, because until last week the GSA retained ownership of the building and the land. In current dollars, Trump got paid for the renovated Old Post Office $452 million, or $972 million per square foot—again, just for the lease.That means, among other things, that even if the Old Post Office Building’s new buyer gets its asking price of $400 million, the building and the land will sell for less in 2026 than just the lease sold for in 2021. And who’s the likeliest buyer? According to The Wall Street Journal, Eric Trump has been in talks to repurchase the Old Post Office Building since mid-January 2025. Trump wants his Kleptorium back, at a discount.When Trump bought the Old Post Office lease back in 2012, Steven Pearlstein observed in The Washington Post that the likely outcome would be, for Trump, yet another appearance in bankruptcy court. Trump had bad luck with hotels, having previously gone bust with the Taj Mahal in Atlantic City, the Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City, the storied Plaza Hotel in Midtown Manhattan, and the Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts. Pearlstein thought the GSA was crazy to lease the Old Post Office to a screw-up like Trump. He didn’t know the half of it.As he’d done many times before, Trump overpaid for the Old Post Office, agreeing to an inflation-adjusted annual lease payment of $3 million plus the $200 million renovation. Pearlstein was quite right that this would compel Trump to charge room rates well above those of his hotel competitors. What Pearlstein couldn’t know was that Trump would become president of the United States shortly after his Trump International Hotel opened on Pennsylvania Avenue, allowing it to become, as I wrote in May 2022, Washington’s premier shakedown venue. Foreign governments spent $3.8 million at the hotel; the Secret Service spent more than $200,000; the Republican National Committee spent $3,000 per month; Trump’s inaugural committee spent $1 million (prompting a lawsuit from the D.C. attorney general that Trump later settled for $750,000); and so on. But Trump had paid so extravagantly for the Old Post Office that even with all this baksheesh pouring in, the Trump International still lost about $70 million in operating expenses. Then he lost the 2020 election, which meant he no longer needed a Kleptorium. Trump sold the Trump International Hotel for $375 million, pocketing $100 million in profit. The $375 million price tag was, Jonathan O’Connell reported in The Washington Post, the most anybody had ever paid for a Washington hotel, which was all the more remarkable because a) this was a money-losing ventureand b) the building and the land were still owned by the federal government. (I recount the story up to here, in greater detail, in my May 2022 piece.) The new owners, who scraped Trump’s name off the hotel and reopened it in 2022 as a Waldorf Astoria hotel, were a Miami-based investment group called CGI Merchant Group. It isn’t clear why CGI Merchant Group got into this, but the trade publication The Real Deal last year called the firm “financially embattled” because of various real estate investments gone sour. To no one’s surprise, CGI Merchant Group in 2024 had to sell the Waldorf Astoria for $100 million at a foreclosure auction. The purchaser at foreclosure was a private equity firm called MSD Partners (now BDT & MSD Partners). MSD Partners had put up most of the money for CGI Merchant Group to buy Trump’s unprofitable hotel in the first place; of the $375 million purchase price, $285 million came from MSD Partners. After CGI Merchant Group defaulted on that $285 million loan, BDT & MSD Partners decided, what the hell, let’s kick in another $100 million and take it off their hands. And so they became the owners of Trump’s unprofitable former hotel—or rather, the owners of a lot of fancy renovations and a lease on same. Now GSA has come along and sold the building itself to BDT & MSD for an additional $80 million. I don’t know who’s a more generous soul—BDT & MSD for acquiring this dog of an enterprise, or GSA for handing over title at so low a price.We know why GSA would be charitable; these folks work for President Donald Trump, who wants to repurchase the Old Post Office, this time at a less burdensome price. But why would BDT & MSD Partners be charitable? Because when Trump was trying to unload the Old Post Office back in 2021, MSD Partners’ chief executive was a Palm Beach neighbor named John Phelan. (Phelan left the firm in June 2022, seven months after the sale.) Phelan is one of Trump’s biggest financial supporters. In April 2024, Phelan threw a Trump fundraiser at his Aspen vacation home, with contribution tiers rising from $25,000 to $500,000. Phelan himself donated $927,000 to Trump’s 2024 campaign.Shortly after that election, Trump named Phelan to be secretary of the Navy, despite Phelan’s notable lack of armed forces experience in either a military or a civilian capacity. Experts told the Associated Press that Phelan was chosen because he wouldn’t give Trump any pushback. But Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth reportedly grew jealous of Phelan’s closeness to the president, and in April Hegseth fired Phelan, apparently annoyed that Phelan was currying favor with Trump by proposing to create an expensive new “Trump Class” of battleships. This may be the single instance in which Hegseth fired someone from the Pentagon who was actually unqualified.BDT & MSD Partners, I’ll wager, would very much like to sell the Waldorf-Astoria at a price that lets them recoup their investment in the property, which (between the unpaid portion of its loan to CGI Merchant Group, its foreclosure purchase, and its purchase from GSA of the building and land) probably isn’t much lower than its $400 million asking price. Indeed, given operating expenses on the less-than-thriving hotel, BDT & MSD may be out even more than $400 million. If Trump pays $400 million to buy back the Old Post Office, he’ll get it for $52 million less, after inflation, than he sold it for five years ago—and this time he’ll have the building and the land. That’s a pretty good deal! But if I know Trump, he’ll demand a lower price than $400 million, leaning heavily on his knowledge that the GSA sold it to BDT & MSD Partners for a mere $80 million and pretending not to remember MSD Partners’ previous exertions to bail him out. He has no time to delve into such petty details. And anyway, he gave that guy the Navy secretary gig and he blew it. Trump probably doesn’t remember how. He’s a very busy man.

Last month, a federal judge tossed the federal criminal case against Kilmar Ábrego García, the Maryland man who became nationally known last year after the Trump administration acknowledged having illegally deported him to the CECOT mega-prison in El Salvador along with a larger set of Latino men that seemed to have been randomly snatched up by federal agents despite the government’s evidence-free insistence that they were all hardened gang members.All of these removals were illegal, but Ábrego García’s was most obviously, glaringly so, on account of the fact that an immigration judge had specifically ruled that he could not be returned to El Salvador, where he would face danger. After a separate federal judge ordered his return, the government dragged its feet for months, insisting absurdly it had no custody over him before abruptly flying him back and immediately hitting him with criminal human smuggling charges—which were dismissed under an extremely rare finding of vindictive prosecution.That doesn’t mean the 30-year-old sheet metal apprentice is out of the woods. The government is still trying to deport him, having rejected his offer to be removed to Costa Rica and instead gunning to send him to Liberia, where he’s never been, after an effort to deport him to Uganda, where he’s also never been. Every time there’s a new twist in this saga, I see people asking the same basic questions: Are they being serious? Is the administration still expending resources, over a year-plus, in a fanatical attempt to screw over this one guy? Why?I think there’s an answer, and it’s a different one from that of many of the administration’s other targets in its weaponization of its power. While Ábrego García’s case is often lumped in with the attempts to investigate or prosecute people like former FBI Director James Comey, New York Attorney General Letitia James, former Federal Reserve Chair Jay Powell, and Senator Mark Kelly, I think there are clear differences in both intent and result, which stem ultimately from an analysis of their relative power.Naturally, each of these efforts is an outrage in its own right, and not just in a “violating our sacred norms and decorum” kind of way. The spurious attempted railroadings of James, Powell, and Kelly are attempts to wrestle control of parts of the government or civil society that Trump has not been able to fully take by force or subservience—local prosecutors, the central bank, and parts of the Senate, respectively. Every single one is a direct shot at the foundations of our system of government, just in time for the nation’s 250th anniversary.These people, though, will ultimately all be fine. Each have gone into an incredibly high-profile and powerful role in government, and while they didn’t and shouldn’t have expected to be criminally investigated for their trouble, they knew they were to some extent playing the game, one that has only gotten more dangerous in the Trump era. For good or ill, elected officials and high government functionaries at all levels, particularly those who are pro-democracy and willing to do something about it, should be steeling themselves for an increased level of risk, perhaps more than they thought they signed up for. Politics these days is a perilous field (and those that aren’t prepared for that should step aside).Ábrego García did not sign up for any such risk. Everything we know about him points to his being a relatively run-of-the-mill Maryland dad that—while having had some acute personal struggles at times in his life—seemed, until his detention, to be focused mainly on learning the sheet metal trade and raising his son. If he’s become a fixation of the federal government, it’s not really because of anything he personally did. Instead, he has become this idée fixe because of something that was done to him. Or, if you prefer, he’s now famous for what his travails have come to represent: The Millerite campaign of savagery is indiscriminate, it is sloppy, and the government is, in fact, making serious mistakes that enormously impact people’s lives. He is a living, high-stakes symbol of Trumpian misrule and this administration’s need to break its opponents on the rack of authoritarianism.The admission of an “administrative error” that triggered Ábrego García’s removal to the notorious CECOT gulag remains one of the few times I can remember when this innately combative and contemptuous administration has acknowledged in any public forum that it made a significant mistake. This was all the more disorienting in the context of a situation where it was sending, without any acknowledged legal basis whatsoever, people to be held in kind-of-but-also-kind-of-not U.S. custody at a foreign mega-prison with no due process. The admission of Ábrego García’s unlawful deportation was a crack in a carefully constructed facade of righteously deployed power for which the administration has never forgiven him.In that way, he has become the most acute example of this phenomenon—but certainly not the only one. Mahmoud Khalil certainly involved himself more in political life than Ábrego García did, but it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that he was a campus activist and negotiator at one university campus, admittedly one of the most high-profile sites of pro-Palestinian organizing. Still, he was little known outside that scene until he was actually detained. I do not in any way intend to minimize his dedication and his activism in saying that it seems clear the Trump administration did not engineer his arrest as a way to decapitate Palestinian activism or take a significant public opponent off the board.As Khalil himself told me when I spoke with him for this magazine last year, he had expected to potentially incur the wrath of the administration (and he certainly did). He never considered that his activism would draw the individualized attention of the federal government, and while he doesn’t at all regret his work, this is a level of consequence neither he nor anyone had really gamed out. Rather, his detention was a signal—you might think you’re not a big enough fish to warrant a heavy-handed response, but that response might come anyway.To this you can add the so-called Broadview Six, an assortment of individuals that include a congressional candidate, her aide, several local elected officials and candidates, and a musician. The Six were all charged with felonies, including conspiracy, after a September protest outside an ICE holding facility in Broadview, Illinois, in which an ICE vehicle was mildly damaged. The defendant pool was whittled down to four people facing misdemeanors before the case was dismissed altogether amid questions about federal prosecutors’ conduct with the grand jury. Still, the months of uncertainty and legal bills took a toll on all of them, just as the specter of prosecution and deportation have taken a toll on Khalil and Ábrego García, who are not insulated by high public office and connections.These committed efforts to throw the massive weight of the federal government against not just potent political enemies but individuals who, at least in the case of Ábrego García, don’t seem to have any public political bearing at all are not coming out of nowhere. It is a tried and true method among authoritarians, of making clear to the population that while any given person might be unlikely to find themselves in these terrifying crosshairs, it absolutely can happen to you, and so maybe you should work assiduously to avoid drawing that unwelcome attention.Most anyone who’s had even a cursory brush with the adversarial power of the state knows how jarring it can be, whether that’s being pulled over or audited or investigated in some way. These interactions might be quickly resolved, but while they’re ongoing, the awesome power of the state and the stark imbalance between you and it put themselves in acute relief. Now imagine that this stretches beyond any one particular interaction and becomes an all-encompassing monthslong ordeal where every legal victory against the state’s vexations leads to the government doubling down again and again, with the goal of depleting resources and willpower even when putatively unsuccessful. It is the legal procedural equivalent of a head on a stake outside the castle doors: a warning to the others, to everyone.While Trump’s malicious series of attempted prosecutions and investigations so far have been framed as an abject failure—and, from a pure legal perspective, they have been a litany of embarrassing disasters that have damaged the Justice Department indelibly—it’s quite possible that, at chilling speech and political action, they’ve been more successful than we can see on the surface. That is a Trump legacy that will be difficult to repair.

Hunter Biden is back, seven years drug-free, and spoiling for social media fights. He’s won kudos for his (only slightly creaky) clapbacks to his haters. “Hunter went from smoking crack to smoking MAGAs,” observed one fan last week. Last seen advising his father to defy common sense by staying in the 2024 presidential race, Hunter is today owning his crackhead days and flexing his recovery from addiction. He’s even launched a kind of secular ministry with the hope, he says, of “giving people the space to talk about what they’re going through” and helping them see “the incredible promises they can receive if they stay the course” of recovery. What’s novel about this coming-out is not that Biden, who has been through the wringer, now abstains from alcohol and drugs. Teetotaling in public life is extremely common. Instead, the surprise is that he’s expressing a moral ideal we haven’t seen in U.S. politics in a long, long time: a form of sobriety that is much more appealing than mere abstinence from drugs and alcohol.Alcoholics Anonymous, which Biden has participated in, sees sobriety as a kind of sacred condition, one contingent on much more than a person’s blood alcohol content. Sobriety requires a daily commitment to a set of moral and spiritual precepts, including honesty, humility, accountability, solidarity, and service. By contrast, a “dry drunk,” in A.A.’s terms, is an alcoholic who doesn’t drink but hasn’t undergone the wholesale psychic change that is both the price and the dividend of A.A. The logic adds up. Dry drunks must manfully resist the temptation to drink, and thus often feel deprived, like a person on a highly restrictive diet. You can think of a dry drunk as always hangry, always stuck in traffic without A.C., always quietly fuming about what the world has denied him—from career success to a hit of the crack pipe to the adulation of the whole world. Out of this sense of deprivation, dry drunks variously retreat into self-loathing, approach others with fear, or lash out in anger.We’ve had 18 years of dry drunks in the White House, with a reprieve only with Obama, who drank in moderation. With George W. Bush, Joe Biden, and now Donald Trump, none of whom touched a drop as president, it might be that dry drunkery, in which suppressed demons come out sideways, has become the ranking paradigm of moral character. For most of this century, then, Americans have not seen a president with a temperament worth aspiring to.George W. Bush drank heavily for decades and gave it up when he was born again at 40. Fine. But as president, he was given to saber-rattling and warmongering that many in A.A. consider to be at steep odds with Twelve Step sobriety. Likewise, Joe Biden, who abstained, citing family history, could often be what my sober friend Beau Friedlander calls a “crispy critter”—prone to defensiveness and snippiness. Unwisely deciding to stay in the 2024 race suggests that Biden lacks the humility and self-awareness that is key to real sobriety. And then there’s Trump. He has always maintained that he doesn’t smoke or drink, for fear of ending up like his older brother, an alcoholic who died young. And while he has periodically taken Ambien, a sedative-hypnotic tightly controlled by the Drug Enforcement Administration, and while allegations of further drug use are rampant, Trump doesn’t come off like an active addict. Instead, he’s a quintessential dry drunk. Feeling deprived, Trump has made a career of copping resentments, indulging in self-pity, and striking out in frustration at those who least deserve it. Members of A.A. are taught to be wary of exactly the “willpower” dry drunks like Trump pride themselves on; sobriety requires letting go of alcoholic impulses, not repressing them. All of this comes to mind just about every time the president speaks. During his interview with Kristen Welker on Meet the Press Sunday, he later recalled, he was driven to rage by the sound of the rain on the roof. The man is nearly 80, and anyone with a modicum of serenity should be soothed and not enraged by the sound of rain.But he also seemed to be scanning his mind for someone to blame for his discomfort, someone to hate. “They’re crooked,” he said of one of his imagined foes, “just like you’re crooked.” Welker calmly replied, “I’m not crooked.” Trump then shot back, “You’re either crooked or you’re stupid!” Before he stormed out, stepping on his mic, he added maniacally, “Thank you darling! Have a good time!” Whether he drinks or not, this is not a sober man.Sobriety proceeds a day at a time, and it’s hard to know what Hunter Biden’s interior life is like these days. On the one hand, Biden has exhibited real candor and willingness to help others in his recent tweets and interviews. On the other hand, it’s not clear how close he stays to the moral demands of true sobriety. “I know what I’ve done, I know the amends I have to make,” he now says. But Lunden Roberts, the mother of one of Hunter’s children, has written movingly and without rancor about raising their daughter in Arkansas while Biden first refused to acknowledge his child, then paid less than expected in support, then seemed to ghost his daughter. Making a complete amends to one’s children and partners is usually considered a first step toward lasting sobriety.As Hunter Biden would surely be the first to attest, the path to sobriety is winding and difficult, and, as A.A. says, “We seek progress, not perfection.” Biden’s voice is welcome in the public sphere, and not for the zingers. Rather, he has opened the possibility—just the possibility—that with attention to our moral responsibilities we Americans might one day find a less furious, more honest, and more charitable way to live.

UFC Freedom 250 was an authoritarian pregame for the nation’s 250th anniversary coming up in July.

A special by-election in Makerfield could potentially push Kier Starmer out of a job.

News Desk, The Cradle. Iran’s Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf warned in a statement on 14 June that there is “no point” in continuing efforts to reach a deal with Washington if Tel Aviv remains unrestrained, a few hours after a new Israeli attack on Lebanon’s capital. Translation: The Zionists’ incursion into Dahiyeh has once again shown […]

The president said Sunday that if a bill requiring voter ID is not attached to its renewal, then he’s “against FISA.”