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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.

Increasing numbers of ships are navigating the Strait of Hormuz with their transponders on, as confidence in the truce between Washington and Tehran grows.

Hugo Temby, Australian National University and Joel Nilon, Australian National University for The Conversation The past five years have not been easy for the people of the Pacific. COVID restrictions disrupted tourism and upended supply chains, while global fuel shocks raised prices and hit island economies hard. The region relies on expensive imports of fossil fuels, as domestic sources are largely lacking. Some […]

The post Carbon Captured appeared first on ProPublica.

In the past, conventional wisdom would have us believe that any victory by the Democratic Socialists of America was due to their overwhelmingly white, young, transplant membership—bike lane users, co-op members, and Bernie 2020 voters. Meanwhile, DSA candidates struggled with working-class Black and brown voters due to a lack of trust, gentrification-fueled disdain, and communication failures. And more than anything, socialism just wasn’t something Black and brown people were “comfortable” with historically. But recent election victories have thrown out that entire narrative. Nowhere was that more evident than in Washington, D.C., last week, where the DSA-backed mayoral candidate won the Democratic primary thanks to support in majority-Black neighborhoods, while the candidate packaged as the preference for native Black voters actually lost them by a landslide.In the weeks leading up to the primary, moderate Democratic Councilman Kenyan McDuffie framed himself as a measured, natural progression from current Mayor Muriel Bowser. He promised to be tough on crime and focused his rhetoric on the native residents of D.C.’s historically Black neighborhoods. Meanwhile, Councilwoman and Metro DSA member Janeese Lewis George represented a progressive vision for the city that focused on universal childcare, housing, and affordability—a vision that political commentators and media outlets said was more salient with the transplant-heavy neighborhoods. The New York Times wrote that Lewis George was “expected to be preferred by younger white residents who’ve lived in Washington less than 10 years.” CityCast DC featured a “Newbies Vs. Natives” analysis stating that “the Democratic Socialists of America member Lewis George does not seem to be cleaning up among D.C.’s poorer and less-educated voters,” and that “the younger, better educated, and newer you are to D.C., the more likely you are to support Lewis George.” Lewis George’s primary victory put that narrative to rest. She won seven of the eight wards in D.C. and had secured more than 50 percent of the vote even before the first round of ranked-choice tabulation. McDuffie only won Ward 3—which contains affluent, majority-white neighborhoods like Woodley Park, Chevy Chase, Foxhall Village, Friendship Heights, Palisades, and Tenleytown. Ward 3 is 69 percent white, with nearly 90 percent of residents holding a bachelor’s degree, an average age of 40 years old, and a median household income of around $144,877. And yet this younger, white, more educated, more affluent ward is the only one that went for McDuffie, and just barely. NBC reported that the specific neighborhoods that went for him were “among the most heavily white neighborhoods in D.C.”Conventional wisdom would have had McDuffie cleaning up in D.C.’s Ward 8—81 percent Black with an average household income of $52,769 and less than a third of its residents holding a bachelor’s degree. Lewis George won it by 15 points. And in Ward 5, which is 55 percent Black and where McDuffie grew up, George won by 20 points. In the end, it was McDuffie who found the most support in the city’s whitest neighborhoods, while Lewis George overwhelmingly carried Black and Latino ones.  There are plenty of theories as to why McDuffie lost so handily both across D.C. and specifically in poor neighborhoods of color. His focus on crime—calling Lewis George’s decision to vote against a teen curfew a “failure” after a chaotic teen brawl in Navy Yard—may have been overshadowed by a more imaginative platform from Lewis George, who was trying to address the constant struggles that the district’s most vulnerable residents face. Hyperfocusing on teen crime—an issue that Lewis George will eventually have to address—may not have landed well while hundreds of National Guardsmen roam the streets of D.C. at the behest of the president. McDuffie’s ties to Bowser (who has a dismal 49 percent disapproval rate) and the city’s centrist political establishment didn’t help, either, as the outgoing mayor gave him her support without offering an official endorsement. It’s easy to make comparisons between Lewis George and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. Two DSA members ended long reigns of neoliberalism in two major East Coast cities, and expanded their voting blocs well into the Black and brown working class, even as pundits expected them to be successful only in “Commie corridor” neighborhoods from Bushwick to Mount Pleasant. But there are notable differences. Lewis George never got a Bernie Sanders or AOC endorsement. Lewis George stated that she has no relationship with Mamdani. And D.C. operates in a different landscape, given its lack of statehood—another unique issue Lewis George will face as she likely squares off with President Donald Trump, who has had no qualms about strong-arming D.C. leaders.Lewis George will certainly face a host of doubts and challenges in her tenure, as will DSA as a whole. Of course, this movement would be nowhere without the college-educated, mostly white transplants who move to cities like New York and D.C. But it’s equally true that they have made legitimate connections with older, more moderate natives who are skeptical of them. That tension will remain. But Lewis George’s victory—bucking stereotypes and punditry to deliver a resounding, mandate-securing election—shows that democratic socialism can no longer be viewed as a disqualifier for Black working-class voters. It’s mainstream now. 

It’s rare for a judge to acknowledge that they are handing down a prison sentence for political reasons. But that is precisely what Chief District Judge Reed O’Connor stated from the bench in a North Texas federal courtroom this week, during the sentencing of eight defendants in one of the Prairieland cases, so named for the defendants’ participation last year in a July 4 demonstration at the Prairieland Detention Facility, a federal immigrant detention camp in Alvarado, Texas. In a hearing on Tuesday, as O’Connor handed down sentences of decades in prison, the judge said he was ordering the maximum allowed in each case because “the state wants to send a message to anyone who shares a similar ideology,” according to a support committee for the defendants.The bluntness of the sentiment struck some of the defendants’ supporters hard. “We’ve always known the U.S. government has punished dissent every chance possible, but for it to be so blatantly pointed out was such a hit,” said Kels Menchaca, a member of the DFW Support Committee, which provides practical support to the defendants and works to educate the public about these cases. The group is now preparing for the long-haul support the defendants will need over what may be decades in federal prison, pending appeals or possibly pardons. The Prairieland cases are an emergency in their own right, but they are also a warning. This is not the last time the Trump administration will try to severely punish dissent. Opposing these sentences could help us stop the next one. The Prairieland cases should be understood as the government’s effort to heroize ICE in the face of community defense efforts to stop mass deportations, and to shift the blame for political violence from federal officers to the left. Last summer, in Los Angeles and other cities, people took to the streets in massive numbers to demand an end to the flood of federal officers assaulting and abducting people profiled as immigrants in chaotic operations that were often captured on video by teams working for the government. As people organized regular demonstrations at federal sites used for the mass detention of immigrants, Trump threatened to send in troops to stop them. No one knew how these events would escalate, but it was clear the administration was looking for scapegoats.On July 4, 2025, community members held a demonstration outside the Prairieland Detention Facility. As the demonstrators made noise and set off fireworks outside that night, hoping the people locked up inside would hear them, a few split off. A security booth and some employees’ cars were graffitied, and a security camera was broken. The detention center guards told the demonstrators to leave; most did. A police officer arrived on the scene, his weapon drawn. One of the remaining demonstrators was open-carrying a rifle. An officer was shot in the shoulder. He was briefly hospitalized and survived. Within hours, what followed was garnering breathless coverage in right-wing media as an antifa assault on a federal facility.There was no such assault. But the facts weren’t enough to stop the government from punishing eight people with effective life sentences, convicting them of “providing material support to terrorists” for acts such as printing and distributing leftist zines, joining an anarchist book club, communicating on the same messaging app, or having visited the same shooting range. These people are now facing 30-, 50-, 70-, and 100-year prison sentences. “These are friends,” Menchaca said. “These are people’s family, and they’re being given extraordinary sentences for things that are supposed to be protected actions. Fireworks on the Fourth of July being called explosives and terrorism? Political literature is something worth taking 30 years of someone’s life?” In all, 21 people were arrested for their alleged connection to the Prairieland demonstration, some that night but many much later. In a press release on July 8, ICE claimed that “nearly a dozen violent assailants equipped with tactical gear and weapons attacked the Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Prairieland Detention Facility.” Todd Lyons, then the acting director of ICE, used the arrests to hammer home the administration’s narrative. “This is precisely what we have been warning against, as disinformation and dangerous politically motivated rhetoric spreads,” Lyons said. The department promised terrorism charges, and “vowed” to charge “anyone obstructing ICE operations or assaulting federal law enforcement officers.”The government’s story diminished before any of the defendants made it to court. Multiple shooters became one, and up to 30 rounds fired dropped to fewer than a dozen, as Steven Monacelli found in an investigation for The Barbed Wire. Months passed before the defendants, some of whom remained in custody, were arraigned. But in that interval, the president issued an executive order claiming to designate “antifa” as a “domestic terrorist organization” (there is no such designation), and signed a national security memo authorizing sweeping investigations for alleged “political violence” from the left. Finally, when grand jury indictments were made public, the official story had settled: The Department of Justice had taken down a “North Texas antifa cell” that had “created and distributed insurrectionary material called zines,” “dressed in ‘black bloc’—dark clothing with head and face coverings,” and used “an encrypted messaging app to coordinate with each other that had auto-delete functions.” Now, just shy of one year after the demonstration, we are witnessing the part of the government’s narrative in which the administration thinks it has won. Its position is clear, Menchaca said: “Not allowing the government to abuse people will cost you most of your natural life. Not allowing the police to murder an unarmed protester fleeing means your life is now forfeit to the state.”But since the Prairieland defendants were indicted and as their trials wound on, we’ve seen many of the government’s attempts to charge people for disrupting ICE operations fall apart, some in now high-profile scandals such as that involving the former Broadview Six, a group of demonstrators at an ICE facility near Chicago, who were indicted on charges of conspiracy to impede a federal agent. (The charges were dropped after prosecutorial misconduct came to light.) Still, such failures have not slowed the government down. Last week, 15 people in Minnesota were indicted on federal conspiracy charges related to allegedly impeding federal officers.The lesson here is not that the Prairieland defendants did something uniquely dangerous, but that they faced the same political repression any number of us could. The government, Menchaca said, is “trying to set the stage to criminalize every person who doesn’t agree to their atrocities. And our loved ones are suffering for their compassion.”

The Supreme Court decided two cases on Tuesday that, at least at first glance, have nothing to do with one another. One involves the People’s Republic of China, Silicon Valley, and the Judiciary Act of 1789. The other involves Louisiana prisons, Rastafarian spiritual beliefs, and contract law. In both cases, however, is a shared and recurring impulse from the court’s conservative majority: a nearly boundless contempt for Congress as an institution.The first case, Cisco Systems v. Doe, involves a group of plaintiffs who claim that the Chinese government has persecuted them for their religious beliefs. They filed lawsuits against Cisco, a major U.S. tech company, alleging that the company sold surveillance software to the Chinese government that was later used to surveil, torture, and otherwise abuse them.In theory, no federal law is any more “constitutional” than another. But laws from the First Congress tend to be seen as indicative of how the Constitution’s Framers intended the government to function. Among the early laws they passed was the Alien Tort Statute, or ATS, which allows federal courts to hear “any civil action” against a foreign national for any “tort” that was “committed in violation of the law of nations or a treaty of the United States.”Congress enacted the ATS as part of the Judiciary Act of 1789—the first federal law it enacted to structure the federal courts. Though it was only occasionally invoked in those courts until the 1980s, one might think that its founding-era pedigree might entitle it to a little more respect. Apparently not. The modern-day aversion to this long-standing law was on display in the 2004 case Sosa v. Alvarez-Machain, a complex case about whether a man arrested by federal agents on drug charges could sue a Mexican national for temporarily apprehending him.In his majority opinion, Justice David Souter wrote that the ATS “was originally understood to be available to enforce a small number of international norms that a federal court could properly recognize as within the common law enforceable without further statutory authority.” Those norms included “offenses against ambassadors, violation of safe conducts, and piracy.” Accordingly, he rejected Sosa’s more novel claim against Alvarez-Machain.Does this mean that only that “small number” of claims described by Souter could be pursued under the ATS? Souter said no. He left open the possibility that the high court might recognize future implied claims beyond the more traditional ones. Justice Antonin Scalia took the opposite approach. He wrote in a partially dissenting opinion that he disagreed with the majority’s “reservation of a discretionary power in the federal judiciary to create causes of action for the enforcement of international-law-based norms.”Scalia argued that this approach would “amount to judicial lawmaking” that the federal courts are “neither authorized nor suited to perform.” Souter, on the other hand, took a more deferential approach to the framework that Congress had created in the ATS. He noted that Congress could correct the court’s work through its own legislative powers by amending the ATS itself or adding new constraints to it through separate legislation.“While we agree with Justice Scalia to the point that we would welcome any congressional guidance in exercising jurisdiction with such obvious potential to affect foreign relations, nothing Congress has done is a reason for us to shut the door to the law of nations entirely,” Souter explained. “It is enough to say that Congress may do that at any time (explicitly, or implicitly by treaties or statutes that occupy the field) just as it may modify or cancel any judicial decision so far as it rests on recognizing an international norm as such.”The court’s conservative majority was never satisfied with that ruling. In case after case over the past 20 years, the justices repeatedly narrowed the scope of ATS claims, including by ruling that the statute could not be used to sue foreign corporations and by holding that domestic corporations can’t be sued for “general corporate activity” linked to human rights abuses. In Cisco, Justice Amy Coney Barrett finally transformed Scalia’s dissent in Sosa into the court’s new majority opinion.“Since Sosa was decided, we have firmly committed to the view that judicially created causes of action offend the separation of powers in almost every circumstance,” Barrett wrote. “As a result, we have virtually eliminated the practice of fashioning them.” She finished the job by “clos[ing] the door that Sosa cracked to judicially created ATS liability.” The Supreme Court’s rulings on these matters are often described as “closing the courthouse door” on wronged plaintiffs, but rarely by the majority itself.Justice Sonia Sotomayor, writing in dissent, chastised the majority for its transparent about-face. “The Court nonetheless closes the courthouse doors not just to [the plaintiffs], but to virtually every future litigant seeking redress for a violation of international law under the ATS,” she wrote. “It thus overrules Sosa, without even acknowledging that it is doing so. Today’s decision marks yet another low point in this Court’s esteem for its precedents.”OK, you might think, maybe that’s a defensible reading of an archaic founding-era law. Perhaps there is good reason not to lean so heavily on an eighteenth-century statute in novel contexts. So then, what happens when Congress does provide unambiguous guidance on how to sue someone? Landor v. Louisiana Department of Corrections shows that even this is not enough to satisfy the justices.Again, it is worth tracing the history of the underlying law in question. In 1990, the Supreme Court held in Employment Division v. Smith that litigants could not invoke the First Amendment’s free exercise clause to challenge what the court described as “neutral laws of general applicability,” meaning general laws that applied to all people with few or no exceptions. Congress and President Bill Clinton responded to the perceived curtailment of religious freedom by enacting the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, or RFRA.RFRA originally required laws and policies that infringed on free-exercise grounds to meet the highest threshold of judicial scrutiny. In 1997, however, the Supreme Court ruled that Congress could not apply RFRA to actions by state and local governments for federalism reasons. In response, Congress enacted the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, or RLUIPA, in 2000 that sought to apply RFRA protections to the states on narrower grounds.One of those contexts was state prison systems. Under RLUIPA, states that accept funds from Congress for their prisons must also allow private plaintiffs to file free exercise clause lawsuits against them and (more importantly, in this particular case) their employees. This framework sought to place Congress’s goals on firmer constitutional footing—namely, Congress’s spending clause power—even though its overall impact would be more limited than at the federal level.It would be hard to find a more clear-cut violation of the free exercise clause than Damon Landor’s treatment by Louisiana correctional officials in 2020. Landor, a Rastafarian, grew out his hair into lengthy dreadlocks in keeping with the practices of his faith. Long hair is generally disallowed in prison systems for safety and hygiene reasons, but Landor had previously obtained exemptions on religious grounds.When he was transferred to a new facility, Landor told the prison personnel that his hair was kept long for religious reasons. He also provided them with a copy of a 2017 ruling by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which has jurisdiction over Louisiana, that held that it would be a RLUIPA violation for state prison officials to cut a Rastafarian’s hair. Nonetheless, prison officials threw the ruling in the trash and shaved Landor’s head.In response, Landor sued both the Louisiana Department of Corrections, or LDOC, as well as the guards themselves in their personal capacity under RLUIPA. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals had previously held that RLUIPA could not be used to sue prison officials in their personal capacity. In 2020, however, the Supreme Court ruled in Tanzin v. Tanvir that plaintiffs could bring those claims against federal officials under RFRA. Landor now sought to apply that reasoning to RLUIPA.Justice Neil Gorsuch, writing for the court, declined to do so. He framed the dispute not as a question of religious freedom but of Congress’s power to impose conditions on federal funds. The decision is an unusually muddled one for Gorsuch. He insisted that Congress’s choice to provide federal funds to Louisiana so long as the state abides by certain conditions is a contract of sorts. While Congress can impose conditions on those funds for the states, Gorsuch argued, it cannot contractually bind people—in this case, the prison officials—who didn’t consent to the agreement in the first place.This reasoning is too clever by half. The Louisiana Department of Corrections is not some sort of cosmic entity or demiurge. It does not independently exist in a metaphysical sense, despite its legal personality. It is, at its root, a group of people in buildings who sit behind desks and walk down hallways and occasionally violate people’s constitutional rights. Gorsuch nonetheless hypothesized about ways that Congress could, in theory, rewrite the law to properly bind those employees in a private capacity.“For example, Congress could have said that, as a condition of federal funding to LDOC, its officers had to agree to enter separate contracts with the federal government consenting to answer suits under RLUIPA,” he wrote. The officers arguably fulfilled that condition by agreeing to work at the Louisiana Department of Corrections in the first place, which is supposedly still bound by RLUIPA’s conditions.Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who dissented with the court’s other two liberal members, also argued that the majority’s reading of the spending clause upended decades of precedent about congressional powers. “Today’s decision magically transforms a federal statute into an invitation to be accepted or declined, deemed binding only if each particular defendant has explicitly agreed to be penalized,” she explained. “No matter that laws, as opposed to contracts, don’t ordinarily work this way.”At the root of Gorsuch’s opinion, she hinted, was a fundamental lack of respect for Congress as an institution. “In the end, the Court reduces some of Congress’s greatest legislative achievements—federal laws that secure civil rights, environmental stability, healthcare, and more—to nothing more than the wheelings-and-dealings of an especially wealthy private party,” she warned.Gorsuch did not forthrightly address the Tanzin argument, apparently because his reductive spending clause interpretation made it unnecessary to grapple with. Nonetheless, Jackson argued that Tanzin’s reasoning applied with “even more force” to RLUIPA because damages would often be the “only form of relief available” to prisoners when their religious freedoms are violated.“The Prison Litigation Reform Act’s exhaustion requirement and strict limitations on injunctive relief in prisons, coupled with States’ ability to transfer prisoners and thereby moot claims for injunctive relief, mean that withholding a damages remedy will often leave prisoners with no remedy at all,” she explained. A right with no remedy, it goes without saying, is not really a right at all.For most of the twentieth century, the Supreme Court confined itself to interpreting federal law instead of rewriting it. Thanks to the conservative legal movement, that posture has changed. The court’s Republican appointees have developed a wide array of tools to second-guess Congress, sometimes even under the cynical guise of defending its prerogatives.Under the “major questions” doctrine, for example, the Supreme Court has claimed the power to strike down federal rules and regulations if the statute they rely upon does not “speak clearly” on the issue in question. What is often framed by the conservatives justices as a check on executive branch overreach is actually a curtailment of Congress’s legislative powers. By denying it the power to pass broadly worded legislation, the court is denying it the ability to legislate for unforeseen circumstances.The justices are also either ignorant of, or hostile to, the basic nature of the legislative process. Congress typically enacts legislation after a long period of debate, consideration, and jockeying between various factions—from groups and movements that can be partisan, civic, business, special-interest, activist, and so on. Entire election cycles can hinge on a specific bill, as the 2010 and 2012 elections did for the Affordable Care Act.This democratic process receives no deference or validation from the high court, either implicitly or explicitly. Thus, the work of years of activism, negotiation, and compromise can be undone with a few friend-of-the-court briefs and the right five justices on the court. When the Supreme Court struck down the Voting Rights Act’s preclearance formula in 2013, it invited Congress to simply draft a new one—knowing full well that congressional Republicans would never agree to it.When the justices don’t want to overturn a law, they simply rewrite it. In VRA decisions in 2021 and earlier this year, the court’s conservatives added atextual limits on the law’s protections under the guise of interpreting it. Baseless fears of voter fraud can be used by states to evade challenges to voting restrictions; states’ rights to partisan gerrymander can be used to defeat racial gerrymandering lawsuits. Thirteen years later, after Shelby County v. Holder, with the rest of the VRA now in ruins, it is clear that the court wouldn’t have approved a new preclearance formula anyway—it wouldn’t have mattered how “clearly” Congress managed to speak on the matter.“Heads I win, tails you lose” has become this court’s judicial maxim. Tuesday’s rulings underscore how far these impulses will go. It does not matter if Congress broadly intends for courts to hear civil lawsuits over human rights violations. Nor does it matter if Congress narrowly seeks to ensure that Americans whose federal constitutional rights are violated via federal funds can seek redress in federal court. Whatever Congress does, the Supreme Court will happily insert its own judgment in favor of that of the people’s elected representatives.

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.