Articles & Videos

13929 items
All PoliticsPolicyEconomyRights & JusticeInternationalClimate & EnvironmentTechnologyHealthMediaCulture & Society

Select Date Range

Why Do Some Liberals Go Gaga Over So-Called Non-MAGA Republicans?
New Republic • Feb 4, 2026

Why Do Some Liberals Go Gaga Over So-Called Non-MAGA Republicans?

Utah Governor Spencer Cox is frequently lifted up as the kind of non-MAGA Republican that America desperately needs. So New York Times columnist Ezra Klein had the governor on his podcast last September, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro did a series of joint interviews with him last fall, and the Harvard Kennedy School brought him to campus last week. He talks a good game about reducing partisan polarization and occasionally critiques Donald Trump.It’s just talk though. Republicans in Utah’s state legislature, angry that the state’s Supreme Court has occasionally ruled against them, recently pushed through a bill that would add two justices to the court. They made disingenuous claims of making the court more efficient, but their intention is obviously to appoint two GOP loyalists and ensure the court never again rules against the legislature. Cox signed the court-packing into law last weekend without a word of complaint. Liberals have spent the last decade desperately searching for “good” Republican politicians and lavishing praise on any GOP official such as Cox who shows even the slightest distance from the president. They should stop. It’s essential that liberals understand that non-MAGA Republican politicians’ loyalties are with the Republican Party and therefore ultimately Trump and MAGA. Non-MAGA Republican politicians can’t be trusted to defend democratic values, and no strategy for defending democracy in the United States can rely on them. Let me define my terms here. Fully anti-Trump, anti-MAGA Republicans/ex-Republicans are people who have fully denounced the current GOP and endorsed Democratic candidates in recent presidential elections. Their ranks include former party Chair Michael Steele, onetime GOP staffers Bill Kristol and Nicolle Wallace, journalist Jennifer Rubin, ex-Representative Adam Kinzinger, and numerous others. They are critical to defending American democracy. Anti-Trump Republicans have helped persuade many journalists, business and civic leaders, and ultimately voters that Trump is a distinct threat to the country and a serious break with the conservatism of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. Non-MAGA Republican politicians are those who have been endlessly profiled and featured by the media over the last decade because they have made a few anti-Trump votes or statements but haven’t fully denounced Trump and embraced Democratic candidates. My informal list includes former Senators Bob Corker and Mitt Romney; ex-Representative Will Hurd; current Senators Bill Cassidy, Susan Collins, and Lisa Murkowski; Justices John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett; and Governor Cox. Some of these Republicans, such as Barrett, Collins, and Murkowski, have not personally leaned into casting themselves as non-MAGA Republicans. The media has elevated them. But others have consciously portrayed themselves as unaligned and even hostile to Trump. Remember when Roberts sanctimoniously declared, “We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges” after the president criticized court rulings against him? Barrett memorably declared that the high court was “not a bunch of partisan hacks” (while sharing a stage with Mitch McConnell!). Romney did numerous interviews when he was in the Senate praising himself for not backing Trump as often as his colleagues. Cox knows that The New York Times and Harvard are very influential institutions on the left and seems eager to be portrayed by Democrats as smart and reasonable. I call bullshit. When histories are written of Trump’s two terms in office, they will show that, an occasional vote or statement aside, the non-MAGA Republicans weren’t that different from the proudly MAGA Republicans they served with. Cassidy, Collins, Murkowski, and Romney provided key votes for federal judges who have rewritten the law to defend whatever radical actions Trump takes and for Cabinet officers like Kristi Noem who are manifestly unqualified for their jobs and have performed them terribly. Roberts, Barrett, and Kavanaugh have joined Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, who are perceived to be more pro-Trump, in numerous rulings that have defended Trump’s wild abuses of executive power. Roberts authored perhaps the worst opinion of the Trump era, the 2024 Trump v. United States decision that essentially declared that presidents can do anything while in office and not later be prosecuted for it. The Times published a story this week showing that the chief justice has started requesting that court employees sign nondisclosure agreements. Why? Because behind-the-scenes reporting on the high court is demonstrating that, Roberts’s pleas of innocence aside, it is full of Republican-aligned justices maneuvering to defend Republicans and Trump whenever possible. Sadly, Roberts is trying to limit reporting on his and his colleagues’ partisanship, instead of limiting the real problem—their excessive partisanship. Cox presents himself as different from hyperpartisan GOP governors like Florida’s Ron DeSantis or Texas’s Greg Abbott. But adding state Supreme Court justices because you are mad that the current court has ruled against you is exactly the kind of move that DeSantis and Abbott are known for. Republicans in Utah are frustrated because the state’s Supreme Court keeps putting barriers on their attempts to gerrymander Utah’s congressional districts. This is payback. It’s not as if the Utah Supreme Court is some liberal bastion. All five current justices were appointed by Republican governors, including three by Cox himself. And the governor signed this legislation two days after he was at Harvard puffing out his chest for rising above partisanship. Cox has also signed anti-trans legislation and provisions limiting diversity and equity policies on Utah college campuses. He is fully on board, not just with the anti-tax policies of old-style Republicans like Romney and Bush but with the obsessions of MAGA. So if non-MAGA Republicans are ultimately just polite MAGA Republicans, why do liberals spend so much time courting and praising them? For people like Shapiro and Klein and institutions such as the Kennedy School, presenting themselves as open to Republicans and not super-partisan is part of their brand. They are always looking for “reasonable” Republicans to align with or feature. But I will admit falling into the trap of praising non-MAGA Republicans myself. Barrett ruled against the GOP’s position in a few cases in late 2024 and early 2025, and I wrote a piece excitedly hoping that she would be a bulwark against Trump. That of course didn’t pan out, and I probably shouldn’t have thought for even a second that it would. I (and I suspect many other liberals) still on some level think that the anti-MAGA Republicans will get up one day and fully join the resistance. After all, their words and deeds suggest they understand how radical Trump is and disagree with him much more than very MAGA figures like DeSantis do. The problem, of course, is that MAGA and Trump have fully taken over the Republican Party. So on any policy issue, it’s ultimately the Democratic position versus the MAGA one. There’s no middle ground. Republican politicians like Cox who want to remain in good standing in the party end up taking MAGA positions. Justices like Barrett and Roberts might dislike Trump but seem to really fear being cast as conservative traitors in the mold of David Souter and Sandra O’Connor, who were appointed by GOP presidents but often ruled against right-wing causes while on the bench. So Spencer Cox isn’t uniquely bad. But he’s bad. He and other non-MAGA Republicans can’t be trusted to defend democratic values or hold Trump in check. We’ve had 10 years of these people faking opposition to Trump and MAGA before ultimately falling in line. We liberals need to stop falling for it.

Transcript: The Religious Left Is a Leader in the ICE Resistance
New Republic • Feb 4, 2026

Transcript: The Religious Left Is a Leader in the ICE Resistance

This is a lightly edited transcript of the February 2 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.Perry Bacon: Good afternoon. I’m Perry Bacon. I’m the host of The New Republic show Right Now. I’m honored to be joined by David Buckley. He’s a professor at the University of Louisville who is a political scientist. He studies comparative politics—he studies religion in politics among his expertises. And we’re going to talk about ... religion in politics and particularly the role ... religious groups are playing in the Trump presidency—Trump 2.0. David, thanks for joining me.David Buckley: Great to be here, Perry. Thanks. Bacon: So ... I’m going to go through different religious groups. I think that might be helpful as a way to think about ... different groups in the U.S. and how they’re playing a role. So I want to start with Protestants who are for Trump.The old story was basically white evangelicals were a big part of the Republican Party, and they were pushing pro-life and maybe anti-LGBT policies along with Republican politicians. But I think things have changed now. So Protestants who are on Trump’s side—what are they doing right now?Buckley: Yeah, it’s a good question. I think that if you just look at the demographic data at a top-line level, white Christians in general are a huge part of Trump’s core constituency. That is predominantly white evangelicals. But it’s also actually white mainline Protestants and disproportionately white Catholics.Bacon: We’re coming to Catholics in a minute, but yeah, go ahead.Buckley: So at a basic level, saying that white Christians make up the core of Trump’s political constituency is true.The thing that has maybe started to change is that the first-term rationale was that this was essentially a bargain being made by social conservatives in exchange for justices who would make progress on Roe, for a president who they weren’t personally enthusiastic about, but who they went along with because they were making a calculated judgment rooted in their social conservatism.In the second term, it’s harder to see any of that hesitancy playing out. These are not reluctant social conservatives. These are, in fact, some of the fullest throated supporters of the president. And if anything, there’s important evidence emerging from political science and sociology that it’s as much the personal loyalty to the president that’s driving the support as any theological motivation—or that the line between the two is almost impossible to distinguish. That, on a certain level, the president has become a kind of theological figure, almost, for a lot of these reasons.Bacon: What are the Protestant right’s policy priorities? Because, as you said, Roe has been overturned. So that was the old priority—Roe—and to some extent, gay marriage is legal and probably going to stay that way. So what are the policy priorities of today’s Protestant Christian right?Buckley: Yeah, it’s a good question. You have the old social conservatives who are still out there, who are pushing “frontier issues,” maybe related to abortion in the states, related to same-sex marriage and conscience exemptions. Older issues related to religion and education, for instance—which are not new at all in American democracy but have really flared up again in the second term—including legal questions related to the funding of religious charter schools.And questions of “curricular reform” and how religion fits into the curriculum of American public schools or materials that are made available in American public schools. So you might think of those as just traditional sexuality- and gender-based culture wars—version 2.0.Bacon: This is an issue that has been going on a long time. Buckley: Yeah, exactly. So there’s nothing particularly new there, although it’s a new environment that it’s playing out in. But I think that what has bubbled up in this term is also the fusion of Trumpist Christianity into areas of the second Trump term that we might not have traditionally associated with conservative Christians.What do I mean by that? For instance: enthusiastic conservative Christian endorsement for dismantling of elements of foreign assistance, and attacks on U.S. foreign aid as being “woke” or enmeshed in DEI politics.That wasn’t necessarily on the bingo card for most folks who studied conservative Christian politics, the extent to which Trump’s most enthusiastic Christian supporters have really become enthusiastic endorsers of the “war on woke”—the turn against DEI policy, the turn against elite universities.Those sorts of issues that we associate with this side of the Trump term are newer. You could find analogs for these things going back, but I think those are “new frontiers” that we didn’t see as much of in the first term.Bacon: Are those issues they’re motivated by, or they’re just joining because those are issues the coalition is motivated by? Are they driving them, or are they just going along?Buckley: I think this is the million-dollar question. There’s a lot of evidence from scholars like Michele Margolis and David Campbell and others that, frequently these days, we might think of religion as changing politics. When we study these things, religion changes politics. But that, actually, politics has changed religion and people’s religious commitments in the U.S. as much as the other way around.And so in this case, the implication of that might be that the reason that these issues have come to rally the faithful isn’t because there’s a preexisting theological commitment here; it’s because the president has told them to. It’s the political cues essentially setting the religious agenda.Now, there’s certain theological foundations for that that have maybe made some of those individuals in those communities more susceptible to Trumpist signaling. There’s traditions of apocalypticism, for instance. My colleague Paul Djupe talks a lot about this—and his colleagues and co-authors—and how that’s fusing with a Trumpist anti-institutionalism and anti-elitism. There’s raw material there theologically, but the president is the driver of that, and his religious supporters are responding to his cues.Bacon: In an old world, there was Jerry Falwell; there was Pat Robertson. There were people whose names I remember ... who were prominent Protestants involved in politics. I guess Paula White is someone I can name, but do we have the same cohort of pastors around, like the way we did with George W. Bush? Is there a cohort of pastors Trump is around, and who is that? And if so, what does the group look like, demographically and socially?Buckley: You certainly could point to folks who are on advisory councils. There’s a Religious Liberty Commission in this term that you could point to. In the first term, there was especially a network tied to his campaign’s evangelical advisory board from the first campaign that then transitioned into an informal advisory role. Those types of folks are around.That folks who study their backgrounds—there would be diverse individuals, including Catholic bishops, for instance, involved in the Religious Liberty Commission—but there’s probably a disproportionate representation from leaders from the more kind of Pentecostal wing of American Protestantism among those folks, including somebody like Paula White, who’s probably the most prominent national-level representative of that.But I do think it’s fair to say that this generation of a conservative Christian organizing is a little bit less institutionalized than the old-line religious right organizations. So there are newer organizations; there are organizations out there that are communicating regularly. But to me, it seems like a little bit of a less coherent organizational landscape than the generation maybe 20 or 25 years ago, when you had the Family Research Council—or a little bit before that, when you had the Moral Majority and Concerned Women for America. These are pretty clear-cut nationally organized focal points. To me, it’s a bit of a more diffuse landscape right now in terms of the religious leadership.Bacon: You’re not quite saying this, but I want to drill down. Are you saying that in the old world, maybe that the religious leaders had a policy agenda that they pushed on the politicians—and maybe today the politicians have an agenda and the religious leaders are adopting it because it’s not clear that there’s a Christian conservative policy that’s separate from the Trump agenda?Buckley: Yeah, that’s a fair enough way to capture the change in the model. The old sort of model would’ve been that the Christian right was essentially an interest group from within the Republican coalition that tried to do what it could to push its priorities onto the party that best matched those priorities—and actually, it often felt like it was losing those debates even inside the party. It often felt like it was taken advantage of, or not really appreciated, blah, blah, blah. But it definitely had exogenous preferences—preferences that stood on their own. I’m not as clear that that is systematically the case right now.Bacon: I know that Don Lemon, the journalist, got arrested today—I don’t know if you’ve seen this or not. He was recording at a church in Minneapolis. That church was conservative—or the pastor was conservative? What’s the story there?Buckley: I’ll be perfectly honest; I don’t know the details of the church and the religious leadership involved. I believe the idea was that someone in religious leadership at the church—maybe not the main pastor—was somehow involved in immigration enforcement in a day job. But I don’t know the details on that.Bacon: Talk about Protestant opposition to Trump.... I think that is part of the story in Minneapolis—the Black church is involved, I think—talk about where we’re seeing opposition to Trump among Protestants.Buckley: Yeah, I would say most visibly in Minneapolis—it’s not hard to find clergy, actually, in the protest coverage and in the leadership of protest networks. It’s not an accident, actually. Minneapolis has a very active, faith-based community organizing sector that predates all of this.And the infrastructure of that sector does have a heavily Protestant foundation—not only, but heavily—and it’s in denominations that we would typically associate with mainline Protestantism as scholars, which we would usually contrast with evangelicalism as a tradition.Bacon: Presbyterian, Episcopalian, what are we talking about?Buckley: Episcopalians, United Methodist Church, maybe Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, PCUSA (Presbyterian Church USA), United Church of Christ. Sorry if I’m forgetting anyone off the top of my head. But those are the kinds of denominations that we’re talking about.And those clergy have a long tradition of activism in especially American urban environments, going at least back to the American civil rights—to the sort of ’60s civil rights movement—and the kind of “social gospel” of the first half of the twentieth century. So the fact that those denominations and their leadership would be highly critical of the Trump administration’s approach to immigration enforcement is not surprising. And it builds on a kind of long tradition of grassroots advocacy coming out of those denominations.There’s also certainly been some “Never Trump” evangelicals—to use the term that sometimes gets tossed around—that goes back all the way to the first term. Usually, these were disproportionately relatively elite and university-tied in their affiliations, who, for various reasons, came to see the Trumpist turn within the Republican Party as actually a deeply anti-conservative turn. And so came to oppose it. I think people like David French would be in that category, and Russell Moore at Christianity Today would probably fit within that category of people who had “skin in the game” as conservative Christian leaders in an earlier stage of American politics, but who broke with the Trump administration.I honestly don’t know the extent to which leaders from that wing of American evangelicalism have been involvedin the grassroots protests. I know they’ve said things ... in public that have been quite critical of what’s happened recently. I’m not on the ground, though, and I’m not positioned to know whether evangelical communities who would be in that “Never Trump” category have actually been in the streets and been taking collective action in this immediate period.Bacon: What is the rhetoric of the Protestant, religious anti-Trump[ers]? How does sound different than, like, Democratic politicians? Buckley: You mean the mainline Protestants? Bacon: Yes, the mainline Protestants.Buckley: I think the theological tradition most of these folks are operating out of is a sort of descendant of that “social gospel” tradition coming out of the first half of the twentieth century—one that is very comfortable speaking the language of sin, which might be different from your typical Democratic politician, for example.But it locates sin not in individual decisions, but in social structures. And so in this case, the location of sin is not the undocumented migrant who has crossed borders. The location of sin, for instance, is the economic structures of global capital that have pushed these individuals into making almost choiceless choices to protect their families.So that language of sin—but locating the language of sin within economic structures and social structures that marginalize communities and enrich minorities in [the] capitalist system—I think that language of sin and critique would be different from what you would get from most Democrats anyway.Bacon: I haven’t looked at the Pew data lately, but I think, in general, we’re getting to the point where the Democratic Party is about half split between—let’s call it Christians—and the number of people who are atheists or ...  agnostic or “nones.” Those numbers are getting into where ... they might be close to 50-50.I’m not including other faiths, obviously, but those numbers are converging. But I don’t have a sense yet that there’s a real—even though believing in Christianity and not are very different beliefs—I don’t get a sense that the party is divided on religion right now. And it seems like the nonreligious can work with religious [leaders] pretty well. That’s my impression. I’m curious if you’re seeing signs of that fissure yet.Buckley: Yeah, I think that it’s true that, in this immediate moment, migration is one of those issues that helps the Democratic Party talk about religion, because it’s an issue that presents an obvious, common moral vocabulary for both the secular wing of the party and the religious wing of the party—which is not just Christian, by the way.A lot of those commitments would be deeply resonant with Jewish communities, with Muslim communities, with various communities of non-Abrahamic religions. And so I think that this policy issue helps those coalitions to activate. The question is when we elevate beyond this particular policy issue to a broader hypothetical primary campaign between hypothetical candidates for the presidency in a couple of years.In that environment, when we’re talking about the whole package of the policy vision, does a kind of explicitly religious vision help more than it hurts in a primary environment? I think that’s still an open question. I think that’s where ...Bacon: [Pete] Buttigieg is very openly religious. Some of the other candidates probably are not. I think Wes Moore is—although a lot of the candidates that are maybe running ...Buckley: A lot of them have actually started to position themselves in a pretty clever way. [Josh] Shapiro’s new book—[Andy] Beshear here in Kentucky. All the folks that you just mentioned actually have their own foundation laid on those issues.So it’ll be interesting to see how that develops. I don’t think that—for instance, you won’t have an openly anti-clerical presidential candidate who makes that the foundation of their campaign; that doesn’t work in the American environment. But the question is: Would there be more subtle ways in which a strong religious framing of the campaign would not help in the primary environment?Bacon: Let’s talk about Catholics. We have a new Pope ... let’s talk about the Catholic opposition to Trump. What does that look like? It looks like that’s playing out in Minneapolis, too. Talk about what the character of that is.Buckley: Sure. Listeners may be aware that the Pope has himself commented on being troubled by what he’s seeing related to immigration enforcement in the country right now, especially the dehumanization of immigrant communities.And the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops—which represents as a whole group all of the Catholic bishops in the United States—at its most recent national meeting back in November issued a statement that was substantially concerned about the directions of migration policy. So, as a body, this group has chosen to speak in a unique way on this issue. And they would tell you ... the last time they issued that type of statement, I believe, was during the Affordable Care Act controversies over the contraception mandate—which obviously would come down on the conservative end of the spectrum.So it’s different for them to be speaking on this kind of an issue. It’s clear that the migration issue touches a very powerful moral nerve tied to not just the current Pope, but Pope Francis, who spoke out consistently about the need to minister to migrants and refugees. And there is also, if we’re being honest, a practical necessity for the Catholic Church to minister to migrants because, for a long time in the United States, the Catholic Church has been an immigrant church. And this goes back to the Irish, and it goes back to the Germans and then the Italians and the Poles, and now the Vietnamese and Latinos and et cetera.There is a very practical need for Catholic leaders to minister to their flocks that makes this issue different. And they also see it on the front lines—not just at a high-level abstract theology, but also the practical ministry that Catholic charities [perform] all around this country, especially along the border and in other cities with large immigrant populations. The practical work of ministering to these communities is carried out in our cities and in our border areas, in not only, but in large part, by religious charity. A lot of those are Catholic charity affiliates in our communities.Bacon: Most Latinos in the U.S. are Catholic, still—is that correct? The Protestant number is growing ...Buckley: I think that “most” is still accurate. It is decreasing. So you’re seeing a growth in both evangelical Protestantism, but also the religiously unaffiliated, which is a real thing that’s growing in America’s nonwhite communities in general. But fairly certain that “most” is still an accurate number.Bacon: And then talk to me about Catholic support for what Trump’s doing.... Are there Catholic leaders who are conservative on immigration too?Buckley: There are certainly lay-Catholic leaders who are conservative on immigration. There’s one who’s living in the vice president’s residence right now, for instance. And you could point to other leaders within the administration who are quite comfortable making explicitly moral arguments in favor of the need to enforce laws and have order and that sort of thing.So on the lay side, there’s no doubt about it. That exists. And a number of those leaders—most prominently the vice president—have at times been quite comfortable about even pushing back on religious leadership, including criticizing statements that are coming from Catholic bishops either as being ill-informed or out of their area of expertise.In terms of full-throated endorsement, particularly on the immigration issue, from within the hierarchy, there haven’t been ... full-throated endorsements, I would say. What you’ve seen from some of the bishops who we might think of as more conservative in recent weeks have been statements that have pointed out the importance of collaboration and cooperation in our relationships with security officials, and the need to maintain order and protest with respect and how we need to not provoke further dissent and division. That kind of framing. But that’s not exactly coming out and openly saying protesters are terrorists who are targeting our police. You haven’t seen that from official bishops at the highest levels.Bacon: Is Trump pushing other policies? He’s not talked about abortion a lot during the administration. They’ve not done a ton of abortion policy. Are there issues where conservative Catholics are excited by his policy vision, and what might those be?Buckley: That’s a good question. There certainly was some disappointment, for instance, when at the president’s urging, the language about abortion was changed in the Republican party platform. The pro-life movement noticed that. And  there is a certain sense of uncertainty about what the next frontier on the national level is for that movement.So, in other words, what do we really want the administration to do on the national front? There are steps that you can take—globally, the Mexico City policy, for instance, and relatively small-ball asks—but not on the level of “overturn Roe.” I don’t personally think that the Obergefell decision poses the same salient target to Catholic leaders—at least, not official Catholic leaders in this country. I think, for the most part, they’ve reconciled themselves to that outcome.To be perfectly honest, the questions of trans issues and gender and sexuality and “gender ideology” ... that is probably the most substantive policy area that does have some ties to theological foundation within the Catholic tradition, that those folks can point to and say, “This is actually something that we’re on pretty firm foundation with, and where this administration is delivering for us.”Bacon: What’s the Pope’s position on transgender rights, or “transgenderism,” for lack of a better term here—or transgender people?Buckley: I’ll be perfectly honest, I don’t know if Leo has commented publicly on that. I don’t want to speak out of turn. Pope Francis was certainly someone who was always pushing the church to encounter people on the margins—what he called the “margins of society.” And that included, in his ministry, encountering people who were in trans communities, which he personally did many times throughout his pontificate.But that didn’t accompany a fundamental change in Catholic doctrine on issues of gender and sexuality. And it’s not something that I would expect to see out of Pope Leo, based on the initial signals that we’ve seen from him.Bacon: I hate to have a sort of “other faith group,” because that encompasses a lot, but that’s what I want to do here in terms of: Is there anything worth noting about other non-Christian faiths’ roles in supporting Trump?Buckley: It’s a fair question. I think that you can certainly find evidence, for instance, of some expanded support from elements of the American Jewish community for the Trump administration—especially tied to orthodoxy within the American Jewish community. Not all Orthodox Jews, but if you look at survey data, there’s a pretty clear partisan divide between American Jews who identify as orthodox and other American Jews. And that goes back to the first term. It’s not a surprise, and we still continue to see that in this term.In terms of the American Muslim community, in the last election, there was pretty strong evidence—who knows why, but I suspect that it’s because of the Biden administration’s approach to the war in Gaza, and Israel’s role in that, and our role in that as a country—you saw voter turnout decrease in some of the more Muslim-heavy parts of the country, probably most famously in and around Dearborn. But that’s different than full-throated support for Trumpism. I would actually suspect—it’s tricky to survey small religious minorities—but I would expect that we would see a cooling of support in the American Muslim community since the election.Other parts of the American religious landscape that are interesting to think about ... the other one that is interesting is the American Mormon community, or the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.Bacon: All I really follow is, like, Mike Lee used to be against Trump and now has become very pro-Trump. And I think Utah’s election results—Trump did much better in 2024 than 2016.Buckley: Yeah, although that’s because of the nature of the ballot and who wasn’t on the ballot.Bacon: Who was on the ballot in ’16?Buckley: Evan McMullin in 2016. He wins a—I forget, I don’t remember off the top of my head—but he wins a large percentage. He gets a real number. And that’s in large part because of Mormon support, and that’s gone. So Trump’s number does go up, but it doesn’t go up to where you would expect a “normal Republican” to be.And then there is evidence ... that the Latter-day Saints community—is still less Trumpified than the rest of white Christianity. Now, I don’t know what that looks like long-term, but it seems to be one sector that has not become as fully Trumpified as other portions of American Christianity have.Bacon: Let me drill down and finish here on Minneapolis, as we’re seeing this ... it looks to me like there’s a lot of activism that happened in Minneapolis. I’m thinking about the fact that we have this growing religiously unaffiliated population in the country. And I’m trying to figure out—what does that mean for religion in politics, ultimately?... How is the religiously unaffiliated community changing politics?Buckley: Yeah, it’s a good question. This is probably the most important big-picture structural change in religion and U.S. politics of the last 25 years at least.So for listeners who might not be familiar, the so-called “nones”—those who will say that they don’t have a religious affiliation—they are now on their way to being upwards of a third of Americans. And it’s true that there’s some evidence that’s leveled off—maybe just short of a third—but still, that’s an increase of manyfold from just a few decades ago.But you’re right that it’s not going to take religion off the American political agenda, in part because there’s still a strong floor of religiosity in American society. So maybe the ceiling of that religious influence has come down a bit, but the floor is still well above secularized societies in Western Europe, for example. I just don’t think we’re going down that road.And because that floor is still pretty robust, there’s a foundation in place for public engagement, and it’s not all about conservative Christianity. It’s also going to be, especially in America’s cities, tied to the longstanding urban infrastructure of American religion. I said that the activism in Minneapolis doesn’t come out of nowhere. It’s building on a tradition of what’s called “faith-based community organizing”—not just in Minneapolis, but in a lot of American cities.Faith-based community organizing networks tend to focus heavily on issues of local concern. So issues related to community relationships with the department of public safety in a city. Or concerns about getting across crosswalks in a safe way or having mental health access for impoverished community members. Bread-and-butter stuff of local urban politics. And getting churches and mosques and synagogues and temples to serve as the infrastructure for bringing those public priorities to local elected officials—mayors, city councils, that sort of thing.Faith-based community organizing networks exist in most American major cities and even some smaller ones. And the one in Minneapolis was actually known for being quite active well in advance of this. That unique role in a more localized religious politics is what we’re seeing still have an important place in American democracy—in part also because this is a time where, especially in America’s urban areas, local civic institutions are continuing to be hollowed out and weakened overall.We don’t have the same kinds of urban community associations, especially in marginalized communities, including communities of color, that maybe we did 30 or 50 years ago. And the churches and the mosques and the synagogues are one thing that still has some space. I know right here in Louisville, for instance—during the Breonna Taylor protests several years ago—churches downtown in Louisville were involved in supporting protesters, providing a place for rest, for safe recovery, that sort of thing. That same sort of thing is going on in Minneapolis. That role is sometimes under the radar of national politics. But it’s always been there. But now it’s very visible all of a sudden, because of the way that immigration enforcement actions are targeting American cities at the grassroots, at the margins, which is where these networks have always been strongest.Bacon: Last question. Do we think that—when I think about protest movements, I’m thinking about Dr. King—do we think that pastors, religious leaders, have moral authority, still? In a country that’s becoming less religious, in a country in which people don’t believe anyone—numbers about trust in authority ... I think we’re struggling with, like, do we have a civil society? How do we rise above partisanship? Is there anybody who people listen to for a moral voice?I saw Senator [Raphael] Warnock went to Minneapolis, and he talked about, “This is a moral moment.” I respect him and I think he has authority. But my father was a pastor; I respect religious authorities in a certain way. He’s a Democratic politician, so I’m guessing a lot of people heard him in that role, because he’s obviously a Democratic politician. So do we think that religious leaders have—the Pope probably does—but do we think that people care what religious leaders think beyond ... whatever party hat you wear?Buckley: So I would leave you with two points on this. The first is that there is evidence that religious leader moral authority has become caught up in partisanship in the United States. Support, for instance, for religious leaders speaking out in politics is generally stronger among Republicans than among Democrats.While there are some racial differences there, the partisan bit is very powerful. There’s actually evidence that Americans have become less religiously affiliated over time because they’re reacting negatively to conservative Christian cues in politics. That’s real.The other point, though, that I would remind everybody is that if moral authority can be weakened, that means that it’s dynamic and it can also be rebuilt. And I actually think that is a really important frontier of research right now. It’s some work that I’m doing—and colleagues are too—this question of: OK, is it possible to rebuild the moral authority for religious leaders in American communities if Americans see those leaders as engaging in costly action on behalf of the common good and their own moral priorities?I think that’s a very interesting and, right now, open research question—and one that I don’t know the answer to. But ... if the decisions of certain religious leaders can damage moral authority, there’s reason to think that the decisions of other religious leaders could rebuild that authority. Although it’s unlikely to happen overnight.Bacon: Good place to end on. David, great to see you. Great conversation. Thank you, and thanks, everybody, for joining us.Buckley: Thanks so much, Perry. And thanks, everybody, for being here.

The Unusual Working-Class Message That Turned a Deep-Red District Blue
New Republic • Feb 4, 2026

The Unusual Working-Class Message That Turned a Deep-Red District Blue

The issues that have worked for Democrats around the country this election season—affordability and working-class stability chief among them—also worked for Taylor Rehmet, a union president and machinist who beat his Trump-backed opponent for a deep-red state Senate seat in the Fort Worth area of Texas last weekend. But his platform included something more unusual and a little retro: a promise to return vocational education to public high schools.Rehmet, 33, is the son of blue-collar Republicans: His father was an airplane mechanic, and his mother was a hairdresser. He has said he plans to expand vocational education as part of an effort at “rebuilding the pipeline between schools and good-paying jobs,” and made it part of his pro–working class pitch. “No matter what party you’re in, if you work hard and focus on the issues—such as lowering costs, health care, and really focusing on working people—that’s how you’ll get people to show up and vote,” he said on ABC News Live after his victory.The focus comes at a time when Republicans are paying lip service to American workers while dismantling public education, the economy, and pro-worker laws. At the same time, more and more American families are anxious about their economic future and how to maintain stable careers that will survive the next technological revolution. Talking about vocational training—now commonly referred to as career and technical education, or CTE—may hit the sweet spot for many voters. It’s a message other Democrats could pick up.“CTE enrollment is up almost 10 percent over the last three years, which is a big jump in a short period of time,” said Taylor White, director of postsecondary pathways for youth at New America, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington, D.C. “[Rehmet] is tapping into something that is for real happening, not just in his backyard.”The U.S. education system for at least a generation has focused on sending high school students to college, owing to the decline in manufacturing in the last half of the twentieth century and the expansion of service-sector and knowledge-worker careers that required college educations. That has meant a lot of changes in practice, one of them being an under-investment in the kinds of agricultural, woodworking, shop, home economics, and other career-focused classes that had been common in high schools until then.There were some good reasons for the shift. It seemed that college educations held the key to the best-paying jobs, and it’s still true that college graduates earn a wage premium. And in the past, some of the vocational education pathways amounted to tracking some students into classes that closed off college opportunities and weren’t always academically rigorous enough to truly prepare them for jobs. That made parents skeptical of CTE in general.“It was absolutely terrible for many years,” said Mary Alice McCarthy, director of New America’s Center on Education and Labor. “Researchers in the ’70s and ’80s and ’90s found that it was a space where students of color, Black students in particular, were tracked into these programs. They were dead-end programs. They were very low quality. And, you know, they just had a terrible reputation, and vocational education had a lot of stigma associated with it.”The reforms since then have been significant, she said. “We don’t usually have really good stories of reform to tell in the education space, but career and technical education is one of those stories,” she said. So much so that the College Board is extending its Advanced Placement program, which is college-level courses offered in high schools that can allow students to earn college credit, into some CTE classes. Students who take CTE can still go to college as well, so it no longer diverts students away from earning bachelor’s degrees if they want them.All of this speaks to the appeal of these classes to students and their parents, who are seeking AI-proof career paths and rethinking the sizable investment it takes to go to college. But federal funding for CTE is still lacking; it received almost $1.5 billion in 2025, just 14 percent more than in 2008—not enough to keep pace with inflation. And President Donald Trump is slowly dismantling the Department of Education, impacting some of these programs.“They are trying to move parts of the Department of Education which are really necessary for career and technical education, vocational programs and others, to different agencies,” said Veronica Goodman, senior director of workforce development policy at the Center for American Progress. “And as we’ve seen, that’s already led to a lot of disarray for programs and workers and the institutions that rely on these funds. And so I think that’s definitely going to have an impact, a negative impact, on the preparation that students and workers are getting.”That will mean even fewer students could have access to those programs than do today. At the same time, Trump’s dismantling of many of the programs in the Inflation Reduction Act and other manufacturing policies passed by President Joe Biden means that the apprenticeships and entry-level jobs that could provide an alternative pathway into those careers could disappear too.While expanding CTE might make sense on its own, Rehmet also framed his support as a way to bolster his support for public education in general. He says he wants to increase teacher pay and repeal the state’s voucher system, which diverts government money to private schools. This message apparently resonated in a district where his opponent, Republican Leigh Wambsganss, had helped fuel an anti–diversity, equity, and inclusion push at local libraries and on the school board—which had already inspired a backlash. CTE education is part of Rehmet’s broader message about reinvesting in public schools and helping the working class find stable jobs in an economy where they can afford houses, groceries, and more stable lives. It’s part of an overarching message about rebuilding unions and the working class.His message could also resonate in working-class communities beyond Texas. “This is an area that should rise up in the priorities of progressives and Democrats,” McCarthy said. “We’ve been so focused on a college mentality, but students and families are voting with their feet, and they are picking CTE.”

Trump’s New “Prison Camp” Threat Unleashes Fury Even in MAGA Country
New Republic • Feb 4, 2026

Trump’s New “Prison Camp” Threat Unleashes Fury Even in MAGA Country

When Stephen Miller offered his first big rollout of Donald Trump’s immigration agenda during the 2024 campaign, he demonstrated great enthusiasm for the idea of giant migrant camps. He gushed about creating “vast holding facilities” built on “open land,” which would enable Trump to escalate the volume and speed of deportations to unprecedented heights. Trembling with excitement, Miller vowed: “President Trump will do whatever it takes.”But a funny thing has happened with Miller’s authoritarian fever dreams. As plans for these new detention facilities have become public, they’re encountering opposition in some very unlikely places. Notably, that includes regions that backed Trump in 2024. Which in turn captures something essential about this moment: The public backlash unleashed by Trump’s immigration agenda runs far deeper than revulsion at imagery of ICE violence. It’s now seemingly coalescing against the goal of mass removals as a broader ideological project.We’re now learning that this year, Immigration and Customs Enforcement plans to retrofit around two dozen vast new facilities. In keeping with Trump-Miller’s visions, ICE vows to detain an additional 80,000 people in them. Some will reportedly hold up to 10,000 detainees apiece. In other words, the Trump-Miller threat to create a system of new detention camps is just getting underway in earnest.To put a ghoulish twist on the oft-discussed ideal of bureaucratic “capacity,” this will allow Trump and Miller to imprison and then deport vastly more people a whole lot faster. Right now, more than 70,000 migrants are languishing in detention—a record—but the administration is running out of space. Add another 80,000 beds, and it would supercharge expulsion capacity.Yet these detention dreams are hitting stiff opposition. ICE wants to buy a warehouse in Virginia’s Hanover County, which went for Trump by 26 points in 2024 and combines rural territory with Richmond’s northern suburbs. Residents recently turned out in force and angrily condemned the proposed sale, with local reports suggesting only a “handful” backed it. The GOP-heavy Board of Supervisors opposed the transaction. The warehouse owner canceled the sale.Meanwhile, in New Jersey, the Republican-dominated Roxbury Township Council, in slightly-Trump-leaning Morris County, recently voted unanimously to oppose ICE’s plans to buy a warehouse there, with some locals sharply protesting the scheme for humanitarian reasons. The Republican mayor of Oklahoma City came out against a proposed ICE warehouse, with the owner also nixing the sale. Officials in places like Kansas City, Missouri, and Salt Lake City, Utah, are also dead set against plans for ICE camps in their locales.Guess what: The opposition is only getting started. As MS NOW’s Rachel Maddow noted in a useful overview of the opposition Monday night, we’re already seeing mass protests outside existing facilities. Those are smaller than some of the gargantuan new camps ICE hopes to create, yet migrant deaths are already soaring in the current facilities, and the bigger ones will be even worse. “If they build them, they will fill them,” Maddow said, labeling them “prison camps.” She added: “How do you think those facilities are going to be run?”The pushback has come together surprisingly quickly. What explains this? A bizarrely overlooked finding in a recent Pew Research poll sheds some light: It finds that a huge majority of Americans oppose mass immigrant detention. The wording is critical here:Do you favor or oppose keeping large numbers of immigrants in detention centers while their cases are decided?Favor: 35 percentOppose: 64 percentNote that huge majorities are against keeping immigrants in detention while their cases are being decided. This is a decisive repudiation of a key pillar of MAGA ideology. Trump and Miller have long treated the release of immigrants awaiting court dates as something akin to profound national humiliation, even a harbinger of cultural decay and civilizational decline. But the broad American mainstream—including 59 percent of white voters in the Pew poll—appears to oppose detaining them. With majorities also opposing deporting noncriminal undocumented immigrants and longtime residents, that MAGA understanding is just not widely shared. For Trumpworld, mass detention isn’t merely about facilitating deportations. It’s also supposed to correct the grievous national wound that previous presidents inflicted by releasing migrants into the interior. Is it really possible that majorities are actually OK with such a horror? Apparently it is.That wasn’t supposed to happen. After Trump’s 2024 victory, some analysts suggested that his win reflected a decisive cultural shift in the direction of his restrictionist views on immigration, one that Democrats must accommodate themselves to going forward. Call it the “MAGA moment” thesis.But it’s hard to square that idea with what we’re seeing now. As political scientist Julia Azari argues, notions of such a shift are bound up with the deeper idea that the culture is undergoing a meaningful conservative reorientation on race and nationalism. Yet that now looks baseless, Azari notes, because “the public seems to be turning against some of the hardcore principles of MAGA in that regard, especially on immigration.”To wit: Trump’s overall approval on the issue is in the toilet, and ICE has become a pariah agency. Majorities oppose deporting longtime residents with jobs and no criminal record and view immigration as a positive good for the country. In that Pew poll, 60 percent of Americans oppose pausing visa applications for the 75 countries Trump has singled out, apparently in keeping with his hatred for “shithole countries,” and two-thirds oppose ending asylum applications for people fleeing horrors abroad. So, at the most fundamental level, large majorities are rejecting both the Trump-Miller ethnonationalist reengineering of the country and their effort to choke off all humanitarian pathways for settling here. Such public sentiments seem very much at odds with diagnoses of a durable Trumpist-nationalist moment.Relatedly, Substacker Brian Beutler recently argued that social signaling is generating opposition to Trump’s worst policies, as more and more ordinary people see them as shameful and heinous in the most basic moral and human terms. Something like that is helping drive opposition to detention centers: See this remarkable column in the Kansas City Star that seeks to shame warehouse owners into refraining from selling to ICE, arguing that doing so risks social ostracism. Similar efforts probably helped persuade owners to nix selling in Oklahoma and deep-red parts of Virginia. The growing opposition to ICE prison camps suggests much, much more of this to come.In short: If there ever was a big “MAGA moment” cultural shift on immigration, well, it’s already long gone.

Trump and Musk Knew Exactly Who Jeffrey Epstein Was
New Republic • Feb 4, 2026

Trump and Musk Knew Exactly Who Jeffrey Epstein Was

Elon Musk is very insistent that he never visited Jeffrey Epstein’s private island in the Caribbean. That may very well be true. There is nothing in the millions of Epstein’s emails to suggest that Musk did—or, for that matter, that he ever flew on the “Lolita Express,” the alleged sex trafficker’s infamous jet.“I had very little correspondence with Epstein and declined repeated invitations to go to his island or fly on his ‘Lolita Express,’” Musk wrote on his X platform on Friday, not long after emails between him and Epstein were released by the federal government, “but was well aware that some email correspondence with him could be misinterpreted and used by detractors to smear my name.” There’s always a “but.” While there’s very little direct correspondence between Musk and Epstein—at least that we know of today, with millions of files still unreleased—it’s easy to see why Musk felt the need to explain himself. In 2012 and 2013, he wrote to Epstein on several occasions asking about visiting his island. In one email, Musk inquired which night would feature the “wildest party.” In another, he initially begged off attending a party Epstein was throwing during the United Nations General Assembly because he thought it meant it would be full of diplomats. Epstein, who pleaded guilty in 2008 to soliciting prostitution from someone under 18, responded that “there is no one over 25 and all very cute.”The email chain ends there, and there’s no evidence Musk attended the party or any other event Epstein hosted. For Musk, that’s enough. He has continued his grandstanding about Epstein, demanding the federal government do more to prosecute people in the files—but not him, of course. “When there is at least one arrest, some justice will be done. If not, this is all performative,” he wrote. “Nothing but a distraction.” The distraction he is referring to, it seems, is his relationship with Epstein. But the emails between Musk and Epstein are far from exculpatory. It’s obvious from Musk’s limited correspondence with Epstein that he was fully aware of Epstein’s reputation. Epstein was a guy who reliably threw parties full of “girls.” When, at one point, Epstein informed Musk that the “ratio” on his island may make Talulah Riley, Musk’s wife at the time, uncomfortable, the tech billionaire was blunt: “Ratio is not a problem for Talulah.” Musk, it seems, had few concerns about corresponding or—whether or not they ever actually hung out—associating with Epstein given his reputation. To the contrary, it seems to have been the point of associating with Epstein. Of course, the millions of emails released last week make it clear that a lot of other powerful people, most of them men, felt the exact same way. There is a sense of admiration, sometimes even envy, in their correspondence with Epstein. Mostly, though, they thought he was a good hang—not in spite of his reputation but because of it. Musk’s defense is notable because it mirrors the one offered by Donald Trump of his yearslong friendship with Epstein, which began in the late 1980s and ended in the mid-2000s. But Trump’s relationship with Epstein was not limited to correspondence. Indeed, given Trump’s relative paucity of grown-up friendships, one could credibly make the case that his relationship with Epstein was one of the deepest of his adult life. (Epstein told the journalist Michael Wolff—whose disturbingly close relationship with his “source” is detailed throughout the files—that Trump was once his “closest friend.”) “I’ve known Jeff [Epstein] for 15 years. Terrific guy,” Trump told New York magazine in 2002. “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.” Around the same time, he sent Epstein a birthday card featuring a hand-drawn silhouette. “A pal is a wonderful thing,” Trump wrote. “Happy Birthday—and may every day be another wonderful secret.” Trump has since suggested that his relationship with Epstein deteriorated when he learned that his friend was a creep—specifically when Epstein attempted to “steal” a young masseuse (possibly Virginia Giuffre, who recently published a memoir detailing Epstein’s abuse and who died by suicide last year) who worked at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club. Trump’s allies have repeated that claim ad nauseam, also claiming that Epstein was “banned” from the club at the same time. There’s no evidence that’s true. (Epstein, it seems, was never a dues-paying member of Mar-a-Lago but was treated as one, given his close relationship with Trump.) Instead, the best contemporaneous evidence of their falling out suggests that it was over real estate, not Epstein’s treatment of women: The two engaged in a bitter battle to buy a historic Palm Beach property in 2004 that ultimately destroyed their friendship.That real estate, not misogyny or criminal sexual activity, destroyed Trump and Epstein’s relationship makes sense because it’s clear from public comments and private correspondence that Trump was aware that Epstein was a creep—he just thought it was cool. Every day with him, after all, was a “wonderful secret.” The fact that Epstein liked women on the “younger side” was something to toast. The extent to which Trump participated in Epstein’s criminal activity is not clear. But what is obvious is that he was well aware of who his friend was, and that it was worth celebrating. He liked Epstein because he liked young girls and was frequently surrounded by them. Which is also why, years after Epstein and Trump’s falling out, Musk wrote to him to ask when he would be throwing the “wildest” party.If you are looking for people to prosecute, as Musk claims he is, the millions of documents released by the Department of Justice have many leads but few obvious open and shut cases. What they show instead is something different—but similarly repugnant. Again and again, powerful men—Musk and Wolff, certainly, but also Bill Gates, Steve Bannon, Peter Thiel, Prince Andrew, New York Giants owner Steve Tisch, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, and recently named CBS contributor Peter Attia among them—seek out Epstein. There is no indication in their emails that they are unaware of Epstein’s reputation or status as a convicted sex offender. In some cases—Prince Andrew being perhaps the most notable—the friendship appears to be built around that fact. But in others, it’s clear that Epstein’s correspondents simply don’t care. Instead, Epstein is a confidant, someone to talk with about business, the state of the world, and, in many cases, girls. He’s not a pariah but a valued member of a social circle that wields enormous power in the world.The handful of examples of people turning down Epstein only make that clearer. (When The Daily Beast founder Tina Brown was asked to attend a dinner with Epstein, Woody Allen, and Prince Andrew in 2010, she replied, “What the fuck is this … ? The paedophile’s ball?”) The general public may not have known who Epstein was, but elites did. They knew he was a criminal sex offender and that he was a creep—and that’s precisely why so many of them kept hanging out with him.Musk is pushing for “prosecutions” for cynical reasons: Doing so downplays his own relationship with Epstein by drawing attention to people who engaged in real criminal conduct. He’s right on this much: It is absurd that no one has been prosecuted as a result of the millions of documents that federal law enforcement officers have acquired in the Epstein investigation. Still, Musk’s demand is somewhat beside the point. The millions of emails released by the Department of Justice mostly don’t show glaring criminal conduct or detail the inner workings of what Musk alleges: a sinister and sophisticated cabal of pedophiles.Indeed, most of the emails are quite banal. But what they do show is nevertheless extremely bleak: They depict a global, but primarily American, elite–one that Musk and Trump belong to—that openly embraced and celebrated a man who preyed on underage girls. The people corresponding with him quite literally ran the country’s government and economy, or are doing so today. When they wanted to hang out with girls or attend a wild party, they got in touch with their pal Jeff. And they didn’t stop until he got thrown in prison—a second time.

12...625626627628629...15471548