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Katie Miller, a former Trump administration staffer and wife of White House adviser Stephen Miller, has called for Anthony Fauci to be jailed, citing the recent release of his diary entries as proof that he is nothing but an attention-seeker. But the diary entries reveal something else. During President Trump’s first term, when Katie Miller was then-Vice President Mike Pence’s communications director and involved in the White House’s response to Covid-19, she appeared quite close with the director of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases. Fauci provided regular medical advice to the Millers, counseling the family after Katie tested positive for the virus in 2020 while she was pregnant, when her husband had Covid-19, and when her newborn child had a medical episode, NOTUS reports. “I am calling katie frequently to check on her couple time per day. She is very anxious about getting very ill since she is 10 weeks pregnant. Tonight she had an anxiety reaction. I calmed her over the phone,” Fauci wrote in his diary on May 9, 2020. Fauci wrote in another entry how he called the doctors treating Miller’s child directly to discuss the baby’s medical care. Senator Rand Paul released over 1,000 pages of Fauci’s diary Saturday, and quite a few of those entries showed the extent of Fauci’s interactions with Miller before they were later redacted. NOTUS compared pages before and after the redactions, and found that many of the suddenly redacted passages concerned the Millers’ relationship with Fauci, with the original documents mentioning Katie 56 times, while the redacted version mentioned her just 37 times. Katie told NOTUS not to publish details of her child’s medical history, claiming that Paul published them without her permission. She also said that despite her regular contact with Fauci during the pandemic, she thought at the time that he was “incredibly self-centered and sought to promote himself above the good of the people.”“He was not my doctor. He was not my friend. He was a work colleague who called me for work purposes, and in the course of a phone call, you would discuss other things,” Miller said to NOTUS. Fauci describes Katie Miller in his diary as someone who he saw as an ally to help deal with Pence and Trump while the Coronavirus Task Force was active. “katie Miller is great (tough, smart,but great),” Fauci wrote on March 25, 2020. He also spoke to her multiple times while she was traveling to her parents’ home in Texas later in October that year, after her husband tested positive. “Am on phone frequently with katie and Stephen,” Fauci wrote on December 31, 2020.But since then, Katie has blasted Fauci frequently online, accusing him of caring “more about virtue signaling than science” and causing “decades of harm” to children with his leadership of the government’s response to Covid-19. She now speaks often about not vaccinating her youngest child on her podcast.It’s highly hypocritical how she and her husband are now trashing a dedicated public servant and medical professional who went out of his way to help them during the Covid-19 pandemic, when they dealt with the same fears of the virus as every other American. Now the Millers are happy to pile on and blame Fauci for the failures of the Trump administration’s Covid-19 response.  

Amendment 3 would mean most homeowners pay less in property taxes – but that may not end up significantly lowering their costs.

U.S. Strikes IRGC Targets Inside Iran, Killing 3 People on Qeshm Island, Antiwar Rally in NYC Organized by Iranian Diaspora, Demonstrators in Libya Storm Energy Complex in Anti-Gov’t Protests, U.N.: Israeli Settler Violence in the Occupied West Bank Hits All-Time High, Israel Continues to Move Its So-Called Yellow Line of Control in Gaza, Drop Site News: Trump’s Former Campaign Manager Working to Influence How AI Chatbots Talk About Gaza, Russia Launches Missile and Drone Attack on Ukraine, Killing 8 People, U.N. Warns of Growing Hunger Crisis in Eastern Congo Amid Ebola Outbreak, Pakistani Authorities Accused of Killing 30 People in Pakistan-Administered Kashmir, Federal Reserve Votes to Maintain the Current Interest Rate at Around 3.6%, GOP Senator Cornyn and Tillis Threaten to Withhold Support for Blanche to Be Attorney General, U.S. Senate Unanimously Passes Bill Opposing Pardon for Ghislaine Maxwell, Trump Asks SCOTUS to Overturn $83.3 Million Jury Award Against Him for Defaming E. Jean Carroll, GOP Congressmember Miller Faces Allegations of Domestic Abuse from Ex-Wife, Fauci Invokes Fifth Amendment More Than 100 Times During Senate Hearing

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the July 30 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.Donald Trump is confronting the limits on his power in fresh ways, and it’s rattling him badly. His inner circle is leaking word that he’s frustrated at his inability to force Iran’s hand, and he’s seeing some of his most corrupt designs crash and burn on many fronts at once. Yet there’s something sobering about it all. Placing limits on Trump has required immense effort. Paradoxically, the more he’s thwarted, the more dangerous he’s becoming. And in constraining Trump, our institutions are still on a knife’s edge, with the endgame still too murky to predict.We’re trying to make sense of all these strange dynamics with Talking Points Memo editor at large David Kurtz, whose excellent newsletter delves into this stuff regularly. David, always good to have you on.David Kurtz: Hi, Greg, good to be with you.Sargent: So let’s start with a very visible and jarring failing: Trump’s effort to jail former FBI director James Comey, based on his social media posting of seashells arranged to spell “86 47.” We just learned that Secret Service agents who questioned Comey about this were ordered to quickly send a summary of the interrogation to Trump himself, which shows how intently and corruptly he’s controlling DOJ. David, can you explain what happened here and why it’s important?Kurtz: Sure. It’s really a remarkable series of filings in the Comey case last night, where they’re making a claim that this is the second vindictive prosecution of him—meaning that Trump has directed DOJ to go after him because he’s one of Trump’s political foes. And so this is the politicization, the weaponization of DOJ that we’ve all been covering for so long. And what makes this especially remarkable is how difficult it is to make a vindictive prosecution claim. But here you have so much evidence, right? It goes all the way to Trump aboard Air Force One, tracking the investigation in real time, getting reports from Secret Service as he’s returning to the U.S. from Europe. You just don’t get that kind of evidence in these sorts of cases.Sargent: So Comey’s lawyers are trying to say, we have smoking gun evidence that this prosecution is a vindictive one and therefore should be thrown out. And the smoking gun evidence is that Donald Trump is micromanaging the prosecution of Comey in real time, demanding to know exactly what happened in these interrogations as they happen. Kurtz: I mean, we could do like a whole semester seminar on the many reasons that this is so messed up. And it really comes down to: prosecutors have an obligation under the law to conduct prosecutions in the public interest and in the interest of justice. And that goes beyond even sort of complying with whatever the policy directives of a particular president are. They can set broad policy parameters, but they’re not supposed to be directing individual prosecutions. And they’re certainly not supposed to be conjuring up prosecutions as bogus as this one out of thin air—or for any reason, frankly, in order to target political foes for any reason that goes to their personal interest, to their political interest, and isn’t in the interest of justice.And I know that may sound, in the year of our Lord 2026, maybe a little pie in the sky. But up until this point, in the 250-year history of the country, it has not operated that way, with a few rare exceptions like Watergate, which are hugely scandalous, but frankly which don’t come near to how bad this is.Sargent: Yeah, and it looks to me as if this revelation is yet another sign that this prosecution is likely to really fall apart. And on that front—on the front of Trump becoming more and more aware of the limits on his power—The Atlantic had this interesting report on his deliberations over Iran. A senior official says Trump is frustrated by his failure to get Iran to budge, to the point of wanting to order a heavier attack on Iran. But he and his advisors decided against it because it could further deplete our weapons stockpiles. And David, get this: Trump told advisors that he fears that an escalation could cause a global economic meltdown and, quote, “turn me into a Hoover,” as Trump put it. That’s a real admission. He doesn’t have the power to force Iran’s hand, and he’s acknowledging that Iran has leverage over the global economy. And it’s, of course, because of what he did, right?Kurtz: Yeah, it’s because of what he did. And there’s no clear way out of this box canyon for him. And it is a quagmire. And Iran continues to have cards that it can play to keep him at bay. And I think what he’s describing there is, in part, acknowledging that, right? That there is a limit as to what he can do, and Iran has him in a box.So, I think what’s interesting, Greg, is it’s hard to look at all of these data points and see a single common thread. I think there’s some things—in this case, it’s like a geopolitical limitation he’s running into. In other instances, it’s like the limits of the powers or the abilities of his people. In other cases, he does run up against limits in the law. But you’re right, there are an increasing number of examples where we see him bumping up against the limits of his powers. And it’s, after a year and a half of feeling like we were watching a rogue or renegade president sort of trammel all limits, it’s good to see that there may be some limits to that that will hold, at least for a time.Sargent: And making this even more buffoonish on the Iran front, these revelations about Trump holding back because he knows he can’t really force Iran’s hand come even as he just said to Fox News the following: “We are going to beat the effing shit out of them, and we will be hitting them hard. They’re going to get a beating.” David, Donald Trump has managed to degrade his own threats so badly through repetition that Iran no longer seems to fear his mightiness. What do you make of that?Kurtz: Well, Greg, this all comes after—didn’t we declare victory in this war like a month or two ago? I mean, we’re just at a point where I think one of the dynamics of the whole Iran fiasco has been that it’s revealed the perils of trying to narrate this kind of conflict through a president when the president is like a Donald Trump. Because every week, every day, for the six months this has been going on, there’s a new line from the White House, a new declaration that peace is at hand, or a new declaration that we’re about to bomb them back to the Stone Age. And it really feels like it is as mercurial and unpredictable as Trump’s personality itself.And so, taking a long view on it, I think it’s been an ongoing conflict this whole time. There’s been ebbs and flows to it, but I don’t think it really matches in any way what we’ve heard from the White House in terms of an accurate description, a reliable narration of what has happened. And so, I hope we’re at a point now where they see some of those limits and take those into account. But I’m afraid that we’re in just an ebb that could very well—as you suggested a moment ago—that in some ways he gets more dangerous the more he gets boxed in. And you could see a lashing out, even if it has global economic consequences, even if it’s not going to be effective in advancing U.S. interests, which this hasn’t been, even if he really can’t knock Iran back on its heels in the Strait of Hormuz. Like, there’s a million ways here in which this could still go wrong. And the way this has been so erratic and unpredictable and in fits and starts the whole six months we’ve been engaged in this, I think it’s just representative of him and the underlying strategy that epitomizes him. It’s an extension of this personality, is what I’m trying to say.Sargent: Yeah, it absolutely is. I think to me the most representative thing is that it was only a few weeks ago, or maybe a month ago, that Trump threatened to obliterate Iranian civilization entirely, meaning he threatened to eliminate Iran’s 91 million people from the face of this earth. And that didn’t force Iran’s hand. And so now he’s saying, I’m going to blow up a bridge. Right? And so it’s like, do you remember what you yourself said just a month ago, and how comically ridiculous it sounds for you to make this new threat now in relation to that one?But still, I agree with you a hundred percent, because when he talks about bombing, all of Iran’s power plants, as he’s been saying lately, that would be a threat of a massive war crime and serious atrocities. And it’s not hard to see him going down that road if he can’t force Iran’s hand, just in order to appear like he’s doing something. And of course, Iran will just absorb the pain that is inflicted on its own people, and it won’t do anything.Kurtz: Yeah, I think there’s one way of looking at this that I think is actually a helpful prism, which is that it is one long, ongoing negotiation. And if you see it as a negotiation in which war is one of the negotiating techniques—in which escalation, de-escalation of the violence is part of the negotiation—it all makes a little more sense. But the problem with Trump is that he sees negotiation as a zero-sum game. He’s got a very limited understanding of it. You know, for the “art of the deal” guy, it’s kind of remarkable how little he understands.And part of it too, as you suggest, is that it’s not just Iranian interests versus U.S. interests. It’s like this triangulation of Iranian interests, U.S. interests, regional interests, Trump’s own personal political interests. And there’s no way for him to sort of do a 3D chess move on any of that. I mean, this is beyond his capability. It’s beyond how he even thinks, right? Negotiation for him is a zero-sum game. And I think the longer Iran holds out, the harder it is for him to figure out how to make sense of it, given the prism he looks at this through.Sargent: Absolutely. So here’s another one. Trump’s acting director of national intelligence, Bill Pulte, who’s about to get replaced, spent his final time in his job tweeting boastfully about how he’s fired huge numbers of intelligence officials and so forth. But as it turns out, no one can figure out who exactly he fired and whether that’s close to accurate. We should note that Pulte is the person who previously used his federal housing agency perch to fabricate pretext to prosecute Trump critics like Adam Schiff and so forth. Those have all failed pretty badly as of now as well. And now here we are with Pulte boasting about taking on the deep state in ways that might not even be real. Talk about revealing the limits on Trump’s power. Can you explain this one?Kurtz: Yeah, this has a few different layers to it. We know that Pulte was put in place as acting DNI while they worked on getting Jay Clayton confirmed. He was confirmed this week, so Pulte will soon be done. And Trump, I think, both publicly and reported privately, was saying that he wanted Pulte to knock heads while he was at DNI, right? Trump has generally been very skeptical of U.S. intel. He’s been particularly skeptical of DNI. And I think he sees it as a seat of the deep state. And so he wants to purge that.Now, there’s been a fair amount of reporting that Pulte was doing that, but this most recent reporting suggests that part of it may be performative. Which speaks to what the incentives are that Trump puts in place for people to do the things that he wants them to do—or at least to pretend to do the things he wants them to do. It has a very “emperor with no clothes on” sort of vibe to it. Sargent: And I think I saw in Politico that Pulte might be in line for a Cabinet slot. So he’s going to get rewarded for feeding grist to the MAGA circus, even if it’s not real grist.Kurtz: Yeah, that’s right. And it’s not out of character, in the sense that none of the mortgage fraud cases were real mortgage fraud either, right? Which is what he was drumming up around Adam Schiff and Letitia James and others. So it is consistent with his MO to this point.Sargent: OK, and here’s yet another one. He’s seeing his schemes collapse on other fronts as well. Huge numbers of ICE arrests of protesters are not ending with convictions. That’s an area where Trump is abusing his power most flagrantly, perhaps. You’ve written on this. Can you talk about this one?Kurtz: Yeah. So there have been a number of examples, in LA, in Chicago, in Minnesota, where it seemed clear that the White House was directing sort of a maximal response to protesters who were protesting ICE in their cities—either at raids themselves or at ICE facilities within those metro areas. And the charges that DOJ brought were in some cases way over the top, in other cases utterly unsupported by the evidence. And in a few cases were brought on the basis of either misstatements or outright falsehoods by agents who were bringing the charges. So there’s like a whole array of things happening there. But those have slowly melted away. Sometimes charges were reduced from felonies to misdemeanors, other times they were dropped outright. In some cases, both.Sargent: So let’s tie all this together. Trump is running the most imperial, most corrupt presidency in modern memory, and it’s not even close. No president has abused his powers the way Trump has. And yet in key ways he really is being constrained, and he’s really angry about it. But that, again, paradoxically, means the areas where he wields less fettered powers are ones we really need to worry about. What’s your overall reading here? Are we holding him back or not?Kurtz: I think it is a very tenuous moment, where in some areas I think we’ve seen some modest success. I think how things go in the November elections will really dictate how much more he’s able to run amok over the last two years of this term. At the same time, Greg, I am really cognizant that we only know what we know, and that this administration has done myriad things to reduce transparency and accountability and ready access into what they’re doing and how they’re doing it.I’m thinking about things like the high-seas strikes on drug smuggling boats. I’m thinking—you talk about areas with unfettered power—I’m thinking special operations activities around the globe. I’m thinking other military actions or activities we might not know about. And I’m not suggesting some dark, hidden conspiracy, I just mean we don’t know. And so while we are trying to gauge how well things are going, I suspect that we may be spending the next several decades unearthing things that happened during this period that we just didn’t know about.And at the same time, Greg—and I think this is kind of what you were getting at—you know, in the example, for instance, of these vindictive prosecutions, in a lot of ways the damage has already been done. You know, let’s say Comey succeeds again in making this one go away. He’s had two come up now, and there’s other people who have been subjected to this. Abrego Garcia’s case has succeeded on a vindictive prosecution claim in Tennessee. But the turmoil, the emotional cost, the financial cost to people of this—and I think this is really key, Greg—the sense that it creates of fear in the populace, of fear in other officials, and fear in people who would oppose Trump. That’s real damage, right? And it’s real damage that’s done to the institutions of government that are being abused. It’s going to take us decades to recover from.So in a lot of ways, what we’re seeing are him bumping up against limits, but around his feet—if we’re going to visualize this—it is the litter of institutions that he’s kicked over, and of people that he’s trammeled, and of sort of basic civil liberties that we’ve long valued as sort of fundamental to who we are. And all of that, I think, he has laid waste to, to one degree or another, in a way that will take some time to recover from.Sargent: I just want to try to salvage one optimistic note from all this, while acknowledging everything you just said is right there. I can’t help but feel like there’s a pattern of resilience that we’re seeing. The backlash to ICE that we saw in places like Minnesota and Chicago—huge numbers of people banded together in really creative and unexpected ways to defend immigrants against heavily armed paramilitary goons at great risk to themselves. Lower court judges are doing tremendous fact-finding work—I know you agree with this one—and they’re really putting a real record out there for us, a factual record of what this administration is doing on front after front after front. People are not being dissuaded by these buffoonish efforts to prosecute ICE protesters. People are going out there at great risk to themselves, putting their necks out there to try and defend the country.And I think nobody’s going to be dissuaded by Trump’s efforts to persuade everybody that voting can’t work. Nobody’s going to be persuaded by that. I think we’re going to see tremendous turnout in the midterms. We’ve seen this in two dozen special elections, huge outpourings of political energy. I really hate to sound Pollyannaish, but it seems like there’s a pattern of resistance and resilience that’s worth talking about.Kurtz: No, I agree, Greg. And I think you’ve probably seen the same thing I have, which is that sort of in the depths of things a year ago, I think people started to feel a sense of hopelessness and a sense of that he was kind of running the table. And what I’ve noticed is that each setback, each reversal, each time he’s been at least halted, if not outright stopped, it has energized folks. I think it’s given people a sense that there are avenues here towards protest, towards resistance, towards pushing back, and just sort of living our civic lives in a full way, that makes a difference. And people feed on that. And so I think it can build on itself as well.Sargent: I agree a hundred percent with that. David, really well said. Folks, stay in the game. We can win this. We really can, I promise you. David Kurtz, really, really great to talk to you. Folks, if you want more of David Kurtz, make sure to check out his daily newsletter over at talkingpointsmemo.com. David, great to have you on.Kurtz: Great. Thank you, Greg.

Our TV-addled president took the world to the brink of calamity because a bunch of talking heads told him to do it. Their GOP allies, meanwhile, put Anthony Fauci through congressional torture.

No one has ever seen anything like it, as Donald Trump himself might say. Buried in a new CNN poll is something striking: Trump isn’t just cratering by conventional approval measurements; he’s also absolutely collapsing by many metrics involving personal traits, from his mental state to his disconnectedness from ordinary people to his fondness for building monuments to himself.Welcome to the era of Late-Stage Trumpism. The “personalist” aspects of Trumpian rule—the shaping of much of the government and even the physical capital of Washington, D.C., around one man’s relentless self-dealing and self-aggrandizement—have all started imploding, in a collapsing supernova of venality and megalomania.The CNN poll finds that only 34 percent of Americans approve of Trump’s job performance, matching the low point he hit after inciting a violent insurrection on January 6, 2021. Here are some striking findings on his personal traits and obsessions:73 percent say Trump is not in touch with the problems that ordinary Americans face daily; only 27 percent say he is.66 percent say Trump does not put the good of the country over his personal gain; only 34 percent say he does.62 percent say Trump is not an effective world leader; only 38 percent say he is.57 percent say Trump does not have the stamina and sharpness to serve effectively as president; only 43 percent say he does.64 percent say Trump has gone too far in pursuing his personal business as president; only 31 percent say this has been about right.61 percent say Trump has gone too far in undertaking projects to remodel the White House and other Washington landmarks; only 32 percent say he hasn’t.That’s remarkable. Note that the poll uses very benign language to describe Trump’s unilateral razing of the White House East Wing to build a ballroom for himself; his plans for a triumphal arch in the capital; the festooning of his name (and even enormous totalitarian images of his face glowering down on us) at various locations in D.C.; and much more. Even so, a huge majority disapproves.What’s more, note that huge majorities don’t just disapprove of Trump’s use of the presidency to enrich himself; they also see that Trump is putting his own interests before those of the country, an even more damning construction on his conduct. Large majorities see him as out of touch, failing on the world stage, and lacking in the basic mental fitness required to serve.“We have seen massive collapses of support for presidents—like Richard Nixon in the midst of Watergate and Lyndon Johnson as the Vietnam War overshadowed his domestic agenda,” Corey Brettschneider, an expert and podcaster on presidential power, told me. “What’s different here is the widespread recognition of Trump’s unprecedented corruption, narcissism, and putting of personal greed over the public interest.”So what does this say about Late-Stage Trumpism? Consider a related development: On many fronts, Trumpian rule is descending into displays of malice that are unbearably cheap, petty, and venal.To wit: Trump’s acting Director of National Intelligence Bill Pulte is now boasting about firings of ODNI insiders that may not have actually happened. Feeding the MAGA base even with made-up “deep state” purgings may be good enough these days. Pulte gained renown for using his federal housing agency post to fabricate pretexts for prosecuting Trump critics. Most of those efforts have gone belly-up, yet Trump is now seriously considering him for a Cabinet post. To get such a big promotion, all you need these days are personal loyalty and a willingness to supply MAGA with bread and circuses.Meanwhile, Trump is now reportedly overriding determinations by his own agencies to deny disaster aid to blue states. Trump grew so angry about the failure of his renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool that prosecutors are now throwing the book at a former Olympian for supposedly tampering with the project. Yet a key witness dramatically undercut the case by testifying that damage preexisted his contact with it. And the whole country watched—or cringed—as Trump tried to transform our 250th anniversary into a celebration of himself while almost nobody came. None of this is to minimize the damage that Trump is doing on many critical fronts. But even there, a Late-Stage-Trumpism vibe is taking hold: Note how Trump’s ever-escalating threats to obliterate Iran entirely don’t seem to be breaking Iran’s resolve. We’re simultaneously getting inundated with nonstop trivialities and pratfalls, all of them direct outgrowths of Trump’s personal obsessions and pathologies, even as he’s cratering by just about every personal polling metric you can think of.All this has bearing on the national debate that’s underway over what a post-Trump MAGA movement and GOP will look like. In a recent conversation with me, political theorist Alan Elrod cautioned against overinterpreting Trump’s decline, noting that the waning of Trumpism as a “personalist project” doesn’t necessarily mean the broader “reactionary project” he represents is sunsetting with him. It’s a crucial distinction to keep in mind. And no one should see any of this as a sign that the midterms or the 2028 presidential race will be easy. Nonetheless, if Trumpism as a personalist project is sunsetting, it’s an important, noteworthy development in itself. For one thing, as Damon Linker aptly points out, the GOP will struggle to evolve out from under Trump’s personal shadow, especially when the 2028 succession battle gets underway:Then there are the inevitable humiliations Trump is sure to bestow on anyone daring to run to succeed him. The sitting president will be acting as a 24/7 insult comic at rallies and on social media, blasting the party’s nominee for kicks, shits, and giggles.“As long as Trump is living and/or sentient,” Linker concludes, the GOP “will be stuck in the Trump era.” What’s more, Republicans may also struggle to disentangle Trump’s personalist failings from the failures of the broader reactionary project. Note that due to war, tariffs, the shredding of international alliances and commitments, and the violence of Trump’s mass deportation agenda, Trump has squandered a trifecta of traditional GOP advantages on the economy, immigration, and national security (the CNN poll reveals this very clearly, as well). Protectionism, draconian immigration restrictions, and the “America First” rejection of multilateral alliances and institutions are among the key pillars of right-wing authoritarian nationalism. It’s at least possible Trump will leave them all badly discredited.Finally, it’s just heartening to see the American people so overwhelmingly reject the trappings and degradations of personalist rule as a development in and of itself. That was not at all preordained. With a little luck, we’ll look back on this as a crucial tell, as an enduring sign of our democratic resilience.

Alani Bankhead, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Montana, should end her campaign and clear the path for independent Seth Bodnar to consolidate the votes of the state’s non-Republicans. Bodnar is polling better than Bankhead in head-to-head matchups against Republican candidate Kurt Alme and probably has a better chance of winning. And a Bodnar win could be critical, potentially denying the Republicans the fiftieth seat they need to control the Senate. This shouldn’t just be a strategy for one Senate race in Montana. Democratic leaders, strategists, and ultimately voters need to start regularly backing independent candidates in very red places, at least for the next few election cycles. This may not work. But we should test every possible approach to keep politicians nominated by today’s radical, antidemocratic Republican Party out of power, and running independents has real potential to do just that. The reality is that Democratic candidates simply can’t win races in many states and districts right now. (And the same is true for Republicans in very blue areas.) It’s hard for Democrats to accept this reality because they remember the exceptions to this rule. Alabama’s Doug Jones, Montana’s Jon Tester, Kansas’s Laura Kelly, Louisiana’s John Bel Elwards, West Virginia’s Joe Manchin, and Kentucky’s Andy Beshear are among the Democrats who have won in very red areas over the last decade. But those are outliers, usually with some specific explanation. (Manchin and Tester were incumbents who had first been elected in less polarizing eras. So had Beshear’s father, Steve. Jones’s Republican opponent was accused of sexually assaulting underage girls.) The overwhelming majority of Democratic candidates in those states and other red places lose. These candidates aren’t losing simply because they are too liberal. (Tester lost his 2024 reelection bid, and Manchin almost certainly would have been defeated if he had run as a Democrat for another term two years ago.) Democrats who take conservative stands, such as opposing abortion rights, run all the time and still lose in red states. What’s plaguing them is the label Democrat. Today, much more so than in the past, many voters and therefore entire districts and states almost never will back a candidate from the opposite party, no matter their policy stands. The party brands eclipse any individual. Swing voters exist. But their ranks are small. So both parties can win statewide races in Michigan or Wisconsin, but Republicans almost always win in Kentucky, as do Democrats in Massachusetts. But shunning the party label seems to help shake up this state of affairs. In 2022, Never-Trump former Republican Evan McMullin ran for a U.S. Senate seat in Utah as an independent, even though he was as critical of MAGA Republicans as most Democrats. He lost by 10 percentage points. Two years later, an anti-MAGA candidate who ran as a Democrat lost by 30 in a Utah Senate race. Nebraska’s Dan Osborn, a mechanic and union leader, ran for the Senate in 2024 and lost by seven. In that same election, Kamala Harris ran 20 points behind Donald Trump, and in Nebraska’s other U.S. Senate race, a Democratic candidate lost by 25 to a Republican. In both McMullin’s and Osborn’s races, the Democratic Party didn’t really run anyone, allowing the independent candidates to get all Democratic votes without having to use the party’s label. Osborn is running again this year and effectively tied in polls against Republican incumbent Pete Ricketts. In Montana, polling also suggests the value of an independent candidacy. The Democratic-leaning firm GQR released a survey this week showing the Republican Alme at 41 percent, the independent Bodnar at 27, and the Democrat Bankhead at 21. (There is a Libertarian candidate getting a small percentage of the vote too.) If the independent Bodnar is not included in the poll, Republican Alme leads 44–40 over Democrat Bankhead. But if the Democrat Bankhead is not included, the independent Bodnar has a 44–40 lead over Republican Alme. We are talking about a fairly small advantage—independent Bodnar leading by four, while Democrat Bankhead is down by four. This poll alone does not give assurance that the independent Bodnar would certainly win, that the Democratic Bankhead would certainly lose, or that Bodnar would do better than Bankhead against the Republican. But the long record of Democrats losing Montana and other red states and the better showings by independents in other states in that region make me think that Bodnar would be the superior candidate. And one thing is for certain: Having them both run guarantees a Republican victory. I would normally be reluctant to ask a candidate to stand down. Bankhead ran in a competitive primary and won. She has earned the right to be on the ballot and force Bodnar and Alme to beat her. We aren’t in normal times, though. A Senate without a GOP majority could be a critical bulwark against Trump, most notably in stopping the appointment of more ultra-right-wing judges. If one of the conservative judges on the U.S. Supreme Court dies or suddenly can’t serve because of health reasons, I want a Trump nominee to get confirmed only if he can win the votes of some non-Republican senators. So Senate seats really, really matter right now. Bodnar has committed to not joining the Senate Democratic Caucus if elected. But he will not join the GOP, either. More importantly, he would not be an automatic vote in favor of Trump’s agenda, as outgoing senator Steve Daines is and Alme likely would be, as well. There are four real shortcomings to this independent strategy. First, it may never work in actually defeating a Republican candidate in a red state. McMullin and Osborn were the more liberal candidates in their races and tacitly backed by the Democratic Party. And that likely limited their ability to appeal to stalwart Republican voters, the majority of the electorate in red states. Bodnar, who is backed by Tester and other prominent Democrats in Montana, will also likely be seen as essentially a Democratic candidate by many Montana voters, complicating his path to victory. Second, if Osborn and/or Bodnar make it to Washington, they won’t be full-fledged Democrats. If 49 Republicans, 49 Democrats, and Osborn and Bodnar are elected to the Senate this fall, the Republicans would likely remain in charge of the chamber and determine the agenda, because JD Vance would be the fiftieth GOP vote. And Osborn and Bodnar would probably try to cast high-profile votes with Republicans and against Democrats to solidify their independent bona fides. Think of Manchin or Kyrsten Simena—but maybe worse. These senators would be formally independent from the Democratic Party. Third, this strategy weakens the party in the long term. In pursuing this course in Utah, Nebraska, and now potentially Montana, Democrats are essentially announcing that their party brand is toxic and can’t win in certain states. That’s certainly true right now. But that admission reinforces that weakness. This is not how a confident party would act. It also denies the party opportunities to get stronger in red states. Perhaps Nebraska’s Osborn would win fewer votes by running as a Democrat, but he might convince more union workers or mechanics to join the party if he were running under its banner. Same for Bodnar. “His candidacy is entirely focused on one short-term win—and if what he’s doing becomes the norm, there might be no rescuing the party from the wreckage,” former Tester aide Nick Perkins wrote in a recent TNR essay. Fourth, I suspect that this independent strategy will unfairly prop up white male candidates and diminish women and people of color. McMullin, Osborn, and Bodnar are white men. Bodnar is attempting to push aside a female candidate in Bankhead. McMullin, Osborn, and Bodnar’s supporters likely assume they can win over Republican voters in part because of their race and gender. I worry that liberal-leaning women and people of color in the South or West who seek broader support for their independent candidacies won’t get it and that women and people of color who win Democratic nominations will increasingly get shunted aside for white male independents. That, I admit, is a lot of shortcomings. This strategy is kind of sexist and racist, weakens the Democratic brand, and will at best send Joe Manchin types to Washington. But I still want to see this independent experiment tried widely. And that’s partly because of where I live. Here in Kentucky, Democratic candidates just have no chance. Beshear aside, Republicans win virtually all statewide races by 15 percentage points or more. But on policy, this is not an ultraconservative state. Voters rejected recent ballot initiatives designed to outlaw abortions and create an expansive school voucher program. Voters in the state’s rural areas truly hate the Democratic Party, though. I suspect we can have semi-competitive elections and occasional victories by non-Republicans only if alternative candidates are running as independents instead of Democrats. In Montana, Bankhead, the Democratic candidate, insists she won’t drop out by the August 10 deadline.  And the state’s Republican secretary of state says that the Democratic Party would have to choose another candidate if she left the race. But ideally, the party would replace Bankhead with someone who isn’t really running and essentially concedes the Democratic vote to Bodnar. Even if all that happened, the Republican Senate candidate not winning in Montana, which Trump carried by 20 points in 2024, is a long shot. It’s a shot worth taking, creatively and yes, independently. A Senate with Seth Bodnar in it will be 1 percent less pro-Trump—and we need every percent we can take to fight our authoritarian president. For now, a winning Democratic Party will be one that tries to win in a few less places.