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This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown is largely targeting people from the countries most vulnerable to displacement from climate-driven disasters, a Guardian analysis shows. As the Trump administration pushes policies to boost planet-heating fossil fuels, millions of people are being forced to flee their homelands due to […]

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The following is a lightly edited transcript of the June 12 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.CNN reports that Donald Trump is “furious” because his bombings of Iran this week were not portrayed by the media as strong and powerful. He’s apparently “frustrated,” according to CNN sources, who are clearly leaking out of concern for his mental state. On another front entirely, Trump is smashing new records in the polling. He’s reaching new thresholds on inflation. Thanks to Trump, Democrats may now be leading Republicans by a key polling metric for the first time in many decades.We think these stories should all be connected to each other. The rage and frustration over Iran is basically rage and frustration over his political situation, because the former is causing the latter. He’s in a political bind we don’t think we’ve ever seen before.So we’re parsing through all this new data and new Trump lunacy with Democratic strategist Christina Reynolds, who has worked on a lot of midterms and can explain how all this is playing on the ground. Christina, thanks for coming on.Christina Reynolds: Thanks for having me.Sargent: So let’s start here. CNN polling analyst Harry Enten made a point I haven’t heard before. He said Trump is the only president ever to hit a net approval on inflation of negative 50 points. And he’s done this in many polls. Listen to Enten.Harry Enten (voiceover): Inflation net approval: minus 50 points or worse. Fifty points underwater or worse. Total polls per president. Trump in 2026—already at least eight polls in which his net approval rating on inflation or the cost of living is negative 50 points or worse. Every other president in every other year, the answer is zero.Sargent: So just to reiterate, in eight polls, Trump has hit a net approval on inflation of negative 50 points. No other president has ever done that. Christina, I don’t think I’ve seen polling quite this bad on the economy for a president ever! As long as I’ve been following politics! Maybe something under George W. Bush? I don’t know. What do you think?Reynolds: I don’t think it was this bad. I worked at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in ’06, and we took back the House. Bush was certainly not a popular president at that time. But these are numbers that I would send back to the pollster and say, Can you double-check? I don’t know that I’ve seen numbers this bad.Republicans have an even bigger problem than those numbers. They have a president who absolutely wants credit for fixing everything. He believes his own spin, certainly, but also he believes he’s taken action and should get credit for that action. That happens with a lot of politicians, but this president is especially guilty of that. He is not going to fade away into the background, which Bush did largely in 2006. He is not going to let the Republicans go out and shift the conversation.Not that they would be able to shift the conversation. When inflation is growing higher than your wages, voters understand that. They know it. They live it. You can’t convince them things are better when they’re literally not. But Trump is not just going to go out and talk about things and remind voters of that—he’s going to go out and talk about his ballroom. He’s going to go out and talk about the reflecting pool, as he did in Wisconsin when he went to one of the most vulnerable Republicans. So this is a huge problem for Republicans. It’s not just the polling number, it’s what Trump’s going to do because of the polling number.Sargent: You raise a really interesting point there, which is that Donald Trump isn’t being at all accommodating of the situation that Republicans find themselves in. They’ve urged him to try to talk about the economy in a way that makes it look as if he understands what people are going through and makes it look as if he’s doing stuff. But he won’t do that, because it makes him look like a failure.Since everything has to always be about his lionization, his glorious greatness, he just says, I don’t care about inflation, or, Affordability’s a hoax. There’s no sensitivity or awareness of the situation the rest of his party is in, in any sense.Reynolds: Absolutely not. That is counter to George Bush. It’s counter to what Nancy Pelosi did when she was House Speaker and understood that some people were going to speak out against her. As long as she had the votes, she was OK. There’s some level of what gets the party, what gets the values that you support where you need to go. And Trump is about what gets Trump where he needs to go. It’s a huge problem for Republicans.You heard it in the “I don’t care about the midterms” comment. You hear it in everything that he does. If I was a Republican, I would want him to take a back seat on things outside of maybe fundraising. He’s doing the exact opposite. If you’re a Republican and you’re forced to stand up there and praise him for gold-plating the White House, that’s a pretty tough campaign ask.Sargent: That’s really interesting. By the way, Harry Enten also notes that, according to his calculations, Democrats are more trusted on inflation than Republicans for the first time since the 1970s. Enten also notes that Trump is the only president to ever hit 80 percent disapproval on gas prices. Eighty percent disapproval on gas prices! Trump is just crushing records all over the place. I swear I have not seen numbers like this, ever.Reynolds: No, me neither. It’s pretty impressive when you think about it. It also is a sign that you can’t pull the wool over voters’ eyes on things like this. Everyone goes to the gas station. Everyone has to deal with the prices going up because of gas prices. You can’t fool them. Trump talking the way he does and acknowledging that it’s OK, but it’ll get better, doesn’t help them now. He’s really leaving Republicans in a rough spot.Sargent: It’s really extraordinary. So all this is key context for what’s coming next. CNN’s Dana Bash reports that sources are saying Trump is, quote-unquote, “furious.” Why? Because after Trump struck Iran this week, the media didn’t view his action as powerful enough. Dana Bash also reports that Trump is “frustrated” that Iran didn’t seem to be taking the strike seriously. Amazing.So now Trump is saying that he won’t strike Iran again because they’re now close to a deal. He says—maybe by the time people listen to this, there will be a deal. Maybe not. I don’t think so, because he’s now talking about this weekend. But put that aside. I want to focus on the connection between Trump’s rage and his terrible polls. The reason Trump is angry isn’t just because Iran won’t do his bidding. It’s that by not doing Trump’s bidding and keeping the Strait of Hormuz closed, Iran has him cornered. It’s driving up prices, destroying his numbers, and destroying GOP midterm hopes. The anger and the polling are connected in that sense, right, Christina?Reynolds: Absolutely they are. His frustration is coming out in what voters are understanding. It’s one of the reasons he can’t stop talking about things that are incredibly unpopular. He is just clinically unable to move on because of that rage and that frustration, because it didn’t go the way he assumed it would go. So we are stuck in a war that people didn’t ask for, that we proactively started. But we are domestically stuck with higher gas prices and everything that stems from that.That’s all because he didn’t get what he wanted, and no one is giving him credit for what he thinks he should get credit for. I am a little baffled as to what he thinks he should get credit for at this point, but no one is giving him any credit. They are giving him, rightly, the blame. He can’t handle that.Sargent: I think that’s exactly right. He’s in a rage because the media is portraying him as being fundamentally ineffective and unable to resolve the very situation that’s creating the high prices.By the way, even if he gets a deal—I don’t know, by the time people listen to this, or on the weekend, whenever—even if he gets one, those prices, especially on things like energy and gas, are going to stay up for a long time. As someone who’s worked on midterm elections, how do you anticipate the impact of this playing out on the ground in all these races over the next few months? What’s it going to look like politically?Reynolds: It’s going to look like a few things. We’re going to see more retirements. We’re seeing that at every level of the ballot, where Republicans are choosing just not to run again in this environment. We’re going to continue to see voters open for a change in surprising places, voters who understand—maybe it’s not forever, maybe we rent some seats for a little while—but they see it’s not working.Where we have candidates that are out there talking about issues that matter versus a candidate that is forced to talk about a ballroom or to praise a war that they’re not that into, you’re going to continue to see voters give a chance to those candidates.I think we’re running better candidates, and we have candidates who understand their districts and are willing to take a chance. One big difference in the shift that I’ve seen from 2002 and 2006 to 2018 and now—there’s some power in looking at Donald Trump getting elected for people who are not traditional politicians to say, Maybe I can give it a try. Maybe I can offer something different, or I can connect better with my community. That means we see some interesting candidates out there who offer something different. Different is good in a change electorate.It’s going to make for some challenging elections for Republicans that they’re not expecting. What also happens in those places, when we expand the field—you have candidates that aren’t used to hard races. You have candidates who got a little lazy. They have not done their constituent services, they have not gone out and had a tough campaign schedule, versus a candidate that’s new, that’s trying again, that has the fire in their belly. I can tell you which candidate I’d rather work for every time in that scenario.Sargent: I want to pick up a little bit more on that because we have a piece up at NewRepublic.com right now about American Bridge, which is a Democratic group. They’re investing $50 million in trying to expand the House map. The Senate map as well, but let’s focus on the House for now. They’re trying to expand the House map by really going into some very difficult districts traditionally for Democrats—ones that lean Republican by four or five, six, seven, eight, that kind of thing. Some of these are in North Carolina, some of them are in central Pennsylvania, some are in Iowa.But Democrats, not just American Bridge, but as a party generally—it now looks like there’s a new level of commitment to going into harder races, to contesting tougher places and really trying to shake loose whatever can be shaken loose. That’s what happens, right, in an environment like this? If you go contest these races in hard places, things happen. Funny things happen. Surprising things happen.Reynolds: You expand the field at a time like this because we look at what’s happened since Trump got elected. Since Trump got elected, Democrats have flipped 30 state legislative seats, Republicans have flipped none. Democrats have overperformed in the elections that have happened—a variety of special elections, state legislative elections. Democrats have overperformed in 85 percent of those seats. That number in 2006 was about two-thirds. We’re overperforming all over the place.You’re going to see it at the House level, you’re going to see it at the state legislative level, where we’re looking for where we can play. Where they have an incumbent that has gotten lazy or is standing with Trump too much against the interests of their people. They have an electorate that’s just a little tired of what’s happening or is particularly impacted by the economy, by gas prices. Ag communities are great examples of this.You’re going to see this more and more, where organizations, campaigns expand out, and we’re going to pick up some of those seats. The Republicans also have to try and expand their map. And they’re not ready for that. They don’t have the message for that, to actually reach and connect with voters.Sargent: Fascinating. To bear this all out, we have this new Emerson poll. It has Democrats leading in the generic House ballot matchup by 10 points, 50 percent to 40 percent. That’s 50–40. Now the polling averages have it a little tighter—50PlusOne, they have it at six points, the average is 49 to 43. But this 10-point poll makes me think that the average could start to widen as well. And if Democrats are up at seven, eight, nine points, you’re looking at a wave. Where do you think it is right now? Do you think it’s closer to six or do you think it’s closer to 10? And where do you expect the spread to end up this fall?Reynolds: I am usually a pragmatist, maybe a pessimist. But I think this is going to be a wave election. We spend a lot of time talking about very few candidates, and we miss some of the amazing candidates who are running in races down the ballot. We have a lot of phenomenal women running around the country who are working-class candidates who’ve been really in their communities. We have a number of people who are doing surprising things on the state level. We have some phenomenal candidates.Between the environment, between the precedent, and between what Trump’s going to be able to do and how little they are going to be able to control that, and how much they’re going to have to walk with him off that cliff—I feel good about where Democrats are.One of the reasons that generic ballot is at 10 points right now is we are reminding people—and one of the reasons, most importantly, that Democrats are winning on inflation—is we are reminding people that we understand that costs are important, that there is work that government can do, important work, to help make things a little bit easier for families. Trump is not doing that at all. That’s part of how he won: communicating with voters and telling them he understood. Now he has moved on to ballrooms, to wars they didn’t ask for, and [saying] these price increases don’t matter.Sargent: And you’re talking about House candidates when you talk about these working-class women around the country?Reynolds: House candidates, state legislative candidates, in some cases gubernatorial candidates. They don’t get as much attention as Senate candidates, but there’s some really great candidates out there doing great work. And that’s going to make a difference, too.Sargent: It’s very similar to 2018, where Trump’s first election just brought in this whole new class of public servant just out of nowhere. We’re seeing a new wave of it right now, and it really is heartening stuff to see.I want to flag something else from the Emerson poll. In the generic House ballot matchup, Democrats are leading the GOP among independents by 15, 45 to 30. Now, how important are independents in midterm elections? What do you make of that number? My sense is a lot of what we’re seeing now is making it possible for Democrats to have conversations with certain constituencies and types of voters that they couldn’t really reach before. They’re more attuned to listening to what Democrats have to say now.Reynolds: That’s exactly it. I think that number is huge and hugely important. More and more, people are finding themselves unaffiliated. They are deciding, Maybe I’m not connected to either party. Some of this is the divisiveness, some of this is the way we paint both sides. Count me as someone who—I don’t love where the Democratic Party brand is right now. But I’m not as worried about it because each candidate is running their own race on Democratic values, and those values are incredibly popular. That’s why we’re appealing to independents right now.Sargent: Well, it’s sure looking really good right now, Christina. Tell us, what could go wrong?Reynolds: Haha. Lots of things. We never know what’s going to happen in the world. We never know how things are going to change and what voters exactly are going to care about. Will there be massive world events? Will there be natural disasters and things like that, all of which throw a campaign off its axis a little bit? We never know that. But I feel very good about the fact that we have a class of candidates across the country and up and down the ballot who know how to talk to voters, who have an agenda that they can sell. This is not just “Trump stinks.” Those messages, those ads write themselves. He keeps giving us content. That’s out there. But we have to provide something positive for voters. And I actually think we’re doing that.I feel good about that. We keep laying the groundwork, we keep supporting those candidates. And—gosh, I’m not usually an optimistic person, Greg—but we’re doing what we need to do, and voters understand where the world is right now, and they need change.Sargent: It’s really got the same nose-to-the-grindstone feeling that 2018 had.Reynolds: It does. It very much does.Sargent: Christina Reynolds, on that note—we don’t usually end on a positive note around here, so let’s grab this opportunity while it’s there. Christina, awesome to talk to you. Thank you so much. Come back, please.Reynolds: You too. Thanks so much.

Sports are governed by rules. Those rules separate a ball from a strike, a fumble from an incomplete pass, and foul balls from a fair. Without rules, sporting events are nothing more than random people getting some exercise. And without people to enforce those rules, there is no integrity, no fairness, and no genuine competition.By those standards, college sports is currently the world’s most lucrative workout club. A state judge in Texas ordered the NCAA earlier this month to reinstate Brendan Sorsby, a quarterback at Texas Tech University who has admitted to placing bets at sportsbooks on, among other things, his own team at a previous school.The NCAA had refused to reinstate Sorsby while it conducts an investigation into the scope of his gambling policy violations. He then sought a temporary injunction that would allow him to continue playing in 2026 and “clarify” his status before he would have to apply for the NFL’s supplemental draft later this summer. The judge sided with Sorsby; the NCAA has vowed to appeal.Sorsby’s case is far from the only legal battle that the NCAA has found itself in in recent years. But the lawsuit speaks volumes about the constitutional crisis in which collegiate athletics now finds itself—and the shortcomings of the NCAA’s solutions. As long as it resists treating athletes like workers, these problems will only get worse.The most recent crisis for college sports began in April when Texas Tech announced that Sorsby, who had transferred there from the University of Cincinnati in January, had entered an inpatient treatment facility for gambling addiction. NCAA rules prohibit student-athletes from placing bets on collegiate or professional sports.Sorsby is far from the first athlete to be embroiled in a gambling scandal since 2018, when the Supreme Court struck down a federal ban on sports betting and paved the way for its widespread legalization by states. But his case may be the most egregious one on record.According to court documents filed in May, Sorsby wagered more than $90,000 on online sportsbooks over a four-year period. He used accounts registered to friends and family members to evade detection by sportsbooks and school officials. His claims of addiction are also hard to dispute: In an 18-month span while attending Indiana University, for example, he reportedly placed a minimum of 2,900 bets on various sports.“It became a habit for me to bet,” Sorsby told the NCAA in a statement, according to ESPN. “My betting became a compulsion which made it virtually impossible to resist the constant notifications I received from betting apps. I lost complete control of my addiction. I now realize the apps controlled me and I did not control them.”The news outlet reported that Sorsby placed at least 40 bets on Indiana University football while playing for the school. The bets were small amounts—ranging from a single dollar to slightly more than $100—but each represents a massive ethical breach. While major sports leagues have adopted a wide range of rules on sports betting over the past few years, none of them allow players to bet on their own sport, let alone their own team.According to court documents reviewed by The Athletic, Sorsby also claimed that he had “never placed any bets on any Indiana football game that I participated in or that I reasonably expected that I could have participated in.” At the time, he noted, he was on Indiana’s scout team “with several quarterbacks ahead of me on the team’s depth chart” and “no reasonable chance that I would play.” Sorsby reportedly claimed that he had never used nonpublic information when placing the bets—which is both unverifiable and extremely hard to believe.None of this mattered under the most recent version of the NCAA’s ban on sports betting by student-athletes. Current rules prohibits student-athletes from placing bets on any sport that the NCAA sponsors, even at the amateur or professional level. The NCAA voted last November to restore its ban on betting in professional sports after federal prosecutors charged multiple NBA players and coaches for their alleged roles in illegal gambling operations.NCAA athletes who violate the organization’s gambling policy can face permanent loss of eligibility. Under NCAA rules, Texas Tech declared Sorsby ineligible after the NCAA opened its investigation into him in April. The school claimed the right to request Sorsby’s reinstatement to restore that eligibility on his behalf. In a lawsuit filed against the NCAA in May, Sorsby claimed that he faced imminent and irreparable harm if the organization did not reach a decision on his eligibility soon. The deadline to apply for the NFL’s supplemental draft is later this month, which would be his last chance to play in the league for its 2026 season. If the NCAA does not reach a decision until after that deadline, Sorsby argued, he could face the loss of both his final year in college football and an entire year in professional football.Judge Ken Curry agreed and granted Sorsby’s request for a temporary injunction, concluding that he was likely to prevail at trial. Curry also scheduled the trial date for February 8, 2027—two weeks after the 2026 college football season ends. As a result, even if the NCAA were to ultimately prevail on the merits, Sorsby will already be out of college athletics. (The judge, for the record, did not attend Texas Tech as an undergraduate or as a law student.)Legal disputes between the NCAA and college athletes aren’t uncommon. Ole Miss quarterback Trinidad Chambliss successfully challenged the NCAA’s decision to deny him a sixth year of eligibility, for example, in Mississippi state court earlier this year. But the Sorsby ruling struck the college sports landscape like a thunderbolt because it called into question the NCAA’s basic ability to sanction players for egregious policy violations.“The NCAA strongly disagrees with the court’s ruling in Sorsby’s case and is deeply concerned about the damaging, far-reaching and broadly destabilizing ramifications of this outcome—which undermines and corrupts the integrity of sports,” the organization said in a statement after the ruling was issued.The university is not a party to Sorsby’s lawsuit, but has expressed a strong interest in having him play in the upcoming season. Sorsby was among the most highly sought players in the transfer portal this spring. Texas Tech struck a NIL deal with him in January that could bring the fifth-year quarterback roughly $5 million for one season of play.“I’ve heard the word ‘integrity’ used a great deal in the last 48 hours,” Texas Tech athletics director Kirby Hocutt said in a statement on Wednesday. “As someone who has dedicated his career to college sports, I, too, believe integrity is central to our industry’s success. I also think integrity applies on more than one front. The integrity of sport matters. So does the integrity of how we treat a 22-year-old who sought help, entered residential treatment, and is working every day toward recovery. These two things don’t have to be in conflict.”Hocutt’s voice appears to be a solitary one. There are widespread reports that other schools and conferences may try to collectively punish Texas Tech for the scandal by refusing to schedule games against them at all levels, effectively freezing its athletics program out of competitions. Texas Tech has responded by threatening to pursue litigation if the other schools try to hold the school accountable for enabling Sorsby’s tactics.College football coaches and officials were openly horrified by the prospect that a court would require a player who admitted to betting on his own team to play in the upcoming season. “As someone who grew up reading about the Black Sox Scandal, and seeing what happened to Pete Rose and just understanding how bright that line seemed to be in all of American sports, I’m stunned that there would be a question at the court level that this is acceptable,” Scott Stricklin, the athletic director for the University of Florida, told ESPN.It is hard to not draw comparisons to baseball’s own gambling scandals, which had a seismic impact on the sport itself and led to fundamental changes in how it operates. The Black Sox scandal, in which several Chicago White Sox players helped gamblers fix the 1919 World Series, led Major League Baseball to create a commissioner’s office with far-reaching powers to regulate the sport’s integrity.Baseball had other advantages that the NCAA lacks. Thanks to a controversial 1922 Supreme Court ruling, Major League Baseball enjoys a free-standing exemption to federal antitrust law. Other major sports leagues are also exempt from antitrust law to some degree by the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961, which allows teams to collectively negotiate television deals without fear of anticompetitive charges. The NCAA, on the other hand, has faced a decade of legal struggles precisely because it lacks an exemption. The greatest blow came in 2021 when the Supreme Court unanimously upheld a lower court decision that found some of the NCAA’s compensation rules violated federal antitrust law. That ruling opened the door to the NIL era, where players can be compensated semi-indirectly for the use of their name, image, and likeness rights. During oral arguments and in the ruling itself, justices sharply castigated the NCAA for its long-standing opposition to compensating players while reaping millions of dollars in profits from their labor.“Nowhere else in America can businesses get away with agreeing not to pay their workers a fair market rate on the theory that their product is defined by not paying their workers a fair market rate,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in a concurring opinion. “And under ordinary principles of antitrust law, it is not evident why college sports should be any different. The NCAA is not above the law.”The NCAA evaded legal scrutiny for so long for a variety of reasons, but at least partly through sheer inertia and its byzantine structure. While the NCAA has a governing board and a president—currently Charlie Baker, the former governor of Massachusetts—it is also a largely decentralized organization. Individual schools wield significant power through the various conferences that also oversee college sports, like the Southeastern Conference and the misleadingly named Big Ten Conference. Many of those schools are also public universities, which means they are governed directly by state governments to varying degrees.As a result, it is hard to even describe the NCAA as a sports “league” in any meaningful sense. One crucial difference between NCAA sports and professional leagues is the absence of collective bargaining, which sets ground rules between players and owners. Instead, college athletes are free to accept NIL money and transfer almost at will. Sorsby, for example, is currently facing a lawsuit from the University of Cincinnati over a $1 million exit fee in his NIL contract that the quarterback has not yet paid since refusing to play in last year’s bowl game and transferring to Texas Tech.To “save” college sports from the daunting threats of antitrust enforcement and a robust market for athlete compensation, the NCAA and colleges are doing something unthinkable these days: asking Congress to pass legislation. One bipartisan proposal, the Protect College Sports Act, was drafted by Texas Senator Ted Cruz and Washington Senator Maria Cantwell. It would impose new restrictions on transfers and eligibility that strongly favor schools and constrain student-athletes.Some of college athletics’ top voices, such as former Alabama football head coach Nick Saban, embraced the bill earlier this month during Senate hearings. But significant obstacles remain. The SEC—the conference, not the financial regulator—and the Big Ten said they opposed the bill, in statements earlier this week. Though their reasoning was vague, the bill would prevent conferences from breaking away from the NCAA to form a more lucrative “super league” of top schools. It would require them to potentially share more broadcast revenue with other schools.The NCAA also has not yet endorsed the bill. ESPN’s Dan Murphy noted last month that it lacks one of the organization’s main demands: to bar athletes from being classified as employees, which could open the door to collective bargaining. It would be fitting if the NCAA missed out on vital legal protections because it wanted to preserve its original sin of uncompensated labor.A collective-bargaining agreement would’ve been helpful in the Sorsby case. When major-league players cheat and gamble, they are punished by the procedures laid out in their collective-bargaining agreements, with no role for meddling state judges to override things. Saban lamented during this week’s hearing that “right now in college football we have no rules.” He’s right, but it may be even more accurate to say that the NCAA hasn’t been playing by any rules all along.