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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. 

A new batch of documents published by The Chronicle of Higher Education reveals widespread censorship of course content at Texas A&M, one of many public universities where MAGA politicians—not faculty and department heads—now determine what can and can’t be taught. It is the latest example, among many since President Trump’s reelection, that the campus free speech wars of a decade ago are now over. The right has won. Following the passage of a Texas law that requires governing boards to review academic programs—one of several state laws based on Trump’s January 2025 executive orders against “gender ideology” and diversity, equity, and inclusion—Texas A&M is subjecting course titles, descriptions, and syllabuses to an opaque review process to decide which courses will go forward and which will be canceled. For the coming fall semester, 45 courses were referred from an initial review committee to the university president’s office for a final decision, of which 31 were approved as “exceptions,” eight were approved under conditions of specifying or removing reading materials, and two—an English course on “LGBTQ Literatures” and a Women’s and Gender Studies introduction to “LGBTQ Studies”—were denied outright and removed from the curriculum. A similar process is unfolding at Auburn University, where faculty received a form referencing Alabama legislation that bans public universities from teaching “divisive concepts,” again based on anti-DEI directives from the Trump White House. When a sociology course on “Crime and Justice in America” drew the ire of conservative website 1819 News and then Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville (“ZERO REASON taxpayer funds should go to teaching our students to HATE law and order. Woke indoctrination has NO PLACE in Alabama or our taxpayer-funded universities”), the sociology professor was removed from the course. Unlike Texas A&M, where the president ultimately makes the decision, Auburn puts the onus on faculty to self-police their courses to remain in compliance with a state law forbidding the teaching of “divisive concepts.” As the Chronicle reports, an Auburn geosciences professor said of the course surveillance forms, “in terms of feeling like you are free to do your job—following scientific rigor, academic rigor, all of that—instead you have to think about the political ramifications of what you’re doing.”Surveillance and censorship of faculty is not confined to large, land-grant universities or Southern states. At West Point, Tim Bakken, the academy’s longest-serving law professor, has brought a lawsuit against his employer for its adoption of Trump administration directives that, Bakken claims, “chill and suppress speech and censor viewpoints that might be contrary to the views” of West Point, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, and Trump. The Washington Post recounted a chilling scene in which Bakken arose in a faculty meeting to speak against the policy of requiring faculty members to get administrative approval for giving talks and publishing their work. “Stop talking,” said a deputy department head who outranks Bakken, “and sit down.”It would be tempting to think all of this is nothing more than the shoe on the other foot. Between 2015 and 2020, conservatives fomented a national panic over the idea that left-wing college students and professors had turned universities into places of censorship and ideological intolerance. After Yale students protested against a professor over her response to a campus-wide directive about offensive Halloween costumes, The Wall Street Journal editorial board called them “little Robespierres”—a reference to the French revolutionary whose eighteenth-century Reign of Terror led to some 17,000 executions. In 2021, New York Times columnist Brett Stephens compared a ham-fisted bias training at Smith College to Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution in China, whose violent purges resulted in death tolls estimated between one and two million.Centrist commentators embraced such right-wing characterizations of students and faculty as coddled authoritarians who couldn’t live with speech they didn’t like and would resort to violence to stop it. Jonathan Chait, writing for New York magazine, compared campus “political correctness” with Marxist authoritarianism, adding, “American political correctness has obviously never perpetrated the brutality of a communist government, but it has also never acquired the powers that come with full control of the machinery of the state.” For Chait, the college campus was an experimental window into a dark future, a place where “the p.c. left can muster the strength to impose its political hegemony upon others” because of its institutional dominance. At the time, many of us argued in response that although left-wing college students and faculty could be wrongheaded and intolerant, most campus free speech controversies were either actual debates involving speech on all sides—with ordinary social consequences—or debates about access to platforms, not access to free speech as such.But we also saw unfolding a greater and more dangerous threat to free speech. By pushing hyperbolic portrayals of the campus left as budding murderous authoritarians, the right was normalizing grounds for its own exercises in violent repression. Surveillance and attack-dog organizations, like Turning Point USA, created “watchlists” to publicize (and sensationalize) professors’ statements and courses, leading to intimidation and death threats. Armed, reactionary militia groups began taking up the mantle of defenders of free speech and “Western values,” turning up at campus events with the aim of provoking students and left-wing agitators into violence. All of this amounted to a twofold assault from the right on free speech itself, albeit one couched as a necessary response to left-wing overreach: First, portray the critical but protected speech of a left majority on campus—student protests, open letters, denials of speaking platforms—as suppression of free speech akin to authoritarianism; then, with that bad-faith characterization as an excuse, rachet up efforts to silence those students—through threats of violence, if necessary—and claim to be defending free speech. It’s clear now, if it wasn’t then, that the right was always the biggest threat to free speech. The MAGA-pilled Republican Party has moved at the federal and state levels to censor the very content of what professors can teach and students can learn. In some cases, the Trump administration has gone even further to silence speech. A Tufts University student was arrested by masked federal agents, detained for weeks, then forced to “self-deport” for writing a pro-Palestinian column in the student newspaper; a Georgetown professor was arrested and jailed for also expressing pro-Palestinian views.No exaggeration is necessary here. We can now see the difference between students contesting speech—that is, open debates about the value of certain speech on campus—and real authoritarian suppression of speech, because the latter is happening every day in America. No longer are we using censorship as a metaphor for when a marketplace of ideas picks winners and losers, nor authoritarianism as a hypothetical. The MAGA right has the power to legislate and otherwise enforce censorship on campus, and that’s exactly what it’s doing. Of course, this Trump-led crackdown on free speech extends well beyond campus too. ICE protesters have been arrested and in some cases imprisoned. Vice President JD Vance fueled a witch hunt that led to more than 145 people being fired for protected speech criticizing Charlie Kirk, the Turning Point USA leader who was murdered. Journalists have been barred from the halls of power in Washington, subjected to federal investigations, and even arrested and charged with bogus crimes. And so on.It wasn’t very long ago that the right at least pretended to care about First Amendment freedoms. That pretense is out the window. The MAGA assault on free speech is unlike anything we’ve seen since at least the McCarthy era, but it’s also the kind of slow-building political story that we can too easily lose track of amid the daily chaos of the Trump administration. The story is now too big to be ignored: The Republicans are against liberty. They do not believe in freedom. They are enemies of the First Amendment, on and off campus.

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Tom Cotton sent a letter Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick raising concerns about Chinese AI models.