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This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. The Trump administration plans to dismantle a $368 million deep-sea observation system that has for more than a decade provided crucial data on ocean systems and climate change. In a notice, the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced that it had “initiated descoping of the Ocean […]

Todd Blanche is set to be nominated as attorney general proper but even he knows demands for vengeance will catch up to him sooner or later. Plus, Rashida Tlaib raises GOP tempers on Lebanon.

Joshua Scheer This conversation strikes close to home. My grandmother was part of the Bundist tradition discussed here, a movement that offered a radically different vision of Jewish life—one rooted in solidarity, workers’ rights, and the belief that oppression should be confronted rather than displaced onto others. While my own politics have evolved in different […]

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the June 4 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.Secretary of State Marco Rubio testified before the House Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday. An extraordinary extended exchange took place between Rubio and Democrat Ted Lieu, and it was all about Trump’s tendency to fall asleep at public events. Ted Lieu cornered Rubio on this and forced him to lie to Congress about what all of us can see with our own eyes. That might seem trivial, but the way Representative Lieu handled this moment captures something essential about how our politics works today. And it shows why Democrats need to relentlessly center Trump’s ongoing physical and mental decline.We’re talking about this moment with Brian Beutler, because he writes regularly on his excellent Substack, Off Message, about the need for Democrats to fight the information wars aggressively. And this Rubio moment raises some important issues related to that. Brian, always good to have you on.Brian Beutler: Great to be back.Sargent: OK. So this moment started when Representative Ted Lieu got to question Rubio. First, Lieu played video of Rubio talking at a recent Cabinet meeting with Trump slumbering away right beside him. Then Ted Lieu asked Rubio about that. Listen.Ted Lieu (voiceover): Secretary Rubio, have you been at more than one meeting where President Trump has fallen asleep?Marco Rubio (voiceover): That’s false. That’s false. I’ve never seen him fall asleep. On the contrary, the guy doesn’t sleep, which is a big problem because he calls me at two in the morning. He calls me at five in the morning. And, you know, I like to sleep a little bit.Sargent: Brian, just to start off, Rubio is actually undercutting himself here because he’s admitting that Trump is up at all hours of the night. And that’s part of the problem, since it’s another symptom of his ongoing decline. But otherwise, what do you make of this move by Lieu here?Beutler: Part of the reason he’s falling asleep in Cabinet meetings is that he’s this erratic person who is outraged all night, stays up all night tweeting, and then is too exhausted for the work that he actually finds boring—the work of the president that happens during mostly normal business hours.But I think that the point here is to put Rubio, or whoever happens to be testifying before Congress, in a bind and make them say ridiculous things under oath that are contradicted right there by video evidence, so that they make the rounds on social media and you and I talk about them on this podcast. What Lieu is saying is, I know that you know the truth and you are here misrepresenting it to the public—and just putting a lot of pressure on Rubio. Because somewhere deep down in Marco Rubio, one assumes, is a conscience, is somebody who is in character, and the character will break down under enough pressure.Sargent: Right. Well, let’s listen to more of the exchange. It continues this way. After Rubio had denied that Trump falls asleep at the meetings, Lieu played more video that showed Trump sleeping away right next to Rubio. And then Lieu said this. Listen.Lieu (voiceover): You are literally talking about issues of war and peace and Donald Trump is sleeping right next to you. If Donald Trump cannot stay awake at these important meetings where the cameras are rolling, imagine what he’s like when the cameras are not there. So I’m going to ask you—have you been at classified meetings where Donald Trump has fallen asleep or had trouble staying awake?Rubio (voiceover): I’ve never been at any meeting where he—the things you’re showing me now, he was not falling asleep.Lieu (voiceover): So you’re lying again. You’re consistently lying to Congress. You’re lying to Congress, Secretary Rubio. So I’m going to show you another video in a moment. The president’s inability to stay awake on the job has caused other countries to perceive him differently. They mock him. They see he is weak and he is feeble.Sargent: Brian, what interests me about this is Rubio’s trying to plead that this is too trivial a matter to be discussed before the Foreign Relations Committee. But Lieu just doesn’t let himself get knocked off course by that. Everything here is all about Trump’s fundamental unfitness for the job, about how he shouldn’t be making these decisions and he shouldn’t have this power and that this is a disaster for America and the world. Your thoughts on that?Beutler: Yeah, I mean, in a way—obviously it requires a bit of explication and Lieu couldn’t interrupt himself in the five minutes or whatever that he had to question Rubio to point this out. But there’s an almost obvious contradiction here where Rubio is on the one hand saying he wasn’t asleep, but also, if he was asleep, it’s no big deal. And in a more normal context, a president slipping—they’re in office for four years, there’s cameras everywhere. They might trip and fall. They might nod off in one meeting. They might accidentally hit post on a tweet before they finish typing it. And that would be ridiculous to home in on in a Foreign Relations Committee meeting because it is trivial. But there’s a pattern here with Trump. This is elemental to his presidency. It’s gotten us into a war that Trump can’t get himself out of. It has inspired mockery around the world. It makes foreign leaders and even domestic counterparties kind of know how to manipulate Trump.His not just—not the fact that he’s old and tired, but the fact that he’s unwell, erratic, susceptible to flattery. These are all part of one thing. And it is a crisis. It is relevant to the work of the Foreign Affairs Committee and multiple other committees of Congress. Sargent: And I think part of the story here that gets at the unfitness you’re talking about is that Lieu is trying to bait Rubio into revealing himself to be kind of an unprincipled, sycophantic dirtbag, basically. Beutler: He has a lot of experience at shape-shifting at this point.Sargent: Yeah, he certainly does. Well, let’s listen to a little bit more of Ted Lieu and Rubio. Here, Lieu broadens the indictment out to Trump’s mental state in a bigger sense.Lieu (voiceover): Donald Trump’s inability to stay awake on the job shows that there’s something very wrong with his health or cognitive abilities. In fact, on a number of occasions, Donald Trump will contradict himself in literally the same meeting or interview.Sargent: Lieu then plays more video of Trump and then says this. Listen.Lieu (voiceover): So, Secretary Rubio, instead of holding North Korean–style Cabinet meetings where everyone goes around the room kissing Donald Trump’s ass, I’m going to ask you to come clean with the American people and the White House as well. There’s something wrong with Donald Trump’s health or cognitive abilities. There’s a reason he keeps going to the hospital and they keep giving him cognitive tests. We have not seen the president in eight days. The American people deserve the truth. I yield back.Rubio (voiceover): I don’t even know how to respond to that. Other than to tell you that it’s absurd and ridiculous. And I can’t believe we’re in a Foreign Affairs Committee meeting in front of the House at an important time in American foreign policy. Lieu (voiceover): Just keep lying. Just keep on—Rubio (voiceover): With supposedly someone who thinks he’s a medical expert—Sargent: So Rubio goes on to spin a bunch of bullshit about how youthful and vigorous and superior to everyone around him Trump is. But the thing is, Brian, what strikes me about this is Rubio’s forced to deny what we can all see as true. And it seems to me Democrats don’t do this kind of hand-to-hand combat enough. They don’t make Republicans deny what’s true about them. They spend—meaning Democrats spend—their time denying Republican lies about them. What do you make of that?Beutler: Yeah. We in the writers community have this phrase, or this cliché, “show, don’t tell,” which can be effective for writing in an evocative way or making people think. But in politics, especially today, I think it’s more important to tell, not show—or tell and show. I think Democrats have had a hard time shaking the habit of assuming that what is true will be made clear to people when they watch television or when they read the newspaper, that the mediating institutions will do this work for them. They don’t need to say, hey, why has Donald Trump been to the hospital so many times to take so many cognitive tests? Why is Donald Trump falling asleep in all of his meetings? Does it have something to do with him being up until 3 a.m. tweeting libel all the time?And what Lieu recognizes is that if you want to make that something that the public thinks of as a big, discrete problem, you have to tell them that it is a big, discrete problem and then connect the dots for them. And it would be better if more members of the Democratic caucuses on Capitol Hill had picked this up the way Lieu has.Sargent: Agreed. And just to broaden out what we’re really talking about here, some people might watch these exchanges and listen to what you and I are saying and conclude, this is just TDS, Trump Derangement Syndrome. They’re just obsessing over Trump. It’s not focused on what people really care about. Brian, you spend a lot of time focused on this idea of what people really care about. So I’m going to set you up here. This just seems to misunderstand how politics works these days. Now, I’m not going to say that talking about Trump’s unfitness is all you need to do. Of course not. You do have to explain to people how you’re going to make their lives better and so forth. But it’s just factual that Trump is the center of our political universe. And it’s precisely when voters forget how unfit he is that he does well, that Republicans do well. It’s when voters understand and see glaringly how unfit he is that he and Republicans lose. What’s your big theory on all this?Beutler: Well, I do want to say that I think that the public is more willing to overlook this stuff when things are going better. So when Trump is in some sense insulated from the substantive consequences of his unfitness for office—which was essentially the case for the first three years of his first term—he was never popular then, but his economic approval ratings were high. And it was very easy for people who either supported him fully or were willing to tolerate him to say, look, I don’t like all the insane tweeting or whatever, but things are basically going OK. So that’s not a big deal.And I think that does suggest that there is some balance that you need to strike between trying to make issues and trying to appeal to people on the basis of regular concerns. I never want to overstate the case and say forget about kitchen-table issues, don’t have healthcare plans and stuff. That stuff is important. But people can be made to care about all kinds of things through persuasion of a different kind, where people of influence behave in a way that suggests this is important, people need to care about this, and make consumers, voters, in essence think: huh, whatever I want the government to be doing for me, I really can’t have my president be like this.Sargent: Trump would absolutely agree with our understanding of how politics works. And here’s why. He runs everything through a strong-versus-weak frame. Everything is about his dominance, his virility, his masculine strength, his big crowds, his big ratings. And everything is always also about how weak his enemies are, how they’re failing, how they get low ratings, how they have low energy. And he lashes out with particular vitriol at those who question those narratives about his dominance and strength. He knows that if he’s seen as flailing or floundering or not in control, that it’s deadly for him. What are your thoughts on that? What can we conclude from that about how our politics works these days, do you think?Beutler: Yeah. I mean, even before Donald Trump kind of took it to this insane level where everything he says about his opponent you can count on to be a lie and abusive and maybe libelous—with the goal being to make them look small and easily squashed like a bug, and he’s the strong person who’s setting the terms of the political argument—Republicans would do this. They did this to John Kerry in 2004. He was a war hero. And so they said, nah, you faked your injuries and you didn’t deserve your Purple Heart. And the idea wasn’t just to convince people of the lie. It was to put Kerry in a bind, to make Kerry reveal that he didn’t know how to fight back, to defend himself, and thus appear weak.And I think in the end of that—this Swift Boat Veterans thing that I’m alluding to from 22 years ago—Kerry found his footing. But it was a perilous moment, because Kerry’s initial inability to stand up for himself was dangerous because people cared less about the attack than they did about the likelihood, the possibility that Kerry would become president and bring this unwillingness to stand up for himself to the office. And if he wouldn’t stand up for himself, how could he stand up for regular people or the country?And that aspect of politics, while regrettable, is sort of irreducible. And it was maybe useful to Barack Obama to see John Kerry have to struggle with that, because by the time he came onto the scene in the next election, I think Democrats had at that point learned that you can’t just shrug these things off or say, that was so rude, you’ve got to apologize to me, only to be smacked in the face again. You really have to set the terms of the debate yourself. And somewhere after Donald Trump won his first election, I think Democrats lost faith in that, or they lost sight of that insight and they lost their confidence. And things like what Ted Lieu did in the clips you played are the kind of thing that can help bring it back.Sargent: I think it would be helpful to bring another contemporary example into this here. James Talarico and the Texas Senate race. Republicans are attacking Talarico as transgender, as someone with low testosterone, as a vegan—basically as a wimp. Now, Republicans don’t expect voters to actually say to themselves, he’s transgender and a vegan, so I’m not voting for him. Instead, what Republicans want is for Talarico to lie down and take these attacks. That’s the main event they want. They want, again, to go back to the Swift Boat example, for one side to be seen as strong and dominant and the other as weak and submissive and unable to fight back. And these attacks are almost designed to trigger bad instincts in Democrats, I think, in a way. Can you talk about this Texas Senate race example in this context a little bit? You wrote a great piece about this. It’s applicable, isn’t it?Beutler: I think it’s directly applicable. And I do want to say it’s both things. There are definitely voters in Texas who, absent everything, might think Ken Paxton is such a sleazebag that even though I’m conservative, I’m a Republican, I like Donald Trump, Paxton takes it too far, so this time I’m going to vote for Talarico or I’m going to stay home. And Republicans certainly want some of those voters to think, well, if you vote for Talarico, that means you’re not a real man. And they want those people’s friends to be saying, you’re not going to vote for that Talarico guy, are you? To create a kind of peer pressure, a social environment where supporting Talarico is something that you have to be ashamed of.But the flip side of that is that there are people who are less committed. They’re really more genuinely independent. They vote for both parties or they vote for Republicans mostly out of habit. They’re not super committed. Republicanism isn’t part of their identity. But they do value strength. They do respect people who stand up for themselves. And they do think that people who don’t stand up for themselves are weak and pathetic in some sense. And so, irrespective of the attack—Talarico is trans—I don’t think that they particularly care about the truth or falsity of the accusation. They’re looking to Talarico to see if he’ll take an affront to his identity lying down.Not that there’s something wrong with being trans, but that when someone lies about you in a way that’s designed to make half of the state hate you, do you say, well, that’s just a distraction from kitchen-table issues, and refuse to stand up for yourself? Or do you challenge Ken Paxton to a real debate about what it means to be a man? And my hope—I think the best way for Talarico to thread this needle, to address the libel without either throwing trans people under the bus or anchoring the whole campaign around questions of trans rights—would be to take it head-on in that way. Like, you’re going to lie about me? Let’s have it out.We shall see. So far, I think the Talarico campaign has done a very good job of reminding people just how scummy Ken Paxton is, but have not done a particularly good job of telling, as opposed to showing, that Talarico is the real man in this race, is the strong man in this race. And there are ways that they can do this without undercutting the more positive vision that they want to run.Sargent: Absolutely. So just to close this out, just to go back to this Ted Lieu–Rubio exchange—what’s your general feeling about what Democrats can actually learn from an exchange like this? And what do you want to see them doing? This is something you write about all the time, very well. Folks, check out Brian’s Substack, Off Message. It’s really good on these topics. What do you want to see Democrats take from an exchange like that? And what do you want to see them do from here through election day, and I guess through 2028?Beutler: I guess the through line here is that there’s a lot of political value in putting your opposition in a bind that, at least at a glance, feels impossible. I do want to say that I think Rubio, because Republicans are well versed in this, handled this exchange about as well as is possible if you work in Trump’s administration. And it’s because he understands—don’t get yourself in a bind. Think through what your opposition is likely to throw at you and how you’re going to respond.And so this is why I write a lot about how Democrats can prepare to counter Republicans or set their own traps for Republicans. And what was so sharp about what Lieu did is, in a sort of more aboveboard and honest way, it required Rubio to make a choice: I either have to lie and debase myself, or tell the truth and lose my job. And if Democrats on Capitol Hill grilling Republicans before committees can try to keep that binary in mind, then their questions are going to be a lot sharper, a lot better. And there will be people who aren’t quite as adept as Rubio, and they will start to flounder.Sargent: Brian Beutler, always awesome to talk to you, man. Folks, check out Brian’s Substack, Off Message. Brian, thanks for coming on. Let’s do it again soon.

As head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, Pulte’s used his position to launch unnecessary mortgage fraud investigations against Trump’s enemies.

Love, the pop star at the center of Candice Wuehle’s second novel, Ultranatural, feels familiar, like the idol we’ve all known since 1998 when she appeared on MTV singing and dancing through a high school in white button-down, pleated mini skirt, and thigh-high socks. Like Britney Spears, Love gets her big break as a teenager with a voice that is “velvety, too rich for a child,” yet fit for a “breathy baby doll.” Like Britney, Love wears a neon catsuit in a music video and performs with a “banana yellow boa constrictor that weighed more than I did.” Like Britney, Love shaves her head and goes to rehab. Like Britney, Love posts “strings of random emojis” to social media from a mansion tucked into the foothills west of Los Angeles; like Britney, her fortune is not her own to spend or control. But while these parallels to our most iconic pop star’s meteoric rise and tabloid downfall shimmer through the pages of Ultranatural like sequins on costumes, Wuehle brings a fresh lens to the perils of superstardom, one that draws out the alienated labor at its core. Narrated by Love, the novel traces her transformation from 14-year-old Lacey Dove Bart, desperate to escape her Ohio hometown in 2005, to megastar with a residency at the Bellagio and abs insured for a million dollars in 2011, to plastic surgery addict who rarely leaves her mansion in 2016. It is a career shaped by Lacey’s quest for safety, which she equates with money and being watched by an audience—a quest that is continually exploited by men who surveil and control her body, image, and voice, the key elements of her livelihood. “I had given myself away in such small, intimate increments that I did not even realize there was nothing left anymore,” she confesses at the end of the novel. The harder she works, the more estranged she becomes from her self.Wuehle is the only writer I would trust to write a spellbinding novel inspired by both the life of (and conspiracy theories surrounding) Britney Spears and the writings of Karl Marx. (Wuehle uses a quote from Marx’s essay “Estranged Labour” as an epigraph for the novel.) Her 2022 novel, Monarch, expertly surveyed the pitfalls of Y2K-era young womanhood, as it followed a former beauty queen’s realization that she had been programmed as a sleeper agent in an offshoot of Project MKUltra. Along the way, Monarch picked apart the greatest misogynistic hits of 1990s true crime pop culture—Lorena Bobbitt, Nicole Brown Simpson, and JonBenét Ramsey all feature in the beauty queen’s realizations about her past. Wuehle has continued her critiques of the power structures that underlie pop culture in her brilliant Substack newsletter “Bimbo Summit,” which takes its name from the 2006 front-page New York Post headline that accompanied a paparazzi shot of Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, and Lindsay Lohan piled together in the front seat of a car. Ultranatural remixes that infamous tabloid moment and others as ominous beats in a cursed tale, gasps for freedom that only ever result in more intense scrutiny of Love’s every move by her handlers and the press.Ultranatural is the story of a woman fighting to reclaim herself by seeking to reconnect with the only person who ever really saw her. But the novel is not all misery—in fact, Lacey tells us as much in the opening lines: “Most stories are tragedies. This one isn’t, but it does start on the stone steps of an abandoned asylum for the insane.” At the core of the novel is her friendship with Carrie-Anne, with whom she hung out on those steps as a kid, writing lyrics and singing. It was Carrie-Anne who lit Lacey’s path out of Athens, Ohio, and Carrie-Anne who remains her only true link back. Framed with desperate, emoji-laden messages to Carrie-Anne, Ultranatural is the story of a woman fighting to reclaim herself by seeking to reconnect with the only person who ever really saw her. The abandoned asylum had great acoustics, which is why Lacey and Carrie-Anne chose to rehearse there for their auditions for Newland Academy, a private performing-arts high school in Virginia that Carrie-Anne found on the internet. Through the girls’ intense relationship, Wuehle explores the disjuncture between art and commerce and how Lacey, in her desperation to escape Appalachia, falls into the trap of worshipping the latter. Wuehle makes Lacey’s fervent need to get out more than understandable; her Athens is a place where employment opportunities range from $7.50 an hour part-time work at the Sonic Drive-In to stripping at the Golden Horseshoe, where the male owners arbitrarily raise the price of renting pole time, outpacing tips. The Golden Horseshoe is where Carrie-Anne’s sister Austina works after graduating from Prairie High, where she had been the star of the track team; when she rebuffed her handsy coach, she lost his support for college track scholarships.Lacey’s father regularly escapes Athens when he gets assigned routes as a long-haul trucker, though his income never seems enough to pay down the bills papering their refrigerator, and his steady diet of “bad news in bulk” and Yellow Jacket energy pills heightens his fury and unpredictability. Her churchgoing mother, “unable to do a single thing in the world without my father’s say-so,” becomes practically catatonic when he leaves on a new trucking job. Carrie-Anne’s mother, Deenie, the town psychic, is no better. In their cabin out in unincorporated territory, where the road was built by an anti-government militia, Deenie undergoes episodes of depression so severe that she appears dead.In this bleak environment, the audition for Newland Academy feels life-or-death. But while Carrie-Anne believes their originality will open the door to this “incubator for young minds,” Lacey is convinced that they need to purchase matching costumes to communicate in the “secret language of the superficial.” This concern with looking the part and an obsession with what it will cost leads Lacey to take a job bagging groceries at Kroger as soon as she turns 15—a job that exposes her to unwanted and increasingly dangerous male attention. It is Lacey’s misapprehension that bootstrap-style hard work would net her money and safety that makes her vulnerable to men reaping the profits of her labor and disguising their plunder as protection.But when the girls gain admission to Newland, only Carrie-Anne is truly satisfied. While Carrie-Anne flourishes in an environment where she can work on poetry chapbooks and compose an “experimental chamber piece” for choir—where she can make art without concern for its commercial appeal—all Lacey can focus on is how rich most of the other students are. When Lacey expresses envy of a girl who auditioned and got cast on a Christian television show called The Billy Bunny Hour, Carrie-Anne reminds her that “art’s not a pizza … you don’t get fewer slices because she got more.” To Lacey, this is “childish,” akin to a “lesson Billy Bunny himself shoved down the throats of poor kids so they’d stay poor. Carrie-Anne couldn’t understand credit cards or taxes or having an hourly job and she couldn’t understand what I was trying to say.”While Lacey believes that “once money was involved and my talent was measured not by bullshit metrics like grades or school plays or admission committees, but by how much I could earn, life would get fairer,” she overlooks a key wisdom of Carrie-Anne’s—that a scarcity mentality “estranges us from one another, and worse, from ourselves.” It is Lacey’s misapprehension that bootstrap-style hard work would net her money and safety—influenced by the TV news her father was always blasting when he was home—that makes her vulnerable to men reaping the profits of her labor and disguising their plunder as protection.Having richly evoked this background in the first half of Ultranatural, Wuehle traces just how far Lacey strays from her own essence—and from Carrie-Anne—as she rides the escalator of fame. That escalator is operated by a sleazy Christian entertainment executive whose “real name” is, unbelievably, Jimmy Coins, who takes Lacey from her own turn on The Billy Bunny Hour to promoting her first album in shopping-mall food courts, to touring the world for her second, “while impersonating a sexy baby from Anywhere, America, with a selective southern accent and astonishing tolerance for signing lines.” The schedule leaves Lacey drained. The press and public react with glee when she’s hospitalized for exhaustion; as Wuehle writes, “People were as fascinated by that as they were by the actual art, if you can call it art.”At times, Wuehle lays on the labor commentary—and the Britney Spears parallels—a bit thick. “I Got It (U Take It),” the title song of Love’s first album, sounds an awful lot like Britney’s “Work Bitch”—its bridge consists of “an Auto-Tuned repetition of me singing ‘Bitch, you’re gonna work’ in a vaguely British accent,” which Carrie-Anne comments is “equivalent to a Karl Marx quote.” But it is this unrelenting focus on how much Lacey works, how little she reaps from it, and how much her fans fetishize it, that allows Wuehle to highlight the consequences of the extraction at the center of a pop star’s career. When Lacey appears to lose her mind in Ultranatural—under conditions just as sinister as Spears’s conservatorship, with no privacy and no ability to speak frankly with Carrie-Anne, the one person “who could explain me”—it makes perfect sense. With her interior life stripped away, Lacey attempts to reclaim what Deenie termed the “inner sanctum”—“the place where you know what you know, where you recognize your own voice, where you think your own thoughts.” This metaphysical turn, where Lacey literally searches for her soul, allows Wuehle to upend what might look from the outside to be a pop star’s unraveling. When Lacey’s last album tanks because “one of the tracks was just bells and me singing about a light in the woods,” or when her cryptic social media posts “freak out the few thousand commenting fans I had left,” she has not lost touch with reality but the exact opposite. These erratic-seeming moves are her attempts to shirk the manufactured persona and voice Jimmy Coins thrust upon her.It is only when Lacey is finally left alone by Jimmy and her cadre of handlers and the paparazzi and press—albeit in a manner so creepy and cruel that it makes conservatorships look like coddling—that she can rediscover what she actually thinks and feels. As she retells the story of her life in messages to Carrie-Anne, Lacey finds her real self.

Colombia may be on the verge of electing a far-right president who’s mused about how much fun he had blowing up cats as a kid. On Sunday, in a shocking result, Abelardo De La Espriella got the most votes in the first-round election, netting 44 percent of ballots cast. The candidate from the ruling left-wing Pacto Historico coalition, Iván Cepeda, came in second, with 41 percent. Paloma Valencia—who represents Colombia’s more institutional right, and is aligned with the disgraced former President Alvaro Uribe—took home a much lower than expected 7 percent. De La Espriella and Cepeda will now face each other in a June 21 runoff.Trump was relatively quiet about the election until Wednesday morning, when he issued a soaring endorsement of De La Espriella on social media. “Because of his tremendous accomplishments in life,” Trump wrote, “and his political support for me, personally, it is my Honor to give Abelardo my Complete and Total endorsement.” The most surprising thing about this endorsement might be that it didn’t happen sooner. The U.S. has a long, ugly, and violent history of meddling in Latin American democracy. In recent years, Republicans—including top Trump administration officials—have taken a special interest in a new breed of aspiring strongman, championing the likes of Argentina’s President Javier Milei, Chile’s José Antonio Kast, El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, and Ecuador’s Daniel Noboa. Lately, it seems, for guidance on how to approach Colombia, Trump has turned to Colombian-born Ohio Senator Bernie Moreno. The former car dealer hasn’t been shy about his dislike of Colombia’s current left-wing president, Gustavo Petro, or his affinity for De La Espriella. Last October, when Moreno met with Trump to discuss Latin American politics, he brought the president a fake image of Petro in an orange jumpsuit. In March, when Moreno posed for pictures embracing De La Espriella, the pair flashed smiles while delivering the candidate’s signature military-style salute. Moreno’s interventions in Colombia have not been merely symbolic. He’s pushed, for instance, for the U.S. to impose sanctions on Petro and his family; the Treasury Department did so on the grounds that the president has “allowed drug cartels to flourish and refused to stop this activity.” When Cepeda was ahead in the polls, days before Moreno traveled to the country to serve as an accredited election observer for Sunday’s elections (as part of a larger delegation from the U.S.), the Ohio senator suggested that election officials should invalidate votes from “parts of the country that are not secure.” Pleased with what he saw on the ground on Sunday, Moreno instead praised the country’s electoral process after polls closed and congratulated De La Espriella, who thanked the senator for his “support during Sunday’s electoral process.” On Tuesday, Moreno told reporters that he had “vetted” the candidate and found him to be “impeccable.” The next day, Trump issued his endorsement.In many ways, the thumbs-up was to be expected. Aesthetically, De La Espriella has many of the trappings of other far-right strongmen Republicans have come to love. He’s a showy, self-styled “outsider” to politics with a penchant for donning the jersey of his country’s soccer team, threatening to exact revenge on the left, and cozying up to Trump. While he’s campaigned on vaguely populist rhetoric, he likes to wear Louis Vuitton loafers, buy $10,000 bottles of alcohol, and run his mouth. In one television appearance, he admitted to having tied firecrackers to cats as a child to watch them explode. “It was terrible,” he laughed, “but I enjoyed it.” Moreno’s showboating and odd confessions aside, however, the U.S. right seems to value candidates who will welcome U.S. presence in their country and pursue a like-minded brand of authoritarianism. De La Espriella has proposed opening 10 “mega-prisons” and said he wants to foster closer ties to the U.S. and Israel. He plans to slash 700,000 government employee and contractor jobs, “put God back into our children’s classes,” and build a “Miracle Homeland.”From Bukele’s gulag network to Javier Milei’s chainsaws and Trump’s theatrics, members of the far right have been learning from one another. “We’re seeing the replication of a Trumpist political economy across the continent,” said David Adler, the general coordinator for the Progressive International, who was in Colombia for Sunday’s election. “That may not be a coincidence, as we’ve seen in repeated electoral contests. The U.S. is intervening financially, politically, technologically to push these elections towards their preferred candidates that happen to mimic the style, the approach, and the geopolitical orientation of the Trump White House.”However, although they share a love of Trump’s attention, Moreno’s embrace of De La Espriella does appear to be at odds with some of his own policy positions. Born in Colombia to a prominent political family, Moreno moved to the U.S. as a child and has renounced his Colombian citizenship. Citing that experience, he’s introduced legislation to outlaw dual citizenship. “Being an American citizen is an honor and a privilege—and if you want to be an American, it’s all or nothing,” he’s written. De La Espriella, meanwhile, is a citizen of Colombia, Italy, and the United States. He owns property in Miami, and traveled to the U.S. twice during his campaign.This isn’t the only contradiction to be found in MAGA world’s embrace of Latin America’s far right—and De La Espriella, in particular. The Trump administration has justified its enthusiasm for the region’s hard-line candidates as means of confronting narco-traffickers. The Shield of the Americas—the Trump administration’s alliance of its favorite leaders in Latin America—was ostensibly founded in order to “advance strategies that stop foreign interference in our hemisphere, criminal and narco-terrorist gangs and cartels, and illegal and mass immigration.” It’s officially called the Americas Counter Cartel Coalition. The administration has carried out all manner of atrocities in the name of confronting narco-traffickers, from the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro to ongoing military strikes on purported drug smugglers in the Caribbean and Pacific; the bombings have already killed more than 200 people. There’s been scant evidence that the growing list of victims—including several fishermen—were actually engaged in “narco-trafficking operations,” as U.S. officials claim. Key U.S. allies in the region, however, have their own well-documented ties to traffickers and paramilitaries. De La Espriella—who’s promised to “wipe out narco-terrorism and those who I’ve declared a military target like cockroaches, like rats”—spent much of his legal career defending them in court. Among his clients are Uribe, who was convicted last year of bribing paramilitary witnesses to change damaging testimony that incriminated him. The former president—whom Moreno visited in Colombia last year—also happens to be a friend of De La Espriella’s father. A collection of declassified State Department documents, published by the National Security Archive in 2018, showed that U.S. diplomats harbored serious concerns about Uribe’s links to the narcos, even including him on list of suspected Colombian “Narcopols.” De La Espriella has also defended the former paramilitary leader Salvatore Mancuso and Colombian-born businessman Alex Saab, a onetime member of Maduro’s Cabinet who was handed over to the U.S. last month and faces charges of laundering hundreds of millions of dollars. However confident De La Espriella and his allies in the U.S. might be, the election in Colombia isn’t over. Cepeda—a human rights advocate who’s been critical of U.S. meddling in the region—took home more votes than Petro did in the first round of the last presidential elections. He’ll face an uphill battle to expand the Pacto Historico’s base over the coming weeks. Moreno, for his part, plans to return as an accredited observer for the June 21 runoff. As has been the case in recent elections, including in Honduras, the White House could try to tip the scales even further to support its preferred candidate.The Donroe doctrine—as Republican policy toward Latin American policy has been called—is many things. It is cosmopolitan, it is violent, and it is more than willing to violate international law. It’s also a meeting point for those openly pledging to continue committing extrajudicial murders and the supposedly more respectable supporters of the Latin American far right, like Moreno. Whatever claims Moreno might make about supporting “democracy” in Latin America, there’s no hiding the fact that Abelardo De La Espriella and his ilk are promising to destroy it.

The Supreme Court handed down a bombshell order on Tuesday night that made racial gerrymandering effectively impossible to challenge in court, expanding upon last month’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais to eliminate the last vestiges of the Voting Rights Act of 1965—and with it, the primary mechanism for protecting multiracial democracy in the American South.Tuesday’s 6–3 order in Allen v. Milligan, which was technically unsigned, allows Alabama—and, in the future, other states—to enact legislative maps even if a federal court rules that they were enacted with racially discriminatory intent. This decision goes well beyond the court’s ruling in Callais, which focused on VRA claims under Section 2 about gerrymandered maps with a racially discriminatory effect.The decision gives carte blanche to Southern state lawmakers to eliminate majority-Black districts as soon as they feasibly can—or, in Alabama’s case, even if it is not actually feasible or practical. (More on that later.) In 1957, the Supreme Court unanimously ordered Southern states to desegregate their schools “with all available speed.” In 2026, the court’s conservative majority is demanding the elimination of Black electoral power in the South on the same timescale.“In addition to being wrong on the merits, the Court’s decision inflicts two grave harms on the public,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissent. “It debases the democratic process by upending Alabama’s entire election in the name of permitting Alabama to discriminate against Black Alabamians. It also corrodes the rule of law by rewarding Alabama’s gamesmanship and outright defiance of court orders.”Allen v. Milligan may sound familiar because we have been here before. The Supreme Court already heard the case as a Section 2 challenge to Alabama’s post-2020 congressional districts in 2023. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh joined with the court’s three liberals to uphold a district court ruling that required Alabama to draw a second majority-Black congressional district.Though the decision was a surprise victory for voting rights groups, given the Roberts court’s hostility to the VRA, there were also warning signs lurking beneath the surface. The majority opinion by Roberts merely stated that the district court had “faithfully applied the court’s precedents” while going out of its way to endorse those precedents.“The concern that §2 may impermissibly elevate race in the allocation of political power within the States is, of course, not new,” Roberts concluded. “Our opinion today does not diminish or disregard these concerns. It simply holds that a faithful application of our precedents and a fair reading of the record before us do not bear them out here.” In hindsight, the ruling reads more like a stay of execution than a grant of clemency.Let us take stock of how we got here. Conservatives have long sought to limit the VRA’s power. In the 1980 case Mobile v. Borden, the Supreme Court held that a “facially neutral” voting practice only violates Section 2 if it is enacted with discriminatory intent. While that may have been relatively easy to prove in the Jim Crow era, Congress also intended to root out more subtle and insidious forms of racially discriminatory voting practices.To that end, Congress amended the VRA in 1982 to reverse the Supreme Court’s ruling and specifically prohibit laws that had a discriminatory effect, regardless of intent, under Section 2. The high court accepted Congress’s vote-dilution framework in the 1986 case Thornburg v. Gingles and laid out a multipart test to determine when and how racial gerrymandering claims could succeed. (Borden and Gingles did not involve racial gerrymandering claims per se, but the impact on them is identical.)Since Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito joined the high court in 2005, the Supreme Court has grown steadily more hostile to the Voting Rights Act. In 2013, the court’s conservative majority struck down the VRA’s preclearance formula in Shelby County v. Holder because the justices thought it was outdated and violated the “equal sovereignty of the states,” a bespoke principle to which the court has never returned. That ruling freed many jurisdictions, mostly in the South, from seeking preapproval from federal courts or officials before changing their voting laws. A wave of voting restrictions soon followed.In the 2021 case Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, the court took aim at Section 2 as applied to state voting laws. Alito, writing for the court, threw up a wave of new constraints on Section 2 claims to state election laws. Transmuting Fox News talking points into the law of the land, he even claimed that states could overcome Section 2 challenges to voting laws by invoking the phantasmal threat of voter fraud. “The majority creates a set of extra-textual exceptions and considerations to sap the Act’s strength, and to save laws like Arizona’s,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her dissent. “No matter what Congress wanted, the majority has other ideas.”After the court’s 2023 ruling in Allen v. Milligan required Alabama to draw a second majority-Black congressional district, voting rights litigants in Louisiana sought the same remedy for that state. After they prevailed, a different group of litigants who cryptically described themselves as “non-African American voters” argued that the court’s remedy had unconstitutionally diluted their votes. Bert Callais, the lead plaintiff in the second case, reportedly later turned out to be a participant in the January 6 attack on the Capitol in 2021.In Callais, the Supreme Court applied the same framework as Brnovich—keep the law intact, but rewrite it to be unworkable and unrecognizable—in order to defeat Section 2’s ability to curb racial gerrymandering. Under Section 2, voters could challenge their legislative maps by claiming that they are designed to dilute a particular racial group’s electoral power. Now, Alito said, they must “disentangle politics from race” by proving that the state wasn’t engaging in constitutionally permissible racial gerrymandering, which is practically impossible in states where race and party affiliation are nearly identical.Alito also required that Section 2 plaintiffs draw a remedial map that could achieve a state’s other legitimate gerrymandering purposes, which can be pretextual in nature. In other words, if you want to succeed at a racial gerrymandering claim, you must provide the court with a map that generally does the same thing as the one you are trying to challenge. This is the same Justice Samuel Alito who describes himself as a textualist when it comes to interpreting statutes.It is important to state this clearly: To the Supreme Court’s conservative majority, the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause is not violated when a state legislature gerrymanders Black voters in the South out of political power, but rather when Congress uses the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to compel the states to redraw their racist maps. The Voting Rights Act, in other words, is the real racism in the high court’s eyes.Even with all these bad-faith constraints to nullify Section 2’s effects test, there still remained one safety valve: Plaintiffs could mount a direct challenge to a racially gerrymandered map on equal-protection grounds by arguing that it was enacted with discriminatory intent. This will be less effective than Section 2 as it was, of course: Kagan noted in her Callais dissent that states can readily concoct race-neutral pretexts for discriminatory maps, and Alito’s majority opinion reads like a how-to guide for concocting them. But I suppose it’s better than nothing.Now even that door is closed. Rick Hasen, a UCLA law professor who specializes in election law, noted on Tuesday night that the court’s new order effectively created an “unrebuttable presumption that a legislature is acting in good faith” so long as the state “can assert some pretextual non-racial reason for enacting its plan.” It’s worth noting that the three-judge panel on the district court included two Trump appointees.“Even if plaintiffs get past this new discriminatory intent barrier, the Court has now imported the Callais discriminatory effects test into a constitutional vote-dilution analysis,” Hasen explained. “So in these cases, plaintiffs will need to meet an impossible standard to prove effect, just as in a post-Callais Section 2 case, a standard which simply ignores the fact that when (white) Republicans discriminate against Democrats in the South, they are discriminating against Black voters.”Hasen speculates that Alito also wrote the four-page order in Milligan. To me, it reads more like Roberts taking a second pass at Alito’s clunky and obtuse writing in Callais. The order’s author dropped the partisan-gerrymandering nonsense that shaped Alito’s decision last month and distilled the case down to its essential elements: making it impossible to stop states from racially gerrymandering racial minorities out of power.Tuesday’s order also opens with a curious turn of phrase. The majority said it had taken up Callais “to resolve the tension between vote-dilution claims under [Section 2] and our colorblind Constitution.” First, no such tension existed. To the contrary, the tension is between states that want to gerrymander Black voters out of electoral influence and the Reconstruction Amendments that empower Congress to protect voting rights from state-level violations.The “colorblind” term is particularly pernicious. This appears to be the first time that the court’s conservatives have articulated its vision of the Constitution in those terms in a majority opinion. While a society that does not consider race is a powerful ideal, the Constitution’s antidiscrimination protections cannot function by pretending that racism does not exist—or, worse, by pretending that those who challenge it are the real racists. The Roberts court has achieved a colorblind Constitution by gouging out the eyes of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.Equally troubling is how the court balanced the equities here—in other words, how it decided whether or not to stay the lower court’s decision as a preliminary matter. When Alabama was ordered to redraw its legislative maps by the district court after the 2023 ruling, state lawmakers declined to draw a second majority-Black district—what Sotomayor calls an “opportunity district”—and adopted a new map without one. By effectively defying its original ruling, the district court then concluded that Alabama had met the threshold for an intentional discrimination claim—which is normally an extraordinary bar to clear—and imposed its own map for the 2024 election.In Tuesday’s ruling, the Supreme Court effectively rewarded Alabama’s defiance by letting it use the 2023 map—the revised one that ignored the lower court’s order—for the upcoming election (and, presumably, for the rest of the decade). What’s more, the court’s sudden post-Callais reversal could throw Alabama’s ongoing primary elections into chaos. “The State has no legitimate interest in enforcing an unconstitutional map, while vast harms will likely arise from upending the status quo, sowing chaos in Alabama, and rewarding Alabama’s gamesmanship,” Sotomayor said.Not so, says the majority. It chided the district court for ruling against Alabama because the judges “did not heed the presumption of legislative good faith because it interpreted the State’s legal disagreement with the court’s earlier remedial order as proof of discriminatory animus.” In the twentieth century, the Supreme Court rose to the occasion by standing up to Southern states that defied court rulings and the Reconstruction Amendments. Now it is a co-conspirator in their demolition.