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On May First—International Workers’ Day—people across the U.S. and the world joined rallies and other actions calling for “Workers over Billionaires.” In the U.S., workers organized over 4,000 May Day actions in big cities and small towns. They focused on three demands: tax the wealthy, no to ICE, and expand democracy, not corporate power.

There have been nearly 400 US military casualties in Operation Epic Fury so far.

Backlash to Flock cameras and AI systems is exploding after scandals, including police using the tech to stalk women.

The president has described a paused $14 billion weapons package for the self-governing island as a “negotiating chip” with China.

If you’ve read anything about the Democrats’ “autopsy” of its 2024 election loss, which was released Thursday after being suppressed for months, it probably highlighted what the report doesn’t include: any mention of Gaza, the Biden administration’s refusal to curb Israel’s genocidal war, or Kamala Harris’s mealymouthed efforts to triangulate a position after becoming the nominee in July. “There are 50,000 Words in the DNC Autopsy. ‘Gaza’ Isn’t One,” Mother Jones announced. The Intercept struck a similar note: “DNC Autopsy Doesn’t Mention Gaza or Israel At All.” On the other side of the aisle, National Review crowed about the omission: “DNC Autopsy Exposes the Left’s ‘Gaza’ Excuse as Nonsense.”“When it arrived in my inbox, I immediately clicked on it, used the search function, and searched for Gaza. Came up as zero,” Halie Soifer, the CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, told Politico. “Israel came up as zero, Jews came up as zero. I was surprised. It looks like there’s a huge omission.”Well, yes. The omission of Gaza, which played an important role in Harris’s disappointing showing with young voters, is appalling and suggests a party leadership still unwilling to reckon with the cost of the Biden administration’s support for Israel—or even to acknowledge just how far Democratic attitudes toward Israel have shifted in recent years. But the overriding focus on this one omission misses a more important point. The problem with the DNC autopsy isn’t just that it doesn’t mention Gaza. It’s that it ignores policy and, for that matter, politics—how policies are messaged, and what role they play in coalition building—altogether. It is a profoundly weird document that’s almost entirely concerned with fundraising and spending while devoting almost no space to issues, including the two most consequential ones: inflation and President Biden’s age and fitness. Those issues, though less morally stark than Gaza, were clearly decisive. And the autopsy ignores them. “The report’s so stupid, it’s hard to make sense why something’s in there and why it’s not,” one senior Democratic operative told Politico. It’s obvious why the DNC shelved the autopsy. It’s long yet incomplete, and utterly useless for its intended purpose: to show Democrats what they did wrong, so they don’t make the same mistakes in 2028. In a way, it’s actually worse than useless because the DNC’s clumsy attempt to suppress it became an unnecessary intraparty scandal in itself, making it seem to journalists and Democratic voters alike that some forbidden truth was being suppressed. In reality, the scandal is that this is the best the DNC could do to explain the party’s catastrophic loss in 2024, which set the country on a path of unimaginable corruption and authoritarian thuggery. There is a disclaimer early in the autopsy noting that “this document reflects the views of the author, not the DNC.” The first question should be obvious: If this isn’t the DNC’s view of what went wrong in 2024, then just what are we doing here? The second question is just as straightforward: Just who is the author? It’s Paul Rivera, a longtime Democratic strategist and friend of DNC Chair Ken Martin. He is also, as many people have noted, a fixture of New York’s notoriously corrupt and incompetent Democratic Party and worked as an aide for state Senator John Sampson, who was convicted on charges of obstruction of justice and lying to federal agents in 2015. (Rivera resigned shortly before Sampson’s arrest.) It’s not clear why Rivera was tapped for this important job, aside from the fact that he was available and seemingly willing to work for free. He hadn’t worked on a presidential campaign since John Kerry’s in 2004. Rivera clearly wasn’t up for the task, but the autopsy contains some critiques—mostly vague or incoherent—over voter targeting. It suggests that Trump’s anti-trans ad, “Kamala is for they/them, I am for you,” was especially effective, and observed that the Harris campaign didn’t do enough to try to capture rural voters. Mostly, though, it consists of platitudes, such as: “At times, it seems Democrats are trying to win arguments while Republicans are focused on winning elections. Democrats operate in an ecosystem defined by reason even in cycles when the electorate is defined by rage.”The right, the report claims, is “always on,” but Democrats are not. What does that mean? Here’s the report’s explanation: “The difference is right-wing interests take a longer-term approach and amplify polarizing messaging and candidates within the Democratic family with the intention of ‘othering’ all Democrats. Without aggressive pushback and tactics, it works.” You can look at aspects of the right-wing machine—Fox News certainly, and parts of the Koch machine—and nod along. This analysis isn’t wrong, exactly, but it’s outdated—the kind of thing every Democrat was wailing about during the George W. Bush presidency and early Obama years. It doesn’t capture the most dominant force in right-wing politics over the last decade: Donald Trump.To be clear, a report that reckoned with aspects of Democratic messaging and voter targeting, while also examining political and policy issues like Gaza, inflation, and Biden’s stubborn refusal to hold onto power, could be useful. One of the most peculiar aspects of this autopsy is that two of those issues—inflation and Biden—are now political advantages for Democrats, given that the current president is a decrepit Republican who’s directly responsible for a massive spike in inflation. This is the kind of observation that can give the DNC cover to delve into thornier questions, like what the party’s stance on Israel should be or how it can win back the young voters and people of color who voted for Trump in 2024. But that would have been too obvious a path for Ken Martin, it seems. He had to muck things up by handing this task to a party insider who predictably mailed it in, then he mucked things up even more by trying to squash the autopsy once he realized how slapdash and misguided it was. The document itself may be useless, but it has yielded one important lesson nonetheless: The DNC needs new leadership.

Private equity’s expansion into housing comes at the same time as Americans are increasingly struggling to afford rent.

After Donald Trump launched his war on Iran, a spirited debate broke out among a small set of public intellectuals over an unexpectedly relevant question: Is Trumpism dead? The case for Trumpism’s passing rested on the idea that the war is so contrary to his promises to the base that the movement can’t survive such a betrayal. The counterargument held, correctly, that Trumpism isn’t actually antiwar, and its deeper impulses within right-leaning America aren’t close to spent.But a bunch of recent events suggests that Trumpism as a broad ideological project has suddenly sustained a new kind of damage. The findings in this week’s poll from Fox News—a major institutional ally of Trumpism—combined with fresh levels of exasperation at Trump among GOP lawmakers leave little doubt: Some kind of new threshold has been crossed. The Fox poll’s most brutal finding is that Trump is losing major ground among both his most loyal constituencies and those he made surprise inroads with in 2024. On the former, Trump’s approval is underwater with working-class whites (46–54), rural voters (43–57), and even white men (48–52). On the latter, he’s tanking among young voters (31–69), Latinos (33–67), and working-class voters of all races (40–60), suggesting he’s squandered his gains with nonwhite working people entirely.His numbers on the economy are even worse. Only 29 percent of voters approve of his handling of it, while an extraordinary 71 percent disapprove. On inflation it’s an eye-popping 24–76. All his aforementioned core voter groups disapprove of Trump’s economic performance, as well—in very large majorities.Just look at Fox’s write-up of its poll. It reports that Trump’s disapproval is at a “new high,” while even noting that he has slipped underwater on border security. It takes note of sudden new jumps in the percentages who disapprove of Trump on the economy and reports candidly on precipitous declines among base voter groups. That’s as close as Fox will ever come to admitting that Trump is in collapse. As Media Matters’s Matt Gertz, who closely follows Fox, tells me, this is “certainly the most devastating Fox News poll of this presidency” and “portrays a presidency in free fall.”Now look at what’s happening inside the GOP. At a private lunch Thursday, many Republican senators unloaded angrily on acting Attorney General Todd Blanche over Trump’s new $1.8 billion slush fund. They questioned the legality of the fund—which will hand out taxpayer money to Trump allies, including the January 6 rioters, pursuant to a corrupt “settlement” of his lawsuit against the IRS. Some Republicans objected to giving taxpayer money to January 6ers who attacked police officers.This comes just after Republicans dropped their quest to give Trump $1 billion in taxpayer money for his ballroom. And House Republicans just shelved a vote on a measure to end his Iran war because they lacked the votes to defeat it. These too saw serious GOP defections from Trump.What ties all this together? It’s this: Republicans probably wouldn’t be standing up to Trump so aggressively if his approval were in the mid-40s or higher, if his economic standing weren’t dropping so precipitously, and if his war weren’t destroying the global economy.But there’s an even deeper connecting thread here. In recent days, Trump has crowed about his ousting of disloyal Republicans via his backing of primary challenges to them. He has succeeded at that. But suddenly, that’s not cowing the GOP into doing his bidding. Trump’s primary-success boasts are meant to strike fear into GOP lawmakers: He can still turn the MAGA base against them on a whim with a twitch of his Truth Social thumbs. Yet terror of the base apparently weighs less heavily on Republicans when party actors come to genuinely fear the broader electorate outside the MAGA bubble—as evidenced by their apparent belief that Trump’s ballroom, his corrupt slush fund for January 6ers, and even his war are growing too toxic for them to bear.It’s no accident that this comes as Trump is hemorrhaging support from both base groups and 2024 converts. To be a viable political project, Trumpism likely needs a combination of hypercharged core voters (the low-engagement Americans directly energized by Trump and only Trump) and non-MAGA voters sporadically attracted to him by economic dissatisfaction and his lingering cultural aura.Yet it now looks plausible that these constituencies can’t hold together in a plurality coalition—let alone a majority one—under the conditions unleashed by Trumpist governing. Recent events drive this home with fresh clarity: It’s precisely the conditions wrought by the policies most associated with Trumpism and “America First” nationalism that are alienating voters the most. The American carnage, as it were, is all around us, from the tariffs (which are meant to rebuild domestic manufacturing and disentangle us from globalization) to the war (which is designed to reestablish American imperial power while shrugging off liberal internationalist obligations). As a result, voters aren’t merely alienated by the damage wrought by “America First” nationalism. This week’s Times poll finds that 63 percent want to remain in NATO too, perhaps illustrating that voters are rediscovering why we should value our international alliances, not discard them.Meanwhile, Trump’s mass deportations (which in the Trumpist program are consciously designed as an ethno-nationalist purging of the nation) have driven him deep underwater on his “best” issue of immigration. Stephen Miller, once drunk with hubris, was certain he could awaken the American majority’s latent racial nationalism. Now, having reminded many Americans why they like immigrants, his influence has withered.Add to all this the sudden GOP willingness to buck Trump on his ballroom and his January 6 slush fund. Trump’s glorious monuments to himself, his self-enrichment, and his dispensing of the spoils of corruption to the MAGA paramilitary wing are supposed to be untouchable for Republicans—manifestations of his mystical bond with Trumpist America. But now, even among some GOP lawmakers, Trump’s aura as a tribune of the Real People—another core MAGA myth—is breaking down. It’s far too optimistic to conclude that Trumpism is dying. But its principal tenets and mythologies appear to be getting badly discredited, putting the whole project in considerable jeopardy. By demanding absolute fealty to his Nero-like obsessions, his bottomless self-dealing, his floundering economic nationalism, and his world-historical delusions about U.S. military might, Trump is shrinking MAGA down to its molten core. Yet there’s a whole universe of American voters outside of it—and in a truly startling revelation, it turns out that they matter too.