House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Maryland Governor Wes Moore, and a long list of other powerful figures in the party spent last winter and spring begging Maryland’s state legislature to further gerrymander the state to make up for Republican moves in Texas and other GOP strongholds. But Maryland state Senate President Bill Ferguson, a Democrat, not only balked at moving forward on the gerrymandering but refused to even hold a vote. By March, the redistricting proposal was dead, and party leaders huffed and puffed but moved on. Last night, we saw the opposite of that docile approach—and, unfortunately, it worked for Republicans. President Trump pushed super-hard for Indiana Republicans to redistrict. Party leaders there felt compelled to hold a vote on redistricting, but surprisingly a slew of Republican state senators joined their Democratic colleagues to block it. That vote provided Trump names. Eight of the Republican state senators who opposed the redistricting were up for reelection this year. Trump endorsed primary challengers to seven of them. And on Tuesday, five of the seven lost to their Trump-backed rivals; some of the incumbents were resoundingly defeated. Another primary is currently too close to call. Just one has been declared the winner of his race. The good news is that the results of Indiana show that the Republican Party is really a cult of Trump—so Republican candidates will be reluctant to distance themselves from an increasingly unpopular president and therefore might lose winnable races this November and in two years. The bad news, though, is that the results in Indiana show that the Republican Party is a cult of Trump—so Supreme Court justices, governors, state legislatures, congresspeople, and even rank-and-file GOP voters will keep falling in line with the whims of our wannabe dictator. America’s conflicts today pit a pro-democracy party against one that is anti-democratic. The Democrats are the morally superior entity. But I worry that today’s conflicts also pit a party that will do anything to win against one that doesn’t fully understand that it’s in a zero-sum, existential fight over what kind of country the United States will be. Over the last week, Republicans on the U.S. Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, Florida Republicans rapidly gerrymandered their districts to potentially win four more seats, Republican governors and legislatures quickly mobilized to implement the VRA ruling and eliminate Democratic-leaning districts in their states, and the Republicans on the Supreme Court blessed one of those hurried redistricting moves after ruling for years that states couldn’t change their electoral procedures when an election is near. And now in Indiana, Trump and Republican voters have again forced dissidents out of the party, as they did to Liz Cheney and others over the last decade who broke with the president. April 21, when Virginia Democrats pushed through their own redistricting referendum, seems a distant memory right now. Even more so because the Virginia Supreme Court so far has refused to overturn an injunction that declared the referendum invalid. There is growing concern that the court will ultimately rule against the referendum. That would give Republicans a seven-seat advantage gained through redistricting, according to Ballotpedia. And more seats could come if the GOP further gerrymanders Louisiana, Alabama, and Tennessee, which seems entirely possible. This is an abomination. House elections are often a check on incumbent presidents. But Trump, instead of taking the democratic course of either pushing a more popular agenda or accepting defeat, insisted on his party redrawing congressional districts to ensure a GOP majority. This is straight out of the authoritarian playbook. Unfortunately, it may work, because the entire party has joined him in this effort. Meanwhile, Democrats have struggled to catch up. In some states, the party pushed independent redistricting commissions that seemed like good democratic behavior at the time but now resemble unilateral disarmament. And in states like Illinois and the aforementioned Maryland, Democratic officials simply refused to gerrymander, either not understanding the huge stakes of this year’s House elections or not having the nerve to do anything about it. Indiana isn’t a story of successful gerrymandering. But it is a story of successful partisanship and party leadership. Trump just ended the careers of five politicians he probably hadn’t heard of a year ago. I don’t like the idea of party bosses. But what makes me really discouraged is being on the side of a party that doesn’t have effective bosses against one that does. There is a silver lining though. Trump will be emboldened by the results in Indiana. He will keep making Republicans defend whatever he does, such as stuffing funding for the White House ballroom into a budget bill moving through Congress this week. And Trump’s approval rating continues to sink, potentially plunging to post-Katrina lows of George W. Bush at the end of his second term. Even if Republicans are super-effective at gerrymandering, a very unpopular president creates the possibility of a big House majority and a slim Democratic Senate majority this November and a Democratic landslide in the 2028 presidential election. So Tuesday was a short-term victory for Trump. But it might be a long-term defeat for the Republican Party.
The following is a lightly edited transcript of the May 6 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.Donald Trump’s allies are privately warning that the GOP is in serious trouble in the midterms. Politico reports that Trump’s obsessions with his vanity projects, like his ballroom, are distracting from the economic message that Republicans think is necessary to stave off a bloodbath. So what did Trump do this week? Well, he managed to get Republicans to seek $1 billion in taxpayer money for the ballroom. He also rambled bizarrely about his support with MAGA voters, as if that somehow will matter in the midterms. Trump simply does not have any conception of public service, of the presidency as an institution that belongs to the people. Is that itself becoming a huge liability for the GOP?We’re talking about all this with political scientist Tom Schaller, who has a new piece for the Public Notice Substack on Trump’s vanity presidency. Tom, good to have you on.Tom Schaller: Great to be back, Greg.Sargent: So I just want to start with something Trump said today about his polling and his public support. Listen to this.Donald Trump (voiceover): I am, according to CNN, 100 percent approval within the Republican Party. That’s almost—that’s better than your record. I’m at 100 percent approval. Do you see the CNN poll? Nobody talks about it. CNN—I think the people that did that poll probably got fired—but within the Republican Party and MAGA, which is basically 100 percent of the party, I think. 100 percent.Sargent: Tom, the Republican Party is not actually 100 percent MAGA. Many Republicans are non-MAGA and a non-trivial swath of them disapprove of Trump’s various policies. But more important, MAGA support won’t be nearly enough for Republicans to survive the midterms. Yet here, Trump appears unable to process that thought because only his supporters exist. Your thoughts on that?Schaller: I mean, as the kids say today, he’s delulu. Greg, I mean, he has no concept of what’s going on, or worse, he knows what’s going on and he’s trying to spin things. I mean, that’s actually the more charitable view—that his tutelage under Roy Cohn is that you never admit defeat, you never say you’re wrong, you always put the shine on the bright side of everything, and you fake the numbers. We know he inflates all kinds of percentages and makes up gas prices—lower when he’s in charge, higher when somebody else is in charge. But part of the problem—I think, on a more serious note, aside from his delusional attitudes about things and beliefs in himself—is that unlike the first term, we had some serious people recommended to him that worked for him, including all the way up to chief of staff and top advisors. He’s completely surrounded by yes-women and yes-men. And all they do is praise him and tell him how amazing he is. And so you wonder if bad news even gets through anymore to him because nobody has the fortitude to say, hey, Mr. President, this is not polling well, or you’ve made a bad decision here, or here’s what they’re saying in the news. And so I don’t know. It must be piercing somehow because he’s online at 2, 3 in the morning. But maybe his feed is such that it’s just nothing but praise.Sargent: Well, that gets to something I want to ask you about. Politico reports that some of Trump’s closest allies fear that his efforts to stage events around the economy are failing for a number of reasons. One of them is that Trump’s tendency to talk about his imperial projects, like the White House ballroom and the victory arch, is muddying the economic contrast that Republicans think must be drawn with Democrats. The report says Republicans are increasingly anxious and think the House is basically lost. Tom, what’s funny is you don’t hear Republicans attach their name to the idea that the ballroom talk is bad for them, precisely because the cult leader won’t allow it. And yet the slavish devotion to Trump is itself killing them. Can you talk about this weird dynamic? I haven’t seen anything quite like it.Schaller: Yeah, it’s like they’re willing to go down with the Titanic on this guy because they’re so petrified of him and his voters. But when these issues are turning against him, it doesn’t make any sense for them to jump on board with these sort of vanity projects and stapling his name to everything. For all the talk about how inflation and the price of things matter—and it does, and I’m not saying it’s unimportant—I remember telling people very early on in 2025, I’m like, these kinds of things like tearing down a whole chunk of the White House—it’s not really a vanity thing, although it’s a selfish thing, like tearing down Rob Reiner after his murder. Those things are—I call them like V8 politics. Like, you don’t have to understand what the donut hole problem is in the Social Security funding for people born between 1935 and 1937 to have an opinion about Rob Reiner, whose movies you probably love. And you don’t have to be an expert in the FICA taxes and how they fund Social Security and Medicare to understand that a president coming in and just tearing down the White House as if it’s his personal property at Mar-a-Lago—these things resonate in a way that turn people against you as a person. They sour you not just on a president, but make you look like a malicious, selfish, vain person, which is exactly who he is.Sargent: Tom, I think for that reason that you identified there, the ballroom has actually gotten tremendous penetration in the culture. It’s really the perfect symbol of Trump’s megalomania and sort of the state of things in the country right now. Now, I want to remind everyone that there was a moment where some Democrats called it a distraction and said they wouldn’t talk about it, they’d only talk about affordability. I think that’s a big mistake. Things like the ballroom punch through to low-information voters in a way that virtually nothing else does. And Democrats need to beat the living shit out of Trump over the ballroom day in and day out, in my view.Schaller: I agree 100 percent, Greg. To me, these moments hearken back to, say, the 1992 presidential debate where George H.W. Bush, then the incumbent president, is answering economic questions and Clinton is killing him in that little town hall debate. And they catch George H.W. Bush looking at his watch, which—it’s just a nonverbal. It has nothing to do with whether he’s a good president, whether he’s managed the Gulf War well, how well he’s doing on the economy, a very shallow and short recession. It just indicates that he literally doesn’t care. I think people are starting—including MAGA people—to figure out that this presidency is all about him and it’s not about the voters. And so to your point, it’s not either/or, it’s not a mutually exclusive choice. They can talk about the price of gas and affordability and the fact that Trump, after 10 years, tells us he doesn’t even have concepts of a healthcare plan other than repeal and replace Obamacare, which is working very well. It’s that he’s so focused on this other stuff. So yeah, it’s only a billion dollars in a $7 trillion budget—that’s one seven-thousandth. You can say these are pennies on a dollar, and it is a billion dollars for a ballroom. But it’s what the message sends—that he’s got more time to talk about this than he has to talk about everyday Americans’ lives. And it reinforces the idea that the presidency for him is all about him. And it’s not a job to serve the American public and do what’s best for the people of the United States.Sargent: Yeah. And if you think about low-information voters, for them, it’s these little symbolic things that really carry a lot of resonance. And you can kind of see why that’s the case. They’re not obsessing over politics the way you and I are. They’re catching little glimpses of it here and there on their phone, on the TV, maybe between shows that they’re watching, whatever. It’s not easy for people to interpret politics to the degree that you and I try to. Schaller: So for the 90 percent of voters who are Democrats or Republicans or lean heavily toward one party or the other, policy doesn’t matter even if they’re familiar with it. But for the 10 percent in the middle—these are people who don’t vote in primaries, they only vote in presidentials, they’re very tuned out to policy, they don’t even understand what the parties have in their platforms, they can’t really measure objectively the performance or the relevance of a particular bill. The vast majority of voters going into 2024 had not heard of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act or his stimulus package or anything else he had done. And those voters, as you point out, they vote on optics. They vote on little clips. And they vote on things like, this guy’s trying to put his name and face on everything that he can get his hands on.Sargent: Right. And we’ve got Republicans in Congress now seeking one billion dollars in taxpayer money to pay for the ballroom—though the money’s supposed to only fund security elements of it. Trump and Karoline Leavitt had previously said it would be paid for 100 percent by donors. Republicans are just shackling themselves to this megalomania, which is a strange spectacle indeed, Tom.Schaller: He’s lost everybody that doesn’t wear a red hat. And I think he’s lost a lot of them, particularly those in the middle—the soft Republicans, moderate Republicans, and the people in the middle who aren’t hard partisans—because they look at a billion dollars and they say, he’s got time for that, but he doesn’t have time to solve healthcare. He’s got time to put his name on the passport, but he doesn’t have time to lower prices, which he said he would do on day one. He’s got time to build a 250-foot arch, but he doesn’t have time to figure out the price of gas and the price of groceries and the price of eggs, as was the big issue in 2024. He’s focused on all the wrong things because he’s focused mostly on himself and only himself.Sargent: Well, we had a Washington Post poll that found 56 percent of Americans oppose the ballroom and only 28 percent support it. Sixty-one percent of independents oppose it, which is really something. Now, 65 percent of Republicans support the ballroom. At first glance, I read that and I thought, well, okay, this really shows that the base is with Trump. And that’s kind of true, but 65 percent isn’t that big actually. So there’s a fairly non-trivial swath of Republican voters out there—again, the non-MAGA types—who also look at the ballroom and say to themselves, holy shit, this is just a complete disaster.Schaller: I guess the good news is he can’t go any lower, if you’re his top advisors and you’re Susie Wiles or Karoline Leavitt. And I suppose he could bounce back. Presidents usually don’t bounce back—usually their poll numbers do not recover, barring a major crisis. I mean, this is a guy who’s trying to capitalize on an attempted assassination, even though it wasn’t really close. The guy was taken down a floor away and his numbers haven’t moved. There’s no empathy or sympathy left for Trump because I think he’s exhausted whatever reserves he had from January 20th, 2025. They’re gone now. It only took him 16 months to exhaust everybody who doesn’t wear a red hat.Sargent: So what’s the upshot of this? Is there data out there that supports the general idea that Trump’s megalomania—the imperial presidency, as it were—is itself actually backfiring at this point?Schaller: Yeah, I think you already cited the ballroom opposition. There was a poll from YouGov about Trump’s face on the passport and 62 percent of Americans say they wouldn’t want his face on their passport. And I’m curious to see what happens with this 250-foot arch that he’s planning for Northern Virginia. When he was asked about it, they said, what is this designed to commemorate? And he gave his favorite one-word answer: me. And I think as people start to tune into that, they’re going to realize that this sort of vanity presidency is not what they voted for him for. They voted for him to fix inflation. And even though he ran on two inflationary policies—A, run out all the immigrants who provide cheap labor to keep the cost of domestic goods down, and B, tariffs, which raise the price on all imported goods—I often wonder who’s dumber: Donald Trump running against inflation with two inflationary policies, or the people who voted for him thinking he was going to solve inflation with two inflationary policies. He promised all these day-one things—he was going to solve Gaza-Israel, he was going to solve the energy bills. And he hasn’t done any of it. And people gave him a little bit of time through the summer. He’s 16 months in now and he hasn’t accomplished any of that. And he’s actually created new problems in Iran, as you well know. And it seems like he’s very, very distracted with trying to leave all these legacy footprints—of him and statues and pictures and images and the Kennedy Center and the new airport in West Palm Beach. It probably doesn’t take a lot of time, between you and me, to order some toady to go down and lean on the FAA to change the name to DJT, Donald J. Trump Airport, in South Florida. But it’s the optics of it. It’s like, he’s got time for that, but he doesn’t have time for me and my family.Sargent: So in your piece, which talked about the vanity presidency as a thing, you got into the larger historical context here. You discussed how we’ve had really corrupt presidents. We’ve had really inept ones. We’ve had nasty bastard ones and so forth. You went through the whole litany of bad presidential qualities, as it were, and concluded that Trump is something special. Can you talk about that?Schaller: Yeah. So I start off with sort of the superficial stuff, which we already covered—and I will repeat: the naming things, putting his name and tacky gold leaf on everything, lying about, you know, his golf championships and all the other stuff that he does. That’s just about me, me, me and how great I am and bragging about his big brain and his incredible memory. And everybody agrees I’m one of the most genius people. He’s now apparently comparing himself to Caesar and Alexander the Great, as literally the most influential and powerful person ever to draw breath on the planet—this nonstop breaking his own arm to pat himself on the back.But I dig in in the middle of the piece, as you know, Greg, and I take a more serious angle to this. Because the problem with Trump’s megalomania, the problem with his narcissism, the problem with his vanity, is that because he needs these people to tell him in every cabinet meeting how special and great and smart he is, he begins to believe that he’s invulnerable. He begins to believe he’s the smartest person on every topic. He literally believes he’s the smartest person on every topic in every room. And that’s starting to backfire now because he’s so dumb he couldn’t figure out what a teenage first-night player of Stratego could figure out, which is that Iran was going to block the Strait of Hormuz as their one and only ace in the hole.Sargent: There’s also just a different conception of the presidency at work here. Obviously, previous presidents have been corrupt. They’ve been warmongers. They’ve been incompetent and so forth. But this is a level of, I guess, personalist rule that I think is hard to find a parallel with. Isn’t that right, Tom? We’re talking about someone who just on some really fundamental level doesn’t see his role as serving the public in a large sense. They’re really only his supporters and him, and that’s it. Not only does no one else exist, but those parts of the country are to be punished and beaten down and denied basic services and otherwise crucified really. Can you talk about this conception of the presidency, the personal conception of it?Schaller: Yeah, the other half of this coin—besides, like, everybody praise me, everybody tell me how great I am, let me put my name on every building, every airport I can pin down—is the negative side of this that you allude to, which is remember Trump ran this time as: I am your retribution. He framed it that way. Vote for me to get retribution against the liberals and the woke. And to be fair, he has gone after universities. He has gone after intellectuals and expertise in general. He has gone after science. He has gone after the media. So he has gotten some retribution for what his MAGA meatheads love and devour voraciously. But if you pay attention to what he’s really doing—if you look at how he’s twisted the Department of Justice in particular to go after James Comey, to go after Letitia James—that doesn’t put any extra money in anybody’s pocket. That doesn’t lower the price of eggs. That doesn’t make healthcare more affordable. That doesn’t lower the price of gas.What he really meant—though he was very clever, because he’s a great con man, in phrasing it—he said, you’re my retribution. The voters are his retribution for all the perceived ills of the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax and the supposedly stolen election and every other enemy on his list.Sargent: You know, that’s really interesting. In other words, when he said, I am your retribution, what he really meant is all the voters, the entire electorate, is merely an instrument in his personal drama.Schaller: Exactly. Like he views everybody instrumentally. I don’t think we need to work our way through that—that’s very clear. And everything for Donald Trump is transactional, and those transactions are always asymmetric. You praise me, you support me, you bow to me, you give me what I need. And then I never return the favor. It’s amazing how many Republicans have not learned the lesson that no matter how much loyalty you give, how much praise, he never reciprocates. Right? And even when he endorses people, he endorses so he can say he won or he endorses because he needs their vote. Everything is instrumental. Everything is selfish. And like I said, he was very clever about framing it as, I’m going to be like this vehicle, this vessel in which you pour all your animosities and angers and hatred, and I’m going to exact retribution against immigrants and liberals and trans people and wokism and pronouns and whatever else you’re mad about in middle America that you think retribution is going to make your life somehow better, even though it doesn’t. And he’s done some of that, to be fair, but most of his retribution has been done on a very private and personal level with his own personal agenda.Sargent: Well, as you said, Republicans don’t seem to be getting the message. They don’t seem capable of understanding any of this. But there really is only one group of people who can deliver this message to Republicans, and that’s voters in the midterms. Tom Schaller, really great to talk to you. Thanks so much for coming on.Schaller: Great to be here, Greg. Thanks so much.
On Monday, President Trump gathered more than 100 small-business leaders in the East Wing of the White House to take a victory lap. His return to the White House had resulted in “record business,” he said. The tax and regulatory cuts in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the legislative centerpiece of his second term, were already a huge success. The economy was “roaring.” Everything was going phenomenally, unbelievably, historically well. It didn’t take long for Trump’s own allies to start sniping to the media. Within a few hours, Politico reported that some of the president’s advisers were rolling their eyes at his comments. Touting the economy was simply not going to cut it as a message to win the midterms, they said. “Everybody is pretty realistic about the fact that holding the House is going to be extremely difficult,” said one person granted anonymity. “Every day the war goes on, every day gas prices hover around five bucks, it makes it less and less likely, and it’s already very unlikely.” That’s more or less right. Thanks to Trump’s war in Iran, the average price of a gallon of gas nationwide is nearly $4.50, up from about $3.15 a year ago, and indeed is hovering around $5 in some Upper Midwest and West Coast states. This comes after the president’s tariffs had already caused a massive spike in prices. Though some of those tariffs were invalidated by the Supreme Court, Trump continues to push new ones: Last week, he announced a 25 percent tax on cars and trucks from the European Union. Trump is stuck in a quagmire in Iran, and he knows it. That’s why he announced a “Project Freedom” on Sunday to help the roughly 1,550 ships stranded in the Persian Gulf to pass through Strait of Hormuz, the vital shipping lane that Iran effectively closed when the U.S. began bombing the country in late February. His “war” secretary, Pete Hegseth, claimed on Tuesday to have set up a “red, white, and blue” dome over the strait, but there’s no indication of a big uptick in maritime traffic. Two Navy destroyers pushed through the strait on Monday, and as of Tuesday only a few stranded ships had made it through—which might explain why Trump on Tuesday evening announced that he was pausing Project Freedom.It’s no surprise, then, that a barrel of crude oil is still trading north of $100, compared to $60 a year ago. And even if the strait—through which about a quarter of the world’s oil and gas supply passes—partially reopens and oil prices drop, it may be months before prices at the gas pump follow suit. As The New York Times explained in early April, a day after the U.S. and Iran announced a ceasefire, “There’s a saying in the energy industry that explains how the cost of gasoline behaves: It goes up like a rocket, but down like a feather.” Plus, the strait’s closure isn’t the only supply problem: The war has caused the destruction of dozens of oil and gas facilities throughout the Middle East. It’s hardly just the U.S. that’s suffering the economic consequences of Trump’s war. In fact, that U.S. has been more insulated from its effects than most other countries, thanks to being a major oil producer itself and being on relatively solid economic footing this year. “The fallout from two months of war in Iran is shuttering textile mills in India and Bangladesh, grounding airplanes in Ireland, Poland and Germany, and prompting energy rationing in Vietnam, South Korea and Thailand,” the Times reported last week, noting that “warning signs of a recession are flashing across countries in Asia and Europe.” Asian countries, in particular, are facing fuel shortages.How does this end? Trump’s options in Iran, as I wrote last week, are extremely limited and mostly terrible. He could restart the war. Iran appears to be trying to goad him into doing just that by firing missiles at Navy destroyers and at the United Arab Emirates. But Trump, whose fear of lengthy, boots-on-the-ground conflicts is one of his few consistently held beliefs, is hesitant to re-escalate. The Pentagon said Iran’s attacks this week do not violate the ceasefire, which seems obviously false at face value. And so, Trump is left with his second option: continue to blockade Iran in retaliation for Iran’s closure of the strait. Trump is trying to inflict enough pain on Iran—and perhaps, enough on the world, so that the few nations that count Iran as an ally can beg it to relent—in a short enough window to somehow avert global economic catastrophe. Obviously, that is is also a terrible option. It effectively amounts to playing a giant game of chicken that could wreck the global economy. Trump appears convinced—or wants to appear convinced—that Iran will cave before the U.S. does, either due to economic pressure or, perhaps, the resumption of bombing. He hinted on Monday that the U.S. would have little choice but to retaliate after Iran’s missile strikes. “I call it a mini war,” he told the small-business leaders, and also called it a “little detour.” But it’s unclear how such a move, which Trump is already admitting would be short-lived, would somehow change Iran’s calculus. The only military action that seems likely to force Iran’s hand would be exactly what Trump fears: a lengthy war involving the deployment of ground troops, either en masse or in highly risky, targeted operations aimed at retrieving Iran’s stockpile of uranium. There is a third option, not that Trump acknowledges it: The United States could negotiate an end to the war, a process that would almost certainly involve the unfreezing of billions (likely tens of billions) of dollars in assets in exchange for an end to the nuclear deal. It would, in short, be similar to the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. The Iranian negotiators have put something like it on the table. There’s just one problem: Trump has railed against the JCPOA for years, because the Obama administration did it, and he canceled it upon assuming office in 2018. A zero-sum negotiator, Trump is not at all interested in deals that involve a give and take—and is especially not interested in this one, where the U.S. would almost certainly be considered the loser given the astronomical costs of the war. So this may well be our status quo for a while: an “open” but still effectively closed Strait of Hormuz, tit-for-tat missile strikes that we’re told are not acts of war, and the grinding economic pain of high energy and fertilizer prices, with no end in sight. But games of chicken do end eventually. Either one of the combatants pulls up short, or it ends in catastrophic mutual destruction.
President Donald Trump is obsessed these days with reshaping Washington, D.C., in his own image. He demolished the White House’s East Wing and plans to build a grandiose ballroom atop it. He wants to build a massive triumphal arch on the road between Arlington National Cemetery and the Lincoln Memorial—ostensibly to honor the troops, but, according to Trump, to actually honor him. Giant banners with his face now hang from several federal buildings, and he has affixed his name to the Institute of Peace and the Kennedy Center. The U.S. Mint plans to issue a coin bearing his image, defying a statutory ban on adding living people to U.S. currency, while the State Department plans to issue a select number of passports bearing his grim visage.Of these many projects, one of them constantly fascinates me: the National Garden of American Heroes. Trump first pitched the concept of a park featuring statutes of more than two hundred prominent Americans in an executive order in the tumultuous summer of 2020. It went unpursued during the Biden administration, but has received new attention during Trump’s second term. Of all his plans to physically reshape the capital, this one is on the firmest footing, both legally and financially: Congress last year appropriated the whopping sum of $40 million to complete it. According to a New York Times account over the weekend, Trump now plans to place 250 statues on a piece of parkland near the National Mall used for public recreation and sports, with the first ones placed by the 250th anniversary of American independence this July.The proposed garden is a perfect window into how Trump’s presidency has largely failed. Like many of his initiatives, this one appears to have begun with something he saw on TV. Activists tore down multiple statues across the country during the George Floyd protests in 2020, typically as part of a broader reckoning over racial injustice in American history. Trump, who opposed the protests, apparently concluded that the best solution would be to build more statues.“My Administration will not abide an assault on our collective national memory,” he declared in the 2020 executive order. “In the face of such acts of destruction, it is our responsibility as Americans to stand strong against this violence, and to peacefully transmit our great national story to future generations through newly commissioned monuments to American heroes.”Trump’s list of “American heroes” is eclectic, to say the least—but not entirely as controversial as you’d imagine. Many of the statues would depict people who would undoubtedly be included if any other president had proposed this. There are astronauts like Neil Armstrong, inventors like Thomas Edison, explorers like Amelia Earhart and Lewis and Clark, and artists like Elvis Presley, Mark Twain, and Whitney Houston. A clear majority of the honorees are people that Americans first learn about in elementary school.Plenty of early Americans and colonial founders would get a plinth. Christopher Columbus—a frequent target of statue vandals, and one of Trump’s preferred selectees—gets one despite never setting foot on U.S. soil. So do early patriots like Samuel Adams, Paul Revere, and Crispus Attucks. Betsy Ross gets a statue for designing the American flag, while Francis Scott Key gets one for writing a song about it. Multiple Founding Fathers are included, as well as three First Ladies. A healthy dose of Americana is also present. Johnny Appleseed, or at least the historical figure upon whom the fables were based, gets a statute. So does Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, James Fenimore Cooper, Annie Oakley, and Buffalo Bill Cody. The Wright brothers are each honored. Bob Hope, Laura Ingalls Wilder, and John Wayne are included as well. It is fitting that this tableau includes Norman Rockwell as well, since it almost seems to evoke the mid-twentieth century cultural iconography that he helped evangelize.Statesmen abound, as they always do with things like this. Seventeen presidents are named, including the likely suspects (George Washington and Thomas Jefferson) and less likely ones (Grover Cleveland and Calvin Coolidge). Prominent Democrats like Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and John F. Kennedy made the cut, as did Ronald Reagan. Among the Supreme Court justices honored are both Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Henry Clay would get a statute, but not his fellow triumvirs Daniel Webster or (perhaps for the best) John C. Calhoun.The most striking additions, given the Trump administration’s later turns on racial justice, are the wealth of civil-rights heroes. Obvious choices like Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, and Frederick Douglass are honored. So too are C.T. Vivian, a founding figure in the Black fraternity movement, and founding-era writer Phillis Wheatley. Civil-rights activist Medgar Evers, Nixon impeachment leader Barbara Jordan, three Black NASA scientists depicted in the film Hidden Figures, and multiple prominent Black artists would get statues.The choices for sailors and soldiers are also better than one might expect. The Trump administration has previously paid tribute to Confederate rebels and restored honors to nineteenth-century U.S. troops who committed war crimes. No such flaws can be found here. The list ranges from celebrated generals of America’s major wars before 1945 to underrepresented figures like Prince Estabrook, a free Black man who fought at Lexington and Concord, and Grace Hopper, a Navy admiral and pioneering computer programmer. More than a few Union Army heroes are honored, while Robert E. Lee was rightfully skipped.Some choices, on the other hand, likely reflect the quirks and ideological vision of the White House aides who presumably drafted the original list. A few picks, for example, appear tilted toward honoring a particular vision of twentieth-century American conservatism. Barry Goldwater, William F. Buckley, Jr., Russell Kirk, and Clare Boothe Luce get statutes, as do House Un-American Activities Committee witnesses Whittaker Chambers and Elia Kazan.Anti-abortion activist Nellie Gray is honored for founding the annual March for Life. Milton Friedman somehow gets a statue as well. Jeane Kirkpatrick, a Reagan-era diplomat who often criticized the United Nations, is among the more obscure choices. In fairness, a Democratic White House that drafted such a list would likely make choices that conservatives probably wouldn’t. William Rehnquist would be swapped out for Earl Warren in a heartbeat, for example.There is also a predilection for twentieth-century pop-culture figures that feels strangely selective on its own terms and ill-fitting for the project in general. Among the Hollywood figures who would be recognized are Shirley Temple, Lauren Bacall, Ingrid Bergman, Humphrey Bogart, Alfred Hitchcock, Charlton Heston, and Frank Capra. They are accomplished actors and directors, to be sure, but one gets the impression that Trump was just naming to staffers his personal favorites from when he was a young man.In other cases, Trump’s lack of personal attention is keenly felt. Of the more than a dozen American religious figures on the list, at least eight of them are Catholic saints and clergy. Some are recognizable names like Junipero Serra, a Spanish missionary who played a major role in California history, or Elizabeth Ann Seton, a founding-era leader of Catholic education who became the first American saint. Others are fairly esoteric, like a Native American saint named Kateri Tekakwitha who died roughly two hundred years before the Declaration of Independence was signed.Catholics have contributed greatly to this nation’s history, of course, but the overall composition of the selected religious leaders is a little unbalanced. Mormon leader Joseph Smith, abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher, and Black Methodist founder Richard Allen were omitted, to name a few. The only rabbi so honored is Alexander Goode, who was selected along with the other three of the Four Chaplains who died in World War II. Reading through this part of the list is like hearing someone say the greatest sluggers of all time are Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle, and Aaron Judge. Solid choices, but they say more about the fan—or, perhaps, the White House aides—than the sport.Speaking of athletes, there is a strong preference towards baseball. Lou Gehrig, Babe Ruth, Cy Young, and Roberto Clemente would be recognized, as would Jackie Robinson, who broke the sport’s color barrier. His inclusion on the list suggests that the Pentagon’s shameful move to erase Robinson’s wartime service last year was not a top-down initiative from the White House—or, at minimum, from Trump himself. Gridiron football is represented by Native American athlete Jim Thorpe and longtime Green Bay Packers head coach Vince Lombardi, while hockey gets Herb Brooks, who oversaw the Miracle on Ice team in the 1980 Olympics. Jesse Owens and Muhammad Ali also made the cut.Perhaps the single most baffling inclusion in the entire list is basketball’s sole representative. Among the planned statutes would be one of Kobe Bryant, who died in a helicopter crash in 2020. The best-case scenario here is that the aides who drafted the list felt obligated to choose a basketball player after recognizing the nation’s other three top sports and couldn’t think of a better one at the time. Bill Russell died two years after the original order came out; it probably wouldn’t be too late to make a quick substitution for someone more worthy of the honor.What is most remarkable about the list is how relatively uncontroversial most of the names are. About 80 percent of the names would likely show up on a similar list drafted by the Obama or Biden White Houses. Some of the choices—naturalist John Muir, labor leader Samuel Gompers, pacifist lawmaker Jeanette Rankin, various Native American chiefs, early feminist activists, and a racially diverse group of artists—reflect a much broader vision for America, both demographically and ideologically, than is usually found from the MAGA worldview.This is not an endorsement of this project, of course. The capital does not really need statues of most of these people. More than a few of them, like King and most of the presidents, are already honored elsewhere in D.C. at their respective memorial sites. Others were good Americans who can be better recognized in other ways. My own personal admiration of former Jeopardy! host Alex Trebek, for example, does not extend to commissioning a marble or bronze statue of him at taxpayer expense.Nor do I think a statute of Trebek would be worth it if means that some of these other historical figures get one as well. The republic will be no better off if we erect statues of Steve Jobs, whose signature product has been a net negative for American society, or Sam Walton, whose company leveraged its sheer size to hollow out small towns and impoverish their residents. Trump’s original executive order described the statues as “silent teachers in solid form of stone and metal.” (You can tell he doesn’t write this stuff.) Some of the lessons they have to offer aren’t worth learning.There are other problems with this planned garden. One is that statues are hard to make, often taking years at a time. (The Times reports that they plan to get some statues in place by July 4 and add the rest by 2029.) Another one is that there aren’t enough sculptors in America who can make the kind of statues that Trump envisioned. This is not Renaissance Florence, where you can bump into marble sculptors for the Medicis while walking down the street. And even if there were, Trump’s attacks on artistic and cultural spaces have hardly endeared the nation’s top sculptors to work with him.Unlike his other projects, Trump actually managed to get some buy-in from Congress on this one. But his insistence on personally directing things is only a hindrance from there. When Democrats retake the White House, one of their top priorities will likely be to halt Trump’s vanity projects, like the weird Arlington arch, or at least redirect them to better purposes. The White House will still need an East Wing, but the Democratic-led version will probably nix the grotesque Mar-a-Lagoesque ballroom in favor of something more befitting our nation’s republican heritage.Trump’s slapdash efforts will make it even easier for his critics and opponents to dismantle. West Potomac Park, the site that Trump hopes to transform with his heroes garden, can be put to far better use than a half-baked site for random statues of Dr. Seuss and Ernest Hemingway. Perhaps the finished statues can be redistributed to other sites if alternatives can be found. But the capital’s public space is too limited and valuable to indulge one man’s vain obsessions.When the federal government builds public spaces and monuments through collaboration and consultation, they tend to endure. The National World War I Memorial in D.C. was completed throughout Trump’s first term and opened in the first days of Biden’s presidency. When someone governs through personalist rule and tries to reshape the capital’s physical landscape in your own image, it is no surprise that Trump’s successors will treat it as an injury to our cultural heritage instead of an addition to it.It also helps that Trump’s idea already exists. In the U.S. Capitol, each state has contributed two statues of their state’s most illustrious citizens to the National Statuary Hall Collection. Some of the statues are qualitatively better than others; a few of them honor Confederate traitors who do not belong in the Capitol at all. More than a few of Trump’s selections are already honored there, making his project even more superfluous than it already appeared to be. The congressional collection holds lessons for Trump as well. The most enduring monuments in this country’s personal life weren’t created in such an ad hoc fashion or through arbitrary forms of governance. What can be built by fiat can be undone by fiat as well. For that reason, Trump’s self-absorbed campaign to reshape D.C. has only ensured that he will leave no enduring physical mark on the nation’s capital in the long run.
An Eastern Cape giant cycad in the Palm House at Kew Gardens in London is over 240 years old. It has lived most of its two centuries, since it was first transported by ship from South Africa, in a container, making it, according to the Kew Gardens website, “the oldest pot plant in the world.” A backhanded distinction, maybe, for a cycad, a type of plant that has been around for 250 million years; still, this specimen has made the best of its confines, curling toward the ribbed dome of the enormous greenhouse, propped up on crutches “like some senior citizens,” the website tactfully notes.I almost missed the titular reference in The Palm House, the latest novel from British novelist Gwendoline Riley. The narrator, a fortyish writer named Laura Miller, briefly mentions that she plans to go there with her friend Edmund Putnam and his father, to see the “ancient cycad.” It’s a living fossil, a relic of another age—and Putnam is prone to feeling that way too. “Ah, the passing of time!” he pronounces as they walk through London.Riley is wonderful with a metaphor, and often funny too: “a dark yellow sky—like iodine,” a washed-up writer’s prose like “a tip-toeing cartoon burglar,” someone peering at their phone “as if it were a dowsing rod.” She can condense character in a single gesture: a man who “haul[s] his shoulders back, like a precocious little ice skater, zooming to a halt before a camera.” She telegraphs themes in a few words’ worth of dialogue, which often goes on, not in alternating quips or monologues but in broken-up bits—not he said, she said, but he said, he said, he said, she said, she said, she said. The characters tell on themselves. Vignettes are juxtaposed; the bones of a life are present, not all the connective tissue.Still, it’s hard to call her novels subtle, especially taken collectively, since they all circle the same concerns, with narrators who are versions of one another. Her first two novels—published when she was in her early twenties—took place in Manchester, their narrators both young women in bars and bad relationships. Her next two books detoured to the United States but featured many of the same elements. In each, there are brutish fathers and magnetically hapless mothers. Both of those figures, but especially the mothers, dominate First Love (2017) and My Phantoms (2021), which were published simultaneously, to widespread acclaim, in the U.S. by New York Review Books in 2022. First Love is a devastating account of a woman named Neve’s marriage to an older man who berates and belittles her, a nauseating seat at their claustrophobic kitchen table leavened (if that’s the word) by Riley’s way with detail and character, and her narrator’s fundamental empathy for herself and others. My Phantoms delves further into the relationship between the narrator—this time a writer named Bridget—and her mother, Hen.“In all of my books so far,” Riley said in a 2017 interview, “there is a woman looking at her life and asking, ‘How did I get here? Why are things the way they are?’ with varying degrees of panic.” In that same interview Riley also said she was trying to break from this pattern in her work, while at the same time wondering, did she have to? If it ain’t broke, fixate. And yet, the aperture is slightly wider here than one woman’s Talking Heads moment. The Palm House feels more thickly peopled, the narrator’s inner life more porous. The central focus is a friendship—in setting her narrator in front of a mirror showing something other than her parents, Riley refracts her very personal preoccupations. The effect is less disturbing than First Love and My Phantoms; this new book is less acute, perhaps less substantial, but I found myself more moved by the narrator precisely because her importance is somewhat displaced. The Palm House has more of a plot than most of Riley’s novels—one that consists mostly of gossip. Sequence magazine, a venerable literary publication where Putnam is an editor and to which Laura is an occasional but long-standing contributor—has fallen victim to an attempted revamp by its corporate board. They’ve installed a young man named Simon Halfpenny, who goes by Shove. (“Yes, Shove.”) He has come to the job from a sports magazine with a sensibility that feels out of place at the rarefied Sequence; he starts writing editorials that begin, “What is it about dogs?” and “April is the cruellest month, as the poet T.S. Eliot once famously wrote.” Shove reportedly recalls Stephen “Stig” Abell, who was installed by NewsCorp as editor of the Times Literary Supplement in 2016, when Riley’s ex-husband was deputy editor. Riley has waved away the connection, but in any case Shove is a familiar type to anyone who has worked at a high-turnover media start-up whose clueless owners dreamed of disrupting the news business:He called Putnam “Ed”; Katherine “Kath”; he called Vik “the Prof.” When Vik grew a beard he shouted, “Great beard, Prof!” “Has everyone seen the Prof’s beard?” “Hey, are you a hipster now?” he shouted. “Hey, Prof, do you have a beard regime?” he shouted. “Do you use beard oil?” … Shove did not stop bellowing. About the news, about celebrities; he’d shout about exchanges he was following on Twitter. He could not be quiet. He could not sit still. In fact he would literally travel around the room on his chair, propelling himself from desk to desk, as if the room were a screen and he himself a restive cursor.“There’s always money for nonsense,” as one of the Sequence staffers puts it. Putnam can’t stand Shove, and soon quits. As the months go by, however, whenever he and Laura meet up for drinks or dinner, the narrative around his departure changes: He insists he was pushed out. He has a bit of a midlife crisis, developing, in Laura’s words, an “insistent, cloying ruefulness,” a childish conviction that the world has treated him unfairly and that even his friends don’t understand.Between the palace intrigue at Sequence we get, in typical Riley mode, memoiristic snatches of Laura’s life: a holiday to Dubrovnik with her mother and grandmother, in which the trio buys maids’ shoes, thinking them chic; her teenage stint as a groupie for a comedian, which culminates in a sordid sexual assault; her relationship with an actor “so actorly, he seemed at times to be acting the part of an actor”; her day job at a history magazine that “every other month … seemed to run a piece headlined REVEALED: NEW SECRETS OF HITLER’S BUNKER”; a portrait of the last roommate she hopes ever to have. The awful father’s appearance is blessedly brief; the mother character is still embarrassing and unsympathetic but this time she’s not quite so pathetic. After retirement she takes up Spanish, which “she speaks as if summoning dark forces; the language seems to entail for her an element of torque. Soy vegana, she might say, warningly, y trabajo en una revista de cine!” When a boyfriend leaves her, the mother goes back to the same resort in Spain they’d visited together. A waiter recognizes her, asks after the boyfriend. “I just said he’d died,” she said, “then asked for some, I don’t know, patatas bravas.” Might it be that, in their insular literary world, they are protected to some extent from really grappling with the passage of time?During Putnam’s exile from Sequence, his and Laura’s lives run gently parallel. Both their fathers pass away. They each inherit some money. They share vegetarian meals (Riley’s narrators are always vegetarian, but I don’t think that she’s marking them as wan little husks—to borrow a Joyce Carol Oatesism. The vegetarianism is certainly a marker of how these women have moved away from their upbringings, but the diet seems more practical than waifish. Though I cannot find any evidence to confirm that Riley herself is a vegetarian, militant or otherwise, I like to imagine the ubiquitous veg curries of her novels as a political commitment to normalizing plant-based eating. For his part, Putnam is a self-described “nineties vegetarian,” who finds textured vegetable protein perfectly delicious. “I’m not going to start faffing with aubergines at my age,” he says.Laura and Putnam still like to drink. As they do, they reflect on how London has changed, on the habits and ambition of those slightly younger than themselves (“gingerly sipping a half, if they come to the pub at all”; “she said it would just be, quote, a great way to skip mid-career, unquote … we wouldn’t have dreamt …”). Putnam’s periodic despondency aside, for the most part he and Laura are united in an outlook more quizzical than bitter. Might it be that, in their insular literary world, they are protected to some extent from really grappling with the passage of time? Even being fired from a legacy arts publication in London in the mid-2010s means you’ve been living in a hothouse. Nostalgia permeates the drama, along with, at times, “a peaceful sort of quiescence”—a phrase Laura uses to describe the effect that strange weather has on her, in an early vignette. Putnam acts out his pique by writing letters to the editor at the TLS and the FT, about historiography. “Are you really unhappy?” Laura asks him, at the bar.Putnam pushed out his lips for a second.“Mm…” he said.“’pparently,” he said.It is significant that his sadness truly breaks through when they visit Putnam’s father’s favorite café. He’s brought to his father’s environment, and then he does despair: “The see-saw of life just tips, doesn’t it?” he says, “and then it is downhill all the way.” And yet, I think this is the happiest book of Riley’s that I’ve read. There is here a melancholic happiness, the kind that sets in after a solo drink on a pleasant afternoon, maybe, but there is contentment, nonetheless.The parents in all of Riley’s books, as well as the husband in First Love, are models of how not to age. They are by turns or in combination embarrassing, cruel, lonely, incompetent, unhealthy, absurd, and obdurate. The Palm House is a novel about getting older under the influence of the same cautionary tales as in her earlier books, but it’s not nearly so panicky. Laura, it would seem, has devised ways to avoid the fate of turning into your mother or marrying your father: Don’t have any kids yourself; stay healthy; stay solvent; if you must keep parental contact make the visits short and the phone calls dutiful; don’t wind up with someone you hate, or who hates you, out of fear of being alone. “It seemed an outlandish fate, to trail along behind my mother,” Laura says of her mother’s boyfriend, “ignored and despised.” At one point during his crisis Laura marvels that Putnam in his 49 years, most of them spent consuming literature and cinema, had not turned up “some model for elegant survival.” Laura, one assumes, thinks she has.The parents in all of Riley’s books are models of how not to age. They are embarrassing, cruel, lonely, incompetent, unhealthy, absurd, and obdurate. And yet, Riley knows we can’t forget the pot in which the palm has grown. Both Putnam’s and Laura’s financial independence comes from their fathers dying and leaving them some real estate: Laura’s odious father’s house, on which he’d done no upkeep, nets her enough for a studio apartment, while Putnam is embarrassed by what he gets for his father’s modest home in a neighborhood where through the windows he and Laura can spy new levels of suburban luxury—“huge paintings, and pianos, and vast TV screens.” “There’ll be a great big tank in the driveway before long. Then they’ll be digging out their double-decker sex dungeon,” he says. But it means he can wait out the reign of Shove. And Laura will not have to live with roommates again: “I was free,” she says, “I was lifted-up.” So, in the way of generations, the parents provide the conditions for escaping from them. Inheritance buys children freedom, by showing them how they do not wish to be. Freedom up to a point: The studio Laura buys is across the street from a house where her mother once lived. One of her mother’s ideas for occupying herself after retirement, besides the Spanish lessons, had been to go around to all the places she’d ever lived and take photos of how the blocks had changed. Much of The Palm House amounts to Laura’s own version of that project.Our parents’ ailments, physical and otherwise, so often seem a curse hurled at ourselves—think of Lenù’s mother’s bad hip in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet (books that Bridget tries to get Hen to read in First Love). They take on mythic proportions; they make our suffering unique and all-important. The relative lightness of The Palm House comes from the way the burden of inheritance is generalized, and shared. There is Putnam and his father; there is Putnam and Laura’s friendship; there is the lively community around Sequence, which rallies to the publication’s defense. There is a jungle of potted ferns and monsteras and camellias cultivated on the patio of Putnam’s downstairs neighbor, his crush. She gets the pots off freegan sites. It’s a different sort of palm house. When the neighbor travels for work, she asks him to look after it. It won’t be hard, he says, they thrive on neglect. “But not total neglect,” he adds, “Not abandonment.”
A year ago, Senator Jon Ossoff seemed like he might be a one-hit wonder—elected in that short period from November 2020 to January 2021 when Georgia turned blue, then defeated in his reelection bid and quickly forgotten. Or if he won reelection, always outshined by his home state colleague, the eloquent Raphael Warnock, who still leads the Atlanta church that Martin Luther King Sr. and Jr. once helmed. But over the last year, Ossoff has become a Democratic star. His strong fundraising and poll numbers have made the 39-year-old the clear favorite in his reelection bid this fall, delighting Democrats who worried the party’s 2022 and 2024 struggles in Georgia suggested that the state had gone back to being red. Ossoff’s campaign ads and lines from his speeches are going viral and being borrowed by others in the party, most notably his February denunciation of what he called the “Epstein class.”And while California Representative Ro Khanna, Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear, and many other ambitious Democrats are flying to fundraisers across the country and appearing on whatever podcasts they can to drum up interest in their presidential bids, there is considerable buzz about a 2028 Ossoff candidacy—even though the Georgian has done nothing to stoke it. “The moment he wins in November he becomes a front runner for 2028,” journalist Mehdi Hasan tweeted a few months ago, along with a clip of one of Ossoff’s speeches. Ossoff recently had to publicly declare that he was not considering a presidential run, as such speculation was becoming so loud that it might have hurt his Senate campaign. How did Ossoff go in less than a decade from baby-faced documentary filmmaker who couldn’t get elected to the House to dream presidential candidate for some Democratic insiders? A combination of luck, skill, and circumstance. Ossoff’s political career didn’t look promising when it started nine years ago. He ran in a special election for a U.S. House seat in the Atlanta suburbs in early 2017. It was the first campaign for Ossoff, who had worked as a legislative aide on Capitol Hill before leading a film company called Insight. The 30-year-old candidate vastly out-raised most of his rivals and picked up endorsements from Stacey Abrams, the late John Lewis, and other prominent figures in Georgia Democratic politics. But after qualifying for a runoff, he was narrowly defeated by Republican Karen Handel. Some Democrats felt Ossoff had lost a winnable race because he didn’t have a clear message or strong platform. His defeat looked even worse after another Democrat, Lucy McBath, beat Handel in that same district in November 2018. Ossoff didn’t give up, though. That House race drew national attention, because it was one of the first elections after Donald Trump’s surprising 2016 victory. So Ossoff had cultivated a national fundraising base. He used that to run for U.S. Senate in 2020 and win a competitive Democratic primary. He and Warnock then effectively campaigned together to defeat two incumbent Republicans in the January 2021 runoff that delivered a U.S. Senate majority to Democrats. Ossoff was officially declared the winner of his race on January 6, 2021—the day of the Trump-led insurrection.At the time, Ossoff’s victory seemed as much about Abrams, Warnock, Trump, and Joe Biden as his own political skills. A backlash against Trump in the Atlanta suburbs and Biden’s popularity back then appeared to have boosted both Ossoff and Warnock. Abrams had spent years mobilizing voters in the state and convincing Democratic donors that Georgia was winnable. And having a charismatic Black candidate (Warnock) running at the same time no doubt helped Ossoff win more African American votes in heavily Black Georgia. But his Senate career suggests that Ossoff is quite savvy on his own. He seems to have started preparing for reelection from the moment he arrived on Capitol Hill, taking a number of steps that would appeal to independent and even conservative-leaning voters in Georgia. He and his aides have focused less on making national news than on being hyperresponsive to Georgia residents. Ossoff told The Washington Post that each week he calls a few Georgians who have contacted his office for help to assess how well his aides are doing in constituent service. In his committee work, Ossoff has worked with his Republican colleagues on investigating and issuing reports on government malfeasance, such as substandard military housing. Ossoff largely voted the party line when Biden was in office, but he didn’t take many high-profile stands that would paint him as super-progressive. Early last year, after Trump’s win, Ossoff took even more aggressive steps to inoculate himself politically. He supported the Laken Riley Act, an immigration bill written by congressional Republicans that calls for the detention of undocumented immigrants if they are arrested for minor crimes like burglary, even if they have not yet been convicted. He also voted for a cryptocurrency regulation bill that was favored by the industry but bashed as too light by progressives such as Senator Elizabeth Warren. In terms of policy, these are terrible votes. But Laken Riley was a nursing student in Georgia who was killed by an undocumented immigrant. Cryptocurrency companies spend tens of millions of dollars to defeat their political enemies. So those stances were perhaps politically necessary in Georgia, as Ossoff seemed likely to face one of his state’s most popular politicians: Governor Brian Kemp.Then Ossoff got lucky. Kemp was elected in 2018 over Abrams and defeated her fairly handily in their 2022 rematch. He gained a reputation as a reasonable Republican by refusing to go along with Trump’s attempts in 2020 to illegally overturn Biden’s victory in Georgia, which helped him with the state’s swing voters. Republicans in Washington were urging him to run against Ossoff. If Kemp had jumped in, Ossoff would likely be in a very hard race right now. A poll conducted by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution last April showed Kemp narrowly ahead of Ossoff in a hypothetical matchup. But last May, Kemp bowed out. Ossoff’s solid poll numbers and fundraising no doubt played a role. It would not have been a cakewalk for Kemp. But ultimately, the governor suggested he simply didn’t want to run for the Senate.At the same time, Trump spent the last year seeming to do everything possible to be unpopular, even in states like Georgia that backed him in 2024. The Economist estimates the president’s net approval in the state is -22. With Kemp on the sidelines, Trump tanking in the polls, and Georgia Republicans stuck in a tense primary with three leading candidates, Ossoff has had the perfect opportunity to position himself for the general election. And he’s taking advantage of it. On the campaign trail, Ossoff is connecting the Epstein scandal, the various ways that Trump and his allies are enriching themselves, the administration’s Medicaid cuts, high grocery and gas prices, the war in Iran, and other issues into a broader narrative of an elite led by Trump that is screwing over average Americans. In the senator’s words, there’s an Epstein class, a “Mar-a-Lago mafia,” and “government of, by, and for the ultra-rich.” While other Democrats fixate solely on affordability, Ossoff also constantly uses another word: corruption. “The Mar-a-Lago mafia has taken American corruption to spectacular new heights, but corruption in America runs a lot deeper than Donald Trump. Because how does American politics really work? It’s coin-operated. Money goes in, favors come out. It’s been running on secret money, corporate money, billionaire money. Both sides,” he says on the campaign trail. While Ossoff regularly bashes Trump, he’s trying to define the core divide in U.S. politics as a wealthy elite versus average Americans, not Republicans versus Democrats. So the senator said earlier this year, “Trump was supposed to fight for the working class. Instead, he’s literally closing rural clinics and hospitals to cut taxes for George Soros and Elon Musk.” That’s a reference to a conservative billionaire but also a liberal one. The Epstein class invokes not only Trump but also super-wealthy individuals connected to the disgraced financier, such as Bill Gates and Democrat politicians like Bill Clinton. “He knows how to write, knows how to punch up the drama. He has a way with words,” the Journal-Constitution’s Washington bureau chief, Tia Mitchell, told me in a recent episode of Right Now, the New Republic show I host. Ossoff’s approach is resonating with Democrats outside of Georgia in part because it seems a path out of the constant tensions between the party’s left and center-left. More moderate Democrats like that Ossoff doesn’t push Medicare for All, free college, or other ideas that they worry scare off swing voters. Instead, he uses Bernie Sanders–like rhetoric to advance modest ideas such as Medicare negotiating with drug companies to get lower prices for prescription drugs. More progressive Democrats appreciate Ossoff’s willingness to slam corporations and the super-wealthy. Ossoff talks about the economy constantly, as many party strategists want, but he also condemns Trump’s antidemocratic and racist tendencies in a way that excites party activists. Ossoff’s newfound acclaim among Democrats of course doesn’t guarantee anything this November. Polls show close hypothetical races between Ossoff and any of his three potential GOP opponents. Republicans will likely pump tens of millions of dollars into the state this fall, both to try to defeat Ossoff and also so Democrats have to spend money in Georgia instead of Alaska, Ohio, and other states they are trying to flip.But if he wins in November, particularly in a victory by five percentage points or more, the presidential speculation will only increase. Ossoff wouldn’t be the only Democrat who has carried a key swing state in recent years. Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer won in 2018 and 2022; Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro is likely to cruise to reelection in November; Beshear prevailed in 2019 and 2023 in one of the reddest states in the nation. Like those three, Ossoff can appeal to the party’s moderate voters by emphasizing his electability. But he probably has a better chance of exciting progressives than that trio, as well. The Georgia senator, who is Jewish, has been sharply critical of the Israeli government’s actions in Gaza. His work as a young staffer on Capitol Hill for two Black and very progressive House members (Lewis and Hank Johnson) will make it easier for Ossoff to hint to the left that he is more in line with them than his voting record suggests. And while Ossoff isn’t pushing Medicare for All or free college, his signature ideas are quite progressive: banning corporate PACs, barring members of Congress from trading stocks, and preventing out-of-state companies from buying too many homes in residential areas. Ossoff was fairly definitive in ruling out a White House run, telling MS NOW’s Jen Psaki last month, “I have zero interest in running for president in 2028.” On the other hand, many politicians have made such promises and then broken them. Ossoff basically has to say that to ensure victory in his Senate race this November. Mitchell of the Journal-Constitution covers the senator closely, and says that even if he is not running in 2028, Ossoff almost certainly is keeping that option open for the future. “There are going to be certain races that really draw national attention, and his is going to be one of them. So his star is going to rise, and if he wins, he definitely will be part of the conversation,” she said.And he should be. Democrats have plenty of presidential candidates. Ossoff needs to focus on winning in Georgia. But as Stanford political scientist Adam Bonica has argued, an anti-corruption platform has been critical to defeating authoritarians in elections abroad, most recently in Hungary. It would be great to have a candidate in the Democratic primary pushing that message—particularly if they are young, articulate, and good at winning in swing states. He should keep it to himself for now, but I hope Jon Ossoff hasn’t actually closed the door on a presidential run.
Over the last few days, the courts have contributed yet again to the ongoing American whiplash about abortion access. On Friday, a ruling from the super-conservative Fifth Circuit appeals court essentially overrode Food and Drug Administration guidelines for mifepristone, one of two drugs used for medication abortion, so that it could no longer be prescribed by a telehealth provider. Manufacturers of the drug requested that the Supreme Court intervene, and on Monday the court issued an administrative stay for one week. As mifepristone was restricted and made available again over the course of a few days, anyone just trying to get a prescription could be forgiven for not knowing whether a provider would be willing to prescribe it. This kind of confusion is useful for anti-abortion groups, for whom killing Roe was never the final goal but only a step along the way to ending abortion entirely. Or, as the plaintiffs in this latest mifepristone challenge put it in the opening line of their lawsuit, “The fight for life is far from over.”The legal challenge, brought by the attorney general of Louisiana, alongside the Christian nationalist law project Alliance Defending Freedom, argues that the FDA, by increasing access to mifepristone, is responsible for instances of reproductive coercion. The lawsuit also argues that by allowing people in a state where abortion is banned to obtain pills from providers in states without bans, the FDA guidelines interfere with the state’s sovereign laws. These claims get things more or less backward. Access to medication abortion, far from encouraging the coercion of pregnant people, has allowed those in abusive relationships, including those whose partners have sexually assaulted them, to access abortion privately, thus reducing the threat of reprisal from their partners. As for so-called states’ rights, the plaintiffs’ aim here is not to let states decide abortion restrictions or access for themselves; it’s to bring all states in line with the most restrictive laws. With this case, these anti-abortion groups are predictably trying to redefine reproductive freedom as “coercion” or “abusing women,” and genuine coercion as “states’ rights” or “protecting women.” Over decades, it’s become clear that these same groups, along with the legislators and attorneys general who share their politics, won’t rest until abortion is banned or all but banned across the country. This legal challenge demonstrates that they are willing to rerun the same arguments in the same courts over and over until they win. The Supreme Court has, in fact, already heard a case concerning FDA guidelines for accessing mifepristone with telehealth. When the same law project behind the current case, Alliance Defending Freedom, made its arguments in Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 2024, ADF failed to convince the court that the purported health care providers’ group it represented had standing to challenge the FDA’s guidelines. Though the court did not say so explicitly in its opinion, it was nevertheless clear that the group had no apparent purpose other than bringing the next big anti-abortion case to the Supreme Court after Dobbs; indeed, the group was incorporated weeks following that ruling, in a judicial district where it had no activities besides bringing the lawsuit.The truth of that earlier case was this: Mifepristone was as safe before Dobbs as it was after Dobbs. In fact, Dobbs led to an expansion of medication abortion in states where abortion was either banned or all but banned. That expansion of access was made possible in part by an administrative rule change at the FDA, permanently removing the requirement for in-person dispensing of mifepristone. ADF and other anti-abortion groups are now trying to rewrite history to cast mifepristone as a dangerous drug that the FDA is allegedly allowing to menace unsuspecting women. (It’s worth remembering that it was their own obsessive campaign to end Roe that made access to mifepristone so critical in the first place.)Following its loss in Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, Alliance Defending Freedom regrouped and took another swing at the highest court. This time, it’s joining a lawsuit with the Louisiana attorney general, representing a Louisiana woman who, “under immense pressure and fearing for her safety ... took abortion drugs that her boyfriend obtained,” as the lawsuit contends. The choice of collaborator is telling: After Roe, abortion in the state was completely banned with very limited exceptions, and no clinics there provided procedural abortion. Last year, the Louisiana state legislature reclassified misoprostol and mifepristone as “controlled substances.” Getting mifepristone through the mail, prescribed by providers outside the state, was a lifeline for pregnant people in Louisiana; it meant that they could access abortion despite the state laws. This is what ADF’s lawsuit is really about: forcing providers to abandon patients and forcing patients to continue pregnancies.That makes their new post-Dobbs argument, as seen in the Louisiana lawsuit, all the more cynical. Anti-abortion lawmakers such as Missouri Senator Josh Hawley and Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy have lately retooled their opposition to medication abortion, now blaming it for the “abuse” of women, as Garnet Henderson at the reproductive rights and justice news site Autonomy News has reported. It is in that context that an individual who says she has experienced reproductive coercion has been made the face of the Louisiana challenge. But her story aside, she may be a more desirable plaintiff for other reasons: By making her part of its case, the state argued in one filing, it was possible to supply “the standing piece that the Supreme Court found lacking in Alliance.” That is, unlike the purported group of health care providers in that case, not one of whose members had prescribed mifepristone, the Louisiana legal challenge involves an actual person who was allegedly harmed. If not for that defeat, we likely would not be seeing this rerun of a legal challenge now.As of now in this case, that alleged harm has not yet been fully considered; the dispute so far has been limited to the question of whether to block the FDA guidelines as the case proceeds. But even if ADF were ultimately to prevail here, many things about medication abortion would not change. Getting mifepristone would require an in-person appointment before prescription, yes. But it’s possible to perform a medication abortion with only misoprostol, and telehealth access for that pill remains unchanged. People who were getting mifepristone outside direct prescription, such as by ordering from overseas or through informal networks, would still have that option. A win for ADF does not make it a crime to possess mifepristone. But as we have learned in this country over decades of anti-abortion lawmaking and court-wrangling, abortion need not actually be banned for it to be difficult to get, or for people to feel afraid to try. Merely producing headlines about “abortion pills” being “blocked,” even for a day, or half a day, introduces doubt. News that a court now blocks medication abortion could make someone question whether the pills are illegal or unsafe. We’ll know more within a week about whether this particular case is the one anti-abortion groups have been hoping for: a follow-up to Dobbs that permanently blocks telemedicine access to medication abortion across the country and casts doubt on its safety and legality. Whether they win or lose, however, this is not the end for those who have already devoted 40 years to killing Roe. The extreme abortion bans that followed Dobbs—these groups’ big victory—helped make medication abortion more common. They will not stop here.
Donald Trump hasn’t thought this one through. Politico reports that Republicans are grappling with rising “anxiety” about the midterms. A key reason: Trump’s obsession with his ballroom and other pet projects is muddying the GOP economic message. That’s bad enough. Worse, Republicans just agreed to seek $1 billion in taxpayer money for the ballroom. Though this is allegedly for security, vulnerable Republicans will hate having to defend this. It’s not just that they themselves are lamenting that the project is distracting from their economic message. It’s also that the ballroom is already deeply unpopular and they’re now tied more tightly to it. We talked to political scientist Tom Schaller, author of a good piece on Trump’s “vanity presidency.” He explains why the ballroom is so deadly for the GOP, how Trump is creating a uniquely “personalist” presidency, and why Trump’s megalomania actually matters to the voters who will help decide the midterms. Listen to this episode here. A transcript is here.
Donald Trump’s Department of Justice was forced Tuesday to clean up acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s outrageous lie about the Southern Poverty Law Center.Speaking to Fox News on April 21, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche claimed that the government had “no information” to suggest the SPLC had “shared what they learned” from their undercover informant program in hate groups such as the KKK with law enforcement. The SPLC hit back at Blanche’s claim with a motion to retract his false statement, and refrain from making any others like it. In a filing Tuesday, the DOJ cited a statement Blanche made days later on Fox News Sunday with Shannon Bream. “It is true that over the years they have selectively shared with law enforcement. That’s well documented and there’s no dispute there. They aren’t charged with any of that conduct,” Blanche said. “To the extent that any clarification was needed, Acting Attorney Todd Blanche’s remarks on a major Sunday television program certainly suffice,” the filing stated. This is just the latest bit of graceless leadership from Blanche, who actively undermined the Justice Department’s flimsy case against former FBI Director James Comey on Sunday, and is part of a larger trend of unprecedented prosecutorial missteps in the department, undermining numerous civil and criminal cases.
Even the president’s Cabinet is having a hard time subscribing to what Donald Trump is saying about Pope Leo XIV.Secretary of State Marco Rubio attempted to cover for his MAGA boss, telling a reporter at the White House Tuesday that she had mischaracterized Trump’s recent barbs against the Catholic leader.“The president recently said that the pope is endangering a lot of Catholics as a result of his rhetoric around the Iran war. Is that a sentiment—” the reporter began, before Rubio cut her off.“I don’t think that’s an accurate description of what he said,” Rubio interjected. “I think what the president basically said is that Iran can’t have a nuclear weapon because they would use it against places that have a lot of Catholics and Christians and others, for that matter.”Reporter: The president recently said that the Pope is endangering a lot of Catholics as a result of his rhetoric around the Iran war.Rubio: I don't think that's an accurate description of what he said pic.twitter.com/aYRod37pv2— Acyn (@Acyn) May 5, 2026But Rubio was wrong—that is exactly what Trump said.“I think he’s endangering a lot of Catholics and a lot of people,” Trump said in a Monday interview with conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt. “But I guess if it’s up to the pope, he thinks it’s just fine for Iran to have a nuclear weapon.”That’s 100% what President Trump said. Here’s the proof. https://t.co/hHSQu2K6kX pic.twitter.com/yFfcoBUU4f— Christopher Hale (@ChristopherHale) May 5, 2026It was just the latest in a long string of attacks that Trump has made against the pope. Last month, Trump wrote on Truth Social that the religious leader was “weak on crime and terrible for foreign policy.”The Chicago-born pontiff upset the president and a number of Trump’s underlings when he advocated for world peace earlier this year. The Pentagon reportedly threatened a Holy See ambassador in January, days after the pope made antiwar remarks during his State of the World address. Leo has brushed off Trump’s remarks, claiming that he has “no fear” of the Trump administration or of “speaking out loudly of the message of the Gospel,” though the Vatican did reject a White House invitation to host the pope for America’s 250th anniversary on July 4.“I will continue to speak out loudly against war, looking to promote peace, promoting dialogue and multilateral relationships among the states to look for just solutions to problems,” the pope told reporters aboard a flight in April. “Too many people are suffering in the world today. Too many innocent people are being killed. And I think someone has to stand up and say there’s a better way.”It’s very possible that Iran wouldn’t have an enriched uranium stockpile capable of developing nuclear weaponry if it weren’t for Trump’s ascent to the White House.Iran lacked a single bomb’s worth of uranium in 2018, three years after former President Barack Obama brokered the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action to limit the country’s enormous uranium stockpile. That changed when Trump withdrew the U.S. from the pact that year and imposed a series of tough economic sanctions against the Middle East country.By 2025, Iran had curated an 11-ton stockpile of enriched uranium, the whereabouts of which remain largely unknown. The total stockpile could create as many as 10 bombs if fully enriched, according to a 2025 assessment by the International Atomic Energy Agency.
President Trump’s administration is targeting The New York Times, claiming that the newspaper discriminates against white men.The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sued the newspaper in federal court Tuesday on behalf of a white man who alleged his race and sex were factors in being denied a promotion, violating the Civil Rights Act. A spokesperson for the publication, Danielle Rhoades Ha, called the allegations “politically motivated.”“The New York Times categorically rejects the meritless and politically motivated allegations that the Trump administration’s E.E.O.C. is pursuing against us,” Rhoades Ha said. “Our employment practices are merit-based and focused on recruiting and promoting the best talent in the world.”According to the Times, the white employee filed his complaint in July 2025 with the EEOC office in New York, but the office later transferred the complaint to an Alabama investigator. Since then, the commission had been investigating the Times, with the two sides sending information back and forth.The two were briefly engaged in a voluntary mediation process known as conciliation, the paper said, which usually takes place after the EEOC finds “reasonable cause” that discrimination has occurred. If conciliation fails, then the EEOC decides whether to file a lawsuit.While the complaint began as a general look at the newspaper’s hiring and promotions, the case, personally handled by EEOC Chair Andrea Lucus, soon became a specific question over whether the white employee did not get a deputy editor job. On April 21, the EEOC told the newspaper that the case had been referred to the agency’s legal unit.It’s the latest attack by the Trump administration against media outlets that criticize the president, and it’s not the first time they have invoked diversity, equity, and inclusion in the process. The FCC is currently investigating NBC’s parent company, Comcast, over alleged DEI practices, and last month, commissioner Brendan Carr announced an investigation into DEI practices at Disney, ABC’s parent company.Trump has long hated the Times for how it has covered him, filing a $15 billion defamation lawsuit against the paper last year, and calling the paper “the failing New York Times” for at least a decade. Now, he’s using the power of his office against them.
President Trump is pushing the Food and Drug Administration to approve flavored vapes as his approval rating with young people continues to tumble.The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump expressed frustration with FDA Commissioner Marty Makary on the phone over the weekend and in the White House on Monday. Makary has refused to approve blueberry, mango, and menthol vape flavors from manufacturer Glas out of concern the flavors would be too marketable to young and underage users. This puts a real wrench in Trump’s 2024 campaign pledge to “save vaping,” and in his quest to win back the youth vote. Recent polling suggests that the president has lost virtually all of the gains he made with youth in 2024, sitting at a dismal 24 percent approval rating with Gen Z.The Journal’s report raises doubts about Makary’s job security, with people familiar with the conversations saying the FDA commissioner is on thin ice. The White House has publicly said otherwise, claiming President Trump is “thrilled with his accomplishments.”
The Miami U.S. attorney’s office is in turmoil.The legal office has steered resources away from criminal cases in order to aid Donald Trump’s personal revenge tour, Bloomberg reported Tuesday. The decision to explicitly aid Trump’s agenda has triggered a mass exodus of staff, hamstringing the department’s ability to prosecute white-collar crime and narcotics trafficking cases, according to more than a dozen sources that spoke with the outlet.Several dozen attorneys have already left the Southern District of Florida since Trump returned to office, either by quitting, retiring, or being fired by the current administration. One unit focused on prosecuting economic crimes lost roughly half of its staff, reported Bloomberg.The Justice Department has issued different figures. So far, the DOJ has recorded just 26 departures since Jason Reding Quiñones took over as U.S. attorney in the Southern District of Florida in August 2025. Two months after he was confirmed by Congress, Reding Quiñones filed more than two dozen subpoenas to U.S. officials that took part in the 2016 Russian election interference inquiry, which has been internally redefined among Trump loyalists as the “grand conspiracy.” The unsubstantiated theory turns Trump’s legal challenges on their head, positing that the real-life charges—and Trump’s fleeting comeuppance—were a part of a groundless scheme by Democrats and “deep-state” operatives to destroy Trump and his political movement.The district has become the epicenter of Trump’s political retribution since Reding Quiñones took over, but it’s far from the only office to massively reorient its resources under pressure by Trump’s White House. The Department of Homeland Security has had to move away from other missions in order to abet Trump’s deportation plans; the Department of Defense shifted billions of dollars to fund Trump’s border mission; and more than 6,000 FBI agents were diverted to handling “immigration-related matters,” effectively redefining the agency’s work.The Justice Department has also dropped thousands of criminal cases in an attempt to funnel its efforts—almost singularly—toward convicting immigration cases. Altogether, the chief law enforcement agency closed some 23,000 criminal cases in the first six months of Trump’s term, including investigations into terrorism, white-collar crimes, and drugs, while prosecuting 32,000 new immigration cases.The shift in priorities is an indication that “making America safe again” is not necessarily as much of a goal for the current administration as Trump has promised. At the president’s direction, federal authorities have arrested thousands of noncriminal immigrants across the country, despite repeated pledges that the deportation purge is focused on the “worst of the worst”—such as “murderers, pedophiles, rapists, gang members, and terrorists.”
The Supreme Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act last week came about thanks to a conspiracy theorist who participated in the Capitol insurrection on January 6, 2021. Democracy Docket reports that Phillip “Bert” Callais, the lead plaintiff in Louisiana v. Callais, has long claimed U.S. elections are rigged on social media. Callais posted photos and video from the scene at the infamous “Stop the Steal” protest prior to the 2021 Capitol riot, and his Facebook page is full of MAGA and right-wing content, including attacks on vaccines and anything to the left of President Trump. It’s a sharp contrast to the original legal complaint that ultimately reached the Supreme Court. Callais is described there as a “non–African American voter” from Brusly, Louisiana, whose congressional district changed after his state redrew its districts. Callais also said that he was a member of a local board of supervisors in 2024. In reality, Callais seems to be a partisan activist steeped in the right’s conspiracy theories regarding elections. On X, he commented on an Elon Musk post in December 2025, writing, “This is f#€king insane, non citizens voting in our country.” In February of this year, he expressed doubt in election security, and in January, he called the voting system “manipulated,” touting hand-counted paper ballots as a solution. Callais also dismissed concerns about how eliminating mail-in voting would hurt disabled or elderly voters, posting in February, “Find someone to haul you to the polls. Don’t let your disability put the rest of the country at risk.” On Sunday, only days after the Supreme Court’s ruling, election denier Seth Keshel, featured in The New York Times for his voter fraud claims, posted a photo to X of him shaking hands with Callais. All of this seems to reveal a plot by conservatives to change how Americans vote in order to satisfy debunked conspiracy theories. With the right plaintiff, Republican politicians and wealthy donors can push through a tailored legal case to undo laws that protect elections from partisan interference. Callais seems to have been ready and willing.
Louisiana’s secretary of state has already received tens of thousands of absentee ballots for the state’s primary elections, but now won’t count them because of Republican Governor Jeff Landry’s desperate move to please Donald Trump. The Supreme Court voted 6-3 last week to throw out Louisiana’s congressional map and get rid of its only Democratic (and majority-Black) district. Landry immediately suspended the primary elections for Louisiana’s U.S. House seats in order to implement a new map that could give Republicans an advantage.By the time the governor pushed the date of the race from May 16 to July 15, more than 42,000 absentee votes had already been received, the Louisiana Illuminator reported Monday. Landry’s blatant attempt to overturn thousands of votes comes at the bidding of Trump, who has pressured red states to redraw their congressional maps.Several Democratic candidates and civil rights advocates have urged voters to continue voting in these races, as Landry’s move is subject to an array of legal challenges. Other races in the party primaries on May 16 are going forward, including those for the two Senate contests.
President Trump has trademarked the name “Donald J. Trump International Airport”—and could soon generate millions of dollars for his family.Palm Beach County commissioners will vote on Tuesday on whether to use taxpayer dollars to rename Florida’s Palm Beach International Airport the “President Donald J. Trump International Airport.” If they approve the name change, a trademark deal between the county and DTTM Operations LLC—a company run by Donald Trump Jr.—will force the airport to run all airport-branded merchandise by the Trump family for approval.Trump would become the first and only president with an airport named after him who has trademarked his own name in this manner.While Trump’s companies have claimed that the trademark is only for legal protections, and that Trump won’t directly profit, the agreement signed by Trump and reviewed by the Miami Herald would leave loopholes for the president’s companies to sell “President Donald J. Trump Airport” branded merchandise off-site, and even gives the president control over biographical information included at the airport.The agreement also allows Trump to create the list of “approved retailers” from which airport stores have to buy Trump-branded items. If the county or any retail businesses want to sell DJT Airport merch, they have to buy those products “exclusively and directly from such entities designated by Licensor.” The licensor is DTTM—of which Trump Jr. is the president.“Normally a license agreement says that the goods have to be of a certain quality. It doesn’t say that you have to purchase them from a retailer that we’re approving them from,” trademark lawyer Josh Gerben told the Herald. “It’s not just a nonpartisan individual that’s going to be able to write marketing materials or talk about Donald Trump. It’s going to be him and his organizations getting to control the messaging here.”Doubts about the ethics of the deal were raised months ago, with Palm Beach lawmakers stating over email that the airport renaming would confer “a commercial benefit upon the president and his companies.” Even still, the deal may very well be approved on Tuesday, giving perhaps the most blatantly corrupt president yet another free pass.
Here’s a simple thought experiment for you. The Justice Department, as you know, is prosecuting former FBI Director James Comey, a longtime foe of Donald Trump. Now imagine if acting Attorney General Todd Blanche remarked to a colleague: “I know this prosecution is nonsense on the facts and the law, but I’m pursuing it anyway, purely because Trump ordered me to—and because it will induce Trump to make me permanent A.G.”Would that be illegal or unlawful on Blanche’s part? Would Blanche be subject to sanctions or accountability? The answers turn out to be complicated. And right now, Democrats are starting to think them through. Because if they win back one or both chambers of Congress, passing DOJ reform will be critical as part of an agenda to “fascism-proof” the system against future authoritarian presidents.“We’re going to explore whether there’s a way to prohibit this,” Senator Adam Schiff, the California Democrat who has also been targeted by Trump, told me in an interview, speaking of Trump’s prosecutions of Comey and other enemies. “There has to be a lawful, constitutional way.”Blanche’s quotes on NBC News over the weekend about the Comey prosecution underscored the urgency of this for Democrats. The DOJ is prosecuting Comey for allegedly threatening the president, based on his social media posting of an image of seashells arranged to read “86 47,” which doesn’t remotely meet the statutory requirement for such a threat to be chargeable. Blanche acknowledged in that NBC appearance that “86 47” is commonplace and that others using it on social media or to sell merchandise won’t be prosecuted. “That’s posted constantly,” he admitted. But he insisted that the phrase is only “part of” the case against Comey, suggesting that 11 months of investigation—Comey’s post came last spring—had turned up much more evidence.The naked absurdity of this has been witheringly dissected everywhere. The term “86” doesn’t even mean “assassinate.” The relevant statute requires prosecutors to prove that a reasonable person would have understood the phrase as a true threat to the life of the president—and that Comey actually did intend to convey that threat. It’s always possible the DOJ has amassed devastating evidence of this intent, but no experts think it’s likely.Which raises bigger questions: Presuming that this prosecution is utterly baseless, is Blanche allowed to do this? What can be done to stop such prosecutions in the future?You’ll recall, of course, that Trump has publicly ordered the DOJ to prosecute many of his enemies, from Comey to New York Attorney General Letitia James to Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell. He frames this as retribution, meaning he’s demanding prosecutions regardless of what the evidence shows.What’s more, Blanche predecessor Pam Bondi’s transgression was precisely that she failed (after trying very hard) to carry out prosecutions unsupported by facts and law. As The New York Times reports, Blanche is maximizing efforts to prosecute Trump foes because the president wants him to, and it could win him the attorney general slot on a permanent basis. No one is even pretending this is about anything else. So—in the spirit of the above thought experiment—what should be done about it?In our interview, Schiff said that if granted the majority, Democrats will explore legislative fixes that could limit presidential pardons of prosecutors who carry out corrupt prosecutions, among other things. Schiff allowed that there may be separation-of-powers problems with limiting a president’s ability to direct prosecutions, but he said Trump’s underlings might be further constrained.One possibility, Schiff noted, might be to codify into law—and further clarify—the guidelines that already exist at DOJ. Those theoretically limit malicious or baseless prosecutions. But prosecutors still enjoy tremendous discretion—so much so that it’s not even clear my thought experiment involves illegal acts or that they would be actionable. Schiff suggests barring the department from bringing charges solely on the order of a president that the department would not have brought otherwise. Another idea: creating new types of limits on knowingly “selective” or “vindictive” prosecutions.“I do think there’s a way of legislating this that would be constitutional,” Schiff told me, noting that the goal should be “codifying guardrails” into “strict and legally enforceable protections against any future president abusing the office the way Trump has.” Schiff and other Democrats have already sponsored legislation that would require more reporting to Congress on White House–DOJ communications. In a new book, former federal prosecutor Barb McQuade suggests codifying limits on president-to-DOJ communications about the president’s political rivals in particular, among many other things. Meanwhile, the Center for American Progress is exploring ideas like new evidentiary burdens for DOJ to meet in cases involving people explicitly targeted by the president for prosecution. Brian Beutler has suggested that the next attorney general launch a major post-Trump fumigation of the department—with concrete accountability for its abuses at its center. Relatedly, law professor Stephen Vladeck suggests an overall posture for Democrats: “If you’re going to act in a way that’s grossly unethical and in violation of individuals’ rights, we’re going to do whatever we can to hold you accountable.”“The Justice Department is in shambles,” Schiff told me. “There is an unethical culture at the top that’s going to have to change.”That’s seconded by Ken White, a federal criminal defense attorney who writes a well-regarded blog about the law. He called the Comey prosecution “the single most flagrantly meritless indictment I’ve seen in my entire career” and added that it occasions deeper congressional reforms.For instance, White said, one reform might direct courts that conclude a prosecution was brought based on misinformation to order the DOJ to reimburse defendants’ legal fees. He also suggested requiring courts that determine a grand jury has been flagrantly misled by prosecutors—as White believes happened with Comey—to report it to the relevant state bar, facilitating professional disciplinary action. The point here is to establish a forward-looking mindset: that dealing with these levels of flood-the-zone lawlessness and abuses of power will require future Congresses to think big. Richard Nixon’s abuses exposed the need for far-reaching post-Watergate reforms. But much of that architecture—along with many norms of prosecutorial good faith and independence it inspired, at least as an ideal—has broken down in the face of an even more lawless president.“A lot of the limits on the incredible power of federal prosecutors are normative, rather than legal,” White told me. “Hopefully some of these abuses are appalling enough that a future Democratic Congress will pass hard statutory protections instead of just relying on DOJ culture, tradition, and institutionalism.”The post-Nixon Congresses were populated by a new generation of eager reformers known as “Watergate babies.” The post-Trump reformers will have to make their predecessors look like, well, babies—by outdoing them in determination, ambition, inspiration, and purpose.
Senate Republicans are looking to funnel nearly $70 billion with absolutely no strings attached to Donald Trump’s lawless immigration enforcement campaign. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley unveiled the legislative text Monday night for the Republicans’ reconciliation package, directing $38.2 billion to Immigrations and Customs Enforcement. The bill also allocates $26 billion for offices under Customs and Border Protection, including $3.5 billion for border security technology and screening, according to Punchbowl News. Meanwhile, another bill from the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee would provide an additional $32.5 billion, bringing the total package for immigration enforcement to roughly $69.2 billion, with ICE set to receive approximately $38.2 billion, according to Migrant Insider. Bobby Kogan, senior director of federal budget policy for the Center for American Progress, warned on X Monday night that these funds had “enormous flexibility, with far less accountability or oversight than typical annual appropriations for DHS funding has.” Senate Republicans have framed this massive expenditure as giving ICE and CBP enough funds to be shutdown-proof until the end of Trump’s term. But in reality, ICE already had twice as much funding as it needed to run from the president’s One Big Beautiful Bill, passed in July. Now ICE has roughly four or five times the amount of funding it needs to run until 2029, while CBP only has the funds to make it to 2027, according to Kogan. There do not appear to be any offsetting cuts to pay for this bill.Since Trump launched his sweeping immigration crackdown, American voters have borne witness to federal immigration agents’ use of threats and intimidation, excessive force, warrantless searches or arrests, racial profiling, and wrongful detentions. ICE has detained hundreds of children, and families of mixed legal status are being regularly torn apart by the administration’s relentless immigration crackdown. Federal immigration agents were also responsible for the deaths of two U.S. citizens in Minnesota. Rather than reform these federal agencies, Senate Republicans are choosing to write them a blank check using taxpayer dollars.
President Trump thinks that an event where he is surrounded by children is the best time to discuss the Iran war and then doze off.On Tuesday, at a signing ceremony in the Oval Office to restore the Presidential Fitness Award, Trump went off on a tangent on the war while thanking some members of his Cabinet, including Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, whom he praised for a press conference earlier in the day.“That was really great, and you’re doing very well,” Trump said from his seat at the Resolute Desk, turning to Hegseth. Then he abruptly changed the subject to Iran.“They don’t like playing games with us. They don’t like it at all, you’ll see that. As time goes by, you’re gonna see it. I think you’ve already seen it; we’ve basically wiped out their military in about two weeks,” Trump added, with kids and senior officials on either side of him. Later, Trump went further, describing Iran’s leaders as “sick people” and “lunatics” that he would not allow to have a nuclear weapon.the optics of this Oval Office event are absolutely insane. get a load of this. crazytown. pic.twitter.com/CTU1T84Y8Q— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 5, 2026Then Trump thanked Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., but as Kennedy spoke about how “grateful” he was for Trump’s decision to restore the fitness test, the president fell asleep.Trump, surrounded by kids, is struggling to stay awake as RFK Jr drones on and on pic.twitter.com/hXrfk9uuSU— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 5, 2026When it became Secretary of Education Linda McMahon’s turn to speak, Trump’s head was bobbing, his eyes opening and closing as McMahon spoke about needing to eat well and exercise to have a “sound mind.”LINDA McMAHON: In order to have a sound mind, you do have to eat well, you do have to exerciseTRUMP: *sitting, eyes closed* pic.twitter.com/5lMSkmYmJ5— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 5, 2026All of this shows that Trump is not well, mentally or physically. He is in clear decline in full view to the public, and no matter the subject, he will wander off topic and doze off if he gets the chance.
Donald Trump does not have the same sway that he used to.The MAGA leader’s supposedly astronomical influence over the Republican Party is being tested in the run-up to the November midterms, Politico reported early Tuesday.There’s plenty of evidence that his pull is fading. Trump’s retribution campaign begins in Indiana, where 21 local Republican legislators blocked his attempts to redistrict their state in December. Eight of them are up for reelection this cycle, and Trump aims to oust all of them. So far, Trump has endorsed primary challengers against seven, and his allies have spent millions of dollars on the relatively tiny races. Yet his candidates have largely failed to break out on their own, with the strongest only holding narrow leads in polls. Even those close to the president are not expecting all of Trump’s favorites to win, reported Politico.The president has also backed primary opponents to some of his biggest in-party thorns, including Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy and Kentucky Representative Thomas Massie, the latter of whom has so far weathered the storm. Cassidy, who became an enemy of the far-right movement when he voted to convict Trump on impeachment charges in 2021, is down by just a handful of points, according to the latest Emerson College poll.It’s another indication that the MAGA movement is turning away from its longtime leader, potentially looking for new stewardship as Trump enters the lame-duck stage of his presidency—even if Trump has no plans to end his reign.The 79-year-old once again toyed with the idea of extending his time in office while speaking at the White House small-business summit Monday, claiming that he could potentially stay in office for another two terms, or eight years in total.“He’s hit his max power and now you’re seeing the backside of that power curve,” former GOP Representative Adam Kinzinger told Politico. “This will be his last competitive election cycle that will have any impact on him. And I think the base is starting to think into the future.”
President Trump is dumping toxic debris containing lead and chromium from his East Wing demolition onto East Potomac Golf Links—raising more questions about the health and safety standards tied to his vanity project, and potentially putting golfers in harm’s way. And the president is doing this debris dumping while simultaneously preparing to massively overhaul the public golf course, as well.The National Parks Service claims that the soil, even with the presence of lead, is not excessively toxic, a spokeswoman for the Interior Department telling The New York Times that the soil has been tested “multiple times by multiple parties, and this project passed all standards set by law.” But doubts remain.“There’s no safe level of exposure to lead; it’s one of the most toxic elements we know of,” Harvard exposure assessment professor Joseph G. Allen told the Times. “One of the risks you have to think about with lead is that it doesn’t just stay outside in soil.… We track it on our shoes. So depending on where the soil was placed, golfers and other people could track it indoors.“We knew that the demolition of the East Wing and the changes to East Potomac were legally toxic; now we know they’re environmentally toxic as well,” said Democracy Defenders Fund executive chair Norm Eisen, who is representing the DC Preservation League in a lawsuit against the dumping and against Trump’s takeover of the public golf course. The group recently sought a temporary restraining order on construction and tree removal at the course, but its request was denied.
President Donald Trump’s Department of Education is targeting Smith College for accepting transgender women.The DOE’s Office of Civil Rights announced Monday that it would investigate Smith College for allowing “biological males into women’s intimate spaces” in violation of Title IX, the landmark 1972 law banning sex discrimination, which the Trump administration has used to rampantly discriminate against transgender people. “Title IX contains a single-sex exception that allows colleges to enroll all-male or all-female student bodies—but the exception applies on the basis of biological sex difference, not subjective gender identity,” the DOE said in a statement. “An all-girls college that enrolls male students professing a female identity would cease to qualify as single sex under Title IX.”Smith College is considered a historically women’s college, or HWC, founded as a single-sex education institution. The school accepts “any applicants who self-identify as women; cis, trans, and nonbinary women” and has accepted transgender women since 2015. Many other HWCs also accept transgender women. As for the DOE’s phony concerns about “intimate spaces,” Smith College’s website says it provides single-occupancy, all-gender restrooms, and an all-gender locker room with private changing and showering areas on campus. Shannon Minter, an attorney with the National Center for LGBTQ Rights, told CNN that the investigation was an “ominous” government overreach into the workings of private institutions. “If [women’s colleges] have chosen—as many of them have—to admit transgender students, that’s something they should be able to do freely without being worried about persecution by the federal government,” he told CNN. “This administration seems hell-bent on eliminating any inclusion of transgender people anywhere in our society.”
MAGA’s best case scenario for the war in Iran is, apparently, a return to the prewar status quo.In an interview with Fox News Monday night, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham claimed that the U.S. would win the Middle East war if it regained “freedom of navigation in the Strait of Hormuz” and attained relative peace for Iran’s neighbors—something that existed before Donald Trump decided to attack Iran.“We’re close to victory,” Graham said. “Victory for me would mean regaining freedom of navigation in the Strait of Hormuz, degrading a little bit further—short, big, strong response—their military capability a bit further, threaten Kharg Island with destruction and pull out and try to get Israel and Saudi Arabia back to peace.“The Strait of Hormuz is the only thing left,” Graham noted, touting White House talking points. “This has been a brilliant campaign by President Trump and our military.“If we can take back control of the Straits of Hormuz, it is checkmate,” Graham said. “This thing is over.”Yet even better than a win for the U.S. would be a win for Israel, according to Graham.“The ultimate victory is that Saudi Arabia and Israel make peace, ending the Arab-Israeli conflict,” Graham continued, continuing to heap praise on Trump’s name by claiming that the president will “go down in history as the greatest peacemaker.”U.S. involvement in the war was reportedly arranged following a February 11 meeting between Trump, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and several U.S. and Israeli officials in the White House Situation Room. It was reportedly Netanyahu’s direct influence—and the ensuing pressure campaign—that thrust America into the war. U.S. military commanders advised Trump that components of Netanyahu’s plan to attack Iran were “farcical,” but by that point, Trump had already been inspired to go after Tehran’s theocratic regime.The State Department backed the narrative via a government release penned late last month, detailing how the U.S. “is engaged in this conflict at the request of and in the collective self-defense of its Israeli ally, as well as in the exercise of the United States’ own inherent right of self-defense.”Nonetheless, the White House has disputed that narrative, repeatedly insisting that Israel had nothing to do with Trump’s decision to involve the country in another unpopular war in the Middle East.America has so far been at war with Iran for more than nine weeks and spent at least $25 billion in the process (though some estimates put the number at more than $70 billion). The regional conflict has damaged strategic alliances, stalled global trade, and thrust the world into an energy crisis due to the blockade on the Strait of Hormuz. It is not clear exactly what the war in Iran has accomplished. Together, the U.S. and Israel have killed thousands of Iranian civilians and obliterated Iranian civilian infrastructure, failing to damage Iran’s nuclear capabilities in the process. Meanwhile, 13 U.S. soldiers have died.The war has also spiked the cost of living for people around the world and agitated international relations—particularly between the U.S. and longtime allies in the Western hemisphere.It has also sparked a political rejection of MAGA ideology across the U.S. as the American public becomes more and more disillusioned with its increasingly infirm, unstable, and volatile president.
President Trump is trying to get the personal information of thousands of election workers and volunteers in Fulton County, Georgia, who helped with the 2020 election.The Fulton County Board of Elections filed a 27-page motion Monday to block a Department of Justice subpoena seeking the personal information of election workers, calling the move unprecedented and politically motivated.The subpoena, issued on April 17 but disclosed in court Monday, demands that the board’s custodian of records appear in federal court Tuesday with the full election staff roster, including names, home addresses, email addresses, and personal phone numbers of everyone involved in the 2020 presidential election in Georgia’s most populous county.County attorneys say that this goes too far and could include nearly 3,000 county employees, temporary poll workers, and volunteers. Fulton County Commission Chair Robb Pitts told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that the purpose of the subpoena is to “intimidate workers in our county, to discourage people from voting,” adding that the county would fight back with “with every possible resource.”Trump and his MAGA base have pushed conspiracy theories that Joe Biden’s 2020 victory in Georgia was due to election fraud, even though those claims have been debunked in court. Since winning his second term as president, Trump has weaponized the federal government to go after Fulton County, sending his director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, to accompany FBI agents to raid an elections office there in January.All of this could be a pretext for Trump to interfere in the November midterm elections, and even beyond that. The country could be in for several long legal battles.
The federal government secretly used your tax dollars to settle sexual harassment claims against House members for decades. According to documents from the Office of Congressional Workplace Rights and Republican Representative Nancy Mace, who recently forced the release of those documents through a subpoena, the federal government paid out more than $338,000 from 2004 to 2017 to secretly settle sexual harassment claims against six House members or their offices. The following year, Congress banned the federal government from paying off settlements for sex pests.Mace said she plans to release the records publicly “once we confirm that personally identifiable information of victims and witnesses has been properly redacted.... Accountability is not a threat,” she said. “It is a promise.”According to Mace’s calculations, those implicated include former Democratic Representatives Eric Massa ($115,000) and John Conyers ($77,000), and Republicans Blake Farenthold ($84,000) and Patrick Meehan ($39,000), whose misconduct was already public but not the exact sums. Less public settlements included an $8,000 payout on behalf of the late Democratic Representative Carolyn McCarthy’s office and a $15,000 payout for former Republican Representative Rodney Alexander. Alexander claimed the settlement had to do with accusations against one of his staffers at the time, while a former McCarthy aide did not respond to a query from Politico. These payouts—which have received even more scrutiny in the wake of allegations of misconduct against former Representatives Eric Swalwell and Tony Gonzales—demonstate the massive lack of accountability for members of Congress. Our leaders are hiding behind our money instead of actually having to acknowledge their misdeeds.
The war in Iran has done very little damage to the country’s nuclear capabilities, according to U.S. intelligence assessments.So far, America has been at war with Iran for more than nine weeks and spent at least $25 billion in the process. The regional conflict has damaged strategic alliances, stalled global trade, and thrust the world into an energy crisis due to the blockade on the Strait of Hormuz. It has also killed thousands of people.And yet assessments of Tehran’s nuclear program remain largely unchanged from roughly a year ago, when Donald Trump ordered strikes on three of Iran’s nuclear sites, hitting Fordo, Natanz, and Isfahan on June 22. Prior to the June attack, U.S. analysts believed that Iran had the capacity to build a nuclear bomb within three to six months, according to three sources familiar with the matter that spoke with Reuters Monday night. Afterward, U.S. analysts estimated that the attack—internally referred to as Operation Midnight Hammer—changed the Islamic Republic’s nuclear timeline back to about nine months to a year.That estimate is still the same, according to Reuters’s unnamed sources.Since February 28, the majority of U.S. and Israeli attacks have focused on hitting conventional military targets in Iran. The stagnant timeline suggests that such a strategy is not effective at diminishing Iran’s nuclear capabilities. To do that may require the destruction or removal of Iran’s remaining stockpile of highly enriched uranium, or HEU, reported Reuters.Iran lacked a single bomb’s worth of uranium in 2018, three years after former President Barack Obama brokered the Iran Nuclear Deal to limit the country’s enormous uranium stockpile. But that changed when Trump withdrew the U.S. from the pact and imposed a series of tough economic sanctions against the Middle Eastern country. By 2025, Iran had curated an 11-ton stockpile of enriched uranium, the whereabouts of which remain largely unknown. The total HEU stockpile could create as many as 10 bombs if fully enriched, according to a 2025 assessment by the International Atomic Energy Agency.Trump has previously stated that his primary objective in the war was to completely eliminate Iran’s nuclear capabilities, but his administration has not been consistent in relaying its mission progress to the general public. In the immediate aftermath of Operation Midnight Hammer, Trump and his administration claimed that Iran’s nuclear production was set back by multiple “years.” Yet former National Counterterrorism Center Director Joe Kent suddenly resigned over the issue in March, writing in his resignation letter that he could not “in good conscience” support the war in Iran because the country “posed no imminent threat to our nation.”
Another Republican governor is refusing to bend to Donald Trump’s demand to rig their state’s elections in his favor. South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster, a longtime Trump ally, is not preparing to call a special legislative session to redraw his state’s congressional map mid-decade, his office told Palmetto Politics. McMaster’s office told the outlet that he had been in communication with the White House following the Supreme Court’s decision to gut the Voting Rights Act last week, but the governor’s office rejected the idea it was being “pressured” by the Trump administration. His office insisted that it was part of “ongoing coordination” with the White House and the talks were simply part of the “regular communications” the governor enjoys with Trump. Shortly after the Supreme Court’s decision, McMaster suggested that it could be worth reviewing South Carolina’s congressional map, noting that it had been upheld as recently as 2024. “In light of the Court’s most recent decision on the Voting Rights Act, it would be appropriate for the General Assembly to ensure that South Carolina’s congressional map still complies with all requirements of federal law and the U.S. Constitution,” he wrote in a post on X.South Carolina currently has six Republicans and one Democrat in the House of Representatives.Last week, Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, another Republican, also said that he wouldn’t pursue mid-decade redistricting in light of the recent Supreme Court decision. Meanwhile, Trump has continued to threaten red states that refuse to rig their elections in his favor.
Republicans are now trying to get $1 billion in taxpayer funding for President Trump’s ballroom.Senator Chuck Grassley, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, included a request for the funds in a reconciliation package released Monday night. The $1 billion would go to the Secret Service for “security adjustments and upgrades” related to the ballroom’s construction. An additional $30.7 billion for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and $3.5 billion for Customs and Border Protection were also included in the budget item.In a statement Monday, Grassley said, “Republicans won’t allow our country to be dragged backwards by Democrats’ radical, anti-law enforcement agenda.“The Senate Judiciary Committee is taking action to help provide certainty for federal law enforcement and safer streets for American families. We will work to ensure this critical funding gets signed into law without unnecessary delay.”The reconciliation process allows for a simple majority in the Senate, meaning that if there is no Republican opposition, Trump will get the ballroom funds. It’s quite an increase from the $400 million in tax dollars that Senate Republicans asked for last month, and from the zero dollars from taxpayers that Trump promised. But he must have his ballroom, whether the American people want it or not.
President Trump is still beefing with Pope Leo XIV, accusing the first American pope of “endangering a lot of Catholics,” on The Hugh Hewitt Show on Monday.Trump attacked the pope unprovoked after Hewitt said perhaps the pope could speak up about China’s detention of Hong Kong billionaire Jimmy Lai. “Well, the pope would rather talk about the fact that it’s OK for Iran to have a nuclear weapon.… I don’t think that’s very good,” Trump said. “I think he’s endangering a lot of Catholics and a lot of people, but I guess, if it’s up to the pope, he thinks it’s just fine for Iran to have a nuclear weapon.”It’s clear that Trump has been extremely bothered by the pope’s very measured criticism last month, and consumed with this one-sided beef ever since. Trump is claiming that Pope Leo is “endangering” Catholics because he wants Iran to have a nuclear weapon. Pope Leo XIV never said anything close to that. Instead, he simply criticized Trump’s war on Iran and his genocidal threats accompanying it, and the president has been crashing out since, calling him “weak on crime” and putting words in his mouth to cope.
You can watch this episode of Right Now With Perry Bacon above or by following this show on YouTube or Substack. You can read a transcript here.The Supreme Court’s Louisiana v. Callais decision on gerrymandering was the latest example of its disingenuous approach to racial issues, says Kimberlé Crenshaw, a law professor at Columbia University and UCLA. Crenshaw argues that the court’s six conservative justices fully understand why partisan gerrymandering hurts Black Americans but are pretending not to. She said that the ruling is a part of a broad conservative attack against affirmative action, diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, and virtually any policy that acknowledges race and racism in America. Crenshaw also discusses her new memoir, “Backtalker.” In the book, Crenshaw explains the process behind her pioneering legal and intellectual work on critical race theory and intersectionality. She describes how past and contemporary political controversies underline the importance of those concepts.
This is a lightly edited transcript of the May 1 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.Perry Bacon: I’m Perry Bacon. I’m the host of The New Republic show Right Now. We have a great guest. Kimberlé Crenshaw is a professor of law at UCLA and Columbia, and she’s very well known for writing about intersectionality, but also as a great professor, activist, and expert for decades now. So Kim, welcome.Kimberlé Crenshaw: Always happy to be in conversation with you, Perry. Thanks for having me.Bacon: Yes—you were a great guest, I think in November. You have a memoir out, so I want to talk about that—which is great news, hearing from you in this kind of lane—but I want to start with really important news from yesterday, and you’re the right kind of person to ask about this. We now have another Supreme Court ruling further limiting the Voting Rights Act, and as we’re speaking right now, legislators and governors in Alabama, Louisiana, among other places, are literally talking about, How do we redraw our districts to further limit the number of Black representatives we send to Congress and to state legislatures, and to limit Black voices in our states further? So talk about your reaction to that ruling yesterday, first of all.Crenshaw: Perry, it was sadly expected. Anyone who has been following the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence over the last two decades knows that we are looking at a deliberate, devastating approach to the infrastructure of the Civil Rights Movement.The Voting Rights Act has been particularly painful to watch as it’s being destroyed. It’s been called the crown jewel of the Civil Rights Movement for good reason. It’s the only law that actually focuses on results. It focuses on representation, and anything that is done in states that had a history of denying African Americans the right to vote is potentially subject to intervention.Most other laws are not like that. To take an equivalency between voting and housing, for example—one could say practices and policies and procedures that predictably produce segregated housing, no matter what they are, whether it’s insurance lending, redlining, restrictive covenants—all of these things are suspicious because they produce a particular end that we associate with discrimination, segregation, and white supremacy. That’s what the Voting Rights Act has done. That’s what it has been. That’s why it is one of the most successful laws in the United States in terms of achieving a particular objective. It has become so much of our fabric in this society that when we look at Black representatives, we don’t think about how much had to happen, and what the infrastructure of voting procedures and policies has to be for that to happen. Now, unfortunately, as you mentioned, these state legislatures are quickly going about—now that they have the green light—to have at it. We’re going to see how important these laws had been in creating a reality that we have since then taken for granted.Bacon: I’m not a lawyer or legal expert, but if you read these opinions, not only this one but the past ones ... the idea of critical race theory is in part to look at outcomes and results and not just intent. It seems like Alito and Roberts’s intention is very much to make it so that unless you said the N-word and said, “I want to stop every Black person from voting because [I’m a racist]”—they’re trying to define civil rights law down to express an intent that very few people make in 2026.Crenshaw: Yes. They are targeting a kind of discrimination—a reflection of discrimination that goes all the way back to a time that was 50, 60 years ago. People don’t discriminate like that anymore. Even when they did discriminate like that, they didn’t often say, “No Black person can come to the polls.” What they would do is bury their discriminatory intent inside a process, inside a structure, inside a procedure. So when you had to pass a literacy test, or had to guess how many marbles are in a jar, or when you had to recite the Constitution—these were not said to be, “If you’re Black, you can’t vote,” but it gave the power, the authority, and the discretion to individual white people to effectively do what they wanted to do, which is not to let any Black people vote.Even their telling of discrimination is anachronistic to 1965, when the Voting Rights Act was passed. Now we’re talking a half-century later, and the only thing they think counts as discrimination is something that’s over a century old. This is why they’ve gone after critical race theory, because critical race theory makes that clear. It says discrimination, exclusion can happen in any number of ways that are presumably race-neutral.The Voting Rights Act understood that—that’s why it was so effective. The MAGA judges understand that, and that is exactly why they gutted it.Bacon: Talk about what the results will be. I guess there are two things I want to talk about. The first is you’re going to end up with a state like Louisiana or Alabama where you have very few—almost no—Democratic members of Congress. The second is: Even if you have one, they’re less likely to be Black than before. So talk about those things differently, because part of what I’m concerned about is Democratic members, but part of it is Black representation—and these things are being conflated in various ways. So talk about why those things are different and why they’re the same.Crenshaw: Yeah. Let’s be clear about what it is that the Voting Rights Act protected. It protected the right of Black voters to elect someone of their choosing without their preferences being artificially diminished because of the structure of the voting regime. The issue is: Who is it that Black voters are preferring? How is it that their preferences are basically being swallowed up by—in some cases—districts that are drawn in such a way that either pack them all into one district, or crack them across several districts in order to minimize the voting power that they actually have? It’s the choices of Black voters—not necessarily the identity or even the party of the choices that they make.But because race, identity, Democratic Party affiliation, and voter preference are in many ways an amalgam—it is therefore that much easier to disenfranchise Black people, to say, “This is a party gerrymander, not a racial gerrymander.”Here’s what’s the real kicker in this: The ability to gerrymander on the basis of party has been one of the ways that Black voters’ choices have been undermined, which in turn created the pressure under law to create corrective district line-drawing so that that political gerrymander doesn’t rob Black people of the right to vote. Now what they’re going to be able to say is that the remediation—the fix—the way in which the party gerrymander is no longer available to undermine Black voters because of the Voting Rights Act—that’s now gone.So it’s a twofer. They can now freely use party gerrymandering to suppress Black voters, and Black voters don’t have a recourse in the Voting Rights Act. That is what’s so insidious about this decision.Bacon: We talk a lot about Trump, but in reality we have a Republican—you said “MAGA judges.” What we’re really talking about is a much broader architecture of anti-Blackness. If President Trump didn’t exist, all these six people—most of them were not even appointed by him. Talk about the fact that we talk about racism as if it’s Donald Trump, but this is a much deeper anti-Black project than Donald Trump, right?Crenshaw: It’s been an anti-Black project that has been in the making for a couple of decades. We’re looking at justices on the Supreme Court who argued in memos against Brown v. Board of Education. We’re talking about justices who attempted to participate in voter suppression. We’re talking about one judge in particular who wrote this opinion, who was known to say that the institutions that he attended were better when they practiced discrimination—Princeton, and gender discrimination, to be specific. This has been a very long fuse that was inevitably going to result in an explosive moment like this if that fuse was not extinguished, and it was not. So we’ve got a steady drumbeat of dismantling the beautiful infrastructure that was created out of the blood, sweat, and tears—the lives lost—in the 1960s. Now we’re at a point where that fire, as far as the law is concerned, is on the brink of extinguishing—if it has not already happened.Bacon: I was going to ask you—you’re a law professor; courts and law and legal systems are your field. But on some level, have we lost the law? Is it all about winning elections? With these six people ultimately deciding what the law is, is the law—whatever it was in 1954—is the law no longer a tool that’s of much use for us?Crenshaw: It’s important to acknowledge that there is no further appeal when the Supreme Court makes a decision. That is the it, and that is the all of it. Now, there are always possibilities of repassing the law. There are always possibilities at a local level of trying to work around this ideology that the Supreme Court has created. Our challenge often has been that when the court sets out a particular pathway—this pathway now is to label anything that is not colorblind as potentially unconstitutional—the tendency has been to give the other side the victory before they’ve had to litigate it.Here’s the example in the reverse. In 1954, as we know, Brown v. Board of Education ruled that segregation in education was unconstitutional. It was not the case that all the segregating institutions said, OK, we’re done, we’re going to go in the direction that the Supreme Court is leading us in. They resisted massively. They shut down the schools rather than integrate them. They came up with freedom-of-choice plans. They extended their resistance so that each demand to abide by the law had to be litigated. The question is: Do we have that fight in us? Do we have the ability to say—even though we know what this court is trying to do with colorblindness—each case is its own case? Make them win it in each court. Make them win it each time they’re trying to apply this specious ideology to yet another arena. There is room to fight. The question is whether there’s a will to fight.And I have to say that the ledger doesn’t look so promising when we see how many law firms that used to be on the right side bending the knee, kissing the ring—universities, without even being asked to, eliminating their scholarships and their programs. We see some foundations scrubbing the support that they give for racial justice. We even see some of our allies listing almost every issue that’s important to a progressive community except anti-Blackness. So if anything, we have to hope that this moment is a wake-up call. There’s no pivoting our way out of it. There’s no “unsaying the thing that needs to be said” way out of it. The only thing we have right now is to fight our way out of it. Hopefully the bell has been rung.Bacon: I hope you’re right, because as you were talking, I was thinking: The universities folded so quickly and preemptively surrendered so much that the idea that other people will fight is not what we’ve seen so far.OK, so you have a memoir out—it’s called Backtalker. So talk about the title, first of all. I think I know what that word means, but talk about why that’s the title.Crenshaw: I was raised to talk, and I was raised to talk back against injustice. Those two ideas have come together throughout my career. In thinking about how to express, explain, historicize this moment—the need for us to talk back, the need for us to use some of the tools, the concepts like critical race theory and intersectionality—it was important for me to talk back against one particular idea, which is that all these ideas are foreign imports. They come from other people and are not homegrown reactions to the realities that we here in the United States have faced.It reminds me of the way that the Freedom Riders and the Civil Rights Movement was framed by folks in the South as outside intervention—of course, our Black people here have no problem going around to the back door, have no problem being denied the right to vote or denied education. It took somebody from outside to come and get them all stirred up. In a way, that’s what a lot of critics of critical race theory and intersectionality have been saying: This is coming from somewhere else.I thought it was important to say it’s not coming from anywhere else but this country, this land, these places, these spaces that followed a policy and practice—in fact, a cultural politics—that created the recognition that yes, we live in a society that is still dealing with the shadow of segregation and enslavement. And that recognition, that literacy about what that means in our lives, doesn’t come from sitting in an ivory tower with one’s finger to the temple. It comes from experience up. It comes from the things that we learned from the time we were little babies. It comes from the way that it got reinforced when we were in public school and when we went to college and when we gained career traction. This is a story about how we live in this country as racialized subjects and what knowledge that life has given to us.Bacon: You write about the Clarence Thomas–Anita Hill period, and you knew Anita Hill a little bit before she became nationally famous. So the question would be: That’s a moment where intersectional beliefs and views were not really expressed—it became that defending Black people meant you defended Clarence Thomas, functionally, and not Anita Hill, functionally. Do you think as a society we’ve gotten better on that, where we recognize that Black women are different and [there are] two sort of distinct identities? Are we getting better on this issue, you think?Crenshaw: That’s a difficult assessment to make after this last election, for example—where we effectively had a candidate who was a Black woman being called out of her name repeatedly, being framed in such a misogynistic—I have to bring in Moya Bailey here, who calls it “misogynoir.” You take sexism and you take racism, and together they create a debacle. That was what it was to hear the way that Vice President Kamala Harris was regarded. Then you come out of that election with so few people in the mainstream news environment willing to take up what that meant, what new bottom that created. Then of course you have the purging of Black women from positions of power. You have the undermining of their expertise. You have the idea that just seeing a Black woman in a job that requires expertise and knowledge and skill is, for them, de facto unqualified—the worst stories about DEI.In terms of the broader political culture, being able to address the intersectional gaps that led to the confirmation of Clarence Thomas—it’s a big, continuing hole into which not only the well-being of Black women has fallen, and the well-being of Black communities, but the whole nation has been driven into this point of destruction. I never miss the opportunity to remind people who complain about our politics now being owned by oligarchs that the 5–4 decision that defeated meaningful campaign finance reform was made possible by that fifth vote that was won when Clarence Thomas was confirmed. There’s not much that you could look at in this moment of disaster that you can’t point to some rule that the Supreme Court has made that created a permissive environment for precisely this thing to happen. That’s intersectional failure that has undermined us all, including the very republic that we claim to be part of.Bacon: Another intersectional issue—one where I was surprised by the book. I like Barack Obama, I think he has done a lot of good things. But ... there was a program called My Brother’s Keeper that they started in the Obama White House in 2014. The idea was, “We’re going to help Black men.” Talk about that—you came to the White House and said, “Why don’t we do a program for Black women?” And their response was not yes, which is what it should have been—it was something different. What was it?Crenshaw: The response was that this program, My Brother’s Keeper, was targeted to the specific ways that—frankly, it was conceived as a response to Trayvon Martin, so Black boys were always front and center—but it was then expanded to deal with all boys of color, and then eventually all boys, in some of the school and educational programs. But the idea was Black men and boys are exceptionally left behind, they’re exceptionally vulnerable, and because they have special needs, there has to be a program that is attentive to those needs.Our complaint wasn’t that there weren’t specific needs that were racialized and gendered. Our point was that it’s not just Black boys who are experiencing racialized and gendered modes of underdevelopment, of risk, of vulnerability—that the many issues around which there was data that was quoted as the reason for the program applied to girls and women as well. From the consequences of living in low-resourced communities, to the consequences of early dropping out of school, to the vulnerability to violence, to being surveilled, to being reflected in the culture as people without potential, as people who are a drag on our society rather than a benefit—nearly 80 percent of the data that was cited as just about boys was about all Black youth, and yet only the boys were carved out as a point of intervention, basically leaving their sisters and their mothers behind.This was not the strategy that we used to get this far. This was not the understanding of what it meant to stand in solidarity with each other as we press for greater forms of equity. What it was, however, was a throwback to a report in the ’60s called the Moynihan Report, that basically said that the problem that Black people were facing was that our homes were in gender disrepair—women were heading up the household, men were not around, thus we cannot compete to be equal. So determined was Moynihan to try to force this framework on the Black community that he advocated against providing Black women—who even then were disproportionately relied on to support their families—from having job training, from actually being able to increase their economic viability.So Moynihan has always looked with a side eye toward the interests of Black women and girls. Because of that, the entire community has suffered, because we have to rely on all of our incomes and all of our advances to ensure the economic and social well-being of our whole community. We were arguing for inclusion, not exclusion. We were arguing for a gender-integrated program to approach some of the issues that we still struggle with.Bacon: Two more questions. The first one: I read your book, and I talked to Ibram Kendi a few weeks ago too—it’s even more so for you, though. What is it like when you’ve done all this research, had excellent ideas, validated ideas—ideas that were rigorous, ideas that were well explained, ideas that reflected the reality of the world—those ideas had prominence for a long time, and then people with power banned the ideas on all kinds of disingenuous pretenses. You’re closer to the end of your career than the beginning.You release this memoir, you’ve had all these ideas—intersectionality, CRT—that are, I would say, correct, but Samuel Alito has more power than you. So how do you feel ... about a world in which Alito gets to write the law even though he’s obviously not as smart as you are?Crenshaw: Ha, thank you. I appreciate that acknowledgement that it must be difficult—it is. I do complain with my friends sometimes: “I can’t believe this. I can’t believe that some of this idiocy is actually going to go down as the law of the land.” Then my friends will sometimes remind me, “Oh, you know what? Someone had a theory about that. What’s it called? Could it be intersectionality?”Somebody had an understanding about how power is frequently not based on superior thinking. It’s not based on rationality. It’s often not based on legitimate forms of understanding. It’s based on sheer coercion. It’s based on force. And sometimes that coercion, sometimes that force, is racialized and gendered.We do not live outside of the history that produced this country. There was never a moment where the whole deck was cleared and we started over. We still live in a society—we can’t say that this society was never a slave society, or never a genocide-based society. It’s a post-slavery society. It’s a post-segregation, post-genocidal society, which means there are elements of those things that still live. We walk and breathe in a society in which the institutions that we live in, the laws that we are told to abide by, are grounded in and reflective of many of those commitments from the past. It’s not surprising that MAGA goes after these efforts to remember and make that history present to this moment. It’s not surprising that they’re engaging in a process of trying to erase our literacy. It used to be against the law, and you could be punished by death, even, to learn how to read. So it’s understood that literacy, the ability to think, to reason, to make sense out of our situation—how dangerous that is to oligarchs and those who want to maintain a status quo which predictably delivers privilege and power to some people who look and inherit a certain legacy, and the rest of us who are on the bottom.So in some ways, this moment does prove the correctness of the theory. The question is: What is the practice that comes out of it?I have to say—Perry, I feel fortunate that I had the opportunity to write the book to drop in this moment. I was bemoaning it during 2020 and during 2008 that I hadn’t done a memoir. But I had a lot more life to live and a lot more to say about what was happening at the time. Now I feel fortunate that yes, I’m toward the end of my career, and this might not be the mic drop yet, but it’s letting people know: Here is what the project was, here is what it still is, and here is the baton for you to run the next lap with.Bacon: Yeah, that’s what I want to end on. People like me who are younger than you, who are in the more middle of their career, who are living in this moment where everything we believe seems to be eroding in front of our faces—it doesn’t feel very hopeful right now. I write things and it feels like, you know, John Roberts doesn’t care what I think. What do you tell people—scholars who are trying to come up with theories that acknowledge CRT, or acknowledge intersectionality, or acknowledge that there’s racism in America—when John Roberts and Alito get to say every day there isn’t? What’s your message for us? We’re people who are doing this work that feels futile right now. Is it futile?Crenshaw: No, it is not futile at all. We have to remember that we are planting seeds—of trees that might not give us shade. But the seeds nonetheless must be planted. This moment is particularly important to me because I’ve been spending some time trying to gather up the insights, the awareness, that our ancestors who experienced precisely this at the end of Reconstruction thought about. What is the wisdom that they passed on? What did they do? What did they try? What was a no-go? What is something where now, they think, Had we been more prepared, we could have done something different?We need to be thinking, at minimum, about providing this for the next generation. Did we know? Yes, we knew. Did we try to fight? Some of us did. Were our allies ready to fight with us? Well, there is the problem right there.Some of them were willing to throw us under the bus, thinking that pivoting away from the great cause of the Civil War, for example, or dialing back the promises of citizenship, or refusing to celebrate the legacy of the Union soldiers, the Black Union soldiers, and the Black enslaved people who went on a strike that defeated the Confederacy. The erasure of that history, done by those who relied on us, is the crime we need to keep focused on—from back then, and its shadow happening right now.So yeah, there’s going to be fight back. There is going to eventually be someone else in the White House. Whether we go into the White House with that person—whether the eventuality of the collapse of this stranglehold that the MAGA faction has on our democracy will also open up a new possibility to regain what we’ve lost—turns on the fights that we’re having right now: with our allies inside the party that many of us vote for, with the media who cover these issues. We’re fighting for our lives in this moment—not for something that’s going to happen two years from now or eight years from now. It’s about how these moments are being covered, and whether anti-Blackness is important enough for us to go to the mat to insist that it be discussed, that it be prioritized, and that it be organized around.Bacon: Alright—I promise, my real last question. OK, right now some people I like—AOC, Ro Khanna, my governor Andy Beshear—some honorable people are thinking about running for president. But the advice they’re getting is: There’s too much wokeness. You saw the Kamala loss. When you talk about race, that means we lose. You can only talk about jobs and the economy. They’re getting this advice every day, even from people who ostensibly agree with you and I. What would you tell them if they got the memo that says, Anytime you talk about race, you lose 2 percent—you should only obsess about the white working-class person in Wisconsin, wokeness is bad, whatever that means. What would you tell them if you got with these people? Because I don’t think they’re hearing from voices like yours very much—so at least through this podcast they can.What would you tell one of them? This idea that you can forget about race and we can just win the election—I don’t think it’s correct, but I’d be curious what you would tell them.Crenshaw: I don’t think it’s correct either. First of all, we have to make sure that they understand that the allegation of wokeness that lost this last presidential election certainly didn’t come from Kamala over-indexing on talking about race. In fact—Bacon: She never did.Crenshaw: She couldn’t even talk about the fact that her race was being erased! So for people to think that she was over-indexing is just a false understanding of what happened. The person that did talk about race was the racist in the election.Bacon: The person who won.Crenshaw: The person who won! You cannot win an asymmetrical war when one side is weaponizing race, when it is appealing to white Christian nationalists, when it is openly embracing some of the most damaging racial tropes in the history of this country, and we’re mum about it. Our response is like, “What? Who? We didn’t hear that.” That is not a workable solution. You’ve got the yeehaws happening, and you’ve got nothing on the other side. We have a rich history, we have a rich tradition, we have a history in which we have been able to create winning coalitions who are not willing to sign on to that. But if you’re not willing to call them to the battle, if you’re not willing to say this is not who we want to be, then you don’t deserve to win. You’re not offering an alternative that is getting to the heart of why this country is on the skids in this moment. It’s because of these concerns about replacement. It’s because of the weaponization of resentment. It’s because they’ve been taught to punch down rather than lift up. We cannot win not addressing that, and I don’t think it’s just theoretical.If we look at my mayor in New York City—he didn’t follow that logic, he didn’t bend the knee in the ways that he was told to, and he won, and it wasn’t close. We have other examples. I would say: Challenge your pollsters, who many times are just asking the same old questions to give the same old answers. And number two: Ask if you’re really willing to move away from an entire part of the populace, or if you’re willing to leave their votes on the table and to move back into a democracy in which huge parts of the American public are not engaged. If that’s what you want, then that is not a prescription for many of us who are looking for a campaign, a candidate, a possibility that will reconnect us as a people to a democracy that’s worth fighting for.Bacon: Great place to end. Thanks, everybody. Kimberlé Crenshaw’s book is called Backtalker. It comes out May 5. I’m sure it’s on Amazon and other places. She’s on Instagram and Bluesky and Twitter. She’s a great voice. Kim, thanks for joining me. I appreciate it.Crenshaw: Thank you, Perry. Always a pleasure.
The following is a lightly edited transcript of the May 5 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.For background reading on the topic of today’s episode, see this piece arguing that the Supreme Court’s gerrymandering ruling will unleash a massive redistricting arms race. Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.Last week, the Supreme Court gutted a key protection against racial gerrymandering, and Donald Trump is already urging Republicans to capitalize on it. In a Truth Social rant, Trump called on GOP states to gerrymander their congressional maps to the max in time for this fall’s elections. That means eliminating as many seats represented by African Americans as possible. By expressly putting this in the context of the midterms, Trump in essence openly admitted that this new gerrymandering push is all about keeping power in the face of his nose-diving approval, which just hit yet another new low. All of which will simply require Democrats to act in response.Max Flugrath of the voting rights group Fair Fight Action has been thinking a lot about the roadmap ahead for Democrats. So we’re talking to him about all this today. Max, good to have you on.Max Flugrath: Greg, thanks so much for having me.Sargent: So as you all know, the Supreme Court’s ruling gutted the Voting Rights Act yet again, removing a check on racial gerrymandering. On Truth Social, Donald Trump urged GOP legislatures to act on the ruling by redrawing their congressional district maps aggressively, saying, “Republicans will receive more than 20 House seats in the upcoming midterms.” Now, Max, the idea that Republicans can get 20 House seats in time for the midterms is pure bullshit, and we’ll get to that. But for now, note how Trump doesn’t even disguise that this is about preventing the loss of the House of Representatives. Your thoughts on that?Flugrath: It’s a shameless paragraph, plain and simple. And it’s something that his advisors have actually been talking to donors about for some time. In December, Axios reported that Chris LaCivita and [Tony] Fabrizio—Trump’s pollster—were at an RNC donor retreat telling them that this case, Louisiana v. Callais, would boost their prospects in 2026 and it would transform the Republican Party’s ability to win elections for years to come. They’re not being coy about it at all.Sargent: They certainly aren’t. Well, let’s recap the current situation. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, a Republican, just signed a new map potentially flipping four Democratic seats into the GOP camp. Up until now, the redistricting arms race had been mostly a wash, particularly after Virginia redrew and added up to four Democratic seats. So now maybe with Florida, the ledger tips a little bit toward the GOP. A lot depends on what happens in court with both the Florida and Virginia cases, but maybe it ends up being a wash. Can you sum up where we are?Flugrath: So yeah, this all started in Texas after Trump demanded they rig their maps. After that, we saw Republicans add more seats to their column in Ohio, in Missouri, and North Carolina. Of course, California responded right after—that was sort of a gut punch in response—and they put it to the voters, which is not what Republican states have been doing at all. Virginia was next in this redistricting war saga that Trump kicked off. Like you mentioned, that’s under review, strangely. Republicans are looking for a court to vacate the will of the voters due to some technical BS, in my opinion.Now we’re seeing what’s going to happen in Florida. They have an actual constitutional amendment there, which was passed overwhelmingly by voters in 2010 to restrict and outlaw partisan gerrymandering. So it’s unclear, the fate of those maps. DeSantis and others involved have talked about them in a pretty partisan way. So they may have shot themselves in the foot. Of course, the result remains to be seen.Sargent: Right. So California and Virginia, just to clarify, added seats into the Democratic column, more or less making this a wash. But again, a lot turns on what happens in court with Virginia and Florida. Here it gets a bit complicated. Due to the high court ruling, several GOP states are going to try to redraw in time for the midterms this fall. Meanwhile, some other GOP states will try to wait and redraw in time for the 2028 election. Just to break this down, let’s start with the first batch. As of now, GOP legislatures in Louisiana, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, and South Carolina are going to try to redraw in time for this fall. Max, can you walk us through what that entails? I know there’s some doubt about South Carolina, but what’s the general picture?Flugrath: They’re going to try to ram these maps through and it’ll probably add a couple of seats in the Republican column, leaning it in their favor. But there’ll be a lot of procedural hurdles they’ll have to clear in order to get there. In Alabama, they might have to do some sort of special primary situation, which could even mean they have to vacate results of the regular primary. Tennessee, they’re going to have to amend their own laws to allow them to do mid-decade redistricting in the first place. In Louisiana, the governor is calling them for a special session to redraw that map. Mississippi had already been called for a special session to redraw state Supreme Court maps, but the governor can amend that call to include other maps. So all those prospects are on the table and they seem to be rushing to do it. Sargent: There will be lawsuits all over the place and it’s a little hard to know exactly how this shakes out, but it’s possible Republicans get a few extra seats out of this.Flugrath: Yeah, that’s definitely fair to say. Sargent: Now let’s go a little further out to the out years. A bunch of other GOP states will try to redraw next year in time for the 2028 elections. What could that look like and how many seats overall could Republicans pull into their column in time for those elections in 2028?Flugrath: We released a report in 2025 and we looked at all these states across the South and what would happen if this exact ruling were to come to pass. We found that Republicans could draw 19 new safe Republican seats. So the number is pretty staggering. It seems high, but it all adds up if they go state by state and maximize the amount of seats they can squeeze out of the maps.Sargent: Nineteen extra seats for Republicans is basically armageddon. There could be a number of scenarios which fall well short of that but are still bad. There could be like 10 or 12, right?Flugrath: Yeah, “up to 19” is a good way to characterize it.Sargent: So we don’t know, but no matter how this shakes out, it’s bad for Democrats. And the sheer naked corruption of all this simply requires Democrats to act in time for 2028. Your group, Fair Fight Action, had another analysis—which I reported on at NewRepublic.com—finding that Democrats can themselves add anywhere from 10 to 22 seats by aggressively redistricting in blue states. Can you walk us through that set of calculations?Flugrath: Yeah. So we looked at seven states. Four of them, Democrats have trifecta control—they control the governor and both chambers of the legislature. Those are the states where the path is the easiest. Those states total up to 10 additional seats that we found. It’s New York, Colorado, Maryland, and Oregon. Our second tier could essentially net up to 12 seats, but it’s three states and we need to flip one legislative chamber in order to do it. So it’s Pennsylvania, it’s Wisconsin, and it’s Minnesota.Sargent: And you’d have to flip both legislative chambers in Wisconsin to make it happen.Flugrath: Correct.Sargent: The key to this is that there are Democratic governors in those three states. If you get Democratic control of the legislatures in this fall’s elections, then there’s a trifecta in place to redistrict by these Democratic state legislatures and governors in time for 2028, then you get to a scenario where you could get as many as 22 seats. Flugrath: Yep. It could effectively nullify the up to 19 seats that our 2025 analysis found could be added for Republicans. You also mentioned that Democrats have been forced into this position. It’s a long-held position in the Democratic Party widely: that we don’t like gerrymandering, we want to ban it. They introduced legislation in 2021 to do just that—they passed it through the House. But Republicans are sort of forcing this gerrymandering war upon the American people.Sargent: Right, no question about that. In fact, Democrats have modeled an alternate approach in a lot of these states as well. They’ve passed independent redistricting commissions. That’s a better way to do this—by far. It’s fair. Each party treats the other party’s voters with respect instead of with disrespect, which is what gerrymandering does. But Republicans won’t have any of it. They just want to redistrict and gerrymander to their heart’s content because they think it benefits them. They don’t care what it does to the system itself.I want to underscore this point though. It’s the state legislative elections this year that have the impact on what Democrats can do next year. That’s really essential for people to get. State legislative elections suddenly got much more consequential—people really have to get out and vote in these things because flipping state legislatures now makes it possible to negate the Republican advantage later.Flugrath: Yes, absolutely correct. There’s going to be an outsized importance in these state legislative races. And luckily that’s beneficial for Democrats widely. We saw a bunch of special elections for state legislative seats across the country last year. Democrats won all of them.We’re entering an environment where Democrats are poised to win because people widely—whether or not they are Democrats or they support Democrats—are usually very fed up with what’s happening here. It’s being driven by Trump and the Republicans in Washington. That’s why we’re seeing this effort to rig the maps. They don’t want to face the voters in a fair election.Sargent: Well, speaking of that, not coincidentally, Trump is hitting record lows in polling. Let’s listen to this from CNN polling analyst Harry Enten. Here he’s talking about the new Washington Post/ABC poll, which finds Trump’s approval at 37 percent and his disapproval at 62 percent. Listen.Harry Enten (voiceover): Trump’s numbers have fallen to a new record low according to the Washington Post/ABC News poll. He is now 25 points underwater on the net approval rating—that is the lowest ever. Sargent: And on top of that, CNN’s average of polls has Trump at a record high disapproval of 64 percent. Absolutely abysmal numbers.So here you can see why the desperation is mounting from Trump to get Republicans to gerrymander as many extra GOP seats as possible in time for the midterms. Trump knows a Democratic House will impeach him and investigate him in every way. He is begging Republicans in these states to redraw their maps in order to prevent the voters from stating their verdict on this disastrous presidency. It’s that simple.Flugrath: It is that simple. It brings me to something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, which is: Political parties try to compete and earn your vote. Authoritarian movements try to steal it. We’re not really in a time now when there is a Republican Party. It’s become sort of an authoritarian cult that just supports the leader.Sargent: Well, the way they absolutely scampered in, rushed in—the second the Supreme Court issued its ruling—to say, We’re now going to gerrymander absolutely wherever we possibly can, without the slightest hint of shame—really underscores your point. This is not a party that’s functioning as an actor in a democracy any longer. And this is tricky, as you pointed out for Democrats. They don’t like gerrymandering for good reason. Again, gerrymandering’s bad. The future that Trump and Republicans want is one where they play by a different set of rules, and Democrats can’t let that happen.Flugrath: Republicans have also locked themselves into this—if you remember, famously, after they lost the 2012 election, they did the RNC autopsy report. And the conclusion was they needed to broaden their base of supporters by reaching out to minorities, to Black voters, to Hispanic voters. Then Donald Trump came in and took them in the opposite direction. And although they did get higher levels of support from those types of voters in the 2024 election, it seems to have been an aberration because now voters are seeing the reality of what happens when you elect Donald Trump.Sargent: It certainly is. Donald Trump is historically underwater. As Trump might say, nobody’s ever seen anything like it. But I want to conclude on an essential point here, which is Democrats are going to be tempted to say something like, We really hate gerrymandering—for good reason, again—what we should be doing is trying to pass reform on the federal level that bars it. Maybe we shouldn’t really gerrymander ourselves. But the point is: They don’t have to choose between one or the other. They should adopt a two-track approach here. One track is perpetually offer the option of ending gerrymandering for both parties with federal legislation. If Republicans want to join in doing that, great, let’s do it.If Republicans don’t like the fact that Democrats are gerrymandering in response to what they’re doing, let’s end it together. Awesome. Let’s do that. But meanwhile, if they’re not going to end it, if Republicans won’t agree to that, Democrats have to forge ahead in these states. That makes it more likely and not less that Republicans ultimately end up agreeing to some kind of peace, some kind of détente. They’ll never agree to any kind of détente if Democrats roll over and take it. Can you talk about that?Flugrath: Republicans have forced Democrats into this position because they have brought a new weapon to this fight—unmitigated, blatant gerrymandering. And even though Democrats are against it ideologically, if we don’t respond in kind, we’re abdicating our responsibility to the voters to protect their rights, protect their freedoms, and make sure that we have a fair representative system of democracy. You can’t win a fight by intentionally choosing not to use stronger weapons that your opponent is using.Sargent: A hundred percent. To wrap this up, what do you think is the most likely scenario in this fall’s elections and then in the out years?Flugrath: I think Republicans are running a big risk. If you look at the recent special elections in Florida, Democrats dramatically overperformed. And although I’m a Floridian and I want to believe it’s a purple state, most people consider it a red state, but Democrats overperformed there. They had some really great wins. If Republicans take up this aggressive map-redrawing, map-rigging approach across the country, they may see Democrats overperforming. I think people see this for what it is, which is a blatant partisan power grab. In Florida, a majority of voters opposed redrawing the maps. When you combine this rigging the game with everything people are seeing and living through—whether it’s higher prices, higher gas prices, the chaos and death of the Iran war, ICE harming people all over the country—they’re going to vote for the people who aren’t doing those things and who want to stop doing those things. So I think Democrats can overperform.They could take back Congress. And once they do that, I think they have a real center of federal power to obstruct, slow down, and mitigate all the harms that are being done to our country. Sargent: But even if they do take back Congress, they cannot relax, because again, next year, Republicans in some of these states could start gerrymandering pretty aggressively. And before you know it, the House map is all lopsided again, and in the 2028 elections, Republicans would be dramatically favored. So we’ve got to avoid that.Flugrath: If they take back power, they have to aggressively start on pro-democracy reforms, which means banning partisan gerrymandering across the country and making it very clear that racial gerrymandering is also illegal, contrary to what the corrupted Supreme Court says. They need to do Supreme Court reform, enact ethics rules, transparency measures, term limits. The last thing they need to do is sort of shine a light on the real impact that these rigged maps have—by holding committee hearings, you can really point to the human effects. Like what happened in Flint, Michigan—the whole Flint, Michigan water crisis happened because of really gerrymandered maps that allowed a governor and a state legislature to install people there who were not accountable and could do whatever they wanted, effectively. Sargent: And if Republicans are going to continue gerrymandering, even in the face of all this, Democrats in these states have to respond. It’s just got to happen. Max Flugrath, thanks so much for that overview. We really appreciate it.Flugrath: Absolutely, Greg. Anytime.
“Cartels of terrorists across our hemisphere, enabled by adversaries, created and profited from chaos,” remarked Secretary of “War” Pete Hegseth at the Americas Counter Cartel Conference in early March. “What creates chaos? No leadership creates chaos.” The Christian nationalist crusader, whose Pentagon is in constant upheaval, was referring to the Biden administration—but his words are a much more apt description of his department, and of the Trump administration broadly. The president and his acolytes claim that they’re cracking down on terrorists, but even in the best cases, their efforts have proved costly and ineffective; in the worst, they’ve actually benefited terrorists, helping them swell their ranks and even enriching them.The boat strikes that Hegseth has boasted about are a prime example of the former. “Under President Trump for the first time in history, the Department of War is on the offense against narco-terrorists,” he said at the conference. Putting aside the ethical implications of killing at least 185 people without trials, even when they’re clearly surrendering, and the damage such attacks do to our moral standing in the world, the strikes have also proven rather ineffective. While there’s evidence that certain drug routes from Venezuela have been shut down, the cartels have simply shifted to new routes and other methods of export, moving cocaine through cargo ships in multiple ports across Latin America. As Alex Papadovassilakis wrote for InSight Crime, “Concealment within legitimate cargo remains the main method for reaching consumer markets in the United States, Europe, and beyond, with traffickers routing loads through ports in countries like the Dominican Republic.” Papadovassilakis also noted that even people in “go-fast boats” who are actually transporting drugs are likely not direct members of the cartels but instead local fishermen and merchants doing one-off deals. Gen. Francis L. Donovan, the head of U.S. Southern Command, essentially acknowledged the limited reach of the murderous strikes when he testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee in March, saying that, going forward, “boat strikes will be one of the main tools, and probably not the most effective.” It seems the U.S. military’s removal of Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro, who is now facing narco-terrorism charges in the U.S., has also been ineffective. Because Trump’s gambit didn’t topple the government—leaving key figures like Venezuela’s corrupt interior minister, Diosdado Cabello, in power, “the country’s broader criminal ecosystem remains largely intact,” Papadovassilakis reported. Yet our ineffectiveness has not been cheap, as the military raid and ongoing boat strikes have cost at least $4.7 billion, according to a joint analysis by the progressive Institute for Policy Studies and Brown University’s Costs of War project. Meanwhile, a recent New York Times exposé revealed that we’re inadvertently supporting major drug cartels in Colombia by purchasing gold from mines they control, despite declaring the end products that move through our mints to be “100% American.” It’s a practice that preceded the Trump administration, but of which it seemed blithely unaware, with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent telling the Times he’ll investigate it. There’s no indication that this will in any way affect the release of the 250th-anniversary commemorative gold coin featuring Trump’s phony tough-guy stare.The fight against drug cartels has been further hampered by Trump’s pardon policies. At the request of Roger Stone, himself a recipient of a Trump pardon, the president pardoned former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, who’d been sentenced to 45 years in U.S. prison for his role in a massive drug conspiracy. Hernández helped cartels smuggle 400 tons of cocaine to the U.S. in exchange for millions in bribes, but Trump claims it was just a Biden setup. Trump may even be angling to install Hernández back in power, according to a bombshell report published by Canal Red and Hondurasgate. Fulfilling a campaign promise he’d made to secure Libertarian votes, Trump pardoned Ross Ulbricht, whose Silk Road site acted as a trading post for narcotics. Ulbricht had been sentenced to two life terms, plus forty years, and was suspected of involvement in five murders. Trump also pardoned billionaire Changpeng Zhao, the Binance founder convicted of failing to stop money laundering on the site, which was thought to be used by Russian gangsters and Hamas.The administration’s efforts in Africa have perhaps been even more heinous and counterproductive, worsened by massive cuts to aid that have killed many and destabilized regions. Trump ordered a strike on Nigeria back in December, claiming it was necessary to combat a Christian genocide that right-wing conspiracy theorists wrongfully claim is occurring there. If a genocide were occurring, of course, a single strike would hardly suffice to halt it. As it is, the strike seems to have galvanized the terrorist group Boko Haram and its offshoot, the Islamic State West African Province, both of which are believed to be coordinating attacks against the Nigerian government. In response, the U.S. has ordered all nonessential staff out of our embassy in Abuja.The Trump administration’s actions in Somalia, on the other hand, have been much more consistent and much deadlier. While presidents have ordered strikes against the unstable African state since the 1990s, under Trump they’ve drastically increased, leading to hundreds or perhaps thousands of deaths (it’s hard to tell exactly, since U.S. African Command conveniently stopped reporting the numbers a year ago). Undoubtedly, both ISIS and Al Shabab maintain a significant presence in Somalia, but West Africa has become the new hotbed of jihadist activity, and yet—with the single Nigeria strike as the one exception—the U.S. has done nothing to combat the rise of terrorist groups there. Why, then, have we carried out so many operations in Somalia? Well, as former Secretary of State for African Affairs Tibor Nagy Jr. told Vox’s Joshua Keating, “It seems like it’s on autopilot. It’s easier to keep doing something because there’s the institutional bureaucracy in place to keep supporting it.” In other words, it’s administrative laziness. Trump relaxed the rules for U.S. African Command to act independently and has since been uninvolved. We keep hitting Somalia because we have more resources there than in the Sahel region of West Africa, where terrorists are congregating.Just across the Gulf of Aden from Somalia, in Yemen, the U.S. has been incompetently battling the Houthis. Despite Trump telling the terrorist group in March 2025 that their “time is up,” it quickly became evident that the hundreds of millions we were spending on airstrikes had accomplished virtually nothing. Two months later, Trump claimed the group had “capitulated” by agreeing to a ceasefire. But today, the Houthis are as powerful as ever. In fact, they’re using our withdrawal from the area as evidence of their strength. “By portraying themselves as the only force resisting foreign powers—the U.S. and Israel—the Houthis strengthened their internal support, increased recruitment, and reinforced their image as Yemen’s primary defenders,” reported the Stimson Center. They’ve also slowed traffic through the Bab El-Mandeb Strait by well over 50 percent, limiting petroleum exports in the region.The Houthis’ ally, Iran, may have taken that as its cue when it closed the Strait of Hormuz, causing a massive oil shortage and impelling the U.S. administration to release $14 billion of Iranian oil from sanctions, thus providing plenty of funding for more state-sponsored terrorism. Humiliated before the world, Trump called for a ceasefire—one that has now been stretched indefinitely—even as he and Hegseth repeatedly claimed that their objectives have been met and that the U.S. has won. Iran’s theocratic regime, in contrast, has only become more hard-line. While the U.S. continues to flounder abroad, terrorist attacks at home have gone largely unnoticed by the White House, and Trump’s completely unqualified “counterterrorism czar,” the campaign hack Sebastian Gorka, has no plan to combat them. The administration even reassigned terrorism specialists to immigration cases, only to call many of them back to their old roles after hostilities began with Iran. At the same time, Trump has distracted from genuine threats with fictitious accusations about the “radical left terrorists.” It fits a pattern: Fail, point fingers, and never, under any circumstances, take a good long look in the mirror.
Get ready with me while we talk about Ashley St. Clair.Ashley St. Clair is a gonzo MAGA influencer turned gonzo ex-MAGA influencer who is also known for having mothered a child with Elon Musk in 2023. She is a college student. She is 27.For the last few months, St. Clair has been posting to TikTok about her escape or exile from the MAGA carnies. She sums it up this way: “I became a cringe MAGA influencer for 8 years before I found my brain.” Now she is ready to “talk about my experience within this machine of MAGA” and “speak about the inside of a system that nobody else is.” Though she makes serious reference to having renounced her previous creed and making earnest amends, St. Clair is mostly conducting her multipart exposé with Catskills-style comedy. She’s well suited to it, as she resembles a young Fran Drescher, and has something of Drescher’s manner, manicures, and nasality. In this costume, St. Clair delivers MAGA lore and tea to an increasingly intrigued audience. You might call this a redemption tour, except that her shtick is that she’s way, way beyond redemption. And lately she’s been drawing viewers in with the four words that have become a favorite opener on the app: “Get ready with me.” To her following, this curtain-raiser signals that St. Clair will put on a millefeuille of makeup in a sublimely expert way, transforming herself from girlish smart aleck to indomitable broad, all while dishing about the women of Mar-a-Lago, the right-wing media group Arsenal, “the rack on Kristi Noem’s husband,” the “Stop the Steal” hoax, the former North Carolina Representative Madison Cawthorn, Benny Johnson, Alex Jones, and how MAGA influence campaigns work. Why is this at all compelling? I think it comes through in the makeup application itself, as this exhausted and broken-hearted young woman, who has both engineered suffering and suffered herself, self-consciously masks her extreme fragility with extreme bravado. St. Clair is clearly experiencing a form of how-did-I-get-here despair that mirrors the nation’s. In one video (now unfindable) she contrasted images of her heavily made-up self with her private one—raw, red-faced, sobbing. I find her both insightful and untrustworthy. “Bitch, I’m at rock bottom,” she posted. “There’s not an embarrassed bone in my body. I care about literally nothing.” So here’s the rock bottom she’s referring to. In 2023, St. Clair’s relationship with Musk rocketed from their D.M.s to her pregnancy to his madness. “To reach legion-level before the apocalypse,” Musk texted St. Clair about his breeding plan for her, according to The Wall Street Journal, “we will need to use surrogates.” Not long after, St. Clair announced the birth of their son Romulus on X, and named Musk as the father. He had evidently hoped to keep this quiet. A beef ensued. “You withdrew most of [the child support] to maintain control and punish me for ‘disobedience,’” St. Clair tweeted at Musk, saying she was facing eviction. Musk then decided St. Clair had somehow entrapped him, and went insane. A tsunami of horrific, pornographic, xAI-generated images of St. Clair as a minor hit X. St. Clair sued xAI. Now xAI has bashed back. Or rather, as she puts it, “my ex’s fuck-ass racist robot company is suing me.”For a new mother in precarious circumstances to go toe-to-toe with Musk, the RMITW, took cojones. To do so on Musk’s own Satan-site, and in the presence of his zillion bloodthirsty acolytes—this gives you a sense of St. Clair’s risk nonaversion. So she took her rock bottom to TikTok. When she arrived, she mostly lip-synched to internet memes. These videos are surprisingly funny, and she still does them. But only last August when she warned about Palantir, and the dangers of “simping for the military-industrial complex,” did she get true engagement. These days, some 70,000 of us are following. The tea is hot, as they say. The apparent debauchery, recklessness, and casual brutality of some of the nation’s leading conservatives is really something. St. Clair chips off jokes about everything she did and had done to her in her early twenties, and her tough-as-nails posture is, by design, only half-persuasive.Then St. Clair can also turn downright somber, as in a video last week. In this one (now removed), St. Clair addressed Erika Kirk, the widow of Charlie who had just released a weird video of her own. St. Clair urged Kirk to log off the internet for a time and get better people to advise her. St. Clair then thought better of the post and took it down. “As a mother,” she said in the next video, she didn’t want to encourage people to “dogpile” on Kirk. Once a “brand ambassador” for Turning Point USA, St. Clair also wanted to underscore in this follow-up video that she vehemently opposes the ideology of the Kirks—and the whole movement she once embraced. To this end, she has taken her name off an anti-trans children’s book she published a few years ago. She further aims to take responsibility for having, as she says, dehumanized the trans community—and so many others.“I encourage people within MAGA to really look at what’s happening in this country and what you’re a part of,” she said in a Get Ready With Me video last Friday, with apparent anguish. She went on to say she’s not a grifter or a makeup influencer. She hopes, in fact, to go to law school one day.“I am speaking openly and honestly about my experiences. I understand that there’s a lot of skepticism and critique, and I am open to that, and I am understanding that there are a lot of people that are still going to be angry at me. And I don’t fault them for that because of my role in harm.”Gen Z MAGA—how will we ever understand you? The sincerity crossed with the oddball memes with the deep suffering with the mean-girl zingers. But the GRWM video was done. The makeup was done. In the captions, St. Clair had helpfully included a 15-item cosmetics product list, including Rare Blush in Wisdom, Nars Blush in Dolce Vita, and One Size Liner in Outta Line. What a mess. But maybe the list held a clue to Ashley’s, MAGA’s, or even America’s trajectory. Dolce Vita to Outta Line to some Wisdom at last? What was I doing? I finally scrolled away.
Last week, the Supreme Court gutted protections against racial gerrymandering, and Donald Trump is already urging Republicans to seize on it. Trump unleashed a Truth Social rant on Monday urging GOP state legislatures to maximize the gerrymandering, insisting this would net an additional 20 congressional seats in the midterms. That number is wrong: Trump accidentally conflated this cycle with the next, and he didn’t even bother concealing that this corrupt scheme is only about holding power amid cratering public support. Indeed, Trump’s net approval just hit an abysmal new low even as his disapproval has hit a new high. Regardless, this absolutely requires Democrats to respond. We talked to Max Flugrath of the voting rights group Fair Fight Action. We discuss how Democrats can undertake retaliatory redistrictings of their own, what the roadmap ahead for this looks like, and why it’s absolutely possible for Democrats to neutralize the GOP advantage. Listen to this episode here. A transcript is here.
The White House is forecasting a rough November for congressional Republicans.In private briefings, attorneys at the White House Counsel’s Office are preparing executive branch staff for a blue wave in the 2026 elections, The Washington Post reported Monday.The 30-minute briefings feature a PowerPoint presentation detailing how congressional oversight works and best practices for handling it, reported the Post. Other components of the past-due education involve guidance on how to respond to congressional inquiries in a timely manner.“It’s obvious to everyone that it’s very likely,” one attending official told the Post. “It was a sober-eyed conversation.”A White House official said that the meetings were “nothing new” and that the counsel’s office has provided oversight guidance to relevant stakeholders since Donald Trump returned to office.Yet multiple sources that spoke with the Post explained that recent meetings with the office were acutely focused on the midterms and their fallout. Trump, who was once a golden ticket for the Republican Party at the ballot box, has in his second term cooked up a litany of issues, any one of which could be a death knell for conservatives come November.In the 15 months since he returned to America’s highest office, Trump has launched the U.S. into a war with Iran, sparking a global energy crisis that has raised the cost of living pretty much everywhere. He also invaded Venezuela and kidnapped its leader, Nicolás Maduro, axed thousands of staffers from the federal government and crippled some government agencies, and used his office to target his political opponents. He has hobbled America’s press, sowed doubt and distrust in the country’s democratic elections, undermined the judiciary system, pardoned hundreds of people who served his personal interests—such as those who attacked Capitol Hill on January 6, 2021—imposed nonsensical tariffs on U.S. trading partners, aggressed America’s international alliances, abused the purpose of executive orders, and endorsed violent immigration policies and detention centers that have been compared to concentration camps, among other issues.His lagging popularity has been reflected in nationwide polls: 62 percent of Americans disapprove of the president, according to an ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll published Friday, a growth of two percentage points since the poll was previously conducted in February.Despite the cost of his own influence, the president has placed enormous pressure on his party to win, well aware of the consequences that await him if they don’t.“You got to win the midterms, because if we don’t win the midterms, they’ll find a reason to impeach me,” Trump said in January. “I’ll get impeached.”
Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post and, with his wife, Lauren Sanchez, he’s an honorary co-chair of Monday evening’s Met Gala. The Post cost Bezos a reported $100 million last year in losses, prompting him to lay off one-third of the newsroom. The Met Gala co-chairmanships set back Bezos a reported $10 to $20 million, plus ancillary costs like the $1 million per month that Sanchez reportedly spends on her wardrobe so she can get taken seriously by Anna Wintour (who runs the Gala and asked the Bezoses to bankroll it this year). Let’s call Bezos’s total Met Gala costs $30 million.Both the Post and the Gala might look to you and me like philanthropic ventures because, well, they are. Bezos, however, regards the two very differently. The Post holds governments accountable, both at home and abroad, as my stepdaughter Claire Parker, the Post’s Cairo bureau chief, explained eloquently in January—shortly before she was laid off, along with most of the Post’s foreign correspondents and local correspondents. Holding governments accountable is obviously a societal function of vital importance. But Bezos has said: “This is not a philanthropic endeavor. For me, I really believe, a healthy newspaper that has an independent newsroom should be self-sustaining.”The Met Gala funds the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, which houses 33,000 objects representing fashionable dress and accessories from the sixteenth century to the present, none of them on permanent public view because aging textiles don’t preserve well when exposed to the light. The Costume Institute doesn’t make the cut for my annual giving list, but to each their own. Bezos hasn’t commented publicly on whether the Costume Institute should be self-sustaining, but if it ceased to be a charity that would deprive Bezos of the opportunity to raise his and Sanchez’s status in the fashion world by giving money to it.The punch line is that while the Post is nowhere near self-sustaining, and never will be, the Costume Institute is already there. According to a May 1 report by Vanessa Friedman in The New York Times, the Costume Institute has since 2016 been putting Met Gala funds into an endowment that will allow it “to potentially support its own basic operations for the foreseeable future.” The gala raised $166.5 million over the past decade. Operating costs for the Costume Institute are a modest $5 million per year, or $50 million over 10 years, which should mean the endowment has $116 million already. The average annual draw on a museum endowment, the Times reports, is 5 percent, which in this case would throw off $5.8 million per year. The Times’ Friedman says the Costume Institute will need a couple more Met Galas to top off its endowment, but that strikes me as generous. The Met Gala is already unnecessary.To cancel the Met Gala, however, would be unthinkable. Demand for it among rich New Yorkers and Hollywood celebrities is way too high to contemplate so rash a move. I therefore propose to turn it into an annual fundraiser for The Washington Post, which has no endowment.Obviously Bezos no longer feels he acquires social cachet through bankrolling what, until recently, was one of America’s three remaining great newspapers. If he prefers instead to bankroll the Met Gala, then why not use its status value to shore up The Washington Post? Attendees could still dress up in expensive fashions, and the event could still be held in New York. There’s a precedent for that: Katharine Graham announced her elevation to Post publisher 60 years ago by letting Truman Capote throw her a Black and White ball in the Grand Ballroom of New York’s Plaza Hotel. People still talk about that party. In similar spirit, Bezos could host an annual charity ball to celebrate that he owns the Post. For legal reasons, he’d probably have to convert the Post into a nonprofit, but as we’ve seen, it isn’t contributing to charity that Bezos minds so much as not extracting social capital from the transaction.Of all the ways to show off how rich you are, Thorstein Veblen wrote in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), “admitted expenditure for display is more obviously present, and is, perhaps, more universally practiced, in the manner of dress than in any other line of consumption.” That extends well past the demonstration that you can afford to buy an expensive outfit. The manner of dress should also “make plain to all observers that the wearer is not engaged in any kind of productive labor.” The elaborate Met Gala getups that women in particular display don’t stop at demonstrating that the wearer could never work in them. They also raise some questions about whether the wearer is too ethereal to go to the ladies’ room. The Washington Post’s Maura Judkis published a groundbreaking report on this question Monday, revealing that a class of assistants exists whose “path to rising up the fashion and celebrity ranks includes helping stars who are sewn into their own underpants onto and off of the toilet.”Would the beautiful people come to a dress-up ball in New York whose charity was The Washington Post? Of course they would. It’s doubtful many of these people ever gave a damn about the Costume Institute, and while some might resent this or that Post story about themselves, most would appreciate the free publicity. Politicians would have more reason to boycott the Post, but not many attend the Met Gala now (for instance, Mayor Zohran Mamdani is a no-show this year), so that’s no great loss. A key to success would be to keep lowly Washington Post staffers away unless they were covering the event. They’ll just have to gratify their own status urges by attending the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, whose sartorial demands are more achievable. Anna Wintour could still run the gala if she wants, and perhaps the Met could be persuaded to host in exchange for a few free advertorials spotlighting travel-worthy exhibitions like its current Raphael blockbuster.Every Met Gala has a theme, and every year that theme is lame. This year, it’s “Fashion Is Art” (which it goddamned well better be if the Met spends $5 million per year on it). Last year it was “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style,” which was an attempt to suggest that fashion had something to do with racial justice, which it doesn’t. Think how much easier it would be to dream up Met Gala themes for annual balls that bankrolled The Washington Post. This year’s could be: “If We’re Going to War In the Middle East Let’s Have Bureaus There!” Next year it could be: “Bring Back Book Reviews!” or “Let’s Cover City Council!” Invitations could stipulate that attending the Met Gala incurs no obligation to read a newspaper or, indeed, to read anything. In fact, the fewer attendees there were who read newspapers, the easier it would be to glamorize newspapers into something exotic and mysterious and available only to an elect few. The business is halfway there already.A simpler solution, of course, would be for Bezos to stop looking for frivolous charities to waste money on and focus on the philanthropic concern that suffers daily from his stinginess. Yes, the Post is an expensive charity, but Bezos lost one-third as much money this year to the Costume Institute, which didn’t need a cent. Also, give me a break, the man is worth $277 billion. If he peeled off $3 billion to create a Post endowment and then walked away, that would throw off more than enough each year to run the Post properly for the rest of his life. When he died, Bezos could leave it more. He could still live like a pasha until then.
President Donald Trump derailed his own speech Monday to insist how mentally healthy he is, following new poll data showing that a record high of Americans think he’s lost his mind. “I feel the same as I felt 50 years ago, I don’t know,” Trump told the audience at a small-business summit at the White House.“I’ll say, ‘I’m not feeling well’—well, someday, I might say that to you, and you’ll be the first to know. Actually I won’t have to say it, because you’ll be able to see it, just like you did in the last administration,” Trump said. Trump: I took three cognitive tests. They are hard. Many people in this room couldn’t ace them. The first question is you have a lion, a bear, an alligator, and a what's another good, a squirrel, OK? Which is the squirrel? pic.twitter.com/8GusHR4vy0— Acyn (@Acyn) May 4, 2026Americans have already been seeing Trump’s apparent cognitive decline: A recent poll found that 59 percent of Americans don’t think Trump has the mental acuity to serve as president, and 55 percent think he is not in physical shape to do so.Trump continued ranting about his pitch to require candidates for office to take cognitive tests. “No president has ever taken one except me, and I’ve taken three of them. And I’ve aced each one,” he said. Trump went on to describe the test, which sounds a lot like the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, a 10-minute assessment designed to identify signs of dementia or Alzheimer’s. It is not a test for intelligence. “You know the first question is very easy. They always show the first question, it’s: You have a lion, a bear, an alligator, and a—what’s another good—a squirrel, OK? Which is the squirrel?” Trump said, claiming the questions got increasingly complex.He then veered into a tirade against California Governor Gavin Newsom before resuming his point. “I think everyone in this room is brilliant, but nobody’s gonna get all 30 questions correct. Nobody. ’Cause when you get to those last questions they’re pretty hard, you got to be pretty sharp.“One doctor said, ‘It’s the first time I’ve ever seen anyone get all questions right.’ That’s a doctor, who does this stuff for a living. And I did it three times. So, I don’t know. I think I’m done with those days, I’m tired of taking those tests,” Trump said. Trump segued again, insisting on the importance of picking an intelligent leader during times of war. He went on to claim that his military campaign in Iran only lasted six weeks, though the Strait of Hormuz has been closed for more than two months; that the Vietnam War lasted 19 years, even though the U.S. was only really involved for eight; and that the war in Iraq was 10 or 12 years long, when, again, it was really only eight.
A federal judge on Monday apologized to Cole Allen, the alleged White House Correspondents’ Dinner shooter, for what his lawyers described as “excessive restrictions on his liberty that serve no justifiable purpose.”Cole Allen, who stormed into the Washington Hilton last month, was placed on temporary suicide watch upon arriving in jail in Washington, D.C.—even as he did not appear to be suicidal. He was also placed in a “safe cell,” a padded enclosure extremely similar to solitary confinement, made to wear a restrictive vest, and was only allowed out of his cell to speak to lawyers or receive medical attention.His treatment in jail has been worse than that of the January 6 rioters, warned Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui, who oversaw many of their cases.“The Jan. 6 defendants all were moved to the [Central Treatment Facility],” Faruqui said. “Pardons may erase convictions but they do not erase history.… He’s being treated differently than anyone I’ve ever observed.“He can be both kept safe and treated with dignity. Right now, it’s not working. I think it’s legally deficient and ultimately if the DOC can’t do it, I’ll speak to the U.S. attorney’s office,” Faruqui continued. “I know they have other facilities they can contract with. If you all cannot handle it, we’re going to have to reassess that with the marshals and the Department of Justice.”
Insecurity about the midterms is rising—and Republicans are shoving some of the blame onto House Speaker Mike Johnson.Concern is spreading that Johnson has “lost control of his conference,” creating an environment that is unlikely to pass meaningful legislation before the November elections, The Hill reported Monday. North Dakota Senator Kevin Cramer warned that the caucus’s relentless infighting has hurt the GOP brand, potentially sinking both chambers of Congress.“It’s not like these things are hard. That’s the thing,” Cramer told The Hill. “I feel like the Senate has teed up things fairly easily for them, even to the point where if they don’t like it, they can blame us. And they still haven’t taken the opportunity to actually govern, and I do think it’s hurting the brand. The House is rowdy.”Johnson barely kept the party afloat last week amid what Texas Representative Troy Nehls aptly dubbed “hell week.” “We can’t really agree on much of anything,” Nehls said on Capitol Hill Wednesday. Republicans in the lower chamber struggled to tackle high-priority GOP issues such as extending the government’s warrantless spying powers, passing the farm bill, and funding the Department of Homeland Security. Votes stretched on for hours, and committee hearings flew off the rails. But the squabbles—and the dissent—persisted.“We’re moving from one fire drill to the next every single week, and then half the time it feels like, why are we even here?” one House Republican told MS NOW on Friday.Some of the bluster followed weeks of intraparty protests, in which members of the House GOP adamantly opposed bills introduced and passed by their Senate colleagues. Yet House Republicans were all too willing to bend as the clock ticked down to deadline on various policy issues, prompting scorn and criticism from the upper chamber.“It’s like a wreck over there,” one Republican senator told The Hill on the condition of anonymity, noting that their mainstream GOP colleagues in the House shared their frustration.“They don’t know if they’re coming or going. Everybody is fighting,” the senator said.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has tapped a top New York Democrat to lead redistricting efforts in the state after the Supreme Court handed the Republican Party a major advantage for the upcoming midterms. Jeffries directed Representative Joe Morelle, the former majority leader in the New York state assembly, to meet with state leaders in order to redraw congressional districts “for the balance of the decade,” the two said in a joint statement Monday. New York currently has 19 Democrats and seven Republicans in the House of Representatives. This directive comes less than a week after the Supreme Court ruled 6–3 along party lines in Louisiana v. Callais to effectively dismantle Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination based on race. The court’s conservative majority raised new hurdles for those seeking to prove a racial gerrymandering claim, and gave its blessing to those who would claim partisan gerrymandering as a legal defense. Within hours of the decision, New York Governor Kathy Hochul had already signaled that she supported a redistricting effort in her state. “The Supreme Court has been chipping away at our elections for years. It is clearly carrying out Donald Trump’s will with this decision,” she wrote on X Wednesday. “New York has always led the fight for voting rights and we’ll lead again. I’m working with the Legislature to change New York’s redistricting process so we can fight back against Washington’s attempts to rig our democracy.”Jeffries’s order was also given in response to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis implementing a map that his own office specifically drew in order to capture four more Republican seats in time for November’s midterm elections. Meanwhile, Trump has continued to threaten red states that refuse to rig their elections in his favor.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis made his state’s new gerrymandered congressional map official Monday.DeSantis signed the map that his own office specifically drew in order to capture four more Republican seats in time for November’s midterm elections, hoping to prevent GOP losses as President Trump’s unpopularity continues to grow.“Signed, Sealed, and Delivered,” DeSantis posted on X shortly after noon Monday, along with a map of the state’s new districts. The move occurred without a flashy signing ceremony or press conference, less than a week after Florida’s legislature signed the map into law. That vote took place just hours after the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act. Now seats belonging to Democratic Representatives Kathy Castor, Jared Moskowitz, Darren Soto, and Debbie Wasserman Schultz are at risk. The move is already being challenged in court, with a lawsuit filed less than 90 minutes after DeSantis’s post. Florida’s Constitution bans drawing districts with “the intent to favor or disfavor a political party or an incumbent,” and last week, Florida House Democratic Leader Fentrice Driskell called out the DeSantis staffer who drew the map, Jason Poreda.“The man who drew this map testified under oath that he used partisan data to draw up every single district,” Driskell said. “Every single one. And when the governor’s attorney was asked whether Democratic voters were being underrepresented in our congressional delegation, his answer was that ‘this is a normative question.’”The map, if it stands, could backfire in an election year where Trump is dragging Republican poll numbers historically low, as the new districts aren’t considered entirely safe for the GOP. Florida’s new maps, along with efforts in Republican-led states around the country, were actually spurred by Trump last year, and have set off Democratic redistricting in states like California and Virginia; others could soon join in.
The war on Iran is very much back on, and President Trump is making more genocidal threats. Iran on Monday bombed a South Korean ship and civilian sites in the United Arab Emirates, in the wake of President Trump’s announcement that the United States would be using its Navy to force ships through Iran’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz as part of “Project Freedom.” The U.S. military also stated that it sank six Iranian small boats and that Iran has fired missiles and drones at other vessels in the strait.This has sent the president into a rage.If the Iranians try to target U.S. ships in this area, they will be “blown off the face of the earth,” Trump told Fox News’s Trey Yingst on Monday afternoon.“We have more weapons and ammunition at a much higher grade than we had before,” he warned.BREAKING: President Trump sends a new warning to the Iranian regime if it attacks any U.S. vessel working to implement Project Freedom:“They’ll be blown off the face of the earth.”Trump tells @TreyYingst that Iran has become "much more malleable" in talks.“We have more… pic.twitter.com/bLqscDAgag— Fox News (@FoxNews) May 4, 2026Iran’s attack on the UAE is the first since the ceasefire was declared one month ago, as escalating tensions threaten to once again reignite a wider conflict in the region.It’s clear Trump’s plan to take control of the Strait of Hormuz wasn’t well thought out. Did Trump really expect the Iranian government to just cave to his demands?On Monday afternoon, shortly after begging South Korea to join the war following the attack on its ship, the president announced that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine will hold a press conference Tuesday morning.
The Justice Department is running out of attorneys.The nation’s largest law office has repeatedly asked for delays in arguing its myriad cases, and in doing so has accidentally divulged a massive staffing crisis raging underneath the surface.In an obscure civil lawsuit dug up by independent journalist Scott MacFarlane, a Justice Department attorney revealed that “the Appellate Section has lost over 40 percent of its attorneys since February 2025, due to retirement, resignation, or temporary transfer.” “At this time, it is not possible for me to assign this case to yet another attorney, who would need to devote time to learning the issues,” she wrote in a filing dated February 19.The overwhelming stress inside the agency has seeped through the cracks in other ways, as well. In early February, a lawyer volunteering with the short-staffed office on ICE-related cases in Minnesota begged a judge to put her in contempt of court so that she could “get 24 hours of sleep.”“The system sucks, this job sucks, I am trying with every breath I have to get you what I need,” said attorney Julie Le when pressed as to why the government had failed to follow judicial orders. Since then, Le was removed from the temporary position and reshuffled back to ICE. She has since leveraged the notoriety of her remarks to launch a congressional bid for Minnesota’s 5th congressional district.The DOJ’s appellate staffs vary in size but altogether account for more than 150 positions, according to a 2012 write-up in Scotusblog by Al J. Daniel Jr., a former DOJ appellate attorney.Yet that’s just the tip of the iceberg for the department’s staffing woes. There were an estimated 10,000 attorneys working across the Justice Department before Donald Trump returned to the White House. By September 2025, that number had been nearly halved: Justice Connection, an advocacy group that tracks DOJ departures, estimated that around 5,500 people (not all of them attorneys) had left the department, either by their own volition, by accepting the Trump administration’s buyout, or by being fired.Just a fraction of those experienced employees have been replaced, causing a massive backlog of work. The immigration court system—which has been placed under tremendous pressure as a result of Trump’s aggressive deportation agenda—has been particularly hampered, experiencing a backlog of more than 3.3 million cases by the end of February 2026, according to data from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. That means that the lives of more than three million people are effectively on pause as they await legal decisions that determine whether their future will be spent inside or outside of the United States.The Justice Department’s rightward shift toward the MAGA agenda has sparked concern inside the legal community, with former prosecutors and ethics directors arguing that the agency’s recent politicization has undermined public confidence in the country’s legal system.
Donald Trump is lying about the U.S. military’s escalating extrajudicial strikes on vessels in the Caribbean, according to a sweeping report from The Intercept published Monday. In late January, Trump claimed to reporters in the Oval Office that the Pentagon’s deadly strikes on boats suspected of carrying drugs from South America to the United States had successfully brought down the amount of “drugs entering our country by sea” by 97 percent. But the Pentagon’s own statements don’t support this outrageous claim, Rear Admiral William Baumgartner, the former commander of the Seventh Coast Guard District, told The Intercept.“He’s trying to imply that 97 percent of the cocaine that left South America by boat headed to the United States has been stopped,” Baumgartner said. “That’s not true and is contradicted by the administration’s own statements.” In March, Joseph Humire, a Pentagon official, told the House Armed Services Committee that there had been only a “20 percent reduction of movements of drug vessels in the Caribbean and an additional 25 percent reduction in the Eastern Pacific.” Humire also credited Operation Southern Spear with causing a 20 percent drop in drug overdose deaths as of September 2025—but the strikes on so-called drug boats didn’t start until September. “I can’t imagine how you could come to some of these conclusions regarding illegal smuggling and drug overdose deaths based on the facts as we know them,” Baumgartner told The Intercept.As the White House has continued to espouse the strikes’ value as a deterrent against trafficking, there is little evidence that vessels are actually being deterred. Last month, there were eight strikes in the span of 16 days, with five strikes occurring within as many days, according to The Intercept. Last month, the Coast Guard boasted a record-setting interdiction of cocaine seized in the Caribbean and the Pacific, suggesting that trafficking has not stopped. Baumgartner pointed to a recent offloading of 1.2 tons of cocaine by the U.S. Coast Guard, which claimed the haul was worth $19.3 million altogether. “This works out to be about a $16,500 per kilogram wholesale price. It doesn’t reflect the major jump in price that you would expect if you really had 97 percent reduction in flow,” Baumgartner said.It’s also worth noting that the House Armed Services Committee was explicitly told that vessels were not actually transporting fentanyl, according to Representative Sara Jacobs and five other government officials who spoke to The Intercept. “They had some convoluted reason why it was still impacting fentanyl that was hard to follow and I did not buy,” Jacobs told the outlet, before pointing out that statistics suggest that 99 percent of the drugs that enter the United States come through legal ports of entry, brought by U.S. citizens and permanent residents. Baumgartner also easily dismantled Trump’s outrageous claim about how many lives he’s saved: about 25,000 per boat, the president claimed. “The claim that sinking each cocaine smuggling boat saves 25,000 lives makes no sense,” said Baumgartner. “That would probably be more than the number of cocaine deaths in the last five decades combined.”
President Trump is directly ordering Senate Republicans to attempt to turn embattled Democratic Senator John Fetterman to their side to ensure that they maintain their slim Senate majority. Politico has reported that if Fetterman does turn Republican, it will be because of Trump’s lobbying, the endorsement and “financial windfall” he’s apparently being promised, and the influence of Republican Senators Dave McCormick and Katie Britt, whom he is close with. One anonymous source claimed that Fetterman was open to the idea of switching sides.Fox News host Sean Hannity gave up the game to Fetterman while he interviewed the Democrat on his show in March.“I did talk to President Trump last night, and I told him you were gonna be on the show,” Hannity told Fetterman. “And he said ‘OK. I wanna give you a job. Your job is to tell him: He’s gonna be run as a Republican, he’s gonna have our full support, more money than he ever dreamed of, and he’s gonna win big.’” But Fetterman says he remains steadfast in his commitment to the Democratic Party—at least publicly.“I’m not changing,” he told Politico in an interview published Monday. “I’m a Democrat, and I’m staying one.... I’d be a shitty Republican.” Some would say Fetterman has been a pretty shitty Democrat too, fueling this Republican effort to get him to switch sides. Since first running for office as a Bernie Sanders–backed progressive eight years ago, and keeping up the facade in his 2022 Senate campaign, Fetterman has gone out of his way to offer rhetorical and legislative support for President Trump’s agenda while spiting the left flank that helped him secure his Senate seat. He was the very first Senate Democrat to meet with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, and has defended the actions of federal immigration agents, saying that any calls to abolish ICE were “inappropriate and outrageous.” He is the only Democrat who voted against curtailing Trump’s war powers in Iran, and he is one of the staunchest supporters of Israel in the Senate. In one conversation last year, he reportedly proclaimed, “Let’s get back to killing,” referring to Israel’s genocide of Palestinians. “Kill them all.” Fetterman later denied the account.Earlier this month, not a single one of his Pennsylvania House counterparts could offer a vote of confidence for his 2028 reelection when asked by Punchbowl News. These admissions, while unsurprising, add yet another layer of contention to Fetterman’s relationship to his own party.These positions aren’t just unpopular among the Democrats rebuking him, they’re unpopular throughout the entire state. Last month, CNN polling showed that Fetterman’s net approval rating with state Democrats has plummeted a ghastly 108 points since he took office, from +68 in 2023 to -40 in 2026. “He’s down there with the Titanic,” CNN’s Harry Enten said. “There’s no historical analog to his unpopularity.”With all this in mind, it seems only natural that Trump is now actively courting the man he calls his “favorite Democrat.”
Donald Trump has the reputation of being a bit of a card shark—but apparently, he has no idea what he’s doing at the table.The president was roasted alive on Sunday after he revealed via a photoshopped image that he doesn’t understand the rules of the popular card game UNO.The image, first circulated by Trump and then the White House, depicts Trump holding a handful of “wild” cards. It’s unclear what Trump was referring to, but he has said before that he holds “all the cards” when it comes to negotiating with Iran.“I have all the cards,” Trump wrote—apparently unaware that the goal of the 55-year-old game is to have no cards.“In Uno that means you are losing,” quipped MeidasTouch editor in chief Ron Filipkowski.“I bet this goes hard if you’re fucking stupid,” wrote Jamie Bonkiewicz, a political commentator who was allegedly visited by the Secret Service in January after she tweeted about White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt.Other social media users had different interpretations of Trump’s empty flex, using the open-format meme to call the president out on his soft spot for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his failed economic strategies against China and Xi Jinping, his various connections to child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, and the current state of the war with Iran.“Starting to think all those 3-D chess analogies were off the mark,” wrote X user @RoguePotusStaff.That same day, in another ludicrous attempt to frame the president as a relentless victor, the White House official account shared an hour-long loop of Trump saying the word “winning” at one of his campaign rallies. “Can’t stop, won’t stop,” the account wrote.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche admitted Sunday that “86 47” isn’t a serious threat against President Donald Trump. NBC’s Meet the Press host Kristen Welker asked Blanche what he made of the dozens of products being sold on Amazon that use the slogan “86 47,” the same slogan that landed former FBI Director James Comey with his second indictment for allegedly threatening the president.“Should individuals selling or buying ‘86 47’ merchandise be concerned that they’re going to be prosecuted by the DOJ?” Welker asked. “This isn’t about a single incident,” Blanche said. “That’s posted constantly, that phrase is used constantly, there are constantly men and women who choose to make threatening statements against President Trump. Every one of those statements do not result in indictments, of course,” he added.“Just to be very clear, you are suggesting the seashells themselves are not at the root of this indictment?” Welker pressed. “No, I am suggesting that every single case depends on the investigation that’s done. And of course, the seashells are part of that case, I mean, that’s what the public sees,” Blanche said. “But without a doubt—and it should be evident by the fact that it’s been 11 months since the posting and the indictment—there is an investigation that takes place. And the result of that investigation is the indictment that was returned last week.”AG Todd Blanche tells Kristen Welker that individuals selling 86 merchandise or posting messages similar to Comey’s seashell post will not be prosecuted:“Of course not. That’s posted constantly. That phrase is used constantly.” pic.twitter.com/AQHvynlTob— Acyn (@Acyn) May 3, 2026A look at the actual indictment suggests that it really is just about the seashells. The indictment alleges that the shells were a “serious expression of intent to do harm” against the president. The document makes no mention of additional materials that supposedly contributed to the legitimacy of that threat. And as Blanche readily admitted Sunday, “86 47” is widely used by Trump’s critics and is not considered to be a serious threat in every case. So, what made this case different? Blanche didn’t bother to explain, simply pointing to the 11 months it took the DOJ to investigate a highly publicized Instagram post. It seems the only difference is who posted it: someone who Trump has decided is his enemy.
The Supreme Court restored access to the abortion drug mifepristone Monday, overturning a lower court ruling last week that blocked the pill from being distributed by mail. Justice Samuel Alito signed the measure, which temporarily lifts restrictions that mandated visiting a doctor or clinic in person in order to obtain the medication, following a ruling from the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday. Both sides of the case have a week to respond before the court weighs in further. Friday’s ruling from a three-judge panel led by Kyle Duncan, appointed by President Trump, upended years of precedent, including the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of mifepristone in 2000 and a 2024 Supreme Court ruling unanimously protecting access to the drug. The case stems from a lawsuit from the state of Louisiana alleging that mail access to the pill violates its own abortion bans. “Every abortion facilitated by FDA’s action cancels Louisiana’s ban on medical abortions and undermines its policy that ‘every unborn child is human being from the moment of conception and is, therefore, a legal person,’” Duncan wrote in his ruling. Alito is one of the most conservative justices on the Supreme Court, so his ruling is not necessarily a sign of support for mifepristone. He limited his administrative stay on the lower court ruling to one week, while most of the time, his stays are indefinite. Alito and his fellow conservatives have a 6-3 majority on the high court, so he could very well be biding his time, using this stay as a fig leaf. A total ban on the drug, not just on mail-in access, may be coming soon. This story has been updated.
A federal judge rebuked the Trump administration Monday morning for an alleged attempt to seize and bulldoze a public golf course in Washington, D.C.U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes responded to a request from the DC Preservation League to block the administration from taking over the East Potomac Golf Links. During the hearing, she chastised White House lawyers trying to argue that their plans for the golf course simply involve the removal of dead trees.“We can’t have bulldozers taking down trees … and no one has come to me first,” Reyes said, adding that if the administration wants to cut down more than 10 trees, the court needs to be notified and needs to see plans.The DC Preservation League is worried that the White House will move quickly to demolish parts of the course, pointing to how fast President Trump took over the Kennedy Center. The Preservation League’s attorney said that they didn’t trust the administration, and when Reyes asked a White House lawyer if they planned to close the golf course, the attorney said, “No closure notice has been issued ... but it’s still under consideration at this point.”“I didn’t hear a ‘NO,’ your honor!” the plaintiff’s attorney interrupted. The White House’s lawyer tried to claim that they would follow the rules, and that they haven’t closed anything yet. But Reyes was then handed a note stating, “It looks like there were signs on the golf course that there were closures.” The administration’s counsel had no response to this, and Reyes said she was concerned about the White House making a “surprise” move on the golf course.On Friday, NOTUS reported that the White House planned to take over the course and begin landscaping and tree clearing, with major renovations beginning later. A golf course architect, Tom Fazio, has already been chosen, an unnamed source told NOTUS. While the administration denied the report, the DC Preservation League quickly filed an emergency motion to block any construction.It’s clear that the preservation group does not trust the administration in the slightest, and for good reason. Trump quickly demolished the East Wing of the White House without legal approval for his ballroom project, after saying publicly that he wouldn’t make large-scale changes. He has also slapped his name on several Washington buildings and government organizations without congressional or legal approval.Whatever Trump’s plans are for this and other public golf courses in the nation’s capital, Reyes’s decision Monday may just slow him down rather than deter his plans altogether. Trump seems intent on remaking Washington in his own image regardless of what its residents or the courts say.