Despite campaigning to bring back free speech, President Trump has been a serial violator of the First Amendment to the Constitution, according to a new report. A Reuters investigation found 75 rulings from federal judges that Trump infringed on constitutional freedoms such as religion, freedom, and the press. Many had to do with the Trump administration’s attacks on pro-Palestine advocacy, and the rulings came from judges appointed by both Democratic and Republican presidents. In September, for example, a Reagan-appointed federal judge found that the administration illegally revoked visas and deported foreign faculty and students over their stance on Palestine and Israel.“The President’s palpable misunderstanding that the government simply cannot seek retribution for speech he disdains poses a great threat to Americans’ freedom of speech,” Young wrote in his ruling.Other judicial rebukes had to do with Trump’s attacks on law firms, his termination of grants for universities that seemingly go against his ideological agenda, and use of excessive force against protesters. Trump has attacked federal judges who rule against him, leveling insults and accusing them of being activists. While most of the president’s legal losses came from judges appointed by Democratic presidents, 10 of them came from Republican appointees. Many of the lawsuits filed against Trump came from media outlets or organizations that ideologically oppose Trump, Reuters found. Oftentimes, lawsuits were challenging Trump executive orders, which have sought to take revenge against Trump’s enemies or target ideological viewpoints that the president opposes. Trump has attacked everything from diversity, equity and inclusion to gender ideology with executive orders, with only federal courts standing in the way thanks to an unwilling Republican-controlled Congress. All of this goes to show that Trump may be the most anti-free speech president ever.
President Trump’s Justice Department lost yet another attempt to access a state’s unredacted voter rolls, bringing their record to 0 for 20. U.S. District Judge Philip Brimmer on Monday delivered the Trump administration its 20th straight loss, ruling that the Justice Department could not offer a legitimate reason for the executive branch to be granted access to Colorado’s voter rolls. The lawsuit was filed against Colorado’s Democratic secretary of state, Jena Griswold.Brimmer, a George W. Bush appointee, dismissed the case with prejudice, as he could not identify a legitimate reason for the executive branch to be granted access to something that has never been under its constitutional jurisdiction. “In cases where the United States has sought [statewide voter registration list] pursuant to § 20703, courts have found that ‘a voter registration list is not a record subject to retention and preservation under § 20701,’” Brimmer wrote. “Title III’s commands therefore pertain to records and papers that election officials receive from prospective voters to support the exercise of the suffrage by the prospective voters, not lists or other tools created by election officials for the purpose of preserving the information provided by voters and ensuring that persons appearing to vote are registered.”“The Attorney General is simply not entitled to the NYSVoter List under Title III,” he continued. “This conclusion is supported by six recent district court decisions which have determined that voter registration lists are not records subject to retention and preservation.”Colorado’s loss likely won’t be the administration’s last. U.S. District Judge Kymberly Evanson on Tuesday appeared to reject the DOJ’s argument using Title III of the Civil Rights Act (which states that all voting records should be retained and preserved “for a period of twenty-two months”) to justify gaining access to the Social Security numbers, driver’s licenses, and birthdates of American citizens. “By my count, this is the 20th court to address this exact issue,” Evanson said. “Is there any meaningful basis on which to distinguish this case from the many other district courts and the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals across the country that have dismissed the government’s complaints or denied their motion to compel?”“No, your Honor,” DOJ attorney Raymond Yang admitted. “Relevant facts are similar to all the other cases.”It’s abundantly clear that this is not a winning strategy in Trump’s greater mission of purging voter rolls to exert his executive will upon elections that are already free and fair.“Rather than addressing any real problem, these lawsuits seek private voter information that is protected under state law,” Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs said. “The DOJ’s demands for complete voter rolls are another example of federal overreach and an attempt to exert control over our elections. My office will continue defending Washington voters’ private information while ensuring the integrity of our voter roll remains secure, accurate, and trustworthy.”While Evanson is a Biden appointee, Brimmer and 11 other judges who rejected the Trump administration’s voter suppression efforts were appointed by Republican presidents—with eight being appointed by Trump himself. The DOJ has now sued in 30 total states and the District of Columbia: California, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Colorado, Hawaii, Nevada, Massachusetts, Georgia, Illinois, Wisconsin, Utah, Oklahoma, Kentucky, West Virginia, New Jersey, Connecticut, Arizona, Virginia, Idaho, and Washington — all unsuccessfully.
Republican Senators Thom Tillis and John Cornyn each reneged on their promises to meet with victims of Jeffrey Epstein, with Tillis even leaving them waiting in his office for 45 minutes before they gave up.A group of Epstein survivors on Tuesday accused Blanche and Cornyn of going back on their word, as the senators prepared to vote in favor of Todd Blanche’s nomination for attorney general after he provided a weak promise in writing to kill President Trump’s $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund.”“The treatment we received from senators throughout this process was just as revealing. Senator Tillis publicly invited us, on camera, to come to his office and promised to meet with us. We did. We waited for 45 minutes in his lobby, only to be told by a staffer he would not meet with us after all,” the survivors wrote in a joint statement.“Senator Cornyn also refused to hear directly from survivors before casting his vote. Senators Tillis and Cornyn were not willing to sit across from us and answer for the vote they were preparing to cast. If they believed they were doing the right thing, they should have had the courage to look survivors in the eye and tell us why. The message was unmistakable: They wanted us to go away. We are not going away.”Tillis’s snubbing is particularly nasty given that he made a big fuss about not voting for Blanche’s confirmation unless he met with Epstein survivors. Blanche did eventually meet with survivors, but it did not go well, as survivors reported he told them to “get to the point” and to talk to the FBI instead. Survivor Danielle Bensky called the meeting “a box-checking exercise to secure Tillis’ vote,” and noted he “offered no meaningful explanation for how the redaction failures happened, who approved the release, or what steps he would take to prevent survivors from being exposed again.”Before Tillis ghosted the survivors, he promised on camera to invite them to his office.“I wanna meet—not with the attorneys, but with the survivors. And have a discussion about that stuff,” Tillis said. “I wanna see specific action items. And some of that could even have to do with investigations. My office is right around the corner.... I gotta rush … but I wanna have that meeting. I don’t want suits in the room. I want victims, and me.”In case you missed it, here’s the video where he clearly agreed to meet with them, only to stand them up in his office. Beyond disrespectful and cowardly pic.twitter.com/VzDKk5Li8a— Cheyenne Hunt (@CheyenneHuntCA) August 4, 2026Tillis and Cornyn are both outgoing senators who would have lost nothing for being genuine and transparent. Instead of actually acting upon any of their own stated principles, they opted to play political theatre with the emotions of these survivors, unable to even offer them the basic decency of coming to a meeting they said they’d be at. We’re talking about women who survived abuse from perhaps the most infamous predator of the century.
Republican Senator John Cornyn tried to claim Tuesday that Republicans didn’t have any power over President Trump. After Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee, including Cornyn, voted to send acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s confirmation to the full Senate Tuesday, a reporter asked the Texas senator whether he was concerned about Trump continuing to say he wants to find a way to pay January 6 insurrectionists.“Well, there’s nothing we could do to, uh, rein in the president when he said he likes the [anti-weaponization] fund and wishes it still exists, but the fact of the matter is it’s dead, and that’s all we could do under the circumstances,” Cornyn replied. Cornyn: "There's nothing we could do to rein in the president" pic.twitter.com/WdzZTtY4J0— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 4, 2026Cornyn and his fellow Republicans have had countless opportunities to rein in the president. After making a big deal about Trump’s $1.776 billion slush fund, Cornyn and his colleague, Senator Thom Tillis, settled for a weak agreement full of loopholes. And last week, Republicans shot down an amendment that would have killed Trump’s tax audit immunity, the other big issue with the president’s IRS settlement. In June, all but three Republicans voted against a Democratic attempt to kill the “Anti-Weaponization Fund.” Senate Democrats also introduced the “Drain the Slush Fund Act” in June, but no Republicans have signed off on it. It all fits a pattern in Trump’s second term: Republicans have a problem with something Trump has proposed or is doing, then the administration reaches out to them, and then they fall in line.
President Donald Trump has ordered contractors to redo weeks of work on a new helipad for the White House, after already demanding workers speed up construction.For more than a month, contractors have worked around the clock to complete Trump’s helipad, which he directed to be built without any official notice. Now the contractors have been forced to take apart their work, according to photographs obtained by The Washington Post. It’s unclear how much money the additional alterations will cost, or if the helipad will be completed on schedule. In early July, Clark Construction received a last-minute demand to complete the helipad by September 17, adding an estimated $875,000 to the price tag in the process. The government’s request, which indicated that Trump hoped to have the helipad ready for an “upcoming state visit,” was made just days after the president invited his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, to come on September 24. That’s not the only reason it’s an awkward time to be ordering redos. The Department of Justice recently admitted in court that the lining peeling off the bottom of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool was the result of “flawed” application by Trump’s handpicked contractors. Clark Construction similarly received a no-bid contract to construct the new helipad. Now, it seems the former slumlord may be finding it increasingly difficult to manifest his visions of grandeur.The helipad is part of a $13 million renovation project that also included work on the South Portico and driveway. Previously, Trump announced that Sikorsky, a subsidiary of Lockheed Martin that builds Marine One helicopters, would cover the cost of a $5 million or $6 million helipad, complete with a White House seal carved out of granite. It seems likely that American taxpayers will pay for the rest. This is the latest renovation project Trump has demanded at the White House, which the president treats like one of his gaudy resorts and not federal land. Last month, the front of the White House was covered in a massive tarp as the front doors underwent security improvements and repairs were made to the iconic columns on the North Portico. And lest we forget: There’s also the demolition of the East Wing, the paving of the Rose Garden, and the president’s outrageous $600 million ballroom.
The allegations against Representative Max Miller have become so loud that the Ohio Republican has decided to launch a House ethics investigation into himself in a flagrant attempt to salvage his spiraling midterm campaign.“In light of all the renewed interest in my family affairs I am going to file my own paperwork for an ethics investigation into myself to clear my name from these horrific attacks on myself and family,” Miller wrote on X Tuesday. “I have absolutely nothing to hide.“We will be providing the committee all necessary documents needed for a detail examination,” he continued. “The accusations continue to change, but my facts stay the same. I am looking forward to my colleagues reading everything for themselves.”Shortly after his post, the House Ethics Committee announced it was opening an investigation into Miller. The investigation will effectively give Miller exactly what he wants: a chance to stay in a midterm race that he is almost certainly going to lose. Miller has repeatedly rejected calls for his exit, despite mounting public pressure to do so. Wednesday, August 5, marks the last day for Miller to withdraw.Emily Moreno, Miller’s ex-wife, has accused the congressman of physically hurting her and their two-year-old daughter. In court filings and police reports, Moreno has charged Miller with throwing her against a wall, leaving an “obvious grab mark on her upper arm”; throwing scalding water on her (an incident that Miller refuted as “horseplay”); and having “held a gun to her head.” Moreno also recounted an instance in which their daughter told her, “Daddy kill you.”Medical records submitted during the couple’s custody dispute cited several injuries to their young daughter, as well, including a broken collarbone that Moreno claimed occurred during Miller’s care.Moreno’s father, Senator Bernie Moreno, accused Miller Tuesday of holding his toddler’s favorite stuffed animal “hostage,” even as she struggled to sleep without it.“This is truly the seventh level of hell,” Senator Moreno told CBS News Tuesday. “My daughter lives in constant fear of this man, not like something that’s existential, but deeply in her heart, she fears what this guy is capable of.”Miller has categorically denied the allegations and sued his ex-wife for defamation in May. He was never charged with a crime, and the Department of Children and Family Services did not find evidence to substantiate allegations of child abuse, according to court filings.Miller published audio recordings of some of their private disagreements in an attempt to prove his innocence, but in doing so incidentally publicized more accusations against him by his wife related to suspected drug abuse. In one clip, Moreno can be heard accusing her ex-husband of keeping needles by his bedside and abusing THC and weed products. While publishing the audio recordings, Miller also accidentally shared a folder that contained images of his daughter, including one that appears to show her genitals. His ex-wife’s lawyers warned the image “could be considered Child Sexual Abuse Material.”It took the Ohio senator weeks to get publicly involved in the dangerous affair affecting his daughter and granddaughter, but Moreno finally denounced Miller on Sunday, writing in a post on X that the Donald Trump–backed Republican should “not serve in the House of Representatives.”“I believe Max Miller needs to seek professional help to end the clear pattern of abuse he has left in his wake,” the senator said.Trump has repeatedly backed Miller, despite the loaded allegations. On Monday, Trump insisted to reporters that Miller is a “good person.”“I mean I always thought he was a very good person. And I’m going to let the families figure that out,” Trump said. “It’s accusations. And I’m going to let them figure that out.”But by that evening, even the president could see the writing on the wall for Miller’s November prospects. The president reportedly phoned Miller to explain that “things aren’t looking good” and that the road ahead to reelection would be tough, multiple sources familiar with the call told Axios.The scandals have only continued to mount for Miller: By Tuesday afternoon, the Daily Mail had obtained and circulated images of Miller holding weed gummies, as well as of the needles that were purportedly kept by Miller’s bedside.This story has been updated.
U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro hauled a crate of evidence to the White House Monday evening in a bid to convince President Donald Trump that vandals weren’t responsible for damaging the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. Trump is reportedly considering firing Pirro over the Department of Justice’s admission in court that the pool’s peeling lining was the result of “flawed” renovation work, not vandals.Pirro brought a large carton of evidence collected by the Department of the Interior to a private meeting with Trump in the Oval Office, sources familiar told CBS News Tuesday. The evidence was reportedly used to exonerate former U.S. Olympian David Hearn. Later, Pirro was spotted leaving the White House dragging her enormous box of proof behind her. BREAKING: Jeanine Pirro was just spotted leaving the WH with a briefcase and white box. Looks like she may have just been fired for not lying enough. pic.twitter.com/QoA7Rc7ImJ— Brian Krassenstein (@krassenstein) August 4, 2026The occasionally heated meeting took place shortly after the president lashed out at her during a press conference. Since then, Trump has made no indication that he was the least bit convinced, but federal prosecutors have moved to drop the charges against the remaining two alleged vandals. In a filing last week, federal prosecutors admitted that the DOJ hadn’t fully investigated the matter because the pool hadn’t actually been drained, and the lining was “mostly obscured” by water. Federal prosecutors blamed the Department of the Interior for initially claiming that the damage was “entirely caused by vandals.” Pirro has been criticized for mounting prosecutions against a group of alleged vandals before fully investigating.
The Trump administration is making Haitians in the U.S. report to immigration offices to either get ankle monitors or immediately be deported after stripping their Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, last month.In Springfield, Ohio, dozens of Haitians with TPS were called to ICE offices, fitted with the ankle monitors, and given instructions not to travel more than 75 miles from their homes. The Haitian community in the city is about 15,000 strong, and a Supreme Court decision in June allowed the Trump administration to take away their TPS protections despite the ongoing poor security situation in Haiti.Many Haitians have asylum applications that have been pending for years. One Haitian resident was told to either wear an ankle monitor or be deported with $2,600, the Cincinnati Enquirer reported. ICE has sent letters to Haitians with TPS to come to immigration offices with “any and all immigration documents.” “It is important that you keep this appointment and bring this letter with you,” the letter states. “If you are unable to do so, state your reason, sign below, and return this letter to this office at once.”A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson told The Independent that “Temporary Protected Status is exactly that—temporary.”“What we would say now is it’s closing time which means you don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here,” the spokesperson said. “The good news is it’s not too late to get a $2,600 check and a free flight home.”President Trump infamously accused Haitians in Springfield of eating cats and dogs on the campaign trail in 2024, and the Haitian community has been bracing for heavy-handed ICE raids ever since the Supreme Court’s decision in June. Ohio’s Republican Governor Mike DeWine has spoken up in support of Haitians in his state but has not promised any support beyond that.“These are people who have helped Springfield really come back,” DeWine said in a CBS interview last month, explaining that Haitians have filled jobs and opened businesses where the economy once struggled. “The Haitians who are living there and employed there, they came there to work, and they came there because there were jobs that were not being filled by other people.“Haiti is hell today. So you’d be sending people … back to hell.”
Eleven different U.S. cities are still trying to get paid what they’re owed by FIFA after hosting 2026 World Cup club matches.FIFA President Gianni Infantino reportedly verbally promised Seattle, the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, Dallas, Houston, Kansas City, Atlanta, Philadelphia, New York/New Jersey, Miami, and Boston each $1 million for their hosting troubles, calling it a “legacy contribution.” While FIFA made no public statement about the payments, four executives at U.S. host city committees told The Athletic that FIFA management repeatedly reassured them about the payment.Now, nearly a month after the World Cup ended—and after Infantino’s U-turn on his disastrous plan to sell stakes in the international competition—all of those cities are still waiting for their payouts.“The absolute, utter stupidity of these host city executives for not getting this in writing,” said Pablo Iglesias Maurer, a soccer reporter for The Guardian. “I can’t even wrap my head around this—It’s FIFA, FFS. You’re taking Gianni Infantino’s word for it?”It doesn’t make much sense that FIFA can’t make an $11 million total payment after the profit from ticketing, media rights, and private donations. The tournament made over $15 billion in revenue from 2023 through the end of the 2026 World Cup, and FIFA only had a tournament operation budget of $2.7 billion. Meanwhile, hosts like Kansas City have had to dip into state funding to cover the costs.FIFA is one of the most historically corrupt organizations in all of sports, if not the entire world. And if Infantino’s been taking any cues from Trump, those cities won’t be seeing that money anytime soon.
Senate Judiciary Democrats used their final moments ahead of Todd Blanche’s nomination vote Tuesday to remind the committee of numerous reasons why the acting attorney general should not be permanently promoted—but apparently all Republicans heard was a bunch of “whining.”Missouri Senator Eric Schmitt was quick to mock his Democratic committee colleagues, sharing a derogatory note on X that he penned during the proceedings.“So much whining!” the note read.Schmitt’s language is an interesting choice, considering that the “whining” was an explicit exploration of why Donald Trump’s personal attorney should not have the keys to the Justice Department.Senator Sheldon Whitehouse referred to Blanche’s botched rollout of the Epstein files as just one reason why he should be disqualified from consideration. Whitehouse reminded the committee that even other Trump officials—notably, former Attorney General Pam Bondi—said Blanche was responsible for the bungled release.Senator Dick Durbin effectively accused Blanche of violating his oath of office by having “aided and abetted the most corrupt administration in the history of the United States” rather than “serving the American people and upholding the rule of law and the Constitution.”Durbin further accused Blanche—who is, again, in the running to be America’s preeminent lawyer—of lying under oath about statements relating to Trump’s $1.8 billion slush fund “to avoid offending President Trump.”Other damning details cited by Democrats involved Blanche’s personal role in crafting the collusive settlement between the DOJ, Trump’s personal attorneys, and the IRS that laid the groundwork for the taxpayer-funded honeypot. Liberal lawmakers also chided Blanche’s utilization of the Justice Department within his current limited capacity to target Trump’s perceived political enemies with bogus criminal cases.Democrats noted that Blanche still had not walked back a deal to protect Trump, a convicted tax fraudster, against future IRS investigations. But perhaps most scathing were the repeat references to Blanche’s bad lawyering. Democrats pointed to a petition signed by hundreds of Blanche’s former colleagues that claimed Blanche was simply unfit to be America’s top law enforcement official. The New York City Bar Association also protested Blanche’s nomination, accusing Blanche of having dubious ethical standards that failed to meet the standard required by the office.Schmitt’s dismissive tone could only suggest that he either didn’t listen to the complaints or he simply doesn’t care.
It’s been only a few days since federal prosecutors moved to dismiss criminal charges against former Olympian David Hearn, and the Department of Justice’s remaining vandalism cases have already fallen apart like cheap pool lining. The DOJ indicated Monday night that it would not prosecute the remaining two defendants accused of vandalizing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, Cameron Thiers and Sophie Dennison-Gibby.In a filing Friday, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia acknowledged that damage to the Reflecting Pool was caused by the contractor’s flawed installation of the pool lining, and blamed the Department of the Interior for initially claiming that the damage was “entirely caused by vandals.” The government also quietly dismissed charges against defendant Justin Carreno on Friday. G. Allen Dale, an attorney representing Thiers, told NPR News that, after the filing about Hearn, there was no way to keep the rest of the government’s cases afloat. “Anyone who’s read the pleading that was filed in Mr. Hearn’s case would understand exactly why they would have to dismiss against the remainder of those charged,” Dale said. The move to dismiss charges against Hearn sparked major backlash from President Donald Trump, who’d hand-picked Atlantic Industrial Coating for the project and spent weeks blaming vandals for the contractor’s apparently shoddy workmanship. He railed against U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro for dropping the Hearn case, saying Monday she “choked.”
Republican Senator Thom Tillis doesn’t think highly of acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, but he voted to confirm him anyway.Tillis, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, gave a long-winded defense of his support for Blanche on the Senate floor Tuesday, even as he admitted that this Justice Department seems particularly bad.“Everybody has this view that they are as pure as the driven snow and it’s the other side that has a problem. I think we both have a problem, folks. If you want to talk about weaponization, take a look at the Biden administration, take a look at the Obama administration,” Tillis said.“The bottom line is, nobody is clean here, and until we start recognizing this behavior as bad, we’re just going to one-up it. Maybe it’s a little bit more intense in this administration than the last one, and that a little bit more intense the prior administration, and so on and so forth, but folks, we’ve got to end this stuff. We do,” Tillis continued. “I’m gonna support Mr. Blanche’s nomination, but what I hope I see out of him is a bending of the curve of this absurdity.”Tillis: "Everybody has this view that they are as pure as the driven snow and it's the other side that has a problem. I think we both have a problem, folks. If you want to talk about weaponization, take a look at the Biden administration, take a look at the Obama administration,… pic.twitter.com/bnBhpjfsBg— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 4, 2026Tillis’s excuse doesn’t hold up very well. Tillis was one of two Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee withholding his vote to support Blanche over President Trump’s settlement with the IRS, which created a $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” and gave Trump and his family immunity from IRS audits.But over the weekend, Tillis, along with Republican Senator John Cornyn, changed his mind following a written statement from the Department of Justice in which Blanche purportedly agreed to end the Anti-Weaponization Fund. However, that memo still left open the preservation of the fund, as well as Trump’s immunity from IRS audits, as Democrats quickly pointed out.Tillis seems to know all of this, based on his statement Tuesday. But even though he’ll be out of the Senate next year, he’s putting politics over principle.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche went mask-off last week, promising behind closed doors to roll back abortion access even further, and telling religious pro-life hard-liners that he wanted the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision overturning the right to abortion to become “permanent in every single state.”Blanche made the comments in a “prayer call” last Thursday hosted by the White House Faith Office and attended by various faith leaders. The call was not open to press and not on the record, although the entirety of the call is now up on YouTube. “We don’t have complete victory yet, but we will have victory, and victory will be soon, and it will be permanent,” Blanche said. “If states have said, ‘We are going to protect the unborn and we’re going to protect every life from the moment of conception,’ we’re putting practices and policies in place so that other states and other organizations can’t attack that.”“They can’t do things like they’re doing with mailing in mail-order drugs,” Blanche added, singling out abortion pills.This is a far cry from the answer he offered at his confirmation hearing, when he claimed he would “carefully evaluate every lawful action available to ensure the faithful enforcement of the Comstock Act,” the 150-year-old law that bans the mailing of contraceptives and other things considered to be “obscene.” He also noted that the Trump administration is “putting practices and policies in place” to block abortion pills mifepristone and misoprostol from being sent to states that have banned abortion, a process that would require the Justice Department to invoke the Comstock Act—something President Trump specifically said he wouldn’t do back in 2024 while campaigning. “A vote to confirm Todd Blanche is a vote ‘so that the Dobbs decision becomes permanent in every single state,’” Senator Patty Murray wrote Tuesday on X. “Those were his own words to anti-abortion extremists. Senators who vote for Blanche are voting for an Attorney General who will attack abortion rights in EVERY state.”
The Senate Judiciary Committee confirmed Todd Blanche to run the Justice Department Tuesday, advancing Blanche’s nomination for attorney general to the Senate floor.Democrats on the committee dissented, arguing that Donald Trump’s blindly loyal former personal attorney should not have the keys to America’s top law enforcement agency.Senator Sheldon Whitehouse remarked that it was a “sad and embarrassing day for this committee,” right before Blanche’s nomination moved forward solely on a party-line vote. Whitehouse noted that Blanche was “probably the most discreditable person ever to seek the office of attorney general of the United States.”Outgoing Republican Senators Thom Tillis and John Cornyn, who held up Blanche’s nomination until the acting attorney general vaguely assured them he would end Trump’s $1.8 billion slush fund, ultimately cracked under the pressure and fell in line with their party earlier this week.Yet even Blanche’s former colleagues could see that he wasn’t right for the monumental role. Prior to the vote, hundreds of federal prosecutors urged the Senate to reject Blanche’s bid. In a joint memo, the cohort questioned whether the Justice Department would continue to exist as an entity that serves the American people—and whether the American people would continue to have faith in its abilities to serve them—if it remained under Blanche’s control.They cited Blanche’s willingness to fire career prosecutors and FBI agents to satisfy Trump’s political interests, his belief that Trump has a “right” and a “duty” to shape federal probes, his mishandling of the Epstein files and repeat refusals to meet with the sex trafficker’s victims, and the DOJ’s $1.8 billion slush fund as just a handful of examples that have so far tanked their faith in Blanche’s abilities to remain independent of the White House.This story has been updated.
What ever happened to Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy’s reality television show sponsored by the companies he regulates?In May, Duffy announced that The Great American Road Trip, starring the secretary and his family, would premiere the following month. The five-part docuseries was planned in anticipation of the Fourth of July, and “aligned” with President Donald Trump’s sketchy Freedom 250 celebration. Now summer vacation is almost over, and Duffy’s show never actually aired. The disappearance of the show has been accompanied by a social media blackout on the topic, suggesting Duffy’s road trip won’t make it to screens anytime soon. The official Great American Road Trip X account has continued to post generic travel content but has not mentioned the show since May 8. Duffy hasn’t posted about the show on X since May 13, and the Department of Transportation doesn’t appear to have made a single post on X mentioning the project. Duffy—a multimillionaire with a taxpayer-funded salary—did not pay for the extravagant trip himself. Instead, the money came from a nonprofit called Great American Road Trip Inc. Behind the nonprofit’s funding is a medley of industry giants, including Boeing and Toyota, who each donated $1 million to the project. Other companies include Shell, United Airlines, the U.S. Travel Association, Chase Travel, Royal Caribbean Group, and a range of other companies that rely on the regulatory systems of the Department of Transportation. After the show was announced, Duffy’s corporate-funded vacation received enormous backlash, which the secretary attributed to “the radical, miserable left.” At the time it was announced, the show appeared in especially bad taste amid skyrocketing gas prices caused by Trump’s war in Iran. Still, it’s not entirely clear why the project never made it to air. If the show never makes it to screens, a slew of major corporations will have spent millions of dollars for no legitimate reason. In May, Senator Patty Murray, a Democrat from Washington, asked the DOT’s inspector general to investigate Duffy’s involvement with the project. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a government watchdog group, filed its own complaint alleging Duffy accepted and solicited gifts from organizations his agency oversees.
Editor’s Note: Welcome to The TNR Blue Book. It’s our new daily newsletter that covers Congress and much more, but with a distinctly TNR twist: Our focus will be strictly on Democrats, liberal and progressive groups, and the fight to take back power and save democracy. Every morning, you’ll get a rundown of late-breaking news, what Democrats on Capitol Hill are thinking, quick hits on what you need to know nationally, the latest on what’s coming out of the think tanks and activist groups, short interviews with progressive newsmakers and authors, and more (including some humor and political trivia!). There’s nothing else out there like it.Sign up and get this newsletter for free. Inside WashingtonCould Black voters change their minds about Abdul El-Sayed?In the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate in Michigan, progressive candidate Abdul El-Sayed has consistently polled ahead of his opponent, the establishment-backed Representative Haley Stevens. But there’s one demographic that El-Sayed hasn’t yet won over—a crucial one not just in Tuesday’s election, but for the general election in November: Black voters, who make up roughly a quarter of the state’s Democratic electorate. The big question is why that is. Some political analysts have suggested that Black voters support Stevens because of her association with the Democratic establishment, and they are wary of progressives like El-Sayed, whose rhetoric can come across as “burn it all down.” But it’s not that simple, said Vincent Hutchings, diversity and social transformation professor at the University of Michigan. “I think the notion that this is somehow indicative of an ideological split is probably overstated,” he said.Instead, Hutchings said, Black voters are likely following cues from trusted members of the party establishment, like Representative Jim Clyburn, a senior member of the Congressional Black Caucus who endorsed Stevens. “I know what it takes to energize Democratic voters. I know she has what it takes to energize Democratic voters, and we need that,” Clyburn said alongside Stevens at a Teamsters hall in Detroit on July 24.Some Black voters may favor Stevens because of her association with President Barack Obama; though Obama hasn’t endorsed a candidate in the primary, Stevens’s supporters have spent $5 million to air an advertisement nearly 4,000 times where Obama praises her work on the U.S. Auto Rescue Task Force. The ad is funded by United Democracy Project, an AIPAC-affiliated super PAC, which has so far spent $30 million to support Stevens’s campaign.There’s a “disconnect,” Hutchings said, between the fact that Black voters often embrace the “most leftist racial and economic policies in the party,” yet also often vote for the more moderate, establishment candidate. But his answer to that contradiction is simple: Black voters, like all voters, “are frequently not familiar with the actual platforms of the candidates.” Instead, they pay attention to crucial endorsements.“That’s why it’s a mistake to think, ‘Oh, well, looks like there’s a divide in the Democratic Party between the quote-unquote ‘progressive forces’ and the quote-unquote ‘establishment forces,’ and it looks like Black voters are on the side of the quote-unquote ‘establishment,’” he said. “That’s an easy story to tell. I get why people tell it. It seems to map onto reality, but only until you scratch a little beneath the surface.”Some Black voters could also be put off by progressive candidates who speak too adamantly against the Democratic establishment, explained Christopher Towler, a political science professor at California State University, Sacramento, and the director of the Black Voter Project. “A lot of progressive candidates who follow the [Senator Bernie] Sanders mold and are trying to break away from the party have to be very careful about alienating Black voters,” he said. “Many Black voters, especially the ones who vote in primaries, associate the Democratic Party with civil rights gains.” Criticizing the party and its establishment too adamantly could backfire, he explained.Both Towler and Hutchings mentioned Sanders’s 2020 presidential primary run as an example of these same issues playing out. In Michigan, then-candidate Joe Biden walloped Sanders, winning every county in the state. Biden picked up 73 delegates to Sanders’s 52. It was a marked regression from Sanders’s performance in 2016, when he won the majority of Michigan’s counties and beat Hillary Clinton in the state. Biden’s victory in the state is partially attributed to Black voters showing up for him. A similar story played out in the South; in South Carolina, Sanders finished with a measly 17 percent of the Black vote, dealing a death blow to his campaign. In Michigan, Sanders has been a major supporter of El-Sayed’s campaign.“Black voters are very strategic and practical with their votes, even in primaries,” said Towler. “If there’s not a candidate that they’re not completely in love with … they’re going to vote for who they think will win the election.” It’s a shrewd cost-benefit analysis focused on avoiding a Republican victory at all costs.Both Stevens and El-Sayed have worked to court Black voters, spending countless Sunday mornings at Black churches across the state and highlighting their respective endorsements from Black leaders. El-Sayed picked up an endorsement from the Council of Baptist Pastors of Detroit and Vicinity in early July, and has the support of some younger or more progressive members of the Congressional Black Caucus, like Representatives Summer Lee, Maxwell Frost, and Bonnie Watson Coleman (among others). Some observers think El-Sayed has a good chance with these younger Black voters, who might care less about an endorsement from Clyburn or a sound bite featuring Obama. Meanwhile, Stevens surrogates have pushed narratives that El-Sayed is at odds with prominent Black political figures like Michelle Obama and Kamala Harris. Another United Democracy Project–funded mailer features a photo of Michelle Obama and quotes El-Sayed calling her work on childhood obesity as “uninspired” and “ineffectual.” Though the ad aimed to paint El-Sayed as a misogynist, Towler said that it could hurt him among Black voters, as well. El-Sayed has also needed to emphasize his support of Harris’s 2024 presidential campaign. In February 2024, El-Sayed pledged to vote “uncommitted” in the Democratic presidential primary to protest then-President Biden’s actions in Gaza. When Harris took over the nomination, El-Sayed endorsed her, but Stevens’s campaign continues to emphasize that original “uncommitted” vote.Whoever wins Tuesday’s primary will need Black voters to propel them to a victory against Republican Mike Rogers in November. “You need to really focus on protecting the Black community from Trump and MAGA Republicans and the GOP’s agenda, which has become more and more anti-Black and focused on rolling back the racial progress that this country has made since the civil rights era,” said Towler, offering advice for whoever wins the primary. Black voters tend to be skeptical of big policy promises, Towler added. He says candidates should focus on stopping the GOP, “and then we can start to talk about what type of policy we can provide.” That contrasts with El-Sayed’s campaign slogan: “Money out of politics, money in your pocket, Medicare for All.”If, as polls suggest, El-Sayed is headed to a primary victory, Towler isn’t concerned about how Black voters will respond, and pointed to other examples of progressives who might not have won the Black vote in their primary but still won over the demographic during their general elections. “This again goes back to the practicality of Black voters when choosing candidates. They’re not going to vote for the Republican,” he said. Whether you’re talking about Zohran Mamdani in New York, James Talarico in Texas, or Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan—all of whom have failed to convince Black voters in the primary—the same principle applies, Towler said: When it comes to the general election, “Black voters are going to come home.” —Emma JanssenOutside WashingtonOther (i.e., non-Michigan) stories to watch in Tuesday’s primariesWhile the Democratic Senate primary in Michigan has gotten most of the attention, there’s plenty to watch in the four other states with primaries on Tuesday: Kansas, Missouri, Virginia, and Washington. In Washington—a top-two primary system—Kshama Sawant and Melissa Chaudhry are challenging incumbent Representative Adam Smith from his left. In Missouri, the headline race is the heated rematch between sitting Representative Wesley Bell and former Representative Cori Bush, the erstwhile Squad member whom Bell, with significant funding from AIPAC, defeated in 2024 by a little under six points. Will the 2026 climate, in which progressives have notched more wins than in past cycles, help Bush prevail this time? There isn’t much polling on this one.In Virginia, four different Dems—Adam Dunigan, Mo Seifeldein, Michael Duffin, and Lorena Bruner—are challenging incumbent Representative Don Beyer, in another race without much polling. Meanwhile, Democrat Eugene Vindman will find out who his Republican opponent will be in the competitive November race for the 7th congressional district, once represented by Abigail Spanberger. In Kansas, Democratic voters will choose between gubernatorial contenders Cindy Holscher and Ethan Corson. There have been some weird side stories in this one involving the fight for term-limited Democratic Governor Laura Kelly’s either endorsement or nonintervention, but substantively, data centers are proving to be a big issue. (Holscher backs a temporary pause on construction, while Corson favors more modest policies around energy and water use.) Polling’s pretty limited on this race as well, although Holscher was well ahead in two polls conducted before the campaign really heated up. All that and much more, to be decided Tuesday. Elsewhere:David Dayen at The American Prospect looks at the private equity firms and life insurance companies whose fortunes are increasingly tied to the AI bubble—with potentially expensive consequences for taxpayers in the event of a bailout. For other reading that will definitely not help your anxiety: Try The Washington Post’s data-filled feature on law enforcement officials using Flock cameras to stalk women. —Heather Souvaine HornThe Ideas FactoryA coalition of climate advocates, watchdog organizations, and other groups on Monday denounced the Securities and Exchange Commission’s plan to “rescind its 2024 climate disclosure rule”—a move that would “undermine transparency in capital markets” and help risk-exposed companies avoid important disclosures. The Center for American Progress submits a comment letter to the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative arguing that the Trump administration’s “Board of Trade” plan—a bilateral body established “to ensure that trade with China is more balanced and beneficial for Americans,” according to Ambassador Jamieson Greer—does nothing to “address the clear and present danger presented by the growing tide of Chinese industrial overcapacity.” The letter urges the administration to “prioritize working with like-minded partners and allies” rather than slapping tariffs on them.On Wednesday at 1 p.m., the Roosevelt Institute hosts a Zoom panel on “What Social Security’s Shortfall Is Really Telling Us About the Economy.” Panelists include Kathryn Anne Edwards, Kate Bahn, Bradley Hardy, and Betsey Stevenson.—Heather Souvaine HornIn ClosingFour Questions For: Trita Parsi, co-founder and executive vice president of the Quincy InstituteInterview by Indigo Olivier Q: What are you working on right now?A: My primary focus right now is on ending the disastrous Iran war and on preparing the U.S. for a multipolar world, and the world for a non-unipolar America.Q: You’ve spent years arguing for diplomacy with Iran. What’s the hardest part of doing that in Washington?A: After decades of animosity and mistrust, it isn’t simply a policy shift that is needed to resolve the tensions, but a paradigm shift. A fundamental rethinking of the U.S.’s own interest, its image of the other side, and its fundamental assumptions about what the other side wants and is willing to give up. At the same time, the enmity essentially runs on autopilot with a path dependency that renders any serious rethinking very difficult.Q: Looking back over the last year or two, what accomplishment are you most proud of?A: It is difficult to be happy or proud of anything in this current situation. We should not be in this war. People have died needlessly, immense amounts of money have been wasted on another war, and the pathways to a diplomatic breakthrough have become increasingly narrow. Until this war has been ended, it’s premature to talk about accomplishments.Q: What has it been like to find yourself at the center of a controversy over your work and your immigration status?A: Given how tense and politically charged this issue is in Washington, it unfortunately comes with the territory that any push for peace will be punished by those who prefer conflict. And on this issue, the gloves have always been off, sadly. Until a resolution to the U.S.-Iran conflict has been found, I don’t expect the political charge of this issue to recede, which means that many of us in this space will pay a personal price for challenging the forces of war. Political Trivia Question of the Day On the subject of Michigan: Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg coined the term “Reagan Democrat” in 1985 by interviewing and studying the voters of what paradigmatically swingy suburban Detroit county? (Sign up for The Blue Book to find the answer in tomorrow’s newsletter.)
President Trump has exhausted almost all of the U.S. military’s long-range precision missile supply in the Iran war. Reuters reports that key stockpiles of Precision Strike Missiles and Army Tactical Missile Systems have “virtually all” been used up. These are highly accurate, long-range missiles that cost over $1 million each and have been used on targets inside Russia amid the war in Ukraine. The U.S. has also used up nearly half of its Tomahawk missiles, according to sources within the administration. The depletion of these missiles means that any escalation in Iran would require piloted bombing missions, which are riskier and put fighter pilots in harm’s way. And it leaves the U.S. unable to deter other major adversaries, such as Russia and China. In a statement, the White House denied the report, saying the U.S. has “far more munitions than anyone in the world” and “far more than we need.”“Our defense companies are, at this moment, making more munitions than they have ever made before, in addition to expanding their plants and equipment at record levels,” Trump said. The White House’s statement didn’t specifically mention precision missiles. While Reuters noted that certain types of weapons, such as artillery shells and other missiles, are being produced at record levels, that still may not be enough for a long-term, protracted war. Trump’s decision last week not to launch new strikes on Iran was partly due to warnings from military advisers about the depleted missile stockpiles, as well as pressure from U.S. allies in the Persian Gulf. Last week, the Department of Defense circulated a memo asking for ideas on “creative” ways to pressure Iran. Now we know that’s because the conventional way of long-range missile strikes has been exhausted.
Republican Representative Max Miller—accused of holding a gun to his wife’s head, scalding her with boiling water, and breaking his two-year-old daughter’s collarbone—has now shared pictures of that same daughter’s genitals. This would be considered Child Sex Abuse Material, adding yet another disturbing allegation to Miller’s plate. Miller inadvertently shared the picture on Sunday while using Dropbox to upload police reports, recorded conversations, medical records, and a 20-minute long indignant video denying his ex-wife Emily Moreno’s abuse allegations. “The first time Miller shared the folder, it contained private images of Miller and Ms. Moreno’s daughter and left her name unredacted. At least one of those images could be considered Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) because the daughter’s genitals appear to be visible,” Moreno’s lawyers said in a letter to Miller’s legal team on Monday. “We write to demand an explanation about how this occurred. Whose idea was it to share this intimate image of the child? Why did your firm share it? Did you or your firm vet the images before sharing them? Did anyone? Who? Who removed the images from the second folder and why? Was it because someone realized that it was ill-advised (and in the case of the potential SAM image, illegal) to share these images with the world?”Miller’s lawyer, Aaron Minc, later admitted that he had accidentally uploaded the picture of the daughter’s genitals.“Unfortunately, I missed the last three pages of a 40+ page document with sensitive content. It was completely unintentional and a mistake.... To be clear, this was completely my fault. I am solely responsible for what happened. I was the only person responsible for assembling, creating, reviewing, adding, deleting, redacting, or making any changes to the information and files that were in this folder,” Minc wrote.“I am truly sorry to Congressman Miller, Ms. Moreno, both of their families, and, especially, to their daughter. I deeply regret the mistake. I find it egregious and shameful that Ms. Moreno and here counsels have decided to make a media spectacle regarding this unfortunate mistake and attract media attention to this incident as a means to try to gain leverage in court and distract from the underlying evidence that exonerates Mr. Miller from the false allegations he is accused of, and we are attempting to fight on his behalf.”Minc’s apology offered no explanation as to why the daughter’s genitalia were included in the Dropbox in the first place. This news is the latest domino to fall for Miller. On Sunday, Republican Senator Bernie Moreno, Miller’s ex-father-in-law, finally came out against Miller, saying he needed “serious psychological help,” and calling on him to step down from Congress and abandon his current reelection campaign. “He is a danger to my daughter, and I hold my breath every minute he has custody of my granddaughter,” Moreno wrote on X. “If there are any basic standards of character required to hold elected office, Max Miller fails them.”Then on Monday, Miller received a restraining order from his ex-girlfriend and former Trump White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham. And that same day, President Trump—who was initially supportive of Miller—reportedly called him directly to tell him that “things aren’t looking good” for his campaign. Miller continues to deny virtually every accusation his ex-wife has made, even as the Dropbox release that allegedly included his daughter’s genitals also shows him describing throwing hot water on Emily as a “playful incident” and her alleging that she found needles next to his bed, which he did not deny.Miller, who worked for the presidential campaigns of both Marco Rubio and Trump in 2016, remains in office and continues to run for reelection, as the vast majority of his Republican colleagues have displayed extreme cowardice by either ignoring the situation entirely or supporting him outright. Miller has made it abundantly clear that he has no plans to step down. As of now he will face off against Democrat Brian Poindexter in the general election for his House seat. The GOP has until Wednesday to replace him on the ballot.Here is the full video from Congressman Max Miller's live this morning—in the event he decides to delete it.Watch it. Share it. Help make sure as many people as possible see him expose himself with his own words. pic.twitter.com/aEn7SLHOFJ— Adam Parkhomenko (@AdamParkhomenko) August 2, 2026This story has been updated.
CBS’s 60 Minutes had the scoop on Jeffrey Epstein’s sketchy financials—before the Bari Weiss–run network fired the reporter fronting the investigation.A new report by Democratic Senator Ron Wyden revealed that Deutsche Bank AG, JPMorgan Chase, and Bank of America enabled Epstein by permitting millions in suspicious transactions over the course of the sex offender’s criminal career.Deutsche Bank AG failed to promptly notify authorities of more than $250 million in questionable transfers tied to Epstein, according to Wyden’s report. Those included cash amounts to pay women in Russia and Eastern Europe—of which the bank retroactively informed U.S. officials after Epstein was arrested on sex-trafficking charges in July 2019.Bank of America Corp. reported $170 million in Epstein-related transactions tied to billionaire Leon Black. The bank, according to Wyden’s report, noted years later that the transactions had “no apparent economic, business, or lawful purpose.”JPMorgan Chase, as previously reported, processed more than $1 billion for Epstein, despite internal concerns at the bank.Yet former 60 Minutes correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi had the story months ago, having interviewed Wyden in March about her own investigation into Wall Street banks’ and the U.S. Virgin Islands government’s relationship with Epstein, according to Bloomberg.But the report, and Wyden’s interview, would never air: Alfonsi was fired by CBS News leadership in the midst of a major network shakeup two months later, in May, when she publicly criticized Weiss’s editorial grip on the storied news magazine. Weiss had blocked a segment Alfonsi previously reported on Donald Trump’s deportation program and El Salvador’s notoriously lethal CECOT prison.A spokesperson for CBS News confirmed to Bloomberg that Alfonsi had interviewed Wyden earlier this year, but said the story had not been finished by the end of the last 60 Minutes season. The spokesperson did not elaborate on whether the show intended to air the segment during its next season.In a statement to The New Republic, a CBS News spokesperson refuted any notion that the network had tried to bury Alfonsi’s Epstein story, citing numerous reports on Epstein written by journalists across CBS News.“We are proud of our aggressive and extensive reporting on the Epstein scandal,” the CBS News spokesperson wrote. “That reporting continues. We air pieces when they are ready and suggesting that an interview is being ‘suppressed’ for any reason is categorically false.”This story has been updated.
President Donald Trump reached out to Ohio Representative Max Miller, who is facing allegations that he assaulted his ex-wife and child, to warn him that his candidacy is in jeopardy. In a phone call, Trump told Miller that “things aren’t looking good” for the November midterms, Axios reported Monday night. While Trump may be delivering—or simply hoping to give the impression of—tough love behind closed doors, the president defended Miller while speaking to reporters in the Oval Office earlier Monday.“It’s a very sad thing. I know Max. He’s a good person. I mean, I’ve always thought he was a very good person, and I’m gonna let the families figure that out,” Trump told the press.The president alluded to knowing the family very well. Before running for office, Miller was a Trump White House aide. Miller married Emily Moreno, his now ex-wife, at Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey, in 2022, and received the president’s official endorsement for Congress that same year. Moreno has accused Miller of assaulting her, throwing a pot of boiling water on her, holding a gun to her head, and breaking their two-year-old daughter’s collarbone. Last week, Moreno filed for a new restraining order against her ex-husband, alleging that he’d physically grabbed one of her attorneys and used a profane slur. In a statement Sunday, Ohio Senator Bernie Moreno, Emily’s father, said that Miller should “not serve in the House of Representatives.” “As he has admitted privately, Max Miller needs serious psychological help. He is a danger to my daughter, and I hold my breath every minute he has custody of my granddaughter,” Moreno wrote on X. Miller responded saying that Moreno’s statement was “all political.”Miller was dealt another blow Monday night when his ex-girlfriend, former White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham, filed a temporary restraining order against him.
The following is a lightly edited transcript of the August 4 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.A Fox News poll of Texas shows Democrat James Talarico leading by three points. But here’s what’s really striking about this survey. It finds Donald Trump underwater by nine points in Texas, a state that he won by fourteen points less than two years ago. Those are stunning numbers for the Lone Star State, and if Democrats are suddenly competitive for the Senate, numbers like that explain why.All this comes as Trump just unleashed a crazed tirade about his poll numbers, one that strongly suggests he has zero interest in helping his party in the midterms. It now feels like time is running out for Trump to turn things around, and we may be within striking distance of getting the election that Democrats really want. So we’re talking about all of it with Democratic strategist Sawyer Hackett, who knows Texas and has worked on midterm elections as well. Sawyer, good to have you back on.Sawyer Hackett: Great to be with you, Greg.Sargent: So let’s just start with this bizarre rant from Trump. He posted this: “My real poll numbers, not those made up by the fake news media, are the best they have ever been. And why wouldn’t they be with the biggest tax cuts and employment numbers ever, the biggest outside investment in America and world history? A totally secure border, a giant victory in Venezuela, the denuclearization of Iran. Unparalleled respect and success throughout the world, and much more.”Sawyer, does that litany of made-up successes sound like a description of what majorities see in this presidency?Hackett: Based on the polling that we’re seeing across the country right now, it looks like Donald Trump’s coalition has fallen apart. I mean, he’s atrophied severely with Latino voters, atrophied severely with Black voters, atrophied severely with young voters, and especially independent voters who are running away from him across the country in all of these major swing states, in all of these states where we have major Senate races. And that’s really going to be the tipping point, I think, for the midterm cycle.Sargent: And by every metric, things are not going in the right direction. Let’s talk about this Fox News poll of Texas. It finds Talarico leading Republican Ken Paxton by 51 to 48 among registered voters. Before we get into the head-to-head, let’s talk about Trump’s numbers in Texas. CNN’s Harry Enten flagged this. Fox has 54 percent viewing him unfavorably there versus 45 percent viewing him favorably. Sawyer, as someone who knows Texas, can you explain how shocking it is for Trump to be nine points underwater in that state?Hackett: It’s absolutely shocking for him to be nine points underwater in the state, especially this far out from the election. I mean, Donald Trump won Texas by, I think, more than thirteen points in 2024. It’s a state that has consistently been red for the last thirty years. I mean, we haven’t elected a statewide Democrat in Texas for many, many decades. And so, you know, over cycle over cycle, we’ve gotten closer and closer to kind of flipping the state, but Republican numbers, especially Republican incumbents, have always kind of performed better in Texas, because it is a state that is fairly conservative. It’s also a state that’s fairly independent. It’s one of the most unaffiliated states in the country. And those voters, while they claim to be independent, tend to break towards conservatives, tend to break towards Republicans in some of these statewide races. And so yeah, it’s shocking to see Trump underwater nine points with still a couple more months—three or four more months—until the election, when this is a state just a year and a half ago that Trump won by almost fourteen points.Sargent: You brought up independents. The Fox poll finds that 78 percent of independents view Trump unfavorably versus 18 percent who view him favorably. That’s sixty points underwater. And 50 percent of independents in Texas in the Fox poll have a strongly unfavorable view of Trump. Sawyer, have you ever heard of numbers like that? And can you explain why independents matter so much in Texas?Hackett: Yeah, as I mentioned before, independents make up a huge chunk of the electorate in Texas. It’s one of the most unaffiliated states in the country. And I think independents have largely shaped how Democrats have performed over the last 30 years. As I mentioned, they’ve kind of broken towards Republicans, towards conservatives in each of these statewide races. But I think independent voters, more so than any other specific demographic, are responding to what’s happening with the economy. I mean, you look at this poll and you look at the breakdown of what are the most important issues voters care about to independents especially, it’s affordability. And on cost of living, you have James Talarico running away with the issue, with Ken Paxton, who I think has been kind of bogged down and mired in personal scandal and kind of trying to overcome that with the electorate, not necessarily winning over those independent voters with his attacks on James Talarico’s masculinity. That’s not necessarily working for them. So Talarico being focused on affordability is turning those independents in droves over to the Democratic side.Sargent: Yeah, and I think it’s interesting that you say that we have to be alert to the possibility that independents break away from Democrats at the end. But numbers like these would suggest that we’re looking at maybe a muted effect. If anything, along those lines, it looks like Talarico’s going to win this demographic. In fact, the Fox poll has Talarico beating Paxton by thirty-nine points among independents. Clearly Trump is driving that. Yet at the same time, Paxton is winning by really overwhelming margins among non-college white voters and rural voters. That’s why it’s so close, despite Trump being shockingly underwater there. What’s your candid assessment of the real state of the Texas Senate race now?Hackett: My assessment is that Talarico is in a really prime position to take this victory in November. And I think it’s kind of a perfect storm in Texas, where you have a really faulty candidate on the Republican side who’s turning away independents and not necessarily able to keep that coalition intact, and a Democratic nominee who’s able to kind of reach across the aisle towards independents, who are really disillusioned with what’s happening on the economy. You look at these pollings and you look at the crosstabs, impressions are much more firm of Ken Paxton in these polls than they are of Talarico. And there’s still something like 14 percent of Texas voters who are undecided at this point in the race. From this point on through November, you’re going to see a deluge of millions and millions of dollars of negative ads. I think especially coming from the right against James Talarico, that are going to be trying to peel away some of those independent voters from him. A lot of them are really fixed on that cost of living issue. And that’s been the issue that Talarico has been dominating on in the race. So really, I think it’s a matter of whether Talarico can keep running up those margins. We can keep running down Trump’s numbers in the state. And hopefully we can get to a point where, heading into the GOTV part of this race, the deluge of money that we’re going to see coming from the right isn’t enough to dissuade enough independents away from Talarico.Sargent: And you can see a few other spots that Talarico really has got to firm up here. For instance, Fox has Talarico winning among Hispanics by 59 percent to 41 percent. The last time you were on here, you said that one of the key pieces of a Talarico victory is to really run up the margins in some of those southern Texas counties that are very heavily Latino. It seems to me like he isn’t quite there with Hispanics if that Fox number is right, doesn’t it?Hackett: Well, and we talk about, the Trump coalition of 2024, the reason he was able to kind of have such a wild swing to the right across all these different states and all these different demographics—that coalition was built on winning over support from Latino and Hispanic voters in places like Texas, winning over younger Black men, winning over younger voters in general. That coalition has completely collapsed. And I think Texas embodies that collapse more than any state in the country.The Texas Tribune, just a couple of weeks ago, had a poll out that said one in five Latino Texans who voted for Trump in 2024 would not support him again. And two-thirds of Latinos in the state disapprove of the job he’s doing as president. Those are not numbers that you can compete in, in a state like Texas, whose electorate has become so much more diverse and so much younger and so much more urbanized. And in all of those places, in all of those areas, Donald Trump is atrophying his support among voters, not gaining.Sargent: I would assume, though, that we should all breathe a little easier if Talarico gets up into the sixties with Hispanics, right?Hackett: I think it would be a lot better if he was winning over a bigger share of the Latino vote in Texas. I think, if you look at it compared to 2024, it’s a pretty wild swing, a thirty-point swing towards Democrats. That being said, historically, to compete in a state like Texas, I think you need to run up those numbers really high. The other thing I found interesting in that Fox poll was that Talarico, it looks like he has 87 percent support among Black voters in the state. There’s been a lot of conversation, especially post-primary, whether Talarico can win over Black support, especially after kind of that dust-up during the primary cycle. It looks like he’s doing a lot better with Black voters than he was just a few weeks ago. I’d like to see those Hispanic numbers come up a little bit, but the coalition is looking pretty strong.Sargent: Yeah, the story seems to be that the coalition’s coming together. We still have some spots where he’s got to do better. I think he’s got to probably keep [Paxton’s] numbers down a little bit in some of these rural areas as well. To your point about the swing among Hispanics from 2024 to the present, again, Fox has it at 59 to 41 in Talarico’s favor among Hispanics. We really shouldn’t overlook the deeper importance of this. As I think you alluded to, the swing to Trump in South Texas among Latinos was widely held up by countless pundits and commentators and analysts as a sign that there had been something like a permanent realignment in U.S. politics. And now that has entirely evaporated. So this swing away from Trump among Texas Latinos is a major, major story. It shows that lots and lots of people really overread the significance of 2024. And I really think we should underscore that. Can you talk about that?Hackett: I think that’s absolutely right. And I think that’s not just a story that’s happening in Texas. That’s happening in states across the country, especially in these states with a major predominant Hispanic population like Texas. That coalition, Donald Trump’s coalition in 2024, I think was an aberration. I think those voters were largely reacting to an economic situation in which affordability was the top concern for voters, and they did not feel like Democrats were serious enough in addressing it, and at the time had a nominee—or an incumbent president in Joe Biden—who was not kind of addressing their concerns. What we’ve seen is that that coalition was not actually intact at all. And mostly they were responding to the national environment, which is what we want to happen right now in 2026 in the midterms.We want those same voters to be looking at the national environment and to be upset by what they’re seeing in terms of cost of living, in terms of these foreign wars, in terms of these tariffs that are driving up prices in places like Texas. So really, you know, I think what we’re seeing is a new dynamic with Hispanic voters and Black voters that are much more responsive to what’s happening in that exact national moment, as opposed to kind of just, winning over voters on cultural issues or whatever it may be from Trump.Sargent: And there’s some cause for concern going forward about whether, if Democrats can pull these voters back, how permanent is that? But I think the story here is that Trump’s 2024 gains with these demographics proved incredibly fleeting, right?Hackett: Yeah, it was never an actual intact coalition as far as I can tell. I think this was, again, an aberration. I think Democrats can do a lot to win back those voters. That being said, if we come out of this midterm cycle and we’ve won 63 percent of Latino voters nationwide, we should not rest on our laurels that they’re going to come back out and turn out for us in 2028. We have to be laser-focused on telling our story to all parts of the coalition, including Hispanic voters, about why they should support us, why they and their families would be better off under Democratic policies that support them and help lower their costs.Sargent: A hundred percent. Couldn’t agree more. Let’s listen to something CNN’s Harry Enten said about all this. He points out that if Talarico is really ahead in Texas, even if it’s a small amount, three points, then all of a sudden numerous other Senate races are in play. Then he cites the prediction markets. Listen to this.Harry Enten (voiceover): All of a sudden you put Texas in play, you put places like Iowa, Ohio in play. You know, you’re talking about Alaska being potentially in play. Look at this chance to win the Senate. Now it’s basically an even race. Republicans were three-to-two favorites a month ago. Look at where we are right now. Now Republicans’ chances have fallen significantly, just a 53 percent chance to hold on to the United States Senate. Democrats have a real shot indeed.Sargent: So I don’t know how much stock to place in prediction markets, but it seems to me the story here again is Trump, Trump, Trump. If you want to know why the Senate’s in play, a big part of it is Trump being nine points underwater in Texas and what that says about the possibilities in Ohio, in Iowa, and places like that, North Carolina, right?Hackett: Our ability to compete in all of these major Senate states is mostly going to be a reaction to where Trump is. Where costs are at the time, what’s Trump’s approval rating, are we still at war with Iran and the Strait of Hormuz is still shut down? All of these are factors that are going to play into the national environment around Trump. And right now we’re having this discussion in the Democratic Party about, you know, what these results mean for the party and where we should take things. But really, all of this is going to be a reaction to Donald Trump. Every midterm election is a referendum on the current administration. And right now they have a current administration that’s driving their prices up on gas, on groceries, is kind of causing them massive chaos and corruption on a daily basis that they’re having to deal with. And right now I think voters are looking at the situation and they want to turn the page. It’s kind of a throw-the-bums-out election.And I think if you’re seeing a state like Texas be that competitive, the kind of brackets for what’s available to Democrats is pretty wide. We have to gain four net seats in this midterm cycle in the Senate. We have to defend Georgia and Michigan. We have to, you know, look at flipping states like North Carolina and Maine. But then maybe we also look at states like Iowa and Texas. And Iowa and Texas may be kind of in that bracket of states that help protect our majority if, say, we win one seat, a one-seat Senate majority, and then John Fetterman decides to flip to the other side. I think we need to have that buffer. And a state like Texas, I think, is right within that wheelhouse of what’s achievable. But so is a state like Alaska. So is a state like Iowa. So is a state like Ohio and North Carolina. So we’re competing in all of these states. But I think Texas right now, James Talarico is kind of putting forward a playbook on how to compete in the Trump era. He’s staying focused on affordability, staying focused on corruption, and honing his own message and not getting into this back-and-forth over culture war crap that they’re trying to put out against him.Sargent: I will say one thing about Talarico, though, in addition to all those things you said there. On some level he is campaigning against the kind of moral rot that Trump and MAGA have foisted on the country. And that’s what I really like about him as well. He is laser-focused on affordability, but he isn’t afraid to really speak in lofty moral terms about what’s happening to this country right now. I find that to be—I’ve said this before on here, but it’s like he’s found this new politics for the era of late-stage Trumpism or end-stage Trumpism, where everybody’s just had it and just wants to move on and wants to see something better in this country than this complete maniac completely unleashes on us every single day, day in and day out. What do you think of all that? Is Talarico, and maybe Ossoff as well, John Ossoff in Georgia, developing a language too? Are you seeing a language come together here that’s a little bit new and different?Hackett: I am. And I don’t necessarily think that it’s tied to ideology, right? Like in both of those candidates, both Ossoff and Talarico—I also think you’re seeing it in states like Michigan with someone like Abdul El-Sayed. These are not necessarily just focused on ideology. They’re not trying to come at Trump from the left or from the right. It’s from the top and the bottom, right? They’re talking about corruption. The way that these two, Ossoff and Talarico specifically, have been able to kind of hone in on the corruption angle in the midst of a conversation about affordability has been fascinating. And I think it’s going to be the kind of message that we’re going to need to run head-on with in 2028. I think Ossoff’s honing it very, very well ahead of a potential 2028 run. I would like to see more Democrats start to articulate that message, because it does seem like it kind of—you can win over a lot of folks who are in the middle. You can win over independent voters who are kind of looking at the corruption and looking at the affordability concerns and saying, this is a problem happening in both parties. I think Trump is the one causing the pain right now. But I’m willing to support this Democratic nominee in a state like Texas because he’s clearly laser-focused on the things that are, you know, driving up my costs and, you know, making me angry when I see my elected representatives kind of enriching themselves and their allies at the expense of working families.Sargent: It really is interesting what’s happening. And of course, John Ossoff has to win first. James Talarico has to win first. But if it happens like it’s looking like it might happen, then there will be a ton of stuff to learn about this. Sawyer Hackett, awesome to talk to you. That was really fascinating. Thanks, man.Hackett: Yeah, great to be with you, Greg.
This is a lightly edited transcript of the August 3 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.Perry Bacon: We’re going to talk about these big primaries that are happening—tomorrow in Michigan, and then next week in Wisconsin, where Nathan is. So these are primaries. I’m here in Louisville, but people are talking about them. It’s become like this year’s version of the New York primary, where everybody who’s left of center is thinking about these races, talking about them, knows the candidates’ names, knows who they would vote for, even though we do not get to vote. Nathan does, but the rest of us do not get to vote in these races.So I’ll start with a question I like to ask, which is—we’ll start with Michigan—we don’t know who’s going to win, and we haven’t had any results yet. I brought you all on intentionally knowing that, because I want to ask, in some ways, what are we going to learn? We don’t know who the winner is, and I hate when people say, This race obviously showed X, when they wouldn’t have said that if they knew what the results were. So I want to ask you all, knowing what you know today, which is not the results, what have we learned about the Democratic Party from this race in Michigan? There’s a lot of things that have happened. You went from three candidates to two, a lot of spending, so on. So I’ll start with Nathan.Nathan Kalmoe: Yeah. Thanks, Perry. I think maybe the main takeaway for me is that Democratic voters seem to be unsatisfied with the conventional Democratic candidates that the party prefers. Obviously, it’s up to the voters to decide, but clearly the party establishment has preferences. The supporting groups have preferences. Some of that could look ideological, I realize. People talk about left and right, and we’ll get into this later. I think the main takeaway is less about ideology and more about dissatisfaction with the level of fight, with what Democrats have been providing. Obviously, a range of fight. And the other piece for me is just the dissatisfaction with what Democrats have been able to deliver. And I think that’s reflected in the advantages that we see for El-Sayed in Michigan and for Hong in Wisconsin.Anat Shenker-Osorio: I guess that’s me.Bacon: Yes.Shenker-Osorio: I want to say the responsible thing on both these counts, which is that I know Abdul, I have for a very long time. I don’t do paid work for him, I never have, but I have given him advice from time to time. We’re going to talk about Wisconsin, where I’m from, next. The same goes for Frannie Hong. So that feels like the responsible disclaimer to make. I’m just a human being, and so I know that objectivity is a fiction, so that feels fair.So I think as far as what we’ve learned—just to take it in a different vein than Nathan did—I agree entirely with what he said, and in fact, I think that could be underscored with how much more traction Abdul has this time around than, say, when he ran for governor unsuccessfully against one Gretchen Whitmer, who, spoiler alert, is the governor. So that’s how that went. And obviously different race, different time, but still so much more traction than he had in the previous round. We’re seeing that in multiple ways. And so, just at the outset, big picture: Insurgent candidates—this is the term a lot of people have been using for them—are doing better than they have before, which just is a point of fact to hold up what Nathan said.I think, to give a different answer, what’s interesting—and I saw an author named Eric Garcia remark this, and I thought it was really smart—the Democratic establishment, Chuck Schumer, Gretchen Whitmer, etc., could have gotten behind McMorrow. She was sitting right there for them, and she was very much positioned, I would argue, as a Goldilocks candidate, right? Not too hot, not too cold, somewhere in between, and had progressive bona fides to run on, came to prominence through a really well-done speech clapping back against a lot of anti-LGBT hatred, as we probably recall. And they didn’t. They went with the true, most establishment of the establishment. And like I said, just looking for a different thing to say, because I agree with Nathan: What we learn is that even when there is an option that the party arguably could have been more comfortable with, they still go to, I don’t know, the least common denominator.Bacon: Let me follow up one thing Nathan said. You said it’s not about ideology, it’s about fight, not fight. It seems to me—I agree with that on some level, but I’m struggling to name the fighting moderates, and I think there’s a reason why that might be the case. So I agree with you in concept that maybe the voters are not voting on ideology. But the people who voted for Kristi Noem all are moderates, and I think that does tell us something. So talk about the point I just made.Kalmoe: Yeah. So it’s not only fight, I want to be clear. A lot of the conversation around that, where people are using ideological terms, I would say is really about groups. It’s fundamentally about groups—by race, by class, by sex and gender, sexuality, religion. And people have fairly clear views about prominent social groups, and they make choices in politics based on that. Likewise, they’re not very ideological, most voters, in the sense of ideas of principle differences, or like really elaborated policy preferences. There are some of those people, but they’re few. People are really oriented more around how they feel about groups.You could say that there’s maybe an ideological principle of, like, egalitarianism generally—like, all groups should be treated equally. But even there, when you get into the practice, even among liberals, you’ll see that there are certain groups that don’t count, or they’re left out of that formulation. And likewise, even though we talk about candidates and parties in terms of ideology, really parties are coalitions of groups, of interest groups, of social groups. And the goal of the party is to form a majority, in most cases, of—Bacon: Let me stop you a second. So you would agree that the people who give money to AIPAC and the people who go to DSA meetings probably do have some ideology. You’re just saying that’s probably not the average voter.Kalmoe: Yeah. And the people who go to DSA meetings, that’s a really tiny percentage of people. The folks who like DSA candidates are a much larger fraction of the public. And part of this is recognizing that voters are really heterogeneous. They’re really heterogeneous in the ways that they make decisions, and the kinds of views that they bring to bear. So all of this is with a grain of salt, but even among primary voters, people are less ideological than you think.An example of this is, in 2016, Chris Achen and Larry Bartels did an analysis that they published in The New York Times about Bernie Sanders and Clinton supporters, and found that on average, on many economic issues where you’d expect that Bernie supporters would be to the left of Clinton on the ideological spectrum, they actually weren’t. They were pretty similar, or in some cases, Clinton voters even a little bit to the left. So even in, like, the sort of quintessential ideological battles that we imagine, the voters, even in the primaries, are not always resembling that.Shenker-Osorio: We do focus groups all the time. All the time. We’ve done 320, maybe 330 since the outset of 2021. That means a whole lot of voters.Bacon: A lot, yeah.Shenker-Osorio: They tend to be configurations either of what we call “disaffected Democrats”—people who, if they were to turn out, they would turn out for Democrats, but they are very plague-on-both-your-houses—and then your traditional swing voters. I like to joke that swing voters have all had to quit their jobs, because they’re required to be 24/7 in various focus groups because there are so few of them.And what I would say is that we don’t do this every time, but we used to, all the time, do two things. We would ask voters, “If you had to liken the Democratic Party to an animal, what animal would it be?” Perry, forgive me if we’ve talked about this—I remember nothing anymore. And generally speaking, with sort of regularity, you could almost turn it into a drinking game. They would say a slug, a sloth, a turtle, or a tortoise. And with Republicans, they would say an apex predator—so that would be a lion, a shark, a tiger. And in more recent groups, we finally got some variety, because we had some folks saying a deer in headlights, which—I don’t know, you tell me, is that better or worse? I guess a deer, in theory, could run, but, you know, it is considered—Bacon: It is not running well.Shenker-Osorio: My summary statement for a very long time is that voters’ beef with Democrats is that they’re weak, not woke. And that’s not because you can’t talk them into being mad about whatever it is you want them to be mad about, but you have to actually plant that for them. And if you do, you can take them on that merry journey. I’m, again, not arguing you can’t. But left to their own devices, what upsets you about Democrats? It’s that they don’t do anything. It’s that they don’t stand up. It’s that they don’t fight back. And that is, generally speaking, what most people feel. And as I’m sure we’re about to get into more deeply, and Nathan has already intimated, most voters are very low information.Bacon: OK, that was helpful. I’m going to shift to something a little bit different. So in Michigan, there was a poll by a firm, EPIC-MRA. This is a poll that does a lot of polling for the Detroit newspapers there. And there was a poll that showed, in a general election, hypothetically, Mike Rogers, a Republican, 46 percent, Abdul, 43 percent—so a three-point advantage—versus Haley Stevens, who would be at 44 if she were the candidate, and Mike Rogers at 42. In other words, they show Abdul maybe down by three, potentially, and Haley Stevens up by two. This went viral on Twitter as an idea of, Oh dear, the Democrats are about to give away a Senate seat by not picking the most electable candidate. Talk about why that should not be the conclusion here. Anat, I’ll start with you.Shenker-Osorio: Yeah. So first of all, I’m not looking at the poll. I’m guessing it was probably an N size of 1,000, because that’s what, usually at best, a state poll is going to be. The margin of error is, I don’t know, two points, 2.5, three. So first of all, let’s just take that all with a grain of salt.Bacon: In other words, if the poll showed Stevens ahead by 15 and Abdul down by 12, that would be different than a poll with this small number of—Shenker-Osorio: First. Second, I tried to find this, and so hopefully one of you remembers better than I do. I couldn’t find it before this interview. My recollection is that Abdul came up from behind, that whatever he was polling—how many months are we from November?—at the start of the primary, and where he is now, is a radically different trajectory. Or is a radically different spot. Am I wrong?Bacon: You mean among Democrats, right?Shenker-Osorio: Among Democrats.Bacon: Yes. He’s surged tremendously. Yes.Shenker-Osorio: Just wanted to, you know, not spew lies on here. There are many other channels that can do that.Bacon: Are you saying politics is not static, you might imply? That he might be able to gain support as politicians do when they are good at politics.Shenker-Osorio: Good at politics. So I want to underscore that. Like, any human being could start in one place and end in another. This particular human being happens to have demonstrated actually achieving that recently. So that’s a thing that’s already happened among Democrats, of course, in Michigan.Then the next thing to say is—ironically, I would say ironically, if the consequences were not so dire—a lot of the discourse that has happened at the end of this race, if there is anything that is really troubling and may be a contributing factor to concern about any Democrat being able to take Michigan in November—which, thermostatically, just based on the environment, is what should occur, like, that is how the setup is right now—the ugliness and the brutality of this race, the amount of corporate cash unleashed against Abdul, the personal nature of the attacks. As far as self-inflicted wound, if the Democrats are really serious that they want a Democrat to take this seat, period—then that’s a serious issue.And then finally, what I would say is just that people cannot tell you today, in August, what they actually plan to do in November. And I am not saying I know he’s going to win. That’s ridiculous. I’m not even telling you I know he’s going to win tomorrow. I’m certainly not saying that about November. But what I’m saying is, we have not yet begun to fight. He has not begun to fight the general election. And so that kind of idea is so premature, and it is detrimental to the overall cause, if the overall cause is actually a Democrat winning this seat.Bacon: Nathan, can you respond to this? And also, I want you to weave in what you wrote and sent to me, about candidate parties and maybe not candidates. Anyway, go ahead.Kalmoe: Yeah. And some of this reiterates your great article, I think last week, talking about these electability issues. I think the big picture is that in each of these races, all of the party’s candidates, all the Democrats’ candidates, would be similarly favored to win or lose against their Republican opponents. So it’s going to be close in these swing elections, no doubt. But no Democrat is clearly safer than the others, for a couple of reasons.In general, political conditions favor Democrats. It’s not the best year ever, but things are looking good for Democrats to win in wave elections generally. Those fundamentals of conditions, broader conditions for the party, matter a lot more than candidates and campaign choice.Maybe the biggest point here is that progressive candidates do just as well as moderate candidates for Democrats in recent elections. There’s really good work by Bonica and Grumbach on this, basically showing that decades ago, there was a penalty for progressive candidates compared to, quote, unquote, “moderate candidates,” but that seems to have gone away in the last decade or so.And then there’s the points on polling. I haven’t looked into the particular poll that you were citing, but I have paid very close attention to the polls in Wisconsin that have similar nuances in the methodology that I won’t bore anybody here with, but to pull apart a little bit, reinforcing some of what Anat said. At least in Wisconsin, the main poll has been the Marquette University poll by Charles Franklin, which is great. But it is a sample of registered voters. And Wisconsin has same-day registration, and Hong’s support is strongest among young people and others who are less likely to be registered. And so that means that both in the primary and the general election hypothetical matchups, her support is probably underestimated by just having a sample that starts with registered voters.As Anat said, polls won’t become really strongly predictive of the outcome until November. Most people who are normal people—no offense to anybody, us or anybody—Bacon: All the listeners will be abnormal, so to speak.Kalmoe: No shade intended. But most people couldn’t even name the candidates right now.Shenker-Osorio: Most people can’t name their elected official.Bacon: Congressman is what I was going to say. Yeah. Kalmoe: So we always have to readjust our baselines when we’re thinking about that. As an outset, in Michigan and in the Wisconsin case, with similar hypotheticals about general election matchups, they’re within the margin of error—which means basically they’re statistically indistinguishable.And then, maybe a broader point—I don’t want to push this too far, but getting representative samples, especially at the state level, is really hard these days, for a bunch of reasons. And although all of the polls seem to be moving in similar directions—which is a good sign, that there’s some kind of reliability between them—they may all be picking up similar biases that come about from the challenge of recruiting people to participate in surveys. There’s such a low percentage of people agreeing, you always have to be a little bit nervous that the people who are participating are, despite all of the best efforts of these survey companies, maybe not as ideally representative as we would like. And it’s hard to know what that bias is.Bacon: Nathan, in the answer you said two things. Generally, it’s the parties that win—if a party’s doing well in a swing state, all the candidates will do well in that party. And you said something along the lines of, moderates do as well as progressives do. So OK, so you’re in Wisconsin. Mandela Barnes in 2022 loses for Senate, Tony Evers wins—I think that’s what the moderate camp would say is a victory for moderation. 2024, Elissa Slotkin, one of my least favorite members of Congress, I think, did manage to win a Senate race where Kamala Harris lost the presidential race. Ruben Gallego wins a Senate race, versus Kamala Harris loses the presidential.So both of you, how do you take those? I think those are used as examples of the “moderates win and other people don’t.” How do you all respond to those? Maybe not each one, but just talk about why that might not be the explanation there.Shenker-Osorio: Nathan, do you want to start?Kalmoe: Sure. I’ll just start with some of the Wisconsin details. So in 2022, the Democratic incumbent Governor Evers won the governorship by 3 percent, and the Democratic challenger for U.S. Senate, Mandela Barnes, lost to Ron Johnson by 1 percent. You can try to point to differences in the candidates, differences in the campaigns—and Anat can speak to some of those things too—but one of the big differences is that Ron Johnson, the Republican, was the incumbent. Tony Evers, the Democrat, was the incumbent.Similar in 2018, you have Tammy Baldwin, the other senator from Wisconsin, winning her Senate race by 11 percent, while Tony Evers, when he was first running as a challenger against Scott Walker, was only elected by 1 percent. And you could argue that Baldwin was more progressive, relatively, than Evers. And similarly, in 2024, Baldwin won her Senate race by 1 percent, and Kamala Harris lost the state to Trump by 1 percent. I think that provides a little bit of context.Especially recently, we’re talking about very small differences. I think incumbency is a bigger factor, and there’s no incumbent in this case. And something that we haven’t really talked about yet, but I think we will—midterms are very much about turnout, and having people enthusiastic about supporting the vision of the candidate and the party. And to the extent that different people respond differently to the candidates and the parties and the conditions, a lot of the potential effects would be offsetting. Some things that might turn off a handful of voters can be things that other voters are more enthusiastic about. It makes them want to turn out more.Shenker-Osorio: What I would add is that, on Barnes-Evers specifically, Barnes three weeks out from the election was minus nine. And in a three-week sprint, which I would argue was a decidedly different campaign than what had preceded it, managed to make up eight points to lose by one—which is still losing, and as we know in politics, there’s only winning and losing.But the campaign that he was running previously, when he got to minus nine, was a campaign that was very much, perhaps ironically, controlled by a very old-school, stalwart, you’ve-got-to-be-centrist campaign model that was foisted upon him from the DSCC, the people holding the purse strings, Chuck Schumer. And in particular, Barnes was met with really horrifying, really ugly—I call it Willie Horton on steroids—tough-on-crime attacks that were bought and paid for by Wisconsin’s very own homegrown billionaires. There was a state level of the badness to prop up Ron Johnson.And instead of recognizing that there’s no such thing as race neutral in American politics—because the right, at the very least, is never ever going to shut up about race, and so even if you don’t care from a moral perspective, which, by the way, is my view, you just care from a strategic perspective, that just doesn’t exist, because those racialized attacks are occurring in voters’ faces for the campaign. And so if you clap back with an ad with your candidate making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich—which perhaps is the most offensive thing that could happen in Wisconsin, when obviously the man could have been making beer brats, at the very least. If you’re going to pander, let’s pander, Wisconsin. Nathan and I are both from Wisconsin, and therefore deeply offended by the peanut butter and je—well, I’m not going to speak for Nathan—but you just can’t clap back against evil with vacuousness.Bacon: So now I’m eager to know what happened in the last three weeks. I’m waiting on the edge of my seat, even though I covered this, I think.Shenker-Osorio: Yeah. Again, not objective, because—Bacon: You were working with him.Shenker-Osorio: Not objective. But from my view, he began to actually clap back and to actually say, Look, they have the same one trick in the book that all authoritarians do—not that he said authoritarian, that’s my wording—They want you to point your finger at me. They want to divide us. They want to have us at odds. They want to scare you about me, because they know that I’m the one that’s actually going to try to make life better for you and do something about these billionaires that are financing these attacks.There is, I would argue, a formula to how you clap back, and he began to be more honest and forthright, some would say aggressive—which was advice he had been given not to do, because you’re going to look, and I’m sorry to say it, but like—Bacon: He’s a Black candidate, so you can’t seem aggressive. Sorry, I’ll just say it and help you make it.Shenker-Osorio: Yeah, thanks, Perry, for being my Black man anger translator. So, was that the reason? I don’t know. But that happened, that occurred.And then, I think more broadly, to Nathan’s final point about midterms being different elections—this is where he didn’t want to torture you, even though he is a professor, with Stats 101. But you have to remember—for those who, it was long enough ago—if you’re only polling, you’re only surveying registered voters, by definition you are over-indexing to the people who are reliable, habitual voters. And in midterms—Mike Podhorzer has pointed this out many times—if you were to look at a graph of participation in every midterm and look at every year, it’s in this narrow band. It’s all these other years, and then you have 2018. And 2018 is a leap larger than any previous leap, except for when we granted women the vote.Meaning we actually altered who could participate. We have not seen a jump between two different midterms that large previously, except in that instance, which I think is pretty explicable. And so what is the point of that story? The point of that story is that the name of the game really is, are we bringing new voters—meaning people who’ve just aged into the electorate—and new voters meaning people who have been like, A plague on both your houses. I don’t care about any of this. Please turn it off. I am not interested—into the electorate. And so the question really is, who are the candidates that can do that, in a year in which the name of the game is throw the bastards out? And by the bastards I mean MAGA. And that is really what is drawing in a lot of these either new or non-habitual voters. It’s really a desire to beat Republicans.And so even with my un-objective view about Hong and about El-Sayed—what’s going to happen in this election, fingers crossed, is that Republicans will lose. Notice that I say Republicans will lose, not Democrats will win. And we have a two-party system, so that’s the same thing. But I really do mean Republicans will lose.Bacon: I want to come back to that before we finish, but let me move to—we’ve talked about Michigan mostly, but in general, Wisconsin is happening next week. We don’t know the results. We do know Hong is leading, and that one is more surprising. I knew Abdul had run before, and I knew he was a strong candidate, even if he had a base, even if he didn’t think he was going to win. Hong—I didn’t know much about her. She’s a state rep. She’s an actual socialist, which I thought would be a bug, not a feature, in Wisconsin. So talk about that campaign. Nathan, you’re there. What has happened there? What does that race tell you—about also this weird thing where Tony Evers, like, grabs someone off the street to run again, for whatever reason? What, in some ways, has this race told you about the Democratic Party?Kalmoe: Crowley isn’t quite off the street, but—Bacon: But he was out of the campaign, and, anyway, I get the point. Yes.Kalmoe: He dropped out, an establishment person dropped out, and then Crowley was in, and Evers had endorsed the guy who was out but now is in. It’s been a little bit chaotic these last couple of weeks. And now Barnes is out too.I think big picture, Hong has been really hammering home the ways that government can help people. And I think that’s been meeting people’s needs, not in a sort of affordability in a really micro sense, but in a more profound way. And it’s not really about policy proposals, necessarily. Policies are basically the heuristic, the gesture toward, I have a plan to help the people that I say that I’m going to help, and to live up to the values that I’m putting forward.Bacon: If you don’t mind, just to zero in—because she’s probably not running on free buses and a rent freeze, because it’s not New York. So what is she—she’s doing a sort of practical campaign, like Zohran, but with different issues. Can you name some of the issues?Kalmoe: Yeah, education, healthcare. Anat, you can go ahead.Shenker-Osorio: Big on $20 minimum wage, temporary moratorium on data centers, and then there’s a third one, because she knows that three is cognitive good.Bacon: That’s helpful. Go ahead, Nathan, about what’s going on there.Kalmoe: Another sort of big picture factor is that, unlike Michigan, there was really a large number of Democrats who were running, and multiple candidates who really fit the more or less more establishment. And Hong really stood out as somebody who was pushing back against that and really emphasizing this change narrative and the fight narrative. And so I think part of the story is the lack of coordination. I think there were certainly preferred candidates, but they couldn’t unite behind one candidate early enough to really give her a run for her money. And I think part of that is there were low expectations for her ability to generate real enthusiasm among Democrats.And I think actually the biggest argument against her right now is really—other Democrats have basically conceded that the kinds of ideas that she’s putting forward are what Democratic voters here in Wisconsin want, the values and the vision. And really, their main argument is an electability argument. They say—Bacon: She really doesn’t shy from calling herself a socialist, mostly, right?Kalmoe: Yep. And it’s been remarkable that they basically have given up on the substantive argument. And I hear this from people who cross the ideological spectrum, if we want to use that, after I just poo-pooed that. But people with a wide range of ideas about politics are approaching this with, I think, trepidation, because so many of us have learned—from maybe not in elementary school, but from maybe college classes, from the scholars that we hear in the news and the news media—the pundit messages are all embracing this idea of the median voter. And this myth that everybody’s going to vote, everybody has strong preferences about policy and about ideology, and you can only win if you win over the median voter. And forgetting about turnout entirely.And basically, that entire model is false. This has been around since the mid-20th century. A guy named Anthony Downs, a scholar, put this forward in An Economic Theory of Democracy, and it’s not all his fault, but people took the idea and ran with it, and I think fundamentally misunderstand politics as a result. So lots of Democrats have absorbed this conventional wisdom that I think is dangerously wrong about how elections are won and lost, and how people think about politics when they’re making these choices.And so I think Hong’s support would actually be quite a bit higher if not for people who are saying, You know what? I really want to support her, but I’m worried about the—can she actually win? And we can’t guarantee that she’s going to win. It looks like she’s going to be the nominee. But the electability arguments are based on lots of misunderstandings, and really, I don’t see a way that she’s less electable than the other candidates who are running.Bacon: I want to ask Anat about Wisconsin, but let me ask one thing before that, Anat. I read a piece by Astead Herndon—worked at The New York Times for a while, he’s now at Vox—and the piece argued that the story we’re telling about this election is like, the left candidates, or the progressives, or the insurgents, whatever the term we’re going to use, are innovating and doing really well. And he argued the actual story is the other side—establishment, whatever—they have nothing to say. And that’s what the real issue is. “What is Haley Stevens running on?” would be a hard question to answer. “What were all these people in Wisconsin running on, beyond electability?” would be hard to answer. Is that a big part of it, that the one side has things they have to say that they are proud to say, and one side has pablum? Is that actually the story that’s happening?Shenker-Osorio: I have so many things to say at once. That’s part of it. Part of it is actually—Bacon: You can’t beat something with nothing, and they have nothing.Shenker-Osorio: Yeah. There’s the mechanics of the way that they are running, which is really notable in Hong’s case, and I’m happy to talk about that. And, for example, the sort of marquee people that famously just swept various New York races—talking about Brad [Lander], I’m talking about Darializa [Avila Chevalier].To put it in sort of simple, crass terms: When you don’t have to spend as much, or even any, of your time doing call time—which is famously what candidates are required to do for a certain number of hours a week, sometimes even a day, calling donors to be like, Hi, I’d like some more of that sweet, sweet cash—then you have more time to be out in the world. And the number of person-hours that Hong has spent, the number of person-hours that Mamdani spent, the number of person-hours that those other New York candidates spent, is just more time.And one mainstay that people reported back to me—and this is anecdotal—in New York, is they would just be like, “I don’t know. He was just everywhere. I would be dropping my kids off and there’d be Brad Lander,” or, “I’d be, like, at a picnic and there’d be Brad Lander.” And I’ve lived in this district for however long and I’ve never seen my elected representative. I’ve literally never seen him, so I don’t know what he’s doing, and he’s been the representative for however long.And so one of the things that Hong did, which is a really interesting model—there’s a Wisconsin consultant named Josh Clemens who does, like, down-down-down-ballot races. He also worked digital consultant for Dan Osborn, and he calls it the “backbone model.” And I won’t go into all the details, but basically, Fran was relatively unknown. You said it yourself, obviously you’re out of state, but she was a state representative from the east side of Madison, and in the rest of Wisconsin she wasn’t a big name. She had almost no money, and somehow she went from this real outlier, just in terms of the pragmatics of how you’re supposed to run a campaign and what you’re supposed to need, to becoming this front-runner. And a big piece of that was that after she was elected as a state representative, unlike everyone else, she didn’t turn off her digital advertising machine.She kept serving ads at a very low rate, but they weren’t ads. They weren’t traditional political advertising that was like, Stop right now. It’s about to be the whatever quarter, and we need this much money. The most important vote ever is happening. It would be like her at a fish fry, or her hanging out with people, or—AOC is famous for this—doing a get-ready-with-me, or doing a behind-the-scenes, “We just took a vote, this is what actually happens in Congress,” or Mamdani doing a scavenger hunt.So there’s a big difference between political advertising and content—and making content that people actually want to watch, that doesn’t, on the face of it, look political, but actually is a get-to-know-you, establishes a brand. It establishes a relationship. Because the mistake that these mainstream consultants have been making—forget ideology for a second—Bacon: Or even policy. OK.Shenker-Osorio: They have misunderstood, I would argue, the practice of politics, as being: Hold all of your money, hold all of your fire until October, because most voters are low information, they’re paying no attention—that’s true—and do endless RCT, randomized control trial testing, and come up with a spreadsheet of, this ad did best, this ad did best, this ad did best, this ad did best. None of those ads together tell a story. This one is about healthcare, this one is about the bus, this one is about taxes, this one is about peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and there is no establishment of a story and a brand.That does not work, because in reality, the way that people make political decisions, especially low information people, is on the basis of an impressionistic feeling and whether or not they get a sense of belonging, whether or not the people in their milieu are also—the guy, to take the New York example, my bodega owner keeps talking about this Mamdani guy. I don’t know who he is, but it seems like the bodega owner’s really into him. And so in Hong’s case—not a lot of bodegas, some in Madison, some in Milwaukee, but for the most part—it’s like she shows up to things. She does content, not advertising. She has been doing this the entire time she was in office. She’s running a better campaign.And so with that, that means that she is going to run a better campaign for the general election, because that is what she has been doing. And does that mean that I’m sure she’s going to win? I’m not sure of anything. I’m not sure what’s going to happen tomorrow, but that is a good indicator. I maybe have wandered away from your question unintentionally. I get very passionate about this.Bacon: I have even forgotten what my question was, but that’s OK. But I like the answer, and I feel like it was very informative. Oh, I did—the question was along the lines of: Is the story of the last year and a half, New York campaign, these campaigns, that the insurgent candidates are running well, which you explained very well? Or that the mainstream candidates are running blandly, which you didn’t get into as much, but they’re not doing the things you talk about? I think the answer to the question is yes, but I was just trying to—is the story here that politicians are behaving well, or are politicians behaving boringly? And that’s what I’m trying to tease out, what’s driving the results here.Shenker-Osorio: Part of it is boring. Part of it is, the piece of advice that I give to everyone the world over, that is the most obvious statement that I ever make but somehow cannot be internalized by most people, is that a message that nobody hears, by definition, cannot persuade them.And so when they are perfectly calibrating these 80-word or 100-word statements that are crafted toward this median voter, or whatever the name of Chuck Schumer’s make-believe family. I don’t know, they’re so boring to me, I can’t remember their names.Bacon: I can’t remember their names, yes. I’ve read this article a few times. Yes.Shenker-Osorio: I can’t remember their names, this made-up family he is pitching to—which is perfect, both literally and as a metaphor for everything. Nobody hears what you’re saying, because politics, modern life, is such a cacophony that if you are not actually saying—when you’re Mamdani, you’re questioned about, you’ve said you’re going to tax the rich, you’re going to tax the rich, you’re going to tax the rich, and so you’re asked on The View, people are saying that you’re anti-billionaire, and instead of demurring, he says, “I don’t think billionaires should exist.”Part of wanting to get heard is that you actually have to say something that makes people go, “What?” and stop scrolling. And you have to recognize that if you’re running a campaign, there’s going to be conflict. You’re going to be attacked by the people who oppose you. And so rather than get freaked out by that, you have to figure out how to turn that back into a way to keep talking about your issues. You have to remember the rule of three. You have to make it seem like voting for you could make a tangible difference in people’s lives, rather than just simply belabor their problems.And the problem with the standard Democratic practice, which seems to be that they think they’re on an episode of Price Is Right, and they just keep saying, Can you see how expensive this is? Can you see how expensive this is? Can you see how expensive this is?—I guess because this is the first time they’ve ever been to a grocery store and not had a helper do it for them, they’re suddenly clued in. People don’t need you to tell them how expensive things are. They actually shop for themselves. They know. So what they need is to feel like voting for you could resolve that problem, if only a little bit. It’s not enough just to name the problem.And so yeah, it’s about not being boring. It’s about being able to actually present something. And it’s about demonstrating that you’re actually going to fight back, because if you won’t fight back, how will you make any of these things into law?Bacon: I’m going to close with a tweet—I’m on X, so this is an X comment from a professor. His name is Keith Oragel—I hope I’m pronouncing his name right—but I like what he said, so I’m going to read it to you. “Yes, if it’s a massive blue wave and Dems win everywhere but El-Sayed and Hong lose, then lefties will have to face some real tough realities about electability in swing states. But that has not happened, and I remain optimistic they will win.”And so the question I want to get at is, are these—like Wisconsin and Michigan, if the two candidates we’re talking about win—are these really high stakes races, in this way he’s implying? Is the AOC presidential campaign, or the Ro Khanna one, kind of dependent upon the results here? So talk about these campaigns and what the implications of them are. I’ll start with you, Nathan.Kalmoe: Yeah. So, good question. Obviously, people are going to—people always take election results and interpret them, often in ways that reinforce the way they already thought. This is going to sound like a dodge, but I think we’re going to learn a lot about what is possible from a range of elections this year. But no one election is really definitive as to whether things made a difference or not, because you don’t ever get to see the counterfactual, right? We will never see—assuming, let’s say, Hong gets the nomination in Wisconsin—we’ll never see Barnes or Crowley or Boyd or others in a similar position. And we can speculate, but we don’t really have strong evidence to suggest otherwise.So really, what Grumbach and Bonica are doing in their analysis, it’s hard to wrap our minds around, because these individual cases are so salient. But really, you have to look at the constellation of all the results to find what would be small differences, but actually it turns out are really, really quite small. I think the best evidence that would be more definitive from these elections is if Hong, El-Sayed, and others who are similar do as well as we would expect a standard Democrat to do. I think that’s a really strong proof of concept for progressive candidates, for progressive groups. Again, it sounds like a dodge, but if they lose and it’s close, and it’s basically where we would expect a standard Democrat to perform, I don’t think that is a definitive knock against their candidate or the ideas or the vision that they’re putting forward.Shenker-Osorio: Yeah, two things. One, Fran Hong is a working-class candidate. Not a cosplay, not a make-believe—she grew up in her parents’ restaurants, not for funsies, but because that is what they needed in order to survive. She didn’t finish college so that she could go home and help her parents work in that restaurant, and she eventually became a restaurateur herself. She has famously held two jobs, both on the Capitol Square: the restaurant, which is located there, and the state legislature, which is also located there.So I guess if she loses, we can conclude that actually people don’t want working-class candidates. But that’s not what we’re going to conclude, is it? Because somehow Graham Platner is manna from the heavens when he is a cosplaying fisherman, but she is not. So that’s just my little snark aside.My non-snark aside, or non-aside, is that this electability conversation is, in and of itself—to the extent that voters, that normie voters are paying attention to anything that it is we are saying, and thank God they are not, because they are too low information to be inside baseball—it is itself detrimental to the cause of getting Democrats elected, period. And that is because, again, people do the thing they think people like them do. And so if low information people are inhabiting a milieu, like they did largely speaking in 2018, where the vibe and the thing to do and what everyone believes and is doing is, I’m going to go, I’m going to vote even though I never do in midterms, or I never do, period, and I’m going to get rid of these MAGA bastards, then that’s what other people do.And that is in fact the dominant discourse that we require—whether that is to elect a Fran Hong, or whether that is to elect a Dan Goldman, whomever—is, voters are turning out in record numbers. Your vote is your ice whistle, blow it. Your vote is your gas bill, lower it. Your vote is your healthcare premium, slash it. Your vote is your body, protect it. And that’s what people like me do. And so shame on the people who are introducing an argument that Democrats could possibly lose. That is a silly thing to do, across the board. It is not something we should be doing for moderate candidates. It’s not something we should be doing for insurgent candidates. We need to be reinforcing the behavior that we actually desire.Bacon: I want to repeat that just so the audience makes sure they hear it. I would not vote for Haley Stevens, Perry Bacon, but I am not going around saying Haley Stevens cannot win, because I want Haley Stevens to win if she is the nominee. So I’m not saying she’s a weirdo people wouldn’t vote for, because I want people to vote for her if necessary. So please, if you’re listening, whatever centrist you are, saying you don’t agree with Abdul on policy, don’t vote for him—in the primary, that’s fine. Abdul is a weirdo who can’t win the general election is not helpful. Please stop saying this. Particularly since the Muslim candidate is going to be hurt worse by the sort of vague, “unelectable,” what have you, things.We’ve got to get away from this kind of discourse. I’ve been trying to write a lot about saying, having every primary be about electability is problematic. And I’d much rather—even Israel policy, while being divisive, is still not a divide that is suggesting if you vote for this person, it is not normal to do. We want people to think voting for the Democratic candidate is normal, no matter which one they are, and I don’t know how we get out of this. I guess I’ll ask you about this: Is there a way to get out of the primaries being about electability? I guess that’s easy for the progressive to say that, but is there a way to—I’m not a centrist, but is there a way to get centrists to run on centrism, as opposed to the progressives are weird? Because the progressives are weird is a toxic argument.Kalmoe: Yeah. I just wanted to reinforce what Anat was saying, that Democrats, if they want to win, need to stop being so terrified about what Republicans are going to say about them, and really focus on what they say about themselves and make Republicans afraid of what we’re going to say about them. Because they’re running as extremists, insurrectionists, people who support pedophiles. It’s pretty shocking to come up against them and feel like we’re the ones who should be afraid of what they’re going to say about us.Shenker-Osorio: Is there a way to make them stop? No. And I think the fact that they will not stop is them telling on themselves. Because—Bacon: They might prefer to lose than to win without being in charge.Shenker-Osorio: That’s the even meaner version, which I agree with. If you can’t run on your actual policies, if you can’t run on—what do we want, incremental change? When do we want it? Whenever I get around to it. If that can’t be your campaign slogan, which even you know it can’t be, then the only thing you can run on is, that person can’t win.Kalmoe: Yes.Shenker-Osorio: And so that has to be their campaign message, because the thing that they are actually selling themselves is, unfortunately, a lighter version of what voters are not that into. And so that’s what they got. And regardless, even still, this is a wave year. It is going to be a blue tsunami. This may be the Berkeley, or the Bay Area, in me, but you need to speak into existence the thing you want to occur—not for woo-woo reasons, but because humans are primates, we are social creatures, and we do the thing that people like us do. And so what people like us are going to do, come November, is send these pedophile protectors, this MAGA murder regime of the bullies for the billionaires, packing, to try to save our own lives. That is what we are going to do, and that is what we should be saying.Kalmoe: And it’s not going to be just the advertising that does that. It’s really—politics is relational and social, and it’s all of you out there talking to your friends, and them talking to their friends, and knocking on doors, that is going to make the difference.Bacon: Nathan, Anat, thanks for joining me. Great place to end on. Good to see you all.Shenker-Osorio: Great to see you.Kalmoe: Thank you. Thanks, Perry.
The mainstream U.S. media has done a fairly good job in reporting on the latest in a long line of reprehensible Supreme Court decisions. As of July 27, the high court stripped legal protection from 330,000 Haitians who are here in America, thus granting the Trump administration leave to deport them back to a country torn by the type of deadly violence that brought them to these shores in the first place. But The New York Times, CNN, and the rest are ignoring one vital angle to the story: There is compelling evidence that the U.S. government, under both Democrats and Republicans, is partly but directly complicit in the ongoing disaster in Haiti. The United States therefore has a strong moral obligation to stop the deportation of Haitians, on top of our simple humanitarian duty to not arrest people and ship them to a country where they will likely be murdered. That the U.S. government bears this moral responsibility is clear, if unreported. Let’s start with a major prosecution witness: the former U.S. ambassador to Haiti, Dan Foote. He warned nearly five years ago that U.S. policy was a dangerous failure, and in September 2021 he resigned in protest, ending a distinguished 23-year State Department career. His blistering resignation letter, which became public, argued that the repeated efforts by the U.S. (and other outside powers) to intervene in Haiti’s political life had “consistently produced catastrophic results,” and he warned of “calamitous consequences to come.” That calamity is here. The 330,000 Haitians who now face deportation have been here legally under the Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, program, which Congress established by law in 1990. The U.S. media are, to their credit, reporting that the Haitians who are in the U.S. are overwhelmingly hardworking and law-abiding. Haitian health workers and home aides for the elderly are indispensable in certain places, such as Florida, New York City, and Boston. The Republican governor of Ohio has defended the Haitian factory workers in his state, the same people who Donald Trump and J.D. Vance lied about, despicably asserting that they were eating cats and dogs.The U.S. press is also explaining how dangerous Haiti is now, as violent gangs control much of the capital, Port-au-Prince, and are expanding their reach. Some 1.5 million people have had to flee their homes for safety, more than a tenth of the population. The situation is so perilous that the American media has understandably rarely sent journalists there. Fortunately, there are brave and skilled Haitian reporters on the scene, such as Widlore Mérancourt and Magdela Louis, who are producing chilling accounts of massacres. What’s more, the gangs are already kidnapping returning deportees, assuming, correctly, that they have more money than those who did not leave.But the U.S. media is missing American complicity in the crisis, which should not exclusively be blamed on Donald Trump. Even when Democrats ran the State Department, U.S. policy was a growing disaster.First, it may sound unbelievable given the grim news in recent years, but the truth is that Haitians are not a violent people. As late as 2012, the murder rate there was 6.9 per 100,000, one of the lowest in the Americas (and the same as Long Beach, California). As ex-Ambassador Foote told me: “Just look at Haitian communities here in the U.S. They are not violent.” But over the years, Haiti has been dominated by a small, selfish economic elite, which is often allied with a ruthless political class. In the past decade or so, some of that elite helped fund and arm the emerging gangs, in order to maintain their hold on power. The chronic political and economic crisis deepened, especially after President Jovenel Moise was assassinated in July 2021. The gangs have exploded in size, using powerful weapons smuggled in from Florida to outgun the beleaguered, underpaid local police. All the while, the U.S. State Department contributed to the deepening crisis. Outsiders may be surprised at just how prominent and powerful a political figure the U.S. ambassador is in Haiti. Haitians are politically conscious, especially in the capital, and they scrutinize the American envoy’s statements and apparent preferences as part of their political analysis. Foote says, “Everyone including the shoeshine guy pays attention.” And one U.S. ambassador after another stood behind the increasingly corrupt Haitian elite. Here’s just one example of blatant U.S. interference, which I witnessed firsthand in January 2016. The outgoing president, Michel Martelly, who had been a favorite of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, tried to impose his handpicked successor in scheduled elections, even though Haitian voters had been enraged by Martelly’s massive corruption. The State Department—this was still the Obama administration—tried to pressure Haitians to accept the results of the tainted balloting, and only massive street demonstrations forced the U.S. to back down, at least for a time. But American meddling only got worse. Starting in 2018, a popular mass movement rocked the country, as huge marches blasted government corruption and demanded that the president resign and that democracy be respected. The protesters also called for an end to U.S. engerans, the Haitian word for “interference.” Popular resistance reached a peak in November 2019, when a nationwide strike paralyzed the country for more than two months. The strike, in the Haitian language, was called “Peyi Lok” or “Country Lockdown.”The U.S. State Department ignored the protests. Its motivations, under both the Trump and Biden administrations, are still something of a mystery. Were U.S. officials supporting Haiti’s ruling elites by instinct? In the mistaken view that those elites could maintain “stability?” Or were American officials just plain stupid?Foote arrived in Haiti as the U.S. special envoy in July 2021. He had been stationed there 10 years earlier, so he knew his way around. He was immediately surprised to hear from his local Haitian contacts that the State Department had not been talking to them during the long political upheaval. “I was astounded to find that the Embassy had not been regularly meeting with opposition figures and members of civil society,” he told me.He has other examples of foreign meddling. As the U.S. ambassador, he chaired meetings of the Core Group, which consisted of the major outside powers. “As the most significant foreign aid giver, the U.S. chaired the meetings,” he said. “There were of course no Haitians in the room, because heaven help us that Haitians should be allowed in to decide the future of their own country.”Foote could see right away that the State Department wanted to impose its own choice as Haiti’s interim leader, a suspicious character named Dr. Ariel Henry. Foote, based on his previous experience, had other ideas: “I wanted to convene meetings of a broad range of Haitian civil society, so that they could among themselves devise a Haitian-led political accord that would plan a transition to holding fair elections and establishing a new government.”It took Foote only three months to see that his efforts were doomed. In September 2021, he drafted his resignation letter to Secretary of State Anthony Blinken. That letter, which is only five paragraphs long, is an eloquent indictment of American arrogance that deserves to be widely known, and it made him a hero in Haiti. Here is part of it: “But what our Haitian friends really want, and need, is the opportunity to chart their own course, without international puppeteering and favored candidates but with genuine support for that course. I do not believe that Haiti can enjoy stability until her citizens have the dignity of freely choosing their own leaders fairly and acceptably.”Today, Foote argues that Haiti would be better off if his recommendation had been followed: “We would have moved forward with a Haitian-led political accord,” he says, “and worked with an interim provisional government. The Haitian people might not have trusted us at the beginning, with good reason, but they could have come to trust the process. Things there would not have gotten worse. Instead, over the last few years Haiti has lost political control of the country to the gangs, which have gotten significantly more powerful because under the unpopular government that the U.S. imposed the state and the rule of law have collapsed.” Foote is blunt about American responsibility for Haiti’s present crisis. “We caused it,” he says. “The United States’s foreign policy caused it. We messed this up. And we’re taking no responsibility for it.”
Seven years ago last month, President Donald Trump remarked that he had “an Article 2 where I have the right to do whatever I want as president.” This statement was widely mocked during his first term, but it appears now to be generally true as a matter of practice. The second Trump administration has broken numerous federal laws, ransacked the Treasury, threatened the states, and even defied the courts from time to time.The Supreme Court, with rare exceptions, has encouraged this behavior. Its current conservative majority has gone to great lengths to expand presidential power while simultaneously weakening Congress. It has operated from a deeply flawed understanding of the separation of powers—one that, despite the majority’s originalist pretenses, would be alien to the Framers in 1789. In doing so, the court has also greatly strengthened itself.Congress has been the primary victim in this two-branch conspiracy. But the real injury is to the American people themselves. Hyper-presidentialism has robbed the American people of their natural way to govern themselves. It has transformed a two-and-a-half-century-old constitutional order into a semi-Bonapartist regime, where a national executive’s election is treated as a referendum on the national soul, subject only to review by a guardian council of unelected jurists.Americans must not conflate the weakness of Congress’s current members with the weakness of Congress as an institution. Trump and the Supreme Court often insist that it is the president who must play the central role in American political life. This is not how the Constitution was designed to work, which is why it increasingly does not seem to work at all. Congressional primacy must be restored, and the cult of the presidency must be defeated.Perhaps the clearest articulation of this presidentialist vision can be found in Chief Justice John Roberts’s majority opinion in Seila Law v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The 2019 case centered on whether Congress could lawfully structure the CFPB to be overseen by a single director who could only be removed for cause by the president. To answer this question, Roberts laid out an overarching vision of the separation of powers.Quoting from a variety of sources, the chief justice argued that the Framers “split the atom of sovereignty itself into one federal government and the states” to prevent “abuse[s] of power” and preserve “liberty,” thereby creating our federal system. From there, “they divided the powers of the new federal government into three defined categories, legislative, executive, and judicial,” Roberts explained.“They did not stop there,” he continued. “Most prominently, the Framers bifurcated the federal legislative power into two chambers: the House of Representatives and the Senate, each composed of multiple members and senators.” The presidency, he claimed, “is a stark departure from this tradition,” with a unity of vision that reflects the Framers’ own supposed preferences.The Framers viewed the legislative power as a special threat to individual liberty, so they divided that power to ensure that “differences of opinion” and the “jarrings of parties” would “promote deliberation and circumspection” and “check excesses in the majority.” See The Federalist No. 70, at 475 (A. Hamilton); see also id., No. 51, at 350. By contrast, the Framers thought it necessary to secure the authority of the Executive so that he could carry out his unique responsibilities. See id., No. 70, at 475–478. As Madison put it, while “the weight of the legislative authority requires that it should be … divided, the weakness of the executive may require, on the other hand, that it should be fortified.”“To justify and check that authority—unique in our constitutional structure—the Framers made the President the most democratic and politically accountable official in government,” Roberts concluded. “Only the president (along with the vice president) is elected by the entire nation. And the president’s political accountability is enhanced by the solitary nature of the executive branch, which provides ‘a single object for the jealousy and watchfulness of the people.’”This creation myth is cohesive but unpersuasive. Contrary to Roberts’s telling, the Framers did not create Congress in a vacuum. There was no “atom” to be split. The Constitution was built upon existing institutions, including a multitude of state legislatures and an effective but ramshackle provisional government. This depiction of events might be tolerable if you must explain the Constitution to children. Its detachment from historical reality makes it poorly suited for a Supreme Court opinion.Roberts also fundamentally misreads Federalist, Number 70. As I’ve noted before, Hamilton wrote it to explain the virtues of a single executive, like our presidency, over a plural executive. In the late eighteenth century, some states like Pennsylvania vested their executive powers in councils instead of governors. Ancient and medieval republics in Europe also often had plural executives: Rome’s consuls, Carthage’s shofets, Sparta’s ephors, Athens’s archons, and so on.Hamilton forcefully argued that a single executive would be more efficient and accountable than multiple chief magistrates, who might evade public scrutiny or conspire together to deprive the people of their liberties. Along the way, he noted that “differences of opinion” and the “jarrings of parties,” which he described as unavoidable in legislative bodies, would be ill fitting for an executive branch. To read Federalist, Number 70’s commentary on plural/single executives as a debate over legislative/executive power is like arguing that “thou shalt not steal” forbids the Bessemer process.From there, Roberts made a number of additional historical errors. For one thing, the Framers did not make the president democratically accountable, as he claimed. The Constitution gives state legislatures the discretion to choose how to appoint electors. Many states opted for some form of popular election, but some legislatures in the early republic simply appointed them. They also set up an Electoral College to further distance the president from the people. To that end, the presidency is the only elective office in the entire republic where you can get the most votes and lose. That is not a strong conduit for democratic accountability, as the last decade has shown.But the most important heresy by Roberts and the conservative majority is their overall perception of Congress itself. The Framers did not view “the legislative power” as a “special threat to individual liberty.” On the contrary, the entire path from independence to ratification can be seen as a long campaign to create and empower a national legislature to govern—and govern effectively—on the people’s behalf.In the beginning, there was only Congress. The first concept of a national legislative body for the American colonies emerged in the 1750s. Benjamin Franklin proposed one at a gathering of delegates in Albany, New York, to coordinate colonial involvement in the French and Indian War. It would consist of a “president-general” who was “appointed and supported by the Crown” and a “grand council” of representatives from the various American colonies, in proportion to their relative populations.This plan did not go into effect, but the idea of continental unity persisted and grew. Twenty years later, Franklin was among Pennsylvania’s delegates to the Continental Congress, which gathered in Philadelphia in 1774 to discuss a unified response to the colonies’ disputes with the British government. When no peaceable solution could be found, the delegates declared independence from the British Empire two years later.Many casual depictions of early American history fast-forward from the Declaration of Independence to the Constitution’s ratification and George Washington’s presidency in 1789. But the Continental Congress did not disband or disappear after declaring independence. To the contrary, it played a central role in organizing American resistance to British rule as a provisional government of sorts. The Continental Congress sent envoys to foreign powers for aid, cajoled states into contributing funds and materiel, supervised the war’s conduct, paid and equipped soldiers, and appointed generals, including Washington himself.Washington was a superb general, albeit one who spent most of the war trying to keep the Continental Army out of a decisive battle with superior British forces. He was also an accomplished president who laid the framework for the early republic. But his most celebrated trait for early Americans was his loyalty to Congress, both as an institution and an idea. His conduct during and after the war entrenched civilian control of the military—and, more specifically, to Congress—into the basic fabric of American governance.As the war drew to a close, the Founders transformed the Continental Congress from a provisional wartime government into a first attempt at a national government. “Certain I am that unless Congress speaks in a more decisive tone—unless they are vested with powers by the several states competent to the great purposes of war, or assume them as a matter of right, and they, and the states respectively, act with more energy than they hitherto have done—our cause is lost,” Washington wrote in a letter to a colleague in 1780.The Articles of Confederation, enacted in 1781, two years before the war’s end, largely preserved the national government as it was. Each state had one vote in Congress, as they had in the pre-Confederation version, and unanimity was required to get most things done. But its enforcement powers were ephemeral, it authority to collect revenue was limited, and it was largely dependent on state governments to function and carry out its will. These manifest flaws soon prompted the new nation’s leading statesmen to craft a more suitable replacement.Contrary to the presidentialist narrative, the Framers drafted the Constitution to empower Congress, not to weaken it. They endowed it with numerous powers once held only by the states, whose own legislatures were considered by Madison and others to be unruly and untrustworthy. “In addition to correcting the deficiencies of the Articles of Confederation,” Gordon Wood, the preeminent historian of the founding era, wrote in his 2009 book, Empire of Liberty, “the Constitution was intended to restrain the excesses of democracy and protect minority rights from overbearing majorities in the state legislatures.”In an April 1787 letter to Washington, one month before the Constitutional Convention began in Philadelphia, James Madison described at length how he thought Congress should be structured under the new national charter. He touched upon numerous topics that would arise at the upcoming convention in Philadelphia: the representation formula for Congress, the transfer of powers to it from the states, the creation and jurisdiction of national courts, the supremacy of national law over state law, and so on.“Conceiving that an individual independence of the States is utterly irreconcileable with their aggregate sovereignty; and that a consolidation of the whole into one simple republic would be as inexpedient as it is unattainable,” Madison told his fellow Virginian, “I have sought for some middle ground, which may at once support a due supremacy of the national authority, and not exclude the local authorities wherever they can be subordinately useful.”This was a remarkable letter, one that foreshadows much of what would become the Constitution. Madison’s blueprint outlines some checks on Congress, such as bicameralism, but only in the context of also granting it extraordinary new powers. As for the “national executive,” he wrote to the man who would eventually be the first president, “I have scarcely ventured as yet to form my own opinion either of the manner in which it ought to be constituted or of the authorities with which it ought to be cloathed.”During the convention, Madison also advanced some proposals to give Congress even greater powers than what it ultimately received. One of them, for example, would have given the national legislature the ability to veto any state law. What ultimately emerged from the debates in Philadelphia was a far stronger legislature than had existed under the Confederation. Congress now had the exclusive power to levy tariffs—the principal source of revenue in the fledgling republic—as well as the ability to levy other taxes. It could raise a national army and regulate state militias. It could regulate interstate commerce and set rules for naturalization.While the Constitution separated the executive, legislative, and judicial branches, there was also a clear winner in the checks and balances. Congress can remove presidents and judges from office by impeachment, while neither branch can affect or alter Congress’s membership or composition. Congress alone decides how the executive and legislative branches are structured. It can create and destroy executive departments, and it can establish and abolish the lower federal courts.For practical reasons, there are roughly two million federal employees to carry out the functions of the federal government these days. But constitutional government could theoretically exist with just four people outside of Congress: a president, a vice president, a single federal district court judge to hear trials, and a chief justice of the United States to review those decisions. That would be highly impractical, of course, but it illustrates that much of what we think of as the “executive branch” and the “judicial branch” is merely a result of congressional preference.Congress could vote tomorrow to abolish the White House, for example, both literally by selling off the building to private owners and figuratively by defunding the president’s staff of personal advisers in the West Wing. There is nothing in the Constitution that says the president must get free room and board. The president’s salary is irrevocable, but the many perks he enjoys—access to Air Force One and a fleet of luxury limousines, a retirement pension and free health care, an oil painting of himself somewhere down the line, and so on—come from the public fisc, and thus from Congress.The Supreme Court didn’t even have its own building until the 1930s. It used to hear cases in the Capitol’s basement, which may have helped keep it humble. Only a handful of cases are heard before the Supreme Court on its original jurisdiction, which is constitutionally mandated. If Congress so wished, it could remove the Supreme Court’s appellate jurisdiction altogether or reduce it to whatever degree it wishes. Congress’s good graces are all that stand between the nine justices and a future where they serve as the world’s most prestigious admiralty court.Alternatively, and perhaps more cruelly, Congress could eliminate the court’s ability to choose the cases that it takes. Only in 1891 did Congress begin to grant the Supreme Court the ability to reject some cases, and only after Chief Justice William Howard Taft cajoled lawmakers in the 1920s did it grant the court the power to turn down most of the petitions it receives. Perhaps the justices would have less free time to cook up things like “presidential immunity” if they had to review every patent dispute and criminal appeal in the republic.To be clear, I am not proposing that Congress actually do these things. I only wish to emphasize that the federal government as we know it today is Congress’s creation, not the president’s or the chief justice’s. Meanwhile, what can the other two branches do to Congress? Not much. The president can veto the laws it enacts, but even that can be overridden by a two-thirds vote. Lawmakers are also immune from prosecution while going to and from Congress, or for anything they say on the floor. The Supreme Court can strike down federal laws as unconstitutional—a mighty power, to be sure. Congress can respond by expanding the court, limiting its jurisdiction in specific cases, or proposing constitutional amendments for the states to ratify.Nor do I mean to overstate my case. Congress did not inherit the English doctrine of parliamentary supremacy. Parliament, in the words of one eminent British legal thinker, “can do every thing which is not naturally impossible.” Congress, by contrast, is bound by its enumerated powers in Article 1. It is only one actor on a vast constitutional stage that includes the other two branches as well as the states. Nonetheless, Congress is designed to be the leading figure in our national drama, while the other two branches largely exist to serve in supporting roles.When the Constitution tells the president to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed,” it is Congress’s laws that the president must carry out. When the Supreme Court hears cases and controversies, it is often Congress’s laws that must be applied. In other words, if the Framers truly viewed “the legislative power” as a “special threat to individual liberty,” as Roberts claimed, they did a fairly poor job of showing it.Roberts leaned heavily on the Federalist Papers to make his case. Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay wrote them during the ratification debates as a defense of the Constitution’s structure and design. Those papers can be instructive as to the Framers’ intent in some areas, but they must be taken in the context in which they are written. They are a series of arguments made on the Constitution’s behalf, with points made to suit their audience’s skepticism and doubt. Even then, the papers illustrate the purpose of the constitutional project. Their authors spend so much time explaining the constraints on Congress precisely because they imbued it with so much power.Madison described Congress’s powers in Federalist, Number 48 as “at once more extensive, and less susceptible of precise limits,” than the other two branches. The presidency, he wrote, is “restrained within a narrower compass” and “more simple in its nature,” while the judiciary’s power under Article 3 is “described by landmarks still less uncertain.” Because of their limited powers, Madison explained, “projects of usurpation by either of these departments would immediately betray and defeat themselves.”Our present situation does not prove Madison wrong, though it does illustrate how far things have fallen. “In republican government, the legislative authority necessarily predominates,” he would later argue in Federalist, Number 51. The president essentially has four real powers that are entirely his own: the power to pardon federal offenses, the power to veto legislation, the power to nominate officials for federal offices, and (with some limits) the power to dismiss Senate-confirmed officials from their posts. To the extent that the executive power exists beyond that, it is to carry out Congress’s wishes.Restoring congressional primacy will require both rethinking and restoring how the federal government works. For the courts, it means giving greater deference to the legislative process. Some of the Supreme Court’s worst moments came when it superimposed its own judgment over that of Congress. After the high court established judicial review in Marbury v. Madison, it went another half-century before striking down another act of Congress. That decision, Dred Scott v. Sandford, abolished the Missouri Compromise and helped precipitate the Civil War.Dred Scott may have been the most inglorious use of judicial review, but it was hardly the only one. The Supreme Court overturned federal child-labor laws in the Progressive era under now-abandoned theories of congressional power. It waged war against FDR’s New Deal for most of the 1930s until the threat of judicial reform forced it to back down. After 1937, the court did not limit Congress’s powers under the commerce clause again until a critical mass of conservative justices returned to the court in the 1990s.Now the Supreme Court overturns and invalidates federal laws at an alarming clip. It has invented an entire arsenal of weapons to do so. Under the “major questions doctrine,” the court can invalidate any regulatory move if it thinks Congress did not “speak clearly” enough in the authorizing statute in question—in practice, this has become a subjective means of vetoing Democratic presidents’ policy items. By abandoning Chevron deference, the high court gave conservative judges in lower courts a tool to adopt bizarre readings of federal laws instead of deferring to reasonable interpretations by regulatory agencies on Congress’s behalf.Legislation is the product of more than just a vote in two chambers of Congress. It reflects the culmination of election platforms and campaign promises between representatives, senators, and their voters. Every major bill comes with a delicate series of negotiations and compromises between legislators, stakeholders, interest groups, and even the other two branches. Those coalitions, once formed, are often temporary in nature because their work is thought to be finished. To invalidate this complex work on a habitual basis, as the Supreme Court has recently done, is to render American democracy pointless and frivolous.The court’s conservative majority often engages in some sleight of hand when it comes to Congress and its powers. It is common for the court to substantively limit Congress’s powers while performatively claiming to protect it from executive overreach, as in the major questions doctrine cases, or by insisting that Congress can still act in the future. In the 2013 case Shelby County v. Holder, for example, the Supreme Court struck down a key provision in the Voting Rights Act of 1965 on the grounds that Congress had not sufficiently updated that provision to reflect what it saw as significant changes in the South. It also claimed that it was upholding the “equal sovereignty of the states,” which appears to be a ticket good for one ride only.While the court claimed that Congress “may draft another formula based on current conditions,” the destruction of the rest of the VRA casts serious doubts about that promise. It is not surprising that conservatives fear a powerful Congress, for it is a powerful Congress that has often achieved the most far-reaching changes to American society. In the 1860s and early 1870s, Radical Republicans used their legislative supermajority to pass multiple laws and constitutional amendments to build multiracial democracy in the South. Progressives in Congress at the turn of the twentieth century enacted the first federal labor, antitrust, and consumer protection laws.Franklin D. Roosevelt and his allies may have conceived of the New Deal, but it was Congress that actually enacted Social Security, funded public works programs, regulated the banks, and expanded labor rights. Lyndon B. Johnson’s greatest triumphs came from working with Congress to pass civil rights laws and create new social programs like Medicare and Medicaid. Most of the nation’s most successful presidents actually owe a healthy share of credit to their colleagues in the legislative branch.I have argued before that Congress must expand the Supreme Court because the conservative majority cannot be trusted in the wake of Trump v. United States, the infamous immunity decision from two years ago. That ruling crystallized the court’s upside-down understanding of the president’s role in the constitutional order by giving him an unwritten absolute immunity from criminal prosecution—one that goes far beyond the explicit and conditional immunities that the Constitution actually grants to lawmakers. This case arose in the context of Trump’s plot to overthrow the 2020 presidential election and, eventually, the attack on Congress itself by his supporters. By holding the high court accountable for that ruling, Congress would also be defending itself from future assaults.Congress must also revisit the amount of free-standing discretion that it gives the president. Many of Trump’s worst abuses as president have come from finding loaded guns left lying around by past generations of lawmakers, so to speak. The Supreme Court blocked Trump from deploying the National Guard to Chicago and other cities last December, recognizing that it exceeded the powers granted by Congress under federal law. At the same time, legal efforts to block the deployment of troops to D.C. have failed because Congress explicitly (and unwisely) granted that discretion to the president with few constraints.A wide range of “emergency” laws enacted by Congress over the past century gave powers to presidents under the assumption that they would be used wisely and legitimately. That is clearly no longer the case. While the Supreme Court blocked Trump from imposing hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of tariffs on the nation’s top trading partners earlier this year, Congress might rethink whether it should outsource so much discretion to the White House under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977. Perhaps the most urgent target for reform is the Insurrection Act, which Trump and his allies view as a flip-switch for authoritarian rule.Most importantly, Congress must rejuvenate itself. One good place to start would be by rebuilding its institutional expertise. Before the 1990s, Congress “operated one of the world’s premier scientific advisory bodies” and employed an “extensive network” of shared policy-expert staffers who helped inform legislation, according to a 2013 study. After the 1994 midterms, then-Speaker Newt Gingrich abolished the Office of Technological Assessment and defunded much of Congress’s policy-expert staff. The result was a more partisan and less knowledgeable workforce on Capitol Hill that became reliant on partisan think tanks for policymaking and expertise.Other Gingrich-era changes centralized power in the speaker’s office, weakening committee chairs and diminishing the power of rank-and-file members to influence legislation. In tandem with broader political and media trends, the House soon devolved into a more performative institution where lawmakers, now robbed of the ability to deliver substantive changes for their constituents, increasingly turned to partisan theater to raise their public profile—and their reelection chances—in Washington.Naturally, reversing these changes would not fix U.S. politics in one stroke. There are deeper reforms that could be undertaken, as well. Adopting proportional representation would restore competitive elections to the House and end the scourge of gerrymandering forever. House gerrymanders contributed mightily to the polarization of U.S. politics over the past 25 years. Shifting energy and attention back toward general elections instead of party primaries would result in fewer incentives for extremist candidates.Congressional primacy is not merely a matter of passing the right laws and installing the right justices. It is also about telling the truth about our constitutional order. Americans have a consistently low opinion of Congress as an institution, and not without cause. Legislators who are not willing to forcefully defend and rebuild the legislative branch should not be elected to it, no matter their party affiliation. This country was not meant to be ruled by the whims of presidents and justices, but rather governed by a strong, forceful Congress. The proper balance of powers must be restored.
Flipping four Senate seats, which would give Democrats a 51-seat majority in the upper house, is a daunting enough challenge for this midterm cycle. But that’s the easy part. Realistically, the party really needs to flip five. Pennsylvania’s John Fetterman simply can’t be relied upon anymore. He seems more angered by the progressive faction in the Democratic Party than the antidemocratic radicals who run the GOP and the country. So Democrats must invest heavily in Iowa, Texas, and other traditionally red states that will be hard to win, in order to get a 52-seat majority and make him irrelevant—or to spur him to make a party switch. A Senate where John Fetterman is the swing vote cannot be a steady bulwark against President Trump and his misrule.Fetterman, in a recent interview with The New York Times, declared that he would “never” switch parties. I don’t trust that promise. Fetterman noted that he agrees with the Democrats on the vast majority of policy issues. But based on his public comments, the senator seems fixated on two particular matters: Israeli-Palestinian policy and the progressive-socialist left. And on those two matters, the divide between Fetterman and the Democratic Party is huge and growing. The Democratic left that Fetterman goes on Fox News to bash is surging in numbers and power—in no small part because of the status quo that Fetterman has done much to uphold. Antipathy toward Israel has expanded from progressive politicians to even average Democratic voters. I worry that one day, say in April 2027, someone like Representative Ayanna Pressley tweets something that annoys Fetterman, he declares on X, “I didn’t leave the party, the party left me,’ and immediately becomes a Republican or an independent. Also, it may eventually be smart (and perhaps even necessary) for Fetterman to leave the Democratic Party. If he runs for reelection in 2028 as a Democrat, he will have a hard time winning a primary. His poll numbers among Pennsylvania Democrats (not just progressives) are terrible. Only 19 percent of Democrats approve of him, according to a recent Quinnipiac University poll, while 69 percent disapprove. One poll from last week had him trailing “someone else” by 18 points.Meanwhile, he keeps taking high-profile actions that will inflame stalwart Democrats, such as writing an op-ed in defense of the filibuster. And he shouldn’t just be worried about progressive challengers. A traditional center-left Democrat, such as ex-Representative Conor Lamb, who Fetterman beat in the 2022 Senate primary, might knock him off too. Someone like Lamb could say, “I will be a loyal Democrat and not go on Fox News and bash the party all the time” and win votes from Fetterman. It’s entirely possible that by this time next year, Fetterman is running in a Democratic primary against a well-funded opponent who is endorsed by a big bloc of Democratic politicians and is well ahead of the incumbent senator in the polls. Then, leaving the party would not entirely be Fetterman’s decision—the Democrats would have effectively kicked him out. (That’s what happened to then–Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema in 2022.) Fetterman’s best chances of winning reelection are either hoping Republicans adopt him as their candidate or running as an independent and winning a three-person race by wooing moderate voters from both parties. If he chooses the GOP path, there’s no better way for Fetterman to ingratiate himself to Republicans voters than leaving the Democratic Party when he’s its fifty-first Senate vote, thereby putting the GOP back in the majority. So no matter what Fetterman claims now, the chances of him leaving the Democratic Party next year or in 2028 are substantial enough that the party needs to price it into its midterms calculus. Let’s say that in the short term Fetterman remains a Democrat. If there are only 51 Democratic senators, every member holds the majority in their hands. I don’t trust Fetterman to use that awesome power for good. In theory, the Senate majority leader (likely Chuck Schumer in a Dem majority) controls the chamber. Schumer won’t schedule votes for Trump-backed policies or nominations that most Democrats oppose. But imagine if there was a Supreme Court vacancy and Trump nominates someone who is strongly pro-Israel and anti-DSA and would be confirmed if Fetterman joined the Republicans. Fetterman could threaten to switch parties unless Schumer brought that judge up for a vote. Are you confident he wouldn’t use his power that way? I’m not. In fact, screwing over Democrats on a very high-profile vote seems the exact kind of thing Fetterman dreams of doing. It’s like—you know—writing an op-ed defending the filibuster knowing that the rest of the party believes that gutting the filibuster is a first step to enacting essential pro-democracy reforms. And while the majority leader generally controls the calendar, there are certain amendments and policies that individual senators can bring up for votes. Fetterman would almost certainly join 49 Republicans and Vice President JD Vance at times, in a way most other Democratic senators wouldn’t. What’s important to underscore is that Fetterman does not act like a normal moderate or centrist Democrat, such as say, Elissa Slotkin of Michigan. I don’t always agree with Slotkin’s votes or speeches, but I’m not worried about her undermining core Democratic goals or helping Trump. Fetterman’s different. He’s not a moderate or centrist Democrat as much as an anti-Democrat Democrat, or really a Democratic troll. Like Sinema and Joe Manchin a few years ago, he wants to announce as loudly as possible that the party has gone too far left and punish it for doing so. That’s why he’s appearing on Fox and bashing Bernie Sanders so often. That’s the worst possible kind of Democrat to be part of a majority of only 51. Fetterman’s behavior makes it essential for Democrats to win a big majority this fall. Here’s the good news—they can. Either because of weak GOP incumbents, strong Democratic candidates, or Trump’s unpopularity, polls show Democrats tied or leading in the Senate seats currently held by Republicans in Alaska, Ohio, Iowa, Maine, North Carolina, and Texas. Winning five of those races is a very tall order, but it’s not outside the realm of possibility. The party’s various super PACs and big-money organizations as well as liberal grassroots groups need to be broadening, not shrinking, their maps and ambitions this fall. Independent candidates running in Nebraska and South Dakota are opportunities to potentially deny Republicans Senate seats they might have otherwise won. And with Trump’s unpopularity only growing, perhaps super-long shots such as Mississippi are in play too. Whatever the path, the goal for Democrats must be a 52–48 or 51–48, or 50–47 Senate, one where Fetterman couldn’t put the GOP back in the majority on a whim. A few years ago, people used to joke about “President Manchin.” The West Virginia senator was one of the most powerful people in Washington when Democrats had a 51–50 Senate majority (by dint of Kamala Harris’s tiebreaker) in 2021 and 2022. He could and often did block Joe Biden’s initiatives. It was a cruel joke, though. The Democratic Party and liberalism were held hostage by an unpredictable, erratic man more annoyed by people trying to expand voting rights than those trying to restrict them. We can’t afford a repeat of that. John Fetterman, more supportive of the Netanyahu administration than the Mamdani administration, doesn’t deserve to be a senator at all, let alone the most important one. A successful 2026 for Democrats will make John Fetterman Senator Irrelevant, whatever party he’s in.
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 primaries in Wisconsin and Michigan have become intense, nationally watched battles between the establishment and insurgent factions in the Democratic Party. In the latest edition of Right Now, Anat Shenker-Osorio, a progressive political strategist, and Nathan Kalmoe, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, explain why Wisconsin’s Francesca Hong and Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed have been such strong candidates during these primaries. They argue that Hong and El-Sayed would also likely be solid contenders in general election races against Republicans. Hong and El-Sayed have surged past their primary opponents. That suggests political skill that will extend to the general election, says Shenker-Osorio. Kalmoe argues that the broader political environment matters much more than individual candidates. Democratic candidates are likely to win in Michigan and Wisconsin, he says, because this appears to be an anti-Republican year.
Whenever my friends and family despair about the GOP’s decades-long stranglehold on Texas, I remind them—wistfully—that it hasn’t always been this way. If you’re wincing, I get it. Such optimism in the face of electoral reality is insufferable, especially since I’m frequently bringing this cheerful message from highfalutin New York City, where I moved in 1996, two years after Democratic Governor Ann Richards lost to Republican George W. Bush.Every time I make a pilgrimage to the Lone Star State, which I do a couple of times a year, to visit loved ones and emotionally eat enchiladas, I cherish any opportunity to remind liberal Texans that I have faith. All is not lost. I dream of a blue Texas. It is my birthright. Texas hasn’t always been red. I know this because my old man worked for the last duly elected Democratic senator from the great state of Texas.He was a press secretary, a job I did not understand. I knew he had a small office in the Senate Hart building that he would fill with cigar smoke. I once asked him why people ran for office and became politicians, and he told me some people get into it because they want to help other people—and sometimes the game changes them for the worse—and then he told me other people run for office because someone else corners them at a cocktail party and says, “You know, you should run for office,” and that person says, “Yeah, I should.”Which of these was the senator that my dad served? The man he was doggedly loyal to for decades? Politics is no place for romantics, but I want to believe the former.The first time I ever became aware of politics as a force, a kind of social energy rather than the family business, was during Ann Richards’s epic barn burner of a keynote address at the 1988 Democratic National Convention in Atlanta. She was the Texas state treasurer then—the first woman elected to that office—and later, in 1991, sworn in as the state’s second woman governor.Her pugnacious speech electrified me as I watched it in the basement of my house in Northern Virgina with my mother. I was not born in Texas. I was raised inside the Beltway. This is my shame. I didn’t see much of my dad that year, but I knew he was there, somewhere in that roaring convention center.Her performance was perfectly Texan; polite, spicy, principled. She smirked, but she was not fucking around. The Democrats had suffered a long winter during President Ronald Reagan’s eight years in office. The party was hungry, and the Texans, especially, were scraping for a fight. Richards, with her silver hair and confident swagger, mocked Vice President George H.W. Bush, a political aristocrat from Connecticut who had reinvented himself as a Houston oilman. At one point, she had fun with the Bushes’ penchant for gaffes: “Poor George,” she purred. “He can’t help it. He was born with a silver foot in his mouth.” I didn’t even really understand the joke, but I hooted and hollered. Here, glowing from my television screen, was a truly great Texan. It was during this convention that my dad’s boss, Lloyd Bentsen, was chosen as Michael Dukakis’s running mate, an attempt to recreate the fabled Kennedy-LBJ “Austin-to-Boston” axis. My dad spent most of the campaign tending to Bentsen’s Senate campaign—Texas law allowed him to run for both offices.Weeks later, the vice presidential debate between 41-year-old Indiana Senator Dan Quayle and Lloyd Bentsen, a lean, buttoned-up 67, proved to be something vice presidential debates usually aren’t: memorable. I don’t think any of my peers watched the debate except, perhaps, Quayle’s son, Tucker, who went to the same middle school I attended.It’s quaint how high-stakes the 1988 election felt; it’s also hard to convey how Zeus-like Ronald Reagan seemed, even when it was apparent, at that stage of his presidency, that he was diminished. At the time, I did not have a sophisticated understanding of why he was the enemy, but he was, and now, I understand, especially, that Reagan and his loyalists were intent on reordering society’s priorities, and at the top of their list were the feelings and fortunes of the rich. I never recall my dad bad-mouthing Republicans, not that he talked shop a lot at home—preferring to decompress while playing Nintendo—but he did warn me to beware of lawyers wearing shiny new cowboy boots. Austin has always crawled with them. Reagan’s veep, George H.W. Bush, was not a shoo-in, but with the help of his sons, including a cocky George W., and the cynical campaign strategist Lee Atwater, he slowly waged a campaign that validated the prejudices of white voters. It was risky to stir up those dark feelings, but Reagan’s legacy was on the line, and Dukakis, while a decent man, was vulnerable because he, the son of immigrants, suffered from the Democrats’ greatest weakness, which is an inability to be mean as a rattlesnake on command.Here, Bentsen struck a contrast with the top of the ticket. At one point, during the debate, Quayle dared compare himself to another young, dashing politician: JFK. This prompted Bentsen to coolly retort: “I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. And you, Senator, are no Jack Kennedy.” This was the equivalent of a body blow, a sudden burst of excitement in an otherwise sleepy back-and-forth. All Quayle could do was stutter and respond: “That was really uncalled for, Senator.”The Democrats would lose the White House in November, but Bentsen would win reelection. In 1992, Bentsen would become President Bill Clinton’s first, and arguably most influential, treasury secretary, and my dad would follow. But Bentsen’s mostly remembered for delivering the spiciest debate zinger in modern presidential politics.I met Senator Bentsen a few times. He was always warm. I knew to call him “Senator”—as in “Nice to see you again, Senator” or “Yes, Senator”—and to simply punctuate my sentences with “sir” when in a room with him, and only when addressed. I knew it was important to my father that I perform acts of Texan courtliness for his employer, whose position in the adult world I didn’t quite understand before the ’88 election. I regarded the senator as a sort of Santa Claus figure, a magical authority figure whose favor I craved. Politics is a spiteful business. Theatrical. Occasionally bloody, which is surprising, since the job tends to attract the squeamish. But growing up inside the Beltway, politics was a bedtime story. A morality tale starring Texans. Texans who never lied. Who cared about others. One thing that must be understood about Texans is that they are a deeply sentimental people. From the Panhandle to the border, the Hill Country to the Gulf. The state was once nothing but wild country. Rugged individuals don’t survive long out on the frontier. Especially not alone. You need friends. Neighbors. They watch your back and vice versa.I grew up being told stories about Texans. I was raised to believe the three greatest Americans were Texans: Lyndon Johnson, Jesus, and Tom Landry, the coach of the Dallas Cowboys from 1960 to 1988. My old man looked up to LBJ, whose flaws he was willing to point out. This was years before bestselling biographer Robert Caro—great New Yorker that he is—canonized him as a twentieth-century icon. My dad would sometimes listen to cassette tapes of LBJ’s phone calls in the car. What he liked about the man was his ability to change and do the right thing, despite his moral flaws and long-standing loyalty to racist Dixie. The senator had been a protégé of LBJ. He was an oil scion, a blue blood, a World War II combat vet—like George H.W. Bush—and believed in civil rights and social safety nets: old-school noblesse oblige. He also found my father funny.He was probably more conservative than my memory allows—he once publicly opposed Ice-T’s iconic rap song “Cop Killer,” much to my teenage, free speech–loving chagrin. When I complained about his boss’s opinion in 1992, my father dutifully noted my disapproval, and we never spoke of it again.Their collaboration was among the longest on Capitol Hill and ended after 23 years, when Bentsen left Clinton’s Cabinet in 1994. Bentsen and my dad were dubbed “the Odd Couple” by the press—an aristocrat and a preacher’s kid—which felt honest enough, but who knows? The Texas Democratic Party I grew up in resembled my parents’ relationship: racially and religiously mixed. She was a Mexican American Catholic; he was the son of a Southern Baptist pastor who had a congregation in El Paso before moving west and eventually settling in Phoenix. They taught me that Jesus heard you no matter what house you prayed in. The party at the time was diverse and hopeful. That was the story I was told, anyway. I remember names like Barbara Jordan—the first Black woman elected to the Texas state Senate and then, a few years later, the first Southern Black woman elected to Congress—who spoke from a wheelchair during the 1992 Democratic Convention. She was commanding and principled, and she mesmerized me. There was Henry González, the first Texas-born Mexican American elected to the House. He was the longest-serving Hispanic member of Congress. And Henry Cisneros, former mayor of San Antonio and housing and urban development secretary.The first openly gay member of the Texas state legislature was Democrat Glen Maxey. He was elected in a 1991 special election. A true trailblazer, he was shunned by many of his conservative colleagues. Some victories are ugly. One of my father’s friends (or, if you prefer, “allies”) was Lieutenant Governor Bob Bullock, a hard-drinking, chain-smoking “sumbitch”—a Texanism that, depending on the intonation, could mean “honest and reliable” or “two-faced and greedy.” The lieutenant governor is a powerful position in Texas’s quirky legislature, which meets every two years. Bullock was a prodigious smoker, like my old man, and they both fought cancer around the same time.My dad was fond of Bullock, a temperamental rabble-rouser in his heyday. I had heard many stories of him over the years that made him sound like a tyrant, but he was the man who called my father in the hospital after risky surgery to remove a tumor-riddled lung and gently reminded him to eat his breakfast. Here is one story my dad told me back when Texas politics was chummier than it is now. In the late 1990s, Bullock was friendly with George W. Bush, then the governor. Bullock had told Bush that some bill the governor didn’t particularly care for wasn’t going to make it to the floor for a vote. But later, Bullock buckled under pressure from his party. Bush found out that Bullock was going to break his promise, so he stormed into Bullock’s office before he could get a chance to break the news and gave him a smooch on the lips. “I like to get kissed before I get fucked,” said Bush. The message: I understand. We’re good. Dubya was popular in Texas. That was mainly down to Bush’s frat boy charms. He was the worst president of my lifetime, who visited death and destruction on millions of people all over the world and who changed this country for the worse. But he was never unlikeable. He won two elections, and one of those victories was even fair and square.But there was something else in Bullock’s story my dad loved—a kind of boys’ club nostalgia. Great Texans aren’t petty. They may see things differently, but they’re not rude. Or cruel. They respect one another. They work together when they can, and when they can’t, they crack a joke and move on. All of this is naïve, in retrospect. The fantasy of bipartisanism is well intentioned, even if it has led us to where we are now: a flailing democracy in which one party does not believe the other is legitimate. Years later, in 2002, months before he died at the age of 63, during his last trip to visit me in New York City, my dad and I attended a party for Ann Richards, who was joining the Austin-based P.R. firm he worked for part-time after retiring from government.The firm was run by friends, and this hootenanny, held at the legendary French restaurant Le Cirque, was a modest display of clout. The restaurant itself, true to its name, was a colorful circus for fat cats and the well connected, and this launch party was meant to introduce Richards to New York’s elite. Everyone was there, including Harvey Weinstein and Bill Clinton. Richards’s job was to hobnob with Democrats and Republicans and, most of all, her bestie, New York gossip columnist Liz Smith.I remember feeling out of place. I was too shy to shake Clinton’s hand. My dad stood in the back, weak but happy. Smiling, even. Richards was bright and feisty. Cackling as champagne glasses clinked. There were so many more fights to have. I was starstruck. I adored her, from a distance. Can you imagine the bullshit she must have put up with? She would pass away four years later, at the age of 73.Sometimes I wonder what my father would think of everything. Of Texas, of me. How it all turned out. His burial flag sits on the dresser in my bedroom in Austin. When I visit, I stare at it before falling asleep and dreaming. When I dream, I dream of a blue Texas. Getting your hopes up is always a risk, but you should do it all the same, from time to time. You’re allowed. It’s a good dream, after all.
On Monday, CNN analyst Harry Enten flagged a truly surprising finding in a Fox News poll that had eluded our attention: Trump’s approval is nine points underwater in very red Texas, which he won by 14 points in 2024. That’s not all: The Fox poll, which shows Democrat James Talarico up by three points, finds Trump’s approval at an astounding 18 percent among independents in Texas, with 50 percent disapproving strongly. That’s remarkable, especially given how key independents are in Texas races. All this comes as Trump unleashed a long tirade claiming “my REAL poll numbers” are “the best they have ever been.” Trump also bizarrely listed a long litany of accomplishments that were, well, entirely made up, showing he has zero intention to help his party by recalibrating. We talked to Democratic strategist Sawyer Hacket, who knows Texas and has worked on midterms. He explains why Trump’s standing with Texas independents is “absolutely shocking,” what the path to victory there looks like, where Talarico still must improve, and how numbers like these could open up other red states for Democrats. Listen to this episode here. A transcript is here.
The Trump administration’s attempt to prevent new American citizens from receiving help on voter registration was blocked in federal court Monday. U.S. District Judge Adam B. Abelson paused a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services policy from last August preventing nonpartisan groups from helping new citizens register to vote. Under the policy, only state and local election officials were allowed to offer help with voter registration at citizenship ceremonies, prompting the League of Women Voters and National Council of Jewish Women (NJCW) to sue the government over it. “NCJW has amply shown a likelihood of success on the merits of its claim that the Ban was motivated by discriminatory intent,” Abelson wrote in his ruling. “The various statements by government officials leading up to the Ban that NCJW cites further support this conclusion, including USCIS Director Joseph Edlow’s statement that immigrants threaten to reshape the nation electorally by becoming citizens.”Abelson also cited Edlow’s comments to right-wing website Breitbart last year, in which he claimed that Democrats’ “long-term plan, I think we have to assume, was to grant some sort of mass amnesty, make them all citizens, and then spread them out to try to change demographics elsewhere throughout the country.” The ruling restores the agency’s previous policy, where nonpartisan organizations are allowed to help with voter registration when state and local election officials aren’t able to attend naturalization ceremonies. It’s a policy that was in place for decades until 2025, including during Trump’s first term, and thousands of new voters have benefited. In 2024, the League of Women Voters helped to register over 122,000 new voters at naturalization ceremonies. Abelson’s ruling is not final, but only pauses USCIS’s policy while it gets a full review in federal court. The government’s own words won’t help its case, considering that many administration officials, including Vice President JD Vance, have echoed statements alluding to the white nationalist “great replacement” theory that liberals and the left seek to replace a white electorate with nonwhite immigrants. For now, though, new citizens should have an easier time registering to vote.
President Trump is not happy over how Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, handled the prosecution of alleged vandalism at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.CNN reports that Trump is considering firing Pirro, a former Fox News host, over the Department of Justice’s legal admission that the pool’s peeling stemmed from “flawed” renovation work and not vandals like ex–Olympic canoeist David Hearn, who was federally indicted before charges against him were dropped.One unnamed source told CNN that Trump is “furious” with Pirro and thinks that it’s “highly likely she’s removed from her job,” while another told the network that the president was “blindsided” by the DOJ filing from Pirro’s office.“The president did not know beforehand that she was going to do that,” the source told CNN.Trump confirmed his dissatisfaction with Pirro Monday, telling reporters in the Oval Office that he thinks “she choked, because the judge was really vicious. Instead of going after the people that did it, the judge went after her and went after her department, and I guess she choked. I don’t know what the hell happened.”When a reporter asked Trump if he was reconsidering Pirro’s role, he snapped.“I don’t know what—you’re fake news. Don’t ever talk again. You’re fake news, one of the worst in the business. Fortunately, nobody watches you,” Trump said. Trump says Jeanine Pirro "choked" and then snaps at a reporter who asks if her job is safe: "Don't ever talk again" pic.twitter.com/dL7aLBO6h1— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 3, 2026Trump has made construction, beautification, and renovation projects around Washington, D.C., his highest priority in his second term, but his $14 million efforts to “fix” the Reflecting Pool keep failing. The “American flag blue” paint he added because he didn’t like the look of green algae was quickly obscured by, well, algal blooms. His contractors added hydrogen peroxide to kill the algae, failing to realize that it’s a paint thinner, and the blue lining started to peel away.Unwilling to admit that he caused the peeling, Trump went on a witch hunt against alleged vandals, which is where the spurious charges from Pirro’s office against Hearn came from. Now that the case has fallen through, Trump may soon take out his anger by firing Pirro. Meanwhile, the pool looks much worse than before.
Missourians are about to vote on their own power to change the state constitution.Missouri, along with 26 other states and Washington, D.C., has a process by which voters can gather signatures and initiate amendments to the state constitution by putting a ballot measure to a vote. As it stands, if a citizen-led amendment wins a simple statewide majority—six of Missouri’s eight congressional districts—the initiative will pass.But Tuesday’s primary election might take that away.Amendment 4, placed on the ballot by Missouri Republicans, would require any citizen-led amendment to pass in all eight districts, rather than the traditional six. This means that any single district could tank an amendment, regardless of popular support in the rest of the state. No other state makes it that hard.“I view it as a politician’s power grab,” Franklin County resident Derek Schriewer told The Missouri Independent. “They are trying to take away a typical function that we have had for over 100 years for citizens to be able to hold politicians accountable.”Doug Kerr, chairman of the Knox County Republican Central Committee and a staunch supporter of Amendment 4, argued that GOP interests were not getting enough representation—despite the Republican supermajority in the state legislature.“Our voices are not being heard,” Kerr told The Missouri Independent. “We’re not just a democracy. We are a democratic republic, and the rights of the minority should at least be heard. And right now, they’re not.”Amendment 4 has powerful allies, and not just among Republican state representatives. It has also been endorsed by Missouri’s most salient agricultural lobby, the Missouri Farm Bureau, as well as the Missouri Right to Life PAC. Campaign spending, both for and against the measure, is through the roof, and Missouri Secretary of State Denny Hoskins is predicting the highest primary turnout among Missouri voters since 2004.In recent years, Missouri voters have relied on citizen-led amendments to expand Medicaid access, legalize recreational marijuana, approve sports betting, and enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution.The irony of Amendment 4 is that it only cuts one way. Lawmakers aren’t limiting their own power to change the state constitution—they will still have the power to put constitutional amendments on the ballot. But if voters want to do the same thing, they’re out of luck.
President Donald Trump claimed Monday he was in talks to open the Strait of Hormuz “literally by tomorrow”—while Iran has denied speaking to the United States. Speaking at a press conference to sign an executive order, Trump rambled about ongoing talks with Iran to reopen the strait. “It’s not very complex. We’re talking about the strait, the opening of the strait, having it open, literally by tomorrow. Completely open,” Trump said. The president claimed that would be the first phase before proceeding to denuclearization talks.Trump, who has been claiming the US controls the Strait of Hormuz, now says he's talking with Iran about "opening the Strait literally by tomorrow" 🤔 pic.twitter.com/8hKjbT9BBA— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 3, 2026Don’t hold your breath. Trump has teased an imminent deal with Iran more than three dozen times since the war began six months ago, and this doesn’t appear to be any different. Trump told reporters Sunday that he’d called off another “massive attack,” because U.S. allies in the Middle East believed that Tehran was ready to make “a deal on Hormuz.” The president indicated that the talks would begin Monday. But Esmaeil Baghaei, spokesperson for Iran’s foreign ministry, told reporters Monday that Iran was not currently in talks with the U.S. He said Iran was in the final stages of discussions with Oman to open the strait. In response, Trump called Iran’s leadership “unbelievably duplicitous,” claiming in a social media post before the press conference they’d begged him to restart talks. Still, Trump inexplicably promised there would be progress. “We’re gonna find out today or tomorrow. I mean, they’re gonna go quickly, one way or another,” he said during the press conference.
The cyclosporiasis outbreak just turned deadly.Two people died in Michigan after contracting cyclosporiasis, the state’s health department announced Monday. They’re the first confirmed deaths in the country that have been tied to the public health crisis spurred by a single-celled parasite found on iceberg lettuce.Both people had “significant underlying health conditions that may have been impacted by cyclosporiasis and dehydration,” the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services said in a statement, noting that no additional information about the specific cases will be shared.“Cyclosporiasis is generally not a life-threatening illness,” the statement continued. “Death resulting from cyclosporiasis is uncommon in the United States.”So far, the state health agency has tallied 11,234 cases and 193 confirmed hospitalizations associated with the illness.Those numbers would indicate that federal health agencies are far behind in their own analysis of the parasite’s spread—or, at the very least, are failing to inform the American people as to the true nature of the nationwide threat. As of Monday, the CDC’s “fast facts” page on cyclosporiasis recorded “at least 1,947” cases and 98 hospitalizations across nine states.In a July 28 memo, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said that it had received reports of at least 6,707 laboratory-confirmed domestic cases of cyclosporiasis, though an additional 11,500 cases had not yet been confirmed.An analysis by The New Republic of state health agency data found at least 18,517 cases across the nine states listed by the CDC. The survey compiled reported figures from Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia. However, several of those states had not updated their own public-facing data within days or even weeks, suggesting that the current case tally could be much higher.Health officials said that anyone experiencing symptoms should reach out to a health care provider right away. Symptoms of cyclosporiasis can include sudden, prolonged diarrhea; bloating, severe stomach cramps, loss of appetite, extreme lethargy, and even a low-grade fever, though many people infected by the parasite show no symptoms at all, according to the Cleveland Clinic.Those most at risk of serious illness from the parasite are the elderly, infants, and people with compromised immune systems.Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said Thursday that public health investigators were having a difficult time tracking the disease as it can take people one to two weeks to exhibit symptoms after the consumption of infected food.The current outbreak has been linked to iceberg lettuce served at Taco Bell restaurants, supplied by one of the largest fresh-produce suppliers in the country, Taylor Farms. The pro-Trump produce supplier sells products to Walmart, Sam’s Club, Kroger, SYSCO, Aldi, Target, and Dollar General. It also sells food for private-label brands such as Whole Foods’ “365” line, and offers assembly-line products for a slew of fast-food chains, including McDonald’s, KFC, Pizza Hut, Subway, and more.Investigators are also examining other possible causes for the uptick, which has seen cases of cyclosporiasis increase across 45 states in 2026 thus far. It is not clear if the cases are all tied to the contaminated lettuce, according to the CDC.
Strip clubs, casinos, designer purses, guns, an Adam Sandler puzzle, 30 different ice cream flavors, and a private performance of Ed Sheeran’s “Hills of Aberfeldy”: Representative Chuck Edwards has a long pattern of creepy behavior, and the House Ethics Committee just detailed all of it.The House Ethics Committee Monday released a 25-page report on the congressman’s inappropriate conduct towards two young women staffers in his office, accusing him of violating House rules related to “sexual harassment and hostile workplaces.”On pages 5 and 6 of the report, the committee lays out, in detail, a long list of Edwards’s inappropriate conduct, which made the women in his employ feel uncomfortable and unsafe. The list includes lavish vacations, expensive gifts, trips to a staffer’s house to do her yardwork, and messages that made both women uncomfortable. In the case of one staffer, he arranged for a private singer to go to her “birthday party to sing Ed Sheeran’s ‘Hills of Aberfeldy’ and say that it was ‘from a special someone,’” after which the staffer told a friend she was “scared lowkey.” After one staffer went to a restaurant the congressman recommended, he texted her: “I’m burning with jealousy because I wanted to be the person to introduce you to it.” After a staffer accompanied Edwards to a work event, he wrote: “You’re so fun to be with, so easy to talk to, and I love listening to you. By all means—let’s explore more of DC together. We seem to have a fondness for many of the same things. Even where we do not, I’ll enjoy the adventure alongside you!”When the same staffer later left Edwards’s office, he read a poem “at her going away party in the congressional office accompanied by a slideshow, during which he cried. Several staffers present testified that they felt uncomfortable, and Representative Edwards acknowledged in his own testimony that he could tell the staff felt uncomfortable.”The House Ethics Committee noted that many messages central to the investigation were mysteriously missing from the congressman’s phone. Edwards also deleted a photograph of 30 different types of ice cream that he had delivered to a staffers house, as well as her response: “Thank you, but this seems a bit excessive.” “You looked like you needed a lot of cheering up!” the congressman texted back. “My heart was breaking seeing you like that.”When the same staffer later wrote “I don’t think dinner is a great idea,” the congressman responded:It’s disappointing to feel something that used to be easy has gotten complicated. Whether we were talking about cat poop, crime plots, or thoughts more meaningful—I’ve always valued the time we shared, and the money we won :) and I thought you might too. I didn’t expect outside chatter to change that. Still, I understand. You get to set the boundaries, and I get to respect them. If you ever feel easy again, I hope you’ll give me the signal.The House Ethics Committee began investigating Representative Edwards in late April for then-unspecified “allegations.” Reports of inappropriate conduct with two young female staffers soon followed, including a handwritten note from the congressman that read, “Your kindness, encouragement, and light-heartedness have written a complex chapter in my heart that I will never stop reading.”Edwards has been married to his wife, Teresa, since 1980.Despite this mountain of evidence to the contrary, Edwards continues to insist that he did nothing wrong.“Representative Edwards has continued to deny any wrongdoing publicly and to the Committee. He has also refused to acknowledge the reality of the power imbalance between a Member of Congress and young staffers,” the report states. “This shows a lack of self-awareness and accountability.”In one staffer’s testimony before the committee, she said that Edwards completely ignored “the fact that [the staffer was] a young female in politics and that [her] image is everything. And while he can navigate rumors like those that are circulating now without concern because he is, I guess, a male in politics, he had no regard for how something like this could impact my career.”Moving forward, the committee intends to “bring a privileged resolution for consideration and vote by the full House.”This story has been updated.
The Department of Homeland Security has drastically ramped up efforts to add DNA from nearly one million immigrants to a massive criminal database. Most of them have no criminal history; some of them are kids. In 2025, Immigration and Customs Enforcement added up to roughly 920,000 DNA profiles into the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System, a database used for conducting criminal investigations, WIRED reported Monday. That’s equivalent to more than 2,700 new profiles every day for an entire year. We know that most of the people added to the database have no criminal record because most of the people who have been detained by ICE as part of President Donald Trump’s massive deportation crusade have no criminal record. New research from Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy and Technology, published in a report titled “Raiding the Genome: How the United States Government Is Abusing Its Immigration Powers to Amass DNA for Future Policing” uncovered a huge increase in the rate of DNA collection from undocumented immigrants. Customs and Border Protection has historically been responsible for collecting DNA from immigrants entering through the U.S.-Mexico border. Between October 2020 and December 2024, CBP collected the DNA of at least 1.36 million people, more than one dozen times the rate of ICE’s DNA collection during the same period. Even so, CBP’s prior collection rate has been dwarfed by the new data provided by ICE. Among the scores of immigrants whose genomes are now being tracked by the government are the children held at the family detention center in Dilley, Texas, the source of multiple reports documenting unsafe living conditions. “None of the families at Dilley have been convicted of a crime,” Representatives Joaquin Castro, Greg Stanton, and Nanette Barragán said in a joint statement to WIRED. “They do not belong in a database meant for violent criminals, especially children.”The ICE facility in Dilley has been the source of horrific reports about living conditions. Records released to Georgetown by CBP identified 492 children under age 14 whose DNA was sent to the FBI in 2025—including 33 seven-year-olds, 32 six-year-olds, and 21 five-year-olds, WIRED reported. And breaking with past precedent, ICE has also begun charging immigrants who refuse to submit a DNA sample when they are taken into custody. WIRED identified two prosecutions filed in 2025 against people in immigration custody who’d refused DNA collection. In response to questions from WIRED, a DHS spokesperson defended DNA collection and claimed the agency had collected DNA from children in order to verify family relationships. That program is distinct, however, from the DNA collection program centered in WIRED’s reporting.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s supposed deal to end President Trump’s $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” in his settlement with the IRS has a lot of loopholes.As Blanche seems to have stifled a Republican revolt and secured his Senate confirmation, Democrats on Capitol Hill sounded off against the settlement revision, which was announced late Sunday night.As Democrats pointed out, there are some major problems with the rewritten IRS settlement. First, there is no guarantee that Trump won’t later create a separate fund to reward his allies. Second, the IRS agreement granting Trump, his family, and Trump Organization immunity from IRS audits is still in place. Blanche’s only revision is that the immunity deal can’t apply to the future. And third, Blanche’s deal wasn’t signed by all parties, namely Trump, as the original IRS settlement was.“Nothing here stops DOJ from using taxpayer money to pay off January 6th insurrectionists. And it leaves the IRS shield protecting Trump and his family from past audits fully intact,” Democratic Senator Alex Padilla posted on X Monday. “Todd Blanche has always been Trump’s personal lawyer—and this ‘deal’ proves he’s unfit to serve as Attorney General. Congress must pass my legislation to permanently ban any payouts to J6ers.”California’s other Democratic senator, Adam Schiff, also criticized the deal, pointing out that it “doesn’t prevent payouts to violent insurrectionists in the future.”“It doesn’t prevent the admin from bringing the slush fund back from the dead next week or using DOJ’s Judgment Fund for the same illicit purpose,” Schiff posted on X. “It leaves in place a tax-immunity deal that could help Trump skip taxes on the $2.3 billion he made last year, and still leaves it vague who and what is covered.”Representative Daniel Goldman echoed concerns about the IRS audit immunity provision, pointing out that “the ridiculous tax immunity deal still applies to all tax years up to and including this year.“Remember, the lawsuit was a total sham that was withdrawn and this was an addendum that had no relevance or connection to the lawsuit ‘settlement,’” Goldman posted.Trump does not want the weaponization fund to die, complaining that people who were “horribly treated” deserve compensation. Sunday’s deal seems aimed at placating superficial opposition from Republicans who are on their way out of the Senate at the end of this year, without actually addressing the many corrupt issues with Trump’s IRS settlement.
Over the weekend, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin committed the ultimate sin in the eyes of MAGA personalities, triggering vicious attacks and even calls for his ouster. What was this grave transgression? Well, Mullin dared to suggest that if handled correctly, immigration can be made to work in the national interest, which is something MAGA cannot permit to be true or uttered anywhere in public.That’s not how these MAGA figures put it, of course. Instead, they’re claiming Mullin revealed that he’s falling woefully short of Donald Trump’s promise of mass deportations. But if you scratch the surface of this dustup, it lays bare the true ideological aims of the MAGA white nationalist project with unusual vividness—and exposes a deep political weakness in the whole Trump-MAGA immigration agenda.Mullin’s comments came during a meeting on Saturday of the bipartisan National Governors Association in Oklahoma. In a long monologue, Mullin talked about why immigration reform is so hard, then discussed the need for changes to visa processes that currently facilitate seasonal labor even as much farmwork is now year-round.“If we’re looking to grow our economy, then we need to look at making more permanent solutions on this,” Mullin said, adding that the “narrative” that immigrants steal Americans’ jobs is “not true for all industries,” such as agriculture. Mullin added:It is America First. We want to take care of Americans first. It’s our economy. It’s our homeland. But there’s a way to utilize labor where we’re not having the participation rate where we need to. And we can plug those holes.These remarks triggered extraordinary offense among MAGA figures. Fox News personality Tomi Lahren raged that Mullin is out to “appease liberal media.” Laura Loomer called on Trump to fire Mullin immediately. Podcasters Steve Bannon and Jack Posobiec both told Politico that MAGA wants Trump to replace Mullin with someone who, as Posobiec put it, “puts deportations first.”The key tell here lies in what Mullin actually said. By “utilize labor” to “plug holes,” Mullin meant we should make it easier for migrant workers to fill currently unfilled jobs, particularly in agriculture. In other words, Mullin let slip a very dirty secret indeed: By reforming governing processes, we can broaden legal pathways for immigrants to work in the United States in ways that would benefit our economy and our country.Ask yourself this: Why exactly does MAGA cast this suggestion as a threat to the broader project of mass deportations? It’s not as if Mullin’s Department of Homeland Security has backed down on them: Migrant detentions just hit a new high, arrests have surged, and deportations appear to be escalating. What’s actually threatening to the MAGA project, then, is the underlying idea that Mullin endorsed: that immigration can be made to function in the national interest—and more to the point, that the right reforms actually can accomplish this and make it a reality.A darkly amusing cycle has kicked in here. The Trump administration keeps accidentally admitting that more immigration can indeed benefit our economy—and then quickly suppressing that truth when MAGA erupts over it. In June 2025, for instance, Trump openly declared that due to mass deportations—his own policy—the agriculture and hospitality industries were losing many “good” and “longtime” workers, and he pledged to carve out deportation exceptions for them. But Stephen Miller quickly prevailed on Trump to reverse the decision—just as MAGA is now raging at Mullin for making a similar suggestion.It’s easy to see why this keeps happening: The admission wrecks MAGA mythology on a very deep level. A core MAGA idea is that mass purgings of immigrants are needed because they take the jobs of Americans, of course. But the deeper idea here is that this deprives young American men of good, honest, breadwinning work, leaving them moldering away in left-behind areas of the heartland. In short, immigrants are a primary cause of the social crisis afflicting young MAGA men. Indeed, this social crisis has been deliberately engineered by liberal elites—it’s a key component of the “great replacement” of MAGA America with the “Third World.” In this story, mass deportations and putting the brakes on mass unskilled immigration should mean all these young American men will come stampeding into new jobs left vacant by now-deported invaders, and their families and communities will flourish.But it isn’t happening. Paul Krugman recently illustrated that this economic story is now in shambles: The virtual end of net immigration hasn’t led to a boom in jobs for the native-born. Growth in the working-age population has stalled, but so has job creation, and the employment rate for native-born adults is lower, not higher, than it was before the pogroms began.Meanwhile, studies have found that recent surges in mass deportations have cost Americans jobs in local economies without boosting wages for the native-born.Indeed, if anything, Mullin’s admission was far too narrow. He insisted immigrants are taking American jobs in some areas (a story that, again, is simply unsupported), while allowing that in agriculture, deportations are hurting the economy.Yet even this qualified admission triggered MAGA. Because every time someone like Mullin effectively admits, even in a limited way, that deporting immigrant laborers is not resulting in more work for Americans—that creating more legal pathways would boost the economy—it casts doubt on the larger MAGA ruse behind it all. It’s the coup de grâce that Mullin described his suggestions as the actual “America First” stance. I suspect he doesn’t grasp just how dangerous a heresy this truly is. After all, it neatly exposes MAGA’s real position: Mass deportations must be carried out even if they hurt the economy. Mullin must “put deportations first”—that is, he must put them before economic concerns. The goal is not primarily an economic one: It’s about ethnically purging the country. Trump’s deportations are badly underwater in polls, including in swing states. If more voters understood the actual Trump-MAGA position to be that deportations must be maximized regardless of their economic impact—that maximal removals are preferable to having a better economy—Americans would recoil even more. No wonder MAGA wants Mullin to shut up and stop giving away its vile scam in public.
President Trump’s giant “triumphal arch” project is not only going to be big and ugly, it’ll also be in your way.According to a recent assessment by the National Park Service, the proposed arch design will irrevocably detract from Washington, D.C.’s carefully planned views and historic properties. The assessment lists, in detail, 37 significant historic sites in the capital city at risk for adverse effects.“Adverse effects” means “you’re building something that will irreversibly harm the experience in these other locations,” National Parks Conservation Association vice president for government affairs Ed Stierli told The New York Times.“These adverse effects are intentional and inherent in the design of the arch; it is intended to dominate the surrounding landscape,” Virginia State Historic Preservation Officer Roger W. Kitchen wrote in a letter to the Park Service in June.The Memorial Avenue Corridor—the stretch between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery, which includes Robert E. Lee’s historic Arlington House and the Kennedy Gravesite—is most at risk, as the 250-foot triumphal arch will alter and obstruct views from each site, the assessment explains.“The entirety of the corridor forms a major component of the monumental core of Washington, D.C. and was conceived as both a ceremonial gateway to the nation’s Capital and a symbolic landscape commemorating national unity and reconciliation following the Civil War,” the document reads. “The bridge alignment and associated ceremonial landscape were intended to physically and symbolically unite North and South through a coordinated monumental composition extending across the Potomac River.”And now there will be a big Trump shrine smack in the middle of it.This latest Park Service assessment on the proposed project’s impact on the surrounding landscape is an essential step in the administration’s mission to receive final approval for construction from the National Capital Planning Commission.As a federal undertaking, the arch project is subject to Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966, which mandates an adverse effects assessment, but does not require any particular outcome or changes to the project. Instead, the assessment is “meant to get agencies to pause, consult experts and the public, and consider alternatives or design changes,” The New York Times’ Emily Badger explains.There have been alternative designs proposed—smaller arches, which were not considered sufficiently “representative” of the 250-year American independence milestone, and alternative locations beyond the historic heart of the city—but the project is expected to move forward as originally planned.Incidentally, the Park Service assessment comes as the Trump administration pushes to dramatically overhaul the process under which construction projects in historical areas are reviewed—a thinly veiled attempt to make it easier for Trump to redesign the nation’s capital in his own image. Under the proposed rules, “visual, atmospheric, or audible” adverse effects of building projects would be of no consequence, and federal agencies would be empowered to approve projects without the input of historical experts or the public.
Darline Graham is planning to take her late brother Lindsey Graham’s public office in a very different direction.The temporary lawmaker received Donald Trump’s coveted endorsement last month to represent South Carolinians in the upper chamber after her 71-year-old brother suddenly passed away from heart issues. In the weeks since, Graham has decided that her short-term placement could be permanent, tossing her hat in the ring to formally run for South Carolina’s vacant Senate seat.In an interview with Fox News Sunday evening, the younger Graham revealed that her campaign and legislative priorities would not line up with her brother’s legacy—or even with the White House’s interests.“Lindsey was focused on national security, and I know that’s important, but I will probably be focused more on affordability and what matters to families in South Carolina, the struggling families,” Graham explained.“I know what it is to struggle from week to week, paycheck to paycheck,” she said, referring to her and her brother’s tumultuous childhood. “So definitely affordability.”She noted that her “first priority” would be to “fight for South Carolina and … help President Trump achieve his agenda.”Graham also mentioned that she would like to get the Russian sanctions bill “across the finish line” because it was “extremely important” to her departed brother.A focus on affordability would surely win over Graham’s recently acquired constituents, but it would also highlight the Trump administration’s myriad failures in that department.Affordability is the chief concern for Americans heading into the midterm elections, according to an April Gallup poll. In January, a New York Times/Siena poll found that 65 percent of American voters felt that a middle-class lifestyle was out of reach, while 77 percent said that a middle-class life was more difficult to attain than it was a generation before. All in all, a majority of Americans feel that they’ve been priced out of a broad range of necessities, including education, health care, and having a family.Those sentiments have surely only been exacerbated in the months since. The cost of oil and gas has skyrocketed since the onset of the Iran war; utility bills have continued to climb; health insurance premiums have drastically outpaced the growth of employee paychecks; and homeownership seems like an increasingly unattainable dream due to low market availability and astronomical prices.Meanwhile, the White House has repeatedly detached itself from efforts that would aid America’s middle and lower classes. Case in point: Trump’s decision last month to divorce his office from a bipartisan housing bill. Trump did so in yet another futile attempt to force through his unpopular voter ID bill, the SAVE America Act.
After FIFA president Gianni Infantino’s plan to sell off a stake in the World Cup fell through due to heavy backlash, he tried to get in touch with President Trump.The New York Post reports that Infantino attempted to call Trump over the weekend several times because he was worried about losing his job following an avalanche of negative press over his idea, which led to the European and North American soccer associations, UEFA and CONCACAF respectively, threatening to boycott all FIFA events. Unable to reach Trump, Infantino instead reportedly held a private call with Secretary of State Marco Rubio Monday morning, hoping to enlist help in staving off pressure to resign.“He wanted to get online with the secretary and talk about how soccer can be a form of soft power for America,” an unnamed source told the Post. “But we all know that it is about job protection. It is not about anything else at this point.”Infantino’s plan was to create a commercial entity for broadcasting, sponsorship, licensing, and ticketing rights, and he enlisted financial backing from Thrive Capital, an investment firm led by Josh Kushner, the brother of Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner. The plan was immediately attacked as yet another example of decades-long FIFA corruption, which has only gotten worse under Trump.Now, if Infantino keeps his job, it will be seen as Trump further intervening in international soccer and cementing the corrupt relationship between the two. The threat of a World Cup boycott from major countries apparently didn’t scare Infantino enough, because getting Trump’s help will only increase soccer fans’ anger.
President Donald Trump has his eye on the ball—a golf ball, that is. The president took to Truth Social Sunday to trash-talk his opponents at a championship tournament at the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey.“I won with a score of 70, and am so honored in that, unlike the rest of the field, I’m given very little time to practice, because I’m focused on many other things,” Trump wrote. “It’s called TALENT, and I have it, and they don’t!”Putting aside the fact that Trump just insulted all of the people who pay him thousands of dollars a year for membership at his clubs, the president’s talent for golf has long been disputed. In his 2019 book Commander in Cheat: How Golf Explains Trump, veteran sportswriter Rick Reilly claimed that when it came to golf, Trump “cheats like a mafia accountant.” In any case, Trump’s victory was seemingly undercut by the small crowd of attendees who turned up to watch him play. No wonder he had to take to social media to share a video of his final stroke.Trump’s latest golf triumph brings to mind a quote by Emmet Hughes, a political speechwriter and aide to former Presider Dwight D. Eisenhower. Hughes asserted that as an intellectual, Eisenhower “bestowed upon the games of golf and bridge all the enthusiasm and perseverance that he withheld from his books and ideas.” Nothing could be truer about Trump, who just put out an open call for “unconventional” new ideas to end his war in Iran. Maybe that will give him more time to work on his golf game.
It’s hard to imagine a more consummate and humiliating debacle than the retreat the Department of Justice was forced to execute last Friday in the Reflecting Pool case. Having staked a large portion of its remaining credibility on the charges against David Hearn, the 67-year-old former Olympic canoeist it had accused of vandalizing the pool back in June, DOJ was reduced on Friday evening to confessing, in a 20-page filing, that its whole theory was false: The pool had been ruined not by vandals but by the administration’s own botched, rushed renovation.Some observers gave the department credit for belatedly doing the right thing, In fact, U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro had zero choice. A grenade had been hurled into her office, and she was forced to fall on it. No points here for virtue.Her motion even put her crosswise with the president, a friend and ally since the 1980s, who to this hour insists the pool was slashed with knives and box cutters and wants the case pressed. “I disagree 100% with Jeanine Pirro,” Trump fumed on Truth Social. “I don’t know what she was thinking?” For a prosecutor who has spent this administration as one of Donald Trump’s most reliable instruments, dismissing his pet case and blaming his renovation looks like a rare act of conscience. Don’t believe it.The move that forced Pirro’s hand was the receipt of documents from the Interior Department demonstrating that the pool’s lining was peeling because of a rushed, failed installation—not because David Hearn tugged at a flap of it. That revelation is what we legal types call classic Brady material: exculpatory evidence the government must turn over to the defense at once, in line with the landmark 1963 Supreme Court decision in Brady v. Maryland. Pirro’s own motion piously recites the point, reminding the court that “prosecutors have an affirmative obligation” to produce such evidence—which takes some nerve, given that the reason she was writing was that the Brady bomb had just gone off in her hands.Once those documents surfaced, she had two choices. She could either dismiss the case on her own terms—spinning the story as diligent prosecutors misled by a careless agency—or turn the material over to Hearn’s lawyers and let them present it to Judge Todd Edelman, a former career public defender who, a week earlier, had already warned the government it was “operating at its own peril.” Handed the Interior documents, he would have blown his top and dismissed the indictment himself, in open court. So Pirro’s dismissal was not virtue: It was damage control.The hasty surrender served another purpose: It steered Pirro out of the path of two looming train wrecks, or so she hopes.The first was a grand jury problem. Hearn had filed a motion on July 27 alleging that the government presented the grand jury with no evidence of damages at all. The administration had elevated what elsewhere were misdemeanor charges to a felony on the strength of a single element—$1,000 or more in damage—yet it apparently had no proof of that amount, or any amount. And the hole was not incidental; the grand jurors saw it themselves. They asked the government’s witness about the cost of the damage, and he could not quantify it. He testified, moreover, that the repairs would have been necessary regardless of anything Hearn did—the pool was already leaking more than a million gallons a week, its expansion joints past their service life, the liner already torn. On that record, the grand jury somehow returned a felony. Hearn’s motion would have exposed how the prosecution steered it there. Dismissing the case makes that question go away.The second was Pirro’s own conduct. When the indictment came down on July 2, she did not let the charging document speak for itself, as DOJ norms require. She called a news conference and went well outside the record. “This is not only a priority for the president, but for myself,” she announced—welding her office to Trump’s political grievance—and averred that she had witnesses who saw Hearn do the crime. Prejudicial extrajudicial statements about a defendant are improper in themselves; they are far worse when they are, as these seem to be, whopping lies. A bar complaint over her handling of the case has already been filed in New York.None of this is peculiar to the Reflecting Pool case. It is a method. Across this administration, the Justice Department has brought cases that are built backward, from the outcome the president wanted to a theory that might sustain it. Grand juries now reject this department’s indictments with a regularity once almost unheard of, and Pirro’s office has been a repeat offender.All the bluster gives the episode an element of farce—a Cabinet secretary insisting he could “absolutely” prove vandalism, a president raving about a 300-foot slit cut with a box cutter, a U.S. attorney promising tremendous evidence, all collapsing into a filing that concedes the pool fell apart on its own. But the farce should not obscure the gravity. To prop up a talking point almost everyone knew was false, the government cast a private citizen with no quarrel with Trump and no connection to the pool as the villain of a fiction, and moved to put him in prison for years. The leader tells a lie everyone knows is a lie, and the machinery of the state sets about forcing the rest of us to repeat it—all the way to the felony prosecution of an innocent bystander. That is what makes it the most perfectly Kafkaesque prosecution I can remember outside the annals of fiction.David Hearn went for a bike ride and grabbed at a flap of coating that was already peeling off on its own. For that, the government of the United States tried to take 10 years of his life. He is owed more than a dismissal; he is owed, for starters, an apology. And the rest of us are owed an accounting of how the Justice Department came to be a willing instrument of the president’s vanity, and what misconduct its dismissal may be attempting to obscure.
Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear is backing off threats to replace Senator Mitch McConnell, noting that the Republican’s extended absence would hurt his party all the same. Beshear announced Monday that the August 3 deadline to call a special election to replace McConnell had “no legal impact” on the governor’s options should there be a Senate vacancy. “Worth a reminder, right now, there’s one less vote for the SAVE Act, Trump’s war with Iran, or the potential replacement of a SCOTUS justice,” Beshear wrote in a statement on X. Beshear never had the power to force McConnell out of his seat.Under Section 152 of the Kentucky state Constitution, McConnell needed to resign at least three months ahead of the vote in order to call a special election. Kentucky’s law on Senate vacancies, House Bill 622, eliminated the governor’s ability to appoint interim replacements for vacant U.S. Senate seats. That law remains legally untested. Beshear has repeatedly called on McConnell to justify his absence from Congress or to step down in time for Kentucky voters to choose a replacement. Now, the Kentucky governor’s arguing that missing votes might be a punishment in and of itself for the Republican Party’s astounding lack of transparency. Over the weekend, Beshear came under fire from Republicans for missing Kentucky’s annual Fancy Farm picnic. The Kentucky governor called them out for their obvious double standard.“Funny how the Republicans are all mad I missed one political event to watch my son play baseball. But no outrage that Mitch McConnell has been nowhere to be seen for 50 days,” he wrote on X Saturday.
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin is on thin ice.It’s only been four months since Mullin took over from Kristi Noem as head of DHS, and influential MAGA allies are already calling for him to be replaced.The latest surge of anger came Saturday after Mullin delivered remarks about immigration reform at the National Governors Association Summer Meeting in Oklahoma City. In the meeting, Mullin made the mistake of distinguishing between immigrants pursuing legal status and those who aren’t, calling for changes to work visas and broader immigration reform to address American labor shortages.A few hours later, Mullin attempted to walk back his statement on X, posting “NO amnesty for illegal aliens. Ever. We are a nation of laws. If you are illegally present in the United States of America—you will be detained and deported. Period.”But the damage was already done.Influential voices on the right quickly began attacking Mullin for being weak on immigration.“Mullin is the wrong guy at the wrong time for the wrong job,” Steve Bannon told Politico Saturday. “At a time when we need focus on ‘mass deportations,’ we get an amnesty advocate.”Bannon’s sentiments were joined by those of a slew of right-wing advocates, including Laura Loomer, Nick Sortor, Robby Starbuck, and MAGA podcaster Jake Posobiec.Even former Border Patrol chief Gregory Bovino got in on the action, posting that Mullin “celebrates your replacement as long as it’s done legally, without mentioning that 80% of legal immigrants will vote Democrat.… And we wonder why we’re going to lose the midterms?”“It takes a lot to unite this administration around a cohesive point of view,” one senior Trump official told Politico. “Mullin deserves credit where credit is due. Everyone agrees he sucks donkey butt.”Mullin’s tenure as DHS secretary has been dogged by a series of missteps and controversies, including his attempt to temporarily restrict Immigration and Customs Enforcement vehicle stops (there have been 11 fatal shootings by ICE agents since President Trump returned to office, many of which involved officers firing into vehicles), as well as his apparent willingness to interact civilly with the enemy across the aisle, including Democratic Governor of Pennsylvania Josh Shapiro and Democratic Maryland Governor Wes Moore.Trump allies are already floating names for Mullin’s replacement, including acting Director of National Intelligence Bill Pulte and White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller.Still, the administration is standing by its DHS secretary—at least for now.“The President has confidence in Secretary Mullin and his entire Administration to carry out the agenda the American people voted for,” White House deputy press secretary Abigail Jackson told Politico.
The Trump administration is running out of ways to pressure Iran, with its airstrikes failing to end Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz or force the country back to the negotiating table. So now the military is asking for “unconventional” new ideas.CNN reports that an officer in the U.S. Central Command’s intelligence branch sent a message Wednesday to military analysts “looking for new creative and unconventional ways to pressure and punish Iran.” It’s an unusual thing to ask over email, according to CNN, and shows that President Trump knows his options are limited as the war with Iran enters its sixth month.The email was sent before Trump threatened new airstrikes against Iran and then relented, over the weekend, after Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and other Gulf leaders talked him out of it. Among the plans were attacking Pickaxe Mountain and other Iranian sites reportedly housing nuclear equipment or material.Those sites are deep underground, however, and would have likely required deploying American ground troops, which Trump is trying to avoid. Eighteen American service members have been killed in the war, according to official counts, and the administration has been criticized for its lack of transparency on military casualties.“At the end of the day, POTUS will want a deal, so he’ll continually look for ways to get tough and get out of this,” an unnamed source told CNN. “You need creative minds at times—especially if you’re running out of conventional options.”But more bombing probably won’t change Iran’s negotiating position, according to the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency. Trump has effectively backed himself into a corner with his ill-advised war, and is having trouble with being able to walk away with anything he can call a victory. American missile stockpiles have dwindled, scores of civilians have been killed, and the global economy, including gas prices, has taken a massive hit. Trump needs a way out.
Negotiations to end the Iran war do not seem to be going well.The White House and Tehran are apparently not even on the same page when it comes to resolving the nearly six-month conflict. Iranian officials directly contradicted Donald Trump Monday by telling Reuters that talks were not currently underway and that there were no plans to resume them.Trump called off another slate of attacks against Iran Sunday, backing down yet again from the threat of a major assault.Speaking with reporters aboard Air Force One that day, Trump said that he had scrapped the “massive” attack after being lobbied by Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar.“We were all set to go, but when our allies ask to call it off, you sort of have to say, ‘Well, let’s see,’” Trump said.“And the reason they asked is they think there’s a deal. There’s a deal on Hormuz, and then there will be a deal on the nuclear—or you might call it the denuclearization of Iran. I call it the denuclearization of Iran,” Trump said. “So we’re holding it. We can do it anytime we want, but we were asked by the three primary groups, we were also asked by Iran very strongly actually. They said, ‘We’d like to make a deal.’”The president then predicted that Tehran would turn around and say, “We don’t know what he’s talking about” with regard to a potential peace deal.“Obviously they don’t want to be attacked,” Trump said.The negotiations were set to take place Monday afternoon, according to the president.Iran is currently in talks with Oman to establish a safe, temporary route for ships through the Strait of Hormuz, according to Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baghaei. “To avoid any ambiguity, it should be clarified who the negotiations are with. We currently have no negotiations with the United States; the negotiations are with Oman,” Baghaei told CNN Monday, adding that the tentative arrangement would not automatically reopen the strait. “Whether this stage and this process can be connected to another process that leads to a reduction of tensions in the region, we must wait and see.”Baghaei also blamed U.S. officials for blowing up the memorandum of understanding in June, prolonging the unpopular and bloody hostilities.“It violated all of its commitments, reinstated the illegal maritime blockade, revoked the authorization for the sale of Iranian oil, and effectively declared almost all of the other commitments it had accepted under the memorandum null and void,” Baghaei said.
The Department of Justice’s move to dismiss its criminal case against Olympian David Hearn exposed just how bad things have gotten inside the Trump administration. In a new episode of his Justice Matters podcast, former federal prosecutor Glenn Kirschner argued that the DOJ’s motion to dismiss revealed just how shoddy its case was to begin with. Kirschner noted that Donald Trump’s DOJ blamed the Department of the Interior for initially claiming that the damage was “entirely caused by vandals” and admitted that the DOJ hadn’t fully investigated the matter. “Talk about finger-pointing,” Kirschner said. “Talk about the refusal to take responsibility for your botched indictment. That is ugly. That is unseemly. As a career federal prosecutor, including decades that I served in that very office, the D.C. U.S. Attorney’s Office, you don’t indict first and investigate later. Nor do you take the word of another agency of government.”In its filing Friday, the DOJ acknowledged that damage to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool was caused by flawed installation by the contractor—contrary to the narrative Trump has been pushing for weeks.In a statement Saturday, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum scrambled to keep up the story. “The evidence is clear, vandals have repeatedly caused damage to the Reflecting Pool. Some of these acts were even caught on camera,” he wrote on X. Kirschner also slammed the U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro for mounting prosecution before fully investigating her own case.“That is not the way prosecution works,” Kirschner said. “Not in the ‘Before Times,’ but in the legal upside-down [world] courtesy of Trump and Todd Blanche and Jeanine Pirro, it is ready, fire, aim, and that is inexcusable. It’s horrific, and it is a gross abuse of prosecutorial discretion and power.”Trump criticized Pirro’s decision to drop the case. In a Truth Social post Saturday, Trump admitted there “may have been some contractor difficulty” in the lining installation, but “the major damage was caused by VANDALS!”“I disagree 100% with Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, on the Reflecting Pool,” he wrote.
Texas Senator John Cornyn and North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis just caved to Donald Trump’s demands, paving the way for acting Attorney General Todd Blanche to move toward a full Senate confirmation.The two Republican holdouts announced Monday that they had reached a deal with the Justice Department that they claimed satisfied their aims to end Trump’s $1.8 “anti-weaponization” fund.“We are pleased that the Department of Justice has issued a formal order terminating the anti-weaponization fund,” the outgoing lawmakers said in a joint statement. “Additionally, the Department has acknowledged in a binding written order that the audit settlement is limited to the plaintiffs and the scope does not extend beyond the defendants in the lawsuit, the IRS and the Treasury, addressing concerns that multiple of our Republican colleagues share.”Cornyn faced a barrage of criticism Sunday after he decided that Blanche’s vague assurances against Trump’s slush fund were good enough.Cornyn had previously predicated his support for Blanche’s promotion on the fund’s end. But a tricky memo released by Blanche Sunday night seemed to have tripped up both senators’ offices—and their conditions.On its face, Blanche’s note appeared to terminate the fund, specifying that the order was “rescinded and shall have no force or effect.” However, journalists were quick to comment that the language employed in the rest of Blanche’s memo not only suggested that the honey pot fund would be preserved in some form, but also failed to terminate Trump’s underlying IRS immunity arrangement.But vague gestures at accountability were apparently all Cornyn and Tillis needed to get in line.In his own comments addressing the backlash on X Monday morning, Tillis wrote that he and Cornyn had only sought a “written document addressing our concerns on the IRS audit agreement and the anti-weaponization fund” and “legally ending the anti-weaponization fund.”“Additionally, the Department has acknowledged in a binding written order that the audit settlement is limited to the plaintiffs and the scope does not extend beyond the defendants in the lawsuit, the IRS and the Treasury, addressing concerns that multiple of our Republican colleagues share,” he added.But attorneys responding to Tillis flamed the North Carolinian for his paltry litmus test.“You cannot unilaterally alter a settlement agreement, and you know it,” responded lawyer Robin DesCamp.The fund was the result of an unprecedented deal that Trump made with himself after he dropped his faltering $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service. The arrangement included a curious addendum from Blanche, immunizing Trump from further federal prosecution. The government of the United States, Blanche wrote, would be “forever barred and precluded” from pursuing “any and all claims” against Trump, his family, or his business. The fund itself would be used as reparations, paid for by U.S. taxpayers through the Department of Justice, to virtually any right-winger that felt impugned by the previous presidential administration.The idea of the fund fell apart following weeks of backlash, numerous lawsuits, and opposition from even Republican lawmakers, who felt the issue had gummed up party efforts to pass a reconciliation bill.But Trump has refused to let the topic go, repeatedly affirming his support for the supposedly defunct fund.“It is dead, but I wish it weren’t, to be honest with you,” Trump said during a Cabinet meeting on Friday. “I think people were horribly treated, horribly abused.”Trump doubled down on the fund while speaking with reporters on Air Force One Sunday. He said he wanted it to provide “a reimbursement for the pain” his supporters have supposedly endured.“A lot of people like it. A lot of big supporters of Trump like it,” he insisted.Blanche’s efforts to salvage the fund should be viewed as yet more evidence that the fund is not as dead as officials have publicly claimed.“Let’s be clear: It’s more certain that Trump is still pursuing bounties for rioters today than when this started,” wrote legal journalist Adam Klasfeld on Monday. “Trump is openly stating that’s the goal, taking legal action to get there and refusing to do the one thing that would kill it.”Cornyn and Tillis are in the twilight years of their last term in office, after their decades-long careers were cut short by Trump’s decision to endorse another candidate in Texas’s and North Carolina’s GOP primaries. The cut cord has granted the pair the breathing room to ignore larger party directives and push back harder against the Trump administration’s off-color orders, but apparently, they are only willing to take that so far.This story has been updated.
The following is a lightly edited transcript of the August 3 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.Late Sunday, Todd Blanche finally confirmed in writing that the slush fund is officially dead.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 just unleashed two angry, explosive rants at members of his own party, and they were really revealing. It’s clear that Trump is extremely sensitive to perceptions that he’s losing control over the GOP, because he fears it makes him look weak. And in response to all this, one GOP senator dropped a bomb, making a surprising revelation. So here’s a big question: Can Democrats be doing more to exploit these schisms, and more to inflict pain on the GOP over Trump’s cratering public standing?New Republic staff writer Emma Janssen has a new piece reporting on how that might happen. She’s the author of TNR’s new newsletter on D.C. politics, The Blue Book, which you should subscribe to right away. Emma, good to have you on.Emma Janssen: Hi, Greg. Thank you so much for having me. I am a big fan of the podcast, and I’m glad I’m here.Sargent: Thanks so much. OK, so Trump is in a fury with Senator John Cornyn and several others who are holding up Todd Blanche’s nomination to officially become attorney general. The sticking point is that Blanche created this billion-dollar fund as a settlement of Trump’s corrupt fake lawsuit against the IRS, which is supposed to give money to supposed victims of government weaponization and gives Trump and his family tax immunity. These senators want this thing dead for good. Emma, can you just explain this situation and why it’s so important?Janssen: Senator John Cornyn, as well as Senator Thom Tillis, are two crucial votes for pushing forward Todd Blanche as the nominee for attorney general. And they’ve been so far holding out and saying that they won’t vote for Todd Blanche because of this anti-weaponization fund, like you mentioned. The idea behind this fund is very corrupt. It’s to provide financial benefit to January 6-ers. And these two Republican senators have drawn a red line and say that unless they have it in writing that this fund will not move forward and that it’s dead, they cannot vote for Todd Blanche.Sargent: I mean, this thing is a slush fund, right, Emma? All it is is just this huge pile of money that Trump can just hand out to his insurrectionist supporters and to other supporters if he wants. The way it was configured was extraordinarily corrupt. It gave him lots of backdoor control over it. And then the tax shield is even worse. And so these senators are actually taking something of a principled stand here, right?Janssen: They definitely are, kind of shockingly. There are other things about Blanche that they have overlooked and say that his actions—for example, on the Epstein files—have not been great, but they’re willing to sort of overlook that. This slush fund, however, is not something that they will let happen and vote for Blanche.Sargent: So Trump unleashed this wild tirade on Truth Social targeting Cornyn. Trump absurdly claimed that this fund is necessary to reward all the January 6-ers, who he painted as victims and martyrs. Then Trump tore into Cornyn and gloated over his endorsement of Ken Paxton, who defeated Cornyn in the Texas GOP primary. Trump said this: “Millions of people agree with me, as was proven in my landslide presidential win, so did John Cornyn until he lost his election to an opponent that I endorsed. Todd Blanche, a good man, should be immediately approved as U.S. Attorney General.”It was an epic screed, and I think what Trump meant is that millions of people agree that all this money should be handed to January 6-ers. But of course, there’s no way that’s true. Emma, what did you make of all that? Janssen: I think it’s the latest example of how Trump really uses primary elections as a way to force Republicans to comply with his agenda. As he mentioned in that Truth Social post, he endorsed Ken Paxton over John Cornyn, and Cornyn is now leaving the Senate. Of course, that has sort of backfired on him in this situation, now that Cornyn seems to be standing up and asserting a little more independence from Trump’s agenda. But Trump has really been able to force Republicans into compliance with even these ridiculously unpopular policies—slush funds, etc.—because of how he engages with the primaries.Sargent: And now we’re really seeing some shifting here, where Republicans are getting less reluctant to go along with him. You did this piece for The Blue Book, which is The New Republic’s new newsletter—folks, subscribe to this, please—that stepped back and looked at what these tensions really mean. As you detailed in the piece, it’s very clear that Republicans are now at odds with Trump in a new way. There’s the anger over the IRS fund, which Republicans are holding up Blanche over. And the holdup of Blanche is itself a pretty big deal, as evidenced by Trump exploding in such rage. Then there’s the war powers vote. Three Republicans just joined Dems to curb Trump’s war in Iran—Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and Rand Paul. That failed, but still it’s very clear Republicans are now at odds with him over the war, not least because the GOP base is splitting over it and a lot of MAGA influencers have gone their own way. Can you talk about these splits?Janssen: With respect to the war powers resolution, this is the thirteenth time that Democrats have tried to get senators on the record about their support for the Iran war. And it has actually passed once before. Like you mentioned, it didn’t pass this time, but it feels like they’re increasingly getting more and more Republican defectors to come over and vote against the war. When I spoke to some Democratic senators, what they really seem to be focused on are the midterms in November. Because as a minority party, there’s little that they can actually do to advance their agenda, to advance partisan legislation. But they’re hoping that by forcing Republicans to vote for an expensive and unpopular war, they can then weaponize that into electoral victory in November and actual change in the next Congress.Sargent: Well, your piece for The Blue Book points out that Republicans really need distance on the war in particular from Trump, but Trump doesn’t want to let them. And the key here is that that’s unusual. Presidents tend to understand the needs of their own party when they’re holding their party back in a midterm, the way Trump is now. You quoted a political scientist, Seth Masket, who’s very good, saying, “He’s proven that he can end careers.” I think the essence of this here is Trump can’t let Republicans get distance from him, in part because it would require admitting that he’s unpopular and that his war is failing. And he can’t do that. Can you talk about your reporting on that?Janssen: This is a deeply unpopular war. It continues to get more and more unpopular. It is incredibly expensive for average consumers when we’re talking about, obviously, gas. Farmers might be feeling it from fertilizer prices. People who play video games could feel it when the price of their regular everyday electronics go up. And there’s also kind of a humanitarian element. People don’t want to see U.S. soldiers dying in the war. They don’t want to see Iranians dying in the war, etc. But yeah, Trump has this grip on the party and cannot come to terms with the fact that he’s gotten the country into an unpopular war and forced his party to back it.I think that there are some obvious places where we see splits here. This is over on the House side, not the Senate side, but Thomas Massie from Kentucky lost his election. This was a big uproar. When he was running for reelection—he has been a strong opponent of this war, and he’s also been against Trump on other issues, such as the Epstein files—and Trump endorsed against him. And a lot of money, including from AIPAC, was poured in to get his opponent elected, and Massie lost his election. So this is happening in the House, this is happening in the Senate. And Trump has shown that he can get his way by just blunt-force endorsing an opponent in a Republican primary and making sure that money gets funneled into that election. And I think we’re going to keep seeing that. But on the flip side, like we’re seeing with Cornyn and Tillis to some extent, we’re also seeing a bit more independence now that they’ve lost their primaries.Sargent: Yeah, and we should note that Trump has really gloated like crazy over ousting Thomas Massie in a really disgusting way. Trump exploded in another rant, this time at a Republican state Senate leader named Rodric Bray. Trump is still angry because Indiana refused to obey his command that they redraw congressional districts, and Trump backed primaries against all the Republicans who bucked him. Trump gloated here again about ousting Bray, and he said this: “Rodric Bray should be ashamed of himself for costing our country, mainly the Republican Party, two U.S. House seats.” Trump went on to rip Bray as a “FOOL” in capital letters and thanked Indiana GOP voters for their loyalty in ousting Bray, meaning their loyalty to Trump.Emma, I think this is really telling, because, you know, this whole thing with Indiana happened a good while ago already, yet Trump is bringing it up now because he’s so desperate to remind Republicans that he can oust them in primaries—precisely because he’s losing control over them now. Your thoughts on that?Janssen: Yeah, exactly. It’s also notable that we’re getting to the end of primary season. So this major source of power for him to enforce his agenda and elect the people that he wants elected, or make sure that the people he doesn’t like don’t get elected—that might actually be the more important part. That tool for him is disappearing now that the primaries are coming to a close. And so I think it’s exactly what you said. It’s a grip on power. And we might start seeing more resistance from his own party. I mean, I wouldn’t put a ton of money on that, but he’s losing this tool. And that could open up a space for more Republicans to jump ship on a war powers resolution, for example.Sargent: Absolutely. I think there’s a bit of a split screen here that’s worth commenting on for a sec. On the one hand, he really does wield this iron control over Republican primary voters. His record is not one hundred percent perfect, but it’s pretty damn good when it comes to ousting whoever he wants, with whoever comes along and says, Mr. Trump, I’ll run a primary for you. He’s just able to get Republican voters to stampede away from their own representative or senator and go back whoever Trump says they should vote for instead. So, you know, I don’t know how well that reflects on these Republican voters—not very well—but it surely shows that Trump does wield some real power over them.But then on the other hand, he doesn’t have that kind of control over Republican legislators, senators, and even in some cases representatives. And that drives him absolutely crazy. And he can’t stand that. So he won’t let them get distance from him in order to position themselves for the midterms, which they absolutely desperately have to do. I really wonder whether Trump in his head doesn’t understand that the midterm electorate is a different thing than the Republican primary electorate. You know what I mean?Janssen: Yeah, that is a very good point, because Trump is incredibly unpopular. And now that we’re shifting from primaries to general elections, the entire game has changed.Sargent: You were talking to a bunch of Democrats about whether there are openings to drive these wedges and schisms a little deeper. What’s your sense of that? Is there a way to do that? And what are Democrats saying to you about it?Janssen: When I talked to Professor Masket, he made the point that even if Democrats were able to advance a great piece of legislation on whatever—you name it—Trump would just veto it. So there’s not actually much that they can do concretely and materially right now, except just trying to push this messaging game. Trying to force Republicans to get on the record, to take a side, to split with Trump. And then hopefully we’ll see the results of that in November. That’s kind of what I heard over and over again: We’re going to make them defend their positions on the war, we’re going to make them defend the high cost of gas. And if they can’t do it, they’re going to lose their seats.Sargent: And it seems like Democrats have been somewhat effective at forcing Republicans to take votes that they don’t want to take. What’s your sense of that? Do you think they have been?Janssen: Yeah, I think Democrats have been successful, particularly on the issue of the war, at getting Republicans on the record again and again and again. There was a long stretch there when they just kept bringing war powers votes to the table. This is in both chambers—the House was doing this, the Senate was doing this. And the point of it was to just get those “nay” votes from Republicans and be able to point to them later during midterm season, for example, and say, hey, are you upset that your gas is expensive? Well, look what your representative voted for.Sargent: Senator Thom Tillis, who, as you mentioned, is one of the voices trying to kill this thing, really dropped a bomb on Twitter in response to Donald Trump’s crazy screeds today. Tillis said: “The president made it clear today that the so-called anti-weaponization fund is still alive, which is exactly why we are attempting to formally end it.” That’s pretty harsh language. Tillis is saying here, you just revealed, Mr. President, that you’re a corrupt shit, and we’re not going to let you get away with it, basically.And then there’s another line in here where Tillis says that he’s been working with Blanche to end the anti-weaponization fund and praises Blanche’s work on that. But then Tillis adds this: “It’s a shame his confirmation has hit a snag only because an incompetent personal advisor to the president refuses to amend the bogus settlement.” Emma, I mean, that’s really harsh stuff. I think what Tillis is saying here is he’s letting the world know that there’s somebody inside the White House who’s corruptly and in great depravity trying to keep this thing alive against the will of everybody else, right?Janssen: Yeah, that’s how I’m reading it. And I think, importantly, he is definitely leaving open a path for Blanche. He’s not scorching that earth at all. Like you read, he calls Blanche forthright, thoughtful, patient. So I agree—it seems that he is putting blame squarely on someone else, who we don’t know who it is. And he’s kind of framing it as though Blanche is trying to make it work. Trump himself doesn’t seem to want to make it work. He is not certainly being forthright, thoughtful, and patient about this. He has continued throughout the week to say that he wants the fund, even if he is sort of acknowledging that it’s likely dead. So yeah, I wonder who this incompetent personal advisor is. Trump himself doesn’t seem to want to amend the agreement, but it seems like this is a scapegoat situation.Sargent: Yeah. And I think Tillis is sending up a flare to the media saying, “Look into this, people.” There’s somebody in there who’s really acting in an extraordinarily corrupt way, trying to prevent us from ending this thing. And that person is who you should be focused on.Janssen: I agree. That is definitely what it seems like he’s trying to do.Sargent: OK, to close this out, let’s talk about what’s really at stake here, I think. Glenn Thrush of The New York Times had a really good point. Basically, what he said is that the battle is far bigger than about Blanche. What’s actually happening here is that Republicans are, for the first serious time, revolting against something much bigger, which is Trump’s effort to turn DOJ into an extension of his own will, into a corrupt instrument of presidential will, into his own personal team of lawyers who’ll extract pain and revenge on whoever he directs them to go after. And so I think if Republicans actually do hold the line here and force an end to this fund, then something important will have been achieved. I don’t want to get too optimistic about Republicans doing that, but I really do think that if they can kill the fund, it lets Trump know that there are limits to just how much he can corrupt DOJ. What do you think of that?Janssen: I completely agree. I think that there’s a couple of messages that could come out of this, if the line is held by Tillis and Cornyn. Like you said, there’s the message that you can’t actually go this far with the DOJ. Of course, they’re letting some things slide that Democrats certainly wouldn’t. Blanche has been a big part of the effort to conceal the Epstein files, and he spoke with Ghislaine Maxwell in prison, right? There’s a lot that I think is still concerning about Blanche that isn’t related to this slush fund. But it sends that exact message that you mentioned. It also sends the message that Republicans can stand up against Trump and potentially win. Maybe not win their elections, but they can win some public favor and also accomplish the goals that they’re hoping to accomplish.Sargent: Emma Janssen, well said. Folks, make sure to check out Emma’s new newsletter. It’s TNR’s new newsletter on what’s going on inside Washington. It’s good stuff. You need to subscribe. It’s called The Blue Book. Please subscribe, folks. Emma, really nice to talk to you. Thanks so much for coming on.Janssen: Thank you, Greg. I really appreciate you having me, and this was a great conversation.
In September 2021, while yachting in the Mediterranean, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner found paradise. They stopped to refuel their yacht in the Albanian port city of Durrës, around an hour’s drive from the capital, Tirana. Edi Rama, Albania’s prime minister, joined them for dinner. When they met again at Davos, Rama has said, Kushner raved about Albania.“You are an American investor,” Rama recalled telling him. “And this country is open to every American investor.”By 2024, Kushner had announced plans to build a luxury complex on the former military island of Sazan, off Albania’s southern coast, and on nearby beaches. The artist renderings posted to Instagram depicted villas cascading down rocky slopes, their organic facades undulating against the face of the cliff. Most of the development is intended for the mainland, rather than the island. Initial documents from 2025 sketched out more than 2,500 units of one to seven bedrooms, along with a yacht club and marina for 350 superyachts (“up to and over 100 meters,” or 328 feet), a casino, an “equestrian center,” an 18-hole golf course, a nearly one-million-square-foot water park, and a shopping and leisure hub called the “Citadel.”Local residents heard about the project on the news. For nearly two decades, they had been caught in property disputes over the same stretch of coastline with a mysterious Miami-based developer whom prosecutors and investigators had linked to organized crime. They immediately sent a letter to Affinity Partners, Kushner’s private equity firm, requesting compensation or a halt to the project until the property disputes could be resolved. They heard nothing back.In late January 2026, a colonnade of black cars wound through the villages on the mainland across from Sazan, where, in the ecologically protected Vjosë-Nartë delta, the construction is planned. Ivanka was conducting a site visit, during which residents were instructed to stay in their homes. Later, she dined with Rama in nearby Vlorë. In late April, trucks appeared along one of the delta’s rugged beaches. The coast at that time of year is windy and wet, and mist is common over the lagoon as migratory birds return for the spring. Soon bulldozers and excavators came to lay gravel for a new road. By May 12, local shepherds, who regularly take their sheep to the area to graze, noticed that deep holes had been dug along the perimeter of the beach. A fence suddenly appeared.For local villagers, the fence was a clear signal that whoever put it up had no intention of grinding out property disputes in court before building. After all, this was how many projects across Albania had begun. Once the churn of development begins, it rarely stops.By the end of the month, as the weather turned warm enough for summer tourists to begin arriving, a barbed wire perimeter replaced the fence. Residents from the surrounding area came to protest, including a man who was dragged along the road by private security and punched repeatedly in the neck. Later, he told reporters that his mouth filled with blood as he was beaten. He has since been in Greece, where he works to send money home to support his sick mother and paralyzed brother.After a recording of the assault went viral in Albania, protesters arrived in Tirana’s streets en masse. They came from across the ideological spectrum, united by the belief that this project was an example of politically connected development that repeatedly trumped protections meant to safeguard Albanian citizens. Grievances included years of disputed land seizures, ecological destruction, corruption, crumbling public services, and poor infrastructure. Protests have since continued daily, with estimated attendance reaching as high as the tens of thousands.Soon they were calling for a new direction for the country and a new government. The movement has been dubbed the “Flamingo Revolution,” a reference to the flamingos that feed in the protected lagoon. Conservationists say the project would sacrifice one of the Mediterranean’s last surviving untouched wetlands—largely preserved by decades of communist isolation—by loosening environmental protections to clear the way for construction. It would threaten a fragile habitat not only for flamingos but also for more than 70 other endangered species, including loggerhead sea turtles, Dalmatian pelicans, and Mediterranean monk seals.The day after the protests in Tirana began, Ivanka Trump appeared on a YouTube channel hosted by the business influencer David Senra, extolling the virtues of the planned project. “We have five miles of beachfront directly across from the island, this beautiful peninsula with a lagoon on one side, the ocean on the other,” she said. “We developed the opportunity to help realize its potential and transform it, but with a lot of restraint and care because the land is so beautiful.”She also spoke about plans for Sazan, Albania’s largest island, which lies at the meeting point of the Adriatic and Ionian seas. During a brief period of Italian fascist control of Albania, Benito Mussolini built a villa there. Under the communist regime that followed, it was made into a highly fortified military outpost. Closed to the public for decades, the island now receives tour boats that depart regularly from the city of Vlorë, carrying visitors past abandoned military installations and ashore among thousands of decaying “mushroom” bunkers left behind by the paranoid communist dictator Enver Hoxha. There is no running water; sanctioned trails wind through scrub, where several healthy populations of venomous Mediterranean snakes live among rusting military debris and shattered concrete. In an area known to local sailors as “Hell’s Gorge,” unexploded artillery shells and anti-submarine mines remain scattered in the surrounding waters.“We were on a friend’s boat, and we stopped for a swim,” Ivanka told Senra. “Effectively, that’s how we found it. We swam to the island. We went on a hike, barefoot all the way, up to the top. And we were just captivated.”Sazan Island may have entered the Kushners’ founding myth by chance. As a former military outpost, it remained public land, still patrolled by a small rotating military contingent. But the environmentally protected coastline along Vlorë Bay, around which many of the protests are centered, was sold.The seller was Artur Shehu, who transferred the land for €110 million to Albania Land Development, a project-specific company within a byzantine multilayered holding structure linked to the Ivanka-Kushner development project. After a stint in Albania’s special forces in the 1990s, Shehu owned a hotel and built a casino in Vlorë. In 1997, the country dissolved into near anarchy when nationwide pyramid schemes collapsed and some 700,000 weapons entered civilian hands. Shehu fled the country two years later, when his uncle and brother were killed in a shoot-out at a bar he owned. He continued to conduct business from Miami, where he has lived since 2005. For years, Albanian authorities have alleged that, via an intermediary, Shehu used fraudulent documents to claim ownership of hundreds of hectares of coastal property, including land claimed by some 300 other local families.According to documents recently obtained and analyzed by the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network, or BIRN, one of Shehu’s property claims was based on an Ottoman-language document from around 1900, at the tail end of the Ottoman period, purportedly proving that his ancestor “owned thousands of square metres of forest and grazing land.” The ownership claim, in other words, ultimately relies on a document that only a handful of modern experts familiar with a bureaucratic world that died 100 years ago could interpret. The case files say that once landownership was secured, Shehu further subdivided and transferred ownership through various means, “with the aim of obscuring their origin and making tracing more difficult.”Shehu’s alleged intermediary in securing the land was sentenced in 2018 to three years in prison for the fraudulent acquisition of 187 hectares of land in Zvërnec, near the Ivanka-Kushner development, according to reporting in 2021 by the Miami Herald and the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, or OCCRP. The case, however, has since continued to bounce between courts; it remains hotly contested.From the outside, determining the legitimacy of a land claim can seem like an intractable tangle of Ottoman deeds, unreliable courts, and endless litigation. For the families caught up in these claims, the questions are ancestral and personal.I met Agron Hyseni, a contractor and developer in Vlorë who goes by Goni, and his cousin Hyrie Luzaj, who goes by Coco, at Goni’s bar in the newly reconstructed old town of Vlorë. Sitting across from them was Bareq Sadiraj, the “mayor,” or kryetar, of Kaninë, which overlooks Vlorë from the nearby mountainside. They are all from Kaninë, where Shehu is also from, and told me they had known him and his family their whole lives.All agreed that the development promised by the Ivanka-Kushner resort was the best thing that could happen to Vlorë. Infrastructure would come in the form of developed roads and a revitalization of Vlorë’s languishing airport. Sadiraj mostly ignored my presence, except to show me an AI rendering of a glass and steel building in the shape of an enormous two-headed eagle, the national symbol of Albania, towering over the turquoise waters of what I presumed to be the Narta Lagoon, where the resort is planned. The image bore no resemblance to the renderings I’d seen, but he thought it was a cool idea.The group believed that the land sold to the Ivanka-Kushner development indisputably belonged to Shehu. Because their families go back generations, they suggested, they simply know the property claims are correct. A question about what should happen to the families who also claim the land that Shehu sold to the Ivanka-Kushner development project elicited a groan from the table.“Everyone knows where everyone’s land is,” Coco explained. “Everyone knows it’s Shehu’s land. It’s not a secret.” In 1991, as Albania’s communist regime was collapsing, Coco was 15. She left Albania for San Diego, where she lived for much of the past 35 years before recently returning to her birth country. She, too, is embroiled in a land dispute. Acting as an interpreter between me, Goni, and Sadiraj, she nearly exploded at the mention of Law 7501, the regulation that redistributed land previously confiscated by the state to the people living and working on it.“It is a disgusting law,” she said. “It has meant that I haven’t been able to get back my land—my ancestral land!”A great deal of the confusion over land disputes in Albania can be traced back to Law 7501. Under communism, private property was nationalized, and much of it converted to collective farms. Law 7501 attempted to return land to those working it rather than to its pre-communist owners, while later laws sought to compensate those expropriated by the regime. The result was a palimpsest of overlapping claims, a mess compounded by poor records, uneven enforcement, and mass emigration. A vulnerable legal system was left to answer what should be a simple question: Who owns what?Law 7501 has meant that for Albanians like Coco, whose family were prominent landowners before the communist period, land restitution has been a question of inheritance. They see themselves not as elites but as victims and insist that their families paid dearly under the regime. Coco recollected packaging tobacco as a young child to help her mother on a collective farm and being refused a glass of milk for her ill grandmother. Goni said he had no childhood, only labor. In their view, post-communist Albania never truly broke with the country’s communist past—they believe that former communist elites simply reconstructed themselves as new political elites while denying restitution to families whose land had been confiscated. To landowning families, today’s corruption is not a recent phenomenon but the continuation of an unfinished tradition.Goni and Coco told me that I had misunderstood Shehu and the land issue by listening to protesters and prosecutors. They offered to take me to Kaninë to show me where his land is.Two days later, we met at the same bar. Driving through Vlorë, construction was everywhere. Cranes loomed, and it was rare to drive more than a minute or two before spotting a skeletal concrete stack of boxes that may, someday, become a usable building. This is a common sight across Albania, especially in Vlorë, which, as the gateway to a stretch of pristine beaches called the “Albanian Riviera,” has seen a massive construction boom under Rama.Driving from Vlorë into the steep hills where Kaninë sits, I had an immense view of the city. Its patchwork construction interrupts whole neighborhoods, while skyscrapers sprout from the ground like weeds.We stopped at a marble fountain carved into the hillside. It read SH D KANINË 12.11.1924, and Goni and Coco said it was evidence that this was Shehu land.Driving on, we reached a castle at the top of the mountain. It sat in ruins, its stone walls crumbled to nubs. A bulldozer puttered back and forth behind us as we walked along the ramparts. Reconstruction of the castle had been ongoing for the last year.“Whoever owned the castle owned all the land they could see in their view,” Coco said, translating for Goni. “That’s how it used to work.”As we drove back down into Vlorë, Coco said she wanted to drive past her own family’s land. If she were able to reclaim it, she said, she would use it to build homes for her family and develop the rest. She had been navigating the issue of ownership since returning to Albania from San Diego a year and a half ago.“Every time I pass by, I think: Oh I want to have a home here, I want to have a home there,” Coco said. “It’s such a wild beauty.”It really was. Every view was a dream landscape unlike any I’d ever seen. Soaring mountains plunged into turquoise waters. Vines blanketed fences and walls. Despite the ubiquitous construction, so much of Albania felt remarkably untamed.After winding down the mountain switchbacks, we were back at the gorgeous beachfront. Driving along the Lungomare, the palm-lined waterfront promenade that has become Vlorë’s showpiece for tourism and development, Goni stuck his hand out of his Land Rover. “All of this,” he said—he gestured broadly, from the water to several buildings back—“all of this is Shehu land.”To our right, as we drove, stretched Vlorë Bay and Sazan Island, which the Kushners have acquired at zero taxes for 99 years during development while the Albanian state takes care of water, electricity, and sewage. (Rama has insisted that this project is “a private deal between private parties which the Albanian government has nothing to do [with].”) To our left, apartment buildings in varying conditions and states of construction stretched back up onto the base of the hills.Directly abutting Shehu’s land is Coco’s family’s land. “But we cannot get it, there are other families there,” she said. “I pass by and I look at it and I see other people on my property.”Coco showed me the parcel of land that she has been able to reclaim. It is only a small portion of what rightly belongs to her family, she said. We passed one- or two-story homes with fences made from naked brick or concrete. Satellite dishes and clotheslines with bedsheets drying in the sun covered makeshift porches, and bougainvillea spilled over walls in pink and purple cascades.Suddenly, we arrived at a fence surrounding an enormous pit. On the fence were renderings of two sinuous towers of glass and steel labeled LUZAJ TOWERS. Luzaj is Coco’s family name. The development’s website describes the buildings as “fluid, organic forms—resembling amoeba-like silhouettes—elegantly rising above a solid, monolithic plinth.” Just a few hundred feet from the seaside, the structure’s “elevated design maximizes sea and mountain views” from the 23 stories planned.“Imagine, we could have built 10 of those,” Coco said. “Is it fair that it is given to other people and you own none of it?”I didn’t know the answer to that question. It doesn’t seem like anyone in Albania does.There was another reason Albanians viewed the Ivanka-Kushner project differently from an ordinary investment. It wasn’t simply that it was foreign capital. It was that it was American.On June 22, 1991, just a week and a half after the communist party that had ruled since 1944 officially dissolved, an American motorcade wove its way through Albania’s capital city. U.S. Secretary of State James Baker was making the first high-level official visit to the country, and as he and his team drove through the city, the streets seemed strangely empty. But soon, on the city’s outskirts, American flags began to appear. People crowded the cars, threw flowers, and kissed the windshields. Some even tried to carry Baker’s limousine toward Tirana.An estimated 300,000 people crammed into the central Skanderbeg Square, designed to accommodate 200,000 as the principal venue for communist ceremonies. Under Enver Hoxha, Albania had been one of the most isolated countries on Earth. Foreign travel was nearly impossible, Western broadcasts were jammed, and private property long forgotten. America existed less as a country than as an idea. When Baker arrived, he was greeted by a banner draped across the Palace of Culture that featured the Statue of Liberty and read: “Welcome Mr. Baker, Albania has been waiting for you for 50 years.”Baker responded, “America is returning to you,” as the crowd cheered for freedom, prosperity, and hope.Many Albanians of a certain age recall the idea of Baker arriving with a “blank check” that would underwrite Albania’s reentry into the world after near total isolation. But actual aid was far more paltry than anticipated, and the transition to capitalism proved harsher than imagined. (One contemporaneous article about the visit stated that Baker ultimately signed off on just $6 million in aid, half of it in powdered milk.)Despite the relative meagerness of that gift, for most Albanians, the United States as a symbol of competence and leadership endures. Even in the protests in Tirana today, it is common to see protesters carrying American flags alongside the Albanian double-headed eagle. According to Gallup polls, Albania has remained one of the most steadfastly pro-American places in the world, typically ranking only behind neighboring Kosovo—which is 90 percent ethnic Albanian.Jared Kushner arrived in Albania not simply as an investor, but as the beneficiary of more than three decades of accumulated American goodwill. Many protesters I spoke to felt that Kushner’s American fame was used as a means of selling the project to Albanians.This is all to say that Kushner arrived in Albania not simply as an investor, but as the beneficiary of more than three decades of accumulated American goodwill. Many protesters I spoke to felt that Kushner’s American fame was used as a means of selling the project to Albanians; it was seen not as an uncomfortable inconvenience but as an asset.In other words, it’s not so much that the dream of the United States has disappeared in Albania; it’s more that it has mutated. If in 1991 Baker embodied an America of diplomacy, democratic aspiration, and public institutions, in 2026, Kushner represents an America whose primary instrument is private capital. In place of diplomacy is “dealmaking.” And Albanians no longer believe that anyone will offer aid without asking for something in return. “No one does anything for nothing,” I recall Coco telling me.Kushner is notoriously publicity-shy, so scrying his mind is a different challenge than it is with his father-in-law. But he has quietly become one of the most revealing characters of Trump’s foreign policy, both when he was in the administration and now that he works outside it as a special adviser. And the basic idea that investment is statecraft and statecraft is investment seems to be the governing rationale of his geopolitics. Speaking at a conference in Miami earlier this year, he remarked that “all countries should have a business plan.” He added, “Why don’t countries do that?”It is an illuminating theory of government. It also says something about why Kushner seems to be constantly shuttled off to negotiate this or that crisis, which often have wildly different histories and contexts: For Kushner, every problem boils down to business. But one obvious counter to the question he poses is that countries are not companies. Or at least democratic ones aren’t. Unlike corporations, democracies are not usually organized around a single goal; they balance them. Employees do not vote on the direction of the company or its leader the way a citizen does for their country, and governments cannot simply pursue the highest return without also asking who and what bears the cost. A coastline may be more valuable as a luxury resort than as a protected area for wildlife or the rightful land of a handful of villagers. That alone doesn’t mean it should become one.Kushner’s vision extends well beyond Albania, and has a funny way of being regurgitated by President Donald Trump, albeit in his own idiom. Speaking at Harvard in 2024, Kushner described the Gazan waterfront as “very valuable” and suggested moving civilians to a bulldozed location in the Negev desert while developers would “clean up” the strip. A year later, at a press conference with Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump suggested that the United States would “take over” and redevelop it into “the Riviera of the Middle East.” Later, he shared a fever dream, AI-generated, rage-bait video of “Trump Gaza” that featured golden Trump heads and children dancing on a gleaming beachfront as dollars rained from the sky.And it’s possible that Trump’s penchant for hotels has rubbed off on Kushner as well. This is the first international hotel the Kushners have publicly backed, although there was an attempt at building one in Serbia, too—on the site of the 1999 NATO bombing of the former Yugoslav Ministry of Defense, which stands in decay as an informal memorial and a reminder of U.S. interventionism in the region, albeit from the opposite political vantage of Albania’s. Kushner halted the project after several senior officials were charged with corruption.In his first term, Trump said that he would cease inking new deals on branded resorts in foreign countries and would cede control of the Trump Organization to his sons Eric and Don Jr. He declared that legally he “didn’t have to do that,” but would anyway for the sake of optics against foreign influence. In Trump 2.0, the Trump Organization has explicitly abandoned that restriction. According to Forbes, Trump’s foreign licensing and development business has grown 900 percent.But why hotels? Why is a luxury resort more of a nation-building project than, say, a semiconductor factory, a logistics hub, or a hospital? For Trump, the answer might be simple. To build a “big beautiful hotel” is to say something like, “This place is fixed now.” If a country can sustain a luxury resort, it signals that disorder has ended—that it has become habitable not just for those who live there, but for those wealthy enough to choose anywhere else. What does a luxury property promise if not a life of leisure, free from the friction of labor, strife, or conflict? For Kushner, the answer may be even simpler: A hotel offers the cool logic of an optimized asset.“After Jared announced the deal, the prices of real estate in Vlorë had a visible jump,” Rama said, speaking to the Financial Times, arguing that an investment of more than €4 billion into a country with a total GDP of a little more than €29 billion was self-justifying. “We need super luxury in this country like the desert needs water. What you gain from 500 yachts is the same as from 40,000 budget tourists.”In a July 2024 interview with Kushner, veteran Italian journalist Marzio Mian reported that Kushner said the project wasn’t exactly for everyone, despite Kushner’s business partner Asher Abehsera’s insistence that “everyone should have the opportunity to visit the island.” Kushner, according to Mian, seemed skeptical of that idea. “We’re creating a very, very high-end luxury product,” he said. “One of the most compelling points about the island is the ability to have privacy.”Kushner, even as he remains one of Trump’s most unusually empowered advisers, certainly values his own privacy. Despite rarely explaining himself to the press, during the first Trump administration, Kushner presided over a portfolio that stretched from criminal justice reform to Covid vaccinations. But he became most closely associated with Middle East diplomacy. His “Peace to Prosperity” program, a $50 billion economic plan unveiled in Bahrain in 2019, hinged on the premise that investment in commercial and tourist infrastructure could create the conditions for peace in the Israel-Palestine conflict. In a 2021 op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, Kushner wrote that the Abraham Accords, arguably his most lauded diplomatic success, had exposed the Israel-Palestine conflict as “nothing more than a real-estate dispute.”Beyond the Middle East and back in the Balkans, Kushner also played a role in normalizing economic relations between Serbia and Kosovo. To do so, the administration reportedly leaned heavily on the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation, or DFC, colloquially called by some in development-finance circles “the bank of Jared,” which was created in 2019 to encourage private-sector investment in developing countries.Whether in the Middle East or the Balkans, Kushner has repeatedly treated economic development not simply as a consequence of peace but as a tool for producing it. When the American dream in the form of Baker arrived in Tirana, Albanians imagined a blank check; instead, they received a few million dollars and shipments of powdered milk. Nevertheless, Baker’s statement that “America is returning” revealed itself to be true in one sense. Three decades later, a proxy for another U.S. administration has arrived with an actual investment proposal whose scale, at least on paper, outstrips anything Washington ever contemplated.Kushner did not have to persuade Rama that development could transform a nation. Rama had spent years advancing his own version of that vision. But Kushner’s proposal alone could not explain why it found such an enthusiastic champion in the prime minister. To understand that, I needed to better understand the city he had spent more than a decade remaking.If there is a single fact Prime Minister Rama wants the world to know about him, it is that he is an artist. “People can lecture me on many things—economics, legal affairs, agriculture, or health care—but there is one thing no one can lecture me on, and that is beauty,” Rama said, speaking to a reporter at Deutsche Welle.After training as a painter in Paris, Rama became Albania’s minister of culture in 1998; he was mayor of Tirana from 2000 to 2011. As mayor, Rama transformed the city. Since becoming prime minister in 2013, he has treated architecture, design, and ambitious development as a cornerstone of economic growth and as a mechanism for reimagining Albania’s place in the world.Between 2015 and 2025, Tirana alone approved nearly 10 million square meters (107.6 million square feet) of new construction. That’s roughly the equivalent of building 30 One World Trade Centers. Meanwhile, emigration remains high, as tens of thousands of Albanians continue to leave each year to seek economic opportunities abroad. This kind of construction is happening across the country, in Vlorë as much as in Tirana. Who is all of this being built for? And how is any of it making any money?To explore these questions, I went on a walking tour with Redi Muçi, a young MP who has been in Parliament since last year, after leaving his post as a lecturer in engineering at the Polytechnic University of Tirana. Muçi got involved in activism in 2011, when, as a newly appointed university lecturer, he stepped out of his offices to join protests against Sali Berisha, then the prime minister, who had been implicated in several corruption scandals. When protesters clashed with police outside the prime minister’s office, the police opened fire. Four people were killed and dozens more injured. Muçi is now the only elected MP out of 140 seats to represent the “Together Movement,” a leftist party formed in 2022 from people involved in student and youth activism.We met in Tirana near two enormous 25-story towers that dwarfed the surrounding buildings. There was a café called Mr. Chef and a dental parlor. According to Muçi, the site once housed a natural history museum, which was left to decay in the 1990s and 2000s. The road in front of it, by contrast, “is the same as it was 80 years ago,” Muçi said, only with more traffic. Most of the apartments are empty because normal Albanians cannot afford them. “This is typical,” Muçi said.Mass construction with murky financing is common across Albania. In addition to allegedly using falsified documents to obtain the land that will be used for the Ivanka-Kushner resort outside Vlorë, Shehu has been named in an ongoing investigation by Albania’s Special Prosecutor’s Office Against Corruption, or SPAK. On June 10, SPAK announced 20 arrest warrants, froze more than €128 million in assets, and ordered the seizure of properties across Tirana and the southern Albanian coast. A SPAK court filing, summarizing information gathered by Belgian authorities, cited Shehu’s direct contact with Alfredo Hamzai, who was convicted in Belgium in a narcotics-trafficking case, and Shehu’s international travel “to participate in meetings for the purpose of organizing narcotics trafficking” as evidence that Shehu holds “a leadership position” in trafficking networks. (There is no reason to believe Kushner or Ivanka had knowledge of these allegations before purchasing the land. Neither Rama, Affinity Partners, nor Abehsera, Kushner’s operating partner, responded to requests for comment. A spokesperson for the development project said that, contrary to widespread reporting, Affinity Partners is not connected to it, and that Kushner and Ivanka are involved in their personal capacities. In answer to detailed questions, Shehu’s lawyer responded, “OK.”)As we walked toward Skanderbeg Square, where Baker had stood amid a cheering crowd 35 years before, Muçi pointed out a troubling construction project every few hundred feet. There was a 60-story, half-completed building whose construction was halted due to the project’s links with drug trafficking. Another had illegally built an additional seven stories. A national theater was demolished to make way for skyscrapers. Construction on a building meant to be the tallest in the Balkans was halted, again, due to links with drug traffickers.“I think it’s a way to transform the city, to give the aura of wealth or progress,” Muçi said. He explained that foreign investment in Albania is “very, very low, almost zero,” and cited a long list of issues that would be concerning for an investor. “Unresolved property rights, a monopolized economy that benefits so-called strategic investors, a low workforce because young people are leaving, and a host of other issues which make it not worth it, even if you’re an investor who wants to come invest here.”We arrived in Skanderbeg Square, where Albanians had come to protest nightly for a month. Dominating the square was a skyscraper whose balconies form a familiar outline.“Is it a face?” I asked.It was supposed to be Skanderbeg, the medieval nobleman who became Albania’s national hero for resisting the Ottomans in the fifteenth century. “But everybody feels that this is Edi Rama’s facial features,” Muçi explained, “who wants to immortalize himself with this building.”We counted five cranes from our view in the square. “Will these buildings be filled with rich people who have invested?” Muçi asked. “I don’t see that happening; it is only a means of transforming the facade. It is a means of money laundering and drug trafficking, but the mere fact that all these apartments remain empty, it shows that it is not for Albanians.” For land disputes, state protection is limited. “You can go to court, but nothing comes out of it,” Muçi explained.Much of this construction was made possible by the introduction of Rama’s “strategic investment” framework of laws in 2015, which were expanded in 2024. Rather than waiting for every dispute to be resolved before construction began, the state increasingly treated private development as a matter of public interest.The existence of these kinds of laws is not inherently remarkable. The United States has eminent domain, and many European countries have versions of mechanisms that acquire land or expedite projects in the public interest. “In a normal property system, this might simply be a development incentive,” wrote Elton Dusha, an economist in Tirana with the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, in the magazine Peizazhe të Fjalës. “In Albania’s system, where ownership is often unresolved, it becomes much more powerful.” Once a project receives strategic status, like the Ivanka-Kushner resort, “the state … puts its weight behind the investor before land disputes have been fully resolved.” And this weight essentially flows directly from the Strategic Investment Committee, established by Rama and chaired by Rama himself.It helps explain why fences and bulldozers typically arrive as a first step in construction projects in Albania, while hundreds of families still insist the land is theirs. Under the strategic investment framework, the existence of competing claims is no longer, by itself, enough to halt development. Because the underlying property law, 7501, is vague, and the strategic investment framework gives sweeping powers to push through large projects, “the government becomes the end-all and be-all of economic activity,” Dusha told me in a phone call. “If Kushner is just some guy with no connection to the government, he is a nobody.”“Everything somehow functions outside the legal boundaries of what’s permissible and what’s not,” Muçi said. “Construction starts, it becomes a fact, and then the whole administration and the paperwork is in the service of what has already happened.” But serious investors generally want rule of law; they want limited risk on their investments. “If the property rights are not sold ... the only way to make it worth investing is if you contact the prime minister directly and somehow arrange it.”“This is why it’s so hard to attract foreign investors in Albania,” he said, “because who would want to play by these rules?”What Typically deters investment is uncertainty: disputed ownership, weak courts, and the possibility that political connections matter more than legal rights. For many investors, those conditions in Albania make it a risky place to do business. But Ivanka and Kushner are not most investors. Kushner arrives with not only private capital, but private capital backed by extraordinary political access; the prime minister has personally championed his project. The risks that might discourage an ordinary developer can look very different to someone whose relationship with the state is anything but ordinary.The novelty is not that Kushner, as a representative of the Trump administration, mixes business and foreign policy. It is that, under Trump, business is the foreign policy. Thirty-five years ago, the United States encouraged Albania to build institutions that could withstand the pressures of powerful individuals. Kushner has a different goal. The novelty is not that Kushner, as a representative of the Trump administration, mixes business and foreign policy. It is that, under Trump, business is the foreign policy. And it’s a business that chafes against the restraints states typically put in place to prevent the powerful from simply taking what they want.While I was in Albania, a pink coffee-table book was released with a foreword by Rama. The Albanian Files, as it’s called, documents more than a decade of architectural projects by internationally renowned architects Rama brought in. In his foreword, Rama describes what draws the “world’s most visionary architects” to his country. It is “something alive, something unrepeatable.” But it is also that Albania is “still free from the suffocating comfort of overregulation” and offers “a freedom from ‘no’ in all its forms.”After our tour of Kaninë, Coco and Goni took me to lunch at Shehu’s resort on the water. We walked a literal red carpet through a poolside patio to our table. The seats were tan and plush, the tables an elegant natural stone. A vanishing-edge pool looked out over the sea, Sazan Island in the middle of our view.The chefs clearly knew us, and we were offered a lavish off-menu feast that blended old and new Albanian cuisine. I requested a glass of white wine. No one asked what kind, and the correct one simply arrived. Cubes of polenta artfully arranged with peppers, cheese, and marinated anchovies appeared, along with more courses of purple shrimp carpaccio, grilled squid in ink, black truffle pasta, ravioli with lamb ragu, and an elevated sultjash—traditional rice pudding with cinnamon. We finished the meal with an enormous plate of perfect fruits on a bed of ice, condensation pilling on their skins.“You are sitting at the table Ivanka sat at,” Goni told me.I asked what made them proud to be Albanian. Coco smiled as she translated. “We get down but we get back up, bigger and stronger,” she said. She took a second to laugh. “Kind of like Trump!”Then Coco put it another way. America, she said, was Albania’s “big brother,” and the former regime looms large.“The whole perception of the regime had a counterweight in the U.S.,” Muçi later told me. “People in Albania are not protesting because the U.S. wants to take away Sazan Island. It’s been happening across Albania for a long time. And we feel that Ivanka and Jared are there to pink-wash this typical Albanian thing.”As of now, protests notwithstanding, the Ivanka-Kushner project is still happening. Rama has vowed to press on. “I was voted to make these things happen,” he said. “I’m not voted to be led by people that have a different idea of how to develop the country.” He has insisted that the resort could be open to visitors by the end of the decade.At the pool, Coco and Goni told me that the allegations against Shehu were false. They said that, despite years of scrutiny from law enforcement, investigators had never been able to pin anything on Shehu. Everyone was looking, no one had found anything, and no one gets away with a crime with no traces. I didn’t know what to say. Getting away with illegal activity sounded like the definition of organized crime to me.Goni asked me who I thought owned the pool behind us. Shehu, I presumed. “No, it belongs to the city of Vlorë,” he said. It has an entry fee, of course, but technically it is publicly owned.I saw families lounging, speaking French, German, English, and Italian. Someone getting a scuba lesson bobbed in the water. The atmosphere was rarefied and opulent. I had a hard time imagining how locals might think the pool was accessible, let alone built for them.Beyond the pool, a half-finished concrete structure jutted out into the sea. A fence had been put up at its entrance. As I watched, a group of teen boys casually climbed it and walked out to where the water was deeper. They took turns jumping into the clear water below. For now, I thought, this place still belonged to them.