Politics | The Atlantic

The Northern Passage

2026-09-21T06:00:00-04:00

Photographs by Christopher Gregory-Rivera

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Updated at 12:25 p.m. ET on September 21, 2026

The message from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services arrived on August 7 as Jeanne was finishing up her shift at a restaurant in the suburbs of Charlotte, North Carolina. Her legal status in the United States had been terminated. Her work permit was no longer valid. Jeanne immediately switched off the location-tracking on her phone. What if ICE was already looking for her? What if she was deported back to Haiti?

Five years in the United States had brought her physical safety but nagging stress. Jeanne, who asked me not to use her real name, arrived in the United States in July 2021 to visit family on a short-term visa. She had been mugged on the streets of Port-au-Prince a few months earlier, and gangs were taking over more of the city. The Biden administration had recently expanded Temporary Protected Status for Haitians—offering provisional residency, protection from deportation, and work permits—citing the country’s deteriorating security. Two days after Jeanne arrived, Haitian President Jovenel Moïse was assassinated in his bedroom. Jeanne overstayed her visa, applied for TPS, and tried to begin a new life in North Carolina. But she could never really settle in, she told me.

As President Trump campaigned to return to the White House, he promised the largest immigration crackdown in history—and repeated false rumors about Haitian migrants in Ohio eating pets. Soon after he returned to office, he canceled TPS protections for Haiti, and Jeanne lost her job. She was scared to leave her home and had to drain her savings to pay bills. After a federal judge blocked Trump’s move in February 2026, effectively reinstating TPS, she got her job back. But in June, the Supreme Court sided with Trump, and when the ruling took effect last month, Jeanne was among the roughly 300,000 Haitians who could no longer work legally and faced possible arrest and deportation by ICE. Jeanne looked for advice online, finding mostly fear and despair. Her relatives urged her to head north and stay with her brother in Canada.

Canada’s asylum rules allow migrants with close family members to enter the country and seek protection, but Jeanne worried about making the 900-mile journey to the border. She had read that ICE officers and Border Patrol agents were checking buses and trains, asking for papers. A friend gave her the number of a driver, who charged $700 for the one-way trip. “I was praying, crying, anxious, stressed. I couldn’t eat or drink or anything,” she told me last week as we sat at a Tim Hortons doughnut shop in the Montreal suburb of Laval. Safely making it to Canada seemed like her only option. The violence in Haiti was unrelenting; her social-media feeds were filled with stories about two girls who had been kidnapped by an armed gang on their way to school.

The drive took nearly 22 hours. At the border, Canadian officers allowed her to cross into Quebec. She arrived with “almost nothing,” she told me, and she felt immediate relief. Her brother arrived an hour later to pick her up. She was lucky. For other Haitians fleeing ICE, the only route into Canada is a path through the woods.

Christopher Gregory-Rivera for The Atlantic

A small border-crossing station in Churubusco, New York.

I arrived in Montreal two days after President Trump published a cartoon image of himself holding a hockey stick over a cowering Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney. It felt like a new low point, but a bilateral relationship between two countries that are so extensively intertwined has many ways to get worse. The 5,525-mile boundary they share—the longest international land border in the world—is an obvious place for friction. Long celebrated for its openness and permeability, it’s been tightening up from tariffs and declining cross-border tourism. Some prominent Republicans, including Ohio nominee for governor Vivek Ramaswamy and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, have previously called for the construction of a northern border wall to stop drugs and migrants from Canada. But Trump’s mass-deportation campaign is now sending some migrants, especially Haitians, in the opposite direction.

[Read: The ‘big black scar’]

The number of ICE arrests surged to 50,000 a month this summer, the highest level ever. ICE remains behind on the White House’s goal to deport 1 million immigrants a year, and MAGA hard-liners want Trump to further intensify the crackdown. Haitians who arrived during the Biden administration are an easy target. Some of the 300,000 who lost their TPS status were among the more than 200,000 who the Biden administration allowed to enter the United States between 2021 and 2024 using the president’s humanitarian parole authority, which the Trump administration revoked soon after he returned to office. ICE already has their addresses, phone numbers, and fingerprints and other biometric information in its files. They are much easier to find than someone who slipped across the border undetected and doesn’t show up in federal databases.

It’s difficult to predict how many Haitians may try crossing into Canada as ICE ramps up operations. Haitians without close family members in Canada who arrive at the land border are generally ineligible to seek asylum, and in August, Canadian authorities rejected 133 asylum seekers at official crossings from the United States, the highest one-month total this year, according to Canadian government data. Those who are deemed ineligible are turned over to U.S. Customs and Border Protection and typically transferred to ICE.

Since August 20, when the United States resumed deportation flights to Haiti, ICE has sent five planeloads of deportees, totaling nearly 500 people. Security conditions in Haiti remain so poor that the Federal Aviation Administration has prohibited U.S. aircraft from landing in Port-au-Prince, the capital. ICE has been dropping off deportees in Cap-Haïtien, the country’s second-largest city, forcing those with homes or family in the capital to travel across the country through highway checkpoints controlled by gangs.

Canadian authorities declined to tell me how many Haitians they’ve intercepted trying to illegally cross the border since the TPS termination took effect. Haitians are already the leading group of asylum seekers in Canada, according to Canadian government data. Viles Dorsainvil, the director of the Haitian Support Center, an immigrant aid group in Springfield, Ohio, told me that most Haitians he’s spoken with who have lost their legal status are terrified of ICE but unsure of what to do next. About three dozen people he knows have already been taken into ICE custody and sent to detention centers, and many others have upcoming “check-in” appointments that require them to report to ICE offices. “Folks are stuck at home, not able to go to work, with their power service and water being shut off,” Dorsainvil told me. Some are thinking about leaving for Canada, he said, but aren’t sure how to get there safely.

Asylum rules along the U.S.-Canada border are governed by the “Safe Third Country” agreement between the two nations, first signed in 2002, which requires anyone seeking refuge to apply in the country where they first arrive. It prevents someone who fails to qualify in the United States from making a second attempt in Canada, and vice versa. The rules mean that asylum seekers interdicted along the U.S.-Canada border can be quickly sent back, without access to immigration courts.

During Trump’s first term, thousands of migrants who feared arrest in the United States crossed into Canada, often through an unofficial crossing point, Roxham Road, where Canadian border authorities had set up a makeshift processing station. Canada shut down the Roxham Road crossing in 2023 as a public backlash built. In March, the Canadian Parliament passed a bill that further restricted asylum eligibility, by effectively disqualifying anyone who enters illegally. Asylum claims have dropped 60 percent this year in comparison with the same period last year, according to the latest statistics from the Canada Border Services Agency. The tougher law reflects a sharp turn in Canadian public opinion against the country’s liberal immigration policies. About 23 percent of Canada’s population is foreign-born, according to the country’s most recent census data (versus about 14 percent of the U.S. population), and in a 2024 poll, nearly six in 10 Canadians said immigration levels were too high, citing housing costs and strains on the country’s public services.

[Read: A reverse Ellis Island]

Canada’s new rules left a loophole, however. Although migrants who are caught within 14 days of arrival can be sent back to the United States, those who can prove a longer presence in Canada—using receipts, a time-stamped photograph, or some other evidence—are allowed to remain. Canada does not send deportation flights to Haiti because it is too risky, so someone who crosses illegally and hides in a safehouse for two weeks can stay in the country and qualify for a work permit.

The system is Canada’s version of Temporary Protected Status, and is “probably preferable to being detained and deported to Haiti,” Jenn McIntyre, the clinic coordinator of the Canada-US Border Rights Clinic, an advocacy group in Canada, told me. But it’s not a path to legal residency, McIntyre cautioned, leaving asylum seekers in a state of long-term limbo, with a risk of deportation looming if Canada resumes deportation flights to Haiti or can find another country that will accept them. “A lot of people who say Let’s go to Canada! have no idea how hard it’s going to be,” she said.

Christopher Gregory-Rivera for The Atlantic

An anti-surveillance sign hangs near a strip of stores serving the Haitian community in North Montreal.

Christopher Gregory-Rivera for The Atlantic

Haitian immigrants have settled across the city but the densest enclaves are in North Montreal.

At Poulet Royal, a chicken restaurant on the outskirts of Montreal, I met Albert, a 53-year-old Haitian who arrived in Canada this summer after living in the United States for two years. It was dark that night, and pouring rain, but Albert didn’t want to be picked up in front of the house nearby where he’d been staying.

Albert, who also asked me not to use his real name, told me that he crossed from New York into Canada illegally through the forest with his sons, ages 10 and 9, one night in late June. He had worked for more than 20 years as a police officer in Haiti, joining an anti-gang unit that received training from U.S., Canadian, and French instructors. He was based in a district outside Port-au-Prince, where he mostly worked as a shift commander at the station, rather than on the streets. But sometimes he was sent into the city’s most violent neighborhoods, which became more dangerous over time. After his best friend, a fellow officer, was killed by gunmen in 2022, Albert looked for a way out of Haiti. He had a side job providing private security for a U.S. missionary organization, which helped sponsor him. His two other children, both adults, were already living in the United States.

The Biden administration granted Albert humanitarian parole, and he arrived in New York City with his two younger boys in 2024. A friend persuaded him to move to Evansville, Indiana, and then to Columbus, Ohio, where Albert found work in the shipping department of a cosmetics company. The job lasted less than a year. Albert lost his work permit when Trump took office and canceled the parole program. Albert searched for odd jobs, finding little, and slowly sank into depression, he told me. His sons would come home from school asking why he wasn’t working and didn’t leave the house. Albert worried that ICE would pick him up and that he would have to take the boys back to Haiti. “My older children said that if we got sent back, their younger brothers would never forgive me,” he told me.

[Read: A new kind of family-separation crisis]

When his sons finished the school year, Albert hired a driver to take them from Columbus to the Canadian border. They arrived at night, joining a group of other Haitians, some of whom admonished Albert for bringing children into the woods. He told me that he has no idea where they crossed, but that his sons were brave and said they were fine leaving the United States if it meant their father could get a job and be happier.

After a short walk to the Canadian side, Albert said, the group got into a car that took them to Montreal. He and the boys spent two weeks in hiding, then submitted their immigration applications. The boys are now enrolled in local schools and adjusting quickly, he told me. “My future doesn’t really matter,” he said. “I just want them to have a better life and to live to my age.”

Albert told me that being in Haiti is “like living in a maze.” You never feel safe, he said. “You’re just trapped.” He said that he knew it might take months to receive a work permit in Canada, but that he wasn’t as anxious as he felt in Ohio. “Here, I can breathe,” he said. On his phone, he showed me pictures of his boys in matching soccer uniforms.

The farm roads of northern New York State cut through hay fields and groves of sugar maples, right up to the boundary with Canada. These roadways once ran straight through, but today they’re split by a ditch or a low-slung barrier to block vehicles. Most of the international boundary runs through thick forests, and the trees have been cut along a 20-foot-wide clearing to create a demarcation. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police call it “The Slash.”

I rode along the Slash in an eight-wheel all-terrain vehicle earlier this month with a Canadian border officer, Jonathan Maheu, an RCMP sergeant. It had rained heavily the day before, and the Slash was flooded with knee-deep puddles. Frogs jumped out of Maheu’s path through the bogs. Maple branches and thick brush lashed at the vehicle as it lurched and groaned over the rough terrain. The woods on either side were dark and gloomy, but all the sunlight that reaches into the Slash had caused an eruption of wildflowers that were shoulder-high by the end of summer: goldenrod, Queen Anne’s lace, and pink aster. We heard something crashing through the brush. “Fawn,” Maheu said.

The RCMP had arrested a group of 13 Haitians crossing illegally there a few days earlier, and handed them over to U.S. authorities. Maheu scanned for new footprints or paths. We didn’t see anyone.

Christopher Gregory-Rivera for The Atlantic

Royal Canadian Mounted Police Sergeant Jonathan Maheu patrols the Slash in the all-terrain vehicle.

RCMP officers patrol for illegal entries, relying on remote cameras and surveillance drones. But the police service does not have the personnel to put officers along the border the way U.S. agents are deployed. The rough terrain of the Slash is the main physical impediment along the border itself, and as Maheu drove, he pointed out the many trails and dirt tracks leading into Canada. There were any number of places to cross quickly, within a short walk of rural roads and highways.

Maheu told me the area is disorienting, inhospitable, and dangerous, especially in the winter. Smugglers sometimes provide little more than the GPS coordinates of designated pickup spots, but cellphone service is spotty, and migrants sometimes try to hide without enough food, water, or warmth. “One of my colleagues tracked a group for seven hours, and when he found them, they were nearly freezing to death. It was minus-30 degrees Celsius. The kids had tinfoil wrapped around their feet, trying to keep warm.”

At the edge of a field, we stopped to chat with Jerry Miller, a 69-year-old farmer on the New York side who has windmills towering over his property, which generate about $20,000 in rent per year from power companies. Miller told me that he has lived on the Canadian border all his life, and has never seen as many migrants heading north as he has since Trump took office last year. They generally keep to themselves but sometimes cause damage, he said, describing how a neighbor recently ran over a perfume bottle with his hay combine, spoiling several bales. Miller showed me a photo on his phone of an abandoned pickup truck someone tried to drive through the Slash that got stuck. Discarded water bottles and clothing are also a nuisance. “I don’t care if they’re coming or going, it ain’t right,” Miller told me. His stories reminded me of the many conversations I’ve had with ranchers along the U.S. southern border whose cattle escaped after smugglers cut their barbed-wire fences or left gates open.

[Read: The man in charge of immigration data just resigned]

A few hundred yards away in the Slash, we found a pile of items that looked as if they’d been hastily discarded: a backpack, two jackets, a polka-dot shirt. They were soaked from the rain but appeared to have been recently abandoned. Maheu said smugglers tell migrants to change clothing in case they’ve been spotted on surveillance cameras. There were other scattered items: deodorant, lotion, a pen, a hair pick. A toad jumped out from under a pair of wet jeans.

Philippe Mélancon, an RCMP staff sergeant who works with Maheu, told me that Canadian officers are trying to target the criminal groups who “profit from migrants who feel helpless and want to get a better life for themselves.”

“They make a lot of money telling migrants they’re going to bring them across safely, and they won’t get caught, and it’s 100 percent guaranteed, which is not the truth,” Mélancon told me. “They put their lives in danger.” I didn’t doubt that smuggling organizations were making money from Haitians and others trying to flee to Canada. But having spent many years reporting on criminal organizations in Mexico, I found it hard to see the northern border as a similarly dangerous place. There are not widespread reports of killings, assaults, or rapes in the woods of Quebec. The attorneys and migrant advocates I’ve spoken with described the groups moving Haitians as mostly informal—more like old-school coyote guides than sinister cartel operatives. But maybe that’s where things will go if the money and the desperation increase.

Frantz André became a volunteer migrant advocate about a decade ago, after he retired from a career as a restaurant executive helping fast-food companies expand into Canada. Born in Haiti, he arrived in Canada in 1965, when he was 10, fleeing the dictatorship of “Papa Doc” Duvalier and his fearsome secret police, known as the Tonton Macoutes. He estimates that only about 800 Haitians lived in Montreal then.

Christopher Gregory-Rivera for The Atlantic

Frantz André

Today that number has grown to about 80,000, making them Montreal’s largest immigrant group. Since the termination of TPS in the United States last month, André said, he’s been receiving about 30 calls a day from asylum seekers who have arrived in Canada or who want to cross. “Many of them will take the risk of going irregularly across the border. It’s not going to stop them,” he told me. “Being deported to Haiti is a greater risk than trying to enter here. They’ll take the last chance.”

André helps migrants fill out paperwork and refers them to legal-aid groups or attorneys who can represent them, but he isn’t a lawyer. At a time when few Canadian politicians seem eager to discuss immigration cooperation with the Trump administration, he has become a prominent critic of the country’s narrower asylum rules.

Christopher Gregory-Rivera for The Atlantic

A woman shops in North Montreal.

I asked André if he thought the Carney government could shift again and soften its stance toward Haitians fleeing Trump’s ICE crackdown, given how unpopular Trump is in Canada. Carney has gotten a popularity boost by defying Trump on trade and tariff issues, presenting himself as an “elbows-up” defender of Canadian dignity. (CBP officials I’ve spoken with told me that the tensions between Trump and Carney have had no bearing on long-running border security cooperation, and that U.S. agents remain in close contact with their RCMP counterparts.)

[From the April issue: ‘America doesn’t want my children or grandchildren’]

André told me no; Canada is eager to emphasize its immigration enforcement cooperation with the United States, because other elements of the bilateral relationship are strained. “With a lot of our immigration policies, we’re becoming more and more the 51st state,” André said. “It’s very hypocritical. We say: Okay, we’re not going to deport you to Haiti because we believe it’s not a safe country. But at the same time, at the border, they’re sending them right into that environment, knowing that people are being deported.”

André is helping Jeanne and Albert file claims for protection and obtain work permits. They’re safe for now, he said. But he’s not sure how the Canadian government will respond if more and more Haitians come through the woods.

This article originally misspelled the last name of the RCMP sergeant. He is Jonathan Maheu, not Jonathan Matheu.

The Pinball President

2026-09-20T07:00:00-04:00

In 1946, the year that Donald Trump was born, the pinball machine offered everything but control. The bumpers were propulsive, the lights flashed, but the player’s only honest move was to pull a spring-loaded plunger. After that, the ball belonged to the machine, zinging and zooming wherever the bumpers sent it.

This is how many Americans experience the Trump presidency today: antic caroming that they can do little more than watch. The ballroom. The Iran war. The threats against Canada. Greenland. Portraits of himself as Christ, a decorated general, or the pope. The arch. The Kennedy Center. Prosecution of enemies. Pardons. Imaginary Reflecting Pool vandals. Federal incursions into voting. Tariffs on. Tariffs off. Tariffs on again. The Qatari plane. Endless promises—to release tax returns, to end corruption, to deliver $5,000 checks—that never materialize.

No president has been more with us than Trump, because no president has been better at seizing public attention. But there is a difference between getting attention and doing something with it. For months, the president has been unable to convince the public that he’s up to the job. In a CNN poll released at the end of July, 65 percent of respondents said that his policies had worsened the economy, and only 28 percent approved of his handling of Iran.

Voters have watched the caroming and have concluded that he doesn’t have his eye on the ball. They care about the economy, and he seems to care about everything else. Only 27 percent of adults told CNN that Trump has the right priorities, down from 45 percent when the term began. And a record 73 percent said he hasn’t paid enough attention to the country’s most important issues. In June, while Trump was fixated on the Reflecting Pool and stopping widespread voter fraud that doesn’t exist, a bipartisan housing bill aimed at high costs reached his desk. He called it “a big yawn” and said he hadn’t decided whether to sign it. In July, he let it become law without his signature.

This is a problem for Republicans in November 2026, but it’s an opportunity for voters looking to November 2028. Once a roster of candidates emerges, their supporters will discover that the office demands—wouldn’t you know it?—exactly the qualities that their preferred candidate happens to possess. Now, when there’s no one horse to back, is the time to use the current president’s rat-a-tat treatment of our attention to ask how we want the next president to spend it.

Many voters will ask only one thing of the next president: Don’t be Donald Trump. Fair enough. But stopping at “not Trump” wastes the extremity of the Trump years. Extremes clarify. A flood shows you where the ground was always low.

The Trump years have been a reminder that the presidency is a trust. The public’s attention belongs to the public. A president borrows it, and the test at every turn is whether he spends it on their account or his own. Trump treats it as a possession, to do with as he pleases, like the East Wing. For him, the public is his cheering section. A president who ignores the half of the country that voted against him teaches them that elections are conquests. They will remember that when they win.

[Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer: ‘I run the country and the world’]

It’s true that when Trump wants to focus the nation’s attention on something, he is relentless: immigration, his enemies, his ballroom. In April, The Washington Post found that he had publicly mentioned the ballroom on roughly a third of the days by that point in the year; he had posted about it more than about tariffs. But what he cares about often isn’t in the nation’s greater interest. A trustee doesn’t spend the trust on himself.

The next president should ration his calls on the public’s attention, which, after all, protects his own effectiveness and the country’s. “Public psychology,” Franklin Roosevelt wrote in 1935 to a reporter urging him to speak out more often, “cannot, because of human weakness, be attuned for long periods of time to a constant repetition of the highest note in the scale.” When Roosevelt did speak, he explained. In his first fireside chat, he walked the country through how a bank works. Explanation is what lets a president speak less: A public that has been shown why can carry the argument on its own, and a public that has only been told what must be told again tomorrow.

A president cannot push opinion where it doesn’t want to go, only nudge it, and that is possible only if he hasn’t already worn the audience out. A president who is always talking cannot use talking to signal that this time matters. The creed of this current era is the opposite. “If you’re not making news, you’re not governing,” wrote former Representative Matt Gaetz, who made news nearly every day he served and governed not at all.

A president who consumes the country’s attention spends down a resource that citizens need for their own affairs, including those delightful corners of human experience that should be free of political consideration. The UFC fighter Bryce Mitchell understood this before the bouts on the White House lawn this summer. Mitchell, who did not participate, said that the government was “desecrating its role in society.” The government, he said, “is supposed to protect us, not entertain us.”

Sometimes a president doesn’t have to ask for the country’s attention, because catastrophe has already gathered it. In these cases, a president can act as a moral force, particularly in consolation. Reagan after the Challenger explosion, Clinton after the Oklahoma City bombing, the younger Bush after the attacks of 9/11, and Obama at Emanuel AME in Charleston, South Carolina. Each president spent the nation’s attention on its grief and, in doing so, reminded the nation what it valued. Trump has nearly erased this part of the job, inventing a new one in its place: chief grave dancer. When Rob Reiner was murdered in December, Trump blamed Reiner himself; when Robert Mueller died in March, Trump wrote, “Good, I’m glad he’s dead.”

A president sends a moral signal not just in the words he uses but also in what he chooses to spend them on. After the white-nationalist march and the death of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017, Trump denounced the neo-Nazis, but the thrust of his attention was aimed elsewhere. He obsessed over the counterprotesters. He praised himself for being the only one brave enough to name what he claimed were the misdeeds of the people opposing the neo-Nazis. “You had a group on one side that was bad, and you had a group on the other side that was also very violent,” he insisted without evidence, “and nobody wants to say it, but I will say it right now.” He sent six tweets about Charlottesville and, in those tweets, never used the terms racism, bigotry, or white nationalism. He sent 37 tweets about NFL players kneeling during the anthem.

All of this happens where we can see it. We tend to treat the presidency as if it existed only in that public form. Most of it doesn’t. Because much of the job happens in secret or out of camera range, what the president chooses to do with public attention is our best evidence of how he sorts the world in private. That evidence has limits. A president who never mentions the deficit might be working on it every morning. Eisenhower’s style was called the “hidden hand”: The president who looked idle at the podium was working the levers out of sight. But a president whose public attention shows no discipline, discernment, or patience isn’t going to discover those attributes at the necessary scale when the cameras turn away. Trump governs by the Heisman hand, always in your face.

[George T. Conway III: Unfit for office]

The presidency demands brutal prioritization. “I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important,” goes a line that Eisenhower liked to quote. “The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.” It was such a simple idea that it became the Eisenhower Matrix, used by managers everywhere to sort incoming challenges. The principle applies with more force in a job where the urgent arrives by the hour. If missile stockpiles are low, we want a president fixing that now, not giving a speech about the deficit. But we also want a president who can see the deficit coming and feel some obligation to the future citizens who will live under galactic debt. Trump spends a lot of his time on matters that are neither important nor urgent. The New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman, who has covered Trump for 30 years, has said that if you charted his mind these days, 70 percent of it would go to gilding, construction, renaming, and tribute projects.

The exhaustion after Trump will produce an appetite for quiet. It has happened before. George W. Bush campaigned on restoring dignity to the office because Americans were worn out by the dramas of the Clinton years; he wanted a presidency that his team promised would show up on page A24 of the newspaper. But quiet is not a standard. The office needs a benchmark built from the job itself, not from the last man to hold it. Nor should the next president react to Trump’s frivolity by turning every subject into a family talk in the living room about Important Matters—a brittle standard where partisans adopt the posture of the online scold who answers “I love dogs” with “Your silence on cats is deafening.” Under that standard, a president must speak to everything, and a president who speaks to everything has no time left to do anything.

Campaigns often measure for qualities that have little or nothing to do with the office. But voters can evaluate how candidates treat public attention on the campaign trail and make some inferences about how they would approach the job. Here are some questions to ask: Does the candidate choose problems that a president can actually move, and can he say why those and not others? Can a president articulate a vision for the country to people who are not likely to vote for her? Can he explain rather than merely assert? Does she ever talk about a problem that won’t pay off before the next election? Can he let a news cycle pass without joining it? And when grief or outrage arrives, does he show any evidence of a concern for the entire nation? How a candidate handles these moments during a campaign—when public attention, ever more scarce in the age of the algorithm, is the only thing he has to spend—tells us how that candidate will spend ours.

In 1947, the year after Trump’s birth, pinball changed. The flipper was added, which meant the player was no longer merely watching. Where the ball went was now, at least in part, up to the player. In 2028, voters will be in the game again. But that requires attention to the office now.

Jon Ossoff Is Doing Something Different

2026-09-18T05:00:00-04:00

If you’re a Democrat, attending a Jon Ossoff rally feels very good. Therapeutic, even. Many Democrats feel as if every day of the second Trump administration has brought some fresh horror: a discouraging development in the never-ending Iran war; a new vow of retribution from the 80-year-old leader of the free world; or the revelation of yet another money-making venture cooked up by the Trumps.

But now, from the South, a young senator has emerged, with a deep voice promising change and a speaking cadence not unlike Barack Obama’s. His dark hair sits just so; his skin is perfectly even—is that makeup he’s wearing? Never mind. We’re looking at his sleeves now, which are carefully rolled up and emphasize biceps that are, well, quite noticeably larger than they were when Georgia voters sent him to Congress in 2021.

More important, this senator sounds different from other Democrats. Ossoff is doing something on the campaign trail that basically no one else in his party seems able to pull off: elegantly and comprehensively skewering the Trump administration, while earning some Republican support.

He’s doing this in speeches at his campaign events, such as the one I attended on Sunday in Athens, Georgia. But those speeches seem carefully calibrated to be heard by an audience much farther away: Every week, millions of Americans are encountering Ossoff on their phones, through perfectly produced clips of the senator unveiling a new insult or innovative critique of the Trump administration. “He’s trying to put his face on the money. Did you see that? He’s building a monument to himself,” he said in May. “He’s doing these things now because no one will honor him when he’s gone.” Last month, the senator’s reference to the zealous Trump aide Natalie Harp spiked Google searches for Harp by 5,000 percent.

[Read: Ossoff’s ‘Natalie’ moment]

The revelation of Ossoff’s particular talent explains why the senator is suddenly all over the news and Instagram, and why so many people in his party are breathlessly positioning him as the new favorite to win the Democratic nomination in 2028. Premature? Maybe. Ossoff might not be well suited for such a task. But Democrats are desperate for leaders and feel that the senator has pierced the party’s gloom like a beam of warm light. (Ossoff, through a spokesperson, declined an interview for this story.)

Outside the Georgia Theatre in Athens, Judith McWillie struggled to explain how she felt about her senator. The retired professor sighed, blinked, and sighed some more, like a computer malfunctioning after being assigned too many tasks. But then, at last, she smiled a dreamy smile. “It’s like taking a clean shower to hear these things spoken so clearly,” she told me. She hadn’t even gotten to see the senator in person—the rally was so packed that she’d had to watch on a screen from the taqueria next door. Disappointing. But she’d seen what she needed to see. “I’ve been waiting for the Democrats to do that for 15 years.”

Ossoff is expected to win his reelection bid in November against his Republican opponent. But it’s still not clear that the senator would be able to go beyond scripted zingers if he decides to campaign for higher office.

Nicole Craine for The Atlantic

It’s obvious at an Ossoff event that the senator once worked as a documentary filmmaker. His rallies have an almost cinematic quality—professional lighting, well-dispersed signs with stylish fonts and vivid colors, plenty of American-flag bunting. Every clip the campaign releases after a rally is perfectly cropped for social media, and some photos are angled upward to show the senator looking out over the crowd, his sharp jawline front and center. (This framing has the added benefit of being recyclable for another, perhaps higher-profile, campaign down the line.)

In Athens, the press risers were, much to the chagrin of some attendees, right in the middle of the crowd. Ossoff himself stood on a part of the stage that jutted toward the audience. Behind him, his team had assembled a diverse display of good-looking young people. During his speech, the crowd was treated to language equal parts poetic and biting. On Iran: “We sink in the quicksand of reckless war.” On President Trump: “Our task is not just to contain his wickedness but to cure the rot that gave rise to it.” The current president is “the broken old man,” and Ossoff’s opponent, Republican Representative Mike Collins, is “a crumbling little bigot.” In a few short lines, Ossoff managed to squeeze in virtually every Democratic critique of Trump and his administration: “They doubled your insurance premiums and slashed Medicaid to cut taxes for their corporate donors and the ultrarich. They made you pay more for everything. They lied us into war and spent most of the last year covering up for the world’s most famous pedophile.”

Ossoff is eager to highlight and explain to voters the Trump family’s alleged state-sponsored enrichment schemes, and concluded for the Athens audience that “it pays to be a Trump, especially when the whole world knows Daddy’s a crook.” Days after a former Anthropic researcher warned that artificial intelligence could wipe out humanity, Ossoff introduced a new line on AI, arguing that Trump has too many investments with tech companies to ever regulate them. “A capable president would move swiftly to secure and reassure the American people, rush inspectors into frontier labs, fortify the nation against bioterrorism,” he said. “But President Trump is compromised.”

[Read: The only thing capable of uniting Bernie and Bannon]

During Ossoff’s speeches, he lays out the several endorsements he’s received from Georgia Republicans who commend his office’s constituent services. Then, in a call for national unity, he hits the crowd with an “e pluribus unum,” and everyone goes bananas.

Nicole Craine for The Atlantic

Some progressives believe that Ossoff is too moderate—or worse, too generic. They argue that his appeal does not go much further than his generally pleasing aura. In fact, I have never attended a political rally where a candidate’s supporters seemed quite so unable to articulate a reason for their support. A couple of attendees cited Ossoff’s push for affordable insulin and his work preventing child trafficking. But mostly, their compliments were vague. “I couldn’t specify anything,” one woman told me before the rally, even though she’d arrived early enough to press right up against the barricade. “He votes the way I want him to,” another person said.

This changed after Ossoff finished speaking, when people sounded totally stunned. “He’s gonna be a star!” one woman exclaimed to her friend as they left the theater. Other attendees used words such as inspiring, articulate, and refreshing. Older voters heard the echoes of another well-spoken young Democrat. “Jon has the charisma that Kennedy had,” Susan Cartwright, a retiree from Athens, told me.

Ossoff events are a warm bath for Democrats because they represent exactly what they’ve been demanding since Trump’s reelection: a leader who demonstrates some mettle and who, by virtue of his youth, can communicate a vigorous, anti-Trump message using modern methods. Other Democrats “will take a term paper to a gun fight,” Fred Hicks, a Democratic strategist based in Georgia, told me. But Ossoff “is able to position things in sound bites and make complex ideas very simple.”

His looks also seem to help. “He’s gorgeous,” one elderly woman told me at the rally, adding, conspiratorially, “You know some people are calling him ‘Senator My Boo.’”

The task of stopping Senator My Boo has fallen to Mike Collins, but the situation doesn’t look promising for the Republican nominee. It’s shaping up to be a good year nationally for Democrats, and in Georgia, Ossoff has the advantage of incumbency. Collins is also facing a triumvirate of controversies that would be bad enough on their own but together amount to campaign poison: A former staffer for Collins posted a swastika and a photo of himself in a Ku Klux Klan–style robe on social media. Collins’s son-in-law, a social-media influencer, has shared white-nationalist rhetoric and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. To top it off, the House Ethics Committee is investigating Collins for allegedly misusing taxpayer funds. “Mike Collins is going to get his teeth kicked in; it’s just a matter of how many teeth,” a state Republican consultant, who agreed to speak on the condition of anonymity, told me. “There’s nobody here who thinks he has a chance.” Meyer Siegfried, a spokesperson for the Collins campaign, dismissed this analysis as “a fantasy pushed by anonymous operatives captured by the Ossoff hype machine.” Georgia, he added, “remains a serious battleground.”

It seems obvious that Ossoff isn’t merely hoping to beat Collins. He’s hoping to win so big that his tide lifts all the other Democratic boats in Georgia—with the helpful side effect of demonstrating to his party that he enjoys broad appeal in a state that voted for Trump in 2024.

Some Democrats are predicting—or perhaps manifesting—that if he wins in November, Ossoff will turn immediately toward a bigger project: running for president in 2028. Ossoff has repeatedly denied that he is interested in doing this. If he won, he’d have to give up his hard-fought Senate seat, which, if Georgia elects a Republican governor this year, would be politically perilous for Democrats. Ossoff, who has two daughters under the age of 5, is also very protective of his family life.

But national Democrats don’t care much about these caveats, and many consultants can’t wait to draft him into the 2028 race—although none wanted to engage in such speculation on the record. One referred to him as an “S-tier” presidential candidate. On the prediction-market platform Kalshi, Ossoff’s odds of winning the 2028 nomination are higher than any other Democrat’s.

Nicole Craine for The Atlantic

The people at the Athens rally were certainly keen on the possibility. Similarly pugnacious candidates, such as Gavin Newsom, “have a lot of negativity that follows them around,” Cartwright said. But Ossoff “would be one of the best choices we could have.” Deborah Dykstra, a 68-year-old from Athens, slapped my arm excitedly when I suggested that her senator might run for president. “He’s young; he’s intelligent,” she said. “I heard him speak when Kamala was in Atlanta, and I liked listening to what he was saying better.”

[Read: Gavin Newsom would rather be wrong than weak]

It’s not entirely clear that Ossoff would be good at running for president. Like Obama, the Georgia senator is confident onstage reading from a teleprompter. Unlike Obama, Ossoff has yet to prove that he’s entirely comfortable speaking off-the-cuff. In interviews, he rarely seems willing to let down his guard. Asked for his favorite swear word in a conversation with The Bulwark’s Tim Miller, who tends toward playful interviews, Ossoff would not be drawn in. “That’s just one of those private questions,” Ossoff said. The man is consistent. In a 2012 tweet, Ossoff wrote that he’d thought twice about sharing an explicit song because “I don’t want someone to ask why I linked to profanity in 15 yrs.” He similarly avoids playing along when TMZ reporters ask silly questions on Capitol Hill. You might call it being relentlessly on-message. “He’s always been serious,” Hicks, the Democratic strategist, said. “He would say the moment we’re in requires a little gravity.”

But, as the former Obama adviser David Axelrod once said, presidential campaigns “are like an MRI for the soul.” They require something more than straightforward speech-making: an ability to sit down with Joe Rogan for a three-hour, stream-of-consciousness interview, for example. Or, as the old political adage goes, an unbuttoned ease that makes voters want to pull up beside them at the bar.

Perhaps Jon Ossoff has yet to fully reveal himself. His supporters in Georgia predict that he will. “I get the feeling, too, that there’s a lot more even coming from Ossoff,” McWillie, the retired professor, said. “He’s doing it carefully, in stages, instead of trying to just throw everything out there all at once.” The 2028 presidential primary could hinge on whether the senator learns how to go off script.

Buttigieg: Democrats Need to Get Serious About Amending the Constitution

2026-09-17T18:36:33-04:00

In a conversation at The Atlantic Festival with The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, former Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg warned fellow members of the Democratic Party to resist the urge to revert to “the previous status quo” if they regain power in the midterms.

It would be a mistake, Buttigieg argued, for Democrats to try to reverse “the damage” of the past two years of the Donald Trump presidency by trying to restore the country to how it looked in 2022 or “whenever we think that America was great.” He said that Democrats instead need to build for the idea that “the next quarter century between here and 2050, which is kind of a make-or-break quarter century for the whole American project, is subject to very different conditions and problems than the ones that we inherited.”

Buttigieg—whom many analysts see as a potential 2028 presidential contender—offered examples of what that vision might look like. He called for banning gerrymandering and passing a constitutional amendment to address the deluge of money in politics. “This idea that it is somehow beyond our power to use what is probably the single most elegant feature of the Constitution, which is its capacity to be amended—right?—is a complete failure of ambition and imagination,” Buttigieg said.

When asked by Goldberg about the Democratic Socialists of America, Buttigieg responded that he thinks “there’s a temptation to imagine that being bold is the same thing as being kind of maximally ideological.” Sometimes it is the case, Buttigieg said, that the leftmost idea is the boldest. But other, more ideologically moderate projects may require “radical reform to our institutions,” he noted.

“I know the commentariat wants to get it all fixed on some left-to-center-to-right spectrum,” Buttigieg continued. “To me, what’s more interesting is: Do we have the right package of base hits and big swings, and are we going after both of them, at the same time, all the time?”

The following is an edited transcript of the conversation.

Jeffrey Goldberg: I want to get to the state of our civilization, but there’s this thing—and we’ve talked about this already—there’s this thing that’s been bothering me more than most things bothering me in the past few days. The fact that a Vladimir Putin–aligned oligarch, extremely dubious past—as opposed to the oligarchs with a wholesome past—

(Laughter)

Extremely dubious past, funded openly—or not openly, it was discovered, but there’s no secret—funded a two-day celebration for the president of the United States’ son. And we were talking a little bit about how that seems fairly normal in our new reality, but if you actually step back a few years ago, in a Bush presidency, Obama presidency, and told somebody, Oh, yeah, the president of the United States’ kid’s wedding is being underwritten by a Russian oligarch, no one would believe that we’ve entered that level of dystopic reality. So my question is: How screwed are we?

Pete Buttigieg: Well, if I thought we were altogether screwed, I wouldn’t be doing this.

Goldberg: What would you be doing? Moving to Canada?

(Laughter)

Buttigieg: I guess.

Goldberg: I just want to know; he’s got access to different forms of transportation.

Buttigieg: Is that what giving up looks like now? Moving to Canada? No, I think it’s symptomatic of this bigger pattern we’ve been in where we stare down something that is completely unacceptable and then just move on. And in some ways, the big thing, the spectacular corruption, actually is harder to face. It’s like if you’re in Washington, D.C., and you walk up to the Washington Monument and you stick your hand on it and you look up—which, by the way, is a fascinating experience if you ever get the chance, because you can walk right up to it—but once you do that, you cannot make out the shape or even the size of the Washington Monument, right? Because it’s right there.

And when we have monumental corruption or monumental systemic breakdowns, I think it can have the same effect. Part of what I’m trying to do, as I travel the country, is insist that we’ve got to deal with a whole set of things that we’ve just been talking about being wrong for a long time. I’m not just talking about the near term, the recent shocking, spectacular forms of corruption, like what you mentioned about the wedding or the sentences that are coming out of our mouth, right? Half a billion dollars of crypto money from a foreign prince going to the first family, or the jumbo jet—I mean, we all know this list of things, right?

Goldberg: Or renaming a cultural center named after a martyred president for yourself.

Buttigieg: For example, and then shutting it down because—

Goldberg: Because you ran out of money.

Buttigieg: You couldn’t get your way. I mean, even that, right? He becomes chairman of the premier cultural institution in the country, and within two years, it’s shutting down, right? But my point is, there’s something broader, bigger, and longer in the making than even Trump and Trumpism itself. Like, if I said the system is broken, that’ll be the least memorable thing I said all day, right? “The system is broken” is a cliché. Everybody says it. Certainly, every politician says it because it’s true. The weird thing is, we say the system is broken, and then we act as if it wasn’t. We go right back to normal and—

Goldberg: The system is broken. What’s for lunch?

Buttigieg: Yeah, right? Like, if you’re getting ready for a flight and the captain comes on and mentions in passing that the airplane is broken—

(Laughter)

You’re not going to stay on the plane, right?

Goldberg: So that’s one of the things you worked on as secretary of transportation, right?

(Laughter)

Was that a bigger problem than we know about? Because that would be really useful.

Buttigieg: No, but that’s the point, right? When lots of planes were crashing in the ’60s and ’70s and ’80s, we did something about it and developed this incredible, civilizational achievement of aviation safety, because we didn’t think it was acceptable to have that happen. And here we are in this political system where everybody knows that the role of money in politics, the unrepresentative nature of Congress, what the Supreme Court has turned into, is a huge problem. And eight years ago, when I was talking about things like Supreme Court reform—pretty lonely position—everybody was looking at me funny. Part of why I was doing that was not only because I believe in Supreme Court reform, but because I believe in elevating our ambition as a country when it comes to reforming things that are obviously broken.

And look, at a political level, most of the time, most of what people like me should be talking about is the fact that diesel is at the highest price ever recorded, and the fact that interest rates are higher because of the policies of this administration, and the fact that most of us are paying higher health-insurance premiums because of what the Republicans are doing. But the reality is, those kitchen-table issues have become intractable, because you’ve got this political system kicking the legs out from under the kitchen table. And when people see that day after day after day, then when they see some cases of spectacular corruption by the first family, it’s just all part of that wash of low expectations that we’ve come to have for our politics and our system.

Goldberg: Is the system broken, or are people broken?

Buttigieg: The system is more broken than people.

Goldberg: But when I say people, I mean specific people, like the members of Congress.

Buttigieg: Okay, well, some of them. But here’s the thing.

Goldberg: I don’t mean our audience. They’re not broken. They look great.

Buttigieg: It would be an extraordinary run of bad luck if all of the people that we have elected to Congress over the past few years just randomly turned out to be terrible people, right? That would be just statistically—

Goldberg: You say that like that’s science fiction, but I don’t know, I mean, but it doesn’t sound that incredible to me either.

Buttigieg: Either something about the system makes people worse, or something about the system is actively selecting worse people, right? It’s not just bad luck, right? And I say this having dealt with the United States Congress quite a bit, and you can see how even people who start out good are incentivized to become less so over time. You sit in a committee hearing, and it’s basically a content farm now. You go in hoping to have some legislative progress, and they look at you and tell you you’re right, and then explain why it’s never going to happen. So we can keep wondering why the people who our system produces and pushes into leadership are deeply flawed, or we can do something to create a system where it’s better than that.

Goldberg: I’m focusing on Congress because Congress has abdicated its oversight responsibility to a large degree. The judiciary is—put aside the Supreme Court for a second; you do have federal judges checking executive power. But Congress, in its current form, ain’t. So what do you do?

Buttigieg: Get a better Congress.

(Applause)

Goldberg: If you were king.

Buttigieg: Let me explain what I mean. Yeah, obviously, in the near term, what I mean is elect better people to Congress, which is why I’ve been to most U.S. states at least once in the past year and a half, trying to campaign for people who I think would make better representatives in Congress than the ones that we’ve got. So there’s that. But what I really mean is: Design a better Congress. For example, one way to make sure that you get better and not worse people in a job is to have a very competitive hiring process. We have 435 seats in the House. Roughly 40 of them are competitive, which means nine out of 10 congressional races are races where you pretty much know who’s going to win before the first vote is even cast. In a 50/50 country, right? Which means it is not an authentic, competitive process.

Goldberg: It is the most cost-effective job-protection system ever devised.

Buttigieg: Yeah. So we ought to ban gerrymandering nationally. We ought to ban gerrymandering.

(Applause)

And the last reason to have any hesitation about doing that fell when they gutted the Voting Rights Act in the Callais decision, because there was, up until then, an argument that, Look, because these states are badly gerrymandered anyway, the only way we’re getting minority representation is to protect minority districts. Now the Supreme Court has basically established a de facto right to partisan gerrymandering. We can have a law that changes that, right? The role of money in politics, obviously part of the problem here. These are not things that are completely beyond our power to deal with.

Goldberg: Well, the Supreme Court has basically said it’s beyond your power, on the role of money in politics.

Buttigieg: Right. So we should have a constitutional amendment on that.

Goldberg: And is that realistic?

Buttigieg: We’ve had 27.

(Laughter)

Goldberg: Not lately, though.

Buttigieg: We had a—

Goldberg: Stopped doing it.

Buttigieg: We had a constitutional amendment so that you couldn’t have a drink. And then, like, 10 years later, we thought that was dumb. And we changed it with another constitutional amendment. So this idea that it is somehow beyond our power to use what is probably the single most elegant feature of the Constitution, which is its capacity to be amended, is a complete failure of ambition and imagination.

(Applause)

There are some other things we can do in the meantime. I was in Montana helping gather signatures for an effort called the Montana Plan, which is using, because of what the Supreme Court has said, instead of setting it up as a regulation on speech—since the Supreme Court has said that, you know, money is speech and corporations are people—you go to the fact that corporations only exist as a function of state law, and corporations actually in state law don’t have rights; they have powers, and those powers are enumerated.

And so in the law that makes corporations exist, you just have a feature in there that basically says, You don’t get to be a corporation if you are using your Treasury dollars to manipulate elections. That’s one example of something that is designed to have an effect while we don’t yet have a constitutional amendment. Think of it this way: Citizens United came down, I believe, in 2010. So if the counter to a constitutional-amendment process is That could take 15 years, well, if we’d started in 2010, we’d be there, right? This is a level of ambition I think we need to have, or else every time we’re trying to make sure that more people can get health insurance or the minimum wage, which hasn’t been raised, I think, since 2009 or 2007, actually goes up—or any other outcome which a majority of Americans already agree—we’re going to keep getting frustrated.

Goldberg: I want to ask you something about an even deeper structure. You know, James Madison had a lot of fears, which is why he designed the system we have. James Madison feared that the rise of the daily newspaper would sink democracy, because the once-a-day addition of new information into the human brain was too much for people. You couldn’t go from emotion to reason before new information came the next day. We’re beyond that now.

(Laughter)

We’re well beyond that. And so the question is—it’s a cognitive question. One of the tricks of the Trump administration is to do so much so quickly that you reach overload. The other part of this is, in the social-media environment in which we have, is it irrational or a sign of poor character for a member of Congress to say, You know what, I’m not going out on a limb, because I’m going to get 10,000 death threats a day on social media, and I exist in that content farm, in another form of that content farm? So what do you do to reintroduce the possibility, the space for reason, logic, contemplation?

Buttigieg: I’ve come to realize that we have different levels within us of thinking, of consciousness. And part of the problem with social media is that it speaks to the lizard brain, right? Kind of the least contemplative of our levels of thinking. And there’s no question that the system of rewards and punishments that is kind of dominant in the digital world is not healthy for politics. But that is not the only realm where we can practice politics. So one thing that we can do more of is engage in actual spaces—real, physical spaces where people are actually in a room. And politics is often at its best when the public square is physical. I think about it in terms of how I travel, just when I’m walking around town or going through an airport. And 99.9 percent of people who come up to me are very positive. And that includes some people who say, I don’t agree with you politically, but it’s nice to see you. They’re just kind of excited to see somebody they recognize.

Goldberg: Having a human interaction.

Buttigieg: Yeah. And it’s not because obviously I have 99 percent support. I know this is a divided country. What that tells me is most people in an actual 3-D interaction aren’t assholes, right?

(Laughter)

Very different from how it is online. So I think one very simple thing is to try to cultivate and create more spaces and environments where those interactions happen. That’s in-person convenings, that’s the public square, that’s third spaces, that’s building social capital around existing physical spaces that bring people together, like schools.

It’s also something that is part of why I believe in ideas like national service, creating more opportunities for service. Because when I was in the military, that was definitely an environment where I was side by side with people that I had wildly different political values from, and we quickly learned to trust each other with our lives. And part of that had to do with the extreme pressure of being in a war zone. But part of that just had to do with the fact that this group of people was thrown together and tasked with doing something hard. You know, not everybody needs to be in the military for that to be available to more people. It’s why I think a voluntary but ultimately universal opportunity for service would do a lot of good. It would just rewire our brains in a healthier fashion.

Goldberg: The answer to Is Donald Trump a symptom or a cause? is both. Yeah, obviously. The question is what percentage is symptom and what percentage is cause? Is it possible to disaggregate that?

Buttigieg: I think of it in terms of the broad symptoms and then the cause of some acute problems. So the symptom stuff—this is what I’m getting at with my systems and reform talk: that if the economic and political and social systems in this country were working, we wouldn’t be here. You don’t get a guy like Trump just out of nowhere, right? So, that’s the evidence.

Goldberg: Let’s pause on that. What system in particular, or what aspect of the system would have—I don’t mean the cultural system, rise of reality TV and social media—but what part of the system would have stopped this?

Buttigieg: The part I think is worst is the part where in a supposedly representative system of government, people reach consensus, or at least overwhelming majority, that certain things should happen, and then they don’t. That is lethal to people’s confidence in their political system, and it leads, sooner or later, to a pattern where they say, You know what? I’m just going to vote to burn the house down because none of this is working. By the way, just a quick political digression here—it is really interesting that most of those big kind of two-to-one things are actually things that are Democratic positions in Washington. So if I think about, like I mentioned earlier, raising the minimum wage—raising the minimum wage at least to $12 is something a majority of Republicans believe we should do. Background checks on guns: 70, 80, 90 percent. Eighty percent of Republicans, gun owners, think we ought to at least do that. Tax fairness, where the wealthiest people are paying at least as much in their taxes as a percentage as a firefighter—overwhelming majority.

And what I’ve realized is we’re actually—Democrats are still getting used to being on the right side of the American public on a lot of issues. Because when I came of age, right—like now, everybody’s pretty much with us on taxes and health care—you know, when I came of age, we were on defense about things like the death tax and welfare reform and all of that. And my first time ever on the ballot was 2010, when Obamacare was the toxic issue that killed the Democrats, right? Now it is the winning issue for Democrats. So some of this is new, and I think Democrats aren’t used to that. But my bigger point is you have all these things where there’s actually two-to-one agreement among the American people on what to do. By the way, even immigration—this is true—the broad framework of a grand bargain on immigration that’s been there the whole time, and then nothing like that happens in Washington. That breeds a kind of cynicism that I think leads you to a guy like Trump.

But then back to the cause part. Even a guy like that didn’t have to do things like this. Like, you could imagine some disagreeable populist leader who is presented with the possibility that AI may threaten the continued existence of the human species and does not decide to call that a hoax. It really matters that we happen to have a president who does. Or if you think about what’s happening, if you’re imagining the calculations that are going on in Beijing right now, or Moscow, obviously they are preparing to take advantage of some specific issues that are attached to having a specifically unstable person running the United States of America. And that’s not just some, you know, world historical force. That’s the particular misfortune we have of being led by this particular man at this particular moment.

(Applause)

Goldberg: Right. They’re clapping for instability.

(Laughter)

I want to come back to the global picture in a second, but stay on this interesting subject of the Democrats. There’s been a switch, you’re right. Mainstream Democratic positions are, generally speaking, the more popular positions. How are the Democrats going to mess up in the next two months so that they don’t take Congress back?

(Laughter)

Buttigieg: Look, I feel really good about the tailwind that we have in the next two months. I was just in Tucson, Arizona, where I think JoAnna Mendoza, who’s a Marine drill instructor and a mom, is going to defeat the Republican congressman there. Then we were in southern New Mexico, where we have Gabe Vasquez, extraordinary frontline Democrat. I think he’s going to earn reelection. Just last night, I was up in Tarrytown with Cait Conley, West Pointer, [who] I think is going to defeat Mike Lawler. We have great candidates running great campaigns. What could go wrong? Two things. Well, lots of things could go wrong between now and the election. I’m mostly trying to make sure—obviously I spend all day, pretty much, when I’m campaigning, trying to make sure things go right at the election.

What about after the election? Two things I think would be a terrible mistake. One is to revert to the status quo, the previous status quo. I really think that’s going to be a strong temptation to say, Okay, we’re in; we’re going to reverse the damage. You hear the phrase reverse the damage, right? Which is understandable because the damage has been horrific. But the implication of reverse the damage, if that’s going to be our mantra, is, Okay, we’re going to put all these things back just the way they were, and we’re going to give you the world the way it looked in 2022 or 2012 or 1994, or whenever we think America was great. And that’s not going to work. So we’ve got to make sure we resist the temptation to be restoring some previous status quo and build for the new reality that we’re in, with the next quarter century between here in 2050, which is kind of a make-or-break quarter century for the whole American project, is subject to very different conditions and problems than the ones that we inherited. The other thing that I think we need to do is keep it simple in terms of a legislative agenda. So I’ve been thinking a lot about these.

For example, one thing that the chattering class will get into right away as soon as there’s hopefully a Democratic victory, is what’s going to be H.R. 1? What’s going to be the big, telltale, Christmas-tree, signature bill that you put all your hopes and dreams in that signifies the priorities of the party and of the new Congress, right? To me, I would like to see, like an H.R. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5—like 10 or 12 dozen things. Stand-alone bills, clean bills, not this ponderous 2,000-page thing that tries to take care of every single thing, but a set of things that are needed, popular, and wise, and will make a difference to people, especially in being able to afford everyday life.

So, what does that look like? Restoring the child-tax-credit extension. That puts money back in the pockets of lower-income families trying to raise kids. Obviously, getting us out of a war in Iran that has everybody paying more for gas and diesel. Restoring the help on health care. By the way, also, on the tax side—so usually the revenue part’s unpopular, so you have to tuck that in with the spending part that’s popular. Right now, fixing the tax code so that wealthy tax cheats couldn’t get away with it or even trueing up the rates to be a little more normal for wealthy individuals or for corporations—those things are popular on their own. Even if you didn’t staple it to how you’re going to spend the money, just the tax side alone is popular because it’s the right thing to do, and because everybody can tell there’s something wrong with the way things are going.

So to me, a rapid fire of clean bills to do these things that everybody—raise the minimum wage, right—these things that everybody knows we ought to do, that’s how we move forward. How do we go wrong? We get tangled up, get in our own way, make it super complicated, and people don’t feel like we’re doing what we actually, hopefully will have gotten elected on, which is making everyday life better, and in particular, making everyday life more affordable.

Goldberg: Talk about the DSA temptation.

Buttigieg: I mean, look, I think there’s a temptation to imagine that being bold is the same thing as being kind of maximally ideological. To me, sometimes that might be true; sometimes the boldest idea maybe is the leftmost idea. Sometimes I think we’ve reached a point where actually, what I would consider to be kind of ideologically moderate projects—like everything I mentioned, is kind of moderate by definition because two-thirds of Americans want to do it—requires some radical reform to our institutions. And so there are big swings we need to be taking with some of the ones I talked about on reform in the Supreme Court and money and politics and gerrymandering, but also big policy swings, right?

I mean, eight years ago, the whole Democratic primary fight in the debates that I was in was about was universal health care going to become mandatory or was universal health care just going to be optional? And not much has changed since then, right? So we also just need to have a higher level of ambition. To me that’s the most interesting thing. I know the commentariat wants to get it all fixed on some left-to-center-to-right spectrum. To me, what’s more interesting is do we have the right package of base hits and big swings, and are we going after both of them at the same time all the time?

Goldberg: In the few minutes we have left, talk about the fact that we’re already in World War III and don’t even know it, and while we’re in World War III, the president of the United States is making enemies out of our allies.

Buttigieg: Yeah.

Goldberg: Discuss.

(Laughter)

Buttigieg: Another essay question.

Goldberg: Yeah, you have four minutes—I mean, because this is the Alice in Wonderland cut. We’re trying to have a rational conversation about all the things that you could do to make the lives of Americans somewhat better, you know? And, we have a president right now who seems to want to go to war against Canada, which is a South Park episode.

I mean, the question is like, we’re having this conversation, but we’re living in a reality that is South Park.

Buttigieg: First of all, every time we see one of these things, we have to remember it doesn’t have to be this way. It doesn’t have to be this way. And politically, what I’m trying to do is connect these things that are happening around the world to issues at home. Because foreign policy always codes as this kind of high-minded, kind of elite concern. But the reality is, foreign policy and what’s going on in the world hits us at home in a million different ways. Like my neighbors in Michigan, you know, a year ago, nobody filling up the pump necessarily had to know or care what was going on in the Strait of Hormuz. It’s not your problem. Now you’ve got gas closer to $5 than $4 in Michigan. Diesel’s through the roof. This is a direct relationship right between what’s going on in the world and what’s going on at home.

I was talking with union members in the hospitality industry in Las Vegas, cocktail servers getting fewer hours. Las Vegas has one of the highest unemployment rates in Nevada; generally, in the U.S. Why? Well, one of the reasons is, pissing off Canada meant that Canadians who normally come to southern Nevada, especially in the wintertime, decided to take their money elsewhere, right? So there are these very direct effects on working Americans that happen when you have an absurd foreign policy, like we do. And the result is that it leaves us worse off in the near term economically at home, as well as, of course, the bigger, longer-term picture, which is, we don’t know exactly how and when we’ll need our allies next, but we know that we’ll need our allies. And having alienated them, it’s realistically going to take a generation to have the right level of credibility.

Goldberg: This is the question. I mean, let’s assume for a minute that, you know, there’s a Democratic president in the beginning of 2029. How much of what’s happened overseas is reversible and how much is just—I guess the biggest question is, are we, right now, undergoing a midlife crisis, a nervous breakdown, or are we facing a terminal illness? And if you’re sitting in Canada, Paris, London, South Korea, Japan, you’re asking yourself, I don’t know anymore about these people.

Buttigieg: Yeah, no, that’s definitely what’s happening. I’ve talked to leaders who—one, who just looked at me and said, “Look, the first time you guys did this, it was,”—this is of a U.S. ally—“it was a blip. I thought of it as a blip. Now it’s a pattern and our country has to prepare.” And obviously, this scenario where you have a Democratic president next, everybody’s going to be saying, Okay, that’s great, you’re saying all the right things now. But, you know. what’s going to happen in four years? Which is exactly why reversible is not the word on my mind. I’m trying to purge my vocabulary of just about anything with the prefix re in it.

But, again, this doesn’t have to be 100 percent negative, because we’re entering into a world where the old patterns and institutions are not coming back. And a lot of those institutions were pretty rickety to begin with. The UN Security Council was set up at a time when the vast majority of people in China were impoverished rural peasants, right? Now, a middle-class city dweller in China arguably has a more technologically sophisticated everyday life than a middle-class city dweller in America. We’re in a very different world in terms of technology, in terms of competition, in terms of the security balance. And so we’re going to need to revamp—there I go, re again. We’re going to need to—I think reimagine is okay.

Goldberg: What about refried beans? How do you feel?

(Laughter)

Buttigieg: Ambivalent.

Goldberg: Just going out for fried beans from now on.

Buttigieg: But I think there’s an opportunity, so it comes back to what I was saying earlier. You know, interpersonally, my experience is you can build trust in a hurry if you are working together on something hard and important. That’s true for people. That’s true for countries. So in addition to the generational project of earning trust and credibility by just consistently doing the right thing and being a dependable friend and ally and a sober voice in the world, there’s also no shortage of very difficult things that we need to be, starting with the response to AI—no shortage of very difficult things where we need to be working with friends, allies, partners, and, in some cases, the whole world. And I think we can quickly earn trust, in the same way that the entire pattern of the U.S. being the most respected and indispensable partner—that was kind of the pattern of the second half of the 20th century—really was built up in a matter of just a few years of doing the right thing when it was really hard. I actually see in that an opportunity, precisely because of how bad it is. I see an opportunity to build something that is going to serve us well for the balance of this century.

Goldberg: We’ll find out.

Pete, we can do this all day, but we can’t, unfortunately. So, thank you very much for coming.

‘The Best Thing That Happened to Him Was Losing in 2020’

2026-09-17T13:25:00-04:00

Few reporters understand as much about Donald Trump’s thinking, motives, and behavior as Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan. Haberman has been covering the president closely for more than a decade at The New York Times; she started with his first campaign in 2015, and her record of scoops quickly brought her into the public eye. Swan was, for many years, her chief professional rival: He worked for Axios, where he landed a controversial 2018 one-on-one interview with Trump. In late 2022, the Times announced that it was hiring Swan, turning the rivals into colleagues.

This past June, they published Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump. The book, an instant best seller, advances a new understanding of the first year of Trump’s second term, relaying in minute-by-minute detail how, since retaking office, he has pursued his personal goals with few limits on his power. The Atlantic staff writer Tim Alberta sat down with both authors at The Atlantic Festival, where he asked them about the 2028 election and the future of the presidency and the Republican Party.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Tim Alberta: Maggie, this country has been through a lot, and I’m wondering if you could help us understand how a “regime change” of this sort came to be.

Maggie Haberman: Essentially, we have had a series of national traumas since 9/11: two forever wars, a fiscal crisis, immense populist anger that started rising in 2010. To me, that was the year that set the tone. It was also the year that the proto-Trump, Carl Paladino, was the Republican nominee for governor in New York State. One of the issues that he ran on was the planned mosque to be built near the World Trade Center; it became known incorrectly as the “Ground Zero Mosque,” and it became a clear avatar of a change in this country after the era of George W. Bush. So you get to 2014, when immigration and particularly border crossings were on the rise under President Obama. Suddenly, this became a massive issue within the Republican Party. You had this mix of anger over the wars, anger over the massive accumulated debt under President Bush, then Obamacare, anger about immigration, and a shifting job market. The time was ripe for a candidate who presented himself as a fighter—and who was already known to most of the Republican electorate, not just as a celebrity on The Apprentice but as a cultural figure.

Alberta: 2016, Trump 1.0, is its own story. So much of what this book is about is how the end of that first term, and then his time in exile after losing in 2020, shapes this dramatic, radical, wholesale change to government and to executive power.

Jonathan Swan: When we were reporting for this book, we heard from a couple of people who were close to Trump at a pretty high level that, in their view, the best thing that happened to him was losing in 2020. Which is something they could never say publicly or in his presence, because, of course, he never lost the election and what have you. But it’s indisputably true. Let’s say Trump ekes out that victory in 2020: He comes back in; he is hobbled by COVID. He has the same inflation that every other country around the world has. He still has the rump of a team around him that he really doesn’t like very much, who are, in quite a few instances, pushing back on some of his more extreme desires. He really can’t get his arms around the presidency.

Instead, he loses. People like Stephen Miller spent those four years very productively. It wasn’t just drawing up the plans—you saw that blitz of executive orders at the start of 2025, which was all very well prepared. They also spent a lot of time thinking about Who are the lawyers that we want to fill the government with? And I’m not just talking about the White House counsel’s office; I’m talking about across the government. Agency lawyers, general counsels—they would constantly say, Well, no, what you’re proposing is illegal. But when you have lawyers who are saying, Well, actually, if we turn it this way and then turn it this way and then give it a little bit of a spin, then they can bless what you want. And that’s what’s happening.

I’ll give you the perfect example that describes the difference between term one and term two: In term one, Trump was saying almost yearningly, You know, they don’t have a drug problem in China, because Xi Jinping, he just kills the drug dealers. And they don’t have a drug problem in the Philippines, because Rodrigo Duterte just kills them. Trump was very fond of these extrajudicial killings. In term one, there wasn’t a huge amount of enthusiasm for this idea among the leadership of the Defense Department. Now you have Pete Hegseth, and you have lawyers inside the government that allow a policy where Donald Trump decided, in his mind, that people on fishing boats transporting cocaine in the Caribbean Sea are not drug traffickers who are to be interdicted by the Coast Guard and dealt with in a criminal-justice system. No: They’re enemy combatants in a war. We’re not going to interdict them. We’re not going to arrest them. We’re just going to kill them. And that’s something that has been blessed within the government. They haven’t even bothered to try to legally justify this in a public setting. They just do it, knowing that they have the right lawyers in place.

[Read: Pete Hegseth delights in violence]

The other big element making this term unrecognizable from the first term is the immunity decision. Maggie and I talk about this all the time. Trump would say early on, I’m immune; I’m immune. He has said privately that he’s going to pardon anyone who came within 250 feet of the Oval Office.

The point is, he had the time to rebuild, and his team had time to prepare. That’s how you get this second term.

Alberta: Trump can’t stay in power forever. He will soon be a lame duck after these November midterms. I’m wondering how he’s handling that: whether he is going to allow a neat and tidy process to unfold for his successor, and whether or not J. D. Vance, who got a bit crosswise with him over Iran, is going to be tortured over the next several years as the president deliberates over whom he should hand all of this over to.

Swan: We have a scene in the book that I think illustrates what you’re describing. Rupert Murdoch comes to the White House for dinner. This is October of last year, and they’re in the Blue Room of the White House. And at the table are J. D. Vance and Marco Rubio.

Haberman: And, like, 10 other people.

Swan: Halfway through the conversation, Trump says, I really like J.D. I really like Marco. Rupert, what do you think of J.D.? And he starts this beauty pageant, essentially, in front of both of them, with the most powerful proprietor of conservative media—knowing full well that Rupert Murdoch is no fan of J. D. Vance and, in fact, tried to stop him from becoming the vice president. There’s this pause, and Rupert Murdoch says, J.D. has the potential to be great—just withering. Vance says, Oh, gee, thanks, Rupert. It’s a very awkward moment. Trump says, What do you think of Marco? And Rupert doesn’t miss a beat: He says, Marco’s brilliant. This savage moment just foretells what the next two years are going to be like. How is he grappling with being a lame duck? The way he’s grappling with it is by refusing to be a lame duck.

[Read: Vance vs. Rubio: Iran edition]

Vance is in a really difficult position because, as you noted, there were several meetings leading up to the Iran war, in the Situation Room and the Oval Office, where Vance was the only one in the room arguing against it. That did not go down well with Trump. And so the notion that this is going to be some smooth glide path to the 2028 nomination is contradicted by every piece of evidence we have about who Donald Trump is and how he behaves.

Alberta: Maggie, that point that Jonathan makes about Trump’s refusal to be a lame duck over the next two years—what does that look like?

Haberman: I don’t want to limit anyone’s imagination here on what it would look like. The question that we get a lot is, Will he try for a third term? I truly don’t believe he will, but I’m absolutely willing to be wrong. I don’t actually think he wants that, and he doesn’t need it. He will be the dominant figure in this party until he is no longer on this Earth, whether he’s in office or not. He has made more money than he ever made in his life during this presidency—at least just liquid, that we know of, assets.

Swan: By orders of magnitude.

Haberman: The crypto money is, I think, $2.2 billion in the first year-ish of the presidency. His children have continued to make money. There were very valid questions about Hunter Biden, but it is so dwarfed by everything that we are seeing now, everything that Hunter Biden was doing.

What the next two years I expect will look like will be the projects Trump really cares about, which are these monuments to himself in Washington—the ballroom. I’m very curious to see what happens with the Kennedy Center; that’s a big open question. This is not going to look like any kind of congressional flip that we’ve seen before in a lame-duck presidency, because to Jonathan’s point, Trump knows that he is immune from federal prosecution. He has talked about pardons very openly. We spoke with a number of people who are counting on their pardons. We’ve never seen a government just not respond to subpoenas in Congress. The only recourse that Congress has if they don’t get cooperation is a contempt-of-Congress vote and a referral to the Department of Justice, where I’m confident Attorney General Todd Blanche is not going to do a lot. This is a government that has done so little in terms of legislating. Everything, for the most part, was by executive action.

Alberta: Your reporting describes a government that is not recognizable at a fundamental level. How do we come back from that?

Haberman: That’s the reason for the title.

Swan: It’s such an interesting question, because on the one hand, there will be a desire by many to restore what was before. On the other hand, Trump has also shown what you can do unilaterally. He’s demonstrated, particularly in the second term, that a lot of the constraints that we take for granted around the presidency are not legal constraints. They’re self-restraint or norms. Just take the ballroom, for example. Yes, in the end, it was green-lighted, right? The court system is not stopping him from building this ballroom. But by the time the court system got up to that point, there was a giant hole in the ground. There were cranes in the sky; there were shovels going through the earth.

[Leah Litman: The court’s ballroom decision is a sign of deeper problems]

The tariffs are another great example: Yes, ultimately, the Supreme Court checked him on his tariffs—months after he started a global trade war, which had all kinds of rippling consequences. This is a legal system that is not built to deal with a president like Donald Trump; he has shown that you can just get away with acting and forcing others to react. That was a deliberate strategy—overwhelm the opposition; overwhelm the legal groups.

So you have two models: One is a figure who comes back and says, Actually, we need to restore checks and balances and the constitutional system. Or you have either a right-wing populist or a left-wing populist saying, You know what? Donald Trump has actually shown us what nirvana could look like if we do it on behalf of our chosen priorities. That’s how you can get potentially even more of an expansion of executive power and the imperial presidency.

Haberman: The one addendum I would make is that I think that for the most part, President Biden did try going back. He really did. He did fairly little by executive action; he had big legislation; he left the Justice Department alone. What I hear from Democrats I speak with is that they want someone who is going to fight in the manner that they have seen Republicans fight. I agree with Jonathan that I don’t think there is another Donald Trump walking around; I think he is sui generis for a lot of reasons. But that doesn’t mean there are not aspects that would be appealing. And certainly, I believe that whoever the next Republican nominee is, they’re going to be in the mold of Donald Trump. I mean, this is Donald Trump’s party until there is another Republican president, not just nominee, or for as long as he is alive. Whatever you see the Democrats form will be a reaction to that.

The only other asterisk is that if ever there was an election cycle that was ripe for a Ross Perot type, it will be 2028. There is so much anger at the system. Part of why Trump is struggling right now in polls is that he broke several campaign promises, and voters can feel that. They can feel $4.50 gas. People want to feel like somebody is actually helping them.

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An Electoral Mess in Missouri

2026-09-16T06:55:47-04:00

Bethany Mann has put thousands of miles on her 2014 Toyota RAV4 while campaigning for office in Missouri’s Third Congressional District. The problem for Mann, her opponents, and the hundreds of thousands of voters who live there is that for months, no one has known precisely where the district’s boundaries are.

Missouri jumped last year into the nation’s redistricting wars, pushing through a new congressional map backed by President Trump that would secure an additional Republican House seat in November. The plan has mostly collapsed, leading to a year of legal fights and confusion for voters. The partisan battle reached the Supreme Court last week and spurred a chaotic back-and-forth among the courts that changed the boundaries multiple times within a single hour. For now, the old map, which was adopted in 2022, is back in effect, but Republican candidates are still battling. A hearing in a federal appeals court is set for tomorrow—one day before the state is required to start making absentee ballots available to overseas voters.

[Read: The election deniers’ long game]

The mayhem in Missouri is the latest example of how uncertain and volatile the midterm elections have become. Republicans started the redistricting battles last year to gain partisan advantage during the midterms, and Democrats quickly followed. Missouri and nine other states have since redrawn their maps. On Monday, the Court blocked a Trump executive order that would have dramatically restricted voting by mail, a decision that Trump called a “big loss for Republicans, and America itself.” Voting-rights groups celebrated the decision, which they say prevents chaos. But with fewer than two months until Election Day, election-related litigation is still winding its way through the courts, and Trump continues to claim that the electoral system is rigged.

“We’re talking about last-minute changes to election infrastructure, which could lead to either confusion or affect the outcome of the election,” Nate Persily, a Stanford University law professor, told me. “And it is a serious problem, particularly in our current context when voter confidence in the election infrastructure has collapsed.”

Missouri’s saga began shortly after the state legislature passed the new, GOP-friendly map at the urging of the White House last September. Opponents seized on a quirk in the state constitution that empowers citizens to petition for a referendum on an act of the state legislature. In December, an advocacy group submitted more than 305,000 signatures asking for a vote before the new map would be put into effect—which would leave the old map in use for the election this fall. Secretary of State Denny Hoskins, a Republican, had until August 4, the state’s primary date, to certify the referendum for November’s ballot.

For months, it’s been unclear which map would actually be used. Democratic candidates, including Mann, told me that they’d stumped through both the new and old versions of their district—a choice that took extra manpower, organizing, and money. Others, including Representative Bob Onder, a Republican whom Mann is challenging, told me that they’d campaigned off of the revised 2025 map.

[Quinta Jurecic: Rules designed to create chaos]

“We knew that they were going to be enacting this gerrymandered scheme,” Mann said. “So our strategy, not just in the Third Congressional but as a Democratic Party as a whole, was to beat these congresspeople on any map that they offer.”

But the morning of the primary came, and Hoskins had still not certified the referendum. He directed election administrators to hold the primary under the 2025 map. At 4 p.m. that day, an hour before the referendum deadline, Hoskins rejected the petition on state constitutional grounds. Candidates won their primaries based on the gerrymandered map.

A month later, the situation got even more complex. On September 3, the Missouri Supreme Court unanimously ruled against Hoskins, finding that the referendum petition was legal and should not have been rejected. It ordered the 2022 map to be used in November. Hoskins appealed the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court, which rejected his arguments last Tuesday. Thirty minutes later, a federal district judge ruling on a separate lawsuit ordered that the 2025 map must be used in November. Citing that decision, Hoskins announced that Missouri would use the new gerrymandered map—leading the Missouri Supreme Court to threaten him with contempt of court. The U.S. Supreme Court quickly chimed in again and restored the old map, for now; Hoskins was briefly held in contempt for continuing to insist that the 2025 map was valid, but he quickly switched his position to match that of the U.S. Supreme Court. Legal experts told me that it is highly unlikely that the appeals court would change the map again, but as the past two weeks have shown, nothing is certain.

Both sides agree that the situation is a mess. Republicans I spoke with blamed the Missouri Supreme Court for rejecting the 2025 map after it had already been used for a primary. Democrats—and the majority of legal experts I spoke with—blamed Hoskins for waiting until the last available hour to reject the petition, a move that effectively forced the primary to be conducted with the 2025 map, which his party drew up. They said that the arguments should have played out in court months ago. Hoskins disagreed.

“I take my job and oath of office very seriously,” Hoskins told me. “I met that deadline, my constitutional deadline, of August 4. I would say those that don’t like that deadline and want to see that deadline change, they need to contact their lawmaker.”

Some of the federal officials whose seats are on the line are, like voters, trying to figure out what’s going on and who is to blame. Onder, who is suing to reinstate the new map, told me that he and voters “operated on the assumption” that the 2025 map was the correct one. “To the extent this has been thrown into confusion and chaos, the fault is entirely [on] the part of the Missouri Supreme Court.” Representative Emanuel Cleaver, whose seat was supposed to be wiped out by the new map, told me that he had been campaigning “all over the state” over the past few weeks because of his uncertainty about which district he’d be in. “There’s been a fog over the state of Missouri,” Cleaver said. “We are now spending time trying to erase the confusion.”

[Read: The election system wasn’t built for this]

The bulk of the work is now in the hands of local election administrators, who are scrambling to prepare for the midterms on a condensed timeframe and with a confused electorate. Kurt Bahr, a Republican and the St. Charles County elections director, told me that he’s printing ballots under the old 2022 map but is preparing contingency plans in case courts once again change which map to use. In Boone County, where about 40 percent of voters would shift into a new district under the 2025 map, the clerk Brianna Lennon has provided a lookup tool so voters can see their districts under both maps. She said that she and her staff have been working to inform voters about what’s happening without causing needless panic.

“These things are always being argued over and fought over by people who don’t have to run the election,” Eric Fey, the Democratic director of elections in St. Louis County, told me. Election administrators, he said, are the “folks that are left holding the bag at the end of the day.”

Last year, Onder posted a clip of a speech in which he recounted speaking with Trump about redistricting. “I said, ‘Mr. President, do you want us to draw you an extra congressional seat in Missouri?,’” Onder said, adding that the state, which voted for Trump by 18 points and has Republican supermajorities in the state legislature, was poised under the old map to send “two progressive Democrats” to Congress. Missouri’s 2025 map aims to net an additional Republican seat in the House by carving Kansas City—long represented by Cleaver—into three districts that extend into rural central Missouri and strongly favor Republicans.

The fate of Independence Boulevard Christian Church, in northeast Kansas City, exemplifies this gerrymandering tactic, known as “cracking.” Under the 2025 map, the church is in one district, the parking lot in another, and a market across the street in a third.

“Before, there already were people who were saying [voting] doesn’t matter; they had already felt disenfranchised,” Mindy Fugarino, the pastor of the church, told me. “I think there are some folks just using this as another reason to disengage.”

The “downward spiral” of extreme partisan gerrymandering over the past year risks disillusioning people, Richard Pildes, a constitutional-law professor at New York University, told me. “It leads to many voters feeling the system is being manipulated, that the system’s rigged,” he said.

[Read: Out of the gerrymandering darkness, a new hope for reform ]

Both Democrats and Republicans in Missouri told me they feel cheated as the map continues to change. St. Charles County Republican Central Committee Chair Bob Eno told me he believes that the state supreme-court ruling took away people’s chances to choose their own representation by shifting the state back to the old map after primary votes had already been cast. Pat Harcourt, who lives in Wright City, initially thought that her Democratic ballot was incorrect for the August primary. But it wasn’t—her address had moved into a different district under the gerrymandered map. “And here I am writing postcards to people, ‘Your vote counts,’” Harcourt told me. “Well, I don’t know. Maybe it counts, but it may not be in your congressional district.” Mitchell Clem, a Republican voter whose district also moved under the new map, told me that he doesn’t like gerrymandering but understands that Missouri is part of a national trend. “We need to fix this,” Clem, who lives in the St. Louis suburb of O’Fallon, said. “It’s just gotten out of hand.”

The drawing of congressional districts has always seemed subjective, and the rules for drawing them have been scrutinized since gerrymandering was first deployed as a political tactic more than 200 years ago. But as partisanship continues to deepen, the rules keep shifting far too late in the process, and voters try, perhaps in vain, just to keep up.

The Only Thing Capable of Uniting Bernie and Bannon

2026-09-15T20:09:41-04:00

If there was any question over whether the concept of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” is still operative in Washington’s hyper-partisan political environment, the answer may be found in the budding coalition of progressives and MAGA-friendly activists who have united in recent days to speak out against artificial intelligence. Which is how Senator Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon found themselves speaking on the same stage today.

With warnings that the technology could cause mass economic displacement and even human extinction, political figures who once wanted nothing to do with one another are suddenly joining forces, scrambling the political landscape just weeks before the midterm elections. The odd couples, who would have been hard to fathom just weeks ago, are also reshaping the legislative agenda. Republican Senators Ted Cruz and John Thune have teamed up with Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar on an AI-safety bill; progressive Senator Richard Blumenthal joined forces with conservative Senator Josh Hawley to push a bill requiring AI companies to obtain approval from the Department of Energy before deploying new systems.

Nearly a decade ago, Sanders urged then-President-Elect Trump to reverse his decision to hire Bannon, a pugilistic architect of the MAGA movement, and called him “a racist individual.” Last year, Bannon called Sanders a “pussy” for not going after Hillary Clinton hard enough in 2016. But the two were able to put all of that aside today to deliver the same message: If AI has the potential to wipe out humanity, Americans should have a say in how it operates.

[Read: Trump’s see-no-evil AI policy]

“If the lives of every man, woman, and child are going to be fundamentally changed by this technology, then the people of this country must make the decisions about AI, and not just a handful of oligarchs,” Sanders said at the all-day “Pro-Human Assembly.” Bannon sounded pretty much exactly the same. “The American citizens are not going to be supplicants to the oligarchs anymore,” the MAGA strategist said in what easily could have been a continuation of the Vermont socialist’s remarks. “We can’t do it.”

Standing decidedly outside of this spirit of cross-party cooperation is Trump, who has downplayed warnings about AI’s risks and called the concerns over the rapidly advancing technology a “hoax.” Trump made a surprise appearance at an AI-friendly event yesterday by placing a phone call to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and making clear that he does not believe the doomsday warnings that have circulated in recent days. “The robots are not going to be taking over the world,” he told Huang, who took the call while speaking at a summit in Los Angeles and put it on speakerphone for the crowd to hear. “That’s not going to happen.”

Bannon and Sanders, speaking back-to-back, essentially agreed to disagree about Trump. Sanders said that Trump’s “ignorance regarding this issue is truly embarrassing” and suggested that the president is not taking the technology’s risks seriously enough.

“Obviously, he and I have a quite different opinion of the president of the United States,” Bannon told the crowd. “But we’re trying to raise above partisanship, and we have to.” That line received applause. But overriding Trump’s opposition to AI regulation in order to make meaningful policy changes could be a heavy lift. In several social-media posts yesterday, Trump dismissed those concerned about AI’s dangers as “Conspiracy Theorists, Treasonists, Traitors, and Leakers.” He suggested that AI and the data centers that power it could represent the greatest economic opportunity in American history. “Don’t kill the Golden Goose!” he wrote. Some lawmakers and activists, including Trump supporters and detractors, are now attempting to create a formal coalition to push for stronger guardrails around AI. Sanders plans to host a closed-door, bipartisan briefing on AI tomorrow in Washington.

Today’s event in Washington was branded by organizers as an opportunity to create a “more human-centric path for AI development.” Speakers, including lawmakers, labor officials, and faith leaders, leaned heavily on the idea that the battle to slow AI’s advance should transcend traditional partisan or ideological divides.

[Ian Bogost: The thrill of wanting AI to destroy the world]

The event was organized by the Future of Life Institute, a nonprofit that was primarily funded by a donation of more than $650 million in 2021 from Vitalik Buterin, a wealthy cryptocurrency entrepreneur. (The donation was delivered in crypto.) Politico reported in 2024 that the small organization’s hefty war chest put it in the same league as organizational behemoths such as the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation and the Brookings Institution.

Today’s event featured free merch that included Carhartt shirts, yellow hoodies, and camouflage hats featuring mottos such as Keep the future human and Pro-Human. A video booth, fully decked out with stage lighting and a single chair, offered attendees the chance to answer the prompt When did you feel most human? Not, apparently, on video: When I walked by it a few times, it was not being used.

A parody news report on nearby television screens played a staged interview with “Dan X,” who appeared to be a stand-in for an AI executive. The CEO of a fictional company called Replacement.AI was described by the faux journalist as “a walking paradox” who “loves people but isn’t crazy about humans.” Wearing a Patagonia vest and a smartwatch, the Millennial-coded CEO ended the interview by offering this advice: “Live every day as if it is your last, because one day soon, very soon, it might be.”

Stuart Russell, a computer-science professor and the president of the International Association for Safe & Ethical AI, told the crowd that his private discussions with AI-company officials included even more dire predictions about the technology’s dangers than what they have discussed publicly. But organizers seemed eager to push the event beyond dystopian warnings and move toward solutions.

“There is no better testimony to how united we are than the mind-blowing ideological diversity that you’re going to see onstage today,” Max Tegmark, a co-founder and the chair of the Future of Life Institute, said at the assembly’s opening. In addition to lawmakers, the event featured clergy who spoke about AI’s impact on faith, parents whose teenage children had committed suicide after engaging with chatbots, and economists concerned about the mass displacement of the workforce. Attendees attempting to navigate the event website had to first agree to “Standards of Conduct” requiring participants to “practice active listening” and refrain from personal attacks.

Representative Chip Roy of Texas, who is retiring from Congress, was the only elected Republican to appear onstage. He told me that organizers had encouraged him to avoid politics in his remarks but that he predicted that political differences will inevitably intrude as the debate over what to do about AI continues. “I doubt Bernie’s solutions are going to be my solution,” he said.

Still, there were signs that figures on both sides of the aisle seemed ready to at least have an honest conversation. “I don’t think you could find any two harder partisans than Bernie Sanders on the left and Steve Bannon on the right,” Bannon said during his remarks. “This is a hinge in history. We have to handle this correctly. To handle it correctly, No. 1, we can never trust what an oligarch says.”

Sanders was by then out of sight, but on that much, he surely agreed.

Trump’s See-No-Evil AI Policy

2026-09-14T20:53:00-04:00

Not long ago, most of Washington was scrambling to be as friendly as possible to the rise of artificial intelligence. Lawmakers from both parties saw a chance to bolster the nation’s economy—and their campaign coffers. But rarely has public opinion flipped so quickly and so thoroughly as it has on AI in recent months. While AI was making some tech leaders unfathomably rich, many Americans in states both red and blue grew alarmed by the proliferation of loud, electricity-guzzling data centers, convinced that AI would first make life more expensive and then, for good measure, eliminate their job. In the past few days, some of the top voices in the AI industry have gone further, warning that unless development of the technology is slowed, and slowed soon, all of humanity could be made extinct.

These fears have rattled markets and galvanized a bipartisan set of leaders into calling for the government to step in. AI has now become a central issue in the midterm elections. But President Trump, who first came to power by closely reading the mood of the country and shifting his views to meet those of the electorate, seems to have his fingers in his ears, ignoring it all and continuing to embrace AI, confident that everything will be fine because he is in charge. Unless, of course, the human race ends first.

Trump would seem to have a perfect opportunity to try to contain this fast-moving political conflagration: Next week, he’s set to host China’s president, Xi Jinping, at the White House. The United States and China are the world’s leaders on AI and are in a race to develop the technology. The summit could be a venue, some in the industry hope, to order a pause in development or establish international safety guidelines. But Trump, at least for now, wants no part of a slowdown. AI growth has propped up Wall Street and sectors of the American economy for the duration of his second term, and the president has made clear that he doesn’t want to do anything that could burst that bubble.

“The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!” Trump wrote on Truth Social today, as he made half a dozen posts, each seemingly more frantic than the last. He later compared the concerns about the technology to his own impeachments, declaring that “AI taking over the World, destroying Humanity, and all other things bad, is a HOAX.”

As tech insiders offered warnings about the AI apocalypse, Trump was busy rallying the MAGA faithful in Texas and taking in rounds of golf in Ireland. The dire prophecies began last Tuesday, with a series of viral social-media posts by an AI researcher who said that the technology is advancing so quickly that it could bring about human extinction by the end of the decade. The threat of annihilation seemed to grab Washington’s attention as few other concerns have. By the next afternoon, after several other researchers had echoed the alarm, members of Congress were beginning to call for legislation, new agencies, hearings, and regulations to address the threat. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont told us on Wednesday that he had sent invitations to a bipartisan set of lawmakers for a closed-door briefing with AI experts. He said that the researchers had provided a wake-up call about a technology that poses an “extraordinary danger for the human race.” That night, Trump spoke for nearly two hours at the Republican midterm convention in Dallas, but he did not mention AI once.

[Read: AI is running laps around our political system]

In the days that followed, more troubling evidence emerged. Anthropic released a report detailing the ways that individuals and nation-states have attempted to misuse its technology, including for sophisticated cyberattacks and research that could potentially support the development of biological weapons.

Trump decamped to Ireland, where he spent the weekend watching a golf tournament at one of his properties. He was dismissive of the Silicon Valley warnings, emphasizing the need to defeat China in the AI race and downplaying the technology’s risks. On Saturday, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei wrote that a downshift in the pace of AI development “could greatly reduce the risk that something goes seriously wrong.” Other industry leaders joined in, including OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Elon Musk, the sometimes–Trump ally.

One of Trump’s first moves upon returning to office last year was to revoke the executive order signed by his predecessor, Joe Biden, that imposed a series of regulations on the AI industry. Trump’s focus was business growth, and he reveled in the power he had over the nation’s tech titans. Many crowded the room at his inauguration, and he has hosted AI-industry leaders such as Altman, former Oracle CEO Safra Catz, and Nvidia President Jensen Huang.

Still, some of Trump’s advisers have had concerns since last year about the political impacts of the AI backlash, when figures as disparate as Sanders and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis began calling for more regulation. To head off the potential populist backlash, Trump announced the Ratepayer Protection Pledge in March, asking major developers of AI to “build, bring, or buy” resources needed for any new electricity-production and utility-infrastructure upgrades. Now the White House is working with House Speaker Mike Johnson to fast-track legislation that would put into law some of the pledge’s voluntary measures. A vote is scheduled for tomorrow.

[From the March issue: America isn’t ready for what AI will do to jobs]

People close to the administration perceive some figures, including White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, to be supportive of additional regulation of the industry, two people familiar with internal White House deliberations told us, speaking on the condition of anonymity. Others, such as Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, have advocated for as little government interference as possible, while Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has demanded that Anthropic abandon ethical safeguards—such as rules against mass surveillance and autonomous lethal targeting—in its work for the Pentagon. (When Anthropic refused, Hegseth cut ties with the company.)

Trump has dug in on letting AI rip. He has watched as the industry has propelled the stock market, the president’s favorite indicator of a strong economy, keeping it high even amid challenges posed by the Iran conflict, stubborn inflation, and tariffs. Trump has expressed worry to those close to him that a halt to AI expansion could send the economy into a recession, one ally told us.

Some in the president’s orbit have raised suspicions about the AI executives’ warnings: Is this an attempt at market capture? (They worry that new regulations would freeze the industry and prevent would-be competitors from catching up to the industry giants.) Vice President Vance seemed to give expression to that idea by saying today that tech companies “begging the government to regulate them” feels “like a bit of a Trojan horse.” David Sacks, a co-chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, wondered on social media over the weekend why AI companies cannot just regulate themselves; he told tech leaders to “stop pretending you need anyone else’s permission. Stop pretending antitrust law has to be suspended so you can form a cartel.” (Top AI firms could work together to implement some safety standards, but antitrust law would likely prevent them from implementing any kind of reciprocal agreement to throttle the pace of development, unless Congress granted a waiver for that purpose, MacKenzie Arnold, the managing director of the Institute for Law and AI, a nonpartisan think tank, told The Atlantic.) Today, Trump called Huang while the CEO was onstage at an AI event to assure the Nvidia head that he will keep supporting the technology.

[Read: J. D. Vance’s AI doctrine]

The pleas for action have created unlikely political bedfellows. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, a Republican, declared that “we need substantially more regulation,” while Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii, a Democrat, said that Congress needs to “move at the pace of the threat.” Tomorrow, Sanders will join the Trump adviser Steve Bannon at a “Pro-Human Assembly,” an all-day gathering in Washington, D.C., focused on ensuring that humans remain in charge of AI. Despite support for regulation from both the right and the left, there is little meaningful oversight of AI that can be implemented without the president’s approval. Sanders told us that he hopes the bipartisan outrage will ultimately get Trump’s attention. “Trump’s ignorance is extremely dangerous,” he said. “He has not a clue about the dangers inherent in this technology, nor do people in his administration.”

Trump is looking forward to next week’s summit with Xi, which follows a May meeting in Beijing. The U.S. president has stressed his strong relationship with the Chinese leader and has downplayed China’s efforts to thwart the United States. It seems unlikely that Trump will let AI fears fully derail the summit’s agenda. Trump has also minimized China’s chances of catching up to the U.S.—he green-lighted a sale of Nvidia chips to China late last year—even as he has played up the stakes. “Whoever wins AI wins,” he said this past weekend.

But Xi may come into the meeting with a new wariness of his own. China’s top intelligence official warned yesterday that AI could pose a direct threat to the Chinese Communist Party’s hold on power by enabling sophisticated hacking and disinformation campaigns. Many in the industry hope that the summit will be an inflection point. Nate Persily, a co-director of the Stanford Law AI Initiative, told us that “if ever there was an opportunity to get some kind of consensus on AI safety, this provides that opportunity.” And Altman, in an interview over the weekend, made a clever appeal to Trump’s vanity, suggesting that if he and Xi strike some sort of deal to create AI guardrails, the president could win his long-coveted Nobel Peace Prize.

Michael Scherer, Ashley Parker, Will Oremus, and Jack Rodriquez-Vars contributed reporting.

Gas Prices Could Cost Republicans the Midterms

2026-09-14T16:46:00-04:00

One might expect Donald Trump to be concerned about gas prices. Less than two months out from the midterms, gas costs 37 percent more than it did a year ago. Home-heating oil was up 52 percent as of August, and diesel is up a staggering 69 percent. None of those numbers is likely to go down significantly as long as the Iran war drags on. Meanwhile, just last week, a Saudi oil pipeline that carries about 4 percent of the global oil supply shut down after being bombed. (No one has claimed credit for the attack.)

But Trump says he isn’t worried. Speaking with reporters last week, he insisted that the United States, not Iran, is in control of the Strait of Hormuz. “Right after the election,” he said, “oil prices are going to be tumbling downward.”

Even if that prediction were based on anything resembling fact, the timing would be too late to do Trump much good. Political scientists tend to agree that gas prices influence voter behavior. Although many voters no doubt understand that the president isn’t usually directly responsible for the price of oil, this time, he is. In fact, the oil shock related to Trump’s war of choice with Iran is the only reason the U.S. has any inflation to speak of. Inflation in all non-energy consumer purchases is at just 2 percent over the past year. If Democrats manage to take back the House and Senate in November despite an inhospitable electoral map, the Trump effect on gas prices may well be the reason.

[Jonathan Chait: Does Trump want Republicans to win the midterms?]

Voters hate inflation, and gas prices are especially hard to tune out. Juan Felipe Riaño, an economist who has studied inflation’s political consequences, told me that voters understand that price increases translate into lower real wages. The more they drive, the more pronounced the effect. People who live in rural areas and exurbs have the most to lose, because they have the longest commutes. These are the reddest parts of the country, meaning that they are home to millions of voters whom Democrats are trying to persuade to vote blue. According to a Brookings Institution analysis, the average voter in a Republican-held district drives 26 percent more miles than their counterpart in a Democratic district. Other research has found that those with longer drive times are more likely to hold the president accountable for increases in gas prices.

These Trump-friendly areas are exactly where Democrats need to make inroads. They can’t take the Senate without winning multiple states that Trump won by more than 10 points in 2024. Meanwhile, although gerrymandering has created more red districts, it has done so by spreading the Republican advantage more thinly across districts. This has created more places where Democrats could win in a wave election. Currently, Democrats lead Republicans on generic congressional polls by about seven points. In a plus-seven election, their best recruits could pick up seats even in districts that went heavily for Trump in 2024.

Perhaps the best thing Trump could do to avoid that outcome would be to bring gas prices down before Election Day. His approval rating has been declining almost continuously since he took office a second time, and since August, it has hovered around 38 percent, according to Silver Bulletin. Voters say that their top issue is the cost of living, and only 25 percent approve of how Trump has handled it. That’s a decline of nine points since the war with Iran began.

[Sarah Longwell: Voters have a message for Democrats]

As for Republican candidates in competitive races, their best bet for avoiding the gas-price backlash might be to distance themselves from the president. But Trump has made that extremely difficult. Last week, Republicans gathered in Dallas for an unusual midterm convention devoted to celebrating Trump’s greatness. At one point, he asked the crowd to repeat a “pledge to the greatest president in the history of the United States.”

And if Trump’s goal is to remind Republican candidates that their voters’ first loyalty is to him, not them, he seems to be succeeding. Only a tiny handful of congressional Republicans have publicly denounced the Iran war. Several vulnerable Republicans have refused to allow daylight between themselves and Trump, even when doing so would seem to be tactically wise. Michael Whatley, Mike Collins, and Mike Rogers, the Republican Senate nominees in the swing states of North Carolina, Georgia, and Michigan, respectively, all spoke at the convention. So, too, did Jon Husted and Ken Paxton, who are running in Ohio and Texas, two states Trump won by more than 10 points in 2024, but where polls suggest that Democrats have a chance to pick up Senate seats.

Even when voters believe that the president is to blame for painful gas-price increases, they may be unsure about how aligned their local House or Senate candidate is with the White House. Heading into the midterms, Trump is going out of his way to make sure no such uncertainty exists.

Trump’s Secret Points System for Cabinet Members

2026-09-13T06:00:00-04:00

Nearly every day, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles meets with Meghan Bauer, a presidential assistant who coordinates with Cabinet members, to review who’s recently traveled where, who’s heading out into the country, and—perhaps most important—who’s in a swing district at that very moment. The debrief is part of the administration’s unofficial Cabinet Travel Competition, overseen by Bauer, in which the White House encourages Cabinet secretaries to traverse the country to promote President Trump’s agenda and tracks their visits to politically competitive congressional districts or states ahead of the midterm elections.

We first found out about the competition when chatting with a Cabinet secretary about an event that person had declined to attend in Manhattan, in part for fear of being docked points in the White House contest for going to a solidly blue area. (Several White House officials said that no one ever loses points, and two added that a trip to New York for a cable-news hit praising the administration’s policies, for instance, would still count toward the contest.)

When we talked with Karoline Leavitt late last month, in her final days as White House press secretary, she marveled: “I think we have seven or eight of them out on the road in targeted districts just today.” The formal competition ran from Memorial Day to Labor Day, although secretaries will likely be encouraged to keep going through November. There were rumors of a prize—possibly a dinner with the president for the winning Cabinet secretary, plus their family—but several White House officials insisted that the competition is simply for bragging rights. They all spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were discussing internal matters.

These officials said that contestants are encouraged to travel to key congressional districts or competitive states, appear with members of Congress, and participate in local media interviews. The thinking, in part, is that local press coverage is more valuable than talking with national outlets in Washington, and that Cabinet officials can help drive Trump’s message by highlighting how his actions and policies have improved the lives of voters. Any midterm-related travel must be flagged for White House approval—and everyone is instructed to comply with federal rules that forbid certain forms of partisan politicking. As in previous administrations, taxpayers foot the bill for travel related to the secretaries’ official duties, and the top officials are expected to pay for any personal political travel themselves. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. got approval to use a more costly military jet for some of his trips, The Washington Post reported.

In February, Wiles told agency heads they should limit their international travel so that they could focus on helping Republicans win the midterm elections. The president would do the same, she said at the time, and he would spend every other week stumping through the country, ramping up to at least once a week as the November elections neared. Punishment for those who disobeyed was swift; among the various reasons Kristi Noem was pushed out as Homeland Security secretary were images of her atop a camel in Bahrain and well-documented horseback-riding jaunts in Argentina’s Campo de Mayo and near South Dakota’s Mount Rushmore, where there are no competitive federal midterm races. “They know not to take 10-day-long vacations in Wyoming,” Leavitt said of the Cabinet members. “The president is working all the time, and he expects them to as well.”

[Read: The YOLO presidency]

The White House declined to provide us with its tally of each Cabinet member’s political travel, but it did send us a list of the numbers of visits made to at least 13 states over the summer. In the lead with 46 visits was Texas, where Republicans are spending millions to try to hold on to a Senate seat. Following close behind was Pennsylvania with 42, and New York with 40. (Manhattan may not be MAGA country, but New York has several competitive House districts.) On the lower end of the most-visited states were New Jersey and North Carolina (both 10), Alaska (five), and Nevada (four). In a little more than three months, the White House said, Cabinet members made a total of 265 visits to those 13 states.

We made our own list, searching through publicly documented domestic travel by members of Trump’s Cabinet starting on Memorial Day and ending on August 31. To try to emulate the White House’s tracking system, we gave each person a point for traveling to a competitive congressional district or a state with a close Senate race. We used the Cook Political Report ratings to determine competitiveness, focusing on the 37 districts with races that Cook rated as a toss-up or leaning toward one political party, as well as any states with a similarly competitive Senate contest. (Though the White House might reward someone who went to Manhattan for a media interview, we did not. We also awarded only one point for multiple stops in one state during a single trip.)

According to our tally, the winner is likely Small Business Administration head Kelly Loeffler, who took at least 18 trips to competitive states, including more than one stop each in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Virginia. She is followed closely by Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins (at least 17), Acting Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling (at least 15), and Kennedy and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy (at least 10 each). In certain ways, the competition is really just among the handful of members whose job lends itself to regular national travel; folks such as the U.S. trade representative, the CIA director, and the director of the Office of Management and Budget seem to have each taken only one trip to a competitive area since Memorial Day. We could not find any midterm-related trips for Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who since his confirmation has clocked thousands of miles overseas. And though Duffy tied for fourth place during this period, we were nonetheless surprised his travel wasn’t a bit more robust, given that he previously spent several months traversing the country with his family for his six-episode reality series, The Great American Road Trip. Perhaps he was just recovering from his long joyride across the United States.

The White House spokesperson Olivia Wales praised both Trump’s Cabinet and his policy achievements in an emailed statement. “Cabinet officials will continue to meet with everyday Americans across our country to inform future policymaking and tout these victories, drawing a strong contrast to the record of failure by radical Democrats on the border, inflation, and crime,” she wrote. Since Trump’s first term, Democrats and watchdog groups have accused Trump officials of violating the Hatch Act—a 1939 federal law that, to minimize partisanship in government, limits federal employees from engaging in certain political activities. And in the run-up to these midterms, at least one Cabinet member—Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth—has come under intense criticism for seemingly blurring the line between personal and government travel.

Two decades ago, President George W. Bush’s staff similarly tracked Cabinet travel before the 2006 midterms, and offered incentives to federal employees who volunteered in battleground races. The Office of Special Counsel condemned the operation years later, objecting to the use of federal funds for political purposes. Back then, the Republican National Committee kept an “Administration Tracker” spreadsheet to log the travel of political appointees to targeted races, and the White House kept its own list of Cabinet “assets” and where they had deployed. The investigation found that the Bush tracking system spurred a “friendly competition” between White House liaisons that, ultimately, was part of the “type of electioneering proscribed by the Hatch Act.”

The partisan travel of federal officials has long been legally and politically fraught. During the Biden administration, in 2024, House and Senate Republicans investigated trips that top officials from the Small Business Administration, including the administrator, took to crucial battleground states. Federal watchdogs found in 2021 that members of the Trump administration had shown “willful disregard” for the law by pushing for Trump’s reelection in their official capacities.

Whether the White House is violating the law now would depend on what internal safeguards have been created to prevent federal funds from being spent on political purposes, Donald Sherman, the president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, told us. “The details do matter,” he said. “But it is also hard to imagine that that compliance is being prioritized in a competition-like scenario, particularly in an administration that has been hostile to the Hatch Act in pretty much every other instance.”

Trump fired the head of the Office of Special Counsel when he returned to office, and the Hatch Act has not been enforced against senior Trump-administration officials since then, despite complaints from watchdog groups about apparent violations. A White House official told us that the administration has implemented a process in which the White House and agency ethics officials review political appearances by Trump’s appointees. “All Administration officials who chose to participate in political activity and travel have been encouraged to work with their respective agency counsels and the White House to ensure that they are in full compliance,” the official wrote in an emailed statement.

In the run-up to the 2010 midterms, then-President Obama and his team invented the “Recovery Summer,” a six-week push—featuring, yes, Cabinet secretaries and other senior officials—to spotlight infrastructure investments from their stimulus bill. In 2022, the Biden administration deployed its top messengers across the country to highlight his policies as well. Then–Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg proved the most in-demand Cabinet surrogate, and his position allowed him to tout the administration’s roughly $1 trillion infrastructure bill.

[Read: Trump plans to buy midterm ads about his own record]

But those administrations were more diligent than Trump’s in distinguishing between personal and government travel, and took pains not to mix the two. And despite the Trump administration’s alleged disregard for the Hatch Act, many of the Cabinet members we’ve tracked have similarly avoided blurring political and government trips, albeit with (at least) one notable exception. In May, before the official competition began, Hegseth appeared in Kentucky alongside the former Navy SEAL Ed Gallrein, who successfully challenged Representative Thomas Massie, a Trump irritant, in the Republican primary. Hegseth’s star turn on the stump raised questions about whether he’d violated the Hatch Act; though a Pentagon spokesperson said Hegseth had attended in his “personal capacity,” he appeared the same day at Fort Campbell in Kentucky in his official capacity to award Purple Hearts. Past Pentagon chiefs and other top Defense Department officials have avoided even a whiff of partisanship. Then, in August, Hegseth appeared at the Iowa State Fair alongside Representative Zach Nunn, where he endorsed Nunn’s reelection bid and praised him as an ally of both the Pentagon and the president.

Perhaps emboldened by his previous campaign-trail appearance—which prompted much griping but no meaningful consequences—Hegseth declared, “According to the lawyers, I’m only here in a personal capacity.”

Agriculture Secretary Rollins—a frequent traveler, by our count—journeyed in early June to a farm in North Carolina, where she walked between rows of tobacco and stood in front of John Deere tractors, touting the Trump administration’s labor reforms, which she said had reduced costs for the state’s farmers. In July, she joined a radio interview in Georgia with Representative Brian Jack—a Republican expected to win his reelection campaign—and described a new program for shipping meat as “so exciting” and “so important” for the state. And in late August, she appeared at the Iowa State Fair, where she defended Trump’s controversial decision to ease restrictions on imported beef, which she said was necessary to lower prices for struggling families. All three states have competitive Senate races that are essential to Republicans maintaining control of the chamber.

Her fellow Cabinet members traveled to other key states to spread similar enthusiasm. Energy Secretary Chris Wright—with nine trips to competitive areas, by our count—traveled to Alaska to deliver “a giant thank-you” for the state’s copious oil exports. And Veterans Affairs Secretary Doug Collins tied with him, including travel to a military event in Virginia Beach with Vice President Vance and a day of stops in central Michigan to meet with local veterans, alongside the district’s Republican representative.

The agency chiefs tailor their messages to their specific audiences. But if the competition is any indication—and mere mention of it elicited knowing nods and smiles from agency staff and White House officials—the Cabinet officials understand their singular mission: to spread the Trump doctrine far and wide, but especially to purple battlegrounds. They are eager to comply.

Madison Hahamy, Jack Rodriquez-Vars, and Marie-Rose Sheinerman contributed to this report.

*Illustration Sources: Shawn Thew / EPA / Bloomberg / Getty; Kevin Dietsch / Getty; Anna Moneymaker / Getty; Brendan Smialowski / AFP / Getty; Aaron Schwartz / Bloomberg / Getty.

AI Is Running Laps Around Our Political System

2026-09-12T14:32:33-04:00

Politicians have no shortage of ideas about how to rein in AI: a 100 percent federal tax rate on data-center incentives, a pause on all development of advanced AI, new standards to block AI agents from going rogue, a halt to the construction of data centers altogether.

The flurry of proposals has been impossible to miss, with both Democrats and Republicans proclaiming that something must be done to avert a disaster foretold by AI insiders. Current and former Anthropic researchers have in recent days gone public with warnings that AI could wipe out humanity before the decade ends; the company’s CEO, Dario Amodei, wrote in an essay today that the industry must “slow the pace” at which the technology is being developed. Meanwhile, OpenAI agents escaped a test environment and conspired with one another to breach the servers of the AI giant Hugging Face, an incident that caused alarm both in Silicon Valley and on Capitol Hill. Politicians are also dealing with mounting public opposition to data centers and the fear that robots will soon replace humans across large swaths of the workforce. If this were an alien-invasion movie, now would be the moment when people of all persuasions put aside their differences and band together to save the human race. But that kind of bonhomie feels far out of reach.

Instead, technological advances and grassroots sentiment have been moving faster than politicians have been willing to act. Now some seem to be waking up. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, a Republican, said last Wednesday that he will soon unveil legislation, alongside Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Senate Majority Leader John Thune of South Dakota, intended to head off AI-induced biological or nuclear catastrophes. Representative Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey, a Democrat, and Representative Mike Lawler of New York, a Republican, teamed up earlier this month to introduce legislation that would direct the federal government to create standards for securely deploying AI agents and preventing them from going rogue. Several lawmakers have called for Congress to reconvene specifically for the purpose of addressing the threats posed by AI. Yesterday, Representative Ro Khanna, who represents part of Silicon Valley, called for the creation of an AI safety agency.

Others are shifting their position in real time. Michigan’s Democratic Senate nominee, Abdul El-Sayed, released a lengthy plan in June for AI development to continue with greater regulation and restrictions. He said Wednesday that he now favors “an all-out pause” on AI development. Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who once approvingly called the state “the epicenter of AI development,” ordered an audit of all data-center projects before any could move forward.

But whether politicians can act quickly enough to mitigate possible damage is doubtful, experts told me. “The developments are coming so fast and furious that it is very difficult to keep up with what the harms are and how to address them,” Nate Persily, a co-director of the Stanford Law AI Initiative, told me. He said that although there’s a growing consensus that it would be “foolish” to allow AI to continue advancing without robust federal guardrails, the complexities and rapidly changing threat landscape would challenge any country’s leadership. “There are genuinely hard questions of statutory design here,” he said.

The next few weeks—and the upcoming elections—could determine whether or not politicians are able to deliver any meaningful results or whether they will instead default to the partisan gridlock that most Americans now expect. “The good news is that people across the political spectrum are understanding that we have a technology which is the most dangerous and transformational in human history,” Senator Bernie Sanders told me. The Vermont democratic socialist was among the first lawmakers to call for a moratorium on the data centers that facilitate AI advancement and for a broader pause on the industry’s growth. We spoke shortly after Sanders sent out an invitation to members of Congress for a closed-door briefing this week with top AI-safety experts. The briefing, which will take place on Wednesday, is designed to give lawmakers a clearer understanding of the threats posed by AI and ideas for legislative action.

The invitation was made especially timely by a Tuesday social-media post from the AI researcher Jacob Coxon, who wrote that he had resigned from Anthropic over concerns about the risks of the fast-advancing technology. “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade,” wrote Coxon, a former employee of both OpenAI and Anthropic. His posts, which argue that the AI industry is “gambling with our lives,” were publicly boosted by several other AI researchers. The messages seemed to break through in a way that few other warnings have. Sanders told me that Coxon’s X post, which received more than 120 million views within 24 hours, landed among his colleagues in Congress as “an extraordinary wake-up call.”

President Trump’s signature will be needed to enact any significant change to federal AI policy, but so far, he’s not among those who seem particularly worried. As concerns about AI and data centers have proliferated, Trump has said “let Data Reign” and rejected calls to restrict AI development in the United States. His former AI czar took a similar laissez-faire approach, espousing a philosophy that he summarized as “let the private sector cook.”

Some other Republicans are also wary of saddling American AI companies with too much government oversight. Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee said earlier this year that her proposed TRUMP AMERICA AI Act, which aims to codify the president’s pro-industry executive order on artificial intelligence, would “ensure America triumphs over foreign adversaries in the global race for AI dominance.”

Even for those Republicans who do believe in more muscular federal guardrails for tech companies, Trump’s position presents a significant political hurdle. The president has made clear that he does not want regulation to impede America’s ability to win the global AI race. As is his custom, he has shown no hesitation about attacking members of his own coalition who disagree with him. Even as a growing number of Republican lawmakers are embracing some limits on AI and data centers, few have been willing to openly cross Trump or sign on to more sweeping legislation to pause or restrict AI advancement. In recent years, America’s polarized political system has generated bitter stalemates on how to prevent school shootings, what to do about climate change, and where to draw the line in responding to a once-in-a-generation pandemic. The question of how to handle the race toward superintelligence might not be any different.

In July, about 1,400 AI-company employees signed an open letter calling on the government to help regulate their industry. In a nearly 6,000-word essay published last month, the Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates wrote that powerful AI models “could begin to act against our interests and we could lose control.” In a report published Thursday, Anthropic said that it had intervened to stop several attempts by scientists to use its models in a way that could potentially help develop biological weapons. Amodei wrote that he worries that within the next 6 to 12 months, a swarm of models similar to the one that breached the Hugging Face servers “could be capable of taking over the entire internet with a persistent botnet (potentially causing hundreds of billions of dollars in damage), and that the scale of damage would continue to increase from there if AI becomes more powerful without the necessary guardrails.”

AI, of course, has already delivered advances in health care and science, and there’s no consensus on the scale of the threat it poses. Nuance is required to figure out how to manage it. But lawmakers on both sides of the aisle acknowledge that our current political landscape does not lend itself to sober, cross-party problem-solving. “It is possible to move bipartisan legislation,” Cruz said on ABC’s The View Wednesday after discussing the prospects of his proposed bill. He added, “But it ain’t easy. This is a very divided time.” So far, none of the recent AI-related legislation appears close to becoming law. A bill proposed by Sanders and Representative Greg Casar of Texas, which would ban superintelligence and pause advanced-AI development, faces long odds because no Republicans have signed on.

Democratic and Republican political strategists I spoke with said that the likelihood of bipartisan cooperation to properly govern AI is slim at best. “People are deeply cynical and deeply skeptical, and then you add into that this moment of severe economic disruption,” Joel Payne, a Democratic strategist, told me. “The politicization and the polarization is lighter fluid on top of that.”

That these warnings about AI are emerging in the heat of election season only heightens the likelihood of inaction. With Congress largely out of session for the rest of the year, politicians have settled into campaign mode, attempting to reposition themselves politically and outflank their opponents. In Wisconsin, the race for governor has been dominated by political posturing over data centers. Tom Tiffany, the Republican candidate for governor, has run ads branding his Democratic opponent, David Crowley, as “Data Center David Crowley.” The Democratic Senate candidate Sherrod Brown has run television ads blasting the incumbent, Jon Husted, as “the face of data centers in Ohio.” A memo from the National Republican Senatorial Committee warned that data centers are “the anchor hanging around Husted’s neck” that could ultimately cause him to lose in a state that Trump won handily in 2024. Crowley and Husted have responded with attacks of their own, attempting to link their opponents to data-center development. Political-ad spending nationwide on spots highlighting data centers has spiked in recent months; both Democrats and Republicans have spent millions to attack opponents on the issue, according to data from the firm AdImpact. Tech companies have also poured millions of dollars into political-action committees with the aim of boosting candidates who are friendlier to their cause.

Virginia has become central to this effort. Loudoun County, not far from Washington, D.C., has the largest concentration of data centers in the world, and advocates have tried to tout the benefits for the economy and tax revenue even as residents have raised quality-of-life concerns. The Data Center Coalition, whose membership includes Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, has recently stepped up lobbying efforts in D.C. and in Northern Virginia to oppose moratoriums on data centers and stricter regulations at the federal, state, and local levels. “Sweeping restrictions do not solve complex infrastructure challenges; instead, they risk stalling economic opportunity, defunding essential local public services, and undermining America’s technological edge,” Nicole Riley, the director of Virginia government affairs for the Data Center Coalition, told me.

The White House has shown little interest in halting the march of advanced AI. Trump attacked data-center detractors late last month, posting on social media that communities should oppose the projects only “if they want to end up being backwards and poor.” In May, Trump intervened to postpone an executive order aimed at regulating AI development, telling reporters that “we’re leading China. We’re leading everybody, and I don’t want to do anything that’s going to get in the way of that lead.” The president later signed a narrower order that allows developers to engage governmental review of advanced AI models before their release.

“President Trump’s bold leadership is turning data centers into engines of growth and opportunity for communities across the country that want them, all while cementing America’s dominance over China in the global AI race,” the White House spokesperson Davis Ingle told me, adding that the president’s push to require tech companies to pay for their own power and water resources has protected residents.

Some Republicans have bristled at the president’s rhetorical approach, even if they agree with him on the substance. “I actually think Trump is right, but, as usual, his language gets in the way of what he wants to accomplish,” Doug Heye, a Republican strategist and the former communications director of the Republican National Committee, told me. Heye acknowledged that voter “wariness” about AI is ubiquitous but said that politicians who are now trying to recant their earlier support for data centers are projecting a sense of fear rather than leadership. “Voters can smell that,” he said.

A Pew Research Center poll released last month found that just over half of Americans feel more concerned than excited about the increased use of AI in daily life, up from 37 percent in 2021. Voters have expressed concerns that the fast-advancing technology could replace human jobs, drive up energy costs, and pollute the environment. The AI industry has sullied its own image with “the worst sales pitch in the history of sales pitches,” said Senator Bernie Moreno of Ohio, who recently proposed a 100 percent federal tax on any state or local incentives provided to data centers. Speaking at the Ohio Energy Affordability Summit earlier this month, Moreno said that voters are angry and worried that “these data centers are going to come into our community and take our water and pollute our environment. They’re going to raise our electricity prices. They’re going to eventually put us out of work—and our taxpayer dollars are going to support the construction of these things.”

The latest warnings about superintelligence and human extinction have spurred even the largest AI companies to call on Congress to step in quickly to regulate their industry before it is no longer possible (or, perhaps, before smaller competitors can get a foothold). Amodei said that the government has a role to play in helping slow down AI development, including by implementing regulations “focused on keeping capabilities in balance with safety.” The government can also mediate or facilitate discussions between companies to help them set safety standards and embed third-party evaluators. Amodei wrote that he agrees with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent that a “Chinese lead in AI would pose grave danger for the United States and the world,” and that the U.S. should take measures that include not selling powerful AI chips to China. “Companies and the US government should cooperate to make these steps as effective as possible,” Amodei wrote.

In a post Wednesday, OpenAI’s chief global-affairs officer, Chris Lehane, wrote that the U.S. is facing a brief opportunity to create guardrails around AI development “before AI capabilities outpace the institutions responsible for governing them.” He said that OpenAI now supports several state regulations on the technology that the company had opposed just months ago.

“The prospect of AI-accelerated AI development demands more than voluntary commitments. The United States needs mandatory, capability-based national regulation that can evolve as the technology does,” Lehane wrote.

Sanders told me that he is hopeful that at least some politicians will be willing to work across the aisle out of a sense of self-preservation. He said that his goal over the coming days is to get lawmakers to put pressure on Trump ahead of his meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping later this month, with the hope of encouraging Trump to focus on negotiating a kind of arms treaty with China to rein in AI advancement globally.

But getting Trump’s attention in this political environment may be a challenge in and of itself. On Wednesday, the president spent nearly two hours speaking about his agenda and a wide range of issues at the Republican Party’s midterm convention in Dallas. Trump promised to pay every adult U.S. citizen $5,000 if Republicans hold both houses of Congress, and he told a fictional story about a Democratic Senate candidate vomiting after eating barbecue. He also suggested that the Strait of Hormuz should be renamed the “Trump Strait.” He did not mention AI.

Trump’s Dream World in Dallas

2026-09-10T11:28:00-04:00

Photographs by Joseph Rushmore

Updated at 3:42 p.m. ET on September 11, 2026.

President Trump began his midterm-convention address last night by casting his spell on the crowd in Dallas. “This place is packed,” he announced from the stage, pointing to the back of the American Airlines Center, where everyone could see hundreds of empty seats. Those who looked up saw thousands more, whole sections without any people at all. But the crowd cheered anyway. A deal had been struck. Reality would be ignored.

After more than a decade in politics, Trump is facing his last great electoral test—his popularity is waning, his party is down in the polls, Republicans could lose control in the U.S. House and maybe the Senate. He demanded greater complicity minutes later, seeming to invent a person in the back of the room. “He’s leaving for the bathroom. He’ll be back in two minutes,” he said, pointing. “They’ll take a picture of his seat while he’s gone. And they’ll say Trump did not fill up the arena.”

Laughter joined with the cheers for their political wizard. It was working. Trump could say that he had passed “the largest tax cut in the history of our country,” even if that was not the case. He could claim to have won the presidency three times, when he’s actually done so twice. He could describe the recent past as “the most successful two years financially and every other way in the history of the presidency,” despite six in 10 voters saying he had made the economy worse. He could promise to pay every adult U.S. citizen $5,000 if Republicans held both legislative houses, as if that sum did not amount to about 80 percent of the federal discretionary budget. He might even be able to convince the country to embrace the big fantasy, a chance to defy history and seal victory for Republicans in November.

“I’m asking you to pretend that I’m on the ballot,” he said. “I’m on the ballot. I’m on the ballot. Just one more time.”

Joseph Rushmore for The Atlantic

The night was all about Trump. He was the alpha and omega, the focus and the solution. Attendees wore pictures of the president on lanyards around their necks, the ticket for entry to the arena. VIP boxes were stocked with Trump was right about everything hats. Oversize photos of the president lined the hallways. Five hours before he arrived, he received his first standing ovation. A video montage played on the big screen, images of the president narrated by a reading of Rudyard Kipling’s “If”—“If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue.” When each speaker dropped Trump’s name, it was cause for riotous celebration.

Until now, national political conventions have been held only during presidential-election years, when delegates from each state gather to select their nominee. In the 1970s, the gatherings shifted from smoke-filled rooms for party business to televised infomercials for the candidates. Trump this year created a simulation of a simulation. The balloon nets had no nominee to drop for. The state delegations, sitting under signs on the floor, had no procedural purpose. (The smart party leaders, one strategist told us, were selling their “delegate” tickets to donors.) The convention-in-name-only was for, by, and about one man—who, importantly, cannot be a candidate for president again, according to the U.S. Constitution.

[Read: Trump plans to buy midterm ads about his own record]

“The only way to keep dangerous, radical, weird out of the Senate is a united Republican Party standing with our president, Donald J. Trump,” Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, the chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, bellowed from the stage. “Stand for the president, Donald J. Trump. This is a battle for the heart of our nation. I said the heart of our nation.”

Joseph Rushmore for The Atlantic

Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina addresses the audience.

No president has tried something like this before. None has had so much money to spend on themselves at this point in a presidency. None has chosen to make the midterms a referendum on themselves while polling so badly. But this is Trump, and Trump has come back from worse. For a decade, the GOP’s electoral success has risen and fallen on his energies. The strategist in chief has bet that turning out Trump voters, the ones who typically stay home when he is not on the ballot, is the only path forward. This is why the first ads he bought for the cycle were not about any candidates who are running this year, but about himself. This was why his latest show was a celebration of the unlimited possibility of his incantations.

“Vote Republican, and we will leave the world in our dust for generations to come,” he told the crowd. “There’ll be nothing like it.”

Joseph Rushmore for The Atlantic

Outside Trump’s curated fantasy world, not everything has gone according to plan. Trump’s political strategist, James Blair, announced after the off-year elections in 2025 that the president would be “very, very focused on prices and cost of living.” White House aides told us in the new year that the pivot would come after Trump scratched his itch for another confrontation with Iran. By May, as that conflict dragged on, Trump advisers told us quietly that if it had not receded, along with gas prices, by Labor Day, there would be trouble. Two weeks ago, multiple Trump advisers told us they expected the kinetic part of the Iran war to mostly cease in September, clearing the way for lower gas prices.

None of that has happened. Missiles are still flying in the Strait of Hormuz. Since the 2025 elections, gas prices have risen 39 percent, from $3.08 to $4.28; 30-year mortgage rates have increased 8 percent; electricity prices have gone up more than 4 percent. Charlie Cook, a political analyst and the dean emeritus of legislative-election handicapping, says that Republicans should brace themselves for a tough result. “The worst-case scenario for the GOP and best for Democrats today would have sounded ludicrous eight months ago,” he wrote recently. “The most plausible today resembles Republicans’ nightmare scenario at the beginning of the year.”

[Read: The YOLO presidency]

Those Republican nightmares, both new and old, are unlikely to be worse than the 40-seat gain made by Democrats in the House of Representatives during Trump’s first term, in 2018, thanks to increased polarization and mid-decennial redistricting. But few Republicans still pretend off-camera that they will be able to maintain control of the House. Narrow Democratic control of the Senate, once outlandish, could be within reach. On the sidelines of the convention in Dallas, strategists muttered about recent polling in House races that shows jump balls where Trump won by double digits in 2024.

The outstanding question is whether Democratic candidates can emerge from the dim shadow of President Biden. “While there is a lot of focus on the Republicans’ problems, Democrats have a real problem—they have a real party-image problem,” the Trump pollster Tony Fabrizio told us.

Jesse Ferguson, a Democratic strategist, depicts his party in PowerPoint presentations as a backpacker hiking up a steep mountain with gusts of wind at his back. The incline represents Trump’s financial advantages, and the challenge of winning seats in gerrymandered districts and Republican states such as Ohio, Iowa, Texas, and Alaska. The wind is voter sentiment and the enthusiasm advantage inside the Democratic Party. “Democrats have won the message fight. Republicans have lost the governance fight,” he told us. “The question is whether they can use structural advantages to overcome it.”

On the whole, Democrats are delighted by Trump’s strategy—to put front and center a man whose unpopularity fires up their voters and further alienates the newly skeptical. “If the Democrats have a great year, it will be because they got their base out to vote in large numbers,” Rich Thau, the moderator of the Swing Voter Project, told us. “It won’t be because they magically converted these swing voters into Democratic senatorial and gubernatorial voters.”

Joseph Rushmore for The Atlantic

But they may not be accounting for Trump’s magic. Two years ago, he bounced back from two impeachments and an attack by his supporters on the U.S. Capitol to win the presidency. Now the odds are against him again. By multiple measures, the president who appeared on the Dallas stage last night had lost a step. When he first won the White House, in 2016, he denounced the folly of distant wars of choice, promised to remedy the reigning economic turmoil of globalization, and boasted of his independence as someone who eschewed campaign donations. A decade later, he is managing a reescalating war in Iran that he started. He has positioned himself as a champion of data centers, the latest lightning rod for populist resentment. And he controls a massive $850 million slush fund he acquired in office through seemingly transactional demands of companies, lobbyists, and wealthy individuals seeking government favor.

[Read: Trump is preparing for a long war]

His economic approval rating this summer, according to Quinnipiac University, stood at 34 percent, down from 53 percent on the eve of the last midterm elections on his watch, in 2018. The 2024 presidential election hinged on the rising cost of living, and after Republicans won the trifecta—the White House and both chambers of Congress—the expectation was that Trump and his party would fix what many still view as Biden’s economy. “I want to emphasize that this wasn’t to just slightly improve things,” David Winston, a Republican strategist who works with congressional leadership, told us. “They viewed a substantive outcome as what they were looking for.” It has not come to pass.

Trump has not lost his talent for showmanship. No longer tied to a single hit program in a single slot on NBC, he has spent much of the year creating television spectacles from the Oval Office—an IndyCar race, a UFC fight, a Fourth of July party, a World Cup championship celebration where he lingered in the frame. This string of network debuts gave him the confidence to schedule his convention against the first two games of the NFL season. Only Trump would choose to go up against the Seattle Seahawks and New England Patriots.

Joseph Rushmore for The Atlantic

For those who watched, the first night in Dallas had production quality that has escaped many recent Republican conventions. All the tropes and tricks were hit—the testimonials of a Pennsylvania steelworker and a Florida grandma about policy wins, the glitter reels of alleged Democratic bad behavior, the plea for campaign donations for Ken Paxton, the Republican Senate nominee from Texas. Multiple speakers gave mock “land acknowledgments” praising the national heritage of European colonizers. The comedian Adam Carolla did a bit about Trump’s hair: “You ever see underwater footage of a kelp bed?” There were “everyday Americans,” “American workers,” and Border Patrol agents who gathered onstage, many in work gear. “President Trump refuses to surrender,” Senator Dave McCormick of Pennsylvania said, after a friendly video introduction from his Democratic colleague John Fetterman. “This November there can be no surrender.”

Joseph Rushmore for The Atlantic

There was even a moment to lay out the core contrast that Trump’s advisers hope will frame the election, the sort of message that any other Republican president in his position would be entirely focused on delivering at this point. In a short video, his team spliced together clips from fringe voices on the left—the “woke,” the America-bashing, the revolutionary—before defining the decision on the ballot. “This is no longer simply Republican versus Democrat, or conservative versus liberal,” said the voice-over. “Today the choice is unmistakable: extreme versus mainstream.”

But the centerpiece remained Trump. Speaker after speaker described him in near-messianic terms. “As it turns out, Washington wasn’t incapable of working for the American people; all we needed was a new president,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said. T. W. Shannon, a candidate for lieutenant governor in Oklahoma, placed the entire GOP in the president’s shadow. “We’re also the party of the greatest president in American history, President Donald J. Trump,” he declared.

But no comments mattered more than Trump’s. He talked for nearly two hours, a rollicking, weaving address that only occasionally stuck to the teleprompter. It ended where he began. “Please pretend that I’m running, and get out and vote on November 3 or sooner,” he said. “Because, in actuality, I really am running.” In actuality, he is not. Or maybe he is, in a way. His crowd remained in their seats to the end. The room, at times, felt packed to the rafters.

Additional reporting by Jack Rodriquez-Vars

Support for the photography was provided by the Magnum Foundation

Correction: This article originally called the Freedom 250 Grand Prix a Formula One race. It was an IndyCar race.

The Election Deniers’ Long Game

2026-09-10T07:00:00-04:00

Updated at 6:01 p.m. ET on September 10, 2026

In the anxious days following President Trump’s 2020 election loss—before his supporters stormed the Capitol, before his vengeful return to the White House, before the mass pardons for cop beaters—some Republican figures sought to cast his attempt to overturn the results as nothing more than a coping mechanism.

Trump was merely blowing off steam, people close to the president told me and other reporters. “What is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time?” one asked, suggesting that in the end, his antics would amount to no more than a footnote in the annals of presidential history.

The January 6 insurrection a few weeks later would, of course, turn those predictions into punch lines. Nearly six years on, they look worse still: The election denialism that inspired Trump’s MAGA loyalists to attack the Capitol has metastasized into an animating feature of Republican Party politics.

Trump himself remains at the forefront of this movement. Since returning to office, he has insisted that American elections are “rigged” against the GOP, fired Democratic election officials, threatened to “take over” voting across the country, and issued executive orders that would tightly restrict the vote. The president’s most far-reaching efforts have largely been blocked by the courts or Congress, at least so far. As in 2020, Trump in fact has little legal authority to interfere with elections, and this has given comfort to many Americans.

But as November approaches, the most serious threats posed to free and fair elections no longer come from the White House itself. Instead, they are local, where much of the power over elections actually resides, and they stem from the continuing absorption of Trump’s Big Lie into our political culture. In statehouses and county offices, a cohort of election deniers has taken control of significant parts of the nation’s electoral infrastructure. Some of its members have replaced the officials and legislators who rejected Trump’s push to corrupt the 2020 race. A grassroots movement of Big Lie believers has meanwhile been organized and trained as poll workers or informal observers to sound alarms over local elections they deem suspect in any way.

The November elections represent something new in American politics: For the first time, a coalition of partners at the local, state, and federal levels is ready to pull off the kind of election heist that eluded the president back in 2020. At the very least, the midterms could serve as a trial run for this coalition ahead of the 2028 presidential race, when much of Trump’s legacy will be at stake.

[Listen: The election deniers are in charge now]

Nowhere is the threat of election subversion more evident than in Georgia, the state Trump lost by the slimmest margin in 2020 and the site of his most brazen efforts to overturn the results. Trump’s hourlong phone call on January 2, 2021, urging Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes” to reverse his loss is the most famous example, but hardly the only one. By the time of that call, the president and his allies had spent weeks pressing local lawmakers and election officials to throw out votes, delay the certification of Joe Biden’s victory, and lay the groundwork for an administrative coup. On Thanksgiving Day, Trump had called Raffensperger an “enemy of the people” and falsely accused him of engaging in illegal election practices. The secretary of state’s security had to be beefed up—as did that of his colleague Gabriel Sterling, then–Lieutenant Governor Geoff Duncan, and others—following death threats. The Fulton County poll workers Ruby Freeman and Wandrea “Shaye” Moss were publicly accused by Trump-campaign allies of pulling fake ballots from suitcases to help Biden, a false allegation that elicited more death threats.

In the end, the system warped but did not break under the weight of the president’s pressure. Georgia’s election officials did their job, affirmed the integrity of the vote, and followed the law.

But the ranks of Republican officials in Georgia who resisted Trump’s election-fraud lies have thinned significantly since 2020. Duncan is gone, and Sterling will leave the Secretary of State’s Office before the midterms. Raffensperger is a lame duck whose power over the state’s electoral apparatus is fading. In 2024, he was ousted from the state election board he had once chaired. In May, he lost a long-shot bid for governor, garnering just 15 percent of the vote in the GOP primary.

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and his colleague Gabriel Sterling testified before the House January 6 committee about Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election.(Michael Reynolds / Getty)

The state election board, which sets voting policy for all of Georgia, is now dominated by Trump acolytes. Salleigh Grubbs is one example. Prior to 2020, she had no role in government and had shown little interest in politics, but then, that year, she became animated by rumors that Democrats were plotting to steal the state from Trump. Upon hearing from a friend that a large truck from a paper-shredding company was parked outside a Cobb County events center a day after a statewide recount had occurred there, she sped over in her Toyota Venza. She took videos of the truck and pursued it when it left, later likening the action to a scene in Thelma and Louise. The truck had merely been hauling away empty ballot envelopes and other trash, but Grubbs remained convinced that election fraud had happened in broad daylight. She decided to get more involved, and won a campaign to become chair of the Republican Party in Cobb County in 2021, then worked her way up to an appointment to the board in January.

Across the state, other Republicans with a new view of elections were making similar journeys. Ben Johnson, a tech entrepreneur who became the chair of Spalding County’s election board in 2021, has spread QAnon conspiracy theories, reportedly called Biden a pedophile, and asserted numerous times that fraud played a role in the 2020 election. Danny Bartlett, the chair of the Ware County election board since 2023, recently posted an image of Joseph Stalin on Substack, along with his apocryphal quote “It’s not who votes that counts, it’s who counts the votes.”

On the five-person state election board, Grubbs joined Janice Johnston, a retired doctor who had become obsessed with election policy after the 2020 race, and Janelle King, a Republican media personality who had been appointed to the board in 2024. That year, King and Johnston had pushed for rule changes that would have given Trump more opportunities to challenge the results if he lost the state to Kamala Harris. During an August 2024 campaign rally in Atlanta, Trump singled out the right-wing members of the board, heralding them as “pitbulls fighting for honesty, transparency, and victory.” Johnston later resigned but was replaced by another MAGA Republican, ensuring that three of the five seats on the board would still be held by Trump allies.

Since 2021, the board has been granted (or, in some cases, seized) broad powers over Georgia’s voting process, including the authority to assume control of elections in counties it deems to be administering the vote poorly. King has not ruled out the idea of the board taking over election administration in Fulton County, home to Atlanta and the epicenter of the state’s Democratic base. The question in Georgia today is less whether its current officials could resist Trump’s pressure again, and more what some of them might do on their own, without any presidential pressure at all.

When the FBI raided a Fulton County election warehouse in January, seeking evidence of fraud in the 2020 vote, it cited the work of the state election board in its search-warrant affidavit. Johnston, King, and Grubbs filed an amicus brief in support of the operation.

John Fervier, the board’s chair and a lifelong Republican, has sometimes found himself siding with the board’s lone Democrat to try to rein in the right-wing contingent, though many of his efforts have been futile. “Our board has at times gotten political when it shouldn’t be political,” he told me, carefully, in May. He said he was exasperated by what appeared to be an endless crusade by politicians to validate the president’s claims about his loss to Biden. “These people want to keep pointing back to 2020, and my thing is, to what end? ”

We met inside the same Fulton County election warehouse that FBI agents had entered months earlier, wearing tactical vests and carting away more than 650 boxes of ballots and other materials. While they blocked off the entrance with crime-scene tape and trawled the cavernous 600,000-square-foot building for evidence, Grubbs was outside on a video call with Steve Bannon for an episode of his War Room podcast. She referred to the moment as “surreal” and “wonderful,” as election-denying activists posed for photos nearby. Indoors, Tulsi Gabbard, then the director of national intelligence, watched over the scene. Trump later spoke by phone with the agents who had conducted the raid, congratulating them on a job well done.

The ultimate goal of the operation, and of all the theatricality surrounding it, seems fairly clear. The seizure itself likely caused more Americans to mistrust the 2020 result. It may have salved Trump’s ego. Any scrap of evidence that can be marshaled to suggest wrongdoing or fraud, however weak, will presumably be made public and spun. And that, in turn, may soften more Americans to the idea that election fraud is a real and widespread problem—ironically making the subversion of the vote easier to achieve.

Even in Fulton County, election deniers have a significant ally. For the past two and a half years, Julie Adams has been a Republican appointee on the county’s election board. In the first months of her tenure, she declined to vote to certify any of the results of the state’s 2024 primary contests. There was no actual evidence of irregularities (and Trump had won the GOP presidential primary), but Adams wanted to further investigate. She was outvoted by the rest of the board, which by law has little discretion in validating the results. Still, Adams (who did not respond to my requests for an interview) has used her post as a public official to challenge the validity of Fulton’s voting process and has encouraged allies on other boards to do the same.

Adams also serves as a regional coordinator for the Election Integrity Network, a nationwide organization of election-denying activists that appears ready to play a significant role in the midterms and the 2028 presidential election. In at least one private call with members of EIN, she has discussed changing state laws to give local officials more leeway to delay or reject certification of races. The certification of election results by local officials has traditionally happened without controversy, but Trump’s 2020 push to overturn his loss transformed this normally routine process into a new political battleground. Certification is a key means by which vote totals are finalized, and increasing the discretion of everyone involved would multiply the opportunities to raise fraud claims. The Election Integrity Network has been a major proponent of greater discretion—and in recent races, several like-minded election officials in various states have voted to withhold or delay the certification of results.

Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer who aided Trump’s bid to challenge the 2020 results, founded EIN in 2021. It now has affiliates in at least 30 states, including every presidential battleground, and its volunteers are regularly in touch with Republican officials. The organization, which recently registered as a tax-exempt nonprofit, has raised funds while doing little to hide its political motivations. In an April 2022 interview with the conservative radio host John Fredericks, Mitchell (who did not respond to my own request for an interview) adopted Trump’s language as she lambasted Democrats: “The only way they win is to cheat.”

EIN’s affiliates regularly attend state- and county-level election-board meetings, turning once-boring hearings about election administration—including issues such as ballot-drop-box locations and voter-roll maintenance—into contentious, standing-room-only affairs. EIN officials have also trained activists to serve as poll observers, encouraged volunteers to challenge voters’ eligibility, and advised members to lobby friendly politicians and go after lawmakers who oppose their efforts. This is a new phenomenon in the United States. In a system that relies on broad confidence in the sanctity of elections, the emergence of an organized infrastructure of activists focused on sowing doubt is creating fresh opportunities for malfeasance.

FBI agents raided a Fulton County, Georgia, election center in January, seeking evidence of fraud in the 2020 election. (Nicole Craine / The New York Times / Redux)

Armchair sleuths and election enthusiasts have had dramatic success ushering conspiracy theories from the internet onto the agendas of county boards and state legislatures. In Michigan, Macomb County Clerk Anthony Forlini has pursued an audit of the 2020 election and suggested in January that a significant number of noncitizens might be on the state’s voter rolls, a charge amplified by an official at the Justice Department despite flimsy evidence. Forlini, who came under scrutiny for hiring a January 6 protester to train poll workers, is now the Republican candidate for secretary of state, a role that could prove pivotal in the 2028 presidential election.

A 2024 investigation by the Center for Media and Democracy found more than 100 election deniers serving in election positions in eight swing states. There are likely more today. America’s highly decentralized elections have often been touted as a strength, making subversion by foreign adversaries or domestic cabals difficult. But many of the local-level positions that help administer our elections have low barriers to entry—the people who fill them are often appointed by local party bosses, county commissioners, or state election officials, with little public scrutiny. These roles are vulnerable to takeover by mass movements, especially those allied with bad actors or extreme partisans looking to upend the system from the inside.

The hyperpartisan politics of the past several years have only increased this vulnerability. In December 2024, for instance, just weeks before the Democrat Josh Stein was set to be sworn in as governor of North Carolina, Republican legislators transferred the authority to appoint the chair of each of the 100 county election boards and fill a majority of the state election board’s seats from the governor to the incoming Republican state auditor. Every one of these boards is now dominated by Republicans, several election deniers among them, and the state has recently moved to oust nonpartisan election supervisors, challenge the eligibility of thousands of voters, and make it easier to throw out mail-in votes. These moves have come as Democrats vie to flip a Senate seat in what could be a close race.

Many states, including Florida, Ohio, Kansas, and Utah, have passed laws that mirror those pushed by EIN—expanding voter-identification requirements, restricting mail-in voting, making it easier to remove people from voter rolls. Some of the provisions also resemble those in the federal SAVE America Act, championed by Trump, which if passed could disenfranchise, or at least confuse, millions of voters. The advocates who support these changes typically describe them as commonsense measures designed to enhance election security and root out fraud (even though evidence of actual voter fraud in modern U.S. elections is minuscule). Trump often dispenses with the pretense. Last year, he asserted that Republicans would “pick up 100 more seats” if his proposed bans on electronic voting machines and mail-in ballots were enacted.

Even if he takes no additional action before November, the president has already done a lot to interfere with the upcoming election. He has punished officials who validated the accuracy of the 2020 election, encouraged criminal investigations into Democratic lawmakers who are up for reelection, and sought to steer taxpayer dollars to compensate January 6 rioters and other supporters convicted of crimes linked to his Big Lie—actions that all seem more likely to foster election tampering than deter it. The Justice Department began demanding in May 2025 that states hand over their voter rolls (many have refused), and the White House has neutered federal offices responsible for preventing actual voter fraud.

And, of course, the president has used the bully pulpit like no other previous American leader to undermine confidence in the country’s elections. More than 100 times in the past year alone, Trump has claimed that the 2020 election was stolen, often likening American voting to that of a “Third World country.” (He does this apparently without considering what it implies about the integrity of his own two presidential victories.) His allies’ proposals to station immigration enforcers or military troops outside polling sites, which Trump has publicly declined to rule out, could have an impact even if the president does not make good on them. If voters fear chaos or intimidation, some will stay away from the polls.

Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson, defended the president’s efforts. Trump, she told me in a statement, “is committed to ensuring that Americans have full confidence in the administration of elections, and that includes totally accurate and up-to-date voter rolls free of errors and unlawfully registered non-citizen voters.” She added that Trump was simply making good on a “campaign pledge” to millions of his supporters who agree with his views on elections.

Trump’s efforts to rile his base will no doubt intensify between now and Election Day. A substantial majority of Republicans already believe that the 2020 election was stolen, that large numbers of illegitimate ballots are cast by noncitizens, and that mail-in ballots are rife with fraud. Networks of local activists will be on the lookout for any developments—rumors, photos, stray comments by election officials—that might seem to undermine the integrity of the vote. As Election Day unfolds, some MAGA electoral officials are likely to join in, significantly raising the temperature.

It is possible that Trump might use the resulting clamor as a pretext to seize voting machines in key counties, breaking the chain of custody for lawful ballots and bringing the count—at least as a practical matter—under the control of his administration. In January, Trump told The New York Times that he regretted not doing so back in 2020. It is likewise possible that local or state officials could agree to “find” votes, or to discard them, though it would be difficult for any single official to change a ballot count without leaving an obvious trail. The system is too well built for that.

But decisively changing the vote count would not be the only—or even the most likely—path to an illegitimate result for a key Senate seat or a handful of seats in the House. Instead, the president’s allies might hope to prevail by fomenting enough distrust in the results to change the terrain on which the election is decided. Well-connected activists are prepared this year to push for extending certification deadlines and ordering independent vote audits. Trump and his allies have openly entertained proposals to use security concerns as a pretext for nationalizing elections. Once vote tallies are rendered as tainted or unknowable, partisan actors in state capitols and Congress could play an outsize role in determining the result.

How would all of this ultimately get resolved? The historians, election lawyers, and constitutional scholars I spoke with struggled to come up with straightforward predictions, in part because the country has never had such a confluence of election-denying officials in power at so many levels of government. Close or contested races for just a few House and Senate seats could leave control of Congress in doubt long after Election Day. Amid loud and continuing uncertainties, the Republican-led Congress could opt to exercise rarely used constitutional powers to override the voters’ will and choose the winners of contested races. The courts would likely have a say, but in an environment so thick with mistrust and confusion on fundamentally political matters, they might be more likely to defer to politicians. And the law is fairly clear that the House and Senate have the final authority in determining whom to seat in their chambers.

If this playbook sounds familiar, it is because Trump and his allies pursued the same tactics in 2020, ultimately failing to persuade Congress and the courts to supplant the vote. Today, their chances of succeeding would be far higher.

Many election officials hope for decisive results in November that leave little doubt about the will of the voters; landslides are hard to challenge, and even in swing states and districts, there may be a lot of them this year. Beyond that, key guardrails are still standing. Courts have largely frowned on Trump’s efforts to change voting rules. So far, Senate Republicans have opted against ripping up the filibuster to pass the SAVE America Act.

In Georgia, Raffensperger will still be in office on Election Day. And across the country, elements of civil society are more prepared for disorder than they were six years ago. The American Civil Liberties Union, for example, has been holding regular training sessions so its members and volunteers can respond to attempts to tamper with the voting process, covering dozens of scenarios. David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, told me that an army of lawyers is standing ready to help local election administrators beat back pressure campaigns. “We’ve recruited over 10,000 attorneys all over the country who are willing to serve pro bono,” he said.

Still, it’s not hard to see which way the tide is flowing. “Under the best of situations and circumstances, preparing for an election is a very exacting process,” Mark Earley, the election supervisor in Leon County, Florida, told me, noting that administrative staff have to plan for weather disruptions, power outages, and any number of other possible events so that they can conduct a seamless and fully accountable process for voters. But now there’s more to prepare for: online mobs, and real ones, incited by rumors; potentially unreliable voices from the inside.

There’s more pressure on election workers too. Recently, the Trump administration sent a letter to each state, threatening to prosecute election officials who fail to remove noncitizens from registration lists or allow them to cast ballots. And Trump himself signed an executive order in March calling on the attorney general to prosecute election workers and officials who give ballots to such voters. (The courts have since invalidated much of the order.)

Some states and counties have gamed out how people would need to step up, on the spot, if various election officials were arrested while trying to prevent federal agents from seizing ballots or otherwise interfering with their operations. Many election workers have quit because the job is now so fraught with anxiety, Earley said. Several election officials told me they have exhausted the limits of their imagination in attempting to prepare for what may come.

In Georgia, it was apparent even in May how activism on the right might lead to disorder in November. Conspiracy theories about voting machines were threatening to paralyze the state’s general elections. After years of activists spreading baseless claims that machines designed by Dominion Voting Systems were vulnerable to foreign manipulation, legislators had passed a law in 2024 requiring the state to overhaul its ballot-counting system. A leading proponent of the change was an eccentric 76-year-old man named Garland Favorito, who has spent decades challenging the integrity of the state’s electronic voting system, and who has collaborated with EIN. Favorito has also claimed that Israel may have been behind the September 11 terrorist attacks and that George H. W. Bush may have been involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

Favorito spent years pursuing a lawsuit, which was dismissed in February, to access ballots from the 2020 election in Georgia, arguing that he will be able to prove that the presidential result was rigged. He told me he fears that future elections are vulnerable to similar rigging and that we have a “national-security crisis” based on “forensics showing that our voting systems have been remotely accessed by foreign programmers and modified without detection.”

Tax records show that his group, VoterGA, has received at least $385,000 from an entity called the America Project, which was co-founded by Patrick Byrne, the Overstock.com founder and a prominent election skeptic who urged Trump to seize voting machines after the 2020 race. At a gathering of election deniers in Washington, D.C., earlier this year, Byrne boasted of spending more than $100 million on election-related activities since 2020, much of it to support groups seeking to upend local election-administration policies.

The problem in May was that the law banning Georgia’s current voting machines was set to take effect in just a few weeks, but amid continued controversies over paper ballots and other options, legislators had not yet established an alternative. Election workers were running a primary while also looking ahead to November with the possibility of a rapid and destabilizing changeover weighing on them. The deadline for a switch has now been postponed until after the midterms, but a new system still has not been finalized.

To try to get some sense of what the elections in November and in 2028 might be like, I watched Georgia’s primaries, on May 19, from the Fulton County election hub. At the time, Favorito’s focus had shifted, at least temporarily, to a new potential source of fraud. Raffensperger, as secretary of state, had decided to deny election-board members access to the operations center where he would be receiving and reporting the voting results on Election Night. Because Raffensperger was also a candidate in the governor’s race, Favorito and other right-wing election skeptics began to publicly suggest that the secretary of state was attempting to count—and perhaps manipulate—the votes from the confines of a “secret bunker.” Grubbs, the state-election-board member who’d once chased a paper-shredding truck, joined Bannon’s War Room podcast on the day of the primary to complain about being excluded from said bunker. Speaking in front of a large Trump-Vance campaign sign, she agreed with Bannon when he likened the situation to a banana republic.

Raffensperger rejected those allegations. On the morning of the primary, he told reporters that officials should stop making “wild claims and accusations” about the operations center. He suggested that those concerned about the vote-counting process should spend the evening at one of the county election centers where the ballot tabulation was in fact taking place.

Jason Frazier, an election skeptic who has spent the past few years challenging the eligibility of thousands of Georgia voters, appeared to be following that advice when I ran into him at the Fulton County election hub on the night of the primary. He told me he had come to observe the tabulation process, but still felt that there was something nefarious about the operations center. “If the doors are closed and you’re trying to hide things, that creates a conspiracy, whether there’s something there or not,” he said.

Just days earlier, Frazier had been hired as a part-time investigator by the state election board, the latest example of a self-made voting expert achieving official status within Georgia’s electoral apparatus. Fervier, the board’s chair, told me that Frazier’s hiring had happened without his knowledge. The MAGA-aligned majority on the board had gone around him to bring an ally into the system.

In the end, little would come of the bunker conspiracy. Raffensperger’s office would accurately report the results of the primary race for governor, in which he was soundly defeated. But the night of the primary election was not without additional drama. When 911 reports of a gunman near an Atlanta-area school forced two precincts to close for about four hours that afternoon, a local judge ordered the polls to stay open late at those locations, giving voters until about 11 p.m. to cast their ballots. The delayed closing of those two precincts meant Fulton officials would have to wait an additional four hours to begin reporting results for the entire county.

Inside the Fulton election center, I watched as members of the county election board anxiously flipped through thick books of voting statutes and called their attorneys to determine what the law allowed for. When I checked my social-media feed, I could see what was making them nervous. An online rumor mill had begun pushing the idea that Fulton County was intentionally holding back its results in order to sufficiently skew them once other counties reported. “Just one county in the core ATL metro hasn’t reported ANY votes…. Anyone want to take a guess which one?” Seth Keshel, a Trump ally and the author of The American War on Election Corruption, wrote on X at 8:57 p.m.

“It’s always Fulton County,” Greg Dolezal, a Republican state senator and candidate for lieutenant governor, wrote at 9:49 p.m. “It’s time for Georgia to takeover the process. We will not have another 2020 this November!” He suggested that the state election board could temporarily appoint someone to seize control of voting there.

Voters cast their ballots in Georgia’s primary elections in May, amid conspiracy theories about a secret bunker and, later in the day, reports of a gunman near an Atlanta-area school that forced two precincts to close for about four hours. (Megan Varner / Getty)

The idea did not come out of the blue. Not only had Janelle King, the state-election-board member, previously floated it, but Republican Party officials had used the primary ballot to ask GOP voters in Fulton County whether the state board should “take over Fulton County elections to protect the integrity of our elections.” And although the results would have no binding legal effect, nearly three-quarters of GOP-primary voters responded “Yes.” Weeks after the primary, an audit would confirm the accuracy of the vote totals that were reported in Fulton County, and throughout Georgia, that night. By then, most of the skeptics had moved on.

However the midterms turn out in November, they will likely tell us something about the integrity of the presidential election in 2028, and the elections beyond that one.

Some of the president’s allies have suggested that despite his stepped-up attention to voting issues in recent months, he is much more focused on 2028. After all, the election of a Democratic successor could easily wipe away much of his legacy. It would also, presumably, end the government’s extraordinarily favorable treatment of his family’s businesses, through which the Trumps have enriched themselves by billions of dollars since his return to office. And it would likewise increase his legal risks.

According to States United Action, a nonpartisan group that supports state and local election officials, dozens of election deniers will be on the ballots in November for positions including governor and secretary of state, roles that could prove pivotal in the certification of the 2028 contest. (In Georgia, the GOP candidate for governor is Rick Jackson, who has denied the validity of the 2020 election; in Arizona, the Republican nominee for that same position is Andy Biggs, who as a state representative voted against certifying Trump’s loss.) Many of these officials owe their ascendance to Trump. It would take only a small subset of them to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power.

“If we have a corrupted election in America, I don’t know if we ever go back to normal,” Senator Mark Warner, a Democrat from Virginia and the vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told me. The country is built on the premise of free and fair elections, he said. “You unwind that, and you are in a very different America.”

The truest danger this November may not be Trump attempting to cancel the vote or ordering troops to barnstorm polling places, but the smaller, quieter ways that democracy could continue eroding in towns, counties, and state capitals. As millions of Americans prepare to cast their ballots in the coming weeks and to settle in on Election Night to await the results, they should be ready to hold their local officials accountable for what happens next. Those officials, under the watchful eyes of the people who entrust them with power, must choose whether to use that power to reinforce the democratic system that has sustained America for 250 years or to bend it, little by little, further out of shape—until what remains is chaos.

This article has been updated to clarify a description of Gabriel Sterling’s tenure at the Georgia Secretary of State’s Office. The article appears in the October 2026 print edition with the headline “The Election Deniers Are Now in Charge.”

New York, 25 Years Later

2026-09-09T17:30:53-04:00

Photographs by Sasha Arutyunova

Like most New Englanders of a certain generation, my parents viewed New York City with distrust. They associated their neighbor to the south with “The Bronx Is Burning,” Bernhard Goetz, blackouts, bankruptcy, and the famous New York Daily News headline Ford to City: Drop Dead. The heart of Manhattan was a decadent playground for the wealthy, while outlying neighborhoods were plagued by desperate poverty and violence. I grew up only 200 miles away, and yet my parents never took me there as a kid.

But if New York felt menacing and foreign to them, in reality, it is the most American of cities. New York is a symbol of the nation’s money and power, its diversity and freedom. It is our capital of culture, a proudly loud and bustling melting pot. And for those who wanted to humble the world’s sole superpower, New York was the perfect place to strike 25 years ago this week. Two of its signature skyscrapers were toppled, and nearly 3,000 lives were lost.

The response underscored how much New York belongs to America. Rescue workers from red and blue states raced to help. Donations poured in from rich California cities and small Montana towns. American flags were seemingly everywhere. For the first time in decades, and less than a year after a bitterly contested presidential election, the nation felt unified.

We’ve been chasing that feeling ever since. New York City has bounced back—revitalized and thriving—with a new skyline emerging from the dust. But the nation is deeply divided, with angrier elections and escalating political violence. The pandemic could have brought the sort of unity we felt after the terror attacks, but it instead largely fostered division and rage. There is a new conflict in the Middle East, one whose dubious origins evoke the misguided war launched there after the World Trade Center fell. And now, a quarter century after the September 11 attacks, a New Yorker is president, one who was in Manhattan that crystal-clear, late-summer day. But Donald Trump won’t be there on Friday.

My first visit to New York City included the World Trade Center. I was in high school when, in 1995, my brother and I joined a church-group trip down from Massachusetts (my parents still wanted no part of it) to Liberty and Ellis Islands. I remember the ferry ride back to Lower Manhattan at the day’s end, staring at those impossibly tall towers. I was transfixed. Later, I was lucky enough to go to college in New York, and immersed myself in its energy. The Twin Towers were not exactly beloved architecture, but they were a constant, comforting presence; when you got out of the subway downtown, below the city’s street grid, the easiest way to orient yourself was to locate the World Trade Center. Find those towers, and you could get yourself anywhere. You could get yourself home.

Sasha Arutyunova for The Atlantic

On September 11, 2001, I was a 21-year-old intern at the New York Daily News and, with no money to my name, was between apartments and sleeping on my friend’s couch. It was Primary Day, and I had the morning off ahead of covering some comptroller candidate’s Election Night party. My friend’s nanny had the television on, and I heard her shriek. Al-Qaeda got what it wanted: As the world watched the first tower burn, the second was hit. I grabbed my notebook and tried to get to work. But I was staying uptown, at West 120th Street, and the subways were already a mess and soon shut completely. I couldn’t reach the newspaper’s assignment desk; the phones were overloaded. So I started walking south, toward the World Trade Center, trying to listen to updates on my portable radio. Not long after the towers fell, I connected with an editor who diverted me to a major hospital with a trauma center, to witness the arrival of the injured.

I was instead confronted by a jarring and heartbreaking image: rows of empty hospital beds. The scores of survivors never came; there simply weren’t many. The sky was incongruously beautiful. When the wind turned, I could smell the smoke, an acrid blend of jet fuel and steel and other things too sad to consider. My next stop, after nightfall, was a bereavement center set up farther downtown. I fielded as many questions as I asked and desperate pleas from frantic people—some covered in ash—looking for information about their missing loved ones. Soon, the city would be dotted with homemade signs about those who were lost, posters hung by families clinging to hope. Many would stay up for months.

On September 12, I slipped past the security perimeter and reached Ground Zero. I was there, off and on, for days, trying to describe the indescribable to the newspaper’s readers. The rubble continued to burn. Debris and body parts were everywhere. Firefighters refused breaks, as they dug for their fallen brothers. There was a pervasive sense of fear: It seemed as if anything could happen, including more attacks.

[Read: The man who refused to sit on the sidelines]

The four hijacked airplanes had attacked symbols of the United States’ financial might (the World Trade Center), its military (the Pentagon), and its democracy (the U.S. Capitol or the White House were the likely target of a fourth plane that passengers forced to crash in the Pennsylvania countryside). The sense of loss and disruption was overwhelming. Many nights, I cried myself to sleep. It felt as if life would never return to normal; even the small routines—going to an office, riding the subway, going to a baseball game—seemed newly fragile.

In the weeks that followed, I covered dozens of funerals. Traditionally, when a New York firefighter dies, much of the department attends. But that terrible fall and winter, many of the city’s firefighters were still working long shifts digging through the pile at Ground Zero. To make sure that each service was robustly attended, hundreds—and, at times, thousands—of firefighters journeyed from departments across the country. The funerals invariably included a version of “Amazing Grace” from the FDNY’s pipes-and-drums band. To this day, I have a hard time hearing bagpipes.

Sasha Arutyunova for The Atlantic

Yet even in those first hours, there were signs of hope. The city’s mayor, Rudy Giuliani, had woken up that morning as an unpopular lame duck, a self-styled political brawler whose success fighting crime had been overshadowed by his personal foibles and executive overreach. But with President George W. Bush largely out of sight that day, Giuliani became the face of a mourning, yet determined, city. His leadership in the weeks that followed was nothing short of heroic. He was followed into office by Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire businessman who led the city’s recovery and rebuilding (and personally financed much of the National September 11 Memorial & Museum). In bipartisan fashion, Congress passed a victims-compensation fund. Our NATO allies stood by us, invoking the Article 5 mutual-defense clause for the first and, so far, only time in the alliance’s history. Bush spoke out firmly against Islamophobia. The nation even rallied around the Yankees’ run to the World Series that year. (Okay, maybe not everybody rooted for them.)

Despite early conversations about whether anyone would ever want to work or live in Lower Manhattan again, businesses came back, and, in a surprise development, more people moved downtown. As for the World Trade Center site itself, there were certainly turf wars, differing visions, false starts and delays, and probably more new office space than really was needed. But it slowly grew again, anchored by the 1,776-foot-high One World Trade Center and the 9/11 memorial and museum. The tree-lined, eight-acre site was transformed into a peaceful park with two reflecting pools where the towers once stood. Those pools are filled by waterfalls and ringed by the names of the victims. Dennis Mojica. James P. O’Brien Jr. Cindy Yan Zhu Guan.

The rest of the city came back too. In the decades that followed, apartment prices skyrocketed, and young people transformed neighborhoods deep into Brooklyn and Queens. Crime plummeted, and the NYPD developed a counterterrorism arm. More skyscrapers soared above Manhattan. Broadway boomed. Tourists arrived in record numbers (and, yes, even my parents warmed to the city). There are still challenges, affordable housing and income inequality among them. But the city today is safer and more vibrant than ever. And in a development that would have been unthinkable a quarter century ago, the year’s September 11 remembrance services will include the city’s 34-year-old democratic socialist Muslim mayor.

The city’s communal response to the terror attacks was inspirational: People checked on loved ones and strangers; they donated blood; they saluted first responders. The tragedy also provided a template of sorts for the calamities that would lie ahead. Gone were the stereotypes that New Yorkers didn’t care about their neighbors, or would take advantage of disaster to loot or riot. In their place were scenes of regular people banding together to pull through the 2003 blackout, Hurricane Sandy, and the pandemic. During those fear-filled early months of 2020, One World Trade Center’s top would at times be bathed in red, white, and blue.

Sasha Arutyunova for The Atlantic

The city today sits in a far more divided nation. That initial feeling of national unity was dealt a series of body blows, including the Iraq War, the financial panic of 2008, and the racist backlash to the election of the first Black president. The country became angrier, more polarized, more red versus blue, more us versus them.

Donald Trump seized the moment. Over the past decade, he has widened the nation’s political and cultural fissures, eroded trust of American institutions, governed like he was president only of his supporters—and moved to punish those who didn’t back him. Giuliani, once heralded as “America’s Mayor,” embraced Trump’s lies about the 2020 election, drawing an indictment, disbarments, and a loss in a $148 million defamation lawsuit over his false claims about two Georgia election workers.

[John Avlon: What happened to Rudy Giuliani?]

Trump has never seemed all that moved by his hometown’s darkest day. Mere hours after the towers fell, he spoke to a local television station, saying that a building he owned had suddenly gained in stature. That building, 40 Wall Street, “actually was the second-tallest building in Downtown Manhattan, and it was actually—before the World Trade Center—was the tallest,” he said. (The claim was inaccurate, as well as insensitive.) Trump has attended the annual memorial at Ground Zero a few times, including in 2024, but will not do so again this week. The New York Times reported that the president is instead participating in a Pentagon event because Manhattan organizers would not let him deliver a speech. (By tradition, there are no speeches delivered at Ground Zero, only a solemn reading of the victims’ names.) It would also be easier for Trump to fly out of Washington to attend a golf tournament this weekend at a course he owns in Ireland. The White House denied that Trump had asked to speak.

Trump has long been incapable of bringing people together and uninterested in doing so. He frequently indulges in anti-Muslim rhetoric (emphasizing Barack Obama’s middle name, Hussein, and the full name of Michigan’s Democratic Senate candidate, Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed) and once proposed a travel ban for anyone of that faith. His war against Iran has raised fears of another terror attack. The relationship between the president and his hometown is broken; he rarely visits his Midtown penthouse and is greeted with protests when he does. In all three of his presidential campaigns, he lost badly in New York. And though he has seemed charmed by the city’s new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, that did not stop his administration from announcing the results of a deportation surge for the city—dubbed “Operation Rotten Apple”—just days before the solemn Ground Zero commemoration.

New York City has been abandoned by its most famous son. But it will push forward, and it won’t be alone. Former presidents from both parties are slated to attend the ceremony on Friday morning. The commemoration itself is meant for the victims’ families, and officials expect a larger-than-usual turnout. But once the event is over, and the temporary ropes come down, the memorial will again open to the public. I took my sons there earlier this week. We saw people from red states and blue ones, and heard languages from all over the world. Those visitors stared at the waterfalls, let their hands run over the names of those lost, and shared quiet hugs. That will happen again this September 11. And when night falls, the Tribute in Light will switch on and beam pillars of light upward. The illuminated towers will stretch to the heavens—and they’ll guide so many of us home.

All the Places Trump Was on 9/11

2026-09-09T16:06:37-04:00

Updated at 4:30 p.m. ET on September 9, 2026

Where were you on 9/11? Every American old enough to remember the day has an answer to that question. President Trump has several.

At a ceremony honoring first responders and victims’ families yesterday, Trump offered an elaborate account of where he was in the hours and days after nearly 3,000 Americans were killed. “I was building a big building in New York, and I took the whole crew down there right after this happened, and they had no hesitation; everybody went down with me. We went down as a big group of people. Wasn’t too much we could do, I’ll be honest. It was raw—nobody had seen anything like it, ever.”

The story presents significant problems in terms of its relationship to reality. Listeners could be forgiven for interpreting Trump’s remarks as a reference to his whereabouts on the day of the attack itself. (The president clarified that timeline last night: “I was there, obviously not on the same day as the collapse, but shortly thereafter, with a large group of Construction Workers,” he wrote in a Truth Social post.) It is true that two days after the attack, on September 13, Trump was interviewed by reporters while walking in Lower Manhattan. The president has previously made variations of the same claim—that he and the employees he sent downtown helped clear rubble in the days following the attack. “Everyone who helped clear the rubble—and I was there, and I watched, and I helped a little bit” was his version of it on the 2016 campaign trail. But supporting evidence is scant, and the whole account is likely an exaggeration. Richard Alles, a retired New York City Fire Department deputy chief who had a supervisory role in the efforts, said in 2019 not only that he never witnessed Trump at the site, but that the account doesn’t add up: “He was a private citizen at the time. I don’t know what kind of role he could have possibly played.” And, Alles added, if Trump had indeed sent workers, as he has claimed, there would be a record of it: “Is there a chance he was ever down there by himself and I didn’t know it? It’s possible, but I know of no one who ever witnessed him there.”

Nevertheless, Trump pressed on, veering into territory even further detached from verifiable fact. The U.S. Steel Building—a skyscraper in Lower Manhattan known today as One Liberty Plaza—was “really creaking,” Trump said at yesterday’s ceremony. “I’ll never forget: two firemen. We thought it was coming down on top of us and two firemen—big, strong guys. And I’m not the smallest guy in the world. They grabbed me under the arms, said, ‘Gotta get outta here.’ And they literally lifted me up—this is not easy to do; I’m big. They lifted me up, and they started running with me. I said, ‘Fellas, I can run myself.’ But they were amazing, but they thought it was coming down. It didn’t come down: U.S. Steel.”

There was, in fact, public concern in the days following the attack that the building at One Liberty Plaza could collapse. But the notion that Trump was inside the building and rushed out by firefighters has not been corroborated by any evidence. The president has offered versions of the same account before, though in less colorful form. In 2016, he told a story about being evacuated by firefighters—but in that rendition, it took place “a couple of days” after the collapse, and the U.S. Steel building was “not so far from us” when the two “massive guys” grabbed him. “I never knew I could run that fast,” he said then. In 2021, Trump likewise recalled two firemen grabbing him after hearing “creaks.”

Trump’s whereabouts on September 11 are no mystery. They are fairly well documented by his own prior statements about watching the attacks unfold from his home in Trump Tower, about four miles north of the Twin Towers. For those who have reason to doubt Trump’s statements, his whereabouts are also documented on video. “I have a window that looks directly at the World Trade Center, and I saw this huge explosion,” he said in a phone interview with a New Jersey news channel on 9/11. “For years, I’ve looked right directly at the building—I’d see the Empire State Building in the foreground and the World Trade Center in the background—and now I’m looking at absolutely nothing. It’s just gone, and it’s just hard to believe.”

Trump’s view may have been clear, but his recollection of September 11 has been murky, as reporters have tracked for more than a decade.

Sometimes, in his accounts, he watched the second plane hit the World Trade Center from his apartment in Trump Tower; when he called into the live broadcast that day, he did not mention having witnessed the second jet. Sometimes, he claims to have personally seen people jumping from the Twin Towers. “I have a window in my apartment that specifically was aimed at the World Trade Center,” he said in 2015 on the campaign trail, “and I watched as people jumped.” In his TV interview the day of the attack, he didn’t see those scenes himself but talked to someone who had. “I have somebody that was down there who witnessed at least 10 people jumping out of the building from 70 and 80 stories up in the air,” Trump said.

The president has also embellished what he saw in news coverage on that day, most notoriously claiming to have seen widespread celebrations by Muslim residents in New Jersey. “I watched when the World Trade Center came tumbling down,” he said in a 2015 stump speech. “And I watched in Jersey City, New Jersey, where thousands and thousands of people were cheering as that building was coming down.” That claim has been thoroughly disproved. A professor who spent months combing through news reels and video archives from that day found one possible instance that could slightly resemble those events—a few Arab American teenagers who briefly gathered in front of a library in South Paterson in a way that could be seen as celebratory.

Even the live phone interview Trump participated in on the day of the attack contains inaccuracies. On the call, Trump said that one of his buildings was now the tallest in downtown Manhattan: “Forty Wall Street actually was the second-tallest building in downtown Manhattan,” he said when asked whether his property had been damaged. “When they built the World Trade Center, it became known as the second tallest. And now it’s the tallest.” But as The Washington Post documented, using data from the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, neither claim was true. Forty Wall Street was the tallest building for only about two years and that was in the 1930s, before Trump was born.

At the center of yesterday’s ceremony was an important honor—one that Trump had promised to bestow months prior. Welles Crowther, who was first identified as “the man in the red bandana” in a 2002 New York Times story, rescued more than a dozen people from the South Tower before being killed when the building collapsed. His parents, who had given him a red bandana as a boy and knew that he always carried it with him, were able to recognize him by that detail and confirmed through the survivors that their son had helped them. Crowther was an equities trader and a volunteer firefighter, and he was 24 years old when he died. While awarding a posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom to Crowther, Trump drew the focus to himself, comparing his own fame to that of the fallen hero: “The Man in the Red Bandana, he’s become more famous than me—I don’t like it. Very unhappy. But he’s become much more famous than me.”

[Read: Trump is putting his face on everything]

When the president has brought up 9/11 lately, the remark has usually been severed from the attack, its victims, or its perpetrators. This year, Trump has tended to mention the day in the context of lambasting political opponents. He’s invoked it on several recent occasions—alongside World War I, World War II, and Pearl Harbor—when arguing that the attack and all three of those historical calamities are dwarfed by the danger communism poses to America today.

Critics have noted that other presidents, both Republican and Democrat, might have faced months of blowback—if not the end of their political careers—were they caught exaggerating or outright inventing aspects of their experience on one of the most catastrophic days in American history. But Trump has rarely if ever paid a real political price for misleading statements. In a second term marked by his fixation on his legacy, Trump’s relationship with history has often involved “taking bits and pieces from a grab bag and turning it into a story that’s useful to him—either politically useful, as in the case of his fabrication about Muslims celebrating 9/11, or making himself the center of a story that obviously he was not the center of 25 years ago,” Tim Naftali, a presidential historian at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs, told me. The fabrications are unlikely to stop, he said, especially as the president ages. “It doesn’t happen the same to all men in their 80s, but we may see more of this: new recollections about the past that we’ve never heard before, because they never happened,” Naftali said. The White House did not address my specific questions about the president’s most recent claims, but Davis Ingle, a White House spokesperson, said in a statement that the president “was relaying his experience of a city reeling” from the attacks.

September 11 continues to be a point of tension about what the government owed, and continues to owe, those who were most affected. The mayor’s office released more than 170,000 pages of city records this week showing that city officials misled New Yorkers about air quality following the attacks. And the health toll continues to grow; the number of 9/11 survivors receiving assistance for cancer treatment roughly tripled over the past five years, according to a Washington Post analysis of reports by the World Trade Center Health Program, which funds health care for responders and survivors. Twenty-five years later, Americans everywhere will pause to remember what the nation lost that day—both those who suffered directly and those who lived through it by watching the tragedy unfold from the safety of their homes, much as Trump did.

This article originally stated that Welles Crowther was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Honor. In fact, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

The DSA’s Problem Isn’t ‘Media Training’

2026-09-07T07:00:00-04:00

American socialists are convinced that they have a media-training problem.

In the past year, members of the Democratic Socialists of America, the country’s largest leftist organization, have won electoral victories in places such as New York City and Michigan, drawing a spotlight that the group has struggled to handle.

Last month, the DSA’s co-chairs, Megan Romer and Ashik Siddique, gave several high-profile interviews that even many of their most fervent supporters agree were disastrous. The two leaders struggled to give straight answers to simple questions, and they defended outlandish policies, such as abolishing prisons and police. They seemed to present socialists exactly the way their opponents caricature them: as extremist, unserious, and unprepared.

In damage-control mode, many of DSA’s defenders on social media are repeating the phrase media training as though it were a mantra. If only the group’s leaders had been better prepared to deal with media outlets, the thinking goes, they would have avoided this train wreck. The DSA’s communications director, Priscilla Yeverino, recently told Axios, “Our leaders aren’t politicians. They’re working-class people and new to doing media.”

The idea that the DSA’s troubles on prime-time television are a technical matter solvable by the right training is surely comforting, but it is also wrong. The group has a bigger problem: It is led by unpractical extremists whose views are a far cry from those that its electorally successful figures, such as Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, espouse.

[Read: Why do rich kids love socialism?]

This disconnect is partly explained by a sharp division within the DSA. One wing engages in mass politics and includes AOC, Mamdani, and other socialists committed to democratic principles. The other wing is sectarian and extremist: It evinces little commitment to democracy and includes open admirers of Hamas, the Iranian regime, and historical dictators such as Mao Zedong. If the interviews with the DSA’s co-chairs were embarrassing, that’s a result not of a lackluster media performance but of the actual positions the group has embraced.

A closer look at the interviews confirms this. Romer, who belongs to the sectarian wing, evidently did not know what the 2000 Camp David Summit was and could not say what “taxing the hell out of millionaires,” as she demanded, would look like in practice. When asked about authoritarianism in Cuba, she praised the country’s constitution and suggested that Americans should learn from it.

Maybe media training could have taught Romer what happened at Camp David and what a tax policy might entail. It still wouldn’t have made the pro-authoritarian politics she shares with her faction of the DSA more palatable. In December, Romer’s Red Star caucus, a self-declared Marxist-Leninist faction of the DSA, posted quotes from a speech by Mao in “celebration” of the Chinese Communist leader’s 132nd birthday. Members of the faction study the works of Mao and the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin as part of their political education. Red Star has declared its unequivocal sympathy for Hamas and praised the “good judgement” of “our socialist siblings” in Palestine for working with the Islamist organization and “external groups like Iran, Hezbollah, and Ansarallah under a principle they call unity of the fields.” In other words, Red Star is an admirer of Iran’s notorious “Axis of Resistance.”

That Romer wouldn’t critique authoritarianism in Cuba is not a lapse but an expression of her faction’s politics. Red Star’s stated policy couldn’t be any clearer about this: “To publicly critique a government or movement that stands in opposition to the American government is to do the U.S. State Department’s work for them, from Iran to Palestine.”

In other words, any state or group that opposes the American government should be beyond criticism. Liberation, the DSA’s “Marxist-Leninist-Maoist caucus,” likewise declares the United States to be “not a nation” but a “prison-house of nations, with the Euro-Americans being the jailer.”

Unlike Romer, Siddique belongs to the mainstream wing of the DSA, but he is bound by the group’s statements and broader culture. The sectarian wing currently dominates the DSA: The group’s convention in Chicago last year rejected a resolution opposing “all governments that engage in the repression of democratic rights.” Thus, when asked repeatedly what he thought of Fidel Castro, whom the DSA had praised in an earlier statement, Siddique awkwardly referred to “inequality in the United States” and criticized U.S. policy—deflecting the question and offering sound bites instead of engagement, much as an establishment pol might do.

[David Brooks: Democrats became great by fighting the left]

This pro-left-authoritarian orientation explains why DSA electoral observers shamefully reported no fraud when they were dispatched to monitor the electoral sham organized by Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in 2024. Those results were so bogus that even the left-wing governments of Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay couldn’t accept them. Yet at a DSA session on the subject, a pro-Maduro organization’s assessment that Venezuela’s electoral system was “one of the very best in the world” was presented as fact, as was the false claim that Venezuela’s main opposition candidates were “fascist.”

The two wings of the DSA are committed to wildly different methods. Mamdani governs New York City partly as a technocrat, and AOC has sought to influence the Democratic Party from within. One of the DSA’s sectarian factions, by contrast, recently suggested that socialist lawmakers “should do everything in their power to disrupt any Congressional business that does not benefit the working class or advance the socialist program.” They should, it went on, “creatively abuse their powers to make it difficult to conduct legislative business,” for instance by packing the galleries of Congress with hecklers. This faction seems to view elected lawmakers as “tribunes” for the socialist movement rather than as people who, you know, make laws.

The sectarian wing got the DSA to drop its endorsement of AOC and refuse to support Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election. Red Star argued against endorsing AOC unless she withdrew her support for Joe Biden (then the Democratic nominee), and it refused to fundraise for the Democratic leadership or central congressional campaign. But ultimately, the DSA dropped AOC on the grounds that she was not sufficiently anti-Israel—a singular obsession of the sectarian wing. (The foreign-policy section of the DSA’s political platform discusses the details of only one country’s politics, and that’s Israel and Palestine, in which it calls for the self-determination of Palestinians without making a similar provision for Israeli Jews.)

For all of the extremist wing’s influence, however, my years of research into the group suggest that the DSA’s members are mostly not members of any caucuses. The average DSA member probably has more in common with AOC than with Mao or Hamas, and the nonsectarians seem especially dominant in the group’s large urban chapters—such as in New York City, where the DSA has more than 15,000 of its approximately 120,000 members. More than 80 percent of DSA members in the Bronx and Queens voted in 2024 to endorse AOC. The sectarian wing came to control much of the organization’s leadership by manipulating internal processes, which is one reason it opposes organizational referenda and other one-member-one-vote procedures.

The DSA’s mainstream wing includes thinkers who are committed to democracy, critical of authoritarianism (including that of socialist regimes, past and present), and who reject some of the signature policies of the sectarian wing, such as police abolition. These figures have been vocal in response to last month’s media fiasco.

Eric Blanc, a labor historian at Rutgers, sharply criticized Romer for “falling into a trap being set by the establishment,” which seeks “to paint DSA as extreme.” Like others in his wing, Blanc advocates for adopting a Nordic-style social democracy as a step toward overcoming capitalism. This position is also shared by the Jacobin founder and former DSA Vice Chair Bhaskar Sunkara, whose 2019 Socialist Manifesto explores Swedish social democracy in envisioning a socialism for the 21st century.

[James Kirchick: The DSA is a parasite]

Reacting to the DSA’s recent media debacles, Ben Burgis, a philosopher and Jacobin writer, opined: “We don’t do ourselves any favors by refusing to say anything too negative about left-wing dictatorships targeted by US foreign policy,” especially “if we’re trying to argue that the failures of authoritarian state socialism in the twentieth century shouldn’t mean that capitalism is the best humanity will ever be able to do.” The group has failed to reassure its critics of its commitment to multiparty democracy, Burgis added.

Thinkers in this wing of the DSA take seriously the imperative to reconcile socialist commitments to economic justice with democratic and liberal values. Burgis, Sunkara, and the economist Mike Beggs have co-authored a forthcoming book called The Blueprint: How Socialism Can Work in the Real World, which attempts to offer a “realistic model” of a post-capitalist economic system. Drawing on the work of the liberal philosopher John Rawls, as well as detailed economic research, the book takes the Soviet Union to task for a “record of systematic economic failure, not just political repression” and suggests a model that mixes social ownership with a significant role for the market. It also engages the arguments of well-known critics of socialism, such as Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises. This work puts the flippancy of Romer’s “taxing the hell out of millionaires” comment to shame.

But if the likes of AOC, Sunkara, Burgis, and Blanc wish for the American public to give their notions of an economically rigorous and democratically committed socialism a chance, they need to break with the fans of Mao and Hamas. So long as they share an organization with the DSA’s sectarians, they can’t complain when the media associates the DSA—and American socialism—with the extreme positions that it formally adopts and that its leaders espouse. No amount of media training can solve that.

The Charges Were Dropped, but the Damage Was Already Done

2026-09-07T07:00:00-04:00

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David Huerta sat on a steel bed too small for his burly frame in a Los Angeles jail last summer and looked out a small rectangular window at Dodger Stadium, where he’d once spent evenings with his two boys. He was the kid who’d made good, although it hadn’t been easy. His mother died from breast cancer when he was 4. He was raised in southeast L.A. by his dad, a veteran of the Korean War turned Teamster, who paid the bills by loading and unloading cargo—and, when he was out of work, took his sons with him to the hiring hall. Huerta steered clear of gangs and instead went to college, became a union organizer, and worked his way up to become president of the largest labor union in the state, the Service Employees International Union of California.

Yet here he was.

He was sure that he hadn’t done anything illegal. He had screamed at masked federal agents as they executed search warrants at a downtown apparel business that was suspected of hiring undocumented immigrants. He had been angry, no question—especially at President Trump. He had flipped his middle fingers at the masked federal officers. At one point, he sat down in front of the business’s gate; later, he encouraged other protesters to form a picket circle in front of it. When an officer warned him he might be arrested, he replied, “I can’t hear you through your fucking mask.” And when a police van tried to enter, he stood with his hands on his hips nearby. He considered all of that well within the bounds of his First Amendment rights. But he couldn’t stop second-guessing his decision to show up at such a volatile scene alone.

Huerta wondered how his wife and sons, his niece and nephew, and his other family members would react to seeing videos of his arrest. He wondered if he had somehow jeopardized the safety of his union’s hundreds of thousands of members by drawing unwanted headlines. He wondered if his arrest would make others more fearful of opposing this administration’s actions. He wondered when he would be released—or if he would be. He wondered if he could survive prison, should it come to that. And he wondered what his late dad would’ve thought of him sitting on a thin, stained mattress as his cellmate on the top bunk managed a comedown from drugs. Would he have been ashamed, or proud?

Trump’s top federal prosecutor in Los Angeles charged Huerta with conspiracy to impede a federal officer—a felony, under a Civil War–era statute that had rarely been used before last year. If convicted, Huerta faced up to six years in prison. But months later, prosecutors lessened the charges to a misdemeanor count of obstructing, resisting, or opposing a federal officer. This July, the Justice Department said it would drop the charges altogether, adding it to the growing list of federal prosecutions that have fallen apart before going to trial.

Although those dismissals have been celebrated as victories, the cases have taken a financial and psychological toll on the defendants. For Huerta, the past 15 months have been filled with anxiety. He has endured sleepless nights and grown emotionally distant from his wife of 30 years. The public attention continues to make it more difficult to do his job. And despite his pride in standing for what he believed in, he struggles with the shame of being jailed and appearing in court in shackles—an image he worries that his two sons and niece and nephew (whom he has raised as his own) will never forget. As we spoke inside a coffee shop in his neighborhood of Highland Park one recent afternoon, Huerta’s voice rose in anger and indignation while he recounted and, at times, reenacted the minutes before he was shoved to the ground by a federal officer. He teared up.

“The president of the union just got fucking arrested,” he said. “If they can do this to me, imagine what they’re doing to other people.”

On the morning of June 6, 2025, the phones at the SEIU office were ringing with reported sightings of immigration-enforcement operations in and around downtown L.A. Huerta and his team—along with other labor leaders, Democrats, and social-justice groups—had been preparing for a moment like this ever since Trump was elected to a second term. The administration was trying to detain and deport as many immigrants as possible. Workplaces were being targeted, and even American-born Latinos were getting caught up in immigration dragnets. Huerta and his team would later learn that this day was the opening of a monthslong operation in the L.A. area overseen by then–Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino. It aimed to not just increase arrest numbers but also intimidate immigrant communities.

[Read: A U.S. citizen detained by ICE for three days tells his story]

The union’s rapid-response network was designed to help employees during moments like this. “Shit’s happening,” Huerta recalled thinking that morning, “and we’re now in the fight.” He heard a report of an immigration raid in the apparel district, so he scrapped his plans and headed there.

Federal agents were swarming an industrial complex. A woman stood outside the facility’s gate, prosecutors later claimed in charging documents, filming officers and telling someone by phone what was happening. A federal agent later said that Huerta seemed to be communicating with that woman and other protesters “in a concerted effort to disrupt” the operation.

As the crowd grew, people screamed expletives at the officers, and someone yelled, “I want you to kill yourself,” according to the accounts of federal agents contained in court filings. The agents described Huerta joining in the taunting, urging protesters to “walk in circles and picket,” and pacing in front of the gate, “effectively preventing law enforcement vehicles from entering or exiting.”

Huerta told me that he had never acted quite like this at a protest, but that he had snapped when he saw how the officers were treating a young girl who was crying about her dad, who she said was inside the building. “They were so dismissive of her,” he said. He screamed at the agents, asking how targeting workers was making the city safer, and telling them that they were “taking orders from a fucking monster.”

When a federal agent ordered Huerta to move away from the gate, he remained in place, confident that the vehicles had plenty of room. An officer then began to move Huerta out of the way. He recalls not fighting back and keeping his hands on his hips—just as he was trained. But he was still pushed to the ground. A video shows Huerta falling on his back, his head hitting the curb. He told me that he was rolled onto his stomach, sprayed with a chemical irritant, cuffed, and taken to the hospital, where he spent several hours before being transferred to a federal detention center.

His wife, Lucía Aguayo-Huerta, learned of his arrest while at the doctor. His oldest son, Ismael, heard from a cousin, who was crying hysterically. He jumped on Instagram and typed in his father’s name. Huerta had a bum shoulder from an old skiing injury. His other son, Camilo, watched as Huerta’s arm was pulled behind his back in one of the videos. “I was almost on the verge of tears,” he told me. “Almost screaming at my phone, like, You’re fucking with his shoulder!”

Huerta didn’t sleep that first night in jail, and when he arrived at breakfast, he squirreled away packaged food in case it would become valuable in the days ahead. He’d been fingerprinted for detention on a Friday night but had not been fully processed and so had no way to call his family, although he’d briefly called his wife, Lucía, while he was at the hospital.

Protests had erupted in parts of downtown Los Angeles as word of the raids spread. Outside the detention facility, people were showing up in large numbers, clashing at times with police. Inside, news of those protests streamed on a TV. At one point, an inmate looked back and forth from the TV to Huerta, and asked Huerta if that was him on-screen. “That’s me, bro,” Huerta replied. He said the man asked, You’re the fucking union president? What the fuck are you doing here? His title, and years spent helping workers, made his life over the next 48 hours easier. Another inmate gave him toilet paper, a cup, and toothpaste, the holy trinity of jail provisions. Word spread, Huerta told me, and soon 100 or so men had gathered to applaud him.

It was a demonstration of support that Huerta hadn’t realized he needed. The sense of community he felt in that moment reminded him of his own union and the solidarity shown by his dad’s old Teamster buddies, who’d rallied around their family after his mom died, bringing them money and bags of food. He spent the rest of that day learning about the other men and the circumstances that had landed them in jail, in hopes of helping them after his release.

The hardest part of all, Huerta said, was when his wife and kids showed up for his arraignment and bail hearing and he had to look them in the eye. He wore a black T-shirt, black jeans, cuffs, and shackles. From his perspective, it was humiliating. From theirs, it was honorable. His sons told me that their dad had held his head high, his shoulders back, and his chest straight.

Listen[: When Border Patrol comes to town]

Dozens of other union leaders and workers packed the courtroom to support Huerta, along with Democratic Senator Adam Schiff. Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass wrote a letter to the judge, urging her to take into account his ties and contributions to the community as she decided bail. Huerta was charged with conspiracy, released on $50,000 bond, and dropped outside without his shoes. Facing a throng of supporters, he defended his actions and spoke of the men he had met who were still stuck inside. “We will have our time for justice,” he told the crowd, “but we must do it in a way that we demonstrate the power of working people.” That night, though, after a long shower and dinner from his favorite taco truck, Huerta lay awake in his bed thinking about a new, terrifying phrase: “conspiracy to impede.”

The psychological stress was, Huerta later realized, his worst punishment. He wanted to get back to work, but he didn’t want his presence at the office to draw negative attention to the union. For a time, he worked remotely. Lucía and the boys worried about his health. He had grown moody and snippy, often wanting to be left alone after work. Other family members worried that Huerta’s critics might try to physically harm him.

Three attorneys and their teams from Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., represented him pro bono, and nonprofits helped pay other expenses. But Huerta was still stressed about the many hundreds of hours that his case was consuming. All of the time he was spending on his legal fight was time lost organizing laborers, he said. Senator Alex Padilla of California, a Democrat, told me he figured that the federal government’s case against Huerta, a friend, would fail, but he knew it had to be taken seriously. “It was clear to me that it was weighing on him,” Padilla said. But Huerta also understood, the senator said, that his members were “looking to him for how to handle the chaos that was going on and the pain that was being inflicted.”

“Free David Huerta” rallies popped up around the state; supporters carried posters featuring his stenciled portrait and wore T-shirts emblazoned with his name. “An injury to one,” the AFL-CIO wrote on Facebook, “is an injury to all.” Huerta attended two rallies to protest Trump’s immigration policies, but kept his appearances short, he told me. He left one as people marched toward a detention facility; he didn’t want to violate the terms of his bond that required he stay at least 100 yards away from federal-law-enforcement agents or operations. One day, while at home with Lucía, he paced the house and imagined how much worse things could get, feeling out of control. “Hey, calm down, you’re okay,” his wife told him. He later realized that he had suffered an anxiety attack. He was raised in a culture in which seeking treatment for mental health carries a stigma, but he knew he needed help. He began to see a therapist for the first time.

In October, his charge was downgraded to a misdemeanor. Prosecutors needed to establish that he had planned to interfere with federal officers that day—but his actions were unplanned, his attorneys said. His team tried to get prosecutors to dismiss the case entirely.

The lesser charges brought some relief, but his character and reputation were still under attack. “Those anxieties of uncertainty,” he said, “they kept creeping up.” The case continued to weigh heavily on his marriage. Then, in July, prosecutors gave up. Late last month, the charge was dismissed with prejudice. He got back his passport and phone, two items that symbolize his freedom and his work. He did not celebrate. “I was detained—and fortunately, that’s all that happened,” he told me. Others—in Minneapolis, Houston, Maine—had been shot dead while interacting with immigration officers. Bill Essayli, the top federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, said on X that Huerta, since his arrest, had complied with conditions to not interfere with federal agents and operations, but “should he unlawfully interfere with any federal agent engaged in their duties, we will not hesitate to arrest and charge him again.” His office declined further comment.

[Read: Another fatal ICE shooting]

If the point was to try to make an example out of him, a conviction wasn’t necessary. The case against Huerta signaled to the labor and immigrant communities that no one could protest immigration raids without real risk, he and other labor leaders told me. Some union members grew afraid of speaking out, they said. But many others were moved to show their disapproval of the immigration crackdown by protesting peacefully because of how they saw officers treat Huerta, Arnulfo De La Cruz, who took over in April as president of SEIU California, told me. “In a lot of ways, he was the embodiment of a transition from fear to We’re not gonna back down.”

Huerta doesn’t know when—or even if—he will show up at another immigration-enforcement protest, he said. His experience has made him think hard about how he tries to achieve his goals. “I’m not leaving the work,” he told me. “But I would be a liar to say that it’s not in the back of my head that I could find myself in the same situation.” On the day I saw him, he had just pulled into town from Big Bear, a rare escape. He spoke not of the views or the lake, but of the workers powering the restaurants and hotels.

The Hasan Piker Question

2026-09-03T16:12:23-04:00

Like late-summer humidity, Hasan Piker hangs heavy over the discourse.

At a rally on Monday, Vice President Vance brought up the hard-left streamer in an attempt to paint the Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed as anti-American. Last week, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries called Piker’s recent statements about Jewish Americans “dangerous and anti-Semitic.” Senators Jon Ossoff, Cory Booker, and Jacky Rosen said much the same. Facing questions about a totally different set of Piker comments, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez hustled into an elevator.

Some Democrats are trying to dismiss the 35-year-old political commentator as irrelevant. He’s just “a streamer in California,” El-Sayed said on Saturday, waving off questions from reporters. Piker himself has spent the past week casting himself as the victim of hysteria. “I have become this media cycle’s ‘trans athletes’ or ‘migrant caravan,’” he posted on X.

But it was El-Sayed who first made Piker central to his campaign by bringing him out on the trail, partying poolside with him at an influencer event, and celebrating with him during his Election Night rally. In his thousands of hours of streaming, Piker has produced a dense catalog of comments spanning the spectrum from stupid to incredibly offensive, including several iterations of the phrase “I hate America” and, perhaps most memorably, that “America deserved 9/11.” (He quickly attempted to walk it back.) Piker also flaunts his authoritarian sympathies, calling Mao Zedong “one of the great leaders of this world” and counting the collapse of the Soviet Union among the “catastrophes” of the 20th century. Last week, he warned that “eventually someone is going to come around and take action” against American Jews who are “singularly invested in Israel.”

[Read: What El-Sayed does next matters ]

Hasan Piker is part of the conversation now. He has become central to the Republican strategy in Michigan, where El-Sayed will continue to be asked about him. So, too, will Democrats across the country. The question ahead of November is whether their answers will satisfy voters.

El-Sayed has moved away from Piker since winning the primary last month. The streamer has not been on the trail in Michigan. “I have spoken with the good doctor,” Representative Jim Clyburn told reporters of El-Sayed, who has a medical degree. “He has apologized. He says he will not campaign with Piker anymore.” After Piker’s comments last week about American Jews, El-Sayed said in a statement that anti-Semitism is a “scourge” and that “I stand against any rhetoric that puts the community at risk.” When asked about Piker at a meeting with a group of Jewish Democrats on Saturday, though, El-Sayed declined to disavow him. “If you want to make this race about a streamer in California, I just think you’re missing the boat.”

Anyone could have predicted the Piker blowback. Plenty of people did. In March, one of El-Sayed’s primary opponents, Mallory McMorrow, compared Piker to the white-supremacist influencer Nick Fuentes, and leaders of the centrist think tank Third Way wrote a column urging Democrats not to associate with Piker. “Everyone saw it coming from a mile away, so they should’ve been better prepared to handle it,” one Democratic strategist told me. Even some of El-Sayed’s own backers felt similarly. “Not all socialism is toxic to the Democratic brand, but Piker certainly is,” one progressive strategist told me.

(None of the Democrat-aligned operatives I reached out to would agree to speak on the record for this story, citing their support for El-Sayed as well as their fear of reprisal from Piker’s rabid online fans.)

The Piker drama is a ribbon-wrapped gift to Republicans in a year when so much else—inflation, high gas prices, an unpopular president—is working against them. They seem well aware of this. Mike Rogers, El-Sayed’s Republican opponent, refers to Piker as El-Sayed’s “running mate.” “When I see Abdul El-Sayed campaign around this state with somebody who said that America deserved 9/11, what I see is a man who has sympathy and compassion for people who share his religion, but has nothing for people who don’t,” Vance said at the rally on Monday. “What I’d ask you to remember is that whoever you send to Washington, whatever policy views you have or you don’t have, send people of good heart who focus on the right issues, who fight for the right people, and who love the United States of America.” The strategy is obvious: Identify every repellent thing Piker has ever said, tie Piker to El-Sayed, and advertise the relationship at every opportunity.

There is more than a hint of irony in this situation. President Trump has shown a strong affinity for shock jocks and trolls. In 2020, he awarded Rush Limbaugh, who had a recurring segment celebrating the deaths of gay people from AIDS, the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Laura Loomer, a far-right activist and an ally of Trump’s, last week referred to a Senate candidate as a “ghetto black communist bitch.” Some Democrats, seeing Trump suffer little political consequence for such associations, believe it’s unfair that El-Sayed should have to answer for Piker’s actions.

[Read: Laura Loomer is a warning]

But politics, like life, is famously unfair. Democrats are constantly being asked to condemn Piker in cable-news hits and hallway interviews, even outside Michigan. Several Jewish Democrats have weighed in too. Through a spokesperson, Ossoff said he “unreservedly rejects reckless and dangerous rhetoric suggesting that policy advocacy invites violence against the Jewish community or any community.” Representative Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey said that “anyone who campaigns with Piker or elevates him is complicit in the rising antisemitism and anti-American hatred in this country.” Moderate Democrats are seizing the moment as a chance to engage in a little centrist posturing. Senator John Fetterman went on Fox News and delivered a challenge to El-Sayed: “I’m offering $50,000 for you to do a rally with Hasan Piker” on September 11, he said. Piker was not immediately available for comment for this story. But last week, after several Jewish Democrats criticized him, he dismissed their concerns by implying they reflected an orchestrated conspiracy against him, writing on X that an “aipac boss call was made.”

Maybe El-Sayed could quell some of the frenzy himself. In 2008, controversial comments from Barack Obama’s former pastor Jeremiah Wright threatened to upend Obama’s bid for the White House. In a sermon shortly after September 11, the pastor said that “America’s chickens are coming home to roost.” Later, Wright said, “No, no, no, not God Bless America. God damn America—that’s in the Bible—for killing innocent people.”

Obama chose to address the controversy directly, and delivered a speech condemning Wright’s remarks while offering context about America’s racial tensions. That speech “was a masterpiece of empathy, and at the time it felt that it changed the trajectory of his campaign,” Michelle Goldberg wrote this week. At the very least, some Democrats argue, El-Sayed could more plainly denounce his friend. “Say, ‘Here’s what I condemn; here’s what I disavow. I disagree; it was wrong and hurtful,’” the progressive strategist said. “If Piker says something new that’s bad—which, if I was a betting man, I’d say will happen—you come out against it swiftly.”

Michigan, a state that Trump won in 2016 and 2024, was never going to be an easy win for El-Sayed. His relationship with Piker, who is paid to provoke, not persuade, isn’t going to make that task any simpler. The good news for Democrats is that most people don’t actually know Piker; polling from earlier this year showed that 60 percent of likely voters have never heard of him. The bad news for Democrats is that Republicans will spend the next two months working diligently to change that.

The Air Marshals Keeping Watch On Eric Swalwell

2026-09-02T07:00:00-04:00

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On August 8, former Representative Eric Swalwell boarded a United Airlines flight from Frankfurt, Germany, to Washington, D.C. He didn’t know it, but federal agents were watching him throughout the nine-hour trip.

The FBI had asked the Federal Air Marshal Service to covertly monitor Swalwell on board and to watch him use his electronic devices, to see whether its officers could visually ascertain his passcodes, according to records I obtained that have not previously been reported on. Air marshals are trained to blend in with other passengers and quietly keep tabs on their subjects, who are usually suspected terrorists or potential hijackers, not politicians.

But Swalwell is an enemy of sorts to the Trump administration. For years, the Democrat has been one of Donald Trump’s most visible political antagonists, having served as a manager in the president’s second impeachment trial. Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller has called Swalwell a “scumbag” on national television. And FBI Director Kash Patel, the leader of the agency that wanted Swalwell monitored, described him as one of the “corrupt actors of the first order” in his 2023 book, Government Gangsters.

The directive for air-marshal surveillance said that Swalwell was the “focus” of an FBI investigation, but it didn’t provide additional details. Law enforcement has good reason to investigate the 45-year-old. This past spring, a former staff member accused Swalwell of twice raping her while she was intoxicated. A woman in California accused Swalwell of drugging and raping her after he’d promised to assist with her career. Three more women have accused Swalwell of making unwanted advances and sending them lewd text messages, including nude pictures of himself. Swalwell has denied the allegations, but authorities in Los Angeles and Manhattan have opened a criminal investigation. In April, as the number of accusers mounted, Swalwell suspended his campaign for governor of California and resigned from his seat in Congress.

A week after the flight from Germany, Swalwell got off another plane at San Francisco International Airport. FBI agents were waiting for him with a search warrant. They seized his mobile phone and personal computer. (It’s not clear whether, by that point, the FBI knew the passcodes to unlock those devices.) The next day, agents searched Swalwell’s home in Washington, D.C. Documents filed in federal court in California suggest that the bureau is investigating Swalwell in connection with the sexual-assault cases in Los Angeles and New York.

Despite the seriousness of the accusations against Swalwell, many aspects of the FBI’s request to the Federal Air Marshal Service were unusual, current and former officials told me. For one thing, the FBI does not usually investigate sexual assault. For another, asking air marshals to obtain a subject’s electronic passcodes is considered out of the ordinary even for traditional subjects of surveillance, one former official said. The agency presumes that requests for assistance from the FBI, which are not unusual, are relevant to a legitimate investigation. But the bureau’s behavior here undermines that confidence, the former official added.

The request to monitor Swalwell was classified as “Special Mission Coverage,” a term for ad hoc requests from law-enforcement or intelligence agencies that don’t involve people on security watch lists. The FBI’s decision to ask air marshals for help also puzzled some former law-enforcement officials I spoke with, who asked why the FBI hadn’t put its own agents on the plane to conduct surveillance, which would have been a routine matter.

Given the public evidence and the history of the Trump administration’s efforts to investigate or discredit Swalwell, current and former officials and security experts told me that they have trouble imagining that the federal government would have gone to such lengths if the accused were not one of the administration’s least favorite people. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because they didn’t want to provoke reprisals.

Sara Azari, Swalwell’s lawyer, told me in a statement that Swalwell has been in contact with the Department of Justice throughout the assault investigation. “Not once were we asked for Mr. Swalwell’s phones or devices. Had the DOJ asked, we would have complied, as we have with every other request,” she said. Azari called the air-marshal surveillance an “extraordinary escalation” against her client, who has not been charged with a crime.

The FBI declined to comment. The Transportation Security Administration, which runs the air-marshals service, didn’t respond to emails and phone calls requesting comment.

The midair surveillance of the former lawmaker is not the only unusual step the federal government has taken in this case. The warrant used to seize Swalwell’s electronic devices cited a civil-rights statute that historically has been applied to police officers who abuse their authority while acting “under color of law.” It traces its origins to the 19th century and was used in the 1960s to charge local police in Mississippi who conspired with Klansmen to murder civil-rights workers. Decades later, two of the police officers who’d beaten Rodney King were convicted under the law. And it was used to bring federal charges against Derek Chauvin, the officer convicted in Minnesota of killing George Floyd.

The FBI hasn’t publicly articulated its rationale for applying the law to Swalwell. But one theory, according to legal experts I spoke with, may be that he used the power of his office to intimidate his alleged victims into silence. Prosecutors might believe that there’s evidence of coercion or threats in Swalwell’s electronic communications.

But it’s not clear that the law would apply to a legislator as it does to law-enforcement officials, who have the power to detain people. “Mr. Swalwell’s private relationships between consenting adults have nothing to do with his office, his authority, or his official duties,” his lawyer said.

The fact that details about the search of Swalwell’s devices and home are publicly known is also a departure from usual law-enforcement procedure. The inventory of what the agents took from him at the San Francisco airport, which should have been kept under seal, was somehow made public.

Under Patel, the FBI has publicized its investigative steps against high-profile suspects before they have been charged. In August 2025, Patel posted on X about an imminent FBI action just as agents began raiding the home of former National Security Adviser John Bolton, a Trump critic. Broadcasting a secret operation in advance could tip off a suspect and potentially put agents in physical danger. At least one news organization appeared to have known ahead of time about the Bolton raid. A month later, Patel posted that “the subject” in the murder of Charlie Kirk was in custody, hours before it was true. He also posted details about leads that agents were following in the Kirk case, which could have jeopardized the investigation.

[Read: The FBI director is MIA]

It’s possible that the FBI is interested in Swalwell for reasons that go beyond his alleged treatment of women. The Department of Homeland Security is investigating his employment of a nanny from Brazil. Swalwell is also among the Trump critics whom Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte criminally referred to the Department of Justice over alleged mortgage fraud. Swalwell has never been charged, however, and experts have pointed out that Pulte’s allegations against officials probably reflect paperwork errors, not genuine attempts to defraud lenders.

Swalwell was also once a subject in a counterintelligence investigation of a suspected agent for China’s intelligence service. But in 2017, the FBI cleared him, and the Justice Department didn’t file charges. A former U.S. official familiar with the case told me that the representative had cooperated with investigators after they’d presented him with evidence that the woman he knew might be a foreign operative.

Last month, the administration made the unusual decision to publicly release classified FBI files related to that investigation. Swalwell’s conservative critics have long been obsessed with the case of Christine Fang, known as Fang Fang, who the files show was suspected of working for China’s Ministry of State Security. The files helped the public understand more details about Chinese espionage. But they also revealed that Swalwell had admitted to having a physical relationship with Fang. Embarrassing Swalwell might have been the point of disclosing the documents.

Patel has made no secret of his contempt for Swalwell. During a House Judiciary Committee hearing last September, when Swalwell was a member, they sparred over whether Trump’s name appeared in files from the investigation of Jeffrey Epstein, and what Patel had told then–Attorney General Pam Bondi about the matter. Swalwell accused Patel of being evasive and showing “consciousness of guilt.”

Swalwell then cited Patel’s book, in which Swalwell’s name appears on a list of “deep state” actors. Twenty of those people, Swalwell said, had already been investigated or faced “adverse actions.” He asked whether Patel would recuse himself from any investigations of the people he had named, including Swalwell.

“I’m going to borrow your terminology and call bullshit on your entire career in Congress. It has been a disgrace to the American people,” Patel said. The two men spoke over each other.

Finally, the FBI director answered Swalwell’s question. “No,” he said, he would not recuse.

Madison Hahamy and Marie-Rose Sheinerman contributed research to this story.

*Illustration Sources: Tierney L. Cross / Bloomberg / Getty; Tom Williams / CQ-Roll Call, Inc / Getty.

Inside a Conservative Operation to Hijack Your Social-Media Feed

2026-09-02T06:00:00-04:00

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If you’re short on cash, there is someone in Riga, Latvia, who can help. “You can literally make 100k a month with this campaign,” a young man with blond curls and a thick accent says into a camera. All you have to do is post on social media video clips of “anything that supports Republican.” Unfamiliar with U.S. politics? No problem: “If you’re not from the USA, like, What the fuck is even Republicans? like me,” then simply go to Gemini or ChatGPT, he suggests, “and be like ‘Yo, Gemini, I want some videos promoting Republican values. Give me ideas.’ Go to Gemini. Get ideas. Boom.”

The man, who goes by Serviuos, is promoting a campaign called Elephant Clipping, run by his company, ClipIt. The company pays subcontractors, many from poorer countries in Eastern Europe and the global South, to chop up videos the company provides into bite-size pieces in the hope that the clips will go viral online.

Such “clipping” operations have become a popular means of manipulating people’s attention. Brands, influencers, musical artists, and others spend six-figure sums on such promotional campaigns. Perhaps inevitably, the practice is now moving into politics, often without the transparency required to know exactly what is being served up and by whom. Five months before the midterms, though, Serviuos is up-front about the goal of the Elephant Clipping campaign: “So that republican win in USA,” he writes in one message. I sent Serviuos a list of questions about his work in American right-wing politics. He wrote back, “Seems very out of context,” but didn’t comment further.

Many video-clipping services operate in relative secrecy so that the public isn’t aware of the manipulation of their social-media feeds. But the services also need to attract potential clippers. They typically rely on chat servers on Discord—an internet messaging app that was initially developed for gamers.

After an anonymous tipster flagged Elephant Clipping to me, I was able to access its Discord server and other related political-clipping campaign chats just by clicking “Join,” noting on a form that I was based in the United States, and answering some questions about my availability and desire to clip. Once I was in, I could see the mechanics of the campaign, which pays huge sums of money to people—many of whom appeared to be outside the U.S.—to push video clips from accounts designed to look like those of ordinary Americans spontaneously touting reasons to favor the GOP.

In one channel on the server, users can submit pro-Republican videos that they’ve already posted on TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts to be reviewed for payment. A separate Google Drive contains suggested videos for clippers to use, but “you can clip anything as long as it is positively framed conservative pro-Republican content,” Serviuos explains to participants. He provides some examples: a video of “Top 5 Joe Rogan moments,” a video of a conservative YouTuber confronting liberals with the suggested caption “See how Nick Shirley handles being told to ‘get the f* out’ of a public property.” Clippers are paid a proportionate share of the campaign’s monthly budget of $300,000. Every 1 million views yields a $300 payout.

[Read: An unsettling glimpse into the GOP’s future]

The videos that result are not publicly visible in the Discord. Some clipper accounts on social media, however, inadvertently revealed their participation in the campaign by repeating the 258-word “Goal of the Campaign” instructions in the captions of some of their short videos. The Instagram account @_politicalhub, for example, posted the caption alongside a video of Charlie Kirk calling Palestine a “nonexistent place.” Another account called @frontrawpolitics posted the instructional text in the caption of a video of a conservative influencer saying that she would never marry a liberal, “because he’s going to raise my son to be a faggot.” Each video had only a single like, but both accounts had posted other videos, without the instructional caption, that collectively accrued tens of thousands of views.

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: servtheclipper / YouTube.

The instructions contain no directive to add a disclosure that the video may result in the poster being paid or that it is part of an organized campaign. Clippers are instructed to use U.S.-based proxy servers and to hide their location on social media to obfuscate that they’re working from outside the United States. The server also doesn’t disclose who’s funding any of this. But it does leave some clues that lead to a relative of a Republican mega-donor.

Elephant Clipping’s operation is the newest version of “astroturfing”—orchestrated messaging designed to look like genuine expressions of grassroots support. In the 2016 election cycle, the Internet Research Agency, a Kremlin-linked troll farm outside St. Petersburg, tried to influence the U.S. presidential election with fake social-media posts, bot farms, and protests organized through Facebook. Teens in Macedonia also posted incendiary disinformation about U.S. politics in a bid to generate advertising revenue from the number of clicks they generated on Google and other platforms. Serviuos’s clipping operations—Elephant Clipping is just one of them—are driving views to the cause they are being paid to promote.

Isabel Linzer, a policy analyst at the Center for Democracy and Technology, a Washington, D.C.–based think tank, told me that the existence of political clip farms operating at scale, such as Elephant Clipping, had been suspected but hadn’t previously been confirmed. Earlier reports revealed more targeted operations. MS NOW, for instance, recently reported on a campaign in which influencers were paid to post videos supportive of the Democratic Senate candidate Haley Stevens. (She lost her primary race in Michigan last month anyway.) Linzer noted that Elephant Clipping stands out for the apparent scale of the investment and for its attempt to create faux grassroots support.

In the Discord server I accessed, one of Serviuos’s associates touts the campaign as “a once in a lifetime opportunity” to be a part of what “could be the biggest clipping campaign in the entire industry.” Hyperbole, perhaps. And comparisons are hard to come by, because many of these campaigns involve private chat rooms. But the numbers that Elephant Clipping claims are very large. The operation aims to hit 1 billion views a month on videos its clippers post. It often falls short of that goal, but the campaign still regularly accrues hundreds of millions of views a week, according to automated campaign updates, which could not be independently verified. Serviuos seems to have been running the campaign for some time: Discord records for Elephant Clipping’s budget go back only to April, but the campaign has been going on for “about a year now,” Serviuos said in a video posted that month.

[Read: ‘We need to do McCarthyism to the tenth power’]

My examination of Elephant Clipping led me to several other, similar clipping campaigns that appeared linked to Serviuos and that all appeared to be pushing conservative content. Another site visible on the server, Monster Lab, displays large clipping-campaign budgets that have now ended. One “political clipping” campaign that ran in February displays a $900,000 budget. Two other campaigns that ran in March and April, which involved making clips of a famous “U.S. political commentator,” also each listed a $900,000 monthly budget. Yet another campaign that ran last month had a $120,000 budget and instructed clippers to post videos edited from the YouTube channel of Turning Point USA, the conservative nonprofit organization co-founded by the late Charlie Kirk. It also links to a Google Drive folder with videos, mostly of his wife, Erika Kirk, that were uploaded on September 15, 2025, five days after Kirk’s assassination. (Andrew Kolvet, a Turning Point spokesperson, told me that “I can pretty much guarantee we aren’t working with a Latvian company” and that none of the contractors the nonprofit works with are familiar with the clipping campaign.)

A separate Discord server, called US Politics Clipping, is run by a young Norwegian named Anders Wedøe, who runs ClipSon, a Norwegian clipping company. US Politics Clipping links to the same Google Drive as Elephant Clipping. The folder includes videos of figures including Shirley, President Trump, and Vice President Vance, as well as the ESPN sports commentator Stephen A. Smith. US Politics Clipping displays a monthly budget of $125,000, and its users are restricted to posting only clips edited from the videos provided in the Google Drive. Wedøe declined to speak about his business’s involvement in politics.

Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: servtheclipper / YouTube; Getty.

When I described Elephant Clipping to Whitney Phillips, a professor at the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism and Communication, she told me, “That’s just social media now.” Phillips was only half-joking. Short-form video clips have become ubiquitous. “This moment is so disorienting. When you’re looking right at something, you don’t have enough information to describe what you’re seeing,” Phillips said. In prior technological cycles, many ads, such as television commercials, were obvious. On social media, many are unlabeled, especially those in the form of short videos, and they sometimes aim to convey the impression of a groundswell that doesn’t exist.

The Discord server doesn’t specify who is paying Elephant Clipping or the other right-leaning political-clipping operations, but Google Drive folders in each of the Serviuos and Wedøe-run campaigns are filled with files uploaded by what appear to be three employees of Enclave & Key, a Las Vegas–based marketing company: Jules Katz, the chief of staff; Benjamin Goodman, a vice president of operations; and Jack O’Hara, the head of media production at an Enclave & Key subsidiary. O’Hara and Katz seem to have uploaded videos to the Google Drive with their company email address. In at least one instance, O’Hara also used what appears to be his personal email address. It’s not specified what role, if any, Enclave & Key plays in the campaigns.

Enclave & Key’s CEO and founder is Blake Wynn, the 26-year-old nephew of the billionaire and conservative mega-donor Steve Wynn. (ClipSon runs a clipping campaign for Steve Wynn with a $10,000 monthly budget, which directs participants to a Google Drive of videos seemingly uploaded by Goodman.) Enclave & Key’s services include connecting influencers to brands, organizing branding events, and other types of marketing, according to the company website.

When I reached out to Blake Wynn with a list of questions, he responded that “there are a number of inaccuracies” but declined to offer further clarification and didn’t follow through on an invitation to talk. Enclave & Key told me in an emailed statement that “news has been clipped and shared for generations” and described itself as an “American company engaged in a routine, longstanding and lawful practice, despite attempts to sensationalize it by invoking high-profile conservative names and portray it as something nefarious.” Steve Wynn didn’t respond to a request for comment. Shortly after I first reached out to both Wynns, Enclave & Key, and others involved in the campaigns, the deletions started.

By Thursday afternoon, video folders for clippers that had been uploaded to a Google Drive by Katz and O’Hara had disappeared, though the same files were then posted by Goodman, who used an email address not linked to Enclave & Key. The Discord channels for US Politics Clipping and Elephant Clipping were also delisted from the publicly visible campaigns in the ClipSon and ClipIt Discords. The campaigns were still visible on Monster Lab, but descriptions explaining the purpose of each campaign were gone. On Friday morning, Enclave & Key Google Drives for the campaigns were taken down as well.

Blake Wynn has connections beyond his uncle in the conservative mediasphere. During a November 2025 interview on the sports-focused podcast Bring the Juice, he said that he and Enclave & Key “do a lot of work in politics.” Wynn also said that he regularly speaks with FBI Director Kash Patel, and that he was good friends with Kirk. In the same podcast, Wynn recounted sitting next to Trump at Mar-a-Lago on Election Night in 2024, alongside Elon Musk, UFC CEO Dana White, and Steve Witkoff, Trump’s friend and special envoy. In the past several years, he’s posted pictures of himself on Instagram at small gatherings at the White House and at Mar-a-Lago, alongside the Kirks and Tulsi Gabbard, the former director of national intelligence.

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Bryan Steffy / Getty.

Clipping campaigns may lack transparency, but they likely are legal. “There’s no clear-cut disclosure rules for these types of campaigns,” Saurav Ghosh, a campaign-finance expert at the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan, pro-democracy nonprofit, told me. “This seems like a clear case of why we need more transparency rules for digital content so badly.”

Elephant Clipping has some areas that are out of bounds, for reasons that aren’t made clear. Clippers are instructed not to post videos of the journalist Megyn Kelly, the commentators Nick Fuentes and Tucker Carlson, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., or the anti-trans activist Riley Gaines, among others. Banned subjects include the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and the cryptocurrencies that members of the Trump family have promoted. In the Turning Point USA campaign, clippers are barred from posting videos of Candace Owens, who has become an Erika Kirk antagonist.

Clippers are also prohibited from telling people to “vote for” or “vote against” individual candidates or causes and cannot suggest that viewers “donate” to specific causes. It’s possible, experts told me, that these limits are intended to avoid triggering campaign-finance regulations that would require the funder behind the campaign to be identified or to avoid content-moderation rules on social-media platforms. Two sub-campaigns in the Discord offer extra money for clippers to post favorable videos about Vivek Ramaswamy—a GOP candidate for Ohio governor—and Gabbard. Serviuos also manages clipping campaigns for the conservative influencers Ben Shapiro and Steven Crowder. Both campaigns are listed on Monster Lab with $30,000 budgets for last month, and Crowder’s campaign also links to an Enclave & Key–connected Google Drive. (Neither Shapiro nor Crowder responded to requests for comment.)

[Read: The intellectual right is mad at the mess it’s made]

Blake Wynn claims to have met with both Ramaswamy and Gabbard. He said during his interview on Bring the Juice that he’d shared a car with Ramaswamy as a part of Trump’s 2024 Election Night victory motorcade. Last year, when Gabbard became director of national intelligence, Wynn posted pictures of himself with her at the swearing-in ceremony, along with a caption that read in part: “I don’t think this will be my last time in the Oval Office with YOU!” Gabbard resigned in June. (Ramaswamy and Gabbard didn’t respond to requests for comment.)

A decade after political interference on social media involving overseas actors first became a major issue, the pattern is repeating as the midterms approach. In 2018, Philip Howard, a researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute, called attempts to influence elections via social media “the new normal.” Elephant Clipping and its related campaigns show just how prescient he was.

The Guard That Won’t Be Changing

2026-09-01T21:01:28-04:00

Many Democrats of a certain age took the same message from the party’s 2024 debacle: Voters are sick of the old guard and craving younger, more aggressive leaders. Better to retire on your own terms than suffer the fate of Joe Biden, forced to stand down from his reelection campaign after a public humiliation. Nancy Pelosi, the 86-year-old former speaker, announced her exit from the House, as did her longtime lieutenant, 87-year-old Steny Hoyer. Senators Dick Durbin (81) and Jeanne Shaheen (79) passed up reelection bids this year, and so, too, did two senators merely in their late 60s.

Senator Ed Markey, 80, heeded no such warning, and evidently, he didn’t need to. The Massachusetts Democrat is one of just two current senators whose tenures in Congress date to the presidency of Gerald Ford. But tonight, the oldest Democratic senator on the ballot this year trounced his much younger primary opponent, Representative Seth Moulton. The AP called the race a half hour after polls closed, with Markey leading by nearly 50 points.

In a race that pitted ideology against age, Massachusetts Democrats opted for a progressive stalwart who will be 86 at the end of another six-year term over a more moderate 47-year-old challenger. Moulton, an Iraq War veteran who is concluding his sixth term in the House, moved left to appeal to a statewide primary electorate. But he could not hope to outflank Markey, who won support from Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Instead, Moulton urged voters to embrace “a new generation of leadership” and argued that he could more effectively fight for liberal causes than an incumbent in the twilight of his career.

Markey had already faced that kind of challenge before, and won. Six years ago, he handily defeated then-Representative Joe Kennedy III, a grandson of Robert F. Kennedy who contended that the incumbent, after so many decades in office, was no longer up to the task. Young progressives, unimpressed with what remained of the Kennedy aura and appreciative of Markey’s record championing the Green New Deal, rallied to Markey’s side. But that race preceded Biden’s flameout in 2024 and the reckoning over the Democratic Party’s gerontocracy.

Some Massachusetts Democrats believed that Markey could be newly vulnerable, especially if a popular progressive such as Representative Ayanna Pressley, who is 52, decided to challenge him. Mary Anne Marsh, a longtime Democratic strategist in the state, told me that after seeing the reception Pressley received at a party convention last year, she became convinced that “if Ayanna runs, she wins.” But Pressley opted to run for reelection to the House, leaving Moulton to challenge Markey.

Moulton has never lacked ambition—he led a failed bid to oust Pelosi as party leader in 2018 and waged a short-lived presidential campaign the following year—but he’s neither as progressive as Pressley nor as well liked. He built a reputation as a moderate in the House Democratic caucus, and after President Trump’s victory over Kamala Harris in 2024, Moulton angered many on the left by accusing his party of being “afraid” to say that transgender athletes should not play women’s sports. He has since offered a partial apology to the transgender community, but the line became fodder for Markey, who said that he’d thrown “trans kids under the bus.” The issue was emblematic of Moulton’s struggle to convince progressives in Massachusetts that he shared their values. “He’s tried to become a progressive, but he does it by defining progressive in a way that nobody believes,” Marsh said. “He tried to become something that he’s not.”

The Massachusetts race was a rare Democratic primary this year in which U.S. policy toward Israel did not become a flash point, as both candidates criticized Benjamin Netanyahu’s government and opposed new military aid to Israel. (Moulton announced last year that he would return donations from AIPAC.)

Both public polling and Markey’s internal surveys showed a closer race until earlier this summer, when the incumbent began to pull away. A Markey adviser told me that voters had not really tuned in to the campaign yet, and media attention was focused on higher-profile Democratic primaries elsewhere. Markey’s age also did not become a big factor, perhaps because the years since 2020 have been kinder to him than they were to Biden. His support reflected a frequently overlooked nuance in the debate over whether the party needs new leadership: Older progressive leaders, particularly the 84-year-old Sanders, remain popular. “There’s a difference between being old and being part of the old guard,” the Markey adviser, who was not authorized to speak publicly, said. “Younger voters love Ed Markey, younger voters love Bernie Sanders, younger voters love Elizabeth Warren, and I think that has a lot to do with the fact that they take younger voters seriously.”

Moulton tried to align Markey with a Democratic establishment that he said has failed to deliver progressive wins. He frequently invoked the name of Senator Chuck Schumer, vowing to oppose the New Yorker if he seeks to remain the Democratic leader. And Moulton even accused Markey of having ties to the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, an attack that, according to Marsh, backfired so badly that it might have sealed Moulton’s defeat. (Markey denied any affiliation with Epstein.)

In the end, Massachusetts Democrats preferred Markey’s progressivism over Moulton’s relative youth. Markey might have been helped by the fact that the stakes in this primary were not as high as they were elsewhere this year—and certainly much lower than when the party pushed Biden to withdraw in 2024. Massachusetts is not in danger of going Republican in November. Democratic voters wanted a trusted fighter to wage battle against Trump for the next two years and—they hope—for transformative progressive policies in the four years after that. They didn’t seem to care much that the fighter they chose happens to be 80 years old.

How the Right Could Actually End Birthright Citizenship

2026-08-31T07:00:00-04:00

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Early last year, a woman named Liza and her husband were busy preparing for the birth of their child. On top of the normal stresses of pregnancy, they faced another, less typical concern: that their baby would be stateless. The couple had left Russia for the United States. Liza is legally in the U.S. on a temporary status, and her husband is seeking asylum. They could in theory have applied for Russian citizenship for the baby at the consulate, though Liza told me that would have been risky, in light of her husband’s asylum application.

Before January 20, 2025, this would not have been a concern: Although Liza and her husband are Russian citizens, their baby, born on American soil, would have automatically received U.S. citizenship under the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution. But an executive order signed by Donald Trump on the day of his second inauguration had called that guarantee into question. After February 19, according to the order, only children with at least one biological parent who was either a U.S. citizen or a green-card holder could be legally considered American. That would have left Liza’s baby without U.S. citizenship—or citizenship anywhere at all. Liza, who asked that I withhold her last name out of concern for her family’s safety, worried that her child would be entirely without legal protection if she and her husband were deported.

“I was really, really anxious,” she said. “I was even blaming myself, like, Why didn’t I have the baby sooner? ” On January 21, Liza and four other expectant mothers joined a lawsuit against the order—one of several challenges to Trump’s decree. (The plaintiffs sued using pseudonyms or only their first names, to protect their identities.) Within days, federal courts blocked the policy from going into effect.

[Quinta Jurecic: Trump’s absurd citizenship arguments went nowhere]

At the end of June, a year and a half after Trump issued the order, the Supreme Court ruled in Trump v. Barbara that the policy violated the Fourteenth Amendment. Civil-liberties groups and immigration advocates cheered the ruling. Headlines declared it a major loss for Trump. Anna O. Law, a political scientist who studies constitutional law and immigration at CUNY, told me she had been scheduled to join two news broadcasts to discuss the ruling. Once the Court decided against Trump, both canceled because, as one put it, “the danger has passed.”

But the Court made its decision by a far tighter margin than most observers had anticipated: Only five of the nine justices took the view that Trump’s executive order was constitutionally prohibited. Four justices, all conservatives, would have allowed at least some restrictions on birthright citizenship. “Trump v. Barbara was not a win; it was a reprieve,” Law said.

Administration officials were hardly coy about their plans. “We have to keep fighting,” Vice President Vance told the Fox News host Laura Ingraham, “because we actually have an opportunity to reverse this decision.” A month later, the White House announced a second, narrower executive order purporting to restrict certain limited categories of people from birthright citizenship, such as children born to members of legally designated foreign terrorist groups.

[Adam Serwer: These justices are not impartial]

The new order also appears largely unconstitutional, and is more a howl of frustration than a serious effort to pare back the Supreme Court’s ruling in Barbara. But it signals that MAGA’s assault on the Fourteenth Amendment is far from over. And the right already has a proven model for how to overturn a Supreme Court ruling, one more careful and systematic than a single executive order: the campaign against Roe v. Wade. The conservative movement never regarded Roe as the final word on abortion. The MAGA movement does not regard Trump v. Barbara as the final word on birthright citizenship.

The citizenship clause of the Fourteenth Amendment makes a simple guarantee: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.” The country ratified the amendment in 1868 as a response to the Dred Scott decision, which had barred Black Americans from citizenship. As the nation reconceived itself during Reconstruction, the Fourteenth Amendment represented a rejection of the system of racial subordination that had brought America to civil war—and it was meant to be definitive. Senator Jacob Howard, a supporter of the amendment, told his colleagues that the clause “removes all doubt as to what persons are or are not citizens of the United States.”

The Supreme Court reaffirmed the Fourteenth Amendment’s meaning 30 years later in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, in which it upheld the citizenship of a man born in San Francisco to Chinese parents. The Court identified only a handful of exceptions to the amendment’s broad sweep, excluding children not fully subject to U.S. law—such as babies born to foreign diplomats, soldiers in invading military forces, and members of Native nations. (In 1924, Congress passed the Indian Citizenship Act, which automatically granted American citizenship to Native people born within the United States.)

Despite the clarity of the constitutional language, birthright citizenship has never been entirely uncontroversial. Along with the other Reconstruction amendments, it committed the country to a radical vision of equality—unlinking Americanness from a person’s race or how long their family had been in the country.

Even after the Court’s ruling in Wong Kim Ark, Chinese Americans—including Wong himself—had to fight to convince immigration officials of their status as citizens. During World War II, nativist groups in California tried, and failed, to challenge the citizenship of children born to Japanese immigrants. As the 20th century came to a close, right-wing activists fought to deny citizenship to the children of undocumented migrants. But those aiming to restrict who counted as an American strained against the plain meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment. The rejection of birthright citizenship has always been “a cause that’s in search of a theory,” Rachel Rosenbloom, a law professor at Northeastern University who studies immigration law, told me.

Despite this history of opposition, Trump lacked any real legal foothold for his executive order—a precarious position to be in as the Supreme Court prepared to hear the case. Fortunately for Trump, a small group of right-leaning law professors busied themselves with the work of casting doubt on the question that judges in the lower courts—and, for more than 150 years, nearly every other expert—had found so clear. Some were up-front about their motivations. “My political predisposition was actually to think birthright citizenship is morally quite a complex issue and that the Trump position might be the right moral answer,” Ilan Wurman, a law professor at the University of Minnesota, explained in an interview on Moment of Truth, a podcast produced by a MAGA-aligned think tank. He co-wrote a New York Times op-ed in February 2025 and later published a law-review article. Both drew selectively from Anglo-American legal history to suggest that the words subject to the jurisdiction thereof might be read to mean “subject to America’s ‘social compact,’ ” whereby an individual gives up certain rights so that the state can guarantee others. People in the United States illegally haven’t entered into an “exchange of allegiance and protection,” Wurman argued, and therefore might not be guaranteed birthright citizenship for their children.

Scholarship proceeds through debate and contestation, but the convenient timing of this intervention and the patchiness of the historical work looked a great deal like an effort to sway the Court in Trump’s favor. Prior to Trump’s executive order, Wurman hadn’t published any academic work questioning the conventional understanding of birthright citizenship; he pressed forward with his op-ed, he said on the podcast, because he “wanted to move the Overton window.” Other scholars were appalled by his argument. Law, the CUNY professor, described the revisionist conclusions as “hogwash” that elide “mountains of scholarship on the other side.” Even fellow conservative originalists, who share Wurman’s approach to constitutional interpretation rooted in historical meaning, questioned his interpretation of subject to the jurisdiction thereof. Under common law and the public understanding of the Fourteenth Amendment at the time of the amendment’s drafting, they argued, subject to the jurisdiction thereof meant “subject to the law of”—which would include just about everyone on U.S. soil. “Aliens within the territory owe obedience to the law just like a natural-born citizen does,” the originalist law professor Keith Whittington wrote in a February 2026 paper. (Asked about his methodology, Wurman responded over email, “There is no single answer to the question of when sufficient historical data has been presented to make historical claims convincing.”)

Yet the revisionist scholarship found a receptive audience among the conservative justices on the Court. During oral arguments in April, most of the justices seemed skeptical of, even hostile toward, Solicitor General D. John Sauer’s case against birthright citizenship. By the time the Court handed down its ruling at the end of June, however, only five—the three liberals, along with Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett—found the executive order to be unconstitutional. Justice Clarence Thomas drew from what he termed a “groundswell of new scholarship” in his dissent. Justice Brett Kavanaugh, dissenting in part, likewise pointed to the debate on the question to suggest that “the constitutional issue is not straightforward.” He argued that Congress would need to rewrite existing law to create exceptions to birthright citizenship for “children born to foreign citizens unlawfully or temporarily in the country.”

Anthony Michael Kreis, a law professor at Georgia State University, believes the revisionists’ rapid work helped sway several conservative justices. “Without that kind of sustained public offensive, I’m not sure that you have more than one or two people in the dissent,” he told me. Wurman seems to agree. “I think four votes on the Supreme Court for what was thought to be off-the-wall a year and a half ago is a huge victory,” he said in a taping of his own podcast shortly after the Court released its opinion.

After the ruling, Republican members of Congress rushed to follow Kavanaugh’s advice. Some lawmakers took a relatively modest approach: Representative Morgan Griffith argued for restricting the statutory granting of birthright citizenship in U.S. territories, where the Supreme Court has never extended the full reach of the citizenship clause. (Political leaders in Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands promptly objected.) Other members of Congress chose to attack the Court’s majority directly. Senator Eric Schmitt, for example, acknowledged that his bill restricting citizenship to children of citizens or green-card holders would be unconstitutional under Barbara, but said that his initiative would “restart our fight in the courts for sanity in birthright citizenship.”

[The David Frum Show: David W. Blight on Republicans vs. the Fourteenth Amendment]

Griffith’s and Schmitt’s proposals represent two different potential approaches for immigration restrictionists, neither of which precludes the other. One is to acknowledge the loss in Barbara and work within its constraints. The other approach is to get Barbara overturned.

“There’s a lot of practical things that this administration could do” with Barbara still on the books, Simon Hankinson, who researches immigration at the conservative Heritage Foundation, told me. When we spoke, he was fresh off a daylong event discussing how to respond to the Court’s ruling. Among other ideas, he suggested banning U.S.-based commercial surrogacy for foreign parents and aggressive visa enforcement to prevent women from traveling to the U.S. to give birth.

In August, Trump appeared to endorse both ideas, issuing an executive order on “birth tourism” alongside his follow-up order on birthright citizenship, which, among other things, would prevent the children of foreign nationals born to U.S.-based surrogates from receiving citizenship. The new birthright-citizenship order claims to be compliant with Barbara, though much of it flatly contradicts the ruling. Parts of the decree engage in what amount to word games, redefining certain babies to fit within the existing exceptions for diplomats and invading armies under Wong Kim Ark. This second order is less ambitious than Trump’s initial, sweeping attempt. It would bar only a small number of people from citizenship—and the government has already faced legal challenges.

[Read: The campaign to create second-class citizens]

For the new decree to have any real effect—and to roll back birthright citizenship more broadly—the right will need to undo Barbara in court. This is where the strategies developed during the long effort to overturn Roe will come into play. Over the course of decades, the conservative movement refined its legal arguments, stacked the courts with sympathetic judges, and chipped away at precedent until the decision collapsed.

The right has had remarkable success pursuing this strategy in recent years. The Roberts Court has reversed precedents that once protected affirmative action, shielded independent government agencies from presidential interference, and limited racial gerrymandering. Legal principles that long seemed stable are newly uncertain.

Conservatives should attack Barbara with “the model that dismantled Roe,” the conservative strategist Rachel Bovard wrote in First Things, a right-leaning religious publication. “Trump v. Barbara must act as a litmus test for every future conservative nominee.” The movement is in many ways better situated today than it was after Roe was decided. Trump’s spree of judicial appointments during his first term has widened the right’s advantage in the courts, and this new generation of judges may be more open to the revisionist view of the Fourteenth Amendment. Less than a month after the Court’s ruling in Barbara, the Senate confirmed Benjamin Flowers to the appellate bench. Flowers had filed an amicus brief in Barbara on behalf of a law professor who urged the Court to deny birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants.

For now, however, the effort to gut birthright citizenship lacks key votes on the Supreme Court. And there may be other obstacles in the path to overturning Barbara. Mary Ziegler, a law professor at UC Davis who studies the history of anti-abortion activism, told me that the Roe comparison likely “underestimates the level of difficulty” of weakening birthright citizenship. Conservatives opposed to Roe successfully painted the decision, which enshrined a new constitutional right, as an example of judicial overreach, whereas Barbara reaffirmed existing constitutional language. Ziegler also questioned whether opponents of birthright citizenship could muster the “singular focus” of the anti-abortion movement. But opponents of birthright citizenship are not starting from zero: They can build upon the infrastructure that the conservative legal movement and anti-abortion activists spent decades putting into place.

“We came to the U.S. for protection,” Liza told me. She and her husband had arrived in America “having seen in the movies, having read in the books, and really thinking that it’s the most democratic and free country in the world.” As the Trump administration turned against immigrants, Liza was baffled by the sudden hostility from a country she had understood as a locus of freedom.

Liza gave birth in the spring of 2025, and her baby is an American citizen. Still unsettled, though, is whether her child will grow up in an America that recognizes the equality of all who are born within its borders.

This article appears in the October 2026 print edition with the headline “The War on Birthright Citizenship.”

Which Dan Sullivan Will These Dan Sullivans Vote For?

2026-08-30T07:00:00-04:00

What in the Dan Sullivan is going on in Alaska? Senator Daniel S. Sullivan is running for reelection. Daniel J. Sullivan is one of his challengers. And former Anchorage Mayor Daniel A. Sullivan recently endorsed the senator, while also declaring himself “the OG Dan Sullivan.”

“It’s kind of hilarious,” Daniel K. Sullivan, a 33-year-old diesel mechanic and off-road fabricator from Wasilla, who is not running for Senate, told me.

“I got a chuckle out of it,” Daniel P. Sullivan, a longtime teacher from Nome, who is also not on the ballot, told me.

Control of the Senate could come down to a ranked-choice ballot that currently includes two Dan Sullivans (the Republican incumbent and the Republican challenger) and one Mary Peltola (a Democrat who was the state’s former at-large congresswoman). Republicans are worried that voters could be confused about which Dan Sullivan to select. Theories abound: Is this some sort of nefarious political plot by the Democrats? Or is it just that there are so many Dan Sullivans in the state that something like this was bound to happen?

To get at the question, I reached out to half a dozen Dan Sullivans who appear to live in Alaska.

I caught a second Daniel P. Sullivan, this one from Chugiak, while he was driving on a remote gravel road the other day. “The Dan Sullivan thing” has become a common topic of conversation, he told me, and his co-workers call him “the senator.” So many Dan Sullivans live in Alaska that his firearms purchases require a deeper background check. “So I don’t get mistaken for another Dan Sullivan,” he explained. (He said that he’s planning to move next summer so likely won’t vote for either of the Dan Sullivans: “Not really fair to vote when the outcome doesn’t affect me.”)

Daniel F. Sullivan, a registered nurse, called me back from Palmer. “I often joke that I’m the real Dan Sullivan, and those are all impostors,” he told me. He said he grew up in New York with another Dan Sullivan in his high school, who was a better student than he was: “My parents would sometimes get honor-roll letters in the mail. I always wondered if his parents got all the bad letters about skipping school.”

In Alaska, he found that his name had even greater benefits. A few years back, he had workers out to fix the electronic system in his hot tub, and the bill they promised to send never arrived. “I often wonder if the other Dan Sullivan got the bill,” he said. Whenever he’s part of a group going out to eat, the reservation is in his name in case it prompts VIP treatment. In this election, he said, he’ll probably vote but hasn’t settled on a candidate. “I won’t vote just because it’s a Dan Sullivan,” he said.

This is not the first time a ballot has featured multiple Dan Sullivans. In 2014, Dan S. Sullivan was running for Senate for the first time when Dan A. Sullivan, the mayor of Anchorage, was running for lieutenant governor (the Senate bid was successful; the lieutenant-governor one was not). Then, in 2016, the former mayor briefly ran for the state’s other Senate seat. Had he won, both of the state’s U.S. senators would have been named Dan Sullivan. Neither of those Dan Sullivans returned my messages.

The Dan Sullivan who has put the name into the news is Dan J. Sullivan, who lives in Petersburg, a small fishing village on an island where Sitka black-tailed deer outnumber the roughly 3,000 people. His father was named Dan Sullivan. So was his grandfather. At the moment, so is one of his sitting senators. Shortly before the June 1 deadline, he filed paperwork declaring his candidacy. “We need a Sullivan who stands up for Alaska,” his website says.

[Read: Republicans have only themselves to blame for their Alaskan defeat]

The only Dan Sullivans he personally knows, he told me in an email, are in his own family: three Dan Sullivans and four more Dans who are not Sullivans. “We all have nicknames,” he said. “Mine will never be divulged.” He says that his campaign strategy mostly consists of maintaining his website and posting on social media. “Maybe some travel, but I don’t have much money,” he told me. (He has $8,400 cash on hand in his campaign account. The other Dan Sullivan has nearly $7.3 million.)

His candidacy was immediately challenged by the National Republican Senatorial Committee, which referred to him as “Sham Candidate Sullivan,” and the Alaska Republican Party. Senator Dan Sullivan told reporters in Washington that it was “an insult” and that the challenger was “trying to trick my constituents to rig the election for Peltola.” “This is serious stuff,” he told CNN. “When people are going, Oh there’s two Dan Sullivans, isn’t that funny? No. It’s cheating.”

The senator and his allies pointed to similarities between the challenger’s logo and the senator’s: Both are navy and mustard-yellow and feature at least one gold star. They accused the other Dan Sullivan of being part of a partisan plot engineered by a Democratic consultant. The Sullivan facing those questions told me the consultant had helped set up his campaign site and provided “tips on communications and basic campaign functions,” but said “she is not currently working for me.” They questioned his party affiliation. (He was previously a member of the Alaska Independence Party, but when that disbanded late last year, he switched his affiliation to the Republican Party, which he said was in line with his conservative views.) The director of the Alaska Division of Elections, which is overseen by the state’s Republican lieutenant governor, determined in June that the newcomer’s declaration as a candidate was invalid because it had been “filed with a purpose to confuse or mislead and to thereby compromise the ballot’s fairness or neutrality.” The Sullivan in question appealed to the Alaska Superior Court.

“I am running because I am tired of sitting back and watching our current Senator routinely fail to represent the interests of ordinary Alaskans like me,” he wrote in his defense. “The fact that Senator Sullivan shares my first and last names adds insult to injury, motivating me to raise my hand as an alternative choice for Alaskans.”

Ultimately, the court determined that Dan Sullivan met all the requirements for making the ballot: It was his actual name; he did live in Alaska; he was over the age of 30. The whole experience, he told me, has been “daunting” because he feels unfairly singled out. “Typical of Sullivan to cry about it, make a nickname, and blame others,” he said, when asked about being called a “sham” candidate. Of the dozens of candidates running statewide in Alaska, he said, “only I have been accused of bad intentions (including one guy who is in jail). Seems unfair to me.”

Both Dan Sullivans were on the ballot in the nonpartisan primary earlier this month, after which the top four candidates advanced to the general election. Peltola, the Democratic candidate, got the most votes, leading the incumbent Sullivan by seven percentage points. Daniel J. Sullivan came in a distant third with 2.5 percent of the vote, qualifying him for the general election—and showing that he could be a spoiler in November.

His advancement angered Republicans, including the president. “The Crooked, Radical Left Dumocrats have put up another man named ‘Dan Sullivan,’ and they did this to take Votes away from our Great Senator of the same name,” Donald Trump wrote on social media. Senator Dan Sullivan’s early campaign ads have not mentioned the other Dan Sullivan, and when he talks in his speeches about an opponent, he references only Peltola.

[Read: Democrats’ great Alaskan hope]

But this is not the first time an election has featured similarly named candidates and accusations of political shenanigans. When John F. Kennedy ran for Congress in 1946 against a Boston city council member named Joe Russo, his allies helped recruit a janitor named Joe Russo to also run. In 2004, Representative José E. Serrano of New York was primaried by an unemployed former dockworker, Jose E. Serrano, who dropped out after being questioned about his legislative platform and not knowing what that was. In 2024, the governor’s race in Washington State featured Attorney General Bob Ferguson running against Robert Arthur Ferguson and Robert Benjamin Ferguson (the latter two Fergusons withdrew from the primary before ballots were printed).

The name Dan Sullivan is common enough. There was the offensive lineman for the Baltimore Colts in the 1960s. There was the race-car driver Danny Sullivan, who won the 1985 Indianapolis 500. There’s a theater and film director named Daniel J. Sullivan. Daniel was the ninth-most-common first name and Sullivan was the 107th-most-common last name in the United States in 2020, according to census records. There are nearly 5,300 Dan Sullivans in the country, according to the personal search aggregator Spokeo, and more than two dozen in Alaska.

In Anchorage, there’s the Sullivan Arena (named for the city’s longtime mayor, George M. Sullivan, the father of the Dan Sullivan who was the most recent mayor of Anchorage) and Sullivan’s Steakhouse (named after John Sullivan, a 19th-century boxer). “Sullivan just seems to be the big thing,” Dan Sullivan the Wasilla mechanic told me. “But I don’t know any benefits from it that I’m aware of. I don’t get any discount at the steakhouse or anything.”

The Dan Sullivan from Nome told me he would occasionally get random calls from people around the state confronting him about his campaign promises, especially when the Anchorage mayor and the U.S. senator were both Dan Sullivans. “I’d show my credit card, and they’d look at me and do a double take,” he said. “I got to meet all the Dan Sullivans. All the famous ones. I’m probably the least interesting out of all of them.” (He has since retired and has been traveling, and says he has not yet done his homework on which candidate he’ll support in the election).

For the Dan Sullivans, it can be a little disorienting when the political ads are blanketing the airwaves. “It’ll say, Dan Sullivan’s ruining the Alaska fisheries! Or Dan Sullivan voted to raise your health insurance! I’m like, No, I didn’t! It wasn’t me,” said Dan Sullivan the mechanic. “Or you’ll get an ad on the radio and it’s like, Dan Sullivan’s great for Alaska! Yeah, he is.” He’s not much into politics, so he says he’s unlikely to join the other Dan Sullivans in campaigning. He’s more conservative, so he plans to vote for the incumbent senator.

As if things couldn’t get more confusing, there’s also a Dan Sullivan who has run for Congress in Massachusetts. There are so many Dan Sullivans that, at times, my attempts to reach the ones in Alaska went awry. I messaged a Dan Sullivan I thought for sure was from Palmer, Alaska, but instead located one in Cleveland, Ohio. He politely responded that his origins are in Brooklyn and Massachusetts. “I am Daniel M. Sullivan. My dad was Daniel P. Sullivan,” he said. Although he won’t be voting in Alaska, the intrigue has caught his eye: “I have been following this story with interest.”

The Alaska race will be determined in November. At least in this election cycle, there’s room for only one Dan Sullivan in the Senate (and possibly none). But some other Dan Sullivans are getting ideas about future options.

“Maybe one of us needs to run for president,” Dan Sullivan the mechanic told me. Or perhaps two? “You can pick anybody you want. As long as it’s Dan Sullivan.”

Not American Enough

2026-08-27T06:00:00-04:00

For Carlos Alemán, the pinnacle of the dozen years since he became a U.S. citizen was the night in 2020 when he was elected to serve on the city council of Homewood, Alabama. One of the lowest moments came earlier this year, when he learned that some of the most powerful people in his state are attempting to ban immigrants like him from pursuing higher office.

“It seems to be part of a project to reject anyone who’s not born in this country as not worthy or deserving of the full rights of citizenship,” Alemán, who was born in Nicaragua, told me.

For most of American history, becoming a citizen has meant acquiring the right to participate in virtually all aspects of civic life, including voting, serving on juries, and mounting a campaign for any political office other than the presidency. But in Alabama and other states across the country, Republican lawmakers are now pushing to make an important distinction: Naturalized citizens, they argue, should not have the same right to serve in public office as someone born in the United States.

In recent months, an idea once confined to the fringes has gained mainstream traction across the country. Republican legislators in several states have introduced proposals that would restrict naturalized citizens and dual citizens from running for a range of elected positions, including sheriff and governor. In Congress, at least five Republicans have sponsored various proposals to bar naturalized or dual citizens from serving in roles including federal judgeships, Cabinet posts, and ambassadorships, and in Congress itself. Florida lawmakers this year enacted a law requiring candidates for several state and federal offices to disclose whether they hold another citizenship in addition to being a citizen of the United States.

The movement has been fueled in part by the rise of a new class of foreign-born politicians—most prominently New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, the Ugandan-born son of parents of Indian extraction, whose ascent has become a favorite target of the right. His victory, along with the success of other progressive candidates born outside the U.S., has come to symbolize something dangerous in the eyes of President Trump’s MAGA base: the ability of people born elsewhere to acquire American citizenship and the possibility of political power. Now Republican lawmakers are pledging to do something about it.

The push began in parallel to Mamdani’s rise. When Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen first floated the idea of barring naturalized citizens from serving in elected office, he cited Mamdani’s mayoral run as one impetus. “We want to make sure that no potential foreign influence or foreign meddling could impact our state’s highest elected leaders,” he told AL.com last year.

Trump’s June defeat at the Supreme Court on birthright citizenship has also been a motivating factor. After his administration failed to convince a majority of the justices that his executive order limiting citizenship for those born in the U.S. to undocumented parents was constitutional, Trump wrote on social media that he would find alternative routes to accomplish his goals “in Congress through Legislation.” Drawing on the president’s “America First” rhetoric, some Trump allies have begun targeting the political rights of naturalized citizens in a broad campaign to continue that fight.

“Even as we have progressed technologically, Immigration Policy has eroded those gains and living conditions for many,” Trump wrote last November on Truth Social, pledging to permanently pause migration from developing countries and denaturalize immigrants he deemed disruptive. “Only REVERSE MIGRATION can fully cure this situation. Other than that, HAPPY THANKSGIVING TO ALL, except those that hate, steal, murder, and destroy everything that America stands for—You won’t be here for long!”

Trump used to strike a different tone when talking about naturalized Americans. In 2019, Trump welcomed five legal immigrants into the White House, hailing the “beauty and majesty of citizenship” as he conducted what he described as the first-ever naturalization ceremony in the Oval Office.

“No matter where our story begins, whether we are the first generation or the tenth generation, we are all equal,” Trump told the new Americans. During the Republican National Convention the following year, the president again used the trappings of the White House to swear in new citizens and praise them for earning their status the proper way.

“With the rights and freedoms each of you now enjoy as citizens, there is no dream beyond your wildest reach,” he said. The president, and the party he leads, have since soured on such inclusive rhetoric about America as a melting pot where everyone is equal and anyone can achieve anything. For a more up-to-date sense of how the president views America’s legal-immigration process, one need look no further than his Truth Social account. “If you import The Third World, you become The Third World!” he posted in April. A few weeks later, he reposted an anti-immigrant screed from a right-wing podcaster that questioned the loyalty of naturalized Americans and declared that “the idea of the melting pot is long over.” This narrative shift is showing up in policy as well. An analysis in January found that the Trump administration’s restrictive immigration policies would reduce legal immigration by one-third to one-half over his four-year term, affecting 1.5 million to 2.4 million people.

The campaign to bar naturalized citizens from public office is a lesser-known manifestation of this broader push. Although the Constitution has always required aspirants for the presidency—and, by extension, the vice presidency—to be “a natural born Citizen,” it makes no such demand for any other government position. Some Republicans are now seeking to change that.

State lawmakers in Alabama introduced legislation earlier this year that would require natural-born citizenship of those seeking to run for governor, legislator, sheriff, or a handful of other elected positions. Republican legislators introduced similar bills in Kentucky and Tennessee this year. Although the proposals—which face significant constitutional questions—have not yet passed, the effort is nevertheless building momentum. When the law in Florida requiring disclosure for dual citizens takes effect next year, it will mark the first time such a proposal has become state law.

Many Republican-base voters have taken a sharp turn against legal immigration in recent years, in some cases even outpacing Trump himself in their rebellion against foreigners’ influence on American culture and commerce. The kind of racist rhetoric the president has long used against undocumented immigrants from developing nations—“They’re poisoning the blood of our country,” Trump said in 2023—is now regularly being directed against legal immigrants too. Last week, Texas Governor Greg Abbott, a Republican, said that he would bar public schools in his state from hiring H-1B-visa holders. He described the first-of-its-kind proposal as a way to reduce “foreign influence” and “indoctrination in the classroom.”

That push has dovetailed with the ascendance of Mamdani and other liberal, foreign-born politicians. The combination of their leftist views and their status as naturalized Americans has provided fodder for right-wing voices who have tried to blame America’s immigration policies and increased diversity for a growing list of the country’s problems. Representative Nancy Mace—who has introduced resolutions this year seeking to disqualify naturalized citizens and dual citizens from serving in Congress, the federal judiciary, and dozens of federal offices—has pointed to her left-leaning colleagues as motivation.

[Read: Mamdani is the foil Trump wants]

“We have been called racist, xenophobic and hateful,” she wrote in a Newsweek op-ed that was published on the nation’s 250th birthday. “But when you see a pattern of foreign-born officials who have proven time and again they are not America First, what is wrong with wanting them out of power?” Mace told me that because the actions of members of Congress have “enormous consequences” for national security, “the American people deserve to know the people holding them have one allegiance: America.” She did not say what specific risks her proposals would address.

According to congressional records, 26 House members and six senators were born outside the U.S., though some were born to American parents living abroad. Democrats dominate the list, but there are several Republicans who hail from other nations, including Cuba, Ukraine, and Mexico.

Senator Bernie Moreno of Ohio, a Republican who was born in Colombia and became a U.S. citizen when he turned 18, will be barred from serving if Mace’s proposal becomes law. But he has introduced legislation of his own that aims to crack down on the concept of dual citizenship, proposing to ban any American from claiming the citizenship of another country. He did not respond to a request for comment about Mace’s legislation. When I asked Mace about the fact that her proposal would block Moreno and other Republicans from serving, she said, “This isn’t personal. It’s about what standard we want for the people entrusted with enormous power over the American people.”

The Constitution already lays out specific qualifications for members of Congress, including a stipulation that any House member be at least 25 years old and have been a U.S. citizen for at least seven years. Any effort to add new requirements without amending the Constitution—as some of the recent proposals have attempted—would run into legal roadblocks, Pamela Karlan, a professor at Stanford Law School, told me. “Those qualifications are exclusive,” she said. “The state can’t add qualifications on top of those, nor indeed can the federal government.”

After walking me through the nuances of the legal framework and the relevant case law, she offered a more frank perspective on the political backdrop that had made our conversation necessary in the first place: “It’s just incredibly ugly, stupid, and unconstitutional.”

Judges have checked efforts to curb the rights of naturalized citizens; in the process, they’ve also become targets. When U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan ruled in June that the Trump administration had “knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens” with a federal database of citizenship information, her own citizenship status became an object of attack. Representative Abe Hamadeh of Arizona, a Republican, introduced articles of impeachment against Sooknanan, pointing out that the judge “holds dual citizenship in the United States and Trinidad and Tobago.” Senator Eric Schmitt of Missouri, a Republican, wrote on X: “If judges can stop Presidents, they should not also be citizens of foreign nations.” Mace added, “No one born in another country should be serving in our government. Judges included.” Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s broader immigration crackdown, chimed in as well, sarcastically writing, “Judge Sparkle decrees that America belongs to any random alien on planet earth, just like our founders intended.”

Miller has been a leading proponent of the idea that many of America’s modern-day problems can be traced back to its immigration policies. After Mamdani’s primary victory last year, Miller took to social media to decry how “unchecked migration fundamentally remade the NYC electorate,” branding New York “the clearest warning yet” of the downside of allowing so many foreigners into the country.

Trump has also seized on the ascendance of Democratic Socialists of America–backed candidates such as Mamdani, linking their policies to communism and foreign ideology. With Miller’s help, he has implemented dozens of new restrictions on legal immigration, tightening virtually every avenue through which foreigners obtain visas and become Americans.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment about whether the president supports barring naturalized citizens from public service and whether he agrees with lawmakers who are trying to do so.

Earlier this month, Trump signed an executive order attempting to restrict birthright citizenship and warning about the “risks posed by malign foreign actors who attempt to swindle American citizens by taking advantage of the generosity of our Nation.” Trump’s focus on such proposed risks echoes a sentiment that has become popular with his MAGA base: that America’s legal immigrants represent not, as the poet Emma Lazarus wrote, “huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” but instead national-security threats yearning to impose radical ideology on the masses already here.

Muslim immigrants have received particular hostility. “We need more Islamophobia, not less,” Representative Randy Fine of Florida, a Republican, wrote on social media in March, a few months after he filed legislation to ban dual citizens from serving in Congress. “Every single Muslim holding public office in America is a trojan horse, and a threat to both national security and our republic,” Mace posted online earlier this month in response to the primary victory of the Michigan U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, a Democrat.

[Read: Islamophobia has corroded American values]

Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, a Republican who is running for governor, took to the Senate floor last month to warn about Muslim immigrants, who, he said, are trying to “radically change the ethnic, religious, and political makeup of our country.” He declared that “Islam is not a religion; it’s a death cult.” In March, he reposted an image of Mamdani next to an image of the 9/11 attacks, declaring that the “enemy is inside the gates.” He has proposed the ASSIMILATION Act, which aims to impose new ideological restrictions on those seeking to become citizens. The bill has almost no chance of passing Congress, but Tuberville could have more success turning his ideas into legislation if, as expected, he wins his race for governor in November. He could also unstick efforts to block naturalized citizens from running for office in Alabama that stalled earlier this year.

Former Representative Mo Brooks of Alabama, a Republican, told me that although he supports much of Trump’s immigration agenda, he opposes discriminating against U.S. citizens based on their place of birth. In a country that is growing more diverse, telling certain Americans that they should not be eligible to run for office is an easy way to ensure that they will never vote for your party, he said: “It is one of the dumbest tactical moves I’ve ever seen politicians make. It’s extraordinarily unwise to try to win elections based on this racist appeal.”

There are more than 77,000 naturalized citizens in Alabama, accounting for 1.5 percent of the population, according to the American Immigration Council. With one of the lowest proportions of foreign-born residents in the country, the state is an odd place to be leading the charge against naturalized citizens in public service, Steven Taylor, a retired political-science professor at Troy University, told me. “On one level, it seems incredibly trivial,” he said. “On another, it seems kind of serious because of the ongoing, disturbing nationalism in our politics right now.”

Alemán, who recently opted not to run for reelection to the Homewood City Council, told me that it is exhausting to constantly have his loyalty to America questioned. “My daughter has a southern twang. She pronounces words differently than I do. This is home to her,” he said, adding that he is proud that his children could see his community of mostly white residents choose him as their representative. “Alabama can surprise you sometimes.”

If some policy makers have their way, the outcome could be surprising in a more alarming sense: Alemán’s children may grow up to see their father deemed American enough to vote, pay taxes, and raise a family here—but not American enough to serve as an elected official.

The Real Reason Trump Wants Economic Sanctions in Iran

2026-08-26T12:07:00-04:00

Updated at 1:40 p.m. ET on August 26, 2026.

For months, President Trump has been unable to bring the conflict with Iran to a close. A massive bombing campaign lost its effectiveness, and U.S. munitions supplies ran low. Diplomacy lagged, as leaders in Tehran remained content to deliberately prolong the process and harden their control over the Strait of Hormuz. Even the current pseudo-cease-fire—as deeply uneasy as it is—has done little to meaningfully lower the cost of energy around the globe.

With few options remaining, the Trump administration has settled into a potentially lengthy campaign of economic pressure, pledging to squeeze Iran until its leaders have no choice but to seriously return to negotiations. But that tack could prove toothless if the U.S. doesn’t also punish the nations that still do business with Iran and keep its economy afloat—and Trump has historically shown little willingness to stand up to the likes of China and Russia, or even North Korea, which has a strategic alliance with Tehran.

If nothing else, the new approach allows the White House to say it’s trying something and then—importantly—to stop talking about the war. Part of the plan, Trump advisers and allies tell us, is to try to push Iran to the background, while hoping that gas prices come down even a little and that Republicans can shift the nation’s focus to more politically palatable topics ahead of the midterms.

That won’t change the reality on the ground in the Middle East: Alliances have been strained, the U.S. military has been overtaxed, and Iran wields far more power in the region than it did at the beginning of the war, about six months ago. But it could allow Trump, a master of distraction, to turn to other priorities—a trade war with Canada! Claims of election fraud! His skill at flagpoles!—to try to save at least one chamber of Congress for his party this fall.

“We’re just trying to hang on until the midterms,” one Trump adviser told us.

At this moment, strategists in both parties believe that the Democrats are favored to capture the House. And despite a GOP-friendly Senate map, the upper chamber is viewed as a toss-up. Trends were already working against Republicans: Traditionally, the party out of power tends to do well in the midterms, and over the past decade, Trump supporters have seemed less inclined to vote when his name isn’t on the ballot. The president hasn’t done much to help, and his poll numbers have plunged, even on the economy and immigration, his usual strengths. Republicans, fearing hostility, have largely opted to forgo town halls this summer, skipping what tends to be an effective way to reach constituents. A few of those who have held gatherings in their districts have faced anger and tough questions about Iran, including why the U.S. launched the war in the first place.

[Read: The forever negotiation]

Republicans have been urging the White House to wrap up the conflict and reduce its drag on the nation’s economy—and their reelection chances. But a solution has proved elusive. Trump’s goals for the conflict were never well enunciated and have shifted many times. Gone are lofty promises about regime change or preventing Iran from having a nuclear program. Instead, the president has privately told his political allies that once the Strait of Hormuz is reopened, he is inclined to simply declare victory and move on, one outside adviser and a senior administration official told us on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. But even that has proved vexing: Iran has continued to menace ships traveling through the strait and has insisted upon charging a fee or toll. Other countries in the region have declared that unacceptable—the strait was, after all, open and free before the war—though Trump has waffled on whether or not he could live with it. The president said yesterday that the last of the Iranian mines had been removed from the channel, but an official from a country in the region stressed to us that even if that were to remain true, Iran could still terrorize ships with small boats, handheld rocket launchers, and drones.

Republicans have signaled to the White House their approval of its new economic pressure campaign, which was announced by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent earlier this week. The White House’s political shop hopes the plan creates a quiet stranglehold—Bessent deemed it “economic asphyxiation”—that could make steady progress in resolving the conflict while having the added bonus of keeping it out of the headlines. (Trump’s bellicose threats toward Iran have unfailingly driven news cycles and hurt Republicans.) Some in the administration believe that emerging divides in Tehran’s leadership could prompt talks. And if the new sanctions did bring Iran to the table before November, then maybe a renewed stab at diplomacy could juice the markets—and provide an 11th-hour boost for Republicans.

Trump has been bored of the war for a while. Aides have been pushing him to focus on the economy to help Republican candidates, but he has continued to downplay the nation’s affordability challenges, much to his aides’ chagrin. And while Trump remains furious at Iran’s unwillingness to bend, aides have persuaded him to give the new plan a chance. In some ways, it’s not an original idea: Trump has relied on an economic “maximum pressure” campaign since his first term to try to force Iran to abandon its nuclear program. But the intelligence community was mistaken in its belief that Iran would buckle quickly under the financial strain. The regime seems willing to endure significant hardship, and its own citizens’ struggles, to maintain its grip on power. And the new approach carries its own political risks. If Iran proves resilient again, the pressure campaign may have to stretch beyond the midterms, leaving prices high in the interim.

White House spokesperson Olivia Wales told us in a statement that the United States has already “destroyed Iran’s military capabilities” and is now “strangling what’s left of its abysmal economy” by severing its remaining financial lifelines. “They will stand alone, broke, and isolated,” Wales wrote. “The President has been clear: he will always advance America’s interests and never allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon.”

The U.S. military has not struck Iran in weeks. This month’s relative reprieve follows a long pattern of using force to try to extract concessions from Iran and failing. After a 13-day strike campaign in July, the U.S. military privately assessed that extending the campaign would lead to diminishing returns—and worsen the nation’s extraordinary munitions shortage.

Earlier this month, Steve Feinberg, the No. 2 leader at the Pentagon, sent a memo demanding that the defense industry rapidly expand its production. Over the course of the war, the U.S. has used many of its Tomahawks, drones, and air-defense munitions. A July 27 assessment by the Center for Strategic and International Studies concluded that the war has significantly depleted U.S. air-defense stocks—particularly of Patriot and THAAD interceptors—and that replenishing those munitions to prewar levels would take years. Last week, Raytheon announced it had been awarded a $22.9 billion contract that would “dramatically accelerate the production of Tomahawk cruise missiles.” Still, the administration insists its stockpile is robust.

[Read: How the U.S. squandered its strategic advantage]

There have been other costs to the American military: Eighteen service members have been killed, and bases in the region have been damaged. The USS Abraham Lincoln’s 5,000 sailors and Marines spent more than 270 consecutive days at sea without a port visit; the carrier’s extended deployment was marked by reports of food and supply shortages, plumbing problems, and declining morale. Only in recent days did it leave the region, bound for Asia, though the U.S. is keeping two aircraft-carrier strike groups nearby—the USS George Washington and the USS George H. W. Bush.

Iran has also largely stopped its strikes toward U.S. bases across the region. Last week, the United Arab Emirates said that Iran had launched two ballistic missiles that splashed down in the Persian Gulf, one within the Emirates’ territorial waters—the last known instance of Iranian aggression (though Tehran denied involvement). On Monday, an oil tanker was struck by an unidentified projectile in the Omani shipping lane through the Strait of Hormuz, damaging its engine room and disabling the vessel. The crew was unharmed, and no one has yet claimed responsibility.

Trump has never been one to show much discipline, and could lose patience with the waiting game. But Iran also gets a say in determining what happens between now and November. More punitive American sanctions are likely to provoke a response from Iran, particularly because its leaders want the U.S. to feel the costs of the war. Iran is also watching the midterm elections closely; some officials fear that Trump could become more aggressive in the weeks after ballots are cast. That could prompt Iran to escalate first—and once more put the war back into voters’ minds.