Politics | The Atlantic

How America Gave Up on Its Own History

2026-06-08T05:55:00-04:00

Illustrations by Tyler Comrie

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On a July afternoon in 2019, I found myself in a large, sun-dappled room within one of America’s great estates. An assemblage of distinguished jurists, Ivy League professors, nonprofit leaders, journalists, and theologians sat around me in a half circle. I was trying to be on my best behavior, but I blurted out a word dirty enough to make them blanch.

In my defense, I thought it was what I had been summoned there to do. An independent commission had spent the previous year contemplating the dismal state of American democracy. In dozens of focus groups that it had convened around the country, participants from across the political spectrum had been quick to identify sources of division—but requests to name the things that united them as Americans were generally met with nervous laughter. The commissioners themselves were convinced that the country needed a shared narrative, but were at odds with one another as to what it should be. And so they called in a handful of outsiders, myself among them, to help inject some fresh thinking into how to find one. The topic was so fraught that we all agreed, before attending, not to be quoted by name.

Our first exercise, the facilitator explained, was intended to build trust—listing words or concepts that all Americans could endorse, even if our definitions might vary. He uncapped his marker and looked around expectantly. I sat there, surrounded by an uncomfortable silence, searching for a word so anodyne that no one could possibly object. I thought about the acute improbability of my own existence. One of my grandfathers was born to Greek immigrants from a village in the mountains above Sparta, the other to Jewish immigrants from what is now Belarus. Other ancestors had fled aboard the Mayflower from the persecution of Puritans in England, aboard a steamship from pogroms in Ukraine, aboard a schooner from Spanish repression in Cuba. Where else would a life like mine even be possible?

[America at 250: The unfinished revolution]

But my loyalty to this country is not merely biographical. I’ve traveled widely enough abroad to acquire real gratitude for the liberties that Americans enjoy, and for what its ideals have meant to those in other lands. I’ve also seen enough of the United States to be painfully aware of how often we fail to live up to those ideals at home. I knew that we were there to figure out how to reconcile those realities, but our common love for this country seemed like the right place to start.

“Patriotism,” I volunteered.

I had rolled a live grenade into the center of the room. One participant flinched, as if struck. Suddenly, everyone was talking at once, voices and tempers rising. One woman said the word made her feel excluded. Another said it connoted violence and racism. Still another participant was offended that anyone could be offended by the word. The facilitator declined to write patriotism on the easel. As the quarreling continued, I sat back, stunned. All of the people in the room had come here for the specific purpose of finding a common narrative. What hope did that project have if they could not even agree—each in their own way—on loving the country they were trying to save?

Americans, of course, have never exactly agreed on why this country was founded or what it stands for. Fierce arguments over those questions have long divided families and roiled politics, and even once produced a bloody civil war. But throughout the 19th century and well into the 20th, a simplistic patriotic narrative prevailed. “Providence designed that on this continent should be seen an example of democratic government,” a textbook explained to young students in 1872, “which means government ‘of the people, for the people, by the people.’ ”

Americans defined their nation in this way, by their commitment to a common creed—of equality, rights, and opportunity—and to a corresponding set of democratic ideals that they were modeling for the world. In practice, they generally fell short of those principles, sometimes seeming to pursue their abnegation more than their fulfillment. But the white men who built their fledgling republic around an idea, instead of around a common ancestry, opened the possibility that any who subscribed to its creed could become a citizen. Over time, other Americans demanded that the nation live up to its ideals and recognize their equality. For more than two centuries, our creedal nationalism has been a source of strength, binding together Americans of diverse faiths and backgrounds.

[From the October 2018 issue: Yoni Appelbaum on how Americans aren’t practicing democracy anymore]

But lately, we have discovered that it is also a vulnerability. A nation defined by blood and soil—built around a shared religion or ethnicity—can survive divergent narratives. To a country built on an idea, though, and bound together by a shared understanding of our history, the inability to tell a common story might well prove fatal.

In recent decades, the traditional American story has come under sustained attack from both flanks. On the left, scholars and activists suspicious of nationalism have pushed to redefine the United States as a country exceptional mostly for its flaws and crimes. On the right, politicians and commentators hostile to diversity have sought to gloss over those sins and, more recently, lay claim to the nation on behalf of “heritage Americans.” Unable to agree on how to tell our story, we have swiftly abandoned efforts to tell it at all. The hours devoted to social studies in schools are shrinking, and survey courses in American history are vanishing from college campuses. The signature event of the nation’s 250th birthday might prove to be not a keynote speech or a patriotic pageant, but a no-holds-barred UFC fight on the South Lawn of the White House.

Most Americans are still proud of their country—although the percentage has been declining with each successive generation, and the decline is particularly steep among young progressives. If patriotism is going to be a word that can be used in polite company, then we will need to figure out how to tell the story of ourselves. Because without a coherent national story, we will fail to be a coherent nation.

Our present disagreements would have astonished the historians of the mid-20th century, who found America more remarkable for its consensus than for its conflicts. Americans, the historian Louis Hartz argued, embraced a common liberal tradition, built around a respect for democracy, property, and individual liberty. Many of the scholars in this Cold War–era consensus school were, like Hartz, the children of Jewish immigrants who had found in America a vital refuge, and they wanted to explain its exceptionality. They held a flattering mirror up to the country. Their books became best sellers, they wrote for popular magazines, and they advised prominent politicians.

But theirs was hardly the whole story. In the 1960s, as women and people of color entered the academy in larger numbers, they set about telling the stories that the consensus school had glossed over or ignored. The explosion of scholarship they produced was a tremendous boon for history, the Harvard historian Jill Lepore told me, widening our understanding of our past. The focus of academics swung to class, race, and gender, to giving voice to the voiceless and documenting injustices. No single national story seemed capable of capturing the full diversity of America, and it seemed wrong to even try. “People were suspicious of any national story as the handmaiden of ethnic nationalism, or white nationalism,” Lepore explained. Patriotic histories, after all, had long been used to buttress the oppressive systems that these scholars now sought to unmask.

[From the October 2025 issue: Jill Lepore on how originalism killed the Constitution]

As professors pursued the separate histories of various groups, uncovering neglected stories and challenging facile assumptions, they made comparatively little effort to assemble the pieces into a comprehensible narrative. Scholars largely stopped writing single-volume histories of the United States.

The new histories disagreed with the mid-century consensus school less over the facts than over which ones to emphasize, and how to string them together into a story. Take the simple question of democracy. In Revolutionary America, the franchise was extraordinarily widespread; more than half of adult white men could vote, while in England only about one in seven could do the same. And in the young republic, enfranchisement quickly expanded further, with perhaps 80 percent of adult white men—90 percent in some states—coming to hold the right to vote. This was truly an unprecedentedly broad form of democracy. It was also one that almost entirely excluded women, who, under the doctrine of coverture, had their legal personhood merged into that of their husbands; Black Americans, most of whom were enslaved; and Native Americans, denied citizenship in their own land. The fight to expand the franchise produced a long, at times blood-drenched struggle that has not yet ended. Previous historians had tended to highlight the breadth of the franchise. Now a new generation instead tallied the damage of disenfranchisement, and told the stories of the individuals and groups fighting to secure the right to vote.

The history wars soon spilled beyond college campuses, spreading to high schools and even grade schools. In 1991, the George H. W. Bush administration set out to develop common history standards, and the chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Lynne Cheney, asked a center at UCLA to produce them. But when conservatives reviewed the guidelines, which reflected the latest scholarship, they did not like what they found. Cheney denounced the standards for emphasizing America’s failings over its achievements, and Rush Limbaugh said that they aimed to teach students “that America is a rotten place.” The Senate voted to reject the standards, 99–1.

By 2001, when Bush’s son and Cheney’s husband came into office, they were painfully aware of just how contentious a topic history could be. So as their administration worked with Congress to create the tough accountability framework of No Child Left Behind, they delicately set the question of how to teach history to the side. NCLB held schools responsible for their students’ performance on standardized tests, but only in English and math. There was no such exam for history—less because reformers cared too little about it than because, ironically, everyone cared too much to agree on what should be tested.

Illustration by Tyler Comrie

That’s been bad for American education, and worse for America. Schools that struggled to make the grade on math and English swiftly cut back on other subjects to compensate. At the elementary level, the largest decreases came in the time devoted to social studies, which within a few years dropped by a third, or 76 minutes each week. The high-school history classroom, meanwhile, became the safest place to park the football coach, so that he could earn a full-time salary safely removed from the subjects tested under NCLB. Within a decade, more than a third of social-studies educators were coaching sports or teaching phys ed. They had fewer years of experience and were far more reliant on textbooks and worksheets than their less athletic colleagues, who leaned more heavily on primary sources. Students joked that all of their history teachers had the same first name: Coach. States have since haltingly rolled out standards for history education, but after 30 years of reform, students’ performance on history exams has slightly declined—just 14 percent are rated proficient.

[Read: How to teach American history in a divided country]

The abandonment of the effort to tell the American story is hardly limited to high schools or universities. Nowhere is it more evident, in fact, than in the preparations for America’s 250th birthday. When the Biden administration took over the nascent project, it simply punted on the question of how to create something unifying. The federal Semiquincentennial Commission instead invited people to record their personal history, on the theory that “your story is America’s story.” Local institutions were encouraged to plan events that would speak to their particular communities.

Donald Trump returned to office in 2025 excited to put his own stamp on the occasion. But he appears to have little notion of precisely what we should be honoring. It is hard to discern any message, beyond the president’s love of spectacle and celebrity, from a mixed-martial-arts bout on the South Lawn; or a Formula 1 race in Washington, D.C.; or a colossal archway near the entrance to Arlington National Cemetery. Trump’s proposal for a National Garden of American Heroes, where visitors could commune with statues of 250 historic figures, is simply bewildering. The list of honorees bears less resemblance to a pantheon collectively embodying the American idea than to the setup of a bad joke: Davy Crockett, Julia Child, and Kobe Bryant walk into a bar …

It’s our 250th birthday, and no one seems to know what we’re celebrating.

Johann Neem was not quite 3 years old when his parents left Mumbai for San Francisco in 1976. He landed in a world of tantalizing possibility—that people could become better, freer, more prosperous. And as he grew up, eating masala dosas and also Thanksgiving turkey, he understood that he was at once an Indian immigrant and fully American. “Pretty astounding, right?” he told me. “A claim that someone from South Asia can come to this country and become American.”

That claim has astounded new arrivals from the start. President John Quincy Adams, a popular anecdote relates, once asked an Irishman how he liked the United States. “Indeed, sir,” he replied, “I like it very much. I like it so much, that I intend soon, to become a native!” The story was retold in jest, but it contained a deep truth. You had to be born an Irishman, but, as President Ronald Reagan put it, “anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American.”

Neem is now a historian at Western Washington University, where he has watched the erosion of that promise in dismay. Last year, he delivered the annual lecture on the state of the discipline to the American Historical Association, lamenting the loss of a common and inclusive narrative. (It drew furious responses, including from one leftist scholar who accused him of “retreat, if not outright capitulation” to the fell logic of nationalism.) In recent decades, Neem told me, there have been three competing versions of the American story. The first is grounded in the notion that the United States is a work in progress. This approach mixes the self-flattery of some older histories with frank acknowledgment of the many ways in which America has fallen short of its ideals, incorporating the critical scholarship of recent decades. It approaches the American story as an ongoing struggle between our best impulses and our worst. Neem calls this approach the mainstream school, because it is how most Americans still think about their country, even though it has fallen from favor on campus.

On the left, an approach that Neem terms post-American has taken root, pushing the arguments of the 1970s in an ever more emphatic direction. The United States was built on racism and genocide, it contends, a settler-colonial nation founded in white supremacy, irredeemably illiberal and oppressive. Many scholars who pursue this approach actively seek to decenter the nation in their narratives. They find no common inspiration to be taken from this history, only a litany of sins requiring atonement.

The right, meanwhile, is pursuing what Neem calls a hyper-American approach—fueled in part by opposition to the post-American turn on the left. In some ways, the histories of this school call back to those written in the 19th century, casting the country’s origin as providential—not quite an immaculate conception, but not far off—and emphasizing the morality and timelessness of America’s founding creed. Slavery, in their telling, was not a system on which the country was built, but a deviation from the immutable truths on which it was founded. To reckon too closely with the darker chapters of our past, they suggest, is to risk disenchanting the nation. Trump’s 1776 Commission, typically, called for approaching American history “with reverence and love.”

Last July, Vice President Vance joined the debate, attacking then–New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani for saying that he is “proud of our country even as we constantly strive to make it better.” To Vance, Mamdani’s words failed to display the gratitude and deference that he believes immigrants like Mamdani ought to show—not only to the American past but also to past Americans. “Who the hell do these people think they are?” he asked. Then he took things one step further. “America is not just an idea,” Vance declared, contending instead that “we’re a particular place, with a particular people.”

Neem discerns within all of this a strange convergence, as both the far right and the far left have come to agree that the history of the United States has been defined by whiteness. The left no longer believes that immigrants of diverse backgrounds should assimilate themselves into a national culture tainted by white supremacy, while the right views immigrants’ very presence in the country as a threat to that same national culture. Naturalized citizens have a particular commitment to the American project—they tend to be more patriotic than native-born Americans, more trusting in our institutions, and more likely to believe that the world would be better off if people elsewhere resembled Americans. But as our national story narrows, it has begun to exclude them. “I’ve seen a change on both ends that makes it harder for someone like me to be an American,” Neem said.

Amid all the fracture and contention, though, are some recent signs that Americans are again seeking a way to tell an inclusive national story. As progressives have begun to fear that the American system might in fact be lost, many have rediscovered its virtues. In 2016, as Trump barreled toward the White House, Khizr Khan brandished a pocket Constitution at the Democratic National Convention to raucous applause from Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders supporters alike. During Trump’s first term, the Baby Boomers who once burned flags in youthful rebellion marched off to join the Resistance wrapped in the Stars and Stripes. In his second, the “No Kings” rallies have looked back to the founding era for inspiration.

Historians, many of whom had spent decades tearing apart patriotic myths and decentering the nation-state, awoke to discover that they had, in effect, ceded the task of telling the American story to the likes of Bill O’Reilly and Newt Gingrich. A few, perhaps emboldened by the growing popular hunger for a narrative, began to produce accounts grounded in the mainstream school, wrestling with America’s defects while still recognizing its ideals. In 2018, Jill Lepore published These Truths, the sort of sweeping single-volume history of the nation that no prominent scholar had attempted in generations. The following year, a Boston College history professor named Heather Cox Richardson launched a newsletter on the premise that “to understand the present, we have to understand how we got here,” and swiftly became the most successful author on Substack.

This is not to say that any agreement on the American project is about to be found. From the vantage point of some on the left, Trump has looked less like a threat to America’s virtues than a confirmation of its vices, decisive evidence that the United States has been a white-supremacist state all along. In The New York Times’ “The 1619 Project,” the journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones argued that the American story began not in 1776 but in 1619, with the advent of slavery. The contributions of Black Americans and the consequences of slavery belong “at the very center of our national narrative,” she claimed.

Critics, some eminent historians among them, were swift to note that Hannah-Jones’s history was reductive and, in places, simply wrong. Trump found in “The 1619 Project” a useful foil, attacking it as “toxic propaganda, ideological poison that, if not removed, will dissolve the civic bonds that tie us together.” But although her account of America’s origins was extremely gloomy, Hannah-Jones also offered a more optimistic view of the country’s progress through the ensuing centuries. The project chronicled “the struggle of Black Americans to perfect these ideals of liberty, freedom, equality in the law, equality in society,” she told me. “And that’s a redemptive, unifying narrative,” albeit not one that she is sure the nation is ready to accept. Notably, Hannah-Jones’s essay ends with her wish that she could tell her younger self to “boldly, proudly, draw the stars and those stripes of the American flag.”

Conservatives frequently warn that the close study of the darkest chapters of our past will erode any sense of patriotism. In Hannah-Jones’s case, at least, it had the opposite effect. One question she’d sought to answer, as she researched her essay, was why newly emancipated slaves did not leave the country that had so wronged them, as she assumed they would have wanted to do. She read their accounts and saw them argue that, at the moment they had finally gained rights and citizenship, they could not abandon the only land they had ever known. They resolved to stay and to make the nation what it could and should have been. “I actually did find that really inspiring,” she told me. “And I think that’s the first time I ever felt I could see a path to patriotism.”

After Lepore published These Truths, she was astonished by the number of readers who reached out to tell her what the book meant to them. One woman wrote to say that she had bought it to study for her citizenship exam but, enthralled, kept reading. “I really feel like I belong here now,” she wrote, “because I understand the whole journey that is the story of this land and this people and these ideas and this country.” Most significantly, Lepore found that readers wanted to know the full story of their country—the progress and the revanchism, the beauty and the ugliness, the racial massacres and the Indian New Deal.

The Trump administration seems allergic to this kind of complexity. Last March, it issued an executive order on “restoring truth and sanity to American history.” Among other measures, it instructed the National Park Service to remove signs that “inappropriately disparage” historical figures instead of focusing on the “greatness” of American achievements. A display on George Washington’s slaves came down in Philadelphia; an exhibit at the Grand Canyon was stripped of a passage noting that federal officials had “pushed tribes off their land” to establish the park.

Deleting accounts of the past not because they are false but because they are true betrays a curious lack of confidence. Do the censors fear that Americans will cease to love their country once they know the full story?

The evidence suggests otherwise. Large majorities of Americans prefer history that challenges what they know over accounts that reinforce it. By an almost nine-to-one margin, they think it’s at least as important to learn about other racial and ethnic communities as about their own. And they overwhelmingly agree on the importance of learning about past harms, even when doing so makes them uncomfortable. “I’ve been on the road, literally, for seven years since the project came out, in every type of community,” Hannah-Jones told me. “And I’ve never had someone walk away and say they hate this country. They say they’re ashamed of things this country has done, that they’re deeply disappointed, and they want to see the country be better.” Americans appear aligned not with the unquestioning patriotism of the naval hero Stephen Decatur, who was said to have declared, “My country, right or wrong,” but with the deeper patriotism of the Reconstruction-era Senator Carl Schurz, who added: “If right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right.”

[From the November 2025 issue: George Packer on why we still need patriotism]

The American story—the whole American story—deserves to be told. People are hungry to hear it. History, Neem told me, shapes how we understand the moment we’re living in, and “makes it possible for us to see where we’re going.” As our understanding of the past constantly shifts, how we choose to retell our story matters. When the historical revolution of the 1960s and ’70s insisted that we contend with America’s bigotry and exclusion, Neem said, the mainstream narrative evolved to give us a story in which “overcoming racism was to become more American.” Our nation is still evolving; whether the story we tell ourselves can continue to evolve along with it remains to be seen.

I asked Lepore if the United States could cohere without a common narrative. “Everything ends,” she replied, “and this could be a part of what unravels it.” But Neem was more hopeful. “Realizing what we’re losing might enable us to remember the America we want,” he said.

Just down the street from where I live lies one of America’s smallest national cemeteries. On a bright July morning several years ago, I visited it with my daughter, on the anniversary of the Civil War battle it commemorates. Together with a handful of neighbors, we stuck small American flags by the marble headstones of 40 men and boys who, far from their homes, fought in defense of the idea that all are created equal, bound together in a common project. They won the battle but lost their lives. For us, the living, their unfinished work remains.

This article appears in the July 2026 print edition with the headline “How to Tell the American Story.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

The Liberal District That Could Oust a Trump-Defying Democrat

2026-06-07T08:11:02-04:00

As Democratic heretics go, Representative Dan Goldman isn’t guilty of many crimes against his party. He initially won election to the House after prosecuting the first impeachment of President Trump (whom he now calls a “fascist”), and during two terms, he has voted overwhelmingly with Democratic leaders—even swinging to their left by backing Medicare for All and the abolition of ICE. Goldman isn’t tainted by scandal, nor is he on death’s doorstep; at 50, he’s pretty young for Congress.

Yet if the polls in New York’s Tenth Congressional District are anywhere near correct, Goldman will lose his bid for reelection in a primary later this month to another middle-aged Jewish guy aligned with progressive causes. Brad Lander, a former New York City comptroller and mayoral candidate, is challenging Goldman from the left, seeking to parlay an endorsement from the city’s new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, into a House seat.

Lander’s case against Goldman spans from the parochial to the global. Goldman refused to endorse Mamdani’s mayoral bid last year even after the former state legislator captured the Democratic nomination, and he was slow to turn against Israel’s war in Gaza, which Lander (like Mamdani) calls a genocide. “He’s fundamentally out of step with the core progressive values of the district,” Lander told me.

Goldman says Lander is exaggerating the gulf between them. “I am a progressive, I have a very progressive agenda, and I am very aligned with the district,” he told me. “I think 95 percent of the time we would vote the same way.” A few Goldman allies I interviewed seemed perplexed that the liberal wing of the party would want to defeat him. After all, he’s no Joe Manchin or Kyrsten Sinema, the centrist Democrats who stood in the way of some of former President Biden’s top priorities. Nor is he like John Fetterman, the Pennsylvania Democrat and onetime darling of the left who has become the party’s most ardent defender of Israel. “I don’t think he’s done anything wrong,” Mario Cilento, a New York State labor leader backing Goldman, told me. “Every Congress member gets one vote. If that individual votes the right way, I’m really not sure what else they can do.” To mock attacks on his record, Goldman is running a commercial designed as a scare ad that points out all the “radical progressives” who are supporting him, including Planned Parenthood, teachers’ unions, and public-housing advocates.

Goldman’s progressive critics acknowledge that he’s given them few bad votes to attack. But they have used the race to argue for raising the bar for a Democratic member of Congress, demanding more visibility—and more activism—rather than mere party loyalty. Lander’s backers are also challenging a system in which a safe House seat can easily become a sinecure, so long as the incumbent avoids either prison or an ideological betrayal. “Someone who’s gonna just take votes and follow the status quo of being a mainstream Democrat is not what this district deserves or needs,” Jasmine Gripper, a co-director of the New York Working Families Party, which is supporting Lander, told me.

New York City has been a staging ground for progressive primary challenges in recent years. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s stunning 2018 defeat of Representative Joe Crowley, a Queens party boss and member of the Democratic House leadership, catapulted her to international fame. Two years later, another senior House Democrat, Representative Eliot Engel, lost in a primary to a left-wing challenger. This year, Mamdani is backing another like-minded democratic socialist, Darializa Avila Chevalier, who is running against Representative Adriano Espaillat, the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.

Those races all featured sharp divides—ideological, generational, racial—between the candidates. The dynamics of the Goldman-Lander matchup, by contrast, are more complicated.

New York’s Tenth District is split between Manhattan and Brooklyn, and it encompasses some of the city’s wealthiest and most recognizable neighborhoods, including Wall Street, Greenwich Village, SoHo, and the stately brownstones of Brooklyn Heights and Park Slope. By that metric, Goldman is a perfect fit for the district. He is one of the richest members of Congress and has contributed millions to his campaigns; earlier this spring he announced that he would match every additional donation with funds of his own. (Goldman’s middle name is Sachs, and he has up to a $50 million line of credit with Goldman Sachs, according to a 2022 financial disclosure, but his family money comes from the Levi Strauss fortune.)

Goldman’s wealth is a liability in the race—“He bought the seat” is a common refrain from the Lander side—but perhaps not as much in a city that thrice elected Mike Bloomberg mayor as it would be elsewhere. Goldman won his first primary in 2022 by just over 1,300 votes, aided by his considerable financial advantage, the fame he’d earned as an impeachment star and talking head on MSNBC, and—perhaps most consequentially—divisions within the district’s progressive base that split its votes among several other candidates. “The only reason he won—let’s be absolutely clear—is that the left was divided,” Gripper said. “Our side didn’t get their act together.”

[Read: California Democrats avoided a worst-case scenario]

Since taking office, Goldman has focused his attention less on his district’s ritzier, progressive neighborhoods than on the working-class, immigrant-populated enclaves that he says local politicians have neglected. On a recent Tuesday I found him stumping in Manhattan’s Chinatown, where he spoke to about 100 constituents inside a small shopping mall that had seen better days. Goldman campaign signs covered up makeshift wooden walls, and wiring hung down from a partially intact ceiling. Residents told me that the mall had once been full of stalls leased by local merchants but that it had emptied out during the pandemic and, unlike many other areas of New York, struggled to recover. Few in the audience were conversing in English, and they listened quietly as they waited for Goldman’s remarks to be translated.

He explained that he’d opened a satellite office in the neighborhood that has served more than 1,000 people, and he touted his work fighting against cuts to SNAP, anti-Asian hate crimes, and the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. Toward the end of his speech, Goldman finally got to the rub: “One of the reasons why Chinatown is often underserved and overlooked,” he said, “is because voter turnout is pretty low, and what happens is many elected officials, including my opponent, only focus on the areas that have high voter turnout.

“I didn’t do that,” Goldman continued, “because I knew that you all needed more help than you were getting.” “But,” he said: “now I need your help.”

Goldman’s direct appeal was at once the kind of ask that urban politicians have been making of their constituents for generations—and a telling indication of why he’s in so much electoral trouble. While Goldman is hunting for votes in places that don’t ordinarily turn out in large numbers, Lander seems to have the advantage in the neighborhoods that do. He represented Park Slope and its surroundings on the city council for 12 years. Lander’s ads depict him as a Mister Rogers–like figure who will “make every day a beautiful day in our neighborhood” (one ad mentions a “fascist president” and “rogue ICE agents” as animated birds tweet by). Polls have shown that he has better name recognition in the district than Goldman, the incumbent. The disparity has forced Goldman into the awkward position of defending a seat he’s held for two terms by running, at least in part, as the outsider. “He has a much longer history in the district,” Goldman told me of Lander. “And I bring a new and different energy to this job.”

Goldman’s problem, his critics say, is that he has avoided the district’s more liberal neighborhoods and refused to engage with its influential activist community. Those tensions were magnified after Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, when progressives in New York began demonstrating against Israel’s retaliatory war in Gaza. Robert Carroll, a Democrat who represents Park Slope in the state assembly, endorsed Goldman during his first race but told me he soon realized he had made a mistake. He accused Goldman of displaying an “arrogance” toward activists that Carroll found off-putting. “New York 10 is a progressive bastion,” Carroll said. “There are not many in the United States, and the idea that we have a representative who refuses to meaningfully interact with, represent, and work with the progressive voters and residents of his district is disqualifying.”

I sat down with Goldman for an interview in a diner in Chinatown he’d picked, not far from where he had held his event the week before. He expressed few regrets, other than wishing that more people knew about the record he had built in Congress. “If I were to do something different, it would have been to more aggressively publicize a lot of the work that I have done,” Goldman said.

From the moment he narrowly won his primary in 2022, progressives seemed to have marked Goldman for future defeat. But if there was a threat, he appears not to have picked up on it. I asked Goldman whether, knowing that he had captured just over a quarter of the party vote in that first election, he had developed a plan for beating back the kind of challenge that had toppled much more established New York City Democrats in recent years. “I didn’t really think about it that much,” Goldman replied. “I mostly really focused on doing the work.”

Goldman’s path to reelection might have been smoother had Lander gotten either of the municipal posts he sought last year. He finished third in the Democratic primary for mayor after locking arms with Mamdani in a cross-endorsement facilitated by the city’s ranked-choice voting system. After Mamdani captured the nomination last summer, Lander was reportedly angling to become first deputy mayor—in essence, chief lieutenant—in the new administration. But Mamdani picked someone else and instead gave Lander his enthusiastic endorsement to challenge Goldman. “He needed a job,” Goldman told me, “and I think the mayor wanted to give him an off-ramp to save face a little bit.”

For his part, the 56-year-old Lander told me that some of his supporters began urging him to run for Congress as soon as he lost the mayoral primary. “I’m grateful for his support,” Lander said of Mamdani. “A seat in Congress is no one’s consolation prize, especially at a moment when your democracy is on the line.” (A Mamdani spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.)

[Read: Where Mamdani has refused to moderate]

The mayor’s endorsement of Lander has set up something of a proxy battle with other Democratic power brokers, such as New York Governor Kathy Hochul and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, who are backing Goldman. But Mamdani is clearly the most popular of the three in the district, and Lander mentions him nearly as often as a Trump-backed Republican name-drops the president in MAGA territory. “We don’t agree on every single thing, but I want the mayor to have an ally in Washington instead of an adversary in his own backyard,” Lander said during a local radio forum last month.

Goldman was far from the only prominent Democrat to withhold support from Mamdani during his general-election campaign. Jeffries didn’t endorse Mamdani until late October, and Senator Chuck Schumer (a constituent of Goldman’s in Park Slope) never backed him at all. But Goldman appears to be the first to pay a price for his neutrality. In my interviews with voters, Goldman’s refusal to get behind Mamdani was one of two main complaints they had about his record.

The other was Goldman’s support for Israel, which has come to dominate the race, crowding out discussions about Trump, immigration, and affordability. (The issue took up the first quarter of an hourlong debate he and Lander held earlier this week.) Lander has assailed Goldman for accepting AIPAC’s endorsement and for voting to send military aid to Israel, which Lander has vowed to oppose. Lander has also criticized Goldman for voting alongside Republicans to censure Representative Rashida Tlaib, a Democrat and the only Palestinian American serving in Congress, over her use of the phrase from the river to the sea in the immediate aftermath of October 7. Goldman recently suggested that he regretted the vote, citing the emotions of the moment—he and his family were in Israel when the attack occurred—but at the time he said Tlaib had used “a hurtful antisemitic trope.”

Goldman has loudly opposed Trump’s war in Iran; he begins one TV ad with the words “No more wars,” a line he delivers morosely and directly to the camera. He told me that “the devastation in Gaza is horrific, unnecessary, and excessive.” But Lander has gone much further in his denunciations of Israel, particularly in the past year. During his mayoral campaign, he did not use the word genocide to describe Israel’s war in Gaza. By the fall, however, he had begun accusing Israel of genocide—a shift that coincided with his preparations to challenge Goldman. Lander told me that he’d changed his mind after conversations with his daughter, a 23-year-old University of Chicago graduate who talked to him about her studies of Raphael Lemkin, a Jewish lawyer from Poland who is credited with coining the term genocide after the Holocaust.

Goldman has tried to minimize his and Lander’s differences on Israel, noting that in a district in which nearly a quarter of the electorate is Jewish, both Democratic candidates identify as “liberal Zionists,” have condemned Israel’s tactics in Gaza, and support the creation of a Palestinian state. Lander and Goldman each opposed a vote by the Park Slope Food Co-op to boycott Israeli products.

Goldman’s critics and, privately, a few of his allies, believe he did not appreciate the shakiness of his standing within his district, or the threat that even a few political missteps might pose to his future. He may not have broken with his party—or even his district’s progressive base—all that much, but his margin of error was thin to begin with. “Dan Goldman has been doing his best to fight Donald Trump, which is all we can expect from him,” a Lander supporter, Steve Flack, told me. But to Flack and, it seems, many of Goldman’s constituents, that is not sufficient to win another term. Goldman, he said, “really just thought he could slide as an incumbent.”

If Goldman once thought the seat he won in 2022 was securely his own, he knows now that is not the case. He’s spent months reintroducing himself to voters, touting his record, and trying to rebut Lander’s claim that he’s too closely aligned with the corporate establishment. But in the coming weeks, Goldman may discover that in this district, at this fraught moment, Democratic voters just want more.

*Illustration sources: The New York Historical / Getty; Tom Williams / CQ-Roll Call, Inc / Getty; Michael Nagle / Bloomberg / Getty.

The World Cup of Ugh

2026-06-04T16:42:00-04:00

Updated at 4:10 p.m. ET on June 5, 2026

The World Cup is nearly here! But so far, at least, no one seems all that excited.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. The biggest sporting event in the world is on the verge of returning to the United States for the first time in more than 30 years. Starting next week, teams from 48 nations will play 104 matches in 16 cities across the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. Some of the most famous people on Earth will be playing, each recognizable by a single name: Messi, Mbappé, Ronaldo, Salah. After years of buildup, soccer lovers were convinced that Americans were finally—finally!—ready to fully embrace the sport played and watched by far more people than any other around the globe.

Yet a tournament that should be hotly anticipated—providing a joyful backdrop to America’s 250th-birthday celebrations—is instead surrounded by angst and even dread. Ticket prices are astronomical, demand for them has slumped, and hotels are half-booked. There is little buzz. The New York City area, which will be home to the World Cup Final next month, is far more focused on the Knicks. There is anxiety about fans traveling from the Democratic Republic of the Congo in light of the Ebola outbreak there. Some international visitors are barred by travel bans, and others are nervous about making the trip. Fans are anxious about the potential for ICE raids outside stadiums or terror attacks targeting gatherings of supporters. Hopes for a strong showing for the U.S. team have mostly faded. President Trump has, to the shock of no one, inserted himself into the proceedings. Hanging over it all is the war in Iran, particularly because it was started by the guy to whom the tournament’s organizers recently awarded a peace prize. The United States’ relations with its co-host countries have grown strained—as have its relations with just about every country that is slated to participate.

Perhaps the situation can still be salvaged. Ahead of the previous World Cup, four years ago, there was extraordinary consternation about that tournament’s host, Qatar. Migrant laborers had died in building the nation’s stadiums and infrastructure. Accusations of corruption were rampant. The host country seemed to be an unlikely choice, and its summers were so hot that the tournament had to move to the fall. Plus, the Qataris didn’t even serve beer. All of those concerns were largely forgotten after the transcendent final, when Lionel Messi, of Argentina, triumphed over Kylian Mbappé, of France, in a match considered one of the greatest ever. Can that happen again?

The only other time the World Cup was held in the United States, in 1994, it was treated as a bit of a novelty. Back then, the sport was viewed by Americans as something that the rest of the world loved but that we mostly ignored. We wouldn’t even use their name for it, insisting on soccer rather than football. Sure, little kids play it, but then they move on to American sports such as baseball, basketball, and the other football (the one with helmets). During World War II, my grandfather’s skill at baseball got him designated as the grenade thrower for his unit as he and his comrades fought their way across Europe. Years later, he used to joke that only “a communist sport” wouldn’t let you use your hands.

[Read: When soccer was an American afterthought]

The 1994 World Cup ended when Italy’s Roberto Baggio sent his penalty kick sailing high over the net and doomed his side’s chances. Since then, there has been no question that soccer (we’ll stick to calling it that) has grown far more popular in the United States. Youth participation continues to grow. Major League Soccer, launched after the 1994 tournament, has finally come into its own. No, it can’t compete with the English Premier League or Spain’s La Liga or Germany’s Bundesliga, and it is not on the same footing as the NFL, MLB, NHL, or NBA. But it is healthy, being played in new soccer-only stadiums and having a slick Apple TV contract, and it’s become a popular spot for aging international players to make a final run. (Pink-and-black Messi Inter Miami CF jerseys have become a must-have for many kids.) The U.S. men’s team has made surprisingly strong showings in a few World Cups, the most notable a run to the quarterfinals in 2002 and to the final 16 in 2010, 2014, and 2022. The National Women’s Soccer League is rapidly expanding, and the U.S. team has been the most dominant in the Women’s World Cup, winning in 1991, 1999, 2015, and 2019. Both of my sons play soccer, and we’ve become ardent Liverpool supporters—though we live nowhere near the west of England. For the soccer enthusiasts among us, 2026 was primed to be “The Year.”

But that’s not how it’s shaping up. MetLife Stadium is a personality-less concrete behemoth in the swamps of New Jersey, about eight traffic-clogged miles from Midtown Manhattan. So naturally enough, it was picked to host the World Cup final. Last summer, it hosted the finals of the FIFA Club World Cup, a new tournament of elite clubs meant to stir interest in the real World Cup a year later. But several top teams were absent, and attendance was generally light. A fairly healthy crowd assembled for the last match, though, to see Chelsea capture the title—but lose the trophy. Trump celebrated as though he, too, had just defeated Paris Saint-Germain 3–0, and then he snagged the trophy for himself, later displaying it in the Oval Office. (The team subsequently received its own trophy.)

FIFA President Gianni Infantino indulged Trump’s trophy-grab as part of his ongoing effort to keep the mercurial U.S. president happy through a tournament that is expected to generate about $9 billion. Infantino then unleashed a hat trick of over-the-top flattery. First, the FIFA World Cup draw was held at the Kennedy Center, to which Trump was about to attach his name. Second, he had the president help draw teams to select the tournament’s groups. And third, Infantino created the FIFA Peace Prize and presented it to Trump, who had been grousing for months that he had not received a Nobel Peace Prize. Why, you might sensibly ask, is a soccer organization giving out such awards? Trump didn’t seem to care, and beamed as he wore the medal around his neck—and further celebrated peace by commissioning a military operation in Venezuela, and then launching a war on Iran.

That war will be a storyline at the tournament; there was some debate as to whether the Iranian team would participate at all. (It will, but it has moved its tournament training from Arizona to Mexico.) Other countries touched by the conflict (Iraq, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia, among others) will also be playing. Security officials have warned about possible terror attacks, and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin likened the challenges of safeguarding the tournament to protecting “78 Super Bowls.” Some experts are worried that fan gatherings are potential targets that are even more difficult to protect.

[Read: Here’s another way America will choke at the World Cup]

FIFA, of course, is no stranger to awarding hosting of its prized tournament to nations with complicated relationships with the rest of the world. Four years before Qatar, the tournament was in Russia, giving Vladimir Putin a turn on the global stage despite his incursions into Ukraine and Georgia. (No peace prize for him, at least.) And there is precedent for a World Cup being split among rival nations; the 2002 tournament was shared between Japan and South Korea and was marked by some mild diplomatic spats. But the leader of Japan didn’t take to social media less than two weeks before the tournament began to muse about annexing South Korea, as Trump did with Canada on Monday, writing: “51st State!”

Against this backdrop, it’s perhaps not surprising that 54 percent of Americans surveyed in a poll released last week said that they were not at all interested in the World Cup. Even those who are interested likely can’t afford to attend a game. Outside of a limited number of affordable tickets, the face-value price for even nosebleed seats currently stands at $400 to $600. Ticket lotteries seemed impossible to win, and then some fans accused FIFA of assigning them worse seats than they’d purchased. The secondary-ticket market right now is so outrageous that the cheapest option on StubHub for the World Cup final is $8,000 (and continuing to climb), and the most expensive is more than $84,000. (To be fair, the top price to a potential NBA Finals–clinching Game 6 at Madison Square Garden is currently listed for more than that.) New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani was able to secure a limited number of $50 tickets to earlier games for city residents, but only after he complained that World Cup prices were so high that “you’d have to mortgage your house to be able to afford that.”

[Read: The unhappy hosts of the World Cup]

Yet the games will go on. And for significant swaths of the country—and, of course, much of the world—that’s all that matters. The kickoff pits Mexico versus South Africa in Mexico City next Thursday afternoon, and the U.S. team opens up the next day playing against Paraguay in Los Angeles. TV ratings are expected to be huge. (An estimated 1.4 billion people worldwide watched at least a portion of the 2022 final.) And even though the U.S. team enters the tournament with modest expectations, host teams sometimes make unexpected runs. South Korea, hardly a soccer powerhouse, went all the way to the semifinals when the World Cup was on its turf. Roger Bennett, one of the great soccer evangelists, told me that he agrees that the tournament will be massive, irrespective of how far the U.S. men’s team goes.

“Americans will reconnect with their generational roots, as they did in 1994 at the Meadowlands when Italy played Ireland, and the whole of New Jersey was there, half the stadium like The Sopranos, the other half Angela’s Ashes,” Bennett, the author of We Are the World (Cup), said. “That is this tournament’s magic.”

He spoke of the tournament’s potential with bright-eyed optimism, promising me that it could provide “pure moments which can drive out darkness and let in light.” I hope he’s correct that the game itself will indeed be beautiful, the stars transcendent. Perhaps England will collapse again in heartbreaking fashion, and we will witness matches that we’ll all remember for a lifetime. The hope is that all of the ugliness and worry will be forgotten during next month’s final, when the winning team hoists the World Cup trophy. Unless, of course, Trump takes that one too.

This article originally identified pink-and-black Messi jerseys as belonging to Miami FC. In fact, they belong to Inter Miami CF.

California Democrats Avoided the Worst-Case Scenario

2026-06-04T16:35:00-04:00

As with pretty much everything involving California governance, discerning the state’s election results can devolve into a big, unruly mess. To wit, Tuesday’s primary—particularly the free-for-all campaign for governor to succeed Gavin Newsom—remains too muddled to call, with millions of outstanding ballots likely yet to be counted.

At minimum, though, we can speak with some preliminary clarity, let’s call it, on the contest. California elections are consolidated via a “jungle primary” system, in which the top-two finishers, regardless of party, advance to November. As of today, the Trump-endorsed Republican Steve Hilton, a British transplant and former Fox News host, is the leading vote-getter. Two Democrats—the former California attorney general and Joe Biden Cabinet secretary Xavier Becerra and the billionaire climate activist Tom Steyer—are currently sitting in second and third place, respectively. And there’s still a chance both could come from behind to squeeze out Hilton.

Democrats appear to have skirted a dreaded “Blue Armageddon” scenario in which their crowded field of middling-or-worse candidates cancel one another out, while the two middling-or-worse Republicans (Hilton and Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco) advance to the final two. “Bullet dodged” seems to be the prevailing takeaway among Democrats. If Becerra or Steyer winds up facing Hilton, they will clearly be favored to win, given the state’s heavily Democratic makeup and what looks to be an overwhelmingly Democratic-friendly electoral environment across the country.

Still, even if Team Blue will likely win in the end, the California governor’s race has been a fiasco for Democrats from the start—and in ways that reflect an ongoing dysfunction that has become a feature of the party in recent years. Even worse, California in 2026 could portend a larger and more destructive performance from the party in 2028.

[Mark Leibovich: California’s Blue Armageddon]

For starters, Democrats won’t have Donald Trump to save them in the future, as he seems to be doing this year. The president’s unhinged behavior, bungled policies, cartoonish overreach, and GOP-undermining impulses have pretty much been the single best asset that Democrats have had going for them since the end of 2024—rather than them having any actual popularity of their own. For all the hand-wringing, blame-tossing, and “autopsy” reports that followed their 2024 election disaster, the Democratic Party remains a deeply broken brand, lacking in ideological coherence, unifying figures, and a compelling message beyond “Billionaires are bad” and “Trump is terrible.”

It’s also worth pointing out that Trump might have sabotaged his own party in the California governor’s race by supporting Hilton. After Trump offered his “COMPLETE & TOTAL ENDORSEMENT” of Hilton in April, Bianco’s ranking in the polls began dropping. As of today, he is running a distant fourth in the votes tallied so far.

Otherwise, the Democrats’ showing in the campaign has amounted to a pileup of debacles. For starters, none of the preferred candidates that Democratic voters might have rallied to—Kamala Harris, Senator Alex Padilla—opted to run. The ones who did—including the former House members Katie Porter and Eric Swalwell—were deeply flawed, self-destructive, or both, while a host of other unknowns and has-beens—including San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan and former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa—went nowhere. One of the debates, a March forum at the University of Southern California, was abruptly canceled because of its exclusion of nonwhite candidates.

Through it all, Democrats showed no collective ability to recruit other, better contenders into the race, winnow the field, or even produce one or two candidates that voters were genuinely excited about. Steyer was a top contender in the race only because of his willingness to spend about $200 million of his own money on pervasive TV and digital ads. Becerra, meanwhile, is the leading Democrat right now because he is the best-known, least offensive member of his party still standing. He is also prone to prickliness and has received underwhelming reviews from some of his former colleagues in the Biden administration. And although he boasts a deep and varied résumé, little in Becerra’s background indicates that he’s up to the job of leading the biggest, most complex, and most unpredictable state in the nation.

An added wrinkle, based on Newsom’s experience, is that Trump will almost certainly target California and its next governor with all manner of abuse and provocation. Newsom, it turned out, possessed the instincts and personality to be a worthy foil to Trump and a defender of left-leaning California values. Does Becerra? Or, for that matter, does the great liberal avenger Steyer the Barbarian?

[Marc Novicoff: L.A.’s lose-lose-lose primary]

Because this is California—and Hilton is no Ronald Reagan—Becerra (or possibly Steyer) looks like a good bet to extend the Democratic dynasty in Sacramento. The state has not elected a Republican governor since Arnold Schwarzenegger won his second term, two decades ago.

Yet the race for the White House in 2028 will be far less forgiving for Democrats. It will be refreshing to have new candidates in the field, no Bidens or Clintons on the ballot, and debates about ideas without the specter of “Trump is bad” overshadowing everything else. But if, to this point, the California governor’s race offers any lesson for Democrats, it’s that it is hard to run a wide-open primary without established leaders, a strong party structure, or agreed-upon rules and referees to keep things on track.

Come 2028, the Democrats (and Republicans) will have another free-for-all on their hands, and with higher stakes. God willing, the candidate field will be more appealing than it has been in the California primary. Thankfully, it’s over, or will be eventually.

Maine Has a Graham Platner Problem

2026-06-04T09:57:15-04:00

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We don’t know what Graham Platner, a Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in Maine, wrote in his sexually explicit texts with women other than his wife—six, according to his campaign; a dozen, according to an ex-aide—but do we need to? The glaring question that the texts pose to voters about the presumptive Democratic nominee at this point in a pivotal midterm race is: Are we really going to do this again?

In 2016, voters were asked to choose between a populist candidate dogged by questions about his integrity, judgment, decency, civility, empathy, and respect for everyone from complete strangers to his own wife, and an overqualified, glass-ceiling-smashing woman. When voters opted for Donald Trump, Democrats were outraged. Now, faced with the choice between Platner and Governor Janet Mills, Maine Democrats have largely backed the populist themselves.

Mills suspended her primary bid in April amid a cash shortfall and concerns that she’s too old and old-school to win. At age 78, she understandably gives pause to many Democrats still suffering from Joe Biden–related PTSD. But she’s also one of the few political leaders who have stood up to Trump. A former state attorney general and district attorney, she did it to defend the rule of law.

[Mike Nelson: Condemning a Nazi tattoo shouldn’t be this hard]

Mills, though, is an endangered species of American politician—one whose playbook the Democrats ought to be following, instead of the one they seem to have stolen from the GOP. In her first term as Maine’s first woman governor, she made a succession of unpopular decisions as she led the state through COVID. “It takes real guts to make decisions that have an overt negative political implication on the abstract proposition that it will save lives,” Angus King, Maine’s independent U.S. Senator and a former governor, told me in 2023. (I wrote a book that year about Mills and her COVID correspondence with a constituent, who sent her a weekly letter of support throughout the first year of the pandemic.) The governor’s tough choices paid off, and Maine emerged with some of the most successful health and economic metrics in the country. Mills won reelection by a historic margin.

I was astonished that she allowed me to incorporate her unedited and candid journals from that time into my narrative. She is unusually at ease with herself in public and private, and has cultivated a relatable image, memorably wearing L.L. Bean duck boots to her second inauguration.

Platner, by comparison, has no experience in elected office. He has already asked his state to forgive and forget a list of lapses, including an incendiary tattoo he claims he didn’t know was a Nazi symbol when he got it, and a slew of angry, misogynistic, or otherwise offensive Reddit posts he’s disavowed.

Add to that the revelation that in late 2023, his wife, Amy Gertner, caught him sexting with multiple other women. Notably, it was she who disclosed this to his campaign, not the candidate. Now Gertner is defending her husband in part by pointing out that he sent the texts “in the early days of our marriage,” as if that is somehow a mitigating, not an aggravating, factor.

Unlike some politicians who have been rejected by voters for their past indiscretions, or gotten reelected despite them, Platner has apologized and shown promising awareness of his own human fallibility. He has also offered voters some compelling ideas, and inspired people hungering for leadership to remember their own agency. That has been enough, so far, for his supporters to overlook his inexperience and accept each new apology. Platner’s campaign events have attracted swarms of Maine voters, and he’s won endorsements from a cadre of Democratic Party leaders drawn to his charisma and candor, who seem to have mistaken him for the next John F. Kennedy.

[Tyler Austin Harper: How ‘big tent’ are Democrats willing to go?]

Democratic leaders seem determined not to allow anything to get in the way of winning Maine’s Senate seat, even if that requires willful blindness toward Platner’s lengthening record of indiscretions. In response to questions about Platner’s extramarital sexting, Senator Bernie Sanders said, “I think it might be a good idea if we focused on the important issues facing the working families of Maine” such as gas prices, health care, and groceries. Senator Elizabeth Warren similarly told reporters she preferred to focus on the “price of gasoline.”

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who had previously supported Mills, met with Platner in the thick of the sexting fallout, and remained focused on defeating the incumbent Republican senator in November. “We’re going to beat Susan Collins and take back the Senate,” he said. And Republicans are clearly worried that he’s right, already spending twice as much on the race as Democrats have.

But Democrats don’t need to repeat the mistakes made by Republicans. There is an alternative, at least for Mainers: As Mills reminded them last Sunday, her name is still on the ballot. The primary election takes place on Tuesday. And so Maine voters still have a chance to send a message to the party brass continuing to coalesce around candidates who are not merely imperfect but entitled or unfit. We don’t have to do this again.

We’re About to Hear a Lot More About Iowa

2026-06-03T18:36:34-04:00

You could be forgiven for ignoring the recent political goings-on in Iowa. The state, which was once a violet-hued hub of unpredictability, has lately elected and reelected Republicans.

In last night’s primaries, though, Iowa Democrats nominated the kind of candidates the national party has struggled to find. Josh Turek, a two-time Paralympic gold medalist with a record of winning red areas, is the party’s nominee for the state’s open U.S. Senate seat. And Rob Sand, the affably idiosyncratic state auditor who didn’t have a challenger, is officially up for governor. Which means that national Democrats and Republicans are now wrestling with a development that, until this week, had registered as little more than a quiet observation in the broadcast-standard English of farm country: Iowa is competitive again.

Let’s start with Turek, whose primary, in the end, wasn’t even close: He beat Zach Wahls, a 34-year-old Democratic state legislator, by more than 25 points. This isn’t because Turek is better-known or more beloved. It’s because he was perceived by Iowa Democrats as more electable. And the perception of electability is everything to Iowa Democrats right now, as they sense victory like sharks smell blood in the water.

Turek was the Senate candidate that Iowa Republicans did not want, which is, of course, exactly why Democrats had to have him. Turek describes himself as a “poor, disabled kid from Council Bluffs,” a reliably red part of the state. He has previously run against and beaten Republicans in a state House district that also supports Trump. He’s also got a compelling backstory: The 47-year-old was born with spina bifida, caused by his father’s exposure to Agent Orange during the Vietnam War, and has said he underwent 21 surgeries as a child. Before entering politics, Turek was a wheelchair-basketball player, played in four Paralympic games, and worked at a mobility-technology company. During a visit to Iowa in March, I watched as he dragged his chair up hills and stairs to introduce himself to Iowans. “There’s something compelling about a man in a wheelchair making his way up a staircase,” Kurt Meyer, a state Democratic activist, told me. “It’s a visceral positive reaction when you see somebody that’s just that dog-determined.”

The money helped: Even though Turek hasn’t served in the military, VoteVets, an organization that supports veterans, poured several million dollars into his campaign. Given the group’s alignment with Senate Democrats, Wahls attempted to frame Turek as a Chuck Schumer–backed establishment type. Among primary voters, this argument appeared to amount to very little. Turek has a history of winning, one prominent Iowa Democrat told me last month—“and he wins hard, hard places.”

[Read: The Democrats might actually win Iowa]

Democrats will have to hope so. In November, Turek will be up against Representative Ashley Hinson, the polished former TV journalist who will likely be the best-known and most popular Iowa Republican on the ballot. Hinson, who secured Trump’s early endorsement, once pledged to be Trump’s “top ally” in the Senate, a promise that will continue to feature prominently in Democratic ads. But Hinson doesn’t register as MAGA or far right in the way that many other Trump-endorsed candidates do, and Republicans are hopeful that her presence at the top of the ticket will help pull her downballot colleagues through.

Unlike Turek, Rob Sand has had the Democratic Party’s nomination locked down for a while, even though he seems generally averse to the label. The 43-year-old former prosecutor has positioned himself as a public servant who is frustrated with both parties, an independent who just so happens to have a D next to his name. His strategy to win statewide relies on persuasion and good, old-fashioned Iowan open-mindedness—if such a thing still exists.

But now, in an unexpected twist, Sand will face an opponent that virtually no one was expecting. The GOP front-runner, Representative Randy Feenstra, had been endorsed by Trump but was sideswiped on Election Day by Zach Lahn, a conservative activist and private-school co-founder whose candidacy only recently gained traction. Lahn won, strategists told me, because he took advantage of the fact that Feenstra wasn’t actually showing up: “He had name ID, a ruby-red district in his hands, and a lot of money, but the campaign for some reason chose to keep him under wraps,” David Oman, a state Republican strategist, told me.

Feenstra might have been a more welcome opponent for Sand, given how little excitement he generated among the GOP base. Lahn seems to energize them: He’s the preferred candidate of the “Make America Healthy Again” movement and has pledged to “take on the big ag cartels” as well as Big Pharma.

But Lahn has his own weaknesses. The most obvious is that the “Iowa First” candidate, who was born and attended high school in the state, spent many years living in Kansas and has said he moved back to Iowa only in 2023; he still maintains a Kansas home and flies there regularly. Lahn is also a conservative culture warrior whose ads about resisting “Marxist ideology” and defending the “Western tradition” probably helped earn him the endorsement of former Representative Steve King, who was unseated by Feenstra in 2020 after years of making racist remarks. But the biggest complication for Lahn, who vowed last night in his victory speech to fight “the establishment” at every turn, is that in Iowa Republicans are the establishment.

Iowa has been a red state for a while. And basic math, in politics as in life, so often serves as the great crusher of dreams. So it goes for Democrats in Iowa, who are outnumbered by registered Republican voters by a margin of nearly 200,000.

But Republicans are up against their own set of unfortunate circumstances: Gas prices are high. So is the cost of fertilizer. Trump’s war with Iran isn’t popular, and neither is he. When you add Turek and Sand to the mix, things start to look sunnier for Democrats. The Cook Political Report has recently reassessed both of their races, deeming the Republicans only slightly favored to hold their Senate seat, and the governor’s race a toss-up. Three of Iowa’s four House races might also be in play. “We’re going to see two incredibly colorful and interesting general-election campaigns—and maybe three good House races,” Oman, the GOP strategist, told me. “It’ll be a red-letter political year in Iowa.” He paused, then added, “Maybe I shouldn’t say red.”

[Read: ‘We have not seen ugly yet’]

Iowa will now join Maine, North Carolina, Ohio, and Alaska on the list of states that Democrats are desperate to flip and Republicans will have to scramble to protect in order to keep their Senate majority. Campaign ads will clog the airwaves. Out-of-state money will flood the zone. The national Democrats prepared to invest hundreds of millions backing James Talarico in Texas might even reconsider. Why not spend a sliver of a fraction of that amount for a possibly better result?

Going forward, not much is certain except for this: We’re about to hear a lot more about Iowa.

The White House Is the New Green Zone

2026-06-01T08:30:00-04:00

Across from the White House sits a museum called The People’s House: A White House Experience. Inside is a replica of the Oval Office, and interactive exhibits on what it’s like to attend a State Dinner or sit in on a Cabinet meeting. It’s about as close to the White House as you can get without actually being there, a wholesome reminder of how democracy is supposed to work.

But early last Saturday evening, two bullets shattered the glass between displays of Christmas ornaments and dining plates. A 21-year-old gunman had opened fire on Secret Service agents who then returned fire, killing him.

It was the latest reminder of how our democracy is actually working, how omnipresent political violence can feel, how inaccessible public buildings are becoming to the public. Three times in four weeks, gunfire has broken out as federal agents were protecting the president and vice president in the vicinity of the White House. Three months ago, a man was shot and killed after entering the Mar-a-Lago security perimeter with a shotgun and fuel can. Three months before that, two National Guard members were shot just blocks from the White House. The Secret Service, which says it has protections all around the building—some visible, some not—has a division that over the past year has been studying the rise in violent rhetoric and action to get at the question: What is driving the attacks—and can they be headed off in advance?

The Secret Service has investigated 40 percent more cases this year than it did during the comparable period in 2025, the agency told me. It’s had seven times more cases involving people with mental-health issues over that same time period. The surge is putting the Secret Service in what longtime agents say is an unprecedented threat environment.

“In the past, there have been some peak periods where we had maybe a really large uptick for a month or two,” Matthew Quinn, the deputy director of the Secret Service, told me. “But for us right now, it’s not a linear increase anymore. It’s really gone exponential.”

With the growing threat has come greater fortification—so much so that the White House complex can be thought of as the new Green Zone. The 18-acre site is laced with fencing, sensors, jammers, cameras, armed guards, bunkers, drone interceptors, and surface-to-air missiles—all of which speak to how we now protect, and isolate, our leaders. Tourists can no longer approach the 13-foot fence that rings the compound. Additional fencing went up in January around Lafayette Square, which remains under construction, and prevents access from the north. The perimeter to the south extends near Independence Avenue; the area around the Ellipse was closed last month. It’s impossible to enter from the east, through the barriers and construction where the East Wing once stood. And a battery of security vehicles, police on bikes, and Secret Service agents stand guard from the west.

[Read: A shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner]

Quinn was recently delivering a graduation speech, reflecting on some of the shifts he’s seen during his time at the Secret Service. Twenty years ago, he said, the questions he’d get were about how he stayed vigilant given that agents rarely had to draw their weapons. “Well,” he said, “we don’t have to explain it to anybody anymore.”

In 1801, Thomas Jefferson built the first fence around the White House, a wooden structure that was designed to keep animals away from the gardens. As for the people, they were largely able to roam freely on a property that had little security. “Early presidents would have had, more or less, their household staff doubling as their security force,” Matthew Costello, the chief education officer of the White House Historical Association, told me.

Franklin Pierce was the first president to have a full-time bodyguard. Abraham Lincoln posted guards outside, but inside they were dressed in civilian clothes and hid their firearms. In 1893, the grounds were closed to try to protect Grover Cleveland’s young daughter after tourists tried to cut off some of her hair. In the early 1900s, after the assassination of William McKinley, the Secret Service was tasked with presidential protection and two men were assigned to a full-time detail for Theodore Roosevelt. “The secret service men are a very small but very necessary thorn in the flesh,” Roosevelt wrote in 1906, reflecting the centuries-long struggle between presidential protection and public accessibility.

During World War I, the White House grounds were closed. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, security was enhanced once more: Bulletproof glass was added to the Oval Office windows and air-raid shelters were installed belowground. (Franklin D. Roosevelt rejected proposals from the Secret Service to line the property with 15-foot-high piles of sandbags and to repaint the White House in camouflage.) After the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, the section of Pennsylvania Avenue that goes by the White House was closed to vehicles. At the time, it seemed like a significant infringement on traditional American freedoms.

“Pennsylvania Avenue has been routinely open to traffic for the entire history of our Republic,” Bill Clinton said in his weekly radio address announcing the decision. “Through four Presidential assassinations and eight unsuccessful attempts on the lives of Presidents, it’s been open. Through a civil war, two world wars, and the Gulf war, it was open. But now it must be closed.”

After the September 11 attacks, the perimeter was widened again; vehicular traffic was shut down along E Street, on the south side. Airspace was more tightly restricted. To push the security perimeter any farther, the government would need to take over the Hay-Adams hotel or occupy the coffee shops (Peet’s, Starbucks, Swing’s) that sit on the blocks nearest the West Wing entrance and help fuel the staffers who enter it. Without the ability to go farther out, the security barriers must go higher up.

Former Secret Service agent Keith Wojcieszek told me that during his 16 years on the job, people routinely climbed over the 6-foot-6-inch perimeter fence. In one particularly embarrassing incident for the agency, a man not only jumped the fence but got to the front door of the White House and entered before being apprehended. Seven years ago, work began on a new fence—long requested by the Secret Service—of nearly double the height. But it is still not impenetrable: At least twice, toddlers have slipped through the fence, only to be retrieved by agents and returned to their parents.

Now, under protocols implemented this year, neither toddlers nor anyone else can get that close. Meanwhile, the park across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House, Lafayette Square, is closed for renovations that the National Park Service told me it wants to complete before July 4. After the park reopens, the Secret Service wants to install a gating system to quickly secure the area if needed. The area in and around the park was for many years the scene of protests, demonstrators’ chants echoing within the halls of the White House. But not now. Among the protests was an anti-war vigil that had been continuously operating since 1981. It was partially dismantled earlier this year, after Donald Trump deemed it an eyesore.

In wartime Baghdad and Kabul, 30-foot-high blast walls shielded sensitive government sites. The White House still has a modicum of openness. But that’s possible only because of all the security protections that a visiting tourist can’t necessarily see.

Beyond the perimeter, plainclothes and uniformed officers roam the streets. Snipers patrol the roof. Drones hover nearby. K9 attack dogs are ready to pounce. The system operates in layers, with different agents monitoring different distances and threat levels. “It’s the Secret Service’s protective methodology,” the former agent Donald Mihalek, who retired in 2019 after 21 years, told me. “If you don’t catch it in the outer ring, you catch it in the inner ring. You want those overlapping rings of protection.”

The weaponry has been upgraded over time, to rifles that can easily cover the 290 yards from the White House to the fence line on the southern side. The White House snipers on the roof can see 1,000 yards in every direction. “It really is not just 360 degrees of a linear circle,” the retired Secret Service agent Jeffrey James, who served 22 years, told me. “It’s almost a sphere around them by the time you add the people on the ground, the assets above us.”

One of the trickiest parts for the Secret Service is trying to anticipate the lone wolf who might suddenly show up at an event, or approach the White House gates. Cole Tomas Allen was a 31-year-old mechanical engineer from Torrance, California, who traveled to Washington, wrote a manifesto, and bolted through security at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Michael Marx was a 45-year-old from Midland, Texas, who allegedly shot at Secret Service agents as they approached him near the Washington Monument around the time that Vice President Vance’s motorcade was passing nearby. Nasire Best was a 21-year-old from Dundalk, Maryland, who had previously been arrested for claiming that he was Jesus Christ and trying to gain access to the White House; he was fatally shot last weekend after firing at a security checkpoint.

[Read: The era of normie extremism is here]

About a year ago, the Secret Service launched what it calls the Advanced Threat Interdiction Unit, which is designed to stop threats before someone shows up at an event or at the White House. “We don’t want to have a shootout on 15th Street,” Quinn told me. “If we know of a known-threat case and they’re on a record with us, we want to be able to intercept them, say, at Key Bridge or on 395 and not at the White House.” Quinn and others told me it's difficult to pinpoint any one cause for the rise in threats, but they named a few factors, including the proliferation of social media, a polarized political climate, and global unrest.

The president is not the only one who’s been targeted with violence. Governors, members of Congress, state legislators, and municipal judges have all been victims—or intended victims—of attacks. The U.S. Capitol Police, which protects members of Congress and their families and staff, investigated nearly 15,000 threats and actions in 2025, an increase of almost 60 percent over the previous year. Josh Shapiro’s family was asleep in the Pennsylvania governor’s mansion last year when the house was set ablaze by an arsonist, and Minnesota State Representative Melissa Hortman, who led the House Democratic caucus, was shot and killed in her home. At least a half dozen members of Trump’s Cabinet and White House staff have moved into military housing, spaces that help shield them from political violence, as well as protest.

One of the criticisms of the Green Zone in Iraq was that it created a false sense of tranquility. The Americans, protected by their security—not to mention the air-conditioned facilities, swimming pools, and buffet-style dining—were detached from the realities of war taking place on the other side of the gate. The zone was derisively nicknamed “the Bubble.”

The White House has long risked being its own kind of bubble. Harry Truman called it the “great white jail.” Joe Biden described it as a “gilded cage” and spent many of his weekends in Wilmington, Delaware. Barack Obama made a habit of reading 10 letters selected from the thousands sent to the White House each day. Trump uses his phone to reach those beyond his bubble, but his response to growing threats has been to try to further fortify the White House; at the same time, he’s cut back on travel, except to his golf clubs. Although his aides insist that he can maintain a connection with ordinary Americans, he has dismissed the economic hardships that many are facing as prices have risen since the start of the Iran war. Rather than talk about bringing down costs, he often focuses on his pet projects: the large cage going up on the White House lawn for a UFC fight that will be staged on his 80th birthday, for instance, or the ballroom he is determined to build.

[Read: Trump might already be a lame duck]

When in mid-May he invited a group of reporters to tour the construction site where the East Wing once stood, he spoke of the ballroom in militaristic terms. The roof, he said, will not only have a “barrier” and a “shield” so strong that “if a drone hits it, it bounces off,” but it will also contain a drone base of sorts. (He’s described it as a “drone empire,” a “drone gallery,” and a “drone port” that will house “unlimited drones” to protect all of Washington.) The side walls will contain “impenetrable steel” and the windows will be “four inches thick.” He bragged about the previously installed fencing surrounding the complex—made of titanium (“the strongest of all the metals”)—and said it goes deep into the ground and can’t be toppled by a tractor or a bulldozer.

His response in the immediate aftermath of the attempted assasination at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner was to call for the ballroom construction to go ahead. The day after the shooting at the White House gates last weekend, his lawyers submitted a new filing in the lawsuit that has blocked him from continuing. “When completed, this highly knitted, integrated, and unified Project, which is a singular and vital National Security facility, will provide a ‘SAFE HAVEN’ from attackers such as the one last night, and on April 25th,” it read.

Inside the Cabinet Room on Wednesday, Trump was asked about the Saturday-night incident, when he was at the White House working as shots rang out nearby. Trump said he pushes such thoughts from his mind. “If I thought about it a lot, you know, I wouldn’t be a very good president. I wouldn’t be here, probably. I’d be up in some room with a locked door,” he said. Outside, the ceaseless roar of jackhammering and bulldozing went on as the ballroom, challenged by lawsuits and protected by that titanium fencing, took shape.

Use It or Lose It

2026-06-01T07:00:00-04:00

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.

Even in an age of unintended metaphors, few can compare to the scene that unfolded one winter morning five years ago on a street corner in downtown Washington, D.C.

A group of men gathered in front of the seven-story building at Pennsylvania Avenue and Sixth Street Northwest, just a short walk from the Capitol, and prepared for an act of careful destruction. Their task was to do away with the colossal facade overhead. Slab by slab, they removed the Tennessee pink marble. The 45 words of the First Amendment had been there for years, giant letters carved in stone. Now that message was gone.

Although the symbolism was impossible to ignore, the backstory bordered on mundane: The Newseum, a museum devoted to the history of journalism, had run out of money and closed. So down went the tribute to the First Amendment, sent in pieces to Philadelphia. The marble was reconfigured by the National Constitution Center, which is all well and good for those who want to pay $24.95 to bask in freedom’s most glorious words. But those words are no longer displayed on Pennsylvania Avenue, where anyone traversing the street that connects Congress to the White House would once have seen them.

The facade was only ever a blip on the radar screen—installed in 2007, dismantled in 2021. And if you’re looking for razed history, there’s plenty more at that exact intersection. A century before the First Amendment (briefly) towered over passersby, two rival hotels stood at the corner of Pennsylvania and Sixth. One had a tavern that held the distinction of being the first public place in Washington where “The Star-Spangled Banner” was sung, in 1814. The other, the National Hotel, was where John Wilkes Booth slept the night before he assassinated Abraham Lincoln, in 1865.

miralex / Getty

From 2007 to 2021, the facade of the Newseum reminded passersby in downtown Washington of their First Amendment freedoms.

My point is: America is in a constant state of change. Anything that persists for a time does so only through a combination of fortune and choice. Our core freedoms may be enshrined in our founding documents, but they are guaranteed to us only in principle. Advancing the cause of freedom in practice is another matter.

Americans must try to better understand what freedom demands of them. One requirement of self-governance is the relentless pursuit of truth, which necessarily involves questioning people in positions of power in order to prevent tyranny. Yet misconceptions about what free speech and free press actually mean are everywhere. Too many people assume that freedom of speech means freedom from consequences—whether reputational, social, or professional—for what they say. (It does not.) Others conflate the role of privately run companies with that of the government, arguing, for example, that a social-media company’s moderation decisions amount to state censorship. (They do not, and in fact the individuals who run social platforms have their own First Amendment rights as publishers—even if they don’t like to concede that they themselves are publishers.)

Far too many people behave as though freedom of the press refers only to freedom for professional journalists. But journalists are not in some special category. The right to free press is, like free speech, a basic freedom that applies to all Americans who choose to exercise it. The First Amendment tells the government that it cannot encroach on any American’s right to speak and publish. Freedom of the press is not about the press; it’s about the freedom.

So when you encounter an American cheering on the notion that the “fake-news media” should be jailed, or punished, or destroyed, what you’re actually seeing is someone cheering for the government to trample on their own First Amendment rights. And if you’re the one excoriating “the media” for their failings, consider not just complaining but competing: Exercise your own right to free press. The barriers to distributing information have never been lower. What once required an expensive printing press can now be done with a smartphone—paper, a pen, and a copy machine still work in a pinch too.

It is no coincidence that President Trump has conditioned his followers to attack their fellow citizens as enemies of America for questioning him. He makes himself available to the public far more readily than other modern presidents have, a quality that offers a simulacrum of transparency—until you observe how he interacts with people who dare speak words that upset him. He kicked the Associated Press out of the White House for not calling the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.” His administration replaced the Pentagon press corps with MAGA lapdogs, influencers, and a disgraced former congressman turned podcaster. All the while, Trump routinely lashes out at citizens for posing basic questions that the American people deserve answers to. When one woman asked him when the Iran war would end, he called her a “disgrace.” When another woman asked him why he’s focused on beautifying the Reflecting Pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial during wartime, especially as gas prices soar, he snapped that it was a “stupid question.” When a woman asked the president about his administration’s handling of Afghan refugees, he interrupted her, saying, “Are you stupid? Are you a stupid person?” To yet another woman, who’d asked him about Jeffrey Epstein, the president responded, “Quiet! Quiet, piggy.” He has told other Americans that they are “horrible,” “obnoxious,” “terrible,” “stupid and nasty,” simply for asking him serious questions on behalf of the public.

Trump, gifted showman that he is, understands that insulting citizens on camera is a tactic that serves his interests. It distracts people from the fact that he hasn’t answered the question. And it is chum for his propagandists, who eat up this debasement of American freedom and share clips with breathless commentary such as “Trump absolutely bodies a CNN reporter” and “annoying anti-MAGA brat gets HUMILIATED LIVE.” Trump has effectively cast journalists as a separate special-interest group—apart from ordinary American citizens. But this is a lie.

The tech barons who run the platforms where these indecent clips proliferate are pliant cogs in Trump’s machine. So it’s not entirely surprising how many of them share his disdain for Americans who happen to work as journalists. Nevertheless, it is alarming that Silicon Valley is now emulating the president and establishing its own “editorial” teams that please and flatter tech leaders, who in turn refuse to subject themselves to serious questioning.

Power doesn’t like to be checked. Peter Thiel has declared anyone who criticizes his vision of AI “the anti-Christ.” The venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz—co-founded by Marc Andreessen, a man who infamously blocks every journalist he can find on social media—has an “editor in chief” for one of its funds and an in-house media team designed to bypass independent outlets. Elon Musk bought Twitter and turned it into a right-wing propaganda network. Anthropic has an “editorial team.” So does Apple. Meta has an “editorial” leader, whom it hired away from The New York Times. At OpenAI, which also has an “editorial lead,” Sam Altman claims that TBPN, the podcast he recently acquired, will be fully editorially independent. (As of this writing, Altman has refused to speak with any journalist at The Atlantic for years despite our many, many, many requests. We will keep asking.) Like Trump, the tech industry’s most powerful and illiberal figures want to replace those who seek truth in the public interest with sycophants who cheer on their consolidation of power and self-enrichment. They believe that the American people won’t notice, or don’t care, and in plenty of cases they are right.

[From the March 2024 issue: Adrienne LaFrance on the rise of techno-authoritarianism]

I should note that every last one of these people is exercising their own First Amendment rights. If someone wants to do “editorial” work for a tech company that involves publishing only stories advancing the mission of the company and the worldview of its owner, that’s their right. Corporate public relations and marketing are, like any other form of publishing, protected under the First Amendment from government interference, as they should be, even if they aren’t guided by the same values and standards as journalism.

I should also note that working journalists bear an awesome responsibility. Anyone who is charged with seeking the truth and reporting it, and is lucky enough to spend their days asking questions of powerful people, should remember that journalism is first and foremost a public service, and that it is a privilege to serve. Journalists are not above reproach. Americans have a civic obligation to demand the highest standards from anyone who promises to represent their interests—regardless of whether that person is an elected official or simply a fellow citizen. Journalists should receive good-faith criticism with humility and appreciation.

Although every American is entitled to exercise the right to free press, no one is entitled to be trusted or believed—that, you have to earn. The nosedive in trust in journalism is multifactorial, and journalists themselves are not without blame. All journalists make mistakes. And those mistakes are never acceptable. But pay close attention to the difference between how a reputable news organization acknowledges its mistakes—namely, by transparently correcting them—and how Trump or Musk reacts to being called out for getting something wrong.

In the United States, we like to tell ourselves that freedom is as natural as sunshine and as American as bubble gum. But American freedom has always been simultaneously conditional and aspirational—available to some and not to others, and at times diminished for all.

The cause of freedom has advanced only because of those who have been willing to stand up against government overreach. On September 25, 1690, in Boston, Benjamin Harris published colonial America’s first newspaper, Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick. Harris was a refugee from England, where he’d faced harsh government censorship in his failed attempts to establish a free press. The first issue of Publick Occurrences contained a few items of local news and, notably, one salacious sentence speculating that King Louis XIV of France was sleeping with his son’s wife. Colonial authorities shut down the newspaper immediately—citing the fact that Harris, along with the printer, Richard Pierce, had disseminated information without first seeking government approval. They ordered Harris not to publish another edition and destroyed all remaining copies of the paper. (A single copy is known to have survived, and it is now in London, of all places.) Harris and Pierce had no constitutional protection of their right to free press; the government believed that it had total discretion over what information was allowed to reach the public. Publick Occurrences existed for exactly one issue. The next newspaper would not be printed in the colonies for 14 long years.

The paper often credited with being the first true daily in America, The Pennsylvania Evening Post, was founded generations later, in the months leading up to the American Revolution. (The Post was the first to publish the text of the Declaration of Independence, on July 6, 1776.) And although the Bill of Rights came soon after, ever since the First Amendment was ratified, Americans have had to continually, sometimes aggressively, insist on their right to free expression in the face of political pressure.

[From the May 2025 issue: Adrienne LaFrance on how capitulation is contagious]

Alexander Manly did so when he continued to publish his newspaper, The Daily Record, in Wilmington, North Carolina, after racist backlash to an anti-lynching editorial. A former congressman led a mob in burning the Record ’s office to the ground in 1898. Manly was just one target in the wave of post-Reconstruction violence that erased hard-won freedoms. Ida Tarbell and Ida B. Wells pushed for freedom through their relentless reporting, exposing the predatory practices of the oil baron John D. Rockefeller and the horrors of white mobs lynching Black Americans across the South. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. defended free expression when he argued for a competitive marketplace of ideas. Lenny Bruce did it from the stage in a comedy club. And Fannie Lou Hamer did it when she refused to be silenced by presidential intimidation and described the brutality she’d faced for simply trying to vote.

Every human deserves the five basic freedoms protected by the First Amendment: religion, speech, press, assembly, and petition. But freedom is not promised to any of us, not really. American freedom is a continual achievement that is secured by those willing to defend and perpetuate it. And it is a choice we must make, again and again and again, knowing that the forces aligned against the pursuit of truth are inherently working against the cause of liberty too.

This article appears in the July 2026 print edition with the headline “Use It or Lose It.”

Trump’s 250th Celebration Is a Fiasco

2026-05-31T11:09:33-04:00

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.

“You talk too damn much, and it’s too damn much about you.”

That quote from Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye is a good summary of the fiasco that Donald Trump has made of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

You might have thought that presiding over such a celebration would be an easy success for Trump. He is a showman, after all. He loves parades and extravaganzas. It was all an easy layup, a gimme, a chance for a now-unpopular second-term president to reinvent himself as the leader of all of the American people. The only thing he had to do was—for once in his life—not act like an insane egomaniac.

He couldn’t do it.

As things are developing, we’ll remember the story of America’s grandest commemorations as follows:

One hundredth: a giant industrial exposition in Philadelphia.
Two hundredth: a tall-ships regatta in New York harbor.
Two hundred and fiftieth: a Trump flop in Washington, D.C.

Trump knows he has botched the anniversary. He says so himself. Last night, he posted the following indictment of his own program on his Truth Social platform:

We should have a giant MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN RALLY, for 250, instead of having overpriced singers, who nobody wants to hear, whose music is boring, and yet who do nothing but complain. Cancel it, just like I canceled my involvement with the failing and unsafe to be in Kennedy Center, because a Highly Conflicted, Crooked Federal Judge, said that I should not be allowed to spend my time and money in order to MAKE THE CENTER GREAT AGAIN, actually, far greater than it ever was before! It would have also been nice to see a Republican/Democrat union bring it back to life. The Kennedy Center is broken, unsafe, and $busted, and has been for many years! Judge Cooper also stated that the highly prestigious Board of the Center was not authorized to add on the name “TRUMP” despite the fact that hundreds of millions of dollars of my time and money will be necessary for its successful reincarnation. So now, the Kennedy Center will collapse, both structurally and financially. Judge Cooper and his wife, Amy Jeffress (obfuscation anyone?), should be ashamed of themselves. Judge Cooper, like numerous other Crooked Judges on my cases, should be IMPEACHED. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! President DONALD J. TRUMP

Translated into plain English, the president was complaining that seven of the nine acts scheduled to headline the July 4 weekend musical program canceled within 48 hours of one another because they realized that the event was degenerating into a hyperpartisan salute to Trump personally. His proposed solution? Replace the canceled acts with a Trump rally speech! A speech that will focus on Trump’s outrage that a judge blocked him from renaming the Kennedy Center after himself!

On July 4, 1776, Congress declared not only the severance of the political tie between 13 British colonies and their former homeland but also the end of monarchical government in the United States. For 150 years before 1776, the American colonies were ruled by a sequence of queens and kings. The names of those monarchs were inscribed on the American map: Virginia, Jamestown, Charleston, Annapolis, Georgia, and in innumerable King Streets and Queen Streets. Then, on one parchment, the new nation repudiated its political origin, and declared that “all men are created equal.” Whatever those words meant, however much slaveholder hypocrisy attended them, they promised a republican future for the people of the land.

The man who assumed responsibility for organizing the 250th commemoration of those words instead decided to make the day a royalist celebration of himself: seeking to emblazon his face on coinage and currency, displaying his image on banners in downtown Washington, and scheduling the central event of the celebration—a televised cage fight—for his own birthday on June 14. A cage fight may seem to some a barbarous way to honor Thomas Jefferson’s great manifesto. But many Americans will enjoy it, and on an occasion such as this, there’s room for a wide range of activities. There’s no room, however, to elevate the presidency created by the revolution of 1776 into a gaudy cult of personality. Trump’s drive to transform July 4, 2026, into a colossal national Day of Trump instead has triggered a rebellious update of the “Spirit of ’76.”

The Americans alive in 1776 shared and read Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense.” That pamphlet denounced, 250 years before the event, the pretensions of Trump’s version of America 250: Government by kings, Paine wrote, “was the most prosperous invention the Devil ever set on foot for the promotion of idolatry. The Heathens paid divine honours to their deceased kings, and the Christian World hath improved on the plan by doing the same to their living ones.”

Trump’s effort to rebrand the semiquincentennial as the Day of Trump left no time, budget, or effort available for the true purpose of the anniversary. As his own self-celebration has fizzled, a void has opened between the scheduled roster of events and the true purpose and meaning of the solemnity of July 4, 2026. This powerful date will go unmarked by any act of memory worthy of the nation. The Reflecting Pool will be repainted too blue by an overpaid no-bid contractor. The statues on the Memorial Bridge will be gilded too brightly by another overpaid no-bid contractor. There’s a project to erect an Albert Speer–style triumphal arch overlooking the Potomac. But Trump has failed to deliver the victories that the arch might have memorialized—and as the war in Iran has stalemated, so the plans for the arch have stalled. Most symbolic of all, the White House is flanked by a stop-start construction site where the East Wing used to stand. Trump shook down government favor-seekers for enough money to begin work on a presidential ballroom complex, but he did not shake enough to finish it. Now the taxpayer is being asked to pay the balance. A federal judge has ordered work paused pending a vote in Congress, and Trump has whittled down his majorities in the House and Senate to the point where he apparently cannot pass a funding bill. If he loses control of either house in November, construction is unlikely to resume. Instead of a Trump Ballroom, the most conspicuous feature of the Trump White House in 2026 is a gaping Trump Hole.

The greatest of all Fourth of July orations was delivered in 1852, on the 76th anniversary of American independence, by Frederick Douglass in Rochester, New York. In the opening passages of that speech, Douglass observed ominously: “The eye of the reformer is met with angry flashes, portending disastrous times.” Yet even as Douglass foresaw the coming Civil War and lamented the nation’s flaws, he still expressed hope that “high lessons of wisdom, of justice and of truth, will yet give direction to her destiny.” Trump has made a pitiful shambles of what should have been a glorious moment. But the nation honored by the glorious moment still retains the power of recovery and renewal praised by Douglass. As we contemplate the farce of Trump Day, we can turn our imaginations to what yet might be for America at 300.

We as individuals may or may not live to see it, but we can believe in it all the same. We can believe in it all the more fervently for this experience of living through a chapter of American history that so flagrantly betrays the Founders’ hopes and so arduously tests the Founders’ legacy.

L.A.’s Lose-Lose-Lose Primary

2026-05-31T07:30:00-04:00

It’s happening again. In a big American city, a young Indian American democratic socialist is trying to unseat an unpopular Black incumbent on a platform of housing affordability. This time, the arena is not New York City but Los Angeles. Nithya Raman, the insurgent, has fashioned herself as a Zohran Mamdani of the West. Karen Bass, the embattled incumbent, is fighting to stay in office and make sure that lightning doesn’t strike on opposite coasts.

But the similarities mostly end there. In New York, an inspiring young leftist competed against a boorish, but experienced, former governor to replace a corrupt mayor. In Los Angeles, the leftist insurgent isn’t inspiring, and the boorish challenger—the former reality-TV villain Spencer Pratt—is inexperienced. The incumbent isn’t corrupt, just feckless. Despite their overwhelming weaknesses, two of these candidates will advance from Tuesday’s nonpartisan primary, and one will win in the November general election. Los Angeles is unlikely to be better off.

On paper, Raman seems like a natural heir to Mamdanism. In 2020, she became the first member of the Democratic Socialists of America to be elected to L.A.’s city council and the first challenger to unseat an incumbent there in 17 years. Now she’s running as a housing wonk who knows what it takes to deliver affordability.

Unfortunately for Raman, she appears to have neither Mamdani’s charisma nor his mastery of modern campaigning. She has few social-media followers and none of the sleek vertical videos that made Mamdani famous before he was polling well. (Instead, she has posted strange scripted Instagram videos with such captions as “Hayley’s landlord gave her an impossible ultimatum, but Nithya Raman said ‘NOT TODAY! Now she still has her apartment… and a new boyfriend?”) Her website’s homepage features a video of her reading a speech off her phone. Her performance in a televised debate a few weeks ago was widely panned after she gave word-salad answers to yes-or-no questions such as whether noncitizens should vote in local elections. She was “not ready for prime time and certainly not ready to step up and be mayor of the second biggest city in the U.S.,” Garry South, a longtime L.A. political consultant, told me. Her odds of becoming mayor on the prediction site Kalshi went from 51 percent to 18 percent in the two days that followed.

When I spoke with Raman a few weeks ago over Zoom, I asked for her elevator pitch on why she deserved to be mayor. Here is how her reply began: “You know, I’m an urban planner; I’m a mom; I’m a politician.” Later, after we went back and forth for several minutes discussing the issue of street homelessness, she asked me, “Is this all you wanted to talk about?” It was not, but homelessness consistently polls as a top issue in the race, so it seemed worth covering.

Raman does have certain advantages that Mamdani did not. She came much earlier than he did to YIMBYism—the movement that advocates for removing barriers to building more housing. This fact has activated the salivary glands of L.A. policy wonks. Scott Epstein, the policy and research director of Abundant Housing LA, told me that Raman, who has a master’s degree in urban planning, is “a dream candidate for us.”

[Mark Leibovich: California’s blue Armageddon]

But Raman’s more left-wing views threaten to scare away the same coalition that might be interested in building. She has been a vociferous advocate of tenants’ rights, to the point of trying to extend the pandemic-era eviction moratorium into February 2023. In her 2020 run, she called to “defund the police” and specified that the police department should be made “much smaller.” She has since recanted, but on the somewhat narrow grounds that the city doesn’t yet have “an unarmed responder” for 911 calls. “Unless we can, materially, take call load off of LAPD, we do have to be able to have a system that is responsive to people’s needs,” she told me.

Her biggest liabilities might arise from her attitude toward homelessness, the issue dominating the election. Los Angeles has a much worse street-homelessness problem than most cities do, creating a widespread feeling of public disorder even as the violent-crime rate falls. Thousands of homeless people die on the streets of L.A. every year, and it is a political liability to suggest that nothing can be done about this until some future date when housing is cheap. In 2022, during a city-council vote on a law to restrict tents within 500 feet of schools and day-care centers, Raman voted against the measure and then, a year later, memorably rolled her eyes at people who were upset with her about it. She continues to dismiss tent sweeps as a “politically-motivated game of sidewalk shuffle.”

Despite her commitment to progressive policies, Raman has failed to consolidate the support of the Los Angeles left. The three other DSA members of the city council have all endorsed Bass. So has almost every union that has made an endorsement, including the über-influential L.A. County Federation of Labor, which has close to a million members. The Los Angeles DSA chapter gave Raman a tepid recommendation that it specified “is not an endorsement.” In a party straw poll, 42 percent of local members preferred another candidate: the pastor and community organizer Rae Huang, who told me that her ideology is shaped by “Marxism and the gospel.”

Catching fire as a socialist is harder in L.A. than in New York. The local DSA chapter, which draws from all of Los Angeles County, has only about 5,000 members, compared with roughly 14,000 in New York City (which is slightly less populous). “L.A. isn’t like New York or Chicago, where people live and breathe politics,” South said. “Mayors here come and go without leaving much of an impression.”

Few big-city mayors make less of an impression than Karen Bass has. Los Angeles mayor is an inherently weaker position than its counterpart in New York City or Chicago. City-council members can veto development in their districts, social services are handled at the county level, and schools are handled by a separately elected school board. But Bass seems to have gone out of her way to exercise as little power as possible.

In 2023, six months into the job, she said her goal was to eliminate unsheltered homelessness by the end of her first term. More recently, she has taken to boasting about a 17 percent drop in two years. Her signature program, Inside Safe, offers free, temporary housing—mostly motel rooms—to the homeless for three to six months, before moving them into permanent housing.

It barely works. The program has cost about $400 million and served just under 6,000 people— 14 percent of the homeless population—in the three and a half years since it began. Only a quarter of those people are now in permanent housing. Another quarter are still in the motels, where the average stay has turned out to be a year. The other half have exited the program, overwhelmingly to return to life on the streets. The program has cost $254,653 for every homeless person who is now permanently housed. (In an email, a Bass campaign spokesperson pointed out that the county pays some of the cost.) At the current pace of housing 1,500 people every three years, Inside Safe is on track to solve L.A.’s homelessness problem in the year 2108.

Bass has also done very little to address Los Angeles’s housing crisis. Bass’s main housing policy is an executive order she signed during her first week in office to streamline affordable-housing development. The policy immediately appeared to be a modest success. Seven months later, under pressure from homeowners, Bass excluded single-family-home neighborhoods from the order, which make up most of the residential land in L.A. A year after that, she issued a revision that added several more development-killing loopholes to the order. (One of those changes excluded all historical-preservation zones, which appeared to be in response to complaints over a 70-unit building proposed on a “historically preserved” vacant lot.)

In 2022, about 23,400 housing units were permitted in Los Angeles. Bass took office in December that year. In 2023, the number fell to about 18,600, and then to 17,200 in 2024. Meanwhile, Los Angeles is home to roughly 100,000 fewer people than it was in 2019.

[Conor Friedersdorf: Spencer Pratt and the temptations of populism]

Politically, this strategy of watering down her own initiatives to avoid alienating interest groups might have worked, if not for the fires. Bass was at a cocktail party as part of a delegation to Ghana when Los Angeles went up in flames last January, breaking a campaign promise to never leave the country during her mayoralty. Her approval ratings have been abysmal ever since, currently sitting at about 35 percent approval and 57 percent disapproval. “In the entire era of modern L.A. politics—where we have polling, et cetera—no incumbent mayor running for reelection is as low in the polls and as high in disapproval as Karen Bass,” Fernando Guerra, a political scientist at Loyola Marymount University, told me. In a poll he conducted in October, he said, more than two-thirds of respondents said that they wouldn’t vote for her. (In response to interview requests, Bass’s campaign told me that the mayor would speak with me, but never actually made her available.)

Bass has secured every important endorsement, including from Kamala Harris, Gavin Newsom, and the California Democratic Party, but her unpopularity with voters puts her in a weak position. Polls have her leading the pack, but with only about 25 percent support. If she were to face Raman head-to-head, she could lose. But she might not have to. Thanks to Spencer Pratt.

Spencer Pratt does not have the background of a conventional political candidate. He originally became famous for being an entertaining jerk on the reality show The Hills in his 20s. After his career being a heel on camera ended, he took the proceeds and blew them all on fancy suits, ammunition, and healing crystals. According to a 2013 interview with OK! magazine, he rationalized this spending by telling himself that the world was going to end in 2012 anyway, at the conclusion of the 13th Mayan baktun. He was set to carry on as many ex-celebrities do, slowly running out of money and then occasionally appearing on TV to get paid for activating the audience’s nostalgia for the time when they were famous.

Everything changed after his house burned down in the Palisades Fire. His parents’ house burned down, too. Twelve of their neighbors died. Pratt became enraged at the city’s leadership, accusing Bass of negligence. On the one-year anniversary of the fires, he channeled that anger into a long-shot bid for mayor. Since then, he has run a surprisingly formidable campaign.

Of the three major candidates in the race, Pratt has been the most digitally adept. He posts short, well-produced videos that get across his simple and darkly attractive message: L.A. is a hellscape, and its political class, including Bass and Raman, is to blame. Just as Mamdani answers every question with some version of “affordability,” Pratt turns every conversation back to his assertion that L.A. is a “zombie”-infested wasteland that he could easily fix. His housing affordability plan is to clear Skid Row and build multifamily developments there.

Pratt’s digital savvy and populist politics have created a nationwide media storm around his campaign. Fans have made AI-generated ads that depict Pratt as a hero who finally cleans up the city. The videos can be hilarious despite their messages. One such video parodies the Lego Movie song “Everything Is Awesome” with the hook “Everything Is Awful.” Pratt himself reposts his favorites—he seems to like the ones in which he is Batman. (Pratt’s representatives declined to make him available for this article.)

Although he is a registered Republican, Pratt has made genuine efforts to depict himself as the real liberal of the race. He compares himself to Barack Obama; insists that his friends, family, and supporters are Democrats; and told CBS that “Mayor Bass loves ICE.” He has fashioned himself as a lifelong animal lover, showing off his softer side in videos of him feeding hummingbirds with his children, and allying with animal advocates in their outrage over the treatment of dogs on Skid Row. When asked by CNN why he was a Republican at all, he offered a single reason: He believes in the right of a well-trained gun owner to carry a concealed firearm. Still, Pratt has little chance of becoming mayor. The homicide rate in the city is at a 66-year low, a problem for his apocalyptic message. (Pratt claims that “crime isn’t down,” just going unreported). His biggest obstacle is that he is a registered Republican, and that Donald Trump said on camera that he’s heard Pratt is “a big MAGA person.” (Pratt wisely appeared not to accept the semi-endorsement, but still.) L.A. voted 70–27 for Harris over Trump in 2024, and 2026 is shaping up to be an especially bad year for Republicans.

[Meghan Daum: What Los Angeles has become]

In a reality-TV-worthy twist, however, he might help Bass keep her job. The latest poll shows all three candidates within the margin of error, but most prior polls showed Bass and Pratt finishing first and second. Polls of that head-to-head matchup show Bass winning by 14 to 32 percentage points. Raman might well beat either in a head-to-head race, according to polls, but only if she can make it out of the primary. (Technically, if a candidate wins 51 percent of the primary vote, no general election will happen. But that is extraordinarily unlikely.)

This is all quite bleak for my hometown of L.A. The city is an eye-wateringly beautiful place, with perfect weather and the country’s best food scene. Its mayoral race, however, has become a staging ground for three of the most unfortunate tendencies in contemporary American politics: Nithya Raman’s Millennial socialism, freed from the troublesome belief that eviction and policing are worthwhile; Karen Bass’s milquetoast establishment-ism that avoids making the choices necessary to solve hard problems; and Pratt’s carnage-populism that tells Americans they live in something other than the greatest place that’s ever existed. Whichever of the three candidates wins, Los Angeles will most likely lose.

*Sources: Eric Thayer / Los Angeles Times / Getty; Getty; Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times / Getty; Roy Rochlin / Getty; Sarah Reingewirtz / MediaNews Group / Los Angeles Daily News / Getty.

The Arc of the Voting Rights Act

2026-05-31T07:00:00-04:00

THe morning after Louisiana’s House primaries were scheduled to take place, worshippers at Mount Zion First Baptist Church in Baton Rouge were on their feet, swaying to the gospel music that vibrated through the wooden pews. Just days earlier, the vote had been abruptly postponed as Republicans scrambled to redraw congressional boundaries in a way that would erase one of the state’s two majority-Black congressional districts and dilute the political influence that many in the congregation had fought for. From the pulpit, Reverend Renè Brown said that all of this was on his mind. “The pastor,” he declared after reading a passage from the Book of Numbers about the allotment of land, “wants to talk about biblical redistricting.”

Two giant television screens had just displayed the U.S., Confederate, and Christian flags and the words BIBLICAL REDISTRICTING. Churchgoers gasped and glanced at their neighbors; some burst out laughing. “Oh Lordy,” one man said under his breath, his eyebrows arching nearly up to his hairline as he braced for an intense sermon. Some might wonder why the debate over representation is being framed in racial terms, Brown told his congregants. “The reason many people ask that question is because it doesn’t affect their race,” he said. “It is about race. People make race-based decisions regardless of what they are and what they know.”

In the weeks since the Supreme Court hollowed out the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the past has felt especially present to many at Mount Zion. Over the arc of their lives, the elders gathered inside the sanctuary had experienced the promise of the law, its reality, and, now, its narrowing. The Court’s 6–3 ruling in Louisiana v. Callais could return the country to an earlier era of weakened Black voting power, and comes amid a partisan gerrymandering battle mounted by President Trump. The Court’s ruling has supercharged Republican efforts across the South—in states including Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia—to redraw congressional districts in a way that benefits white citizens at the expense of nonwhite voters who primarily cast ballots for Democrats. In Louisiana, where about one-third of the state’s residents are Black, the state legislature on Friday redrew a majority-Black district held by Representative Cleo Fields, a Democrat, making it far more Republican-rich. The map with the redrawn district, which includes Mount Zion, is expected to be signed into law by Governor Jeff Landry, a Republican. The GOP would then be favored to claim five of six congressional seats in a state that Trump won in 2024 by 22 points.

[Read: The GOP’s stunningly swift gerrymandering drive]

Louisiana Republicans have said that race was not a factor as they quickly redrew the maps. But Democrats told me they regard the swift attempt to consolidate power ahead of the November midterm elections as a betrayal of Black Americans and the democratic process. Before stepping into a Legislative Black Caucus meeting in the basement of the state capital, State Representative Edmond Jordan, who chairs the caucus, detailed his concern that the ruling could shrink minority representation nationwide. “We’re in a bad spot right now,” he told me.

L. Kasimu Harris for The Atlantic

An abandoned church in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Many at Mount Zion agreed. Brown closed the service by asking congregants to support a petition to recall Landry. The idea is far-fetched in a state where Republicans are so dominant, but when church ended, the lines for signatures crept up the aisles and jammed the floral-scented foyer.

Mount Zion was once led by T. J. Jemison, who in 1953 led a boycott of segregated buses in Baton Rouge, which became a model for the Montgomery bus boycott two years later. Church members told me that the America they remembered as children—one that legally enforced segregation at schools and swimming pools, and imposed literacy tests to vote—had come rushing back. They described despair and disappointment and pain, along with an overwhelming sense that the diminishment of their influence was both un-American—and precisely what they have always known their country to be.

Laura Bradley remembers being forced as a child to enter a malt shop through the back door because the front was reserved for white people. “It feels like we’re in James Crow Jr.,” the 72-year-old told me after signing her name to the recall petition. “All these feelings that you thought you had allayed and set aside, now they are back in the forefront again.” The gains from decades of struggle for equal representation had been wiped out. “It’s almost starting again from ground zero,” she said. She was angry, but also had hope that aggressive gerrymandering could backfire against Republicans by galvanizing minority voters to turn out, both in 2026 and in 2028.

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

L. Kasimu Harris for The Atlantic

Laura Bradley attends Mount Zion First Baptist Church.

Across the South, Black pastors, civil-rights organizations, and lawmakers are working to make that happen. They are registering new voters, and urging Black athletes and fans to boycott public universities in states that are weakening the influence of Black voters. “If you’ve got somebody in your house and they ain’t registered to vote,” Brown told his congregation, “put them out.” At nearby Mount Pilgrim Baptist Church, guest pastor Melvin Ivan Britten IV had the congregation on its feet as he asked them to hold on to their faith during a moment of darkness. “The same God that helped us through Jim Crow,” Britten said, “is the same God that will help us right now!” From a pew in the back, a tired-looking Fields nodded his head and clapped his hands in praise.

Sitting in his pastor’s office later, a heaviness seemed to hang over the congressman as he spoke of the history of the Supreme Court’s ruling. “It pushes us back to 60 years ago,” he said. “We thought we had fought these battles.” He described the gutting of the Voting Rights Act as the culmination of a yearslong erosion of Black political power, first by conservative court decisions and, more recently, by the Trump administration’s war against diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. “You know, I can play football on a Saturday and have a whole stadium cheering for me,” he said quietly, his hands clasped together. “But I can’t go govern on Monday?” Fields told me shortly after the map won legislative approval on Friday that he will not run against Troy Carter, the Democrat who represents the state’s other majority-Black district. When I asked what the new map means for his future, he told me he was figuring it out. “Within the next week or two, everybody’s going to know what I’m doing.”

Earlier, Fields recalled for me a conversation he had with Jesse Jackson during his 1988 presidential campaign, during which Fields bemoaned political disengagement. “There are no apathetic people,” Jackson told him. “There are only uninspired people.” Perhaps, Fields told me, this moment will inspire the uninspired. But across the Mississippi River, in West Baton Rouge Parish, Black and white residents said there was little to be inspired about. The area voted for Trump in 2024. But over the past year, residents told me, the price of gas has nearly doubled, their credit-card debt is piling up, their rents are rising, and they feel like they are sliding backwards.

“I stopped paying attention,” Joseph Hopkins, a 42-year-old manager at a local fast-food restaurant who used to vote as a Democrat, told me while he watched the price tick up as he fueled his SUV. “There’s a lot of things they say but never follow through on. I don’t trust no man.” Outside a nearby auto-parts shop, a man in camouflage pants and Crocs peered at his truck’s engine. “These people swing the vote however they want,” he told me when I asked about the legislature’s gerrymandering push. Whether he votes or not, he said, “ain’t gonna make much of a difference.” In rural Ascension Parish, 25 miles southeast of Baton Rouge, a half dozen people told me they don’t pay any attention to their government. “I don’t know nothing about it,” one woman shopping for Sunday dinner told me. “And I’d be lying if I said I did.”

More than 42,000 voters had already cast ballots for the May 16 primary when Landry postponed the House elections. (ANY VOTES CAST WILL NOT BE COUNTED in the congressional race, read a sign at the West Baton Rouge Parish Registrar of Voters office.) Many people thought the election had been canceled, and even election officials admitted they were confused. With other votes going ahead, all five proposed amendments to the state constitution—four of which were backed by Landry—went down to defeat. Some voters said they were trying to send a message to Republicans. “If you have to go in and redraw lines to get the upper hand,” Michael, a 39-year-old Democrat who spoke on the condition that his full name not be used, told me an hour after polls closed, “that’s a person that’s afraid.” He likened the state’s redistricting push to the 1997 WBA Heavyweight Championship fight, when Mike Tyson bit off part of Evander Holyfield’s ear. “He was getting beat,” he said of Tyson. “He had to do something drastic—they’re biting our ear off!”

L. Kasimu Harris for The Atlantic

Homes in Baton Rouge’s Beauregard Town.

Most Americans oppose drawing congressional boundaries in ways that deliberately favor one party over another, according to an Economist/YouGov poll from late April. (Just 7 percent said partisan gerrymandering should be allowed, whereas 22 percent were unsure.) A separate survey from earlier this month, after the Callais decision, found that just a quarter of Americans think states should be allowed to draw congressional maps in a way that helps minority candidates get elected; half of Democrats said yes, whereas only 9 percent of Republicans agreed.

Republicans I spoke with said it was only fair that House boundaries reflect the GOP’s dominance in their state. Several cited Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion, which argued that the nation had made “great strides in ending entrenched racial discrimination.” Cindy Norwood told me that the country’s “whole mentality has been trying to do more and bring up the minorities, which is a good thing to do.” But, the 72-year-old said, it’s not right to consider race when drawing congressional lines. Norwood said she didn’t understand why so many minority voters were complaining that a new map would likely lead to the election of someone who does not best represent their interests. “They will have representation, but we can’t make it happen—we can’t force it to happen because they want more,” she said.

At a restaurant in West Baton Rouge Parish, a trio of Trump supporters in their 70s—all of them white—celebrated the new maps. “They created a majority-Black district just for the sake of political reasons—I’m totally against that,” said Billy Bourgeois, who lives in Fields’s district. Bourgeois told me he hopes the new boundaries will yield a Republican lawmaker who better represents his interests—lower taxes and stricter policies against illegal immigration.

To the Democrats I spoke with, the situation looks inverted: Republicans are drawing district lines to keep Black voters from having a meaningful say. “It feels like they’re just trying to put you at the bottom of the totem pole,” Terry Jackson, a 55-year-old truck driver, said while picking up plates of BBQ at a popular Port Allen Cajun diner. Jackson, who is Black, told me he’s not ready to accept that. If anything, the GOP’s push to redraw the maps has reminded him how much power he really has. “They’re showing that, actually, your vote matters,” he said. “If it didn’t matter, they wouldn’t be trying so hard to keep you from being able to vote.”

A photo caption mistakenly identified an abandoned church in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, as Mount Zion First Baptist Church.

Trump Might Already Be a Lame Duck

2026-05-29T05:00:00-04:00

President Trump has never really cared about the Republican Party per se. He basks in its adulation, and it’s beneficial to him when the GOP controls Congress. But he’s never adhered to its orthodoxies or honored its heroes. Neither has he been willing to brook internal dissent in the name of the party’s big tent. He demands absolute fealty but displays little loyalty. He can’t help obsessing over his personal priorities—such as his proposed ballroom or his retribution campaign against perceived tormentors—to the detriment of his party’s political interests. On ballots, Donald Trump (MAGA) would be more accurate than Donald Trump (R).

With little more than five months until the midterms, that divergence between what Trump thinks is good for Trump and what is good for the Republican Party has never been wider. Trump’s priorities appear in many ways to be hurting the GOP’s chances in November, when it already faces stiff odds of keeping control of Congress. The war he started with Iran put Americans’ economic struggles front and center when the price of gasoline jumped. Any semblance of a national legislative agenda has evaporated as he pushes long-shot bills that his own party declines to take forward. And his obsession with construction in and around Washington, D.C., it is safe to say, doesn’t suggest a chief executive focused on the problems of everyday citizens.

Meanwhile, Trump has wielded his clout inside the party like a broadsword, endorsing primary opponents in races against incumbents who defy him. Trump has a perfect endorsement record this year: All 118 candidates—for House, Senate, and governors’ races—he has backed in primaries have won, according to a Fox News count (though many of these races were not really contested). Even though Trump’s power over his party appears at its pinnacle, many Republicans believe that the president has actually accelerated his own political decline. Many of those primary winners may struggle in November, darkening the GOP’s prospects for keeping control of Congress. And at least some of the defeated incumbents, who will serve on Capitol Hill until next January, now feel liberated to push back on what they dislike in Trump’s agenda. Others in the Senate who are not up for reelection are bitter about the president’s role in their colleagues’ defeat and have shown little interest in helping him pursue his personal-grievance campaign.

“The problem is he has nobody around him who is willing to tell him, ‘Sir, the stuff you are talking about is not possible, and you are shooting yourself in the foot every time,’” one Republican Senate adviser told us. “He essentially has lame-ducked himself in pursuit of retribution, and either the staff has failed to make a reasonable argument against these actions, or they have told him this and he is no longer listening.” Either way, the party loses.

Since Trump returned to the White House, very few Republicans have dared defy him. Most have set aside private reservations to embrace his push on tariffs and mass deportations while professing ignorance about Trump’s efforts to enrich himself and his family. (“I haven’t seen the story,” is a common refrain.) On those rare occasions when a lawmaker has resisted his will, Trump has paid attention and waited for his revenge. Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky, as measured by his voting record, was a reliable conservative. But he also was a prominent Republican voice calling for the release of the Epstein files. Trump opposed the release (unusually, he didn’t get his way), slammed the Kentucky congressman, and supported his primary opponent. Massie lost. Seven Indiana state lawmakers broke with Trump’s effort to redistrict their state in favor of the GOP. Trump backed their primary challengers. Five of the incumbents lost; one other faces a recount.

[Read: The ‘crazy’ plot to release the Epstein files]

The biggest ructions have been in the Senate. No modern president has endorsed challengers to two sitting senators from his own party. But Trump successfully backed Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton against the four-term incumbent John Cornyn in Tuesday’s primary runoff, and also helped oust Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana. Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina, meanwhile, got so fed up with Trump that he decided to retire. But scorned senators can be furious foes. The Republican majority of 53 already was a tad precarious because of occasional defections from two relative moderates, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. Add in Tillis, Cornyn, Cassidy, and retiring former Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and Trump’s grip on the chamber starts to look shaky.

The president’s purge of candidates who have shown they can win a general election in favor of newcomers who are focused on pleasing him means the party will now have to do more to have a shot at victory in November. Some strategists think that the Texas race for U.S. Senate with Paxton on the ticket could require as much as $100 million in additional Republican funding from out of state, both because Paxton is a less effective fundraiser than Cornyn and because his turbulent history leaves him more vulnerable to Democratic attacks. Although Democrats have often hyped but seldom delivered in the Lone Star State, they see Paxton as the weaker opponent for state lawmaker James Talarico. A Talarico win in Texas could hand the Senate to the Democrats; even if he loses, the diversion of GOP resources to Paxton could put other states in play.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune made no secret of his support for Cornyn. When Trump and Thune spoke on May 18, the call was so tense that Thune told his advisers afterward that he thought Trump would back Paxton. Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, who runs the National Republican Senatorial Committee, followed up with his own pitch for Cornyn in a less contentious conversation with the president, people briefed on the exchanges told us. Trump endorsed Paxton the next day. (Internal polls were already showing Paxton ahead, but the president’s endorsement turned the contest into a rout.)

Thune in particular has at times thrown up his hands in the face of the president’s obduracy. Trump, in turn, has been venting to other GOP senators that the upper chamber is ineffective and insufficiently loyal. “There are definitely frustrations there that are not going away,” one person familiar with the exchanges told us, “and there is no appetite from Thune to resolve it.”

Trump grew so frustrated over the Senate’s inability to pass the SAVE America Act—legislation designed to crack down on issues as disparate as immigrant voting rights and transgender surgeries—that he embraced the idea of a “talking filibuster,” based on the recommendation of Utah’s Mike Lee. (The talking filibuster is a rarely used tactic during which senators delay voting on a bill by refusing to yield the floor, thereby forcing very lengthy debate.)

Thune had the thankless task of explaining to Trump that such an approach would also empower Democrats to offer their own amendments. That could have forced floor votes on issues such as tariffs, the Iran war, and abortion rights, where Republicans would have to choose between defying the president and giving Democrats ammunition for the fall. The legislation remains stalled.

[Read: A serious Senate debate about an unserious bill]

Senate Republicans have shown other flashes of independence. Tillis held up Trump’s nominee for chair of the Federal Reserve until the Justice Department stopped pursuing Jerome Powell. Rand Paul, Murkowski, Collins, and Cassidy voted to advance a resolution that would require Trump to get congressional authorization to continue the war in Iran. (House Republicans canceled a vote on the measure out of fear that it might pass.) And early hopes that Congress might authorize $1 billion in security funding for the White House ballroom were dashed after pushback from some GOP lawmakers and a ruling from the Senate parliamentarian. Trump ordered Thune to fire the parliamentarian; the majority leader refused.

Last week, still smarting from the Paxton endorsement, the Senate went into recess rather than consider Trump’s plan to create a nearly $1.8 billion fund for alleged victims of government “weaponization.” The plan was widely and immediately panned on two grounds: the prospect of recompense for the rioters who attacked Congress on January 6, 2021, and protections that would forever shield Trump, his family, and businesses from IRS scrutiny. “So the nation’s top law enforcement official is asking for a slush fund to pay people who assault cops? Utterly stupid, morally wrong — Take your pick,” McConnell said in a statement. The fund’s fate is now unclear.

Over the weekend, Iran hawks in the Senate who are usually joined at the hip to Trump—Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz, Roger Wicker—fumed at the reported terms of an Iran peace deal that the president was touting as imminent. The White House tried to silence the objections, but the timetable for a deal notably decelerated, and nothing has been signed.

In the House, where the Republican majority is even more tenuous than in the Senate, Trump has also faced defiance. Massie, Kevin Kiley of California, and Don Bacon of Nebraska broke ranks to give Democrats a chance to oppose Trump’s tariffs on Canada. Bacon is retiring after criticizing Trump’s foreign policy. Kiley, meanwhile, found his congressional district eliminated as California leaders retaliated for GOP redistricting in Texas. Kiley declared that he would run for reelection in a new district—as an independent.

Steven Cheung, the White House communications director, downplayed the internal GOP strife. “President Trump is the unquestioned leader of the Republican Party,” he told us in a statement. “Look no further than his perfect and sterling record in the past year—a 100% success rate for his preferred candidates, proving his endorsement is the most powerful endorsement in history.”

For months now, Republicans have fervently hoped that Trump’s focus would shift to issues that could help the party in November. Instead, he has been consumed with an Iran peace agreement and with his projects: new paint for the Reflecting Pool, a triumphal arch near Arlington National Cemetery, the conversion of a Washington, D.C., public golf course into championship links, and, of course, the ballroom. The economy? Not so much.

A recent Quinnipiac poll found that 45 percent of voters said that affording gas is now somewhat or very difficult, up from 29 percent in December. The same poll found that 55 percent of voters, including 16 percent of Republicans, blamed Trump “a lot” for the rise in costs, and 56 percent of voters opposed the U.S. military action against Iran.

[Read: Trump voters are over it ]

Despite White House promises that the president would hold events across the country to promote economic fixes, Trump has largely stayed in Washington (or at Mar-a-Lago) and declared that the affordability crisis is a Democratic “hoax.” He seems uninterested in fulfilling his campaign promises to get prices down. Earlier this month, the president effectively gifted the Democrats a campaign ad by saying, “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation,” when he was asked about the impact of the Iran war. On Wednesday, while insisting that domestic political considerations would not factor into his negotiations with Tehran, Trump declared, “I don’t care about the midterms.” Many Republicans likely nodded in resigned agreement.

The King of Queens

2026-05-28T12:00:00-04:00

President Trump delights in playing what he calls “the gay national anthem” whenever he wants to rev up a crowd. He’s obsessed with Elton John, was once friendly with Liza Minnelli, and has a Liberace-esque flair for gilded interiors. One of his favorite sports to watch—mixed martial arts—is basically sweaty, semi-naked dudes. And he is a deep and vocal admirer of the physique of fellow men, often announcing which ones he would cast in a movie: “They’re perfect specimens,” he said last year of the military pilots who had visited him in the Oval Office; “He looks like the Marlboro Man,” he cooed about a former Iowa state senator; “Young, handsome guy. It’s always nice to be young and handsome,” he complimented the president of Paraguay.

Some of Trump’s allies note that years before gay marriage was legalized, Trump had gay friends, took pro-gay stances, and allowed gay people to join his private club in Palm Beach starting in the mid-1990s. Ric Grenell became the first openly gay person to hold a Cabinet position when Trump appointed him acting director of national intelligence. Grenell, who is now the president’s envoy for special missions, once called Trump “the most pro-gay president in American history,” a title that Trump said he was honored to have.

To be clear: Trump says he is attracted only to women and, in fact, has been married to three of them. He once hosted the Miss Universe pageant, was caught on tape saying that he loves to grab women “by the pussy,” and was found civilly liable for sexually abusing a woman. Loads more have accused him of sexual misconduct. (Trump has denied the accusations.) “Women—I like. Men—no, I don’t have any interest,” Trump affirmed at a Board of Peace meeting earlier this year.

But there’s also little doubt that Trump has unabashedly embraced the aesthetic—the je ne sais quoi—of a certain kind of gay man. Some who are sympathetic to the president have gone even further. Blaze Media, a conservative outlet started by the talk-radio host Glenn Beck, ran a story in 2024 headlined “Donald Trump: Our First Gay President,” much in the way people talked about Bill Clinton as having been the first Black one. The story notes, in a section titled “Queen of Queens”: “He blows kisses to Hulk Hogan, weighs in on Fashion Week (‘used to be so glamorous and exciting! No stars, no fun—just boring’), and his rivalry with lesbian Rosie O’Donnell remains a gem of the catty naughties social feuds.” Pod Save America, a liberal podcast started by former aides to President Obama, declared that Trump would be a gay icon, if only he had “liberal social values.” The president, the episode’s title observes, “DEMANDS a Ballroom at the White House, Loves Musicals, & Wears Make-up.”

James Kirchick, the author of Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington, told me that Trump’s personal story, a guy from Queens making it big in Manhattan, tracks with the “typical gay story” of men of his era. In another life, he continued, the 79-year-old could be a classic aging gay, “living in Wilton Manors, sitting at a bar, making bitchy comments to everyone who comes in.” (Of course, Trump’s perch from the Oval Office confers much more power than a bar stool does, and his comments have moved markets and sent allies reeling.) “It’s a gay man frozen in amber in the late 1970s and early 1980s, before AIDS,” Kirchick said, referring to the type of gay man he believes Trump would embody. “It’s a certain age and a certain era. It’s very campy.”

The comedian and podcaster Caleb Hearon deemed Trump to be of the “old-school-gay” era, “because, you know, gay guys used to be mean before media training,” he said in an interview with Ziwe Fumudoh on her YouTube comedy show. The president, Hearon continued, should have become “a red-carpet fashion adviser,” the sort who would say things like: “That dress, honey. I don’t think so!” “That would have been amazing. I would have watched every night,” he said. “Instead, he ran for office on a platform of mass deportation, so that’s where things got tricky, obviously.”

[Read: The surprising reason for the new homophobia]

People close to Trump say he has long been gay-friendly in his actions as a private citizen. In the early days of his career as a developer, Trump was mentored by Roy Cohn, the legendary and ruthless New York lawyer and political fixer, who was gay. During Studio 54’s heyday, Trump relished making cameos. In 2024, Trump quietly allowed a gay wedding at Mar-a-Lago, although he didn’t attend.

But Trump has also been willing to vilify transgender individuals, especially athletes, for political gain. The ACLU has issued a scathing assessment of Trump’s record on LGBTQ rights, and the Trevor Project, which supports LGBTQ youth, said that outreach to its crisis hotline skyrocketed—a 700 percent increase—the day after he was elected a second time. Jonathan Lovitz, a senior vice president at Human Rights Campaign, wrote to me in an email that LGBTQ+ people helped profoundly shape the culture that Trump experienced while coming of age in New York City. That’s why, he continued, many queer people are offended when Trump engages in certain forms of camp: “Not because it’s tacky (which it is), but because it underscores a deeper contradiction: he wants the benefits of a country and culture that queer people helped create, while advancing policies that make those same people less safe every day.”

Trump’s continued patter about men’s bodies has also drawn attention. As my colleague Marie-Rose Sheinerman and I dug into examples of these corporeal appraisals, we were surprised by their sheer quantity and just how much Trump seems to delight in complimenting other men. He has given the compliment of “handsome” at least 68 times so far in his second term—or 69 times, if we count the two Thanksgiving turkeys he also collectively described as such. He is unapologetic in his preference for Cabinet members and administration officials who seem to come out of “central casting”; he praised Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who is gay, for his Hollywood-worthy bona fides, before appreciatively noting that “under that beautiful exterior is a killer.”

He can almost never resist commenting on the physique of brawny men: “Look at the muscles on this guy!” he said, gazing upon a young cadet while delivering the commencement address at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy last week. Two days later, he took pains to praise the New York Giants quarterback Jaxson Dart, calling him a “beautiful guy” and waxing poetic about his “legs like tree trunks.” And speaking about the golfer Arnold Palmer in 2024, Trump managed to both reassert his preference for women while also remarking on the legend’s masculinity: “I love women, but this guy—this guy—this is a guy that was all man.” (He also noted Palmer’s powerful swing with “stiff-shafted clubs,” and his, um, alleged other assets: “When he took showers with the other pros, they came out of there—they said, Oh my God, that’s unbelievable.”)

[Read: The question that the lawyers representing trans athletes didn’t answer]

Unsurprisingly, late-night hosts and comedians have been eager to tango with Trump’s inner gay. Bransen Gates, an actor and a social-media personality, has become known for his Instagram videos in which he takes snippets of Trump’s speeches and vampishly lip-synchs them—mouth pursed, eyes wide yet coy, finger wagging—under archetypes such as “The straight man speaking at graduation who is ‘definitely not gay’” and “When you have a crush on a guy named Stephen” (Miller, in Trump’s case). In perhaps his best-known video, aptly titled “Tr*mp was born to be a gay man,” Gates reprises Trump’s comments at an October 2020 campaign rally. “I’ll kiss every guy—man and woman, man and woman,” Gates-as-Trump says, complete with sexually suggestive winks, eye rolls, and light shimmies. “Look at that guy, how handsome he is. I’ll kiss him, not—not with a lot of enjoyment, but that’s okay.”

In a March Fox News interview, Trump was asked about the sexuality of Iran’s leader, the sort of highly sensitive question that nearly any other president would have handled with utmost care. Instead, Trump somehow pivoted to how “the Palestinian regime” is bad for gays—“Who are the gays for Palestine?” he mused—and later laughingly noted that one of his rally songs, “Y.M.C.A.,” by the Village People, is considered “the gay national anthem.”

“I did very well with the gay vote, okay?” he told the hosts. (The “gay vote” is a difficult thing to measure, although a variety of polls found that in both the 2020 and 2024 elections, Trump did have some gay support. However, a majority of voters who identified as LGBT preferred his Democratic opponents.)

Paul Baker, the author of Camp!: The Story of the Attitude That Conquered the World, told me over email that when it comes to Trump, making the distinction between camp and campy is important. The latter is the more self-conscious, ironic adoption of camp. But Trump is “the original, pure form—it’s when someone’s behaviour is outrageous, excessive, subversive and unintentionally funny,” he said. “The person doesn’t realise they’re funny or that they’re camp. They’re just being themselves.”

The risk, he continued, is when camp becomes a distraction from the president’s actual policies, such as executive orders and actions that could negatively affect LGBTQ health. Upon returning to office, for instance, Trump rescinded nondiscrimination protections for LGBTQ youth in school, which advocates say could worsen their mental health. “Laugh at him on Instagram all you like, but don’t let that take away oxygen from crucial topics like electoral reform, protecting democracy, gun control, immigration, healthcare and access to education in the US,” Baker concluded in his email to me.

[Read: The YOLO presidency]

Kirchick’s husband, Josef Palermo, was the Kennedy Center’s first curator of visual arts, until he was laid off after Trump took control of the cultural institution. (Palermo forwent a severance agreement to be able to publicly share—including in an essay for The Atlantic—his observations about the decimation of the Kennedy Center under Trump’s leadership.) Before Palermo lost his job last year, the two attended the Kennedy Center Honors, which Trump hosted, and Kirchick discovered that he prefers Trump more as a gala emcee than as a political leader. Kirchick said that Trump was “great” in the role, describing him as “a combination of Joan Rivers and Don Rickles.” He added wistfully: “I wish he could just do that.”

Marie-Rose Sheinerman contributed to this report.

*Illustration sources: Roberto Schmidt / Getty; Christian Rose / Roger Viollet / Getty; Echoes / Redferns / Getty; Jack Robinsonv / Hulton Archive / Getty

Jill Biden Worried Her Husband Was Drugged on Debate Night

2026-05-28T07:56:39-04:00

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As she watched President Biden stumble through the most cringeworthy portion of his disastrous June 2024 debate, First Lady Jill Biden wondered if her husband had unknowingly ingested drugs or was having a medical episode on live television. “Is he short-circuiting?” Jill Biden thought. “Is this a stroke? I felt like we were watching an AI hologram of the man we knew, and the hologram was glitching. Has he been drugged?”

Her mind then wandered to a more personal anxiety, considering how his nonsensical word salads—one of which ended with “we finally beat Medicare”—might implicate her as the person best positioned to know if the man who appeared to disassemble onstage was privately prone to incoherence. “Oh God—will people watching assume this is how he is all the time?” she writes in her new memoir, View From the East Wing, a copy of which The Atlantic obtained ahead of its June 2 release date.

Part of Jill Biden’s goal for writing a book about her four years as first lady, it seems, is to dispel bipartisan accusations that she was a hidden hand covering up her aging husband’s cognitive decline and nudging him to cling to power longer than his mind and body could sustain. As his closest confidant and the person who saw him even when his staff was not around, the former first lady has faced a deluge of conspiracy theories that place her at the center of what critics describe as a grand cover-up. A spokesperson for the Bidens declined to comment.

That Jill Biden felt compelled, in her words, to “set the record straight” highlights how much that presidential debate nearly two years ago—and the ensuing months of political turbulence that led to President Trump’s return to power—continues to reverberate within the Democratic Party. Even as its leaders struggle to find a potent counterattack to Trump’s presidency, this memoir, which resurfaces many moments the party would like to forget, showcases the difficulty Democrats face in closing an embarrassing chapter.

The story of how Biden’s presidency imploded, it seems, is destined to continuously be written and rewritten. View From the East Wing follows books by former Vice President Harris and Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, each of which shed an unflattering light on the president’s condition as he sought reelection and the chaos that erupted after the debate. Last week, the Democratic National Committee released an autopsy report on the 2024 election, highlighting how Biden’s presidency paved the way to Harris’s doomed 107-day campaign and Trump’s resurgence. Trump seems determined to keep Biden in the news as well, mentioning his predecessor almost daily.

But Biden’s book may not deliver the kind of closure the party has been desperately, and repeatedly, seeking. Rather than offering an explosive political tell-all, the former first lady instead focuses on the nuances of navigating the politics of the White House’s East Wing. She describes struggling with the “catch-22” of being first lady, a position in which knowing too little can make you “an embarrassment” and knowing too much can make you seem power hungry. She largely holds back from lashing out against her foes—including those who abandoned Biden after the debate—though at one point she faults former Attorney General Merrick Garland for his handling of the case that resulted in Hunter Biden’s conviction on gun charges. (The president pardoned his son before leaving the White House.) While she writes that a “thought bubble above my head was full of expletives” after Harris attacked her husband over school busing during a June 2019 debate, by 2024, the first lady and vice president were professing their “love” for each other. The book does not dwell much on the current president, though it laments Trump’s destruction of the East Wing, likening it to the slaughter of a “rare and precious animal.”

Jill Biden concedes that her husband, who turned 80 shortly before announcing his reelection bid, “was definitely aging” in office, occasionally failing in his fight against fatigue and the physical demands of the presidency. He apparently battled “excruciating pain most days” from a November 2020 foot injury that never fully healed. She acknowledges that her husband had “privately floated the idea of voluntarily being a one-term, transitional president” during his 2020 campaign and, deep into his presidency, seriously considered whether pursuing a second term would be the right decision. At one point in January 2023, she writes, she “floated a hypothetical” and wondered if the Republicans would “continue to go after our family if you decided not to run?” (Hunter Biden’s struggle with drug addiction and the political liability it created for his father take up a considerable portion of the book.) But the president did not think that was a good reason to forgo a presidential race, she says.

And besides, the president’s political advisers—and his family members—insisted that he needed to run for reelection, pointing to polling showing him as the most formidable Democrat and laying out the stakes for what might happen if Republicans retook the White House.

But Jill Biden vehemently denies that her husband had been showing any signs of senility or dementia that would have foreshadowed such a painful-to-watch debate performance when he stood on the stage with Trump in Atlanta (“The truth was, Joe was not who he was on a day-to-day basis in that debate,” she writes). So what happened? Even nearly two years later, Jill Biden seems to have more questions than answers.

“Nothing explained what I was seeing,” she writes at one point about her husband’s “strangely monochromatic” visage and lackluster performance.

“To this day, I still don’t know what happened. Why wasn’t he making any sense? It was inexplicable to me,” she says elsewhere in the book. Maybe he had rehearsed too much? Maybe he had traveled too much that month? Or was he just ill? The president had seemed exhausted earlier in the day and had told her that he was not feeling too well. Later, after positing that he may have unwittingly taken codeine cough syrup or Ambien to fight off a cold or to help him sleep, Jill Biden seems to rhetorically throw her hands in the air: “I only wish I had the answer.” (You could forgive the reader for wondering, Well, did you ask him?) The first lady writes that she wished she had thought to ask for a blood test after the debate (and also says she suggested the president take a cognitive test to calm doubts, but was overruled by his advisers).

Jill Biden writes that on their bathroom mirror, she would at times leave inspirational messages like “You are my hero” or, on particularly tough days, “Get up, champ. Get up.” Sometimes, she would sneak in messages on policy, relying on her ability to be frank and open with the leader of the free world in ways that others could not. During Israel’s military offensive in Gaza, after an air strike killed seven people working for a humanitarian-aid group, she left a Post-it note on the mirror reading “Net has to stop,” a reference to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Knowing that Biden and Netanyahu would be speaking the following day, she left another note the next morning, which read: “Be strong. Don’t let BN use your goodness.”

That bluntness apparently resurfaced in the moments after the debate. As the president walked off the stage, he whispered to his wife, “I really f**ked up, didn’t I?” she writes. “‘Yes, you did,’ I whispered back.”

‘We Have Not Seen Ugly Yet’

2026-05-27T17:53:47-04:00

Two things are as certain as bluebonnets in spring now that Ken Paxton is the Republican nominee for the Senate in Texas: Democrats have a better-than-usual chance of winning statewide. And the next 23 weeks are going to be hideous.

Paxton’s big win comes days after President Trump stuck his finger into the wind, determined that the incumbent, John Cornyn, was toast, and gave the attorney general his last-minute support. Even though the nearly 28-point margin was surprising, it was probably always going to be Paxton. A runoff tends to attract the hardest of the hard-core—the kind of determined voter who is willing not only to show up to vote in March, but to show up and vote in March, sit through 12 weeks of brutal attack ads, then head back out to the polls in May. The kind of Republican who might argue, as one woman did in Dallas when I spoke with her last week, that Paxton and Trump are bringing masculinity back to the party like Bambi’s father “coming out of the forest with those huge antlers.”

Now that these dutiful Republicans have secured the animated stag of their dreams, they will turn their attention to his general-election opponent: James Talarico, the 37-year-old Democratic state lawmaker and aspiring Presbyterian minister. In some ways, the two men have become avatars for their respective parties, which will spend the next five months ruthlessly attacking each other.

Paxton, a MAGA folk hero, seems even more committed to the movement than Trump himself is. As attorney general, he filed dozens upon dozens of lawsuits against Presidents Obama and Biden, and sued to overturn the 2020 election results. Paxton and Trump happen to share a strikingly similar ethical and legal rap sheet: Both men have been indicted (Paxton’s charges involved securities fraud and were dismissed after he agreed to do community service and take an ethics class); both have been impeached (Paxton was suspended by the Texas House but later acquitted by the Senate); and both have been accused of—and deny—infidelity. (Angela Paxton is now divorcing Ken on “biblical grounds.”)

[Read: Ken Paxton is actually doing this]

Although Talarico doesn’t yet have Paxton’s name recognition, he does have strong youth-pastor energy and, at least for now, the moral high ground. As a faith-forward economic populist, Talarico has a core campaign message of love triumphing over hate, and little guys taking on the billionaires. Republicans know that they’ve got a tough race ahead of them, which is why they’ve already settled on a strategy: make Talarico seem like a weird dude.

Unfortunately for Democrats, Talarico has been more than a little helpful in this effort. In 2021, the state lawmaker said that “God is nonbinary,” a statement that is off-putting to some Christians, not because they believe that God is literally a man but because they can’t fathom why someone would drag God into the earthly debate over gender identity. Talarico has also said that there are six biological sexes and that he supports access to abortion, in part, because God asked for consent when he blessed Mary with the baby Jesus. As a candidate in 2022, he pledged to run a “non-meat campaign,” which was never going to play well in cattle country.

Lately, Talarico has been doing some backtracking. “I know there are two sexes, men and women. I also know there’s a very small percentage of people who have these chromosomal abnormalities, and I believe they deserve to be treated with dignity and respect,” he told CBS this week, adding that there are “some statements that I’ve made that I certainly regret.” Whenever Talarico is accused of being insufficiently pro-meat, his campaign circulates a photo of the candidate gnawing on a turkey leg at the state fair.

Still, both sides have heaps of material to work with. Which is why the next few months promise a total inundation of negative advertising online, and on the airwaves in Texas. Democrats will hammer into voters Paxton’s scandals—and the failures of Republican leadership. “Will Republicans get away with running a superficial attack campaign when Texans are really hurting?” Matt Angle, a state Democratic strategist, told me. “They’ve been in control for 30 years. If something’s broke, they broke it.” Meanwhile, Republicans are already parroting Paxton’s proposed “Tala-freako” and “Low-T Talarico” nicknames. This morning, the Trump adviser Stephen Miller wrote on X that Democrats have nominated their “first transgender senate candidate.” (Talarico is not transgender.) “We have not seen ugly yet,” Vinny Minchillo, a Texas Republican strategist, told me. They’re going to make Talarico “the woke DEI candidate of all woke DEI candidates. And pound him, pound him, pound him.”

The task ahead will be tough for Talarico, who will have to decide when to counter these attacks directly—Define thyself lest ye be defined, as the political maxim goes—and when to remain firmly astride his moral high horse. He will also have to fend off the unprecedented amounts of money that Republicans are pumping into the race in order to protect their fragile Senate majority. Already, Paxton has secured the backing of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, which initially endorsed Cornyn and which, last night, dutifully scrubbed its website of all anti-Paxton press releases and ads.

Yet for Talarico, hope remains. No Texan needs reminding that inflation is high, or that the war in Iran has the whole world on edge and gas prices rising. Trump’s polling is bad, and among Texans, Talarico has higher favorability numbers than both Paxton and the president. In what might end up being a particularly good year for Democrats, victory is not only possible but achievable.

Still, if Democrats have done one thing well in Texas over the past 30 years, it’s dash hopes. The last time a Democrat came close to winning statewide in Texas was in 2018. Back then, Senator Ted Cruz beat Beto O’Rourke by roughly 215,000 votes. This time, the figure that Republicans have their eye on is 778,139, or the number of Texans who voted in the March GOP primary but who were not excited enough about either Republican candidate to vote in the runoff. A drop in turnout was expected. But a 36 percent decline “mirrors a lack of Republican enthusiasm we’ve seen in other states,” Minchillo said. For Texas Republicans, that number is “distressing.”

Last night on Truth Social, Trump congratulated Paxton and promised to hold a few rallies to help gin up some excitement. “Texas, this will be FUN!” the president teased. We’ll see.

Why Trump Lost

2026-05-24T10:45:37-04:00

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The first surprising thing about President Trump’s impending defeat in the 2026 Iran war is that he already fought and won a successful war against Iran last year. In June 2025, U.S. and Israeli air strikes badly damaged the Iranian nuclear program in 12 days of bombardment. Exactly how badly remains controversial. But they didn’t do nothing. If Trump had quit while ahead, he could have banked his gains from last June as a solid if imperfect win.

The second surprising thing about Trump’s impending defeat is that he does not seem to have cared at all about the only evident reason to resume fighting in 2026: the Iranian people’s rebellion against their brutal oppressors. Trump has never given any evidence of caring about Iranian democracy or human rights. He promised the Iranian people “Help is on the way” on January 13, but military operations did not commence until thousands were dead and the rebellion was already effectively crushed. During military operations, Trump made clear that he sought a deal with the existing regime. He made no effort to support or cooperate with Iranian dissidents before, during, or after the uprising.

The third surprising thing about Trump’s impending defeat is that even he himself seems never to have understood why he went back to war against Iran. What exactly did he think he would achieve? He kept saying that he wanted to ensure that Iran never developed a nuclear weapon. He also insisted that he had effectively prevented it from doing so in August. He seemed genuinely to believe that claim. If so, why resume the fighting? If, however, those words were wrong, then why not simply hit the nuclear sites again? Why the need for this bigger war?

Trump started the February 28 war for reasons of personality, not strategy. He is on his way to losing the war for the same reasons of personality.

Trump is arrogant. Think how often Trump mocks his predecessors as “dumb” and praises himself as “smart.” Those predecessors, from Jimmy Carter through Ronald Reagan to Joe Biden, all had to ponder military responses to Iranian terrorism and aggression. They all ultimately decided not to wage a major war against Iranian national territory. Among the prime deterrents to action: the Strait of Hormuz problem. Trump apparently decided that a problem that was too hard for everybody else would magically disappear for him, because he is tough and growls in his official photographs.

Trump is reckless. Trump is not a plan-ahead guy. He plunges into desperate adventures without any clear endgame in mind. What really was Trump’s plan on January 6, 2021? After Mike Pence was seized by rioters and forced at gunpoint to recite the magic words Trump wanted him to say, what was supposed to happen then? The 81 million American majority who’d voted against Trump in 2020 would submit? The military, CIA, and FBI would follow blatantly illegal orders? In 2021, Trump provoked violence and hoped it would all somehow work out. He followed the same approach again in 2026.

Trump hates procedure. A lot of the apparatus of the modern presidency exists to force confrontations with unwelcome realities. Cabinet officers are confirmed by the Senate to assure the country that major offices are filled by people of character and competence. The National Security Council is supposed to process challenging data to ensure that the president receives necessary information. But to run the Department of Defense, Trump nominated and the Senate approved Pete Hegseth. Instead of choosing a national security adviser to replace Mike Waltz after Waltz’s resignation on May 1, 2025, Trump tapped Secretary of State Marco Rubio to take on the role. But to double up that particular job dooms the job not to be done at all, especially because Trump has shriveled the NSC’s staff and subjected it to loyalty tests demanded by his most screwball supporters.

Trump is panicky. For all his bluster and boasting, Trump cannot take the heat. Presidents who believe in their decisions ride out bad polls. Trump panics and reverses course. Trump has been signaling since mid-March that he wants an end to the Iran war at almost any price. The Iranians have read those signals. For all the damage the U.S. military inflicted on Iran, the Iranians seem to have gambled that they could outlast Trump. They’ve been proven right.

Trump is gullible. As Trump’s present secretary of state observed back in 2016, Trump is most fundamentally a con artist. But Trump is often a self-defeating con artist who falls victim to his own con. Trump demanded “unconditional surrender” from Iran. Instead, he’s negotiating an exit that concedes most of Iran’s demands and leaves Iran in a more dominant position over Persian Gulf oil traffic than it occupied before the war. But Trump seems genuinely to have convinced himself that he’s won a mighty victory, and he seems truly baffled that others decline to endorse his flim-flam.

Trump can’t lead. Trump’s method of governance is command. He cannot work across party lines, and he cannot speak to any part of the American nation beyond his MAGA base. A war leader, however, must be a national leader. War imposes costly sacrifices. Leaders who take the nation to war must explain those costs and inspire those sacrifices. Trump simply cannot do any of that work, and he has no idea how it could be done.

For three years in his first term, Trump benefited from the strong economy that he inherited. Then the pandemic struck, and his first instinct was to hunt for someone to blame. In this second presidency, his main work has been spectacular self-enrichment, even as the economy has sagged under the weight of his catastrophic trade wars. He made no case for an Iran war to the public and never sought approval by Congress. There are some Iran hawks on the Democratic side, especially in the Senate. Trump never tried to ally with them.

Trump’s vision of the presidency is authoritarian and kleptocratic: Issue orders, grab money, luxuriate in flattery, erect monuments to oneself. That’s no way to lead a nation through the hazards and difficulties of war. Now the war is ending on disadvantageous terms for the United States. Trump’s old methods will be turned to a new task: trying to deceive the American people and the world into believing that the war he lost was really a big win, the biggest ever, so big you cannot believe it. He’s likely to discover that, indeed, nobody does believe it.

Out of the Gerrymandering Darkness, a New Hope for Reform

2026-05-23T06:00:00-04:00

Representatives Brian Fitzpatrick and Tom Suozzi occupy a lonely space in Congress. Their respective parties—Fitzpatrick is a Republican from Pennsylvania, Suozzi a Democrat from New York—are waging a nationwide gerrymandering fight that neither wants any part in. With the seat-for-seat battle expanding to new states seemingly by the day, Fitzpatrick and Suozzi are calling for a truce—if only anyone would listen.

“There’s got to be people that come to the table and agree that it’s in the best interest of our nation to not do this, that it’s a race to the bottom,” Fitzpatrick told me.

National leaders in both parties, however, are in no mood for peace. President Trump has directed Republicans to seize every opportunity to draw House seats in their favor, in hope that the GOP can create a buffer big enough to overcome the president’s sagging poll numbers in the midterm elections this fall. The Supreme Court’s decision to weaken the Voting Rights Act last month freed Republicans to redistrict even more aggressively across the Deep South, building on the party’s gains in Texas and a handful of other states last fall.

Democrats, who hit back in California but lost a court fight in Virginia, have vowed their own escalation in blue states next year. “We’re going to win in November,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries vowed to reporters last week, before adopting a bit of fantasy-flick hyperbole: “And then we’re going to crush their souls as it relates to the extremism that they are trying to unleash on the American people.”

The gerrymandering frenzy will likely extend for at least two more years, which in turn will only exacerbate the polarization and partisanship that has gripped Congress and steadily diminished its standing. “We’ve just made this so bad for our country,” Suozzi told me. “We have got to address this problem, or we’re going to fall further into this spiral, this death spiral.”

Fitzpatrick and Suozzi are co-chairs of the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus, a group that in an ideal world might comprise the entirety of Congress—after all, what else is a legislative body for?—but in these dysfunctional times make up a few dozen lawmakers along the center political axis of both parties. With the House so closely divided over the past decade, the caucus has occasionally exerted influence over policy—when it’s been able to avoid its own issues. I spoke with Fitzpatrick and Suozzi in a joint phone interview earlier this week, during which they told me that the caucus had resolved to make a concerted push against gerrymandering.

Both Fitzpatrick and Suozzi have some incentive to make this stand, as do many of their problem-solving colleagues. Fitzpatrick represents one of just three GOP-held districts that voted for Kamala Harris in 2024, whereas Trump narrowly carried Suozzi’s Long Island constituency. Their purple seats are the kind that both parties target in redistricting, and the two hope that demonstrating their distaste for partisan warfare can help them win crossover voters in November.

[Read: The House of Representatives is turning into the Electoral College]

The Problem Solvers Caucus met inside the Capitol last week to discuss what to do about the redistricting “death spiral,” at a gathering that took place a short walk away from where House Democrats were beginning to plot their next round of revenge on gerrymandering Republicans. The challenge for the Problem Solvers is that they are constrained both by an internal struggle for consensus and by their relatively narrow view of Congress’ power to regulate a practice that’s nearly as old as the republic.

Fitzpatrick joined every other Republican in opposing a Democratic bill in 2022 that would have, among many other things, banned partisan gerrymandering nationwide and forced states to use independent redistricting commissions to draw House maps. Although he supports independent commissions, he told me that Congress couldn’t require their use. Instead, he said, Congress would have to use its funding power to encourage political reforms such as nonpartisan redistricting and open primaries—another popular idea to combat polarization. But the caucus has yet to endorse even that proposal. “We haven’t come to a decision as to what we’re going to advocate for yet,” Suozzi told me when I asked what the caucus planned to do about gerrymandering. “We’ve come to a decision that it’s a problem.”

Outside Congress, election reformers are even glummer about the gerrymandering race, but they have far grander ideas about how to fix the nation’s politics. A few of them think—or at least hope—that Americans will grow so infuriated by the whole mess that a new opportunity for change will emerge.

In early 2020, the political scientist Lee Drutman published a book in which he decried the “doom loop” created by the nation’s two major parties. Seven years later, he says that the system is now even “doomier and loopier.” He told me that he is not sure how much worse Congress can get. “Things are pretty ugly and pretty nasty and pretty bitter,” Drutman said, “but I guess you should never underestimate how low the floor can go.”

[Read: The fight-club rule on gerrymandering]

Drutman advocates for a system known as proportional representation, in which each House district elects not just one but multiple members determined by the percentage of the vote each party receives. Congress would include representatives from several parties, as opposed to its current configuration of Republicans, Democrats, and a small number of independents who align with one caucus or the other. The idea might seem like a pipe dream, but it has been drawing more discussion in the past few years (including in this magazine). Last week Harris, who is considering another White House bid, mentioned multimember districts during an interview in which she called for the party to hold a “no-bad-ideas brainstorm” to “strengthen democracy” and respond to the gutting of the Voting Rights Act.

The Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais, written by Justice Samuel Alito and joined by five other conservatives, set off a fresh rush by Republican-dominated states to gerrymander in advance of the midterm elections, and threatened to decimate the ranks of Black representatives from the South in Congress. Tennessee eliminated its lone majority-minority district barely a week later, and GOP leaders in both Louisiana and Alabama announced new elections so that they could redraw districts currently held by Black Democrats. (Louisiana suspended a primary election that was already under way to do so.) South Carolina Republicans are now debating whether to carve up the district long held by Representative James Clyburn; in Georgia, Governor Brian Kemp called a special session of the legislature so that the GOP majority—which Democrats hope to displace in November—could redistrict for the 2028 election while the party still holds power in the state.

Drutman said that the Callais ruling could end up being the “hinge point” in the debate over systemic political reform. It was a moment in which “the rules changed,” he said. Aside from proportional representation, Drutman mentioned other ideas that have gained currency in recent years, particularly on the left. They include increasing the size of the House from its current 435 members and expanding the nine-member Supreme Court, along with campaign-finance and ethics reforms.

Democrats considered some of those changes when they last held power in Congress, and Harris mentioned Supreme Court expansion as part of her proposed brainstorm. (She also cited the possibility of statehood for the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico.) As the party seeks to reclaim both the White House and durable congressional majorities over the next few years, it must debate whether to prioritize reforms that will enhance its power or those intended to decrease partisanship in the system as a whole.

The voters who stand to lose the most in the power struggle between Republicans and Democrats are those who don’t register with either party—and who represent the fastest-growing share of the national electorate. In a Gallup poll released earlier this year, 45 percent of respondents identified themselves as independents, the highest percentage Gallup has ever recorded. As the two parties shrink in stature, they are trying to consolidate their power, in part by drawing districts stacked in their favor and also by closing primary elections to independent voters and opposing efforts to open them up. In a gerrymandered district where only voters registered with a party can participate in the primaries, candidates aim to appeal to a small slice of the electorate that tends to be much more partisan than the population as a whole, deepening the divide across the country.

To many reformers, changing primary rules to expand access for independent voters is a more effective way of combatting polarization than farther-reaching proposals such as proportional representation and increasing the size of the House. The parties’ “push to maximize partisan advantage in ways that silence voters will lead to a populist backlash, and I think in that backlash is our opportunity,” Nick Troiano, the executive director of Unite America, a group that opposes closed-party primaries, told me.

Unite America invested heavily in statewide ballot initiatives to replicate Alaska’s unique voting system, in which four candidates advance from a nonpartisan primary to a general election run on ranked-choice voting. The campaigns lost nearly everywhere they were on the ballot in 2024, but Troiano thinks that had they been before voters this year, in the midst of this redistricting brawl, they might have fared better. “I don’t think that strategy was a failure. I think the timing was off,” he said.

The trouble for any election reform in this hyperpartisan moment is that as soon as one party—or even a prominent party leader, such as Harris—takes a liking to a proposal, the other party becomes more skeptical of the idea. (Ranked-choice voting, which for a while enjoyed bipartisan appeal, fell victim to this dynamic after its adoption in Maine coincided with Democratic victories.)

Open primaries face resistance among leaders of both parties because the model explicitly challenges their dominance. In California, top Democrats have never loved the state’s voter-approved nonpartisan primary, and the risk that the party might get shut out of the runoff election in the governor’s race this November has prompted a new effort to scrap it. Democratic leaders in Colorado and Nevada opposed primary-reform ballot campaigns. Louisiana Republicans ditched the state’s so-called jungle primary in 2024.

But at least a few Republicans are entertaining the idea of open primaries as a partial remedy to polarization and the legislative paralysis it can cause. Fitzpatrick has said that if Pennsylvania had an open primary, he’d run for Congress as an independent rather than as a Republican. A closed primary, he told me, effectively disenfranchises more than one-third of voters. “As a matter of justice, it’s wrong,” Fitzpatrick said. “And it has a corrosive effect on the House floor. You can tell the people who live in closed-primary states. They conduct themselves very differently.” (Fitzpatrick ran unopposed in his primary on Tuesday, but his occasional breaks with Trump have attracted the president’s attention. “He likes voting against Trump,” the president told Fox News’s Jacqui Heinrich, who is engaged to Fitzpatrick. “You know what happens with that? It doesn’t work out well.”)

[Listen: America has always had a gerrymandering problem. This is new.]

Garret Graves, a Republican from Louisiana who served in the House for a decade until last year before an earlier round of redistricting split up his district, shared a similar perspective on closed primaries. “There were hundreds of times where I had members of Congress, both Democrats and Republicans, who said to me, in summary, I know this vote is the right thing to do, but I can’t do it, because I’ll get primaried,” Graves told me. Closed primaries, he said, “distort democracy. They distort free markets.”

Yet Graves was looking not to his former colleagues in the House but to the public and even the courts for a solution. He suggested that a lawsuit challenging closed primaries as unfairly disenfranchising voters could succeed. “I would really welcome something like that,” Graves said. As for Congress, he seemed to think that the chances it would act on closed primaries were as small as the likelihood that the parties would lay down their arms on gerrymandering anytime soon. “I have zero hope,” Graves said.

What Is Hunter Biden Doing?

2026-05-22T17:34:00-04:00

It was something of a political hall of mirrors: Hunter Biden arriving at Candace Owens’s house, sitting in a book-filled room decorated with a crucifix and orchids in the shape of a heart, holding a coffee cup labeled conspiracy theorist, and answering a range of questions from a podcast host who has called him “an alleged sex predator” and “A DEGENERATE THAT SHOULD BE IN PRISON” who comes from a “SCUM family.” The first question: “The cocaine that was found at the White House, was it yours?”

To say this was an unusual pairing is an understatement. To claim it was Frost/Nixon is an overstatement. But it said something about modern-day politics—and the weirdness of online culture—that the son of a former Democratic president and a right-wing podcaster were sitting there together, conversing for nearly two hours, finding common ground on being misunderstood, on being targeted by a powerful president, and on questioning the circumstances of Charlie Kirk’s death and whether the assassination attempts against Donald Trump were staged.

Owens apologized for treating Biden like “a caricature” and joining the “political machine” that attacked him during one of the lowest moments of his life (“I’m really sorry that I contributed to that. Like, I just feel really shitty”). He lavished her with praise (“You’re probably the most effective communicator I’ve ever heard behind the microphone”). She encouraged him to spend time in confession (“Don’t worry,” he responded, “I’ve been to confession”), and he giddily proposed that they go see Pope Leo XIV together: “For real, let’s go to the Vatican.” Biden offered book recommendations (“Have you ever read The Devil’s Chessboard?”), and Owens complimented his intelligence (“Not to be rude, but I thought you were dumb”).

Much of the conversation focused on Biden’s recovery story, human details of which Owens seemed largely unaware. “I just didn’t even consider: He’s a crackhead. That’s actually a very relatable thing,” she said at one point. (Never mind that in December 2024 she devoted a segment to President Biden pardoning his son, in which she mentioned “crack” more than two dozen times over about 20 minutes.) To anyone who has read Hunter Biden’s 2021 memoir, followed his federal court cases, or heard him in previous interviews, there were a lot of familiar themes: The guy who has long had addiction issues, and been in and out of rehab through much of his adult life. The guy who spiraled further after his brother died. The guy who watched as compromising photos, his private text messages, and more than a decade of emails became public fodder and complicated his dad’s campaign and presidency. “It forced me into a choice,” he said. “And the choice was: Do I get out of bed and live, or do I die? And it became that much of a dichotomy. And I chose to live, and it wasn’t easy.”

Biden has spent years living under Republican attacks. Owens herself led many of them alongside other fixtures of the hard right. Former Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene once, during a congressional hearing, held up graphic images of Biden engaged in sex acts. Yet earlier this week, Greene wrote on social media, “I am so interested in this interview. This is what real journalism looks like along with where the political underground of America is moving.” Both Owens and Greene have been repeatedly criticized for making anti-Semitic comments, downplaying the Holocaust, and playing into anti-Jewish tropes.

The most revealing moment came toward the end, as Biden recounted the attacks he faced. “They tore off all my clothes, tarred and feathered me, and put me in the center of town, and said, ‘Look at him.’ And I survived,” he said. Owens locked eyes with him and apologized several times. “Genuinely, I’m so sorry,” she said. “I did partake in just the inhumanity of just Look at this guy at the worst moment of his life, with prostitutes. He’s on crack, he’s on drugs, and we should make fun of him.” Biden began tearing up, wiping his eyes. “For you to say that to me, I truly mean it, just from a purely selfish point of view, means the world. And I truly didn’t come here for that.”

But why was he there? Why did he recently reactivate his account on X? And what’s next for the man many Republicans have loved to hate and many Democrats have hoped would disappear?

I have gotten to know Hunter Biden quite well over the past few years. I spent months in 2021 combing through a copy of his hard drive—the product of an infamous laptop that he allegedly dropped off at a computer-repair shop and never retrieved—and learned way more about him than I cared to. The research produced a number of stories about his business pursuits, about his relationship with Tucker Carlson, and about how he benefited from his family name.

I also wrote about Biden’s attempts to become an artist, along with the ethical concerns his ambitions raised in the White House and the congressional investigations that followed. That all can seem quite quaint now. For some time, Biden has been privately angry about the Trump family and their business pursuits that involve far more money and foreign countries, pose far more conflicts of interest—and get far less scrutiny. That anger burst out in the interview with Owens.

[Read: MAGA’s next top influencer]

“I had two shows and probably sold a total of 20 paintings,” he said. “And you had a problem—not you; well, you too—had a problem with me being this emblem of corruption?” Owens agreed, and said she would forever distance herself from the Trump family and now sees their business pursuits on a far different scale of corruption. “I wish I could go back to the days where I thought, like, Hunter Biden’s art was the most corrupt deal that was done in politics,” she responded.

Owens largely steered clear of the topic of Joe Biden, explaining that it would be “completely demonic” to try to get Hunter to say anything bad about his dad. Not that he would. He views himself as something of a defender of the Biden legacy at a time when so many Democrats have ridiculed the former president for deciding to run for reelection. But Owens did try to get him to address the subject of Kamala Harris, who replaced his dad on the ticket. Biden demurred, saying that he didn’t know her well and that she was always nice to him. “I’m not dodging the question,” Biden said, “but I don’t want to shit on the vice president.”

The free-ranging interview also provided a window into what I’ve long seen as Biden’s willingness to entertain ideas that can seem far-fetched, his deep skepticism of certain parts of the federal government, and a worry over the vindictiveness of the current administration.

Although his father granted a sweeping pardon to him for crimes committed in the past, Biden expressed worry about being framed or targeted by Trump in the future. Before getting on flights, he said that he has a witness watch him pack his bags, afraid that someone might plant drugs. Given his track record, he said, no one would believe that he’s clean and sober.

At one point, Biden asked to keep one of Owens’s trademark coffee mugs (the ones with Conspiracy theorist on them), and they both suggested that the assassination attempts against Trump and the murder of Kirk, a close friend to Owens, could have been staged. They have every right, the pair agreed, to question whether they were. “It’s almost as if they’re just saying, like, eff you,” Biden said of those who dismiss their questions.

[Read: Finally, a Democrat who could shine on Joe Rogan’s show]

“It’s so disrespectful that we’re not even getting good psyops anymore,” Owens responded. “Like, we’re supposed to believe he’s survived four—what are we at, four assassination attempts? The first president that’s ever survived four assassination attempts? They lie to us about things.”

The two also think something else has changed. “There is a meanness. A willingness to adopt very, very un-American tactics against our opponents because it’s become a zero-sum game,” Biden said. “It’s not just, I disagree with you. It’s, You need to be punished. You need to be punished for what you believe.”

As to Owens’s first question about the cocaine found at the White House in July 2023—which, at the time, spawned its own conspiracy theories—Biden said it most certainly wasn’t his. He’s been sober, he said, since June 1, 2019. “I’m an easy target. And understandably so. I’ve been, I think, probably the most famous addict—and famous person, because of the grace of God, in recovery.”

Ken Paxton Is Actually Doing This

2026-05-22T10:59:51-04:00

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President Trump took 11 weeks to choose between Senator John Cornyn and State Attorney General Ken Paxton in the Texas Senate primary runoff—so long that most people figured he’d never actually decide. Which is why, when Trump finally endorsed Paxton on Tuesday, the news hit a crowd of Republican retirees at a Tex-Mex restaurant like manna from the MAGA heavens.

Paxton was due that day for a meet-and-greet at Matt’s Rancho Martinez in Allen, but he was running late. Suddenly, the sound system, which had been vibrating gently with a selection of the Country Top 40, began blasting “Y.M.C.A.” People read Trump’s Truth Social post aloud from their phones and waved their arms in time with the president’s unofficial anthem. A man near me with slicked-back hair shouted into his phone, “We did it!” And by the time the next song came on—Thunderstruck! Ahh-ahh!—waiters were circulating with trays of free margaritas. “I have chills!” one elderly woman told me happily. Another lifted her plastic cup to the sky and shouted over the din, “What a time to be alive!”

It really is. Donald Trump is a historically unpopular politician. Gas prices, high inflation, and the war with Iran have all systems flashing fire-engine red for Republicans in November. Yet here was the president, throwing his political weight behind Paxton—a man who has been indicted, impeached, and allegedly unfaithful to his wife. In Washington, D.C., Senate Republicans were apoplectic at the president’s casual betrayal of one of their own. But here at the Rancho, an endorsement from Trump was welcomed like a hug from Oprah or the title of “Sole Survivor,” an American prize of inestimable value. These Texas Republicans love their attorney general the way that they love Trump: wholeheartedly, with no questions asked.

By choosing Paxton, the president is rewarding his—and his base’s—unwavering devotion. He is likely also guaranteeing Paxton a primary victory over Cornyn. And in so doing, Trump may have cemented a set of very difficult circumstances for his party. If Paxton wins on Tuesday, Democrats will probably be better positioned to win statewide in Texas than they’ve been in the past 40 years.

In the beginning, there was a pen. A $1,000 Montblanc, to be specific, the writing instrument of choice for celebrities, heads of state, and other kinds of people who recognize the cultural cachet of a customizable gold nib. Paxton apparently knows a good pen when he sees one, and in 2013, then–State Senator Paxton did see one—next to a metal detector at the Collin County Courthouse, where a fellow attorney had accidentally left it behind. Paxton picked it up and pocketed it. Later, after a call from an officer, Paxton returned the pen to its rightful owner; it had been a misunderstanding, a simple mistake, a Paxton spokesperson said. But that didn’t stop the ads. “This is Attorney General Ken Paxton, rummaging through the metal-detector trays and stealing that $1,000 pen,” the narrator says in one from 2018.

Texas hadn’t seen anything yet.

Over the next decade, Paxton would build a rap sheet of legal and ethical entanglements so long and complex that it is difficult to quickly sum up. I’ll try: In 2015, his first year as attorney general, Paxton was charged with defrauding investors in a tech company. (The charges were dismissed after Paxton agreed to do community service and take an ethics class.) In 2020, some of Paxton’s aides reported their boss to the FBI, accusing him of using his office to benefit a particular donor; Paxton later fired those staffers, who sued, alleging retaliation. (The FBI investigated Paxton, but the Justice Department ultimately declined to prosecute. A judge did find that the attorney general had violated the state Whistleblower Act, and Texas paid the aides $6.6 million.) In late 2020, Paxton became a star player in Trump’s “Stop the Steal” attempt to overturn the results of the presidential election, by suing to invalidate the results in four states that Joe Biden won.

By 2023, Paxton was the subject of a full-blown impeachment investigation based in part on the above allegations. Ultimately, the Texas House, including the majority of Republicans, voted to impeach him. Paxton was eventually acquitted by the Senate, with Trump’s help. But during the Senate trial, sordid details about his personal life spilled out, including witness testimony that Paxton had cheated on his wife, State Senator Angela Paxton. Later, in 2025, Angela announced that she was divorcing Paxton on “biblical grounds,” which is the Baptist way of saying that Ken was at it again. (Paxton has denied allegations of an affair.)

Despite all of this, Paxton continues to win. He’s been reelected twice since 2014, serving 11 years as attorney general. Cornyn has run attack ads, but the rushing river of Paxton controversies is tough to channel. Earlier this year, the Cornyn campaign released a six-minute ad unpacking all of Paxton’s corruption allegations that no voter could reasonably be expected to sit through. Later, the campaign tried a different approach, publishing an AI-generated spot centered on Paxton’s alleged infidelity that was both hard to follow and painfully campy.

Ask any Paxton supporter what they make of these accusations, and they will usually reply with some version of “Fake news!” or “He who is without sin can cast the first stone.” Many of them simply seem exasperated. “Who cares?” a man named Eric told me in Allen. “We’ve got bigger fish to fry!” The truth is that grassroots conservatives in Texas stand by Paxton because he has consistently stuck by them. By the time Trump entered the White House, Paxton had already positioned himself as an enemy of the establishment, a warrior against the deep state. As attorney general, he sued the Obama administration more than a dozen times, with mixed success; later, he filed more than 100 lawsuits against the Biden administration. (Both of these facts are applause lines in Paxton’s stump speech.)

As attorney general, Paxton sues like he breathes. This month, he won a $10 million settlement from the Texas Children’s Hospital that required it to stop gender-transition surgeries for minors. He also ordered Texas public schools to show proof that they were displaying copies of the Ten Commandments in classrooms, which, considering the quantity and credibility of all the allegations against him, is a bit like the fox giving the henhouse a lesson on etiquette.

Paxton’s superpower is that he is highly adaptable to the changing dynamics of his party and, like the president, appears to be completely lacking in shame. He has always simply “ignored electability as a concern,” Brandon Rottinghaus, a political-science professor at the University of Houston, told me. “He has no brakes.”

Voters I interviewed proudly made the same comparison. People thought Trump couldn’t win in 2016, a man named Doug Snyder told me after writing a $1,000 check for Paxton in Dallas. “Guess what? We’ve got the hats. And we’ve been to Mar-a-Lago,” he said.

Politics needs more leaders like Paxton and Trump, Diane Truitt told me at the same event—alpha males, she elaborated, like Bambi’s dad “coming out of the forest with those huge antlers.”

Which brings us, as always, back to Trump. Senate Republicans had urged the president to endorse Cornyn, who has been in the Senate for 23 years, and whose white-haired politesse evokes a bygone congressional era. Last week, in an apparently desperate effort to secure Trump’s affections, Cornyn tried to rename a highway after him. But Trump was not to be swayed. “John Cornyn is a good man, and I worked well with him, but he was not supportive of me when times were tough,” the president wrote on Truth Social.

Paxton’s supporters can rattle off Cornyn’s sins without even pausing to think: He was slow to endorse Trump in 2016, and wasn’t enthusiastic enough about Trump’s efforts to build the border wall. Worse, he voted with Democrats to pass a gun-control package after the 2022 school shooting in Uvalde. He is, in short, a RINO, or Republican in Name Only. Paxton’s advertising campaign against Cornyn has been ugly. This month, the attorney general put out an ad arguing that the incumbent senator supports “Muslim mass immigration” and featuring Cornyn saying “Inshallah.” (“Ken Paxton has never said anything in Arabic,” a spokesperson for Paxton told me.)

Next week’s primary will be close, but Trump’s endorsement will probably give Paxton the edge. Whichever man wins will go up against James Talarico, a baby-faced state lawmaker and Presbyterian seminarian whose campaign has centered on faith and economic populism. Talarico is, in some ways, eminently attackable: He has said, for example, that “God is nonbinary” and argued that opposition to abortion isn’t rooted in scripture. Paxton is already workshopping nicknames for him, including “Six-Gender Jimmy” and “Low-T Talarico.”

But many Texas political observers and strategists believe that Cornyn would be better-positioned than Paxton to beat Talarico in November, given Cornyn’s ability to fundraise and his palatability among general-election voters. Especially in a year when the political environment seems so favorable to Democrats, running someone as controversial as Paxton, they argue, would be risky. The Cook Political Report has already said that if the attorney general wins next week, “Texas would move into a fully competitive race.”

This is, of course, the outcome that many Republicans dread most: that Paxton will be unable to win over the moderate Republican and independent voters he’ll need to succeed in November—and that Texas will make Talarico the first Democratic senator it’s elected since 1988. If Paxton is the nominee, “we’re in deep kimchi, which is Korean for ‘shit,’” Jerry Patterson, a Republican, former Texas land commissioner, and Cornyn supporter, told me. (Patterson is evidently not a fermented-vegetable fan.) “We’ve excited a new group of voters,” he added, referring to Trump and Paxton supporters, “and now we’re paying the price for it.”

At least for now, the voters Patterson is talking about seem to exist in an alternate reality—a place where Donald Trump’s endorsement can only be a good thing, where MAGA reigns and margaritas abound. “I don’t know where they’re getting those numbers from,” a woman named Mary told me in Allen, when I asked about the president’s dwindling national popularity. At the Rancho, voters don’t see Ken Paxton as an electoral liability any more than they believe that Joe Biden won the 2020 election fair and square. For them, November is looking particularly bright.

Two Futures for the American Left

2026-05-22T07:00:00-04:00

In a spat between Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Marjorie Taylor Greene, which side would American leftists take? Until recently, this might have sounded like a ludicrous question. By any measure, AOC is one of America’s most left-wing politicians. Greene is a self-described Christian nationalist who once belonged to the right-wing Freedom Caucus.

But two weeks ago, AOC described Greene as “a proven bigot and anti-Semite” who shouldn’t be trusted, and many American leftists flocked to Greene’s corner, condemning AOC for her comments. They included the activist Cenk Uygur, the journalists Glenn Greenwald and Ryan Grim, the Palestinian writers Susan Abulhawa and Mohammed el-Kurd, and the Democratic strategist Peter Daou, to name a few.

The newfound love for Greene on the left is explained primarily by one factor: Israel. MTG has changed sides on the issue. In the past she evinced strong support for “our ally Israel,” criticized AOC on the grounds that the representative “hates Israel,” and complained about “Israel-hating radicals.” Now Greene has broken with Donald Trump and come to condemn the “genocide in Gaza.”

Greene hasn’t become more tolerant: She greeted the election of Zohran Mamdani, New York’s first Muslim mayor, last year with an X post that showed the Statue of Liberty in a burka. And she hasn’t abandoned conspiracism: Just last week, with regard to COVID-19, she claimed that the pharmaceutical company Moderna had helped “manipulate the virus (bioweapon), make the vaccine (poison), and then make the profits.”

[Yair Rosenberg: Four simple questions for Marjorie Taylor Greene]

But Israel tops all concerns for some leftists, so Greene’s reversal on the issue is enough to win their support, and AOC’s refusal to embrace her is seen as a counterproductive purity test. Uygur, for instance, claimed that AOC had done “exactly what Israeli supporters want—split the anti-war movement and critics of Israel’s genocide.”

The AOC-MTG dustup is not really about how big a tent the American left should erect, however. It’s not even about whether left-wingers should occasionally collaborate with those on the right. Rather, it presents a choice between two irreconcilable futures for the leftist movement itself.

One of these two visions involves building on America’s liberal tradition while attempting to push it toward democratic socialism. This approach has a long history in the United States. In the late 1930s, the Communist Party gave vociferous support to Franklin D. Roosevelt even while recruiting thousands of people to its own ranks. The Port Huron Statement of 1962—the defining document of the American New Left—called for the movement to “include liberals and socialists, the former for their relevance, the latter for their sense of thoroughgoing reforms in the system.”

Institutionally and electorally, this version of the left relies on a grand coalition of trade unions and civil-rights groups advancing the rights of women and Black Americans—in other words, the historic constituency of the post-1970s Democratic Party. It would work to gain back the working-class votes that the party has lost in recent years.

Such a path is essentially that of Bernie Sanders, who has managed to both oppose the two-party system and make himself a core part of the Democratic Party, occupying top positions and helping shape its platform. AOC has made similar choices: She’s stayed on good terms with the Democratic leadership, even while being enormously popular within the country’s largest leftist organization, the Democratic Socialists of America.

The alternative to this vision for the left is very different. It envisages a future anchored in populist anti-elitism rather than in defined values or political traditions. It would unite those angry at “the system,” including by opposing the post-1945 world order and liberalism itself, in search of an alliance of the far left and the far right. Hence Greenwald, once on the left, now makes common cause with his right-wing counterparts, such as Alex Jones and Candace Owens. A popular pro-Palestinian account on X endorsed both a leftist Democratic-primary candidate in Michigan and Dan Bilzerian, a Holocaust denier who is running for Congress in Florida. As an emotional wedge issue, Israel is ideal for this trans-spectrum populism. Those on the left embrace hostility toward Israel as an anti-imperialist cause, while those on the right advocate an American nationalism suspicious of entanglements abroad, such as the steadfast U.S. support for Israel.

Some of the responses to AOC’s remarks about MTG made clear that her critics weren’t just suggesting that she tactically align with Greene, but that they preferred Greene’s politics to AOC’s, especially on Israel. Daou, for instance, averred that Greene had “far more intellectual honesty” and “far more courage on the defining moral issue of our time,” namely, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Abulhawa, too, asserted that for her, “as a leftie,” Greene had “more credibility and honor” on that issue. In fact, AOC has one of the most pro-Palestinian records in Congress. But the populist wing of the left distrusts her commitment largely because of her association with the Democratic Party establishment. Greene, since her rift with Trump, can be cast as an outsider.

The writer Sohrab Ahmari, who combines Catholic conservative social values with populist economic views, recently wrote about AOC’s criticism of Greene in the British magazine UnHerd. He called on AOC to view society as divided into two camps—underdogs versus those in power—and to mobilize the former against the latter.

But this kind of populism does not have a track record of success for the left. Perhaps the most significant force to have tried it is the Spanish party Podemos, founded in 2014, which attempted to ignite a left-right groundswell against an ill-defined establishment that it called “the caste.” But this message didn’t resonate with Spanish voters. No grand populist coalition came to be; instead, Podemos wound up allying with the Socialist and Communist Parties, and it currently backs Spain’s Socialist-led government.

[David Frum: The new blood libel]

Populism has, at the same time, proved stunningly successful on the right. And as far-right populist parties consolidate power in one country after another, many on the global left find themselves drawn to join them in a shared anti-liberalism. Last year, Perry Anderson, the grand old theorist of the British New Left, offered an account of populism that strongly suggested that its purveyors on the right and left could pursue a common agenda.

But a far left that put aside its significant differences with the far right to unite over a joint opposition to “the system” and obsession with Israel would no longer be recognizable. It would be forced to abandon or heavily de-emphasize defining values, such as gender equality, anti-racism, and the need for action on climate change, without necessarily finding common ground with the right on its economic agenda.

This is thus a struggle over the American left’s identity. The 2010s, following the 2008 global financial crisis, gave rise to anti-establishment forces across the world. In the U.S., these included both the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street. The former’s success eventually transformed the Republican Party and brought about the Trump presidency. The left, in turn, has done much to transform the Democratic Party: Despite losing two primaries in 2016 and 2020, Sanders, once a lonely voice on the fringe, has become a major force, and some polls show AOC leading among potential Democratic candidates for president in 2028. A DSA member is now mayor of America’s largest city.

But the American left must choose. It can help transform the Democratic Party into a broad liberal-socialist coalition that encompasses the politics of Sanders and AOC. Or it can try to compete for the right’s populist voters by dissolving its political and historical identity into an unrecognizable mash of anti-elite anger. In the process, it will become ever more like Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Homeland Security’s Plan to Squeeze International Flights

2026-05-21T13:33:00-04:00

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In early April, shortly after Markwayne Mullin took over the Department of Homeland Security, he floated an idea on Fox News that wasn’t taken seriously; it sounded, in fact, like a proposal from someone very new on the job: Mullin threatened to cut federal screening of international passengers and cargo at airports in cities with “sanctuary” policies, which limit cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Such a move would trigger flight cancellations to airports in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and other major cities and force airlines to reroute to other destinations. Mullin’s proposal seemed more like a wild swing than a real plan.

The new secretary is pushing forward anyway. Last Wednesday, Mullin convened a small group of airline and travel-industry executives at DHS headquarters in Washington and told them he may reduce Customs and Border Protection staffing at major airports that serve sanctuary jurisdictions. Mullin told the executives the locations could include Portland International Airport, in Oregon; New York City–area airports such as John F. Kennedy International Airport and Newark Liberty International Airport; and Washington Dulles International Airport, according to two people with knowledge of the discussion who were not authorized to speak publicly. Mullin did not indicate when DHS would begin the pullback, but it would likely occur sometime after the United States finishes hosting the World Cup in July, the two people told me.

Travel executives are alarmed, and have told DHS that international travelers and cargo cannot be easily routed elsewhere, these people said. The disruption would cause chaos in major U.S. airports and inflict significant economic damage beyond the cities Mullin is seeking to pressure, executives have told the department. “The message was this is a real proposal that is being considered by the administration,” one of the people with knowledge of the meeting told me, calling the potential impact on the airline industry “devastating.”

When Mullin first mentioned the idea during the interview on Fox News, he described it as a creative way to pressure the cities to comply with ICE. The Trump administration wants access to city and county jails so ICE officers can take custody of potential deportees before they are released. “If they’re a sanctuary city and they’re receiving international flights, and we’re asking them to partner with us at the airport, but once they walk out of the airport, they’re not going to enforce immigration policy—maybe we need to have a really hard look at that,” Mullin said. “I’m going to have to be forced to make hard decisions.”

Mullin’s proposal appears to reflect a thin grasp of global-travel logistics, as well as an inflated sense of the government’s ability to impose economic pain on specific cities, according to industry executives and former DHS officials I spoke with. The U.S. airports where international travelers and cargo first arrive are often not their final destination. A German business traveler flying into JFK may be en route to a meeting in Cincinnati. A Korean family landing at Los Angeles International Airport could be headed for Disney World. The proportion of economic pain imposed on sanctuary cities might be relatively small compared with the wider ripple effects on the U.S. travel industry.

“If you thought the economy was bad with Trump’s war driving prices at the pump up … just wait until international travel is halted at some of the busiest airports in the world,” California Governor Gavin Newsom’s press account posted to X after Mullin first mentioned the proposal. “Talk about a stupid idea.”

DHS declined to respond to questions about Mullin’s meeting with the travel executives, instead pointing me to his interview with Fox News six weeks ago. One senior administration official told me no decision on the airport plan has been made, but DHS is looking at several ways to gain more leverage over sanctuary cities. Those options could include curbing federal benefits programs for legal immigrants through U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, such as green-card processing or citizenship naturalizations. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe the internal discussions, said those options remain preliminary.

Mullin and other administration officials have been looking for new ways to revive the mass-deportation campaign President Trump promised in 2024. The administration last year tried pressuring sanctuary cities—including Los Angeles, Chicago, and Minneapolis—by flooding their streets with thousands of Border Patrol agents and ICE officers. That phase of the campaign came to an end, at least for now, after the killing of two protesters in Minneapolis, Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

Since then the administration has been trying to shift attention away from ICE; Mullin told lawmakers during his confirmation hearing in March that he didn’t want DHS in the headlines every day. Greg Bovino, the brash Border Patrol commander who led the roving crackdown, was removed from the job and has now retired. Trump ousted his first DHS secretary this term, Kristi Noem, in March and replaced her with Mullin. Tom Homan, the White House border czar, has been mentoring Mullin on ICE operations and immigration politics. From the moment Trump sent Homan to defuse public anger in Minneapolis, the border czar has sought to shift blame to sanctuary policies and insisted that cooperation with ICE is urgent for public safety.

Homan has not been able to shield himself, or Mullin, from attacks by immigration hard-liners on the right—including Bovino—who say the administration has backed off the president’s mass-deportation promises. ICE statistics show arrests and deportations are down slightly since January. Homan has blamed the 76-day DHS-funding shutdown this spring. Both he and Mullin say ICE is taking a smarter, more targeted approach that prioritizes violent criminals and public-safety threats over mass roundups.

[Read: Kristi Noem is gone. Now mass deportations can really begin.]

Getting more cooperation from sanctuary cities, even on a limited basis, would amount to a political win for Mullin and Homan. Trump officials are suing many of these cities in federal court and have threatened to withhold federal grants, but Mullin’s airport proposal goes a step further, enlisting the travel industry in the pressure campaign.

John Rose, a risk analyst and consultant for the travel company Altour, told me he was struggling to understand how Mullin’s proposal would work. “It doesn’t really give the government a lot of leverage over those cities,” Rose said. “It hurts the airlines. It hurts the airports. But I don’t know if it’ll put a lot of pressure on the cities.”

Rose told me it would not be a simple matter for an airline to shift its international flights to airports in Texas or Florida or another non-sanctuary destination. Those locations have neither the capacity nor the personnel to absorb much traffic from large airports such as JFK and LAX. “There are only so many gates. There are only so many connection-availability options possible for travelers,” Rose said.

The restrictions would hit the tourism industry hard. “If travelers abroad want to go to New York, they won’t be able to fly there, and will have to fly somewhere else first,” Rose told me. But it’s not as if the burden would fall solely on foreign visitors. A traveler living in the New York City metro area would potentially have to fly to another U.S. city in a non-sanctuary jurisdiction just to leave the country.

Another challenge is that most of the country’s largest coastal cities have adopted sanctuary policies, so restricting travel to some might simply benefit the others. If, for example, Mullin began implementing his plan in a relatively small city such as Portland, where local leaders are staunch defenders of sanctuary policies, the flights would need to divert elsewhere. The Portland International Airport has routes to Mexico, Canada, and several European cities, although international flights account for only about 4 percent of operations, according to the most recent data. International travelers traveling to Portland would potentially have to connect through other West Coast hubs such as Seattle, San Francisco, or Los Angeles. But all of those cities are sanctuary jurisdictions, too, and they would end up benefiting at Portland’s expense, by the logic of Mullin’s proposal.

One senior DHS official I am in touch with—who is not authorized to speak to the media—said he remains skeptical Mullin will go forward with the plan. It risks drawing the administration into a new fight over immigration policy with Democrats at a time when the polls show Trump’s approval ratings on the issue have dropped. Trump created havoc at international airports at the beginning of his first term with his “Muslim ban” on travelers from majority-Muslim nations, and more recently, his administration didn’t appear to convince a majority of Americans that long security lines at airports during the congressional shutdown were the fault of Democrats. It may not be eager to produce a third airport debacle.

[Read: 78 Super Bowls]

DHS officials first need to get through the World Cup, which the United States will co-host with Mexico and Canada. DHS says that it is preparing to process as many as 7 million international travelers during the tournament, and Mullin has likened the security responsibilities of hosting the matches to protecting “78 Super Bowls.” There are worries about long waits for screening at airports and land-border crossings for fans traveling back and forth to matches in Canada and Mexico. DHS has been under significant strain as it recovers from the shutdown and scrambles to prepare for the tournament. But even when the World Cup is over, there may not be much appetite to use American airports and international-arrival halls as tools of political leverage.

The Real Reason Thomas Massie Lost

2026-05-20T15:37:26-04:00

Last night, Donald Trump notched the latest victory in his cross-country revenge campaign against political apostates. Ed Gallrein, a Navy SEAL backed by the president, soundly defeated the seven-term representative Thomas Massie in Kentucky’s Fourth Congressional District. The 10-point drubbing followed the triumphs of other Trump-tapped challengers in primaries in Louisiana and Indiana, which effectively ended the careers of local legislators and a sitting U.S. senator who had angered the president.

“This is basic political management of a party,” a senior White House adviser said yesterday, before the Kentucky contest. “You have to keep everybody on the reservation. Occasionally you have to shoot a hostage. The next one is Thomas Massie.” Less than two hours after polls closed, Gallrein was projected as the winner.

Gallrein has an illustrious military résumé, but he has never held elected office and barely campaigned for this one, skipping every debate with Massie. What Gallrein did have was Trump’s endorsement, and that was all that mattered.

This decisive outcome underscores what should already have been obvious: Even as Trump’s overall approval rating hits new lows, his hold on the Republican Party—and specifically its MAGA core—remains absolute. Contrary to months of breathless headlines, the president’s base never deserted him and continues to punish those who defy him. That’s because the MAGA movement is united, not by any particular set of ideological commitments but by commitment to a particular person.

[Russell Berman: Why Thomas Massie thought he was different]

Gallrein’s final online ad was just 15 seconds long, and he never said a word in it. “This is a real hero,” intoned a Trump voice-over. “Ed Gallrein has my complete and total endorsement.” In a video filmed in the Oval Office and posted on the eve of the election, Trump was more explicit about what was really at stake in this clash. “Ed Gallrein, he’s fantastic,” the president declared. “But forget that. Massie is the worst congressman in the history of our country, always voting against Republicans and good values. So get rid of Thomas Massie.” The next day, Republican voters obliged, and the Kentucky representative joined the ranks of Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia as recent casualties of Trump’s perpetual purge of the insufficiently subservient.

That list of victims is long and dates back to Trump’s first term. It includes nearly all GOP members of Congress who voted to impeach the president, as well as the chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, who had the temerity to endorse Ron DeSantis over Trump in 2024. These people were drummed out of politics not because of their ideologies—some were establishment squishes, others hard-right gadflies—but because they violated the one real rule of the MAGA Republican Party: Never cross the boss.

Massie allied with Democrats to oppose Trump’s Middle East policy and his handling of the Epstein files, and voted against Trump’s signature tax-and-immigration bill. Louisiana’s Cassidy voted to convict Trump after the January 6 riot. Indiana’s local Republicans refused to redistrict the state according to the president’s wishes. What united—and doomed—all of these soon-to-be-former legislators was not their politics but their refusal to fall in line.

This dynamic also explains why none of Massie’s ideological attempts to defend his seat made a difference. As the tide turned against him, Massie leaned into anti-Israel advocacy as his closing argument. He told a reporter that if he lost, it would mean that “Israel controls this Congress,” and joked that his opponent’s phone number had an area code “in Tel Aviv,” a line he repeated in his concession speech last night.

He also openly engaged with anti-Semitic ideas and influencers. The weekend before the election, Massie invited a select group of supporters to his homestead in northeastern Kentucky, including the Holocaust denier Ryan Matta, who previously posed for a photo with Massie and hugged him while wearing an American Reich shirt. At the gathering, Massie played banjo alongside David Reilly, an activist who has described himself as an “anti-Semite.” In the final days of the campaign, a pro-Massie PAC ran an ad that superimposed a rainbow Star of David behind an image of Paul Singer, a conservative pro-Israel donor known to support LGBTQ causes. It warned that the ultraconservative Gallrein would bring “trans madness” to Kentucky at the Jewish donor’s behest: “The gay mafia will own Eddie.”

But whatever one thinks of Massie’s anti-Israel activism and anti-Jewish insinuations, neither was the reason he was excised. A libertarian opponent of all foreign aid, Massie voted year after year against assistance to Israel with little consequence. The White House began plotting his ouster only after he voted against Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” in May 2025. The Israel-critical Massie committed the same sin that prompted Trump to defenestrate the Israel hawk Liz Cheney: He defied a president who prized personal loyalty above all else and was punished by a GOP electorate that enforced their leader’s litmus test.

[Yair Rosenberg: The biggest myth about Trump’s base (and why many believe it)]

Massie and his allies knew that his break with Trump was his real liability, whether they admitted it or not. They ran ads emphasizing Massie’s alignment with the president and others accusing Gallrein of being a “Trump hater” and “Trump traitor.” On Election Day, the campaign sent a text message to voters touting Trump’s endorsement of Massie in 2022—with the date removed. This prompted Trump to return to X for the first time in months to demand that Massie disavow the ruse.

Massie did not. But his campaign’s desperation to deceive the electorate into thinking that he was actually allied with the president illustrates why he lost before the fight began: Even Massie’s own advertising accepted the premise of the case against him. Pro-Trump and pro-Israel groups poured millions into the race against Massie, but the ads they aired worked only because Republican primary voters were primed to accept their argument that those disloyal to Trump had to go.

That the current Republican Party is defined by allegiance to a person rather than any principle is not a new development. “America First” has always meant Trump first. “All this time, I thought they were voting for libertarian Republicans,” one astute Republican congressman mused to the Washington Examiner as far back as 2017, “but after some soul searching I realized when they voted for Rand and Ron [Paul] and me in these primaries, they weren’t voting for libertarian ideas—they were voting for the craziest son of a bitch in the race. And Donald Trump won best in class, as we had up until he came along.”

The politician who said that was Thomas Massie.

Why Thomas Massie Thought He Was Different

2026-05-20T10:22:32-04:00

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For a long time, Representative Thomas Massie confidently defied an ironclad law of modern Republican politics—that to oppose President Trump was to start a ticking clock on your electoral career. “I’m not worried about losing,” he told me last spring inside the Capitol, as he explained to a group of reporters the strength of his support within his Kentucky district.

Massie had already angered Trump just a few months into the president’s second term, after clashing with him during his first. Massie voted against government-funding bills, criticized the president’s tariffs, and would soon become one of the only Republicans in Congress to oppose Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which the fiscally hawkish Massie deemed irresponsible. Trump lashed out at Massie and vowed to find a primary opponent to defeat his bid for an eighth term; as early as last summer, the president’s allies stood up a political-action committee to run ads attacking Massie in his district.

Still, Massie refused to fall in line. Over the next several months, he condemned Trump’s military adventurism, including his unilateral attacks on Iran, and he helped lead a remarkably successful bipartisan effort to force the administration to release its trove of files on the disgraced financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Massie, an iconoclast to his fans and an ineffective gadfly to his detractors, had always gone his own way in Congress. Maybe he believed he was uniquely positioned to withstand a Trump-backed barrage. Or perhaps he knew he was toast and had resolved to go down on his own terms.

[Read: The ‘crazy’ plot to release the Epstein files]

Either way, last night Massie met the same fate as so many of Trump’s Republican critics: He lost his primary. In the end, Massie’s campaign against Ed Gallrein, a Navy SEAL whom the president had personally recruited to run, wasn’t particularly close. Gallrein won by about 10 points, and Massie conceded not long after the polls closed.

For months leading up to the primary, Massie had held up his race as an important test case for the Trump era: If he could criticize the president and win anyway, his victory would embolden other Republicans to speak out and vote against Trump when they felt compelled to, loosening his viselike grip on the party. As many as a dozen House Republicans, he told me last month, would then be “more liable to vote with their constituents instead of the party line.”

That prediction, however, looked dubious even before Massie’s defeat became clear, as Trump reasserted his dominance over the GOP elsewhere. Less than six months from the midterm elections, the president may be as unpopular as he’s ever been with the general public. But inside the Republican Party, he remains the undisputed kingmaker.

In Indiana earlier this month, Trump-backed challengers defeated five of the seven Republican incumbents who sought reelection to the state Senate after opposing the president’s push to adopt a newly gerrymandered congressional map. On Saturday in Louisiana, Senator Bill Cassidy finished third in a Republican primary after Trump endorsed one of his opponents. (Cassidy had voted to convict Trump during his second impeachment trial after the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021.) Trump likely sealed the defeat of another GOP incumbent, Senator John Cornyn, yesterday by endorsing a primary challenge from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who had been leading in the polls.

Kentucky’s Fourth District includes the suburbs of Cincinnati and Louisville and stretches east nearly 200 miles, close to the West Virginia border. Massie had hoped that his base of younger libertarian voters would turn out in sufficient numbers to overcome Gallrein’s strength among older Republicans who wanted a representative more loyal to Trump. He had turned aside primary challengers before with relative ease. But the money Trump and his allies put behind Gallrein dwarfed anything Massie had previously faced. Pro-Israel groups, hostile to Massie because of his staunch opposition to the Iran war and aid to the Jewish state, spent millions to defeat him. Massie used Trump’s attacks on him to raise plenty of his own funds, and the total spent on both sides swelled to some $33 million, making the race the most expensive House primary in U.S. history.

[Read: The Republican who outsmarted Trump]

Massie told reporters that his internal polling found that although most Republicans in his district still backed Trump, the president’s support was notably weaker within the party than during his first term. (He also acknowledged that his position on Iran was unpopular among primary voters in the district.) But although Massie never renounced his criticism of Trump, he spent the final weeks of the campaign reminding his constituents that he sided with the president far more than he opposed him. “I agree with President Trump nearly all of the time,” Massie said in one ad. In an April interview, Massie told me he had been willing to serve in Trump’s Cabinet.

These efforts to downplay a long-running feud with the president seemed as good an indication as any that Massie knew he was in trouble. They also weren’t enough to save him. As the end neared, his jocular lack of concern about his chances began to give way to equanimity at the prospect of defeat. Last night, after the race was called early, Massie appeared for his concession speech before the sun had set in Kentucky. “I would have come out sooner,” he said, before taking a dig at his opponent’s support from pro-Israel donors, “but it took a while to find Ed Gallrein in Tel Aviv.” He seemed to harbor some bitterness but few regrets, even as he joined the growing number of Republicans who have taken on Trump and lost.

The Most Interesting Part of Trump’s Prayer Rally

2026-05-18T16:00:36-04:00

By 10 a.m. yesterday, the line of people wishing to dedicate America to God was more than three hours long. They came ready with prayer flags to wave the Holy Spirit into action, and shofars to scatter demonic forces. They wore T-shirts declaring the sort of Christians they were. A muscular man wore one that read Prayer Warrior. A woman in cargo shorts announced that she was an Intercessor for America. An elderly woman wore one that read I Am the Weapon.

“You understand you’re not going to be able to get in with that,” a security guard told a man wheeling a huge cross toward the entrance to the National Mall, as thousands of people began spreading out across a swath of grass that many of them now considered a kind of occupied territory in a cosmic spiritual war.

“We are here to bring the Earth into alignment with God,” a man named Joel Balin, who had come with a friend from Atlanta, told me. “To bring the kingdom of heaven to Earth.”

The rally, called Rededicate 250, was billed as a “jubilee of prayer, praise and Thanksgiving” for “God’s presence” in American history. It was part of a series of events celebrating the nation’s anniversary put together by a Donald Trump–aligned nonprofit called Freedom 250, which is being funded by a public-private partnership that includes corporate donors such as Exxon Mobil, Lockheed Martin, and Palantir and for which Congress has allocated $150 million. Critics of the event denounced the reliance on government funds, the participation of administration officials, and the near-total lack of religious diversity as an attempt to make a certain version of Christianity a national religion. A minor protest went on outside the barricades—a small group of people holding signs supporting LGBTQ people, immigrants, and all of the other Americans they believed to be under threat from the Trump administration. They blasted metal music, and a woman with pink hair screamed into a bullhorn.

The people in line paid them little mind. The event was a long-sought triumph for those who came and for millions more grassroots believers who helped elect Trump twice, embracing prophecies that God anointed him for the great spiritual battle against demonic forces that they understand to be animating current events. This idea was the work of the apostles and prophets of the New Apostolic Reformation, a charismatic movement that began gathering momentum in the 1990s and is now the leading edge of the Christian right. Sunday was a clear display of the influence of the movement, whose leaders were instrumental in mobilizing voters to turn out in recent elections and to take part in the January 6 insurrection, when many people believed that they were taking the U.S. Capitol for God’s kingdom.

[Peter Wehner: The evangelicals who see Trump’s viciousness as virtue]

Speakers yesterday included Paula White-Cain, an apostle who now leads the White House Faith Office; Lou Engle, an apostle and prophet who is known for organizing the kind of mass-prayer gatherings that characterize the movement; and Guillermo Maldonado, an apostle who leads one of the largest Latino churches in the country, El Rey Jesús, in Florida. Administration officials including Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, whose own theologies do not exactly align with the movement, told stories about God deploying miracles at key moments in the nation’s history, leveraging these anecdotes to argue that the United States was founded to be a Christian nation. Historians say this is a clear misunderstanding of the American Revolution. Trump, just back from China, appeared in a prerecorded video in which he reads from the Old Testament, which seemed to be the same video that he had recorded for a marathon reading of the Bible last month. More revealing than any of these speakers, though, were the thousands of people willing to stand in line for three hours and then roast for seven more in the hot sun.

Balin, who leads a men’s ministry called Wednesday Warriors, told me that by enabling the event, Trump was “opening up a door for us to do spiritual warfare,” and that the very presence of so many believers gathered in the nation’s capital was scattering demonic forces and advancing the kingdom. He said that church-state separation is a “myth” and that, really, any separation from God is a foolish denial of the cosmic reality of the spiritual battle under way. He said that people he knows are tired of “materialism” and “dualism” and “an Enlightenment mindset” that fails to account for how supernatural forces affect earthly life. “There are so many things happening in the supernatural realm, and in the ancient world and other cultures, they recognized this—there was no separation,” he said. “I think we are rediscovering that as Americans.”

It was past 11 a.m., and people were spreading out blankets on the green grass, taking selfies, and livestreaming to congregations back home. “This is Pastor John!” a man in a blue suit said into his cellphone. The crowd was mostly white, but many people I spoke with emphasized that their movement is international and multiethnic, even as some expressed skepticism about accepting Muslim and other non-Christian immigrants into the country. MAGA hats abounded.

[Tim Alberta: My father, my faith, and Donald Trump]

On the stage, the first of many praise bands blasted the surging worship music common in charismatic churches these days. People mouthed the words. A screen displayed what appeared to be two church windows, which sometimes were filled with images of stained glass, and sometimes with an American flag, and sometimes with swirling clouds and stars. In the crowd, several women danced free-form with prayer flags, and other people periodically blew a shofar, the hollowed-out ram’s horn used in traditional Jewish services and considered in charismatic circles to be a tool of spiritual warfare. Two women from the central coast of California looked around.

“This is what we’ve been praying for, for our country to turn back to God,” Debbie Cloud, a retiree, told me as she began to cry.

She and her friend Susan Fraze said that they are working on the long-shot campaign of an influential apostle named Ché Ahn, who is running for governor of California as a write-in candidate. Cloud said that she attends a nondenominational church called Calvary Chapel. Fraze goes to a nondenominational church called the Bridge. Almost everyone I spoke with had some story about how they used to be Baptist, or Pentecostal, or Methodist but had found their way to churches with names such as Oasis and Free Chapel and Anchor and Abundant Harvest, the kind of nondenominational congregations that are growing as most denominations continue to decline. At least 15 percent of all American adults now identify as nondenominational, and most of them are embracing charismatic ideas about signs and wonders and spiritual warfare. Many people told me about their involvement with prayer groups, prayer rooms, prayer closets, and so-called prayer furnaces, spaces dedicated to intense, dayslong prayer sessions that people believe can shape the spiritual destiny of the country.

Under the shade of a tree, a man named Adriel Lam told me that he’d flown in from Hawaii, where he works for Capitol Ministries, an organization that seeks to bring prayer into state capitols. Lam is also running for Congress. He said that yesterday’s gathering was more evidence that an outpouring of the Holy Spirit is under way across America, a moment that he described as “post-postmodernism.”

“Modernism told us, Let’s know our chemistry. Let’s know our physics. Science can explain the world,” he said. “Then postmodernism said, Let’s question the foundations of everything. Post-postmodernism is people saying, Let’s go back to zero. Let’s go back to the first century, when Jesus united the physical and the spiritual. God is moving our generation for renewal.”

On a blue towel in the grass, David Hitt, an accountant from Atlanta, huddled and kneeled with several friends. He told me afterward that they were submitting themselves to Jesus and aligning their spiritual posture with God.

“We underestimate what’s going on in the invisible realm,” he said. “Our assembly, our worship, our prayer is creating openings for God to do his will.” He elaborated that he meant actual openings, portals where the Holy Spirit could enter into battle against actual demonic forces. He estimated that the prayer of just one person could put 1,000 demons in flight, and the prayer of two people could eject 10,000.

[Stephanie McCrummen: The army of God comes out of the shadows]

“So here we’ve got how many people focused on God?” he said, envisioning legions of demons fleeing the capital.

“Praise Jesus,” someone said. A man walked by in a T-shirt that read Jesus is King, Repent or Die. Another wore one that read Blessed are those persecuted for righteousness.

Outside the metal barricades, the capital was quiet. People jogged and went to the Smithsonian, and beyond a block or so, you couldn’t hear the music or the loud cheers when House Speaker Mike Johnson said, “We hereby rededicate the United States of America as one nation under God.” Inside, though, the message was clear.

“We are the kingdom,” a woman named Robin Noll, who’d come to Washington, D.C., on a bus with 29 others from western Pennsylvania, told me. “God is driving us into the battlefield.”

The Great Gen Z Dividing Line

2026-05-18T10:40:23-04:00

A little less than two years ago, Gen Z underwent a rebrand. Donald Trump had just been reelected. Exit polls suggested that young voters—especially young men—had helped deliver the Republican victory. Rather suddenly, a generation associated with climate activism and trigger warnings became known for manosphere podcasts, fiscal conservatism, and gender relations so icy that they’ve contributed to the national panic about fertility rates.

But a lot has changed since 2024. Trump has begun a (thus far ineffectual) war with Iran, something he said wouldn’t happen. His administration’s handling of the Epstein files, where his name appears abundantly, has been criticized by Democrats and Republicans alike. He vowed to lower gas and grocery prices; instead, they keep rising. His approval ratings have hit record lows, and he’s losing favor among crucial voting blocs such as independents and Latinos. Journalists and political commentators keep speculating and debating: Will the young men who moved rightward crawl back in the other direction?

[Read: The not-so-woke Generation Z]

That may depend, it turns out, on whether you’re talking about young men—or even younger men. The spring 2026 Yale Youth Poll, released last month, found that a majority of respondents—and roughly 70 percent of the young adults—disapproved of Trump. Even with men under 30, the president lost ground compared with Yale’s fall 2025 poll. But the data also revealed a dividing line: Among 23-to-29-year-old men, support for Democrats increased by 14 percentage points. Among 18-to-22-year-old men, it fell by a percentage point—even while their approval of Trump declined somewhat. The women in that youngest age group, meanwhile, make up the single most liberal population: further left than the slightly older Gen Z women.

Of course, you can splice and dice any cohort differently and come up with what’s called a “microgeneration.” But this poll echoed something I’ve heard in my reporting before: Gen Z, which encompasses people born from 1997 to 2012, splinters into an older and a younger group that tend to behave quite differently. Rachel Janfaza, who researches and writes about this age group, has referred to them as Gen Z 1.0 and 2.0. The generational researcher Meghan Grace described them to me as “Big Zs” and “Little Zs.” Whatever you call them, the split seems like a meaningful one. You might think of Little Zs as the angstier siblings to their Big Z counterparts: more divided, less trusting, and even readier to shatter the status quo.

When you’re young, everything around you might shape your still-nascent beliefs: your family, your neighborhood, but also the state of the world in that chapter in time, Patrick Egan, a public-policy professor at NYU, told me. Your politics, in adolescence and early adulthood, are in the process of “crystalizing.” Just look at Gen Xers, he said, who came of age when Ronald Reagan was enjoying a popular presidency in the mid-to-late 1980s; perhaps partly for that reason, the group leans Republican compared with other generations.

Little Zs and Big Zs grew up nearly at the same time—but in different worlds. Big Zs might’ve texted their friends on flip phones; Little Zs grew up with smartphones, herded toward content by TikTok algorithms. Big Zs might have looked up assigned reading on SparkNotes, but Little Zs could use AI to write a high-school paper. Perhaps most important, Big Zs were already in college, or had even graduated, by the time COVID hit. That doesn’t mean the pandemic wasn’t difficult for many of them. But they’d done some real maturing—and gained some real self-understanding—before that blow. Little Zs were in middle or high school in 2020. They were at home when they should’ve been making new friends, breaking rules and getting grounded, falling in goofy early love.

The Little Zs who resented attending Zoom class and missing prom might have appreciated that many Republicans were criticizing school shutdowns, scorning mask mandates, and talking about personal freedom. More broadly, their anger with decision makers might have fed the anti-establishment impulse that researchers have noticed especially among younger Zoomers, who are “a lot less tethered,” Egan said, “to the traditional ways that people even a little bit older than them have been thinking about politics for a long time.” Many of them, he told me, like that Trump positions himself as a norm-flouting outsider to politics—despite the fact that he’s a second-term president.

[Read: 20-somethings are in trouble]

Clearly the MAGA mentality has spoken to the men of Little Z in particular. Perhaps that’s because many Republicans put a particular brand of masculinity on a pedestal at a time when these men were still developing a sense of self. They might have heard GOP leaders on “bro podcasts,” Grace said, or seen them partner with the Ultimate Fighting Championship, and understood those efforts as an invitation: “Yes, your voice does matter. And we want it to be on our side.” Now these men have graduated from high school. They’re thinking about how they’ll make a living. They’re seeing that job growth is happening largely in traditionally female-dominated fields—health care, retail, social services—rather than in, say, manufacturing, Egan told me. And they’re still hearing Trump claim he’ll fix the economy.

Republicans might have spoken to Little Z women, too—to their money anxiety, their COVID trauma, their frustration with the status quo. But in other ways they’ve been turning those young women away. The 2021 Dobbs decision that struck down abortion protections may have been a particular blow for the women who are now in their early 20s. Grace and her colleague Corey Seemiller have been studying Zoomers’ political ideology for years, and in 2021, they identified that Little Z men were starting to shift rightward compared with Big Z men. But they didn’t see much of a shift at all among women. Then Dobbs happened, and young women lurched left. They were perhaps old enough to be having sex but young enough to be especially terrified of pregnancy, and of the thought that men would be telling them what to do about it.

Much has been written about the gender gap in Gen Z politics. But that split seems to be especially dramatic among Little Zs. Judging, in part, by the Yale poll results, “it may be more pronounced than anyone’s really anticipated,” Egan said. That divergence could have profound implications for not only future elections but also how Little Zs continue to relate to one another. Grace and Seemiller surveyed young women and found that, of the respondents who didn’t plan to marry, a third said that was because they fear losing their independence. A lot of them, she said, feel like the men around them have already voted to take away their freedom.

[Read: Young men aren’t the only ones struggling]

But the beliefs of Little Z, as much as they might be crystallizing, are not set in stone. Little Zs are different from Big Zs because they’ve been through different formative experiences—but also simply because they’re younger. And many kinds of political figures, regardless of party, could still respond to their sense of disempowerment, their skepticism of elites, their hunger for authenticity. Egan has heard young voters talk glowingly not just of Trump but of Zohran Mamdani, Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. “There’s just tremendous choice,” Egan told me—far more than when he, a member of Gen X, was younger. In his day, a 20-year-old didn’t have nearly as many disparate voices—on TikTok, CNN, or Fox News, or in the halls of Congress—acknowledging their particular struggles. Now, he said, one “can find messages that really speak to that sense of precarity, that sense of upheaval.”

If Trump keeps breaking his campaign promises, even Little Z men might turn toward other leaders. The midterms are around the corner. Young people don’t tend to show up in great numbers, historically, but Grace reminded me that in 2018 and 2022, Zoomers had notably high midterm-election turnout for their age group. They’re not like other generations; they’re not even like one another. Someday, Little Zs won’t be so little anymore—and their elders might be surprised by who they grow into.