Politics | The Atlantic

The Guard That Won’t Be Changing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How the Right Could Actually End Birthright Citizenship

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Adam Serwer: These justices are not impartial]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which Dan Sullivan Will These Dan Sullivans Vote For?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Read: Democrats’ great Alaskan hope]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not American Enough

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Read: Mamdani is the foil Trump wants]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Read: Islamophobia has corroded American values]

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

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

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

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

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

The Real Reason Trump Wants Economic Sanctions in Iran

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Read: The forever negotiation]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The German Far Right Is Poised for a Breakthrough

2026-08-26T06:00:00-04:00

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Imagine that it’s October 2026, and one of Germany’s 16 federal states has come under the control of a far-right government for the first time since the Nazi era. With an absolute majority in the state Parliament and one of its own installed as state premier, the Alternative for Germany, or AfD, quickly begins implementing its agenda. The interior minister announces an emergency remigration program: abolishing asylum, revoking the residence permit of any foreigner convicted of a crime, pledging to review all naturalization decisions made during this century, and incarcerating those designated for deportation. The government stops classifying Ukrainians as war refugees and ends their social benefits. European Union flags disappear from public buildings. The mainstream press is shunned in favor of influencers aligned with the party’s ideology. The government authorizes vigilante groups to act as an auxiliary police force in regions with high crime rates.

This hasn’t happened, but it’s not merely hypothetical either. The AfD is projected to win an election next month in Saxony-Anhalt, a central German state of some 2 million people. An anti-racism NGO in Berlin, the Amadeu Antonio Foundation, created this scenario based on the far-right party’s own election manifesto and the statements of its representatives. For decades, right-wing politics have carried particular weight in Germany, where atonement for the Holocaust includes mandatory education about the rise of National Socialism. The far right was long relegated to the fringes, its most ardent members easily identified as skinheads decked out in leather. But the AfD, founded in 2013 as a mild euroskeptic party led mostly by conservative economists opposed to eurozone bailouts, is now Germany’s most important right-wing force since the Nazis.

At the national level, the AfD is the most popular party, supported by more than a quarter of voters in recent polls. It leads both of the traditional broad-based parties, the center-right Christian Democrats and the center-left Social Democrats. Its base of support is in the formerly Communist east—generally poorer, older, and angrier than the rest of Germany. And that’s where it’s poised for a breakthrough later this summer. In past state elections, other parties have contorted themselves to keep the far-right faction out of governing coalitions, maintaining a so-called firewall even when the AfD has won the most votes. That may not be possible in Saxony-Anhalt, where ahead of a September 6 vote, the AfD is polling at more than 40 percent. If smaller parties fail to reach the required 5 percent threshold to enter Parliament, this kind of showing by the AfD could be enough for it to win an outright majority, meaning that it wouldn’t need cooperation from other parties to govern. Suddenly, Saxony-Anhalt would become a testing ground for AfD policies.

If the AfD doesn’t reach that threshold, the spotlight would turn to the Christian Democratic Union, the party of German Chancellor Friedrich Merz. The Christian Democrats would face a dilemma: whether to breach the firewall and work with the AfD or join hands with the far-left party Die Linke in a last-ditch effort to keep the far right from taking power. In fact, the Christian Democrats have a policy, formalized in 2018 and known as an incompatibility resolution, against working with either party. Andreas Rödder, a historian who previously headed the center-right party’s fundamental-values commission, told me that the decision didn’t generate much controversy within the party at the time because the matter was mostly symbolic; the center-right party, then dominated by Chancellor Angela Merkel, had other choices for governing partners. At that time, German politics remained fairly stable, relatively speaking, as anti-establishment forces shook up other Western democracies. For many in Germany, this was a point of pride, a sign that the country had learned from its history, that it knew where political fanaticism led.

Less than a decade later, Germany no longer appears immune to extremism, and the stable politics that once attested to its moral redemption are “on the brink of being fundamentally shattered,” Rödder said. The country’s domestic intelligence agency has classified Saxony-Anhalt’s branch of the AfD as a right-wing extremist group. Some voters support the party because of that hard-right agenda. Others are drawn to it for contrarian reasons: to register their dissent against elite gatekeepers, whether in the security service, the judiciary, or the media. In this way, their vote is a version of the declaration once made by the Russian literary critic Vissarion Belinsky: “Negation is my god.”

“Every organ of elite opinion tells people they can’t vote for the AfD,” a German diplomat told me. “And many people respond by saying, ‘Hell yes, we can.’”

Why does an election in a relatively small German state matter? Because what happens in Germany matters. That’s been the nature of the German problem for almost two centuries—what to do with this country, larger and more prosperous than its neighbors, that has caused so much torment for Europe and for the world. The problem arose with the Franco-Prussian War and the unification of Germany in 1871. It returned in monstrous form during both world wars. And it recurred with German reunification in 1990.

The German question is back as the country breaks with postwar taboos. Germany is rearming, spending billions to turn its army into the strongest in Europe. Its steadfast support for Israel has been shaken by the extremism of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. And in Saxony-Anhalt as well as other German regions, even if not yet nationally, the far right appears on the cusp of claiming power.

[From the January issue: The new German war machine]

Germany’s situation isn’t unique; what’s striking in a country where historians have debated whether a Sonderweg, or “special path,” produced destructive nationalism is how much it mirrors what’s happening elsewhere in Europe. Marine Le Pen, the far-right French firebrand, is leading in polls ahead of a presidential election next year. Nigel Farage’s Reform UK remains in a strong position in Britain. Giorgia Meloni already leads a far-right government in Italy, representing a party that traces its roots to the country’s postwar neofascist movement. Saxony-Anhalt is following these same trends. But the circumstances command greater attention. As Henry Morgenthau Jr., President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s treasury secretary, titled his postwar book on the defeated Axis power, Germany Is Our Problem.

Saxony-Anhalt is sometimes called the heartland of German history. It’s the birthplace of the Protestant Reformation, where Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the church door in Wittenberg. Cities such as the capital, Magdeburg, were important centers of the Holy Roman Empire. In the 20th century, modernism flourished in the region, which has Germany’s highest concentration of Bauhaus architecture. It’s long been a hub of the chemical and coal-mining industries. During the Cold War, the territory fell on the eastern side of the Iron Curtain, and the state still faces structural problems left over from post-reunification deindustrialization and out-migration, including higher rates of poverty and unemployment than the national average. The psychic effect also lingers. Until 1990, there was no genuine democracy; freedom and civil rights were curtailed. “In some quarters,” Detlef Gürth, a member of the ruling Christian Democrats in Saxony-Anhalt’s state Parliament, told me, there is still a “pronounced desire for a ‘strongman,’ a messiah who dictates the course of action and takes care of everything.”

Two recent events crystallize the state’s misfortune and the feeling among many residents that things aren’t working. In December 2024, a Saudi-born doctor drove a rented SUV through a crowded Christmas market in Magdeburg, killing six people and injuring hundreds more. Authorities said the perpetrator was an anti-Islam activist sympathetic to far-right groups, but terrorist violence of any kind, the facts notwithstanding, played into the far right’s hands. The following year, the California-based Intel Corporation canceled plans for a €30 billion chip factory in Magdeburg, which would have been the biggest-ever foreign direct investment in Germany. The episodes were unrelated; the company said it had simply grown too fast, although a government minister also found an explanation in “Donald Trump’s ‘America First’ philosophy.” Together, however, they contributed to a gathering feeling of precarity and bad luck.

The AfD promises to shake up the system. Its 35-year-old front man, Ulrich Siegmund, is a perpetually smiling social-media sensation. He is a salesman by trade, the founder of a fragrance company called Berlin-Duftet, whose name means literally “Berlin smells good.” Der Spiegel, the prestigious German news magazine, recently branded him “the most dangerous man in Germany,” which turned out to be great publicity; at campaign events, he autographed copies of the magazine cover.

A fan of Ulrich Siegmund, the lead candidate for the far-right Alternative for Germany, waits for Siegmund to sign copies of Der Spiegel that show him on the cover. (Sean Gallup / Getty)

As Siegmund racks up likes on social media, he leaves the most incendiary topics to others in the party. When some members of the state AfD branch traveled to the United States last year to attend a gala of the Trump-aligned New York Young Republican Club, Siegmund stayed home. The party’s ideological engine in Saxony-Anhalt is said to be Hans-Thomas Tillschneider, a member of the state Parliament who has likened Islam to a fungus, condemned the “sacralization of the Holocaust,” and suggested that Jewish institutions are using Muslim immigration to achieve the “abolition of our people.” He has called AIDS patients the “price we pay for a decadent social model” and argued that the Bauhaus movement “raped the human need for comfort.” On foreign policy, Tillschneider sides with Russia in its assault on Ukraine, praising President Vladimir Putin as “a real man with a sound set of values” and insisting that Moscow is “defending itself.”

When I asked Tillschneider to explain his party’s success in the region, he said it didn’t stem from one particular issue or another but amounted to a rejection of the mainstream’s whole approach to policy making. He argued that the “established parties have formed a consensus against the interests of the citizens” and refuse to entertain ideas that go against their orthodoxy. The AfD is testing the limits of what’s acceptable in German political culture, especially on immigration. The party’s election manifesto declares ominously, “Our streets and squares are no longer safe.” And it promises a “deportation and remigration offensive.” The term remigration, once a fringe concept linked to ethnic cleansing, is now a focus of far-right immigration discourse, and has flexible meanings. Tillschneider defined it as “the maximum possible deportation within the framework of the constitutional order.” In addition to a “180-degree turn” in migration policy, the party is also vowing to revamp education and art, instill pride in German identity, and end the country’s “guilt complex.” The AfD also objects to the established parties’ anti-Russia policies and seeks to expand Russian-language instruction in schools and revive student exchanges with Russia.

The Christian Democrats, who currently govern Saxony-Anhalt in a coalition with the Social Democrats and the liberal Free Democrats, have struggled to respond. The state premier, Sven Schulze, took umbrage at the far right for “constantly belittling Saxony-Anhalt and acting as if everything here is doomed to failure.” AfD representatives can sense the desperation. Tillschneider said the firewall had become a “tomb wall” that the Christian Democratic Union has built for itself. He envisioned only two possibilities after the September election: either an AfD government or an “all-party government against us.” On this there seems to be some agreement. Gürth, the Christian Democratic lawmaker, said his party can’t justify cooperation with the AfD, which “operates like the Nazi Party” in its methods: “It exaggerates real or perceived problems, taps into public discontent, and paints a dystopian picture of Germany teetering on the brink of collapse. All other parties are blamed, and only the AfD can save Germany.”

[Read: J. D. Vance is definitely against foreign election interference]

In the scenario outlined by the Amadeu Antonio Foundation, an AfD-led government soon turns the state into a platform for international self-promotion, hosting conferences and opening offices in Washington and Moscow. Vice President Vance, who met with an AfD leader on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference last year, visits the state and offers to support American companies that choose to invest in Saxony-Anhalt. In the next federal election, in 2029, the AfD wins. The party may soon get the chance to give this scenario a shot.

Trump Plans to Buy Midterm Ads About His Own Record

2026-08-25T20:44:06-04:00

President Trump gathered his top political advisers in the Oval Office early this month to solve a problem of riches: how to spend his super PAC’s $400 million political war chest with fewer than 100 days to go before the midterm elections.

Republican strategists are concerned about Trump’s low approval ratings and voter anxiety about the economy. One person familiar with the Oval Office strategy meeting put it this way: “When the issues that you typically campaign on don’t move voters—or voters are pissed off at you about those issues—the question becomes: What do you campaign on?” Some GOP strategists favor focusing entirely on specific races in an effort to convince voters of the merits of individual candidates and local issues.

But Trump himself has rejected that approach. House and Senate Democrats, the president noted during the meeting, will make their fall campaigns a referendum on him. His advisers told him that the poor polling reflects the fact that the voting public still does not know about many of his accomplishments—the dozens of new stock-market highs, a decline in fentanyl deaths, the “sealed” southern border, the increase in domestic-manufacturing production.

The solution Trump settled on, according to three people familiar with the meeting, was to lean into the Democratic strategy of focusing on himself. The president ordered a series of television advertisements about his own record that will serve as a backdrop to the hundreds of individual House and Senate contests. Trump wanted what one person described to us as “environmental lift” ads—commercials that would focus on nationalizing the midterms broadly around his victories—and he suggested that the ad makers mine his own on-camera statements as building blocks. “Go look at the clips,” the president told his team, according to this person. “I cite accomplishments all the time.”

That decision has resulted in a Trump midterm-election ad blitz that is set to be rolled out soon from MAGA Inc., the main repository of Trump’s political fundraising, according to people familiar with the discussions, all of whom insisted on anonymity to describe internal conversations. Most of MAGA Inc.’s spending is still expected to go to targeted House and Senate races, for which the group has been establishing teams to review polling, voter modeling, and message testing. “We are going to unload the guns on both chambers real soon,” one of the people said. But another person told us that because Trump will inevitably be part of voters’ considerations, highlighting his achievements makes sense. “I think everybody does understand that the president and his agenda are on the ballot to some degree,” another person told us.

A spokesperson for MAGA Inc. told us that the group does not comment on internal deliberations or plans. Olivia Wales, a White House spokesperson, told us that Trump is committed to maintaining the Republican majorities in Congress. “President Trump is cleaning up Joe Biden’s mess,” she said in a statement. “There is a great story to tell because the United States of America has never been stronger than under his leadership.”

Trump’s decision to focus a portion of his spending on himself echoes President Biden’s decision in the fall of 2023 to launch a series of ads trumpeting his own legislative record, as he sought to increase his approval rating in advance of his reelection bid. But Trump is not on the ballot this fall, which presents new risks. A new strategy of touting Trump’s achievements could well backfire by aiding Democratic efforts to make each race about national issues at a time when Trump’s approval rating is at record lows. Yet given the midterm headwinds, Republicans may have little choice but to present their most effective communicator to voters.

The political climate—an economic election in which voters don’t feel that their life has gotten better, despite some positive indicators—is in many ways similar to what Democrats faced in 2010 and 2022, when the electorate blamed their party for the economic pain of the 2008 financial crisis and the coronavirus pandemic, respectively. But in other ways, the situation Trump faces is different. Polls show that voters aren’t just anxious about inflation; they are frustrated with Trump’s war of choice with Iran and concerned about government corruption. Before Trump’s first midterm election as president, in 2018, the Pew Research Center found that 51 percent of the country believed that the economy was doing well, including 13 percent who described the economy as excellent. By July of this year, only 22 percent felt that the economy was doing well, and only 3 percent described it as excellent. Trump’s economic approval rating hovered at about 50 percent in 2018 public polls. Most polls this year show that his standing has fallen into the 30s.

Republican political consultants have voiced concerns both publicly and privately in recent weeks about the triumphant tone of some of Trump’s economic messaging. Democrats see a familiar dilemma. “You’ve got to take voters from where they are to where you want to go, and the only way to do that is to not dismiss in any way what they know—and what I mean by that is, you can’t go in playing ‘It’s Christmas Time’ when that’s the last holiday they can afford,” Rahm Emanuel, who worked for the Obama and Biden administrations and is a potential contender in the 2028 presidential election, told us. “They’re going to put you on mute.”

In 2010, Barack Obama wrestled with this problem by alighting on a “car in the ditch” metaphor to explain why, after the 2008 financial crisis, the promised recovery still felt slow in coming. Yet even that formulation proved ineffective, Obama’s senior strategist David Axelrod told us. “We sort of abandoned it because what we found was even that was offensive to people, because it felt like we were trying to blame others,” he said. “What we learned very quickly is, you cannot jawbone people into feeling what they do not feel in their own lives, and Biden defied that to his own detriment.”

Trump has shown much more interest in hyperbole than in complicated metaphors, branding his second term in office as a new “Golden Age.” While stumping last Friday for Senator Darline Graham of South Carolina, Trump spoke glowingly about his second term. “You have record manufacturing and auto plants being built right now in the United States and in South Carolina,” he said. “We have the greatest economy in our history. Now, some people haven’t seen it yet, but they will.” Axelrod noted that Trump argued at the same rally that his own polling “should be at 100 percent on the economy.” “If you’re the average person out there, you’re seeing that and thinking What planet is he living on?” Axelrod said. “You have to acknowledge that people are struggling and this is a work in progress.”

David Winston, a Republican strategist who works with congressional leadership, told us that key to the midterms is whether voters, when they walk into a grocery store, feel that they can manage at least a little bit better than before Trump returned to office. “So Republicans need to be talking about what actions they took in terms of the economy to at least get things moving in the right direction, and what the outcome has been,” he said. “This is one where it can’t be a laundry list of 35 talking points. This has to be one or two key things.”

[Read: How Trump left America vulnerable to cyberattacks]

Trump’s advisers are hoping to drive home a discrete set of facts about his accomplishments over the past 19 months. The list is likely to include new tax breaks for certain workers and seniors, the stock market’s rise over the past two years, the military’s boat strikes purportedly targeting fentanyl, and his efforts to “seal” the U.S.-Mexico border, to name a few. Rather than distance himself from congressional elections—the preference of some Republican candidates in swing districts—Trump has argued that he can drive turnout in those races by making himself the center of the conversation. Next month, he will host the Republican Party for a two-day “midterm convention” rally in Dallas aimed at nationalizing the November races as a choice between extreme Democrats and Republican accomplishments. Trump has asked his supporters to treat November as though his name is on the ballot. “What I really want you to do is pretend, please, that I’m on the ballot. Just come and vote. It’s so important,” Trump said on Friday in South Carolina. “Just say that I’m on the ballot one more time.”

In other, important ways, Trump is better positioned than either Obama or Biden were at this point in their midterm races. He has a massive cash advantage, thanks to his aggressive fundraising over the first year of his term that collected tens of millions from crypto companies, AI entrepreneurs, and traditional Republican donors. He also enjoys a sharply gerrymandered political map in the House that has created a new cushion of Republican-leaning seats after mid-cycle redistricting. And the Senate majority will be decided by races in Republican-leaning states such as Texas, Alaska, Ohio, and Iowa.

Trump’s advisers have not yet indicated to Republican consultants how much money the president will spend on the midterms, according to people familiar with the matter. But the merits of Trump inserting himself into the election may be less important to some Republicans than the fact that MAGA Inc. is starting to spend. Some in the party have worried for months that Trump might hoard his fundraising for the 2028 presidential-election cycle—or for something else entirely.

MAGA Inc. has begun work on a number of campaigns about specific House and Senate races for the fall. Much of that advertising is expected to feature negative attacks on Democratic candidates, the traditional role of independent super PACs. MAGA Inc. has commissioned polling and research, along with modeling in the targeted House and Senate races. It has also shared information with other independent groups, including the Senate Leadership Fund and the Congressional Leadership Fund, which are affiliated with Senate Majority Leader John Thune of South Dakota and Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana.

In the early spring, Trump’s aides hoped to launch a disciplined sales pitch to voters focused on Trump’s accomplishments, only to have that effort largely derailed by the open-ended Iran conflict. Trump’s approval ratings have eroded further since then. Now is the president’s last chance for a do-over, and his team is projecting confidence that it can get it right. “Anybody that is saying we are headed for a shellacking absolutely can’t just read the numbers,” one of the people familiar with the Oval Office meeting told us. With early voting starting in the first weeks of October, Republicans are once again betting that more Trump is their best way to block Democratic hopes of a wave election.

ICE Has Quietly Changed Its Deadly-Force Rule

2026-08-25T18:22:00-04:00

ICE quietly enacted new rules this month that will keep officers involved in deadly-force incidents—such as firing a gun and using a choke hold—off the streets until the completion of an investigation. Previously, these officers were able to return to their regular job in as few as three days. Now they must remain on desk duty until they are cleared by investigators, according to two senior ICE officials with knowledge of the change, who spoke with me on the condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to discuss agency matters with reporters.

Under the old rules, ICE supervisors could lengthen an officer’s period of leave, but such an extension was often viewed internally as signaling a lack of confidence in the officer and their version of events. At ICE and other law-enforcement agencies, officers are typically eager to return to full patrol duties as quickly as possible, and not remain in limbo as an investigation plays out. The change, which has not been publicly announced, means that officers who fire their guns, choke someone, or use some other form of deadly force—even if no one is killed—will potentially be limited to performing administrative duties for much longer periods. Acting ICE Director David Venturella and other senior ICE leaders ordered the change late last month, the two senior officials said.

ICE and the Department of Homeland Security did not respond to my questions about why the policy change was made or how many such incidents have occurred since President Trump returned to office. ICE officers have shot at least 16 people since last January, four of them fatally, according to public records. Last month, there were two fatal shootings during traffic stops: On July 7, ICE officers in Texas killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a 52-year-old contractor from Mexico, and six days later, an officer in Maine fatally shot Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, a 25-year-old Colombian immigrant. DHS said the officers fired in self-defense, but the incidents are under federal investigation.

Veteran ICE officials have worried for months about the competence of the thousands of new recruits who were added during a hiring binge last fall, many of whom were rushed onto the streets after taking a fast-track training course. The ICE officer in Maine, David Brouillette, was a new hire, and his relatives told reporters he had a history of mental-health issues and violent behavior that should have disqualified him from getting a badge and gun.

[Read: The secretary of homeland]

Violent confrontations during traffic stops particularly concern ICE leaders; the agency has not typically had so many officers pulling over vehicles and attempting to arrest people who are in cars. After the shootings last month, ICE and DHS pledged to expedite the deployment of body-worn cameras for ICE officers. Although most of the cameras have been delivered, the officials told me that they don’t know when all of ICE’s roughly 15,000 deportation officers will be wearing them. After the killing in Maine, Venturella and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin halted the use of nonemergency traffic stops—but Trump reversed the directive when immigration hard-liners said it made the White House look weak. The president has said that ICE officers “make mistakes sometimes” and can be “too rough,” but they’re doing a “GREAT job.”

Arrests by ICE totaled nearly 50,000 in July, the highest level in a single month since Trump returned to office, the officials told me. The agency is no longer using a city-by-city approach to surge arrests, as it did last year under then–Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, and this has led to fewer clashes with protesters. But officers remain under pressure to maximize arrests and deportations, and new videos continue to emerge showing officers tackling immigrants and pointing guns at people who are filming them or are allegedly disobeying their orders.

ICE leaders say they’re looking for ways to reduce the use of deadly force by giving officers more nonlethal tools. The agency is planning to spend up to $20 million on electrified gloves that allow officers to deliver painful shocks. The gloves, which have been used by some police departments and public-school security officers, will be assigned to ICE teams involved in traffic stops and other potential confrontations, according to the officials I spoke with. They told me the shocks delivered through the gloves are painful but less intense and more localized than those from a Taser, and will be easier to direct than chemical sprays.

Prior to the current Trump administration, the use of deadly force by ICE deportation officers in U.S. cities was more rare than shootings by U.S. agents along the Mexico border were, Scott Shuchart, an attorney and a former ICE official who worked at the agency’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties from 2010 to 2018, told me. The U.S. Border Patrol reduced its annual number of shooting incidents more than a decade ago by hiring independent consultants who recommended giving agents more nonlethal tools and better training. The number of Border Patrol’s firearm-use incidents, measured across fiscal years, fell from 55 in 2012 to eight last year. Shuchart said the administrative-leave extension “seemed like a healthy signal” that ICE leaders knew “they might have a real problem” after the shooting in Maine. “They don’t want to be creating more risk by putting people back out on the street,” he said.

[Read: ‘Maybe DHS was a bad idea’]

Deborah Fleischaker, a senior ICE official during part of President Biden’s term, told me that the change to ICE’s rules will matter little if internal oversight mechanisms don’t hold officers accountable for wrongdoing. Trump officials gutted offices at DHS that had reviewed complaints against ICE personnel and about poor detention-center conditions. “If the goal is to ensure that people are on administrative leave through the entirety of an investigation, that’s a good goal, but it doesn’t speak to the quality of the investigation,” Fleischaker said.

Fleischaker, now an immigration-policy adviser at the Hispanic-advocacy group UnidosUS, said Trump officials have conveyed a clear message to the federal workforce that “mass deportation is a high-profile goal of this administration and people need to be real careful of getting in the way of anything that slows that down.”

In October, Stephen Miller said on Fox News that ICE officers had “federal immunity” to perform their duties while carrying out Trump’s immigration crackdown. But since then, Democratic leaders in several states have vowed to bring charges against ICE officers for use of excessive force. In Minnesota, state prosecutors charged the ICE officer Christian Castro with four counts of second-degree assault and one count of falsely reporting a crime for his role in the nonfatal shooting of a Venezuelan immigrant on January 14—a day after DHS published a clip of Miller’s “immunity” remarks. Minnesota has been seeking Castro’s arrest and extradition from Texas, but Governor Greg Abbott, a Republican, is challenging the request in federal court. CNN reported today that the Department of Justice is considering filing federal charges against Castro.

Darline Graham Is Not Her Brother

2026-08-25T06:00:00-04:00

It’s something that happens so often in politics that there’s a name for it: widow’s succession. Dozens of times over the past century, women have filled a seat previously occupied by their late husband, and some have gone on to serve a long career.

What has never happened in Congress before is what Darline Graham is doing: a sister’s succession.

Less than 48 hours after Senator Lindsey Graham died suddenly from heart issues last month, South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster appointed Graham’s younger sister to complete the remaining six months of his term. Soon after that, Darline Graham announced that she would also run for a full six-year term, a bid that came at President Trump’s request. In the solidly red state, her biggest hurdle is likely to come in a primary runoff today. She is running in part on the legacy of her brother—but also in ways that bear no resemblance to the way he approached the job. Where he was chatty and seemed to love campaigning, she is reserved and describes the campaign as “brutal.” Where he was the ultimate Washington insider who served in Congress for more than 31 years, she is running as a populist outsider who previously worked with the disabled and visually impaired. And where he was one of his party’s most prominent and outspoken foreign-policy hawks until the day he died, she has conceded to having no experience and not much interest in such matters.

“I’m not that informed on national security,” she said during a debate last week, a blunder that has become a focal point in the final days of an abbreviated campaign. The president came to her defense, praising her for being honest. He has invested significant time and political capital in attempting to give her a late boost in a closer-than-expected primary race.

Her late brother comes up during almost every public event she holds—“I knew I could not sit on the sidelines. That’s not how Lindsey and I were raised,” she’s said—and campaign mailers tout that she is “Prepared to Carry on Lindsey’s Legacy.” She tells voters that “no one can ever fill his shoes” but that she will earn his seat. “I don’t just expect it to be handed to me,” she said earlier this month after casting her ballot in the special primary election.

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

Her Republican primary opponent is Ralph Norman, a congressman since 2017 who earlier this summer lost his bid for governor. He has also referenced Lindsey Graham’s pull on the race. “Nobody’s entitled by birthright to this office,” Norman said before the debate last week. “You’ve got to earn it.” He tried to put the situation into college-football terms during an interview with the Associated Press, telling voters to imagine presenting the head coach at Clemson University with a top quarterback prospect who has just this qualification: They’re kin to Tom Brady. “Tell me how that analogy doesn’t work here,” Norman said. Although Graham has a famous last name and the president’s endorsement, Norman and his supporters believe that he can win today. Their message: Darline Graham is not Lindsey Graham. A PAC supporting Norman recently began running an ad that asks, “What if Darline Graham had any other last name?”

It’s the last name that has gotten her here—the reason she was appointed interim senator. But in the final stretch of the race, it is complicating her campaign, which has become the latest test of the power of Trump’s endorsement. Although the president has often played kingmaker in Republican primaries over the past decade, that influence has significantly weakened: 10 of his picks have failed to advance this year, many of them in the past few weeks. The congressional candidates Cory Mills and Catalina Lauf both lost in Florida last week. Two of his picks in races for governor—Megan Degenfelder in Wyoming and Mike Lindell in Minnesota—lost by double digits. If Graham loses, it will signal a limit to Trump’s ability to direct the MAGA base in one of the most MAGA states.

The relationship between Lindsey and Darline was long ago condensed into a few stock lines in their stump speeches: how they grew up in a one-room home that was attached to the bar and restaurant their parents ran. How their parents both died when Lindsey was in college, and how he took responsibility for helping raise his sister, who was nine years his junior. “Lindsey has been there for me throughout the years,” she said at the Iowa State Fair during his long-shot 2016 presidential campaign. “He has never let me down since then. He’s always been by my side.” Her remarks were earnest. And then he jumped to the stage with a joke: “Well, as Darline said, we grew up in a pool hall, a bar, and a liquor store. I’m eminently qualified to be president of the United States!”

A more textured version of their relationship emerges in a memoir he released during that campaign. He tells of how he arranged for her to have golf lessons, so that she could play one of his favorite sports. He took her to the movies (they both loved James Bond). He taught her to ride a bicycle when she was 5—then gifted her a turquoise one when she turned 9. In the early 1970s, he wrote, he heard his young sister use a racial slur. “She didn’t even think the term was offensive. She had heard it used so often,” he wrote. “I told her to not say it again, and a little while later, I went to my parents and asked them to make a change.” Graham says his mother offered a beer to a Black customer, who previously would have taken his beer home, and motioned to him to take a stool, slowly beginning to more actively integrate the barroom.

Graham also wrote of persuading his parents to take Darline to Disney World, a trip that became their first big family vacation. (Years later, in March 2026, the senator went viral for riding Space Mountain and carrying a bubble wand around during a government shutdown.) It was his and Darline’s first time on an airplane, and they stayed for five days at a Howard Johnson’s hotel with a pool. “Life was good. Then it wasn’t,” he wrote. The next year, his mother died. Shortly after, so did his father; it was Darline who found his unresponsive body, Graham wrote.

Lindsey Graham would go on to a career in the Air Force and then in Congress. His sister would earn a master’s degree in rehabilitation counseling from South Carolina State University, in Orangeburg, a historically Black school. She got her optician’s certification and in recent years led the South Carolina Commission for the Blind, which provides vocational, youth, and prevention services. She married her husband, Larry Nordone, in 2006, and they have two daughters. Darline kept her maiden name, she said recently on the campaign trail, as a way to feel connected to her parents.

The closest parallel that I could find to what Darline Graham is doing is this: When Representative Sonny Bono died during a family ski trip in 1998, his widow, Mary Bono, ran for his seat with the backing of Republican leaders. “It was crazy. It was a lot,” she told me. She got cotton mouth during her first debate but was so nervous that her shaky hand couldn’t bring the glass of water to her lips. “You’re told, It’d be great to be elected and fulfill the legacy of the loved one that was lost. But it’s really obvious on the campaign trail that only goes so far,” she said. “You have to establish who you are, what you care about, and show voters your own philosophies.” She won the race—and then, on the Judiciary Committee, she sat next to Lindsey Graham. “He had such a great and quick wit,” she said. Of Darline Graham, Bono told me: “I’m glad she’s running. But it will have to become her legacy and her work. It’s a hard job.”

Darline Graham has talked about the difficulty of campaigning while grieving, saying that she has not had time to fully process her brother’s death. She has said that sometimes, in the morning, she has time to reflect: “I think a lot about what I would say to him.” She remarked to a crowd at a barbecue joint in Florence, South Carolina, that she’d lost 10 pounds during the monthlong campaign following her brother’s death. “It’s been absolutely brutal. This past month has been brutal,” she said during a speech after making it to the runoff, one month after her brother’s death. “None of this has been comfortable for me. But like I said, I’m a fighter.” Her campaign and Senate office did not respond to my inquiries.

In South Carolina, an open Senate seat is rarer than a restaurant that doesn’t serve sweet tea. Strom Thurmond and Fritz Hollings had a combined tenure of more than 85 years, spanning most of the second half of the 20th century. Graham has occupied the seat since 2003. Longtime political operatives see Darline as quite different from her brother, although voters may be willing to overlook that if she can put forward a convincing case of her own. “Lindsey was the unique character in the public spotlight for decades. He was convivial. He was kind of a backslapper, wisecrack. Could deflect. Self-effacing,” Chip Felkel, a veteran Republican strategist in the state, told me. “I don’t see her personality that way, but I don’t think people care if she delivers for the state.”

The way Darline Graham is running her campaign reflects the ways she is trying to both align herself with her brother and differentiate herself from him. Her stump speech includes nods to the Second Amendment (“I believe gun control is how steady you hold your weapon”), a nod to voter-ID laws (“If you have to have an ID to check out a library book, you should have to have one to vote”), and transgender policies from her experience as a self-described volleyball mom (“I love watching my daughter play, and I know that boys have no place in girls sports, especially not in the locker room”). She has said that her No. 1 priority is “affordability” (a word that Trump has described as a hoax made up by Democrats). She wants to control health-care costs. She has also pointed to differences with her brother, saying that she would favor getting rid of the filibuster, something that he resisted, and that she would take a tougher line on immigration. Her brother supported creating a clearer pathway to citizenship. “I love Lindsey to death, but I’m a little bit stronger on immigration,” she said during a campaign event last week. “To me, it’s really clear; it’s a black-and-white issue: It’s legal versus illegal. If you’re here illegally, you should be deported. You’re breaking the law.”

As Trump prepared to fly to Myrtle Beach on Friday night for a Graham rally, he suggested to reporters that although “she’s a terrific woman,” it’s difficult for voters to get excited about her. The president’s message to voters at the rally: “What I really want you to do is pretend, please, that I’m on the ballot.” Once he arrived in South Carolina that night, the memory of Lindsey Graham hovered. The late senator was the reason Trump knew Darline and that so many in the state knew her, the president said. Twice, he announced: “I’m doing this to honor Lindsey.” He asked voters to do the same.

“For Lindsey,” he said, “I want it to happen.”

Jack Rodriquez-Vars contributed research to this report.

Yet Another Purge in Washington

2026-08-21T20:09:14-04:00

Before becoming a regular travel companion of President Trump’s, the nation’s top housing-finance official and the nation’s top intelligence official for one summer, Bill Pulte was a meme-stock celebrity who was once honored in a livestream with a gag dinosaur trophy inscribed with the words Bill Pulte Fucks on the front and only the young on the back. “That looks pretty badass,” he said upon accepting the bizarro honor.

The 38-year-old heir to a developer dynasty has brought the same raw attitude to his time as a government servant. In his first months at the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, he oversaw hundreds of firings at the agency and at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and replaced both organizations’ chief executives. He boasted of overseeing five rounds of layoffs during his six-week stint as acting director of national intelligence that reduced the staff by about 30 percent at an agency that Trump has long viewed as redundant and adversarial. Then, this week, just days after returning to his old job at FHFA, he fired about a dozen more senior executives at Fannie Mae, a government-sponsored company that guarantees $4.1 trillion in U.S. mortgages, two people familiar with the firings told me.

[Read: Trump has a Bill Pulte problem]

The bio pages of some of the company’s top executives—Senior Vice President of Capital Markets Devang Doshi, Multifamily Chief Financial Officer Brian Hensen, to name two—were redirecting to 404-error pages yesterday, after announcements were made on Wednesday that they would lose their jobs, according to people involved. The firings were first reported by The Wall Street Journal. Doshi, Hensen, and others who were dismissed did not respond to requests for comment.

One person involved in the effort told me that the firings had been carried out because of an evolution in the business at Fannie and not for any ideological reason. “Mostly it was operational. We just don’t need them anymore, especially in the D.C. office,” this person told me, after requesting anonymity to describe personnel matters. “With the advent of AI and stuff, we have gotten a lot of savings.” Spokespeople for Fannie Mae and FHFA did not respond to requests for comment.

But the lasting impact of the firings may have more to do with Pulte’s positioning of himself as a go-to disrupter in Trump’s senior team. It’s a position that has caused tensions with other White House officials, who see Pulte as a distracting and problematic troublemaker who appeals to Trump’s most reckless instincts. Last year, Pulte proposed a new standard 50-year mortgage, which Trump briefly embraced, prompting a bipartisan backlash from policy makers who worried that Americans would lose out on equity gains. During a single July day in 2025, Pulte posted 15 separate attacks on Jerome Powell, then the chair of the Federal Reserve. “As someone with deep experience in construction, I am requesting to tour the Fed building and the new, ridiculous ‘renovations’, which I believe are riddled with fraud,” read one.

The Government Accountability Office has opened an investigation into Pulte’s use of typically private mortgage data to accuse prominent Trump targets, such as Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, of mortgage fraud. Officials told me that Pulte had pushed Trump to replace the U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia, Erik Siebert, when he’d failed to indict a Trump foe on mortgage fraud. (The replacement, Lindsey Halligan, was later disqualified by a federal judge, and her major indictments have since been tossed.) When 61 former Fannie employees sued Pulte for defamation after he accused them without evidence of getting “kickbacks” for charitable donations, a judge tossed the case, finding that Pulte’s government position gave him legal immunity.

But Trump has long had a soft spot for the type of advisers he sometimes describes as “killers”—people defined by loyalty and a defiant focus on supporting the boss, even if they sometimes leave controversy in their wake. Trump’s first campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, who recently left the administration, and his legal adviser Boris Epshteyn both fit that bill. In this way, Pulte continues to wield power, even if he is unlikely to receive another profane dinosaur trophy while serving U.S. taxpayers.

Isaac Stanley-Becker contributed reporting.

Ossoff’s ‘Natalie’ Moment

2026-08-21T06:00:00-04:00

How many words does it take to trigger MAGA world? Three, it turns out.

When Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia said at a rally on Sunday that President Trump wants to “travel with Natalie”—implying an untoward relationship between the 80-year-old grandfather and his 35-year-old special assistant, Natalie Harp—the outrage from Trump allies was as loud as it was predictable: Megyn Kelly, Newt Gingrich, and Laura Ingraham, among others, accused Ossoff of misogyny, despite having previously defended Trump’s own sexist comments. (The word hypocrisy feels inadequate here.)

But as this debate over propriety unfolds, a dedicated swath of the Democratic base is delighted. Since Trump’s reelection, these voters have been hankering to see their leaders show, well, a little more fight. So far, most of that fight seems to have come from midterm candidates on the far left, who often target the Democratic Party itself or the so-called establishment. To hear Ossoff, a more moderate Democrat in a reddish-purple state, direct a sharp—albeit petty—jab directly at the president thrilled such voters.

Some, in fact, found it almost cathartic. “Someone finally said something,” a 52-year-old woman named Rebecca, who attended Ossoff’s Atlanta rally, told me, sounding delighted. Bring on the “smoke,” Aaron Whitely, the chair of the Democratic Party of Chatham County, in Georgia, told me. “The younger folks are looking for it. The older folks are loving it.”

Ossoff appears to know this. It’s why viral clips of the senator, who is running for reelection, seem to pop up every few weeks like zinnias in summer. It’s also why you can’t have a conversation about the 2028 presidential race without mentioning his name. But just because the base loves the smoke doesn’t mean every other Georgia voter will.

Throughout Ossoff’s reelection campaign, Democratic talking heads have credited the senator for succinctly calling out the Trump administration’s alleged self-dealing. His speech at the Center Stage Theater in Atlanta on Sunday afternoon contained his usual anti-corruption message: “They made you pay more for everything and took us to war on lies and spent most of last year trying to cover up for the world’s most famous pedophile,” he told the crowd, “while the crook president and his crook family raked in billions.”

But this time, about 10 minutes into the speech, Ossoff threw in the comment that lit up social media and group chats. “The president sleeps through his meetings. He golfs and trades stocks,” he said. “See, he doesn’t want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the emir of Qatar.”

[Read: Five theories of the Jon Ossoff moment]

The rowdy crowd laughed and groaned. Ossoff’s speeches are typically so dense with current-affairs references that only the most plugged-in rally-goers fully understand them. In those few lines alone, the senator nodded to the ongoing Iran war, to viral footage of Trump appearing to nap in public, to the controversial gift of a plane that Trump was forced to abandon because of security concerns, and, ultimately, to Trump’s intense closeness with Harp, the aide whose obsession with the president reportedly alarmed the Secret Service. Attendees understood him immediately. “He didn’t have to make any reference to their relationship; it’s very well known,” Rebecca, who declined to share her last name for fear of being targeted by the administration, said. “It’s in the public consciousness.”

People who have scrolled Facebook or tuned in to MS NOW during the past two years—and plenty of engaged Democrats of a certain age have done both, obsessively—are quite familiar with Harp. In 2024, reporting from Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan identified her as Trump’s closest aide, one who keeps the president updated on positive press coverage and social-media buzz and who once gushed to Trump in a letter, “You are all that matters to me.” This week, CNN reported that Harp had once hunkered down in the trunk of an SUV to avoid being separated from the president. Another report revealed that Harp had worked in the White House for more than a year without an active security clearance.

It’s obvious that Ossoff’s comment about Harp found its target in the West Wing, because, as that awful saying goes, a hit dog really does tend to holler. “Jon Jackoff has to be the biggest cuck loser in politics,” Steven Cheung, the White House communications director, posted. When the CNN reporter Kristen Holmes asked Trump about Ossoff’s remark, the White House Rapid Response X account called her a “disgraceful, humiliating embarrassment to her alleged profession” and said that one day, her children would be “sickened and embarrassed” by her. Soon, it was as though a private memo had gone out—and perhaps one did—to MAGA talking heads instructing them to frame Ossoff’s words as a misogynistic smear on a woman simply doing her job. “I feel bad for your staff if this is what you think of women,” Representative Anna Paulina Luna of Florida wrote on X. “Donald Trump has done more to elevate women in politics than any other President,” CNN’s Scott Jennings, who might be auditioning to replace Karoline Leavitt as White House press secretary, offered on X.

Some Democrats were irked with Ossoff too. The comments about Natalie “distracted and detracted from the power” of his otherwise effective message, the former Barack Obama adviser David Axelrod wrote on X. On the whole, “Ossoff has gone after Trump in a tough, fair, and pointed way,” Axelrod told me on a phone call yesterday. “This just seemed a little unnecessary and a bit gratuitous.”

Axelrod’s response was dismissed by the voters and local party leaders I spoke with as too sensitive. They pointed out that Ossoff had made only a light reference to Harp—one that a listener could interpret as they pleased. He didn’t actually accuse them of having an affair! Even if he had, those Democrats said, isn’t it time for party leaders to take a break from the high road? When I read Axelrod’s quote over the phone to Wanda Townes, the chair of the Democrats of Camden County, in Georgia, she was instantly annoyed. “That softness is the reason that Trump is in office. Stop being soft,” she told me. (“There’s no doubt it was chum in the water” for people “who feel like Trump has pushed Democrats around,” Axelrod said when I asked for his response.)

Earlier this summer, I wrote about the Democrats’ frustration that their party leaders still haven’t seemed to match their voters’ rage. “We’re still pissed that we lost the election in 2024—and we’re pissed at them for not doing a better job of standing up to the Republicans and to Trump,” Susan Polakoff Shaw, a leader of an Ohio grassroots Democratic group, told me then. It makes sense that she loved Ossoff’s comment this week about Harp. “If nothing else, Ossoff shed light on who this young woman is, what her job is, and the twisted relationship the two of them have,” she texted me. “I mean, who writes love letters to an 80 year old!??”

[Read: The Democratic base is angry ]

Pissed is certainly the operative word. And Ossoff has been successful lately because he sounds about as ticked off as voters are and channels that anger into clippable sound bites for social media. California Governor Gavin Newsom similarly attempts to provoke Trump in an aggressive, Trumpian style. But from Ossoff, who cuts a more wholesome figure and doesn’t imitate the president, the attacks are more surprising—and therefore perhaps more effective. Videos of the senator that have gone viral this year include Ossoff referring to Trump as a “failed president and a national disgrace” and using the phrases “Mar-a-Lago mafia” and “the Epstein class” to describe the president’s allies. Last month, Ossoff repeatedly asked Jay Clayton, Trump’s nominee for director of national intelligence, who had won the 2020 presidential election and called it “humiliating” when Clayton would not answer.

This kind of assertiveness is refreshing to Democrats, the party members I spoke with said. “Older white ladies, older Black ladies—they’re loving it,” Whitely said. Townes described her ideal future for the Democrats: “We need more Ossoffs; we need more Jasmine Crocketts,” she said, referring to the Texas representative whose own MAGA jabs have gone viral.

There is, of course, a downside to jabbing in politics: Not every voter relishes the melee. Crockett, to use Townes’s example, lost a primary for Senate in Texas this year, at least in part because even the Democrats who loved her pugnacity did not believe that she would be able to persuade independent and moderate Texans to vote for a Democrat. Similarly, success for Ossoff will be measured not by how much he delights his party’s most loyal supporters but by how many Georgians he can win over in November.

Madison Hahamy contributed research to this report.

The White House Freak-Out Over Natalie Harp

2026-08-20T20:05:00-04:00

You are reading this story only because the White House didn’t want you to.

I’ll explain. This past Sunday, Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia—who has become quite good at delivering viral campaign sound bites, slickly filmed by multiple cameras—unleashed a blistering indictment of President Trump’s leadership. Ossoff, a former documentary filmmaker who is generating 2028 buzz, denounced Trump’s handling of the Iran war this way: “While he fruitlessly drains our munitions and oil reserves, the president sleeps through his meetings. He golfs and trades stocks. See, he doesn’t want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the emir of Qatar.”

It was a pithy and well-structured attack, but not so different from the broadsides delivered daily by Democrats on the campaign trail or on MS NOW. But one new word stood out: Natalie.

The line got a knowing laugh from a handful of observers in the room, and it electrified a subset of political obsessives on social media, who took to their favorite platforms and group chats with some version of “Oh, he went there!” or “I can’t believe he did that!” But although Ossoff’s aside resonated with the junkies, the majority of Americans likely had no idea who this Natalie woman was, and might never have given it another thought.

But then the West Wing lost its mind. And Trump did too. Their pushback was so overwhelming, so obviously coordinated, so ugly and personal that it became a story. The White House inadvertently created news, as well as a permission structure for even the most cautious, fact-based media organizations to take on the topic. Which is why the name Natalie Harp is now everywhere.

In Trump’s second term, his White House is populated by true believers. And no one believes more truly than Harp, whose devotion to Trump is unparalleled. A cancer survivor who credits the president with saving her life, the 35-year-old aide seems firmly glued to his side, an adoring smile stretched across her face. Harp has become an Oval Office gatekeeper, a ubiquitous travel companion, and one of only a few people with the keys to the president’s social-media account. She’s become one of the most unlikely powerful people in the administration—often seen in public but rarely heard from—and her presence has turned into a curiosity. Although she got some mentions in the press as well as in a new, best-selling book about Trump, Harp largely stayed out of the headlines even as she became the subject of Washington gossip and some West Wing grumbling.

[Read: The YOLO presidency]

But things changed because of a Turkish catering truck. The Washington Post reported last week that Harp was one of a handful of aides chosen to join Trump when he was furtively whisked off Air Force One at the Ankara airport earlier this summer because of Secret Service concerns about a threat from Iran. The questions were immediate: Why did this young aide, whose official responsibilities remain murky at best, hide with Trump in the truck as the president secretly boarded a different aircraft, even as the secretary of state and the secretary of the Treasury were left on board what became, in essence, a decoy plane? Just who is she, and what does she actually do? That chatter is likely what prompted Ossoff to name-drop Natalie. But it was the White House that pushed the story into the national discourse.

This White House rarely does things subtly—just look at all of the gold in the Oval Office or the maps depicting Canada as the 51st state. And when it comes to pushing back against a story aides don’t like, the two options are usually a) scorched earth or b) total obliteration. But even by that over-the-top standard, the outsize reaction was eyebrow-raising. Beyond some winking posts and passing mentions on cable-news shows, the story really wasn’t going anywhere until White House Communications Director Steven Cheung unleashed a flamethrower of a post on Monday morning, writing, in part, “Jon Jackoff has to be the biggest cuck loser in politics. Instead of denigrating hard working people serving their country, Jon should look deep into his soul and ask himself why he’s a miserable person who hates this country.” Just a few minutes later, the White House spokesperson Davis Ingle chimed in with “Jon Ossoff is a cringeworthy, feminine theatre kid cosplaying as Barack Obama. Nobody gives a shit what this lightweight loser says.”

Well then! Suddenly, the story had life. A few hours later, the press pool was invited into the Oval Office for a photo op as Trump honored a heroic California lifeguard. The president prides himself on his accessibility to the media and took a few questions. Kristen Holmes of CNN asked, “Jon Ossoff said that you’d rather travel with your aide Natalie Harp and build the ballroom than do your job as president. What is your response?” Trump responded with his standard, 1980s-vintage insult about Ossoff—he called him “Pee-wee Herman”—and then, well, he proved the senator’s point by launching into a several-hundred-word defense of the ballroom. Later, he shushed Holmes as she tried to ask another question by snapping, “You’re a loud, boisterous person. You’re fake news. Be quiet, be quiet, be quiet.”

A short time later, the official White House Rapid Response X account went a step further, posting that Holmes was an “embarrassment to her alleged profession” and then, in a deeply personal attack, declaring, “Someday, your children will come across your disgusting and inhumane question. They will be sickened and embarrassed to have a parent be so callous and vindictive.” The ugliness of the comment drew immediate pushback from CNN and other journalists, who defended Holmes.

Meanwhile, White House aides and Trump allies began an all-out shielding of Harp. One of the president’s sons defended her, as did a Cabinet member and a congresswoman. With some prodding from the White House, a whole bunch of conservative media members and MAGA influencers joined them, I was told by one of the people who’d received a nudge. (Ossoff, for his part, told MS NOW yesterday that Harp was fair game because “these White House staffers are adults, public officials paid by the taxpayer with immense power in positions of public trust.”)

If the goal was to shut down talk about Harp, it backfired spectacularly. Suddenly, media outlets that had ignored her felt the need to write about her. Questions about her security clearance came up, along with this one: When was the last time First Lady Melania Trump was seen in public anyway? (July 19, at the World Cup final.) And as more stories were written, West Wing aides got angrier, taking their cues from a furious president, two outside allies and a senior staffer told me, speaking on the condition of anonymity so as not to have that ire turned their way. “It’s rare to see them this worked up about anything,” one of the outside allies told me.

That furor, in a way, underlines Harp’s importance in Trump’s world. She is the president’s constant companion on Marine One, at Mar-a-Lago, and at summits across the world, those familiar with her position told me. They added that the president has described her to them as “my Natalie.” She’s also been nicknamed the “human printer” because she totes around a portable printer so she can, at any point, dash out a paper copy (Trump’s preferred form in which to read things) of a poll or a news story. She has learned his cadence—and unorthodox capitalizations—well enough to draft social-media posts for him to approve. She trawls social media for material that the president can use in his feeds, including posts that have led to trouble, such as one depicting the Obamas as apes. Some aides have quietly grumbled to those I spoke with that Harp is too inexperienced to have such unfettered access to the president.

Each item she prints, whether a positive poll of dubious origin or an attack on a political foe, reinforces Trump’s worldview. In Regime Change, a new book by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, Trump is depicted explaining to people that Harp is the only aide who loves him as much as his family does. Haberman now says that Harp is Trump’s “human binkie.” Tales of Harp’s commitment to Trump are legion: She rode in the trunk of an SUV to accompany him to court. She sprinted across a golf course in Scotland so he wouldn’t be out of her sight. She left notes for the president that documented her intense devotion. And so on.

Ingle, the White House spokesperson, perhaps unsurprisingly reacted strongly when I asked for a comment about the matter, sending me a statement that read: “The media should get back to reporting real news and stop regurgitating Trump-Deranged liberal talking points.” And there is no expectation that, despite the whirlwind week, Harp’s role will change; a senior official told me that Harp was “upset by the unfair attention” but would not allow it to deter her from her duties. But those in the West Wing are bracing for more scrutiny. And, it just so happens, Melania Trump chose today to make an appearance in public.

“Good afternoon, I heard you missed me,” she told a Rose Garden crowd gathered for a foster-care initiative. “Here I am.”

An Unsettling Glimpse Into the GOP’s Future

2026-08-20T18:30:00-04:00

Normally, when a primary candidate finishes with 10.5 percent of the vote, it is a clear signal of their irrelevance.

James Fishback finished third in Tuesday’s Florida Republican gubernatorial primary, and at no point in the race did it seem like he ever had a chance. In fact, at no point in his broader career has the 31-year-old, who is known for his racist slurs and unabashed bigotry, achieved anything of note. The high-school-debate nonprofit he founded was hit with allegations that he had sexually groomed a 17-year-old employee. A hedge fund where he’d once worked said that it had planned on firing him before he resigned, and accused him of claiming a job title that had never existed at the firm. He founded his own investment firm but left after the board decided to shut down the funds he managed. Fishback told me that he had left the firm to run for governor. He claims to have been an adviser to DOGE—but former senior DOGE officials have denied it.

However, Fishback is defiantly proud of his showing, despite losing the primary to Representative Byron Donalds and also finishing well behind Lieutenant Governor Jay Collins. “I would much rather have gotten 10 percent and done all of this and really moved the needle in political discourse,” he told me today, “than have gotten 24 percent like Jay Collins did and have nothing to show for it.”

Despite his penchant for spectacular, serial failure, Fishback matters because he managed to figure out at least one thing: how to capture attention from the youthful right. Heading into Election Night, this was the one area where Fishback appeared to excel. A February poll from the University of North Florida found Fishback to be the leading candidate among GOP primary voters under 35, with 31 percent supporting him. By July, that number was up to 51 percent, according to a Change Research poll paid for by the conservative nonprofit Freedom Project USA. His candidacy was, in some respects, a test run for what might work with the next generation of Republican voters. What seems to be working is unrepentant bigotry.

[Read: Young Republican activists are turning against Trump]

Fishback’s appeal to younger voters can be explained by a few other things: He is relatively young. He ran a rage-bait campaign that met young people where they are, maintaining a heavy digital presence with posts and appearances on the livestreams of prominent influencers. He spoke with sympathy of the economic concerns of downwardly mobile youth. He did all of this while regularly tossing off casual racism and anti-Semitism.

During the campaign, he referred to Byron Donalds, who is Black, as By’rone and called him a “slave” to donor and corporate interests. When a Black man questioned Fishback about the grooming allegations against him, the Florida politician said that the man should be “lynched.” When I reached out to him earlier today, he doubled down: “I think anyone should be executed” for making those kinds of “false allegations,” he said. When I pressed him on why he’d specifically said “lynched” instead of “executed,” he trailed off before claiming that he might have actually gained votes for saying this. He has made not-so-subtle overtures to Groypers—slang for fans of the white-supremacist internet personality Nick Fuentes—by reportedly claiming that he rebuffed a PAC that offered him $500,000 under the condition that he rebuke Fuentes. “I hung up the phone, because I will never disavow patriotic Americans,” he told a crowd. He has used the term goyslop, anti-Semitic internet slang suggesting that there’s a Jewish conspiracy to harm the Gentile masses by feeding them junk food.

Fishback contests the “anti-Semitic” label. “I’ve condemned anti-Semitism repeatedly. It has no place in our society. Neither does the hatred of Christians,” he said when I questioned him about his use of goyslop and his praise of Groypers as “insightful” and “patriotic.” Fishback also pushed back against most of the ways he’s been described in the media. He said that he has “never claimed to be a DOGE adviser” even though he posted on X last year that he has “advised DOGE.” Fishback has maintained that the sexual-misconduct allegations are “completely false,” and he reiterated this to me, saying that no court ever found him guilty.

If you’re not prone to anti-Semitism and don’t enjoy far-right politics, it’s tempting to see Fishback as an aberration. When poll-tracking websites observed that Fishback seemed to be dominating campus precincts in Florida on Tuesday, several pundits were quick to point out that, in many cases, winning meant accruing only dozens of votes, because few students had returned to campuses from summer break. “FSU has 46,184 students. Twenty-eight people voted in this precinct. Fishback got 25,” wrote the conservative communications strategist Erica Knight. “He didn’t capture the youth vote. He captured a group chat.”

But the signs of a shift to the hard right among young Republican voters have been well documented. The New York Young Republicans Club’s Nazi tendencies are well known. A Yale poll from this past spring found that younger voters are more anti-Semitic than older generations. And a Manhattan Institute poll from December found that 25 percent of Republicans under the age of 50 openly express anti-Semitic views. “I do see the youth right turning the dial up on misogyny, anti-Semitism, and racism—even as the youth right is racially and ethnically diverse,” Lauren Lassabe Shepherd, a historian who has written about American campus conservatism, told me when I asked her about Fishback. She suspects that the “online populism and anti-establishment politics” that Fishback espouses are here to stay.

[Read: ‘Looksmaxxing’ reveals the depth of the crisis facing young men]

In my own coverage of the right, I’ve observed a steady uptick in the far-right drift of young conservatives. At large right-wing events, young conservatives have consistently espoused a deeply nativist strain of politics, and expressed their fandom of Fuentes and his politics. Even young right-wingers who don’t like Fuentes have told me that they’ve witnessed the growing influence of his politics or that they agree with his views and simply see him as an imperfect vessel. Young Republican staffers on Capitol Hill are increasingly open to his far-right, Groyper style of politics.

Fishback was able to show that the energy Fuentes and other young far-right figures online have tapped into isn’t just an internet or a conservative-staffer phenomenon. It’s an ideology that someone savvier and more skilled than Fishback might well leverage to achieve greater real-world success at some point in the near future.

President Trump Has a Pet-Project Docket at the National Parks

2026-08-20T15:42:00-04:00

President Trump gets what he wants, when he wants it, from the National Park Service. One and a half million dollars to replace brick pavers in Lafayette Park, across from the White House? Contracting officials at the NPS Washington headquarters found the money within five days last month. A $170,000 request to remove a fence around the Hains Point golf course, preparing the ground for a new “championship-quality” layout? Six days this summer. And the more–than–$5 million project to gild equine statues along the nearby Memorial Bridge? That took 12 days.

The rapid-approval system is specific to projects Trump wants, thanks to a reorganization at the Interior Department led by Secretary Doug Burgum. Trump issued an executive order to make the District of Columbia “safe and beautiful,” justifying the creation of an NPS docket of “White House priorities” that is handled separately from other park projects and is prioritized both for funding and contracting resources, according to documents I obtained and interviews with five current or former NPS officials. Meanwhile, many other projects throughout the nationwide system of parks are languishing.

The list I received includes Trump’s well-known projects on the National Mall and the refurbishment of the White House, along with several lesser-known efforts: The hiring and equipping of 450 new U.S. Park Police officers in the Washington region, and more than $12.8 million—some of which came from the Department of Justice—for police equipment, including new Flock license-plate-reading cameras, radios, tasers, laptops, body cameras, and body armor. Internal documentation for park projects typically includes “Consequences of Failure to Act,” which scores the urgency based on health and safety measures. When work began in January on fountains near the White House, officials described the need for the work in this way: “Such failure will disappoint visitors, as well as residents and employees of the White House.”

The new project-funding system was described by a contracting officer during an April meeting with NPS officials. “There’s three different lists: White House priorities, high priorities, and low priorities,” the official told colleagues on the virtual call, according to a written account that was provided to me. Those on the call, who do not work on White House priorities, were advised that projects on the low-priority list likely would not be completed, so they should attempt to get their needs moved to the high-priority list. White House priorities, meanwhile, were nonnegotiable. As Washington is beautified at great expense, officials told me, vital needs at dozens of national parks are not being filled.

I obtained copies of the high- and low-priority lists that circulated this summer inside the NPS. As of mid-July, that low-priority list included 1,573 projects, including many that officials told me would have been funded under prior administrations. Projects that have not yet been funded from that list, according to a separate national-park database, include requests for new wildlife-resistant dumpsters in Bryce Canyon National Park, snow machines to provide fire remediation in Alaska’s remote Yukon–Charley Rivers National Preserve, and an archaeological survey of recently acquired land at Camp Nelson National Monument, a major Union supply base during the Civil War that trained Black soldiers.

The Interior Department dismissed the concerns over this approach when I reached out for comment and told me that the low-priority list I had obtained included items that had been “mis-prioritized and were corrected.” Interior leaders have also boasted about new funding streams, including revenue from more expensive national-park passes for foreign visitors. “In any year, the National Park Service must prioritize projects most in need,” the press office said in an unsigned statement. “The National Park Service has not only been focused on beautifying the district for the 250th celebrations in our nation’s capital but has also been working on many deferred maintenance projects throughout the country.”

[Read: ‘Rush project at request of POTUS’]

But those working in the parks say that it is not just money holding these projects back. It’s also a lack of staff, after rounds of workforce reductions, who are able to handle contracts, a problem that the contracting official on the April call referred to as “capacity.” When Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency targeted the department last year, many contracting managers at the NPS took buyouts, and many of those who remained found themselves reassigned within the larger department. The NPS had 179 full-time administrative officers in June, a 21 percent decrease from the month Trump took office, according to Office of Management and Budget records. The result is a growing backlog of unfinished projects in far-flung parks, as government employees try to jury-rig temporary fixes, the officials said. “There is very little acquisition support,” one of the NPS employees told me. “This is going to get exponentially worse.”

Spencer Morgan, the site superintendent of the Theodore Roosevelt Inaugural National Historic Site, in Buffalo, New York, told me that his facility is still waiting on this fiscal year’s promised operating-support funding, which needs to arrive before the end of September, or he will have to institute major cuts. He has been told that an additional stream of routine-maintenance funding he was expecting will never arrive. Because the site is run in conjunction with a local nonprofit that pays Morgan’s salary, he said that he was comfortable speaking openly about the struggles his staff faces as funding and resources are instead directed to the White House list. “I am not beholden to hold my tongue at this point,” he said.

Inside the NPS, Morgan said, the staff has been decimated. “I started in this role in April of 2024, and the number of people who are not there since I started is gut-wrenching,” he told me. “There is a whole loss of institutional knowledge.”

Other NPS employees requested anonymity to speak with me because they fear retaliation from their supervisors. One employee told me that their park can’t hire employees to fill vacant slots but also can’t contract out work, because it’s difficult to get on the high-priority list. “We keep being told to be creative,” this employee said. “And we are running into dead ends every time we try to pivot.”

[Read: Let them eat gold]

This reduction in spending showed up in budgetary documents I reported on in June. The documents showed a decrease of $854 million, or 68 percent, in spending on projects in park regions outside the Washington area in the first eight and a half months of fiscal year 2026, compared with the full prior fiscal year. During that same period, spending around Washington increased by about $100 million, not counting about $310 million in donations that the NPS received from allies of the president, most of which is going to fund a new White House ballroom.

The frustration over these shifting priorities has been a frequent topic of conversation among park superintendents, who are struggling to maintain services this summer. At another NPS meeting in early July, an employee presented a list of 133 projects, totaling $35.8 million, that they said were ready to go but lacked contracting staff to make them happen, according to a person on the call.

It’s not clear whether all of the projects on the White House priority list will receive funding this fiscal year. The list also includes a $25 million plan to replace the Eagle One helicopter used by the U.S. Park Police (and at least once by Burgum when he was running late for an Air Force One flight), $475,000 to clean and repaint the White House exterior, drones “to support law enforcement” in the Washington region, a new park-police substation for Rock Creek Park, and streetlight replacement along the National Mall. The priority list also includes improvements for parts of the country where Trump is known to travel. The document shows a $77,300 expense to clear brush and plant new trees around Camp David, the presidential retreat in Maryland, as part of a much larger effort to plant 3,000 trees and provide a “security benefit” to the facility.

And Trump continues to add more projects to the list—or expand projects already on it. Take, for example, the brick pavers in Lafayette Park outside the White House gates. In May, Trump said that the park renovation would be funded by “a contribution that I made,” even though internal documentation shows public funds being used. After the Fourth of July celebrations, the NPS agreed to pay an additional $1.5 million to replace more of the brick pavers in that park. Then, in August, the president told reporters in the Oval Office that he was still deliberating on whether the brick pavers were good enough.

“Now we have a big decision to make,” he said. “Do we take the pavers that are red—you know, the red-brick pavers—and do we change them into a granite, to gray granite? They’re beautiful, but they’re not the original. So we’re gonna have to make that decision.” The National Park Service, no doubt, will be ready to follow the president’s lead if he pivots.

Alan Dershowitz Won’t Forget What Larry David Did to Him

2026-08-18T08:00:00-04:00

Here it is, August on Martha’s Vineyard, and Alan Dershowitz has barely been heard from.

Well, that’s not exactly true. He has been heard from on many topics—because Dershowitz is who he is, and pretty much anyone can join Substack, and TV bookers can be hard to resist. Still, he has said little publicly about the maddening injustice he’s faced in recent years: his annual summer shunning at the hands of the island’s liberal social gentry. Has this perennial comedy of ill manners—the Vineyard cancellation of Alan Dershowitz—finally run its course?

The story has become a familiar seasonal menace; as pernicious as ticks, and as hard to kill. Its particulars are known. Dershowitz, the inexhaustible Harvard Law professor who represented a gallery of notorious clients over several decades, was once a kibitzing dynamo here. But that was before the blacklists and the badgering.

In his telling (and retelling), Dershowitz became socially radioactive during Donald Trump’s first term, when he began speaking out on the president’s behalf, and then joined his first impeachment defense team. Although he did not personally support Trump—he’d been a lifelong Democrat who’d voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and would support Joe Biden in 2020—his stock explanation was that everyone is entitled to legal representation. It was the same basic principle he had applied when representing the likes of Mike Tyson, O. J. Simpson, Claus von Bülow, and, more recently, Jeffrey Epstein. It was no different, in fact, than the occasion of Dershowitz’s first-ever visit to Martha’s Vineyard, in 1969, when he was enlisted to help in the defense of Ted Kennedy after his late-night accident at Chappaquiddick.

Yet defending Trump was apparently too noxious for Dershowitz’s reputation. “I never thought I would see McCarthyism come to Martha’s Vineyard,” he lamented in a column in The Hill in 2018. According to Dershowitz, locals have urged his exclusion from various Vineyard businesses and institutions. Every summer, it seems, has brought a new episode in ostracism, cold shoulders in the hot sun.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams: The right is changing the rules of the culture war]

There was the Great Pierogi Incident last year at the West Tisbury farmers’ market, in which a vendor refused to sell half a dozen dumplings to Dershowitz, citing his representation of “several sexual predators and abusers, including Jeffrey Epstein.” Dershowitz claimed that he was being discriminated against over his vocal support for Israel and initiated a follow-up spectacle a week later in which the vendor, Krem Miskevich, refused to accept a signed copy of one of Dershowitz’s books (The Ten Big Anti-Israel Lies) as a peace offering.

In 2022, Dershowitz said he’d received a fan email from a reader who alleged that he’d been beaten up at the beach (he did not specify where) just for carrying a copy of a book written by Dershowitz. “Without warning, I was slugged and punched in the face,” the man wrote to Dershowitz, who reprinted the unverified email on Substack in a post titled “Email From a Man Who Got Beaten Up for Reading My Book.”

And then there was the infamous clash at the Chilmark General Store with Dershowitz’s now very-much-ex-friend Larry David. In the annals of Dershowitz’s social spiral on the Vineyard, this conflagration has taken on almost-mythic dimensions, like his own personal Stalingrad. Dershowitz was sitting on the porch of the store with another friend, “who happened to be a very kind of radical woke lefty from New York, but very tolerant,” he told me. David was not very tolerant, at least of Dershowitz. He walked onto the porch, refused to shake Dershowitz’s hand, called him “disgusting,” and stormed off. Dershowitz said at the time that David was so irate, Dershowitz worried that the comedian might suffer a stroke.

That unpleasantness on the porch, memorialized on Page Six, took place five summers ago. But Dershowitz talks about it as if it were yesterday.

On a recent Saturday, I ventured north from Washington for a little hardship duty in Chilmark, the preciously pastoral town on the western side of the island where Dershowitz has owned a home since 1991. I approached him first by email, telling Dershowitz that I was curious about his current social standing on the Vineyard and how things were going for him this summer. The subject matter could be freshly topical, I figured, because his two most prominent clients—Trump and Epstein—are more toxic than ever. To my surprise, Dershowitz agreed to speak with me.

Actually, I was not surprised.

“We can meet on the porch for a slice,” he proposed.

Dershowitz, who turns 88 next month, has been presiding from the rocking chairs of the Chilmark General Store for decades, juggling pizza and discourse. When I arrived, I found him wearing a bright-red T-shirt with the words Proud American over an Israeli flag and an American one, each in the shape of a heart. He told me that he’d asked his wife, Carolyn Cohen, to join us but she had no interest. “She said, ‘I’m so sick and tired of this subject,’” he told me. Dershowitz conceded that he, too, is weary of it. “But, you know, it’s important that people get the whole context,” he said.

The whole context, in 2026, is basically this: Dershowitz says he has started a new life on the Vineyard. But just because his persecution tale has become an island eye-roll does not mean that it has subsided. Especially, according to Dershowitz, in his own, bucolic neighborhood. “Here in Chilmark, it’s 90 percent negative,” Dershowitz reported to me. That reception contrasts with what he gets in Miami Beach, where he spends his winters and where, he said, he is treated “wonderfully.” He is “treated very well” even in the more heavily trafficked Vineyard towns on the other side of the island. “In Edgartown and even Oak Bluffs, the African American community, I’m treated very well,” he said. “It’s all Chilmark. And it’s all Jewish, anti-Zionist.”

I noted that he can at least still hold court at the Chilmark General Store. But he argued with my choice of the term holding court.

“I used to—not anymore,” he said.

“You don’t hold court anymore?” I asked, as he arguably held court. “What is this?”

“You’re interviewing me,” he said. In the past, it would have been a high-end conclave. “Normally, we would have this whole area,” he said, motioning to a group of rocking chairs on one side of the porch. “I would have Larry David here,” he said. “Ted Danson was here sometimes,” he added. “The guy who did Ghostbusters—he died a few years ago—he was here.” (This was Harold Ramis, who died in 2014.)

“The whole crew of Chilmark friends, I would say, 20 or so, no longer talk to me,” Dershowitz said.

He pointed next door to the Chilmark Tavern, one of his favorite restaurants on the Vineyard, where he claims that some of his vacation nemeses are trying to get him banned. “A bunch of people went to the Chilmark Tavern and said If you continue to serve Dershowitz, we’re not coming here,” he insisted.

I was skeptical of this. “Ask her; you can check with her,” he said. “Jenny.” When I contacted Jenna Petersiel, the proprietor of the Chilmark Tavern, she told me that she’d assumed that The Atlantic wanted to speak with her about the challenges of running a restaurant, or ticks. “A discussion of Alan Dershowitz had not crossed my mind,” she said, declining to comment otherwise. Dershowitz also told me of an event he had attended on the Chilmark Tavern deck not long ago. A woman got out of her car, he claimed, “saw I was up there, turned around, and went back to her car.”

He appears to have a limitless supply of such stories, in part because it seems as if Dershowitz initiates a fair number of confrontations himself. The week before our conversation, he had returned to the hallowed cultural battleground of the Pierogi Wars, the West Tisbury farmers’ market. He was wearing his U.S.-Israel shirt (or “my Zionist T-shirt,” of which he has two—one red, one blue) and saw a guy wearing a Free Palestine shirt. “I walked up to him. I said, ‘Can we take a picture together?’” The man refused. “He said, ‘No, no, no Israel,’ and he walked away.”

Dershowitz believes that many of his old Vineyard friends revile him for calling out the “anti-Zionist” and “radical” bent of the progressive left. He showed me his phone and cued up what he calls “my daily love note.” This one was an unsolicited email he’d just received, with “GENOCIDAL ZIONIST ISRAEL!” in the subject line; he kindly forwarded the note to me. “They always combine Zionism with pedophilia,” Dershowitz observed of his correspondents.

A few times during our conversation, I questioned Dershowitz about whether people really reject him because of his Zionist views or whether it might involve something more comprehensive: him being Alan Dershowitz. His position on the Middle East seems farther down the list of reasons that people might not like him than his affiliations with Trump and Epstein and his overall reputation, accrued over decades.

But Dershowitz claims, for instance, that he’s no longer asked to speak at the Martha’s Vineyard Book Festival because “they censor anybody they disagree with.” (A spokesperson for the book festival told me in an email that Dershowitz’s claim is “completely false” and that “the festival line up over the past two decades hardly reflects a narrow or excluding agenda.”)

“I personify what the woke hates,” Dershowitz said. Before I could ask him what, exactly, “the woke” is, he explained that he is now seen as a “traitor” to the Democratic Party. The enmity is mutual. In September, he has a new book coming out called Why I Quit the Dems: And So Should You! The subtitle is Confessions of a Reluctant Republican.

I asked Dershowitz directly whether he had voted for Trump in 2024.

“You’re allowed to ask it,” he said. “And my wife does not allow me to answer it.”

“Okay, so you’re going to hide behind your wife,” I said.

“I’m going to hide behind my wife,” he confirmed.

For the record, Dershowitz added that he always votes, and said that he had not voted for Kamala Harris. Also, his new book includes a blurb from President Trump (who obviously read every word).

Alan Dershowitz watches as Donald Trump speaks to the media at Manhattan Criminal Court in May 2024. (Michael M. Santiago / Getty)

Despite all of this, Dershowitz has arrived at a nuanced take on his snubbing. “I think it’s selective cancellation,” he told me. “We decided, basically, to change our life on the Vineyard.”

He said that he keeps busy by writing and doing regular paid appearances on Newsmax, occasional hits on Fox News, Piers Morgan’s show on YouTube, and other outlets. (He used to be on CNN all the time, but no more—“CNN has canceled me.”) He said that he does not lack social options. He has become very active in a Vineyard Chabad that he helped start. He told me at one point about all of the new friends he’s made. “Most of them are more supportive of Israel than the other group was,” he said. “And I often ask myself, How did I allow myself to become part of that other group?”

When I asked Dershowitz who his new friends are, we wound up talking about someone who is definitely in the “other group”: Larry David.

They used to speak all the time, Dershowitz told me. They would have dinner, share jokes. “I allowed him to use my gym to work out,” Dershowitz said. “I helped him on a number of occasions.”

“Larry David doesn’t talk to me anymore,” Dershowitz said at another point. “He screams and yells at me when he sees me.” He told me that he used to be a fan of Curb Your Enthusiasm but can no longer bring himself to watch it. When discussing David, Dershowitz often spoke in the present tense, describing their breach as if it were an active feud and a still-fresh wound.

Predictably, David had minimal enthusiasm for discussing any of this when I reached out to him.

“I don’t know why he’s still thinking and talking about me,” he told me by email.

As for the five-year-old confrontation at the Chilmark store, David added this: “I have lots of confrontations on my show but rarely in life,” he said. “And then only if I think I can take them in a fight. Hence the Dershowitz dust-up.”

While Dershowitz and I spoke on the porch, a woman sitting in a rocking chair next to him kept leaning in, almost certainly eavesdropping. She confirmed this about half an hour into our conversation.

“I’m sorry to interrupt,” the woman said to Dershowitz. “I was just sitting here. And I just wanted to say, you sound super fascinating. And I hope nobody’s ever mean to you. Ever.”

Dershowitz kvelled.

“Did you plant her there or something?” I joked (sort of).

“I only paid her 10 dollars,” he joked (I think).

During our conversation, Dershowitz told me about a less cordial episode that had taken place last month in front of the Chilmark store, just a few feet from where we were sitting. The incident was not covered in the media, but Dershowitz had filmed a portion of it on his phone and shared the video with me. A guy in a Yankees cap had spotted Dershowitz at the store and promptly launched a barrage of Bronx cheers his way from the parking lot.

The man showed exemplary message discipline.

“Do you defend pedophiles? Do you defend pedophiles?” he repeated. “Yes, he does.”

Dershowitz demanded that his tormentor identify himself.

“My name is Jeffrey Epstein Jr., great friend to Alan Dershowitz,” the man replied.

Dershowitz kept demanding that the man state his name.

“What are you going to do?” the man asked.

“I’m going to sue you if you give your name,” Dershowitz said. (Surprisingly, the man continued to withhold his name.)

“Why? What are you going to sue me for?” he asked.

“For defamation.”

The heckler also mocked Dershowitz for, among other things, claiming to a TV reporter that, although he’d once received a massage from an adult woman at Epstein’s house, he’d kept his underwear on during the experience.

“He was on the plane, and he kept his underwear on,” the man taunted, while retreating across the street. There was some more hollering back and forth.

“You’re still a schmuck,” Dershowitz shouted.

In the pantheon of rogues and sleazeballs that Dershowitz has represented, Epstein stands out. Dershowitz helped orchestrate the late sex offender’s controversial plea deal in 2008; Epstein was allowed to plead guilty to state prostitution crimes in Florida, but he avoided federal trafficking charges and wound up serving just 13 months in jail. (At the time of his death, in 2019, he was awaiting trial on federal charges of child sex trafficking, by which point Dershowitz had fallen out with him and was no longer representing him.) Earlier in their relationship, they were frequent companions. Dershowitz was a visitor to Epstein’s homes in Palm Beach and New York, and went once with his wife and daughter to Epstein’s infamous island. (“No young women there,” Dershowitz wrote to me by email. “No one there except staff and ghislaine Maxwell.”)

I asked Dershowitz whether he’d ever been a passenger on Epstein’s plane.

“Oh, 20 times,” he said. As Epstein’s attorney, he explained, when he had to travel to Florida, his client would fly him down. However, the heckler’s claim that Dershowitz had received a massage on the plane was incorrect. That had taken place at Epstein’s home in Palm Beach. “This was a shoulder-and-neck massage, from an older woman,” Dershowitz told me. He said that this was “the only massage I’ve ever had in Epstein’s situation.”

“I’ve never in my life had an erotic massage. Not even from my wife,” he added, excruciatingly.

Dershowitz has said repeatedly that he never witnessed or participated in any unlawful sexual impropriety related to Epstein. In 2014, the Epstein survivor Virginia Giuffre alleged in court documents that the financier had trafficked her to multiple men while she was a minor. This included Dershowitz, who vehemently denied the charges. Giuffre sued Dershowitz for defamation, and Dershowitz countersued, claiming that she had made up the accusations. Giuffre withdrew her suit against Dershowitz in 2022, acknowledging that she might have made a mistake in identifying him. She died by suicide last year.

[Gilad Edelman: What everyone assumes about Jeffrey Epstein]

“I wish I never met him,” Dershowitz told me, speaking of Epstein. “But I don’t regret my representation of him.” This struck me as a classic bit of Dershowitz hairsplitting, and I was not quite sure what to make of it. Regardless, Dershowitz conveyed far more remorse over representing Epstein than I heard him express about any of his other clients. And he told me that he is resigned to Epstein being a lasting stain on his reputation and legacy.

“I’ve been already told I will have a bad obituary in The New York Times,” he volunteered.

“Who told you that?” I asked. “Do they work at The New York Times?”

“No,” Dershowitz said. He claimed to have heard it “from a guy who does obituaries for another newspaper.” (Apparently, all obit writers swap notes.) He added that an obituary writer for the Times did call him.

“With his deep obituary voice,” he noted, affecting a stentorian baritone. “I have to tell you that your obituary will include the allegations against you from Jeffrey Epstein,” the Times reporter said, according to the deep-voiced Dershowitz. He said that he’d urged the obit guy to “put it in perspective.” (Danielle Rhoades Ha, a New York Times spokesperson, declined to comment on any specific obituaries but told me by email, “We don’t write ‘negative’ or ‘positive’ obituaries, but strive for fair, comprehensive and accurate accounts of a person’s full life.”)

Tony Luong for The Atlantic

Dershowitz wanted to make clear to me how unfair he believes the Epstein-related allegations against him are. He and his wife have been married for 40 years, he said: “I have never cheated. I have never hugged—I don’t hug people. I don’t like hugging.” He also told me that he is “not a big massage person.”

“And by the way, nobody on the Vineyard believed this, even the people who hated me,” Dershowitz added. “Because they all see me with my wife.”

He went further. “In fact, the lawyer for Virginia Giuffre, he came over to me one day”—it was during a deposition—“and said, ‘Alan, I’ve seen you with your wife. I can’t believe you would ever have done anything.’”

I said I was dubious that the opposing lawyer would say something like this.

“I’ll give you his name—his name is Chuck Cooper.”

Reached by phone for comment, Charles Cooper, Giuffre’s lawyer, told me the exchange that Dershowitz had described had never taken place.

“This event that he’s reporting and this comment that he’s attributing to me are both categorically untrue,” Cooper said. He added that he remembers seeing Dershowitz with his wife on only one occasion, and that it was enough for him to make only a “fleeting observation.” Either way, “I did not say and I would never have said what he’s attributed to me,” Cooper said. “Give me a break.”

In the course of my discussion with Dershowitz, I learned of another fundamental change to his life, one that filled me with something I did not expect to feel: pathos.

Last year, Dershowitz’s son Elon died at 64, after suffering a stroke. He had been diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor when he was 10 and had been told that he’d be lucky to make it to his bar mitzvah. “We took extraordinary steps,” Dershowitz said, “all over the world.”

Elon had been his father’s sidekick. A film producer, he was the prime mover behind Reversal of Fortune, the 1990 legal thriller based on Dershowitz’s book about his successful defense of the British socialite Claus von Bülow in his trial for the attempted murder of his wife. The film solidified the status of Dershowitz (played by Ron Silver) as one of the “super lawyers” of his generation. “We went to the Oscars together,” Dershowitz said of him and Elon. Jeremy Irons won Best Actor for his portrayal of von Bülow. They went to an after-party. “I sat next to Gregory Peck, and it was a great moment,” Dershowitz said.

When Dershowitz spoke about Elon, I detected a note of anguish in his voice. On the Vineyard, they’d been pretty much inseparable. Dershowitz’s son used to join him at the Chilmark store, when he still held court. “He would come to the porch with me every day,” Dershowitz said. If anyone came up and started giving him trouble, Elon would get after them. “He was my guy.”

[Read: Nantucket doesn’t belong to the preppies]

Everybody on the Vineyard liked Elon, Dershowitz said: “Even when they turned against me, they generally didn’t turn against Elon.”

“Although Larry David did.”

“Even when my son died—and Larry knew him very well—he never sent me a card,” Dershowitz said. “Never called me, never did anything to acknowledge it.”

After I returned from the Vineyard, I spoke with Dershowitz by phone. Since my visit, he’d suffered a fractured rib. When I asked how it had happened, he lamented that the cause was nothing dramatic. “I mean, I’d love to have a great story,” he said. “Passionate lovemaking, you know?” (Although definitely not an erotic massage.)

Alas. “I sneezed too hard,” he said. “My doctor told me at my age, a sneeze or a hard cough can fracture a rib.”

Despite being in pain, Dershowitz said that he was planning to go that night to a Chabad event at the home of the billionaire hedge-fund manager Paul Singer, a big Republican donor and supporter of Israel. In a few days, Dershowitz was scheduled to be honored at the Chabad to mark the 75th anniversary of his bar mitzvah. We briefly revisited the Pierogi Incident; he sent me a link to a Facebook post from someone marking “the anniversary of Pierogigate” and vowing to “have a potato pierogi later today in honor of Dershowitz.”

When I mentioned Larry David’s name again, Dershowitz sounded freshly pained—as if I’d elbowed him in his bad rib. They had been really good friends, he reiterated. I asked whether he’d had any interaction with David since the Chilmark-store episode in 2021. Not really, Dershowitz said, except for one chance meeting at a restaurant, in which David had again blown him off. Later, Dershowitz wanted to know whether I’d spoken with David for this story.

After our initial email exchange, I finally did speak with David by phone late last week. He was on vacation on Martha’s Vineyard, and I expected him to be cantankerous and annoyed—which he was at first. When I brought up the matter of Elon’s death, however, David’s tone shifted. “He’s 100 percent right,” David told me, referring to Dershowitz. “I should have reached out, and I certainly regret not doing so. As I said on Curb once, ‘I think of nice things. I just don’t act on them.’”

David, who turned 79 last month, said that he has been “softening” and might be open to some kind of rapprochement with Dershowitz, if only to extinguish their one-way feud once and for all. “I’m starting to feel a little sorry for him, actually,” David told me. “Certainly because of his son.”

It was a touching moment, and seemed sincere. But something also felt off, as if the network had enlisted focus groups and then ordered up a feel-good ending.

Then David sent me an email the next morning.

“I’m loath to say anything mean because he’s been so ostracized,” he wrote of Dershowitz. A reversion to sarcasm! “But he only has himself to blame. He made a deal with the devil. Literally. And I’d bet the devil hasn’t said a word to him since the impeachment.”

Trump Is Putting His Face on Everything

2026-08-18T06:00:00-04:00

We Americans remember our presidents in all sorts of ways, with monuments and statues, on coins and street signs. Another thing we do is wait—we wait until a president is safely out of office, or dead, before we bestow such honors.

Donald Trump has bent many democratic traditions, but this one, he’s discarded altogether. Trump has been putting his name on buildings since before most Americans were born. He built his political career atop his personal brand, and much of his second term has been defined by an obsession with leaving his mark. The result is something entirely new in the nation’s history. The more you look, the more you see Trump’s face, name, or signature all around you—on a government building, infrastructure project, banknote, taxpayer-funded website, or official document.

COMPLETED

Trump’s face has appeared swiftly, often with little warning—and nowhere more so than in the nation’s capital. To find a comparable leader so fixated on the proliferation of his image, the historians I spoke with reached across oceans and time: The face of Hafez al-Assad, who ruled Syria for nearly three decades, was printed on children’s schoolbook covers; Mussolini covered Rome’s Palazzo Braschi with a display featuring his head. Obviously Mao Zedong comes to mind. This creation of a cult of personality is partly how strongmen have sought to erase memories of their predecessors and “insert themselves into the social fabric,” Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a historian of authoritarianism at NYU, told me. There may not be a perfect comparison, but past regimes offer clues, the scholars said, about how a leader’s ubiquity can help inure citizens to broader shifts in their relationship to their government.

Kevin Carter / Getty

Trump’s face—staring back at federal workers, residents, and tourists from banners draped on agencies such as the Labor Department—sends a message that “he is inseparable from these more impersonal institutions of governance,” says Lisa Wedeen, a political scientist at the University of Chicago.

Kevin Carter / Getty

A banner featuring the president’s face appeared on the Agriculture Department (right) last year, but was taken down soon after. Banners similar to it remain on the Labor, Justice (left), and Interior (center) Departments, despite objections by Democrats over the cost and the message they send—especially at the Justice Department, which, particularly since Watergate, has tried to operate autonomously from the president, for all sorts of obvious reasons.

Anna Moneymaker / Getty

The U.S. Institute of Peace, a government-funded think tank, had Donald J. Trump added to its name in December, even as a battle over the administration’s efforts to take control of the institute continues to play out in court.

Kevin Dietsch / Getty

The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts likewise has become the target of a Trump takeover. The center, initially named the National Cultural Center, was renamed for Kennedy through an act of Congress two months after his assassination.

Kevin Carter / Getty

Less than six months after loyalists Trump installed on the center’s board put his name on the center’s facade, the lettering came down following a judge’s order. But two months later, a tarp continues to cover the spot where the president’s name once was—and the board now wants to inscribe this on the facade: Restored and Renovated by President Donald J. Trump.

Andrew Leyden / Getty

In a rush to “beautify” Washington, D.C., the president has turned stretches of the city into a construction zone—in part by redirecting money once used for national-park repairs. The most notable among these beautification efforts involves the Reflecting Pool and launched a thousand headlines this summer, as fresh sealant flaked off and algae bloomed.

Saul Loeb / AFP / Getty

Although every president brings his own interior-decorating sense to the People’s House, Trump has dramatically altered the building’s appearance. At least three paintings and one statue at the White House illustrate the moments following the July 2024 attempt on Trump’s life in Butler, Pennsylvania.

Doug Mills / The New York Times / Redux

Chip Somodevilla / Getty

Demetrius Freeman / The Washington Post / Getty

Doug Mills / The New York Times / Redux

Andrew Harnik / Getty

Doug Mills / The New York Times / Redux

Trump has filled the White House with portraits of himself. One painting is positioned between official portraits of former First Ladies Laura Bush and Hillary Clinton. Another, which is hanging in the West Wing, depicts him, Henry Clay, and Abraham Lincoln with the label The Tariff Men. Yet another shows Trump with Lincoln and Ronald Reagan.

Celal Gunes / Anadolu / Getty

Late last year, the White House unveiled a “Presidential Walk of Fame” in the colonnade connecting the West Wing to the White House residence. Gold plaques and framed images of past presidents, including an autopen in place of President Biden, are examples of the administration’s attempts to rewrite history—in Trump’s signature color, no less.

Travel.state.gov / U.S. Department of State

As part of the celebration of America’s 250th birthday this year, the administration released what it calls the “Patriot Passport”—a special commemorative document featuring Trump’s face. The State Department began issuing the passports in July to those applying in person at the Washington, D.C., passport agency.

National Park Service

This year’s $80 annual resident National Parks pass looks quite different from those issued in years past (think: misty redwoods, a camouflaging frog, a snowy mountainside). Now it features Trump’s face beside George Washington’s. An environmental group sued, arguing that the Interior Department had violated a law requiring the passes to display the winner of an annual public-lands photo contest.

trumpcard.gov

Trump has made mass deportation a pillar of his domestic agenda, but the Trump Gold Card offers a special residency permit to foreigners willing to make a $1 million “contribution” to the United States. (Only one person is said to have received the card thus far.) A government website claims that a Trump Platinum Card is coming soon—offering up tax-related benefits in exchange for $5 million. Officials have said the funds collected through the visas will be directed to the Treasury Department.

Brendan Smialowski / AFP / Getty

Trump’s name made its way into the “.gov” URL for the site advertising the administration’s child-savings-account program—as well as to the top of the official IRS form that applicants must fill out.

trumprx.gov; trumpira.gov; trumpaccounts.gov

Two other government websites similarly bear Trump’s name: TrumpRx deals with prescription-drug costs and launched in February; TrumpIRA advertises a federal platform for retirement savings, and is set to roll out in 2027.

nps.gov

Trump celebrated his 80th birthday on June 14 with a UFC fight on the White House’s South Lawn. Other Americans could celebrate the occasion at national parks: The Interior Department deemed it a “resident-only patriotic fee-free” day.

@realDonaldTrump / Truth Social

This spring, the Treasury Department announced that Trump’s signature would appear on future bills—a first for a sitting president. U.S. Treasurer Brandon Beach, the official who oversees the production of coins and paper money, called the move “not only appropriate, but also well deserved.”

Saul Loeb / AFP / Getty

A major promise of Trump’s first presidential campaign, the border wall—which remains under construction—includes plaques featuring his signature.

Chandan Khanna / AFP / Getty

George Walker IV / AP

Andrew Caballero-Reynolds / AFP / Getty

Amy Beth Bennett / South Florida Sun-Sentinel / TNS / Getty

Elsewhere around the country, local officials have pushed for naming streets and highways after the president. Although the majority of those measures have so far gone nowhere, a few came to fruition. A Trump bridge was unveiled in Tennessee last month, and Palm Beach International Airport was renamed for the president. Trump’s sons were passengers on the first flight to land at the freshly renamed airport.

Helen H. Richardson / MediaNews Group / The Denver Post / Getty

Last March, Trump deemed a portrait of himself that had been hanging in the Colorado state capitol since 2019 “purposefully distorted.” Lawmakers voted to “immediately” remove the unflattering picture.

Thomas Peipert / AP

A few months later, the president celebrated the portrait that took its place. The artist, Vanessa Horabuena, says she drove 33 hours in two days that summer to hand-deliver another one of her paintings to the White House.

IN THE WORKS

The Kennedy Center debacle offered the president a reminder: “Letters can easily be taken off of the surface of buildings,” Lawrence Vale, an MIT urban-planning professor who studies capital-city design and national identity, told me. Come 2029, if a Democrat wins back the White House, it’s difficult to imagine the Trump-faced banners and paintings remaining up for long. Other things—multimillion-dollar monuments, travel documents, money in circulation—would be far more challenging to undo.

CFA (Commission of Fine Arts)

It’s not in the official name, but everyone can plainly see—it’s the Arc de Trump.

Jim Bourg / Redux

Andrew Harnik / Getty

Inspired by Napoleon’s Arc de Triomphe, the prospective arch has faced backlash from locals worried that the 250-foot-tall monument would ruin the city’s skyline and tarnish the sacred stretch that connects the Lincoln Memorial to Arlington National Cemetery. The arch is still in the planning stage, but the president has shared various models with donors.

Salwan Georges / The Washington Post / Getty

Trump has dismissed the idea of the “President Donald J. Trump Ballroom” as “fake news.” But a list of the project’s donors referred to it as such, and top White House officials have reportedly used the name too.

McCreary Architects PLLC 2025 / whitehouse.gov

Regardless of its formal title, a completed ballroom where the East Wing stood a short while ago would represent the fruition of one of the president’s biggest passion projects—and, invariably, remain associated with his name.

AP Graphic / Treasury Department

In the history of empires, dictators spreading their likeness via gold coin is not particularly novel. In the history of the United States, a sitting president last appeared on a coin 100 years ago, when Calvin Coolidge was featured alongside George Washington on a commemorative half-dollar issued for the nation’s 150th birthday. Last month, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said that the U.S. Mint would soon begin producing a $1 gold-colored coin with Trump’s face on it.

Kent Nishimura / AFP / Getty

The Donald J. Trump $250 Bill Act proposes featuring the president on a new $250 bill. The legislation is unlikely to make it out of committee, as federal law says only portraits of deceased individuals may appear on U.S. currency. (Although living people have appeared on commemorative coins like the one Bessent announced, no living person has been featured on paper money since that statute was enacted 160 years ago.) But Beach, the treasurer, reportedly asked for prototypes of the $250 note, prompting the departure of the Treasury’s printing director. She wrote to her colleagues: “The buck stopped here.”

Andrew Caballero-Reynolds / AFP / Getty

The Navy’s plans for a new fleet of 15 Trump-class battleships were announced in December. But the project is still a long way off. Earlier this month, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the first of the warships would take at least eight years to build—and that the program could cost $275 billion.

US Air Force

The Air Force, meanwhile, in a nod to Trump—the 47th president—awarded a contract to Boeing in March to develop “the world’s first sixth-generation fighter aircraft,” to be called the F-47. “It’s a beautiful number,” Trump said when announcing the plans for the new jets.

ON TRUMP’S WISH LIST

Trump—and those in his orbit looking to flatter him—will almost certainly propose more places for his name and face to appear. The president could grow dissatisfied with having his name on just one airport, especially one that serves fewer than 10 million people a year. Or the new football stadium coming to Washington might grab his attention. And, of course, there is his obsession with being on Mount Rushmore. Many ideas that seemed improbable when they were first introduced have since been carried out.

@realDonaldTrump / Truth Social

The first time Kristi Noem met Trump in the Oval Office, she was a congresswoman from South Dakota, and he told her: “Do you know it’s my dream to have my face on Mount Rushmore?” she recounted in a 2018 interview. She remembered laughing in response; the president wasn’t laughing. On a recent trip to the monument, the president and his guests were served cookies on Air Force One that featured five presidents on the mountain, with Trump sketched in to the right of Lincoln.

Courtesy Washington Commanders

Last fall, ESPN reported, Trump was telling people privately that he wants the planned new Commanders stadium in D.C. to be named after him. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt wouldn’t confirm the rumor, but she did tell the outlet, “That would be a beautiful name.”

Courtesy Dulles Airport

The airports named after John F. Kennedy (in New York), Ronald Reagan (near D.C.), and George H. W. Bush (in Houston) may be serving as inspiration. (Never mind, of course, that each of those airports was renamed after each president had died or left office.) As Dulles Airport, in Northern Virginia, prepares for a major renovation, Trump has told people that he wants the international hub renamed after him, ABC News reported; there’s a bill ready to be resuscitated that would do just that.

The tenures of previous world leaders obsessed with imparting their images onto history have yielded troves of artifacts—and left successors with the question of what to do with them all.

As Hungary’s Communist era came to an end, the government confronted one such quandary. Budapest’s new government didn’t want to melt statues down or discard them, so in 1993, it deposited dozens of them in a park 20 minutes outside the city center. In one sense, the park became an oversize storage unit for junk the Hungarian public no longer needed; in another, it was a tourist attraction in its own right—a memorial to the way that a past regime had sought to memorialize itself.

Image sources: COMPLETED: Kevin Carter / Getty; Kevin Carter / Getty; Kevin Carter / Getty; Kevin Carter / Getty; Anna Moneymaker / Getty; Kevin Dietsch / Getty; Kevin Carter / Getty; Andrew Leyden / Getty; Saul Loeb / AFP / Getty; Doug Mills / The New York Times / Redux; Doug Mills / The New York Times / Redux; Chip Somodevilla / Getty; Demetrius Freeman / The Washington Post / Getty; Doug Mills / The New York Times / Redux; Doug Mills / The New York Times / Redux; Andrew Harnik / Getty; Doug Mills / The New York Times / Redux; Doug Mills / The New York Times / Redux; Celal Gunes / Anadolu / Getty; travel.state.gov / U.S. Department of State; National Park Service; trumpcard.gov; Brendan Smialowski / AFP / Getty; trumpaccounts.gov; trumpira.gov; trumprx.gov; nps.gov; @realDonaldTrump / Truth Social; Saul Loeb / AFP / Getty; Chandan Khanna / AFP / Getty; George Walker IV / AP; Andrew Caballero-Reynolds / AFP / Getty; Amy Beth Bennett / South Florida Sun Sentinel / TNS / Getty; IN THE WORKS: Helen H. Richardson / MediaNews Group / The Denver Post / Getty; Thomas Peipert / AP; Commission of Fine Arts; Jim Bourg / Redux; Andrew Harnik / Getty; Salwan Georges / The Washington Post / Getty; McCreary Architects PLLC 2025; AP Graphic / Treasury Department; Kent Nishimura / AFP / Getty; Andrew Caballero-Reynolds / AFP / Getty; U.S. Air Force. ON TRUMP’S WISH LIST: @realDonaldTrump / Truth Social; Courtesy of Washington Commanders; Courtesy of Dulles Airport.

A Democrat in Name Only

2026-08-15T06:00:00-04:00

Photographs by KC McGinnis

Somewhere along the county road between Independence and Manchester, I lost Rob Sand.

This had been a distinct possibility when I agreed to join the 44-year-old Democratic candidate for governor on a segment of a weeklong bike ride across Iowa. Unlike Sand, I am not a biker—merely a leisurely walker and, like any good Millennial woman, an occasional Pilates-doer. Which is why, on a long, low-grade hill dotted with Queen Anne’s lace, my quads began to burn, my pace slowed, and the subject of my story disappeared into a rainbow river of helmets. A minute later, the sag wagon overtook me. Soon so did a 9-year-old boy.

Thankfully, my humiliation was short-lived. These days in Iowa, one can never truly be without Rob Sand. Even as I panted alone at the back of the peloton, I could hear people chattering about the man who would be governor. “Was that who I think it was?” they said. And, “Oh, I just love him!” At one point, a fit-looking cyclist who turned out to be the former NFL wide receiver Tim Dwight pulled up beside me to lament Iowa’s unfulfilled economic potential. “This is why,” he said, “we need Rob.”

Sand, the state auditor, is ubiquitous in Iowa. On any given day, one might encounter him in a TV ad, promising jail time for corrupt politicians; on Instagram, talking through a mouthful of Casey’s breakfast pizza; and at a town hall singing “America the Beautiful” with a bipartisan crowd of gray hairs. Sand is something rarely found in nature: a successful Iowa Democrat. Which is perhaps why his presence generates such mania. Biking with him across the state felt a little like showing up to a middle-school slumber party with Taylor Swift—or riding shotgun in the popemobile. Despite Sand’s bike helmet and lack of signage, hundreds of people recognized him and begged for selfies. “I nearly killed Iowa’s next governor!” yelled a man in Winthrop who bumped into Sand’s bike. People often used both his first and last name, running them together into a single word. “I lent my bike pump to Robsand!” another man declared in Independence.

Sand’s party has struggled to gain purchase in Iowa since the dawn of the Trump era, and a Democrat hasn’t been elected governor since 2006. The funny thing is, Sand is not a particularly proud Democrat. He tends to refer to the party as “the lesser of two evils” and made a face when I asked whether he enjoyed being in it. “I can’t imagine saying I like being in any political party,” he told me. “I love being a dad.” Before addressing a crowd in Des Moines County last year, Sand’s staff asked for party insignia to be removed from the walls to make the space more inclusive.

The auditor obviously wants to steer clear of the national party’s noxious fumes. But whereas his progressive contemporaries distance themselves by railing against the establishment, Sand’s campaign approach has been different: Quietly, and with an easygoing optimism that Fred Rogers would envy, Sand questions the concept of partisanship itself. “Our political system is broken, and it’s broken mostly because it’s run by two private clubs” that make voters “feel trapped” into making a binary choice, he told a crowd last month in Newton. “The good news is that Iowa is a place where we have typically said we are going to make politics work for ordinary people.”

National Democrats like what they see—even if they find it tough to describe. Sand “is doing the opposite of what almost every other politician is doing,” the strategist and former Pete Buttigieg adviser Lis Smith told me. He isn’t a loud progressive, but he also doesn’t sound like a corporate moderate, Adam Carlson, a pollster, agreed. “Sand is doing a third thing.”

KC McGinnis for The Atlantic

Rob Sand rides his bike from Independence to Manchester, Iowa, during RAGBRAI, a weeklong bike ride across Iowa.

KC McGinnis for The Atlantic

One of the notes riders left for patients of the University of Iowa Health Care Stead Family Children’s Hospital was written by Sand.

KC McGinnis for The Atlantic

A cyclist wears a jersey with a corn print.

In November, Sand will be up against a potentially strong GOP candidate. But his most daunting adversary will be the math: Registered Republicans outnumber Democrats by almost 200,000 in Iowa. Which means that Sand plans to spend the next 11 weeks telling Iowans that he can be trusted, in spite of the D behind his name. Will enough of them believe it?

Sand had been annoyed the last time I wrote about him. I’d included all of the relevant background details in my story: that he grew up in Decorah, a town near the Minnesota border, which explains his long vowels (Sand pronounces it “Dee-corah”); that he went to Brown University and worked a few modeling jobs in Europe before attending law school and working for seven years as a prosecutor. I’d explained that, like any good red-state Democrat, Sand loves to hunt and spends Sunday morning in church—and that his wife’s brothers called him “Baby Jesus” for his tendency toward self-righteousness.

But Sand was concerned about something else: that I had not fully captured his frustration with America’s two-party political system. “I was hoping you’d get more into election reform,” he texted me—a sentence that, I am confident, no one has ever said before or since. At the time, I did not imagine that many readers were pining to hear a state auditor’s thoughts on the decline of bipartisanship. But here we are, three summers later, and Sand is still talking about the same ideas: moving to an open-primary system and implementing “approval voting,” which would allow Iowans to support more than one candidate. More remarkable, voters are listening.

Sand is a Democrat because “Jesus is for the little guy, and the Democratic Party, at its best, is for the little guy.” But his more inclusive vision wouldn’t require party affiliation. The scramble to replace Graham Platner in Maine, for example, wouldn’t have happened under Sand’s system, he said. Or, “if a really old candidate, hypothetically, had a bad debate experience, and everyone was like, Um, maybe this person is too old to do this, it wouldn’t be a crisis.” The reforms would reward civility, Sand added, and prevent one-party domination of a state.

Republicans have had total control over Iowa for a decade. In that time, they’ve dramatically cut income taxes, redirected hundreds of millions of public dollars toward private schools, and restricted abortion after six weeks. Right now, the state is facing a $1 billion budget shortfall and the second-highest cancer rate in the country.

But Sand does not harp on Republicans. Actually, a Sand political event doesn’t really feel like one: Each town hall begins with a round of applause for the Republicans, independents, and Democrats (for good measure) who showed up, then transitions into a group rendition of “America the Beautiful.” Sand speaks for a while about his policy priorities (corruption, public education, affordability) before opening the floor to questions, some friendly and others confrontational. The event I attended in Newton concluded with a resounding cheer for—you guessed it!—a return to divided government in Iowa.

KC McGinnis for The Atlantic

Sand speaks with cyclists in Manchester.

An observer might fairly describe all of this as just a tad cringe. But one person’s cringe is another’s stirring call for unity. “There’s a movement afoot for change, and he comes along at a good time,” Steve Mullen, a retired teacher, told me in Newton.

It helps that Sand does not behave like most Democrats. He is not, for example, easily drawn into culture-war debates or bandwagon slogans. Early in his campaign when a radio host asked him whether biological males should be allowed to play in women’s sports, Sand answered succinctly, “No.” In January, after federal officers killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, Sand did not join in the calls to abolish ICE. “He’s taken some of the cultural issues that dog Democrats in red states off the table,” Adam Jentleson, the founder of the center-left think tank Searchlight, told me.

[Read: ‘Abolish ICE’ is back ]

The progressive left, as you might imagine, is not wild about Sand. Some were disgusted, for example, that the Democrat did not release a statement denouncing ICE after Good’s and Pretti’s deaths. Others see Sand’s comments on trans athletes as a betrayal of the LGBTQ community. Still, most seem to find the state auditor tolerable. “He’s a happy warrior for nonpartisan technocratic efficiency and anti-corruption,” Adam Green, the co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, told me. Sand might slap that on a billboard.

Iowa’s state auditor can seem a little naive. Even if he becomes governor, Sand would almost certainly be working with a Republican state legislature that won’t be eager to hand him any wins. But Sand says he isn’t worried. “There’s still a lot of people of good faith in that caucus,” Sand told me at a deli in Manchester after we’d finished our bike ride. State GOP lawmakers know that they’ll need to have something to show for their public service when they “reach the pearly gates.” Had Sand met a politician recently? I thought. When I voiced my doubts out loud, Sand looked stricken. “I am really hopeful,” he said.

KC McGinnis for The Atlantic

Sand greets supporters at Nordic Fest in his hometown of Decorah, Iowa.

Meanwhile, Republicans are busy trying to convince Iowa voters that the auditor is more extreme than his kumbaya suggests. “It’s like The Truman Show,” Zach Lahn, Sand’s GOP opponent, says in one campaign video. “He’s not a moderate.” In another, Lahn pledges to take back Iowa’s public-school curriculum “from the Marxists who hijacked it.”

Lahn, a former Republican operative, seemed to come out of nowhere in June when he defeated incumbent Representative Randy Feenstra for the GOP nomination. More specifically, Lahn came from Kansas. Although he was born and raised in Iowa, he has lived in Wichita, where he founded a private school, for much of the past decade. The Des Moines Register reported that Lahn splits his time between Iowa and his second home in Kansas, where some of his children live, although Lahn reassured Iowans that if he is elected governor, he will be in the state “as much as humanly possible.” (Lahn did not respond to my requests for comment.)

But Lahn’s outsider status might help him. He has no elected-office experience and is not yet a known quantity in Iowa, which means that he does not wear the albatross of incumbency. So far, he’s campaigned on protecting small farms from corporate agriculture, an unusual Republican position in the state. For this, as well as his pledge to ban mRNA vaccines and improve the state’s water quality, Lahn has also received the MAHA stamp of approval. Several conservative Iowans along the bike route told me that they wouldn’t have voted for Feenstra, but they were considering Lahn’s “new ideas.”

Lately, Republicans have accused Sand of doing too much stumping and not enough of his day job; they’ve also drawn attention to the significant campaign donations from his wife and her wealthy family. But Lahn’s main project ahead of November will be to remind Iowans that Sand, regardless of his rhetoric, is running as a Democrat. At Sand’s Newton town hall, a Lahn supporter named Carrie Atkinson asked the auditor to declare the number of weeks at which he would support a ban on abortion. Sand answered that he thought Roe v. Wade was a reasonable decision. “He didn’t answer my question!” Atkinson told me later. At another event, a local Republican activist named Gary Loeffler asked Sand to justify his support for abortion as a Christian. There are “many verses in the Bible that say life begins at breath,” Sand said, an answer that enraged some religious conservatives.

KC McGinnis for The Atlantic

Horned helmets line a table.

KC McGinnis for The Atlantic

Dancers at Nordic Fest

KC McGinnis for The Atlantic

Sand rides in the Nordic Fest parade.

Republicans believe, or say they believe, that Sand, a wealthy guy with an Ivy League education, is far more liberal than he lets on. Loeffler offered a disturbing visual: Like an infested cob of sweet corn, Sand might look normal on the outside, but inside, he’s “full of worms.”

Luckily, I was able to test Loeffler’s hypothesis—by traveling to Sand’s hometown and peering into the proverbial husk. In Decorah, along the Upper Iowa River, I attended Nordic Fest, a celebration of Scandinavian heritage that included Viking battle reenactments, Nordic dancers, and a parade featuring Sand in the back of a convertible. It felt a little like visiting Bedford Falls with George Bailey. “This is Rob Sand; he’s a good friend of my eldest son!” the announcer said as the auditor drove by. Sand’s aunt, who ran the lefse stand, trotted into the street to give him a package of fresh Norwegian flatbread. Sand’s father asked me in Norwegian if I spoke the language of my ancestors. (I do not.)

After the parade, Sand offered a wry tour of his hometown. Walking down the main drag, he pointed out the old teen center. “Can you guess how many times we went?” Near a statue of a long-snouted woodland creature, he explained: “Trolls are out in the world and can be dangerous.” Quickly, we were overwhelmed by friends and well-wishers. Among them was Andy Rasmussen, Sand’s best friend from high school. Sand was always smart and ambitious, Rasmussen, who does auto-body work in Decorah, told me later. He liked to skateboard and bowhunt. He didn’t drink, but he’d give friends rides to parties. “The running joke was that someday Rob’s gonna be president,” Rasmussen said. But what were Sand’s politics back then? I wanted to know. Is he a Trojan horse of socialist corn worms? Rasmussen basically shrugged. “He will generally talk to and listen to anybody that’s out there.”

Others who knew Sand during college and law school similarly described a man committed to listening. At Brown in the early 2000s, Sand frequently criticized the Bush administration in his column in the school paper. Still, he recruited Stephen Beale, a conservative columnist at the paper, to start a new class on conservative thought, featuring readings from Edmund Burke, Barry Goldwater, and Pat Buchanan. Sand is still “being his authentic self,” Beale, who now works as a freelance writer, told me. “He really does care about hearing the other side.”

I thought about Sand’s cheering section at the Nordic Fest parade. “Light ’em up, Rob!” one man had shouted. But Sand had waved him off. “No, no, no,” he’d said.

The next two months may not be so friendly. So far, Sand has outraised Lahn, but Republicans are pouring millions into the state, partly thanks to a high-profile Senate bid from Democrat Josh Turek and three surprisingly competitive House races. Expect ads from both parties to be vicious—and pervasive. On Thursday, screaming activists for Turning Point Action chased Sand around the Iowa State Fair.

[Read: Democrats might actually win Iowa]

Right now, Sand looks reasonably well positioned for victory. The Cook Political Report has changed its analysis of the race from “lean Republican” to “toss up,” and new polling shows Sand leading Lahn by five points. If he succeeds, Democrats might finally be able to say out loud what many have believed for years: that Iowa still defies partisan categorization.

Many Iowans are only now starting to pay attention. Before I lost Sand on the bike ride, a middle-aged man named Ethan Vaas had rolled up next to us. “Are you who I think you are?” he asked Sand, sounding more suspicious than excited. The two chatted for a moment, but Vaas soon pedaled away, looking unimpressed. An hour later, though, he was back, this time to talk with Sand about his job and his kids. Vaas wasn’t sure how he’d vote this year, he told me later. He typically “leans right.” But there was something different about Sand.

Hunger Games, MAGA Style

2026-08-13T15:21:00-04:00

The semiquincentennial events that President Trump has personally directed have been a celebration of his very particular version of America. The bloody UFC fight on the White House lawn was followed by the sparsely attended Great American State Fair and a world-record-breaking July 4 fireworks show held alongside a dangerous lightning storm. Next weekend will bring a high-speed car race through the museum-lined streets of Washington. But of all of these festivities, the Patriot Games in Ohio this week might have been the oddest.

Organizers convened 120 teenagers from across the country—in their telling, the “next generation of leaders, competitors, and champions,” but also whoever happened to respond to an online request for personal essays and video entries—at a high school in Geneva, Ohio (population 5,924), roughly 45 miles northeast of downtown Cleveland. For three days, they competed in gym-class staples such as ball tosses, long jumps, tug-of-war, dodgeball, and an arcade-style basketball game called Victory Hoops. The field was narrowed to eight contestants who competed before the president on Tuesday night, clambering through a Ninja Warrior–style obstacle course while wearing red, white, and blue. One boy and one girl were crowned champions, and each was given a $125,000 scholarship.

Over the past several days, ESPN has streamed more than 26 hours of this contest, and I have consumed many of those hours—but I have yet to fully understand why this competition happened or what it has to do with American history, or even with American culture at this moment. I could barely follow how the various events were scored. It was like watching a nationally televised field day—with wholesome moments and cheerful contestants along the way—but it was unclear what the grand takeaway was supposed to be. (Perhaps that will be revealed when the event is condensed into a one-hour special airing tonight on ABC.) More than anything, it was a reality-television-style snapshot of the America that Trump most wants to see. The contestants were overwhelmingly white, in a country where roughly half of children are not, and many spoke openly of their Christian faith or their affection for this particular president.

[Read: The YOLO presidency]

When Trump showed up on Tuesday night, accompanied by the ESPN commentator Pat McAfee, the crowd erupted. “He’s got that Michael Jordan glow,” one spectator said. “We love you, Mr. President!” one man yelled. “2028!” another exclaimed. Outside the arena, a football-field scoreboard displayed a score of 45–47 in Trump’s honor. The crowd chanted “USA! USA! USA!” when he arrived and danced to his favorite song, “YMCA,” before he left.

“I didn’t know what to expect,” Trump told ESPN’s Laura Rutledge during an onstage interview, a few yards from dozens of teenagers. “I’m very proud of the group of people in this room. You see the spirit and the love of the country, our great country. And our country’s never done better.”

In that moment, it became clear that this gathering, like so many others this president has overseen, was actually all about Trump. This was his vision of the Hunger Games, MAGA style. He was front and center, watching the grand finale unfold and eyeing golden trophies he could present. But who were these contestants, and how were they chosen? Why these random events? And what does this all say about our country, and how does it mark our 250 years as one?

The Patriot Games, it must be said, seldom made for great television. I watched kids’ arms quiver as they tried to keep their chin up and over a bar—at least one lasted scarcely a second. Some struggled to cross the monkey bars in an obstacle course. Others tripped over the hurdles on the track, knocking over almost every one. (“A natural hurdler? Not really,” the announcer remarked.)

In one contest, the teenagers were asked to navigate an obstacle course of sorts: bear-crawl under a net, high-step through tires, weave between slalom poles, climb up and down a cargo net, walk across a beam, flip a tire (once for girls; twice for boys), traverse the monkey bars, carry two jerricans, leap onto hanging panels, and push a red button. In another contest, they went through a circuit of various sports. They attempted to kick a soccer ball into a bull’s-eye, catch three tennis balls, run through a maze of tackling dummies, throw a football into a target, serve a volleyball three times, hit a T-ball, and, finally, run around a few bases. In between challenges, some kids offered brief, out-of-breath analysis. “I did a lot better than I thought I would on the monkey bars,” concluded Gabriel Hayes, who was representing the Shawnee Tribe. “I just got kinda tired, to be honest,” said Remy Taylor, from Delaware.

The announcers revealed the kinds of small biographical details familiar to anyone who has watched the Olympics, attempting to humanize the athletes by highlighting their love of macaroni and cheese, Greek mythology, or Legos. Some were members of JROTC or the Future Farmers of America. Many came from military families, and aspired to carry on that tradition. There were at least three sets of siblings. Multiple boys wore a cross necklace, and several of the girls had a cross painted on their body. “I just want to say, it’s the glory for God. Thank you, Lord, for this opportunity,” said Max Biondolillo of Florida, after finishing the obstacle course. “Thank you, Jesus. That’s all I can say. Thank you, Jesus,” Seylah Brown, representing North Carolina, said after completing the circuit of sports.

The biographies suggested that the organizers might have struggled with recruitment in some deep-blue jurisdictions. The boy representing Puerto Rico has a southern accent and resides in Texas. Elsie Bruckart was the contestant for Vermont, but her hometown was listed as Bellbrook, Ohio. Her cousin Rebekah Roberts competed for Maine, but her hometown was Cornish, New Hampshire. Bobbi Vickers was representing Massachusetts, but she is from California. “I get a bunch of questions, like Why are you representing Massachusetts and not your home state?” Vickers told CNN. “But I think it’s really cool, because a lot of my family is from there and my favorite basketball team is actually the Boston Celtics.”

People familiar with the process told me that the athletes were selected through applications that required submissions of performance data and athletic statistics, along with a personal-essay and video submission. Freedom 250 did not respond to questions about why certain states were represented by competitors living in other states, or why there was such a lack of diversity among the contestants.

Danielle Alvarez, a spokesperson for Freedom 250, the Trump-aligned group that organized the games, said in a statement that the Patriot Games were one of the “unforgettable signature events” meant to “celebrate our country and inspire the next generation.” Organizers told me that they’d sought to create a range of challenges, aiming to show that the winner has mastered many different skills.

[Read: Inside America’s ugly birthday battle]

Often, during the events, the producers displayed the scores for only the top-10 contestants, shielding from embarrassment those who struggled. The announcers remarked several times that just because a contestant hadn’t performed well in one discipline didn’t mean they wouldn’t do better in another. Coaches shouted encouragement from the sidelines like summer-camp counselors: Give it your all! Finish the race! Be proud of the process! Some contestants had said beforehand that they had little clue before they arrived in Ohio what events would be included. “I’ve never really played soccer before,” said the girl representing Michigan. “I don’t know how to throw a football,” said the girl representing the Virgin Islands.

“It was hard. It was challenging. I mean, I’ve never played any of these sports. Like, I’m a cheerleader,” Laynie Arrowood, the 16-year-old representing the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma, told the sideline reporter good-naturedly. “I’m not good at throwing football—obviously not good at soccer! But it’s okay. I tried my best.” Most of the contestants did seem to be enjoying themselves, and several said they’d made close friendships over the days they’d spent together. Some said they understood how Trump’s involvement had politicized the competition but were baffled as to why they had come under scrutiny. “We can’t vote,” Jonah Beauregard, a 17-year-old from Massachusetts, told The Boston Globe. “We can’t do anything in our power to do anything to help it.”

Trump announced in May 2023 that, if elected to a second term, he wanted to host “major sporting contests for high-school athletes” as part of the country’s 250th celebrations. “These Patriot Games will allow young Americans from every state to show off the best of American skills, sportsmanship, and competitive spirit,” he said in a campaign video.

America has a rich athletic history, and the youth-sports industry in this country generates an estimated $40 billion in annual revenue. But to find a precedent for these games, you’d have to go further afield. The Roman emperor Nero, in 59 C.E., began hosting the Ludi Juvenales, a series of youth games in a festival to mark the transition from boyhood to manhood. In ancient Greece, athletic competitions began when boys turned 12. And the International Olympic Committee stages a Youth Olympic Games every four years for those ages 15 to 17.

Andy Hall, an ESPN communications director, told me that Freedom 250 approached the network last year about televising the event. He said that the network is not paying for the rights to carry it, but he would not say whether it was being paid and declined to provide any viewership data on how many people were streaming the content. (The link was buried inside the ESPN app and took me some time to find.) He said that the network had no role in organizing or planning the games, and that it was televising them as it would games organized by other entities. The content will all be repackaged into an hour-long ESPN special that will air tonight on ABC. Representatives for ABC did not immediately respond to a request for comment, and Hall declined to further comment. The Federal Communications Commission ordered a review earlier this year of the network’s licenses. Airing the president’s competition on its national platform may buy the network some goodwill.

On Tuesday night, Trump sat as the finalists worked through a course that involved swinging from ropes, carrying two kettlebells, and climbing up a wall. Kennadi Fuhrman, a soccer player from Kansas, won the girls’ competition, crediting “God, all the way.” Rockwell Myers, a tennis player and ballroom dancer from Utah, won the boys’. “It’s been amazing, and it’s taught me so much,” he said. “It really, really puts an emphasis on how important it is to put God first in your life and make him your No. 1 priority.”

Trump came onstage and helped present the trophies and oversize checks. “Incredible people. I like the audience also, I have to tell you. But what a great bunch of young athletes,” he said. Confetti went off, falling onto the contestants. One blue piece stuck in the president’s hair.

Michael Scherer contributed to this report.

The Man in Charge of Immigration Data Just Resigned

2026-08-10T06:00:00-04:00

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Marc Rosenblum, the top statistician at the Department of Homeland Security for more than a decade, resigned in frustration in late July. Three years ago, he established the Office of Homeland Security Statistics, with support from lawmakers from both parties, to provide Congress and the broader public with reliable, timely statistics on immigration enforcement and other homeland-security trends free of political interference. When President Trump returned, that effort was doomed.

During the past year and a half, as the White House directed DHS to run the largest deportation campaign in history, Trump officials blocked Rosenblum’s team from publishing monthly reports. The office’s website went stale, and its immigration-enforcement tables became frozen in 2024, as if nothing has happened since then. In a post on LinkedIn, Rosenblum said he was glad to quit an administration whose values he didn’t share but sad to leave his team operating in a “hostile work environment.”

It’s difficult to think of an issue other than immigration that both plays such a central role in our national politics and has basic statistical metrics that are so poorly understood and easily twisted. Presidential administrations from both parties have tried to spin or delay the release of certain data categories, such as illegal border crossings, when the numbers aren’t favorable. The Trump administration has taken the distortions to extremes. Over the past several months, the White House “border czar” Tom Homan and DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin have pledged greater transparency and better data sharing, but the administration’s immigration crackdown continues in a fog of fake numbers and statistical subterfuge.

Arrests and deportations by Immigration and Customs Enforcement are the data categories most crucial to understanding what Trump is doing in his second term. With DHS’s data office muzzled, the only public source for immigration data has been the ICE website, where the agency periodically publishes enforcement statistics—but it has sometimes gone months without posting updates. ICE statistics show that the agency deported about 400,000 people during Trump’s first year in office, a figure well short of the White House’s goal of 1 million annual removals. Trump officials, starting with Kristi Noem during her time as DHS secretary, found a way to gloss over this fact by claiming that a far greater number of immigrants left the United States voluntarily than were removed by ICE. The department has counted these estimates as “self-deportations,” as if they were confirmed departures rather than rough guesses.

I asked DHS why Rosenblum’s team had been blocked from publishing monthly reports. The department’s press office didn’t answer that question, but it sent a statement: “This is the most transparent administration in American history.” The email was unsigned, and sentences appeared in different-size fonts, as if they had been copied and pasted. The statement said that during the president’s first year in office, “more than 3 million illegal aliens have left the U.S. because of the Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal immigration including an estimated 2.2 million self-deportations.”

Even the immigration hard-liners in Trump’s MAGA movement aren’t buying it. They say that the administration is backing off the president’s campaign pledge to undertake the largest mass-deportation campaign in history, swayed by pro-business Republicans who are worried about labor shortages and political strategists who warn that aggressive enforcement will hurt the party in the midterm elections. Critics on the right—including Trump’s former adviser Steve Bannon, the Fox News host Tomi Lahren, and the MAGA influencer Laura Loomer—have most recently blamed Mullin, who took over from Noem in March.

Mullin has pushed back against critics, insisting that ICE enforcement is the most intense it’s ever been, and that officers averaged 4,200 daily arrests nationwide during the first week of August. DHS hasn’t published data backing that claim, though, and the most recent ICE data show that average daily arrests were fewer than half that amount in July. The discrepancy is typical of the way that immigration data tend to surface in social-media posts or in leaks to right-wing publications or influencers, not in the regular, apples-to-apples systematic way that Rosenblum’s former office was designed to deliver.

The fundamental problem is the same one that U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro faced when she had to tell the president the truth last week about the Reflecting Pool—that the damage to its lining was likely caused by a botched installation, not vandals. The White House’s benchmark for success—1 million deportations a year—has worked better as a rhetorical device than an achievable goal. ICE’s previous record for deportations was 432,238, set in 2013, according to DHS data. The gap between the president’s expectations and the reality of what ICE can pull off endangers the job of any DHS official who acknowledges numbers that fall short. No one wants to tell the president that his deportation claims have no clothes.

Trump’s return path to the White House was paved by embellished immigration data. Illegal border crossings reached an all-time high during the Biden administration, but Trump, Vice President Vance, and other administration officials have repeatedly claimed, without evidence, that 20 to 30 million immigrants illegally arrived during Joe Biden’s term. Last year, DHS published on X an idyllic image of a sandy beach with the caption, “America After 100 Million Deportations,” a figure whose basic math amounted to fantasizing about the forced removal of tens of millions of American citizens. Not to be outdone, the former Border Patrol “commander at large” Gregory Bovino, who remains a hero of MAGA hard-liners, said that he wanted to arrest and deport 100 million people, equal to roughly 30 percent of the U.S. population.

The nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute estimates that the total number of unauthorized immigrants living in the United States increased from 10.8 million in 2019 to 15.8 million in 2024. The Pew Research Center, another nonpartisan group, has similar estimates. White House officials including Stephen Miller have depicted Trump’s crackdown as an urgent remedy to the influx that occurred under Biden. But even as the administration ramps up deportations, it has added to the pool of potential deportees by stripping legal status from more than 1.5 million immigrants who were living and working in the United States with Temporary Protected Status or another form of provisional permission. The number of people whose immigration status the administration has rendered illegal over the past 18 months has so far outpaced the number of immigrants ICE has actually deported.

[Read: The problem with shutting down ICE in blue states]

I spoke to opponents of the administration as well as to Republican supporters frustrated by the lack of transparency and the “self-deportation” estimates DHS has used in lieu of hard data. “I don’t care what the data says. Just give it to me,” Andrew Arthur, a former immigration judge at the Center for Immigration Studies, a D.C. think tank that backs Trump’s deportation agenda, told me. He said that the only way to get beyond “the partisan chatter” and allow the public to fairly assess the deportation campaign is for the administration to release reliable counts of the number of people ICE has arrested, detained, and deported.

The ICE website periodically publishes enforcement statistics, but the site went dark from April until July, a period during which ICE arrests and deportations lagged behind the levels reached under Noem. The administration blamed Democrats and the congressional shutdown for the data lapse, but officials I spoke with at DHS told me that staff members working through the shutdown could have continued updating the ICE site. When the agency resumed publishing its statistics last month, arrests and deportations were once more on an upswing.

Mike Howell, a fellow at the Heritage Foundation who worked in the DHS legal office during Trump’s first term, sued the administration last month to force the release of more ICE data. Howell runs a campaign, the Oversight Project, to press the administration to deliver on Trump’s promises, and he helped launch the Mass Deportation Coalition to rally like-minded groups who see themselves as competing for the president’s sympathies with pro-business interests. “The Trump administration’s deportation numbers should be released with the same transparency, regularity, meaningful metrics, and fanfare as other government numbers, like the jobs report,” Howell wrote in a press release after filing the lawsuit. “Americans should be able to track and cheer progress the same way they watch the stock market.”

[Read: Inside Trump’s reversal on ICE]

Howell told me he wants to see the administration target employers and sweep through farms and factories rather than make individual stops in U.S. cities. “It’s the mass-deportation coalition’s view that people aren’t going to leave unless the deportation numbers are much, much larger,” Howell said. His suspicion, he said, is that the administration exaggerates its enforcement data to merely look tough, as a way to prepare the political terrain for a deal with Democrats after the midterms that would provide legal status to some portion of the unauthorized-immigrant population—the scenario that Howell and his allies abhor as “amnesty.”

During Trump’s first term, when record numbers of Central American families crossed the southern border illegally, DHS officials delayed many releases of monthly data until they could package the numbers in a press release with a favorable spin. The Biden administration initially did this, too, but as it faced intense criticism over record numbers of illegal crossings and images of chaos at the southern border, DHS officials came under pressure from lawmakers from both parties to share more data. The department’s most recent appropriations bill includes new oversight provisions requiring DHS officials to publish more data, but compliance remains spotty.

The Office of Homeland Security Statistics was set up outside the typical political review process for a reason, Blas Nuñez-Neto, the top border-policy official at DHS under Biden, who helped start the office and was Rosenblum’s supervisor, told me. “With all of these independent statistical units—whether it’s the Bureau of Labor Statistics or some of the other statistical agencies—what makes them special is that they’re supposedly not reporting to political appointees; they’re just producing raw data,” Nuñez-Neto said.

Nuñez-Neto acknowledged that immigration statistics aren’t the same as economic indicators, because immigration data are a measure of a given administration’s own performance on border enforcement—the pace of deportations, for example. “What OHSS was doing was to report on data that is internal to the department’s functioning,” he said, “so there was always a bit of tension.”

[Read: The border wall is back]

During the final year of Biden’s term, as a bipartisan group of senators attempted to negotiate a new border-security deal (which Trump eventually killed), lawmakers funded Rosenblum’s office at levels beyond its requested amount. His team began producing the kinds of user-friendly data tables that allowed the broader public to compare key statistics over time. Their last data set was published January 16, 2025, four days before Trump returned to office.

Rosenblum, who declined to be interviewed, said in his LinkedIn post that it’d been “an honor to serve the public by improving DHS data quality and supporting evidence-based policymaking,” and added a parting shot at the administration. “Between the war on immigrants, the war on feds, and the war on facts (not to mention the crazy war in Iran and the brazen corruption), I just need a change,” he said.

DHS officials have not said when, or if, Rosenblum’s office will resume publishing monthly reports. In the meantime, others are happy to fill the void. Last weekend, the Turning Point USA spokesperson Andrew Kolvert wrote on X that he was told by “a source at DHS” that the department had compiled a report that states there have been 1,461,529 “total alien forced departures” over the past 12 months.

In the comments below the post, which had more than 700,000 views, Kolvert said he wasn’t sure how “total alien forced departures” were calculated. The category is not one used by the DHS statistics office, and although Kolvert claimed that the report had already “dropped,” it has not been published anywhere.

The Watchdogs Are Barking Themselves Hoarse

2026-08-09T08:00:00-04:00

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Last May, President Trump held an “intimate” dinner at his members-only golf club in Virginia for the top-220 investors in $TRUMP, a meme coin he launched days before the start of his second term that, by the end of 2025, would generate $636 million for him. About 100 protesters gathered outside in rain jackets, baseball caps, and muddy sneakers to confront the dinner guests arriving in shiny dress shoes, tuxedos, and black Cadillac SUVs. They pointed to the dinner as the encapsulation of the troublesome grift of Trump’s second term: trading personal access to the president in exchange for cash and funneling money to a Trump-owned property. “This is like the Mount Everest of corruption,” Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon, a Democrat, said that night, standing before a crowd spotted with signs reading GRIFTER IN CHIEF and DON THE CON.

But a year later, when Trump hosted the winners of the second iteration of the so-called crypto contest at a luncheon gala in Mar-a-Lago in Florida, no large group of protesters greeted the attendees. The private Florida resort is a logistically more challenging location for a protest than a golf club 45 minutes from downtown Washington. But the ever-intensifying rush of ethics concerns had also made the crypto contest fade into the background, even for activists who closely follow each allegation. The Mar-a-Lago edition of the feast didn’t make headlines the way the first had done. “I think maybe it is because people have become more inured to some of what was going on, and it wasn’t breaking through in the same way,” Lisa Gilbert, a co-president of Public Citizen, a consumer-rights group that helped organize the protest last year, told me. “As profiteering becomes the norm, it’s harder to explain why it’s outrageous.”

Washington’s ethics watchdog groups thought they were prepared for Trump’s second term. During his first four years in the White House, they had quickly learned which possible misuses of taxpayer funds to focus on, which apparent case of profiteering off the presidency to anchor a report around, and which allegations of nepotism or self-dealing to try to pitch to journalists as worthy of a story. Most such allegations frequently generated shock and anger, and some surveys of Trump voters found that they were outraged at several of his Cabinet secretaries for spending millions in taxpayer dollars on first-class air travel and personal security, or Trump’s family businesses making millions while he was in office. Sometimes, the backlash prompted accountability: Three of Trump’s Cabinet members were forced out, lawmakers from both parties launched inquiries into alleged ethics violations, and top officials reimbursed the government for travel originally paid for by taxpayers.

This term, the watchdogs are even more alarmed by what they’re witnessing, and they are racing to keep up. Public Citizen added litigators and researchers, and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) hired an expert in cryptocurrency. Last year, the Campaign Legal Center filed its highest number of ethics complaints in a single year and launched a tracker of “corrupt transactions” to ensure that “the exhaustion factor” doesn’t get in the way of keeping a careful count of such instances, even if the media no longer closely cover each one, Saurav Ghosh, the group’s director of federal-campaign-finance reform, told me.

That doesn’t mean the public has grown indifferent. Although polls show that voters have long considered most politicians to be corrupt, a recent survey by Echelon Insights found that the share of Americans who see corruption as the biggest issue facing the nation is now 17 percent, up from 8 percent in December 2024. But there has also been a dampening of objections to possible instances of self-dealing, especially among Republicans, and the examples of accountability are scarce.

Within a few days of the inauguration last year, the administration had fired 17 inspectors general, dismantling oversight of taxpayer funds, quid-pro-quo business ventures, and ethics-law violations. The president made roughly $2.2 billion last year, according to The New York Times, a windfall that came mostly from cryptocurrency deals, a new source of income that now forms the bulk of his net worth at a time when his administration has made eroding crypto oversight part of its economic agenda. He also booked up to $117 million in legal settlements, mostly with major tech and media companies, and $125 million from foreign golf and real-estate deals—roughly twice the revenue generated from such deals in 2017. The president has also made more than 21,000 securities trades, often in quick bursts tied to market-moving moments he sparked, according to a Bloomberg analysis. His sons’ portfolio of defensive-technology companies, meanwhile, has collectively generated more than $3 billion in direct government business since Eric and Donald Trump Jr. made their investments, The Washington Post found.

“I think the big difference in this term is just how blatant all of it is. In the first term, there was at least a head nod towards Trump as president being separate from Trump the businessman,” Jordan Libowitz, a spokesperson for CREW, told me. “Now that’s gone.”

The White House sees things differently. Anna Kelly, a White House spokesperson, told me in an email that the allegations of corruption are “the same, tired narrative that Democrats have pushed against President Trump, his family, and his administration for a decade.” She said that the president’s assets are “held in fully discretionary accounts managed by independent third-party financial institutions” and that he has no conflicts of interest.

[Read: The anti-Trump strategy that’s actually working]

But it’s hard to deny the shift in scale from Trump’s previous four years in office. One of the many examples of how much has changed: In the fall of 2019, the administration announced that the G7 summit would be held at Trump’s golf club in Doral, Florida, which alarmed not just watchdog groups but also Republican lawmakers who didn’t think the president should award his own company a government contract. Two days later, Trump retreated and blamed “Media & Democrat Crazed and Irrational Hostility” for his reversal.

This March, the Doral golf club played host to the Shield of the Americas summit, a gathering of Latin American and Caribbean leaders to discuss combatting drug cartels. Trump has announced that the G20 summit later this year will be held at the same hotel because it’s “the best location” for the job. The reaction from GOP members of Congress to the news ranged from silent to “thrilled.”

Many of the major ethics scandals of Trump’s first term seem almost quaint: Housing Secretary Ben Carson, or possibly his wife, spent $31,000 on a dining set. Ivanka Trump endorsed Goya beans. EPA Secretary Scott Pruitt spent $43,000 to install a phone booth.

What seemed to generate a drumbeat of headlines then was the cost of Trump’s travel, especially to his own properties. Although Trump had once ridiculed President Obama for taking a 2012 vacation that cost “taxpayers millions of dollars,” he often traveled several times a month to his private properties in Florida and New Jersey. Less than two months into his first term, The Washington Post reported that Trump had spent nearly one of every three days in office at one of his own properties. A Government Accountability Office report found that the president’s four trips to Mar-a-Lago in one month of 2017 cost taxpayers a total of $13.6 million.

A year and a half into his second term, Trump has made 270 visits to his properties, marking a 14 percent jump compared with the same point in his first term, according to the CREW tracker (which updates daily). Trump’s taxpayer tab for golfing trips hit $70 million last fall, HuffPost calculated. If he continues golfing and traveling at the current pace, the analysis showed, this term will run taxpayers $300 million—twice what they paid during his first term. Those costs include protecting the president and his family; the Secret Service spent nearly $100,000 at Trump-owned properties in the first five months of the second term.

[Read: Trump isn’t giving up on his slush fund]

A related category of recurring stories from the first term concerned Trump’s Cabinet members and their questionable taxpayer-funded travel. In the fall of 2017, Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price became the administration’s first Cabinet member forced to resign following outcry over his use of public funds for work trips in private jets. Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin’s firing followed after, among other things, the public learned of a taxpayer-funded trip to the United Kingdom he’d taken with his wife. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke left the administration in 2018 following several scandals involving misuse of government-funded travel, including to Dallas and the Virgin Islands. And Pruitt, the EPA secretary, faced scrutiny over repeated trips home to Tulsa and abroad on the taxpayers’ dime. In Trump’s second term, the focus of outrage is rarely the trips themselves, but rather what happens on them—for example, FBI Director Kash Patel’s taxpayer-funded trip to Hawaii, where he went on a “VIP snorkel” at a Pearl Harbor memorial, and his trip to Milan for the Olympics, during which he was filmed drinking in the locker room with the U.S. men’s hockey team.

One of the many scandals surrounding Kristi Noem when she led the Department of Homeland Security involved a $70 million jet supposedly intended for high-profile deportations, as well as the purchase of two luxury planes for $172 million. Her replacement, Markwayne Mullin, uses one of the planes to fly home to Oklahoma most weekends, and the department says he picks up the bill, although it won’t provide details on how that’s calculated. Another is reportedly being used by Melania Trump.

Yet another category of ethical issues that has gained relatively little notice is the volume of merchandise being sold by the president and those in his orbit. In February 2017, a weekslong controversy followed Kellyanne Conway, then a top aide to Trump, promoting Ivanka Trump’s clothing line during a Fox & Friends appearance. Conway faced bipartisan accusations of violating a statute that prohibits federal employees from using “their public office for their own private gain,” including through “the endorsement of any product, service, or enterprise.” The Republican chair of the House Oversight Committee pushed for a prompt review of Conway’s statements, including possible disciplinary action.

Now brand promotion and trademarked gear have become so ubiquitous in the White House that the Oval Office study—a small room that past presidents have used for tasks such as reviewing speech drafts and making calls—has been transformed into a shrine for baseball caps and collectibles emblazoned with MAGA, Gulf of America, and TRUMP 2028. Officials throughout the administration are known to enjoy self-branded merchandise (maybe Patel most ardently). This past spring, the Trump Organization applied for a trademark for “Trump 250” images to allow the president to profit from clothing or knickknack sales tied to America’s 250th birthday. The Trump Organization’s flagship store launched 168 new products in time for Trump’s second Inauguration Day, according to a count by CREW. Truth Social, Trump’s primary form of communication with the public, is his own company as well—meaning that anyone who wants to hear directly from the president must do so on an app where their clicks and page views generate ad revenue for Trump. (Many of those ads are for his own products.) The company recently launched a service selling to Wall Street early access to the president’s digital communications, which frequently move markets.

[Read: Trump tests the definition of ‘insider trading’]

But perhaps the most significant category of self-dealing allegations is the one with no first-term analogue. A few days before Trump’s second inauguration, an Emirati royal backed a deal to purchase a 49 percent stake in World Liberty Financial, the Trump family’s primary crypto venture, for half a billion dollars. The deal, reportedly signed by Eric Trump, included $187 million up front and at least $31 million set to go toward entities linked to the family of Steve Witkoff, a lead Middle East negotiator for the administration and a co-founder of the crypto firm. A majority of the wealth that Trump has amassed this term, according to financial disclosures, comes from his family’s cryptocurrency businesses. World Liberty Financial applied for a national-trust bank charter in January and is expected to receive permission to operate like a bank in the near future, NOTUS reported this summer, a move that could give executives yet another way to direct money toward the president.

For Trump’s birthday, in June, a bloody spectacle arrived on the White House South Lawn, courtesy of UFC Freedom 250; World Liberty Financial was an “official partner,” and fighters were paid bonuses in “stablecoins,” cryptocurrency issued by the company. The Trump family also used the fight as an opportunity to sell physical silver and gold coins—some priced as high as $12,000—featuring Trump’s face and purportedly “designed by President Trump” through a collaboration between UFC and the Trump Organization. The Public Integrity Project, a legal nonprofit, sued to try to stop the event, calling it “a volcano of corruption,” but failed. Several other groups, including CREW and Public Citizen, raised questions and condemned the festivities. But the fights continued as planned.

MAGA’s Most Famous Prisoner Is Free

2026-08-07T08:04:57-04:00

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Earlier this year, Tina Peters was languishing in a Colorado women’s prison, eating processed food, and complaining of declining health—including a persistent cough, digestive issues, and bumps on her skin. But by the end of June, the woman who was convicted on charges tied to tampering with voting equipment under her control in 2020 strolled into the White House, sporting a tailored pinstripe suit and red lipstick, her hair cut in a sharp bob. She feasted on a fried-chicken-and-noodle dish with President Trump in his private dining room and posed for photos in the Oval Office. She told the president about her ordeal and “what prison does to a person,” and they both bemoaned the state of the nation’s voting systems. “He was kind. He listened,” Peters told me in an email.

Peters, once a martyr to the MAGA cause, is now a free woman, feted by the stolen-election movement. The former clerk and recorder of Mesa County, Colorado, was convicted in 2024 and sentenced to nearly nine years in prison after prosecutors said she deceived colleagues to grant an unauthorized person access to voting equipment. After returning to office, Trump, aided by his White House counsel and Justice Department, spearheaded a campaign to “Free Tina Peters” as MAGA commentators and her attorneys relentlessly used the power of their keyboards to demand her release. But because Peters was convicted of state charges, the only person with the power to get her out was Colorado Governor Jared Polis. The Democrat bowed to extraordinary pressure in May and granted Peters clemency despite pleas from prosecutors, his clemency board, and election officials that her punishment was just.

Peters was released on June 1 after serving about 20 months of her sentence. Her freedom came as Trump ordered the nation’s intelligence community to find proof of foreign interference in the 2020 presidential election—only for it to again come up empty. That hasn’t stopped Peters, who wants the government to go even further in its efforts to find fraud she alleges exists from 2020 and overhaul rules and systems over the next three months to prevent malfeasance in November’s midterm elections.

[Read: Trump still hasn’t found what he’s looking for ]

She walked out of prison repeating many of the unsubstantiated claims that helped land her behind bars. She immediately hit the MAGA circuit, appearing on podcasts and livestreams from locations that look straight out of Architectural Digest. She has crusaded against the machinery used to conduct American elections, insisting that votes have been flipped and that foreign adversaries could exploit future contests. She rails against prison conditions and calls for one of her critics—Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold, a Democrat—to be locked up. Her comeback tour has taken her around the country, including, on June 30, to the White House’s Presidential Walk of Fame, where a photo showed her glancing adoringly at Trump’s portrait while holding what appeared to be a Birkin bag. During the visit she and Trump talked about “election integrity,” Peters told me, including “why people need a process they can verify—paper, open counts, accountability.”

Peters has said in nearly all of these media appearances that the actions that landed her in prison were an attempt to expose irregularities in her county’s voting equipment. She insists that her incarceration was “retribution” for showing that votes could be flipped—though there is no evidence of that claim. Ahead of the midterms she is imploring Trump to declare a national emergency on elections as a way to try to assert federal control over contests that are, by constitutional design, run by state and local governments. “We don’t have to prove anymore that these machines are cheating, that the ballots are being harvested,” Peters told War Room, a show hosted by the Trump ally Steve Bannon. The chyron identified her as a Former Political Prisoner.

No longer subjected to rigid routines, head counts, or fixed mealtimes, Peters has enjoyed choosing her own food again, including steak, salads, and juicy tomatoes (“things that taste like they came from a kitchen instead of a tray.”) “Right now I’m trying to get healthy,” Peters told me. “See the people I love, and keep doing lawful work. I’m not interested in living bitter.” Her faith helped her endure especially tough moments. “I’m grateful to God,” she wrote. “Some days feel normal. Some don’t.” Peters must get permission from a parole officer before traveling out of state.

Election denial has become her full-time job. She directs supporters to her recently revamped website, where she asks that they contribute to her cause (a red “Donate” button hovers in the top-right corner). At a “Fraud Fighter Summit” off the Las Vegas Strip in June, Peters took the stage, clutching a bouquet of flowers, to the delight of the crowd, and a moderator gushed about how “wonderful” she looked. Peters talked on speakerphone with Roseanne Barr, who had planned to attend the conference but had to scrap her trip. “Congratulations for being released from detainment in a communist country, Tina,” the sitcom star said. “You are our hero.” They pledged to take a girls’ trip at some point soon. Hawaii, Peters said, sounded like a good destination, adding: “I can still travel.”

Peters has a history of finding herself embroiled in election disputes. She was elected Mesa County clerk and recorder in 2018 after campaigning on a promise to reopen a closed DMV office. Fruita, Colorado, got its motor-vehicles branch back, but Peters soon found herself in the middle of her first voting-related controversy. Nearly 600 ballots cast in a November 2019 election were found in a drop box outside the clerk’s office months later; an effort to recall Peters over the discovery failed to collect enough signatures. In November 2020 Trump won Mesa County, amassing nearly two-thirds of votes cast.

But that election, Peters claimed in 2021, was tainted. Prosecutors said that Peters ordered video cameras to be turned off and deceived colleagues to obtain credentials that allowed an election-denial activist to access election equipment. Peters ran for Colorado secretary of state, despite being charged with numerous felonies, on a platform that included the claim that election equipment posed a threat to democracy. She lost in the primary. In 2024, a jury found her guilty of seven charges, including four felonies. The judge presiding over the case called Peters a “charlatan” and said that Peters, not faulty equipment, posed a threat to the electoral process.

Trump returned to the Oval Office a few months after her conviction and quickly started a campaign to spring her from prison through pressure and threats of retaliation. He warned that “harsh measures” would ensue if she remained incarcerated and directed his Justice Department “to take all necessary action to help secure the release of this ‘hostage.’” Peters was convicted on state charges beyond Trump’s pardon power, but in December he issued one anyway. Senior U.S. District Court Judge R. Brooke Jackson, in a preliminary order blocking the administration’s threat to cut Colorado’s SNAP benefits, noted in March that Trump called Polis “weak and pathetic” for keeping Peters confined, and that the administration had launched “a barrage of threats and actions designed, by all appearances, to punish Colorado.” They included terminating millions of Department of Transportation funds, threatening cancellation of energy funds, announcing a plan to dismantle the Boulder-based National Center for Atmospheric Research, and denying federal disaster-relief assistance.

An appeals court upheld Peters’s conviction a few weeks later, but found that the judge who presided over her case may have improperly considered her public comments—violating her First Amendment rights—and ordered that she be resentenced. Instead, Polis decided to commute her sentence. He wrote that hers was an “extremely unusual and lengthy sentence for a first time offender who committed nonviolent crimes.” An addendum to her clemency application that I obtained shows she acknowledges having “made mistakes,” that she pledged to obey the law if released, and that she noted that she wouldn’t have the ability to commit similar crimes since she is no longer a county clerk. “My work to ensure honest elections,” she wrote, “will continue.”

When Peters was freed, on June 1, Francis McClelland was ready to greet her. Carrying a handmade sign reading Tina Peters Mahalo for Your Sacrifice Fight Fight Fight, the 69-year-old stood outside of the La Vista Correctional Facility in Pueblo with a handful of other supporters. McClelland had never understood why Peters would be imprisoned for trying to help prove that elections are rigged, and so he rented a car in Philadelphia and drove out to Colorado hoping to see her. But he made the trip in vain. Neither state-prison officials nor those close to her would say where she was, citing security concerns. “I just wanted to be in the area and if she saw the sign, just to know that, ‘Hey, man, you made a sacrifice,’” McClelland, an independent Trump supporter from Hawaii, told me. “You shouldn’t back down when you’re right,” he said. “I do believe she’s right.”

[Listen: The election deniers are in charge now]

Peters told me her early days outside of prison were mostly quiet, and devoted to the simple pleasures of her new freedom. She slept, and ate avocados. She went outside without asking permission. “I called people,” she told me. “I hugged people. I did boring grown-up stuff you can’t do inside. It wasn’t a parade. It was me trying to feel like a person.”

In her first media appearance after her release, on War Room, Peters appeared alongside a friend and looked tired. “I feel like I’ve aged about 10 years,” she said. She called her release a “miracle” and thanked Trump, her attorneys, and the supporters who sent money through her website. She said she had a long road to clear her name and then went right back to the themes that had landed her in trouble, saying that Democrats “are going to cheat” in elections. “No one’s really addressing the problem that I spent my time in prison as retribution for,” she said. “And that was exposing the election machines that allow the votes to be flipped. As we’re coming up to our 250-year anniversary, I’m joyful that we still have our liberty but, at the same time, I’m very concerned and burdened with why no one is talking about this.”

The Tina Peters tour hasn’t stopped since. She joins the MAGA-sphere from a constantly changing rotation of tastefully decorated settings, including a room with small duck figurines in the background and another with furniture upholstered in black-and-white chevron. She was spotted at a gathering with Arizona’s Kari Lake, another prominent voice in the election-skeptic movement. And wherever she appears, she always implores viewers to hit that red “Donate” button on her site.

In June, a 12-hour online “Lift Tina Telethon” featured a roster of MAGA personalities applauding her sacrifice. She was likened to Joan of Arc and Nelson Mandela, and someone suggested that her face should be carved into Mount Rushmore. A banner crawling across the bottom of the screen asked viewers to Please DONATE NOW to reach a fundraising goal that one speaker set from $1 million to $2 million. Peters made her appearance midway through, and choked up almost immediately. She spoke of her time in prison, during which she wrote letters to Trump, and of a call she had with the president after her release. “I told him, ‘I only wrote two people while I was in prison,’” she said. “I got thousands and thousands of letters. I’m just so humbled and grateful because you guys were, and still are, the wind beneath my wings.” Peters said she told Trump she was discouraged that little progress had been made to secure election equipment. She hoped to talk more about it with him soon. She was staring down other problems, the kind that viewer donations might fix: Her air-conditioning had gone out, and so had the brakes on her truck. “It’s real difficult for me to ask for myself,” she said.

The tour’s biggest stop, the White House, came at Trump’s request, according to Peters’s attorney Peter Ticktin. “He really admires her because she’s an American hero—and he referred to her as such,” Ticktin, a longtime friend of the president’s, told me. “She’s the one he wanted to meet.” Ticktin declined to say what was discussed. Peters said she felt valued during that visit. She spoke with the president about what she saw as a county clerk, how prison affects people, and of the need for “paper, open counts, accountability” in elections. “He talked like he actually cares what happens to regular people,” she wrote to me, “which is not how a lot of papers write him up.” At one point during the visit, she clutched a red AMERICA IS BACK! hat. She also met with Ed Martin, the U.S. pardon attorney, and was presented with a gold eagle brooch representing the Eagle Forum, the conservative advocacy group founded by Phyllis Schlafly.

The White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson did not answer questions about the meeting with Peters, but said in a statement that “President Trump is committed to ensuring that Americans have full confidence in the administration of elections, and that includes totally accurate and up-to-date voter rolls free of errors and unlawfully registered non-citizen voters.” Trump wants Congress to pass the SAVE America Act, which would require proof of citizenship and voter ID to vote, as well as “other legislative proposals that would establish a uniform standard of photo ID for voting, prohibit no-excuse mail-in voting, and end the practice of ballot harvesting,” Jackson wrote.

Two weeks after Peters visited the White House, Trump delivered a primetime address on election security, but again failed to provide clear evidence of fraud in the 2020 election. Many, including Peters, had hoped for more. On X, she called on Trump to “declare a National emergency” surrounding elections “to protect our country.” She later joined a handful of other election activists calling on federal officials to enforce a “Risk Mitigation Election Plan” before November that would, among other things, require hand-counting each ballot for federal contests before votes are certified, and compare them with counts tallied by electronic tabulators. “The objective is clear: reduce the opportunity for cheating,” read a July 24 letter from the activists to the acting director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. CISA did not answer my questions about the activists’ proposed plan or a meeting the activists said they had with the agency.

Many of the people who administer America’s elections are dismayed by Peters’s post-prison celebrity. Her efforts to convince people that their elections can’t be trusted make the job of administrators more difficult and dangerous, they told me. “She didn’t learn a thing,” Carly Koppes, the Weld County, Colorado, clerk and recorder, said. “Her stance on ‘remorse’ is despicable, and she’s doing exactly what we told the governor she was going to do.” Tiffany Lee, the clerk and recorder from La Plata County, told me she and her staff cried with relief when Peters was sentenced. Now she is angry about what she termed Peters’s “sabotage” road show. "I knew for a fact that she would go right back to getting the attention," Lee said.

When I asked Peters what she would say to people who allege that her claims are false, she deflected. “I didn’t create the mistrust,” she wrote in the email. “For years the public got told everything was the most secure ever, and basic questions got treated like a threat. Now a lot of Americans say they don’t trust the process.”

Peters has her own ideas for making elections more secure. “Yelling at citizens won’t fix it. Proof will. Hand-marked paper. Paper poll books. Chain of custody. Counts people can watch, especially in federal races. That’s clearer than black-box machines and electronic poll books,” she wrote. “Making an election observable isn’t an attack on the country. It’s how you earn confidence back.” Election experts mostly dismiss these proposals as impractical, or warn they could produce large-scale errors.

Peters’s podcaster pals, attorneys, and online supporters told me they see her as a symbol of a broader resistance against forces of evil who are attempting to overtake America. “She’s very brave,” Steve Stern, a Republican activist in Broward County, Florida who hosts The Stern American Show on Rumble, told me. (Peters has treated his audience to interviews at least twice since her release.) “She’s trying to do something to help the country.”

Ticktin and another of her attorneys, John Case, told me they have earned no money from representing Peters. “Hopefully someday I’ll get fully compensated,” Case said, laughing. “But it’s doubtful. I’m not doing it for money—I’ll put it that way.” (At one point in his career, he charged $350 an hour.) Ticktin told me the work he’s doing at his own expense to help Peters is bigger than her: It’s about exposing “the biggest crime in the history of the United States—to steal our country.” Peters told me that some of her supporters were misled by fundraising pages that had nothing to do with her. Donations made on her website, she said, help pay for “legitimate costs: legal bills, security when needed,” and travel expenses for her advocacy work.

Her saga damaged some of her relationships with family members, she said. “That still stings,” she wrote. “I’m very grateful for my mom, for the family who stayed, and for the friends and supporters who didn’t throw me away.” She said she is doing ordinary things with family members and catching up on the past two years. When I talked briefly on the phone with her last month, she said she was traveling. “I’ll be in Texas tomorrow; I’ll be in different places the next few days,” she told me, her voice carrying a hint of a southern drawl. She later stressed that she’s traveling for work, not play.

When Peters first hit the election-activist circuit, the movement was dismissed by many elected officials and experts as “fringe.” Six years later, with Trump back in office and election deniers winning races up and down the ballot nationwide, the movement has been mainstreamed within the GOP even as the public’s trust in elections has declined. Their attempts to one day prove that 2020 was stolen may never bear fruit. But activists are already gearing up to uncover the fraud they believe might help Democrats win back Congress in 2026.

What El-Sayed Does Next Matters

2026-08-05T17:23:18-04:00

This story was updated on August 5, 2026, at 7:29 p.m. ET

The Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed made the customary call for unity after a hard-fought primary against a fellow Democrat. “Always magnanimity in victory,” he told a packed crowd of supporters, adding that “however much we might disagree with our Democratic opponent, there is so much more that unites us than divides us.”

But just minutes earlier, one of his most famous endorsers was pushing a much different message. “Everyone being like, Abdul has a fuck-ton of work to do mending bridges, here’s the fucking take-nuke for you, okay? You are all unbelievably Islamophobic pieces of shit,” Hasan Piker, the left-wing Twitch streamer who has said that America deserved 9/11 and who El-Sayed has embraced on the campaign trail, told some of his millions of followers. Piker went on to challenge would-be holdouts in the party to back El-Sayed: “Do you want to fucking win or not?”

Democrats in Michigan do, in fact, want to win in November, but they find themselves in a predicament over how to get everyone on board. El-Sayed, a progressive, eked out a victory over the more moderate Haley Stevens in a historically expensive and high-profile showdown between the party’s insurgent and centrist wings. The closeness of the race—El-Sayed led by about one point when the AP declared him the victor this morning—surprised many people, given that a number of polls showed the 41-year-old doctor with a double-digit lead over the four-term congresswoman.

The narrow margin of victory has, predictably, sparked a blizzard of thoughts about what lessons Democrats should garner from El-Sayed’s victory as the party barrels toward November. The candidate has suggested that he doesn’t plan to moderate his platform; he ended a news conference this morning by giving a version of his campaign slogan, asking Michiganders to join a “movement to get money out of politics, so we can put money back in pockets and finally guarantee the promise of health care through Medicare for all.” At the same time, he insisted that Democratic harmony would be crucial in the face of what he predicted would be an onslaught of negative attacks from his Republican opponents.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, the chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, were happy to comply. They endorsed El-Sayed’s candidacy this morning, praising his “energetic campaign.” (Both had originally endorsed Stevens.) Michigan State Senator Mallory McMorrow, who ended her bid for the Democratic nomination last month, announced her support for El-Sayed last night before the race had even been called. Stevens also added her endorsement this morning. But much of the common ground ended there. The takes on what El-Sayed should do and the lessons the party should learn from his victory are so abundant in part because the stakes are so high. Democrats will struggle to recapture the Senate if they do not win the race in Michigan.

Adam Green, a co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, told us that El-Sayed’s win “sends a signal to every other Democratic politician in America that you can cross very powerful interests and still win if the people are on your side.” Green suggested that El-Sayed doesn’t need to perform some grand pivot to appeal to general-election voters who may be skeptical about his leftist views: “We believe that Abdul El-Sayed and candidates like him are more electable in a general election because we’re living in an outsider moment and people in all political parties and independents want someone who will shake up a broken system, not be a creature of it.”

Asked about Green’s comment, another Democratic strategist, who requested anonymity to be frank, was, well, frank. “What the fuck is he talking about? Now you’re pushing an ideological agenda and not trying to win,” the strategist told us, before addressing El-Sayed himself. “You clearly need to pivot,” this person said. “A lot of the people in the party don’t like you!”

The returns highlighted clear vulnerabilities for the new nominee. El-Sayed performed well in highly educated, mostly white and affluent communities, including some of Michigan’s college towns, while trailing Stevens in some working-class areas and Black neighborhoods. Adam Jentleson, a former Democratic Senate leadership aide, posted on X that El-Sayed begins the general election as an underdog. He predicted that the Democrat would underperform his polls “because a lot of normie Dems are voting against him,” and added that El-Sayed should try to win over these folks by being “a little less rigidly left-wing, and a little more heterodox.”

El-Sayed said today that the primary would “pale in comparison to the cynicism” that would come from his Republican opponent, former Representative Mike Rogers, and President Trump during the general election. That prediction seemed to come true just hours later, as the National Republican Senatorial Committee released its first ad of the general election. “Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed—the most radical Senate candidate in America,” the ad’s narrator begins, casting away any sense of subtlety before going on to link the Democrat to the Muslim Brotherhood and describe him as “too dangerous” for Michigan. (The ad uses the full name of the candidate attempting to become the nation’s first Muslim American senator at a time when some Republicans have been fomenting Islamophobia.)

[Read: The Republican who wants to banish his own constituents ]

Michigan continues to swing between Republicans and Democrats—Trump won the state in 2016 and 2024. The president wasted no time weighing in on El-Sayed’s victory this morning, calling him a “Communist loser who hates Jews and Israel.” El-Sayed ran as an unabashed critic of Israel and AIPAC, which spent tens of millions of dollars backing Stevens. Trump predicted that, with El-Sayed, the “Dumocrats crazy policies will only get worse” and called his win “great news for the Republican Party.”

Lis Smith, a Democratic operative who advised McMorrow in the primary, told us that El-Sayed should focus on broadening his coalition, adding that she feels that “he has not tried to do that one iota during this primary.” Rogers, who ran unopposed, came just about 20,000 votes shy of winning a Senate seat in 2024. El-Sayed bashed Rogers last night and this morning, aiming to cast him as an avatar of the corporate elite that has raised prices and left everyday Michiganders struggling. He also tied Rogers closely to Trump, who polls show is unpopular in the state.

[Read: America’s most divided state loves its extremes ]

The call for Democratic unity is a new one for El-Sayed. He showed no hesitation about blasting the party as he pursued its nomination, telling a group of young voters last month that “the Democratic Party brand right now is so bullshit.” El-Sayed also used his primary victory to attack politics as usual—clearly implying that Democrats have been engaged in it for far too long.

Although El-Sayed’s victory was the main event this week, several other races across the country complicated the idea that the Democratic Party has been seized by the progressive movement. In Missouri, former Representative Cori Bush lost handily to Representative Wesley Bell, the moderate who originally ousted her from her seat two years ago. In Washington State, centrist incumbent Marie Gluesenkamp Perez beat back a challenge from the left to win a primary for a district that Trump carried in 2024. Moderate Democrats in Virginia prevailed in two key congressional primaries, while left-leaning candidates claimed victories in two congressional primaries in Michigan.

The murkiness of the results shows that the party is stuck in a state of tension. Joel Payne, a Democratic strategist whose organization, MoveOn, endorsed El-Sayed, told us that although the process appears chaotic, it is necessary for a party trying to redefine itself and recover from traumatic losses in 2024. “Democrats tried an era where we swept things under the rug and we tried to sort things out before it got in front of voters,” he said. “That doesn’t work. We’re in a different era.” Instead, he advised, the party needs to openly “have the fights, let it get messy, and then put it back together on the back side.”

Things in Michigan are certainly messy. Now El-Sayed and his fellow Democrats need to put them back together over the next 13 weeks if Democrats hope to win back the Senate in November.

The Once-Shameless President Is Deeply Embarrassed

2026-08-05T13:54:00-04:00

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One of President Trump’s superpowers is his shamelessness. Most of the time, he demonstrates a singular ability to shrug off—or flat-out lie about—scandals or missteps that would have caused another politician’s career to self-immolate. Get caught on an Access Hollywood video boasting about abusing women? That’s just locker-room talk! Grow insecure about crowd size? The photo must be doctored! Mistakenly suggest that Alabama was in the path of a hurricane? Someone get a Sharpie and a map! Trump has long been able to shrug off a bad headline and move on to the next news cycle, counting on his base to swallow his claims and never waver in their support.

But that power appears to be fading. Trump is undeniably in a bad spot. His poll numbers have tumbled, and Republicans are fearful that they will lose at least one chamber of Congress this November. Trump’s behavior has grown more erratic in recent months—just check out his Truth Social account most nights—and he recently marked his 80th birthday. And lately, he has shown something else: an ability to be embarrassed. When that has happened, he has lashed out angrily—and has been willing to deploy the levers of government, and his compliant staff, to menace those he blames for his humiliation.

His recent targets include an Olympic canoeist accused of vandalizing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool after a rushed and botched renovation project, and journalists who reported about the security deficiencies of Trump’s new Air Force One. In the first matter, he pushed for a prosecution after an arrest was made; in the other, he ordered a criminal investigation. (The case against the canoeist and other alleged vandals fell apart, and the subpoenas of the journalists have been dropped, at least for the moment.)

For months now, Trump has been on the receiving end of another humiliation: He has been repeatedly mocked and ignored by the hard-line leaders in Iran. Once more this week, the president reacted with rage when Iran again contradicted his claims about negotiations to bring the war to a close. How will he lash out this time?

Trump really, really does not want to be forgotten, and he cares deeply about leaving his physical mark on Washington. He is a developer at heart who spent decades obsessing over the details of his homes in Manhattan and Palm Beach while also overseeing the design of luxury golf courses around the world. He mostly kept that impulse in check during his first term, but now, facing his political mortality, he has decisively shifted his focus to his legacy, whether that be trying to claim territory for the United States or reshaping the nation’s capital. You know the list: the East Wing, the Rose Garden, the Kennedy Center, the arch, the municipal golf courses, a helipad on the White House South Lawn, and so on. Trump has long prized symbols—particularly when the symbols can project his power—and seized upon America’s 250th birthday as an opportunity to further beautify Washington, his backdrop as he presided over the grandiose celebrations. His attention was particularly drawn to the Reflecting Pool.

[Read: Let them eat gold]

Trump was not wrong in thinking it could use a little love. The Reflecting Pool, which stretches east from the Lincoln Memorial, on the National Mall, toward the Washington Monument, has long leaked and showed its age, bedeviling administrations for decades. In April, Trump announced a solution: a swimming-pool liner that would be, in his words, American-flag blue. To complete the project before the July 4 festivities, the Trump administration awarded no-bid contracts to redo the base of the pool and install a nanobubbling system that was meant to kill off algae growth. Instead, the algae flourished, the pool turned green, fences went up, and mitigation efforts failed. The Reflecting Pool undeniably looked worse. More than $16 million was wasted, and the national symbol was closed on the nation’s birthday.

Trump was furious. One of his signature projects had fallen apart—and he needed a scapegoat. He settled on an unexpected one: an Olympic canoer. David Hearn, 67, says he had just finished up a bike ride when he swung by the Reflecting Pool to see the failing sealant and reached down to touch the green water. He was arrested and detained for hours. The case, on its surface, seemed ridiculous. But it gained traction when Trump, reeling from the renovation’s failures, began going on Truth Social to blame so-called vandals for destroying the pool and accuse them of cutting an (improbable) 250-foot gash down the middle. Media outlets promptly debunked the claim with a series of fact-checks, but Trump was undeterred, relentlessly claiming that the pool had been vandalized.

Even some of his closest allies, two of them told me, privately rolled their eyes at the president’s obsession and scoffed at his refusal to admit a mistake. One Republican lawmaker, speaking to me on the condition of anonymity to avoid Trump’s wrath, deemed it “the dumbest controversy of his term” but added, with a rueful chuckle, that “it’s better than talking about how badly everything else is going.” But the episode had real-world consequences: Hearn told my colleague Matt Viser that it was “unsettling to feel like I’m being targeted by my government.” He had to hire lawyers and attend court dates, and he had his phone seized. The legal process itself functioned as a form of punishment.

The Reflecting Pool was an unlikely cause célèbre this summer, but it seemed likely to end with a whimper at the end of last week. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro, who once touted her office’s ability to prosecute the case, executed a textbook Friday news dump when her office asked to dismiss the cases against Hearn and the handful of others accused of vandalism because evidence had emerged that suggested the damage was the the result of a botched installation, not vandalism. The farce seemed, mercifully, over.

[Read: How the Reflecting Pool vandalism case fell apart]

Nope! Trump went on social media this past weekend to eviscerate Pirro, who has been one of his most loyal allies. Throwing the facts out the window, Trump declared that “to me, it was a pure case of VANDALISM” and that he would “disagree 100%” with the U.S. attorney in D.C. Accustomed to complete fealty, he raged to allies. In the Oval Office on Monday, he declared that the former Fox News host had “choked” and “folded like an umbrella.” Pirro was then summoned to the Oval Office; she was later seen walking out of the West Wing, wheeling a box full of materials from the case that she had brought to show the president and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, whose agency has oversight of the Reflecting Pool (Trump did not appear to be mollified by the meeting and continued to criticize his longtime ally last night). A White House official told me that Pirro still had her job. The official added that may not be the case for long.

Trump has complained about Air Force One for nearly a decade. When he took office after his 2016 election, the president—who had grown accustomed to flying around in his luxury private jet—was dismayed by the antiquated state of the two VC-25 aircraft that usually bear the call sign, which had been in use since the early ’90s. He pushed for a new plane with a more Trumpian color scheme, but a series of setbacks and delays pushed the arrival of the modern replacement jet until 2028. This was not something, most people understood, that could be rushed: Air Force One needed to be outfitted with top-of-the-line (and often classified) communications and security features that allow it to serve as a White House in the sky, especially in case of an emergency.

But Trump grew impatient. So when Qatar’s royal family offered to give him a $400 million “palace in the sky,” Trump immediately demanded that the luxury liner become his interim aircraft until Boeing completed delivery. It would, Trump said, be a gift to the Department of Defense, and it would go to his presidential library once he left office. This, of course, prompted all sorts of pushback. Permitting a foreign government to supply the signature American aircraft struck many people as not just unpatriotic, but also an outrageous security risk. It was also yet another example of Trump displaying a disregard for norms and for traditional legal and political guardrails—and this time at a truly gargantuan scale.

[Read: The MAGA-world rift over Trump’s Qatari jet]

Trump didn’t care. Nor did he seem bothered that it would cost up to $1 billion to retrofit the jet to make it acceptable for an American president to use. He set the same aggressive timeline as with the Reflecting Pool: He wanted the interim plane ready for use on the nation’s birthday. And there it was, soaring above Mount Rushmore on July 3 and then off to a NATO summit in Turkey a week later. But then, suddenly, Trump was back aboard the old baby-blue-and-gold Air Force One when he left Ankara. He claimed that the new jet had gone ahead of him to England to give troops stationed there a chance to tour it and that he was taking the original “for old time’s sake.”

A few days later, The New York Times reported what many had suspected: When hostilities ignited again in nearby Iran, the Secret Service determined that there were security concerns with the new aircraft flying near a danger zone. It was missing some key defense modifications, the paper reported, in a story that ran only after the president had safely returned to the United States. Trump, once more, was furious and embarrassed, and summoned FBI Director Kash Patel to the White House. In an extraordinary escalation of the administration’s pressure on independent news organizations, subpoenas were issued to several Times reporters, some delivered at their homes. The government requested the reporters’ phone records and demanded that they provide grand-jury testimony as part of a leak investigation to unmask the confidential sources who had provided information to the newspaper about a national-security matter.

The Times defended its reporters, while press organizations and Democrats issued statements about overreach and intimidation. Trump, once again, took to social media to blast his hometown paper and its journalists, sometimes in ugly, personal ways. It didn’t matter, it seemed, that the White House later admitted that the new plane would need upgrades, and that the president himself said it would be “maxxed out,” which all but confirmed the newspaper’s reporting. Trump was “incensed,” one adviser told me, and “wanted a head on a pike.” But, again, the legal process intervened, this time in the shape of a federal judge who grilled Department of Justice lawyers late last month over the handling of the subpoenas. DOJ then withdrew them. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told me in a statement, “The President and the Administration remain committed to holding individuals who recklessly and illegally leak classified information to the media accountable.”

There was a reason Trump reacted so strongly to those two humbling moments, some people close to him told me. And that’s because they came against the backdrop of the near-daily humiliation that the president has been suffering at the hands of Iran. The war is not going well. A conflict that Trump thought might take a few weeks at most has now stretched into its sixth month, and, try as he might, he can’t get out of it. He has declared victory many times and threatened to wipe Iran off the map nearly as often. Neither has happened. At this point, his unfulfilled threats—with Iran calling his bluff—have almost become a dark running gag.

[Read: The YOLO presidency]

The past few days, in a way, have been a microcosm of the whole conflict: Over the weekend, Trump came close to ordering a new wave of attacks, but walked them back after calls from regional allies, including Saudi Arabia, and fears of how Iran might respond. Instead, Trump said he would give diplomacy another chance, claiming that good progress was being made and that the Strait of Hormuz would soon be open. But Tehran denied that any negotiations were happening. And then another ship was attacked in the strait. Trump reacted in fury, posting that the Iranian regime was “unbelievably duplicitous,” when decades of history would suggest that Tehran was, in fact, very knowably duplicitous.

But how Trump will respond next to this ongoing embarrassment remains unknown. He’s made the war deeply personal. Will he now bail on the stalled war entirely, leaving Iran more empowered in the region? Will he follow through on his threats to dramatically escalate the conflict, perhaps even to strike civilian infrastructure and energy sites? Or will he channel his rage against Americans who point out his mistakes?

‘Disappear the Democrat’ Backfires in Montana

2026-08-05T12:01:00-04:00

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The Democratic nominee for Montana’s open U.S. Senate seat, Alani Bankhead, has been telling everyone for months that there is no price anyone can pay to keep her name from appearing on the November ballot. “Why is it you are asking me a question I have been asked a thousand times?” she told me on Monday, when I tried to probe her commitment to the race. “There is nothing that is going to force me from the ticket unless God himself tells me to drop out.”

The lack of divine intervention has challenged Democratic hopes for a big-sky Senate pickup. As it stands, Bankhead will likely split the state’s ever shrinking number of non-Republicans with an independent candidate, Seth Bodnar, who has raised more money and secured more support from senior party leaders who believe he will caucus with Democrats if he prevails. That all but ensures a win for the Republican candidate, Kurt Alme, which has set off a last-minute scramble to push Bankhead from the race before the August 10 deadline for locking the ballot. The state Democratic Party has been preparing for her to leave the race. A national Democratic polling firm, Global Strategy Group, circulated new polling yesterday arguing that she should drop out. And national Democrats have been calling her, seeking meetings. Bankhead told me that former Governor Steve Bullock, a Democrat who has not yet endorsed in the race, called her last week to ask if she would meet him for coffee. She said she did not respond. “It is a very strange process to be in this position where Alani feels more like the independent than the independent,” Jeri Bucy, her communications strategist, told me.

Shannon O’Brien, the head of the state party, convened a meeting of its executive board last Thursday to discuss the possibility of leaving the Democratic line on the ballot empty if Bankhead does leave the race. State law says political parties “shall” appoint a replacement if the nominee bows out 85 or more days from an election. State Democratic party bylaws say that the party central committee “shall” call a meeting and “shall” vote on a replacement. The Montana secretary of state, a Republican, says the state party must follow those words and pick a replacement.

But Jacquelyn Lopez, the general counsel for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, attended the meeting to argue that the party would likely win in court if it opted not to replace Bankhead, according to three people familiar with the meeting who were not authorized to speak publicly. Under this plan, the party would gloss over the “shall”s in state law and party rules on the grounds that political parties have the power to interpret their own rules and significant right under the First Amendment to do what they please. Someone in the meeting asked Lopez if the Democratic National Committee would fund the inevitable lawsuits that would result from such a move, the three people said. Lopez answered in the affirmative, all three said, including one who referenced written notes of the meeting made the following day. “There was without a doubt comments made that made everyone think the DNC would pay for it,” one of the people told me. “For everyone after the meeting, there was the gist that we were going to have our bills paid for us.”

Lopez, an attorney at the Elias Law Group, told me that she represented the state party and not the DSCC at the meeting. “I did not state that the DNC would fund a lawsuit at any point, and it would be inaccurate to report that,” she told me. She did not respond to follow-up questions. A spokesperson for the DNC, Angelo Fernández Hernández, told me that the national party “has never been approached to pay any legal bills related to candidates dropping out from the election.” A DSCC spokesperson told me the committee was not involved in the meeting.

[Read: One morning of controlled chaos in Maine]

The discussion only deepened suspicions that national Democrats are conspiring against the state’s Democratic candidate in what is emerging as the clumsiest, if not the most catastrophic, political gambit of the 2026 midterms. “It’s pretty wild out here,” Nancy Keenan, a former Montana Democratic Party executive director, told me. “They call it the Wild West—but holy Toledo.”

The disappear-the-Democrat electoral strategy—a response to the party’s terrible national brand, especially in states Donald Trump comfortably won—has had more success elsewhere. In Nebraska, Democrats nominated a candidate for Senate who pledged to abandon her campaign to clear the way for an independent, Dan Osborn. In Idaho, the Democratic Senate nominee, David Roth, dropped out last week to make way for the independent Todd Achilles. Yesterday Julian Beaudion, the Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate seat in South Dakota, said he would suspend his campaign to protect “the mental and physical safety of my family,” making way for an independent candidate, Brian Bengs.

Democrats hoped Montana would follow a similar script to clear the way for Bodnar, a former university administrator and U.S. Army Green Beret, who is running on a moderate Democratic platform with a “both parties are to blame” message. As former Senator Jon Tester put it in a text message to fellow state Democrats about supporting Bodnar, “During my last two races the democratic Party was poison in my attempts to get re-elected.”

But that message never filtered down to the Democratic rank and file, a largely populist and freethinking bunch who have watched their state vote for Trump by double digits three times in a row. Party activists have rebelled, saying that there will be downballot repercussions for abandoning the party brand in the premier statewide race this year, and state voters continue to show significant support for Bankhead, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel and a first-time candidate. Recent Republican and Democratic polling shows Bodnar and Bankhead roughly splitting the non-Alme vote, giving the Republican a significant double-digit lead in a four-way race that also includes a libertarian candidate.

The situation has created a last-minute scramble and deepening paranoia on all sides. Days after Bankhead heard from Bullock, Montanans began getting calls from pollsters, first reported by the Washington Reporter, testing a hypothetical scenario in which Bullock replaced both Bodnar and Bankhead, creating a two-person race between Bullock and Alme. The possibility of Bullock running again for Senate, after losing a bid in 2020, has long circulated in the state, and the funding for the poll has not been disclosed. Bullock did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

To make matters more complicated, Bankhead won her June 2 primary with significant financial backing from apparent Bodnar allies, according to federal records. They sided with Bankhead over another primary candidate, the fierce Bodnar critic Reilly Neill. The Progressive Vet PAC spent $2.8 million to support Bankhead and oppose Neill. Jason Carroll, a tech entrepreneur and Bodnar donor, gave the group $200,000. The other $2.6 million came from a nonprofit called Contours Inc. that has supported other independent-candidate efforts. Bankhead maintained that she had no ties to the group, and had made no pledge to get out of the race if she won. She has held true to that bargain.

The pledges of other Democrats in the state have been a bit more complex. Back in April, O’Brien told me she would “support the Democratic nominee,” and rejected any rumors that the state party was preparing to clear the way for Bodnar. “To my knowledge there is no intention to change the rules to allow for support of anyone else,” she said. State Senate Minority Leader Pat Flowers told me that the idea of secret plotting for a change in rules to allow Democrats to not field a nominee was a “fever dream.”

Days after the executive-board meeting last week, O’Brien sent a four-page legal memo from the Elias Law Group to Democrats in the state. The memo acknowledges that the state party’s bylaws instruct the committee to name a replacement candidate if a nominee withdraws. But it went on to argue that if the party tries to replace a candidate and fails, it would likely survive the resulting lawsuit. “The key question,” the document reads, is how the Montana Democratic Party “interprets its own bylaws and whether a failure to appoint a replacement candidate is defensible as a reasonable interpretation of the party’s own rules.” In one scenario, the state party could construe its rules to put forward a “none of the above” option at its nominating meeting. In another scenario, the state party could require qualifications for a replacement candidate that are so stringent that “no available candidate satisfies those requirements.”

[Read: America’s most divided state loves its extremes]

Bankhead has concluded that O’Brien cannot be trusted. “There is only one person in the state Democratic Party that is standing against me, and that is Shannon O’Brien, who has been in Bodnar’s pocket the whole time,” Bankhead told me. O’Brien has previously denied any effort to support Bodnar, but could not be reached for comment for this story. A spokesperson for the state party declined to comment.

Bodnar’s campaign, for its part, says he is prepared to win a four-way contest. A super PAC supporting his campaign began running new ads against Bankhead today, asking, “What else don’t we know about Alani Bankhead?” Bankhead and Bodnar met privately in Helena on Friday, according to three people familiar with the meeting. Bankhead asked Bodnar to drop out and transfer his endorsement and money to her, two people said, which he declined to do. Bankhead told me Monday that Bodnar has not made the same request of her. “He said, I would never ask you to drop out, and I said, Great, because I wouldn’t,” she told me. But both candidates have also made clear that they think the other can’t win, and allies of Bankhead have been calling for Bodnar’s exit. “If there were somebody else who had a pathway to defeat Kurt Alme in this race, I’d step aside in a heartbeat,” Bodnar told supporters in a livestream Monday night.

The pressure is likely to only increase over the coming days, testing Bankhead’s resolve. “Nobody can accurately predict any election,” she told me. “If polls mattered, Hillary would have won. If name ID mattered, Bullock would have won. If money mattered, Tester would have won.”

When she mentioned the Almighty as the only one who might persuade her to abandon her campaign, I asked how frequently she communicated with God. “I am a person of faith,” she said.

A Family Tragedy in the Age of Trump

2026-08-03T23:20:00-04:00

Once upon a time, it was practically de minimis for either political party to disavow a candidate facing allegations of domestic violence. But now is not that time.

Which might help explain why, as the divorce of young MAGA royalty—Ohio Representative Max Miller and Emily Moreno, daughter of Bernie Moreno, the senator from Ohio—has morphed from a deeply personal family tragedy into a highly public political spectacle, Republicans have been reluctant to say that an alleged domestic abuser (especially one facing allegations from two women) is probably a poor choice to represent their party this November.

I am referring, of course, to Miller, whom Emily Moreno has accused of scalding her with hot water, holding a gun to her head, and throwing her against a wall—all allegations he has denied. (She also suggested that because of his history of violence against her, she couldn’t rule out that he had fractured their daughter’s collarbone, which he also denies.) But this is now a party whose leader has been accused of sexual misconduct by more than two dozen women; a party whose president was found liable in a civil trial for sexually abusing and defaming the writer E. Jean Carroll; a party whose chief once palled around with Jeffrey Epstein, the notorious convicted sex offender. And so perhaps only in President Trump’s Republican Party does believing all women—or even some women, some of the time—become politically fraught.

[Read: The grim aftermath of the E. Jean Carroll verdict]

Bernie Moreno declared yesterday that Miller should not serve in the House of Representatives, writing on X that the past two years have been “pure hell” for his family. “Max Miller needs serious psychological help,” Moreno wrote. “He is a danger to my daughter, and I hold my breath every minute he has custody of my granddaughter.” He concluded by saying that he owed it to his wife, “to Emily, and to my granddaughter to speak the truth now.”

Moreno’s statement came after Miller appeared on a roughly 20-minute livestream that morning, in which he refused to drop out of his House race and explained that he strived to comport himself with “dignity” for the sake of his daughter—all while proceeding to publicly impugn his daughter’s mother.

Initially, Moreno found himself on a tiny island of Republicans who believe that an alleged domestic abuser is not fit to serve in Congress. When Trump was asked on Air Force One yesterday if he thought Miller should resign, he said he would “look at it,” but noted, “so far it’s accusations.” He repeated that stance in the Oval Office this afternoon, calling Miller “a good person” and suggesting that this is a situation that needs to be resolved within the family, not within the party. A representative for Miller declined to comment.

But by this evening, as the Senate returned and reporters pressed lawmakers on Miller’s fate, a growing number of Republicans conceded that maybe he wasn’t the best candidate, after all. Trump also reportedly called Miller today to express concerns about his candidacy, according to Axios. But a person familiar with Trump’s concerns told me that even if the president pushed Miller to bow out, they weren’t certain the young House member would heed the president’s advice.

Claims of misbehavior and anger issues have dogged Miller since at least high school, and Emily Moreno is not the first woman to accuse him of being violent.

When Miller first ran for office, in 2021, the former White House communications director Stephanie Grisham said that when she dated him during Trump’s first term, their relationship had turned physically abusive. (Grisham wrote in a Washington Post op-ed in October 2021 that she told both President Trump and First Lady Melania Trump, for whom she also worked, about the abuse, and they did nothing.) Miller denied the accusations and sued Grisham for defamation, before dropping the lawsuit as part of a confidential settlement. That same year, a Politico profile of Miller recounted several brushes he had had with authorities when he was younger, including charges of assault, disorderly conduct, and resisting arrest as a high-school senior. The story also detailed how Miller allegedly pushed a girl out of his room after she resisted his advances, and she fell down some stairs, an incident sourced to three people who said they were present at the time and more who said they heard about the incident in the aftermath. At the time, Miller told Politico through a lawyer that he “categorically denies” the event. A description in that profile from someone who knew Miller during his earlier years—and described him as someone who “could be very scary”—has stayed with me: “I can, like, see the red face.”

[From the June issue: The men who want women to be quiet]

In mid-July, a Mother Jones piece unearthed new allegations against Miller, based on more than 2,000 pages of court filings and police reports that the writer Abby Vesoulis obtained through public-records requests that contain “allegations of drug use by Miller, misogyny and verbal abuse, and violent behavior against multiple women,” she writes. A report about a collarbone injury his daughter suffered, for instance, includes Emily Moreno telling investigators that her daughter told her, “Daddy’s house is scary.” (Miller’s spokesperson did not directly address all of the magazine’s questions, but pointed to previous statements Miller and his representatives have made to other news organizations, denying he has ever been violent toward women.) Then, a New York Times article last week brought more attention to the allegations, raising uncomfortable questions for the Republican Party about why its members seem so reluctant to suggest that Miller step aside. For a time, this included Moreno himself.

I am not unsympathetic to Bernie Moreno. I am the stepmom in a blended family, and I understand a key tenet of Divorce 101, especially when there are kids, is to never speak ill of anyone involved. Moreno seemed to be trying to abide by that ideal. In a recorded conversation between Miller and Emily Moreno—made public yesterday when Miller released a collection of documents, videos, and audio clips he says will help exonerate him—she described being upset Miller had lashed out at her father, noting, “My dad, despite what you may think, has never said negative things about you to me, even to this day, through this process.” She added that when she told her dad that other people have, post-divorce, discouraged her from being in regular contact with Miller, her dad disagreed and reminded her that Miller is still the father of her daughter.

Two people close to the family told me Moreno’s initial silence was at his daughter’s request: Emily Moreno does not want her own daughter to one day read about her grandfather attacking her dad. One of these people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the fraught nature of the dispute, added that because of the ongoing litigation, Moreno was reluctant to say anything publicly that Miller’s lawyers would almost certainly try to use against his family, and he also feared that Miller could take out any anger toward the senator on his daughter and granddaughter. A second person close to Emily Moreno offered a similar assessment. A third person familiar told me the entire Moreno family had hoped to prevent the divorce from becoming a vicious spectacle, and that while the senator had wanted to speak out for months, he did not, out of respect for his daughter and granddaughter, but has always supported her privately—including paying her legal fees, which now run in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Nonetheless, Miller was quick to attack Moreno’s seemingly belated response, writing yesterday on X: “If my daughter said the same thing to me, I personally wouldn’t wait two years before holding him accountable. You know this isn’t true and the only reason you are speaking out now is to hide from your own media circus. This is all political.”

And Moreno—not unlike many Republicans who at first remained silent on the Miller scandal, pleading they were not equipped to weigh in on mere allegations—has had no problem using allegations to go after Democratic opponents in the past. In a June Senate hearing, the senator alluded to the ongoing scandals involving then–Senate candidate of Maine Graham Platner in a quest to “just do a little vetting here this morning.” He asked the assembled nominees before him: “Do any of you have a Nazi tattoo?” and “Have any of you ever said that women deserve to be raped and should take accountability for being intoxicated?” In an April hearing, Moreno took aim at Eric Swalwell, a Democrat who had just resigned from Congress and ended his bid for California governor amid his own allegations of sexual misconduct. “What’s interesting to me is you look at the depraved individuals that serve in this body, people like Eric Swalwell—I don’t know that I’d want to be categorized the same way,” Moreno said.

Which is why, on Friday, when NOTUS asked Moreno if Republicans should replace Miller on the ticket—the deadline to do so is Wednesday—because of the accusations of domestic violence, I was surprised by the senator’s tepid reply: “I don’t know.”

[Read: A police report about a House candidate surprised the White House]

A profile in courage this was not, as many Democrats (and former Republicans) pointed out online. “Be the kind of father who doesn’t tolerate a man who abused his daughter,” Sarah Longwell, the anti-MAGA political strategist and founder of The Bulwark, wrote on X. And from former Representative Adam Kinzinger, who served as a Republican: “Imagine if your dad picked his job over you. @berniemoreno is a despicable man.” To his critics, the NOTUS story was just another example of cowardice by Moreno and his party. To those who know him well, the ensuing response was yet another reminder that anything can be used for political gain, even a family’s anguish.

Tonight, when reporters pressed Moreno about why it took him some time to issue a statement about Miller, his long-simmering anger seeped out. “I hope you never have to go through a situation like this, and you wouldn’t ask that kind of fucking question,” he said.

Miller and Emily Moreno’s relationship started like a MAGA romance novel: a marriage of two young MAGA scions—both from politically powerful and wealthy Ohio families—held at the president’s gilded Bedminster Club in August 2022 and attended by Trump himself. A father-in-law and son-in-law with big political ambitions, sharing the same midwestern state. But it did not end that way. Divorce filings came almost exactly two years later, in August 2024, along with mutual restraining orders issued the same day, and nasty accusations soon followed.

In his livestream yesterday, Miller denied that he was violent with his ex-wife, pointing to messages between them several days after an alleged incident, in which she offered to cook him dinner. (To Miller, this exchange is exonerating; to many people familiar with domestic abuse, this exchange is also typical of how victims sometimes try to salvage their relationship or protect themselves and their kids.) Miller also, claiming to speak from “great sadness, and not anger,” cast his ex-wife as mentally ill, saying he did not mention this “to embarrass her, or to attack her”—despite spending the majority of his address doing just that. The situation, he said, has been painful for everyone involved, “especially our daughter, who we both need to think about more so than ever, and I feel as if I am the only one who does.”

Then, for a man interested in protecting his daughter, and convincing the public he’s not the controlling abuser his ex-wife claims he is, he added a confusing coda: “She is a beautiful, innocent child, and she didn’t ask for any of the media scrutinization of her family, and she will eventually see all of these reports one day, as she will continue to bear my last name—Miller.”

I began digging into the documents Miller released that he said would refute his ex-wife’s claims. The collection includes a series of text messages between the two parents, filled with the quotidian challenges of life with a toddler, all further exacerbated by divorce—screen-time concerns, balancing work and child care, birthday-party drop-offs.

And then there was this: Emily Moreno told Miller in February that their daughter was having another anxiety attack, similar to one she’d had previously. Miller responded: “Ugh, hold her tight and snuggle with her. I hate this for her. The only remedy I know is just to hold her tight and snuggle.”

The two go back and forth a few more times—with Emily Moreno expressing concern that their daughter told her, “Daddy kill you,” and Miller arguing, “there is no way she is saying that”—before Moreno offers another update the following morning. “She woke up once in middle of night for cuddles but overall much better.”

Marie-Rose Sheinerman contributed to this report.