Politics | The Atlantic

Perhaps the Nazi Tattoo Was a Clue

2026-07-07T19:45:11-04:00

The Senate race in Maine looks significantly different than it did 48 hours ago. Yesterday, Politico reported a credible allegation of sexual assault against the Democratic nominee, Graham Platner. In a video posted after the story broke, Platner denied the accusation but said that his campaign would explore the best way forward, opening the door to what seems like an inevitable withdrawal from the race.

Now the voices that had most vehemently defended Platner during previous scandals or vouched for the necessity of his folksy progressivism have withdrawn their endorsements, one after another, and called for him to drop out. Among those voices are Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, Representative Ro Khanna, and Pod Save America’s Jon Favreau. No doubt, none of these Democratic politicians, party power brokers, or podcasters were aware of the alleged rape when they made and maintained their endorsements. Nearly everyone who previously supported Platner seems to have since reversed course. Credible allegations of sexual assault do, indeed, go too far.

But the question remains: Why was this horrific allegation the threshold when Platner had so obviously transgressed so many times before? Perhaps Platner’s Nazi tattoo should have been a sufficient indicator that he lacked the character to be a senator. Perhaps maintaining that SS logo for two decades, covering it up only when it became politically inconvenient, demonstrated that he lacked the judgment for national office. Perhaps a multiyear history of not just having abhorrent views about women and minorities, but feeling the need to post them for the world to see, could have told us that he is not the person to be Maine’s voice in Washington. Maybe a well-documented history of contemptible behavior in his personal life should have been enough, when taken with everything else, for Democrats to conclude that Platner was exactly the person he appeared to be.

[Jonathan Chait: With Graham Platner, Democrats got drunk on the beer test]

When Platner emerged last year as the Democrats’ shiny new object—DSA sensibilities with a gruff voice and working-class clothes—many who favored his brand of leftist populism rallied to help him defeat Democratic centrism. He managed to do so when his primary opponent, Governor Janet Mills, suspended her campaign before votes were cast. Platner’s backers hoped that he could do the same against Susan Collins this fall. But when a clear pattern of Platner’s bad behavior and bad judgment emerged, these Democrats held firm, using their positions of prominence to assure voters that what we all could see was somehow not as it seemed. This latest allegation was not a black-swan event—a shocking and unexpected revelation from an otherwise strong candidate. Rather, it was the most recent in a steady drumbeat of disqualifying revelations.

It’s good that those who have changed their mind about Platner are now telling the woman who spoke with Politico, Jenny Racicot, that they will not stand with her alleged victimizer. But why were the Jews who were targeted by the organization whose logo he bore not worthy of the same support? And was Lyndsey Fifield, a conservative woman who alleged that Platner had engaged in emotional and physical abuse (also denied by Platner), less worthy because of her politics? What does it say about Platner’s defenders that his other horrible behavior was within their range of acceptability?

Those who waited until this week to rescind their endorsements had all the indicators they needed to surmise that Platner was a problem. And pretending otherwise required a willful denial of the facts. For instance, they claimed that he hadn’t known the significance of his tattoo until recently, despite the fact that at least three people said they’d had conversations with Platner about the image prior to its public disclosure.

We have spent months listening to spin from Democrats arguing that what was clear about Platner’s character was somehow more nuanced and explainable, all because progressives had found a candidate in Carhartt. The idea that a candidate could have a Nazi tattoo and stay in the race sounds more like a subplot from Veep than the reality upon which several prominent Democrats staked their reputations.

[Elizabeth Bruenig: Yet more damning revelations about Graham Platner]

When the Platner campaign comes to its ignominious end, as it almost certainly will whether he withdraws or not, the value of conducting a postmortem will not be about Platner himself, a deeply flawed person worthy of neither the office he sought nor the support he received. It will be about those who gave him that support. Not only did they stand by Platner; they expressed outrage toward those of us who said he was unfit. And contemptibly, they attacked one of Platner’s accusers, Fifield. “Believe women,” it seems, does not extend to victims who commit the unforgivable sin of having voted for Republicans.

Perhaps next time these officeholders, influencers, advocates, and organizations will think twice before throwing their full-throated support behind someone they do not actually know or, at a minimum, withhold support from those who are clearly unacceptable. They lied to voters, either by vouching for the virtue of a candidate about whom they did not have specific knowledge, or by claiming that someone they knew to be detestable was not. Perhaps now voters will think twice before heeding the advice of Sanders, Warren, Khanna, Favreau, and others, or of Veterans for Responsible Leadership, the advocacy organization that had endorsed Platner, who served in the Marines, and reiterated its support through the previous scandals.

The voters themselves should not be let off the hook; a republic’s survival requires the engagement of an educated electorate. Even though most of Platner’s behavior had been widely reported prior to the June 9 primary, an overwhelming majority of Democratic voters in Maine selected Platner. They either made no effort to inform themselves about the man for whom they cast their vote, did not believe the well-corroborated claims against him, or felt that Nazi iconography, alleged partner abuse, admitted substance abuse, and offensive Reddit posts were of less importance than defeating Mills. None of those justifications was ever sufficient.

It would be nice to believe that those who failed the test during the Platner campaign will learn from their mistake, but I am skeptical, particularly in today’s political environment. For those who apparently lacked the integrity to denounce contemptible candidates, the discernment to detect them, or the desire to do the right thing, might I offer a simple rule to assist—even just toward the pragmatic goal of selecting electable candidates. Prior to the Platner campaign, I would have thought this rule was common sense and easy to follow, but apparently it should be made explicit: Maybe, at a minimum, don’t support a candidate with a Nazi tattoo.

The Demon Next Door

2026-07-07T06:00:00-04:00

Photographs by Houston Cofield

From the outside, the church looked like a plain brick storefront, the mirrored windows peeling, a sign above painted white with blue letters. THE WELL, it read, and underneath, REVIVAL HUB.

There were older and grander churches in Maryville, a college town in East Tennessee where you could barely drive a minute without passing a cross or a sign about Jesus. But when Mike and Andrea Brewer established the Well, in 2016, they understood themselves to be part of something more mystical and revolutionary than any existing denomination—a charismatic-Christian movement that has drawn millions of Americans with the promise of supernatural encounters with God and visions of cosmic battle.

By his own account, Mike had been an exhausted factory worker and a lapsed Pentecostal addicted to pornography when one night, at home and praying for a better life, he heard an unfamiliar voice calling out to him and believed that it was God. At church a few days later, he would write, he felt a “tangible explosion” in his chest, followed by “the purity and righteousness of God moving through me in waves.” He came to believe that a demon had exited his body and that the Holy Spirit had taken its place. He decided that God had chosen him for a divine assignment.

The Brewers began attending conferences with names such as “Voice of the Prophets” and “Voice of the Apostles” in places like Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and Springfield, Missouri. At one gathering, Mike claimed to have seen an actual angel, and at another, a manifestation of the Holy Spirit that he described to me as “like five fog machines, like a cloud just rolling into the room.” He and Andrea came to believe that God was unleashing new signs and wonders and raising up modern-day apostles and prophets, including, it turned out, them.

Houston Cofield for The Atlantic

Andrea and Mike Brewer, the founders of the Well, consider themselves hardened spiritual warriors.

They went abroad as missionaries to India and Haiti, which only confirmed their emerging understanding of a universe with three distinct realms—the heavenly, the earthly, and the underworld, with the Earth being the realm of spiritual warfare. On one side, the Holy Spirit, angels, and believers comprised an army of God. On the other were the forces of Satan—legions of demons with names, ranks, and personalities that could inhabit people, geographical regions, and entire nations. In India, the Brewers claimed to have battled Shiva, Brahma, and Kali. In Haiti, Python and Mami Wata. There was Marduk, Osiris, Ra, Horus, Diana, Artemis, Shesha Naga, and so on—a whole pantheon of demons that represented ancient religions and civilizations, and whose earthly expressions were essential to understanding current events.

By the time the Brewers returned to Maryville, they saw themselves as hardened spiritual warriors. They founded the Well to continue the battle, joining an international network of churches and ministries called Global Awakening, which also had a seminary, where Andrea began studying demon history and hierarchies. When Mike asked God for their exact assignment, he told me when I visited in March, “the Lord spoke so clearly. He said, ‘I’m giving you and the Well a mandate for the full eradication of witchcraft and demonic activity in the region.’”

And that was what led the Brewers to look across the street one day a few years later and determine that the central hub for demonic activity in the region was roughly 100 yards away. It was a bookstore called Southland.

The owner was Lisa Misosky, and she was chatting with customers one afternoon when she found out that people in town were accusing her of demonic activity, and not in a metaphorical way.

Over the course of three decades in Maryville, Misosky had made Southland Books and Cafe into a local institution, a sprawling maze of old bookcases where people could find a leather-bound Mark Twain, a paperback Charles Bukowski, shelves of military history, and flyers for a local mah-jongg group. Misosky had a bar downstairs where she hosted trivia nights, readings, all-ages punk shows, and fundraisers that sometimes involved drag performances. She occasionally provided space to the local Democratic Party. But none of that had drawn public protest until a new church moved in across the street.

“You’re not gonna believe this shit,” a friend texted her, and then sent the first of several videos posted by a man who introduced himself as Mike Brewer, the leader of an “apostolic hub” called the Well. Sitting at a desk, he explained in a calm and methodical manner that the bookstore had been identified as a “regional demonic stronghold.” A high-ranking demon named Lilith was involved, Misosky would learn, and the bookstore was being targeted for something called “strategic-level spiritual warfare,” the goal of which was to “remove the enemy.”

Houston Cofield for The Atlantic

Lisa Misosky, the owner of Southland Books and Cafe

Misosky had been born and raised in Maryville. She was 58, Catholic, and gay, and told me she was used to living among conservative Christians. Still, demonic came as a surprise. “This is probably the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard,” she remembered thinking after seeing the first video, not yet realizing that the church was part of the fastest-growing segment of Christianity in the country, or that the language she was hearing in the fall of 2022 was spreading across the Christian right and the wider political landscape.

[Molly Worthen: What the growth of charismatic Christianity reveals about America]

In the years ahead, Donald Trump would accuse the entire Democratic Party of being demonic. Tucker Carlson would claim that he had been mauled by a demon in his sleep. Steve Bannon would call Lutheran and Catholic activists who help immigrants demonic. A federal emergency-management official would speak of being teleported to a Waffle House 50 miles away, elaborating that he was not sure whether the transporting forces were “good” or “evil.” J. D. Vance would say of UFOs, “I don’t think they’re aliens. I think they’re demons.” And the same apostles and prophets who’d claimed that God had anointed Trump to be president would encourage him to see his war with Iran as a cosmic showdown with a demonic entity known as the Prince of Persia.

In that beginning moment, though, Misosky was simply wondering what the accusations meant for her bookstore and the people who went there. Why was she being targeted? What, precisely, was demonic about Southland? The mah-jongg? The romantasy section? A drag performer called Icky Stardust? Her? She wondered if she needed to worry about security.

She began searching for books on the subject, learning of an entire specialty called demonology. She found a manual written by an East Texas couple called Pigs in the Parlor: A Practical Guide to Deliverance, which had a chapter outlining 53 different demonic groupings.

From her front door, she kept an eye on what was happening across the street. A tobacco store blocked her full view of the church, but on Thursdays and Sundays, she could see cars and trucks wheeling into the craggy parking lot.

In one way, of course, none of this was new. Belief in satanic forces has been part of Christianity since the first century. What was relatively new was the rising movement that was supercharging these concepts, and that had first taken root in charismatic circles during the 1990s. Early leaders called their ideas the New Apostolic Reformation, claiming that a wave of Holy Spirit power was surging around the globe, heralding a “new apostolic age.” NAR leaders revised a common End Times narrative in a way that would prove revolutionary: Instead of retreating from the world and awaiting the return of Jesus Christ, they believed, Christians were supposed to establish God’s Kingdom, right now, on Earth.

[From the February 2025 issue: Stephanie McCrummen on the New Apostolic Reformation’s army of God]

Their version of the Kingdom mapped neatly onto the political goals of social conservatives, libertarians, and, more recently, the MAGA movement. The Kingdom would have limited government, free markets, two genders, one kind of marriage, and one kind of God. The “right now” part, meanwhile, offered an urgent paradigm for mobilizing grassroots believers out of the Church and into electoral politics, government, education, and all other realms of life where they were to assert God’s dominion. The new apostles and prophets of the NAR spread these ideas through decentralized networks of churches, international prayer ministries, schools, revivals, and prayer rallies, attracting followers who could find a sense of power and purpose in building the Kingdom. Leaders spoke of believers as “warriors” or “God’s army” or even “special forces,” and churches as “military bases,” and certain apostles as “generals.” They believed that being a Christian meant being in a constant state of spiritual warfare.

In its most basic form, this simply meant praying for God to eradicate evil. But NAR leaders pioneered a more radical version that they called “strategic spiritual warfare,” which entailed the idea that demons could take over cities and institutions, and that Christians could target and scatter them by their physical presence, intensive prayer, singing, marching, and other strategies.

One version of how this could look was when a team of NAR leaders in the ’90s climbed Mount Everest, where they spent weeks praying at various altitudes in an attempt to displace a high-ranking demon called the Queen of Heaven, whom they believed to be suppressing the spread of Christianity across the Middle East and Asia. Another version was the run-up to the January 6, 2021, insurrection, when prominent apostles and prophets held prayer rallies calling for “the minutemen of the Kingdom” to rise up against demonic forces that they believed had stolen the 2020 election, after which many of their followers were among those who stormed the U.S. Capitol. Another version was what happened after the Brewers returned to Maryville.

The first gatherings of the Well were held in the office of a former used-car dealership, just a few families praying for God to reveal the enemy. As more people joined, the group relocated to an office building, where one Sunday Mike decided that it was time to begin the first phase of strategic spiritual warfare, targeting what he considered to be ground-level demons. He invited anyone carrying “emotional pain or tormenting thoughts” to come to the front of the room. As he and Andrea tell the story, a young man recently released from prison stepped forward. Andrea put her hands on his shoulders, and as Mike ordered any demons to come to attention, the young man began shaking and crying, a catharsis that Mike declared to be God’s victory over a demon that they later identified as Odin, because of the man’s participation in a white-supremacist prison gang that embraced the Norse god. After that, more people began coming forward, and it was during this time that Mike received the mandate for the full eradication of witchcraft and demonic activity in the region.

Houston Cofield for The Atlantic

Services at the Well, in Maryville, Tennessee, are typical of those in charismatic churches—people dancing with prayer flags, pacing the room, lying prostrate on the floor. Thursday evenings are set aside for delivering people from demons.

The church moved in 2021 to the brick building, a former grocery store along a main thoroughfare in town, and set aside Thursday nights for delivering the people of Maryville. The sign went up. Into the sanctuary went 100 or so chairs arranged in a semicircle around a drum kit, guitars, and amplifiers. On one wall went a map of the area superimposed with what appeared to be a huge spiderweb that divided the region into prayer sectors. Where a church’s pulpit or a cross would usually be was an arrangement of amber-toned spotlights and glowing flameless candles. And when people came, they found the sort of free-form services common in the movement—people dancing with colored prayer flags, or pacing the room, or lying prostrate on the floor, the band playing one anthemic song after another.

A woman named Sasha, a driver for Uber Eats at the time, told me that on her first night at the Well, “this cry came out of me,” which she believed was a demon leaving her body, freeing her of the emotional and physical pain of a hysterectomy. A 62-year-old woman named Pam told me that a deliverance team conducted a “spiritual evaluation” to determine how demons might have entered her body, asking whether she’d had astral projections or tarot cards read, done meditation or yoga, or ever felt envious, angry, depressed, or insecure. The team then led her through an elaborate process of renouncing curses and revoking demonic rights, and when it was over, she said, “I really believed I was a child of God.” A young man suffering from severe anxiety and depression told me that after his cleansing, he felt “the most love I have ever felt.” A middle-aged woman who had struggled with drug and pornography addictions told me that after several sessions, she felt “euphoric—whole, complete, one, merged with the Trinity,” and that whatever God asks of her, “I will do, at all costs.”

People came from Alabama, Florida, Michigan, Minnesota. Mike said that a wealthy businessman from Indiana flew in for a private session. Deliverance leaders told me that they identified demons by the ways a person might be tormented. Feelings of worthlessness was Belial. Sexual confusion could be Jezebel. Anger could be Thor, who was under the command of Odin. The Brewers estimated that they’d delivered many hundreds of people, enough that they decided they were ready to move into the next phase of spiritual warfare. This meant identifying higher-ranking territorial demons, which involved a process that Andrea called determining the “narrative of hell” over the region.

She began gathering what she called “spiritual intelligence.” She kept track of what demons had been identified during deliverances at the Well. As she drove around the area, she told me, she made note of Masonic lodges, tarot-card readers, and anything else that made her feel uneasy. She paid attention to her dreams. Then came the day that Mike noticed an event posted on Facebook, an upcoming fundraiser for local foster kids that involved death-metal and drag performances. The Murvul Punk Toy Drive was being held at a bookstore right across the street.

The Brewers had not heard much about Southland, but scrolling through the shop’s Facebook page, they saw rainbow flags. They saw postings about local Democratic Party meetings and a drum circle, along with videos of past drag shows, including one in which Icky Stardust performed an elaborate routine to a blasting metal version of “White Wedding” and poured fake blood all over their dress. Mike thought that he saw a teenager in the audience.

“It was obvious,” Andrea said. The high-ranking demon influencing the region was Lilith, a Mesopotamian wind goddess who ruled over forbidden sexual desire, and Southland was the stronghold, which Mike defined as a place where certain thoughts, attitudes, and behaviors contrary to God were flourishing. Mike informed the church elders. “I said, ‘We cannot just let this stuff go,’” he told me. “I said, ‘This is evil.’”

After she watched the video, Misosky started asking around about the Brewers. She was a little bit older than Mike, but it only took a couple of phone calls to find out that he was from a nearby town called Townsend, known as a tourist gateway to the Great Smoky Mountains. Her sister and a friend had worked with his cousins; another friend who had worked at Southland had joined the Well, and Misosky had not seen her since. She realized that Andrea had worked at a local hardware store.

“Jackleg preacher,” Misosky would mutter when Mike’s name came up.

She had never wanted to be a political activist. But during the Trump era, Southland was becoming a social haven of the sort that can be found in many small southern towns. The campus of Maryville College was down the street, and students and faculty often hung out in the café. A professor sometimes gave lectures on the Constitution. Older gay couples met for beers. Misosky decided to host the county’s first Pride event in 2019, the same year that the Well received the mandate. She had thought that a dozen or so people would show up, but more than 700 did, which she found unexpectedly moving. She hosted more events after that, including drag-show fundraisers; minors could attend with a parent or a guardian, which was the case with the punk toy drive that was now drawing the attention of the Well.

Misosky flipped through Pigs in the Parlor. “This is the day of spiritual battle and spiritual-victory,” read a chapter titled “The Final Conflict.” “The warfare is on!”

She went online and looked up Lilith. “Primordial she-demon,” read one description. “Banished from the Garden of Eden for disobeying Adam,” read another.

“Every story needs a hero—a protagonist and an antagonist,” she remembered thinking. “So I guess I’m their antagonist, in collusion with Lilith.”

She wanted to blow it all off but couldn’t. She’d thought that the QAnon conspiracy was bonkers, and it had compelled a man to drive to Washington, D.C., with an AR‑15 and fire shots inside a pizza parlor. Nancy Pelosi, as speaker of the House, had been called demonic, and then her husband had been assaulted by a man who spoke of “evil” forces.

Across the street, the Brewers turned a conference room at the Well into what they called a “war room.” They put maps of all the surrounding counties on the walls, representing what they considered their spiritual theater of operation. Mike began posting about the fundraiser to his thousands of social-media followers, saying that it was from “the pits of hell.” At some point, he said, someone apparently upset by this sent him an envelope full of excrement; others sent checks and urged him to keep going. A few congregants started “prayer walking” near the bookstore, a tactic of spiritual warfare that had been deployed in the days and weeks before the January 6 insurrection, when people marched around the U.S. Supreme Court and state capitol buildings, calling the Holy Spirit into battle.

Meanwhile, Andrea began doing research into Tennessee laws and found an old statute banning cabaret performances within 1,000 feet of a church. The Brewers sent the information to the local district attorney, the police, the sheriff, and city and county commissioners. Soon, a wider circle of activists and pastors became involved in the cause, including one who had recently held a book burning in the town of Mt. Juliet, about three hours away—a huge bonfire that had drawn a crowd of cheering people who’d tossed copies of Harry Potter and other books deemed demonic into the flames.

At the Well, Mike showed images of the drag shows to his congregation. He kept streaming live videos describing what was happening at Southland as “wicked.” Then, a few days before the fundraiser, in November 2022, Mike and Misosky spoke by phone.

Her recollection is that she called Mike, and that he talked about doing spiritual warfare against voodoo chiefs in Haiti, and that she said, “That’s great, Mike. Why don’t you have a cup of coffee with me?”

Mike’s recollection is that he called Misosky. “I said, ‘I’m not calling to resolve differences. We’re not going to do that. I am calling to request that you go 18 and older for events,’” he said. “ ‘If you’re marketing to children of this area, we’re going to do everything within the law and the spirit to stop you. We will never harm you physically.’ I said, ‘I’m calling out of respect.’”

And that was the last time they spoke.

Soon after, Misosky got a call from the Anti-Defamation League. There had been some chatter about a protest at Southland on neo-Nazi forums that the group monitored. At the time, all kinds of LGBTQ events around the country were being targeted by extremist groups. A gunman had just killed five people and injured 19 at an LGBTQ nightclub in Colorado. Misosky called the police. She called some local pastors she knew and asked that they show up at the fundraiser wearing their collars. She posted on Facebook that “MAGA fascists” were threatening the toy drive.

The next evening, she stood with dozens of supporters in front of the bookstore, watching as a group of nine men, some with their faces covered with bandannas, marched down a side street and up to the sidewalk in front of the entrance, where police stopped them from going any farther. According to local press reports, the men held signs that read GROOMERS ARE PEDOPHILES and IT’S OK TO BE WHITE. At least one of them appeared to have a gun.

The Brewers said that they had no idea who the protesters were, and that they were at home at the time. On Facebook, Mike speculated that Misosky had organized a “false flag” operation to smear Christians. Later, the ADL and another watchdog group would identify the men as members of a neo-Nazi group called the Tennessee Active Club, part of a network of such clubs across the United States. Members of the group would show up the next year in the town of Franklin, about three and a half hours from Maryville, to provide security for a mayoral candidate named Gabrielle Hanson. During her campaign, Hanson spoke of battling vague forces threatening the nation and was anointed for office at a tent revival whose promotional posters declared WE ARE TAKING BACK THE LAND BY DISPLACING DEMONIC FORCES AND USHERING IN HIS GLORY. (Hanson said in a statement later that she had not hired the men who showed up, and denied being affiliated with “any white supremacy or Nazi-affiliated group.”)

In front of Southland, there was shouting back and forth between the protesters and Misosky’s supporters, and after a few hours, the masked men returned to their cars, which were parked several blocks away; some of them reported to the police that their tires had been slashed.

The fundraiser went on, but Misosky remained unsettled. She blamed the Well for “putting a target on our back” and providing “moral cover” for people who might want to justify violence. She spent the night of the protest and several nights after that camped out on the floor of Southland with a .38, a 9-mm, a shotgun, and a baseball bat.

Mike told me that he and Andrea were merely bringing the reality of demonic activities at Southland to light. “The truth hurts,” he said. “We won’t resolve our differences, our worldviews. I would never physically harm anyone, but I will bring an awareness.”

When I reached one of the protesters named in local press accounts, he told me that he had never heard of the Well but made clear his view of drag performances. “Influencing children to sexual activities isn’t demonic?” he wrote in a text message.

Not long after the fundraiser, Misosky received word from the county sheriff, through an intermediary, asking whether she wanted to sign her staff up for active-shooter training.

Andrea, meanwhile, received word from God. It came through one of her mentors, a prophet in Colorado, who trained people in spiritual warfare and told Andrea that she had gotten a prophecy that the Well was entering into a final battle with Lilith, which the Brewers understood less as a prediction than as an instruction.

Until recently, all of this might have been considered a dispatch from the fringes of American religion, except that the ideas taking hold in Maryville are becoming more and more mainstream.

While the Southern Baptists, United Methodists, and other denominations continue to decline, millions of Americans are finding their way to nondenominational churches with names such as Oasis, Elevation, and Harvest Rock, where they are learning about the intricacies of demons, spiritual warfare, and other NAR ideas. Some of the nation’s largest megachurches, such as El Rey Jesús in Florida and Free Chapel in Georgia, are led by apostles and prophets in the movement. One such apostle, Paula White-Cain, is President Trump’s spiritual adviser.

[Read: The most interesting part of Trump’s prayer rally]

By 2024, roughly 61 percent of American Christians agreed with the statement that “there are modern-day apostles and prophets,” and roughly half agreed that “there are demonic ‘principalities’ and ‘powers’ who control physical territory,” according to a survey conducted by Paul Djupe, a Denison University political scientist who is among the few scholars attempting to track the ways that NAR ideas are transforming Christianity. By December 2025, roughly 59 percent of evangelical Christians and 22 percent of non-evangelicals agreed that “the church should organize campaigns of spiritual warfare and prayer to displace high-level demons,” Djupe found in a follow-up survey.

The same survey also indicated that more people are encountering these concepts on social media than in church, which speaks to how people are following apostles and prophets through online ministries and prayer networks, and to how influencers across the broader Christian right are leveraging these ideas to gain and possibly radicalize followers.

This was obvious at the memorial for Charlie Kirk following his assassination last year. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth described the moment at hand as a “spiritual war.” The right-wing influencer Benny Johnson urged members of Trump’s Cabinet to “wield the sword for the terror of evil men in our nation.” The far-right activist Jack Posobiec told people to “put on the full armor of God and face the evil in high places and the spiritual warfare before us,” rhetoric that has only continued to escalate as the midterm elections approach.

[Read: Charlie Kirk and the ‘third Great Awakening’]

Speaking about the anti-ICE protests in Minneapolis earlier this year, the influential NAR strategist Lance Wallnau said that “the demons are manifesting.” More recently, the lieutenant governor of Indiana, Micah Beckwith, speaking about Democratic attempts to gerrymander congressional districts, said that the party was being led by “the minions and voices of darkness.”

“Wake up, Christians. They are coming for you,” he said on a show called FlashPoint, a kind of nightly news for the apostles-and-prophets crowd. “You can’t pet a demon. I know people like to say, ‘Hey, demons, stay over there. Just don’t hurt us, and we won’t hurt you.’ It doesn’t work that way. Evil will find you. Until strong men stand up and do something and fight fire with fire, then we will continue to lose ground, our children will be warped, the curse will be over the land.”

As the MAGA coalition has fractured, some of Trump’s former supporters have been turning this language against him. Among others, Tucker Carlson has questioned whether Trump could be the anti-Christ, while Carlson’s critics have suggested that Carlson himself might be under demonic influence. The conservative writer Rod Dreher, seeking to explain his former friend’s growing anti-Semitism, recently wrote that he wondered whether there was “some demonic force in the New England wood where Tucker lives, and if it has been working on his mind.”

Dreher, a friend of Vance’s who identifies as Eastern Orthodox, has been writing a lot about demons lately and told me that he believes something larger is going on in American culture. “I think the whole materialist paradigm we’ve lived by is breaking down,” he said. “The world is becoming re-enchanted, whether people want it to be or not. It’s all very real. People—the overclass, the professional class—just don’t see it and don’t want to see it.” In books and interviews, Dreher has been promoting parable-like stories about demons that seem designed to reach those people, or perhaps shift some spiritual Overton window. One involves a haunted McMansion in Louisiana. Another is about a wealthy New York City woman whose husband placed her under an exorcist’s care. Yet another is about a Chicago lawyer terrorized by alien visitations that turned out to be demons.

[From the March 2026 issue: Rod Dreher thinks the Enlightenment was a mistake]

In a more immediate sense, invoking demons can be a means of dehumanizing and delegitimizing political enemies, which has often been a precursor to actual warfare and political violence. “It’s a very useful way to get around the Christian imperative to love your enemy,” Matthew Taylor, a visiting scholar at the Center on Faith and Justice at Georgetown University, told me. “For the most part, that is the ironclad command. So how do you get Christians to hate their enemies? Or to hate them even if they love them? Demons are easy to hate. They are irredeemable objects of hatred.”

Houston Cofield for The Atlantic

In 2021, the Well moved into an abandoned grocery store across the street from Southland.

Which Misosky understood as she told the sheriff’s office that, yes, she would like to sign up for active-shooter training.

And so, three years into a campaign of spiritual warfare against demonic forces in Maryville, she and her staff learned how long it would take for police to arrive should she call 911, and what to do in those minutes. They learned how to duck and cover, and run for the exits. The trainer suggested that Misosky arm each door with something to spray in the eyes of a possible shooter. She bought some cans of wasp spray and placed them strategically near the two entrances, behind several bookcases, by the door to the downstairs space, and under the bar.

Upstairs, she kept the baseball bat and a gun under her desk, which she adjusted so that she could face the front door and scan each person who came in. Sitting there, she sometimes found herself thinking, “I know they would shoot me first.”

Across the street, the Brewers were feeling more and more triumphant. In 2023, Tennessee’s state legislature passed the nation’s first law banning drag performances in public spaces or where minors could view them. Arizona, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Idaho, among other states, then passed laws similar to Tennessee’s, which is being challenged in court, but which still felt to them like a victory for the Kingdom of God.

In accordance with the prophecy that Andrea had received from Colorado, the Well entered the final phase of spiritual warfare against Lilith in the spring of 2024, which involved 40 days of continuous prayer asking for God to liberate Maryville. The Brewers said that people showed up every day and sometimes stayed into the night. “We just left the doors open, and people came,” Mike said, describing how he believed those prayers were answered when the state legislature passed a resolution declaring July of that year to be a month of prayer and fasting for the entire state.

That summer, a Republican state representative coordinated prayer rallies for all 95 counties across Tennessee, and Andrea was asked to speak at one in Maryville, along with state and local officials. As the Brewers saw it, the law, the government, and the whole state were coming into alignment to fulfill the mandate that God had given them.

The rally was on the steps of the county courthouse. The day was a bit cloudy, and several hundred people came, including many from the Well, some of whom had American flags in their pockets, and many of whom kneeled, then bowed, pressing their forehead to the warm concrete. When it was Andrea’s turn to speak, she felt full of God’s authority. She commanded that Lilith leave the region in the name of Jesus, at which point, she said, she heard sirens going off. When she looked up into the sky, she said, she saw something like clouds parting, and what she discerned to be a “halo” of colors in the sky.

“Something shifted,” she said. “Something changed. There was a moment where God said, ‘I am breaking through this situation.’ And everybody present—you just felt it.”

And now it was a spring Sunday at the Well, one like so many other Sundays in a church where spiritual warfare never really ends, and several dozen people filed into the sanctuary to hear what God might want them to do next.

A member of the congregation gave a message about grief, but mostly there was praying as the band played, drums pounding, building and building, amber spotlights glowing. Two women danced around the room with prayer flags, and others lay on the floor. After 45 minutes of this, someone declared, “Right there, I felt like we pushed through the atmosphere,” and someone else said, “Something is breaking right now in this room, and it’s going to break through this city, and break through this region,” and someone else said, “In the name of Jesus, every demon out!”

During the two weeks I spent at the Well, prayer teams performed deliverances almost every day. Some of them involved newcomers, but many were a kind of spiritual maintenance for long-standing congregants who kept returning for more—more purification, more power, more of this version of freedom and purpose. People told me that during their deliverances, they had visions of snakes and soldiers, doors and colors.

Sasha, the woman who’d worked for Uber Eats, told me that she had struggled with childhood trauma, homosexual feelings, and drug addiction, and that she was on her fifth or sixth deliverance to rid herself of those and other things that she did not consider God. The sessions could be emotionally exhausting, and she said that her deliverance leader had explained that she should space them out for her own safety: “She told me, ‘Honey, you’ve been through so much, your frame could not contain it.’” By that point, Sasha had been liberated from Python, Osiris, Apollo, Lilith, and other demons, and she suspected that more were still in there.

At the same time, she and others said that their deliverances were not only about their own purification. The experience had also changed how they saw the world and their role in it. “It’s like being a warrior—there’s no rest,” Sasha said. “Things are changing in the spirit realm, and people are not ready for what’s to come.”

She and others told me about all the ways they now saw Satan working in the world. It was Jeffrey Epstein, and child trafficking, and underground tunnels. It was Iran, and Muslims whose goal is “to outpopulate us all and take over,” in Sasha’s words. It was Pride Month, and transgenderism. It was churches that were stifling the Holy Spirit. It was not just separation of Church and state that was the problem in this country, but a far more profound separation of humanity from what they understood to be the one true God.

“If we keep everything separate, no one will ever see the big picture,” Sasha said, and she explained how she starts her days.

“I wake up in the morning, and I anoint myself,” she began. She said that she asks God to open her senses to the supernatural, because at times she can smell demons. She puts her hand on her head and asks God to “silence the voice of the accuser in Jesus’s name” and to “silence the voice of my own thoughts in Jesus’s name.” She asks to “have the helmet of salvation and the very mind of Christ” and to “bring every thought into submission.” And then she heads into the world, a spiritual warrior.

Across the street, Lisa Misosky started her day with the wasp spray still by the doors, and the baseball bat and gun still under her desk, and a worn copy of Pigs in the Parlor on a shelf.

The Brewers, meanwhile, had decided that their work in Maryville was done. “A beachhead has been established,” Mike said. The Well would continue. But he and Andrea were moving on to the next front, relocating to a town north of Palm Beach, Florida, where Mike was starting a ministry to train businesspeople and other leaders in “Kingdom warfare.” Andrea was developing the narrative of hell in their new neighborhood, where many streets were named for Greek gods.

“The Well has been in war for almost 10 years to deliver this territory,” Andrea said just before they left Maryville. “Now it’s a calmer season. But there will be another wave.”

This article appears in the August 2026 print edition with the headline “The Demons of Maryville.”

The Other Celebration of America

2026-07-06T20:16:00-04:00

The celebrations of America’s 250th birthday, though they offered many wonderful moments, did not provide the sweeping sense of national unity for which some people had hoped. Some Americans found the July 4 weekend too political, too polarizing, and offering too much President Trump.

But another event this summer has proved to be a source of infectious patriotism: the World Cup. A tournament that started with so much angst—so much “ugh,” some might say—has turned into a joyful celebration of America. A nation that, by reputation, doesn’t even like soccer is now rallying around its upstart team. TV ratings are at an all-time high, attendance records are being set, and the American squad can advance to the quarterfinals if it triumphs in tonight’s game against Belgium. Politics have mostly been irrelevant (well, until yesterday’s red-card controversy), and many Americans have briefly set aside their red-versus-blue differences to rally together in the nation’s swirly red, white, and blue soccer kits.

Something else has happened over the past four weeks of this tournament: People from around the world came to our shores and fell in love with our country. The United States’ international standing has been badly damaged in the Trump era—alliances have been strained, bombs have been dropped, foreign aid has been cut—yet waves of foreign visitors have been moved by what they have found. There have been exceptions, and some of the good vibes are surely online fabrications, but for many, the geopolitical tensions have been temporarily set aside. Thousands of Norwegians marveled at the lights of Times Square. Algerians were delighted by the warm welcome they received in Lawrence, Kansas. The Scots drank Boston out of beer. A supposed German tourist went viral for a chain-restaurant tour of the South. The America on display was the land of plenty: full supermarkets, air-conditioning that actually works in a heat wave, endless appetizers and breadsticks. The United States’ soft power now relies less on USAID than on Applebee’s.

The respite may be brief. Right around when tonight’s U.S. match wraps up, Trump will depart Washington and head to a NATO summit in Turkey, where, if past is prologue, he could clash with world leaders over defense spending, the war in Ukraine, and who knows what else. A high-stakes midterm election is coming, and there is little expectation that the good feelings created by the American squad’s run will last. But right now, let’s enjoy this summer party—even if it’s not the one we expected.

For a time, organizers and others thought America 250 might be that galvanizing, flag-waving force. And there was precedent. The nation’s bicentennial, in 1976, also arrived at a fraught moment, just two years after the resignation of President Richard Nixon. There was a fuel crisis, skyrocketing inflation, high unemployment, the recent trauma of Vietnam, plus the Cold War. Yet the nation’s 200th birthday largely was a triumph. President Gerald Ford, knowing that the country needed to heal after Watergate, tried to make it a bipartisan celebration. He allowed the nation’s history, good and bad, to take center stage. He acknowledged that much work needed to be done to make it a safer, more equitable nation. For many, the parade of tall ships through New York Harbor and the massive fireworks display was a moment of renewed optimism.

Our politics have grown only more partisan in the past 50 years, and Trump has never pretended to be interested in governing all of his nation’s people. He took office promising retribution, and he’s shown a keen interest in remaking the nation, especially its capital, in his image. The Kennedy Center. The East Wing. A triumphal arch. The list is exhausting. He’s put himself in charge of telling our nation’s story; his administration has removed signs he doesn’t like from the nation’s parks, and is eyeing the Smithsonian next. It came as no surprise that he’d hijack the semiquincentennial, pushing out the bipartisan America 250 group in favor of the more Trump-friendly Freedom 250. Predictably, the anniversary celebrations in Washington took on a MAGA tint, and many Americans who oppose Trump steered clear. A concert featuring C-list stars was canceled. A state fair on the National Mall drew sparse crowds in the sweltering heat. The much-discussed Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool was closed. Trump’s July 4 speech, delayed by storms, didn’t start until much of the nation had gone to bed. And the smoke from the fireworks display left Washington in a haze of poor air quality.

[Read: The capital is a mess]

To be clear, there were wonderful moments throughout the nation to celebrate the Fourth of July. Charming parades in small towns. Families all over the country manning the BBQs and the sparklers, and maybe reminiscing about James Madison. A naturalization ceremony on Long Island. Readings of the Declaration of Independence in Massachusetts. Trump recognized several elderly veterans in his speech on the National Mall. And, yes, the tall ships were back in New York Harbor, this time accompanied by a military flyover.

On July 4, in addition to watching the fireworks, millions of Americans were watching France take on Paraguay in the cradle of independence, Philadelphia. The game lost a little of its historical luster when Germany was upset by Paraguay (FIFA spared England the possibility of suffering a second devastating loss on July 4), but the roster of history makers in Philadelphia added a name: Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, and now Mbappé. France’s 1–0 victory not even four miles south of Independence Hall was just one of the tournament’s seemingly endless supply of can’t-miss matches—and perhaps its biggest victory on these shores since Yorktown.

[Listen: How the World Cup explains the world ]

The tournament has not been without its problems. Tickets are astronomically expensive. A highly decorated referee was barred from traveling from his native Somalia. International visits were much lower than expected. The Iranian team played a match the same day that Trump authorized a strike on its nation amid a dispute over the Strait of Hormuz. But, as I wrote last month, there was always the hope that the games would overcome whatever had seemed off about the tournament. And they have. Who will forget Cape Verde’s magical run and near-upset of defending champion Argentina? England surviving the cauldron that is playing Mexico in Mexico City? How so many of the tournament’s biggest stars—Lionel Messi, Erling Haaland, Harry Kane, Mohamed Salah, and more—have delivered for their squads?

But those bravura performances won’t be what I remember most about this World Cup. I’ll recall the Brazilians singing in the NJ Transit train as we journeyed to a World Cup match at MetLife Stadium. The Norwegians taking over a subway escalator to do their traditional “Viking Row” celebration. Watch parties at JCPenney stores. How every game day brings a new torrent of fans sporting soccer kits. In a popular culture that is so fragmented, there was something refreshing about how so many conversations, either online or in person, were about the same thing. At dinner the other night, I was happy to provide scores to a neighboring table whose cell signal wasn’t strong enough to refresh the ESPN app. The cities with some of the highest TV ratings—Boston, Austin, and the greater Kansas City area—are in both red and blue states. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist, went to a game. California Governor Gavin Newsom and Secretary of State Marco Rubio were at the U.S. opener. Trump is expected to attend the final. For Americans who have grown to dread the judgmental looks when traveling overseas, it was a delight to see foreigners enjoying the U.S. again.

Trump, for a while, was preoccupied by the 250th celebrations and largely stayed out of the World Cup. But I knew that wouldn’t last. After a stellar group stage, the U.S. played Bosnia and Herzegovina in its first knockout game last week. Nursing a 1–0 lead, one of the team’s stars, Folarin Balogun, was given a red card, which meant that he was ejected from that match, leaving his team to play with 10 men. The U.S. still managed to win and advance to face Belgium, but Balogun was supposed to be suspended from playing in that match as part of the punishment for the red card. Now, let’s be clear: The call was bogus. No foul was assessed in real time, and the red card was awarded only after the official stared at a slow-motion replay. It was a bad break, but there was also little that the U.S. could do.

[Read: A very bad World Cup call]

Enter Trump. He called his pal Gianni Infantino, the head of FIFA—who has spent nearly two years buttering up Trump, including awarding him the inaugural FIFA Peace Prize. And suddenly, out of nowhere, FIFA lifted Balogun’s ban, a decision that drew outrage from many international teams and fans. (Perhaps it escaped Trump’s attention that Balogun, who grew up in the United Kingdom but was born in the United States while his Nigerian mother was visiting New York, was allowed to play for the U.S. because of birthright citizenship, the constitutional protection Trump wants eliminated.) The president quickly took a victory lap, but the karma is not great.

The hard feelings around the decision will hopefully be fleeting. A series of great games await before the World Cup wraps up, on July 19. And right now, the surprising sense of national spirit is worth cherishing, and the renewed affection for the United States that so many nations are feeling is worth savoring.

So many nations—except for Belgium.

With Graham Platner, Democrats Got Drunk on the Beer Test

2026-07-06T18:37:35-04:00

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Last September, the progressive strategist Morris Katz confessed to The New Yorker that the process by which he decided that Graham Platner was qualified to run for U.S. Senate required less time than drinking a cup of coffee. Actually, it seems to have been less a confession than a boast. “Within a few minutes of talking to him, I was, like, ‘This guy owes it to the country to run for Senate,’” Katz recalled.

In the 10 months that have followed, a procession of unflattering stories have made clear how dreadfully irresponsible it was for Democrats to entrust the task of flipping what seems like the most necessary seat to secure their potential Senate majority to a man who had never run for office or led an organization of any size. The almost-certain final straw is a Politico report that alleges Platner raped a woman named Jenny Racicot in 2021. The story includes messages referring to the incident sent by Racicot two years later, before Platner contemplated running for office. Platner called any allegation of nonconsensual behavior “categorically untrue.”

There is no longer much question as to whether Platner is suitable for public office, and even less question as to whether plucking him from political obscurity made any sense. A more pertinent question is: What could possibly drive a professional political strategist to support such a rapid promotion in mere minutes?

One plausible reason appears to be political ideology. Katz and his allies have sought out candidates who are willing to castigate the Democratic Party for selling out the working class—which necessitates, or at least militates toward, candidates who have no experience inside the party. And whereas this ideological orientation requires an intensity of commitment, it does not require a mastery of policy detail.

[Read: Maine has a Graham Platner problem]

Dan Moraff, one of the strategists who helped select and vet Platner, “wants his candidates to back Medicare for All and characterize the Israel-Hamas conflict as a genocide, but beyond that, doesn’t believe voters care about detailed proposals,” The Wall Street Journal reported last month. Having a policy agenda that could fit comfortably on a Post-it note without omitting any important details certainly speeds up the process. Platner, indeed, has boiled down nearly all political problems to the perfidy of sinister oligarchs. Whatever the merits of this worldview, it does not demand much knowledge.

But a second, at least as important reason for Platner’s lightning-fast ratification was that he has the desired look for the part. Donald Trump has described liking his appointees to come right out of “central casting,” by which he means that they look like a Hollywood version of the position they are filling.

Katz and Moraff have taken an almost literal approach to this “central casting” criteria, searching for candidates whom the camera loves and then offering them to an adoring progressive fan base. Platner’s qualifications in this regard are obvious. He has a masculine baritone, and works with his hands. Last year, Katz filmed a video of his new protégé shucking oysters, chopping wood, swinging kettlebells, and speaking directly to the camera in a muddy sweatshirt about how the oligarchy had screwed their beloved state.

The performance helped make Platner a political star. “I flew here to profile Graham Platner,” wrote Ana Marie Cox in The New Republic last September, “because his announcement video for his Senate campaign (produced by the same company that’s done work for Zohran Mamdani) struck the same deep chord in me as it did in the millions of others who watched it.” A stream of adulatory profiles followed.

It soon emerged that Katz’s abbreviated assessment of Platner had missed, or overlooked, troubling details. He had posted inflammatory messages on Reddit and gotten a tattoo associated with Nazi war criminals. Platner claimed that his past indiscretions were the products of post-traumatic stress, and promised that he was a changed man with no additional skeletons to hide.

More skeletons kept turning up, though. Platner had sexted with at least half a dozen women after he was married, and reportedly lied about what he knew about his tattoo. He assured Senate backers that no additional negative stories would come out, only for his promise to crumble again.

Platner’s enthusiasts initially continued to support his campaign and reject the evidence of his misconduct. When The New York Times reported that a past girlfriend alleged he had physically abused her, the paper dismissed her testimony on account of her being a Republican, ignoring the discrepancies in Platner’s own defense.

[Mike Nelson: The ‘broke veteran’ excuse]

Matt Stoller, a researcher at the left-wing American Economic Liberties Project, wrote on X, “Graham Platner represents a rejection of Dem HR lady politics.” In a follow-up post, Stoller apologized for the impolitic term, but explained that he meant the party had fallen prey to a form of corporate rule that had especially harmed men. Human-resources departments, he wrote, “increasingly were forced to become bagmen for monopolists who hated labor.” Despising these departments, he reasoned, was actually progressive, because they represented the interests of the oligarchy.

At the risk of apologizing for the corporate power structure, one function of the HR department is to ensure the company does not hire somebody whose background contains multiple firing offenses.

In reality, Platner was the Democratic-candidate equivalent of the grinning empty suit who gets the job after a handshake because the boss likes the cut of his jib. He looked like the authentic working-class hero so many progressives wanted, so he had to be one. George Burns once quipped, “When you’re playing a role you’ve got to be honest. And if you can fake that, you’ve got it made.” In politics, people call this “authenticity.” But maybe looking and sounding like a working-class dude who hates big corporations is not adequate qualification for high office—or even proof that you can be taken at your word.

The ‘Consumer Socialism’ Trap

2026-07-06T07:00:00-04:00

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

This past January, in his inaugural address, Zohran Mamdani memorably promised to “replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.” In the parlance of the Democratic Socialists of America, of which Mamdani is a member, collectivism is a good thing. It is not meant to recall Stalin’s seizure of farms, which resulted in mass famine, or Mao’s Great Leap Forward, which also resulted in mass famine. American socialism today is different. The DSA still formally aspires to “popular control of resources and production,” otherwise known as seizing the means of production. Yet the New York City mayor’s attention-grabbing policy proposals—to freeze rents, establish city-run grocery stores, and pay for universal child care—are aimed at a more modest goal: socializing the cost of consumption.

“Consumer socialism” does not liberate workers from the exploitation of owners; it liberates consumers from the burden of prices. Although its advocates may claim inspiration from both the Great Society tradition of the Democratic Party and Nordic-style democratic socialism, consumer socialism is really a muddle of the two. The Great Society emphasized poverty reduction through means-tested programs such as Medicaid and Head Start; consumer socialism is meant for all. And unlike the Nordic welfare states, which are supported by high levels of taxation for all workers, Mamdani’s approach aims to raise sufficient revenue from corporations and the rich. Consumer socialism tries to have it all: universal social provisions without universally steep taxes. It retains, like other forms of socialism, a supreme optimism in the ability of state planners to shape markets. Where the old central planners failed, the new ones think they will succeed.

Mamdani is only one of consumer socialism’s proponents. The newly elected mayor of Seattle, Katie Wilson, is a former transit organizer who campaigned on both universal child care and spending $1 billion to pay for union-built public housing. The leading candidate for mayor of Washington, D.C., is DSA-backed Janeese Lewis George, who also calls for universal child care and massive production of below-market-rate housing. (She is open to the idea of government-run grocery stores as well.) Mamdani, Wilson, and Lewis George have claimed the mantle not of Stalinists or Maoists, but of a different subspecies of socialist—the “sewer socialists” who ran Milwaukee for decades starting in 1910. They made peace with the capitalist superstructure and devoted themselves to good, incorruptible governance and reliable public infrastructure—sewage systems, yes, but also parks, libraries, and fire departments. In their time, they were skewered for practicing “slowcialism.” In a speech he gave to mark his 100th day in office, Mamdani labeled “our 2026 answer to sewer socialism” as “pothole politics”—doing mundane jobs, such as filling more than 100,000 potholes, because “government is not too busy, not too self-important, not too mired in paperwork to fix the problems of this city.”

Sewer socialism is attracting renewed interest in America because it is too boring to threaten capitalism. Lenin despised its predecessor, municipal socialism, for much the same reason. In the late 19th century in English and German cities, socialist administrators operated public utilities such as gasworks, electric trams, and even city-owned slaughterhouses. This variation of socialism aimed to blunt the rapacity of capitalism rather than sharpen its contradictions and hasten the coming revolution. Under municipal socialism, Lenin wrote in 1907, “attention is diverted to the sphere of minor local questions, being directed not to the question of the class rule of the bourgeoisie, nor to the question of the chief instruments of that rule, but to the question of distributing the crumbs thrown by the rich bourgeoisie for the ‘needs of the population.’ ”

Lenin’s ghost would be similarly unimpressed with contemporary American socialism—too much democracy, too little murder. Still, there’s nothing small-bore about consumer socialists’ desire to overhaul the economy. In their view, high prices are not market failures but moral ones, the result of greed and corruption, which can be vanquished with the right intention. The ideal state is a kind of Lake Wobegon, where every price is below average.

[Michael Powell: What Mamdani doesn’t know about tenants]

One irony of consumer socialism is that it is better tailored to the laptop classes—which now form the backbone of the Democratic Party—than to the American left’s traditional working-class base. The upper classes disproportionately use child-care centers, while lower-income households rely more on stay-at-home parents and relatives. This is partly because wealthier people can more easily afford formal care services. But not every community may even want to send their kids to a child-care center. Some evidence suggests that Latina mothers prefer to have a relative look after their children, even when cost is no issue. Rent stabilization and controls apply to units, not occupants—which in New York has sometimes meant showering benefits on celebrities and on politicians, such as former Governor David Paterson and the late Representative Charles Rangel. Upper-middle-class meritocrats are generally not exhausted by capitalism. They are exhausted by the costs of rent and child care in desirable neighborhoods—bills that the preexisting means-tested welfare state would never have covered.

Mamdani will probably fall short of implementing his vision: Budget constraints mean that buses are unlikely to be free, as he promised; his child-care proposal received funds to last for just two years so far; and New York, a city of more than 8 million people, will have, at most, five city-run grocery stores by the end of his first term. Despite his pledges to tax the rich, he is limited in his ability to do so, and although his recently passed pied-à-terre tax might raise $500 million a year, universal child care would, according to his own campaign, cost $6 billion a year.

The natural habitat of consumer socialism—solidly left-wing American cities—imposes serious limits on its ambitions. Unlike the federal government, cities typically cannot run huge deficits year after year, and must quickly reckon with promises that cannot be paid for. In 2018, New York City officials rolled out a voucher program with an unwieldy name, CityFHEPS, and the laudable goal of decreasing homelessness by subsidizing housing. In 2019, the annual cost of the program was budgeted at $25 million; its projected cost last fiscal year reached $1.7 billion, as the number of recipients and the cost per voucher increased simultaneously. Faced with the city’s daunting budget deficit, Mamdani reversed his campaign pledge to expand CityFHEPS and has instead scrambled for ways to hold costs down.

Many risks lurk in consumer socialism’s promises of cheap goods and services. If New York City or Washington, D.C., rapidly increases subsidies for child care, for instance, without expanding the number of approved providers, the existing ones will charge more to meet excessive demand. Another complication is that the more generous any city benefits are, the more people will move across municipal limits to use them—creating a cost spiral.

The sewer socialists chose their targets carefully. Milwaukee’s mayors had a strong economic rationale for pursuing public ownership of utilities: avoiding the massive, duplicative costs of rival water networks without letting a private monopoly gouge consumers. In contrast, publicly run grocery stores are interventions in a low-margin, highly competitive industry. In his 100-days speech, Mamdani pledged, “At our stores, eggs will be cheaper. Bread will be cheaper. Grocery shopping will no longer be an unsolvable equation.” But the mathematics of running retail outlets might prove more flummoxing than he realizes. Many aspects of life in the Soviet Union have come to be retroactively romanticized; its grocery stores are not among them.

Optimists think—or hope—that Mamdani-style socialists have a greater awareness of economic constraints than they let on. My colleague Derek Thompson recently said that Mamdani may be sporting “the abundance mullet, which is to say, economic populism in the front and abundance in the back.” Abundance is a term that Thompson coined in this magazine to describe policies that expand supply through public and private investment and deregulation—essentially supply-side economics for liberals. The idea is that Mamdani would win popular support by freezing rents—an idea almost unanimously derided by economists—while simultaneously boosting home-building. But the second half of this bargain may never materialize. Although New York’s Rent Guidelines Board has approved a promised freeze for nearly 1 million rent-stabilized apartments, Mamdani’s efforts to permit more home-building have been plodding by comparison. Absent new supply, restrictions on rent increases will limit mobility for those who receive the benefit, and increase costs for those who do not.

[Derek Thompson: A simple plan to solve all of America’s problems]

Plans are already afoot to scale consumer socialism across America. National Democrats have realized that the high cost of living makes for a powerful midterm-election theme, and some in the party prefer to address it with subsidies and price controls rather than measures that increase personal incomes and economic growth. The Congressional Progressive Caucus recently released its “New Affordability Agenda,” which includes plans to make child care a nationwide entitlement—staffed by day-care workers paid as much as teachers—and to create a new set of housing subsidies for rent and down payments. Progressives also argue that this can be financed without tax hikes on ordinary people, but through targeted taxes on plutocrats and corporations. Enacting any such changes nationwide would require many more votes than the caucus currently has. And the problem with implementing such plans at the local level is that the rich can always decamp to Austin or Miami, as some of California’s billionaires are threatening to do over a ballot measure that would take 5 percent of their wealth.

Perhaps cities like New York will refine a functional version of consumer socialism, in which subsidies are balanced with enormous supply-side expansions in the number of homes and child-care centers, leaving everyone better off. Perhaps capitalism can be appropriately fettered within the confines of a select few cities, inspiring a nonviolent, nationwide socialist revolution. That would be a remarkable triumph for Mamdani’s consumerist ideology, which wears the transgressive label of socialism but is born primarily out of anger over prices (and an innate American antipathy toward taxes). American collectivism may be, as Mamdani promised, warmer than rugged individualism. It will certainly be warmer than Soviet or Maoist collectivism. It could also be just as unworkable. And it will certainly be extraordinarily expensive.

This article appears in the August 2026 print edition with the headline “The ‘Consumer Socialism’ Trap.”

The Alabamafication of National Politics

2026-07-05T08:00:00-04:00

On Juneteenth, I watched Doug Jones, the Democratic nominee for Alabama governor, deliver a speech at the Scottsboro Boys Museum, in the northeastern corner of the state. I found myself thinking of the 1960s civil-rights rallies that I’d covered as a young reporter, and that many of the older Alabamians in the packed venue had attended. A former U.S. attorney who served three years in the Senate, Jones is a master of the old-time Bama stem-winder in settings such as the 150-year-old Black church that houses the museum, which commemorates nine young Black men who were falsely accused of rape nearly a century ago.

“We don’t want to go back, folks,” Jones said, in a rising preacherly cadence. The audience responded with Amens. “We have a different view of governing,” he said of his campaign. “We have a different view of Alabama than somebody from Florida that wants to be your governor. My view of Alabama, and what we’re trying to do in this campaign, is to build a house with a crowded table.” He went on, “We’re all a little broken, but in Alabama we all belong.”

The Florida quip was a shot at Jones’s opponent, Senator Tommy Tuberville, and a nod to the one issue that Alabama’s Republicans fear in this campaign to lead one of the reddest states in the South. A Democratic judge in Montgomery will rule soon on whether Tuberville meets the state constitution’s seven-year residency requirement to run for governor. His opponents argue that his real home is the 5,000-square-foot Florida beach mansion that he bought after his 10-season coaching stint at Auburn University.

Tripp Skipper, a former paid consultant to Tuberville, summed up the Republican view of the contest for me. “The only path for victory that I see for Doug is one that the courts provide for him, and I don’t see that happening,” Skipper said. “The voters have already rendered a verdict on Tuberville and Jones, and the political environment has not changed in any significant way since 2020.” That year, Jones, who was trying to hold on to the Senate seat he’d won in a 2017 special election, lost to Tuberville by nearly 472,000 votes.

[Adam Serwer: The Supreme Court has invented a right to discriminate]

Tuberville is certainly the favorite in the race. He is a committed loyalist to Donald Trump, who won the state by 30 points in the last presidential election. Alabama hasn’t had a Democratic governor in more than two decades. And yet, during a recent visit to the state where I was born and began my newspaper career, I came to believe that Jones’s candidacy has a long-shot logic, positing a collapse of Trump’s popularity. Jones must stir voter resistance to Tuberville’s political baggage and his gift for goofy statements. At the least, Jones’s candidacy is a bravely idealistic waving of the flag in a state that is growing more diverse and lurching toward modernity in its population centers.

Roving 187 miles from Scottsboro to the Montgomery bedroom town of Wetumpka, I didn’t see a MAGA cap on the sidewalks. The Trump faithful seemed hunkered down. Doug signs festooned the lawns in the rich suburbs south of Birmingham, just as they had when Jones won in 2017. Republican leaders in Alabama are demonstrably jumpy on the residency issue. A sure sign was the state GOP’s executive meeting on June 14, when Tuberville’s party put him under oath behind closed doors to testify about his homes. Tuberville told a committee that, since 2018, his effective residence has been a small house in Auburn that his wife and son bought in 2017; he presented tax statements that his lawyers said supported this. He also testified that he’d voted in Florida as recently as 2018 and hadn’t put his name on the Auburn deed until two years ago. The committee rallied behind Tuberville, dismissing a challenge by an obscure candidate who wanted to replace him on the GOP ticket.

In an interview, Jones, who is 72, told me that he is counting less on the residency issue than the national mood swing that he believes has reached even the Trump faithful in Alabama, and on the arithmetic of his previous campaigns. He scored a come-from-behind win in 2017 against a flawed Republican candidate, former Alabama Supreme Court Justice Roy Moore. Moore saw his lead vanish after several women credibly accused him of pursuing sexual relationships with them when they were minors. (He denied engaging in sexual misconduct.) This year, Republicans are fretting about a slide in voter participation. AL.com reported that, in the May 19 primary, the state moved from “as far red as you can go” to “something that might almost look purple in the right light” in terms of voter turnout. On primary day, 42.5 percent of the votes cast were Democratic, up by more than 20 points from 2022, while “Republican turnout dropped by nearly as much as Democratic turnout increased,” according to AL.com.

If this turnout pattern continues in November, Jones hopes that his “magic number” of 920,000—his vote count against Tuberville in 2020—could squeak him into the governor’s mansion. In short, he’s counting on MAGA no-shows rather than conversions. “We’re not going to spend any time trying to persuade the unpersuadable,” he said.

Jones is Alabama’s proven upset artist. Witness not just his 2017 victory over Moore but his successful cold-case prosecutions of Klansmen. While back home, I spent time with his political role model, former Alabama Attorney General Bill Baxley, another civil-rights hero who, like Jones, is an avatar of Alabama’s embattled, but occasionally decisive, progressive coalition. Made up of minority and white voters from the state’s professional classes—educators, trial lawyers, union members—and suburban independents, this bloc undercuts stereotypes about Alabama as a white conservative monolith. Elected in 1970, Baxley shamed the FBI into giving him the evidence needed to convict the infamous Klan terrorist Robert “Dynamite Bob” Chambliss of murder in 1977 for his role in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church, which killed four Black girls on September 15, 1963. Chambliss had escaped punishment for 14 years because J. Edgar Hoover closed the celebrated case as unsolvable in 1968. Birmingham police had never shown much interest, because Chambliss operated under the personal protection of Public Safety Commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor.

I covered the dramatic Chambliss trial in Birmingham for the St. Petersburg Times. Unbeknownst to me, Jones had skipped law-school classes nearby at Samford University and watched from the courtroom balcony as Baxley presented the tightly choreographed prosecution that put Chambliss in prison for life. Inspired by Baxley’s performance, Jones went on to become U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Alabama in 1997. The FBI’s Birmingham field office had quietly reopened the 16th Street case, and provided Jones with wiretap evidence that the bureau had withheld from Baxley. In 2001 and 2002, Jones secured murder convictions against Chambliss’s aging accomplices, the Klansmen Thomas Blanton Jr. and Bobby Frank Cherry. Chambliss was unrepentant when I visited him in prison in 1980, and both Blanton and Cherry died in prison without admitting their guilt. (All three men had lived in or near the industrial neighborhood in Birmingham where I came of age. I am revisiting those places now to research a book about “Bombingham.”)

To this day, repentance and empathy are not much part of the political ethos in Alabama. The Alabama style, with proven voter appeal, has more to do with anger, violent language, and an enduring sense of grievance about being looked down upon by outsiders in the public, the media, and the federal government. Scratch enough and you’ll surface these sentiments among even rich, educated Republicans in the most affluent suburbs of the big cities. It is no mystery, then, that Trump and Tuberville have both found success in Alabama by railing against elites and intellectuals, as George Wallace did in his day. Jones knows all about Alabamians who cast throwback votes, even as he declared defiantly in Scottsboro that the Confederate flags he’d spotted on the way to the museum are “a symbol of hatred.”

“I know I was preaching to the choir back there,” Jones told me as we drove away from the museum. Still, he insists that the zeitgeist is shifting in Alabama in light of socioeconomic change and the trickle-down effect from Trump’s erratic record. There is some truth to this; the state is now a land of high-rise financial offices, Mercedes and Honda plants, a nationally ranked medical center, and soon data centers and energy farms around Birmingham and Mobile, and in the Black Belt. Birmingham has even become a destination city for foodies. As a reporter for The Atlanta Constitution and The New York Times, I watched Atlanta evolve in the ’70s, and I’d judge that my hometown is on a similar arc, just one or two decades behind.

Tuberville, 71, has yet to campaign hard. He must recognize that the residency litigation could be a close-run thing. On June 29, Circuit Judge Brooke E. Reid said she’d read all the briefs, and noted that “it’s not a well-settled issue in my opinion.” Reid, a Democrat, said she expected her ruling to be appealed to the all-Republican state supreme court. There, a rejection of Tuberville’s candidacy would shake the highly political city of Montgomery to the foundations of the antebellum capitol building.

In a state that favors performative politicians, Tuberville is far from a perfect candidate. He sports nice suits and Conway Twitty hair, but he’s hardly charismatic. AL.com’s cartoonist and liberal columnists openly ridicule him as “dumb.” Tuberville’s 2023 blocking of Pentagon promotions was not popular in a state that’s heavily dependent on spending for military bases and NASA. His recent suggestion that President Obama should be jailed for imaginary offenses may be too absurd even in a state used to hyperbole. Tuberville also has a way of talking himself into trouble, as when he promised during his 2020 campaign to give his $174,000 Senate salary to veterans. Lagniappe Daily, a frisky newspaper in Mobile, recently reported, based on tax information released by the Tuberville campaign, that the senator might have broken that pledge. “Coach has to live with that himself, I know what he said and I know what he promised—me and the people heard that,” Chester McKinney, the treasurer of the senator’s own charitable organization, the Tommy Tuberville Foundation, told Lagniappe Daily. “I’m not trying to cover for him.” Tuberville’s office has declined to answer questions on the matter.

Then there’s the mystery of why anyone would give up a Senate seat to be governor of an eccentric state. “He’s an executive by nature,” Tripp Skipper offered. “The sausage-making of being in Washington does not suit his skill set. Being at the head of the table, head of a team overseeing departments, that’s his strength.” That is to say, he wants to be head coach again, and he wasn’t bad at that at Auburn: From 1999 to 2008, he defeated the Alabama Crimson Tide six straight years in the Iron Bowl. Auburn fans believe that his undefeated 2004 team was cheated out of a national championship, which fits nicely with Alabama’s traditional persecution neurosis. Both football and basketball seemed to be on Tuberville’s mind after a June 24 meeting in which he watched Trump dress down Republican senators who’d voted to limit the president’s war powers. “It was like a half-time speech from a coach,” Tuberville told White House reporters. “If we don’t do something with the filibuster, and we don’t get things passed, it’ll be the last time we have a Republican president or a Republican Congress. The ball’s in our court.”

Still, it’s a home truth that Alabama voters habitually forgive rascals and verbal excesses. Jones is not just running against a vociferous Trump puppet. He is running against the state tradition of entrenched, defiant passivity. Since Reconstruction, the state’s white majority has almost always voted against progressive change. For top offices, Alabama voters time after time have elected the candidates who put the state in the worst light nationally. Wallace was hardly the most extreme product of this strange land. In 1908, Representative James Thomas “Cotton Tom” Heflin shot a Black man on a Washington, D.C., streetcar for allegedly cursing within earshot of a white woman. In 1920, Heflin, a Klansman, was rewarded with a Senate seat, which he held until 1931.

[Read: The great resegregation]

On my visit to the state, I was struck anew that Alabama is the Deep South’s last stronghold of what V. O. Key Jr., in his 1949 classic, Southern Politics in State and Nation, called “a comic opera staged on a grand scale for the amusement of the nation.” The state’s carnival politics have frequently foreshadowed larger developments, as when Wallace’s race-conscious conservatism paved the way for the Nixon and Reagan presidential campaigns. Today, Alabama demonstrates the durable power of corrupt oligarchies to block progressive politics. From the start of the 20th century, the “Big Mule” cabal led by U.S. Steel and the Black Belt cotton-and-timber barons owned the Alabama legislature. Now politics in Montgomery are swayed by the Southern Company, a multistate utility that owns the Alabama Power Company, and Alfa, the insurance giant sprouted from the venerable Alabama Farmers Federation. National Republicans’ unfair tax policies that rip off MAGA voters are another example of what Kyle Whitmire, a columnist for AL.com, has dubbed “the Alabamafication” of U.S. politics. In Alabama, industrial and agricultural businesses pay only token property taxes on their large timber and mineral holdings. The cost of running the government is billed to consumers through taxes on food, gasoline, alcohol, tobacco, and household necessities. One reason this regressive system persists is that every newly elected legislator knows that someone with ties to Alabama Power or Alfa will show up to retire his or her campaign debt and finance the next campaign.

Alabama politics have a time-warp feel to them, on both sides of the aisle. Jones favors the humanistic homilies of the ’60s. He was received rapturously by the crowd in Scottsboro. After he drifted away for handshaking, I asked a friend of his, Jackson County’s Republican sheriff, Rocky Harnen, to assess Jones’s chances. He responded warily, and I sensed that he didn’t want to undercut Jones. He probably wouldn’t carry the very red Jackson County, the sheriff said. “But statewide you can’t even tell if he might have a chance.” After this very thin slice of optimism, Harnen sheltered in the idiom of Alabama’s civic religion, football. “Auburn people are all for Tuberville. Alabama people, they’re not so sure,” he said, making a holding-my-nose gesture. The suggestion was that Jones’s University of Alabama degree might be a factor against an Auburn man.

Tuberville’s campaign looks back to the ’60s too, but he emulates the apocalyptic tone that worked so well for Wallace. On statewide radio, I heard the Republican candidate call Alabamians to battle against the “socialistic, communistic Democrats.” It sounded both anachronistic and Trumpian to me. But Alabama voters have often responded well to dark warnings.

Trump Is Getting Tired of Losing Election Cases

2026-07-04T06:00:00-04:00

Earlier this year, President Trump claimed a new area of expertise: election law. “I have searched the depths of Legal Arguments not yet articulated or vetted on this subject,” Trump wrote on social media, and found an “irrefutable one” that he would soon present. He suggested that it would allow him to bypass Congress and gain approval from the courts to impose his will on the nation’s locally run election system, including requiring voters to show identification while casting ballots in the upcoming midterms.

It was a heady time for a man who obsesses over voting policy and is seeking to prove that the 2020 election was stolen out from under him. Two weeks before Trump claimed in his February 13 post to have broken new legal ground, the FBI had conducted a raid of an election warehouse in Fulton County, Georgia. Officials made off with more than 650 boxes of ballots as part of a criminal investigation stemming from Trump’s 2020 defeat, an unprecedented action that the president hailed as a major advance for his unsubstantiated claim that the contest was riddled with fraud. The House of Representatives had just passed the SAVE America Act, a bill that would force people to provide proof of citizenship when registering to vote and to show photo identification when casting a ballot.

[Read: A serious debate about an unserious bill ]

Now a sense of gloom has replaced the hope that Trump and his allies had when they thought they were on the verge of making good on his election promises, which also included eliminating most voting by mail and conducting mass purges of voter rolls. The SAVE America Act is doomed to fail in Congress, and Trump is at war with his own party over it. Nothing, so far, has come of the Fulton County case. And the president’s legal arguments are a lot more refutable than he claimed. Trump is consistently being rebuffed in court; the Justice Department has lost at least a dozen election lawsuits. Some changes to the election system that Trump laid out in a March executive order have been blocked by judges. The president is running out of time and low on options to change the country’s voting policies—which he has denigrated as “rigged” and reminiscent of developing nations’—because the courts, Congress, and the Constitution seem to keep getting in the way.

District-level judges have, over the past two weeks, ruled against Trump’s most significant executive orders on voting, blocked efforts by his administration to compel states to hand their voter rolls over to the Justice Department, and outlawed the Department of Homeland Security’s modified Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system. The administration has expanded the SAVE database, which previously focused on noncitizens, by adding Social Security records and other data from native-born Americans to conduct checks of people’s voter eligibility. A judge said that the expanded system “knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote.” Other judges are undercutting Trump’s assertion that he can remake the election system—which is administered by state and local officials—as he sees fit.

“The Constitution does not grant the President any specific powers over elections,” U.S. District Court Judge Indira Talwani wrote in blocking much of Trump’s March executive order that aimed to give the U.S. Postal Service new authority to determine which Americans could vote by mail. She underlined the words does not for extra emphasis.

The administration’s “efforts have been rebuked by every court to consider them,” Cathy Bissoon, the chief judge of the U.S. District Court for Western Pennsylvania, wrote in a ruling that blocked the Department of Justice’s push to obtain voter data from the state. Bissoon noted that 10 courts had already blocked similar efforts in other states, before punctuating her comments with a footnote: “The administration’s demands have yielded one unexpected benefit, namely, bipartisan agreement. Five of the district judges are Trump appointees.”

They include U.S. District Court Judge Stephanie Gallagher, whom Trump nominated to the bench in 2019. She dismissed a DOJ lawsuit against Maryland seeking its voting records. “The Court joins every court to have addressed this issue,” Gallagher wrote in determining that an unredacted voter file is not something a state is compelled to give to the federal government. Trump has also lost in the Supreme Court that he helped reshape: Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote on Monday that states could allow mail-in ballots that arrive after Election Day, essentially dismissing the president’s argument that such late-arriving votes fuel fraud and distrust.

David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, told reporters on Monday that the Trump administration’s cold streak is remarkable. “It is losing literally every single case it’s involved in,” Becker said. “I was a former voting section attorney in the DOJ, and I can’t remember the DOJ or any administration losing more than one or two trial-court cases a year, at the most. We are well into the double digits with this administration, and the year is not even half over yet.”

A Justice Department spokesperson told me that the Trump administration is “devoting significant resources” to continue the legal battle, including through its “litigation to ensure voter roll maintenance and a clear focus on ensuring that American elections are decided solely by American citizens.”

Publicly, the White House is shrugging off the legal setbacks. “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,” Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson, told me in a statement, asserting that existing laws give the Justice Department what it needs to compel states to maintain clean voter rolls. “This campaign pledge from the President is why millions of Americans sent him back to the White House.”

But the president has done little to hide his frustration over his inability to make good on that pledge. The stalled SAVE America Act has led to shouting matches and standoffs over strategy with Republican lawmakers, leaving Congress in a legislative quagmire. And this year’s losing streak is a continuation of the president’s dismal record in the courts when it comes to voting cases. After Trump’s 2020-election loss, the president and his allies filed dozens of lawsuits in an effort to overturn the results. In the end, they lost almost every case. A Washington Post review of court cases a month after Joe Biden’s victory found that 86 judges had ruled against Trump or his supporters.

This is not to say that Trump has not had success influencing America’s electoral system, particularly in the past year. The president has elevated MAGA-friendly election deniers into the federal government, sicced the Justice Department on his political enemies, and drafted multiple agencies into his relentless hunt to substantiate his broad claims of voter fraud. The Supreme Court’s Louisiana v. Callais ruling in April gutted the Voting Rights Act and cleared the way for several Republican-led states to redraw congressional maps and eliminate Democrat-leaning districts with large portions of minority voters. On Tuesday, the Supreme Court rolled back campaign-finance restrictions on political parties, which Trump hailed as “A BIG WIN FOR REPUBLICANS.” At the state level, pro-Trump lawmakers have implemented miniature versions of the SAVE America Act or found other ways to support the president’s vision for voting. At least 10 states have voluntarily turned over the personal information of millions of voters to the Justice Department.

[Read: The election deniers are winning ]

“They’re trying to appease Trump in these ways and implement his will in the states,” Gréta Bedekovics, the former director of democracy at the Center for American Progress, told me. In a report released Monday, Bedekovics and her co-author, Devon Ombres, found that at least 12 states have passed laws requiring documentary proof of citizenship for people registering to vote or mandating citizenship-verification checks for voters since 2024.

The setbacks that Trump has faced in court and Congress increase the likelihood that the midterm elections will proceed as election officials have intended, even though the president has, with little evidence, continued to denigrate the system as rife with fraud. On Monday, he lamented the “tremendous loss in the Supreme Court” on late-arriving mail-in ballots and said “it is more important than ever to pass THE SAVE AMERICA ACT.”

The president’s growing desperation over election policy has begun to bleed into other parts of his agenda. Last month, he abruptly canceled a signing ceremony for a bipartisan housing bill, suggesting that it was a “yawn” compared with legislation on elections. He has likewise encouraged Congress to block other bills, including national-security legislation, if the SAVE America Act—which Trump has deemed a “National Emergency”—is not attached. Congress left town this week mired in disagreement over how to balance the president’s election obsession with other pressing priorities, including the annual defense-spending bill.

Time is running out. Judges generally frown on any major actions to change voting laws in the weeks before an election. Early voting for the midterms will begin as soon as September in some states.

With Congress gridlocked and the courts repeatedly brushing back Trump, there is growing fear among election officials that the president may try to influence election policy in unprecedented ways, such as seizing voting machines—something Trump has said he regrets having not ordered the National Guard to do in 2020—and deploying federal agents to polling places.

The courts have proved to be a solid bulwark against Trump’s push to disrupt the midterm elections. But the president is nothing if not persistent when it comes to trying to bend the rules in his favor. As a result, the sanctity of the vote could rely on whether other government institutions and, ultimately, the citizenry can also mount a stand against the president’s worst impulses.

The Capital Is a Mess

2026-07-02T09:15:00-04:00

Photographs by Caroline Gutman

The capital city is an absolute mess.

The White House is an active construction site, with cement trucks going through the same gates typically used by the president’s armored limousine. There’s a gaping hole where half of the building once stood, a project held up by lawsuits. The South Lawn and the Ellipse, a 52-acre park between the White House and the Washington Monument, are completely torn up. The once-green grass where a temporary arena held a bloody UFC fight last month has turned brown. It looks like a demolition derby took place.

The Reflecting Pool is a murky shade of green, despite a multimillion-dollar renovation to repaint it American-flag blue and mitigate its algae problem. It is now surrounded by fencing and ominous signs that read DANGER EXPLOSIVES and show a bomb being detonated. Ducks that died in the water are being tested.

The National Mall seems to be wrapped in a variety of fencing, some of it in place for construction reasons, some of it to create a security gantlet for the July 4 celebration. At East Potomac Golf Links, at nearby Hains Point, is a massive pile of dirt that some golfers have dubbed “Mount Trump,” taken from the East Wing debris in preparation for a golf-course redo. The Federal Reserve is under construction, as are various roads and bridges, and the Kennedy Center is allegedly in disrepair—and now has an odd contraption of scaffolding and flame-retardant tarps covering its signage at the main entrance like a giant Band-Aid. There are construction cranes, National Guard troops, and portable restrooms everywhere.

Throughout the city, there are government signs proclaiming, We are making DC safe and beautiful. D.C. may be relatively safe, but much of it certainly isn’t beautiful.

Caroline Gutman for The Atlantic

Construction materials sit near the Lincoln Memorial on June 25.

Donald Trump has often prided himself on being a builder of grand things. He laid out an expansive vision for Washington, including a gargantuan new triumphal arch in a traffic circle that leads to Arlington National Cemetery. He aggressively took over the 250th celebrations in Washington, redirecting tens of millions of dollars to glam up the tired capital. But so far, he has done more demolition and renovation than construction.

“It’s as if there were a natural disaster, and we’re looking at the damage after a hurricane. Or think of Manhattan after the World Trade Center was hit by an act of terrorism,” Charles A. Birnbaum, the president of the Cultural Landscape Foundation, told me. “If you were just to parachute into Washington, you’d say: Gosh, what happened here?”

Happy birthday, America.

When Trump was getting his start as a developer in New York in the 1980s, his attention to detail could be difficult to manage, Barbara Res, who oversaw construction for the Trump Organization and was placed in charge of building Trump Tower, told me. He kept tinkering with the design of his apartment, she said, making changes that stretched the patience of the architect. He didn’t like the braille markers in the elevator and wanted them removed from the designs. (They ultimately stayed, she said.)

Plans for the Trump Tower atrium and lobby called for a collection of ficus trees, which Res said were grown in Florida for a year and a half, with an employee dispatched every so often to check on them. Workers constructed a special tunnel to bring the larger ones into the building, in Midtown Manhattan. Once Trump saw how the specially grown trees blocked views in the atrium, leaving those on higher floors unable to see the pink marble floor and indoor waterfall below, he realized that they were a mistake.

[Read: Trump’s other paint job]

“One by one, he made us cut those trees,” Res said. “We begged him, Don’t cut down the last tree.”

Every ficus tree in the atrium was gone, but Trump allowed four to remain in the lobby. Years later, when their leaves eventually fell off, workers attached fake leaves to the real trees. Trump was probably right that cutting down the trees made the atrium look better, Res recalled. “He interfered, is what he did,” she said. “But he let us do our work. He respected us. Now he doesn’t respect anyone.”

Caroline Gutman for The Atlantic

A reflection of the Washington Monument through temporary fencing surrounding the Reflecting Pool.

Caroline Gutman for The Atlantic

Scaffolding and fencing surrounding one of the Arts of Peace sculptures.

Caroline Gutman for The Atlantic

Visitors look at the White House from behind fencing in Lafayette Square on June 25.

In Washington, Trump’s dreams have been slowed by lawsuits. The Cultural Landscape Foundation, Birnbaum’s Washington-based nonprofit, has filed a challenge to Trump’s renovations to the Reflecting Pool and joined as a co-plaintiff on suits related to the president’s plans for the Kennedy Center and a “National Garden of American Heroes” in West Potomac Park. Trump’s proposals for a ballroom and an arch also face legal challenges. Some of the suits are aimed at proving that the Trump administration is avoiding the normal review process for federal projects that would reshape the capital landscape in ways that it hasn’t been in decades. Birnbaum said that he has been “gobsmacked” that the careful layout of the city and the legal protections that have been in place for more than a century are being upended.

The desire to give the nation’s capital a fresh look for a big birthday is not unusual: When the United States celebrated its bicentennial, in 1976, the occasion became an accelerant for projects that reshaped the city. But in that case, it was the culmination of planning that had taken years. A reflecting pool in front of the U.S. Capitol building was completed in 1971, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden was finished in 1974. The Washington Metro system opened its initial, 4.6-mile line on March 27, 1976. The Constitution Gardens, a 50-acre park along the Mall, was dedicated as a bicentennial tribute in May 1976. The National Air and Space Museum opened to the public that July.

Trump has argued that his projects are an emergency and thus need to bypass certain rules that would typically apply. (“We knew the 250th was coming,” Birnbaum countered dryly. “It didn’t sneak up on us.”) This is how the administration gave no-bid contracts for work on the Reflecting Pool, providing $14.7 million to the contractors that installed sealant that has been peeling away, and another $1.7 million for a “high-tech nanobubble ozone technology” that is supposed to combat the algae that grew so rapidly in recent weeks.

Trump is thinking like a developer, seeing open space not as part of a design feature but as real estate that he can try to build upon. White House officials disputed the notion that the nation’s capital hasn’t seen improvements and said that Trump has done plenty to spruce it up. They gave me a lengthy list of improvements that includes the removal of 154 homeless encampments, the rehabilitation of 1,143 benches, the fixing of 1,695 lights, and the cleaning of 28 statues and 45 monuments and memorials. The administration also boasted of installing 134 “rat-resistant trash cans.”

[Read: The YOLO presidency]

Trump has been particularly proud of the improvements and repairs to 22 water fountains around the city and to the changes he’s made to the White House complex itself. He paved over the Rose Garden’s central lawn and added patio furniture, installed two 100-foot-tall flagpoles on the North and South Lawns, and repaved the colonnade with black granite (Trump said that he would pay for the repaving himself but has instead billed it to taxpayers, as my colleague Michael Scherer discovered). White House officials told me that the more ambitious projects—the ballroom and the arch—will take longer because of federal reviews and the amount of construction required.

Caroline Gutman for The Atlantic

A banner near the White House on June 25.

“For the first time in decades, America’s capital has been dramatically transformed thanks to President Trump’s commitment to Making DC Safe and Beautiful Again,” Taylor Rogers, a White House spokesperson, said in a statement.

Trump toured several of his projects on Sunday, looking at Lafayette Park and the restored fountains; going on a motorcade ride through Memorial Circle, where he wants to build the arch; and then inspecting the golf course that he wants to redesign. After his tour, he released a 589-word post on social media saying that progress was being was made throughout the city on statues, monuments, and fountains (“Truly beautiful, even nicer than the day they were built”); the Reflecting Pool (“The criminally made algae is gone”); and Lafayette Park (“Has not looked so good since its inception in 1820!”). “We will build one of the Greatest Golf Courses anywhere in the World,” he wrote, saying that work would begin on September 1, although a federal judge has ordered work not to proceed without required approvals and notification.

Don Folden, a 73-year-old, has been stationing himself on the north side of the White House for six years, speaking to tourists through his microphone and trying to convince the crowds to “stop hating each other because you disagree.” But lately, his message has been as much about spreading peace as it has been about handling disappointment. He’s seen one of Washington’s most sought-after photo backgrounds disappear behind fencing and other obstacles. The other day, he shouted: “You came at the wrong time! The other side is closed too!”

The construction has also made the White House, a symbol of American power, seem small. Much of Lafayette Square has been surrounded by fencing for most of the year, with crowds still gathering to get the best possible view they can, though it’s not a good one. “Is that claw thing still here?” one woman wondered aloud during a recent visit, inquiring about the UFC cage that loomed over the White House like a giant spider.

“People are disappointed,” Folden told me. “The one time they come to D.C., and people are surprised to find this. It is discouraging.” He’s hopeful that the end result will be a nicer park. But there have also been security concerns after a series of incidents, and the Secret Service is aiming to install a gating system to quickly secure the area if needed. The National Park Service wants to reopen the park by July 4, although it’s unclear whether it will meet the deadline. When I stopped by yesterday morning, the fencing had been opened slightly to make more space for tourists. Behind the fences, the fountains are working and the grass is green, but I watched as a woman extended her selfie stick above to try to get an unobstructed view.

[Read: What I saw inside the Kennedy Center]

Caroline Gutman

Two visitors look through temporary fencing on June 25.

Down by the Potomac River, the Kennedy Center has kept the wrapping over the entrance, where Trump’s name was attached to the marble walls before a judge ordered it removed. A spokesperson for the Kennedy Center would not provide a timeline for when the covering might come down, telling me, “The scaffolding and tarp will remain up as crews address maintenance needs of the marble and soffit panels.” The wrapping also just happens to restrict viewers from seeing that Trump’s name is no longer there. The grand entrance to the building now identifies it as: THE JOHN F. … ORMING ARTS. It’s like an exhibit by Christo, only with scaffolding instead of polypropylene fabric.

Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser described the state of the National Mall as “different” from anything she has seen over her years living in the city, but, she added, “I’ve also never been alive for the 250th anniversary.” On Monday, she urged residents and tourists who want to attend the July 4 celebration to plan ahead and be patient. The forecast is for sweltering temperatures and a possibility of rain. A heavy security presence is expected, and fireworks are not planned to begin until at least 10:30 p.m.—when they will illuminate the not-yet-transformed city below.

Something Is Happening in the Democratic Base

2026-07-01T16:10:48-04:00

Something is happening in the Democratic base.

For a year and a half Democrats have been disgusted with President Trump. They’ve been similarly outraged by the fecklessness of their own party leaders. Now, after a handful of surprising primary elections last night in Colorado, a third observation is coming into focus: The Democratic base would like to shove the entire political establishment into a blade grinder.

In Colorado’s deep-blue First Congressional District, a 29-year-old democratic socialist beat longtime Representative Diana DeGette; in the neighboring Eighth District, a young progressive trounced a more moderate Democrat and will go up against a Republican incumbent—who narrowly won his seat—in November. Statewide, one moderate officeholder won’t get the job he wants: Longtime Senator Michael Bennet lost his primary for governor to Colorado’s attorney general, who ran to his left.

Two years after Joe Biden’s visible decline helped Trump return to the White House, these results are further evidence that the base is angry—at institutions, about Israel and ICE, and about its own leadership’s handling of Trump. But more than using any specific set of policies as a litmus test, Democratic voters appear drawn to the candidates who most radiate disdain for the status quo. Maine’s Graham Platner, with his sweatshirts and tattoos and the damning revelations about his past, was the first to demonstrate this desire, when he beat the establishment-backed Janet Mills. Last week, a pair of candidates endorsed by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani ousted incumbent Representatives Adriano Espaillat and Dan Goldman.

[Read: New York’s warning for Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer ]

“If you look and sound like someone who should be in elected office,” one Democratic strategist told us, “voters want nothing to do with you.”

Like Espaillat in New York, the 68-year-old DeGette was slow to recognize the seriousness of the challenge she faced from Melat Kiros, a democratic socialist who was born a few months after DeGette began serving her first term in Congress. This is partly because DeGette is not exactly a mushy moderate. First elected in 1996, she has been a progressive voice close to the party leadership for decades—and she ran with the endorsement of a former Congressional Progressive Caucus chair, Representative Pramila Jayapal.

But last night, both DeGette and 74-year-old John Hickenlooper, who was able to beat back a challenge to his Senate seat, seemed to have underappreciated the Democratic base’s desire for generational and political change. Kiros defeated DeGette by nearly 10 points; Hickenlooper’s DSA-backed opponent came closer than expected. “Diana DeGette hasn’t done anything wrong,” but right now, “being in Congress really works against you,” the Democratic strategist, who is affiliated with a race in Colorado, told us, speaking on the condition of anonymity to offer an unvarnished assessment.

DeGette’s district, which encompasses almost all of Denver, is solidly Democratic and probably a guaranteed win for Kiros in November. This makes Kiros’s victory similar to some of the progressive movement’s victories last week in New York, where three Mamdani-backed candidates won in deep-blue districts.

But north of New York City, the Democratic establishment scored a big win: The party leadership’s preferred candidate, Cait Conley, won her primary in a purple district now held by GOP Representative Mike Lawler. Her success allowed some senior Democrats to claim that where it really mattered—in the swing districts that will determine which party controls the House next year—the party’s voters were sticking with candidates with more crossover appeal. DeGette’s defeat in a safely Democratic district followed that logic. “Is it shocking that a further-left progressive candidate wins in a further-left progressive area? I’m not surprised by it,” Representative Jason Crow, a Colorado Democrat who represents the Denver suburbs, told us as polls were closing last night.

[Read: The Democratic base is angry]

But at least one progressive victory in Colorado yesterday could have more significant ramifications for the national balance of power. Colorado’s Eighth District, north of Denver, is not a liberal bastion. Republican Representative Gabe Evans beat a Democratic incumbent by about 2,500 votes two years ago, and he is now one of the Democrats’ top targets this fall.

Many in the party establishment were rooting for Shannon Bird, a 57-year-old former state legislator, to win the primary. She secured the backing of The Bench, a new Democratic group that has prioritized electability over ideology, and touted her experience finding common ground to pass legislation. But progressives rallied around a much younger state legislator, Manny Rutinel, who has emphasized his working-class roots and vowed to fight the Trump administration aggressively. Yesterday, Rutinel captured the nomination handily.

Rutinel, who is 31, is not nearly as far left as Kiros or Darializa Avila Chevalier, the candidate who toppled Espaillat, the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, last week in New York City. (Rutinel touted an endorsement from Espaillat in his race.) Rutinel reportedly shifted his stance on a number of issues during the primary, moving away from progressive positions opposing fracking and supporting single-payer health care and student-debt cancellation. But some Democrats worry that those earlier views, as well as Rutinel’s harsh critique of cattle farming—a big industry in the district—will make him a weaker choice than Bird in a general election.

Rutinel being the nominee “will hurt us writ large,” the Democratic strategist said. The voters in a general election will not all be the same burn-it-down Democrats who weighed in last night; they’ll be older, moderate Republicans and independents. His frank assessment: “We’re not going to flip this seat now.”

Not all Democrats share that fear. And Rutinel’s race this fall is one of several across the country that could redefine what it means to be electable. When we asked Crow, a moderate who touts his national-security credentials as a former Army Ranger, whether he shared the strategist’s concerns about Rutinel, he replied: “Whoever that consultant was doesn’t know what the fuck they’re talking about.” Ideological labels, Crow argued, are less relevant to voters now than “whether or not somebody is a street fighter, whether they’re willing to go to the mats for the people they represent.”

After Democrats lost big in the 2024 election, some party members speculated that a Great Ideological Rejiggering was in order. One group of strategists launched a think tank to help encourage candidates to embrace “heterodox ideas” that make their candidacies more palatable to independent and Republican voters. On his podcast, Ezra Klein suggested that Democrats should consider running candidates who oppose abortion in red areas. Other strategists launched groups such as Majority Democrats to recruit and support more “electable” Democrats.

[Read: The Democrats’ heterodoxy problem]

But the beauty of primary elections is that they reveal the preferences not of consultants or talking heads but of actual voters—albeit ones who tend to be more politically engaged. And this year, those highly engaged voters aren’t as interested in heterodoxy as they are in total disruption.

Adam Green, a co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, is delighted with Kiros’s win over DeGette, and with the broader successes of insurgent Democrats so far this primary season. He predicts more of them to come, including in Michigan, where his organization has endorsed Abdul El-Sayed, the most progressive candidate running in the state’s competitive Democratic Senate primary. Candidates such as Kiros and El-Sayed, Green says, will redefine the conventional wisdom about what kind of Democrat can win in what kind of place. “Milquetoast, boring Democrats,” he said, “are not electable.”

The party’s base certainly feels this way. We’ll find out in November if their instincts are right.

The White House Considers Granting 250 Pardons for the Nation’s Birthday

2026-06-29T18:35:00-04:00

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This story was updated at 9:45 a.m. on June 30, 2026.

Presidents have generally treated their pardon power like an embarrassing secret, closely held among only a few trusted aides and exercised quietly in the final days of an administration. Some have signed clemency warrants just hours before boarding Marine One for their final flight.

But not Donald Trump.

Since returning to the White House for his second term, Trump has wielded his authority to grant clemency with abandon. He issued pardons or commuted the sentences of nearly 1,600 people associated with the January 6 Capitol riot on his first day back in office and has publicly mused since about preemptively pardoning aides and allies. Now the White House is discussing a possible announcement of presidential pardons as a centerpiece of the nation’s semiquincentennial celebrations over the Fourth of July weekend, according to 14 people familiar with the conversations. The idea has been described as “250 pardons for 250 years,” an initiative that would put one of the most politically fraught constitutional powers at the forefront of the country’s birthday festivities.

The president had not been presented with the proposal as of Friday, and the idea may never rise to his level, a White House official told us. Trump’s advisers are still split on whether mass pardons for the anniversary of American independence would be a good idea. One adviser said there had been polling that suggested that a mass pardon could benefit the president, but any action was unlikely by Independence Day. The Wall Street Journal reported last month that 250 pardons were being considered.

Advocates for the plan say that it would both underscore the president’s singular authority and reinforce an image he has long sought to cultivate: “Trump the merciful,” as a person close to the White House described it to us recently. Meanwhile, the prospect of a mass pardon has set off an international frenzy of lobbying and dealmaking, in which even slight proximity to the president can be monetized.

Five current and former administration officials and nine private-sector lawyers, lobbyists, and other individuals with ties to Trump’s orbit told us that the jockeying among those seeking clemency for past crimes has been intense. One criminal-defense attorney called it “a three-ring circus,” and a former administration official said that it was “batshit crazy.” One lobbyist told us that he had started turning off his cellphone as the ”“aggressive” requests from clients intensified in recent weeks. All spoke with us on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters with high stakes in the days ahead.

One former Trump associate who had been approached to help facilitate a pardon described the push to be included in the possible 250 for the celebration of American independence as distinctly different from what had occurred in Trump’s first term. “Everything is now out in the open,” he told me, drawing a contrast to previous attempts to keep plans under wraps and disguise the appearance of selling access. For those hoping to obtain a presidential pardon or other form of clemency, this person said, “now is the time.”

The White House did not respond in detail to the reporting in this story. “President Trump takes his absolute constitutional power to issue pardons and commutations seriously,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told us in a statement. “That’s why we have a rigorous review process involving the Department of Justice and the White House Counsel’s Office—a team of elite lawyers who carefully evaluate every request before it reaches the President’s desk, and he serves as the final decision maker.”

Attorneys and lobbyists told us that they had been inundated with requests to take on pardon cases in recent weeks as word of the possibility of 250 pardons circulated; some firms have struggled to keep up with the demand. “In 30 years of practicing law, I’ve never seen anything like this,” another attorney told us wearily. “I’m exhausted.”

The “250 for 250” mass-pardon effort has been supported in part by Alice Johnson, who became the nation’s first “pardon czar” last February, as well as the Department of Justice pardon attorney Edward R. Martin Jr. and others in the president’s orbit. (Martin was previously the interim U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C.) Advocates say that the idea is to link the July 4 theme of freedom with correcting what some view as overly punitive criminal sentences or the “weaponization” of the justice system by the president’s Democratic predecessors.

The president’s advisers differ as to whether a July 4 mass pardon would be politically helpful because it would shore up support among the president’s allies, or harmful amid low approval ratings and weakening support among Republicans in Congress. Last month, members of Trump’s party openly balked at a DOJ plan to pay out $1.776 billion to those who claim to have been targeted by the government.

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

Those familiar with the pardon efforts said that although there had been indications by White House and Justice Department officials of “movement” in pardon cases in recent days, it was unclear what the president would ultimately decide if the plan was formally presented to him. “The list is ready when he asks for it,” one attorney who has been in contact with the White House told us.

Three people familiar with the pardon discussions told us that among the individuals being considered are the Malaysian fugitive Low Taek Jho, also known as “Jho Low,” who is wanted for his alleged role in an international financial-fraud scheme that diverted billions of dollars, involving a company known as 1MDB. Pras Michel, of the musical group the Fugees, is also being considered for a pardon after being convicted for conspiring with Jho Low and a Chinese-government official to carry out a lobbying campaign to end the U.S. criminal investigations into the scheme after the money was stolen. Another person being considered is Nicole Daedone, a co-founder of the OneTaste “orgasmic meditation” business, who was sentenced to nine years in prison for her role in a forced-labor conspiracy. The White House did not respond to this reporting before publication. After this story was published, a White House official said in a statement, “While the President is the final decision maker on all pardons, these individuals are not on the radar of the pardon team.”

Juda S. Engelmayer, a spokesperson for OneTaste, told us that the company was familiar with the “250 for 250” discussions but that “we know people are advocating for us” on behalf of Daedone. Engelmayer said that the company had not received any communication from the White House or other official channels. David Tafuri, who is among the attorneys representing Michel in his post-conviction motions and potential legal appeal, told us in an email that “we have never had any involvement in any matters related to a potential pardon and have had zero discussions with anyone in the US Government about it.” (Representatives for Low did not respond to a request for comment.)

One attorney familiar with the recent pardon efforts told us that there have been discussions involving “very rich, well-placed individuals” from India, Greece, Turkey, and France who were told that their cases were under consideration. Those who had recently spoken with the White House about potential pardons said that they were told that criminals sentenced by Barack Obama– or Joe Biden–appointed judges were viewed more favorably for pardons, and that those sentenced by Trump-appointed judges may be less likely to receive a pardon.

Two administration officials familiar with the “250 for 250” effort said that the White House could also consider individuals who had been charged under a law that imposes stiff mandatory minimum sentences for those in possession of firearms in relation to violent or drug-trafficking crimes.

In response to questions, a Justice Department spokesperson said, “Anyone is eligible to apply for a pardon and POTUS is the ultimate decider.”

The established process of applying for pardons runs through the Department of Justice’s Office of the Pardon Attorney, which is supposed to evaluate cases and compile a list of recommendations for the president. But people involved with the process told us that it has largely been replaced with an informal network of intermediaries to the White House. They use their connections to advocate for a pardon, in exchange for a fee.

“It is general knowledge in our practice that for $2 million, you can have a pardon,” one prominent white-collar defense attorney told me. “The clients come to us and tell us, I’ve been told I need to go hire this specific person, and [then] I will get a pardon.” Liz Oyer, who was the Justice Department’s Pardon Attorney under Biden and during the initial months of Trump’s second term, wrote to us that “Donald Trump has turned the pardon process into the Hunger Games.” Leavitt told us that the president “finds it detestable that anyone would even attempt to profit off pardons.”

We spoke with multiple people loosely affiliated with the Trump administration who had been approached in recent weeks by lawyers seeking pardons for clients as part of any Independence Day announcement. These people said they were told that they would make millions if they would use their connections to help facilitate the conversations necessary for a pardon—despite, in many cases, having no prior legal or lobbying experience. Most said that $1 million to $2 million was the going rate, though they were aware of clients offering many times that for more challenging cases. Some established white-collar defense lawyers told us that they were unwilling to continue to advise those who pursued pardons in a way that could be viewed as a potential felony by a future Justice Department once Trump is no longer in office.

Some of the president’s allies have been pushing for a mass-pardon announcement for more than a year. They came close to succeeding last year before the planned announcement was abruptly halted, two former administration officials told us. One former administration official told us that although previous administrations had focused on pardons at the end of the presidential term, officials wanted it known that the Trump White House Counsel’s Office and Justice Department were “open for business” from the earliest days of the second term.

Among the president’s advisers, some share the president’s belief that he should use his pardon power widely to correct for the “weaponization” of past Justice Departments. They see his pardon authority as a mechanism, in part, for currying support with key parts of his base as the midterms approach. Other advisers have warned that issuing pardons at this juncture may backfire politically. Republicans in Congress have also expressed their concerns about mass pardons and say that any action could complicate Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s already contentious confirmation process.

‘Rush Project at Request of POTUS’

2026-06-26T12:26:00-04:00

The pathway that connects the White House residence to the Oval Office has long been paved in Tennessee flagstone. Every president since Harry Truman made the 45-second commute, and made it without complaint, until Donald Trump. The dun rock would not do. Instead, Trump wanted polished African granite, carved in Italy, with a flamed-finish stripe—slightly raised, to prevent slips—running down the middle. As workers tore up the flagstone in March, a reporter asked Trump who was paying for the enhancements. “Paid for by me,” he replied.

But that wasn’t true. Budget documents from the National Park Service that I obtained show that the walkway replacement cost taxpayers $689,232, and is part of a $1.3 million project that included repairing adjacent stone and masonry and providing new hardware for nearby doors. A year earlier, in a separate “Rush project at request of POTUS,” the Park Service spent $347,503 to remove and replace the stucco on the colonnade wall, a project that cleared the way for Trump to affix gold frames and plaques mocking some of his predecessors.

This previously undisclosed spending is part of an enormous shift of taxpayer cash away from national parks around the country and into the Washington area. In order to pay for the president’s projects, the parks have had to cancel needed repairs, slash their budgets, and operate with fewer employees. Taxpayer spending on projects in the National Capital Region has increased 92 percent over the past year, according to the budget documents. The windfall draws on revolving maintenance accounts and more than $100 million in fees collected almost entirely from national parks elsewhere. Trump has ordered the refurbishment of fountains, the lining of the Reflecting Pool, and a $1.6 million Fourth of July fireworks display on the National Mall. He has requested billions more from lawmakers, who thus far have refused. “I’m so proud of Washington, D.C.,” Trump said Wednesday during a meeting in the Oval Office with the secretary-general of NATO. “It’s become one of the hottest cities in the world.”

But as Trump attempts to adorn his immediate surroundings with taxpayer-funded improvements, other parks are going without. Park Service employees I spoke with describe a quiet crisis unfolding as the Interior Department’s regular budget shrinks and political appointees redirect the dwindling funds. More than 900 Park Service projects that were expected to be funded this year never received the money, according to internal records. They include a $1.5 million roof-replacement project at the Yellowstone Center for Resources to halt pest invasions and water leaks, more than $3 million to continue operating the free-bus system in Acadia National Park, and a roughly $424,000 guardrail replacement on the cliff edge of Black Canyon in Colorado’s Gunnison National Park, a project needed to rectify a “significant safety hazard for visitors.”

“The president is prioritizing D.C. at the expense of parks throughout the country,” Emily Douce, a lobbyist for the National Parks Conservation Association, told me. “There is $24 billion of maintenance needs throughout the National Park Service system, and adding these new vanity projects just adds to the need.”

[Read: The YOLO presidency]

The dozens of pages of budgetary documentation show an $854 million, or 68 percent, decrease 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. That includes a $235 million decrease in spending in Pacific West parks such as Yosemite, a $254 million decrease in the Intermountain Region parks such as Yellowstone, and a $33 million decrease in Alaska. During that same period, spending around Washington increased by about $100 million, not counting about $310 million in donations that the Park Service received from allies of the president, most of which is going to fund a new White House ballroom.

Park Service staff have been told, in some cases, that their 2026 projects are being defunded because the Trump administration has prioritized America’s 250th birthday and other programs. A Park Service employee who was not authorized to speak publicly told me that some parks and projects have had “nearly 70 percent of their approved anticipated project funds pulled back,” forcing them to delay making crucial repairs to historic structures, hiring interns, and ensuring that trails are wheelchair accessible. “It means that signage and exhibits won’t be improved, youth programs can’t be offered, that a trail is not improved,” the employee said.

In response to my request for comment, a Department of the Interior spokesperson criticized spending by Barack Obama in his first term and boasted about collecting $2.4 million more in park fees during the first three months of this year by raising prices on foreign visitors. “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,” the spokesperson, whom the department would not identify, said in a statement.

The White House did not respond to a question about the source of funding for the new West Colonnade paving stones.

A memo distributed in March on behalf of the parks director, Jessica Bowron, warned employees of an “all-hands-on deck approach” for the semiquincentennial events that might make vacation time impossible over the summer. She also made clear that the employees may be required to take leave of their assigned posts for the events. “Resource sharing across parks and regions will be essential, and some staff may be called upon to support incident management teams or other mission-critical assignments,” the memo announced.

Earlier this month, about 400 staff from approximately 180 parks had been redeployed to the Washington region for various tasks related to the nation’s 250th celebrations, according to documents that I obtained. By this week, it had grown to about 450 staff from more than 200 parks. The cost of this deployment was not calculated in the documents. But under the park system’s policies, home parks continue to pay for the eight-hour work days of their redeployed staff, while additional costs such as transportation, overtime, hotels, and a per diem are shouldered by other service accounts.

[Read: Trump is setting the national parks up to fail]

That loss of staffing comes as many parks are already operating with fewer employees. The Park Service has lost nearly a quarter of its staff since Trump returned to office in 2025, because of terminations, early retirements, and a federal buyout initiated by the Trump administration, according to the National Parks Conservation Association. The Interior Department spokesperson did not dispute the major staffing cuts but attacked the National Parks Conservation Association, a nonpartisan group that advocates for increased national-park funding, for not donating a greater share of its revenue directly to the park system and for its current CEO’s public support of Vice President Harris in the last election.

Trump has proposed reducing the staff at national parks even more. His 2027 budget proposes cutting 3,967 full-time employees, a 31 percent reduction from the 2025 staffing level. The proposal is not popular on Capitol Hill, and unlikely to make it into law. Last month, the Senate rejected Trump’s request for $1 billion for “security enhancements” to the East Wing as it is reconstructed to make way for a new ballroom; Trump had tried to include that funding in an immigration-enforcement supplemental bill. The supplemental request to pay for the Iran war, which was released this week, includes $500 million in Park Service funding for D.C. projects such as a new seawall on the Potomac River. Trump’s 2027 budget calls for $10 billion to continue to beautify the Washington area—a request that was nearly eight times as large as all National Park Service project spending in 2025. In late May, Republicans on the appropriations subcommittee that oversees the Interior budget marked up a version of the president’s budget for consideration by the full committee. Trump’s $10 billion was not included.

In April, Senator Angus King of Maine questioned Interior Secretary Doug Burgum about how the money would be spent. Burgum said it would not go to new projects, such as the 250-foot memorial arch Trump plans to build on the Potomac. But he did not offer details on what projects in the area would require so much funding. “D.C. is like a state, and it’s not just the National Mall,” Burgum said. “It is for the greater capital region.”

[Read: The Cabinet secretary who wants his cookies freshly baked]

Many of the president’s projects are not onetime expenses, but will require increased funding on an ongoing basis. National Park Service managers in March approved using $32,095 from a maintenance account to care for the statues that Trump installed in his retrofitted Rose Garden. “The scope may be expanded in the future to include maintenance of any additional statues that are installed in the garden,” the budget document stated. “Work includes cleaning, waxing, inspection for damage, and minor conservation treatments as needed.”

When Trump began his renovation of the White House complex last year, the president said that he and his donors would bear the cost of his dreams. The Trust for the National Mall raised money to pave over the Rose Garden and put marble in the nearby Palm Room, a way station between the president’s residence and the West Colonnade. But the details of the spending, including price tags and the identity of the donors, have been murky. There are a number of other renovation and decorating projects with no public accounting of the costs: Trump’s marbling of a bathroom in the residence, his relocation of a copy of the Declaration of Independence to the Oval Office, his addition of gold filigree to the walls and coins on many of the internal doors.

Then there’s the most expensive project, the demolition of the East Wing to make way for a ballroom. Trump has been adamant that the new ballroom would not cost the American people anything. “We didn’t ask for any tax money. This is taxpayer free. We have no taxpayer putting up 10 cents,” Trump said on April 1. “The ballroom is a donation.” To date, $300 million of donations have been transferred to the National Park Service for the ballroom, according to the internal Park Service budget documents. But taxpayers will still likely need to chip in to pay for the broader project.

[Read: Donald Trump’s paint jobs]

Recently unearthed contractor documents, revealed by The Washington Post, describe the true cost of the East Wing reconstruction as closer to $600 million, with more than half coming from taxpayer-funded accounts managed by the White House Military Office and the Secret Service. The White House budget office released $351.6 million to the Secret Service this month, a transfer first reported by Roll Call. The White House has not confirmed the purpose of the funds, but the transfer happened after senators refused a White House request for $1 billion in funding for the Secret Service for security enhancements at the White House, including the East Wing project. White House spokesperson Davis Ingle described the East Wing project in a statement as “inextricably tied to the security of the President,” and said Trump was coordinating with “the White House Military Office and the United States Secret Service” on design and planning. Ingle said the president and his allies would fund the East Wing project “to the tune of approximately $400 million.”

The next projects on Trump’s agenda also lack clear funding sources or a defined budget. In addition to the memorial arch, Trump intends to rebuild the East Potomac golf course and install a new sculpture garden, and has floated plans to paint the Eisenhower Executive Office Building white, to match the West Wing next door. None of these projects has yet been added to the Park Service budget documents I reviewed.

Another project that is taking shape will be paid for by private donations with supervision by federal park officials: Trump plans to install a new landing pad on the South Lawn of the White House, which would allow the latest model of the president’s Marine One helicopter to take off without burning the grass. According to the budget documents, the project will be funded by a $5 million donation from defense contractor Lockheed Martin—the maker of the new helicopter.

The Meltdown

2026-06-25T19:34:00-04:00

A desultory, grievance-filled speech on what should have been a joyous occasion. The last-minute cancellation of a rare bipartisan bill signing in favor of yet another push for doomed, unpopular legislation. A loud confrontation with members of his own party followed by sneering remarks about some of the nation’s oldest allies. And a nonsensical accusation that, if we have it right, blames the algae-filled Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool not on his rushed renovations but on knife-wielding vandals … and maybe Barack Obama.

And that was just yesterday.

For President Trump, things aren’t going great. He normally thrives in chaos, reveling in unpredictability to keep his opponents off-balance. But right now, he’s just flailing. Despite his long-standing superpower of knowing how to control the national conversation and quickly change it, he has been unable to shake the consequences of a war with Iran that increased prices for Americans and weakened the country’s standing in the world. Trump’s poll numbers have plummeted. Republicans fear a November wipeout. Members of a panicked, fed-up GOP are beginning to defy their president. Trump, whose political image revolves around strength, finds himself diminished.

At this time roughly a year ago, Trump had overwhelmed Washington. He had slashed taxes, launched trade wars, angered longtime international allies, cracked down on border crossings, and eviscerated the federal government. The Democrats struggled to slow him down; Trump, meanwhile, openly mused about defying the Constitution to run for a third presidential term in 2028. On July Fourth, he punctuated the frenzy by signing a far-reaching and expensive piece of legislation—which he dubbed, in typical Trumpian fashion, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act—at an outdoor White House ceremony complete with a flyover by the B-2 bomber that had just clobbered Iran’s nuclear facilities.

But as this Independence Day approaches—as the nation celebrates its semiquincentennial—Trump is unable to control the political narrative about a war that did not go the way he had hoped. A memorandum of understanding signed last week extended a shaky cease-fire and led to an initial round of negotiations involving Vice President Vance. A host of issues remains, including the fate of Iran’s uranium-enrichment program and its control over the Strait of Hormuz. Negotiations could take many months.

[Read: Trump in defeat]

This is not something that Trump wants to hear. He’s been bored of this war for a while, and in the West Wing, there was a race to be done with it. Allies have told us there are also quiet, behind-closed-doors doubts: What, exactly, did the conflict accomplish? Few, if any, of the president’s goals were achieved. Iran could close the strait again. Yet Trump has frantically tried to spin this as a victory, even as he walks away from some of his stated objections. He has taken to Truth Social repeatedly this week to defend the deal and once again seethe about comparisons with the agreement that Obama struck more than a decade ago. Trump continued to waffle as to what could come next—even suggesting a resumption of the bombing campaign if Iran does not comply, a threat that few take seriously. His attempts at unpredictability were quite predictable, and Iran has proved itself to be anything but cowed.

Still, many in Trump’s orbit tell us that they believe the war won’t have much political staying power. Their focus, at least for now, is not the long-term ramifications on the Middle East or America’s international relationships, but rather the political moment ahead of the midterms. They hope that the war will be soon forgotten—that the strait will reopen, that the price of gas will fall, that bombs will not need to fall again. Aides pointed us to a number of major events, including a series of Supreme Court decisions and even the World Cup, that could eclipse the war in the national consciousness. “The midterms are months away,” one official told us. “We’ll have lots of plot twists by then.”

But so far, Trump’s efforts aren’t working. And when his frustrations exploded yesterday, he lashed out against senators who have faithfully served him—and whose support he can’t afford to lose.

Tensions between Trump and Senate Republicans have been building for months. The president irked party leaders by endorsing a primary opponent to Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, who lost his bid for a third term. Trump then infuriated them by snubbing Senator John Cornyn of Texas in favor of his scandal-plagued primary challenger, state Attorney General Ken Paxton—a move that appeared to seal Cornyn’s doom in last month’s primary runoff. Senate Majority Leader John Thune had strongly backed Cornyn, a former member of the Senate GOP leadership, and the party’s campaign arm had spent millions of dollars to boost his candidacy before Trump undercut them.

Senate Republicans gave Trump much of what he wanted last year, but he now faces some resistance as the GOP’s prospects in this year’s midterms worsen. Egged on by loyalists such as Senator Mike Lee of Utah, Trump has tried to jawbone Republicans into scrapping or circumventing the filibuster’s 60-vote threshold to pass legislation known as the SAVE America Act, which would require people to provide proof of citizenship when registering to vote and photo identification when casting their ballot. (It would also, in some versions, significantly curtail voting by mail.) Republicans have never had a majority that supports eliminating the filibuster, and Trump’s refusal to accept that reality has frustrated senators.

On top of all that, Trump’s efforts to force members of his own party into retirement have created what’s become known as the “YOLO Caucus” in the Senate, as Republicans such as Cassidy, Cornyn, and Thom Tillis of North Carolina (who announced his retirement immediately after declaring his opposition to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act last year) have felt liberated to oppose and criticize the president in ways they would not have if they faced reelection. Tillis, in particular, has trashed some of Trump’s ideas and appointees with a newfound zeal—he called Bill Pulte, the acting director of national intelligence, “an incompetent sycophant.” And Cassidy decried the administration’s deal with Iran as “the worst foreign policy blunder in decades.”

[Read: A serious debate about an unserious bill]

The intraparty feud came to a head yesterday, when Trump abruptly canceled a ceremony to sign a major housing bill—a rare example of significant bipartisan legislation—and demanded that Republicans first pass the partisan SAVE America Act if they wanted his approval. Things devolved from there. During a meeting with Senate Republicans in the Capitol, Trump berated them for allowing (through a combination of defections and absences) the passage of a resolution seeking to constrain his ability to wage war on Iran. Cassidy confronted him over the deal he had struck, and the two got into a loud argument in which Trump at one point reportedly told the senator to sit down. “I make no apologies for standing up to the president,” Cassidy told reporters afterward. “I am sticking up for the American people, even if I’m speaking to the president.”

Naturally, Trump proclaimed the whole thing a success anyway. “We had a really great meeting,” he told reporters. “We like our leader. We like our party. We like, really, everybody in the room—I don’t like a few people, but that’s okay.” The president was flanked by three of his loyalists: Senators Rick Scott of Florida, John Barrasso of Wyoming, and Lee, all of whom wore a Trump-style red tie. Thune stood to the side, his blue tie appearing—intentionally or not—like a small declaration of independence. By nightfall, the friction between Trump and Senate Republicans seemed to ease a bit—at least for the moment. The chamber took a symbolic revote of the war-powers resolution and defeated it. Two Republicans flipped their votes; one of them was Cassidy. White House officials pointed to that as a sign of Trump’s continued hold on the GOP.

When we reached out to the White House for comment, the spokesperson Taylor Rogers responded with a list of the president’s accomplishments and added: “President Trump is the leader of the free world, and thanks to his bold leadership, the United States of America has never been stronger.”

In the face of these struggles, Trump has continued to try to create his own reality. He returned to the White House from the Hill for a meeting with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte. Yet even as Rutte lavished him with praise, Trump took the moment to attack some of NATO’s key members for not helping with the Iran war, and he unleashed particular bile on Italy as part of a diplomatic spat that began when the president claimed that its prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, had “begged” him for a photo at the G7 summit last week. Meloni denied that, which infuriated Trump.

But Trump was far angrier about something closer to home. As part of his expansive effort to remake Washington in his own image, he took on a project to fix up the Reflecting Pool. What he got instead was an on-the-nose metaphor for the state of his presidency: a no-bid contract to a crony that went over budget, ended in failure, and resulted in the pool being policed by federal troops. The pool’s liner has come apart, and the water has turned a brilliant, stubborn green—far from the “American-flag blue” that Trump intended. But rather than take responsibility, Trump has veered into conspiracy theories.

[Read: What color is the Reflecting Pool? An investigation.]

He has, predictably, turned America’s birthday into a commemoration of himself. Plans for a concert on the National Mall to kick off the festivities turned into a pro-Trump rally, and most of the music acts backed out once they realized how partisan the event had become. Trump went ahead anyway, making himself last night’s centerpiece with a few C-listers as his opening acts. But his heart didn’t seem in it as he delivered a short speech that included some nods to the republic’s founding and plenty of grievances. He spoke from behind bulletproof glass, and the crowd was small by Trump’s standards. Social-media footage showed many people leaving while he was still speaking.

Trump, ever attuned to what is trending, posted on social media today that he had a massive crowd and that “everybody stayed right until the end of my Speech.” He did not weigh in on the day’s breaking news from the Middle East: Despite the cease-fire agreement, Iran fired upon a vessel trying to transit the Strait of Hormuz, which underscored the challenges that lay ahead in negotiations. Try as he might, Trump can’t change the subject.

The True Believers at the Great MAGA Fair

2026-06-25T18:28:01-04:00

For one night, in the heart of deep-blue Washington, D.C., a fenced-off section of the National Mall became an oasis for members of the MAGA base. They had believed in President Trump from the beginning and carried him triumphantly back to power in 2024, and now they came to the grand opening of America’s 250th-birthday celebration in red-white-and-blue headbands, draped in flags, and sporting dangly blue AMERICA earrings. Doubts about anything related to Trump—his abysmal approval ratings, inflation accelerated by the war he started in Iran, his clashes with Republican senators earlier in the day—were, for an evening, drowned out by the roar of fighter jets overhead.

Last night’s festivities were meant to kick off two weeks in which Americans could come together and commemorate America’s semiquincentennial. But a string of artists had pulled out of events in Washington amid concerns that the celebrations would become the Trump show. And indeed, the evening felt like a Trump rally, with a montage of hits that his most die-hard fans know and love, including Trump’s favorite tenor singing “Ave Maria.” The president declared that America is “the hottest country anywhere in the world” and rattled off a list of ways in which his administration continues to “Make America Great Again.” “The best is yet to come!”

The crowd agreed. At this moment, attendees told me, when so much seems uncertain, the most logical thing for them to do is to put their faith in the president.

[Read: Thank you for your attention to this birthday]

Karen and Paul Depperschmidt are living the retirement they always dreamed about—road-tripping around America, visiting national parks. They live full-time in Wilmington, North Carolina, and they made the six-and-a-half-hour trip up to D.C. for the Great American State Fair—and the rally especially. The trip came with an added bonus—the chance to share RV parks with international visitors here for the World Cup. They met a family from Brazil and three Scottish tourists who were en route from Boston to Florida. “The nicest guys, they are having the best time,” Karen told me. “They love this country.”

The Trump rallies they’d previously attended—Karen’s been to two, Paul to three—had been a blast, they said. “Everybody’s so nice.” And, as lifelong conservatives originally from Texas, they wanted to show support for a president who they believe is keeping his word. “A lot of people don’t like it, but he is doing exactly what he said he was going to do,” Paul said.

When I asked them about the cost of gas—a particular concern for those living the camper-van lifestyle—it didn’t seem to matter: Prices at the pump are coming down, they said, which they knew would happen. More important, they told me, Trump was trying to eliminate the nuclear threat from Iran. When Paul finds himself questioning Trump’s decision making, he reminds himself to back up; the president has information that isn’t available to the public. “I think he’s earned our trust,” Paul told me. “I trust he’s going to do the right thing, and he hasn’t let us down yet.” The couple said they appreciate the breadth of the administration’s ambitions globally: across the Middle East and in China, Venezuela, and Cuba. In each place, Paul told me, he sees a president who’s “not ashamed to use the power that we have economically to benefit us and, in the long run, benefit the world.”

Rally attendees who didn’t want to stand shoulder to shoulder or who didn’t snag a chair close to the stage settled in on picnic blankets or broken-down cardboard boxes on the sidelines to take in nearly two hours of entertainment—including the U.S. Army’s rock band riling up the crowd with “Sweet Caroline,” Lee Greenwood singing “God Bless the U.S.A.,” and Alexis Wilkins, a country singer who is FBI Director Kash Patel’s girlfriend, performing the national anthem. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy told the crowd that the night’s musical acts were “way better than those libtards that canceled on us,” to raucous cheers.

As I wove my way through the crowd before the show began, while many rally-goers were still making their way through security, it seemed that journalists and evangelists spreading the gospel were competing for families’ attention. More than once, eyeing attendees to see if they’d be willing to chat with me, I realized they were already speaking with a reporter. Multiple conversations were interrupted by someone hoping to share that Jesus loves us.

Suzanne Jones and Joey Ervin flew to Washington from Chattanooga, Tennessee, yesterday morning to celebrate their son’s birthday. They managed to squeeze in visits to both the National Air and Space Museum and the Washington Monument before arriving at the night’s festivities. Their son, Alex, was particularly excited to see the president do “the dance”—pumping his arms to the Village People’s “Y.M.C.A.”

Jones told me that one of her biggest concerns going into the 2024 elections had been border security. She said she feels safer today than she did under President Biden, and she noted that the “disastrous” four years under him felt all too recent. “Having a president, somebody that’s protecting my country, that can’t even have a speech—that’s rough. It makes me feel, you know, insecure,” Ervin told me of Biden. He said that while he wasn’t necessarily a fan of Trump’s decision to go to war with Iran, “I’d prefer to do that than what we did when we withdrew out of Afghanistan—10 times out of 10.”

Not everything, the couple concedes, is perfect. They bought their house before interest rates dropped and prices skyrocketed in 2020, and said they wouldn’t move now, because the market is difficult and doesn’t seem to be getting better. “My view of the economy is once stuff goes up, it’s not coming back down—I don’t care who’s in charge.” Gas prices, Ervin said, were high long before the Iran war. “We were in L.A. in 2024 and the gas prices were $7. That was before any of the Iran stuff started.”

[Read: Trump in defeat]

Washington—where the president has called up the National Guard, put his mark on local parks, and turned the city’s monumental core into a construction zone—is a bastion of opposition to Trump. But not everyone in D.C. is critical of the president. Jessica Greenfield and her husband, a D.C. police officer, moved to the city from Virginia in 2024. She said she’s seen a “huge difference” in crime over the past year—the streets are clean, and there are fewer carjackings and robberies. She credits, in part, Trump’s decision to deploy the Guard. “I haven’t heard of crime in our neighborhood in a really long time,” Greenfield said.

The 2024 election marked Greenfield’s first time voting for Trump—a decision that put a strain on her relationship with some friends and family members. “It’s gotten tough with some of my more liberal friends, where they’ll really try to debate with me about it,” she told me. “I’m not really into that.” Greenfield said she reasons that “if I can have a nice street and walk my daughter and feel safe, that’s what’s important to me.”

Even those in the crowd who weren’t ardent Trump fans told me they appreciated that America’s birthday was being headlined by a showman. And they felt lucky to be at the party. “Is President Trump my favorite person in the world?” Ervin said. “No. But he is a good president; he does a good job. So we’re here to see him and put it on the bucket list: We saw the president.”

Trump’s Other Paint Job

2026-06-24T19:00:00-04:00

Halfway through President Trump’s first term, as construction crews were busy installing hundreds of miles of barriers along the southern border, a puzzling edict came down from America’s aesthete in chief. Trump wanted the border wall painted black.

The president had already lost an argument about what his “big, beautiful wall” should look like. Trump envisioned a solid-concrete structure, like the one Israel has built through the West Bank. But U.S. Customs and Border Protection already had a preferred prototype, consisting of vertical steel bars that, crucially, allowed border agents to see through to spot potential threats on the Mexican side. The competing visions pointed to a larger fundamental question: Whose border wall was it?

How quaint that seems now. Trump in his second term treats federal property as his own, demolishing the East Wing of the White House, adding his name to the Kennedy Center, and ordering the construction of a 250-foot arch opposite the Lincoln Memorial. His fixation with paint continued as he ordered a blue coating on the Reflecting Pool that turned it into a slime lagoon. He also wants to cover the Eisenhower Executive Office Building’s granite in white paint to make it better match the White House, next door.

Trump in 2017 was still willing to defer to experts, especially those in uniform. Although CBP officials managed to talk him out of the concrete-wall idea, along with a proposal to add sharp spikes to the top so that climbers would risk impaling themselves, they relented on the black paint. Trump saw it as another way to deter migrants. He told a story—since recited many times—about his golfing buddies scalding their arms after he installed a black-granite countertop at the snack bar of one of his clubs. The president even had a specific shade of paint that he called “flat black,” whose heat-retention properties he deemed superior. Potential border jumpers would burn their hands if they tried to touch the steel bars, Trump insisted. The president seemed to enjoy discussing the various ways that migrants could be injured or killed by the wall, according to his aides, who said often that he talked about grisly scenarios as the best way to prevent illegal crossings.

Neither CBP nor the Army Corps of Engineers, which manages the construction of the wall, thought that the paint was a good idea. It would add hundreds of millions in costs and saddle the structure with long-term maintenance expenses. And what if a future Democratic administration didn’t want to pay for more paint jobs?

Then there was the steel itself. CBP had selected a type of high-grade alloy that is well suited for the desert environment. It doesn’t require paint, because it develops a sheen of exterior rust, or weathering, that acts as a natural protective layer. Industrial-materials experts I consulted during Trump’s first term told me that a rough surface increases the steel’s ability to absorb solar radiation and transfer heat, leaving it nearly as hot, or even hotter, than black paint would, despite Trump’s claims.

The bigger problem was that Trump didn’t like the reddish rusted look. He told everyone that black paint would do a better job preserving the steel.

A former CBP official who was involved with the project at the time told me that Trump’s claims about the heat-transferring properties of black paint were “not the bang for the buck that was touted.” The official, who retains good relations with Trump-administration officials and didn’t want to be identified, said that the steel used for the border wall “needs the rust layer to protect it and make it last longer.” There was also discomfort at CBP with the idea of explicitly trying to injure people. “The negative optics behind trying to make the wall too hot to touch were a detractor for us,” he said.

[Read: The ‘big black scar’]

The border-wall project was more cost-sensitive back then too. The standoff with Democrats over funding in late 2018 led to a 35-day congressional shutdown. Trump lost the fight but moved billions from Department of Defense budgets to the project. His advisers persuaded him to prioritize getting as many miles of new barriers into the ground as possible, even if they couldn’t be painted, before he left office.

Trump pushed for the black coating anyway. He sent soldiers with brushes and rollers to paint the wall by hand, not unlike his use of National Guard troops to police the Reflecting Pool for alleged vandals. The Pentagon referred to the black paint as an “anti-climb coating.”

Trump ended up installing about 450 miles of new barriers during his first term, at a cost of more than $11 billion. Most of that was not painted black. During President Biden’s term, I went to a few locations in Arizona where Trump’s crews had rolled on the black paint. Some of it was already peeling off in the punishing desert sun. It was hot to the touch, but unpainted segments were too. And by then, smugglers on the Mexico side were already building cheap ladders out of rebar or wood. By leaning them against the top of the wall, they could bring migrants over the top, using ropes to lower them down the U.S. side.

Trump was still talking about the black paint after Biden took office in 2021. Biden halted border-wall construction, leaving Trump’s legacy project incomplete. When Trump visited a segment of the wall in the Rio Grande Valley with Texas Governor Greg Abbott that year, he stood near an unfinished gap and complained about the lack of black paint, saying that Biden had left the structure “rusting and rotting.”

“If they don’t paint it, bad things are happening,” Trump said. “And the best color to paint it is black. Because if you paint it black, it’s so hot, nobody can even try to climb it.”

By the time Trump returned to office, he was no longer interested in what experts or CBP officials had to say about paint. And money was no longer a limit. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act approved by Republican lawmakers last year included $46.5 billion for the barrier, enough to pay for 700 additional miles and all of the black paint Trump wants. The segments of fencing that I saw going up in southern Arizona earlier this year arrived at the border pre-painted with a uniform, factory-grade coating.

[Read: Every state is a Border Patrol State]

Trump spoke at length about the black paint last summer when FIFA President Gianni Infantino visited the Oval Office amid planning discussions for the World Cup soccer tournament. Then–Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was there, and Trump said that he’d been pleased to see her painting the wall by hand with a roller on television the night before.

“I built the same wall that the Border Patrol asked me to build,” Trump said. “It wasn’t my first choice. I wanted to do concrete plank and everything nice, but you wouldn’t have been able to see through it.”

The president proceeded to tout the wall’s various physical properties. Infantino stood next to him, holding up an oversize World Cup–finals ticket with the president’s name on it, but Trump wasn’t interested in talking about soccer. “Good black flat paint. It would look beautiful,” Trump mused.

“If it’s white, it’s not hot,” Trump added. It wasn’t clear whether anyone had proposed painting the border wall that color, or whether it was just something he’d considered before choosing black.

New York’s Warning for Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer

2026-06-24T15:56:17-04:00

In the weeks after he was elected mayor of New York City last fall, Zohran Mamdani worked behind the scenes to torpedo a bid by one of his allies, a charismatic young democratic socialist, to challenge the reelection of House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries in Brooklyn. Such a high-profile primary fight, Mamdani reportedly argued at the time, could slow his agenda for the city.

In light of what happened last night, Mamdani’s intervention might have saved the political career of a man who could become the nation’s first Black House speaker next year. Mamdani picked other primary battles across the city, and he won them all. Candidates whom the mayor backed defeated two House Democratic incumbents: Representative Dan Goldman in Manhattan and Brooklyn, and Harlem Representative Adriano Espaillat, the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. In an open-seat race, the Mamdani-endorsed state legislator Claire Valdez swamped a Democrat who had the support of much of the party’s local establishment.

The insurgent victories exposed a striking dynamic with significant implications for national politics: America’s two most powerful Democrats, Jeffries and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, both hail from New York City, but they are not the dominant force in their own hometown. For the moment, that distinction belongs indisputably to Mamdani, the 34-year-old whose winning mayoral campaign last year took both men—and almost everyone else—by surprise.

Mamdani first endorsed Brad Lander, a rival turned ally in last year’s mayoral race. Lander trounced Goldman, a second-term Democrat and an heir to the Levi Strauss fortune, largely by playing up their differences over Israel in a district that includes some of the city’s most progressive neighborhoods. The mayor made a much bigger bet in backing Darializa Avila Chevalier, a 32-year-old democratic socialist challenging Espaillat, a five-term incumbent whom Mamdani had initially promised to endorse. Avila Chevalier has taken positions that could make her the most far-left Democrat elected to Congress in the past decade; she has said that “all deportations are wrong,” describes herself as a prison abolitionist, and attended a rally on the day after Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel that was widely perceived as expressing support for the attack. (Lander, who now accuses Israel of committing genocide in Gaza, condemned the event at the time.) Avila Chevalier narrowly defeated Espaillat, who had the support of Jeffries and New York Governor Kathy Hochul, among other establishment figures.

[Read: The liberal district that could oust a Trump-defying Democrat ]

“Mayor Mamdani made a calculation that this was a moment where we could get progressive fighters into Congress,” Rebecca Katz, a Democratic strategist whose agency made ads for Mamdani’s campaign last year, told me. “He took that risk, and he is reaping that reward.”

The wins by Lander, Avila Chevalier, and Valdez reflect the recent success of the left in deep-blue areas across the country. Last week, the democratic socialist Janeese Lewis George won the Democratic nomination for mayor of Washington, D.C.; in Los Angeles, Nithya Raman advanced in a primary to challenge Mayor Karen Bass in November. The Senate candidacy of Graham Platner in Maine will test how well leftist candidates can do in more closely divided and rural areas.

[Read: D.C. progressives’ great socialist hope ]

Republicans are—unsurprisingly—trying to use the left-wing victories to paint the entire Democratic Party as captive to extremists. The National Republican Congressional Committee headlined a press release last night, “The Democrat Party Officially Belongs to the Socialists.” It also included a photo of condolence flowers placed at Jeffries’s office door. “Every House Democrat, in safe and competitive districts alike, will now answer to the radicals calling the shots,” the NRCC spokesperson Mike Marinella said in the press release. “And Americans should be terrified by where the Democrat Party is headed.”

In New York, the influence of a new mayor at the height of his popularity seemed to be as big a factor as any last night. Establishment candidates fared better in races that Mamdani chose to sit out. In a Manhattan contest that became one of the nation’s most expensive House races, Micah Lasher prevailed over Alex Bores; President John F. Kennedy’s grandson, Jack Schlossberg; and George Conway, a former Republican who is one of President Trump’s biggest critics. Lasher won with the support of both retiring Representative Jerry Nadler and former Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who is not popular with left-wing Democrats in New York. North of the city, in New York’s Hudson Valley, the moderate Cait Conley easily defeated a more progressive opponent in a GOP-held district that Democrats will contest aggressively this fall.

Whether Mamdani can sustain his clout remains to be seen. His moderate predecessor, Eric Adams, flamed out quickly after an initial political honeymoon; Adams’s bid for a second term last year ended before Election Day. The three previous New York City mayors—Rudy Giuliani, Bloomberg, and Bill de Blasio—all failed badly in their campaign for the presidency. (Lest we get ahead of ourselves: Mamdani is constitutionally ineligible to become president, because he was born in Uganda, and no New York City mayor has risen to higher office in more than 150 years.)

Yet it’s clear that Mamdani is a more powerful broker in New York than either Schumer or Jeffries, whose decisions as national party leaders have often put them at odds with Democratic-base voters back home. “If I’m Hakeem Jeffries or Chuck Schumer, and I’m looking at 2028, I would be somewhat nervous—especially Hakeem,” Christina Greer, a political scientist at Fordham University, told me.

Jeffries’s team has been dismissive of would-be left-wing challengers, referring to them as “Team Gentrification.” After last night, progressives told me, that attitude has to change. “It’s time for Leader Jeffries to recognize the left as a part of the bigger Democratic coalition and start building with it, not around it,” Katz said. “That’s how we win.”

Jeffries has said that he and Mamdani have a good working relationship, and he told reporters yesterday that he and the mayor had simply “agreed to strongly disagree” on the primary races involving Espaillat and Goldman. “A handful of primaries,” he said, would not “reshape” the Democratic caucus in the House.

Allies of Jeffries defend his relationship with progressives and insist that he is much better positioned to withstand a primary challenge in 2028 than was Espaillat, pointing to frequent appearances he makes in his district.

Schumer has kept even more distance from Mamdani, which some New York progressives see as a sign that he might not seek a sixth Senate term in 2028, when he’ll turn 78. The Senate leader, who lives in Brooklyn, did not endorse Mamdani even after he won the Democratic mayoral nomination, and he stayed out of this year’s primary fights entirely. (His office did not return a request for comment.) The left’s preferred successor to Schumer is Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, but she could instead run for president in 2028. Ocasio-Cortez won her House seat by toppling a Democratic leader in a primary, but she declined to endorse in any of this year’s competitive congressional races.

The progressive movement is a considerably stronger force within the five boroughs of New York City than it is in the rest of the state, and the past few years have demonstrated that it’s not particularly hard to mount a serious challenge against an incumbent in the city, where turnout for House primaries is frequently low. Jeffries, who is hoping to make history in a few months, would certainly not want to spend his early tenure as speaker fighting both Trump in Washington and a Mamdani-backed opponent in Brooklyn.

New York City’s ascendant left might not care, however. At Valdez’s victory party, which took place not far from Jeffries’s own district, the crowd began booing when Jeffries appeared on TV screens. Then it began chanting: “You’re next!”

The Election System Wasn’t Built for This

2026-06-22T07:00:00-04:00

Not so long ago, the Republicans who ran elections in one of the nation’s most important battlegrounds—Maricopa County, Arizona—largely got along. There were egos and quibbles, sure. But in the face of unyielding attacks on elections led by President Trump, the recorder and board of supervisors—which together split election duties—resolved conflicts without blowing up a delicate system built on trust and cooperation.

Today’s recorder and board, a mostly new cast chosen by voters in 2024, are different. They’re locked in an all-out war over the machinery, money, and operations that make the democratic process possible. Both sides agree that the standoff threatens their ability to carry out November’s midterm elections free of complications for the county’s 2.6 million voters, more than half the state’s total. The recorder’s side describes the situation in dire terms, writing to a judge that “the legal validity of the election results themselves” is at risk. The recorder’s critics fear that the fight could be used as pretext to cancel results MAGA doesn’t like in elections that could tip the balance in Congress.

Before this battle for control fully exploded in recent weeks—with the recorder insisting the Republican-dominated board pay six-figure contempt-of-court fines and election staff facing possible prosecution for setting up ballot drop boxes—he floated an idea through his attorney. Recorder Justin Heap, a Trump ally who was elected two years ago on a pledge to “end the laughingstock elections,” suggested that the two sides mediate their dispute using Cleta Mitchell, the lawyer and election activist who worked closely with Trump to try to reverse his 2020 defeat. “Ms. Mitchell would be ideal,” the attorney wrote, according to records I obtained, which cited “her expertise.”

The suggestion that Mitchell be brought in to broker the conflict astonished county staff still haunted by a 2020 cycle that drew protests at the tabulation center, pressure from Trump and his allies to overturn his loss, years of death threats, and ceaseless trolling from critics. In February, Mitchell told me that “Maricopa County is a complete disaster” and that federal investigators should turn their attention to the desert swing county. The recorder’s proposal to bring her in as a mediator of the dispute went nowhere. But the very idea that a lawyer who plotted to overturn the 2020 election could be a neutral arbiter signaled how differently Heap and the Board of Supervisors see the situation, people involved in the private deliberations told me.

[Read: Arizona is now at the center of election investigations]

Trump has spent his second term trying to “nationalize” elections that are, by constitutional design, run by state and local governments. He’s sought to advance his voter-ID legislation, and pressed the Justice Department to probe his loss six years ago. None of those efforts have yielded very much. But far from Washington, his allies have gained influence inside the local offices that do the hard work of actually administering the vote.

That includes the Maricopa recorder’s office, which over the past year has had striking success in court. Heap last year brought on an Arizona attorney who works for the America First Legal Foundation—co-founded by Stephen Miller, the powerful Trump adviser who supports stricter voter-registration verification and voter-roll purges—to represent him in his fights. The group’s involvement has alarmed the Republican county attorney, whose lawyer argues that the group is usurping her authority and using its representation of the recorder as a “launching pad for an unprecedented power grab.”

American election systems weren’t built for this. The brawl in Maricopa County has exposed the vulnerabilities of election structures that divided functions and duties between different offices, requiring cooperation in the service of democracy. Though the split-authority model worked well for decades, it is fraying under the weight of today’s hyper-partisan and conspiratorial environment.

“This is a new front in what appears to be a long-term play by America First to change how elections are run,” one person involved in the dispute on the board’s side told me. “They want them to be run by not just the Republican Party—but the MAGA movement.”

To his critics, Heap represents a dire threat to free and fair elections. To his supporters, he is a gutsy conservative who is unafraid to challenge the status quo. For an Arizona judge—whose opinions mattered most until Thursday, when an appellate court weighed in—Heap simply made a persuasive case that he is entitled to more power over elections than his office previously enjoyed. Heap’s office did not make him available for an interview.

An attorney and one-term state lawmaker, Heap was bolstered in his 2024 campaign for recorder by support from Charlie Kirk’s Arizona-based Turning Point USA’s political wing and the failed Senate and gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake. In the primary, he faced a Republican incumbent, Stephen Richer, who had been outspoken in his opposition to Trump-inspired election denial and in his support for the integrity of the voting system. Heap won convincingly. Trump allies welcomed Heap’s ascent to an office that holds sway over election procedures in a county that generally dictates on which side of the red-blue divide Arizona will fall. “I’m confident that Maricopa County is about to get a huge upgrade in its election administration,” Harmeet Dhillon, now a senior Justice Department official, wrote on X after Heap won his race. But the board of supervisors continued to be controlled by Republicans who are more in the mold of Richer—conservative, yes, but unwilling to go along with wild theories that the voting system is rigged.

[Read: The election deniers are winning]

In Arizona, the legislature assigns election responsibilities such as voter registration and early voting to county recorders. Other responsibilities, such as Election Day operations and tabulation, fall under the county boards of supervisors. In Maricopa County, the board’s elections department carries out many of those duties.

After taking office in January 2025, Heap terminated a power-sharing agreement that Richer had made with the previous board in the final months of their tenures—after his primary loss and before the November general election. That agreement transferred the recorder’s IT department—including personnel and about $4.5 million in funding—to the board’s control. Though the idea had been percolating well before Heap’s election, he argued it was punitive and disrupted his ability to carry out his duties. County supervisors sought to negotiate new terms, and Rachel Mitchell, the Republican county attorney, authorized two outside lawyers, including a former state Supreme Court justice, to help Heap negotiate a new agreement. Instead, Heap brought on America First Legal and, last summer, sued the board, which has a 4–1 Republican majority. Heap alleged that the board had illegally taken over IT staff, servers, databases, equipment, and key election functions, including maintaining ballot drop boxes during early voting.

On April 16, following a contentious trial, Heap largely won his case. The judge ruled that the board “acted unlawfully and exceeded its statutory authority by seizing the Recorder’s personnel, systems and equipment and refusing to return them to the Recorder’s control.” He concluded that the board must give those things back or fund a new system for Heap. The judge also found that certain election duties that the board had considered its own fell to the recorder instead.

The ruling complicated an already messy situation. With the recorder and board preparing for the start of early voting, which begins this week for a July 21 primary, the board and election staff said it was impossible on such a short time frame to untangle their complex procedures, implement new protocols, and train staff to fully comply with the judge’s order. An attorney who represents most of the board has warned that the recorder’s “burgeoning cyclone of chaos also threatens to envelop the voters.” The judge refused to pause, but on Thursday, the board won an appeal to stop the changes. In intervening, the appellate court said that the fight was “no mere backroom dispute over accounting principles or organizational charts. It is, by everyone’s assessment, a live conflict hurtling toward real-world consequences in elections about to begin.”

Arizona this fall has a competitive governor’s race, and two House contests that could help determine who controls the chamber. But the dispute over who gets to run the election shows no signs of clearing up anytime soon. In fact, it has only escalated. Heap’s America First lawyer recently threatened possible criminal prosecution of the supervisors and their election staff unless they fully comply with the judge’s order, which has been stayed. Heap has also asked that the board be punished with $100,000 daily fines (which taxpayers would pay, a county official told me). The board argues that a redistribution of election duties risks delays and confusion and envisions a nightmare scenario in which tabulation is conducted by two separate offices. The conflict has already chilled participation among poll workers who are declining to work the election because “they fear the Recorder’s threats of retribution,” the attorney who represents most of the board has said.

During a recent hearing, a judge ordered the two sides to try to work things out. “I know it would be a miracle,” the judge said. Heap on Friday asked the state supreme court to review the appeal court’s decision, and has said he is “fully committed to conducting a secure, orderly, and lawful election while this litigation continues.”

Even in the best of circumstances, pulling off elections is difficult. This one features a president with sagging poll numbers whose administration is determined to prove the 2020 vote was stolen, rising pressure on slow-moving courts to act as arbiters of democratic legitimacy, and a battle for control of Congress with implications for Trump’s agenda. Mix in local fights for control like the one in Maricopa, and it’s little wonder that election officials I speak with are fearful of a disaster.

Democrats’ Great Alaskan Hope

2026-06-22T07:00:00-04:00

Updated at 12:25 p.m. ET on June 24, 2026

The Democrat Mary Peltola has led in every public poll since she declared for the U.S. Senate election this year in Alaska, a state that Donald Trump won by double digits in 2024. A former U.S representative, Peltola is a culturally moderate mother of seven whose top issue is fish. Unlike the candidates dominating national headlines, she’s neither a social-media sensation nor a charismatic progressive. Most people outside Alaska have never heard of her. That’s a problem from a fundraising perspective—but an asset from an electoral one. If Peltola is a little boring, that’s exactly why she’s the Democrat most likely to flip a red-state Senate seat this year.

Peltola does not resemble a stereotypical Democratic politician. Both her biography and her political positions suggest someone attuned to the importance of environmental preservation—and to the simultaneous economic value of resource extraction. She has worked as a commercial fisher and a spokesperson for a gold-mining company, a job she quit after a different mining company spilled toxic waste into local waters. Peltola, who is Yup’ik on her mother’s side, then became a tribal lobbyist and worked at a tribal fishing commission. Fishing is a huge part of her political brand. Her campaign slogan in every federal race she has run in has been “Fish, family, freedom,” and one of her top policy goals is to enact stricter regulations, favored by small-scale fishers, on the use of dragnets by industrial fishing companies. At a time when even local races can easily get subsumed by national politics, this approach has helped Peltola come across as singularly focused on Alaska-specific issues—as she puts it, “Alaska first.”

[Elaine Godfrey: The Democratic base is ready to go]

In 2022, Peltola won two statewide elections: first in a special election to become Alaska’s at-large House representative, and then again by a larger margin that November, even as Republicans gained seats in the House. In 2024, when Kamala Harris lost Alaska by 13 points, Peltola lost her seat by fewer than three points.

During her two years in office, she followed a middle lane on mining and drilling. She pushed for the Biden administration to approve the Willow oil-drilling project in 2023, and when the same administration canceled oil and gas leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, she became the only Democratic sponsor of a bill to overturn the decision. But she opposed a Republican move to use the bill to remove environmental protections from part of the Bering Sea. She also urged the EPA to block a locally unpopular copper-mine-development project.

This middle lane has not satisfied everyone. After she signed an amicus brief endorsing a local gold-mine development, a tribal group opposed to the mine declared, “We elected Representative Peltola to represent us, and by signing this amicus brief, she is going against us.” The League of Conservation Voters, a powerful environmentalist group, maintains a list of her 14 “anti-environment votes” during her two years in Congress.

Peltola, who declined to be interviewed for this article, has taken moderate positions on other cultural issues. She has said she owns 176 long guns, and in her 2024 run, she became the first Democrat in four years to secure an NRA endorsement. (No Democrat has gotten one since.) And she was one of six Democrats to vote to condemn Joe Biden’s immigration policies.

Her independent image has, however, won the admiration of Alaska Republicans. When Don Young, the longtime Republican Alaska congressman, died in 2022, some of his staffers endorsed Peltola to replace him over former Governor Sarah Palin. So did Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski. (Peltola returned the favor, supporting Murkowski in that year’s Senate race.) John-Henry Heckendorn, an Alaska political consultant who helped recruit Peltola for federal office, told me that those are “the kind of odd-couple endorsements that really catch people’s attention.” When Palin lost the congressional race, even she couldn’t help being charmed by the experience, texting Peltola in the days after the election that she was “a real Alaskan chick. Beautiful and smart and tough.”

The caricature of a bipartisan centrist is someone who avoids controversy and bold ideas, standing helplessly athwart the people’s will for change. Peltola is not that. This cycle, her two campaign pillars are affordability and “fixing the rigged system.” In the latter category, she’s proposing term limits, a ban on members of Congress trading stocks, and a crackdown on waste and foreign influence. On the affordability side, she offers some ideas generally beloved by centrist intellectuals (permitting reform, a larger child tax credit, “right to repair” laws) alongside other, more economically irresponsible proposals that they’d dismiss as “slopulism,” such as eliminating taxes on Social Security and the first $92,000 of income. This combination—economic populism and cultural moderation—comes across to many voters as sensible. It also distinguishes Peltola from most would-be Democratic populists, who are reluctant to give an inch on progressive social-policy commitments.

All of these traits—her bipartisanship, her cultural moderation, her focus on local issues—come at a cost: Peltola gets less attention and fewer donations than other similarly situated Democratic Senate candidates. By Alaska standards, the nearly $9 million Peltola raised from January to March is a huge haul. But it’s minimal compared with the $40 million war chest that Texas’s James Talarico has built up, or with the more than $16 million that Maine’s Graham Platner has raised. Even Alexander Vindman, the star witness in Trump’s 2019 impeachment trial, has significantly outraised Peltola in small donations for his much unlikelier Senate candidacy in Florida.

Donors are different from the average voter, Raymond La Raja, a political scientist and co-author of a book about small-dollar donors, told me. “First and foremost, they’re partisans,” he said. Their ideal candidate is a doctrinaire progressive in a high-profile race who seems to “have a chance of beating Darth Vader.” Dan Sullivan, the incumbent Republican whom Peltola is challenging, has one of the lowest in-state approval ratings of any senator, but he’s basically unknown outside Alaska. And Peltola is anything but doctrinaire. “You don’t see people who are more moderate, or people who tend to just focus on policy, getting a lot of small donations,” La Raja said.

[Mark Leibovich: Democrats could use a cold shower before the midterms]

But Peltola’s relative fundraising disadvantage is really a symptom of her success at being the type of candidate who appeals to Alaska voters more than to national Democrats. She looks poised to pull off the upset. Public polls released in the past few months show her leading Sullivan by five to seven percentage points. Bettors on Kalshi and Polymarket believe that she has a higher than 60 percent chance of winning, better odds than Talarico in Texas, Sherrod Brown in Ohio, Joshua Turek in Iowa, and Vindman in Florida.

Alaska has some quirks that make a candidate like Peltola especially viable. Since 2022, the state has had open, nonpartisan primaries. The top four candidates advance to the general, which features ranked-choice voting. This design benefits a candidate with cross-partisan support. Because there is no partisan primary, Peltola doesn’t have to worry about being outflanked by a more left-wing candidate who appeals to the Democratic base. And the ranked-choice system is designed to benefit candidates who are acceptable to a majority of the electorate. In the 2022 general election that sent Peltola to Congress, the two Republican candidates combined for 59 percent of the first-choice vote, but so many voters ranked Peltola second that she still prevailed.

Still, Peltola’s past overperformance and current lead in the polls suggest that the big mystery of how to win over Trump voters is not such a mystery at all. Peltola is succeeding by catering to the deeply held views of the citizens of her state—not just the ones in her party.

This article originally stated that Mary Peltola's former employer had spilled toxic waste into Alaskan waters. In fact, a different mining company was involved in that spill.

Science Has a Name for What’s Plaguing the Reflecting Pool

2026-06-19T15:50:00-04:00

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Donald Trump has a new nemesis, with a name worthy of a supervillain: Scenedesmus.

The Reflecting Pool on the National Mall has become the country’s most high-profile science experiment, with workers battling against nature. After a week of combat, they have essentially killed off one type of algae infesting the pool, only to create the conditions for a new type to take over. And Scenedesmus, a genus of green algae nicknamed “Skinny Dead Mouse” by scientists, is now flourishing, according to testing that was run at the request of The Atlantic.

The pool, at the moment, looks like a strange bit of modern art. As workers treat different sections, the areas where they succeed in reducing the algae turn lighter shades of green. In some places, the water is relatively clear. In others, it’s an oily sludge. A quick glance, though, is enough to confirm that this is not the American-flag blue it was supposed to be.

Over the past few days, I’ve seen baby ducks swim through the pool; National Park Service workers wading around as they try to clean it; small children bending over to touch it. But none of the NPS workers at the site have been able to definitively tell me whether despite all of the algae—some species of which can be toxic—the water remains safe.

A spokesperson at the Department of Interior told me “there is ongoing water testing happening,” but would not disclose the results of those tests. Requests to spokespeople at the NPS have gone unanswered. I have been in touch with scientists who have applied for permits to get into the pool and conduct their own tests, but those permits have yet to be granted.

With the lack of transparency from the federal government and no clarity on what’s inside that murky water, I decided to dig—or dip—a little deeper myself. So late on Thursday morning, I filled several water bottles from different areas of the pool. Some were fairly clear, while other samples were dark green. My samples were delivered to two different scientists by that evening.

Algae from the Reflecting Pool seen under a microscope (Courtesy of Greg Boyer)

When algae first began to flourish in the Reflecting Pool, it appeared to be a blue-green cyanobacterial bloom that had taken over. Photos showed the kind of greenish surface film that can be indicative of that algae, which in some instances may produce neurotoxins harmful to people and pets. When Hans W. Paerl, a professor of marine and environmental sciences at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, opened the bottle of one of the samples I collected, he detected the distinctive earthy scents reminiscent of other cyanobacterial blooms he’d previously smelled. Under the microscope, he could see remnants of the previous bloom, but they were too degraded to identify. He attributed this, in part, to the endless jugs of hydrogen peroxide that workers had dumped into the pool to kill off the algae. “The guys dealing with peroxide treatment can pat themselves on the back,” he told me. “But it doesn’t really solve the overall problem.”

In fact, it’s created a new problem: The green algae, perhaps in the absence of the blue-green algae, are absolutely flourishing. “It is a pretty aggressive grower,” Paerl said. “What’s happened is they’ve just switched the players. And the green algae are just taking over.”

“I’ve never seen it bloom quite this thick,” Greg Boyer, a professor emeritus of biochemistry at the State University of New York, who analyzed our other samples, told me.

Read: What color is the Reflecting Pool? An investigation.

Boyer ran additional tests that determined there was little to no blue-green algae in the samples, making it highly unlikely to be toxic. That is to be expected, he said, at least for the moment. “This is peak season for green algae,” he said. “We’re pretty early in the season for blue-green algae.” In the next few weeks, by late July, that could change.

The treatments that NPS is now using to combat the bloom—hydrogen peroxide and nanobubble technology—are more effective at fighting blue-green algae. The green algae that are growing now, both Boyer and Paerl told me, are not likely to be discouraged by those methods, and so far they are proving to be resilient. Boyer was able to run tests to determine the current health of the algae. “They are stressed, but they are definitely not dead,” he said. “If I was going to design a facility to grow algae, I would probably design a facility that had a lot of surface area and was very shallow, so you have sunlight down to the bottom. And put a lot of nutrients in it. And that’s pretty much what the Reflecting Pool is. It’s just a perfect facility for growing algae.” The decision to paint the bottom a deep shade of blue, scientists have told me, raised the water temperature and accelerated the growth.

Bottom line? “The water will probably remain green for the foreseeable future,” Paerl said.

For the past week, workers at the Reflecting Pool have attempted to vacuum algae from the bottom, with hoses connected to the vacuums pumping water down nearby drains. The work, apparently, has become something of an emergency, with an email going out to NPS employees asking for volunteers to work 12-hour shifts and help pump out the algae as part of “critical pre-July 4th operational needs.” The email, which was reported by MeidasTouch Network, referred to the operation as a “regional and national priority.”

[Read: Inside America’s ugly birthday battle]

Yesterday evening, I saw several people in the center of the pool. They were dressed in the D.C. office uniform of khakis and a dress shirt, wearing waders as they vacuumed. As one of them ended a shift, handing his equipment back to NPS workers, he said he was “just doing my part.”

But another problem has also emerged: The sealant at the bottom of the pool, which was the bulk of the $16.4 million renovation project, is beginning to peel off. By yesterday evening, a whole chunk was gone. Tourists and locals were converging on the site where Martin Luther King Jr. spoke and where protesters denounced the Vietnam War, just to catch a glimpse of the wayward sealant—or perhaps even a souvenir.

“Taking a piece of paint is like taking a piece of the Berlin Wall,” one cyclist passing by told me. “It’s a piece of history.”

The Democratic Base Is Angry

2026-06-18T11:00:00-04:00

Perhaps I should’ve expected the meeting to devolve into chaos. It was predictable, especially if you subscribe to the essential maxim that any room containing several dozen women of a certain age and Summer Shandy on tap is bound to get a little rowdy. Unfortunately, the chair of the Ohio Democrats did not see it coming.

Kathleen Clyde, the state party leader, was standing on a small stage at a bar in the Cleveland suburbs, having just finished delivering what was supposed to be a stirring call to action to a group of local Democratic activists. Her tone, however, had not conveyed any particular sense of passion about the upcoming midterms. The ladies in the audience did not seem impressed. And now—oh, no—it was time for questions.

“What are we going to do differently?” one woman asked, pointing out that the Democrats’ brand is terrible. Eventually, the microphone was abandoned, and another woman asked: “Why don’t the Democrats have a good message?” A third woman chimed in, a little frantically: “What can we do?!”

Clyde’s eyes were wide. She hadn’t expected friendly fire. “We do have a good message!” she sputtered. “Affordability!” But the women smelled weakness, and now, several of them were shouting at once. “How are you going to do that?” one demanded. “It has to be more specific!” From the back, an older woman offered: “We need smart!” Clyde assured the group that the party’s message was smart, and it was going to resonate in November. But moments later, she was off the stage and hightailing it back to Columbus.

Afterward, one of the attendees joked in a group chat that she had witnessed a murder. Actually, what she’d witnessed was a tidy encapsulation of the broader tension at play in her party: Ahead of the midterms, the base is raring to go. But it’s also demanding a reckoning from its highest ranks that hasn’t come. “The party needs to be able to answer tough questions,” Susan Polakoff Shaw, a leader of the group at the bar, told me. “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.”

It’s a dynamic that has some Democrats chewing their cuticles, despite a fairly promising political landscape for their party. These Democrats expect, of course, that many of their candidates will perform well in November. But they worry that victory will paint a too-cheery gloss over the party’s bigger issues—and prolong the time it takes to solve them.

Let’s back up. The women at that Ohio bar were veterans of political activism. They launched GRR, short for Grass Roots Resistance, roughly a week after Donald Trump won his first election, one of hundreds of activist groups to do so. In 2020, I wrote about the women’s evolution from passive or occasional voters to active party organizers. GRR helped flip a state House seat from red to blue, the only such success in Ohio that year.

In the past decade, GRR has ballooned from a dozen women to more than 200, and is now large enough to fill a party room at the back of a suburban bar. One GRR member I interviewed in 2020, who was then leading a school-levy campaign, is now president of the local school board. At each GRR meeting, there is a table for new-member sign-up sheets, a table for the petition du jour, and a table for snacks. Attendees show up half an hour early for “W(h)ine time,” an opportunity to vent about the latest affront to democracy from Trump or state Republicans. Newcomers receive a button that reads I survived my 1st GRR meeting, and it won’t be my last! and introduce themselves onstage in a ritual known as the “GRRgin Sacrifice.” At the meeting where Clyde spoke, eight new GRRgins were initiated.

Right now, the group is campaigning for one of its longtime members, who is running for the state House. The women are also volunteering for Sherrod Brown’s U.S. Senate bid and for Amy Acton, who is running for Ohio governor. Next month, group leaders will unveil GRR’s week-by-week plan of action for the midterms. Enthusiasm inside GRR has never been higher. “This year feels like 2018 on steroids,” Shaw said.

[Read: Sherrod Brown is grinding it out]

But GRR is not unique. Across America, the Democrats’ cup runneth over with activist spirit. Indivisible, the national network of activist groups, says that it now has about 2,800 confirmed active chapters—more than double what it had before the 2024 election. The number of people getting involved during Trump’s second term as president “is dramatically higher” than it was in his first, Leah Greenberg, a co-founder of the group, told me. Similarly, about 80,000 people signed up to run for office through Run for Something in 2025, more than the number who did during the entirety of Trump’s first term, the group told me. Red, Wine & Blue, a group that launched in 2019 to activate swing voters in the suburbs, has welcomed 200,000 new members after Trump’s second inauguration—a faster rate of growth than in either the 2020 or 2022 cycles. Organizers of the third “No Kings” protest, held in March, say they had 8 million participants, which would make it the largest single-day protest in American history.

But the tenor of all of this grassroots activism is angrier and more desperate than it was in 2018, the last time a midterm election was held while Trump was in the White House. “In 2018, there was a top-down resistance,” Amanda Litman, the executive director of Run for Something, told me. “That hasn’t felt true this time.” Instead, the base has led the way. And base voters are furious—partly at Trump, but also at their own leaders.

Impatience is growing among volunteers and donors “about the cultural sclerosis” inside Democratic organizations, Yasmin Radjy, the executive director of the progressive group Swing Left, told me. “The question we hear over and over is, What are Democrats doing differently than in 2024 to make sure we win?”

This is, of course, the million-dollar question—and there has been no genuine institutional attempt to answer it. Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin has demonstrated an almost impressive inability to reassure and reinvigorate his party after its devastating losses in the 2024 election. Only after a sustained bullying campaign led, in part, by the Pod Save America hosts did Martin release the promised 2024 autopsy. The result? A half-finished report with few clear conclusions.

[From the March issue: The Democrats aren’t built for this]

There are other, more existential items that Democrats have yet to address. The first is their brand, which multiple party strategists described to me as “in the toilet.” A poll from earlier this year presented Democrats with the discomfiting revelation that among the American public, their party is more popular than Iran—but less popular than AI. Another challenge facing Democrats is that their leaders are reviled but, for some reason, still sticking around. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, for example, is poised to return as majority leader if Democrats win back the Senate, even though he is more passionately disliked than Trump, according to some polling.

Still, the consensus at the moment suggests that things are going to go pretty well for Democrats in November. They will probably win back the House. If they’re lucky in Ohio, North Carolina, Maine, and Alaska, they might even win back the Senate. But none of those wins can be attributed to some new, inspiring message—or to the party having undergone some fundamental evolution. Victory is expected, mainly, because the alternative is worse: Trump is a historically unpopular president who has embroiled the country in a new Middle Eastern conflict, the results of which are rising costs and, for many, a general sense of precariousness.

“Are we gonna win a bunch of seats in November? Yes. Do we have the enthusiasm to carry that forward into ’28? Yes,” Kelly Dietrich, the founder of the National Democratic Training Committee, told me. “Do we have the infrastructure we need to do that? No.” Dietrich has proposed a “Democratic Innovation Fund” for investing in state and local elections even in off-year election cycles. He also points to conservative groups such as Turning Point USA and the Leadership Institute as models for building trust and the party’s volunteer base beyond the federal level. If Democrats invested in similar “long-term brand-building outside the party,” he said, “people would understand who we are.”

[Read: My disorienting weekend with the women of Turning Point]

Last year, Radjy’s group, Swing Left, started its own brand-building operation called Ground Truth, a year-round canvassing program that uses AI to summarize and transmit voter concerns back to the party. The excitement about the midterms is wonderful, Radjy told me. But “we need to ask ourselves: Are we building something durable, or is it all a house of sand?” she said. “Are we going to wake up in June 2027 and say, Oh shit, now we gotta go build this stuff?”

When I reached out to Clyde, the Ohio Democrats chair, to ask about her experience at the GRR meeting, and about what specific lessons Democrats have learned since 2024, her office sent back a statement that did not directly address any of my questions. “Ohio Democrats are laser-focused on lowering costs, protecting Ohioans’ freedoms, and getting our state and country back on track,” the statement attributed to Clyde stated. “Ohioans of all political backgrounds are getting involved with our Democratic candidates because of the strength of their winning message.”

There was more, but none of it acknowledged the Democrats’ broader problems—or any of the related concerns that the ladies of GRR had brought up at the meeting. When I texted Shaw to ask what she made of Clyde’s response, she replied immediately with a GIF of Liz Lemon rolling her eyes.

What Color Is the Reflecting Pool? An Investigation.

2026-06-17T15:30:00-04:00

Workers on the National Mall, desperate to turn the Reflecting Pool to President Trump’s preferred shade of blue, poured jug after jug of hydrogen peroxide into the water yesterday morning. As they did so, members of the National Guard, deployed to clean up crime, looked on. The water, at that moment, matched their mossy-green fatigues.

The Reflecting Pool now evokes the joy of a Green Bay Packers victory. Or a high-school prank. Or St. Patrick’s Day in Chicago. It most certainly is not the gleaming American-flag blue that Trump’s repainting of the pool was supposed to produce. That project—the one that cost taxpayers at least $16.4 million and came with a nanobubbling system that promised to kill off algae growth—is hidden under 18 to 30 inches of swamp water dense with scraggly plumes of algae.

“Yeah, it’s gross!” said one woman passing by.

“Quite green,” remarked another.

A woman visiting from Fort Worth, Texas, told me she just hopes it’s fixed in time for America’s 250th birthday, on July 4: “We came and expected it to be blue, and we’re like, What is all this green junk in there?”

It’s a question that has ignited internet memes and conspiracy theories, posing the latest political Rorschach test to a divided nation. A not insignificant number of federal workers have now been mobilized to fight the green junk and answer questions about whether the green junk is under control. After the morning doses of hydrogen peroxide came the midday deployment of half a dozen National Park Service workers in bright-yellow vests, many with long-poled contraptions that they swept through the water. “Is that … a vacuum?” a passing man wondered aloud. Yes, he was told. It is a vacuum.

By evening, the situation had escalated: Workers strapped on waders, grabbed handfuls of tubing, and got in the pool. Generators hummed; water pumped; workers scraped. By dusk, some areas—though by no means all—had transformed to a hopeful shade of teal. Aerial views, as some noted, made it look like a painting by the abstract artist Mark Rothko.

So it’s come to this: A nation launched on the Founding Fathers’ grand dreams about democracy—one that survived a civil war and foreign attacks, that endured depressions and recessions and assassinations—is celebrating its semiquincentennial by watching to see whether we can clean the water in a century-old concrete pool. Even a stone-faced Abraham Lincoln is looking on.

Trump’s second term has been all about attempting tasks big and small that presidents before him failed to accomplish—or never thought of in the first place. That includes his pledge to freshen the water in the Reflecting Pool, an issue that has bedeviled administrations for decades. In April, he announced a solution: a swimming-pool liner. A blue one. To complete the project before July 4, 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. “This was highly sophisticated material, industrial strength, that could last for 100 years, applied by very talented people,” Trump explained on Truth Social on June 5. “The material is thick, strong, flexible, and has a natural, beautiful color, the dark blue of the American Flag!”

But it didn’t take long for the algae to reappear.

[Read: Inside America’s ugly birthday battle]

The cloudiness of the pool has triggered a predictable descent into polarizing politics: Some Trump supporters have claimed that the water isn’t actually green, and others have suggested there’s some outside force trying to undermine the pool renovation—and, by extension, Trump himself. Fox News dispatched the producer Johnny Belisario to the National Mall to interview tourists and mock anyone critical of the project. “And the Democrats, they’re going to tell you, Oh, there’s green algae; it looks soooo bad,” he said. “But there’s pool guys cleaning it up right now. No other president would do that.”

Grant Stinchfield, a conservative host on the Real America’s Voice network, made his own trip to the pool and concluded that the water was, in fact, green—but he found that fact suspicious and decided to do some investigating. He interviewed a woman who noticed that the water at the nearby World War II memorial was fine. “I feel like it’s sabotage!” Stinchfield concluded. “Is it nefarious? I tend to think so. You wouldn’t have so much algae that you see in here—you would not have that that quickly unless somebody did something. I’m telling you! I think they want Trump to fail so badly that they’ll come out here and do anything.”

I took it upon myself to clear up any murkiness by speaking with some of the country’s foremost experts on algae. They were in universal agreement: There’s no conspiracy. All of this was utterly predictable. Trump undertook this transformation during the hottest part of the year, when algae flourish, and he made the cement dark blue, which retains even more heat, turning the shallow pool into an algae incubator.

“Algae, particularly blue-green algae, like it hot. So this time of year is their optimal growth period. It’s sort of Biology 101,” Hans Paerl, a professor of marine and environmental sciences at the University of North Carolina, told me. “This is not rocket science.” Don Anderson, the director of the U.S. National Office for Harmful Algal Blooms at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, told me that the shallow water in warm weather created the perfect conditions for algae to flourish, and he’s baffled why no one appeared to anticipate that, either by using water with fewer of the nutrients that help algae grow, or by sealing the system to prevent residual algae from seeping back into the pool. “This is a pretty simple system to control,” he said. “It’s the same idea as keeping a swimming pool clean, but it’s much larger.”

It would have been better to do a project like this one in the fall or winter. As it is, Paerl said he was doubtful that the situation could be reversed. Hydrogen peroxide is one option, he said, but it is expensive to use effectively in a 4-million-gallon pool. In warm weather, multiple applications and enormous quantities may be required. Climate change, he noted, has made these problems only more acute.

[Read: Donald Trump’s paint jobs]

“I think we’re just going to have to appreciate that it’s green right now,” he told me. “And it’ll turn blue later. And hopefully the algae blooming in there are not toxic.” Oh yes, there’s a chance this situation gets even worse. The experts I spoke with were uncertain what species of algae has been growing in the pool but warned that some could be harmful to pets and other animals if they drink it, especially when it’s laced with hydrogen peroxide. And that hydrogen peroxide? It may be killing the algae, causing them to release pigments that make the water more blue, but not without side effects. “When you get dead algae in water, there’s lots of other problems. It can get stinky,” Paerl told me. “It sounds like a horror story that never ends. But it will, in the winter, when the water cools.”

Again, all of this was avoidable, Wayne Carmichael, a professor emeritus of biological sciences at Wright State University, told me. “The rush to get it done combined with not using a company that understood pool-water management, plus a serious injection of political hubris, allowed the bloom to happen,” he said.

The stink over the Reflecting Pool happens to coincide with a congressional fight over reauthorization of the Harmful Algal Bloom and Hypoxia Research and Control Act. (Yes, really.) Some scientists hope they can use the new petri dish on the Mall as part of their lobbying campaign, but concern is also simmering that the fight against the kind of algae that can harm drinking water, fisheries, and tourism—a topic that has enjoyed bipartisan support—may now enter the political vortex.

No one wants to take responsibility for this money-sucking algae bloom. Eddie Wood—an owner of Atlantic Industrial Coatings, which was paid $14.7 million to line the pool—told me his company is not at fault because they were “only responsible for the installation of a waterproof liner.” Representatives from Green Water Solutions—that is the actual name of the company—which provided the $1.7 million nanobubbling system, did not respond to requests for comment. That system is supposed to inject nanobubbles containing the powerful oxidant ozone that can kill algae and break down the organic material they have produced, including their toxins. One of the experts, Anderson, told me that the product can be effective but isn’t in all situations, making this particular project “a very expensive trial.”

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The Department of Interior blamed the Obama administration for an earlier renovation “that resulted in massive algae clumps taking over the pool’s surface following years of construction that cost taxpayers millions upon millions, only to be broken and disgusting days later.” In a lengthy response to my questions, the department’s press team stated that the National Park Service is properly maintaining the Reflecting Pool. “Due to deploying the advanced nanobubbler technology, the algae is dead and being vacuumed up as we speak,” they wrote in a statement. “We thank President Trump for fixing the Reflecting Pool for good.”

Taylor Rogers, a White House spokesperson, said that the new lining “will permanently seal the Reflecting Pool, which previously leaked 16 million gallons per year and wasted countless taxpayer dollars.” Given some time, Rogers suggested, the color will improve: “A high-tech nanobubble ozone technology will be deployed to kill the algae and keep the Reflecting Pool crystal clear.”

Steve Padler, a Washington local who was watching the cleanup operation, told me he empathized with a problem that has vexed several presidents. But he’s frustrated that the Trump administration spent such an “absurd” amount of money trying to find a quick fix to a problem not so easily solved. “It looks like it did before,” he said. “It’s green.”

One of the workers vacuuming the water yesterday told me that he thought their efforts were having an impact, having noticed a difference in the small corner he was working on. Aerial views showed some progress along the edges of the pool, and Reuters launched a livestream for those wanting to watch in real time. Meanwhile, tourists as well as locals are now coming to check out the latest Washington attraction, which reflects not the majesty of the Mall but something more humbling: how clumps of aquatic plant matter foiled the wishes of the most powerful man in the world. And how the president who said he’d drain the swamp has instead created the conditions for a new one.

The Conversions of J. D. Vance

2026-06-15T12:01:00-04:00

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Driving back to his Marine Corps base in North Carolina alone after attending his grandmother’s funeral, a despondent J. D. Vance was steering through Virginia’s Appalachian Mountains when a combination of slippery roads and bad luck sent his car hurtling toward a guardrail. What came next, he describes as an almost “supernatural experience.” Instead of crashing through the guardrail and sliding off the mountain, the car, he says, mysteriously stopped.

“Even during my later years as a strident atheist, the experience sat there inconveniently in the back of my mind,” Vance writes in his new book, Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith. “It was as if it existed to annoy me, to challenge the confidence I had in the laws of the universe and the idea that I sat firmly—and alone—in life’s driver’s seat.”

Communion, a copy of which I obtained in advance of its release tomorrow, reads as a sequel to Vance’s first book, Hillbilly Elegy. It is billed as a conversion narrative, a reflection on Vance’s 2019 embrace of Catholicism. In an interview, Vance told me that he believes it is appropriate for political leaders “to talk about what influences them, what motivates them, what inspires them.” He added that there is a certain “humility and grace” required of political leaders and said it was his aim to project those things in the book.

A memoir is a rite of passage for anyone contemplating a run for president. Vance’s first book catapulted him to prominence with its portrait of working-class white America. In the decade since it was published, however, much has changed—both for the country and for Vance.

Communion also tells the story of Vance’s other conversion: from ardent Never Trumper to Donald Trump’s vice president, a shift that he argues was driven not by ambition but by the belief that Trump had proved himself an effective president. Not that he expects everyone to believe that. “To my critics, it was a politically cynical maneuver to gain political power. I doubt I’ll ever change their minds,” he writes.

Much of the book is a rumination on matters ethical and spiritual—a perhaps not-so-subtle way to show how he’s different from the man currently in the White House, whose office Vance is widely expected to seek two years from now. Although the book doesn’t directly address whether the vice president intends to run in 2028, it offers some clues, including a notably softer tone than Vance has frequently employed when doing digital battle with opponents on social media. And the man whom White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles dubbed a “conspiracy theorist” is not much in evidence.

But Vance does venture beyond his own faith journey to offer commentary on the spiritual health of the country, much of it in line with diagnoses popular among the religious right. He describes America as a nation that has lost its Christian foundations, and he calls Christianity “America’s creed” while allowing that one doesn’t have to be Christian to be an American. Both political parties, he writes, are “guilty of casting aside the Christian inheritance of our civilization.” This, he adds, has had an impact on issues such as marriage rates and population: “Our abandonment of Christian culture has coincided with an apparent decline in our collective will to live.”

I told him that I noticed a tonal difference between what he writes in the book and what he’s projected to the world, especially in some of his hyper-partisan posts on social media. Even compared with the first book, he curses less in this one. Vance told me he’s trying to reduce his use of profanity. Is that, I asked, an effort to appeal to a broader group of voters? “I definitely curse like a sailor,” he responded, sidestepping the question while noting that his habit is not ideal with young kids at home and a wife who’d prefer fewer obscenities. “I’ve tried to cut back on that.”

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The book traces Vance’s path from religious drift and skepticism of faith during his younger years to his eventual embrace of Catholicism. He writes of an upbringing in which faith was deep-rooted, but also untethered from the Church. “Our family attended church very rarely,” he writes. “Our faith was amorphous, tied to family and oral traditions and not to institutional orthodoxy.” Many of his foundational religious memories center on his grandmother, whom he calls Mamaw and who largely raised Vance. He describes her religion as unconventional. “She loved to say the f-word, and when she died she owned nineteen loaded handguns,” he writes of the woman who is at the heart of Hillbilly Elegy. “Mamaw’s God suited her: loving and forgiving, but tough, demanding, and possibly packing.”

At one point, Vance acknowledges that his grandmother believed abortion should be legal and felt that the government should stay out of a woman’s business—a striking contrast to his own self-described “100 percent pro-life” views, which have shifted in their specifics over time. Vance describes over the course of his childhood and adolescence bouncing among Pentecostal and Southern Baptist congregations, all of them broadly conservative. “I didn’t know then about the various theological differences between these churches,” he writes. “Nor did I know of the host of mainline Protestant denominations whose teachings aligned more closely with the American Left than the Right.”

Catholicism, he writes, was foreign to him, but its teachings, as he got older, began to engage him on an intellectual level “more than anything I’d seen in either the secular or religious worlds I’d previously operated in.” He also describes a “rich social tradition” of Catholicism, which fostered in him a deeper understanding about relationships with others, but also with himself. “This resonated with me,” he writes.

I was interested to know how he squares this concept of a Christian creed in America with the First Amendment guarantee of separation between Church and state. He pointed to the founding of the country, when many of the original colonies had officially established churches. “There was this recognition that public religion would have a significant role in public life,” Vance told me. “We just didn’t want Congress mandating or requiring religion, or really getting involved at the federal level in questions of faith.”

He insisted that Christian teachings can complement American life. He told me he also embraced the notion that “different people could come at different truths with some broad understanding, but also some disagreement. And that dynamism was, I think, very much part of the American founding too.”

After publishing Hillbilly Elegy in 2016, Vance writes, he found a “comfortable niche as a Trump skeptic.” He was criticizing Trump “from a conservative perspective while defending his voters,” he writes in Communion. (The account soft-pedals the extent of Vance’s discomfort with Trump, whom he referred to in 2016 as “reprehensible” and an “idiot” who could well become “America’s Hitler.” In a story 10 years ago for this magazine, Vance wrote that Trump was “cultural heroin.”) Vance explains his stance then in the context of “social rituals” of political commentary: “I was rewarded for saying bad things about Donald Trump even though my background and politics made me an odd fit for elite media culture.”

“Trump criticism,” he adds, “functioned as social immunity.”

But he noticed that his family and friends back in Ohio and Kentucky supported Trump overwhelmingly and were unbothered by his coarse approach to communication. Vance came to believe that he needed to focus less on the “stylistic element” of Trump and pay more attention to his policies. “Part of the reason the anti-Trump conservatives hated Donald Trump,” he says, revisiting comments he made to The New York Times, “was that he represented a threat to a way of doing things in this country that has been very good for them.” Vance voted for Trump in his losing 2020 bid.

[Read: The MAGA intellectual who prophesied a Queen Melania]

By the time Vance ran for Senate in 2022, he was fully on board with Trumpism, perpetuating the then-former president’s claims of a stolen election, downplaying the gravity of the January 6 attack on the Capitol, and claiming that Democrats had encouraged illegal immigration to grow their support base. With Trump’s backing, he won. He recalls being stunned two years later to make Trump’s vice-presidential shortlist, given that he was a white senator from a non-swing state, and describes enduring a somewhat jarring vetting process that scrutinized everything, including his marriage (“Have you cheated on your wife?” he says he was asked, in a conversation that included his wife).

Usha, his wife, is Hindu. But Vance credits her with propelling him on his journey back to Christianity, through her openness to exploring the world and challenging received ideas and teachings. There is, he writes, “at least a little irony in the fact that my non-Christian wife helped lead me back to my own Christian faith, and then made it possible for me to discuss the journey on paper. The Lord works in mysterious ways, indeed.”

Vance blends together his reflections on faith and politics in Communion, not least in his discussion of the Vatican, an institution with which Vance has been unafraid to tangle. He briefly mentions his meeting last year with Pope Francis, whom he says was more frail than he had expected. (Francis died a day after the meeting.) He also reflects on his conversation with Cardinal Pietro Parolin, who was then viewed as a favorite to be the next pope. He writes that he found the conversations “unsettling” because the Vatican’s criticism of the Trump administration’s immigration policies struck him as disconnected from the hard choices involved in governance. Vatican officials acknowledged America’s right to secure its borders while also urging humane treatment of migrants, but didn’t seem to Vance to recognize just how difficult it was to balance the two. “Here I was, the most senior Catholic in the United States government, and the Vatican seemed unwilling to move its moral guidance past the point of trite platitudes,” he writes.

The Vatican’s stance has become a more direct point of tension under Pope Leo XIV, the first American pontiff. Since his election in May, Leo has emerged as a sharp critic of the administration’s immigration policies and its approach to the war with Iran, prompting Vance to publicly defend the White House.

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At a Turning Point USA event at the University of Georgia in April, he admonished the pope to be “careful when he talks about matters of theology,” after the pope posted on social media that anyone who is a disciple of Christ “is never on the side of those who once wielded the sword and today drop bombs.” The pope’s comments were widely interpreted as criticism of the Iran war—a conflict that Trump launched despite his vice president’s reservations. Leo has also urged Catholics to heed U.S. bishops’ calls for a more humane approach to immigration, arguing that people who have spent years or decades building lives in America deserve to be treated with dignity.

In the book, Vance tries to reconcile his record on immigration—which has included spreading unverified rumors about immigrants in Ohio eating pets—with his Christian beliefs. “Real engagement with the immigration issue requires real engagement with the trade-offs. Law enforcement is an inherently difficult business,” he writes. “The difficulty is applying these principles in a messy world with competing values.”

In recent months, Trump’s once-impenetrable MAGA coalition has begun to show cracks, with divisions emerging over the Iran war and the Epstein files, among other things. I asked Vance if he feels well placed to bridge those divides, both as a possible Trump heir and as a onetime Never Trumper. His answer was carefully calibrated to avoid alienating Trump: “The president is the person most uniquely placed, obviously, as the leader of the party and the leader of the movement,” he told me.

If Vance runs in 2028, he’ll have to reckon with how he’s applied his principles during his service to Trump. Ingratiating himself with the man who has dominated Republican politics for the past decade once seemed an expedient political bet—but not anymore, as Trump’s popularity falters. The vice president will soon need to decide how loyal he can afford to be. His latest conversions may not be his last.

My Descent Into Mah-Jongg

2026-06-15T05:00:00-04:00

When my mom found out I was planning to travel to Dallas to play in a Lunar New Year mah-jongg tournament, she texted a reasonable query: “Don’t they require some level of competence?”

And yet, during the third week of February, I found myself first at a dazzling private home in Dallas, and then at a luxury hotel, sitting down with my more refined counterparts to play in a competition in the epicenter of the country’s American mah-jongg resurgence.

First, a bit about how I got here. One of my oldest friends, Catherine—who, like seemingly half of all women in my middle-aged-mom peer group, had suddenly become obsessed with the game—came over to visit one afternoon when I was back in my childhood home for a stretch last summer, helping my mom recover from surgery. Catherine brought her mah-jongg set, along with the promise that she’d teach us and we’d love it and it would be so much fun. Initially, it did not feel particularly fun; it felt like learning a confounding new language, with Chinese characters, complicated rules (and exceptions for every rule), and hard-to-recall new words: crak, pung, chow, bam (and birdbam, another name for one bam, and also an excuse for players drinking alcohol to clink glasses and take a sip). At one point, I realized my brow was actually furrowed, my hands were on my head, and I was having flashbacks to BC Calculus—brain fully engaged, answer still elusive.

“At some point,” Catherine assured us, with a sunniness I did not yet feel, “you’ll even be able to chat while you play.”

I wasn’t hooked, but I was intrigued. I liked the way the tiles—colorful and sleek, each the size of a chunky domino—looked and felt, slightly weighty in my hand. I liked how they clacked when I swirled them together or stacked them in neat rows. I liked that I hadn’t checked my phone—hadn’t been able to, such was the required concentration—as we played. And I liked the promise of the game: that if I put in the effort to learn the tiles and the language and customs and the rules, I could become privy to a subculture of sorts, an activity that connected me not only to my peers but to those who came before. I also realized that to get good, or even competent, I needed to play regularly and continue to be taught, and that is how I began my monthslong descent into the delightful rabbit hole that is mah-jongg.

In the stretch since Catherine gave me that first rudimentary lesson, I have played mah-jongg with one group that meets Tuesday afternoons in a small café in downtown Washington, D.C.; another that gets together Wednesday afternoons at a series of rotating locations; and yet another that plays Friday afternoons at the local Jewish community center; at a weekly mah-jongg night at a D.C. public library; at a fundraiser for my 7-year-old’s elementary school; in the kitchen of a mom’s home in my neighborhood; in the foyer of the home belonging to a woman I met through the Tuesday-afternoon group; in an airport bar with Catherine; with a group of college friends when we gathered at the home of one undergoing a particularly grueling regimen of chemotherapy; with Catherine and another childhood friend during a weekend getaway to Annapolis, Maryland; and at the office of a publicist I’d last talked to nearly two decades ago but whom I reconnected with once I learned she represents Oh My Mahjong, the company that hosted the Lunar New Year tournament. “That’s mah-jongg for you!” she said.

I have played American mah-jongg, Chinese classical mah-jongg, and various online versions. I have paid to play and played for free. I have played in casual games with fellow beginners, where lessons were part of the experience, and in more competitive games, where I struggled to keep pace. But what I found, almost everywhere I played, was an incredibly welcoming group of people. Unlike, say, joining a running club—where my postpartum body and slow pace would leave me self-conscious—I never once felt uncomfortable showing up solo to a group full of strangers and announcing, “I’m here to play mah-jongg.” The barrier to entry, I found, was almost always just an eagerness to learn. So I bought a $300 ticket for the tournament in Dallas, the equivalent of someone who has just discovered rec-league basketball deciding to show up at WNBA tryouts.

Mah-jongg has hit its loose sesquicentennial, and the game suddenly seems to be everywhere, all at once. Celebrities, too, have been gushing about the pastime. Meghan Markle featured her “Mahj squad” on an episode of her Netflix show, Amy Poehler spoke of her “Mah-jongg May” (presumably like Dry January, but more fun), and Kelly Ripa and Sarah Jessica Parker enthused about the game too. Blake Lively reportedly had her chauffeur bring her bespoke mah-jongg set to a long day of court during her suit against her former co-star Justin Baldoni. And when Oh My Mahjong hosted a suite at the Super Bowl this year for the players’ wives, the Patriots’ Drake Maye and Hunter Henry both stopped by to play. I was not entirely surprised, then, to see that designers have gotten in on the action, offering over-the-top sets ranging from $695 (Jonathan Adler) to $14,600 (Hermès). By contrast, a seemingly perpetually sold-out Costco set came in at roughly $100, and stores such as Target and Hobby Lobby offer sets for even cheaper.

I understood the appeal. The beguiling combination of strategy and luck. The state of flow, for a phone-free hour or two. The mental stimulation, not unlike jigsawing a puzzle or inking a crossword. The sensory delight of the tiles and colors. The excuse to gather, and sense of community, because four people are required to play (though you can improvise your way through games with three, or even play “Siamese mahj” with just two). The joy of a book club, without the stress of reading a book. But I also wondered: Why now?

Mah-jongg started sometime in the mid-to-late 1800s around Shanghai’s Yangtze Delta area—a part of China known for its rich history of game development—before slowly spreading to the country’s urban centers, where it gained popularity as a mostly male, mostly gambling pastime, according to Annelise Heinz, a historian at the University of Oregon. In the early 1900s, an American Standard Oil representative named Joseph Park Babcock became instrumental in introducing the game to other Americans living in China. Along with his wife and business partner, he kicked off mah-jongg’s U.S. debut with a massive advertising campaign in 1922. The game was so successful that by 1924, Congress passed a law that included a specific duty category for mah-jongg sets.

“It’s hard to overstate how big of a fad this was,” Heinz, the author of Mahjong: A Chinese Game and the Making of Modern American Culture, told me. Like most fads, mah-jongg slowly began to fade. It was still played in some pockets (in Chinese American communities, among the wives of Air Force officers), but its next resurgence did not come until the late ’30s, this one driven by a group of enterprising Jewish women. As Jewish families entered the middle class and began moving to the suburbs, Heinz told me, these women did not need to work outside the home, but they found themselves bored and isolated in their new communities, looking for ways to connect. So, in 1937, they founded the National Mah Jongg League—which still exists today and has become the unofficial governing body for American mah-jongg—and began tweaking the game, which came to include joker tiles and a changing card that players must purchase anew each year for $14 ($15 for large print).

Until recently, mah-jongg was mainly played by older Chinese Americans (both men and women) and Jewish women. But as I started dabbling in the game, and as my social-media feed mysteriously filled with mah-jongg content, I noticed what I began to think of as the Lilly Pulitzerization of mah-jongg. Or, put more bluntly, Bougie White Woman Mah-Jongg. I was flooded not just with images of mah-jongg mats and tips on how to best deploy my flower tiles (never pass them during the Charleston), but with mah-jongg luxury: beautiful tablescapes of bright pastels (dainty glasses of rosé alongside dusty rose tiles), sun-kissed tableaus of “AquaMahj” (floating mah-jongg tables in glinting private pools), offers to upscale mah-jongg retreats, and gauzy photo upon gauzy photo of jauntily dressed, gel-manicured—and, yes, almost always white—women playing mah-jongg. (I should note here that I am white, nominally Jewish, and also partial to gel manicures.)

Although all versions of mah-jongg use, broadly, the same set of tiles, and involve four players around a table forming sets and sequences to try to complete winning hands, variants of the games diverge significantly from there. Many Asian versions more closely resemble gin rummy, and the strategy rests in the much more elaborate scoring. In American mah-jongg, much of the real strategy comes before official play ever begins, when players engage in the “Charleston”—named after the Roaring ’20s energetic dance—by passing tiles around the table up to six times. This pregame swapping allows you to begin to make your hand, discarding tiles you don’t need, while simultaneously sussing out which tiles your opponents might be hoarding.

The American version of mah-jongg has prompted a backlash, especially against white-owned companies, whose tiles are sometimes unrecognizable to a traditional player familiar with the three main suits—craks (the Chinese characters for the numbers one through nine), bams (short for bamboo), and dots. Even more confusing, the American version’s popularity has spawned regional varieties; a “New England” set, for instance, has lobster buoys for dots, sailing boats for craks, and yes, lacrosse-stick and cranberry-bog jokers. When the game has changed so much that a longtime aficionado can’t simply sit down and play, then perhaps it is time to reconsider how we got to a moment where some people are claiming to have just discovered an amazing new game that Chinese people have been playing for nearly two centuries—and that, in fact, has already been appropriated at least once.

“It’s the capitalization of it. American mah-jongg is the Americanization of mah-jongg, because they’ve found a way to monetize it,” Tim Ma, the chef and owner of Lucky Danger, a Chinese restaurant in D.C., told me. (The game’s annually changing card and its required fee, Ma said, are “like Amazon Prime.”) Lucky Danger features a red-lantern-lit “hidden” mah-jongg parlor in the back, inspired by the illegal mah-jongg parlor in Jackie Chan’s Rush Hour 2. Ma, a Chinese and Taiwanese American, grew up playing Taiwanese mah-jongg, and along with his father—the elder Tim Ma—began hosting weekly lessons at his restaurant. As I sat with Ma at one of the self-shuffling mah-jongg tables in “Lucky Club,” his gaming den, he explained that he and his dad “are a bit of purists,” and personally teach only the Taiwanese and Chinese versions of the game.

Ma was surprised at how quickly their class offerings—which, at one point, included a partnership with a group providing American-mah-jongg lessons—became popular, initially with (again, mainly white) moms from the D.C. suburbs. Ma told me that his dad was born in China, lived through the Communist Revolution, and now “brings all of his Chinese trauma into his class.” “He says it in a nice way, but he says, like, ‘Why would you do that? Are you not smart?’” Ma said. “People think it’s endearing, but I’m like, Can you imagine growing up with this guy?”

Ma described how, when he and his friends play, they put down a bottle of bourbon and click-clack-click until 6 a.m., smoking and drinking and chatting, almost instantaneously calculating their odds and only occasionally glancing at their tiles, when it’s their turn to discard. He was amused to see how newbies played: “They’re only looking at their tiles and they just keep looking at them, and that’s all that happens,” he said.

Nicole Wong, the author of Mahjong: House Rules From Across the Asian Diaspora, grew up in Santa Monica, California, the daughter of New Zealand immigrants of Chinese descent. She came of age in the ’90s and aughts, when, she told me, being Asian was not considered cool, and she connected with her culture mainly through food. Then, the summer after she graduated college in 2009, Wong went to stay with her paternal grandparents in New Zealand, where they taught her the game. But house rules often differ by family or culture. When she went to a mah-jongg night with some Asian American friends a few years later, she was frustrated to realize that she didn’t understand their version of the game, nor her own well enough to teach it to them. And so the Mahjong Project was born, her effort to document her Chinese New Zealand family’s mah-jongg rules, which existed primarily as oral traditions, and to gather other variations from across the Asian diaspora.

Wong’s reason for learning was personal, but she offered me some theories for the current resurgence. She noted that in the wake of recent anti-Asian violence, younger Asian Americans, especially Gen Zers and Millennials, are eager to reconnect (or, in some cases, just connect) with a culture that they might not have fully appreciated or understood growing up. “What excites me the most about mah-jongg are the opportunities to meet new people, to sit down next to someone in their 70s and hear about their childhood memories of the game and therefore of their life,” she said.

And, like nearly everyone else I spoke with, she also mentioned Crazy Rich Asians, the wildly successful 2018 rom-com set in Singapore, which features a pivotal scene—a face-off between a would-be mother-in-law and daughter-in-law—at a mah-jongg parlor. Much like the mah-jongg scene in The Joy Luck Club more than two decades prior, the movie helped push mah-jongg back into popular culture. Following the coronavirus pandemic, Wong said, people were eager to leave their houses and connect with one another, and mah-jongg offered an affordable way to gather with existing friends or make new ones—at a time when this sort of connection was perhaps needed most. “You have to sit; you have to use your mouth to talk to people; you have to use your eyes to look at things—all those very basic human things that can feel woefully out of practice,” she said.

Ma grew up watching his family elders play, and was relegated to the kids’ table himself. Even now, he told me that he and his cousins—some of whom are in their 60s—have still not been promoted to the adult game. “As long as they have four old Chinese people, they play,” he said. “We still play at the kids’ table.”

But now, he explained, the Americanization of mah-jongg has opened the game to everyone—and ultimately, he thinks more mah-jongg is a good thing. Laughing, he assessed the current moment with both praise and insult. “It’s not like, Go sit at the kids’ table,” Ma told me. “Every table is the kids’ table now.”

When I traveled to Dallas for the tournament, I finally got a sense of the true cult of American mah-jongg, and how the other half—the mah-jongg one-percenters, if you will—live. On my first night in town, Catherine and I ended up at an event hosted by the Mahjong Country Club, a group of 200 people (with a waiting list double that) who pay $500 a year for membership and play once a week at the estate at which we found ourselves, among other locales. The club also offers small group trips to places such as Aspen, Colorado, and Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. On arrival, the organizers encouraged us to “shop the shed”—a converted pool house featuring mah-jongg sets, mah-jongg jewelry, and Goyard handbags.

The next morning, we met Megan Trottier, the Oh My Mahjong founder, at the company’s warehouse, where a neon sign read Modern twist to a timeless tradition. Trottier said she wants her tiles to be recognizable to people who have played for decades, but also “updated and funky.” Her line first took off in what I began to think of as the SEC belt—small southern towns and suburbs that have a culture of aspirational hostessing. (The brand has even begun throwing “Oh My Sisterhood” events at sorority houses, and is now the largest American mah-jongg company.) “A lot of our customers are returning customers,” Trottier said, explaining that these aficionados swap out their sets, like china or crystal, depending on the season or crowd. A starter kit, which includes tiles, a mat, pushers, and a storage bag starts at about $665. I splurged, spending more than $300 on a solo set of navy “Gatsby” tiles (“classic, refined, and effortlessly sophisticated”).

The actual tournament was the extravagant culmination of an already over-the-top whirlwind, with nearly every decoration a shade of pink—an Oh My Mahjong twist on the traditional red for the Lunar New Year. That included a giant Year-of-the-Horse horse that had been assembled in the middle of the bar. Outside, two women in shimmering magenta-fringed cowboy jackets sat astride actual horses, welcoming the players.

I chose a table with three moms slightly younger than me, and we started to play. They all played socially in Dallas, and two also played in a competitive league, but our actual tournament games—we made it through four—were surprisingly chill. In our first game, when one woman realized she was a tile short, we simply let her pick up a new one. And in our second game, when I first incorrectly called a four dot to complete a run of consecutive numbers (you can’t call a tile to complete a run, unless it’s to win mah-jongg) and then later incorrectly used a joker to complete a run and falsely declare “mah-jongg!,” no one cared and we just played on. We kept up a polite patter—“I want to convert my children’s room into a mahj room,” one said, to which the other cooed, “That would be so perfect”—and I somehow, confusingly, won my table but did not advance to the final round.

As others have observed, the game, at its core, requires you to attempt order from chaos. To play mah-jongg, at least the way I have mainly played it—occasionally with close friends, but more often with casual acquaintances and total strangers—also forces you to pause and focus on something outside of your own life, if only fleetingly.

That I was in Dallas at all continued to surprise me. About a week before the tournament, my dad, who had been sick with dementia for more than a decade, was unexpectedly moved to hospice care. He died on Valentine’s Day, two days before I was set to fly out. I debated what to do, but his memorial service wasn’t for nearly a week, Catherine and I had already bought tickets, and I rationalized that it would be a good distraction. Finding myself playing mah-jongg in Texas in the period between my dad’s death and his memorial was purely coincidental, but what was perhaps less of a coincidence was that I had first learned the game when my mom was recovering after surgery. I had needed a forced break from my daily routine—work, kids, life—before I could even begin to learn the game that helps people slow down.

Once I learned how to pause, I found myself able to breathe during those few days in Dallas. Tears still periodically plinked down my cheeks, and I did not totally abandon myself to the gods of the tiles. But the distance and the distraction, along with an old friend, offered a welcome respite. I thought of my hands (Would it be crazy to go for all winds?) and, just as easily, I thought of my dad. And then, in the days after I returned home, Catherine—mah-jongg set in tow—stopped by my mom’s house yet again, for another few games as we waited for my dad’s ashes to be returned to us.

The ‘Broken Veteran’ Excuse

2026-06-14T08:00:00-04:00

Graham Platner’s victory this week in Maine’s Democratic Senate primary would have been a stunning achievement for a political newcomer under any circumstances. What makes it truly remarkable is that Platner pulled this off despite a decades-long trail of questionable behavior: a Nazi tattoo; contemptible written statements about sexual-abuse victims, Black people, and women; admissions of past substance abuse and marital infidelity; allegations of demeaning, disturbing, and physically threatening behavior toward former girlfriends. (Platner has denied any physical intimidation or violence.)

Platner and his surrogates have rolled out a catch-all excuse, meant not only to clarify how he could have made so many bad decisions, but also to shame people who criticize him: Platner, a Marine Corps veteran, was dealing with the heavy emotional burden and mental toll of the wars this nation sent him to fight. It’s not his fault. And he’s a better person now.

But that argument—and I say this as a veteran of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars—is nonsense, a convenient answer intended to divert the conversation from legitimate questions about Platner’s many flaws. It plays on Americans’ sympathy for those who have fought in war and overplays the distinction between veterans and civilians. Whether this justification is used cynically or sincerely—or ignorantly—it is insulting to veterans. Many of them suffer from their time in combat but don’t engage in the kind of behavior that Platner has. And many of them—despite, or because of, their wartime experience—are among our nation’s most accomplished, ethical, hardworking, and patriotic citizens and leaders.

Let me put this as plainly as possible: I know quite literally hundreds of combat veterans, and the soldiers I fought with, to my knowledge, all somehow managed to avoid getting Nazi tattoos. It doesn’t take much effort to avoid being inked with an SS symbol.

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

Platner himself has said repeatedly that much of his bad behavior stemmed from his war experience. “I’ve been very up front since the beginning of this campaign that that was a pretty dark period of my life after I came back from my combat service,” he recently told MS NOW’s Chris Hayes, admitting to “not being a good boyfriend” and “self-medicating with alcohol.” He has spoken about having PTSD and, in an interview with The New York Times, described an incident in which his friend was badly injured when their vehicle got hit by an IED in Iraq. The morning after his primary win, Platner said that he had only started to feel like himself again in 2021, and added, “I wake up every single morning just trying to be a little bit better and a little bit kinder than the way I was before.”

His surrogates echo this defense, which plays into the dangerous and condescending stereotype of American veterans as broken people. Speaking at a Platner rally a few days before the primary, Representative Ro Khanna acknowledged that some of Platner’s past relationships were “toxic and volatile,” before pivoting to: “But we need to have an honest conversation in this country. We broke thousands of young men by sending them into dumb wars.” Senator Chris Van Hollen has defended Platner, saying, “Let’s take a couple issues, including the comments he’s made in the past. I mean, he’s been very clear that he went into combat on behalf of the United States. He went through a really rough period, PTSD-type period.”

According to this logic, Platner is not responsible for his own actions. The burdens he carries excuse things he has done over the course of two decades—in the military, after returning to civilian life, and apparently up until he decided to run for Senate.

Some of these defenses are well-intentioned. They suggest an admiration for the sacrifices that veterans have made. Perhaps some civilians feel unqualified to judge people who have served and who may well still experience the effects of their time overseas. The chasm between those who have been in combat and those who’ve only watched news of it is massive and growing: A smaller percentage of Americans served in the global War on Terror than in any other major war over the past century. This can lead some civilians to be overly deferential to veterans, who are, after all, human.

But showing respect to the point of refusing to judge someone’s questionable actions is a version of what George W. Bush called “the soft bigotry of low expectations.” Some Americans seem to view Afghanistan and Iraq veterans almost as an alien species, whose experiences cannot be understood and who therefore have a separate set of expectations. This attitude reduces an incredibly diverse group of individuals to the “broken veteran” cliché.

In some cases, Platner supporters who are veterans themselves have tried to lend credibility to this explanation. In a Substack essay published shortly before the primary, Daniel Barkhuff, the founder of Veterans for Responsible Leadership, a super PAC that endorsed Platner, wrote: “He said dumb things. He did dumb things.” Platner, Barkhuff added, seems to have “the sort of impulsive aggressiveness that is curated and encouraged in ground combat units where 99% of your problems can be solved by getting more violent and faster than the other guy. None of that is hidden, and none of it needs to be excused.” Barkhuff explained that he himself has used offensive language in online arguments. But that analogy doesn’t amount to much of a defense of Platner, whose troubling history goes well beyond a few bad words.

Platner and his supporters frequently talk about his personal story as one of redemption and recovery after his time at war. “Graham clearly made a mistake. What I appreciated about him is he owned that mistake. He took responsibility for it,” Representative Seth Moulton said in reference to Platner’s tattoo. But has he owned his mistakes? Although Platner claims that he didn’t know the significance of his Nazi Totenkopf tattoo, others have disputed this. His former campaign political director said that Platner “knows damn well what it means.” A former romantic partner, Lyndsey Fifield, told The New York Times that Platner had referred to the tattoo years ago as “my Totenkopf.” When Hayes asked Platner about a text in which Fifield referred to the “Nazi tattoo on his chest” before the tattoo became public, Platner responded, “Well, she certainly didn’t send that text to me.” His denial proved even more absurd when an unnamed second former romantic partner told The New York Post that she’d had a conversation with Platner about the tattoo and its Nazi meaning in 2021, and shared screenshots demonstrating her awareness of the tattoo prior to the public disclosure.

In reaction to a New York Times story in which Fifield alleged that Platner had grabbed her, pushed her, and twisted her arm, Platner denied not only that behavior but also that he and Fifield had ever dated, despite contemporaneous texts and social-media posts suggesting that they had been in a relationship. Platner’s campaign has also attacked Fifield, who has been active in conservative circles, as a political operative, though the Times found no evidence that Fifield was acting on Collins’s behalf. Part of redemption is accounting for one’s faults, and targeting the people who bear witness to those faults is not accountability—it’s defensiveness. When Morning Joe’s Mika Brzezinski recently asked Platner whether additional controversies might come out, Platner said, “There’s nothing out there that’s actually concerning. People will make everything seem very concerning.”

[Elizabeth Bruenig: Yet more damning revelations about Graham Platner]

I have seen veterans deal with the very real stresses of America’s long wars—physical wounds as well as psychological ones that linger after witnessing death and carnage, or coming close to it oneself. The separation from home, family, and social networks to deploy to high-stress and high-risk environments, repeated cyclically over the course of decades, took a toll on every veteran of the War-on-Terror generation—whether they deployed once or a dozen times, whether they were directly in harm’s way or far from the explosions. Many veterans have sunk into substance abuse or engaged in questionable personal behavior, and I can understand why. Some no doubt have felt the need to “cut loose,” and we shouldn’t be surprised that the kinds of people who sign up to exit an aircraft mid-flight might also have a high risk tolerance in their personal lives.

But even if Platner’s pattern of behavior isn’t unique, that doesn’t mean it’s representative of the experiences or choices of the great majority of people who have served. And if all veterans who have suffered or stumbled deserve help and treatment, that doesn’t mean their hardship is a blanket excuse for immoral behavior. Everyone is responsible for the choices they make. That’s a lesson we learn in the military.

Anyone who claims that this kind of baggage is the cost of getting “regular” people—and specifically veterans—to run for office doesn’t realize how smug and out of touch that claim is. This argument implies that veterans are all a bunch of drunks with a history of contemptible beliefs and actions. We can’t claim to pay tribute to veterans while holding them to such low standards. This logic also ignores the many veterans who have entered public life without such questionable pasts.

Veterans are a part of American society, and many will continue to run for public office. But their status as veterans, though an important component of their story, should never excuse decisions they have made. Nor should veteran candidates use their service as automatic proof of their worthiness for office. If a candidate wishes to make his wartime service an essential part of why voters should select him, then he should highlight the traits he wishes to bring to the office, not dismiss the traits he wishes them to ignore.

Thank You for Your Attention to This Birthday

2026-06-12T05:00:00-04:00

Donald Trump is old. The president turns 80 on Sunday, becoming the second man to mark that milestone birthday in office. The other, of course, was his predecessor, Joe Biden. Neither particularly likes to be reminded of his age, and both have had White House aides furiously try to stymie any attempts to question their fitness for office. But that’s about where the similarities end when it comes to how each man prepared to ring in his ninth decade.

Biden said little about his 80th as it approached, in November 2022, as if wishing to avoid contributing to the debate over whether he was too old to seek reelection. He stayed out of sight and quietly marked the occasion with an understated brunch that fell between his granddaughter’s wedding and a Thanksgiving trip to Nantucket. Trump, however, is building an illuminated octagon with a 92-foot-tall portable-canopy stage, known as the “Claw,” on the White House South Lawn, where he and thousands of spectators will watch half-naked men brutally assault each other. To each their own, I guess.

Trump’s fight night is not solely for his birthday; it’s part of several weeks of events in Washington, D.C., to mark the nation’s 250th anniversary—and, hey, it’s also Flag Day. But it’s mostly about celebrating Trump, who first suggested staging a UFC fight at the White House not long after he won the 2024 election. The White House soon connected the fight with the birthdays of Trump and the nation. The more than $60 million event is so Trump; he is fond of over-the-top spectacles, he’s pals with UFC President and CEO Dana White, and he has attended multiple mixed martial arts fights across his two terms (I was in the press pool covering one in 2019 when a fighter got knocked unconscious right in front of us).

[Read: Inside America’s ugly birthday battle]

He’s certainly getting a spectacle. The Claw towers over the executive mansion and has clear sight lines to the Washington Monument. It’s lit up in patriotic red, white, and blue, and sometimes blasts Vegas-nightclub-style spotlights into the sky. The bleachers can seat 4,300 people for seven fights on Sunday night. A few of the fighters may even enter the octagon from the Oval Office. For some, this is Trump’s latest assault on the character and history of “the People’s House,” following the destruction of the East Wing for a proposed ballroom and the paving-over of the Rose Garden for a dinner patio. Last week, Trump compared the Claw to the Eiffel Tower and joked (I think?) that, just like the Paris landmark, the stage could be a temporary attraction turned permanent part of his ongoing effort to remake Washington in his image.

Although it’s unlikely that Trump will publicly dwell on his advancing age, he’s certainly not hiding from his birthday. This is all part of an in-your-face presidency, one meant to dominate and overwhelm, to blot out the sun. Prices are high, the Iran war is not going well, Republicans are panicking over November’s midterms, and polls show that a majority of Americans believe that the president’s priorities are misplaced. But Trump doesn’t care. He is simply doing what he wants, which is to be the center of all things, political consequences be damned.

The president has told confidants that he has become more aware of his mortality since he was nearly assassinated in Butler, Pennsylvania, two summers ago. His first term seems downright docile compared with the frenetic pace at which he is conducting Trump 2.0. A longtime Trump friend told me, on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations, that the president “can hear the clock ticking.” Trump knows that term limits will end his time in office, the friend explained, but the president “can read an actuarial table too.” Trump’s parents lived until they were 93 (his dad) and 88 (his mom). Questions have begun to swirl about Trump’s own health, focused on his bruised hands and swollen ankles and penchant for dozing off in front of the White House press pool. Whatever the motivation, Trump seems focused on cramming in as much as he can as quickly as he can—and racing to accumulate presidential power and wealth for himself and his family.

[Read: The YOLO presidency]

Trump has cut back on domestic travel, he is doing little to campaign for fellow Republicans, and he barely made an effort to sell this Congress’s signature piece of legislation, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, to the country. He holds fewer rallies than he once did, causing him to lose connection with his supporters while he surrounds himself with sycophants and rich friends. When he does leave the White House, in most cases it’s to go to one of his own clubs or a luxury box at a sporting event. (On Monday, he showed up at Madison Square Garden for an NBA Finals game and was blamed by some for ending the New York Knicks’ 13-game winning streak. When he skipped Wednesday’s game, the Knicks responded with a record-setting comeback win.) Trump has become obsessed with seeking vengeance against his political foes and has abandoned his promise to bring prices down, even mocking the nation’s affordability crisis. Many midterm elections are decided based on the economy, and Republicans have cringed when Trump, in recent days, has said things such as, “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation,” and, “I love the inflation.” The GOP is now at risk of losing both chambers of Congress.

But Trump seems indifferent to the criticisms and is instead focused on his entry in the history books. He’s drawn to attempting to achieve things that his predecessors could not, including seizing territory for the United States (Greenland, for sure, but maybe Canada, too) and toppling antagonistic regimes (Venezuela, Iran, possibly Cuba). But the war in Iran has not gone according to plan: The hard-liners in Tehran have been emboldened as oil prices have soared. Efforts to bring the conflict to a close have so far failed. This week, hostilities reignited. And back at home, Trump has treated the nation’s capital as his own plaything, restoring the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, adding his name to the Kennedy Center (only to have a judge order its removal), and planning to build a triumphal arch that would obscure the view between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery.

Which is why, I suppose, he thought nothing of using the nation’s most symbolic address as the backdrop for his bloody birthday bash.

President Theodore Roosevelt had been a boxer at Harvard and would occasionally spar at the White House. But, to the best of my knowledge, Trump is the first president to toast his birthday with a blood sport. Some took Biden’s low-key approach; Jimmy Carter, for instance, treated his birthday like any other workday, save for a piece of pistachio cake. Neither George Washington nor Abraham Lincoln was fond of public celebrations for their own birthdays (yet they became state and federal holidays anyway; it’s a safe bet that Trump wouldn’t object to such honors).

But other presidents have gone big: Ronald Reagan, who held the title of oldest president until Biden and Trump came along, didn’t shy away from birthdays and hosted a big gathering for his 75th. One of Lyndon B. Johnson’s birthdays fell on the final day of the 1964 Democratic National Convention, so he accepted his nomination in front of a celebrating, singing crowd. Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose time in office was defined by the Great Depression and World War II, used his birthdays as fundraising events that eventually became the March of Dimes. Years later, Bill Clinton turned 50 with a fundraiser at Radio City Music Hall. Barack Obama celebrated the same milestone with a star-studded outdoor barbecue on the same lawn that now hosts the UFC cage. The most famous presidential birthday party was for John F. Kennedy’s 45th, a fundraiser held at Madison Square Garden that will be forever remembered for Marilyn Monroe’s sultry rendition of “Happy Birthday, Mr. President.”

Assuming that the weather cooperates (thunderstorms are in the forecast), how will history recall Trump’s festivities? Perhaps they will be remembered as an ideal representation of his id, or as a testament to excess at a time of war and economic worry. Or maybe the UFC fights will become a historical curiosity that’s remembered mainly by the fighters, their broken bones and bloodied noses souvenirs of the night they did battle in a makeshift cage outside the White House.

Inside America’s Ugly Birthday Battle

2026-06-11T08:30:00-04:00

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Years before Poison’s Bret Michaels, Young MC, and the Commodores dropped out of this summer’s concert series on the National Mall celebrating America’s 250th birthday, planners envisioned a Smithsonian-led blockbuster festival stretching from the Washington Monument to the U.S. Capitol that would be open to all and free of partisanship. They wanted a party bigger than the Folklife Festival, an annual two-week summer exhibition, and much longer-lasting. This new “Festival of Festivals” would focus on the semiquincentennial, with four to six weeks of performances, workshops, and displays to “celebrate the nation’s successes,” “contemplate the consequences of our history,” and “commit to advancing our multicultural democracy,” according to a November 27, 2023, memo that I obtained.

But last summer, with little fanfare, President Trump took control of the event and renamed it. While campaigning, he had promised to work with all 50 state governors to put on his own “Great American State Fair” at the Iowa State Fairgrounds. Last July, he traveled to Iowa to announce a change of plans: “a giant patriotic festival next summer on the National Mall featuring exhibits from all 50 states.” The announcement got little attention, because at the same event, Trump said this about congressional Democrats: “I hate them.” The Smithsonian quietly recast the Festival of Festivals as a series of events around the country.

So began Trump’s multipronged takeover of the historic celebrations, which will culminate on July 4—the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence—amid growing disarray and conflict, according to documents I obtained and interviews with 10 people involved in the planning or oversight of the event, most of whom requested anonymity because they are not authorized to speak publicly.

They described frayed trust and growing conflict that has become so acrimonious that the Department of the Interior is refusing to honor a December agreement with America250, a bipartisan group authorized by Congress in 2016 to plan the nation’s festivities. A memorandum of agreement I obtained shows that the department pledged to transfer $50 million in congressional appropriations by February 1, but only $25 million has been delivered so far. “Spending taxpayer money on frivolous, poorly attended events and D.C. consultants who are trying to get rich off America’s 250th is the exact opposite of what was intended,” the Department of the Interior press office told me yesterday in an unsigned statement, when I asked why the America250 money had not been transferred. “This administration will not light taxpayer money on fire. Full stop.”

Democratic and Republican lawmakers have expressed frustration at the breakdown, with one House committee opening its own investigations into the Trump administration’s handling of taxpayer funding for America’s birthday party. “This is straight out of It’s a Wonderful Life, when Henry Potter steals George Bailey’s money and tries to drive him to the brink,” one commissioner for America250 told me. “With less than a month away from this historic milestone, there is just no room for politics, and we remain hopeful that cooler heads will prevail.”

Trump’s team is similarly frustrated. The White House created its own rival group, Freedom 250, late last year to improve on the existing plans. Trump aides now accuse the bipartisan group of resisting the rightful role of the commander in chief to put his own mark on the celebrations. “America250 can’t get over the fact that Trump won,” Trump’s former co–campaign manager Chris LaCivita, who worked as a top contractor for America250 last year before switching to Freedom 250, told me. “They want to apologize for America’s 250th. We don’t.”

The discord broke into public view late last month when seven music acts bowed out of the Great American State Fair after they learned that Freedom 250, not the bipartisan planners, were organizing it. Trump angrily canceled the live-music series and pledged to make the event more explicitly political. Days later, he announced a June 24 rally on the National Mall to launch the state fair, an event he is now billing as a “Rally to end all Rallies,” featuring him as the centerpiece and no “singers with no talent.” He invited U.S. military bands; the country singer Lee Greenwood, whose “God Bless the U.S.A.” was Trump’s campaign walk-out song; and the opera tenor Christopher Macchio, who sang at Trump’s 2025 inauguration.

Some supporters of America250, which is backed by a bipartisan caucus of 421 federal lawmakers, view this event as further proof that Trump always planned to remake the national celebration in his image. They point to a draft Freedom 250 document, which details how organizers could encourage Americans to host their own events—town halls or rallies, say, “around a core America First issue” such as parental rights, free speech, and election integrity. Cathy Gillespie, a lifelong Republican who has been an America250 commissioner for eight years, told me in a statement that her group’s mission is to “honor and celebrate” the anniversary “in a way that engages and inspires all Americans, regardless of political affiliation.” She added, “There is nothing anywhere that validates a claim it has failed in this mission, let alone apologize for our 250th Anniversary.”

But with weeks to go, relations between the two sides could deteriorate further, potentially marring a national event that both say should be unifying. The White House spokesperson Davis Ingle told me in a statement that the celebrations “shouldn’t be ruined by people or organizations more concerned with partisanship and apologizing for America than celebrating the greatest nation in history.” Late last month, America250’s leadership sent a letter to Trump inviting him to participate in the events, including a ball drop at midnight on July 3 in Times Square, a concert in Los Angeles, and the burying of a time capsule in Philadelphia.

Discussions have followed, but the president has not yet committed to attending. Kellyanne Conway, another Republican America250 commissioner who has spoken with Trump about the celebrations, has been pushing to lower temperatures. “America’s birthday party will be epic,” she told me in a statement. “I have witnessed more collaboration than confrontation, and hope all can operate toward the same goal.”

At first, the two teams worked as one. Trump had publicly shared his vision for the 250th celebration in a May 2023 campaign video. Festivities would last an entire year, starting in 2025 on Memorial Day, he explained, and would include a Great American State Fair, a high-school athletic competition called the Patriot Games, a National Garden of American Heroes with sculptures, and a prayer event. None of those ideas appeared on the congressional planners’ agenda, but the two teams agreed that there was still time to add more events.

The America250 chair, Rosie Rios, who had served as the U.S. treasurer during the Barack Obama presidency, sent a November 2024 memo to Trump asking him to issue an executive order to mobilize federal resources for the celebrations, according to an annual report released in January. She also suggested that Trump invite King Charles III for a visit, to replicate Queen Elizabeth’s 1976 visit to mark the bicentennial. He took her up on both suggestions.

[Read: The King’s admirer in chief]

Rios brought on a number of Trump’s top advisers, including LaCivita, the fundraiser Meredith O’Rourke, and Justin Caporale, the producer of Trump’s political events. The White House then appointed Ariel Abergel—a former producer at Fox News who had worked for First Lady Melania Trump—as America250’s executive director.

When Trump wanted to stage a military parade in Washington, D.C., on his birthday last June to commemorate the Army’s 250th anniversary, America250 allowed the president’s team to raise money for that and for a series of other Trump-focused events through their nonprofit operation. The parade—along with Trump’s speech in Iowa, his remarks at the 2025 West Point graduation, and a speech at Fort Bragg—were paid for with more than $30 million that the Trump team routed through the group, according to the America250 annual report. Sponsorships came from companies seeking Trump’s favor, such as Palantir, Amazon, Oracle, and Coinbase, and the group reported an $849,000 “fundraising fee and commission” for these programs, according to America250 documents. Some of the money raised went to other programs, including a plan for mobile museum exhibits.

But relations became strained last July after Trump declared his hatred of the Democrats at the Iowa rally, as the crowd waved America250 signs. Around the same time, Abergel suggested to four commissioners that they resign, angering some in the organization and raising concern on Capitol Hill. He pushed internally for America250 to focus more on televised events, not the less visible programming at the core of the effort. In September, he used the group’s official Instagram account to post “God bless Charlie Kirk” after the conservative activist’s assassination. Abergel was pushed out of the organization.

Tensions also emerged over money. America250 had initially planned to request $100 million in onetime funding from the Republican-backed One Big Beautiful Bill Act in 2025, according to an account given by America250 organizers to investigators of the House Natural Resources Committee, which I obtained. But at LaCivita’s recommendation, America250 changed the ask to $150 million, with the understanding that $100 million would finance America250 programming and the remaining $50 million would be spent by the White House for its own 250th events, they told the investigators. Congress assigned the Interior Department to distribute the funds.

After the bill passed, leaders of America250—which then employed LaCivita, Caporale, and O’Rourke—met with the White House staff, including Vince Haley, the director of the domestic-policy council. Caporale drafted a budget for the coming 18 months, which I obtained, that projected about $130 million in spending on America250 projects, a number that presumed $100 million in federal funds from the One Big Beautiful Bill and $30 million in other appropriations, according to the America250 response to House investigators. Under the plan, America250 expected O’Rourke to raise $85 million in private funds that would pay mostly for the programming championed by Trump, including the Great American State Fair, the Navy and Marine celebrations that fall, and the Patriot Games.

The agreement fell apart, as commissioners for America250 pushed for distance from the events that Trump’s team was planning, and the president’s advisers began raising questions about America250 spending. In November, with the support of America250, Trump’s advisers set up Freedom 250 as a LLC inside the nonpartisan National Park Foundation and began raising money for celebrations in the Washington area. America250 agreed to focus elsewhere in the country. The original talking points for the group described Freedom 250 as “complementary and reinforcing” with America250, designed to “unite Americans across political, geographic, and demographic lines.” But instead, it has become a rival effort, taking an increasing share of federal funding, scooping up donations, and assuming responsibility for long-planned events while sometimes placing Trump at the center of the celebrations.

Corporate-sponsorship packages for Freedom 250 offered top donors access to a “thank you reception hosted by President Donald J. Trump,” along with VIP access and speaking opportunities for events. Donors who give more than $2.5 million have been promised a “dedicated” press release announcing their support and a “historic” photo opportunity with Trump. A list of donors has not been disclosed, but the defense contractor Northrop Grumman and the manufacturer John Deere, which are also America250 donors, were announced in Freedom 250 press releases as “partners.”

[Read: The YOLO presidency ]

Trump’s campaign advisers who’d initially worked for America250 left and became major vendors for Freedom 250. Caporale’s firm, Event Strategies Inc., which organized the Army parade for Trump last summer, began producing Trump’s 250th program. Trump’s campaign-merchandise vendor, a Louisiana-based firm called Ace Specialties, began operating the Freedom 250 online storefront, which offered similar merchandise as the America250 store.

The dueling celebrations of the nation were often at odds. On New Year’s Eve, Freedom 250 spent about $3 million to broadcast a light show on the Washington Monument, an idea that America250 had originally developed. America250 spent about $4 million for a televised New Year’s promotion in Times Square of its America Gives volunteer initiative. America250 partnered with the NFL during this year’s Super Bowl; Freedom 250 bought ad time around the event to promote its own brand. While America250 promoted its America’s Field Trip program, a patriotic-essay-writing contest that allowed schoolkids to win trips to historic landmarks, Freedom 250 launched the American Heroes Student Art Contest, with a trip to the Great American State Fair as the prize.

America250 adopted “350 for 250” as its motto around the time Trump retook office, a reference to the congressional mandate to include all 350 million Americans in the semiquincentennial celebration. Trump’s advisers began using a variation of the slogan—“250 for 250”—to promote the construction of a 250-foot-tall memorial arch by Arlington National Cemetery. The planned arch, which is yet to begin construction and is opposed by Democrats, has been included in promotional images for the Great American State Fair.

The nastiest fights have arisen over money. Trump-administration officials signaled late last year that America250’s programming would not receive $100 million from the One Big Beautiful Bill. Instead, the National Park Service, which was handling the funds for the Interior Department, signed a memorandum of agreement with America250 in December to transfer $50 million to the group by February 1. The full amount never arrived.

“We thought we’d taken care of that in last year’s budget—$150 million for America250, promised $50 million; they only received $25 so far,” Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, a Republican who is a member of the America250 commission, said at an April hearing with Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum. “I am still concerned about this additional $25 million that was to be directed to America250.”

“We are working closely with the White House on that, and so we’ll get back to you,” Burgum responded. The Interior press office suggested yesterday that the money would not be coming anytime soon. “The Trump administration has been clear since day one that we will be good stewards of taxpayer money,” it told me in a statement. “The Memorandum of Understanding signed with all 250th related entities made that clear.”

The Trump team now says that it became concerned about the cost of America250’s programming. It inquired about the decision to provide Rios with an apartment in Washington. “There are serious concerns about America250’s accountability,” one person in Trump’s orbit who is familiar with the discussions told me. “Since 2016, the organization has received over $120 million in public and private funding per their own documents. Now they claim a budget deficit, and they need another $130 million? What about their bloated budget and lame programming is worth $250 million?”

Trump’s team was particularly concerned about America’s Field Trip, an essay-writing contest that has provided trips for 275 students and their chaperones to historic locales across the country, along with $500 cash awards for an equal number of runners-up. The budget for the program is not fixed, but one projection I viewed put it at $10.4 million over eight years, or about $38,000 per field-trip winner. “Whatever way you cut the math, it doesn’t work,” the person in Trump’s orbit said.

Representatives of America250 rejected the suggestion that money had been mishandled, and they pointed out that the goal of the field-trip project was to engage students across the country, not just to award prizes. More than 20,000 students have submitted patriotic essays as part of the program. The group has re-budgeted its programming to account for the decreased allocations from the One Big Beautiful Bill, though it continues to seek the second $25 million promised in the Interior agreement. “Any claim that America250 has misused taxpayer resources or operated as a partisan organization is completely unfounded and wrong,” Gillespie said. The Washington apartment used by Rios was rented for use by any America250 commissioner, who all work as volunteers, after it was determined that the arrangement would be less expensive than renting hotel rooms, an America250 official told me.

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From December to April, the Interior Department transferred $68 million to the National Park Foundation, which houses Freedom 250, for semiquincentennial programming, according to federal records. The White House also asked the department to transfer other funds to the Defense Department to pay for the Navy and Marine 250th celebrations last fall, according to the person in Trump’s orbit familiar with the discussions.

At the same time, the Trump administration has given Washington a glam-up ahead of the summer’s festivities, upsetting some Democrats. Federal payment records show that since the start of November, the Interior Department has transferred about $98 million from the National Park Service’s entry-fee program to beautification efforts around D.C., including the retrofit of the Reflecting Pool and multiple nearby fountains and monuments.

All of this spending by Trump’s team is now the subject of a Democratic investigation in the House, an inquiry that could expand if the party wins control of Congress in the November elections. “We’ve found a lot in our investigations and will keep digging,” Representative Jared Huffman of California, the ranking member of the House Natural Resources Committee, told me in a statement, “but it seems pretty clear this con man is at it again and has co-opted America’s birthday to rake in foreign donations, siphon taxpayer dollars from the legitimate America 250 into this shadowy LLC, and use it all to celebrate himself instead of the country.”

Republicans on the same committee, meanwhile, have attacked America250 while praising Freedom 250. “The America250 organization had ten years to prepare for this historic milestone, yet they have been accused of mismanaging taxpayer dollars,” Representative Addison McDowell of North Carolina told me in a statement. “Freedom 250 is celebrating our country in the patriotic way it deserves.”

Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, a group that represents federal workers, has also filed a lawsuit to force Interior to turn over more documents detailing spending on Freedom 250 and separate spending by the National Park Service to prepare Washington-area monuments for the summer events. “This really doesn’t feel like a bipartisan celebration that is inclusive of all Americans,” PEER Executive Director Tim Whitehouse told me. “This feels like a political prop show for the president.”

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At the Department of the Interior, employees have been instructed to treat Freedom 250 as a trusted partner. In an April 30 internal National Park Service email that I reviewed, the agency urged its staff to wear Freedom 250 commemorative pins on their uniform lapels. Those who do not wear uniforms were told to wear the pin with business attire “as a mark of Esprit de Corps.” Park Service volunteers were also encouraged to wear the pin.

“This pin serves as a symbol of our shared history and commitment to the values of service and liberty that have defined this nation for two and a half centuries,” the email to staff reads. The Park Service said in the email that the pins, which retail individually for $8 on the Freedom 250 website, could be ordered in batches of “100 or more” from Trump’s campaign vendor in Louisiana. “Any insinuation that employees were tasked with buying Freedom 250 pins is categorically false,” the Interior press office told me in a statement.

The Smithsonian, meanwhile, is moving ahead with its 250th celebrations, far from the controversy in Washington. The Festival of Festivals will now take place in 27 states and two territories, according to the Smithsonian, integrating the federal museum programming into far-flung events that were already planned. While Trump gathers Americans for his rally and fair, the Smithsonian will make appearances at Farm Aid, a Virginia Beach concert organized by the musicians Willie Nelson, Neil Young, and Dave Matthews that is scheduled for September, and at Burning Man, an annual arts bacchanal in the Nevada desert. The Burning Man plan, according to Smithsonian officials, is to set up a “mobile recording station” where revelers can give five-to-10-minute oral-history interviews “on culture, identity, and democracy” for the 250th.