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The Man in Charge of Immigration Data Just Resigned

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Read: Inside Trump’s reversal on ICE]

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

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

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

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

[Read: The border wall is back]

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

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

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

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

The Watchdogs Are Barking Themselves Hoarse

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MAGA’s Most Famous Prisoner Is Free

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Listen: The election deniers are in charge now]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What El-Sayed Does Next Matters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Once-Shameless President Is Deeply Embarrassed

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Read: Let them eat gold]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Read: The YOLO presidency]

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

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

‘Disappear the Democrat’ Backfires in Montana

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Read: One morning of controlled chaos in Maine]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Family Tragedy in the Age of Trump

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Marie-Rose Sheinerman contributed to this report.

Let Them Eat Gold

2026-08-02T08:00:00-04:00

When you approach the freshly gilded twin statues near the Lincoln Memorial, there is no mistaking that they are gold. Very, very gold. Distractingly gold—or, more precisely, covered in 23.75-karat gold leaf costing $5.1 million. The 19-foot statues, called The Arts of War, were once easy to miss but now look a bit like oversized children’s trophies, especially next to the classical and austere Lincoln Memorial. Seeing them is as if, on the walk between Arlington National Cemetery and the National Mall, you’d suddenly stumbled upon a P. F. Chang’s.

This is how President Trump is approaching his redecoration of Washington: glitzy and gaudy, even if out of place. He has already splashed gold all around the White House, but these statues are the most prominent symbols of Washington’s new gilded age. As the scaffolding around the statues came down this week, marking one of the few completions of a Trump-ordered renovation project, the president giddily posted photos on social media—and tourists, commuters, cyclists, and runners paused to take photos of their own of the capital’s latest can-you-believe-it attraction.

Trump has worn his love of gold like a blinging billboard. Mar-a-Lago’s ballroom is inspired by Versailles, and he has proudly bragged of golden bathrooms, golden airplane-seatbelt buckles, and a gold-infused penthouse suite. The Oval Office now looks like a Middle Eastern bazaar crossed with an opulent Cracker Barrel. Thick, gold frames line the walls; gold vases and ice buckets adorn the fireplace mantel; gold stars form a circle on the ceiling; and gold appliqués fill any gaps. (Trump insists that these are real gold, and not painted flourishes from Home Depot.) Last year, he exempted gold bullion from his reciprocal tariffs, and he named his special visa program for wealthy foreigners the Trump Gold Card. He has taken his personally designed presidential challenge coin (which is golden) and glued it to the center of the Oval Office door, at about eye level. The coasters are gold, the curtains are gold, and guests know to come bearing gifts of gold.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt (left) and White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles sit in the Oval Office on February 2. (Alex Wong / Getty)

When FIFA President Gianni Infantino awarded Trump the first FIFA Peace Prize, it was a golden orb of a trophy. Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook presented the president with a 24-karat-gold base to hold a glass sculpture. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last year gave him a golden pager to commemorate an operation in which members of Hezbollah were killed when their pagers detonated. “See,” he said during a meeting with his Cabinet in March while riffing about all of the projects he’d launched in Washington, “I’m a gold person.”

It’s one thing for Trump to have a personal fascination with one of the world’s most expensive metals. It’s another for the president to flaunt it at a time when many Americans are struggling to pay rent, losing their health insurance, and seeing high prices at the gas pump. It may not quite be a “Let them eat cake” moment, but it is one when he seems to be saying: Let them see that I just spent $5 million in taxpayer funds on golden statues.

Trump for decades has loved gold and marble, liberally sprinkling them about his development projects and his personal spaces. Ivana Trump, his first wife, who was the Trump Organization’s vice president of interior design, encouraged Trump’s gold obsession, according to Regime Change, the recent book by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan that has a golden cover. (Ivana’s love of the color proved lasting: She was buried in a gold casket.) In the 1980s, Trump bought Mar-a-Lago in South Florida and went on to put $7 million worth of gold leaf on the walls, plus gold-plated sinks near the ballroom. He hired the designer Henry Conversano, known for infusing golden flourishes in the Golden Nugget casinos, to remodel his Trump Tower penthouse apartment and work at his Atlantic City casino. In 1988, he purchased from the sultan of Brunei a yacht that was bathed in gold—couches, sinks, ceilings—and named it the Trump Princess.

[Read: A decade of golden-escalator politics]

“It was so gaudy. Almost shockingly gaudy. And he loved it. He thought it was the most beautiful thing out there,” Jack O’Donnell, one of Trump’s former casino executives who helped him host parties on the boat, told me. He speculated that Trump may have been inspired by the yacht when he remade the Lincoln Bathroom almost entirely in gold and marble.

Years later, in 2008, when Trump built a hotel in Las Vegas, the 406,000-square-foot facade was coated in a layer of gold-infused glass. More recently, when a group of Trump supporters erected a 22-foot statue of him at his golf course in Doral, Florida, they opted for a gold finish.

“To him gold was the essence of richness and class,” Barbara Res, who oversaw construction for the Trump Organization and was placed in charge of building Trump Tower, told me. “To him it meant, This is gold. This is mine. It’s the best you can get, and I’m the best. That’s how his mind works. I’m going to show you the best by buying the best.” Sometimes, she said, it wasn’t the best. It was a cheaper alternative that looked like gold but actually wasn’t (although she found that he was willing to spend his money for something that was his idea). He liked the design concept trompe l’oeil, a French word that means “deceive the eye,” where painters could make a column that looked like marble.

“It was tricking the eye of the consumer. He loved it,” Res said. “And he took an interest in the gold finishes. It reflects his taste and his ability to spend endless money on something beautiful. That’s what he wants people to believe.”

Whether it’s in his long, red ties; his swooshed-over hairstyle; or his “Thank you for your attention to this matter” social-media posts, Trump is all about branding. Perhaps nothing is more on-brand for him than his affection for gold. “I love the gold, but if you don’t use 24 karat gold, it doesn’t look good,” he told reporters last August. “It just beams,” he marveled in September. “It’s all real stuff,” he said in March. “You can’t imitate it. Someday they’ll discover a paint that will look like gold, and the guy’s going to be the richest man in the world.”

Peter York, a design and culture columnist, wrote in Politico Magazine in 2017 that Trump’s design style is “aspirational, meant to project the wealth so many citizens can only dream of.” Although it’s often associated with Italian Renaissance or French Baroque, York says a better comparison is more recent. “The best aesthetic descriptor of Trump’s look, I’d argue, is dictator style,” he wrote.

[Read: The YOLO presidency ]

Gold has often been used to represent imperial power, whether in 18th-century France or 19th-century Russia. When Trump went to the Middle East for his first foreign trip of his second term, I watched as he marveled at the gold and marble in the palaces of Doha and Abu Dhabi. “Versailles is not a gold leaf,” he said in June ahead of a trip to the palace. “Versailles is the real deal.”

President Trump receives a tour of the Chateau de Versailles from French President Emmanuel Macron on June 17. (Anna Moneymaker / Pool / AFP / Getty)

The two Arts of War statues, called Valor and Sacrifice, were sculpted by Leo Friedlander and cast in Italy. They were dedicated in 1951, offered to the United States as a gift from the Italians for helping rebuild their country after World War II. Each statue shows a nude man and a seminude woman. Two other statues, collectively called The Arts of Peace, are nearby but still undergoing their golden glam-ups.

Each of the statues sits on a granite pedestal ringed with 36 stars, representing the states in the Union at the end of the Civil War. The statues, cast in bronze, were last regilded in 1971 and had since faded. Trump added them to the list of eyesores he wanted fixed before the nation’s 250th birthday, on July 4, and federal officials scrambled to meet his demands.

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

When I reached out to the White House to ask about the project, the president’s role in it, and his choice of gold, the spokesperson Davis Ingle responded with a statement that made no mention of gold and said, in part: “No other president has done more to beautify our Nation’s interior than President Trump.” He said that the president’s “bold vision” was ensuring that the 250th birthday was filled with “glory and pride.” He referred other questions to the Department of Interior, which did not address any of my questions about the project, its delays, the choice to heavily apply gold, or Trump’s involvement. “Residents and visitors are excited to see the city revitalized to the grand destination it was meant to be,” the department offered in a statement.

Federal officials did not seek competitive bids for the work on the statues, bypassing the typical process and awarding a contract in April for $5.1 million. The project was treated as a high priority by the National Park Service, according to The New York Times, which cited internal documents that referred to it as “a visible, high-impact example of how the N.P.S. is responding to presidential directives.” Extensive market research was not done to determine whether $5 million was a fair price, according to documents obtained by NOTUS, and the agency determined that only one company could meet the requirements of the work and the timeline: the Gilders’ Studio in Maryland.

The company, which did not respond to my message, has done a large number of regilding projects around the country, including the dome of the Georgia State House, the cupola of Faneuil Hall in Boston, and—perhaps most similar to the statues in Washington—the Sherman Monument in Central Park. A description of the project had a mandatory competition date of July 1. But for the past few weeks, as it had for the months before, the scaffolding remained up, and tarps read: We are making DC safe and beautiful.

Only now is the project coming into view, and although Trump is clearly pleased, others are less so. “Fit for an oligarch’s ballroom,” a review in ARTNews reads.

As I rode my bike past the new gilded statues Friday morning, I couldn’t help but wonder what would next succumb to Trump’s Midas touch. If a triumphal arch is constructed across the bridge, will it be just as glaringly golden? Will Trump cast the John F. Kennedy statue outside the Kennedy Center in gold? Is Abraham Lincoln, sitting nearby, at risk? Or the pensive Thomas Jefferson standing in the dome across the way? How far will Trump’s new golden age extend?

America’s Most Divided State Loves Its Extremes

2026-08-01T07:00:00-04:00

Wisconsin has been the nation’s most closely divided state for a quarter century. Since 2000, only one presidential candidate—Barack Obama, twice—has carried the state by more than a single percentage point. But despite its status as a battleground, America’s Dairyland has never been a bastion of milquetoast moderation. Wisconsin has produced both a father of progressivism, Robert La Follette, and the red-baiting conservative Joseph McCarthy. More recently, its voters have backed the liberal stalwarts Russ Feingold and Tammy Baldwin as well as the right-wing Republicans Scott Walker and Ron Johnson.

Francesca Hong is keenly aware of this history. Indeed, she’s relying on it as she tries to persuade Democratic voters to trust her with the party’s nomination for governor later this month. “We’ve been a laboratory for democracy and a petri dish for conservatism,” Hong told me during an interview last weekend at a brewery in Appleton, a small city near Green Bay where she had drawn more than 200 people for a rally.

A state legislator and former restaurateur, the 37-year-old Hong wants to make Wisconsin the country’s biggest lab for democratic socialism. She’s running on an expansive platform that includes creating a public bank and public grocery stores; providing universal child care and free school lunches; paid leave and a $20 minimum wage; and many more favored policies of the progressive left. Hong has filmed campaign videos in restaurant kitchens and on soccer fields, and she’s often wearing a red bandana that evokes Rosie the Riveter and labor solidarity. Her rallies are punctuated by profanity—a fellow state legislator who introduced her on Sunday wore a T-shirt that said Fight the Fuckery—earthy musical acts, and hearty endorsements by like-minded local progressives.

With innovative ads and a grassroots network of more than 7,000 volunteers knocking on doors across the state, Hong’s campaign has shot out far ahead of more experienced and well-known Democratic rivals. (Wisconsin’s current lieutenant governor, Sara Rodriguez, dropped her bid for the top job amid a campaign-finance scandal; its previous lieutenant governor, Mandela Barnes, suspended his candidacy on Thursday and effectively conceded to Hong.) The most recent survey from Marquette Law School—the state’s most reputable pollster—found Hong with 38 percent of the vote in a five-way race, with more than twice the support of her nearest competitor.

Naturally, Democratic grandees are nervous. Republicans, eager to run against a far-left candidate in the fall, have pumped more than $2.5 million into ads aimed at boosting Hong’s profile across the state. David Axelrod, an architect of Obama’s two victories, likened the Democratic primary on August 11 to “a slow-rolling car headed for a cliff.” Whoever captures the Democratic nomination will face Representative Tom Tiffany, a Trump loyalist elected in 2020 from the northern part of the state.

The primary race has alternated between unusual sleepiness and extreme volatility. David Crowley, the Milwaukee County executive, suspended his campaign early in July for lack of support, but then jumped back in after Rodriguez dropped out a few weeks later. Wisconsin’s outgoing Democratic governor, Tony Evers (who, if not quite milquetoast, is far more moderate than Hong), stayed on the sidelines for months. Then, with Rodriguez out, he passed over both Hong and his former second in command, Barnes, to back Crowley, who was far behind in the polls. “There’s been a lot,” Kendra Koeppen Mulwana, the director of the statewide group Badger Youth Action, told me with a laugh. “It feels like there’s something new that’s happened everyday.” A few hours after we spoke, Barnes’s withdrawal jolted the race again.

With so much uncertainty, many Wisconsin Democrats have yet to make up their mind even after months of campaigning—a dynamic that, with Barnes out, could give Crowley an opportunity to make a late run at Hong. During a televised debate on Tuesday, none of Hong’s rivals went after her very aggressively. “It’s hard to understand,” Barry Burden, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told me. “There was not really a sense of urgency from the other candidates that you would expect.”

[Read: The Democratic base is angry]

In a phone interview the day before, Crowley also declined to criticize either Hong’s record or her electability, telling me he was focused on “reintroducing” himself to voters. Yet that has also proved difficult with so little time left in the primary. On the day we spoke, Crowley had been scheduled to greet voters at the same Appleton venue where Hong appeared a day earlier, but he canceled the event after a tornado tore through the city. Christine Sinicki, a state representative and former chair of the Milwaukee County Democrats who is backing Crowley, told me that for Crowley to win, Evers would need to campaign across the state with him—something that has yet to happen.

The stakes of this election year are high for Democrats across the country, but particularly so in Wisconsin. The party has a chance to end years of Republican dominance in the state legislature and, if they also hold the governorship, secure a trifecta for the first time since 2008. Such an outcome could have ripple effects in Washington, because Democrats would then have the power to redraw Wisconsin’s congressional map and reverse a GOP gerrymander that has given Republicans all but two of the state’s eight House seats. That is one reason Sinicki is worried about nominating Hong for governor. “This is not the time to take a risk,” she told me. “2026 should be a Democratic year.”

When you ask Hong and her supporters how a socialist from Madison can appeal to independent and conservative voters across a state that Trump carried in 2024, they have a ready reply: AI data centers. Hong has proposed a one-year moratorium on their construction, going further than any of her rivals to crack down on development that, according to polls and interviews, is unpopular with voters of all political ideologies.

“I’m willing to stand up to bullies on both sides because I’m fighting for you” is how Hong summarized the pitch she’d make to Wisconsinites who voted for Trump. She told me, “I think that folks want someone to take a firm stance on another massive entity that’s trying to take control of people’s lives right now when people already are so uneasy about rising costs and feeling that it’s not enough.”

Data centers came up repeatedly as I spoke with Hong supporters at the Appleton event. Treston Kaepernick, an 18-year-old who’ll be enrolling at UW in the fall, told me he’s seen Hong signs pop up in his conservative hometown of New London and that he’s encountered Republicans who cite her opposition to data centers as a reason for their support. A Hong canvasser, Matthew Hennes, told me he brings up Hong’s proposed moratorium early in many of his conversations with voters. “That usually gets them very interested,” Hennes said. “From my personal experience knocking on doors and talking to the community, nobody wants data centers constructed in their backyard.”

[From the April 2026 issue: Inside the dirty, dystopian world of AI data centers]

The question for Hong, should she win the primary, is whether her crossover appeal on the issue of data centers can overcome what will surely be millions of dollars worth of ads from Republicans highlighting other positions of hers that might not go over as well with middle-of-the-road voters, such as her past calls to defund the police and abolish prisons. During last week’s debate, she said she did not support “the full platform” of the national Democratic Socialists of America and that although she is a DSA member, she is not running with its endorsement.

Hong is not quite as outspoken in interviews as she is on the stump. When I asked her how she differentiated herself as a democratic socialist from a progressive Democrat, she replied with a fairly anodyne answer that might have fit most Democratic officeholders. “Democratic socialist means that I want there to be more power for working-class people and the workers,” Hong said. “That the mega corporations and the billionaires pay their fair share. That we're unapologetic in taking on corporate interests and the status quo.” As for defunding the police? “I can’t defund or abolish the police as governor, and I won’t,” Hong told me.

Hong addresses what she calls “the E-word”—electability—head-on at her rallies. She cites her sprawling volunteer network and the people who tell her that their “Republican uncle” is supporting her, and the fact that she has more donors and more individual donations than Tiffany. “We’re already beating him!” she exclaimed at one point. “I truly think that in this moment, the more that folks doubt our power, the more power we can actually reclaim,” Hong said later in her speech. “When I hear from folks that there’s only a certain group that’s supporting our campaign, or that it’s fringe or left, one word comes to mind: bullshit.” The crowd roared.

But Democratic voters in Wisconsin are clearly thinking about the E-word too. As I followed Hennes on his canvassing route through Appleton, several people told him they liked Hong’s policies or were leaning toward her. But they also expressed some pause. “I like what she has to say,” Bob Molitor, a 75-year-old retiree, said, “but we’ve got to get a winner.”

Wisconsin’s history suggests the concerns about Hong’s statewide appeal could be overstated. Michael Wagner, a University of Wisconsin political scientist, pointed me to research showing that voters do not punish more extreme candidates. Her chances might be better still in a midterm election when turnout is expected to be lower than a presidential year, he said. “An ideological extremist can absolutely win a statewide election in Wisconsin,” Wagner said.

Democrats such as Sinicki, the former Milwaukee party chair, remain nervous about Hong because so much is at stake for the party. But for others, the favorable political environment for Democrats is reason enough to take the chance. “There’s not a better year to go all out than this one,” Kaepernick told me. With just slightly more than a week to go before the primary, most Wisconsin Democrats seem to agree.

How the Reflecting Pool Vandalism Case Fell Apart

2026-07-31T21:15:00-04:00

As government prosecutors examined the Reflecting Pool to build their case against a three-time Olympic canoeist accused of violently ripping the lining with his bare hands, everything fell apart. They found that damage was consistent all around the pool, even in the middle, “where a vandal would not likely attempt to peel the lining.” This evening, the office of U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro asked to drop the case against David Hearn, whom she had excoriated after his indictment 29 days ago.

In a striking 19-page legal document filed late this afternoon, her office undermined everything that President Trump has been saying about the damage to the Reflecting Pool for the past six weeks, including the claim that vandals had used a box cutter to slash the floor of the pool. “The damage was the result of a botched installation and not vandalism,” Pirro’s office wrote in a motion to dismiss the case.

Taken as a whole, the court filing acknowledged what has been obvious to anyone who has spent time at the Reflecting Pool in recent weeks and watched the president’s $16.4 million project deteriorate in full view. Almost immediately after its reopening in June, the shallow pool filled with the green algae that the expensive renovation was supposed to have prevented. As park workers rushed to combat the algae, the pool’s sealant began to peel away in chunks. It was surprising to see outlined in legal language how Pirro’s office claims it felt duped. Rather than continue with evidence it acknowledged is not there, it is dropping the case.

“The Trump administration’s case against Davey Hearn should have never been brought,” his legal team—Norm Eisen, Mary Dohrmann, and Steve Levin—said in a statement. “Its dismissal today does not erase the abuse of government power in arresting and charging a patriotic American who did nothing wrong. The government’s approach was ready, fire, aim. The administration owes Mr. Hearn an apology.” The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Pirro’s office declined to comment beyond what was in the legal filing.

[Read: The canoeist accused of destroying the Reflecting Pool ]

The filing largely blamed Department of the Interior officials for supplying information that was used to present evidence to a grand jury and obtain an indictment. Only afterward did prosecutors realize that they had been misled, and that Interior officials “provided less than fulsome information.” A large amount of data and documents that Pirro’s office later received “strongly suggest that a rushed and botched installation” is to blame, her office stated.

“These documents indicated a rushed and flawed installation process, with repeated failures of the lining during the installation process, and extensive peeling of the lining throughout the Reflecting Pool,” the filing stated. Eddie Wood—an owner of Atlantic Industrial Coatings, which was paid $14.7 million to line the pool—did not immediately respond to messages. Weather delays hampered installation, the filing stated, and rain meant more delays. Internal notes said that the project was “significantly behind schedule,” which caused further urgency to complete the project before the president’s promised deadline of July 4. A quality-control inspector noted blistering in the finished portions of the liner, requiring further repairs.

A final inspection was done on June 9, the filing stated, and crews cleaned the site. But only two days later, on June 11, an engineer at the National Park Service was alerted to peeling in the lining. The fact that officials were scrambling and identifying problems eight days before Hearn was arrested was likely going to cause legal problems in the case.

An open question remains as to how and whether the project, one of the most high-profile priorities for the president, will be completed. The pool has been drained, and the latest legal filing indicated uncertainty over why exactly the lining failed in the first place—and whether problems will emerge again when water is pumped back in.

I attended Hearn’s court hearings, and they often attracted a crowd of supporters. Some dressed as canoeists; others held signs. At one of his recent hearings, four people wore inflatable-frog costumes. The charges seemed ridiculous to his supporters. But when I recently spoke with Hearn, he told me that the case was hurting his ability to sleep at night. He had once carried the Olympic torch for his country, and he was now worried about being the center of a political firestorm. “It’s unsettling,” Hearn told me, “to feel like I’m being targeted by my government.”

Schengen’s Greatest Failure

2026-07-31T15:21:29-04:00

In the summer of 1985, representatives from five Western European countries met aboard a riverboat in Schengen, a wine-making village in Luxembourg, to celebrate the removal of checkpoints at their borders. According to the treaty they approved, which became known as the Schengen Agreement, the signatory countries sought “solidarity between their peoples by removing obstacles to free movement,” forming a borderless zone that gave tangible expression to principles of liberal internationalism that were ascendant as the West glimpsed victory in the Cold War.

Schengen has succeeded spectacularly, at least by certain metrics. It has grown to include 29 countries, from Portugal to Poland, and more than 450 million people. Four decades on, it remains one of Europe’s most popular policies among people who benefit from it—those who work, study, shop, date, and live across borders, able to cross multiple European states in a matter of hours, without ever stopping their car. But as a mechanism to build European solidarity, Schengen has been a failure.

The latest evidence of that came this week, when as many as 60,000 migrants from Morocco rushed into the Spanish exclave of Ceuta, which sits on the North African coast of the Mediterranean. Ceuta has a population of only 83,000 and isn’t even on the European continent. But because it is part of Spain, entering Ceuta, in theory, affords access to 29 countries. The migrants swam or climbed over fences to reach the tiny territory. Several dozen have died.

Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, decried the situation as an “attack” and a violation of his country’s territorial integrity, vowing that the migrants would be turned back; according to Spain’s interior ministry, more than half of them already have been. Sánchez blamed trafficking gangs, and others pointed a finger at Moroccan authorities for possibly instigating or enabling the huge number of crossings into the Schengen Area, dwarfing equivalent single-day figures from the European migration crisis in 2015. Morocco’s ambassador to Spain disputed such allegations.

[Rogé Karma: The Spanish exception]

The political blowback for Sánchez, a leftist whose pro-immigrant position has differentiated him in an era of resurgent nationalism, was predictable. Criticism came from his domestic opposition in Madrid, as well as from the White House, where President Trump saw an opportunity to paint Europe as lax on immigration and identify an edge for his party as the midterms approach. “That’s going to be us in three years if the wrong side gets in,” Trump told Fox News.

The most notable reactions, however, came from other European capitals, which once committed themselves to freedom of movement as a basis for cross-border solidarity, an integral part of shared European Union membership that also includes a common trade policy and, in most cases, a shared currency. Giorgia Meloni, the right-wing prime minister of Italy, called for the suspension of Spain’s Schengen membership (for which there is no formal process), and her foreign minister blamed the Spanish government for the chaos, labeling its plans to grant legal status to more than half a million migrants “profoundly wrong.” In response, Madrid summoned the Italian ambassador, accusing foreign leaders of “partisan demagoguery.”

Other countries backed Meloni. Finland’s interior minister argued that Spain had “completely failed to protect the Schengen Area’s external border from infiltration,” adding in a post on social media, “This cannot continue.” France increased checks at its border with Spain, and the chancellor of Austria, which is about 1,000 miles from the Iberian Peninsula, said his country was weighing whether to close its borders.

There is no evidence that any of the new arrivals in Ceuta have crossed the Strait of Gibraltar to the Spanish mainland. Transiting the strait typically requires a ferry or plane, and involves border and identity checks that validate whether passengers have the relevant visas. Meanwhile, there aren’t legal mechanisms to suspend a country’s Schengen membership, especially unilaterally. What other countries can do is reintroduce controls at their borders. The authority to do so was written into an implementing convention approved by the signatory states in 1990, and they’ve made liberal use of it. Italy had already reimposed checks at its land border with France because of the anticipated presence of “radical activists” at a festival in Piedmont, in northwestern Italy, and earlier today, Meloni’s government halted passport-free travel at air and sea borders with Spain. Austria had already reintroduced controls at borders with four of its neighbors, citing irregular migration through the Balkans, the burden of migrants on its asylum system, and the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East.

But these piecemeal steps to police borders aren’t grandiose enough when there’s political hay to be made of immigration. Meloni can’t be outdone by her deputy prime minister and coalition partner, Matteo Salvini, who has taken to social media in recent days to urge, vaguely yet repeatedly, “Suspend Schengen.” Marine Le Pen, the far-right firebrand in France and a candidate for president in next year’s elections, vowed today to restrict the agreement if she came to power. Le Pen’s party, now called National Rally, has expertly channeled anger about Schengen. Amid the 2015 refugee crisis, when more than 1 million people crossed into Europe, mostly in flight from the Syrian civil war, party representatives performed death rites on the riverbank near where the agreement was signed 30 years earlier. They laid a funereal wreath on a star-etched monument to the system of free movement created there.

[Read: Europe’s far right is turning on Trump ]

The corps of mid-level diplomats who created Schengen gave little consideration to its political consequences. “We did our job as junior ministers,” the French representative, Catherine Lalumière, told me as part of research for my book on the history of the agreement. They thought that borderless travel would fulfill promises made by the Treaty of Rome, the founding document of European integration, and advance both the development of a common market and the cultivation of solidarity among member states.

Except there were signs of a potent backlash already at that time. In 1983, the National Front, as Le Pen’s far-right party was then known, came to power for the first time in French municipal elections, in a small town called Dreux. A year after Schengen’s creation, the party entered the national Parliament for the first time, in elections held in 1986. As anti-immigrant populism gained influence in France, the government in Paris helped lead the drafting of Schengen’s implementing convention, trying to pair internal freedom of movement with security at Europe’s external borders. Language about “solidarity” present in the original agreement was nowhere to be found in the 1990 document. Instead, more than half of the convention’s 142 articles dealt with security and the exchange of data necessary to crack down on unwanted immigration of the kind now seen in Spain’s offshore exclave.

The crisis in Ceuta is likely to be contained, and quickly. But if Europe’s reaction to a surge of immigration is to isolate individual states, rather than to use the tools it created to protect freedom and manage human displacement in a globalized world, Schengen really is at risk.

What the Fauci Diary Reveals About Washington

2026-07-31T09:00:00-04:00

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Meeting your heroes can be demoralizing. Reading more than 1,000 pages of their personal diary can be worse. Or, alternatively, totally riveting, at least in that rubbernecking-at-a-car-crash kind of way—the car crash, in this case, being one of the most storied careers in the history of American science.

That’s been my takeaway after cringing my way through the pandemic-era musings of Dr. Anthony Fauci, which the former chief of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases inexplicably saved on a government server.

Predictably, Fauci’s diaries made their way into the hands of one of mainstream science’s most notorious mean girls: Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky. Also predictably, hundreds of pages of Fauci’s entries came to light—or were leaked to light—just in time to embarrass the embattled doctor before his appearance on Wednesday in front of Paul’s Senate committee that’s investigating the origins of the coronavirus pandemic. In response to taunts and baiting questions from Senate Republicans, Fauci repeatedly invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

If only he’d shown the same discretion with his diary.

A generous reading of the compilation is that Fauci, long seen as a paragon of selfless, nonpartisan government service, was attempting to catalog the mounting disbelief he felt during a surreal period in the nation’s history—and certainly in his own history. “Brewery in Georgia named a beer after me,” he wrote in one entry from April 2020. “Bobbleheads of me being made in massive quantities in China.” He refers to “stories of granmothers who have crushes” on him (the misspelling is Fauci’s) and to petitions to vote him “Sexiest Man Alive.”

[Read: The unmaking of Anthony Fauci]

But whatever Fauci’s intentions might have been, the document has become an instant classic in the genre of bubble-world anthropology that confirms everyone’s worst suspicions about Washington being a cesspool of pampered, preening, and panting self-regard. More than a decade ago, I wrote a book that tried to explain to readers, essentially, what Beltway people are really like when the cameras aren’t rolling and the talking points are tossed aside. If I were working on that book now, Fauci’s diary would be a godsend.

His saucer-eyed romp behind the curtain renders a not-especially flattering impression of the people allegedly in charge of our country during a precarious time. Foremost, this includes the diarist himself, as Fauci becomes more and more high on his own supply of Washington adulation, at a time when COVID death rates were soaring across the country.

Here are extracts from a few of Fauci’s entries—typos and all—that I copied and pasted for posterity, in no particular order.

July 29, 2021

Went to a book signing party add the home of Adrienne Arsh. The book is “I alone can fix it “ bye Phil Rucker and Carol Leonnig. The Super a list from Washington DC was there. It was a little bit uncomfortable since I was wearing a mask with the new guidance from the CDC and almost everyone else was without a mask. When they saw me with a mask , several of them put a mask on.

October 17, 2021

Chris and I went to a wonderful brunch over Adrienne Arsh’s home. The brunch was in honor of Christine LaGarde. the typical Washington a list was there. It was a fun brunch since Adrienne is such a wonderful and generous person. I tend to shy away from these functions since everyone gathers around me wanting to take photos and telling me what a wonderful job I’m doing.

For the record, I too go to a lot of Washington brunches and book parties—yet I have never met Fauci. Am I not getting invited to the right “Super a list” parties? Whom do I talk to about this?

November 5, 2021

Another extraordinary Day !!! I attended the Funeral services of General Colin L Powell at the Washington National Cathedral at the invitation of the Powell family.

He added:

On the wayout General Mark Milley came up to me put his arms around my shoulder and said “the only person who was getting his balls kicked more than me in Washington is you “. I responded by saying “no shit”. he then responded by saying “Fuck ‘em”.

November 11, 2022

Exciting day. In preparation for the installing of my “living portrait’ by Hugo Crosthwaite into the National Portrait Gallery tomorrow, there was a gala celebration at the home of Jeff Bezos … His home is an enormous mansion that goes on and on.

November 16, 2022

Terrific event last evening. I was honored at the home of the French Ambassador to the United States … where I received the Pasteur Medal commemorating the bicentenary of Louis Pasteur's birth in 1822.

May 5, 2020

OMG! This is really getting nutsy. Sally Quinn evidently wrote a book some time ago about a character that is me.

July 1, 2020

Had dinner over Jake Tapper and Jen Tapper’s home in DC. Terrific couple. Friendship building.

April 17, 2021

Dana Bash sent me a text: “I just watched the whole Jordan thing. Again, you’re a better man than I…. As our friend Wolf Blitzer said to me yesterday – no one would have blamed you if you said simply “Mr. Jordan, go f--- yourself””

Presumably, this referred to Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio. Also, presumably, Fauci refrained from telling him this.

June 5, 2020

I made favorable comments today on CNBC about vaccines and decreasing of # of cases and the stock market went up by 3%. I should (but will not) contact the POTUS and say that he told me on Tuesday that my remarks blunted the increase in the Stock Market and cost him “one trillion fucking dollars”. And so now my remarks actually made him “4 trillion fucking dollars”, and so he owes me $3 trillion.

August 20, 2020

Becoming really nice pen pal with Joan Baez.

This appears to be true. Fauci says she texted him later that year on his birthday (“HAPPY FUCKING BIRTHDAY AND MANY MORE”). The onetime “Queen of Folk” also called Donald Trump a “miserable fuck,” according to the diary, and told Fauci that he should be honored by the president’s attacks on him.

October 5, 2020

POTUS called me up from his hospital room at Walter Reed. 1:08 PM. He rambled on about the suite he was in and how expensive it was to build it. Says it is better than the White House. Asked me if I have ever been there. I told him about the time I went there to help in the treatment of President Nixon’s pneumonia.

November 4, 2021 (“Call from Barack Obama”)

Obama said That Donald Trump junior is “A fucking moron”. He apologized for using crude language but then went on to say that Donald Trump was a hopeless idiot who was a pathologic liar.

August 14, 2020

Joan Baez sent me a beautiful note this evening.

Hi Tony,

Just a thought..

People have told me over and over how important I was I’m their lives..I never really either believed them or paid them much attention. But maybe too much modesty, false or otherwise, is as silly as blowing ones own trumpet to loudly.

Fauci and Baez had not yet met in person at that point. But Baez invited him to attend a May 2021 ceremony in which she received the “Kennedy Center medallion for lifetime performance as a performing artist.”

[Gal Beckerman: The revelatory cringe of Anthony Fauci]

“Finally, I got to meet her in person after the year-long building up of our friendship via texts and phone calls,” Fauci gushed to his diary. “She is an absolutely amazing, warm an endearing person, and our friendship was cemented last night as it became clear that we really were, as I said, ‘meant for each other ‘.”

I have questions!

August 30, 2020

Spoke with Joan Baez today – She wants to use the portrait of me [one Baez had painted] to advertise the need for science and adhering to public health messages. In essence, she wants to use the portrait in PSAs. She really is wonderful.

October 1, 2020

Hope Hicks is infected!!!

November 17, 2021

I went to a book party last night for Jonathan Karl’s new book about Trump. It took place at the Cafe Milano. The place was incredibly crowded and I was almost forced to take my mask off for 2/3 of the time I was there since they were serving drinks and people were talking and taking selfies. I was totally swamped all night by people wanting to say hello, shake my hands, and take pictures with me. I could not get away from it . Although some people may think that this is great to have people treat you like Elvis Presley , but it was really very unnerving.

Unnerving indeed. Reading Fauci’s dispatches left me with a strong sense of returning to a grainy dream state. How did we survive that time? Did this really happen? And did Barbra Streisand really call Fauci’s cellphone?

Yes, she did. “Had great call with Barbra Streisand,” Fauci wrote on February 23, 2021. She consulted him on a medical issue. “We then stared discussing life in general,” he continued (more friendship-building). “I told her that I work listening to her songs on ALEXA. She really did not know what ALEXA was. I accidentally butt called her later in the evening and she said that she was going to call me anyway.”

Celebrities: They’re just like us!

“I brought the phone over to ALEXA and asked to play ‘Songs by Barbra Streisand’,” Fauci added. “When the song came on loud and clear, she started laughing and absolutely loved it!”

Embarrassing as this all may be, a lot of high-level government officials insist on keeping diaries in which they chronicle their high-level government activities. This happens even, or especially, when these activities involve sensitive matters. And if these diaries become public (which seems to occur with some frequency), they can yield irresistible morsels for history’s sake. Or, at the very least, gossip’s sake.

The Anti-Democrat

2026-07-29T16:26:52-04:00

Photographs by Nic Antaya

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You won’t find a much harsher critic of the Democratic Party than the progressive trying to secure its nomination for Senate in Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed. When I caught up with him last week in Ann Arbor, he was at a café holding an outdoor roundtable with young voters, many of them college students or recent graduates. The normally voluble El-Sayed, drinking matcha and dressed casually in his signature tight black T-shirt and jeans, listened as much as he talked, and he heard the students describe their disillusionment with politics—and especially with Democratic candidates.

“Your generation has a great bullshit meter, because you’re fed bullshit online all day,” El-Sayed told the group. “And the Democratic Party brand right now is so bullshit.” It was not a statement with which any of the students seemed to disagree. “You tell it like it is, and that’s what we young people want,” Joe Garris, the president of the College Democrats at Eastern Michigan University, told El-Sayed. “We don’t want to hear corporate answers anymore. We just want the straight truth.”

One of the few factors that could impede a Democratic wave in this year’s midterms is the party’s own unpopularity; polling suggests that plenty of voters outside college campuses might also nod along to El-Sayed’s denunciation of Democrats. Antipathy toward the party is fueling the rise of populist insurgents such as El-Sayed, who castigate Democratic leaders like Chuck Schumer with nearly as much fervor as they criticize President Trump.

Nowhere are the lines dividing Democrats more clearly drawn than in Michigan, a state that the party must win to have any real chance of retaking the Senate majority in November. Democrats have to flip four Republican-held seats without losing any of their own, and Michigan is the Democratic-held seat at the most risk of going red. (The incumbent, Senator Gary Peters, is retiring.) El-Sayed is battling Representative Haley Stevens in the August 4 primary, and the winner will face former Representative Mike Rogers, a formidable GOP candidate who came within roughly 20,000 votes of capturing Michigan’s other Senate seat two years ago.

A 41-year-old doctor, Rhodes Scholar, and former county health director, El-Sayed is running as an unabashed critic of Israel and of corruption in both parties. He begins rallies with a call-and-response incantation of his campaign slogan: “Money out of … politics! Money in your … pocket! Medicare for … all!” I sat down with him after his event in Ann Arbor and asked him to specify the parts of the Democratic brand that he believes are “bullshit.” He began with some of his campaign themes and described Democrats as hypocrites in thrall to corporate donors. “You say you’re for human rights and can’t name a genocide a genocide,” El-Sayed said. “You say you want to give people health care but take money from the people who are keeping us from having health care. You say you want to stand up to Big Tech and take money from Big Tech.”

Nic Antaya for The Atlantic
A yard sign for Abdul El-Sayed in Ferndale, Michigan

Nic Antaya for The Atlantic
A person claps during an El-Sayed rally.

“What are we actually for?” El-Sayed continued. “Are we just the permanent opposition party where ‘We’re not them’?” Then, referring to Republicans, he added, “At least they’re honest about who they are, for the most part.”

This message should be familiar to those who have watched progressives and democratic socialists topple establishment favorites in New York City, Colorado, and Maine over the past several months. But Michigan is a state that Trump carried in 2024, and many Democrats fear that nominating a candidate who calls for abolishing ICE and establishing a single-payer health-care system is too big a risk in such a crucial year for the party. El-Sayed is also seeking to be the first Muslim senator at a time when some Republicans are fomenting unrestrained Islamophobia. A poll released on Tuesday found Stevens running even with Rogers while El-Sayed trailed him by 10 points in a hypothetical general-election matchup.

[Read: Something is happening in the Democratic base]

El-Sayed’s confidence can border on cockiness—some Democrats see his strident attacks on Stevens as demeaning or even sexist—and he has leaned into the electability debate. Ahead of the 2028 presidential race, he and his progressive supporters view the Michigan contest as an opportunity to extinguish what they see as stale Democratic beliefs about the types of candidates that can win in swing states. “This is just a different time, and this time calls for different kinds of candidates,” El-Sayed told me. “I hope that coming out of this election, the question of electability is no longer asked and interpreted in the same way.”

He turns the argument back against Stevens, who has trailed in many polls despite benefiting from more than $60 million worth of ads bolstering her candidacy and attacking El-Sayed (about half of it coming from AIPAC). “If you can’t get elected without $60 million being spent for you, you can’t get elected. I’m so sorry,” El-Sayed said.

The progressives’ chief data point is Trump’s 2024 win, which they interpret not as an endorsement of the president’s vision but as a rejection of Democrats and the political system more broadly. “You know what people hate more than Trump? Politics as usual. They hate politics as usual so much that they were willing to take Trump, warts and all,” El-Sayed told me. “So what happens if you offer them something that’s not politics as usual and isn’t a megalomaniacal billionaire narcissist? Well, let’s see.”

Nic Antaya for The Atlantic
Representative Haley Stevens laughs with supporters at the the Michigan Conference of Teamsters in Detroit on July 24.

Stevens is in many ways the quintessential swing-state Democratic Senate candidate. A former Obama-administration official who worked on the auto-rescue task force during his first term, she won a Republican-held House seat in the Detroit suburbs in 2018. Her trajectory is broadly similar to that of Elissa Slotkin, a former CIA analyst and Pentagon official who was elected to Congress in 2018 and then narrowly defeated Rogers in the 2024 Senate race.

In the House, Stevens has distinguished herself mostly through her loyalty to the Democratic leadership. She provided a reliable vote for President Biden’s major initiatives and enthusiastically backed his 2024 reelection bid even after many in the party were calling for him to drop out.

Stevens’s campaign for Senate is well funded but also exceedingly conventional. She emphasizes her Michigan roots, her ties to Obama, and what she’s done for the state in Congress. Taking aim at El-Sayed’s personal wealth, Stevens likes to point out that she’s the only Senate candidate who’s not a millionaire, and she criticized him repeatedly for not releasing a complete financial disclosure. (He released it just before their final debate this week; it showed he’s worth as much as $2.1 million and earned income from a rental property his wife owns in Dubai.)

Still, Stevens has not been able to generate the same amount of energy as El-Sayed, nor does she seem desperate to try. Over my three days in Michigan, he held at least eight events across the southern part of the state; she publicized just two, and her campaign declined to make her available for an interview. (It has helped El-Sayed that, unlike Stevens, he does not have to juggle campaigning with an important day job: “I’m Abdul. I’m 41, I’m unemployed, and I spend my time asking people for money,” El-Sayed joked to the students in Ann Arbor as he introduced himself.)

[Read: The return of the Democratic manly man]

Polling in the race has been murky. Surveys conducted by groups aligned with El-Sayed’s campaign have shown him up by double digits, as did an independent poll released today. But a Detroit News poll earlier this month found Stevens leading by nearly seven points. Supporters of Stevens had hoped the early-July exit of a third major candidate, State Senator Mallory McMorrow, would help her consolidate support. But one of McMorrow’s most prominent backers, Senator Elizabeth Warren, campaigned with El-Sayed over the weekend.

With El-Sayed holding strong, Michigan’s most prominent Democrats have rallied behind Stevens in a bid to deny him the nomination. This spring, former Senator Debbie Stabenow endorsed Stevens. Then, soon after McMorrow dropped out, Stevens gained the endorsement of the retiring Peters, a former chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee who had earlier indicated he would stay out of the primary to succeed him.

By far the biggest get for Stevens, however, was Governor Gretchen Whitmer, the state’s most popular Democrat, who announced her endorsement last Friday, a day before the start of early voting. Whitmer appeared that afternoon alongside Stevens and another key establishment backer, Representative James Clyburn, at a union rally in Detroit, where Stevens is counting on a big turnout among the city’s Black community. Without mentioning El-Sayed’s name, Whitmer strongly suggested that Stevens would be the stronger general-election candidate. “Michiganders understand better than anyone that our vote has a consequence for every American,” Whitmer said. “We also know that winning Michigan is as tough as it gets. But as someone who won statewide twice, I know Haley is tougher than the environment we’ve got to win in.”

Nic Antaya for The Atlantic
From left, Representative Pramila Jayapal, Senator Elizabeth Warren, Abdul El-Sayed, and Senator Chris Van Hollen in Ferndale, Michigan

The primary race has turned nasty in its closing weeks, a concern for Democrats hoping that the party can unify to defeat Rogers, who has coasted to the GOP nomination without significant opposition. Stevens’s supporters erupted after El-Sayed implied to Semafor that she could not “string together two coherent sentences.” Soon after, he urged his supporters to stop making fun of Stevens “for things that have nothing to do with her policies or politics.” The flap may have helped Stevens find her voice—literally in a certain sense. She has turned her thick Michigan accent into a calling card of authenticity. “Some of you have seen, there’s those cool kids on the internet. They’re doing the cool-kid chatter. Some of them might be the coastal elites making fun of how I talk,” she told the crowd in Detroit, which laughed loudly. “They’re thinking they’re better than us. And what they don’t know is I am your voice, and their jokes and their criticism only makes me fight harder.”

[Read: One morning of controlled chaos in Maine]

As I talked with voters in Detroit and its suburbs, it seemed apparent that after such a bitter primary, either candidate could struggle to assemble the coalition they would need to win in November. Younger voters filled El-Sayed’s events, and several of them told me they weren’t sure they would support Stevens if she were the nominee. The image painted by El-Sayed of Stevens as a politician beholden to big-money interests had taken hold. “She would depress the youth vote,” Scott Siegal, a 24-year-old student, told me at an El-Sayed rally in Ferndale. If Stevens wins the nomination, he said, “I’d probably just not vote.” Colin Takata, a 27-year-old who works for an audio company, said of Stevens: “It almost feels like she’s a corporation in a trench coat.”

At the Stevens rally, some of her supporters said they found El-Sayed likable and appealing, but they favored Stevens’s experience and had concerns about his ability to win. “I have nothing against the brother. He’s a nice guy,” Robert Royster, a funeral director in Detroit, told me. “But she has receipts.” Others, however, took offense at El-Sayed’s treatment of Stevens. “From what I’ve heard, I don’t think he likes women,” Tyrone, a former auto worker who declined to give his last name in discussing such a fraught primary, told me.

Long-simmering tensions between the Arab and Black communities in Detroit could also hamper El-Sayed. One of the first attendees I spoke with at the Stevens rally told me he didn’t care for El-Sayed in part because he doesn’t like Arab people. He was not the only person at the event who expressed such prejudice. Tyrone Carter, a state representative from Detroit backing Stevens, acknowledged the Arab-Black tensions in the city. “They’re real, and they exist,” he told me at the rally.

Some of the nation’s most popular progressives have come to Michigan to campaign with El-Sayed, including Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (as well as Warren). But an endorsement he values as highly as any of those has come from a Democrat with a far lower national profile, at least for now: Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland. El-Sayed told me he wants to see Van Hollen replace Schumer as the Democratic leader in the Senate; Van Hollen says he’s “kicking the tires” on a 2028 presidential run instead, though he has notably not told El-Sayed to stop promoting him for the Senate leadership.

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

Nic Antaya for The Atlantic
Stevens signs line the wall at the Michigan Conference of Teamsters.

As a chair of the Democratic campaign committee first in the House and then, more recently, in the Senate, Van Hollen was responsible for recruiting candidates in the party’s toughest races. Many of those picks looked and sounded a lot more like Stevens than El-Sayed.

But Van Hollen has become one of the Senate’s staunchest critics of Israel, and he told me the Trump era has changed his view about electability. “I think people want somebody who’s going to rock the boat,” he said, pointing to the election of “a convicted felon” to the presidency. “I think Donald Trump’s election was a symptom of a deeper unrest among voters. That unrest is real.” When I asked him if he agreed with El-Sayed’s assessment that the Democratic Party’s brand is “bullshit,” Van Hollen did not repeat the word, but he didn’t dispute it, either.

Were he to win in November, El-Sayed would be the most progressive candidate elected in a swing state in modern times, but he keeps some space between himself and the leftward bound of today’s Democrats. He is not a democratic socialist, and when the question comes up, his position hews closer to Elizabeth Warren than to Bernie Sanders. “I think that capitalism is, when it actually works, an efficient way to allocate resources,” El-Sayed told me. “It’s not working right now.”

“I know that the establishment desperately wants to turn me into a DSA candidate,” he went on. “I’m just not, and it bothers them so much.” El-Sayed is right about that. Neither his Democratic critics nor the Republicans who seem to be awaiting his nomination with glee are apt to make that distinction for Michigan voters. And if he defeats Stevens next week, the general election will test just how far the progressive movement can advance in this political era. It’s an opportunity that El-Sayed and his supporters have been waiting years to grab.

Trump Crashes Into Reality

2026-07-28T19:17:00-04:00

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President Trump has mused about being the most powerful man in history. He has started wars and remade his nation’s economic and strategic relationships with the world. He has demanded, and largely received, total obedience from his party. He has dominated the national discourse like no president has before, and he’s tried to recast his nation’s capital—and even its history—to his liking. He’s everywhere. He has said he believes that there are “no limits” to his power.

But if that was ever truly the case, it certainly isn’t now. Recent months have delivered a reckoning for Trump, who has crashed hard against some real limits. The war in Iran, a conflict that he’d once thought would take only a few weeks, hit the five-month mark today. The U.S. casualty count is growing, weapons stockpiles are running low, and gas prices are again surging. Trump desperately wants the war to end. He is receiving conflicting guidance from his advisers—escalate, some urge, as others tell him to cut and run—and has become just the latest U.S. president to be humiliated by hard-liners in Tehran.

Trump is also flailing domestically. His approval numbers have sunk, and Republicans are finally, in small doses, beginning to defy him. Trump has demanded that the Senate blow up the filibuster to pass the SAVE Act, which would make voting more difficult and require voters to provide proof of citizenship. But Republicans have refused. Although the legislation seems dead, Trump called yesterday for Republicans to stay in Washington to work on it, potentially saddling them with unpopular (and doomed) votes while also preventing them from returning home to campaign ahead of the midterms. Strategists from both parties predict that at least one chamber of Congress will flip to the Democrats, allowing the party to stall whatever is left of the president’s legislative agenda and open investigations into his administration and allies.

Once the midterms are over, Trump could face his worst fear: irrelevance. He will be a lame duck, down to his final two years in office, and at some point will no longer be the nation’s top topic of conversation. As focus shifts to the presidential primaries, Trump risks disappearing from the headlines. Even some of his closest allies don’t know how he’ll react.

Trump gathered a team of senior advisers at the White House on Friday to walk through the latest options in the war that he’d already declared won. The meeting came after nearly two weeks of the United States bombing Iran, with Tehran striking back against allies in the region, including a hit on a military base in Jordan that killed three American service members. Trump had wanted to avoid resuming hostilities after signing a cease-fire agreement last month at Versailles, of all places. But negotiations for a permanent peace have stalled, and Iran has continued to menace the Strait of Hormuz and threatened to charge tolls for ships using the vital waterway, a nonstarter for American allies in the Persian Gulf. Meanwhile, the new wave of bombings, green-lighted by Trump, has not produced meaningful change along the strait. The meeting was set to discuss the possibility of returning to an all-out war.

[Read: War by any other name]

Trump has threatened escalations many times before, only for Iran to call his bluff. This time, a senior White House official familiar with the discussions told me, the frustrated president seemed more inclined to order a heavier assault—but he and his advisers once again opted against it. There were several reasons to discard the idea, at least for now, the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal conversations. That included the risk of dangerously depleting the number of defensive interceptor missiles available to the military’s Central Command, which is responsible for operations in the Middle East. Advisers also expressed worry about the prospect of a widening war in the Middle East, the anger of key Gulf allies targeted by Iran’s counterattack, and the potential for an energy or a refugee crisis. Trump repeatedly told advisers that he worried that an escalation could spark a global economic conflagration and “turn me into Hoover,” the senior official told me.

A number of influential Republicans and conservatives have begun to urge Trump to abruptly declare some sort of win and leave the Iran mess behind. They argue that the short-term benefit of doing so would be to lower prices, push Iran out of the headlines, and potentially salvage Republicans’ midterm chances this fall. But the geostrategic consequences would be significant; Tehran would possess an economic weapon—control of the strait—that it could wield at any time to inflict global economic pain. And the Iranian regime could strike with impunity at its neighbors, including Israel.

Trump’s campaign swing through Michigan yesterday was a rarity in his second term. But his refrain there was not: He made unfounded claims about election fraud and, this time, appeared alongside a GOP congressman running for governor who falsely said that Trump had won the state three times. (Nope, only twice.) The president exaggerated the nation’s manufacturing rebound under his watch and, once more, mocked the affordability crisis that polls suggest is top of mind for many voters. His recent moves seem designed to dissuade or prevent voters from casting their ballot, not to inspire them. He has spent weeks talking about election security, including in a prime-time White House address, prompting Democrats to warn that Trump is trying to set up a pretext for challenging this fall’s results. His administration has appealed to the Supreme Court to curb mail-in voting, and Trump has relentlessly pushed for voter restrictions via the SAVE Act.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune has refused to do away with the filibuster, a move that would allow the GOP to push the SAVE Act through. Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said last week that the president’s “patience is running out” with Thune, and a senior adviser told me that Trump has privately derided the majority leader as “one of my biggest headaches.” (Trump downplayed the friction yesterday, telling reporters on Air Force One that his relationship with Thune was “fine” while also demanding that the legislation pass.)

Just over a year ago, the GOP marched in lockstep to pass the One Big Beautiful Bill Act tax legislation. Now Trump’s wish list has stalled. Some Republicans have sought permission to distance themselves from the unpopular president, and even loyalists such as House Speaker Mike Johnson said last week that, in terms of the war, it was time to “wrap it up.” By no means are Republicans in revolt. But Trump’s grip on the party has loosened, just a little.

The White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson reiterated to me in a statement that the SAVE Act “has always been a top priority for President Trump and it remains one,” adding that he “will not stop fighting until it is passed.”

Trump, a man who has spent his life in pursuit of attention, is also beginning to contemplate the limits of his relevancy. The former celebrity developer and reality-TV star has famously declared that he’d rather receive bad publicity than no publicity. At times, he even faked being his own publicist to plant some news. One of his superpowers is his ability to command attention, to change the news cycle or move markets with a stray comment or tweet. His ubiquity, some of his advisers believe, is a strength—because Trump is everywhere all the time, he’s hard to pin down, and controversies slide away. With loud volume and relentless repetition, he can shape the national conversation.

[Read: A different kind of fading president]

But even those in Trump’s inner circle aren’t sure what to expect if people start talking about him less. The political calendar is relentless: Once the midterms clear, Washington will turn its focus to the 2028 presidential campaign. With no incumbent in the race and no clear front-runner in either party, it will be as wide-open as any race in decades. Trump may no longer be among each day’s top stories—arguably for the first time since he came down the Trump Tower escalator more than a decade ago. It’s not as if he will suddenly vanish; he’ll aim to play GOP kingmaker, and he’ll still be commander in chief. But he’ll be staring at life as a private citizen again, one whose businesses and family could face questions from a future Democratic president’s Department of Justice. His widely panned speech at last week’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner seemed to offer a preview of his future: His grievances were met mostly with silence. Some of the president’s allies have begun to privately wonder how he might handle a new, reduced status. No one suspects that he’ll take it well.

Lindsey Graham’s Last Laugh

2026-07-28T18:40:04-04:00

Lindsey Graham always had a deep appreciation for earpieces, motorcades, and heavily secured environments. He recognized heady Washington status symbols when he saw them—including posthumous ones, such as big memorial services held in big, important rooms containing big, important entourages.

These were Graham’s kind of sanctums. And today was his kind of send-off.

The South Carolina Republican, who died earlier this month at 71, was celebrated in back-to-back departure rites—a morning ceremony in the Capitol Rotunda, followed by a funeral at the Washington National Cathedral. Both gatherings were invitation-only, and heavily guarded. Graham would have liked that too; it underscored the potent lineup of dignitaries who’d come to pay respects to a senator who craved few things more than being part of top-level delegations, high-wire negotiations, and inner-circle golf foursomes. Power mourners included Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Vice President Vance, a good portion of the Trump Cabinet, and a bipartisan assemblage of the U.S. Senate.

President Trump, whom Graham once despised—until Trump was elected and Graham managed to contort himself into an Oval Office confidant—served as the senator’s marquee eulogist. “A true American original,” Trump called Graham, which is one of those catchall descriptors for odd-duck characters who defy easy classification. Trump acknowledged that he and Graham “did not exactly get off to the best of starts.” Eventually, though, they would forge an important, if volatile, partnership. The president recounted an especially rough patch during the 2016 presidential campaign when Graham called Trump a “jackass” and Trump responded by sharing Graham’s private cellphone number at a rally in South Carolina.

[Anne Applebaum: The quintessential politician of this era]

For old times’ sake, Trump recited the number in his speech today: “202-228-0292, if anybody wants to give it a shot.” He added that Graham had the last laugh, “because while I blew up his phone for one day, we became great friends, and Lindsey did not stop calling me for the next 10 years.”

Trump’s line drew laughs, but it also contained the key to Graham’s political durability: his ability to disarm opponents and to be dexterous in his alliances. “He understood that if people like you, then they’re more likely to work with you,” Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina told me shortly after the Rotunda service had broken up. “He could endear himself to you,” Tillis said of Graham. “That’s who he was. But it was also smart politics.”

Graham could sometimes come off as a disheveled mess of a man. “A small earthquake,” as his Senate colleague John Kennedy of Louisiana put it to me. He could be persistent, exhausting, and unrelenting. And he was not always in perfect harmony with Trump.

[Mark Leibovich: What Lindsey Graham wanted]

Graham was a devoted advocate of Ukraine, and a close ally of Zelensky’s. “He never saw a war that he didn’t like,” Trump said in his eulogy. He seemed to mean this as a slight exaggeration. Or maybe not. But Graham learned to modulate his hawkishness toward Russia for the sake of keeping peace with Trump—and also keeping his audience with him.

In this way, Graham made himself an essential player in the life of Trump-era Washington. It took some doing. And no doubt compromise, frustration, and countless blows to his dignity. But Graham succeeded in making himself a center of influence and an important “voice in the room.”

“I have never been called this much by a president in my life,” Graham told me late in Trump’s first term. He found this exhilarating and was always gravely serious about his role.

Trump was followed to the podium by none other than Sean Hannity of Fox News. This felt quite fitting, as Graham had been a regular guest on Hannity’s nightly show, just as Trump was a regular viewer.

Graham “probably has a heavenly version of Mar-a-Lago,” Hannity said. “It may even be a little bigger.” He envisioned a massive ballroom and an arch somewhere on the property: a big, important room for Lindsey Graham, for all eternity.

The Problem With Shutting Down ICE in Blue States

2026-07-26T07:00:00-04:00

Photographs by Klaus Galiano

It was probably inevitable that the Delaney Hall immigration detention center in Newark, New Jersey, would become a battleground in the broader fight over President Trump’s mass-deportation campaign. The privately run jail reopened last year as the only sizable facility of its kind in the New York City metro area, with capacity for 1,000 ICE detainees. Trump officials have been threatening for months to intensify ICE enforcement in New York, making Delaney Hall essential to their plans. It’s also smack-dab in a blue sea of state and local governments dominated by Democrats whose constituents are furious at ICE.

Protesters have rallied outside Delaney Hall since May to denounce poor conditions inside the facility, operated by the GEO Group on a $1 billion, 15-year contract. Trump officials say that complaints about the facility are overblown and that protesters’ true goal is to drive out ICE.

New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill and other prominent Democrats have joined calls for Delaney Hall to be shut down, and they’re suing the Trump administration to block ICE plans for a larger jail in another part of the state.

In recent years, blocking or limiting ICE jails has generally been an effective tactic for immigration activists because it constrains the government’s ability to arrest and hold large numbers of immigrants. It also drives up costs by forcing ICE to relocate detainees. Squeezing ICE’s capacity has worked in tandem with so-called sanctuary policies adopted by state and local jurisdictions that try to limit or prohibit cooperation with federal immigration enforcement. The result is a geographic imbalance in ICE infrastructure: There are relatively few detention centers close to northern and coastal cities with large immigrant populations, while a disproportionate number of the agency’s jails are concentrated in Texas and Louisiana.

But the keep-ICE-out approach has downsides that Democrats rarely acknowledge. And now that ICE is swimming in cash, a strategy that relies on starving ICE of resources might turn out to be not just futile, but counterproductive.

Klaus Galiano

A protest outside Delaney Hall on May 28

Since Trump returned to office, Republicans have used the budget-reconciliation process to channel more than $100 billion in additional funding to ICE, 10 times the agency’s annual budget. ICE opponents can make it harder to open new immigration jails in blue cities and states, but the administration now has all the money it needs to ship detainees to southern states, where detention costs are generally lower. When Tom Homan, Trump’s “border czar,” traveled to New Jersey last month to defend conditions inside Delaney Hall and meet with Democratic officials, he said protesters’ calls to close the jail would backfire.

John Gihon, a former ICE attorney in Florida who is a board member of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, told me that when ICE facilities shut down in Democratic-run states and cities, it’s “a small-time win” for activists but it leaves detainees worse off.

“ICE is going to find the bed space,” Gihon said. “A lot of time, it’s going to be farther away from a blue state, and farther away from friendly federal courts, in a place with terrible conditions.” In addition to being more distant from family members, immigration courts in Texas and Louisiana have judges who reject asylum claims at some of the highest rates in the country, federal data show. And sanctuary cities such as New York and Chicago generally have more legal-aid organizations that can help ICE detainees get out of custody and fight deportation. “When I have a detention center near me that I can drive to, I never have to worry about my client missing a phone call,” Gihon told me.

That’s not to say that advocates have no reason to fight for better conditions, or to get immigrants out of ICE custody. At least 52 detainees have died while detained by ICE since Trump returned to office, two and a half times the rate of fatalities from his first term, according to a report published last month by Human Rights Watch.

But Democrats calling for Delaney Hall to close should be careful what they wish for, Gihon told me. “If you shut that place down, everybody gets sent to Louisiana,” he said. “And most of them are not going to get out.”

ICE relies on a patchwork of jail facilities and immigration detention centers, many of which are privately run, to hold the immigrants it arrests and seeks to deport. The agency currently has about 65,000 detainees in custody nationwide, down slightly from January but still close to record levels. Trump officials say they need to boost detention capacity to 100,000 to hit their goal of 1 million deportations a year.

Opponents of Trump’s immigration crackdown have scored some victories lately in their battle to stop the expansion of ICE detention centers. The “Alligator Alcatraz” camp in the swamps of south Florida has been closed. In Maryland, a federal judge has blocked ICE’s attempt to open the state’s first large immigration detention facility. And Trump officials have scaled back plans to create a national network of ICE megajails out of converted warehouses, and are instead preparing to sell or repurpose several properties purchased during a billion-dollar spending spree last winter.

The backlash to ICE has picked up momentum around the country as more Democrats condemn the agency and endorse calls to eliminate it. A YouGov poll conducted in March found that three-quarters of Democrats and more than half of independents favor abolishing ICE. The survey was conducted after the killing of two U.S. citizens protesting the ICE crackdown in Minneapolis.

[Read: ‘Abolish ICE’ is back ]

Homan, who used to run ICE, has waged a counter-messaging campaign in defense of his former agency and its legal authorities. He met with Newark Mayor Ras Baraka to ask for more support from city police, and ate a meal in the Delaney Hall cafeteria, pronouncing the spaghetti “good.” And he leveled a warning last month to Sherrill and other Democrats calling for the jail’s closure. "You want to shut down the facility?” Homan said. “Then every illegal alien we arrest in that state, we’ll fly to Texas. We’ll fly to Arizona, detain them there, because we’re going to keep arresting people. We’re going to keep detaining people. We’re going to keep removing people.”

Detainees picked up by ICE in the New York City area and held at Delaney Hall remain close to their families. (One of the demands of recent protests was increased visitation hours.) If the facility is shut down, Homan said, immigrant families will see their loved ones shipped out of state. “How does that benefit the migrant community?” he asked.

Attorneys and immigrant advocates I’ve spoken with deplore Homan’s threats, but acknowledge that ICE’s funding surge has put them in a bind. They’re not giving up calls to shut down immigration jails and stop ICE from opening new ones. Yet for detainees who are already in ICE custody, they concede, that approach is likely to make outcomes worse. The rates at which immigration judges grant protection to immigrants seeking asylum vary widely, for instance; New York City courts have some of the highest approval rates, while courts in Houston have among the lowest.

The advocates I spoke with said ICE opponents, by and large, have not yet reckoned with the implications of ICE’s new financial resources, and remain committed to tactics that try to limit arrests and deportations by making it as difficult as possible for the agency to operate in their communities.

Claire Trickler-McNulty, an attorney who oversaw ICE policy and planning under Joe Biden and who now advises advocacy organizations, told me the agency’s geographic imbalance developed partly because detention facilities in southern states were lower cost and logistically convenient for deportation flights or bus transfers to Mexico. Trickler-McNulty said activists who want to fight Trump’s crackdown should call for safe, humane detention and, more important, fewer detainees. “My view is you want to be very clear on who needs to be detained and for how long, and manage those cases very closely, so that people aren’t spending too long in detention,” Trickler-McNulty said. “If we accept the premise that we are going to have immigration detention for a certain segment of the population, then that is what you would want.”

ICE officers arrested nearly 40,000 people last month nationwide, the highest one-month total since Trump reentered office, according to the agency’s most recent data. Thanks to a hiring surge last fall, ICE has added about 8,000 officers, doubling the size of its workforce. Homan has threatened to marshal those forces to surge operations in New York City and other sanctuary jurisdictions, where immigrants generally face lower risk of arrest and deportation.

Klaus Galiano

A man and child wait at Delaney Hall to visit a detainee on July 4.

[Read: The truth about ICE’s recruiting push ]

Last January, soon after Trump took office, I was invited on a ride-along with William Joyce, the second-highest-ranking official in New York City for ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations division, which handles deportations. Joyce told me he had fewer than 100 detention beds available, leased from a jail about 60 miles north of the city, in Orange County, New York. When space ran out there, he had to send detainees to jails in Pennsylvania, Virginia, or farther south. The lack of ICE-jail capacity in the New York City metro area has led to overcrowding at the agency’s processing center inside 26 Federal Plaza in Lower Manhattan. (A suspect was arrested there Monday after a failed arson attack at the building’s entrance that did not result in serious injuries.) Joyce, like a lot of ICE officials in sanctuary jurisdictions, had a limited budget to work with, and prioritized using the available jail space for detainees with serious criminal histories over those whose only violations were immigration-related.

Such trade-offs are no longer necessary. Nearly 40 percent of immigrants taken into custody have no criminal records, according to Homan. “We’re arresting everybody we find,” he said Tuesday on a podcast hosted by Katie Miller, the wife of the Trump aide Stephen Miller.

The ICE detainee population has also soared because the Trump administration has made it harder for judges to issue bonds that would allow immigrants fighting deportation to be released and continue working while they await their next court appearance. And the Laken Riley Act, signed by Trump nine days after taking office, has expanded the range of criminal charges that render someone ineligible for release, to include shoplifting and theft.

Last fall, then–Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem oversaw the purchase of at least 11 large warehouse properties around the country at a cost totaling more than $1 billion. The acquisitions were part of a $38 billion ICE plan to build a national network of megajails with capacity for as many as 10,000 detainees. But the agency faced intense opposition to the plan, including in Republican-led states, and ICE officials found themselves facing a red-tape labyrinth as they sought permits from local governments for their sewer and water upgrades. The warehouse purchases, which were directed by Noem and her de facto chief of staff, Corey Lewandowski, are now under internal investigation by DHS’s inspector general.

DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin, who replaced Noem in March, has said the department is scaling back and reevaluating the ICE-warehouse plan. Department officials say they may repurpose or sell several of the warehouses, boosting ICE capacity elsewhere by purchasing privately run facilities from ICE contractors and adding space at existing jails.

[Read: The $97 million Utah warehouse ICE bought for $145 million ]

Trump officials are still looking to boost their jail capacity in the Northeast. After the administration bought a large warehouse in Roxbury, New Jersey, for $129 million in February, state officials and the Republican-led town council sued to stop ICE from converting it into a detention center, citing environmental concerns. The government said last month that it was no longer planning to go forward with the conversion, but after Sherrill celebrated the announcement as a “major victory,” Mullin abruptly reversed course, and declared that the department “will NEVER back down.” As of last week, attorneys for the Trump administration told the court they’re still figuring out what to do with the warehouse, and they gave no timeline for the decision.

The White House’s MAHA Gatekeeper

2026-07-24T06:30:00-04:00

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The world’s most popular podcaster, Joe Rogan, reached out privately in April to the world’s most powerful man, Donald Trump, to discuss the healing power of ibogaine, a psychedelic made from the root bark of a Central African shrub that researchers are studying as a treatment for addiction and trauma. Trump responded by text, “‘Sounds great. Do you want FDA approval? Let’s do it,’” Rogan announced weeks later, when he stood behind the president in the Oval Office for the signing of an executive order on psychedelic therapies. “It was literally that quick.”

But it wasn’t that simple. After hearing from Rogan, the president told his team at the Department of Health and Human Services to change the policy, and the team sent a draft executive order to the White House Domestic Policy Council. That’s when things got messy. In the days that followed, Rogan’s allies engaged in battle with a mid-level White House health adviser, Dr. Heidi Overton. As a deputy assistant to the president who focuses on health policy, Overton ran a process to revise the draft in coordination with other stakeholders, including the Departments of Justice and Veterans Affairs.

Members of the “Make America Healthy Again” movement were furious, convinced that Overton, not for the first time, had undermined Trump’s own desires. The friction, which has not been previously reported, became so intense that Rogan and W. Bryan Hubbard, the CEO of Americans for Ibogaine, a nonprofit that champions the drug’s therapeutic benefits, threatened to pull out of the signing ceremony if they did not have a say in Overton’s final edits, according to three people familiar with the events.

Overton’s efforts on the Domestic Policy Council shrank the roughly 1,400-word HHS draft to about 900 words by the time Trump signed his name. Entire sections were removed, including those calling for a psychedelic-therapy czar and treatment-funding reforms, according to a draft we reviewed. A $250 million research fund became a $50 million partnership with states. In the end, the document accelerated review for some drugs and pushed the government to reschedule psychedelic substances that perform well in large clinical trials, enough to persuade Rogan and Hubbard to show for the signing.

Overton is one of the most powerful public-health officials in Trump’s orbit who has little public profile. Her job, as a senior health-policy official on the White House Domestic Policy Council, is to convert the president’s priorities into the scope and language of documents that will advance the White House’s agenda. But Overton’s detractors describe her as one of the biggest obstacles to MAHA actually realizing its priorities—“the controlled opposition,” one person who has worked with her told us. They accuse her of slow-walking marijuana rescheduling, trying to limit MAHA changes to federal nutrition guidelines, and delaying or weakening several other initiatives. “As an unelected bureaucrat, Heidi Overton sought to use her pen to override the intended exercise of presidential power,” one person outside of government who was familiar with the psychedelic-executive-order process told us. “It was a derogation of representative democracy.”

Leaders of the West Wing and HHS, by contrast, say the 37-year-old physician represents democracy at work. They have rushed to her defense, describing her as a star scientific wonk with a medical degree and a doctorate in clinical investigation who knows how to balance competing interests to achieve Trump’s goals. “The president adores her,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told us. Since the start of Trump’s second term, the White House has trusted Overton to coordinate nearly all of its major health policies, including MAHA priorities such as revisions to childhood-vaccine recommendations and the redesign of the food pyramid.

“In President Trump’s administration, the Domestic Policy Council is the White House office that is and should be depended on to make sure things are correct, legally durable, done with policy consistency, and, in this case, medically sound,” White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles told us. “Any suggestion that Heidi Overton or the Domestic Policy Council is slowing things down is being made by an uninformed person. Things move at a light speed in this administration.” The White House has been sufficiently impressed by Overton’s work that she has been named as one of three finalists to become the next Food and Drug Administration commissioner, a promotion that would give her direct power over the pharmaceutical industry, medical devices, tobacco products, and most of the nation’s food.

The fight over Overton’s role in the first 18 months of Trump’s second term is certain to become more public if she faces Senate confirmation later this year. It has already revealed a growing rift between the White House and a group of MAHA policy makers over the pace and limits of reforming federal health policy.

[Read: Why is Robert F. Kennedy Jr. so convinced he’s right?]

Sky-high expectations for radical change at the start of the administration yielded some dramatic shifts on vaccine recommendations, nutrition guidelines, pharmaceutical regulation, and agricultural policy. But the team that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. built has faced pushback on pesticide regulation and other areas where they sought to disrupt decades of federal policy making. Overton, as the traffic cop of health policy at the White House, has found herself at the center of those fights. This story is based on interviews with 17 people with direct knowledge of Overton’s work. Nearly all of them requested anonymity because they are not authorized to speak publicly or feared retribution from the White House if they publicly criticized her. Overton declined to comment for this story.

Kennedy, the founder and public face of the Make America Healthy Again movement, who has from the start of the administration found himself limited by the interagency process that Overton runs, is nevertheless one of her most vocal defenders. At the signing ceremony for the psychedelics executive order, he thanked Overton while acknowledging the behind-closed- doors fights that had taken place. “It was often frustrating but always right,” he said of her advice. “She brings exceptional dedication, meticulous attention to detail, and strategic leadership to every policy she touches, turning our vision into meaningful results for the American people,” Kennedy told us in a statement.

But supporters of Kennedy’s MAHA ambitions say that he has been frustrated at times with the limits that Overton and the White House have put on him. “Time after time her views were to dig in and resist the president’s agenda until his friends called him directly and overrode her,” another person familiar with her work told us, pointing to issues such as psychedelic treatments for veterans and marijuana rescheduling.

At the HHS headquarters building last year, a joke began circulating about all of the policies that Kennedy advisers believed Overton was holding up, according to three sources: Policy proposals that go to the White House fall into what they call the “Overton window” of inaction—a play on the social-science term named after an unrelated researcher that describes the range of acceptable change in a political system.

Overton began working for Trump in 2019 while doing a surgical residency at Johns Hopkins University, where she became an ally of the last FDA commissioner, Marty Makary. She joined the White House at a time of crisis, serving on the front lines of the nation’s COVID response. Allies say that the experience left her skeptical of the established public-health infrastructure, pushing her to finish her doctorate in clinical investigation at Hopkins and perhaps making her receptive to the reforms called for by the MAHA movement. After Trump’s defeat in 2020, she joined Brooke Rollins, her former boss at the White House Domestic Policy Council, at America First Policy Institute, a think tank that doubled as a Cabinet-in-waiting for a second Trump term.

Rollins became agriculture secretary when Trump returned to the White House. Overton helped Kennedy put together his team for HHS, people involved told us. She supported Trump’s embrace of the MAHA agenda, people who interacted with her at the time told us. Top Trump advisers trusted her to support the cause while running the scientific traps, keeping an eye on the political risks, and managing the contentious inter-department fights that Kennedy’s proposals would inevitably create.

One of Kennedy’s first major MAHA drives was to replace what he called the “unreadable” scientific groundwork by the Biden administration to revise federal nutrition guidelines. He launched a new push for “gold standard science,” prompting a monthslong rush to develop new evidence reviews to back up the guidelines that Kennedy wanted to issue. Those effectively flipped the 1990s USDA “food pyramid” to prioritize the consumption of proteins, healthy fats, and fibrous vegetables—what Kennedy considers real food—over refined grains and ultra-processed foods. Rollins, at USDA, and Kennedy, at HHS, made a show of working closely together. But behind the scenes, their departments engaged in sometimes acrimonious battle, and Overton was in the center, mediating the back-and-forth.

HHS officials became convinced that Overton was siding with USDA. Wary of a legal deadline to produce the new recommendations, she chafed at Kennedy’s idea of throwing out all of the Biden administration’s work. She wanted to keep the parts that the Trump administration had no qualms about, such as research done on saturated fats. And some HHS officials viewed her as sympathetic to USDA concerns about a lack of consultation with the new scientific advisory panel that HHS had appointed, two people said.

“At one point, her recommendation was Can we just use the old science?” one person involved in the process told us. “Long story short, she did everything she could to prevent the real-food thing from being a success.” HHS officials became so concerned that Overton was favoring USDA and undermining their efforts that they created a binder, documenting every communication among her and USDA officials in a bid to better counter her arguments, according to two people familiar with the effort.

Overton’s allies say that to suggest that she did not want a major remake of nutrition guidelines is just wrong. They point to the end result as evidence. Overton also subsequently led the policy process that resulted in USDA committing $700 million to a regenerative-farming program, championed by Kennedy, that seeks to avoid heavy dependence on chemical fertilizer and pesticides. She also helped write the first MAHA executive order last February, which reframed the government’s health priorities around countering chronic diseases, reversing declining life expectancy, and reducing supposed overreliance on medication.

But other changes came more slowly, to the frustration of MAHA advocates. Recently, Overton has been involved in drafting new policies for the use of peptides, short chains of amino acids that are available on the gray market but that, in many cases, have scant scientific evidence to support their safety or efficacy. An FDA advisory board is meeting this week to consider whether to recommend easing regulations on seven popular peptides, allowing them to be made by compounding pharmacies, which prepare custom medications that in many cases aren’t available from traditional pharmacies.

MAHA advocates support greater peptide availability, often portraying them as preferable to conventional pharmaceuticals. Kennedy himself has acknowledged using peptides. Overton, however, is viewed by some as wary of the lack of scientific research into some of the compounds. For her supporters, this is proof that she is doing her job. For her opponents, it is evidence that she is a bureaucratic institutionalist representing the kind of inaction that MAHA had hoped to break. “Heidi is a skeptic of anything that is not pharma, and that would include peptides,” a person familiar with the matter told us.

Overton was also in the middle of a fierce internal debate over marijuana regulation. Trump made a 2024 campaign promise to reclassify the drug from Schedule I (a criminal designation that highlights abuse potential for substances without medical value) to Schedule III (lower abuse risk and an allowance for medical prescription and study). Law-enforcement agencies and conservatives were wary of marijuana’s harms, and the Trump administration stalled on the initiative for almost all of last year.

Marijuana entrepreneurs and one of the president’s wealthy friends, Howard Kessler, eventually triumphed with direct appeals to the president, creating a playbook that Rogan followed in his outreach on loosening the regulation of psychedelics. Those direct appeals were designed, to some degree, to bypass the interagency process, people familiar with the matter told us. Once Trump decided to move, he relied on Overton to make the change happen. “I’ve never been inundated by so many people as I have about this particular reclassification,” Trump said at a December signing of an executive order that finally directed the marijuana-classification change. Kessler developed a direct relationship with Overton during the process and has since been working with her on other health issues.

In late December, Trump pushed for another MAHA health initiative to be codified in short order, calling for a new childhood-vaccination schedule to be in place by the end of the year. Once again, Overton was in the middle of wrangling between the White House and HHS. She and department officials created an initial draft, but HHS lawyers initially rejected the proposal as lacking enough scientific backing and therefore vulnerable to legal challenge. At a meeting that month in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, next to the White House, Overton dressed down HHS officials for not presenting a document that would pass legal review, according to a person who attended. “I think she felt blindsided,” the person said.

HHS staff worked through Christmas and New Year’s to footnote the document, recruiting Martin Kulldorff, a former Harvard biostatistician who now works in Kennedy’s office, to help. The new rules were introduced in January. A federal judge blocked them in March, ruling that the agency had not done a proper scientific review even after the later revisions.

Kennedy suggested last year that Overton take the job overseeing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, an offer that she declined, according to two people familiar with the situation. But in recent weeks, Overton has made clear that she is open to running the FDA, a larger and more powerful agency. White House officials are also considering two others: Jeff Vacirca, a cancer physician serving as the CEO and chairman of the board of New York Cancer & Blood Specialists, and the senior Pentagon health official Stephen Ferrara. A decision is expected soon.

Trump’s psychedelic order came together in weeks. Shortly after Rogan reached out to Trump, they saw each other at an Ultimate Fighting Championship event in Miami. “He came to me and said, It’s done. We’re going to take care of it. It’s a good thing for the soldiers. It’s a good thing for everybody,” Rogan later recounted on his podcast.

[Read: How to have a ‘don’t-know mind’]

Some in the White House were caught off guard and questioned the wisdom of unleashing psychedelic mental-health treatments that had not yet been studied like other approved pharmaceuticals. Officials at the Department of Veterans Affairs were concerned about patients suddenly demanding treatments that the department was not ready to provide. Overton once again stepped in. “She wanted to make sure it was being done the right way,” Chris Klomp, a senior adviser to Kennedy, told us. “What I observed with the psychedelics is that Heidi ran a process to try to align all these different pieces.”

But Klomp said that he was not surprised that the process ended with some people unhappy. “The Domestic Policy Council is in no small part a quarterback aligning all those different parties,” Klomp said. “If you don’t understand that process, you can at times feel pretty frustrated.”

MAHA activists, who view Trump’s presidency and Kennedy as a rare opportunity for major change, see Overton’s more cautious, deliberate approach as anathema. Overton’s allies say that this is a misreading of her role, which is to build consensus and deliver a lasting outcome. Now, as Trump considers moving her to a much larger position, the debate may soon find a wider audience.

The Trump Family Sparks a Revolution in Albania

2026-07-23T16:40:00-04:00

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In the summer of 2021, Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, were cruising the Mediterranean by yacht when they stopped for a swim off the Adriatic coast. They splashed over to an island and hiked, barefoot, across its hilly, rugged terrain. “Effectively that’s how we found it,” the president’s eldest daughter would later recount.

The Albanian island that the Trump heirs stumbled on, Robinson Crusoe–like, is called Sazan, once the site of a top-secret military base. Sazan is not undiscovered territory to Albanians; it’s their country’s largest island. Because it was uninhabited for many years, vegetation and wildlife flourished, making it a cherished nature preserve. Luckily for the Trump couple, Albania’s prime minister, Edi Rama, was a guest on the same yacht one of the nights they were on board.

Three years later—and about two months after Donald Trump’s reelection in 2024—an investment committee led by Rama gave preliminary approval to the couple’s plans to develop the island into an opulent resort. The venture extends to nearby land next to a coastal lagoon, which serves as a crucial habitat for flamingos, sea turtles, and other species. The couple’s partners in the project include a pair of Qatari brothers who have financed ultra-luxury developments across the Middle East and South Asia and an Albanian conglomerate with holdings in energy, construction, infrastructure, insurance, and tourism. In a recent podcast interview, Ivanka Trump described the project as “the culmination of all of my experience in real estate, all of my travel, a lot of reflection on how I want to live, how I think people increasingly are wanting to live.”

Many Albanians see matters differently. Hundreds of thousands have joined daily protests against the plans, in one of the country’s largest social mobilizations since the end of Communist rule 35 years ago. The uprising, called the Flamingo Revolution, takes its name from the wild birds that breed in the wetland habitat. Protesters have carried inflatable flamingos and placards with drawings.

The unrest has it all: accusations of organized crime and drug trafficking, competing claims of foreign influence, a cameo by Kanye West. For the participants I spoke with, the demonstrations are about accumulated frustration with Albanian politicians who have failed to give the country a solid economic foundation. “You can interpret it as an anti-Trump demonstration in the sense that it’s opposed to a Trump-like system we see here,” Fatos Lubonja, a writer and dissident who was imprisoned during Albania’s Communist dictatorship, told me: “government decisions made in secret, for the benefit of the few, motivated by money linked to oligarchs.”

The beauty of the landscape discovered by the American president’s daughter “belongs to all Albanians,” Lubonja said. He paraphrased Dostoyevsky: “And beauty will save the world.” But Rama, a former professional artist, won’t hear it. “I can be lectured about many things—about economy, about legal affairs, about agriculture, about health care,” he said in a recent interview. “But there is one thing that nobody can lecture me, which is beauty.”

The Flamingo Revolution seems, at first glance, the unlikeliest of anti-Trump protests. Albania, a nation of fewer than 3 million people, is one of the most pro-American countries in the world, and has been since the United States opposed Albanian partition all the way back in 1920. More recently, Washington backed Albania’s entry into NATO, in 2009, and has upheld its security in a historically volatile region that’s sometimes called the powder keg of Europe.

In the 18 months since Trump returned to power, I have traveled extensively in European countries with some of the strongest postwar ties to the U.S., including Britain, Germany, and Denmark. One of the questions I hear most often is why the Americans opposed to Trump aren’t mounting larger and more sustained demonstrations against him. The question arises especially when I ask European diplomats why the leaders of their countries don’t stand up more forcefully to an American president who insults them and entertains annexing their territory. They turn the inquiry back on me, asking, Why aren’t Americans standing up? Millions have marched in “No Kings” protests; the mobilization in the spring was one of the largest single-day protests in American history. Still, the point remains. Trump made at least $2.2 billion during his first year back in office, as wage growth slowed. He is pursuing an unpopular war, unauthorized by Congress and unsanctioned by international law. Even pro-American Europeans want to know: Why aren’t people in the streets every day?

[Read: Trump is learning that bullying has consequences]

In Albania, a small country on Europe’s Balkan Peninsula, they are. Today marks the 54th consecutive day of protests triggered by the Trump-family development project. Few would have pegged Albania as the center of the international anti-Trump opposition. But a tour through the country’s recent history suggests that it isn’t as unlikely as it appears.

Albania was once one of the most isolated countries in Europe. It was ruled, from the end of World War II until 1985, by a ruthless and paranoid Communist dictator, Enver Hoxha, whose fear of foreign invasion spawned the construction of an estimated 173,000 bunkers. Albania earned the nickname “Europe’s North Korea.” The Communist state was abolished in 1991, and the anti-Communist opposition swept to power in parliamentary elections a year later. But the transition to a market economy wasn’t easy. Breakneck privatization under a system known as “shock therapy” devastated local industries and drove mass unemployment. In 1997, the collapse of massive, state-sanctioned pyramid schemes wiped out the life savings of about two-thirds of Albanians. A small cadre of politicians has competed for control of the country ever since. Because of its recent experience, the population is highly attuned to signs of autocracy, Dana Fisher, a sociologist at American University who has studied the demographics of the No Kings protests in the U.S., told me. Familiarity can breed complacency. But in this case, it’s inspiring fierce resistance.

The Trump family triggered the uprising, but the target of the protests is Rama. The leader of his country’s Socialist Party, Rama came to power in 2013, as Albania was still sloughing off its insular identity. Albania became a candidate for European Union accession the following year. Rama was once a vehement Trump critic who greeted the prospect of the mogul’s nomination in 2016 by remarking, “God forbid!” He foresaw harm not just to the United States but to the “democratic world.”

Rama is now much more supportive. He hailed Trump’s “remarkable victory” in 2024 and, a year later, echoed the president’s assertions of divine providence, adding, “When Trump says that God saved him to Make America Great Again, he tells only half of the story. The other half is that he saved Trump also to make Europe wake up and get its act together.” Rama is one of the only European leaders to accept an invitation to the Trump-chaired Board of Peace. Domestically, he has sought to improve the Albanian economy by upgrading the hospitality industry. He told The Guardian last year: “We need luxury tourism like a desert needs water.”

That’s in line with Kushner’s ambitions. “I was very, very impressed with his vision for what he wanted to do with Albania,” Trump’s son-in-law told an investment conference. Kushner continued: “I really didn’t know anything about the country. I didn’t understand the history, and the darkness of the history with the Communism, and the terrible leadership actually led to it being fully undeveloped as a nation.”

It’s not Kushner’s first attempt at high-end development in the Balkans. Last December, he pulled out of plans to build a Trump Tower in Belgrade, at the site of the former Yugoslav defense ministry, which was bombed by NATO in 1999. His investment firm withdrew from the project hours after the country’s organized-crime prosecutors indicted the culture minister for allegedly forging documents as part of the process to remove the building’s cultural-heritage status. The company issued a statement saying the plans would not proceed, because “meaningful projects should unite rather than divide.”

In Albania, people involved in the resort project maintain that construction isn’t yet under way, even though environmental activists say fencing has gone up, trees have been removed, and sand dunes have been flattened. The country amended its environmental regulations in 2024, cutting a path for the development by lifting construction bans in protected ecological zones. The move drew a warning from the European Parliament about compliance with environmental standards as part of Albania’s bid to join the bloc. Rama’s office didn’t respond to a request for comment, but Asher Abehsera, one of the Trump couple’s partners in the endeavor, told me in a statement, “Our goal is simple: celebrate Albania’s natural beauty, create jobs, and build something future generations can be proud of.”

He added: “Its future will ultimately be determined by Albania and the Albanian people.”

Large-scale demonstrations began in Albania at the end of May, after video circulated of private security guards punching and dragging a protester along a beach in Zvërnec, the coastal enclave where part of the Trump-family project is planned. “This was the tipping point,” Ditmir Bushati, a former Albanian foreign minister, told me. “It started as a dispute over access to the sea and access to nature, and it was transformed in a couple of days into a protest about who should decide the future of the country.”

Thousands mobilized in Tirana, the capital, with signs proclaiming that the nation was not for sale and declaring, I don’t want Albania like Dubai. Rama also dug in his heels, issuing a statement saying, “There is absolutely no chance that the investment will stop as long as I am here.” As the protests grew, they became a platform for frenzied speculation and conspiracy theories. Some protesters saw parallels to Kushner’s support for a proposed “Gaza Riviera,” fearing that Albanian land would be used to resettle Palestinians. Further afield, online commenters called the development “another Epstein island,” a reference to the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s hideouts in the U.S. Virgin Islands. A separate controversy, over government-backed plans for a Kanye West concert outside Tirana, added to the grievances. Attention came from all ideological corners. Senator Bernie Sanders welcomed the protests as a dissent against “global oligarchy.” Alex Jones, the right-wing conspiracy theorist, enthused about an impending “civil war.”

Vlasov Sulaj / NurPhoto / Getty

The prime minister argued that the protests had been hijacked by foreign actors, blaming “Trump haters” as well as “enemies of Israel and Albania.” Albania, where about half of the population is Muslim, has strong ties to Israel rooted in historical goodwill. During the Second World War, Albanians motivated by an ancient honor code called besa, literally “to keep the promise,” hid thousands of Jewish refugees; it was the only European country with more Jewish residents after the Holocaust than before. In this century, Albania made itself a target of the Iranian regime when it agreed, at the request of the United States and the United Nations in 2013, to host exiled members of the dissident group Mujahedin-e-Khalq, or MEK. In 2022, Albania expelled Iranian diplomats after concluding that Tehran was behind a wave of cyberattacks aimed at government institutions and critical infrastructure. In recent weeks, Rama has accused Iran of waging a “hybrid war” by spreading disinformation about the development and inflaming opposition to his government’s plans. Iran has denied the accusations.

[Read: War by any other name]

Protesters appear intent on proving that the uprising is authentic and homegrown. Bushati, the former foreign minister, has celebrated the protests as “the best investment in our image as a people and in our path towards the European Union.” He said as many as 200,000 people mobilized over the July 4 weekend and dismissed claims of foreign interference. “Iran has zero influence in Albania,” he said. “This is a country living happily in the U.S. orbit.”

Iranian influence hardly seems necessary to destabilize the resort plans. The land on which part of the project is planned is contested. Sazan, the island, is owned by the state, so a lease would ultimately be necessary; the Trump-linked consortium currently has what’s called “strategic investor” status, which helps accelerate permitting and negotiations for a long-term agreement. The coastal land in Zvërnec, however, is private. Entities linked to the Trump couple purchased it from a Miami-based businessman, Artur Shehu, who insists that his family’s claim on the land dates to Ottoman times. Locals in Zvërnec argue that they are the rightful owners. It’s a messy picture because land was requisitioned by the state during the Communist period; when properties returned to private hands in the 1990s, ownership was often disputed.

The saga became considerably more dramatic this summer, when an Albanian agency devoted to countering financial crimes, the Special Structure Against Corruption and Organized Crime, said it was investigating whether Shehu had forged deeds to the property. Finding out whether he has lawful title to the land is just one part of a broader probe by the agency into allegations that Shehu and his associates had trafficked cocaine into European ports and then laundered the money for real-estate projects. A message sent to a number associated with Shehu went unanswered; his attorney denied the allegations to Reuters. The Trump couple and their partners in the venture are not accused of wrongdoing. A spokesperson for the venture said, “The Albanian legal system is the appropriate venue for resolving questions about land ownership and the integrity of prior transactions. We respect that process, and as always, we will cooperate with any lawful process as required.”

The Flamingo Revolution reflects dissatisfaction with Albania’s democratic institutions 35 years after the fall of Communism. Yet the popular mobilization, combined with the anti-corruption inquiry that seeks to validate some of its core claims, is evidence of democratic maturity. Albanian society has developed antibodies to signs of state capture. The irony is that an initiative emanating from the American president’s family would trigger such a powerful immune response.

One Morning of Controlled Chaos in Maine

2026-07-22T06:00:00-04:00

Photographs by Cassandra Klos

Kathie Purdy doesn’t mind the phone calls. And there have been a lot of them—producing a sustained buzzing from her iPhone throughout the nearly two weeks since Graham Platner announced that he would drop out of the Maine Senate race. At one point, Purdy’s device grew so hot that she had to take it out of its case to let it breathe. But that was okay, she told me. As chair of the York County Democratic Committee, it was her job to help guide Mainers through this confusing moment.

What Purdy did not appreciate was the insinuation—from other Democrats, from members of the media, from online trolls—that the process to replace Platner was somehow undemocratic. “This is what I’m talking about,” Purdy told me on Sunday, showing me a text from a voter asking whom “leadership had picked” for the nomination. It was early afternoon in the Sanford Performing Arts Center, and we were sitting side by side on the stage, looking out over the democratic process in action. Purdy rolled her eyes, exasperated. “Actually, right now we are conducting the caucus-type meeting in Sanford where the participants vote for a group of delegates,” she replied, using voice-to-text. “That’s the folks who’ll be voting for your Senate candidate.”

Choosing those delegates was not a tidy affair. All morning, the room had been crowded, even though the state party had urged people to please consider voting from home. Mainers who wanted to be delegates and Mainers who came to meet delegate candidates and campaign volunteers proffering lists of allied delegates wove in between the aisles of red-upholstered chairs, shaking hands and arguing and complaining about various parts of the process in which they were taking part. Some struggled with the Wi-Fi. Occasionally, Purdy took the stage to make an announcement: We found a pair of car keys. Please come to the stage if they’re yours!

Looking around, I imagined that, somewhere a few hours north, Susan Collins was rubbing her hands together with delight. Maine Democrats have failed to unseat her for nearly three decades, and there’s plenty of reason to believe that in three months they’ll come up short again. Zoomed out, the situation is, objectively, ridiculous. Maine Democrats nominated Platner despite a bouquet of red flags, including a Nazi tattoo and allegations of volatile behavior from past girlfriends. Now that an accusation of rape has toppled Platner’s candidacy, the Democrats who selected him are desperately trying to pick up the pieces of a race that might be their party’s best shot to take back the Senate.

[Read: Platner just made things harder for Democrats]

Cassandra Klos for The Atlantic

Kathie Purdy, chair of the York County Democratic committee, organizes the vote for delegates.

Cassandra Klos for The Atlantic

A list of progressive delegates

Yet the predictable conclusion—that the Democrats are once again in disarray—could not be drawn, at least not fully. Because ultimately, after all the hemming and hawing and arguing and complaining, the Democrats of York County sat down and voted. Totals were reached surprisingly quickly. Only a few hours after most attendees had arrived, Purdy was reading out the names of the 84 delegates and 17 alternates who would go to the party’s nominating convention in Bangor.

Plenty of people were frustrated with the results, which, across Maine, were very good for Troy Jackson, a progressive former state legislator. Others had issues with the process itself. But “that’s democracy,” Purdy told me. So far, in Maine, it’s going pretty well.

In the days after Platner announced that he was dropping out of the race, there was much consternation about how the Democrats would replace him. The party wouldn’t have time to conduct another primary. But if state Democratic leaders simply chose a new nominee on their own, voters might be indignant. Much of Platner’s support, after all, had come from people exhausted with the so-called establishment.

The Maine Democrats had settled on a compromise: They would hold a convention on July 25, where 601 delegates would choose Platner’s replacement. Before that, each county would have an election to choose its portion of delegates. People were not exactly pleased about this. Whereas independent Mainers had been able to participate in the June primary, only registered Democrats were allowed to select the replacement nominee. “As an independent you’re saying my vote doesn’t count now,” one commenter on the York County Democratic Committee Facebook page wrote. (Much of the debate has played out on Facebook.) Another self-proclaimed former Democrat weighed in: “If you believe primary voters should choose nominees, not party insiders, consider whether your party registration still reflects your values.”

Meanwhile, the county committee chairs—who, as volunteers, are paid precisely zero dollars for their work—were under a lot of stress. No one from the Maine Democrats returned any of my calls or emails. Purdy was begging people to be kind. “I would really appreciate some respect,” she wrote on Facebook. “Please stop the snark.” Joseph Zamboni, the chair of the Cumberland County Democratic Committee, seemed on the verge of tears when I spoke with him on the phone about where and when the nominating meeting would take place. In one of his many lengthy social-media updates, Zamboni tried to shed some light on the stressful decision-making process. “Nobel Prize–winning scholar Herbert Simon, whose work transformed the fields of economics, psychology, and administration, argued that people rarely make perfectly informed or ‘optimal’ decisions because none of us has unlimited time, information, or mental capacity,” he wrote.

Cassandra Klos for The Atlantic

Voters confer over delegate slates.

Cassandra Klos for The Atlantic

Voters wore stickers and T-shirts representing their Senate candidate of choice.

Cassandra Klos for The Atlantic

An attendee waits in Sanford, Maine.

So I did not know what I would find on Sunday. But when I arrived at the auditorium in Sanford at 9 a.m. sharp, I was greeted with a dozen volunteers and a box of donut holes. In the parking lot outside, supporters held a rally for Jackson while, inside, dozens of people were already circulating. “Usually, when we hold a convention, we have to go begging” for delegates, one county committee chair told me, “Right now we’re fighting ’em off.” (In York County, more than 400 people had applied to fill 101 positions.)

For two hours before voting began, people made the case for their candidates. Most were either supporting Jackson, a logger and former state-Senate president, or Nirav Shah, the former leader of the Maine CDC, who has since dropped out of the race. Jackson’s supporters said they liked him because his positions are most closely aligned with those of Platner, and he could, they believe, more easily inherit Platner’s movement. “We’ve lost a lot of momentum, and he has the best chance of keeping them engaged,” Reed Gordon, a 29-year-old delegate candidate, told me. The case for Shah was that he is slightly more moderate and might, therefore, be an easier sell for independent and moderate Mainers. Platner was too aggressive, Paula Busby, a 62-year-old from the town of Lebanon, told me. “We need to stand up against” President Trump, she said, “but we have to be measured.”

Because the Democrats at these county meetings were choosing delegates rather than voting directly for candidates themselves, campaigns had made lists of allied delegates ahead of time and passed them out. Delegate selection was, basically, a proxy election: If you wanted Jackson to win, you’d vote for Jackson’s slate. This was upsetting to the Mainers who’d hoped that the people sent to the convention would be impartial. “This isn’t the way I’d have done it,” Julian Rogers, the former vice chair of the Maine Democrats and a delegate candidate himself, told me. “Rather than sort of coronating one person, I think we need to hear from these other people and have a little more balance.”

Leah Macomber, a game developer from Saco, was also on the ballot to be a delegate, but she didn’t know anything about the slates until Sunday morning. “I was so pissed off,” she told me. “I’m a Mainer, and I don’t like being told what to do, or especially who to vote for.” So she made a T-shirt reading Vote Independent Thinker and wore it to the event. She also handed out lollipops labeled Susan sucks to try to stand out to voters. Neither she nor Rogers were selected as delegates.

[Read: Can Democrats salvage their chances in Maine? ]

Cassandra Klos for The Atlantic

The scene at the Sanford Performing Arts Center

Still, even they were impressed at how quickly the process had been put into place, and how clear the communication had been from the state and county parties. It was preferable, some Mainers told me, to the 2024 process to replace Joe Biden, which was ultimately an anointing of Kamala Harris. And it was obviously better than powering through with a toxic nominee.

The Democrats got a redo, a freebie, to try again and get someone better. “I was so disappointed when Platner dropped out,” Diana Garry, a retired nurse from Shapleigh, told me. “I was so discouraged. But now I’m thinking it’s a blessing.”

By 11:15 a.m., people were in their seats, with their phones and iPads open, ready to vote. “It’ll all be electronic, so it’ll be fast,” Purdy said from the stage. I wondered whether she was tempting fate. The Democrats, after all, do not have the best track record when it comes to using technology to facilitate important elections. And when Purdy began reading out instructions for voting through the link sent via email—“To edit your submission, hit ‘Continue,’ then ‘Edit,’ then ‘Continue’ again”—a feeling of dread came over me. It was not assuaged by the line for technical support that quickly formed down the center aisle of the auditorium.

But my concerns proved unfounded. The vote was going smoothly. An hour in, all of the people in line had been helped. Some Mainers had left; they’d see the results posted online. Soon, Purdy was onstage giving a 10-minute warning. “Can I get a ‘yay’?” she asked the now-dwindling crowd. “Yay!” people replied, more enthusiastically than I’d expected.

She sat back down next to me. “I’m proud of what we’ve done,” she said, looking relieved. “We had a very short time to do something herculean.” Thanks to Sunday’s elections, next weekend’s convention will be pretty straightforward. The question now is whether Purdy and all the rest of Maine’s Democrats can pull off something similarly herculean in November.

The Secretary of Homeland

2026-07-21T10:00:00-04:00

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The most important policy decision made by Markwayne Mullin in his short tenure atop the Department of Homeland Security stood for barely a day. ICE officers had just killed two people: a Mexican construction worker with three American sons in Texas, and a Colombian delivery driver whose 3-year-old daughter saw him lying dead in the street in Maine. In each case, the officers had been looking for men other than the ones they killed. DHS officials claimed that the officers had fired defensively during chaotic vehicle stops, but they offered no body-camera footage to back those claims. After phone calls with Maine’s senators, including Susan Collins, the secretary ordered an emergency halt to most traffic stops. But the decision surprised many in the White House, including President Trump, who reversed the order in a social-media post the next morning. Mullin wasn’t fired, but his authority was undercut, to the delight of the online MAGA mob that had been hammering the former Oklahoma senator as a wuss.

Mullin declared on social media that he and Trump were “on the same page” on ICE enforcement tactics and priorities. But for a secretary whose views on the department he leads are still vague, the phrasing posed a question: What page are they on, exactly?

Trump seeks the removal of millions of immigrants from U.S. cities and communities, and Mullin was brought in to do that more quietly and cheerfully than his predecessor. Kristi Noem was ousted after the killings in January of two U.S. citizens protesting ICE in Minneapolis. But Mullin, who started in March, is already being squeezed by the same forces that led to her removal. Trump’s supporters want to see the record-breaking deportation campaign that Trump promised them. But when DHS dials up the intensity of ICE enforcement, the broader public recoils from the violence it generates.

Mullin, who dropped out of college to run his father’s plumbing business in eastern Oklahoma, took an unusual path to leading the most important domestic-policy initiative of Trump’s second term. He came to the job as somewhat of a blank slate, lacking both the ideological zeal of Stephen Miller, Trump’s immigration-policy chief, and the icy resolve of Noem, who pressed Trump’s mass-deportation campaign with a ruthless determination.

Mullin was an improbable choice in other ways. He is not from a border state and did not arrive with deep knowledge of immigration policy or a background in counterterrorism. He never served in the military or in law enforcement, and he didn’t work on the congressional committees that directly oversee DHS and immigration. A former wrestler and mixed-martial-arts fighter, Mullin was known for organizing vigorous bipartisan workout sessions on the Hill, where he served for a decade in the House and for three years in the Senate. What was never in doubt were Mullin’s qualifications as a combatant for Trump. The president liked that Mullin was someone, he said, who “truly gets along well with people” but is also a “MAGA Warrior,” ready to brawl in congressional hearings and cable-news hits on the president’s behalf.

Mullin spent his career running businesses he owns, rarely having to follow a chain of command. Some of the DHS officials I’ve spoken with, who are generally supportive of Mullin, say that he’s not used to getting permission from superiors and lacks the experience on immigration issues to understand the implications of policy decisions such as halting vehicle stops. “He wasn’t brought in because of his command of CBP and ICE issues,” one DHS official told me. “He was brought in to restore normalcy.” But normalcy is not what MAGA hard-liners want to see. When Mullin demonstrates the slightest unease with the human cost of enforcement operations, right-wing critics pounce, taunting him as “Markwayne Muslim” and the “Kung Fu Plumber.”

Mullin does bring to DHS the one quality valued above any other in this administration: an imperturbable loyalty to Trump. The question hanging over him, as the pressure to ramp up deportations collides with the messy realities of carrying them out, is whether that loyalty has any limit.

Created in the aftermath of the September 11 attack, the Department of Homeland Security is a buttoned-up place with leaders who generally try to project steady resolve. Mullin brings more emotion to the job. Despite his tough-guy image, he struggles to hold back tears when he talks about his family. He got choked up during his confirmation hearing in March talking about his father’s work ethic and the devotion of his wife, Christie, whom he “fell in love with in third grade.” His eyes welled up during a budget hearing last month when he talked about sex-trafficking victims and confronting “evil in the world.” And he breaks down when talking about the brain injury his son survived in 2020, a story that also explains his personal devotion to Trump.

Mullin’s son Jim was 15 years old when he took a blow to the head during a wrestling match and collapsed. The boy’s pulse dropped, and his lips turned blue. When Jim woke up in the hospital 26 hours later, he didn’t recognize his parents and had the motor skills of a toddler. “He’s a totally different kid,” Mullin later recalled. “We almost lost him.” But when the teenager was asked who the president was, his father says, he knew. Trump was delighted when he heard this. The president offered his plane to fly Jim to a rehab clinic in California and showed deep concern for the boy’s condition, visiting him and calling every week to check on his “buddy” for a year and a half. It was Trump’s affection, Mullin said, that helped Jim reclaim his memories and stay motivated. “We were acquaintances before that,” Mullin told a Senate panel earlier this year. “We’ve been friends ever since.”

Mullin declared that he would follow Trump “into any situation”—and he has. Not long after Jim’s injury, Mullin joined the president in falsely claiming that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen, a position he stuck to even after he directly confronted rioters as they tried to break into the House chamber on January 6. As a senator, Mullin championed the president’s massive spending bill last year, even though he’d first run for office as a fiscal hawk. And in March, when Trump asked Mullin to replace the scandal-ridden Noem at DHS, Mullin gave up what could have been a long congressional career for a job often described as one of the worst in Washington: a political hot seat with grave security responsibilities, atop a bureaucratic mash-up of 22 agencies and subagencies, and 275,000 employees. Mullin, who said he was surprised by Trump’s request, didn’t think twice.“It’s hard to say no to someone you have that kind of connection with,” Jason Owens, a former Border Patrol chief who is also Mullin’s cousin, told me.

Jim Watson / AFP / Getty

President Trump shakes hands with the newly sworn-in secretary of homeland security on March 24, 2026.

The department has become far more partisan under Trump, and Mullin has done nothing to indicate that he’s likely to impose boundaries. Two days after the public reversal on vehicle stops, Mullin held a media briefing next door to the White House to push Trump’s favorite issue, echoing thin claims about election fraud while issuing threats—idle ones, legal experts say—to state officials who refuse to hand over voter data. When a reporter asked Mullin whether Trump had known in advance about the order halting ICE vehicle stops, Mullin dissembled, insisting that there was “no daylight” between them. “I’ve turned down the temperature of the stove, to try to get it correct, without boiling over,” Mullin said, touting record numbers of immigration arrests in recent weeks. Asked to clarify what he meant by “temperature,” Mullin said that he wanted less intense media coverage, not less aggressive ICE operations. “We’re turning up the heat on the streets,” he said.

Mullin is 48, compact and powerful, with a thick neck and tight-fitting suits that look as if they’re about to burst. His front teeth are fake, he says; the original ones were knocked out at a rodeo by a “horn to the mouth.” Bull riding, wrestling, and MMA fighting all involve short, performative bursts of action, not unlike partisan combat. Mullin shares his boss’s urge to lunge at any slight but also to befriend former enemies if they decide to embrace him. Sean O’Brien—the burly Teamsters boss whom Mullin told to “stand your butt up” and fight him during a 2023 Senate hearing—ended up endorsing Mullin’s nomination to lead DHS after the president encouraged the two to make peace. During the confirmation hearing, O’Brien sat just over his shoulder, next to Mullin’s wife, Christie.

Miller remains the driving force behind Trump’s immigration agenda, even though his influence over day-to-day DHS operations has diminished somewhat since the Minneapolis shootings. Mullin, like Miller, delights in hyperbolic attacks on Democrats, but the two men are in many ways stylistic opposites: Mullin is earnest and unpretentious; emotional, not cerebral. It’s almost impossible to imagine Miller crying in public.

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

Mullin has been a vocal supporter of ICE officers and Trump’s border wall, but he has also spoken sympathetically about hard-working immigrants who stay out of trouble, sounding more like a conventional pro-business Republican than a closed-borders ideologue. Some Republicans facing difficult midterm races hoped that Mullin would defuse some of the backlash to Trump’s heavy-handed tactics, while hard-liners have been wary of Mullin’s statements in support of legal immigration (they want none) and his emphasis on deporting dangerous criminals (they want more deportations than that).

Others have even loftier dreams for Mullin. I was surprised when a conservative former DHS official told me that he expected Trump to seek a major immigration compromise before the end of his term, as a legacy-building project and a bid to bring Latino voters back to the Republican Party. Mullin, who has impeccable MAGA credentials and improbably friendly relations with key Democrats, would be the ideal person to make such a deal, he told me.

Mullin’s desire to keep DHS out of the headlines was wishful thinking, if not naive. After a few weeks on the job, he threatened to curb international flights to U.S. airports that serve “sanctuary” jurisdictions that won’t help ICE, then backed off that idea after it was panned by business groups, members of both parties, and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy. Although there are no longer sweeping crackdowns on major cities for the time being, ICE arrests are ramping up again to roughly 2,000 a day nationwide, nearly double the pace since spring.

Andres Kudacki / Getty

ICE agents arrive to clear protesters from a gate outside the Delaney Hall Detention Facility in Newark, New Jersey.

Mullin has been trying to turn temperatures down in other ways. He has eased off warrantless searches and enforcement around sensitive locations such as courthouses and schools. ICE recruits are no longer being fast-tracked through the training academy, and Mullin has halted plans to house tens of thousands of detainees in retrofitted warehouses. But Mullin gets prickly when Democrats claim a victory that could make him look weak. When New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill, a Democrat, boasted on social media last month that DHS had “backed down” from its plan to open an ICE jail in her state, Mullin reversed course. “DHS will NEVER back down,” he declared. “We will be keeping this site for a detention center.”

Mullin says that his personal mantra is “Love the people, love the call,” and he has applied that as a management approach at DHS. Employee morale suffered during Noem’s tenure, and Mullin has devoted time to rallying the workforce, earning the nickname “MAGA Mayorkas.” It’s meant as a favorable comparison to Joe Biden’s DHS secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, who was known within DHS for being kind to his staff even though Republicans treated him like the boogeyman.

In Mullin’s office at DHS headquarters, located in the former Saint Elizabeths psychiatric-hospital complex in Southeast Washington, the secretary carries around a little squishy pink ball. Since middle school, he has used it as a stress-relief device and fidget tool—he calls it his “pacifier”—and he’ll bounce it to center himself when he wants to make a point. He grew up with a “bad speech impediment,” he says, and the alphabet soup of agencies and subagencies at DHS tripped him up at first. Mullin has since learned to carefully enunciate initialisms such as “CBP” in the correct order but has a curious habit of referring to DHS simply as “Homeland,” like the TV show, and his role as the “secretary of Homeland.” It makes the job sound warmer—like heartland—while also subtly reinforcing the view, popular with Trump appointees at DHS, that the nation’s top immigration-enforcement official should be a kind of cultural and demographic policeman as well as a real one.

Michael M. Santiago / Getty

Mullin speaks during a July press conference in New York City.

[Read: ‘Maybe DHS was a bad idea’]

Mullin is only the second Native American to lead a Cabinet agency, but for much of his political career, he treated his Cherokee identity as more of a biographical footnote than a central feature. “I never knew I was special for being Cherokee until I came to D.C.,” Mullin said during a Senate hearing last year. “Where I’m from, everybody’s Indian, or wants to be.”

When Democrats pressed Mullin last month during a DHS budget hearing to address questions about discrimination and racial profiling by immigration-enforcement officers, Mullin used his Cherokee identity as a shield. Representative Lou Correa of California, a Democrat, asked Mullin whether his constituents needed to carry their U.S. passport to protect themselves from ICE. “I’m from Indian Country, and we got a lot of brown people around there too,” Mullin fired back. After Representative Al Green of Texas, another Democrat, accused Mullin of defending racism, Mullin interrupted: “Are you calling me racist?” Green, incensed, shouted at him to “shut up,” but Mullin kept on swinging. “No one will call me a racist. I’m Cherokee,” he said.

Mullin flies home to his family in Oklahoma most weekends on the same executive jet that Noem controversially purchased for the department, one of several missteps that led to her ouster. DHS told me that Mullin pays for his trips, but the department did not respond to follow-up questions about how his share of the cost is calculated. The Mullins—who married when they were teenagers—live in a large house in the Tulsa suburb of Bixby, where they moved a few years ago when their kids’ beloved wrestling coach took a job there. Mullin’s convoy of black SUVs has been spotted rolling around Bixby when he’s home. The couple have six children, three of whom are adopted. “I am proud to be pro-life,” Mullin has said of his large family.

I went to northeast Oklahoma, where Mullin grew up, to gain a better understanding of his origins and his divided life between home and Washington, D.C. Although much of the state is flat, and rich in oil and gas, the 14 counties that compose the Cherokee Nation are a gentle landscape of forests, rivers, and cattle pastures in the foothills of the Ozark Mountains.

Mullin was dragged on social media after asserting his Cherokee identity during the hearing, because he appears white. He is one of more than 460,000 enrolled members of the country’s largest federally recognized tribe. Eligibility is based on genealogical lineage, not on physical appearance or a minimum “blood quantum.” Members must trace direct lineage to a Cherokee ancestor inscribed in the Dawes Rolls, a federal registry of tribal members in Oklahoma kept from 1898 to 1914. Chuck Hoskin Jr., the chief of the Cherokee Nation, told me that he estimates that the majority of enrolled members have one-eighth or less Cherokee DNA. People who see Mullin “may say, ‘That doesn’t fit my perception of what a Native American should be,’” Hoskin said. “But it’s very much statistically who we are.”

Other Cherokee members I met described their tribal heritage as Mullin does, as a source of pride but not necessarily the defining feature of their life. It’s also a source of social-welfare benefits. Cherokee identity has long been bound up in the tribe’s relationship to the federal government; enrollments surged during the creation of the Dawes Rolls, Julie L. Reed, a historian at the University of Tulsa, told me. In the mid-20th century, more white-passing members were eager to assimilate and downplay their heritage. Things have come full circle in recent decades, Reed said, the result of government benefits, federal-contracting advantages, and a resurgent pride in Cherokee identity. “People whose families had distanced themselves from the Cherokee Nation for all sorts of reasons over the course of the 20th century found their way back once the Nation really started to have real economic, political, and social impacts on the surrounding area,” Reed said.

The Cherokee Nation, whose chief is an elected official, is an economic juggernaut with annual revenues of more than $3 billion from casinos, federal contracts, and an array of tribe-owned businesses. One of the region’s largest employers, the Nation has invested more than $1.2 billion into capital projects in recent years, according to Hoskin. Tahlequah, the Cherokee capital, is a thriving midsize town, with chain stores along the highways and a welcoming, well-maintained historic district. There’s a new medical complex, along with new community centers, senior care, playgrounds, and schools, some offering Cherokee-language immersion programs.

Oklahoma was solidly Democratic for decades after it became the 46th state, in 1907, especially after the New Deal brought federal jobs and benefits to counties that were among the nation’s poorest. Benny Denton, an 85-year-old rancher who lives near the Mullin-family homestead, told me that when he was growing up, “I didn’t know of anybody who actually starved to death. But there wasn’t a rabbit in the field or a fish in the river.” The Cherokee Nation, whose government is nonpartisan, has spent the past several decades building the kind of cradle-to-grave welfare state once contemplated in the New Deal, even as Democrats have virtually disappeared from Oklahoma public office.

The ranch where Mullin grew up is less than a mile from the Arkansas state line, outside the tiny town of Westville, at the end of a narrow road winding past battered houses and trailers. A tall metal fence surrounds the 1,600-acre property, its gates engraved with the large M of the family logo. Mullin is the youngest of seven children, and friends and neighbors of the family spoke highly of his parents as hardworking, devout, and down-to-earth. Mullin’s father has a reputation for being somewhat stern, and he disciplined his kids with a belt; his mother is known for being warm, chatty, and a prodigious baker of cookies. Mullin was named after her brothers, Mark and Wayne. John Garrett, the 84-year-old chief justice of the Cherokee Nation Supreme Court, has known the family for decades and remembers Mullin accompanying his father to plumbing calls as a teenager. He was ambitious, a “go-getter,” Garrett told me. “He just had a lot of energy.”

Tom Williams / CQ Roll Call / Getty

Mullin, then a member of the House, gives a tour of the Capitol Rotunda to friends in 2016.

[Read: High stakes, and a low bar, for Markwayne Mullin at DHS]

The state’s shift to the Republican Party happened during those teen years, and the party’s attacks on “big government” found traction in a region with a fraught relationship to federal agencies that many Cherokee both depended on and resented. Mullin’s father embodied the change. He was a small-business owner who didn’t hide his frustrations with the IRS. Mullin was a devoted son who ran errands for his father. “You wouldn’t want to get in his father’s way,” said Denton, who owned the hardware store in town.

Mullin enrolled in college on a wrestling scholarship but left to help run the family plumbing business. Over the years, he grew the company—known for its signature red vans and its slogan, “The Red Rooter”—and became its pitchman in commercials. Working around construction sites in the Tulsa metro area was probably when Mullin first had experience with immigrant laborers, people I spoke with there told me; eastern Oklahoma was not a destination for immigrants when Mullin was growing up. Records show that Mullin Plumbing has earned more than $520,000 in federal contracts since 2010, mostly through the Indian Health Service. Mullin Plumbing was listed as minority-owned, Native American–owned, American Indian–owned, and a “small disadvantaged business,” but according to contracting records, those categories were not a factor in the awards.

In 2011, before he entered politics, Mullin began hosting a weekly radio show, House Talk, modeled in part after NPR’s Car Talk, to dispense advice on home improvement and repairs. Friends of the family told me that they think Mullin’s father pushed him to run for Congress around the same time to deploy his combativeness against environmental regulators and tax collectors. Mullin railed against the Affordable Care Act, opposing mandates that would require him to offer coverage to his employees despite having access himself to free health care as a tribal member. Mullin’s 2012 campaign slogan was “A rancher. A businessman. Not a politician.” When he arrived in Washington, he said, he didn’t know how to put on a tie.

Mullin positioned himself firmly among the most conservative members of Congress, proposing, for example, a total abortion ban, even when a mother’s life is in danger. When he first took office, he pledged to serve a maximum of three terms, then broke the promise in 2018. Mullin explained the decision in a video, seated with Christie, saying that he “didn’t understand politics” when he got to Washington. With Trump in office, Mullin said, he could have a bigger impact if he stayed on the job. It turned out to be the most pivotal moment of his career, consolidating his transition from D.C. outsider to MAGA insider. “The first lesson I learned up there is, you gotta build relationships,” Mullin said.

A private-equity company acquired Mullin Plumbing in 2021 for an undisclosed sum, estimated in the tens of millions of dollars’ worth of shares on the same day of the sale. The next year, Mullin won a special election for an open Senate seat. In both chambers, he was one of the few lawmakers without a four-year college degree, but his recent financial disclosures show an estimated net worth somewhere from $29 million to $97 million.

John Bankel, a GOP activist in the area who knows the family, told me that he doubts that DHS will be Mullin’s last job in politics. Christie Mullin believes deeply in her husband’s political talents and “is the one who pushes Markwayne to the next level,” he said. Bankel told me that he thinks Mullin could run for president someday.

Anna Moneymaker / Getty

Mullin walks through the Capitol in 2025.

Friends of the family told me that Mullin has sometimes regretted not serving in the military or law enforcement. The DHS-secretary job gives him a chance to be a man of action, with a lead role in national security and law enforcement. Mullin’s grandfather, who was Cherokee and a competitive bull rider, served in World War II, and last year, Mullin cited his role in liberating Nazi concentration camps when condemning a group of young Republicans who’d made racist and anti-Semitic statements in group chats.

Mullin has tried to burnish his own reputation for daring, though in a cryptic way. He has told interviewers that he performed “special assignments” outside of the U.S. military. After the Taliban took Kabul in 2021, Mullin asked the U.S. ambassador to Tajikistan to help him bring in a large amount of cash so he could rent a helicopter and lead a dangerous mission into Afghan territory to rescue a mother and her four children, all U.S. citizens. Mullin threatened U.S.-embassy staff when they turned him down. After Trump nominated him for the DHS job, Mullin told senators that the “smell” of war was something he would “never forget.” When Democrats asked what he meant, Mullin said that he’d taken a classified trip in 2016 as a member of Congress that required specialized conflict-zone training. But he refused to provide more details. “There’s another side of my bio that I don’t talk about, nor will I,” Mullin previously said on a podcast, in no great hurry to dispel the intrigue.

Soon, it came out that Mullin had told Senate colleagues during a 2023 closed-door meeting with Jordan’s King Abdullah II that he and other Americans were once rescued when the king sent his personal helicopter, because they could not get help from the U.S. military, according to The New York Times. Mullin described blood all over the helicopter. Had Mullin made a top-secret trip into war-torn Syria? Mullin has refused to say, and no one from the administration has cleared up the mystery.

Not far from Mullin’s old high school, in Stilwell, is a cemetery with a historic marker that commemorates the end of the Trail of Tears, the 1,000-mile journey made by thousands of Cherokee who were forced out of their ancestral homes in southeastern Appalachia under the Indian Removal Act of 1830. The ordeal remains central to Cherokee identity—it’s the foundational story of the Cherokee Nation as well as its greatest tragedy. From 1838 to 1839, more than 3,500 Cherokee arrived at the site in Stilwell, an official “disbandment depot” just outside the borders of the settled United States. The deported families waited in lines to receive government provisions and were sent off into the forest to rebuild their lives. Most of them spent the winter in tents around the edges of the depot site. Some of the more than 1,000 Cherokee who died making the journey are buried in the Stilwell cemetery, according to the National Park Service.

Removal remains an official government term, though today it’s used primarily at DHS to tally ICE deportations. There is no comparison, of course, between the removal of immigrants who enter the United States illegally and the relocation of the Cherokee and other tribes. That doesn’t make deportation less fraught or painful for those who develop deep ties to the United States or have children here. Taking people from their home and separating families are grave and consequential acts.

Mullin so far has engaged little with these messy realities, at least publicly. Mostly, he has echoed the rhetoric of Trump officials who prefer to depict ICE enforcement as a matter of public safety focused on the removal of dangerous criminals. (ICE data show that only a small percentage of deportees—ranging from about 5 to 15 percent—have violent felony convictions.) Like Tom Homan, the White House “border czar,” Mullin has seemed most animated when talking about the trafficking and abuse of underage migrants who arrived in record numbers during the Biden administration, an issue that lacks the moral complexity of much of ICE’s other work.

Republican lawmakers used the reconciliation process last month to score $70 billion in additional funding for Trump’s immigration crackdown over the next three years, adding to the $170 billion they’d obtained in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act last summer without a single Democratic vote. Trump has nominated a Mullin loyalist, the former Oklahoma state trooper Lance Schroyer, to be the next ICE director.

The flood of congressional funding and recent Supreme Court rulings in favor of tougher enforcement have positioned Trump’s mass-deportation plan for takeoff. That leaves Mullin, who launched his political career attacking big government, as the face of one of the largest-ever law-enforcement operations in U.S. history. Mullin’s “Homeland” department will soon have twice as many ICE officers on the streets, and all of the money it needs to round up and deport 1 million people a year. Mullin would like that to happen quietly, but it will likely trigger new pushback and protest, testing just how far he’s willing to go for Trump.

Marie-Rose Sheinerman and Isabel Ruehl contributed to this report.

*Illustration sources: Jim Watson / Getty; Andrew Lichtenstein / Corbis / Getty; Elizabeth Fernandez / Getty; Chip Somodevilla / Getty.

The Wingman

2026-07-20T09:00:00-04:00

Photographs by Philip Cheung

Read more about the Democrats who might run for president in 2028 here.

“My wife, Gabby, was shot in the head.”

Obviously, I knew this. Senator Mark Kelly’s wife, the former congresswoman Gabby Giffords, was shot in the head and grievously wounded in a mass shooting outside a Tucson Safeway in 2011. It was one of the most notorious acts of political violence in America.

In several recent conversations with Kelly, however, I was struck by how often and how bluntly he repeated these exact words. Kelly, a retired Navy pilot and former NASA astronaut, seems to appreciate the curt repetition of the statement: My wife was shot in the head. It captures how stark and defining this incident was, and continues to be, in his life.

The near-assassination ended Giffords’s career in Congress and his in space. She was left with acute damage to the area of her brain that controls speech. Kelly was compelled by circumstance to create a new course for himself as a caregiver to his wife, Democratic senator, possible candidate for president, and severe critic of President Trump and his defense secretary, Pete Hegseth.

Fifteen years after the shooting, Kelly and Giffords remain a singular entity in American public life. I went to Arizona to join them at a series of events around Phoenix. We met at a coffee shop. It was a Friday afternoon, with triple-digit heat, and had already been a grind of a day for both of them. From our meeting, they would go to a reception, followed by a dinner, and then Giffords would fly to Louisiana, where she would attend a memorial service for eight children who’d been slaughtered in a mass shooting a few weeks earlier.

Interviewing Giffords and Kelly was like nothing I’ve ever experienced in 25 years of reporting on politics. In our time together, I kept snagging on the same inescapable question: How would their unparalleled dynamic play within the merciless spectacle of a presidential campaign?

“I’m Gabby.”

She says this by way of introduction, and as a wistful acknowledgment of her name’s cruel irony. Even by politician standards, Giffords was quite the chatterbox. In their joint memoir, Gabby: A Story of Courage, Love, and Resilience, Kelly estimates that before she was shot, Giffords did about 60 or 70 percent of the talking between them. Kelly was the reticent one in the couple, happy to let his wife gobble up the silences. The massacre left Giffords with a condition known as “non-fluent aphasia.” It does not affect intelligence, or ability to comprehend events or remember stories—only to relay them. After Tucson, Kelly says, he started carrying 95 percent of their conversations.

During my visit, Kelly often finished Giffords’s sentences and elaborated on what she was trying to say. She speaks in bursts of words and short fragments. It’s evident when she is trying to express something but her voice is not cooperating. She shakes her head, moves her mouth, rocks back and forth.

When we were first getting settled at the café, Kelly walked over with a blueberry muffin and a large cup of ice water.

“Drink your water!” Giffords declared. “China. Drink more water.”

What did this mean?

“You know what people say in China when you sneeze?” Kelly explained. “Drink more water.”

Giffords chuckled—which she does a lot. Kelly often joins her. They share a dry, absurdist, and understandably dark sense of humor. It’s a bit of a platitude to say this about political couples, but Kelly really does project as a different person around his spouse. His usual solo mode is quiet intensity. With Giffords present, he becomes much more engaged, as if he’s trying to draw out whatever he can of his wife’s former extroversion.

Mark Wilson / Getty

Gabby Giffords and Mark Kelly appear at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing about gun control in 2013.

“They’re very symbiotic,” Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a close friend of the couple who was elected to Congress with Giffords in 2006, told me. As an example, Gillibrand said that Giffords might throw out a single word to prompt Kelly to tell a whole story.

I watched this pattern several times. At one point, Kelly mentioned a trip that he and Giffords had taken to Western China early in their relationship.

“China,” Giffords said. “Gorilla. Monkey.”

“Oh, panda,” Kelly said, and took it from there. They had visited a panda preserve. For $80, visitors could be photographed holding a newborn.

“Then Gabby’s like, ‘I want to hold the baby panda,’” Kelly told me. A woman at the preserve told Kelly that for $35, she could offer a photograph with a less adorable panda. Kelly referred to it as a “raccoon,” but it was in fact a scruffy little red panda. Or “Budget Panda,” as Giffords called it.

“Danger, danger,” Giffords said.

“Oh yes, it’s endangered,” Kelly said. They still have the photo of Giffords holding Budget Panda.

“She has a smile on her face,” he said of Giffords. “But you know what she’s really thinking?”

“Fuck!” Giffords said, and they laughed again.

Giffords can be mischievous in what she encourages Kelly to say, sometimes leading him into impolitic stories. At one point, I asked Kelly whether he gets more questions about what it’s like to be a fighter pilot, an astronaut, or a senator.

“Oh, diapers,” Giffords interjected.

Kelly translated: “How do you go to the bathroom in space? I get a lot of those questions.”

“Skull,” Giffords said at another point.

“Yeah, we still got Gabby’s skull,” Kelly explained. “Like, her real skull.”

After she was shot, doctors performed an emergency craniectomy on Giffords, removing a large portion of her skull to reduce pressure on her swelling brain. Kelly asked the doctor what would happen to the original chunk of bone. “It will go in the incinerator,” the doctor told him. “And I was like, Gabby’s in a coma right now. I think she might want it.”

“We stuck it in the freezer,” Kelly told me—in a Tupperware container. They still have it too. “Next to the turkey,” Kelly said.

I thought this might be a joke, but it was not. Kelly seemed to notice me looking perhaps slightly taken aback. “It’s not in the freezer we use every day,” he clarified. “It’s a separate freezer.”

Here are some things that Mark Kelly has survived: a turbulent and sometimes violent childhood, 39 combat missions in Desert Storm, a missile blowing up just above his plane, and four space-shuttle voyages (two as mission commander). He has also braved the near-murder of the person he loves most and watched her get deluged with death threats for years afterward.

It is fair to observe that Pete Hegseth cannot scare him.

Kelly, who is 62, presents as a somewhat reserved, even sheepish, figure, which can belie the crowded and suspenseful life he has led—and the chilling conflict he now finds himself in with his own government. He also has a knack for understatement.

“I mean, it’s not great to wake up one morning and to find out the president wants you hanged,” Kelly said.

He was referring to a series of Truth Social posts from Trump last November. Kelly and five of his Democratic colleagues in the House and Senate had made a video reminding U.S. service members of their duty not to obey illegal orders. Trump responded by accusing the lawmakers of sedition and threatening to seek their execution. When I asked Kelly how he first learned of the president’s foreboding pronouncement, Kelly conceded that he did not in fact “wake up” to the news. He had been sitting next to another one of the video participants, his Senate colleague Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, during a mid-morning briefing on Venezuela. A security officer walked over and passed Slotkin a note from an aide.

“It says something like, ‘President called for your arrest,’” Kelly told me.

Slotkin left the room, came back a few minutes later, and informed Kelly that Trump had called for his arrest too. Slotkin confirmed this account to me. “I just slid the note over to him,” she said. “And we just had a whole conversation with our eyes.”

In addition to the president issuing a “punishable by DEATH!” decree via Truth Social, he also called for the video participants to be “ARRESTED AND PUT ON TRIAL.” Hegseth followed up with a letter of censure to Kelly, seeking to reduce his military rank and pension, and threatening “criminal prosecution.” (Of the lawmakers involved, only Kelly served more than 20 years in the armed forces, and thus has retired-military status and a continuing relationship with the Department of Defense.)

On a cloudy morning in early May, I sat with Kelly and Giffords in the back of a sedan headed to a federal courthouse in Washington. Kelly would be appearing before a panel of appeals-court judges in connection to a lawsuit he had filed against Hegseth to block his intended punishments.

“I think this is the first time in our country’s history that a president has ordered, or has called for, the execution of members of Congress,” Kelly told me.

This is the kind of historical distinction that you’d think would shake even the most jaded naval aviator. Yet during the short ride to the courthouse, he and Giffords appeared quite unbothered by any of this. Kelly spent much of the drive talking about how people often ask him his view on whether Pluto meets the criteria for being a full-size planet. The topic then shifted (as topics do) to the cryonically frozen head of the baseball legend Ted Williams, which is currently housed at the Alcor life-extension facility in Scottsdale, Arizona. “I’m Ted Williams’s head’s senator,” Kelly pointed out.

[Missy Ryan: The Mark Kelly case is bigger than it seems]

Kelly started reading headlines from his phone about an old controversy involving the allegedly shoddy treatment of the Splendid Splinter’s remains: “Williams’ Head Abused at Facility,” he declared merrily.

“It’s hard to get me nervous,” Kelly said as we arrived at the courthouse. “You think about, like, Trump saying he wants me hanged,” he told me later—“all right, I’ll deal with it.”

This was the inescapable subtext of pretty much everything we discussed over several hours of interviews: Adversity is extremely relative to Kelly. It is a notion that he internalized a long time ago, but especially after Giffords was shot.

If anything, being targeted by Trump and Hegseth appears more invigorating than ominous to Kelly. Not to be crass, but if you’re a Democrat, having Trump call for your execution can be excellent for business. Especially so if you are a Democrat who, like Kelly, is “seriously considering” a presidential run.

Since arriving to the Senate in 2020, Kelly’s storybook résumé and the goodwill he’s accrued as Giffords’s spouse have granted him a high level of admiration that has yet to translate to a high level of excitement for him as a potential standard-bearer. He was a finalist to be Kamala Harris’s running mate in 2024, but was passed over. He is seen as a serious and respected lawmaker, steeped in such matters as national defense and border security. But in his relatively brief time in Washington, he has struggled to acquire main-character status or a readily identifiable fight that could burnish the profile of an ascendant national candidate.

Ting Shen / Bloomberg / Getty

Kelly was elected to the Senate in a special election in 2020, filling the seat that had been held by John McCain.

He sounds eager to be viewed as a cause célèbre. “This is not about me,” Kelly often insists, as politicians are wont to do (usually at events featuring themselves, and devoted to their career advancement).

At his May 7 court hearing, Kelly was trailed by about a dozen reporters and cameras, and a campaign-worthy entourage. After the session, which lasted about 90 minutes, he delivered a brief, ostentatiously defiant speech in front of the courthouse entrance on Constitution Avenue. “The secretary of defense picked the wrong guy,” Kelly said.

He was flanked by Giffords; his younger daughter, Claire (one of two grown kids from his first marriage); a former Navy colleague; and several other veterans and retired service members. The courthouse loomed directly behind him, and American flags flew overhead while, at the next building over, a massive likeness of Trump’s face dominated the front of the Labor Department’s headquarters.

“They’re trying to send a message to other retired veterans, and really to all of us,” Kelly said. “If you say something that the president, or this administration, does not like, they’re going to come after you.”

As much as Kelly might be milking this attention, being subjected to such a high-level threat can arouse serious menace from the acolyte mobs. After Trump’s posts about the lawmakers in the video, Slotkin told me that her father, in the last weeks of his life, was swatted in the middle of the night. Kelly said he received more death threats in a single day than he would typically get in several months. (For what it’s worth, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt later insisted that Trump in fact did not want the lawmakers to be executed.)

Kelly told me that he tries not to worry, because he is oriented to probabilities. “I’m a believer in math,” Kelly said. “So, when you look at Desert Storm, you look at all the combat missions flown, and the number of people killed—flying on the space shuttle is probably 10 times more dangerous.” And both, certainly, are much more dangerous than his current profession, he said. Statistically speaking, the universe of contemporary U.S. politicians who have actually taken a bullet is minuscule.

“But not in my family,” Kelly noted. “I thought I had the risky job—until January 8th of 2011.”

Giffords was scheduled to hold one of her regular “Congress on Your Corner” meetings with constituents in front of a Tucson Safeway that day. She had just been elected to her third term, even as Republicans had retaken control of the House in a torrent of Tea Party–driven anger over the Affordable Care Act. At about 10:10 a.m., a few minutes into the event, a gunman named Jared Lee Loughner opened fire.

Kelly was in Houston, training for a space-shuttle mission. He learned of the shooting in a call from one of Giffords’s staffers. As he flew to Tucson with his mother and his two teenage daughters, NPR reported that Giffords had died. Kelly, typically a non-demonstrative engineer, retreated to the airplane bathroom and sobbed. When he emerged 20 minutes later, he called the hospital and learned that Giffords was in fact still clutching to life. University Medical Center in Tucson corrected the media reports.

Giffords woke from a medically induced coma about a week later. Loughner’s bullet had ripped through the left hemisphere of her brain, entering over her left eye and exiting out the back of her skull. She could barely move, and could speak only a few words at a time, though it was clear that her brain worked well enough to know that something unimaginable had occurred. “What is happening to me?” she kept saying.

Kelly was diligent in documenting this period in which it all changed, taking video of her ordeal from close in. Giffords was hooked up to tubes and monitors, and her head was shaved. Some of the footage appears in the 2022 documentary Gabby Giffords Won’t Back Down. The video shows, more than anything visible today, Giffords’s despair. As happens with aphasia, she perseverates on random words. “Chicken, chicken, chicken” keeps tumbling out. At one point, she puts her head down and just cries.

The shooting scrambled each of their plans entirely. Although Kelly had already traveled multiple times into space and seemingly reached the pinnacle of his career, Giffords had very much been rising in hers. She was hailed as a natural politician, a performer from a young age who had starred in music and theater productions. (Gwyneth Paltrow is her second cousin.) She grew up in the Tanque Verde Valley, northeast of Tucson, and after college in California and a stint in New York, returned home to run her family business, El Campo Tire. She built her local celebrity as a motormouthed pitchwoman, appearing in TV ads in which she would order viewers to “Race into the El Campo Service Center today, before the offer is gone!” Giffords launched her first campaign in 2000, for the Arizona House of Representatives. Six years later, at 36, she won her U.S. House seat and was immediately touted as a future senator. She was a vibrant speaker, hawkish on border security, and, yes, a proud gun owner.

Kelly and Giffords met in 2003, on a trip to China for an international conference of young leaders. She was a state legislator, and he was at NASA. They reconnected at another conference, this one in Arizona, a year later, by which point Kelly was divorced and Giffords was single. In November 2004, Giffords was doing research for death-penalty-related legislation and invited Kelly to join her on a tour of an Arizona state prison in Florence. “We went to death row on our first date,” Kelly says. He recalls at one point stepping into the actual gas chamber.

Before long, Giffords started showing up to Kelly’s rocket launches in Houston. Kelly came to Giffords’s campaign events in Tucson. As political sidekicks went, Kelly jumped straight out of the catalog: the sturdy astronaut, content to toil in the wings with his intricate machinery. He sent her emails from space. “Tell my wife I love her very much; she knows,” Kelly said, quoting David Bowie’s “Space Oddity,” while appearing via video at a U2 concert, from the International Space Station.

Philip Cheung for The Atlantic

“Certainly, if I was not married to Gabby, I would not be sitting here,” Kelly said of his role in the Senate.

Beyond the storybook optics, Giffords and Kelly were also well-matched workaholics with high-velocity careers. It was a commuter arrangement: After they were married, Kelly continued to live in Houston, while Giffords split time between Washington and Arizona. “We did not live together until the day she got shot,” Kelly told me.

Before the shooting, the couple had been trying to have children. Giffords, then 40, desperately wanted to become a mother and was undergoing fertility treatments at Bethesda Naval Hospital. She’d had an appointment to have an embryo implanted on Monday, January 10. After the shooting, that dream, too, quickly faded. She embarked instead on a prolonged and agonizing rehabilitation.

In addition to her difficulty speaking, Giffords was left with severely limited peripheral vision in one eye, and suffered partial paralysis and motor impairment on the right side of her body. She uses a walking stick, sometimes a wheelchair for longer distances. Flights can be difficult. She travels with a full-time health aide. Yet Giffords keeps a punishing schedule, much of it connected to her anti-gun-violence organization. She meets with victims and families, attends vigils and funerals, and spends more than half of her time on the road.

Periodically, Giffords breaks into song. Although the speech part of her brain was ravaged, the music area remains intact, Kelly told me. Lyrics flow more easily for her than words.

“The sun will come out tomorrow,” she sang on the topic of the Democrats’ prospects in the midterms this fall. “Bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow, come what may!” On other occasions, when I referred to something that had occurred the day before, Giffords would chime in with, “Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away.”

“Yesterday” and “Tomorrow” are Giffords’s go-to refrains. Her life with Kelly carries a hard line of demarcation between the before and the after.

Kelly grew up in West Orange, New Jersey, in an Irish Catholic household of little outward affection and high tumult. Richard and Patricia Kelly—both police officers—were at constant odds. “One of the worst feelings in the world is, you’re in a deep sleep and then you slowly wake up to your parents screaming at one another and throwing things,” Scott Kelly, Mark’s identical twin brother, told me. “We were raised in that environment of, you know, a lot of cops, alcohol, some violence, definitely a lot of drunkenness.” The twins’ general approach, for much of their youth, was to try to protect their mother as best they could and stay occupied outside the house. After getting their driver’s licenses, the Kelly boys worked as EMTs, rushing in ambulances to the scenes of shootings, stabbings, and car crashes.

Mark said he never realized there was anything unusual about his upbringing. “When you’re a kid, that’s your experience,” he told me. “So, you’re not so sure, like, Is this normal or not normal? And you realize later it’s not normal.”

Kelly described his father as an alcoholic, but one who did not drink every day and rarely at home: “It was, like, a Friday, Saturday-night thing at the bar with his cop friends.” In some ways, Kelly added, he looked up to his father. Richard Kelly coached his sons’ Little League teams, worked as a detective, and “was putting bad guys in jail.” He also investigated mobsters, Mark told me. (New Jersey in the ’70s and ’80s, go figure.) With some pride, Kelly noted that in The Sopranos, Tony went to West Orange High School.

In his memoir with Giffords, Kelly writes that he and Scott were “borderline juvenile delinquents” growing up, always getting into trouble, accidents, and fights. They were late academic bloomers. Mark was the first to become captivated by a career in outer space; his twin, younger by six minutes, became an astronaut as well. Mark had no interest in politics, let alone a career in it. He wanted to pursue the moon, not the swamp.

But after the horror of January 2011 and Giffords’s forced retirement, Kelly began to get mentioned as a potential political candidate himself. He first ran for Senate in 2020 to fill the seat vacated by John McCain’s death in 2018; he defeated Republican Martha McSally, and was reelected to a full six-year term in 2022. I asked Kelly what had made him decide to run for office. First off, he said, he was concerned about “the trajectory of our country with Donald Trump in the White House.” This did not exactly make him a brave and lonely voice in the Democratic wilderness. But Kelly traces his particular aha moment to a get-out-the-vote rally that he attended in Phoenix before the 2018 midterms. A woman, probably in her 30s, approached him.

“She just stands next to me and says, ‘Hey, my son has Down Syndrome. And I’m terrified he’s going to lose his health insurance. Would you please consider running for the U.S. Senate?’” Kelly told the woman he would think about it.

As political origin stories go, this one feels quite labored. It seemed dubious to me, given that Kelly’s name had come up in the past, that it had never occurred to him to run for something until a woman he met at a GOTV rally brought it up. “I don’t know if I wanted to be in the Senate badly enough,” he told me. “But when I focus on something, I work really hard at it.”

Kelly makes frequent cracks about the astonishing sequence of events that landed him in his current peacocking profession. Before a taped interview at a Phoenix TV studio, he pulled out a makeup brush and applied foundation to dull the shine of his bald head. “I used to be the commander of the space shuttle,” he said, shaking his head. “Now I carry my own makeup.”

After the interview, Kelly headed off on a visit to the John S. McCain III VFW Post 7401, a half hour away in Chandler. When we arrived, he spent about 10 minutes serviceably glad-handing his way through a front bar area, dressed in an old flight jacket and camouflage cap with NAVY in big print across the front. At least two of the people Kelly met urged him to run for president. He said he’d not yet decided, though he is taking many of the so-called necessary steps, including traveling to South Carolina, Nevada, and New Hampshire in recent months.

Rebecca Noble / Getty

Kelly speaks at John S. McCain III VFW Post 7401 on May 8 in Chandler, Arizona.

His speeches need work. Kelly’s voice is more conversational than booming. His words sync awkwardly with robotic hand motions. When Kelly tries to amplify, it sounds like he’s straining. He’s used to working in tight places rather than big rooms.

At the VFW, Cindy McCain, the widow of the late senator, introduced Kelly. He moved quickly to his skirmish with the administration. “I said something the president didn’t like,” he said. “Anybody see this?” Nods and scattered applause across the room. “And the president said I should be hanged, executed, prosecuted,” Kelly said. He paused for effect. “The guy couldn’t even get the order right!”

Kelly’s main message was grounded in the old soldiers’ credo: that “to fight for a cause larger than yourself,” as McCain used to say, was its own reward. It was a friendly audience. He took questions, and came well briefed and well versed in legislative detail.

One question, however, exposed a weakness. A woman named Jennifer Worthy told a gutting story about her husband, Marine Sergeant Joseph Worthy, who was battling Stage 4 colon cancer. He had fought in Desert Storm, where he was almost certainly exposed to lethal toxins from burning oil fields. At the end of her question, Jennifer choked up. Her husband, she said, was getting chemotherapy treatment right at that hour. She asked Kelly if he would take a picture with her that she could bring back. He nodded yes, and the crowd broke into applause as Jennifer wiped away more tears.

For a politician, the instinctive move in this situation is easy: hug the woman. She was standing about 10 feet away and clearly in crisis. It should not take an elite pain-feeler like Bill Clinton to recognize this. But Kelly came off oddly oblivious. He stood in place and kept glancing around the room. He retreated into his sound bites and talked about himself: how treacherous it was for him to fly missions during the Gulf War after Saddam Hussein’s forces set fire to the oil fields. “I was there on an aircraft carrier, the USS Midway,” he said. “I’m flying around there, and the sky is black.” (Kelly did pose for a photo with Worthy and had a brief visit with her after his remarks.)

When we spoke later, Kelly acknowledged that his political personality is a work in progress. His background, he says, sets him apart from that of most other senators. In a body dominated by lawyers and debate-team types, he “brings the training of an engineer, the clarity of a tactician from his time as a naval aviator, and the cool-under-pressure of an astronaut,” his Democratic colleague Jon Ossoff, of Georgia, told me. Kelly excels in quiet, stressful, and often collaborative environments—like a spacecraft or, as Ossoff said, the Senate Intelligence Committee, where he and Kelly serve together.

[Helen Lewis: The front-runner]

Still, it’s hard to imagine a successful presidential candidate that doesn’t possess at least some knack for the performative conviviality required of big-ticket politicians.

“In my defense,” Kelly told me, “if you look at people that are, like, the normal stereotypical engineers on, like, a spectrum”—he made a hand motion, presumably to convey a spectrum of personality types—he grades himself as more gregarious than most. “I’m much more comfortable now giving random people hugs,” Kelly said.

By contrast, Kelly told me at the coffee shop in Phoenix, Giffords is always giving random people hugs—whether or not they want to be hugged.

“Airport,” Giffords said.

“She gives a lot of hugs at the airport,” Kelly confirmed. He turned to her.

“Well, I mean, you just kissed a dude on his face, like, an hour ago,” he said. “Who was that guy?”

He nudged his wife and shook his head. She smiled.

The three of us spoke for a while about the brutality of politics these days. How do they tolerate it?

“Servant, servant, servant,” Giffords said.

“You can’t live your life paranoid,” Kelly added.

I took this to mean, basically, that they are servants to a cause greater than themselves. And it comes with occupational hazards they both know too well.

“Gabby, do you worry about somebody else coming up to you and shooting you?” Kelly asked her. She shook her head.

“I mean, if somebody decided to walk up to me and shoot me, not much I can do about it,” Kelly said. “Space shuttle blows up? Not much I can do about it.”

“So sad,” Giffords said.

It’s easy to sense an undercurrent of Kelly wanting to excel in politics in order to realize the full ambitions of his wife. He talks a lot these days about how he will not be “silenced” by Hegseth, and how he is standing up for others in doing so. (“There are 2 million retired service members like me that they want to silence,” he says repeatedly.) One parallel Kelly does not draw explicitly, but that is evident to anyone who is familiar with Giffords’s story, is that he will not be silenced by the defense secretary just as his wife would not be silenced by her would-be assassin. “Mr. Loughner, you may have put a bullet through her head, but you haven’t put a dent in her spirit,” Kelly told the gunman in 2012 at his sentencing hearing. (Loughner is serving seven consecutive life terms in prison, plus an additional 140 years tacked on for the victims he injured and maimed.)

Listening to Kelly and Giffords, I was periodically struck by how their endeavors have been interwoven. “Certainly, if I was not married to Gabby, I would not be sitting here,” Kelly told me during one of our conversations in his Senate office. “And if she wasn’t shot, I mean, I wouldn’t be here, right?”

I wasn’t entirely sure at first what point Kelly was making. That if he hadn’t ever been attached to Giffords, he would not have been elected on his own? Or that most people know him only as a grieving spouse, and he was elected out of sympathy? When I asked Kelly to elaborate, he explained that if not for the shooting, he thinks his wife would have eventually been elected to the Senate. But because that was not possible for her, being Giffords’s husband had afforded him the statewide name recognition and political organization to do it himself.

Our last stop of the day in Arizona was a fundraising dinner for the state Democratic Party, officially christened the “Gabby Giffords Gala.” Kelly and Giffords headlined the program, which included a procession of local elected officials in front of about 1,000 party activists and appendages. In keeping with their professions, Kelly and Giffords have to do a lot of these banquets. They usually stand onstage together, and Kelly does most of the talking. Giffords might say a few words at the end, usually halting phrases:

“I chose to make a new start—to move ahead.”

“Do not look back.”

“Setbacks are hard.”

“I tell myself, move ahead.”

Giffords received her customary standing ovation at the banquet, along with chants of “Gabby, Gabby, Gabby.” Kelly then helped her down from the podium.

Kelly and Giffords are an inspiring couple to be around, and also not an easy one. A special kind of burden goes with being the surviving protagonists of a national tragedy. In general, when you say you’re running for president, the feel-good story ends. If we’ve learned anything over the past 10 years, it is the extraordinary capacity of people to be cruel in politics.

Kelly told me that he goes onto social media sometimes. He forces himself to read comment sections. “It thickens your skin a little bit,” he explained. “I see what they say.” I wondered how he would handle a political adversary going after his wife—calling her names, saying heartless things about her disability, deploying the kind of hateful language that Trump has empowered many of his supporters to use. It’s easy to imagine.

I asked Kelly, straight up, if he thought America was ready to have a disabled first lady.

“Hey,” he said, “in my opinion, we have a disabled president right now.”

He pivoted back to Giffords: how much of a role model she is, with all she has overcome. “The way she connects with people is unlike anybody else I’ve ever known,” Kelly said. “Before she was injured, people used to compare her with Bill Clinton.” His wife, he told me, can handle herself. “She’s been in this business,” he said. “And she had, you know, like the worst thing that any politician could have happen, right? She gets shot in the head.”

Kelly keeps his official letter of censure from Hegseth taped to the door of his Senate office. I hadn’t noticed it until he mentioned it to me. The document—dated January 5, 2026—is addressed to “Captain Kelly” and printed on “Department of War” stationery. It is three pages long, one of them crooked. Kelly told me that he hung the missive sloppily on purpose, to reflect his lack of respect for its contents and sender. Perhaps, he said, he should smear it with ketchup.

I asked Kelly why he displays the letter on his door.

“I think that, you know, the seriousness of this whole thing,” he said. “It’s good for me to be reminded of what’s at stake, and who these people are.”

Politically at least, it also can be good to remind as many people as possible that the Trump administration is targeting Mark Kelly. Kelly raised $12.5 million in the last quarter of 2025, much of it after November 24, when the Defense Department announced that it was investigating “serious allegations of misconduct” by the lawmakers in the “illegal orders” video. Kelly brought up his lawsuit against the defense secretary at every public event of his that I attended. (The panel of three D.C. judges has yet to announce a decision, although two of them signaled strong opposition to punishing Kelly at the May 7 hearing.) He always took care to identify the case by its docket name, Kelly v. Hegseth. I once referred to the litigants in the wrong order—Hegseth v. Kelly—and Kelly immediately corrected me.

In Phoenix, I asked Giffords the obligatory question: Does she want Kelly to run for president?

“All of it,” she said. “Yeah, go for it.”

“We’re a team” is another mantra of hers.

Philip Cheung for The Atlantic

Giffords and Kelly at their home in Tucson

Scott Kelly told me that he also wants his brother to run in 2028—and not just because then Mark could become the first identical-twin astronaut ever to reach the White House (unless I’m overlooking someone). “I’ve known him my whole life,” Scott said. “He doesn’t have the type of ego that he would think he can fix every problem and would be the savior to this country.” On the contrary, his brother is low-key, collaborative, and analytical. This might be precisely what the country is primed for after the Trump experience, Scott said.

During an office interview with Kelly in June, I asked him for an update on his thinking about running for president. His official position remained “considering it.” But he also made the point, in a variety of ways, that once he gets locked into an idea, he tends to go ahead and launch it. I took this to mean he is more likely than not to run.

As we were discussing this decision, Kelly talked about the experience of getting close to being Harris’s running mate in 2024. He clearly wanted it, more so than passed-over running mates usually admit. He was one of two runners-up—along with Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro—for the job that eventually went to Minnesota Governor Tim Walz.

[Tim Alberta: The operator]

In her campaign memoir, 107 Days, Harris lists a few concerns that she had about Kelly. One was that he had never experienced an “oh shit moment” in his political career. This is quite a remarkable statement. Harris added that she “couldn’t afford to test Mark Kelly in that ugly grinder” of a national campaign.

Kelly told me that he’d only “read parts” of Harris’s memoir. Presumably, these were the parts that corresponded to mentions of “Kelly, Mark.” He smiled when I suggested this and did not deny it. When I brought up that Harris said she was concerned that he wasn’t tested as a national candidate, Kelly grew more openly annoyed than I might have expected, given how beside the point the topic is now.

“What does that mean?” Kelly said. “I ran one of the most competitive Senate races in the country, in a swing state,” he continued. “My Senate races were harder than her Senate races.”

He also noted, sarcastically, that some people apparently found it charming that Walz asked for Diet Mountain Dew to drink during his VP interview. “Shapiro and I asked for water,” he said, smirking.

As I spent time around Kelly, I concluded that he would have been a good choice for Harris—and not just because he’d probably have done less harm than Walz did. Kelly struck me as having an ideal vice-presidential temperament. My question, then, is whether he could plausibly sell himself as the ringmaster in the chaotic circus of a modern presidency. In this age of infinite spotlights, people are obsessed with finding “alphas.” It helps to be a showman, and not to be boring. Trump is proof of how far that can get a person—and also where it can lead the country.

One last note on Harris’s running-mate decision: The former vice president wrote that another concern she had was that she did not want to subject Kelly’s military record to the kind of scrutiny, or smears, that presidential campaigns can invite. This packed a certain richness, given how Walz’s military record—or his overstatement of it—created its own recurring migraine for Harris. But when I asked about this, Kelly shifted to his current predicament. “I would be ecstatic if Pete Hegseth managed to get all of my military records and stick it online,” he told me.

He would go further. “Mark has made it clear to me that he is willing to be in prison to defend the Constitution,” Ossoff told me.

Kelly made this clear to me too. If “they actually sent me to prison, I’ll be fine,” he told me. “I’ll continue to fight back against these people.”

I mentioned that it would seem unlikely at this point that Kelly would be sent to jail over the “illegal orders” video. The government, after all, already failed once to win an indictment against the lawmakers. Kelly agreed, but then went on to describe scenarios in which it could happen: If, Kelly suggested, his lawsuit against Hegseth goes to the Supreme Court and they rule against him, the Pentagon could then have other punishment options. “I could wind up in a nonjudicial punishment process in the Navy,” he said. “And you know, that’s a big pain in the ass.”

“I tell you what they could do; they could try to indict us again,” Kelly continued. “Then, maybe do it in a place where maybe they get enough grand jurors. And then I wind up getting charged with seditious conspiracy.”

I joked that if Kelly did wind up in prison, he would probably raise $50 million within a week. He reiterated that he was not scared of imprisonment. His wife is not worried about it either, he said.

“We’ve been through a lot,” Kelly told me. “And you know, if they lock me up, I’m sure she’d come visit me.”

J. D. Vance’s New Book Wasn’t Meant to Be Read

2026-07-20T07:30:00-04:00

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J. D. Vance’s new book, Communion, answers a question no one had thought to ask: What would Augustine’s Confessions have looked like if the saint’s greatest literary influence had been Hillary Clinton’s immortal classic, Hard Choices?

One of the best-selling nonfiction titles of 2014, Hard Choices runs to more than 600 pages, many of which consist of factoids copied and pasted from Clinton’s old speeches. It is possibly the least introspective book ever written. Her ghostwriters’ modus operandi was to take a bunch of platitudinous abstractions from her time at the State Department (“The strategic fundamentals of our relationship—shared democratic values, economic imperatives and diplomatic priorities—are moving us closer to an understanding and a trust that reflects the convergence of values and interests”) and switch the tenses (“The strategic fundamentals of our relationship with India—shared democratic values, economic imperatives, and diplomatic priorities—were pushing both countries’ interests into closer convergence”).

Vance’s book never quite sinks to this level, but it does make me wonder why it was published, and for whose edification. Even by the standards of faith-driven airport nonfiction, Communion is not very interesting. Despite what the jacket copy suggests, the book is not “the story” of Vance’s conversion to Roman Catholicism, which had already been recounted in an essay published six years ago in the journal I edit, The Lamp. (Unaltered passages from it appear in the present volume without acknowledgment.) If anything, the book, from its Methodist-church-emblazoned cover on, seems oddly squeamish about the Catholic Church, couching most of its arguments concerning religious questions in a generically Christian register. When Vance does address specifically Catholic subject matter, his language is in some cases awkward and in almost all curiously unidiomatic. At one point, he describes himself attending “a Mass mourning Christ’s passion,” a phrase so theologically defective that it could be the subject of an entire ecumenical council.

Like Hard Choices, Communion is full of what might loosely be described as anecdotes. Take the one about Vance’s future wife, Usha, recommending Joan Didion’s memoir The Year of Magical Thinking while they were students at Yale Law School. Usha said she found it “cathartic,” prompting Vance to look up this unknown word in the Oxford English Dictionary. As one does? Until I stumbled onto this passage, I would have guessed that the middle of the Venn diagram of “people who use the paywalled OED rather than Dictionary.com” and “people who don’t know what cathartic means” is empty, like the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. I’m not saying that Vance’s story is impossible. I’m just saying that if it did happen as described, it would be like somebody discovering this Beethoven character in his well-thumbed set of the multivolume New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.

[Read: Who made the Oxford English Dictionary?]

If random disclosure of common-sense-defying detail is your idea of a searing, poignant journey into the light of faith, there’s more where that came from. Communion includes what is almost certainly the ne plus ultra of a new rhetorical trope—the posthumous invocation of Charlie Kirk to justify whatever the author or speaker wants you to believe or do. You know what I mean: the thing where a conservative podcast host assures his audience that a week or a few days or possibly just minutes before the man’s death, Kirk shared the secret gnosis about Israel, which is inevitably followed by a riposte from a Mar-a-Lago influencer insisting with equal stridency that milliseconds before (or perhaps even after) the shooting, she received private confirmation via text message of Kirk’s established public position. In this case, however, the spirit is summoned to explain why Usha had become pregnant again; specifically, we learn that Kirk’s widow, Erika, told Vance’s wife that she regrets not having more kids with Charlie, and that this moved Usha deeply and—Marvin Gaye needle drop.

People decide to have children for every possible reason or none. But until recently, the actual circumstances leading up to their conception were generally a private matter. If a dead friend inspired me and my wife to renew our acquaintance with the facts of life, I would probably not feel comfortable immortalizing his influence in my spiritual memoir slash campaign manifesto. But over and over again in these pages, Vance gives the impression that his book is meant to provide some kind of quasi-evangelical impetus to aspiring parents. If the right-wing dads of America start using “Let’s do it—for Charlie!” as a come-on, the U.S. birth rate is going to drop below that of Vatican City.

This oversharing of small details exists uneasily alongside a surprising lack of reflection on the book’s ostensible themes. A memoir that begins with criticism of anhedonic ambition becomes the chronicle of a man who, in less than a decade, is elected to the Senate and becomes vice president of the United States. Does everything that Vance says about the perfunctory pursuit of empty honors (he gives the example of Supreme Court clerkships) apply to his own rapid ascent to the office memorably described by John Nance Garner, one of its former holders, as “not worth a bucket of warm piss”? If not, why? Vance skates around this question—not, I think, because he is actively trying to do so, but because it actually seems not to have occurred to him.

[From the July 2025 issue: The talented Mr. Vance]

There is one interesting exception here to Vance’s lack of reflection on his political career: a two-page apology for his remarks about “childless cat ladies.” For what it’s worth, I think he is protesting too much. When these comments came up again during the 2024 presidential campaign, my sister was a childless cat lady, a fan of Vance’s writing, and a Trump voter; she joked about his remarks with her husband, a naturalized citizen born in Mexico, and voted for Donald Trump again. Now the two of them are the proud parents of a beautiful baby boy. Only in America! At any rate, for me, this pang (OED : “a sudden sharp feeling of mental anguish or intense emotional pain”) of conscience was oddly precise in its calibration. If Vance now recognizes his comments as churlish, lacking in charity, and utterly unlikely to persuade voters, much less witness to the sublime truths of the Christian religion, good for him. But what about those Haitians in Ohio who, it turned out, were not barbecuing Lassie? Does he consider those dog whistles at least equally ill-conceived? Or was the issue simply that dunking on DINKs is a riskier gambit for graduates of Yale Law School than race-baiting?

I could go on. But to what end? I have said that after reading Communion, I was left wondering why it had been published. This is not as cutting a remark as it might sound. Even less interesting than a deeply mediocre book is a reviewer taking such a book too seriously. There is not a single person in the United States whose desire to read (or purchase) it will be affected by my opinions.

Could Vance have written a better book? Could Hard Choices have been better? Come on. When I say that Communion is a complete waste (of time, paper, the resources of the vice presidency, etc.), I really mean it, but I would say the same if I had been asked to review, say, Kamala Harris’s 107 Days. Here is a sample from what her ghostwriter expects us to believe is an actual conversation:

“I’m fully behind you, Joe,” I told him. “But if you decide not to run, I’m ready. And I would give it all I’ve got, because Trump has to be beaten.”

Dialogue is always stilted in these books. But for every ludicrous snippet of fanfic like this, there is at least an equal number of conversations so boring that they must be true. Early on in Jill Biden’s View From the East Wing, the former first lady recounts a conversation that begins “Let’s have lunch,” to which her husband replies, “Okay.” A few sentences later, the repartee continues, with the couple addressing a perhaps invisible server whose existence we are simply meant to infer (unless, of course, the Bidens were talking to themselves).

“Chardonnay, please,” I said.

Joe said, “I’ll have a Diet Coke.”

Before we’d even looked at the menu, I said:

“This is it, Joe. You have to make up your mind. Are you going to run or not?”

“Yes, I want to run,” he told me, matter-of-factly.

At last, clarity.

“Okay,” I said.

Okay. On what possible scale involving literary merit, human interest, or historical value is it even possible to evaluate a text containing these sentences?

At times the book reads like a bold linguistic experiment, an attempt to discover the absolute minimum level of evocation that can be achieved by what are technically grammatical English sentences. Don’t get me wrong, though. View From the East Wing would not have been improved if it had been more lyrical. The single worst thing about the book is that every few pages, we get a high-toned quotation, or at least an attempt at one: “The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard said, ‘Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.’ ” He didn’t.

The only thing harder than envisioning the end of capitalism is trying to imagine a readable book written by (or attributed to) a contemporary American political figure. These books are not meant to be seriously reviewed, for the very simple reason that they are not meant to be seriously read. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that they are not meant to be read at all. They exist to be announced breathlessly, advertised, embargoed, analyzed via leaks and scooplets, discussed on podcasts—but their final end is to collect dust in the free pile outside used-book stores. For a laugh, go to the books section of a Salvation Army or a Goodwill and see how many copies of Bill Clinton’s My Life you can find. My personal record is 43, sitting side by side in their glorious order and array, like the blessed angels in heaven.

The problem here extends beyond books by politicians (and their wives). Already so much of what publishers find room for is “current affairs” slop that is basically indistinguishable from the kind of bad writing I am talking about, save for the fact that the authors are television stars or podcasters or—(shudders)—political reporters rather than elected officials. Only readers can stop this madness, by turning their attention elsewhere. Read about the past. Read about faraway places. Read Macaulay or Sylvia Townsend Warner or Santayana’s letters. Read a real book.

This article appears in the September 2026 print edition with the headline “A Book That Wasn’t Meant to Be Read.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Pete Hegseth, You Call That a Pull-Up?

2026-07-20T07:00:00-04:00

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Pete Hegseth wants us to watch him sweat. Videos of the secretary of defense in a T-shirt and shorts working out alongside military personnel have become a trademark of his tenure. He has been filmed running on Omaha Beach, swinging a kettlebell on a university campus, and doing jumping jacks on an amphibious assault ship. In one clip, Hegseth pumps iron with troops at the Guantánamo Bay naval base—or, as a Defense Department X account put it, “America’s @SECWAR CRUSHED 44 reps on the bench after a morning run.”

But did he really crush those reps? Each time a new episode of Boot Camp Pete drops, critics skewer his form and mock his endurance. They insist that he’s all flex and no fundamentals. In that bench-press clip, for example, he doesn’t fully extend his arms, making the exercise far easier and inflating his total. A few seconds into the clip, you can hear someone yell, “All the way down, all the way up!” Hegseth fails to heed that helpful cue.

Such nitpicking would be uncharitable if Hegseth were just another 40-something dad getting a lift in at Planet Fitness. But these are highlight reels, posted by the Pentagon. Plus, the former Fox News host isn’t exactly known for withholding judgment himself: Recall how, last September, he gathered the nation’s generals and admirals together so that he could upbraid them for being overweight. He told them that leaders set the standard and that when “you let the small stuff go, the big stuff eventually goes.”

With Hegseth’s wisdom in mind, let’s examine what the United States military’s training manuals have to say about proper exercise form. Short answer: a lot. You’ll find hundreds of pages spelling out precisely how to perform all manner of movements, including how to stretch your thighs (“grasp the left ankle and pull toward the left buttock”), how to plank (“forearms flat on the ground, forming a triangle”), and how to throw a four-pound ball from a seated position (“do not throw the medicine ball like shooting a basketball”). These manuals are replete with charts, bullet points, and illustrations. The Army’s Holistic Health and Fitness Testing manual provides detailed instructions, accompanied by photographs, on the bench press, warning that you must not “jerk or shrug the shoulders, arch the back, or allow the hips to rise off the bench” (note to Secretary Hegseth: p. 65, Appendix B).

Standards vary across branches, even for basic exercises. Take the push-up. For the Army’s fitness test, soldiers must do what’s known as a hand-release push-up, requiring them to stick their arms straight out to the side after each repetition. The Marine guide devotes several hundred words to describing how to do a traditional push-up, specifying that the chest may not rest on the deck “except as required to ensure that the upper arms are at least parallel to the deck.” In the Air Force, your feet cannot be more than 12 inches apart, and you must maintain a “rigid head to heel form.” These are directives rather than suggestions. Failure to meet the standard results in a “no-go,” in military parlance, meaning you haven’t passed that portion of the test.

Hegseth’s push-ups wouldn’t pass muster in any branch. Last summer, Hegseth and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. kicked off the “Pete & Bobby Challenge,” in which participants attempt to do 50 pull-ups and 100 push-ups in less than 10 minutes. Hegseth’s push-ups are more like half-ups: In the ones captured on video, he doesn’t go through the full range of motion. His substandard technique is ironic because he’s on record ridiculing others for their lack of push-up prowess. In his 2024 book, The War on Warriors, Hegseth mocks women soldiers who can do only “ten push-ups at a pop” and refers to a transgender woman as a “ten-push-up kind of guy.”

To be fair, Hegseth’s pull-up form, at times, is more or less textbook. The issue is consistency: Hegseth can’t seem to maintain the standard for the duration of the competition, and raises his knees to his chest to give himself additional oomph. This is known as “kipping” and is forbidden in an eight-page pull-up guide published by the Marines. In one clip, Hegseth kips while using an underhand grip, which technically makes what he’s doing a chin-up—an exercise often considered less challenging than a pull-up. (The Marine guide permits both, though kipping is always forbidden.) According to the guide: “Poor quality work will prevent you from getting the most from your workout and can lead to injury.” Hegseth’s work is, by Marine standards, poor.

Illustration by Simon Bailly / Sepia. Sources: U.S. Marine Corps; U.S. Department of Health and Human Services

Top: Proper pull-up form, as demonstrated by a Marine Corps officer. Bottom: Secretary Hegseth’s form is inconsistent. In one clip from the “Pete & Bobby Challenge,” he does a chin-up and raises his knees to give himself additional oomph—a technique known as “kipping” that is forbidden by the Marines.

Hegseth claims at the end of the video that he finished in less than six minutes, which would be impressive if he weren’t flouting the rules and sacrificing form for speed. What’s more, he’s doing these exercises incorrectly during a challenge that bears his name. Given all of this, it’s impossible to have confidence in the validity of Hegseth’s self-reported feat.

Granted, I am not a trained grader of military exercises. Prior to perusing these manuals, I wasn’t aware that your arms need to be at a 45-degree angle in relation to your trunk for the modified bent-leg body twist, or that it is imperative to point your toes to the rear for the prone row. I was entirely unfamiliar with the squat bender and the quadraplex. Nor did I know, before watching an Army instructional video, how to swing a kettlebell.

As it happens, neither does Hegseth, who, in January, was filmed swinging a kettlebell with recruits at UCLA. You’re supposed to keep the kettlebell near your body and generate momentum with your legs and hips. Instead, Hegseth squats, as if doing deep knee bends, and brings the weight far too close to the ground, putting strain on his shoulders and back. This is wrong, according to Joel Del Rosario, a retired Marine and a kettlebell coach. Del Rosario told me he’s glad to see Hegseth encouraging better fitness in the military, and he noted that, in his experience, pretty much everyone who gives the kettlebell a whirl fails at first. He said he’d be honored if asked to show Hegseth how to do the exercise properly.

I consulted other military exercise experts too. Among them was Stew Smith, a former Navy SEAL and the author of a series of books about prepping to qualify for the Special Forces, including one on the Ranger Physical Assessment. A former Army National Guard infantry officer, Hegseth has bemoaned slipping standards across the military, including at the Ranger School—even though he never completed the famously grueling 61-day leadership and fitness course. Smith said he doesn’t evaluate the performance of people unless they ask, and so wouldn’t comment specifically on Hegseth’s approach and abilities. But he said he stresses to his students the importance of going all the way up and all the way down, whether it’s a pull-up, push-up, or bench press.

I also asked Maureen LeBoeuf what she made of the “Pete & Bobby Challenge” video. LeBoeuf is a retired brigadier general and the first and only woman to head the physical-education department at West Point, a position known as “master of the sword.” She said that nothing she saw from the defense secretary in that video would have counted if she had been the grader, and she has graded thousands of such tests. “His pull-ups or chin-ups and the kicking that he does—you would never allow that. You’d stop somebody; you’d say, ‘Okay, you’re done,’ ” LeBoeuf said. “He just keeps kicking, and it’s not a good look.” She allowed that he might have been exhausted in those clips, but the Army doesn’t usually recognize fatigue as an excuse. And it’s hard to forgive such lapses and corner-cutting from someone who, as LeBoeuf put it, is “real big on standards.”

In response to an inquiry about the criticism of Hegseth’s workouts, Joel Valdez, the acting Pentagon press secretary, insisted that Hegseth was being unfairly singled out. “Have you ever seen Lloyd Austin’s form? Did the Atlantic ever ask about it?” he wrote. “The answer to both of those questions is no.” That’s true, but Austin, the previous secretary of defense, was not known for posting self-promotional exercise content on social media. He did, however, complete Ranger School and Airborne School, command the 10th Mountain Division in Afghanistan, lead the fight against the Islamic State, and earn a Silver Star.

This article appears in the September 2026 print edition with the headline “You Call That a Pull-Up?”

The Canoeist Accused of Destroying the Reflecting Pool

2026-07-20T06:00:00-04:00

Photographs by Carolyn Van Houten

The summer after the country celebrated its 200th birthday, David Hearn paddled a canoe nicknamed the Queen Mary around the Reflecting Pool as part of an event intended to draw attention to a sport that would later lead him to Olympic glory. Nearly half a century later, as the country approached its 250th birthday, Hearn was back. On June 19, the 67-year-old stopped by the pool at the tail end of a long bike ride to look at the floating flakes of sealant that had come untethered following a rushed renovation ordered by President Trump. Hearn says he snapped some photos and dipped his hand into the water. Then he was arrested. Officers put him in handcuffs and detained him for hours.

Federal prosecutors have accused Hearn of “forcefully and violently” ripping up the sealant, causing damage to federal property that should be punishable by up to 10 years in prison. Hearn’s lawyers argue that these are ridiculous and frivolous charges—and in a motion to dismiss the case said they could present photographic evidence proving he didn’t cause major damage. Hearn, who for many years sold waterproofing materials for boats and canoes, has suggested that he was trying to figure out why the pool’s lining was falling apart, not damage it.

If last year’s emblem of prosecutorial overreach was the Sandwich Guy, this year’s has become the Canoe Guy.

Abbie Endicott, who helped organize the canoe event 49 years ago, told me that the Reflecting Pool holds special meaning to her, Hearn, and the others who paddled the shallow water that day. “The idea that any of us would want to damage something that’s meant to be so beautiful—and is, when it’s clean,” said Endicott, whose husband, Bill, was a longtime head coach of the U.S. canoeing team. “It’s meant to reflect everything that’s around it.”

Carolyn Van Houten for The Atlantic

The drained Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool is blocked off by fencing on July 18.

With so many headlines to choose from, it’s a little strange that the Reflecting Pool has become the political scandal of the summer. But it has a dash of everything that Trump’s critics loathe about this presidency: a vanity project driven by Trump’s desire to accomplish what his predecessors couldn’t; a no-bid contract for a straight-from-central-casting Trump donor; incompetence leading to a botched repair; refusals to acknowledge reality; and, finally, the scapegoating of perceived enemies. Along the way, algae bloomed, chemicals were dumped, and ducks turned up dead. The banks of the pool—at its best a scene of unparalleled American majesty—took on a sort of circus atmosphere as locals and tourists alike stopped by to see the disaster for themselves. Some took a small souvenir to commemorate the moment.

The day after Hearn’s arrest, law enforcement from around the country, who had just arrived to help with the July 4 celebrations, swarmed the area. Some were assigned foot patrols near the Reflecting Pool and in quick succession, court records show, arrested several other visitors for allegedly reaching into the pool and pulling up pieces of sealant. On June 20 around 12:30 p.m., 47-year-old Justin Carreno was detained by a police officer from Oklahoma City. A little after 2 p.m., officers from Texas, Oklahoma, and California took into custody 26-year-old Cameron Thiers. An hour and a half later, a correctional officer from Montana nabbed 49-year-old Sophie Dennison-Gibby. All were charged with destruction of property valued at less than $1,000, a misdemeanor punishable of up to 180 days in jail. All have pleaded not guilty, and their attorneys declined to comment. A judge has ordered each of them to stay away from the Reflecting Pool; court appearances are scheduled for August.

Hearn’s case is the most serious: He faces felony charges for damages that exceed $1,000. At a press conference on July 2 to announce Hearn’s indictment, U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro called Reflecting Pool prosecutions a presidential priority, and said that Hearn could serve a sentence of a decade in prison for what she called “a violent effort to rip up the sealant from the bottom of the pool.” She stated that witnesses reported that he used both hands to pull up the liner, damaging about two square feet, but she declined to reveal any other evidence and urged reporters to attend the trial. (Court documents filed late Friday afternoon indicated that prosecutors had made dozens of items available to Hearn’s attorneys, including body-camera video, images, and a witness statement.)

To many of Hearn’s friends and supporters, the charges seem just as ridiculous as Trump’s fumbling of the renovation. But when I spoke with Hearn at length last week, he used the same word a few times: unsettling. He said the prosecution has cut into his ability to sleep at night. The man who once carried the Olympic torch for his country said he now worries about being a focal point in a divisive political moment. “It’s unsettling,” Hearn told me, “to feel like I’m being targeted by my government.”

[Read: The capital is a mess]

Hearn’s life has revolved around water. He grew up in the Washington area, and his family spent summers in Montana, where he developed his love for paddling. He and his siblings were members of canoeing clubs and went paddling with friends nearly every day after school. As a 16-year-old, he began keeping training logs of his sleep patterns and workouts, a practice he kept up for more than 25 years as he rose to become one of the most decorated white-water canoe athletes in U.S. history. In college, he installed a slalom gate—poles that hang from overhead and set the course—in his dorm room so he could practice being near them without touching them. His older sister was also a U.S. team member, and his younger brother raced. His wife, Jennifer, was also a competitive canoeist and assistant coach of the Olympic national team. Hearn competed in three Summer Olympics—1992, 1996, and 2000—and was a torchbearer in the 1996 Olympics, carrying the flame into Washington, D.C. He won eight world championships, competing in single and team events, and in 2005 was one of the inaugural inductees into the International Whitewater Hall of Fame.

After retiring from active competition in 2002, Hearn worked as a coach and continued to maintain his business selling boats and paddles. In 2005, he and his wife took over a company that distributed epoxy, waterproofing, and other materials used primarily for building and repairing watercraft. They sold the business last year, but some of that experience gave him an additional interest in what was happening at the Reflecting Pool. “I’ve always been curious about science in general, and how materials work,” he told me. “It’s the kind of thing that really makes me curious.”

Carolyn Van Houten for The Atlantic

Hearn checks for damage to the surface of his canoe.

Dozens of people gathered outside the Superior Court of the District of Columbia for Hearn’s first hearing on July 9. Some dressed as canoeists. One wore an inflatable pink frog costume with AMPHIFA painted on the tummy. Posters read The Deflecting Pool and Davey’s a champ, not a scamp! Several signs featured dead ducks. And the crowd chanted: Free Davey Hearn! He is a hero! Inside, the court staff reserved two overflow rooms. The courtroom itself was so packed that journalists were invited to sit in the jury box. I was in the seat normally saved for juror No. 1, giving me a direct view of Hearn as he sat at the defense table. The man arrested in spandex and helmet during his visit to the Reflecting Pool was now in coat and tie, with an Olympic pin affixed to his navy jacket. He stood as the judge entered the room.

“This is the United States v. David Hearn.”

It was all over within eight minutes. Hearn pleaded not guilty. His attorneys asked for a speedy trial. The federal prosecutor warned, “There’s going to be a lot of discovery in this case.” Hearn was released without restrictions. But then government prosecutors approached Hearn and his legal team with a warrant for his cellphone. Their affidavit, a portion of which is quoted in subsequent court filings, suggested that they were looking for photos or proof that he “engaged in research” about how to cause damage to the Reflecting Pool.

Hearn’s attorneys argue that the photos on his phone will prove that he did not damage the pool. A photo that Hearn says he took just before placing his hand in the water—one that he later provided to The Washington Post and the BBC—shows the same damage to the sealant as the photo that National Park Service workers took after they arrested him. (In the affidavit, which has remained sealed, prosecutors used a different “before” photo that Hearn’s lawyers say in court filings has no date and could have been taken days or weeks beforehand.) The U.S. attorney’s office declined to comment. Hearn’s attorneys on Friday filed a lengthy motion to dismiss the case on the grounds that the government has drained and altered the Reflecting Pool, essentially tampering with the evidence without allowing the defense to examine it.

When Hearn emerged from the courthouse without his phone, his supporters chanted and cheered. He looked out to cyclists who had ridden with him, canoeists who had paddled with him, people who had been rescued by him, and musicians who had jammed with him in impromptu sessions. (Hearn plays harmonica; his wife, ukulele.) One of Hearn’s lawyers—Norm Eisen, who was head of White House ethics and ambassador to the Czech Republic under President Obama—told the crowd that evidence will show that Hearn is innocent. Eisen then declared: “It is not a crime to touch water in the Reflecting Pool.”

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

I counted 15 professional video cameras recording the event and talked with numerous outraged Hearn fans. “Of course he’s interested in a $14 million botched job. What went wrong? Feel the texture of it. Was it cured? Was it brittle?” Paul Flack, dressed in a kayaker’s helmet and a Team USA shirt, told me. Gary Roush, a retiree who knows Hearn from concerts they attend, added: “This is so clearly a case of the government seeking scapegoats. They’re trying to blame their failure on ordinary, innocent Americans.”

Trump has claimed that the damage was caused by vandals who cut a gash into the pool that he has described of varying lengths, from 250 feet to 300 yards. Eight days after Hearn’s court appearance, the president seemed to refer to him in a social-media post: “The Scum in Court will hopefully be prosecuted to the MAX.” But when the pool was fully drained last week, no such gashes were visible on the surface. A detailed visual analysis by The Washington Post last week found seven locations where the lining had separated at seams that were created when material was applied at different times—a pattern that experts said strongly suggested errors in the application process. I was down at the Reflecting Pool the day before Hearn was arrested, and large chunks of sealant were clearly already coming loose and floating in the water.

Carolyn Van Houten for The Atlantic

Newspaper clippings that others gathered for Hearn

Adam Van Grack—a former chair of the U.S. Olympic governing body for canoe and kayak sports who has known Hearn for decades and is now a city-council member in Rockville, Maryland—told me that “the U.S. government could not have picked a worse person to be the headliner felony defendant in this trial.” Hearn and his wife are active volunteers who organize cleanups of the Potomac River and help maintain a historic lockhouse along a Washington-area canal. And the alleged offense? “Maybe I shouldn’t say this, but I put my hand in the Reflecting Pool,” Van Grack admitted to me. “It’s been the people’s pool, as opposed to this idea that if you touch the water or touch the bottom of the pool, you’ve committed a felony.”

What people can do at the pool—and whether government prosecutors can deliver proof that Hearn caused damage—will be determined in court over the coming months, including a status hearing scheduled for this morning. Meanwhile, work continues at the drained and dry Reflecting Pool, which is now surrounded by fences.

Trump Still Hasn’t Found What He’s Looking For

2026-07-17T00:02:48-04:00

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Since President Trump returned to office a year and a half ago, he has dispatched investigators and analysts from across the U.S. intelligence community to search for evidence of foreign interference in an election that he lost but claims he won. In an address from the White House tonight, the president sought to reveal proof for his baseless assertions of a 2020 vote marred by fraud. But once again, he came up empty.

The president spoke for nearly half an hour, tendentiously connecting reports of stolen voter records to software vulnerabilities in voting machines to fake voter-registration drives. But he never claimed that a foreign power had actually changed any votes, and all signs indicate that it didn’t happen. Earlier in the day, a White House official told us that after an exhaustive examination of “millions” of documents that had been collected, a team of investigators had found no evidence to support such claims.

Former intelligence officials expressed bewilderment at the president’s characterizations of what’s in those documents. “I have never seen raw, unverified reporting pushed out this way: harvested for the pieces that fit, fashioned into a weapon against American elections,” Julia Curlee, a former intelligence officer who was among those who provided Trump’s daily briefing in his first term, told us.

Toward the end of a speech laden with more innuendo than fact, Trump insisted, “We can never watch a stolen election again.” But he announced no steps that his administration would take to prevent further meddling, other than sharing more information with state governments, something that the United States used to do routinely before Trump gutted election-security initiatives at the start of his second term. Trump also announced no plans to try to commandeer the authority to run elections that are, under the Constitution, overseen by the states. Many of the election deniers who have fueled Trump’s false claims had hoped he would declare a national emergency to somehow seize control.

Trump made clear that he believes the U.S. voting system is insecure. The president’s core claim rests on what he says is newly revealed reporting by U.S. intelligence agencies, which have found that China has obtained more than 200 million Americans’ voter records in 18 states. Those are startling numbers. But they are hardly news.

During Trump’s first term, U.S. intelligence analysts reported that Chinese intelligence had analyzed “election voter registration data ” from multiple states. Former U.S. officials told us that they were aware that China was stealing or otherwise acquiring voter-registration data, which might include a person’s name, address, and political party. Those kinds of data are often publicly available online.

China’s harvesting of voter-registration information is not news. It was spelled out in an intelligence assessment of the 2020 election and presented to Trump and his senior advisers, then declassified and released publicly after he left office.

[Listen: The election deniers are in charge now]

That assessment was unequivocal on the consequences of foreign interventions, including by Russia and Iran: “We have no indications that any foreign actor attempted to interfere in the 2020 US elections by altering any technical aspect of the voting process, including voter registration, ballot casting, vote tabulation, or reporting results.”

This is not to say that China’s harvesting of American voter data is benign. As U.S. officials reported in 2020, it was part of an effort by China to “predict electoral outcomes and to inform its efforts to influence US policy toward China under either election outcome.” U.S. law-enforcement and intelligence officials and cybersecurity experts have acknowledged for years that China has pursued aggressive and wide-ranging efforts over several decades to collect personally identifying information and other data about American citizens. The goal, officials say, is to strengthen China’s geopolitical position by collecting as much data as possible that can be used for espionage purposes. Current and former officials have spoken openly about their assessments that the Chinese government has obtained data on almost every American. But that does not mean the data were used to subvert the election.

It was only after he lost that Trump appeared to have become convinced that the 2020 election was insecure. In February 2020, for instance, senior intelligence officials briefed him on efforts to protect elections from foreign interference and ensure that voting machines were trustworthy. According to a person familiar with that briefing, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share a private interaction, the president was so pleased that he wanted to call a press conference and tell the American people that their elections would be secure. The event never took place. In his White House address tonight, Trump adopted a mocking tone as he parroted what officials had told him and have said publicly—that the 2020 election was well protected.

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Former officials also told us that if Trump was not told every detail about stolen voter rolls, that was because such activity was just one component of China’s broader efforts to influence politics in the United States. Trump now appears to claim that because he wasn’t informed of every piece of intelligence, biased officials were trying to hide the truth from him. But it’s routine practice to inform the president of the top-level findings of intelligence analysis and spare him many of the details.

Some of what Trump claimed was at odds with the documents that he had declassified. He said that U.S. intelligence uncovered a plot “to do a big number in favor of the corrupt Maduro regime in Venezuela” and had conspired “to digitally rig their own country’s elections in 2020.” But the declassified CIA report he referenced, dated June 29, 2026, said that while Maduro’s regime did develop techniques to electronically manipulate vote totals, U.S. intelligence “did not definitively confirm that large-scale electronic fraud was successfully executed in specific Venezuelan elections.”

In fact, the CIA cited a redacted source who “judged the regime did not need to resort to gross fraud to win the December 2020 National Assembly elections, given that virtually the entire opposition boycotted and the regime had already co-opted opposition party leadership.”

Trump’s history of false election-related statements prompted ABC and NBC to decide not to broadcast his speech live, despite the White House’s requests to do so. The president suggested that that editorial choice amounted to a crime by the broadcasters. “Fraud like this should mean a revocation of their licenses,” he said. “All we want is honesty in our elections and honesty in reporting.”

In the lead-up to Trump’s remarks, his online allies had primed their audiences for seismic news, setting expectations that he would fundamentally upend the way elections are conducted. Mike Lindell, the pillow-company executive who has long espoused election falsehoods, told us this week that he expected Trump to announce evidence of foreign manipulation of election equipment used to run American elections. “The voting-machine world is crumbling,” he said. “Won’t that be something? Are you going to write a big article that ‘Mike Lindell Was Right?’”

[Read: MAGA thinks Maduro will prove Trump won in 2020]

Seth Keshel, a former Army intelligence captain, wrote on social media that “all hell is going to break loose” after Trump’s remarks, which he hoped would create pressure for Congress to pass Trump’s long-touted SAVE America Act. The bill, among other things, would require people to provide proof of citizenship when registering to vote and photo identification when casting their ballot. Trump called on lawmakers tonight to pass it—saying, “the only reason you wouldn’t do it is you want to cheat”—though the prospects of success appear dim. Election experts say the bill will make it harder for people to vote and do little to curb fraudulent ballots that they say are already extremely rare.

Cisco Aguilar, Nevada’s secretary of state and the chair of the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State, summed up his reaction to the president’s remarks in four words: “That was some bullshit.”

The reception around Trump was markedly different. After he finished his speech, those in attendance—which included senior members of his administration and the intelligence community—burst into applause.