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Maine Senator Susan Collins, one of the most vulnerable Republicans in the midterms, faced a humiliating reality check Tuesday night during her debate against Democratic challenger Troy Jackson.

In the first of four televised debates, Collins struggled to defend her efforts to rein in President Donald Trump’s disastrous policies.

“Troy mocked it, but I was successful in getting concrete, pulp, and road salt removed from the tariff list,” Collins said.

“I didn’t mock the fact that she got road salt back, I mocked the fact that, what about everything else? We can’t eat road salt,” Jackson said. “And the thing about it is, is that everything that she’s doing with Iran war, stuff like that, there’s going to be so many less people that’ll be able to afford to drive that I’m not even sure the road salt is going to be worth anything either.”

It was a startling moment dealt by a comparatively novice challenger against a five-term senator, highlighting just how Collins has failed to truly stand up to Trump.

Collins has voted five separate times to extend Trump’s military campaign in the Middle East. A study found that as of July, the average Maine household has had to pay $3,900 more for goods and services during Trump’s second term.

Better Know a Democrat is an interview series to give voters a closer look at candidates in competitive races across the U.S. In these polarized political times, it’s rare that voters cross party lines to support the opposing team. But as Republicans begin to sour on President Donald Trump for betraying his promises to lower costs and stay out of new wars, Democrats are looking to…

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President Trump isn’t going to like how the European Parliament is allowing him to be depicted.

An eight-foot tall statue covered in 23-karat gold leaf has been erected at the building in Strasbourg, France, showing a naked, overweight Trump being carried on the back of a much smaller man, while the president holds a golf club, a tiny world-shaped ball, and the scales of justice. The base is inscribed with the words “I am sitting on the back of a man. He is sinking under my burden. I will do anything to help him. Except stepping down from his back,” attributed to “The King of Injustice.”

The statue’s creator, Danish sculptor Jens Galschiøt, calls his creation “The Orange Plague,” and said it’s a satirical outcry against volatile U.S. environmental and foreign policy.

“Trump represents one of the greatest threats to the rule-based world order, democratic values, and our common effort to solving the climate crisis,” Galschiøt said in a statement. “We must address this issue and stand together against such destructive influence.”

“If someone is so thin-skinned that they cannot tolerate this sculpture being exhibited in the European Parliament, then they have no place on the world stage,” said Danish member of the European Parliament Per Clausen at the statue’s unveiling.

Trump has been mocked by statues before. Before the 2024 presidential election, a 43-foot tall naked statue of the president toured the U.S., appearing in Michigan, Arizona, Wisconsin, and Nevada. The president’s supporters at the time called the statue “political violence.” Golden statues of Trump also appeared at the time in Portland and Philadelphia behind statues of naked women with the inscriptions, “In honor of a lifetime of sexual assault.”

More recently, statues and art installations addressing Trump’s association with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein have popped up in Washington, D.C. Trump himself usually avoids commenting directly on these satirical art pieces, instead condemning them through spokespeople. He has yet to comment on this statue in France.

Yet another leaked recording of Texas Senate candidate Ken Paxton has landed. 

“It’s the war, it’s gas prices.... It’s over $6 a gallon for diesel,” Paxton said at a donor meeting when asked what issues were “dragging” on him and his campaign, according to audio obtained by Axios. “People are feeling that pinch. So I’d say that’s probably the biggest problem … food prices, everything else.... That’s by far our biggest problem, and I think that’s why we’re having a hard time with numbers.” 

“How do you respond to it?” a reporter asked. Paxton went on to give his spiel on his tax cut plan called “Protecting the Texas Promise Plan.” He said he wants people to use it on everything from “gym memberships” to “GLP-1s.” 

He went on to note that he was essentially powerless to stop President Trump’s war on Iran—the very thing causing the problems he previously listed. “I have no control over the aspects [of the war]. So many of the factors of this federal race are uncontrollable. I don’t make the decisions, I don’t know what’s behind some of the decisions.” 

This is at least the third time Paxton has unknowingly been recorded sending either subliminal or direct messages to Trump in recent days. Just a week ago at a fundraiser, he told someone that Trump’s GOP midterm convention in Dallas was having a direct negative impact on his numbers. And two days ago, an audio was released of Paxton essentially saying his own Senate race was being operated by outside forces in Washington. 

“I’ve never been in a race where I felt less control over the campaign and, like, what issues are going to matter because it’s all coming—you know—from D.C.,” he said last month. “I don’t control the message or what we’re doing.... I don’t have ability to change anything,” Paxton continued. “So I have to live with whatever I’ve got. So it is a challenge.”

This amount of leaks from one of the GOP’s most important Senate campaigns this cycle feels shocking, especially when each leak is Paxton indirectly blaming Trump for low poll numbers and affordability issues that he has to cover for. It seems obvious that he’s upset with the Trump administration—as he keeps confirming to donors over and over again.  

Since launching on Oct. 7, 1996, Fox News has spent the past 30 years airing a nonstop stream of bile, misinformation, bigotry, and stupidity. The network was started by Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch, who has used his influence through outlets like The Sun and the New York Post to shift global politics to the right. The network was designed by former Richard Nixon adviser Roger…

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The Trump administration has quietly announced that its own lawyers will represent unaccompanied migrant children in immigration court, facing off against other administration lawyers who are trying to deport the kids.

Immigration advocates are concerned that the arrangement, announced last week in the Federal Register, could pose a conflict of interest. In the past, unaccompanied minors were represented by a network of independent nonprofits, but the administration ended the contract this year after the network refused to hand over privileged information about its young clients.

“I’m concerned about the lack of independence” of these new government lawyers, says Ana Raquel Devereaux, an attorney at the nonprofit Michigan Immigrant Rights Center, part of the network that lost the contract.

The administration’s new attorneys will be housed in the Department of Health and Human Services, in a section called the Unaccompanied Alien Children Legal Representation Division. HHS did not respond to questions about when they would begin their work.

The federal rules in place to protect immigrant kids from harm and exploitation “rely on experienced legal representatives trained to work with children.”

Unaccompanied minors are granted special protections under federal law because they are so vulnerable after entering the United States without a parent or legal guardian; many of them are very young and could be at risk of trafficking or abuse. The Trafficking Victims Protection and Reauthorization Act requires that they be assigned independent lawyers.

This requirement is particularly important, immigrant advocates point out, because the other arms of immigration court are far from independent: Immigration judges work for the Department of Justice and deportation attorneys work for the Department of Homeland Security. “We already don’t have an independent [immigration] judiciary, and to have the defense side of representation also be within the government makes me feel like it’s all a farce and everybody is working together to get the kids removed,” says Devereaux.

The Federal Register notes that the new division of lawyers will be separate from another division at HHS, the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which temporarily houses unaccompanied kids after they cross the border alone until they can be reunited with sponsors, who are often relatives. As my colleague Isabela Dias and I reported last week, ORR has been holding children for significantly longer periods under the Trump administration and is also detaining children who are arguably not even unaccompanied.

In a statement to the Associated Press, HHS said the new lawyers would “give the Department an additional mechanism to provide these children direct legal support while dedicated public servants work around the clock to safely reunify them with their families.” But immigration advocates fear—not without justification—that the administration will instead work to deport the kids. As our earlier piece mentioned, the government tried to fly dozens of Guatemalan children from ORR shelters out of the country in the middle of the night last year, but a court intervened. And ProPublica reported that unaccompanied minors have been detained and removed from the United States at three times the rate they were during Trump’s first term.

The administration’s plan to represent migrant kids in court was announced after months of upheaval over who should play that role. In August, the longstanding contract with the network of independent legal nonprofits expired. Then, the administration awarded a contract to Burke Law Group, a small Texas firm with far less experience in such matters, but greater ties to Trump: one of Burke’s co-founders served in the first Trump administration and one of its founding partners works for the second.

Facing backlash, Burke Law Group pulled out and the administration instead awarded the contract to Our Rescue, a nonprofit founded by a former ICE agent that had no experience representing immigrant kids in court.

Last month, dozens of federal lawmakers signed a letter expressing concern that the administration would give such an important job to “firms so plainly unqualified for the task.” The Our Rescue deal was put on hold after the nonprofit Acacia Center for Justice filed a bid protest, whereupon the administration awarded another contract to the US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants. But in recent court filings, immigration advocates said USCRI was not representing kids in court, and its lawyers often sat silently as judges considered the children’s cases.

“There are rules in place…to protect children, but those rules rely on experienced legal representatives trained to work with children,” Roxana Avila-Cimpeanu, deputy director of the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project, also part of the nonprofit network that lost its contract, said in a press conference last month. “Instead, the administration has chosen to fracture this network of experienced child-centered advocates that existed, with no plan in place to replace it.”

Laura doesn’t know what she’s going to do when her medication runs out. For years, she relied on Medi-Cal, California’s version of Medicaid, to cover the costs of treating her Type 2 diabetes: doctor visits, tests, medication. An undocumented immigrant from Mexico, she benefited from California policies that opened Medi-Cal to all low-income residents, regardless of immigration status.

Last winter, however, she received a notice that her coverage was set to expire and that she would need to renew it. At the time, Laura, who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, said she rarely left her home, scared of getting caught up in an immigration enforcement operation. For months, she had missed many of her appointments and sent friends to pick up her prescriptions. 

But she eventually ventured to the enrollment office. There, the person reviewing her renewal application told her that, since some of her family members were paid under the table, they would all have to make and sign attestations of income. Her husband was hesitant, worried by news of Medicaid’s data-sharing agreement with ICE.

“For me it was more about fear,” she said in Spanish. “I didn’t write the letter and I didn’t take it back…We didn’t know if [the news about data sharing] was true or what they could do.”

They decided the risk was too great. The deadline passed. And now Laura cannot get her coverage back. On January 1, California began denying full Medi-Cal benefits to undocumented adults amid a growing budget deficit and federal Medicaid cuts. Now, only those enrolled before 2026 can keep their coverage, as long as they don’t roll off; for Laura, it was too late.

Since the start of the second Trump administration, doctors and policy experts across the country have increasingly warned that immigrants are avoiding medical care as deportation fears weigh heavily on their day-to-day lives. During Minnesota’s Operation Metro Surge last winter, for instance, researchers found that the rate of missed appointments increased by more than 80 percent among Spanish-speaking families. 

Medicaid doesn’t fund full coverage for undocumented immigrants. In fact, this October, it scaled back coverage for many immigrants with legal status who were previously eligible, as provisions of the GOP’s July 2025 budget bill—better known as the “One Big Beautiful Bill”—kicked in.

But many immigrants are also choosing to drop out of programs that they are still eligible for, including state-funded coverage—even though, as blue states including California, Colorado, and Washington roll back and cap enrollment for these programs due to funding constraints, they might not be able to recover that medical support later on.

“What past research has shown us is that just the chilling effect and the fears and uncertainty around these policies lead many more immigrants to disenroll from coverage than those who are directly impacted,” said Drishti Pillai, director of immigrant health policy at KFF. 

As more federal policies are implemented, such as the new eligibility provisions and changes to the federal public charge rule, which now penalizes some green card applicants if they use non-cash public benefits like Medicaid, —it’s likely that the share of immigrants avoiding healthcare will keep “increasing as time goes on,” Pillai said.

Laura, who is going by a pseudonym in this article, said she was initially reluctant to share her experience for the same reasons she didn’t risk renewing her health insurance benefits. But it was important, she reasoned, to raise awareness of a situation that has also happened to other of her friends and acquaintances.

“I know I’m not the only person who is going through this,” she said.

From May 2025 to March 2026, around 244,000 immigrants disenrolled from California-funded expansion programs meant for low-income residents ineligible for Medicaid due to their legal status. It’s a drastic change from years prior, when enrollment in these programs generally increased each month. 

Despite the fact that people in expansion programs only made up about one in nine of the state’s Medi-Cal enrollees as of May 2025, based on public enrollment data, they accounted for about a third of disenrollments in the state from that month to March 2026, according to Diana Camacho, a senior program officer at the California Health Care Foundation.

California doesn’t keep track of why its residents disenroll from Medi-Cal. Many people, like Laura, simply roll off when they don’t renew their plan before their deadline.

Conversations Camacho has had, however, suggest that “fear and lack of information” are at work. Her team has heard immigrants voice concerns “about immigration enforcement, data sharing, as well as changing public charge rules” in weighing whether to renew—even when, like Laura, they might not be able to reverse their decision.

“A whole generation of children and immigrant families are falling behind in school because of all of this.”

A recent analysis by the Latino Policy and Politics Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles, compared data on ICE arrests with Medi-Cal enrollment numbers in state-funded programs. It found that, though enrollment rates in state-funded programs—which are used predominantly by undocumented immigrants—started decreasing after raids began in Los Angeles, the drops went far beyond the number of people arrested during that time.

Many factors “suggest that immigration enforcement has led to what is commonly known as the chilling effect,” said Arturo Vargas Bustamante, the institute’s faculty director of research. About a third of this group’s disenrollments in 2025, his study noted, couldn’t be explained by deportations or by regular enrollment fluctuations. Vargas Bustamante attributes that share of the decline to fear. 

Though Northern California has been spared raids on the scale of Los Angeles or Chicago, Laura and her family have had much to be scared about: Last October, a planned massive ICE deployment was announced, then cancelled in the Bay Area, followed by news of ICE activity in multiple cities across the region and at San Francisco International Airport.

Laura’s biggest worry, she said, is that her family could be separated. Her two children, both US citizens, have told her they don’t want to move to a new country and leave their old lives behind. Though her children are young adults—her son just started college, and her daughter works and lives on her own—they still need her help. Her son is not yet financially independent; her daughter is autistic, so Laura wants to be close by.

Last year, when she still had coverage, “I would tell my doctor that I didn’t know why my glucose levels were rising,” Laura said. “I was working out, I was eating well, but I was stressed. And my stress was because my son was in high school and very worried about me. He would tell me to not go to his school, to not wait for him, and he would get worried. And I was even more worried for him.” 

According to Vargas Bustamante, families like Laura’s, where undocumented parents are a household’s main providers, are among “the most affected” by these chilling effects: they are those for whom fears of family separation carry the most weight.

Even adults with coverage are underusing the health services they have access to, says Alma Santana of Mujeres Unidas y Activas, a nonprofit that supports Latina and indigenous women in Oakland and San Francisco.

“Our members have stopped going to their appointments, from basic ones to primary care visits,” said Santana, who heads the nonprofit’s immigrant rights program. “They’re worried about being detained if they go.” Two women she worked with, who had diabetes and cancer respectively, she said, decided to self-deport to Mexico, worried about interruptions to their medical care if they were detained. 

It’s increasingly difficult for advocates and resource providers to tell immigrants what’s safe. Many of the federal administration’s new immigration policies have been challenged in court, though not always successfully. Sometimes, as with Medicaid’s data sharing agreement with ICE, the way the federal government plans to use the data remains unclear. But groups like Santana’s try to make sure immigrants have as much information as possible to weigh their options. 

A rally outside a hospital in Glendale, California, protesting ICE officials who were guarding a person detained in the building, July 17, 2025.David McNew/Getty

 “There’s a lot of fear, and then there’s people who, at a moment in time, decided not to renew and then later regretted it,” Santana said. 

That impact extends to kids. Over the years, San Francisco pediatrician Raul Gutierrez has built a lot of trust with his patients, many of whom are from Spanish-speaking immigrant families. But since the start of the second Trump presidency, he’s noticed they’re much more reluctant to seek treatment.

“More kids need reminders to come to their visits. Kids are missing their vaccines,” Gutierrez said. “Kids are missing their specialty appointments for things that they need to be evaluated on.” 

One mother asked Gutierrez if it was necessary to take her daughter to the gastroenterologist; the specialist was located in a different city that she didn’t know well. ”She really was struggling with that question of, ‘Do we go and just risk the possibility of being detained?’” he said. 

He has sought workarounds to let those families safely access care, such as phone appointments. But that’s not always possible. Some families, Gutierrez said, wait too long to access care; one family he knows, whose child had a condition that causes fluid accumulation in the brain, waited until their child needed emergency surgery.

Other families, he has noticed, have opted to not renew their children’s Medi-Cal altogether—even though children under 18 in California are still eligible regardless of immigration status. “There’s so many questions that are being asked and so much uncertainty about how that information is being shared,” he said.

Gutierrez worries that these lapses in coverage will leave immigrant children with even more unmet health care needs, including mental health support, which he notes more children now require amid deportation fears.

“I worry that a whole generation of children and immigrant families are afraid to engage in their communities and not take advantage of all the wonderful things that help them thrive and that help them just be children,” he said. “A whole generation of children and immigrant families are falling behind in school because of all of this.”

New state and federal policies could make disenrollments even worse in the coming year, Camacho said, and not just for immigrants. Further restrictions on Medi-Cal will kick in next year that add more eligibility checks and work reporting requirements, creating more barriers for all low-income California residents.

The “public charge” rule, implemented in mid-September, is among the policies that alarms advocates most: immigration officers now consider whether immigrants or their family members use public benefits like Medicaid and SNAP when reviewing applications for permanent residency. 

“It’s hard not to live stressed, thinking about what might happen tomorrow if you go to the store and you don’t come back.”

After Trump first tried to implement a similar rule in 2019—when it was contested in the courts and eventually rescinded by the Biden administration—researchers found that, though the rule did not apply to many of the immigrant groups that qualify for benefits, it had broader impacts on those groups’ willingness to seek support. A 2021 KFF survey, for instance, found that 1 in 4 undocumented Latino adults, and 1 in 10 lawful permanent Latino residents, had decided to opt out of government assistance programs because they worried about its impact on their immigration status or that of a family member. 

“Perhaps it’s going to go away at the end of the Trump administration,” Vargas Bustamante said. A group of 22 states has already filed a lawsuit challenging the rule. But for now, he predicts, it will only “generate bigger and more chilling effects in our communities.”

The last time Laura saw her doctor, she re-filled Laura’s prescriptions and said that they could figure out a way to continue their visits, even though Laura no longer had coverage.  

It wasn’t the first time her doctor had expressed concern. Laura said the doctor had called her multiple times last winter, asking her why she wasn’t showing up to her appointments. Laura would say that she didn’t want to put herself at risk. But what would happen, Laura’s physician asked, if she stopped going to the doctor?

When Laura went to pick up her pills with her new prescription, she learned she’d have to pay out of pocket. She can’t cover that cost regularly—the 53-year-old hasn’t been able to find a consistent source of income since last year, when the woman she regularly cooked and cleaned for told her she could no longer afford to pay for her help due to the Bay Area’s rising cost of living. 

“It’s a very uncertain future,” Laura said. “I don’t know if I’m going to have the same support.”

She is hardly the only one.

“With the messages we’re getting every day, it’s hard to stay calm,” said Santana, of Mujeres Unidas y Activas. “It’s hard not to live stressed, thinking about what might happen tomorrow if you go to the store and you don’t come back.”

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the October 7 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

Donald Trump erupted in a crazed, manic tirade this week about the South Carolina Senate race. He raged wildly at the Democratic candidate, Dr. Annie Andrews, smearing her with an anti-trans slur and unleashing all kinds of dim-witted lies about her to boot. Notably, this comes as a major GOP super PAC just poured $5 million into South Carolina to shore up GOP Senator Darline Graham. One Republican admitted that the GOP needs an “insurance policy” in the state, and two GOP-aligned pollsters have found the race to be very close.

We think the odds remain very long here, but now that Trump has signaled alarm about this race, we’re getting a download on it from Jalisa Washington-Price, a veteran South Carolina-based Democratic operative who heads the Democratic-aligned PAC Fresh Start. Jalisa, thanks for coming on.

Jalisa Washington-Price: Thank you for having me, Greg.

Sargent: So let’s start with the money. Axios reports that the Senate Leadership Fund, which is the leading Republican super PAC, is putting $5 million into this race as an “insurance policy.” One source told Axios: “We’re not taking anything for granted.”

Jalisa, two things. One, what does it say that they have to put this money in here, that they can’t take South Carolina for granted? And number two, are you seeing signs of their spending yet?

Washington-Price: Right. We haven’t seen signs yet, but as you know, we know that it’s coming, right? And South Carolina isn’t supposed to be on anybody’s battleground map this election cycle. But looking at the numbers, right, even right-leaning pollsters and polls show Annie Andrews in striking distance with Darline Graham, and a noticeable amount of undecideds still out there, right?

And that’s just not noise. Those are real numbers, that’s real enthusiasm that we’re seeing on the ground and hearing even from some of these pollsters that have been paying close attention to this race.

And the fact that Republicans are having to spend here, instead of being more competitive in these places that we were expecting, like in Michigan, you know, in some of these other states—it says a lot. And it’s also a warning sign for Republicans too, right? Like, what’s to come in November.

Sargent: Well, absolutely. So let’s talk about Trump losing it here. He viciously attacks Dr. Andrews, the Democratic challenger. She’s taking on Senator Darline Graham, who’s the sister of the late Lindsey Graham. Trump called her a vicious anti-trans slur twice and posted this:

“She is in favor of Transgender for Everyone, Open Borders, Defunding the Police, high taxes, a weak military, and will absolutely fight to take your guns away. She is against our Great Second Amendment!”

Trump also called her a low-quality person, while insisting Darline Graham is a high-quality one who can be trusted to have the right values. Jalisa, you just want to start by responding to all that?

Washington-Price: It’s unfortunate we have to respond to this and respond to the president’s comments. But as the saying goes, when you’re winning, you talk about your candidate, and when you’re losing, you talk about your opponent.

Trump’s post was almost all about Annie Andrews, and it tells you everything you need to know. When a conversation is about grocery prices and gas and health care, he knows he and the Republicans are going to lose that conversation and lose that discussion.

Sargent: Let’s talk about South Carolina for a sec. Trump won there by a whopping 18 points in 2024. Lindsey Graham won his last election there in 2020 by over 10 points. This is a red state. Can you just give us the rough demographic breakdown?

Washington-Price: So we have about three and a half million registered voters in South Carolina. Two out of three of those voters are white, and about one in four are Black, right? There’s no party registration in the state of South Carolina, so as of now, anybody can vote across lines in the primary. So it makes it hard for us to kind of track registered Republicans or Democrats in the state.

But what we’ve seen, particularly with the base of Democrats in South Carolina, Black voters—some of your voters in places like Columbia, which is a very Democratic county, somewhat of Charleston and in Greenville, some of your larger counties—you’re seeing the base very excited, not only for Annie Andrews but for Democrats across the state, right?

So you’re seeing that enthusiasm. You’re also seeing kind of the disenchantment with Republicans, and we like to call them non-MAGA Republicans, who are just tired of the fight. And they’re tired of, again, these culture wars that Republicans have been putting on our state, and they are ready for change.

And white voters, they make about six in ten for Darline Graham. And then we see about three in ten for Annie Andrews, according to the latest polls. And for Black voters, I think we have up to eight and nine out of ten for Andrews, which are real numbers, right? Like, those are real numbers. They’re showing real enthusiasm.

And we’re hoping to get those numbers up and really go after some of these undecideds. I think the last poll had about eight, almost 9 percent undecided, still out there and up for grabs.

And I know Annie Andrews, her team, as well as the IE—we are doing everything we can to talk to those voters and put the real issues in front of them, and really showing Annie Andrews’s credentials. She’s a pediatrician, she’s a mom of three. She’s fought her whole life for affordable health care, and she has a real plan to get South Carolina and this country back on track.

Sargent: So brass tacks here. If you get really, really good turnout among Democrats, and Annie Andrews gets 90 percent of Democrats, something like that, maybe even higher, does well with independents—what percentage of Republican voters does she have to get to win?

Washington-Price: Percentage of Republican voters that we believe she would have to get to—I think it’s a short answer, roughly about one in five Republicans, if we can give or take away from the Republicans, right? I think we would do well. So roughly we would need between 15 to 20 percent of Republicans to get over 50 percent.

Sargent: That’s hard!

Washington-Price: It is. It’s very hard, right? And we always knew it was going to be an uphill battle, right? But again, I think even going back to the primary—you know, South Carolina was a part of the conversation around redistricting, right? And we were one of the southern states to reject redistricting in the state.

And one of the reasons I think that was, too, is because I think Republicans in South Carolina saw the enthusiasm and kind of the fire that that lit around Democrats. We had some of the highest number of early voters among Democrats, and particularly Black voters in the South, show up in our primary.

And those voters aren’t just going away, right? They’re continuing to be fired up. We’ve been continuing to fire them up and communicate to them, on top of trying to pull over some of the Republicans. And I think that has to be our goal and our strategy in order to win.

It’s not going to be easy. South Carolina has not voted for a Democrat in the Senate since Jim DeMint. And I can’t tell you how old I was when that was. So it’s also—if you see even, like, David Beasley, who came out publicly condemning—he was a Republican governor in South Carolina—he came out condemning Trump and his comments about Annie Andrews.

I think you’re seeing more Republicans even kind of create a permission structure for Republicans in South Carolina to say this is enough. We’re tired of this. It’s time for something new. And I think you’re going to see even more of that as we get closer to election day. It’s not going to be easy, but we are very optimistic about it. And I think Republicans see that too, right?

Sargent: Well, yes. And since you brought up David Beasley, who’s a former Republican governor of South Carolina, I just pulled up his response. He was quite condemnatory of Trump. He was quite strong on this. He said, “This is abhorrent. Elections don’t have to be about cruelty and lies. South Carolina deserves better.”

That’s strong stuff. David Beasley, I’m guessing, is a fairly well-respected former politician. Is there an outside chance that a sizable bloc of Republican voters listen to a retired Republican in the MAGA era, when Donald Trump is issuing his commands to them to see her as as trans or whatever the hell he thinks he’s saying?

Washington-Price: Yeah, I really do believe so, right? And it goes back to what I said early about some of these Republicans creating a permission structure for other Republicans to be able to vote for a Democrat. And I think David Beasley laid it out correctly. It’s like, there is no place for that type of rhetoric anymore in the political conversational landscape.

Again, Trump and these Republicans know, when you talk about the issues, you talk about affordability, you talk about health care, they lose every time. And that’s why he goes back to kind of these culture wars that he’s no longer winning. I think you want to see more Republicans come out publicly and get at some of this stuff too.

Sargent: Well, let’s talk about the polls. There’s Trafalgar, which showed Darline Graham up a hair, by 43 to 42, over Annie Andrews. InsiderAdvantage had a poll finding Graham at 46 and Andrews at 45. So both of those have the race at around a point, which is just unthinkable. And those are Republican pollsters as well. Are you guys polling?

Washington-Price: We have a poll out in the field now, so we’re hoping it comes back soon.

Sargent: OK. And where do you guys think the race is right now, candidly?

Washington-Price: I honestly think we’re in two-to-three-point striking distance from Darline Graham. Even when you think about kind of the generational divide—I think even the last polling, and we’re seeing it on the ground, had every age group under the age of fifty break in for Annie Andrews. Again, you think about enthusiasm, you think about who is excited and wanting to show up to the polls for a change, those are the demographics and that’s the age group that we know will show out, right?

And I think even if we can’t convert some of these Republicans, to your point, if we can get them to stay home and just, you know, throw their hands up with it, that’s a win for us. And it kind of goes back to the messaging that we are trying to drill home to these voters, right? Who is going to be best for your families, who’s going to be best for your future, your kids’ future?

And I think that’s what we’re seeing in the polling. I think folks believe that it’s going to be Annie Andrews, and that Darline Graham does not have a plan for the state, and that she’s just going to be a rubber stamp for Trump and his failed policies. And people are tired of that.

Sargent: Would you guys like to see some Democratic money come into the state from places like the Senate Majority PAC or from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee?

Washington-Price: We would definitely love to see it, right? And I think there’s a long-term play for South Carolina. If we can flip the seat for Annie Andrews, I think it sends a signal across the country. It sends a signal across the South that we are competitive and we can stay competitive.

Georgia and North Carolina have done it, and we are right in the middle of both of those states. We share media markets with both of those states. And we think, you know, any resources that come into South Carolina will benefit Democrats, and it kind of is an investment that is a long play for Democrats in the South.

Sargent: Well, it’s worth pointing out that both Georgia and North Carolina right now, those races have Democrats pulling away. In Georgia, it’s Senator Jon Ossoff, who looks like he’s basically on track to having this sewn up. In North Carolina, it’s Roy Cooper, who’s running for the open seat there. He also seems to have this close to sewn up. Republicans are pulling money out of both states.

I mean, as long as I’ve been following politics, if you had told me a while ago that the states where Democrats would be running away are Georgia and North Carolina, I would have looked at you like you were nuts.

Washington-Price: That’s right. Yeah, that’s right.

Sargent: And so the demographic story in Georgia and North Carolina is sort of similar. They’re very similar to South Carolina.

Washington-Price: That’s right.

Sargent: Well, I’m going to ask you about that, because Virginia’s the big success story. That’s the southern state that really first kind of moved in this direction that we’re talking about, with population growth in the northern parts of the state, the D.C. suburbs, kind of slowly outnumbering the vast rural structures of the state.

You see something similar but a little less pronounced in North Carolina, with some other East Coast hubs kind of really developing and becoming more Democratic and kind of slowly catching up with the rest of the state, which is enormously rural and red throughout. Is something like that happening in South Carolina? What’s the process there?

Washington-Price: I think so, right? South Carolina is one of the fastest-growing states in the country. Like, that is something that has been reported within the year. And I think you’re seeing that for a number of issues.

We’re seeing folks moving from across the country to places like South Carolina because of the affordability crisis that’s happening across our country. And they’re looking for opportunities, they’re looking for cheaper childcare, they’re looking for, you know, some affordable housing.

But what does that mean for a state like South Carolina, with these new people that have maybe come from bluer states or maybe even come from more moderate states, right? Like, how do we engage them? How do we get them kind of baked into the political culture in South Carolina? And how do we get them to vote for Democrats? And I think that is the type of long-term investment that we’re hoping not only the party, but some of these committees also will see and want to tap into.

And we’re seeing it in places like Mississippi and Alabama too. I do a lot of work across the South, and some of that’s kind of the same story we’re seeing across the board. You’re having folks that are moving into the state. You’re also having people move back, right, from the state, who were born and raised there, maybe left because of a number of issues, but they’re moving back. And we have to be able to capture those folks, engage with them, and talk about issues that are important to them.

And I think it’s a real opportunity for Democrats. But it has to continue and start now. Georgia and North Carolina didn’t just happen overnight. It took some work. And there’s a host of people, including, like, Stacey Abrams, who is to thank for that.

But I think because of that, you know, we’re seeing what Democrats can do when they win in these southern states. And I think we just have to keep hammering home on what it means for Democrats to win in the South.

Sargent: Well, Democrats need a southern strategy long term, because of what’s happening with some of these demographic changes in the North.

Washington-Price: That’s right.

Sargent: Which is, you know, chipping away at their Electoral College strongholds.

Washington-Price: That’s exactly right.

Sargent: OK, so you guys, the Fresh Start PAC—you guys are going up on the air in coming days, right? How much money are you putting in, and what’s the ad?

Washington-Price: This first tranche of ads that is coming out is about health care. It’s really hammering in on Annie Andrews’s kind of credentials and her fight when it comes to lowering health care costs in South Carolina. I think this first ad—and I’ll send you the article too, Greg—but we want to put about $2 million behind the first ad, and we’re still raising money. We’re hoping we get some more money.

Between me and you, I maybe shouldn’t announce this, and this might be breaking news, but we also have some testimonials from Republicans who have been lifelong Republicans who are breaking away from the party and voting for Annie Andrews, the first time voting for a Democrat. But they’re tired and they’re fed up.

Sargent: So these Republicans are going to be in these ads?

Washington-Price: Yeah. We have some testimonials with Republicans that are on camera, that are going to be in ads.

Sargent: Why don’t you give us one or two names? Nothing wrong with breaking news here.

Washington-Price: So one I can give you is—his name is Scott Singer. He was a former county councilman from Aiken County, which you could say is a mostly Republican county, or goes back and forth. It’s Joe Wilson’s district. But he was a lifelong Republican, and he is tired of the party. He has said that he’s voting for Annie Andrews this election cycle.

Sargent: And he’s going to be in your ad saying that.

Washington-Price: He’s going to be in our ad saying that.

Sargent: OK, well, listen, best of luck to you all. It’s going to be an uphill climb, but it’s certainly worth watching.

Washington-Price: It is. Greg, thank you so much for your time and having me on.

If you’ve ever listened to President Trump talk about our elections, you might hear something like this: Voter fraud is rampant. Noncitizens are regularly voting illegally. And our elections are rigged. The president often uses the bully pulpit to repeat these claims despite study after study showing they’re just not true. But it’s not just the president. There are many others at the ground level saying the same things to justify voting restrictions that could disenfranchise legal voters, especially voters of color.

https://play.prx.org/e?ge=prx_149_2598ef8a-3035-444f-945a-faf4b1af96f5&uf=https%3A%2F%2Ffeeds.revealradio.org%2Frevealpodcast

One of them is J. Christian Adams. An activist and former trial attorney for the US Department of Justice, Adams was named to Trump’s Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity in 2017. Today, he’s the president of Public Interest Legal Foundation, a nonprofit that advocates for stricter voter ID laws and sues states and local governments to remove illegal voters from election rolls.

On this week’s “More To The Story,” Adams claims there’s systemic voter fraud in the US before abruptly ending the interview after host Al Letson challenges his assertions. Al then talks with Mother Jones National Voting Rights Correspondent Ari Berman about the lack of evidence from activists like Adams, the claims Adams and PILF have made that noncitizens are illegally voting, and what conservative activists who say election fraud is rampant are really trying to achieve.

Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to subscribe.

I’m nervous about the polls and election forecasts projecting a huge Democratic wave. And I think you should be too.

Why? For two reasons. First of all, the numbers, as eye-watering as they are, may be setting us up for disappointment, even if Democrats have a solid night next month. They simply seem too good to be true. According to polls and forecasts, the Democrats are virtually guaranteed to win back the House. Fairly progressive Democrats (Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed, Maine’s Troy Jackson) are leading in blue-leaning swing states. More centrist Democrats (North Carolina’s Roy Cooper, Georgia’s Jon Ossoff) are comfortably ahead in swing states that traditionally lean a bit red.

It gets better. Democrats seem poised to win several races in states that have been reliably red in the Trump era: Alaska and Texas Senate, Iowa governor, the Senate and gubernatorial contests in Ohio. They have an outside chance of winning the governorship in Texas and Senate seats in Iowa and Kansas too.

I’m not done. Democrats could win enough governorships and state legislatures that a majority of Americans live in states with a Democratic trifecta next year. A Black politician from Milwaukee (David Crowley) is favored to win the governorship in Wisconsin, overcoming long-standing resentment against the state’s biggest city. In Georgia, Keisha Bottoms has a real chance of becoming the first Black woman elected governor in U.S. history.

Twenty-one months ago, after Donald Trump won a second term, I would have been thrilled if just one or two of the things I enumerated above happened. Now, the polls suggest a blue wave that would even eclipse 2006 or 2018. If the polls are right, we are looking at a political earthquake akin to 2008, when America, including Indiana and North Carolina, chose a Black man to be president. Democrats winning statewide elections in Texas raises the prospect of the party being competitive in the state that delivers the most Electoral College votes (40) to Republicans, putting GOP prospects in presidential elections in peril. If El-Sayed wins, it will be even harder for centrist Democrats and Republicans to argue that a potentially transformative politician such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez can’t be elected president.

Some data experts say that we should trust the polls; others argue that they might be inflating Democrats’ chances. In my view, polls are generally reliable, but they can’t predict the winner of a race that’s within three to five points—as many of these contests are.

I’ll admit it: I don’t have a data-based reason to doubt the polls. It just comes from covering U.S. politics for more than two decades and being a Black person in America. I will believe that a Democrat can carry Texas the moment that the Associated Press or one of the television networks officially declares that Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico or gubernatorial hopeful Gina Hinojosa has won—and not a moment before. After all, a Democrat last won a Senate race or gubernatorial race in Texas in 1990. I worry that animus against Black women and Muslims is an understated barrier for Bottoms and El-Sayed, respectively. I worry that too many voters in the South both love Trump and hate Black people for Cooper or Ossoff to win by more than a few points. I worry that Maine’s voters can’t quit Republican incumbent Senator Susan Collins, no matter how often she disingenuously claims to be deeply concerned by something Trump has done.

And honestly, to assume that the big blue wave that’s being projected won’t happen is probably better for my mental health. I was saddened when the 2016 and 2024 elections did not permanently force Trump out of politics and put a woman in charge of the country for the first time. I was dismayed at how close the swing states were in 2020, considering how terrible Trump’s presidency had been.

My advice for TNR readers and other liberals would be to assume that Democrats win 48 or 49 Senate seats, 225 House seats, and nothing major in Ohio or Texas. That’s not a prediction; it’s an exercise in setting expectations at a realistic but low level.

Here’s a second reason to be wary of the polls: They are creating expectations that the mainstream media might use against Democrats. In January 2025, if you told reporters at AP, The New York Times, CNN, NBC News, and other centrist news outlets that Democrats were going to win 225 House seats and 49 Senate seats in November 2026, they might have been skeptical Democrats would do that well. In January, I wrote a piece that was titled “Amazingly, the Democrats Have a Shot at a Senate Majority,” reflecting how unlikely that seemed even nine months ago.

Now, polls and election forecasts based on those surveys are projecting a much stronger showing for Democrats. The “median outcome” of the election is 242 Democratic House seats and 52 in the Senate, according to FiftyPlusOne, an election site run by G. Elliott Morris and other alums of FiveThirtyEight. Other sites view it similarly: 235 Democrats in the House and 51 in the Senate (Decision Desk HQ); 232/52 (VoteHub); 234/52 (Split Ticket).

If Democrats fall short of these projections, even if they win 229 House seats and 50 in the Senate, I am quite confident the mainstream media will revert to its preferred approach to covering politics: centrism/false equivalence/balance/both sides/“independence.” Centrist news outlets will use headlines like “Voters Dislike Trump but Aren’t Sure About Democrats Either,” “Americans Hate Both Parties,” “American Voters Deliver a Mixed Verdict.”

This is nonsense, of course. Trump is an incredibly unpopular president, so disliked that Republicans are struggling to win in Texas. He is also an authoritarian figure bent on eroding democracy, including the freedom of the press. But the mainstream media is still eager to cast itself as above the fray, neutral, and certainly not opposed to a president trying to destroy its industry. If neither Talarico nor Hinojosa wins, the media will likely not cover this election as the decisive rejection of Trump that it almost certainly will be.

So for now, I’m taking the polls seriously but not literally, to borrow a formation from earlier in the Trump era. I am confident that Republicans will do worse in Kansas, Texas, Iowa, and other red states than usual. I am sure that some Democrats will win by larger margins in many swing states than seemed possible two years ago. But I will be delighted and surprised if there are Governors Bottoms, Crowley, and Hinojosa or Senators El-Sayed or Talarico. It could happen, though. The polls in 2026 look as rosy for Democrats as 2008. They were right back then. They could be right again.

It is January 3, 2027. The Democrats, fresh off their sweeping victory in the November elections, are set to take the majority in the House of Representatives.

All that remains is for the House clerk to compile a list of new members from the certified winners of the November races. It is an administrative technicality, a rote task that has gone off largely without incident every two years since 1789.

At least it did before Donald Trump turned the Republican Party into an election-denying cult. Now it has become the latest tool in the GOP arsenal to overturn election losses. Following the Democrats’ triumph in November, House Speaker Mike Johnson replaced the nonpartisan House clerk with a MAGA loyalist. Citing allegations of election fraud, the new clerk announces that he will not accept the documents certifying Democratic wins in key races. As a result, the members-elect cannot take their seats. 

The Democratic National Committee unleashes an army of lawyers to challenge the move. But when the matter arrives before the Supreme Court, the Roberts majority, invoking the “political question doctrine,” rules that it cannot interfere in the internal operations of another branch.

And just like that, the Republicans have stolen the midterms.

According to election experts, this scenario, though unlikely, is entirely feasible. Worse, such a scheme might prove to be a dress rehearsal for the main event: a GOP gambit to overturn the 2028 presidential election. In 2020, Trump lost the election but tried to hang onto power regardless. Why would 2028 be any different?

Sure, Trump is barred from running for another term, but the Roberts majority might not see it that way. In any case, one would scarcely expect a different nominee to show more respect for the democratic process. That includes JD Vance. “If I had been vice president” in 2020, he once mused, “I would have told the states … that we needed to have multiple slates of electors”—a reference to an illegal scheme to keep Trump in office.

Freedom-loving people need to plan ahead to counter any Trumpian coup. Fortunately, there is an effective blueprint that we can follow.

The idea of the Trump administration successfully defying an election loss might seem fanciful. After all, these guys are not the sharpest tools in the shed. Perhaps they would try, but could they really pull it off?

They probably won’t. Even still, complacency is dangerous in the face of a cold-blooded autocrat who’s already challenged laws and defied norms willy-nilly. What Trump and his allies lack in brains, they make up for in power. He failed to reverse the 2020 election because the White House and federal bureaucracy were staffed by professionals who refused to go along with the plan.

That is no longer the case. The institutionalists who once stymied Trump’s authoritarian ambitions are long gone. In their place are MAGA flunkies committed to doing the president’s bidding. With their help, he could conceivably defy any resistance from Congress and the Supreme Court.

Leading experts agree that the U.S. has transitioned to authoritarianism during Trump’s second term. The days when constitutional checks and balances were enough to keep a rogue president in line are over. What’s more, defeating a Republican at the ballot box no longer guarantees that he will accept defeat.

Still, Trump is not some omnipotent demigod casting thunderbolts at will upon his hapless subjects. No dictator can rule without the people’s consent. Withdraw that consent, and he is just another guy with a spray tan and a chancy comb-over.

Nonviolent rebellion—the strategic use of protests, strikes, and similar methods—has paralyzed authoritarian regimes and forced despots from power the world over. It can work in America too.

Political scientists have found that nonviolent rebellion is the most reliable path from dictatorship to democracy. Decades of research point to four steps that successful rebellions follow.

Consider Serbia, where a handful of students launched a movement called Otpor! (“Resistance!”) that brought down strongman Slobodan Milošević in October 2000. The first step was to get organized. Members set up chapters in dozens of towns, trained volunteers in nonviolent resistance, and forged links with labor unions, nongovernmental organizations, independent media, and opposition parties.

Second, they used the dictator’s repression against him. Instead of trying to avoid it, they harnessed the public outrage that it sparked. This backfire effect proved to be their best recruitment tool.

Eventually, Milošević forced through constitutional changes that allowed him to run for another term. Soon after, he called an early election. When the votes were counted, he had lost decisively. But he was not about to heed the will of the voters. The movement had to ramp up the pressure, but how?

Protests can be effective at signaling public support. But they rarely damage a regime on their own. So the third step was to diversify resistance methods. The rebels complemented their protests with a general strike that brought the country to a halt.

The fourth and final step was to sweep away the dictator’s pillars of support. For months, the movement had been courting police officers, officials, and other regime insiders. When hundreds of thousands converged on Belgrade on October 5, Milošević’s loyalists saw the writing on the wall and abandoned him in droves. Even the police stood aside. He had no choice but to concede.

It was a stunning feat. But it would have been much harder to pull off were it not for Otpor!’s efforts to maintain nonviolent discipline. Pitched street battles with police might have galvanized Milošević’s allies to close ranks rather than defect. Such violence could also have sapped public support for the rebellion, preventing the backfire effect from working.

If the conventional political process is not sufficient to restore democracy, nonviolent rebellion remains the most effective tool. To counter GOP election theft, Americans might have to mount a rebellion of their own. The good news is that our fellow citizens have already produced one such movement during Trump’s second term.

When jackbooted federal thugs began forcing Minnesotans into unmarked vans, Minneapolitans responded. First, they got organized. Activist groups trained citizens in specific resistance tactics. They also established support networks for immigrant families who had been forced into hiding.

Second, they used the dictator’s repression against him. The sight of armed thugs manhandling children brought waves of new recruits into the resistance. By the end of January, local organizations had trained nearly 30,000 citizen-volunteers to monitor federal agents.

Third, they deployed a range of nonviolent resistance methods, including protests, boycotts, and the tracking of ICE agents.

As for step four—sweeping away the dictator’s pillars of support—Trump and his goons took care of that by themselves. The tragic killings of two resisters, Alex Pretti and Renee Good, proved to be a tipping point. Public anger over the shootings prompted numerous allies to break from the president. A leading GOP gubernatorial candidate in Minnesota dropped out of the race. Republican members of Congress spoke out against the roundups.

With the pressure mounting, Trump was forced to beat a public retreat. Gestapo enthusiast Greg Bovino was shown the door. Homeland Security chief Kristi Noem was relieved of operational responsibility and eventually sacked.

In the coming years, Americans might have to replicate this feat on a bigger stage. Only this time, the goal will be to reverse a stolen election. The four steps above offer a road map to victory. But the work starts now. If Serbia and Minnesota proved anything, it is this: The people determine whether the dictator rules—not the other way around.

There is a strange irony in the career that Francis Fukuyama recounts in his new memoir, In the Realm of the Last Man. The Stanford political scientist and former neoconservative rose to prominence, of course, by famously asking in 1989 whether humanity had reached the “end of history.” Arriving in The National Interest magazine just before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Fukuyama’s well-timed query perfectly articulated an idea then becoming a new form of political common sense: Western-style liberal democracy was the eventual destiny of all humankind. Even if some details remained to be sorted out—and some holdouts remained to be convinced—liberalism’s enemies were exhausted and the future seemed determined.

Now in his seventies, Fukuyama’s new retrospective inadvertently reveals that it’s the liberal democratic model that seems unready for the next century. Able to see the flaws in his system but unwilling to countenance the type of politics that might transcend them, Fukuyama has produced a book emblematic of a “centrism” still proudly fighting the last brushfires of the twentieth century long after the wildfires of the twenty-first have swept by them. Apparently meant as a kind of valedictory statement, In The Realm of the Last Man announces not just the latest phase of Fukuyama’s career but the exhaustion of the ideas that career rested on.

This career, as he reveals in the book’s opening vignette, began in California, where he first arrived to take up an internship at the Rand Corporation in 1978. That position was part of a quest to avoid what Fukuyama calls an “overdetermined outcome”: becoming an academic. “While I was growing up,” he writes, “I told myself I didn’t want to be a professor,” a path he rejected even after getting his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1981. The son of first- and second-generation Japanese immigrants, Fukuyama came from an academic family. His father, Yoshio Fukuyama, was a congregationalist minister and sociologist who served on the faculty at the Chicago Theological Seminary and Penn State. His mother, Toshiko, herself the daughter of an economics professor and university president, had survived World War II in Japan before emigrating to the United States in 1949 to attend the University of Chicago.

Yoshio, his son writes, was a “committed liberal and pacificist,” the source of some tension as Francis drifted rightward during his college years under the mentorship of Allan Bloom (the classicist most famous for authoring The Closing of the American Mind). The elder Fukuyama had narrowly escaped internment by the U.S. government during the war thanks to a scholarship program that helped Japanese American students attend universities outside the military exclusion zones on the West Coast. His parents and siblings had not been so lucky, spending the entirety of the war unjustly incarcerated in camps in Colorado and Arkansas. Whether those experiences influenced his father’s views, Francis does not say; regardless, Yoshio “and his church were at the forefront of the Civil Rights Movement and opposition to the Vietnam War.” Yoshio often suggested that his son had been “brainwashed” by right-wing professors, and during a visit to California in the 1980s wondered aloud whether Francis would ever leave the Department of Defense–aligned Rand and “get a real job” elsewhere.

Fukuyama would, eventually, become a professor like his father, the result of another transition in which Bloom played a key role. In 1988, while Fukuyama was working for the State Department, Bloom invited him to speak at the University of Chicago as part of a lecture series gloomily titled “The Decline of the West.” Fukuyama accepted, provided he could present a “more optimistic take.” His talk was called “The End of History?” and it was published in article form the following summer.

In the piece (which he later turned into a bestselling book), Fukuyama championed a new political order—that which emerged in the 1970s and 1980s as Cold War tensions ebbed and the welfare states of the West staggered under the weight of rising oil prices and slow economic growth. The new order was a fusion of two insurgent sets of ideas, often called “neoconservatism” and “neoliberalism.” The former responded to the declining Cold War by arguing for the U.S. to use its power to aggressively spread liberal democratic ideals across the world. The latter, meanwhile, proposed solving the economic crises of the period by gutting the welfare state to free the economy to innovate and grow.

Fukuyama, for his part, saw this moment as the end of a long process of human evolution, one spanning from the primitive societies of the Stone Age past to the advanced industrial economies of the twentieth century. This idea of human history as an evolutionary process was borrowed openly from Alexandre Kojève, a Russo-French philosopher famous on the continent for a series of lectures he gave on philosopher G.W.F. Hegel in the 1930s (and about whom Fukuyama had learned from Bloom). Building on Hegel, Kojève depicted history as a millennia-old battle for “recognition” between dominant groups—“masters”—and their subordinates—“slaves.” The masters would employ belief systems to justify their rule, while the slaves would, with time, develop new ideas that revealed the weaknesses in the masters’ system. The result of the conflict between the “thesis” of the master and the “antithesis” of the slave would be a period of conflict and confusion, before a new “synthesis” was born, fusing the old ideas with the new. This three-step process was destined to continue on repeat until a final structure emerged, one that equally distributed recognition between master and slave, removing the age-old sources of conflict by granting all parties the recognition they desired. Kojève believed just such an idea system had arrived with the emergence of liberalism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—history had thus “ended,” not in the sense that there wouldn’t continue to be wars and historical events, but instead meaning humanity had reached its evolutionary end point.

Fukuyama’s career-making triumph was suggesting that the events of the late twentieth century indicated such an end might really be in the offing, pointing to Mikhail Gorbachev’s economic and political liberalization of the Soviet Union, Deng Xiaoping’s contemporaneous opening of the Chinese economy, and a wave of democratization and economic liberalization in the global south. The subsequent collapse of the Soviet empire seemed to further confirm Fukuyama’s thesis, transforming an obscure State Department staffer into an intellectual celebrity.

Finally accepting his scholastic fate, he took up an endowed chair at George Mason University in 1996. The first of several academic posts (including later positions at Johns Hopkins and Stanford), it was the beginning of a long and successful career as an academic, consultant, and public thinker. The “end of history” idea, meanwhile, came to define the age, as a dominant United States loomed over a globe seemingly destined to transform into one vast mirror image of America.

More nuanced a scholar than many other neoconservatives and pro-market idealogues, Fukuyama emerged from all this as one of the most talented defenders of this new post–Cold War order, his very reticence in its support seemingly signaling his reliability. Never an orthodox neoliberal calling for the complete deregulation of the economy, for example, Fukuyama remained an ardent supporter of economic liberalization—usually finding other causes, like “social trust,” a concept he wrote about a great deal in the late 1990s, to explain problems others might have attributed to money’s machinations. He was also relatively wary of the use of military force abroad and yet still signed two open letters urging the United States to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq, one in 1998 and another, more significantly, in late September 2001.

It was with Iraq that things began to unravel. In private, Fukuyama was growing increasingly skeptical of what became George W. Bush’s March 2003 invasion of the country—hedging his bets in editorials and interviews over the course of 2002, suggesting that removing Saddam was justifiable but dangerous and that the U.S. should not proceed without U.N. support. He also reportedly warned, or cautioned, his friend and fellow neocon, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, against the invasion in a classified briefing in early 2003. He took a clear public stand against the war, however, only in 2004, after it was too late.

“The problem,” as he admits in the book, “was psychological … not a matter of policy judgment.” Though Fukuyama “knew full well that the intervention was likely to lead to huge unintended consequences,” he felt “a mental block against taking a public stand against the views of longtime friends” and allies like Wolfowitz, The Weekly Standard’s Bill Kristol, and the columnist Charles Krauthammer. By the following February—as the situation in Iraq worsened and the invasion’s supporters continued to insist the mission was a success—Fukuyama had had enough, determining that his “friends … had taken leave of reality.” He would denounce the war in the pages of The New York Times soon after.

Fukuyama later broke even more decisively with neoconservative thinking in his 2006 book, America at the Crossroads, and would endorse Barack Obama in 2008. By this point, not only had neoconservatism lost its shine due to the disaster in Iraq, but so too had neoliberalism, thanks to the Great Recession that began with the collapse of Lehman Brothers that September. As he writes in the memoir, “The twin failures of the war and of the financial system did a lot to discredit conservative ideas about the uses of military power and of free markets, mistakes for which America paid a huge price.”

Fukuyama mixes a strange complacency about the deeper problems confronting liberal democracy with attacks on straw-men versions of those who seek its reform.

Fukuyama deserves a great deal of credit for abandoning his previous positions once it was clear they were wrong—a rare enough trait in academia, as well as the punditocracy—but, as a widely respected scholar who apparently knew better, staying quiet about the war seems a bigger mistake than he acknowledges in these pages. He also further tests the reader’s tolerance for his mea culpas by describing the isolation he suffered after being cast out of neocon social circles—recalling a silent and “a painful ride up … in an elevator to a party” with Krauthammer and his wife, for example—right before admitting his break with the movement was “nothing like having your brains drilled out by an opposing militiaman, or losing your legs to an IED.” It’s an odd juxtaposition, however humble the intention.

On the whole, Fukuyama does not seem properly chastened by the events of the past two decades—mixing a strange complacency about the deeper problems confronting liberal democracy with attacks on straw-men versions of those who seek its reform.

These issues appear to stem from his continued attachment to the end of history thesis. In his mind, the biggest problems of the world in 2026—Donald Trump and the rise of authoritarianism draw most of his attention—are part of the tribulations of the “last man” of his title. The “last men” (and “last women”) are all of us living today in liberal societies. We, Fukuyama argues, are the “last” because we live in a time and place when history has ended, where all the big questions have already been answered. This, he suggests, is fundamentally unsatisfactory for many, because an inherent part of being human is in fact the desire to be part of history, to struggle for causes larger than oneself. “When the world is actually in pretty good shape,” he writes, and “there are no great causes worthy of risking one’s life,” people start to get restless. Thus, they pursue “struggle for struggle’s sake,” taking apart a perfectly good political order in the foolish pursuit of an impossible perfection. The primary culprits here for Fukuyama are “the extreme right and left.”

While he reserves most of his ire for the MAGA right, Fukuyama is also unwavering in lecturing members of the (so-called) radical left. Much of the analysis on this score is thin and unreasoned. Though Fukuyama admits that the left focuses on problems truly in need of fixing—like economic inequality, climate change, and “the plight of Palestinian civilians … in Gaza,” for example—he still thinks most activists are motivated primarily by boredom. Of students protesting Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza, he sniffs, “What they want is a break from their lives of steady but unheroic striving.” Ignoring the glaringly obvious differences between U.S. policy in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, he argues that if the protesters were serious about improving the world they would be “similarly outraged at the situation of Ukrainians besieged by Russia.”

In another sleight of hand, he proclaims that “virtually all progressive visions for an alternative to the current liberal order have been tried already,” or “have already been happily incorporated into present day social democratic welfare states.” (Never mind the work his ideological fellow travelers did to dismantle the midcentury welfare state decades ago.) Briefly acknowledging the desirability of a carbon tax, he also castigates “extreme environmentalists” and the very small “de-growth” movement, leaving the reader with the impression that the latter effectively characterizes the entirety of the environmentalist cause. On all these issues, he insists paternally, the real answer is not “radical change” but the “boring” work of “slow, steady … reform.” Who is going to bring about this reform if not the very people he is dismissing, and when and how it should be expected to arrive, are questions he leaves unanswered.

And herein lies the problem with the “end of history” as an idea: It’s an intellectual trap, limiting our ability to imaginatively confront the future. If the current form of liberal democracy is more or less the best we can hope for, then Fukuyama is right and no problem is worth too radical a reform. We must throw up our hands and simply wait for things to somehow, miraculously, get better—wait for the powers that be to have the spare time to fix up the small projects left unfinished in our otherwise well-founded post-historical home. Meanwhile, perhaps we can take up woodworking, one of the several hobbies (along with photography and flying drones) that Fukuyama describes in strange, avuncular asides that fill the book.

Herein lies the problem with the “end of history” as an idea: It’s an intellectual trap, limiting our ability to imaginatively confront the future.

But as it is, the end of history thesis plainly fails to account for important features of our reality. As long as capital continues to dominate the worker, liberal society will be inherently unstable—as is the case today, thanks to four decades of neoliberal economic policy and the rampant inequality it created. End of history liberalism also hides another master-and-slave relationship that must be addressed: that between wealthy industrial states and those of the former colonized world. As long as the bond between affluence in the one and poverty in the other is obscured, the liberal synthesis will continue to generate destabilizing antitheses among the world’s poor and oppressed, in Gaza and elsewhere.

Finally, there is the dialectic between humanity and nature. The very idea of historical progress is premised on the flawed assumption that humanity has separated itself from its natural origins, that—as Kojève himself described it—human progress “creates … a non-natural World, a cultural historical human World” where “man lives an essentially different life from that of animals.” Such logic renders the environment a mere object for our disposal, an utterly plastic means to human ends, open to whatever purposes we seek to put it toward, whether they be rampant consumerism or launching rockets to the moon. Nature in 2026 is exposing that lie, forcing on us the recognition it deserves—whether as equal or master remains to be seen—flooding into our homes, melting our cities, and burning our fields.

Liberal democracy’s achievements should be cherished—yes—but they should not be embalmed. Reflecting on a long career tied to the idea, Fukuyama can perhaps still afford to live at the end of history. The rest of us cannot.

It was 9 a.m. in Kyiv, and I showed up at class ready to teach Vaclav Havel’s “The Power of the Powerless,” his celebrated 1978 essay about totalitarian control, but was feeling rough around the edges because I had been in a bomb shelter until 5:30 a.m. that morning. So had my students.

This was my first time back in Ukraine for more than 30 years. I had previously come in Ukraine’s first year of independence in 1992. Back then, I had been invited to spend the year as a visiting professor at Kyiv Mohyla Academy, which was opening its doors for the first time since Russian Czar Alexander I shuttered them in 1819. It was a time of great hope and aspirations for Kyiv Mohyla and for Ukraine, which was attempting to navigate its existence after centuries of czarist and Soviet rule. The same could be said for me and my fellow idealistic (primarily young) American and European lecturers: We had responded to the “people power” that swept Central and Eastern Europe at the time by volunteering to teach in universities across the region as a part of an organization called the Civic Education Project. This idealism was symbolized by Havel himself, who had transformed from dissident playwright to president of Czechoslovakia and then Czech Republic.

Now, in 2026, I came for two reasons: to give a commencement speech at Kyiv School of Economics, or KSE, one of Ukraine’s most dynamic higher education institutions, and to help oversee and teach in an educational program for advanced high school students called Language and Thinking (affectionately known as L&T) offered at KSE by Bard College, where I am acting president.

Bard runs L&T around the globe, from its main campus on Annandale-on-Hudson to seven prisons in New York state to our program at Al-Quds University in East Jerusalem. L&T is really the introduction to the liberal arts and sciences, involving a careful reading of texts and a variety of writing practices that emphasize the iterative process between ideas and the written word. Most of all, it is about voice and agency, helping students to understand that they have the capacity to develop and express their own perspectives and views, that they are empowered thinkers. It is, as I say in countries that offer more traditional education systems, the antidote to rote learning. One can imagine how powerful L&T can be for young people whose own voices are being crowded out by artificial intelligence and the endless noise of social media.

In the Ukraine iteration of L&T, students read everything from Antigone to the Ukrainian Constitution. In the classroom at KSE, what struck me was how the program offered a metaphor for many of the changes I have seen in Ukraine over these past three decades, a way of tracking the trajectory from Kiev, as it was known under Soviet rule, to Kyiv, which reflects the Ukrainian pronunciation and symbolizes independence and autonomy. When I was in Ukraine, just after independence, the region was still often referred to as fSU, former Soviet Union. The economy and culture still reflected the Soviet imprint, as well as centuries of Russian imperial rule.

Although the country was visibly at war following Russia’s full-scale invasion of 2022, and ubiquitous phone apps rang regularly warning of drone and missile attacks, the streets of Kyiv were bustling with vibrant café and restaurant life, something totally absent while I was previously there and the country was in the midst of post-Soviet economic collapse. More importantly, Kyiv had become visibly Ukrainian, instead of a mix of Soviet, Russian, and Ukrainian: The language I heard on the street and in the cafés was Ukrainian, not Russian, and the sense of patriotism, be it in the display of national symbols or the various forms of memorializing the war dead, was palpable.

In the early 1990s, I taught students who had been raised in the Soviet style. They felt that they would accelerate academically if they repeated what I, the professor, said, often in shockingly verbatim forms, offering long recitations of things I had said in class. It was extremely difficult for them to understand that I wanted to know what they thought. It just did not compute.

The students I taught this summer, many from Kyiv but also from frontline communities in the east and south, were remarkably different. These young people are the first generation shaped since Russia’s invasion of Crimea in 2014. They were unquestionably and unambiguously Ukrainian.

But they were also Ukrainians who experienced war on a daily basis. The course was in part a sobering search for normalcy that could be achieved by diving into texts. But this was not a simple escape or diversion. After just a couple of days, they were, like their country, confident in their views—their individual views—and determined to articulate them, even if they were a multivocal community.

Perhaps the most inspiring moment came when I taught Havel’s “The Power of the Powerless,” in which we interrogated something I have been thinking a lot about lately, which is “living in truth.” The essay is about pressures in post-1968 Czechoslovakia—that is, after the Soviets brutally put down the “Prague Spring” uprising—to, as it were, passively comport to and perpetuate the myths of the post-totalitarian order by becoming obedient agents of a hollow ideology.

That was not these students. For them, the daily realities of war are so present and raw that there is no space for artifice. Their engagement with social and political issues spoke to the heart of “living in truth,” which Havel described as “an attempt to regain control over one’s own sense of responsibility.” Their very act of participating in an educational program in the face of a massive assault by the Putin government that has attempted to impose a uniformity of thought and eviscerate any notion of academic freedom was itself an act of living in truth.

But their engagement was not simply an act of resistance. Their manifest nationalism and confidence in being Ukrainian did not mean that they were afraid to criticize the Ukrainian government: Many students were openly critical of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and sympathetic to anti-government protests that took place over the summer in response to the dismissal of young Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov, who is viewed as the architect of Ukraine’s massively successful drone strategy.

I couldn’t help but notice, moreover, that they were embracing their freedoms in ways that reflect back to us our own reluctance to fight for those freedoms in the United States: the freedom to learn, the freedom to think for oneself, the freedom to disagree in the classroom and in the public square.

For me this was a remarkable turn. When I had originally gone to Ukraine as I was completing my doctorate at Oxford, I was full of youthful exuberance and arrogance as I was teaching students about things like human rights and rule of law. Now, I was being reminded both of the ways in which so many in America today, both individually and institutionally, and particularly in positions of leadership, are willing, as Havel said, to “live within a lie.”

What would Havel think of the top officials at Florida International University, the home of the Havel Center for Human Rights & Democracy, after they sanctioned students for standing in silent protest while wearing “ICE OFF FIU” T-shirts, charging that they violated policies prohibiting “expressive activities” inside campus buildings? What would he think of the academic institutions that have expressed enthusiasm for the different versions of the administration’s “compacts,” or that are choosing to wave the banner of neutrality enthusiastically in order to avoid punishment from the regime, just as the greengrocer, the central character in the Havel essay, did in posting the sign, “Workers of the world, unite”? Would he think that they were perpetuating, as the greengrocer had, the ruling party’s ideology?

The antidote to the melancholy that I felt in reflecting on the transformation that had taken place in my own country in the decades since I first visited Ukraine was situated in the infectious idealism of my student, the chief organizer of the course, Yana Lahoda. Yana is a rising senior at Bard who is from near Zaporizhzhia, where Russians still occupy the nuclear power plant where her father worked. She still speaks Russian with her parents, who now live in Germany. But she is determined to be part of the effort to build a new Ukraine. The L&T program is only the first step in her plans: When she graduates, she intends to return to build an early college in Ukraine as a part of an effort to jump-start what she hopes is a civically robust postwar Ukraine. For her, living in truth is not a choice but a reality that exists in every fiber of her existence.

Havel wrote of young people who were “given every opportunity to adapt to the status quo, to accept the principles of living with a lie and thus to enjoy life undisturbed by the authorities,” and yet who “decided on a different course.” Yana’s determination, in the face of a genuine existential threat, was a stark reminder of the power of idealism, the importance of education, and the fact that courage is not simply manifested in broad public gestures but in small acts of resistance. Acts that so often begin with writing and with thinking.

Donald Trump unleashed a long, crazed tirade this week about Dr. Annie Andrews, the Democratic Senate candidate in South Carolina. He attacked her with the vicious slur “tranny” not once but twice. He smeared her with numerous lies about her positions, insisting she is for “Defunding the Police” and “Transgender for Everyone.” The source of Trump’s rage is obvious: He fears the race is unexpectedly competitive. Indeed, two GOP-aligned pollsters—Trafalgar and Inside Advantage—recently found the race to be within one point. This is very bad news for Trump, and worse, Republicans plainly have their own polling showing something similar: A major GOP Super PAC just poured $5 million into the contest. The odds here are very, very long, especially once GOP money starts flowing. But since Trump clearly fears the race, we got a download on it from Jalisa Washington-Price, a veteran South Carolina Democratic operative who runs the pro-Andrews PAC Fresh Start. She explains the demographics of the state, why national Democrats should invest here, why the road ahead is very difficult—but not impossible!—and where this race fits into the recent history of the South. Listen to this episode here.

A newly released military study paints a frightening picture of the electric shock gloves ICE recently purchased by the thousands—and which the agency and its acting head David Venturella seem eager to deploy regardless of the potential consequences.

Records unearthed by the watchdog group American Oversight and first shared with the Associated Press show that in one set of trials carried out by the US Army in 2024, the electric shock gloves caused “overwhelmingly immediate” pain to soldiers playing the role of combative inmates in a mock forced cell extraction scenario, who then reported that “just seeing the glove” frightened them into obedience.

GLOVEs, or Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter, are taser-like devices that look like standard work gloves, but deliver a painful electric charge when the wearer touches a person’s skin. As I’ve previously reported, they’ve been described as “low optics”—police language for a weapon that causes harm but doesn’t leave marks, making it harder for victims to sue or for public outrage to stem from visible harm.

Two weeks ago, the shock gloves’ manufacturer, Jeff Niklaus, called the devices the “safest, most humane deescalatory product probably ever to come along.”

The Army study found that the gloves caused “intense pain,” but didn’t significantly change the amount of time it took to control a combative prisoner, or transfer someone from one unit to another. In one trial, a participant accidentally turned the shock gloves on; in another, “inmates” were able to fight off “guards” wearing the gloves for longer than they were able to hold off unarmed ones. People with water or oil on their skin felt more pain when shocked, and one participant reported lingering pain for 30 minutes afterward.

Soldiers, once shocked, were terrified to be shocked again. Army investigators reported “fatigue, soreness, and excessive apprehensiveness to being shocked again” in the soldiers playing inmates—and noted that the shock gloves gave a confidence boost to those who were playing guards, especially “smaller or less trained members.” The gloves, the study concluded, should be deployed in military prisons.

In September, ICE finalized its purchase of 6,650 pairs of the shock gloves for $16.7 million from Kentucky-based Compliant Technologies. White House border czar Tom Homan said in August that it could “be a while” before the gloves are in use in the field. But ICE, according to the Associated Press, was already well aware of the Army study when it chose to purchase the gloves.

Things are undoubtedly rough for Republicans as they face the prospect of deep losses in the U.S. Senate. The map is shocking given that the Democratic Party’s path to the majority runs through states like Alaska, Iowa, and Ohio—deep red states that shouldn’t, under any normal circumstances, be competitive. It’s particularly crazy since even redder states like Nebraska and South Carolina are…

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Now more than ever, we modern-day court jesters need your support! Become a paid subscriber to any (or all!) of the platforms below to keep Keef gentleman-cartooning into the future and beyond! www.patreon.com/keefknight keithknight.substack.com ko-fi.com/… kchronicles.com/…

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Republican nominee Steve Hilton is facing exceptionally steep odds in his run for governor of California. But as the former Fox News host joined Daily Kos from a spotty video connection en route to another campaign event, Hilton’s determination to change California’s blue history was unwavering, to say the least. “I’ve always felt that it’s an uphill battle, no question,” he told us in…

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President Donald Trump falsely claimed Tuesday that his military campaign against Iran ended eight months before he started it.

In the latest installment of Senior Moment or Shocking Admission?, the president offered an outrageous defense against anyone complaining that his so-called “six-week war” had stretched on for more than seven months.

“We really ended it as soon as the B2 bombers hit, because that was the end of their nuclear [program], that was 95 percent of the reason we did it. Maybe 100 percent,” he said.

Trump was referring to a series of strikes using “bunker buster” bombs on three of Iran’s nuclear facilities in June 2025. That was a full eight months before he ordered attacks in March 2026.

Clearly, those strikes didn’t actually end the war in the Middle East.

This particular comment is concerning in light of the Trump administration officials who have previously contradicted Trump’s claims that Iran’s nuclear program presented any imminent threat to national security.

If Trump’s initial bombing campaign had satisfied his desire for violence, then 22 U.S. servicemembers would likely not have been killed, hundreds more would not have been injured, and the Department of Defense wouldn’t have tried to cover it up. Multiple U.S. bases in the Middle East would still be standing, and the DOD wouldn’t have tried to cover that up, too. Hundreds of Iranian civilians, including dozens of school children, would still be alive. A U.S. battleship would never have been deployed for hundreds of days, leading to a number of attempted suicides. The Pentagon would not have spent more than $45 billion, and the U.S. military weapons’ stockpile would not have shrunk to dangerous levels.

If only Trump’s pissing contest with Iran had somehow ended before it ever started. Yes, if only.