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When Lucy found out she was pregnant in the summer of 2025, she might have been delighted. Instead, the news added to the uncertainty she’d been facing since that February, when she was among the first crop of federal workers fired by the Trump administration.

Her old bosses at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) wanted to rehire her, but human resources offered nothing in writing, and given how the administration had treated her already, she just couldn’t trust the proposal. (She would eventually return as a contractor, hence her request that I use a pseudonym—one former colleague, after all, had been fired for putting up a protest sign.)

The survey of fired federal workers “came from me not being okay and wanting to see if other people were as not okay as I was.”

President Donald Trump has claimed repeatedly that the career workers his minions drove out—roughly 317,000 were fired, quit, or took a buyout since he returned to the White House—are “getting private sector jobs” and making “twice as much money, three times as much money.” Even the judge who ruled those early firings illegal was under that impression. The workers “have moved on with their lives and found new jobs,” he stated last fall. “Many would no longer be willing or able to return to their posts.”

That wasn’t Lucy’s experience. She’d applied for at least 80 positions, resulting in just two dead-end interviews, though her PhD and ample work experience had made her well-qualified. By the time she knew she was expecting, she’d accepted a retail gig without health insurance. Similar stories abounded among her former colleagues.

I, too, left a job at the NIH last year—voluntarily, having seen the writing on the wall. My old workmates and I keep in touch via a group Signal chat, which, in addition to hand-drawn protest signs and pictures of pets, has been populated with tips for job seekers, mutual aid info, and countless employment postings.

Lucy, whom I hadn’t met prior to reporting this story, figured she wasn’t an outlier in terms of her difficulties finding suitable work. As the anniversary of the so-called Valentine’s Day Massacre approached, the members of one of her Signal chats began talking about designing a survey to assess how ejected workers were really faring.

Among the laid-off workers were plenty of people skilled in collecting and analyzing data—including Lucy, an epidemiologist, who raised her hand to help. “It came from me not being okay and wanting to see if other people were as not okay as I was,” she says.

“I’ve done a lot of different analysis projects, worked with a lot of data. I’ve never done something that was personal like this,” says Christa Reynolds, another fired NIH employee who helped crunch the numbers. “In one way, it was validating. In another way, it just was terrible.”

The data they collected—300 responses across 14 federal agencies and nearly every state—suggested that the fired workers had not, by and large, settled into high-paying private sector jobs. Many struggled to find work, with about 40 percent searching for at least six months. A year after Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) cut them loose, almost 17 percent remained unemployed.

“Probationary sounds like they’re just out of college,” said a former IRS chief, but “a lot” of the fired workers had “very sophisticated backgrounds.”

And not for lack of trying. Brier Ryver, who also helped design the survey, said they applied to at least 110 jobs after getting fired as a park ranger for a federal wildlife refuge in Florida. Wildlife conservation “is an extremely competitive field,” Ryver told me. Most of their applications were for local government positions, in dozens of states.

“Every single county government and every single state government and every single university has a different website to apply through, so I had to create accounts for every single one,” Ryver says. “I’d stay up till 3 a.m. applying and overthinking and making my materials look as good as I can.”

Seasonal work was a nonstarter—at first. “I need benefits in some way, shape, or form,” Ryver explains. But as rejections piled up, their expectations grew more flexible: “I’m going to take little money over no money.”

In the survey, more than two-thirds of the workers who had found jobs reported taking a pay cut. One interpretation might be that federal salaries were “bloated,” as House Republicans misleadingly put it in a 2024 proposal to slash benefits for civil servants. But a fairer interpretation is that they took what they could get in a hostile job market—even if overqualified. “There are a lot of families who are two-fed households, one was probationary and the other was RIFed,” Lucy notes, using the acronym for “reductions in force,” a.k.a. layoffs.

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The survey focused on probationary employees, whom the administration went after first. Legally, they were easier to terminate because they’d been in their roles less than two years, though many were longtime contractors or seasoned civil servants transferring from other positions. “Probationary sounds like they’re just out of college,” former IRS chief John Koskinen told one of my Mother Jones colleagues as DOGE hit his agency. “A lot of them came with very sophisticated backgrounds…They weren’t 25-year-olds. They were filling important positions.” 

Either way, many of the fired workers shouldered financial risks for the opportunity to serve the public. “I uprooted my life and moved across country to take this new position to a place where I had no community,” one of them, a single mother, wrote in her survey response. Another said their spouse had quit their job to enable the move. Nearly a third of the surveyed workers reported financial losses related to moving or housing instability. Some drew down their retirement savings—nearly one in six took out a loan.

The Federal Harms Tracker, a project of the nonprofit Partnership for Public Service, estimates that Trump’s layoffs have cost taxpayers more than $70 billion, and that’s not even counting the inevitable fallout when the country’s largest employer sheds more than 7 percent of its personnel. Nearly half of respondents in the probationary workers’ survey said they’d delayed major life events, like getting married or buying a home. “It’s comparable to the pandemic,” notes Tracy Hadden Loh, a fellow at the Brookings Institute who tracks economic indicators in the DC area to study the layoffs’ impacts.

Trump’s firings have been terribly wasteful. “They lost all this money that they spent training us and recruiting.”

A recent report by Loh and her colleagues found that home prices in DC, which boasted the nation’s highest unemployment rate in 2025, have dropped by a quarter compared to 2019, and inflation-adjusted rents have plummeted, though “no tenant feels like the rent went down.” Housing remains expensive relative to incomes, and as fired federal workers tightened their belts, the researchers saw declines in all types of spending.

But the majority of federal workers resided outside the capital, and unemployment spiked in states where they had the biggest presence. Locales with strong federal ties were also vulnerable. Ryver, for example, worked at the only wildlife refuge designated for the protection of Florida’s manatees: “The local economy was very based on manatee tourism.”

Ryver managed the commercial permits that allowed tour groups to operate, and assessed buildings, boardwalks, and other facilities to ensure they were safe for public use. The refuge was understaffed even before DOGE came along. “We were already drowning in work and deferred maintenance,” Ryver says.

Beyond the inevitable deterioration of government services, the firings have been terribly wasteful—a serious brain drain. “They lost all this money that they spent training us and recruiting,” Reynolds explains, and rehiring fired workers as contractors, which happens a fair bit, is generally more costly—and less stable. “I don’t feel secure,” Lucy told me. “I feel like any day they could pull my contract.”

“There can be people who, of course, get new jobs, and they can look fine from the outside, and they can feel better, but the nervous system is really changed,” says Rosalyn Beroza, a therapist who specializes in trauma. “It’s a state where none of the givens held, and you can draw a line between before and after—nothing feels the same afterwards. That’s what has happened to federal employees.”

Beroza, a DC local and daughter of a government scientist, has spent her entire life around civil servants. And so, in early 2025, she began assembling a network of therapists willing to offer free or low-cost therapy to departing federal workers. “The demand was huge,” she says. “I got so many people wanting help, and it was so sad.”

The mass firings were “essentially a natural disaster, because you lose everything. You lose finances, but you also lose your identity, your sense of purpose.”

Russell Vought, director of Trump’s Office of Management and Budget, had promised to put federal workers “in trauma” and the data suggest he succeeded: In the survey Lucy and her colleagues designed, 95 percent of the fired employees reported new mental health symptoms, including nervousness, insomnia, difficulty concentrating, and thoughts of self-harm. “If it weren’t for my family, if it weren’t for my friends, my community around me, I would not be here,” Lucy says.

When I reached out to Reynolds, the mental health stats were the first thing she wanted to talk about, but she wasn’t sure the public would care. “I’ve heard other people be like, ‘Oh, well people lose their jobs every day,’” she says. “It’s hard to explain. Like, this is not a normal job loss.”

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Beroza agrees. “It’s not an overreaction, because of the way that these firings took place,” she says. “It’s essentially a natural disaster, because you lose everything. You lose finances, but you also lose your identity, your sense of purpose, your sense of the future.”

If there were any guardrails, federal workers no longer trust them. “I expected some bad things to happen, but I thought that they would follow laws,” Reynolds recalls. If not, she figured Congress or the courts would step up. But Congress demurred and the courts were too little, too late.

Another survey, conducted last year by the Federal News Network, suggested that 95 percent of federal employees who stayed on have experienced increased anxiety and depression since Trump came back to office. More than four out of five considered quitting for mental health reasons.

In a recent analysis, the Government Accountability Office classified more than three quarters of last year’s federal departures as voluntary. But though opting into the deferred resignation program—Musk’s notorious “fork in the road”—was technically a choice, it wasn’t much of one. “Many people did that because they were told that their jobs were going to be eliminated, so how voluntary is that?” Loh, the economic analyst, asks.

I can relate. A few weeks after Trump returned to office, my government-supplied laptop wouldn’t let me log in. It turned out to be a technical issue, but for 30 minutes I thought I’d been fired. Colleagues had already been placed on administrative leave, articles and educational materials I’d worked on were scratched off federal websites, and I’d been all but prohibited from doing my job.

A third of the fired employees, including people with chronic diseases, said they had delayed medical care. “My life was in danger,” wrote one.

Once my first colleague was axed, I’d been jumpy at every email and increasingly nauseous every day I clocked in. When the password to my work computer was suddenly defective, I mostly felt relief. I put in my resignation a few days later. On paper, my departure was voluntary, though I wouldn’t have left if not for the hostility Musk, Trump, Vought, and the rest leveled at dedicated civil servants.

Like Lucy, despite countless applications, I spent more than six months unemployed, resorted to gig work to pay my bills, and (like one in four fired workers surveyed) began taking a psychiatric medication—in my case to deal with new heights of anxiety. It helped, but that period still haunts me.

Roughly 90 percent of the survey respondents reported that mental health symptoms triggered by their job losses were still affecting them a year later. Ryver recalls “some skill regression” as a result. “It erodes your cognitive abilities, your problem-solving abilities, to have to operate at such high levels of activation,” says Beroza, the trauma therapist.

Many fired federal workers say they wouldn’t go back to working for the government. Lucy, who did so out of necessity, can understand that. Her reinstatement process, too, was anxiety inducing. It lasted half a year, for most of which she couldn’t reach anyone in human resources and had nothing in writing—and no functional health insurance.

Which is why she had to find an obstetrician willing to see uninsured patients. During her first appointment, the doctor couldn’t detect a fetal heartbeat, and Lucy was told to schedule a followup. “Those were the longest two weeks of my life,” she remembers.

Her pregnancy, it turned out, wasn’t viable, which threatened to become a financial blow in addition to an emotional one. Lucy required a procedure the doctor’s office said would cost $5,000 out of pocket. She and her partner hit the phones and eventually learned she could get the same treatment at Planned Parenthood for $650—which still wasn’t easy. “That time would have been a lot less stressful if I had insurance,” she recalls.

In the workers’ survey, a third of the fired employees said they had delayed medical care. Those with chronic diseases reported worsening symptoms, one writing, “My life was in danger during that time.”

DOGE officially came to an end on July 4, according to the executive order that created it. The passing of this expiration date feels weirdly anticlimactic—perhaps because Musk and his underlings haven’t been active in the onslaught for some time now, or because some parts of the government are showing signs of returning to normalcy, at least on paper. Hard-hit agencies, including the IRS, are now hiring, sometimes at rates surpassing the earlier layoffs. Health and Human Services, where Lucy and Reynolds both worked, is looking to add 12,000 workers—20 percent more than it shed.

Agencies are recruiting former federal workers for many of the roles, but the vast majority of those workers are wary—if not shellshocked. When the Partnership for Public Service surveyed more than 11,000 remaining federal workers last fall, 58 percent said they were “less engaged” than a year earlier, and only 10 percent trusted the political leadership—which, as Reynolds points out, has “been upfront about not respecting us and not caring for our work.”

Reynolds doubts the damage this administration has wrought—on institutional knowledge and the trust and dedication of career employees—is reversible. “It gets beyond that personal feeling of hurt for being fired,” she says. Because even if federal agencies are repopulated, it’s hard to be confident they’ll adhere to the public-facing missions that once motivated Reynolds and other civil servants. “The long-term effects” of the layoffs, she says, “are definitely one of the more stressful things for me.”

Last summer, I noticed a shift: I was calmer and happier than I’d been in years.

This was puzzling, since my life didn’t look particularly calm. I was planning a solo cross-country move, and my days were full of bubble wrap and goodbye dinners and Craigslist alerts. But as I packed up boxes in Boston, and then adjusted to life in San Francisco, I marveled at the ­little changes. Feeling content, rather than lonely, on nights cooking a new recipe by myself. Pausing to chat with baristas instead of rushing to order a latte. I couldn’t remember crying out of happiness before, but there I was on a morning walk, eyes welling at the way the sun hit a cypress tree. Friends and family said I seemed lighter. As the summer progressed, I wrote journal entries like, “felt relaxed/happy a lot of the day for no particular reason” and “surprised by how ok I am.”

Since I was a teenager, I’ve grappled with a tangle of anxiety, depression, and insomnia: feeling a knot at the base of my ribs, weeping in the fetal position for no obvious reason, waking up in the middle of the night, simultaneously exhausted and wired. Over the years, I have, as therapists like to say, amassed the tools in my toolbox. I’ve spent countless hours with psychiatrists and therapists, gravitating toward cool grandma types, taking their advice to cultivate a mindfulness practice. I’ve talked to my actual grandma, a vivacious 102-year-old psychologist who has a way of asking pointed questions over ­breakfast. (On insomnia: “Does sex help?”) I’ve tried Prozac and Zoloft and Ambien. I run a few miles every day after work—the best mood booster I’ve found so far. I’ve even tried some of the more out-there stuff, like working with a coach to ask my stomach why it’s so tense.

But when the knot and the crying jags and the inexplicably wired nights persisted, I came to think of them as just how I was built. In the same way that I have dark hair and brown eyes, I thought, I was a person with a low hum of anxiety and bouts of depression.

So it was particularly noticeable when things shifted. It wasn’t that I suddenly transformed; rather, it felt like the temperature of the anxiety came down, and sadness became a feeling that passed rather than a state of being. My Oura ring told me that the quality of my sleep was “Fair” or “Good,” and not the dreaded “Pay attention.”

It took a couple of months for me to realize that these changes dovetailed with another event: the removal of my IUD.

Like many millennial women, I’ve been on hormonal contraceptives for most of my adult life. I got my first intrauterine ­device after graduating from college. I loved that I didn’t have to worry about getting pregnant or bother with taking a pill every day. I loved that, like many women with hormonal IUDs, I didn’t get my period. And I loved that, with the exception of when I had to replace it every so often, I didn’t think about having an IUD much at all for the next 14 years.

“I think this is a real thing. I don’t think it was just in your uterus or just in your head,” said Dr. Tamar Gur, adding: “Your experience, unfortunately, is very common.”

One morning last August, I decided to do some digging into whether my newfound equilibrium was related to going off birth control. I’d heard that the pill could cause mood changes for some users, but what I found shocked me: For years, research in well-respected scientific journals has found that people on hormonal contraceptives—especially those using non-oral contraceptives, like IUDs—are much more likely to experience depression, suicidality, anxiety, insomnia, and other psychological effects rarely discussed by the doctors who prescribe them. While the likelihood of ­severe mood changes from hormonal contraceptives is relatively low, even a small increase in risk can have profound consequences when a group of products is used by more than 300 million women worldwide.

“There are subsets of women who are ­exquisitely sensitive to hormonal shifts,” says Dr. Tamar Gur, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist who directs the women’s health research program at Ohio State University. “I think this is a real thing. I don’t think it was just in your uterus or just in your head,” she told me, adding: “Your experience, unfortunately, is very common.” Like many doctors I spoke with, Gur often paused midsentence to rephrase what she was saying. “I just want to be so careful with my words, because I don’t want someone out there who would benefit from hormonal contraception to feel scared of it or feel like they’re doomed to experience it.”

Indeed, some important caveats are in order. Again and again, scientists stressed to me that, while some women on ­hormonal contraceptives experience dramatic mood effects, the vast majority do not. Some, in fact, report feeling happier on contraceptives than off them. On top of that, the potential consequence of not using birth control—namely, unplanned pregnancy—can have immense psychological repercussions. And finally, the large studies are observational, meaning they show correlation, not causation. It’s challenging, for ethical reasons, to do randomized, controlled studies on the effects of birth control by placing some participants on placebos, and the science is complicated by the fact that there are hundreds of formulations of contraceptives and little funding to study drugs already on the market. Even my story isn’t exactly linear: My college years were by far my most depressed, and I wasn’t on contraceptives most of that time.

And yet it’s an undeniably jarring experience to realize, at 36, that I may be a significantly calmer and happier person than I thought I was. Did my IUD contribute to or prolong my depression and anxiety? And of the many mental health specialists I saw over the years, why didn’t anyone ask about my birth control?

I’ve been mulling this at a time when birth control is under attack. In October, the Department of Health and Human Services laid off the staff administering Title X, which provides contraceptives and other family planning services to millions of low-income Americans annually. The agency recently released guidance on ­family planning projects it expects to fund in the coming year—with the goal of reducing “overmedicalization” and promoting “natural family planning” approaches.

On social media, misinformation about contraceptives is rampant, with videos on TikTok—generating billions of views—leading some women to come off birth control in favor of “natural” alternatives. Turning Point USA podcaster Alex Clark has called hormonal birth control “poison.” Candace Owens calls it a “Machiavellian, evil design to keep you stupid.” Celebrities from Gwyneth Paltrow to Joe Rogan and Elon Musk have used their platforms to suggest birth control is dangerous.

At virtually every gathering where the subject came up, at least one woman—and often many—told stories of stopping or changing birth control because of the side effects.

At a time when abortion is unavailable to many and contraceptives could be next on the chopping block, it can feel like there are only two camps: those who champion birth control, warts and all, and those who criticize it with hopes of making it go away. But there is a quieter third camp: scientists, doctors, and public health researchers who are scrutinizing birth control not to get rid of it, but to make it better.

I hadn’t appreciated just how much support there was for this last group until I started telling women in my life that I was working on this story. Nervous that friends would think I’d gone off some sort of Goop–ey deep end, I came to dinner parties and book clubs prepared to rattle off study stats and assure them that real scientists said this was a thing. I needn’t have worried. At virtually every gathering where the subject came up, at least one woman—and often many—told stories of stopping or changing birth control because of the side effects. I learned of friends who went off hormonal contraceptives after thoughts of harming themselves, or having thoughts of harming others, or spiraling in anxiety. This shouldn’t have surprised me: Roughly a fifth of women stop using birth control or switch methods within the first year because of side effects, many of them mood-related.

While researchers know that some women will suffer from dramatic reactions, they’re still learning who and why. “We’re in the murky middle,” said psychology professor Adriene Beltz, who studies the cognitive effects of sex hormones at the University of Michigan.

Beltz was among the many experts I spoke with who worried, in this political climate, that their research would be weaponized. It can feel, she said, like “you’re either gaslighting the experiences of folks or you’re limiting folks’ options at a time when options are already limited.”

This isn’t altogether a new challenge. When Beltz started her research more than a decade ago, people would ask what she would do if she discovered something negative about contraceptives. Her response: “I would say, ‘Women deserve to know all possible risks and benefits.’”

Vanessa Saba

In June 2011, when I was 21, I showed up to my gynecologist’s office in Minneapolis to discuss contraception. My medical records note that I was leaning toward a Mirena IUD. “Had a tough year depression/anxiety-­wise and is concerned about mood effects with hormonal contraceptives,” the records say. Still, after a discussion about pros and cons, I elected to have it inserted that day.

I don’t doubt any of this, but I also have no recollection of this appointment. It was the summer after I graduated from college, and I’d talked to friends who had IUDs and liked them. My understanding of the devices was that they operated locally, without the far-reaching effects of oral contraceptives. At the time, Bayer, which makes the Mirena, explained on its website that the IUD “delivers small amounts of hormone directly to the uterus.”

The fact that the insertion of an effective, long-acting contraceptive was so unremarkable to me was, in its own way, extraordinary. For millennia, women in ­ancient societies had gone to extreme lengths to prevent pregnancy: inserting acacia gum or crocodile dung in Egypt, cervical sponges made of bamboo tissue paper in Japan, wads of wool in Greek and Islamic cultures. Starting in the 1900s, douches containing Lysol were marketed as “feminine hygiene” products to get around laws limiting the sale of contraceptives.

All of which made the first-ever birth control pill, which hit the market in the summer of 1960, such a game changer. Here was the “magic pill” that reproductive rights crusaders like Margaret Sanger had been dreaming of. Sex before—and after—marriage became less fraught. Women could study and pursue careers without fear of unplanned pregnancy. The pill suppressed ovulation by supplying a constant dose of synthetic estrogen and progesterone (called progestin)—the sexual hormones that rise and fall with each menstrual cycle. Within five years, it had become the most popular form of birth control in the country.

Plenty of women “were happy to have the choice, but they were unhappy that this great new thing came with so many downsides,” said historian Judith Houck, “and that they were told, ‘You should be happy.'”

But as its popularity soared, concerns among patients and doctors grew about troubling complications, from blood clots to strokes and depression. As it turns out, the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the pill had been based on a study of low-income women in Puerto Rico—17 percent of whom reported dizziness, nausea, vomiting, and headaches and three of whom died without further investigation. So strong were the side effects that Dr. Edris Rice-Wray, who oversaw the trial, concluded that while the pill protected against pregnancy, it “causes too many side reactions to be acceptable generally.” Her concerns were dismissed by the male heads of research.

When Congress held a series of hearings about the pill’s potential dangers in 1970, doctors testified about its extreme psychological effects on some of their patients, describing how these women became psychotic or suicidal. One doctor said he was fielding calls from husbands, saying, “Do something about my wife—my God, she’s just turned into a bitch.” No women were invited to speak about their personal experiences, prompting feminist protesters to persistently interrupt the proceedings, calling out questions like, “Why are 10 million women being used as guinea pigs?”

Plenty of women “were happy to have the choice, but they were unhappy that this great new thing came with so many downsides,” said Judith Houck, a historian of women’s health at the University of ­Wisconsin, Madison, “and that they were told, You should be happy.”

The hearings, together with feminist ­organizing, helped push the FDA to require drug manufacturers to include possible side effects in the pill’s packaging. In the following years, drugmakers introduced oral contraceptives with significantly lower doses of hormones and fewer risks. Meanwhile, nonhormonal IUDs, including copper versions, arrived in the ’60s and ’70s, but the disastrous Dalkon Shield—linked to infections, infertility, sepsis, and death—turned Americans away from them for years to come.

Starting in the 1900s, douches containing Lysol were marketed as “feminine hygiene” products to get around laws limiting the sale of contraceptives.

In many ways, that’s how things stayed for the next three decades in the United States. Research into new contraceptives stalled. Pharmaceutical executives concluded that the litigation risks were too high, the products too politically charged. They seemed to assume—correctly—that many women would simply put up with the side effects in exchange for reproductive autonomy. The number of American women on the pill steadily climbed; in 1987, 4 out of 5 women in their mid-30s had used oral contraceptives. By 1990, all but one of the large American pharmaceutical companies that had previously been doing research on new contraceptives had stopped.

“The outlook for new contraceptive development is bleak,” Dr. Luigi Mastroianni, a University of Pennsylvania professor of obstetrics and gynecology, said in 1990. While some Europeans could choose from a variety of implants, injectables, pills, IUDS, and sterilization techniques, “we in the United States make do with the same range of options available 30 years ago.”

That changed in 2000, when the nation’s first hormonal IUD hit the market. The Mirena was a small, T-shaped piece of plastic, inserted into the uterus in a quick outpatient procedure. Like the pill, it offered a steady dose of synthetic hormones—in this case, only progestin. But unlike the pill, patients didn’t have to think about it daily or refill prescriptions. That helped make it far more effective: The rate of unplanned pregnancy in the first year of typical use with a Mirena was 0.2 percent, compared with 9 percent for women on the pill.

Bayer sponsored promotional parties featuring a nurse practitioner passing around a Mirena—the nation’s first hormonal IUD—and a presentation by a fashion stylist.

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the field’s leading professional group that issues clinical guidance, soon embraced IUDs. In a 2005 bulletin, ACOG said they “should be considered for all women who seek a reliable, reversible contraceptive that is effective ­before coitus,” adding that side effects were “minimal.” This stamp of approval came despite the fact that the package insert noted that “5 percent or more” of users experienced abdominal pain, back pain, decreased libido, depression, nervousness, or a host of other side effects.

By 2011, ACOG’s guidance was even more effusive, saying that “almost all women are eligible for implants and IUDs.” The logic was simple: IUDs are exceedingly effective at preventing unplanned pregnancy. Doctors often ranked contraceptives in terms of efficacy, with IUDs and other long-acting methods in the top ­category. (ACOG later acknowledged that this approach failed to consider the broader needs and values of the patient, including concerns about side effects.)

After the Mirena, Bayer came out with IUDs with lower doses of progestin, each sounding like a sperm-slaying goddess of war: the Skyla in 2013, the Kyleena in 2016. The company marketed them as a convenient option for busy moms. Bayer sponsored promotional parties featuring a nurse practitioner passing around a Mirena and a presentation by a fashion stylist. “How would you categorize yourself?” the nurse practitioner was coached to ask attendees. “Hot and sexy with a lot of spontaneity or too tired with little time to be intimate?”

In some cases, doctors promoted IUDs with enthusiasm that bordered on overzealousness. In a 2017 study, public health researchers interviewed a dozen primary care providers at clinics in the Bronx. They found that when patients requested to have their IUDs taken out because of side effects, providers often pushed back.

“I never want to have anyone remove their IUD unless they want to have a planned pregnancy and they’re ready for it,” one physician told the researchers. “Every other case, I feel like they should keep it in if they can, obviously.”

Around 2013, epidemiologist Charlotte Wessel Skovlund heard from a friend who’d become depressed after having an IUD inserted. At the time, Skovlund was the data ­manager for Dr. Øjvind Lidegaard, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Copenhagen. For years, Lidegaard had been studying the effects of hormonal contraceptives on rates of heart attacks and stroke. Skovlund approached Lidegaard with a research question: Was it possible, she wondered, that her friend’s IUD and her depression were connected?

Lidegaard was intrigued. The existing research was inconclusive, but over the years, he’d had patients who would return weeks after he’d prescribed hormonal contraceptives, saying their moods had changed and they needed an alternative. “We have always known that some women feel that way,” he told me, “but we have generally considered it to be a little minority of women.”

Teens using progestin-only IUDs were three times more likely than non-users to be diagnosed with depression and to be prescribed antidepressants.

In Denmark, as in several other ­European countries, a national registry tracks residents’ anonymized medical histories, enabling large observational studies. Skovlund, Lidegaard, and a team of scientists decided to embark on a multiyear research project, examining the records of more than a million women between 1995 and 2013.

Their landmark study, published in JAMA Psychiatry in 2016, found that most common hormonal contraceptives were ­associated with higher rates of depression and antidepressant prescriptions—with particularly high rates among those using progestin-­only contraceptives, those who started as teenagers, and those using non-oral contraceptives, like IUDs. At gravest risk were teenagers using progestin-only IUDs like the Mirena, who were three times more likely than non-users to be ­diagnosed with depression and to be prescribed antidepressants.

After the study came out, Lidegaard received “not hundreds, but thousands of emails” from women around the world about their own experiences. One that stuck with him was from an 18-year-old American who had no history of ­mental health problems, but, two days after starting the pill, found herself on the Brooklyn Bridge, about to jump. She was dissuaded by an onlooker. Eventually, she stopped taking the pill at a family ­member’s suggestion and hadn’t experienced depression since. “It’s of course an extreme ­example,” Lidegaard said, “but it illustrates that the sensitivity to these things are so different. For some women, it can be an almost overnight change.”

Lidegaard is quick to note that depression rates among people using hormonal contraceptives, while elevated, are still quite low overall. The Mirena’s package insert today estimates that 6.4 percent of users experience depression as a side effect; similarly, Lidegaard said about 7 percent of women stop using hormonal contraceptives within the first few weeks because of psychological side effects.

On the flip side, contraceptives are used by so many people that a small increase in depression risk can have dramatic impacts. In Denmark, according to Lidegaard’s math, hormonal contraceptives are responsible for more than 1,200 episodes of depression among teenage girls each year.

More studies followed. In 2017, the ­Danish team found that women using hormonal contraceptives—or who even recently used them—were about twice as likely to attempt suicide compared with those who’d never used them. Studies using medical data banks from the United Kingdom found progestin IUDs to be associated with higher rates of anxiety and sleep problems compared with nonhormonal IUDs, and users of oral contraceptives to have higher rates of depression compared with those who’d never taken them.

Critics often note that observational studies should be taken with a grain of salt. It could be that there’s something about the lifestyle of contraceptive users that is ­causing them to be depressed—or to seek medical intervention for depression—rather than the birth control itself. (One scientist joked with Lidegaard that women on contraceptives were probably more depressed because they were more likely to be interacting with men.)

“What maybe the companies would like you to believe is: Oh, it’s just totally local. Nothing is getting out of that uterus,” said Dr. Andrew Novick. “In reality, there is systemic exposure.”

But a 2024 study led by Skovlund suggests that progestin has something to do with it. The researchers looked at the ­depression rates of hormonal IUD users only, separating participants into groups based on which IUDs they used. They found that depression rates were significantly higher among those using contraceptives with the largest dose of progestin. (This is echoed by the package inserts of Bayer’s three IUDs: As the hormonal doses go up—from Skyla to Kyleena to Mirena—so too do the reported depression rates.)

These findings fly in the face of a longtime selling point of IUDs: that they operate locally and therefore their effects should be more confined.

“What maybe the companies would like you to believe is: Oh, it’s just totally local. Nothing is getting out of that uterus,” said Dr. Andrew Novick, a psychiatrist at the University of Colorado Anschutz who studies the impact of reproductive hormones on the brain. “In reality, there is systemic exposure.” Women with non-oral birth control may be more susceptible to mood changes than those on the pill because of the differences in the way the hormones are processed—namely, the pill is filtered by the liver, whereas progestin in IUDs and other non-oral contraceptives makes its way directly into the bloodstream. From there, it binds with hormone receptors in cells across the body, including those in the brain. (A recent Bayer training guide instructs healthcare providers to tell patients that “only small amounts of hormone enter your blood,” though a Bayer spokesperson told Mother Jones that the company consistently has noted the systemic hormonal exposure in IUDs’ product information.)

What happens next is still murky, but some studies suggest that hormonal birth control changes the body’s stress response. Those on contraceptives have blunted cortisol responses to individual stressors, but higher cortisol levels overall—an effect similar to what’s seen in individuals under chronic stress, Novick said.

Additional studies have found that women with a history of depression are more likely to experience mood-related side effects. Also at higher risk are women who start contraceptives as teenagers. That’s notable, since nearly a fifth of American teenage girls use hormonal contraception—often for reasons other than pregnancy prevention, like treating acne or heavy periods.

“Children are not small adults,” said Gur, the Ohio State researcher. They have “wildly different central nervous systems, and so it’s not surprising to me, just as a scientist, that they might respond differently.”

Search “birth control” on TikTok, and you’ll see clip after clip of women bemoaning hormonal contraceptives and suggesting natural alternatives. In a video with 1.6 million likes, a “holistic nutritionist” who posts under the handle “beingwellis­hot,” and who, indeed, has perfect skin and doe eyes, suggests that eating papaya seeds can induce your period to avoid pregnancy. Some influencers promote the oil from neem plants as a natural contraceptive. (“Kills sperm in 30 seconds tops,” promises one.) Others suggest seeds from wild carrots: “You might have birth control growing in your backyard!”

Prominent conservatives, from the late Charlie Kirk to podcaster Alex Clark, have suggested that birth control causes fertility problems. “If you want women to be feminine again, and soft again, and beautiful,” Clark said last year in a conversation with anti-abortion internet personality Seth Gruber, “women need to be ovulating.”

The top 100 TikTok videos about reproductive health received nearly 5 billion views in a single month in 2023.

It’s no secret that what’s so pernicious about misinformation is that it’s often nestled among kernels of truth. The claims above lack evidence, but they’re alongside reels about well-documented birth control side effects: women in crop tops showing weight they’ve gained; teary women talking to the camera; women laid up with back pain.

Birth control TikTok is hugely influential; the top 100 videos about reproductive health received nearly 5 billion views in a single month in 2023, and only 10 percent of them came from medical professionals. A KFF survey the following year found that 1 in 7 women between 18 and 25 made a change to their birth control, or considered making a change, based on something they saw on social media.

In an ideal world, one could turn to medical professionals to separate the signal from the noise. And indeed, in 2024, ACOG unveiled a website aimed at combating misinformation about contraceptives. But rather than diving into the nuance, the organization took a different approach.

On the subject of weight gain, ACOG’s site said “there is no causal link” between birth control and weight gain, with the exception of hormonal injections. Claims about changes in mood or libido, meanwhile, were branded “myths” and “misinformation.”

This all struck me as odd, considering that pharmaceutical companies themselves list changes to mood, libido, and weight as possible side effects for many brands of birth control—disclosures feminists fought for back in the ’70s.

When I asked ACOG about the effects of contraceptives on mental health, I was connected with Dr. Rachel Jensen, a ­gynecologist and ACOG fellow focusing on complex family planning. On average, she said, birth control “has not been shown to cause significant mood changes.” If a patient reports a shift in demeanor after starting contraceptives, Jensen makes sure the cause isn’t something “more severe,” like anemia or thyroid disorders. “I’m all for discontinuing [birth control] or taking a break, but I can’t guarantee that that will fix whatever is going on, because the research that we have doesn’t tell us that birth control would necessarily be causing that,” she said.

On social media, influencers warn about the dangers of contraceptives and promote “natural” alternatives, from carrot seeds to papaya.

When I asked why the group lists mood changes from contraceptives as a “myth,” she acknowledged that some IUDs are known to be associated with depression. “I think our goal here is to talk about the aggregate,” she said. “Most people do not experience mood changes based on the studies that we have.”

A few days after our conversation, an ACOG spokesperson emailed to say that our interview had sparked an internal discussion; the group, she said, had decided to remove changes in mood and libido from the list of birth control myths. “As the statement is written, it does not feel patient-­centered or inclusive of experienced symptoms that may not be borne out in the data,” she wrote in mid-November.

The “relentlessly positive framing” of birth control by medical organizations can come off as “medical gaslighting,” says biological anthropologist Kathryn Clancy.

Two months later, the website was indeed updated—but not by much. According to the new language, it was no longer a myth that birth control leads to mood changes; rather, it was a myth that birth control “routinely” causes mood changes. These myths “frighten people away from well-studied, clinically proven, safe, and effective choices that can improve their health and their lives.”

The “relentlessly positive framing” of birth control by medical organizations may come from a desire to protect access to contraceptives, but this “toxic positivity” can come off “as medical gaslighting,” said Kathryn Clancy, a biological anthropologist at the University of Illinois who wrote ­Period: The Real Story of Menstruation. “What I don’t think sometimes these doctors realize is how it reads to a patient who has had a negative experience—which is a very large number of people who’ve been on hormonal contraception,” she told me. When they feel dismissed by mainstream medicine, she said, many flock to the internet for birth control advice. Charlatans on social media are “stepping into a place where there is medical mistrust,” she said, “and until we address those, there will always be people who take advantage and then come up with bananas things.”

So, how should doctors talk with patients? Dr. Aaron Lazorwitz, a gynecologist and pharmacogeneticist at Yale who studies how genetic differences shape patients’ responses to birth control, stresses the importance of transparency. “The biggest thing is being open and honest about what we know and what we don’t know,” he said. “‘Here are the potential side effects you could ­experience. I can’t tell you what you’re going to experience beforehand, unfortunately. We have to closely monitor how you do, and if it’s not going well, I need you to tell me.’ That’s the biggest thing.”

This sounds basic enough, but it’s not particularly common. One survey in 2021 and 2022 found that 83 percent of women said their provider never mentioned the possibility of psychological side effects during contraceptive counseling.

There are signs of change. Lazorwitz said he hears more mentions of mood and contraceptives on social media. Reporters are asking him about it. He likens the issue to pain during IUD insertion—a topic that was rarely discussed by doctors until a surge of complaints about it on social media and in news stories prompted ACOG to release new pain management guidelines last year. The groundswell “really forced providers who weren’t talking about it to start talking about it more,” Lazorwitz said. “I imagine that something like that may be coming up with mood symptoms and birth control as well.”

Vanessa Saba

When I spoke with Dr. Neill Epperson, chair of psychiatry at the University of Colorado Anschutz, I started with my own story. She laughed a knowing laugh.

“Yeah, the good old progesterone IUD,” she said. Then she told a story about a patient who was stable, got an IUD, and came back to her office with suicidal ideation. “And I said to her, ‘You need to take it out,’” Epperson recalled. “‘I know you just put it in, but you need to take it out.’ And within days, it was resolved.”

Some medical disciplines may downplay the mental health effects of contraceptives, but reproductive psychiatry, the emerging subspecialty that Epperson helped pioneer, is the exception. Reproductive psychiatrists focus on how the dramatic hormonal fluctuations across women’s lifespans can affect ­mental health—including mood changes from menstruation, pregnancy, the postpartum period, and menopause. (­Notably, women are about twice as likely to ­experience depression as men.)

Hormonal contraceptives are psychotropic medicines, Epperson said, because they affect your brain. Too often, doctors don’t treat them as such—and don’t even ask patients whether they’re on birth control when asking for lists of medications. “I think that’s wrong,” she said. “I think you’re really ­remiss in your evaluation of that patient.”

We don’t quite know how the menstrual cycle affects mood, a former senior NIH official said, let alone when you add contraceptives to the mix.

Epperson’s interest in the subject was sparked in the early 1990s, when she was one of the only female psychiatry residents in her program at Yale. She was referred a patient who, she was told, had postpartum depression—a condition that Epperson admits she “knew nothing about.” The symptoms didn’t fit Epperson’s limited understanding of the disorder; the patient was having intrusive thoughts of harming her kids and was so distressed that she was spending less time with them. Epperson started wondering whether hormones were having a more complicated impact on patients’ mental health than she’d learned in her training.

Epperson was stepping into a research void. Until the ’90s, reproductive-age women were mostly banned from clinical studies, and until 2016, female animals were routinely left out of preclinical studies—in part because scientists worried that hormonal fluctuations would complicate scientific findings. The result is that scientists know little about the impact of hormonal changes in women. Public funding structures have compounded the research gap. A recent National Academies report found that many women’s health conditions are not prioritized by any of the 27 branches of the National Institutes of Health—leading the authors to call for a new institute dedicated to women’s health.

The basics that remain unknown are myriad: We still don’t know what triggers a pregnant woman’s body to deliver a baby. We’re not entirely sure why hormonal IUDs work. (Bayer says it’s “most likely” by thickening cervical mucus, inhibiting sperm movement, and thinning the uterine lining, but “it is not known exactly how these actions work together to prevent pregnancy.”) When I asked a former senior NIH official about the safety of contraceptives, she told me to back up: We don’t quite know how the menstrual cycle affects mood, she said, let alone when you add contraceptives to the mix. This information gap has ramifications far beyond reproduction. A 2024 ­Nature study, for example, suggests that breast cancer treatment may be more effective during certain parts of the ­menstrual cycle.

Reproductive psychiatry is still a relatively young field, with fewer than 20 fellowship programs across the country. I didn’t know it existed until I started reporting this story, and I’ve since wondered if my life would have been different if I’d talked to someone like ­Epperson years ago. Was it possible that my mood improved because my IUD was removed?

“Yes,” she said. “That is quite, quite possible.”

I had my IUD taken out last summer on something of a lark, after learning from a friend that she uses Natural Cycles, the first app cleared by the FDA to be used as contraception. It works by tracking basal body temperature—in my case, using my Oura ring—to identify fertile periods.

This is, to be clear, far from a full-throated endorsement for using fertility awareness apps. They’re not as effective at preventing pregnancy as hormonal contraceptives—with failure rates between 2 and 23 percent—in part because they rely on the user consistently wearing a temperature-­tracking device, remembering to check their fertility status before sex, and using protection during potentially fertile periods, which happen to be when women’s sex drives are at their peak. They’re also pricey: I paid $499 for my Oura ring, in addition to annual fees for Oura and Natural Cycles.

When I signed up for 28, the Peter Thiel–backed fertility awareness app, it promised me fewer PMS symptoms and a “sexier body” in 90 days.

Despite all this, fertility awareness technology is booming. About 1 in 5 women ages 18 to 25 reported using menstrual tracking methods like Natural Cycles as contraception in 2024. The menstrual health app market, already worth $1.7 billion in 2024, is expected to triple by 2030. The apps appeal to a wide and eclectic range of users, from wellness influencers to MAHA supporters and women who are simply sick of the side effects of other contraceptives.

Chelsea Polis, a principal scientist at the reproductive think tank the Guttmacher Institute, said fertility awareness apps, while not as effective as other options, can be a tool to avoid pregnancy. The problem is, they’re supported by lots of people who want to get rid of the other tools, too, from hormonal contraceptives to abortion.

For some proponents—think free birthers, trad wives, and anti-vaxxers—womanhood means living as “naturally” as possible, rejecting not just hormonal contraceptives, but also other trappings of modern medicine. A period-tracking app backed by Peter Thiel, called 28, recommends cycle-­based health plans and sells an herbal supplement, Toxic Breakup, to help women discontinue hormonal ­contraceptives. The app features close-ups of dewy, bikini-­clad models meditating on the beach. (When I signed up, it promised me fewer PMS symptoms and a “sexier body” in 90 days.) Brittany Hugoboom, the ­conservative influencer who co-created 28, has said, “We wanted users to feel like a fertility goddess.”

Screenshots from 28, the Peter Thiel–backed fertility wellness app.

“There are so many other things that are being stripped away and constricting choice and wellbeing, and this is being thrust forward,” Polis said, “like, ‘Here’s your choice for contraception, this is what you should use.’”

But what she’s hoping for—innovation in contraceptives—is slow-moving at best.

The pharmaceutical industry continues to have little appetite for investing in new forms of birth control. Typically, pharmaceutical companies spend around 20 percent of their sales revenue on the research and development of new products, but for contraceptives, that figure is just 2 percent. There were only about 25 industry-funded clinical trials for new contraceptives between 2017 and 2020—in comparison, there were more than 60 clinical trials for hair thinning.

One big reason for the discrepancy: ­liability. Traditionally, pharmaceutical companies develop drugs to treat a medical condition. But contraceptives aren’t necessarily treating an illness—rather, they’re temporarily stopping the reproductive cycle. “What you’re doing with a contraceptive is suspending a function that is very important to people and trying to guarantee that you will give it back,” said Heather Vahdat, a public health researcher. “If your job is purely risk analysis, that’s crazy cakes.” There’s a pervasive sense, she said, that the products are good enough and women should quit their complaining: “That’s where the misogyny starts to eke in a little bit.”

As public funding has remained stagnant and private investment has fallen, philanthropy has filled the gap. The largest donations have come from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which made up an estimated 44 percent of all contraceptive research and development in 2022—far more than the NIH and three times more than industry. Last year, the foundation announced plans to spend $2.5 billion on women’s health by 2030. About a fifth of that will go toward research into new hormonal and nonhormonal contraceptives, though they’ve estimated that the latter is likely decades away.

And then there’s the Male Contraceptive Initiative, which, as the name suggests, supports innovation in birth control for men. The products furthest along in the clinical trial process include a hormonal gel that men rub on their shoulders and a polymer that is injected into the vas deferens, with an effect similar to a temporary vasectomy. (MCI funds the latter.) Vahdat, who directs the initiative, said the products could be on the market in about five years, though she’s hesitant to make any promises. “They’ve been saying male birth ­control is around the corner for like 50 years, so there’s a lot of exhaustion,” she said.

What if men across the globe took contraceptives that caused some of them to experience bleeding, pelvic pain, back pain, and headaches? And what if some small but meaningful fraction of those men experienced depression?

Research has found that there’s overwhelming interest across the globe in male contraceptives, not just from disgruntled women, but from men, too. Vahdat recalled men whom she’d talked to over the years: the husband in a Delhi slum who said he wished he could take a pill so his wife wouldn’t have to; the Bay Area high schooler who wished he could take something to protect himself from the ramifications of an unintended pregnancy; the man in the Frankfurt airport who, seeing Vahdat’s shirt reading “Male Birth Control Now,” came up and hugged her. 

It’s not a new thought experiment, but a telling one all the same, to imagine what might happen were the gender roles ­reversed. What if men across the globe took contraceptives that caused some of them to experience bleeding, pelvic pain, back pain, and headaches? And what if some small but meaningful fraction of those men experienced depression?

A version of this thought experiment played out in an actual experiment, between 2008 and 2012, during a male contraceptive clinical trial. More than 300 men across the world received hormonal injections every eight weeks. The injections were overwhelmingly effective at preventing pregnancy, and overall, men were satisfied with them—more than 4 out of 5 participants said they’d use the product if it were available. But the injections caused frequent side effects, like acne, muscle pain, increased libido, and emotional changes. Nearly 5 percent of the participants reported mood swings, and nearly 3 percent reported depression. One man attempted suicide. After that, the scientific review panel cut the study short, determining that the risks outweighed the benefits.

This concern over participant side effects draws a sharp contrast to the early birth control studies for women. “I think there’s a case to be made,” Vahdat said, “that I don’t know that female contraception would pass through today’s drug development.”

I’m still surprised by the lightness I’ve felt since my IUD was removed—still half-­convinced that this version of myself is a yearlong aberration rather than my baseline. My period has come back, and with it, PMS: when progesterone is peaking and, I’ve learned, I’m far more likely to feel down and anxious and to wake up wired in the small hours.

I mean this in a purely matter-of-fact way, not a woo-woo, Fertility Goddess–worshipping one: There’s something ­reassuring about getting my period. I like being able to anticipate and understand my moodiness, rather than constantly searching my psyche for an underlying cause. For now, this system works for me, but given the failure rate of fertility awareness tracking, I’m not sure if I’ll stick with it or ­eventually try something else.

Some of the experts I spoke with—women who’ve spent years studying the effects of contraceptives on the brain—were similarly lost when it came to their own birth control use. Without more clinical research to guide them on which contraceptive might suit them best, they had taken to testing the available options on themselves, like reluctant guinea pigs in their own tiny experiments. One postdoctoral research psychologist said she’s tried seven or eight different contraceptives to see how they would affect her. “Because I’m a ­researcher, I’m interested in trying out that kind of thing,” she said. “But, man. That’s a process to go through, right?”

A public health expert who recently switched to an IUD said she’s thrilled that she doesn’t have the bleeding that she had on other forms of contraception, but she’s been worried about her own mood. “The bar is so low,” she said, that she finds herself thinking, “Well, I’m not bleeding out my eyeballs, so this is a great method.”

One epidemiologist told me that she recently came off contraceptives and was shocked at how much better she felt. Now she doesn’t know what to do. She doesn’t want to get pregnant, but she also doesn’t want to feel depressed. “I feel so good,” she said, “and I’m terrified of screwing something up.”

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the July 8 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 thinks he has a new way to force Republicans to pass voter suppression legislation in time for the midterms. In a late-night tirade, Trump demanded that Republicans pass the so-called SAVE Act by attaching it to a must-pass defense spending bill. This comes as Republicans are getting more nervous about losing the Senate this fall, and some reportedly fear that Trump is setting them up. If they don’t pass the SAVE Act, they fear he’ll blame them for any midterm fiasco that takes place.

We think it’s premature to rule out the possibility of Republicans actually passing this thing. It’s a high-stakes moment that’s passing largely under the radar. So we’re talking to congressional scholar Norm Ornstein, one of our go-to people for decoding the congressional GOP. Norm, nice to see you.

Norm Ornstein: Good to see you too, Greg.

Sargent: So Donald Trump and MAGA are pressuring Republicans to pass the SAVE Act, which is this disgusting piece of voter suppression legislation. It can’t pass the Senate, so Trump is demanding that Republicans end the filibuster to pass it, which they don’t want to do or can’t do.

Meanwhile, House Speaker Mike Johnson is looking for a way to pass something that he can call the SAVE Act to placate all the hardliners allied with Trump. Norm, what exactly is Mike Johnson trying to pass, and what’s he trying to pull off here?

Ornstein: So first let me note, Greg, that John Thune has been as loyal a leader to a president, and certainly to Donald Trump, as anyone could have wished. And now he’s taking all of this abuse. But for Mike Johnson—many of his members, and they’re of course in very real danger of losing the House—they’re talking, and he’s talking to Trump, about using every voter suppression measure possible.

But they really, really, really want this SAVE Act, because so many of the districts that are vulnerable to them are in blue states. Red states are going to do a lot, including a lot that’s already in the SAVE Act. Florida’s talking about passing their own version, Texas and others.

But he needs something, and the SAVE Act includes a whole series of measures that would limit votes, suppress votes, make it difficult for people to vote at a time when Republicans are worried about a surge in voting—requiring that everybody provide proof of citizenship.

And even if you’re registered, you have to go back to the office to re-register with that proof of citizenship, which has to be either a passport or passport card or a birth certificate—but not just any birth certificate. It has to be one that’s embossed, not a copy. And of course, as we know, if you are a woman who got married and changed your name, you have to jump through additional hoops.

Sargent: The SAVE Act, as Trump wants it to pass, would include both the proof of citizenship requirement and also basically an end to mail voting, among a bunch of other stuff as well.

What Mike Johnson seems to be trying to do is put aside the piece that would end mail voting, because Republicans who aren’t crazy actually know that they need mail voting for themselves as well. So Mike Johnson wants to put that aside and pass the proof of citizenship piece, correct?

Ornstein: Exactly so, Greg. And let’s note here that Mike Johnson has a couple of reasons for wanting to do this. He is desperate to get something done. The fact is, many of his own members—and it’s particularly true of Mike Lee in the Senate and a couple of the others—are agitating publicly for this over and over again. There is a fear on the part of Johnson and other House Republicans that if they don’t pass something that has the name “the SAVE Act” attached to it, it will demoralize a portion of their base, who will say, you’re not doing what you need to do. That’s one reason.

The other, as we’ve discussed, is suppressing what they believe will be votes for Democrats. And the proof of citizenship, which is a poll tax, which ought to be unconstitutional and illegal, is the core part of it. But he wants to take out the mail-in voting, not just because it can hurt Republicans a lot—they use mail-in voting plenty—but also because he needs to get something through and then blame the Senate. Because frankly, if Mike Johnson had to choose one house to go over to the Democrats, he of course would rather have it be the Senate.

Sargent: Right. And so Mike Johnson thinks that he can essentially have slightly more of a chance of passing a SAVE Act that doesn’t have the mail voting piece. So in this context, at 12:58 a.m., Trump unleashes a tirade on Truth Social, calling our military “the strongest and the hottest in the world” and so forth—never mind the Iran fiasco, which is ongoing.

Then Trump says this: “When Congress returns, we must pass Reconciliation 3.0. The SAVE America Act, paired with the full funding of our great Department of War, can be passed very quickly, ensuring that the United States of America stays FREE for generations to come.”

Norm, let’s break this up into two pieces. What exactly does Trump want here? It seems that he wants Republicans to attach as much of the SAVE Act as they can to defense funding and pass the entire thing via reconciliation, which would then be able to pass the Senate on a simple majority due to that process, correct?

Ornstein: That’s exactly what he’s trying to do. And he wants to make the defense bill, which normally would be handled separately, as part of a separate appropriations along with a separate authorization, folded into a third reconciliation bill.

They’ve already done two. It’s unprecedented, or close to it, to have a third one. But it’s basically blowing up norms and rules to try and jam this through, even though the rules make it clear that it’s not allowable.

Sargent: Why can’t Republicans end the filibuster? Is it just that they don’t have enough Republican votes to do that?

Ornstein: Look, one part of it is a belief that if they do this first, then Democrats are going to take advantage of it if and when they end up with majorities in the House and Senate and a president, and they will dismantle everything that Republicans have done—not just during the Trump era, but going back to previous Republican presidents.

Sargent: Right. But Norm, if Republicans wanted to end the filibuster, could they do it?

Ornstein: They could with a majority. But there’s another deeper reason why some Republicans don’t want to do this. They know that there are lots of things that would be deadly for them and the country, devastating, that they don’t want to do—crazy radical stuff, stuff that moves us even more towards a police state, stuff that could blow up their own economies and their own workforces.

And they’re able to avoid doing that by saying, we would have voted for it, but we don’t have 60 votes. So the filibuster actually gives a number of them who are not the crazy radical rightists—there are few who are—even if they all vote the same way, who understand that the filibuster gives them protection.

Sargent: Norm, let me underscore that just so people really get it. Republicans know that if the filibuster were done away with, all of a sudden they’d be able to pass whatever Trump and MAGA want with a simple majority in the Senate. And they don’t want that state of affairs, because that would fuck the country and fuck the Republican Party in essence. So keeping the filibuster for them is kind of like a way to crazy-proof themselves against Trump and MAGA, more or less, right?

Ornstein: That’s exactly right.

Sargent: If Mike Johnson were to send some version of the SAVE Act over to the Senate, can they pass it with reconciliation, or would the Senate parliamentarian kick that out?

Ornstein: There is no doubt that every part of the SAVE Act is inadmissible under budget reconciliation rules in the Senate. They have something called the Byrd Rule, which is named for Robert Byrd when he was the Senate leader. And it is basically that the fundamentals of everything in the budget reconciliation bill have to be fiscal. It has to involve spending and/or taxes. And it has to not add to the deficit or debt after a 10-year period. But they’ve always relied on what the parliamentarians said.

However, the way they’ve relaxed their rules in the past is through this kind of maneuver. The parliamentarian rules that this is out of order. Somebody appeals the ruling of the chair. A simple majority can overrule the chair.

And so what would happen here is, the parliamentarian would say, no SAVE Act, no portion of the SAVE Act, not allowable under the rules. Somebody—Tom Cotton, Mike Lee, any of the others—would appeal the ruling of the chair. Fifty Republicans would vote to overrule the chair, and then it would pass.

It would be wrong. It would be illegal under the Senate rules. What would stop it from being signed by the president? Nothing. What would stop it in the courts? There’s no way the courts would intervene.

So they can do this through the back door. But they also know that doing it that way is going to open up the floodgates for all kinds of actions that they would not like. And if they do it this way, then every radical, crazy Freedom Caucus right-wing proposal under the sun, they’re going to jam into reconciliation and use this as a precedent.

Sargent: And then overrule the chair. Well, I just want to move on to another thing. NBC had this really striking report on what’s going on inside the Republican Senate caucus. The report says, “Some Republican strategists worry the party’s chances of holding the Senate are dwindling.”

And the report also suggests Republicans are shocked and baffled that Trump keeps prioritizing the SAVE Act over showing that the party cares about costs, which is voters’ top issue. Republicans think, in short, that this is screwing them—Trump is screwing them, essentially.

One GOP operative says, “Poll after poll shows affordability is the top issue, but his mind is elsewhere.” Norm, you’ve been around a long time. Have you ever seen a GOP Senate caucus quite this angry with a Republican president?

Ornstein: No, I have not seen a Republican caucus in the Senate this angry with one of their own presidents. But let’s also keep in mind, Greg, that that anger, which is expressed for almost all of them privately—occasional exceptions—Thom Tillis talks a good game, and then they vote for what he wants.

Now, they may not do it in this case, because it cuts too close to home. But two things are involved here. They’re pissed because he’s putting pressure on them to do something they don’t want to do, and it’s a distraction, and it undermines their standing at home, because some of their own base voters are going to say these guys are disloyal—because they’re cultist voters. At the same time, they’re right that what people care about is first and foremost their own lives and affordability.

And it’s not just, let me note, that Trump is just talking about the SAVE Act. Look at some of the things he’s said recently. “They make up this word ‘affordability,’ those Democrats. There’s no such thing”—which does not resonate with their own voters, with working-class voters. And he said, we’ve got a war to fight, we can’t fund Medicare or Medicaid or education or housing or any of these other things.

And when they were able to pass a bipartisan housing bill to deal with a key component of affordability, he said, I’m not going to sign it—after promising that he would. The bait and switch. So he’s undermining them at every front. But it’s still a cult, Greg, and we cannot rule out that when he pushes hard, they’ll go along, because they’re afraid.

Sargent: Well, there’s another striking thing in the NBC report. Republicans say they fear Trump is setting them up to take the blame for midterm losses. One GOP senator says Trump “will blame it on us and the fact that we didn’t pass the SAVE Act.”

The senator adds: “He likes to dominate people, and he’s a bully, and he’s fucked things up as fast as he can, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it.”

Norm, that’s amazing stuff. Republicans created this guy every step of the way. He’s fucked them in every which way. His unpopularity is the reason that they’re cratering potentially this fall. And now they’re saying—now all of a sudden they’re angry at him? What do you make of that?

Ornstein: I think there’s frustration. And part of the frustration is that they’ve come to realize that the rash acts that he’s taken—this insane war with Iran and the way it’s playing out, the tariffs in and out and up and down, the inability to deal with major problems facing the country. The fact that—because he’s not just blown up green energy, he’s paying billions of taxpayer money to stop wind projects that are almost completed.

And as a result, we’re likely to have more energy shortages and stoppages during the worst summer weather, that will hurt them as well. There is a growing awareness that this monster that they’ve created is creating problems for them and not just for others.

You know, at the same time, they are unwilling to push back on the horrible things that ICE and the Border Patrol are doing. And what they’re realizing in states, including like Texas, is that the Hispanic votes that went to Republicans in 2024 are leaving them in substantial numbers, because of the policies that Trump is pursuing and their unwillingness to try and put a brake on any of them.

Sargent: A hundred percent. Well, to wrap this up: we’ve got Donald Trump demanding that they pass the SAVE Act, Republicans fearing that his obsession with the SAVE Act and refusal to focus on costs and everything else are putting them at risk. What’s going to happen?

There are several stages here where this could kind of fall apart, on liberals really. Number one, they could just end the filibuster—Republicans could end the filibuster and pass the SAVE Act. Number two, they could try to pass it via reconciliation, and if the parliamentarian throws it out, they could take the steps you outlined to overrule the parliamentarian. So is one of those things going to happen? Are they going to pass the SAVE Act, Norm?

Ornstein: I think there is a 40 percent chance that they will. And the reason, in the end, is—well, two reasons. One is the relentless pressure from Trump and the fear that by failing to do so, their own voters will turn against them. The second is the fear that they could lose the Senate, and they’ll do anything, including long-shot stuff, to make it happen.

Now, there’s one caveat I would offer out there. The Constitution has banned poll taxes. This goes back to the Jim Crow era, where Southern segregationists blocked African American votes—blocked poor people’s votes—by putting a poll tax. You had to pay to vote. And the Constitution says you can’t do that in federal elections. Law says you can’t do it in state and local elections.

Requiring a passport or an embossed birth certificate is a poll tax. It costs $170 to get a passport if you don’t have one. And you have to provide proof of citizenship. Every state has some kind of a fee for an official birth certificate. Many of them are not available. So it’s at least possible that that part of the SAVE Act could be blocked in the courts as unconstitutional—although this Supreme Court, God knows what they would do.

Sargent: Right. And that’s critical, because it looks like the mail piece won’t pass—the banning of vote by mail won’t pass, because Republicans want to keep that. Just to really clarify this: you think there’s a 40 percent chance that Republicans either end the filibuster or overrule the parliamentarian to pass the SAVE Act?

Ornstein: Yeah. And I think it’s far more likely that they would do it by overruling the parliamentarian, so that they could then claim, we didn’t take away the filibuster.

Sargent: Well, if that happens, Norm, all bets are off—but I really just don’t know whether that actually helps them. It could potentially help Democrats more. Norm Ornstein, thanks so much for coming on. That was a really, really great roadmap for us. We really appreciate it.

Ornstein: Always happy to do it with you, Greg.

Last month, the Supreme Court issued a number of landmark opinions involving transgender rights, campaign finance, executive power, and immigration. Those decisions were issued in the traditional way many of us recognize: pages and pages of arguments and citations, with each justice on the record voting yea or nay. But over the last decade, the court—led by Chief Justice John Roberts—has increasingly relied on a fast-track way of making decisions that was once rarely used. It’s known as the shadow docket.

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Few reporters have done more to shine light on the shadow docket than New York Times investigative journalist Jodi Kantor. Along with her colleague Adam Liptak, Kantor recently published a number of previously undisclosed memos detailing the shadow docket’s unprecedented expansion under the Roberts court.

“So many major decisions about presidential power are being made on the shadow docket,” Kantor says. “And the question for the Supreme Court is why they’re doing business in this way and why in a lot of these decisions they are not writing opinions.”

On this week’s More To The Story, Kantor talks to host Al Letson about what’s driving the Roberts court to bypass the traditional ways of issuing decisions and how that’s affecting public trust in the court. Plus, Kantor looks back at her Pulitzer Prize–winning reporting on sexual abuse allegations against Harvey Weinstein that helped set off the #metoo movement and argues that obituaries for the movement almost 10 years later are dead wrong.

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

The most important part of any Supreme Court ruling today is the majority opinion, for that is what the law is. The second-most-important part is whatever Justice Clarence Thomas writes separately, for that is what the conservative legal movement would like the law to be.

Thomas has long carved out a reputation for frequent and idiosyncratic opinion writing. He pens more concurring and dissenting opinions than any of his colleagues on the high court. (Chief Justice John Roberts, by comparison, has not written separately in the last two terms.) This year alone, in a wide range of cases, Thomas sketched out a stunningly broad view of executive power—and, simultaneously, a sharply narrowed view of congressional power—that verges on the monarchical.

This can manifest in both historic cases and less closely watched ones. In Monsanto v. Durnell, for example, the court was asked to decide whether a federal law on insecticides could preempt state-level lawsuits against the makers of Roundup. The court’s answer was “yes,” with which Thomas agreed. But he then went further, in a concurring opinion, to “call attention to some of the underlying constitutional infirmities in the [Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide] Act.”

In his view, the law exceeded Congress’s powers under the commerce clause. “This power allows Congress to regulate ‘selling, buying, and bartering’ across state lines,” he wrote, quoting from a concurring opinion that he wrote in 1995. “It does not allow Congress to regulate ‘agriculture’ or ‘manufacturing,’ activities entirely ‘separate’ from ‘commerce.’”

Huh? It is somewhat absurd to treat “agriculture” or “manufacturing” as distinct from “commerce,” as if farmers grow crops and factories make goods for recreation instead of economic reasons. Thomas’s own phrasing of the commerce clause is much narrower than its actual text, which gives the legislature the power to regulate “commerce … among the several states.” Thomas’s interpretation, if adopted by the high court, would demolish most federal statutes that regulate the economy.

In Learning Resources v. Trump, the Supreme Court struck down the “Liberation Day” tariffs imposed by Trump last April. The court concluded that the Cold War–era law invoked by Trump did not allow him to impose tariffs via its permission to “regulate importations.” Some of the court’s conservative members disagreed with this interpretation, including Justices Samuel Alito and Brett Kavanaugh.

Thomas also disagreed with the majority’s holding but, as usual, opted to take it one step further. He argued that Congress could delegate, and had broadly delegated, its power to levy tariffs to the presidency. Thomas claimed that the nondelegation doctrine, which generally forbids one branch of government from ceding its power to another, did not apply here.

“Because the Constitution assigns Congress many powers that do not implicate the nondelegation doctrine, Congress may delegate the exercise of many powers to the President,” Thomas wrote. “Congress has done so repeatedly since the founding, with this Court’s blessing. The power to impose duties on imports can be delegated.”

This seemed to baffle some of Thomas’s usual allies, such as Justice Neil Gorsuch, who has frequently called for a stricter interpretation of the nondelegation doctrine. “It’s a sweeping theory,” he wrote, while disputing Thomas’s argument at length. “One that would require us to reimagine much of our case law addressing Article I’s Vesting Clause. And one that presents difficulties of its own.”

Thomas drew on medieval and early modern English sources to argue that the presidency could, in fact, wield broad powers like those of the British king. “In Great Britain, the King had no unilateral legislative power, but he had much unilateral power over foreign commerce,” the justice argued, quoting from the English jurist Lord Blackstone. “His power over foreign commerce included the power to ‘govern foreign trade,’ and to ‘prohibit any of his subjects from leaving the realm.’”

Gorsuch could barely hide his astonishment at this line of argument. He noted that, to the extent it was relevant, the arc of English history was one of Parliament wrestling away revenue raising from the Crown. More relevantly, he noted, the Boston Tea Party ran counter to Thomas’s thesis. “Are we really to believe that the patriots that night in Boston Harbor considered the whole of the tariff power some kingly prerogative?” Gorsuch asked.

Thomas’s view of executive power went even further in the court’s presidential-removal cases this term. In two separate cases, Trump v. Cook and Trump v. Slaughter, the justices weighed when and how the president could fire Senate-confirmed executive branch officials despite Congress’s protections for for-cause removal.

In Slaughter, the court’s conservative majority held that the president could fire commissioners on the Federal Trade Commission at will, overturning a nearly century-old precedent to the contrary. But in Cook, the court held that Trump could not remove a member of the Federal Reserve’s board of governors, even with a pretextual for-cause rationale. Thomas enthusiastically supported the former ruling but dissented at length from the latter.

“Today’s decision is an unprecedented incursion on the executive branch,” Thomas wrote. “Neither the parties nor the court can point to a single time in American history that this court has upheld an injunction against the president’s removal of an executive officer. In the 237-year history of our Constitution, this court has, by all accounts, never done so.”

Roberts, writing for the court in Cook, concluded that the Federal Reserve could maintain its independence because it fit within the historical tradition of the First and Second Banks of the United States, which operated at arms’ length from the federal government of that era. Thomas found the comparison to be ahistorical and argued for absolute presidential control over the nation’s central bank.

“Regardless of whether unaccountable executive officers like Cook would better govern the economy, the Framers rejected such a ‘promised land of technocratic governance,’” Thomas wrote. “They instead chose government by the people. As a court, our duty is not to second-guess that decision, but to uphold it.”

Thomas’s invocation of “the people” here is revealing. The executive and legislative branches are often described as the “elected branches,” in comparison to the life-tenured appointees to the federal bench. But only one of those two branches was elected from the start. The Framers always intended for Americans to choose their own representatives in the House, even if they circumscribed in practice who actually got to cast a vote.

The presidency, on the other hand, is not and has never been directly elected by the American people. The Framers inserted the Electoral College as a buffer between the popular will expressed by American voters and state legislatures and the nation’s executive power. While some states allowed voters to cast ballots for slates of presidential electors, this did not become the norm until after the founding generation had passed out of public life in the 1820s and 1830s.

Congress, on the other hand, was always meant to be the branch that channeled the popular will into law and policy. Part of that “government by the people” is Congress’s decision to create a central bank with a healthy degree of independence from the president’s day-to-day influence. If the American people wished to change course, they could elect representatives to Congress who would change it for them. They have not done so because, broadly speaking, it is good financial policy to not let the president personally set interest rates.

Thomas’s monarchical tendencies are strongest when it comes to immigration and foreign policy. Mullen v. Al Otro Lado involved a challenge by immigrants rights groups to a federal immigration policy that prevented asylum-seekers from applying for asylum at U.S. ports of entry by physically preventing them from stepping foot on U.S. soil. The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the policy, interpreting the statute’s defining of “arriv[ing] in the United States” to mean literally setting foot on U.S. soil.

Thomas joined the majority opinion but also wrote a concurring opinion where he went even further to criticize the lower court that had initially ruled in favor of the immigrants. “The relief that the district court provided may well have unconstitutionally infringed on the president’s inherent authority to exclude aliens from the country,” Thomas wrote.

Under the high court’s precedents, Congress and the executive branch have absolute discretion to determine which foreign nationals—whether they be immigrants, asylum-seekers, temporary visa holders, or whatnot—can or can’t enter the country. Thomas took this reasoning an additional step to argue that this power actually rests with the executive branch, not with Congress.

Thomas previously argued, in the Muslim travel-ban case during Trump’s first term, that the president “has inherent authority to exclude aliens from the country,” a remarkable theory given that Congress has the explicit Article 1 power to regulate immigration and naturalization. But Thomas disagreed with that approach on two levels.

First, he claimed, the president inherited such a power from the English monarchy. “For example, William Blackstone explained that the King could send alien friends ‘home whenever the king sees occasion,’” he wrote. “And, at the time of ratification, [the] Framers of the Constitution argued that the President would have the same power.”

Second, he argued that Congress’s power over immigration was much narrower than the legal consensus assumed over the past 150 years. “Congress, for its part, has no enumerated power to require the President to bring certain aliens into the country,” he wrote. “The Constitution grants Congress the power to ‘establish a uniform Rule of Naturalization.’ But, the class members in this case are not naturalized or even on the path to naturalization.”

To the extent that this is true, it is because the executive branch literally denied them the ability to request asylum at a U.S. port of entry. But to Thomas, this does not matter. “Any statute that forced the president to allow aliens to cross the border against his will would appear to exceed Congress’s enumerated powers, and a court could not enforce it against the President,” he claimed.

If the court were to adopt this position, it would gut much of federal immigration law. Holding a green card would be pointless if the president, on a whim, could deport you back to the country from which you originally came. Statutory protections for refugees, asylum-seekers, and temporary visa holders would be meaningless. A broad swath of people lawfully present in the United States would suddenly find themselves at the president’s personal mercy, even if Congress wished to protect them.

Thomas’s concurring and dissenting opinions, by nature, are not law. They can nevertheless prove to be highly influential in conservative legal circles. Lower court judges routinely cite them when challenging or disputing Supreme Court precedents. Some of those judges can be former Thomas clerks themselves: The Trump administration has drawn heavily from his acolytes to staff the federal bench. While Thomas’s opinions are rarely the law today, they can be a telling indicator of the world in which the conservative legal movement hopes to one day make us live.

You can sort of tell the White House’s Domestic Policy Council knew it had a dud when it released its condemnation of the National Museum of American History over a holiday weekend. “Saving America’s Story: How Ideological Capture at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History Erases Our Heritage” is a failure even when judged against the standards of the genre. It lacks the bitchy grandeur of a Joseph Epstein hit piece and the wacky verve of a Donald Wildmon sermon. More fundamentally, the report doesn’t have the goods. It’s the fruit of a “monthslong investigation,” according to the executive summary, but like much of President Donald Trump’s commemoration of the nation’s semiquincentennial—the blue sealant peeling from the $15 million renovation of the Reflecting Pool, that hunk of the Freedom 250 stage that fell and nearly killed rehearsing dancers on the National Mall—it’s a work of shoddy craftsmanship. 

Happily for the report’s authors, it was nearly impossible in the immediate aftermath of the report’s release to check its findings against the reality of the museum itself. It took me nearly an hour after I got off the subway on July 6 to get inside the building because Trump’s Great American State Fair, it turns out, runs through July 10. Not that many people were making their way into it, but the Mall itself was surrounded by fencing and Army trucks—this state fair looks more like an internment camp—and National Guard personnel patrolling the perimeter gave contradictory information about how to get around it. 

When finally I staggered into the National Museum of American History, I remembered my mixed feelings about the place. These objections have nothing to do with any evangelical leftism that the White House claims to have found there. Rather, I can’t square the museum’s mishmash of genuinely stirring artifacts (the Star-Spangled Banner, Abraham Lincoln’s stovepipe hat, the short-handled hoe that wrecked the backs of generations of California farmworkers until Cesar Chavez got it banned) with its pop-culture kitsch (Judy Garland’s ruby slippers, R2DT from Star Wars). The latter items really belong in the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles or the Paley Center for Media in New York (though let’s keep Dizzy Gillespie’s trumpet). Plus there’s all those terminally boring First Lady gowns. For as long as I can remember, NMAH has been over-anxiousness to please the masses. The masses are not pleased by lefty virtue-signaling, so you won’t find much there.

Reading the White House report, one realizes as early as Page 2 that the authors’ evidence-gathering will fall short. The sentence announcing this is: “One of the most significant findings in this report concerns what is missing.” No self-respecting polemicist ever begins this way; you save the null-set argument for last, after you’ve flattened your opposition with devastating particulars. In this philippic, though, “what’s missing” is the very first item listed under the heading, “Key Findings.”  You can practically hear Domestic Policy Council director Vince Haley—a former speechwriter to Newt Gingrich—shout from his rostrum, “I got nothing.”

What exactly “is missing” from the National Museum of American History? The Founding Fathers! The report explains:

[A] visitor to the Museum today will find no major exhibit dedicated to America’s Founding era, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, other Founding Fathers, the Continental Congress, the Pilgrims, the Puritans, or major moments of the American Revolution, such as Washington’s crossing of the Delaware.

I’m going to spend the rest of this essay demonstrating how very untrue that is. 

As we enter NMAH the very first thing to catch our eye is a monumental Horatio Greenough statue of a bare-chested and toga-clad George Washington. The work’s homoeroticism embarrassed many people at its unveiling at the U.S. Capitol in 1841 (Charles Bullfinch: “I fear this statue will only give the idea of entering or leaving a bath”), prompting its eventual removal to the Smithsonian. But Haley and his coauthors know that a bathhouse-dwelling George Washington can’t be blamed on today’s LGBTQ lobby, so they leave Greenough alone.  

Instead, the White House gripes about a “didactic” (i.e., a text panel accompanying an artwork; I thought Haley was being snide but that’s what museums actually call these) describing a frieze on Washington’s chair that shows Hercules battling a snake. This symbolizes, the didactic says, “the perceived courage of the American people.” If you can’t see what’s wrong with that phrasing, congratulate yourself for being sane. The offending word is “perceived.” Such distancing, the report complains, “refuses to affirm the exceptional courage of the American people.”

Are the American people courageous? Some are, certainly. But to me, the great revelation over the past 18 months has been discovering how many of our leaders are not.

When the first thing you see on entering the National Museum of American History is a gigantic half-naked George Washington, in what sense does that give short shrift to the Founders? Well, Haley might reply, a statue is not a “major exhibit.” So let’s step around our first president and enter “American Democracy: A Great Leap of Faith,” an exhibit on permanent display since 2017. “More than just waging a war of independence, American revolutionaries took a great leap of faith,” reads a wall text, “and established a new government based on the sovereignty of the people. It was truly a radical idea that entrusted the power of the nation not in a monarchy but in its citizens. Each generation since continues to question how to form ‘a more perfect union’ around this radical idea.”

Inside the exhibit, what I first notice is an original copy of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. Okay, Paine’s not the right’s favorite Founder (too left), but they like Thomas Jefferson, right? Here’s a handsome reproduction of Jefferson’s portable desk (the real one is on loan to the Smithsonian Castle, across the once-traversable National Mall), which (of course) Jefferson designed himself. Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence on that desk. And here’s a print of the Declaration of Independence made from a copper-plate facsimile commissioned in 1823 by John Quincy Adams, when he was secretary of state. And here’s the document box that George Washington used at the Constitutional Convention, which may be the single most exciting object in NMAH’s collection. Incidentally, I see here no didactics that tattle on Washington for being an enslaver (though probably there’s one someplace around here because—sorry Parson Weems—he was). What I see instead is the following, which I quote in its entirety:

“Father of His Country”

Admired in his time for courage, integrity, and leadership, George Washington became an icon after his death—a man to be emulated and venerated in monuments, celebrations, and epic stories, both real and myth. While Washington can seem a distant figure to 21st-century Americans, and modern scholarship focuses on the fallible man rather than the marble hero, his image is still used for inspiration, patriotism, and commercial gain. Now joined by modern heroic figures such as Martin Luther King Jr., George Washington continues to hold a place for many as a symbolic “father” of the country.

Note that we see here no hedging on Washington’s courage (unlike that of the American people, it’s indisputable). I’m not crazy about the word “icon” (more here), and I suppose Haley might work up a head of steam over putting the word father inside quotation marks, but that’s too weak a complaint even for the White House report. Another didactic similarly omits Washington’s slaveholding and says he “spent his life in service to the nation.” Not perceived service to the nation. Service to the nation.

Continental Congress? Check. Pilgrims? Check. Puritans? Check. Revolutionary War? Check. I didn’t see anything about Washington crossing the Delaware, but it’s possible I missed it (and anyway, who gives a shit; if you want to see the Emanuel Leutze painting visit the American wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art). 

I did glimpse the gunboat Philadelphia, “part of a small fleet that against all odds stalled a British invasion intent on ending the American Revolution,” per the didactic. “Today conservators are preserving this iconic vessel, stabilizing its timbers and iron fittings. And historians are making new discoveries about the people who built it and fought aboard it.” 

Hooray. Let’s hope White House budget chief Russell Vought doesn’t cut their funding.

For weeks, Donald Trump’s fury has been growing at Republicans for failing to pass voter suppression legislation, demanding that they end the filibuster to do so. In a late-night tirade, he urged them to attach the SAVE Act to a must-pass defense spending bill, a dramatic move that reveals his deep frustration with them. As everybody knows, Trump sees restricting voting as the only way to stave off a midterm calamity. Meanwhile, in a striking piece, NBC News reports that Trump’s angry pressure has left Senate Republicans at wit’s end. They privately fear Trump is laying the groundwork to pin a midterm fiasco on their failure to pass something. They also blame Trump for letting this obsession take his focus off costs. One GOP Senator even tells NBC: “He’s a bully, and he’s f------ things up as fast as he can.” We talked to congressional scholar Norm Ornstein. He walks us through the details of the GOP predicament, decodes the real reason Republicans aren’t nixing the filibuster, and explains why it’s premature to rule out passage of the SAVE Act, offering a road map to what’s next. Listen to this episode here.

I get a lot of things wrong—but never when I’m predicting that President Donald Trump will screw over his own party. “Trump prepares to squander his midterm war chest,” read the headline on a story of mine from February, when Democrats were freaking out over the $483 million he had amassed. My argument was simple: Trump would spend that money purifying his party of his critics and…

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A daily roundup of the best stories and cartoons by Daily Kos staff and contributors to keep you in the know. Trump’s pointless helipad is going to cost us a fortune Will the expensive vanity projects never end? ICE is now coming for US citizens over strongly worded emails And it could happen to you. Bernie Sanders sure knows how to pick ’em Graham Platner is…

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President Donald Trump has been known to hold onto a grudge, but his desire to take control of Greenland is eyebrow raising. On Tuesday, the president reignited his open desire to seize the semi-autonomous territory of Denmark. Greenland “should be controlled by the United States, not by Denmark,” Trump said to reporters while at the NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey.

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The Department of Homeland Security has purchased two privately-run detention facilities from the for-profit prison company CoreCivic, the company announced Monday, in a move that may serve to shield the facilities from state oversight.

DHS bought the two Southern California prisons, Otay Mesa Detention Center and California City Detention Center, for about $1.5 billion on Monday. But the facilities will still be operated by CoreCivic employees, meaning the company will still generate income, over and above the sale price, from both prisons. 

California law requires that privately held detention centers be subject to oversight by local and state authorities, as well as members of Congress. 

Now that DHS owns the buildings, finding out what’s going on inside of them is likely to become harder.

“It seems like a very clear attempt to evade oversight and accountability,” said Alexa Van Brunt, a civil rights attorney with the MacArthur Justice Center. “If they own the building, then there is a very good argument that a state law cannot trump federal ownership,” Van Brunt explained. That sets up a potential oversight battle between California’s state government and the Trump administration. 

DHS said as much. “ICE can not rely on local state and county partners for detention space in California,” where “politicians continue to push legislation to outlaw or make private prisons financially infeasible,” an agency spokesperson said in response to a request for comment. “Now, with federal ownership of these detention centers which are crucial to ICE’s detention network on the west coast ICE retains the detention capacity needed to arrest, detain, and remove illegal aliens,” the spokesperson concluded.

The purchase could also protect the detention centers from legal attacks. As Katya Schwenk of The Lever put it in March, when the plans were first reported, federal ownership may help ICE evade not only state monitoring but “some lawsuits tied to alleged abuse, including labor violations.” 

One such lawsuit concerns Otay Mesa: Owino v. CoreCivic, ongoing since 2017, is a massive class-action suit alleging forced labor practices there. It’s one of many attempts to curb or regulate ICE detention in California: just this week, the state sued to stop the construction of a new detention center outside the town of Gilroy. 

“California created oversight for private detention facilities because we have seen too many abuses, including deaths, behind closed doors,” said state Sen. María Elena Durazo, who co-sponsored legislation to strengthen state oversight. “It is shameful for any government agency to try to sidestep basic health and safety protections for people in its custody. If the federal government believes that purchasing these facilities allows it to avoid oversight, that is unacceptable.”

CoreCivic representative Ryan Gustin did not respond to questions about how federal ownership of the facilities might impact oversight. “Asset transactions of this nature are not uncommon for government,” Gustin said in a written statement. “We have previously completed facility sales to government partners, and operating government-owned facilities is a well-established model within our business.” 

Other firms are indeed exploring the model. George Zoley, CEO of GEO Group—the other major ICE detention contractor—said on an earnings call in May that “as some blue states are considering more active involvement in oversight of facilities, I think the logical solution to much of that is federal ownership,” as The Appeal’s Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg reported.

If the federal government owns the buildings, it will “provide stronger credibility in the courts,” Zoley added, such that “states can only have very limited involvement in those policies and programs.” 

ICE facilities across the country, both privately and publicly owned, have been slammed with lawsuits over detainee mistreatment, forced labor, health code violations, and deaths in custody. At least 21 people have died in ICE custody this year, according to data collected by lawyer and journalist Andrew Free, as the number of people detained by ICE skyrockets from around 45,000 last year to more than 63,000 as of this week. Denying state officials the right of inspection makes investigating those deaths—as UN human rights chief Volker Türk demanded this week—far harder. 

Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) conducted oversight visits at Otay Mesa when it still belonged to CoreCivic—and, like lawmakers in other states, was sometimes denied entry.

“Too many people who pose no threat to public safety and should not be in detention are nevertheless being held in unacceptable conditions with inadequate access to medical care, legal counsel, clean water, nutritious food, and other basic necessities,” Padilla said. “Whether these facilities are operated by a private contractor or owned by the federal government, my expectations remain the same.”

Setareh Ghandehari, of the advocacy group Detention Watch Network, described the purchase as one facet of ICE’s mass expansion of incarceration: converting warehouses into detention centers, buying existing jails, and contracting to build new ones, all of which will “intensify the already cruel and inhumane conditions in ICE detention and streamline the agency’s ability to target and dehumanize immigrant communities to achieve its stated goal of ‘Amazonification’ of mass detention and deportation,” Ghandehari said. 

“There still will be avenues for accountability,” Van Brunt, of MacArthur Justice, said. Even without the right of inspection, ICE-owned detention centers could be sued on constitutional grounds. But this purchase “does make it harder for people to get in those detention facilities at the state level and find out what’s actually going on,” Van Brunt continued. “It makes it much more of a black box, and it makes the people who are held there much more vulnerable to abuses and to poor conditions.”

Welcome to the latest installment in our informal series about how everyone hates acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, whom President Donald Trump has nominated to be his next head of the Department of Justice. From the posh folks at Washington’s Metropolitan Club trying to block him from joining their ranks to the 101 former federal and state judges filing a bar complaint against him…

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I always understood Graham Platner’s political appeal, but I wish more people would admit how much aesthetics played a role. The Maine Democrat’s press photo—his ruddy, sun-splashed face, tousled dirty-blonde hair, matching beard, and pecs bursting underneath a fitted black Henley—could easily be confused with the cover of a romance novel. But no, this youngish, handsome, salt-of-the-earth oysterman and military veteran was running for political office. What’s more, he said all the right things on the campaign trail. His unstudied, gravel-voiced speeches made him sound like the working-class champion the Democrats needed to unseat longtime Republican incumbent Susan Collins in their bid to take back the Senate. That Platner’s only obstacle to the Democratic nomination was the centrist 71-year-old governor, Janet Mills, made his appeal even stronger.

So I understood the hype, but I never thought he was a great candidate. The political class who backed him—overwhelmingly white, male progressives—should have been more discerning, especially as one scandal after another emerged. The fact that his sketchy past, like his troubling Reddit posts and Nazi tattoo and “unsettling” behavior toward women didn’t imperil his campaign until a woman came forward with rape allegations on Monday shows how toxic some reaches of the left can be, as willing as the right to dismiss misogyny and other disqualifying offenses when it’s politically inconvenient. In fact, Platner’s checkered history may have been part of his appeal, as some on the left romanticize the working class and think we should cling to an outdated masculine ideal to win them back.

For starters, Platner’s working-class bona fides were questionable. His grandfather was an architect, and his father was an attorney in Ellsworth, Maine. He attended private schools as a teenager. His father lent him $200,000 to buy his house, which he pays about $950 a month toward, and his mother owns a restaurant that buys his oysters. In an interview with NPR’s Leila Fadel, in June, Platner rebutted charges that he was “cosplaying” by effectively broadening his definition of working class. “If the bulk of the money that you get to live comes from wages, comes from working, and you are not just sitting on an immense amount of hoarded wealth, which generates income for you, then you work for a living,” he said.

While I’m sympathetic to that broader definition, the bulk of working-class folks who don’t have some amount of family privilege to fall back on might quibble with it. Much of Platner’s adolescence and early adulthood—being expelled from school, working odd jobs, eschewing college, serving in the Marines in Iraq before his mother helped get him into oyster farming—speaks to the kind of privilege someone with a solid middle-class upbringing knows they can rely on, not the kind of panicked effort to find solid ground I witnessed in my working-class upbringing in Arkansas.

Platner has attributed his alcohol abuse and other troubles in adulthood to PTSD related to his military deployments (he also served in Afghanistan with the National Guard). That is useful context for some of his problems but not all of them—and it’s certainly not cause enough for wholesale forgiveness. Yet, despite these setbacks, Platner continued to get extra chances to make it in society. It’s hard to imagine someone who grew up with less money and connections (or anyone but a white man, for that matter) bouncing back from his checkered history and lack of professional experience to run, not just for any political office, but for a U.S. Senate seat held by a five-term incumbent—and then somehow successfully convincing voters to back him in the primary over the sitting (woman) governor.

As a candidate seeking the je ne sais quoi of authenticity, Platner conveniently eschewed his family history and instead implored voters to consider his experiences as a working-class adult. But at the same time, we were asked to discount some of his other experiences and actions in adulthood. When it was revealed that he had a Totenkopf tattoo, he said he was drunk when he got it and didn’t know its history. I can maybe buy that. But are we also meant to believe that in the intervening 20 years he never learned—from, say, a World War II documentary, a book, or a friend—the truth about his tattoo? That is harder to believe.

When Platner’s questionable treatment of women first surfaced, he hardly needed to defend himself because other people were happy to do it for him. It wasn’t just that his fans dismissed these accusations, but that they had nothing but contempt for the people who did worry about them. In fact, when he clinched the Democratic nomination in the June 9 primary, his fans doubled down. Journalist Ken Klippenstein called it the end of “smoothgroin” politics, comparing certain politicians to real-life Ken dolls. “People are done with the clean-cut types who’ve harbored ambitions for political office since they were on high school student council and have lived every waking moment accordingly,” he wrote, and went on to describe politicians he thought fit that mold. “In the real world, it seems everyone and anyone can have dark present and past,” he wrote.

Matt Stoller, the anti-monopoly journalist, declared it the end of “Dem HR lady politics.” After some backlash, he tried to claim he was making the case against “authoritarian corporate officers.” But it was hard not to envision what he meant in his first post. You can make any case against corporations you want, but the fact is that in most workplaces sexual harassment claims are handled by HR offices—often populated by middle-class women, by the way—and to the extent they still exist, most of us encounter HR officers as the person who makes sure you get your vacation time and sign up for your health insurance and 401(k). Stoller wants us to believe that lurking behind HR is a corporate machine that protects itself from liability by being unfair to men. (The MeToo movement showed how wrong that is, because it took outrageously horrendous examples of sexual assault to bring down powerful men—and even then many of them got a second or even third chance.)

For some of Platner’s male supporters, or perhaps many of them, his violent edge was always part of his appeal. He seemed like he could punch someone, and people are angry and want a fighter. But that is not what it means to be working class—and working-class voters in Maine apparently sensed that Platner was a phony. While it’s still early in this midterm election year, with most voters still tuned out, a recent New York Times poll showed that Collins led him by 30 points among white men without college degrees. She’s a known quantity in the state with a lot of name recognition, and a newcomer like Platner had some campaign work to do. But most of his support was coming from those with bachelor’s degrees, 66 percent of whom backed him over Collins.

That may seem surprising given how Platner portrayed himself on the campaign trail. But it’s less surprising when you consider that his loudest supporters online were that same demographic. They, at least, were fooled: To lefty college graduates who pay close attention to politics, no matter the month or year, Platner did indeed appear authentically middle-class—or at least close enough not to question it, given that he adopted all of the progressive positions that this online cohort supports. Perhaps Platner’s press photo was modeled on a romance novel after all, because these people swooned over him.

As Platner appears poised to drop out of the race, many progressives are pushing for the Maine Democratic Party to tap Troy Jackson, a former president of the state senate, to take on Collins. It’s easy to see why. He’s a staunch union supporter with a history of fighting for strong labor protections, but he’s also a middle-aged white guy with working-class bona fides: He’s a fifth-generation logger. Let’s hope he’s been a better man than Platner has been.

During his 2015 State of the Union address, then-President Barack Obama announced what he promised would be an ambitious public health project. “Tonight, I’m launching a new Precision Medicine Initiative to bring us closer to curing diseases like cancer and diabetes, and to give all of us access to the personalized information we need to keep ourselves and our families healthier,” Obama said with confidence. “We can do this.” He was met with applause. 

That announcement introduced the National Institutes of Health’s “All of US” initiative, designed to organize and provide to researchers the health data of up to a million Americans who opted in to donate their blood, general electronic health records, and more. People’s names are replaced with a code before researchers access their data, and NIH asserts that only a few people have access to the list of codes that correspond with names. As of late June, data from nearly 750,000 participants is available to researchers who are studying such diseases like Alzheimer’s disease and diabetes, as well as overall health patterns like sleep.

Since then, proponents of the program have highlighted how it has addressed urgent issues. A 2022 study from the University of California, Irvine, study that used the NIH data, for instance, was the first to find that Latino immigrants have higher rates of liver cancer than Latino people who were born in the United States. In a 2024 speech, the head of the All of US initiative said that 87 percent of its participants belong to “underrepresented groups in biomedical research,” such as Latino and Black people.

“Palantir is not a company that is pro–public interest or welfare, or public health.”

What many participants may not know is that the defense technology and data giant Palantir, which has deep links to both the intelligence community and the Trump administration, is one of the firms involved with the project—the same Palantir that the Trump administration has tapped to gather information for ICE and which already worked extensively with the Department of Defense.

Palantir’s involvement with All of US is a matter of public record; it has been announced in press releases. However, experts I spoke with about the firm’s connection to the massive federal health data project have raised ethical concerns about what it means for a company involved in Trump’s deportation machine—a choice that has reportedly troubled even some of Palantir’s own employees—to manage such sensitive information. 

Palantir’s involvement with All of Us was announced in 2023, through its role in the Center for Linkage and Acquisition of Data, which is now hosted at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The company was brought in by an NIH awardee, the University of Colorado Anschutz, a major medical research center. An NIH press release from October 2023 announcing the center boasted that the sub-awardees were “comprised of leading academic, data, security, and software organizations.”

“That it was approved during the Biden administration only underscores how much unfortunate buy-in the tech industry has across both Democrats and Republicans,” said Anita Chan, chair of Indiana University Bloomington’s department of information and library science and author of a 2025 book that looks at the use and misuse of data.

“Palantir’s CLAD role is limited and non-research: no participant interaction, no study administration, no scientific analysis,” an NIH spokesperson said in response to a request for comment, adding that “data aren’t owned by Palantir or available for independent use, and can’t move into external corporate databases,” and that Palantir “doesn’t control the data, use it independently, or decide how it’s shared or analyzed.

“To be clear, there’s no partnership with Palantir,” the spokesperson said, emphasizing that the firm was a subcontractor.

A University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill spokesperson noted in response to a separate request for comment that “Protecting privacy is a top priority for the university while using technology in research,” and that “Every action on the data is captured in tamper-proof audit logs, and because the data stays inside this controlled environment, it cannot be copied out, sold, or used for any purpose” not approved by the research project.

Palantir’s involvement in the sphere of personal health data is fairly expansive. In 2020, near the end of the first Trump administration, NIH awarded Palantir a contract to work with data related to Covid, a database that has also been used for Long Covid research. Palantir also has a contract worth the equivalent of hundreds of millions of dollars with the UK’s National Health Service to create a health data platform.

“[It] is concerning to have one company that has such a large role in [handling] so many different kinds of data,” Center for Genetics and Society executive director Katie Hasson told me. “I don’t think people hoping to benefit public health by sharing their genetic data were really thinking that that’s the kind of company that would be handling their information.”

Kenny Morris, of the American Friends Service Committee, which is running a campaign to encourage divestment from Palantir, said he was concerned that the company was “involved in health data at all,” citing its relationships with the Israeli military, which has used Palantir technology in Gaza, the US military, which has employed it in attacks on Iran, and the Department of Homeland Security, which relies on Palantir’s “ImmigrationOS” and other software to help carry out the dictates of Palantir stockholder and White House deputy Stephen Miller.

A still from a March 2026 protest in New York City against Palantir. Camara Porter/AdMedia/Zuma

A Palantir spokesperson said that the firm was “not in the business” of storing, collecting, mining, or selling data: “We don’t ‘use’ data from customers for other efforts,” the spokesperson said. “In all cases, our customers control and retain their own data. We are simply the software that helps them make sense of it. And in all deployments of our software, we strictly uphold our enduring commitment to protecting privacy and civil liberties.”

All of Us has been able to attract a diverse set of participants through the outreach of community engagement partners, including the Asian Health Initiative, the National Alliance for Hispanic Health, and the American Association on Health and Disability. (The University of California, San Francisco’s hospital system reached out to me in 2024 to ask if I wanted to participate Palantir’s potential involvement wasn’t mentioned.)

“I don’t know if all of the hospitals or institutions that have been involved in recruiting people into the study at various times would necessarily even know” about Palantir’s involvement, Hasson said.

There are many questions about how visible Palantir’s involvement is, including if any hospitals disclose it to patients and if researchers are acutely aware of Palantir’s involvement, despite the public press releases. Sample consent forms for patients on NIH’s website do not mention Palantir.

“Palantir is not a company that is pro–public interest or welfare, or public health, or sort of traditional obligations of democratic institutions and states,” Chan said. “Its vision of civic accountability is non-existent.”  

Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general and a Republican nominee for Senate, is under fire once again after a video surfaced online that purportedly showed on vacation in London around the Fourth of July holiday. The video, obtained by The Daily Mail, appears to show Paxton sightseeing in London alongside a woman reported to be Tracy Duhon, a Christian influencer who has been romantically…

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A cartoon by Mike Luckovich. Related | Trump fails miserably to throw America a birthday party…

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A content creator who runs a satirical cat account trolling Vice President JD Vance on Instagram is suing after being banned from one of his events by the Secret Service.

Amanda McGonigle, who has nearly two million followers for her massive “CatsOnACouch” Instagram account, was stopped in line at a Maine event for the vice president in May.

“They got me. So, while I was in line to go into the event, Secret Service … came up to me and said, ‘Hey Amanda, you can’t come in.’ And I was basically like ‘but I have my registration,’ and they were like ‘well since it’s a private event , you can’t come in,’” McGonigle said on her Instagram account back in May. “I was like … ‘You realize that’s silly, right? I’m a cat account.’”

While she was waiting in line, McGonigle was also told by the Secret Service, “We know where you stand.” She insists that the event was advertised as public.

“Either it was a public event as advertised and I was denied entry because I think JD Vance is a sentient jar of mayonnaise, or it was a private event and taxpayer dollars were being used to fund JD Vance’s little ‘safe space,’” McGonigle said again after the event. “Either way, it’s giving lawsuit vibes.”

McGonigle is suing the U.S. Secret Service and the Executive Office of the President for infringement on her constitutional rights.

“The First Amendment protects every person’s right to express their opinions and political views, free from fear of government retaliation or retribution,” ACLU of Maine attorney Anahita Sotoohi said in a statement. “Ms. McGonigle uses her platform to criticize and satirize elected officials, using humor to garner support for causes important to her and inform her followers about political developments. The freedom to mock has been a central tenet of American political discourse since the founding. The First Amendment cannot be revoked just because one of the country’s most powerful people can’t take a joke.”

McGonigle created the account in 2024 in the wake of Vance’s comment deriding “childless cat ladies.” It exists with the aim to “have more followers than JD Vance by the time he leaves office and to troll him mercilessly every single day,” according to McGonigle.

The White House has yet to comment on McGonigle, although they seem to very aware of—and bothered by—her account’s existence.

Senator Mitch McConnell’s medical condition remains unknown, and his office won’t address questions about the former Senate majority leader being “brain dead.”

HuffPost’s Jennifer Bendery reached out to McConnell’s staff Tuesday about the speculation. A day earlier, far-right influencer Laura Loomer and independent journalist Desirée Townsend, who first flagged the EMS call to McConnell’s home that revealed he was unconscious, declared that the Kentucky senator is “officially brain dead.” Bendery said the senator’s staff did not confirm or deny the report, instead directing her to a week-old statement that doesn’t clarify McConnell’s condition.

“Senator McConnell appreciates the outpouring of support he’s receiving while he continues his recovery in the hospital,” a spokesperson told Bendery. “The Senator continues to improve, and is working closely with his staff on Kentucky and Senate matters while the Senate is out of session.”

Earlier in the day Tuesday, several Republicans publicly insisted that McConnell was still alive and that they had just spoken to him. CNN commentator Scott Jennings said, “He’s still recovering in the hospital. We talked for just shy of 20 minutes … about IRAN, UKRAINE, the unfolding situation in MAINE, my visit to the [Teddy Roosevelt] Presidential Library, and even a little bit of Senate history.”

Senator Scott Barrasso and Senate Majority Leader John Thune also said they had spoken to McConnell about Senate business. However, other Republicans, such as Senator Mike Lee, said they still don’t know what’s going on with McConnell.

“Many of us aren’t speaking about Mitch McConnell’s condition because we know nothing about his condition,” Lee said on X.

Trump’s MAGA base has demanded proof that McConnell is still alive, and his office’s response Tuesday will only fuel their conspiracy theories. There’s speculation over whether Republicans are trying to avoid a quick special election, as is required under Kentucky law, that could open the door for Representative Thomas Massie, a Trump critic, to run for the seat. For now, McConnell remains in the hospital without any explanation.

Even Graham Platner’s volunteers are reportedly closing the chapter on the politically troubled Maine Democratic Senate candidate.

A damning new rape allegation emerged against Platner Monday evening, marring the Maine oyster farmer’s candidacy and prompting a slew of progressive lawmakers to revoke their endorsements of the firebrand.

It was, apparently, the final straw for Platner’s team, who had largely stayed by his side through previous controversies, including the uproar over his Nazi-themed chest tattoo, prior accusations related to Platner’s heavy drinking, revelations about his extramarital sexting, and allegations from his former romantic partners about his violent propensities.

Within hours of the Politico report, some 1,400 volunteers on Platner’s statewide organizing Discord server had called for him to withdraw from the race, reported Drop Site News Tuesday, noting that the cohort included door knockers, canvassers, digital organizers, and tablers.

“I don’t necessarily want Graham to win. I want our political ideas to win. He is not coming back from this and we should find someone to carry on the ideals now,” Dante Cusolito, a volunteer and recent college graduate, told Drop Site. “People can be flawed and become better, but hanging your movement on the coattails of somebody credibly accused of sexual assault is the exact thing we are trying to be better than.”

Instead, local political organizers are turning to former State Senator Troy Jackson, a Bernie Sanders–backed logger from northern Maine, as Platner’s possible replacement.

A spokeswoman for Jackson, Christine Kirby, told Drop Site that their campaign had been flooded with calls, texts, and emails encouraging Jackson’s candidacy since the rape allegations emerged.

“He is clearly the strongest option to replace Graham Platner and take on Susan Collins in the general election,” Kirby told Drop Site. “This movement is greater than any one person, it’s about a coalition of Maine people fighting for a future that doesn’t have to belong only to the wealthy and powerful. And Troy is up for the fight.”

Jackson, who served as president of the Maine Senate from 2018 to 2024, came in third place in the Maine Democratic gubernatorial primary last month. By Tuesday, he had already repositioned himself, filing exploratory committee paperwork with the Federal Election Commission for a potential Senate run.

But he’s not the only Mainer trying to throw his hat in the ring to supplant Platner. Bangor-born David Costello, who lost the state primary race to Platner last month, wrote on X that he’s “back in” to replace Collins if Platner formally withdraws.

Nirav Shah, a visiting professor at Colby College who similarly failed to gain ground in Maine’s gubernatorial primary, also released a statement indicating his interest in the Senate race.

The writing is on the wall for Graham Platner, who after being credibly accused of rape by a former girlfriend and multiple other red flags is now facing calls to drop out of the Maine Senate race by Democrats on all sides of the ideological spectrum. Platner has yet to announce whether he’ll drop out, but it is clearly untenable for him to continue as national Democrats are pulling the plug…

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