Political News

Is President Donald Trump a sports jinx or just a corrupt fool?

Trump is once again an international laughingstock after the U.S. Men’s National Team crashed out of the World Cup despite the president’s meddling.

Trump had urged FIFA president Gianni Infantino over the weekend to overturn a red card that would’ve kept the U.S. team’s top scorer from playing against Belgium Monday night. For the first time in half a century, FIFA overturned the decision, but even that couldn’t save the U.S. Men’s Soccer team from being handily defeated 4-1. (And the player in question, Folarin Balogun, didn’t even score America’s lone goal of the night.)

“Overturn this,” the Belgian Red Devils, Belgium’s national team, wrote in a post on X after the game.

As if losing wasn’t humiliating enough, a handful of players on the Belgian team were spotted doing Trump’s iconic dance to celebrate one of their goals.

Belgium’s team celebrated their victory over the US by mocking Trump’s signature double jerk off dance move. pic.twitter.com/emvy5tK6Xr

— Anonymous (@YourAnonCentral) July 7, 2026

Online, people speculated that Trump might even be a sports curse.

Last month, Trump made an appearance at Madison Square Garden for the NBA Finals. The president was loudly booed, fell asleep—and the Knicks broke their winning steak.

In 2025, Trump attended the Super Bowl, fled the stadium during a very political halftime performance by Kendrick Lamar, and backed the Kansas City Chiefs—who lost. Trump skipped this year’s Super Bowl after being warned that he’d be drowned in a sea of 69,000 boos, and the New England Patriots, his friend Robert Kraft’s team, still lost.

Trump also attended the 2025 Ryder Cup, where team Europe beat the United States.

Were you hoping that the surprise helicopter landing pad being built on White House grounds could be even more corrupt and stupid? You’re in luck! The Washington Post is reporting that the White House is speeding up the construction of the helipad, a thing we only learned was being built less than a week ago, because that’s how things go these days. The accelerated timeline means this…

Source

MAGA world is not satisfied with the excuses from Senator Mitch McConnell’s office over his sudden disappearance, and are now demanding proof that the former Senate majority leader is still alive.

McConnell was admitted to the hospital last month, sparking grave concerns about the Kentucky Republican’s health. The worries were only stoked by vague and repetitive statements from McConnell’s aides that failed to elaborate on the senator’s condition or why he was receiving care.

But rumors about McConnell’s health spiked late Monday, when far-right influencer Laura Loomer claimed on X that an unnamed “high level source close to the White House” told her that “Mitch McConnell is officially brain dead.” In a separate post, Loomer elaborated that “McConnell is in organ failure,” and that the White House had been told “McConnell isn’t ever coming back.”

Shortly afterward, the reporter that first broke the story about McConnell’s cardiac arrest—Desirée Townsend—said that her sources had shared the same information.

By Tuesday morning, a slew of MAGA-aligned figures were demanding answers from McConnell’s office.

“McConnell’s staff should produce proof of the senator’s condition one way or another right now,” posted Matthew Boyle, the Washington bureau chief for the far-right commentary website Breitbart.

MAGA influencer Catturd posed the obvious question to his 4 million followers on X: “It’s really easy for Mitch McConnell’s team to prove he’s still alive and well. Just do a video from the hospital. Why won’t they do it?”

Steve Bannon has also speculated about McConnell’s condition, promoting claims online that the senator’s office is trying to “avoid triggering a special election that could allow Thomas Massie to run as an independent.”

The 84-year-old Republican has represented Kentucky in the U.S. Senate since 1985. He also served as the majority leader of the upper chamber from 2015 to 2021.

These are supposed to be McConnell’s final months in office—he is currently set to retire in January, at the end of his seventh term.

But his determination to remain in play on Capitol Hill has also forced him into the limelight due to several critical health scares since 2023. In March of that year, McConnell fell at a dinner event at Washington’s Waldorf Astoria hotel, fracturing his rib and suffering a concussion in the process. He fell again that July. He also froze mid-sentence twice that year, dissociating for 20 to 30 seconds each time, sparking concerns that the aging lawmaker had suffered a stroke.

In December 2024, McConnell fell for a third time in a public setting, and again in October 2025 while on his way to vote in the Capitol. He has since been transported via wheelchair by his aides as a health precaution.

In February, McConnell’s staffers shared that the lawmaker had spent roughly eight days in the hospital for “flu-like symptoms.”

The university has been fighting attempts at union organizing for years. Now it’s seeking help from an employer-friendly labor board. By Mark Kreidler for Capital & Main When a faculty group at the University of Southern California voted overwhelmingly to unionize in June, the university cloaked its decision to appeal the result of the election in the most gentle language imaginable…

Source

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

Source

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Donald Trump has blamed everything—from “national security” issues, the deaths of birds and whales, and cancer—in his decades-long campaign against windfarms. But as the Trump administration continues to undermine the industry, what worries workers most are their jobs.

Since taking office for a second term, Trump has issued an executive order aiming to halt all wind-energy leases and permits, attempted to issue stop-work orders on wind projects under construction, and paid more than $2.6 billion in settlements to buy out wind energy leases. And hundreds of workers have been affected.

Thomas Kilday, a furnace electrician with IBEW local 99 in Providence, Rhode Island, was in the midst of a four-week shift onboard a vessel off the Atlantic coast working on the Revolution Wind Project in August last year when the Trump administration issued a stop-work order on the project.

“No one really knew what was going on. We didn’t know what it meant for us. We just knew that everything was up in the air,” said Kilday. “You plan your whole life around being gone for 28 days, and to come out here and have it thrown up in the air, worrying what does this mean for me, for my pay for the next four weeks, what’s going to happen? There’s a lot of uncertainty.”

Construction on the project is done on shifts of 28 days on and 28 days off, with workers residing on a vessel on the ocean and taking helicopters to work on the turbines.

“What the Trump administration is doing is just throwing money away for the sake of their ideology.”

A federal court granted an injunction to block the stop-work order in September last year. In December, the Trump administration issued another 90-day stop-work order, citing national security, before a second judge issued an injunction in January.

When the second stop-work order was issued, Kilday was celebrating Christmas with his family and preparing for another four-week shift. “That was really difficult,” he said. “I just spent a bunch of money on Christmas gifts for my family, and it was not what I wanted to be thinking about. Six months out of the year we’re away from home, and for what little time we do have at home, not to be able to just focus all of that time and energy on our families, it’s tough. It’s not a great feeling to be worried about your job when you’re supposed to be home.”

“We’re proud of the work that we do out here, and we want to be able to continue to do it. We think it’s important work,” added Kilday. “When I’m at home, and I drive down my street, I look up at those power lines. I helped create the power that’s running through those power lines, and I’m proud of that.”

Revolution Wind announced in March that it began delivering power to New England, citing the work of more than 1,000 local union workers, and is expected to power more than 350,000 homes and businesses. The project’s construction is over 90 percent complete.

In June, the Trump administration abandoned an effort to try to halt all wind projects and leases across the US, giving up a challenge in court to a judge tossing Trump’s executive order to freeze all permitting and leasing for wind projects.

Instead, the Trump administration has opted to buy out wind project leases.

Trump’s Department of Interior has completed four deals so far to cancel wind project leases, paying energy corporations a sum of more than $2.6 billion, including paying $765 million to Invenergy to abandon four wind projects in California, New York, and Maine and nearly $900 million to Bluepoint Wind and Garden State Wind to cancel offshore wind leases in New York and California.

“I think it’s a foolish policy that the Trump administration is engaging in trying to buy out these leases,” Pat Crowley, president of the Rhode Island AFL-CIO, told the Guardian. “These projects are not only helping to reduce our carbon emissions, they’re providing good-paying union jobs for thousands.”

Crowley said that workers would have had long-term job stability from working on these projects. He noted the Trump administration had lost in court in its attempts to issue stop-work orders on five wind projects in the Rhode Island area.

“It’s a personal vendetta… Good union jobs—we shouldn’t be trying to take those off the table. That just doesn’t make any kind of sense.”

“We’re five for five taking on the Trump administration,” he said. “What the Trump administration is doing is just throwing money away for the sake of their ideology.”

Will Gonzalez, a construction laborer with the Laborers’ local 385 in Fairhaven, Massachusetts, worked on the Vinyard Wind 1 project off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard, a project the Trump administration attempted to halt in January. The project is now completed and fully operational.

He criticized the Trump administration’s efforts to halt wind turbine projects, claiming the opposition from Trump stems from his experiences trying to stop a wind turbine project near his golf course in Scotland, losing an appeal in December 2015. “It’s a personal vendetta,” said Gonzalez. “Good union jobs—we shouldn’t be trying to take those off the table. That just doesn’t make any kind of sense. Families obviously need good jobs…Why take those jobs away?”

Gonzalez said he and his co-workers were leaving training and certifications unused because of the halting of wind power projects. “All of us that worked on that Vinyard Wind 1, obviously, we would have loved to segue right into another project,” he said. “We’re fully trained, ready to go, willing and able, so it directly affected us. But you move on. You [have] got to move on. You can’t sit and dwell on that, because that’s not going to pay the bills.”

The White House directed comment to the Department of Interior.

A spokesperson for the department denied the cancellation and stop-work orders of projects had had any impact on jobs, even on projects under construction when halted. The spokesperson did not respond to a question asking for clarification and did not comment on Trump’s prior animus toward wind turbine projects involving his golf courses.

“No jobs were eliminated because none of these leases were operational or supporting employment,” the spokesperson said. Rather than waiting years for the projects to materialize, they added, the Trump administration is prioritizing investments in existing infrastructure and functioning supply chains that can create jobs now and deliver economic benefits faster. “This approach puts more people to work more quickly, using proven, affordable, and reliable energy rather than relying on projects tied to leases that were not producing jobs in the first place.”

Eucalyptus trees have been scattered across California since the 1850s, when they were brought over by Australians flocking to the Gold Rush. The trees are now considered invasive, and their bark contributes to wildfire risk. But even so, they’re a staple of the area, their scent and stature intrinsic to the California coast. 

In 2023, author and poet Victoria Chang watched as the massive eucalyptus tree across the street from her home in Los Angeles was cut down. As the men lopped off the tree’s limbs, Chang realized she hadn’t spent much time really looking at it. She reflected that the tree had probably taken years to grow and was so easily cut down in just a few days. Chang felt compelled to write poems about this feeling that would later evolve into her latest poetry collection, which asks what it means to be human in the face of nature.

With the same name as Swedish artist Hilma af Klint’s painting series, Chang’s new book Tree of Knowledge is a meditation on abstract art, mortality, language, home, and history. Chang writes in both absolutes and inquiries she artfully taps into what it means to be human while parsing through both personal and collective histories. 

At the core of the collection is the long poem, “Eureka” which examines the violent expulsion of Chinese Americans from Eureka, California. On February 6, 1885, about 300 Chinese residents were ordered by a committee of 15 men to leave their homes within 48 hours after a white city council member was killed by a stray bullet from a shootout near Chinatown. Through the poem, history collapses, we’re both in the present and past. We, as readers observe Chang try to process the atrocities Chinese Americans faced as they were forced onto two steamboats and shipped to San Francisco amid threats of hanging. We see this processing throughout the collection in the images of Chinese Americans working in canneries around the Eureka area that have red thread stitched through them.

In our conversation, Chang discussed the earth’s memory, the experience of first generation Americans, and motherhood. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. 

The collection has so many genres of history wrapped in it. There’s a personal history, collective history, and art history. In the book, you also talk about how art and writing are acts of archival. Could you speak more to that sort of collective history that you’re highlighting?

I’m interested in all sorts of things. I love visual art. I love to make art. I love to go to any museum or gallery or just anything to look at. For me, I started noticing there’s so much artwork that had these gorgeous trees in them. And once I started noticing that I couldn’t unnotice it. 

That’s something I love about being human, is once someone points something out to you, once you start seeing something, you start seeing it everywhere. I think that is maybe partially, a key to empathy. Once you start seeing people, different kinds of people, you really start humanizing them in ways that are not a form of othering or objectifying in terms of people as objects. 

So once I started seeing trees and artwork, I started seeing it everywhere. Then I started sort of writing in conversation with these paintings and other sculptures and artworks.

I think that’s the beauty of art and nature. If you actually start talking to these things, just like if you start talking to people that might seem different from you, things start opening, the aperture widens, and that’s how my mind works, and that’s kind of how this book feels. There’s a little bit of everything in here because I like looking at things, reading things, meeting trees, meeting art, and they all end up being a part of my life experience in my art too.

I wondered about the environmental politics in this collection. How much it seems that, especially now with AI data centers, we’re taking the earth for granted. What role did that play for you as you were writing?

While I was writing this collection, I was also traveling a lot. I wrote a whole bunch of poems related to my visit to Alaska. I was so struck by how we are stewards of this earth. We are guests, and it’s our job to actually be good stewards to what we have. It occurs to me every single day how we are all absolutely awful stewards of this earth. 

I went to [the redwood trees in Eureka, California], and there was not a single car in the parking lot. I walked amongst these massive trees that had been here for so long, by myself. I realized I’m just sort of energy, like my time here is so short. These trees are really going to be here long after my time, anyone’s time, and that it’s our role to respect them and to kneel before them. 

In the poem “The Bird Cage,” you write about the tension surrounding immigration, which reminded me of a similar conversation in your 2021 memoir, Dear Memory. That feels especially urgent right now. 

Ever since we’ve been alive, and especially recently in this administration, every day, there’s so much conflict and there’s so much anger. 

I think so much about how my parents came [to the US] during a time period where people like them were welcomed. I was just pulling out some of my parents’ archives, and my mother sponsored all of her relatives to come here after she came here as a technical person during the 60s. 

Once she got here, she filled out these forms to sponsor all of her siblings, and it was so easy and welcoming. Some of my uncles and aunts were approved to come here in like five days after filling out this form. It seemed so different than it is now. I just don’t understand where that hatred comes from because I think about my own parents and how they did so much in this country and experienced so much, but also gave a lot back and how I’m a direct result of that.

There’s nothing wrong with people coming here and wanting to experience this beautiful place. When I wrote [“The Bird Cage”], I thought about how some people have to leave countries they’re born in, like my parents. Other people, like me, have to leave countries they’ve never seen. And others have to install their own countries; they have nothing, I’m the latter. 

So, I was thinking about how I’m so grateful to be here and to have been born in this country and to live here, but in order for me to live here, I’ve had to leave countries that I’ll never know. Which is like a weird thing to think about, because this is my country, but I don’t ever feel like it’s really my country. 

I think many people of color are interested in hearing different perspectives of America, and want to see more representation. How does it feel to think about this book in the context of the 250th anniversary of the US? 

Since I was a very young child, I’ve been so confused as to why the history that we were presented in school and in the media was always one thing. I didn’t understand why so many things weren’t talked about. As I became older, I started learning more and more about my own history, about all the marginalized people in this country, and how there are so many incredible stories that weren’t being told and still aren’t being told. 

It’s such a short history now that you’re mentioning it. Our country is so short and we’ve done so much damage in such a short time, which is quite frightening. But being an optimist by nature, it’s never too late to change things. As a person with a historian kind of background, the only way we can move forward is to learn about the past. So, I’m interested in the past and stories from the past, and it’s our obligation to try and tell those stories as much as we can.

In the center of the collection, there’s a long poem about the violent expulsion of Chinese Americans from Eureka, California in 1885. I know you also tackled this topic in your 2026 children’s book of the same name, Eureka. Why has this specific moment in history stuck with you so much?

It struck me once I learned about it. It struck me how few people knew about it, including myself. My parents were not from the part of China that a lot of these Chinese people were from, but obviously, I’m a Chinese person, and I felt completely struck and horrified by what I read and what I learned. The more I read, the more I learned, the more I realized that there were actually a lot of people in Eureka, California that were working to keep this history alive and to tell these stories. 

Before I wrote this long poem, I wanted to go find these people. I wrote a children’s book [about the expulsion] 10 years ago. In typical publishing, no one was really interested in that story. It just kept on bothering me and so I wanted to keep learning about it. Ten years later, I went up to Eureka, California and met all these people that were trying to keep the story alive. So I wanted to do my part, and so I wrote this long poem that explores these themes and also explores my time when I was up there. I think when I wrote this adult poem, I didn’t know that the children’s book was going to be published, so the timing just kind of worked that way.

In the long poem, you write, “Who has the rights to imagination? Who has the rights to illumination? What if history must travel through us?” I think that those sorts of questions illuminate these ideas of what a lot of marginalized people feel in America about who owns history, and who can tell history.

My parents aren’t from this area, which is in the southern part of China, where these Chinese people came from. My mother was from a different region of China and spoke a different dialect. My father was Taiwanese.

So I thought a lot about, should I even tell this story, do I have the right to tell this story, and how do I do it in a way that feels respectful, and that honors these people and honors the differences between myself and those people who are no longer here. 

Because they have ancestors who are still here, who maybe aren’t writers or artists. If you’re going to speak in another’s voice that’s not your own, how do you do that with the utmost care and respect? 

So even though I know other people would say, “Oh, she’s a Chinese person, of course, she has the right to speak about these things,” I am much more nuanced than that as all marginalized people are. We know the nuances and the subtle differences between all of the people that other people clump in one category, and I wanted to be very careful thinking about those things. 

It’s really interesting what you do with grief and this acceptance of death, and how that makes us recontextualize history and time. I was also thinking about the themes of motherhood and raising children and how that sort of affects our idea of time too. When you’re talking about grieving your parents and then raising these children who will one day leave to live their own lives, how does it feel to put that out there and have your daughters engage with it?

It goes back to some of the environmental things we were talking about earlier, like “What does it mean to move toward leaving the earth and help bring the next generations? Raise them and help grow them in ways that they could be good stewards to this earth, both environmentally, historically.” 

I think about that all the time. Every day, I’m thinking about that and what can I do, as more of a senior person, with a lot of life experience, to sort of help the next generation who are going to be here much longer than I will. My own children are now like older teenagers, one is 19, and the other is 17. They’re young adults and every day, I think about what I could say to them, or how I could show them through my actions, or the things I do to sort of help them become better citizens of this earth, in this country, in this world. 

I think these are things we all should be doing, no matter how old we are and where we come from. It’s a job of ours. 

How do you not pass down racism and hate and misogyny and consumerism and capitalism? How do you actually help the next generation be aware of their own complicity, and how do you do that as one human being, whether you’re a parent or not? I think that’s the big question for us as adults, to be honest with you. 

I think it’s our responsibility to be communal and to build community and to pass along whatever knowledge, wisdom, ideas, offerings that we might have. That to me is so important as a human being, but especially important as an artist. Today it’s like, “please read,” like just getting younger people to read, to think more deeply in the age of AI, where everything is being stripped down and simplified. To know we want complexity, we want nuance; those are the things that I feel like I’m fighting for now.

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

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

In the run-up to Donald Trump’s gala celebrating the nation’s 250th anniversary, we’ve been arguing here that it was important for it to fail. Trump delivered his speech, and there were some pretty bad highlights, but perhaps most notably it was beset with chaos after Trump overruled officials who recommended calling it off amid storms causing an exodus from the mall. But we’re going to dig deeper into the bigger failures here.

This was the moment when we were supposed to celebrate the American experiment enduring for a quarter of a millennium, and Trump still couldn’t help but make it all about the crowd sizes that were supposedly there for him and all about his pet obsessions. We’re talking about all of it with New Republic senior editor Alex Shephard, because Alex predicted very early on that Donald Trump would lose the culture, including on this, on the celebration of the 250th. Alex, good to have you back.

Alex Shephard: It’s great to be back.

Sargent: So what we now know is that Trump finally delivered his speech after 11 p.m. on July 4, after what The Washington Post called a “chaotic scramble.” This was the result of officials essentially saying this thing should be canceled and then him overruling them. Trump claims 150,000 people were there in the end, while saying that at least twice or three times as many had been there before the evacuation. Alex, you saw the imagery of the empty seats. What’s your take on the claim of 150,000 for the speech?

Shephard: I mean, there have been a lot of ridiculous Trump crowd-size claims, but I think this is one of the more brazen ones. The VIP section of this speech wasn’t even full. It was half full by the middle of the speech. People that love Trump and that need things from Trump weren’t willing to stay the entire time.

The weather was awful, but I think mostly people did not want to sit through what Trump had promised to be a very long speech. It wasn’t actually that long—I think it was like 30, 35 minutes. But it was exactly what you would expect. It was this kind of endless recitation of the familiar grievances, with a few kind of new half-baked insults thrown in.

So it just felt exactly like a perfect encapsulation of where we are with this president right now. Somebody who’s just almost bored, I think, with it, but who has no real argument to make to the American people and is still just kind of falling back on these very, very tired arguments.

Sargent: And of course, crowd sizes were really essential for Trump. Leading up to it, there was reporting saying that he had been in absolute rage about pictures of the crowd sizes during the events leading up to this. They had really set him off quite miserably in many ways.

Shephard: Well, I think going back to that too, there’s this larger failure of the Great American State Fair project, this kind of idea that they were supposed to put on almost like a world’s fair on the National Mall. It increasingly got taken over by Trump people. And between the weather and, I think, the lack of real draws, you were just seeing nobody coming through here.

And I think that again, like, the president can be furious about this as much as he wants, but it’s just another example of him living in this total fantasy world. It’s like when he posts about polls where seventy percent of the people love him. It’s just absurd.

Sargent: It is. Well, let’s check out what Trump said during the speech about the size of his crowd. Listen.

Donald Trump (voiceover): And they estimated they had 375,000 people before everybody had to leave. And they now have 150,000 people. It’s the craziest thing anyone’s ever seen. At least.

Sargent: But then on Truth Social afterwards, he suddenly inflated the number. He said, “The crowd at 7:05 in the evening was 422,000 people.”

Shephard: I mean, I think it also gives it a sort of historic register, right? He wants this to be like the March on Washington. He wants this to be like—I don’t know, when they tried to levitate the Pentagon or something. But I think what you’re seeing is the president trying, like, really, really hard to use his theoretical superpower, which is to just manufacture reality, right?

He’s a disciple of the power of positive thinking. He believes he can just kind of manipulate reality by saying things, and that by the time people correct him, it’ll be too late. But I think what we’ve seen again and again, especially since the start of this year, is that he’s just totally lost that ability, right? He can just say this stuff and people just ignore it. It doesn’t matter anymore.

Sargent: I mean, it’s almost like one final humiliation for him to not only get 150,000 by his own invented estimation, but that’s actually this huge bump down from this bigger number that he estimated—and then he turns around and undermines even that bigger number by inventing another one.

Shephard: I think Trump at his best, in a kind of non-value-judgment way, is sort of like the Grateful Dead or something, where people are going because there might be these parts that are not very good, but there’s going to be 20 or 30 minutes that are genuinely surprising and new and interesting.

And I think that’s like what brought people into Trump in ‘15 and ‘16. And I think now you’re seeing Trump as the Grateful Dead when Jerry Garcia was on loads of heroin or something—it’s just very familiar and it doesn’t work at all. And I think people are just bored by it right now.

Part of it is that he’s the president, right? So he’s just repeating the same kind of points over and over again. But I think that what we’re seeing is just a president that’s not actually engaged with people or with the culture in a larger way. And the speech itself, to me, failed on numerous grounds. But I think one of the reasons why people were not coming is just, it was this really familiar recitation of grievances, and kind of really pro forma points that Trump himself doesn’t even really care about.

Sargent: So let’s talk about a few highlights here. Trump claimed that we built the “Empire of Liberty.” He slurred his speech numerous times, a lot of screw-ups. He actually talked about the need to end mail balloting, which is really, truly bizarre. Talk about grievances—that’s something that a lot of Republicans don’t want to hear him talk about anymore.

And then there’s one quote that really leapt out, I think. It was this quote: “As our Declaration of Independence tells you, we’re all made in the image of one Almighty God, and a communist will never say that.”

Alex, to you, what substantively about the speech really kind of jumped out?

Shephard: I think part of it to me—or the big part, you just got at it—was this really new move from Trump, which is to try to kind of re-energize the Cold War, or to sort of make the larger fight for the country one of capitalism against communism. Essentially the idea here seems to be to use Mamdani as the kind of symbol of the Democratic Party heading into the midterms. But part of the issue here is—and maybe I’ll just sound like Barack Obama in the debate against Mitt Romney, but I’m like, the Cold War was a long time ago, right?

And one of the reasons why—and you see this—I think Steve Bannon is not somebody whose word should be taken literally most of the time, but I thought he had a very interesting point about the rise of kind of democratic socialism after the Colorado results last week, where he was essentially saying, yeah, you know what, these people are speaking to people who are dissatisfied with our current politics, right?

And they’re organizing really effectively around that. And I think that with Trump, what’s notable here is that Trump first rose speaking to a similar kind of person, right? Somebody who’s disaffected, somebody who is, I think, fairly concerned about the corruption of our politics and looking for people who don’t fit the mold of regular politicians. And that was Trump for a while, right?

But now Trump is himself trying to say, no, I am the kind of symbol of capitalism—all while running the most corrupt and crony-filled administration that you’ve ever seen. And I think that to me points to somebody who’s just lost his touch to some extent. This is the laziest argument that you can make in politics, essentially: my opponents are all communists, right? Well, people like Mamdani—he’s made himself a kind of very approachable, kind force in American politics.

And I think has actually organized really effectively, in a way that Trump has as well. But I think what we’re seeing here is just this effort to kind of narrativize his way out of this mess. And the narrative that he’s offering is one that Republicans have been pushing since Barry Goldwater, right? And sometimes it works, but most of the time it doesn’t.

Sargent: That’s absolutely right. I want to home in a little bit on his characterization of the Declaration of Independence, though. When he says, “we are all made in the image of one Almighty God,” he’s referring to the fact that the Declaration says we hold these truths to be self-evident, that our creator made all people equal and so forth. But Trump very much invisibly dispenses with the equal part. And also, “our creator” is not the same as “one Almighty God.” “Our creator” is a much more generic way of putting it, which is deliberate. He’s turning this into almost like a Christian nationalist celebration in a sense.

Shephard: Yeah, I mean, I think that Thomas Jefferson certainly would be appalled by that, right? Like, as a deist, he was not somebody who was thinking about our creator endowing us with anything. I think that the idea here for Trump is that the white men who founded this country did so with very clear designs in that order, that align with the sort of Pete Hegseth vision. And again, I think that speaks to a weakness within this administration, to me—that Trump is parroting stuff that he doesn’t care about, right? He’s not a Christian nationalist. He’s just doing this to try to pander to people within his base, right? And whenever Trump sounds like Pete Hegseth, I feel like he’s really losing here overall.

And I think again, we’re just seeing this kind of laziness, right? It’s this really warmed-over version of Republican politics, really like kind of mainstream Republican politics. As bad as the Christian nationalism stuff has gotten, a lot of the content of this speech would be familiar in a bad speech given by any Republican politician for the last sixty years. And ordinarily you would say, OK, well, that’s fine.

But the problem is that Trump’s whole thing is he’s not like those other people. So this speech, I think, to me captures the two halves of what we’re seeing with Trump right now, which are, on the one hand, these really finely ground grievances like the SAVE Act, right, that most people do not care about, things that Trump cares about quite a bit. And then on the other half, it’s just this really familiar drivel that has sort of characterized the conservative movement and the Republican Party for decades. And I think when you combine these two, you get one, just a really boring speech, but you also get a picture of a presidency that’s in total freefall.

Sargent: And let’s point out that Barack Obama spoke at the dedication of his presidential center just around a month ago. I want to read a sentence from his speech, because I think it’s really applicable here. It’s sort of fortuitous that Obama’s speech came around a month before Trump’s display, because they really neatly bookend this moment in a really kind of telling way. Obama said that the story of America at its best rests on shared values that make democracy possible.

They include this quote: “a belief in the intrinsic dignity and worth of all people, that no one is above the law or beneath its protection. A belief in checks and balances in our government, a belief that our military and law enforcement owe allegiance not to any president or political party, but to the people and our Constitution.”

You know, Alex, there was a time when a Republican president, whether he would mean it or not, would say something quite like that. But of course, let’s be clear—it’s a defining fact of this moment that Trump and MAGA don’t accept any of those things to be true, what Obama said, right?

Shephard: Yeah, I mean, I think it’s part of the long run of Republican and Democratic presidents giving speeches that subtextually rebuke Trump in this exact way, right? Like, George H.W. Bush could have given a large part of what you just read as well. But that’s—I think one of the other things that really jumps out about this moment, and in some ways the tragedy of Trump being president at this moment—there are many worse things that are happening.

But one of them, I think, is that this is an opportunity to reflect on the actual meaning of this nation. And I think it’s one of the things that Obama does very well. It’s something that actually Mayor Mamdani here in New York City, I think, also did very well in a speech that he gave on July 3 that was largely about immigration as part of the American story. But there’s just been this refusal to engage with that kind of narrativizing, right? Which I think is an important part of building a culture.

And I think what you see with Trump is that he’s only capable of essentially either, when things are going well for him, building a political movement, or, I think, attempting to sustain or salvage it, which is what we’re seeing now. And it’s just the political movement, right? It’s only things that are innate to Trump. And as you’ve mentioned, the Declaration of Independence is hostile to that project, right?

Like the Reconstruction amendments are hostile to that project. When you think about the larger American story—which Obama has narrativized, I think, brilliantly many times, of a country struggling to live up to the ideals in its founding documents—that’s, I think, a powerful story. But that’s not the story that Trump tells, right? The story that Trump tells is, these people won’t pass the SAVE Act, and so my elections are going to keep getting stolen.

Sargent: You’ve got the World Cup really sort of acting as the perfect foil to Donald Trump’s Christian nationalist display of our 250th. Can you talk about the contrast there?

Shephard: For the most part, what you’ve seen in this World Cup is it being a celebration of the kinds of things that Obama talked about in that speech, that I think you look at when you think about the good parts of America, right? People are really friendly here. People like to visit America, and they like to visit it because of Americans and because of American culture. And I think we’ve seen quite a bit of that. And this tournament has largely been a huge refutation of Trumpism.

The best player for the United States men’s national team during this tournament is somebody who is only a U.S. citizen because of birthright citizenship. It’s a huge refutation of the president. But what we’ve seen since Sunday, when that player for—Folarin Balogun, who had been suspended, that he gets unsuspended, possibly because of lobbying from the White House, and the president certainly takes credit for it. And I think what you see is, it’s not that dissimilar to when Trump came to New York for game three of the NBA Finals. What you see is a sort of party, right? This sort of joyous thing that’s then poisoned by the president.

But I think it’s more notable here too, in that it’s another example of his weakness culturally, right? Like, the U.S. team is doing really well, but Trump doesn’t own that at all—partly because, again, the striker on this team, Folarin Balogun, is on the team because of birthright citizenship. His backup, Ricardo Pepi, his family is Mexican, right? The left back is English, the right back is Dutch. It’s a complicated story of America, but it’s one that refutes what the president’s trying to say. And I think with this sort of eleventh-hour intervention, what you’re seeing from this president is someone who can’t own the narrative. So he has to force his way in. And I think that’s what we’ve seen here.

And the U.S. will play Belgium after we talk, before this episode goes out. But I think that the team may or may not respond to that. Hopefully they are able to kind of compartmentalize it. But for a lot of people—and I wrote about this for the New Republic site today—this has kind of poisoned the World Cup. And that, I think, is what Donald Trump has been doing culturally for the last year and a half, essentially. He’s just kind of butted into things and ruined them.

Sargent: And just to conclude this, Donald Trump is clearly trying to associate himself with the success of the World Cup, but failing. And I think the dynamic that you’re getting at is really that everyone just wants to be done with this guy and done with this movement already, right? Everybody just at this point sees how toxic Trump and Trumpism have really become as toxic forces in American life.

I mean, the ethno-nationalism, the cruelties and the barbarities, the corruption, the self-dealing, the oligarchy, right? The big upward transfer of oligarchic wealth, which was a major component of Trump’s second-term agenda, the displays of dictatorial self-glorification, and him just kind of desecrating these symbols of republicanism, small-r republicanism, in the nation’s capital. Everybody just wants to be done with this—all these enmities, all these hatreds, all these degradations, all this nonsense already.

Shephard: Well, yeah, I think that the U.S. team is a great example of this, right? Like, so I mentioned Balogun being a sort of birthright citizen, but you don’t have to know that to enjoy this team, right? They’re a fun team. And I think that they encapsulate a lot of what you would like to love about this country. If you’re a MAGA person, you could easily get into a kind of “USA, USA” version of this team. If you’re a liberal like myself, you can find a million ways to be excited about them, right?

And I think that what you see about Trumpism culturally here is the inability to let those kind of monocultural things stand, right? You have to choose one or the other. Taylor Swift can’t be Taylor Swift, right? She has to be an enemy of the MAGA movement. Bruce Springsteen, same thing—which is, again, how you got the horrific music lineup at the Great American State Fair.

But I think that you’re seeing a kind of resistance to that now as well, right? And I think that this is a sort of political movement dying out, in that it’s resisting Trump’s efforts to co-opt it. But it sucks to be in the end stage of that too, because he is, I think, really raging against the dying of the light right now, for lack of a better term.

Sargent: Yes, I’ve been using the term “Late Stage Trumpism.”

Shephard: Yeah.

Sargent: It really is—it’s got an end-stage feeling to it, an end-stage cult feeling. We’re in the middle of Late Stage Trumpism, and everybody’s just waiting for it to collapse in on itself, basically. And I think maybe the ultimate tell here is for Donald Trump to inflate the crowd sizes at the 250th event, right, which is supposed to be all about the country. And one last time, he makes it about himself. He makes it about his own crowd sizes. It’s almost the final humiliation.

Shephard: Well, yeah, and it’s how it all began, right? That was literally day one of the Trump administration, when people were saying, maybe this guy will be different. And you’re just like, nope. It’s just going to be an even dumber and worse version of what we thought. And now we’re just—it’s crowd sizes all the way down now. And we’ve got two and a half more years of this, and it’s going to be brutal. But, you know, again, it is the late stage.

Sargent: Late-stage Trumpism, folks. That’s what America’s become. Alex Shephard, always a great pleasure talking to you, man. Thanks so much for all this. And you were really ahead of the curve on this stuff, I’m telling you.

Shephard: Thank you. I appreciate it.

“Religion is back in our country, bigger and stronger than it has been in many, many years,” President Donald Trump announced to the Faith and Freedom Coalition on June 26. “Religion’s really …”—he made a rocket-ship sound effect and thrust his finger skyward—“going up. If that were a stock, we’d be very, very rich, all of us.” Great nations have God and religion, and, he added, “if you don’t have that, it just doesn’t seem to work out, does it?” It sounded almost like a threat.

That same day, Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission delivered a full draft of its 224-page report, the centerpiece of which is “12 Recommendations to Strengthen Religious Liberty for All Americans.” Those recommendations include the creation of a Justice Department “religious liberty task force,” production of “Know Your Rights” posters, repealing the Johnson Amendment, and creating “religious liberty violation reporting hotlines/online portals.”

The commission, housed in the DOJ, was established via executive order last year to advise the White House Faith Office and Domestic Policy Council by offering suggestions for how to “preserve and enhance religious liberty” in U.S. law and public life. Chaired by Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick and vice-chaired by Ben Carson, it is primarily composed of right-wing activists. A few have legal experience; others are prominent religious leaders, politicians, authors—and Dr. Phil.

The report itself is, as legal scholar Micah Schwartzman has put it, “an embarrassing document” (although “shameless” might be more fitting). Still, as we have learned and relearned over the past decade, government officials do not have to be thoughtful, competent, or serious to do real damage. Slapdash and unserious as the report might be, it does its job: laying out how to use the cause of religious liberty to advance right-wing goals.

For over two decades, the Christian conservative legal movement, led by well-funded groups such as Alliance Defending Freedom and with help from the Roberts court, has transformed the idea of religious freedom. The era of “high separation” between church and state is over, and free exercise is a tool reserved primarily for conservative Christians. If the commission’s recommendations are implemented with the DOJ’s backing, they will be the next steps in this broader project. Religious liberty is a banner under which the administration and its allies will continue to undermine other civil rights, dismantle public goods, and insulate certain favored citizens from public accountability.

The commission’s report offers many legal and policy suggestions, but it also seeks a broader cultural shift. “Safeguarding religious liberty,” it claims, “requires more than defending legal rights after they have been violated. It requires cultivating a culture that understands why those rights exist in the first place.” This mission demands that Americans respect religious liberty and the rights it affords, but first they must celebrate and value religion itself.

The premise of the commission’s work is “a simple but profound truth: religious liberty is essential because religion itself is indispensable to a flourishing society.” In recent decades, high-profile cases have dramatized the conflict between individual religious freedom and the public good. The religious belief and speech of cake bakers, website designers, and licensed counselors—to refer to three Supreme Court cases in which ADF successfully sought exemption from or contested Colorado’s civil rights laws—come into conflict with the civil rights of others, particularly LGBTQ people. But, the commission argues, the “Founding Fathers recognized that religious liberty is not merely a private benefit for believers, but a public good for the nation.”

Here, they sidestep the fact that private benefits do in fact conflict with public goods—when business owners discriminate against their potential clients, when tax dollars are funneled to discriminatory private institutions and away from public schools, or when religious groups flout public health mandates during a pandemic—and instead assert that, because religion is ultimately good, religious liberty benefits everyone. If religion is “an essential aspect of what it means to be human,” as the report claims, then it follows that it would be privileged at least as much as, if not more than, other aspects of one’s humanity. Thus, those institutions that foster religion are not at odds with, or even really separate from, state institutions: Church and state should not be completely separate but, “in reality,” should “strengthen and support one another.” There is no wall between the two, the commission concludes, but a “bridge.”

The report is divided into 14 chapters, most of which are devoted to a particular issue or arena of public life. Chapter titles include “Students Don’t Check their Rights at the Schoolhouse Gate,” “The Rights and Roles of Parents and Teachers,” and “Anti-Semitism.” The content of each is drawn largely from the commission’s seven hearings held over the past year. These hearings primarily served as platforms for supposedly persecuted believers—each one a potential “religious freedom celebrity”—to offer testimonials, with occasional subject-area experts adding their analysis. Some were claimants in well-publicized disputes, including cases brought by conservative Christian legal organizations, such as ADF and First Liberty Institute, whose Kelly Shackelford and Allyson Ho are on the commission.

These anecdotes make up much of the report, the final recommendation of which is: “Honor the courage of religious liberty heroes through creating a Presidential Medal of Religious Liberty and First Freedom Hero Awards to recognize Americans who stand up for religious freedom and play an indispensable role in protecting citizens’ Constitutional rights.” Chapters conclude with pictures from the hearings of these heroes. It reads like a book of martyrs with policy recommendations.

The testimonies reveal their uses. Twelve-year-old Shea Encinas testified that in fifth grade, his “school forced [him] to teach [his] kindergarten buddy about changing his gender using a book called My Shadow Is Pink.” Shea did not refuse. However, his family “spoke up” afterward, and, according to Shea, “the school treated us badly and kids started bullying me and my brother because of our faith and the school did nothing to stop it.” The school did not offer an opt-out of certain readings. Later, the school hosted a “Pink Out the Hate” day, on which students would wear pink to show solidarity with LGBTQ students. According to Shea, he “felt like the entire school …[was] standing against me and ridiculing my beliefs.” When he arrived, he was dismayed to see that “over half the school wore pink. I felt completely alone.” Shea and his brother were ostracized, and the family “felt they had no choice” but to enroll in a private school.

Without discounting (or taking too seriously) Shea’s feelings, there is something poignant in stating so starkly that when he was not in the majority he “felt completely alone.” In the nation the commission hopes to create, Shea’s rights would not simply be protected; so too would his feelings. The commission wants Americans to be proud of religion, and of religious liberty. Perhaps even more than wanting to feel pride, they want some people not to feel shame. They want anti-sociality without consequent social stigma. As religious studies scholar Donovan Schaefer has written, for some conservatives, “it becomes easier to repudiate shame altogether than respond to the moral demands placed on them.”

Following this line of argument, religious studies scholar Finbarr Curtis explains, “Trumpism is the response to the fear that someone somewhere is threatening to take something that is rightfully yours. As a vigorous response to threats, Trump’s illiberalism makes his supporters feel safe.” The message of the commission’s report is that these threats abound, from vaccine mandates and “transgenderism” and “bad actors in the government and within institutions,” but the Department of Justice will protect you. There will be posters reminding everyone to “Know Your Rights.” Your teachers will undergo religious liberty training. If anyone does violate your rights or make you feel unsafe, there will be an online portal where you can report the threat. They will be investigated.

Even in this boom time for religious liberty, with religion’s stock going up, some claimants still lose their cases. In fact, the named claimant in Landor v. Louisiana Department of Corrections, the most recent religious freedom case at the Supreme Court, lost. And a landmark law—2000’s Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, or RLUIPA—was significantly restricted. Naturally, it was a case that spelled out exactly who could expect to enjoy religious freedom and who should not.

Damon Landor, by all accounts a devout Rastafarian, did not cut his hair in keeping with his faith. When incarcerated, he explained and documented this practice. For a while, his religious rights were honored. When he was transferred to a new facility, he handed them his paperwork stating his religious exemption. Prison guards threw it in the trash and then held Landor down and shaved his head. He sued the prison officials in their individual capacity, which the court found was beyond the scope of RLUIPA. Justice Neil Gorsuch, writing for the majority, held that prison employees could not be sued here because they had not “voluntarily and knowingly consent[ed] to answer lawsuits” under RLUIPA. As lawyer and legal scholar Elizabeth Reiner Platt noted, this is a standard that “employees are unlikely to agree to.” Why would they?

The Religious Liberty Commission’s report—in a draft issued three days after the Landor decision—says DOJ “should issue updated guidance on how [RLUIPA] provides incarcerated individual with the right to receive reasonable religious accommodations while incarcerated.” To what end? With what effect? Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in her Landor dissent that “state-empowered prison officials will have little incentive to abide by federal law.” It is hard to imagine that DOJ will effectively cultivate a culture of respect for religion and religious liberty in a case like this. Will prisons hang “Know Your Rights” posters in common spaces? Will wardens undergo religious liberty trainings that would prevent such an incident? Will incarcerated persons call the hotline? The recommendations seem to be for Shea Encinas and his parents more than Damon Landor.

Some critics, such as Sarah Posner, a journalist and expert on the Christian right, have called the commission’s report “an homage to Christian nationalism.” As Posner notes, a multi-religious coalition legally challenged the commission, based on its nearly entirely Christian composition and clearly biased framing. Skye Perryman, president and CEO of Democracy Forward, said that the commission is “not about religious liberty, it is about pursuing a culture of Christian Nationalism that seeks to divide and isolate people across our nation.”

The Public Religion Research Institute has found that 11 percent of Americans are “adherents” to Christian nationalist ideas and 21 percent are “sympathizers.” Christian nationalism is correlated with support for religion in general and “Judeo-Christian values.” In a 2021 poll on religious liberty, PRRI found that 10 percent of Americans completely agree and 21 percent somewhat agree with the statement, “In the U.S., when there is a conflict, the rights and religious freedom of Christians have priority over the rights and religious freedom of non-Christians and non-religious Americans.” Perhaps this is the “culture of Christian Nationalism” of which Perryman warns. About a third of Americans, then, support some kinds of favorable treatment for Christians. It is reasonable to think that the hotlines are for them—or, at least, that they’ll be frequent users.

While Christian nationalist ideology might be a factor, the Religious Liberty Commission is better understood as a right-wing project. If its goal is to install Christian supremacy, it is only as a route to empower private actors to subvert the public good. It seeks to exempt certain people—Christians, yes, but more importantly conservatives—from public accountability, and from feeling bad about abridging the civil rights of disfavored groups. It advocates siphoning funds from public schools and rerouting them toward private institutions, or “creating a robust system of universal school choice” and “securing parental rights.” It encourages citizens to surveil and report, rather than tolerate, their neighbors. It recommends that DOJ “develop a dedicated Religious Liberty Task Force,” whose tasks would include issuing cease-and-desist letters to public school districts with trans-inclusive policies. It seeks to create a culture of fear and suspicion and, in so doing, alleviate the fears of anti-pluralists, their feelings of loneliness, exclusion, and shame. Throughout, the message is clear: Get religion. If you don’t, the commission suggests, it just doesn’t seem to work out, does it?

Every summer, the Supreme Court hands down its most consequential rulings, and every summer, the conservative majority assures us that whatever it decided was compelled by history and the original meaning of the Constitution, and not partisan preferences. This most recent term was no different, except for one thing: The justices have never been less convincing.

Make no mistake, originalism has always been a sham—and always applied selectively in the pursuit of reactionary ends—but this term’s opinions put on display a methodology that’s in crisis, unworkable even for the justices who claim to be its most ardent proponents.

Let’s start with Trump v. Slaughter, which dismantled the century-long practice of Congress restricting the president’s power to fire the heads of certain agencies. The ruling had been a longtime goal of the right-wing legal movement, but standing in its way was not only decades of precedent but also some inconveniently conclusive evidence from the Founders themselves.

Take a line from Federalist, Number 77, where Alexander Hamilton noted the Senate’s consent would be required “to displace as well as to appoint an officer,” so as to prevent the president from becoming “the sole disposer of offices.” When it comes to founding-era evidence, it’s hard to get better than that—the most forceful and influential advocate for a strong executive among the founding generation answering your question directly on point.

The conservative majority’s response? To call this a “passing comment,” bizarrely suggesting the word “displace” doesn’t necessarily mean “remove,” and instead demanding that we consult the “logic of The Federalist as a whole.” It’s one thing to completely ignore inconvenient evidence in pursuit of a sought-after goal; surely we’ve seen that move employed before. It’s another for this group of jurists, who so dogmatically scold those who diverge even slightly from the historical record, to so brazenly toss aside the plain meaning of words spoken directly by one of the Founders themselves in the name of “logic as a whole.”

Still, that alone would be a fine, if familiar, example of conservatives editing the record to achieve their predetermined outcome. But it’s in Barbara v. Trump, the ruling that blocked President Trump’s abominable effort to eviscerate birthright citizenship, where things take another turn.

The majority in Barbara is an unlikely pairing of the liberal justices with two conservatives, so the result provides a unique window into the unstable nature of the right’s methodology. Justice Brett Kavanaugh concurred in the judgment, but wrote separately to state that the constitutional definition of birthright citizenship is not set in stone, and opened the door for Congress to create “exceptions” to birthright citizenship “recognized based on new developments after 1868.”

“Exceptions”? “New developments”? You might be wondering where this guy was when gun rights activists questioned the logic of blocking assault rifle restrictions based on words written centuries before those weapons existed, or when reproductive rights activists asked whether eighteenth-century history should govern modern medical procedures. You’re right to be confused. It’s people like Kavanaugh who laugh progressives out of the room for suggesting that two people separated by two centuries might read the same words differently.

Archconservative Justice Samuel Alito, in dissent, takes things even further, developing a citizenship test so strict that virtually all children born to foreign parents would fail. But recognizing how absurd this result will be, Alito just stops his historical inquiry right there, developing an exception out of thin air for parents who have “done everything within their power … to become American.”

In response, a fellow originalist, Chief Justice John Roberts, scolds Alito for creating this “ad hoc exception,” simply because he cannot “stomach” the result of his supposedly historical exercise. Alito, he writes, “does not explain how that exception can be squared with his view of the text.” As for Kavanaugh, Roberts writes that his willy-nilly reasoning is “at war with his supposedly unifying principle of the Clause.”

If this seems like a mess, it is. And that’s the tell. Originalism was never marketed to the public as just one interpretive tool among many. It was marketed as a discipline, the thing that would keep judges from substituting their own values for the Constitution’s plain original meaning. But here we are, answering some of the most momentous constitutional questions ever posed to this nation’s high court, and the method that promised to provide clarity and stability is instead producing some of the more incoherent, nonsensical gobbledygook ever published.

Indeed, a method that can’t generate internal agreement among its own adherents—let alone a coherent logic behind its conclusions—is not a method at all. It’s just a vocabulary. What was once sold as a mission to develop clear, consistent, stable jurisprudence has instead rendered constitutional law in this country a foolish and exhausting exercise, completely divorced from logic, philosophy, or common sense; a petty game of jurisprudential grab bag to determine who has the best quote from an eighteenth-century slave owner.

None of this is an argument that the justices are reasoning badly, exactly. Every judge, on every court, has always had to decide which evidence matters and which doesn’t. That is simply what judging is. Even Antonin Scalia, the godfather of originalism, reserved the right to set aside historical evidence when the results struck him as too absurd to accept, famously noting that “I’m an originalist and a textualist, not a nut.”

It was a tell even then—an admission that the method bends whenever it has to. But the scandal was never the bending. It was the pretense that a stable, principled method existed at all, one capable of producing consistent results regardless of who was applying it. Slaughter and Barbara show that even the people who invented that pretense can no longer keep it up among themselves. It might be time for the rest of us to stop pretending as well.

After the Supreme Court handed Donald Trump a major defeat by upholding birthright citizenship last month, an angry Trump took to Truth Social to urge Republican lawmakers to overturn it with legislation. “Congress should start TODAY,” Trump demanded, adding: “No long and unwieldy Constitutional Amendment is necessary!”

That’s nonsense—five justices affirmed that just about all children born on U.S. soil, including those with undocumented parents, are citizens under the Fourteenth Amendment. But House Speaker Mike Johnson knows he must appear prepared to obey Trump’s command, so on Fox News Sunday, he declared that House Republicans are examining ways to undo what the Constitution says.

“If there’s some legislative fix, we’ll advance that immediately,” Johnson insisted. Note the word “immediately,” which seems to mean “between now and Election Day.” Is this something vulnerable House Republicans will really want to vote on?

Doubtful. Indeed, look carefully and you’ll see the beginnings of a pattern: Republicans like Johnson—who know this would be extremely unpopular—are conjuring up a new tone and new language designed to recast it as a modest step, and not as the radical upheaval it would truly represent.

Just watch Johnson’s full quote on this matter:

🚨 IT'S OFFICIAL: Speaker Johnson announces he's coming up with legislation to STRIKE DOWN rampant birthright citizenship and tourism scams for illegal aliens

GOOD! Act fast!

"I really enjoyed Justice Clarence Thomas' dissent, everybody should read that. And he explained that… pic.twitter.com/GT2z3kgeV6

— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) July 5, 2026

Birthright citizenship might require a mere “legislative fix,” Johnson says, because under it, citizenship has been “devalued” by “birth tourism.” That last phrase has long been a noxious rallying cry on the anti-immigrant right. But in Johnson’s hands, it’s meant to portray the birthright citizenship “problem” as no biggie, as a trivial matter that just needs a little patching up. And note the oh-so-casual tone he strikes throughout, as if he’s discussing an adjustment to marginal tax rates.

Or take Vice President JD Vance, who recently described ending birthright citizenship in similarly bland terms. “It’s fundamentally a loophole that exists in our immigration system that rewards illegal aliens,” Vance said on Fox News Sunday. “There are a number of things that we’re already looking at to close that loophole.”

Note Vance’s repetition of the word “loophole,” which seems suspiciously deliberate. Why, this would be a mere tweak—akin to a new coat of paint on the garage door or oiling a squeaky hinge, you see.

Theoretically, Johnson and Republicans could write legislation that, say, prohibits the grant of citizenship to any babies born to one or two parents who entered illegally and/or were undocumented at the time of the birth. Right now, such a bill would presumably be upheld as constitutional by “only” four Supreme Court justices: Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Neil Gorsuch voted to overturn birthright citizenship on constitutional grounds, and Brett Kavanaugh sided with the majority but only on a statutory basis, not a constitutional one.

That’s alarming. It means only five justices now believe birthright citizenship is a “foundational guarantee,” explains Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern, so opponents need only to “nab one more vote” on the court to create a majority to uphold a congressional statute ending it. So Republicans might try to pass something that might be invalidated now but could test the court again—and lay the groundwork for more efforts later, similar to how Roe v. Wade foes chipped away at it for years before succeeding.

The irony to Johnson’s effort to make all this sound trivial is that the problem he identifies—people coming into our country solely to have a baby and scam the system into letting them stay—actually is very insignificant. A brief in the case by over 100 specialists in social science, demography, and other fields notes that the government’s own numbers put such births at far less than one percent of overall U.S. births. And even that low figure is almost certainly wrong: The real total, they detail, is far more “infinitesimal.”

But the change that Republicans are contemplating would be a moral, substantive, humanitarian, and constitutional earthquake. As Amanda Frost explains, ending birthright citizenship could lead to hundreds of thousands of newborn babies per year going forward remaining undocumented. That would mean they have less earning power as adults, harming the economy. Alternatively, if they are removed (or not born here at all), that means a future of national demographic decline.

Here it’s critical to stress that the overwhelming majority of those people would not be the children of “birth tourists.” They wouldn’t be the children of people who came here solely to have babies and are getting “rewarded” for this, as it doesn’t earn the parents legal status in any case. Instead, the parents constitute families already in the process of immigrating here for the same reasons immigrants long have done—to participate productively in our economy and communities and, ultimately, in our democracy.

So while Johnson and Vance are aiming their rhetoric at “birth tourists”—an easy-to-demonize group—their actual concern is with the much larger class of people who want to settle here for reasons that are recognizably American. That’s who they want to keep out.

Further underscoring the point, don’t overlook Johnson’s assertion that our citizenship is being “devalued” by birthright citizenship. Two of the justices—Thomas and Alito—used similar terms, insisting the children of undocumented immigrants “devalue” and “degrade” American citizenship more broadly. That’s extremely loaded language: As Adam Serwer notes, it echoes Civil War-era language about freedom for enslaved people “degrading” the white race, thus casting all those undocumented children as fundamentally “inferior” to other American-born children.

Which is ultimately why all this strikes so hard at our constitutional order. Ketanji Brown Jackson’s concurrence forcefully points out that birthright citizenship enshrines the promise of equality in part precisely by overturning “bloodline” as the “marker” of belonging. The key is that the child’s status should not be hereditary. Vance and Johnson want to undo that, reversing what Jackson calls the 14th Amendment’s destruction of “racial caste.”

So let’s step back and really appreciate Johnson’s vile two-step. He claims in passing that birthright citizenship “devalues” American citizenship, casually endorsing a disgusting attack on the hallowed principle that a child’s status should depend on birthplace, not heritage or inheritance. Undoing this would be seismic, yet he frames it as a mere “fix” to “birth tourism,” making it sound benign to those who might not immediately appreciate the grand principles at stake here.

“The new quote-unquote ‘fixes’ try to shift the public’s focus to the legal status of the parents, away from the geographical birthplace of the child,” Anna O. Law, a historian of immigration law, tells me. “For people who don’t know the history of the 14th Amendment, it might sound plausible. But it would blow a huge hole in the U.S. Constitution. It’s deeply cynical.”

It would also be deeply, deeply unpopular. A recent Fox News poll found that 69 percent of Americans think kids born to an “illegal immigrant” (Fox’s language) should “automatically become a U.S. citizen.” That includes 65 percent of non-college white voters, 61 percent of rural whites, and even 57 percent of white evangelicals. As Fox quietly reported in March (how often do you hear this finding on the network?), relative to previous years, support for it is up.

To be sure, now that Trump and MAGA have taken up this cause, it might shift some Republican voters their way. Focus-grouping by The Bulwark’s Sarah Longwell shows some Trump voters are now echoing his own language about it.

But still: It’s very, very doubtful that Johnson really wants vulnerable House Republicans to vote on such legislation before the midterms. Yet he’s now been pushed into the position of keeping expectations for a legislative “fix” alive with MAGA—all because he’s required to pretend Trump’s command for legislation is rooted in something real. And Vance will have to champion this when his presidential run starts next year, no matter how unpopular it remains. When he does, he’ll use euphemisms like “loophole” to mask how wildly radical and destructive it is. And it’ll be squarely on us to prevent him, at all costs, from getting away with it.

Donald Trump ended the tortured saga around his gala for America’s 250th anniversary in typical fashion. Trump claimed 150,000 people attended his final speech, which was humiliatingly contradicted by videos of the event. Then Trump made it worse. During the speech he insisted that 375,000 people had been present before storms and an evacuation caused chaos and turmoil, reducing the crowd to 150,000 (again, a baseless number). But then afterward he posted that the initial total had been 422,000. Somehow the number ballooned by nearly 50,000, delivering still another blow to his credibility. We talked to New Republic senior editor Alex Shephard, who writes really well about MAGA’s dwindling cultural relevance. We discuss the deeper failures of Trump’s extravaganza, why Trump can’t tell a compelling story about the country anymore, why Barack Obama’s national narrative is far superior, and why the World Cup is acting as the perfect foil to Late Stage Trumpism. Listen to this episode here.

Donald Trump is using the office of the presidency to enrich himself. Who the heck knows why he needs more money, given that he already has a bunch of it. It’s pathological. But what makes Trump’s corruption particularly stunning is that much of the money he has made has come directly from his own followers. Trump’s cryptocurrency schemes have made him billions while producing the…

Source

A daily roundup of the best stories and cartoons by Daily Kos staff and contributors to keep you in the know. The DOJ’s descent into total clowndom continues Just when you thought they couldn’t get any more incompetent … What’s going on with Mitch McConnell’s health? It’s been weeks with no updates. Trump makes the World Cup even more corrupt As per usual, Trump doesn’…

Source

A cartoon by Drew Sheneman. Related | Mamdani’s got Trump and Fox News big mad…

Source

President Donald Trump did everything in his presidential power to keep the party going for his Freedom 250 celebration in Washington, D.C.—even if it was a mess. “When I heard that it was cancelled, I immediately overturned that decision, and waited a while for people to come back,” the president wrote in a now-deleted Truth Social post Sunday. While Trump bragged about the return of…

Source

Preliminary hearings into the murder of conservative activist Charlie Kirk began on Monday, and it almost immediately became clear that the right-wing media culture of conspiracy theory around the case has not gone away. Kirk’s widow, Turning Point USA head Erika Kirk, attended the hearing, along with Kirk’s parents. Donald Trump Jr. was also in attendance at the hearing in Salt Lake City…

Source

As the US men’s national soccer team prepares to face off against Belgium on Monday night, the question isn’t whether their aggressive and quick play style can defeat an opponent that humiliated them 5-2 back in March—it’s what Donald Trump’s role in the decision to suspend star striker Folarin Balogun’s one-match ban means for the integrity of the World Cup.

FIFA, the international soccer governing body, on Sunday suspended the red card Balogun received in Wednesday’s match against Bosnia-Herzegovina, which would normally bar him from the next game as well. In case you haven’t followed the flurry of developments since, here’s a non-exhaustive list of events as of Monday afternoon:

First, FIFA suspended Balogun’s one-match ban by applying Article 27 of its disciplinary code, which allows it to cancel or delay a suspension without explanation. The governing body could have easily just stated that the match officials’ video review system was not applied correctly by showing slow-motion and still images to evaluate the severity of Balogun’s foul, which is typically against protocol—but it didn’t.

The other side was, unsurprisingly, outraged.

Reports came out the same day that President Trump called Gianni Infantino, the president of FIFA, just hours after the Wednesday match, asking him to review the suspension—the first of what were reportedly three such calls.

By Sunday, Trump was thanking FIFA in a Truth Social post for “reversing a great injustice” by suspending Balogun’s ban. On Monday morning, FIFA granted Belgium the right to appeal against its decision—and promptly dismissed Belgium’s challenge the same day, stating that since the soccer federation was “not a party to the proceedings,” it had “no standing to appeal the decision.” 

UEFA, the soccer governing body in Europe, said that FIFA crossed “a red line” with the move. “When the certainty of rules is no longer guaranteed by its guardians, the integrity of the game is at stake and the credibility of a competition is undermined,” it added.

Belgium’s soccer federation released a statement, saying that “to safeguard the legitimate rights of all participating teams and to protect the fundamental principles of fair play in our sport,” it was “investigating all potential options” to push back against the move. Even the country’s foreign minister risked Trump’s ire, saying bluntly, “If a phone call really is what explains this incomprehensible decision, it would amount to undermining the most basic rules of soccer and sports.”

Belgium’s soccer federation said that it did not receive an explanation of the decision and would leave “all further actions open,” suggesting a potential dispute at the Council of Arbitration for Sport.

While this is not FIFA’s first in-game controversy—including allegations of match-fixing in favor of host Argentina in 1978—the debacle has already set an alarming precedent. France has now asked FIFA to rescind their talented player Michael Olise’s yellow card against Paraguay. England coach Thomas Tuchel joked that Trump could help overturn defender Jarell Quansah’s red card against Mexico. 

As Christina Unkel, a former soccer referee and current sports executive, wrote on X on Sunday, FIFA’s refusal to state any reasons both raises a variety of questions and invites other countries to bring their political weight to bear to appeal calls by referees, although no other leader shares Trump’s close relationship with FIFA’s top official.

Regardless of how Belgium’s appeal and France’s request shake out, the White House’s role in the controversy will likely follow Folarin Balogun—who didn’t ask for the reversal—throughout the rest of his international career. Balogun was a good sport about the red card: He shook all the match officials’ hands after the match on Wednesday, and later told reporters that he accepted the referee’s initial decision.

“You can feel something unjust has happened to you, but it’s not an excuse to not do the right thing,” Balgun said. “Every game I try to shake the referee’s hand and this game was no different. It’s important to give the correct example to people watching.”

It’s an idea that FIFA should take into consideration.

A federal judge in Ohio ruled against the Trump administration Monday, citing bigoted comments President Trump and Vice President JD Vance made about immigrants. 

U.S. District Judge Algenon Marbley ordered the White House to unfreeze immigrants’ benefit applications, citing Trump and Vance’s “outright hostility towards immigrants, both before and after the 2024 presidential elections.” These applications include filings for work authorization and green cards from people in the U.S. from countries including Burma, Canada, Iran, Nigeria, Syria, Tanzania, and Venezuela.

“Their ire appears focused on immigrants from countries in the Caribbean, South America, Africa, and Asia,” Marbley, nominated to the federal bench by President Clinton in 1997, wrote.  

The judge quoted many of Trump’s comments against immigrants of color, including the time he railed against people coming to the U.S. from “shithole countries” or when he claimed Haitians are “poisoning the blood” of our country. In his second term as president, Trump attacked Somali Americans and accused them of adding “nothing” to the country, and oversaw violent immigration crackdowns across the country, particularly in Minnesota.

Marbley also highlighted Trump and Vance’s made-up accusation that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating people’s pet cats and dogs. 

“If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do,” Vance said in 2024, which Marbley quoted directly.

“This general hostility to immigration contrasts with an apparent interest in and preference for the migration of white people,” Marbley added.

Now, the Trump administration’s racism has come back to bite Trump and Vance, and at least some immigrants can have a chance to establish some stability in the U.S. The administration’s attempt to shut them out and penalize them for where they come from, for reasons born of prejudice, was temporarily blocked Monday. 

Graham Platner, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Maine, appears to be contemplating dropping out of the race after Politico published a bombshell report on Monday from a woman who went on the record to accuse him of sexual assault. “Regardless of the inaccuracy of the reporting but mindful of the political reality it will inflict, we are taking the time to reflect on the best path forward…

Source