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The health status of ailing Kentucky GOP Sen. Mitch McConnell remains a mystery weeks after he was hospitalized for unspecified causes, with his staff providing few details about what ailment he is suffering from or what his long-term prognosis is. On June 14, McConnell’s staff made a virtually detail-free announcement that the 84-year-old senator “was admitted to the hospital this morning”…

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All’s fair in love and Trumpworld.

Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s former fixer-turned-political defector, is reportedly back on good terms with the president, according to The New York Post.

Cohen had served as a personal attorney to Trump for more than a decade before he became the middleman in Trump’s hush-money fiasco with porn star Stormy Daniels. To save himself, Cohen testified in Trump’s 2024 criminal trial, divulging that the real estate tycoon had directed him to pay Daniels ahead of the 2016 election in order to quell reports that Trump had had an extramarital affair with the adult film star circa 2006.

The hush-money trial ultimately found Trump guilty on 34 counts of falsifying business records, but the bad blood between Cohen and Trump is apparently history. 

Cohen, as of this past weekend, has landed a new gig at 770 WABC radio—with the president’s blessing.

Cohen told the Post that the new gig will be “completely liberating” and give him an “unfiltered pipeline to the people.”

“I’m moving my 1.5 million followers from my podcasts, YouTube, and Substack over to this new platform, and it’s an absolute rush to have a space where I can give them the plain, unvarnished truth,” Cohen said on Sunday, noting that “after everything I’ve been through, I know exactly what BS smells like, and I’m here to call it out every single day.”

“I’m here to use my past and my insider knowledge to pull back the curtain and set the record straight for them,” Cohen told the Post.

WABC owner and major Trump supporter John Catsimidatidis told the Post that Cohen and Trump had made amends.

“I checked with the White House and they had no objection,” Catsimatidis said. “I understand everything is fine.”

Cohen is expected to take over the Sunday slot from the disgraced ex-governor of New York Andrew Cuomo, though Cohen is reportedly vying for a regular, five-days-a-week show. His voice will be heard on the conservative talk radio station beginning July 12.

“I was told the president  gave me a glowing recommendation for this gig because he believes I’m going to be the next Rush Limbaugh,” Cohen said.

President Donald Trump is sitting on a more than $350 million war chest, but Republicans are starting to feel shortchanged, Politico reported Monday.

MAGA Inc., a pro-Trump super PAC, hasn’t spent directly on a race since March, when it spent $17,900 to back Georgia Representative Clay Fuller’s campaign. Since then, MAGA Inc. has only given $560,000 to MAGA KY, which used it to back Ed Gallrein’s challenge against Kentucky Representative Thomas Massie.

Trump has openly mocked mounting concerns about affordability, and actively downplayed Republicans’ efforts to address it. Now, Republicans are frustrated that the president hasn’t spent a dime to convince voters that his party actually cares about them.

“We didn’t leave our most powerful missiles on the ships when we were trying to crush Iran. Money is the political equivalent in politics,” a GOP lobbyist and donor told Politico. “The electorate’s mindset on the economy is normally locked in stone by Labor Day after a summer of backyard conversations and paying for summer vacation gas.”

“Now is the time to sell the message—America 250, the world loves America, the Democrats are crazy left again, and we sealed the border,” the lobbyist added.

Matthew Bartlett, Republican strategist and former Trump appointee to the State Department in the first administration, wasn’t optimistic that help was on the way.

“What makes you think they’re going to spend? We’ve been waiting for the cavalry,” Bartlett told Politico. “Every day matters about shaping sentiment and ideas, and when you have limited time, you should be attacking that early. So the notion of waiting is just inherently concerning … but even more of like, are you even actually going to be playing?”

Beyond sorely neglecting Republican candidates in November’s midterm elections, in some cases, Trump has actively undermined them.

President Trump took a shot at Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni Sunday afternoon on Truth Social, posting a picture showing her looking up at him with the caption “restraining order needed.”

Trump’s latest attempt to antagonize Meloni comes ahead of a NATO meeting in Turkey on Tuesday, which both leaders will be attending.

Last month, the president nearly sparked a diplomatic crisis by claiming to an Italian TV station that Meloni “begged” him for a picture with her at a G7 summit in France.

“She wanted a picture with me so badly. I wouldn’t have taken it, but I felt sorry for her,” Trump said. Meloni denied ever saying that, posting a video on X stating, “Neither I nor Italy ever beg,” in Italian.

“Donald Trump’s statements are completely made up,” Meloni said. “I am frankly astonished. I don’t ‌know why ⁠the president of the United States behaves like this towards his allies: It is not the first time, moreover.”

After that, Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani canceled a planned trip to the U.S., calling Trump’s remarks “serious and offensive.” Footage emerged from the summit of Meloni appearing to speak forcefully toward Trump, not appearing to beg at all.

Trump doubled down days later, claiming that Meloni asked for a picture “over and over” and telling NBC News that she “was a big fan” of his.

“But I don’t want her as a fan because she was not there―along with the NATO group―having to do with the strait,” Trump said, referring to Italy’s refusal to join in any efforts to retake the Strait of Hormuz along with other European allies of the U.S. He also mocked Meloni and claimed she needed a photo with him because “she is doing poorly in Italy with her level of popularity.”

“My popularity is none of your concern,” Meloni later replied. “I suggest you focus on yours.”

What his intention is with his latest post doesn’t make sense, and is likely to make things worse. He clearly has some kind of obsession with her, as he called her a “beautiful young woman” in an embarrassing moment at a peace summit in Egypt last year. She was less than impressed.

President Trump is once again attacking Smithsonian director Lonnie Bunch and the museum system, the latest development in his “war on wokeness.”

“The Smithsonian Institution, and the National Museum of American History in particular, under its current leadership and current interpretive ideology, cannot be trusted to tell America’s story honestly and in a way that is inspiring, unifying, and worthy of our great republic,” the White House Domestic Policy Council wrote in a report published the evening of July 4.

“As this report shows, confirmed in the words of Museum leadership, this ideological capture has moved the Museum’s mission away from straightforward historical education and scholarship toward an extreme political activism that seeks to transform our country,” the report continued. “By the intention and at the direction of current Museum and Smithsonian leadership, has become subject to institutional capture by a radical, activist ideology that is fundamentally opposed to telling the noble, honest story of the great country we know and love.”

From the Kennedy Center to Ivy League schools to the National Park Service, Trump has made a concerted effort to imbue cultural institutions with a more whitewashed version of American history that minimizes the injustices suffered by minority groups while ignoring the well-documented sins and valid critiques of the country’s founding fathers. This is all tied to his “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” executive order signed upon his return to office.

“American history belongs to us all. Any attempt to erase history will fail. It lives in our very DNA,” former DNC Chairwoman Donna Brazile wrote on X.

Last spring, the National Park Service briefly removed a picture of African American slave and freedom fighter Harriet Tubman from its webpage on the Underground Railroad, changed the words “enslaved African Americans” to “enslaved workers,” and removed a section that discussed Benjamin Franklin being a slave owner.

“There’s not one individual narrative that a president gets about our history,” Pennsylvania governor and presidential hopeful Josh Shapiro said in a CNN interview aired the day after Trump’s report. “And any president should want to make sure that that full history is shared, that the American people are able to draw their own conclusions.... If we understand where we came from, we’re going to have a better path forward.”

These days, the Department of Justice is, to put it extremely mildly, in absolute disarray. The whole agency has been reduced to essentially two missions and two missions only. First, they are the blunt objects President Donald Trump regularly deploys to persecute his enemies. Second, they are the stooges tasked with handling the massive amount of immigration cases that have resulted from all the…

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President Donald Trump may have revealed just how corrupt FIFA’s 2026 World Cup really is.

Just hours after top U.S. Soccer scorer Folarin Balogun received a red card and a minimum automatic one-game suspension, Trump urged FIFA President Gianni Infantino to review the decision, four people told The New York Times.

FIFA announced Sunday that it had reversed Balogun’s suspension, making him eligible to play against Belgium on Monday as the U.S. tries to advance to the quarterfinals. This is the first time since 1962 that a player has been allowed to appear in a game after receiving a suspension.

The unprecedented decision has sparked serious concerns of favoritism. Earlier this year, Infantino shocked his own top officials by cooking up the FIFA World Peace Prize, apparently to placate Trump after his campaign for the Nobel Peace Prize crashed and burned.

It wasn’t just Trump who intervened—senior administration officials including Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and World Cup task force director Andrew Giuliani worked quickly to engage lawyers to help U.S. Soccer mount an appeal.

When FIFA delivered its decision, the organization offered no explanation for why Balogun was exempt from his suspension, sparking widespread outrage.

The Royal Belgian Football Association released a statement Monday arguing that FIFA had failed to follow its own rules in processing an appeal, and was “investigating all potential options.” Shortly after, the federation announced it was challenging the decision.

The Europa League also released a statement saying the decision was “unprecedented, incomprehensible and unjustifiable,” and that FIFA had “crossed a red line.”

“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,” the football club said.

Meanwhile, Trump celebrated the decision. “Thank you to FIFA for doing what was right, and reversing a great injustice!” the president wrote in a post on Truth Social Sunday afternoon.

The Trump administration seems to be living in an alternate reality when it comes to the president’s vanity projects.

Despite having to drain and fix the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool within weeks of insisting the renovation was complete, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum insisted to ABC News Sunday that the multimillion dollar restoration was nonetheless a “big success.”

“And so when we look in context, President Trump set out to make D.C. safe and beautiful. He’s done that,” Burgum said. “The Reflecting Pool was part of the original design of the Lincoln Memorial.… It was leaking 45,000 gallons a day.”

Burgum then cited attempts by previous presidential administrations to remedy the pool’s leaks, including the Obama administration’s two-year, $34 million effort between 2010 and 2012. The difference now, according to Burgum, is a vast advancement in technology, such as “nanobubblers” that he claimed have completely rid the pool of algae, as well as an industrial liner that has stopped the pool from leaking.

Neither of those details, however, appear to be true. Within days of refilling the pool, the algal bloom that the Trump administration had spent $14.7 million to eradicate had returned, while the painted liner at the bottom had begun to slough off.

“So the Reflecting Pool has been a big success. And we’ve got 340 million people in this country that are celebrating 250. We did have a few vandals, but all that’s going to be repairable, and that’ll all be fixed in the coming weeks as we go forward,” Burgum said.

“Well, you say it’s been a success, but the pool is going to be drained this week, isn’t it?” asked host George Stephanopoulos.

“We don’t know if we need to drain the whole thing or not because, you know, the cutting happened on the edge,” Burgum responded. “And of course, again, when you’re talking about 340,000 square feet of surface, even though there was, you know, damage done by vandals that was there, it is a small, small 99.99 percent of the pool bottom is perfect.”

Donald Trump had originally promised that the project would cost $1.8 million. Now, it seems the total project will cost far more than $15 million.

In another interview with CNN, Burgum again insisted—without evidence—that portions of the pool’s broken liner were caused by vandalism, echoing Trump’s explanation for the failing reno.

“It didn’t peel off. There was vandalism. There were box cutters. There have been seven arrests. There were people literally trying to destroy part of a monument, the Reflecting Pool,” Burgum told the network.

“There are photographs of a person or people cutting a 300- or 350-foot gash in the bottom of the Reflecting Pool?” pressed State of the Union host Dana Bash. The president initially announced late last month that the damage involved a 250-foot gash. The following day, the number escalated to 300, and then 350 feet the day after that.

“Dana, I’m not sure why you and others in the media think that you want to keep trying to question whether or not—think, this is an industrial liner,” Burgum continued. “Every farmer and rancher in America that’s had their pickup liner lined by this sprayed-on liner knows that you literally—literally, it would never just like peel off or fall off. This is, like, a strong material.”

“The only way you can end up with actual slices in one spot and not the other is that someone physically cut it,” Burgum said.

Even some Trump-appointed judges have agreed that indefinite detention is unconstitutional. By Tim Henderson for Stateline Gilberto Pacheco was driving to work for a construction job in California when he was pulled over in what court papers called a “traffic stop” in January. He was not accused of any crime, not even a traffic infraction, but he was imprisoned without bond for…

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As always, if you find value in this work I do, please consider helping me keep it sustainable by joining my weekly newsletter, Sparky’s List! You can get it in your inbox or read it on Patreon, the content is the same. Don’t forget to visit the Tom Tomorrow Merchandise Mall, and, if you’re so inclined, follow me on Bluesky! Related | Most Americans want to impeach Trump—for the third time…

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

For the past two years, more than a dozen major banks have been not only reneging on their climate commitments, they’ve been actively making the crisis worse. 

In 2024 and 2025, during the leadup to President Donald Trump’s second inauguration, all six of the nation’s largest banks abandoned the Net-Zero Banking Alliance, a voluntary climate coalition, precipitating the Alliance’s complete shutdown in October. Since then, others including Royal Bank of Canada, Scotiabank, HSBC, NatWest, Santander, and JPMorgan Chase have either weakened or scrapped their decarbonization targets.

Now, new evidence shows banks are ramping up spending on fossil fuels. Beyond helping companies extract more oil and gas, they are bankrolling the industry’s pivot to plastics, fertilizers, and other petrochemical products.

“Petrochemicals are a deliberate and pivotal strategy to ensure that we continue using fossil fuels.”

Two reports released earlier this month illustrate the trend. An analysis from the Rainforest Action Network (RAN), and other environmental groups found the world’s top 65 banks contributed $508 billion to companies expanding fossil fuel development in 2025. That’s a 27 percent increase since 2024, and more than any other year since at least 2016, based on the organization’s past analyses.

The second report comes from the nonprofit Center for International Environmental Law. It found that, between January 2019 and June 2025, big banks gave the world’s top 15 petrochemical companies at least $591 billion in loans and underwriting. Some of that benefited integrated oil and gas corporations; the amount CIEL could directly attribute to petrochemical activities was $252 billion. (For context, New Zealand’s GDP is about $279 billion.)

Together, the reports suggest that large financial institutions are enabling a long-term viability strategy for the fossil fuel industry, one in which declining demand for oil and gas in energy systems and transportation is offset by a boom in petrochemicals. Indeed, in recent years oil majors including ExxonMobil, Shell, and Saudi Aramco have invested heavily in that field by, among other things, acquiring majority stakes in plastics and chemical companies and retrofitting oil refineries to accommodate a shift in production.

These investments reflect projections from the International Energy Agency that plastics, agrichemicals, and other petrochemical products will account for more than one-third of the growth in oil demand through 2030, and nearly half of it by 2050—much more than other sectors like aviation and shipping. 

“Petrochemicals are not just a general growth area for fossil fuel companies,” said Ximena Banegas, a plastics campaigner for CIEL and the author of the organization’s report. “They are a deliberate and pivotal strategy to ensure that we continue using fossil fuels.”

“Banks are unfortunately continuing to put profits over responsible societal action.”

Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, and the Japanese bank Mizuho Financial were among the top banks increasing financing for fossil fuel expansion last year, RAN’s analysis found. All 65 banks it analyzed boosted funding across the board for new oil and gas exploration, transportation, and refining. But the largest growth by far was for transportation—including new pipelines and capital-intensive LNG export terminals, which can create a decades-long commitment to using methane gas. 

“It’s overall disappointing,” said Allison Fajans-Turner, a senior energy finance campaigner for RAN. “Banks are unfortunately continuing to put profits over responsible societal action.” She noted that fossil fuel financing is becoming more concentrated among a smaller number of large banks, primarily those based in North America and Japan, as several European banks have begun to scale back funding.

RAN’s report didn’t look directly at financing for the production of petrochemicals, but some of its findings indicate growing interest in this portion of the industry. A significant increase in loans and underwriting for coal expansion, for example, is at least partially linked to a recent spike in the number of coal-to-chemical plants planned globally—mostly in China and India. Environmental advocates say these investments risk giving coal “a new lease of life.”

Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, and Mizuho Financial are also among the top funders of petrochemical activities, according to CIEL’s report. The top 15 recipients of this funding include a mix of oil and gas, agriculture, plastics, and chemical companies, such as ExxonMobil, Syngenta, LyondellBasell, and Dow.

Although CIEL didn’t compare each year between 2019 and 2025, it did notice a significant jump in petrochemical finance in 2024, the last full year examined. As evidence of the industry’s ongoing expansion, Banegas pointed to a recent report estimating that 127 new polyethylene projects will come online between 2025 and 2030. 

CIEL’s report also notes the petrochemical industry’s outsize contribution to toxic chemical pollution and global warming. As of 2020, petrochemicals’ annual greenhouse gas emissions amounted to 1.9 billion metric tons, more than twice that of aviation and shipping.

“If we’re serious about sustainable materials, then we need to put our money where we want to go.”

Fredric Bauer, a senior lecturer at Lund University in Sweden, has conducted similar research on petrochemical financing between 2010 and 2020. He said it’s not surprising to see continued interest in big plastics and chemicals projects, although it is perhaps counterintuitive. Despite warnings from industry analysts that the petrochemical industry is in “structural decline”—as shown by a large number of canceled or delayed projects, downgradings from multiple credit rating agencies, and the recent plastics and agrichemicals price shocks due to the war with Iran—companies keep investing because they often “do not respond to conventional market signals,” he said.

Rather than say, ‘“Oh, there’s oversupply, we should probably not invest in more supply or production capacity right now,’” their priority is “to ensure long-term markets for oil and gas.”

A coalition of advocacy groups including CIEL are calling on big banks to end their support for fossil fuel and petrochemical expansion. They’d like to see policies against financing companies building facilities to produce virgin plastics and fossil fuel-derived fertilizers. They also want banks to require clients to adopt credible transition plans to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees C, which may include targets to reduce plastics use and phase out some pesticides. 

Fajans-Turner said the upward swing in fossil fuel financing reveals the weakness of voluntary sustainability commitments and reinforces the need for regulation. She suggested that, in addition to mandating more robust decarbonization plans from financial institutions, governments should require improved incorporation of climate risks when determining a borrower’s creditworthiness. “That would actually have many downstream consequences about who gets funding and who does not,” she said.

Joel Tickner, a professor of public health at the University of Massachusetts Lowell and founder of an independent research initiative on sustainable chemicals, said it’s important that governments scale back loans and tax incentives supporting the fossil fuel industry, subsidies that amount to more than $1 trillion annually. Some of this money could help finance the development and commercialization of greener chemistry.

Fossil fuel companies “have received decades of subsidies and financial support,” Tickner said. “If we’re serious about sustainable materials, then we need to put our money where we want to go.”

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the July 6 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.

The right has long been obsessed with the idea that huge numbers of women come illegally to the United States only to have babies. But now Donald Trump’s top officials and the MAGA movement are giving this a new twist. They’re seriously talking about preventing pregnant women from entering the country. This is being discussed all over MAGA media. Some are talking about forced sterilization. Others are talking about pregnancy tests before entry.

Sarah Posner, a writer for Talking Points Memo, memorably summed this up with a single tweet: “So will every woman now have to pee in a cup at airports?” It’s a damn good question. And it’s all very ludicrous, except for one thing—it reflects an actual vision for the country, a vision that JD Vance and Donald Trump and a lot of significant MAGA personalities very much share. So we’re talking to Sarah Posner about all of it. Sarah, great to have you on.

Sarah Posner: Thanks for having me again, Greg.

Sargent: So the backdrop to all this is the Supreme Court ruling upholding birthright citizenship. This unleashed fury and anxiety among MAGA figures across the spectrum, who started to imagine the United States getting dramatically swamped by far more immigrant babies going forward. One leading MAGA figure said the possible ways forward now should include: “Deny entry to all pregnant foreigners,” “deny entry to all female foreigners,” “require sterilization of all foreign visitors prior to entry.”

Wow. What’s your immediate reaction to just the sheer level of fear and anxiety we’re witnessing here?

Posner: Well, I think we’re witnessing a sheer level of racism. The anxiety about birth tourism, and women coming to America from China or other places just so they could have a baby who would be an American citizen, has long been a talking point in the anti-immigrant right. So it’s not like it came out of nowhere.

But never have I seen the range of people talking about such extreme policy proposals, if you can call them that, to try to prevent this thing that can already be prevented by U.S. consulates, who investigate this sort of thing when they’re deciding whether to grant somebody a visa, and can turn down somebody’s visa based on that.

What these people are proposing is the idea that women would be potentially sterilized if they wanted to come to America. That’s insane. Or that testing women, giving women pregnancy tests before they come. I mean, it’s just so bananas. I can’t even believe that they’re not ashamed to talk about it on TV.

Sargent: Yeah, and they even seem to be enjoying it a whole lot as well. I want to read some quotes from leading MAGA figures. Here’s Mike Davis: “We need to get all illegals out of our country fast, and we need to start with birthing-aged women.”

Ben Shapiro: “If you’re coming in six months pregnant, we should not give you a four-month visa. We should give you a one-month visa and then kick your ass out, right?”

Sarah, one interesting thing here is that there’s always been this intense misogyny to MAGA. And here you’re seeing almost a conflation or a bundling of the misogyny and the hysterical hatred of immigrants and the great replacement theory, just really juiced up to the most hyperbolic and insane levels you can imagine. You’re good on the topic of MAGA misogyny. What do you make of that element of it?

Posner: Well, for one thing, MAGA has always been very interested in policing women’s bodies, whether it’s preventing them from having an abortion, preventing them from accessing birth control, or in this case, preventing them from being in the United States when they go into labor, right?

Like, all of these things are about making sure that they have control over women’s bodies and women’s reproductive freedom. So that is completely on brand for them, to be obsessed with this.

And then you add that to their obsession about immigrant, quote-unquote, “invasions”—that these invasions of immigrants are making the United States less pure, are contaminating us. And so you have a movement that’s at its core disgusted by women’s bodies. And that’s why they want to control them.

And here they add to that layer of disgust by talking about immigrant women as being—or, I mean, not just immigrant women, women in general, like women who are coming to the United States to visit family or go see the Empire State Building—you know, that they’re talking about them as being conniving and dirty and wanting to basically defraud America.

Sargent: And some leading MAGA women are getting into this act too. Here’s Megyn Kelly.

Megyn Kelly (voiceover): Would there be the possibility of cracking down on pregnant aliens who are coming over here—revoking visas, pregnancy tests, even? I mean, how far could we go with that?

Sargent: There seems to be this almost zealous desire to stop people from coming here at all. I really think at this point they just want the whole world to go away. Can you talk about that element of this?

Posner: Well, I think that they’re creating this image that they’re closing off America to the world, and that they’re going to make it difficult or scary for people to come here, even if it’s just for a vacation. And I think that it is in part a performance for MAGA. Because as we’ve seen from the World Cup—even though the world has seen that ICE is arresting people, and people are being sent to gulags or deported to a country that they’ve never been to, and those fears are real—it made me quite astonished, actually, that lots of people came to see the World Cup anyway.

But a lot of people did come, right? So they were basically saying either, you know, that’s not going to happen to me, or I’m not afraid of ICE, or maybe they were just thinking, I want to see the World Cup so badly that I don’t care.

And the deportations and the arrests and detentions are very real, but I also feel like the scale of what they’re proposing here is so absurd that I’m not sure how they could actually carry it out without completely collapsing the American tourism industry.

Right. And so I think a lot of it is to kind of perform for MAGA, perform for Trump, because they have to coddle their little baby fascist president who just lost a case at the Supreme Court. So they have to show that they are really coming up with other ways to ensure that no foreigner has a baby in the United States anymore, despite the Supreme Court decision.

Sargent: I think you put a finger there on something really essential about how MAGA and Trump function, which is that when they take a loss, their instant response, almost without exception, is to come up with some way to re-portray themselves as being on offense. Because they can never lose, they can never be weak, they can never be on the wrong end of public opinion, on the wrong end of history, on the wrong end of the law, et cetera, et cetera.

So you’ve actually got acting Attorney General Todd Blanche going out there saying that there will be concrete action to stop this. He says there will be things the administration might do as part of the visa process to limit it.

And at one point he actually said that the Justice Department, which he runs, is going to make sure that Homeland Security Investigations agents and the FBI are focused on stopping pregnant people who intend to come here to have a child.

Posner: It’s actually not the Department of Homeland—I mean, I don’t know that acting Attorney General Todd Blanche knows this or not, which is kind of sad and pathetic, but it’s not the Department of Homeland Security who decides who gets a visa. It’s the State Department. So he can ask the Department of Homeland Security to do stuff, but they’re not the ones who would stop somebody from getting a visa.

And then in terms of people who are coming here for a shorter time than would require a visa—what’s he proposing? That every single woman of childbearing age who crosses the border from Canada or Mexico, or who flies in an airplane into any of the airports in the United States, will have to be examined to see if she’s pregnant? Like, what are they even talking about? How would that even work?

I suppose they could try to do it, but the scale of staff and resources that they would need to do it—now, that doesn’t mean that wouldn’t stop them from making an example of somebody, because they love to produce content for all the people who are watching, all these influencers on their podcasts and on X, talk about stopping all this supposed birth tourism.

So you could definitely see them pulling this stunt on a woman entering the country just to scare other people, or to perform, like I said, for Trump or for social media content. But the scale of what they’re talking about is so ludicrous that it’s hard to take seriously as a mass policy.

Sargent: Yeah, I think it just goes back to what you said before about them performing for the audience of one. They need to let him know that things are being done, because he’s strong and he never just loses. He’s always on offense, right? So here they are on offense again. I really think that is such a crucial piece of the MAGA psyche—to always be on offense, to always be strong, to never be losing, et cetera, et cetera.

Posner: But I think in this particular case, it’s not just the audience of one. It’s that that audience of one has had a terrible couple of weeks in terms of his popularity, the complete failure of his Great American State Fair, which has been a complete bust in terms of people coming to it.

And so they also have to perform for the MAGA audience, that they’re worried might be either losing interest or thinking that maybe Trump is failing or losing his power. Trump’s power is ebbing—that can’t be the image.

Sargent: Let’s listen to something that Stephen Miller said about the birthright citizenship decision, because it really kind of encapsulates the bigger thing that they’re talking about here. Listen to this.

Stephen Miller (voiceover): Just physically being on U.S. soil does not make you a citizen, or qualified to carry on or capable of executing the inheritance of this country. We have people from all over the world, from third world nations, nations that on their own would have never invented the wheel, let alone modern technology, let alone medicine, let alone air travel. And they can just come into the country, have a baby at a hospital, paid for by you and me, and then that baby’s automatically a citizen. That baby can sit on a jury when he turns 18 and sit in judgment of you and sit in judgment of me and sit in judgment of our loved ones, can decide who our mayors are, our governors are, our presidents are.

Sargent: So, Sarah, this rant is one of the most crazy things I have ever heard from a Trump administration official, or any administration official ever. It’s absolutely unhinged in every conceivable way.

But what I think it gets at really is the degree to which stopping birthright citizenship, or upending birthright citizenship, was central to their big project. They really, really, really think that we’re in the midst of a demographic emergency, and that something incredibly drastic and Caesar-like is needed to prevent that from happening.

Posner: Does he think that the wheel was invented in the United States of America? Like, he’s so crazy. And so the idea that he’s trying to invent a reason why—that it’s not just, we don’t want them here. So he’s trying to say, well, the people who want to come here and have their babies are not smart and inventive and creative and coming up with inventing the airplane or anything like that. And so that’s why we can’t let them in.

And it’s just such a crazy, weird thing to say, because obviously it’s not true. Like, Americans have not invented all the great inventions in the history of humanity. And also that he feels like that’s the thing that he has to say.

So I don’t know. I mean, I just find Stephen Miller such a simultaneously dangerous and ridiculous person. But you can’t help but hear that kind of desperation in his voice in that particular clip.

Sargent: I think what he thinks is that the United States is the privileged inheritor of what he calls Western civilization, and that everybody outside this kind of civilizational charmed circle that he’s invented—which essentially includes Europe, and now includes southern and parts of Eastern Europe, whereas it didn’t before when his relatives came over—he thinks that the charmed circle of civilization has been drawn in a way that it excludes what he calls the third world.

And so everybody outside this circle, in the third world, none of those people are fit to invent things or fit to inherit the great Western inheritance that we are fortunate to have bequeathed to us. It’s a really, really deeply twisted vision that really is, I guess, civilizational supremacy.

And you’ve written about this as well a number of times. Can you talk about the religious dimension to what I’m talking about there, this kind of vision of civilizational supremacy? There is a religious nationalist dimension to it as well, isn’t there?

Posner: Well, Christian nationalism is a movement of American superiority and American exceptionalism. There was a point in time in the not-too-distant past that the Republican Party and the evangelical movement believed that the future of their political project depended on immigrants—depended on immigrants who were evangelical or Catholic, coming from Central and South America. And there was a senator by the name of Marco Rubio who was very involved in an effort to engage in immigration reform back in the 2010s. And, I’m sure that Rubio would not want to be reminded of that now.

And so I think that the religious right has shifted. Like, they’ve gone back and forth between being an anti-immigrant movement, being a movement that pretended for a while that it was interested in bringing people of color and immigrants into their movement and making them part of the Republican Party, and to being completely committed to Donald Trump and his mass deportation policies.

So I think that the modern religious right has had an identity crisis over this. But now they’re in a place where they cannot deviate from Trump or Stephen Miller or any of his other acolytes. And so they’re all in on whatever his immigration policy is. They don’t question it.

Sargent: I think you really nailed it when you said that they’re going to essentially want women to pee in cups at airports now, because that really captures all the craziness of it—the misogyny, the hostility to women’s bodily functions and so forth.

Let’s spool this forward a little bit. Next year, JD Vance is presumably going to be starting his presidential run. He’s going to be trying to figure out how to inherit this kind of coalition that’s been created. And he’s going to have to figure out how to deal with, I guess, a major part of the coalition here, which is extremely frustrated and anxious and angry about having failed at this one fundamental thing, which is so central to their broader agenda.

How does he, do you think, handle that while at the same time appealing to the middle? It seems like this vision is so extreme and so crazy. And someone like JD Vance, whose whole kind of shtick is to be the guy who makes MAGA seem reasonable and puts an intellectual gloss on it—we’re now at a point where it’s getting so crazy that it’s going to be very hard for him to do that. How do you see him managing this?

Posner: I actually don’t see him as trying to put a more moderate gloss on MAGA. I think that that is an image that he has worked hard to promote, and some people in the press have helped him with that. But when you hear him talk, he’s not really doing anything to soften any MAGA positions. He’s typically just saying something that will position him as being maybe less of a loser, say, in the Iran war ceasefire negotiations.

I think that Vance’s biggest political problem—one of his own creation, obviously, because he’s trying to appeal to the MAGA base and the anti-immigrant base—is that the base is very distrustful of him because his wife is not white and she’s not Christian. And he has to like run in circles to try to convince them that he’s OK and he’s one of them.

But I think that for someone like him, given his track record, trying to promote the idea that they’re going to police, quote-unquote, “birth tourism” more aggressively will be super convenient, even if he knows that it’s super impractical. But I don’t see him running from this.

I mean, he’s reinvented himself numerous times, but he can’t go anywhere without the MAGA base, right? Because it’s not like he has some natural constituency other than the MAGA base. So it’s not like if you went out there tomorrow and said, I agree with the majority opinion in the birthright citizenship case, that there would be a constituency for him. So he’s stuck with trying to appeal to MAGA.

Sargent: Yeah, I have to agree with you, Sarah. I think that this is going to be extremely difficult for JD Vance to manage. But the funny thing is, you know, he helped create this monster. And if he gets devoured by it, then, you know, that’s poetic justice. Sarah Posner, always an enormous pleasure to talk to you. Thanks so much for coming on.

Posner: Thanks for having me, Greg.

“What up, Council?” said the comedian J.T. Parr, greeting the Pasadena City Council in a surfer persona. Then he got to the point: “Americans are united in our hatred of data centers. They’re big, ugly water guzzlers.”

He’s right. America the Polarized has found some agreement at last. While President Trump guns it on building data centers, 71 percent of Americans oppose them, including a majority of Republicans. In Michigan, Pennsylvania and Texas, Republicans are breaking with Trump and issuing stern warnings about the massive facilities that increasingly pock rural America. And now Humans First, a conservative group that says it supports an “America First AI policy,” is planning a nationwide data-center protest on July 18.

Data centers are also shaping up to be a rogue issue putting torque on the midterms. South Florida Representative Byron Donalds, now a Trump-endorsed gubernatorial candidate in his state, has quietly defied the big guy, pledging to “protect Florida’s families and communities from data centers.” In one ad, he even seems to support government control of electric utilities. (Welcome to the struggle, Comrade Donalds.)

So who supports data centers? Only politicians who benefit from Big Tech’s ambition to dominate global AI. Parr, who himself ran for city council in Berkeley, Calif., in 2024, further said of data centers: “We’re just supposed to accept them because we might lose a race with China. Dude, where’s China?”

That Homer Simpson-esque question might just nail it, and it should be taken seriously if not literally. It suggests just how vexed Americans are with Big Tech’s ongoing effort to sacrifice regular people to the global ambitions of billionaires.

Thus we have a mass mobilization focused squarely on protecting American hometowns from oligarchic exploitation. According to Data Center Watch, protest groups against data centers now number an eye-popping 833 across 49 states. That’s a genuine movement. For more than a year, the protests have roused corners of America that not long ago were stuck in tribal stalemates focused on the personality of Trump.

Out of these protests, a surprising, hopeful, and effective rural progressivism is emerging. Data centers, which never close, consume vast amounts of electricity. They also drain millions of gallons of local water for cooling and churn out air and noise pollution all day every day. No wonder the data-center protesters have keyed in to AI’s environmental impact. Contrary to popular belief that Americans are dismissive of climate concerns, 70 percent of Americans now worry about the ravages of data centers.

Populists of every stripe have further grown wary of the brutally expensive ruling-class projects that jeopardize our daily lives: Silicon Valley monopolies and the war in Iran. A big faction of the anti-globalist set has further turned its attention away from the right-wing bugbear of immigration and toward causes that elsewhere are derided as “communist”: working people and the climate.

And the protests are surprisingly tactical. When it comes to affecting policy, they put the bigger No Kings demonstrations, which largely exist to express anger and ideological affiliation, in the shade. According to a watchdog group, data center opponents blocked or slowed more than 75 projects nationwide, worth $130 billion, between January and March alone. What’s more, 141 moratoria have been proposed at local, county, state, and national levels. And dozens of cities have actually implemented temporary bans, including Birmingham, Alabama; New Orleans; and Tulsa, Oklahoma.

“Communities have internalized an opposition playbook,” wrote Data Center Watch. “As political resistance builds and local organizing becomes more coordinated, this is now a sustained and intensifying trend.”

If these communities keep at it, and keep notching wins, they might just show the way out of the defeatism and blind rage that have stymied American progress and policy for the better part of a decade.

“We are anti sacrifice zone,” said protester Megan McDonough at a Pennsylvania State Capitol demonstration last week. A sacrifice zone is a municipality that is thrown to the wolves of Big Tech.

“We are anti being told that billionaire tech bros deserve more protection than the people who drink the water, breathe the air, pay the taxes, and live with the consequences.”

McDonough’s speech and Parr’s what’s-China comedy spiel really point to what’s most galvanizing about the protests. The data-center opponents are ordinary Americans. They embody a national everyman type we need more of in politics: the wise child, forever underestimated, who asks Socratic questions.

This archetype is so American it should be featured in a pavilion for the 250th. Its vibe draws on centuries of unlikely American heroes: nonconformist Yankee Doodle, outlaw Huckleberry Finn, naively principled Mr. Smith, anti-authoritarian Jeff Spicoli, and, of course, skeptical realist Homer Simpson.

These fellows are friends to the obvious. They don’t like abstractions. The data centers are right in front of our faces. They’re not one of the intangible threats of technology that preoccupy anti-woke and anti-tech faddists like Jonathan Haidt. (Citing Haidt’s out-of-step philosophies and opposition to D.E.I., dozens of students booed and walked out of his commencement address at NYU last week.) Instead, the data centers are physical outposts of AI empires—ugly water-guzzlers that don’t even pretend to serve communities.

At least Homer’s nuclear plant keeps him employed. A massive data facility uses automation and, once built, rarely employs more than a few dozen people. Data centers really only benefit the Big Tech emperors, to whom, according to a growing American consensus, we are no longer willing to sacrifice our towns.

American higher education is in crisis. Changes to student loan financing, a decline in the number of international students, and a weaponized federal research apparatus are creating historic challenges for everyone. Every day, new pitfalls emerge out of Washington and state capitals across the country. Right now, for instance, the Department of Education is finalizing a rule that would limit financial aid for graduate students if the program they are enrolled in does not produce enough graduates who make enough money, threatening a large number of graduate arts programs. At stake are the jobs of thousands of people who are employed by schools across the country. Now we’re beginning to see the toll this is taking.

Layoffs have hit multiple universities. Boston University laid off more than 100 of its staff last spring, the New School laid off nearly 90 faculty and staff, the University of Maryland laid off 84 employees, and Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Science is looking at laying off 25 percent of its staff (thanks to a plan put together by McKinsey and Company). Most dramatically, Hampshire College announced the closure of its doors this past spring. It will unfortunately not be the last institution to fold.

Where faculty have jobs, they increasingly do not feel free to do their work. In Texas, the A&M and Tech systems have implemented prohibitions on teaching of race, sex, and gender—leading to the cancellation or modification of courses. At the University of Texas at Austin, departments have been merged, likely because of pressure caused by “anti DEI” bills, which also saw the closure of student services offices across the state of Texas. But it’s not just public universities in Republican states that face these pressures. At Harvard, the heads of the Center for Middle East Studies and the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights were dismissed from their roles for running programming related to Palestine.

Facing distrust from the public, hostile lawmakers, and corporate decision-making practices, what are the students, staff, and faculty of the ivory tower to do? The solution lies in what graduate students across the country have been doing for the past few years; what workers in the U.S. have done for over a hundred years—organize a union.

Both inside and outside of higher education, there has been talk for years about what ails the system and why it has seemingly become out of touch and distrusted. A core tenet of the oft-repeated arguments is that universities have become bastions of activism, rather than places where scholarship is cultivated. The lone scholar who spends years studying Plato and Aristotle is run off campus and replaced by a purple-haired student with a sticker-laden megaphone; or so we are told. At the same time, universities are critiqued for not being engaged enough with communities, for setting kids up with degrees that will not serve them in the “real world”—the bubble of scholarly pursuit is simultaneously romanticized as a lost bygone era and source of present-day weakness.

The solution to this put forward by higher education leaders is to invest millions in viewpoint diversity or civic engagement centers, like those at Tufts University and the University of North Carolina, with the goal of bringing more conservative voices to campus. At the behest of donors and lawmakers, universities have become a battleground for the culture war.

When you dig in to the polling numbers about why universities are distrusted, it is true that a vast majority of Americans believe colleges and universities are headed in the wrong direction. Within those numbers, about 45 percent of people believe that universities do not do enough to expose students to a wide range of opinions. Meanwhile, 80 percent believe that universities are doing a poor job of keeping tuition costs affordable. 

The reality is that universities have come to be operated more as businesses than as not-for-profit entities of higher education, and this has led to their having the trust that businesses are afforded. Presidents of private colleges, in particular, are paid in the millions (at public universities, so are the football coaches). Universities have amassed huge amounts of property, corporate consultants are brought in for all sorts of reasons, and tuition costs continue to skyrocket. This trend is slated to get worse as universities seek to disentangle themselves from public dollars to make them less fickle to changes in political winds.

Despite being operated like businesses, universities encourage their workers to view their pursuit of knowledge and/or labor in support of it as separate from work that would require a union: It is a privilege to be able to do scholarship or work in higher education, and therefore you don’t require a union like a coal miner or an autoworker. It is this separation of profession that encourages isolation from other working people. When graduate students across the country unionized with the United Auto Workers, they showed up on the picket line when autoworkers went on strike in 2023. Dues paid by academic workers support other industries when they are on strike, and vice versa.

I’ve seen this dynamic firsthand as a member of a graduate labor union. When workers of the local grocery store chain went on strike, in 2019, the union coordinated people to join up at the picket line. A few of us joined one rainy morning and were approached by a white guy in an NRA hat, holding a strike sign. He thanked us for being there; regardless of what he may have heard about universities, or what differences may have otherwise existed politically, here was an example of workers coming together in a material struggle.

Unions contribute to community cohesion and trust. In Rust Belt Union Blues, Lainey Newman and Theda Skocpol write about how unions in Pennsylvania integrated themselves into every facet of daily life. The union hall was a place where weddings and community functions occurred; the union itself was a source of connection—where people felt united based on their shared identity as workers. As unions dwindled due to deindustrialization, so too did this broader union infrastructure, leaving people to find social identity in other group settings, some of them more reactionary. Higher-ed unions are not going to magically solve community isolation and atomization, but considering the acute need to boost community understanding and trust for this sector, in particular, academic workers can and should be part of the solution.

Organizing a union requires having hard conversations. It requires you to talk to many different people across life and work experience, political allegiances, and other divisions. They may or may not agree with the purpose of a union. Still, this dialogue exposes you to alternative viewpoints in a more visceral way than the proposed “viewpoint diversity” centers will allow. Whether or not everyone agrees from the outset, they will ultimately be a part of your union if you succeed. And to get there, you have to do the necessary work of convincing a majority of the potential beneficiaries of labor organizing that it’s a worthwhile effort—that at the end of the day, they’ll all come out ahead.

There are many tangible material benefits that unionization can provide; it creates leverage on university governance, where faculty, staff, and students may otherwise feel they have none. But unions are not a panacea—in light of broader industry-related shifts, layoffs do happen (Harvard staff who are facing cuts are unionized). It happened to the auto industry, and it can happen to higher ed. Nevertheless, organizing makes any cuts to workers much more costly to do, and it gives workers far more benefits when parting.

For people in higher education, the last year has been spent on edge watching decisions come down the pipeline that have impacted their industry and their livelihoods, with no ability to control what happens. It is a feeling of utter and complete helplessness. Universities and professional organizations have been mostly siloed in this effort, relying on conversations with members of Congress and direct negotiations with the government, or otherwise taking legal action. As the public has been galvanized by issues of war, immigration, and the economy, the destruction of America’s research and academic institutions is not a top priority for people’s attention.

This siloing also occurs on campus. Currently, the American Association of University Professors is trying to organize faculty across different fields of study. For years, it was thought that humanities faculty were the ones primarily under threat, so they currently make up more of the AAUP’s base. Now it is science faculty who are facing the chopping block and are doing so unorganized and unprepared. While humanities faculty may be aware and sympathetic, it ultimately takes members of the scientific community to provide insight on how certain policies put forward by federal agencies may impact them. You cannot be a bystander to the saving of your field; no one else will have these conversations for you.

As nonsensical and counterproductive as these cuts are to the national interest, they are no different from what a factory worker experienced during the signing of the free trade agreements of the 1980s and 1990s. Watching the government take an ax to your industry and countless communities, with little recourse available, is depressing. Organizing can help allay the bad feelings and put those who are under the boot back on the front foot. Universities may not be able to mobilize the public or build effective coalitions as institutions, but members of the university community can—and should. 

Through the union, every street becomes the classroom; coalitions are built, picket lines are formed, and people come to understand each other across lines of division. This may seem overly idealistic and hopelessly naïve. There’s no doubt that the battle will be a hard one. All the same, it is a path forward with tangible steps and real benefit—if only because you’ll be fighting the fight together. Form the union today, protect your job tomorrow, build a better community next week.

Every nation sustains itself with mythmaking. This is why Augustus commissioned Virgil to write The Aeneid at the moment the emperor was transforming the Roman Republic into the Roman Empire, why the British monarch is crowned atop the Stone of Destiny, why Marianne looks over Paris from both the Place de la Nation and the Place de la République, and why the Mexican president emerges every September 15 around 11 p.m. onto the balcony of the National Palace in Mexico City to issue el Grito—the cry that sparked the Mexican war of independence—anew.

But perhaps no nation has been more dependent upon its stories than the United States, a country formed in the relatively recent past without the benefits of shared ethnicity, language, or custom. In the absence of the usual ties that typically hold a nation together, it is values, we are told, that make an American an American and that make this country the special place that it is. Ironically, while Americans have always bitterly disagreed about the practical implications of those values, they have largely been consistent in the story they tell about those values and thus themselves. That story goes a little something like this: The United States was founded by good men, rebelling against tyranny and dedicated to the cause of liberty. Throughout its history, the United States has sought to pursue the path of freedom and justice, although some people—often, but not always progressives—are willing to concede that it has sometimes fallen short of this ideal. What these people will not concede, however—what they almost never concede—is the fundamental assumption that the United States of America is collectively a nation striving for the good.

In any other time, this persistent bit of American Exceptionalism might be excusable, even charming. But in a moment in which it seems not only increasingly impossible, but irresponsible, to ignore the deep flaws at the heart of the American project, this is exactly the choice that has been made by a certain brand of liberal public intellectual cum influencer in the Trump era. This cohort includes figures such as Jill Lepore, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Joanne B. Freeman, and Kevin M. Kruse. Heather Cox Richardson and Timothy Snyder are arguably the two most prominent examples of a new iteration of an old trend, the historian as explainer, and perhaps more jarringly as political strategist. Credentialed historians and critics of the current regime, they promise key insight into the present via their knowledge of the past, and they have become a prominent feature of the opposition to Donald Trump.

The narrative of history and, more importantly, of the present that they offer has gone viral, offering comfort to its audience and a substantial economic benefit to its creators in the form of newsletter subscriptions and book deals. While it seems cruel to challenge anyone’s source of comfort in this very disquieting age and is certainly unkind to question academics pursuing alternate income streams, it is time we start to question the narrative of history that has been so widely adopted by many Americans and ask whether this particular fantasy of the past is providing any benefit in our increasingly dystopian present. In particular, there is an insistence among these figures that the past is something to be mined for lessons about how to survive the rising tide of authoritarianism and fascism. It’s a compelling premise. But a decade into what future historians may very well term the “Trump Era,” it’s still not precisely clear what use the past is to understanding—let alone escaping—the current predicament.

The Resist! Historians, as you might call them, would not be possible if not for the American center-left’s increasingly romantic view of expertise. It (and the Democratic Party) have over the past 30 years come to be dominated by the most well-educated: Roughly 60 percent of people with graduate degrees lean blue. The nation’s best students are now collected in one political corner utterly unwilling to question the teacher’s competence. She is, after all, the teacher.

This shift has also been catalyzed by the American right’s increasingly dangerous anti-intellectualism, which in part drove their political opponents to a sometimes exaggerated deference to credentialed authority—a deference that often ignores the fact that experts frequently disagree with each other. Take, for example, the progressive rallying cry to “Believe science.” This certainly seems to be a good idea, especially on clearly settled topics such as the efficiency of vaccines and the reality of climate change. But what about those issues where the science—and more importantly the scientists—deeply disagree? Who exactly are we trusting then? After all, there are good faith, legitimate debates occurring around issues ranging from the effects and efficiency of long-term psychiatric drug use in children to support options for autistic people to the ethics of AI. None of this is settled, and experts—credentialed experts—disagree.

This deification of expertise in and of itself has also made it somewhat portable, a fact that is on clear display among the historian influencers. Take, for example, Heather Cox Richardson—arguably the most prominent of the cohort. Richardson’s Substack Letters From an American boasts over three million subscribers and is one of the most widely read newsletters in the world. The Harvard-educated Boston College professor has nearly six million followers on social media and was a Time 100 Creator in 2025. Letters From an American began as a synopsis of the events around Trump’s first impeachment and continues as a daily commentary on current events, much of which includes Richardson’s advice on topics ranging from how to identify fascism to how resistance to the MAGA movement ought to be organized. Her blog has also built a New York Times bestselling book, Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America.

When her work is shared, and it often is, the credibility of her positions is upheld by the assurance that Richardson is an expert—which is most certainly true: She wrote her dissertation on the Republican Party’s economic policies during the Civil War. Before Richardson entered the realm of public intellectualism as the co-host of the NPR-affiliate podcast Freak Out and Carry On in 2017, all of her books were focused on nineteenth-century America, including works on Reconstruction, the Battle of Wounded Knee, and the history of the Republican Party. Although fascism does have nineteenth-century roots, albeit in Europe, much of her newsletter is devoted to what is best described as punditry: analysis of the president’s mental state, upcoming Senate elections, and the weaponization of government agencies.

Timothy Snyder, the other bright star of this constellation, has a better claim to being an expert on fascism. Snyder, who decamped from Yale to the University of Toronto last year, is a historian of Central and Eastern Europe, with a specialization in the Holocaust and the Soviet Union. But his academic work is not directly linked to his advice on what to do in twenty-first-century America. That work, for example, includes a biography of Wilhelm von Habsburg, the poet and soldier who was placed in charge of Ukrainians against the Bolsheviks in the aftermath of World War I. Moreover, perhaps even more than Richardson, Snyder has leaned into the dubious idea that the historian is really a political strategist in disguise. His 2017 book, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century, topped The New York Times bestseller list and became something like scripture among some left-leaning Americans during the first Trump administration.

The entire subdiscipline of historiography exists because historians themselves are conscious that the way history is written and interpreted does itself have a history, one that is infused by ideological and sociological (and not infrequently psychological) influence. When we try to learn lessons from history, we must first choose a version to teach us—which narratives to highlight or omit, which assumptions to accept, which voices to elevate or ignore. That is why the past is often a comforter as much as if not more than it is a teacher. This is certainly true in the case of the Resist! Historians.

The popular success of figures like Richardson and Snyder rests on the fact they are presenting a narrative that rarely challenges their audience—which is largely white, middle-class, well-educated, and progressive. It is an audience made up of people for whom, up until now, the American project has worked out very well. What many of these people want to hear is that the rise of Trump and the MAGA movement is an aberration, a fixable malfunction. The audience for Richardson and Snyder, whether on podcasts, Substack, or Threads, want to believe that the current president and his supporters are not heirs to their American legacy but have instead twisted the truth about this nation’s history for their own malign ends. In this context, not only are their detractors the real inheritors of the nation’s Founders, but there is a clear path to escaping this fraught moment: accepting the truth about the nation and following where it leads us.

When Richardson, for instance, wrote about Rededicate 250, a bizarre event held on the National Mall on May 17 that was part political rally and part evangelical revival, she wrote with confidence, “...the United States of America was not founded as a Christian nation. The Founders were quite clear about that…,” and she went on to quote the 1797 Treaty of Tripoli, which famously declared that “the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion” and “has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility [of Muslims].” It’s a bold, appealing proclamation, one that seeks to co-opt, if not to obliterate, a key trope on the right, where the Founders’ status as (almost exclusively) white Protestants and their invocations of the Almighty trump the constitutionally protected rights they enshrined, most notably in the First Amendment.

And it’s true, the Treaty of Tripoli does say exactly that. But this is not the whole story. Many states maintained a religious test for office, and an established church, well into the nineteenth century. In fact, Massachusetts, where Richardson was educated and continues to work, did not fully disestablish its state church until 1833. Moreover, institutional histories are not the only histories that count. Rededicate 250 can only be seen as an anomaly if you ignore the long history connecting evangelical revivals and American politics dating back to Colonial times—traditions that have continually reasserted themselves in figures like Billy Graham and the continued prominence of megachurches. In the lived history of the Republic, not only the Christian character, but the evangelical nature of the country, are hard to deny. It can certainly be complicated and contextualized via documents like the Treaty of Tripoli. But that is different than asserting that their existence trumps other relevant details and events in U.S. history.

Of course, the truth of some of its assertions does not mean that the contemporary brand of MAGA evangelical has the right to govern the United States unchallenged, but it is also incorrect that there is no precedent for the rise of MAGA. As in a version of the twentieth century that exists to provide “lessons” to anti-fascists in the present, the idea that there is a pure, uncontested American history available for use by those disgusted by the current regime is comforting, even inspiring. It simplifies history, creating binaries between the authentic and the opportunistic and, in many cases, between good and evil. Rather than unspooling the complexities and ambiguities of American history, it instead treats the past as raw material for punditry. The Treaty of Tripoli is not an early example of diplomacy and statecraft from a new nation struggling for legitimacy, but a tool to be used against Christian conservatives who wield history and Scripture selectively.

History is neither a teacher who rewards the best students nor a sweeping morality play. It is inconsistent, morally ambiguous, and often not especially helpful.

But history is neither a teacher who rewards the best students nor a sweeping morality play. It is inconsistent, morally ambiguous, and often not especially helpful. It is one of many forms of expertise that can provide resonant analogies and occasional lessons—but its lessons are not inherently of more use than those offered by social science or even political activism.

It is, of course, hardly unique for subject experts, particularly academics, to stray outside their areas, particularly while providing mainstream political commentary. Economics, in particular, has turned out a steady stream of pundits, from the respectable (former New York Times columnist and, yes, current Substacker Paul Krugman, for example) to the baldly ideological (such as the nationally syndicated, baldly libertarian John Stossel). But there is nothing about academic training, no matter the discipline, that translates automatically to expertise in political strategy, just as there is nothing in history that provides a clear playbook for escaping the overlapping crises brought about by the second Trump administration.

That is not to say that Richardson, Snyder, and the other historian influencers need to quit the public square, but more that their visions and approaches to historical punditry need to be challenged. There is room for more diverse and sometimes dissenting voices, who are more willing to voice facts about the United States that disquiet and disturb. There is room to question expertise, particularly when it is deployed as cover for political analysis or punditry. And there is room for more stories to be told about America, even when they are stories we may not like.

Donald Trump has a new favorite word. He’s been calling Democrats “communists” ever since a few democratic socialists won the party’s House primaries. “These are hardcore, godless communists,” he told the Faith & Freedom Coalition conference last month. “This is the most serious threat to our country since its existence.” GOP House Speaker Mike Johnson, the ever-loyal Shih Tzu on his emperor’s lap, has picked it up as well. The midterms, he said recently, will pit “common sense versus communism.”

Well. The first question here is whether Americans even know what communism is (or was) anymore. There are five countries in the world that still call themselves communist, but one of those is China, which at least in economic terms barely counts (the others are Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam, and Laos). More than that, it’s getting to be close to 40 years now since the Eastern bloc collapsed. A person would have to be at least 45 years old to have any memory of all that. Right now, 57.5 percent of Americans are under that age.

As you’d expect, young people who weren’t alive to see how cruel, corrupt, and lethargic the Soviet Union was either don’t know much about communism or don’t see it as such a bad thing. A poll released last week by the libertarian Cato Institute had some interesting numbers. Among all Americans, capitalism was viewed favorably by just 52 percent (that’s the number that would be worrying me if I were a Friedmanesque free-marketeer; it’s insanely low!). Socialism was viewed favorably by 37 percent. And communism got a thumbs up from 21 percent.

That’s overall. Among respondents under 30 years old, 38 percent said they had a favorable view of communism. But in the Queens of Donald Trump’s youth, calling someone a commie packed a real wallop, so he clearly thinks it still can.

The word doesn’t actually apply to any of these people he’s trying to condemn, of course. As I noted last week, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Zohran Mamdani, and even Bernie Sanders himself aren’t really socialists, in the proper historical sense of the word. I don’t hear any of them calling for the state to seize the means of production, which is the basic historical position of socialism. They’re social democrats.

The only one among the crop who has apparently said a few nice things about actual communism is Darializa Avila Chevalier, the 32-year-old who won the Democratic primary in an upper Manhattan district. Her leftism appears to be much more of the campus-radical variety than Mamdani’s sewer socialism; we’ll see in two years whether the voters of her district are good with that, or whether she has indeed “grown considerably” since she wrote those social media posts.

Meanwhile, on the Fourth of July, a bunch of white supremacists from something called the Patriot Front felt at home enough in Trump’s Washington to march in front of the Capitol wearing masks, sunglasses, and ballcaps with the group’s logo boldly displayed, and carrying an array of flags including the Confederate flag. (These ghouls undoubtedly went unmasked during the pandemic to protest supposedly totalitarian public health policies, and now they’re dressing like totalitarians in an attempt to terrorize regular people.)  

And that night, of course, America, or that portion of it that was interested, listened to another windy address from a president who once invited avowed white supremacist Nick Fuentes to dine with him at his house and told the extremist Proud Boys to stand by.

That same president participated back in May in Rededicate 250, a Christian nationalist prayer gathering that, whatever its organizers said, was clearly intended to pound home the idea that the United States is supposed to be a Christian nation, which of course it is not. Democratic Representative Jared Huffman of California accurately told PBS that the event “would have the founders rolling in their graves.” 

This doesn’t begin to scratch the surface of right-wing radicalism in this country, most of which Trump tacitly or sometimes explicitly endorses with rhetoric that’s clearly fascist. And beyond Trump himself, many rank-and-file Republicans are shocking extremists; remember Nazis mingling openly at the 2024 CPAC conference, or those leaked text messages by young Republicans last fall (“I love Hitler”)?

It’s crystal clear in a factual sense which party is more radical today. The Democrats could elect two dozen socialists and they still wouldn’t be anywhere near as far left as the GOP has gone far right. Oh, and by the way: For all the media attention socialist candidates get when they win, it’s still a fact that on balance, mainstream and even centrist Democrats are winning more primaries this year. The Cook Political Report revealed over the weekend that in the 22 GOP-controlled congressional districts where Democrats have held primaries so far, 14 have been won by candidates with mainstream and centrist backing. Only four have been won by candidates backed by the Progressive Caucus. So in swing districts, Democratic voters are still mainly choosing the nominees they calculate have a better shot at winning such a district.

But we’re going to be hearing all about communists for the next four months. Trump is obviously trying to make the midterms a referendum on the Democratic Party and not on him. 

History tells us this rarely works. It didn’t work for him in 2018, when he was around 40 percent in the polls and tried to make the dreaded caravan headed toward the Rio Grande from Central America the central issue. And the economy was comparatively good then, unlike now, when a soaring stock market is benefitting the rich while most Americans continue to struggle with Trump-juiced inflation.

So Democrats, who tend to freak out about things, should not freak out about this. Sure, communism is a scary word, at least to people of a certain age and ideological bent. But I’d imagine very few people who aren’t dyed in the wool MAGA believe the Democratic Party is a bunch of communists. I hope that instead of lamely denying it and moving on to gas prices, they have the guts to fight fire with fire and point out to voters who the real extremists in this country are.

Ever since the Supreme Court upheld birthright citizenship in June, MAGA personalities have really gone off the rails. Many angrily started saying it’s time for the U.S. to find new ways to bar women from coming to this country and having babies. Some are talking about pregnancy tests upon arrival. Others are discussing the possibility of unleashing federal law enforcement on women suspected of pregnancy—and unnervingly, this includes the acting Attorney General. And as a Media Matters roundup shows, some are talking about truly crackpot ideas like forced sterilization. Talking Points Memo writer Sarah Posner sums it up well: “Will every woman now have to pee in cups at airports?” We talked to Posner, a scholar of Christian Nationalism and the religious right. We discuss how all this reflects a genuine and ambitious, if vile, vision for the country, why JD Vance may take up this cause in some form when his presidential run begins next year, and what it all says about MAGA’s deeper misogyny and darkening extreme nationalism. Listen to this episode here.

Survey Says is a weekly series rounding up the most important polling trends or data points you need to know about, plus a vibe check on a trend that’s driving politics or culture. Video gaming is getting more expensive, and two reviled entities hold much of the blame: President Donald Trump and the artificial intelligence industry. And such inflation is only bad news for the Republican…

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A cartoon by Jack Ohman. Related | Vance gets his ass whooped on ‘The View’…

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A warm, dry winter set the stage for an early and aggressive start to fire season. More fires are on the horizon. By Kiley Price for Inside Climate News After an exceptionally warm and dry winter, vast swaths of the Western United States are up in flames—and conditions could get worse. Several large fires are burning in Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Wyoming, Nevada and Utah.

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