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Luigi Mangione pleaded guilty on Friday to federal stalking charges in the 2024 killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Mangione, 28, entered the plea at a hastily scheduled hearing in Manhattan federal court, resolving one of two cases against him in connection with Thompson’s death. With this guilty plea, his lawyers could seek to have the state case thrown out on double jeopardy…

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Inside Washington

Mary Peltola is putting the “fish” back in kitchen table issues

Alaska Senate candidate Mary Peltola has a campaign slogan you don’t hear in other states: “Fish, Family, and Freedom.” The last two aren’t surprising. But “fish”?

Other Senate candidates this year are focusing on gas prices or health care costs. But to Peltola and many other Alaskans, fish are a crucial and overlooked policy issue touching everything from affordability to labor to the role of money in politics. Ahead of the primary on Tuesday, August 18, she’s been traveling around the state making her case. The top four candidates in the nonpartisan ranked-choice voting primary will advance to the November general election. Peltola is all but guaranteed to advance to the general.

Peltola’s main opponent is Republican incumbent Dan Sullivan, who is seeking a third term. Peltola faces an uphill battle in the red state, which hasn’t voted for a Democrat for president since 1964. But Peltola, who represented the state as its single Congressperson from 2022 to 2025, has outperformed other Alaskan Democrats—in 2024, she lost reelection to the House by fewer than three points, while President Donald Trump won the state by 13 points.

Recent polls show a competitive race. An early August Alaska Survey Research poll showed Peltola with 50.8 percent compared to Sullivan’s 49.2 percent in the final round of ranked-choice. A late June poll from The New York Times and Siena University has Sullivan with a two point lead in the initial round of ranked-choice, with five percent of respondents undecided. Both the Cook Political Report and Sabato’s Crystal Ball classify the race as a toss-up.

Peltola’s fish policy isn’t just about fish, her campaign says, but also the role of corporate spending in politics, Alaska Native sovereignty, and everyday bread-and-butter (fish-and-butter?) issues.

“As someone who grew up salmon fishing on the Kuskokwim River with my father, I know firsthand that fish is more than food—it’s central to Alaskans’ way of life,” Peltola said in a statement. “That’s why I will fight tooth and nail to restore our fisheries to abundance, and that means doing whatever it takes to ban factory trawling and reduce bycatch, deliver relief for Alaska fishermen and communities that are suffering the fallout of fishery collapse, and save our fish. I will stand up to anyone—including the factory trawling lobby and Lower 48 special interests—to fix the rigged system in D.C. and put Alaska first.”

Trawling—using nets pulled through the water to catch fish—is common in Alaska’s fisheries, but can have devastating consequences for the marine ecosystem. In 2026 so far, trawlers have caught nearly 22,000 Chinook salmon by accident in their nets—a side effect known as bycatch. Alaskans are two years into a seven-year fishing moratorium in the Yukon River to protect the fish population. Indigenous subsistence fishers say the ban harms their way of life, while large-scale trawling continues. A majority of likely Alaska voters support a ban on trawling and believe fishing should be limited to rural residents when the salmon population is low, according to a 2025 survey conducted by Data for Progress.

“Alaska is actually well known for having some of the best managed fisheries,” said Liz Nussbaumer, a program officer in the Seafood, Public Health, and Food Systems Project at Johns Hopkins University. Despite that, she said, Peltola’s proposed fisheries policies are welcomed by many, particularly in the deregulatory environment of the Trump administration.

Nussbaumer pointed to Peltola’s plans for fishery disaster funding (which helps keep fisheries stable after a natural or man-made disaster), a fish by-product economy (using fish waste produce for things like pet food and pharmaceuticals), and new monitoring technology to stop bycatch as the most innovative proposals on her platform. “It’s been a blind spot for fisheries and aquatic food systems, where terrestrial [agriculture] typically has had a lot of these protections, but fisheries have not, and especially smaller scale operations, these producers can be living paycheck to paycheck,” Nussbaumer said about disaster funding for fisheries.

Sullivan, meanwhile, has received nearly $280,000 from the trawling industry. One of his largest contributors is Trident Seafoods, which has a history of environmental violations. In 2011, the Department of Justice announced that the company would pay $2.5 million to resolve Clean Water Act violations. In 2018, Trident Seafoods was fined $300,000 for underwater piles of fish by-product near its processing facilities. This June, Sullivan introduced a bill to reduce bycatch, but experts say it was similar to a bill Peltola introduced during her time in the House, which Sullivan did not support.

Peltola’s plan to create a fish by-product economy could help reduce the waste created and dumped by companies like Trident Seafoods. But she also sees this waste as part of a larger story. “Whether it’s bycatch or broken promises from D.C. insiders, Alaskans can’t stand waste, fraud, or abuse,” her website reads. She’s called for 12-year term limits on members of Congress, overturning Citizens United, and banning lawmakers from trading stocks. It’s not directly about salmon. But it’s part of the same story that Peltola is hoping will resonate with voters.

—Emma Janssen

Outside Washington

Republican House Representative John James, currently competing against Democratic nominee and Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson in the race to replace Governor Gretchen Whitmer, has chosen his running mate, and it’s looking like he opted for an attack dog: State Representative Jay DeBoyer. DeBoyer was one of the Republicans spearheading Michigan House’s lawsuit against Benson last year to force the release of training materials for election officials—information that Benson claimed, if publicized, “would enable someone to interfere with the chain of custody of ballots, tamper with election equipment, or impersonate a clerk on Election Day.” DeBoyer also led an effort to hold her in contempt for failing to comply with a subpoena over this. Additionally, The Detroit Free Press’s Clara Hendrickson reports, “during a fiery exchange in a June 2025 committee hearing, he zeroed in on her violation of the state’s campaign law when she held a launch event for her campaign for governor in the building that houses her department’s offices.”

DeBoyer’s statement accompanying James’s announcement naming him to the lieutenant governor spot, Bridge Michigan reports, said that “Michiganders face a clear choice between socialism and a bold new direction rooted in freedom, opportunity, and prosperity.” Given that Benson is pretty moderate, this “socialism” reference may indicate that DeBoyer will try to use Democrat Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed (who also does not identify as a socialist, but is considerably more progressive than Benson) to argue that all Democrats are radicals.

—Heather Souvaine Horn

The Ideas Factory

A new report from State Futures, a nonprofit focused on state policy in response to “federal authoritarian overreach,” paints a vivid picture of life in the Trump era: So far in 2026, the report finds, lawmakers have introduced 242 bills in 32 states to try to protect residents in response to the administration’s immigration policies. Of these, 53 have passed. Two, notably, have been vetoed—one by Virginia Democratic Governor Abigail Spanberger, who said banning ICE from courthouses, schools, and hospitals “would effectively require security guards and, in some cases, local law enforcement be placed in the untenable position of choosing between violating state law or federal law.” The other veto came from Democratic Governor of Colorado Jared Polis, who said a bill allowing people to sue ICE agents for violating their rights contained overly narrow language.

The Open Markets Institute files an amicus brief in a case currently before the Tenth Circuit, “urging the court to reverse a lower court decision that shielded a no-hire agreement between grocery giants Kroger and Albertsons from antitrust liability.… Open Markets argues that the agreement deprived workers of one of their most important sources of leverage during a strike: the ability to seek employment with a competing unionized employer.”

Data for Progress released a new poll finding that “voters think they are more likely to become homeless than a millionaire or billionaire, and reject the idea that billionaires obtain their wealth through innovation and hard work, instead seeing them as exploitative and a sign of a dysfunctional, anti-working-class economy.” There’s impressive cross-party agreement on that: Not just 67 percent of Democrats, but 65 percent of Republicans say they’re more likely to become homeless than become a billionaire—interestingly, only 54 percent of independents or third-party respondents agree with that. They’re more likely than either Democrats or Republicans to say they “don’t know” or are “more likely to become a billionaire.”

—Heather Souvaine Horn

In Closing

Good Week: David Crowley

In a matter of days, Crowley went from trailing Francesca Hong in the polls by 18 points to narrowly beating her in the Democratic primary for Wisconsin governor.

Bad Week: Pollsters

Maybe voters really believed Hong wanted to cancel Thanksgiving. Maybe Crowley dropping out of the race then reentering it, or Mandela Barnes’s sudden exit in late July, scrambled things so badly that no survey stood a chance. But coming hard on the heels of Abdul El-Sayed’s much-closer-than-expected victory in Michigan, Midwest pollsters have been the target of a lot of quips this week.

Political Trivia Question of the Day

Who was the first ever Black Cabinet secretary? That’s a pretty tough one, so partial credit for naming the president who appointed him.

(Sign up for The Blue Book to find the answer in tomorrow’s newsletter.)

The question has popped up frequently in this election cycle. Even in the wins notched by left-leaning and socialist candidates, those candidates appear to have fared comparatively poorly among voters of the actual working class.

There aren’t exit polls in primaries, so we don’t know how voters without a college education—the typical proxy for working-class—cast their ballots. But we can still tell a lot from geography: Cities are liberal and on average more educated, rural areas the opposite; some counties are dominated by universities or colleges; and finally, we know the demographics of the bellwether swing counties in every state. So in the Michigan Democratic senatorial primary, Abdul El-Sayed did best in urban and diverse Grand Rapids (Kent County) and where the University of Michigan is (Washtenaw). Haley Stevens won Detroit, where she did a better job of connecting to Black voters, and she tended to win the rural counties. In the Wisconsin Democratic gubernatorial, David Crowley won Milwaukee and most of the rural counties, while Francesca Hong took the counties with universities and colleges.

Critics of the left like to sneer about this, saying it exposes a hypocrisy at the core of the current left resurgence—namely, that these candidates who claim to speak for the proletariat are doing a pretty lousy job of winning their votes. They’re obviously not wrong, factually. But I think they’re wrong, or mostly wrong, about why.

These critics tend to argue that these results prove that the new populist politics doesn’t appeal to actual working-class people, who are, in the critics’ telling, more moderate in their politics. Therefore the right way to appeal to these people is with sensible, moderate positions. They also often point out with no small amount of schadenfreude that the inability of people like El-Sayed and Hong—this was also true, according to the polls, of Maine’s Graham Platner, the Hotchkiss oysterman—to win working-class voters is proof of what out-of-touch elitists they really are.

Leftists shouldn’t delude themselves: There is some truth to the second point. There’s a long, long history here. In 1848, there were revolutions across Europe as citizens finally became restive enough about all those inbred monarchies to demand change. Initially, students and workers in Vienna, Prague, and other cities marched side by side. Before too long, however, divisions began to emerge. The students wanted things like political rights. The workers just wanted better factory conditions and more bread. Things didn’t end well in most places—like Paris, for example, where Napoleon’s nephew seized power and held it for more than two decades until he started a dumb war and the radical Paris Commune took over.

Today, we see the split in, say, certain aspects of the platform of the national Democratic Socialists of America. A national DSA co-chair has recently done two hugely embarrassing interviews, one with Fox News and the other with The New Yorker’s David Remnick, in which she touted prison abolition and border elimination and so on (and incredibly had no idea at what rate she would tax rich people). These are, to be sure, not ideas working-class people would get behind. They’re purely campus-left positions that aren’t going to get you very far in electoral politics.

The local DSA chapters, in contrast, are far more pragmatic. They emphasize housing and health care and economic things that actually matter in people’s lives. The difference between the more ideological national DSA and the more grounded local chapters was well and knowledgeably laid out by Nathan Newman in
a Substack post in early July.

But even that isn’t really the main reason why progressive candidates have trouble getting working-class votes. The main reason, in my view, is this.

Non-college working-class voters are more skeptical than more educated voters are. I say that not to praise or damn one group or the other. It’s just, I think, the reality. It stems from the fact, more glaringly true in this country with each successive generation, that for the educated class, things like opportunity and advancement and the confidence that one’s children will live better lives are far more real than they are for working-class people. Working-class people’s lives in these last couple of decades have just gotten much harder, inching ever closer to the precipice of job loss, default, indignity. Working-class people live in regular if not constant fear of these things. Educated people, in an economy that leans more and more toward rewarding them, do not.

Therefore, educated voters and non-college voters hear politicians’ promises through very different ears. To educated voters, big promises about government improving people’s lives sound great, or at least plausible. To non-college voters, those promises sound like just more empty talk. In fact, I would even go so far as to say that to non-college voters, the bigger the promise, the phonier it sounds. They hear promises about free health care for all, and they think yeah, right, that’s never gonna happen in this country. Their experience has taught them not to believe, and for the most part, you can’t blame them.

It’s true that it’s not fair that social democrats—and again, most of these candidates are really social democrats, not democratic socialists—should pay the electoral price for this. After all, it wasn’t they who’ve been screwing over the working class for four decades. But they’re stuck with the reality that the screwing has made working-class people extremely suspicious of those promising them big things.

So what’s the solution? Well, the only real solution is to win office in sufficient numbers to deliver on the promises to the point that working people do see genuine improvement in their material conditions. But that’s going to take a lot of time. A decade, maybe more.

In the meantime, I think the best progressive candidates can do is first and obviously, stay away from topics like prison abolition; but second and more importantly, really just explain things to working-class voters in a way that understands and assumes their skepticism. Aspirational rhetoric appeals to educated voters. To non-college voters, it just sounds like more fluff. Tell them, specifically and concretely, why their rent keeps going up, who’s doing it to them, and how you’re going to go after the people doing it. And explain clearly and specifically how your Republican opponent is on the side of the rent-raisers. Dot-connecting of that sort seems to me more likely to win working-class votes than lofty rhetoric and big promises.

This article first appeared in Fighting Words, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by editor Michael Tomasky. Sign up here.

Politicians from both parties are crossing the aisle to voice their opposition to President Trump’s bulldozing of Big Bend National Park to make way for more wall along the southern border.

Big Bend is a sprawling, 800,000 acre park within Texas’s Rio Grande Valley that’s been frequented by hikers and campers since it opened in 1944. The park is so beautiful and so significant that even the most pro-border conservatives are setting aside their views to defend it.

“I believe in border security 100%,” Terrell County Republican Sheriff and former Border Patrol agent Thaddeus Cleveland said to Fox San Antonio. “Believe in even installation of barriers where they’re needed. But I can tell you that specific area ... even just what they’ve done, unnecessary.”

The Trump administration has been bulldozing to place 17 miles barriers, surveillance, and sensors along the mouth of the Santa Elena Canyon. The plan was initially “a bold line of wall structure along the floodplain of most of the Rio Grande in the high desert region of Far West Texas,” as laid out in Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill. But that was shelved after local protest.

BREAKING: DHS IS BULLDOZING THE MOUTH OF SANTA ELENA CANYON.

DHS waived every single environmental law, now they’re butchering the most iconic part of Texas’ crown jewel national park. All happening the day after a massive protest right here and on the morning CNN left. This is… pic.twitter.com/GEc5YQEDxK

— Laiken Jordahl (@LaikenJordahl) August 13, 2026

Another thing both Democrats and Republicans agree on is that Big Bend’s mountains already function as a natural deterrent for migrants.

“My constituents believe that the 1,000-foot riverbank cliffs and remote Big Bend terrain offers its own source of deterrence for any illegal migrants crossing into the United States,” Republican Senator John Cornyn wrote in a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin last week. “Many residents that live and work around the parks are also concerned that a physical wall, which would be accompanied by lighting systems, access roads, and maintenance corridors, would (1) ruin the beauty, landscape, and wildlife of the park, (2) threaten culturally significant Native American sites, (3) disrupt wildlife migration, (4) limit access to the Rio Grande River, and (5) significantly harm the local economy as tourism is a major economic driver for the region.”

“God already built a wall through Big Bend — it’s called the Chisos Mountains,” Texas Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico added. “We don’t need to give billions of our tax dollars to out of state vendors. We don’t need to desecrate this sacred land. We don’t need this useless, disgraceful, corrupt Big Bend border wall.”

“We have an obligation to secure our border, but Big Bend’s rugged, unforgiving terrain already serves as a natural, God-given barrier that deters illegal crossings. The border crossing data already confirms this,” Texas Representative Drew Darby said. “The federal government has immediate access to smart barrier technologies that increase interdiction rates without bulldozing through Texas’ most scenic and irreplaceable landscapes. DHS can and should use these alternative methods and stop the bulldozing now.”

Republicans still seems to have a (Theodore) Rooseveltian sense of justice when it comes to National Parks and lands, which might cause problems for President Trump as he continues to attack America’s defining landscapes, removing protections from over 86 million acres of public lands to free it up for drilling and wall-building.

Donald Trump is once again freaking out about vandals at a national monument. Here’s why you shouldn’t take his outrage seriously.

The president took to Truth Social Friday morning to rave about an incident at the World War II Memorial, which had been covered in red and green graffiti and soapy bubbles.

“Our beautiful World War II Memorial was just hit by Spray Painting Vandals,” Trump wrote. “THERE CAN BE NO GREATER INSULT TO THOSE AMERICAN HEROES WHO DIED IN WORLD WAR II. First the Reflecting Pool, now this. We are on their trail! Where do these animals come from???”

Beneath the memorial’s arch, red graffiti spelled out the message “Clean hands dirty $,” and the memorial’s fountains were also filled with soapy bubbles.

Shortly after Trump’s post, U.S. Attorney Jeannine Pirro announced that one alleged vandal was already in custody, and included photographs of the suspect.

The Friends of the National World War II Memorial said it was “deeply disturbed by the reported vandalism,” and the Interior Department called the incident an “utter disgrace.”

While the recent vandalism is blatantly disrespectful to the memorial’s honorees and their families, Trump’s outrage is entirely disingenuous.

If anyone started a trend of “vandalism,” it was Trump and his hand-picked federal contractors. Not only were they responsible for the damage to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, but they left the monument drained and surrounded by chain-link fences. Trump’s federal contractors were also also responsible for cracking the fountain at the German-American Friendship Garden. Where is the president’s outrage about that?

Still, the president has used stories about alleged vandalism to stir up a frenzy of public outrage in order to antagonize his critics and increase surveillance in Washington, D.C. Notably, this high-profile vandalism has taken place more than a year after deploying the National Guard to literally clean up the nation’s capital.

If Trump wants to get personally involved in protecting America’s landmarks, maybe he should turn his attention to the bulldozers at Big Bend National Park—instead, he’s annoyed about graffiti.

President Donald Trump’s plan for moving Americans’ retirement investments into cryptocurrency and private equity got a boost of support—from dead people.   

The Department of Labor received public comments on the plan to fulfill Trump’s executive order pushing for the financial changes, and close to 12,000 of the comments, all in support, show signs of being fabricated, with several being attributed to people who aren’t alive. These comments don’t include email addresses, the commenter’s city and state, or signatures, Bloomberg reported Thursday. 

Bloomberg attempted to contact some of supporters on the list, many of whom had unique names identifiable through public records, and found people who say they never made the comments attributed to them, or were dead. One comment made in May and attributed to Danna Oderman was clearly fake, her son Heath Oderman told Bloomberg, not only because she died in December, but because “the language is nothing she would ever have used while on this Earth.”

Another May submission shows Lyngrid Rawlings supporting the president’s plan, but the educator and U.S. Foreign Service officer died in 2024, her daughter Lauren said to the publication. 

“It’s deeply disrespectful and dishonoring,” Lauren said. “Her life was about service, and to have her name misused in this way is the antithesis of everything she lived for.”

Living people also had comments falsely attributed to them, including Karl Gilberson, a retired Massachusetts professor, who said to Bloomberg that “those don’t reflect my sentiments, at all.” 

All of these comments followed just five templates and were submitted from April 29 to May 5. The names differed, but line breaks, length, and punctuation were all identical, according to Bloomberg’s findings. They also happen to make up the vast majority of supportive comments. In contrast, almost all 30,000 comments opposing the measure were spread out throughout the nine-week comment period and included differing language, email addresses, and signatures, as well as cities and states. 

The plan was submitted as a draft rule to the Employee Benefits Security Administration on March 31, and has support from the private equity industry as well as other private sector industries. It seems that some entity or person who really wants American retirement accounts diversified into the private sector decided to manufacture support. The Trump administration considers the measure a top priority, with acting Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling telling senators in July that “this is how President Trump is going to make America wealthy again.”

But, they don’t seem that concerned about fake comments. The Department of Labor’s “focus when reviewing a comment is on the substance of the comment and not on the identity of the commenter or the number of commenters making the same point,” a spokesperson told Bloomberg.

6 minutes agoWalter EinenkelThe GOP message on affordability? “trans stuff and allowing men in women’s sports.” Copy linkShare on FacebookShare on XShare via email 7 minutes agoWalter Einenkel“He’s a marginally failed real estate developer with multiple bankruptcies…” Sen. Mark Kelly has a message for warmongering Trump. Copy linkShare on FacebookShare on XShare via email 8 minutes agoEvan…

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Sometimes, MAGA voters actually do learn. Take Randy, who has undergone quite the evolution on his Facebook page. (Please don’t pile on with comments on his page.) Back in 2024, in between photos of him hunting, the Arkansas resident was posting stuff like this: Or this nugget, in September 2023: So, you know, a typical red-state deplorable. And come hell or…

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President Donald Trump is about to waste billions of dollars to put old-fashioned technology on aircraft carriers.

Trump signed a memorandum Thursday directing the U.S. Navy to start installing old-fashioned steam catapults on its aircraft carriers, instead of electromagnetic launchers, U.S. officials told The Wall Street Journal.

The memo directs the Navy to redesign the Doris Miller, the newest Gerald R. Ford class aircraft carrier, and all remaining ships. The first three ships, the Ford, John F. Kennedy, and Enterprise, will keep their electromagnetic system.

Trump has been ranting about “goddamn steam” catapults since 2017, suggesting that the Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System doesn’t work, while providing no evidence to support that claim. In January 2024, Trump baselessly claimed that magnets stop working when placed in water, and therefore were a stupid thing to put on a boat. In October 2025, he said he just loved the sight of “that beautiful steam pouring off the deck.”

As recently as last month, Trump called the electromagnetic launchers “not nearly as good, too complex.”

In reality, the Navy says that the electromagnetic launchers have allowed their Ford-class carriers to launch and recover aircraft at a higher rate than previous classes of ships. Additionally, the maintenance on steam catapults is considered labor intensive and costly, compared to newer models.

Trump’s long-standing grudge against electromagnetic launchers seems to stem from his frustration about the production of the USS Gerald R. Ford, which cost roughly $13 billion to make and experienced delays and cost overruns. There’s no reason to think its launchers don’t work, however.

In a statement, the White House said that steam catapults were more “resilient and robust,” and that the move would reactivate parts of the maritime industrial base that are “easier to scale.”

Trump has long pushed for this senseless redesign, but top Navy officials and industry leaders have resisted the move to tear out such a complex system integral to the design of the Ford class. Bryan Clark, a naval expert with the Hudson Institute, told the Journal that replacing the electromagnetic launchers with steam catapults would likely cost billions of dollars.

Trump is not an expert in military asset design—but that hasn’t stopped him from inserting himself in their development.

A high-profile heart doctor is raising concerns about the White House’s failure to fully disclose President Donald Trump’s health issues, and Trump’s team is lashing out in response instead of leveling with the public. Dr. Jonathan Reiner made his case in an op-ed published in the New York Times on Thursday. Reiner is a professor of medicine and surgery at George Washington University and…

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Fox News is not buying the Trump administration’s claims that the U.S. controls the Strait of Hormuz instead of Iran.

Secretary of Energy Chris Wright spoke to the network’s Bret Baier Thursday evening, and didn’t have a good answer when Baier asked him about the strait.

“Mr. Secretary, you can concede, can’t you, that the U.S. doesn’t have total control over the Strait of Hormuz?” Baier asked.

“Look, Iran is attempting to hold the world economy hostage and to terrorize their neighbors. They built up a giant arsenal. So are they causing difficulties in the region? Absolutely. But they have a losing strategy. At the end, that will lead to the collapse of this regime in Iran as their economy gets strangled,” Wright responded. “But are they causing some difficulties for their neighbors and the world economy? Absolutely. But their ability to cause difficulties are declining. Our ability to escort and bring products out of that region is growing. They have sort of one card and it’s shrinking in size.”

“That does not sound like total control,” Baier said.

Baier: Mr. Secretary, you can concede, can't you, that the U.S. doesn't have total control over the strait of hormuz?

Wright: Are they causing some difficulties for their neighbors and the world economy? Absolutely. But their ability to cause difficulties are declining.

Baier:… pic.twitter.com/iGBClwkNZx

— Acyn (@Acyn) August 13, 2026

At one point in the interview, Baier played a clip from November where Wright claimed energy prices would plummet. He then showed the secretary that energy costs were much higher now. Wright ignored Baier’s comparison, claiming that costs were down.

Bret Baier plays Wright a clip of himself from November 2025 saying there will be a downward trend in energy prices. Baier then shows Wright the current figures detailing the rise in energy prices. Wright responds by saying things are going in the right direction. 😬 pic.twitter.com/SILt2IwrGv

— Acyn (@Acyn) August 13, 2026

If Fox News is skeptical and willing to call out a Trump administration official, that suggests that the continued Iran war and its negative effects on the global economy are too big to ignore for conservatives. For months, gas prices have stayed high, and talks between Iran and the U.S. have yo-yoed between a peace deal and Donald Trump threatening to escalate the war, but pulling back at the last minute and raising concerns that he is manipulating markets.

If no deal is reached by November, the midterms will not go well for Trump and Republicans, and Democrats could retake Congress. They’d have the ability to end the conflict with a war powers resolution and investigate Trump’s market manipulation, as well as his mishandling of the battle with Iran.

By Paula Span for KFF Dennis Schmidt started smoking as a teenager, when that was so unexceptional that his Catholic high school designated outdoor “senior smoking quarters,” where students in their final year could take cigarette breaks. He smoked a pack of menthols daily for nearly 40 years. As a registered nurse at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center and a former Air…

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A cartoon by Jack Ohman. Related | Trump’s new ‘do raises hairy questions about his health…

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

Matthew LaPlante doesn’t have to go to a lab to see his research in action. On some mornings, he can just look out his own window in the mountains high above Salt Lake City. After a warm night when the temperature stays above freezing, he’ll wake up and see that the snow level has dropped by inches, revealing more of the aspens he taps for syrup.

“It feels like a monster came and just in the middle of the night, took a bite out of a snowpack,” said LaPlante, a journalist and climate scientist at Utah State University.

So it’s fitting that scientists have started calling these kinds of heat waves, marked by unusually high temperatures in the spring and early summer, “snow eaters.” 

LaPlante was part of a recent study, published in the journal Science Advances, that attempted, for the first time, to identify what conditions exactly make for a “snow eater.” Compared to normal warm spells or heat waves, the researchers determined that these events happen when temperatures stay above freezing through both day and night for multiple days, typically three to five. These events can roughly double the rate at which snow melts, causing flooding and making it challenging to manage water resources. 

“Snow eaters” appear to be occurring earlier in the year and becoming more widespread in the Western United States as the climate warms. Since the 1850s, the study found, the area affected by snow eaters has increased by an average of about 40,000 square miles per century, and the first snow eater of the season has been arriving about one month earlier per century. 

“Water that would otherwise be stored as snow comes out early, and then we have to deal with it as a hazard instead of a resource.”

The term “snow eater” has a murky history. By at least the 1880s, people in the West were talking about “snow-eating” chinooks, warm mountain winds that make snow disappear quickly. More recently, the phrase “snow-eater heat wave” first made headlines in March, when an early heat wave enveloped much of the West, quickly wiping away snowpack in the Colorado Rockies and California’s Sierra Nevada. The scientists hope the catchy, evocative term can help draw more attention to this type of heat wave, since there’s still a lot to learn. The study only looked at the Western US, but snow eater heat waves almost assuredly occur elsewhere, LaPlante said.

Solar radiation is a major, but sometimes overlooked, driver of snowmelt, said Noah Molotch, a professor of geography at the University of Colorado Boulder who was not involved in the new study. When it interacts with heat waves, those impacts are amplified. As snow crystals warm up, they lose some of their structure and light-reflecting abilities, causing snowpacks to absorb more sunlight and melt faster. “It’s a little bit of a—no pun intended—a snowball effect,” he said.

Much of the Western U.S. saw record-low snowpack this spring. What was really unusual about it, Molotch said, was how widespread it was. Colorado received less precipitation than normal this winter, while California got lots of precipitation, but in the form of rain instead of snow. But across the region, “the one thing in common was above-average air temperatures,” Molotch said.

These conditions have likely helped fuel exceptionally severe wildfires in the West, from Utah to Spokane, Washington, where hundreds of homes burned earlier this month. “Drought stress for mountain forests around the Western US is heavily dictated by the snow that accumulates each winter and then melts through the spring and summer,” Molotch said. “There is a direct connection there in terms of the water availability and drought stress that can provide one of the important ingredients for increases in wildfire intensity and frequency.”

Source: Emma Tyrrell/CU Boulder/National Interagency Fire CenterSachi Kitajima Mulkey/Grist

If scientists are able to better predict what will happen to snowpack, it could help water managers plan for what’s coming. Early or rapid snowmelt poses problems for managing water resources in the West, where snowpack serves as a key source of fresh water in the drier summer months. “Water that would otherwise be stored as snow comes out early, and then we have to deal with it as a hazard instead of a resource at our reservoirs and along the rivers and streams,” said Ben Hatchett, a co-author on the study and a scientist at Colorado State University’s Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere.

Snow-eater heat waves also may pose risks to skiers, hikers, and anyone else on or near mountains. They could be linked to hazards such as avalanches, glacial collapses, and permafrost melt, Hatchett said, though scientists are still investigating those connections. He lives in the Sierra Nevada, and he’s noticed one tangible change over his lifetime: The soundscape has changed.

“At night, it used to be quiet,” he said. “And now it’s not quiet, because everything’s melting all the time.”

It seems extremely unlikely that accused rapists and sex traffickers Andrew and Tristan Tate will be released from Miami’s federal detention center, where they’re being held. For one thing, the brothers are awaiting extradition to the United Kingdom to face sprawling charges related to sex trafficking, rape, assault, and indecent images of a child, and the Trump administration has declined to step in. For another, as government prosecutors laid out in a filing opposing pre-trial release earlier this week, there is something of a flight risk, given that Andrew Tate previously used an alter-ego Twitter account to brag about being, in his words, “above the law” and “hard to kill,” as well as having of four or five passports and nine drivers’ licenses in several names. “I have had warrants out for my arrest and travelled freely,” @OfWudan, an account linked to Tate, tweeted in 2019. “I am smarter than you. I am Steven Seagal. I am above the law.” (Tristan Tate, according to the prosecutors’ filing, is similarly alleged by UK authorities to have a Mexican passport bearing his photo and date of birth, but with the name “Vladimir Scorpius,” a James Bond villain.) 

The mountain impeding the Tates’ pretrial release, then, is extremely high, but Joseph McBride is determined to climb it. McBride, a New York attorney representing both brothers, has launched an aggressive, quixotic, and highly public quest to free the Tates and promote a positive image of the two men. He’s using several tools to do so, including podcasting (both on his own, entitled Judgment Day, and through appearances on others’ shows), intense media engagement, a rally outside the jail, verbose tweeting, and, most unusually of all, a flood of AI-generated images released on X and Instagram.

The conditions Andrew and Tristan Tate are being held in are a disgrace.

Small filthy cell.
Cockroaches.
Shower water to drink.
No chair.
Lights they cannot control.

Food that makes Taco Bell look like a Michelin restaurant.

Beds too small for men who are 6’3” and 6’5”.

Three… pic.twitter.com/gVZC0zwyI6

— Joe McBride (@McBrideLawNYC) July 28, 2026

The faked images typically show the Tates manfully bearing their suffering in the clink: meditating in orange jumpsuits together atop a bunk, for instance, or dually staring at the viewer from inside a filthy cell. He also shared a striking image of the Tates sitting around a table with prominent men from across the historical spectrum—from Joe Rogan back through George Washington, with his tricorn hat looming oddly behind his head—accompanied by a lengthy caption on the importance of masculinity. It begins with a claim that the “manosphere built Western society.” 

McBride, who previously represented a series of January 6 defendants, describes himself on social media as a “traditional Catholic Warrior” and a “Defender of American Patriots, The Constitution, and Andrew & Tristan Tate.” (Besides the extradition case, he’s also representing the Tates in a Florida defamation lawsuit they are waging against one of their accusers.) McBride has cast the cases against the brothers as an attack by “the system”—a term that the Tates also use—due to their purported advocacy for men. 

“His message is male empowerment,” McBride tweeted in May, referring to Andrew Tate. “The system cannot control strong men. That is why he is public enemy number one. Escape the Matrix.” This week, McBride told podcaster Michael Malice that he fears the Tates will be “Epsteined” in jail, by which he meant murdered. 

“Strategically, a picture is worth 1,000 words,” claims the Tates’ lawyer.

In an email, McBride told me the allegations in the government’s filing opposing the Tates’ release are false. “On Monday, the government filed a brief that drips with falsehood from every page. Our reply will be filed on or before August 21, and it will answer that brief lie by lie and line by line, on paper, with documents,” he wrote. “Every claim in the government’s filing,” he added, “will be tested against the record.” 

McBride was less eager to discuss the AI images of the Tates he’s been posting—there have been at least nine since July—and declined to disclose what image generating tool was used to construct the memes. “This is my favorite question,” he told me. “Two men who are convicted of nothing, on any continent, in any court, are sitting in solitary confinement at the request of a foreign government that has not even filed its extradition papers, and Mother Jones wants to know what software their lawyer uses to make pictures. You found the scandal, Ms. Merlan. It is not the unconvicted men in the SHU. It is the memes. When you are ready to ask a question about the Constitution, you know how to find me.”

I did not ask a question about the Constitution—I couldn’t think of a relevant one at the moment—but in a followup email, McBride clarified that the AI-generated images are part of his overall plan to represent the Tates. “Strategically, a picture is worth 1,000 words,” he told me. 

McBride outside Miami’s federal courthouse in July.Joe Raedle/Getty

McBride also said that despite the previous tweets from the @OfWudan account, Andrew Tate does not consider himself to be above the law. “No one is above the law, and no one is beneath its protection,” he wrote. “Andrew Tate is convicted of nothing and charged with no American crime. The government is quoting tweets in a federal court filing. That tells you everything you need to know about the strength of its case.” 

The Tates are, as New Yorker reporter Heidi Blake laid out in a lengthy June investigation, intensely politically connected, with fans in Trump’s administration and family, including Donald Trump Jr. and Barron Trump. Blake’s piece describes McBride himself as “a star in MAGA circles, dining at Mar-a-Lago and befriending Donald Trump, Jr.” (The two were photographed together at a 2022 New York Young Republican Club gala.)

Yet those political connections haven’t served them particularly well lately; in his emails, McBride decried the “gutless pussies” in Congress, as he put it, who have privately voiced fandom for the Tates but haven’t spoken up in their defense. 

“Many members of Congress have, at different places and times, privately expressed their disapproval of the allegations against Andrew and Tristan Tate,” McBride wrote. “They have also asked for social media advice, messages for their kids, and have asked to take photos with the brothers. Andrew and Tristan give of their time freely. There was never an ask or expectation of anything in return. I am simply voicing my displeasure with their predictable silence regarding speaking out against injustice during times where courage is needed.” 

For now, the Tates remain in the Miami facility’s special housing unit, separate from the general population. Andrew’s X account continues to proclaim the brothers’ innocence and protest their jail conditions. Neither McBride nor anyone else connected with the Tates have disclosed how he’s tweeting from jail, or who else may be posting on his behalf. The government, meanwhile, has said in their filings that the Tates are being held in the SHU for their own protection, that conditions at the jail are reasonable, and that the brothers have been accorded things other SHU inmates are not, including joint meetings with their lawyers and access to the commissary. To drive the point home, the prosecutors included a receipt detailing the brothers’ purchases of ramen, coffee, Doritos, and Twix. 

A hearing on their pretrial release motion is scheduled for August 27.

The plane was stuck on the tarmac of a Louisiana airport, but Yurin Quiroa Ralda, 21, was not particularly eager to take off. He was being deported, based in part on misinterpreted records. And not to his birthplace, Guatemala, but to Ecuador, where he’d never even been.

That alone was a nightmare, but Yurin’s situation was even more frustrating: After he’d crossed the US-Mexico border alone at age 16, the US government told him that if he waited patiently, he could apply for a green card because he had Special Immigrant Juvenile status, a classification reserved for kids who were abused, abandoned, or neglected by a parent. Congress created SIJ status in 1990, to give these kids a pathway to legal permanent residency so they wouldn’t have to go back to families that harmed them. Yurin, whose dad had abandoned him before he was born, had followed the rules and waited—and he’d recently became eligible to apply for a green card. Yet here he was on a plane bound for Ecuador.

A judge in a similar case cited the administration’s “reprehensible act of unimaginable cruelty,” noting, “Unquestionably, the laws of human decency condemn such villainy.”

Thousands of kids with SIJ status live in the United States, though many have grown into young adults. Like Yurin, whom I wasn’t able to interview directly for this story, they’ve spent years on waitlists because the government has a cap on visas that it can issue each year. While they waited, the Biden administration gave them deferred action, a designation that temporarily shields a person from deportation and allows them to work. But despite this safeguard, President Trump’s immigration officers detained about 400 people with SIJ status and deported 132 of them during his first year back in office, according to Department of Homeland Security (DHS) data shared with Congress.

These kids were told, “‘You should stay here; here’s your protection,” says Molly Huffaker, an attorney who represents Yurin at the Michigan Immigrant Rights Center. “All they’ve gotten is a broken promise,” adds Ellie Norton, an attorney at the National Immigration Project who focuses on SIJ cases.

The Trump administration officially ended Biden’s policy for SIJ youth in June 2025, saying it would no longer offer deferred action to people on the government waitlists. A court blocked that move on the grounds that DHS hadn’t jumped through the necessary bureaucratic hoops. The administration tried again in April (a lawsuit against its second attempt is ongoing), emphasizing that the restrictions would only apply to new cases, and that people who already had deferred action, like Yurin, could keep their status.

Yet Trump’s immigration officers are detaining those young men and women anyway, says Rachel Davidson, who directs the End SIJS Backlog Coalition at the National Immigration Project, which helped file the aforementioned lawsuit. “If the courts are going to impede [DHS] on a systemic level from terminating the policy writ large,” she told me, “then what they’re doing is going after young people individually, one by one.”

Yurin’s nightmare began last November, when local law enforcement pulled over his cousin for speeding in West Virginia. Yurin, a passenger, had an immigration background that should have helped him: He’d gotten SIJ status because his dad had abandoned him and his mom in Guatemala, leaving them financially insecure and facing eviction. He had to drop out of school at age 12 to work construction. He arrived in the United States in 2021, fleeing gang violence and seeking asylum. Most recently, he’d lived in Michigan with relatives and in Maryland, taking English classes and dreaming of becoming a mechanic.

The cops called ICE, which shipped him to a detention center in Pennsylvania hundreds of miles away. For months, he was trapped in bureaucratic hell: The legal status he’d obtained seemed meaningless, and deferred action wasn’t enough to get him out of detention. And though there was good news on the horizon—he would become eligible to apply for a green card in March, after years of waiting—a judge ordered him deported in February.

When his attorneys pushed back, the judge said—confusingly—that he couldn’t budge because Yurin had a criminal record. Three years earlier, when he was 18, he’d gotten into a car accident while driving his cousin’s kids to school and wound up with a misdemeanor. He’d allegedly rear-ended someone and then run a stop sign, whereupon another car hit him, injuring the kids. His relatively minor offense—a moving violation resulting in physical injury—didn’t affect his SIJ status, according to his attorneys.

But immigration officials were now claiming he had four assault charges from the same year. Yurin insisted he had no idea what they were talking about. His attorney, Molly Huffaker, reached out to the relevant police department for clarification and requested records of the alleged incident, but nobody responded.

I recently obtained those records, along with records from the county sheriff and local prosecutors. It’s now clear that federal officials either mischaracterized or misunderstood the situation, or that they had bad documentation. On August 12, 2023, the same day they claimed four assault charges were filed against him, Yurin had reported to the jail for booking on four initial charges related to the car accident. None of them involved assault, and he was never charged with assault in the police records I obtained. In other words, Yurin was being blamed for a crime that never happened.

“It’s devastating that that mischaracterization may be the only reason he was detained and deported,” his attorney Huffaker told me after I showed her the records. She says a witness at the scene of his arrest in West Virginia overheard the officers say they were specifically detaining Yurin for his “assault record.”

In April, stuck in detention with his deportation looming, Yurin filed a habeas corpus petition arguing that his incarceration was unlawful because he had deferred action. The court dismissed his petition on a technicality—federal law says that anyone with a final deportation order is subject to mandatory detention for 90 days, and he was still within that 90-day window; he could resubmit his petition when the window ended June 11.

If only.

Less than a week before June 11, the administration terminated Yurin’s deferred action. This was always a possibility. Deferred action is a temporary protection and the government has discretion to end it on a case by case basis, typically if a person’s circumstances change significantly and they’re no longer eligible for SIJ. But the timing, so long after his alleged criminal offenses and his arrest by ICE, and just days before he could refile his habeas petition, seemed suspicious.

Yurin’s attorneys accused the administration of retaliating against him for pursuing habeas claims, in violation of his First Amendment rights as well as his Fifth Amendment right to due process. Its actions in this case were hardly a one-off, according to the National Immigration Project: “It’s an unwritten practice,” says attorney Norton.

In March, a federal judge in New York slammed the administration for doing something similar to Garcia Lanza, a 24-year-old from Honduras who came to the country at age 9, graduated magna cum laude from the New York City College of Technology, and had no criminal record. US District Judge Gary Brown described the termination of Lanza’s deferred action as “seemingly retaliatory”: It appeared the government was trying to “rationalize his illegal arrest and detention,” he wrote, calling the termination a “reprehensible act of unimaginable cruelty.”

“He cannot understand why the same government that once granted him protection is now trying to send him to a foreign country.”

“This isn’t how things are supposed to work in America,” the judge wrote. “Unquestionably, the laws of human decency condemn such villainy.” He reinstated Lanza’s deferred action.

That precedent might have helped Yurin. Unfortunately, the jurist overseeing his case in Louisiana, US District Judge Jerry Edwards Jr., paid more attention to a less favorable ruling in Tennessee that essentially says people don’t have due process rights when it comes to discretionary benefits like deferred action. On that basis, Edwards declined to reinstate Yurin’s deferred action, writing that the government “owed him no notice or opportunity to be heard before terminating it.”

“It’s so sad and problematic,” attorney Norton says of the ruling. These young immigrants “followed all the rules and did everything right—they were on the path to lawful status, and the government promised them that unlike when they were let down by their parents, someone was going to protect them and cared about what was best for them. It’s difficult for them to be in detention and not understand what they did wrong and what they did to deserve that.”

DHS defended its decision. “Special Immigrant Juvenile classification or providing a path to a Green Card does NOT confer lawful status,” a department spokesperson told me. “This is standard procedure and there is nothing retaliatory about enforcing the nation’s immigration laws. Yurin was afforded due process before the Executive Office for Immigration Review.”

The DHS spokesperson emphasized Yurin’s alleged assault history. When I showed them the records indicating that the assault never happened, they declined to comment other than referring me to the local police department and adding that Yurin would have been eligible for deportation anyway. The spokesperson also said that “hundreds of suspected and confirmed adult gang members” were let into the country under the SIJ program, and that the program is “infected with fraud and abuses.” A DHS report last year made similar claims and accused people of lying to receive the status.

Before his deportation, Yurin’s attorneys begged the court to reconsider. The judge had opted to send him to Ecuador because his asylum application said Guatemala was too dangerous. The attorneys pointed out that he had no status in Ecuador, had never been there, and knew nobody. “He cannot understand why the same government that once granted him protection,” they had written earlier, “is now trying to send him to a foreign country.”

The judge held firm, and on June 11, seven months after he was detained, Yurin boarded the plane in Louisiana. It was not what he wanted, but he figured at least his bureaucratic hell might finally be over.

Or not.

As he waited for the plane to take off, an officer approached and told him to get up. He would not be going to Ecuador after all. (Huffaker, his attorney, isn’t sure why, but notes that sending someone to a country where they have no history is more difficult and requires certain paperwork.)

Yurin called his cousins the next day to let them know he was still in the United States. Then the family lost touch with him. Huffaker reached out to all the government contacts she could think of to ask where he was.

Almost a week later, he called his cousins again—from Guatemala.

Soon after, ICE reached out to Huffaker with an offer: The agency admitted that Guatemala was not listed on Yurin’s official removal order; he should not have been sent there. So if he wanted, they would bring him back to the United States.

But there was a caveat: If Yurin agreed to return, the agency said, they would keep him in detention until they found a way to deport him again. The nightmare would continue.

Huffaker hasn’t had the opportunity to relay the offer, in any case. She hasn’t been able to reach Yurin since he was shipped back to Guatemala.

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the August 14 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

After we recorded, new Fox polls found Dems up eight in Ohio and down four in Michigan.

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

This week, Fox News released a poll showing Democrat Troy Jackson up two points over Susan Collins in Maine. Even more strikingly, Trump is more than 20 points underwater in the state. So we went back and looked at the summer’s Fox polls, and it turns out they’re some of the very worst for Trump of all. He’s deeply underwater in many states he won. This comes as two new forecasts have Dems narrowly favored to win the Senate.

And it also comes as new reporting suggests Trump and his advisors don’t understand how they got to this point. So do Dems really have a shot at the Senate? To parse this question, we’re talking to Democratic strategist Caitlin Legacki, who’s worked on a lot of Senate races. Caitlin, thanks for coming on.

Caitlin Legacki: Thanks for having me.

Sargent: So if you go back through four recent Fox polls of Senate races, here are the top lines. In Maine, Troy Jackson edges Senator Susan Collins by 48 to 46. In Texas, Democrat James Talarico is up on Ken Paxton by 51 to 48. In North Carolina, Roy Cooper is sizably ahead of Republican Michael Whatley by 53 to 44. And in Iowa, Josh Turek is up over Ashley Hinson by 50 to 46.

Caitlin, all of those, with the possible exception of North Carolina, are very close. And I will say, I doubt Roy Cooper’s that far ahead in North Carolina. In your experience, how good a position is this for Democrats given the timing, and what do you make of those numbers?

Legacki: Our friends at the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee could not, I think, be in a better position than they are right now. This is an extremely difficult map for Democrats. So to be leading, even if only within the margin of error, in all of these states, it’s an incredible sign that the Senate is within reach.

But I think, to your point, there’s a lot of things that have to go right between now and November for that to happen. And I think that while everyone is doing all of the right things, we certainly cannot take it for granted.

Sargent: Well, I’ll say, I really think that all these Senate races are on a knife’s edge, with the possible exception of North Carolina and Georgia, which is one we didn’t talk about the numbers on. But the main event in these Fox polls is Trump’s dismal favorability ratings. Let’s go through them.

In Maine, it’s 39 to 60. That’s 21 points underwater. In Texas, it’s 45 to 54, nine points underwater in Texas. In North Carolina, it’s 40 to 59, 19 points underwater in North Carolina. And in Iowa, it’s 42 to 55, which is 13 points underwater. Trump won three of those states, two by double digits. I don’t know what to make of numbers like this. What do you make of them?

Legacki: A lot of folks said that they voted against Democrats in 2024 because they were dissatisfied with the Biden administration’s approach to inflation and reducing costs. And Trump campaigned on promises to bring costs down on day one. And I think when you look back at the last two years, almost every single thing he’s done has actually increased costs—whether it’s unnecessary tariffs on allies like Canada, or, you know, needlessly bombing Iran and shutting down the Strait of Hormuz, which has caused some of the highest gas prices we’ve seen in decades. Every single thing he’s done has been like a heat-seeking missile to increase prices on American families. And I think that that’s a huge factor in the dissatisfaction you’re seeing with his job performance.

Sargent: How big do you think Iran is in this? My basic sense is that Iran is playing a huge role in Trump’s low approval ratings. It really symbolizes so many things about the failures of this presidency, and it’s yet another example of a direct link between his own pathological craziness and his policies and high costs on Americans. Do you think Iran is central to the equation here?

Legacki: A hundred percent, I do. I mean one of the most glaring, I think, signifiers of cost and inflation that American families have is the price of gas at the pump. And so every single day, when people are commuting to work and having to fill up their car, they’re seeing five dollars a gallon, six dollars a gallon in some places. And that’s—first of all, it’s frustrating on its own, but it’s doubly so when everyone knows that this was a war of choice.

And so I think part of the reason you’re seeing Democrats doing well and Republicans doing so poorly in a lot of these historically conservative states is because there’s just so much frustration with the way that he’s popping off, as it were, and doing these things needlessly, and refusing to change direction or change course. It just, it drives people crazy.

Sargent: I think also the war is a big reason that the Senate is at risk for Republicans, because voters implicitly understand that Congress has just basically turned a blind eye and essentially given Trump this blank check for this insane adventure he’s on. The war is hitting people with higher costs, it’s creating the impression that Trump is completely lost and rudderless as a leader.

And The Atlantic reports that Trump has “furiously” told aides that Iran is acting in bad faith in these negotiations. Yet, according to The Atlantic, his aides are privately showing him all this data that supposedly shows that if he just bides his time, Iran’s economy will ultimately cause them to surrender: Sir, sir, absolutely, you’re doing the right thing by doing nothing!

So they’re basically telling him right now that doing nothing is a very smart plan, really shrewd on his part. And you can kind of see that manifesting itself in Trump constantly saying things like, “I’ve got nothing but time.” And it’s like, behind the scenes, Republican Senate strategists must be tearing their hair out.

Legacki: I think this speaks, at a macro level, to the dangers of having a president who surrounds himself with yes-men. During the first Trump administration, at least, there were people around him that were willing to get fired from their jobs in order to try to tell him the truth. In the second administration, it’s all sycophants. And what that means is, like, we know he’s being given bad data.

We know people are using that to push their personal political agendas. And the people that are suffering most are American families, and then the families that are being bombed in Iran and elsewhere, simply because, you know, we kind of have a sucker for a president right now.

But the other problem that Republicans in the Senate are dealing with is, you know, the main argument for Susan Collins to get reelected is that she has been a Republican check on Trump. But in all of these instances, you see kind of like this scenario where Republican senators stand up to Trump, they delay something, but then ultimately they fold.

Sargent: Yeah, well, let’s talk about independents for a second, because I think for independents, the failure of Republican senators to stand up to Trump is really critical. In Maine, in the Fox polling, Trump’s favorable rating with independents is 23 to 73. In Texas, it’s 18 to 78. I’m not kidding, those are the numbers. In North Carolina, 24 to 74. In Iowa, 24 to 67.

Again, that’s with independents, in states that Trump mostly won. I just don’t know what to make of that. He’s around fifty points underwater with independents in three of those, a bit less in the fourth. Those numbers just seem too terrible for Trump to be real. What do you think?

Legacki: Yeah, I think that to some degree they are real. But where I agree with you is that they’re not necessarily going to be Democratic voters. And I think that a lot of those independents are just fed up with both parties right now. And so the impetus on Democratic candidates is to stand up to Trump and show how they’re going to be able to be a check and a balance on him.

But then also to show voters how they’re going to do things differently, and how they’re going to stand up to the Democratic leadership in a way that, I think restores some common sense to D.C. And you know, I think that the biggest mistake Democrats can make right now is to conflate the dissatisfaction with Trump as a mandate for Democrats or for Democratic policies, without us actually, like, getting into office and showing that that trust is earned.

Sargent: I think there’s maybe a realistic way to understand these numbers, in keeping with what you’re saying, which is: Trump is in absolutely terrible shape with the electorate, and with the middle of the electorate as well. Like, these numbers with independents are just absolutely awful. But that doesn’t necessarily mean Democrats win them in the numbers that they ultimately need.

And so maybe the way to think about this is, if there’s a way for Democrats to win the Senate this time, it’s in those numbers. In other words, there really is a very real opportunity here to win the Senate in numbers like those. It’s just a matter of converting just enough independents into Democratic voters to make it happen. What do you think of all that?

Legacki: I think that’s exactly right. And I think this goes to the heart of a debate that has been waging within the Democratic Party for the last few presidential elections, where there is a fundamental question of: is it more important to excite and turn out our base, or is it more important to moderate a little bit in an effort to win over those independent voters? And obviously, you know, it’s a balancing act, because we need our base voters to turn out, right? But we also need to win enough of those independents in order to get over the finish line.

And so I think, you know, part of the reason that folks were freaking out about Francesca Hong, and were less enthusiastic about Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, is just that, you know, if we run too far to the left, we run the risk of losing seats that are otherwise winnable. And so I think we have to be very mindful that nothing is a given here. And all of these races, as strong as Democrats’ position is right now—all of these races are extremely losable for us, as much as they are winnable.

Sargent: They are. They are on a knife’s edge, I think, as I said earlier. Let’s talk about the overall map for a sec. I think if Abdul El-Sayed hadn’t won in Michigan, we might feel even a little bit better right now. I think Abdul can get there. I really do. It seems like he wants to win, and it seems like he’s taking the steps necessary to moderate and mend fences in the party and so forth. And it’s going to be a very good year for Democrats. That’s probably enough to get him there.

Democrats need to flip four seats, though, and a lot of those races are very close. We had another poll just out of Texas that had Talarico down one, unfortunately. And so the Fox numbers are encouraging, but they aren’t the whole story. What’s your sense of the whole map? Where do you see the strong spots, and where do you see the weak spots?

Legacki: Yeah, so I think you’re exactly right about Michigan. I think Michigan is still very winnable. It’s just going to cost Democrats more money in terms of outside spending and investment to get there. The strongest spots that I see here are North Carolina and Georgia. I think the bright spots are really Iowa, Texas, and Alaska.

I’d also just mention, as it relates to Maine, both Alaska and Maine have ranked-choice voting. So I think that that adds a wrinkle that makes me a little bit more bullish on Democrats picking up that Alaska seat than otherwise I would be. And then, you know, somehow in all of this, Sherrod Brown in Ohio gets forgotten a lot. And I think, as red as Ohio has gotten in recent years, he’s running a really strong campaign. It’s very local. It’s focused a lot on issues related to data centers. And I think that he’s kind of the sleeper to get us over the finish line.

Sargent: Let’s just assume for now that Georgia is almost certainly going to stay in the Democratic camp. And let’s just also assume that North Carolina Democrats are going to win there. It really does look like Roy Cooper’s going to win. Michael Whatley’s challenge just doesn’t appear strong enough, and Roy Cooper’s well liked in the state and so forth. So that means Democrats have to flip three out of Ohio, Maine, Texas, and Alaska.

There was a time when I would have felt better about Maine than I do now. I think Troy Jackson really doesn’t appear to me to be a strong candidate yet. Maybe he can kind of grow into it, I hope, as you say, that he sort of codes for voters as a generic Dem. I don’t know if that’ll happen, but I really hope so. If you had to pick right now, which three out of Ohio, Maine, Texas, and Alaska would you say Democrats are going to win, if they are?

Legacki: Alaska, Ohio, and Maine. And I actually have a very different take than you do on Maine.

Sargent: OK.

Legacki: Which is that—and part of the reason that I was more in favor of Janet Mills than I was of Graham Platner—is that the worst-case scenario for Susan Collins running this campaign is that it is a referendum on her and whether or not she has been an appropriate check on Donald Trump.

The Graham Platner campaign obviously came with a lot of baggage that would have allowed her to make, I think, the story more about him. And it would have allowed her to make this election more of a choice. I think—having been in this position myself, working for Claire McCaskill in 2012—the worst possible person for Susan Collins to run against is a generic Democrat, right?

And so even if he’s not the world’s strongest campaigner, I think that if he and, like, Democratic outside groups are able to make the Maine election a referendum on Susan Collins and Donald Trump, there’s a very good chance we win there.

Sargent: All right, so you’re thinking Texas is probably the one that’s less likely to flip out of those four.

Legacki: Yeah. And it’s not meant to be any sort of knock on Talarico. He’s running a great campaign, he’s doing everything he needs to. It’s just that Texas is such a big state, it is so expensive to run there. I think it is just inherently the hardest of the three states to win in.

Sargent: Yeah, I think that’s right. And Ohio is going to be really tough, though, let’s face it. I mean, this is a state that Trump won by a very sizable margin in 2024. And I think Alaska is something everybody’s sleeping on in a way. But it does seem possible. It does seem like Sherrod Brown is running a strong enough campaign, and the numbers are bad enough for Trump in red states, that make a pickup in Ohio actually possible.

So you can see a path through the races that you just identified, and it basically goes something like this: Sherrod Brown runs a strong campaign all the way through, and Trump’s terrible numbers just make it possible to eke it out. Troy Jackson runs a generically Democratic campaign in Maine, and they manage to turn it into a referendum on Susan Collins and Donald Trump. And Alaska happens without anybody looking, right?

Legacki: Honestly, it might. And the thing about Ohio that I think people are sleeping on a little bit is that you’ve got both a governor’s race and a Senate race this year. And on the governor side, they’ve got Amy Acton versus Vivek Ramaswamy. Acton is also running a great campaign. Ramaswamy is also running a terrible campaign.

And so I think increasingly it’s hard to see any scenarios in which Republican voters in Ohio are excited about turning out and Democratic voters are unenthusiastic. And so I think those factors lend themselves to kind of a perfect storm in Ohio, of Democrats eking one out there.

Sargent: Well, we have two new forecasts that pretty much bear out what we’re saying in this conversation. The Fifty Plus One forecast has Dems very narrowly favored to retake the Senate, at 55 percent probability. Nate Silver’s new forecast has it at 57 percent. I will tell you, I look at those numbers, Caitlin, and I say to myself, well, OK, I am right to think that everything’s on a knife’s edge here. Like, at first you look at the numbers and you say, OK, well, we’re favored. But, you know, those are incredibly, incredibly close odds, and everything could just flip like that.

Legacki: Yeah, it’s a coin flip. And I think the thing that nobody is really talking about or focused on is the fact that Republican Party committees and outside groups have about twice as much money as Democrats. And you know, Democrats are raising a ton of money, the campaigns are outraising their Republican opponents. But when you’re looking at a disparity of about six hundred and fifty million to three seventy-five, or whatever Democrats have, that’s a big difference. And I think that that is something that right now is the one thing that Democrats aren’t crushing. And that could be the difference-maker.

Sargent: It absolutely could. You can see in the fundraising appeals from some of these candidates that they really see that as well.

Well, Caitlin, let’s close on the comic relief here. It has to do with Iran, and I think this really underscores the degree to which Trump’s terrible numbers and Republicans’ difficult spot is rooted in the Iran war, as well as a few other related things. Michele Tafoya, the Republican candidate for Senate, had this to say about prices and the Iran war. Listen.

Michele Tafoya (voiceover): I think right now, at least, just kind of keeping a stiff upper lip. Maybe you take one less trip to Starbucks, and so that gas goes a little further until this thing is over and these gas prices come back down again. Let’s just try to be patriots about this

Sargent: Well, Caitlin, there you have it. I think what that actually shows is that these Republican candidates all have one other big liability, which is they’re not allowed to seek any distance from Trump. They have to defend everything he does as absolutely perfect, to the point where they actually have to say, “Screw you,” to the voters, in order to sustain their hagiography for Trump.

Legacki: I haven’t seen “suck it up” as a winning message before, but you never know.

Sargent: You never know. Caitlin Legacki, it was really awesome to talk to you. Thanks so much for coming on.

Legacki: Thanks for having me.

Twenty years ago, a blue wave washed across the country, as favorable political conditions allowed Democrats to earn majorities in both chambers of Congress and gain control of several governors’ mansions. Their success was spurred by voter frustration with the second term of Republican President George W. Bush and his unpopular war in the Middle East, as well as concerns over the economy and rising energy costs.

It’s a story that today’s Democrats would love to rerun, and which Republicans fear to repeat. On the surface, the conditions seem similar: President Donald Trump’s approval ratings are nearly 20 points underwater; the national average for the price of gas is more than $4 per gallon; and the war in Iran is little liked by the public.

But it’s unlikely that Democrats will see the kind of blue wave they experienced two decades ago, even with favorable conditions. In 2006, Democrats netted six new Senate seats and gained 31 seats in the House of Representatives. It’s hard to imagine such a sweeping victory this November, in part because there are fewer competitive swing seats than there have been in elections past.

In the House, this is partially due to partisan gerrymandering of congressional districts. Republicans are particularly skilled in this arena: According to the Cook Political Report, there was a 70 percent drop in swing seats in states with GOP redistricting control between 1997 and 2023. These fights have only become more rabid, with a slate of states undertaking mid-decade redistricting efforts in response to urgings from Trump—a practice recently empowered by the Supreme Court’s decision diluting the power of racial minority voters.

“Redistricting was a factor in our elections 20 years ago, but the parties have gotten better at drawing the lines, and have reduced the number of seats that are reasonably within reach for for each party,” said Nathan Gonzales, the editor and publisher of Inside Elections, a nonpartisan election analysis site.

But there is also an increasingly large gulf between the two parties on the ideological spectrum, and blue-state Republicans and red-state Democrats are less likely to be elected on a federal level. Members of Congress are voting in line further to the left or the right than they have been in previous years. And even though fewer voters are identifying themselves as either Democrats or Republicans, they are also less willing to consider a candidate from the party they ideologically oppose.

“Today the parties want to build very different worlds, and in 2006 they wanted to build worlds that were different, but not as different as they are today,” said Lynn Vavreck, a political science and communications professor at UCLA. “In 2006, if you were a voter who didn’t have a strong party allegiance, you were better able to entertain a vote for one side or the other side.”

In 2026, however, a Democratic-leaning voter casting a ballot for a Republican candidate would signal support for Trump’s most controversial policies, such as the surge of Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers in blue cities. Conversely, a more conservative voter who might have been able to swallow their dislike of Democrats in 2006 to express their displeasure with the war in Iraq might be less likely to do so today.

“The parties are far apart and it’s harder for voters to swing, and that might limit the losses, and that’s really the reason that nobody is really predicting a 31 seat swing in 2026,” said Vavreck.

In 2006, Democrats’ dramatic victories were in part the result of a “snowball effect” in seemingly unrelated issues with Republicans turned into political poison, including a series of scandals that plagued GOP members of Congress—resulting in the resignation of four members of Congress leading up to the 2006 elections, and the reelection losses of another three. Similarly, accusations of sexual harassment and assault have upended some House races this year, and domestic violence allegations against Representative Max Miller have put his seat in play for Democrats. (Serious accusations against prominent politicians this year are not limited to Republicans: California gubernatorial candidate Eric Swalwell and Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner both ended their campaigns after being accused of rape.)

Even if some Democratic candidates have flaws that on the surface make them weaker candidates, it’s possible that the frustration with the president and Republicans will bubble over at the ballot box, as it did in 2006.

“There were Republicans in 2006 who were excited about the opposition research that they had on Democratic candidates, but voters weren’t willing to listen,” said Gonzales. “Those attack messages were falling flat because voters were determined that change was more important.”

Howard Dean, the former governor of Vermont who served as chair of the Democratic National Party during 2006 elections, believes that Trump will be an even greater drag on the Republican Party in 2026 than President George W. Bush was 20 years ago. Trump’s election in 2024 was a sign of how voters wanted change “in the worst way,” argued Dean, but now he believes many have buyer’s remorse.

“I think it’s not so much that people want to change to the Democrats. It’s just that they’re very unhappy with the status quo. It’s gotten worse, not better, since Trump has been president,” said Dean.

Even without Trump’s relative unpopularity, Republicans would be facing unfavorable political conditions this year. The president’s party typically does poorly in the first midterm elections after he enters office. Of the nine Senate elections that are considered to be competitive this year, three are held by Democrats, and the remaining six by Republicans. Democrats have a solid chance of flipping Senate seats in North Carolina, Alaska, Maine, Ohio, Iowa, and Texas. Many analysts give Democrats even better odds of gaining control of the House.

It’s an open question whether these headwinds will benefit Democrats on the state level. In 2006, the blue wave didn’t just apply to the chambers of Congress, but to statehouses as well. Before the midterm elections, there were 22 Democratic governors and 28 Republicans; afterwards, those numbers were reversed. Democrats also won 300 state legislative seats across the country that year.

But where voters wanted to send a message on their displeasure with American involvement in Iraq in 2006, the frustration with the war in Iran is more connected to cost-of-living issues. Preelection polling in 2006 found that the Iraq war was the top issue for voters, whereas recent polling has shown that the state of the economy is the priority for voters ahead of this November’s election. There are warning signs for Republicans today about Trump’s handling of the economy. According to a Politico poll, 41 percent of Trump voters who do not identify with the MAGA movement believe the rising cost of living is Trump’s biggest failure.

Republicans have often tried to capitalize on the “culture war” issues of a given era, and in this cycle, they are working to tie Democrats to socialism, particularly given the success of progressive candidates such as Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan. Whether those attacks stick could determine the behavior of voters in the very few remaining swing states.

“If voters are focused on the economy, inflation, cost of living, then Democrats are going to do very well. But if voters are focused on the Democratic Socialists of America and socialism, and whether they like socialism or not, then Republicans are going to do well and maybe hold on to both the House and the Senate,” said Gonzales.

In the first episode of Hulu’s mesmerizing new detective series, Furious, Nora Washington (Quincy Tyler Bernstine), the head of the FBI’s sex crimes unit, relates the story of Medusa to a young agent. The monster with snakes for hair who can turn men to stone with a glance, Medusa was not always that way. Medusa was raped by Poseidon in Athena’s temple, and Athena, deeming this Medusa’s fault, transformed her into the monster we know. It’s an apt tale to serve as prologue to a detective series about a female serial killer tracking down all the men who’ve wronged her, but it also resonates with the women who are hunting her. “Victims of violence are the most violent,” Nora says. “Don’t you think so?”

Alice Black (Emmy Rossum), the young agent listening to Nora’s story, was formerly a Brooklyn homicide detective in an abusive relationship with Marshall (Jake Lacy), a colleague in the precinct and her childhood sweetheart. On one occasion, he beat her so badly she ended up in the hospital. She told her commanding officer, and rumors spread, but the department did not reprimand or discipline Marshall; instead Alice was shunned as disloyal, as a liar. Doubly traumatized by the abuse and by the department’s rejection of her, Alice has started a new life as a fed, aspiring to become an agent for the sex crimes unit.

When she and Marshall cross paths on a case—they’re working a PD-FBI collaboration on a string of murders—he is apologetic, cowed, even meek in his interactions with her. He invites her to come see his sick mother. He seems, to all outward appearances, like a good guy. She agrees, but the sentimental scene quickly turns sour. His mother berates Alice for lying to try to ruin her son’s career, and Alice storms to the door. “She just wants to know that I’m gonna be okay,” Marshall pleads in the soft, chastened tones we’ve come to expect from him, “and she wants you to know that I’ve changed.” Alice, enraged, replies, “You changed things? What’d you change? You got a new coat? What? You got new pants? New haircut?”

And then Marshall really does change. “Please stop for a second,” he whisper-shouts. His hands raise to the sides of his head, his fingers tensed, grabbing air. “Stop making jokes!” Things unravel from there, Marshall’s pretense of friendly détente vanishes, he chases her, she pulls a gun on him. He tried to play it cool, but in that moment, Alice saw, and we saw, the truth. He wanted to hit her. Furious, one of the best new shows of the year, is about what it’s like to be one of the women who make men like Marshall so angry. And what kind of rage lies in them.

Furious, created by Elizabeth Meriwether, is about the systems through which men abuse women and girls, as well as the systems through which they get away with it. Sometimes those systems are occult bureaucracies and complicated conspiracies, but often, we see, there’s really no system at all but the patriarchy. The villainous men of this show—domestic abusers, biased bosses, sex traffickers, dirty lawyers—get away with their crimes by being bold enough to commit them in the first place, and they rely on the reflexive fear or complacency or even sympathy of their witnesses to protect them. It’s a world in which it’s perfectly natural for a man’s desires and impulses to put him afoul of the law, but unnatural for a woman to try to hold him accountable.

Furious is about the systems through which men abuse women and girls, as well as the systems through which they get away with it.

At the center of the show, though, are three women who are ready to try. There’s Alice, abused, brilliant, but struggling through both her PTSD and the stigma she still carries, even at a new agency, to be taken seriously. There’s Nora, her reluctant mentor, whose career has been held back by workplace sexism, workplace racism, and the aforementioned systems that prevent her from ever really truly getting to the bad guys. “You think you’re ever gonna catch anyone who matters,” she asks Alice, by way of welcoming her to the profession.

Alice and Nora find each other in pursuit of a third wronged woman. In the show’s opening scenes, we see a man—an heir to the wealthy Easton family—obviously drugged and hurt, desperately crawling through his hallway. He is quickly subdued by a diminutive, even cheery, young woman with violent bangs and a sequined shoulder bag. As he lays in agony on his staircase, she injects him with what we eventually learn is a fatal dose of fentanyl. But she snuggles up beside him as he breathes his last. Gazing into his eyes, her brow furrows. “I don’t really like listening to you,” she confides to him, and then his eyes glaze over.

As Alice quickly surmises, Easton’s murder is not an isolated event. He is, instead, the second in what will soon be a line of men, all killed in the same way by the same woman. That emergent serial killer is Catherine Grace (Lola Petticrew). She was trafficked as a child, raped and abused by countless men, and now, she’s methodically wiping out her abusers, specifically the ones she thinks are connected to the death of her childhood friend. We spend as much time onscreen with her as we do our law enforcement leads, and one of the show’s most obvious, but most subtly performed tricks, is getting us to understand the three of them as allies, despite their cat-and-mouse antagonism. Neither Alice nor Nora represents or even ever fully wields the power of their institutions; Catherine is never the real villain.

Furious is the third show Elizabeth Meriwether has created in the past four years, following 2022’s The Dropout and 2025’s Dying for Sex. All three series, to start, are ten times funnier than they have any right to be. For as ghastly as Furious can be, it’s filled with actors who have intuitive comic timing, and characters who make each other laugh. When Alice admits to Nora that she hooks up with men and asks them to get violent with her, Nora says, “You think I’ve never asked someone to smack me around a little in the throes of a passionate embrace? You think I’ve never let someone take a few whacks at this piñata?” Both of them laugh. The fifth episode of the show—alternating between Alice’s tense undercover operation and Danny’s slapstick interrogation of Catherine’s friend and possible fiancé Alden—is equal parts Silence of the Lambs and The Pink Panther. When Danny tells Alden that he suspects Catherine may have murdered his mother, Alden replies, “Nobody’s perfect.”

As ghastly as Furious can be, it’s filled with actors who have intuitive comic timing, and characters who make each other laugh.

Furious also shares with The Dropout and Dying for Sex a common focus on the unruly, even contradictory feelings of underestimated women. And, in that, it is committed to a patient and unwavering focus on the texture of their experience. Nora sings Meat Loaf at karaoke; Catherine preps for murder by bedazzling pictures of her victims and dancing around in her room to Rihanna’s “We Found Love.” The shows are not just about what happens to these women, but what it feels like, how it happens to them as particular, eccentric individuals. Each series is an improvised dance between these women in extremis and the faceless institutions—Silicon Valley, the health care industry, the justice system—to which they are either invisible or a nuisance.

None of that would matter, though, if Meriwether didn’t have the genius for casting that she has. Amanda Seyfried, Michelle Williams, and Jenny Slate have all delivered career-best performances under her care. In Furious, there is, likewise, an embarrassment of riches: prestige TV veteran Emmy Rossum, stage actor and award-winning audiobook narrator Quincy Tyler Bernstine, and ferocious up-and-coming Irish actor Lola Petticrew. Each performance is so tenderly crafted and full of life—not one of these actors takes the available route of stoic gloom, the path of any number of raincoat-bedecked traumatized detectives and murderers before them. Abuse, violence, inequity have made these women strange, unpredictable, unable to play along and conform to the world around them. And that makes them spellbinding to watch onscreen—three weird sisters.

Furious is about the inescapability of bad guys and the labor the women—and decent men—around them have to perform in order to counterbalance or even appease them. It’s not enough that they’re there, it’s that they need things from the people they are most likely to abuse or exploit. A recurring theme of the series is men asking our three heroines things that make them uncomfortable. Nora’s supervisor asks her to drop a case to protect a powerful friend; Marshall asks Alice to call the lieutenant and tell him that the abuse allegations are lies; Marshall asks Alice to get back together; as she’s seducing one of her targets, he asks Catherine to sign an NDA. Even the “good” guys can’t help it: Both Alice and Catherine receive lovelorn proposals from their male friends (Scoot McNairy and Steve Way, respectively) at, or near, their lowest moments. Malevolent, dismissive, oblivious.

The obvious comparison for Furious is Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Killing Eve, another series about a fucked-up female friendship plot between a cop and a murderer. But Furious is not a violent romance between two women on opposite sides of the law. The comparison that feels more apt is The Wire. Both shows are interested in the ways all parties concerned are caught up in the hypocrisy of a law enforcement bureaucracy that can’t—or perhaps is not even designed to—enforce the law. Both live inside that structural disappointment. Alice and Nora work quickly and competently to solve their case but are stymied by buffoonishness and corruption at every turn; Catherine knows that becoming a serial killer is the only way for her to extract justice for herself or her friend. Good intentions are the decadent luxury of the few agents who aren’t primarily concerned with covering their own asses—it’s easy to see why Alice and Nora might find kinship with Catherine, another woman whose intentions and interiority don’t matter in even the slightest bit to those with power over them. It is, to say the least, infuriating.

The effort to relitigate the social and political earthquake of 2020 is undergoing yet another hopefully brief revival. Back in May, New York City Councilmember Chi Ossé quipped on X: “Woke 1 was crazyyyy.” Last Sunday, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez repeated Osse’s maybe-joking comment on ABC’s “This Week,” in seeming agreement, amid a slew of questions about a new, allegedly radical, wave of Democratic candidates, and whether “the movement”—the unignorable rebellion against the power of police—had gone “too far.” The congresswoman didn’t cut through the charges; she seemed to entertain them. Her elevation of “Woke One” set off a cascade of debate: “If Woke 1.0 is in the past, when did it die?” the New York Times asked in a pithyish explainer; “The Democrats Can’t Just Laugh Off ‘Woke 1,’” declared The Atlantic this week. Implicit in all this was a patronizing threat, and it made no sense: Repudiate your 2020 positions, which no reasonable person would vote for, even though you’re also winning right now. And it started with a weak joke on a bad website. This convoluted mess of content and campaigning was cursed from the start.

As in earlier iterations, the latest round of demands to repudiate all things (smeared as) “woke” is best understood as a desire to delegitimize opposition, brought about by a real challenge: the left building power. This time, that challenge arises from a few meaningful electoral victories by democratic socialists and their allies, which, going into the midterms and the next presidential election, have activated those who see their job in politics as protecting the Democratic Party from itself.  Rather than enter head-on into a legitimate political struggle with the candidates to their left, rather than have a fight over substantive differences, some Democrats have instead decided to pin their problems on the rhetorical—hence the turn on “woke.” What started as shitposting—“woke 1.0” etc.—is being used as a tool with which to discipline the left. It is depressing to see elected officials who have benefited from this leftward shift, including AOC, indulge that nonsense.

Those wielding this tool, engaging in what we are condemned to nonsensically call “anti-wokeism,” are using “woke” mostly as a way of casting anyone challenging their power as being outside reasonable debate, as illegitimate. Dismissing “woke” is a way of dismissing those people, without wading into the dirty work of explaining in public that you consider them your lessers, as beneath consideration. In that regard, this is not so much a backlash as a revival. The origins of “woke” as a descriptor and where it came from help make that plain.

When Blues legend Huddie Ledbetter, also known as Lead Belly, was recorded performing his extensive repertoire in 1938, he closed one song with an advisory to Black people going south: “Stay woke, keep your eyes open.” The song, “Scottsboro Boys,” was inspired by the unjust criminal punishment of a group of Black teenagers and young men, who were falsely accused of raping two young white women and were sentenced to death—a case still unfolding when Ledbetter gave that advisory. Alabamans at the time considered the case a sign of their advancement: after all, they held trials, not lynchings. Scottsboro is synonymous with the ways white supremacy structures and reinforces the criminal legal system in the United States. Ledbetter himself had faced and survived prison, in part through his music. All this is what prompted Ledbetter’s warning, 90 years before the same forces were, as in Scottsboro, exposed for the world to see, after police stole the lives Breonna Taylor and George Floyd. 

I do not expect anyone to remember that history, especially when the anti-woke turn relies on deliberately misrepresenting very recent history, one that its proponents lived and worked through. But if Woke 1 is whatever we say it is, it may as well be Scottsboro and Lead Belly’s song.

The anti-woke are pointing at something real, but the crisis is inside their own heads. They keep revisiting allegedly crazyyyy things people said in 2020—but not what actually happened in 2020. Neither are they are interested in whether negative consequences, if any, occurred as a result of this pandemic of people stating their beliefs.

My colleague Perry Bacon has astutely corrected the record: “There is no such thing as Woke One, and it would be almost impossible to define such a time, era, or set of positions.” Those stirred by current events to recite a litany of “woke” sins tend to turn to the same few examples as evidence of how the left went “too far,” but the demand to abolish the police is always on the list.

It’s true: That demand was made. So where did those abolished officers wind up? They’re still out there, still killing Black people, and now making way for ICE to abduct immigrants. Fine, fine, cops weren’t abolished—but they were defunded, right? Well, where, exactly? A number of cities pledged to cut police funding; most of them ultimately increased police budgets. A 2025 study of nearly 300 major U.S. cities found that in Republican-dominated cities, police funding significantly increased after the protests in 2020. Police were not fully defunded anywhere—or, at least not anywhere outside the anti-woke imagination. 

So what did happen? A dam broke, and the routine police murder of Black people mobilized some white people, and that multiracial mobilization was scary to other white people. There was a groundswell of popular support for abolitionist projects, inspiring new connections between abolition and other social movements. For a moment, the summer of 2020 made people consider whether policing could ever keep us safe. The ongoing anti-woke revival is, in truth, an effort to make sure none of that ever happens again.

Each time the anti-woke crowd revive themselves, it is not because anything was stolen from them, but because they feel as if someone has challenged their presumed ownership. This is, as ever, an expression of white power, in particular an expression of its fears that it is losing its historical dominance. That is what happened in 2020. It is not complicated, even as it takes on other forms. It is MAGA crowds holding mass-produced signs reading “mass deportations now.” It is endless iterations of the same conspiracy theories about non-white usurpers and invaders stealing elections. It is Southern white prosecutors in Scottsboro.

“Woke” remains a live target across the political spectrum because white dominance is, too. It is sad to see the same refrain play out in 2026, when, far from having succeeded to “excess,” the movement was denied most of what it demanded, by Republicans and Democrats alike, who now insist that the movement did win. Why would they want to rewrite events to grant their opposition a win? Well, why bother saying you stand for something, when you might be told you have to stand for something else later? It is safer to campaign in opposition to what was never achieved; then you need only win in the mind. It is safer to fight a phantom. As the movement reminded us in 2020, there is no shortage of ghosts.