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The average price per gallon of gas in the United States climbed back over $4 on Wednesday, according to data from GasBuddy, as the wars in Iran and Ukraine continue to wreak havoc on energy prices. That is the highest price gas has been at this point in the year, according to GasBuddy gas price tracker Patrick De Haan, who in a post on X said, “the national average has never been above $4/

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It looks like White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt was finally honest about something.

In a lengthy statement on X Wednesday, Leavitt confirmed that she would be leaving the White House at the end of the month and included two photos of her with President Donald Trump.

Soon after, the internet started claiming that one of the photographs appeared to have been edited with AI. The Daily Beast reported that Leavitt had been “busted” for using AI to alter her image. The publication even produced a graphic showing all the ways she’d touched up her appearance, “slimmed” her waist, “enhanced” her chest, and “volumized” her hair.

But for once, Leavitt was telling the truth. The contested photograph was taken by Anna Moneymaker outside of the White House on July 15, 2025. It can be found on Getty Images in all of its original glory.

So, Leavitt’s photograph isn’t a lie—but you know what is? Everything else she said during her time as fascism’s mouthpiece.

For example: Leavitt parroted a fake story about Trump blocking $50 million worth of condoms to Gaza. She played along with claims that a deadly aircraft collision that killed 67 people had been caused by “DEI.” She called the Epstein files a “Democratic hoax.” She played defense for Trump’s mysterious bruises. She claimed that the Democratic Party’s main constituency was “Hamas terrorists, illegal aliens, and violent criminals.” And much, much more.

So long, Leavitt. It’s been real. Not literally, obviously, but you know what I mean.

Intelligence officials didn’t have a lot of confidence that Iran threatened to assassinate President Donald Trump after a NATO summit in Turkey last month. 

The Washington Post reported Wednesday evening that the CIA was skeptical of reports of a threat, which were relayed by Israeli intelligence and led to Trump hiding in a catering truck to be moved to an alternate military aircraft, which then flew him out of Turkey. An unnamed official told the Post that the reports were deemed “Israeli-derived, not U.S.-generated, and viewed as low confidence.” 

Trump was originally going to fly out of Turkey aboard his new Air Force One, a Boeing 747 plane gifted to him by Qatar. But amid apparent concerns that the plane wasn’t fitted with sufficient security measures, Trump first switched to a second, older Air Force One jet before secretly leaving that plane aboard the catering truck, which took him to a military plane that flew him out with select aides. 

Despite the CIA’s doubts about the nature of the threat, the White House decided not to take any chances, leaving the media and key staff, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, aboard the older Air Force One plane. Meanwhile, Trump was on the military jet unbeknownst to the public and even some senior administration officials. 

One former official told the Post that some U.S. intelligence officials think Israel shared the plot against Trump with them not to inform the president, but to try and influence his decisions over U.S. policy and the war in Iran.  

It “fit a broader pattern of Israeli intelligence reporting that some officials see as designed as much to shape presidential decision-making as to inform it,” that former official told the publication, adding that Rubio was briefed on the intelligence behind the threat but decided to stay on the older Air Force One plane anyway, even though that plane was ostensibly in more danger.  

“I am very curious about the extent to which the Israeli-provided intelligence was not only credible but independently verifiable,” Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen told the Post. “I have no doubt that Iran would like to see the president gone, but this all seems a little fantastical.”

Historian Sheri Berman on the links between declining democracy, neoliberal economics and what’s driving radicalization on the right and left, By Kelly Candaele for Capital & Main Democracy is facing an uncertain future in the United States as President Donald Trump continues to spread baseless claims that our voting system is “rigged.” Historian Sheri Berman writes in her new book…

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Please join the team that makes it possible for your friendly neighborhood comic strip Tom the Dancing Bug to exist in this hostile Trumpverse! JOIN US FOR 2026 IN THE INNER HIVE, and be the first kid on your block to get each week’s Tom the Dancing Bug comic – before it’s published anywhere. * Sign up for the free weekly newsletter, The Tom the Dancing Bug Review! Not nearly as good as…

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This story was co-published with The 74, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on education in America. Sign up for their early learning Substack.

A few years ago, Eric Gil was living at his uncle’s place in Waterbury, Connecticut, where he shared a bedroom with his brother and cousin. With eight people in the house, it was crowded. 

He was trying to get out, but rental prices in Waterbury—which currently average $1,600 a month—were prohibitively expensive. Housing costs in New Haven, where he works as an assistant preschool teacher at Friends Center for Children, a nonprofit early care and education program, were even higher.

“I was looking everywhere,” Gil recalled. “It was out of my budget. It was like, for monthly rent, 40 percent of my monthly income. It was outrageous, basically.”

He and other early childhood educators are among the lowest paid professionals in the United States, often earning less than dog walkers. But short of a complete overhaul of the current early care and education system, that seems unlikely to change anytime soon. 

Thus, Gil remained in his uncle’s house, with a long daily commute to his teaching job and no clear way out. That is, until Friends Center offered him an opportunity to move into his own place just minutes away from his job—for free—through its teacher housing initiative, which covers the full cost of housing for select staff.

Friends Center, a high-quality early learning program with four locations across New Haven, currently employs 47 teachers, many of whom are in situations that resemble Gil’s. On their salaries, the area’s housing costs have left many of them in less-than-desirable living arrangements. 

It’s an issue that Friends Center has been trying to solve for years. Back in 2019, the organization wanted to get to the root of the problem and raise salaries, said CEO Allyx Schiavone. But after months of trying to figure out how to budget for salary increases, Schiavone realized they couldn’t cover them without more public funding or raising tuition for families. 

So they tried to do the next best thing and reduce what was overwhelmingly the biggest expense for employees. 

“At that moment,” Schiavone said, “we decided, as an organization, we were going to tackle that: We were going to figure out how to give teachers free housing.”

The teacher housing initiative formally kicked off in 2020, when the first teacher moved into a three-family home. Today, 10 teachers, including Gil, live in free housing provided by Friends Center, with two more slated to move in this fall. The nonprofit has set a goal of housing 30% of its growing teaching staff by 2028, which Schiavone said it is on track to do; the center expects to double its housing inventory over the next three years.

As the teacher housing initiative scales up in New Haven, the work is catching on elsewhere too. Early childhood educators in Missouri, Michigan and Georgia are also getting free housing now, with inspiration and support from leaders at Friends Center. 

Friends Center for Children kicked off its teacher housing initiative in 2020, when a single teacher with three young kids moved into a three-family home. Courtesy of Friends Center for Children

When the initiative began, the first two properties—a three-family home and a single-family home—were donated to Friends Center, creating four housing units for staff members. In addition to donated properties, Friends Center also has a partnership with Yale School of Architecture, in which college students design and construct about one home per year for an early childhood educator. All the properties involved in the initiative are owned by Friends Center, making the organization both the landlord and employer of all teacher residents.

The benefit of free housing can be a game-changer for teachers. In Connecticut, early childhood educators earn, on average, about $31,000 per year, according to the most recent data from the Early Childhood Workforce Index, and the median rent in the state is about $24,000 per year, according to Zillow.

Friends Center pays its staff well above the state average, Schiavone said, but it’s still “not a livable wage.” 

When the organization decided to provide free housing to its teachers, it intentionally started with those who needed it most—typically the lowest-income earners with dependents. 

The first tenant, housed in 2020, was a single mom of three children under age 7. The next year, another single mother, Paris Pierce, moved into a single-family home with her young children. Both homes were purchased by donors for Friends Center. 

Pierce said she loves the charms that come with her old house, like the stained-glass windows. She loves all the natural light that floods in, too, and the fact that her kids—now ages 4, 8 and 14—have more room than before. 

Paris Pierce, a single mom with three children, is among the 10 teachers at Friends Center who currently live in free housing.Courtesy of Friends Center for Children

Gil moved into Friends Center housing about two years ago. He lives in a home that was built by students through the Yale University partnership. 

The Yale houses are worth about $750,000, and Friends Center is getting them for about $300,000. These homes are all constructed on one large property that was donated to the housing initiative. Today, five Friends Center teachers live as neighbors in that area, which is known as “the Village” and is about a five-minute walk from the program where most of them work. 

Gil lives with one of his teaching colleagues. They share a kitchen, but otherwise have separate spaces throughout the house, which Gil said is very spacious with “huge, beautiful” windows—his favorite part of his new residence. The two colleagues have since become friends, Gil said; they often read, watch movies, play video games and work out together. 

Every teacher who receives free housing meets monthly with a financial coach to help them set and reach goals. How much do they want to be saving each month? How can they improve their credit scores? 

Pierce said her goal is to save money, and already she’s been able to put her two older children in extracurricular activities—dance for her daughter and soccer for her son—that she wasn’t able to afford before. Pierce recently enrolled in a program to earn her bachelor’s degree so she can become a lead teacher. 

“I can show up being my best self, not worrying about making ends meet. I can pursue other things.”

The free housing, Pierce said, has made her a better mother and a better teacher. 

“I can show up being my best self, not worrying about making ends meet. I can pursue other things,” she said. “Children pick up on everything, [so] me being able to show up and be my best self is a great feeling.”

Through a partnership with the nearby Yale School of Architecture, many Friends Center teachers now live as neighbors in homes built by Yale students, in an area known as “the Village.” Courtesy of Friends Center for Children

It didn’t take long for word of the housing initiative to travel far. Many early care and education programs across the country heard about Friends Center’s approach and wanted to learn more. Since 2020, more than 1,000 visitors have traveled to New Haven to see it for themselves, and some have taken their observations back home and begun to act. 

Leaders at Urban Sprouts, a nonprofit early learning program in St. Louis, visited Friends Center in August 2025. They thought it was a clever approach to the teacher shortage in the field, even if it wasn’t directly remedying the issue of teachers being “woefully underpaid,” said Joey Saunders, chief of strategy and advancement at Urban Sprouts. 

Urban Sprouts, which serves about 130 children from birth to age 5 at a single location, launched a pilot program this year to provide free housing to staff in a model that closely aligns with Friends Center’s. Program leaders identified two teachers for the first two houses in its pilot. 

Zarina Militello, an infant-toddler teacher at Urban Sprouts, moved into a two-bedroom house in April. Urban Sprouts, with the help of some partner organizations, had furnished every room in the space except her bedroom. “Everything down to kitchen utensils was provided,” she said. “It was very, very nice.”

Militello had been living with her parents and younger brothers until the move earlier this year. The average cost of a studio apartment in University City, the neighborhood in St. Louis where the center is located, is between $1,400 and $1,600 per month, Saunders said. Militello preferred to save money by living with her parents over spending most of her paycheck on rent, especially with student loans hanging over her. But she was commuting 45 minutes each way, often arriving to work late, and spending way too much of her income on gas, she said. 

Now, living in employer housing, she can walk to work in about 5 minutes—and is showing up on time every day. 

Jenyne Woodruff, a longtime pre-K teacher at Urban Sprouts, learned in June that the center had purchased a three-bedroom house for her, her daughter and her granddaughter. Seeing the house for the first time, she was very emotional. When she moved in earlier this summer, it became the first time in her entire life that she’s had her own bedroom. Even in the rental property she just left, which she shared with her daughter and granddaughter, Woodruff didn’t have a room with a door—and for that she was paying about $1,700 per month. 

Zarina Militello, an infant-toddler teacher at Urban Sprouts, became the first teacher in her center to receive free employer housing when she moved into a two-bedroom home in April.Courtesy of Urban Sprouts Jenyne Woodruff, a pre-K teacher at Urban Sprouts, was among the first staff members selected for the center’s free housing. Courtesy of Urban Sprouts

“It is a literal dream come true,” she said of the new house. “It has been rough. I’ve been on my own since I was 19 years old. It’s been a struggle. When I walked in [to my new house], I just felt like it was my home. I am very grateful.”

“It is a literal dream come true.”

In Battle Creek, Michigan, a group of seven community partners has come together to form First Home, First Teacher, an initiative that aims to provide rent-free housing as a salaried benefit to 30 percent of the area’s childcare workforce over the next 20 years.

Battle Creek, with a population of 55,000, lacks a large center-based early care and education provider like Friends Center, said Kathy Szenda Wilson, co-executive director of Pulse, an initiative of the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research focused on improving early childhood development in Michigan. (Pulse is one of the groups that helped design and launch  the First Home, First Teacher initiative.) Instead, Battle Creek has lots of small programs. By her count, there are about 550 employees across 34 center-based programs in the city. 

The model builds on an earlier community effort to provide short-term rental assistance to childcare workers during and after the pandemic. “From that, at least we know the ground is tilled,” said Szenda Wilson. 

After traveling to Connecticut and seeing what Friends Center was doing, a team of early childhood advocates from Battle Creek wondered what it would take for their community to offer something more transformational than rental assistance. 

The First Home, First Teacher initiative is still young. This summer, the partner organizations are working to establish a trust and a governing board to oversee the initiative. But they’re not letting the process hold up progress. 

On June 8, the partners had a “furnishing day” with the two inaugural teacher residents of First Home, First Teacher—two single moms from two different centers in Battle Creek, living with their kids in a two-unit duplex. 

The pilot at Urban Sprouts, the initiative in Battle Creek, and an early childhood program in Georgia that started a year-and-a-half ago and has so far housed two teachers are all working closely with Friends Center. Schiavone, at Friends Center, is glad to see communities building on the model she established in Connecticut. 

“What we’re doing here in New Haven is version 1.0,” she said. 

To truly scale, she added, the work needs to be publicly funded, and the model needs to move away from having the childcare program as the property owner.

“We don’t think, at the scale version, that is the best way to move forward,” she said. “Childcare providers don’t want to be owners and landlords.”

That’s why she’s especially interested to see what comes of the work in Battle Creek. 

Schiavone and the other program leaders are clear, though, that free teacher housing is not a solution to the systemic problems that face early childhood educators. 

“Early childhood education is only as strong as the people who provide it,” Schiavone said. “We’re paying women to be in poverty. It is completely unacceptable.”

Saunders, at Urban Sprouts in St. Louis, emphasized that the housing initiative there is in pilot stage and will hopefully scale, but that it’s not meant to distract from the larger issues in the field. “We’ll continue to ring the bell that this is a real crisis across our nation,” he said. 

“If we want high-quality early care and education, then we need educators to be stable and feel secure and be their best selves,” Schiavone said. “We believe you can’t wait for public funding. If you wait, ideas will die. You need to move forward.”

Furnishing day in Battle Creek, Michigan, for the “First Home, First Teacher,” initiative on June 8. Two single moms working at early childhood centers moved into a duplex. Nick Buckley

The US government doesn’t have many watchdogs left. Donald Trump fired a whole bunch of them shortly after returning to power, and many others have been pushed out since. We do still have a Government Accountability Office (GAO), for what it’s worth, and one week ago, that office published a report detailing the remarkable lack of transparency in how Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency conducted its affairs and how the savings DOGE reported fell far short of its claims.

But here’s the thing: a) We knew that from the start, and b) the GAO entirely misses the point.

DOGE saved us nothing. In fact, Musk’s little project has cost America dearly. In countless ways, we are much worse off than we were on the day Trump took back the Oval Office and invited the richest man on Earth to come in and break things.

Here’s just a partial accounting of what their nonsense has cost us.

A ton of money: Before he was tapped to run the IRS under President Barack Obama, John Koskinen spent decades as a turnaround man, helping large, failing organizations get back on track. And “the last thing I ever thought,” he told me, reflecting on how DOGE was gutting the tax agency, “was, ‘Well, let’s starve the revenue arm.”

But starving the government’s revenue arm is precisely what DOGE and Trump have done, with the gleeful complicity of Republican leaders long hostile to tax enforcement yet who are always eager to enact obscene tax breaks for the wealthy at the expense of the poor.

During Trump’s first year back, through the firings and deferred resignations that DOGE spearheaded, the IRS lost 28 percent of its workforce. The first to go were probationary employees, Joe Biden hires who had been on the job less for than two years. “A lot of them came with very sophisticated backgrounds and experience in technology and tax law management,” Koskinen said. “They weren’t 25-year-olds. They were filling important positions.”

“The cuts were done not on a glide path, as one would do if one had conducted a reasonable review of programming, but it was a cliff.”

Cheered by Republicans, these firings crippled the IRS’s capacity to collect unpaid taxes and investigate sophisticated tax cheats—rich individuals and companies, including firms that, as we speak, are routing their substantial profits through offshore tax havens without consequences.

The IRS’s inability to conduct complex audits encourages law-breaking by the uber-rich, the richest of whom invariably avoid punishment. (Commoners who defy the rules are easy to catch.) An April report from the Yale Budget Lab estimates that the 2025 IRS layoffs will cost the nation $600 billion in lost revenues over 10 years—and the IRS budget cuts in the One Big Beautiful Bill will add another $263 billion to the deficit. The combined losses total about what you’d need to restore the Medicaid funding that congressional Republicans, in passing that bill, took from America’s most desperate people.

On Joe Biden’s watch, the IRS was making progress on enforcement and collections, but that’s over now. And taxpayer services? Forget about it. Trump killed the agency’s free filing program on behalf of some billionaire software moguls. And my colleague Stephanie Mencimer recently wrote about the scorched wasteland that IRS customer service has become under Trump.

Good luck getting through.

Our humanity: Musk’s unsanctioned HR strategy was notable for its cruelty, not only for the hundreds of thousands of US workers whose lives and livelihoods were upended, but for the people they served. His abrupt destruction of the US Agency for International Development—which he’d vowed to feed through “a wood chipper”—has sown death and misery all over the globe. That’s not a great look for a once-admired nation.

“The cuts were done not on a glide path, as one would do if one had conducted a reasonable review of programming, but it was a cliff,” former USAID Administrator Samantha Power told PBS one year later. By that time, at least 800,000 deaths had been chalked up to Musk’s thoughtlessness, and the British medical journal The Lancet estimated 14 million people would die by 2030 if the programs DOGE destroyed weren’t resumed. The mindless way the cuts were done, Power noted, ensured “the most human harm possible.”

The world can now thank Musk for, among other things, the out-of-control Ebola outbreak now wracking the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

A semblance of privacy: To be fair, we lost our privacy ages ago to corporations like Lexis, Equifax, and Cambridge Analytica, but at least our government could be trusted to protect the confidential information it collected on citizens and others living here. Enter Elon Musk. In April 2025, Wired reported that DOGE, without authorization, was rapidly consolidating data from agencies including the IRS and the Social Security Administration (SSA), as well as state voting records, into a massive Department of Homeland Security database. “The scale at which DOGE is seeking to interconnect data, including sensitive biometric data, has never been done before, raising alarms with experts who fear it may lead to disastrous privacy violations for citizens, certified foreign workers, and undocumented immigrants,” the article noted. And this “has nothing to do with finding fraud or wasteful spending,” a senior DHS official told Wired.

It also goes well beyond the administration’s efforts to track down and deport undocumented immigrants. As Wired reported separately in January, a Department of Justice court filing indicated DOGE may have shared SSA data with an outside group that seeks to “overturn election results in certain states.”

“What I want people to be scared of,” Jonathan Kamens, a former government cybersecurity expert, told NPR, is “that this data that the government has on them, which in some cases can be used to damage them, will be used to damage them.”

Leadership in science: A friend who runs a life-science lab at UC Berkeley told me that he’d recently lost a third of his grant money and now would have to lay someone off. He studies RNA-protein complexes, which have nothing to do with DEI. No matter. Musk and Trump’s freezing, slashing, and bottlenecking of National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation funding for research labs all over America, and the gutting of federal staff responsible for ensuring grants are doled out smoothly, threatens to destroy oen thing that really has made America great—our global leadership in science and innovation.

Who do you think built the foundation for all the big biomedical and tech innovations over the past three-quarters of a century? You and your loved ones likely owe your lives to the US government-funded development and distribution—now in jeopardy thanks to Trump and RFK Jr.—of vaccines for scourges like Covid, diphtheria, pertussis, polio, mumps, measles, rubella, and countless more. Our tax dollars have paid for the revolutionary development of CRISPR and mRNA vaccines; pioneering surgical treatments; and HIV and cancer therapies. Guess who sequenced the first human genome? Literally built the internet? Invented GPS? Funded the Google guys as they were developing their cute little search engine? Provided the fledgling EV industry with the subsidies and loans that Musk relied on for Tesla’s success?

And yet, after taxpayers helped him get rich, Musk set out to drive a stake through the heart of America’s innovation engine. Very classy, pal.

Educational opportunities: The funding delays and cancellations initiated by DOGE, and the ongoing attacks on higher education by the Trump administration and Congress, not to mention the immigration threats and denials of visas for international students, have resulted in painful cuts to undergraduate and graduate education across America. With grants throttled and funding uncertain, colleges have laid off faculty and staff; rescinded acceptances; and eliminated courses, graduate programs, and even entire departments. There’s “a whole generation of young scientists who see no pathway into the field for them,” a paleoecologist who’d stopped taking on new graduate students told the Guardian. 

Now Trump wants to hand oversight of federal grants to his political appointees at the Office of Management and Budget, the same office whose chief, Russell Vought, vowed to put federal workers in “trauma” (and succeeded). The new plan faces fierce public opposition, and rightly so. Not that Trump gives a damn.

Safe food: Got cyclospora? I’m sorry. The FDA’s food inspection regimen was never 100 percent reliable. Produce coming across the border is spot-checked for disease-causing organisms, but that’s not foolproof, so occasional outbreaks of food-borne illness are inevitable. It’s what happens next that matters.

The public health response to the cyclospora outbreaks have been “confusing,” Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, told Minnesota Public Radio. Cyclospora is a tough parasite to track, Osterholm conceded, but “the cuts that have occurred in this administration, and some of it with DOGE itself, [have] really crippled us in terms of our ability to respond. I mean, the senior leadership in the laboratory science area at CDC and parasites were all let go, basically. We’ve had just a number of issues where there’s a shortage of public health workers, and so it has hindered this investigation. There’s absolutely no question about it.”

Another thing to pin on Musk: explosive diarrhea.

Consumer protection: The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was a staunchly independent agency created by Congress and funded by the Federal Reserve to protect people against the kinds of deceptive corporate practices we saw from Wall Street in the lead-up to the Great Recession. The CFPB launched in 2011, and in its first 10 years secured about $14.4 billion in relief and $1.7 billion in civil penalties for millions of American families. It still would be protecting them were it not for DOGE. By June 2025, according to the public interest group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, Musk’s minions had ensured the loss of nearly 1,500 CFPB employees and “effectively shuttered an agency which returned over $26 billion to the American people…but only cost taxpayers a fraction of that amount to run.”

Some additional realms in which the DOGE cuts have cost us dearly:

• Clean air and water protections
• Government oversight
• Upkeep and protection of national parks
• Local public safety
• Disaster preparedness and response
• Health and pandemic response
• Reliability of federal data
• Veterans health care
• A functional Social Security system

I’ll bet you can come up with 20 more.

The point is, talking about “savings” from DOGE is like talking about savings from not paying your mortgage, ignoring the part where the bank comes and takes your home. Such is the subterfuge we’re dealing with.

Breaking things is disastrously easy. Building them is hard. Elon Musk pushed Humpty Dumpty off the wall. Piecing him back together, if even possible, will take decades, concerted effort, and enormous sums of money—money that will now be in short supply thanks to Trump and his enablers.

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the August 13 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

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

By now you’ve heard that when Donald Trump left the NATO summit in Turkey last month, the Secret Service transferred him off of Air Force One and onto an alternative plane, flying him out clandestinely to avoid an Iranian threat. Many of Trump’s Cabinet members were left on the decoy plane. Now new leaks from inside the administration are making this whole affair look considerably darker.

It appears several of Trump’s most loyal aides were transferred to the secret plane with him, even as reporters were not informed about any of this and were left on the decoy plane as well. All this neatly symbolizes Trump’s abusive and authoritarian relationship with the media. So to dig into all of it, we’re talking to Margaret Sullivan. She regularly calls on the press to treat Trump as the abnormal threat he truly is, on her excellent Substack, American Crisis. Margaret, nice to have you on.

Margaret Sullivan: Thank you, Greg. Good to see you and hear you.

Sargent: You too. So we learned from The Washington Post that Trump was secretly removed from Air Force One onto a catering truck without the knowledge of the press corps, and possibly many of his Cabinet officials who were left on the plane. The Times’s reporting on this is quite scathing. It notes that, quote, “If Iranians were trying to shoot down the presidential plane,” then the subterfuge that protected the president “may have made targets” of those who flew aboard the jet.

Margaret, can you explain why that’s so highly irregular and objectionable?

Sullivan: Yes, it’s highly unusual. It’s actually shocking that Donald Trump would, you know, arrange for himself to be flown in safety while leaving many members of the press on the plane who didn’t realize the threat, and didn’t realize that the president was removed to yet another plane.

He has treated the press in a very unusual and very bad way for years now, and unfortunately, many members of the mainstream media, they don’t seem to care, or they don’t know what to do about it, but they keep covering him in this very normalizing way. Like, “Well, he’s the president, so therefore we have to believe everything he says,” or, you know, treat it with a great deal of deference. And, you know, this, I think, is a very vivid example of what he thinks of them.

Sargent: So now, based on more leaks, news outlets are reporting that others who accompanied Trump on the catering truck and onto the separate plane included White House Deputy Chief of Staff Dan Scavino, Walt Nauta, another top aide, and Natalie Harp, Trump’s executive assistant, who kind of functions like a security blanket to the president. I don’t know, Margaret, that seems pretty questionable.

Obviously, there are reasons Trump would want his closest aides around him, but this occurred even as all these other people were left on the decoy plane.

Sullivan: So his actions were to protect and keep around him the people you just mentioned. And one of them is, is Pete Hegseth. And, you know, not to protect and not to keep in mind or think about the welfare, apparently, of the press and some of his Cabinet members, including the secretary of state. So I think it is very telling, and it certainly speaks to the relationship with the press in a bad way.

Sargent: It really does. And so something similar happened with President Bill Clinton, at least similar in the sense that there was a decoy operation. But in that case, the press was briefed beforehand.

It was explained to the White House Correspondents’ Association, and they were told what sort of safety procedures were being put in place for journalists. It’s just plainly obvious that the Trump group didn’t think about the journalists at all in this case, right?

Sullivan: Yeah. I mean, maybe they thought, maybe they had some dire thoughts about it, like, “Well, if something happens, oh well.” But we don’t have to go quite that dark here. I think what we can see is that there wasn’t an effort to inform, there wasn’t an effort to protect, and also what ends up happening is that the press then is misleading the public about what exactly took place. And with no correction afterwards. It had to be turned up weeks later by The Washington Post.

Sargent: It’s so strange. So Margaret, what do you make of the White House Correspondents’ Association’s role in this whole thing? They were not informed. In the case of the Clinton decoy operation, the White House Correspondents’ Association was informed at the time, and now the White House Correspondents’ Association is reacting kind of meekly to what’s happened here. What do you make of that?

Sullivan: So, as I understand it, what’s happened is that the new president, if that’s the title, of the White House Correspondents’ Association, who happens to be a Fox News correspondent got together with White House officials and apparently, I think with perhaps a written statement as well as spoken words, said, Gee, you know, we really didn’t appreciate that too much, and it’s a problem, and please, you know, let’s not do that again. But was there a huge outcry? Was there a sense of, “My God, you can’t do this. It’s an absolute outrage? No.

And this is the same White House Correspondents’ Association that just had, you know, a big gala dinner at which President Trump trashed the press. They knew that would happen, and they did it anyway, and I can pretty much assure you that even after this, it will happen again next year. There’ll be a gala event. He’ll be invited. He’ll come. He’ll say some horrible things about the fake news media. And it’s a ridiculous relationship that should not be. They really should be standing up to him. They really should be doing a lot more in solidarity and for the public. I mean, that’s the part that bothers me—is this is about access. It’s not for the public interest.

Sargent: That’s really interesting. I’d like to pick up a little bit on that. You wrote a good piece about the White House Correspondents’ Dinner with Trump. He just relentlessly abused reporters, personally abused them, and he lied about the media having Trump Derangement Syndrome, or at least Trump’s lackeys did that. I think on some fundamental level, the White House Correspondents’ Association just doesn’t want to say that Trump is different, that he’s different from other presidents in the most fundamental way, in the sense that he really just has zero respect for the media’s institutional role in a democracy.

And previous presidents, you know, they did all kinds of disgusting things, like under Bush the propaganda was terrible, under Clinton there was a lot of manipulation, et cetera, et cetera. But I think on some level they recognized that the press has an important institutional role in liberal democracy. This group does not recognize that at all, and that’s something the White House Correspondents’ Association doesn’t think it can say. What do you think of all that?

Sullivan: I think two things. One is that they’re very afraid of losing access to the White House. I mean, it’s their job not to, you know, sort of dig up dirt about the White House, or, like, really sort of get under the surface. It’s mostly their job to, you know, for example, be in the briefing room and ask a question, and then the evening news with David Muir, or whoever it may be will take that as a soundbite and show, Look, we’re, we’re doing our jobs here. So much of it is optics.

So some of it is losing access, not being able to, you know, do that, and some of it is just this strange normalization that has gone on for years now, in which the reporters seem to be saying to themselves, Well, he’s the president, and no one can argue with the fact that what the president does creates news. So we’re going to simply treat it as news. And if we need to do a little fact-checking or pushback, we’ll do that, but nothing that’s very radical. Whereas he’s radical, and so I think something much more powerful needs to be done in reaction to that. But don’t hold your breath.

Sargent: Yeah, and I think there’s a bigger calculation as well on the part of the news media, and maybe you could shed a little light on this. They really think that the election of Trump represented some sort of seismic cultural event that repudiated them. I think that’s how they think about it on some level, a lot of reporters. He called them fake news for years. They just kind of let it roll off their backs, and then Trump was reelected, so maybe the American people agree that we’re fake news, right?

Like, I think that may be the way a lot of these reporters conceive of it, and they think to themselves, We can’t really point out that Trump is different, because that puts us on the wrong side of this kind of shifting cultural phenomenon. What do you think of that? You think that’s possible?

Sullivan: I do think that when Trump was elected in 2016, there was a kind of internal reckoning. Was it the right reckoning? I’m not so sure about that. I think the right reckoning would’ve been to say, Gee, maybe we paid a little too much attention to Hillary Clinton’s email problems, and, you know, maybe we did a few things that were out of line. But no, the reckoning was, We need to get out of D.C. and New York and California and get into the heartland. OK, that’s reasonable. The Washington Post put together an America desk, you know.

That’s all fine, but it, it isn’t the only thing. I wish that the press corps would have in their minds, and I wish their bosses would insist on, their actual role in a democracy, which is to be the eyes and ears of the public, and to, to represent the public. And I just don’t see that. So much is about ratings and optics and access, all the wrong things—profits, shareholders. What does my boss...what merger is my boss trying to do right now? That’s not what the First Amendment was supposed to accomplish.

Sargent: Certainly not. I want to flag a quote from Joe Lockhart, press secretary to Bill Clinton, about the difference between the Clinton decoy example and the current one. Lockhart said this, quote: “They just didn’t seem to give a second thought to anybody but the president and the few people who were with him. We went out of our way to make sure the maximum number of people, especially civilians, were protected and not human shields. They didn’t even think about it, and to me, that’s the big difference,” close quote.

Margaret, there’s an irony to this whole thing I want to flag. The press actually was absolutely terrible to Bill Clinton, if you recall how Bill and Hillary were covered. By contrast, now Trump pretends he’s mistreated by the press, right? But there’s no comparison whatsoever between the way the press treated Bill Clinton and the way they treat Trump. They treated Clinton much, much worse and much more unfairly. Yet Trump world doesn’t respect the media’s institutional role. It’s just everything is upside down.

Sullivan: That’s right. And, you know, the role of the media and the role of the press, and their sort of power to hold public officials, especially the president, accountable, has radically changed since the Clinton years. And, you know, that’s for many reasons that could be a book. But one of them is the decline of local news. One of them is that Trump is—we may criticize him harshly for certain things, but he’s very good at sort of blasting this misinformation out there, and then when he’s called on it, blaming the press.

We’re in a different world now, and that’s a part of the, you know, contrast between what happened in the Clinton years and what’s happened now. Also, so many of the things that Trump does would be impeachable offenses, but we’re so overwhelmed by all of it that I think that it’s, as somebody wrote this past week very well—Craig Unger—”Nothing moves the needle.” And this is another thing that I’m afraid will not move the needle.

Sargent: Yeah, it might not. I guess we’ll see what happens in the midterms. I think things are sort of on the right track there. Let me ask you this, though, Margaret. Is there another thing going on here with the press and Trump that maybe we should pin down, which is that the press sort of feels like it’s on its back foot in a big sense, right? Not just vis-à-vis the culture with Trump’s victory, but also because of all the changes in the media landscape, which are actually really delivering the media some pretty severe blows.

TikTok, the way the internet works now, right, the role of independent media, which is really kind of flourishing in a certain way and poaching people away from the MSM, and of course, like what you’re talking about, the local press disappearing. I wonder if the press feels institutionally really under threat and defensive in a very big sense, and that too makes them somewhat unwilling to really say that Trump is different. What do you think of that?

Sullivan: Well, I mean, there’s a lot of pushback against the mainstream press right now, from the public, from public officials. Yes, but we have a job to do, and we ought to do it and not be worried about whether what foot we’re on, or whether we’re sensitive and got hurt or let somebody call us a name or something. We have a constitutionally protected job to do, and that should be front and center for us.

Sargent: Just to wrap this up, it seems to me like there’s sort of two stories at once. In certain respects, I want to give the media some credit here. You alluded to The Washington Post’s great scoop on all this. In some respects, the press is reporting as aggressively on Donald Trump as I’ve seen the press report on any president in my lifetime. There really is a lot of great work being done.

But on the other side of the equation, you’ve got, like, the conventions of political reporting aren’t really shifting to meet the moment in some sense. The headlines don’t really reflect the seriousness of what the reporters themselves are turning up. This is something you’ve talked about, like the conventions of political reporting. How do we get the press to take a little more seriously this difficulty—that the conventions of political reporting really aren’t up to the moment and need rethinking?

Sullivan: Well, it comes from leadership. I really think that the leadership, the top editors, the top people at the really big news organizations, need to send that message out to the troops that we’re going to bear down on this in a different way, including through the headlines.

I mean, very often—and this is I think part of what you’re saying—very often there is a very strong story, and it has a very wimpy headline on it, and often people don’t get past the headline. You know, they’re skimming. They see a news alert, they see a tweet or a Bluesky, you know, whatever it may be. They’re not going to read into the 11th or 12th paragraph. So we see a headline that says, “Critics say,” something, and it seems just like more infighting, when in fact the story could be very strong.

So I think that needs to be taken seriously. But self-reflection is not something I’ve noticed as a really high value or ability of, you know, big journalism.

Sargent: So do you think this latest thing has the capacity to change things a little? I mean, you could not ask for a clearer look at just the amount of pure contempt that Trump and his people have for the media than this one. Will that change anything?

Sullivan: I would love to think so, Greg, but I just don’t. There have been so many things that have come along that seem like the thing that will change stuff. I think the only thing that will change anything is the overall accumulation of, you know, the public saying, there’s just too much now. It’s just, it’s gone too far. And the midterms are going to be extremely important, because Trump is unrestrained. And so if the checks and balances start to work, I think that changes everything.

Sargent: Yeah, I think that’s a really important point. I just want to close on it. If Democrats can take one or both houses of Congress, they’re going to have more of a role in setting the agenda of what the press is talking about. And Trump’s going to look weaker, and if there’s one thing that reporters can really sniff out, it’s when someone’s weak or losing. They like that story, right, Margaret?

Sullivan: They certainly liked it with the end of Biden’s presidency.

Sargent: Well, we’ll see if they apply it here. I don’t know. Well, folks, if you enjoyed this, make sure to check out Margaret Sullivan’s excellent Substack, American Crisis. Please subscribe to that. Margaret, thanks so much for coming on. Great to talk to you.

Sullivan: Thanks, Greg. Good to be on with you.

In the summer of 2024, amid his characteristically mean-spirited presidential campaign versus Kamala Harris, Donald Trump made a refreshingly generous promise that buoyed the hopes of parents across the country who had struggled to conceive a child. “We are going to be, under the Trump administration, we are going to be paying for that treatment,” Trump said, referring to in vitro fertilization, “or we’re going to be mandating that the insurance company pay.” A few weeks before the election, he even went so far as declare himself the “father of IVF.” “We want fertilization, and it’s all the way, and the Democrats tried to attack us on it, and we’re out there on IVF, even more than them,” he said during a town hall hosted by Fox News.

Once back in office, though, Trump was more like a deadbeat dad. Yes, in February he issued an executive order to increase access to IVF while lowering its cost, which in his eyes made him the “fertilization president.” But it was mostly hot air. Trump did strike a deal in October with a subsidiary of German pharmaceutical company Merck KGaA to slash prices for IVF drugs in exchange for tariff relief, but IVF advocates said the estimated $2,200 savings wouldn’t do much to help couples afford a treatment that costs as much as $25,000 for a single round. The promised free coverage for IVF never came to pass, and in many ways the IVF landscape has gotten notably worse thanks to Republicans in Washington and in state houses across the country. And that’s a big opportunity for the Democrats in a critical election year.

In April 2025, budget cuts killed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Assisted Reproductive Technology Surveillance team, a panel that tracked how well IVF works in the United States. Then in December, and again a few weeks ago, Republicans in Congress killed a provision to expand the military’s coverage of IVF, despite having voted for such coverage in the past. Trump, who is notorious for letting Capitol Hill lawmakers know when they have displeased him, said nothing. Meanwhile, there’s a nascent movement in red states to regulate IVF and providers, leading to fears that anti-IVF forces will slowly chip away at access to fertility technology much as anti-abortion groups eroded access to abortion in the years leading up to the Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling.

This is a dramatic shift from 2024, when the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that embryos created through IVF are considered “unborn children,” leading local clinics to pause treatment out of fear of criminal prosecution and civil liabilities. The nationwide backlash pressured the Alabama legislature to move quickly to assure the legality of IVF, and Republicans across the country scrambled to assure voters that they supported the procedure.

“Already in 2024, the Democratic plan was to make reproductive policy issues as big a deal as they could,” said Sean Tipton, chief advocacy and policy officer for the American Society for Reproductive Medicine. “President Trump, being the extremely talented politician that he is, saw that and decided that being against IVF was going to be really bad. So he was going to be for it. I think if he had not done that, I don’t think we would have heard any pro-IVF things out of most Republicans.

“So Republicans had to thread that needle,” Tipton added. “What they have chosen to do is campaign as if they’re pro-IVF and govern as if they’re not.”

Danielle Melfi, CEO of the national infertility association RESOLVE, said there’s a “big gap ... between promises and reality.” “Every politician was really forced to go on the record to say, hey, we support IVF, we support people being able to have families if they’ve experienced infertility,” she said. “But where the difference is coming up is, how do we make real-world access available to people?”

Trump seemed sincere about supporting IVF, and has been vocal about wanting more native-born babies in America. As recently as May, in an Oval Office event, he announced a proposed rule that would allow employers to offer IVF coverage as a stand-alone benefit, much like vision or dental care. Still, that rule wouldn’t require employers to cover fertility treatments. “No president has done more to help Americans struggling to start families than President Trump, whose administration has created a new fertility benefit option and slashed the cost of fertility drugs,” White House spokesman Kush Desai said in a statement to The New Republic. “The Administration will continue to explore additional policies to build on these historic successes.”

IVF was a politically polarizing issue even before the 1978 birth of Briton Louise Brown, dubbed the first “test tube baby” by the media. Some believed that IVF, which includes freezing and sometimes destroying unused embryos, was tantamount to abortion. Others “didn’t like IVF because it would enable people who were single, unmarried, and people who were in same-sex relationships to all have children, too—and also, enable people to prioritize a career and education,” said Mary Ziegler, a professor at UC Davis School of Law who is at work on a book on the history of IVF. “All of these things were not something conservatives approved of.”

IVF is enormously popular now, with a 2024 Pew Research poll showing that seven in ten Americans think it’s a good thing; eight percent think it’s a bad thing, and 22 percent don’t know. But determined opposition remains from religious and social conservatives. That’s apparent not just in Congress, where GOP House Speaker Mike Johnson, an evangelical Christian, has quietly scuttled efforts to expand access to IVF, but in the reaction to last weekend’s announcement by Democratic Representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez that she is freezing her eggs.

Prominent blogger Matt Walsh called the decision “totally backwards and ridiculous,” writing, “She’ll turn 37 in a couple months. If she got pregnant now, it would technically be a geriatric pregnancy. Instead she’s freezing her eggs. This desire to start having children late in life is completely baffling to me.” Mollie Hemingway, the editor in chief of The Federalist, wrote, “Ladies, get married to a good man as young as you’re able and have your babies and do it naturally. This is a very sad public performance/display of unnecessarily unwise decision making.” (“Naturally” is right-wing code for getting pregnant through sex and not using birth control, condoms, or other forms of contraception.)

The White House, however, sees this is a losing issue. “We most certainly want to encourage more women and families to have children, period,” a senior White House official told Axios. “That’s a diplomatic way of saying, ‘Yes, the Matt Walsh messaging is not helpful.’” Another Trump adviser told the outlet, noting the upcoming midterm elections, “This isn’t really a winner for Republicans.”

Democrats haven’t made IVF a front-burner issue in the midterms, as they did in the 2024 general election, after the Alabama court ruling. But it’s starting to pick up: In announcing the reintroduction of the Right to IVF Act in July, Senator Tammy Duckworth, a Wisconsin Democrat who had both of her children via IVF, slammed Trump for dropping the fertility ball. “Almost two years after promising free IVF for all Americans if he were elected, Donald Trump has still failed to deliver,” she said. And Ocasio-Cortez, making her egg-freezing announcement, noted that she was doing so in part because of the “political environment where this administration is denying reproductive care to women across the country, from abortion rights to the ability to carry out a healthy pregnancy.”

With Congress at a standstill on the issue, action is moving to the states. And there, IVF advocates say, is the real threat. RESOLVE monitored 181 bills across 39 states this year and found that 41 threatened IVF access.

Proposals range from mandatory tracking of embryos (as South Dakota considered and rejected this year) to Targeted Restrictions of IVF Providers, known as “TRIP” laws, which would impose reporting and other regulations on clinics, as Tennessee considered and rejected last year. That measure also would have prohibited genetic testing and imposed an embryo creation limit of four times the number of children the patient hopes to have. (Since not all embryos are viable, providers try for as many as they can create—typically eight for women under 35, and four to five for patients 35-40.)

Embryonic “personhood” laws and bills (considered but not passed this year in South Carolina, Oklahoma, and Minnesota) are a constant threat to IVF, advocates say, citing the Alabama Supreme Court ruling. In Louisiana, embryos are considered “juridical persons” under the law, and it is illegal to intentionally destroy a viable embryo. People who have embryos created have to keep them frozen in the Bayou State or ship them elsewhere.

Such tactics, reproductive rights advocates say, are similar to the strategy used to weaken abortion rights, state by state, when an outright ban was out of reach. “We see a lot of parallels between the efforts to restrict or ban abortion and what we’re seeing now in the states to restrict IVF,” said Karla Torres, senior human rights counsel for the Center for Reproductive Rights. “Conservatives or anti-abortion advocates who are now targeting IVF know they cannot outright ban it. What they are looking for [are ways] to restrict access to it or undermine the standard of care for IVF.”

Ziegler agrees. “It’s parallel to the playbook that took down Roe,” she said.

Arkansas, meanwhile, last year became the first state to enact the RESTORE Act, which requires insurance companies to cover what is called Restorative Reproductive Medicine, or RRM. The controversial approach—which critics deride as “blame and shame”—aims to identify and treat physical issues and lifestyle choices that allegedly interfere with fertility. The problem, IVF proponents say, is that precious time can be wasted finding the “root cause” of infertility—and then it may be too late for IVF.

Emma Waters, senior policy analyst in the Center for Technology and the Human Person at The Heritage Foundation, rejects the notion that RRM is not as effective. “To treat infertility, one must treat the underlying causes. IVF, in and of itself, doesn’t do that,” said Waters, the co-author of the Heritage paper that has become a template for state legislation pushing RRM.

Torres said she expects other states to follow suit in promoting the “restorative” care at the expense of IVF. In Texas, the state GOP recently approved a party platform opposing IVF and promoting “natural procreative technology,” an element of RRM, as an alternative to IVF. (While Texas law requires insurers to offer IVF coverage, employers don’t have to sign up for it. Further, with a few exceptions, the couple must have been infertile for five years, and only the husband’s sperm can be used.)

Another new battleground in the IVF wars is surrogacy, Torres said. Florida recently enacted a law banning gestational surrogacy contracts if any of the parties is a citizen or resident of a State Department-designated “foreign country of concern.” While the law appears aimed at birthright citizenship, it has the effect of limiting IVF, Torres said.

The movement in red states to limit IVF is picking up steam, Tipton said. And since state legislatures tend to move more quickly than Congress, they could change IVF access quickly. “Legislation is like sperm,” Tipton said. “There’s a lot of it. Most of it’s not going to amount to anything. But if you’re not taking appropriate precautions, there’s going to be hell to pay.”

Something’s off with Melania. This speculation about the First Lady has existed as long as the Trump era itself. The theories have always worn tinfoil hats. Is she a body double? An extraterrestrial? A Russian spy?

In October 2017, during the first year of Trump’s first term, Guardian columnist Marina Hyde tweeted, “Absolutely convinced Melania is being played by a Melania impersonator.”

At bottom was the evergreen mystery of how anyone could stand to be married to Donald Trump. This “Melania” beside Trump in photos, acting wifely through gritted veneers, must be a decoy. “Theory: she left him weeks ago,” Hyde proposed.

But Melania did not leave him. Like a MAGA last-gasper in denial about Trump’s infinite betrayals, Melania stayed. Trump cheated on her—but she stayed. He ignored her birthday, forgot her name, and razed her side of the White House—but she stayed. Yes, she swats away his touch, sleeps alone, and seems to despise him. But, like so many blind Trump supporters, she’s apparently determined to give over her one life on Earth to this dance of death.

Melania’s brand combines high vanity and low self-respect. It doesn’t win her fans. Indeed, her unfavorability rating makes all other modern first ladies look like national treasures. In the summers of their own husbands’ second terms, Hillary Clinton had +25 favorability, Laura Bush had +46, and Michelle Obama had +42.

As of July, Melania Trump was at -13. That’s below circle-the-drain levels. “Melania Trump breaking records in the way that you don’t want to break records—historically awful,” Harry Enten said on CNN when she first hit -12. He also echoed her callous “I Really Don’t Care, Do U?” jacket, the one she wore to visit children in detention centers in 2018.

“The American people really don’t care for her.”

Probably Melania was never going to win Miss Congeniality. She’s reclusive, for one. This year, she’s appeared only 38 times in public, including in one photo that shows her briefly deplaning Air Force One. When she does go out these days, it’s behind a mask of cosmetics, a curtain of hair, and clothing in funereal hues.

Her most striking appearance came in April, when she gave a panicked address before the White House press corps. She spoke cryptically and acidly of “lies” circulating about her and Jeffrey Epstein.

This speech, of course, pointed sleuths straight to the cause of her distress: rumors about whether teen-modeling kingpin Paolo Zampoli (now an employee of U.S. taxpayers as the “U.S. Special Representative for Global Partnerships”) or the unspeakable Jeffrey Epstein introduced the Trumps in 1998. Her features looked controlled, static, even synthetic. The common touch is missing for Melania. But the human touch is missing too.

For MAGA devotees, a Slovenian-born former model in dominatrix stilettos doesn’t exactly scream America First. To find another foreign-born First Lady, you have to go back to Louisa Adams, wife of John Quincy Adams, who was born in London in 1775. She was admittedly extremely popular; but unlike Melania, she had an American father.

Then there are the 80 percent of us who are non-MAGA Americans. For us, it remains an article of faith that anyone with a beating heart must find Trump too repellent to tolerate. That’s why theories that Melania’s a simulacrum have never quite died.

Back in 2017, days after Marina Hyde’s tweet, comedian Andrea Wagner Barton posted a photo on Facebook to prove a Melania impersonator was in the mix. It was a blurry photo of Melania looking uncanny. Digital Zapruder sleuths were off to the races comparing noses. Google searches for “Melania Trump double” and “Fake Melania” skyrocketed.

These days, Trump, with his own marked likability issues, still considers Melania an asset. On Sunday, he posted a stylized press picture of him and his wife to Truth Social, next to a snap of Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee in the Michigan Senate race, and his wife, Dr. Sarah Jukaku. “Two VERY DIFFERENT America’s,” Trump’s caption read.

El-Sayed shot back on CNN: “Sarah and I actually like each other... I don’t know about the First Lady and the president, but from what I’ve heard, it’s a bit of a rocky road.”

What do Americans even need from first ladies? It’s a deeply conservative role, and Melania, though 57, doesn’t exactly conjure home and hearth. But first ladies are at least expected to engage in public advocacy for non-partisan causes. At this Melania has also failed. “Be Best” was a daftly named nothingburger.

On the other hand, she has shown some passion for self-promotion. Her flop documentary “Melania,” which was directed by accused sexual abuser and Epstein cohort Brett Ratner, was financed by Amazon in what looked like a bribe to her husband.

Undaunted, Melania has a limited reality series on Amazon coming out in the fall. It will give a restive nation another behind-the-scenes look at Melania’s stupor and suppressed irritability, this time in the first weeks of Trump’s current term. The preview for the series opens with Melania sighing “here we go again” and features disembodied stilettos sinking into carpets in what could double as content for OnlyFans.

In the meantime, tinfoil tall tales about Melania’s off-ness keep evolving. Now people speculate that Melania is AI. In May, she published an audiobook that was voiced by AI. “A NEW ERA IN PUBLISHING,” she wrote on X.

Also in the spring, Melania in white strode a red carpet with a robot in white named Figure 03, a humanoid programmed to do dishes and laundry. Like a slightly drugged but obedient homemaker, Figure 03, which has no eyes or mouth, has precise, slow-mo, melancholic movements and a soft girlish voice. For an audience who has never warmed to the First Lady, the jokes made themselves.

“One is a soulless, foreign-made device, sold by one shady businessman to another,” wrote a YouTube commenter. “The other is a robot.”

                                              “n. the specific feeling of the sun’s heat on a cold day.”

Venice was too hot,
we both agreed that first evening,
so we pointed the car
toward the cooler Alps,
which we had read about in a book.

I was driving a green
ragtop Sunbeam Alpine,
shirts off, just nineteen,
and we were cooled up there
then warmed by the Alpine sunbeams.

Last summer, Bruno was in a Chinese class when he found out that three of his close friends—Ines Soto, Elizabeth Soto, and Savanna Battan—were among those arrested after a noise demonstration the day before, outside an ICE detention camp in Alvarado, Texas. While Bruno was working to locate his friends in the jail system, federal prosecutors were telling the public that the demonstration was “a planned ambush.” When Bruno found the Sotos and Battan in a county jail database, he was able to read the charges himself: attempted murder of a federal officer. “I saw the charges and was just shocked,” he told me. “What the hell happened at the protest?” Lurid details provided by prosecutors began to spread through otherwise slight news reports: Investigators reportedly found flyers reading “Fight ICE Terror With Class War,” and seized masks, “tactical gloves,” a “cache of weapons,” and “insurrectionist material” from the home of one “suspect.” Officers were descending on the residences not just of those arrested, but those of friends and families, too. Bruno worried he could be next. “I couldn’t sleep for days,” he remembered, “and would just stay up all night, mentally preparing myself.” 

What had happened? Some of that is still up for debate, and some trials are pending, but a few important facts are generally accepted. On the night of July 4, 2025, around a dozen people converged on the immigrant detention camp known as Prairieland. They had planned a noise demonstration, gathering near enough so that those inside could hear them as they chanted supportive slogans through bullhorns, waved flashlights, and set off fireworks. One person vandalized a few cars in the parking lot. Some security cameras were damaged. The camp’s officers told the demonstrators to leave, and most of them did. A local police officer arrived and saw, at a distance, someone wearing a neon-green neck gaiter and carrying a rifle. The officer drew his weapon. The person in green fired, striking and wounding the officer. More law enforcement swarmed the scene and arrested everyone they could find.

In the ensuing days, law enforcement sought anyone they thought was involved. There were raids, more arrests, and a hunt for Benjamin Song, who fired the rifle. On July 8, federal prosecutors announced the first round of arrests and charged 10 people with attempted murder of a federal officer. A few months later, after the president declared war on what he called “Antifa,” federal prosecutors began describing those arrested as an “Antifa cell.” Then they charged them with “providing material support to terrorists.” In the end, some 22 people were swept up in this case, facing a range of federal and state charges. This June and July, 15 people were sentenced by federal judges to prison sentences spanning 30, 50, and 100 years.

Beyond the shooting, beyond the demonstration, the political activities prosecutors pointed at to justify charging these activists were utterly ordinary. The government deemed the protests defendants organized, the zines they made, and their shared interests in antifascism and anarchism the incriminating features of a (nonexistent) antifa terror cell. Importantly, some of the people who were first to come to the defendants’ aid were engaged in those political acts, too. They shared those political interests. This meant that from the beginning, supporters faced the reality that their actions could also be characterized as criminal. They knew that the Trump administration was not interested in merely prosecuting individual acts of violence or even vandalism, but rather in casting a group of people as a threat to the nation. 

The boundaries of that group extended beyond the July 4 noise demonstration. Prosecutors got indictments for people who weren’t even there: someone who moderated a group chat on Discord, someone who gave a defendant a Faraday bag (meant to block a phone signal) that she had crafted herself, and someone who moved a box zines from a home he’d shared with a defendant (who was also his wife). If the government was already going this far to target activists in its crackdown on dissent, was there any kind of organizing that could be considered safe? 

“It’s obvious to me that the prosecution optimized for the headline,” said Lydia Koza, whose wife, Autumn Hill, was sentenced to 50 years. “They optimized for the shock and awe.” We spoke just after the anniversaries of the noise demonstration and the raid on her home with Hill. For months after the arrests, Koza explained, the defendants remained in detention, unindicted, some in “administrative segregation”—solitary confinement—“while the Justice Department scrambled to try and put together a theory of the case that served their ends.” 

What the case was supposedly about—the purpose and nature of a noise demonstration—was something that could be easily mischaracterized, a fact the government’s case arguably benefited from. Noise demonstrations, recalled Autumn Hill in a recent rare interview she gave from prison, are “a pretty typical form of protest”: “Fireworks and megaphones and bells and whistles and all that are extremely common.” While a noise demo is one form of protest, it can also be an expression of care and connection. “My goal,” Hill said, “was to let the people inside, the detainees, know, ‘Hey, we’re here, we know that you are there, you haven’t been forgotten, and we understand that what is happening to you is unjust.’” In that sense, a noise demo has more in common with sending a letter to a person in prison than it does with a march or a rally. It’s not merely a symbolic action; it’s a way of showing those incarcerated that people on the outside are looking out for them and paying attention to what happens to them. Showing up and connecting with others is the point.

The day after the noise demonstration, on July 5, Autumn Hill was arrested in a raid on the Dallas home she shared with Koza. “They tried to present this house as being like a commune, or a compound,” Koza told me. In the government’s telling, the house was linked to what prosecutors called “the attack.” At a pretrial hearing, FBI Special Agent Joseph Clark Wiethorn, testifying for the government, was asked what the house meant to “the group.” “It’s been referred to as different things,” Wiethorn replied. “I’ve heard the term as a commune for multiple individuals.” As he put it, “This place was used for holding meetings, for organizing.” Then he called the house “a staging location” that had been “used for pre-attack planning.” It was if by being the scene of an organizing meeting, the house they shared was something sinister in disguise. “You know, we’re living together for fundamentally economic reasons, because this economy is brutal, and because sharing a house is literally the only way to get by,” Koza explained. “This is not as weird as the prosecution wants to make this sound.” 

Meanwhile, the “planning” the government offered as evidence of conspiracy appeared to involve discussions of the necessary and complex logistics of organizing a demonstration in the midst of ICE raids. People at anti-ICE protests were facing violence from police as well as political repression through wildly reaching criminal charges brought by federal prosecutors (many of which, across the country, have since been thrown out, from the cases involving DC Sandwich Guy and labor leaders to the Broadview 6). This escalation in criminal charges was a pattern already becoming clear in mid-2025, and it was directed from the top. 

About two weeks before the Prairieland arrests, the Justice Department had issued a directive to all U.S. attorneys to step up cases against anti-ICE demonstrators. Federal prosecutors, a memo from Associate Deputy Attorney General Aakash Singh stated, should prioritize investigations to do with alleged “rioting, looting, arson, destruction of property, assaults on officers (federal, state, and local), and obstruction of federal immigration enforcement efforts,” and should publicize their efforts. “Push out press releases whenever you file charges in these matters,” Singh instructed.

That July, after the arrests, as federal prosecutors rolled out their case against the Prairieland defendants to the media and the defendants sat in jail, their supporters were at work just trying to find each other. These efforts were the beginnings of what became the DFW Support Committee, a group started, Bruno explained, “to connect everyone who’s part of this wider and pretty small radical community in the DFW metroplex area.” It wasn’t easy, he said, because people had typically tried to remain “as anonymous and disconnected from each other as possible.” The size of their community, compared to the local opposition, along with the opposition’s increasing access to mainstream political power, had already led people to isolate themselves and take precautions, even before the more punitive climate took hold. The political repression driving the case could give them more reasons to disconnect from one another. It was difficult to verify the names and dates of birth for the defendants, information that was necessary in order to locate them in jail and communicate with them there. Some people may have deleted the Signal app off their phone, Bruno said, or changed their usernames. It could take weeks or months before participants connected names they knew on a screen to faces they knew from an organizing meeting. 

Those kinds of meetings, tying this somewhat diffuse community together, were also made suspect in the government’s case. Ines Soto, Elizabeth Soto, and Savanna Battan—Bruno’s friends—were the driving force behind the Emma Goldman Book Club, which Bruno had been attending as far back as 2016, “not when it started, but damn near close,” he told me. “Emma Goldman Book Club. It sounds very innocuous,” said Assistant U.S. Attorney Shawn Smith. “It’s camouflage for what it is.” Prosecutors put anarchist books and zines that might be read in the club—or at least, their covers—in press materials.

Alexandra Edwards first went to the book club in 2023, she told me, when she was new to the DFW activist scene. “Ines made room for me,” she wrote in a recent essay on the case. Edwards, a writer and academic who teaches about anarchism and researches fascist movements and networks, was at the time working to support the Stop Cop City defendants, who had been organizing against a planned $90 million police megafacility in Atlanta. The Georgia attorney general charged more than 60 people with racketeering for their involvement, and more than a dozen with domestic terrorism. (These defendants were characterized by prosecutors as “militant anarchists.”)  “I wanted to host a letter-writing night for the Cop City defendants—people then reading their mail in jail,” Edwards wrote, and when she brought this idea to the book club, “Ines folded it into the evening.” Three years later, Ines Soto was among those jailed for participating in the noise demo, and the book club was demonized in the government’s case.

The government was convinced, or at least wanted the jury to be convinced, that the book club was a front for plotting insurrection. “Emma Goldman is a known anarchist. And in these book clubs, this is a place for people to come together and share and spread this type of literature, this anarchist material,” testified FBI Special Agent Joseph Clark Wiethorn at one pretrial hearing. “And where they read, they set up what’s called tabling events. And it’s a place for these people to come together to discuss these ideas.” In other words, it was an ordinary a book club, with one distinguishing characteristic: the nature of the ideas under discussion. “All right,” replied Assistant U.S. Attorney Smith. “And these are really kind of violent, overthrow-the-government-type things?” The FBI agent answered simply, “Correct.”

The noise demo itself, meant to express solidarity with people locked away in an immigrant camp, has resulted in a bitter symmetry. The demonstrators who organized to show support for detainees are now imprisoned, and others are now organizing and demonstrating to support them. 

On days when the trial was in session, members of the support committee staffed a table at the courthouse; people shared zines and pamphlets about the case. Bruno told me that he gave essays about the case to anarchists in Greece and South Korea. The types of networks that had been made to sound suspicious in the government’s arguments were put to use raising money for lawyers and supporting defendants’ family members. It is the kind of network that could grow, as Bruno and others have put it, the mass movement that it would take to free the Prairieland defendants—broad and strong enough to put the necessary pressure on a future president to pardon and release them.

Early on, Bruno said, the government’s aggressive roundups and violent raids had unfortunately been “pretty successful in scattering everyone.” It took concerted effort to get them back together, he explained, “and understand that these are battles that have to be fought in community, have to be fought collectively, instead of trying to hide.” The risks they face remain very real. But for Bruno, there’s a deeper lesson here, one for the future: “Repression is harder when we’re all together—when we all stick together, when we are all in community with each other—than when we’re separate.”

I was sitting at the bar of a coffee shop in South Austin, researching the suffragist movement.

“Those are old newspaper articles?” the guy next to me asked. He might have been in his thirties. He had a loose hipster haircut and expensive sneakers. “Very cool.”

I told him I was reading news stories speculating about the possibility of a female president. The furthest back I’d traced the dream was to suffragist Tennie Claflin, who, a newspaper reported, predicted that “a mixed Presidential ticket” would “sweep the country” in the 1908 election.

“Oh, wow,” the guy marveled. “That’s … a long time ago.”

We talked for a couple of minutes about the recent past, and Hillary Clinton’s and Kamala Harris’s near misses. “How long do you think it will take?” I asked him.

He thought a bit. “For sure in the next 50 years,” he said. Then he saw my face. “Maybe 20?” He amended: “Soon.”

The country’s next chance to turn “soon” into now is 2028, and without a doubt it is the Democrats’ opportunity, should they choose to embrace it. Karen Finney, a longtime Democratic political consultant, told me her colleagues on the other side of the aisle had no real prospects of a female nominee—not the way the party is now. The Democrats’ field, meanwhile, is unformed. Three women swirl in the mix: Gretchen Whitmer, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Harris, who has put out the strongest signals of the three. (We might add a fourth, Amy Klobuchar, who is running for governor of Minnesota this year; if she wins, that’s a fine perch from which to seek the presidency.) Because we have no firm sense of which specific women might be up for consideration, now is exactly the time to consider the Democrats’ current attitude toward nominating any woman at all—and what it means if they don’t.

Most of the party faithful I spoke to seemed to go only so far as to obliquely acknowledge the existence of skittishness around nominating a woman: Usually, I gathered some version of “I’m hearing it, too.” In January, New York magazine asked, “Will Democrats Dare Nominate a Woman for President in 2028?” MS NOW wondered whether, for Democrats, a female candidate at the top of the ticket would be “radioactive.” The most public declamation of the reality Democrats must contend with came from Michelle Obama, who has twice explained her refusal to entertain her own entry into the race as a function of knowing she’d lose: “You all are lying. You’re not ready for a woman. You are not.” Indeed, we’ve run A/B tests on the subject, and the results have been heartbreaking: two eminently qualified women against a buffoonish serial sex pest; one qualified but rather boring man against the same tyrant. You can point to a thousand different variables at play, but there was one inarguable constant. The women lost; the man won.

There are obvious reasons for leaders to avoid publicly quashing the hope that a woman might once again top the ticket. One is their obligation to their constituents. For years, Democratic voters have told pollsters that they would like to see a female president elected in their lifetime: 89 percent of them, according to a YouGov poll in October 2025. But partisans are not immune to arguments about electability, and certainly electability—generally pitched as a concern about ideology and not gender—played an enormous role in Joe Biden’s taking the nomination in 2020, when he ran against a record number of female candidates.

For those who are anxious about winning in 2028, it makes gut-level sense to minimize the various specific reasons Harris—and before her, Clinton—lost, and fixate on their gender as a liability. After all, the stakes are so high. Run a woman and fail, and more than the presidency could be lost—democracy, women’s rights, everyone’s rights. “Soon” could become “never.” This is a genuine concern.

And yet it’s also true that if the Democrats nominate a man, the choice would not be neutral. You can insist that any particular female candidate is not the one for you; certainly, I have found myself supporting a man when a woman was in the field. But women have been running for president since before we won the vote, and our chance to lead the country has always been just around the corner. Every time it’s a man at the top of the ticket—even in the days before women could “credibly” run—the choice of candidate has sent a message to voters about who is worthy of consideration and whose voices deserve to be heard. The Harris and Clinton losses were devastating, no doubt. But in 2028, being robbed of even the chance to make a woman president would hurt, too.

The history of people telling women they will not become president is rage-bait. “Never” is always “never.” But a march through the history of “soon” leaves a mark on the heart. Over one hundred years of “someday” makes each next chance feel even further away, not closer. Certainly, women are not the only group that hasn’t had their turn in the Oval Office; our grief is not unique—or rather each intersectionality can claim its own particular shade of mourning. What all women can share is the familiar sense of a promise just a little too far away to be kept.

Tennie Claflin’s prediction that a mixed ticket would “sweep the country” in the 1908 election came after defiant campaigns by her sister Victoria Woodhull in 1872 and Belva Ann Lockwood in 1884 and 1888. That highest, hardest glass ceiling has more cracks than most people know. The hope that it will give is older yet. “I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors,” Abigail Adams wrote to her husband, John, in March 1776. “Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could.” (“I cannot but laugh,” John wrote back.)

It was after the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified in 1920 that talk of “soon” took the shape it has today, a respectable guessing game to fill up feature wells when the right news hook comes along: Women have come so far. The presidency is next.

Less than three months after suffrage, newspapers ran a syndicated column evaluating the chances of possible female candidates for president. Women had led a grassroots movement that wrought a change to the Constitution—two movements, if you count how many women had been key to pushing the prohibition amendment through. The White House was the logical next step.

The column’s analysis was as sober and considered as any panel discussion today, perhaps more so. The article quoted Martha Corman, who theorized the front-runner to be suffragist Carrie Chapman Catt, “a stateswoman of broad and generous vision, a student of international affairs” who commanded “an organization the like of which no man running for president ever had to support him.” Or perhaps it would be the more radical Alice Paul, head of the National Woman’s Party, who might release the same “hunger strikers and prison martyrs” who won the right to vote “on persons who are blocking the way to some other goal of progress the pickets hope to reach.” (Donald Trump is the only candidate in modern times who has seen supporters’ prison martyrdom work in his favor.)

From here, the trail of “soon” winds its way through the American conversation, intersecting with actual campaigns but more often taking place in the space between them. A specific campaign squeezes the question into the shape of a specific person. The mainstream media has been entertaining the idea of electing a woman for more than 100 years; the actual women running have had more trouble finding consideration.

By 1934, the argument that a woman could become president reached the exact same point we remain at today, which is to say that women had by then been elected to every other office. As an Associated Press story that year observed, “The presidency and vice-presidency is the only high government executive office this country has not already accorded women.”

In 1945, a columnist opined that somewhere in the country “is a girl … who may succeed in being elected President of the United States”—after all, that year saw a record number of women serving in Congress: 11.

In 1949, a Gallup poll on willingness to vote for a woman saw the respondents split, 48 percent for and 48 percent against. A poll write-up summarized the state of affairs: “A ‘Madam President’ is as inevitable for the United States as the return of short skirts.” That same year, Harry S. Truman told the delegates of Girls Nation that by the time “all of us old people will be out of the way … you might have this terrible job which I have.”

In 1959, John F. Kennedy wrote that a woman would be president “during this generation.” In 1976, Betty Ford thought it might happen by 1996. In 2006, Laura Bush guessed it was imminent. Bill Clinton, a week after Harris’s loss in 2024: “Pretty soon.”

In 1959, John F. Kennedy wrote that it would happen “during this generation.”

Meanwhile, more and more women tested this theory in the major parties, including Republican Margaret Chase Smith in 1964 and Democrats Shirley Chisholm and Patsy Mink in 1972. Smaller parties with longer odds took the biggest chances—most of the women who have run for president in the United States have led third-party tickets, and almost half have been women of color.

In 1976, Betty Ford thought it might happen by 1996.

In 1980, Jimmy Carter said it would happen by the time his daughter Amy came of age (and maybe she’d have the job).

In 1984, the same year the Democrat Geraldine Ferraro stepped into place as a vice presidential candidate and lost, Ronald Reagan assured a group of female Republican leaders that they’d see a woman in the office “one of these days,” and four years later added that a woman president was “inevitable.”

In 1990, Ferraro herself said she thought that “we have a real shot at having a woman president in this next decade” because the sexist nature of her coverage—“How I did my hair, where I bought my clothes. Dumb things”—would be put away. “Because I was the first woman, people were caught up in a lot of other things besides my brain,” she told McCall’s. “People got it out of their system in 1984.”

In 1991, 65-year-old Barbara Bush said she planned “to be around” for it. (She died in 2018.)

In 1992, Democrats’ “Year of the Woman” saw more women than ever run for office and more women win. Patricia Aburdene, the co-author of Megatrends for Women, confidently asserted that “male-dominated institutions, from religious fundamentalism to the Senate Judiciary Committee to the Supreme Court, will be dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st Century.”

In 1993, in a television interview, Bill Clinton—as his wife stood straight-faced beside him—guessed that it would be “not long,” adding, “probably within my lifetime.”

In February 1999, pollster Larry Sabato, self-proclaimed possessor of a political “crystal ball,” said, “It’s going to happen sooner than anyone expects,” and predicted that if there were four male candidates in the 2000 presidential election, one would be a minority. “People are going to be stunned at how quickly the white male power structure falls.”

In 2006, Laura Bush guessed it was imminent: “I think it will happen probably in the next few terms.”

In 2010, George H.W. Bush saw it on the horizon: “I don’t know who, or when, but I would say fairly soon.”

In 2016—you remember.

In 2017, Hillary Clinton softly echoed her husband’s timeline: “Will we ever have a female president? We will. I hope I’m around to vote for her.”

Then 2024. You remember.

Bill Clinton, two weeks after Harris’s loss in 2024: “Pretty soon.”

Nancy Pelosi, 2025: “Within this next generation.”

Barack Obama, 2026: “Sometime soon,” he told People magazine in June. “In my lifetime.”

Ask a political scientist about women’s representation in American politics and one of the first things you’ll hear is, “When women run, they win.” This is true as far as it goes, which is to say: They win until they get to the presidency. That women succeed in downballot races has, in fact, been true since the 1990s. A 1997 study of more than 60,000 candidates stated unequivocally that “a candidate’s sex does not affect his or her chances of winning an election…. Winning elections has nothing to do with the sex of the candidate,” and no major studies since have found otherwise. A 2016 study of congressional races from 1982 through 2012 found “no evidence of a gender penalty” in “general election vote share [or] probability of victory.” In 2021, a meta-analysis of 67 papers looking at candidate choice concluded that being a woman actually increased support from voters by just under 2 percent, and found “only a modest difference in the effect of gender for white and black candidates.”

Women have run for office in larger and larger numbers, and their proportions have continued to increase—but their representation has moved only incrementally over time, far out of step with their participation as voters (women’s turnout is consistently higher than men’s), as community volunteers (women are 30 percent more likely to volunteer than men), and as political donors (women give less money overall, but tend to make up half of overall unique donors). Women hold about a third of state and federal offices across the United States: 27 percent of senators, 28 percent of the House, and 33.6 percent of state legislators. At the executive level, 25.4 percent of U.S. mayors are women, and 28 percent of governors. Then there’s the presidency, standing still at 0 percent overall. There’s just something different about it.

The discrepancy between “when women run, they win” and the lack of diversity in political leadership was largely framed as a “pipeline problem” through the 1990s, and activists sought to address the issue with amped-up recruitment and candidate workshops. A 2005 study by researchers Jennifer Lawless and Richard Fox reframed the debate. Surveying the rise of women in professions that typically generate candidates (including education, law, and business), they documented what they called an “ambition gap.” Lawless and Fox indicated that women didn’t show the same interest in running for office as men, but to describe it as simply a problem of “ambition” disguises a more troubling disconnect. Women were interested in politics at the same rates as men, but they didn’t see themselves as potential candidates. They were also less likely to see themselves as qualified and less likely to have taken steps to run. Lawless and Fox found these gaps to be consistent across demographics. Their book on the subject became a cornerstone of the field, and its title is a bit of a rallying cry: It Takes a Candidate.

The two researchers remained on the case throughout the decades, returning to the original sample in 2008 to find the gap unchanged and the implied solution the same as well: It Still Takes a Candidate came out in 2012. Their 2014 research on young people’s interest in politics found the ambition gap in college students to be just as significant, despite, again, interest in politics being basically equal among genders.

In 2023, these intrepid researchers sallied once more into the surveys, with a paper whose exhaustion bleeds through every line: “It Takes More Than a Candidate: The Invincible Gender Gap in Political Ambition.” The paper is a bleak tour of how little has changed in 20 years, and how women’s prospects have, in some ways, gotten worse. The gap between men who had “ever considered running for office” and women who had ever considered it increased from 16 points in 2001 and 2011 to 18 in 2021. In 2001, there was a 12-point difference between men and women who self-identified as “very qualified” to run for office. In 2011, it was 13, and in 2021, 14. The gap between men and women being approached about running for office has remained constant as well. To be clear, there have been gains in women’s representation—each cycle seems to bring a new record. What Lawless and Fox and other researchers emphasize, however, is that those gains aren’t nearly enough.

Lawless and Fox offer a hypothesis to explain the stasis despite 20 years of enormous change in so many other respects. They call it “the representation paradox.” More women are seeking office than ever before, which means even more women are put through the meat grinder of increasingly more toxic elections. (If you want a vivid example of just how personal and wretched campaigning for women in the modern age has become, search “CANDIDATE NAME + PORN” and notice how the results differ for women and men.) Specifically, when it comes to women taking on the most visible race in the country, if not the world, they may run, but they mostly lose—and these campaigns are particularly nasty.

There’s no doubt that something has made Americans, especially women, who have witnessed these candidacies more discouraged about their role in the political process than they once were. A survey in 2015 by YouGov showed that 67 percent of Americans believed the country to be ready for a female president. Ahead of the 2024 election, 57 percent said the country was ready. YouGov’s October 2025 poll showed support for that belief dropping to just 48 percent. A similarly timed survey by the American University School of Public Affairs found an even more precipitous decline: Just 38 percent of respondents agreed that the “men of America are ready to elect more women to political office” in general. Only 20 percent of women under 50 thought this was the case—consistent with 2018 Pew polling that shows women have led the shift in pessimism about America’s readiness. In 2014, 41 percent said that voters had a problem electing women to high office, and in 2018, 57 percent did, while men’s assessment stayed essentially the same (at 31 and then 32 percent).

These numbers fly in the face of Gallup’s poll, which generally shows upwards of 90 percent of all Americans saying that they, personally, are ready to vote for a female president, a number that has remained more or less constant for years. Others have found less stellar results, but all sorts of polling show Americans portraying themselves as willing to vote for some hypothetical woman, while their guesses as to other people’s willingness to do that are less rosy.

There’s an argument that asking about what your neighbors think and not what you would do is a sneaky way around social desirability bias—the tendency people have to answer questions in ways they think are more socially acceptable. Contra Michelle Obama, I think it’s a little more complicated than the country simply lying about its readiness. People are correctly surveying the environment as it is rather than trying to figure out what others might “really” believe. If the world seems sexist and racist on its face, why might you think some people feel differently, deep inside?

This type of misjudgment of others is called “pluralistic ignorance.” According to one review of the literature, this sociological phenomenon explains “the lag between a society’s perception of itself and actual changes in people’s private beliefs and values” in all sorts of areas, particularly race and gender. A landmark study in 1931 showed that white fraternity members consistently said that they themselves were willing to admit racial minorities but just as consistently voted against doing so—because they believed their fraternity brothers were against it. Other studies have shown that men understate other men’s support of parental leave relative to their own and that men and women underestimate men’s concerns about gender bias in STEM contexts. Without intervention, ignorance of this type perpetuates the problem.

This is the loop of “soon.” As long as women perceive that the path to the presidency is all misery and no glory, as long as they believe they are running uphill only to hit a brick wall, there is going to be a lid on the number of women willing to run.

In fact, according to Lawless and Fox, women under 40 aren’t just pessimistic about women’s chances in politics, they are most likely to see the political environment as particularly hostile to women. Over a third agree strongly that “women face more scrutiny and challenges when they run for office than men do,” compared to over a quarter of women over 60. They are also somewhat more likely to doubt that they have thick enough skin to endure a campaign: 66 percent compared to 61 percent. This is the next generation of potential female candidates, and they don’t want the job. Or to put a finer point on it: They don’t want to go through the painful experience of running only to fail in the end. Once again, the truism of “When women run, they win” cannot break through what’s on the news and in their social media feed: Lawless and Fox found that only 23 percent of women think women are just as likely as men to win their races.

As Lawless and Fox observe, “to the degree that the candidacies of Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin, or Kamala Harris serve as a civic education project about women who run for office, they appear to reinforce, or perhaps exacerbate, women’s doubts. Thus, for many well-qualified women, dismissing the idea of running for office is a rational response.” This is an incomplete hypothesis. The problem is not so much that these candidates, Clinton and Harris in particular, faced disparagement and ridicule and even more subtle forms of bias. The problem is that they faced those hurdles and it was for naught.

Even worse: Look who they lost to.

I was a reluctant Hillary Clinton supporter. I was not especially taken with her 2008 campaign. I supported Bernie Sanders in 2016. But on Election Day of that year, I felt the surge of hope that many did. My mother died in 2012, and I found myself thinking of her as I walked to my office, how tickled she’d be. My immediate grief that night was as much for the happiness I thought her victory would have meant for my mom as it was for the general state of the country.

Thousands—hundreds of thousands—of women shared that grief. It mobilized the Women’s March on Washington and the hundreds of satellite marches around it. On election night in 2024, that same pang pieced many of the same hearts. We got the message: You are not wanted here.

The desire for a female candidate isn’t universal among women, or at least it doesn’t always trump women’s other desires and concerns. Harris won the lowest support among women of any recent Democratic nominee. White women without college degrees voted against the female presidential candidates in significant numbers in the general election when they got the chance; women in the Republican primary in 2024 were cool toward Nikki Haley. But is unconcern about women’s representation proof that you’re immune to the message that women aren’t suited for the job? No. In fact, it means you’ve internalized the message more completely. Women made up around 45 percent of Democratic congressional nominees in 2024 and 16 percent of Republican hopefuls, despite persistent and progressively more alarmed calls for candidate recruitment. They make up just 15 percent of Republicans serving. Representative Elise Stefanik called the situation a “crisis” in 2018, and while it’s no longer a crisis, Republican women’s representation lags far behind that of Democrats. You could argue that’s because Stefanik’s crusade is dwarfed by the GOP’s larger project. But what’s happening in their party is just a more dramatic version of what we’re all living through.

When I asked Betsy Hodges, the former mayor of Minneapolis, what she thought of the Democrats nominating a woman in 2028, she interjected: “If there’s an election in 2028.” Whether or not the nominee is female, she pointed out, doesn’t matter if elections aren’t fair and free. But if it does seem like the election will proceed, she said, a male candidate would at least mean “less noise in the process, fewer think pieces about whatever.”

“I don’t know,” she went on. “I’m kind of agnostic on the idea of whether or not a woman can win.” At the moment, she said, people are making decisions about the nomination and the presidency based on the devastating disappointments of the Trump Era. “The chances of people fully healing from the trauma of the last 10 years by November of 2028—the chances are pretty slim.”

Hodges isn’t wrong to be cynical. Her agnosticism about running a woman—the wish for less noise, the acknowledgment that people will be making decisions under stress—fits the pattern Lawless and Fox describe. “I think a lot of women, having been disappointed twice now … are reverting back to their disappointment as well,” Hodges told me. This is the discouragement loop, working as designed.

The loop can be interrupted. In 2020, researchers surveying potential Democratic primary voters found that presenting “when women run, they win” data caused a measurable shift in intentions to vote for a woman. Suggestively, showing primary voters polls about America’s “readiness” to vote for a woman did little to shift behavior. As the study notes, neutralizing electability concerns “may require more than merely correcting perceptions of others’ attitudes; it may require shifting perceptions of others’ likely behavior.” Perhaps not enough primary voters got the memo; most assuredly, what primary voters actually did in 2020 is the more meaningful statement on likely behavior than what you’d read in a survey.

Optimistic observers might argue that a woman who survives a truly bruising primary might fare better than Clinton or Harris in the general election. After all, however unique their paths to the nomination, both were tarred with the same undermining allegation: They didn’t really earn it. Harris, obviously, suffered because of Biden’s selfish decision to run for reelection. His delayed exit from the race made Harris’s coronation a matter about which the party had little choice. In 2016, the field was basically cleared for Clinton; then, once she was challenged by Sanders, the Democratic National Committee under Debbie Wasserman Schultz clearly put a finger or two on the scale for her. And all this came trailing decades of accusations that she was only in the public eye at all because of Bill anyway.

Those analyses may be accurate. It’s also true that allegations of not having earned something are especially damaging to women candidates, who come into positions of power having to defend their right to be there. Biden certainly benefited from the Democratic establishment’s backing of him. He was unquestionably the candidate who had waited his “turn,” and he didn’t suffer from the same sorts of whispers. That these narratives cling to Clinton and Harris as explanations for their losses doesn’t suggest that all the next female nominee has to do is win a “normal” nomination—rather, it suggests just how durable the narrative of deservingness is. I want to believe that all it would take to shed this suspicion is a decisive-enough win, but everything I’ve ever seen tells me that the bar for “deserving” is always set in retrospect, and women never fully surpass it. This isn’t an argument against voting for a woman in the primary; it’s just a warning against the inevitable.

Sending another woman into the maw of 2028 is a risk. A brutal enough campaign and another loss for the Democrats could continue to suppress women’s interest in running. But waiting to give a woman a chance to win is a risk, too.

Sending another woman into the maw of 2028 is a risk. A brutal enough campaign and another loss for the Democrats could continue to suppress women’s interest in running—if (as Hodges worried) there’s ever another election again, that is. Democratic primary voters are not wrong to believe that democracy is on the ballot. A Republican win could endanger women beyond their mere presence on the ticket or their absence from the Oval Office, not to mention what might befall other vulnerable groups. The whole architecture of the country is wobbling—do you want to gamble that sexism (conscious or not) won’t move a couple of ten thousand votes somewhere in the Upper Midwest?

But waiting to give a woman a chance to win is a risk, too. It creates the circumstances for another generation of women to mostly absent themselves from the process.

This is the cost of “soon.”

Should a woman not get the Democratic nomination, the best-case scenario—barring a surprise such as a dynastic intervention putting Ivanka on the throne, say—would move the prospect of a female nominee or even president to 2032.

So, eight more years, or even just four.

Things are getting better, and it feels churlish to argue with that. Yes, there are more and more women in Congress, on the bench, and in city hall. But breathless headlines and raised-arm celebrations can hide the pace of change. Balancing hope, which is necessary, against reality, which is just as essential, is a trick for anyone without power. If I’ve come down hard on the side of reality, it because I’m so sick of “soon.”

In my tour of “soon” I also found truth-tellers, women who sized up the country’s intransigence and spelled out the double standards. In 1934, Eleanor Roosevelt, often spoken of as a presidential candidate herself, slyly drew out the double standard: “We certainly will not have a woman president until some woman worthy of being president appears on the horizon. In the meantime, men both worthy and unworthy will probably fill that office.” And Gloria Steinem in 1983, calling the shot: “Most categories of men will precede any category of women.… We are likely to have a Jewish male president, a black male president, Hispanic male president before we elect any women.” Even Shirley Chisholm reflected in 1972, “Black male politicians are no different from white male politicians. This ‘woman thing’ is so deep. I’ve found it out in this campaign if I never knew it before.”

These women weren’t being pessimistic. They were being honest. Their honesty didn’t change the outcome then, and honesty alone won’t change it now. Only action can.

You are not sexist for wanting the candidate to be a man or supporting a man. At the same time, you get to decide if a hundred years of “soon” might now add up to something. To wait longer is to reinforce the exact system that’s brought us here. A hundred years of “soon” is not a promise. It’s a pattern.

By now you’ve heard that when Donald Trump left the NATO summit in Turkey last month, he was clandestinely transferred from Air Force One to an alternative plane to avert a credible Iranian threat. It appears many of his cabinet members were left on Air Force One. Now new leaks make the story look darker: It turns out Trump brought several of the aides who are personally closest to him on the safe alternative flight. This, even as he left numerous journalists on the original plane, an extraordinarily derelict move that effectively turned them into a decoy that might have been targeted. Stunningly, none were informed of the operation. It all perfectly captures Trump’s contempt for the media, so we talked to Margaret Sullivan, author of the excellent press-critiquing Substack “American Crisis.” She explains why this saga is so irregular, why the media faces a moment of uncommon challenges, and why journalists often won’t directly confront authoritarianism, even when it gravely threatens their own institution. Listen to this episode here.

On ABC News “This Week” on Sunday, Rep. Alexandria made two startling admissions—yes, she’s thinking about running for president (“I haven’t ruled out the possibility”), and perhaps related, she put distance between herself and the left’s “woke” politics of the late 2010s and early 2020s. “I have a local city councilman that has this saying, ‘Woke One was crazy,’” she said…

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A cartoon by Jack Ohman. Related | ‘Tariffs have been incredible’: Trump grows more delusional on economy…

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Well, lookie here. President Donald Trump actually did show up for his jingoistic, low-rent Patriot Games. You’d think, in the middle of a war and a collapsing economy, Trump might have better things to do than fly to a tiny town in Ohio to watch some high schoolers do extremely real and important sports like dodgeball, but Trump always makes time for events that praise Trump.

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New York Democratic officials stood in solidarity at a press conference Wednesday, responding to the increasingly cruel and deeply authoritarian threats coming from Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement goons. “That appears to me, on its face, to be a violation of civil rights,” Gov. Kathy Hochul said when asked about ICE requests for “electric shock gloves” to use on the various people…

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White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt—one of the most public facing spokespersons for President Trump and the MAGA agenda—will step away from her role next month to spend more time with her family. 

“Our wonderful White House Press Secretary, and one of my most trusted aides, Karoline Leavitt, will be departing her role at the end of the month so she can spend more time with her beautiful young children and family, a decision I totally understand and respect!” Trump wrote Wednesday afternoon on Truth Social. “Karoline has been a real leader in the White House, and has done a phenomenal job fighting for Justice, Liberty, and Freedom, since 2018, including our Historic Re-Election Campaign of 2024. Karoline has been one of the best White House Press Secretaries in the History of the Office. Thank you, Karoline, for a job well done!” 

Leavitt first joined the Trump administration in 2020 as part of the White House Office of Presidential Correspondence, and was eventually named assistant White House Press Secretary. She ran an unsuccessful campaign for Congress in New Hampshire before making her way back to the Trump campaign, and was named press secretary in 2024, the youngest one ever at 28 years old. It is unclear who will replace her. 

Leavitt leaves a legacy of devoted bigotry behind her. She lied about Trump blocking $50 million worth of condoms to Gaza. She blamed a deadly collision between a military helicopter and an American Airlines flight that killed 67 people on DEI instead of massive cuts Trump made.  She called the Epstein files a “Democratic hoax, and she called Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Salvadoran national and Maryland father wrongly deported by the Trump administration, a “foreign terrorist,” and “MS-13 gang member’ who “was engaged in human trafficking.” That was a lie too. 

The midterm election primary season is nearing its end, with only a few contests remaining in a handful of states across the country. That means we have a ton of data about primary turnout to draw some inferences about what November will look like. And what that data shows is a surging Democratic primary turnout that suggests a massive blue wave is building that will sweep Republicans out to…

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