Political News

When I began the publicity push for How Russia Won: Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and the Fight for America, a friend who until recently worked for a major national news outlet offered me advice: Try to get on Fox News or Joe Rogan’s podcast. You’re not likely to change the mind of anyone in their audiences, she said, but you might gin up controversy that would draw attention to the book. And don’t you think, she added, they would welcome the chance to take the Trump–Russia story head-on?

She was wrong. The publicist at the publishing house contacted Fox and Rogan’s show. I sent a note to a Fox host with whom I’ve had a cordial relationship. I also sent Rogan an email—and I did the same with Theo Von, a podcaster who draws an audience similar to Rogan’s. No one responded.

The guy who turned on Trump and called him a racist, liar, and sleazebag is now back in the fold, chatting with his old boss and hosting a radio show that is part of a pro-Trump lineup on WABC-AM in New York City.

That was no surprise. Fox is not interested in good debates or deep dives. Its business strategy is to sling red meat to its viewers, and that includes disinformation, hyped-up falsehoods, conspiracy theories, and other nonsense. Examining—let alone challenging—the audience’s fervently held beliefs, such as the view that the Trump–Russia scandal is nothing but a Deep State scheme (hoax! witch hunt!), doesn’t fit into the model. And Rogan, who has hosted and embraced purveyors of this hogwash, including Kash Patel and Tulsi Gabbard, was unlikely to book a guest who would show he had been duped (as I once explained in an article).

The one path I found to perhaps reach a conservative audience was Michael Cohen. The onetime Trump fixer who became a fierce Trump critic and who recently returned to being a Trump chum was game.

Cohen’s dramatic 180 has generated much scorn among Trump detractors. The guy who turned on Trump and called him a racist, liar, and sleazebag is now back in the fold, chatting with his old boss and hosting a radio show that is part of a pro-Trump lineup on WABC-AM in New York City. I asked if he wanted to interview me about the book. He invited me on his podcast.

It was a bizarre experience. I don’t know why Cohen reversed himself on Trump. Some have cited this as evidence that he’s just a grifter. I wonder if he was afraid that Trump’s Justice Department, seeking revenge for Cohen’s testimony against Trump in the porn star/hush money case that ended with Trump being convicted on 34 felony counts, might investigate him. But as an author desperate for attention for his book (see here), I steered clear of that topic so we could focus on How Russia Won.

During the podcast, Cohen was in full defense-of-Trump mode. He opened by declaring it was good Trump was buddy-buddy with Putin. “Trump’s whole pitch is pragmatic realism,” he said. “You talk to people like Putin at the G20. You host meetings in Alaska, so you keep a dialogue open so that you don’t end up in World War III. I mean, if keeping lines of communication open prevents direct military conflict and paves the way for a deal with Ukraine, why paint that as appeasement, rather than basic hard-headed diplomacy?”

That might be a decent take if Trump’s cozying up to Putin resulted in progress toward ending the war the Russian tyrant launched against Ukraine. But it hasn’t. And, as I noted, my book shows that Putin has for a decade been waging a shadow war against the United States with influence and disinformation operations that benefit Trump—and Trump has been aiding Putin by denying any of this has been occurring. Worse, he’s been in cahoots with the Russians. I pointed out that when Rudy Giuliani was Trump’s personal attorney in 2019 and 2020, Giuliani colluded with a Russian intelligence agent to smear Joe Biden.

Now hewing to the party line, Cohen insisted the Trump–Russia scandal was a “hoax,” even as he referred to me as a “very prestigious journalist, somebody who knows a lot.”

Cohen replied: “You’re 100 percent correct…I’m not going to argue with you about that. Rudy Giuliani is not Donald Trump. Let’s be clear.” But, I countered, Giuliani was Trump’s lawyer at that time. “That doesn’t mean Trump was involved,” Cohen replied.

That was a strange defense of Trump. I shot back: “US intelligence told Donald Trump that Rudy Giuliani was a target of Russian intelligence and Donald Trump did nothing. He never told him to stop…Donald Trump even ended up tweeting some of the Russian disinformation [about Biden] that Rudy Giuliani was putting out there. He was part of this.” Cohen’s answer: “I don’t know if [Trump] was part of this. Maybe he was just trying to support Rudy.”

Trump merely trying to support his lawyer who was collaborating with a foreign intelligence operation to tarnish Trump’s political rival? Gee, what a guy. (Remember, Trump and Giuliani also together pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to manufacture dirt on Biden.)

Now hewing to the party line, Cohen insisted the Trump–Russia scandal was a “hoax,” even as he referred to me as a “very prestigious journalist, somebody who knows a lot.” He maintained Trump had “nothing to do with Russia in 2016, to the best of my knowledge.” But Cohen knows that in June 2016, Donald Trump Jr., Paul Manafort, and Jared Kushner met with a Russian emissary who was supposed to pass them derogatory information on Hillary Clinton after being told this go-between was part of a secret Kremlin effort to help Trump’s campaign. And Cohen knows that during the 2016 campaign, Trump was pursuing a big deal to develop a Trump Tower in Moscow. Cohen was the point man for this endeavor, which involved negotiations with Russian businessmen with possible ties to Russian intelligence (according to a bipartisan 2020 Senate Intelligence  Committee report).

When I mentioned that over the past year and a half, the Trump administration has shuttered units within the FBI, State Department, and  intelligence community that track and try to thwart Russian disinformation aimed at the United States (as well as disinformation operations mounted by other foreign governments), Cohen countered that conservatives “look at these same intelligence agencies…and they see bloated, partisan operations that spent years, years chasing rumors…Isn’t it fair to say that cutting those units down to size is just good governance and draining the swamp than leaving our doors unlocked to Moscow?”

Uh, no. Trump seems to be purposefully leaving the door wide open for Russian interference in the current elections.

His position was that it’s fine for Trump to let Putin attack a US election. That’s not very America First-ish.

I described the disinformation and influence operations Putin directed at the United States in the 2020 and 2024 elections. Cohen contended that there’s no evidence Trump was personally involved. “He denies Russia has done anything,” I responded, “even though his own intelligence community and Treasury Department in his first term identified Russian operations aimed at the 2020 election to hurt Joe Biden.”

“Fair point,” Cohen said. Now he was agreeing with me?

After I again criticized Trump for dismantling the anti-disinformation offices, he said: “That’s one way to look at it. Another [for Trump] is that ‘They were helping me, so I don’t personally give a shit. Let them do whatever they want. I’m not going to interfere if someone wants to help me.’” His position was that it’s fine for Trump to let Putin attack a US election. That’s not very America First-ish.

Then Cohen derided the recent news reports that Moscow is meddling in the midterms, noting it’s “just the same political playbook” every election. I explained these reports come up each campaign season “because it keeps happening again and again. And Donald Trump refuses to recognize this because it’s happening often to his benefit…He’s been denying it all this time, which is why it keeps happening.”

We went back and forth on Trump’s actions regarding Ukraine, with Cohen maintaining that his former employer was not soft on Putin. He asked why voters ought to care about the fuss over Trump and Russia. I contended that a foreign adversary subverting a US election was a prominent national security concern. And he stupefied me with this comment: “The premise of your book is accurate. I’m not going to argue with the premise of the book. Now do I think, again, that Trump is allowing Putin to win? No more than Obama wanted to play into the hands of the Iranians when he sent over $9 billion in an airplane in cash.”

Why was he hailing a book that depicts Trump as a useful idiot for Putin who has betrayed the United States? It seemed Cohen was having trouble sticking to his new Trump-friendly stance when confronted with facts.

You cannot say my book is accurate and Trump has done no wrong—though that’s what Cohen did. And his attempted deflection referring to Iran made no sense. (It was $1.7 billion that the Treasury Department paid Tehran to settle a long-standing breach-of-contract claim pending before the Iran–US Claims Tribunal at The Hague, an arrangement that coincided with the multilateral Iran nuclear agreement.)

We argued over whether Trump’s refusal to acknowledge Putin’s assaults on the United States was an important matter. “One hundred percent and it is,” Cohen eventually said. But he quickly added, “It is one person’s opinion.” Presumably mine. He then remarked: “I applaud you. I applaud the writing of this book. I agree with the premise: Russia, bad; America, good.”

That’s not the premise of the book. But why was he hailing a book that depicts Trump as a useful idiot for Putin who has betrayed the United States? It seemed Cohen was having trouble sticking to his new Trump-friendly stance when confronted with facts.

Toward the end, Cohen said: “The beauty of having you, David, come on is the fact that you and I can have a respectful and an open conversation about differences of opinions…That’s what I believe is needed today in America in order for us to actually start to become Americans again.”

I replied, “I wish that sentiment was held by your friend the president.” I stated that Trump routinely “denigrates people he doesn’t like as communists, radicals, enemies of the state…He’s a demagogue, and he uses the bully pulpit actually to divide America…I hope now that you’re pals, he will listen to you and that you will spend all your energy and your great strength to convince him to drop the bullshit and try to unite the country so we can have these conversations.”

Cohen didn’t take the bait. He said: “I appreciate you. I respect you. I wish you the best of luck with your book. I recommend people read it.” I couldn’t argue with that.

Cohen had wiggled his way back into Trump’s good graces, but here he was telling his listeners to read a book that shows that Trump has been complicit in Putin’s twilight war against the United States. I was confused, but I concluded that Cohen’s recent reversal had caused him some whiplash and he, too, was confused about how to be pro-Trump, appear fair-minded, and not go full MAGA. Good luck with that.

At one point, I kiddingly remarked that I hoped Trump reads How Russia Won. “Send me the book,” Cohen said. “I’m going to go see him, and I’ll hand it to him.” I asked my publisher to mail Cohen a copy. What are the odds he keeps that promise?

Tennessee’s bungled attempt to execute Christa Pike was not the first time a state has failed to carry out a lethal injection over problems in the death chamber. Pike, 50, has regained consciousness and is speaking a week after Tennessee gave her two lethal doses of pentobarbital. Outgoing Republican Gov. Bill Lee has ordered a review into what went wrong, and the state has not said…

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A cartoon by David Horsey. Related | Mamdani calls for AI regulation ‘at every single level’…

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The so-called lame duck session of Congress after November’s midterm elections could be momentous for clean energy, as lawmakers are set to consider a long-sought bipartisan deal to speed permitting of large energy and infrastructure projects.

Clean energy advocates and policy experts view the bill as a rare opportunity to deal with a major clean energy roadblock—long queues for interconnection to the grid. But division emerged immediately among environmental advocates, with some arguing the measure would weaken state and tribal government authority and allow pipelines and other fossil fuel projects to take advantage of a streamlined process.

This tension is not unusual. A version of it happened during debate over what would become the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, also known as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022 under President Joe Biden.

“This bill is a compromise. We believe it is a compromise that will result in a brighter, cleaner, more affordable future.”

“These policy bills have to get 60 Senate votes, so they have to be bipartisan, and so necessarily you’re going to be in a situation [in which there are] things that members like and things they don’t like,” said Rob Gramlich, president of Grid Strategies, a consulting firm that specializes in federal energy issues. The 60-vote threshold in the Senate is the number needed to overcome either party’s ability to block legislation with a filibuster.

Gramlich considers the bill a big step forward for renewable energy because of technology-neutral provisions that would “enable many tens of gigawatts of clean energy to be connected that otherwise are unable to develop,” he said.

Also supporting the bill is Pete Wyckoff, vice president of policy for Evergreen Action, an environmental advocacy group. He also played a key role in developing the Inflation Reduction Act when he worked for Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minn).

“America can’t confront the climate crisis and meet growing energy demand unless we can build clean energy faster—and that means fixing how we permit it,” Wyckoff said in a statement.

An Evergreen spokeswoman specified that Wyckoff and the organization support the parts of the bill that would ease construction of interstate power lines and clean energy projects, but are still reviewing the bill as a whole.

Some of the Senate’s most vocal members on climate change co-wrote the measure. “If we can pass this bill, we will flood the grid with clean, affordable energy and make data centers start paying their fair share,” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), ranking member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, said in a statement. “Like all major pieces of bipartisan legislation, this bill is a compromise. We believe it is a compromise that will result in a brighter, cleaner, more affordable future.”

Whitehouse and the bill’s other co-authors are calling it the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act of 2026.

Committee Chair Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), maintained that the bill would continue to protect land, water and wildlife while transforming the nation’s ability to fuel future growth. “For far too long, our broken and outdated federal environmental review and permitting processes have stood in the way of energy reliability, secure jobs, modern infrastructure, and economic growth,” Capito said in a statement. 

After months of working to hammer out their permitting compromise, Capito, Whitehouse and their partners on the deal—Senate Energy Committee leaders Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.)—made clear they had run out of time to get the package to a vote before the midterm election.

That kicks the legislation to the final weeks of the 119th Congress, and possibly—depending on the November results—the last session of unified Republican control.

This creates some political peril for the package, clean energy lobbyist Chris Moyer, founder of Echo Communications Advisors, pointed out in a newsletter to his clients. “The question for the lame duck, especially with House Democrats, is whether we experience a repeat of the familiar cycle,” Moyer wrote. “The party on the verge of taking power holds out until the new Congress to get a ‘better’ bill.”

Moyer noted that Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.), ranking Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee, expressed exactly this sentiment in a post on X. “We can’t throw states, tribes, impacted communities, and threatened and endangered wildlife under the bus,” said Huffman, who pledged to work for a better bill in the next Congress.

But history has shown lame-duck sessions can forge compromises that wouldn’t be possible in regular sessions of Congress, in part because departing members will not face repercussions from voters. Among the historic environmental measures that passed Congress during lame-duck sessions were the Superfund toxic waste clean-up bill in 1980 and the establishment of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration in 1970.

The most significant challenge the legislation faces may be securing enough Democratic votes in the Senate in the face of opposition from some environmentalists. Even before the text of the legislation was released, the Western Environmental Law Center released a statement labeling the deal a “five-alarm fire” that would allow artificial intelligence data centers and energy infrastructure to proliferate.

“We think if you can reform that process, if you can provide a level playing field, the economics of clean energy will win out”

Among the changes the legislation would make is limiting state and tribal officials from using their authority under the Clean Water Act to address issues unrelated to direct water pollution; the Trump administration proposed a similar regulatory change earlier this year. 

“The permitting deal is a betrayal of public lands, water and wildlife, and environmental justice values that Westerners depend on for clean air and water, places to hike, hunt, and fish, and the inestimable sense of freedom the West provides us all,” said Erik Schlenker-Goodrich, executive director of the center.

At the unveiling of the legislation, Heinrich pointed to a provision in the bill that would require AI data centers to fully pay for grid upgrades made to serve them, even as they continue to bear their share of the costs of the rest of the power grid. If passed, it would be the first act of Congress to protect consumers from paying an unfair burden of the energy costs of data center proliferation.

By far, the most consequential provisions in the legislation for clean energy and climate change are those to speed up the process of siting transmission projects and getting clean energy on the grid. The 550-mile SunZia Wind and Transmission project, which came online this year between New Mexico and Arizona, took nearly 18 years to make its way through the permitting process. At that pace, clean energy advocates argue it will be nearly impossible for solar and wind power, as well as emerging low-carbon technologies like enhanced geothermal, to significantly reduce the nation’s dependence on fossil fuels.

New modeling by the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, or C2ES, and Greenline Insights indicated that the bill’s reforms would produce enough new clean energy to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 9 percent in the four regional power grids they studied. The analysis showed that nationwide, the reforms could also reduce cumulative grid costs by $125 billion and residential electricity bills by $19 billion between 2026 and 2040.

“We think if you can reform that process, if you can provide a level playing field, the economics of clean energy will win out,” said Nat Keohane, president of C2ES. “We’re on the cusp of a moment I think that we and many others have been working toward for years.”

A velvety butterfly called the coastal green hairstreak once peppered the fog-capped hills of San Francisco. But then the city began to build out, and new structures fractured the jewel-toned insect’s native range. The butterflies were scattered into isolated populations, some only a few blocks apart—an astronomical distance for a creature that, over its lifetime, can venture only a few hundred feet or so from the native shrubs it depends on.

In 2007, when the species was nearly gone from San Francisco, a local nonprofit got to work on a simple solution: Create a butterfly highway between some of the scattered populations by adding more of the insect’s host plants. “We planted microhabitats wherever we could get—a swath of a triangle or a long stairway edge,” says Amber Mahlberg, executive director of Nature in the City, the organization leading the project.

It worked. Butterflies from previously isolated populations followed the breadcrumb trail and interbred, boosting their genetic diversity and odds of long-term survival.

Microhabitats like these are good for wildlife like butterflies, and they benefit humans, too: Mounting research shows that small green spaces could improve the health of people who live nearby. “Americans tend to think about [the] nature benefit from the great outdoors, our national parks,” says Kathleen Wolf, a University of Washington social scientist focused on urban greening. However, for both humans and other animals, ease of access tends to trump grandiosity. Over the past decade, scientists have found that when tiny green spaces are scattered across cities, their cumulative effects are greater than the sum of their parts.

Mini-parks can give migrating birds passing through urban areas a place to rest and feed, says Frank La Sorte, a Yale scientist who studies avian ecology and behavior. In a 2023 study, La Sorte found that cities studded with small parks have a greater number of bird species than those with just a few large parks.

As for human benefits, a 2026 study determined that Americans with easier access to parks had lower rates of obesity, high blood pressure, and diabetes. Advocates for mini–green spaces pointed to such correlations in their push for changes in the federal rules for parks funding, though many of the new grants approved in the name of environmental justice were promptly eliminated by the Trump administration, which dismissed them as “DEI.”

Federal and state governments have long prioritized bigger parks, says Will Klein, research director at the nonprofit Trust for Public Land. That can make it tricky to get the necessary funding to build small green spaces in park deserts. So the group developed a new metric to assess a park’s value: the “10-minute walk.”

The idea is that everyone in US cities should be able to stroll from their home to a public green space in 10 minutes or less—which the group estimates is currently not the case for one-third of Americans. More than 300 mayors have embraced the idea, and now almost every major US city has incorporated the “10-minute walk” into its planning criteria, Klein says.

As part of the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), Congress approved more than $1 billion for urban greening. “All sorts of organizations lined up, scrambled, put in grant proposals, were awarded funds, and were beginning to do the projects,” Wolf recalls.

“The thing with urban parks is that they’re not as isolated as they might appear.”

Just across the bay from San Francisco, home of the successful butterfly highway, the community of North Richmond secured some of those much-needed dollars from another IRA program. During my recent visit, I could see why the community so desperately needed the funds. Amid a dense mix of residential and industrial properties, there were just a few public outdoor spaces. I saw two of them; one was a sports field and the other was called Landfill Loop, a former dump that, as far as I could tell from the prints in the dirt, isn’t frequented by anyone but raccoons.

In December 2024, through the IRA’s Community Change Grants program, North Richmond was promised $19 million to establish new green spaces, among other things, but the vast majority of that money never arrived. North Richmond, along with more than 100 other communities across the country, was left in the lurch.

In July, a judge ordered the Trump administration to pay out the grants, but the funding remains on hold while the administration appeals the ruling. Now, the work of micropark building often falls to nonprofits and volunteers.

That’s not so bad in high-income zip codes—like the ones the green hairstreaks needed to cross—where private resources for neighborhood improvement are often ample. It’s much harder in places like North Richmond, which is ironic, because these poorer communities tend to have plenty of neglected patches that would make for perfect tiny parks. Green spaces can slot into almost any oddly shaped, leftover parcel that no one knows what to do with. As ecologist La Sorte put it, “The thing with urban parks is that they’re not as isolated as they might appear.”

It could be the strip of dirt by some train tracks or a gravel-filled schoolyard or sometimes even guerrilla gardening on abandoned lots—a kind of living patchwork with the potential to transform an entire neighborhood.

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the October 9 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

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

Donald Trump has been furious at Fox News for many months now, and he just raged at the network again this week. But his fury is backfiring. We’re now learning that the White House and senior Republicans waged a behind-the-scenes campaign to get Fox to stop covering Abdul El-Sayed the way it had been, because it was making him into a stronger candidate. That’s humiliating enough, but it also captures a lot about Trump and MAGA right now: the belief that Fox should function as their twenty-four-seven propaganda operation, the shock that many voters aren’t perceiving El-Sayed in accordance with MAGA smears, and the ways in which all these manly MAGA men devolve into pathetic whiners when the going gets just a little hard.

Jennifer Rubin, editor in chief of The Contrarian, has a good piece all about MAGA whininess today, so we’re talking to her about all of it. Jen, always good to have you on.

Jennifer Rubin: It’s great to be here, Greg.

Sargent: So Trump’s been in a fury with Fox News for months. He hates their polling, which shows Democrats on the cusp of winning Senate races in deep red states. This week Trump raged as follows: “Fox News spends more time covering the jihadist and Democrat candidates than they do the good old-fashioned Republicans. All they talk about is Democrat jihadists like El-Sayed.”

Trump slammed Fox’s Martha MacCallum for a softball interview, and he also slammed Fox for not covering his rallies to his liking. Jen, your thoughts on all that?

Rubin: Well, Trump is very upset that Fox is trying to save him from himself, and trying to save the Republicans from this grossly unpopular president. It is true. They are madly cutting away from his rallies, because they are so nuts. They are so discordant.

He is blowing up New York and San Diego. He is railing on unregulated data centers, which is the kiss of death for candidates. He is going off on veganism. He is so nuts, so out of control, that Fox does not want to put him on. Their rationale is, we’ve got to elect Republicans. We can’t have them seeing our crazy commander in chief.

Sargent: Yeah, what’s funny about that is that Trump is completely incapable of imagining that showing Trump’s rallies might hurt Republican candidates. That to me is really amusing. In Trump’s head, all attention is good. You’re winning when you’re the center of attention. But he is the kiss of death for many of these candidates now.

Rubin: Exactly. His poll numbers have fallen off the cliff. And on all of these issues that he keeps repeating—if Republicans adopt them, they go down in the polls and they get killed. Data centers, not popular. Trump insisting affordability is not a real issue. If Republicans say that stuff, they get laughed at.

And you know who thinks Trump is bad? JD Vance. JD Vance is no longer using the world’s-greatest-economy line. He is beginning to tiptoe away and say, well, we know things are hard, give us another shot. He can see the writing on the wall.

He may be a radical racist, but he’s not stupid. He can read the polls. And with Trump’s demise and the demise of the Republican Party, he can see his own 2028 prospects evaporating.

Sargent: Here’s where the stuff about Fox News gets really rich. Axios reports that Republicans have privately griped to Fox for months over their coverage of El-Sayed. They say this helps El-Sayed, complicating their efforts to portray him as out of the mainstream. And White House officials privately reached out to Fox this week to complain about that interview of him.

Jen, let me translate this. What they really mean is, if Fox lets El-Sayed talk, it becomes a lot harder to smear him as a scary radical jihadist, because people see who he actually is, right?

Rubin: That’s right. And this is the beauty of candidates like El-Sayed, like Pete Buttigieg, who can go on Fox, because they debunk the lies and the smears. So you’re right. It wasn’t that it was a particularly softball interview. It was just that he steamrolled right over her.

And all the lies that they live with, the crazy conspiracies, the smears—when they hit reality, when you actually see the candidate, when you hear the candidate, anybody, even a Fox viewer, can tell that this is just a lie.

Sargent: There’s another great detail from this reporting. Top GOP operatives repeatedly contacted Fox executives and producers, complaining that Jesse Watters of Fox had commented on El-Sayed in a way that could allow him to portray himself as moderate. Again, translation: by all means, Fox News, don’t tell the truth about this guy. We can’t win the election if you do that. I just love it.

Rubin: It also shows, by the way, the degree to which not even Fox can keep up with the lies and the smears. Trump is so far out of reality, and the MAGA view of Democrats is so divorced from reality, that they can’t possibly construct any kind of, quote, news program that follows the plot. It’s impossible.

The Democrats have, I think, been so down on themselves and on their brand that they failed to realize how utterly insane and incapable the Republicans are of constructing a narrative that makes any sense.

Sargent: Absolutely. And I want to play an ad from Mike Rogers, who’s the Republican opponent of El-Sayed in Michigan. Listen to him talking here about Trump’s tariffs and his trade war with Canada. This is Mike Rogers, the Republican.

Mike Rogers (voiceover): Drinking a Labatt and watching the Red Wings, man, it just doesn’t get any more Michigan than that. And here in Michigan, we know that Canada is not our enemy. We need to end this tariff war.

Sargent: That’s really remarkable stuff, Jen. He says straight out that interdependence with Canada is a good thing, and Canada is not the enemy that Trump is depicting. Of course, you might note something here, which is that Mike Rogers doesn’t happen to mention who is starting this trade war with Canada, who’s conducting this trade war with Canada.

He forgot to mention that part. It’s his party that’s doing it. It’s the leader of his party. But still, that is a real sign of Trump’s toxicity, if in a Midwestern state the Republican has to aggressively become Mr. Globalist all of a sudden.

Rubin: Exactly. And this is happening all over the place. Look at the Republicans who are running against the war that they’ve repeatedly voted to give Trump a blank check to operate. So now they want the war to end. Now they don’t like the trade war. What’s next? Saying the big bad bill was a rotten thing?

I mean, this is what happens. They are now caught in what you and I have been saying all along. These positions are politically untenable. They’re not just untenable in blue areas. They’re untenable in red states, in red districts. No one’s in favor of these policies, and they’ve backfired.

So what’s next? I want to get out of the war because Trump has driven up gas prices? Well, that would be honest, but unfortunately they haven’t voted that way.

Sargent: Well, yeah, I mean, a number of them are essentially trying to adopt that as their position. In your piece, you identified a pattern in which a lot of manly MAGA figures are getting quite whiny as this election approaches. One example you gave is JD Vance begging voters to give Republicans a second chance. You also pointed out that Ken Paxton, the Republican Senate candidate in Texas, recently complained that he’s not in charge of his own campaign. As you pointed out, James Talarico is supposed to be the low-T guy, but Paxton’s claiming he’s helplessly controlled by others. That’s just crazy.

Rubin: And Trump is the worst of them. Now his favorite complaint is, there are reports—and we’re going to throw these reporters in jail—for saying there are empty seats at my rallies. He says, no, people are moving down to fill in the seats. Wait a second. How do you fill in a seat if it’s not empty? That logic escapes him.

But this is what happens when the, quote, strongmen meet reality. Suddenly they are humiliated. They are perceived as weak, as unpopular, and they are becoming unglued. And we are seeing this. So now they whine. They complain. They go running to Fox.

I’m sorry, but maybe the reason that a lot of white men are no longer turning out is that they don’t like all this crybaby activity. His own ability to respond to the criticism is so degraded, because his mind is turning to shit, that he is unable to even mount any kind of comeback. No wonder Fox won’t put him on the air.

Sargent: So you mentioned the strongman dimension to all this, and I want to pick up on that. Like, you see this same dynamic at play with all these depictions of Donald Trump as this manly, virile young figure—like all these memes that paste these young muscular bodies on Trump’s head.

And meanwhile, he’s falling asleep at meetings. I mean, that is like the perfect example of the sort of weirdly brittle strongman politics. The image of it is always so brittle and shaky, and just cracks up at the slightest bit of probing, right?

Rubin: And that’s why they have freaked out at the criticism over Natalie Harp. She is there to try to boost his ego, to keep him, I don’t know, on track, or to keep him from completely losing it. But now she looks like a nursemaid. She’s there to kind of soothe him and keep him going, pat him on the head, make sure he doesn’t lose control.

This is the complete devolution of a party that, as I say in the piece, has marinated in toxic masculinity for years. They have gone after trans kids. They’ve slammed Democrats for feminizing the country and for feminizing the military. But who sounds like a bunch of whiny little girls? And I want to apologize to whiny little girls, because they don’t sound this bad.

Sargent: Well, Pew had a new poll that we should talk about, because it sheds a lot of light on this. It finds Donald Trump’s approval rating now at 30 percent, which is the lowest of his second term.

Jen, I think we’re getting into the twenties maybe pretty soon here. What do you think?

Rubin: I think we’re getting into George Bush territory. Not only are his poll numbers low, but he is dragging down the entire party. This particular poll has the generic lead for Democrats at eight. We’ve seen other polls where it’s double digits. And even more frightful for Republicans is the enthusiasm gap.

That poll had some very frightful numbers about how strongly people in the two parties feel about getting out to vote, how important it is for their party to control the House. And once those numbers drop off and Republicans don’t show up, a whole slew of seats then come into play. If they don’t show up, they can’t win.

And that’s why the DCCC—that’s the group that elects Democratic House members—keeps expanding the map. That’s why independent analysts like Charlie Cook now have Kansas as a true toss-up in the Senate. The wheels come off the bus.

We talked about this a few weeks ago, Greg. The self-fulfilling prophecy of negativity, of doom and gloom, of embarrassment, that Donald Trump is hitting your party. And I think this Pew poll shows that in spades.

Sargent: So you brought up the enthusiasm numbers in the Pew poll. I’m just going to cite those. Pew finds that Democratic supporters are 14 points more likely than Republican supporters to say they’ve given the election a lot of thought. They’re seventeen points more likely to say they’re extremely motivated to vote this year.

These dynamics are all connected to one another. The Trump rallies going off the rails—I think that that’s really starting to get a lot of Republican voters to sort of say, you know what, man, I can’t do this anymore. This guy is too nuts.

Now, I think we should probably acknowledge that that door wouldn’t have been opened if he hadn’t fucked up the economy so badly with the tariffs and the war and everything else, and if he hadn’t screwed up everything so badly.

But that door is open now. Now that he’s screwed that all up, Republicans are now willing to take a bit of a harder look at Trump. I think that’s what’s happening here.

And I don’t want to overstate this. I don’t think the percentage of Republicans that are willing to look frankly at Trump is all that high. But there is a non-trivial number out there that are going to this place.

In fact, a recent Fox News poll found in Texas that non-MAGA Republicans actually disapprove of Trump now, and they are also demobilized. They’re not that enthusiastic about voting. So these are real dynamics, Jen.

Rubin: And you’re beginning to see coverage in the legacy media that Republicans don’t want to go out and knock on doors. Republicans don’t want to volunteer. We’re not talking about the mega-donors. We’re talking about ordinary people who make up the backbone of a party.

If you don’t have people who, a month before, want to listen to the news, let alone volunteer, you’re going to have some real trouble. And there are going to be people who look like they’re in safe seats now, because the numbers don’t look so dire. But if 5 percent, 7 percent more Republicans don’t show up, that’s going to sweep in a whole bunch more Democrats.

Sargent: It is. And just to wrap this up, your piece went very big picture on this by tying this to strongman politics as a general matter. As you pointed out, what we’re seeing here is kind of like a microcosm version of what you see with authoritarian movements—when the sort of facade of strength and power starts to crack, it really starts to fall apart rather quickly. Can you talk about those dynamics?

Rubin: Absolutely. You know, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, who has looked at strongmen in her book about fascism, really makes the point that there’s a moment in which the wheels come off the bus, the lies don’t work, the mistakes become too apparent, and as a result you see this kind of crack-up.

Two things happen, and they’re both happening now. On one hand, the leader becomes unglued and starts saying a bunch of crazy shit. And the other thing is, they become much more aggressive, much more confrontational.

Now we hear that there are more people he wants to arrest. Cassidy Hutchinson is now on the potential list of indictees. He is coming after people because they are frustrated. There are reports that FBI agents are very upset because they, quote, want indictments. Indictments for what? Around what crimes?

So it is this frenzy of panic that has overtaken the Trump regime. On one hand, they become whiny, crybabies, desperate, saying all kinds of absolutely batshit, nutty stuff. But they also become much more aggressive, much more violent, much more prone to misuse law enforcement. So Democrats—and I know they are preparing—but they’d better be ready for election day, because we’re going to see, I am sure, all kinds of legal shenanigans. They’ve already begun.

Sargent: Absolutely, Jen Rubin. And I’ve got to say, you know, with a little luck, Fox News will get bullied by Donald Trump into covering his rallies a whole lot more, right?

Rubin: Please, please, twenty-four-seven. And you know what? He shouldn’t just go to Red America. This Democrat is pleading with him. Please go to some purple districts. Go to more states that are in play. Please let us all see him. The great leader needs to get out more where it matters.

Sargent: Exactly. Jen Rubin, it’s always a great pleasure to talk to you. Thanks so much for coming on.

Rubin: It’s fun, Greg. Thanks so much.

If you doubt that President Donald Trump is successfully trashing the administrative state, consider a rule change that the Securities and Exchange Commission announced with little fanfare that took effect on October 2. Under the new rule, the SEC, which effectively until now has required a quorum of three to conduct business, will now require a quorum of only one.

At the moment, the SEC has two commissioners, both Republican. These are the Trump sycophant Paul Atkins, who serves as the SEC chairman, and the reliably pro-business Mark Uyeda, whom Trump appointed acting chairman before Atkins took office in April 2025. During Trump’s first term, Jim Chanos, a billionaire investment manager who predicted a year in advance the collapse of Enron, pronounced that America had entered “the golden age of fraud.” That was premature. In his second term, Trump is much more energetically pardoning financial fraudsters, and his SEC is more aggressively reducing transparency and slashing enforcement.

Even in the best of times, Republican administrations are much less keen than Democratic ones to enforce the nation’s securities laws. But Trump is taking moral laxity to stratospheric new levels. Perhaps Trump became more hospitable to white-collar felons after becoming one himself. Perhaps Trump is neutering the SEC so he doesn’t have to look over his shoulder whenever he trades stocks on insider information or uses his office to reward investors in his crypto business. Whatever the motive, going forward, our unitary executive will be able to indulge financial criminality more freely with a unitary SEC.

To help you understand how appalling this SEC rule change is, bear with me while I explain how the regulatory process works. You have Cabinet agencies like the Commerce Department or the Interior Department and you have independent agencies like the SEC, the Federal Trade Commission, and the National Labor Relations Board. Cabinet agencies are always headed by a single political appointee who answers to the president. Independent agencies are usually headed by a commission, or board, typically consisting of five Senate-confirmed commissioners (or board members). These commissioners serve staggered fixed terms, typically five years. When a sitting commissioner’s term ends, the president nominates a new one, but in doing so he must limit to a bare majority (typically three) the slots filled from his own party. For the remaining slots, he must nominate a person from the opposing party.

In practice, a president seldom must wait very long before an independent agency is controlled by a majority from his own party. An unfriendly Congress may resist confirming some commissioner or other on partisan grounds, but such standoffs are typically resolved when an additional commission slot opens for the opposite party. You want your guy? Then vote for my guy.

Trump, of course, famously lacks impulse control, and he doesn’t like waiting even a little bit to win a majority at any given independent agency. Consequently, he’s experimented with not nominating anybody to an independent agency if the next in line’s a Democrat, or, alternatively, firing sitting Democrats. Sometimes he’s done both. Firing a sitting commissioner without cause was, until this past June, illegal under the Supreme Court’s 1935 Humphrey’s Executor decision, which said President Franklin Roosevelt lacked the power to fire, without cause, a seriously obnoxious Republican commissioner on the Federal Trade Commission named William E. Humphrey, before Humphrey’s term ended. Humphrey obligingly dropped dead while his case made its way through the courts, but Humphrey’s heirs continued it on the grounds that he was owed back pay, which the final decision granted them. (Hence “Executor.”)

Ninety-one years later, however, a unitary-executive-besotted Supreme Court ruled in Trump v. Slaughter that Trump was perfectly free to fire, without cause, Rebecca Slaughter and Alvara Bedoya, two Democratic appointees to the Federal Trade Commission, before their terms ended. By extension, Trump is now free to fire any commissioner of almost any independent agency simply for being a Democrat. Thus far (not counting Cook) Trump has fired at least 21 Democrats (five of them his own appointees!). Through either firings or refusing to nominate a replacement when a Democratic term expires, Trump has managed to deprive the SEC, the FTC, and the Commodities Future Trading Commission of a single Democratic member.

The CFTC, which has neither a statutory quorum requirement nor an internal rule defining a quorum, represents Trump’s beau idéal. It’s operated for nearly one year with a single commissioner, Michael Selig, an enthusiastic cheerleader for crypto, prediction markets, and sports betting. “The era of political lawfare, debanking and regulation by enforcement is over,” Trump’s solitary cop on the commodities beat said in August. “Innovators … are welcomed to the White House, not railroaded to the big house.” In the CFTC we see unitary executiveship at its most uninhibited. Even before Selig got there, CFTC enforcement actions in 2025 were down 80 percent compared to the previous decade, according to NPR’s Luke Garrett.

The only independent agency still insulated from Trump under Trump v. Slaughter is the Federal Reserve, where the commissioners are called governors. In a separate ruling issued the same day, Trump was barred from firing the Fed Governor Lisa Cook. The legal justification for letting Trump fire Slaughter, Bedoya, and 19 other Democrats but not Cook was, as I understand it, the following:

Because we say so.

Apart from some mumbo-jumbo about the Second Bank of the United States, the justices enunciated no distinction between the Fed and every other independent agency. This reactionary majority simply values the Fed—where political meddling could put its stock portfolios at risk—much more highly other regulatory agencies.

Trump v. Slaughter freed Trump to stop independent agencies in their tracks. But depriving them of a quorum turns out to be too clever by half, as I pointed out a month after Trump returned to office. That’s because Trump needs these agencies able to function so they can overturn regulations and rulings left behind by President Joe Biden.

A nice illustration came in June when Trump’s new best friend Jeff Bezos lost two Amazon cases before the National Labor Relations Board because Trump had denied the NLRB a quorum. In one case, an administrative law judge had to uphold a Biden precedent, and in the other case the NLRB actually possessed a quorum but followed a genteel board tradition not to overturn any precedent by fewer than three votes, which it didn’t have. Three months later, the NLRB had a quorum sufficient to reward Bezos and Amazon with three legal victories in two employee misclassification cases in which Amazon truly had no leg to stand on.

For Trump, the lesson should be: Play it straight! Nominate commissioners in timely fashion and you won’t have to wait long to get your working majority. Rush the process by firing commissioners, or by not nominating new ones, and you may deprive yourself of the quorum necessary to overturn Democratic precedents and do the business lobby’s bidding.

But the SEC’s new maneuver points to a third option: the one-person commission.

Even before the rule change, the SEC’s quorum requirement was, at least formally, fairly lax. Under a 1995 rule, three votes constituted a quorum if that agency had three or more commissioners. If it had two commissioners, or even one, then two or one could constitute a quorum on a sort of emergency basis. However, if the number of voting commissioners in a particular case was reduced by one or more recusals, then a minimum of two votes was still necessary to establish a quorum. This seemingly minor exception had the practical effect of imposing in nearly all instances a three-person quorum.

Let me explain. Recusals (that is, non-participation based on a conflict of interest) are extremely common at the SEC because so many commissioners come from the world of finance. In 2013, The Wall Street Journal estimated that more than half the SEC’s enforcement decisions required recusals from one or more commissioners. Given such a conflict-clogged environment, the SEC couldn’t until now easily tolerate many vacancies. The practical result was that the SEC almost never made a ruling with fewer than three commissioners—and if there was a single instance in which it ever made a ruling with only one commissioner I can’t find it.

John Reed Start, who was an SEC lawyer at the time the 1995 rule was implemented, wrote on LinkedIn that its provisional allowance for a quorum of two or one commissioners “was a stopgap, nothing more, and everyone assumed five commissioners would eventually be in place.” Indeed, according to Robin Wigglesworth of the Financial Times, with one exception (a six-month period in 2008) the SEC has never in its 92-year history operated without a member of the minority party.

In essence, the new SEC rule routinizes what was previously only a theoretical one-person quorum and renders unnecessary the appointment of any minority-party commissioners. The White House need no longer fret about the composition of the SEC. Trump can not only stop nominating pesky Democrats; he can stop pushing any SEC nomination through what Nate Silver predicts will be a Democratic Senate.

SEC Commissioner Uyeda’s term lasts through much of 2028, and if nobody is nominated to succeed him it can be extended through the rest of Trump’s presidency (and perhaps several months into the next). But if Uyeda’s term isn’t extended—or if Uyeda must recuse himself from this or that case—SEC Chair Atkins can act as Trump’s one-man quorum for the remainder of Trump’s presidency, because Atkins’ term doesn’t end until 2030. Granted, under Trump v. Slaughter any Democrat who succeeds Trump can (and probably will) fire Atkins promptly on January 20, 2029. But if a Republican succeeds Trump, Atkins could end up running the SEC as a one-man band for years.

You can’t pull this trick at every independent agency, because for some—the NLRB, for instance, or the Federal Communications Commission, or the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission— the enabling statute specifies a three-person quorum. The 1934 statute that created the SEC, however, imposed no quorum requirement; the previous quorum requirement, dating to 1995, was simply a rule, and rules can be changed. Big rule changes require a period of public comment, so the SEC decided this was a little rule change that didn’t require public comment. But of course it isn’t a little change at all.

When the president commands a majority at an independent agency, that agency makes decisions in at least rough accordance with the president’s views. Why, then, should we care whether members of the opposite party are present to register dissent? Because, Senate Banking Committee Democrats wrote the White House in June, “a full slate of commissioners and board members can bring a range of perspectives to policies that shape our markets.”

This may strike a discordant note in the current political environment, but there’s practical value in being compelled to listen to the arguments of people who disagree with you. That’s why independent agencies were set up to include minority-party representation. When the president is as corrupt as Trump, the minority-party function extends to bearing witness. Thus Caroline Crenshaw, the last Democrat on Trump’s SEC—she left this past January—was able to alert the public the previous May that “we’re playing a game of regulatory Jenga…. The tower remains standing when you pull out a block or two here and there. But, how many blocks can you pull before the tower gives way?”

In a September 30 letter to the SEC, a shareholder activist named James McRitchie quoted several past and present SEC commissioners about the virtue of the SEC’s bipartisan structure. One of them, ironically, was Uyeda, who I presume must have voted in favor of the SEC’s new rule change (otherwise it would have deadlocked 1-1). Here’s what Uyeda said:

The Commission is structurally designed to promote regulation that is the product of consideration by five individuals with different perspectives. The underlying statute that created the Commission requires that the commissioners come from different political parties, with no more than three being from the same party. I view this arrangement as creating a basic bargain that the SEC will enjoy a degree of independence….

Amen. But what changed Uyeda’s mind after he spoke these words? The presence of a Republican in the White House. Uyeda delivered the above remarks in 2022, when Joe Biden was president and Uyeda was a lowly minority-party SEC commissioner. Now that Uyeda’s aligned with the White House and the SEC has gone almost a year without any minority-party commissioners, I suppose he’s come to appreciate the peace and quiet. But Uyeda will rediscover the virtues of “different perspectives” when Democrats retake the White House. When that happens, Democrats should honor independent-agency norms, restore space for the opposition, and above all abolish the one-person quorum.

While some stories provide imaginative escape, others are lessons or warnings, inviting us to dive into drama so we might return to our own lives with renewed purpose and impetus to act. Two of the most anticipated films of the fall, Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Digger and Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Reckoning, unfold urgent stories of our shared future, but ask what it means to tell them too late—too late to undo past wrongs, too late to change course, too late to do something with the lesson we might learn.

Digger begins with the eponymous Digger Rockwell (Tom Cruise), an aging oil baron with a heavy drawl, caring for his cat, who is clearly dying though Digger won’t admit it. In the middle of this ordeal, he discovers that his drill site in Antarctica—which he has criminally mismanaged—is setting in motion a series of environmental cataclysms. The American president (John Goodman) and his Cabinet descend on Digger’s sprawling mansion to make a plan—not to save a single soul but, rather, to skew global opinion in their favor.

As Digger and President Compson stand and gaze out of a picture window, a tree falls over on its side. It would appear to be another instance of environmental collapse, except that, moments later, a giant human hand reaches out and rights it. Be prepared, for the remaining 90 or so minutes of the movie, to feel left out, to find that you are, by design, the last to know what is really going on.

The Social Reckoning, on the other hand, delivers pretty much what a news-literate Sorkin fan might expect. The sequel picks up over a decade after Sorkin’s The Social Network, in which Mark Zuckerberg invented Facebook and looked bad doing it, and critiques Facebook as a global power and an international threat. Sorkin, the screenwriter for both, takes over the directorial reins here from David Fincher, and Zuckerberg is now played by Jeremy Strong. Jesse Eisenberg chose not to reprise the role, telling Variety that he didn’t “want to be associated with that character.” In the film as in life, it’s Zuckerberg’s company and its technology that have taken on a worrying momentum of their own, appearing ever more capable of AI-powered mass destruction. Can a single whistleblower force the hand of a trillion-dollar company and set in motion radical change?

Just as Sorkin favors principled stances, stylishly delivered, Iñárritu makes a meal of moral ambiguity, but both films revolve around bad men and a lot of monologuing.  

Both Digger and The Social Reckoning begin their stories of ego-fueled disaster at a point in the narrative when it is too late for any of the characters to stop it. They each approach the problem of too-late storytelling from their preferred modes. Sorkin turns in a trademark love letter to journalism, Iñárritu a satire of satire that moves between cerebral and bizarre. Just as Sorkin favors principled stances, stylishly delivered, Iñárritu makes a meal of moral ambiguity, but both films revolve around bad men and a lot of monologuing.  

Digger is the story of Digger Rockwell, but it is also a production of a play called Fossil Fools, centered on a character named “Digger Rockwell.” Most of the scenes in the film are in fact rehearsals for that play, and the others show us the drama behind the scenes. That is the film’s first twist, but it isn’t its last, and once revealed, it seems both obvious and impossible. Certainly, the viewer of a play would not witness the proceedings as we do, moving through the rooms of Digger’s mansion (antique, but still tacky), or experience a suspenseful pan from the person looking to what they are looking at. When the production is paused or halted, a network of elaborate, high-resolution screens are moved through space by faceless extras.

It is an unsettling trick, which only partly works. Generously, one might argue that the disorientation is intentional: The vast, inhuman scale of climate change is not just an environmental crisis but a representational one, as writers like Amitav Ghosh have explained. Iñárritu grapples with this in Fossil Fools, when the men in charge can only understand the size of the ice shelf that is racing toward Europe by comparing it to the size of American cities (Philadelphia, Boston). Digger dismisses out of hand the initial crack in the glacier, because it is only 30 times the size of his penis.

At its most lively, though, the play-within-the-play invites us to watch the actors hustle to their marks, scurry off in the darkness, shed their costumes with necessary speed. Goodman plays the most repulsive role in a universe full of stiff competition, a cancer-stricken president who believes himself to be the savior of the world but would be hard-pressed to name his favorite Bible verse. Riz Ahmed turns in the most moving performance as scientist Dr. Nirav Ganesh, executing hairpin turns from broad humor to quiet agony; his curtain-call robot dance is also quite good.

Then there’s Cruise, who is tasked with holding together the film’s two plots, and whose star presence is never absent. The indestructible Tom Cruise has been saving the world for decades, most recently defeating an AI antagonist in Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning. As Digger, he throws back to his roles as a greasy motivational speaker in Magnolia or a foul-mouthed Hollywood executive in Tropic Thunder; they might not have the power to end the world, but they are sure going to make things worse before they go.

But when we see Cruise playing “Curtis Markson,” the actor who plays Digger in the play, we also get a brief look at Cruise as the meticulous, perfectionist, demanding creative who has notes for everyone, even the makeup artist. Of course, it’s a look at, never into, the star himself; it only draws on those elements that the Cruise team would approve (not the other stuff). Over and over, Digger teases us with the prospect of something real, only to offer more stagecraft.

Over and over, Digger teases us with the prospect of something real, only to offer more stagecraft.

If this sounds like a punishing two hours at the cinema, it’s because the movie probably thinks you deserve it. The play presents the offices of the European Commission as a sterile white set, full of angry extras whom Digger bluntly confronts. You “bask in the comfort of your unsustainable life,” he tells them, adding, “You demand, and I supply!” The figure of Digger is decidedly an antihero, but the mob is fairly repellent too. The European Commission scene feels like a demented Frank Capra fantasy in which Jimmy Stewart’s Mr. Smith goes to Washington in order to drill, baby, drill. No wonder Markson doesn’t know what this play is saying.

“It’s funny and it’s stupid and it’s scary and it makes no goddamn sense!” crows the show’s creepy, red-headed producer (Jesse Plemons). Some of that is true, at least. It is also hostile, clever, too clever, abstract, chilly, angry, and bored. All of this would be forgivable, even impressive, if it was also exciting.

With its layered storytelling and the connections between the play and the mysteriously shrouded present, their present and our own, Digger is more than it seems. It is possible that, like Fossil Fools, it will even stand the test of time. But if annihilation is around the corner, as this film persuasively imagines, you might not want to spend your precious remaining hours watching Tom Cruise use his pinky nail to feed tuna to an animatronic cat.

Where Digger has its ice shelf, the 2010 film The Social Network had a person, and that person was Mark Zuckerberg. When the Winklevoss twins visit Harvard president Larry Summers to explain that Zuckerberg has stolen their idea for a social networking platform, Summers is dismissive and snide. When they suggest this idea could be worth millions, he replies, “You might be letting your imagination run away with you.” 

No one sees Zuckerberg coming, because no one has the imagination or the hunger of this prickly dweeb from Westchester County, and Sorkin cannot help but throw some begrudging admiration his way. “You’re not an asshole, Mark,” says one of Zuckerberg’s young attorneys. “You’re just trying so hard to be.”

Eisenberg’s squinting, surly adolescent has aged into a bopping, smirking twerp who cannot find a necktie to suit his sallow complexion. (His poor, poor professional dresser.) In The Social Reckoning, Strong, an unrepentant Method performer, captures Zuckerberg’s smugness and impatience, though the film is not interested in some of his specific quirks (the aborted political run, the mixed martial arts hobby). Throughout the film we see him prepare to testify before Congress, with the help of a professional crisis manager (Wunmi Mosaku) and associate turned public detractor, Charlie (Bill Burr), who has been improbably called on to serve as a resource. Charlie and Mark argue at length about whether it is Facebook’s job to police deliberate misinformation. “Harm, I promise you, is fucking imminent,” Charlie warns.

With all its focus on preparation, The Social Reckoning, like Digger, is consumed with the act of rehearsal. The fact that the characters are simply honing their performances infuses their words and actions with an air of unreality: Whether they’re discussing climate apocalypse or right-wing indoctrination, there’s a sense that this is all practice and that the real dangers are happening somewhere off-screen. Characters hide behind their scripts: Zuckerberg flatly repeats that Facebook is the public square, Facebook is a corkboard, even as he skews the Facebook algorithm toward “meaningful social interaction,” an internal euphemism for “outrage bait.” Users, fed toxic slop, rehearse increasingly extremist political or self-harming beliefs until, finally, they are radicalized or broken.

No longer the surly, squinting teen to whom we had private access, Zuckerberg has grown into an impenetrable billionaire and a public figure, so he is no longer required to make sense. And, like Digger and the powerful men who surround him, Zuckerberg’s sense of scale is warped by greed and the dick-measuring contests of Silicon Valley. When he is presented with the option to put in safeguards to avoid inflammatory, dangerous speech, the only downside being a 1 percent reduction in users, he snaps, “Do you know what one percent is at scale?”

Zuckerberg has ceased to be the smartest guy in the room, and so Sorkin redirects his attention to journalist Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White) and Facebook employee turned whistleblower Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison). Political reporter Horwitz moves to The Wall Street Journal’s Bay Area office to cover the Facebook beat, despite his knowing nothing about social media or technology. (His boss, played by Betty Gilpin, is a foul-mouthed, His Girl Friday–style delight.) Coming home from a bad date with a Facebook bro, Frances sees Jeff’s message on her LinkedIn and impulsively responds.

She has become concerned about the dangers that Facebook poses to teen mental health, and about the ways the algorithm had been redesigned to direct users toward extremist hate groups. For a long time, she has been trying to convey her troubling findings to other members of the Civic Integrity committee; all she has received in return is the nickname “Cassandra,” a reference to the woman in Greek mythology cursed with visions of the future and never be believed when she shares them.

Haugen and Horwitz have their own mantras to rehearse, drums to beat; Haugen in particular. “You and I aren’t on the same team,” Haugen recites, ad nauseam; she believes in the “mission” of Facebook. Haugen is a squarely adorable Sorkinian invention, a blunt and scowling heroine game to do Anora cosplay when she wants to go incognito in public. (On one trip to his hotel, she dresses up in a black bustier.) Meanwhile, Horwitz asks his source the right questions and waits patiently, blue eyes wide and warm, as she ties herself in knots. She mocks his love of old movies and calls his banana daiquiris “a dumb drink”; he teases her, approvingly, for being “mean. Like, scary mean.” It plays more like a 1990s romantic comedy than a corporate thriller.

Digger is ostensibly about a play but works like a movie, while The Social Reckoning is a journalism movie that feels like a play, and a didactic one at that.

This fictionalized near-miss love story is there because the audience needs something to look at during the film’s lengthy scenes of exposition. When the two aren’t flirting, they are explaining journalistic ethics and Tech 101 to one another, and, more importantly, to us. The bulk of the film’s run time is dedicated to these conversations, sometimes enlightening but mostly rudimentary rundowns of how social media works. These only underscore who this film is for: social media luddites, middlebrow legacy media fanatics, and Facebook obsessives who, in Horwitz’s words, don’t even realize the drink has been spiked.

The Social Reckoning lacks the cinematic dynamism of The Social Network or even of Digger, which, for all its shortcomings, is wildly visually inventive. Digger is ostensibly about a play but works like a movie, while The Social Reckoning is a journalism movie that feels like a play, and a didactic one at that. The most compelling sequence comes when the action cuts between two threads: Haugen, having quit her job, snaps pictures of sensitive internal documents before she loses access to the Facebook server; Zuckerberg is panic-stricken on January 6 as Trump supporters storm the Capitol, and staffers in his war room beg him to lock Trump out of his account.

Are these moments meant to be happening at the same time? Or is it more of a thematic montage, placing the patriotism of a whistleblower next to the horrors of bloodied flags and Zuckerberg’s infuriating facial expressions? I’m not sure precisely what Sorkin means here, but at least the movie is showing us something instead of just telling.

The Social Reckoning ends on a muddled hopefulness, with Haugen testifying before Congress—unlike Zuckerberg, she is seemingly unrehearsed, frank, drawing on just a few cute notecards. The closing title cards detail Facebook/Meta’s recent $17 billion settlement with 47 states, alongside the company’s renewed commitment to zero fact checking. It also refers to the enormous influence Facebook once exercised over the circulation and consumption of news, citing a 2018 Pew Research Center study finding that 43 percent of adults read about current events on the site. The music is triumphant, as is Haugen’s proud, abashed expression. The good guys’ victory is far from secured, but, as Horwitz says earlier of a basketball game on television, “the game’s not over.” 

We must continue to mistrust and talk over those who would tell us, in Digger’s parlance, that “compliance is freedom.” Better, as the 2023 nuclear dramedy Asteroid City urged, to “keep telling the story.” For Iñárritu, storytelling is a vehicle for catharsis and distraction and not much else. The Social Reckoning, with all its cuteness and misplaced pomp, isn’t ready to roll over and play dead. It may be too late to reverse years of tech-induced harms, but there is still time to unfriend a few billionaires.

In Maine, as everywhere else in the country, one of this year’s biggest electoral issues is the cost of energy. The price of electricity is rising at the third-highest rate in the nation, and heating oil—which Maine relies on more than any other state—now costs a record $6. So it’s no surprise that the state’s candidates for governor were asked about this issue in a debate last week. But Democrats should take note of how their nominee responded.

Hannah Pingree, a former speaker of the Maine House of Representatives, rightly attributed these rising costs in part to the global energy crisis caused by President Trump’s war against Iran. “We need to end the war,” she said. “That might bring relief.” She also called on the state and federal government to provide more funds, especially to help low-income families. The usual solutions. But then she went one step further.

“I do believe deeply in weatherization and efficiency programs,” she said. Pingree formerly co-chaired the Maine Climate Council, an advisory group that created the state’s ambitious climate plan, and she noted that she helped create Maine’s quasi-state energy-efficiency agency, which Republican nominee Bobby Charles “wants to get rid of.” She added, “I believe investing in efficiency, continuing to install heat pumps, which help people get off foreign oil ... will long term save us money and make us more energy independent.”

The magic words here, believe it or not, are “heat pumps,” which Mainers have adopted at a rapid clip thanks in part to Pingree’s championing. And notably, in her answer, she did not utter two other words that have bedeviled the Democrats: climate change.

Since Trump’s return to the White House, a debate has roiled the Democratic Party about “climate hushing”—the accusation that politicians are deliberately not talking about climate change. This is a real phenomenon, and it’s driven by the belief, sowed in part by the consultant class, that the subject alienates voters. But as the Maine race shows, “climate change” is on midterm ballots all over the country—even if those exact words aren’t being spoken—because of its connection to voters’ wallets.

Rising gas and electricity prices are top of mind for many voters—second only to the affordability of health care, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation poll published Tuesday. That’s a huge problem for the Republicans, not merely because they’ve been in power amid the price spike but because their president is directly responsible for it. In addition to Trump’s war with Iran, his war on climate policy has put extra pressure on the global oil supply by taking so many alternatives off the table. Energy Innovation, a California think tank, released data last week showing that policy changes since he took office—like cancelling wind, solar, and other clean energy projects—would raise household energy costs by thousands of dollars through 2040.

Trump is also perhaps the country’s most prominent supporter of one the biggest villains in this year’s elections: data centers, which are rapidly proliferating across the country to support the AI boom—and consequently increasing communities’ electricity bills. These energy-hogging monstrosities, many of which are powered by natural gas, also befoul the local environment and, yes, contribute to climate change. Voters in Maine, Michigan, Colorado, Arizona, and beyond might not be opposing them for that reason—or at least not only for that reason—but there’s no doubting the net benefit to the planet of that opposition.

Welcome to the new political landscape, in which “climate” and “cost of living” are no longer politically incompatible priorities—rather, a productively messy coupling. As utility bills rise, the cost at the pump gets prohibitive, and rural America is invaded by data centers, it’s clear that environmental and economic issues are so intertwined that it no longer makes sense to talk about them as separate “issues.”

The shift counters conventional wisdom: Political consultants and pundits have in recent years warned that climate was divisive and that Democrats should instead stick to “affordability.” David Schor, an influential pollster, said in 2021, “when you talk about climate change, you sound like a weird, very liberal white person.” Democrats weren’t talking that much about climate change anyway, but largely heeded this advice, even when making climate-forward policy. President Biden hardly bragged about his considerable investments in renewable energy, the whole package of which was branded as the “Inflation Reduction Act” to advertise (somewhat misleadingly) an economic impact.

Trump’s 2024 victory only made matters worse, apparently convincing even more elected Democrats that talking about climate change is at best ineffective, and at worst damaging. The warnings from consultants and pundits intensified. The Searchlight Institute, run by Adam Jentleson, Senator John Fetterman’s former chief of staff, released a report a year ago titled “The First Rule About Solving Climate Change.” That rule is, “Don’t Say Climate Change,” because while “battleground voters overwhelmingly agree climate change is a problem, addressing it is not a priority for them.” Socialist geographer Matt Huber, writing in The New York Times in May, suggested that Democrats emulate candidates who avoid the subject to win back the working class: “The kinds of policies they support — for example, public investments in infrastructure like housing and electricity — will help address climate change, but there is little reason for politicians like them to focus on the issue anymore.”

Many Democratic candidates, even some insurgents on the left, are finding their own path through this thicket. Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed has gone on Fox News and flatly stated, “I’m not going to defend the Green New Deal.” But he has called for a moratorium on data centers, not just to protect ratepayers, but the environment, too. “Keep the data centers away from our Great Lakes,” he said recently. He’s perhaps avoiding “climate change” as a political issue, but he’s showing how we can’t silo the wellbeing of “nature” from our own. It’s all connected.

New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani is perhaps the foremost example of a Democrat who’s threading this needle. He ran on an affordability platform last year before it became a buzzword among Democrats, and he doesn’t talk much about “climate” or the “environment”—but he has been working to expand bike lanes and make buses free, which will save New Yorkers money and reduce car emissions. The socialist mayor has a 60 percent approval rating, more popular by far than any other New York politician.

It’s hard to argue with success. Still, drawing the connection between climate and affordability more explicitly—as some, but too few Democrats are doing—will help build an even bigger constituency for the policies that address both problems, and will sharpen the Democrats’ line of attack on the Republicans. And there are ample other opportunities to make these kinds of connections on the campaign trail. For instance, a new study by Food and Water Watch found that over the past decade household water costs have increased by 62 percent. Privatization, federal disinvestment in water systems, and climate change are all factors, the group said. The biggest increase—a staggering 177 percent—was in New Hampshire; take note, 2028 presidential primary hopefuls.

Climate change is not a toxic subject for voters. It’s just not a top priority: A recent Environmental Voter Project poll of likely voters in eight Senate battleground states found that just 23 percent of Democrats and 19 percent of independents consider “climate change and pollution” to be a top-three issue. However, the same poll also found that voters are more likely to support candidates who want to transition away from fossil fuels, and that “they wanted politicians to spend more time talking about climate change and pollution (59%), rather than less (17%).” In other words, voters themselves are coming out against climate hushing.

This year Gavin Newsom has shown that he would be a billionaire-friendly president. Which means he shouldn’t be president at all. In short order, we will all have a huge field of Democratic presidential hopefuls to keep up with, but Newsom has done us a favor and disqualified himself before he even formally launches his expected campaign.

Newsom has aligned himself with the uberwealthy on two major fronts. He has strongly opposed a ballot initiative that would impose a one-time 5 percent tax on the assets of California billionaires. The measure would almost certainly pass if it had vocal backing from Democratic politicians in the state. But lacking that support, polls suggest it might fail. In addition, Newsom pushed Attorney General Rob Bonta and other Democratic attorneys to cut a deal with David Ellison (son of Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison) and his company Skydance, instead of continuing litigation to stop or stall Skydance’s acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery. Newsom’s public wariness about the attorney generals taking a tough line against the merger inspired other California Democratic politicians to adopt the same stance, undercutting the leverage of Bonta and his colleagues. The attorney generals ended up dropping their opposition to the merger after a few minor concessions from Ellison and his firm.

Newsom has cast these moves as being in the interests of his state’s residents. After all, Ellison threatened to move Paramount’s headquarters away from California unless Bonta and the other attorneys general blessed the merger, potentially costing thousands of Californians their jobs. (Ellison’s Skydance acquired Paramount last year.) Newsom and other critics of the billionaire tax say it would raise money initially but ultimately would rob California of revenue, as the superrich leave the state en masse.

In reality, the economic case for the governor’s stances isn’t clear-cut. Sure, Ellison isn’t moving Paramount’s headquarters from California for now, but I would expect the company’s workforce in the Bay State to be drastically reduced in the next few years. That’s what companies that merge do—claim redundancies and lay off thousands of people. Ellison has already written a memo to employees of the newly merged company hinting at significant job cuts to come.

Also, we should consider the economic effects for Californians (and other Americans) who aren’t employees at Paramount’s headquarters. Will the costs and options for people who watch movies, streaming television, and other products offered by Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery get better or worse now that a rival company has been removed from the market? I predict worse. Will actors, television writers, and others in the entertainment industry get more or fewer opportunities with one less competitor for their services? I would bet on fewer.

In terms of the billionaires’ tax, I have no doubt some billionaires would move. But there have been numerous studies of the effects of increased taxes on superrich individuals. They often don’t back up their threats to move. Their homes, families, country clubs, and other cherished possessions are still in the place where they made their money. California has great weather and is the center of numerous industries. All the billionaires there aren’t going to flee.

And the specifics in California make the case for the proposed wealth tax even stronger. California billionaires pay a tax rate of about 0.2 percent on their wealth each year, according to an analysis from economists Jasper Boll, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman. That’s significantly less than the proposed tax. “Even if one fourth of all billionaires left, it would take 100 years for the income tax loss to match the revenue from the wealth tax. In the extreme case where all billionaires left, it would take 25 years for the income tax loss to match the revenue from the tax,” the economists say.

But while the economics here are at least a bit complicated, the democratic implications are not. They are simply terrible. Ellison put Bari Weiss in charge of CBS News, where she has both shifted the network decidedly to the right and forced out many of the company’s top journalists after they wouldn’t abide by her Trump-friendly direction for the network. By acquiring Warner Bros. Discovery, Ellison now controls CNN, perhaps an even more important news institution in today’s America than CBS. Ellison is letting current CNN editor in chief and chairman Mark Thompson remain in his post, instead of bringing in Weiss or one of her allies to run the network. But that shouldn’t reassure anyone. Thompson and everyone else at CNN have seen how Weiss has run CBS with Ellison’s blessing. They have to assume his journalism vision is pro-Israel, anti-anti-Trump, and pro-billionaire. CNN employees are likely to self-censor to avoid drawing Ellison’s ire.

Yes, I know that fewer Americans watch television news than ever. But outlets like CNN and CBS still matter, because they have reputations and brands that carry a lot of weight, as well as large, experienced staffs whose coverage influences what shows up on social media. What stories about the antidemocratic tendencies of Trump and the Republicans won’t be covered by CNN because of Ellison’s leadership? (Remember that Weiss initially blocked a 60 Minutes report on the horrible conditions in a prison in El Salvador where the Trump administration sent immigrants from Venezuela.) What negative stories about Trump will be whitewashed? How negatively will Democrats skeptical of Israel be covered? (In Ellison’s defense, CNN anchors Dana Bash and Jake Tapper in particular are already quite hostile to critics of Israel and don’t need their new boss to push them there.)

It is shocking and incredibly stupid that one of the most prominent politicians in a pro-democracy party has helped allies of an authoritarian acquire a major news outlet. Has Newsom not studied how autocrats across the world censor critical content by ensuring media is owned by people friendly to them? Has he not seen how Ellison and Weiss have led CBS?

And it’s not just CNN. HBO, TNT, and numerous media properties are part of Warner Bros. Discovery and therefore now Ellison’s empire. The movie Sinners was distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures; John Oliver’s show Last Week Tonight airs on HBO. A wide array of anti-racist, progressive, pro-democracy content and personnel is now under the thumb of Ellison. I predict that Ellison and his team will either block some of that content or force it to be more pro-Trump, or at least less anti-Trump. Has Newsom not considered this, or does he consider his (likely misplaced) hopes of saving a few thousand California jobs more important?

The billionaire tax doesn’t just raise revenue. It’s a way to both underscore the prodigious, excessive wealth of billionaires in the United States today and limit their ability to use their wealth to influence politics. One of the main reasons our democracy is eroding is the alliance between right-wing politicians and billionaires like Elon Musk. And there is finally a grassroots movement to confront the oligarchy, best illustrated by the nationwide, bipartisan resistance to AI data centers. This ballot initiative being defeated in California, one of the most liberal states in the country, would be a huge blow to that movement.

That’s why it’s so galling and, again, stupid for Newsom, one of the most prominent Democrats in the country, to be joining the effort to kill the wealth tax.

Why is Newsom doing the billionaires’ work for them? The main reason is probably ideology. He’s a typical California establishment Democrat. Such Democrats, including Kamala Harris and Nancy Pelosi, tend to be generically “liberal” and supportive of gay rights and abortion rights. But they often aren’t progressive on economic issues, especially when it comes to challenging corporate power and the wealthy.

Secondly, there’s 2028. Many of the superrich don’t like the current Republican Party but are also wary of progressive Democrats and greater regulations on corporations. They would love a Democratic Party led by a billionaire-friendly figure and might pump in tens of millions of dollars to boost such a candidate during the primary. If Newsom is auditioning for anti-MAGA millionaires and billionaires, his moves this year help him.

So, either Newsom doesn’t appreciate the danger of billionaires and mega companies, or does understand it but is ignoring all of that to help his presidential campaign. I’m not sure which explanation for his moves is the correct one. I also don’t care. Either way, Newsom has shown, even before he officially declares his presidential candidacy, that he isn’t the right person to lead the Democratic Party. Maybe that was already obvious. Remember that Newsom’s first major move after Trump won a second term was to yuck it up with Charlie Kirk and Steve Bannon on the governor’s podcast. Newsom has bad political instincts, and as his pro-billionaire moves show, he’s terrible on policy too. Democrats who were considering him as a 2028 candidate should have one word for the California governor: Next!

Donald Trump rages regularly at Fox News. But Axios now reports that there’s more behind this than meets the eye: White House and GOP operatives have privately pressured Fox for months to change how it’s covering Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed. The problem? By giving El-Sayed airtime and covering him in a somewhat factual way, it’s made it harder for Trump and the GOP to smear him as a crazy radical jihadist. Translation: Don’t let voters learn the truth about this guy; it’ll make it harder for us to beat him! That is so deeply humiliating. But it also gets at a bigger story about how the manly men of MAGA get so whiny when the electoral going gets tough. We talked to Jennifer Rubin, editor-in-chief of The Contrarian. We discuss her new piece on the flimsiness of MAGA machismo, probe the deeper reasons Trump can’t allow the truth about El-Sayed to be told, and dissect a new Pew poll showing Trump’s approval down to an abysmal 30 percent. Listen to this episode here.

A federal immigration agent shot a man in the Bronx on Thursday afternoon, the latest of nearly two dozen such shootings in the past two years. The shooting took place around 4:00 p.m. local time; the victim is conscious and in treatment at an area hospital, according to the New York Police Department. A statement by New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani indicated that the man had a five-year-old child in his car.

This afternoon in Marble Hill, a New Yorker was shot by an ICE agent in a residential neighborhood. Early reports indicate agents surrounded him and a 5-year-old child in his car before firing multiple rounds. We believe the child was physically unharmed.

This is an…

— Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani (@NYCMayor) October 8, 2026

“This is an unconscionable and incredibly serious situation,” Mamdani said, adding that he has asked to call President Donald Trump, and intends to demand that ICE leave the city of New York. “I will not stand by while ICE agents terrorize our communities,” he added.

Since Trump returned to office, federal agents have shot at more than 21 people as part of the administration’s immigration crackdown, killing six of them. Like today’s shooting, almost all of these cases involved officers firing on someone while they were inside a vehicle.

The Department of Homeland Security confirmed their role in the shooting in a social media post Thursday night that asserted that the victim was a gang member with a criminal record—and blamed “sanctuary politicians” for their own officers shooting someone.

“When dangerous illegal aliens are released back onto the streets by radical sanctuary politicians, our officers are forced to make arrests at large in the community in unpredictable and dangerous environments,” the department posted on X.

Two days before the shooting, as CNN reported, ICE agents nationwide were told to increase arrests by 1,000 more people daily.

By Thursday evening, a crowd of protesters had gathered at the scene, according to local outlet the City Reporter. The man’s car was still smashed in the street.

This is a developing story and may be updated.

How far gone do you have to be to think that New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is “genocidal”? Apparently, this far gone: And this far gone: Think about how utterly insane this is. Mamdani is a Muslim Democratic socialist who has spent his political career advocating for Palestinian rights. And he was elected mayor of the country’s largest city while openly…

Source

A cartoon by Tim Campbell. Related | Can Trump buy your vote for $90?

Source

Better Know a Democrat is an interview series to give voters a closer look at candidates in competitive races across the U.S. All eyes are on a potentially purpling Texas. Yes, Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico seems to be in every other headline while he and Republican Ken Paxton scrap it out. But you’ll find another competitive race in Texas’ 23rd Congressional District…

Source

Secretary of State Marco Rubio berated reporters on Thursday as he avoided answering questions about a scandal enveloping the U.S. Ambassador to Greece, former Fox News host (and Donald Trump Jr.’s ex-fiancée) Kimberly Guilfoyle. A Wall Street Journal report revealed apparent text messages between Guilfoyle and Trump donor Eric Deters while the Senate was debating her confirmation last year.

Source

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth spoke with antisemitic right-wing conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec aboard the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln on Thursday. The podcaster asked him about this week’s announcement that President Donald Trump has approved the execution by firing squad of Nidal Hasan, a former U.S. Army major and Medical Corps psychiatrist found guilty of killing 13 people in a…

Source

It’s true that we’re all sick of President Donald Trump. Also true: We can’t ignore him. He is the president of the United States, and he’s causing our nation and the world grave damage. We shouldn’t be looking away. He’s also the best surrogate for Democrats this November. While our party isn’t lighting it up with public support, gaining power will be the first step toward showing the…

Source

Either Donald Trump is playing dumb with the American people, or there actually is something wrong with him.

The president turned to Truth Social Thursday to dispel fears surrounding his recent taunts to Iran, insisting via a social media post that he had not invited “the enemy to bomb San Diego and Los Angeles.”

But he did. Three times.

Trump first told the world that Iran should bomb the two major Californian metropoles during a midterm campaign rally in Grand Island, Nebraska, on Monday.

“I want to see a tremendous victory,” Trump said then. “You want to see a tremendous victory because it verifies all the things we did. And again, remember, with the war, it’s just artificial. It’s a little bit high. It’s a small price to pay for keeping the world safe, keeping our country safe.”

“They can take out a city. Let them take, let them take out Los Angeles; let them take out San Diego,” Trump continued as the packed-out arena cheered. “That’s—this is a very small price to pay, and it’s going to be over with very soon. It’s essentially almost over with.… But it’s going to end very soon. And it’ll end one way or the other. And your gas and your gasoline and all of the things.”

Trump repeated the threat on Wednesday in Texas, where he told another fawning MAGA crowd: “I said it the other day, let them hit a missile into San Diego or Los Angeles.”

For whatever reason, while speaking with reporters that same night, Trump felt compelled to solicit a foreign adversary to attack America for a third time.

“I say it all the time, let’s see what would happen if Iran ever did anything to Los Angeles or San Diego. I’m talking about through missiles. You want to see problems, let them hit Los Angeles or San Diego,” Trump said.

But writing on his social media platform hours later, Trump claimed that reports of his own words were the result of “fake and artificial news” and that the comments were made in relation to the “temporary increase in the price of Gasoline,” which he suggested online was “a small price to pay for Iran not having a Nuclear Weapon.”

“And, if you want to see a big price, can you imagine what it would be like if they bombed San Diego and/or Los Angeles? All I was doing was making a comparison between paying a little more, for a short time, for Gasoline, versus the bombing of our Major Cities,” Trump wrote, adding that “everybody knew that.”

If Trump actually did mean to discuss the country’s current military efforts and its corresponding (and unfortunate) toll on oil and gas prices, then his attempts to do so were so bizarre and confounding that their sole communicative success was in denigrating the office of the president.

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Inside Washington

Virginia’s 5th congressional district is rural, evangelical, and red. But, in a testament to how difficult 2026 is for Republicans, Democrat Tom Perriello just might have a fighting chance.

“It is somewhat surprising that, at least based on the polls, the Democratic candidate is polling so well,” said Alex Keena, a professor of political science at Virginia Commonwealth University. “And then on the other hand, it’s probably not surprising at all, given what’s going on in this cycle.”

Farming is a cornerstone of the local economy, and the district is also home to Liberty University. Since the district’s new lines were drawn in the 2020 redistricting process, Democrats haven’t considered it a particularly viable target. President Donald Trump won the district by 12 points in 2024, and Republican incumbent John McGuire defeated his Democratic opponent by 15 points. Even in 2025, which was considered a good year for Virginia Democrats, Governor Abigail Spanberger received just over 46 percent of the vote in the district.

But, as Keena suggested, things are different in 2026. McGuire was leading Perriello 51 percent to 45 percent among likely voters in a recent Washington Post–Schar School poll, with a 4.6 percent margin of error. Though that still puts the Republican in the lead, experts say it’s a slimmer margin than expected, and Perriello has a chance. Like voters in the rest of the country, residents of Virginia’s 5th district are feeling the knock-on effects of Trump’s war in Iran. The district is a mix of blue college towns and red farmland, and those farmers have been hit hard by the increasing costs of fertilizer, gas, and other goods.

Trump helped boost McGuire’s campaign in 2024 as a form of revenge against Representative Bob Good, the district’s then-representative. Good, a staunch conservative and former chair of the Freedom Caucus, supported Florida Governor Ron DeSantis in the 2024 Republican primary, drawing Trump’s ire. 

The decision to replace Good in 2024 is part of why Perriello has a chance now, Keena said. “Members of Congress are most vulnerable in that first reelection cycle,” he explained. Good could have stayed in office, building a reputation for himself among constituents. Instead, McGuire is a newcomer and comparatively unfamiliar to voters in the district. “This is kind of like the chickens coming home to roost for a president who likes to make erratic decisions and likes to use his endorsements to air grievances and punish people,” he said.

Perriello, on the other hand, has a reputation within the district. He represented the 5th district from 2009 to 2011. The district was a bit different then, before the most recent round of redistricting, but experts say he’s still a known entity in the area. He’s been campaigning hard: On Monday, he campaigned for more than 24 hours straight in what he dubs, “24 Hours of Tom.”

“The original idea was, I knew that people were working a double shift to support their own families. I wanted them to believe I’d work a double shift for them in Congress, and that became this idea of the 24 hours of campaigning,” Perriello told The New Republic on Wednesday. In the 26 hours that he campaigned, he hit every county in the district. “We want to make it clear that I am running to represent every part of this district, not just the blue areas.” During the early morning hours, Perriello said, he rode along with Charlottesville police, met with emergency responders, and joined farmers who were getting to work at 4 a.m. He also met with truckers refueling at gas stations; one explained that it cost $3,000 to fill up his tank. The cost of living crisis, Perriello said, makes voters “particularly angry because these were man-made problems, and those men are Donald Trump and John McGuire.”

Data centers have, unsurprisingly, become a key issue in the race. Virginia has the country’s highest concentration of data centers, and it is also the proposed home of the Valley Link Transmission Line, a high-voltage electric line that would traverse 115 miles across the state. Perriello has made data centers, AI concerns, and utility costs a centerpiece of his campaign and hopes it will pay off with voters who see data centers as a physical manifestation of their fears around AI and affordability. “The voters are way ahead of the political parties on AI,” he said. “You have issues like the Valley Link Transmission Line and data centers that are uniting people across very different kinds of politics.”

Perriello said that communities should be the ones to decide whether companies can build them in their backyards. “Where communities don’t want data centers, we should help them fight the data centers. And where communities want them, we should fight to get them the best possible deal,” he said. “But it is really hard to find communities that want them.” McGuire, meanwhile, has said that communities should decide whether a data center is built, but that the U.S. must beat China in the fight for AI dominance.

Experts who spoke to The New Republic emphasized that, despite the favorable political circumstances, the odds are still in Republicans’ favor in Virginia’s 5th district. But there’s a larger story at play. “Democrats can win the House without Virginia five,” said Stephen Farnsworth, a professor of political science at the University of Mary Washington. But “the fact that Virginia five is increasingly seen as competitive speaks to what a challenging environment Republicans are facing this fall.”

—Emma Janssen

Outside Washington

The Minnesota Star Tribune’s Allison Kite and Briana Bierschbach pen a fascinating report on the shifting politics of northeastern Minnesota, which used to offer strong support to the Minnesota Democratic Farmer Labor Party but “has become harder for Democrats to hold” and could be key to Republicans gaining the upper hand in the state’s tightly balanced legislature. Republican candidates are playing up issues like immigration and fraud, while Democrats such as state senator Grant Hauschild—looking to defend himself from a second-time challenge from Republican Andrea Zupancich—are “betting that health care and childcare will matter to voters, too.” Democrat Aaron Schweiger, currently running against sitting state Representative Natalie Zeleznikar, similarly “said Trump has effectively pulled rural voters away from Democrats based largely on ‘cultural issues,’” and material ones could push them back into the blue. Meanwhile, everyone’s trying to claim the high ground on data centers.

New York’s 1st congressional district candidate Chris Gallant gives The New York Times an interview for the ages: “‘I mean, all my friends know I’m kinky’ as hell, he said, using a saltier word. ‘I make Christian Grey look like amateur hour.’” Times reporter Jacob Bernstein was accompanying the Democrat to the shooting range and had asked him about the photos that the New York Post publicized last month, from when Gallant posed for a “San Francisco fetish brand” in 2010. Gallant initially called it a “coordinated political hit” but has opted to own the vibe.

—Heather Souvaine Horn

The Ideas Factory

On Thursday at 1 p.m., the Center for American Progress will hold an online discussion with Eric Zwick and Owen Zidar, authors of the recent book The Everywhere Millionaire, about how business ownership became the “main path to wealth in America, and what that means for the future of tax policy and the American Dream.” New York University professor Lily Batchelder and Amy Hanauer of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy will also join the discussion, which will be moderated by Corey Husak, with introductory remarks from Emily Gee.

A new poll from Data for Progress finds 56 percent of likely voters think “the government should invest more” in public housing, with strong majorities backing extreme weather resilience, energy efficiency, and clean water and air as factors to be considered in constructing such housing. The organization concludes that voters generally support the components of the so-called “Green New Deal” for public housing—just not necessarily by that name.

—Heather Souvaine Horn

In Closing

Here’s Why That’s B.S.

Destroying Los Angeles is a “small price to pay”?

Watch TNR’s Edith Olmsted unpack the speech in which Trump seemed to suggest it would be okay for Iran to nuke southern California.

Political Trivia Question of the Day  

Who was the United States of America’s first ambassador to France? He’s a pretty famous guy.

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

—Michael Tomasky