Political News

Donald Trump is absolutely, finally, paying E. Jean Carroll.

The Second Circuit Court of Appeals denied the president’s emergency motion to temporarily suspend the court-ordered payment late Wednesday.

The decision came shortly after Judge Lewis Kaplan ordered the release of $5 million in court-held funds to the beleaguered columnist, more than three years after Trump was found civilly liable for sexually assaulting Carroll in a department store in late 1995.

The last-minute stay was a Hail Mary thrown by Trump’s legal team, who had tried to appeal the case to the Supreme Court earlier this week. But the nation’s highest judiciary ultimately rejected the request on Tuesday.

Despite the high court’s decision, Trump’s legal team wrote to Kaplan asking him not to release the funds, claiming that the president’s Supreme Court petition for a new hearing was still pending.

By Wednesday morning, the SCOTUS docket had been updated to reflect that it was anticipating a corrected petition from the president’s team. But hours later, it appeared that Kaplan had gone ahead and ordered the release of the funds to Carroll despite Trump’s pending filing, anyway.

In a six-page memorandum penned Wednesday, Kaplan noted that Trump “has been stalling this case for years.”

“It is time for him to ‘do equity’ and pay the judgment,” Kaplan ordered.

The Second Circuit Court of Appeals clearly agreed.

Carroll has a long and grim history with the president. After the 2023 civil case, Trump tried and failed to sue Carroll for defamation. Kaplan later ruled that Trump had continued to defame the advice columnist by denying the rape on the basis that she wasn’t his “type,” and by accusing her of making up the sexual assault allegations against him for the benefit of her book. A jury awarded Carroll $83.3 million in that case, though Carroll has not yet seen any proceeds from that decision, either.

Late last month, Carroll’s attorney Roberta Kaplan (no relation to the New York–based judge) asked a judge to implement an expedited payment schedule for the sum that Trump owes Carroll, noting that by this point, the president owes Carroll interest on the original amount.

“It is time for this case to come to an end,” Carroll’s attorney wrote in a Tuesday legal filing.

ICE is making people’s worst fears a reality.

The family of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican man who was shot and killed Tuesday by immigration enforcement agents in Texas, is calling for a full investigation into his death.

Speaking at a press conference Wednesday, Ronaldo Salgado, the deceased’s son, gave an emotional account of how he learned of his father’s death.

“I saw a video posted on Facebook that he had been shot. I recognized him immediately,” Ronaldo said, his voice breaking. “Not from his appearance, but from his voice, crying for help as he lay on the street, bleeding out.”

Salgado set off for the area where his father was working construction in North Houston, and remained on the site for hours looking for answers. League of United Latin American Citizens Representative Conchita Reyes connected him to Texas Representative Sylvia Garcia to locate his father at Ben Taub Hospital.

“With all the hope in the world I drove to Ben Taub Hospital, the hospital that I was born in, my brother Lorenzo Jr. was born in, and my youngest was born in. I went to Ben Taub Hospital, demanded answers, but no one could give them to me,” Salgado said.

“I learned of my father’s passing from a news report on social media, not the hospital, not law enforcement,” he continued.

Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was undocumented, but his three children are U.S. citizens. His son said his father had completed the paperwork for a legal work permit, submitted good character affidavits and fingerprints 18 months ago, and was awaiting a response.

In the hours after the shooting, the Department of Homeland Security claimed the officer had fired in self-defense after Lorenzo Salgado Araujo refused to comply with orders and “weaponized his vehicle in an attempt to run over an ICE law enforcement officer.”

But that’s a familiar refrain used by ICE agents to skirt legal issues, as the agency’s use-of-force policy bars agents from firing at a vehicle unless there is an imminent threat to their safety.

DHS made similar claims about the shooting of Marimar Martinez and the fatal shooting of Renee Good. The claims about Martinez quickly fell apart when her lawyer showed footage of immigration agents steering their vehicle into Martinez’s truck. While the investigation into Good’s death has gone nowhere, DHS’s claims are highly disputed.

His family believes that Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, who had no criminal record, would have complied with orders if he’d known that the officers pursuing him in unmarked vehicles were federal immigration authorities. The family even had a plan in place in the event that Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was picked up by ICE.

“He did not deserve to die. He did not deserve to be reduced to a headline of ‘Mexican Man Shot and Killed by ICE.’ He deserved to live a quiet life as Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a husband, a father, and a job creator for dozens of men who also wanted the American dream,” his son said.

Lorenzo Salgado Araujo’s death marks the tenth fatal shooting by federal immigration enforcement during President Donald Trump’s second term.

Graham Platner continued to deny his sexual assault allegations, lambasted “larger forces” against him, and demanded that the Maine Democratic Party allow him a say in his replacement upon announcing his withdrawal from the Senate race. The angry video went against everything his closest aides advised. 

“Accusations are supposed to be the beginning of things, not the end,” Platner said in his 11-minute video, posted Wednesday evening on X. “This was the last week to try to get me off of the ballot. That’s why this is occurring.... [The allegations] are being used by the political establishment to put structural pressure on us.... It is a system that is built structurally to make sure that movements like ours cannot flourish. That if they begin to succeed, they can be crushed.” 

“They are going to take everything away from us. Those in power who have the ability to do so are using these allegations as an excuse to take away all of the things we need to run a campaign,” Platner continued in his vertically shot video. “They would rather see Susan Collins win than have me be the next senator from Maine.”  

My name might be on the ballot right now, but that ballot line belongs to the people of Maine. pic.twitter.com/RKVyLU76tm

— Graham Platner for Senate (@grahamformaine) July 9, 2026

His indignant rhetoric was also mirrored in his claims that national Democrats were trying to choose his successor behind “closed doors” and his insistence that they choose a fellow progressive. In reality, Maine’s Democratic Party is planning to hold a nominating convention with about 600 delegates later this month.

According to Politico, several of Graham’s closest advisers begged him not to take this approach with his resignation video, urging him to center “gratitude” and to to strike a “conciliatory” tone instead. But he refused to take their advice.

Platner was accused of sexual assault by Jenny Racicot, a 41-year-old Maine resident who dated him on and off for two years, in a Politico article published on Monday. She alleged that the former Marine drunkenly entered her home uninvited five years ago and forced himself on her even as she asked him to stop. Platner continued to profusely deny these allegations in his resignation video. 

Blaming the larger political establishment for your rape allegation with an 11-minute long video does not seem particularly gracious. Now Maine’s Democratic Party has until July 27 to pick a candidate—and to try and clean up Platner’s long mess of a campaign.

FBI Director Kash Patel’s lavish spending spree and misuse of government planes has now attracted Republican ire.

Senator Chuck Grassley, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, wrote a letter to Patel asking for information about his use of FBI jets and the bureau’s purchase of BMW cars, MS NOW reports.

“For each trip where you used an FBI aircraft for personal travel, have you reimbursed the FBI as required by law? If yes, please provide the records,” Grassley wrote in his letter.

Grassley wrote that while Patel is required to use FBI planes even for personal use, Congress needs the information to make an “independent and objective review.” The senator also asked Patel to explain “why you decided to purchase BMW vehicles instead of Chevy Suburbans.”

Grassley has defended Patel in the past against accusations that he misused government resources, telling the press in April that “I’ve never had an FBI director cooperate with me as much as Kash Patel has cooperated with me on my request for information, my request for documents. In fact, most FBI directors have been an impediment to my investigations.”

Now, though, Grassley is joining Democrats, such as Representative Jamie Raskin and Senator Dick Durbin, who wrote their own letter to Patel Wednesday saying that they “appreciate Chairman Grassley raising these concerns, which mirror those raised repeatedly by House and Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats.”

Raskin and Durbin’s letter raises concerns about Patel’s travel as FBI director, referring to an incident last year where the military allowed Patel to snorkel at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii around the wreckage of the USS Arizona, which sunk during Japan’s attack on the base in 1941.

“Your VIP snorkeling experience in Hawaii was not an isolated incident,” wrote Raskin and Durbin. “You frequently demand special perks on ‘official’ trips around the globe, such as a taxpayer-funded helicopter tour during your multi-country jaunt across East Asia and other recreational activities like jet skiing.”

“Your jet-setting and the lack of justification for these trips are ‘out of control,’ and the new attaché office you established in Wellington, New Zealand, may have been opened in part to justify a sightseeing trip you took there,” the letter added.

Grassley’s words may mean that Patel will now face bipartisan scrutiny for his actions on the job. In the past, he’s had support from Republicans in Congress, not to mention President Trump. But with the midterm elections approaching, Grassley and others in the GOP could be gearing up for a stronger Democratic presence in Congress that demands more oversight of Trump’s appointments, especially those that like to party on the job.

Eduardo Zayas-Bazán was a 24-year-old lawyer when he left Cuba for the United States and joined about 1,400 other Cuban exiles, who were known as Brigade 2506, to participate in the Bay of Pigs invasion, the botched 1961 mission to overthrow Fidel Castro’s communist regime.

Always a gifted swimmer, he was a frogman, and when he stepped on the shores of Playa Girón on the southern coast of the island, he was shot in the right knee by friendly fire. When the US government-backed incursion failed —largely due to President John F. Kennedy’s decision to withdraw plans to strike Castro’s airfields—the human cost was significant: about 100 exiles died during the attacks, and Zayas-Bazán was arrested along with hundreds of others. He had served for about a year when the Kennedy administration negotiated for the return of exiles from the island to the US. 

Fast forward more than half a century, and Zayas-Bazán is now a 90-year-old retired professor who taught at East Tennessee State University. His experience has become memorialized in the new Bay of Pigs Museum and Library in Miami’s historic Little Havana, which opened with a ribbon-cutting ceremony on April 17, the 65th anniversary of the disastrous invasion. After five years of planning, the 11,000 square foot building was erected on the site of the original Brigade 2506 meetinghouse, a one-story building with a Spanish-tile roof where veterans gathered regularly. At a cost of more than $8 million, the new two-story facility contains numerous glass displays, multiple screens playing interviews of veterans, and a towering mural of the Cuban flag that greets visitors near the entrance.  

Eduardo Zayas-Bazán, a Brigade 2506 veteran and retired professor, stands in the Bay of Pigs Museum and Library, which opened in Miami this year. Laura C. Morel/Mother Jones

The museum has been a rare point of unity for Florida Democrats and Republicans. President Donald Trump stopped at the original house during his 2016 campaign, and the site has also been visited by politicians like Marco Rubio and Florida Sen. Rick Scott. Eileen Higgins, who was elected last year to be Miami’s first Democrat mayor in nearly 30 years, secured funding for the museum. “We’ve got to put party lines aside,” Carlos Luis, the museum president, told me. “This is so important for the Cuban community, and overall, this is the identity of the county and the city.”

“We’ve got to put party lines aside. This is so important for the Cuban community, and overall, this is the identity of the county and the city.”

Most of the men involved in the mission were young with no military experience, many of whom received only a few months of training before the invasion. One of them was Luis’s father, René Luis, who ran an accounting firm in Cuba with his family. When the elder Luis was released from prison after 22 months following the Bay of Pigs, he settled in Miami with his wife. They had seven children. Before dinner, Carlos recalled, the family sang Cuba’s national anthem. His father didn’t open up much about his experience, apart from blaming Kennedy for the failed mission, and he died in 2024 without ever setting foot on the island again. “My involvement here,” Luis said, “is the least I can do for my father.”

For Zayas-Bazán, president of the Brigade’s association and a member of the museum’s board, the new building provides a vivid excursion through his memories. Wearing a crisply ironed guayabera, a traditional linen shirt popular in Cuba, he strode through the exhibits, stopping at the front entrance to point out a video playing black-and-white footage of Havana’s waterfront lined with hotels and bustling city streets; his glasses reflected images of a now-vanished Cuba. “This shows what Cuba was like,” he told me. “So that the people can see what Havana was like before 1959”—the year Fidel Castro took control of the island. 

He stopped at a glass display lined with photos from 1962, when hundreds of Brigade 2506 members who had been imprisoned in Cuba returned to Miami. The photos show young men stepping off airplanes and into the arms of loved ones waiting for them on the tarmac. One such photo is of Zayas-Bazán and his then-wife, her smiling face pressed against his chest. In another corner of the museum, he pointed to a collection of items that Brigade 2506 members kept from that era: metal bowls and plates, spoons, rosaries, and tattered books. Zayas-Bazán read Don Quixote while in prison. 

After the invasion, several men were captured and forced into a crowded truck with no ventilation in the blistering heat. The episode was known as La Rastra de la Muerte, the “trailer truck of death,” because nine men of the dozens who were trapped died of asphyxiation. One exhibit focuses on what happened. “As oxygen dwindled,” the display reads, “some prisoners scraped open tiny holes in the walls and moved dying prisoners to them, an act which saved many.” The names of the men who died were listed, and Zayas-Bazán brushed his hand over those of three of his friends who had perished.

Eduardo Zayas-Bazán points out a photograph taken of him and his wife after his release from a Cuban prison in 1962. Laura C. Morel/Mother Jones

As I reported in March, Cuba is in the midst of the worst economic crisis ever to grip the island. Food is scarce, blackouts are constant, the medical infrastructure is collapsing, and inflation is astronomical. In the spring, Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel confirmed he was in talks with the Trump administration regarding the island’s future, a few months after the US government imposed an oil blockade, further harming the struggling nation. In recent weeks, the situation in Cuba has worsened as the population grapples with water shortages in the midst of the summer’s heat.

The new museum is a reminder for the Cuban exile community of “what could have been” if the Bay of Pigs mission had succeeded, Andy Gomez, one of the leading scholars on Cuba, told me. Without any major changes in the country, he worries that the next generation of Cuban Americans will not travel there and eventually lose ties with the island. “As the Eduardo Zayas-Bazáns of the older generations pass away, that will be another experience that will be lost,” he told me. “It’s important to somehow continue to tell that story.”

And that is what the museum strives to do. Its executive director, Yuleisy Mena, teaches a course about the invasion at the local Florida International University. The museum has also invited teachers from the Miami-Dade County school district to visit. “We have to start getting the next generation ready to take on the baton,” Luis told me. 

The Bay of Pigs veterans were among the first generation of Cubans to leave the island after Castro took power, and today about 200 of them are still alive. After Zayas-Bazán left his homeland more than six decades ago, he became chair of the Foreign Language Department at East Tennessee State University and co-authored Spanish language textbooks. In 1985, he became the first Cuban to lead the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese.

After retiring in 1999, he moved back to Miami to be within the Cuban exile community in case democracy returned to the island nation. “I came thinking that there had to be a change in Cuba,” he told me. “I don’t want to return until I can speak my mind without having to worry, until I can go everywhere I want to and see whomever I want to. I refuse to go and be spied on.”

Despite a life filled with professional and personal successes in the US, “I think about Cuba every day,” Zayas-Bazán said. 

For Brigade 2506 veterans like Zayas-Bazán and their families, the end of Cuba’s current government is more than half a century in the making. “I have never felt more optimistic about changes in Cuba than right now,” he told me, acknowledging that any changes may not happen in the near future with the ongoing disputes with Iran and the earthquake aftermath in Venezuela. “We, the Cuban people, have suffered so much in 67 years.”

Graham Platner’s exit strategy has apparently instilled a “#MeToo” mentality in the president. Or has it?

The Maine Democratic Senate candidate suspended his campaign Wednesday, days after more sexual abuse allegations emerged against him. The situation has pushed Maine into an unprecedented scenario, with questions swirling as to who the state’s Democratic Party intends to pick to replace Platner, in the hopes of unseating Republican Senator Susan Collins with just a few short months until the election. State Democrats have until July 27 to pick a new candidate.

Donald Trump was asked about the conundrum while traveling aboard Air Force One late Wednesday. At first, the president claimed that Platner’s future boils down to “whether or not you believe the woman,” not only misunderstanding that Platner had already left the race but also missing the painful irony of his suddenly supporting the “Believe Women” movement while he has used every tool available to him to shut down the voices of more than two dozen women who have accused him of sexual misconduct.

But soon he was back to casting doubt on the allegations: “A lot of people say big falsehoods. He’s in a bind, he’s in a bind. But should they be able to do it?” he continued, referring to whether state Democrats should be able to pick a new candidate. “Well, I guess he’s going to lose. I imagine he’s gonna lose.”

“It’s very interesting, when a Republican woman came out with the same charge, nobody believed her,” Trump noted, referring to the first woman that explicitly charged Platner with sexual abuse: his conservative ex-girlfriend, Lyndsey Fifield. In an interview with The New York Times last month, Fifield charged Platner with being aggressive with her body, using misogynistic language, and fantasizing about rape. In another interview with The Washington Post published Tuesday, Fifield further accused Platner of removing condoms during sex without her knowledge or consent.

Major progressive figures tentatively stayed by Platner’s side despite Fifield’s allegations, in part due to suspicions about her political motivations as she had previously aided Republican campaigns. But the mood around Platner’s campaign changed suddenly when a second woman—Jenny Racicot—offered Politico explicit details about Platner’s violent propensities, including an incident in which he allegedly broke into her house and raped her during their on-and-off relationship.

“When this woman came out, everyone believed her,” Trump shrugged.

But even Trump couldn’t resist making an off-color remark about the situation.

“Did you get any pictures of her?” Trump asked a reporter, seemingly referring to Racicot. “You don’t wanna. They wouldn’t sell good.”

The widespread protests against ongoing Immigrations and Customs Enforcement detentions have diminished and the media has turned its fragmented attention elsewhere. But the terrorizing and dehumanization of immigrants in the United States has not quieted, even as the voices speaking out against it have. On Tuesday, the cries of one family were heard across the country as they mourned…

Source

President Donald Trump doubled down on his threat to undermine U.S. allies if they won’t hand over Greenland.

While speaking to reporters on Not Air Force One, Trump was asked whether he planned to pull more U.S. troops out of Europe.

“I haven’t made that final determination. A lot is gonna depend on Greenland. A lot. I mean, we’re gonna make a very good deal on Greenland. And if we don’t, maybe I will,” Trump said.

Trump also suggested his next move depends on what happens with Iran, where the president has scrapped his own ceasefire deal to resume deadly military strikes.

“They want to help now, it’s a little late to the thing, because essentially there’s not that much fighting to be done,” Trump said of European allies.

“When they had a chance, an opportunity to help, they chose not to, so. But we’re sort of forgetting about that. And now they want to help, they all want to go in so badly.”

After months of silence on the subject, Trump kicked off the NATO summit in Ankara Tuesday by making yet another wild threat to acquire Greenland. Public opinion in Greenland and Denmark toward the U.S. has plummeted amid Trump’s desperate bids to take over the territory, including bribing its residents.

Trump has repeatedly threatened to withdraw U.S. troops from Europe if they do not agree to spend more on NATO defense. “We could remove all of our soldiers out of Europe,” Trump said as he sat beside Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on Tuesday.

“It continues to be that [Greenland] should be controlled by the United States, not by Denmark,” he added.

Hospitals are struggling to keep up with the influx of patients during climate-fueled heat waves. By Kiley Price for Inside Climate News This summer has been off to a particularly hot—and deadly—start. In June and early July, severe heat waves blanketed Europe and the United States, exposing millions of people to dangerously high temperatures and humidity.

Source

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

Source

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

Energy efficiency standards can make it more expensive to construct new buildings, but they save money for residents in the long run. In a new analysis, the Trump administration ignored the second half of that equation—a move that energy experts fear could undermine efficiency efforts nationwide.

Late last month, the US Department of Energy announced it found that if every state adopted the model 2024 International Energy Conservation Code (IECC) instead of following a 20-year-old building code, the move would drive up housing construction costs by $9.2 billion annually. It’s a break with decades of DOE analysis, spanning Republican and Democratic administrations, which has reported significant energy and financial savings under each iteration of the code.

“The Energy Department is completely contradicting its own findings,” said Donna Stanley, vice president of communications at the nonprofit International Code Council, which develops the model code. ​“The DOE’s new methodology is a deep mystery.”

The moves to crush efficiency measures could exacerbate the country’s affordability problems.

The DOE did not respond by Monday to Canary Media’s question of why it chose to exclude energy bill savings in its analysis.

The IECC, which is updated every three years, has cut energy use in new homes in half since it was first enacted in the late 1970s. While the code is fuel-neutral, meaning that builders can install fossil-fueled equipment, it still has a positive impact for the climate because it reduces energy demand that would be met at least in part by burning fossil fuels.

Most states adopt the IECC or an amended version rather than create their own rules from scratch. Some states, like Alabama, don’t impose statewide standards. In those cases, local governments may choose to use the IECC themselves; as the city of Montgomery does, for example.

Depending on the code-adoption cycle, there can be a lag of several years before a state or local jurisdiction takes up the latest iteration of the IECC. To date, 10 states have adopted the 2024 code, per the International Code Council.

The DOE’s analysis could have a chilling effect on other states still in the process of locking in the 2024 code, including Massachusetts, Minnesota, and Ohio. Lawmakers who have sought to restrict more-efficient building codes—such as those in the Missouri House of Representatives—could use the analysis as fodder for their arguments, according to Ben Rabe, associate director of codes and policy at New Buildings Institute.

The analysis comes as the Trump administration has sought to squelch energy-efficiency efforts across the country. In 2025, it sued two California cities over their superefficient all-electric codes, and this year it has barred households from using federal home-electrification rebates to swap fossil-fueled appliances for heat-pump options. In May, the Trump DOE also rescinded a Biden-era requirement that new homes meet the 2021 IECC standard to qualify for federal mortgage loans.

The moves to crush efficiency measures could exacerbate the country’s energy-affordability problems, making people spend more at a time when electricity and fuel costs have risen fast.

Adoption of the latest codes would save US homes and businesses $182 billion from 2010 to 2040.

The DOE has done a cost-benefit analysis of every version of the IECC, but this latest one is the first time the agency has tallied only the upfront costs from home construction and ignored the long-term bill savings, said Ted Tiffany, senior technical lead at the Building Decarbonization Coalition, a nonprofit advocacy group.

That’s like comparing cars based solely on their sticker prices while ignoring fuel costs and maintenance expenses, he added. ​“A cheaper car may cost less on Day 1, but a more efficient vehicle can save money and provide better performance, safety, and last longer over its lifetime.”

In a report for the DOE last year, the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory calculated the utility bill savings for people who move into homes built to the new standard. The 2024 model code generates an average life-cycle cost savings of nearly $3,000 per residence over the 2021 code, it estimated, though in specific regions that could rise to almost $9,500. The average payback time for a buyer paying for a home in cash, it found, is 2.5 years. Those who get a mortgage would typically see net savings on their combined home and utility payments in just one year.

The adoption of the IECC’s latest residential and commercial energy codes would save US homes and businesses $182 billion between 2010 and 2040, according to a DOE webpage that was removed shortly before the announcement.

“This is the definition of cost-effectiveness,” Tiffany said.

The DOE’s new analysis also rests on a questionable time-period comparison: It benchmarked the 2024 IECC against the 2006 version. Forty-nine states have already adopted more advanced energy codes for new residential units, according to Tiffany; they’re not building to 2006 standards. The DOE’s comparison really works only ​“for perhaps Arkansas,” he said, which lags the rest of the US in building energy codes.

The agency has estimated the added construction costs for compliance with the 2024 IECC over the 2006 IECC at $14,000 per home. 

“But we’ll save way more than that over the life of these buildings,” Rabe said.

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the July 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 stumbled haplessly through a series of events at NATO on Wednesday. It was profoundly humiliating in countless ways, not just to him, but also to the United States. But there was one remarkable exchange in which a Danish reporter pressed the NATO secretary-general about NATO’s relationship with Trump that captured something really essential about this moment. The reporter asked, how can you have any self-respect praising Trump after all he’s done to NATO and to our allies?

The deeper question here is: What’s going to happen to NATO and America’s international alliances after all that Donald Trump has done to them? We’re talking about it all with Elizabeth Saunders, a foreign policy writer and thinker who’s really good on this sort of thing. Elizabeth, thanks for coming on.

Elizabeth Saunders: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Sargent: OK, so the headline news out of Trump’s visit to NATO was that he lashed out at everyone in sight. He said the ceasefire with Iran is over. He threatened more strikes. He erupted at Spain for failing to help with Iran, said our trade is finished with them. And he again threatened to steal Greenland outright. Elizabeth, what was your one simple big takeaway from everything that happened there?

Saunders: Well, I think it was a classic Trump display of volatility. NATO is in survival mode. Its mission at these meetings is to not have anything major come out of them in terms of an American withdrawal, right? So I think if you think back to the Davos meetings in January, when Trump had already been engaged in a couple days of saber-rattling over Greenland, and even floated the idea of taking it through military force—and then Mark Carney came and delivered this “this is a rupture” speech, and then Trump did back down.

That episode—reporting in The Wall Street Journal and elsewhere has shown—it was really a—I wouldn’t say a wake-up call, I’d say it was a straw that broke the camel’s back, but it really made clear to the Europeans that this was a serious crisis, that America might be turning on its allies. And so from that point on, I think the strategy of flattery that many European countries had—I mean, it’s understandable why they thought they had to try—has really fallen by the wayside.

All that said, it is still especially NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte’s job to try to hold the alliance together, move forward. And I think he in particular has stuck with the flattery strategy a lot longer than some of his other counterparts.

Sargent: Yeah, it’s almost comical at this point. So speaking of that, here’s an exchange in which a reporter from Denmark, Rasmus Svaneborg, questioned NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte. The reporter starts out by saying, Mark, you sit next to Trump while he says and does all these things to NATO and our allies. Listen.

Rasmus Svaneborg (voiceover): Mark, you sit next to Donald Trump in moments where he talks about conquering Greenland, talks about lashing out at allies like Spain, starting trade wars—things that it doesn’t seem like the old Mark Rutte would approve of. Does this have any effect on your self-respect when you sit next to him like that and say nothing?

Mark Rutte (voiceover): You know, what I always do is acknowledge when praise is due. And I think we should praise Donald Trump for the fact that NATO is so much stronger. Of course it has to do with the Russian threat, it has to do with the war in Ukraine. But it very much also has to do with President Trump delivering now what, since Eisenhower, the United States tried to achieve—equalizing spending between the U.S. and Europe.

Sargent: So as you heard there, the reporter asked Mark Rutte, how can you sit there next to this guy while he talks about seizing territory by force, lashes out pathologically at allies, and unleashes wildly destructive and crazy trade wars? How can you do that while maintaining your self-respect? Elizabeth, there’s something about this moment that perfectly captures the essence of the situation. What did you think of it?

Saunders: Well, your first instinct is to cheer the reporter and hope that Rutte says something like, you know, you’re right, I feel cheap and horrible when I do that, and I really think that Trump is an idiot or whatever. Very much like people were cheering for Keir Starmer, the prime minister of the U.K., to have a Love Actually moment where he told off the American president in a big televised speech, as Hugh Grant does in the movie Love Actually.

I mean, again, I think the era of flattery is over. I think Rutte probably knows that. But in his defense, he is the one in charge of just NATO, not a country anymore. And so he may feel that there’s a reason why he wants to at least keep Trump from lashing out, right? That’s how you get the no-drama—is you flatter him enough that he doesn’t do anything rash. I do think it does seem increasingly ridiculous to see anybody acting that way, though.

This is the president of the United States. His words really matter. And he again threatened Iranian civilian targets when he said he was going to bomb Iran tonight. I mean, he throws this language around so indiscriminately. And I don’t think we can forget that it’s not normal. It’s very abnormal.

Sargent: On the exchange with the reporter, I just want to point out how, in an understated way, it was an extraordinary takedown of Donald Trump, because it treated him as this buffoonish, irrelevant, sidelined figure, and essentially said, at this point, the only thing that matters now is how the rest of us react to this lunatic. It’s all on us. It essentially says, no more enabling of this madman. The whole world sees how crazy and destructive he is. It’s time to stop.

Saunders: The difficulty is, it isn’t just on the Europeans. Because the U.S. still has all the military power—or most of it, enough military power that it matters more than any other country. The Europeans and the Canadians are still dependent on it. And so you have this situation where Donald Trump is the single point of failure for the West. And it has some pretty serious threats facing it from Russia—I mean, I could go on, but the big one they were there to talk about was Russia, right?

And instead of that, he’s not just, as in his first term, doing things to kind of undermine the foundations. He has actually lashed out at Iran in a way that weakens the entire region, and over which they have very little control over events, if any.

So I don’t envy—there are many jobs I would not want to have in today’s world. University president, European head of state, right? That’s a tough one right now.

Sargent: Let’s listen to what Trump said about Spain. Check this out.

Donald Trump (voiceover): Spain is a wasted cause. We don’t want to do any trade business with Spain anymore, by the way. I’d like to cut her out. Spain is a terrible partner in NATO. They don’t participate, they don’t pay. I don’t want anything to do with Spain. Cut off all trade with Spain, please. Including visits. OK, we don’t want anything to do—watch them, watch them come running back. They’re open about it, they’re hostile about it. And let’s see how hostile they remain when they call up and they please, please, we want to trade with you, sir, we want to trade with you, sir. They make so much money with us, and we’re going to see that they make a lot less.

Sargent: He appears to be angry because Spain wasn’t willing to help reopen the Strait of Hormuz. But let’s just recap what happened there. Trump went to war without consulting allies, after spending the last year and a half shitting all over them. And then when his war went south—exactly as his own advisors and everyone else, including the allies, warned that it would—he suddenly runs back to our allies for help in cleaning up his mess. Elizabeth, can you talk about that big dynamic? How ridiculous it is?

Saunders: Yeah. I think the other piece of it is that Spain refused to sign on to the defense spending pledge that Trump wanted and that Mark Rutte tried to kind of get everyone to pledge. And Spain is pretty far from Russia. It has some mountains in between it and the rest of continental Europe. It certainly has maritime—it’s of great maritime importance.

But Spain is not going to be the backbone of NATO under any circumstances, right? And it doesn’t make sense for Spain to spend as much, or to spend the same way, right? Not every European country can build tanks.

So he’s been angry about Spain not providing help that makes no sense, and then insulting Spain and Italy and—you know, Keir Starmer, who flattered him, as not very Churchillian and so forth—but then he really does need help from the NATO allies. So it’s a situation where, again, he’s not a very good negotiator. He doesn’t know how to take care of his friends and keep them happy so that they’re there when you need them.

Sargent: Rutte has kind of praised Trump by saying he was right about getting European powers to chip in more for defense and all that. And just putting that aside, there’s no denying that Trump has essentially screwed over the alliance in all kinds of ways, is there?

Saunders: And also screwed over America, right? It’s very helpful to have these allies. This is the part that Trump has never appreciated—that having allies who will not just share the burden, but allow you to use their bases, provide all kinds of logistical support without having to occupy them—that’s a huge advantage.

It’s an advantage the Soviets didn’t have in the Cold War. It’s an advantage China doesn’t have today. It’s much better and strategically more valuable and easier for the U.S. to just be really close friends with Denmark and get what they need out of Greenland, rather than take over Greenland itself.

So the U.S. role in the alliance is special. It has the most capabilities, especially the nuclear umbrella. But fundamentally, NATO boils down to trust. Trust that each country will in fact come to each other’s aid if attacked. And fundamentally, the most important country there has always been the U.S., and the credibility of the U.S. guarantee is the most important thing.

Presidents have always sought to make that promise credible. And the way you make things credible is you say what you mean, and then you follow through, and you don’t change your mind overnight and start making demands and so forth. And so I think they have recognized that Trump is the single point of failure in this alliance, and they cannot allow—they need to build in some redundancies.

It’s also just kind of another example of how this is screwing over America too. The dynamic of NATO has always been, we ask the allies to spend more and do more on their own. But the minute they start to do that, we get annoyed, because we also want to tell them what to do. And whatever one thinks of that, clearly we’re giving up whatever leverage we had over the NATO countries militarily. And that’s a loss for the U.S. You can’t deny it.

Saunders: Yeah. Let’s just try to sum up the big picture here. So Donald Trump comes in. He’s supposed to be the hard-headed realist who does big things in the world. He knows how to manhandle Putin because he’s a tough guy like Putin. He recognizes that China’s a threat, and he’ll confront China because, unlike Biden, that softy—he’s a tough guy and all that.

But then what you’ve basically actually got is Trump empowering Russia in all kinds of ways, Trump failing vis-à-vis China, doing things that actually empower China, and simultaneously throwing away all our allies who would essentially act as our allies in being a bulwark against those rising powers. Is that a fair summary of what’s going on?

Saunders: Yeah, I think that sums it up. And for me, one of the—it was both ridiculous and very poignant moments—was when a reporter asked Trump a question about his recent talk of, you know, the fear of communists, because he’s been calling some Democrats communists of late. And leaving aside the whole domestic angle of that, he then went on a long discussion about communism and the dangers of communism, and you can’t go back once you’ve gone communist, and you suffer and you suffer.

And I’m thinking, as I’m listening to this, does he realize that he is in a room full of people dedicated to an organization that was founded to stop the spread of communism and Russian and Soviet aggression? And many of the countries that are now NATO members were behind the Iron Curtain for decades. And they sure do know what it’s like to live under communism.

So I think what you say is right. And I think NATO is sort of hoping that it can limp along—maybe not to a point where—I think nobody really thinks it can go back to the way it was. But I think they hope that they can improve their own defenses to a point where they can make a deal with a much more rational president who will stick to what he says.

Sargent: Yeah, and I think that that’s possible. I think a Democratic president could actually repair all this. Which brings me to this Wall Street Journal report—you referenced this earlier. The Journal reported on what our NATO allies are doing right now as they contemplate a world with a much less reliable America.

As the Journal put it, these countries are engaged in “an unprecedented experiment in de-Americanization.” Paul Krugman had a good line about this, where he said this reflects Europe’s realization that a country that elects Trump twice can’t ever be trusted again.

What I take from this is, the world is moving on from us. Can you talk about this de-Americanization process? What does it entail, and what does it all really mean? Where does it go?

Saunders: Well, there are various points on a spectrum of, quote-unquote, “de-Americanization,” right? And one would just be hedging, where you might not want to have American technology underpinning literally every facet of your defense and economy and so forth—not just because of Trump, but because of American tech companies, and being overly reliant on a single set of systems. Everybody knows that redundancy is good in this sort of situation.

So there’s sort of hedging, insurance, reducing dependency. And then there’s rupture. And Carney’s speech in Davos talked about rupture. But I think even he would probably say it would still be better if NATO existed, right? And existed in a form that people didn’t question whether it was still going to exist in a year or two.

So I think fundamentally we’re going to see more hedging from Europe. I don’t think that they will break away entirely, because their interests—if you step back, if you take a sort of 30,000-foot view of this—fundamentally Europe wants Ukraine to stay sovereign. The U.S. should want Ukraine to stay sovereign.

There’s lots of common interests that still exist. And so I think you’ll see some hedging, but it’s not going to be as far as maybe a full de-Americanization. And part of that also is just the constraints of what Europe can do and how fast it can do it. It can’t make a tech industry overnight.

Sargent: Yeah, it does seem like a Democratic president probably can repair things so that some form of an alliance that really matters in the world can continue. Do you think that’s possible?

Saunders: I don’t think we’re ever going back to the way it was, because I think we had Biden and then we got Trump again. And I think Krugman’s point about this—you know, they voted for him twice. That is the thing that stops people in their tracks when they think about it that way. So I think there will be—even if you got a president from the sort of more, you know, supposedly—like, just throwing out a name, Nikki Haley, right?

Someone who even worked for Trump, but who has clearly got a more internationalist outlook, would not ever want to go trashing NATO for the sake of trashing it. I think that’s someone the leaders at this meeting could work with, would want to work with. But they’re under no illusions anymore. And I think they will want to have redundancy. It’s just prudent, right? Diversification of portfolios—it’s what we’re all supposed to do with our money, right?

So I don’t think they’re going to allow themselves to be in this position, to the extent their economies and capacity allow them to diversify. They have learned an important lesson. And I think America’s going to have to learn what it’s like to have a Europe with some autonomous capacity. As I said before, that traditionally has not been what we actually want when push comes to shove. We’d much rather tell them what to do.

Sargent: Yeah. Well, I think that that reporter and that exchange really kind of nailed it. He basically said, in his own way, it’s time to move on. Elizabeth Saunders, really great to talk to you. Thanks for all that. It’s really great stuff.

Saunders: Thank you so much.

The Graham Platner campaign has collapsed in spectacular fashion, with the upstart candidate suspending his run for Maine senator in a video he released Wednesday night. A woman Platner had dated accusing him of sexual assault effectively ended a candidacy that had a lot of warning signs, from his controversial Nazi tattoo to prior reports alleging mistreatment of women. I and many others were too enthusiastic about Platner’s potential. But, while Democrats rightly abandoned Platner after the woman’s allegations emerged, they shouldn’t abandon what Planter represented: an attempt to find candidates and messages that appeal outside of the party’s core voting base. Such experimentation and innovation is vital, because as the 2016 and 2024 elections showed, there just aren’t enough stalwart Democratic voters to defeat MAGA on their own.

The initial enthusiasm about Platner came from three parts of the Democratic Party coalition. Most importantly, Maine liberals crowded his events, excited by both his personal story and populist politics, and eventually overwhelmingly backed him in last month’s Senate primary. Outside of Maine, leftists such as journalist Ryan Grim and Senator Bernie Sanders got behind Platner as the man who could defeat the party’s establishment’s more centrist choice, Governor Janet Mills. There was a third group of people on the left and center-left, perhaps best exemplified by the hosts of Pod Save America, whose perhaps thought that Platner could appeal to voters who don’t traditionally back Democrats and not only finally defeat Susan Collins but offer clues about how the party could win such voters across the country. I had a foot in both the second and third camps.

The electoral aspect was an important part of the fanfare around Platner. The backlash to President Trump alone may be enough for the Democrats to win control of the House, Senate, and presidency over the next two elections. But even under that optimistic scenario, today’s radical, anti-democracy Republican Party would control about half the states, including almost the entire South, and have a strong chance of regaining power in Washington in 2030 and 2032. And the Republicans will be in a strong position as long as they keep winning the white (57 percent for Trump in 2024), male (57 percent), white non-college (63 percent) and rural (69) votes nationally, particular since many independent voters and younger people either keep backing the GOP or don’t vote at all. So a white male veteran gun owner running in a very rural swing state was destined to get outsized attention from Democrats.

This electoral aspect of Platner’s candidacy is tricky—and a bit icky—to discuss. A party like the Democrats that does better with urban voters than rural voters, women compared to men, Black people compared to white people, and college graduates compared to non-college graduates isn’t doing anything morally wrong. In fact, considering the history of America, the party that is more popular with women and Black people is no doubt on the right side of most moral questions.

But to win elections, it would help Democrats to woo more men, rural voters, white people without degrees, and white people overall, particularly since the Electoral College and the Senate give disproportionate power to the latter three groups. So while no one who backed Platner admitted this openly, it’s unlikely they would have as enthusiastically supported a Black or female candidate in Maine with no political experience, an incendiary tattoo, and crazy social media posts.

Platner was benefiting from affirmative action for gruff-looking white men, with political elites supporting Platner in part on the theory that he could reach other men like himself. It was irritating to see Platner portrayed as a candidate for the working class, since his background was fairly privileged and the voters that he would ideally reach were much better described by their gender (male) and geography (rural) than their income or working conditions. But I was more annoyed by the coded conversation than the reality it masked: There are probably some voters in Maine and other states who will back a white man like Platner but not Democratic candidates of other demographics.

I don’t love elevating gruff white guys as an electoral strategy. But it’s in some ways preferable to the Democratic establishment’s favorite tactic: Constantly moving to the right to appeal to a mythical constituency of anti-Trump Republicans. Following the center-left playbook, Kamala Harris spent the latter part of her 2024 campaign abandoning populist economic policies, promising to ensure that America’s military remained the world’s “most lethal,” and touting her support for more border patrol officers. That approach not only moves the party in a worse direction on policy, but rarely wins over many non-Democratic voters. Many of the Democrats running in 2026 backed anti-immigrant measures last year, although they have shifted left as Trump has become more unpopular.

There are two alternative approaches that hold promise. First, some Democrats rely on parts of their biography to woo voters who aren’t traditional liberals. Georgia Senator Raphael Warnock leans into his Christianity and pastoral role. For Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear, it’s faith and a nerdy dad vibe. Michigan Senator Elissa Slotkin, Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger, and New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill all won swing House districts and then statewide office by emphasizing their service in national security jobs. Second, a growing number of Democrats, such as Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff and Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, are running as anti-system, anti-corruption figures. They emphasize their opposition not to Republicans but to corporate

The virtue of these two approaches is that they don’t require Democratic candidates to be Republican-lite on policy as Harris was on some issues in 2024. And the anti-corruption message allows candidates to tap into the anti-Washington, anti-institution sentiment that pervades the country. In 2024, Harris was constantly highlighting how much support she had from Republican politicians like Liz Cheney.

But being well-liked by fellow politicians, even from the other party, isn’t that useful in appealing to voters who hate everyone in Washington. Two of the most surprising victors in the post-Obama political era, Trump and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, both won over swing voters and inspired people to vote who often sit out elections by running against the establishments in both parties.

Platner was using both of these approaches. He was bashing elites in Washington and calling for limits on corporate and billionaire spending in politics, like other populist candidates across the country. At the same time, his candidacy was very much about his own unique biography: small-town veteran and oysterman who had never previously run for office.

Would this have worked in November? As my colleague Greg Sargent wrote before the sexual assault report, Platner was far behind Collins among voters without college degrees. Perhaps his message and bio weren’t selling. Alternatively, all of the swirl around his past made voters wary, no matter what he said on the campaign trail. We’ll never know how a general election between Collins and an untainted Plater would have gone. And we don’t know how El-Sayed, Ossoff, or others running on the anti-corruption, anti-system agenda will do this November.

But we do know how the 2016 and 2024 elections went. The Democrats, for the presidency and key congressional races, ran traditional candidates with centrist policy platforms—-and they lost. That doesn’t mean Democrats will automatically win if they run pastors, oyster farmers, or anti-corruption warriors. What those elections tell us is that there isn’t yet a clear formula for beating the MAGA right.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer shouldn’t be so confident he knows which candidates are best. Nor should Morris Katz, the strategist who helped steer Mandami to victory but also helped create the debacle that was Platner’s campaign. Platner wasn’t the right candidate. But neither were Hillary Clinton or Harris. The Democratic Party shouldn’t only look for white men with unusual jobs to run office. But it should look for candidates who get voters to give Democrats a second look—even if those candidates are white men with unusual jobs.

On Wednesday, I discussed how the White House Domestic Policy Council’s Saving America’s Story report makes a number of false claims about what’s missing from the National Museum of American History. Today, I want to discuss what the report finds objectionable that’s actually there—starting with the person who oversees it all. 

Surprisingly little of the report, which was released July 4, finds fault with what a visitor will encounter when visiting NMAH today. A huge chunk of it is devoted to the character assassination of Anthea Hartig, the museum’s director since 2019. The word “Hartig” appears 229 times, compared to 81 mentions for “visitor,” 73 mentions for “United States,“ 61 mentions for “National Museum of American History,” 49 mentions for “founder,” 49 mentions for  “president,” 38 mentions for “race,” 31 mentions for  “Congress,” 18 mentions for “ideology,” seven mentions for “bias,” five mentions for “ethnic,” and six mentions for “patriotism.” Firing Hartig is clearly Job One for this report. The Domestic Policy Council condemns Hartig for everything from identifying her pronouns as “she/her/hers” to saying she would like to “problematize” the semiquincentennial. As Philip Kennicott notes in an excellent essay about all this for The Washington Post, “Problematizing is the essence of historical thinking.”

I can’t defend Hartig’s public comments against 229 petty complaints because that won’t leave time for anything else, and anyway it’s a distraction from the topic at had, which is her museum. So let’s stick to the report’s criticisms of how NMAH presents the materials on display in what the museum world, annoyingly, calls “didactics,” meaning those posters and cards that explain what you’re looking at. My method here is to search the document for the word “didactic.” There are 160 of these, so obviously I can’t field all these, either. But to give you some flavor, here are the first four.

• “A didactic in NMAH’s American Democracy exhibit entitled ‘Abraham Lincoln in the Classroom’ … provides no information about the accomplishments of the two great American heroes it cites—Lincoln and Washington—noting only that both were presidents and that Americans have used images of them in an attempt to ‘instill patriotic values and reinforce the idea of a shared national heritage.’”
  

I did not see this particular didactic when I visited the museum earlier this week. But it would appear its subject is not the life of America’s beloved Railsplitter but rather how Lincoln is, you know, taught in the classroom. If the Domestic Policy Council is trying to suggest that biographical information about Lincoln is hard to find at the NMAH, let me assure you it is not. For example, a permanent exhibit titled “The Price of Freedom: Americans at War” contains a large section about the Civil War and, inevitably, much discussion of Abraham Lincoln. If anything, the didactics here tilt rightward. Here’s one:

Lincoln hoped that the nation could be reunited without rancor, but he found himself at odds with Republicans in Congress. They wanted to punish the South for seceding and wanted Southern states to guarantee the freedom and rights of African Americans.

Lincoln’s assassination, and the ineffectual leadership of his successor, Andrew Johnson, enabled the Congress to control Reconstruction. They divided the South into military districts, withholding statehood from some former Confederate states until 1870s.

This approximates the pro-South narrative still taught when I attended high school in the 1970s, all about Northern carpetbaggers, Northern scalawags, wild-eyed Radical Republicans, and ex-slaves unready for citizenship rights in dear old Dixie. I know that the Domestic Policy Council is aware of the Reconstruction revisionist Eric Foner, who called bullshit on all this in 1988, because he’s quoted favorably elsewhere in the report. (It’s probably heard, too, of W.E.B. DuBois, who made a similar case in his 1935 text Black Reconstruction.) But peddling a Gone With the Wind story about Reconstruction’s tragic overreach is never going to raise any hackles in the Trump White House.

• “One didactic about the Broadway musical Hamilton in ‘Entertainment Nation’ simply called Alexander Hamilton an ‘influential and flawed founding father’ likely, in part, because he may have owned slaves.” 
  

Any child who’s seen Hamilton knows that the man’s most conspicuous character flaw was not that he “may have owned slaves” (he also may not have; the historical record on this point is inconclusive and I don’t think the matter comes up in Hamilton at all). Rather, it is that Hamilton had an extramarital affair with Maria Reynolds that, when made public, destroyed his chance of becoming president. In the age of Trump, is it now “woke” to look askance at a politician who cheats on his wife?

• In the “Many Voices, One Nation” exhibit, according to the report, a didactic presents ours as “a fundamentally oppressive nation” in saying European settlement was “a profound unsettling of the American continent” because its “population actually declined … as Old World diseases swept through Native populations that lacked immunity.” 
  

For starters, during the period described here our nation couldn’t have been “oppressive” because it didn’t yet exist. To say that European settlement spread disease “through Native populations that lacked immunity,” and that the North American population therefore declined, is merely true. To describe all this as “a profound unsettling” is offensive only to those who question the value of human life.

• In the same exhibit, the following sentence appears in a didactic: “In creating the new nation, early leaders envisioned a country that promised opportunity and freedom—but only for some.” This, the report states, is a “slander of America.”
  

A slander by definition is untrue. Where’s the untrue part in that sentence? Early leaders granted the vote only to white male property owners. Women were excluded. Blacks were excluded, and anyway most of them were slaves, and slavery is the precise opposite of freedom.

As I stated Wednesday, even when judged by the standards of the form, the White House’s anti-woke polemic is a shoddy piece of workmanship not unlike the peeling blue sealant in the $15 million renovation of the Reflecting Pool. No honest conservative could argue otherwise. I wonder whether that matters. I hope it does.

This spring, Mac Barnett, the award-winning children’s author of such contemporary picture-book classics as Sam and Dave Dig a Hole, dug himself a hole. In Make Believe: On Telling Stories to Children, his new book-length work of literary criticism about children’s books, he makes a forceful argument for adults to take children seriously as readers. Their sense of taste, their sense of justice, their sense of imagination. Too many children’s books, he suggests, condescend to their readers. The best stories for kids, he argues, don’t preach or preen or strive to impart pat moral lessons but “tell the truth about what it means to be a human in the world.” And, because of this possibility for great art in children’s literature, and because of its intimate importance to the young people who read it, it behooves us to take it seriously as a mode of literature. “If you don’t think children’s books are real books,” he writes, “on some level you don’t think children are real people.

Then, he steps in it. “I have a nagging fear,” he writes, “that children’s literature suffers from a slightly higher crud percentage than literature as a whole.” For Barnett, this means that the preponderance of kidlit is clunkily didactic at best, thinly exploitative at worst. On its own, it’s probably hard to argue with this sentiment—the sheer number of children’s books based on Paw Patrol episodes alone seems to prove the point. But Barnett goes on to facetiously offer a guesstimate that 94.7 percent are duds. Only 5.3 percent of children’s books, then, would be worthy of the children reading them.

The backlash was immediate, especially among authors of color who felt that the books Barnett dismissively described as “didactic” might likely include many titles meant to reach out to children historically underrepresented in children’s literature. Barnett immediately apologized, but the damage was done. A petition circulated, and a movement began to have his position as the Library of Congress national ambassador for young people’s literature revoked. Barnett’s “crud” remarks, many felt, stood to cause real harm in an industry that is still struggling to diversify and that is threatened constantly by state-sponsored book bans. As the writer and publisher Meg Reid pointed out, though, Barnett’s (hyperbolic) assertion reads differently if you think about the sheer volume of children’s literature published every year. If we take Barnett’s unserious analytic seriously, then his claim means that many thousands of children’s books of the vast number published annually are not crud. Pretty good!

Children’s television, I’d argue, is in a similar state. In this streaming environment, there is more space for children’s TV series than ever before. Lots of it is CGI sludge, of course, and nursery school nonsense and cynically concocted consumer training, but, amid all that “crud,” there’s a lot to be grateful for. If I were to make a long list of the best TV series of the past decade or so, a decent number of those series would certainly be children’s TV shows: Netflix’s City of Ghosts, Hilda, and The Baby-Sitters Club; Cartoon Network’s Steven Universe; Disney+’s Gravity Falls and The Owl House; and, of course, Bluey, the formally perfect Australian animated series that would be pretty hard to keep out of the top 10. Kids don’t automatically reject series that challenge them. They can feel when they’re being taken seriously, and they like it.

It’s into this environment of crud and classics that Netflix has now released two series adaptations of beloved novels: Little House on the Prairie and Lord of the Flies. One is a show for kids, the other a show about kids. But both tell the truth—or at least part of it—about what it means to be a person in an often inhospitable world.

You may have heard that the new Little House on the Prairie series is “woke.” When the new adaptation of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s novel series was announced early last year, former Fox News pundit Megyn Kelly immediately tweeted at Netflix, “if you wokeify Little House on the Prairie I will make it my singular mission to absolutely ruin your project.” Melissa Gilbert, star of the original 1974 series, responded by saying, “Ummm…watch the original again. TV doesn’t get too much more ‘woke’ than we did. We tackled: racism, addiction, nativism, antisemitism, misogyny, rape, spousal abuse and every other ‘woke’ topic you can think of. Thank you very much.” And this was all before the new show even had a cast list.

The actual series, which has already been green-lit for a follow-up season, is neither the nostalgic tradlife fantasy Kelly hoped for nor the Resistance Lib fever dream she feared. Still, it’s easy to imagine that she might take umbrage with the new show’s primary departure from the beloved series of her childhood. That show, also called Little House on the Prairie, was not strictly an adaptation of the novel of the same name. Indeed, the ’70s series, set in Minnesota in the 1870s, takes place after the events of Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie novel. In other words, the Little House on the Prairie that Kelly romanticizes isn’t really Little House on the Prairie at all.

This new show is. That slightly nudged timeline makes Netflix’s Little House not only different, but dirtier, too. It begins, as the novel does, with the Ingalls family departing the big woods of Wisconsin and traversing the mighty West in a covered wagon, heading for a new home, and free land, on the Kansas prairie. There’s handsome, hopeful Pa (Luke Bracey), worried and wary Ma (Crosby Fitzgerald), angsty older sister Mary (Skywalker Hughes), and, of course, rascally, openhearted Laura (Alice Halsey). A tight-knit unit, they brave the elements and the isolation of frontier life together.

Upon arriving in the town of Independence, Kansas, however, Pa realizes that he’s brought his family there on a false promise. The “free” land advertised by the crumpled poster he carries in his pocket actually belongs to the Osage. Building a home, as he does, on that prairie, makes him a squatter and a speculator. The Ingalls family’s future, then, rests entirely on the completion of an unlikely treaty between the Osage and the federal government that would sell the land to the United States and legitimize all of the settlers’ claims. Pa’s sense of disappointment and guilt—and the sense that he’s betrayed his family by not telling them—hangs over everything.

If the new show is “woke” at all, it’s in the way it holds on to the dark moral compromise at the foundation of the Ingalls family’s adorable log home. Indeed, its primary innovation is in the degree to which it tests Laura’s relentless cheer. There’s nothing uncomplicated about even the show’s happiest moments. The script teases a troubled backstory, suggesting that the Ingallses are less pioneers than exiles from Wisconsin after some unacknowledged family squabble; Pa has several encounters with the ghost of his dead younger brother; the odd fact that the family has come alone, without siblings, parents, or cousins to help settle the land, is pointed out ominously by several different experienced settlers. Even the construction of the “little house” itself seems cursed: Ma graphically injures her foot hauling logs, only then to have a falling-out with neighbor Mr. Edwards over his alcoholism. Laura is the same bright-eyed optimist Megyn Kelly remembers, but her optimism here can read as almost delusional in its insistence.

This is, in some ways, a change that actually makes the show more faithful rather than less to the tone of Wilder’s stories. The biggest structural departure from the book is in the addition of an Osage family, whose trials we follow in parallel with the Ingallses: There’s Mitchell (Meegwun Fairbrother), a mixed-race Osage man; White Sun (Alyssa Wapanatâhk), who is as distrustful of the white settlers as they are of her; and their daughter, Good Eagle (Wren Zhawenim Gotts), who is basically an Osage Laura Ingalls. They don’t get the same screen time as their white counterparts, but the struggle of a mixed-race Osage family caught between a desire to make peace with newly arriving white settlers and make amends to their furious, soon-to-be-displaced people is a crucial element of the new show.

Wilder’s books feature famously vicious depictions of Indigenous people, so there is certainly some corrective impulse in the show’s fleshed-out portrayal of a Native American family, especially as Laura and Good Eagle become besties. The show never has the full courage to make the ­Ingallses true antiheroes—Ma, for instance, is only frightened by rather than prejudiced against their Osage neighbors—but it gestures toward self-consciousness about the kind of erasure that allowed Wilder’s cottagecore mythology to grow in the first place. In the pilot, Laura finds a torn Indian doll on a riverbank. She takes it for her own and has Ma sew it back up with ribbon but gladly surrenders it when she realizes it belongs to Good Eagle. The Osage girl gets back what belongs to her, mended by her new white neighbor.

Netflix’s Lord of the Flies is a nasty little hallucination of a show—I mean that as a compliment. The four-part miniseries, developed and written by Jack Thorne for the BBC, should be read as a spiritual sequel to Thorne’s acrobatic dirge Adolescence—his 2025 miniseries about a young boy’s seemingly inexplicable murder of a teenage girl and all the apps that drove him to it. This time, there’s no social media to turn these little chaps into monsters, but they still manage the old-fashioned way.

As in William Golding’s novel, the new Lord of the Flies starts when a planeload of young British boys crashes on a tropical island. Left to their own devices, the boys fight between the impulse to reestablish some form of civilized society and the temptation to go absolutely wild, indulging in every taboo impulse their parents and schoolteachers forbade. On the side of order and democracy are Ralph (Winston Sawyers), a charming young man who has a way with the littler children, and Piggy (David McKenna), the smartest and least socially adept of the castaways; on the side of bacchanalia is Jack (Lox Pratt), a real little shit of a sociopath, who commands fierce devotion from the other boys who sang with him in the school choir.

All the stuff that happens in Lord of the Flies, the novel, happens here, too, though often from a slightly different perspective or turned out in a slightly different way. This is a story about logistics and survival, and, ultimately, about what the way we choose to survive says about us. Ralph and Piggy struggle to get a beach full of kids to reproduce the civic ideals of modern Britain; they can’t even get them to pee in the right place. Meanwhile, Jack’s and the choir boys’ efforts to assert their heroic masculinity—by hunting for boar and maintaining a dangerously large signal fire—produce only disappointment and strife. And yet, the stunning complexity of these child actors’ performances convinces us of the inevitability of their roles. McKenna imbues Piggy with an almost immediate frank command of this situation and its requirements, while Pratt seethes with the kind of theatrically compensatory overconfidence that both makes men legends and gets men killed.

While not shot with the long-take extravagance of Adolescence, Lord of the Flies is similarly visually striking. Lots of fish-eye lenses help us to share in the topsy-turvy swirl of the boys’ new situation, and some pretty hardcore color-grading gives the gorgeous flora of the island the texture of Gothic horror. Outside of these cinematographic flourishes, Thorne’s major addition to the text is some degree of backstory for our main characters. Specifically, he goes out of his way to show that Jack—the show’s main antagonist—and the spiritual Simon (Ike Talbut) both have difficult fathers back home. These boys aren’t just allegorical baddies or toxic men-in-training; they’re damaged little kids who act out in ways that ultimately make sense. Hurt people hurt people.

As Rebecca Onion has pointed out, this change means that Thorne’s series makes it harder to read the boys as archetypes or as metaphors for this or that geopolitical crisis. They are individuals; their failure to be peaceable doesn’t tell us anything about boys in general or society in general. All they need, perhaps, is love.

I showed the pilot episode of the new Little House to my daughters, who are 10 and six years old. The show was too scary for the six-year-old, and too serious, I think, too. But it was catnip for the tween. Lots of shows she watches occupy this same realm of socially conscious melodrama. This Laura will immediately be the kind of heroine, navigating the thorny contradictions of her world, that appeals to girls in her age bracket. I will not, however, be showing my daughters Lord of the Flies. The extreme violence of these boys in crisis is not exactly pitched at my elder daughter’s age range—and, honestly, might too closely resemble some of the social dynamics she sees on the playground every day. Much like Adolescence, Lord of the Flies is mostly a horror series aimed at parents. All the same, both of these shows take seriously Barnett’s admonition that children are real people—people who can understand concepts like justice, complicity, and repair, and who can, left to their own devices, destroy a new world as easily as they can imagine one.  

A new report from Data for Progress spells good news for Democrats—particularly those running on a message of economic populism. DFP surveyed 447 swing voters between May 15 and June 21 and found that they favor Democrats over Republicans on the generic congressional ballot by a 12-point margin, though the plurality of swing voters (46 percent) are unsure which party they prefer.

What were the top issues that would move swing voters to vote for a Democrat? Raising taxes on the wealthy, instituting Medicare for All, and banning artificial intelligence from using personal data to set wages or prices. Economic issues like these have been embraced by progressive candidates, such as Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, Randy Villegas in California, and Sam Forstag in Montana. Villegas and Forstag both won their House primaries against opponents who ran to the center, and El-Sayed’s Senate primary against an establishment centrist will be held on August 4.

“I think the big takeaway from this report is that swing voters who could decide the midterms are not asking Democrats to sound more like Republicans,” said Ryan O’Donnell, DFP’s executive director.

DFP ran a similar survey in 2024. At that time, swing voters tended to be younger and more racially diverse. Today, DFP found that there aren’t significant demographic differences between swing voters and other likely voters. Despite the change in demographics, economic issues have consistently remained a top priority for swing voters. “Even though the electorate’s changed, the fact that their focus on economic populism has stayed so consistent is something to consider,” O’Donnell said.

Other findings in the report support that notion. DFP asked respondents what issues they consider most when deciding which candidates to vote for. The top three issues were “economy, jobs, and the cost of living,” which 38 percent of respondents selected; “programs like Social Security and Medicare,” which 17 percent selected; and “health care,” which came in at 6 percent. So-called culture-war issues ranked far lower: Only around 3 percent of respondents selected “LGBTQ+ issues” as their top priority, and around 1 percent selected “race relations and racism.” Notably, “immigration” was the third-highest issue in 2024 but has fallen to twelfth in this year’s survey.

Swing voters also shared what they find most concerning about the Democratic Party, and the results echo what many progressive members of the party have been saying for years: 32 percent of respondents said that “leadership is too old and out of touch,” and another 32 percent said that the party is “not doing enough to lower costs.”

Some economic populists have rejected the Democratic Party brand and are running instead as independents, like Senate candidate Dan Osborn in Nebraska. “He’s doing a great job at pushing that message in Nebraska,” O’Donnell said. “Swing voters in general largely reject partisan and ideological labels, so it reflects that, as well.”

Overall, the poll helps dispel the popular wisdom that running a conservative, centrist campaign is the best way to get the support of those in the middle. “If I were a Democratic leader reading this, I would say that these results indicate that taking a more conservative stance is not the way to win over the voters you need to win,” he said.

At the NATO summit on Wednesday, Donald Trump lashed out wildly at, well, everyone in sight. He threatened more war with Iran. He angrily vowed to cut off all trade with Spain. He hinted again at stealing Greenland. There were many other pratfalls. Amid all this, a Danish journalist had an extraordinary confrontation with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, asking him point blank: What does sitting next to Trump and praising him while he viciously attacks allies, threatens to take whole countries by conquest, and unleashes wildly destructive trade wars do to your “self-respect”? In an understated way, it was a crushing takedown of Trump, treating him as a ludicrous, sidelined figure while essentially saying: All that matters is how the rest of us react to this lunatic. We talked to foreign policy expert Elizabeth Saunders. She explains how deep and lasting Trump’s damage to the alliance will be, how our NATO allies are quietly managing Trump with flattery until he’s gone, and how they’re even trying to “de-Americanize”—that is, move on into the future without us. Listen to this episode here.

Maine’s embattled Democratic Senate nominee Graham Platner dropped out of the race on Wednesday after a former partner accused him of sexually assaulting her in 2021.

“We believe for the movement to continue, it can’t be me and for that reason, we are suspending campaign operations,” Platner said in a video posted to social media.

My name might be on the ballot right now, but that ballot line belongs to the people of Maine. pic.twitter.com/RKVyLU76tm

— Graham Platner for Senate (@grahamformaine) July 9, 2026

Jenny Racicot, a 41-year-old Maine resident who dated Platner on and off for two years, told Politico on Monday that the former Marine drunkenly entered her home uninvited five years ago and forced himself on her even as she asked him to stop.

Platner initially denied Racicot’s allegations, and he maintained his innocence in his announcement. He called the accusations “all false” and blamed a “corporate media system and the political establishment [that] got to act as judge, jury, and executioner.”

Maine’s Democratic Party now has until July 27 to pick a candidate to appear on the ballot in November’s general election.

Calls for Platner’s exit had been brewing since Racicot’s announcement.

Platner’s insurgent progressive populist campaign had come close to derailing on multiple occasions. Last October, Platner had to apologize for commenting on Reddit that people concerned about sexual assault had to “take some responsibility for themselves and not get so fucked up they wind up having sex with someone they don’t mean to.” Around the same time, there was the controversy around his Nazi Totenkopf tattoo, which Platner said he and other Marines had done on leave in Croatia in 2007.

And less than two months ago, there was the warning his current wife gave to his Senate campaign about how he had sent sexually explicit texts to several women while they were married. Now, finally, Platner is recusing himself from this political moment. Hopefully, we’re all better off for it.

Graham Platner said Wednesday that he plans to withdraw from the U.S. Senate race in Maine after facing an allegation of sexual assault, shuttering an insurgent campaign that had withstood months of controversy only to implode and imperil Democrats’ attempt to regain power in Washington. Platner’s exit will most likely force a reckoning within the party, which has been divided between its…

Source

Historic trends and current polling have shown that November’s midterm elections are very likely to be a blue wave, with Democrats favored to win control of the U.S. House, flip multiple gubernatorial mansions and state legislatures, and possibly even take back the Senate. But there’s yet another bit of evidence that points to Democrats having a blockbuster election cycle: party registration…

Source