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In a decision that is shocking in scope, but not surprising in light of how the majority has behaved, the Supreme Court’s six conservatives just decided that, sure, President Donald Trump can destroy the midterms with an entirely illegal executive order. It’s honestly not possible to overstate just how much this violates the constitutional order. The executive branch, by design…

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Multiple people close to President Trump advised him to moderate his approach to the war on Iran. Six months later, with 18 U.S. service members and 3,000 Iranians dead and his approval rating at an all-time low, it appears he should’ve listened. 

A new report from The Wall Street Journal reveals how Trump ignored the warnings of his own administration members in the lead-up to the February attack.

Former Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard warned Trump in February that assassinating Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei would only bring a more hardline government into power, which in turn would lead Iran to tighten their grip on the Strait of Hormuz, sending oil prices skyrocketing and and crippling the global energy market. 

There were other warnings, too. Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General Dan Caine told him that an all-out campaign would result in an overexerted fighting force and a depleted weapons stockpile. Even Vice President JD Vance warned against escalation at one point.

The Trump administration has gone to great lengths to make Americans believe that Iran was close to developing a nuclear weapon, that their military really is decimated, and that this feckless war is in their best interest. 

“He will never allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon,” a spokesperson for the White House said, also claiming that Iran’s military was virtually useless. “It would be wise for Iran to reach a deal. Otherwise, they know what could happen.”

Now, as the economy remains in freefall, the Strait of Hormuz remains closed, and as Trump turns to a flimsy “economic D-Day” solution, it is clear that the president should have heeded the advice he was being given. The fact that he’s pivoting back to sanctions now signals what has been obvious for months—that his strongman military approach was a failure. 

The Wall Street Journal also reported that Trump was privately very upset and even confused as to why his all out bombing assault on Iran didn’t yield a surrender, displaying an alarming lack of foreign policy tact, even for him.

“This was all predictable and predicted,” Nuclear Threat Initiative Deputy Vice President Eric Brewer told The Wall Street Journal.  “You can draw a straight line from the fact that the war was launched without any clear political objective to the mishandled diplomacy in trying to end it.”

Conservative activists staged a test of voter vouching, spotlighting an obscure election law they view as an opening for fraud. Here’s how it actually works. By Dion Nissenbaum for Votebeat Can Hamas members from the Gaza Strip walk in and vote in Minnesota elections? A group of disguised conservative activists armed with hidden cameras set out to test that claim during the…

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A cartoon by David Horsey. Related | Feds to open hundreds of acres of Colorado wilderness to oil drilling…

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President Trump is taking out his frustrations on Canada by threatening to rename Lake Ontario.

“The United States is giving serious consideration to changing the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America in that we don’t expect to doing much business with Ontario any longer. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP,” Trump posted early Tuesday morning on Truth Social.

Trump was responding to Ontario Premier Doug Ford, who responded to Trump’s tariff threat against cars and trucks produced in Canada Monday by telling the U.S. president that “he can kiss my ass as far as I’m concerned.

“We’re going to go at him full steam, and we buy 400 percent more cars than anyone in the world,” Ford said in a radio interview.

Trump also denied reports that Canada pulled out of trade negotiations over the weekend over crazy last-minute demands from Trump administration officials such as changing Quebec’s French-language protections.

“I would never interfere with Canadians speaking French! In fact, I have never even thought of doing such a stupid thing. This lie was made up by a weak and ineffective Prime Minister in an attempt to gain political support, which he has totally lost, from the people of Quebec. I love French Canadians! President DONALD J. TRUMP,” Trump posted less than 45 minutes after his threat to rename Lake Ontario.

Trump’s feud with Canada could have far-reaching economic effects. Canadian officials will announce their own retaliatory tariffs against the U.S. on Tuesday. These could target any number of goods and services that Canada provides to its southern neighbor, including electricity, oil and gas, uranium, aluminum, and rare earth materials.

The price of gas and other goods in the U.S. is already high thanks to the Iran war and Trump’s mismanagement of the economy. A trade war with Canada will only hurt the American economy further and punish consumers just in time for November’s midterm elections.

This story has been updated.

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the August 25 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

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

The other day, Donald Trump announced that he will reduce tariffs for a huge amount of imported beef as a way to bring down soaring beef prices. At the same time, he’s escalating his trade war with Canada, wildly threatening a whole range of new tariffs for all kinds of products. The new beef policy is already stirring opposition from his own constituencies, like farmers and ranchers.

The war on Canada, meanwhile, will hurt a lot of people in Trump country in other ways. But taken together, these two moves underscore a whole new level of contempt for his own voters. They expose the deep folly of MAGA economics in all kinds of clarifying new ways. So we’re talking about all of it with the best out there at explaining these things, economist Paul Krugman. Paul, good to have you back on.

Paul Krugman: Good to be on.

Sargent: So let’s start with this beef announcement. Trump declared that the U.S. will now allow 300,000 additional metric tons of ground beef product to be imported without an additional tariff. Trump claimed he has a commitment that this beef will be sold at 25 percent below market prices. Paul, can you explain what Trump thinks he’s saying here?

Krugman: The short answer is no. I have no idea what he thinks he’s saying. This is really weird. I mean, the first question is, where’s the beef? Or actually, where’s the beef coming from? This is an amazing thing. He says we’re going to bring in 300,000 metric tons of beef, but won’t say from where. Among other things, with all of these food safety scares, I think people would like to know who’s supplying this beef. And anyway, so that’s kind of weird in itself.

Our beef import policy was pretty weird to start with. It’s a tariff quota, where you bring in a certain amount free of tariff, but then after that it pays a tariff. And this is supposed to be an addition to the quota part. But normally we think of a tariff quota as being, well, the price of beef is set by the marginal ton of beef, which pays a tariff.

So somebody’s getting the right to import a bunch of beef, but it’s not at all clear why this should be passed on to consumers. And now he’s saying, well, he’s got a commitment that it will be sold at 25 percent less. And a commitment from whom? I mean, even if the wholesalers sell it cheaper, how does the supermarket know this is that imported beef that we’re supposed to sell?

So the whole thing is incoherent. I can’t imagine that anybody sat down to try and figure out how this will work. It just has this feeling of, I wanted to say something. And again, contempt. And consumers will not notice it in the supermarkets, but ranchers definitely will.

Sargent: Right. As far as I can tell, we don’t even know at this point which countries this beef will come from, and there’s no clear way that Trump can even guarantee that it will be sold at a discount, can he?

I mean, even if some beef importer said, I’m importing this at a discount because this country is selling it to us for cheaper, would he even be able to guarantee it then?

Krugman: I mean, maybe the beef importer will promise Trump, or promise the officials, that he’ll sell it below the price of other beef. And maybe that would even happen. But then, you and I don’t buy our hamburgers from beef importers. We buy them from supermarkets. And how does any of that happen?

Trump complains about communists, but this is not a communist economy in which the government gets to set the price at which hamburger is sold in the supermarket. So it’s all kind of bizarre. And it’s clearly meant to say, I am doing something, without anybody, as far as we can tell, being clear about exactly what it’s being done or why it should work.

Sargent: Well, what strikes me about all this as well is that it’s yet another admission that Trump’s tariffs actually do raise the prices for American consumers. Trump has insisted 50,000 different ways that other countries pay his tariffs, yet here he comes right out and says that reducing the tariffs will mean lower prices for consumers. I mean, doesn’t that sort of show an extraordinary level of contempt for his own voters?

Krugman: Oh heah. I mean, every bit of the policy from the beginning has been contempt—belief that people will not understand what I’m doing, which is helped by the fact that he himself doesn’t understand what he’s doing. How can you say, foreigners pay the tariffs, and, by the way, I will help you by making them not pay the tariffs?

This does not sound to me like any kind of thought-out policy. This is thrashing. And I would ask, by the way—even if I don’t see how this actually helps consumers—but, you know, what is it, nine weeks till the midterms? The idea that this is going to change people’s views about Trump economic policy, aside from the fact that you’re going to have a few thousand really pissed-off beef producers—how does this even work politically?

Sargent: Yes, and we should be clear that the contempt is directed at his own voters, don’t you think? Because, number one, as you and I have discussed on here before, and you’ve written a number of times on your great Substack, the people who are getting clobbered by Trump’s tariffs—a lot of them are MAGA voters. A lot of them are Trump voters. And so he’s clearly trying to talk to them.

I mean, he’s elsewhere being quoted saying that he’s essentially begging his voters to turn up in the midterms, because they won’t turn out without him on the ballot. So he’s essentially trying to fool very, very directly his own people here, isn’t he?

Krugman: Yeah. I mean, he’s trying to claim that he’s doing something for consumers. And there’s a lot of hamburger-eating MAGA voters, who he hopes won’t remember that he’s talking out of two sides of his mouth on what tariffs do to prices. And then there’s also—he’s, I guess, taking for granted—I mean, this is not good for the farm sector, which is very, very Trumpy, or was—and he’s basically saying, you’ll vote for my people regardless. And, you know, he might be right, but at this point I’m starting to wonder about that.

Sargent: Well, speaking of which, we’re in a similar situation with Canada. Trump’s trade talks with Canada collapsed over the weekend. That’s triggered 50 percent American tariffs on a range of Canadian goods. Canada’s now set to retaliate, which seems to be aimed at a number of things that will hurt Trump country. This has enraged Trump, who’s now vowing to impose 50 percent tariffs on cars, trucks, and auto parts starting in January.

Now, my understanding of this is that the auto industry has such tightly integrated supply chains across the border that people call it the “Great Lakes supercluster,” right? Which is a great phrase. Can you explain how bad this part of it is?

Krugman: Yeah. I mean, there is no U.S. auto industry. Not now. We had a free trade agreement on autos with Canada in 1966. We’ve had free trade in autos and auto parts for that long, for 60 years. We had a free trade agreement across the board with Canada in 1988. We had NAFTA in 1994, and then, you know, Trump basically had his name inscribed on it and called it the USMCA in his first term.

The point being that we are generations past the point when there was a U.S. auto industry as distinct from a Canadian auto industry. It’s been a completely integrated thing, where the components of a car can cross that border six or seven times before it ends up as a finished car, assembled sometimes on our side of the border, sometimes on theirs, but it really doesn’t matter.

We’re so tightly integrated that most of the statistics on metropolitan areas have a metropolitan area called Detroit–Windsor, where Windsor is the Canadian half of it, because it’s effectively just one city. We are that tightly integrated.

So now you suddenly slap 50 percent tariffs on this, which is, among other things, a blatant violation of a solemnly signed U.S. agreement signed by none other than Donald Trump. And you’re left with the different pieces of an automobile—the plants that make those different pieces are on opposite sides of that sudden tariff wall. So it’s enormously destructive.

Sargent: You mean the trade agreement that Trump signed during his first term. Can you talk about how what he’s doing would directly violate that particular deal?

Krugman: Well, it’s a free trade agreement. I mean, it was originally the North American Free Trade Agreement, which he awkwardly renamed the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement. But it’s a free trade agreement, which means that Canadian products—there are some exceptions—but for the most part, goods produced in either country are supposed to cross the border tariff-free.

The Europeans have a customs union, which means that there basically is no border. Here there is a border. You have to basically wave a sheet of paper at the inspector that says these are American products, so they get to cross free. But there is no tariff. That’s what a free trade agreement is: goods enter free of tariffs.

Now Trump is saying, yeah, but we’re actually imposing 50 percent tariffs on a bunch of these products. It’s not strictly a treaty, but that’s a very legalistic distinction. It is a binding agreement. A large part of the point of these agreements, by the way, is to create certainty, so businesses can plan...I can do engine blocks in Ontario and wiring frames in Michigan, and I don’t need to worry about paying a tariff when I truck them across the border. Now all of a sudden—with the engine block factory and the wiring frame factory on different sides of the border—you’ve screwed up the entire production process for both countries.

Sargent: Well, I want to ask about something Trump said. When he threatened tariffs on all these Canadian goods next year, meaning all these auto parts and cars and trucks, he raged, quote, in all caps, of course: “We don’t need Canada. They need us.”

Now, you had this great piece for your Substack in which you directly questioned that. You pointed out that we are actually far more interdependent with Canada, and far more dependent on Canada, than people realize. Can you talk about that? Because I think it’s something that a lot of people don’t know.

Krugman: Yeah, it’s one of those things—I have learned a lot in these Trump years, because we’ve had so many disruptions, that when you get granular on international trade, it turns out that there’s a lot more sort of crucial interdependence than you might realize. So America produces a lot of lumber. And we import something like a fifth of our lumber from Canada. You say, well, OK, but we’re 80 percent self-sufficient. But it turns out that lumber isn’t lumber—that is, there are different kinds of trees, and they have different properties. And it turns out that the Canadian trees are higher strength-to-weight ratio than the U.S. trees, which means that they’re what you want to use when you’re framing a house. So suddenly—and like 90 percent of that kind of lumber comes from Canada—so suddenly, yes, we do need Canadian lumber.

Give us 10 years—I don’t know how long it takes to grow the right kind of trees, but, you know, I’m not lumberjack. But it takes a long time to switch over. And meanwhile, we actually need that Canadian lumber.

Oil: The U.S. is a net exporter of oil thanks to fracking. So you can say, well, we don’t need Canadian oil—except that the Canadian oil goes to the upper Midwest, which cannot easily get the oil from someplace else. The Canadian oil is different. It’s, again, the details—it’s heavier crude, which turns out to be important for some purposes. So actually, yeah, we have lots of oil in America, but not the right kind of oil, and not in the right places.

And so on down the line. And electricity. I happen to be in the northeastern United States at the moment, and hydropower from Quebec is an important part of what keeps the lights on here. So this idea that we don’t need Canada is just all wrong. And if you cut it off abruptly, as is now happening, it’s a mess.

Sargent: What’s going to happen if this trade war continues to spiral out of control? Is it going to?

Krugman: Well, I think it’s going to spiral out of control. I mean, I don’t know how deep in we get, but—first of all, again, we have a midterm election in nine weeks. There’s going to be a lot of disruption starting like tomorrow because of this trade war. There will not be time, even if Trump suddenly says, well, all is forgiven—the effects will be there. And certainly the psychological effects will be there. And I don’t think it ends quickly, because, look, fundamentally, Trump is going to lose this trade war.

And it is not because we’ll be hurt worse than the Canadians. We are bigger, they will be hurt worse than we are. But the Canadians know why they’re fighting. The Canadians know that Donald Trump is the villain. And you have to search really hard to find an American who hates Canada. You know, even a majority of Republicans think that Canada is good. It’s come down a bit under Trump, but still. And so the Canadians are going to dig in.

Even really pretty bad Canadian politicians are falling over each other to denounce Trump and say, we will stand firm. So this is going to be a war—Canada is not going to cave in. And by the way, Mark Carney, prime minister of Canada, has a 60 percent approval rating, you know, and 30 percent disapproval. It’s Trump upside down.

But Trump cannot admit that he’s lost. It’s this kind of trade version of Iran. He lost the Iran war months ago, but cannot bring himself to admit it. And the trade war with Canada surely will follow the same pattern. So, gosh, this is not going to be over. This is going to—you know, at some level it may end with Canada joining the European Union. I don’t know.

Sargent: Yes. Well, in fact, I think Mark Carney said in his speech today that this is encouraging him to try to pursue more talks with Europe. And I think this is another symptom or sign of something you’ve gotten at before, which is that Trump’s craziness is causing the rest of the world to move on without us, and imagine a post-American world in which they start to work together, maybe more than they would have before.

Krugman: Yeah, it’s worth saying, by the way, that this is not just psychology and future attitudes, but concrete steps are happening because of this. The Canadians are building pipelines that will take oil from Alberta to the Pacific so they can sell it to Asia instead of selling it to us. Assuming that sanity returns to the United States, we will enter a world in which physical facts have been created that make us less influential, less able to conduct productive business with our northern neighbor.

Sargent: Well, I want to try to juxtapose these two things. So on this one front, you’ve got Trump essentially admitting that his tariffs raise prices on consumers. He’s doing that by suspending tariffs on beef in order to bring down prices. So he admits there: my tariffs raise your prices.

And then on this other front, he says, I’m going to impose a whole bunch of new tariffs on Canada, the country that you all love. I just—you put it all together, and it starts to seem so crazy that it’s almost unprocessable.

Krugman: Yeah. I think we have to stop at this point imagining that there’s any rational calculation behind any of these policies. What we’re seeing now is a flailing guy who is losing it personally as well as politically—at some level knows that he’s losing it. He’s lashing out.

I’m kind of worried about—at a certain point, as it’s all going to hell, and assuming that the midterms go really badly for Republicans, Trump won’t say, I need to reconsider, what have I been doing wrong. He’s going to blame America: We have failed him, not the other way around. My imagination isn’t good enough to think of all the destructive things he might do, but there really is a kind of a downfall feeling to all of this.

Sargent: Well, just to wrap this up, it seems like all these things kind of get at something about MAGA economics, if that’s an actual thing. We keep hearing these accidental admissions from Donald Trump about his own policy. So a couple times now in the last year and a half, he’s admitted that he probably should suspend deportations of immigrants who work in the agricultural industry.

I think at one point he actually said something like, you know, people in the farm industry are losing good, hardworking people. And by that he meant the same people he calls rapists and murderers, meaning immigrants. So there he admits that his mass deportations are bad for the economy, right? So you’ve got that. Now you’ve got this new admission that tariffs actually raise the prices for consumers.

I think maybe on some level there’s a tic in the punditry, a habit in the punditry, which was tempted to sort of see Donald Trump’s victory in 2024 as a sign that there’s, like, a deep and authentic conservative, right-wing-populist, nationalist streak in the American people. But now you’re getting every one of the pillars of that—meaning the pillars of this kind of right-wing economics, MAGA economics, nationalist economics—all get thoroughly discredited.

Do you think that’s happening, and is there, like, an opening to come back into this debate for Democrats and liberals to say, OK, you now know populist nationalism failed, now let’s go back to the way liberals do things? What do you think of all that?

Krugman: I’m torn on this. I mean, on the one hand, I think the case that MAGAnomics, to the extent it is coherent at all, doesn’t work—I think that is really sinking in. At this point, Trump’s economic approval numbers are getting down to where...we used to think there was a hardcore of, like, 33 percent who would support anything. I think we’re about to breach that. It looks like we’re going down to—the number of people who actually approve of his economics may well drop into the 20s. And so that really isn’t there.

But then, of course, this was never mainly about economics. It was always much more about race, about misogyny, about whatever—these cultural, emotional issues. And that probably won’t go away. I mean, but hopefully we can function as a country with 70 percent of the population believing in rational economic policy.

I know that we’ll never see it admitted, but not a day comes by that I don’t wish for the days when, you know...Biden made mistakes and things went wrong, but he did not have completely irrational idiots making policy. There were actually good, dedicated people who knew something. And I think I’m not alone. I think a lot of people are starting to feel that way.

Sargent: I do wonder whether there’s finally an opportunity to do what Democrats have failed to do for so long, which is say in a straightforward way: when Republicans run things, it all goes to shit; when Democrats run things, they get better. Now, Trump’s way of running everything into the shitter is different than George W. Bush’s, but the pattern does apply, right?

I mean, this is the story of our lifetimes, more or less, is it not, Paul? And is there a way for Democrats to recapture that story and tell it in a way that persuades people that when Democrats run things, they work better, even if they’re not perfect? Is there a way to break from this pattern where the electorate just lurches us back and forth every two years, basically?

Krugman: Of course the answer is, I don’t know. The politics is kind of mysterious. But I would say, look at Canada, where you have a technocratic prime minister who—he’s one of the few world leaders I actually know, because I met him at many central bankers’ meetings over the years: Former governor of the Bank of England, and competent, and immensely popular. It happens that he’s pretty good at wearing a hockey shirt, but still, it does show that you can do that.

And maybe—in the end, most of us are not that different from Canadians. I’d like to think that the same kind of thing can work here. So let’s hope so. I mean, God knows—the next time somebody thinks that Republicans are better at running the economy, you just need to say two words, “Donald Trump,” and that’ll probably solve the problem.

Sargent: Boy, do I hope that’s true. And it’s really tempting to believe it. And it does seem like Donald Trump has made that more possible than it has been in the past. Folks, make sure to check out Paul Krugman’s Substack. It’s a wonderful piece of work. Every day, in and day out, you’ll learn from it. Paul, thank you so much for coming on, as always. We really appreciate it.

Krugman: Thanks for having me on.

You can watch this episode of Right Now With Perry Bacon above or by following this show on YouTube or Substack. You can read a transcript here.

The American Association of University Professors endorsed Abdul El-Sayed during the Democratic primary for the open Michigan U.S. Senate seat. It was the group’s first political endorsement ever. That set off a controversy about whether professors should collectively endorse, particularly during primaries. Todd Wolfson, the president of the AUUP, defends the group’s endorsement in the latest edition of Right Now. He says that AAUP has decided that professors should not remain silent amid the growing attack on higher education and would be issuing more endorsements this fall. And Wolfson, a professor of journalism and media students at Rutgers University, argues that professors and universities have a critical role in defending democracy at a time of democratic backsliding.

This is a lightly edited transcript of the August 24 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.

Perry Bacon: We have a great guest and interesting discussion today. Todd Wolfson is a professor of journalism and media studies at Rutgers, and for this session, he’s also the president of the American Association of University Professors, and we’re going to talk about some of the work AAUP has done and is doing. So Todd, thanks for joining me. I appreciate it.

Todd Wolfson: Thanks for having me, Perry. I appreciate you.

Bacon: So we’re going to talk about something that’s controversial even among my liberal friends, for lack of a better way to say that, which is, AAUP on the eve of the Michigan primary decided to endorse Abdul El-Sayed in that primary.

So talk about what made you—because it’s interesting, I think it’s clear that on higher education, the right and Republicans are in a different place than Democrats are, but I’m not sure I totally know where Haley Stevens and El-Sayed differ on higher education. So talk about why you decided to make that endorsement in that primary.

Wolfson: Yeah, I’ll say there’s a history here. I was elected in the summer of ‘24, before the Trump-Harris presidential campaign, and when I was elected, we pivoted really fast to put out a vision for higher ed, like a fully funded public system, more investment in the system. We can go down the line. I can talk about that later if you want.

And we did it, and we signed off with all the big unions that represent higher education workers, so NEA and AFT and SEIU—some faculty, some represent staff, some represent medical workers. And then we started working with the Harris campaign, because they had said they support a lot of our vision, and we were planning to actually endorse all the way back then. We didn’t get it done, ultimately, for a host of reasons.

And so fast-forward into the ‘26 cycle. We were very public that we were planning to endorse. With our membership more publicly than that, I put out plenty of statements saying that we’re—

Bacon: Endorse in primary, just to be clear—endorse in primaries.

Wolfson: Potentially endorse in primaries, and certainly endorse and engage. I can get to El-Sayed and Stevens. And so then, the thing that made the Michigan race important, I’ll say, is—there’s a couple things. One is that Abdul’s father was a president of an AAUP local in Michigan, Eastern Michigan University, which is an AAUP local that represents faculty at EMU. Abdul himself was an AAUP member, and also an AFT member, and we’re affiliated with AFT. And we started having dialogue, and we put out our vision. AAUP and AFT came out with a blueprint for higher ed. Again, I can lay out what the vision was, and we shared it with him, and he fully endorsed it.

And I’ll say there’s another piece to this, which is, another higher education organization who we work closely with, Higher Ed Labor United, had a town hall for the Democratic nominees—and this was well back before McMorrow dropped out. McMorrow and El-Sayed came. Stevens did not come.

Our local at Wayne Academic Union had a questionnaire which they gave out to all three candidates. Stevens neglected to respond to our questionnaire, which asked basic questions like, “Do you support a fully invested public system?” Et cetera, et cetera. And then our AFT Michigan affiliate—they’re not affiliated with us, but we’re in relationship with them—they also did a survey. Most of our unions in Michigan are part of AFT Michigan, and they did a poll, and it said that 80 percent of their membership supported El-Sayed, and they endorsed.

And so then we moved to endorse shortly thereafter, for this multiple set of reasons. One, he was aligned with us in our vision for higher ed. Two, his family comes out of our union. And three, both our membership and the membership at AFT Michigan had overwhelmingly supported him. And, just to keep this rolling, we plan to make multiple endorsements going into the midterms for the general. So there’s two questions to parse out here. One, should we have engaged in a primary? But then two, should we be endorsing writ large?

Bacon: Yeah, and I’m going to ask both of them. The first was the primary. So let me stick with the primary question first, because I think—OK, so I’m going to speak in more political language, and you can see how you want to respond to that.

So what I’ve seen is, my professor friends who I would describe, particularly professors who I would describe as more progressive and more leftist, are for this. The ones who I would describe as more center left are against this. I’d put Abdul more in the progressive camp. Stevens is more in the center left camp.

Is it possible that AAUP is more aligned, or you’re more aligned, with the sort of progressive camp, and that’s partly why you would want to endorse him in this race?

Wolfson: No. If a centrist Democrat came out and said publicly, Look, we want a fully invested public system. We want a public higher ed system that pushes back against overwhelming contingency of faculty workers. We want a public system, and a federal research program that fully funds NIH and NSF and is going to take care of Pell, et cetera, we would absolutely be endorsing them.

I’ll keep this as an I proposition: higher education has been defunded in the United States, the public system, over the last 60 years. It’s been a serious divestment from the federal and state governments, and it’s led to all sorts of outcomes that have been really bad for the United States, for our higher education system, for our students, and for our faculty and staff. And so we feel like we need people who are going to stand up and champion the system. I don’t care who they are, if they’re going to champion higher ed right now.

The Republicans have been hell-bent on destroying what is the greatest higher education system in the world, bar none. And so it’s time for us to stand up and fight for that system. What we said was, we need champions, people who are going to say, This is a critical issue to me, who are running for elected office, and Abdul El-Sayed said that. So no, I don’t see a reason why we wouldn’t endorse a more centrist candidate who is speaking our language around higher education.

Bacon: Let me push, and we’ll ask some more questions, which is—

Wolfson: Sure.

Bacon: I would support a centrist Democrat who liked wealth taxes, who loved unions, et cetera, et cetera, who wanted to ban data centers. Those people tend not to exist, because that’s not what centrist Democrats are. And we just had a Democratic president who we had to beg and plead to forgive college debt, who seemed to be leery of defending colleges.

Is part of the issue here that centrist Democrats, like Thomas Friedman, New York Times columnists, love to demean college professors and so on? So is part of being a centrist Democrat right now trashing higher ed, and therefore is that unfortunately where we are right now? Because that’s how I perceive it.

Wolfson: I think that’s what I feel, right? Like, our truck is not with the centrists, it’s them coming after us.

And so what we’ve seen—a great academic called Stuart Hall called it the Great Moving Right Show. And as the Republicans move right on higher ed, the centrist Democrats move right with them, and have made us a problem. We are not a problem, right? They talk about faculty being leftist, and I’m thinking to myself, I represent a dude who’s dreaming about a black hole, another guy who’s training nurses, a woman who is an engineer, and the large majority of my faculty are not thinking politically. They’re building the society we all depend on.

And for Democrats not to embrace that, for Republicans not to embrace that, is ridiculous. But for Democrats not to embrace it, when it’s a central plank of the Democratic Party, education, right—it’s really bewildering to me. And yes, we feel like they are not standing up for us. And so it’s time for us to stand up for ourselves and find candidates who will stand up with us.

Bacon: A central plank of the Democratic Party is education. I think a central plank of the Democratic Party is giving K through 12 schools money. I think a central part of Democratic Party is training people for the workforce. Is training people in journalism, media affairs, sociology, classics, philosophy—giving people an actual education—is that a central plank of today’s Democratic Party?

Wolfson: If it isn’t, it needs to be, and we’re going to fight for it to be. I would say the founder of AAUP is John Dewey, famous philosopher. And John Dewey said that education is the midwife of democracy. And for me that’s key here, right?

We need, especially in a moment of what we could call Democratic backsliding—I don’t know what we want to call the Trump administration, but let’s just say that it’s a shift towards a more authoritarian form of rule—education is an antidote to that, right? It’s a critical antidote, whether it’s funding early learning, as they’re doing in New York City, so that young parents are not going broke putting their kids into daycare and to pre-K, whether it’s having the most robust, amazing K-12 system in the world, or having a fully funded public higher ed system. All of those things, in my mind, are what are going to help us crawl out of this mess, a democratic mess that we’re in.

Bacon: So I think the Democratic Party is wary of college education right now, because of this sort of education divide, where we’re seeing that the correlation is growing. If you have a higher degree, BA, and probably a PhD, you’re more likely to vote Democrat. Growing number of non-college, you vote Republican. And wherever you think, right now there are more people without a college degree than with a college degree, so there’s an electoral environment.

I guess I think education is good, so I’m nervous about this sort of drift toward basically saying we’re the party of the educated, and that’s bad. But how do you think about this sort of education polarization, quote unquote? Should they be nervous about it, and what do you think about it?

Wolfson: What I think is, there’s been this trick that’s been played on the American public over the last, a long time, but let’s just say the last five to six years. Let’s call Ron DeSantis one of the progenitors of it, which is basically that faculty are really left, right? Therefore, higher ed is bad.

But what the real problem is, if you poll, is that higher education is really expensive. Really frigging expensive. And kids are going in and they’re going into debt, their families are going into debt, they can’t afford it, and then they’re coming out the other side—but they’re making a better living when they come out the other side, for sure. Every single study says that. But there’s sticker shock.

And what I think the real problem is, is that we need a public system where kids, working-class kids, can get an education that’s accessible and affordable, and then go on to a career making more money than they would if they did not get that college degree. And we need that to be accessible to the entirety of our populace, right? And that’s the vision we have for a society, and that would be a vision where there wouldn’t be this divide.

This divide is very anti-working class. It’s saying that working-class kids don’t deserve a college education. They should be ready to make widgets the moment they get out of high school. I disagree, and I quibble with that position. That is not the future I think we want. I think we want a future, especially with AI on the march—we want a future where people are educated and can be re-educated and grow and develop over time and find careers, and then maybe new careers. And higher education is critical to that. And a public system that’s free is critical to that. And so that’s the vision we’re calling for.

And they’re saying no. It’s not the sticker shock that’s the problem. It’s that your English professor read Marx once. That’s not what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about the fact that in the 1960s, the University of California system and the New York City CUNY system were free. Free. And working-class kids, Black, Brown kids were all, for the first time, getting either free or highly subsidized public education, and Ronald Reagan and those with him said no to that, and they started charging fees. Ronald Reagan was the governor of California at the time. And then over that arc of time, we’ve seen higher education get so expensive, particularly the privates, but the publics follow suit. And that’s the real problem here.

And what AAUP is saying is, we need a real investment in our higher education system, an investment so that kids can go, they can get a Bachelor of Science, Bachelor of the Arts. They can become an engineer, and they can then go on without being saddled with hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt, and move forward in their life.

Bacon: So you touched on the issue that’s in the conversation, which is that faculty lean left. Or, I think it’s more accurate to say faculty in surveys tend to vote for Democrats over Republicans. I think that’s an accurate thing to say.

Wolfson: That’s what the surveys say, yes.

Bacon: Exactly. That’s what the surveys say. So I guess I would say, to put it—since there’s rarely a Black person who gets to talk about this subject in public. So I would say, I’m part of three groups that vote for Democrats mostly. I’m part of a family of African Americans, so at Thanksgiving there are a few Trump voters. I’ve been to Black churches. There are very few Trump voters there. I’m also a journalist. Very few Trump voters in either of those three groups.

I reject the idea that there is no ideological diversity in those groups. There is plenty of heated debate in those groups, among charter schools or public schools or private schools or other things too. There just isn’t a lot of debate about, should we revote for the party that doesn’t feel like Black people or trans people are human beings. That’s not a great question of debate here.

So I’m not sure what to do with this point about—and also, to me, when I read about, we need to have a program at universities that means hire more Republicans, they’re basically announcing, we’re going to hire fewer Black faculty, because those are related facts. And so I’m not su—but at the same time, I’m not going to reject the—I do think most journalists and most faculty tend to vote for Democrats, but I don’t think that—I think that says something about the Republican Party, not about those people. But I don’t know how you feel about what I just said. Does that seem right?

Wolfson: Look, yeah. If you read Project 2025, there’s a couple interesting things in it. One is that, yeah, of course, if you get a bachelor’s degree, you’re more likely to vote Democrat. So the more education, the more likely you are to see through a very thin veneer of, like, interest in you, which is really self-interest, which I think drives the Republican Party, at least the one that inhabits the White House right now.

Also, if you read Project 2025, they’re like—no, let’s be honest, they don’t say white, but basically the idea is, if you’re white and you get a college degree and you’re a woman, you’re likely to have 1.2 children. But if you’re white and you don’t get a college degree, you have 1.9, right? And so the white replacement stuff is here.

And so the Republicans are attacking higher ed because they don’t think it’s in the interest of their vision of a white—at least this current administration. I’m not going to say every Republican is not a white nationalist. I’m not claiming that. But the Project 2025 was an instantiation of that. And so I think their attack on higher ed is based on that.

But to pull it back, yeah, sure, maybe 70 percent of faculty vote Democrat. But as you saw with our endorsement of Abdul El-Sayed, there was, like, 90 million different people coming out of the woodwork saying what a ridiculous position we were taking, how we had undermined the integrity of the organization, blah, blah, blah. We can go on.

And so there’s a massive, like, ideological diversity within academia. Extreme ideological diversity. But yeah, people are less likely to vote for Republicans. But still—again, does it really matter if you’re voting for a Republican or Democrat if you’re teaching a kid about string theory? I really don’t understand why that matters. Or you’re teaching someone how to be a better nurse, or you’re teaching—I just—yes, sure, there are politics-proper subjects, and certainly those subjects lean to the left.

But also, there’s all these new civic centers that have popped up, one being in West Virginia, where they forced West Virginia University to have a civic, like, Republican-ish constitutional values center. One student, one student was willing to take the courses in that program. You can’t force ideological diversity either, right? It has to emerge in a productive, fertile way.

Bacon: All right, so we talked about primaries. Now the general election. I think the general election objection is different. The objection is that, A, faculty should be objective—AAUP—and also, B, you’re reinforcing this perception, because I assume your endorsements will generally be Democrats, so you’re reinforcing. I’m sure there’s some Republican somewhere who loves higher ed. Please show up.

Wolfson: Please show up, yes.

Bacon: But that said, you’re probably going to endorse Democrats, so you’re reinforcing the perception that professors are Democrats. So I think the good faith critique is, this does—people already know the faculty is for Democrats. Don’t announce it and therefore reinforce this stereotype. How do you respond to that?

Wolfson: I respond quite simply. The last couple years under Trump, but then the last fifty or sixty years, we were silent about our politics, right? And it didn’t go all that well for us.

Bacon: We being the professorate as a group, you mean, not individual professors.

Wolfson: Yeah. Yes, that’s—not individuals, but AAUP.

But let me also say this, that AFT or SEIU or any other number of unions that represent professors endorse in their name all the time.

So that’s one thing that just needs to be flagged. But just with respect to us, AAUP, we did not endorse, and it has not gone all that well for us, right? And sure, I could sit on the sideline when Vance says that professors are the enemy, and I could sit on the sideline when Trump or Russell Vought are deciding that they’re not going to allow us to get our grants for cancer research and Alzheimer’s research. I can sit on the sidelines when they’re snatching up my students because of editorials they don’t like that are being written. But it’s not working out for us.

And so to me, it’s time to try something new, which is, we are a union, we have 60,000 members, I am accountable to my members, and I want to engage politics proper to fight to build the vision for a higher education system that I think would be a foundation to a democracy. And so that’s what we’re going to do. And if we learn in ten to twenty years that things accelerated and got so much worse, then fine, well, made a mistake. We’ll have to analyze it. But I could tell you that the last fifty years tell me that sitting on the sidelines hasn’t really worked all that well for us.

Bacon: You all made your endorsement around the time when the people in my field—another field that sort of struggles with this, the right is saying we’re biased. We were having a dinner with Donald Trump on a Friday night, honoring him as a defender of journalism or something.

And so to me it was like, OK, journalism has been—the Republicans are undermining journalism. We’re still pretending as if they’re objective to it. I actually thought what you did made a lot of sense. Like, the academics are recognizing the threat to them and thinking about how to behave differently. The last fifty years have not gone well. Let’s not have another fifty years like this.

Wolfson: To me, it’s almost alien to—I can understand the argument that’s being made. But it’s almost, somebody is actually attacking you, your livelihood, your sector, and you’re not supposed to stand up and say, “No, enough. What we do is valuable. Universities and colleges are valuable. We’re going to fight so that they’re central to a democracy.” It’s alien to me.

And so it’s really hard for me to think through how that position holds water in the face of Donald Trump, Russell Vought, Chris Rufo, JD Vance, and their attack on our higher education system.

Bacon: Now, I don’t have a good sense of the story you’re experiencing. I live in Kentucky, so I see the red state story of—you’ve mentioned DeSantis. Every red state is the same story of, the Republican governors are trying to ban anybody from studying sociology, film studies, anything like that, roll back on tenure.

I went to Yale, and I’m following the various colleges and how the administrators are trying to fight, trying to defund or threaten any college. But you’re at Rutgers, so public college, blue state. So what’s the story been like there for you, and schools like that?

Wolfson: Yeah, I think even safe, relatively safe public blue state universities, when Trump first got into office, when he was, like, running around bull in a china shop and trying to knock over everything in his way, they were even scared, and they were like, Let’s just keep our heads down. Anybody who has DEI on their website, talking about diversity, equity, and inclusion, or critical race theory, you’re going to scrub that, right? And so—

Bacon: Not get fired, but scrub that from your website. There’s a difference between keeping your job and just, you know—

Wolfson: Yeah, you don’t get fired, but you’re going to scrub it from your website, and we’re going to keep our heads down.

And unfortunately, the thing about our universities and colleges and the leadership of them is that they have been caught in a pretty rough bind. And so I’m not happy with them, but I’m sympathetic to them. And the rough bind is this, right? You’re the president of Columbia University, and Donald Trump says to you, Look, I’m snatching $400 million out of your biomedical research infrastructure, for research you’re doing on diabetes and Alzheimer’s and X, Y, and Z, because there is antisemitism in the university—which I’m not going to substantiate, but I’m going to say it’s there.

And so you’re the president, and you’re forced into a bind, and the bind is this: do I fight for higher education as a whole, right, and protect the institutional autonomy of Columbia University? Or do I fight for the financial wellbeing of Columbia University? And so it was a hard bind they were caught in.

But unfortunately, the majority of the leadership of our universities—not the entirety, but the majority—made the choice to their fiduciary responsibility of their institution over their responsibility to higher education and democracy writ large. And so again, he caught them in a tough bind. He’s a bully. And unfortunately, though, we saw far too many kneel to that dynamic.

Bacon: You said more endorsements are coming. So I’d be curious what you mean by that, because my guess is the Democrat running in Alaska who didn’t want Kamala Harris’s endorsement may not be dying for yours either, candidly. So I’d be curious, is it governors, senators, mayors? Is it swing states?

Wolfson: Yeah, I’ll tell you what we’re looking at, a state where it’s very obvious. I think we’re mostly going to—not entirely, we may engage in state races, but we’ll mostly engage in federal races this time around, as we’re building up our muscles, learning to do this. And so there are really two criteria we’re looking at.

One is swing states where we have a lot of density and could actually maybe potentially impact a race, where the candidate is speaking some of our language. They don’t have to be perfect, but they have to speak some of our language, and they can’t denigrate higher education.

That’s one category, of either Congress or congressional races, senatorial races. And then the other set of races are going to be in probably safe districts, where the people are really coming out and making a free public system central to their vision of a democratic society. And so those would be champions, right?

People who are going to champion higher ed, talk about free public higher education as critical moving forward, an end to contingency, fully funded HBCUs, MSIs, fully funded biomedical research infrastructure. Those are the things we want. An end to student debt. And then the other half will be places where we can actually impact a race and project some power.

Bacon: Do you have two or three you’re considering you can name, or you want to stay away from that right now?

Wolfson: I’m going to stay away from it now, because I don’t want to get in front of my members.

Bacon: Of course. And does it matter if your local endorses, or is it set up that way where the locals—

Wolfson: Absolutely matters. We will not be going and stepping on our locals. We will be working with them and growing through with them. So we have locals. We, AAUP’s a pretty interesting beast, because we have 600 campuses where we have membership. And we have about 100 of them, we have collective bargaining rights. And so 100 campuses, more or less, we have collective bargaining rights, but that makes up 40 some odd thousand faculty members in AAUP.

And then on the other 500 campuses, we don’t have collective bargaining rights. We have what you would call advocacy chapters, where they don’t get to negotiate, which is spread across 500 campuses, and it’s about another 20,000 members. And our locals have been endorsing candidates for office for decades upon decades. But our advocacy chapters haven’t.

Bacon: What percentage of university faculty are in AAUP?

Wolfson: I don’t know. That’s a good question. I would say it’s probably, overall, with the unionization rates in higher ed around 20, 25 percent. And faculty are so hard to enumerate now, because so many are temporary adjunct faculty. It’s a good question, and I should know the answer to that, but I don’t. But 20 to 25 percent of overall higher ed workers are unionized.

Bacon: You’ve been hinting at, and you’ve been saying, “I’m going to talk about our vision.” So what’s your vision for higher ed? You mention HBCUs, you mention free public, but lay out, what does AAUP see as what it wants higher education to look like in the United States?

Wolfson: Yeah. Our vision overall is that a robust democracy demands a robust free public higher education system, right?

Bacon: Does that mean free for everybody? Free for most students? What does that free mean? What do you want?

Wolfson: For me, it should be a universal right. I think we would have to win over a question of means testing with some of our allies who are elected. But to me, I want it to be universal.

Bacon: Like a universal public library.

Wolfson: Yes. And I really want to go back and fix the 1.8 trillion in debt that our students owe. But really, I think for us, there’s this vision of education and higher education as a central, if not the central, pillar to a healthy and robust democracy, where people are learning, where we’re engaging in critical questions, where if you get laid off at 35 as a lawyer, because now people are having Claude write their contracts that you could go back and you could get re-educated and find a way forward, and our universities become a place to support and grow through that very difficult time, which I think is coming. And I think we should really be honest about that.

And so to me, it’s not a laundry list of, we want a free public system, we want the sort of investment through wealth taxes that enable that system. We want fully funded HBCUs and MSIs and HSIs, minority-serving institutions and Hispanic-serving institutions, and also tribal colleges and universities. But we also really want a robust research infrastructure. The great post-World War II deal in the United States that really drove our innovation was a partnership between the federal government and colleges and universities.

And the deal was that we pay the universities and colleges, we have labs, we develop those labs, but the federal government funds critical research. And it’s the reason why—we don’t have a great healthcare system, it’s not good for the majority of us, but what we do have is the greatest healthcare research and innovation, and it comes out of our colleges and universities.

Our pharmaceutical companies would not do the primary research necessary that enables the breakthroughs that come, whether it’s cancer, Alzheimer’s, or any other number of things, Ozempic. They wouldn’t do the primary research necessary, because they don’t see the primary research as a return on investment. And so we need that relationship to grow. A thick, heavily funded research infrastructure, not only for healthcare, but for all untold number of things, and a place that’s a learning society. So that’s the real vision that we have. And I really believe we’re biting off our nose to spite our face when we undermine our great public education system as a public good, whether it’s K-12 or higher education.

And so that’s a vision for the society we have, which I would counter to the vision that Trump is putting out. The vision Trump is putting out, and his administration, is one that says—what did he say, six months ago? “I can’t pay for people’s early childhood learning. But what I can pay for is more bombs.” And that’s not the society I believe in. It’s not even the United States I was born into. And the United States—I was born in the ‘70s, I’m not going to say it was some great place for equity and diversity and for the working class, et cetera.

But what I can say is, it wasn’t cruel like it is today. The cruelty wasn’t this externalized. And so I really think we want to fight for a learning society. We want to make public education free. We want debt-free pathways for people who go to private universities. And we want to build a society, rebuild in the ashes of what this president has done, in a way that’s good for all of us.

Bacon: Todd Wolfson, I’m excited about what you’re doing. Thanks for doing it. Thanks for joining me. Where can people find your thoughts and your work?

Wolfson: Go to aaup.org, please. And if you’re anywhere in higher education, please join us. Whatever campus, we want to build with you. We want to fight for your issues on your campuses, and we want to build with our students, all the students across this country, and staff, and build a system that reflects the greatness of our democracy.

Bacon: Todd, thanks for joining me. I appreciate it. Good to see you.

Wolfson: Thank you, Perry. I really appreciate it.

Bacon: Bye-bye.

There are few political topics that Governors Kathy Hochul and Greg Abbott would likely agree on. But data centers might be one of them. On August 3, Texas Governor Greg Abbott announced a moratorium on Texas data centers (which had been growing at breakneck pace) until they could be effectively audited by the state’s energy regulators. Just over a fortnight beforehand, New York Governor Kathy Hochul signed a statewide moratorium on new hyperscale data centers, partially to build a framework that ensured new developments did not drive up electricity costs for ratepayers and that benefits could be better negotiated with local communities.

There are some significant contrasts between the two governors’ moves. New York’s moratorium lasts for a full year, whereas Texas’s will only last as long as it takes regulators to “conduct a comprehensive verification and audit of all data centers.” But the wider signal both show is clear: Across party lines Americans really, really do not like data centers, and leaders—whether at state, local, or federal level—are rushing to introduce regulation that controls their growth.

The AI industry now finds itself in a bind. By continuing to build out data centers, it risks exacerbating a growing populist anger, spurred in no small part by the incredibly tone-deaf nature of the AI industry’s early marketing. This populist anger is now reflected in legislation being introduced, such as a federal data center moratorium bill, introduced by Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez  or Senator Josh Hawley co-sponsoring a bill designed to prevent data centers from driving up electricity costs. It’s also reflected in the rhetoric of political candidates such as Michigan Democratic Senate hopeful Abdul El-Sayed, who is both angry and suspicious about the opaque way in which the AI industry has approached the data center buildout.

“There’s been so little transparency on the part of the [Big Tech] corporations themselves,” El-Sayed said in July. “It has raised the hackles of folks who’ve learned not to trust a lot of these bigger corporations when they tell them everything’s going to be OK.”

At the same time, AI already exists and has demonstrated significant capability, whether by solving decades-old math problems or (more worryingly), hacking into an AI model repository of its own accord. If you restrict the data center build out, you restrict the computing power behind this technology, artificially choking the supply and driving up the price so that the only people who can afford it would be major technology firms and corporations. This, ironically, could lead to the same sort of social stratification that Sanders has repeatedly warned about—a world in which billionaires and tech oligarchs have access to revolutionary technology the rest simply can’t afford.

The AI industry may look at this bind and be tempted to solve it with a tried-and-tested tactic used by previous industries to great success: offshoring.

In order to function effectively, data centers need a few key things from a location: land, access to power, proximity to users, latency, and—ideally—a politically pliant local environment. And there is one region near the U.S. that offers this in abundance.

Latin America draws more than half of its electricity from renewables. Land is cheap and plentiful. The proximity to U.S. borders gives Mexican data centers competitive levels of latency, and for countries further afield, a new series of undersea cables is adding further connectivity. Finally, the region’s political tailwinds increasingly favor right-leaning, deregulation-friendly leaders such as Chile’s José Antonio Kast (inaugurated March 2026) and Colombia’s Abelardo de la Espriella (inaugurated August 2026).

The numbers indicate that U.S. Big Tech companies see the potential here. Brazil’s hyperscale data center market is expected to double to $6.46 billion from 2025 to 2030. In 2024, Google announced a new data center in Uruguay worth approximately $850 million. According to Mexico Business News, installed data center capacity increased 142 percent between 2024 and 2026 (primarily in the central region of Querétaro) with major US hyperscale operators like Microsoft, AWS, and CloudHQ—which announced a new data center campus in the region worth $4.8 billion last September—all investing heavily. It’s unrealistic to expect all of America’s data centers to pack up and move south of the border. But the above examples show that this offshoring clearly represents an at least partial escape from the populist anger that has been brewing in the United States.

For Latin America, this investment is a double-edged sword. Barring a few bespoke, small-scale projects, the region has minimal homegrown frontier AI capability, meaning it needs to attract the investment of U.S. big tech companies—primarily via data centers—in order to keep pace with the AI boom. Alternative partners are limited: doing business with Chinese AI firms is possible in theory, but geopolitically fraught given Washington’s posture toward the region. This leaves U.S. firms as the most viable near-term option. But that lack of alternatives means that countries in the region cannot afford to question the corporate opacity which has, in the U.S., been the focus of so much local ire.

This opacity is already partially on display in Querétaro, Mexico, where residents and local reporting have linked data center growth to increased blackouts and water restrictions. Whether data centers are the sole driver of these maladies, or merely exacerbating aging infrastructure, remains contested. What is not in dispute is the information gap: While data center operators claim that new technology has significantly reduced water usage, they are not obligated to publish publicly verifiable information about this or electricity use. According to a 2025 report from the International Energy Agency, Mexico currently does not have reporting requirements for data center emissions, electricity consumption, or power usage/water usage effectiveness.

A similar opacity is present in the social sustainability programs launched by some U.S. tech companies. For instance, between 2021 and 2022, Microsoft partnered with the UN-Habitat to figure out how to improve conditions for rural communities in Querétaro, but further media reporting found those projects were left incomplete with no explanation.

There have also been repeated incidents of data centers being planned and built without the Free, Prior Informed Consent, or FPIC, of Indigenous communities whose land is impacted by the development, a right guaranteed under international law. This led to significant backlash in Chile in 2024, where Indigenous leaders likened the construction of a new Google facility to a “saqueo” (“plunder”). A similar case is also currently underway in Brazil, where Indigenous leaders from the northwestern state of Ceará say they were not consulted before construction of a data center on their land.

Finally, there is the issue of outsourcing AI infrastructure. Data centers are usually classified as either hyperscalers or co-locators. The former owns both the building and the computing, while the latter leases out just the building. This is an important distinction:  While hyperscalers are actively building in Latin America, there are also a host of co-locator companies like Equinix and Digital Realty, who lease the facility, insulating the U.S. tech company from complaints about water, electricity, and land. This mirrors issues we see regularly in our work on global supply chains at the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights: Outsourced projects that do not include concrete human rights safeguards, including guarantees of transparency and effective monitoring structures, can result in both serious harms and the disruption of supply.

This dynamic, in which a U.S. company makes grand promises alongside a level of corporate opaqueness, is not an unfamiliar one in Latin America. From the 1960s and accelerating through to the 1980s, U.S. manufacturers built cheap assembly lines along the border (commonly referred to as maquiladoras), where Mexico supplied the raw labor but the profits flowed north. An offshoring of U.S. data centers to Latin America risks repeating a version of this dynamic across the region for the digital age, swapping the extraction of cheap labor for the extraction of land, water, and electricity.

There have been attempts by regional governments to regulate the growth of data centers. Brazil’s REDATA program, for instance, aims to tie tax incentives to clean energy commitments and allocate 10 percent of each center’s processing capacity to the domestic market. But regulation is only half the battle. By its very nature, it is slow—REDATA was introduced last September and is still under debate. The aforementioned technological asymmetry between U.S. tech firms and Latin American countries, coupled with the footloose nature of the industry, means that it would be easy to pit rival countries against each other for data center investment.

The responsibility then falls on U.S. tech firms to look at the backlash they’ve received domestically, take those lessons, and apply them to all their data center infrastructure projects globally, not just the ones that receive the most eyeballs at home. The tools already exist. In January 2026, for instance, Microsoft launched its Community-First AI Infrastructure Plan, promising to pay its full power costs—so its data centers wouldn’t raise local electricity bills—and to train local workers. In March, it went further, announcing that it would stop default use of nondisclosure agreements that kept communities in the dark over data center proposals.

These plans are good starts, but if companies like Microsoft truly believe that AI is a tool for all humanity and that the global south should share in the AI dividends, then they need to apply their data center lessons globally and not just locally. If that were the case, AI could be a technology that has a genuinely globally transformative capacity. Otherwise, these companies would simply be repeating the colonialist, extractivist business dynamics of the last century, just with a new digital branding.

Twelve Democratic attorneys general, including California’s Rob Bonta, filed a lawsuit last month to block the acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery Inc. by Paramount Skydance Corporation. Trying to force Bonta and the other attorneys general to drop the lawsuit, Paramount is threatening to move its operations out of the state of California. So now prominent Democrats, most notably Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, gubernatorial candidate Xavier Becerra, and Governor Gavin Newsom, are publicly urging Bonta to quickly cut a deal with Paramount. (A scheduled meeting between Bonta and Paramount leaders on Monday was postponed.) 

Pathetic. The undermining of Bonta and lack of forceful opposition to this merger by many top Democrats is the latest example of a center-left party establishment that refuses to fully embrace economic populism, constantly capitulates rather than fighting the right, and fails to understand its true enemies. No wonder Democrats have spent the last decade losing elections and policy fights to Donald Trump and the MAGA right.  

Let’s start with economic populism. We are in an era of massive income inequality. The superrich not only hold a higher percentage of the nation’s wealth than in decades but are using that money to dominate politics and other parts of our society. Corporate mergers help the super-wealthy by making industries less competitive, giving workers and consumers fewer choices. That’s why Joe Biden, hardly a radical lefty, appointed people skeptical of corporate mergers to a number of key posts. 

Having two of the biggest companies in film and television and other parts of the entertainment industry merge will almost certainly be a great deal for the shareholders of Paramount and Warner Bros.—and terrible for everyone else. Paramount is threatening to move up to 30,000 jobs from California if Bonta blocks this merger. But if the merger happens, there will likely be even more economic pain. No matter what Paramount claims now, the company will almost certainly cut thousands of jobs, including in California, if this merger is approved. That’s what merged companies always do—fire staffers whose jobs overlap even slightly. 

And no matter what Paramount claims now, the prices that consumers, including those in California, pay for streaming channels, movies, and other products currently offered by the two companies will almost certainly go up. That’s another thing merged companies do—take advantage of the shrunken market to charge higher prices.

In 2026, the position of anyone who cares about making the U.S. economy work for average Americans and protecting American democracy by limiting the outsize power and wealth of the superrich should be strong, reflexive opposition to mergers of the biggest companies in virtually any industry. So why don’t Bass, Becerra, and Newsom, some of the most prominent Democrats in the country, have that position? 

I suspect because they, like many other Democratic politicians, haven’t adjusted to the realities of today’s political economy. Politicians, particularly governors and mayors, have traditionally worked hard to keep companies in their communities, because they provide jobs and tax revenue. But Paramount isn’t a normal company. It’s a megacorporation. And it’s not asking California for a break on its taxes but for the state to accept a merger that will dramatically worsen several different industries.

Massive, billionaire-owned companies like Paramount aren’t going to subject themselves to the whims of elected officials or even the public. They don’t really believe in democracy. That’s why other such companies are trying to build AI data centers despite massive public opposition. Bass, Newsom, and other Democratic politicians must stop pretending to negotiate or appeal to the goodwill of these mega-companies and billionaires. Instead, they should emphatically join with Bonta and others to oppose these kinds of mergers, hoping to either stop them or require concessions that limit the size and scale of the new combined entities. 

Adopting an anti-merger mindset in 2026 doesn’t require you to be a socialist or even a progressive. It’s just common sense. Does anyone want another monopoly-ish company like Google, Microsoft, or Amazon, except for their shareholders? Hell no. 

So Bass, Newsom, Becerra, and anyone who calls themselves a liberal should be opposed to mergers of huge companies these days. But they should especially be opposed to mergers that place David Ellison in charge of more news organizations. Ellison, who runs Paramount and would helm the merged company, hired Bari Weiss to run CBS News. She’s firing stellar journalists, hiring terrible ones, blocking news segments that accurately depict the horrific actions of our authoritarian president, and single-handedly dismantling 60 Minutes. Ellison just published a disingenuous op-ed in The New York Times pretending that Weiss’s actions at CBS are good journalism and suggesting CNN would benefit from a similar approach if the merger happens. (CNN is owned by Warner Bros.) 

I know we are in an era when the audiences and influence of traditional media are in decline. But CBS and CNN still matter. They employ a ton of journalists. They have the budgets to allow those journalists to report stories in depth. What they cover and don’t cover shapes what people see on social media. It would be a huge blow to both democracy and the Democrats if Weiss spends the next few years ordering CNN’s journalists to cover Democratic presidential candidates more negatively than they deserve while soft-pedaling the foibles of JD Vance, Marco Rubio, and other Republican 2028 hopefuls. The prospect of Weiss and Ellison controlling CNN alone should be enough for Democrats like Bass and Becerra to strongly oppose this merger. 

So why aren’t they making this case? The Democratic Party is, well, stupid about the media. The party for decades ignored how the GOP was tilting news coverage to the right by both creating a conservative media ecosystem and blasting the mainstream media as liberally biased. Over the last year, even as liberal journalists have repeatedly pointed out how Weiss is changing CBS, Democratic politicians continue to appear on the network as if nothing has changed. 

In reality, Weiss and Ellison are bigger threats to the Democratic Party than most Republican politicians. Viewers probably ignore anti-Democratic talking points coming from GOP members of Congress. In contrast, having prominent, trusted anchors constantly cast Democratic politicians as crazy and antisemitic, a hallmark of CBS coverage these days, is hugely valuable to the GOP. 

Even if Bass, Newsom, Becerra, and other Democrats aren’t wary of corporate mergers or a Weiss-run CNN, surely they could let Bonta and the other attorneys general do their legal work first? After all, Bonta’s threats to take the merger case to trial would seem more credible (and therefore more fertile ground for a settlement on his terms) if his state’s most prominent Democrats weren’t undercutting him. That brings me to my third point. If you have watched Biden, Hakeem Jeffries, or Chuck Schumer over the last decade, you’ve seen this “let me show how reasonable I am” negotiation style full of rhetorical and actual concessions to the other side. Many Democratic politicians are uncomfortable with real fights and are desperate to avoid them. Advantage GOP, and in this case, David Ellison. 

There is some good news here. Bonta canceled the meeting with Paramount, accusing the company of leaking confidential information about the negotiations. The attorney general does not seem afraid of this fight. He gets it. The problem is so many other Democratic politicians don’t. It would be terrible if a billionaire who has spent the last two years doing everything possible to appease Donald Trump gets to buy HBO and CNN and fire hundreds or even thousands of entertainment industry employees. It would be even worse if David Ellison gets to do all of that in part because Karen Bass, Xavier Becerra, and Gavin Newsom basically laid the groundwork for him. 

Here’s a bit of poetic justice for you: The Democratic bid for control of Congress just might end up running right through the very heart of Trump country. We’re talking about parts of the Midwest that helped drive Donald Trump’s two successful presidential bids—states like Iowa and Ohio, which he drove deeper into the red column, and states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, which Trump flipped outright twice.

That reality explains why Trump’s extended eruption of fury at Canada—he has now redoubled trade hostilities with our longtime ally—is very bad news for the GOP. Trump’s new trade war with Canada threatens fresh harms to local economies in the Midwest—and it’s handing Democrats a weapon in the homestretch of these contests to win over rural Americans and others who are experiencing all this endless derangement in very concrete ways.

“It’s a really dangerous time to be a farmer in the Midwest,” Josh Turek, the Democrat who is challenging Representative Ashley Hinson for the open Senate seat in Iowa, told me.

On Monday, Trump exploded wildly at Canada over the implosion of trade negotiations between the two countries. That collapse in talks over the weekend unleashed 50 percent tariffs by the United States on a large range of Canadian goods, and Canada will now retaliate with tariffs on targeted American exports. Talks are reportedly suspended until after the midterms.

What triggered Trump is that Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney had refused to be cowed by the American threat of tariffs. So Trump threatened yet more tariffs on still more Canadian goods next year, raging: “WE DON’T NEED CANADA, THEY NEED US!”

Whether we “need” Canada or not, the fact remains that a lot of trade currently takes place between the two countries. You know who actually can’t afford for all this to be upended right now? Republican incumbents and candidates in the Midwest, that’s who. So “we” may not “need” Canada, but Republicans in the region really “need” Trump to not rupture trade relations with our ally for the next two months.

Here’s why: Control of the House will turn in no small part on three very competitive House races in Iowa, one in Wisconsin, and three or four in Pennsylvania. Meanwhile, Turek is locked in a dead heat in the Iowa Senate race, and winning there could be pivotal to a Democratic Senate takeover. So could a win by Sherrod Brown, who leads slightly in Ohio. And anything that helps Abdul El-Sayed keep the highly contested Michigan Senate seat blue will also be critical.

These areas will very likely feel the political impact of Trump’s new trade war. Canada’s retaliatory tariffs are expected to hit American exports of agricultural machinery, and that could hit Iowa manufacturers. The state’s very competitive second congressional district, for instance, includes facilities run by John Deere, Altorfer (which deals in Caterpillar products), and other farm equipment concerns.

“Tariffs don’t just hurt our farmers, they hurt our manufacturers as well,” Lindsay James, the Democratic candidate in that district, told me. She added that her GOP opponent, businessman Joe Mitchell, will be a “rubberstamp” for Trump’s trade wars, which she labeled “impulsive.”

Such messages could land disproportionately in Iowa because Trump’s trade wars have already given the state’s agricultural economy a thorough pounding.

Turek, meanwhile, also singled out the coming impact of trade hostilities on farm equipment manufacturers. He noted that tariffs are contributing to a perfect storm in Iowa, which also includes Trump’s war on Iran, which is driving up fertilizer and diesel prices, and his effort to reduce beef prices by importing huge amounts of it, which will undercut American producers.

“You talk to farmers, and they’ll tell you it’s one gut punch after another,” Turek told me, adding that he constantly hears Iowans tell him: “This is betrayal.”

Or take Wisconsin’s third congressional district, where Rebecca Cooke, who grew up on a dairy farm, is challenging GOP incumbent Derrick Van Orden. In Wisconsin, local press coverage of Trump’s latest trade-warring is already forecasting that the state’s exports of dairy goods and farm equipment to Canada could be hit by retaliatory tariffs.

“It’s going to impact the district in a huge way,” Cooke told me. This could resonate in Wisconsin because the state, like Iowa, already has gotten badly hurt by previous Trump trade-warring, Cooke said: “Farmers are already feeling the squeeze, and this will hurt agricultural communities even more.”

All this gives Dems a potent line of attack on incumbent Republicans: that they’ve done nothing to resist the tariffs, even though the levies constitute a huge usurpation of their own power—that is, of Congress’s power to tax.

“Derrick Van Orden has gone right along with whatever Trump says,” Cooke told me. “He’s a lackey for this administration.”

In fact, the trade-warring may be providing a back-door way to make Trump a liability for GOP candidates even in places that backed Trump by large margins. Voters there appear prepared to agree that policies coming out of Washington are hurting them. So some Democrats are making their races about GOP incumbents’ failure to protect voters from those policies, without too much specific talk about Trump that might trigger negative partisanship.

This dynamic may prove particularly pronounced in the Midwest. Some experts on the region point out that it’s already been disproportionately hurt by Trump’s trade wars, and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee tells me it plans to make the latest round a liability for “every Midwestern Republican.”

Note that Trump’s latest eruption vows 50 percent tariffs on a whole slew of Canadian cars, trucks, and automotive parts. How do you think rupturing the auto industry’s complex cross-border supply chains—which are so deeply interconnected that they’ve been called the “Great Lakes supercluster”—will go over in Michigan and Ohio?

There’s still more. Manuel Bonder, a spokesman for Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, points out that Canada is the state’s number one trading partner, with agricultural crops and equipment constituting a “huge industry” in all its competitive House districts. Speaking about Trump’s new trade-warring, Bonder said: “You can’t overstate how much this hurts Pennsylvania’s economy.”

Ron Brownstein recently identified a paradox embedded in Trumpism. Trump’s political successes have been particularly transformative in Midwestern states with large percentages of blue-collar whites in them. Yet in these midterms, his profound unpopularity is now pushing even states he’s turned deep red—like Iowa and Ohio—to revert to competitive swing states.

There’s another layer of irony here, however. The shock of Trump’s 2024 victory led many commentators to conclude that his right-wing populist nationalism had touched a deep, authentic wellspring of sentiment in the American electorate. Yet his mass deportations have unleashed ferocious national opposition. His “America First” unshackling of the U.S. military from international commitments and alliances is absolutely tanking his public standing. And now, if his tariffs and trade-warring help produce a massive electoral backlash—right in the region long mythologized as the heartland of Trumpian populism—it would represent a fitting and highly satisfying outcome indeed.

The other day, Donald Trump unveiled a new “plan” to curb beef prices by suspending tariffs on huge amounts of beef imports, while claiming the beef will be sold to the U.S. at a big discount. But he wouldn’t say which countries will be importing the beef or how he secured that commitment. In this, Trump accidentally revealed that his tariffs actually do raise consumer prices, debunking his own claim that other countries pay the tariffs. This, even as he just escalated his tariffs on another front by expanding his trade war with Canada, which will hit Trump country hard. We think all this shows new levels of contempt for his own voters. So we talked to Paul Krugman, whose Substack is excellent at demystifying such matters. He explains why Trump’s beef plan is a scam, what it reveals about Trump’s disdain for MAGA, and why this trade war with Canada is such a terrible idea. Krugman also discusses how it all discredits MAGA economics and whether liberals can use Trump’s world-historical failures to shift the economic argument more fundamentally. Listen to this episode here.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries met with Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and close adviser, CNN reported Sunday. Why? “To discuss ways the White House can collaborate with Democrats on key issues,” apparently. On its face, it’s not a good look for the White House—a de facto concession that the GOP expects Democrats to take control of the House in November.

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Consider supporting my work so I can continue creating it: Substack: https://nickanderson.substack.com/ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/editorialcartoons Ko-Fi: https://www.patreon.com/c/editorialcartoonsCartoon Related | Darline Graham struggles to contain damage from debate gaffe…

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After a pause of more than two months, the U.S. military announced Monday that it once again carried out a strike on a vessel in the eastern Pacific Ocean, killing two people accused of trafficking drugs. It brings the overall death toll to 223 people killed in 67 strikes during the nearly yearlong U.S. campaign of bombing alleged drug boats off Latin America’s Caribbean coast and in the…

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The Supreme Court on Monday temporarily handed President Trump a key victory in his crusade to restrict mail-in voting. The unsigned opinion by the court’s conservative majority, issued over dissents from the three Democratic appointees, said it was too soon for states to challenge Trump’s executive order from March 2026 severely restricting mail-in voting because they had not shown how they would be harmed by it.

“This ruling violates well-established precedents concerning this Court’s equitable discretion and needlessly injects chaos and uncertainty into the upcoming midterm elections,” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in dissent. “It also lets another shoe drop in the Kafkaesque nightmare that our precedents have been steadily creating for certain plaintiffs who seek to bring election-related challenges. The Court has held for a while now that even valid election-related legal claims can come too late. Today’s revelation is that such claims can also come too early—never mind that an election is looming and related harms
are presently occurring. Never mind, too, that the Government (which controls the timing of proposed and final rules) can easily game the system.”

While not a ruling on the merits of the executive order, the Court’s decision still overrules a series of federal court rulings blocking that order, which represents an unprecedented attempt by the Trump administration to seize control of election administration from the states, based on Trump’s demands for Republicans to “nationalize the voting” and “take over” the voting system.

It instructs the Department of Homeland Security to create lists of voters it deems citizens in each state, essentially overriding state voter rolls, and directs the Postal Service to only deliver mail-in ballots to voters on those lists, leading to the possibility that a significant number of voters will not receive mail-in ballots if the lists are inaccurate. (Trump, despite his frequent tirades against the practice, voted by mail in Florida’s primary last month, the second time this year he has done so in Florida.)

“The consequences of allowing such transformative changes to take effect so close to this fall’s elections would be extreme,” wrote the 23 states, led by California, that are challenging the executive order. “Because of the high risk of errors and the limited window for correcting mistakes, many of the millions of voters who rely on mail voting—especially voters with disabilities and those in rural areas—would likely be denied mail ballots and, as a result, disenfranchised. Many more voters would be confused—either because they wouldn’t receive their mail ballots or would fear that USPS would fail to deliver their voted ballots to state officials for tabulation.”

The Postal Service subsequently issued a new rule on August 21 specifying that it will only deliver mail-in ballots if states hand over their voter rolls to DHS—a form of extortion that has generated furious pushback from election officials. (The Department of Justice has sued 30 states to get access to their voter rolls and is 0-23 in federal court so far.) The executive order also specifies that election officials could be criminally prosecuted if they don’t comply with the administration’s demands.

“The EO directs unprecedented levels of involvement by federal officials in how states administer elections,” a majority of judges on the First Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last month. “Regardless of the details of how federal officials implement the EO, at its core, the EO contemplates that states will have to coordinate with DHS and USPS to ensure that various lists, whether maintained by the agencies or the states, reflect current mail-voter information (which can change daily up until Election Day), or else risk disenfranchisement for certain voters and penalties for states and their officials.”

As the Supreme Court considered the case for weeks, a federal district court issued a nationwide injunction on August 11 against the executive order, halting the Postal Service from taking any steps to implement it. That injunction remains in effect despite the Supreme Court’s order on Monday.

Voting rights groups argued in court over the weekend that the Postal Service’s decision in late August to finalize the rule specifying that mail-in ballots can only be delivered in states that hand over their voter rolls to the administration violated that injunction.

“By issuing this final rule, the Trump administration has flouted the court’s injunction,” those voting rights groups, including the ACLU and League of Women Voters, said in a statement. “The final rule threatens further chaos for voters, civic organizations, and election officials by seeking to impose last-minute changes to mail voting rules. Enforcement of the court’s preliminary injunction is necessary to hold this administration accountable for its unlawful action and make clear that voters can confidently cast their mail ballot free from federal interference this November.”

The Supreme Court’s ruling may only be a temporary win for Trump. “The Court’s disposition of this application does not mean that any measure taken by the Government to implement the Order will necessarily be lawful,” the Court wrote. “On that score, time will tell.”

States can renew their legal challenges to the executive order once DHS and USPS finalize their plans to implement it—and it may be too late to implement the order regardless, with the midterms roughly 70 days away. However, the Court’s decision allowing the executive order to proceed “contributes to pre-election chaos instead of quashing it,” Justice Jackson wrote.

“To be sure, the Court has not foreclosed States from challenging this blatantly unconstitutional Order,” Jackson continued. “But it declines to explain when, exactly, is the right time to bring a meritorious election-rule claim challenging unconstitutional interference with electoral processes. The majority
just signals that these claimants had to wait—even though the election cycle had started and despite facing pocketbook costs, threats of prosecution, and an affront to their sovereignty—before receiving the relief to which they are likely
entitled.”

Trump’s two executive orders restricting ballot access, in 2025 and 2026, were both blocked for violating the Constitution’s clear mandate that states, with oversight from Congress, have the authority to run their elections. “The Constitution does not grant the President any specific powers over elections, ” District Judge Indira Talwani, a Barack Obama appointee, wrote in June. Talwani may soon issue a new injunction blocking the Postal Service’s new rule.

The Supreme Court’s decision nonetheless comes at a time when Trump is escalating his attempts to interfere in the midterm elections. Though his primetime speech on “election integrity” last month was widely regarded as a dud, the president’s false accusation that China interfered in the 2020 election has led to renewed fears that he could use fake claims of foreign interference as a basis to declare a national emergency so that he can attempt to seize control of the voting system.

And the Supreme Court has already green-lit a key part of Trump’s effort to tilt the midterms in the GOP’s favor by destroying the Voting Rights Act and approving the unprecedented mid-decade gerrymandering that has allowed Republicans to draw 10 more GOP-friendly seats in the race for the House of Representatives. That has made it much harder for Democrats to retake the chamber despite Trump’s record-low approval ratings.

On Monday, Justice Jackson perfectly summed up how the Court’s GOP-appointed majority has enabled Trump’s efforts to interfere in the midterms. “Taking its eye off the ball, the majority misses the Government’s actual objective: to secure our imprimatur for its effort to foment chaos ahead of the November elections,” she wrote.

Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson slammed the Supreme Court’s Monday shadow-docket decision to greenlight Donald Trump’s executive order restricting mail-in voting ahead of this year’s midterm elections. While the decision does not necessarily mean mail-in voting will be overhauled, it nevertheless removes a block that the judiciary had placed in the administration’s way.

In an unsigned order Monday, the Supreme Court lifted a lower court stay on an executive order requiring the U.S. Postal Service to bar any person not included on a massive federal voter list from receiving a mail-in or absentee ballot.

All three of the high court’s liberal justices dissented from the unsigned order.

“This ruling violates well-established precedents concerning this Court’s equitable discretion and needlessly injects chaos and uncertainty into the upcoming midterm elections,” wrote Jackson. “It also lets another shoe drop in the Kafkaesque nightmare that our precedents have been steadily creating for certain plaintiffs who seek to bring election-related challenges.”

After the executive order was signed in March, Democratic officials in 23 states and the District of Columbia sued to block the order. U.S. District Court Judge Indira Talwani blocked the plan in Massachusetts, and later issued a nationwide injunction. Last month, Trump’s DOJ asked the Supreme Court to weigh in on the issue, calling the challenge “premature” and “hypothetical” because the order had not been implemented by the Department of Homeland Security or the U.S. Postal Service.

It’s unclear how this order might be implemented in the time that remains between now and the fast-approaching midterm elections. The high court’s decision is also far from the final judicial challenge the administration faces in its efforts to juke the upcoming elections. Today’s ruling left open the possibility for future legal challenges.

Trump’s order has been described by Democratic leaders as a “desperate, illegal power grab” and “laughably unconstitutional.”

Despite the obvious chaos Trump’s order would cause, the U.S. Postal Service has moved ahead with issuing new requirements for mail-in ballots. If implemented, Trump’s executive order could potentially disenfranchise thousands of Americans who vote by mail ahead of the high-stakes midterm elections.

Darline Graham’s latest bid to solidify Donald Trump’s support involves a fraught empty gesture.

The 62-year-old younger sister and current holder of the late Lindsey Graham’s South Carolina Senate seat dodged questions on Monday as to whether she would have certified the results of the 2020 presidential election, as her brother had six years prior.

“Senator, you just mentioned that you agree with your brother on everything except for one matter, that being illegal immigration; you’d go farther than him on that,” said MS NOW’s Mychael Schnell during a press conference. “That being said, I’m curious, do you agree with him about the 2020 election, that Joe Biden was certified the winner of that election, was lawfully elected, and that you would’ve voted to certify the election, as your brother did?”

Graham responded that she believed that the “election system is broken,” attempting to redirect the question toward her support for the White House’s SAVE America Act, a voter suppression bill that has divided Congress for most of the year.

“You won’t commit to having certified the results of the 2020 election?” Schnell pressed in a follow-up question.

Graham refused to elaborate.

Trump has fervently championed Graham’s candidacy, despite the fact that she brings zero legislative experience to the job. She also seems to have little awareness of current events and pressing matters: Last week, Graham flopped on a softball debate question regarding Taiwan, shrugging that “national security is not my thing.” Nevertheless, her actual policy positions may not matter at all with the local electorate, depending on voters’ attitudes toward the president.

“If a voter’s decision is all about Trump, then they don’t care what she knows about foreign policy or anything else,” Scott Huffmon, a professor of political science at Winthrop University, told Newsweek Monday. “The question is will they ‘believe in’ this endorsement and be as, or more, motivated as the people who showed up at county meetings over the years to censure Lindsey Graham.”

Graham’s popularity—as well as Trump’s—will be put to the test Tuesday, when South Carolina Republicans head to the polls to officially decide whether she or five-term Representative Ralph Norman will replace the deceased lawmaker on the general election ballot.

For years, election denialism was one of the minimal litmus tests for MAGA allegiance, requiring wannabe Trumpians to publicly question the security of America’s democracy in order to invite the president’s political favor. But that may be changing: In recent months, Trump’s magic touch hasn’t been quite so effective. So far, 10 of Trump’s candidates have crumbled in this primary cycle—as many as lost in 2018, 2020, and 2024 combined.

Tonight in San Francisco (8/24), I’ll be onstage with Wajahat Ali at the Commonwealth Club. Afterward, I’ll sign books. Tickets still available! Click here for more info.

Court of History Podcast

Last week, I joined journalist Sidney Blumenthal and historian Sean Wilentz for a two-part interview on the Court of History podcast.

Here’s Part One:

And here’s Part Two:

More to come—soon!

On Monday, President Donald Trump announced plans to further undermine public education by bribing Americans with small tax breaks to opt out of public schools. Alongside Secretary of Education Linda McMahon, Trump gave a winding, bigoted speech attacking transgender children and peddling debunked lies from people like Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

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