The New Republic

Wyoming’s Republican Governor Mark Gordon is sounding the alarm about the Trump administration’s “aggressive” and “irregular” elections monitoring.

Speaking at a canvassing board meeting Wednesday, Gordon expressed concerns about the Department of Justice’s surprise efforts to monitor election sites in the state during primary elections last week, WyoFile reported.

“To my knowledge, the U.S. Attorney was unaware of it, and it sounded like the behavior of the observers was a bit aggressive,” Gordon said.

“It just was irregular, and I have asked the attorney general to start looking into, you know, kind of the nature of the visits and all that sort of stuff,” he said.

It’s typical for federal observers to monitor elections, but Gordon claimed that the behavior of those at last week’s voting seemed to overstep the authority Congress had granted to them. “I’m not saying anything went wrong or anything else, and I certainly think the conduct of this election was phenomenal,” he said.

“I feel very strongly about federal government coming in and taking our guns,” Gordon said. “I don’t like that. And I don’t like federal government coming in and taking our votes either.”

In a statement to WyoFile Wednesday evening, Debra Lee, the chief election officer for Laramie County, recounted two monitors’ behavior after they arrived at a polling station in Wyoming’s most populous district. Lee said she was not aware that they were coming, and they did not offer credentials until requested.

The two monitors arrived at the busy polling station and asked staff questions that appeared to be “outside the scope of federal voting rights laws,” including questions about poll worker training and new election equipment. They also asked to examine their tabulators, according to Lee.

When Lee discovered the monitors intended to interview voters in order to “assess compliance with federal civil rights and voting rights laws,” the election official denied their request. “We do not allow interviews to be conducted in polling places,” she said.

“This was a poorly managed exercise and one that showed complete disregard for our state laws and administration of our elections,” she concluded.

The controversy follows a set of primary elections where candidates claiming elections are safe as is did extraordinarily well in Wyoming.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s administration “misappropriated” $10 million from a state Medicaid settlement to lobby against weed.

According to a Florida grand jury report, which was first obtained by CBS News, the money moved from a state Medicaid settlement, to a charity tied to the governor’s wife, Casey DeSantis, to a pair of dark-money PACs, and finally into a campaign to help kill a marijuana legalization ballot measure opposed by the governor.

It is not clear who directed the transfer of funds, which were meant to help poor children receive health insurance, the grand jury noted. As a result, the grand jury found “insufficient evidence to charge anyone criminally.”

“Nobody will take responsibility for deciding the $10 million of taxpayer money would go to Hope Florida,” the jury concluded. “While we can’t prove who is responsible, we can plainly see that taxpayer money was misused for political purposes and we would like to see changes made to prevent this from happening again.”

The grand jury’s report is dated January 28, 2026, and is still officially sealed.

The Hope Florida Foundation is the fundraising arm of a charity, Hope Florida, started by Casey DeSantis in 2021. The organization intends to connect low-income families with churches and local groups to keep them off public assistance. In its own words, Hope Florida goes “beyond government to create a pathway for Floridians to live up to their God-given potential and accomplish the American Dream.”

The $10 million transferred to the charity was initially part of a Medicaid settlement between the state of Florida and Centene Corporation, a for-profit health care company, over claims of over-billing. In February 2023, Centene Corporation offered to pay the entire $67,048,611 settlement to the state. More than a year and a half later, the settlement was split up: “On September 27, 2024, State of Florida officials agreed that Centene would pay $57,048,611 to the State of Florida and $10,000,000 to Hope Florida Foundation, Inc.,” the grand jury’s report read. “Within days, the $10,000,000 was transferred to other organizations for political purposes because money was spent on a political campaign and went to the Republican Party of Florida.”

According to the grand jury report, “after the money was transferred to Hope Florida, it was quickly funneled from there into two political action committees”—$5 million to Secure Florida’s Future and $5 million to Save Our Society From Drugs, both “dark money” groups that are not required to release detailed financial reports. The two groups then used the cash to bankroll Keep Florida Clean, another PAC created specifically to oppose a ballot initiative to legalize marijuana. Although the marijuana amendment was popular across the state, it ultimately failed.

The report goes on to implicate a series of officials in Florida state government who may have had knowledge of the transaction, including Republican Senate candidate Ashley Moody, who was the state’s attorney general at the time. Moody allegedly “authorized” her chief deputy, John Guard, to sign the settlement agreement diverting $10 million to Hope Florida.

When asked about the grand jury’s report on Thursday, DeSantis claimed the only crime that was “apparent was whoever leaked the grand jury report.”

Representative Max Miller is needling his former father-in-law, Senator Bernie Moreno.

The embattled Ohio Republican representative issued a veiled threat against Moreno at the Cuyahoga County family court Wednesday, claiming that his marriage to Moreno’s daughter had revealed things that he believed the senator would like him to “remain quiet about.”

“I was a part of that family for a very long time,” Miller told Mother Jones’s Abby Vesoulis on video. “There are certain things that he would like me to remain quiet about, and I respectfully have and I will always intend to do that because that’s not my business to share. But it’s politically motivated.”

The comment came right after a hearing in Miller’s contentious custody battle over his two-year-old daughter. Miller initially declined to speak with reporters, but then decided to cut his attorney off mid-sentence to voice the warning.

“No, no,” Miller’s lawyer could be heard saying in the background of the clip.

Emily Moreno, Miller’s ex-wife, alleges the congressman physically hurt her and their toddler. In court filings and police reports, Moreno has accused Miller of throwing her against a wall, leaving an “obvious grab mark on her upper arm”; throwing scalding water on her (an incident that Miller refuted as “horseplay”), and having “held a gun to her head.” Moreno also recounted an instance in which their daughter told her, “Daddy kill you.”

Medical records submitted during the couple’s custody dispute cited several injuries to their young daughter, as well, including a broken collarbone that Moreno claimed occurred during Miller’s care.

In other instances, Miller allegedly withheld his daughter’s favorite toy from her, and accidentally published audio recordings alleging his drug abuse as well as naked images of his daughter in misguided attempts to prove his own innocence.

It took the Ohio senator weeks to get publicly involved in the dangerous affair affecting his daughter and granddaughter, but Bernie Moreno finally denounced Miller earlier this month, writing in a post on X that the Donald Trump-backed Republican should “not serve in the House of Representatives.” At least five other senators have also urged Miller to drop out of his respective House race.

Miller has categorically denied the allegations and sued his ex-wife for defamation in May. He was never charged with a crime, and the Department of Children and Family Services did not find evidence to substantiate allegations of child abuse, according to court filings.

This is a lightly edited transcript of the August 26 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.

Michael Podhorzer: We’re going to kick off, and folks will join. Hopefully you all know our guest today. He’s been on here before, but more importantly, I hope you’ve been following his writing, as I have, from when I first encountered him writing for the old FiveThirtyEight, when it was Nate Silver and independent, and was really bringing a not sort of data-nerd-alone exclusive view of the world. And this is someone who actually could map it to what was happening in the world and how it actually affected people, as opposed to, how do we tweak the model so we can improve our forecast by a couple points or whatever.

And from there went on to write a really great column in The Washington Post, which, like, naming it as a great column should be the spoiler alert for what comes next. Because then Bezos shows up, and great columns are no longer part of what The Washington Post is about. It’s not part of the editorial model anymore. And so now he’s at The New Republic, and both writing and doing his own Substack live, which hopefully you’re subscribed to.

So we don’t have as eventful a day after primary as we’ve had for the last couple months. But I thought we’d start, Perry, just getting your sense there. This is an area you’ve covered a lot, which is, what’s going on inside the Democratic Party, and what should we take away from the series of primaries now for 2026?

Perry Bacon: Thanks for the nice introduction first. And, people who don’t know I’ve been doing this so long, I also worked at Time magazine, The Washington Post, and MSNBC before I worked at FiveThirtyEight, too. So I’ve been doing this a long time.

But anyway, the primaries have been interesting in that, as I tell people all the time, the average Democrat in Congress, their politics are probably still closer to Joe Biden’s than Bernie Sanders. I think that’s still true. I worry sometimes we take the sort of a DSA candidate or two winning in a few races—the average Democratic member of Congress is not from the DSA and would not want to be associated with the DSA, and I think that’s still true even in the House.

And also, the primaries themselves, I still can’t tell if these have been referendums on Gaza, on Israel, on socialism, on progressivism, or just, like, looking at the Colorado specifically, are just, we want somebody who’s different and not boring like Michael Bennet. I feel like a lot of these races are explained by somebody generic who’s unmemorable. I’ve been covering Michael Bennet my entire life. What has Michael Bennet done in Congress? Michael Bennet, guys, ran for president. Who remembers that in 2020? Because he was so unmemorable there too.

So I think a lot of cases, you have maybe an outsider, a young person, a person from an unusual job, a person who’s charismatic, running in a primary against a forgettable Democrat who’s either been a state legislator or been in Congress. And the new person may be more progressive, or more anti-Israel, or more pro-Palestinian, or more pro-peace, but they also just are not boring.

If people feel like the party has failed and has not fought Trump hard enough, and they’re open to anybody different, I think is what’s driving a lot of these results. You may not agree with all of that, but that’s part of what I think is going on.

Anat Shenker-Osorio: Yeah. I can see that, and that through line and that explanation makes sense to me. I think that an additional element in the primaries, which is very different to the general election—and I also think, just as an aside, that Democratic primary voters and Republican primary voters are very different to each other.

And so that is one of the asymmetries between the parties, where Democratic primary voters on average are more kind of diehard party stalwarts, perhaps more conservative in the original definition of that word, meaning, like, more let’s-not-shake-things-up-too-much conservative, conserve. Whereas Republican primary voters, I think, tend to be more like white nationalist, super MAGA, and so that has—

Podhorzer: Actually, that actually now is the conservative perspective for the Republican Party.

Shenker-Osorio: Sorry to confuse you with word choice.

Podhorzer: That is actually, like, the mainstream.

Shenker-Osorio: That’s true. OK, but in an attempt to be explanatory. So I think, going back to the point that you made, Perry—and also thank you for joining us, I was saying before we went live that it is fun to turn the tables and have the question asker be the question answerer, so always a good time.

I think that another through line, and this may be motivated cognition on my part, is the difference between sort of the economic message that I think more mainstream Democrats are trying to give, which I basically just liken to being on an episode of The Price Is Right, where they’re trying to prove that they know how much things cost, and they’re basically just, Lettuce. Test me. Try me. 635, 702, gallon of milk. What is it? Which, like a lot of focus group participants, they can tell you how much milk is at 12 different stores in their town. It’s actually astonishing the degree to which people know the prices of things down to the cent. So there’s that model, which is like, I am going to demonstrate empathy by telling you how much things cost.

And then there is, I would argue, a more effective economic message, which is not just, I’m going to prove to you that I can recite prices, but, Here are things I’d actually like to do. And obviously, Mamdani is the standard bearer for this, with the three repeated refrain thing that we saw not just all the way across the country, but people in Europe can tell you what are his three things. But also, Milakiro, speaking of Colorado, Frannie, who obviously came short in Wisconsin, Francesca Hong, Abdul in Michigan, even James Talarico.

It’s much more not just, I’m going to talk about how expensive things are. I’m going to say, These are the things that I would like to do that would alter the material conditions of your life. And part and parcel of that, I would argue, is that they actually provide an origin story for people’s pain. They name a villain, and they’re presenting an economic populist argument, as opposed to, affordability is important, without laying out, “And that’s why we actually need to stick it to the billionaires.”

Podhorzer: Actually, Perry, before you jump in, I want to do, hopefully, a friendly amendment to your Price Is Right metaphor, which is where I thought you were going, because the purpose of that game is to get as close to the right price without going over. And the attitude of most Democrats is to be much more afraid of being too ambitious rather than underselling what they’re doing. But anyway, sorry.

Shenker-Osorio: That’s totally the point I wanted to make. 100 percent, that’s what I was saying.

Podhorzer: OK.

Bacon: But I agree with what she said about the economic populism side, and then how the insurgent progressive—pick your term—candidates are doing something different in terms of specifics. And also, they’re naming villains. They’re much more willing to talk about—I think Talarico talks about corruption a lot. Others talk about billionaires a lot. Some talk about oligarchs a lot. But there is, like, not just things are unaffordable, but things are unaffordable because of these people.

And otherwise you’re left with the things are unaffordable because—the mainstream Democrats would say the gas is unaffordable because of Trump. And so there is a story there, so there’s some story there. But otherwise the story is, things are unaffordable, hands up, not a lot of solutions and not a lot of villains either.

Podhorzer: Yeah. And I think another way of saying it for a lot of them is, like, the origin story is that you didn’t elect me.

Bacon: Yes.

Podhorzer: That right there—like, the only program they’re offering is them being in the majority, which hasn’t worked, and people know that. One thing I would try—I think there’s another big difference in Democratic and Republican primary voters, in a way that, like, may, where it actually matters, which is in places where they’re going to actually win the general election, because of gerrymandering or because of the nature of the state, which is that those primaries are the only ones left in America where a majority of the people who are voting in them are part of an organized movement, right?

Where in the South you have evangelical churches who have become political, and white evangelicals, especially in rural southern states, constitute about 60 percent of everybody who votes in Republican primaries. And so essentially that controls who can be a Republican candidate in districts where the lines are drawn so Republicans are going to win. And even in certain southern districts, it gets around 50 percent for white evangelicals, which is the bonkers part of why we’re all the way the country is, because nationally they only constitute 18 percent. But instead, between gerrymandering and the states they are, they’re able to exert this enormous influence.

There’s, like, this isn’t—DSA is not this for Democrats, right? People don’t go to DSA every Sunday morning to get their instructions about how to vote, right? And I think because we’ve been focused on Republican primaries somewhat in other areas too, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that doesn’t matter. It’s curious because they’re probably not going to win this year. But in the places they are, that’s where it matters.

And I think one of the perspectives which I can bring to this, as someone who lives in Kentucky, is to really get people to see how politics is different in the rest of the country, especially in the South, from the way most of the people probably on this Zoom are experiencing politics.

Bacon: Let me, I’m going to jump on that. Let me add more about the primaries first, which is that I did think the Wisconsin race showed that this electability issue—whether I, speaking for myself, think it’s, like, fake, or imagined, or that we don’t know who’s electable, let’s have the election first. The Democratic voting base, I think, is very consumed by this, and takes cues from party leaders about that.

And so I was telling people—I live in Louisville, as was mentioned here, but I was telling my friends in Wisconsin, “I’d be worried if I was for Hong, because it seems like the governor is, like, saying every day she can’t win, in these very aggressive terms, and that is going to make a difference.” And it did.

And I think it would seem to me, as a person who wants progressive candidates to win more, watching Bernie Sanders and Senator Warren lose because of Joe Biden’s electability every hour, and watching this process in primary after primary, it would seem to me, if you’re AOC, if you’re Ro Khanna, whoever is running who’s to the left needs to sit down and say, A core part of our campaign message needs to be how I can win Wisconsin. And if Tony Evers or Joe Biden or Neera Tanden says I can’t win Wisconsin, here’s the evidence. Like, I agree that electability may be fake and made up, but as long as Democratic primary voters think it’s real, it may be worth addressing it instead of losing because—

Podhorzer: Go ahead, Anat.

Shenker-Osorio: Can I use my Wisconsin privilege? This may be the second time that phrase has been uttered. Except with respect to Ohio. Sorry, Ohio. You know how it is—that was a sports thing, not anything else.

I don’t disagree with you. I think that the one complicating thing about Wisconsin, for folks who are not in the weeds, is that there’s a temptation to draw a parallel between the Senate races in Minnesota and Michigan respectively, and the gubernatorial race in Wisconsin, that I just want to—which isn’t what you were saying, I’m adding a point.

But Crowley is not Haley Stevens, and is not Angie Craig. He is basically much more, I would argue, like Evers, maybe even slightly more progressive than him. And Hong—yeah. So I just want to—I’m just throwing in that complication that, like, there’s a little bit more to it than, you’re choosing between kind of a very cookie cutter standard, like Chuck Schumer pick, and someone else. That’s not the dynamic there.

It’s also interesting, I guess, in a way it’s heartening that Crowley is deemed electable in a state that, I’m embarrassed to say, has never elected a Black person governor, and that sort of didn’t factor in, which thrills me, and I hope that is correct, and—

Bacon: A Black person from Milwaukee, not just—yes, who as far as I know is not the editor of the Harvard Law Review.

Shenker-Osorio: Yeah. And so it is interesting, kind of, when and where electability—everything is relative. Everything is relative.

Bacon: You mentioned the South, Michael, I’ll go to the South now. We talked about this when I came on here about a year ago, when I changed jobs, and one thing I was talking about was, like, if you live in the South, we’ve had this discourse about—there’s a story in the Post, I think. The Washington Post actually does some good journalism, and they did a story, in the news section, about how Black studies and African studies departments are being banned and closed all over the country.

The actual crisis in higher education in America is not that the president of Harvard may not have had enough references on her thesis, and it’s not that person X at Yale cannot say conservative things. It’s actually that in 20 states, they are closing departments, banning words, banning the curriculum.

And one of the biggest problems we have is, we have a media landscape where most of the powerful journalists live in New York and Washington—and I’ll pretend, like, Los Angeles, but really New York and Washington—places where a DSA candidate is more likely to be elected than a MAGA candidate. But in the rest of America, most of America, particularly in 20 states, I would say a MAGA candidate has a much bigger chance. And therefore, also, just to be particularly blunt about this: if you live in New York or Washington, you’re more likely to lose your columnist job, or lose your job speaking on television, or not have your book sales be as good, because of a person to your left in New York or Washington.

But in the real America, your competitors are actually more on the right. There are more people on the right. The threat to democracy is coming from the right. The canceling is being done by Republican legislators, not liberals on Twitter. And we can’t have a discourse—what’s actually happening in America—because the people who shape the discourse live in three places that are not like America. No mayor representing the DSA will get anywhere close to winning the electoral majority in Louisville, Nashville. These are the liberal places in the blue areas, forget about the conservative areas.

So having Zohran be so prominent is useful, but having politics discussed nationally based on people who can vote for Zohran—Andrew Cuomo will be the most liberal person in Kentucky in many races. And so the idea that he’s the conservative tells you all you need to know, in some ways.

Podhorzer: Yeah. One thing, to go back and also end up coming back where you are, like, when you were talking about electability, and to also pull back, having been doing politics for as long as I have and, like, remembering the ‘60s and ‘70s—my sense is that, when you put aside, like, a David Duke or someone who had some personal scandal as the reason that people within their party are saying they’re unelectable, the sort of generic unelectability argument is almost always because the person saying it objects to that candidate’s positions, but knows that those positions or ambitions, whatever, are in fact in line with what their party’s voters want.

And so they can’t say that they’re against them on substantive grounds, because it exposes them to being out of step with what’s the mainstream of the party. And it takes away the—it’s a kind of status hoarding, where if you can position yourself as a judge of that, as opposed to being part of the debate about what Democrats or Republicans should be, then you’re always on the high ground punching down, right? Which is what we’re experiencing.

And the interesting thing was that a lot of this was aimed when Ronald Reagan was trying to run for president, right, as someone who really was in step with the Republican Party voter base, but was an insurgent against what was then the mainstream Republican Party. And interestingly, that was the birth of what they called the 11th Commandment, which is you don’t say anything bad about fellow Republicans, and that held for a long time.

And there’s no movement afoot on the Democratic side for that kind of thing. But I think that’s an important thing to unpack, because, again, like, if someone was accused of Me Too, or if they embezzle, like, electability is a legit thing, right? But when it’s not, it’s really someone saying, I don’t want you because of your positions, but I’m not going to say that, because then people are going to agree with you.

Bacon: Where we might disagree, Michael, is—I agree that electability is an ideological weapon. I just don’t agree that fighting it should be done based on ideolo—I think it has to be fought directly.

Podhorzer: That’s what I’m saying. The answer to someone who says so-and-so is unelectable is to move the conversation to just why, right? Because usually they’re just hand waving, right, saying that they’re too left or they’re too liberal or something like that. Exactly how, right?

Bacon: No, I’m saying something much worse than that. I’m saying, in 2019, Senator Warren should have flown to Wisconsin and given a series of speeches—they were aimed at Nate Cohn and not humans. Whatever. Nate Cohn is a human, but were aimed at pollsters and so on, to lay out, here’s the electoral map. She should have done interviews with Ezra Klein. If AOC actually wants to be president, I would advise her to spend less time thinking about policy and more time thinking about how to appeal to numbersy white guys and show—

Podhorzer: Oh, yeah.

Bacon: —that’s what I. And but, like we’re saying, yes, but these people keep refusing to do this. I’ve been saying this for six years now. If a progressive wants to win the nomination, there’s going—we cannot keep saying electability is fake, and it’s a tool.

Podhorzer: Yeah, I totally agree with you.

Bacon: And now, would you like to win, or would you like to lecture me about why electability is bad? Because I’d like you to win, and I’d like you to try. And Hong might not be a perfect example of that, but in that 10 days when Tony Evers was saying she can’t win, the only thing she should have done in those 10 days was to show up in some swing county, Wisconsin, and say, I can win the election. I will win over cultural conservatives and turn out the Black vote, and whatever she said.

I don’t care what she said, as long as she gave a compelling case for winning. That was the most important thing, and I don’t remember seeing her do that.

Shenker-Osorio: I don’t know. I think—

Bacon: In a strong, compelling way, in a clear speech. Go ahead, sorry.

Shenker-Osorio: Yeah. I think a lot of things happened in those 10 days, and there was a concerted effort in the media, which we’re going to come to, to lift up past statements that she had made to sort of make her answerable for things that—do I wish we weren’t talking about the celebration of Thanksgiving?

Yeah, that was all unhelpful. There were ways to address that, but it’s easier said than done. I don’t know. I think she was trying—maybe not to your satisfaction, maybe it didn’t break through.

Bacon: I gave you, Elizabeth Warren’s a better example, because she had a whole year to do what I’m saying and didn’t. And is very prepared, and still didn’t think she’d had to overcome this. Anyway, sorry, I’ll stop.

Shenker-Osorio: Yeah. I think, Mike, you brought up the Reagan example—I am old enough to remember when Trump was unelectable. That was felt very—

Podhorzer: And he wasn’t elected.

Bacon:, I think many people are electable. Just, like, one wing of one party says no, is always saying this all the time. Anybody can win, that’s what I think, but in general, yeah.

Shenker-Osorio: Yeah. I don’t know that I have deep meaningful things to add. I just, I agree with both of you that it’s an ideological masquerade, making believe, and an unwillingness to actually talk about issue differences.

Because if you were to, then voters would actually find out that somebody wants you to make more money and have a less shitty life, and someone wants to keep you having a shitty life. And if people were to find out about that, maybe they would like nicer things, and for billionaires to finally pay for them.

Bacon: Let me come to the media thing, because I do want to talk about that, which is—it’s not just that Kaitlan Collins, when she was interviewing Francesca Hong, focused on Thanksgiving tweets. That makes sense to me, and that’s, CNN’s going to, quote unquote, “objective network” and so on.

I have been struck by, when Morning Joe and Pod Save America, when they have progressives on too—I think Pod Save America and Morning Joe want Democrats to win, I think, as far as I know. But when they have progressives on, they tend to lead with the, DSA says you want to abolish prisons and abolish— and they go through this whole list. I don’t know how helpful it is to say, “Do you—” the questions imply, Here’s a bunch of crazy things other Democrats believe. Do you believe these things too?

I can’t imagine Angie Dixon, in her national moment on TV, probably wants to talk about things that matter to Floridians every day. Even if she agrees with abolishing the Senate, which I’m for, that’s probably not the most relevant issue in the next two or three months. So if I’m a left-leaning outlet and I want to help Democratic candidates win, I don’t think asking them to disavow DSA policies is the best tactic. But I think this is a sincere effort to help them, because the idea is, you can seem normal on national television. But I actually don’t think that helps that much.

Podhorzer: And, one more note—did either of you see the New York Times Magazine interview with Zohran Mamdani?

Bacon: That’s mostly more hostile media, but anyway, sorry. Go ahead.

Podhorzer: No, but, no surprise, he handled that question so well. And should basically be, like, the training video for everybody who gets on one of those things. And he’s, like, saying this back to the Times, and they’re really trying to get him. It’s like, Hey, I’m a Democrat. I belong to the DSA, I belong to other organizations. Let’s just talk about the issues, right? Why are you presuming that, like, I’m their operative?

And, like, he didn’t have to disavow them, and he made it really awkward for them. Because you can watch it in real time. Because the interviewer didn’t see that coming, right? And anyway, but it showed that it can be disarmed. So it’s not just what the people at CNN decide to do, it’s folks who are getting interviewed being smarter about it and moving with it. Were you going to go to—go ahead.

Shenker-Osorio: I was going to come back to Kentucky, just to be a good hostess.

Podhorzer: Have you been there to come back to?

Shenker-Osorio: I absolutely have been there. I’ve been to Louisville. I have been to the Ark Experience in northern Kentucky. So boy, have I been.

Bacon: Not as proud as that. I wish you said you went to the Derby, or saw college basketball, or went to a bourbon tour, or something like that. Anyway, all right.

Shenker-Osorio: We’ll talk about the Ark Experience at a different time.

Bacon: Please.

Shenker-Osorio: So Andy Beshear recently did the disavowal, non-disavowal, I would argue, really beautifully.

Bacon: Oh, he did a good one. He did a bad one too recently, but anyway—what’s the good one? I’ll be curious, yeah.

Shenker-Osorio: That’s sort of him, though, right?

Bacon: Yeah.

Shenker-Osorio: It’s like, wow, yes, and then, ugh, and I don’t know what’s going on for—

Bacon: I have a theory about that. I’ll come back to it. But anyway, yeah.

Shenker-Osorio: I want to hear your Andy Beshear theory. The one I’m referring to, which I hope is different than the one you’re referring to—as opposed to us being Siskel and Ebert for a moment and having a different evaluation of the same movie. He basically was like, Look, like, I have my views, this other person has their views. We don’t agree on everything. Here’s what we do agree on. We do agree that you should— I’m not quoting him verbatim, but in essence, like, We do agree that you should be able to put food on the table. We do agree that this bag of regimes is entirely corrupt. We do agree that—

And he just was like, Yeah, we don’t agree on everything. Here’s what we do agree on, and they’re all things that, you know, the majority of people desperately want. And I thought that—it’s a variation on the Mamdani thing that you lifted, Mike. I thought he did it really—

Bacon: Four days earlier, he was on MSNBC and said socialism is an outdated ideology, and went through trashing it. So I think he got blowback and gave a better answer. That’s what I—I saw the clip too. He has moments. What I’ll say is, when he was running for governor of Kentucky in 2019 and 2023, living here, I can tell you I’m to the left of him on probably many issues, but he rarely said anything I disagreed with, because he didn’t go out of his way.

He doesn’t do the Joe Manchin, Let me show you how—let me punch left to show you how moderate I am. He rarely did that. He just talked about jobs and schools, and I’m Christian, and I love God, and that, and this. But he rarely thought to attack the left was useful, because there are enough progressives here. And also the thing Anat says all the time—he wanted the chorus to be talking about him.

People who are very left-wing in Louisville will be like, I love Andy Beshear. He’s not a socialist, but he’s a great governor. He stands up for us. He vetoes anti-trans bills. He’s not Mr. Climate Change, but he stands up for us, and we love him for that. And people really appreciated him.

My concern right now is that he’s now running for president, and I think his perception, perhaps correctly, is that the first primary is the sort of center-left donor primary. And to win that—and he’s not rich—to win that, you probably do need to trash the social—he’s competing with Josh Shapiro and 19 other white guy governors, and for that, I worry. I think Andy Beshear actually knows, to win the primary and to win the general election, you need to have people to his left be enthusiastic about him. I think he knows that because he did that here.

So I don’t think he’s unaware of that, but I do think he has to prove to these sort of, the donor types who hate the left more than Trump some days—I do wonder if he’s around those people a lot, and now hearing socialism is bad and Zohran is terrible and repeating that stuff, because he’s now in the fundraising. These governors are now in the—would-be candidates, if you’re not AOC or Ro Khanna, you’re mainly in that donor community trying to figure out who’s going to fund your campaign, and those people are more outraged by Zohran than Trump most days. And so I wonder if he’s around that crowd too much right now. That’s my concern.

Podhorzer: Yeah. I want to go back to something really important that you touched on that we got pulled on, which is about what’s being done to higher education—in terms of the whole, like, just what we can’t talk about, and all of that stuff is a big problem. And connect it to something—I don’t know exactly what you’ve written, but something we’ve talked about a lot, in terms of the kinds of pundits and sense makers and people who are telling Democrats what to do, and all of that over the last six years. Especially as, like, now there’s this whole thing about woke 1.0.

Coming off of the 2020 election, when red state legislatures started passing all these different kinds of terrible voting bills, when DeSantis and others were doing the anti-CRT stuff, and there’s that backlash—by and large, the smart crowd was, on the one hand, like, talking about how, Don’t worry, you can’t really suppress the vote,” or “Don’t take the bait, it’s really just messaging stuff. And not being able to see that it was creating the predicate for what we’re experiencing now, which is, like, under the guise of DEI, basically firing every woman and person of color who’s a general or wants to be, just across the board, right?

But it was not just that there was that effort to arrive at the point we are, it’s that for the most part, this crowd was telling us that we were being counterproductive if we were calling it out, right? That, like, it was just, Oh, those silly people who stormed the Capitol, you can’t pay too much. Oh, look at all these academic studies that say, oh, you can’t really suppress the vote, don’t worry about the elections.

And we’re at a moment where they should be categorically discredited for that perspective, and I haven’t seen a single one even acknowledge that they had any connection to basically tearing down the defenses against this massive regression.

Bacon: In fact, I would argue the leading progressive endorsed their point of view essentially—when I think the woke one was crazy comment was actually really problematic, invoking the language of the right, however she framed it. When I call things crazy, I’m usually not praising them.

And so I just thought that comment encapsulated, six years after these massive protests about something important, that we are now having advocates, leading figures in that, say it was crazy, and so that was problematic. But I want to distinguish between two different groups here, I think. I thought 2021 and ‘22, I was like, every other column, Can you believe what’s happening in the South? They are banning us from, like—hair on fire.

I think Joe Biden sincerely believes in racial equality and so on, and sincerely thought Barack Obama had this backlash, on some level, because he’s Black. Hillary had the backlash, she’s a woman. I, Kamala, would not be popular, because she’s a Black woman. I, Mr. Old White Guy, go to Catholic church every week—if I talk about jobs and infrastructure and boring shit till the end of time, I will be popular, I will restore democracy, Republican voters will vote for me.

I didn’t think that was correct. I thought that ignored lots of research and political science evidence, and was deluded, and kept trying to tell his staff—but I think that was believed sincerely by Joe Biden, and just wrong. I would categorize a lot of the pundit types we’re talking about, New York Times columnists, FiveThirtyEight editors, et cetera, et cetera, as in a different place, which is like which is, they were opposed to some of what was happening. And so you saw, when the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action in colleges, you saw some of these people admit, Actually, I was basically for that. I was against affirmative action, and I was for that decision.

So their view was like, 2020, and the 2014 to 2020, was too much wokeness, too much diversity and inclusion, too much focus on systemic inequality on gender and race. And so they may have not wanted 2025, where Donald Trump is, like, defunding colleges, but they certainly wanted something to the right of 2020, decidedly maybe to the left of 2025. And so on some level they were doing political analysis and saying, The Democrats are losing because they went too far to the left on racial issues.

The Democrats, of course, won the 2020 elections and won a trifecta. What their actual view was, I opposed the way the left and progressive spaces in New York, in San Francisco, how progressive they were on race and on gender, and how Black people got promoted into jobs I wanted, and that couldn’t be stated as easily.

And so we ended up with this sort of, like, backlash to 2014 to 2020 that was, like, endorsed by prominent liberals and Democrats and so on. I think that’s what it is. But I would separate the sort of—I do think Joe Biden himself was not necessarily resentful of 2020, but genuinely thought the politics of unification could work.

Shenker-Osorio: Can I go in deeper on this media thing, because it’s just too—because you’re here, Perry. And we want the tea, we want the dirt, we want to know what it looks like backstage. Like, I feel like one encapsulation of the way that the media covers—waves hands—all of this, is often positioning Democrats as actors and Republicans as reactors, as if everything Republicans do was merely a response to a Democratic overreach. And I think, Mike, you brought up CRT, so I’ll use that, because I think it is probably the canonical example.

The number of people who were thinking about critical race theory before Chris Rufo decided to make people think about critical race theory, outside of the storied academics who are, like, doing interesting legal scholarship around it, was precisely zero. People did not know what that was. They had not heard of it. And I would even say, in the focus groups—I refer to this often—that we do every single month, and have been doing since the end of 2020, when you ask people, What is your biggest beef with Democrats? the number of times they volunteer pronouns, or they volunteer CRT, or they volunteer trans sports, is zero.

You can make them do that. You can lead them on that merry chase, but the things that upset them are the things that you would think upset them, which is basically, they don’t seem to do anything. They don’t seem to actually improve my material conditions. They also seem corrupt, et cetera.

And so what is this impetus, if you agree with my diagnosis, where everything is—and I’m exaggerating for comedic effect, hopefully—where everything is caused by Democrats and Republicans are, like, reacting to it, or voters are reacting to it, instead of explicitly lifting up what Republicans are saying and doing, and how they manufacture topics and controversy and so on. What is that?

Bacon: Part of it is this. I’m obsessed with this geography issue, because it really matters, and I’m going to just, coming together, come back to it again. There was a piece in 2023 in The New York Times, and they were like, it’s not clear what the Republican agenda is, and they quoted John Thune and four of the Republican congressmen and a couple Republican governors.

And I was like, if you look at the 20 Republican states, they all pass the exact same bills every session. Abortion ban here, trans ban here, CRT ban there, massive tax cut. So all you have to do is look down—there’s a very... And then when Donald Trump in 2025 became president, they passed the exact same agenda federally.

So I do think part of it is just purely, the Republicans, I think smartly, a lot of their agenda is executed by state legislators, governors, and judges, the Supreme Court and the lower courts. So on some level, I think journalists—Donald Trump does stuff, I’m not denying the obvious here. But on some level, the Republicans have smartly distributed how they do power. Think about how many, just in a media sense, there’s a huge media assigned to cover Congress and follow around Susan Collins and ask if she’s voting for whatever Trump did that day. I’m not saying that stuff is not important, but the Texas and Louisiana legislators pass these huge sweeping bills all the time and have four people covering them combined.

And so in certain ways, I do think that is part of it, is, like, the agency—the Republicans who are actually doing stuff with lots of agency, who are passing the CRT bans, are random Republican legislators. Even though if you have 1,000 Republican legislators vote for a CRT ban, that’s a lot of people doing stuff, but the media is not—think about the last Thomas Friedman column about a state legislator in any state.

And I think that gets to a part of it, is, versus the Democratic Party—and this is a flaw, is, I would argue our trifecta states don’t do enough. There’s been a controversy about how Gretchen Whitmer was vetoing some bills that the legislature passed in the majority. I don’t feel like we have to beg our—Newsom, and Hochul, we have to beg them, Can you guys do stuff, since you have power? Greg Abbott is not being begged to do stuff. Ron DeSantis is doing stuff.

And so there is a media agency problem, but I do think it’s worth thinking about, part of what’s going on is, the Republicans that are the most strategic are the ones who are not being interviewed each day. John Roberts does not get—John Roberts has done a very effective job moving the country to the right. He does not give a lot of interviews discussing his political plans, and that is probably pretty useful. John Thune does, but John Thune’s is not very tactical or effective, and it doesn’t really matter that much.

Podhorzer: Yeah. So is that, like, a really mean trick question to see if either of us would admit we’d ever read a Tom Friedman column?

Bacon: I used to, I’ll confess. No, during the Gaza War, I read a fair amount, because he actually is very informed about Israel and Palestine. So I haven’t read it. So, yes.

Podhorzer: Yeah. But I think one of the things, though, a couple things on what you were saying: first is, I don’t know that I give Republicans credit for being clever about where they’re getting this done. I think it is just, these are the only places they can win elections and get it done.

Bacon: But they do get a lot done in the places they run, and I would—

Podhorzer: No, that’s what I’m saying.

Bacon: —be concerned if the Democrats—

Podhorzer: But I’m saying, it’s not like they are saying, “We’re only going to talk about this agenda in our states, right? They’re talking about it everywhere, which is why they’ve marginalized themselves as a party in much of the rest of the country. And in that brief moment after the 2010 election, when Scott Walker got elected, when Rick Snyder got elected, they were trying to do the same thing in those states, right?

We had the Flint emergency manager. Like, all of it, like, they were pedal to the metal doing the things they’d been successful at in, like, their solid states. So I think it’s just, we only see it there because everywhere else it’s taken them off, like, the ballot for general elections, right? And—

Shenker-Osorio: But—

Podhorzer: Sorry.

Shenker-Osorio: No, I was just going to make another point in Perry’s geographic analysis column. I was going to issue him a point, but I don’t want to cut you off.

Podhorzer: No, go ahead.

Shenker-Osorio: Just to state the obvious: Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries live in New York, which is, as you noted to us, and I think we were aware, a media center. And Mike Johnson and Mitch McConnell doesn’t live anywhere anymore.

Bacon: I was going to say that, but you got there before I did, yes.

Shenker-Osorio: He doesn’t live anywhere, but he is whatever he is in—

Bacon: In Kentucky, whatever he’s doing.

Shenker-Osorio: Yes.

Bacon: Whatever his status is.

Shenker-Osorio: It’s not in New York. And Thune—yeah, back to your geographic point, if part of the contours of this issue are that the media is covering what Democrats say and refusing to cover what Republicans do—

Bacon: Yes, that’s what I was going to get.

Shenker-Osorio: —it’s because that doing is falling outside of, as you were saying, media centers, because that is, as Mike was saying, where they have power and control. And the saying is falling inside of major media centers, because that is where Democrats have neither power nor control, but titles. It is where they have titles. That makes sense.

Bacon: In New York they have power. They don’t use it, but they have power.

Shenker-Osorio: Yeah. Same with California. I think one of the extraordinary things about working in Minnesota as long as I have is watching them, with a one-vote majority hustle and get themselves 22 pieces of legislation in basically no time. And, granted, it’s cold there, so they have to move their bodies more, and maybe that’s the entire explanation. But I’m joking, Mike. And for those of us in blue trifecta states, and having had them for a while, New York and California—like, where’s the hustle, yo?

Bacon: You made this media point that I want to come back to, which is—I think about the Harvard president, and how The New York Times ran—that’s, like, the prototypic example of that. That was a story that the Harvard president is accused of not doing enough about the anti-Israel protests after October 7th. Then there’s this thing about maybe she didn’t cite enough things in her thesis, and they write story after story about that, and eventually she resigns.

That’s the kind of story where it’s like, the power of the media is not to tell you what to think—obviously Ronald Reagan and George Bush and Donald Trump would never have become president if the journalists got to vote, because the journalists are not for those people. But the media does control what people think about, and we can make something a big story. And the fact that The New York Times made the presidency of Harvard, and what she may have done in her thesis, like, front page news day after—that’s the best example I can think of, like, where the media coverage was so out of bounds.

That was, like, a campaign to get her fired that succeeded, and that would not have succeeded without the nation’s biggest newspaper, a newspaper not based in Boston. It was not a local story. It’s local for them because half their staff went to Harvard, but it’s not local in any sort of real way.

And so, having that happen that way, versus no one in Louisville—that never made the Louisville local news. I’m not sure if it made ABC World News, which my mom would watch. It was purely a New York Times, MSNBC. It wasn’t even covered in The Washington Post that much. That’s the kind of thing where it’s like, there’s where the media power is, and why would The New York Times decide to weigh in there?

That’s not a Republican-Democrat story, but I do think that’s a—The New York Times had, has, more of a pro-Israel position, I think, at that point at least did. Claudine Gay, as the Black president of Harvard, had become a symbol of the DEI has gone too far, and that was a position that The New York Times held, even though that’s not necessarily a Republican—even though The New York Times isn’t Republican, that was just something they held. And so that’s the place where it’s like, here’s where the media has decided, yes. And it’s not like Claudine Gay wrote her thesis last week.

They decided, for whatever reason, that Chris Rufo acted like that was the case. They made him their—his assignment their—and those are the places where, like, that’s the story where you can take off the sort of partisan hats and think about, what kind of media covers Claudine Gay like it’s the most important story in the world? That’s the media you want to change.

Podhorzer: So, yeah. We’re getting close to the end, but I wanted to pull a couple things together. One—and you may have followed this more closely than I did, and I’m pulling sort of other things to inference on this, but my sense, like, on Claudine Gay, was that it’s much more about disciplining universities about Gaza than it was about DEI, and that it was the trustees, and the sort of, who decided they were really dissatisfied with their university administration.

Bacon: I think that “this person might be dumb and didn’t write their thesis” thing is easier to lodge against Claudine Gay than against Larry Summers.

Michael Podhorzer: But why, right?

That why then, as opposed to some other time. The other thing that does, in a way, bring this full circle is that—when we were talking, you both were talking a minute ago about, like, blue trifecta states, right? I think, and you said you’re experiencing this every day, like, where you live.

But to me, like, blue trifecta states are profoundly different from red trifecta states in one important area, which is that there’s still substantive electoral competition, right? The fact that Republican primaries in blue states are the remaining wackos who call themselves Republicans means that the primary races are between the people who used to be electable Republicans but now have to run as Democrats. And we saw it actually happen in the world, like when Arlen Specter left the Republican Party to be run as a Democrat in Pennsylvania, right?

But a lot of the folks—and I think this is in some ways counterproductive, because it doesn’t really acknowledge that there isn’t one blue, and that there are real stakes. There’s, like, factions within these states that, like, confuse us, because they’re both wearing Democratic jerseys, and therefore you think, wow, that other person is a bad blue team member because they’re doing it. And that’s only because you’re not acknowledging that the Republican Party in the North has to wear blue jerseys.

And I don’t think the same thing exists anymore in the South, where maybe someone’s a little more extreme in a primary fight, but not as profoundly in disagreement with abortion bans, or with trans, or with the sort of pillars of what’s become the orthodoxy there.

Bacon: Or, to put it in terms you might—I wish I had said this before—is that it might be, in blue states, the core fight is between, I don’t want to be too reductive, but corporate Democrats and non-corporate Democrats probably gets you most of the way there. And in some ways those are, like, in Massachusetts, for example, which is a one-party state, they have very intense battles over policy, and it’s always between who—the donor-funded Democrat or the non-donor-funded Democrat.

And so on some level, the blue states can’t pass a lot because people with Ds on their name are not really in the same agenda. And I agree, in red states, we just have the Republicans who love Trump extra a lot, and the ones who under-like him two times a lot, and there’s not a lot of—like the sort of the Mitch McConnell Republicans, which I used to refer to almost as people who were pro-immigration and pro-diversity, because Mitch McConnell in iterations of his life.

The history of Mitch McConnell is, Mitch McConnell spent a lot of time promoting this guy named Daniel Cameron, who ran for governor. Mitch McConnell used to care about diversity, and used to really try to promote making more Black people in the Republican Party, and used to really—because he used to be pro-immigration, pro-diversity. There were certain issues. There’s a center at the University of Louisville founded after Mitch McConnell, who used to be very much for education, and used to be very promoting of higher education.

There used to be a kind of Republican that is now gone, and there was an ideological difference between those people. What Marco Rubio was in 20—he’s conservative, but what he was in 2015 was different than what Cruz and Trump are now. And so I think that is an important distinction, and probably why, yes, blue states are actually having a real policy fight between the, yeah, the Gavin Newsoms and the Zohrans.

Podhorzer: Yeah. And it’s not just—it’s not, the important thing for people to understand is, it’s not because Gavin is in some way disloyal to what Democrats are. It’s because there’s still a fight about what Democrats are.

Bacon: What Democrats are for, yeah.

Podhorzer: Yeah.

Shenker-Osorio: I think that sort of takes us. Perry, if you have any parting words, if you want to say anything about—I don’t know, where you see media going, if there’s any bright lights at the end of this dark tunnel, if you just want to spew about The Washington Post, the mic is yours.

Bacon: I’m going to spew about the—I am happy that The Washington Post lost that arbitration case, and my former colleague, Karen Attiah—I don’t know if she’s going to actually go work back there, but they lost. They still have to give her some money, at least, and that’s a good thing, because they fired her unfairly and unjustifiably. I would say The Washington Post, as I mentioned, does some great work in the news section still. They didn’t want the columnists who were left of center, they were not encouraged to stay—but I think that the paper does some good work.

I would say that there’s a lot of great—we’re in this moment where I’ve criticized The New York Times and The Post in this conversation a couple times, and I think that the sort of mainstream CBS News, oh God, CBS News is a particularly bad example, but ABC News—I don’t think the sort of mainstream has risen to the occasion.

But I do think, if you look at The Guardian—the thing that I get up and read each morning—has done a good job. It’s not like they’re saying Democrats are good, they’re saying Trump is breaking rules, and they don’t say that scholars say Trump broke rules, or Trump may have broken rules, but some say the rules, whatever. They just say it. The New Republic, I think, is more openly liberal, but I think we’re doing some great work too. And I’m struggling, I read Drop Site News, I read—I’m struggling right now to name all the things that I read these days. I read Capital B.

But I think we’re in a moment where I encourage people all the time to spend a little less time—if you’re on Bluesky particularly, maybe the time you spent tweeting about paragraph four of New York Times story zero, Z, would be better off spent where you find a story in The Guardian, or The New Republic, or someone’s Substack, and you promote that story. We’re in 2026. People know that The New York Times, The Post, and CBS are going to do a lot of both-sides-ing. People get that.

So maybe you should promote what you want people to read, instead of saying, Don’t read this story that I’m broadcasting for you to not read. Instead, model the behavior you want to see. The American Prospect—somebody noted on the chat—a great publication. The American Prospect, David Dayen, do some great work. They do some excellent work. Great place to read about the Democratic Party in particular.

Shenker-Osorio: Yeah. That’s a great place to leave it. Tell people what you want them to do. Stop promoting what you don’t want them to do. Perry, thank you so much.

Bacon: Thanks for having me. Great to see you guys.

Podhorzer: Yeah. Take care. Bye.

A science professor says he was fired from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York, for refusing to ignore the human causes of climate change, and is now suing the institution in federal court.

Dr. Adam Kalkstein, a professor of geography, told The New York Times that the dean of West Point’s academic board, Brigadier General Shane Reeves, in a meeting last year ordered him to remove everything about human contributions to climate change, as President Trump sets the agenda as commander in chief. Kalkstein told Reeves that such a change would be immoral, and possibly illegal. When Reeves suggested Kalkstein resign, Kalkstein declined, after which the dean stormed out of the room.

“We’re only telling cadets part of the story. We’re lying to them, deceiving them. It would be like trying to teach the law without being able to even mention the Constitution,” Kalkstein reportedly said during the meeting, according to Stars and Stripes.

Six months later, Kalkstein, a tenured professor, was told his contract wouldn’t be renewed, and on Monday, he sued the institution in the Southern District of New York, alleging that his First Amendment rights were violated. The lawsuit states that the institution’s order would require Kalkstein “to omit a massive, fundamental, essential component of the court and to defy science.”

According to the Times, Kalkstein is a conservative Republican who believes military cadets need to know the truth about climate change for national security reasons rather than social justice. He wrote a letter to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth arguing that knowing the causes of climate change was important for competing over resources in the Arctic and understanding why sea ice was melting.

Hegseth, along with the rest of the Trump administration, is trying to purge “wokeness” from government and military institutions, including any acknowledgment of climate change. Early in his tenure last year, Hegseth boasted on X that “The @DeptofDefense does not do climate change crap. We do training and warfighting.”

That’s a major departure from previous administrations. In 2021, the Pentagon concluded in a report that “increasing temperatures; changing precipitation patterns; and more frequent, intense, and unpredictable extreme weather conditions caused by climate change are exacerbating existing risks.”

Those risks still exist, but the Trump administration is flat-out ignoring the science for financial and culture-war reasons. Professors like Kalkstein, and the knowledge of America’s future military officers, are among the casualties.

You can watch this video above. You can read a transcript here.

The spring and summer featured a number of primaries where progressive candidates faced more center-left challengers. TNR’s Perry Bacon discusses those primaries with progressive political strategist Anat Shenker-Osorio and former AFL-CIO political director Michael Podhorzer on their Substack show Meeting the Moment. Perry argues that progressive candidates are making a huge mistake by not forcefully addressing the electability issue and explaining how they can win, particularly in key swing states. Podhorzer argues that centrist Democrats often cast a progressive candidate as unelectable to change the subject, because voters might agree with the progressive’s policy views. The three also discussed how the media covers progressive and Democratic candidates.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWfClU_QgVE

The Iran war has gravely exacerbated the U.S. military’s advanced missile interceptor shortage in Europe.

The shortage is “beyond critical,” as supplies have been quickly and unexpectedly drained by the Iran war, according to a Europe-based U.S. defense official, as well as a NATO official who spoke with the Associated Press Thursday.

The deficit is most serious for the country’s Patriot missile interceptors, which are capable of shooting down ballistic missiles and aircraft but have been heavily relied upon during the war to stave off Iran’s Shahed swarming attack drones.

The deficit boils down to a supply chain problem. Iran’s drones are small, simple to manufacture, and cost roughly $20,000 to produce. They can be launched from almost anywhere, and use GPS to find their target. They’re typically launched en masse to overwhelm opposing defense systems.

Patriot missiles, meanwhile, cost between $3 million and $4 million per unit. An entire Patriot battery system can cost as much as $1.1 billion, including the launcher, radar, and missiles. As a result of the missiles’ enormous price tag, production of America’s highly sought-after Patriot system is relatively slow compared to its demand. In 2025, Lockheed Martin created 620 units of the Patriot missile. Iran, in comparison, is capable of producing about 10,000 drones per month, reported Reuters.

U.S. missile stockpiles were transferred from Europe to the Middle East to aid the war effort, but that has left NATO and American forces based in Europe empty-handed in the face of a potential Russian attack on the continent. The U.S. defense official told the AP that the situation could force America or its European allies “to take punch after punch in the mouth” should the Kremlin decide to launch an assault on a regional military base or nuclear facility.

European and NATO officials have warned that Russia could be in a strategic position to attack the alliance by 2030—though defense contractors have projected that America’s Patriot missile stockpiles should rebound by that point.

Russia has been involved all along: Just over one week into the conflict in March, The Washington Post reported that Russia had funneled military intelligence to Iran to assist the country in targeting U.S. forces. Afterward, Iran systematically destroyed U.S. missile defense systems across the Middle East, including radars and command infrastructure. In the early days of the war, an Iranian drone attack on a Kuwait operations center killed six U.S. soldiers and seriously wounded dozens more.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has rejected opportunities to buy tech that could have given U.S. forces a dramatic advantage in the war. Kyiv offered its expertise, as Ukraine has more experience fighting Shaheds than practically any other country, downing the same design under Russia’s flag (Russia rebranded the military tech as “Geran drones”). But the Trump administration passed.

However, the White House has expressed little public concern over the rising tensions. Speaking with reporters Thursday, Donald Trump said that he recently had “good talks” with Russian President Vladimir Putin and that he believed Putin’s “not going to be attacking.”

While Americans pay the price for President Trump’s war in Iran, he appears to be cashing in on it.

Trump made more than 1,000 dubiously timed stock trades in June, including thousands of dollars in exchanges with companies directly impacted by the Iran war, according to a CNN analysis of a filing with the Office of Government Ethics. As the war drags on, Trump’s portfolio seems to be thriving.

The filing reveals that Trump got involved with U.S. defense contractors including Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, and RTX. Although the exact amounts the president traded are not disclosed in the filing, the dates conspicuously coincide with Iran negotiations between June 12 and 24. According to the filing, Trump purchased Lockheed Martin stock on June 15 and sold on June 16, one day before signing the now-defunct memorandum of understanding with Iran. He purchased Lockheed Martin stock again on June 23, less than a week after signing the deal.

Alongside those eyebrow-raising investments, the president bought and sold energy stocks with Exxon Mobil and Chevron, each to the tune of somewhere between $1,000 and $1500, as oil and gas prices skyrocketed for consumers.

Those investments join others in Palantir, Meta, Boeing, SpaceX, Broadcom, and Nvidia, all of which are currently in business with his administration. It’s no secret that Trump has used the presidency for profit—according to his 2025 financial disclosure, he made over $2 billion in his first year back in the White House alone. His personal gains, boosted by cryptocurrency ventures, foreign real estate, and his many, many stock trades, eclipse what any of his predecessors made during their time in office.

Still, the White House claims that Trump is not personally involved in his own investment portfolio. According to spokesman Davis Ingle, there are “no conflicts of interest,” and Trump’s assets are in a trust managed by his children.

The Iran war has made life more expensive for Americans. Gas prices are higher, groceries are more expensive, and inflation has crept back up. For Trump, it’s another investment opportunity.

Six percent of Texas’s voters—over 1.2 million people—have had their voter registrations suspended, and many might not even know about it.

The designation, which means that the voter’s county doesn’t know their address or thinks they’ve moved, doesn’t stop people from voting in November’s midterm elections, but it does make the process more difficult. If a voter shows up on Election Day and their registration is suspended, they have to fill out a “statement of residence” form, and if they’ve moved to a new county, they’ll either be required to vote in their old one or be given a provisional ballot, The Dallas Morning News reported.

The suspended registrations span the whole state, but also some of Texas’s largest counties, including Dallas County, where more than 129,000 voters are suspended; 56,000 voters in both Collin and Denton counties; and over 73,000 voters in Tarrant County.

Voters have until October 5 to update their registrations and can check their status on the Texas secretary of state’s website, at a county election office, or by mail. But with a number as high as 1.2 million people, the message may not reach many voters in time—especially if they haven’t moved and it’s the fault of a clerical error.

That margin could also be pivotal in a state where polls are close in multiple races, especially the Senate, where Democratic state Senator James Talarico has a narrow edge over Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton. Texas is also cooperating with the Trump administration’s attempts to take control of elections by handing over its voter rolls. If a significant number of Texans are blocked from voting on Election Day, that could make all the difference in what the Senate looks like the next four years.

Need any more proof that Donald Trump’s pettiness knows no bounds? The president signed an executive order Thursday to rename Lake Ontario as “Lake America.”

After sparking a trade war with Canada last week, Trump turned his attention to the incredibly important issue: changing the name of a lake.

The executive order directs Interior Secretary Doug Burgum to update the geographic names to reflect the new name of the Great Lake that shares a border with Canada.

Trump: We’re going to be changing the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America. Effective immediately. It’s going to take place as sign this order. pic.twitter.com/8Ga4qycjeQ

— Acyn (@Acyn) August 27, 2026

The move is reminiscent of his first act as president, which was to change the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America.” This is what happens when a president can’t actually govern: he’s forced to revert to trolling.

“So, if you think about it, we have a gulf, and we have a lake, now all we need is an ocean. So maybe we’ll have to change the name of the Atlantic and or Pacific,” Trump said at the signing.

Trump admitted Wednesday that he’d been behind the detonated trade negotiations last week.

American negotiators reportedly revealed at the last minute that they planned to exclude medium- and heavy-duty trucks from their promise to drop tariffs on Canadian automobiles, and tried to restrict Canada’s ability to strike trade deals with other countries. Another reason that Canadian negotiators walked away was reportedly because the U.S. made what were, in their view, unreasonable demands restricting French-language product documentation.

Since then, Trump has threatened to double tariffs to 50 percent on roughly $28 billion worth of products starting on January 1. In response, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney announced a slate of retaliatory tariffs on about 700 products of up to 50 percent that will go into effect on September 8.

Earlier this week, Trump joked that he’d change the name of Lake Ontario, observing that “we don’t expect to [be] doing much business with Ontario any longer.” That’s one of the many problems with this administration: they take their jokes way too far.

But if Trump’s latest approval numbers are any indication, Americans just aren’t impressed by rage bait—not as prices continue to rise thanks to Trump’s months-long war in the Middle East.

This story has been updated.

An ICE agent accused of shooting a Venezuelan immigrant in Minneapolis in January has been released from a Texas jail with no clear indication as to the future of his charges.

Christian Castro was one of thousands of agents that descended upon Minnesota during Donald Trump’s Operation Metro Surge. On January 14, Castro allegedly chased Alfredo Alejandro Aljorna, a DoorDash driver, to the entryway of his home. Upon arriving at the residence, Castro shot Aljorna’s roommate, Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis, in the leg. Castro claimed at the time that he shot Sosa-Celis in self-defense, purporting that the Venezuelan national had attacked him with a snow shovel.

But even Trump’s Justice Department had a difficult time proving that one. In a rare reversal, the DOJ moved to dismiss charges against Sosa-Celis and Aljorna relating to the assault, and Castro was the one left facing criminal consequences. Surveillance footage of the encounter released in April showed Sosa-Celis tossing the shovel early into his exchange with the ICE agent, and Castro firing shots into the home.

By mid-May, a Minneapolis state court charged Castro with four counts of assault and one count of falsely reporting a crime, issuing a nationwide warrant for his arrest. Days later, Texas Rangers cuffed Castro in Cameron County. He remained in jail until Thursday.

But the ensuing extradition process would prove to be a tumultuous one. Defying historical precedent, Texas Governor Greg Abbott opted not to comply with the warrant and hand Castro over to Minnesotan authorities. Abbott questioned whether the agent qualified as a fugitive since Castro had not technically fled Minnesota but had rather been transferred to work in Texas by the Department of Homeland Security.

On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Fernando Rodriguez Jr. refused to force the extradition, despite fears that Castro would evade further capture by fleeing to Mexico.

“Governor Abbott still has the ability to prevent Christian Castro from walking out of jail. He can choose to stop harboring a fugitive by simply signing the extradition paperwork today,” Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty said in a statement following the decision. “If Castro walks out of jail tomorrow and disappears into Mexico, it will be the fault of one person—Greg Abbott.”

By 7 a.m. on Thursday, Castro’s detention had hit the maximum limit for a pending extradition as set by Texas law, and he was released.

Donald Trump Jr., the president’s son, wants Republican state leaders to stay away from any regulations of prediction markets. 

The New York Times reports that Trump told a gathering of GOP state attorneys general in New Orleans this spring that gambling businesses were attacking prediction markets such as Polymarket and Kalshi to protect their own “monopolies.” Prediction markets already have oversight from the federal government, Trump said, according to four anonymous sources cited by the Times. 

The message appeared clear: Back off the idea of regulating any prediction markets.

Trump was hired by Kalshi in January last year as an adviser and is on the board of Polymarket, which he has a stake in through his investment firm 1789 Capital.  

Both Republican and Democratic state governments are pursuing legal action against prediction markets, with 20 states in litigation over whether prediction markets fall under sports gambling laws. In July, 44 states signed a letter calling prediction markets a “new form of casino” endangering young people. In March, Arizona became the first state to criminally charge Kalshi for allowing people to bet on elections and “operating an illegal gambling business.”  

States are trying to recoup state tax revenue, estimated to be at least $2 billion a year according to the research group the Tax Foundation. The president, meanwhile, is encouraging prediction markets, touting the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, a small agency that oversees derivatives, as being enough to regulate them. 

Since its founding in 1974, the CFTC had never sued a state government over regulations until this year, when it sued nine of them, all with Democratic governors. In two instances, the CFTC has told prediction markets to go around court orders by invoking emergency powers. 

The issue of prediction markets will likely reach the Supreme Court, with the White House highly likely to back the businesses from facing any legal restrictions. The fact that they involve betting on political and international events has already proven to be a major problem, but that doesn’t seem to deter the Trump administration. 

President Donald Trump wants you to pretend that he’s on the ballot in the midterm elections.

Speaking in an interview aired on Fox News’s Hannity Wednesday night, Trump explained his latest strategy to get out the vote in November.

“There’s a theory that I get the vote,” Trump said. “You know, I see it all the time. ‘When Trump’s on the ballot, they win. When he’s not on the ballot, the people don’t go to vote.’ And I’m asking the people through your brilliant show, number one show, I’m asking the people to get out and vote, pretend I’m on the ballot.”

Trump on midterms: Pretend I’m on the ballot. pic.twitter.com/vLg9Pqx10S

— Acyn (@Acyn) August 27, 2026

Trump’s remarks come as he’s directed MAGA Inc. to spend his $400 million elections war chest on ads that focus not on the Republican candidates who are running for the House and Senate, but on the president himself.

But Trump’s new approach to the midterm elections only works if people actually like him—and right now, they don’t.

In recent days, Trump’s approval rating has held at 33 percent, the lowest of his presidency. A poll from Reuters/Ipsos found that Trump’s war with Iran—a conflict that has come to define the first half of his second term—is even less popular, with an approval rating of just 31 percent.

Trump may have been a boost on a ballot before, but this time around, voters are watching his record fall apart. A recent poll published by Strength in Numbers/Verasight found that Trump was underwater on all issues across the board—including border security, which is historically his best issue.

Democrats were hoping to malign Republican candidates for the House and Senate by linking them to Trump—and now those candidates won’t be able to escape him. If this is seriously the president’s best strategy, Democrats may be in for a treat come November.

“Poetry is not sexual misconduct,” writes disgraced North Carolina Representative Chuck Edwards.

The congressman released a rambling 22-page letter to his House colleagues Tuesday detailing all the ways in which he was not a creep while using his position of power to make two young women in his employ feel uncomfortable at work. The letter follows a 25-page report from the House Ethics Committee that recommended Edwards be censured following “substantial evidence” that he violated House rules related to “sexual harassment and hostile workplaces.” Backlash from the report ultimately forced Edwards to pull out of his race for reelection.

Still, Edwards attempted to clear his name with his colleagues, as NOTUS first reported. In the letter, Edwards tries to argue that what the two women reported as harassment was just chummy boss-employee camaraderie, going on to bizarrely claim that “something that could be interpreted as romantic is worlds apart from establishing an unwanted sexual advance.” [Emphasis is Edwards’s.]

“An affectionate friendship is not a sexual proposition. A gift is not sexual misconduct. A compliment is not sexual misconduct. Poetry is not sexual misconduct.

“Friendship is not misconduct,” Edwards’s letter continues. “Generosity is not misconduct. Social interaction is not misconduct. Caring deeply about colleagues who have become important parts of your life is not misconduct. And conduct does not become sexual harassment merely because someone looking backward through thousands of pages can construct a theory under which it ‘could be interpreted as romantic.’”

Among the inappropriate actions listed in the committee’s original report, Edwards paid for expensive gifts and lavish vacations; he tearfully read an original poem at one staff member’s going-away party; he hired a singer to perform Ed Sheeran’s ‘Hills of Aberfeldy’ for her on her birthday; and he sent a trove of long, gushing messages to both staffers. Edwards also regularly commented on the two women’s appearance, calling them “pretty” and “breathtaking,” including comments like, “That’s a great looking dress, I like that color, I like that texture.”

In one staffer’s testimony for the committee, she explained that Edwards ignored “the fact that [she is] a young female in politics and that [her] image is everything. And while he can navigate rumors like those that are circulating now without concern because he is, I guess, a male in politics, he had no regard for how something like this could impact my career.”

Edwards will not remain a sitting member of Congress for long, so this letter looks like an attempt to save his reputation. Unfortunately for the congressman, the evidence speaks for itself.

Poetry is not sexual misconduct. But poetry written by your boss who thinks you’re “pretty,” read aloud at your going-away party, followed by a slideshow, followed by him bursting into tears in front of your co-workers … that might cross the line.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. lied to the Senate about his 2019 trip to Samoa.

During two separate confirmation hearings last year, America’s foremost anti-vaccine activist claimed that his trek to the Polynesian island country had “nothing to do with vaccines.” Fact check: It did.

Letters obtained by The Guardian and the Associated Press, published Thursday, reveal that Kennedy explicitly informed the Samoan prime minister ahead of his trip of his intention to study the efficacy of the measles, mumps, and rubella, or MMR, vaccine.

In one such letter dated January 20, 2019, Kennedy unambiguously argued that he believed two recent infant deaths on the island were “temporally associated with MMR vaccines.”

“For most of the world, investigation of adverse health events associated with vaccines—or any pharmaceutical for that matter—is both difficult and time consuming,” Kennedy wrote. “Health information systems are rarely designed to support rapid study of associations between diagnoses and specific vaccination events.

“It is, however, known that vaccines vary both lot-to-lot from specific manufacturers, and between manufacturers for a single vaccine type,” he continued. “This makes the likelihood of adverse lot and manufacturer specific effects higher for smaller nations where all vaccines can be from a few or a single lot and manufacturer.”

Kennedy’s visit preceded a deadly measles outbreak on the island in 2019. At the time, Kennedy’s anti-vax nonprofit, Children’s Health Defense, spread rampant misinformation about the efficacy of vaccines throughout Samoa, tanking the nation’s vaccination rate from a 60 percent–70 percent range to just 31 percent, according to Mother Jones.

Up until that point, Samoa had not experienced a severe measles outbreak since 1985, when 1,095 confirmed cases were reported to the World Health Organization. But in 2019, after Kennedy’s visit, the country reported 5,707 cases of measles as well as 83 measles-related deaths, the majority of which were children under the age of five.

During his confirmation hearings in February 2025, Kennedy repeatedly told skeptical lawmakers that his visit had “nothing to do with vaccines” and was actually focused on implementing public health systems that would digitize Samoan health records.

A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services told The Guardian in a statement that “Secretary Kennedy’s visit to Samoa in 2019 was unrelated to vaccines.”

The spokesperson added that “any claim or insinuation based on these letters that Secretary Kennedy lied under oath or to Congress is not only false but outright defamatory,” despite the fact that Kennedy was not sworn in under oath before his congressional hearings.

However, that didn’t grant Kennedy the ability and free license to lie to America’s lawmakers: It’s a felony to make false statements to or conceal facts from the federal government, as detailed by U.S. Code.

So long Karoline Leavitt, we hardly knew ye—and what we did know, we didn’t like.

Leavitt will officially step away from the podium Thursday, a relief to those of us who care about honesty in government. As press secretary, Leavitt lied all the time. She parroted the president’s fake stories, conspiracy theories, and baseless accusations. She defended his lack of transparency and antagonized his critics.

To her credit, Leavitt lasted longer than almost all of Donald Trump’s other press secretaries. She held the position from January 20, 2025, until August 27, 2026, a whopping 584 days total. This would be impressive if Trump didn’t have another 877 days left to go.

But this isn’t out of the ordinary for Trump, who Leavitt claimed Thursday is his own “best spokesperson.” Over the course of his two terms in office thus far, the president has had five press secretaries—each more ridiculous than the last.

After Trump’s first inauguration came Sean Spicer, who lasted a total of 183 days. As press secretary, Spicer was inarticulate and clown-like, and after seven months, he resigned over Anthony Scaramucci’s appointment as communications director. Spicer should best be remembered as he began: touting the crowd at Trump’s inauguration as “the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period.”

(Although an honorable mention should be given to the time he literally hid in the bushes to avoid answering questions.)

After Spicer’s departure came Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who served for 711 days. Her style of defending despotism differed from Spicer’s shrillness. Instead, she focused on discrediting the press and deflecting from tough questions. And similarly to Leavitt, she departed from the podium in 2019 to spend more time with her children.

Stephanie Grisham served for just 282 days from July 2019 to April 2020, when she left to serve as chief of staff for the first lady. She later resigned, after Melania Trump refused to issue a statement condemning violence at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, and has turned into an outspoken critic of the president. Kayleigh McEnany replaced Grisham for the final 289 days of Trump’s first term—and she’s continued defending the president’s bad behavior as a host on Fox News.

Leavitt announced her departure earlier this month, following an abbreviated parental leave. (Apparently Trump wouldn’t leave her alone.) Despite Leavitt’s comparatively longer term, Trump has still managed to manufacture a mass staffing exodus from his administration.

Now Trump is hurtling toward midterm elections with record low approval ratings and without his MAGA “machine-gun” mouthpiece.

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Inside Washington

Kamala Harris has been flexing her political power in the South this year, most recently with her general election endorsement of a long-shot House candidate in Arkansas, raising the question of whether the former vice president’s goal is to rack up wins in 2026—or lay the groundwork for another White House bid in 2028.

Harris on Wednesday endorsed Democratic nominee Chris Jones, an MIT-trained physicist and minister running in Arkansas’s 2nd congressional district, which includes parts of Little Rock. It’s considered by far the most likely Arkansas district to flip blue this year, as evidenced by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s decision to add the race to its “Districts in Play” program. But that’s not saying a lot: The district is R+8, or “Solid Republican,” according to the Cook Political Report. 

The district is represented by GOP Congressman French Hill, who has held the seat since 2015. In past elections, Hill has tried to damage his Democratic opponents by linking them to women party leaders like Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton. It’s no far stretch of the imagination that he could seize on the Harris endorsement to tie Jones to any of her past statements or policies that don’t play well in Arkansas.

Jones isn’t worried. “We’re not scared, we’re prepared,” he told me on Wednesday. Hill, he predicts, “is gonna send out mailers that darken my skin, as if people don’t already realize that I’m Black.”

But why is Harris wading into an under-the-radar House race where the odds are heavily stacked against the Democratic challenger? That’s unclear for now, but Jones is not the first candidate she has endorsed in the 2026 cycle. She has endorsed at least seven other candidates for Congress. She has backed two former Biden White House officials in their primary campaigns: James Martin won the Democratic nomination last week in Florida’s 21st congressional district, and Dan Koh is vying for it in Massachusetts’s 6th next week. And last week, Harris endorsed House candidate Richard Pan in his general election campaign against Republican turned independent Representative Kevin Kiley in California’s 6th congressional district. The Cook Political Report rates the district “Solid D,” and Pan is a member of the DCCC’s Red to Blue program. 

Harris’s only primary endorsement for Senate was Texas’s Jasmine Crockett, who lost, but she has given general election endorsements to Abdul El-Sayed, James Talarico, Roy Cooper, and Troy Jackson. She also hit a bump earlier this month when her Fight for the People PAC encouraged voters to donate to Mary Peltola’s Senate campaign in Alaska. The National Republican Senatorial Committee immediately used the endorsement to attack Peltola, whose campaign then rebuffed the endorsement (Harris lost Alaska to President Donald Trump by 13 percentage points in 2024). Rob Sand, a Democrat running for governor in Iowa, also said he wouldn’t want Harris’s help on the campaign trail.

A person familiar with Harris’s strategy told The New Republic that more endorsements are slated to come out as early as next week.

Karen Finney, a Democratic political commentator who worked on Clinton’s 2016 campaign, doesn’t see this as evidence that Harris, specifically, is seen as potentially toxic. “I think that’s less about her and more about a broader environment,” in which ties to the Democratic establishment can harm some candidates, she said.

Jones, for his part, welcomed Harris’s support, saying that it affirms the success of his campaign so far and will direct much-needed resources to his race. The endorsement, Jones told me, “says that this campaign is one of the campaigns in the South that needs attention, resources—and by resources I mean media attention and dollars. Not to change what we’re doing, but to scale what we’re doing.”

Harris has been paying attention to the South lately, as has the Democratic Party more broadly. She swung through the region this summer, joining a back-to-school rally in New Orleans and, earlier, in Tennessee, criticizing the state’s redistricting effort as “backdoored racism.” Meanwhile, the DNC’s Rules and Bylaws Committee last month voted to recommend that South Carolina come first in the 2028 primary schedule, shifting power to the state’s Black voters. 

“The South gets overlooked, and particularly Arkansas gets overlooked,” Jones said. “I’m hopeful that national Democrats have learned a lesson that you cannot ignore the South.”

Black voters, particularly in the South, have lost some of their political power as a result of the Supreme Court’s voting rights decision in April, which gave GOP-led states the green light to eliminate majority-Black districts. At the same time, the decision has galvanized Black voters, who are turning out in increased numbers this midterm season. The person familiar with Harris’s strategy said that she has been very focused on areas impacted by the Supreme Court’s decision.

Finney said Harris’s endorsements in the South could further motivate voters to show up at the ballot box. “This is an area of focus for the party, and [we’re] making it clear that we are not turning our back on the South,” she said. “In fact, we are reengaging.”

Harris is popular among Democrats in the South, and broadly; she leads some very early 2028 polls. “Whether that transfers into a 2028 campaign, who knows?” Finney said. “It’s clear that she is still someone who is popular, who people want to hear from, and care what she says and care who she endorses.”

—Emma Janssen

Outside Washington

What’s in a name? Alaska voters may ask themselves that question in November, when faced with choosing between Democrat Mary Peltola and two Republicans, both named Dan Sullivan, to represent the state in the U.S. Senate.

The top four vote-getters in Alaska’s nonpartisan primaries make it to the general election. The fourth is yet to be determined. But what we already know about the race is likely causing headaches in the campaign headquarters of incumbent Senator Dan S. Sullivan. Election officials confirmed this week that Dan J. Sullivan, a fellow Republican and retired teacher, had qualified for the general election. Peltola, who would be the first Democrat to represent Alaska in the Senate since Dan Begich lost a reelection bid in 2015, holds a narrow lead in most polls, so the last thing that Dan S. Sullivan needs is confusion over his identity in November. He’s got bigger problems than a doppelgänger, after all—like Trump’s trade war with Canada, which shares a 1,500-mile border with Alaska. But Sullivan did get a boost last weekend with an endorsement from a former Anchorage mayor. His name? Dan A. Sullivan.

—Alex Shephard

The Ideas Factory

One of Democrats’ top bogeymen this century is back in the news: The Center for Media and Democracy’s Don Wiener reports that the Koch Industries, which you may recall from such hits as spearheading climate denialism, waging war on organized labor, and drowning our politics in dark money, is “also a major player in the data center building boom, with a $15-billion stake in the industry.” Edged Energy, a firm launched by Koch Real Estate Investments, reportedly owns seven data centers across the U.S. and has six more in the proposal or development stage, prompting opposition groups from Texas to Pennsylvania. 

The Center for Law and Social Policy is out with a new report, “Access Denied: The Public Health Costs of Restricting Immigrant Benefits,” exploring how President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill has cut or restricted benefits to 1.4 million lawful immigrants, while his deportation machine has created an “increasingly hostile environment” that scares immigrants from seeking the benefits that are still rightfully theirs. The report shows how this not only harms health and economic outcomes in immigrant communities across the country but affects everyone in myriad ways—weakening herd immunity, reducing SNAP dollars, increasing demands on medical providers and food banks, and so on.

—Ryan Kearney

In Closing

Here’s Why That’s B.S.  

Is it true that Dolly Parton “really liked” Trump? 

That’s what the president claims, anyway. Watch TNR’s Edie Olmsted explain how Trump’s sinking approval rating has him reaching new lows of slimy—in this case, by trying to capitalize on the tragedy of the country legend’s death this week. (This egomaniac truly makes every story about him.)

Political Trivia Question of the Day  

South Carolina GOP Senator Darline Graham just won her primary, and if she wins the general, will go from being an appointed senator to an elected one. Question(s): How many current senators were originally appointed to their seats, and who is the most recent Democrat to fit this description? (Sign up for The TNR Blue Book to find the answer in Friday’s newsletter.)

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has his eyes on his next Army secretary, and true to form, the leading candidate’s résumé includes credible domestic abuse allegations.

Sean Parnell, the Pentagon’s chief spokesperson, Hegseth’s senior adviser, and a two-time failed congressional candidate, has been pushing his own name for the job for a while. Hegseth is apparently considering it, The Hill reported Thursday, even with the accusations against Parnell.

After losing his bid for Pennsylvania’s 17th congressional district in 2020, Parnell decided to run again for the state’s open Senate seat in 2022. But he ended his campaign after losing a custody battle over domestic violence allegations. Panell’s wife testified that he had choked her, strangled her, and verbally and physically abused their children. The judge ruled that there was “credible evidence” for the abuse allegations, though Parnell denied them.

Parnell’s potential nomination comes after months of tension between Hegseth and current Army Secretary Dan Driscoll over the defense secretary’s quest to purge senior military officials and remake the Department of Defense in his own image. Driscoll is expected to leave the Pentagon as soon as Labor Day.

Driscoll is a close ally and friend to Vice President JD Vance and until recently was at the top of the list of names to replace Hegseth, should the defense secretary end up on President Trump’s bad side. Parnell, on the other hand, is likely to make Hegseth’s grip on the armed forces all the more absolute.

“Mr. Parnell has a deep bench of supporters throughout the Administration and has worked tirelessly to enable cultural change and accountability in the Pentagon,” a Pentagon official with knowledge of Hegseth’s decision-making process told The Hill. “Leveraging his extensive combat and executive experience, he will bring the accountability, change, and engaged transformational leadership the Army so desperately needs at this time.”

Parnell’s potential rise in Hegseth’s Defense Department adds his name to the growing list of men who have recently been accused of sexual assault or misconduct while they were in positions of power in Washington. That list includes Cory Mills, Max Miller, Matt Gaetz, Tony Gonzales, Eric Swalwell, and Jimmy Gomez.

Even Georgia Republicans have grown worried about Representative Mike Collins’s staffing choices.

A former staffer for the memeing Georgia lawmaker—24-year-old Preston Parra—shared Ku Klux Klan and Nazi images to his personal social media account over the summer, including a swastika comprised of the word “twink” and an image of himself clad in a KKK uniform, the hood gripped in his hand. In other posts made in June and July, Parra repeatedly used a racial slur to refer to Black people, and posted the phrase “White Power.”

Parra interned for Collins for a couple of months in 2024 before he was tapped to work as a contractor for Collins’s leadership PAC, reported The Washington Post Thursday.

A self-described political provocateur and “twink fascist,” Parra’s consulting website bills him as a political operative who can access more than 70 million followers through an “elite influencer network” for Republican causes. The website also displays multiple images of Parra next to Donald Trump, and highlights his work as a 2024 Trump surrogate.

In an interview with the Post, Parra claimed that the KKK image was artificially generated, and framed most of his posts as “satirical.” He also said that Collins was not aware of his personal X account, as it was set to private while he worked for the congressman.

“What, is there supposed to be some kind of CIA background check?” Parra told the Post.

He added that he does not identify as a white supremacist because “it goes against his religion and he has a Colombian father,” according to the Post.

“I do think that the white race contributes more to the world,” he said.

However, Parra had more derogatory remarks toward the Post’s coverage following publication.

“Let a n--ga build his twink fascist regime,” Parra wrote on X, sharing a screenshot of the article (though he wrote out the slur).

Several Republicans who spoke with the newspaper said they had become concerned by the climate surrounding the Senate hopeful.

“In the South, we have a saying: You lay down with dogs, you get up with fleas,” Debbie Dooley, an original Tea Party organizer and conservative advocate in Georgia, told the Post. “Well, Mike Collins has got a lot of fleas on him.”

Collins has faced scrutiny over his own social media habits, as well. His endless pursuit of viral moments has spurred some questionable moments, including posts that were called racist and antisemitic.

The 59-year-old also has yet to address his son-in-law’s white supremacist social media posts, as reported by CNN last month. Collins’s November rival, Democratic U.S. Senator Jon Ossoff, has argued that Collins’s silence on the issue should be “disqualifying” for a candidate seeking higher office.

Steve Bannon’s attempt to erase his criminal indictment for refusing to testify before the House’s January 6 committee was shot down by a federal judge appointed by Donald Trump himself. 

U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols on Wednesday ruled that Justice Department prosecutors didn’t have a sufficient explanation for why Bannon’s indictment should be dismissed, though he gave the government the ability to submit its request again. In February,  U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro said in the court filing requesting the dismissal that it would be in “in the interests of justice,” without elaborating further. 

In April, the Supreme Court threw out a lower court ruling upholding Bannon’s conviction, which opened the door for a trial court to dismiss the case against him. Bannon served a four-month prison sentence in 2024 for defying the House committee’s subpoena, so getting his conviction dismissed would be largely symbolic. 

Bannon fought his 2022 conviction for two years, trying to cite executive privilege as the reason for defying the congressional subpoena even though he hadn’t been a Trump administration employee for two years prior to the 2021 Capitol insurrection. He was released just in time for the 2024 election, but hasn’t been a part of the White House this time around, continuing to be a conservative commentator on his radio show. For now, he still has a criminal record.