The New Republic

The Trump administration’s Justice Department has filed 31 federal lawsuits seeking to force 30 states and Washington, D.C., to hand over their unredacted voter rolls. As of Monday afternoon, its record is 0-13.

On Monday, Judge Thomas E. Johnston of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of West Virginia dismissed the federal government’s attempt to acquire sensitive voter information from the state.

The judge, an appointee of George W. Bush, ruled that the Trump administration’s demand was legally deficient. It failed to provide a “factual basis” and “statement of purpose,” as are required by the statute invoked by the administration, Title III of the Civil Rights Act of 1960. For that reason, he wrote, the government had “failed to state a claim.”

The growing string of defeats suggests the administration is simply throwing lawsuits against the wall to see what sticks. None have so far.

In the 13 rulings against the administration thus far, judges appointed by various presidents, including Donald Trump himself, shot down his administration’s attempts to acquire voter data—which anti-authoritarian advocacy group Protect Democracy has described as “an unprecedented and unconstitutional incursion” that seeks to set the stage for “purges of eligible voters, election subversion in 2026, and the invasion of fundamental privacy rights.”

A scathing footnote in Johnston’s ruling lays bare the groundlessness of the Trump administration’s crusade: “Given the lack of an adequate basis or purpose, one is left to wonder what the real purpose was for the Justice Department to go to the trouble of filing civil actions like this one all around the nation,” the judge wrote. “Troubling though this question is, it is not before the Court at this time.”

South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster appointed Darline Graham Nordone Monday to finish out the Senate term of her belated brother, Senator Lindsey Graham.

“Today under the law, it’s my duty—and honor—to name someone to serve and replace this irresistible man, this irreplaceable man, this extraordinary man, for the remainder of his term,” McMaster said. “Lindsey took care of his little sister, in years long departed. It’s my honor to ask his little sister, Darline Graham, to finish his work for him now.”

Graham passed away on Saturday night following what his office described as a “brief and sudden illness.” The next morning, a preliminary medical report found that Graham had died from a tear in his aorta due to the hardening of his arteries.

McMaster, addressing Nordone, recalled how she broke into tears when he initially asked her to serve in the wake of her brother’s death.

“Lindsey has always been there for me, and now I will be there for him,” Nordone said at a press conference. “I think this is what Lindsey would have wanted, and I plan to honor him in this way.”

Donald Trump recommended Nordone in a post on social media Monday morning, claiming that her appointment “would be a fabulous tribute to Lindsey, who loved her dearly!”

McMaster is singularly responsible for tapping Graham’s replacement, as outlined by South Carolina law. Graham was up for reelection in November, having just won his state’s Republican primary last month. South Carolina Republicans have until mid-August to pick his replacement for the ballot.

Nordone does not bring any legislative experience to the role. Instead, the bulk of her experience has been related to disability services. According to Nordone’s LinkedIn, she worked for years as the director of public information for the South Carolina Vocational Rehabilitation Department, and currently serves as a commissioner for the South Carolina Commission for the Blind.

Nonetheless, other prominent South Carolinians have come out in support of Nordone’s appointment following Trump’s announcement. South Carolina Senator Tim Scott wrote on X that, after speaking with Nordone, he believes “there is no one better who understands Lindsey’s love for family, our state, and our country.”

Representative Joe Wilson told the New York Post that he has known Nordone “for years and she’s a constituent of mine.”

“I have faith in Gov. McMaster that he will make the right decision, but I would support the president’s recommendation,” Wilson told the Post.

McMaster’s appointment hands Nordone the power to serve out the remainder of Graham’s term, through January 3, 2027. It’s been just two days since Graham passed, but already a number of South Carolina Republicans have expressed interest in running for a full term in the seat, including Representatives Nancy Mace and Ralph Norman.

Nordone will have to settle into her new position quickly, as the coming week will require her to weigh in on several critical votes, including the National Defense Authorization Act—the preeminent funding bill for the military—and the confirmation of Todd Blanche to run the Justice Department.

The pace won’t let up through the rest of the summer, either: other major upcoming Senate duties include confirmation hearings for Jay Clayton for director of national intelligence, Erica Schwartz for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Keith Sonderling for secretary of Labor, and David Cummins to lead the Transportation Security Administration.

She will also likely take over her brother’s duties on the Senate Budget Committee, of which Graham was the chair, as a new reconciliation bill moves through Congress.

Other Senate priorities include a new Russia sanctions bill, an attempt to renew the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and yet another effort to push through Trump’s voter suppression bill, the SAVE America Act.

Nordone and Graham shared a close relationship. In a 2015 interview with The New York Times, Nordone described Graham—nine years her elder—as “kind of like a brother, a father, and a mother rolled into one.”

“Our mom got cancer and passed away, and about a year and a half later, we lost our dad too. I was just a kid,” Nordone recalled in a May ad spot for Graham’s campaign.

“He’s always been there for me, no matter what,” she said at the time.

In a CNN interview Monday, Senate Majority Leader John Thune said that after speaking to McMaster and Nordone, he believed her appointment would make “a lot of sense.”

“I’ll let the governor make an announcement,” he told the network, adding that “I think in many respects it would be a way of extending Lindsey’s legacy here and certainly something that—if that’s what they decide to end up doing—I think there’d be a lot of support for it.”

One obstacle House Speaker Mike Johnson faces in advancing the GOP agenda in Congress: Outgoing House Republicans are exhibiting a congressional variation of senioritis.

A new analysis by Bloomberg Government finds that, “overall, House Republicans who aren’t coming back next year have missed an average of 39 votes each, more than double the House’s overall average of 18 missed votes per member.”

House absenteeism is coming in large part from Republicans who lost in primaries or elections for another office. Such lawmakers have missed 60 of 595 House roll call votes, or about 10 percent, on average.

That group is made up of almost 10 lawmakers, Bloomberg notes, but it will soon grow, as Arizona Representatives David Schweikert and Andy Biggs are both vying for their party’s nomination for governor. “These reluctant retirees have missed, on average, more than triple the average votes of the rest of the House,” Bloomberg reports.

Representatives Nancy Mace and Wesley Hunt are the House Republicans who have played hooky the most. Mace, who lost her bid for her party’s gubernatorial nomination in South Carolina, has missed 105 votes. Hunt, who unsuccessfully ran in the GOP Senate primary, missed 156, but his attendance actually improved after his loss.

Bloomberg notes that these senior skip days aren’t solely a GOP phenomenon. But Republicans have evidently racked up most of them. And they are yet another thorn in the side of the House speaker, who’s dealing with intraparty strife as Republican insurgents such as Representative Anna Paulina Luna have blocked floor business in hopes of forcing certain far-right priorities.

New footage from ICE’s fatal shooting in Maine Monday morning shows the victim’s car still running in circles after they shot him at the wheel.

The Portland Press Herald released footage from immediately after the shooting in Biddeford, Maine, showing ICE agents attempting to stop the small white car. When the agents finally succeeded in opening the car door, they let the man’s body slump to the ground before putting him in handcuffs.

OMG. They still dropped him on the ground and handcuffed him after a bullet through his head. pic.twitter.com/AsKoHCkZPO https://t.co/pNKH95bryc

— David J. Bier (@David_J_Bier) July 13, 2026

It’s a gruesome scene, and an eyewitness told the Press Herald that he saw agents pull the man from the car, “bleeding profusely from the head.”

“He was talking. He said, ‘I tried to stop,’” the witness said. Other footage appeared to show agents surrounding the man on the ground in an intersection, with the car sporting several bullet holes. A young child, reportedly the victim’s daughter and no older than three years old, was at the scene crying in her Bluey pajamas, according to another witness who spoke with the Press Herald.

Immigration advocates say the man, who has only been identified as a 26-year-old from Colombia, was authorized to work in the United States and had a Social Security number. One eyewitness told Reuters that the ICE officer who shot the man said the victim tried to ram him, a story similar to those that ICE has told in previous violent confrontations.

Maine Representative Chellie Pingree and Senator Angus King said Monday afternoon that the ICE agents were not wearing body cameras at the time of the shooting. The incident has touched off protests against ICE in Biddeford, with the town’s residents marching around the city and reaching Republican Senator Susan Collins’s local office, where they chanted “vote her out.”

Protesters swarmed Senator Susan Collins’ office and entered through the front doors, chanting "vote her out,” after a young man was killed by ICE in Biddeford.

DETAILS: https://t.co/0r4yLML2Ac pic.twitter.com/XF6S5frOWK

— CBS 13 News (@WGME) July 13, 2026

Last week, ICE shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston, and claimed that he tried to ram and kill ICE agents with his car, contradicting witnesses who said ICE agents boxed in his car.

Donald Trump’s first speech after Lindsey Graham’s passing didn’t include one word about the prominent South Carolina Republican’s shocking death. Instead, the president opted to use his time before the American public to stump for an upcoming IndyCar race.

Trump didn’t seem out of sorts in the slightest Monday as he advertised the two-day August race, slated to take place on the National Mall to celebrate America’s 250th anniversary. Instead, he ribbed Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy for being named a three-time world champion in the 90-foot lumberjack speed climb, and joked with the CEO of Fox Sports, Eric Shanks, about what he predicted would be “big ratings.”

“It will be an awesome display of American patriotism and raw horsepower, ingenuity. You’re going to see cars at the level that they’ve never been at before, with cars racing more than 190 miles and even higher than that down Pennsylvania Avenue,” Trump said, pegging the event as a spiritual successor to his UFC 250 fight.

“It wasn’t exactly designed for that, but what Sean Duffy has done with these incredible, brilliant people is really amazing,” he continued. “It’s going to be a sight for the ages.”

Graham passed away on Saturday night after what his office described as a “brief and sudden illness.” The next morning, a preliminary medical report found that Graham had died from a tear in his aorta due to the hardening of his arteries.

Speaking in several interviews Sunday, Trump described Graham as “like a member of the family,” and said that his death was “very tough.” In an interview with NBC’s Meet the Press, Trump recalled that he had spoken with Graham on Saturday night after the senator returned from his trip to Ukraine, and said that, at the time, Graham had “sounded a little bit tired, but perfect.”

“It’s devastating. I thought he was fine. He called me last night,” Trump told CNN. “What a terrible loss it is. He was a great politician. He was a natural. There are very few of them.”

The president also lauded what he considered some of Graham’s finest moments as a senator, including his impassioned defense of Brett Kavanaugh when he was nominated to the Supreme Court in 2018.

“I think it was a top ten, maybe a top five, moment in the history of the Senate,” Trump told CNN. “It was an incredible display, and he did it from the heart. He felt strongly about Brett, and he did it from the heart—and it turned that whole thing around.”

But Trump was far less effusive about Graham’s legacy by Monday morning when he called in to Fox News, boiling down Graham’s 23-year Senate career to his political flip-flop after the January 6 insurrection.

“He had one bad moment, and that was on the Jan. 6 thing when he stood up [and said], ‘All right, now I’ve had it. That’s it. I can’t do it anymore,’” Trump recalled, laughing. “Then he called me like about 40 minutes later, and he said, ‘Did I really say that? I can’t believe it.’ And he took it back. So I give him a 99 instead of a 100, ‘cause most people, a lot of people are at 100, but he did have that one little moment and it was sorta funny.”

At the time, Graham said “enough is enough,” regarding Trump’s 2020 presidential election conspiracy. He quickly changed his mind when Trump returned to power.

But that was practically all Trump had to say on the matter. Fox’s hosts could barely get a word in edgewise as they tried to steer the president back towards his thoughts on Graham’s death. Instead, the president was fixated on his wildly unpopular SAVE America Act, opting to spend the remainder of his time on the broadcast complaining about mail-in ballots and California’s supposedly rigged elections.

Twelve Democratic-led states on Monday sued to stop Paramount Skydance’s $110 billion purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery, arguing that a merger of two of the country’s largest media companies would hurt American consumers.

The attorneys general of Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, and Washington joined together to file the lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The lawsuit argues that the merger will hurt the market for film distribution and give the new company too much power over the market for distributing basic cable channels.

“The unlawful merger of these two entertainment behemoths would lead to higher prices, lower quality, and less content for film and television, harming movie theaters, basic cable distributors, and ultimately, audiences on every sofa and movie theater seat in the U.S.,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta said in a statement.

If Paramount’s acquisition of Warner Bros. is successful, the company would own two major news networks in CNN and CBS News, the movie studio Warner Bros., and the streaming service HBO Max. Larry Ellison and his son David Ellison, staunch supporters of President Trump, own Paramount Skydance, and would effectively have their own conservative media empire.

The merger has also raised concerns that CNN would be overhauled to reflect the conservative political views of the Ellisons. The two Trump allies have already steered Paramount’s CBS News to the right, causing its ratings to plummet and, in the process, an employee exodus from its flagship 60 Minutes program.

Trump is very much in favor of the merger, holding a longtime vendetta against CNN over its critical coverage of him, and has discussed who he wants to be fired at the network once the takeover is complete. Other officials in the Trump administration, such as Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, have openly cheered on pro-Trump changes at CNN.

The Department of Justice said last month that it would not challenge Paramount’s move, saying it was “not likely to harm competition or American consumers.” Now that decision will go to federal court, where a judge will determine if the damage to the public breaks the law.

A federal judge just nixed the settlement underlying Donald Trump’s nearly $1.8 billion slush fund.

The fund was the result of an unprecedented deal that Trump made with himself after he dropped his $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service for the unlawful leak of his tax returns in 2019. The honey pot payments were pitched as reparations, paid for by U.S. taxpayers through the Department of Justice, to virtually any right-winger that felt targeted by the previous presidential administration.

“The nature of the suit itself and the conduct of the Parties and counsel from its filing make plain that this was an attempt to use the Court to provide some legitimacy to an agreement to confer immunity to people and entities affiliated with the President and to earmark billions of dollars from American taxpayers to redress grievances not defined in the law,” wrote U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams in a 56-page order Monday.

Williams ruled that any entities affiliated with the slush fund settlement—including the president, the Treasury Department, and the IRS—were “prohibited” from using the details of the arrangement in any official capacity. She also referred Trump’s attorney, Alejandro Brito, to the Florida bar for possible professional discipline.

She noted that while Trump had the right to pursue legal action over the unauthorized publication of his tax returns, he chose not to do so while he was still a private citizen. Instead, Trump did not bring the charges until he had returned to the White House and subsequently appointed his former lawyer, Todd Blanche, atop the Justice Department.

“These officials then negotiated on behalf of the United States, with his current lawyers, including his former White House Counsel, to reach a ‘settlement,’” Williams assessed. “It is risible to suggest that there was ever adverseness between the Parties.”

The settlement between Trump and his government also included a curious addendum from Blanche that immunized Trump from further federal prosecution. The government of the United States, Blanche wrote, would be “forever barred and precluded” from pursuing “any and all claims” against Trump, his family, or his business.

But as Williams observed, the jaw-dropping components of the case—such as the billions of dollars in taxpayer funds proposed for undefined grievances, or the blanket immunities offered to Trump—were not put before the court. Instead, the question underlying the legality of the president’s slush fund centered around whether the entities engaged in the settlement arrangement, from government representatives to Trump’s personal attorneys, ever represented different parties while they pretended to engage in a legitimate court proceeding.

“The answer is a resounding ‘no’: the Lead Plaintiff and the Government are one, a fully realized unitary interest,” Williams wrote.

That was evidenced before the nation in June, when Blanche testified before the House of Representatives that the Anti-Weaponization Fund would not be moving forward. That slip of the tongue showcased Blanche’s confidence that he could speak for, and bind, both sides of the matter, according to the judge.

“In sum, the facts before this Court demonstrate there was never adverseness between the Parties; there was never a case or controversy; and there was never a question as to who would prevail,” Williams concluded.

This story has been updated.

In the latest instance of Donald Trump’s family lining their pockets during his time in the White House, the president’s sons are cashing in on the administration’s military spending strategy with investments in defense technology.

A new analysis from The Washington Post found that investment funds associated with Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump have “invested in more than a dozen defense tech companies and other firms seeking businesses from the Pentagon and federal agencies.”

Since the brothers’ investments, those firms have secured at least $3.2 billion in federal contracts in total, as well as $3.1 billion in future contract options. Some have even gained entry to exclusive preapproved contractor shortlists and, with that, the opportunity to “bid exclusively on up to nearly $200 billion in future work.”

The companies are benefiting from a ramped-up approach to military spending, which started under Joe Biden but escalated significantly under Trump, reports the Post.

Unsurprisingly, in statements to the newspaper, spokespeople for the administration, the Trump brothers, and the defense contractors have dismissed the plain conflict-of-interest concerns raised by the story. They insist that the contracts have been awarded solely on merit and that there is no corruption afoot.

Far-right conspiracy theorists still aren’t convinced that Mitch McConnell is alive.

The Kentucky senator hasn’t been seen since June 14, when he was found unconscious in his Washington residence. For weeks, McConnell’s office has refused to provide a clear explanation regarding his absence, offering scant details regarding the 84-year-old Republican’s hospitalization.

The media blackout ended on Sunday, when McConnell’s office shared a photo of the lawmaker beside his wife, holding a copy of The Washington Post’s Sunday sports section in his lap.

“My doctors have confirmed that I didn’t break any bones or suffer a concussion. I didn’t have a heart attack or a stroke,” McConnell purportedly said in a statement released by his office. “I don’t have any tumors or hemorrhages. But I was briefly unconscious and was taken to the hospital. While receiving excellent care over the past several weeks, I’ve also had to deal with a mild case of pneumonia.”

He added that he’s since been moved to a rehabilitation facility, and while he isn’t “able to return to the Senate floor to vote quite yet,” he is still “working closely” with legislative staff.

But some figures on the far right were still not satisfied by the update, openly speculating that something was gravely wrong with McConnell.

“How come Mitch McConnell’s staff won’t release a video of him? A photo could have been taken at any time. I call BS. The American people aren’t stupid,” wrote political influencer and Trump loyalist Laura Loomer.

In a string of social media posts, Loomer further claimed that there’s “no way Mitch McConnell wrote that essay,” and questioned whether the newspaper in the photograph had been AI-generated, despite the fact that the pictured stories accurately represented the Post’s Sunday coverage.

“The text is blurry and the tag on his shirt is blurred. Also, if he’s in the hospital, why is there no IV connected to him to monitor his health?” wrote Loomer. “This is such bullshit. His staff are liars.”

Former Utah representative and Fox News contributor Jason Chaffetz also urged McConnell to get on video, writing on X: “Let’s see you say it. A written statement is far different than saying it on camera.”

Former Fox News producer Kylie Jane Kremer demanded to see the “metadata on the original photo” of McConnell, and argued online that “the public deserves clear, direct proof that Senator McConnell is recovering and able to communicate.”

“A brief, unedited video would put nearly all of these questions to rest,” Kremer said.

Trump last instituted a blockade on the strait in April, after Iran had already closed the vital passageway. The U.S. blockade wasn’t particularly successful back then, considering that Iran had the economic resources to outlast it, and ended with the U.S.-Iran memorandum of understanding last month.

Over the weekend, Iran targeted U.S. military bases in the Persian Gulf and Jordan, while the U.S. said it had attacked military targets in Iran such as missile sites, air defenses, and coastal radar. Iran says it will not come back to the negotiating table until there is a new ceasefire, although Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi went to Oman on Saturday to speak with regional mediators about the Strait of Hormuz.

Iran’s leader Mojtaba Khamenei called for revenge against the U.S. in an X post on Saturday following last week’s state funeral for his father, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed by U.S. and Israeli airstrikes at the beginning of the war in February. It remains to be seen if and when tensions will settle down long enough for negotiations to resume.

This story has been updated.

President Trump is spending taxpayer funds worth thousands of dollars to make and hang more large banners with his face on them all over federal buildings in Washington, D.C.

Democratic Senator Adam Schiff shared newly discovered federal contracts with MeidasTouch News that show government agencies putting their own budgets toward “America First” banners, which include ones of the president’s face.

The Department of the Interior made a $39,000 contract for “America First” banners with Trump’s portrait, while the Federal Aviation Administration awarded a $114,000 contract for “Freedom 250” banners. Both contracts went to a Maryland-based graphic design agency called Grafik Industries.

Using taxpayer dollars to fund government propaganda and self-promotion by public officials isn’t allowed, Schiff says.

“The Trump administration is spending hundreds of thousands of your tax dollars to glorify and pay tribute to a sitting U.S. President and his political agenda,” Schiff said in a statement. “Not only is this a terrible waste of Americans’ hard-earned money, it is clearly against the law. Congress has long outlawed spending tax dollars on propaganda and self-aggrandizement and an eight-story high Donald Trump head certainly qualifies as propaganda.”

In September, Schiff issued a report showing that Trump had spent at least $56,000 on promotional banners with his face that were later hung on government buildings, including the Department of Labor, Department of Agriculture, and Department of Health and Human Services headquarters. This is part of a pattern of Trump wanting to put his name and face on as many things as possible in Washington, D.C. and remake the city in his own image.

No matter how much money Trump wastes on his propaganda art, it won’t change the fact that his popularity is plummeting and that federal workers in the nation’s capital hate him.

A person was shot and killed Monday morning by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Biddeford, Maine, according to reports by local media outlets and authorities.

“This morning a shooting occurred in Biddeford,” Maine House Speaker Ryan Fecteau wrote in a Facebook post. “A person was killed. ICE was involved. State Police and the Department of Public Safety are now on scene to gather details and would expect the FBI to investigate as well.”

Video footage circulating online appears to show ICE agents standing around the deceased in an intersection.

This is at least the eleventh fatal ICE shooting since Donald Trump returned to office and the second in less than a week, coming just days after ICE shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston, Texas, on July 7.

This is a developing story.

Last spring, it was rumored that agents with the Federal Bureau of Investigations were trained to redact portions of the Epstein files before the documents became public. On Sunday, agency officials admitted to the scheme.

It took independent journalist and award-winning podcaster Allison Gill a year, a Freedom of Information Act request, and a subsequent lawsuit against the government to obtain evidence that the bureau had specifically trained its investigators to scrub the Epstein files clean. On Sunday, Gill received a stunning admission from the FBI confirming that the training videos—which were never released as part of the legal mandate—do in fact exist.

Numerous federal agents, from the FBI and the Justice Department, have shared their experiences of participating in the censorship effort, recounting how they would sometimes be locked in the building for 24- or 48-hour shifts to review hundreds of thousands of files and videos and photos related to Jeffrey Epstein’s child sex trafficking ring. One of the things agents were reportedly instructed to redact were mentions of Donald Trump’s name.

“They confided in me that there existed an unclassified share point site where a powerpoint deck lived, and that the powerpoint deck had training videos embedded in it, instructing them on how to find and log and mark Trump’s name and other information for redaction,” Gill said in a video report.

The bureau’s Information Management Division was predominantly tasked with censoring the documents, despite the fact that the unit has not historically been used to scrub documents for publication. So the FBI had to create specialized training videos for the agents, instructing them on how to “use an Excel spreadsheet to log Trump’s name, the page number, and the document,” reported Gill.

Even still, Trump was mentioned more than 38,000 times in the initial release of the Epstein files. His name also appeared in an FBI tip sheet listing abuse allegations, including one in which an unknown source accuses Trump of forcing one of Epstein’s victims, presumed to be 13 or 14 years old at the time, to perform oral sex on him “approximately 35 years ago” in New Jersey.

In a Sunday talk show appearance, President Donald Trump used the death of Senator Lindsey Graham the day prior as a get-out-of-answering-questions-free card.

The weekend saw the unexpected death of the Republican senator at age 71. It also saw the United States and Iran trade fire in the Middle East, reaffirming the apparent collapse of the June memorandum of understanding between the two countries.

When CNN’s State of the Union host Jake Tapper queried Trump about the latter development, the president used the former as an excuse not to answer.

“Are we back at war, and who controls the Strait of the Hormuz?” Tapper asked.

Before he had even finished the question, the president was dodging it: “Well I don’t want to—out of respect for Lindsey, I’m not talking about that. We hit ’em very hard last night, so I don’t want to talk about it, but I will say we hit ’em very hard last night.”

The president went on to allege that Iran’s leaders had been “giving up everything” during talks on Saturday before they turned on a dime, hitting “a ship with a drone.” Such rhetoric is consistent with Trump’s past attempts to portray Iran, despite the evidence to the contrary, as desperate and on the verge of surrender.

“These people, there’s something wrong with them,” Trump said of Iran, “but I’m talking about a man who had nothing wrong with him, and that’s Lindsey Graham.”

Later in the interview, Tapper tried again to get information about the war out of Trump, asking if the Strait of Hormuz is closed as Iran has claimed. But his luck was no better this time, with the president responding, “It’s open as far as we’re concerned. Don’t talk about it. Talk about the reason that you asked me to speak.”

Come Monday morning, Iran and the U.S. were both claiming to be in control of the strait.

The sudden death of Senator Lindsey Graham over the weekend makes things tougher for his fellow Republicans.

Several Senate votes loom in the coming weeks, including the confirmations of acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, Jay Clayton for director of national intelligence, Erica Schwartz for the CDC, Keith Sonderling for secretary of labor, and David Cummins for the TSA. On top of that, votes for the National Defense Authorization Act, the main funding bill for the military, are coming up this week.

Graham was also chair of the Senate Budget Committee, and a new reconciliation bill is coming up, with potential tax changes.

“The last time he and I sat down, we talked about doing the third reconciliation bill and having another big tax cut,” said Club for Growth president David McIntosh to Politico. “Lindsey was all for that.”

Other big votes on Senate Majority Leader John Thune’s agenda include a new Russia sanctions bill and an attempt to renew the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. President Trump, meanwhile, is still pushing for his voter suppression bill, the SAVE Act.

Graham also was a key intermediary between the Senate and the White House, and Trump is going to have to find someone new to fill that void who is respected in the chamber. Trump likes Senator Rick Scott, but he isn’t well respected in the chamber, one White House official told Politico, adding that “I could see [Alabama Senator] Katie Britt trying to fill that void.”

A few candidates have popped up to fill Graham’s South Carolina Senate seat, including former Representative Troy Gowdy and the state’s lieutenant governor, Pamela Evette. Gowdy has the support of South Carolina’s other senator, Tim Scott, who has reportedly been making calls around the state on his behalf. Evette is reportedly favored by Governor Henry McMaster, who under state law, can appoint a successor to fill out the rest of Graham’s term. A quick primary will be held in the coming weeks to name a new Republican nominee for the November general election.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has also emerged as a possible new senator, reportedly receiving calls to put his name forward, and Graham’s sister, Darline Graham Nordone, has been brought up by some Republicans. It will be interesting to see whether McMaster goes for a caretaker pick, or a long-term appointment. Trump could also weigh in and endorse a candidate. For now, though, Trump and Thune will want the vote of that immediate appointee as soon as possible.

Robert Siebelink was staring down the kind of ballot California specializes in: 61 people running for governor, and that’s just the top line. So the 54-year-old Democrat from California did what a growing number of Americans are doing, according to a story Jennifer Medina wrote in The New York Times on July 4. He pulled up Claude, Anthropic’s chatbot, uploaded his ballot, and asked which candidates fit his values. It helped him narrow the governor’s race down to two Democrats and talked through the strategy with him. He finished the whole thing in a half hour.

And it seems like he had plenty of company. A woman in Los Angeles County photographed her ballot and flat-out asked Claude who to vote for. A man in Baltimore told the Times that researching his last ballot ate up something like 20 hours of his life; with Claude summarizing every candidate for him, this one took an hour. Medina’s read is that 2026 might be the first cycle where enough voters do this for it to matter, and honestly, that feels conservative to me.

Now … the part the Times didn’t get into.

Three days before that story ran, the Federal Trade Commission proposed a policy declaring that AI companies that steer their chatbots toward “undisclosed ideological objectives” may be committing consumer fraud (the public can comment through July 31). Which sounds reasonable! Nobody wants a secretly ideological chatbot. But then there’s the obvious follow-up: Who decides what “ideological” means? Right now, that would be the Trump administration. The same administration that has spent the past year attacking AI companies as woke, that cut the entire federal government off from the one AI company that told the Pentagon no, and that handed the cheapest deal in its AI purchasing program to the company whose chatbot had spent the better part of a day praising Hitler a couple of months earlier.

Americans started trusting chatbots with their ballots at the exact moment the federal government finished building the machinery to control what those chatbots say. I think that’s a pretty big story! The right ran this pressure campaign against newspapers for decades, then against Facebook and Twitter. The chatbots are the next phase in a familiar playbook.

Back during the 1992 campaign, Republican Party Chair Rich Bond explained to The Washington Post why the right complained so relentlessly about the “liberal media,” and his answer was disarmingly honest: It’s the same thing coaches do to officials, where “what they try to do is ‘work the refs’” in hopes of friendlier calls later. Complain loudly enough, long enough, and the calls start going your way.

The social media sequel ran for most of a decade, which I wrote about back at Media Matters in 2020. Years of shadow-ban panic and congressional hearings about Silicon Valley silencing conservatives, all of it building to Trump signing an executive order on “Preventing Online Censorship” in May 2020, days after Twitter had the nerve to fact-check his mail-in ballot lies. Tucked inside that order was a legal theory worth remembering: If a platform moderates content in ways that contradict what it promises the public, the FTC could treat that as an “unfair or deceptive” business practice.

None of this ever required the underlying claim to be true. When NYU’s Stern Center went looking for evidence in 2021, it concluded that the anti-conservative censorship charge was “itself a form of disinformation,” and that the platforms’ algorithms often handed right-wing content extra reach. Didn’t matter. In 2025, Meta killed its U.S. fact-checking program anyway, with Mark Zuckerberg echoing the censorship complaints himself and shipping his moderation team off to Texas to reassure people worried about its bias.

And the AI version of the surrender was already underway before most people noticed there was a fight. When Meta released Llama 4 in April 2025, the announcement claimed the big AI models all lean left and bragged that the new model’s tilt was “comparable to Grok,” Elon Musk’s chatbot. I wrote about it at the time. A tech giant advertising that its AI now leans like Musk’s is what winning this play looks like.

A year ago this month, Trump signed an executive order titled “Preventing Woke AI in the Federal Government,” which bars federal agencies from buying AI models that fail the administration’s test for “ideological neutrality.” The president explained at the signing: “The American people do not want woke Marxist lunacy in the AI models.”

That same month, then–Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey sent formal demand letters to Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Meta because their chatbots, asked to rank recent presidents on antisemitism, had put Trump last. His theory was that an AI giving unflattering answers about the president might amount to consumer fraud under Missouri law.

The escalation from there moved fast. It’s like I recently described: consumer-outrage campaigns picking up state muscle. In December, Trump signed a second executive order creating a Justice Department task force with one job: suing states over their AI laws. The order also held tens of billions of dollars in broadband money over the heads of states that regulate AI, and it directed the FTC to explain when state AI laws amount to forcing companies to deceive their customers.

And when xAI sued Colorado over its AI antidiscrimination law this spring, the Justice Department intervened on xAI’s side, the first time the federal government has gone to court to kill a state AI law. Colorado didn’t wait around to lose. In May, its legislature gutted the law on its own, swapping the discrimination protections for disclosure requirements.

The FTC’s proposed policy statement from this month runs on the legal theory from the 2020 Twitter order: AI companies market their products as accurate, so steering outputs in ways users wouldn’t expect can be deception under federal law. Chair Andrew Ferguson is inviting the public to tell him about “the subversion of AI systems for ideological ends.”

The lawyers, for what it’s worth, doubt much of this survives contact with a courtroom. TechFreedom’s Andy Jung walked through why the preemption theory fails, concluding that “a policy statement simply will not suffice.” And when Judge Rita Lin got a look at the administration’s treatment of Anthropic, she called it “classic illegal First Amendment retaliation,” though the administration and Anthropic would later come to an agreement.

But the weapon was never really built for a courtroom. The Brennan Center called this last August when the woke-AI order dropped: A standard that vague works as a standing threat, and companies over-comply rather than find out what it means. Which, to no one’s surprise, is exactly what’s been happening.

And if you want proof the administration was never actually worried about chatbots picking sides, you only need to read the FTC’s own footnotes.

So I read the full statement. Nine pages of reasonable-sounding consumer protection language. Like, yes, it’s true that chatbots have accuracy issues. Of course! Then you get to the citations.

Start with its central statistic. The FTC claims consumers accept AI answers without checking them more than 90 percent of the time, and the footnote for that number points to a Forbes write-up headlined “Anthropic: 91% of Users Do Not Fact-Check AI.” The agency’s consumer-deception theory rests on research Anthropic published about its own users.

Then there’s the statement’s lone example of a company that might be “tempted” to warp its outputs for ideological reasons. The citation isn’t a study or an enforcement record. It’s a Fox News story going after a single person at Anthropic for a paper she wrote in 2023.

And xAI? Elon Musk’s company appears in the statement exactly once: in a footnote cataloging how AI companies advertise accuracy, quoting Grok’s pitch as a “truth-seeking AI companion.” That’s it. The one company with a documented record of doing exactly what the statement condemns shows up in it as an example of honest marketing!

That record? Well, in July 2025, PolitiFact put together a breakdown of four times Grok had been tweaked to align with Elon Musk’s beliefs: a system-prompt edit instructing Grok not to name Musk as a top misinformation spreader, then a May stretch where it shoehorned white-genocide claims into questions about baseball. In July came the day of Hitler praise I mentioned at the top, when Grok took to calling itself “MechaHitler” after xAI rewrote its prompt to embrace the politically incorrect. Days later, TechCrunch caught the newly launched Grok 4 searching Musk’s posts before answering controversial questions, its reasoning logs reading “Searching for Elon Musk views on US immigration.” If any company has ever steered a chatbot toward “undisclosed ideological objectives,” it’s this one.

Which leaves the rebuttal you might be forming right now: The chatbots really do lean left.

They do. At least by the measures we have.

In May 2025, a team of researchers from Stanford and Dartmouth asked more than 10,000 Americans to rate chatbot answers to political questions, and the raters, Democrats included, perceived nearly every major model as leaning left. The Washington Post ran its own version of the test last month and got similar results: Most chatbots’ answers tilted left, with Google’s Gemini the outlier, giving both-sides answers at a rate nothing else matched.

None of this is particularly mysterious, though. The models ate the internet, and English-language text online skews the way it skews. Even Meta, in the same announcement where it bragged about matching Grok, blamed the training data rather than any hidden agenda. And a decent chunk of what gets tallied as woke is often just a chatbot declining to confirm a conspiracy theory. Brookings’s Chinasa Okolo put it to NPR plainly: “Some people, unfortunately, believe that basic facts with scientific basis are left-leaning, or ‘woke.’”

So the perceived lean is real. But that’s partially the result of, as Stephen Colbert said during his set at the 2006 White House Correspondents’ Dinner, reality having “a well-known liberal bias.” What the pressure campaign wants is something else entirely: a different lean, picked by the people applying the pressure, and enforced by the federal government. These “bias” reports are a little fishy too.

First, in the Stanford study, the models perceived as the second-most-left-leaning of the eight companies tested belonged to xAI (lol). The company that steers its chatbot by hand, on purpose, toward its owner’s politics still couldn’t land on “neutral,” because neutral in this game moves wherever the loudest complaint puts it. And the complaint always puts it to your right.

If all this vocabulary feels familiar, that’s because a certain cable network spent a couple of decades branding itself “fair and balanced” while running the most nakedly partisan messaging operation on American television. The right has been defining neutral as agrees with us for longer than large language models have existed.

The people in that Times story were marking actual ballots. The political lean of chatbots could become a very real issue. It could swing elections, even.

The campaign industry knows this. Tucked into Medina’s Times story is a link to a consultant’s guide on shaping what chatbots say about your candidate. Getting your candidate a friendlier answer out of ChatGPT is a service you can buy now, the way search engine optimization was 20 years ago.

And that brings me back to Robert Siebelink, and the line of his I can’t shake. Filling out his ballot with Claude, he told the Times, felt like having an expert in his corner, one who knew everything: “We just sat down over coffee and chatted and they took notes.”

That’s the promise. An expert over coffee who has no stake in the fight and takes good notes. But who decides what the expert says? If Trump has his way, the answer is himself.

Higher grocery prices have plagued consumers for years, with President Donald Trump’s war in Iran exacerbating the spike in costs over the past several months. But what began with higher prices at the check-out counter has given rise to another worrisome trend: escalating household debt of the kind that can strain the credit of ordinary families, diminish their long-term financial stability—or leave them more vulnerable to future economic shocks.

Grocery and restaurant prices have ticked up since the coronavirus pandemic, due to exigent factors such as the war in Ukraine, Trump’s tariffs, and now the conflict in Iran. Repeated closures of the Strait of Hormuz, through which a large proportion of the world’s fuel and fertilizer are ferried, have resulted in higher operating costs for farmers, a trend that will indirectly affect grocery prices in the long term. According to recent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, prices for “food at home”—that is, the cost of groceries—increased by 2.7 percent between May 2025 and May 2026.

Although the price of eggs—a point of contention ahead of the 2024 presidential election—has decreased in the past year, other staples such as ground beef and sandwich bread have gone up. Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, said that “almost everyone has a food item that they’re focused on. They buy regularly that they use as a benchmark for the cost of living and their financial situation.”

“The war is just exacerbating all the angst around,” said Zandi. “It’s a real problem financially, but also it’s being supercharged in the minds of people because people are really focused on the cost of food and groceries.”

Even if the Trump administration returned to its brief truce with Iran, the consequences of the conflict will be long lasting. Zandi predicted that the cost of oil will remain high for the next several years, even with producers seeking ways to bypass the Strait of Hormuz.

“There’s no going back on energy costs, at least not in the next couple, three, four years,” Zandi said. “I think we’re all going to be paying a lot more for energy, and that will translate into higher costs for everything, obviously including groceries and food more broadly.”

Higher grocery costs can lead to people using payment methods that threaten their financial stability down the line, such as relying on credit cards or cutting into hard-earned savings. A new report by the Urban Institute found that more than one in four working-age adults used credit cards to pay for groceries, and experienced difficulties with repayment. Moreover, between 2023 and 2025, there was an uptick in the share of adults between the ages of 18 and 64 who reported using credit cards to buy groceries and not always being able to meet the minimum repayment amount.

“If that debt burden becomes large and really difficult for them to manage and repay effectively, it can constrain their ability to meet their day-to-day needs in the future without experiencing hardships,” said Kassandra Martinchek, a senior research associate in the Tax and Income Supports Division at the Urban Institute and a co-author of the report. Other analysis by Martinchek previously found that credit card delinquencies increased by nearly 40 percent between 2022 and 2024, when food prices spiked.

This is a struggle felt by some portion of wealthier Americans. Although low- and moderate-income adults were more likely to report using a credit card for groceries and not being able to make repayments, the new report found that around 4 percent of high-income adults said the same.

The data also shows that around one in 10 adults used “buy now, pay later” options to pay for groceries, and one in 20 used cash from a payday loan to purchase food. Perhaps most notably, nearly 20 percent of working-age adults drew down on savings not intended for daily expenses to buy groceries. Adults who reported an increase in grocery prices were more likely to use savings not intended for daily expenses for purchasing food, and more likely to experience repayment challenges when using credit cards for groceries.

There are other factors that could contribute to higher costs of food in the long term. The rise in prices come amid dramatic changes to the social safety net, including sweeping cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. Republican legislation approved last year tightened SNAP work requirements, and pushed a share of the cost of benefits onto states. The implementation of this latter provision over the next several years could result in states reducing benefit amounts or further restricting SNAP eligibility.

There is some evidence that losing SNAP benefits could lead to greater credit card expenditures on food. A 2025 report co-authored by Martinchek found that the end of pandemic-era “emergency allotments,” which increased a participant’s benefit amount, resulted in SNAP households putting roughly 24 percent more of their grocery bills on credit cards.

Martinchek said that paying for groceries with a credit card was not inherently a sign of lower financial insecurity. Some people may use this payment method to earn credit card rewards, for example. The risk comes when people pay for groceries using credit, but cannot repay their credit card debt all at once.

“Credit can be a lifeline. It can definitely help families smooth when they experience disruptions or aren’t able to meet their daily needs. But relying too much on this can sacrifice their current financial stability, and their future financial stability.” said Martinchek.

It’s hard to remember it now, now that Donald Trump’s dominance over a supine and gutless Republican Party has extended for more than a decade and still shows few signs of abating, but when he first entered politics, Trump did encounter some opposition within the GOP. After all, he had 15 opponents for the Republican nomination for president. One of those, then-Texas Governor Rick Perry, gave a tough speech in Washington about a month after Trump descended his escalator that included the following words and phrases: “barking carnival act”; “cancer on conservatism”; “toxic mix of demagoguery, mean-spiritedness, and nonsense”; “the modern-day incarnation of the know-nothing movement.”

John McCain, then in the twilight of his career but still a commanding voice in the party, said that Trump had “fired up the crazies” with the way he spoke about immigrants. This led to Trump’s infamous attack on McCain at an Iowa candidate forum when he said McCain was no hero: “I like people who weren’t captured.”

This comment in turn invited criticism from some who’d been mostly silent to that point, including the current secretary of state (“it’s not just absurd, it’s offensive, it’s ridiculous,” said Marco Rubio). But no one hit Trump harder than McCain’s great pal Lindsey Graham. The South Carolina senator, who died over the weekend at age 71 of “a brief and sudden” illness, went on CBS This Morning on July 21 and said: “I don’t care if he drops out. Stay in the race, just stop being a jackass … I’m looking for him to be a responsible member of the 16-person primary and stop saying stuff like this. The world is falling apart. We’re becoming Greece. The Ayatollah’s on the verge of having a nuclear weapon, and you’re slandering anybody and everybody to stay in the news. You know, run for president, but don’t be the world’s biggest jackass.”

Trump responded—remember this?—by reading out Graham’s private cell phone number during a speech.

Matters escalated. Trump announced his “Muslim ban” that December 7. The very next day on CNN, Graham laid into him:

“Trump’s a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot. He doesn’t represent my party. He doesn’t represent the values that the men and women who wear the uniform are fighting for … He’s the ISIL man of year, by the way. I just got back from Iraq a week ago this Monday... Now we have young men and women in harm’s way all over the world, particularly in the Middle East. They were concerned about this rhetoric because the enemy will use it against us. What was a concern last week has to be DEFCON 4 this week. Because what Mr. Trump is doing, and I don’t think he has a clue about anything... He’s putting our soldiers and diplomats at risk, he’s empowering the enemy; and this ban, if it’s actually enacted, would take people who have been interpreters, who came to our side in Iraq and Afghanistan and who are under siege in their own countries, it basically becomes a death sentence for them … You know how to make America great again? Tell Donald Trump to go to hell.”

Graham so wanted the world to know that he spoke these words that his office put out a press release drawing attention to them. He never endorsed Trump in 2016, even announcing that he wrote in a third-party candidate when he voted. But the next year, once Trump was president, Graham began to accept a reality quite contrary to the one his remarks to CNN attempted to conjure in December 2015—namely, that Trump not only represented his party, but in effect was his party.

The two started talking. Trump took him on golf outings. By October 2017, Graham was insisting that Trump was “growing into the job.” This, by the way, was a couple weeks after Trump expanded the Muslim travel ban that an earlier Graham had so thoroughly excoriated.

If there were any remaining questions about the relationship, Graham settled them in April 2018, when he announced that “the Trump movement is real ... he will be our nominee, I’m confident of that, and I will support him.” Four months later, eulogizing his dear friend McCain on the Senate floor, Graham said: “He taught me that honor and imperfection are always in competition.”

True to his word, Graham backed Trump in 2020. But in the wake of the January 6, 2021 insurrection, he said he was done: “All I can say is count me out. Enough is enough. I’ve tried to be helpful.” Those words had the ring of finality about them, and I recall that some in the media believed him at the time.

And yet, a mere six weeks later, where was Graham? Back down at Mar-a-Lago, golfing and hanging out. The Washington Post reported that Graham had spoken with Trump “nearly daily” since January 6; that he served Trump’s legal team as an “informal adviser” during the second impeachment trial (back in the 1990s, when he was in the House, Graham was one of the lead House managers for the impeachment trial of Bill Clinton); and that, even though Graham had known Joe Biden far longer than he’d known Donald Trump, he hadn’t had one conversation with the new president during his first month in office.

There are moments in the lives of public figures when everything about them is distilled down to a choice they must make, and those moments rightly guide us toward our historical judgments. There is a lot not to like about a blustery racist imperialist conservative like Winston Churchill. But he seized that moment in the spring of 1940 when he first became prime minister, and his vow that “we will never surrender” to fascism commands our respect. He made his choice with moral clarity.

Lindsey Graham’s fateful moment of choosing arrived during that winter of 2021. At that point, he and probably he alone had the moral authority within the Republican Party to try to guide it away from the man who led a coup d’etat against the United States government and incited a mob to kill his own vice president. Through this odd Washington alchemy that I’ve always found a bit mysterious, some of McCain’s moral authority transferred over to Graham after McCain passed. So, Graham could have made a Churchillian determination that winter: Win or lose, I will make my stand against this. He could have chosen courage. Instead, he chose cowardice—and a few rounds of golf.

Graham served his country in uniform as a judge advocate. I’m sure he was dedicated to his state and its people. He fought for what he believed in, which most of the time happened to be war and more war. But in at least one case, it landed him unambiguously on the right side of history, with his wholly admirable support of Ukraine from the day Vladimir Putin started that war. He had just returned from a trip to Ukraine when he perished.

His career was not without honor. But when his country needed him most, he failed it. In the competition between honor and imperfection that played out within Graham’s soul, it’s pretty clear which side won.

As the rules set by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services finally offer the states some guidance on how they may roll out the new compulsory Medicaid work requirements, blue states are doing the kinds of things you might expect. Liberal leaders are pursuing creative ways to minimize the impending damage, or even seek to delay its implementation. Here, they’re caught between a rock and a hard place: These good-faith efforts might mitigate some of the harms, but they may prove costly to Democratic accountability following Congress’s enactment of America’s broadest assault on the safety net.

H.R. 1, or the so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill,” was an earthquake to the American safety net. It not only imposed a 20 percent funding cut to our nation’s food assistance program, it also cut nearly $1 trillion from Medicaid, a bedrock safety net program on which low-income children and adults depend for health insurance. And as part of this historic cut, Medicaid expansion enrollees must document that they are still eligible, whether because they are working at least 80 hours per week or because they satisfy an exemption category.

In perhaps the clearest reflection of Republicans’ cognizance of the law’s impact on a health insurance program that has enjoyed bipartisan support, they carefully delayed the law’s most damaging effects until after the midterm elections and anchored many of the cuts in the imposition of administrative burden, a strategy far more covert than, for example, the “repeal and replace” rhetoric of 2017.

Medicaid, a health insurance program with shared responsibility between the state and federal governments, has historically left states with significant flexibility in administration. H.R. 1 marks a striking departure from this approach by compelling states’ implementation of work requirement programs that will result in more uninsurance and strain on regional health systems. Although adopting work requirements is compulsory, states retain meaningful discretion over how they are administered. Those choices will shape health care access for millions, but they may also carry unexpected political costs.

States can reduce the damage by relying on existing government data to verify eligibility automatically, minimizing documentation requirements for caregivers and medically frail enrollees, and even seeking waivers to delay implementation until January 2029. In that case, voters would decide on the next president of the United States before experiencing the pain of H.R. 1’s reach.

Democrats face a conundrum. They have good reason to want to safeguard Medicaid enrollees’ health care access, because of both the party’s broad political commitment to health care access and economic concerns about hospital closures. If Democrats fail to intervene in this dangerous policy, the devastation will not just hit marginalized communities—though without a doubt, Medicaid enrollees will face the greatest cost as they find themselves ensnared in red tape and risk the loss of health coverage. In a country with notably expensive health care, coverage loss will assuredly lead to delayed care, potentially resulting in worse health outcomes and financial devastation. Moreover, as hospitals absorb more uncompensated care, they may cut services or close altogether, with ripple effects for emergency care, privately insured patients, and local economies.

But stopping the bleeding from this anything-but-beautiful law risks obscuring for voters the damaging effects of hollowing out the safety net.

Democrats have a history of seeking to bail Republicans out of bad policymaking, most notably amid the shutdown over the expiring marketplace subsidies. While putting people over politics can be viewed as noble and faithfully dedicated to safeguarding health care access, it fails to appreciate how this can impede Democratic accountability when voters cannot appreciate the horrors that Republicans in Congress have wrought.

Public confusion is pervasive. KFF’s June 2026 tracking poll revealed that just 51 percent of respondents understood that H.R. 1 would result in cuts to Medicaid, with the remainder expressing confusion as to whether funding would increase or stay the same. In my own May 2026 survey of 2,064 U.S. adults, 54 percent of respondents who supported increasing Medicaid funding nevertheless also supported the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

KFF finds that support for the legislation declines from 35 percent to 21–25 percent when respondents are informed that the law will increase the uninsurance rate and strain local hospitals, suggesting that preferences are movable but demand effective communication, a task with which the Democrats have historically struggled.

This is hardly the only source of confusion within Medicaid policy. Many Medicaid enrollees are unaware that they are enrolled in Medicaid, a dynamic exacerbated by many states’ decisions to rename their programs (e.g., to “Husky” or “BadgerCare”) in an effort to destigmatize Medicaid, as well as by roughly three-quarters of Medicaid being administered by private insurers like UnitedHealthcare and Humana. This dynamic contributed to political scientist Suzanne Mettler characterizing Medicaid as part of a “submerged state,” with many Americans unable to trace the role of government to their receipt of critical social benefits.

It is little wonder, then, why many Medicaid enrollees have not been attuned to these policy transformations, with an April 2026 Health Management Academy survey of Medicaid enrollees finding that a striking 55 percent of Medicaid-enrolled respondents were unaware of the impending work requirements.

Voters already face significant informational demands. It’s not common knowledge that the One Big Beautiful Bill immediately devastated Medicaid funding, even though the effects are spread out over time. Nor is it easy to understand that “BadgerCare” and the like are actually Medicaid. Furthermore, the connections between (for example) Medicaid coverage losses and rural hospital closures are not abundantly clear to anyone who’s not hyper-attuned to these policy debates. Any blue- or purple-state efforts at damage control or delayed rollout will further obscure the recklessness with which Republicans have slashed the programs that allow people to pull themselves up, and which actually promote life.

This does not mean that the Democrats need to sit idly by as people lose coverage. But it does mean that the Democrats need to take victory laps when they engage in the unsexy but essential work of administrative burden reduction—victory laps that they have historically been loath to take.

Democrats have made this mistake before. After the Affordable Care Act and again after the Inflation Reduction Act’s drug pricing reforms, they quickly shifted to the next legislative fight instead of explaining to voters what they had accomplished. They may find repeated credit claiming to the effect of “Thanks, Obama!” or “Thanks, Biden!” impolite, but it is part of governing in a democracy. Even Trump, who cannot be said to be good at either “governing” or “democracy,” knows the value of publicly spiking the football, regardless of whether he’s actually scored.

There are lessons that Democrats should borrow from Trump, the biggest being: Branding matters. And unlike Trump’s application of lipstick to the proverbial pig, the Democrats’ policies are actually good and popular—if people understand what they are. But voters often need help connecting the dots between policy design and outcomes, especially with the nuances involved in tracing coverage losses to uncompensated care and hospital closures.

In this setting of policy complexity and an onslaught of news that can make it hard even for the observant to keep up, effective Democratic accountability demands effective communication about the One Big Beautiful Bill’s vast expanse, as well as all of the steps taken to spare enrollees from Republicans’ worst impulses.

Democratic governors taking care to minimize coverage losses must find creative and meaningful ways to explain plainly what they are doing and why. The right message might be something along these lines: “Republicans are forcing you to document your work hours to remain insured. We’re using the information we already have so you don’t have to fill out another form. The law protects caregivers and the medically frail. We’re interpreting these protections as broadly as we can and ensuring that everyone who qualifies for those exemptions actually gets them. Republicans imposed the paperwork. We’re reducing the hassle.”

American policy suffers from a damaging and unsustainable asymmetry: Democrats’ effective governance often is precluded by their ineffective politicking. But administrative burden reduction is not enough; It must be paired with explicit credit claiming. Democracy depends not only on governments solving problems, but on citizens knowing who created the problems in the first place. Every Republican burden that a Democratic governor relieves should come with a reminder of who burdened the public in the first place.

In late February, Andrej Karpathy, a founding member of OpenAI who has since left the organization, posted on X that something had broken in the way software gets made. “It is hard to communicate how much programming has changed due to AI in the last 2 months,” he wrote. Coding agents that “basically didn’t work before December” had, in a matter of weeks, become capable enough to “power through large and long tasks” and disrupt the default workflow of his profession.

Weeks later, a friend relayed an exchange I haven’t been able to shake. He’d been talking with a group of experienced software engineers when one of them said: “My job title is more like an AI manager now. I don’t have to really write the code. I input prompts into one AI coding agent, I get another AI coding agent to run tests on it, then I review it, and it goes into production.”

I don’t know which model upgrade was responsible, but this is several years of skill displaced—and the engineer describing this transition seemed proud of it. He had handed over not just his work but the identity he might have built around being a software developer; yet his narrative was one of empowerment.

That narrative is a political problem. While previous waves of capital concentration sparked collective reaction—resulting in the Knights of Labor during the industrial revolution and the CIO during the digital revolution—AI displacement is producing a class that can’t unionize because their roles are eliminated before class identity can form. It doesn’t help that one of the most affected professions, tech workers, were never strong unionizers to begin with: The first certified bargaining union at a major American tech company formed in 2022 at Activision Blizzard. Knowledge workers are among the least inclined to see themselves as “labor,” and tend to realize it only after being displaced.

The standard counterargument to AI-fueled job loss is that the technological leap will create jobs the same way computers and ultimately the internet did. But even if the engineer I quoted above is right that his role merely changed, there will be fewer managers than there had been coders, and the list of “doers” who will no longer have much business in their own field gets lengthy: the contractor in Ohio whose Structured Query Language work is now a SaaS subscription; the paralegal whose document review is now done via large language model; the management consultant whose throughput just doubled “thanks” to Copilot, but whose company is quickly absorbing the productivity gain by reducing headcount. These people, or at least some of them, will keep working—on tighter margins, in narrower roles. 

But the question that matters is: Who owns the machines that replaced some or all of their labor? Because if we keep treating AI displacement as a misfortune to be managed, our proposals will follow suit: Retrain, cushion, compensate the workers. That is a temporary salve at most, not a sustainable remedy. A check can replace a paycheck, but it won’t replace the identity that came with the work. The only sustainable response is to keep displaced workers in the game—as owners of the capital that replaced them.

Robots are capital. It’s no secret that capital concentrates: Absent regulation, and in the face of taxation systems structurally favoring capital gains, every previous technological revolution led exactly here. Many economists assume this as the default trajectory; the purpose of regulation and the welfare state is to keep the dynamic in check. The United States has among the lowest tax-to-gross domestic product ratios in the developed world, and that helps to explain why 11 out of the (currently) 15 trillion-dollar companies are based in the U.S.

It would be simple to blame AI for its own side effects, but unless (or until) AI becomes conscious it is still a tool in the hands of humans. Blaming it would be just as misdirected as blaming cars for road accidents. Besides, AI is a productivity booster on the scale of electrification; deployed correctly, it could enable shorter hours, higher wages, and broad prosperity, the way previous technological shifts eventually did. The blame lies instead with our failure to keep wealth distribution in check, a flawed regulatory system that has been corroding for decades and is now asked to absorb what seems poised to become the largest productivity shock in living memory. Even if one leaves aside the ethical nuances of this reality, what’s different this time is speed: Anthropic’s recent research shows adoption curves measured in months rather than the decades it took computers to redraw the labor market. Displaced workers won’t have the time to even realize what’s going on, let alone find each other, organize, and design adequate institutions to navigate an orderly transition.

The result is a strange political quiet on the subject, perhaps best signaled by the fact that the loudest exception so far has come from the Vatican. In May, Pope Leo XIV devoted his first encyclical to AI, widely covering the dignity of labor and the concentration of power in a handful of companies. The letter was symbolically signed on the anniversary of Rerum Novarum, the 1891 encyclical on labor and capital addressing the industrial revolution. But a papal letter is not a movement, and the lack of organized response among workers is conspicuous, because the dispossession is already visible and material: Entry-level hiring is collapsing in several industries, white-collar layoffs are the norm, the Dallas Fed has flagged a pattern of productivity gains without employment increases.

In Washington, some progressive Democrats have made it a cause: Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez introduced the AI Data Center Moratorium Act to freeze construction until federal safeguards are in place. Sanders went further, proposing a Sovereign Wealth Fund Act that would require 50 percent of the stock of the largest AI companies to be moved into a public fund paying every American a dividend, similar to Norway’s oil fund model. This proposal is an important corrective to a debate that has largely treated AI as an energy and environmental challenge. But the remedy must reach further than a dividend check. What needs protection isn’t just the workers but their identity—and if that can no longer be provided by labor, it must come from becoming owners of the machines that replaced them. Right now, the people being displaced remain scattered and unorganized, but this is the demand they’ll make when they find their voice.   

Workers have found their voice before: The Luddites protesting the mechanization of textile mills set in motion a reform process that eventually led to the Factory Acts; the introduction of computers in the 1970s and 1980s produced a fertile conversation about de-skilling that ran for two decades, starting with Studs Terkel’s Working in 1972 and culminating, in the optimism of the early post–Cold War years, with the tech-friendly reforms promoted by the so-called “Atari Democrats,” implemented during the Clinton-Gore presidency, and intellectually enshrined in Jeremy Rifkin’s The End of Work in 1995. None of these movements achieved everything they wanted, but like an immune response, they produced lasting adaptations: political coalitions, regulation, and a shared understanding of the problems at hand. The current moment has none of this—not even a vocabulary for what’s happening. So far, the news coverage has focused on side effects such as the strain data centers put on energy grids and infrastructure and, more recently, AI’s use in cyberattacks; labor displacement registers, but not with the weight it deserves.

If this displacement concentrates wealth and power in the hands of whoever owns the AI, leaving everyone else high and dry and potentially jobless, why have the workers themselves stayed so quiet, with the resistance primarily delivered by politicians? Because resistance requires class identity, which is exactly what AI ends up dissolving. The steelworker had “steelworker.” The mill worker had the mill. Historical labor movements were built on the recognition that workers shared something specific—a craft, a workplace, a common antagonist—and that recognition was the precondition for organizing. In a world where AI displaces entire professions, the lawyer, the analyst, the programmer have no equivalent community. Most AI practitioners are robots. The humans formerly representing these professions are fewer, less powerful in output, scattered, individualized. That looks more like a diaspora than a united constituency ready to collectively push back.

Most critically, these professional communities won’t reproduce. As AI performs more of the work that used to define entry-level jobs, companies stop hiring humans for those roles. This is the demographic equivalent of a fertility rate below replacement: Given enough time, it leads to extinction. The professions get replaced and therefore controlled by the machines that substituted them, under the supervision of a much smaller number of people who own them. The policy tools that could redirect this trajectory exist—retraining, expanded safety nets, equity-sharing schemes, a serious conversation about what taxing AI productivity would look like—but the people who need them lack the coherence, and over time the critical mass, to demand them politically.

The closest historical analogue to this situation is feudalism, an observation others have made—Yanis Varoufakis and Cédric Durand have famously argued that we’ve already entered a “techno-feudal” order, in which tech giants extract rents the way medieval lords once did. The parallel is correct, but it understates the effect of AI on the political dynamics. Feudalism persisted for centuries, despite the serfs having very clear ideas on what fairness would have looked like: Medieval uprisings, from the Jacquerie of 1358 to the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, show the injustice was perfectly well understood. But feudalism had the upper hand because organization across communities and regions was effectively impossible, leaving serfs trapped in the cycle of survival, season over season, working land that wasn’t owned.

What eventually changed was a slow accumulation of forces—trade, urbanization, religious schisms, even the plague—and among them, a technology: the printing press, gradually changing the way information could travel. It took three centuries, through the Reformation and the Enlightenment, but by 1789 those forces had compounded enough for the Bastille to fall.

Replace land with “compute,” and the dynamic rhymes. Except this time the intervening technology, AI, is working in the opposite direction, and this is where the “techno-feudalism” parallel breaks down: The printing press enabled collective action, while AI effectively suppresses it. It atomizes the workforce, accelerates displacement beyond the pace at which workers can build the institutions that might represent them, and concentrates the surplus in a small number of firms. Those firms are now powerful enough to resemble sovereign states, they are ruled as near-absolute monarchies, and their leaders have enough economic firepower to dominate the public discourse. Think of a middle-class family in America today, how little time they have for civic action after all the demands of the household are met, and suddenly the comparison with the Middle Ages feels real.

Granted, the informed public already harbors strong feelings toward large tech companies in general, and toward AI specifically. In poll after poll, a majority of Americans express worries about AI and want more regulation of it. Sometimes that is expressed in real-world terms, in communities’ slowing or blocking data centers or ChatGPT users’ mass-uninstalling the app after the organization cut a deal with the Pentagon. People aren’t passive. But local action and individual consumer choice aren’t the same as organized, broad-based political power.

The geographic split compounds the problem. Countries with existing social contracts and collective institutions—the Nordics, parts of continental Europe, parts of East Asia—have a foundation to build on, however imperfect. The United States is running this experiment with the lowest union density in the developed world, weakened federal labor enforcement, and a policy debate that has barely begun to treat AI as a political question at all. This is also where much of AI development is concentrated—in the country least equipped to equitably redistribute the gains.

If the net effect of AI is to mark the end of labor—more precisely, the end of labor as the primary factor producing wealth for the majority of the population—the solution has to come from decoupling identity from labor. This implies rebuilding identity itself: civic participation, community, new forms of solidarity rooted not in what people do for a living but in what they are trying to protect; a mission-driven identity, to replace the wage-driven one that industrial labor produced.

John Maynard Keynes imagined, almost a century ago, that abundance would eventually let civilization turn to higher endeavors; Francis Fukuyama later predicted “centuries of boredom” at the end of history. Neither vision has materialized, but their underlying intuition is worth rescuing: We’re not walking a path, we are the path. When the path stops, so does our identity; avoiding that requires dedicating ourselves to a meaningful objective.

Right now, a meaningful enough objective is to figure out a stable social contract that doesn’t sink democracy into the oligarchy of a few trillionaires. The tools to make this happen aren’t mysterious. We know how to tax the productivity of capital, and we know it wouldn’t stifle innovation. We know how to widen ownership of productive assets: employee equity, public positions in the models and the compute, a sovereign fund that pays the public a dividend on the robots, the way Norway reinvests its oil revenue in public services.

On the upside, the speed of displacement—which makes this a crisis rather than a stable order that could last for centuries—might precipitate a viable solution. As more professionals experience displacement personally, as more entry-level workers can’t find jobs, the societal strain becomes visible in daily life: families forced to move 20 streets down as desirable neighborhoods are scooped up by new millionaires; workers forced to work longer shifts and multiple jobs to cover the gap between wages and cost of living; coffee shops filling up with hopeless job applicants on laptops; a shrinking tax base offering fewer social services to people who suddenly need more of them. Eventually, the shared experience itself becomes the basis for a new solidarity.

Not everyone needs to organize. Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute found that when a committed minority reaches 10 percent of a population, the idea or behavior they hold becomes a majority view. Applied to social change, once that threshold is crossed, the idea “spreads like flame.” The open question is whether that threshold can be reached before a new class of techno-oligarchs has reshaped public institutions into something we no longer recognize as democracy.

What equivalent of the printing press can get the right constituency to activate, and drive society toward a more equitable, prosperous future? A good start would be to understand what small, incremental steps anyone can take. One such step is active participation in civic life, which starts from voting and leads to near-impossible feats such as the election of an immigrant of Indian descent as the mayor of New York City. Another step is letting go of the myth that capital deconcentration is impossible, which starts from choosing one’s investments based on impact instead of sheer returns, and comes full circle not in the money it returns but in the impact it forces—as in 2021, when Engine No. 1, a tiny activist fund backed by the three largest U.S. pension funds, won three seats on ExxonMobil’s board and pushed the oil major to take the energy transition seriously. Finally, and most importantly, society should understand that the people on the losing side of the AI rupture are not a professional diaspora to be cared for—supported as they ride into the sunset, perhaps handed some kind of pension—but a still-unorganized constituency of workers waiting to become stakeholders.

Whether they become stakeholders is the whole question. If workers come to own a piece of the machines, they’ll keep their identity, share the gains, and all of us will be able to work less. This is Keynes’s vision, finally realized. If workers don’t, they’ll be deprived of their jobs, their identity, and their share of the wealth all at once, while the world increasingly belongs to a handful of techno-oligarchs who are clearly less interested in democracy than they are in amassing wealth.