The New Republic

Last week, the Department of Homeland Security announced that Immigration and Customs Enforcement would spend between $10 million and $20 million to buy gloves that emit painful electric shocks. The devices, called G.L.O.V.E, or Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter, are manufactured by Compliant Technologies in Kentucky and advertised as a “humane, low-optics, de-escalation solution.” With these gloves, federal agents’ use of force will become nearly invisible to the eye and harder to prove, Mother Jones reported Monday.

“Low-optics” is the key term there. The new gloves won’t stoke public outrage like traditional weapons and they don’t leave any marks—making them the perfect tool for dodging lawsuits for excessive force.

Speaking in a promotional video for Compliant Technologies published in 2024, Adam Glueck, then-assistant chief of the Cape Girardeau Police Department in southeastern Missouri, explained why his officers had grown so “attached” to the devices.

“In today’s society, you know, everybody’s filming everything, everybody has a cell phone,” Glueck said, adding that the glove “looks better on camera, and it looks better to those witnesses. With a glove, there are no burn marks or scars.”

Bob Couey of the Floyd County Sheriff’s Department recommended the glove for “anybody that’s looking for a utility they can use that is conducive to not leading to lawsuits.”

Video footage of the gloves in action show just how powerful they can be, causing grown men to crumple to the ground in a matter of seconds.

The gloves are considered less lethal—but federal agents will likely feel more empowered to use them against a wider range of people. The manufacturer warns against using their device on elderly people, pregnant women, children, and people with severe disabilities—individuals who have not been spared from the Trump administration’s sweeping crackdown on immigrants.

In the midst of a flailing war with Iran that has caused U.S. sailors to literally jump ship, gas prices to skyrocket, and President Trump’s approval rating to plummet, the U.S. Navy is now reviewing plans to give its Ford-class aircraft carrier fleet a makeover.

The Washington Post reported over the weekend that the Navy is conducting an internal review on the viability of moving command towers from the starboard side of the aircraft carriers to the middle, in an attempt to mimic the older warships from World War II that Trump likes. The decision was spurred directly by Trump’s aesthetic preferences, with a Navy official telling The Hill that the president requested the Navy “implement design changes to our future aircraft carriers.” The review is due in “several weeks,” another former official said.

Trump has also ordered the Navy to switch from electromagnetic catapult systems to steam-powered ones, another aesthetic decision that would force the military to spend time and taxpayer funds on making its ships look more antiquated, all so that they can keep sitting around in the Persian Gulf while the Strait of Hormuz remains closed.

“The placement of the island on the Ford class was chosen to support the ship’s design purpose of maximizing aircraft sortie generation—which for an aircraft carrier, directly translates to combat power. A good-faith exploration of future carrier design based on real-world operational requirements is one thing,” Naval maritime strategist Hunter Stires told The Hill. “Expending millions of taxpayer dollars and the time and energy of the Navy’s engineering organizations redesigning the nation’s premier capital ship to indulge the president’s aesthetic whims is not only wasteful and abusive, it exemplifies President Trump’s evident contempt for America’s fighting sailors.”

This news comes as Trump’s upcoming class of 10 new aircraft carriers is estimated to cost $275 billion over the next 30 years.

Left-wing Twitch streamer Hasan Piker appears to be gearing up to sue conservative commentator Scott Jennings for defamation. 

Jennings, a CNN contributor, went viral last week after posting a heavily edited, intentionally misleading video of what looked like Piker expressing extreme hostility towards Black voters and calling for lynchings. With the full context, it is obvious that Piker was being sarcastic. 

“Black voters have been voting against the socialists, only to be ruled in many cases by privileged white commies,” Jennings claimed, using Black identity as a bludgeon against the Democratic left. “Did you ever notice, by the way, how violent these people are? … Now [Abdul] El-Sayed’s best friend is out there calling for Black voters to be lynched. Beneath all the smiles and dancing videos, there’s nothing but hate and violence in the heart of these Communists.”

Abdul El-Sayed’s best pal and campaign partner says the USA should resume lynchings against black people.

Listen for yourself and understand what the socialists have in store for the black community pic.twitter.com/N3ntbIHefw

— Scott Jennings (@ScottJenningsKY) August 12, 2026

As Snopes reported, Jennings lied when he claimed that Piker wanted to bringing back lynchings, as “Piker’s remarks on lynchings were sarcastic reactions to a user’s chat comment and opinions expressed by someone else in a separate video.”

Jennings’s video was widely panned, with many calling for Piker to sue. The streamer called Jennings’s video “the worst instance of defamation” he’d seen. On Sunday, Piker confirmed that his team is preparing a defamation lawsuit, saying it seemed “unavoidable,” and that it might include Fox News.

“This kind of defamation is completely unacceptable,” Piker told Status. “It’s exactly how normal people perceive mainstream media to operate, and it’s a real crisis of credibility. I think someone has to push back against it at some point.”

“In Trump 2.0, we now traffic in lies all the time. Just because the Republicans are trafficking in lies with regular frequency doesn’t mean that you can’t uphold some kind of editorial standard,” he continued. “CNN can put whoever they want to on a panel at the end of the day, but it just signals to me, and I think a lot of other people, that some of their panelists are just going to be liars.”

Piker has been a boogeyman for right-wingers like Jennings and centrist liberals for some time, as they choose to focus their slander on him rather than constructing any kind of tangible, positive political message. And Jennings is perhaps the last person anyone should be listening to in regards to Black politics in America.  

Surprise! President Donald Trump is the real National Mall vandal.

The president took to Truth Social Sunday to blame vandals for a large area of dead grass on the National Mall—that happened to be on the same spot where he built a massive stage for his Fourth of July celebrations.

“Look what VANDALS did to the grass connecting the vandalized World War II Monument and the vandalized Reflecting Pool, which will be opened again, and better than ever, shortly,” Trump wrote. “Anybody who thinks the Reflecting Pool wasn’t vandalized should go back to Law School!”

Last week, Trump sounded the alarm again after the World War II Memorial was covered in red and green graffiti and soapy bubbles. U.S. Attorney Jeannine Pirro said felony charges are being brought against Melissa L. Farris, but the charging documents made no mention of the patch of dead grass on the lawn.

Regardless of Trump’s apparent outrage, the president has demonstrated that he couldn’t care less about protecting national landmarks—he’s the one destroying them.

The president who cried vandalism has been behind a lot of the destruction at the National Mall. The Department of Justice concluded that Trump and his hand-picked contractors were responsible for the damage to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool that left the monument drained and surrounded by chain-link fences. Trump’s federal contractors were also also responsible for cracking the fountain at the German-American Friendship Garden. Not to mention that across the country Trump is actively bulldozing Big Bend National Park in order to build his border wall.

On the day the ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran is scheduled to expire, President Trump threatened to bomb a different country.

Fox News’s Trey Yingst reported on the network Monday that Trump claimed there is a backchannel with Iran’s Revolutionary Guard officials, but that he is in “no hurry” and, “if Oman gets in the way, we’ll bomb the shit out of them.”

It’s not a reassuring statement, especially considering that Iranian Army chief Amir Hatami on Sunday announced bounties for the death or capture of U.S. troops. The sums start at $30,000 and double if a woman completes the mission. Hatami said the plan came after a “large number of requests” to support the war.

“Anyone who kills or captures and hands over invading American military personnel will receive a reward equivalent to $30,000,” Hatami said. “Courageous Iranian women who carry out such an action will receive double the reward.”

Any weapon captured in such an operation would be bought by the Iranian Army for twice its market value and displayed in a museum, according to Iranian state media.

Trump has alternatively threatened to escalate the bombing campaign against Iran while claiming that a peace deal is imminent. Usually, at the last minute, Trump claims he has pulled back from bombing for one reason or another, such as U.S. allies in the region warning against escalation or U.S. military leaders warning of declining missile stockpiles.

On Friday, Trump said that he planned to declare the Strait of Hormuz as U.S. territory, even as Iran continues to throttle maritime traffic through the critical waterway. The area is split between Omani and Iranian territory, and oil and gas from Persian Gulf countries are exported to the world from there. As this war stretches on without Trump sticking to a deal, the global economy continues to suffer, with civilians in Iran and around the Middle East praying that they don’t fall victim to a bomb or airstrike.

President Trump’s last desperate attempt to avoid paying E. Jean Carroll has just been shut down by the Supreme Court.

Trump sought to overturn a jury verdict awarding $5 million to Carroll for defamation and alleged sexual abuse. The Supreme Court rejected an earlier appeal from Trump in June, and Trump wanted them to take the rare step of rehearing the case, which the court unceremoniously rejected Monday.

This is a developing story.

President Trump on Sunday said he ordered the Pentagon to “significantly” reduce the amount of joint military exercises with South Korea, due to his “very good relationship” with North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un.

“Based on my very good relationship with Kim Jong Un, of North Korea, I am not happy with the fact that the United States has, long ago, agreed to participate in Joint Military Exercises with South Korea. These exercises are not only costly, with much of these costs paid for by the United States of America (as usual!), but send a signal that is totally inappropriate and hostile, to a Country that, as long as Donald J. Trump has been President, has been unthreatening and respectful,” he wrote Sunday evening on Truth Social.

“I have instructed Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, to substantially reduce the Joint Military Exercises!” he continued, attributing his decision to South Korea’s position on the Iran war.

“While somewhat unrelated (?), I recently asked the President of South Korea if they would like to join us in the Denuclearization of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and they said, ‘No thanks!’”

It’s unclear how the U.S. plans to reduce the exercises. The annual Ulchi Freedom Shield exercise already proceeded as planned on Monday, the South Korean Defense Ministry confirmed—with 18,000 South Korean forces and 28,500 American ones.

Nonetheless, Trump is spiting South Korea, a longtime ally, for not helping bail him out in Iran while also making a clear overture to the one country it has the most hostile and adversarial relationship with.

“Trump’s description of the D.P.R.K. as ‘unthreatening and respectful’ is alarming to allies, who have watched the regime steadily improve its missile and nuclear capabilities, while also gaining an additional patron in Russia for its support in the war on Ukraine,” Asia Society Policy Institute Deputy Director Emma Chanlett-Avery told The New York Times.

This is just the latest example of the deteriorating U.S.-South Korea relationship under Trump. South Korea has been hit by U.S. tariffs, had hundreds of its citizens (with valid work visas) detained in an immigration raid, and now has lost access to joint military exercizes—all while Trump praises Kim Jong Un and North Korea continues to expand its military capabilities.

“For 70 years, America has held these joint exercises to train AND reassure its Asia-Pacific allies. Furthermore, North Korea’s Kim Jong Un is NOT respectful of the USA, now or ever. In the past few months, he has blatantly said NoKo is and always will be a nuclear power, specifically to ward off any hostile action, like America and Israel’s war on Iran,” CNN’s Christiane Amanpour mused Monday on X.

“He already has dozens of nukes, and in June, called for an ‘exponential’ expansion of Pyongyang’s arsenal. They’d already ramped up dramatically since Trump’s failed Hanoi summit with Kim in 2019, which I covered,” she continued. “Since then, Kim has ramped up missile testing, while his soldiers now have real battlefield experience since fighting for Russia against Ukraine. Respectful?”

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the August 17 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

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

Donald Trump just had two very strange outbursts that won’t make Republicans happy. In one, he angrily ridiculed the idea that anyone would be upset about higher costs created by his war. In the other, he brushed off the concerns of military families about the length of overseas deployments. All this comes as Trump is pushing through dramatic new changes to aircraft carriers that are roundly rejected by military experts.

And that prompted a scalding takedown from a Democratic senator who actually knows something about these topics. It occurs to us that all this captures something essential about the fix we’re in. Trump has been faking it all his life, and it’s finally catching up with us. We’re going to work through it all with MS Now’s Steve Benen, who caught a really interesting pattern buried in all this lunacy. Steve, good to have you back on.

Steve Benen: Thanks, Greg. It’s great to be here.

Sargent: So let’s start with what Trump said at a rally just now. Listen to this.

Donald Trump (voiceover): For you to pay a tiny little bit more for your gasoline, just remember, you’re doing it so that a very evil country cannot have a—it’s really the number one state sponsor of terror in the world. We don’t want to have them have a nuclear weapon. So remember that when you have to pay a little bit more. You’re at four dollars. It’s OK. I mean, it’s—I’m not, I’m not—I’ll never apologize. I did the right thing.

Sargent: Steve, that is really something. Note the pure seething contempt for anyone who’s concerned by the added costs created by his war, his unnecessary war. He’s unable to grasp these voter concerns through any frame other than how it reflects on him. I think this is a big deal, big news. What do you think?

Benen: Yeah, I think you’re right. I mean, here we are, twelve weeks out from the midterms. Polls showed that affordability and the cost of living are the number one issue on the minds of the vast majority of voters. And so one would like to think that the head of the Republican Party, the sitting American president, would have the wherewithal to express some empathy and to say, maybe I can try and help you. Maybe I care about the pain that you’re dealing with right now, and I’m going to maybe promise you new policies or a better tomorrow in some way.

But no, he doesn’t do any of those things. Donald Trump instead stands in front of a crowd full of supporters, mocks the very idea that they’re suffering in any way, and denies any responsibility for the fact that he’s to blame for these circumstances that people are suffering through.

And so, you said you think it’s a big deal. I agree with you. I think this is the sort of thing that can resonate with most voters, who see this and will be disgusted by it. And so I would not be the least bit surprised if this is one of those quotes that just lingers in the public mind for the next several weeks.

Sargent: Yes. And this is something that Democrats really have to grab onto. I don’t want to hear anything from any Democratic strategists about how Trump’s negatives are baked in or whatever. Grab this and use it. That’s what I think they should do.

Benen: Well, wait a minute. It’s a gift handed to Democrats on a platter. I mean, here we are, looking at a set of circumstances in which Democrats are saying that they want to focus almost exclusively on kitchen-table issues. They want to avoid social issues altogether, nothing about the culture war. They want to talk about the economy. Well, great.

The head of the Republican Party just said he doesn’t care about higher gas prices. He laughs off affordability as a scam. He doesn’t accept responsibility for the fact that he’s ultimately to blame for the fact that people are suffering through these higher costs, higher cost of living, higher prices. And so, I think you’re quite right. For Democrats who are looking for a strategy for the final 12 weeks, for this home stretch between now and November—well, here it is. Donald Trump just handed it to you.

Sargent: He absolutely did. This is the sort of thing that could really seep into the coverage. So let’s now go to this other Trump outburst. Reporting had indicated that on the USS Lincoln aircraft carrier, living conditions were poor, in part because it had been out at sea for far too long in the Mideast.

Now, the audio of this exchange is not great, but listen carefully and you can hear that a reporter asks Trump to respond to families’ concerns about these long deployments. Trump just brushes it off. Listen.

Reporter (voiceover): Family members of U.S. servicemembers are concerned with the conditions aboard the USS Lincoln…

Donald Trump (voiceover): Well, no, that ship is moving. No, they’re not. That ship is moving right now, or very shortly, and it’s being replaced with another very similar ship.

Reporter (voiceover): Have the deployments gone on too long?

Donald Trump (voiceover): No, not nearly long enough.

Sargent: So there Trump says that the families just aren’t concerned about all this, because he says so. And then he says, you know, the deployment hasn’t gone on long enough, by which I think he means, we’re going to continue this until we win. But again, the seething contempt is the story here.

Steve, I recognize that Trump has rewritten the rules of our politics, but this plus the other thing together paint a picture of a president who feels zero obligation of any kind to take ordinary people’s concerns seriously.

Benen: I think that in both instances he had an opportunity to show empathy, but he’s simply incapable of doing so. It’s just not in his nature. It’s not part of his MO. He can’t bring himself to recognize that this was an opportunity to show some sympathy, to show some empathy, to show that he cares, that he understands the suffering of people who deserve sympathy—and yet he can’t bring himself to do it.

Now, in the case of high gas prices, it’s a much larger group of people, but at the same time, it’s just as important, if not more so, to sympathize with the sailors and marines on the USS Lincoln and the loved ones back home, who are concerned about the fact that they’ve had this modern-day record for the longest possible deployment, and now they’re running out of soap and food.

What is the president’s response to this? It’s to express indifference, to just shrug it off.

Sargent: Trump instantly converts everything into a question of whether he is getting the esteem and the adulation that he knows is due to him.

Benen: If he were to acknowledge the fact that these families exist, that these loved ones who are worried about the sailors and the marines on the USS Lincoln—if he were to acknowledge the fact that their concerns exist, it would reflect poorly on him. It would reflect poorly on his administration, on his poor judgment, on Pete Hegseth’s judgment, for an illegal war that he doesn’t know how to end.

And so if he were to acknowledge their existence, it would reflect poorly on him. And so therefore he has no choice, in his twisted mind and his twisted perspective and worldview, but to say, well, then therefore they don’t exist, because they can’t, in his mind. And it’s just so offensive on its face. A normal human being, much less a normal American president, knows not to behave this way. And yet here we are, seeing him once again demonstrate the fact that his entire worldview is broken.

Sargent: Yes, and it’s in this context that Trump is directing the Navy to completely uproot a system it uses for launching jets from aircraft carriers and replace it with steam catapults. Now, I don’t claim any expertise in this area, OK?

Benen: Neither do I.

Sargent: But a lot of experts are saying it’s a terrible idea that will needlessly cost billions of dollars. And the Navy has been battling the idea for years, because it’s been a longtime obsession of Trump’s. Steve, can you sort of sum up what this is all about?

Benen: Well, sure. About a decade ago, apparently, according to Donald Trump, he spoke to some sailor who said that the current system of launching jet fighters off of aircraft carriers was too complicated. And so apparently, as part of this conversation, this sailor—who may or may not exist, whose name we do not know—said that he preferred the steam catapults.

And ever since then, Donald Trump has said, for whatever reason, that he disagrees with the Navy, disagrees with the experts, disagrees with all the engineers and everyone who could possibly lend him good advice. He disagrees with all of them and says, no, no, we need steam catapults, not electromagnetic catapults.

And so, early on in his first term, he apparently directed the Navy to start pursuing this change. And they blew him off because—and this is the important part—they know what they’re talking about. Unlike the president, who doesn’t, they knew what they were talking about, and so they ignored him.

And yet here we are, second term, and we have an official document posted to the White House website that shows that Donald Trump has actually gone to the Pentagon and said, I am directing you to move forward with plans to swap out the existing system and replace it with steam-based catapults—because, according to the president, this is the smart thing to do, despite the fact that the Navy has told him that it is not.

Sargent: Yes. And so you caught this interesting, broader pattern in which Trump just declares himself to be one of the world’s foremost experts, or even the world’s leading expert, in all sorts of different areas, in whatever comes up at any time. You looked back and found that he said this on construction, on tariffs, on firearms, on health care, on drone technology, even on grass. That one, I didn’t know what to make of. Trump is an expert on grass. What kind of grass? I might be leaving a few out.

Tell us what you found when you looked at this pattern.

Benen: Well, you know, last week, in an offhand comment, Donald Trump said, quote, “I know more about grass than any human being, I think, anywhere in the world,” end quote. Now, if you’re laughing, as you should, because it’s hilarious—I laughed at it too. But in context, this is something that he does all the time. No matter what the subject is, he is the world-renowned authoritative source on every subject.

He not just claims to have familiarity with the subject, or a basic competence—he claims to have limitless expertise, without rival anywhere on the planet, on all of the subjects. Now, on the one hand, of course, we can laugh about that, because it’s absurd. But on the other hand, that arrogance, that misplaced arrogance, leads him to believe that he’s capable of making decisions about things he knows nothing about, because in his mind he is the foremost expert on these subjects.

And so when it comes to things like how best to launch jet planes off of an aircraft carrier, he doesn’t turn to people who know what they’re talking about. He instead says, well, I am the foremost expert on this subject. I talked to a sailor 10 years ago who likes catapults. So therefore, we’re going to go with that steam-based approach.

Sargent: Donald Trump is a devotee of positive thinking. He’s someone who genuinely believes that you can make things true by saying them. This has been true about Trump all his life. And all his life as well, it has also applied to him saying that he knows more than anyone else in the world about any subject.

But I can’t help but feel like, after a lifetime of Trump getting away with this, we might finally be at the point where he’s not going to be able to get away with it much longer. Is that too optimistic, or what?

Benen: Well, I don’t think it’s too optimistic. And the reason I believe that there’s something to this is that right now we see his approval rating sinking. We see his popularity collapsing. And I think that that is a reflection of the fact that the American mainstream has had an opportunity to get a good look at this guy, to get a good sense of where he’s leading the country, looking at the results of his approach to governance over the last year and a half—in fact, over the last five and a half years of his presidency. And they’re rejecting it roundly and soundly. And they’re saying, you know what? I’m sick of it.

There are a lot of people who voted for him who now regret that. There are a lot of people who voted against him, or who are now eager to vote in the midterms. And so I don’t think it’s overly optimistic to think that we’ve really turned a page here. We’ve got congressional Republicans kind of separating themselves from him. We see voters definitely rejecting the White House.

And so I think that combination of factors, plus what we’re seeing in terms of the special election results and primary turnout—all of these factors lead me to think that there is a blue wave taking shape, that there is a movement taking shape to reject what we’re seeing out of the White House. And so I think that optimism that you described, I think, is well grounded.

Sargent: I think a lot of people will listen to you and me talking about this with a little bit of pessimism or skepticism. They’ll say, OK, well, we went through this in Trump 1.0. And in a few years, everybody just forgot about what Trump had done, even though, you know, hundreds of thousands of people needlessly died and the economy was crashed into the shitter. And that’s true, right? But there is reason to think that things are different this time.

For one thing, voters wrongly, I think—but still, they concluded that COVID was kind of an external event that wasn’t Trump’s fault. It was imposed on him, and that that’s what crashed the economy, right? I don’t think that’s right, but I can see how voters concluded it. For another, during Trump’s first term, he actually did listen to people to a degree that he simply does not right now. And I think that’s a critical difference.

We’re seeing in his second term Trumpism unshackled on every front—immigration, tariffs, America First in the world. And I think that that fact, that the three major pillars of Trumpism, of MAGA, of right-wing populism, were really tried in this new kind of way and are failing so miserably, kind of creates an opening for a different level of rejection of Donald Trump and Trumpism. Do you think that’s too optimistic?

Benen: I don’t. And I want to back up for a second, because you were saying that a lot of people who are listening to this are going to think that, well, we’ve been through this, but Trump had kind of worked his way out and he ends up on top anyway. But I’d remind folks, in his first term, his first midterms were a disaster for Republicans. Democrats took back the House. And in a presidential election, Trump lost roundly, by more than five million votes to Joe Biden.

And so I don’t want to make it seem as if somehow Trump has always persevered under these circumstances, because I think we look back in recent history and that hasn’t been the case. But putting that aside, even looking at more contemporary conditions, I think that what we’re seeing now is a wholesale rejection based on a wholesale failure.

I mean, I think that the benchmarks that you just identified are true. I think that right now the fact that Democrats have an advantage on immigration for the first time in many, many years is a reflection of the fact that people see the status quo and they’re not satisfied with it. They are rejecting it, and they’re opening the door to something fundamentally different.

Sargent: Some polls are showing that Democrats have the advantage on the economy for the first time in many years. So immigration and the economy and national security—three areas where Republicans have had traditional advantages, all thrown away by Donald Trump’s incompetence. That’s the story, I think.

Benen: Right. And it’s fueled by fact. This is not just based on perception, it is fueled by fact. I think that ICE and the immigration agenda has been a spectacular failure. We look at the economy, we see the economy losing jobs and with stagnant growth. These are not just based on perceptions. It’s not just based on media narratives. This is about facts. This is about reality. This is about the daily lives that Americans are experiencing, and they’re seeing failure, and they’re sick of it.

Sargent: These are really the three pillars of right-wing populism more broadly, right? Immigration, economy, America First in the world. And so I think, as you said earlier, the American people might be ready to hear something different. I think really they may have their ears open in a way that maybe they haven’t in a very long time. I sure hope so, anyway.

Benen: I think you’re right. And I think that there’s ample public opinion research that shows that this is not just something that we’re kicking around as a possibility. It is something that is absolutely happening right now as we speak.

Sargent: Well, let’s conclude on Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona. He responded to Trump’s craziness about the Navy and the uprooting of the system. Listen to this.

Mark Kelly (voiceover): By the way, Donald Trump knows nothing about this stuff. Not in any world would I ever suggest to the Navy to change the design of some system on a ship at this point. I mean, does the guy know nothing about the way our government is supposed to work and how it’s supposed to be managed? For him to get in these details, especially with his background? I mean, what is his background? He’s a marginally failed real estate developer, right, with multiple bankruptcies. He shouldn’t be weighing in on systems on aircraft carriers. But for some reason, like something like six years ago, somebody said something to him, and he’s been fixated on this issue that, to a president of the United States, should not be an issue.

Sargent: That’s quite a takedown, Steve. I think that Democrats have an opening to really recapture national security in a very broad sense here, by putting people like Mark Kelly out there to just scaldingly ridicule the idea that this guy has any idea what he’s talking about on any of these fronts, especially when we’re in the middle of such an absolute global catastrophe as the one he’s drawn us into. What do you think?

Benen: It reminds me a lot of what the political landscape looked like towards the end of 2008. You know, the economy was in ruins, and Americans were not only upset about the Great Recession, they were also upset about the fact that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney had launched two unsuccessful wars in the Middle East, in Iraq and Afghanistan, respectively. And at that point, there was an opportunity for people to say, you know what, I’m sick of this, I want to be ready for a change, not just on the economy, but on foreign policy too.

And I think the fact that Trump is failing so miserably in Iran, and the war continues to drag on—here we are, it’s nearly six months in. Americans were told that this was going to be a quick war, this was going to be an easy war, that this was going to be a casualty-free war, and none of those things have happened. And so now we have people like Mark Kelly, who has a lot of credibility on this, clearly speaking out, but others are speaking out as well.

And this message is getting through. The war is wildly unpopular with the American mainstream, nearly as unpopular as Trump’s economic performance. And that one-two punch is absolutely devastating, not only to the White House and its agenda, but to the Republican Party at large, especially here we are in this critical election period.

Sargent: Just to take your 2008 and George W. Bush comparison one step further—everybody should recall that in 2004, after George W. Bush was reelected, he looked absolutely untouchable. I remember the atmosphere at the time was that because of September 11, and because of, you know, all the sort of theatrics that Karl Rove was doing, which at the time looked really formidable, right?

The sense was that he had absolute dominance over our information space, that there was no way they could lose arguments, that Democrats were just scattered and listless and without direction. And then, in two short years, Republicans lost both chambers of Congress. And, then we got 2008 and one of the biggest Democratic victories in, I guess, our lifetimes.

Benen: Exactly. You know, it’s so easy to forget that after 2004, we heard the same things that we were hearing shortly after 2024—that we had entered an era of Republican dominance, that Republicans were going to be leading for the foreseeable future, that they’d cracked the code, they’d rewritten the alignment, everything was going to be different from here on out. That’s what we heard in 2004, when Republicans were running the show. They had the White House, the House, the Senate, and the Supreme Court. And as far as we were told, the conventional wisdom from most of the pundits was that Democrats were just lost at sea for the foreseeable future. Two years later, Democrats took back Congress. And then two years after that, they controlled the show. They were in charge.

And so I think that when you heard similar talk in 2024, after Trump won, that he had somehow realigned American politics, I couldn’t help but laugh at the time, thinking, yeah, let’s get back to me in a year and a half. Let’s see what’s going on as we approach the midterms. And here we are. It’s exactly what’s happening. History is repeating itself. They didn’t really earn a mandate in 2004 or in 2024. They overplayed their hand. Americans rejected the poor economy and a failed war in the Middle East. And it’s happening just like it happened then. It’s happening again now.

Sargent: And Trump was supposed to be the guy who was much shrewder than the Bushes and the Roves of the world. Steve Benen, all of that was beautifully said. Thank you so much for coming on. Folks, if you want to check out Steve Benen’s stuff, make sure to check out the MaddowBlog over at MS Now. Steve, great to talk to you.

Benen: See you soon, Greg. Thanks.

In March, a group of around 50 activists broke into Ridglan Farms, a dog breeding and animal research facility, and liberated 22 beagles, a breed said to be favored by the industry because of their docile and eager-to-please temperaments. The company, which had been the focus of a largely successful multiyear animal rights campaign, was scheduled to surrender its breeding license on July 1 to avoid criminal prosecution after a state investigation had found evidence of felony animal abuse, including severe and unsanitary confinement, eye surgeries performed without anesthesia, and unnecessary euthanasia.

But the protesters still weren’t satisfied. They also wanted Ridglan to surrender the animals in its possession to ensure they wouldn’t be killed or sold for use in future experiments. And so, on a bright and chilly April morning, a surprisingly bipartisan group of 1,000 activists traveled to Blue Mounds, Wisconsin, to engage in what they hoped would be a mass “open rescue” of the more than 2,000 beagles that were still held in the facility.

The first, smaller liberation was met with comparatively little resistance. This time, however, the company was prepared. Perimeters were blocked and trenches dug and filled with manure to dissuade trespassers. Private security guards and police patrolled in force, ready to repel demonstrators with tear gas and rubber bullets.

Some of the protesters wore hazmat suits and carried tools intended to help them enter the facility and open cages, but the majority of attendees were dressed in regular clothes and looked like ordinary Americans. Which is what they were, for the most part. Lawyer and organizer Wayne Hsiung had intentionally emphasized a shared concern for animals and a commitment to the principle of nonviolence that attracted people from across the political spectrum. Anti-capitalist vegans stood shoulder to shoulder with dog-loving conservatives. Parents with children and seniors in wheelchairs cheered from the sidelines as more brazen activists tried and failed to breach the barriers.

Not long after the attempted rescue mission began, Gretchen Primack crouched in pain, her eyes burning from pepper spray. A poet and bookseller from New York state’s Hudson Valley, she had traveled roughly 1,000 miles to try to rescue the dogs. But facing pepper spray and rubber bullets, protesters like Primack had been beaten back.

After four tense hours, the crowd retreated. Twenty-seven people had been arrested, and several were hurt; one demonstrator reportedly lost multiple teeth. As Primack rushed a friend who had been hit with rubber bullets to the ER, she wasn’t alone in feeling, she told us, “totally demoralized.”

And then, just as fast as the cops had gassed the protesters, the activists won. Hsiung called it “the greatest turnaround in animal rights history.” Their victory was, in part, thanks to support from right-wingers.

In April, shortly before the smaller scale raid on the facility, the popular conservative podcaster Tomi Lahren interviewed Hsiung and praised the activists for their bravery. The “bipartisan” issue of animal cruelty, she said, is “one of the few areas I think we can all come together on.” After the action, Lara Trump, President Donald Trump’s daughter-in-law and a proud beagle owner, urged Ridglan to make a deal and sell the dogs. Working behind the scenes, reportedly aided by well-connected allies and some deep-pocketed Trump donors, the activists secured the release of 2,000 dogs on undisclosed terms.

Under past administrations, bold direct actions like the one seen in Wisconsin have typically been dealt with harshly; for decades, law enforcement equated animal liberation with domestic terrorism. Yet even as it viciously suppresses First Amendment dissent in other arenas, the Trump regime has seemingly embraced some forms of militant animal activism and opportunistically seized the moment to take credit for the heartwarming Ridglan outcome. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins released a joint video statement boasting about the “major win for animal welfare,” while Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin posted a photo of himself with a beagle and doubled down on the administration’s preexisting commitment to eliminating animal testing in January. The far right clearly sees political value in these animal welfare fights. So why has the left largely ceded the issue to them?

In 2019, Emily Atkin wrote an insightful article for this magazine titled “Why Animal Rights Is the Next Frontier for the Left.” In it, she predicted that “it’s only a matter of time before [the left has] a serious discussion about the ethics and wisdom of consuming billions of animals every year.”

When it was published, we nodded our heads in agreement, hopeful her analysis would prove prescient. What neither we nor Atkin foresaw was the possibility that animal rights might actually be the next frontier for the right. When, the day before the 2024 presidential election, Vivek Ramaswamy posted that “animal cruelty will eventually become a genuine concern for conservatives,” and that it “shouldn’t be a partisan issue,” we scoffed in disbelief. Perhaps we shouldn’t have. Even then, conservatives were up in arms about P’Nut, the pet squirrel turned social media star who had recently been seized and euthanized by New York state authorities, a viral symbol of supposed government overreach and hostility toward pets. “Just go out there and vote for P’nut,” advised Elon Musk.

Today, Ramaswamy’s call is even harder to discount. A movement is gaining momentum on the far right that can’t simply be reduced to opportunistic concern about celebrity squirrels. In addition to launching a “strike force” to crack down on puppy mills and dogfights, the Trump administration is working to rein in animal experimentation. The National Institutes of Health, or NIH, the world’s foremost funder of biomedical research, has dedicated $87 million to the development of animal-free research methods, and the Food and Drug Administration has published a strategic road map to phase out animal testing. Kennedy has met with People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, or PETA, about the possibility of turning NIH-backed primate research centers into animal sanctuaries—a possibility the NIH has reportedly followed up on.

Tomi Lahren, along with fellow influencers Laura Loomer and Mike Cernovich and Republican officials including Florida Representative Anna Paulina Luna, all worked to defeat the Save Our Bacon Act, a misleadingly named bill being pushed by the pork industry that would have preempted state-level welfare protections that provide gestating sows a tiny bit of room to move.

To be clear, the Save Our Bacon Act is a Republican bill, a fact that underscores the fundamental incoherence and hypocrisy of the right’s relationship to animal welfare. Trump’s fossil fuel–guzzling and pro-corporate policies are, of course, disastrous and deadly for humans and nonhumans alike, and the president and his allies are busy deregulating the government agencies capable of monitoring and halting the animal welfare abuses some right-wingers have begun to decry—including, most recently, with a major rollback of the Endangered Species Act. RFK Jr. may sincerely love dogs, but he has also used his bully pulpit to promote red meat consumption and claims to follow the flesh-heavy “carnivore diet.”

Still, you don’t have to squint too hard to see the potential outlines of a phenomenon similar to Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again, or MAHA. Once again, we have a set of broadly popular issues generally seen as belonging to the left, but never centered or taken seriously there, leaving a vacuum to be filled by savvy conservatives.

The polling justifies the enthusiasm, “While the Left and Right don’t align on much these days, over 85 percent of Republicans and Democrats do agree animal testing should be phased out,” reports the conservative Washington Examiner. Eight out of 10 voters also consider preventing farm animal cruelty to be a moral concern, while 72 percent report being more likely to vote for a candidate who supports protecting threatened and endangered species.

Few progressives appear to take seriously the transformation unfolding on the right—one that may well secure victories for some vulnerable animals while also further elevating an anti-government, anti-science, anti-egalitarian agenda. That appears to be the goal of the White Coat Waste Project, an initiative led by Anthony Bellotti, a former Republican operative who cannily connects animal testing to right-wing preoccupations including Covid conspiracies, federal spending cuts, and transgender fearmongering (based on misrepresentations of hormone studies conducted on mice).

Justin Marceau, faculty director of the Animal Law Program at Sturm College of Law and co-founder of the Animal Activist Legal Defense Project, is hopeful about a subset of conservatives expressing what he describes as “genuine care about nonhuman animal well-being.” Meanwhile, he and many of the people he speaks to are also deeply frustrated with many of their ostensible political allies, including a Democratic Party that appears to take animals and their human advocates for granted. “For nonhuman animals who are dying by the billions every year, we’re already in the worst-case scenario,” Marceau explained. “I think Democrats view people who care about animals as a fringe subset of people who care about climate and the environment. They seem to think it’s just not a constituency that they could lose. I think they’re wrong about that.”

A few years ago, it was almost impossible to imagine crunchy moms who hate Monsanto becoming a key part of Trump’s electoral coalition. But here we are.

Once again, the parallels to MAHA feel inescapable. A few years ago, it was almost impossible to imagine crunchy moms who hate Monsanto becoming a key part of Trump’s electoral coalition. But here we are.

Of course, MAHA quickly revealed its MAGA-laundering fraudulence. Every time its goals have come up against corporate interests in this administration, the corporate interests have won out, often spectacularly so—as when Trump successfully petitioned the Supreme Court to shield glyphosate manufacturers from liability for the health impacts of their pesticides, an almost farcical contravention of MAHA’s ostensible values.

“I don’t see the political right turning on big corporate power when it comes to factory farming,” Marceau acknowledged. “But Democrats have not gone to battle with these big corporate interests either.” And even if the right doesn’t take on the meat industry directly, it “could plausibly deliver victories for animal advocates that were truly unimaginable under Obama or Biden.”

Our conversations with animal rights activists revealed a personal and profound sense of betrayal with regards to the wider left—the ideological and political community, or constellation of communities, separate from the Democratic Party. Consider the fact that the Ridglan protests were covered by mainstream and right-wing news outlets, but barely made it onto the radar of liberal and left media, a massive direct action against a corporate target seemingly unworthy of serious coverage or consideration.

This resistance on the left to even a basic vocalization of compassion for nonhuman animals helps explain why the animal rights movement celebrated some MAGA figures who have begun stepping into the vacuum. “It’s difficult to watch animal rights folks accept this embrace from the right, but at this point I honestly can’t blame them,” explained an activist, who requested anonymity to speak candidly. “If you tell people to fuck off enough times, they’re gonna fuck off. And that’s what the left has been doing to animal rights activists for decades.”

Much of the reluctance to embrace animal rights seems to stem from a broader, zero-sum assumption that these fights distract from or are irrelevant to more traditional leftist issues. This perspective is profoundly divorced from the reality of our industrial system of meat production, the horrors of which are deeply intertwined with the consolidation of corporate power, the exploitation of workers and immigrants, and the destruction of our environment. Far from the prevailing sense of animal rights as a sort of individualistic lifestyle issue, disconnected from a broader critique of capitalism, ending systemic violence against animals actually requires taking on a range of fights that fit in perfectly with the populism that is driving the left’s current political resurgence.

Interestingly, of all the interviews conducted for this piece, it was a conservative activist who best articulated a shorthand for this synthesis. Liam Gray, a former editor for The Daily Caller, is founder of the Wilberforce Institute, a conservative animal rights outfit “focused on ending big government, taxpayer-funded animal cruelty.” Speaking about animal testing companies like Ridglan as well as Big Ag actors like Tyson Foods and Smithfield Foods, Gray said, “The divide on animals right now is feeling less like left versus right and more like people versus special interests. And the more that Democrats don’t respond to that, and side with the special interests, and take for granted that they have the animal people behind them, I think the more it’s going to hurt them.”

Of course, this intersectional approach to animal protection is not guaranteed. MAGA is already attempting to instantiate a very different form of animal politics—what The Atlantic’s Daniel Engber has labeled “Animal Nationalism,” in reference to traditional twentieth-century fascist politics that elevated a subset of animals alongside a subset of supposedly superior human beings.

While conservative groups like Wilberforce are deeply committed to reducing the suffering of all nonhuman animals, for many on the right, it’s clear that some animals are worthy of concern—the cats and dogs in JD Vance’s hateful libel against Haitian immigrants; the bald eagles and whales that have been dishonestly instrumentalized to further right-wing attacks on wind farms—while the vast majority of living beings are imperiled by MAGA’s program of xenophobic cruelty, corporate corruption, and planetary arson. Rather than allow compassion for animals to become another tool in the right’s system of hierarchical politics, the left has the ability—and, indeed, a duty—to elevate a moral framework for animal rights that objects to violence against humans and nonhumans alike on universal grounds.

Fundamentally, any project that aims to decrease needless suffering—which has always been an essential goal of the left—is simply and glaringly incomplete if it does not recognize the vast suffering that humans needlessly inflict on nonhuman animals. Living beings that are capable of joy and pain, affection and sadness, deserve moral recognition. And addressing their immiseration is not at odds with fighting an authoritarian oligarchy that exploits us all. Indeed, not doing so poses serious political risks.

It would be an ethical and tactical blunder to let MAGA uncontestedly lay claim to the compassion that so many feel toward animals. But there is still time to change course. As Marceau put it, “The best-case scenario is that this movement on the right awakens the left to the idea that animal welfare and animal protection ought to matter. To me, that’s the true ideal, because there’s an alignment there that actually makes sense.”

Turning coal mines into solar farms sounds so smart, it’s almost hard to believe that it’s happening in the United States under President Trump. But late last month, construction began in Texas on a 1.2 gigawatt solar farm that will be one of the largest clean energy projects in the country and the biggest solar project built on a brownfield site in North America. It will start producing power a year from now, and will also include 1.6. gigawatt-hours of battery storage.

This $1.7 billion project is groundbreaking, as is another one forthcoming in the same state: The world’s largest carbon removal plant will open at the end of the year.

There are caveats in both cases. The surface coal mine and adjacent coal-fired power plant in Bremond, which sits between Dallas and Houston, will continue operating alongside the new solar farm. And many environmental experts are skeptical of carbon removal as a realistic solution to the climate crisis.

But there’s no doubting this much: Texas is a national leader in renewable energy, and has been so for decades. It’s first in wind power—by a long shot—and second in solar power generation, behind only California. It generates enough power from solar to power the equivalent of half the homes in the state.

In its enthusiasm for wind power, Texas, which Trump won even more convincingly in 2024 than he did in 2016 and 2020, couldn’t be more at odds with the president. He has had a weird vendetta against wind power ever since the early 2010s, when a wind farm was built near one of his golf courses in Scotland—ruining the view, in his opinion. He claims that all renewable energy is part of the Democrats’ “Green New Scam,” and he’s wildly exaggerated the impact of wind turbines on whales and birds.

Now, in his second term, Trump has ramped up his war on wind power. His Defense Department invented completely bogus national security concerns to justify delaying more than 150 onshore wind farms (a federal judge last week ordered the administration to lift the freeze). The administration, with appalling disregard for our futures and our tax dollars, is also paying companies billions of dollars to abandon wind farm projects, which if built would have, according to a Senate investigation, powered millions of homes and created tens of thousands of jobs (not to mention averted huge quantities of carbon emissions).  

Texas is not following suit. It may be Trump country, but it’s also Green Energy country—a paradox that has a fascinating history.

Texas, being an extremely sunny and windy place, has an ideal natural landscape for renewables. Midland is famous for oil wealth, but in the early twentieth century it was known as “Windmill City,” as nearly every house had a windmill in its yard. But natural resources alone don’t explain everything. People must make decisions and lead, and at the end of the twentieth century one of those people was a Midland native, Republican governor, and future president.

Like his father, George W. Bush was a market-based environmentalist. He didn’t support renewable energy out of concerns over air pollution or global warming, but because he saw how much money there was to be made in the industry. “I didn’t use climate change to get the state of Texas to go forward,” Michael Osborne, who co-founded the Texas Renewable Energy Industries Association, told the Houston Chronicle last year. “I used the green that Republicans relate to.” 

Bush signed a bipartisan bill that broke up the local electricity monopolies and mandated that the state install more renewable energy. Under his successor, the far more conservative Rick Perry, the wind boom really took off. In 2005, Republican legislators set 20-year goals for renewable energy—and blew past them by 2010. Since then, wind energy in Texas has more than quadrupled.

In the Trump era, some Republicans in the state legislature have tried to mess with Texas’s green energy sector. Last year, they attempted to limit the development of renewable projects, but failed. This year, they proposed a quota to protect fossil fuels, as the renewables share of the state’s future electricity generation reaches 70 percent. But in Texas, 60 percent of Republican voters support renewables, and not even the oil and gas industry opposes them; after all, that industry uses renewables to power its own operations—to save money.

This is not to say that Texas is a climate policy paradise. It simply is following the Bush template: monetizing all the state’s abundant natural resources. Texas isn’t forcing the phase-out of coal or other fossil fuels, instead pursuing an “all of the above” energy policy, and they’ve been welcoming to data centers. But this approach has strengthened the argument that all new forms of energy are welcome, with the result that renewables don’t have serious opposition, even in a state that normally loves a culture war.

No serious opposition, that is, except from the Trump administration, which has delayed 54 wind projects in Texas as part of its national freeze. The president’s war on wind has been criticized by conservative Texans, who see his moves as interfering in the free market—and with their values and economic interests. Former GOP state Representative John Davis, a Trump voter who has seven wind turbines on his ranch, told the Chronicle that wind energy was a “conservative idea” and that he was frustrated with Republicans who have abandoned it: “Their own voters are rural Texans, and it’s hurting their own voting base.”

Renewable energy makes practical sense in rural places all over the country, where people are struggling with high energy bills yet have abundant access to sun and wind. If Republicans nationally continue to back Trump’s weird vendetta against wind it could hurt them in Texas but also in other conservative rural states. After all, the state that produces the second-most wind energy is Iowa, a famously important state in the presidential election calendar. And solar farms and battery storage on coal mines are not even unique to Texas, as similar projects are underway in Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, and Louisiana.

Trump will never come around on wind. His mind is made up. But even red states whose Republican leaders have gone full MAGA can see the economic upside to renewables, and the profit motive is steadily proving more powerful than a dumb culture war. The voters, politicians, and businesspeople of Texas have understood this for many years, and it’s only a matter of time before their ideological brethren across the South and Midwest follow suit.

It was heartening to see a couple of polls come out recently showing that for the first time in a long time, Americans trust the Democrats more than the Republicans on the economy. It’s insane that this can come as a surprise, and that these two parties are even running as close to one another as they are is absurd. Trusting the Republicans more on the economy at this point is like trusting Sean Combs to be your babysitter.

For decades now, the Republican Party has built it electoral success on myths and lies. Ronald Reagan was the last Republican president who your average person would say left the country better off than he found it. I wouldn’t say that, for a range of ideological reasons, but I’m a liberal. I’m ready to admit, however, that your average person would say that about him.

But that’s a long, long time ago now. You have to be in your fifties at least to have any memory of it. But the last three Republican presidents—Bush, Bush, and Trump—have been disasters. The first Bush oversaw a double-dip recession and a massive savings and loan scandal that looted the treasury. The second Bush started a costly and tragic war based on lies and nearly brought the global economy to its knees. Trump, you know about—corruption, fascism, and staggering incompetence.

That’s four decades of failure. In fact, it goes back much farther. I got an email a couple of weeks ago from my friend Simon Rosenberg, who has for years paid careful attention to the performance of the economy under Democratic and Republican administrations. In this email, he had a chart showing that going all the way back to FDR, monthly job growth has averaged 176,000 under Democratic presidents, and 59,000 under Republican ones. Trump’s average over both terms, because of the job loss during the pandemic, is actually in the red, -7,000. In his current term, Trump averages 44,000 a month. Joe Biden, you wonder? He averaged 336,000.

There’s so much more. Returning now to the post-Reagan era: From 1989 to 2026, we’ve had Democratic presidents for 20 years and Republicans for 17.4 years. Care to hazard a guess as to the number of jobs created under Democrats vs. Republicans?

Answer: It’s 49.8 million versus 1.9 million. That isn’t a typo. Fifty million to two, basically. Democratic presidents have also done far better than Republicans on median household incomes, GDP rates, the Dow Jones index, and even deficit reduction. Dramatically so on deficit reduction.

So why do people usually believe the Republicans are better for the economy? Three reasons.

First, the GOP benefits from being the party of big business, which just leads people to assume that they must have a better handle on profits and loss (they certainly do on the latter). People see that nearly every Wall Streeter and corporate honcho is a Republican, and they take their cues from that.

Second, the Republicans and their media propagandists are extremely skilled at reinforcing the above lazy misperceptions. When a Republican is president, they find the one piece of good economic news and flog it endlessly. When it’s a Democrat, they do the opposite, as Fox News and Fox Business did over and over with BLS’s downward jobs revisions during Biden’s last year in office. Downward revisions are fairly common, but you can bet the Fox outlets aren’t talking about them much these days.

Third and I think most important, the Democrats do an awful job of talking about all this. To begin with, I’m not even sure most of them know just how wide the divergence on the economy is. I remember talking to a group of Democratic House members a few years ago. I started rattling off some of these statistics, and several of them grabbed a pen and a scrap of paper and began scribbling them down. I could tell by the looks on their faces that this was news to them. That’s just indefensible—a total failure of the national party and congressional leadership.

Democrats and their consultants seem to have this belief that they shouldn’t bother attacking the perceived strengths of Republicans. I remember talking with a Biden aide (this was when Biden was still planning on seeking reelection) who said the perception of Trump as a successful businessman was hardwired and unshakeable.

I wouldn’t doubt that every poll and focus group said that. But that doesn’t mean the right line of attack and a pile of cash can’t change that. If you’re old enough to remember 2004, you remember what “Swift-boating” was. In July, the country saw John Kerry as a war hero. Three months and $22.4 million later, half the country thought he was a traitor or a coward or a little of both.

This is a lesson the GOP takes to heart: They went right at his strength, and they changed perceptions of him. When done right, it works. Democrats need to get this. And of course, they were lying about Kerry. And it still worked. But the Democrats just have to tell the truth.

In the current case, Democrats haven’t really done much to drive Trump’s approval down. They haven’t had to. Here, observable reality is doing a lot of the work. But between now and November 2028, it will be up to the Democrats to finish the job.

They have to start telling the country the actual story of the American economy over the last four decades—that every Republican president has left a mess that the Democrat had to try his best to clean up, and that every Democrat has left the country better off economically than he found it, usually far, far better. They should make sure every American knows the numbers 49.8 million and 1.9 million. I’ve only ever heard one prominent Democrat refer to these numbers in a high-profile speech: Bill Clinton, in his speech at the Democratic convention in Charlotte in 2012. It should be mandatory for every speaker at the next convention to mention this.

And by the way, another GOP strength they have to go after directly—this idea that the GOP is the pro-military party. Tell that to the mothers of the sailors aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln. Can you imagine if what’s happening on that carrier had happened under President Kamala Harris? First of all, it wouldn’t have, because whatever her good and bad points, she would not have been stupid enough to start this stupid war because Benjamin Netanyahu put stupid ideas in her head. But if somehow it had, Jim Jordan would be screaming about impeachment, and Fox News programming would consist of little else (as things stand, Fox has covered the story somewhat, but at least one anchor recently ripped into those whiny sailors).

Add to that Trump’s utterly baffling announcement last week ordering the Navy to revert to old, steam-powered catapult systems on some carriers. (Where does he come up with some of this stuff?) Experts say these systems are badly outdated, less effective than the electronic systems currently in use, and will cost billions of dollars to install. To give credit where it’s due, I did like what Democratic Senator Mark Kelly had to say on this one: “He’s a marginally failed real estate developer with multiple bankruptcies. He shouldn’t be weighing in on systems, on aircraft carriers.”

So: no, no, and no. A businessman can’t magically fix things in Washington. One day, maybe one will, but not this one. He’s a conman and always has been. The Republican Party is not good for the economy. They screw it up every time. And the Republican Party is not pro-military. The last two Republican presidents have started completely unnecessary wars, gambling with the lives of service members. The next Democratic presidential nominee—moderate, socialist, man, woman, whatever—better say these things bluntly and repeatedly. And every Democrat needs to join them.

At a rally the other day, Donald Trump handed Democrats the perfect soundbite. “For you to pay a tiny little bit more for your gasoline,” Trump seethed, “just remember” it’s to deprive Iran of a nuclear weapon. He said higher prices are “okay,” and that “I will never apologize.” Trump’s angry, sneering tone on the words “tiny little bit more” projected deep contempt for all who dare object to hardship imposed on them by his needless war, and the moment produced harsh media coverage. Separately, Trump curtly brushed off concerns among military families over long deployments and bad conditions on the U.S.S. Lincoln, leading to more harsh coverage. We talked about all this with MS NOW’s Steve Benen, author of an interesting piece on Trump’s refusal to ever admit error. We discuss how Trump’s lifelong penchant for faking expertise is catching up with him, how Democrats can exploit this new self-own, and why political conditions suddenly resemble those that brought down George W. Bush in his second term. Listen to this episode here.

One of Ronald Reagan’s most famous lines, referring to disarray in his White House, was, “Sometimes the right hand doesn’t know what the far-right hand is doing.” More appropriately for the Trump White House: “Sometimes the far-right hand doesn’t know what the radical lunatic right-wing hand is doing.”

In fall 2017, less than a year into President Trump’s first term, I wrote a piece in The Atlantic titled “American Kakistocracy.” As I wrote then, “Kakistocracy is a term that was first used in the 17th century; derived from a Greek word, it means, literally, government by the worst and most unscrupulous people among us. More broadly, it can mean the most inept and cringeworthy kind of government. The term fell into disuse over the past century or more, and most highly informed people had never heard it before (but to kids familiar with the word “kaka” it might resonate).” They should pay attention now.

Bad as the first Trump term was, it was nothing compared to this one. And the key components of the anti-science, anti-government nihilism, combined with willful ignorance about the consequences of their actions, and the interrelationship across policy areas, is about to play out big time starting next year, with health care and policy on the front lines. Three components of horrible policies across disparate areas will interact to engender a catastrophe in an already stressed health ecosystem.

One is the insane anti-vaccination conspiracy theories brought into full focus by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and his cohort in the Trump administration, all amplified by Trump himself. The measles outbreak, the emergence of tetanus cases, the attacks on the flu and Covid-19 vaccines, and the evisceration of food safety programs leading to outbreaks of norovirus, cyclospora, e-coli, and listeria, have begun to put more stress on the system, with increased costs, more hospital burdens, and likely more trouble ahead when flu season begins and new Covid strains emerge. Not only that, many undocumented immigrants have been working in meat processing plants—some estimates have been as many as 200,000. The massive deportation policy has left many of those plants with fewer workers to do the same volume of processing, and often a form of self-regulation by the industry for the safety of their products.

Add to that the soon-to-be forced removal and deportation of Haitians, among others losing Temporary Protected Status. Over 100,000 Haitians have been employed in the healthcare sector, many taking care of seniors in nursing homes and via home health care, others working hospitals as orderlies, nurses, or other jobs. It will be a significant blow when those jobs are vacated.

Now comes the biggest problem. When the Republican Congress enacted Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill in July 2025, it included massive cuts in the Medicaid program, totaling around $1 trillion over 10 years—but made sure to postpone them until 2027, conveniently after the midterm elections. The cuts focused on adding onerous work and paperwork requirements, all designed to force recipients off the rolls, and will remove somewhere between 10 and 15 million people from the program, leaving them without any health coverage. That is in addition to the millions losing coverage or facing huge premium increases with the erasure of subsidies for the Affordable Care Act. But the impact will go far beyond those directly losing their health insurance. Medicaid money does not go to Medicaid recipients. It goes to the providers. The loss of a major chunk of the money going out to them will have big reverberations.

The American health care system, unlike in most advanced countries, was jerry-built, a combination of public and private entities, and state and federal involvement. But the public and private are not separate. They are like the organs in the human body—if one declines or fails, it has huge impact on the others. And these cuts are going to reverberate in many catastrophic ways.

Start with hospitals, most of which already face major financial strain, and not just in rural areas. There have been major consolidations as those strains have increased; hospitals have had to be creative, to say the least, in finding the revenue to stay solvent. Independent, community-based hospitals have declined precipitously, and the market has shifted to giant, integrated health systems, with major involvement by both private equity firms and large corporations like health insurers and pharmacy giants buying physician groups and integrating vertically and horizontally. Significant revenue, especially via the emergency rooms, comes from Medicaid.

Cut that revenue, and some hospitals will close, in both urban and rural areas. For those that remain, the burden in the ERs will increase their costs and strain their staffs. The law requires hospitals to provide emergency care to anyone in health crisis coming to their ERs, whether they can pay or not. Poor people and the undocumented will either go to the ER and not be able to pay, or will defer any treatment, including drugs they need, and that will mean more emergencies, more deaths, more burden on the broader system.

The loss in revenue may cause many hospitals to reduce staff, adding to the burden on nurses and doctors who remain. For many, their staffs will already be burdened when the deportations take full effect. And reduced staffs will also put more hospital patients in jeopardy if there are fewer nurses and doctors to watch over them and care for them. Of course, to maintain revenue, hospitals will find ways to charge more for their paying patients, so those cost burdens for them and their insurers will go up as well.

Next, turn to nursing homes. Almost two-thirds of those elderly and disabled people living in nursing homes have their care paid for by Medicaid. They have all reduced their assets to a negligible level to qualify for Medicaid coverage, enabling them to be in these facilities instead of in their children’s homes or in precarious situations living on their own.

Nearly all nursing homes rely heavily on that Medicaid revenue. Lose it, and many elderly and disabled will be out on their ears. Their families will take them in—but there is a double whammy here. The subsidies that exist for home health care, including by family members, are going to be slashed as well, leaving families with their own terrible dilemmas, worsened when trained and trusted Haitians depart.

As for the nursing homes, some will close; others will cut staff and staff pay. The ratio of residents to staff will decline, meaning residents unable to secure help when they need it for such vital tasks as getting medications when they require them, getting help going to the bathroom, getting help in bed to prevent bedsores or worse, having responsive care during a health trauma or emergency. More unqualified staff could mean more abuse of the residents.

There will be more effects seen throughout the country, for everyone who is a part of our intertwined health care system, from those working in it to those using it. No wonder Republicans made sure none of the Medicaid cuts would happen before voters experienced the impact. It turns out that kakistocracy is not just a funny word, but a reality with horrific consequences.

While the media has been agog and aghast at the occasional successes of 2026 candidates aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America, I haven’t been feeling the hype. A canny read of the electorate reveals that establishment Democrats, like Xavier Becerra and Amy Klobuchar, are doing just fine. Many primary winners are getting lumped in with the DSA despite not being members, or even socialists, like Brad Lander and Abdul El-Sayed. And as Lander would attest, the electorate isn’t looking for leftist bona fides from their candidates; they simply want fighters, not fakers.

But no one is more choleric over the occasional success of progressive politicians than the dismal corporate dullards at Third Way. After the aforementioned El-Sayed won his Senate primary in Michigan, the centrist organization announced that it was going to “war” with a $15 million campaign against democratic socialist candidates between now and 2028. Both the sense of aggrievement and the paltry amount of money being dispensed makes this extremely sad.

The opening salvo in this supposed “war” is also pretty sad: a wan op-ed by the organization’s top dogs, Jon Cowan and Matt Bennett, in the pages of The Washington Post. The two combine for a few hundred words of grievance, in which they argue that the Democratic Party’s recent woes can be attributed to its extreme politics, which is a very strange thing to say about a party whose recent standard-bearers were Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Cowan and Bennett, in fact, fault Harris for not doing enough to pivot from the leftier positions she espoused on the 2020 stump. This makes me wonder if they were in a coma during the 2024 election, because I distinctly remember Harris both veering wildly toward the center, abandoning previous positions with something approaching a frenzy, and even campaigning with Liz Cheney.

The op-ed is, nevertheless, revealing. Third Way’s politics seem frozen in amber. There’s scant evidence that Cowan and Bennett have spent any time ruminating on the political shifts we’ve undergone since the 2024 election. There’s no mention of the hot-button issues that are fueling the fires of the Democratic electorate, such as the high costs of early childhood, opposition to data centers, the war in Iran, or the GOP’s corruption. The only thing they point to that could be called “recent” is a New York Times poll showing that 62 percent of the Democratic electorate identifies as either somewhat or very liberal, and that most voters want “a fighter for working people who gets things done and is authentic in his or her beliefs.”

That doesn’t describe the kind of candidate that Third Way would support. As Robert Reich wrote this week, “If you bother to look at the funding sources of Third Way ... you’ll find a Star Wars cantina of billionaire megadonors, Fortune 500 CEOs, corporate dark money bundlers, and giant corporations.” Third Way’s donor base is a “Trojan horse” packed to the gills with scoundrels: Wall Street cretins and private equity goons; “members of the GOP-aligned American Legislative Exchange Council,” best known for producing cookie-cutter right-wing legislation that is diametrically at odds with just about every Democratic Party policy priority; and supporters of the Republican Attorneys General Association, “which helps elect Republicans who fight federal environmental and other regulations.” In addition, Reich points out that two of the organization’s former honorary co-chairs are Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. Enough said! (Sludge’s David Moore also reported this week that Third Way has received donations from health insurance interests that undoubtedly oppose Medicare for All, which was the centerpiece of El-Sayed’s campaign.)

Third Way’s limitations as a political organization stem from the fact that its leaders have an umbilical connection to Republican money and probably haven’t talked to a human outside of a cable news green room in years. In fact, the last time anyone from the organization sought to learn what life is like for normal Americans, it was chronicled by Molly Ball in The Atlantic, who trailed the researchers the organization dispatched to Wisconsin after Donald Trump’s first election to find the mythical 70 percent of the population that they believed occupied a position of non-partisan purity.

As Ball’s piece described, things didn’t go the way Third Way expected. Instead of finding a centrist majority out there in the hinterlands, it found a population that was extremely partisan—and fairly skeptical of the organization’s donors. But Third Way’s superpower, it turns out, is the ability to perform vertiginous mental hijinks when its priors are challenged. As Ball reported, the study that Third Way published after its tour of flyover country neatly omitted any of the doubts that she watched the researchers wrestle with on the road. “The report surprised me when I read it,” Ball wrote. “Despite the great variety of views the researchers and I had heard on our tour, the report had somehow reached the conclusion that Wisconsinites wanted consensus, moderation, and pragmatism—just like Third Way.”

This is the biggest irony: The successful politicians who so terrify Third Way are actually really good at listening to the concerns of voters and then organizing those voters around campaigns to address those needs. A recent New York Times report on the insurgent left reveals that these candidates aren’t really reinventing the wheel, they’ve just—well, mastered politics: “The campaigns themselves say the secret is in the basics. They have built old-fashioned ground games, harnessing the anger and energy on the left to recruit armies of volunteers, who in turn have greeted the moment’s protest movement with open arms.”

In fact, if there’s one thing that the smattering of successful DSA-aligned candidates have done in recent campaigns, it’s been the thing Third Way refuses to do: show a willingness to abandon preconceived dogma when it doesn’t survive an encounter with reality. As Nathan Newman recently wrote, the local DSA-aligned politicians who are winning elections have learned something that the national DSA is still struggling to accept: “To win local office, you not only have to activate the maximum number of DSA members possible, you need to reach out to a wide range of other progressive individuals and organizations to win election.” There’s something nifty going on here: It turns out that the successful socialists, through their mastery of retail politics, are showing that they’re capable of a little moderation.

Third Way could really stand to learn a thing or two from the politicians it disdains. But that’s not what the Republican funny money backing its every move wants. Instead, you are going to get $15 million worth of Red Scare fulmination. And that rhetoric will be used by the right to disparage every single Democratic candidate—not just the ones who want to enact Medicare for All. Third Way will be arming both the conservative media machine and the slop merchants at CNN and The New York Times with talking points, and using its phony-baloney identity as a liberal organization to color these attacks as coming from the illusory center.

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.

Detainees at a Mississippi Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility reportedly got sick from a gas leak, complaining of headaches and other medical symptoms.

The Guardian reports that the Adams County Correctional Facility, which is run by the private prison contractor CoreCivic on behalf of ICE, also had a long power outage, leading to a loss of air conditioning for two days this week. This forced detainees to either roast inside cramped cells or spend hours outside in 100-degree temperatures without shade, one detainee told the publication through family members.

The high temperatures also raised tempers, with arguments and physical incidents increasing among the detainees in a facility that is understaffed, causing the publication’s source to fear for his own safety. The gas leak reportedly took place Saturday, and the source, who spoke to The Guardian anonymously, said detainees were evacuated “out into the afternoon heat for hours.”

“They were outside for hours. And when they came back in, it still smelled of gas. And then some of the men were getting headaches and symptoms of inhaled gas. They were never really told where the leak came from, how it was resolved, or was it fully resolved,” the source’s wife said. “Illness has been growing. So there are a lot of people getting sick, and they have begun putting people three to a cell that was designed for two.”

The power outage took place on Monday, and by Tuesday, electricity had only been partially restored for lighting and other operations. Air conditioning would not come on until late in the day Wednesday.

“When these things are happening, either they’re shut out outside without shade and air conditioning, and they’re not given any answers,” the detainee’s U.S. citizen wife told The Guardian. “Or a lot of the time the power was out they just had them locked in their cells, they didn’t get to leave for dinner or breakfast.”

The facility also attempted to prevent detainees from telling anyone outside of the facility about the poor conditions.

“They didn’t give them the tablet devices during that time because they didn’t want them notifying loved ones,” she said. “If they feel anyone’s organizing anything, they’ll send them to solitary.”

CoreCivic downplayed the conditions at Adams County in a statement to The Guardian, saying that the publication received “some bad information.”

“While several detainees thought they may have smelled something related to a natural gas leak, none of our staff members detected anything along these lines,” said CoreCivic’s senior director of public affairs Ryan Gustin. “Out of an abundance of caution, an on-call facility maintenance staff member came in to assess the facility for any possible gas leaks, and none were found.”

Gustin said that the power outage was due to a storm in the area, and that there were no disruptions to the air conditioning systems. He also claimed that no one at any time was refused medical treatment.

The Mississippi facility is one of the largest immigration detention centers in the country, holding more than 2,000 detainees on a 14-acre property as of March. At the time, only nine percent of detainees there had a criminal record. The poor conditions there are not unique, as poor hygiene and illness have been recorded at ICE facilities across the country, such as the Dilley family detention facility in Texas and Delaney Hall in New Jersey, which recently had its third detainee death.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents mocked a U.S. Army wife who was returned to the United States after being put on a deportation flight to her native Brazil.

Maisa Lopes Eliaser was mid-flight Wednesday with several other immigrants when agents received a call about her. She told the Associated Press that an ICE agent then asked her if she wanted to continue to Brazil or return to the U.S. Eliaser’s husband, Army Staff Sgt. Alexis Jaramillo, told the AP that they didn’t know who made the call, “but someone made the phone call, and then she came back.”

Other detainees were led off of the plane in Brazil, but Eliaser was allowed to stay on board to return to Louisiana. Agents then told her that thanks to videos and news reports about her case, she was “famous.”

Jaramillo, an aviation operations specialist who has served in the Army for more than 10 years, was forced to take leave from his duties training soldiers to care for his five-year-old stepson after she was detained last month at an immigration appointment. The government previously told the AP that Eliaser had been issued a final order of removal by an immigration judge in April for overstaying a tourist visa.

Now Eliaser has an appointment Monday to reopen her case and green card application, and the couple is worried. Jaramillo, who is a U.S. citizen and married Eliaser in 2024, has been told there won’t be any more issues. But he and his wife “are really, really, really scared about it, but you know, we have to go.”

“I told the person who gave me the appointment, ‘Hey sir, don’t play with me, I’ve been through a lot,’” Jaramillo told the AP.

The Trump administration has disrespected the immigrant family members of U.S. military personnel, with ICE agents raiding a military base to arrest a newlywed soldier’s wife and staking out Marine Corps graduations to detain immigrants. While Democrats in Congress are investigating deportations of military personnel and their families, Eliaser was fortunate enough to be allowed to return to the U.S. Others have not been so lucky.

It’s been more than a month since the U.S. Food and Drug Administration linked Taylor Farms to the deadly cyclospora outbreak, and yet the agency is only just now sending investigators to visit the produce grower’s facilities.  

Investigators with the FDA finally arrived at Taylor Farms’ operation in Mexico to inspect facilities linked to the parasite that can cause explosive bowel movements, four U.S. officials told The Washington Post Friday. 

Donald Prater, the FDA’s acting deputy commissioner for food, said that there was extensive research into the growing conditions that was required before launching an investigation.

But food safety experts and some former top FDA officials criticized the agency for waiting so long after publicly linking the company’s shredded lettuce to a national outbreak that has sickened more than 13,000 people, and caused two deaths. 

Barbara Kowalcyk, director of George Washington University’s Institute for Food Safety and Nutrition Security, told the Post that in-person work at the facility was necessary for prevention. 

“Ideally, as soon as [the FDA] traced it back to the source, they would be out there working with the facility and specifically working with Taylor Farms to do a root-cause analysis so that we can understand what happened,” Kowalcyk said. “That’s really what’s going to drive prevention going forward.”

On July 17, the FDA notified Taylor Farms that its shredded iceberg lettuce had tested positive for cyclospora. Taylor Farms falsely claimed that the FDA had later walked back its determination, but still promptly recalled all of the shredded iceberg lettuce that was grown and processed in central Mexico out of an “abundance of caution.” A sanitation inspection conducted by Mexican officials between July 18 to July 20 tested negative for cyclospora. The company’s website claims that its own testing of roughly 2,000 samples also tested negative for the parasite. 

Taylor Farms is the country’s largest supplier of fresh produce, and is also pro-Donald Trump. The company sells products to Walmart, Sam’s Club, Kroger, SYSCO, Aldi, Target, and Dollar General.

Before any of this, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. reportedly cut back on parasite monitoring. 

President Trump has hit the lowest national disapproval rating on gas prices in recorded history, as 79 percent of Americans–and a whopping 52 percent of Republicans—feel negatively about how he’s handled skyrocketing gas prices. 

“No president has been hated more when it comes to gas prices,” CNN’s Harry Enten said during a Friday segment. “79 percent ... that is the highest disapproval rating for any president on record.”  Former Presidents George Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden, who each had their own struggles with gas prices, never eclipsed a 75 percent disapproval rating on the issue. 

Enten: "Even a majority of Republicans -- 52% -- that loyal Republican base who has been through thick and thin with Donald John Trump, even they have turned against the president on gas prices ... these are just atrocious numbers" pic.twitter.com/hc5xJfrA6O

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 14, 2026

“Donald Trump takes the cake as these $4 plus gas prices continue to give us pain at the pump. The American people are taking their anger out on the President of the United States.” 

The poll’s party line breakdown is even more devastating, as 52 percent of Republicans disapproving may put Trump-backed candidates at risk in their November elections as they have to answer for his decisions—especially in swing states. 96 percent of Democrats disapproved, along with 85 percent of independents. 

These are startling number that Trump can’t convincingly blame on decisions Biden made three years ago. Gas prices are high—and will continue to be high—because Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu started bombing Iran and Lebanon, and Iran closed the crucial Strait of Hormuz in response. That’s why your gas is $4 for the third time this year—something else that has never happened before.

President Donald Trump denied reports Friday of horrific conditions onboard the USS Abraham Lincoln—and suggested that the U.S. servicemembers should stay at sea for even longer.  

Trump offered a shockingly callous response while taking a question about the aircraft carrier that’s been deployed since November. 

“Family members of U.S. servicemembers are concerned about conditions onboard the USS Lincoln—” one reporter said. 

“Well no—that ship is moving—no, they’re not,” Trump interjected. “That ship is moving right now, or very shortly, and it’s being replaced with another very similar ship.”

Asked whether he believed that the servicemembers had been deployed for “too long,” Trump had a similarly heartless reply.

“No, no, no. Not nearly long enough,” Trump said.

Reporter: Family members of service members are concerned about conditions on the LIncoln.

Trump: No they’re not.

Reporter: Has the deployment gone on too long?

Trump: No. Not nearly long enough. pic.twitter.com/7TM1LPeOru

— Acyn (@Acyn) August 14, 2026

Family of sailors aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln have detailed the carrier’s multiple issues, including plumbing disasters, disruptions with the delivery of mail, and shortages of food, water, and other supplies. These issues have placed an immense strain on the mental health and wellbeing of sailors on board the ship. It’s gotten so bad that multiple sailors have tried to jump overboard. 

The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that the USS George Washington aircraft carrier will soon be deployed to the Persian Gulf from Japan to replace the Abraham Lincoln, part of a previously scheduled rotation plan. But the Lincoln has already been deployed for 250 days and gone a record 200 days without a port call.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth previously claimed that reports about the state of affairs aboard the Lincoln had “misrepresented” the situation. 

Clearly, the president couldn’t care less about U.S. servicemembers or their families. 

Fox News has some very bad news for Fox News.

You’ve probably noticed that Fox pumps out enormous amounts of propaganda designed to smear the Democratic Party as wildly extreme and irredeemably crazy. Leading Fox personalities routinely depict the party as hostage to globalists, transgender rights activists, and violent socialists. Fox figures regularly savage leading Democratic Party figures as traitors.

Fox also perpetually offers a safe space for Donald Trump’s propagandists to smear the Democratic Party as overrun with communists and worse. On Fox recently, Stephen Miller dissolved into crazed paroxysms as he seethed that the party’s primary ideology is “hatred for America.”

The game here, of course, is not just to drag down Democratic candidates by association. It’s even more fundamental: It’s about getting voters to stop seeing the midterms as a referendum on Trump—to stop getting crazy ideas in their heads about holding Trump accountable for his world-historically disastrous presidency already.

So how’s that going? Well, perhaps these Fox News personalities should take a peek at the most recent polling from—wait for it—Fox News.

An intriguing pattern is developing in Fox’s polling of the Senate races this summer: Just about all the Democratic candidates are significantly outrunning the favorability of their party. While the party’s standing—which is pretty bad—can’t be shrugged off, Fox’s polls do show that most of these Democrats are not getting dragged down by association with the party.

Meanwhile, all these polls show Trump deeply underwater—including in states he won by double digits.

To wit: Fox’s latest poll in Ohio finds Democrat Sherrod Brown leading GOP Senator Jon Husted by eight points, 53 percent to 45 percent. That’s despite the fact that only 42 percent view the Democratic Party favorably. The rub is that only 44 percent see Brown as too close to the Democratic “establishment,” while 55 percent do not. Turns out a lot of voters who don’t like the party support Brown.

This applies across other races. Fox’s newish poll of Texas finds Democrat James Talarico leading Republican Ken Paxton by 51-48, even though the Democratic Party is upside down at 45-54. The new Fox poll of Maine finds Democrat Troy Jackson slightly ahead of GOP Senator Susan Collins by 48-46, even though the party is underwater at 44-54. That’s too close to comfort for Jackson, perhaps reflecting his recent entry into the race, but it’s promising.

Meanwhile, earlier this summer, Fox’s poll of North Carolina found former Governor Roy Cooper leading GOPer Michael Whatley by 53-44, even though the Democratic Party is polling at 43-56. And Fox’s survey of Iowa finds Democrat Josh Turek leading GOP Representative Ashley Hinson by 50-46. This poll didn’t test the Democratic Party’s favorability rating, but it did find that only 36 percent of Iowa voters view Turek as “too liberal,” while 60 percent do not.

There’s one exception here: Michigan. Fox’s new survey finds Democrat Abdul El-Sayed trailing GOPer Mike Rogers by 47-51. El-Sayed is outrunning his party (which polls at 43-56), but not by enough. Perhaps it’s that he hasn’t consolidated the base yet (he only wins 75 percent of Black voters), or that his positions are seen as too extreme (54 percent say this), or that he hasn’t reached working people yet (he trails among them by 10 points). But there’s a lot of work to do.

Admittedly, Fox is only one pollster, many other factors will decide these races, and control of the upper chamber is on a knife’s edge. But it’s worth planting a flag on this pattern—Democratic candidates achieving some separation from the party—because it will be a crucial factor. Democratic strategists often say many of these candidates have their own strong identities in their states, and that this will matter more than the party’s overall standing, even in red places. For now, at least, this appears to be holding.

One last thing is worth noting about these polls: Trump’s net favorability ratings are deeply underwater. They’re upside down in Ohio (-14), in Texas (-9), in Iowa (-13), and in North Carolina (-19). In several of these he’s at least 50 points underwater with independents. Trump won all those states—and he won all but the last by double digits.

So here’s a crazy idea: Maybe—just maybe—Trump is a bigger problem for the Republican candidates than the Democratic Party is for the Democratic ones. Note, for instance, that in Maine, 55 percent say Collins votes with Trump too often.

Of course, obscuring such unpleasant realities is one of Fox News’s most critical missions. As Matt Gertz of Media Matters often points out, Fox regularly shields its own viewers from Fox’s own poll findings. Indeed, Trump himself often rages at Fox to fire its pollsters when Fox delivers findings that displease him.

In that sense, Trump and Fox both share a deep understanding about how Trump’s mystique with MAGA really functions: Even mere perceptions that Trump is politically weak or falling short in any way risk fracturing the base.

It’s taken as a truism in American punditry that the supposed impregnability of this base is why Trump has an allegedly unmovable floor. But many of these polls show this base cracking pretty badly as he underperforms with non-college whites and even iwth rural voters to boot. Fox personalities: If you don’t like hearing all this, well, go take it up with your own network’s pollsters.