The New Republic

Chief Supreme Court Justice John Roberts called out Justice Samuel Alito’s nonsensical argument about birthright citizenship.

The Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that children born in the United States to parents who were undocumented or temporarily in the country are citizens at birth under the Fourteenth Amendment’s citizenship clause.

In his separate dissent, Alito argued that immigrant parents, in order for their child to automatically be made an American citizen, could not be subject to any foreign power. But he contended that some people who had done “everything within their power to become United States citizens can be seen as no longer subject to any foreign power.”

But Roberts argued that this kind of “ad hoc exemption” was plainly inconsistent with Alito’s own interpretation of the Civil Rights Act.

“He does not explain how that exception can be squared with his view of the text, which (to repeat) is that anyone ‘automatically’ made a [‘national’] of his ‘parents’ native country’ was not entitled to citizenship,” Roberts wrote.

That wasn’t the only reason Alito’s dissent was a mess.

In closing, Alito argued that the majority’s interpretation “saddles this country with an ancient British rule that even the United Kingdom has abandoned,” referring to jus soli, or the right of soil. But the British government scrapped this law by passing the British Nationality Act of 1981—not by asking the courts to rewrite the nation’s founding documents.

President Trump’s supporters have begun to rail against the Supreme Court’s birthright citizenship ruling, a significant blow to their mass deportation dreams.

The court ruled 6–3 on Tuesday to strike down Trump’s executive order and uphold the constitutional principle that guarantees virtually anyone born on U.S. soil is an American citizen, regardless of their parents’ immigration status. Republicans weren’t pleased about this safeguarding of the Fourteenth Amendment.

“The Supreme Court’s birthright citizenship decision is wrong, dangerous, and disastrous for American sovereignty and the American people,” wrote GOP Senator Eric Schmitt. “If we can’t fix it with ordinary legislation, then we must do what the Constitution commands in moments of national crisis: We must amend the Constitution and restore American citizenship. We must again put ‘We the People’ first.… This ruling is the final alarm bell.”

Heritage Foundation president and Project 2025’s lead architect Kevin Roberts was equally upset. “The Supreme Court’s ruling on birthright citizenship is a tremendous betrayal of the republic. The Justices in the majority have inflamed the all-out assault on our sovereignty and cheapened the sacred value of American citizenship,” he wrote. “Universal birthright citizenship erases any uniquely American birthright—a distortion that was never the meaning or intention of the 14th Amendment. It is time for a constitutional amendment to correct this gross injustice.”

“We are supposed to be a country, not an orphanage. You can’t jump our fence, give birth, cheat the system, and expect our taxpayers to raise your baby,” right-wing influencer and Charlie Kirk disciple Brilyn Hollyhand chimed. “We will be a country again one day. Illegals will be deported and birthright citizenship will end. If you’re a legal immigrant and won’t assimilate you will be denaturalized. If we want to last another 250 years we can’t be trampled on anymore.”

Strangely, the president himself has remained silent, even as he celebrated two other Supreme Court rulings upholding state bans on transgender athletes and loosening campaign finance laws.

Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh—both Trump appointees—sided with the liberal justices in their decision to project birthright citizenship. Kavanaugh did argue that the law could eventually be changed by Congress, not via executive order, leaving the door open for a future attack on one of the most basic tenets of the American experiment.

The Supreme Court may have upended the White House’s attempt to rewrite the Fourteenth Amendment, but at least one justice pointed Republican lawmakers in a different direction to unravel the birthright citizenship clause.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who was appointed by Donald Trump to the bench in 2018, wrote a dissenting opinion in Trump v. Barbara, despite ruling alongside the majority.

His rationale: Trump’s plan to strip American-born second-generation immigrants of their citizenship could work if it were enacted through Congress.

“In my view, the Executive Order does not violate the Fourteenth Amendment. But the Order does contravene a federal statute,” Kavanaugh wrote, referring to the law specifying birthright parameters. “Congress could—consistent with the Fourteenth Amendment—amend [this law] or otherwise enact new legislation establishing exceptions to birthright citizenship for children born to foreign citizens unlawfully or temporarily in the country. But Congress has not yet done so.”

Kavanaugh argued that while Trump’s executive order violated federal law, it did not actually run afoul of the Constitution, even though the federal law echoed the same language employed in the Constitution.

The justice noted that Congress had considered numerous amendments to the law over the last 30 years but never actually enacted any of them.

Trump has tried and failed multiple times over the last year and a half to strip the constitutionally enshrined right. Mere hours after he was sworn into office, Trump signed an executive order stating that children born to immigrants on temporary visas or who are in the country illegally are not entitled to birthright status. That order was blocked by several judges in different court circuits over the last year.

Everyone needs to hear the sound House Speaker Mike Johnson made when he heard the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold birthright citizenship.

The Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that children born in the United States to parents who were undocumented or temporarily in the county are citizens at birth under the Fourteenth Amendment’s citizenship clause.

Johnson was in the midst of reciting his reasons for opposing birthright citizenship, when the ruling was read to him by a member of the press. The Louisiana Republican looked crestfallen.

“What’s your reaction to that?” one reporter asked, as other members of the press struggled to suppress their laughter.

“MmmmMmmm,” Johnson moaned, like he had a bad taste in his mouth.

an unhappy Mike Johnson growls when informed in real time by a reporter that the Supreme Court ruled to uphold birthright citizenship pic.twitter.com/VYMw0krto6

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 30, 2026

“Well, uh, I need to read the opinion, OK? But uh, obviously that’s, I mean you could say that’s a textualist and originalist view,” Johnson stammered. “But, however, I do think that this has been grossly abused in recent years, and that is the case that’s being made by the plaintiffs of the case, and we’re very sympathetic to that because it’s a serious problem.”

The House speaker then suggested that the conclusion from this ruling would be to push for an amendment to the U.S. Constitution, but he noted the significant obstacles to ratifying such a measure.

“I will say I’m very disappointed in that outcome,” Johnson added.

President Trump wants a master list of every foreign intelligence target, including potential recruits and people that U.S. agencies suspect are spies.

The New York Times reports that the White House, through the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, has asked federal intelligence agencies to turn over these names, alarming officials who fear that it would compromise operations or be misused. So far, senior counterintelligence staff at the CIA and FBI have resisted the demands, according to the Times.

Intel officials also can’t agree on how to create, maintain, and secure the list. Trump’s new acting director, Bill Pulte, has no intelligence experience, causing FBI and CIA staff to worry about how he’d handle such a document. And the relationship between the ODNI, FBI, and CIA has gotten worse thanks to former Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who pushed Trump’s false claims of election fraud and cut the office’s staff.

Even creating such a list could jeopardize operation security, as it would put sensitive information that is normally compartmentalized into one place. It could also compromise long-term investigations and operations. Some of the targets on these lists are carefully protected even within federal agencies, with many staff not having access to their identities.

An official from Pulte’s office told the Times that it was only trying to follow National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, the administration’s national security strategy targeting supposed anti-American activity on the left. That official said compiling a list of intelligence assets and targets would help with collaboration and information sharing.

As a Trump loyalist, Pulte is likely to closely follow the president’s orders. Under Gabbard, Trump used the ODNI, which is supposed to focus on foreign intelligence, to investigate nonexistent fraud from the 2020 presidential election and other elections where Trump didn’t like the results. What does he want with a full list of intelligence targets? Does he think there could be some foreign connection to elections, or does he have some misguided or odious foreign policy plans?

The Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld West Virginia and Idaho state laws banning transgender athletes from competing on teams that align with their gender, further restricting trans rights in the U.S.

This is the court’s first ruling on laws regarding trans athletes, and follows last year’s decision in U.S. v. Skrmetti allowing states to ban gender-affirming care for transgender minors.

The ruling contributes to an increasingly bleak legal landscape for trans people in the U.S. Both petitioners argued that the state bans are discriminatory, and violate the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause. One argued that the restrictions are also a violation of Title IX, which prohibits discrimination in schools on the basis of sex.

All three liberal justices dissented in the decision, noting that they would have sent the case back for further factual findings on the equal protection claim.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a partial dissent, joined by Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Elena Kagan.

“States do have some room to legislate around issues when there exists significant, and genuine, scientific debate,” Sotomayor wrote. “At this point, however, neither the District Court nor the Fourth Circuit has passed upon any of the available evidence or made the necessary factual findings about the state of the scientific debate.”

“The majority’s opinion ends by reciting the many wonderful ways in which playing sports can be valuable to young people. It can help build resilience, tenacity, leadership, and discipline. It can lead to life-long friendships, community, and a sense of belonging. It can bring joy and the thrill of victory, along with all the lessons one learns from experiencing defeat. The benefits are immense,” Sotomayor continued. “Because of the Court’s decision today, West Virginia, and any other state actor, can deny B. P. J. and others like her these experiences simply because it thinks they have an inherent athletic advantage, even if the facts show that they do not.”

“A transgender woman penalized for being perceived as aggressive has experienced discrimination ‘on the basis of sex’ just as much as a cisgender woman has, no matter that the transgender woman’s behavior matches expectations of her sex assigned at birth,” Justice Jackson wrote in an additional dissent. “Either way, the institution has imposed its gender-based expectations upon her. And either way, the institution may have violated Title IX.”

The majority decision will have national repercussions on transgender athletes competing in youth and college sports, even as the number of participating trans athletes participating is very slim.

Rachel Kahn contributed reporting to this story.

The Supreme Court has tossed out another of President Donald Trump’s efforts to kill birthright citizenship.

In a decision filed Tuesday, the court ruled in favor of the 1868 constitutional clause, which entitles any person born on U.S. soil to an American passport, further safeguarding the protections of the Fourteenth Amendment from the Trump administration.

Trump has tried and failed multiple times over the course of his second term to strip away the constitutionally enshrined right. Mere hours after he was sworn into office in January 2025, Trump signed an executive order stating that children born to immigrants on temporary visas or who are in the country illegally are not entitled to birthright status. That order was blocked by several judges in different court circuits over the last year.

In December, the nation’s highest judiciary agreed to hear another one of the administration’s birthright challenges, this time pertaining to a case out of New Hampshire. The executive branch argued in the case that language included in the Fourteenth Amendment—specifically, “subject to the jurisdiction of”—required applicable children not only to be present in the country at the time of the birth, but also to confer their allegiance to the United States.

The argument appeared thin at best, considering the administration did not clarify how it expected people who had just been born to declare their allegiance.

In legal arguments filed at the time, Solicitor General D. John Sauer wrote that the naturalized citizenship pathway had become “pervasive” with “destructive consequences.”

In May 2025, justices on both ideological sides of the court flamed the Trump administration’s efforts to rewrite birthright citizenship, questioning why the government’s attorneys would even bring the case to the judiciary’s doorstep when “every court has ruled against” the administration on birthright citizenship.

At the time, Justice Brett Kavanaugh pressed Sauer into a corner, forcing the solicitor general to admit that the Trump administration didn’t even know how it would enforce its birthright citizenship order. Sauer managed to appall another Trump appointee—Justice Amy Coney Barrett—by arguing that Trump has the “right” to disregard legal opinions that he doesn’t personally agree with.

This is a developing story.

This is a lightly edited transcript of the June 29 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.

Perry Bacon: Welcome, everybody. This is Right Now on The New Republic. I’m your host, Perry Bacon. I’ve done a lot of episodes on this show about the media, but most of them have often been very critical—bemoaning layoffs, the decline of local news to some extent, news organizations trying to placate Trump in ways that worry me. The mergers have been troublesome.

But I’m excited today, because we have a positive story about the news and a positive story about journalism. So I have Steve Sachs. He’s the managing director of The Guardian US. You probably have heard of The Guardian—it’s a well-known British paper, but they actually have a very strong US-focused edition and website that has great news about what’s happening in Washington, what’s happening in the country. So I want to talk about what The Guardian is doing here and what maybe other places can learn from it. Steve, welcome.

Steve Sachs: Thank you, Perry. Great to be here.

Bacon: So let me start from the beginning here, to tell people about the history. The Guardian started having a US operation a couple of decades ago. So talk about how that started and what the goal was initially.

Sachs: Yeah. At The Guardian, we’ve always had an editorial team here. But we started about a little more than 15 years ago saying, “Let’s expand into having an audience here and a business here.” And that was part of a strategy at The Guardian, really especially over the last 10 years, where we expanded in two key ways.

One was expanding outside the UK, and the second is expanding committing to being no-paywall, and then asking our audience to support us. Those were important strategic decisions, and expanding in the US was part of that overall strategy.

Bacon: And so let’s talk about pre-Trump—pre-Trump one, even. So as The Guardian opens in the US, you have staffers in New York and in DC and a little bit elsewhere. How big was the initial operation?

Sachs: We started with a team here. New York, DC, and California were our three main places originally. We were first in northern California. We then moved the bureau to southern California, to LA.

And honestly, Perry, in the first few years—first, say, five or six years—it was tough going. We lost a lot of money. We tried to figure out what our unique value is here, and it took us a while to figure out. And it wasn’t a straight line up. The news here—there’s lots of great players. It’s a crowded market.

And so for The Guardian to come in and figure out what is our value overall—what’s our, in business speak, what’s our unique value proposition—it took us a little while to figure out. And our business model took us a little while to figure out as well.

So we started there, but then really over the past, say, six or seven years, we really started to focus and understand what our opportunity is here. And as a result of that, we have grown significantly. We are now, typically in any given month, between 40 and 50 million uniques on our website and in our app, in total. That makes us bigger than the Wall Street Journal in the US.

And over the past five months, for the first time, we now have more page views and more unique visitors in the US than the Washington Post does. We have grown significantly as a result of the work that we’ve done. I could talk a little bit more about what exactly we did, but—

Bacon: We’ll come back to that.

Sachs: The headline is that we’re doing well, and more and more Americans are coming to us as their first choice for all kinds of news and journalism.

Bacon: Let me jump back. The initial goal—why did The Guardian decide to have more staff in the US? What was the initial impetus to start a US edition, or really focus on the US in the first place? Was it part of a worldwide expansion, or was there a specific need you all felt back in 2007?

Sachs: Yeah. So what happened was, 10 years ago—a little bit more than 10 years ago—we were losing a lot of money at The Guardian globally.

And people forget, with the great success of The New York Times—and I have so much respect for what they’ve done—people forget also that 15 years ago, The New York Times was really financially not on strong footing overall. They had to take a loan from a Mexican billionaire, a high-interest loan, in order to really help them shore up their financials.

The Guardian was similar. We were losing about £100 million a year. So that’s about, in today’s dollars, about $135 million. And we only had £700 million in an endowment. So that means we basically had seven years to live.

So what did we do? We decided that—at the time, we were the seventh-largest newspaper in the UK. And we decided that in order to change our economics and to also focus on a broader mission, we would target becoming one of the largest news organizations globally. And the US expansion was an important part of that.

The headline on that is that we are now, in 2026, the fifth-largest news organization globally by audience.

Bacon: CNN, New York Times, Guardian.

Sachs: So we have achieved our goal. New York Times, CNN, BBC, Guardian. So we’ve grown from the seventh-largest news organization in the UK to the fifth-largest news organization globally by audience.

We’ve also changed our economics. So 10 years ago, only 8 percent of our revenue was from outside the UK. Now it’s over 40 percent—it’s 41 percent of our revenue from outside the UK. And so just in 10 years, we successfully changed that. We are also now operating very well financially. And so that big loss that we had, we’ve changed as well.

Bacon: So I’m a journalist—I want to talk about journalism and the stories themselves for a little bit right now. What I found was, in 2017, during that first Trump period, the reason I started reading The Guardian more was, one, I liked the perspective that was international. It wasn’t so grounded in the US, and it helped me see the world a little bit broader, the way you all covered it.

And two, I felt like there was a little more directness about what Trump was doing. Sometimes I worried that NPR, The Times, The Post would do what I think of as a sort of both sides, and not honestly say what he was actually doing and the alarming radicalism. But how do you see that? What was the—how did the Trump era affect what you all did when he was first in office?

Sachs: It’s really interesting to hear what you found valuable for us back in 2017. I would summarize what you said as: we have more of a global perspective.

Whereas many news organizations in the US have more of an American filter. And also what you said was, we can report as is—so that’s really more of an independent view. And that’s exactly right.

A few years ago—when Betsy Reed, our editor, and I started, we both started three and a half years ago, within about a month of each other—one of the first things we did is we wanted to understand what our value proposition is in the US. And there was a lot of debate at the time about what it might be.

So we commissioned research. We did very sophisticated quantitative research with over 3,000 people in the US. They all took a 45-minute in-depth survey. And we did it—those 3,000 people represent that there are about 200 million people in the US who come to digital news every month.

And we wanted to understand what was The Guardian’s value proposition to those 200 million people, and clarify it for us and for the team overall. And the answer is—you got two of the three right. You figured it out in 2017. We didn’t figure it out until 2024.

The answer is that people come to us for the combination of global perspective, independent, and the other important one is no paywall.

Global, independent, and free is what’s unique about us. No one else in the US is doing that. So we are focused on that overall, and that helps us—whether it is what’s happening in DC, or what’s happening in climate, or what’s happening in soccer. Soccer—the World Cup, which is going on right now, or as my colleagues in the UK would call it, football.

There are all kinds of stories that you want to be able to report for an audience that’s looking for a broader global perspective, and independent—not held to, not having the conflicts of a corporate structure that has many different goals, or a billionaire owner that may have personal interests. And we make it all available on our site without any cost.

We then ask people to support us, which we’re very successful in doing. But that’s what we did back then, and even more, that’s what we do now: global perspective that’s independent, without cost, that’s free.

Bacon: Let me probe with all three of those ideas. Let me start with the paywall. The news industry—it was probably a mistake to give everything away for free at the beginning of the internet.

But that said, now when I do my stories and try to look for links and look for facts, I can’t read anything, because everything is behind a paywall now. I really love journalism. I can’t subscribe to every newspaper in every state, and the paywalls are very intense right now. My worry is a lot of the best-quality news—Wall Street Journal, Reuters, Bloomberg—is all behind a paywall.

So tell me—I understand the virtue in having a paywall, but how does that work economically for you all? How do you make money? Just the core question. Everyone wants to have more access, but how do we make that work financially?

Sachs: Yeah. You’re exactly right that, especially even more so over the past couple of years—

When CNN has started a paywall. The BBC has started a paywall in the US. Others have tightened their paywall and made it—you get less for free before you hit the paywall.

Part of it is our mission. So let me tell you a little bit about it, and then I’ll circle back to the exact part of what you were talking about—how we make the economics work. But part of it is our mission, and it’s a mission that comes from the way we are owned and operated.

So The Guardian is owned by a trust in the UK, and the trust has only one mandate, which is to secure the financial and editorial independence of The Guardian in perpetuity. Effectively—

Bacon: And the trust is not run by one person or one family?

Sachs: No, it’s not.

Bacon: OK, that’s important to say.

Sachs: It’s not. It is effectively a nonprofit. We are effectively a nonprofit organization. If we were headquartered in the US, we would reincorporate as a 501(c)(3). There’s no such thing as a 501(c)(3), of course, in the UK, but that’s effectively what we are. They operate us for mission. They operate us for longevity. We have a very large endowment, like a nonprofit news organization or a nonprofit here would have. It’s actually—we have a billion and we have almost a two-billion-pound—sorry, two-billion-dollar—one-and-a-half-billion-pound, two-billion-dollar, approximately, endowment.

And what it does is, that allows us to do the things that we’ve talked about. It allows us to operate independently, because we are—the board, just like ProPublica here has a board. We are like ProPublica, where we have a board that then operates us, governs us in a way that we are reporting and building and being sustainable for the long term. And it does not get involved in journalistic decisions overall.

So the fact that we don’t have a paywall is part of our overall mission to make high-quality journalism, like the other news organizations that you named. The Guardian also has over 1,000 journalists globally now. So we have actually grown. We’re one of the only news organizations that has grown our newsroom over the past few years. In fact, in the US, when I started, we had about 75 journalists. In the US right now, we have 150.

So we’ve doubled in the last three years. So we’re one of the few news organizations in the US that’s actually growing our newsroom too. And the reason why we can do it is, we don’t have to report earnings quarterly. We don’t even report them—we report them voluntarily, publicly.

We can draw down a small amount off of our endowment like a nonprofit would here. But we use that to invest for the future. So all the investment that we’ve done in the US is as a result of being able to draw down a couple of percent off of our endowment every year. And that endowment is still growing, because we’re so conservatively drawing down on it.

So the big picture on it is that The Guardian is different and has an advantage in serving an audience because of the way we’re set up, and because of the way we’re now funded and we’re in a strong financial position.

So then what does that translate into? If we’re going to make all our information available for free on our website, how do we actually make money then? And the answer is that 10 years ago, we started what we call a reader revenue program. It actually—we should really rename it now, because we’re much more than reading. It’s really an audience revenue or supporter revenue program. And when people come, we ask them to support us, in much the same way that, say, NPR asks people to support. We’ve become very good at it.

And in the US, about two-thirds of our revenue—so last year we broke $80 million of revenue in the US. About two-thirds of that comes from voluntary contributions that people don’t have to make, but they do. So that’s $58 million last year. Over 700,000 people in the US and Canada combined made a contribution. About 500,000 of those are actually on a recurring basis, either every month or every year, automatically on a credit card.

And two-thirds of our revenue in the US—$58 million last year and growing, that was up 35 percent, actually, the real revenue was up 35 percent last year versus the year before, so we’re growing—is as a result of people coming to our site or our app and really appreciating what’s there and saying, You know what? This is a different perspective, and I really appreciate it, and it’s made available for free, and I’m going to support it.

Bacon: Make sure I’m understanding this right. So half a million people are contributing to The Guardian in the US, even though they could get it for free. That’s an important statistic.

Sachs: It’s even more than that. It’s 700,000. And the way we look at it is US and Canada—we call it North America, so US and Canada, correctly. But the vast majority is US. Over 700,000 people did that. Of that, 500,000 are on a recurring basis—effectively a subscription.

The other 200,000 made a one-time contribution. And so we’ve got 700,000 people in the US and Canada, North America, that are contributing even though they don’t have to, because they really appreciate what it is that we do and find it really valuable.

Bacon: And I would say, as a person in that group, part of what I find valuable is other people can read the stories. I can send the story to someone, and they can read it without me having to do a bunch of gymnastics and passwords.

Sachs: That’s right. That’s a very important thing. And so there’s that benefit. We do a lot of research to understand, why is it? Why do people support us? And really interestingly, more than half the people that support us aren’t coming regularly. We track how often somebody comes to our site or our app.

Do they come every day? Do they come a couple times a week? Do they come once every 30 days? Have we not seen them in the past 30 days? What’s really interesting is, of the 700,000 people in the US that made a contribution in the last year, over half of them come less than once a month. So you would say, Why are they making a contribution then? They’re not actually coming.

And the answer is—we do a lot of research on this—the answer is that, as there are fewer and fewer news organizations that can report independently, that have the kind of global perspective we have and make the information available for free, they appreciate that and want to support that, even if they’re not coming.

Because it’s not just that they can share with others, it’s also they feel it’s important to have independent journalism in the US that is well-funded, and they’re willing to kick in 50 bucks, or 15 dollars a month, or whatever it is they can afford, in order to have The Guardian exist and be strong and growing.

So it’s really counterintuitive that somebody would give us 15 dollars a month when they don’t come to our site or they don’t come to our app, but they do.

Bacon: That’s amazing. I didn’t realize that.

Sachs: They do that because of the value that we have overall and the importance of that that people feel, for America and the world.

Bacon: Let me drill in on independent. So that’s a tricky word, in that everybody who works at The Guardian says, “We’re independent.” And I perceive you all as being more liberal—not in a high-taxes way, but in a sort of for-freedom, for-equality way. There are some values. So how do you see your values?

My guess is a lot of those 700,000 people, most of them voted for Harris—I don’t know if you want to say that or not. But when you say independent, you mean not owned by a billionaire. So what are the values of The Guardian? Let me put it that way, in terms of journalism. What are the values of The Guardian?

Sachs: Yeah. Independent is a really important one. And what we mean by independent is, in our news report, we are reporting the facts.

And there’s not—as you mentioned—there’s not a both-sides to it that comes into our report. Our opinion—we do opinion, of course. Our opinion is left of center, for sure. We’ve got great opinion writers—Robert Reich and Margaret Sullivan and others, Betty Hassan, who contribute. And our opinion’s left of center, but our news report is independent and is reporting facts without a bias to it.

Bacon: And you want Republicans reading—you want everybody to read it.

Sachs: Not only do we want—we look, sometimes we look at Democrat versus Republican, but what we find more helpful is asking people how they define themselves on a liberal-versus-conservative scale.

And so when we look at our audience and ask them to define themselves as either very liberal, moderate, conservative, or very conservative—when we look at that, only about 40 percent of people define themselves as either liberal or very liberal.

Another 35 percent define themselves as moderate. And 25 percent define themselves as conservative or very conservative.

Bacon: I would not have guessed it. That’s interesting. I’m glad you told me that. That’s good to know.

Sachs: So that, by the way, is different in the US than it is in other parts of the world. Because people didn’t grow up with The Guardian here. In the UK, people grew up with it and have a very clear view of what it is. Here, people are still discovering it. And so they come and they see our news report, and they see us being global, independent, and free.

And so they don’t read into it, Yeah, this is X. This is either very conservative, very liberal, whatever it is. And so we get a broader audience because of that. And that is something that we’re really thrilled about, because there’s so much polarization in the US when it comes to media, and so we would like to be able to reach a broader audience overall. It’s just part of our mission.

Bacon: Are the readers you’re getting people who also read the Times and NPR or CNN? Are they people who don’t? Are you a lot of people’s second read, or their first—maybe they also have a second read? I’m not trying to diminish you. But is it people who read a lot of media, or people who just read one thing? That’s what I’m asking.

Sachs: It’s a great question. The same research I was just referring to, where we figured out our value proposition, and we also asked about how people self-define, liberal versus conservative—we asked about this question because we always had this question of second read versus first read. And it turns out that it’s really interesting.

The whole idea of a first read and second read is actually an outdated idea. It’s from an idea of when a newspaper was thrown up on your driveway, and then you would go out and get it, or dropped off if you’re in an apartment in New York, dropped off at your front door or the front desk.

People now read—or watch or listen—really broadly, because they come to your podcast, and they come to The Guardian, and they go to The New York Times, and they might go to Axios, et cetera. And so when you look at what The Guardian is, we are part of the mix, in the same way that others are as well.

Most people—even when you look at something like CNN or The New York Times—most people would say, Oh, that could be a first, the first thing they turn to. It turns out that, based off of our research, less than 20 percent of the people that, say, go to the New York Times consider it their primary read or view of the world.

Because you’re discovering in your social feed, or you’re getting a newsletter or whatever, so you’re pretty broad here, and we’re now part of that mix as well—which is part of the advantage that we’ve had here, and why it is that we’ve been able to grow our audience while others are not growing their audience. A lot of news organizations have really had their audiences shrink in the last five years. And so it actually is an advantage that people are sampling so much, because they might discover us on Apple News.

And they may not have known about us before that. And then they discover us through that.

Bacon: Global is the third word you use. I think you might be using the word “global” meaning you all are based in Britain, you cover the world a lot. The other reason I think of you all as global being different is that—and I’m not trying to throw shade—when I read a story in the Journal, The New York Times, Axios about politics, it often reflects a DC-centric view of how politics works. And I read you all’s stories, and it’s, Oh, the broader picture. Sometimes the stories are like, sources close to say this.

And you all’s stories tend to be more, Here’s where this issue works, here’s how this thing is working. It’s written so my mom, my brother, and everybody else I know can read the story without having to need a translator. And I think that’s helpful—the domestic stories are written for everybody as opposed to written for the inside-DC crowd. That’s what I perceive. And I think that comes from also not being based in the US.

Sachs: It’s a really—you’re exactly right about that. So when I talk about global, what our audience says, and what we have adopted as part of our value proposition, is global perspective.

Bacon: Global perspective. OK.

Sachs: So what does global perspective mean? It means two things. Number one, it means that we do cover the world, because we now have over 1,000 journalists globally, of which a couple hundred—by the end of this year, a couple hundred—will be in the US. It means more than 800 in other parts of the world. That means that we just have really great coverage of what’s happening all over the world in ways that other news organizations don’t.

And so that is part of what people come to us for. About half of the stories that Americans read or listen to at The Guardian, about half in any given day or month, are created outside the US.

But the part that you’re focused on is exactly right, which is the other side of global perspective—and that is, when we’re covering the US, we cover it with what people call an outside perspective. And that is valuable, because what it means is two things. Number one, when we cover a story that others do also, we cover it with a different view. And number two, we frequently cover stories that others don’t.

So let me give you an example on the first one. Last month we published a series called The Slow Lane, which looks at how Americans’ love of cars caused our public transportation system to fall way behind other global cities or other countries. So if you look at Sydney or Barcelona or Hong Kong—we cover public transportation here with an outside view, more of a global view, while covering what’s happening in the US. That’s an example of something that’s different as well.

When we cover gun violence, or our broken healthcare system, or the death penalty, we cover them not as impossible-to-solve problems—because they’re not—but rather as issues that could be addressed if Americans look beyond their borders at how other countries have tackled them better. And I think that’s part of what you’re talking about, the unique value that you get from The Guardian, and that’s what our audience does too.

Bacon: So last question, just because of who I am and where I’ve come from. I worked at The Washington Post until about a year ago. Jeff Bezos wanted the opinion section to move to the right, and so it ended up making more sense to work at The New Republic now, and I’ve had a great opportunity here.

But I wanted to ask you—did the Washington Post and the LA Times decisions to cancel endorsements and signal a different kind of direction, and maybe even CBS—have some of those changes at other places... I know you all have had a big audience growth. Is some of that driven from those other places maybe making mistakes, or is that more organic? Talk about how the other media’s moves have affected what you all are doing.

Sachs: Yeah. I don’t want to comment on specific companies or people, but I can say that more and more people are discovering The Guardian as they’re looking for other alternatives.

And The Post does some great journalism.

Bacon: I agree. Oh, yes.

Sachs: They do some fantastic journalism. They have a much smaller team than they used to.

But I have a lot of respect for the journalism they do. And others as well. The news audience is very tuned in.

And as decisions are made, they say, I really want to look at other options. And over the past few years, more people have looked around, and we’ve benefited as a result. We’ve seen our audience grow. So for example, as I said, the Washington Post—a year ago we were smaller than The Washington Post in audience, in uniques and in page views on the site. Now we’re bigger.

And that’s because we’ve grown. They’ve shrunk as well. And they do great journalism, but people are making choices.

One thing that’s interesting about The Guardian also, and this points to opportunity in the US, is that we think there’s a lot more opportunity to grow here. So we’re at 40 to 50 million uniques a month now. But also, in our research, only about 59 percent of people in the US who use digital news have ever heard of The Guardian. That number in the UK is 85 percent.

Bacon: And I’m sure The Washington Post number’s up in the 80s or something like this—much higher.

Sachs: Exactly.

Bacon: Yeah, you would assume.

Sachs: And so there’s another 20-plus points of people in the US that still have never heard of us. That will help us as they continue to look around, as we continue to grow what we do. We’ve recently launched new kinds of coverage. We’ve invested heavily in soccer and covering soccer in the US for the World Cup, and so we’ve had huge audiences for that over the past few weeks.

We’ve increased our DC team. We used to do mostly breaking news. We now do enterprise and investigations out of DC also. As we have more for people to discover, and as people look around, I think The Guardian will continue to do well in the US. And others do great work also. I think the audience is frequently now kind of saying, Let me see what else is out there.

Bacon: Last question. I worry about this Trump bump, because you saw from 2017 to 2020, news organizations had a big audience, then it declined. How are you going to make sure you sustain this audience and this growth? Because Trump’s not going to be president anymore after two years or so, obviously. So how do you make sure you keep this audience and keep the growth and keep the momentum going after that?

Sachs: Yeah. There’s no doubt that we’ve had some wind in our sails over the past 18 months. People are coming to us for much more than Trump. So people are coming to us for—we’re among the best in the world in covering climate, one of the most important, maybe the defining issue of our time. People come for health-related, health-equity-related issues.

But what we’re doing is, we are investing heavily outside of hard news, so that when people come, and when the news cycle is less intense than what it is, people know and come to us for other areas. So for example, I mentioned soccer. We now have one of the largest teams in the US covering soccer, plus all the people we have in the UK covering soccer. And soccer has become much more popular in the US, and so even after the World Cup’s over, people are going to be wanting to come to that. They’ll come to The Guardian for that.

We started a heavily researched reviews site called The Filter—our version of consumer journalism, doing reviews like, say, Wirecutter does, or Strategist, or others. We started that a year ago. That’s doing really well. We launched wellness coverage a couple of years ago, with what we call, which is a realistic view on wellness. So much of wellness is really about perfection. That’s not about us at all.

So we’re investing heavily outside of hard news, so that both when people come, there’s more to go to, and also when the news cycle is less frenetic, people will continue to come to us for other reasons.

Bacon: And with that, Steve Sachs—I love the idea of global, independent, and free. Those are three great words to use. Steve Sachs is the managing director for The Guardian US. I highly recommend The Guardian US as a product. If you’re reading the Times and the Post, CNN—you should definitely add The Guardian to your reading list if you haven’t already. Obviously, read The New Republic too, but The Guardian is doing some really great work. So Steve, congrats on that, and thank you for joining me.

Sachs: Perry, thanks so much. I really enjoyed it.

Bacon: Good to see you. Bye-bye.

Peace negotiations between the U.S. and Iran are once again inching along, days after the two countries exchanged strikes. But even top Trump officials aren’t confident in the burgeoning truce.

State Secretary Marco Rubio reportedly told lawmakers during a briefing Monday that the new peace deal wasn’t of the same caliber as the Obama administration’s Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.

California Representative Sydney Kamlager-Dove recounted Rubio’s admission while speaking with MeidasTouch’s Pablo Manríquez outside of the Capitol, claiming that Rubio had said the Obama administration’s set-up was a “real agreement with criteria and benchmarks and thresholds.”

“This [memorandum of understanding] is just a signed piece of paper saying we’re going to continue to talk about talking,” Kamlager-Dove said. “So you should ask yourself, a hundred-and-something billion dollars later, ‘What are these people doing with our money and our national security?’”

Kamlager-Dove on Rubio Iran Briefing: I have to say, the highlight—or lowlight—for me was when Secretary Rubio was asked about the difference between this MOU and the JCPOA. And Marco Rubio essentially said the JCPOA, Obama’s nuclear deal, was a real agreement with criteria,… pic.twitter.com/lwrulT9Hma

— Acyn (@Acyn) June 30, 2026

The unpopular war has so far cost American taxpayers more than $1 billion per day (the current total is estimated at more than $113.3 billion). It has also sparked a political rejection of MAGA ideology across the U.S. as the American public becomes more and more disillusioned with its increasingly infirm, unstable, and volatile president.

The country’s strained economy has also become a political talking point ahead of a contentious midterm season. The projected military expenses don’t encompass the heightened day-to-day costs for the average American. Moody’s Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi told CBS News Monday that it’s likely every American household has spent roughly $1,000 more in heightened fuel and food costs since the war began in late February.

But those additional expenses have apparently not affected the White House.

Donald Trump has been remarkably cavalier about the peace negotiations. As the U.S. and Iran prepared Monday to send delegations to Qatar, the president said that the meeting in Doha would be “perhaps important, perhaps not.”

“We’re going to find out, but we’re winning militarily. It’s almost won militarily, I would say,” Trump said.

The envoys include special envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law. Vice President JD Vance is leading the operation, though he is not expected to attend the upcoming talks.

President Trump is once again building something at the White House without any warning.

Trump is building a new helipad on the White House’s South Lawn, The Washington Post reports, with construction crews already working on the project Monday. The helipad is being built on the lawn’s south portico, near where the presidential helicopter, Marine One, is traditionally kept. A large fence is now blocking off the construction.

The project has not been announced, but is meant to solve the problem of new Sikorsky helicopters built by Lockheed Martin possibly burning the White House lawn due to their exhaust vents. The defense company is reportedly donating $5 million to help pay for the helipad.

Other administrations have refrained from building a permanent helipad on the White House grounds due to concerns of historical preservation, as well as ruining the classical image of presidents boarding Marine One on the grass near the White House.

In his second term, Trump has shown that he has no regard for history or tradition where the White House is concerned, unceremoniously demolishing its East Wing to build a massive ballroom, paving over the Rose Garden and replacing it with a stone patio, and holding a UFC fight on the South Lawn.

Trump can at least argue that this project is operationally necessary. But he’s already done so much damage to the White House in order to push his own gaudy design aesthetic, and because he’s kept his helipad plans under the radar, nobody knows what it’s going to look like.

Trump has repeatedly shown in his second term that if he wants something built a certain way, he won’t listen to any criticism or preserve any history, no matter how tacky his designs. Just look at the hideous mockups of his “triumphal arch.”

On Monday night, the House passed a weaker version of the Senate’s Kids Online Safety Act, or KOSA, aimed at regulating the tech industry and protecting children online. Whether this is a good thing or not depends on whom you ask.

House leaders have taken four years to reach a compromise on their own version of KOSA, which the Senate passed in 2022. The House version, called the Kids Internet and Digital Safety, or KIDS, Act, passed by 267–117 on Monday night.

Representative Frank Pallone Jr., the Democratic co-sponsor of the KIDS Act, lauded it as an example of bipartisan cooperation last week. “This agreement proves Congress can come together to deliver real online protections for our nation’s young people,” he said in a statement.

But Senate Democrats have suggested that they won’t advance the House version. “We’re not going to go with some weak standard,” said Senator Maria Cantwell on Friday. “We are going to go with a law that can be enforced and accountability, and we’re not going with a study, we’re going on with something that holds them accountable.”

Senator Richard Blumenthal, a co-sponsor of KOSA, even suggested that passing the weaker House version could give tech lobbyists ammunition to “exploit the kind of misunderstandings that can occur” between the two chambers and kill provisions they don’t like. “We need to stop this bill in the House and we need to prevent the White House from forming an alliance with Big Tech,” Blumenthal said.

Cantwell, Blumenthal, and their allies say the KIDS Act doesn’t include the strongest parts of KOSA, like the “duty of care” provision, which makes tech companies legally responsible for the well-being of children on their platforms, or the stipulation that KOSA doesn’t preempt states, allowing them to pass stricter measures in the future. The KIDS Act, on the other hand, includes federal preemption language that opponents say could harm states’ ability to enforce tech regulations themselves. In late May, 44 state attorneys general sent a letter to Congress opposing the KIDS Act on the grounds that it would preempt their legislative and legal efforts.

“This bill has no real duty of care. In other words, it has no standard to hold accountable the Big Tech companies that can drive addictive, toxic content through their algorithms and other technologies at children,” Blumenthal said in a press conference on Friday.

On Friday, nearly 100 digital- and kids-safety groups sent a letter to House leadership and the sponsors of the KIDS Act urging them to reject the bill on the grounds that it doesn’t go far enough to protect children from Big Tech. In addition to the “duty of care” issue, the authors noted that the KIDS Act drops the requirement that tech platforms offer a chronological feed rather than an algorithmic, engagement-maximizing one. The authors are also concerned that the KIDS Act defines social media platforms too narrowly, leaving out apps and websites like Roblox, which has exposed some children to sexual and financial exploitation.

But others think both acts are a bad idea—that the provisions in KOSA and KIDS, instead of protecting kids, could harm their ability to engage in free speech and access resources for mental health, addiction, and other social issues. Groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and GLAAD say that measures meant to protect kids could push tech platforms to set age limits and push younger children off of their websites, harming LGBTQ+ kids or others who are looking for community and resources online.

“Maybe by different routes, [the bills] accomplish the same objective,” said Aaron Mackey, the deputy legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “They’ve pushed online services to have legal obligations to police their content and exclude kids from vital places and space.”

Tech companies have pushed against both the House and Senate versions, but have spoken more favorably about the House bill. Zach Lilly, the director of government affairs for NetChoice, a tech industry group, said that the House bill “is a real effort to improve upon the disastrous censorship regime being championed in the Senate.”

After Monday’s House vote, it remains to be seen which bill will ultimately come out on top and head to the president’s desk—and whether the tech lobby will be able to exploit the rift between House and Senate.

The Trump administration has awarded Clark Construction a $500 million no-bid contract to build the president’s ballroom—even as he has promised multiple times that it would either be privately funded and built at no cost to taxpayers, according to The Washington Post. Records show that the president was personally involved in the contract negotiations.

Competitive bidding is generally required for all federal contracts. However, the Trump administration filed this contract through the Executive Residence, which is exempt from competitive contract rules.

The White House justified the move by stating that under federal law, the president can spend however much on the “care, maintenance, repair, alteration, refurnishing, improvement, air-conditioning, heating, and lighting” of the White House grounds. The Trump administration tried to cite the same law as authority to build the ballroom, but a federal judge rejected it in March. The administration’s no-bid contract, however, has yet to become a legal matter.

White House Office of Administration Director Joshua Fisher noted on the contract that it skipped the typical bidding process because “the disclosure of the executive agency’s needs would compromise the national security.”

Trump has repeatedly said that private donors would foot the whole bill for the ballroom construction, but now it’s clearer than ever that’s not true. “They said: ‘Sir, we’ll do it for nothing. This is the greatest honor,” Trump claimed earlier this year.

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the June 30 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 lost a few big cases at the Supreme Court on Monday. He also won a big one. But judging by the extended eruption of rage that followed after those losses, those are the cases he really cared about. And you can see why. In one of those losses, the court allowed states to continue counting ballots that arrive after election day, and that probably cuts off one of the pathways he was eyeing to help steal the midterms. Yet at the same time, his one victory was pretty substantial and underscored again the long-term crisis that the Supreme Court has thrust us into by continually expanding the power of this president.

We’re getting into all of it with Lisa Graves, former counsel for the Senate Judiciary Committee, who writes about the Supreme Court. Lisa, good to have you on.

Lisa Graves: Greg, thank you so much for inviting me.

Sargent: So let’s start with Trump’s losses. The Supreme Court rejected his appeal of a $5 million verdict in favor of E. Jean Carroll after a jury found he’d abused her. It blocked him from firing Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook without cause. And in the biggest loss of all, the court upheld a Mississippi provision that counts mail-in ballots that arrive late, which will deliver a real blow to Trump and Republican efforts to invalidate mail ballots in this fall’s midterms in many other states. Lisa, what’s your basic reading on that last one?

Graves: Well, the Watson case is one where, had the Roberts court ruled in favor of Trump, it would have caused further chaos for the elections. We’re already seeing some of the chaos the Roberts court has caused through the Callais decision and related rulings this spring around the maps and the redrawing of maps in the former Confederate states. But in this instance, the Roberts court said no to the effort of the RNC and Trump to block the counting of ballots that are postmarked by election day but that arrive after.

And obviously, people don’t have any control over how long it takes for the mail to be delivered. And it’s been increasingly slow in recent years. And in numerous other ways, the postmark is the thing that counts. It’s the thing that can’t be altered. And so it’s a really reliable indicator of whether a ballot is on time based on the postmark. And the reality is that even though the press covers election night in the sort of horse-race coverage of who won and who lost, those are projections, because in reality, in many counties across the country, particularly in cities, it takes days to actually count and verify those ballots.

And also there’s an opportunity for people to cure their ballots if they cast provisional ballots, come in later that week with their ID if they didn’t have one with these new ID restrictions. And so it’s not unusual at all for the counting of ballots that are postmarked by election day, and the ballots that are cast on election day, to be counted in the days after the election. Trump, as you point out, was counting on the court siding with him and the RNC to try to disrupt the counting of those ballots.

Sargent: This loss really triggered Trump’s anger more than anything else. He exploded in an extended rant on Truth Social. He said this:

“In light of the tremendous loss in the Supreme Court today concerning Voter’s Rights, and the fact that ‘people’s’ votes are allowed to be counted LONG AFTER an Election is over, it is more important than ever to pass THE SAVE AMERICA ACT!”

Lisa, it’s very rare that Donald Trump admits that he lost, but there he admitted it. And I also thought it was useful that he said straight out that he doesn’t think people’s votes should be counted. That’s very helpful. I think that’s a very clear window into how he saw this.

Graves: Yeah, that’s right. Those in the law would call them admissions against interest, that he confessed those things. And this idea that he’s concerned about voters’ intent—if he were concerned about voters’ intent, he would try to ensure that those votes get counted when people mailed them on or before election day. But of course, as you point out, he also used this to pivot to his pressure campaign to try to get the SAVE Act passed, which is really about trying to save his presidency by making it harder for millions of Americans to vote.

A lot of women—not me—took their husbands’ names when they married. And so their birth certificate is not the same as their driver’s license. And the SAVE Act would make it harder for millions of American women to vote if they can’t show, at that time or in registration, that they are who they are, even if they’ve been voting for years or decades using either their driver’s license or their residence—regular voters.

And so that SAVE pressure point is something Trump has been obsessed with over the last few days in particular, because I think, again, he sees this as a way to try to control the outcome of the election, even though millions of Republican voters would also be affected by this deeply misguided and reckless SAVE Act.

Sargent: This ruling—what it does is, provisions like this one that allow the counting of mail ballots that arrive after election day will now remain in place in many states, including ones with big elections in them this fall. And this is the critical point. For instance, if Democrats win a couple of crucial House seats in California, their path to the majority becomes easier. There are a few other states, maybe New York and Texas, where the upholding of this provision could really matter in the midterms.

It’s obvious Trump and Republicans were hoping to use the slow counting of mail ballots to try to steal those elections outright. They were going to combine this counting of late-arriving votes with an effort to get the Postal Service to slow the delivery of votes, but that’s all been thwarted. That was a big chunk of their plan, wasn’t it?

Graves: That’s a great point, Greg. And we already saw Trump try to run this game plan in Los Angeles with the attacks on the process for counting ballots after the most recent elections in California, including in the mayoral race.

So we know that I think he was itching to deploy that same tactic to discredit elections everywhere by claiming that this is somehow fraudulent, or the results aren’t fair if the votes are counted after election day—even though, as you and I both know, votes are almost always counted after election day, because that’s how long it takes to count the votes.

Sargent: He really hates the counting of votes. I want to dwell a little bit on his use of this moment to push the SAVE Act. It’s really revealing. He responds to this loss on mail ballots by demanding again that Republicans pass voter suppression legislation. But the thing is, Lisa, he has explicitly said this voter suppression legislation is necessary to holding power in the midterms.

So he’s more or less confirming outright that he understood this mail ballot case as a way to block voters from delivering a negative verdict on his presidency, and as a way to block voters from having their say in the midterms. It’s just right out in the open. It’s striking how direct it is, isn’t it?

Graves: It really is. And it’s appalling, quite frankly. Because we’ve never—well, I guess we did in 2020—but before Donald Trump, we never had a president who sought to attack the idea of voting. Obviously, there was litigation around Bush v. Gore and whether those recounts could continue in the southeastern counties of Florida. But that was couched not as just hostility to counting these ballots.

And the thing about this particular circumstance is that, had the Supreme Court ruled in his favor, it would have cast in doubt early voting across the country. Because by setting election day as a particular day, Congress wasn’t intending to say that only ballots cast that day at the polling place could count. That’s not been the practice in the United States for literally more than a century. The first real major mailed ballots were during the Civil War, as the Civil War was going on. And so this is a long-standing part of American history. But Trump doesn’t care about history. What he cares about is power.

And he’s been joined in this attack on voting by mail, and on the potential outcome of this election, by Mike Johnson, who made really clear just the other day how, if Democrats were to win, there would be oversight of Donald Trump. And he said out loud something like, I’m your protection—we’re going to protect you from consequences. Which is also really morally appalling.

Sargent: Protecting you from accountability is what they mean.

Graves: Yes. And the fact is that that’s what representative government is about. That’s what House elections are about. Every two years we get a chance—or at least we’re supposed to get a chance—to do a course correction. And people seem to want a very real and significant course correction.

But between Donald Trump, Mike Johnson, and then the Roberts court’s rulings on Callais and the voting maps cases, what we see are Republican elected officials, or Republican-appointed officials, trying to squeeze and change the rules of the game midway to preserve Donald Trump’s power. Despite all of the extraordinarily outrageous things that Donald Trump has done on an almost daily basis, they seem determined to protect him at any cost—even the cost of representative government itself.

Sargent: Absolutely. But now we have to get to the bad part. The court ruled that Trump has the power to fire independent regulators, which is really going to increase Trump’s power over independent agencies and enable him and MAGA to bend agencies to his corrupt will more easily. The court carved out this exception for the Federal Reserve. Putting that aside for a sec, can you explain why this ruling on all the other agencies is such a disaster?

Graves: Well, it really is a disaster. And I wrote about some of this in my book, Without Precedent, which describes how John Roberts, the chief justice—who made an indelible image in people’s minds during his confirmation process, where he said he was just going to be a fair umpire calling balls and strikes—but in fact, he’s used the judiciary, used his post on the court, to advance some of these really fringe theories into law. And one of those fringe theories is the unitary executive theory.

It was invented during the Reagan administration. And we know that John Roberts was a Reagan revolutionary. He was at the top of the Justice Department at the beginning of Reagan’s term. He was then in the White House counsel’s office. Then he was in the George H.W. Bush administration as the political deputy in the SG’s office. And back then, what they were trying to do was to maximize presidential power.

And now, as a judge, what we’re seeing is John Roberts overturning decades, nearly a century, of legal precedent. Congress had passed this law saying that they wanted to make sure that there were independent agencies—that if the agency had sort of legislative components to its work, like the Federal Trade Commission, in terms of trying to implement Congress’s will of protecting against these mergers, and now they’re mega-mergers in the twenty-first century—that the president could not just fire someone without cause.

And the thing about what Roberts has done, along with his fellow Republican appointees in the Slaughter case, is that it has ripped away the power of Congress to create these independent agencies. And remember, the job of the president isn’t to invent the law. His job, the oath he takes, is to faithfully execute the law. Trump, for the most part, is not actually faithfully executing the law. From day one, minute one, after being sworn in, he started basically asserting that he could just change the law.

But in this instance, with mergers—this is an area where, like I said, going back to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the Supreme Court had said, no, you cannot fire your predecessors’ appointees. It’s just not allowed. We want these agencies to do their job independent of who is the president. And what Roberts has done is change the law radically, dramatically, to empower Trump to have more power than almost any president in the twentieth and twenty-first century has had.

Sargent: Well, let’s step back for a second and really home in on that bigger point. Trump rages wildly over his losses and he attacks the court over them, but he actually got his way in the manner that’s probably most significant in the long term—not for these midterms, but in the long term. And I think that tension captures where we are, which is that Trump’s expectation is so strong that he’ll get his way from the Supreme Court, that the Supreme Court will continue to give him power, that he treats it as unusual and even outrageous when the court occasionally doesn’t do that.

But the big story is that Trump and his appointees on the Supreme Court, and the Republican appointees on the Supreme Court, have conspired to vastly inflate the power of the president and arguably of the court as well, at the expense of Congress.

Isn’t that the big story? That it’s just basically whittled away Congress and reduced it and diminished it while inflating the power of the presidency and inflating the power of the court itself. They’re like allied in this effort, it seems to me.

Graves: Well, you’re exactly right. What we’re seeing is an imperial president being created by an imperial court. What we have is a sort of cult of judicial supremacy where Roberts is basically acting like the kingmaker. He is the one who invented and orchestrated his fellow Republican appointees to come together to give Donald Trump unprecedented immunity from criminal prosecution for his so-called official acts, to allow him to commit crimes. That is extraordinary. It was unprecedented, and it has created the sense of entitlement of Donald Trump in this new term.

So it basically pardoned him when he was not in office, helped sweep him back into power by sending a signal to the American people that he did no wrong, in essence—could do no wrong, and then has empowered him.

And the bookend for that is that this court, through the shadow docket, has ruled in Donald Trump’s favor 90 percent of the time, while the lower courts of different presidential appointments have been ruling against him on a lot of these issues, because they are contrary to the Constitution, to statutes, regulations, legal precedents, and contracts in many instances.

And so what we see here is a Supreme Court majority, six to three—five of them served in the executive branch. They cut their teeth trying to expand and defend presidential power. And now they’re using their posts on the Supreme Court to expand presidential power from the bench, to invent new rules and ignore long-standing precedents to do so.

And in doing so, they also are carving out for themselves this notion that they are the deciders. They are the real people in power, and they are unaccountable to the American people. Which is why I, and an increasing number of my colleagues, are supporting an all-of-the-above strategy on court reform.

Sargent: Well, that is an absolutely awful occurrence, what we’ve seen happen—the big-picture occurrence. I just want to be sure we don’t take away from the importance of Trump losing on mail balloting, because we are going to need a Democratic Congress to challenge the state of affairs. And with these rulings, with the ruling on mail ballots, it has become somewhat more likely that we get that Democratic Congress, right?

Graves: Yes. The fact that they cannot stop ballots from being counted that are postmarked by election day—that is a big victory for the American voter. And it also takes place in the context of this court basically putting its thumb on the scale in these re-gerrymandered maps in ways that may already help Trump. But it’s not a done deal, because Republicans have lost a number of these special elections. And the turnout rates for Democrats versus Republicans in the primaries—there’s been a real disparity in terms of enthusiasm for Democratic candidates and lack of enthusiasm for some of these Republicans.

So, no matter the court’s intervention in general, people are clamoring for change. And this ruling by the Roberts court in the Watson case on mail-in ballots does protect the ability to have ballots be counted as they have been year in and year out for decades before Donald Trump became president.

Sargent: So here’s the bottom line then. With this imperial president getting enabled by this imperial court, as you put it, we’re going to need Congress to discover its power. And if Democrats can win one chamber or both chambers—which is hard but possible—they are going to have to use every last shred of power that they can lay their hands on. Lisa Graves, awesome to talk to you. Thank you so much for coming on. That was just great stuff. Beautifully put.

Graves: Thank you so much, Greg. It was a joy to be on your show.

In late April, Virginia voters narrowly approved an aggressive gerrymander that would have given Democrats a largely unbeatable advantage in 10 of the commonwealth’s 11 U.S. House seats, counteracting GOP power plays in Ohio, Missouri, and North Carolina. Democrats exulted. “Maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time,” a triumphant House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries declared. Data nerds proclaimed that Democrats had fought the mid-decade redistricting wars to a draw, and maybe even won. The Bluesky brigades rejoiced that their side had strapped on boxing gloves for a change.

The good feelings didn’t even last until May. Eight days after the Virginia vote, the U.S. Supreme Court completed its war on the Voting Rights Act with Louisiana v. Callais, unleashing lawmakers across the South to shatter districts that ensured Black representation across the old Confederacy and carve them into safe seats for Republicans. Florida, anticipating the court’s decision, moved first. Alabama, and Tennessee quickly followed. So did Louisiana, which canceled its congressional primaries after thousands of votes had already been cast.

Then, Virginia’s conservative-leaning state Supreme Court delivered the final insult, finding a technicality that allowed it to invalidate the referendum and the new 10–1 map.

There are lessons to be learned here, and if Democrats are serious about maximal warfare, or interested in rescuing government by and for the people, they must digest those lessons and stiffen their spines. They will need to fight back and enact big reforms, both locally and nationally, that reinvigorate and strengthen American democracy, all with the same speed and relentless determination that Southern lawmakers bring to ripping apart Black districts.

We might have one chance. It’s not now, although what we do now is important. It’s in the first 100 days of a 2029 trifecta, when for once electoral wins, electoral reforms, and political will may all align. But even if Democrats win that 2029 trifecta, they can’t lull themselves into declaring a premature victory. The project of saving American democracy will require a massive lift: redistricting, court expansion, and additional states, at once. Hard as it may be, however, we have no choice. Because if you think the redistricting power play this year is bad, just wait. The road to controlling the U.S. House and the White House after that gets decidedly more difficult.

There is a looming time bomb for Democrats hidden in the reapportionment that will follow the 2030 census. Defusing that—overcoming the census, the Supreme Court, and the filibuster with a package that ensures competitive elections and majority rule, just in the nick of time—will require the kind of coordinated, decisive action not seen since Die Hard or Speed.

Here’s the problem: Everything that the Democrats do in 2028 to level the redistricting playing field could be negated post-census. They could win or hold the House thanks to new maps in New York, California, and Illinois, then hand all those seats over to Texas and Florida anyway.

Winning a trifecta and then enacting redistricting reform through the minoritarian Senate, and protecting it from a court that has spent more than a decade tilting maps and electoral rules toward the GOP, are not merely options. They are existential.

Just do the math. Imagine that Democrats in 2028 claim four more seats in California, three in New York, and one apiece in Pennsylvania, Illinois, Minnesota, Oregon, and Wisconsin. Then consider the consequences if Democrats hand each of these seats—along with one in Rhode Island—over to Texas, Florida, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona, Utah, and Idaho after the 2030 census. Because if current population projections hold, that’s exactly what’s going to happen.

William H. Frey, the legendary Brookings Institution demographer, has developed three different models for what the 2030 census could look like, depending on how population patterns and immigration politics work out over the next five years. They range only in the magnitude of bleakness: Will California lose three or four seats? Will Texas gain four or just three? Will New York lose two, or just one? Will Florida gain three, or just two?

Frey cautioned in an interview that much remains unknown, particularly the state-by-state consequences of the Trump administration’s immigration policy that have thrown an historic kill switch on population growth nationwide. But what’s clear is that migration out of New York, California, and the industrial Midwest, coupled with low-to-zero immigration growth, come with what could be a historic migration of political power, almost all of it heading South.

“It should be on people’s minds more,” said Democratic strategist Adam Jentleson. “That’s why we need to run up our margins as much as we possibly can in every election, because this is exactly what happened to us in 2010. We had these two great cycles in 2006 and 2008, and then we just got our asses handed to us in 2010 ... and all the power we won, it evaporated.”

Somewhere between 12 and 14 seats will move away from states where Democrats are likely to draw the lines. The South, currently mapped almost entirely by the GOP, would have its largest number of House seats ever, some 40 percent of the entire body. The Northeast and industrial Midwest, meanwhile, would reach historic lows, abandoned for warmer climates and cheaper housing.

The House math gets more difficult when you add that dozen to the 19 that the GOP could pick up via Callais, which only highlights the urgency of reform. Yet the problem runs deeper than the House. When those seats move toward the Sun Belt and GOP-dominated Western states, presidential electors relocate with them—a shift that will transform the Electoral College map.

The brutal math of House apportionment combined with gerrymandering. A Senate weighted toward whiter, rural states, when 70 percent of the nation will soon live in 15 states. Twenty-five states that voted for Donald Trump three times, with 50 GOP senators: Right now, a majority means winning everyplace else, then expanding the map. A conservative supermajority on the U.S. Supreme Court will be with us into at least the 2050s, if Republican justices strategically retire and allow Trump and a GOP Senate to name replacements.

There is no easy way out of this structural mess that Democrats find themselves in. First, it requires winning elections and taking advantage of a weakened president and unpopular GOP in 2026. Then, it’s adding to those majorities in 2028 while building a mandate for change that restores fairness everywhere, beginning with redistricting and the House. As Democrats learned in 2021, 50 senators and the White House will in no way be enough for the heavy reform lift that will follow. “You’re going to need votes to spare on big-ticket agenda items and structural reforms, like the filibuster itself, or making D.C. a state,” says Jentleson.

The good news is that much of what is broken and unrepresentative can be fixed by statute, given a Democratic trifecta and the political will to use it.

The good news is that much of what is broken can be fixed by statute, given a Democratic trifecta and the political will to use it. Two Democrats who have introduced far-reaching, visionary reform packages believe that the moment might be now.

Moreover, there appears to be significant energy in the party for the project. Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland said that he’s never seen this much interest in proportional representation from his colleagues. Representative Don Beyer of Virginia, along with Raskin and a handful of other legislators, have co-sponsored the Fair Representation Act for almost a decade now. It’s the most complete national solution to end gerrymandering and would create a more proportional House with larger, multimember districts and ranked-choice voting. According to their vision, every district nationwide becomes a swing district, and every delegation would more closely represent the politics and racial demographics of every state. Members who have never wanted to talk about it in the past are now asking Raskin how it works.

After years of experiencing a radical restructuring of our constitutional order by way of presidential usurpation and a runaway court, Raskin said, Americans are ready for a pro-democracy restructuring that makes institutions accountable and elections matter. A proportional House is just a matter of passing a law, no constitutional amendment required. The program would protect the right to vote everywhere; add Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico as new states; and maybe even include Supreme Court reform. “Ultimately, we need to get to independent nonpartisan commissions with multimember districts and ranked-choice voting all over the country,” Raskin said. “Those are some of the things we need to put on the table along with the national popular vote for president.”

Illinois Representative Sean Casten sees all of this as a long overdue corrective that would actually make Congress functional and more representative. “The Founders didn’t actually create a representative democracy,” he pointed out. “They created one representative chamber, another nonrepresentative chamber, a Supreme Court that’s not representative at all, and refused to allow most Americans to vote. The Americans they did allow to vote, they didn’t trust to vote for senators or presidents. We’ve not fixed all that stuff yet.”

Under his plan, only 12 additional senators, elected by a national popular vote, would require a constitutional amendment. Everything else is just fixing a statute. Tweak the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929, and suddenly the size of the House can be adjusted to the population again, as it was every decade before its passage. It’s effectively undoing the Apportionment Act, he said, and the larger House also negates any GOP reapportionment advantage in the Electoral College. Amend the Judges Act of 1925, and it’s easy to change the mix of cases that the U.S. Supreme Court is allowed to hear. The shadow docket, all of it, gone.

For Raskin, the key is to figure out the proper sequencing for all these “powerful and provocative ideas.” But all of them are linked. Everything happens or nothing happens. And if nothing moves through both chambers in the first 100 days of a Democratic trifecta, the likelihood of the reapportionment time bomb detonating—and the GOP’s adding hefty advantages in the House and Electoral College to its control of the Supreme Court and its demographic edge in the Senate—only deepens.

The most pressing change may be to abolish the filibuster. As Jentleson suggested, although nothing moves through the Senate without first addressing the filibuster, none of these structural reforms will stick without shifting the balance of the judiciary. “You need to not just win power, but you are going to need to hold those majorities for at least a few years beyond if you are really serious about the structural reforms that are necessary,” he said. Thankfully, the appetite and scope of what even centrist members will consider have been expanded, he pointed out, by the Callais decision and the behavior of the court. It’s now impossible not to see that “if you pass ambitious structural reforms, but the Supreme Court is still six to three, it’s just going to be a matter of time until they undo those reforms.”

There seems to be political will for big structural reform. Raskin points to D.C. statehood, the For the People Act, and the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act winning near-unanimous majorities among House Democrats as proof that it exists. Those reforms met their end due to the filibuster. “We had a very similar national conversation after the first Trump election, and we had a very similar mass mobilization of people saying, ‘This is unacceptable,’” Casten observed. “We then signed almost none of that into law, because the Senate said it was more important to protect the rights of 40 senators than to protect the rights of 330 million Americans.”

There’s one other hardball play, should the Senate block reform again, or if Democrats fail to win the Senate back. What would happen if the president refused to report the census apportionment to the House? If Congress rewrote the statute governing the transmission of the numbers? Or if the clerk of the House simply declined to certify it? These have been ceremonial tasks in the past. But as Republicans have taught us, they need not be. Which is to say: The choice is clear. It is either big, structural reform or a constitutional, existential crisis.  

In the wake of victories by candidates who New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani endorsed, Senator Joe Manchin complained, “The extremes are driving the conversation while the majority of Americans are being left behind.” Responding to criticism of an article that the paper ran about one of those winning candidates, Darializa Avila Chevalier, The New York Times’ official account said on X, “The Times has been documenting the increasingly extreme viewpoints on both sides of the political spectrum for years.” Centrist Democratic politicians and center-left columnists are urging the country to reject both socialism and MAGA. 

But the idea that America now has a far left that is equally dangerous and radical as  the far right is entirely wrong, no matter how many powerful people and institutions hint or claim otherwise. America’s extreme right wing is by far the country’s big problem, and it’s hard to address that problem when powerful elites insist that the trouble is with “both sides.”

Why is this analogy so far-fetched? First of all and most importantly, the political left in America believes in and practices democracy. Until leftists collectively try to use judicial and then violent means to overturn an election that they clearly lost, as MAGA Republicans did in 2020, I don’t want to hear any bullshit false equivalences between leftists and MAGA conservatives. Conducting free and fair elections and respecting their results is fundamental to democracy. MAGA’s leader, Donald Trump, refused to accept the 2020 results, as did dozens of Republican members of Congress and state officials. To this day, Republicans tiptoe around the issue to the point where they can’t even give a straightforward answer to the question, “Did Joe Biden win the 2020 election?”

In contrast, Mamdani, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders, the Democratic Socialists of America, Avila Chevalier and other powerful people and groups on the left don’t deny Trump was elected in 2024. And it’s not just ignoring election results. The socialist left is trying to win power the democratic way—getting average Americans to vote for their candidates. The MAGA right is trying to gain and expand their power through gerrymandering, voting restrictions, and other undemocratic means. They’ve spent years making up claims of voter fraud. 

I’m pretty sure the Times and the centrist Democratic who sing the “both sides” song know all that. It’s unfortunate that they choose not to distinguish between pro-democracy people with bold policy views and anti-democracy people with bold policy views. 

Let’s move to the allegedly “extreme” agenda of the far left. Avila Chevalier, Mamdani, and other socialist politicians are pushing ideas like abolishing the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency, Medicare for All, a $15 minimum wage, cutting U.S. funding for Israel’s military, and limiting corporate monopolies. Much of their agenda is extremely popular because it takes on the rich and big corporations, as Americans desperately want. Some of those ideas are more contested. 

But guess what? None of that is anywhere as radical as giving an unelected billionaire (Elon Musk) the authority to fire federal workers, unilaterally shuttering federal agencies, and using the presidency to enrich yourself and your family. That’s what Trump has done over the last year and half. At least leftist politicians like Mamdani are open and honest about their controversial ideas. Trump and MAGA Republicans implement a radical agenda that they hide from voters during campaigns—just think back to the president’s constant lying about knowing nothing about Project 2025. 

Yes, some on the left, including Avila Chevalier in the past, advocate abolishing prisons, police, and borders. These are ideas that are truly radical. But ideas seem less outlandish after they have happened. And the right has managed to turn some extreme notions into U.S policy: the right to a “well regulated” militia in the Second Amendment actually means that virtually any restriction on gun ownership is illegal; the right to free speech means billionaires and corporations can spend almost unlimited funds on political campaigns; the constitutional amendments passed in the wake of the Civil War should be interpreted in ways that make it easier to force Black people from Congress. I am not sure that the wildest dreams of the DSA are much more radical than the policies stated in the aforementioned Project 2025 that is being implemented every day. 

Finally, any equivalence between the socialist left and the MAGA right falls apart when you consider the huge differences in power between the two sides. There are probably two dozen House Democrats, a dozen mayors, five senators, and two Democratic governors who would attend a DSA conference. And most of them would not call themselves socialists. In contrast, MAGA Republicans control the White House, about half of the seats in Congress, half the governorships, and at least two seats on the U.S. Supreme Court (Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito). Avila Chevalier and Claire Valdez, another socialist who won a congressional primary in New York last week, will be something like the 250th and 251st most powerful Democrats in Washington next year. MAGA Republicans are the president, vice-president, and top policy adviser to the president (Stephen Miller). MAGA Republicans are the dominant faction in one party; socialist Democrats are a minority bloc in another party. Anyone suggesting that the two blocs are anywhere close to each other in influence is either stupid or dishonest. 

The centrists annoyed by the left aren’t stupid. They are conflating the socialist left with the MAGA right as a rhetorical tool. The media, traditional Democrats, and swing voters will reject Mamdani and his ilk if they are convinced that socialists will be as destructive to America as Trumpists. But this misleading centrist rhetoric has real consequences. What America desperately needs is socialists, traditional liberals, independents, and pro-democracy conservatives to disagree with one another during Democratic primaries but then join together to defeat the MAGA right in general elections. That unity can’t happen if anytime centrist Democrats lose a primary they act as if a socialist candidate winning is as dangerous as a MAGA candidate winning. It’s not. I plead to those on the center left to stop calling people extreme unless they are trying to end democracy in America. 

In 2013, McDonald’s generated some ghastly publicity when it came out that the fast-food giant was advising burger flippers to go on food stamps. Why didn’t McDonald’s, a multinational corporation that generates more than $26 billion in annual revenue, simply pay its burger flippers a living wage? The answer in most (but not all) cases was that, appearances to the contrary, most McDonald’s burger flippers don’t work directly for McDonald’s. They work for McDonald’s franchisees—independent, mostly small businesses that contract with McDonald’s Corporation to lease and operate one or more McDonald’s restaurants according to a mind-bogglingly specific set of rules that guarantees every McDonald’s will be indistinguishable from every other McDonald’s.

McDonald’s is not an isolated example. Over the past half-century, corporate America has systematically shed low-wage workers, either by offshoring them, contracting out their work, or designating them as independent contractors. Only rarely today will a large corporation employ someone earning less than $30,000. That’s not because corporations have gotten more generous but because they’ve gotten more wary of assuming responsibility for low-wage workers. Off-loading them spares corporations bad publicity, and in effect allows them to delegate routine labor violations to much smaller companies that can easily liquidate and/or rename themselves if they run into serious legal trouble.

The contractors don’t try very hard to disguise the nature of the service they provide. In a Pulitzer-winning series on migrant child labor for The New York Times, Hannah Dreier reported that Packers Sanitation Services Inc. pitched itself on its website as being able to “take the liability and risk off your facility’s record.” Packers was as good as its word when the Labor Department in February 2023 fined it $1.5 million for assigning migrant children to overnight shifts in 13 meatpacking plants in eight states. Packers took nearly all the heat, while most of the Fortune 500 companies that owned the plants involved—Tyson, Cargill, etc.—went unpunished. Packers then “rebranded” itself as Fortrex and moved its corporate headquarters from Kieler, Wisconsin, to Atlanta. Problem solved.

The Brandeis economist David Weil labeled this phenomenon “the fissured workplace,” in an influential 2014 book of that name whose thesis was that changes in the structure of corporate hiring that are typically thought of as efficiencies are actually a conscious effort to evade union drives and government-guaranteed labor protections, such as child labor prohibitions and payment of minimum wage, overtime, Social Security tax, and unemployment tax. Weil did his best to reverse that trend when he ran the Labor Department’s Wage and Hour Division under President Barack Obama. But when President Joe Biden renominated Weil for that post, the International Franchise Association, or IFA, a lobby group founded by franchisors and still dominated by them, campaigned against Weil and won sufficient support from the Senate GOP and three Senate Democrats (Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin, who later became independents, plus Senator Mark Kelly) to defeat Weil.

The IFA has had a much easier time during President Donald Trump’s two terms in office, as demonstrated by a proposed Labor Department regulation severely limiting the circumstances under which a corporation can be held accountable for work done on its behalf under the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act, or FLSA, which governs minimum wage and overtime. (A separate joint-employer standard under the 1935 National Labor Relations Act governs union organizing and other concerted activity, and is enforced by the National Labor Relations Board.) The nonprofit Economic Policy Institute, in a public comment sent last week to the Labor Department, estimates that the proposed rule would affect about 15 million workers in “fissured establishments,” of which about 10 million would be the employees of franchisees, and that the rule would cost these workers almost $1 billion annually.

Prior to Trump, the Labor Department followed a guidance document on joint employment drafted in 2015 by Weil. Regarding “vertical joint employment,” wherein an employee works for Company B, which in turn is contracted to Company A, Company A would be designated a joint employer when “the economic realities show that” the worker is “economically dependent on” Company A. This was less an interpretation than a description of what the FLSA actually says. Weil noted that the FLSA defined an employer very broadly as “any person acting directly or indirectly [italics mine] in the interest of an employer in relation to an employee.” (You can look it up.)

But after Trump came into office in 2019, his Labor Department tore up Weil’s guidance and issued a regulation that defined an employer as interacting only directly with an employee. If Company A did not hire and fire a worker for Company B, or schedule that worker’s time, or dictate that worker’s specific work conditions, or set that worker’s wages, or maintain that worker’s employment records, then Company A was not a joint employer. This departed quite blatantly from the statutory language—so much so that a federal court later threw the Trump rule out.

Now the second Trump administration is taking another whack at a Labor Department joint-employment rule, and if any substantive difference exists between Trump’s earlier version and this new one, I can’t see it. Once again, the regulation contradicts the language of the Fair Labor Standards Act by saying that indirect control over employees isn’t good enough to establish that Company A is a joint employer.

The best case the business lobby can make in defense of Trump’s proposed rule is that although it contradicts the statute, it captures the federal government’s past reluctance to enforce it, especially with respect to franchising. In what follows, I rely heavily on an excellent new book, Chains of Command: The Rise and Cruel Reign of the Franchise Economy, by Brian Callaci, chief economist at the nonprofit Open Markets Institute.

When fast-food franchising took off in the 1960s and 1970s, it was often judged in violation of antitrust law, which did not permit collusion between Company A and Company B. The franchisors answered that prohibitions on such “vertical restraint” did not apply because Company A and Company B were essentially the same company. Judges didn’t always buy that, but it was kind of true. Indeed, for a long time the Small Business Administration refused to give loans to Company Bs on the grounds that these weren’t small businesses at all but rather the equivalent of branch offices for Company As.

Unfortunately, franchisors simultaneously contested responsibility for labor violations at Company B by arguing, no, actually, these are two separate companies … which was kind of not true. Yes, Company B signed a licensing agreement to run a fast-food joint for Company A on certain (quite extensive) terms. But Company A could later change that contract’s terms without requiring any sign-off from Company B. It was essentially sharecropping (Callaci more politely likens it to tenant farming), wherein Company B, after being sucked dry by Company A, eked out razor-thin profit margins by squeezing employees. Company A didn’t have to care very much about whether Company B was profitable because it took its money off the top.

Granted, there have been a few franchisee success stories wherein Company B purchased multiple franchises and scaled up sufficiently to earn a real profit. But most Company Bs are single-restaurant operations that barely get by. Callaci quotes one franchise consultant describing the sort of franchisee Company A was looking for:

An entrepreneur makes the worst franchisee. You might think that they would do well, but it is just the opposite. For one thing, they’ll never listen to you.… You don’t want any creative thinkers, either. Again, these people will not follow your system, and instead they’ll look for ways to do their own thing. You want someone who follows the rules.

Ouch.

Fast-food franchising became the behemoth it is today because of an FTC rule in 1979 that gave Company A a get-out-of-antitrust-jail-free card so long as Company A was fully transparent to Company B up front about what a terrible deal it was agreeing to. Franchising also got a boost from the adoption of the “consumer welfare standard,” which said antitrust violations occurred only if consumers were harmed. If franchisees or burger-flippers were harmed, it didn’t matter.

Today the consumer welfare standard is on its way out, but that transition is not happening quickly. Fast-food franchisors used to argue that it didn’t matter how much Company B abused its workers because they were just kids working after-school jobs. But that stopped being true some time ago. Now fast-food employees are mostly grown-ups, often with families, and their best recourse, if they can’t make ends meet, is to go on welfare. Trump’s proposed joint-employer rule will impoverish these workers even more.

“Under President Donald J. Trump’s leadership, America is safer than it has been in over a century,” a White House press release declared in January, claiming the “monumental turnaround” stemmed from Trump “reversing the chaos and carnage unleashed by Radical Left Democrats” and by his administration “ridding the streets of savage criminal illegal aliens, backing law enforcement, and bringing back order where incompetent Democrat politicians surrendered to anarchy and despair.”

Putting aside the racism and xenophobia in that statement, the key word is “reversing.” The administration has been selling hard the idea that Trump, who ran in part on a law-and-order platform, has stepped in and calmed the chaos of our cities, restoring peace to streets made unsafe by naïve Democrats who care more about protecting undocumented immigrants than American citizens. Last week, Trump crowed on Truth Social, “D.C., Memphis, New Orleans, all down to record lows, and quickly!”

He and his acolytes not only are taking credit for the drop in crime, but using it to excuse or hand-wave away a host of transgressions, from the National Guard troops that still occupy the streets of D.C. to ICE raids that continue to break up families and trample on human rights. They even use it to rebut critiques that have no relation to public safety.

In a recent appearance on ABC’s The View, Vice President JD Vance responded to questions about the administration’s whitewashing of U.S. history and its efforts to dilute minority voting power by arguing that it was actually doing more for minorities because crime in D.C., whose population is around 42 percent Black, is down. And FBI Director Kash Patel, during a Senate hearing last month, responded to a question about his indecorous behavior at the recent Winter Olympics—where he chugged a beer with the U.S. men’s hockey team—by holding up a sheet of arrest and crime stats, stating that the murder rate had fallen around 20 percent last year. (The following day, he was busted by MS NOW for inflating those arrest numbers.)

But guess who’s actually responsible for the drop in violent crime? Democrats, by and large—and it predates the Trump administration.

Last September, Trump woke up and fired off the following message on Truth Social: “CHICAGO IS THE MURDER CAPITAL OF THE WORLD!” That’s not true, but no matter. Trump was going to send in the National Guard to clean things up. “We’re going in,” he told the press later that day. “This isn’t a political thing. I have an obligation. When 20 people are killed over the last two and a half weeks, and 75 are shot with bullets, there’s no place in the world, including—you can go to Afghanistan, you can go to places that you would think of—they don’t even come close to this. Chicago is a hellhole right now. Baltimore is a hellhole right now.”

Sure enough, a month later, he sent guardsmen into Chicago and kept them there for three months before the Supreme Court intervened.

I’m not going to argue that Chicago hasn’t had a crime problem, but the data is very clear: The city has been getting dramatically safer. After hitting a quarter-century peak of 804 murders in 2021, the number fell to 719 in 2022, 623 in 2023, 587 in 2024, and 416 last year. The city not only halved its murder rate in four years, but hit its lowest number since 1965. This was likely achieved in part through Mayor Brandon Johnson’s restructuring of the Chicago Police’s detective bureau, his appointment of an effective superintendent in Larry Snelling, and the increased spending and attention given to mental health care and crime prevention programs.

Baltimore witnessed an even more remarkable drop, going from 334 murders in 2022 to 262 in 2023, 202 in 2024, and finally 133 in 2025—a 60 percent decline in just three years. Mayor Brandon Scott, who took office in late 2020, has focused on getting guns off the street and supporting community programs, which target the young people most prone to join gangs and commit violence, providing them with mentors and resources to prevent crimes from ever happening.

As for Washington, D.C., which Trump claims to have singlehandedly made safe by deploying the National Guard, the capital did see a 32 percent reduction in homicides from 2024 to 2025. But this followed from the previous year, when the city hit a 30-year low in violent crime, including a 32 percent decline in murders from 2023 to 2024, long before Trump’s troops arrived. Like Chicago and Baltimore, D.C.’s mayor over this period, Muriel Bowser, was a Democrat.

These drops are actually part of a larger national trend. Homicides have been falling across the nation since Covid—that is, since well before Trump’s second administration. The greatest decreases have been in cities, and 34 of America’s 40 largest cities are run by “Radical Left Democrats,” as Trump would put it. While the Covid pandemic may have fueled an aberrantly high rate, there’s also no doubt that crime fell drastically under President Joe Biden, and experts, such as Ben Struhl of the University of Pennsylvania’s Crime and Justice Policy Lab, credit Biden-era community-based violence intervention programs, or CVI programs, for making a major difference. “The evidence is strong,” he told The New York Times, “for citywide strategies that contain these programs.” These include community funding programs established in Biden’s American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 and the 2022 Bipartisan Safer Communities Act.

Over $325 billion of ARPA’s $1.9 trillion stimulus package went directly to state, local, and tribal governments. The Biden administration encouraged grant recipients to use some of these funds on public safety, and these governments responded by injecting over $10 billion toward that purpose—not just for enforcement efforts, but for proven CVI programs.

Many cities put this to great effect. The most powerful example may be Boston, which is experiencing its lowest crime rate in nearly seven decades under Democratic Mayor Michelle Wu. Police Commissioner Michael Cox largely credited the city’s CVI tactics, declaring, “The Boston Police Department continues to rely on the community as our most valued partner in public safety in the city.” That effort has included over 4,000 officer-attended community events and new programs to empower young people and stop crime before it happens.

Adding to ARPA’s impact, the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act not only increased funding for prevention programs, but expanded access to mental health facilities, strengthened background checks for gun purchases, and closed the “dating loophole” that allowed perpetrators of domestic violence to get guns.

This is all libtard propaganda, though, if you ask the White House. When The Hill’s Sarah Fortinsky dared in February to suggest that Biden’s legislation helped reduce murders, deputy press secretary Abigail Jackson called the claim “absurd,” insisting that “crime is dropping because of President Trump’s law-and-order policies. Any suggestion otherwise is simply not based in reality.”

The irony is surely lost on her that the most lawless administration in American history, led by the most criminal U.S. president ever, is trying to take credit for a crime drop that it’s had little or nothing to do with. But that is the reality. The “carnage and chaos” around this country is being largely caused by Trump and his goons, and there is no bigger “hellhole” in America right now than that white neoclassical building at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue—the one with the literal hole right next to it.

For most people, one of the highest-funded police departments in the country suing its own city for $67.6 million would sound absurd. In St. Louis, it is reality. This spring, the state-controlled St. Louis Board of Police Commissioners filed a lawsuit claiming that tens of millions of dollars from the city’s settlement with the National Football League over the departure of the Rams should be diverted to the police department. The board argued that the settlement funds, along with city reserves, should count as “general revenue” under Missouri law, which would require the city to divert 25 percent of the settlement to policing under a 2025 law.

Earlier this month, a judge rejected that argument, ruling that money received and accounted for in prior years does not suddenly become current-year revenue simply because the police department wants access to it. But the board, joined by Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway, intends to appeal the ruling.

After the unexpected windfall from the Rams lawsuit, city officials and residents spent years debating how to use the money. Under Board Bill 22, which is advancing through the city’s Board of Aldermen, the funds would go to repairing homes damaged by last year’s tornado, helping displaced residents find housing, demolishing unsafe buildings, rebuilding North St. Louis neighborhoods, repairing sidewalks and streets, upgrading aging water infrastructure, redeveloping vacant properties, and supporting small businesses. The settlement is a rare opportunity to make investments that cities often struggle to afford through ordinary annual budgets, but the police board’s position is that tens of millions of those dollars should be diverted to policing instead. The consequence of a board win in the lawsuit would be less money for rebuilding neighborhoods and more money for an institution that already consumes nearly a third of the city’s general revenue—and generates millions more in legal liabilities, settlements, judgments, and overtime costs.

The details are specific to St. Louis, but the underlying dynamic is far more widespread. The lawsuit offers a revealing look at the extraordinary fiscal and political power police departments enjoy in U.S. cities. At a time when local governments are struggling to fund schools, parks, housing programs, public health initiatives, transit systems, and basic infrastructure, a police department that already consumes a substantial portion of municipal resources is attempting to use the courts to suck even more funding away from other city services.

The board is pursuing this funding shift even as taxpayers already bear an enormous range of police-related costs that rarely appear in discussions about police budgets. When politicians and police advocates talk about police spending, they usually mean appropriations. They point to the department’s annual budget and argue that officers need more personnel, more equipment, or higher salaries. But policing’s true price tag extends far beyond the amount formally allocated to a department each year.

Cities also pay for police misconduct settlements. From judgments entered against officers and departments for excessive force to outside counsel hired to defend misconduct suits, to litigation arising from unconstitutional arrests, wrongful imprisonment, and protest crackdowns, the public bears the consequences of police misconduct long after the underlying incident has faded from public attention.

In St. Louis, those costs have been substantial. The city has paid millions of dollars in police misconduct settlements and judgments over the last decade. For example, it paid approximately $5 million to undercover officer Luther Hall after he was beaten by fellow officers during protests following the acquittal of former officer Jason Stockley. Hall was a St. Louis police officer working undercover when members of the department’s notorious “Civil Disobedience Team” attacked him, leaving him with serious injuries. A jury later awarded Hall nearly $24 million in damages against one of the officers involved. The city also paid millions more to settle claims arising from an infamous “kettling” operation in which officers indiscriminately arrested protesters, journalists, legal observers, and bystanders. Publicly documented misconduct settlements and judgments alone amount to tens of millions of dollars.

The department has other significant expenses outside of its annual budget. Recent city budget records show policing already consumes close to 30 percent of St. Louis’s general revenue. Meanwhile, police overtime spending has repeatedly blown past budgeted amounts, costing taxpayers millions more than anticipated.

Yet none of those costs seem to matter when police officials describe the department’s financial situation. The board’s position is effectively that no matter how much policing already costs the public, the police department is entitled to more. That attitude has become even more striking since Missouri restored state control over the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department in 2024.

Supporters of state control argued that local officials could not be trusted to prioritize public safety, and claimed the solution was to exclude key decisions from the oversight of the majority-Democrat city government and place them in the hands of a board appointed by the majority-Republican state government. Under this arrangement, local taxpayers fund the police department but have little control over how that money is spent. When disputes with the city government arise, the board can turn to state officials and the courts to extract additional resources. This current litigation is an example of that dynamic in action.

Taxpayers are effectively paying both sides of the dispute, funding the police board’s effort to obtain more money while simultaneously financing the city’s effort to defend itself. At the same time the board has been pursuing $67.6 million from the Rams settlement, it has also proposed double-digit raises for command staff. The proposal includes raises of 16 percent for lieutenants, 18 percent for captains, 20 percent for majors, and 22 percent for lieutenant colonels. City officials have warned that because of pay-parity requirements, the proposal could trigger nearly $6 million in additional spending when corresponding raises for firefighters are included.

Every dollar directed toward one function of government is a dollar unavailable for another. That reality applies to housing departments, health departments, libraries, schools, sanitation services, and parks; but in cities across the country, police institutions are often treated as exempt from the tradeoffs that govern every other part of municipal government.

Across the country, police unions and departments operate as political actors whose primary objective is securing ever-greater fiscal protection from democratic accountability. When cities attempt to reallocate funds or increase oversight, police organizations mobilize and aim the familiar “weak on crime” rhetoric unrelentingly at any politician who threatens their dominance. Nearly every other public institution is expected to justify its spending, but police budgets are often treated as presumptively legitimate and perpetually insufficient.

Public school teachers pay for basic classroom supplies out of their pockets, libraries have to scrape and beg for every scrap of funding, and public infrastructure wastes away, while any attempt to rightsize the police budget is treated like a five-alarm fire. This political asymmetry helps explain why police budgets have often remained resilient even in periods of fiscal stress. It also helps explain why a police board could look at a major municipal settlement and conclude that the money should belong to them.

The fight over this $67.6 million is about much more than a budget formula. The lawsuit is a test of whether city residents can decide how to spend their own money or whether the police’s trump card will continue to drain communities of vital services. And the implications are nationwide. For years, debates about policing have focused on questions of crime, accountability, and public safety. The St. Louis lawsuit highlights a different question that deserves equal attention: How much public money is enough?

The answer from the police board is pretty simple. Whatever the city has, the police should get more of it. Everyone else can go without.

Donald Trump lost three big cases at the Supreme Court on Monday. His appeal of E. Jean Carroll’s verdict failed. He was blocked from firing a Federal reserve official. And most important, the court upheld the counting of late-arriving mail ballots. He ranted wildly over these losses. On the last one he exploded in a long and angry tirade, seething over the “powerful Communist Movement taking place in our Country” and demanding again that Republicans pass onerous voter suppression. It’s clear why: This deals a major blow to Trump-GOP hopes of stealing the midterms by invalidating untold numbers of votes. Yet Trump won big at the court, too, securing the power to fire independent regulators at will. We talked to Lisa Graves, a former Senate Judiciary Committee counsel who writes about the Supreme Court. We discuss what the ruling on mail-balloting does, why it will thwart a major piece of the Trump-GOP election-rigging scheme, how Trump and the Supreme Court are teaming up to empower themselves at the expense of Congress, and how a future Democratic Congress can fight back. Listen to this episode here.