The New Republic

Even Republican lawmakers are beginning to doubt Senator Mitch McConnell’s recent health update.

Speaking with Real America’s Voice’s Eric Bolling on Monday, MAGA Senator Ron Johnson suggested that the image circulated by McConnell’s office was not actually taken that day.

“I’ve just heard from some other sources that was an older photo. So I really don’t know,” Johnson said. “I haven’t talked to Mitch—I certainly wish he and his family well, I hope he can recover. Listen, it’s sad to watch people age, no matter who that person is.”

The Kentucky senator went missing for nearly a month, with little explanation offered by his office, after he was found unconscious in his Washington residence and rushed to the hospital on June 14. The media blackout finally ended on Sunday, when McConnell’s office shared a photo of the lawmaker beside his wife, holding a copy of The Washington Post’s Sunday sports section in his lap.

In a statement released by McConnell’s office alongside the image, the lawmaker explained several things that had not happened to him—including that he didn’t break any bones or suffer a concussion, and he hadn’t had a heart attack or stroke—rather than what had. The 84-year-old Republican did not offer any clarification on his current health condition, other than to say he had dealt with a “mild case of pneumonia” during his time in the hospital.

He also did not offer a projection for when he might return to work, noting that he has since been moved to a rehabilitation facility and is still “working closely” with legislative staff.

Far-right influencers immediately jumped on McConnell’s statement, baselessly suggesting that the picture had been AI-generated while demanding that McConnell release a video statement to address public concern.

Johnson, however, changed his tune within hours of the broadcast.

“It was a rumor. Just discount it,” Johnson told reporters. “I have no idea. I just, I heard that. I just heard it. So just assume it’s false.”

In a post on X, Johnson urged people to “beware of clickbait” and “watch the full clip.”

“Most importantly, I hope @SenMcConnell makes a full recovery and returns to the Senate,” he added.

An aide to Lindsey Graham called emergency services shortly before he died Saturday, after the South Carolina senator told her he was experiencing chest pains, according to a fellow GOP lawmaker.

Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama provided new information about Graham’s unexpected death to reporters Monday evening.

A woman who worked as Graham’s scheduler, and who had previously been Tuberville’s scheduler, received a phone call from the South Carolina Republican Saturday night. While Tuberville did not identify the scheduler, a staffer named Taylor Stephens was the scheduling director for the late senator, and previously held the same role in Tuberville’s office.

Graham called her, Tuberville recounted, and “basically he said, ‘Listen, I’m having chest pains. I need to do something.’ The scheduler asked if Graham had called 911. He goes, ‘No, that’s the reason I called you.’”

The woman, who had been at a restaurant with a current staffer of Tuberville’s, then contacted emergency services before going to Graham’s residence, where emergency personnel had “knocked the door down, and they were working on him.”

The information elucidates the events of the senator’s death by “aortic dissection due to arteriosclerotic cardiovascular disease,” per his office. Previously, outlets including Fox News reported that the 911 call was made after 8 p.m. Saturday for cardiac arrest. About 25 minutes after the first dispatch, emergency personnel were reportedly conducting CPR.

The most recent draining of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool has made President Trump’s claims of “vandalism” all the more doubtful.

The president made this claim after the “American Flag Blue” paint began to peel off in massive chunks and discolor the water, attributing the failed renovation to a “350-foot gash, made by a very sharp knife or razors.” Yet Monday’s draining revealed no such thing, only what appeared to be tire marks—likely from the president’s motorcade driving through the empty pool in May.

They see me rolling!

President Trump rides in the Reflecting Pool at the Lincoln Memorial! pic.twitter.com/iSRMok2SFk

— Steven Cheung (@StevenCheung47) May 8, 2026

Even still, the president continues to double down on these spurious claims.

“ABC Fake News and its shaky anchor, David Muir, said that the Reflecting Pool was drained to address Peeling Paint (there is no paint, it was slashed with a knife, or box cutter, high grade colored waterproofing liner—it was VANDALISM!) and Algae Blooms (also caused by Vandals, but removed long ago!),” he wrote late Monday night on Truth Social. “In other words, the story was FAKE NEWS, but heavily slanted away from the real cause of the problem, Vandalism. It will be fixed soon, and better than ever. 60 monuments and fountains have been cleaned and fully renovated in D.C., and crime is at record lows! Washington has never looked better, or been safer!”

Six people have been arrested for alleged vandalism, even though one of them— former Olympic canoe racer David Hearn—contends that he was only grabbing one of the massive chunks of the pool’s lining that had floated up to the surface.

No one is buying this. In June, the president said that this so-called “gash” was just 250 feet long. Then it changed to 300 feet, 350 feet, and finally, 300 yards long, the size of three football fields. And yet all that has been revealed in this recent draining is what resembles tire marks, most likely left by the president himself, not vandals with box cutters. And to make matters worse, this failed vanity project has cost American taxpayers over $14 million.

The man Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents shot and killed in Biddeford, Maine, on Monday was not their intended target, Maine Senator Angus King said.

King, an independent who caucuses with Democrats, said that Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin told him that ICE had a warrant for a different person. This is similar to the case of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston, who was also shot and killed by ICE last week.

“This development makes this tragedy even more disturbing and infuriating, and it underscores the reckless and haphazard manner in which immigration enforcement operations are being conducted in Maine and across the country. This has to end,” Maine Governor Janet Mills said on X Monday evening.

Just like in that case, ICE is claiming that the man, a 26-year-old from Colombia identified as Joan Sebastian Guerrero by King’s office, tried to “weaponize” his vehicle by running into or ramming agents. Eyewitnesses dispute that account, and say that agents instead shot at the man’s car. Video shows the Kia sedan riddled with bullet holes, and it was still running afterwards. When agents finally stopped the car, the man’s body slumped to the ground as soon as they opened the driver’s side door.

An eyewitness told the Portland Press Herald that the man was “bleeding profusely from the head” when they pulled him out of the car.

“He was talking. He said, ‘I tried to stop,’” the eyewitness said. Agents surrounded the man on the ground in an intersection. Another witness told the newspaper that a young child, reportedly the victim’s daughter and no older than three years old, was at the scene crying in her Bluey pajamas.

In a statement posted to X Monday evening, the Department of Homeland Security said that “the vehicle attempted to flee the scene and, fearing for public safety, an officer discharged his weapon.

“The driver of the vehicle was struck, and emergency services were immediately contacted. He passed away from his injuries,” the statement read. It made no mention of whether the driver was ICE’s intended target.

Senator Lindsey Graham died Saturday evening from a sudden tear in his aorta. He was 71, making his death an untimely one. But we can regret Graham’s misfortune without admiring his political journey, the lesson of which is that kissing up works much better as a way to get ahead in life than most of us wish to believe.

As TNR’s Michael Tomasky noted Monday, Graham’s legacy is that he groveled before a president whom he knew to be a very bad man, and in doing so played no small role in the Republican Party’s collective surrender to MAGA authoritarianism. We knew Graham thought Trump was a creep because he said so. “Trump’s a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot,” Graham said in 2015. “He doesn’t represent my party.” But five years later Graham tried to help Trump steal the 2020 election, and last month Graham said, “Mr. President, you’re not far behind God.” Had he lived, this Trump toady would have been a shoo-in for re-election in November.

“How can he be honoured,” asked Ralph Waldo Emerson, “when he does not honour himself, when he loses himself in the crowd; when he is no longer the lawgiver, but the sycophant, ducking to the giddy opinion of a reckless public; when he must sustain with shameless advocacy some bad government?” The answer, O Sage of Concord, lies in your very word “shameless.” In this century at least, he who conducts himself without shame will seldom be held to account.

A 1996 meta-analysis on the literature of sucking-up by Randall A. Gordon, professor of psychology of the University of Minnesota, Duluth, confirms this. “The possibility that tactical ingratiation may become completely transparent (especially in situations in which the ingratiator is highly dependent on the target for rewards)” is identified as the “ingratiator’s dilemma.’” But it turns out not to be much of a dilemma. “The high status recipient of agreement,” writes Gordon, quoting a 1964 study, “is not likely to suspect the tactical origin because, from his perspective, it is gratifying, but hardly surprising when people believe what is correct.”

Gordon concluded that sucking up had “a significantly positive effect on perceivers’ judgments” about 52 percent of the time, and a negative effect only about 14 percent of the time—and the latter statistic was not judged very robust. Of all the ways you can ingratiate yourself to the boss, Gordon found, flattery was the most effective—more so, for example, than simply doing favors (like making a phone call to Georgia’s secretary of state to ask whether he has the power to toss mail ballots).

When I was young I had the idea that if I ever sucked up to my boss he would see right through me and humiliate me. My vice was the opposite. I tended to treat my betters gruffly, even rudely, to demonstrate—to whom it was never clear—my fierce integrity. When I was 23 or so, I wrote a piece for this magazine that prompted a kind letter from a well-established journalist whom I very much admired. The gracious and common-sensical thing would have been to express my gratitude in reply. For precisely that reason, I did not. Eventually we became friends, but that was in spite of my infantile surliness, not because of it. Later I grew up enough to behave better, but I never mastered the art of what Harvard Business Review, in a July 1 article, called “Networking Up.”

The premise of the article, by Andy Lopata, co-author of The Financial Times Guide to Mentoring, is that sucking up is necessary but not sufficient. “While relationships with senior leaders matter,” Lopata wrote, “a career-defining reputation is rarely built solely at that level.” Where Gordon concluded 30 years ago that sucking up worked 52 percent of the time, today any serious analysis must start from the premise that sucking up works 100 percent of the time. So we set that tedious question aside to explore the only necessary caveat, which is not to do it to the exclusion of also building relationships with others. Graham followed that advice, as all politicians must. He sucked up to Trump, but he also courted voters in South Carolina.

I’m a little dismayed that the value of treating co-workers decently regardless of rank carries the force of revelation in a major business publication. “For high potentials,” wrote Lopata, “the key question is not Do senior leaders know me?’ but ‘How do the people I rely on describe working with me?’ So, it’s vital to invest time and thought in deepening relationships with the people you work with every day.” Well, duh. What monsters never learned this basic principle while being dandled on mommy’s or daddy’s knee? Suck-ups, I guess.

Lopata, I fear, overstates the practical utility (as opposed to the moral necessity) of behaving decently. We all know people who sucked up and kicked down and did just fine. I know somebody who as a young man arrived at an organization led by a guy who’d desperately wanted the top job for years and didn’t get it because the chairman of the board couldn’t stand him. This guy had been thrown off the fast track by a ghastly error of managerial judgment, then somehow clawed his way to the top through sheer grit. Still, most everyone at the organization, knowing the history, regarded the boss as kind of an amiable clown. Enter my very ambitious young friend. He quickly perceived a void—nobody was sucking up to the boss!—and filled it. At first his co-workers thought he was just weird; later they realized he’d seized an opportunity that never occurred to them. As this person climbed the greasy pole, he sucked up and kicked down. Nobody except the boss could stand him, but that turned out to be enough; eventually he became the boss himself, and, later, an éminence grise of remarkable distinction.

“It pays to kiss up and suck down,” wrote Pilita Clark in Financial Times on Sunday. Clark agreed with Lopata that “Being nice to everyone is far smarter than a lot of ambitious wannabes ever realize.” But like me, Clark found “one of the most infuriating aspects of the toadying sycophant is the extent to which they keep succeeding.” There are “moderately talented bootlickers who rise remorselessly through the ranks while bullying juniors with abandon.” There are middle managers who kiss “up and down” but kick “sideways at peers they deem a threat.” The vileness of such behavior is “obvious to anyone working closely with these people, yet so invisible to everyone else.” But is it really so invisible? There are some bosses—President Donald Trump is one, and the $900 billion man Elon Musk is another—who revel in seeing their workforces demoralized and depleted. For them, subordinates who suck up and kick down are exactly what they’re looking for.

Is playing the sycophant psychologically stressful? Might it even lead to bad health outcomes like, well, a sudden tear in your aorta? Ramani Durvasula, a professor of psychology at California State University, Los Angeles, told CNN in 2017 that sycophants “tend to devalue themselves or overvalue power and proximity or both,” which doesn’t sound very restful to me. A Dutch psychoanalyst named Manfred F.R. Kets de Vries further observed on Medium:

At the heart of sycophancy lies a fragile self — a structure held together not by confidence, but by chronic insecurity and an insatiable hunger for approval. The sycophant doesn’t just want validation — they need it…. At its core, it’s less a strategy than a wounded reflex, a leftover dance from early relationships with dominant figures like parents, teachers, and other authority figures…. In extreme cases, sycophantic behavior may reflect masochistic tendencies — a psychological structure where the individual unconsciously derives satisfaction from self-denial, humiliation, or submission.

So maybe I was right after all when I decided at an early age not to care that much what the boss thought of me. Or rather, maybe I should thank my parents for not warping me into somebody who is desperate to please. Though if I cared a little more, probably I’d have accumulated fewer bosses over my professional career. The ones I have now, incidentally, are perfect.

Senator Lindsey Graham’s death on Saturday shocked Washington, D.C. It also upended the race for Senate in South Carolina, where the longtime incumbent was facing a Democratic challenger in Dr. Annie Andrews, a 45-year-old pediatrician. Now, Andrews doesn’t know whom she’ll face in November, but she still knows exactly why she’s running. She wants to help fix the healthcare system—and to start by getting rid of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the anti-vaxxer in charge of Health and Human Services. 

“The day that RFK Jr. was nominated to lead HHS was the day that I really seriously started considering running for this seat,” she told me on Monday. “RFK Jr. has been my professional arch nemesis for decades, and there are thousands of pediatricians across the country who would say the same thing.”

Andrews was born in Kentucky and raised in Indiana before moving to South Carolina in 2009 to work at MUSC Children’s Hospital in Charleston. But she didn’t get involved in politics until the Parkland school shooting in 2018 moved her to join Moms Demand Action, the gun violence prevention group. In 2022, she challenged House Representative Nancy Mace but lost by 14 points.

Her race against Graham was looking to be closer. A November poll had Graham up six points, and the margin was only three in a poll last month. Now, it’s unclear who her Republican opponent will be. The state GOP will hold a primary on August 11, with a runoff on August 25 if no candidate reaches 50 percent of the vote. 

Andrews says she plans to run a positive campaign focused on the issues she cares about. “I’m thinking about how we move forward as a state together, how we can get past this hyperpartisan, divisive moment and era, frankly, of American politics,” she said. “I don’t want to be a career politician. I see politics as a path to efficiently and effectively solve my patients and their families’ problems.”

Andrews said that when she started her career as a pediatrician, it was a given that her patients were fully vaccinated. In recent years, she has had to brace herself when asking parents about their child’s vaccination status. She pointed to the April 2025 measles outbreak of nearly 1,000 cases in South Carolina as one example of how the Trump administration has harmed children.

“South Carolina is a state that never expanded Medicaid. We have 15 counties without an OB/GYN, we have multiple rural hospitals on the chopping block because of the impending Medicaid budget cuts. We have federally qualified health centers that have already closed their doors. So no matter where I am across the state, that issue comes up in every conversation I’m having with voters,” she said.

Andrews argues that she’s the right candidate for a moment when healthcare access and affordability are top of mind for South Carolinians. “You cannot fight bad politics by staying apolitical. So the only way to fight back against the politicization of pediatric healthcare and healthcare as a whole in this country is by engaging in politics on the other side,” she said. Andrews says she wants to lower the cost of prescription drugs, get private equity out of healthcare, and impeach RFK Jr.

In recent years, a number of Democratic physicians have decided to run for office, and many of them have origin stories that echo Andrews’. In Michigan, public health professional Abdul El-Sayed has made Medicare for All a crucial part of his policy platform. Adam Hamawy, who won his primary in New Jersey’s 12th congressional district, is a former combat surgeon who saved Senator Tammy Duckworth’s life and treated patients in Gaza.

Andrews attributes her strong polling numbers to her political identity as a no-nonsense medical professional. She’s trying to stay away from tensions in the Democratic Party between the progressive and centrist wings. “I don’t identify on any particular part of the political ideological spectrum because to me it’s about naming the problem and solving the problem, and it’s about being pragmatic about it,” she said. “Regardless of who my opponent is, there’s something about me and our campaign and my candidacy that is breaking through those typical partisan voting patterns.”

Now, she’s looking ahead, and doesn’t seem too troubled by whoever her opponent will be. Among the names being floated are  Lieutenant Governor Pamela Evette, Rep. Ralph Norman, and Graham’s most recent primary challenger, Mark Lynch. Mace, who sparred with Andrews during the 2022 election, has also expressed interest in running.

“Nancy Mace likes to make news cycles about her, and I wouldn’t at all be surprised if she does end up getting in this race, despite the fact that she just came in fifth in the Republican gubernatorial primary here in South Carolina just a little over a month ago,” Andrews said. “I’m sure there’s a lot of folks here in the Lowcountry who would be intrigued to see a rematch of me and Nancy Mace.”

On Monday, over 200 researchers and economists, including 15 Nobel laureates, released a joint statement pleading with government and industry to address the economic and social impacts of artificial intelligence, based on the belief that AI will result in the displacement of vast stretches of the workforce. Industry itself is plowing ahead with vast investments in AI infrastructure; Meta just announced a massive expansion of a data center being built in Louisiana, raising the cost to $50 billion. However, this seems a tad optimistic, given it represents a technology that most people don’t want and no one asked for, while making our entire society collectively dumber.

One of my favorite dystopian short stories is “Harrison Bergeron” by Kurt Vonnegut. Set it 2081, the story describes a government that enforces absolute equality by forcing citizens with above-average strength, intelligence, or beauty to wear debilitating handicaps. This world where the government handicaps the gifted leads to societal stagnation, where agents of the government resort to drastic measures to enforce their brand of “equality.”

Today, we are seeing a similar scenario play out, but with AI. Instead of the government handicapping the most intelligent people to make them seem less intelligent, society is becoming ever more dominated by a tool that makes less intelligent people appear smarter, while still making society dumber overall. AI represents a different mechanism and means, but it achieves the same basic societal effect: intellectual and artistic stagnation and decay.

The most obvious example of how AI destroys the human ability to learn and think critically is its ubiquitous use in high schools and colleges. A study released in October 2025 found that 84 percent of high school students use AI to brainstorm ideas, edit or revise essays, and/or conduct research and find sources. Another 69 percent use ChatGPT to help with school assignments and homework.

At the college level, the picture is no better: 85 percent use it for the basics of research and brainstorming. Another 57 percent of college students use AI at least weekly for coursework, and 46 percent say it is “extremely important” to use it in order to understand complex material, save time, and get better grades. Male students are more likely to use it than female students: What normal 19 year old wouldn’t rather be playing beer pong than reading Immanuel Kant?

AI’s allure is understandable. I took Philosophy 101 in the fall of 1994 at the Naval Academy before we had the internet, and I found Kant’s writings to be so dense and impenetrable that I absorbed almost nothing from my hours of reading his work. An AI summary would have been incredibly useful.

But would it have improved my comprehension? The research says no.

A study by MIT found that students who use AI to write show far less brain activity than those who used classic Google searching (with AI off) or those who used neither. Other studies find that students who use AI retain far less of the information that ends up in their writing, possibly as a result of “cognitive offloading” and “cognitive surrender.” Then there are also the issues with AI hallucinating information and citations, or being confidently wrong, which feeds misinformation to students who have never been taught to “trust but verify.”

From my own perspective as a writer, I know firsthand how easy it is to fall into these traps. Google AI search results frequently misattribute or misrepresent the contents of an article. AI-generated slop filling my social media feed often contains wrong information, which I wouldn’t catch if I wasn’t an expert in the areas AI was talking about due to years of reading primary source material. One of the funniest (and worst) examples of this happened when an AI search tried to confidently gaslight me, saying that something never happened, when I was physically there to observe it 30 years ago.

Other times, it generates plausible-sounding stories and videos, but with something about them just slightly … off. The sound. The setup. The people’s behavior. The narrative doesn’t seem quite plausible. But for people—especially younger people—who never had a chance to develop the experience and critical reasoning skills to constantly question what they see and hear, this artificial content will often go unnoticed.

At best, we’re talking about harmless fakes of doorbell cameras recording animals doing silly things. At worst, they are used to create self-reinforcing narratives about what sort of people don’t belong in our society. AI videos and algorithms feed our worst fears, desires, impulses, and beliefs as a culture, in much the same way that The Protocols of the Elders of Zion fed the worst in human gullibility over 100 years ago.

Like in “Harrison Bergeron,” government and industry are colluding to foist this on all of us whether we want it or not. They convince untalented, lazy, or unintelligent people that with AI, they can be just as talented as people who spent decades perfecting their craft. You can make movies! Write poems! Create “art”! Just give the algorithm a series of prompts, et voilà! Anyone can be an artist/moviemaker/writer/poet.

Unfortunately, what comes out the other end of the AI machine is almost universally awful and derivative. While over half the new e-books on Amazon are AI-generated, they generate fewer reviews (most of which are bad anyway) and low sales. Fundamentally, AI is uncreative: It takes all the information available and uses algorithms to generate what it thinks will come next, like a Chinese room thought experiment run amok that uses 4.4 percent (and rising quickly) of all energy in the United States, and up to 90 percent of the total computing power available in the country.

Now that AI has gobbled up everything and started dumping slop everywhere, it is consuming its own product like a bad drug dealer. When AI systems fold AI products into the dataset they draw from, they reinforce and pollute their own algorithms, creating a self-licking ice cream cone. Over time, the data set that AI builds its algorithms on becomes increasingly polluted with its own slop, eventually resulting in model collapse. In laymen’s terms, it is like the children’s game of telephone, or making a Xerox copy of a copy of a copy: The output just keeps getting worse over time.

Despite all of this, industry and the government have formed an unholy alliance to make everyone use AI for things that it probably shouldn’t be used for. The Trump administration is “focused on accelerating federal AI adoption to improve execution, competitiveness, and U.S. strategic advantage,” according to the Brookings Institution, with lax oversight. The lethal strike on a girls school in Iran has been attributed to the military outsourcing targeteering work to Anthropic’s Claude AI model.

Before I left the RAND Corporation, there was a heavy push from leadership to use AI to write reports so we could brand the product as “AI-informed.” This seemed like a terrible idea at a think tank that is supposed to generate new ideas, knowing that AI mostly just recycles and reassembles old ones. Despite this, AI has become the new buzzword, like Lean Six-Sigma or synergy. The Ford Motor Company drank the whole pitcher of Kool-Aid, firing hundreds of employees in the belief that AI could do the job better than humans, only to lose billions and eventually rehire them when it discovered the limits of the AI propaganda it’d been sold.

The promise of AI was that it would replace people or at least make their lives easier. Neither is generally true: It just forces people to multitask and churn out more. The only field where people are being replaced wholesale is in computer programming, where AI is making leaps in capability. The problem is that an entire generation of new coders is being lost. A Fortune-500 tech company senior architect whom I spoke to off the record believes that they’ll remain, if only to vibe-code and manage with AI.

They foresee an Idiocracy-like future where technology is treated like magic. Society survives entirely through extreme automation, but the everyday population has completely lost the understanding of how or why anything works, relying purely on habit—i.e., AI generates mountains of code, but no one is left who can understand it.

There is a rare consensus between Democratic and Republican voters that they dislike data centers using up their water, creating heat domes and noise pollution in their neighborhoods, raising electricity rates, and making it more expensive to buy a computer. There also isn’t a great deal of demand for many of the products AI is offering (like books and movies), leading many expert observers to believe that AI is an investment bubble that will eventually pop.

Most people know about the “faster, cheaper, better—pick two” truism. AI, in both the creative and industrial/engineering worlds, provides such an unbelievable boost to the “faster” and “cheaper (at least for now)” attributes that people are willing to sacrifice quality. Many of them don’t think of the degradation in quality as substantial and consider it a sacrifice worth making. Most people agree that past inventions, in retrospect, were also worth this sacrifice: The printing press eliminated the huge amounts of information memorized by scholars and professionals, and the calculator degraded the human knowledge of the fundamentals of math that the slide rule required. The improvement in speed and cost on one hand, and the sacrifice of quality and human ability on the other, is a level of magnitude above these previous inventions.

However, the fact that so many students use AI suggests that at least that part of it is here to stay. AI pollutes our creative and information ecosystem by making seductively cheap dreck. As in Vonnegut’s story, it makes the dumbest seem smarter, the smartest seem dumber, while dragging the entire human average down in the process.

The best obituary of Lindsey Graham appeared not after his death on Saturday, but exactly a year before the event that would define the final stage of his career. On January 6, 2020, Rolling Stone published a profile of Graham by Mark Binelli that catalogued the South Carolina senator’s path from bipartisan dealmaker to MAGA disciple. It included this quote from Steve Schmidt, who managed John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign back when Graham was the maverick senator’s sidekick:

People try to analyze Lindsey through the prism of the manifest inconsistencies that exist between things that he used to believe and what he’s doing now. The way to understand him is to look at what’s consistent. And essentially what he is in American politics is what, in the aquatic world, would be a pilot fish: a smaller fish that hovers about a larger predator, like a shark, living off of its detritus. That’s Lindsey. And when he swam around the McCain shark, broadly viewed as a virtuous and good shark, Lindsey took on the patina of virtue. But wherever the apex shark is, you find the Lindsey fish hovering about, and Trump’s the newest shark in the sea. Lindsey has a real draw to power—but he’s found it unattainable on his own merits.

There have been many obituaries of Graham over the past few days. Some, especially the one that appeared on NBC’s Meet The Press—where Graham was scheduled to appear on Sunday—treated him as the epitome of back-slapping decorum in the Senate. But the good ones, like those published by Josh Marshall and our own Michael Tomasky, focus on the senator as a pilot fish and a bottom feeder. The real story of Graham’s career wasn’t an evolution from bipartisan dealmaker to fascist enabler; it was a consistent attraction to those who served power.

Graham was never a driver of conservative of right-wing politics, nor did he ever come close to attaining real power. (His lone presidential campaign in 2016 ended two months before the primary began.) Graham was a cynic and an opportunist. But his status as the Republican Party’s preeminent bootlicker also makes him more illustrative of the authoritarian drift of the GOP over the last 30 years than perhaps any other politician. And for all the fond remembrances of Graham’s time at McCain’s side, the party that he represented was never one that was fond of dealmaking or compromise.

Graham was first elected to Congress during the Republican Revolution in 1994. Running with the backing of South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond, Graham won a House seat that had been held by longtime Democratic incumbent Butler Derrick, who decided not to run for reelection in an increasingly red district. Though Graham was less sharp-toothed than many of the other House Republicans that swept into power amid Newt Gingrich’s “Contract for America,” he was still sharply partisan. A longtime attorney, he served as an impeachment manager against Bill Clinton over the president’s affair with Monica Lewinsky and led the push to prove—correctly—that he had lied.

But it wasn’t until Graham entered the Senate in 2003 that he began to emerge as a national figure—largely due to his alliance with John McCain. A former judge advocate general in the Air Force, Graham voted for President George W. Bush’s Iraq War soon after taking office. In the years to come, as one of the “Three Amigos”—a group of neoconservative senators that included McCain and Joe Lieberman, the 2000 Democratic vice presidential nominee—he would consistently use his voice to back using American military power abroad. It’s fitting that Graham may have died because he insisted on using his voice to back intervention: He reportedly declined to seek medical attention on Saturday evening because he wanted to be able to go on Meet the Press on Sunday to discuss a recent trip to Ukraine. “I can’t die now,” he told the person who urged him to see a doctor. “I still need to do the Russia sanctions, get Iran sorted out and do Israeli-Saudi normalization.”

Much has understandably been made about Graham’s transformation after McCain’s death in 2018. It’s true that Graham was a fierce critic of Donald Trump in 2015, when the two were competing for the Republican nomination for president—and continued to condemn Trump after withdrawing from the race in December. Over the course of the 2016 election, Graham called him a “kook,” a “jackass,” and a “race-baiting xenophobic religious bigot.” He said the Republican Party would be “destroyed” if he was elected. And then, soon after McCain’s death in 2018, Graham became one of Trump’s best and most trusted allies in the Senate.

There is some disagreement about whether that marked a “transformation” for Graham and a betrayal of his principles, or if it was simply a continuation of his long career as a “pilot fish.” In many ways, that debate mirrors one about the broader shift of the Republican Party in the Trump era—if its MAGA-fication marks a sharp break from its past or is simply an evolution (or rather, devolution) that can be traced back to Barry Goldwater, if not earlier.

Graham’s career was a strong argument for the latter interpretation. A Zelig-like figure, he was never the most powerful or influential Republican over the course of his 30-plus years in Congress, but he was there every step of the away as the party drifted from the hell-raising of the Gingrich years to the interventionist paranoia of the post-9/11 period to the obstructionist push during Obama’s presidency to the present authoritarian moment. And he was, at nearly every turn, a consummate Republican.

Representative Haley Stevens’s chief argument in her U.S. Senate run in Michigan is, “I beat Republicans.” As she told The Associated Press recently, “I win tough races. I have had Republicans throw everything at me and still managed to win.” Meanwhile her Democratic primary opponent, doctor and public health expert Abdul El-Sayed, says actually that he’s a surer bet than Stevens to win a general election. “It’s risky to put up a candidate who does not actually have clear positions on most of the issues that everybody wants.… It’s risky to tell people that the best thing we can do with our tax dollars is send them abroad to drop bombs on other people rather than to invest here,” he told The Wall Street Journal. Each candidate’s supporters are also making confident claims that their candidate would fare better against the likely Republican nominee, former Representative Mike Rogers.

I get why Democratic candidates and their backers talk like this. Democratic voters are desperate to restrain today’s radical, antidemocratic Republican Party, and winning elections is obviously an essential part of beating MAGA. But while debating electability seems savvy and pragmatic, it’s actually futile and counterproductive. We can’t reliably predict which candidate will do best in a general election. And having candidates spend primaries implying their rivals are electoral losers is a great way … to lose general elections. Democrats need to stop having primaries about electability and start having primaries where candidates prove their electability by wooing voters on the basis of things beyond electoral wishcasting.

In theory, electability is a useful metric on which to compare candidates. If I were 100 percent certain one Democratic candidate in a primary would go on to win the general election in a swing state and 100 percent sure that the other candidate would lose the general election, I would almost certainly back the former, no matter their policy positions. Even if these numbers were 75 percent likely to win and 75 percent likely to lose, I would choose the candidate with the higher chances. But in the overwhelming majority of primaries, including the El-Sayed/Stevens contest, there is no polling or other data showing that one nominee will clearly lose the general election and the other will clearly lose it. Most polls show Stevens and El-Sayed effectively tied in polls against Rogers.

That polling parity isn’t an accident. Politics today is much more partisan and nationalized than a few decades ago, when Bill Clinton flipped several Southern states. So the tactics, strategies, and personas of individual candidates are usually overwhelmed by factors such as the approval rating of the incumbent president, the popularity of the two parties, the state of the economy, and the partisan balance in a given state. In 2006, 2018, and 2020, most Democratic candidates across the country, progressive and centrist, did better than in other cycles. Same for Republicans in 2010, 2014, and 2024.

So the most realistic scenario in Michigan is not that Stevens would lose the general election but El-Sayed would win, or vice versa, but that either nominee will win the general election because purple states like Michigan tend to go blue when there is a super-unpopular Republican president in office. Nearly every election across the country over the last year has featured high Democratic turnout, somewhat lower Republican turnout, and occasional and swing voters backing the Democrats. This is very likely what will happen in Michigan in November, no matter who Democrats nominate in this Senate race.

Stevens’s supporters argue that El-Sayed’s prior positions, such as defunding the police, ensure he would lose some moderate and independent voters that she would win. But political science research from scholars Adam Bonica and Jake Grumbach suggests that there are very few voters these days who back the most centrist candidate because of their policy positions and ideology.

“Moderation used to help candidates in past decades, but in the Trump era, a candidate’s ideological moderation has no consistent, measurable effect on their vote share,” they wrote in an essay published in Boston Review earlier this year. Instead, Americans who aren’t consistent partisan voters and are therefore up for grabs (so those who swing between the two parties and those who vacillate between voting and not voting) are politically erratic and unpredictable. They might back Barack Obama and then Donald Trump; Trump and then Zohran Mamdani. They vote often on personality and vibes.

Some of these voters are fairly conservative on some issues and fairly liberal on others. So it’s not clear that they would be more likely to back Stevens because she is more centrist than El-Sayed. At the same time, even though these voters are often deeply skeptical of corporations and elites, it’s not clear that they will back the more anti-elite, populist El-Sayed, either. A country (and state in Michigan) where Donald Trump twice won is not one that always prizes moderation.

To put it simply, there are swing voters … but we don’t really know exactly why they swing, beyond their reliably swinging against whichever party controls the presidency. So that’s advantage Democrats, but not necessarily advantage Stevens or El-Sayed.

So if there’s no way to prove which candidate will win a general election, why are the El-Sayed and Stevens camps so fixated on electability? That’s mostly the fault of Stevens and center-left Democrats, who are really leaning into that concept. Electability is the center-left’s best and in some ways only argument during Democratic primaries these days.

On policy, the Democratic center-left has been largely discredited. Democratic Party voters don’t want to go back to the social conservatism of Clinton; the corporate-friendly, deficit-obsessed economic policies of Clinton and Obama; the bipartisanship and pro-Israel stances of Joe Biden; or the half-hearted opposition to Trump and rightward shift on immigration from congressional Democrats early last year. Stevens is trying to backtrack from her past fervent support of Israel; fellow centrist Senate candidate Angie Craig of Minnesota has apologized for her vote last year in favor of a Trump-backed immigration bill.

But center-left Democrats, more often than progressives, have won in purple states. So that electoral history gives Stevens an advantage. In contrast, center-left candidates in reliably blue places like New York and Colorado can’t credibly claim a progressive hopeful would lose in the general election.

These electability arguments often resonate with Democratic voters, who prioritize defeating Republicans over virtually anything else. Biden’s primary win in 2020 happened in part because Democratic voters viewed him as more likely to beat Trump than the female, minority, and/or more left-wing candidates that he ran against. So progressive and insurgent candidates such as El-Sayed and their supporters are emphasizing electability because they can’t win otherwise. Democratic voters in swing states aren’t going to listen to a candidate’s policy positions until they are convinced that candidate can win a general election.

So even if their claims lack much evidence, center-left Democrats are smart to lean into electability in their battle with the left over control of the Democratic Party. I expect Stevens to win because the center-left Michigan Democratic establishment will loudly trumpet her electability and sow voters’ doubts about El-Sayed’s ability to win a general election in the run-up to the August 4 Michigan primary. (A Muslim man is particularly vulnerable to these electability doubts, so I wish centrist Democrats who claim to care about religious tolerance and equality kept that in mind.) Similarly, I would bet on Governor Josh Shapiro or another more center-left candidate defeating a progressive like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the 2028 presidential primary by leaning into electability.

But this a bad tactic for the party overall. Democratic primaries don’t happen in some alternative universe separate from the general election. Swing and occasional voters are going to hear that Stevens thinks they won’t support El-Sayed and vice versa. In the general election, the media can use the quotes of the loser of the El-Sayed/Stevens contest suggesting that the Democratic nominee can’t connect with swing voters.

Primaries often include harsh policy attacks from rival candidates. But on policy, Democratic candidates will be distinct from Republicans on nearly every issue. So that’s not a big problem in the general election. What’s more problematic is Democratic candidates spending primaries essentially saying other Democrats are weirdos whom swing voters won’t support.

The other problem is that primaries fixated on electability aren’t good preparation for the general election. “I will win the general election” is a message that’s only for hardcore Democrats. That’s the electorate in a primary, obviously. But “I will fix your health care,” “I will make housing more affordable, “I will bring jobs to the state,” are messages that appeal to primary voters but also the broader electorate. Ideally, Democratic candidates are spending the entire cycle on such broader messages, not spending a year emphasizing their electability during the primary and having only the few months of the general election to say anything that might excite people who aren’t hardcore Democrats.

I know I’m not going to stop the Democrats’ electability obsession. Centrist Democrats know it’s their path to power; progressives know it’s their biggest barrier; liberal voters desperately want to beat Republicans; and everyone, particularly journalists, thinks they are great at predicting which candidates are best. But unfortunately (or I would say fortunately), the only way you can tell if someone is electable … is to let them run in an election. And these days, the only way you can tell if a candidate appeals to voters who claim to be moderate … is to let them run in an election. Those voters might support Haley Stevens. Or Abdul El-Sayed. Or yes, unfortunately, Donald Trump.

This is a lightly edited transcript of the July 13 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.

Perry Bacon: This is the New Republic show Right Now. I’m the host, Perry Bacon. We have a great guest today. It’s Donald Moynihan. He’s a professor of political science and public policy at the University of Michigan. Professor, welcome. Thanks for joining me.

Donald Moynihan: Thanks so much for having me, Perry.

Bacon: And so Don has a great Substack that is about how we govern. I’ve forgotten the title for some reason—Can We Still Govern? is the title. I read it all the time, but I forgot. And it really gets into detail about how this Trump era, and the Trump administration, has affected... It gets into a lot of detail about how policy’s written, how it’s changed, how Trump is destroying the federal government, how we can rebuild.

It’s a really great Substack, Can We Still Govern?, that I highly recommend people read. But what I want to get into today is a post Don wrote in, I guess it’s August 28, 2025. This was early—this is about the time when Trump was sending the National Guard to Chicago and to LA, really in the height of the authoritarianism that we’ve had these last couple years.

And you wrote this piece called “The Authoritarian Checklist,” and you were arguing that we had now entered a competitive authoritarian period—that we lost democracy, and we were entering competitive authoritarianism—and you were describing the ideas that make an authoritarian administration.

And so I want to go through some of those. And what I’m going to ask you to do is rank them on a phase of one to 10, how much Trump has done these things—on a one to 10. Not because rankings are useful, but just to compare where he’s kind of been most successful in taking over and where he’s been arguably a little less successful.

And let me start by saying, this checklist you had is not some kind of—it’s not the political science authoritarian checklist. It was something you came up with yourself, right?

Moynihan: Yeah. I wasn’t drawing from another list of well-defined parameters that someone else had come up with. At the same time, I think it is a pretty standard checklist. I think if you look at authoritarian governments, they do basically the same thing. And so if you look at any textbook about authoritarianism, they might have a longer or shorter list, they might use slightly different words, but the patterns are very similar. The patterns really do look like each other across time.

The settings vary, the types of powers that authoritarians can tap into vary. But what we see with Trump—and this is part of the reason why I wrote the piece—it doesn’t look that different from what we see in Turkey today, or what we had seen in Hungary until Orbán was displaced. And this is also why I wanted to talk about competitive authoritarianism.

So it’s not like a light switch, where you’re either completely authoritarian or you’re completely democratic, but the idea that there is this sort of in-between—where you have some element of political competition, where you have some media, but at the same time the authoritarian force, the government in charge, has tilted the playing field so that it is very difficult for anyone opposing it to do so successfully.

Bacon: So let’s go through. There’s eight things you listed as elements of authoritarianism. So I want to go through, and we’ll discuss them all in order. You can give your one-to-10 ranking at the end—10 being the worst, one being the least bad, 10 being the most bad.

And first of all, control the bureaucracy.

Moynihan: Yeah. And I think this is maybe a nine out of 10 for Trump, and certainly an A+ for effort. And one of the reasons why I think they advanced so much in this space is because at the end of their first term, they really had this idea that the reason they did not succeed—and people who worked in the Trump administration were reasonably upfront in saying, We did not do what we wanted to do in the first term—is that they blamed the bureaucracy.

And so the deep state becomes a real obsession for Trump and the people working around him. And the types of people who worked in his first administration who came back to a second administration—a lot of them spent four years thinking very specifically, How can we use the legal system? How can we use executive orders? How can we push lawsuits in a way that’ll favor us, so we take control of the bureaucracy?

And so there was a lot of homework that went into this. If you look at someone like Russ Vought at OMB, this is very much his baby. And so Trump might have the broad outlines—very much supportive of the idea of making it easier to fire bureaucrats he doesn’t like—but there was an army of lieutenants who did the work of making this happen.

And I think from the start of the second Trump administration, we’ve gone from a system where you have public employees, about two million who had real civil service protections, to today, where they are de facto at-will. They can be fired for any reason, and that is not what the law says, but that’s the reality on the ground.

If you’re working in government right now and you cross paths with a political appointee, or if Laura Loomer finds some old post you did online, you can be fired, and your options for trying to retain your job are really not very good at this point. And the room for resistance within the bureaucracy at this point is pretty small.

Bacon: OK. So in other words, the bureaucracy was something of a check on them in the first term and isn’t now.

Moynihan: I think that’s true. And I think if you were someone who supports Trump, you would say they were engaged in resistance and democracy says the president gets the final say on these things, and therefore we’re within our rights. When you look at the specifics of many of the cases that are under dispute, it’s often bureaucrats saying things like, That’s not what the science says about pollution, or, The law tells us something different about how you’re supposed to use these powers.

Take a super-specific example here, where Kash Patel fired senior FBI officials because they wouldn’t fire their own FBI colleagues, because Patel wouldn’t give them a cause—and you’re supposed to have some sort of cause for firing people related to performance. And they were saying, Look, we think the law says this, and Trump officials were saying, That’s not what we want to hear, and therefore you’re going to be fired.

And so in many cases, resistance was simply people trying to draw on their expertise, or people saying, The law says this, and you’re saying something different, and so we’re going to try to follow the law here.

Bacon: Control the military.

Moynihan: I think that this is probably something more like a six or a seven.

And what we’ve heard are a lot of stories about Hegseth being incredibly active here, in a couple of dimensions. One is, early on, we heard stories about Hegseth basically rewriting military history. So if you go to government websites and you learn about military heroes, or if you go to a graveyard, or if you go to memorials, Hegseth has removed a lot of what he saw as DEI—but basically highlighting women and non-white military heroes and erasing them from military history.

That can be fixed, but that is real. Part of the way the military maintains its esteem in American society is by telling these stories, and who is included, who’s represented. That’s an important part of what they do.

The second thing is the personnel. And obviously Hegseth immediately pushed out the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. We’ve seen an unprecedented degree of turnover in senior military officials, and we’ve also seen unprecedented action, with Hegseth intervening on promotion lists and seemingly specifically targeting, again, typically Black officers, female officers, or officers who were deemed woke—like they might have participated in some sort of event around LGBTQ. And so if there’s any of those measures that Hegseth doesn’t like, your opportunities to advance in the military decline quite a bit.

And the reason why I think they haven’t gone further here is, the US military is popular, right? And there’s a lot of former service members in society. It’s a big constituency. And so in some ways, politicizing that institution is harder than politicizing our civil service. And the US military is also, among the militaries across the world, one that has a very strong track record of honoring civil-military relations, protecting the Constitution.

We don’t have coups in our history in the US. And so the sort of education that senior military officers get historically has emphasized protecting democracy. Now, that education itself is also being politicized—so if you’re in West Point now, what you’re being taught in the classrooms, or who is teaching you in the classrooms, is different than it was a couple of years ago.

But I still think you haven’t seen the sort of mass change across the board in the military that you’ve seen in perhaps the civil service, where, you know, in the civil service, more than 400,000 people have left the government over the last year and a half or so.

Bacon: Control internal security to suppress. I assume internal security means police departments, DHS, ICE, et cetera. Is that what you mean by internal security?

Moynihan: Yeah. And here again, I think it’s like a seven or eight. Massive efforts by the Trump administration, but also reflecting our federalist system, there are a lot of state and local cops, right? And so it’s very hard to control all of them.

Trump has leveraged something called 287(g) agreements, where—if you go back to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, one of the features of that act is tens of billions of dollars are directed towards Homeland Security. Some of it is effectively a slush fund that you can do whatever you want with, and some of that money then goes to state and local police departments, where they’re told, If you work with us and help us on immigration, we’ll give you this money. And so they have some resources there.

And then also you look at ICE and CBP. And here, I think that is the first thing that jumps into your mind. You remember the images from Minnesota. Just last week we saw someone killed in Texas, and that’s happened over 20 times in the last year or so, where you’ve had an ICE official, typically masked, typically pointing a gun into a car, shooting at a person in that car—in five cases, killing that person—and then saying, Oh, that person was weaponizing their vehicle against me. In no case have we actually seen credible evidence that’s true, and in many cases, the evidence that pops up shows that it’s not been true.

But the point is, from a governance perspective, those officials are not being investigated by the federal government. Any investigations that result from those altercations are investigations of the victims. We don’t see a pattern where, as a result, ICE officials on the ground feel fearful that if they shoot someone, they’re going to be suspended or they are going to lose their job. And I think that is quite dangerous.

Especially—we’ve also learned about training that’s happening in ICE, because of whistleblowers who’ve come out and have told us effectively they’re telling these new recruits to ignore constitutional norms about, for example, entering someone’s house.

And so there’s an element of—there is a lot more people working in the national security state. It’s the only part of the government that’s really growing. They’re being told to do things that are not consistent with the Constitution, and then in practice, they have all sorts of protection from the federal government. And that is pretty worrying. And if you criticize ICE, if you say something nasty about ICE, there’s a possibility that they’ll come to your house, and they will have a printout, and they will say, “You can’t do this.” And that’s pretty intimidating.

If you think about the movie version of the police state, where you post something and say, I think this is bad, and then someone from the state comes to your house and says, “You can’t say this”—that’s intimidating.

Bacon: Control the legal system.

Moynihan: Again, I think this is like a nine out of 10, and this is a part where there’s been two aspects to this. One is, first of all—again, this goes back to Trump’s first term—one of the lessons is, the deep state was out to get us. The other is, we need to control the lawyers in government.

And we didn’t do this in the first term. We had general counsels who told us, “No.” We need to find lawyers who will say yes. And they have been quite successful in that. And I think part of what Stephen Miller was doing between 2020 and 2024 was looking for lawyers who would always say yes to them.

Bacon: Let me stop you a second, because when I asked this one, I thought you were going to say something lower—because if you look at the Supreme Court, it has been fairly pro-Trump. The lower courts have not been. So when you mean legal system, you mean government lawyers internally, or do you mean law as a whole? Because I think that might be worth distinguishing between.

Moynihan: I think it’s both, right? I think the operation of the legal system is the use of governmental power in how the law is constructed, and that includes the Department of Justice. It includes which cases the FBI chooses to investigate. It also then includes how the courts adjudicate those cases.

And so I think within the government, the Department of Justice has been captured, the FBI has been captured. The traditional norm that there was a separation between the legal parts of government and the president, which we had post-Watergate—that is completely gone now.

Bacon: They prosecute the president’s enemies and exonerate his friends all the time.

Moynihan: Yeah. Our first attorney general was the president’s personal defense lawyer. The person who was nominated to be our second attorney general was the president’s personal defense lawyer. And their incentives and actions are very much consistent with that.

And even people who are not lawyers—you take someone like Bill Pulte, who is now our acting head of the intelligence services—he’s getting in on that game, where he sees political rewards for using government resources to target the president’s enemies. And that is very worrying.

So then you get to the court system, where I think you’re right—the lower courts have actually been quite good at saying, This is unprecedented. A lot of what’s happening here violates the law. And that has been working pretty well, until you get to the Supreme Court. And I think if you want to hold some actor other than Trump responsible for the moment that we’re in, it is the Supreme Court.

They are the group that has the standing, they have the role, they have the authority to say, This administration is violating the Constitution, it’s violating the law. And again, they haven’t done that. And in fact, they’ve done the opposite. They’ve bought into Trump’s legal theories.

Bacon: Yeah. OK, so that was the legal system. So everything’s been high. Control civil society—and I, if everything’s high for a reason, that’s where we are, I think. But control civil society, particularly businesses.

Moynihan: I think a year ago, I would’ve said this is maybe a seven, and now it’s more like a five.

And so one of the things that has happened here is that Trump immediately starts coercing, say, law firms, universities, the media. And a lot of, for example, white-shoe law firms signed agreements with the administration as a result of executive orders, saying that they would effectively stop doing pro bono work to support the president’s opponents and instead would support the president’s supporters. And that seemed astonishing to a lot of us—that law firms, who presumably should be the ones capable of defending themselves, would fold so easily.

There are examples, however, where when these claims, or claims against universities, have been tested in courts, the administration has not succeeded. But I think what the administration has done with universities, for example, is exploit the fact that—I’m in my university office today.

We are very dependent on federal funding, and if you remove all of that funding without any sort of due process and just say, We’re just going to stop it completely, then that puts our organizations in a really bad financial place. And Trump has exploited that in a way that no president has ever done before.

And conservatives will say, What about when Obama weaponized Title IX to target people for sexual assault on campus? You could argue that’s a precedent, but there was never a case where Obama was saying, All of the federal funding going to your institution is now under threat. There were much lesser penalties.

And so, working in higher education, it is certainly a much more chilled environment, where it’s harder to talk about—you can’t really talk about DEI any longer. You are much more concerned about federal investigations.

The other part of civil society I think about a lot is the media. And here, I think—

Bacon: Let me stop you, because you actually wrote in your essay—civil society, businesses, one; higher education and media, you separated those. Let’s go individually a little bit. So in terms of businesses, let’s focus on that one first, because I think civil society, businesses, is an important one.

Has the threat to businesses gone down, up? It felt like in the first term—I guess right now, whether we’re going through these mergers right now, where it seems to me if you want to have your company merge, you are sucking up to Trump. CNN anchors, I’m sure, are very worried about where they are right now. So in terms of controlling businesses, where are we on a one to 10?

Moynihan: Yeah. You’re right. And in some ways, it is hard to separate these, because the media is a business.

Bacon: The media is a business. That’s a good way to put it. Yes, that’s true.

Moynihan: And if you look at, for example, relative to the start of the administration, you have the Ellison family one of the president’s big supporters, now controlling CBS News, bringing in Bari Weiss, now also trying to take control of CNN—and relying very much on the president’s support to do these things.

With the expectation—and Trump is nothing if not honest about the transactional nature of his presidency—with the expectation that they will tamp down on criticism of Trump. And we’ve seen flashpoints like 60 Minutes, I think, reflecting some of those tensions. Much of the time, those tensions will just happen at a level where we don’t see them.

We’ll see people being fired or leaving organizations in a way that’s going to be less dramatic. But right now, a lot more of the media is owned by people who are sympathetic to the president.

Also, look at the Washington Post, which is a shadow of what it used to be, I think, in terms of the quality of the reporting there. But the editorial page is now somewhere to the right of the Wall Street Journal. And this is purely the function of the billionaire owner of the Post, Jeff Bezos, deciding that he is going to realign his political priorities. And looking beyond the traditional media, you look at the Ellison family having a stake in TikTok. You look at how Meta has realigned itself to be more supportive of Trump under Zuckerberg.

So it’s not just the traditional media that has been captured, it’s also elements of social media as well, where Trump has a stronger sense of control over those outlets.

Bacon: So let’s put a bucket of civil society where we say businesses, media, higher ed. I think that gets into your answer some. So you’d say it was a seven and is now a five. So talk about, what’s the good news there? Why has it gone from a seven to a five?

Moynihan: I think the good news is there are court cases where Trump has lost, and I think especially in higher education, some of the institutions that pushed back were successful in court. I think the bad news is there is more just silent acquiescence to Trump’s policies.

And certainly in business and media, the sort of vibe shift has been where CEOs have decided, It’s a better deal for me to give money to the president, or make sure I appoint people in my media businesses that are not going to offend the president, so I continue to do business the way I want to. And that feels very much like the sort of deal that Putin offered the oligarchs. Make sure you’re with me and you’ll be allowed to do your business, but if you cross me, I will go after you.

Bacon: Let me interrupt you to say this. Part of this civil society—civil society in America, the businesses, media, was probably a little less supportive of DEI and other things than it portrayed itself in 2020, right? So some of this is probably these institutions moving back to their norms. Some of this is moving toward Trump.

Some of this might be just—working in corporate America, working in a news institution, I could tell some of these, there were over-the-top displays of, We love diversity. We must hire more women. We must... I think some of that was in the university, in media context. Some of this stuff was, like, adjusting to—people were making decisions maybe they didn’t necessarily agree with, to comply with a vibe shift in 2020 that was pro-diversity. Now they’re moving back to a vibe shift that is anti-diversity. But either way, this is not just Trump, right?

Moynihan: Yeah, I think so. And I know people who work in corporate America, or people who work in government and sitting at a university—there certainly was a sense that some of this felt performative. And it felt like this was a great business opportunity for people who do training in DEI, but not necessarily for the people that they’re claiming to help. That it’s not solving underlying problems.

And then if you were in those trainings and you find them condescending and irritating, that makes you less supportive of the idea of fixing underlying problems. You see how this is how the institution is dealing with it. And so I think Trump has been expert in exploiting that frustration, but going much deeper, right? And so we’re far past the point of removing DEI in the federal government. We’re now at the point of removing civil rights. Like that—

Bacon: We’re firing the generals because you’re Black, functionally, is like what’s happening now. Yeah.

Moynihan: Or dismantling the Office of Civil Rights and the Department of Justice and replacing those spots with people who fundamentally disagree with the notion of civil rights as a race-based phenomena, except for white people who’ve been discriminated against. And so it went from, We’re going to get rid of the excesses of George Floyd, to, actually, We’re going to get rid of the excesses of the Martin Luther King era.

Bacon: That was interesting. That’s a way to put it. OK, I like it put that way. That’s helpful.

Moynihan: And I would have arguments with colleagues in the hallways of my institution, where they might say, “I think things have gone too far.” And I would always say, “Maybe, but as long as we have autonomy to make those decisions, we can correct them ourselves.” We will have an internal conversation where people say, “We need to do this.” People will push back, and we’ll come to some equilibrium eventually where people are reasonably happy with that. Institutions will solve their own conflicts.

It’s very different from having the federal government say, “No, we are going to be the ones who will solve your institutional conflicts, and we’re going to be the ones who dictate the language you can use in your classroom or in your boardroom.” And that’s where we are right now. There’s a much more intrusive federal government project than we had in this previous era.

Bacon: And the final one you listed was control elections. I’m really curious what you’re going to say about this one.

Moynihan: So I think this is—when I wrote the piece last year, I said, “Look, this is the part where there are some structural differences in America relative to Hungary or Turkey.” The federal government does not control elections, right?

Bacon: Or at least doesn’t right now.

Moynihan: Doesn’t right now, but according to the Constitution these are state functions. And that makes it much more difficult for any president to say, I’m going to start messing around with the elections. And the reason that was the last item on the list is, that was the area where Trump had made the least progress, because of those structural factors—but it was also then the area where he had the most reason to pursue that domain, right? To try and make progress.

And so what we are seeing is Trump is investing effort here. But I don’t think to the point where he’s overcoming his structural disadvantages, where the states still control things. And I’ll give you some specific examples here. So he fired a part of the Department of Homeland Security that investigated cyber threats to elections. These were the people who said, “Look, the 2020 election was not fraudulent.” Those people are gone from government.

He’s written executive orders about mail-in voting, asserting a federal power that he doesn’t actually have. He is still trying to pass the SAVE Act even months before the midterm elections, which would be a massive federal intrusion into elections, and also practically unimplementable at this point. If you’re talking to a local election official, this will completely break the election system. Last week he fired the federal heads of the Election Assistance Commission. So he’s doing what he can. He’s launching investigations into previous elections.

Bacon: Particularly in Georgia. They’re raiding offices in Georgia. Yeah.

Moynihan: And if you’re a local election official—and this is one of the things that I think people don’t understand about elections—we depend upon this army of local election officials who are not terribly well-paid, who are mostly doing it as a civic duty. And in the last few years, a lot of those people have been leaving their jobs. A lot of those people have been facing threats and intimidation.

Once that army disappears, it’s not obvious what will replace it. And I do worry that just the culture of intimidation and threat that Trump is creating will lead a lot of people to say, This is not for me. But up to now, the structural barriers remain.

And so maybe Trump will do more—maybe he will send national guards to election sites, maybe he will ramp up more intimidation—but up to now, he does not control how people vote. And this does make the midterms all the more important. And so here again—

Bacon: So it’s like a two, but—

Moynihan: I would say last year, maybe it’s a two out of 10, and now maybe it’s a three or four out of 10.

Bacon: OK, so it’s lower. But—

Moynihan: But still, yeah, he does not have a button he can press that fundamentally changes the nature of our election experience in America.

Bacon: So just to summarize: in terms of controlling bureaucracy, military, internal security, legal system, you feel like there’s a lot of progress he’s made, unfortunately. Civil society, you feel like there’s a mix. In elections, he’s been pretty weakened. So is that a good summary?

Moynihan: Yeah. I think that’s fair.

Bacon: And I guess you wrote a piece, I think it was last July, where you argued America had become, instead of a full-fledged democracy—America had moved from democracy to competitive authoritarianism. Is that still how you feel?

Moynihan: Yeah. No, I think so. I think you ask yourself, Do you want to live in a country where masked federal officials can shoot citizens or non-citizens as they go about their business and never feel consequences? Do you want to live in a country where they can come to your door if you complain about this? Or do you want to live in a country where the president’s enemies are targeted by the justice system? Do you want to live in a country where we see massive corruption that is being ignored by the justice system?

And mostly, I think we would say no, right? But none of these are unfair descriptions of what is happening in America today. And those characteristics are not consistent with a functioning democracy that is holding its politicians accountable, that is holding the agents of the state accountable to the people.

Bacon: I’ll finish by talking about the role you’re playing yourself. You are an academic—you could just probably teach your classes and go home—but instead, you’ve written a ton of great Substack posts. You’re writing for the Times, you’re writing for The Atlantic, you’re doing interviews like this. Because we’re in this moment where the academy, universities, are being attacked, the president is saying, The problem with universities is they are too liberal. They are against the state. They are against me, and therefore they are biased. His supporters are saying that.

To some extent, I worry that particularly some of the boards at universities, the board members of universities themselves, are saying some of these same things—that academia is too anti-Donald Trump, too anti-right. Talk about what you’re doing and why this charge is wrong.

Moynihan: It’s a great question. And again, if you look at the pattern of authoritarianism, it’s not a coincidence that the first places authoritarians want to exert control includes universities, because historically, universities are always a source of dissent and disagreement.

Bacon: And authority, probably, too, in a certain way. Authority as in academic authority, wisdom, their prestige—I’m trying to think of words. People respect what you all think, in a certain sense.

Moynihan: In theory—we’re not always right, but we specialize in having knowledge about key topics, and in general, we’re rewarded for not just acquiring that knowledge, but using it in a non-ideological way, in a way that’s different from if I worked for the Democratic Party or if I worked for a liberal-leaning think tank.

We do have some career incentives that align us towards independence. And I understand that the grand narrative is that that is not true, and that liberals have infested the academic framework. But generally, when I try to publish research, if it’s shoddy, it doesn’t get published.

And so the integrity of how I think about analysis is really important for my career, and that then gives us a certain amount of authority, maybe, to talk about things. And it’s important that we use that authority well, and we stay within our lane of expertise.

And so for me, for the last few years—you ask yourself, if you were living in some other period of history, like Germany in the 1930s, or Eastern Europe in the 1950s or ‘60s, or America in the 1960s, and you say, What would I have been doing in that time period? The answer is, whatever you’re doing today.

And if I study government—most of my career, the study of public administration, I promise you, was incredibly dull. Very few people were interested in civil service laws, right? And suddenly it’s very relevant.

And if you’ve spent—like, I got my PhD in 2002—you spent like a quarter of your life or half of your life working on this topic, and suddenly it’s relevant, you have some obligation to bring that knowledge to the table. And I also think there are degrees to which I’m advantaged here.

So I’m a full professor, I have tenure, I’m at a very good university where generally our university has not penalized people for being critical of the government. I don’t work at a university in Florida or Texas where plausibly I could be fired for saying the things I’m saying. And this is why these structural factors do matter. And some of these are structural factors at the state level—where you have co-partisans of President Trump helping him in his project of limiting dissent by removing structural protections to people working in universities, making it easier to fire them for speech that is critical of the government. And I think in the long run, that’s very bad for our society.

Academics can be very annoying, I’ll be the first to acknowledge, but it’s better that you have some contrary people in the corner who have a little bit of independence to say, “Hey, historically, when you’ve done the things that we’re seeing now, it has not worked out well for society,” and bring that knowledge to the table. And I think we have an obligation to do that. And I also think we’re more likely to do so when we are protected.

Bacon: Good place to end on. Donald Moynihan, professor at University of Michigan. Can We Still Govern? is his Substack, which I highly recommend. Don, thanks for joining me. I appreciate it.

Moynihan: My pleasure. Thank you, Perry.

Bacon: Good to see you. Bye-bye.

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

Don Moynihan, a public policy professor at the University of Michigan, last year wrote an essay that included an “authoritarian checklist” of common moves by autocratic leaders around the world. His intention was to track how successful President Trump would be in consolidating power. In the latest edition of Right Now, Moynihan assesses Trump’s progress on that list. The professor argues that Trump has been very successful in dominating the federal bureaucracy, the military, and the legal system. Businesses, the media, universities, and other parts of civil society largely bowed to Trump last year, but have been more resistant in 2026. Where Trump has been least successful, according to the professor, is in controlling the U.S. election system. That’s partly because U.S. elections, more so those in other countries, are largely managed at the local and state levels.