The New Republic

President Trump’s meeting with convicted election denier Tina Peters on Monday concerned some disturbing plans for the upcoming midterm elections.

Peter Ticktin, Peters’s attorney, said that she proposed that Trump seize ballots from across the country and conduct a hand recount, reports Kyle Clark of Colorado’s 9 News.

“It’s a good plan, and I do think that something like that is probably going to happen,” Ticktin said to right-wing podcaster Joe Oltmann in Colorado. “In the event that we have this kind of disaster, and everything goes wrong, and the vote is crazy, and the senatorial races put it up there to remove the president and the vice president, in that nightmare, should it come true, Donald Trump is not going to relinquish control again.”

Oltmann has called for the state’s top Democrats to be executed in the past, and said on the podcast that violence is going to be necessary. Ticktin said on the podcast that Trump should be in control of America’s weapons if the country descends into civil war.

“So, he’s got nothing to lose, the nation has nothing to lose, it’s better if we’re going to have a civil war of any sort that it would be martial law with our side in control of the armaments,” Ticktin said.

Normally, this kind of speculation would be written off as a conspiracy theory from the fringe. But Peters was invited to the White House for a meeting, and had her prison sentence for election tampering commuted after Trump put pressure on Colorado’s Democratic Governor Jared Polis. Trump is desperate to avoid a Democratic takeover of Congress after the midterms, and seems willing to entertain all kinds of crazy ideas.

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the October 9 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.

Today we’re checking in on the state of play in the battle for the House of Representatives. New reporting indicates that Republicans have entered into a triage stage, meaning they’re giving up on some seats as all but lost, while urgently sending reinforcements to other ones that should be safe. These leaks are growing more humiliating for Trump, as they’re depicting a political environment that’s sharply deteriorating even as Trump keeps insisting his own numbers are better than ever. On top of that, the polling averages and the forecasts continue to trend toward Democrats.

To make sense of it all, we’re talking to Kyle Kondik, managing editor of the forecasting site Sabato’s Crystal Ball. Kyle, great to have you on.

Kyle Kondik: Hey, Greg.

Sargent: So the Fifty Plus One polling averages have Democrats up a clean eight points in the generic House ballot matchup. They have Trump’s approval down below 35 percent, a key threshold. Nate Silver’s website just declared this: “Democrats are in an excellent position to retake the House, and are also favored to retake the Senate.” Kyle, taking the Senate out of this, do you agree with Nate on the House there?

Kondik: Yeah, I do. You know, we’ll see where the ultimate seat gain lands, but things look very good for Democrats in the House. I mean, really, I think Democrats have been favored in the House the whole cycle. Redistricting added a curveball into all of that, although I think even at their worst point, the Democrats were still favored in the House.

And a lot of us were kind of waiting to see what happened after Labor Day in terms of the polling. And the numbers, if anything, have gotten better for Democrats since then. And you know, maybe you see some rebound for Republicans a little bit, but the picture looks pretty bleak for them in the House, and increasingly maybe in the Senate too.

Although I guess I personally don’t see a clear favorite in the Senate. I know that some of the sort of poll-based forecasts do. I’m not quite ready to go there yet, but it’s undeniable the numbers have been getting better.

Sargent: Well, let’s talk about Sabato’s Crystal Ball, your site, and how it right now ranks things. You guys have 16 Republican-held House seats as toss-ups, versus only four Democratic-held ones being toss-ups. You guys have another eight GOP-held seats as leans Democratic. So that’s at least 24 GOP-held seats that are quite gettable for Dems right now. Can you talk about that pool of seats and explain what that big picture means?

Kondik: Yeah. Look, I think, you know, again, particularly after Labor Day, we’ve been kind of steadily moving races toward the Democrats, sort of as we pick up on, you know, micro-level factors, but also in acknowledgment of what the macro, the big-picture factors are.

And I feel like our moves have generally been vindicated by some of the reporting. You know, Tom Kean in New Jersey Seven appears to be an underdog. He’s an underdog in our ratings. That’s just one of them. Another one is Nebraska’s Second Congressional District, which is Don Bacon’s seat. That’s one of few Harris-district Republican seats that the Republicans held in 2024. Don Bacon is retiring. That looks increasingly like a relatively safe Democratic pickup.

So again, there’s just been a lot of movement, to the point where I think for much of the cycle we were thinking maybe the Democrats are in the 220s. It is easier to imagine them getting into 230s now, I think.

I don’t think that’s exactly where we’re going to land. I’d probably be right around 230 at this point, best guess. But that’s only kind of trended upward for me over the course of the cycle.

Sargent: Well, I will say 230 is actually pretty striking, given that during the whole battle over redistricting, the mid-cycle redistricting efforts, the gerrymandering that Republicans did, it was really starting to look as if the Democratic gain would be much more trimmed. Democrats really sort of had to trim their sails. That was sort of the prevailing take. But 230, you’re getting up into wave territory, right?

Kondik: You’ve got to remember that the most recent House elections have produced very small majorities. So just 222 to 213 for Democrats in 2020. Then it flipped, 222 to 213 for Republicans in 2022. That was followed by just 220 seats for the majority for Republicans in 2024. So we’ve been in a period of very closely contested House majorities.

And the House map did get better for Republicans through the net effects of all the gerrymandering and redistricting that happened. And if this was a closely contested national election, you could see a world in which the Republican advantage on the House map that they have now, that that would have saved the House majority for them when otherwise maybe Democrats would win it.

But when Democrats are leading by eight or nine points on the House generic ballot, and you just see what’s going on in these individual House races—I think Republicans were hoping they could build a wall big enough to overcome a Democratic wave. That I don’t think has happened.

Sargent: Well, Republicans agree with you. Politico reports that Republicans are leaking that they’ve now entered into triage mode. Before we get to the details, I just want to read some quotes. One Republican operative tells Politico there are, “fires everywhere.” Another GOP operative says this: “If the bottom continues falling out like it has been, this will be worse than 2006.”

Kyle, in 2006, Republicans lost both chambers of Congress, including around thirty seats. If Republicans think that the situation could keep deteriorating to the point of something like that, it’s pretty striking, no?

Kondik: Yeah. And it’s also worth remembering that Democrats did really well in 2006. They won the Senate and the House, unlike 2018. But part of the dynamic in 2006 is that there actually were a number of swing-district Republican survivors. So like Jim Gerlach and Chris Shays—some old names from the past. Republicans had kind of blue-leaning or purple seats. But Democrats made it up because they won in some pretty red-leaning territory. And that’s what we’re watching for in the Senate.

And we also could be watching for that in the U.S. House, as Democrats are both defending some of their own incumbents in redistricted double-digit Trump seats, and also trying to flip some double-digit Trump seats. And they appear to have some opportunities to do that.

Sargent: And it seems like some of these dynamics are in place right now. You’ve got certain types of Republican survivor types still out there, like Congressman Brian Fitzpatrick in Pennsylvania, right? Maybe someone like him hangs on.

But at the same time, the national environment is so bad for Republicans that even as some of those types survive in some places, in other places, you know, Republicans go down in districts that are like Trump plus 10. Is that sort of what we could expect?

Kondik: Yeah. I’m going to be publishing something a little bit after this podcast comes out about, you know, the possibility that there may be no Harris-district Republicans left. There were only three in 2024. Brian Fitzpatrick is one of them. We mentioned the open seat, Nebraska Two—that’s another one.

And then Mike Lawler in New York Seventeen, who’s in a narrow Harris seat. And he’s in, I think, basically a toss-up race. I think Fitzpatrick is still favored. And then, because of redistricting, you also have a handful of other seats that became Harris-district Republican seats but are going to flip, like a bunch of seats out in California, for instance.

But even in the bad years for the president’s party, like 2018, there still were three Clinton-district Republicans, including Fitzpatrick back then too, who survived. So it would be historically odd for there to be no Harris-district Republicans. And again, I don’t think we’re quite going to get there, but it may be that there’s only one or two left.

Sargent: I just want to underscore the importance of that. You’re basically saying that if it’s a very good night for Democrats, it’s at least within the realm of possibility that Republicans have no House seats in districts that Kamala Harris won. Zero.

Kondik: That’s right. That’s right. Again, Fitzpatrick is the toughest one there. And again, I still think he’s favored.

Sargent: So Kyle, to get a bit more specific about what this triage mode means for Republicans. They’re now pulling money out of a number of seats that are the easiest tier for Democrats to contest, and putting more money into outer-tier races that are much, much harder for Democrats to win—meaning those are now in danger, and they’re giving up on these low-tier seats.

A couple of examples. National Republicans just cut their spending to Nebraska’s Second District. They’ve pulled out of New Jersey’s Ninth District. What do you make of those shifts?

Kondik: New Jersey Nine is a Democratic seat, but it is a Trump-won seat. That’s Nellie Pou’s district. That was a seat that swung—it’s heavily Latino, it’s like North Jersey—it swung pretty heavily to Republicans in 2024. Seems poised to swing back in 2026. And so I think Republicans are hoping to compete there, but it just never really developed.

And then Nebraska Two, we talked about, as a seat that’s, you know, historically it’s pretty hard for—you know, if the president’s party has an open seat in a hostile midterm that the other party won for president, that’s a seat that they generally will end up losing.

Sargent: Well, I’ll tell you what really struck me as well, Kyle. Republicans just added more money to Kentucky’s Sixth District, which Trump won by 15 points.

Kondik: It is interesting that that race is now kind of more on the battlefield. We have it as leans Republican. So we still favor the Republicans there, but we had it as likely as of, I think, a few weeks ago. And the outside spending is kind of telling that it’s a pretty hot race.

Sargent: They need to send—meaning Republicans need to send—big-time reinforcements in to defend a Republican-held district that Trump won by 15 points.

Kondik: Yeah. And look, think about this too. The president’s approval rating is maybe twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two points underwater, maybe more, maybe less, depending on the poll you look at. A district that Trump won by fifteen—in 2018, his approval rating probably would have been positive in a district like that. Maybe just narrowly, but because his net approval was about minus ten around the time of the 2018 election. Minus twenty, his approval is probably underwater in a Kentucky Six.

And again, there are going to be some people who disapprove of the president but who vote Republican in their, you know, local House and Senate race. But you do see a big battlefield, and I think part of it is just the president’s approval rating being so low.

Sargent: And we’re seeing him underwater in states where he won by double digits as well.

Kondik: Yeah, and that’s something that’s also been striking about the Senate races this year compared to 2018. Because if you go back and look at the exit polls of the big Senate races—you know, the Republicans did pretty well. I mean, they ended up coming out of that cycle with one extra seat. They had lost the Alabama special election in late 2017, but they came in with, I think it was, 52 in 2016, and they came out of the cycle with 53.

And if you look at the exit polling in those big Senate races, Trump’s approval was usually positive in the key races. I mean, particularly in like a North Dakota or an Indiana or Missouri, that Republicans flipped.

But even in some of the more competitive kind of battleground races—this time it looks like the president’s approval rating is underwater in Alaska, and Ohio, Texas, and Iowa, which are all, you know, double-digit Trump states, where Trump would have had positive approval, I think, in the 2018 context.

Sargent: Well, can you step back and sum up the big picture right now? How deep into red territory are Democrats plausibly and credibly reaching right now? What tier of seats do you think they’re going to flip a number of? Is there some way to get a handle on this in a kind of postcard way?

Kondik: I think that coming out of this election, they’re probably going to hold several double-digit Trump districts. I don’t have a great handle as to how many, but particularly—there are those, like, three South Texas House seats that Democrats already hold two of, Henry Cuellar and Vicente Gonzalez. Bobby Pulido is also trying to beat Monica De La Cruz in a Trump-plus-eighteen seat.

And it seems like those kind of Latino-heavy districts are the ones that are going to swing, like, really strongly to the Democrats, more so than some other places. But that hypothetically could be three right there.

And you look around the map—like, what if they actually do win a Kentucky Six? Like, could they—you know, they did win a handful of those kinds of seats in 2018. I kind of wonder if they could actually get into double digits. That’s probably what it would take for them to get to 235 or more House seats.

But again, the environment is just pretty lousy for Republicans. Again, it doesn’t have to be that way. And you know, maybe there is something systematic about the polling that could be underestimating Republicans. But you take the numbers at face value, they’re just pretty poor for Republicans.

Sargent: Just to sum this up in another way, you expect Democrats to pick up a number of Republican districts right now that are Trump plus seven, Trump plus eight, Trump plus nine, and then maybe a handful more that are Trump plus double digits, right? Is that the size of it?

Kondik: Yeah. And again, it wouldn’t surprise me if ultimately the Democrats kind of stall out a few points short in, like, a Kentucky Six or something. Or, you know, maybe some of the other—Montana One is another one that they sometimes talk about. It’s another open seat. But the possibility exists to win a few of those seats anyway.

Sargent: Well, here’s where it gets even worse for Trump. Congressman Tom Emmer, a senior Republican, just admitted to Axios that Republicans are not going to win all the seats they’ve redistricted for themselves in this cycle.

Your outfit, Sabato’s Crystal Ball, is about to make some more ratings changes this week. I understand you guys will move Florida’s 25th District from toss-up to lean Democratic, and Florida’s 22nd District from lean Republican to toss-up. Those are two Dem-held seats in Florida that Republicans had hoped to flip. Those are your coming changes, right? Can you explain why you’re making these changes, and what their bigger significance is?

Kondik: Yeah, look. Republicans wanted to gain four net seats out of this new Florida gerrymander. We don’t really think they’re going to do that. And I think the one who’s probably best positioned to hang on is Jared Moskowitz, running in Florida 25.

Moskowitz, unlike many Democrats, is fairly pro-Israel. Florida 25 is roughly 25 percent Jewish. He’s probably a pretty good fit for that district. It was Trump plus nine, but it also voted for Biden by five. And so there is some old Democratic DNA there that Moskowitz could maybe kind of re-put-together in a much better year for Democrats. And so we’re going to have that one as leans Democratic. It’s some rating changes that we’re making soon.

And then Florida 22 is an open seat. You’ve got two relatively unknown candidates. The partisan top line is kind of similar to Florida 25, in that Trump won it by about 10 points, but Biden did narrowly carry it in 2020. So that’s another South Florida seat to watch.

And then Kathy Castor in Florida Fourteen. That’s still a toss-up. That’s a Trump-plus-ten-ish district in Tampa. Castor’s been around for a long time. Her mom is also a big fixture in Tampa-area politics. The mayor of Tampa’s last name is Castor, even though they’re not related. So there’s a lot of Castors down there in Tampa. But that also looks like a race that Democrats might be able to salvage in this environment.

Sargent: Well, just to sum this up, your best guess is Democrats finish the night with 230 House seats, and they have a shot at getting as high as 235 if it’s a very good night. Is that about right?

Kondik: Yeah, I think that’s right. That would be about where I would land right now, in sort of the 230-ish, maybe a little below, maybe a little above. And again, in my own assessments, that’s been kind of steadily growing just a little bit over time.

Sargent: Well, Kyle Kondik, it’s certainly interesting. Thanks so much for that big picture. It’s really great stuff.

Kondik: Thanks, Greg.

Is this what panic looks like? President Trump has been barnstorming the country in recent days, as part of a tour that will take him across the country until the midterms. His rallies, he says, have been “unbelievable,” generating “unbelievable crowds and enthusiasm.” They are “flipping races all the time.” News outlets—particularly old foes like The New York Times and CNN—may claim there are whole sections of empty seats, but they are lying. In reality, Trump insists on Truth Social, “the Rallies are ‘HOTTER’ than ever. They are all ‘happenings,’ and they never happened before, and will never be duplicated again.” Come the midterm elections, there will be a “MIDTERM SURPRISE.”

There is little point in arguing with Trump about crowd sizes because you can just look at the event photos—there are many empty seats. These rallies are also taking place at smaller venues than he’s used in the past, as noted in recent Daily Beast analysis. On Friday, Trump drew about 8,000 people to a basketball arena in Mobile, Alabama, that holds 10,000—whereas in 2015, he turned out more than 30,000 people to a football stadium in the same city. But perhaps the biggest problem of all is that he was in Mobile to begin with: Why is the president campaigning in deep-red Alabama when his party is fighting for its life in swing states?

Consider the hurricane-force headwinds facing the Republicans right now. The national average for a gallon of gas is $4.36, thanks in part to a foolhardy war with Iran that Trump started but has no clue how to finish. He’s also been waging a trade war with pretty much everyone, which is increasing the cost of myriad other goods. These self-inflicted wounds, coupled with ICE abuses and DOGE belligerence, have dragged down his approval rating to historic lows. No wonder the generic election ballot favors Democrats by more than 9 points, according to Nate Silver’s weighted average.

So, again, why is Trump rallying in places like Mobile and Durant, Oklahoma? “I’m really here because, sometimes,” Trump said at Friday’s Alabama rally, “you’ve got to pay respect to the people that loved you right from the beginning.” It’s a good line, but the notion that Trump pays respect to anyone is laughable. He is simply going where he’s still wanted—where he still has hardcore supporters, and where GOP incumbents and challengers still benefit politically from being seen next to him. There aren’t many of those places left.

So maybe this is what panic looks like. Trump really only has one mode: frenetic activity, for the sole purpose of focusing attention on him. Even with the Republican’s control of Congress in dire jeopardy, he’s more interested in his own adulation than his party’s survival. As The Atlantic’s Ashley Parker noted in a perceptive report on Tuesday, he “doesn’t seem to really care how Republican candidates fare in the midterms, but he’d rather they win than lose, if only because it would save him the headache of congressional investigations.”

Trump’s Greatest Hits tour gets at one of the odder dynamics in this year’s midterm elections. The race is all about Trump, directly and indirectly: about his political project and persona, yes, but also about how that project is currently affecting American lives (mostly badly). Trump is eagerly making the race about himself because that’s all that he knows how to do. Vulnerable Republicans, meanwhile, are doing everything they can to distance themselves from him—including breaking with him over Iran and immigration. But those efforts are often drowned out by the president himself.

Trump may talk about a “MIDTERM SURPRISE,” but his actions speak louder than his Truth Social posts and campaign statements. This week, he pulled government-funded political ads that were inescapable during the weekend’s NFL and college football games, claiming that they would be paid for from super PAC funds going forward (though that super PAC would not be reimbursing the government for more than $12 million already spent). He has started telling his supporters to vote by mail, even though he has falsely claimed for years that the practice is an engine of fraud. And he has started to get invested in races that Republicans shouldn’t have to worry about—like South Carolina’s Senate race, where he attacked Democratic nominee Annie Andrews, a cis woman, with an anti-trans slur.

That’s what panic looks like for Trump. For the rest of the Republican Party, they aren’t really hiding it. Iowa House Republicans were told “by their own pollsters,” per the very plugged in Steve Deace, “that if you are in a +15 district you’re within the margin for error, if you’re in a +10 district you’re underwater, and that this might end being an even worse midterm environment than 2006.” You’re seeing these issues everywhere, including many formerly safe red states: Kansas, South Carolina, even Mississippi. Polling misses are possible, but the vibecast is far more reliable: Thanks to interest rates, gas prices, trade wars, real wars, and Trump, these midterms are shaping up to be a historic bloodbath for the Republicans.

Trump will keep jetting from rally to rally, and keep jerking his arms as “YMCA” blares in ever-smaller venues. He will keep reciting old grievances about Hillary Clinton and newer ones about trans people and Canadians. He will keep doing what he’s always done because he doesn’t know how to do anything else. But there was a kernel to what he said in Mobile about seeking the company of the people who loved him all along. As he becomes more unpopular and his party’s panic grows, these cozy rallies are his safe space—the last remaining place where he is still adored, still funny, and still winning.

Supreme Court justices write and publish books from time to time. Some, like the autobiographies of Clarence Thomas and Sonia Sotomayor. can be interesting to a general audience. Others are meant to be read by lawyers, judges, and law professors. Only rarely are these newsworthy. Justice Samuel Alito’s new book on originalism—and the media tour that accompanies it—is one of those that’s managing to make some waves.

The book, titled So Ordered: An Originalist’s View of the Constitution, reads like an endcap to a 36-year judicial career. In the introduction, Alito explains that the book consists of “adaptations of speeches I delivered over a period of eighteen years, from 2007 to 2025” that were “not composed with the idea that they would eventually be woven together into a book.” Perhaps it is fitting that a book about originalism has very little new material in it. I jest only in part because at least some of these speeches have not been printed for the general public before.

The book release comes at a key moment for both Alito and the court. One looming question is whether and when Alito will retire. Polls show that Democrats are likely to retake the Senate in November’s midterm elections, which would likely prevent Trump from filling the vacancy with a nominee who shares Alito’s judicial outlook. If Democrats retake the White House in 2028, another opportunity might not come for six more years. In response to speculation, Alito ruled out retiring midway through the court’s current term earlier this week. Beyond next June is an open question.

In an interview with CBS’s Jan Crawford, Alito also ruled out the prospect that the Supreme Court would overturn Obergefell v. Hodges, the landmark 2015 ruling that struck down same-sex marriage bans nationwide. He was among the dissenting justices from the ruling 11 years ago and has not changed his position on whether it was correctly decided. But he has argued that the decision’s impact now counsels against overturning it.

“One of the important factors we take into account in deciding whether we should reexamine a past decision is the degree to which there has been reliance on the decision,” Alito explained. “Obviously a great deal had changed in the country as a result of Obergefell. There was a lot of reliance in various ways on the decision in Obergefell.” Overturning it now would call into question untold numbers of marriages, he suggested, with a cavalcade of other legal consequences that would follow.

A few right-wing legal groups and litigants have mounted legal challenges against Obergefell in recent years without success. Even those fringe efforts have caused some alarm on the left, amplified by the court’s willingness to revisit and rewrite other major precedents. Alito’s public disavowal of overturning Obergefell will likely end those efforts altogether for the foreseeable future. If he is not on board, then there certainly won’t be five votes among the other justices to pull it off either.

Alito’s book, along with the interviews and an excerpt in The Wall Street Journal op-ed pages, dwell on these sorts of dilemmas for an originalist judge. “I describe myself as a ‘working judicial originalist’ and warn against various wrong turns that originalist judges should avoid,” Alito wrote in his book. He also described himself as a textualist, meaning “that, in my view, statutes should be interpreted to have the meaning their words convey in context.”

“True originalism sets out the proper method of constitutional interpretation,” Alito explained. “Provisions of the Constitution should be interpreted to mean what they were understood to mean by the public at the time they were adopted. And because we have a good Constitution, originalism generally produces good results. More than any other theory, it furthers the common good, and originalists should not be afraid to discuss good or bad results or originalism’s ultimate aim.”

Alito tried to define his approach to originalism via negativa. His metaphor imagined a highway with seven different off-ramps that an originalist judge could take to varying disastrous ends. One of his “off-ramps” is what he describes as “show-it-to-me-in-black-and-white originalism.” While originalists “must always start with the text of the Constitution,” he explained, “there are times when an important originalist principle is not set out explicitly but instead emerges from the very structure of the Constitution.”

This position is not really an originalist one, in the sense that nearly everyone has believed there to be implied powers in the Constitution since its ratification. Even early strict constructionists like Thomas Jefferson were willing to infer some unwritten powers, like when he agreed to the Louisiana Purchase even though Congress had no explicit power to acquire new lands. As an example, Alito first argued that this applied to the anti-commandeering principle, which holds that the federal government cannot compel states to exercise federal law-enforcement power.

“That is an unmistakable inference from constitutional structure,” Alito wrote. Having established that motte, he then retreated to the bailey of a much less defensible inference. “The same is true, I would say, about the presidential immunity we recognized in Trump v. United States—an immunity, I should add, that applies to all presidents. In this context, the absence of explicit constitutional text is not decisive.”

Wait, what? Why not, you might ask? He doesn’t explain further. The section simply ends there, and he moves to the dangers of “Icarian originalism,” which he described as the danger of originalist arguments about the Constitution “that would have astonished those who ratified and framed those provisions.” (They resemble, in his telling, the Greek mythological figure Icarus.) His example for it is a single friend-of-the-court brief filed in Obergefell, but the off-ramp could very well apply to presidential immunity.

After all, there is no evidence that the Framers thought the president enjoyed any form of immunity for crimes committed while in office, let alone the sweeping immunity outlined by the Supreme Court two years ago. The Constitution’s text provides no explicit basis for presidential immunity. Nor does it provide an implicit basis for one: The Constitution provides for a limited immunity from criminal prosecution for members of Congress under certain circumstances, indicating that the Framers knew how to grant immunity if they thought it was warranted.

Nor did any founding-era statements support the concept of presidential immunity. Chief Justice John Roberts’ majority opinion barely tried to suggest otherwise. He quoted one of the Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton to mean that the executive branch must be “energetic” in its actions. (I’ve discussed Roberts’s misunderstanding of this particular text at greater length elsewhere.) There is obviously a vast gulf of difference between having an “energetic” president and having one that must be allowed to commit crimes as a matter of course.

As for the original public meaning, there is even less evidence that the American people thought this was the Constitution that they ratified. The Federalist Papers themselves show how the Framers went to great lengths to convince the American public and their state legislatures that the new federal government would preserve liberty and avoid tyranny. Founding-era Americans could hardly have believed that they were being asked to approve a constitution where presidents could take bribes for pardons or start illegal wars without any risk of future prosecution. They would have been “astonished” by the idea, to say the least.

Alito did not write the majority opinion in Trump v. United States, nor did he pen a concurring opinion. But we can infer his own approach from how he questioned lawyers at oral arguments in the case. One question, posed to longtime Justice Department lawyer Michael Dreeben, involved a hypothetical scenario that sounds a little too familiar.

“If an incumbent who loses a very close, hotly contested election knows that a real possibility after leaving office is not that the president is going to be able to go off into a peaceful retirement,” he asked, “but that the president may be criminally prosecuted by a bitter political opponent, will that not lead us into a cycle that destabilizes the functioning of our country as a democracy?”

This is not an originalist argument. It is also not a constitutional argument—nor is it even a legal one. I would struggle to even call it a policy argument. To take Alito’s musings at face value, the policy in question would be that a president must be given the power to commit crimes without fear of prosecution because he might be prosecuted in the future for his crimes. This scenario would apply to exactly one president to date in American history. Alito insists in his book that presidential immunity is “an immunity, I should add, that applies to all presidents,” not simply Trump—as if critics’ real objection was that Democrats wouldn’t be allowed to commit crimes too.

Even the name of this off-ramp to defend presidential immunity—“show-it-to-me-in-black-and-white originalism”—is derisively defensive towards the court’s critics. The court could not show in black and white from where in the constitutional text this new principle sprang, and they know it. Maybe that is why the book ultimately reads like a barely disguised effort by one justice to convince all of us—and perhaps even himself—that the court’s own wings aren’t melting.

In short order, America’s data centers have come to stand in for a broad range of apocalyptic threats, from the climate crisis to the surveillance state to Trump’s kleptocracy.

Data centers are an excellent symbol for the Halloween season—sinister in every way. They combine the ugliness of strip mining, the creepiness of a CIA op, and the affront and destruction of a military invasion. They’re hard on the land. They’re loud. They’re built with exquisite tenderness for GPUs, and near total disrespect for human beings.

Finally, the output of data centers—artificial intelligence—has spectacularly failed to win American hearts and minds. AI now seems to exist chiefly so oligarchs can spy on us, confiscate our wealth, lay us off, and finally wipe us out altogether. 

No chatbot oozing charisma, let alone a charmless CEO, seems to be able to persuade Americans that AI has our best interests at heart.

With the midterms less than a month away, suspicion of data centers has reached a fever pitch. Sixty-nine percent of respondents to a September poll by NBC News oppose AI data centers in their areas, and 45 percent “strongly oppose” the buildouts. So candidates in both parties are running hard against them.

Political attacks on data centers reliably conjure a nightmarish extraction economy, in which the powerful are sucking the very life out of the people. “Big corporations gobble up energy to feed their data centers,” Ohio Democratic Senate candidate Sherrod Brown says on the campaign trail. “They devour your land. They suck up your water. They leave you with the bill.”

In Texas, Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico echoed Brown on CNN: “These data centers are popping up in our communities, soaking up all our water, driving up our utility prices.” Talarico described Ken Paxton, his Republican rival, who used AI deepfakes in an attack ad last month, as “bought by the data center industry.”

Meanwhile, Donald Trump has tied his fortunes entirely to AI and leads the frat of its crown princes. Trump has smeared data center protesters as “stupid people” who “want to be poor.” House Speaker Mike Johnson, the ranking Smithers to Trump’s Mr. Burns, insists that the resistance to data centers is a Chinese psyop. But voters in key midterm races continue to protest. Paul Renshaw, founder and lead developer of PressAudit, which evaluates and aggregates the news, has created a map of the data center buildout, showing where hyper scalers are breaking ground and where communities are protesting.Renshaw’s study is revealing. Not only are more data centers in the works, but the proposed new ones are some 12 times larger per site than the centers running today. They’re bigger, louder, and more destructive. If they get up and running, according to Renshaw’s research, the data centers in the pipeline could dominate up to 20 percent of the entire U.S. electrical grid.

This means that, in spite of promises by the AI companies, local electricity bills will almost certainly rise. After all, they’ve already shot up in U.S. states that have data centers, and the price hike is dramatic. Over five years, energy prices rose 41.6 percent in Pennsylvania and Ohio, which are studded with data centers.

The public’s pushback has been fierce, especially in contested districts. Twenty of the 43 most competitive House districts are contending with data center proposals, and protesters have managed to pause about a quarter of them.

As popular resistance to data centers has solidified, the political geography of the buildout has shifted. Most data centers built up through 2024 were erected in Democratic counties, while the new proposals, for the bigger centers, are mostly in Republican ones. This may explain why Republicans have turned so sharply on the buildout. According to Renshaw, support for data centers in their own communities was at +36 among Republicans in July 2025; by August 2026, it sank to −30.

This whiplash has caught at least 16 AI-boosting politicians off guard. These include House candidates in tight races across Pennsylvania, Iowa, and Virginia, along with Republican Senator Susan Collins and Republican Representative Ashley Hinson, candidates for Senate in Maine and Iowa. All have supported data centers in the past, and while some are trying to downplay their records, others are leaning into them. Republican Representative Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, whom Newsweek recently ranked as the top data center booster in a competitive race, has told voters in his district that the U.S. “simply can’t afford to slow down the buildout.” With six in 10 Pennsylvania voters opposed to the centers, it’s Perry’s room-reading skills that might need building out.

There’s something especially satisfying about the oligarchs and their Republican friends crashing into, of all things, American democracy. Because while opposition to data centers could help decide the midterms, the midterms could also shape future data center policy, leading to pauses and moratoria. This would destabilize AI investment and undermine market gains. For the very rich, that’s the real apocalypse.

It’s hard to write a case for reading. The challenge for writers who try it isn’t that reading is more abstruse than other subjects. And it certainly isn’t that arguments for reading can’t find receptive readers. The challenge of writing about reading is that the writing has to be especially good—it has the burden of demonstrating, in itself, the highest virtues of the written word. If it’s true, for instance, that “the intellectual world of print is orderly, logical and rational”—as James Marriott writes in The New Dark Ages: The Death of Reading and the Dawn of the Post-Literate Society—an author telling readers so had better be attentive to the tightness of their own arguments. If it’s the case, as Marriott contends, that “conversation is simply much more forgiving of exaggeration and bullshit than print,” the print surrounding that claim should be as close to bullshit-free as might fairly be expected. And if writing really does force writers into reason and coherence, while “when we talk we are free to ramble, to make unsupported statements, to indulge in logical non sequiturs,” and “to jump from topic to topic as the mood takes us,” it’s incumbent upon a book making that distinction to approach its subject with discipline and sobriety.

The basic task of The New Dark Ages is made all the more difficult by the fact that Marriott, a journalist for The Times of London, is working on already well-trodden ground. “It seems that every few weeks, a new article or video on the literacy crisis goes viral,” the writer Jared Henderson recently observed. “Whether this is a video on YouTube, an article in The Atlantic, or a post on Substack, the message tends to be more or less the same. Americans are reading less; college students struggle to read whole or difficult texts; early childhood education is in decline.” And as we all know—or think we do—our phones are mostly to blame.

The New Dark Ages isn’t fully reducible to those claims—slim as it is, it does, rather ambitiously, try to tell readers the story of reading and give an account of why reading still matters in a world of technological upheaval. But the account is troubled. Readers without their wits about them—for writing is a trickier business than Marriott lets on—will leave the book misled not only about the present state of reading, but about the nature of the real threats our new technologies pose to it and about reading’s fundamental value.

Neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf, whom Marriott references often, is of course right that reading has been “our species’ bridge to insight and novel thought.” Sadly, though, as The New Dark Ages demonstrates, the books we read often fail to deliver either.

Nothing about mass literacy should be taken for granted. It is deeply strange, to begin with, that we have written language at all. “Spoken language comes naturally to us,” Marriott explains. “Reading and writing do not.” Every time we make use of the written word, we’re hacking visual processes we evolved to make sense of the physical world—to read faces, to assess our surroundings, to find and avoid becoming food. The practice of using our eyes to create and absorb systems of language instead is so difficult and so weird, in fact, that, as best as we can tell, and as Marriott reminds us, it’s been invented no more than four times in our 300,000 years as a species.

The written word, moreover, has been an arcane and esoteric tool for most of its history. Egyptian hieroglyphics, obscure to all but trained Egyptologists today, were just as indecipherable to as much as 99 percent of the ancient Egyptian population. Though Latin texts shaped Western civilization, estimates of literacy in ancient Rome, as Marriott writes, “usually land on a figure of 10 or 15 per cent.” Everywhere written language came into use, it was first mastered and maintained by humanity’s first learned elites—priests and philosophers, princes and politicians. And those who lived and labored under them continued making do with oral culture—verbal communication and the explanation and interpretation of the wider world “through ballads, songs and traditional wisdom passed from one generation to the next.”

That’s partially because texts were initially difficult to produce and share—our first books were handwritten, carefully and painfully, by cranky scholars and scribes. Writing, one monk scribbled in the margins of a medieval tome, “is excessive drudgery.... It dims your sight, it twists your stomach and your sides.” That labor made books prohibitively expensive—even the grandest libraries of the Middle Ages held only several hundred volumes—and nearly sacred to the few who could read them. “In some places in Europe stealing a book was a crime punishable by death,” Marriott writes. Thomas à Kempis “advised readers to take ‘a book into thine hands’ as if it was ‘the Child Jesus.’”

The innovation that finally brought books to the wider world deepened their power by reducing their value. Gutenberg’s printing press, invented in the mid–fifteenth century, allowed books to be mass produced for broad audiences on the cheap. Within a few centuries, Europe was drowning in them and an ocean of other texts besides: official documents, pamphlets, flyers, newspapers, magazines, and more.

While near-universal literacy was still many, many years away, it’s thought that at least half of those living in Europe’s most literate societies—including, per the evolutionary biologist Joseph Henrich, “the Netherlands, Britain, Sweden, and Germany”—could read by the mid–eighteenth century. And our first literary celebrities were already being minted—figures respected and renowned not just for what they wrote, but for how much they read. Samuel Johnson, author of the most influential English dictionary of his day, read so hungrily, for instance, that his biographer James Boswell recalled him once “eating dinner with a book wrapped up on his knee in the tablecloth so he could resume reading the moment he had finished his meal.” No work was too random, and no interest was too far-flung or obscure—from Don Quixote to books on Icelandic natural history. He also left many of those books proudly unfinished. “Asked whether he had actually read a fashionable new book in its entirety, he famously replied, ‘No, Sir, do YOU read books THROUGH?’”

Johnson’s habits, extreme as they were, illustrate how reading changed as more texts became available and literacy widened. Once the domain of a privileged few who revisited the same texts and ideas repeatedly, reading was expanding to a broader public who wanted to read omnivorously. And they had access to a wider range of material than ever. A voracious reader could skip between a travelogue, a newspaper, “scandalous romance” novel, and a “scurrilous political pamphlet” as they pleased. The very availability of so much literature invited curiosity and encouraged skepticism, making the scientific and philosophical advances of the Enlightenment possible—“Europe bristled with pedantic pens ready to rout out mysticism or bogus thinking,” Marriott writes, and the weighty abstractions they wrestled with would have been impossible to communicate, systematize, and analyze in preliterate society.

Closer to the ground, literacy also newly empowered the masses. “To most of our ancestors books would have been symbols not of liberation but of oppression: the mysterious sources of the authority of those at the top of the social order,” Marriott writes. The printing press and the reading public who emerged after its invention changed everything—moving us from a world where “knowledge and its interpretation was tightly controlled by those in positions of power” to one in which knowledge could be understood as “something you could go out and explore for yourself.”

Marriott’s summary of this history is breezy, accessible, and charming. He does, in places, break a promise not to unduly romanticize writing, which he describes as an inherently serious and solemn task. “Writers,” he tells us, “painstakingly go over their thoughts until they have worked out the best version of what they want to say.” That claim could have used another pass—obviously, writers are often lazy, illogical, and incoherent. But, more soundly, he also disavows the idea that “reading makes you a good person,” since history is “packed with well-read monsters.”

Here and there, Marriott even goes as far as to disclaim the idea “that literate cultures are superior to so-called ‘oral cultures’ without writing,” though it’s not obvious what all the fuss in the book is supposed to be about if literacy isn’t, on the whole, significantly better than illiteracy. “Literacy involves losses as well as gains,” he offers. “For instance, Joseph Henrich tells us, becoming literate diminishes our ‘ability to identify faces.’” These passages are about as convincing as messages read at gunpoint, given what he contends about literacy most everywhere else—“society,” he also writes, “is a better and more rational place thanks to the advancement of reading.” And indeed, it’s clear in multiple places in the book that Marriott imagines a sizable mob of progressive readers ready to do him in for having the temerity to say reading and writing are good. Advocates for literacy, he warns, have to confront fashionable “squeamishness about seeming to uncritically laud the achievements of that unfashionable enterprise, ‘Western civilisation.’”

The idea Marriott should be working hardest to defend isn’t the idea that reading is good but the idea that reading is dying.

That angst about the reception of an argument for logging off and reading books indicates rather strongly that Marriott, as he freely admits, spends entirely too much time online. Apart from startup founders and grasping grifters who boast that they’ve traded books for sped-up podcasts, chats with Claude, and apps that will give you the gist of The Art of War for $9.99 a month, real disagreement that reading matters is rare anywhere on the political spectrum. The idea Marriott should be working hardest to defend isn’t the idea that reading is good but the idea that reading is dying.

The evidence he assembles will be familiar to those already following literacy discourse. Surveys suggest reading for fun is on the way out—in the U.K., for instance, “more than a third of adults say they have given up the habit.” The books that people do read seem to be getting worse—“self-help, romance, detective stories and young adult fiction” dominate bestseller lists, whereas in the 1960s, novels like “Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, Saul Bellow’s Herzog and Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard” flew off bookstore shelves. “Astonishingly, in 1950,” Marriott notes, “the critic Lionel Trilling’s collection of literary essays The Liberal Imagination was a bestseller in America, shifting more than 100,000 copies in hardback alone.”

After year-on-year improvement “for almost the entire twentieth century,” IQ scores seem to be declining in the developed world. College professors are even more depressed about their students than usual—one tells him that she’s “given up trying to teach George Eliot’s Middlemarch and James Joyce’s Ulysses,” and she doubts her students will make it through Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. And our politicians, as exemplified by President Donald Trump, are even more stupid, “lacking any ability to think beyond the moment-to-moment goldfish-brained chaos of likes, trends and memes.”

Given all this, it is obvious to Marriott that the literacy crisis is real. “If our politicians seem lightweights, our public discourse trivial to the point of dysfunction, and our culture stale and repetitive, it is in large part because books and newspapers have been replaced by ubiquitous screens,” he contends. And though he discusses the way television has been eroding reading habits for decades, the screen that troubles Marriott the most is, of course, the smartphone. “There has simply never been a technology like the smartphone,” he writes, adding that, while other inventions have competed with reading for our attention, the distractions and entertainments offered up by the smartphone are infinite and largely brought to us by algorithms engineered to swallow up as much of our time as possible.

Depressing as much of the material Marriott assembles might be, however, the evidence that reading is doomed is thinner than he implies. He writes, for example, that in the United States “reading for pleasure declined by 40 per cent in the first two decades of the twenty-first century.” That’s a figure from a 2025 paper analyzing data from the American Time Use Survey, which found that the proportion of Americans who reported reading for pleasure on the average day fell by 40 percent between 2003 and 2023. But 20 years ago, not many Americans were reading on the average day in the first place. The proportion of Americans reading for pleasure over this period peaked at 28 percent in 2004, while it reached its lowest point in 2023, at 16 percent. And as The New York Times’ David Wallace-Wells recently observed, the same 2025 paper found that the average amount of time Americans spend reading books each day declined by less than six minutes.

Crucially, these figures only pertain to books and printed materials. If books and the printed word really are losing ground, it’s partially because the internet and the smartphone have besieged us with competing texts to read—as anyone who’s tried to bat away the noise of emails, messages, notifications, news alerts, and tweets to settle down with a book knows. But the 2025 paper doesn’t capture any of that—the American Time Use Survey data it was based on didn’t explicitly categorize reading on the internet as a form of reading for pleasure. “Our reading measures are thus unlikely to have included activities, such as reading blogs or the news online,” the paper’s authors noted, “which may be a form of reading for pleasure.” If we exclude many or most of the things people now read for pleasure—online newspapers and magazines, social media posts, texts from family and friends—the statistics on reading for pleasure are going to look rather grim.

It is certainly true, as Maryanne Wolf has written and as Marriott notes, that the act of reading online differs substantially from reading in print. Our screens seem to encourage certain bad habits. “When reading on a screen,” he says, “the eye moves through a passage of writing in an idiosyncratic ‘zigzag style,’ as readers ‘rapidly ‘word-spot’ through a text” and “dart to the conclusions at the end.” Plenty of data suggests that processing information and retaining it are harder when reading a text on a screen rather than in print—and that is before one even factors in all the distractions of life online. For those and other more pecuniary reasons, few professional writers today, this one included, would turn down a return to a world in which printed books, newspapers, and magazines were dominant again, if such a thing were possible.

But given that it isn’t, we owe it to ourselves to think clearly and soberly about how people are reading today and how their reading might be improved. And people are, in fact, reading on the internet and on their phones. One needn’t believe reading DMs and reading Proust are the same to suspect there’s something fundamentally unsound about rooting our literacy debate in statistics that would count an adult revisiting The Very Hungry Caterpillar as reading but totally ignore any engagement at all with, say, an article like this online.

Marriott maintains, though, that the smartphone should be understood primarily as “a conduit for passively watching videos,” adding that “as the journalist Derek Thompson puts it, ‘nowadays everything is television.’” But this is an oversimplification. The short-form video app TikTok has fewer users than the messaging service WhatsApp. And all told, according to a report by the digital consulting firm Kepios, Americans over the age of 16 spend less than two hours a day on average watching video online altogether, with short-form video taking up less than an hour of that time. Even though social media now competes with books for our attention, it is by no means clear that people are reading books less because they’re vegetatively glued to videos on their phones instead.

The surest thing we can say about the impact of the internet and the smartphone on the written word so far—and the feature that most distinguishes them from television, the radio, film, and the photograph—is that they have made reading, and writing, more central to regular communication for more people than ever before in human history.

There’s also been good news lately for the printed word. As Wallace-Wells points out, more books are sold today than a decade ago, and the number of independent bookstores in the United States has also increased by 70 percent since 2020. And, perhaps surprisingly, that data from the American Time Use Survey suggests young people may be driving part of that trend. “Young Americans are—according to this survey, at least—reading more than they did a couple of decades ago,” he wrote. “In 2003, for instance, Americans ages 15 to 24 read 8.4 minutes a day; in 2016 they read 7.8 minutes a day; and in 2022 they read 11.7 minutes a day.”

Those figures sit oddly alongside the much-discussed drop in K-12 test scores over the last several years, which Marriott naturally references:

One of the most striking trends is the downward trajectory of Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) test scores. PISA tests are an important international metric that tracks the proficiency of fifteen-year-olds in reading, maths and science. Scores began falling in 2012 (significantly, as a report in the Atlantic noted, “students who spend less than one hour of ‘leisure’ time on digital devices a day at school scored about 50 points higher in math than students whose eyes are glued to their screens more than five hours a day”). And in the United States, by 2024, literacy and numeracy skills as measured by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) had declined to their lowest level for twenty years.

Now as important as numeracy is—and as connected to literacy as it might be—it is not the subject of this book. And reading scores, at least in the United States, simply do not tell the story Marriott suggests they do. It is true, as he notes, that students have been doing worse on PISA’s reading assessment recently—on average, scores in the affluent countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development dropped by about 10 points between 2018 and 2022. But in the United States, which ranked sixth out of the 36 OECD nations evaluated in 2022, reading scores dropped by only a point, from 505 to 504—the very same average score American students earned in 2000.

Internally, the reading scores of our own NAEP, last administered by the National Center for Education Statistics in 2024, do show that our national reading scores have dropped at each tested level since 2019—from 220 to 215 for fourth graders, from 263 to 258 for eighth graders, and from 285 to 283 for twelfth graders. But these are dips on a 500-point scale, and the NAEP also notes that reading scores for fourth and eighth graders haven’t changed significantly since 1992. Scores for twelfth graders have dropped about 10 points in that time—that should be a call to action, alongside the evidence that progress in reading for younger students might be stagnating. But proof that reading is dying, this is not.

As dramatically as technology has changed, Marriott’s rendering of the state of literacy would have been recognizable to worried Americans decades ago. If headlines are to be believed, reading has been in crisis for some time. Anxieties about literacy were high in the 1980s, for instance, thanks not only to the publication of Neil Postman’s jeremiad about the coarsening effects of TV and movies, Amusing Ourselves to Death, in 1985 but to the publication that same year of the book Illiterate America by progressive education activist Jonathan Kozol. “One out of every three adult Americans,” the latter’s cover declared, “cannot read this book.” That figure came from a 1973 University of Texas study, which also found that “25 million Americans could not even read the poison warnings on a can of pesticide, a letter from their child’s teacher, or the front page of a daily paper,” Kozol added. In 1986, an article in The New York Times reported that, to the frustration of education experts, estimates of illiteracy had come to range “from less than a million to more than 100 million.” All the hubbub culminated, in 1991, with the National Literacy Act—which authorized new adult literacy grants, and whose opening clauses settled on an estimate that “nearly 30,000,000 adults in the United States have serious problems with literacy.”

By then, worries about the literacy of American students had begun to overtake lingering worries about adult literacy. In 1991, The Atlantic published an essay on college preparedness titled “The Other Crisis In American Education” by Daniel J. Singal, then a professor at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. Much of it should sound markedly familiar to readers of both Marriott’s book and more recent dispatches on literacy by Rose Horowitch in The Atlantic. “When a national poll in 1989 asked professors whether they thought undergraduates were ‘seriously underprepared in basic skills,’ 75 percent said yes and only 15 percent said no...,” Singal wrote. “It’s not that freshmen in 1991 are unable to read or write. Most of them possess what the National Assessment of Educational Progress calls ‘satisfactory’ skills in this area. But is that enough for college?”

Singal’s experiences in the college classroom seemed to suggest not. “Countless times I have been amazed at how little students have managed to glean from a book I know they have read, to the point where they are often unable to recall the names of prominently mentioned figures,” he wrote. “So much escapes them; even those of above-average ability absorb no more than a dusting of detail from a printed text.” A friend at the University of Michigan similarly reported to him that students were incapable of engaging meaningfully with newspaper columns by Walter Lipp­mann. Worse still, a professor at Berkeley had encountered putatively literate and educated students “in her upper-level course on American social history” who were “unable to differentiate between the American Revolution and the Civil War.”

Even at Harvard, a dismayed English professor found that students vaguely “aware that someone oppressed someone else” generally couldn’t recall “exactly what took place and they have no idea of the order in which it happened.” A colleague of his, the director of expository writing, added that the average incoming student there had

a “utilitarian command of language” resulting in sentences that follow a simple subject-predicate, subject-predicate format with little variation or richness of verbal expression. Harvard, of course, gets the cream of the crop. Those of us teaching at lesser institutions would be happy with utilitarian but serviceable prose from our freshmen. More often we get mangled sentences, essays composed without the slightest sense of paragraphing, and writing that can’t sustain a thought for more than half a page.

That piece came amid a drive to reform K-12 education, animated in part by disappointing test scores. A five-point slide in NAEP results for twelfth graders between 1992 and 1994, National Assessment Governing Board chairman William T. Randall said in 1995, suggested that “reading—as a skill, as an information gathering process and as a recreation—is in serious trouble.” Many policymakers in the late 1990s and early 2000s would come to agree, even though, as Jeff McQuillan’s 1998 book The Literacy Crisis observed, reading scores overall had been stable or increasing for decades by then.

The certainty that the bottom has already fallen out of reading as a skill seems to be a product less of material facts than of fuzzy, unrepresentative memories.

The history of the written word over the last century has been marked not only by profound technological shifts but by profound shifts in our expectations. Decades after so many of us should have been killed off, evidently, by inscrutable cans of pesticide, we live today in a society that is, inarguably, hyperliterate—albeit one where years of progress on literacy may have finally stalled. We’re right to wonder why and work toward getting ourselves back on track. The certainty that the bottom has already fallen out of reading as a skill, in The New Dark Ages and elsewhere, seems to be a product less of material facts about the state of literacy than of fuzzy, unrepresentative memories—of eloquent orations by public figures, appearances from authors like James Baldwin and Gore Vidal on talk shows, sales figures for The Liberal Imagination, and the like.

These were the zeniths of a world that will never return. Those of us who have committed our lives to the written word are right to miss them. But some of the changes in literary culture Marriott describes haven’t necessarily been changes for the worse. He ruefully cites, for example, an analysis in The Economist that found “sentences in popular books have contracted by almost a third since the 1930s.” In this shortening he sees evidence that, for today’s smartphone-addled readers, “long sentences and the sophisticated ideas they often convey are just not easy to grapple with.” But the notion that long, winding sentences are meaningful and usefully sophisticated in themselves was rightly challenged by many writers in the early twentieth century and onward. The shortening of sentences has surely been, at least in part, the product of changes in literary style among the very literate, including the rise of literary modernism and a drive toward clarity and precision.

But beyond that, long sentences and sophisticated ideas were likely even more difficult for the general public to absorb in 1930, when a report from the secretary of the interior estimated that as many as 15 million to 20 million Americans, then about 12 percent of the overall population, were too illiterate even to read the Bible or write a letter. Per census figures, just over 4 percent of the population at the time, including more than 16 percent of racial minorities, had no ability to read or write in any language, English or otherwise.

In 1930, incidentally, The Washington Post ran an article about an innovative program in South Carolina—“the first State-wide effort of its kind in the history of the country”—aimed at tackling that problem. “The method employed for teaching the pupils is simple,” it reported. “The name of the illiterate is grooved into a soft substance with a hard pointed instrument, and then the pupil is required to trace the outline until he becomes proficient in writing his name. Later the pupils will probably be taught how to write more than their names, and then an effort will be made to teach them to read.”

That story points us to another potential explanation for the declining complexity of written texts. Competing technologies that have won an increasing share of our investment and attention are a major part of the story. But if popular books, political speeches, and many of the other texts we consume today seem simpler than they would have in 1930 or 1970, we should also be asking ourselves whether that simplicity might be a symptom of increasing literacy—the consequence of a shift from texts written by and for narrower audiences of gifted, highly educated, or dedicated readers and writers to texts written by and for a widening literate public of hundreds of millions who, thanks to compulsory education, have become mediocre to fine at both skills.

That elevation of the masses to mere competence with the written word is nothing to sniff or sneer at, whatever its effects on literary style and culture. In fact, it is, in all probability, modernity’s greatest triumph. The question now is whether we can do even better.

While Marriott often traffics in hyperbole, he is right to be gravely troubled by the tech industry. Its efforts to profitably addict us and our children to its products must be opposed. But we’ll stand little chance in this fight if we don’t understand the industry’s methods and what, precisely, the innovations are doing to us. Marriott doesn’t. At times, this actually undermines the strength of his arguments against them. “We live in a world that is almost compulsively archival,” he claims early in the book, for instance. “In the twenty-first century, everything is recorded. Every draft of every irrelevant unsent email is automatically saved. Our phones are packed with thousands of pictures of holidays, nights out and pointlessly photographed dinners (the same salad from five slightly different angles).”

As internet archivists, researchers, and journalists have discovered with deepening alarm over the last decade, this overstates the web’s stability dramatically. Every day, vast tranches of writing and other online content are being lost forever—or being deliberately erased for cost savings and profit. And one of the newly appreciated advantages of a culture built on mass printing is that materials that only exist digitally on the servers of impersonal companies might be far more insecure and ephemeral than physical texts that, at least conceptually, can be protected and duplicated once they’re in the hands of readers who care about them.

But, more significantly, the nature of the screen’s allure eludes him. Television, Marriott contends, following Postman, first captured our attention not only by dazzling us with imagery our books and printed materials couldn’t compete with, but by giving us the world in interesting, but contextless pieces. “A TV producer might express nature by showing an individual tree, mountain, or stream,” but can’t examine the meaning of nature in the ways that an author can. “It is simply in the nature of TV to deal in disconnected bits of reality rather than to theorise about it as a whole,” he argues.

I don’t think you would enjoy this book if I wrote the entire thing chyron-style: SMARTPHONES DESTROYING SOCIETY … DEMOCRACY IN PERIL … MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE LIKEABLE SIXTEENTH-CENTURY ESSAYIST … NEIL POSTMAN VINDICATED. On screen, enhanced by the appeal of attractive news anchors, dramatic music and exciting images, this kind of disjointed communication is thrilling and almost effortless to watch—even if you don’t really have much of a clue what is actually going on in the Middle East. If the written word imposes order on the world, the screen tends towards disorder.

The smartphone, to Marriott, is the apotheosis of this tendency toward disorder, subjecting us constantly to “a nihilistic tornado of content.” “It has been estimated that the average TikTok user may scroll through as many as 260 videos in the space of about half an hour,” he writes, subjecting the user to “a thousand disconnected and disordered fragments of information” and resulting in a “heap of broken images out of which it is impossible to construct any rational picture of the world.”

But this isn’t really how social media works at all. The algorithms that give us the images and writing on our screens are designed to create steady, predictable streams of content that we want—not chaos, but consistency. TikTok in particular excels at gathering enough data over time to determine the kind of person a user is and serving them an engrossing mix of content that tightly fits their profile. Political junkies of the left and right are sent to the appropriate pundits. Those who hate seed oils and vaccines get their health and wellness influencers. Beauty-conscious Zoomers get their Korean skin care. There are TikTok users getting regular updates on the sexploits of the AI-generated characters on Fruit Love Island, and there are TikTok users being served the same set of forgotten performances on The Ed Sullivan Show over and over again.

We’re hooked to our smartphones, as we were hooked to our televisions before them, because the content on them is palliative, not disorienting. Yes, the notifications buzz and ping at us incessantly, but we’re becoming accustomed to them in the very same way we got used to repetitive and never-ending tickers of “breaking” news. The world, or worlds, that we’ve grown used to having at our fingertips—through the buttons of remote controls and the glass of our iPhones alike—are, for the most part, simpler and evidently more comforting than the real one. This may be why so many of us sleep with our phones not far from our pillows—why it doesn’t strike us as oddly as it should that people leave televisions on to hum away silently in waiting rooms or while they do chores.

This is also what makes it profoundly strange for Marriott to write that, while books “can even console us,” a smartphone “very rarely does”—engineered as smartphones are, as he understands them, to make reality seem incomprehensible. The advantage of books, he writes, is that they’re capable of rendering the world “as a comprehensible whole, not as a whirling snow-storm of fragments.” But he has it exactly backward. It’s our screens that give us the impression, necessarily an illusion, that we’re seeing the whole world and what really matters in it—sound and vision and an infinite web of interlinked text delivered to our eyes and ears, perhaps in real time, all at once, without the work of extrapolation, synthesis, and imagination required to read bare text on a printed page. It is impossible to read a printed book, no matter how well-written, how long, and how tightly argued, with the belief that all reality lies within your hands. The smartphone convinces its users of this easily.

It was the former world of books and print, not the world of screens, that was the world of fragments, partiality, and disorienting, incomplete abstractions. And what we ought to miss the most about it are the ways it forced us—even physically, in the weight of the texts we carried—into an understanding that making sense of ourselves and the world around us is a struggle, not a matter of settling into the right channel or feed, and that our knowledge is often incomplete. The viewer of a tree on a screen thinks, if only for a second, that they have really seen a tree. A reader who comes across a passage about trees has to imagine it, conceptualize it, compare it to another description, or go out into the world and find it. And unless they are particularly skilled, writers who have made a pass at describing trees may find themselves in trouble—it is difficult to make the reader see what they see, think what they think, and feel what they feel through text alone, especially when they are in competition with the readers’ own intuitions, senses, and habits of mind.

Reading and writing matter because written language complicates the world as often as it clarifies it. Indeed, it often helps us make sense of it by convincing us the world is not as simple as it outwardly appears.

All told, reading and writing matter because written language complicates the world as often as it clarifies it. Indeed, it often helps us make sense of it by convincing us the world is not as simple as it outwardly appears. And as Marriott suggests in the book’s more grounded moments, the written word has been fundamentally Promethean in character—it has shaken peoples out of their complacency and into new ways of thinking and seeing the world, for good and for evil.

But this is all the more reason to resist the implication that the world is getting worse because people are reading fewer books. “When I was sixteen it seemed obvious to me that the world was fated to grow ever more rational,” he laments. “I have lost my fervour now.” Yet appeals to reason and sound argumentation have only been part of the story of reading. As Marriott remarks himself, “scurrilous stories, grubby pornographic gossip and libels” were “just as important to damaging the absolute authority of European monarchies” as the rational argumentation of Enlightenment philosophers.

In truth, reason has its work cut out for it in any medium. The value of the written word lies not in an intrinsic tendency toward the rational but in its intrinsic difficulty—difficulty measured not in the complexity of any given text but in the basic demand writing makes of us to turn to resources beyond our eyes, ears, and experiences for an understanding of the world. The data on reading that Marriott and many others have pointed to suggests, so far, that we live in societies where fewer people may want to read seriously and with sustained attention, not a world in which people are now less capable of doing so than in the past. If so, that is nonetheless a problem. But it’s not one that will be solved if we understand the fight for reading primarily as a technological battle that has already been half or mostly lost.

We need a new literacy for the present and a world that has been irrevocably changed from the reading world we took for granted decades ago, not a pining for older forms that will never be dominant again. We need to discover how to read seriously not only on the printed page, but also on our screens, which will entail convincing the public that serious, difficult reading is worth their time. All the more dauntingly, we’ll have to do so without making the untenable promise that a life of reading will deliver them a world that seems more intelligible, orderly, and satisfying.

The case for reading isn’t that it simplifies life but that it vivifies and deepens it. In this Marriott does, to his credit, offer his readers a model reader to look up to: the sixteenth-century essayist Michel de Montaigne, who once said the things that mattered most to him were “variety and the enjoyment of diversity.” Marriott enjoys the way Montaigne “joins stray ideas together, leaps from one subject to another and asks weird questions,” and his ability to include in a single essay “subjects as diverse as sneezing, seasickness, farting, Socrates, amphitheaters, the Spanish conquest of Peru, the Roman general Mark Antony and more.” Montaigne’s motto, “Que sais-je?” means “What do I know?”—a sentiment Marriott admires: “It is the motto of a man of the age of print, whose books showed him that nothing could be taken for granted any more.”

While the dawn of print opened up seemingly endless possibilities for men like Montaigne, the man Marriott describes is also, very probably, one who would have loved reading the internet, and thought seriously about how readers might fight, against all odds, to think for themselves and make the most of the digital age. That is our grave and heady task. That is the nature of our crisis and the nature of our opportunity. “Even in the worst-case scenario,” as Marriott writes, “reading and a cultural reverence for reading will be around for a while yet. And that means those of us who value books and reading still have a chance to make our case.” He’s right. But we’ll need a better case than his.

In today’s episode, nonpartisan political forecaster Kyle Kondik makes some critical points about Donald Trump’s approval rating. First, it may be so low that he’s even underwater in House districts that he carried by double digits. Second, unlike in 2018, his approval is underwater in red states with big Senate races. Indeed, the latest polling averages have him sinking below 35 percent, a key threshold. And Times polling finds him upside down in five Senate-race states he carried by double digits. Taken together, it’s clear his public standing is unraveling. Meanwhile, leaks from Trump’s GOP allies are growing deafening. One GOP operative said: “If the bottom continues falling out like it has been, this will be worse than 2006.” Worse than the GOP’s epic 2006 losses under George W. Bush! For the straight story on the state of the House map, we talked to Kondik, managing director at Sabato’s Crystal Ball. He explains how Trump’s low approval is expanding the map for Democrats in surprising ways, interprets the latest GOP spending in deep red areas, and why he thinks Democrats might end up with 230 House seats. Listen to this episode here.

The Democratic National Committee sued the Trump administration Wednesday, alleging that recent TV advertisements espousing the president’s political agenda were funded by taxpayers and thus violated U.S. propaganda law.

The complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, asks the court to intervene in the scheme to stop the ads and the use of public funds to create and spread them.

This is a developing story.

Election officials in Florida have extended the state’s new voter registration protections to Donald Trump—even though he doesn’t qualify for them.

The Palm Beach County Office of the Supervisor of Elections confirmed to the Tampa Bay Times Wednesday that it had wiped Trump’s personal info from public-facing voter registration records. In doing so, it made private data relating to Trump’s home and mailing addresses, his birth date, his party affiliation, and email address—data available on voting Americans in nearly every state. The change will make it more difficult to ascertain when Trump votes by mail versus in person.

Trump had asked the agency to remove his information earlier this year, but the office told the Tampa Bay Times that it did not review whether the request was actually legitimate. As it turns out, it was not.

A public records law, signed by Governor Ron DeSantis in June 2025, allows certain public officials to remove their personal information from the public-facing state system. That includes members of Congress as well as a smattering of specific elected positions, such as the governor, lieutenant governor, chief financial officer, attorney general, agriculture commissioner, state representative, state senator, property appraiser, supervisor of elections, school superintendent, school board member, mayor, city commissioner, and county commissioner, according to the text of the law.

Notably, the list does not include the president.

Local lawmakers couldn’t help Trump make his request legitimate even if they wanted to: State representatives won’t meet again until March, waylaying the chance to introduce an amendment that could retroactively and specifically include him.

Trump’s request came by way of a notarized document, in which he claimed he was eligible as a state public officer. The form was notarized by Chamberlain Harris, a 26-year-old White House aide whom Trump promoted last year to deputy director of Oval Office operations and subsequently appointed to a four-year term on the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, overseeing Kennedy Center construction (or demolition) projects. Harris was also one of three women in the Trump administration to receive a $45,000 bonus from the president as a “cash gift for the holidays” last year.

President Trump claimed that he can do whatever he wants to his political enemies.

“I could’ve done very bad things to Hillary Clinton. I could’ve done very, very bad things to Joe Biden. I could’ve done very bad things to Barack Hussein Obama,” Trump said in the Oval Office Wednesday after being asked whether he believes Democrats will try to impeach him if they win back the House and Senate. “I thought it was inappropriate to do so because you have to treat the office of the presidency with respect. Then I found out that they impeached me. Twice. And … I can do whatever I want, if I want. They’ve done some very bad things.”

“He’s telling you exactly how he sees his power. Now apply that to an election he’s desperate to control,” Democracy Docket wrote on X.

This is just the latest in a long list of vindictive threats the president has made towards his political enemies, from former FBI Director James Comey to Senator Adam Schiff. He accused Obama of treason this past May. But this recent admission is his most brazen to date, particularly given that it comes right before an extremely consequential midterm election that will also usher in his lame duck period.

President Trump had trouble fighting to stay awake Wednesday while surrounded by members of his administration and the press in the Oval Office.

While his “Trump Accounts” for American children were receiving praise from venture capitalist Brad Gerstner, the president struggled to keep his head from drooping, waking up when he was told “thank you.”

Trump later perked up when a reporter asked him if had spoken with Russian President Vladimir Putin regarding a plague outbreak in Siberia, and the president happily pointed out that Wednesday is Putin’s birthday.

“I have a call set up. Today is his birthday. Today is Vladimir Putin’s birthday, I’m sure you’re gonna celebrate it. Are you gonna celebrate his birthday? No, I have a call set up,” Trump smirked, his voice sounding hoarse.

The octogenarian Trump has fallen asleep in public dozens of times during his second term as president. Only last week, he fell asleep after announcing a new steel plant in Iowa, and his moments of senility keep adding up. Despite all of that, he remembered Putin’s birthday and thought it was important to mention. Is Trump’s planned phone call really about the plague, or will he congratulate the Russian dictator on many happy returns? Judging by Trump’s mental and physical condition, as well as his past deference to Russia, it could very well be either.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio delivered a hypernationalistic speech at the Acropolis in Athens Wednesday in which he lauded the supposed superiority of Western civilization while stoking more fears about immigration.

“The heroes of the West are those who choose to remain faithful to their duty precisely when it is most difficult and painful to do so,” Rubio waxed. “We take the West’s conception of these things—heroism, honor, duty—we take these things for granted. We assume that these somehow are universal to all people in all times and in all places. They are not. They are the product of a distinct character, a distinct character which arose here—and shaped the whole story of the civilization that came after it. The civilization that we must fight to defend today with the same passion as our forefathers did.

“Over time, we in the West came to feel ashamed of the very things that made us exceptional. We felt embarrassed that our achievements set us apart from the rest of the world,” Rubio continued. “Our prosperity somehow became a source of guilt. We no longer believed we deserved and had earned our greatness. The word nationalism became a dirty word. And so we tore down our monuments, we condemned our own history, and in too many places we taught our children to be ashamed of the countries they would inherit. In the process we opened our borders, and outsourced our industry, and allowed our militaries to wither and to decay. And with every passing year, we seem to outsource more of our sovereignty.”

Rubio went on to warn against immigration, amplifying the xenophobia that is a central tenant of both the MAGA movement and the larger international far-right.

“We have built a model of that with our partners here in Greece. In our defense partnerships, in energy and technology, in our shared ambition to secure Europe’s borders from the threats of mass migration,” he said.

Those on the far-right, including Elon Musk, praised the speech—while others pointed to it as a possible sign of Rubio’s long-suspected intentions to run for president in 2028. Either way, the incendiary address reaffirmed the aesthetic importance of ancient Greece to right-wingers.

“This is the classical understanding of politics—and of statecraft—that the Trump administration hopes to reclaim. Reclaim not just for our country, but for the whole of our civilization,” Rubio continued. “We believe that Europe can awaken from its long slumber and rekindle the fire that was lit here millennia ago.”

A Democratic congressional candidate in Arizona says she was sexually assaulted while trying to repair one of her campaign signs.

The Phoenix New Times reports that Bernadette Greene-Placentia, the Democratic nominee in Arizona’s 8th congressional district challenging incumbent Republican Representative Abe Hamadeh, reported being hit over the head this summer in a dark parking lot in Sun City, Arizona, just after 2 a.m. on a Friday as she walked to the damaged sign. She awoke to her rapist pulling his penis out of her, she told the publication.

He said, “—ic bitch, not a very good fuck,” Greene-Placentia said to the New Times, which she filled in her head as “Democratic bitch.” She’s not clear on what exactly he said.

One leg was out of her jeans, and she remembers swinging her leg after another man approached. She heard him say, “Not even worth it,” before he left the scene. She was left face-down in the parking lot, her SUV still running with the trunk open. Greene-Placentia doesn’t remember putting her jeans back on, closing the SUV’s trunk, or leaving the scene to return home.

“It’s just these little tiny flashes of things that I do remember,” she said to the newspaper. “As much as I don’t want to remember, I’ve tried very, very hard to remember more stuff. But that’s where I’m at.”

Greene-Placentia said she had stopped to fix her campaign signs late at night numerous times previously, sometimes with her husband, Alex Placentia, or a campaign staffer. She hasn’t done so since she was raped. She thinks she suffered a concussion, and reported being covered in bruises after the attack.

Initially, Greene-Placentia tried to forget about being attacked, but said she decided to report her assault because she campaigns on fighting for the people of Arizona, “and I didn’t feel like I could keep saying that if I weren’t also fighting for women that are victims of sexual assault.” She told her campaign staff about it the following Sunday, and her husband on Monday. Two weeks later, she reported the rape to the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, according to a police report.

For two days after the assault, Greene-Placentia was “missing in action,” her campaign manager Isaiah Lopez and her husband told the New Times. She vaginally bled for three days after the rape, according to the police report. She said she was a “very angry person” for days and weeks afterward.

“I want a fucking rematch. I want to call them out. I want to like, go on TV and say ‘Let’s go again and don’t come at me from behind,’” she told Lopez and her husband. Her campaign held a staff meeting at a gun range because she felt so angry.

Hamadeh has yet to comment on the alleged rape, but in July, he defended right-wing influencers Andrew and Tristan Tate, who are accused of strangling women unconscious and raping them and face charges of sexual assault, sexual exploitation, and child pornography in Europe.

Greene-Placentia is vowing to press ahead with her campaign.

“I need to let women know that it’s okay to talk about it,” Greene-Placentia told the New Times. “We’re asking people to stand up and donate or volunteer. We’re asking those folks to be uncomfortable, as [Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes] says; then I have to be willing to be uncomfortable too.”

Colorado minister and Republican gubernatorial nominee Victor Marx has declared that he shoved his wife in the past—and he’d do it again.

The admission came by way of a campaign video call with his supporters Tuesday evening, during which Marx shamelessly confessed that he pushed his wife against a door supposedly to teach her a lesson about self-defense.

“Show the before and after, they don’t want the full truth—that my wife was fake crying, suckered me in,” Marx told his donors. “I was like, ‘Oh my gosh are you okay?’ and she does a spinning back kick into my [groin].”

“I was like, ‘Okay, you actually can protect yourself,’” Marx recalled.

Marx’s wife Eileen then appeared on camera, placing her arms around his neck while claiming that she did a “rear choke” defense.

Both Marx and his wife have black belts in karate.

“People have called us the real Mr. and Mrs. Smith,” Marx claimed, referring to the 2005 blockbuster starring Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. “How many wives actually grab a backpack and put a tomahawk, nightvision, put a grenade in their coat pocket—we’re not normal.”

“I’d do it again,” he proclaimed. “I’d do everything again except get close to her to let her kick me, because she’s sneaky.”

Marx similarly admitted to the allegations during a local radio interview on Friday, claiming that he had shoved his wife “just to startle her” and reiterated that she was “fake crying.” In the same interview, Eileen Marx said she did not believe the rough encounters with her husband constituted domestic abuse, but that they had instead reminded her that she does “need to train.”

“What he did—eight years after that, I got my first degree black belt,” Eileen Marx said, noting in other portions of the interview that she grew up in an abusive home, and that the incident with her own husband had inspired her to start teaching women’s self defense classes.

“This was nothing like domestic abuse. This was a karate lesson in our house,” Eileen Marx told the radio show.

Marx has repeatedly claimed that the media has unfairly pegged him as a domestic abuser—but in truth, Marx has been telling variations of this story for years, some much more disturbing than the latest iteration. In 2021, the former Marine-turned-priest laughed while recalling “grabbing her and slamming” his wife after she suggested that he could protect her.

“It was a decent push,” he said at the time, beaming. “She hit that and started crying, bent over, facing the opposite way.”

Still, that’s not the only abuse allegation facing the Republican gubernatorial hopeful: Marx has also been accused of throwing his toddler across a room and pulling a knife on a psychiatrist attempting to treat him.

On the radio, Marx said both stories were true.

Recalling the incident with his small son, Marx said he “grabbed” his son because the child was “hurting his sister.”

“I picked him up, launched him, onto his bed,” Marx said. “That’s when he started crying.”

Marx said he initially shared the story as a warning for young fathers who are struggling to parent and do things “they don’t want to do,” urging people to get psychiatric help.

“I did not hurt my son,” Marx insisted.

The couple are the co-founders of All Things Possible ministry, an entity that critics have derided as a “potentially dangerous” operation, according to a September report by The Guardian. In the last year, the group has funded out-of-state surveillance projects and hired private security contractors. It is also connected to a “network of other self-appointed sex-trafficking rescue groups whose leading figures have attracted significant controversy,” according to The Guardian.

Marx was the chair and president of All Things Possible until his bid to become Colorado’s next governor commenced last October.

In June, Marx claimed during a local TV interview that he was forced to kill someone when he was seven years old. When pressed if he had killed more people, Marx responded: “Does it matter?”

The Department of Justice’s civil rights division is combing the bottom of the barrel to fill prosecutor vacancies.

The New York Times reports that the office has resorted to hiring lawyers with criminal records, misconduct allegations, and a love of conspiracy theories to fill the void left by the departure of nearly 300 career, nonpartisan employees following the start of President Trump’s second term and his hiring of conservative activist Harmeet Dhillon to lead the bureau.

Among the new hires is David Michael Levin, a conservative lawyer who was convicted of hacking into the Lee County, Florida election system in 2015 and 2016 as a political stunt. Levin later served a 20-day jail sentence with two years of probation. DOJ policy allows for people with misdemeanor convictions to be hired after a seven year gap, but apparently interfering with elections was still not a red flag.

Last month, another court ordered Levin to pay more than $200,000 in damages after finding he had engaged in fraudulent misrepresentation and civil conspiracy in a case involving insurance fraud.

Another prosecutor hired by the office, David Vandenberg, had a history of complaints of volatile and angry behavior towards his colleagues as an assistant district attorney in El Paso, Texas. A local judge even barred him from a courtroom for dressing down a court official. He is now facing animal neglect charges.

Former gambling executive James Breslo, who used to host the podcast Hidden Truth, also joined the DOJ under Dhillon’s leadership. His podcast attacked Alcoholics Anonymous in an episode titled “AA Kills,” examined UFOs, and hosted bigot Laura Loomer, who pushed unproven claims that the 2017 Las Vegas strip mass shooting was a plot by the government or religious terrorists.

Another hire, Daniel Flickinger, lost his job at a Birmingham, Alabama, law firm in 2020 for saying in a Facebook post that it was good that George Floyd died in a “fentanyl- and methamphetamine-numbed strangulation” because “it meant being worshiped in a nationwide funeral.”

Dhillon has defended these people and the other 130 new hires during her tenure, saying in a statement that “For years, the civil rights division recruited from a narrow pipeline of progressive activists and called it excellence.”

“We are hiring trial lawyers,” Dhillon said. “The attorneys The Times singled out have collectively tried hundreds of cases, prosecuted those who prey on trafficked children, won at the Supreme Court and practiced law for decades. That is the experience this division needs to enforce civil rights laws for every American.”

Meanwhile, Dhillon has willingly joined the Trump administration’s attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion, even dropping multiple school desegregation cases.

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Inside Washington

Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez has made quite the reputation for herself in Congress. She wanders the halls in outfits noticeably more stylish than those of her colleagues and crusades for issues like removing Red Delicious apples from school lunches, allowing pictures to be used in legislation, and culling sea lions. She’s also drawn the ire of Democratic leaders for siding with Republicans on key votes.

Now, Gluesenkamp Perez is facing a tight race in one of the most important districts for Democrats to hold this year, Washington’s 3rd congressional district. She was just one point behind her Republican opponent, state Senator John Braun, in a recent poll of 500 likely voters—well within the poll’s margin of error. Five percent of those surveyed remain undecided. The swing district voted for President Donald Trump in all three of his elections, while also voting for Gluesenkamp Perez in two of those elections. A plurality of voters surveyed, 35 percent, consider themselves more independent than aligned with either party. 

In the state’s open primary in late August, Braun received 39.7 percent of the vote to Gluesenkamp Perez’s 36.4 percent. Gluesenkamp Perez’s progressive challenger, Brent Hennrich, garnered 16.7 percent of the vote. Experts say that Hennrich voters are likely to vote for Gluesenkamp Perez, though some could stay home if they strongly oppose some of her more controversial votes—like her support for Israel or her “yes” vote on the Trump-backed SAVE Act.

“In some ways, I would call her a throwback,” said Mark Stephan, an associate professor of political science at Washington State University, about Gluesenkamp Perez. “It used to be that representatives around the country, going back 30, 40, 50 years, were Democrat, Republican, but they were also really tuned into their district.” 

Braun, he said, reflects this same district-focused governance. “In some respects, he is the slightly conservative reflection of MGP,” Stephan said. If elected, “I think he would do basically what she’s done but be slightly more conservative about it.” 

Before facing Braun, Gluesenkamp Perez twice beat Republican Joe Kent, who served as the director of the National Counterterrorism Center from 2025 to 2026. But, said John Horvick, a senior vice president at DHM Research, “John Braun is not Joe Kent.” Stephan echoed that. Kent, he explained, “tried to run what I would call a national Republican campaign, meaning that he just tried to appeal to Republicans as Trump voters, as Republicans writ large, and didn’t focus as much on the local stuff.” Braun’s focus on local issues makes him a more competitive opponent for Gluesenkamp Perez.

The local issues that Braun and Gluesenkamp Perez focus on are as varied as the district itself. The district covers the southwest corner of the state, just across the river from Portland, Oregon. Its biggest city is Vancouver, which is surrounded by the Clark County suburbs. But the district also includes rural apple orchards and industrial communities. One such community, Longview, suffered a major industrial disaster in May, when a chemical tank at a paper mill imploded during a shift change. Eleven workers died. In the aftermath of the disaster, Gluesenkamp Perez was present in the community at press conferences and conversations with local leaders. She also spearheaded a bill to restore funding for the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board, which is the agency in charge of identifying the cause of the deadly implosion. It’s unclear how the disaster and its aftermath will affect the race, Stephan said; it depends on whether Longview residents think Gluesenkamp Perez did enough to support their community. 

Another example of Gluesenkamp Perez’s focus on local issues is her crusade against sea lions. Killing these animals, she says, is necessary to protect endangered salmon and steelhead runs in the area. She has pushed for the district’s Native American residents to kill sea lions directly, rather than relying on expensive federal removal programs. She’s also focused on supporting right to repair policies and played up her work in an auto shop.

Experts stressed that the district could swing either way, particularly with a strong Republican candidate like Braun. But Gluesenkamp Perez’s ability to buck the party when necessary could be a major boon to her reelection. “She is willing to throw some mud and poke her finger in the eyes of the Democratic Party,” Horvick said. So far, that’s been a winning strategy in southwest Washington.

—Emma Janssen

Outside Washington

A KFF poll released on Tuesday finds voter trust of Democrats over Republicans when it comes to managing health care costs has grown since its last survey in April. Back then, 37 percent said they trusted Democrats and 26 percent said they trusted Republicans. Now those numbers are 42 percent and 22 percent. It’s reasonable to assume that the effects of the Obamacare subsidies that Republican lawmakers opted to let expire, as well as projected premium increases next year, are affecting those numbers. Also interesting is that 66 percent of respondents said they support Medicare for All, although that number can change depending on whether they’re presented with arguments for or against this type of policy. 

Speaking of health care, sort of: A New York City aesthetician recently pleaded guilty to a series of federal charges related to her importing “bootleg Botox” and administering it to clients, one of whom was subsequently hospitalized. It’s illegal for aestheticians to administer Botox in New York, but this is not the first aesthetician to be accused of shooting people up with a counterfeit. Incidentally, in 2025, a Republican-sponsored bill to prevent aestheticians from administering Botox without medical supervision passed the Texas House by an over three-to-one margin with bipartisan support and unanimously passed the Texas Senate, only for Republican Governor Greg Abbott to veto it, calling it “unnecessary and overly burdensome” for businesses. The most recent poll of the Texas gubernatorial race shows Abbott and Democrat Gina Hinojosa neck and neck: Hinojosa’s three-point lead was within the margin of error.

—Heather Souvaine Horn

The Ideas Factory

At 5 p.m. on Wednesday, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace will hold a virtual event discussing the implications of Israel’s upcoming elections. From the event summary: “What will the Israeli election reveal about the country’s changing political landscape? Might a new government represent a change in Israel’s approach to Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, and the broader region, or largely continue the trajectory of recent years? And what might the outcome mean for Israel’s relations with the Palestinians, its neighbors, and the United States?” Speakers will include Maha Yahya, Aaron David Miller, Nathan J. Brown, Amjad Iraqi, and Tahani Mustafa.

On Thursday at 8 a.m., Center for Strategic and International Studies writer Jasmine Sun will join Wadhwani AI Center director Aalok Mehta for a webcast discussion about the backlash to data centers, in which the two “unpack what’s driving the opposition movement, where Washington and Silicon Valley diverge from the rest of the country, and how the AI infrastructure buildout might influence voters in November.”

—Heather Souvaine Horn

In Closing

Book of the Week: Blockers: Rebels in the Deep State

By Michael Lewis

THE GIST: A spiritual sequel to The Fifth Risk, which explored the disruptions to the federal bureaucracy that accompanied Trump’s first term, Blockers is Michael Lewis’s look at the second Trump presidency, focusing particularly on Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.

PRAISE: “Blockers,” writes Tim Wu, a Columbia professor and author of The Attention Merchants and The Curse of Bigness in The New York Times, “is a warning that our politicization of everything is a tremendous curse and a reminder that, especially in a country of the size and complexity and power of the United States, there is much that government does, or should do, that ought to be quietly nonpartisan.”

CRUISING THE INDEX: “God knows the efficiency of that particular effort,” Lewis writes about DOGE’s gutting of a program that assisted refugees. “No one inside DOGE seems ever to have bothered to ask.” This is a common refrain as Lewis reports the gutting of USAID, the destruction of much of the U.S. government’s science and environmental funding (including much of its wildfire prevention capacity), and more. Everywhere you look in Blockers, there is destruction. More often than not, it is being done by people with no knowledge or curiosity about what government does, on the orders of people (specifically Musk, Trump, and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick) with even less knowledge or curiosity about what government does.

TNR’S QUICK CRITICAL ASSESSMENT: This is perhaps Lewis’s angriest book—no small accomplishment given his long history of detailing the arrogance and stupidity of the U.S. financial system—and also maybe his most tragic. It’s a story about horrific damage to the U.S. government. That story is not over.

—Alex Shephard

Political Trivia Question of the Day  

A rare multiple choice question! Journalist Jacob Weisberg has just published Profiles in Cowardice, which looks at eight prominent Americans who’ve failed to stand up to Donald Trump. The book is a twist on John F. Kennedy’s 1956 Profiles in Courage, which profiled eight senators for courageous moves across history. Which of these senators is not included in JFK’s book? 

A. John Quincy Adams

B. Daniel Webster

C. Nelson Aldrich

D. Robert Taft

(Sign up for The TNR Blue Book to find the answer in tomorrow’s newsletter.)

—Michael Tomasky

Nearly 1,000 armed guards have descended on the United States Postal Service, deploying to at least 55 facilities across the country ahead of Election Day.

The security officers were contracted through multinational private security company Prosegur, according to a Raw Story investigation.

Prosegur has a history of alleged human rights violations, including an incident as recent as 2024 in which the company’s Brazilian subsidiary reportedly prevented indigenous people from accessing food and medical care at a nearby town, per an assessment by the Ethics Council of the Norwegian Government Pension Fund.

Prosegur’s guards are currently located at USPS facilities in Atlanta, Chicago, Denver, Indianapolis, Phoenix, San Diego, and Tampa, according to internal memos obtained by Raw Story.

One postal contractor that spoke with the digital outlet said she was “alarmed” that the armed security guards were predominantly confined to “deep blue states or swing states.”

Frank Albergo, the executive director of the Postal Police Officers Association union, said that the armed guards were deployed at facilities with more than 1,000 employees.

“No one from the postal service will be supervising these armed guards. It will be completely a private contractor who controls these armed guards, so you basically have private contractors in and around ballots without any federal control. To me, that’s crazy,” Albergo told Raw Story.

“It just could be a red flag. Will it have an impact on the election? Who knows? But you certainly could argue that it has an effect,” Albergo continued. “It might give Trump an excuse to call into question the integrity of the election. That’s the problem. It’s the perception of it.”

Mark Ungar, a political science professor at the John Jay School of Criminal Justice in New York who has researched private security firms such as Prosegur, suggested to Raw Story that the company’s presence could afford the Trump administration a retroactive alibi.

“The Trump administration is clearly taking every step they can to control voting, and they’re going to use the Postal Service to do that,” Ungar said. “Any contract with Prosegur, any way that removes accountability from the American people of the Postal Service, which they’re already doing, I think, is concerning at the very least.”

In a statement to Raw Story, a spokesperson for USPS’s law enforcement branch, the United States Postal Inspection Service, said that the snail mail carrier had introduced armed guards to “provide security and act as a deterrent to criminals or employees who may wish to compromise the mailstream or potentially harm the people inside.”

Since the throes of the Covid-19 pandemic, Trump has repeatedly argued that the Postal Service should be dismantled to prevent mail-in voting—a practice that he has repeatedly accused of fraud despite zero evidence and his own apparent preference to vote by mail.

The Supreme Court buoyed one of Trump’s more aggressive voter suppression efforts in August, permitting the White House to move forward with new mail-in voting requirements and an executive order that transferred control of the mail-in voting process to “Trump lackey” (according to Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold) Postmaster General David Steiner.

The judiciary decided the following month, however, that the new requirements would not affect the 2026 midterm cycle, effectively thwarting Trump’s eleventh-hour attempt to create a conservative edge in the race to control Washington.

Yet Steiner has already attempted to flex the power of his position. On Wednesday, Steiner informed the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee that, under a new rule, the USPS would not offer ballot services to states that refused to hand over their voter rolls to the Trump administration.

Meanwhile, the president promoted mail-in voting to his supporters on Monday, urging them to cast their ballot however possible, briefly reversing course on his performative opposition to mail-in voting in the face of what looks like it will be a blue tsunami next month.

President Trump is still using your money to pay for his propaganda hype video commercials ahead of the midterms.

On Wednesday morning, another “Final Battle” commercial for the president aired on Fox & Friends, featuring a black and white clip of Trump walking while he references a “final battle.” It’s the same one that aired on September 27.

“This is the final battle. With you at my side, we will demolish the deep state. We will expel the warmongers from our government. We will drive out the globalists, we will cast out the Communists, Marxists, and fascists,” he says in the ad. “We will throw off the sick political class that hates our country. We will rout the fake news media and we will liberate America from these villains once and for all.”

“Paid for by the U.S. Government” flashes at the bottom of the screen as the commercial concludes. The advertisement is virtually identical to a 2024 Trump campaign ad.

Trump announced Monday that his super PAC would pay for future ads, but it appears that’s not the case.

This commercial is the second installment of Trump’s effort to sway voters his way ahead of midterms. The administration is spending $20 million from the Department of Homeland Security budget to pay for them, claiming they’re necessary public service announcements. The first was that strange “Love Me” ad, which debuted late September on Fox News during Jesse Watters Primetime.

And these commercials aren’t convincing anyone. According to a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll, 86 percent of Americans disapprove of Trump’s use of taxpayer funds on the commercials. Even Republican Senators John Thune and Mike Rounds were critical, while Vice President JD Vance insisted that the ads were somehow “not partisan” and that they were “trying to tell a story.”

Whatever story that is doesn’t seem to matter ahead of midterms, as Americans struggling with rising prices need more than cool videos to assuage them.

The Department of Homeland Security radically reduced training requirements for local law enforcement officers whose departments had agreed to help Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

In an email obtained by American Oversight, an ICE official whose name was redacted explained that the training had been reduced from four weeks of in-person instruction to just 40 hours of virtual courses, The Washington Post reported Tuesday. Additionally, training on real-world scenarios that officers might encounter in the field was eliminated entirely.

The email addressed to former ICE Director Todd Lyons and adviser David Venturella explained how the training had been “truncated” to meet demands that the course be shortened. Lyons resigned in May, and Venturella now leads the agency.

Since President Donald Trump reentered office, the number of local police departments collaborating with ICE has increased exponentially. Under the Biden administration, there were 135 active 287(g) agreements across 16 states. Now, more than 2,600 agencies are receiving compensation to assist in Trump’s sweeping deportation efforts, according to the Post. White House deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller demanded last year that ICE arrest 3,000 immigrants a day.

Chioma Chukwu, executive director of American Oversight, told the Post that some of the materials cut from the training would have helped officers understand whether they had a lawful basis to arrest someone in the first place.

“So for example, who is actually a citizen, what is their immigration status, what grounds could possibly justify seeking their removal?” Chukwu said.

The dangerous consequences of these changes seem obvious: less training will only sow more confusion and chaos during arrests, which will inevitably lead to violent encounters between civilians and law enforcement.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement investigated hundreds of voter registration groups over the past year as part of their efforts to catch noncitizens voting.

The nonprofit organization Democracy Forward obtained government documents showing a wide-ranging probe into the nonprofit groups. The documents also revealed deliberations within Homeland Security Investigations, which conducts investigations for ICE, to send undercover agents into the organizations.

“Future [undercover]-related operations may involve utilizing [undercover agents] to target identified organizations and engage in communications with these entities to substantiate recruitment methods and activities related to illegal alien voter registration,” stated one of the documents. These efforts “will support broader investigative and enforcement actions, leveraging [undercover] findings to initiate prosecutions and dismantle illicit facilitation networks.”

HSI focused on groups in the battleground states of Pennsylvania and Ohio, although it also looked into organizations in Minnesota, Washington, D.C., and New Jersey as well. There is no proof that HSI ever went ahead with using undercover agents, according to Democracy Docket.

The investigations involved using nonprofit search engines and other databases attempting to find “derogatory information” about them. HSI looked into at least 82 organizations in Pennsylvania, including the state’s branch of Council on American-Islamic Relations, the country’s largest civil rights and advocacy organization for American Muslims.

The efforts went beyond nonprofits, as HSI investigated state primary elections earlier this year, the documents revealed, trying to find “any notable trends or vulnerabilities in upholding election integrity.”

HSI’s efforts in Pennsylvania also included investigating Zumiez, a clothing brand that has worked with organizations like Voto Latino and Rock the Vote that encourage civic engagement among young people. Why Zumiez received scrutiny is unclear, as it is a national corporation with headquarters in Washington state.

All of the administration’s efforts seem to be an attempt to prove a long-standing conservative conspiracy theory that Democrats register noncitizens to vote to win elections. Despite the right’s repeated claims of rigged elections, the few actual cases of voter fraud appear to catch conservatives more than anyone else.