The New Republic

Calls for Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s resignation are growing after two unvaccinated people died from measles in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. There have been 393 confirmed measles cases in 28 counties in Pennsylvania this year, and 2,777 total cases nationally—a 35-year high.

These are the first measles deaths in the United States this year, and in Pennsylvania in more than three decades.

“RFK Jr.’s lies and conspiracy theories are making Marylanders sick,” Democratic Maryland Senator Angela Alsobrooks wrote Tuesday on X. “RFK Jr. must resign or be fired. Vaccines are safe and effective. Listen to your pediatrician.”

“Measles is officially out of control. How many more people need to die before there is a nationwide call for RFK Jr. to resign?” said Shaughnessy Naughton, president of the pro-science organizing group 3.14 Action. “His anti-science, anti-vaccine policies are killing people and infecting a generation of Americans with dangerous vaccine skepticism that will take years to recover from.”

These are just the latest calls for Kennedy Jr.’s resignation as he systematically sabotages vaccine science.

“There is one effective way to reduce the spread and severity of measles: vaccination. And RFK Jr. has undermined it at every turn,” Georgia Senator Raphael Warnock wrote on X last month. “He is a hazard to our health and must resign.”

While Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro stopped short of calling for Kennedy Jr.’s resignation Tuesday, he did tell reporters he had a “blunt” conversation with the health secretary.

“His actions and the rhetoric that’s coming from this administration are having a negative impact on communities across America, particularly right here in Pennsylvania,” he said. “Sharing conspiracy theories and misinformation does not help the cause of public health—and it leaves people less healthy and less safe, and it leaves parents in a position where it’s harder for us to do our jobs to protect our children.”

PA Gov. Shapiro on RFK Jr.: I made very clear that his actions, and the rhetoric that is coming from this administration, are having a negative impact on communities across America. Sharing conspiracy theories and misinformation does not help the cause of public health — it… pic.twitter.com/k2F84WOzTg

— Protect Our Care (@ProtectOurCare) August 25, 2026

The Trump administration, in their ongoing effort to shatter previous world records for spitefulness, is threatening to demolish the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts if they’re not allowed to put Donald Trump’s name on it.

In a court filing Monday, prosecutors suggested that the proposed $250 million renovation project—that includes tacking the president’s name to the facade of the building—was necessary for the institution’s survival, The New York Times reported.

“Without those efforts, the center will deteriorate further into an unsafe, decrepit structure that will be required to be taken down,” the filing said, “with a determination to follow on what to build on the site, such as a large outdoor amphitheater overlooking the Potomac River that has been proposed, by some, for many years.”

In reality, Trump’s overhaul of the prestigious national theater has only hastened its demise. The Kennedy Center is on track to fall $100 million short of its profit goal, and the shortfall can be directly tied to Trump changing the institution’s name. It expects to miss its budget target by 70 percent and contributed revenue by 25 percent, a projected $23 million deficit.

The Kennedy Center has become an outlet for the Trump administration’s shocking pettiness. The President Trump-appointed Kennedy Center board first tried to close the Center in May, after multiple artists cancelled their performances in response to his proposed name change. Democratic Ohio Representative Joyce Beatty successfully challenged the decision in court.

The renovations were blocked by U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper, who argued that the board’s decision was “ill-informed and seemingly preordained.”Trump’s name was then scraped off the wall, and the building’s facade has remained concealed by a massive tarp.

Earlier this month, the board voted again, this time deciding to close the center for two years so that they can renovate the building in Trump’s image. Now, Beatty has asked a federal judge to once again keep Trump’s name off of another man’s memorial.

A court has ordered the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, to disclose to immigrants’ rights groups how involved it was in getting tax and Social Security information shared with the Department of Homeland Security. 

U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani ruled Monday that the government has to turn over the records after refusing requests to do so as part of a lawsuit against Trump administration officials, Bloomberg reports. The government has until September 14 to comply with the ruling, Talwani said, adding that its refusal constituted “another significant gap precluding the court from evaluating Plaintiffs’ claims.”

As part of President Trump’s mass deportation agenda, DHS and the IRS reached an agreement to share taxpayer information to find undocumented immigrants. Immigration advocacy groups sued to stop the data sharing, and a federal court granted them a preliminary injunction in February limited to the IRS. 

Talwani rejected the government’s claims that it handed over all of the legally required materials to the groups suing it, saying that federal agencies also had to turn over DOGE’s communications, as well as those from inside the Social Security Administration. However, the judge granted the government one reprieve, saying that it does not need to turn over the actual data the SSA shared with DHS or the names and contact information of SSA employees involved in the data sharing. 

DOGE, spearheaded by tech oligarch Elon Musk, was given unprecedented access to internal government data from the start of Trump’s second term. Almost every agency was mined, including the SSA, the Treasury Department including the IRS, and Medicare and Medicaid records. All of this was ostensibly to root out waste, fraud, and abuse while increasing efficiency, although that never happened. 

Musk’s businesses, including his artificial intelligence company xAi, could have benefited from this information, but that is still under investigation. What is known is that the data definitely helped and continues to help Trump’s efforts to deport millions of immigrants. Now the public will get at least a small look into how DOGE helped Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s violent deportation efforts.  

Is the Republican Party going to spend the election season running away from Donald Trump? If Ralph Alvarado, a Republican candidate running for Kentucky’s 6th congressional district, is any sign of things to come, then maybe so.

This week, Alvarado stripped mentions of the president’s agenda from his campaign materials, apparently deciding that being too tied to Trump would hinder rather than help his odds come November.

Before-and-after screenshots of Alvarado’s campaign website, captured by NBC News’s Sahil Kapur, reveal that Alvarado’s messaging has switched from marking him as an “America First Fighter” to “Independent Leadership.”

On June 9, Alvarado’s website proudly displayed his loyalty to the president, claiming in a subheading that “President Trump needs more allies in Congress to deliver on his bold vision to Make America Great Again. With your help, I will be that fighter.”

By August 24, the physician’s tune had changed. The new text in that space reads: “Healthcare isn’t a talking point to me—it’s been my life’s work. In Congress, I’ll work with both parties to fight for affordable healthcare, lower costs, and practical solutions that help Kentucky families.”

A photo of Alvarado standing beside Trump was also removed from campaign materials. In place of a paragraph that once described Alvarado as “one of President Trump’s earliest supporters” and detailed his determination to “stop the woke agenda,” new language now frames him as an ardent supporter of bipartisanship, singularly focused on bringing down healthcare and affordability costs.

He’s not the only one to make a change. Andy Biggs, the MAGA Republican running in Arizona’s gubernatorial race, originally pushed campaign signs that championed the fact that he was “Trump endorsed” in bold, black lettering above his own name. That no longer seems to be the case. Biggs’s campaign has since erected modified signs that added the name of Biggs’s running mate, Sine Kerr, and stripped any mention of the president from his roadside advertising. (Unlike Alvarado, Biggs’s website still mentions that he was endorsed by Trump.)

Recent polling offers some insight behind these curious changes. A Reuters/Ipsos poll published Tuesday suggests that the president’s influence is waning: Just 13 percent of Americans strongly approve of the president—down from 23 percent who felt the same way this time last year, according to data from a 2025 YouGov Poll.

Republican attitudes towards Trump have also changed, according to the Reuters/Ipsos poll. Just 35 percent of conservatives surveyed said they “strongly approved” of Trump’s job during his second term. In the same poll, 41 percent of registered voters said that they would vote for a Democratic candidate if the presidential election were conducted today.

Midterm-bound Republicans were explicitly encouraged by the White House as well as party leadership last month to break from Trump in an effort to save their election chances.

“The understanding is pretty damn implicit: The president is going to say what the president is going to say,” a Republican operative working on the party’s midterm races told MS NOW in July. “You’re not going to have candidates or lawmakers running out to defend the president’s handling of the economy or the war—polling shows that most people don’t agree with his handling.”

President Donald Trump’s administration was so triggered by a “woke” painting that it had it removed.

For years, a Kehinde Wiley painting titled “Young Artists After Siamesas 1960” hung in the U.S. Embassy in the Dominican Republic. The piece, commissioned by the federal government in 2013, shows four Dominican models against a bright floral backdrop. Wiley is perhaps best known for his portrait of former President Barack Obama, which currently hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. It is perhaps that fact that has made the Trump administration so upset.

Either way, the Trump administration just can’t handle the prospect of displaying another one of Wiley’s works. After covering the painting with a large tarp, State Department officials removed the piece last week. Now they’re considering whether they’re allowed to sell it, The New York Times reported Monday.

Speaking on Sean Spicer’s podcast last week, Erin Scavino, the director of art in embassies, described the painting as “very woke” and “aesthetically terrifying”—whatever that means. According to her State Department bio, Scavino is a lawyer whose vague artistic background includes “cultural expression through fluid installation art” and “innovative design residency programs that integrate art with recycled materials, turning waste into creative wonders” (which sounds pretty “woke”). Her presence in the Trump administration probably has less to do with her fluid installations and more to do with the fact that she did a brief stint on The Apprentice and is currently married to eternal Trump flunkie Dan Scavino, who currently serves as the director of the White House Presidential Personnel Office.

Virginia Shore, who served as director of art in embassies from 2000 to 2017, said there was no precedent for selling the piece. “Calling this ‘woke’ is difficult for me to understand,” she told the Times. “This is a program validated and financially backed under Bush. There is a science of building trust and empathy across borders.”

The Trump administration wasn’t even willing to acknowledge what it is about the painting that offends its sensibilities. In a statement Monday, a state department spokesperson didn’t even address the actual work. Instead, the statement referred to allegations of sexual assault against Wiley, which he has denied, and criticized Wiley for once describing a different artwork as a “play on the ‘kill whitey’ thing.”

“The work of an individual with such violent and racist words and depictions has no place in the America First State Department,” the spokesperson said.

If the Trump administration wanted to get rid of racist art, why reinstall a confederate statue? Well, because it’s not about that at all. The effort comes amid a wider trend of the Trump administration efforts to expunge Black history from American monuments and museums.

Leah Campos, the U.S. ambassador to the Dominican Republic, celebrated the painting’s removal on Instagram.

“In the Trump Administration and under my leadership we are turning away from globalist and woke ideologies and instead embracing American patriotism and the beauty of our great country!” she wrote, including a video of the painting’s removal edited with the Twisted Sister song, “We’re Not Gonna Take It.” Leave it to the Trump administration to put an anti-establishment song over a video of government censorship.

Canada has hit back at the United States, announcing retaliatory tariffs up to 50 percent on $20 billion worth of American goods, most notably aluminum, steel, and fish. Trump announced 50 percent tariffs on Canada last month, and threatened to levy even more this week.

Canada’s tariffs will affect a wide variety of U.S. goods beginning September 8, including steel, dairy, appliances, agricultural equipment, pulp and paper, and electronics.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney suspended trade talks with Trump last Friday after the U.S. demanded last-minute concessions regarding Quebec law requiring the U.S. to print manuals and packaging in French—a seemingly minute detail to make a dealbreaker. This of course led Canada to exit talks, as they took it as an attack on their culture and sovereignty.  

Now U.S. consumers will pay for the perceived slight. 

“Canada must respond, and today we are—in a proportionate, targeted, and strategic way. Today, I am announcing that Canada will match the United States tariffs dollar for dollar, rate for rate. Effective September 8, Canada will impose counter tariffs of up to 15, 25, or 50 percent on $27.6 billion in imports from the United States of America,” Canadian Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne said on Tuesday. “For each product, our tariff would match the American tariff on the same type of Canadian goods. Those tariffs will have real consequences for Canadian workers, businesses, and communities across our nation. Canada must respond, and today we are in a proportionate, targeted, and strategic way.”

Canadian Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne: "Canada will match the US tariffs dollar for dollar, rate for rate. Effective Sept 8, Canada will impose counter-tariffs of up to 15, 25, or 50 percent on $27.6 billion of imports from the US." pic.twitter.com/RQuxm9Td7j

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 25, 2026

These tariffs from Canada will inevitably make it more difficult for U.S. companies that do business with Canada to compete in the near future—and cause prices on those aforementioned key goods to rise. And more than anything, Trump’s chaotic, greedy vindictiveness has cost us a good relationship with perhaps our closest ally in the world. 

According to reports, CIA Director John Ratcliffe secretly flew to Moscow on Tuesday. The purpose of Ratcliffe’s Russia trip is unclear, though inside sources that spoke with CBS News said that he is attending meetings. His visit marks the first time since 2021—months before Russia invaded Ukraine—that a director of the CIA has visited the country.

News of Ratcliffe’s involvement came in the wake of intense speculation surrounding a U.S. Air Force Boeing C-17A Globemaster III transport plane that was spotted flying from Riga, Latvia, to Vnukovo Airport just outside Moscow.

An observer that flew out of Riga Airport Tuesday morning described seeing an aircraft similar in shape, color, and size as a U.S. Air Force C-40B—which are typically used to transport senior U.S. government officials and senior military commanders—alongside the C-17, as well as several cars with diplomatic plates.

Air traffic trackers recorded the C-40’s flight path originating at Joint Base Andrews and landing in Riga.

Moscow residents shared video of the envoy’s arrival, which involved multiple SUVs with tinted windows breezing through city traffic with a heavy police escort.

Neither the U.S. nor Russia has commented on the trip, or offered any insight into who is participating in the meetings. Rather, the Kremlin announced Tuesday that no talks between Moscow and U.S. envoys were expected this week.

“No, there are no such plans,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said at a press conference when asked whether more talks had been scheduled to end the Russia-Ukraine war.

Trump administration officials reportedly asked Kyiv not to strike Moscow, St. Petersburg, or the northern regions of Russia between Monday and Wednesday, to which Ukraine agreed, according to the Financial Times.

The CIA’s press office did not respond to a request for comment prior to publication.

Former CIA Director William Burns was the last CIA chief to visit Moscow. He did so in November 2021 to warn senior Russian officials and Russian President Vladimir Putin against war with Ukraine. Fast forward to today, four years into the war, and peace talks between Russia and Ukraine have made little progress.

Meanwhile, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy is grappling with a domestic catastrophe alongside the violent conflict. Last week, Zelenskiy’s ousted Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov accused Zelenskiy’s administration of rampant corruption and called for a wartime poll to potentially unseat the former comedian, despite regional laws that prevent an election during wartime. Zelenskiy told reporters Sunday that he believed an election at this time would “destroy” Ukraine.

The Republican Party’s first-ever midterm convention is quickly becoming a Trump-style grift.

Puck reports that the National Republican Campaign Committee, which is hosting the September event, is asking for House members to pay a minimum of $25,000 to attend the two-day event in Dallas with a guest, with higher packages costing as much as $100,000. On top of that, the event is taking corporate sponsorship dollars, which are going to a nonprofit that doesn’t have to disclose its donors.

All this is for a convention that doesn’t include any actual party business, since no candidates are being nominated like in presidential election years. The whole thing appears to have been planned haphazardly, with invitations only going out in the last few weeks to Republican leaders and lawmakers, many of whom have other commitments.

“It’s yet another opportunity to shake down corporate America,” one Republican strategist told Puck, adding that it has turned into a “shit show.”

“Nobody understands why we’re doing a midterm convention. It’s just another show that Trump is going to put on to remind the voters that he is sitting there, and maybe they don’t want to be reminded of that,” the strategist added.

The convention is also taking place on September 9 and 10, right before the twenty-fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. The images out of the event are going to be of the wealthy Republican elite partying right before commemorating one of the biggest tragedies in American history.

That’s a bit on the nose for President Trump’s second term, which has seen him focus on lavish, unnecessary projects and celebrations rather than the Americans struggling due to his unnecessary war in Iran and mismanagement of the economy. This convention, much like his Freedom 250 celebrations this summer, will most likely end up being an expensive, sparsely attended dumpster fire benefiting only himself and his wealthy allies.

You’re reading The TNR Blue Book. Get daily scoops, strategy, and developments inside the liberal ideas factory delivered right to your inbox. Sign up for free.

Inside Washington

The nationwide backlash to data centers has become so widespread that it’s even hard to find Republican politicians who openly embrace them—with the exception of President Trump, of course. So why is the Democratic nominee for governor in Wisconsin touting their benefits? It’s a question many puzzled Democrats are asking, given that the governor’s mansion is a crucial bulwark against the state’s Republican-controlled legislature.

Wisconsin has the opportunity to become “an AI and a data hub not only for the entire country, but for the entire globe,” David Crowley, who defeated progressive Francesca Hong earlier this month, said in a 2025 candidate forum. His opponent, GOP Representative Tom Tiffany, has pounced, dropping an ad last week with that quote and calling Crowley “Data Center David Crowley.” “My priority is protecting Wisconsin families, taxpayers, farmland, and water, not turning our state into a data center hub for the ‘entire globe,’” Tiffany said in a recent statement to WisPolitics.

Painting Crowley as pro–data center is a no-brainer for Tiffany, given voter sentiment on the issue. Polling suggests that voters are increasingly negative about data centers. In October, 55 percent of those asked in a Marquette Law School Poll survey of Wisconsin registered voters said that the costs of data centers outweigh the benefits. But in a poll from July, that number jumped to 76 percent. No wonder even the most pro-business Republicans, like Senate candidate Ken Paxton and Governor Greg Abbott in Texas, have come out in favor of strict regulations on data centers.

But as much as Tiffany would like voters to believe he opposes data centers while his Democratic opponent supports them, the reality is a lot more complicated.

Ultimately, the two candidates have similar policy views on data centers, as a piece in Vox laid out last week. Neither one has called for a moratorium on building them, as Hong did. Tiffany has called for rolling back a state subsidy on data centers, which Crowley hasn’t matched, but otherwise the candidates are aligned on the issue, calling for local control over construction and environmental standards to protect natural resources.

Joe Zepecki, a Democratic political strategist who lives in Wisconsin, sees Tiffany’s portrayal of Crowley’s position as an act of desperation from a weaker candidate. “Tiffany is running uphill with an 800 pound anchor on his back,” he said. “I think the fact that the Tiffany campaign chose to engage on data centers right out of the gate is because they know he has vulnerabilities.”

But the race seems to be tight: The latest polls, from mid-August, show Crowley up by three or four percentage points with over two months to go until Election Day. Crucially, the governor’s race could also affect downballot races for the state Senate and Assembly, which have been in Republican control since 2011. During that time, Republicans gerrymandered the state to their advantage. Now Democrats have the best chance they’ve had in years to take back the legislature and try to undo some of the damage the GOP has done, like a 2011 law abolishing collective bargaining for public workers. “If we don’t nominate someone who can win statewide and bring legislative majorities with them, so much of the work of the last eight to ten years is for naught, and so the stakes are enormous,” Zepecki said.

Charles Franklin, a professor of law and public policy who directs the Marquette Law School Poll, said that Tiffany’s focus on data centers could help him appeal to independents who, as his polling suggests, are against data centers at higher rates than Republicans are. He also sees Tiffany’s rhetoric as a way to connect with rural conservative voters, who make up a large part of his base, and rally them. “He just did an event yesterday in western Wisconsin, saying he was, as governor, not going to let data centers take over farmland in this lovely rural area of western Wisconsin,” Franklin said on Monday. “He’s doing it in a way that speaks to the rural parts of the state, which [are] his natural electoral constituents, even if there’s not, in fact, bulldozers coming to bulldoze your farmland.”

In response to Tiffany’s attacks, Crowley is reminding voters that Tiffany hasn’t introduced legislation restricting data centers during his time in Congress. Meanwhile, Tiffany has said that Crowley takes money from data center proponents, which is likely a reference to donations from union interests. Some unions are in favor of data centers since their members would build the infrastructure, but Zepecki cautioned against characterizing all Wisconsin labor interests as pro–data center.

The stakes of this debate feel incredibly high in Wisconsin, explained Amy Barrilleaux, the communications director at Clean Wisconsin, an environmental organization that has called for a pause on data center development. “This is not normal times,” she said. “If we don’t take a minute and understand and prepare and ask questions and get some transparency, we’re going to be looking at a state that’s really different than the state our kids grew up in.”

—Emma Janssen

Outside Washington

Nearly two weeks after massive storms with 100 mph winds tore through Indiana, nearly 30,000 residents are still without power, with roughly a third of them in the predominantly Black city of Gary. “We’re at day twelve, and twelve days is too long for families to be without power,” the city’s mayor, Eddie Melton, said in a video posted on Facebook. “Twelve days is too long for parents to worry about their children and for businesses to lose revenue and for families to wonder when the relief is finally going to come. I want you to know I share that frustration.”

“We’re always in survival mode in Gary,” hairstylist Shatiya Hardin told the Associated Press. “And I think that’s probably why it wasn’t so much of an uproar because the first few days, it was like, ‘OK, we’re used to this.... but this is the second week now. It’s not OK for us to continually be in survival mode, doing the best that we can.”

Gary has faced decades of neglect since the collapse of its steel industry in the 1970s and ’80s, a fact many residents and outsiders believe is directly related to its status as Indiana’s only majority-Black city. Its poverty rate is roughly 30 percent, and the energy grid that failed during the early-August storm was left vulnerable in part due to a failure to do routine tree maintenance by NIPSCO, northern Indiana’s power monopoly. Indiana is one of the most gerrymandered states in the country, with only two of its nine districts viable for Democratic candidates. The state’s 1st congressional district includes Gary—and currently “leans” toward incumbent Democrat Frank Mrvan, who won his primary last week and who welcomed FEMA’s recent federal emergency declaration.

—Alex Shephard

The Ideas Factory

In an issue brief for the Washington Center for Equitable Growth—the first in a three-part series—visiting fellow Mary Beech explores how weaknesses in federal data collection make it difficult to know how broadly artificial intelligence is being adopted by workers—and to what degree it is changing the labor market. “How does the adoption of AI by firms affect worker employment and unemployment, compensation, jobs lost, and job opportunities?” she writes. “As this brief demonstrates, no single data source can answer this question, federal or otherwise.” As Beech notes, there are several efforts in Congress to rectify this problem, in the form of two bipartisan bills—one sponsored by Virginia Senator Mark Warner, and one introduced by New Hampshire Senator Maggie Hassan.

Over at the Institute for Policy Studies, associate fellow Christine Ahn argues in favor of Trump’s order for the U.S. to “substantially reduce” its military drills with South Korea. “While any diplomatic overture from this administration should be viewed with skepticism,” she writes, “progressives shouldn’t miss an opportunity to take a principled position that advances peace, a reduced U.S. military footprint, and the security of the American and Korean people.” Ahn says that instead of “parroting the political establishment that benefits from forever wars, progressives should challenge … the belief that military superiority produces security, that militaristic ‘deterrence’ is stabilizing, and that allies exist for the U.S. to position them. This is not producing peace.”

—Ryan Kearney

In Closing: Four Questions For

Debru Carthan, executive vice president of Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West

Q: Who are you, and what are you working on right now?

A: I’m the vice president of SEIU-UHW, a union representing more than 120,000 health care workers across California. But before anything else, I’m a health care worker. Right now, I’m helping to lead our work on Prop 40. For me, this ballot campaign [to implement a one-time billionaire tax] is about protecting patients … and the fact that this health care crisis was started by the Trump administration giving more tax breaks to billionaires.

Q: What is the most difficult thing about your line of work?

A: The hardest part is knowing that the decisions we make affect real people. Leadership requires you to listen to different perspectives, make difficult decisions, and sometimes move forward even when everyone doesn’t agree. You must be willing to sit in uncomfortable conversations and still keep people focused on what we are trying to accomplish together.

Q: What was your biggest success in the last year or two?

A: My biggest success has been stepping into the role of vice president of SEIU-UHW and having our members put their trust in me to help lead this union. But I don’t measure success by my title. I measure it by what I’m able to do with the opportunity. I spent years as a rank-and-file leader, serving on our executive committee, bargaining contracts, developing leaders, and fighting alongside health care workers. Now I have the opportunity to take everything I learned in those roles and use it to help develop the next generation of leaders.

Q: What keeps you going in these stressful times?

A: When the work gets difficult, I think about the health care workers who get up every day and take care of our communities. I think about the patients depending on us. I think about my children and the generations coming behind us. We have an opportunity to protect health care in California, to make sure that billionaires pay their fair share in taxes, and to show working people what is possible when we recognize our power and use it together.Interview by Monica Potts

Political Trivia Question of the Day

Democratic candidates are pretty well positioned to win governor’s races in both Ohio and Georgia, two states that haven’t had a Democratic governor in a while. Who were the last Democratic governors of those two states? (Sign up for The TNR Blue Book to find the answer in Wednesday’s newsletter.)

President Trump has  hailed his takeover of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts as an economic boon for the storied venue, claiming the historic theater “would be in financial ruin” without Trump, and that not putting his name on the building would “cause donors to flee.” 

Instead, it’s been a complete bust.

New reporting from The Washington Post shows that the center is on track to fall $100 million short of its profit goal directly because of Trump changing the name to the Trump-Kennedy Center. It expects to miss its budget target by 70 percent and contributed revenue by 25 percent, a projected $23 million deficit. 

“The center took a huge hit when the takeover happened,” an anonymous source close to the situation told the Post. While ticket sales plummeted after Trump’s officials launched their anti-woke takeover at the beginning of his term, things got even worse after the name change last December. “It was just an absolute fiscal cliff. Donors disappeared, ticket sales disappeared, artists disappeared—like it was doomsday.”

This all comes as the center is multiple months late in delivering its independent audit during Trump’s first year of leadership. 

The Trump-appointed Kennedy Center board tried to close the center for two years beginning in July, but that decision was blocked by a U.S. district judge who argued that the board’s decision was “ill-informed and seemingly preordained.” Earlier this month, the board again voted to close the center for two years so that it can renovate the building in Trump’s image—and add Trump’s name back. 

Trump has put this once iconic venue through absolute hell. His initial takeover, fueled by a right-wing spite for “woke” culture, led many high-level acts to cancel and donors and patrons to flee. But the name change—which hasn’t even officially, legally happened—may have been the true coup de grâce.

Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee are expanding their probe of Jared Kushner’s alleged foreign corruption to include his suspicious purchase of land in Albania from a suspected gangster.

In April, Ranking Member Jamie Raskin launched an investigation accusing Kushner of serving as “Special Envoy for Peace” in the Middle East, while soliciting millions of dollars from Gulf monarchies. Kushner never responded to the letter.

In a letter sent Tuesday, Democrats updated their probe to include his latest shady dealings in Albania.

Kushner purchased the land for more than $120 million from Arthur Shehu, a suspected criminal with a history of drug trafficking. For years, the Albanian government has claimed that Shehu used fraudulent documents and forged Ottoman-era land records to claim ownership of large swaths of coastal property. Despite warnings from local residents, Kushner proceeded with the purchase of disputed land, sparking massive protests and violence.

Since returning to aid the Trump administration in its negotiations with Iran, Lebanon, and Ukraine, Kushner has continued to operate his investment firm, Affinity Partners, and court foreign funding.

“This episode reflects both your essential frivolousness as an erstwhile representative of the United States and the Trump-Kushner family’s overriding and seemingly insatiable appetite for engaging in political and financial corruption,” Raskin wrote in the letter. “While acting as our nation’s chief negotiator to end several international conflicts created or exacerbated by your father-in-law’s administration, you have taken the time to start another fraud-related international incident all by yourself.”

Lawmakers demanded that Kushner provide them with all records on any real estate, business deals, or protests in Albania by September 7.

The Trump administration is proposing a new rule that would basically give data centers the ability to pollute as much as they want.

The Environmental Protection Agency’s rule change, The Guardian reports, would remove the Clean Air Act requirement that data centers publicly disclose their air pollution, making the disclosures voluntary at the discretion of state and some local officials. But since many state and local governments have business agreements with data center companies, this would likely end most pollution disclosures for data centers nationwide.

Now people with data centers in their community won’t know what substances they’re being exposed to, and won’t have evidence to cite in any legal challenges. In effect, the move seems to be aimed at squashing public criticism and oversight of data centers, according to the EPA’s former assistant administrator for the Office of Air and Radiation Joe Goffman.

The existing rule is supposed to protect members of the public, giving them “an ironclad promise,” Goffman told The Guardian.

“The administration is basically saying: ‘You all may have thought this was an ironclad promise, but it no longer is,’” said Goffman, who has co-authored comments on the proposed rule. While the rule’s public comment period just ended, it could still face legal challenges if finalized.

Data centers have faced heavy public opposition across the country due to their power consumption, pollution, the lack of jobs many create, and the noise they generate, among other issues. The response from President Trump has been denial and an insistence that data centers benefit communities.

“Frankly, communities that don’t take a data center, they’re making a mistake because there’s plenty of communities that want them. Because it means jobs, and it means tremendous tax revenue coming into the towns and cities that take them. So you know, it’s like the smart ones are saying, ‘I want them so badly,’” Trump said in an interview just last week.

The Supreme Court buoyed one of Donald Trump’s more aggressive voter-suppression efforts Monday, permitting the White House to move forward with a March executive order that effectively transfers control of the mail-in voting process to the U.S. Postal Service’s postmaster general.

The preliminary Supreme Court decision—which came over the dissent of the three liberal justices—did not decide the legality of Trump’s scheme, and will likely not be the last time the court speaks on the matter. Nonetheless, it has steered attention toward the postal service which, thanks to the president’s machinations, is on the verge of being controlled by a cohort of Trumpian sycophants.

The postal service is led by a board of governors, similar to a corporation’s board of directors. Typically, the board hosts nine governors, the deputy postmaster general, and postmaster general, totalling 11 members. At the moment, only six people sit on the board.

Weeks before signing the executive order, Trump filed nominations to fill four of the vacancies. Rather than file nominees in bipartisan pairs—as is tradition—Trump opted to exclusively nominate Republicans. Three of the nominees have openly questioned the results of the 2020 presidential election, and have claimed that America’s voting processes are not secure.

Two of Trump’s nominees are on a fast track for approval, and could enter office as soon as the Senate returns from its August recess. Their appointment to the board would effectively transform it and confirm a majority of Trump loyalists at the highest echelons of the postal service.

“It is clear to me that the president is looking for people who will do exactly what he says and will carry out his order without respect for the U.S. Postal Service,” Democratic Senator Elissa Slotkin, who oversees the agency as part of her duties on the Senate Homeland Committee, told The New York Times.

That fear is just as palpable inside the postal service. Jonathan Smith, the head of the American Workers Postal Union, told the Times that postal workers are already concerned they may be forced to implement legally or ethically dubious policies.

“They can direct the people I represent to follow procedures we perceive as possibly not constitutionally sound or legal or even ethical,” Smith told the newspaper. “Because the board of governors were put there for that purpose.”

The U.S. Postal Service is practically as old as the country. It was developed by the Second Continental Congress during the American Revolution, and Benjamin Franklin was appointed as its first postmaster general.

Since then, the Postal Service has reinvented itself again and again, keeping up with the myriad shipping demands of the American public and supporting trillions of dollars in commerce.

It also “generally receives no tax dollars for operating expenses and relies on the sale of postage, products and services to fund its operations,” according to USPS’s website.

Still, that hasn’t prevented America’s public mail system from becoming a favorite target of the president. Since the throes of the Covid-19 pandemic, Trump has repeatedly argued that the Postal Service should be dismantled to prevent voting by mail—a practice that he has repeatedly accused of fraud despite his own apparent preference for the absentee process.

Multiple people close to President Trump advised him to moderate his approach to the war on Iran. Six months later, with 18 U.S. service members and 3,000 Iranians dead and his approval rating at an all-time low, it appears he should’ve listened. 

A new report from The Wall Street Journal reveals how Trump ignored the warnings of his own administration members in the lead-up to the February attack.

Former Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard warned Trump in February that assassinating Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei would only bring a more hardline government into power, which in turn would lead Iran to tighten their grip on the Strait of Hormuz, sending oil prices skyrocketing and and crippling the global energy market. 

There were other warnings, too. Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General Dan Caine told him that an all-out campaign would result in an overexerted fighting force and a depleted weapons stockpile. Even Vice President JD Vance warned against escalation at one point.

The Trump administration has gone to great lengths to make Americans believe that Iran was close to developing a nuclear weapon, that their military really is decimated, and that this feckless war is in their best interest. 

“He will never allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon,” a spokesperson for the White House said, also claiming that Iran’s military was virtually useless. “It would be wise for Iran to reach a deal. Otherwise, they know what could happen.”

Now, as the economy remains in freefall, the Strait of Hormuz remains closed, and as Trump turns to a flimsy “economic D-Day” solution, it is clear that the president should have heeded the advice he was being given. The fact that he’s pivoting back to sanctions now signals what has been obvious for months—that his strongman military approach was a failure. 

The Wall Street Journal also reported that Trump was privately very upset and even confused as to why his all out bombing assault on Iran didn’t yield a surrender, displaying an alarming lack of foreign policy tact, even for him.

“This was all predictable and predicted,” Nuclear Threat Initiative Deputy Vice President Eric Brewer told The Wall Street Journal.  “You can draw a straight line from the fact that the war was launched without any clear political objective to the mishandled diplomacy in trying to end it.”

President Trump is taking out his frustrations on Canada by threatening to rename Lake Ontario.

“The United States is giving serious consideration to changing the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America in that we don’t expect to doing much business with Ontario any longer. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP,” Trump posted early Tuesday morning on Truth Social.

Trump was responding to Ontario Premier Doug Ford, who responded to Trump’s tariff threat against cars and trucks produced in Canada Monday by telling the U.S. president that “he can kiss my ass as far as I’m concerned.

“We’re going to go at him full steam, and we buy 400 percent more cars than anyone in the world,” Ford said in a radio interview.

Trump also denied reports that Canada pulled out of trade negotiations over the weekend over crazy last-minute demands from Trump administration officials such as changing Quebec’s French-language protections.

“I would never interfere with Canadians speaking French! In fact, I have never even thought of doing such a stupid thing. This lie was made up by a weak and ineffective Prime Minister in an attempt to gain political support, which he has totally lost, from the people of Quebec. I love French Canadians! President DONALD J. TRUMP,” Trump posted less than 45 minutes after his threat to rename Lake Ontario.

Trump’s feud with Canada could have far-reaching economic effects. Canadian officials will announce their own retaliatory tariffs against the U.S. on Tuesday. These could target any number of goods and services that Canada provides to its southern neighbor, including electricity, oil and gas, uranium, aluminum, and rare earth materials.

The price of gas and other goods in the U.S. is already high thanks to the Iran war and Trump’s mismanagement of the economy. A trade war with Canada will only hurt the American economy further and punish consumers just in time for November’s midterm elections.

This story has been updated.

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the August 25 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.

The other day, Donald Trump announced that he will reduce tariffs for a huge amount of imported beef as a way to bring down soaring beef prices. At the same time, he’s escalating his trade war with Canada, wildly threatening a whole range of new tariffs for all kinds of products. The new beef policy is already stirring opposition from his own constituencies, like farmers and ranchers.

The war on Canada, meanwhile, will hurt a lot of people in Trump country in other ways. But taken together, these two moves underscore a whole new level of contempt for his own voters. They expose the deep folly of MAGA economics in all kinds of clarifying new ways. So we’re talking about all of it with the best out there at explaining these things, economist Paul Krugman. Paul, good to have you back on.

Paul Krugman: Good to be on.

Sargent: So let’s start with this beef announcement. Trump declared that the U.S. will now allow 300,000 additional metric tons of ground beef product to be imported without an additional tariff. Trump claimed he has a commitment that this beef will be sold at 25 percent below market prices. Paul, can you explain what Trump thinks he’s saying here?

Krugman: The short answer is no. I have no idea what he thinks he’s saying. This is really weird. I mean, the first question is, where’s the beef? Or actually, where’s the beef coming from? This is an amazing thing. He says we’re going to bring in 300,000 metric tons of beef, but won’t say from where. Among other things, with all of these food safety scares, I think people would like to know who’s supplying this beef. And anyway, so that’s kind of weird in itself.

Our beef import policy was pretty weird to start with. It’s a tariff quota, where you bring in a certain amount free of tariff, but then after that it pays a tariff. And this is supposed to be an addition to the quota part. But normally we think of a tariff quota as being, well, the price of beef is set by the marginal ton of beef, which pays a tariff.

So somebody’s getting the right to import a bunch of beef, but it’s not at all clear why this should be passed on to consumers. And now he’s saying, well, he’s got a commitment that it will be sold at 25 percent less. And a commitment from whom? I mean, even if the wholesalers sell it cheaper, how does the supermarket know this is that imported beef that we’re supposed to sell?

So the whole thing is incoherent. I can’t imagine that anybody sat down to try and figure out how this will work. It just has this feeling of, I wanted to say something. And again, contempt. And consumers will not notice it in the supermarkets, but ranchers definitely will.

Sargent: Right. As far as I can tell, we don’t even know at this point which countries this beef will come from, and there’s no clear way that Trump can even guarantee that it will be sold at a discount, can he?

I mean, even if some beef importer said, I’m importing this at a discount because this country is selling it to us for cheaper, would he even be able to guarantee it then?

Krugman: I mean, maybe the beef importer will promise Trump, or promise the officials, that he’ll sell it below the price of other beef. And maybe that would even happen. But then, you and I don’t buy our hamburgers from beef importers. We buy them from supermarkets. And how does any of that happen?

Trump complains about communists, but this is not a communist economy in which the government gets to set the price at which hamburger is sold in the supermarket. So it’s all kind of bizarre. And it’s clearly meant to say, I am doing something, without anybody, as far as we can tell, being clear about exactly what it’s being done or why it should work.

Sargent: Well, what strikes me about all this as well is that it’s yet another admission that Trump’s tariffs actually do raise the prices for American consumers. Trump has insisted 50,000 different ways that other countries pay his tariffs, yet here he comes right out and says that reducing the tariffs will mean lower prices for consumers. I mean, doesn’t that sort of show an extraordinary level of contempt for his own voters?

Krugman: Oh heah. I mean, every bit of the policy from the beginning has been contempt—belief that people will not understand what I’m doing, which is helped by the fact that he himself doesn’t understand what he’s doing. How can you say, foreigners pay the tariffs, and, by the way, I will help you by making them not pay the tariffs?

This does not sound to me like any kind of thought-out policy. This is thrashing. And I would ask, by the way—even if I don’t see how this actually helps consumers—but, you know, what is it, nine weeks till the midterms? The idea that this is going to change people’s views about Trump economic policy, aside from the fact that you’re going to have a few thousand really pissed-off beef producers—how does this even work politically?

Sargent: Yes, and we should be clear that the contempt is directed at his own voters, don’t you think? Because, number one, as you and I have discussed on here before, and you’ve written a number of times on your great Substack, the people who are getting clobbered by Trump’s tariffs—a lot of them are MAGA voters. A lot of them are Trump voters. And so he’s clearly trying to talk to them.

I mean, he’s elsewhere being quoted saying that he’s essentially begging his voters to turn up in the midterms, because they won’t turn out without him on the ballot. So he’s essentially trying to fool very, very directly his own people here, isn’t he?

Krugman: Yeah. I mean, he’s trying to claim that he’s doing something for consumers. And there’s a lot of hamburger-eating MAGA voters, who he hopes won’t remember that he’s talking out of two sides of his mouth on what tariffs do to prices. And then there’s also—he’s, I guess, taking for granted—I mean, this is not good for the farm sector, which is very, very Trumpy, or was—and he’s basically saying, you’ll vote for my people regardless. And, you know, he might be right, but at this point I’m starting to wonder about that.

Sargent: Well, speaking of which, we’re in a similar situation with Canada. Trump’s trade talks with Canada collapsed over the weekend. That’s triggered 50 percent American tariffs on a range of Canadian goods. Canada’s now set to retaliate, which seems to be aimed at a number of things that will hurt Trump country. This has enraged Trump, who’s now vowing to impose 50 percent tariffs on cars, trucks, and auto parts starting in January.

Now, my understanding of this is that the auto industry has such tightly integrated supply chains across the border that people call it the “Great Lakes supercluster,” right? Which is a great phrase. Can you explain how bad this part of it is?

Krugman: Yeah. I mean, there is no U.S. auto industry. Not now. We had a free trade agreement on autos with Canada in 1966. We’ve had free trade in autos and auto parts for that long, for 60 years. We had a free trade agreement across the board with Canada in 1988. We had NAFTA in 1994, and then, you know, Trump basically had his name inscribed on it and called it the USMCA in his first term.

The point being that we are generations past the point when there was a U.S. auto industry as distinct from a Canadian auto industry. It’s been a completely integrated thing, where the components of a car can cross that border six or seven times before it ends up as a finished car, assembled sometimes on our side of the border, sometimes on theirs, but it really doesn’t matter.

We’re so tightly integrated that most of the statistics on metropolitan areas have a metropolitan area called Detroit–Windsor, where Windsor is the Canadian half of it, because it’s effectively just one city. We are that tightly integrated.

So now you suddenly slap 50 percent tariffs on this, which is, among other things, a blatant violation of a solemnly signed U.S. agreement signed by none other than Donald Trump. And you’re left with the different pieces of an automobile—the plants that make those different pieces are on opposite sides of that sudden tariff wall. So it’s enormously destructive.

Sargent: You mean the trade agreement that Trump signed during his first term. Can you talk about how what he’s doing would directly violate that particular deal?

Krugman: Well, it’s a free trade agreement. I mean, it was originally the North American Free Trade Agreement, which he awkwardly renamed the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement. But it’s a free trade agreement, which means that Canadian products—there are some exceptions—but for the most part, goods produced in either country are supposed to cross the border tariff-free.

The Europeans have a customs union, which means that there basically is no border. Here there is a border. You have to basically wave a sheet of paper at the inspector that says these are American products, so they get to cross free. But there is no tariff. That’s what a free trade agreement is: goods enter free of tariffs.

Now Trump is saying, yeah, but we’re actually imposing 50 percent tariffs on a bunch of these products. It’s not strictly a treaty, but that’s a very legalistic distinction. It is a binding agreement. A large part of the point of these agreements, by the way, is to create certainty, so businesses can plan...I can do engine blocks in Ontario and wiring frames in Michigan, and I don’t need to worry about paying a tariff when I truck them across the border. Now all of a sudden—with the engine block factory and the wiring frame factory on different sides of the border—you’ve screwed up the entire production process for both countries.

Sargent: Well, I want to ask about something Trump said. When he threatened tariffs on all these Canadian goods next year, meaning all these auto parts and cars and trucks, he raged, quote, in all caps, of course: “We don’t need Canada. They need us.”

Now, you had this great piece for your Substack in which you directly questioned that. You pointed out that we are actually far more interdependent with Canada, and far more dependent on Canada, than people realize. Can you talk about that? Because I think it’s something that a lot of people don’t know.

Krugman: Yeah, it’s one of those things—I have learned a lot in these Trump years, because we’ve had so many disruptions, that when you get granular on international trade, it turns out that there’s a lot more sort of crucial interdependence than you might realize. So America produces a lot of lumber. And we import something like a fifth of our lumber from Canada. You say, well, OK, but we’re 80 percent self-sufficient. But it turns out that lumber isn’t lumber—that is, there are different kinds of trees, and they have different properties. And it turns out that the Canadian trees are higher strength-to-weight ratio than the U.S. trees, which means that they’re what you want to use when you’re framing a house. So suddenly—and like 90 percent of that kind of lumber comes from Canada—so suddenly, yes, we do need Canadian lumber.

Give us 10 years—I don’t know how long it takes to grow the right kind of trees, but, you know, I’m not lumberjack. But it takes a long time to switch over. And meanwhile, we actually need that Canadian lumber.

Oil: The U.S. is a net exporter of oil thanks to fracking. So you can say, well, we don’t need Canadian oil—except that the Canadian oil goes to the upper Midwest, which cannot easily get the oil from someplace else. The Canadian oil is different. It’s, again, the details—it’s heavier crude, which turns out to be important for some purposes. So actually, yeah, we have lots of oil in America, but not the right kind of oil, and not in the right places.

And so on down the line. And electricity. I happen to be in the northeastern United States at the moment, and hydropower from Quebec is an important part of what keeps the lights on here. So this idea that we don’t need Canada is just all wrong. And if you cut it off abruptly, as is now happening, it’s a mess.

Sargent: What’s going to happen if this trade war continues to spiral out of control? Is it going to?

Krugman: Well, I think it’s going to spiral out of control. I mean, I don’t know how deep in we get, but—first of all, again, we have a midterm election in nine weeks. There’s going to be a lot of disruption starting like tomorrow because of this trade war. There will not be time, even if Trump suddenly says, well, all is forgiven—the effects will be there. And certainly the psychological effects will be there. And I don’t think it ends quickly, because, look, fundamentally, Trump is going to lose this trade war.

And it is not because we’ll be hurt worse than the Canadians. We are bigger, they will be hurt worse than we are. But the Canadians know why they’re fighting. The Canadians know that Donald Trump is the villain. And you have to search really hard to find an American who hates Canada. You know, even a majority of Republicans think that Canada is good. It’s come down a bit under Trump, but still. And so the Canadians are going to dig in.

Even really pretty bad Canadian politicians are falling over each other to denounce Trump and say, we will stand firm. So this is going to be a war—Canada is not going to cave in. And by the way, Mark Carney, prime minister of Canada, has a 60 percent approval rating, you know, and 30 percent disapproval. It’s Trump upside down.

But Trump cannot admit that he’s lost. It’s this kind of trade version of Iran. He lost the Iran war months ago, but cannot bring himself to admit it. And the trade war with Canada surely will follow the same pattern. So, gosh, this is not going to be over. This is going to—you know, at some level it may end with Canada joining the European Union. I don’t know.

Sargent: Yes. Well, in fact, I think Mark Carney said in his speech today that this is encouraging him to try to pursue more talks with Europe. And I think this is another symptom or sign of something you’ve gotten at before, which is that Trump’s craziness is causing the rest of the world to move on without us, and imagine a post-American world in which they start to work together, maybe more than they would have before.

Krugman: Yeah, it’s worth saying, by the way, that this is not just psychology and future attitudes, but concrete steps are happening because of this. The Canadians are building pipelines that will take oil from Alberta to the Pacific so they can sell it to Asia instead of selling it to us. Assuming that sanity returns to the United States, we will enter a world in which physical facts have been created that make us less influential, less able to conduct productive business with our northern neighbor.

Sargent: Well, I want to try to juxtapose these two things. So on this one front, you’ve got Trump essentially admitting that his tariffs raise prices on consumers. He’s doing that by suspending tariffs on beef in order to bring down prices. So he admits there: my tariffs raise your prices.

And then on this other front, he says, I’m going to impose a whole bunch of new tariffs on Canada, the country that you all love. I just—you put it all together, and it starts to seem so crazy that it’s almost unprocessable.

Krugman: Yeah. I think we have to stop at this point imagining that there’s any rational calculation behind any of these policies. What we’re seeing now is a flailing guy who is losing it personally as well as politically—at some level knows that he’s losing it. He’s lashing out.

I’m kind of worried about—at a certain point, as it’s all going to hell, and assuming that the midterms go really badly for Republicans, Trump won’t say, I need to reconsider, what have I been doing wrong. He’s going to blame America: We have failed him, not the other way around. My imagination isn’t good enough to think of all the destructive things he might do, but there really is a kind of a downfall feeling to all of this.

Sargent: Well, just to wrap this up, it seems like all these things kind of get at something about MAGA economics, if that’s an actual thing. We keep hearing these accidental admissions from Donald Trump about his own policy. So a couple times now in the last year and a half, he’s admitted that he probably should suspend deportations of immigrants who work in the agricultural industry.

I think at one point he actually said something like, you know, people in the farm industry are losing good, hardworking people. And by that he meant the same people he calls rapists and murderers, meaning immigrants. So there he admits that his mass deportations are bad for the economy, right? So you’ve got that. Now you’ve got this new admission that tariffs actually raise the prices for consumers.

I think maybe on some level there’s a tic in the punditry, a habit in the punditry, which was tempted to sort of see Donald Trump’s victory in 2024 as a sign that there’s, like, a deep and authentic conservative, right-wing-populist, nationalist streak in the American people. But now you’re getting every one of the pillars of that—meaning the pillars of this kind of right-wing economics, MAGA economics, nationalist economics—all get thoroughly discredited.

Do you think that’s happening, and is there, like, an opening to come back into this debate for Democrats and liberals to say, OK, you now know populist nationalism failed, now let’s go back to the way liberals do things? What do you think of all that?

Krugman: I’m torn on this. I mean, on the one hand, I think the case that MAGAnomics, to the extent it is coherent at all, doesn’t work—I think that is really sinking in. At this point, Trump’s economic approval numbers are getting down to where...we used to think there was a hardcore of, like, 33 percent who would support anything. I think we’re about to breach that. It looks like we’re going down to—the number of people who actually approve of his economics may well drop into the 20s. And so that really isn’t there.

But then, of course, this was never mainly about economics. It was always much more about race, about misogyny, about whatever—these cultural, emotional issues. And that probably won’t go away. I mean, but hopefully we can function as a country with 70 percent of the population believing in rational economic policy.

I know that we’ll never see it admitted, but not a day comes by that I don’t wish for the days when, you know...Biden made mistakes and things went wrong, but he did not have completely irrational idiots making policy. There were actually good, dedicated people who knew something. And I think I’m not alone. I think a lot of people are starting to feel that way.

Sargent: I do wonder whether there’s finally an opportunity to do what Democrats have failed to do for so long, which is say in a straightforward way: when Republicans run things, it all goes to shit; when Democrats run things, they get better. Now, Trump’s way of running everything into the shitter is different than George W. Bush’s, but the pattern does apply, right?

I mean, this is the story of our lifetimes, more or less, is it not, Paul? And is there a way for Democrats to recapture that story and tell it in a way that persuades people that when Democrats run things, they work better, even if they’re not perfect? Is there a way to break from this pattern where the electorate just lurches us back and forth every two years, basically?

Krugman: Of course the answer is, I don’t know. The politics is kind of mysterious. But I would say, look at Canada, where you have a technocratic prime minister who—he’s one of the few world leaders I actually know, because I met him at many central bankers’ meetings over the years: Former governor of the Bank of England, and competent, and immensely popular. It happens that he’s pretty good at wearing a hockey shirt, but still, it does show that you can do that.

And maybe—in the end, most of us are not that different from Canadians. I’d like to think that the same kind of thing can work here. So let’s hope so. I mean, God knows—the next time somebody thinks that Republicans are better at running the economy, you just need to say two words, “Donald Trump,” and that’ll probably solve the problem.

Sargent: Boy, do I hope that’s true. And it’s really tempting to believe it. And it does seem like Donald Trump has made that more possible than it has been in the past. Folks, make sure to check out Paul Krugman’s Substack. It’s a wonderful piece of work. Every day, in and day out, you’ll learn from it. Paul, thank you so much for coming on, as always. We really appreciate it.

Krugman: Thanks for having me on.

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

The American Association of University Professors endorsed Abdul El-Sayed during the Democratic primary for the open Michigan U.S. Senate seat. It was the group’s first political endorsement ever. That set off a controversy about whether professors should collectively endorse, particularly during primaries. Todd Wolfson, the president of the AUUP, defends the group’s endorsement in the latest edition of Right Now. He says that AAUP has decided that professors should not remain silent amid the growing attack on higher education and would be issuing more endorsements this fall. And Wolfson, a professor of journalism and media students at Rutgers University, argues that professors and universities have a critical role in defending democracy at a time of democratic backsliding.

This is a lightly edited transcript of the August 24 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.

Perry Bacon: We have a great guest and interesting discussion today. Todd Wolfson is a professor of journalism and media studies at Rutgers, and for this session, he’s also the president of the American Association of University Professors, and we’re going to talk about some of the work AAUP has done and is doing. So Todd, thanks for joining me. I appreciate it.

Todd Wolfson: Thanks for having me, Perry. I appreciate you.

Bacon: So we’re going to talk about something that’s controversial even among my liberal friends, for lack of a better way to say that, which is, AAUP on the eve of the Michigan primary decided to endorse Abdul El-Sayed in that primary.

So talk about what made you—because it’s interesting, I think it’s clear that on higher education, the right and Republicans are in a different place than Democrats are, but I’m not sure I totally know where Haley Stevens and El-Sayed differ on higher education. So talk about why you decided to make that endorsement in that primary.

Wolfson: Yeah, I’ll say there’s a history here. I was elected in the summer of ‘24, before the Trump-Harris presidential campaign, and when I was elected, we pivoted really fast to put out a vision for higher ed, like a fully funded public system, more investment in the system. We can go down the line. I can talk about that later if you want.

And we did it, and we signed off with all the big unions that represent higher education workers, so NEA and AFT and SEIU—some faculty, some represent staff, some represent medical workers. And then we started working with the Harris campaign, because they had said they support a lot of our vision, and we were planning to actually endorse all the way back then. We didn’t get it done, ultimately, for a host of reasons.

And so fast-forward into the ‘26 cycle. We were very public that we were planning to endorse. With our membership more publicly than that, I put out plenty of statements saying that we’re—

Bacon: Endorse in primary, just to be clear—endorse in primaries.

Wolfson: Potentially endorse in primaries, and certainly endorse and engage. I can get to El-Sayed and Stevens. And so then, the thing that made the Michigan race important, I’ll say, is—there’s a couple things. One is that Abdul’s father was a president of an AAUP local in Michigan, Eastern Michigan University, which is an AAUP local that represents faculty at EMU. Abdul himself was an AAUP member, and also an AFT member, and we’re affiliated with AFT. And we started having dialogue, and we put out our vision. AAUP and AFT came out with a blueprint for higher ed. Again, I can lay out what the vision was, and we shared it with him, and he fully endorsed it.

And I’ll say there’s another piece to this, which is, another higher education organization who we work closely with, Higher Ed Labor United, had a town hall for the Democratic nominees—and this was well back before McMorrow dropped out. McMorrow and El-Sayed came. Stevens did not come.

Our local at Wayne Academic Union had a questionnaire which they gave out to all three candidates. Stevens neglected to respond to our questionnaire, which asked basic questions like, “Do you support a fully invested public system?” Et cetera, et cetera. And then our AFT Michigan affiliate—they’re not affiliated with us, but we’re in relationship with them—they also did a survey. Most of our unions in Michigan are part of AFT Michigan, and they did a poll, and it said that 80 percent of their membership supported El-Sayed, and they endorsed.

And so then we moved to endorse shortly thereafter, for this multiple set of reasons. One, he was aligned with us in our vision for higher ed. Two, his family comes out of our union. And three, both our membership and the membership at AFT Michigan had overwhelmingly supported him. And, just to keep this rolling, we plan to make multiple endorsements going into the midterms for the general. So there’s two questions to parse out here. One, should we have engaged in a primary? But then two, should we be endorsing writ large?

Bacon: Yeah, and I’m going to ask both of them. The first was the primary. So let me stick with the primary question first, because I think—OK, so I’m going to speak in more political language, and you can see how you want to respond to that.

So what I’ve seen is, my professor friends who I would describe, particularly professors who I would describe as more progressive and more leftist, are for this. The ones who I would describe as more center left are against this. I’d put Abdul more in the progressive camp. Stevens is more in the center left camp.

Is it possible that AAUP is more aligned, or you’re more aligned, with the sort of progressive camp, and that’s partly why you would want to endorse him in this race?

Wolfson: No. If a centrist Democrat came out and said publicly, Look, we want a fully invested public system. We want a public higher ed system that pushes back against overwhelming contingency of faculty workers. We want a public system, and a federal research program that fully funds NIH and NSF and is going to take care of Pell, et cetera, we would absolutely be endorsing them.

I’ll keep this as an I proposition: higher education has been defunded in the United States, the public system, over the last 60 years. It’s been a serious divestment from the federal and state governments, and it’s led to all sorts of outcomes that have been really bad for the United States, for our higher education system, for our students, and for our faculty and staff. And so we feel like we need people who are going to stand up and champion the system. I don’t care who they are, if they’re going to champion higher ed right now.

The Republicans have been hell-bent on destroying what is the greatest higher education system in the world, bar none. And so it’s time for us to stand up and fight for that system. What we said was, we need champions, people who are going to say, This is a critical issue to me, who are running for elected office, and Abdul El-Sayed said that. So no, I don’t see a reason why we wouldn’t endorse a more centrist candidate who is speaking our language around higher education.

Bacon: Let me push, and we’ll ask some more questions, which is—

Wolfson: Sure.

Bacon: I would support a centrist Democrat who liked wealth taxes, who loved unions, et cetera, et cetera, who wanted to ban data centers. Those people tend not to exist, because that’s not what centrist Democrats are. And we just had a Democratic president who we had to beg and plead to forgive college debt, who seemed to be leery of defending colleges.

Is part of the issue here that centrist Democrats, like Thomas Friedman, New York Times columnists, love to demean college professors and so on? So is part of being a centrist Democrat right now trashing higher ed, and therefore is that unfortunately where we are right now? Because that’s how I perceive it.

Wolfson: I think that’s what I feel, right? Like, our truck is not with the centrists, it’s them coming after us.

And so what we’ve seen—a great academic called Stuart Hall called it the Great Moving Right Show. And as the Republicans move right on higher ed, the centrist Democrats move right with them, and have made us a problem. We are not a problem, right? They talk about faculty being leftist, and I’m thinking to myself, I represent a dude who’s dreaming about a black hole, another guy who’s training nurses, a woman who is an engineer, and the large majority of my faculty are not thinking politically. They’re building the society we all depend on.

And for Democrats not to embrace that, for Republicans not to embrace that, is ridiculous. But for Democrats not to embrace it, when it’s a central plank of the Democratic Party, education, right—it’s really bewildering to me. And yes, we feel like they are not standing up for us. And so it’s time for us to stand up for ourselves and find candidates who will stand up with us.

Bacon: A central plank of the Democratic Party is education. I think a central plank of the Democratic Party is giving K through 12 schools money. I think a central part of Democratic Party is training people for the workforce. Is training people in journalism, media affairs, sociology, classics, philosophy—giving people an actual education—is that a central plank of today’s Democratic Party?

Wolfson: If it isn’t, it needs to be, and we’re going to fight for it to be. I would say the founder of AAUP is John Dewey, famous philosopher. And John Dewey said that education is the midwife of democracy. And for me that’s key here, right?

We need, especially in a moment of what we could call Democratic backsliding—I don’t know what we want to call the Trump administration, but let’s just say that it’s a shift towards a more authoritarian form of rule—education is an antidote to that, right? It’s a critical antidote, whether it’s funding early learning, as they’re doing in New York City, so that young parents are not going broke putting their kids into daycare and to pre-K, whether it’s having the most robust, amazing K-12 system in the world, or having a fully funded public higher ed system. All of those things, in my mind, are what are going to help us crawl out of this mess, a democratic mess that we’re in.

Bacon: So I think the Democratic Party is wary of college education right now, because of this sort of education divide, where we’re seeing that the correlation is growing. If you have a higher degree, BA, and probably a PhD, you’re more likely to vote Democrat. Growing number of non-college, you vote Republican. And wherever you think, right now there are more people without a college degree than with a college degree, so there’s an electoral environment.

I guess I think education is good, so I’m nervous about this sort of drift toward basically saying we’re the party of the educated, and that’s bad. But how do you think about this sort of education polarization, quote unquote? Should they be nervous about it, and what do you think about it?

Wolfson: What I think is, there’s been this trick that’s been played on the American public over the last, a long time, but let’s just say the last five to six years. Let’s call Ron DeSantis one of the progenitors of it, which is basically that faculty are really left, right? Therefore, higher ed is bad.

But what the real problem is, if you poll, is that higher education is really expensive. Really frigging expensive. And kids are going in and they’re going into debt, their families are going into debt, they can’t afford it, and then they’re coming out the other side—but they’re making a better living when they come out the other side, for sure. Every single study says that. But there’s sticker shock.

And what I think the real problem is, is that we need a public system where kids, working-class kids, can get an education that’s accessible and affordable, and then go on to a career making more money than they would if they did not get that college degree. And we need that to be accessible to the entirety of our populace, right? And that’s the vision we have for a society, and that would be a vision where there wouldn’t be this divide.

This divide is very anti-working class. It’s saying that working-class kids don’t deserve a college education. They should be ready to make widgets the moment they get out of high school. I disagree, and I quibble with that position. That is not the future I think we want. I think we want a future, especially with AI on the march—we want a future where people are educated and can be re-educated and grow and develop over time and find careers, and then maybe new careers. And higher education is critical to that. And a public system that’s free is critical to that. And so that’s the vision we’re calling for.

And they’re saying no. It’s not the sticker shock that’s the problem. It’s that your English professor read Marx once. That’s not what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about the fact that in the 1960s, the University of California system and the New York City CUNY system were free. Free. And working-class kids, Black, Brown kids were all, for the first time, getting either free or highly subsidized public education, and Ronald Reagan and those with him said no to that, and they started charging fees. Ronald Reagan was the governor of California at the time. And then over that arc of time, we’ve seen higher education get so expensive, particularly the privates, but the publics follow suit. And that’s the real problem here.

And what AAUP is saying is, we need a real investment in our higher education system, an investment so that kids can go, they can get a Bachelor of Science, Bachelor of the Arts. They can become an engineer, and they can then go on without being saddled with hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt, and move forward in their life.

Bacon: So you touched on the issue that’s in the conversation, which is that faculty lean left. Or, I think it’s more accurate to say faculty in surveys tend to vote for Democrats over Republicans. I think that’s an accurate thing to say.

Wolfson: That’s what the surveys say, yes.

Bacon: Exactly. That’s what the surveys say. So I guess I would say, to put it—since there’s rarely a Black person who gets to talk about this subject in public. So I would say, I’m part of three groups that vote for Democrats mostly. I’m part of a family of African Americans, so at Thanksgiving there are a few Trump voters. I’ve been to Black churches. There are very few Trump voters there. I’m also a journalist. Very few Trump voters in either of those three groups.

I reject the idea that there is no ideological diversity in those groups. There is plenty of heated debate in those groups, among charter schools or public schools or private schools or other things too. There just isn’t a lot of debate about, should we revote for the party that doesn’t feel like Black people or trans people are human beings. That’s not a great question of debate here.

So I’m not sure what to do with this point about—and also, to me, when I read about, we need to have a program at universities that means hire more Republicans, they’re basically announcing, we’re going to hire fewer Black faculty, because those are related facts. And so I’m not su—but at the same time, I’m not going to reject the—I do think most journalists and most faculty tend to vote for Democrats, but I don’t think that—I think that says something about the Republican Party, not about those people. But I don’t know how you feel about what I just said. Does that seem right?

Wolfson: Look, yeah. If you read Project 2025, there’s a couple interesting things in it. One is that, yeah, of course, if you get a bachelor’s degree, you’re more likely to vote Democrat. So the more education, the more likely you are to see through a very thin veneer of, like, interest in you, which is really self-interest, which I think drives the Republican Party, at least the one that inhabits the White House right now.

Also, if you read Project 2025, they’re like—no, let’s be honest, they don’t say white, but basically the idea is, if you’re white and you get a college degree and you’re a woman, you’re likely to have 1.2 children. But if you’re white and you don’t get a college degree, you have 1.9, right? And so the white replacement stuff is here.

And so the Republicans are attacking higher ed because they don’t think it’s in the interest of their vision of a white—at least this current administration. I’m not going to say every Republican is not a white nationalist. I’m not claiming that. But the Project 2025 was an instantiation of that. And so I think their attack on higher ed is based on that.

But to pull it back, yeah, sure, maybe 70 percent of faculty vote Democrat. But as you saw with our endorsement of Abdul El-Sayed, there was, like, 90 million different people coming out of the woodwork saying what a ridiculous position we were taking, how we had undermined the integrity of the organization, blah, blah, blah. We can go on.

And so there’s a massive, like, ideological diversity within academia. Extreme ideological diversity. But yeah, people are less likely to vote for Republicans. But still—again, does it really matter if you’re voting for a Republican or Democrat if you’re teaching a kid about string theory? I really don’t understand why that matters. Or you’re teaching someone how to be a better nurse, or you’re teaching—I just—yes, sure, there are politics-proper subjects, and certainly those subjects lean to the left.

But also, there’s all these new civic centers that have popped up, one being in West Virginia, where they forced West Virginia University to have a civic, like, Republican-ish constitutional values center. One student, one student was willing to take the courses in that program. You can’t force ideological diversity either, right? It has to emerge in a productive, fertile way.

Bacon: All right, so we talked about primaries. Now the general election. I think the general election objection is different. The objection is that, A, faculty should be objective—AAUP—and also, B, you’re reinforcing this perception, because I assume your endorsements will generally be Democrats, so you’re reinforcing. I’m sure there’s some Republican somewhere who loves higher ed. Please show up.

Wolfson: Please show up, yes.

Bacon: But that said, you’re probably going to endorse Democrats, so you’re reinforcing the perception that professors are Democrats. So I think the good faith critique is, this does—people already know the faculty is for Democrats. Don’t announce it and therefore reinforce this stereotype. How do you respond to that?

Wolfson: I respond quite simply. The last couple years under Trump, but then the last fifty or sixty years, we were silent about our politics, right? And it didn’t go all that well for us.

Bacon: We being the professorate as a group, you mean, not individual professors.

Wolfson: Yeah. Yes, that’s—not individuals, but AAUP.

But let me also say this, that AFT or SEIU or any other number of unions that represent professors endorse in their name all the time.

So that’s one thing that just needs to be flagged. But just with respect to us, AAUP, we did not endorse, and it has not gone all that well for us, right? And sure, I could sit on the sideline when Vance says that professors are the enemy, and I could sit on the sideline when Trump or Russell Vought are deciding that they’re not going to allow us to get our grants for cancer research and Alzheimer’s research. I can sit on the sidelines when they’re snatching up my students because of editorials they don’t like that are being written. But it’s not working out for us.

And so to me, it’s time to try something new, which is, we are a union, we have 60,000 members, I am accountable to my members, and I want to engage politics proper to fight to build the vision for a higher education system that I think would be a foundation to a democracy. And so that’s what we’re going to do. And if we learn in ten to twenty years that things accelerated and got so much worse, then fine, well, made a mistake. We’ll have to analyze it. But I could tell you that the last fifty years tell me that sitting on the sidelines hasn’t really worked all that well for us.

Bacon: You all made your endorsement around the time when the people in my field—another field that sort of struggles with this, the right is saying we’re biased. We were having a dinner with Donald Trump on a Friday night, honoring him as a defender of journalism or something.

And so to me it was like, OK, journalism has been—the Republicans are undermining journalism. We’re still pretending as if they’re objective to it. I actually thought what you did made a lot of sense. Like, the academics are recognizing the threat to them and thinking about how to behave differently. The last fifty years have not gone well. Let’s not have another fifty years like this.

Wolfson: To me, it’s almost alien to—I can understand the argument that’s being made. But it’s almost, somebody is actually attacking you, your livelihood, your sector, and you’re not supposed to stand up and say, “No, enough. What we do is valuable. Universities and colleges are valuable. We’re going to fight so that they’re central to a democracy.” It’s alien to me.

And so it’s really hard for me to think through how that position holds water in the face of Donald Trump, Russell Vought, Chris Rufo, JD Vance, and their attack on our higher education system.

Bacon: Now, I don’t have a good sense of the story you’re experiencing. I live in Kentucky, so I see the red state story of—you’ve mentioned DeSantis. Every red state is the same story of, the Republican governors are trying to ban anybody from studying sociology, film studies, anything like that, roll back on tenure.

I went to Yale, and I’m following the various colleges and how the administrators are trying to fight, trying to defund or threaten any college. But you’re at Rutgers, so public college, blue state. So what’s the story been like there for you, and schools like that?

Wolfson: Yeah, I think even safe, relatively safe public blue state universities, when Trump first got into office, when he was, like, running around bull in a china shop and trying to knock over everything in his way, they were even scared, and they were like, Let’s just keep our heads down. Anybody who has DEI on their website, talking about diversity, equity, and inclusion, or critical race theory, you’re going to scrub that, right? And so—

Bacon: Not get fired, but scrub that from your website. There’s a difference between keeping your job and just, you know—

Wolfson: Yeah, you don’t get fired, but you’re going to scrub it from your website, and we’re going to keep our heads down.

And unfortunately, the thing about our universities and colleges and the leadership of them is that they have been caught in a pretty rough bind. And so I’m not happy with them, but I’m sympathetic to them. And the rough bind is this, right? You’re the president of Columbia University, and Donald Trump says to you, Look, I’m snatching $400 million out of your biomedical research infrastructure, for research you’re doing on diabetes and Alzheimer’s and X, Y, and Z, because there is antisemitism in the university—which I’m not going to substantiate, but I’m going to say it’s there.

And so you’re the president, and you’re forced into a bind, and the bind is this: do I fight for higher education as a whole, right, and protect the institutional autonomy of Columbia University? Or do I fight for the financial wellbeing of Columbia University? And so it was a hard bind they were caught in.

But unfortunately, the majority of the leadership of our universities—not the entirety, but the majority—made the choice to their fiduciary responsibility of their institution over their responsibility to higher education and democracy writ large. And so again, he caught them in a tough bind. He’s a bully. And unfortunately, though, we saw far too many kneel to that dynamic.

Bacon: You said more endorsements are coming. So I’d be curious what you mean by that, because my guess is the Democrat running in Alaska who didn’t want Kamala Harris’s endorsement may not be dying for yours either, candidly. So I’d be curious, is it governors, senators, mayors? Is it swing states?

Wolfson: Yeah, I’ll tell you what we’re looking at, a state where it’s very obvious. I think we’re mostly going to—not entirely, we may engage in state races, but we’ll mostly engage in federal races this time around, as we’re building up our muscles, learning to do this. And so there are really two criteria we’re looking at.

One is swing states where we have a lot of density and could actually maybe potentially impact a race, where the candidate is speaking some of our language. They don’t have to be perfect, but they have to speak some of our language, and they can’t denigrate higher education.

That’s one category, of either Congress or congressional races, senatorial races. And then the other set of races are going to be in probably safe districts, where the people are really coming out and making a free public system central to their vision of a democratic society. And so those would be champions, right?

People who are going to champion higher ed, talk about free public higher education as critical moving forward, an end to contingency, fully funded HBCUs, MSIs, fully funded biomedical research infrastructure. Those are the things we want. An end to student debt. And then the other half will be places where we can actually impact a race and project some power.

Bacon: Do you have two or three you’re considering you can name, or you want to stay away from that right now?

Wolfson: I’m going to stay away from it now, because I don’t want to get in front of my members.

Bacon: Of course. And does it matter if your local endorses, or is it set up that way where the locals—

Wolfson: Absolutely matters. We will not be going and stepping on our locals. We will be working with them and growing through with them. So we have locals. We, AAUP’s a pretty interesting beast, because we have 600 campuses where we have membership. And we have about 100 of them, we have collective bargaining rights. And so 100 campuses, more or less, we have collective bargaining rights, but that makes up 40 some odd thousand faculty members in AAUP.

And then on the other 500 campuses, we don’t have collective bargaining rights. We have what you would call advocacy chapters, where they don’t get to negotiate, which is spread across 500 campuses, and it’s about another 20,000 members. And our locals have been endorsing candidates for office for decades upon decades. But our advocacy chapters haven’t.

Bacon: What percentage of university faculty are in AAUP?

Wolfson: I don’t know. That’s a good question. I would say it’s probably, overall, with the unionization rates in higher ed around 20, 25 percent. And faculty are so hard to enumerate now, because so many are temporary adjunct faculty. It’s a good question, and I should know the answer to that, but I don’t. But 20 to 25 percent of overall higher ed workers are unionized.

Bacon: You’ve been hinting at, and you’ve been saying, “I’m going to talk about our vision.” So what’s your vision for higher ed? You mention HBCUs, you mention free public, but lay out, what does AAUP see as what it wants higher education to look like in the United States?

Wolfson: Yeah. Our vision overall is that a robust democracy demands a robust free public higher education system, right?

Bacon: Does that mean free for everybody? Free for most students? What does that free mean? What do you want?

Wolfson: For me, it should be a universal right. I think we would have to win over a question of means testing with some of our allies who are elected. But to me, I want it to be universal.

Bacon: Like a universal public library.

Wolfson: Yes. And I really want to go back and fix the 1.8 trillion in debt that our students owe. But really, I think for us, there’s this vision of education and higher education as a central, if not the central, pillar to a healthy and robust democracy, where people are learning, where we’re engaging in critical questions, where if you get laid off at 35 as a lawyer, because now people are having Claude write their contracts that you could go back and you could get re-educated and find a way forward, and our universities become a place to support and grow through that very difficult time, which I think is coming. And I think we should really be honest about that.

And so to me, it’s not a laundry list of, we want a free public system, we want the sort of investment through wealth taxes that enable that system. We want fully funded HBCUs and MSIs and HSIs, minority-serving institutions and Hispanic-serving institutions, and also tribal colleges and universities. But we also really want a robust research infrastructure. The great post-World War II deal in the United States that really drove our innovation was a partnership between the federal government and colleges and universities.

And the deal was that we pay the universities and colleges, we have labs, we develop those labs, but the federal government funds critical research. And it’s the reason why—we don’t have a great healthcare system, it’s not good for the majority of us, but what we do have is the greatest healthcare research and innovation, and it comes out of our colleges and universities.

Our pharmaceutical companies would not do the primary research necessary that enables the breakthroughs that come, whether it’s cancer, Alzheimer’s, or any other number of things, Ozempic. They wouldn’t do the primary research necessary, because they don’t see the primary research as a return on investment. And so we need that relationship to grow. A thick, heavily funded research infrastructure, not only for healthcare, but for all untold number of things, and a place that’s a learning society. So that’s the real vision that we have. And I really believe we’re biting off our nose to spite our face when we undermine our great public education system as a public good, whether it’s K-12 or higher education.

And so that’s a vision for the society we have, which I would counter to the vision that Trump is putting out. The vision Trump is putting out, and his administration, is one that says—what did he say, six months ago? “I can’t pay for people’s early childhood learning. But what I can pay for is more bombs.” And that’s not the society I believe in. It’s not even the United States I was born into. And the United States—I was born in the ‘70s, I’m not going to say it was some great place for equity and diversity and for the working class, et cetera.

But what I can say is, it wasn’t cruel like it is today. The cruelty wasn’t this externalized. And so I really think we want to fight for a learning society. We want to make public education free. We want debt-free pathways for people who go to private universities. And we want to build a society, rebuild in the ashes of what this president has done, in a way that’s good for all of us.

Bacon: Todd Wolfson, I’m excited about what you’re doing. Thanks for doing it. Thanks for joining me. Where can people find your thoughts and your work?

Wolfson: Go to aaup.org, please. And if you’re anywhere in higher education, please join us. Whatever campus, we want to build with you. We want to fight for your issues on your campuses, and we want to build with our students, all the students across this country, and staff, and build a system that reflects the greatness of our democracy.

Bacon: Todd, thanks for joining me. I appreciate it. Good to see you.

Wolfson: Thank you, Perry. I really appreciate it.

Bacon: Bye-bye.

There are few political topics that Governors Kathy Hochul and Greg Abbott would likely agree on. But data centers might be one of them. On August 3, Texas Governor Greg Abbott announced a moratorium on Texas data centers (which had been growing at breakneck pace) until they could be effectively audited by the state’s energy regulators. Just over a fortnight beforehand, New York Governor Kathy Hochul signed a statewide moratorium on new hyperscale data centers, partially to build a framework that ensured new developments did not drive up electricity costs for ratepayers and that benefits could be better negotiated with local communities.

There are some significant contrasts between the two governors’ moves. New York’s moratorium lasts for a full year, whereas Texas’s will only last as long as it takes regulators to “conduct a comprehensive verification and audit of all data centers.” But the wider signal both show is clear: Across party lines Americans really, really do not like data centers, and leaders—whether at state, local, or federal level—are rushing to introduce regulation that controls their growth.

The AI industry now finds itself in a bind. By continuing to build out data centers, it risks exacerbating a growing populist anger, spurred in no small part by the incredibly tone-deaf nature of the AI industry’s early marketing. This populist anger is now reflected in legislation being introduced, such as a federal data center moratorium bill, introduced by Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez  or Senator Josh Hawley co-sponsoring a bill designed to prevent data centers from driving up electricity costs. It’s also reflected in the rhetoric of political candidates such as Michigan Democratic Senate hopeful Abdul El-Sayed, who is both angry and suspicious about the opaque way in which the AI industry has approached the data center buildout.

“There’s been so little transparency on the part of the [Big Tech] corporations themselves,” El-Sayed said in July. “It has raised the hackles of folks who’ve learned not to trust a lot of these bigger corporations when they tell them everything’s going to be OK.”

At the same time, AI already exists and has demonstrated significant capability, whether by solving decades-old math problems or (more worryingly), hacking into an AI model repository of its own accord. If you restrict the data center build out, you restrict the computing power behind this technology, artificially choking the supply and driving up the price so that the only people who can afford it would be major technology firms and corporations. This, ironically, could lead to the same sort of social stratification that Sanders has repeatedly warned about—a world in which billionaires and tech oligarchs have access to revolutionary technology the rest simply can’t afford.

The AI industry may look at this bind and be tempted to solve it with a tried-and-tested tactic used by previous industries to great success: offshoring.

In order to function effectively, data centers need a few key things from a location: land, access to power, proximity to users, latency, and—ideally—a politically pliant local environment. And there is one region near the U.S. that offers this in abundance.

Latin America draws more than half of its electricity from renewables. Land is cheap and plentiful. The proximity to U.S. borders gives Mexican data centers competitive levels of latency, and for countries further afield, a new series of undersea cables is adding further connectivity. Finally, the region’s political tailwinds increasingly favor right-leaning, deregulation-friendly leaders such as Chile’s José Antonio Kast (inaugurated March 2026) and Colombia’s Abelardo de la Espriella (inaugurated August 2026).

The numbers indicate that U.S. Big Tech companies see the potential here. Brazil’s hyperscale data center market is expected to double to $6.46 billion from 2025 to 2030. In 2024, Google announced a new data center in Uruguay worth approximately $850 million. According to Mexico Business News, installed data center capacity increased 142 percent between 2024 and 2026 (primarily in the central region of Querétaro) with major US hyperscale operators like Microsoft, AWS, and CloudHQ—which announced a new data center campus in the region worth $4.8 billion last September—all investing heavily. It’s unrealistic to expect all of America’s data centers to pack up and move south of the border. But the above examples show that this offshoring clearly represents an at least partial escape from the populist anger that has been brewing in the United States.

For Latin America, this investment is a double-edged sword. Barring a few bespoke, small-scale projects, the region has minimal homegrown frontier AI capability, meaning it needs to attract the investment of U.S. big tech companies—primarily via data centers—in order to keep pace with the AI boom. Alternative partners are limited: doing business with Chinese AI firms is possible in theory, but geopolitically fraught given Washington’s posture toward the region. This leaves U.S. firms as the most viable near-term option. But that lack of alternatives means that countries in the region cannot afford to question the corporate opacity which has, in the U.S., been the focus of so much local ire.

This opacity is already partially on display in Querétaro, Mexico, where residents and local reporting have linked data center growth to increased blackouts and water restrictions. Whether data centers are the sole driver of these maladies, or merely exacerbating aging infrastructure, remains contested. What is not in dispute is the information gap: While data center operators claim that new technology has significantly reduced water usage, they are not obligated to publish publicly verifiable information about this or electricity use. According to a 2025 report from the International Energy Agency, Mexico currently does not have reporting requirements for data center emissions, electricity consumption, or power usage/water usage effectiveness.

A similar opacity is present in the social sustainability programs launched by some U.S. tech companies. For instance, between 2021 and 2022, Microsoft partnered with the UN-Habitat to figure out how to improve conditions for rural communities in Querétaro, but further media reporting found those projects were left incomplete with no explanation.

There have also been repeated incidents of data centers being planned and built without the Free, Prior Informed Consent, or FPIC, of Indigenous communities whose land is impacted by the development, a right guaranteed under international law. This led to significant backlash in Chile in 2024, where Indigenous leaders likened the construction of a new Google facility to a “saqueo” (“plunder”). A similar case is also currently underway in Brazil, where Indigenous leaders from the northwestern state of Ceará say they were not consulted before construction of a data center on their land.

Finally, there is the issue of outsourcing AI infrastructure. Data centers are usually classified as either hyperscalers or co-locators. The former owns both the building and the computing, while the latter leases out just the building. This is an important distinction:  While hyperscalers are actively building in Latin America, there are also a host of co-locator companies like Equinix and Digital Realty, who lease the facility, insulating the U.S. tech company from complaints about water, electricity, and land. This mirrors issues we see regularly in our work on global supply chains at the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights: Outsourced projects that do not include concrete human rights safeguards, including guarantees of transparency and effective monitoring structures, can result in both serious harms and the disruption of supply.

This dynamic, in which a U.S. company makes grand promises alongside a level of corporate opaqueness, is not an unfamiliar one in Latin America. From the 1960s and accelerating through to the 1980s, U.S. manufacturers built cheap assembly lines along the border (commonly referred to as maquiladoras), where Mexico supplied the raw labor but the profits flowed north. An offshoring of U.S. data centers to Latin America risks repeating a version of this dynamic across the region for the digital age, swapping the extraction of cheap labor for the extraction of land, water, and electricity.

There have been attempts by regional governments to regulate the growth of data centers. Brazil’s REDATA program, for instance, aims to tie tax incentives to clean energy commitments and allocate 10 percent of each center’s processing capacity to the domestic market. But regulation is only half the battle. By its very nature, it is slow—REDATA was introduced last September and is still under debate. The aforementioned technological asymmetry between U.S. tech firms and Latin American countries, coupled with the footloose nature of the industry, means that it would be easy to pit rival countries against each other for data center investment.

The responsibility then falls on U.S. tech firms to look at the backlash they’ve received domestically, take those lessons, and apply them to all their data center infrastructure projects globally, not just the ones that receive the most eyeballs at home. The tools already exist. In January 2026, for instance, Microsoft launched its Community-First AI Infrastructure Plan, promising to pay its full power costs—so its data centers wouldn’t raise local electricity bills—and to train local workers. In March, it went further, announcing that it would stop default use of nondisclosure agreements that kept communities in the dark over data center proposals.

These plans are good starts, but if companies like Microsoft truly believe that AI is a tool for all humanity and that the global south should share in the AI dividends, then they need to apply their data center lessons globally and not just locally. If that were the case, AI could be a technology that has a genuinely globally transformative capacity. Otherwise, these companies would simply be repeating the colonialist, extractivist business dynamics of the last century, just with a new digital branding.

Twelve Democratic attorneys general, including California’s Rob Bonta, filed a lawsuit last month to block the acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery Inc. by Paramount Skydance Corporation. Trying to force Bonta and the other attorneys general to drop the lawsuit, Paramount is threatening to move its operations out of the state of California. So now prominent Democrats, most notably Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, gubernatorial candidate Xavier Becerra, and Governor Gavin Newsom, are publicly urging Bonta to quickly cut a deal with Paramount. (A scheduled meeting between Bonta and Paramount leaders on Monday was postponed.) 

Pathetic. The undermining of Bonta and lack of forceful opposition to this merger by many top Democrats is the latest example of a center-left party establishment that refuses to fully embrace economic populism, constantly capitulates rather than fighting the right, and fails to understand its true enemies. No wonder Democrats have spent the last decade losing elections and policy fights to Donald Trump and the MAGA right.  

Let’s start with economic populism. We are in an era of massive income inequality. The superrich not only hold a higher percentage of the nation’s wealth than in decades but are using that money to dominate politics and other parts of our society. Corporate mergers help the super-wealthy by making industries less competitive, giving workers and consumers fewer choices. That’s why Joe Biden, hardly a radical lefty, appointed people skeptical of corporate mergers to a number of key posts. 

Having two of the biggest companies in film and television and other parts of the entertainment industry merge will almost certainly be a great deal for the shareholders of Paramount and Warner Bros.—and terrible for everyone else. Paramount is threatening to move up to 30,000 jobs from California if Bonta blocks this merger. But if the merger happens, there will likely be even more economic pain. No matter what Paramount claims now, the company will almost certainly cut thousands of jobs, including in California, if this merger is approved. That’s what merged companies always do—fire staffers whose jobs overlap even slightly. 

And no matter what Paramount claims now, the prices that consumers, including those in California, pay for streaming channels, movies, and other products currently offered by the two companies will almost certainly go up. That’s another thing merged companies do—take advantage of the shrunken market to charge higher prices.

In 2026, the position of anyone who cares about making the U.S. economy work for average Americans and protecting American democracy by limiting the outsize power and wealth of the superrich should be strong, reflexive opposition to mergers of the biggest companies in virtually any industry. So why don’t Bass, Becerra, and Newsom, some of the most prominent Democrats in the country, have that position? 

I suspect because they, like many other Democratic politicians, haven’t adjusted to the realities of today’s political economy. Politicians, particularly governors and mayors, have traditionally worked hard to keep companies in their communities, because they provide jobs and tax revenue. But Paramount isn’t a normal company. It’s a megacorporation. And it’s not asking California for a break on its taxes but for the state to accept a merger that will dramatically worsen several different industries.

Massive, billionaire-owned companies like Paramount aren’t going to subject themselves to the whims of elected officials or even the public. They don’t really believe in democracy. That’s why other such companies are trying to build AI data centers despite massive public opposition. Bass, Newsom, and other Democratic politicians must stop pretending to negotiate or appeal to the goodwill of these mega-companies and billionaires. Instead, they should emphatically join with Bonta and others to oppose these kinds of mergers, hoping to either stop them or require concessions that limit the size and scale of the new combined entities. 

Adopting an anti-merger mindset in 2026 doesn’t require you to be a socialist or even a progressive. It’s just common sense. Does anyone want another monopoly-ish company like Google, Microsoft, or Amazon, except for their shareholders? Hell no. 

So Bass, Newsom, Becerra, and anyone who calls themselves a liberal should be opposed to mergers of huge companies these days. But they should especially be opposed to mergers that place David Ellison in charge of more news organizations. Ellison, who runs Paramount and would helm the merged company, hired Bari Weiss to run CBS News. She’s firing stellar journalists, hiring terrible ones, blocking news segments that accurately depict the horrific actions of our authoritarian president, and single-handedly dismantling 60 Minutes. Ellison just published a disingenuous op-ed in The New York Times pretending that Weiss’s actions at CBS are good journalism and suggesting CNN would benefit from a similar approach if the merger happens. (CNN is owned by Warner Bros.) 

I know we are in an era when the audiences and influence of traditional media are in decline. But CBS and CNN still matter. They employ a ton of journalists. They have the budgets to allow those journalists to report stories in depth. What they cover and don’t cover shapes what people see on social media. It would be a huge blow to both democracy and the Democrats if Weiss spends the next few years ordering CNN’s journalists to cover Democratic presidential candidates more negatively than they deserve while soft-pedaling the foibles of JD Vance, Marco Rubio, and other Republican 2028 hopefuls. The prospect of Weiss and Ellison controlling CNN alone should be enough for Democrats like Bass and Becerra to strongly oppose this merger. 

So why aren’t they making this case? The Democratic Party is, well, stupid about the media. The party for decades ignored how the GOP was tilting news coverage to the right by both creating a conservative media ecosystem and blasting the mainstream media as liberally biased. Over the last year, even as liberal journalists have repeatedly pointed out how Weiss is changing CBS, Democratic politicians continue to appear on the network as if nothing has changed. 

In reality, Weiss and Ellison are bigger threats to the Democratic Party than most Republican politicians. Viewers probably ignore anti-Democratic talking points coming from GOP members of Congress. In contrast, having prominent, trusted anchors constantly cast Democratic politicians as crazy and antisemitic, a hallmark of CBS coverage these days, is hugely valuable to the GOP. 

Even if Bass, Newsom, Becerra, and other Democrats aren’t wary of corporate mergers or a Weiss-run CNN, surely they could let Bonta and the other attorneys general do their legal work first? After all, Bonta’s threats to take the merger case to trial would seem more credible (and therefore more fertile ground for a settlement on his terms) if his state’s most prominent Democrats weren’t undercutting him. That brings me to my third point. If you have watched Biden, Hakeem Jeffries, or Chuck Schumer over the last decade, you’ve seen this “let me show how reasonable I am” negotiation style full of rhetorical and actual concessions to the other side. Many Democratic politicians are uncomfortable with real fights and are desperate to avoid them. Advantage GOP, and in this case, David Ellison. 

There is some good news here. Bonta canceled the meeting with Paramount, accusing the company of leaking confidential information about the negotiations. The attorney general does not seem afraid of this fight. He gets it. The problem is so many other Democratic politicians don’t. It would be terrible if a billionaire who has spent the last two years doing everything possible to appease Donald Trump gets to buy HBO and CNN and fire hundreds or even thousands of entertainment industry employees. It would be even worse if David Ellison gets to do all of that in part because Karen Bass, Xavier Becerra, and Gavin Newsom basically laid the groundwork for him.