The New Republic

President Trump threatened Washington, D.C. mayoral front-runner and Democratic Socialist Janeese Lewis George with a federal takeover if she were to win next week’s primary.

“Here in Washington, D.C., there’s a Democratic primary for mayor. One of the two leading candidates, Janeese Lewis George, is running a Zohran Mamdani campaign—focused on socialist policies,” Trump was asked at a Thursday afternoon press conference. “How would you feel if she emerged victorious?”

“Well I wouldn’t like it. Maybe we’ll take back Washington and run it on a federal basis,” Trump responded bluntly. “We won’t put up with it. We’re not gonna lose our businesses.”

Q: Here in Washington DC, there's a Democratic primary for mayor. One of the two leading candidates is running a Zohran Mamdani campaign focusing on socialist policies. How would you feel if she wins?

TRUMP: Maybe we take back Washington and run it on a federal basis. We won't… pic.twitter.com/H3E69bXzdW

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 11, 2026

Lewis George responded on X.

“We are not going to get ICE off our streets or protect Home Rule by fearing this President. Threatening DC because you do not like how our residents vote is an attack on democracy itself,” she wrote. “The people of DC elect the Mayor of DC. And they want someone who will stand up to Trump.”

While the extent of Trump’s threat is unclear, he is no stranger to “federal takeovers” of the nation’s capital. He instituted one last summer, which current Mayor Muriel Bowser largely cooperated with. As for home rule, Trump would need 60 Senate votes to end it—something he’ll likely never have in this term.

The president’s preference for who fills the Office of the Director of National Intelligence reportedly comes down to a casual disregard for the role in its entirety.

Donald Trump tapped Jay Clayton, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, on Thursday as his pick for Tulsi Gabbard’s permanent replacement. It was a shocking about-face for the typically stubborn commander in chief: Trump had earlier this week doubled down on his temporary pick for the job, real estate developer Bill Pulte, though his nomination quickly became a headache in Congress.

Lawmakers argued that Pulte’s appointment, even just as acting DNI, was effectively illegal, as his resume lacked requirements for the job that had been written into the law.

To prevent Pulte becoming permanent DNI, Democrats blocked efforts to renew FISA Section 702, a statute that allows federal agencies such as the NSA and the CIA to surveil people without warrants, which is set to expire Friday.

Clayton rose to the top of a second round of considerations to, in part, “quell all the bitching,” one administration official told Politico Friday.

Other Hill staffers speculated to the publication that Trump may not have understood—or cared about—the tight timeline that Congress was facing with regard to the FISA section renewal. The whole ordeal may have just been another irritant to a president that has little interest in the office.

Trump has “always hated the ODNI role,” one Capitol Hill aide told Politico.

If he passes muster with the FBI and the Senate, Clayton will enter ODNI with zero relevant experience in national security. He has previously worked as a partner at Sullivan & Cromwell, providing counsel on corporate crisis management. He was also an adjunct professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s law school. He was similarly handed his role atop the Southern District of New York without any prosecutorial experience.

Yet Clayton has passed countless litmus tests proving his loyalty to the MAGA movement. He has seeded doubt in America’s election integrity, defended Trump’s $1.8 billion taxpayer-bankrolled slush fund for the president’s aggrieved political allies, and unquestioningly done the president’s bidding in the Southern District of New York.

Former Attorney General Pam Bondi tasked Clayton with probing Jeffrey Epstein’s social connections—so long as they tied back to former Democratic President Bill Clinton, former Obama administration adviser Larry Summers, and Democratic donor Reid Hoffman.

President Donald Trump and his allies are plotting to push Congress to void his past two impeachments from the record—even though it’s not constitutionally possible.

A measure to expunge Trump’s 2019 and 2021 impeachments likely wouldn’t be considered until after the midterm elections, people familiar with the matter told The Wall Street Journal Thursday night.

“It should be done because I did nothing wrong,” Trump told the Journal. “It was a rigged deal—it was a whole rigged situation.”

Experts said that the resolution would have little legal weight considering that the Constitution has no mechanism for expunging impeachments, and Republican lawmakers noted that it wouldn’t be easy to get enough support to pass the bill.

The president’s plan to erase his impeachments gained new momentum in April, after the Trump administration published new documents related to his first impeachment that MAGA claimed undermined the credibility of the witnesses.

In a show of fealty, California Representative Darrell Issa introduced legislation to have Trump’s impeachments “expunged as if such Articles had never passed the full House of Representatives.” Issa has claimed the president was “wrongfully accused” of the crimes that had him impeached.

House Speaker Mike Johnson has taken up that mantle this time around. “I think it makes a lot of sense the more the evidence comes out, the more we know they really were sham impeachments,” he told the Journal. “They make a very compelling case that it should be expunged from the record, because it was a hyper-partisan attack job.”

Johnson said that wiping Trump’s impeachment record was “not an order of first priority” but it was a priority all the same.

In the case of his 2019 impeachment, there is a literal transcript of Trump’s phone call to the Ukrainian government demanding they dig up dirt on Joe Biden ahead of the 2020 election. As for his second impeachment, the president most certainly incited an insurrection on January 6, 2021.

Issa’s measure has attracted 23 co-sponsors, but not every Republican seems interested in getting on board. Representative Don Bacon of Nebraska, who is retiring, suggested it was political suicide for his party. “Maybe they’ve given up on holding the majority? It’s silly. What happened is history.”

But his impeachments are clearly still a sore spot for the grievance-addled president. On Thursday, Trump posted a lengthy screed attacking Representative Jamie Raskin, who led the House’s legal effort to impeach the president in 2021.

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the June 12 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.

CNN reports that Donald Trump is “furious” because his bombings of Iran this week were not portrayed by the media as strong and powerful. He’s apparently “frustrated,” according to CNN sources, who are clearly leaking out of concern for his mental state. On another front entirely, Trump is smashing new records in the polling. He’s reaching new thresholds on inflation. Thanks to Trump, Democrats may now be leading Republicans by a key polling metric for the first time in many decades.

We think these stories should all be connected to each other. The rage and frustration over Iran is basically rage and frustration over his political situation, because the former is causing the latter. He’s in a political bind we don’t think we’ve ever seen before.

So we’re parsing through all this new data and new Trump lunacy with Democratic strategist Christina Reynolds, who has worked on a lot of midterms and can explain how all this is playing on the ground. Christina, thanks for coming on.

Christina Reynolds: Thanks for having me.

Sargent: So let’s start here. CNN polling analyst Harry Enten made a point I haven’t heard before. He said Trump is the only president ever to hit a net approval on inflation of negative 50 points. And he’s done this in many polls. Listen to Enten.

Harry Enten (voiceover): Inflation net approval: minus 50 points or worse. Fifty points underwater or worse. Total polls per president. Trump in 2026—already at least eight polls in which his net approval rating on inflation or the cost of living is negative 50 points or worse. Every other president in every other year, the answer is zero.

Sargent: So just to reiterate, in eight polls, Trump has hit a net approval on inflation of negative 50 points. No other president has ever done that. Christina, I don’t think I’ve seen polling quite this bad on the economy for a president ever! As long as I’ve been following politics! Maybe something under George W. Bush? I don’t know. What do you think?

Reynolds: I don’t think it was this bad. I worked at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in ’06, and we took back the House. Bush was certainly not a popular president at that time. But these are numbers that I would send back to the pollster and say, Can you double-check? I don’t know that I’ve seen numbers this bad.

Republicans have an even bigger problem than those numbers. They have a president who absolutely wants credit for fixing everything. He believes his own spin, certainly, but also he believes he’s taken action and should get credit for that action. That happens with a lot of politicians, but this president is especially guilty of that. He is not going to fade away into the background, which Bush did largely in 2006. He is not going to let the Republicans go out and shift the conversation.

Not that they would be able to shift the conversation. When inflation is growing higher than your wages, voters understand that. They know it. They live it. You can’t convince them things are better when they’re literally not. But Trump is not just going to go out and talk about things and remind voters of that—he’s going to go out and talk about his ballroom. He’s going to go out and talk about the reflecting pool, as he did in Wisconsin when he went to one of the most vulnerable Republicans. So this is a huge problem for Republicans. It’s not just the polling number, it’s what Trump’s going to do because of the polling number.

Sargent: You raise a really interesting point there, which is that Donald Trump isn’t being at all accommodating of the situation that Republicans find themselves in. They’ve urged him to try to talk about the economy in a way that makes it look as if he understands what people are going through and makes it look as if he’s doing stuff. But he won’t do that, because it makes him look like a failure.

Since everything has to always be about his lionization, his glorious greatness, he just says, I don’t care about inflation, or, Affordability’s a hoax. There’s no sensitivity or awareness of the situation the rest of his party is in, in any sense.

Reynolds: Absolutely not. That is counter to George Bush. It’s counter to what Nancy Pelosi did when she was House Speaker and understood that some people were going to speak out against her. As long as she had the votes, she was OK. There’s some level of what gets the party, what gets the values that you support where you need to go. And Trump is about what gets Trump where he needs to go. It’s a huge problem for Republicans.

You heard it in the “I don’t care about the midterms” comment. You hear it in everything that he does. If I was a Republican, I would want him to take a back seat on things outside of maybe fundraising. He’s doing the exact opposite. If you’re a Republican and you’re forced to stand up there and praise him for gold-plating the White House, that’s a pretty tough campaign ask.

Sargent: That’s really interesting. By the way, Harry Enten also notes that, according to his calculations, Democrats are more trusted on inflation than Republicans for the first time since the 1970s. Enten also notes that Trump is the only president to ever hit 80 percent disapproval on gas prices. Eighty percent disapproval on gas prices! Trump is just crushing records all over the place. I swear I have not seen numbers like this, ever.

Reynolds: No, me neither. It’s pretty impressive when you think about it. It also is a sign that you can’t pull the wool over voters’ eyes on things like this. Everyone goes to the gas station. Everyone has to deal with the prices going up because of gas prices.

You can’t fool them. Trump talking the way he does and acknowledging that it’s OK, but it’ll get better, doesn’t help them now. He’s really leaving Republicans in a rough spot.

Sargent: It’s really extraordinary. So all this is key context for what’s coming next. CNN’s Dana Bash reports that sources are saying Trump is, quote-unquote, “furious.” Why? Because after Trump struck Iran this week, the media didn’t view his action as powerful enough.

Dana Bash also reports that Trump is “frustrated” that Iran didn’t seem to be taking the strike seriously. Amazing.

So now Trump is saying that he won’t strike Iran again because they’re now close to a deal. He says—maybe by the time people listen to this, there will be a deal. Maybe not. I don’t think so, because he’s now talking about this weekend. But put that aside. I want to focus on the connection between Trump’s rage and his terrible polls.

The reason Trump is angry isn’t just because Iran won’t do his bidding. It’s that by not doing Trump’s bidding and keeping the Strait of Hormuz closed, Iran has him cornered. It’s driving up prices, destroying his numbers, and destroying GOP midterm hopes. The anger and the polling are connected in that sense, right, Christina?

Reynolds: Absolutely they are. His frustration is coming out in what voters are understanding. It’s one of the reasons he can’t stop talking about things that are incredibly unpopular.

He is just clinically unable to move on because of that rage and that frustration, because it didn’t go the way he assumed it would go. So we are stuck in a war that people didn’t ask for, that we proactively started. But we are domestically stuck with higher gas prices and everything that stems from that.

That’s all because he didn’t get what he wanted, and no one is giving him credit for what he thinks he should get credit for. I am a little baffled as to what he thinks he should get credit for at this point, but no one is giving him any credit. They are giving him, rightly, the blame. He can’t handle that.

Sargent: I think that’s exactly right. He’s in a rage because the media is portraying him as being fundamentally ineffective and unable to resolve the very situation that’s creating the high prices.

By the way, even if he gets a deal—I don’t know, by the time people listen to this, or on the weekend, whenever—even if he gets one, those prices, especially on things like energy and gas, are going to stay up for a long time. As someone who’s worked on midterm elections, how do you anticipate the impact of this playing out on the ground in all these races over the next few months? What’s it going to look like politically?

Reynolds: It’s going to look like a few things. We’re going to see more retirements. We’re seeing that at every level of the ballot, where Republicans are choosing just not to run again in this environment. We’re going to continue to see voters open for a change in surprising places, voters who understand—maybe it’s not forever, maybe we rent some seats for a little while—but they see it’s not working.

Where we have candidates that are out there talking about issues that matter versus a candidate that is forced to talk about a ballroom or to praise a war that they’re not that into, you’re going to continue to see voters give a chance to those candidates.

I think we’re running better candidates, and we have candidates who understand their districts and are willing to take a chance. One big difference in the shift that I’ve seen from 2002 and 2006 to 2018 and now—there’s some power in looking at Donald Trump getting elected for people who are not traditional politicians to say, Maybe I can give it a try. Maybe I can offer something different, or I can connect better with my community. That means we see some interesting candidates out there who offer something different. Different is good in a change electorate.

It’s going to make for some challenging elections for Republicans that they’re not expecting. What also happens in those places, when we expand the field—you have candidates that aren’t used to hard races. You have candidates who got a little lazy.

They have not done their constituent services, they have not gone out and had a tough campaign schedule, versus a candidate that’s new, that’s trying again, that has the fire in their belly. I can tell you which candidate I’d rather work for every time in that scenario.

Sargent: I want to pick up a little bit more on that because we have a piece up at NewRepublic.com right now about American Bridge, which is a Democratic group. They’re investing $50 million in trying to expand the House map. The Senate map as well, but let’s focus on the House for now.

They’re trying to expand the House map by really going into some very difficult districts traditionally for Democrats—ones that lean Republican by four or five, six, seven, eight, that kind of thing. Some of these are in North Carolina, some of them are in central Pennsylvania, some are in Iowa.

But Democrats, not just American Bridge, but as a party generally—it now looks like there’s a new level of commitment to going into harder races, to contesting tougher places and really trying to shake loose whatever can be shaken loose. That’s what happens, right, in an environment like this? If you go contest these races in hard places, things happen. Funny things happen. Surprising things happen.

Reynolds: You expand the field at a time like this because we look at what’s happened since Trump got elected. Since Trump got elected, Democrats have flipped 30 state legislative seats, Republicans have flipped none. Democrats have overperformed in the elections that have happened—a variety of special elections, state legislative elections. Democrats have overperformed in 85 percent of those seats. That number in 2006 was about two-thirds. We’re overperforming all over the place.

You’re going to see it at the House level, you’re going to see it at the state legislative level, where we’re looking for where we can play. Where they have an incumbent that has gotten lazy or is standing with Trump too much against the interests of their people. They have an electorate that’s just a little tired of what’s happening or is particularly impacted by the economy, by gas prices. Ag communities are great examples of this.

You’re going to see this more and more, where organizations, campaigns expand out, and we’re going to pick up some of those seats. The Republicans also have to try and expand their map. And they’re not ready for that. They don’t have the message for that, to actually reach and connect with voters.

Sargent: Fascinating. To bear this all out, we have this new Emerson poll. It has Democrats leading in the generic House ballot matchup by 10 points, 50 percent to 40 percent. That’s 50–40.

Now the polling averages have it a little tighter—50PlusOne, they have it at six points, the average is 49 to 43. But this 10-point poll makes me think that the average could start to widen as well. And if Democrats are up at seven, eight, nine points, you’re looking at a wave.

Where do you think it is right now? Do you think it’s closer to six or do you think it’s closer to 10? And where do you expect the spread to end up this fall?

Reynolds: I am usually a pragmatist, maybe a pessimist. But I think this is going to be a wave election. We spend a lot of time talking about very few candidates, and we miss some of the amazing candidates who are running in races down the ballot.

We have a lot of phenomenal women running around the country who are working-class candidates who’ve been really in their communities. We have a number of people who are doing surprising things on the state level. We have some phenomenal candidates.

Between the environment, between the precedent, and between what Trump’s going to be able to do and how little they are going to be able to control that, and how much they’re going to have to walk with him off that cliff—I feel good about where Democrats are.

One of the reasons that generic ballot is at 10 points right now is we are reminding people—and one of the reasons, most importantly, that Democrats are winning on inflation—is we are reminding people that we understand that costs are important, that there is work that government can do, important work, to help make things a little bit easier for families. Trump is not doing that at all.

That’s part of how he won: communicating with voters and telling them he understood. Now he has moved on to ballrooms, to wars they didn’t ask for, and [saying] these price increases don’t matter.

Sargent: And you’re talking about House candidates when you talk about these working-class women around the country?

Reynolds: House candidates, state legislative candidates, in some cases gubernatorial candidates. They don’t get as much attention as Senate candidates, but there’s some really great candidates out there doing great work. And that’s going to make a difference, too.

Sargent: It’s very similar to 2018, where Trump’s first election just brought in this whole new class of public servant just out of nowhere. We’re seeing a new wave of it right now, and it really is heartening stuff to see.

I want to flag something else from the Emerson poll. In the generic House ballot matchup, Democrats are leading the GOP among independents by 15, 45 to 30. Now, how important are independents in midterm elections? What do you make of that number?

My sense is a lot of what we’re seeing now is making it possible for Democrats to have conversations with certain constituencies and types of voters that they couldn’t really reach before. They’re more attuned to listening to what Democrats have to say now.

Reynolds: That’s exactly it. I think that number is huge and hugely important. More and more, people are finding themselves unaffiliated. They are deciding, Maybe I’m not connected to either party. Some of this is the divisiveness, some of this is the way we paint both sides. Count me as someone who—I don’t love where the Democratic Party brand is right now. But I’m not as worried about it because each candidate is running their own race on Democratic values, and those values are incredibly popular. That’s why we’re appealing to independents right now.

Sargent: Well, it’s sure looking really good right now, Christina. Tell us, what could go wrong?

Reynolds: Haha. Lots of things. We never know what’s going to happen in the world. We never know how things are going to change and what voters exactly are going to care about. Will there be massive world events? Will there be natural disasters and things like that, all of which throw a campaign off its axis a little bit? We never know that.

But I feel very good about the fact that we have a class of candidates across the country and up and down the ballot who know how to talk to voters, who have an agenda that they can sell. This is not just “Trump stinks.” Those messages, those ads write themselves. He keeps giving us content. That’s out there. But we have to provide something positive for voters. And I actually think we’re doing that.

I feel good about that. We keep laying the groundwork, we keep supporting those candidates. And—gosh, I’m not usually an optimistic person, Greg—but we’re doing what we need to do, and voters understand where the world is right now, and they need change.

Sargent: It’s really got the same nose-to-the-grindstone feeling that 2018 had.

Reynolds: It does. It very much does.

Sargent: Christina Reynolds, on that note—we don’t usually end on a positive note around here, so let’s grab this opportunity while it’s there. Christina, awesome to talk to you. Thank you so much. Come back, please.

Reynolds: You too. Thanks so much.

In Oscar Wilde’s 1895 comedy The Importance of Being Earnest, the epigram-spouting Lady Bracknell is told by Jack Worthing, her daughter’s suitor, that he’s lost both his parents. To this, the lady replies imperiously: “To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.” I thought of Lady Bracknell this week on learning that Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson has now let not one but two pro-union bills tiptoe past him to win a House floor vote. Even in a Democratic House, passage within a six-month period of two measures to expand labor rights would be a rarity.

I’d begun to wonder when we’d see a third when I learned that the House Armed Services Committee last week adopted an amendment to this year’s defense authorization bill restoring collective-bargaining rights for civilian workers in the Defense Department, and that the same language last year cleared the House as part of that year’s defense authorization bill before the Senate stripped it out in House-Senate conference prior to final passage. Clearly the legislative politics surrounding labor rights are shifting in labor’s favor.

Having said that, I advise you not to get too excited. The first of these labor bills, introduced by Representative Jared Golden, Democrat of Maine, would restore collective-bargaining rights to all federal workers; like the defense authorization amendment, the Protect America’s Workforce Act would reverse a couple of union-busting executive orders (here and here) from President Donald Trump. But after clearing the House in December, 231–195, it’s going nowhere in the Republican Senate. The second labor bill (text; summary) was introduced by Representative Donald Norcross, Democrat of New Jersey (who also sponsored the defense authorization amendment). The Faster Labor Contracts Act would make it easier for newly established union locals to win their first contract. But after passing the House on June 9, 230–193, Norcross’s bill faces similarly dismal odds in the Republican Senate.

Even if the Senate managed to pass one or both bills, it wouldn’t matter, because the dependably anti-labor Trump (who, bafflingly, increased his share of the working-class vote from 51 percent in 2016 to 56 percent in 2024) would veto it. Norcross’s defense authorization amendment, if it clears the House again, will attract less notice, and Trump might not bother to veto an entire Defense bill over a labor provision. But my guess is he won’t have to, because the Senate will likely strip it out again before it gets to his desk.

I can’t tell you how to get a pro-labor bill through the Senate. But to get one through the House, it seems pretty clear that, so long as Republicans are in the majority, you must avoid the Education and the Workforce Committee. None of the three pro-labor bills under discussion cleared that committee, which is so anti-labor that every time the GOP retakes the House, Republican leaders change its name from “Education and Labor” to “Education and the Workforce” because the very word “labor” disturbs their sleep.

The defense authorization amendment bypassed Education and the Workforce because it lacks jurisdiction over the military. December’s bill to restore collective-bargaining rights to all federal workers and this week’s bill removing management obstacles to negotiating union contracts both got to the House floor by discharge petition, a parliamentary procedure by which any House member may collect signatures to force a vote on a bill bottled up in committee. Once that member has acquired 218 signatures (i.e., a majority), they can bring the bill to the floor.

Organizing a workplace can be a pyrrhic victory if management refuses to agree to a contract. Bloomberg’s Robert Combs calculated in 2022 that it took 465 days on average to negotiate a union contract, and that was when we had a pro-labor National Labor Relations Board. It almost certainly takes longer now. According to the nonprofit Economic Policy Institute, Starbucks baristas in Buffalo have been negotiating a contract for 1,645 days, and Amazon warehouse workers in Staten Island have been at it for 1,532 days.

There isn’t much a union can do about such management foot-dragging except file an unfair labor practice complaint with the NLRB, and if a Republican is in the White House, the NLRB won’t likely be very responsive. Even under Democratic administrations the NLRB lacks statutory authority to level meaningful penalties. The Faster Labor Contracts Act would amend the 1935 National Labor Relations Act to require that employers begin negotiating a labor contract within 10 days of a union election. If 90 days pass without an agreement, the matter will be referred to a mediator, and if the mediator can’t hammer out an agreement within 30 days the matter will be referred to a binding three-person arbitration panel. Getting a bill like that to the House floor was no small accomplishment.

Labor bills aren’t the only measures that are moving through the House by discharge petition these days. As Trump’s popularity plummets, Johnson is losing control over his caucus, resulting in the House turning into a sort of discharge-petition rager. There have been 23 in this Congress, of which nine have been successful. That’s an excellent batting average. One discharge petition was used to compel Trump to release the Jeffrey Epstein files. Another was used to pass a Ukraine aid package. What’s unusual about the labor discharge petitions is that they cross an ideological boundary. Republicans don’t intrinsically oppose releasing files about child predators or containing Russian aggression. But they do intrinsically oppose labor unions. Now a breakaway Republican faction is challenging that.

Five Republicans signed the discharge petition to bring the Protect America’s Workforce Act to the House floor. They were: Representatives Nick LaLota and Michael Lawler of New York; Representatives Brian Fitzpatrick and Robert Bresnahan of Pennsylvania; and Representative Don Bacon of Nebraska. All except Bacon represent blue states. That was a year ago. In March and April, all five signed the discharge petition for the Faster Labor Contracts Act, joined this time by two red-staters: Representatives Max Miller of Ohio and Riley Moore of West Virginia. And in the final vote, these seven Republicans were joined by 13 more. In both last December’s bargaining rights bill and this week’s union contract bill, 20 House Republicans voted for a pro-union bill. That tells me the December vote was not a fluke. When more than one-third of the Republican House caucus casts pro-union votes, even though few of these members supported labor rights in the past, that’s news.

Notably, this latest vote is about something the business lobby cares about a lot more than it does about whether federal workers organize; federal workers don’t work for private employers. The Education and the Workforce Committee website (controlled by the Republican majority) posted a list of objections to the Faster Labor Contracts Act from business leaders: “an unconstitutional taking,” “a rushed floor vote,” “undermines the principle of voluntary agreement,” and so on. Meanwhile, the committee’s ranking Democrat, Representative Bobby Scott of Virginia, took to the floor to praise the bill for “making the right to organize real, not theoretical.”

In the end, it didn’t matter what the Education and the Workforce majority thought. The bill cleared the House anyway. Those 20 pro-union Republican votes aren’t yet able to make much difference. But they’re a sign that labor solidarity is starting to undermine partisan solidarity. Senate Republicans, take heed.

It’s hard to think of a cohort of rich people in recent history as extravagantly exhibitionist as today’s tech billionaires. For the modal Silicon Valley oligarch, the life of easy luxury is not enough. The point of being unfathomably rich in our time is not simply to enjoy the fruits of extreme wealth, exert a crushing influence over the course of politics and public life, or hold up one end of the K-shaped economy: It’s to become the center of global attention, which is where real power in the digital era resides. The sheer visibility of the have-yachts today is staggering. Not only do we have to suffer their opinions elaborated at length on podcasts and in X posts; every squalid little detail of life at the top is out in the open now, freely available for public consumption. We’re intimately familiar with the ins and outs of Jeff Bezos’s time in space and his nuptials in Venice, and there are whole subindustries devoted to parsing Mark Zuckerberg’s T-shirt and jewelry choices.

And then there’s Elon Musk. In the ranks of the billionaire exhibitionists, there’s no one who tries harder or squeaks louder. In 2022, Musk bought Twitter, later renaming it X, and promptly set about turning it into an online mess hall for right-wing lunatics; by 2024, he was posting on X an average of 60 times a day and sometimes up to 40 times every hour. At any given moment on X, Musk can be seen posting with the sweaty eagerness of a teen in the first flush of puberty: On a recent sampling, his feed included a signature mix of self-promotion (plugs for Grok, X’s in-house AI chatbot; the satellite internet service Starlink; and the self-driving Tesla), competition-targeting shitposting (a tweet claiming ChatGPT, OpenAI’s rival to Grok, is “pretending to be ‘unbiased’” scored the Musk retweet), C minus memes (a graphic showing four descending pairs of increasingly bloodshot eyes superposed with the words “Alcohol,” “Weed,” “Cocaine,” and “Monitoring the Situation”), transphobia (“People can pretend or dress up all they want and that’s fine, but they can’t force their mental illness to be my new reality!”), and white nationalist race panic (an approving “100” emoji slapped over the top of a tweet from a verified account claiming that “if White men become a minority, we will be slaughtered”), along with countless variations on the classic theme of middle-aged white guy whining about the state of the world today. A smattering of cruel and lazy jokes about trans people, some indignant quote tweets of garden variety racists like Stephen Miller and British far-right activist Tommy Robinson, a stray “Hmm” or “Troubling” in response to tweets about things like tech regulation, fertility rates, or anti-white racism? In Muskworld, that’s called a Monday.

Musk’s presence on X can often feel like performance art—one of those continuous “bits” that have turned much of social media into a form of digital vaudeville. But where most extremely online victims of internet brain damage emote into the void, Musk is the rare oversharer who’s managed to turn the “based” and “epic” style of memeverse comedy into something more tangible. Dogecoin, the meme coin that has historically soared in value whenever Musk has tweeted about it, eventually became the inspiration for DOGE, the Big Government slash-and-burn operation that Musk led at the start of Donald Trump’s second term. In 2023, Musk committed $100 million in seed money for a new STEM-focused school in Austin that he chose to name the Texas Institute of Technologies and Sciences, or TITS: Every thumbnail on tits.academy, the still-unrealized university’s home page, now takes visitors to an “About Us” screen headed “Take a look at TITS” that includes an embedded YouTube video of Rick Astley’s 1987 pop classic “Never Gonna Give You Up”—an online prank of ancient vintage known as “rickrolling.” In August 2025, Musk announced a plan to launch a fully AI-simulated software company that could supplant all the functions and products offered by Microsoft; he called it “­Macrohard.” LOL! Not content with sitting on the world’s largest personal fortune, Musk seems desperate to be taken seriously as a comedian, too.

Maybe there’s something else at work here. According to the authors of a new book, Musk’s transformation into a hyperactive super-troll expresses a serious purpose. “Musk’s online persona,” write Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff in Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed, is often “misunderstood. Critics see immaturity or malice; fans see relatability or authenticity. Both fail to see that, in Muskism, trolling is infrastructure.” The point of these outbursts is for Musk to gauge whether he can bypass the ordinary institutions of grown-up accountability—the media, elections, quarterly earnings reports—and affect outcomes in the world of money, politics, and popular belief through the sheer force of his own personality. They are a stress test of society’s tolerance for the Muskian worldview.

“Muskism” is the name that Slobodian, a historian, and Tarnoff, a technology writer, give his worldview: a kind of techno-maximalism in which autonomy for individuals and for nations is only achievable through an ever-deeper fusion between human and machine, and can best be guaranteed through the adoption of technologies offered by Musk’s own companies. Just as Fordism was “the operating system of the twentieth century,” Slobodian and Tarnoff contend, Muskism might provide the basis for a new consensus about economic and social life, the Fordism of our time. After all, Fordism, like Muskism, once seemed an intimate reflection of one man’s personality (The Washington Post defined it in a 1922 article as “Ford efforts conceived in disregard or ignorance of Ford limitations”). Only later did it come to mean the belief in mass production and standardization on the factory floor, high wages, and mass consumption as the chief motors of industrial growth. The clarifying and unsettling argument at the heart of Muskism is that, in a deglobalizing and increasingly digitized world, Musk’s vision of the future might win out. But is it possible to separate Muskism from Musk?

Musk may need no greater reason to post than that it flatters his ego. He currently has 240 million followers on X—more than double the following of the second most popular account, that of Barack Obama. This grants him a kind of insurance against failure whenever he tweets, even for his weakest stuff. The “Monitoring the Situation” meme above, for instance, generated more than 900,000 likes, a return out of all proportion to the quality of the material presented—proof, if ever we needed it, that meritocracy in America is dead.

Online ubiquity is also a moneymaking tool. Musk has long been a master of what Slobodian and Tarnoff call “financial fabulism”—the art of extracting ever-higher valuations and capital commitments from investors through confidence, showmanship, and a compelling view of the world to come. When raising money for online business directory Zip2, his first company, in the mid-1990s, Musk covered a normal PC with a big case and wheeled it around to venture capitalists to make them think his software ran on a supercomputer. Zip2 was still losing money when Compaq bought it for $307 million in 1999; Musk walked away with $22 million, and a valuable lesson in the power of his unstinting belief in the future. Musk has channeled this gift for financial fabulism into the digital world, which has compressed and supercharged the feedback loop between words and money. In 2018, he tweeted: “Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured.” The market missed (or ignored) the weed joke in “420” and took him at his word; the company’s stock price jumped nearly 11 percent by the end of the day. In January 2021, he added #bitcoin to his bio on Twitter (as it was then known), and the cryptocurrency surged 20 percent within an hour. The shocking immediacy of cause and effect online, coupled with his embrace of Twitter, helped make Musk “as close to a free-money perpetual motion machine as you’ll ever see in finance,” Bloomberg columnist Matt Levine has written.

But Slobodian and Tarnoff see in Musk’s online presence a deeper expression of his idiosyncratic vision of the future. From the mid-2010s onward, Musk became convinced that humans and machines were becoming one, and that success—for Musk as an entrepreneur, for humanity as a species—would involve accelerating this fusion rather than resisting it. Musk has often warned of a Terminator-style apocalypse from rogue artificial intelligence, but his solution is “not less technology, but more,” Slobodian and Tarnoff write: The risks inherent in the digital cognitive revolution mean we should “merge with AI,” Musk argued in 2016.

All of Musk’s juvenile foolery stems from his “cyborg turn.” Modern Musk—the man as empire, the man as meme—is an embodiment of online culture.

Under Muskism, the path to salvation lies in human-machine symbiosis. All of Musk’s juvenile foolery over the past few years—the insults, the weak memes, the hyperactive posting, the alliance with Trump, the dadly insistence that “I am become meme,” even the bit with the chainsaw at CPAC—stems from this “cyborg turn,” as Slobodian and Tarnoff call it. This turn, they write, “did not mutate out of one man’s cyberpunk delusions, but out of a bipartisan consensus about where America needed to direct its brightest minds and deepest investments.” Modern Musk—the man as empire, the man as meme—is an embodiment of online culture. Or as Slobodian and Tarnoff put it, he is “a hypervisible indicator species for the consequences of fusing the economy ever more tightly with the digital world.”

Whether the future synthesis of human and machine emerges in perfect or imperfect form, few people will benefit from it more than Musk himself. His companies are building much of the infrastructure—the rockets, robots, satellites, collective intelligence networks, and brain-computer interfaces—that will shape the fusions to come. When he left his self-described political “side quest” in Washington last year, he explained that it was to return to his real quest, which is to build the future world of “humanoid robots and digital superintelligence,” to seed our “future machine descendants.”

Slobodian and Tarnoff’s analysis of Musk’s cyborg turn is reassuring and discomfiting at the same time: reassuring because it suggests an intelligible strategy at the heart of Musk’s actions, making him an outlier at a time when most big decisions in politics—kidnapping Maduro, bombing Iran—seem guided by nothing more than the uncut essence of poster brain; discomfiting because, well, it also suggests we’re all about to become replicants welded to a Tesla bot or a SpaceX nozzle.

Mechanization of the human is the logical end of a sequence of fusions that have defined Musk’s career. Social media has allowed him to merge, in some way, his own intelligence with the hive mind, to become one with the scroll. With SpaceX, he engineered a marriage of firm and government, grafting his enterprise onto the state, taking over some of the state’s functions, and exploiting its guarantees for private gain. While many in Silicon Valley profess to dream of liberation from the state, of wholesale exit from its mess of obligations and compromises, Musk’s business interests have pushed in the opposite direction, toward an ever-deeper coupling of public and private: His ultimate goal has always been power over the state rather than freedom from it.

All technology businesses in the digital era arguably free-ride off the state—the internet and its foundational infrastructure, after all, were funded by DARPA, the Pentagon’s R&D arm. Yet few entrepreneurs have been as skilled at piggybacking off public resources as Musk has. Zip2 used GPS data from military satellites, for example, while Musk’s late-1990s online payments company X.com—which would later become PayPal—rested on the federally insured stability of the U.S. financial system. SpaceX—founded in 2002, now valued at $1.55 trillion, and preparing for a public offering that early reports suggest could become the biggest IPO in history—is perhaps the company that has benefited most from government resources.

Speaking at Stanford the year after he launched the company, Musk acknowledged that NASA had already done the hard work “by spending the money to develop some of the fundamental technologies,” and now the door was open for the private sector to swoop in, build on those state-funded foundations, and monetize the gains. Twenty-three years later, SpaceX is firmly enmeshed with U.S. infrastructure. “By 2025, SpaceX accounted for 95 percent of all orbital launches in the United States and more than half of all launches globally—a position that made the Pentagon, NASA, and other government agencies deeply reliant on Musk,” report Slobodian and Tarnoff.

Timing was key to this success. Musk founded SpaceX right as the United States launched the global war on terrorism, which collided with the neoliberal mania for privatization and outsourcing to create a bonanza for corporate defense contractors. But SpaceX’s elevation into an indispensable arm of the modern military, not only in the United States but for countries abroad, also reflected Musk’s real business acumen. Satellites had been around for decades when Musk announced plans for what would become Starlink, a satellite internet service, in 2015. Slow speeds were always a barrier to greater adoption of satellites for global communication. Musk’s solution was to bring the satellites closer to the ground, putting them into low Earth orbit—around 342 miles up, versus 20,000 miles in the air for traditional geostationary satellites. The only catch was that orbiting so close to Earth required a lot more satellites to ensure quality of connection. The result? Starlink now has more than 10,000 functioning satellites in orbit, around two-thirds of all active satellites: The fusion of SpaceX to the state has led the way, quite naturally, to the company’s colonization of the heavens.

Tesla is yet another Musk vehicle that has benefited from state largesse. Musk did not create the company, but he invested in it and took over as CEO in 2008—right at the launch of the first federal tax credit program for buyers of electric vehicles; the company was saved from almost certain death by a $465 million Department of Energy loan awarded a year later. That loan helped Tesla survive the lean years that followed the collapse of the clean tech and renewables sector in the early 2010s—the result of the “shale revolution,” which touched off a surge in U.S. oil and gas production.

But the real reason Tesla prospered through the downturn—eventually becoming the world’s leading EV automaker, a title it relinquished to Chinese firm BYD earlier this year—was that Musk insisted on sourcing and assembling as many of the company’s critical production inputs in-house rather than relying on the global market. At a time when manufacturing consensus was in favor of free trade, offshoring, and global supply chains, Musk seemed to have already begun to anticipate a deglobalizing, post-Covid world by embracing “vertical integration.” The real innovation here was the construction of the first Gigafactory in Sparks, Nevada—what Musk envisioned as a “truly gargantuan factory of mind-boggling size”—that allowed Tesla to make its own lithium-ion batteries. (Since then, fresh Gigafactories have sprouted in Buffalo, Shanghai, Berlin, and Austin.) When the world awoke, a few years ago, to a reality of reshoring, export controls, tariffs, and emerging trade blocs, Tesla was relatively insulated; Musk had built Tesla for a world in which self-reliance, rather than reliance on others, would become the key to survival.

Musk’s fantasy of the future, the authors of Muskism propose, is “a fantasy of the factory,” stripped to its leanest and trimmed of human encumbrances. In 2016, Musk first mentioned his goal of creating an “alien dreadnought”—a factory with no human workers at all. Macrohard is perhaps the first serious attempt at realizing that goal: a company that relies for labor on AI agents. He’s not alone in this ambition: AI’s incursion into labor markets has already begun, and the dream of a fully post-human economy can be felt in every giddy LinkedIn post about the leaps in “productivity” that technologies like Claude Code are now making possible. Under Muskism, humans can either become obsolete or fuse with machines, becoming one with the factory itself.

The sheer number of countries and institutions that rely on Musk’s technologies gives him a bullying leverage that he seems unafraid to flex. For many countries, the exercise of sovereignty brushes up against the whims of a single, unpredictable, and often quite petty man. In March 2025, Musk boasted that Starlink is “the backbone of the Ukrainian army,” and that “their entire front line would collapse if I turned it off”; when the Polish foreign minister, in reply, warned that his own country would be forced to look elsewhere for Ukraine if Starlink was an “unreliable provider,” Musk spat back, “Be quiet, small man.” Exchanges like this highlight the real problem for Muskism as a social project, which is that Earth is a place populated by humans not named Elon Musk, and that many of them disagree, often quite fervently, with his views and methods. Not everyone wishes to be transformed into a widget on the floor of the Muskian factory of the future.

Humans are Musk’s greatest enemy, the source of his keenest humiliations and most obliterating rages: Who could forget the world’s richest man, on the verge of tears, telling Fox News in March 2025 that Minnesota Governor Tim Walz was “a creep,” and “a huge jerk,” all because Walz made fun of Tesla’s plummeting stock price at the height of DOGE-driven chaos in Washington? Empathy, Musk famously once said, is the “fundamental weakness of Western civilization.” That seems untrue, and Musk’s own direct involvement in politics has shown that a lack of empathy is no model for government.

Slobodian and Tarnoff trace Musk’s attempts to correct a listing culture, to rewrite society’s operating code and clean it of the real bugs in the system: people. Twitter had helped propel Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and #MeToo; under Musk, its replacement, X, would reinstate a public square built on precontamination hierarchies of class, gender, and race. Large language models promised a future of objective truth and universal information, but were trained on leftist propaganda; Grok would be refined in “post-training” to reflect Musk’s own anti-woke biases and priorities. The state was overrun with illegitimate claims on the public purse; DOGE would empower a set of very young software engineers to swiftly terminate grants and contracts and lay off public servants en masse.

And yet, here we find ourselves today: On X, there are still as many jokes about Nazis as there are Nazis; Grok is not a serious competitor to ChatGPT or Claude; and DOGE accomplished little more than causing chaos and inflicting misery on federal workers. Its outcomes may have satisfied MAGA ideologues such as Russell Vought, whose express wish was to dismantle the federal bureaucracy by making working conditions unpleasant (“When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work”). And in the midst of his DOGE spree, Musk seemed to share this wish, brandishing a chainsaw on stage at CPAC and bragging about cuts. But if, as Slobodian and Tarnoff argue, Musk had imagined DOGE as a program through which “engineers disciplined society like a factory floor,” it was a failure. Because, as they write, “society is not a factory.”

Musk presents an intriguing contrast with Trump, his on-and-off-again political ally. Both are inveterate posters, both often sound deranged, both have a lot of money (Musk has considerably more, but much of it is illiquid, since it’s mostly held in stock in his companies). Trump is sui generis, a freak of nature whose coalition seems unlikely to survive his departure from the White House (assuming he ever leaves it). Vestiges of Trumpism will survive, but actually existing Trumpism? Only Trump can carry the brand. His interests are superficial: What animates him is a desire to enrich himself and elevate the status of his clique, even at the expense of America’s general welfare and standing in the world. That’s not a political realignment; it’s kleptocracy. And yet, despite all his shortcomings, despite his leaden approval ratings, Trump has twice been elected president. Musk spent less than six months in Washington before he was forced to skulk back to the Gigafactory. The argument that Muskism asks us to take seriously is that Musk, though less charismatic and less popular than Trump, is more symbolic of our era.

Amid institutional breakdown and the overpoliticization of everything, Musk’s companies, his words, and his dogmas might represent a durable shift to a new common sense, a new model of political and economic order. Trump has pioneered a style, but Musk is a master of infrastructure, and the future is always shaped by matter rather than manner. The liberal international order is effectively dead, popular faith in institutions across the democratic world has cratered, and in the United States, the Trumpian wrecking ball has done serious—perhaps lasting—damage to the Constitution and the stately old politics of checks and balances. Muskism offers a set of solutions and arguments suited to the fragmented, paranoid, and militarized world in which we now find ourselves: Independence seems more appealing than integration at a time when multilateralism is at a historic ebb; genocide and wars of choice have normalized the exclusionary thinking and antipathy to empathy on which Musk’s businesses thrive; multipolarity and the return of great power competition invite a deepening fusion of technology and the state. Muskism is a tool kit for a world where concentration matters more than cooperation, where control trumps trust.

Muskism-lite is not the Muskian way; the insults, the trolling, and the inhumanity are inseparable from Musk’s way of doing business.

Still, a future defined by all-out Muskism is not inevitable. It’s not hard to imagine a greater role in years to come for a detoxified version of Muskism, characterized by a turn away from supply chains and globalization, a deepening digitization of daily life, and government by meme. But Muskism-lite is not the Muskian way; the insults, the trolling, and the inhumanity are inseparable from Musk’s way of doing business. There is little utopian promise in the future he portends; the Musk-led tech industry’s vision of collective life is a weird amalgam of sports, speculation, and collective dissolution into the jaws of the machines. Many people, as Musk himself has discovered in recent years, do not want this. Muskism may be one version of the future, but cyborgian oblivion is not our only choice.  

At last week’s WelcomeFest, Matt Yglesias, the longtime blogger turned centrist Substacker, moderated a panel with two Democratic members of Congress from big blue states—Tom Suozzi, who represents part of Long Island, New York, and Adam Gray, who hails from California’s San Joaquin Valley. He ended up making a remark that immediately struck me. I’ve been thinking about it for more than a week.

“The problem for Democrats is that most people see great things about California and about New York, but they don’t think of them as places where government is functioning well,” he said. “The taxes are relatively high, and it’s not obvious that people are getting anything extra for it.” He asked how Democrats could make outcomes better for people in these high-tax states.

The reason this statement rang my bells is that I moved to New York almost three years ago, and taxes were a big reason why. My then partner—now husband—and I decided to move here from Arkansas. That’s right: We wanted to pay more taxes. And I’ll tell you why.

It is true that New York and California have some of the highest income tax rates and estimated share of personal income residents pay in all taxes when property, sales, and local taxes are taken into account. I’m not sure what evidence Yglesias was considering when he said it wasn’t clear what people were getting from their high taxes—or what benefit he specifically thought those taxes were failing to deliver. But then, it’s not always easy to evaluate what bang we’re getting for the buck. How do we measure the effectiveness of the government? These are the questions I found myself asking.

On one level, people experience their taxation in a personal way: There is an amount of money withheld from our paychecks or paid to their state finance departments (or refunded to them) every spring. That is also, usually, how they experience government services, or services largely subsidized or regulated by the government: who decides their county or city’s operations, how transparent are they, how reliable are their utilities, what is a trip to the DMV like? For the most part, they’re only paying individual taxes and living in one state at a time.

Indeed, most people spend the vast majority of their lives in one state, and they’ll spend their working lives paying only one state’s income tax. People don’t make interstate moves that often: The Harvard University Joint Center for Housing Studies calculated in 2020 that about 13 percent of Americans move each year, and only about 14 percent of those moves are across state lines. Most people stay local. Of the people who move, most move for personal reasons having to do with jobs and family—or the chance to buy a new home instead of renting. Which is to say: Most people can’t make a real assessment on what they’re getting for their taxes on an individual level because they lack the information needed to make informed comparisons.

My husband and I lived in my home state of Arkansas together for a little more than five years; like most people, we decided to move for a number of reasons. One was that we could no longer stand the South’s blazing hot summers and were worried about climate change, so we looked for more climate-resilient places to live, which mostly led us up north. We wanted to live somewhere near an Amtrak station with frequent service, near mountains, and we really wanted to buy an older home that we could comfortably afford. We also wanted to leave the South for political and cultural reasons. We landed in central New York.

All that being said, if I had to name the catalyst for the move, it was when I had to write a check for my 2022 Arkansas state income taxes. I was self-employed for most of my time in Arkansas, which meant I frequently owed some amount of taxes at the end of the tax year, and in the spring of 2023 that amount was a little more than $7,000. That was, coincidentally, the amount that the state would soon be giving to individuals who wanted to use tax money to send their children to private school under the newly passed LEARNS Act.

The LEARNS Act gave almost anyone, regardless of income, taxpayer money to use toward private school tuition. I realized the same amount of money I was sending to the state could be used by someone with more money than I had to send their children to a school that promoted teachings I disagreed with, while also robbing the public school system of funds. I simply decided that I didn’t want to live in a state that used its tax dollars—my tax dollars—that way. I wanted to move to a place where my taxes were spent more in line with my values. Even if it meant paying more.

It was a clarifying moment. We had lived for years in a very rural part of the state that looked different even from where we live now, near New York’s dairy country. We often had to take our own trash to the dump, our roads fell into disrepair after the slightest winter storm, and the county often relied on private help to fix them. There were knock-down, drag-out fights over even small amounts of tax increases that funded things like my local library. There was no county-funded animal shelter, and animal control was spotty at best, which meant stray and abandoned animals were everywhere, and my husband and I, dog and cat lovers, spent thousands of our own money to rescue animals, spay and neuter pets for people who couldn’t afford it, and send homeless pets to friends around the country.

Getting even basic information about services, and service interruptions, from the county government or local utilities was difficult. I once FOIA-ed information about county water shutoffs from my local water utility and got a large folder with handwritten records. When the pipes burst at my house—for complicated reasons I won’t go into—I called to ask if the water company could shut my water off so that I could have it fixed, and the person I spoke to told me—and I am deadly serious—to find my water meter and “just stick a screwdriver down there.”

I have spent many years complaining about rural Arkansas only because I loved living there and think my neighbors deserve better. But when we finally left the second time, I realized how stressful the daily indignities of life there had been. We live in a place now where things just work. The roads are plowed in winter, they’re repaired in the spring, the local utilities text and email us when there are service interruptions and they repair them quickly, we have a well-funded library system.

Across the board, the services and benefits I get for my tax money outstrip what I got from my former state. I regularly receive booklets in my mailbox with reports from the county government and the county schools. We live near a city, Utica, with a beautiful train station with services that can get us to most places in the country, and the DMV is in that train station and is one of the quickest, politest places I have ever been. Utica, which has a third of the population of Arkansas’s state capital, Little Rock, is served by a public transit system that provides nearly three times the annual rides that Little Rock’s does. Hourly wages are higher here, and the safety net provides to those in need better.

Moving to New York was the good kind of culture shock. My husband and I are constantly asking each other, “Is it just me, or are the vibes here just … better?” The answer is yes. Together, we have lived in four cities across three states; separately, you can add four more cities and three more states to that list. They vary in their level of taxation and politics, and we have developed a personal metric for assessing the quality of a place, which we call the Potts-Suarez Theory of County Dumps. How easy is it, and how much does it cost, to get rid of your household trash?

In Arkansas, we resorted to piling our own trash into our 2003 Subaru Forester and taking it to the dump on Saturdays, usually spending about $20 a week to do so. Many people in my home county simply burned their own trash in their yards, violating an ordinance to do so because it’s easier and cheaper. In New York State, our trash and recycling services cost half that amount and are reliable, and when we have to make a trip to the county eco-station to dump hazardous waste—we are DIY-ing much of our old house, including removing lead paint—it is open more hours, well organized, clean, and well staffed.

Obviously, this is a very silly and subjective measure. But there are some data points hinting that it’s not just us. The states that rank higher in health outcomes tend to be more progressive states with a higher tax base, while those at the bottom are across the low-tax, low-wage South. Maps look similar for educational attainment, food security, and median income. A recent study ranking states on overall measures of well-being found New York and California in the middle, while the states at the top were a mix of high- and low-tax states, number one being Minnesota, and states at the bottom included much of the mid-South, like Arkansas. Surveys that try to assess happiness find similar results. New York and California are also some of the least affordable states to live in in the U.S., but the supply-side housing folks ought to know that some of that is because the supply is outpaced by demand: People want to live in these states.

Some of my problems are particular to the South, which, as my colleague Perry Bacon Jr. wrote last month, has long been antidemocratic and especially focused on disenfranchising Black citizens. “Whether the United States overall is a liberal democracy or can become one again, the states in the South are at best electoral democracies and are veering toward electoral autocracies,” he wrote, and he details the ways those states restrict freedoms of their residents and liberal voters’ abilities to shape their own cities and communities.

There is, at base, a set of questions each state, or city, or country, has to organize itself around. How can we form a community? How do we create a good life for the people who live here? Most people don’t truly have any way to assess how their own communities are answering that question compared to others. There are very few objective measures on which we can rank states on how nice it is to live there—and they would be imperfect at best because different people value different things. Taxes are one objective measure, but taxes have long been framed as a burden weighing on people, not as an investment we’re all making so that the place we’ve chosen to live is as good as it can be.

Viewed as an investment, the basic level of taxation can fund the services that free up time and energy for its residents to work, care for their families, enjoy their leisure, make art, and build cool things together because they’re less worried about basic things like how hard it is to dispose of the household trash. States that don’t invest in their public infrastructure and well-being are shifting the burdens to individuals.

The great things about California and New York are inextricable from these states’ tax systems. But the vast majority of political writers who question taxes in places like Washington, D.C., New York, or California—or who hold up places like Texas as an example of housing abundance, have never seen what that looks like for the people who live in those places on a daily basis. The lack of taxes, the lack of investment, can take the form of all manner of imposition, from a county dump that is too expensive for people to use to inadequate reproductive health care, to never knowing if your vote will be counted. From 30,000 feet in the air, these can look like separate issues. At ground level, they’re all born from the neglect that comes in the lack of real investment. I know exactly what I’m getting from my taxes in New York. And I suspect other low-tax boosters know what they’re getting too, which is why they haven’t moved en masse to places like Arkansas.

Sports are governed by rules. Those rules separate a ball from a strike, a fumble from an incomplete pass, and foul balls from a fair. Without rules, sporting events are nothing more than random people getting some exercise. And without people to enforce those rules, there is no integrity, no fairness, and no genuine competition.

By those standards, college sports is currently the world’s most lucrative workout club. A state judge in Texas ordered the NCAA earlier this month to reinstate Brendan Sorsby, a quarterback at Texas Tech University who has admitted to placing bets at sportsbooks on, among other things, his own team at a previous school.

The NCAA had refused to reinstate Sorsby while it conducts an investigation into the scope of his gambling policy violations. He then sought a temporary injunction that would allow him to continue playing in 2026 and “clarify” his status before he would have to apply for the NFL’s supplemental draft later this summer. The judge sided with Sorsby; the NCAA has vowed to appeal.

Sorsby’s case is far from the only legal battle that the NCAA has found itself in in recent years. But the lawsuit speaks volumes about the constitutional crisis in which collegiate athletics now finds itself—and the shortcomings of the NCAA’s solutions. As long as it resists treating athletes like workers, these problems will only get worse.

The most recent crisis for college sports began in April when Texas Tech announced that Sorsby, who had transferred there from the University of Cincinnati in January, had entered an inpatient treatment facility for gambling addiction. NCAA rules prohibit student-athletes from placing bets on collegiate or professional sports.

Sorsby is far from the first athlete to be embroiled in a gambling scandal since 2018, when the Supreme Court struck down a federal ban on sports betting and paved the way for its widespread legalization by states. But his case may be the most egregious one on record.

According to court documents filed in May, Sorsby wagered more than $90,000 on online sportsbooks over a four-year period. He used accounts registered to friends and family members to evade detection by sportsbooks and school officials. His claims of addiction are also hard to dispute: In an 18-month span while attending Indiana University, for example, he reportedly placed a minimum of 2,900 bets on various sports.

“It became a habit for me to bet,” Sorsby told the NCAA in a statement, according to ESPN. “My betting became a compulsion which made it virtually impossible to resist the constant notifications I received from betting apps. I lost complete control of my addiction. I now realize the apps controlled me and I did not control them.”

The news outlet reported that Sorsby placed at least 40 bets on Indiana University football while playing for the school. The bets were small amounts—ranging from a single dollar to slightly more than $100—but each represents a massive ethical breach. While major sports leagues have adopted a wide range of rules on sports betting over the past few years, none of them allow players to bet on their own sport, let alone their own team.

According to court documents reviewed by The Athletic, Sorsby also claimed that he had “never placed any bets on any Indiana football game that I participated in or that I reasonably expected that I could have participated in.” At the time, he noted, he was on Indiana’s scout team “with several quarterbacks ahead of me on the team’s depth chart” and “no reasonable chance that I would play.” Sorsby reportedly claimed that he had never used nonpublic information when placing the bets—which is both unverifiable and extremely hard to believe.

None of this mattered under the most recent version of the NCAA’s ban on sports betting by student-athletes. Current rules prohibits student-athletes from placing bets on any sport that the NCAA sponsors, even at the amateur or professional level. The NCAA voted last November to restore its ban on betting in professional sports after federal prosecutors charged multiple NBA players and coaches for their alleged roles in illegal gambling operations.

NCAA athletes who violate the organization’s gambling policy can face permanent loss of eligibility. Under NCAA rules, Texas Tech declared Sorsby ineligible after the NCAA opened its investigation into him in April. The school claimed the right to request Sorsby’s reinstatement to restore that eligibility on his behalf.

In a lawsuit filed against the NCAA in May, Sorsby claimed that he faced imminent and irreparable harm if the organization did not reach a decision on his eligibility soon. The deadline to apply for the NFL’s supplemental draft is later this month, which would be his last chance to play in the league for its 2026 season. If the NCAA does not reach a decision until after that deadline, Sorsby argued, he could face the loss of both his final year in college football and an entire year in professional football.

Judge Ken Curry agreed and granted Sorsby’s request for a temporary injunction, concluding that he was likely to prevail at trial. Curry also scheduled the trial date for February 8, 2027—two weeks after the 2026 college football season ends. As a result, even if the NCAA were to ultimately prevail on the merits, Sorsby will already be out of college athletics. (The judge, for the record, did not attend Texas Tech as an undergraduate or as a law student.)

Legal disputes between the NCAA and college athletes aren’t uncommon. Ole Miss quarterback Trinidad Chambliss successfully challenged the NCAA’s decision to deny him a sixth year of eligibility, for example, in Mississippi state court earlier this year. But the Sorsby ruling struck the college sports landscape like a thunderbolt because it called into question the NCAA’s basic ability to sanction players for egregious policy violations.

“The NCAA strongly disagrees with the court’s ruling in Sorsby’s case and is deeply concerned about the damaging, far-reaching and broadly destabilizing ramifications of this outcome—which undermines and corrupts the integrity of sports,” the organization said in a statement after the ruling was issued.

The university is not a party to Sorsby’s lawsuit, but has expressed a strong interest in having him play in the upcoming season. Sorsby was among the most highly sought players in the transfer portal this spring. Texas Tech struck a NIL deal with him in January that could bring the fifth-year quarterback roughly $5 million for one season of play.

“I’ve heard the word ‘integrity’ used a great deal in the last 48 hours,” Texas Tech athletics director Kirby Hocutt said in a statement on Wednesday. “As someone who has dedicated his career to college sports, I, too, believe integrity is central to our industry’s success. I also think integrity applies on more than one front. The integrity of sport matters. So does the integrity of how we treat a 22-year-old who sought help, entered residential treatment, and is working every day toward recovery. These two things don’t have to be in conflict.”

Hocutt’s voice appears to be a solitary one. There are widespread reports that other schools and conferences may try to collectively punish Texas Tech for the scandal by refusing to schedule games against them at all levels, effectively freezing its athletics program out of competitions. Texas Tech has responded by threatening to pursue litigation if the other schools try to hold the school accountable for enabling Sorsby’s tactics.

College football coaches and officials were openly horrified by the prospect that a court would require a player who admitted to betting on his own team to play in the upcoming season. “As someone who grew up reading about the Black Sox Scandal, and seeing what happened to Pete Rose and just understanding how bright that line seemed to be in all of American sports, I’m stunned that there would be a question at the court level that this is acceptable,” Scott Stricklin, the athletic director for the University of Florida, told ESPN.

It is hard to not draw comparisons to baseball’s own gambling scandals, which had a seismic impact on the sport itself and led to fundamental changes in how it operates. The Black Sox scandal, in which several Chicago White Sox players helped gamblers fix the 1919 World Series, led Major League Baseball to create a commissioner’s office with far-reaching powers to regulate the sport’s integrity.

Baseball had other advantages that the NCAA lacks. Thanks to a controversial 1922 Supreme Court ruling, Major League Baseball enjoys a free-standing exemption to federal antitrust law. Other major sports leagues are also exempt from antitrust law to some degree by the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961, which allows teams to collectively negotiate television deals without fear of anticompetitive charges.

The NCAA, on the other hand, has faced a decade of legal struggles precisely because it lacks an exemption. The greatest blow came in 2021 when the Supreme Court unanimously upheld a lower court decision that found some of the NCAA’s compensation rules violated federal antitrust law. That ruling opened the door to the NIL era, where players can be compensated semi-indirectly for the use of their name, image, and likeness rights. During oral arguments and in the ruling itself, justices sharply castigated the NCAA for its long-standing opposition to compensating players while reaping millions of dollars in profits from their labor.

“Nowhere else in America can businesses get away with agreeing not to pay their workers a fair market rate on the theory that their product is defined by not paying their workers a fair market rate,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in a concurring opinion. “And under ordinary principles of antitrust law, it is not evident why college sports should be any different. The NCAA is not above the law.”

The NCAA evaded legal scrutiny for so long for a variety of reasons, but at least partly through sheer inertia and its byzantine structure. While the NCAA has a governing board and a president—currently Charlie Baker, the former governor of Massachusetts—it is also a largely decentralized organization. Individual schools wield significant power through the various conferences that also oversee college sports, like the Southeastern Conference and the misleadingly named Big Ten Conference. Many of those schools are also public universities, which means they are governed directly by state governments to varying degrees.

As a result, it is hard to even describe the NCAA as a sports “league” in any meaningful sense. One crucial difference between NCAA sports and professional leagues is the absence of collective bargaining, which sets ground rules between players and owners. Instead, college athletes are free to accept NIL money and transfer almost at will. Sorsby, for example, is currently facing a lawsuit from the University of Cincinnati over a $1 million exit fee in his NIL contract that the quarterback has not yet paid since refusing to play in last year’s bowl game and transferring to Texas Tech.

To “save” college sports from the daunting threats of antitrust enforcement and a robust market for athlete compensation, the NCAA and colleges are doing something unthinkable these days: asking Congress to pass legislation. One bipartisan proposal, the Protect College Sports Act, was drafted by Texas Senator Ted Cruz and Washington Senator Maria Cantwell. It would impose new restrictions on transfers and eligibility that strongly favor schools and constrain student-athletes.

Some of college athletics’ top voices, such as former Alabama football head coach Nick Saban, embraced the bill earlier this month during Senate hearings. But significant obstacles remain. The SEC—the conference, not the financial regulator—and the Big Ten said they opposed the bill, in statements earlier this week. Though their reasoning was vague, the bill would prevent conferences from breaking away from the NCAA to form a more lucrative “super league” of top schools. It would require them to potentially share more broadcast revenue with other schools.

The NCAA also has not yet endorsed the bill. ESPN’s Dan Murphy noted last month that it lacks one of the organization’s main demands: to bar athletes from being classified as employees, which could open the door to collective bargaining. It would be fitting if the NCAA missed out on vital legal protections because it wanted to preserve its original sin of uncompensated labor.

A collective-bargaining agreement would’ve been helpful in the Sorsby case. When major-league players cheat and gamble, they are punished by the procedures laid out in their collective-bargaining agreements, with no role for meddling state judges to override things. Saban lamented during this week’s hearing that “right now in college football we have no rules.” He’s right, but it may be even more accurate to say that the NCAA hasn’t been playing by any rules all along.

Donald Trump’s polling just crashed to new lows. He’s hit a net approval on inflation of negative 50 points in numerous surveys, something no other president has done—ever. Trump also is at 80 percent disapproval on gas prices. And this is the first time Democrats have led Republicans on inflation since the 1970s. It’s no accident that this comes as sources around Trump tell CNN that he’s “furious” because the media didn’t make his latest Iran bombing look strong and powerful. These stories are linked: His failure to force Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz is causing the very cost spikes that are tanking his approval and his party’s chances in the midterms. We talked to Democratic strategist Christina Reynolds, who has extensive experience in midterms. She explains how Trump’s travails are translating into new pickup opportunities in surprising places, parses a new poll showing Democrats up 10 in the generic House matchup, and explains why 2026 reminds her of Democratic routs in 2006 and 2018. Listen to this episode here. A transcript is here.

The division of the Department of Justice that was supposed to have handled President Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS—and the subsequent settlement that created a slush fund for his allies—claims to have no communication records related to it.

Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington, a progressive watchdog organization, filed a Freedom of Information request with the DOJ, and in response, they were told that the DOJ “did not locate the case you have cited” within the DOJ’s Civil Division’s case management system.

“We have further inquired with Civil Division staff in the Office of the Assistant Attorney General, and they have advised that they are not aware of any responsive records within the Civil Division pertaining to the case you have cited. Accordingly, we have located no responsive records,” wrote Brian Flannigan, division counsel for records and information in the DOJ, in a response letter.

Trump, his sons Donald Jr. and Eric, and the Trump Organization sued the IRS in January for $10 billion in damages over the leak of their tax returns by a former IRS contractor during Trump’s first term. A settlement was reached last month that created a $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” fund for anyone who believes they were unfairly prosecuted for their political beliefs, essentially the president’s allies who were prosecuted under the Biden administration. As part of the settlement, the IRS also pledged not to audit the Trump family or businesses now or at any point in the future.

The case of the president essentially suing an agency in his own government was controversial enough, but the settlement was heavily criticized, not only for the creation of a slush fund for Trump to disburse to his allies, but also for protecting the Trumps and their assets from ever facing scrutiny over their taxes.

The fact that the DOJ claims to have no records relating to communication about the settlement suggests that either it is lying or negotiations were conducted outside of the legal bodies that should have handled them. All of this is yet more proof of Trump using the presidency to settle grievances, enrich himself and his family, and disregard the law at the same time at the expense of the American people.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio and UFC CEO Dana White signed a memorandum of understanding Thursday cementing a public-private partnership between the mixed martial arts company and the U.S. government.

Trump will likely financially benefit from this deal due to his investment in its parent company, TKO Group Holdings. While conservative media has sold this as “cage fights for diplomacy,” the actual agreement mostly sees the UFC partnering with the State Department’s “sports diplomacy” programs at the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. That program is responsible for “citizen exchanges” and other cultural events but spent more than $52 million last year—giving the UFC a major leg-up compared to other sports leagues.

The MOU also comes just three days before the UFC fight night on the White House lawn on Trump’s birthday.

“UFC is the world’s leading mixed martial arts organization. As an American-founded organization, the UFC has grown into a major global sports platform, reflecting U.S. leadership in modern combat sports promotion, athletic performance standards, and international event production,” the State Department wrote in a press release. “Its events are broadcast worldwide and contribute to the United States’ broader cultural and sports influence through professional competition and athlete development.”

Nowhere in the press release was Trump’s investment in the UFC mentioned.

While the UFC has certainly gained serious traction over the years, it is not without its blemishes—White has been criticized for years for making millions upon millions of dollars while his union-less, battered fighters often need second jobs to keep the lights on.

President Trump’s announcement that a deal has been reached with Iran and approved by “all parties involved” is confusing everyone.

The Israeli government is not aware that a finalized deal has been reached, an official told the country’s Channel 12, and it’s unclear where the Iranian government stands. Fars, a semiofficial news agency affiliated with the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, quoted an “informed source close to Iran’s negotiation team,” who said that “no text for a preliminary memorandum of understanding with the United States has been approved.”

Axios, citing unnamed sources, reported that Iran and Qatari mediators believed they had come up with a written agreement Wednesday that the U.S. would accept. Those sources said that Iran told different countries on Thursday that an agreement was reached in principle but was still waiting for Iranian leader Mojtaba Khamenei’s final approval.

Trump announced on Truth Social Thursday afternoon that the deal had been approved by “the United States, Israel, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, Turkey, Pakistan, Bahrain, Kuwait, Jordan, Egypt, and others.” He made things even weirder shortly later in the Oval Office, saying that a signing ceremony could take place with Iran this weekend in Europe, which he would not be able to attend due to the planned UFC fight on the White House lawn Sunday.

“The [Strait of Hormuz] will be open as soon as we sign, which could be soon, very soon, maybe over the weekend in Europe. I won’t be able to be there, but, uh, [JD Vance] will be there, vice president, and some of the people, [Steve Witkoff] did a great job, [Jared Kushner],” Trump said, mentioning the people he had tasked with negotiating with Iran.

Trump says the Iran deal signing ceremony will happen this weekend in Europe but "I won't be able to be there"

(the UFC fight at the White House is Sunday) pic.twitter.com/K5tvLgLuqP

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 11, 2026

Does this mean a deal is imminent, or is Trump just blowing hot air again? From what the president is saying, it’s either done or very close, but there’s no clear confirmation from Iran, and U.S. ally Israel doesn’t seem to be aware of anything, either. For the sake of international stability, one would expect everyone to be on the same page. But unfortunately, this is how Trump has chosen to operate.

The Trump administration’s Epstein investigator is getting his shot at running U.S. national intelligence.

The president’s nominating process to replace Tulsi Gabbard took a sudden right turn Thursday when he named Jay Clayton, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, as his permanent director of national intelligence.

“Few people anywhere in the Legal Community are respected at the level of Jay. I encourage the United States Senate to confirm Jay as soon as possible,” Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social.

Clayton has previously worked as a partner at Sullivan & Cromwell, providing counsel on corporate crisis management. He was also an adjunct professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s law school. He was handed his role atop the Southern District of New York without any prosecutorial experience, and seemingly does not have any relevant experience to run America’s national security operation, either.

The president had initially tapped Bill Pulte, a national real estate developer serving as the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, to temporarily serve in Gabbard’s stead. But Pulte—who similarly had no relevant experience for the job—became a point of contention with lawmakers, who argued that his appointment, even just as acting DNI, was effectively illegal as his résumé lacked requirements for the job that had been written into the law.

To prevent Pulte becoming permanent DNI, Democrats blocked efforts to renew FISA Section 702, a statute that allows federal agencies such as the NSA and the CIA to surveil people without warrants, but that is set to expire Friday.

It is not yet clear how Clayton will change opinions—or the written requirements. Why the White House singled him out as an exceptional candidate to satisfy the administration’s agenda is far less murky.

Clayton has passed countless litmus tests proving his loyalty to the MAGA movement. He has seeded doubt in America’s election integrity, claiming as recently as Monday that there is a “deep problem with voting in America.” He has also defended Trump’s $1.8 billion taxpayer-bankrolled slush fund for the president’s aggrieved political allies, arguing with CNBC last month that Trump was entitled to “recourse” after a government contractor leaked his tax returns.

“Anybody whose tax returns have been intentionally leaked should have recourse against the government,” Clayton said.

And Clayton unquestioningly did the president’s bidding with regard to his appointment to the SDNY, probing Jeffrey Epstein’s social connections—so long as they tied back to former Democratic President Bill Clinton, former Obama administration adviser Larry Summers, and Democratic donor Reid Hoffman. Later, Clayton was handed an additional Trump administration priority in overseeing the investigation into Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, despite his dubious financial ties to the cases.

It is not clear how quickly the Senate will move to confirm Clayton’s confirmation. Among other steps, Clayton still has to fill out a detailed questionnaire, undergo an FBI background check, and sit for a public hearing before the upper chamber conducts its final vote.

This story has been updated.

Someone has traced “8647”—the anti-Trump expression that got former FBI Director James Comey indicted—into the grass on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.

It’s still unclear who made the markings, or how. The administration has yet to formally respond.

Reuters photographer Nathan Howard captured a photo of the apparent tracing.

The slogan “8647” has two parts: “86”—originating in restaurants and meaning to nix or cancel—has developed a broader slang usage for cancelling something. In some cases, it has been used to refer to killing or disappearing someone. “47” refers to Trump’s status as the forty-seventh president.

This appears to be an impressively clandestine act of protest right in the middle of preparations for President Trump’s garish “Freedom 250” festival, which begins next week with the already collapsing “Great American State Fair.” The FIFA World Cup Fan Zone also began drawing visitors to the National Mall on Thursday, just in time to see the message.

Donald Trump has canceled an attack against Iran that was scheduled to take place Thursday evening.

The president in a post on Truth Social suggested that the two countries had come to an agreement.

“Discussions and final points have been, in both concept and great detail, approved by all parties involved, including the United States, Israel, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, Turkey, Pakistan, Bahrain, Kuwait, Jordan, Egypt, and others,” Trump wrote.

“The Naval Blockade will remain in full force and effect until this Transaction is finalized—Time and place of the signing to be announced shortly,” he added.

The markets immediately reacted to Trump’s announcement: Stock indexes soared and oil prices plummeted.

The Trump administration’s negotiating strategy with Tehran has promised peace deals week after week to no avail. The wildly unpopular Middle East conflict is currently in its fourth month.

U.S. forces had already bombed Iran through two consecutive nights this week in the White House’s latest attempt to force Iranian leadership into negotiations to end the war. The attacks occurred despite the obvious risks of escalation.

“If we need to negotiate with bombs, we will negotiate with bombs,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Wednesday. “We will strike them hard tonight and hopefully Iran makes a good decision.”

The development comes in the immediate wake of a violent threat Trump made against Iran earlier Thursday, in which he pledged that the U.S. would strike Iran “VERY HARD TONIGHT” and would further take control of Iranian oil assets and infrastructure, including Kharg Island.

Negotiators worked through Wednesday night in Tehran to iron out the specifications of the peace deal, which both Qatari and Iranian leadership believed would satisfy the White House’s expectations, reported Axios. Insiders that spoke with the publication said that the new plan narrowed in on three main issues: focusing on the mechanism for releasing Iran’s frozen assets, arranging to reopen the Strait of Hormuz during a 60-day ceasefire period, and creating a roadmap for negotiating Iran’s nuclear program during the ceasefire.

This story has been updated.

Trump officials are secretly telling Trump’s supporters that his $1.776 billion Anti-Weaponization Fund is still on, even as they publicly say that it’s dead.

The Atlantic reports that staffers in the Justice Department and White House are still telling Trump allies that they will get some form of payment, looking at ways to activate parts of the slush fund and alternative methods of compensating Trump loyalists at the same time, even though last week, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said publicly that “we are not moving forward with the fund.”

The DOJ has refused to put the fund’s demise in writing, even after being pressed by a federal judge on Wednesday. When asked why they were refusing, DOJ lawyers replied, “I don’t know,” suggesting that work is going on behind the scenes. Judge Richard Leon warned the administration that if they say the fund is dead, they had better not be lying.

Inside the administration, officials are reportedly divided on whether the fund will come to fruition. Anonymous sources told The Atlantic that the administration is continuing to work on the fund quietly, hoping the objections will dissipate and the story will leave the news cycle.

“Trump didn’t want to fight this out in public,” one DOJ official told the publication. Blanche’s nomination as attorney general is already facing opposition from some Senate Republicans, like Thom Tillis and John Curtis, who are threatening to hold it up to ensure the Anti-Weaponization Fund is officially killed. The fund faces legal challenges, as well, with Republican Senator Bill Cassidy joining his Democratic colleague Cory Booker in a court filing supporting a lawsuit against the fund.

A White House official told The Atlantic in an email that “any speculation about potential future actions is just that—speculation. President Trump remains committed to addressing Biden-era weaponization.”

As the midterms approach, the fund will be politically toxic for Republicans, and Democrats will certainly be using it as campaign fodder. The Trump administration has to know this, but will it take the safe option and kill it, or try to keep its efforts hidden until after November?

Gas prices could climb even higher in the coming months.

Industry officials have already warned the White House that the prices could spike yet again due to rapidly diminishing inventories, reported The Washington Post Thursday.

Since the beginning of the Iran war, commercial and government inventories have supplemented gas consumption across the U.S. The reserves have allowed prices to hover around $4.50 per gallon for the last four months—but that could change very quickly, according to oil and gas executives, who are often loath to make such alarming predictions.

“We’re sounding the alarm on these inventories going to record lows,” American Petroleum Institute CEO Mike Sommers told Fox Business. “We have to solve this problem in the Strait of Hormuz.”

Some inventories could be wiped out in a matter of weeks, according to the Post—just in time for summer holidays.

“I have absolutely no doubt the White House—from the president on down—is fully aware of the nearly universal alarm among oil companies and analysts about the direction of travel for oil prices this summer,” Bob McNally, a former Bush administration energy adviser, told the Post.

Yet Trump has been remarkably cavalier about the rising costs. With inflation at a three-year high, Trump stunned reporters, lawmakers, and voters alike on Wednesday with just four words: “I love the inflation,” he said.

“I love it,” he insisted, pledging that oil prices will drop “like a rock” when the war ends.

But the end of the war seems to be nowhere in sight. U.S. forces bombed Iran through two nights this week, part of the White House’s latest strategy to force Tehran to make a deal, despite the obvious risks of escalation.

“If we need to negotiate with bombs, we will negotiate with bombs,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Wednesday. “We will strike them hard tonight and hopefully Iran makes a good decision.”

Meanwhile, Trump’s allies aren’t so sure that their political movement will weather the brewing economic storm. The far-right populist rode the 2024 campaign on vehement promises of affordability; through his presidency, he swore that Americans would see lower utility bills, cheaper groceries, and more American-based jobs. But that hasn’t been the case.

Instead, as millions of Americans struggle with the rising cost of living and companies contend with rattled supply chains, the president’s inner circle fear that it might be too late to fix the problem for Trump’s midterm-dependent acolytes.

“Whether it’s peak inflation or not, it doesn’t matter,” one former Trump administration official told Politico. “The die has been cast in terms of how people are looking at the economy.”

The Pentagon had multiple floors locked down and evacuated Thursday over an air quality false alarm.

“Earlier this morning, Pentagon occupants were notified ‌of ⁠a potential air quality issue, prompting immediate precautionary safety measures and evaluation. Subsequent testing confirmed no hazard exists, and normal operations have ​resumed,” ​chief Pentagon ⁠spokesman Sean Parnell said. “We express our sincere appreciation to the first responders ​for their swift actions to ensure ​the ⁠safety of all personnel.”

Parnell had originally reported there was an “air quality issue necessitating precautionary measures.” Floors two through five in corridors four through seven were closed down, and the Arlington Fire Department’s hazmat team was also present.

This story has been updated.

The Trump administration is reportedly investigating a critic of the Iran war, threatening to revoke his green card and deport him from the U.S.

Trita Parsi is reportedly being targeted by the White House for his frequent criticisms of the Iran war. Parsi, a Swedish citizen born in Iran who holds U.S. permanent residency, co-founded the National Iranian American Council and the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a foreign policy think tank.

To some in the Trump administration, Parsi’s criticisms—and his push for diplomacy with the Iranian government—suggest more than a dissenting opinion. The administration has used immigration law against critics of its foreign policy, notably with college students who protest against U.S. support for Israel in its massacre of Palestinians in Gaza.

Parsi has for years been accused by some Iranian Americans of promoting the Iranian government’s interests, with many Republicans echoing those criticisms. Far-right influencer Laura Loomer, who has a lot of influence in the White House, called Parsi “a mouthpiece for the Iranian regime” who pushes “pro-Iranian regime talking points,” in an April X post. In May, Loomer wrote that Parsi’s “days in our country are numbered.”

Loomer may have been involved in getting two Iranian women detained earlier this year after she claimed they were related to deceased Iranian military commander Qassem Soleimani, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio and others may still be taking her advice.

The State Department under Trump has detained other critics, as well, including doctoral student Rümeysa Öztürk, who wrote an op-ed column about Gaza, and Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate whom the administration is still trying to deport over his role in protests on campus against the war in Gaza.

The Quincy Institute is preparing to “cover the legal costs to prepare for—and if necessary—fight a deportation attack on Trita,” according to a memo obtained by The Free Press. If the administration pursues deportation against him, it would be a chilling attempt to disregard the First Amendment and send the message that anyone less than a full citizen of the U.S. does not have the right to free speech.

The White House is corroding from the inside.

The president is reportedly “pissed” and “increasingly frustrated with everyone” surrounding him—though the drama seems to be a mess of his own creation.

The pressing issue started last week, when Donald Trump suddenly appointed Bill Pulte—a real estate developer serving as the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency—to run U.S. national intelligence in place of the outbound Tulsi Gabbard.

Democrats and some Republicans on the Hill immediately opposed Pulte’s appointment and were quick to point out that the PulteGroup heir would come to the job with zero national security experience, a direct violation of the law, which specifically requires a director of national intelligence to have “extensive” national security experience.

Lawmakers have accused Trump of nominating Pulte for his own personal benefit: “The apparent motivation for his elevation is the demonstrated willingness of Bill Pulte to search government databases for alleged dirt on President Trump’s chosen political enemies,” House Democratic leadership wrote in a statement Thursday.

At risk thanks to Pulte’s nomination is the imminent expiration of FISA Section 702, a statute that allows federal agencies such as the NSA and the CIA to surveil people without warrants. That statute is slated to expire Friday, but Democratic leadership has indicated it won’t vote to renew it “without meaningful reforms,” emphasizing Pulte’s recent promotion in its demands.

Senate Republicans expected Trump to find an off-ramp on the matter—House Speaker Mike Johnson even visited the White House Tuesday to discuss it. But they were wrong.

Trump was irate with “everyone, from his own team to the Senate,” a MAGA-world operative close to the White House told Politico Thursday, highlighting Senate Republicans’ opposition to Trump’s $400 million White House ballroom, his $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund, and the general disregard for Trump’s desire to fire Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough after she identified procedural problems in the SAVE Act.

“He’s pissed, and people are not recognizing the level of pissed that he is,” the operative added. “He does not like being put in a box. When you put him in a box, then Trump’s going to blow the box up.”

The message was received loud and clear. One senior GOP staffer described Trump’s recent moves to Politico as “a middle finger to Congress.”

Trump is also furious that his preferred candidate for Iowa governor, Representative Randy Feenstra, lost his primary last week. “He’s really angry about this Iowa endorsement—like really, really angry,” a White House ally told Politico. “He’s really angry that his consultants and people pushed him to do that.”