The New Republic

President Trump may have undermined his own legal argument to build a new White House ballroom.

Trump is claiming that ballroom is necessary because it will also provide a secure underground facility in case of a national emergency, an argument his lawyers have used in court. But former White House officials told The Washington Post that the building already has a fortified bunker deep underground that was built more than a decade ago to shelter the president and White House staffers.

The facility, located over 60 feet underneath the White House, was secretly built during the Obama administration and can house dozens of people for multiple weeks, the officials told the Post. It can withstand a nuclear bomb and was designed to give the president a secure command center if such a disastrous scenario takes place.

Trump and his lawyers have argued in court that the White House ballroom is necessary for national security because secure underground facilities are part of the plans. White House spokesperson Davis Ingle repeated those arguments when contacted by the Post.

“The East Wing Modernization Project is inextricably tied to the security of the President, the White House grounds and the certain security infrastructure assets,” Ingle said in a statement. “Recent events such as the foiled attack on the historic UFC Freedom 250 event at the White House proves exactly why the East Wing Modernization Project is severely needed for large scale events, which include drone proof structures and drone ports among other critical security enhancements.”

Last week, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts stayed a lower court ruling and allowed the Trump administration to continue construction on the ballroom while the high court considers the White House’s arguments. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia had ruled that the ballroom was illegal because Trump didn’t have congressional approval.

Administration officials such as White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller have used national security arguments to defend the ballroom. Miller wrote in a court filing that the construction “serves continuity-of-government interests by ensuring that the President and senior national security staff are able to operate from a protected facility during any attack on the nation’s capital.”

In an August 13 filing to the Supreme Court, Army Secretary Dan Driscoll wrote, “Securing this reinforced subterranean node guarantees uninterrupted command and control in place.”

The White House ballroom and underground facilities are “a nondiscretionary prerequisite to ensure the President can maintain continuity of government, uninterrupted operations, and effectively exercise National Command Authority during an attack or global crisis,” Driscoll wrote.

But the Post’s report shows that all of those arguments don’t hold up when there’s already a secure, underground bunker at the White House that is just over a decade old. Trump is expending government resources to defend a vanity project that has no real justification besides his own love of luxury buildings.

A private arbitrator has ordered The Washington Post to rehire opinion columnist Karen Attiah—who was fired from the paper last September after she criticized gun violence and posted a racist quote from right-wing activist Charlie Kirk after his death.  

“After the Washington Post fired me last year for speaking the truth in the wake of the Charlie Kirk killing, I fought back. And I’m happy to announce: I won my case against the Washington Post,” Attiah—the Post’s only Black opinion columnist at the time of her firing—wrote Monday on Bluesky. “They have been ordered to reinstate me immediately.”

“This decision confirms what we’ve said from the start: I was doing my job as an opinion writer, and this was wrongful termination,” she said in another statement. 

An independent arbitrator found the Post “violated” its labor agreement and “did not have good and sufficient cause” to fire Attiah, according to a copy of the order reviewed by The New York Times.

Attiah made a string of posts on Bluesky in the aftermath of Kirk’s shooting in Utah, which followed a school shooting in Colorado, with only one of her posts actually mentioning Kirk by name. 

“I wish I had hope for gun control and that I could believe ‘political violence has no place in this country.’ But we live in a country that accepts white children being massacred by gun violence,” she wrote first. “Not just accepts, but worships violence.”

“Part of what keeps America so violent is the insistence that people perform care, empty goodness and absolution for white men who espouse hatred and violence,” she then wrote, referring to Kirk, who spent much of his career trying to justify racism and bigotry. “Refusing to tear my clothes and smear ashes on my face in performative mourning for a white man that espoused violence is … not the same as violence,” she said later.

The one post Attiah made that actually had Kirk’s name in it was a slightly paraphrased quote. 

“‘Black women do not have the brain processing power to be taken seriously. You have to go steal a white person’s slot’—Charlie Kirk,” she wrote. (Kirk’s original quote was “You do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken seriously,” in reference to former First Lady Michelle Obama, news host Joy Reid, Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, and former Representative Sheila Jackson Lee, although his ire was certainly directed at any successful Black woman.) 

Attiah said the Post found her Bluesky posts to be “unacceptable,” “gross misconduct,” and “endangering the physical safety” of her co-workers. She added that she was fired “without conversation,” and called it a “violation of the very standards of journalistic fairness and rigor the Post claims to uphold.” The arbitrator felt similarly, and the decision to reinstate Attiah was widely celebrated. 

“Journalists can’t work at an organization where they must live in fear of being arbitrarily fired for doing their jobs—which, in Karen’s case, was writing her opinion,” Washington Post Guild Chair Natalie Vineberg wrote in a statement. “This decision is a victory for all Guild members who benefit from and fought for the just cause protections in our contract, and a tribute to every Guild member who took action in solidarity with Karen.”

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the August 24 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

The furor around Donald Trump’s very devoted young aide, Natalie Harp, isn’t abating in the least, and new reporting indicates that anger inside the White House over this story—all driven by the fury of one person in particular—might have backfired, making the story even worse for him. This comes as new leaks also suggest Harp’s role is even more unnerving than we thought.

The whole saga indicates something important about Donald Trump’s political weakness right now, and how Dems can exploit it in today’s information environment. We’re talking about it all with Democratic strategist Greg Greene, who held the job of managing social media accounts under President Obama and wrote about this experience for The New Republic. Greg, good to have you on.

Greg Greene: Glad to be here.

Sargent: OK, so last week Senator Jon Ossoff pointed out that Trump doesn’t like doing the job as president, and instead likes to spend his time traveling with Natalie on the presidential plane. The White House and MAGA went absolutely haywire, resulting in a story that continues right now. Greg, can you bring us up to speed on all this?

Greene: Yes. Jon Ossoff really set off a furor by bringing Natalie into the conversation, and the story has spun out of control almost since then for the White House. What I would say is that I really got interested in this thinking about how Natalie Harp has access not only to the president himself, but also to his phone and to his social media accounts, which really raises questions, in my view, based on my experience, about the appropriateness of her role without supervision in the content that goes out.

Sargent: Yeah, and we’re going to get to that in a second. But we’re now getting new reporting from The Atlantic that reports that the White House freak-out over Harp was really a self-own. The White House publicly tried to humiliate journalists who wrote or asked about Harp, but that only persuaded more outlets that had ignored her role to write about her.

And then The Atlantic reports that aides inside the White House grew angrier because, according to sources, they were, quote, “taking their cues from a furious president.”

Greene: I agree with the White House staffers who believe that this approach to the conversation has really backfired on the White House. Natalie Harp is someone who people have covered since at least 2024.

Maggie Haberman has written about her role in the White House operation and the campaign operation before, but she managed to fly under the radar before now—when, thanks to the escapade in Ankara, Turkey, with the catering cart, she became a live wire in news coverage, in a heated story, and has been since then talked about in a way that really hasn’t served her interests or the president’s, in a time when the president’s approval ratings are already in the tank.

Sargent: Absolutely. And Greg, we know how Trump operates. It goes all the way back to Roy Cohn. It’s never concede error, always attack, always try to humiliate at all costs. What’s the difference between the way Natalie Harp and Trump are doing this versus the way you did it under Obama?

Greene: Well, the biggest difference is that there were many layers between myself and the president. As I say in the piece for The New Republic, I never wrote on a plane, never mind a catering cart. I spent my time at the Democratic National Committee working with colleagues there and consulting with the digital director, the communications director, and people inside the White House communications office to figure out what priorities we had for getting messages out, and to shape our posts around those agenda items.

So it was never an instance of one staffer—never mind myself—getting into the president’s ear and proposing material, because really it was an operation designed to support the presidency, rather than one person just whispering into another person’s ear.

Sargent: And you also didn’t decide what the president saw and what he doesn’t see. If the White House had said nothing, most reporters would have moved on very quickly. But then the vehemence of the reaction kind of stirs the interest of the reporters, because it starts to look like there’s some reason the White House doesn’t want this relationship with this young aide talked about. And boom, there’s the ingredient to really make it blow up.

You’ve been doing this stuff a long time. What does this tell us about how Washington works?

Greene: Well, I would say the first thing is that Washington loves a scandal. When I was at the University of Virginia as a student many, many years ago, I studied in a seminar with political scientist Larry Sabato about campaigns and elections. He wrote the book Feeding Frenzy, about how scandals develop and gain a momentum of their own. And what we’re seeing, perhaps for one of the first times in the Trump presidency, especially in his second term, is an example of that playing out in real life.

He has usually been able to escape this sort of cyclical scrutiny that amplifies as news cycles go on, one after the next. But this time people are really interested in Natalie Harp. And I have to say, they have reason to be, because the relationship between her and the president, and the fashion in which she manages the president’s communications—helping him text with world leaders, helping him craft his social media posts, his Truth Social—without having a gatekeeper in between her and the send button, is highly unusual.

Sargent: It sure is. Well, The New York Times talked to a bunch of advisors around Trump, and they were pretty happy to leak about Natalie Harp. They talked about how she’s really this information gatekeeper for Trump, and his advisors think that because of her, some of the information he gets is, quote, “poisonous and counterproductive,” as the Times put it.

And listen to this from the Times: “She supplies him with content she fishes out of the social media gutter, like the video he posted depicting the Obamas as apes.” Greg, I don’t get why that little nugget didn’t get more attention. It’s a big deal that she was behind him posting that, isn’t it?

Greene: It is a massive revelation. I was personally not shocked, but taken aback by that confirmation. And I would say that, just as a professional who’s been in the shoes of people who post to these accounts that are widely watched, there is a serious lack of editorial judgment that is spoken to by the idea of depicting any public figure in this country, especially a former president of the United States, as an ape. I don’t understand how that had not been a bigger story up to now.

Sargent: I mean, under a conventional presidency, something like that would be a firing offense. I get that Donald Trump has completely revamped the rules for everything and turned the whole idea of a firing offense and scandal into something completely different than it ever was before.

But I would think that if anything close to that happened under a Democratic president, and we knew from the pages of The New York Times that this particular aide fished out this image and got it put on social media under the president’s handle, you’d think that person would get fired instantly, wouldn’t you?

Greene: Yes, I absolutely do think someone would get fired instantly. And more than that, I can think of any number of people who you and I both know, from my time working at the Democratic National Committee, at whose hands I might not even be alive right now had I been so irresponsible with the privilege I had of administering those accounts. It is not only a firing offense, in my view, but it’s unspeakable.

Sargent: And so if she’s got this control over his social media feed—we’ve seen posts with him depicted as Jesus Christ and all these other types of posts that really deify him, that really go to the core of this kind of personalist-dictator vibe that he wants out there about himself. She’s clearly the key figure.

And you can kind of see something even more unnerving in all this, because we’ve now learned from reporting that she really deifies Donald Trump. And so from her letters and stuff like that, we’ve—she essentially dotes over him to the degree that she doesn’t want him to ever suffer any negative feelings of any kind. She wants to bring him joy and so forth and so on.

So you can kind of see where these posts depicting him as Jesus Christ are actually coming from. And I think that given that the whole world is seeing the American president depict himself as the Almighty, we want to know who’s behind that, I think.

Greene: Yes, absolutely. And there is a lack of perspective that is revealed in the letters that were reported yesterday in another publication, that she had written to the president—calling herself unworthy, asking for his approval and forgiveness. Things that I would never have contemplated doing, because, frankly, I was working for the betterment of the president and the presidency, and deliberately kept myself out of public view in my role writing that content, because my profile was not the point. The point was the president’s agenda, and the agenda of the people who helped to bring him to the White House.

Sargent: I think you really put your finger on an important distinction there, which is that under previous presidents—maybe somewhat less so under George W. Bush, but certainly under Democratic presidents—a lot of the senior staff that work with the president and shape his message and so forth understand the presidency as a public thing.

It’s not about one person. It’s about something that the country possesses. It’s an institution that is preserved from one administration to the next. It isn’t about the deification of one person. And under Donald Trump, tons have been written about how his presidency is functionally like a personalist one. But there you really see it very clearly.

The people around Trump do not see the presidency as a public thing, as something that he is stewarding and shepherding on behalf of the American people. They solely understand it as being only about him. And I think this story really reveals that very clearly. What do you think of that?

Greene: It’s really degrading and sordid to be governed in this way—to have the highest office in the land used as a vehicle for glorification of someone who would post material depicting a former president as an ape. Who would post material depicting himself as a fighter pilot dropping poop on No Kings protesters, who are his fellow Americans, on whose behalf he’s supposed to be governing.

It is a day-in and day-out sordid spectacle. And for me personally, I find this—I don’t take it as a personal embarrassment, because I’m not in the White House, I have long since been away from the role of posting social media for people in high office. But I do find this incredibly disappointing and concerning, because the access that she has, both to his information flow and to his accounts, really creates problems for people who are concerned about misuse of that access for various purposes, whether insider trading or worse.

Sargent: And we haven’t even probed yet—no reporters have really gotten to the core of whether she’s instrumental in his tweets that seem to undermine his own negotiators with Iran, for instance.

Greene: Exactly.

Sargent: There’s a paradox at the core of this I want to try to identify as well. Trump and MAGA really think that they have this boundless power to humiliate anyone who dares to criticize them, or really anyone who dares to tell the truth about them. They have this limitless ability to control the information space, they think. And so to them, they can just simply demolish anyone who talks about Harp and leave them in kind of smoking ruins or whatever.

But the problem for them is that the Natalie Harp story does reveal highly unnerving truths about this man’s temperament and total unfitness to be president. And once the story gets onto that topic, their power shrivels and disappears. That’s what we’re seeing here. What do you think of all that, Greg?

Greene: Yes, I do think their power to control and dictate the agenda does dissipate in moments like this. And what we’re seeing here with Natalie Harp is a picture of a White House run poorly, of a president with no self-restraint, with terrible instincts about what’s in the best interest of the country to publish.

And it’s being displayed in a visceral way, because we have also seen Natalie Harp being rescued from what the president considered to be an Air Force One at possible risk—over the head of the secretary of state and other Cabinet officers who are in the presidential line of succession. It is an incredible story about judgment and misjudgment, and it almost tells itself, but I’m glad to help tell part of it.

Sargent: Well, you certainly did. And one last thought on all this, to close. I think a lot of people, you know, in the media look at this and they say, OK, well, did Jon Ossoff err by, you know, making this personal? Did Jon Ossoff make a mistake by attacking a professional woman? Did Jon Ossoff open himself to attacks from the White House by appearing to insinuate things about Trump’s sexual habits or whatever?

And I just think that mindset that looks at it that way is wrong. And it’s actually an insider-D.C. mindset that just misses what I think you got at earlier, which is the degree to which this kind of stuff—seeing this president do this—is just degrading and terrible for us all to live under.

And I think the American people look at a story like this and they see it the way we’re describing it, not the way those D.C. insider types describe it. They see a story of someone who’s just wiping his ass with a public thing, which is the presidency. And they hate that. They hate the ballroom, they hate the Reflecting Pool nonsense.

I think this stuff really works against Trump and Republicans, and underscores that the Republican Party has just let this madman run amok with our stuff, right? And I think that’s the way the story is perceived. What do you think, Greg?

Greene: I think that’s right. It’s certainly how I perceive it. It’s certainly my feeling about how the presidency and the White House have been treated over the last year and a half–plus. I would also say this. Natalie Harp is a grown woman. Just like I was a grown man when I was running those accounts and when I was working at the DNC, there were times when I came under attack for things that I wrote in my personal capacity—not in a public capacity, but that were visible to the public and the press, which followed me at the time.

And there were times when people gave me grief over wordings of social media posts I made on behalf of the Democrats. There are people who today go after the woman who runs the Democrats’ official account now, as in the time when she went after Stephen Miller, rightly so, in my opinion.

So if you are holding a position of public trust—whether that’s even just public-facing, like mine at the Democratic National Committee, or if you are on the federal salary paid by the American people, like Natalie Harp—you have to be able to accept criticism and scrutiny. And the idea that she is a damsel who needs defending from the eyes of the public who pay her salary is pathetic, frankly. I would hope she gets her big-girl pants on and faces the scrutiny that is rightly coming to her, head-on.

Sargent: Very well said. Greg Greene, thanks so much for coming on, man. We really appreciate it.

Greene: I appreciate it. Thanks.

In June, during the first of the record heat waves to scorch Europe this summer, “the London Ambulance Service fielded over 53,000 calls, surpassing the number received when the Covid-19 pandemic was at its height in March 2020,” Bloomberg Green reported this week. And conditions inside U.K. hospitals were “far worse” than during Covid, Fiona Brennan, an anesthetist in Cardiff, Wales, told Bloomberg. It was so hot inside surgery rooms for cancer patients that basic procedures faltered, Brennan said, adding that some patients were so sweaty that she had to constantly check that intravenous drips were not “slipping out” of their bodies.

Also, as with Covid, early mortality figures dramatically understated the death tolls to come. The U.K. Health Security Agency initially estimated that 2,877 people died from heat-related ailments in May and June. France estimated 5,700 excess deaths took place between June 17 and July 2. Other analyses, benefiting from more complete data and advanced methodology, blamed the heat for as many as 20,000 deaths across Europe. And that was before the June heat wave was followed by an additional four heat waves that surely boosted the number of sick and dying.

Europe is not the only hot spot. In India, temperatures in the capital, Delhi, soared to 54 degrees Celsius (129 degrees Fahrenheit), pushing the limits of human survival, especially for the city’s poor, and again illustrating a core injustice of the climate emergency: The people who did the least to cause it are the ones who tend to suffer the most.

But despite such parallels, there are critical differences between the Covid and climate emergencies. In the opening weeks of the pandemic, scientists weren’t sure how the virus spread, or how to treat it. By contrast, science is unequivocal that today’s extreme heat waves—and the drought and fires they’ve kindled—would be “all but impossible” without human-caused global warming driven primarily by burning oil, gas, and coal. “Summer of 2026 is another step in the escalation of our world into a sort of hotter, more dangerous planet that climate scientists have been telling us about for decades,” Jeff Goodell, the author of The Heat Will Kill You First, said on CBS News.

Another difference: When Covid emerged in early 2020, much of the news media rose to the challenge, providing science-based reporting that helped both the public and policymakers make informed decisions about how to respond. Journalists also held governments to account, puncturing claims of miracle cures and explaining the value of physical distancing and getting vaccinated.

But, with notable exceptions like those cited in this article, news coverage of this summer’s extreme weather has fallen well short of the Covid standard. Two-thirds of the articles that major U.K. newspapers published about the summer’s fires did not even mention climate change, much less explain how record heat makes fires more likely and more deadly. In the U.S., the evening newscasts of ABC, CBS, and NBC between July 13 and 19 lavished airtime on the extreme weather but did not utter the words “climate change.”

The Guardian, as usual, has kept the climate connection front and center, and on August 8, it published an opinion piece by the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, who urged government leaders in Britain and around the world to treat climate change as the emergency that scientists say it is—something Khan began doing as mayor in 2018. Khan’s call for leaders to “reduce our reliance on oil and gas” did not name names, but commentators interpreted it as pressing the new British prime minister, Andy Burnham, to rule out more North Sea oil drilling, a question Burnham has studiously avoided since taking office on July 20. Meanwhile, a petition demanding that the government present a televised emergency briefing on the climate crisis has attracted 100,000 signatures, the threshold for getting it debated in Parliament, whose next session begins September 1.

Khan was only half right, however, when he opined that “the climate emergency is here, and no one can say they didn’t see it coming.” Yes, the emergency is here, and “coming faster and harder” than even scientists expected, economist Matthew Agarwala of the University of Sussex said on Britain’s Channel 4. But as Khan’s own article goes on to lament, a small but noisy chorus of climate deniers still deny that climate change is happening at all.

Khan cites Donald Trump’s dismissal of climate change as “a con job” and calls out unnamed “opposition politicians and right-wing populists” in the U.K. He does not point out that these obstructionists represent only a small fraction of public opinion. More than eight out of 10 Britons (83 percent), as well as three out of four Americans (74 percent), want their governments to take stronger climate action, according to Gallup polling that informs Covering Climate Now’s 89 Percent Project. But the deniers appear to be more numerous than they actually are, both because they have access to far-reaching megaphones and because most news coverage does not point out how wildly their claims are contradicted by science.

Again, the contrast with media coverage of Covid is striking. On April 23, 2020, as Covid’s death toll was mounting, Trump suggested at a White House press briefing that injecting disinfectant into the body might kill the virus. News outlets responded with a flurry of stories quoting incredulous experts lambasting Trump’s idea as dangerous nonsense. Trump quickly retreated, claiming that he’d been speaking sarcastically (though video of his remarks showed he was serious).

Now, as the summer of 2026 brings record heat to much of the world, as thousands die and many thousands more endure various degrees of misery, White House reporters do not even ask Trump about climate change, much less challenge his scientifically disproven assertion that it’s a hoax. In the U.K., press coverage largely ignores the climate argument against more North Sea oil drilling, instead framing Burnham’s upcoming decision as the latest battle in the culture wars.

Most journalists did better than this during Covid, and the public needs us to do better now.

This article is published as part of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now.

The situation is dire. Millions of people in the United States are months away from losing their health care. On January 1, dramatic changes to Medicaid outlined in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, or OBBA, will take effect, impacting who is eligible for Medicaid. The new law excludes some groups completely (like most immigrants), introduces “community engagement” requirements (defined as 80 hours a month of work, volunteering, or school) for most people (apart from the elderly, children, and pregnant women), and requires renewals twice a year (as opposed to yearly). Some people have been impacted already (Nebraska implemented its changes on May 1 and began disenrolling people this month), and some will be kicked off their health care in October, when some previously qualified immigrants are made ineligible for Medicaid.

Though 92 percent of people should remain eligible for Medicaid coverage (through either a qualifying exemption or meeting the community engagement requirements), millions will still end up losing care. This is because of the substantial bureaucratic hurdles the OBBA introduces. In addition to increasing the intervals during which people must reverify their eligibility, the government has introduced an onerous process for documenting exemptions to the “community engagement” (i.e., work) requirements.

The process has become a maze of bureaucratic imposition. According to the Center for Medicaid and Medicare Services, you can get an exemption if you have a diagnosis that meets the criteria for being “medically frail.” However, the government has decided to go even further, potentially requiring attestation from a medical provider that an individual’s condition is sufficiently debilitating to keep them from working. The government cites “cancer” and “HIV/AIDS” as examples of conditions that need such a doctor’s note. A number of states have sued the federal government, arguing that this process differs from the law Congress wrote.

If just reading about this sounds confusing, that’s the point. Bureaucratic hurdles are designed with the intent to narrow the number of people who get Medicaid and therefore reduce how much the federal government spends on care. Instead, state governments will spend millions of dollars on administrative costs; data, software, consultants, and workers needed to process extra forms. When Georgia implemented work requirements for Medicaid in 2023, it cost $40 million to implement, and 80 percent of that cost was administrative. The OBBA changes will also have a profound economic cost: Some estimates suggest a loss of 1.2 million jobs and a decrease in gross domestic product by $154 billion when the law is fully implemented in 2029.

The counter to this chaos is simple—and it’s something we’re starting to hear about on the stump from Democratic candidates. As Vox’s Rachel Cohen reports, the health care reform debate has shifted in the direction of improving on the status quo and an openness to bigger ideas. And while candidates like Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, who Cohen notes is flexible on how the system might be improved, on the stump he keeps mentioning a more familiar idea: We could have a national health insurance program, better known as “Medicare for All.” Given the wreckage of the Trump era, Medicare for All has a lot to recommend.

In places such as Canada and the United Kingdom, you don’t worry about having to pay for lifesaving procedures, knowing that the government will pay for it. Getting procedures preapproved by an insurance bureaucrat is not part of the equation, and being buried in thousands of dollars of medical debt is not a concept that exists. These systems may not be perfect, but it is clear on key metrics that the United States does worse on health care than our industrialized counterparts. As just one example, the U.S. has worse life expectancy than most other high-income countries, yet we spend far more per capita than any other nation on health care.

The American health care system is no stranger to complexity. Even for those on private insurance, people are used to having to spend hours on the phone to get their care covered, doctors argue with insurance representatives on prior authorizations, and people have to navigate a labyrinth of numbers and lists—who is in network, what is the deductible, and what are the out-of-pocket maximums. If you buy health care on the Obamacare marketplace, it means having to decide what sort of trade-offs between coverage and cost you need to make when picking a plan. Americans hate dealing with insurance so much that one in four people will stay in a job they do not like in order to keep their commercial health insurance.

For the past few decades in the U.S., academics and politicians alike have treated Medicare for All as a “pie in the sky” idea. Despite studies showing that it would save billions of dollars and thousands of lives, this avenue has largely been unpursued, and instead, incremental steps have been taken to expand health care access. The Affordable Care Act, or ACA, was a monumental step in the right direction—among other things, it expanded Medicaid eligibility greatly.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, the federal government chose to continuously enroll people in Medicaid, keeping millions on health care (by avoiding needless bureaucracy), and Congress passed tax credits for the ACA marketplace (via the American Rescue Plan) and later extended them via the Inflation Reduction Act, bringing down the cost of monthly premiums dramatically. But in many cases, these wins turned out to be temporary. In 2023, continuous enrollment ended and millions were disenrolled from Medicaid. After Congress and the Trump administration let ACA subsidies lapse at the end of 2025, three million fewer people got their health care from the ACA marketplace.

Even though the ACA faced legal and legislative challenges, it has mostly survived. Now Medicaid is facing dramatic cuts. Medicare for All will similarly be an uphill battle, but the lesson we should garner from past experiences is that those who seek the complete privatization of health care in the United States will continue to be relentless at rolling back progress. Any attempt to expand health care or protect gains will be met with organized political resistance; so why not go for the moon? After all, polls show that Medicare for All is increasingly popular and, depending on the poll, has a majority or plurality support.

Medicare for All would not just be an easier experience for patients and doctors; it would also make dealing with a litany of American social problems a whole lot easier. Take treatment for substance use disorder, which is mostly funded through Medicaid. Currently, under the proposed “medical frailty rules,” someone who receives treatment for substance use disorder would be eligible for an exemption to the community engagement requirements, unless they have been in recovery for more than five years. Never mind the fact that recovery is a unique experience and challenging to define, this arbitrary policy could be disruptive and further complicate recovery and addiction treatment. It’s why treatment providers are so worried: having to focus on bureaucracy and paperwork to keep people covered, rather than spending time on care itself.

Contrast that with Medicare for All: A patient gets referred to treatment, the government pays for it with fewer bureaucratic steps, and there are no worries about jumping through hoops to continue to qualify for care. It would be a similar story across the health care system.

The next few years will be rough for the health care industry and patients alike. Hospitals will face enormous budgetary strains as they provide emergency care to people without insurance. Despite the best efforts of many states to keep people enrolled, millions will still likely lose care. Millions more will spend needless hours on bureaucracy and paperwork. While we may be a few years away from being able to implement a real universal health care plan, now is the time to start following the lead of El-Sayed and others to build the groundwork and start pitching it as a serious path forward. Academics, policymakers, professional societies, unions, and others should be relentless in their demand for Medicare for All.

Imagine a world where health insurance wasn’t tied to your job. Where employers didn’t have to negotiate with health insurance companies; where your monthly premium went toward taxes for an all-encompassing plan. A world where you don’t have to worry about making “too much money,” so that you lose your comprehensive health care (most people who work and receive Medicaid are in jobs that don’t provide insurance). That’s a world with Medicare for All.

Life is unaffordable for so many Americans, and managing your health can be difficult—but health care shouldn’t be a luxury that only the rich can afford. It really is that simple.

Pease Elementary in downtown Austin, Texas, has sat empty since 2020. Formerly the oldest continuously operating school in Texas, Pease was shuttered by the Austin Independent School District to save money. On a steamy day this summer, the hulking structure provided an appropriate backdrop for the political campaign of Gina Hinojosa, the Democratic state representative who is challenging incumbent GOP Governor Greg Abbott.

A district plan to close the school in 2012, while Hinojosa’s son was a student there, inspired her political career, sending her first to the school board and then, four years later, to the Statehouse just a few blocks away. But Pease is also symbolic of Texas’s surprisingly fierce attachment to public education. The school dates back to 1876, the same year that the current state constitution enshrined “a system of public free schools”—a factoid that Texas advocates drop with regularity. That Pease is no longer a school matters, too. Since late 2023, at least 135 Texas public schools either have closed or are slated to close due to budget crises brought on by state funding shortfalls.

Hinojosa believes her message that Texas public schools won’t survive another four years of Abbott can galvanize voters across the political spectrum. “For Texans, public schools are crucial to our identity,” Hinojosa told me. “They’re in our state constitution, they’re the largest employers in our rural communities, they represent ‘Friday night lights.’ That they are in crisis is a big deal.”

Her decision to make public schools so central to the campaign may seem like a risky gambit. Education, after all, rarely cracks the top five when it comes to issues Texans claim to care about, far overshadowed by the economy and immigration. And according to polling, just one in five Texas voters has school-age children. The “Pissed Off Texas Mom” T-shirts are a staple of rallies for the candidate whom supporters call simply “Gina,” but in reality, the demographic may be too small to make a difference.

Hinojosa’s critique goes far beyond budget cuts and declining test scores. Schools are the centerpiece of what she argues has been an organized effort by Abbott and the GOP to rig the system against the state’s kids, especially those in working-class families like those she grew up with in Brownsville. Call it “mom populism”—an appeal that centers a full-throated rejection of school privatization and presents the GOP’s increasingly aggressive interventions into local school districts as “corruption schemes” intended to benefit big donors, especially the right-wing oilmen who hold such sway here. By systematically weakening public schools, Hinojosa argues, Abbott and his cronies are undermining the American Dream.

Beating a three-term GOP incumbent in a state like Texas remains a tall order, but there are signs that Hinojosa’s argument may just be breaking through. While Abbott, who is running for an unprecedented fourth term, comes to this fight with a massive war chest, Republicans in Texas are restive, and education is part of their discontent. The $1 billion school voucher program that Abbott muscled through the state legislature last year, after he orchestrated primary runs against rural Republicans who opposed it, remains deeply controversial among many conservatives, who view vouchers less as “education freedom” than as a state takeover of private and home schools.

Michael Ryan is one of Abbott’s defectors. A retired educator, Ryan served on the school board in Fort Worth until the state took over the district last year, installing handpicked leaders. “I’m as red a Republican as they come, but I have to do something different,” said Ryan, a three-time Trump voter. Hinojosa’s pledge to fire Abbott’s top education official on day one won him over, along with her sharp critique of school vouchers and the big money that flooded into the state on their behalf. Ryan was particularly rankled by the $10 million Abbott received from Pennsylvania billionaire investor Jeff Yass. “In the old days, a bribe meant $100 on the floor of the Capitol,” said Ryan.

Recent elections indicate that defectors like Ryan are part of a trend. This January, Democrat Taylor Rehmet, a veteran and union machinist, handily defeated a conservative activist in a special election for a state Senate seat in Tarrant County, a seat Democrats last held in 1991. Despite being far outspent by his opponent, Rehmet won by a decisive 14-point margin in a district Donald Trump carried by 17 points in 2024, alarming Republicans, not just in Texas, but across the country. “[A] swing of this magnitude is not something that can be dismissed,” chimed in Florida Governor Ron DeSantis on X. Rehmet used his background as a union leader at Lockheed Martin to win over working-class voters, but he also made public education central to his campaign, sounding many of the same themes that Hinojosa is running on now.

Affordability was the top issue for voters, but their economic concerns were often entwined with worries over the state of the local schools, said Rehmet, who grew up in a Republican household in Garland, the son of an aircraft mechanic and a beautician. “People are feeling the affordability crunch in the schools. Funding is down, the cost of living is up. You’ve got teachers paying for supplies out of their own salaries.” In a part of the state that has been ground zero for conservative school board takeovers and book bans, Rehmet also tapped into a deepening voter backlash against GOP culture-warring candidates, who have racked up a lengthening string of losses in Tarrant County.

A recent analysis of this spring’s GOP primary turnout in Texas warned that the party’s historically reliable voters were dangerously disengaged, “either sitting out this cycle or, in some cases, shifting their partisan affiliation entirely.” The phenomenon was most pronounced in suburban districts, the pollsters concluded.

That finding comes as no surprise to Hinojosa. “People know who has been in charge,” she told me, “and they want change.”

Mom Populism

Texas isn’t the only state where education has emerged as a potent issue for Democrats. As of March 2026, in the 30 state legislative races where Democrats have flipped seats since Trump returned to office, public education was often a central issue. It’s not hard to see why. As the GOP has shifted sharply in favor of private school vouchers, Democrats are increasingly running against candidates who no longer believe in public education at all, even as constituents in both parties still have kids in the local schools. Ascendant populist Democrats are also tapping into anti-billionaire fury as they campaign against vouchers. And with affordability top of mind in nearly every election these days, Democrats are effectively linking issues like school budget cuts and teacher pay to voters’ broader economic concerns.

“Republicans have no answer to affordability except for eliminating the property tax, which would devastate public schools,” said Eric Gisler, who flipped a Statehouse seat in Georgia in 2025. “That makes education a real wedge issue.”

That Democrats are running—and winning—at least in part on education may seem surprising, given the dire reporting on the state of the nation’s schools. In recent years, the headlines have been relentlessly bleak—sliding test scores in math and reading, a “learning recession,” high rates of chronic absenteeism.

The cascade of bad news has prompted loud calls from influential centrist Democrats, including possible 2028 presidential contender Rahm Emanuel, to return to the more combative education policies of the past in an effort to reverse sagging student achievement. But these Democrats are also making a political argument about the direction of their party. Bring back the high-stakes testing and tough-on-teachers rhetoric of the Obama era, goes this line of thinking, and the party can win back fickle voters. “We’re adrift, it’s killing us politically, and it’s killing our kids,” former Obama Education Secretary Arne Duncan claimed recently.

Yet as I’ve talked to Democrats who flipped seats in districts won by Trump, or who are running surprisingly competitive races in red states, a very different picture has emerged. Candidates like Taylor Rehmet are attracting independents and even former GOP voters by arguing not that the schools are failing, but that kids and communities are being failed by politicians who have abandoned public schools. “We want high standards, but we want them to be fair,” said Rehmet. “If we don’t provide enough funding, isn’t that sabotage?”

And again and again, I heard the strains of an emergent “mom populism,” from male and female candidates alike, that makes an argument for public schools as a vehicle for collective economic uplift. Notably, these Democrats are not claiming that education alone can lift kids out of poverty, or that sending more kids to college is the way to address inequality—an argument that has proved to be a political trap for the party. Instead, candidates often pair their defense of public schools as institutions that benefit working-class kids with populist calls for higher wages and more worker power. When it comes to issues like school vouchers, the influence of teachers’ unions, and college-for-all, these mom populists are departing dramatically from the prescription offered by centrist Democrats, and they’re winning as a result.

Reverse Robin Hood

When Denise Powell emerged as the winner of a hard-fought six-person Democratic primary in Nebraska’s 2nd congressional district last spring, her victory was regarded as an upset. After all, Powell triumphed over much better known candidates, including the descendant of one of the state’s political dynasties. In November, the business and nonprofit consultant will try to flip the seat being vacated by GOP veteran Don Bacon, something Democrats here have tried—and failed—to do for nearly a decade. The contest, regarded as one of the Democrats’ best chances for a pickup, is currently rated as a toss-up, but Powell is convinced that she is uniquely suited to appeal to the independents and former GOP voters she’ll need to win.

Two years ago, when opponents of school vouchers sought to put the issue before Nebraska voters, Powell crisscrossed the state to gather signatures, including in its most rural, deepest red stretches. “At a July Fourth celebration, I had a guy wearing a ‘Fuck Joe Biden’ T-shirt come up to me and ask, ‘Where do I sign?’” she said. While Powell was working on multiple ballot campaigns that summer, including one that would have expanded reproductive rights, it was her experience talking to conservative voters about vouchers that prepared her to run for Congress. “I’d walk up a dirt road to a house flying a Trump flag, but we found common ground, and it was around public education,” said Powell.

Opposition to school vouchers turns out to have been a consistent, and underappreciated, ingredient in recent special elections in which Democrats have flipped Statehouse seats in Florida, Iowa, New Hampshire, and Georgia. In North Texas, Taylor Rehmet made his objection to funding private religious schools with taxpayer money a centerpiece of his campaign. “We shouldn’t be sending public dollars to private schools with no oversight,” said Rehmet, a position that he said resonated with voters across party lines.

In a sign of just how controversial the issue is among conservatives, Rehmet’s opponent, Leigh Wambsganss, chief communications officer at a Christian nationalist cell phone company, was initially a no on Abbott’s signature education policy of vouchers, then changed her position to align with the governor—and the big donors who funded her campaign. Indeed, when the editor of a conservative news outlet asked Wambsganss’s supporters about why they thought she’d lost, they specifically mentioned her flip-flop on vouchers.

That the GOP’s hard pivot against public education has created an opening for Democrats isn’t that surprising. While school vouchers have spread wildly in recent years, particularly in red states, their track record among voters remains dismal. The Nebraska ballot initiative that Denise Powell worked on, which would have created a so-called private school scholarship program, was rejected by nearly 60 percent of voters, even as the state overwhelmingly supported the reelection of Trump. Kentucky voters rejected an attempt to amend their state constitution to allow vouchers by an even more decisive margin. Ignoring a high-profile endorsement from Trump, every single county voted against the measure, with some of the reddest counties the most emphatic in saying no to allowing public dollars to fund private religious education. That MAGA faithful would buck the boss on one of his policy priorities might seem surprising until you consider that voters have been thumbing their noses at vouchers for the past five decades. “Choice proposals have consistently lost in state after state,” concluded a trio of scholars in a postelection analysis, “often by overwhelming margins.”

At a time of populist fervor on the both the left and the right, a policy that is the pet cause of billionaires including Betsy DeVos, Trump’s much-loathed former secretary of education, and Jeff Yass, the wealthiest man in Pennsylvania, seems uniquely calibrated to arouse the ire of voters. So-called universal vouchers, which subsidize the private school tuition of even the wealthiest families, are also a remarkably efficient means of redirecting resources upward. A 2025 analysis of universal or near-universal programs in six states, including Arizona, Indiana, and North Carolina, found that vouchers “were disproportionately used by families in wealthy areas.”

Iowa, which implemented a voucher program in 2023, now spends more than $250 million to pick up the tab for students at private religious schools, the vast majority of whom never attended public schools. Catelin Drey flipped an Iowa state Senate seat with a decisive 2025 special election win, ending the Republican supermajority in that chamber and becoming its only mother of a young child. Drey made vouchers a symbol of the state’s conservative political leaders’ disregard for the struggles of ordinary Iowans, which include watching their public schools shrink and close as resources are increasingly shifted to the wealthy. “We’ve now got a voucher program with no income levels, no guidelines, and an unlimited line item in the budget,” said Drey. “Yet our public schools that serve the vast majority of kids, and do it without question, are doing it with two nickels and a stick of gum.”

The issue is also likely to help determine whether Iowans elect a Democratic governor for the first time in 16 years. On the stump, Democratic candidate Rob Sand rails against vouchers constantly, describing them as “an ideological errand-running program with no accountability paying for the wealthiest families in the state of Iowa to send their kids to the private schools they were going to send them to anyway.” His strategy seems to be paying off. Sand, elected twice as the state auditor, and currently the only Democrat holding statewide elected office in Iowa, has a slight edge over Republican Zach Lahn, previously an operative for the Koch-backed political group Americans for Prosperity. An ardent voucher proponent, Lahn helped start a private school in Wichita, Kansas, with Charles Koch’s son, Chase, before running off with the younger Koch’s wife. Lahn is running as an outsider against what he calls the “uniparty.”

Democrat vs. Democrat

Given the minuscule number of causes that still bring voters together across party lines, opposition to vouchers would seem like a logical rallying cry for Democrats, including those who seek to draw moderates back into the party fold. Instead, the issue is fueling yet another intraparty divide.

Tucked into the budget behemoth known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act was the nation’s very first federal voucher program. Starting next year, individual taxpayers will be able to donate up to $1,700 annually to so-called scholarship-granting organizations and subtract the full amount from what they owe the federal government—a uniquely generous tax credit. The nonprofits that receive the money then bundle it, after taking a cool 10 percent off the top, before redistributing it as scholarships to individual students to pay for private school tuition, tutoring, and a long list of other educational expenses.

The Education Freedom Tax Credit is as controversial as it is convoluted. Thirty U.S. senators, led by Arizona Democrat Mark Kelly, a near-certain 2028 contender, filed a bill last spring that would repeal the program. “School Vouchers Broke Arizona,” read the headline to Kelly’s excoriating op-ed, warning that his home state’s nearly $1 billion-per-year universal voucher program is a fraud-ridden budget buster that is endangering the ability of working-class kids to get a good education. “We should not take Arizona’s failed experiment national,” Kelly concluded.

But the program also has influential Democratic backers. Democrats for Education Reform, or DFER, the two-decade-old advocacy group started by New York City hedge fund managers, is at the helm of an intense lobbying effort to press Democratic governors to opt into the program. Of the 31 governors who have signed on to date, just two are Democrats. Colorado’s outgoing Governor Jared Polis opted in his state as part of a flurry of late-­office activity, including commuting the sentence of MAGA election denier Tina Peters for plotting to tamper with voting machines, then firing officials who opposed the move. New York’s Kathy Hochul, meanwhile, offered an unusually blunt justification for signing her state up: She needs Jewish votes. “Tuition relief” for students who attend religious yeshivas ranks nearly as high as support for Israel as a priority for Orthodox Jewish voters, a group that overwhelmingly backed Hochul’s GOP rival in 2022.

DFER’s sales pitch is predominantly about money. Because some portion of the funds raised can be used to benefit students who attend public schools, opting in is a “no-brainer,” as the group’s CEO, former Providence, Rhode Island, Mayor Jorge Elorza, and Arne Duncan, now a DFER senior fellow, co-wrote for The Washington Post. There’s also an attempt to present the tax credit program, which is projected to cost the U.S. Treasury nearly $26 billion in its first decade, as a vehicle for anti-Trump activism. Deprive Trump of tax dollars, goes the thinking, and he’ll have a harder time carrying out his nefarious schemes. “I would rather help kids struggling in my home state to catch up and have a chance to be successful in life, instead of sending another dollar to D.C. to fund ICE to come attack us,” argued Duncan, who is tasked with shaping the Democrats’ education policy, in a recent interview.

The U.S. Treasury, which will oversee the new tax credit program, has made it clear that governors will have no ability to impose requirements on where the money goes. Schools that discriminate against LGBTQ kids or teach PragerU content can now be funded by, well, you.

The key proponents of the program, including the American Federation for Children, the deep-pocketed lobby group started by Betsy DeVos, spin it rather differently. Moving the nation’s youngsters out of public schools and into private religious institutions that operate free of the “red tape” of civil rights protections has been a conservative movement priority for the last half-century. The program’s generous income guidelines mean that 90 percent of American students will be eligible for a voucher. Meanwhile, Treasury, which will oversee the program, has made it clear that governors will have no ability to impose requirements on where the money goes. Schools that discriminate against LGBTQ kids or teach PragerU content can now be funded by, well, you.

The Union Tussle

The Dem-on-Dem tussle over school vouchers is the latest installment of a much longer skirmish over the role of teachers’ unions within the party. DFER, after all, was founded to serve as an organized and well-funded counterweight to the unions’ influence. While the shine is off the causes the group championed during the Obama era—charter schools, merit pay, and tougher teacher evaluations yoked to student standardized test scores—the argument that Democrats need to take it to the unions has found new purchase in these days of “abundance” and combative centrism. As pundit Josh Barro put it: “Some of ‘the Groups’ are unions, and Democrats need to be better at saying no to them, too.”

It is an article of faith among centrist Democrats that voters’ low regard for the party can be explained at least in part by the Biden administration’s caving to the unions, backing away from test-based accountability and standards. Duncan has even made the case that Kamala Harris might have won in 2024 had the Democrats stuck with the education policies of his boss. The argument that Democrats prosper politically when they embrace positions that rankle teachers and their unions is also central to Rahm Emanuel’s presidential test run. “Clinton did public school choice. Obama did Race to the Top, accountability, and Common Core,” Emanuel told me, referring to the uniform math and English standards that inspired a bipartisan revolt.

Emanuel’s model for reform these days is Mississippi, whose oft-touted miracle has seen impressive academic gains, especially from elementary school students, in the country’s poorest state. “Mississippi shows the combination to the lock,” Emanuel said, describing the emphasis on phonics and strict accountability for teachers and students that has made the state an outlier in a sea of sliding test scores. But that combination also includes teachers’ unions that are relatively powerless, a product of right-to-work laws adopted in the 1950s in an effort to keep wages low and workers, especially Black workers, weak.

For Emanuel, Exhibit A of the Biden Democrats’ capitulation to teachers’ unions was pandemic school closures, what he refers to as the “original sin” of allowing politics to triumph over science. “Voters trust Democrats less than they did six years ago,” said Emanuel. Another leading centrist voice, Massachusetts Representative Jake Auchincloss, insists that Democrats need to apologize to the American people for their role in shuttering schools during Covid. “Any conversation about education needs to start with the catastrophe of the school closures,” Auchincloss told me. “We were wrong, and we won’t do it again.”

But to whom Democrats should apologize is unclear. While research has found that school districts with powerful unions stayed closed for longer, that does not seem to have translated into voter backlash. Late last year, the centrist publication The Argument set out to document the lingering damage done to the Democratic Party from its response to Covid-19. “The only problem is that our poll provided absolutely nothing to back this up,” conceded pollster Lakshya Jain. “If anything, it suggested the opposite.” The data on public opinion regarding school closures, widely understood to be Democrats’ biggest failure, Jain noted, was particularly striking. Republicans and Trump got worse marks from respondents than Biden and the Democrats. And five years after the pandemic, an outright majority of 54 percent Americans believe the shutdowns were “largely necessary” in order to prevent infections, with just 35 percent saying they were “largely unnecessary.”

This gap between rhetoric and public opinion is indicative of a larger problem underlying the centrist project of taking on teachers’ unions in hopes of luring back disaffected voters. In a review of survey data old and new, political scientist Michael Hartney finds that, in the Trump era, Democratic voters have become wildly more supportive of teachers’ unions, which they’ve come to view as “progressive bulwarks” against Trump and the GOP. The more that the unions present themselves as key actors in the progressive coalition, the more Democratic voters like them—which poses a major challenge to the case being made by Emanuel and others.

“Unions are always made out to be these big, bureaucratic institutions, but they don’t exist without members. It’s the teacher in your kid’s classroom,” said Brian Nathan, a union electrician and veteran who shocked Florida’s political establishment last spring when he flipped a state Senate seat in a reliably red part of Tampa. Nathan, whose campaign motto was “steel-toed integrity,” made teacher pay a central focus of the race, continually reminding voters that Florida now ranks dead last in how much teachers earn, and that their own kids are paying the price. “My eldest daughter had a permanent sub for an entire year,” said Nathan. “That’s the result of people fleeing the profession.”

The College Conundrum

In the waning days of a crowded Democratic primary race to represent Pennsylvania’s 7th congressional district, which includes Allentown, Ryan Crosswell, a former prosecutor for the Justice Department, suggested that his opponent, retired firefighter Bob Brooks, was a “flawed candidate” because he hadn’t gone to college. Brooks pounced. “Sorry I wasn’t lucky enough to go to college,” he pronounced on X, accusing Crosswell of “contempt” for working-class voters. Brooks would go on to win the four-person race by nearly 20 points, setting himself up for what is likely to be a fierce midterm contest against Republican Ryan Mackenzie. Should voters in the former coal and steel towns of the Lehigh Valley give him the nod, Brooks will join a select few in Congress: representatives without college degrees.

“It’s important that we run candidates who have lived real lives—it’s not just about going to college,” Brooks told me when I interviewed him after his win. Brooks’s working-class identity, beginning with his first job as a paper boy at age 10, was central to his campaign. But the flip side of his “I’m just like you” appeal to voters in a district where college-degree holders are a minority was the argument that his better-educated opponent wasn’t like them. “Going from Harvard to Harrisburg to D.C. doesn’t mean you understand what people are dealing with,” said Brooks. “And people voted that way.”

Brooks is one of a growing number of blue-collar Democrats running for office on populist platforms, ranks that include union leaders like Brian Nathan in Florida, Taylor Rehmet in Texas, and Rebecca Cooke, a waitress who grew up on a dairy farm in Wisconsin and is set to challenge incumbent Derrick Van Orden. While at least some of these candidates attended college, they’re united in their belief that college should not be the only path to economic security. The appeal of this argument isn’t hard to understand when you consider that more than 60 percent of American adults don’t have a four-year college degree.

But it also presents Democrats with a conundrum.

For decades now, Democrats have sold education, and specifically college, as the pathway to economic mobility; “what you earn depends on what you can learn,” in the parlance of Bill Clinton. By 2009, Barack Obama was warning the nation that recovering from the financial crisis would require more than just pluck. “[E]very American will need to get more than a high school diploma,” he proclaimed in his first joint address to Congress. By 2016, the percentage of young Americans with a two-year degree or higher had risen to 51 percent, a historic high. Yet even as the administration celebrated rising college-going rates, the political backlash to an economic policy that seemed to blame workers themselves for their financial difficulties was getting harder to ignore. A 2013 Pew poll found that Obama’s support among working-class whites without college degrees had evaporated. Today, the country’s deepest divide is between those who attended college and those who didn’t.

In 2021, Dustin Guastella co-founded the Center for Working-Class Politics with the aim of making the case for more working-class candidates in politics, something he said no other progressive think tank was doing at the time. Guastella, the director of operations for a Teamsters local in Philadelphia that represents warehouse workers, said the Democrats’ deep faith in college as the vehicle for economic mobility has hampered the party’s ability to communicate with working-class voters. It has also distorted the party’s view of what constitutes a desirable candidate. “Democrats used to have this tradition of looking for candidates in union halls,” argued Guastella. “Now they want big fundraisers. If you went to an Ivy League school, you know someone who works on Wall Street or in Silicon Valley. That’s not true for blue-collar candidates.”

Among the center’s first major research projects was a survey called “Trump’s Kryptonite,” in which it tested the success of various kinds of candidates in running on economically populist messages. The candidates who fared best at attracting working-class voters held blue-collar jobs or worked in professions like nursing, in which they were “bossed,” said co-founder Jared Abbott. The hypothetical candidate who held the most appeal to these voters turned out to be a female middle school teacher. Corporate execs and lawyers fared the worst. “When you consider that just 2 to 3 percent of Congress comes from the working class despite having a majority in the population, there’s clearly a moral and ethical imperative to have more representation,” said Abbott.

But while plenty of Democrats may be coming around to that view, there’s no consensus on how the party should talk about college. After all, despite the flood of headlines regarding recent grads struggling to find jobs, it is still the case that attending college objectively increases your chance of doing better economically. For now, the party’s messaging seems to have landed in a sort of muddled middle, tapping into concerns that college costs too much, while sidestepping the political minefield of college debt forgiveness, all without ceding the foundational premise that “learning is earning.” “College isn’t for everybody, but it has to change so it returns to the idea that it’s a way to punch your meal ticket,” Emanuel argued at an event in which he laid out his plan to make college more affordable and accessible.

Ironically, the solution to the Democrats’ college conundrum may lie with working-class candidates who are deftly managing to balance talk of education-as-aspiration without drifting into condescension. Bob Brooks often tells the story of his son, who graduated from a Penn State satellite school with a degree in chemical engineering, owing $109,000—what Bob spent to buy his house. That college shouldn’t be a requirement for a middle-class life is a staple of Brooks’s stump speech, but it’s his line about the suffocating cost of college that seems to land with voters: “Our government shouldn’t be making money off the backs of our children,” he said. “Let them start their lives.”

Taylor Rehmet and Brian Nathan, the union leaders turned state senators from Texas and Florida, respectively, both told me similar versions of “college isn’t for everybody.” But central to their affordability crusades is the argument that, college or not, wages need to be higher and workers need more power. Nathan said that when he went door-to-door in Tampa last year, he heard the same set of concerns from virtually every voter. “They’re worried about health care and retirement. I’d tell them that the best way to get those is to join a union,” said Nathan.

Schoolbooks vs. Pitchforks

The scenes of soon-to-be-college grads heckling their commencement speakers last spring became a viral sensation. As the likes of Eric Schmidt, a former chief executive of Google, and record company exec Scott Borchetta waxed lyrical about the AI revolution, students erupted in loud boos, at times drowning out the speakers’ tech boosterism. The source of their frustration is obvious. Already facing the toughest job market since the depths of the pandemic, these students are more likely to see AI as a job stealer than the sort of transformative engine that tech execs extol.

But their fury transcends employment concerns.

“They feel like there’s been a real bait and switch,” said Noam Scheiber, author of Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class. “This generation did everything they were supposed to do—the AP classes, the college degree, they took on crushing debt—and now the jobs they thought they were preparing for are evaporating.”

The frustrations of a growing college-educated precariat are quickly reshaping Democratic politics, powering a cohort of Democratic Socialists into office. In New York, a trio of left-leaning candidates backed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani, two of them members of the Democratic Socialists of America, won primaries. In Washington, D.C., Janeese Lewis George is on track to replace the current mayor, Muriel Bowser. And in Colorado, Melat Kiros thrashed Representative Diane DeGette, who’d been in office for nearly three decades. While the ascendance of left-wing populism reflects deep discontent with establishment Democrats over a long list of issues, including Gaza, education is at the very center of the party’s generational divide. For 40 years, Democrats have made the case that education was the surest route to middle-class affluence. Now that sales pitch has run out of steam.

The debate over how to respond to AI and the looming destruction of white-collar jobs exemplifies the party’s divide over education. If the ascendant left populists are demanding pitchforks, including higher taxes on billionaires and tech industry profits, their more centrist fellows are relying on schoolbooks—the abiding faith that the solution to economic dislocation lies in our schools and in more education for displaced workers. Raise Us, the bipartisan initiative led by former Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, with backing from OpenAI, Anthropic, Amazon, and Microsoft, starts from the premise that the country’s schools are failing to produce enough workers with the skills employers demand and must be overhauled as a result—the same argument bosses have been making since the 1970s. As for the push to let workers share in AI industry profits in a public wealth fund, as Senator Bernie Sanders has proposed, Raimondo isn’t a fan. “It’s frankly the definition of socialism,” she told Politico.

Efforts like Raise Us are intended to defuse a populist revolt, coming from the left and the right, by quickly gearing up a training machine equipped to prepare workers for a future in which they’ll be switching jobs constantly. But at a time when the command to “just school up” manages to alienate workers with and without college degrees, the schoolbook approach seems unlikely to fend off what Raimondo describes as ugly politics.

Spend a few minutes listening to Tucker Carlson, for example, and it’s immediately apparent that he understands the political possibilities of the moment. In an interview last spring, Carlson told The New York Times’ Lulu Garcia-Navarro that young people are being radicalized by “a very lopsided and unfair economic system.” The kids, he said, “are totally screwed at a more profound level than people acknowledge.” It’s not hard to imagine Carlson, or someone like him, stitching together a coalition of the screwed—working-class voters saddled with credit card debt, downwardly mobile college grads burdened by loans that will never pay off.

“There’s a coalition to knit together that would be pretty expansive,” Noam Scheiber told me. “You’ve got a potential supermajority out there of people who think of themselves as working class and precariat, whether they have degrees or not.”

“There’s a coalition to knit together that would be pretty expansive,” Noam Scheiber told me. “You’ve got a potential supermajority out there of people who think of themselves as working class and precariat, whether they have degrees or not.”

Whether Democrats succeed in 2028 will depend in large part on whether they are able to speak to the swelling ranks of the economically anxious. And central to that will be the story they tell about education. For decades, Democrats have sold a vision of education-as-economic uplift, one voters are no longer buying. Now they have an opportunity to move on from the false promise of college-for-all, instead embracing the ideal of public education as a public good that benefits all kids. Voters keep signaling that they’re furious over school privatization and the transfer of wealth it represents. Democrats just have to listen.

There’s a new Democratic presidential frontrunner, according to the Kalshi prediction markets at least. Over the weekend, Jon Ossoff claimed first place (whatever exactly that means on Kalshi), at 18 percent, followed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at 17 percent and then Gavin Newsom at 15 percent (here’s the link, but remember that the figures change constantly; from the time I started writing this to the time I finished it, AOC nudged back into the lead).

Whether he’s first or second, what’s undeniable is that the Georgia senator has caught fire in a way few politicians manage to do. His dig at “Natalie” is still reverberating, more than a week later. In his reelection race, he’s up seven or eight points over Republican Congressman Mike Collins, and for those for whom a Senate race in mid-summer is a little too under the radar for you, you’d be interested to know that he just roasts Collins on a regular basis. He constantly refers to Collins as a corrupt antisemite racist (“a crumbling little bigot,” as he colorfully put it at a recent rally). The Atlanta Journal-Constitution calls it Ossoff’s “no mercy strategy.”

What’s also true is that, at least in my anecdotal experience, Ossoff has both progressives and moderates interested in him, curious to learn more. That’s something to pull off, in this year when the left-center divide in the Democratic Party is probably the greatest it’s been since the early 1970s, when the party was bitterly split into two camps over the Vietnam War. So, what’s Ossoff got that a lot of the other haven’t got?

In a word: conflict. He understands that in today’s media environment, you have to create conflict to generate attention and buzz, and you have to do it in a way that stands a chance of going viral. What was brilliant about the Natalie Harp mention was the way he used only her first name. Saying her full name would have been normal. But saying just her first name was genius. Ossoff clearly intended to suggest that there is something weird about that relationship, as indeed there is. And the whole sentence—“He doesn’t want to do the job; he wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the Emir of Qatar”—got at the corrupt creepiness and the ever-present ineptitude of the entire Trump enterprise.

So, it was with his earlier invocation of “the Epstein class.” Such a simple phrase, but its simplicity is at the heart of its brilliance. And again, let’s recall the fuller quote: “Now, you remember we were told that MAGA was for working-class Americans. Do you remember that? But this is a government of, by, and for the ultra-rich. It is the wealthiest Cabinet ever. This is the Epstein class, ruling our country. They are the elites they pretend to hate.” He just knows how to bring the sauce.

It’s not enough in this era to simply take positions. With a couple of exceptions, such as being aggressively critical of Israel, even controversial ones don’t typically generate a lot of attention. It’s also not enough just to attack your opponent’s positions. Every politician in history has done that. What a politician needs to do today to break through the constant noise of social media and cable news and the rest is a more nuanced two-step process.

Step one is developing in your mind a critique of the essential characteristics of your foe. For Ossoff, it’s that Trump and MAGA are uniquely corrupt, hateful, hypocritical, and brazen. Then step two is the hard part: thinking up ways to press that critique and call out those characteristics in words that are memorable and that cut right to the heart of matters. That’s exactly what “the Epstein class” and “Natalie” did, and it’s why they went viral.

Why can’t more Democrats do this? Well, let’s be fair, it’s harder than it looks. That kind of critique and attack just doesn’t come naturally to everybody. A lot of Democrats just wouldn’t know how to do this. But second, I think too many Democrats are still afraid of putting themselves out there in this fashion. They’re a little afraid of Republicans. They’ve been told a thousand times by their consultants that they must not offend the median voter; that it’s “divisive.” They think on some level that politics is supposed to be more noble than that.

Most of all, they don’t understand how profoundly social media has changed the way people communicate and hear things. You have to think and talk today in a way that will get attention. And more often than not, that means you have to create conflict.

Donald Trump gets it. He’s out there every day creating conflict. Naturally, he creates far too much conflict, and his “all-stick-no-carrot” brand of authoritarianism means even his ostensible allies catch strays. But the fights he picks drive the agenda, every day. I hope the next Democratic president understands this and gets out there nearly every day taking questions and throwing punches at Republicans and oligarchs and monopolists. That’s how you get people to pay attention and persuade them you’re on their side. In politics, you’re defined by the enemies you’re willing to make.

David Axelrod’s criticism of Ossoff’s mention of Harp as “gratuitous and unnecessary” just comes from a bygone era. He contended that mentioning her “distracted and detracted from the power of the message.” Well, no: About 10 or 20 times more people heard the message than probably would have if he hadn’t mentioned her. How exactly is reaching millions more people distracting and detracting? Well, it was distracting and detracting in one way: It hit a major nerve in MAGA-land, putting the president’s allies in tilt for over a week as they impotently gnashed their teeth online. That’s the kind of distraction and detration Democrats need to create more of.

We have a lot to learn about Ossoff before 2028 if he wins reelection and decides to seek the presidency (he says he’s not interested, but they all say that). He hasn’t exactly been much of an economic populist as a legislator. He’s voted in favor of military aid to Israel on all but three occasions (and is getting attacked from the right for those). The website standwithcrypto.org judges that he “strongly supports” crypto, based on five Senate votes. His vote on the Laken-Riley Act was a bad one, full stop.

At the same time, he’s in first term. And he’s not from Vermont or Massachusetts, so he has to be careful about some things that senators from more liberal states don’t. People grow and change. There wasn’t much in Franklin Roosevelt’s gubernatorial record to suggest that he was going to orchestrate an economic revolution.

But Roosevelt responded to his times. The Jon Ossoff of these last few months is responding in a big way to his, at least rhetorically. And think about this: One thing that Ossoff has proven that he doesn’t need to be careful about in a purple state like Georgia is making a full-throated attack on Trump. He has the green light to fight. That’s what rank-and-file Democrats are desperate for, and it’s why more and more people are, figuratively and literally, betting on him to lead the party into the future.

Donald Trump’s handling of the Natalie Harp mess has backfired big time. The Atlantic reports that Trump’s own anger is why Trumpworld exploded so vehemently after Senator Jon Ossoff highighted their closeness. As the media focused on Harp, Trump grew “furious,” which led aides to “take their cues” from him, leading to more lashing out, but this “backfired spectacularly,” prompting more attention—and more leaks. The New York Times reported that some advisers think her sway is “poisonous,” and even that she’s provided him with the ugliest social media content that he posts, such as the image of the Obamas as apes. We talked to Democratic operative Greg Greene, who managed social media accounts under President Obama and wrote about it for The New Republic. We discuss the deeper problems with this arrangement, why the latest disclosures are so unnerving, and what it all says about the Cult of Trump—and about Trumpworld’s profound contempt for our constitutional order. Listen to this episode here.

Five years ago this month, when the U.S. military withdrew from Afghanistan and Kabul fell to the Taliban, Sayed Sadat was out of the country earning his master’s degree at a university in Germany. Having worked with the American government as a lawyer in Afghanistan, Sadat believed it would be relatively easy for himself and his wife to apply for asylum in the United States.

Despite beginning his application in 2021, he did not arrive in the U.S. until 2024. Because his wife was included in his asylum application, he expected that she would join him shortly after he arrived. She had previously been informed by the United Nations International Office of Migration in Jordan that she would be able to receive a visa, then be evacuated first to the United Arab Emirates and the United States. But conditions changed before she could leave Afghanistan: President Donald Trump took office in January of 2025.

It wasn’t long before she heard the bad news. Sadat’s wife received word that the Trump administration had suspended resettlement of refugees. As a result, she would be unable to leave Afghanistan for an indefinite period of time. Sadat has not seen his wife in five years.

Along with halting the refugee resettlement program, the Trump administration has suspended visas and immigration requests for all Afghan migrants, and included Afghanistan in a travel ban that makes it nearly impossible for any Afghan—including family members of asylum seekers already in the country—to enter the U.S. Even for those relatives who have seen their petitions approved, the State Department refuses to issue travel documents in accordance with the travel ban.

“Every day, when she’s calling me three times a day, she’s asking me six times a day: ‘Is the travel ban over, and is the family reunification open now? When is the time that we’re going to be reunited?’ I don’t have an answer for her,” said Sadat. Meanwhile, he has been unable to obtain his green card because of the pause on visa processing.

Sadat’s situation is common for Afghans living in the U.S., nearly 200,000 of whom arrived in the wake of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. Tens of thousands were admitted through humanitarian parole, a temporary legal status for evacuees. Others arrived as holders of Special Immigrant Visas, or SIVs, reserved for allies who assisted the U.S. military during the war in Afghanistan. To Afghans and their supporters in the U.S., including many American veterans with whom they worked alongside—an alliance that puts those who assisted U.S. forces at risk now that the Taliban has resumed control—the administration’s policies and congressional inaction are a betrayal of trust.

Speaking in a press call, Sharif Ali, the president of the International Refugee Assistance Project, a legal aid and advocacy organization that represents refugees said, “As we take stock of whether the U.S. has lived up to its obligations and promises to the Afghans who worked and served alongside American military personnel and partners—often at great personal risks—the clear answer, unfortunately, is a resounding no.”

In July, a federal judge ruled that the Trump administration must allow the family members of asylum seekers, like Sadat’s wife, to be permitted to enter the U.S. The State Department has appealed the decision and requested a motion to stay the court’s order.

“It is really hard to achieve that sense of permanency and belonging when your family’s still separated and you don’t know that they’re safe, or you know that they’re not safe,” said said Kristyn Peck, the CEO of the Lutheran Social Services of the National Capital Area, a regional refugee resettlement organization.

Sadat also hears stories from fellow community members as an intake and administrative coordinator in the Sacramento office of World Relief, a refugee resettlement organization. Family separation weighs most heavily on these clients, as their relatives of all ages are stuck in Afghanistan or neighboring countries. Sadat said that sometimes he will hear from parents that their children in Afghanistan feel abandoned, and will no longer speak to them. The uncertainty has contributed to a frustration within the Afghan community writ large, and a sense that they have been left behind by the American government.

“They’re, like, emotionally hurt. Their feelings are hurt, they don’t believe that anything will happen soon. As I don’t expect that anything will happen soon,” said Sadat. “I even heard from one of the Afghan community members here, they said, like, ‘We were betrayed.’”

The Trump administration also removed a previous exception for SIV holders to the travel ban, who are already stuck in an approval process that has been found in court to be unlawfully slow. Shawn VanDiver, the founder and president of #AfghanEvac, an organization that was founded in 2021 to facilitate the arrival of Afghans into the U.S., said [in a press call] that nearly 180,000 people have been approved for visas but are still waiting for interviews.

“They finished all of the paperwork. All they needed is an interview, a medical check, and a visa printed. That’s not a backlog. A backlog is what you have when you’re working through cases. This is what you have when you just stop it,” VanDiver said. He added that roughly 3,000 relatives of current active-duty American service members are stranded outside of the United States, including 150 in Camp As Sayliyah, a refugee camp in Qatar. The 1,100 Afghan families currently living there have been vetted by the U.S. government.

The Trump administration has also ended Temporary Protected Status for Afghans, leaving around 11,000 Afghans in the U.S. unable to work and facing the threat of detention and deportation. Even those with seemingly secure legal status have been subject to new scrutiny. The Department of Homeland Security has sent notices to hundreds of Afghans with green cards who arrived through SIVs saying that the approval letters that formed the basis of their applications have been revoked.

Afghan refugees are also being subject to re-vetting and re-interviewing. Peck recalled a recent conversation with an Afghan man who approached her at an Iftar dinner, the celebration of the end of Ramadan. He had received the summons for a re-interview on a Friday, and it was scheduled for the following Wednesday, giving him just a few days to prepare. The organization’s legal team was able to represent him at his interview, which lasted for five hours.

Even though there are “no inadequacies or insufficiencies or credibility issues” with peoples’ legal status that the team can find, Peck said, the re-vetting process creates fear and anxiety.

“We want people to feel like they belong in their communities, and how can you feel like you belong if your very legal status here is at risk?” Peck asked.

Congress had a hand in the current struggles faced by Afghans in the U.S. Under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act approved by Congress last year, refugees and asylees are no longer eligible for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. They will also become ineligible for Medicaid beginning in October. Refugees and asylum seekers would need to become green card holders to receive benefits—which they currently cannot do, because processing of green card applications has been paused.

In a press call, Danilo Zak, the director of Policy at Church World Service, another refugee resettlement organization, told reporters, “The provisions have left families and children hungrier and sicker, and denied them often the temporary help they need to get established in their new homes.”

Resettlement organizations and charitable groups have been forced to pick up the slack. Zak said that Church World Service programs are opening up food banks for the first time to help support community members in need.

Jonathan Parsons, interim regional director for the resettlement organization World Relief Texas, said that the ending of SNAP eligibility for refugees had required his colleagues to pivot to providing more basic needs. On the upside, this has allowed for strengthening connections with the local community who can help provide resources, but it also introduces significant challenges.

“It is definitely stretching us in our capacity, and also it does add a lot of stress to staff,” Parsons said. “There’s a lot more weighing on our staff on a day-to-day basis, and just feeling like we don’t have the answers, and … we don’t know when the end is in sight for some of these situations.”

Meanwhile, Afghans in the U.S. are afraid of being detained and deported under the stricter immigration enforcement implemented by Trump. Arrests of Afghans already in the country increased in the wake of a shooting by an Afghan national in Washington, D.C. last December that killed one member of the National Guard. Some asylum seekers have been detained during routine required check-ins with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

“It’s kind of a lose-lose situation for a lot of the these people, because they’re trying to go to the appointments to make sure that they’re doing the right thing to have a pathway to having current documents and more permanent status, but when they’re going to those they’re being detained,” said Parsons. “So it does create a sense of fear and of unknown when you’re going to something that you feel like is what you’re supposed to be doing.”

Peck said that their organization was offering legal trainings and bringing food to the apartment complexes where clients are living, because they are afraid to leave their homes.

“We’re hearing from food banks that they’re seeing a significant decrease in the cohort of refugee and immigrant populations that would be typically accessing their services, and so we’re trying to do what we can to bring it to them,” she said.

Some Afghans have been detained in their communities. Earlier this summer, Mohammad Nazeer Paktiawal, an Afghan man who had fought alongside the U.S. military, was taken from his home by ICE and died while in custody the day after from an allergic reaction.

Laila Ayub, the co-founder and director of Project Anar, a legal advocacy organization, said [in a press call] that the detention of Afghans was a “direct consequence of restrictive immigration policies and a lack of meaningful access to pathways” to permanent residency. Some Afghans have sought to enter the United States through the southern border, resulting in their being sent to detention centers.

“Many that we are in touch with still today are in detention centers for months or even years. At this point, they face harsh conditions, lack of access to medical care, and often mistreatment based on their nationality and faith,” said Ayub.

Afghans and their American supporters have argued that Congress needs to take action to address this issue, but there has been little movement over the past five years. Last year, a bipartisan group of lawmakers introduced the Fulfilling Promises to Afghan Allies Act, which would provide a pathway to permanent legal residency for SIV holders. This measure is an evolution of the Afghan Adjustment Act, which was repeatedly introduced in the wake of the withdrawal from Afghanistan.

More recently, members of Congress from both parties and chambers have introduced legislation to reinstate TPS for Afghanistan. Representative Don Bacon, one of the bill’s Republican cosponsors, has suggested using a discharge petition to force a vote on the legislation on the House floor. Even if the bill were to receive sufficient bipartisan support to receive a vote in the House, it’s unclear whether it could overcome a filibuster in the Senate.

“We have a moral obligation to those we have served with in Afghanistan, who serve by our side, helping us out. We had a promise, and promises made should be promises kept,” Bacon said in a press call.

Sadat said that he remains confident that he will be able to obtain his green card, and is hopeful that he will be joined by his wife soon. He added that Afghans may need support in their continued resettlement, but they are also integrated into their communities in the U.S.

“I don’t care about if I don’t have a green card, or I’m not a permanent resident. Still, I see that I’m a member of this family, this community, and I know we will overcome these challenges, and I will keep fighting,” said Sadat.

If you want to get the unfiltered skinny on how the never-ending war with Iran is going, it’s written in the dust. Responsible Statecraft’s Trita Parsi reported this week that U.S. service members marooned in the Persian Gulf have been expressing themselves in messages fingered onto a dusty aircraft flap. The anonymous graffiti, which calls to mind the helmet scrawls of disgruntled soldiers in Vietnam, include “Operation Epstein Fury,” “Peace deal #64 incoming … ALL THIS FOR THE HOLY LAND,” and “Bibi’s cucks.” Sounds like things aren’t going so well! “I have no frame of reference, I can’t compare it to the sentiments of U.S. soldiers in previous conflicts,” Parsi wrote. “But I suspect these are new sentiments, or at least a new willingness to express them this openly and directly.”

Whether these sentiments are new is indeed unclear, but it’s not without a frame of reference. Trump has always been fairly explicit in his disrespect for the grunts who do most of the work—and all of the dying—in this racket that we call “war.” But only now is a seemingly unwinnable war bringing this all to a head. It’s no longer possible to pretend that the president doesn’t have boundless contempt for U.S. service members. They’re trapped in a war that was essentially kicked off to distract from all the other terrible news the Trump administration generates—or at least to turn attention away from the Epstein files. (Though if these dust etchings are any guide, Trump failed in this attempt to wag the dog.)

In recent weeks, this dynamic has been playing out on board the USS Abraham Lincoln, an aircraft carrier that has been on a nine-month deployment to support Trump’s war with Iran. Conditions on board the carrier have deteriorated to the point where some seamen have jumped overboard in an attempt to escape the misery. The crew has, for several weeks, been dealing with food shortages and grotesque sanitation issues. As TNR’s Hafiz Rashid reported, “In recent town hall meetings with military leaders, including acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao, things have gotten heated, with family members expressing fear and worry over mental health and the risk of self-harm for the ship’s personnel.”

As it happens, this trouble is not confined to the USS Lincoln: Crews on the USS Benfold, Carl Vinson, and Tripoli have also reported miserable conditions in recent weeks. Pete Hegseth, our self-styled “secretary of war,” has gone to great lengths to downplay and even deny these accounts, characterizing them as misrepresentations while covering up the reason the Lincoln, which is now finally coming home, wasn’t resupplied. The dust scribbles surfaced by Parsi tell a different story.

If anything, the story is an old one. There has always been good reason to question Trump’s respect for U.S. service members. As The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg reported in September of 2020, Trump canceled a visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery in Paris, questioning his senior aides as to why he should go to a cemetery full of “losers.” Per Goldberg, “In a separate conversation on the same trip, Trump referred to the more than 1,800 Marines who lost their lives at Belleau Wood as ‘suckers’ for getting killed.” All of this came about because he didn’t want to get his hair mussed in the rainy conditions. (Trump’s former chief of staff, John Kelly, would later confirm Goldberg’s reporting.)

Trump’s disparagement of the military is pretty consistent. He’s slagged off the armed forces’ top officers as “dopes and babies” and compared them unfavorably to the military leaders he, for whatever reason, holds in high esteem: Adolf Hitler’s generals. He’s complained about having to see disabled veterans at military events, and has advocated for the exclusion of wounded soldiers at official functions because, “Nobody wants to see that.” These kinds of insults were a staple of his first run for office, during which time he mocked Gold Star families and, famously, Vietnam POW survivor John McCain.

But Trump’s disregard is hardly limited to mere aesthetics. As The Huffington Post’s David Wood reported in 2017, Trump’s gigantic military buildup shoveled billions of dollars to the Pentagon, but not much of that kitty ended up benefiting the working grunts who risk their lives on our nation’s behalf.

Only the outlines of Trump’s proposal to lavish money on the military have been drawn up. There’s a request for Congress to add $30 billion to this year’s defense budget and a vague plan to add $54 billion to next year’s spending. Not included in those plans: money for the best infantry weapons, the safest troop-lift helicopters, the most protective lightweight body armor. Instead, grunts will have to settle for budget leftovers with antiquated rifles, helicopters built for their grandfathers during the Vietnam War, and communications gear that is overweight and unreliable.

The least surprising observation you can make about Trump is that he is an asshole and a cheapskate. Still, the president’s Iranian misadventure has fully exposed both his ineptitude as commander in chief and the consequences of this lack of care for military members and their families. As conditions on U.S. ships erode, the administration is finding itself in a media war with the concerned families of troops deployed to the region. Stockpiles of vital munitions are being burned through at an alarming rate. And for some reason, Trump has picked this moment to order a bizarre retrofitting of U.S. aircraft carriers, demanding that they be kitted out with obsolete steam catapults. (TNR contributor Brynn Tannehill has the lore drop you need if you’ve been confused by this story.)

Public opinion about the war in Iran has been consistently awful for Trump, whose overall approval hit a low of 33 percent this week. As Parsi reports, those who are stuck on the front lines of this folly are not likely to disabuse their fellow Americans of this being anything but FUBAR. As one service member told him: “What people in the media don’t understand when they compare past conflicts to this one, is this operation has no morale behind it. That makes a world of difference to service members deployed to undesirable locations indefinitely.” Parsi thinks that the only thing left to do now is to “simply end” the war. But Trump is knee-deep in this big muddy, and there truly is no end in sight.

The Justice Department appears to have hired a convicted election hacker to monitor elections.

Democracy Docket reported that David Michael Levin appears to have joined the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division. A Florida attorney, Levin in 2016 was charged with three felonies for hacking a Florida state elections website as well as a county elections website. The hacking had no impact on the vote counting or outcome, but Levin pleaded guilty to the crimes.

Levin argued he just wanted to check in on “the integrity of elections.” He went to jail for 20 days and did two years of probation.

Democracy Docket reported that he was recently involved in a Minnesota election operation alongside William F. Mohrman, a senior counsel in the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division and the attorney who represented Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis police officer who killed George Floyd. The Justice Department has not confirmed Levin’s hiring or his role in the operation.

The Trump administration has made a habit of offering vindication for people who flat out violated election laws in an attempt to stop what they believe was fraud—a lie their president has constantly tried to manifest into existence. Colorado’s Tina Peters, the former Colorado county election clerk found guilty of tampering with voting machines, was hosted at the White House last month. And more broadly, Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon has changed the purpose and function of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division entirely.

The apparent hiring of Levin—a hacker watching over elections—may also be a prelude for the midterms, as the DOJ has already announced plans to send 1,000 poll monitors to ballot boxes around the country during the midterms.

The Supreme Court is letting President Trump move forward with his expensive White House ballroom.

On Friday, Chief Justice John Roberts ordered a stay in the preliminary injunction issued by the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia that would have halted work at 11:59 p.m. This means that for now, construction can resume while the high court gives a full review to the lower court’s ruling earlier this month that the ballroom is illegal due to a lack of congressional approval.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled 2-1 on August 7 that Congress has the “exclusive authority to regulate the construction and demolition of White House structures,” and since Trump began construction on his ballroom with congressional approval, it was against the law.

“At this preliminary stage, the National Trust [for Historic Preservation] has shown, compellingly, that Congress has not ceded unfettered authority to the Executive Branch to dramatically redesign, reshape, and reconstruct the White House—the People’s House—to fit a particular President’s desires,” the ruling stated.

The National Trust for Historic Preservation initiated the legal challenge against Trump’s ballroom, on the grounds that he doesn’t have the authority for its construction, which has resulted in the demolition of the White House’s East Wing. The organization’s lawyers say that Trump is trying to “outrun the courts” by speeding up construction without waiting for judicial rulings.

Last year, Trump vowed that the ballroom “won’t interfere with the current building,” a promise that was quickly broken when the public saw pictures of the gutted White House. He claimed that it would only cost $200 million, only for that number to soar to $300 million and then $400 million after he added extra construction. Later, it emerged that taxpayers would be footing half of the bill for a $600 million project.

For now, Trump gets to keep building his unnecessary ballroom, and by the time the Supreme Court issues a final ruling, the American people could be stuck with it, whether it’s legal or not.

This story has been updated.

President Trump is trying to sue for defamation after yet another report found that the National Guard takeover of cities across America had no significant impact on reducing violent crime levels.

In July, the Center for American Progress, or CAP, published a study analyzing the impact of Trump’s deployment of the National Guard to Los Angeles, Memphis, and Washington, D.C., which he has claimed time and time again saved those cities. In reality, the report found that the effort cost $1.7 billion and did virtually nothing.

“The findings of this analysis confirm what many already suspected: At the time of the administration’s federal law enforcement and National Guard deployments, the primary goal was never to stop crime,” the report noted. “There is no compelling evidence that these deployments reduced homicides, violent crime, or gun violence.”

That scathing finding led Trump to threaten another defamation lawsuit, arguing that the report was false and malicious. Trump’s personal lawyer, Alejandro Brito, contacted CAP on Monday with the lawsuit threat, giving the liberal think tank until 5 p.m. on Friday to retract the study and say sorry to Trump, The New York Times reported.

“The report is just another Radical Left SCAM, as are the people who fund this gaggle of Lunatics, including George Soros, Bill and Melinda Gates, Google, Apple, Visa, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, WellsFargo, Bank of America, Walmart, Toyota, T-Mobile, and NBC Universal. Foreign support includes the Embassy of Japan, the Korea Foundation, Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office (Taiwan), and the Embassy of the United Arab Emirates,” Trump ranted earlier this month. “The Dumocrats love it, and are against anything ‘TRUMP.’ These people, and others like them, are so bad for our Country. Their stated course is anything to hate or demean ‘TRUMP.’ This will be met with a lawsuit, which is being drawn now.”

CAP President Neera Tanden called Trump’s allegations “baseless” and vowed to fight back.

“Silencing research that is inconvenient to government policy is anathema to free speech and the First Amendment,” she wrote on X. “CAP will neither cower nor bend to this attack on independent research.”

A similar report from The Washington Post this month found that the crime numbers Trump so often touted in Washington, D.C.—an 88 to 92 percent decrease in crime and an 18 percent decrease in homicides—were due to a downward trend in crime that appeared long before the National Guard did.

This all of course means that American taxpayers paid billions of dollars for the National Guard to loiter in the streets of blue cities—in metro stops, in beautiful public parks, by Trader Joe’s— for nothing.

President Trump isn’t spending any campaign cash on close midterm election races, irking his fellow Republicans and putting contests like the Texas Senate seat in jeopardy. 

In July, Politico reports, Trump’s MAGA Inc. super PAC didn’t spend any of its $400 million in the bank on Republican candidates, not even Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who only narrowly won his state’s GOP Senate primary and faces surging Democrat James Talarico. 

Republican donors say that Trump needs to step up to keep the Lone Star State from sending its first Democrat to the Senate since 1993, considering that he endorsed scandal-ridden Paxton at the last minute over incumbent John Cornyn. That endorsement was probably the deciding factor in the close runoff election and now Paxton is polling just one point ahead of Talarico, unheard of in staunchly red Texas. 

“The message to Trumpworld is, ‘you broke it, now you own it. You gotta spend some of your money to defend him because we’ve got bigger fish to fry,’” one GOP donor told Politico. 

A second donor told the publication that “the general view is that’s Trump’s responsibility to bankroll, especially since Paxton took out one [of] the GOP Senate’s best fundraisers and is currently running a lackadaisical campaign.”  

These donors would prefer to spend their money on open Senate races in Michigan and North Carolina, kicking out Democrats like Senator Jon Ossoff in Georgia, and protecting vulnerable Republican Senate incumbents like Susan Collins in Maine and Dan Sullivan in Alaska. 

“There’s a lot of people that, one, don’t really like Paxton at all, they think he’d be a terrible senator or they were loyal to Cornyn—or both,” a third GOP donor said to Politico. “This is a situation that we didn’t need to spend this money at all. We need it in North Carolina, in Georgia. To make Texas a toss-up is just a foolish, foolish decision.” 

The National Republican Senatorial Committee is also staying out of Texas, preferring for now to spend its money on eight other races, making Trump’s unwillingness to open his coffers all the more glaring. While the NRSC plans to help set up a joint fundraising campaign with Paxton, any money above a certain amount would go back to the committee, according to Politico. 

Trump has not spent any of his campaign money on a candidate since March, and the candidates he endorses keep losing. He’s refusing to accept any blame for Republicans becoming more and more unpopular, either. It seems like he cares less about his party controlling Congress than he does about his own pet projects. 

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Inside Washington

Do Democrats have a chance to flip a Senate seat in Arkansas? One poll this week suggested they might—stunningly finding that Republican Senator Tom Cotton is trailing his Democratic opponent in the deep red state. Experts say not to take it too seriously: The poll is almost certainly an outlier. But, they add, there might be some useful lessons in it.

This week, Talk Business & Politics and Hendrix College released a survey of 1,217 likely Arkansas voters, finding that Democrat Hallie Shoffner, a farmer and businesswoman, was narrowly ahead of Cotton in the race for Senate. 47.4 percent of respondents said they would vote for Shoffner, and 44 percent backed Cotton. That’s a shocking result; the Cook Political Report considers the Arkansas race a “Solid Republican,” and another poll of likely voters found Cotton ahead by 16 points. Arkansas has been solidly red for around 15 years, and the last time the state elected a Democratic senator was in 2008.

So why does it look like a Democrat has a chance? One answer can be found in the nature of polling itself. “People like to sometimes call polling a prediction. It’s not a prediction, it’s a measurement,” said Robert Coon, managing partner with Impact Management Group, who helped craft the questions for the poll. The poll doesn’t necessarily reflect how Arkansans will vote on November 3, but instead captures how they feel in the present, before spending and advertising has kicked into high gear.

“There’s a ton of time between now and the general election,” said Jay Barth, a professor of politics at Hendrix College who helped design the poll. “Tom Cotton has dramatically more resources than Shoffner.”

Cotton ended June with nearly $10 million in cash on hand. Shoffner had just $864,000. In the 45 to 60 days before the election, both campaigns will likely start spending their money in earnest, putting up more TV ads and sending out mailers. According to Stephen Ansolabehere, a professor of government at Harvard University, most voters don’t start paying full attention to the candidates until at least September; it’s not unusual for earlier polls to yield some bizarre results.

So far in 2026, polls have already proven to be bad predictors of how voters actually behave in the ballot box. In Michigan’s Senate primary, polls predicted that Abdul El-Sayed would defeat Haley Stevens in a blowout. Instead, he won by just one percentage point. A similar phenomenon happened in Wisconsin’s gubernatorial primary, where Francesca Hong was widely expected to beat David Crowley by double digits according to polling; she ultimately lost by less than one percentage point.

“People definitely shouldn’t overweight what one poll says, and there will obviously be more outside polls [and] inside polls that are done,” said Coon. “Really, it’s about a trend line.”

Still, the poll suggests that independents in Arkansas are increasingly frustrated with President Donald Trump and the war in Iran. “Over the last eight election cycles, independent voters have traditionally [leaned] two to one with Republicans,” Coon explained. In this poll though, independents supported the Democratic candidate at a roughly two to one margin.

Even if Shoffner isn’t headed to a shocking win in a solidly red state, the poll still offers some useful guidance for the campaigns as they hurtle toward November. Cotton seems to be underperforming in the fast-growing Northwest Arkansas region, Barth explained. Shoffner has spent time in that part of the state, which could be paying off. But as spending increases, Cotton may put more resources into that area. Shoffner was also doing better with voters in suburbs around Little Rock than Democrats have done in past cycles. That could be because those areas are becoming more and more racially diverse and thus more Democratic, he suggested. Unsurprisingly, Cotton did well among voters 65 and older, a reliably Republican demographic in the state.

In November, independent voters will be the most important group to watch. Barth wonders whether the shifting attitudes among independents could be an early sign of the state becoming less red. “As there starts to be partisan change in a state or in a place, one of the first things we see is those independents start to kind of lean towards one party or the other,” he said. “And I think we are maybe seeing with younger voters some enhanced Democratic lean in response to frustrations with the Republican administration.”

—Emma Janssen

Outside Washington

Xavier Becerra’s senior slump of a “campaign” for California governor continues, to sporadic outbursts of frustration from commentators. Reviewing the Democrat’s almost comically vague statements on everything from AI to gas cars to housing, CalMatters’s Jeanne Kuang notes that Becerra is practically guaranteed to “win based on Democrats’ voter registration advantage in California alone.” Political science professor Melissa Michelson tells Kuang that Becerra “doesn’t have an incentive to go out on a limb,” since the only thing he can do is “mess up.” It’s possible Becerra has taken that message a little too seriously: The Sacramento Bee’s Ben Paviour notes that Becerra has clocked “almost no public appearances” since his June primary win. Despite that, Capitol Weekly’s Dan Morain calculates that Becerra’s campaign raised $1.9 million “in the first 15 days of August” alone. While Becerra has said he’ll debate his Republican opponent, Steve Hilton, they have yet to set a date. “I still don’t really know why Becerra is running and have no expectation that I’ll get an answer before he becomes governor, or even after,” Californian policy analyst Ned Resnikoff recently wrote on Bluesky. “This is a campaign for governor. Not a coronation,” griped Mark Z. Barabak at the Los Angeles Times.

“Cities are increasingly turning to artificial intelligence to address one of the most persistent sources of housing permitting delays: incomplete applications,” reports Robbie Sequeira at Stateline. Baltimore, Denver, and Los Angeles are some of the recent converts, joining many others who have already adopted or are exploring the option. Honolulu and Seattle have both reportedly reviewed the accuracy of the permitting tool CivCheck, finding it somewhere between 87 percent and 92 percent accurate while shortening review time—but no one seems to think it can fully replace human review.

—Heather Souvaine Horn

The Ideas Factory

In a new report for the Roosevelt Institute, Diana Hernandez and Lauren Ross argue that energy insecurity is no longer an issue just for low-income households, but is in fact a growing “mainstream crisis” driven not just by “rising utility rates, inflation, stagnant wages,” but also “outdated” housing stock and heating and cooling systems. Not much remains of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act, they acknowledge, but some lessons can be pulled from the wreckage. Among them: Cross-agency cooperation between bodies like the Department of Energy and Department of Housing and Urban Development better facilitates “whole-home retrofits,” which are likely to be the most effective in achieving “lasting reductions in energy consumption and improv[ing] overall housing quality.”

Damian Murphy, Allison McManus, and Andrew Miller pen an article for the Center for American Progress evaluating the Iran war at the half-year mark. The bottom line: “Six months in, Iran has emerged as the strategic victor, and the longer the Trump administration fails to reach a durable conclusion to the conflict, the more the United States stands to lose.”

—Heather Souvaine Horn

In Closing

Good Week: Angie Nixon

Florida Representative Angie Nixon’s win in the U.S. Senate Democratic primary in Florida was very surprising. Her opponent, Eugene Vindman, had a massive fundraising advantage. Nixon is a Democratic Socialists of America member and Vindman from the center-left Resistance wing of the party, so this is being covered as an ideological result, another win for the surging left. That’s true. But another explanation is that Nixon is fairly rooted in Florida and the political scene there, while Vindman is more of a national, D.C., MSNBC figure.

Bad Week: Natalie Harp

It’s not just that Jon Ossoff made a quip about her that turned into days of news coverage. It’s that many of the salacious, unflattering details that emerged about Harp must have come from other people inside the Trump White House. Her enemies are not only Democrats! That said, she truly seems to have an audience of one and there is little evidence that the president wants Harp to leave his side.

—Perry Bacon

Political Trivia Question of the Day

On this date in 1858, the first of seven of these historic events took place. What events were these? (Sign up for The Blue Book to find the answer in Tuesday’s newsletter.)

President Trump is trying to take away the American Bar Association’s ability to accredit law schools due to its being too woke.

The ABA is the leading accreditor for almost 200 law schools in the United States. Without its accreditation, a school’s graduates may not qualify to take the bar exam, and the school itself may not qualify for federal funding—two massive implications. Now the Education Department has published a 500-page report recommending the removal of that long-standing power because it believes the ABA is trying to “inject their own political preferences, their own ideologies into the work that they do.”

“We have said many times that accreditation, in general, operates like a cartel,” assistant Secretary of Education David Barker said to The Wall Street Journal. “When there’s no competition, accreditors feel free to inject their own political preferences, their own ideologies into the work that they do.”

The Education Department’s recommendation is not final and will take some months to be adjudicated, but the right is already celebrating.

“This will be one of the most meaningful changes to open doors for Americans and steer legal culture toward justice, not radical indoctrination,” former Trump adviser May Mailmain wrote on X. “The American Bar Association (ABA) is a left-wing advocacy group, filing 80% of its amicus briefs for liberal arguments and 0% for conservative. It uses its monopoly on recognizing which law schools are ‘accredited’ (get student loans) to force DEI hiring, recruitment, and inflate the cost of education.”

The right has railed against both the ABA and higher education in general for some time now. The Trump administration has ratcheted up those attacks, going after law firms that won’t capitulate and freezing university funding on DEI grounds. Accreditation is just another tool in this culture war—Trump even called it his “secret weapon.” It’s also worth pondering why the most corrupt president in history would want to cripple the law school education apparatus.

The ABA continues to maintain that it is operating well within the Education Department’s requirements.

“ABA presidents have issued 15 separate statements dealing with judicial independence, security and the integrity of the justice system in the U.S. in the past eight years. That’s Democratic and Republican administrations. And it’s not who we’re opposed to, it’s what we’re in support of,” ABA president William R. Bay told NPR back in 2025 when asked about accusations of liberal bias. “If we want America to be great, we must do the right thing every day. And that’s why we support the rule of law, the bedrock principles of our democracy. And that’s [why] we’re speaking once again for the rule of law, because there’s a clear pattern we see that would suggest it is under considerable duress.”

President Donald Trump is letting fraudsters off the hook at the expense of their victims, according to a new report from Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee Friday.

The 25-page report found that Trump’s sweeping pardons had relieved white-collar criminals of $1.7 billion worth of fines, forfeitures, and restitution, in a “massive redistribution of wealth in favor of convicted criminals.” Democrats accused Trump of sidelining the traditional clemency structure to implement a pay-to-play system.

The report emphasized Trump’s pardon of Trevor Milton, former CEO of Nikola Corporation, who was convicted of fraud in 2022 for misleading investors. Milton had been sentenced to four years in prison, and the judge was scheduled to rule on a recommendation that he pay $700 million in restitution. Then Milton opened his wallet. The convicted fraudster and his wife donated more than $1.8 million to committees supporting Trump’s reelection. Milton was pardoned in March 2025.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Trump pardoned Adriana and Andres Camberos, relieving them of their $50 million in restitution to victims and $30 million in forfeiture. Trump stepped in on behalf of private equity executive David Gentile, commuting his seven-year prison sentence and scrubbing a $15.5 million forfeiture obligation. The president pardoned four executives from BitMEX, a cryptocurrency exchange that violated anti-money laundering laws, and wiped away $130 million of the company’s federal fines. And many, many more.

Since reentering office, Trump has only made it harder for law enforcement to crack down on certain financial crimes. Last week, Trump’s Treasury Department announced it would destroy the government’s registry on shell-company ownership, a database law enforcement uses to investigate money laundering and corruption. In addition to pardoning dozens of white-collar criminals, the Trump administration has eliminated the task forces on kleptocrats, paused the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, and gutted the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

The U.S. Navy has been quietly considering renaming an aircraft carrier that was set to honor Doris Miller, a heroic Black sailor at Pearl Harbor, after President Donald Trump instead.

The effort to rename the planned USS Doris Miller began earlier this year, three sources told CNN Thursday. It’s not yet clear who the newest Gerald R. Ford–class aircraft carrier will be named for, but two of the sources revealed there have been conversations about naming the carrier to honor Trump.

The leaks come after Trump recently ordered redesigns that will waste billions of dollars to put old-fashioned steam catapult technology on board.

Acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao and his office had started to look into updating the official guidance for how ships should be named, two of the sources told CNN. No aircraft carrier has ever been named after a sitting president, and naming the vessel after Trump would be a massive break with precedent.

The effort comes amid a wider trend of the Trump administration expunging Black history from American monuments and museums. The White House has also made a concerted effort to rename institutions after the president.

At the same time, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has launched a campaign to remake the U.S. military in his image. The secretary has repeatedly thwarted the advancements of Black and female Defense Department personnel.

One of the sources told CNN that the Navy is looking to name another warship after Miller, who was the first Black sailor to receive the Navy Cross of Valor. When the bombs started to fall at Pearl Harbor, Miller, a mess attendant, aided his wounded commanding officer, and despite having no training, took control of an anti-aircraft gun to defend the base.

Additionally, the Navy is moving to recommend him for a Medal of Honor. Thomas Bledsoe, Miller’s great-nephew, told CNN that the family had not been informed of the Navy’s plan to rename the ship, or its renewed effort to award Miller with the Medal of Honor, something the family had been working on “for years.”

A federal judge in Oregon ripped the Trump administration for placing political conditions on crucial, potentially life-saving disaster relief.

On Thursday, U.S. District Judge Michael McShane, an Obama appointee, issued a ruling regarding the city of Salem, Oregon’s July lawsuit against Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin and FEMA leadership. In it, the city accused the Trump administration of dangling disaster aid above local leaders’ heads in exchange for a rejection of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.

Salem argued that the conditions were “unlawful,” especially given that the city was still recovering from storm damage from last winter. McShane agreed.

“As wildfires, severe storms, and floods routinely ravage through the State of Oregon, disaster relief has become a tool to advance unrelated executive policy … it is hard to imagine the connection between the use of preferred pronouns and the fires currently burning through central Oregon,” he wrote in his order.

McShane issued a preliminary injunction blocking the DHS restrictions on aid while the case continues.

Withholding basic disaster funds from American citizens just because they live in states that recognize trans people exist or talk about racism in school has become an obvious, spiteful trend for Trump. Last month, he denied FEMA disaster aid requests from four blue states after accepting the aid requests of six red states just two days before.

In just his first week in office, Todd Blanche has inflicted more damage on the norms and traditions of the Department of Justice than any attorney general in its history. I don’t say this casually, and I’m not ignoring the competition. John Mitchell ran Richard Nixon’s dirty tricks and went to federal prison for it. A. Mitchell Palmer used the DOJ to round up and deport thousands of people for their politics. Harry Daugherty turned it into a vehicle for graft, his cronies selling pardons and immunities like so many indulgences, earning the DOJ the nickname “the Department of easy virtue.”

These evil deeds damaged the department, but they were furtive and ended in disgrace. None of these men served up his conduct as a model for the DOJ to follow. Blanche, by contrast, has openly taken a blowtorch to standards that have been articles of faith at the department for 50 years. Puffed up with his Senate confirmation, President Trump’s former personal lawyer has taken on a renewed cockiness—arrogance, really—and proclaimed his and Trump’s perverted view of the attorney general as the new normal.

Consider these five separate betrayals of the department’s ideals.

1. Asked by Kristen Welker on Meet the Press whether he could pledge that the Justice Department would always act independently of the White House, Blanche was combative: “No, I’m not going to pledge that. And no attorney general should ever pledge that.”

That gratuitous added sentence disparages the canonical approach of every attorney general for at least the last half-century. Most of them made the very pledge Blanche now declares inappropriate, and all of them lived by it.

Jeff Sessions, Trump’s very first attorney general, swore that the department’s actions “will not be improperly influenced by political considerations,” and that it “can never be used to retaliate politically against opponents.” Michael Mukasey, the conservative Republican AG brought in by President George W. Bush in 2007 to clean up the U.S. attorney firing scandals, told the Senate that staff who discussed cases with political actors would be fired. Merrick Garland put the principle most concisely at his own confirmation hearing in 2021: “I’m not the president’s lawyer. I am the United States’s lawyer.”

Blanche has now breezily declared that all of these predecessors in office were misguided in their fundamental approach to the job and justice.

2. Days after being sworn in, Blanche stood at the Nassau County Police Academy, flanked by uniformed officers, and warmed up a crowd for Bruce Blakeman, Trump’s endorsed candidate for governor of New York, praising him for doing “everything we need him to do.” No attorney general in at least 100 years has appeared at a political rally for a candidate; I suspect none would even have entertained the idea. The conduct can only undermine public confidence in the Department’s impartiality.

Blanche’s imprudence served to silence the senator whose vote secured his confirmation: Pressed by a reporter about the rally, Bill Cassidy went quiet, then meekly pleaded that he had “never heard anything about that rally until this very minute.”

3. On Thursday, August 13, Blanche delivered a cynical speech to DOJ staff in the Great Hall of Main Justice. He served up empty pieties, most remarkably his assurance that the department would uphold the law “without fear or favor”—the best capsule description of its mission as there is.

As the assembled staffers surely understood, Blanche’s tenure has been—and by every indication will continue to be—marked by justice meted out with both fear and favor. As deputy attorney general and then acting attorney general, Blanche has spent a year presiding over the unwarranted prosecution of political enemies; the sweetheart treatment of January 6 defendants and others who cozy up to Trump; and the firings of DOJ prosecutors for the political sin of doing their jobs by pursuing guilty defendants who now happen to enjoy the president’s favor. He has crowed about forcing out all the prosecutors and agents who worked on the January 6 cases, and he did the same to prosecutors who were assigned to work on cases against defendants who blocked women from entering reproductive service clinics.

4. On Fox News Sunday, after a district court and court of appeals both ordered a halt to construction of the president’s ballroom for failure to obtain congressional approval, Blanche waved away the ruling: “We don’t believe we have to go to Congress. We believe Congress has already given us the authority to do what we’re doing.” It’s not the attorney general’s role to dismiss binding court orders, on television no less.

5. Finally, there is the ludicrous load of crap Blanche served up in a Meet the Press appearance. Asked what he would do if the president directed him to cross an ethical or legal line, he dodged the one-word answer the moment called for. He offered instead a transparently silly claim: “The president will never ask me to do something unethical or illegal. He never has. He never will.”

What a whopper, from the lips of the chief federal law-enforcement officer in the land. Appearances at political rallies are unethical; reprisal prosecutions are illegal; and there’s plenty more Blanche has done in each category. Trump has insisted on bringing cases against his enemies, and Blanche has championed his supposed authority to do so.

Trump has forced out those who moved too slowly, including previous Attorney General Pam Bondi, for failing to deliver his enemies’ heads on a plate. On September 20, Trump posted on Truth Social that James Comey, Adam Schiff, and Leticia James were all “all guilty as hell” and that “JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!” A hand-picked loyalist secured the Comey indictment days later, and in an open court the government’s own advocate conceded that if the president’s post “is not a direction to prosecute, I’d really be in a loss to say what is.” As would anyone.

Blanche’s blithe assurance is a classic authoritarian move, one we have seen from Trump himself repeatedly over the last 20 months: Don’t merely lie; proclaim the exact opposite of the truth, and stand your ground shamelessly.

A. Mitchell Palmer and Harry Daugherty damaged the DOJ by what they did, but none tried to change what it was. Blanche is attacking the institution at its foundations in broad daylight, sawing away at its core principles and rewriting its basic mission. That is why his first week belongs in a shameful category of its own.