The New Republic

The Democratic party will refuse to approve any of President Trump’s Supreme Court nominations in the event they take back control of the Senate, drawing perhaps the strongest line in the sand against the White House to date. 

“The bottom line is: One of the reasons we want to do everything we can to take back the Senate is not let Trump put such horrible justices—MAGA justices—on the Supreme Court and the lower courts,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer told NBC News in a Monday report. 

The rest of the ranks echoed the sentiment. 

“No, we’ve got to do exactly what McConnell did to us,” said Senator Ruben Gallego, referring to Mitch McConnell’s 10-month obstruction of President Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland, a spite-fueled move that resulted in Justice Neil Gorsuch’s appointment to the court instead. “I don’t think you know you want to go down that road... But clearly you know McConnell and Trump used... their power, whatever you want to call it, to change the makeup of the courts. And I think we have to start moving it back.”

“Well, given the history of Trump nominees, I think it is slim to none that we would support a nominee from this administration,” Senator and Senior Judiciary Committee member Richard Blumenthal said. “Because we’ve seen this movie, we know how it ends, which is a politician in robes who is following Trump’s orders on most major questions.”

This report comes just a day after conservative Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito told CBS News he was considering retirement, saying it was “something I think that somebody at my age has to think about every term.” Alito is 76 years old, and fellow conservative Justice Clarence  Thomas is 78, leading both sides of the aisle to start thinking about their replacements. 

“A major reason why I’m running to serve South Carolina and why it’s so important to keep the Senate conservative this November. Should Justice Alito choose to retire next year, a Republican-majority Senate will be needed to vote and hopefully confirm a Supreme Court nominee from President Trump,” Senator Darline Graham wrote on X last Friday. “If Democrats control the Senate, they will not even allow a vote. And if they allow a vote, they will defeat a Trump-nominated candidate regardless of their qualifications.”

The White House continued its press ban Monday, blocking the news outlet Politico from traveling on Air Force One with President Trump.

Politico was scheduled to be the White House print pool representative, and Trump administration officials offered its spot on the plane to other news organizations who are part of the pool. In solidarity, several print organizations said no, CNN reports.

The night before, the White House’s email to the press corps offering guidance on Trump’s trip did not mention any news outlets who were traveling on Air Force One, which is not normal, and could be a sign that media organizations are trying to send a message to the president. Last month, Trump banned MS NOW, Politico, and CNN from the White House, only to be rebuked by U.S. District Court Judge Timothy Kelly, who ordered the ban immediately lifted while the outlets’ court challenge received a full hearing.

At the time, the rest of the White House TV pool refused to cover Chinese President Xi Jinping’s arrival at the White House, leaving only Chinese state media to have video of Xi’s entrance September 24. At the state dinner for Xi that same night, a dumbfounded Trump asked where all of the cameras were.

In an interview with Time magazine published last week, Trump appeared to be confused about Kelly’s order and is still bent on punishing news outlets for coverage that he doesn’t like. The fact that other mainstream media outlets aren’t trying to take advantage of Trump’s ban to get increased access to the president is a good sign. Enabling Trump’s latest attacks on the press would result in watered-down, less critical news coverage of a president who thinks he is above any laws or checks on his power.

Rick Jackson, the Republican gubernatorial nominee in Georgia, is the latest MAGA candidate to delete mentions of President Donald Trump from his campaign website.

A version of Jackson’s website from June stated that he “will work with President Trump to protect Georgians from the consequences of Washington’s failures.” As of Monday, the mention had been removed, MeidasTouch reported.

This sudden deletion (read: defection) comes after Jackson spent months tirelessly tying himself to Trump. In February, his campaign aired a 30-second Super Bowl commercial comparing him to the president. “Like President Trump, I don’t owe anybody anything,” Jackson said. On the campaign trail, Jackson promised voters he’d be Trump’s “favorite governor,” and framed himself as similar to Trump, but with a “southern tone.”

All of this was done without Trump ever actually endorsing Jackson. The president reluctantly bestowed his endorsement to Jackson in July, after the businessman defeated Trump’s original pick, Lieutenant Governor Burt Jones, in the Republican primary runoff in June.

Jackson’s sudden switch-up is part of a wider trend of Republicans toning down their ties to the president ahead of the midterm elections. Jackson is at least the second candidate to remove Trump from his campaign website, after Florida Representative and gubernatorial candidate Byron Donalds. The shift appears to indicate that the Republicans’ leader has become the party’s biggest liability.

President Trump’s ill-advised, poorly executed war in Iran was foreshadowed months before.

The Washington Post reports that the Trump administration’s handling of Yemen’s Houthi militia attacking ships in the area in 2025 had Pentagon leaders raising concerns that would come to fruition during the Iran war the next year.

Specifically, Department of Defense officials Dan Caldwell and Alex Velez-Green were worried that an extended military campaign against the Houthis could deplete U.S. missile stocks, which ended up happening one year later. Last year, in March 2025, President Trump announced Operation Rough Rider, a bombing campaign in Yemen that would become infamous after the national security adviser at the time, Mike Waltz, mistakenly invited Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg into a group chat of senior administration officials discussing the early bombings.

The campaign resulted in 1,000 targets being bombed, with Houthi commanders and ammunition stocks being targeted, but also scores of civilians being killed. Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth called the operation a success, but others in the Pentagon, such as Caldwell and Hegseth’s first chief of staff, Joe Kasper, questioned whether the operation had clear and achievable objectives, again similar to the current Iran war.

A spokesperson for Hegseth, Kingsley Wilson, told the Post that the operation “achieved decisive success against Houthi forces,” resulting in “severely degraded radar networks, air-defense systems, ballistic-missile and drone launch sites, weapons depots, and production facilities while removing multiple mid- and senior-level commanders from the battlefield.” It also “substantially reduced immediate threats to vital international shipping lanes, compelled a clear tactical shift by the adversary, and helped create conditions for a ceasefire that strengthened freedom of navigation in the region.”

Those “successes” seem at best hollow now, as Houthi forces took over the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait in the Red Sea last month. Last year’s operation ended in May 2025 with an Oman-brokered ceasefire and Trump declaring victory, claiming that the Houthis “don’t want to fight anymore.”

“They gave us their word that they wouldn’t be shooting at ships anymore, and we honor that,” Trump said.

In reality, the Houthis weathered the U.S. attacks. They shot down at least seven MQ-9 Reaper drones, and two F/A-18 fighter jets were lost at sea. Trump lost interest in Yemen shortly afterward, to the chagrin of some in U.S. Central Command. Some officials reportedly said at the time, “You ignore Yemen at your own peril.”

That seems all too apparent today, and the U.S. is stuck in a conflict with Iran and its Houthi allies with no clear end in sight. The war has stretched on and continues to hurt the U.S. and global economies, with Trump unwilling to acknowledge that the war should never been waged, was horribly executed, and now needs to end regardless of how bad he looks.

Suddenly, gas prices have absolutely nothing to do with the Iran war, according to the U.S. president.

After spending months denying and downplaying the fact that gas and diesel prices have become more expensive, Donald Trump finally conceded Monday. The only catch to his admission: The rising price tag is definitely not his fault.

“What’s driving up Gasoline is no longer the Strait of Hormuz, because Record Numbers of Barrels are coming out now on an almost daily basis,” Trump wrote on Truth Social Monday.

Instead, Trump blamed the sky-high prices on Ukraine, claiming that its recent attacks on Russian oil refineries had aggrieved the global oil market. (It’s worth noting that Ukraine would likely stop attacking Russian infrastructure if Trump’s buddy Russian President Vladimir Putin stopped invading Ukraine.) Trump also wagged a finger at “Blue States like California” that are trying to veer away from fossil fuels in favor of renewable energy sources.

Provisional ship-tracking data obtained by Reuters revealed that, in the last month of September, oil trade through the Strait of Hormuz had roughly returned to prewar levels. Millions of barrels of oil from European reserves are also expected to help lower prices in the near future, following an urgent plea from Trump to G7 leaders last week.

But American wallets are still hurting. The price of oil and gas has gone up exponentially since the start of the Iran war and the subsequent closure of the Strait of Hormuz. In early February, weeks before the Trump administration initiated the conflict, gas cost approximately $2.99 per gallon. Today, a gallon costs $4.36 on average, according to the AAA fuel price tracker.

This time last year, diesel cost an average of $3.68 a gallon, according to AAA. Today, it costs $6.32 a gallon.

Collectively, Americans have spent $107 billion more on gas and oil since the war began seven months ago, according to an analysis by the Climate Solutions Lab at Brown University published last month.

Consumers have spent roughly $59 billion more on gas and $48.6 billion more on diesel, according to the university’s tracker. That breaks down to an increased price tag of approximately $822.20 per U.S. household.

Vice President JD Vance claimed Monday that Donald Trump’s taxpayer-funded propaganda videos are actually “not partisan.”

The Trump administration has used at least 5.6 million taxpayer dollars to buy a series of at least 15 campaign-style advertisements touting the president’s agenda ahead of November’s midterm elections—even though it’s illegal to use government funds for campaign purposes.

Speaking to the press ahead of his trip to Alaska, Vance tried to downplay the administration’s blatant law-breaking by claiming the television spots did not endorse any particular candidate or party.

“I’m sure that some people don’t like it, but if you look at the message of those advertisements, they’re not partisan, they’re not—you know, it’s not like we’re advocating for a particular candidate,” Vance said. “We’re trying to tell a story, I think, about how great the United States of America is.”

The vice president compared the advertisements to videos that the Obama administration produced about the Affordable Care Act. “You have the people’s government using tax dollars to advertise about what the government is doing,” Vance continued. “It’s part of actually, I think, living in the constitutional republic.”

In 2010, the Department of Health and Human services paid to produce short 30-second ads explaining the changes that the Affordable Care Act made to Medicare, including free check-ups, cancer screenings, and lower prescription drug costs. Not only did these videos have a clear public service function, but they were also not self-aggrandizing or partisan.

By comparison, Trump’s television spots are wildly partisan. One spot, called “King of the Jungle,” features images of Democrats targeted by the Trump administration edited alongside videos of lions hunting in the wild. Another, called “God Made Trump,” presents the president as a messianic figure. One ad called “Resilience” shows multiple moments in Trump’s life before he became president. And in another, the president begs voters to “Love Me.”

In order to make the videos, the Trump administration stole the money from the Department of Homeland Security, specifically from U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

America’s FBI directors are expected to be fiercely independent. Kash Patel is not.

Instead, Patel appears to be completely under the thumb of the White House, bending over backwards to enact the president’s retribution campaign, according to a new report by The Atlantic.

Whereas Patel’s predecessors have historically tried to create distance between themselves and the Oval Office, Patel reportedly receives numerous calls from the White House and its allies throughout the day. Some of his orders come directly from Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, or other executive branch officials, according to current and former officials that spoke with reporter Sarah Fitzpatrick.

“I’ve personally heard him say, ‘I have to do this for the White House,’” one former FBI official said.

The White House did not deny that Miller tells Patel and his agency what to do. Instead, it seemed to reinforce Miller’s broad influence over Trump’s executive branch, confirming that Miller “interacts with all law enforcement agencies on a regular basis.”

FBI Operations Director Joe Perez told The Atlantic in a statement that the bureau “receives referrals from a variety of places, assesses the facts of the allegation, documents the referral, and we make the decision whether or not to proceed accordingly under an authorized purpose as we have always done.”

Patel’s primary mission seems to be lending institutional credence to Trump’s 2020 presidential election conspiracy. Yet despite spending months repeating promises of supposedly imminent arrests, Patel has yet to produce actual results for Trump’s cause.

But the FBI wildcard has invariably escaped consequence from his MAGA boss, even in the wake of numerous controversies.

Over the last year, the podcaster-turned-agency chief has wantonly flown around the country with FBI jets on the taxpayers’ dime. His trips have included a jaunt to Las Vegas, a trip to Nashville, and at least one widely publicized instance in which he flew to Penn State to visit his girlfriend, country singer Alexis Wilkins, who was performing at a wrestling event.

His alleged substance abuse issues have also caused problems. Patel ruffled feathers when he appeared at the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan, where he was caught on video chugging beer and whooping it up with the U.S. men’s hockey team. (He later insisted he was celebrating with his “friends.”)

In April, a federal judge threw out Patel’s defamation claims against a former FBI official, Frank Figliuzzi, who told MS NOW that Patel had “been visible at nightclubs far more” than he had been seen on the seventh floor of the bureau’s Washington headquarters.

Patel is in the midst of suing The Atlantic after the magazine published a damning report earlier this year about his alleged drinking problem, which reportedly goes “far beyond the occasional beer” and may be contributing to Patel’s erratic, paranoid behavior.

But Patel has nonetheless hung on to his credentials within the Trump administration. The windfall, according to a Republican operative that spoke to Fitzpatrick, is due to the fact Patel “is the only guy who never says no.”

“And the president likes that,” they added.

Meanwhile, Patel has been remarkably brash and cavalier while dealing with his critics. In response to three pages of detailed questions about his connections to the White House sent by Fitzpatrick, Patel responded: “I’m still looking for my gold-plated jet ski in the English Channel; you all know where it is. Free ride if you help me find it.”

Fitzpatrick noted that she had never asked or written about a gold-plated jet ski or the English Channel, writing that she “did not understand this response.”

However, a quick Google search turned up an MS NOW report from July about Patel that included an image of a jet ski. At the time, Patel had responded to the article via X, writing: “Nah, my jet ski is gold plated… dumbass.”

“Put simply, Patel responded to The Atlantic’s questions about the FBI’s election investigations by referring to a graphic that appeared on an unrelated news story on another media company’s website,” Fitzpatrick observed.

President Trump has the lowest approval rating in Kansas of any president since Herbert Hoover—who was widely blamed for causing the Great Depression. This is yet another ominous sign for Republicans ahead of what has become a midterm battleground for the Senate.

This comes in the midst of a neck-and-neck campaign between Democrat Reverend Adam Hamilton and incumbent Republican Senator Roger Marshall, with most polls showing them locked at 45 percent. This is the closest Kansas has been to flipping blue in nearly 100 years, making Trump’s historic unpopularity there a clear cause for alarm.

"I would say Donald Trump is probably at this point in his term the least popular Republican president since Herbert Hoover" -- Enten details how Trump is down 20 points of approval in Kansas relative to his first term https://t.co/1bJkA1rlWO

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 5, 2026

“President Trump is historically unpopular for a Republican president in the great state of Kansas.... I absolutely buy the idea that this [Senate] race is close because just take a look at these,” CNN’s Harry Enten said on Monday morning. “In his first time … Donald Trump had +5 points. Look at how much less popular Donald Trump is than he was in term number one at this point. He’s way down in the basement, 15 points underwater—that’s a 20-point shift away ... 16 less points popular than any other Republican president at this point in the term.”

Republicans are worried that Trump’s unpopularity will spill into the race between Hamilton and Rogers.

“It’s a very competitive state, more competitive than I’d like to see it,” South Carolina Senator Tim Scott said last week. “But the fact of the matter is that we’re going to win in Kansas.… It’ll be closer than I want it to be.”

Marshall isn’t really helping his case, either, as his tenure has been defined by timely waffling on ICE and controversy spurred by his past aggressive, high-interest medical debt collections during his time as an obstetrician-gynecologist.

“This to me is potentially a mathematic perfect storm,” Enten continued. “A historically unpopular Republican in Kansas and Donald Trump, and a historically popular Democratic Senate candidate in Adam Hamilton—that may be the equation that gets Kansas its first Democratic senator in 94 years.”

On her way out of the Department of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem may have gotten one of her donors a sweet deal.

President Trump fired Noem from the Cabinet in March over a series of scandals including how DHS handled contracts. But she didn’t leave the agency until her successor, Markwayne Mullin, took over on March 25. Just before she left, the department agreed to pay $108 million to Daedalus Aviation Corporation for a Boeing 737 private jet with a bar, two bedrooms, marble showers, and a table covered in manta-ray skin.

The firm had acquired the plane for less than $90 million, and it wasn’t the only plane deal DHS made to the corporation. The agency bought two more luxury jets from it for $106 million, far more than the $83 million the company paid for them. It also bought two 17-year-old 737s for $45 million each, more than their typical market value, according to The New York Times. All five of those planes were bought on Noem’s last morning at the DHS.

Daedalus’s chairman, William Walters, gave $10,000 to Noem’s political action committee, American Resolve, in 2024. After she was appointed as DHS secretary, Walters’s companies got over $900 million in agency contracts. DHS hired his business Salus Worldwide Solutions to fly Noem and her aides on chartered jets, as well as to encourage immigrants to leave the country voluntarily.

Daedalus was given a no-bid contract to acquire planes for deportation flights, acting as a middleman by buying planes from elsewhere and reselling them to the government.

When Mullin was confirmed as Noem’s successor, he looked into backing out of the deal but was worried about paying a financial penalty. Mullin spoke to White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, who was also concerned about the penalty. She told him not to block the plane purchases, and ultimately, he didn’t.

The planes DHS bought from Daedalus were mostly unused as of August. The whole deal smacks of Noem making money for a former donor and saddling American taxpayers with the cost, without any benefit to them or the government.

Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff have used peace negotiations with Russia to concoct a multibillion-dollar deal to benefit their foreign business partners and political allies.  

In the latest installment of the most corrupt administration in history, the dynamic duo behind multiple botched peace agreements has secured a massive deal to purchase a series of oil fields, refineries, and gas stations owned by Lukoil, one of Russia’s biggest energy companies, The New York Times reported Friday. 

One private firm had already reached a tentative agreement to purchase Lukoil assets earlier this year, but that deal was stalled as a new group of investors emerged—each with direct financial ties to Kushner, Witkoff, and President Donald Trump.

The new group of investors is led by Todd Boehly, co-owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers, who donated $1 million to MAGA Inc. in 2025 and another $1 million to Trump’s inauguration committee through Eldridge Industries, his investment firm. 

One major stakeholder would be an Abu Dhabi–based fund controlled by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, who oversees a fund called Lunate, which is among the largest stakeholders in Kushner’s shady private equity firm, Affinity Partners. Sheikh Tahnoon previously dumped $2 billion into World Liberty Financial, the crypto firm co-founded by Witkoff and majority-owned by the Trump family. Then the U.S. president lifted export restrictions on AI chips to the UAE. Nothing to see there, certainly. 

Another major stakeholder in the sale is a Qatar-based conglomerate controlled by Moutaz Al-Khayyat and his brother Ramez Al-Khayyat, who have helped finance Kushner’s shady luxury hotel project in Albania.

For Kushner and Witkoff’s friends, the best thing about this part of the peace deal doesn’t actually require any peace. The Trump administration has reportedly signaled that it is open to making deals with Russia before the war actually ends, and one person familiar with the matter told the Times that included the Lukoil sale. The potential deal stands to be extremely lucrative for the American buyers as the purchase would release the assets from Russian sanctions, causing their value to instantly increase. 

Hui Chen, a former Justice Department prosecutor and a white-collar crime and ethics adviser, told the Times that the deal was “an alarming and very concerning set of entanglements.”

“And it means you have to question how the Trump administration is evaluating the different bidders involved here. Are the personal interests involved going to wrongly influence the outcome?” Chen said.

News of this deal comes on the heels of a report exposing Kushner’s investment firm as the largest stakeholder in Phoenix Financial, a Tel Aviv–based firm that has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into companies that have seen massive gains as a result of Israel’s ongoing military campaign in Gaza. The president’s son-in-law has previously used his gig as special envoy as an opportunity to try to raise funds from foreign governments and individuals in the Middle East. 

And just one day before the Times report dropped, Kushner himself took to X to insist that he does not let his business dealings influence his diplomatic work.

The president feels absolutely no remorse about doxing Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton.

Donald Trump rationalized the stunning overstep while speaking with reporters Saturday, defending the decision to post Cotton’s personal phone number as a method to pressure him into bending to Trump’s position on daylight saving time.

“We want to get away from this ridiculous way and custom of—every twice a year, turning your clocks back, turning your clocks forward, being late to dinner, being late for very important meetings, it’s ridiculous,” Trump said.

“We don’t want to change clocks twice a year. It’s very expensive, it’s got many problems,” Trump continued.

The House passed the Sunshine Protection Act in July, moving to officially do away with the notion of daylight savings within the 50 states. But Cotton’s staunch opposition to the bill—largely over the prospect of dark winter mornings—has stalled its progress in the Senate.

While addressing the matter on the Senate floor last year, Cotton warned that in some parts of Arkansas, sunrise would not occur until after 8 a.m. if they chose to do away with daylight savings, forcing children, commuters, farmers, and construction workers to begin their days in darkness.

“No one likes changing the clock, me included, but Congress has enacted permanent Daylight Savings Time multiple times before and repealed it each time once Americans experienced absurdly late sunrises in the winter,” Cotton wrote on X Saturday, responding to Trump’s remarks. “Arkansans don’t want their kids going to school in the pitch dark, and I’ll always put Arkansas first.”

Trump’s pressure campaign was not as well received by Cotton’s fellow Senate Republicans, however. In an interview with NBC News, Louisiana Senator John Kennedy said that Trump “can go from zero to a–hole in about three seconds.”

“Every now and then, there are disputes in Congress that have existential significance for the future of Western civilization. Daylight savings time is not one of them,” Kennedy told Kristen Welker on Sunday. “I don’t think he should have given out Tom’s cell phone number. I don’t think that’s going to help convince Tom.”

Former White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt—who resigned from her post in August to spend more time with family after birthing her second child—just got a new job at Fox News.

“Karoline’s firsthand experience in the White House and on the presidential campaign trail gives her a distinct understanding of today’s political landscape,” Fox News Media Chief Executive Suzanne Scott said in a statement.

In her own statement, Leavitt promised to bring “the unique perspective and candor that defined my tenure with the Trump administration.”

Leavitt joined the Trump administration in 2019, and in 2024 ran an unsuccessful campaign for Congress in New Hampshire before returning to serve as White House Press Secretary. She was the youngest press secretary ever at 28 years old, and has still not been replaced. She often made headlines for complete falsities, lying about Trump blocking $50 million worth of condoms to Gaza, blaming a deadly collision between a military helicopter and an American Airlines flight on DEI, calling the Epstein files a “Democratic hoax,” and she saying that wrongly deported Salvadoran national Kilmar Abrego Garcia was a “foreign terrorist” and “MS-13 gang member” who was “engaged in human trafficking.” All lies.

Trump’s “machine gun” will appear on across various shows and time blocks on the right-wing network, using her voice and institutional legitimacy to push what will likely be an unapologetically pro-Trump agenda.

In a leaked audio recording, Texas Attorney General and Republican Senate nominee Ken Paxton lamented that he isn’t in control of his own campaign. 

At a fundraiser in September, Paxton spoke candidly about his flailing campaign, according to the recording shared with Politico and published Monday.  

“I’ve never been in a race where I felt less control over the campaign and, like, what issues are going to matter because it’s all coming—you know—from D.C.,” he said. “I don’t control the message or what we’re doing.

“I don’t have ability to change anything,” Paxton continued. “So I have to live with whatever I’ve got. So it is a challenge.”

The audio was leaked by someone who does not support Paxton, and confirmed by another attendee. One attendee said that Paxton never specifically referred to Donald Trump’s team. Nick Maddux, Paxton’s campaign adviser, said that the candidate was “obviously” referring to the fact that campaigns don’t coordinate with super PACs. 

Trump has repeatedly pledged his desire to see Paxton elected but hesitated to commit any part of his $400 million MAGA Inc. war chest to help him win. Instead, Trump has focused on making the midterm elections a referendum on his own presidency. Last month, Trump held a fundraiser in Houston that was touted as a lifeline to Paxton’s campaign—but the money actually went to the Republican National Convention, according to The Wall Street Journal. 

Paxton has long struggled to match Democratic candidate James Talarico’s funding. According to their latest quarterly filings with the Federal Election Commission, Talarico’s campaign had raked in $31.6 million, while Paxton only raised $9.3 million. The latest New York Times/Sienna poll found that Paxton was six points behind Talarico. 

This is the second piece of audio leaked about Paxton. Last month, the attorney general was caught trashing Trump’s disastrous midterm convention.

The Trump administration is watching Brazil’s presidential election results closely.

Over the weekend, right-wing candidate Flávio Bolsonaro, a son of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and President Trump’s preferred candidate, advanced to a runoff with incumbent President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, a leftist.

The White House has done all it can to boost Bolsonaro and cement Trump’s influence over Latin America. Trump has backed conservative allies in Colombia as well as Argentina and kidnapped Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro. The day after Maduro was brought to the U.S., in January, the State Department posted a picture on social media with Trump and the slogan, “This is OUR hemisphere.”

In total, seven right-wing candidates have won presidential elections across Latin America in the last 18 months, with Trump publicly backing most of them.

“We’re doing very well in South America,” Trump said in September. “Lots of people that I got elected.”

Trump was a strong supporter of the elder Bolsonaro, and they share some odious similarities. Bolsonaro refused to accept losing Brazil’s 2022 elections to Lula, and his supporters stormed government buildings in response. Unlike in the U.S., Bolsonaro and his allies were arrested and put on trial for the coup attempt, with investigators uncovering a plot to kill Lula and his running mate.

Trump’s response was to threaten the country with exorbitant tariffs over the “witch hunt,” as he put it, in July 2025. Undeterred, Lula went ahead with Bolsonaro’s trial and the former president was convicted and sentenced to 27 years in prison. In May this year, Lula and Trump had a frosty meeting with no cameras at the White House. Then, as elections neared, Trump dispatched two State Department officials to investigate “electoral integrity,” only for Brazil to deny their visas and accuse them of interfering in the country’s elections.

Lula used Trump’s efforts in his reelection campaign, accusing Flávio Bolsonaro of being “Trump’s candidate,” and called out Trump at the United Nations General Assembly last month. It remains to be seen whether those efforts will help Lula to win the October 29 runoff.

Two recent polls show that the majority of Latino voters have all but abandoned President Trump—reaffirming a development that’s been brewing since he returned to office and began his draconian immigration crackdown.

The new NBC News/Telemundo poll has Latinos going for Democrats by a margin of 59 percent in the upcoming midterm elections, almost doubling their support from 2024. The new CBS News/YouGov poll tells a similar story, with 60 percent of Latino voters preferring Democratic House candidates. Overall, 69 percent of Latino voters disapprove of President Trump’s performance ahead of the midterms.

This comes two years after Trump won a groundbreaking 42 percent of them, sparking discourse about a new multicultural Republican coalition. That dream seems to be all but dead, as those same voters have responded extremely negatively to Trump’s handling of the economy, his lack of action on the affordability crisis, and his mass deportation campaign.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that these voters will automatically turn out for Democrats now—more Latinos (42 percent) still have a negative view of the party, as it has not fully taken advantage of two years of violent arrests, kidnappings, shootings, pepper balls, and killings.

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the October 5 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.

A new Fox News poll finds James Talarico up seven points over Ken Paxton in Texas. It’s such a shocker that it induced Fox figures to panic right on the air. But what’s striking about this poll is what it says about Trump and Republicans, and how Texas captures what’s happening with the MAGA movement as Trump sunsets. Also telling is how this comes as Republicans are moving around their Senate spending in ways that reveal what they think of their own plight at this very moment.

We’re talking about all of it with political theorist Alan Elrod, who had a great piece for Liberal Currents on Texas Republicans as representative of the Trump-era GOP. Alan, great to have you on.

Alan Elrod: Good to be back.

Sargent: So the new Fox poll finds Talarico up by seven points among registered voters in Texas, 53 to 46, and up two points among likely voters, 51 to 49. I think his lead is probably somewhere in the middle there. But critically, the Fox poll finds Trump’s approval at 44 percent to 55 percent disapproving.

He’s eleven points underwater in a state he carried by 14 points only two years ago. Alan, you have some experience with Texas personally. How surprising is that Fox finding?

Elrod: Yeah, it’s true, my wife is a Texan. She’s from Fort Worth. You know, I think the interesting thing about the finding is that it points at a number of the groups that are frustrated with the second Trump administration, right? Texas does have a lot of Latinos who are jilted—some of them who voted for Trump, some of them who didn’t, but a lot of whom are very frustrated on immigration.

It has a lot of conservative Christians, but there’s also a lot of moderate and progressive Christians in Texas who are angry with Trump for different reasons. And then there’s just the, I think, broader problem of the Texas GOP and some of its candidate selection issues that gloms onto Texas politics in general at the moment.

Sargent: Well, those non-MAGA Christians are going to loom large in this discussion, so let’s put a pin in that. Fox anchor Ainsley Earhardt was so shocked by these findings. Listen to this exchange between her and Fox contributor Clay Travis.

Ainsley Earhardt (voiceover): If you look at that Fox News poll, he’s ahead by seven points in the state of Texas. How is that possible?

Clay Travis (voiceover): Texans have to wake up. I think sometimes when you have seen Republicans win for generations, a lot of people out there just don’t think at all that Democrats are capable of winning in the state. Now, I watch a lot of football, I watch a lot of sports. Every single game that I am watching, I am seeing Republican ads dominating. I think that Republicans have held their proverbial, you know, cash until the last moment, and they now are delivering overwhelming amounts of dollars into the playing field.

Sargent: Alan, note how she says, how on earth can this be happening? And the answer she gets back is, don’t worry, Republican money will bail out Paxton. All that cash going to ads to reach the football demographic. Like, those are the people who should be there for Republicans, but really need to be re-energized behind Trump and today’s Texas GOP. I thought that was telling. What do you think?

Elrod: So I don’t want to pretend that I have no fear of big spending close to the election, but Travis is just avoiding the key problem, which is Paxton. The problem is Paxton. Paxton is a terrible candidate. He’s hated by a lot of people in his own party. I mean, 60 members of his own party voted to impeach him a few years ago. So we’re not talking about a guy that is beloved across the state.

And so, you know, when we look at this, I think one of the encouraging signs is, hey, actually, you can find candidates that are so bad, and on the other side you can find candidates that are so kind of perfectly built for the moment, that you can put those things together and get a potential big win in a state like Texas.

Now, we’re not there yet, right? Signs and polls don’t vote. But what we’re seeing is that candidates still do matter sometimes, and we’re getting good indicators that it is important that the Democrats nominated Talarico, and it is relevant that the Republicans nominated Paxton.

Sargent: Yeah, I mean, this race is on a knife’s edge, let’s face it. And the money is going to be a big deal. They’re going to put a lot of money in there. But let’s talk about Paxton and the Republican Party. He’s sort of like the perfect exemplar of the Texas GOP. And in order to set up the rest of this discussion, let’s talk about what the Texas Republican Party actually is.

You had a great piece on this stressing how the Texas GOP’s white male Christian supremacy and naked ethnonationalism are the future of the Republican Party now that Trump has reshaped it. Talk about that.

Elrod: The argument in this piece is that that’s something that we should both, I think, see a bit of a silver lining in, and also be very concerned about, because the politics are very nasty. They’re corrupt, they’re hateful. They’re very, very nasty.

On the other hand, I think what you’re seeing with the Talarico race is some of the consequences of those politics, right? Ken Paxton is a criminal. He has been under investigation for securities fraud. He is a philanderer who then turns around and tries to castigate Democrats on moral issues. He has waged a really aggressive campaign against trans kids in Texas, going so far as to try to level sort of legal intimidation at places like Seattle Children’s Hospital in Washington, because he’s so determined to try to prevent any form of care for trans kids.

Abbott is running for an unprecedented fourth term. There’s been all the kind of stuff at the border with putting razor wire in the Rio Grande. I mean, these are people who I think have lost the plot.

And it is an example of both the dangers, I think, of our politics. We are headed in a direction where what comes after Trump, I think, is going to be a lot like what we’re seeing in Texas. It’s going to be even nastier, it’s going to be even more corrupt, it’s going to be even more hateful. At the same time, the window is there. You can lose people by behaving this way. And Texas GOP is showing that.

Sargent: And I want to pick up your point about how this kind of opens up a window for making a case to some of these voters that they should peel away from the Republican Party. And the Fox polling actually gets at this. Trump’s approval is underwater in Texas with working-class voters, who are supposedly his base, and even deeper underwater with Latinos, at 38 percent approval to 61 percent disapproval.

Alan, in the mythic version of Trumpism, which was supposed to be a multiracial working-class movement, Latinos were going to be permanently brought into the Trump coalition because they’re culturally conservative and they see the economy as being lifted by Trump.

But of course, what happened in the real world is what the Texas Republican Party has become. The ethnonationalism and the violence helped drive these people away. Doesn’t that sort of get at your thesis a little bit, those findings?

Elrod: Absolutely. I mean, I think what we’re seeing here is, from the racial hatred to the stupidity of things like the tariffs, if you hurt people enough, they will potentially eventually abandon you. You cannot just keep hurting them over and over again and expect loyalty. That does eventually matter.

Now, the people who will stick it out are the people who might feel like they’re getting something in return for that, or the people who feel like they’re the group that gets to hurt everybody else. But that’s a much smaller pool of people than everybody else in Texas. And Texas is a big state.

People don’t, I think, remember this all the time. They know it’s big physically. But Houston is one of the most diverse cities in the country. Texas itself is wildly economically, religiously, culturally diverse. So if you try to wage war on all these different subsets of America, that’s going to be felt in a place like Texas.

Sargent: Well, it gets even more striking with this data. In the Fox poll, Trump is even underwater with Republicans who don’t identify as MAGA—non-MAGA Republicans—at 46 percent approval to 53 percent disapproval. Those are Republicans, Alan. And only 50 percent of that demographic, non-MAGA Republicans, are extremely interested in the election, and that’s lower than other groups—lower than Texas voters overall, lower than Democrats, et cetera, et cetera.

So I think there you see the dynamic that you were talking about, in which kind of non-MAGA Christians in Texas just aren’t willing to go along with what this movement has really become. I mean, they’re not interested in voting for who Trump is telling them to vote for.

Elrod: Absolutely. I mean, there are MAGA Christians all over America who simply come to whatever position or justification they have, even biblical ones, from the starting point of, I do what Trump says, I vote how Trump wants, I say what Trump says. But there are actually a lot of other Christians who are frustrated. And I see this in my own communities here in Arkansas, which is next door. It’s not like you can treat American Christians as this one giant lump, and plenty of them are quite worn out.

It is hard to get people to buy into constant displays of public cruelty, right? That is very different. When you’re trying to nibble around the edges on this stuff, and when you’re sort of being, I think, opaque about the really vicious parts of your policy, and you’re using more maybe sort of sleight-of-hand talking points about how we need border security, you might get people to go along.

But when they’re turning on the TV and seeing that people are being murdered by our own government, by DHS, and then that the Trump administration basically seems to take pleasure in that, that is going to turn off a big middle of Christians who may have otherwise not been activated. Now, we may have wished they would have been activated before this, but that is where we are now.

Sargent: Right. I think you’re putting your finger on something important here about MAGA, right? Which is that the violent ethnic purges, the violent ethnic cleansing, is a feature of the movement. It absolutely saturates official government propaganda about immigrants. It saturates ICE’s recruitment.

ICE’s recruitment is literally, you get to participate in a violent purge. That’s the selling point. If you become an ICE agent, you get to participate in this kind of violent cleansing of America. And it’s like, you will be part of something bigger and higher. That’s what MAGA is. And there just does seem to be a segment of conservative Christians that isn’t there. Is that overly optimistic, though?

Elrod: Well, I think my message in my piece is, you know, I said it’s a warning and it’s a silver lining, but the warning isn’t just to the country as a whole. It’s also, I think, to these sort of self-styled non-MAGA Republicans, which is to say, guys, this isn’t your party anymore. What does it even mean to say you’re a non-MAGA Republican? That’s not a thing anymore. You need to embrace, I think, supporting Democrats for the next few cycles at least. And I think we should just be comfortable trying to say that.

Sargent: I think there’s another development which actually underscores your point quite well, which is that the Senate Leadership Fund, which is a major GOP super PAC, just pulled its spending out of North Carolina, essentially ceding that Senate race, where Democrat Roy Cooper seems to be up. SLF is now putting more money into the Kansas Senate race, of all things. And I think this is really sort of indicative of the phenomenon that you’re identifying.

Adam Hamilton, the Democratic candidate in Kansas, is a pastor. He’s religious. He speaks about his faith. He’s written books about his faith. And so all of a sudden, there does seem to be an opening being created by MAGA extremism to try and appeal to some of these middle-of-the-road religious voters. That’s happening in Texas as well. James Talarico talks about his faith openly. Can you talk about these dynamics?

Elrod: I think at the core of this is, people want to connect with candidates that are coming from a place that they can relate to. And the reality is that a lot of Americans, whether it’s Protestant Christianity or some other affiliation, have some form of faith. And I think people hear candidates talking openly about their faith, and what they hear is, I know people like this. This person is someone I can relate to. This person is being honest, I think, about their own limitations.

And I don’t want to suggest that you can’t do those things and be an atheist candidate. You can. But I think when Democrats spent a little while running away from talking about faith, what they actually did was just make themselves seem sort of unrelatable, and maybe judgmental in a way that I don’t think they maybe meant to. I think some of it was rooted in, we don’t want to seem exclusionary by talking about things like Christian faith.

When in reality, I think what people are drawn to is not sort of one-to-one theological agreement, but a sense of honest and humble striving. Because that’s what a lot of people think about when they think about their faith. They think about their own imperfections. They think about the things in their life that their faith has gotten them through. They think about the things in their life that they’re grateful for.

And I think that’s what people really need to hear from candidates—candidates who feel like they are speaking to the totality of their life experience. And if it feels like you’re hiding some part of yourself away, or you’re unwilling to talk about some frankly huge chunk of what life is about to a lot of Americans because you’re worried about stepping on it the wrong way, then what you’re doing is losing out on a chance to connect with people.

Sargent: Yeah, and I think there’s another dimension to this as well, which is that when James Talarico talks about his faith, or Adam Hamilton does, what they’re essentially saying is that there’s a place in this party for other people of faith.

And that’s an important message if you’re going to win in a place like Texas or a place like Kansas, right? I mean, these are red states. You are not going to win unless you’re able to win over a segment of Republican voters.

And I just wonder whether what we’re seeing here is the kind of development of a new kind of politics for Democrats, a politics that’s very well suited to the kind of moral collapse and moral depravity of what I keep calling Late-Stage Trumpism. Does that seem like it could be happening?

Elrod: Yes. And to that point, I would say people need to be watching very closely Andy Beshear. Andy Beshear from Kentucky is almost certainly going to be a candidate in the 2028 cycle. And his messaging around this stuff is exactly right.

What I love about Andy is that after he vetoed those anti-trans bills in Kentucky, his argument was faith-centric. He said, all children are children of God, and I don’t believe in bullying kids. And then he followed it up very, I think, effectively by saying, also, I don’t think government should be regulating local sports. That’s for communities and schools and families to decide.

But that key thing of, we are all children of God, and I don’t believe in demeaning or making any person who is a child of God feel attacked—that’s incredibly powerful. I think Beshear, even maybe more than Talarico, has just got it figured out on this stuff. And I think he’s going to be a very, very compelling person to watch.

Sargent: I’m glad you raised that message from Beshear, because I think what we’re now seeing is Democrats kind of returning a little bit to this idea of Christianity as equality before God. When James Talarico says that his faith requires him to treat the stranger well, or the neighbor well, he’s basically making a variation on the point that Beshear made about trans people.

Now, I know that people will get mad at this, and yes, I wish James Talarico would figure out where he stands on trans issues a little better. But generally speaking, he’s been very good on immigration. And I do think the through line to all this is this return to a kind of Christian message of equality before God.

Is that what we’re seeing here? And is there kind of an opening here for a broader values-based Democratic coalition that the kind of corruption and depravity and collapse of late-stage Trumpism has created?

Elrod: Absolutely. And I would say this. Christianity is just deeply interwoven into liberalism. And by that I mean, like, small-l liberal—it doesn’t have to be progressive or left—but the universal ideas of Christianity, especially things that come later, the Protestant Reformation, the idea of the priesthood of all believers, this idea that we have equality before God, that we are individuals with equal worth and merit and dignity striving together.

I mean, these are fundamentally Christian ideas that are also really, really rooted in the liberal revolution that comes in the early modern period and onward.

In fact, I think we should embrace the idea that Christianity does not have to be—and this is something that a lot of people on the left side of center make the mistake of doing, which is assuming Christianity has to be a kind of reactionary, regressive thing—when in fact it can be a powerfully liberating and leveling and unifying idea. And it comes in history in many cases, in many points in history, as a liberating and universalizing force and not an oppressive one.

Sargent: Where do you see the Republican Party going? Does the future essentially hold a Texified, if you will, Republican Party? And is that going to be something that’s, you know, a little bit more of a rump, potentially? Or are they going to be able to figure out how to get past Trump and Trumpism and kind of reconstitute something more like a previously existing Republican Party?

Elrod: No, the near-to-medium-term future is a Texified party. And as far as it being a rump, it’s up to us to make it a rump. It won’t be a rump unless we fight to make it one.

And it’s only once we do that, once the party is essentially razed to the ground through electoral defeat after electoral defeat, that there’s a chance you have something different and better on the other side.

Sargent: And James Talarico’s theory of the case, which is that you need this very broad coalition in order to defeat Republicans in Texas, is kind of a way of saying that we have to turn the Republican Party into a MAGA rump. That’s what he’s saying, isn’t he?

Elrod: Absolutely. And this is why I go back to some of the lessons I took from Hungary earlier in the year, with, you know, Péter Magyar basically said the same thing. You have to build a massive coalition against this stuff, and you have to deliver overwhelming defeat. And then you can start to build a program of reconstruction on top of it.

Sargent: Well, I’ll tell you, Alan, big things could be happening now. I guess we’ll know more in around a month. But man, Talarico and these other candidates really have to close this thing out, don’t they?

Elrod: They do. They do. Got to get across the finish line.

Sargent: Folks, make sure to check out Alan Elrod’s piece. It’s called “The Future of the Republican Party After Trump Is in Texas.” And it sure looks that way. Alan, a pleasure to talk to you. Thank you so much.

Elrod: Thanks for having me.

Next week the Supreme Court will return from its summer recess to hear a new term of cases. While the court is already slated to make rulings with far-reaching consequences, the most important decisions looming this term may not even be on its radar yet.

Earlier this week, the justices announced that they would take up what may be the most important case of the term. The Trump administration had asked the court to hear Rhoney v. Barbosa da Cunha to review lower court rulings against its mandatory-detention policy for undocumented immigrants. How the Supreme Court decides the case could have vast implications for the Trump administration’s ability to carry out mass deportations.

At issue in Rhoney is whether the federal government can indefinitely hold undocumented immigrants in custody while their deportation proceedings take place. Since at least the 1980s, immigration courts have routinely allowed them to post bond while they await the outcome of their cases. The Trump administration changed tack in July 2025, arguing that it could instead hold undocumented immigrants without bond.

To support this position, the administration cited a 1996 law known as the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act. Everyone calls it IIRIRA instead. Under IIRIRA, the Justice Department has claimed that one provision in the law requires federal officials to detain undocumented immigrants who illegally crossed the U.S. border. That provision says that “an alien who is an applicant for admission” into the United States “shall be detained” if “the examining immigration officer determines that an alien seeking admission is not clearly and beyond a doubt entitled to be admitted.”

To that end, the Justice Department has invoked the IIRIRA provision to justify holding any undocumented immigrant in custody without bond hearings until their deportation hearings are concluded—or, importantly, until they “voluntarily” agree to leave the country. Since the Trump administration has detained tens of thousands of immigrants in squalid conditions over the past 18 months, an unknown number of those held have agreed to forgo deportation hearings to leave the country.

Holding people indefinitely without due process has been illegal in the Anglo-American legal tradition since Magna Carta in 1215. More to the point, the administration’s policy appears to be based on a misreading of federal law. While the provision they cite does require mandatory detention in a narrow set of circumstances, it only applies to people who are an “applicant for admission”—meaning that they presented themselves at the U.S. border for entry.

Ricardo Barbosa da Cunha, the plaintiff in this case, did no such thing. He crossed the U.S. border in 2004 after traveling from his native Brazil through Mexico. He and his family have lived in Massachusetts for the last two decades, where he owns a small construction business. Barbosa da Cunha has had a legal work authorization since 2016 and has no criminal record. Federal immigration agents arrested him on the way to work last year and have kept him in custody since then.

In April, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals sided with him and rejected the administration’s interpretation of IIRIRA. The section it cited does not apply to undocumented immigrants “who were not apprehended while entering the country or shortly thereafter,” Judge Joseph Bianco wrote for the court. Instead, immigrants like Barbosa da Cunha fall under a different section of IIRIRA that does allow for bond hearings before an immigration judge.

Lower courts are often divided and splintered about how to read certain federal statutes. This case is not one of them. The New York Times reported earlier this week that more than 500 federal district-court judges have rejected the Trump administration’s mandatory-detention policy as unlawful, as have nine of the 11 federal circuit courts of appeal. The Trump administration is hoping that it can garner at least five votes from the justices to outweigh them.

The Supreme Court will also hear another major immigration case later this term on the Trump administration’s aggressive approach to third-country removals. Most deported immigrants have typically been returned to their home countries, aside from recent arrivals at the U.S. border in Mexico who are returned there. In their zeal to remove as many immigrants as possible from the United States, Trump administration officials have shipped thousands of them to countries in Africa that agree to take them in exchange for favorable diplomatic and financial treatment.

Multiple lower courts have held that immigrants must be able to challenge third-country removals, which the Trump administration has vociferously rejected. Some deportation flights have stranded immigrants in countries where they do not speak the language or—as in the case of South Sudan—where they are at risk for torture and abuse by local officials. The Supreme Court declined to forbid the Trump administration from carrying out these types of deportations while it considers the case—a grim sign for the immigrants’ hopes that the justices will ultimately side with them.

The first case of the term next week will also be one of the term’s most important decisions: Suncor Energy v. County Commissioners of Boulder County. At issue is whether local communities that are harmed by climate change and its effects can seek damages in state courts from oil and gas companies that contributed to higher carbon emissions. The town of Boulder, Colorado, argued that its claims fit well within traditional causes of action for harms caused by companies.

Fossil fuel companies have urged the Supreme Court to reject these claims, arguing that federal law preempts the town’s lawsuit and that state courts cannot hear them at all. The high court may also decide to punt the case on procedural grounds for now. Though the court is hardly averse to ruling in favor of the fossil fuel industry, Boulder received some good news on Monday when Justice Samuel Alito announced that he would recuse himself from the case after resisting past suggestions to do so.

In Viramontes v. Cook County, the justices will examine whether state assault-weapons bans can survive under the court’s new Second Amendment precedents. The plaintiffs in the case are challenging bans on AR-15s and similar rifles in both Illinois’s most populous county and the state of Connecticut. (The justices consolidated them on appeal.) Almost a dozen states have similar laws on the books. The Supreme Court has not heard a Second Amendment challenge to laws banning a specific type of firearm this century.

More than a few plaintiffs asked it to do so after proclaiming an individual right to bear arms in 2008, but the court long declined to hear such cases. In 2022, the court’s conservative majority made it substantially easier for gun owners to challenge gun laws when it laid out a new, stricter Second Amendment test that requires states to find a “historical analogue” for laws to survive judicial scrutiny. How that test comports with earlier Supreme Court decisions that allow states to restrict “dangerous” and “unusual” firearms will be the central question for the court.

On the constitutional front, one of the most curious upcoming cases this term is Jouppi v. Arizona. The case centers on an Alaska pilot who flew into a dry town with a passenger who had a six pack of beer in their possession. In response, state officials charged the pilot with violating state liquor laws—which are aimed at reducing alcoholism and domestic violence in the state’s isolated interior—and seized his airplane, which is valued at more than $77,000.

Jouppi, the pilot, argued that confiscating his Cessna violated the Eighth Amendment, which forbids levying excessive fines as punishment for a crime. He argued that seizing an airplane for carrying a few cans of beer met that threshold. The Supreme Court has not elucidated the scope of the excessive fines clause or what counts as “excessive” in this context. How the court decides the case could affect criminal forfeiture laws across the country.

The Supreme Court will also tackle what we can call the “known unknowns.” These are cases that the court is likely to hear but hasn’t yet intervened in. One area where the court may feel compelled to weigh in is on legal challenges to prediction markets and sports betting. A Supreme Court ruling in 2018 struck down a federal ban on sports betting, allowing dozens of states to pass laws to legalize and regulate sportsbooks within their borders. Last year, prediction-market companies like Kalshi and Polymarket also began allowing users to place wagers on the outcomes of professional and amateur sports at all levels in all 50 states, even those that have not legalized sports betting.

The prediction-market industry argued that it wasn’t really offering “bets.” Instead, it claims to be offering “swaps,” where customers could buy contracts on its exchanges that would pay out depending on the outcome of an event. (As courts have noted, its advertising often said otherwise.) The industry also argued that it was regulated by federal law through the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, preempting state enforcement with an extremely favorable regulatory regime from the Trump administration.

State regulators in Nevada and state attorneys general in California, New York, and other states sued Kalshi and Polymarket nonetheless for operating illegal sports-betting websites in their states. The states won a major victory over the summer when the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that prediction-market swaps on sports are bets and that federal law on derivatives exchanges hadn’t displace the states’ traditional authority to regulate gambling. At least one other circuit reached the opposite conclusion, making it likely that the justices will need to resolve the split in the coming term.

Another obvious area where the court will likely feel compelled to involve itself is on President Donald Trump’s extraordinary claims of executive power. During the summer recess, for example, the Supreme Court forbade a lower court from blocking construction of an illegal ballroom on the ruins of the White House’s East Wing, over the dissents of Chief Justice John Roberts and the court’s three liberal justices. Litigation over the fate of the Kennedy Center, which Trump has demanded to be illegally renamed in his honor or face financial ruin, or a heavily armed 250-foot arch outside Arlington National Cemetery, could also reach the court this term.

Since it is an election year, among the most important cases will be election-related ones. The court routinely hears a small number of cases involving ongoing elections on the shadow docket every two years, usually involving last-minute changes or new restrictions. Since last year, the justices have already considered a spate of cases involving the partisan-gerrymandering wars, which it largely let play out without further intervention. Some of those gerrymanders came about after the court effectively legalized racial gerrymandering last term.

This time, the concern is about what Trump could do after the election if he and Republicans suffer major defeats and lose control of Congress, as polls suggest they likely will. The Justice Department’s seizure of ballots in Georgia earlier this year stoked fears among voting rights groups that the administration will interfere in the certification of state results under the false guise of investigating voter fraud. The Supreme Court rejected Trump’s legal bids to overturn the 2020 election six years ago. How they respond to any illegal and extralegal attempts to corrupt the 2026 midterms could be the most important test that the justices face this term.

Well, we’ve entered that time-honored phase of the campaign that we’ve come to know so well: When Republicans turn to their closing argument about the issue that is keeping Americans up at night. Gas prices? The cost of a pound of ground beef? The war in Iran? The cost of health care, or the closing of so many rural hospitals? No, no, no, and no. The issue, of course, is transgender athletes.

“David Jolly is somebody who thinks it’s still okay for boys to be in girls’ sports,” said Byron Donalds, the GOP gubernatorial nominee in Florida of his Democratic opponent. “Just pure insanity.” Ads of that nature are running against Sherrod Brown in Ohio, James Talarico in Texas, and many other places. Talarico has walked back his previously supportive stance, and other prominent Democrats in purple or red states have taken similar positions. But that won’t stop the deluge. You’d think—and of course, this is exactly what Republicans want people to think—that Brown and Talarico spend two-thirds of their waking hours scheming to figure out ways to get trans athletes into Buckeye and Longhorn uniforms.

It’s pathetic. Here we have a president and a political party that have done the following. They have seen prices rise dramatically on their watch and have not only had no response to it, but at least in the case of the president, have repeatedly denied that this is even happening; they have sanctioned and defended the detention (in harsh conditions) of innocent people and the shooting of American citizens by a lavishly funded and poorly trained paramilitary force whose members are recruited through appeals to racial extremism; they have started a calamitous war because the president created the conditions that made war, in his mind, necessary (that is, by rescinding the JCPOA); they have exploded the deficit and the debt; they have engaged in (the president) or turned a blind eye to (the rest of the party) corruption on a Ferdinand-Marcos type of scale. In these and numerous other ways, Donald Trump and the Republican Party have made daily life harder for regular Americans while simultaneously degrading the nation’s character and soul. And they’re going to finish this campaign by trying to terrify people about a thing that hardly exists.

That’s a point that can’t be made often enough. In December 2024, NCAA President Charlie Baker was testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee. “How many athletes are there in the U.S. in NCAA schools?”, Democratic Senator Dick Durbin asked. About 510,000, said Baker. And how many of these athletes are openly transgender, Durbin wondered. The answer came back: “Less than 10.”

And what about the Olympics? In this century, which in this case is likely the same thing as saying “ever,” exactly two transgender athletes have competed in the Olympics, along with about six nonbinary athletes, out of something on the order of 13,000 Olympians every four years (the International Olympics Committee has banned trans women from competing in women’s categories starting in 2028; you can agree or disagree with this decision, but whatever one’s view, the fact is that it means that the future numbers will be zero).

Finally, firm numbers on high-school participation don’t seem to exist. It stands to reason that it could be a bit higher, because a lot more athletes make high school teams than win a collegiate scholarship or a spot on an Olympic team, but it’s hard to think of a good reason why it would be that much higher.

The argument that there are very few trans athletes in the country is one Democrats make a lot. But there’s a second argument that I don’t hear them make very often at all, which I think would be extremely effective, maybe even to the point of ending the debate in most voters’ minds: Individual sports all have governing bodies, and it’s not as if those bodies haven’t been thinking about this issue. They have, and they, or most of them, have drawn up policies. So why don’t we just leave it to them?

It’s a more important point that it may seem. Indeed, I would argue that allowing Republicans to talk generally and vaguely about “sports”—a category that includes everything from football to curling to underwater hockey (yep, it’s a thing), as well as everything from the heights of organized professional sports to local rec leagues—amounts to allowing the demagogues to set the terms of debate.

There are all kinds of sports being played out there, and what’s right for one sport might not be right for another. From the web site transathlete.com, here’s a sampling of policies:

•USA Badminton: admits trans women “on a case-by-case basis.”

•USA Biathlon: states that all athletes “may participate in the gender category that best aligns with their gender identity without restrictions, medical intervention, or proof of gender.”

•USA Cycling: adopted a policy last year making the “female” category “open only to those assigned female at birth on their original birth certificate.”

•US Figure Skating: essentially the same as USA Cycling.

•US Golf Association: Promulgated a policy in 2024 allowing trans athletes to participate “if they meet requirements.” Golf!

•USA Roller Sports: a policy that “follows the 2015 IOC Consensus Statement and requires testosterone levels below 10nmol/L for trans women” (that’s a low testosterone level for young men).

•USA Swimming: adopted a policy in 2025 to “limit the female category to those assigned female at birth.”

Several governing bodies have not promulgated a policy, meaning presumably that it’s not a burning issue in their realms: canoe and kayak, equestrian, luge, pentathlon, skateboarding, softball, table tennis, a few others.

This is important information for people to have. Again, one may agree or disagree with these policies; that’s not the point. The point here is what Democrats should tell voters. And I think they can flip the tables on Republicans by bringing these facts to light, because doing so will make voters see that thousands of responsible adults who have devoted their lives to getting young people to play sports have given this matter a lot of thought, and maybe it’s true that politicians don’t need to meddle in this. Facts don’t usually defeat demagoguery, but in this case, they would help a lot.

So, Democrats should say that. But the larger questions here for Democrats concern tone and context. And this is where Democrats have to understand a crucial point: We aren’t still in the 1990s, when Democrats could use the left as a punching bag on such issues. That isn’t the reality anymore, and doing that would be a political, and moral, disaster.

I think everyone, save maybe a small number of ideological activists, understands that this is a tough issue for Democrats, especially in places like Ohio and Texas. Earlier this year, The New Republic commissioned a poll of around 2,400 rank-and-file Democrats on a broad range of issues. Bear in mind here that this was a very liberal group—when given five ideologies by which to label themselves, about a third said they were “liberal” and another third “progressive,” which was clearly defined to respondents as being a little left of liberal.

We asked folks about their level of support for three aspects of trans rights: protecting trans people from discrimination; allowing trans youth access to gender-affirming care; and allowing trans youth to compete in sports according to their chosen gender identity. The answers: protection from discrimination was supported by 80 percent of respondents; gender-affirming care, by 62 percent; playing sports, just 39 percent. And remember—these were loyal Democrats only. Polls of Americans in general tend to show about three-quarters of the population opposed to allowing trans women to compete in women’s sports.

Those kinds of numbers make it tough for Democrats in purple or red states to take a pure pro-trans athlete line. Again, I think most people understand that. But there are defensible ways to finesse the issue and indefensible ways.

Under “Indefensible,” see Gavin Newsom. The California Governor decided it would be dandy to announce his anti-trans athlete position on his podcast with Charlie Kirk as his guest. Kirk, of course, expressed his hatred of gay and trans people on numerous occasions. It was the debut episode of the podcast, in March 2025. Someone aching to be the Democratic nominee for president telling someone like Kirk that “I agree with you completely” on that issue—it’s the textbook definition of throwing a small and powerless constituency under the bus and pandering to a notoriously homophobic right-winger.

A generation or two ago, what Newsom did would have been very widely praised by pundits for “standing up” to the left-wing loonies. There was some of that when he did it, but not very much. There was far more criticism. That’s what’s different today from, say, 1992, when Bill Clinton created his famous “Sister Souljah moment.” Centrists who pine for Democrats to do a Sister Souljah on trans people today fail to understand how things have changed. In a world where verdicts on such moves are decided not by David Broder and Tim Russert but by TikTokkers and podcasters and YouTube influencers, any attempt at such a moment is guaranteed to backfire and offend liberal base voters. It’s also, you know, the wrong thing to do from a moral and ethical standpoint.

More broadly—and this is the needed context I referred to above—Democrats need to keep in mind that trans people are under assault in this country from the right wing. In many states, trans people—not children, but grown adults, who should be able to live their lives without the state threatening their political and civil rights—live in fear of everyday situations, or circumstances like having to go to the hospital. Calls to LBGTQ hotlines have spiked. Forty-three states have passed 63 bills this year alone impinging on the rights of transgender people. In one poll, nearly half of trans respondents said they had moved or wanted to move to a more hospitable place.

If Republicans are going to bang on about trans athletes, then part of the Democratic response must be to broaden the conversation and remind Americans of this appalling dehumanization campaign. Your average American may not be willing to fight and die for his trans brothers and sisters, but I doubt he wants people to be persecuted in the United States of America. Polls tend to show that 70 or 80 (or more) percent of Americans think trans people deserve the same rights as everyone else.

So, to sum up, the Democratic response on the trans athlete question should consist of three parts:

1. Look, all these sports have governing bodies, and those bodies have all studied this. What works for fencing might not work for track and field. So why don’t we just leave it to the people who ponder these matters for a living, and keep the politicians out of it?

2. The president of the NCAA said there were fewer than 10 trans athletes out of literally more than half a million athletes at America’s colleges and universities, so why is my opponent spending so much time talking about this and not gas prices and the war?

3. Finally, if my opponent wants to talk so much about transgender people, let’s talk about the way trans people, kids and adults, are being persecuted in red states and living in fear, and the fact that trans Americans who are willing and eager to wear this nation’s uniform and even die for their country if asked are being denied the right to do so.

Those three points defend a progressive political position without throwing anybody under any bus or bowing to right-wing framing or pandering to some presumed lowest-common-denominator thinking. They also, I wager, would sound like common sense to your average person.

It’s worth pointing out just how much the landscape has changed since the 2024 election bred fear that Trump’s “they/them” political ads hurt Kamala Harris’s chances. Need proof? Here is Lanae Erickson, the senior vice president for social policy for none other than Third Way, talking about trans issues in a September piece at Assigned Media, a web site that tracks trans issues:
<blockquote>“Going after healthcare for adults, kicking people out of the military, taking people’s driver’s licenses away, they can’t pick up their kids at school – these are well beyond the pale for most American voters. We’ve got an HHS secretary right now who believes the only appropriate healthcare for transgender people is conversion therapy. That’s crazy.” If Third Way’s point person on this issue isn’t afraid to say the right thing, no one in the Democratic coalition has any excuse.

I realize that Democrats still have to answer the basic “do you support trans females participating in girls’ sports?” with a simple yes or a no. Some, like Talarico and others, will feel they have to say no. But I think if they say it in the context of the kind of rhetoric I suggest, most activists will grant them some leeway. Activists worry that yielding on the athletes question will inevitably lead to giving way on other issues, which is certainly a fair concern. But making a broader defense of the rights of transgender people—and actually meaning it—can allay that concern.

And most regular voters will think what they said is fine, and they can pivot back to the issues people actually care about. And if the Democrats can fight off the relentless and vile Republican attacks on this issue, that leaves the Republicans with nothing. Which is precisely what they offer the country.

Four years after the Supreme Court overturned the federal right to an abortion with the Dobbs decision, access to the procedure remains a critical matter for voters across the country. Abortion rights advocates are hoping that abortion-related ballot measures in four states will inspire voters to turn out in the crucial midterm elections—and support candidates in favor of protecting abortion access.

The four states considering such ballot measures are Idaho, Missouri, Nevada, and Virginia. The initiatives in Nevada and Virginia would not change existing law but would amend the constitution to enshrine abortion protections. The Idaho ballot measure would reverse the state’s strict abortion ban. Meanwhile, the Missouri initiative is attempting to undo protections approved by voters as a constitutional amendment in 2024.

Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, 17 states have put forth abortion-related ballot measures. In 2022 and 2023, every state that voted on these measures protected access to abortion. Voters in seven out of the 10 states considering abortion-related ballot measures in 2024 supported protecting abortion rights. But even the failure of ballot measures did not necessarily translate to lack of support: In Florida, an initiative to protect abortion rights received 57 percent of the vote, which did not clear the state’s 60 percent threshold for adding a state constitutional amendment.

“We’ve seen time and time again in states across the country that voters do turn out en masse to support abortion rights ballot measures. They have shown us that when they have a chance to change their state laws and support abortion access, they will take it,” said Sarah Standiford, national campaigns director at the Planned Parenthood Action Fund.

Control of Congress is up for grabs in this year’s elections. Democrats are favored to take the House of Representatives and have a shot at winning the Senate, as well. (The latest analysis from the Cook Political Report says that Democrats retaking the lower chamber is a “done deal” and assesses the chance of seizing the upper chamber as “very realistic.”) But the downballot contests are key where reproductive rights are concerned. State legislatures and gubernatorial races are perhaps even more crucial to ensuring abortion access. Since the Dobbs decision kicked the question of abortion rights to states, they have become the primary battlegrounds on the issue. Abortion rights advocates believe that ballot measures may help juice turnout in these states, but the challenge is ensuring that voters also back their preferred candidates.

“The ballot measures are a tremendous tool in our arsenal here, in order to protect and expand access, but it’s imperative that people are also voting their values up and down the ballot, and and voting to elect people to state office that are going to carry out and enforce the will of the voters by implementing these amendments in the appropriate way,” said Ryan Stitzlein, vice president of political and government relations at Reproductive Freedom for All, an abortion rights organization that launched a $23.5 million voter mobilization campaign earlier this year.

Support for abortion does not necessarily translate to support for Democratic candidates. Of the seven states that approved ballot measures supporting abortion rights, four supported Trump in the 2024 election. Moreover, in Montana and Missouri, politicians who oppose abortion rights were elected governor.

A recent paper by scholars at the University of Richmond and Texas Christian University found that abortion ballot measures aided Democrats in 2022—but two years later, they benefited Republican candidates. The researchers concluded that the spillover effects benefiting Republicans were a result of moderate voters who supported expanding abortion access while also voting for GOP candidates.

“In 2024, moderate voters who would have otherwise voted for Democratic candidates to protect abortion rights instead voted to protect abortion rights on the ballot measure while also voting for Republican candidates to align with their other policy preferences,” the report authors wrote.

Still, voters might now appreciate the stakes of electing candidates who support abortion access. A 2025 poll by the public opinion firm PerryUndem found that 46 percent of voters said they would be more likely to vote for a candidate who supports abortion rights, including 45 percent of independent voters. (Forty-one percent of independent voters said it would not affect their vote at all.) Another 2025 survey from Navigator Research found that majorities of voters reported they probably or definitely could not support candidates who are in favor of banning or restricting access to abortion and contraceptives.

Linking politicians to their positions on abortion is a critical challenge for Nevadans campaigning to oust current Republican Governor Joe Lombardo from office. Although Lombardo signed abortion protections into law in 2023, critics point to his personal opposition to abortion and unwillingness to say whether he supports the amendment as proof that he cannot be trusted to protect access. Nevadans for Reproductive Freedom recently launched a $1 million digital ad campaign in support of the amendment, which also highlights Lombardo’s previous comments opposing abortion. Separately, Planned Parenthood Votes is also investing $1.2 million in ads slamming Lombardo.

Krystal Ortiz, campaign manager for Question 6 at Nevadans for Reproductive Freedom, expects that “yes” votes for the ballot initiative will likely outperform Democratic candidates, but that’s because it’s an issue that Nevadans overwhelmingly support. In accordance with Nevada law, voters must approve a citizen-initiated ballot initiative twice before it can be added to the state constitution. The measure enshrining abortion protections was passed with 63 percent of the vote in 2024, and is now on the ballot again.

Ortiz is focused on building on the work advocates did in 2026—they don’t need to get on the ballot this time, but they do need to remind voters what’s at stake, she said.

“One of the differences between 2026 and 2024 is that this year, we have even more proof that our rights are under attack,” Ortiz said, pointing to abortion bans in other states, as well as efforts by the Trump administration and GOP state attorneys general to limit access to the abortion medication mifepristone. “We’re reminding voters that we have been seeing these kinds of attacks all across the country, and that’s why we need this.”

Abortion rights advocates are also hopeful about the prospects of initiatives in Idaho and Missouri, which are both deeply Republican, even as the road to passage is bumpy. In Idaho, which has one of the strictest abortion bans in the nation, the GOP governor and attorney general succeeded in changing the language of the ballot measure to note that current law “preserves the life of preborn children by prohibiting abortion” with few exceptions. Because passage of the ballot initiative would mean establishment of statutory law and not a constitutional amendment, this measure could be repealed by the state’s conservative legislature even if it succeeds.

In Missouri, Republicans are attempting to sway voter sentiment by including language that would constitutionally ban gender transition care for minors—even though such surgeries and issuing new puberty blocker prescriptions have been illegal in the state since 2023.

Supporters of the amendment are highlighting the gender transition care aspect in their campaigning, and Stitzlein said that abortion rights advocates needed to convince voters that this measure is primarily an abortion ban.

“They’re not saying the word ‘abortion’ in all their paid media. They know that it’s because if they were honest about their intentions here, they would lose,” said Stitzlein. The amendment also shares the same name as the one that enshrined abortion rights two years ago: Where supporters needed to vote “yes” on Amendment 3 two years ago to protect access, they must vote “no” on Amendment 3 to do the same this year. The 2024 measure ensured the right to an abortion through fetal viability.

Even with the efforts to protect abortion access in red states under siege, advocates believe their campaigns will have long-term impact. Standiford said that, as someone who has long worked in abortion rights advocacy, she is very aware that victories can be temporary. Conversely, those wins can inspire voters to continue fighting because their actions at the ballot box result in immediate change. Even if rights are threatened, she argued, that will not depress the movement overall.

“What voters and supporters find energizing about it is they can translate their votes—especially on these constitutional amendment fights—immediately into protections for themselves and their families. And that is a really empowering place to be,” said Standiford.

A couple of weeks ago, the city of Seattle announced that its community violence intervention work would move into the city’s community safety department, also known as CARE. The next day, Baltimore announced the creation of a Department of Neighborhood Safety, which will manage the city’s violence prevention and community crisis response efforts. These cities are just the latest examples of an intriguing new trend of jurisdictions across the nation launching agencies specifically dedicated to community safety, a field of public health interventions designed to build safer neighborhoods. Just this year, New York City and Harris County, Texas, have launched or proposed agencies that join earlier established departments and offices of community safety in Albuquerque, Durham, Greensboro, Los Angeles, and Minneapolis.

The emergence of this community safety ecosystem is one of the more striking innovations in municipal governance in recent years. Community safety agencies are beginning to consolidate jurisdictions’ efforts to address safety through prevention and early intervention, rather than just law enforcement. These community safety interventions include community violence intervention, a range of programs designed to prevent community violence before it happens; community crisis response, a branch of first response designed to handle a range of behavioral health crises and low-level conflicts; and victims services and homeless outreach.

What binds all of these interventions together is a recognition that the most effective way to build safer neighborhoods is to rapidly connect vulnerable populations in crisis to stabilizing services. A violence intervention worker might only have a few hours to find new housing in a neighborhood across town for a family at risk of retaliatory violence. A community crisis responder may be able to provide mediation services to resolve a dispute between neighbors before it takes a darker turn. Or she may be the best equipped to stabilize a person in the downtown corridor experiencing a mental health crisis and then connect them to long-term care.

Community safety interventions are best understood and organized separately from law enforcement—not in opposition to law enforcement but because the draw of relying on enforcement and coercion can undermine the core ethos of community safety. The very point of these agencies is to develop city infrastructure that can intervene before law enforcement becomes necessary. These services can operate without the downsides of relying on force or coercion. Community safety and law enforcement may partner on specific initiatives, such as to deliver a co-response that pairs clinicians and officers to respond to highly volatile situations like high-acuity domestic violence calls or barricaded suspects. But ultimately, cities are wisely recognizing that trying to deliver community safety services from law enforcement agencies is not as effective as giving community safety its own home in the municipal ecosystem—and its own well-trained personnel.

These new community safety agencies are often leveraging services that already exist, but are doing so in a way that addresses long-standing problems in municipal governance related to siloing and reliable investment in and delivery of services. Public health–oriented safety interventions have often operated at a remove, scattered across—and sometimes duplicated across—various city departments. This disconnection has meant that the community violence intervention worker might not know whether a housing voucher is available for their vulnerable family, if they know anything about available housing services at all.

These safety interventions also have not historically received the level of investment afforded to law enforcement, and so, relatedly, they have not been held accountable for responding with the same level of urgency we expect from law enforcement. As a result, the person experiencing a mental health crisis has often faced a difficult choice: a police officer who can arrive quickly but may not be equipped to address the crisis or a trained clinician who may take hours, or days, to arrive. Traditional social services—even those with an implication for public safety—simply were not designed for rapid response. That is beginning to change. Instead of cities considering these programs as charitable and “nice to have,” they are beginning to build them into the city’s safety infrastructure as critical assets that must be deployed as reliably, and sometimes as rapidly, as law enforcement.

In doing so, they reflect a broader understanding of safety that more closely aligns with what residents have been seeking for decades. In Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America, James Forman Jr. writes about how Black communities asking for both better protection from law enforcement and better social services and neighborhood investment over the course of the last half century have been given more (although rarely better) policing, but almost nothing in the way of services and investment. Building dedicated community safety agencies that are focused on leveraging social services, prevention, and early intervention rather than enforcement can help cities take a step back in the right direction, and in a way that also better aligns with how communities are actually thinking about safety.

Politicians often wrongly assume that communities concerned about safety are solely focused on law enforcement as a solution. But both opinion polling and academic research make it clear that people also prioritize prevention and early intervention strategies, including housing, education, employment, and even the design of the built environment of the neighborhood as part of their understanding of the safety of a place. In this way, community safety agencies represent the culmination of a long-overdue effort to address these concerns as vigorously as efforts to address crime rates through enforcement.

Community safety interventions are designed to keep some of the most vulnerable people in our neighborhoods safe, to the benefit of all of us. For example, people living with serious mental illness are more vulnerable than the general population to a range of victimizations, including from police violence. Despite this, our safety infrastructure has largely treated them primarily as a source of potential danger and a problem for law enforcement to solve. In a community safety framework, a moment of mental health crisis is an opportunity to get that person the help they need from someone trained to provide it—and in a way that is most likely to lead to long-term care, reduce the likelihood of additional crises, and ultimately create a safer environment for a person in need of help.

None of this would matter if the evidence base for this work wasn’t strong—and growing. Evaluations of crisis response programs in several cities indicate they reduce arrests, crime reports, and response times while increasing connections to immediate and follow-up services. One multisite study found the likelihood of arrest was 42.5 percent lower in the year following contact with a mobile crisis team. Countless evaluations of community violence intervention programs across the nation have shown impact. A recent study of Richmond, California’s Peacemaker Fellowship found sustained reductions in firearm violence over the course of 14 years.

The community safety field still faces several barriers to achieving its full potential. For one, the field’s interventions are only effective as long as services remain available. Community safety work is already beginning to expose the insufficiency of our decades-long underfunding of the social safety net—especially in housing and behavioral health. Policymakers have always been willing to find the money necessary to jail and imprison as many people as the police were willing to arrest. But they haven’t always been willing to find the money necessary to house and treat those who need it. That will have to change. Governments will need to figure out how to develop and deliver services at a scale commensurate with problems that have been papered over by overreliance on jails, which have become the nation’s de facto treatment facilities for mental illness. As Moki Macias, the director of Atlanta’s Policing Alternatives and Diversion once asked me, how effective would we think the police were if they didn’t have a jail to take people to?

Community safety agencies have emerged primarily (though not at all exclusively) within city governments, raising real questions about how to develop complementary roles for federal, county, and state governments in advancing the field. This is especially the case because many of the behavioral health interventions critical to effective community safety reside in county departments. Bridging the gap and figuring out resource allocation between these county-based services and public safety–oriented teams operating out of cities will be critical for long-term success. State governments will need to begin developing standards for program operations, workforce development, and protocols for partnering with other governmental entities like 911 call centers.

Perhaps most important, federal and state governments will need to develop reliable funding streams for needed community safety services, as well as operations. Current federal streams like Medicaid and Department of Housing and Urban Development housing vouchers can provide some help to budget-strapped localities, but neither program was designed with community safety in mind. Reforms will be needed to ensure these resources can be reliably used by community safety agencies. The federal government may also need to develop dedicated grants for community safety agencies, much like it does for police through the Bureau of Justice Assistance and the Community Oriented Policing Services Office.

If these early successes are any indication, the field of community safety has the potential to fundamentally redefine and expand the way cities address safety concerns and improve the quality of life for everyone—including an unburdened police force. Policymakers, researchers, philanthropic organizations, and community members all have a role to play in ensuring the field continues to grow. The reward for this focus could be that, for the first time, local governments could have infrastructure specifically designed to build safety through prevention and early intervention—not just law enforcement and incarceration.