The New Republic

The Trump administration seems to be living in an alternate reality when it comes to the president’s vanity projects.

Despite having to drain and fix the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool within weeks of insisting the renovation was complete, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum insisted to ABC News Sunday that the multimillion dollar restoration was nonetheless a “big success.”

“And so when we look in context, President Trump set out to make D.C. safe and beautiful. He’s done that,” Burgum said. “The Reflecting Pool was part of the original design of the Lincoln Memorial.… It was leaking 45,000 gallons a day.”

Burgum then cited attempts by previous presidential administrations to remedy the pool’s leaks, including the Obama administration’s two-year, $34 million effort between 2010 and 2012. The difference now, according to Burgum, is a vast advancement in technology, such as “nanobubblers” that he claimed have completely rid the pool of algae, as well as an industrial liner that has stopped the pool from leaking.

Neither of those details, however, appear to be true. Within days of refilling the pool, the algal bloom that the Trump administration had spent $14.7 million to eradicate had returned, while the painted liner at the bottom had begun to slough off.

“So the Reflecting Pool has been a big success. And we’ve got 340 million people in this country that are celebrating 250. We did have a few vandals, but all that’s going to be repairable, and that’ll all be fixed in the coming weeks as we go forward,” Burgum said.

“Well, you say it’s been a success, but the pool is going to be drained this week, isn’t it?” asked host George Stephanopoulos.

“We don’t know if we need to drain the whole thing or not because, you know, the cutting happened on the edge,” Burgum responded. “And of course, again, when you’re talking about 340,000 square feet of surface, even though there was, you know, damage done by vandals that was there, it is a small, small 99.99 percent of the pool bottom is perfect.”

Donald Trump had originally promised that the project would cost $1.8 million. Now, it seems the total project will cost far more than $15 million.

In another interview with CNN, Burgum again insisted—without evidence—that portions of the pool’s broken liner were caused by vandalism, echoing Trump’s explanation for the failing reno.

“It didn’t peel off. There was vandalism. There were box cutters. There have been seven arrests. There were people literally trying to destroy part of a monument, the Reflecting Pool,” Burgum told the network.

“There are photographs of a person or people cutting a 300- or 350-foot gash in the bottom of the Reflecting Pool?” pressed State of the Union host Dana Bash. The president initially announced late last month that the damage involved a 250-foot gash. The following day, the number escalated to 300, and then 350 feet the day after that.

“Dana, I’m not sure why you and others in the media think that you want to keep trying to question whether or not—think, this is an industrial liner,” Burgum continued. “Every farmer and rancher in America that’s had their pickup liner lined by this sprayed-on liner knows that you literally—literally, it would never just like peel off or fall off. This is, like, a strong material.”

“The only way you can end up with actual slices in one spot and not the other is that someone physically cut it,” Burgum said.

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the July 6 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

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

The right has long been obsessed with the idea that huge numbers of women come illegally to the United States only to have babies. But now Donald Trump’s top officials and the MAGA movement are giving this a new twist. They’re seriously talking about preventing pregnant women from entering the country. This is being discussed all over MAGA media. Some are talking about forced sterilization. Others are talking about pregnancy tests before entry.

Sarah Posner, a writer for Talking Points Memo, memorably summed this up with a single tweet: “So will every woman now have to pee in a cup at airports?” It’s a damn good question. And it’s all very ludicrous, except for one thing—it reflects an actual vision for the country, a vision that JD Vance and Donald Trump and a lot of significant MAGA personalities very much share. So we’re talking to Sarah Posner about all of it. Sarah, great to have you on.

Sarah Posner: Thanks for having me again, Greg.

Sargent: So the backdrop to all this is the Supreme Court ruling upholding birthright citizenship. This unleashed fury and anxiety among MAGA figures across the spectrum, who started to imagine the United States getting dramatically swamped by far more immigrant babies going forward. One leading MAGA figure said the possible ways forward now should include: “Deny entry to all pregnant foreigners,” “deny entry to all female foreigners,” “require sterilization of all foreign visitors prior to entry.”

Wow. What’s your immediate reaction to just the sheer level of fear and anxiety we’re witnessing here?

Posner: Well, I think we’re witnessing a sheer level of racism. The anxiety about birth tourism, and women coming to America from China or other places just so they could have a baby who would be an American citizen, has long been a talking point in the anti-immigrant right. So it’s not like it came out of nowhere.

But never have I seen the range of people talking about such extreme policy proposals, if you can call them that, to try to prevent this thing that can already be prevented by U.S. consulates, who investigate this sort of thing when they’re deciding whether to grant somebody a visa, and can turn down somebody’s visa based on that.

What these people are proposing is the idea that women would be potentially sterilized if they wanted to come to America. That’s insane. Or that testing women, giving women pregnancy tests before they come. I mean, it’s just so bananas. I can’t even believe that they’re not ashamed to talk about it on TV.

Sargent: Yeah, and they even seem to be enjoying it a whole lot as well. I want to read some quotes from leading MAGA figures. Here’s Mike Davis: “We need to get all illegals out of our country fast, and we need to start with birthing-aged women.”

Ben Shapiro: “If you’re coming in six months pregnant, we should not give you a four-month visa. We should give you a one-month visa and then kick your ass out, right?”

Sarah, one interesting thing here is that there’s always been this intense misogyny to MAGA. And here you’re seeing almost a conflation or a bundling of the misogyny and the hysterical hatred of immigrants and the great replacement theory, just really juiced up to the most hyperbolic and insane levels you can imagine. You’re good on the topic of MAGA misogyny. What do you make of that element of it?

Posner: Well, for one thing, MAGA has always been very interested in policing women’s bodies, whether it’s preventing them from having an abortion, preventing them from accessing birth control, or in this case, preventing them from being in the United States when they go into labor, right?

Like, all of these things are about making sure that they have control over women’s bodies and women’s reproductive freedom. So that is completely on brand for them, to be obsessed with this.

And then you add that to their obsession about immigrant, quote-unquote, “invasions”—that these invasions of immigrants are making the United States less pure, are contaminating us. And so you have a movement that’s at its core disgusted by women’s bodies. And that’s why they want to control them.

And here they add to that layer of disgust by talking about immigrant women as being—or, I mean, not just immigrant women, women in general, like women who are coming to the United States to visit family or go see the Empire State Building—you know, that they’re talking about them as being conniving and dirty and wanting to basically defraud America.

Sargent: And some leading MAGA women are getting into this act too. Here’s Megyn Kelly.

Megyn Kelly (voiceover): Would there be the possibility of cracking down on pregnant aliens who are coming over here—revoking visas, pregnancy tests, even? I mean, how far could we go with that?

Sargent: There seems to be this almost zealous desire to stop people from coming here at all. I really think at this point they just want the whole world to go away. Can you talk about that element of this?

Posner: Well, I think that they’re creating this image that they’re closing off America to the world, and that they’re going to make it difficult or scary for people to come here, even if it’s just for a vacation. And I think that it is in part a performance for MAGA. Because as we’ve seen from the World Cup—even though the world has seen that ICE is arresting people, and people are being sent to gulags or deported to a country that they’ve never been to, and those fears are real—it made me quite astonished, actually, that lots of people came to see the World Cup anyway.

But a lot of people did come, right? So they were basically saying either, you know, that’s not going to happen to me, or I’m not afraid of ICE, or maybe they were just thinking, I want to see the World Cup so badly that I don’t care.

And the deportations and the arrests and detentions are very real, but I also feel like the scale of what they’re proposing here is so absurd that I’m not sure how they could actually carry it out without completely collapsing the American tourism industry.

Right. And so I think a lot of it is to kind of perform for MAGA, perform for Trump, because they have to coddle their little baby fascist president who just lost a case at the Supreme Court. So they have to show that they are really coming up with other ways to ensure that no foreigner has a baby in the United States anymore, despite the Supreme Court decision.

Sargent: I think you put a finger there on something really essential about how MAGA and Trump function, which is that when they take a loss, their instant response, almost without exception, is to come up with some way to re-portray themselves as being on offense. Because they can never lose, they can never be weak, they can never be on the wrong end of public opinion, on the wrong end of history, on the wrong end of the law, et cetera, et cetera.

So you’ve actually got acting Attorney General Todd Blanche going out there saying that there will be concrete action to stop this. He says there will be things the administration might do as part of the visa process to limit it.

And at one point he actually said that the Justice Department, which he runs, is going to make sure that Homeland Security Investigations agents and the FBI are focused on stopping pregnant people who intend to come here to have a child.

Posner: It’s actually not the Department of Homeland—I mean, I don’t know that acting Attorney General Todd Blanche knows this or not, which is kind of sad and pathetic, but it’s not the Department of Homeland Security who decides who gets a visa. It’s the State Department. So he can ask the Department of Homeland Security to do stuff, but they’re not the ones who would stop somebody from getting a visa.

And then in terms of people who are coming here for a shorter time than would require a visa—what’s he proposing? That every single woman of childbearing age who crosses the border from Canada or Mexico, or who flies in an airplane into any of the airports in the United States, will have to be examined to see if she’s pregnant? Like, what are they even talking about? How would that even work?

I suppose they could try to do it, but the scale of staff and resources that they would need to do it—now, that doesn’t mean that wouldn’t stop them from making an example of somebody, because they love to produce content for all the people who are watching, all these influencers on their podcasts and on X, talk about stopping all this supposed birth tourism.

So you could definitely see them pulling this stunt on a woman entering the country just to scare other people, or to perform, like I said, for Trump or for social media content. But the scale of what they’re talking about is so ludicrous that it’s hard to take seriously as a mass policy.

Sargent: Yeah, I think it just goes back to what you said before about them performing for the audience of one. They need to let him know that things are being done, because he’s strong and he never just loses. He’s always on offense, right? So here they are on offense again. I really think that is such a crucial piece of the MAGA psyche—to always be on offense, to always be strong, to never be losing, et cetera, et cetera.

Posner: But I think in this particular case, it’s not just the audience of one. It’s that that audience of one has had a terrible couple of weeks in terms of his popularity, the complete failure of his Great American State Fair, which has been a complete bust in terms of people coming to it.

And so they also have to perform for the MAGA audience, that they’re worried might be either losing interest or thinking that maybe Trump is failing or losing his power. Trump’s power is ebbing—that can’t be the image.

Sargent: Let’s listen to something that Stephen Miller said about the birthright citizenship decision, because it really kind of encapsulates the bigger thing that they’re talking about here. Listen to this.

Stephen Miller (voiceover): Just physically being on U.S. soil does not make you a citizen, or qualified to carry on or capable of executing the inheritance of this country. We have people from all over the world, from third world nations, nations that on their own would have never invented the wheel, let alone modern technology, let alone medicine, let alone air travel. And they can just come into the country, have a baby at a hospital, paid for by you and me, and then that baby’s automatically a citizen. That baby can sit on a jury when he turns 18 and sit in judgment of you and sit in judgment of me and sit in judgment of our loved ones, can decide who our mayors are, our governors are, our presidents are.

Sargent: So, Sarah, this rant is one of the most crazy things I have ever heard from a Trump administration official, or any administration official ever. It’s absolutely unhinged in every conceivable way.

But what I think it gets at really is the degree to which stopping birthright citizenship, or upending birthright citizenship, was central to their big project. They really, really, really think that we’re in the midst of a demographic emergency, and that something incredibly drastic and Caesar-like is needed to prevent that from happening.

Posner: Does he think that the wheel was invented in the United States of America? Like, he’s so crazy. And so the idea that he’s trying to invent a reason why—that it’s not just, we don’t want them here. So he’s trying to say, well, the people who want to come here and have their babies are not smart and inventive and creative and coming up with inventing the airplane or anything like that. And so that’s why we can’t let them in.

And it’s just such a crazy, weird thing to say, because obviously it’s not true. Like, Americans have not invented all the great inventions in the history of humanity. And also that he feels like that’s the thing that he has to say.

So I don’t know. I mean, I just find Stephen Miller such a simultaneously dangerous and ridiculous person. But you can’t help but hear that kind of desperation in his voice in that particular clip.

Sargent: I think what he thinks is that the United States is the privileged inheritor of what he calls Western civilization, and that everybody outside this kind of civilizational charmed circle that he’s invented—which essentially includes Europe, and now includes southern and parts of Eastern Europe, whereas it didn’t before when his relatives came over—he thinks that the charmed circle of civilization has been drawn in a way that it excludes what he calls the third world.

And so everybody outside this circle, in the third world, none of those people are fit to invent things or fit to inherit the great Western inheritance that we are fortunate to have bequeathed to us. It’s a really, really deeply twisted vision that really is, I guess, civilizational supremacy.

And you’ve written about this as well a number of times. Can you talk about the religious dimension to what I’m talking about there, this kind of vision of civilizational supremacy? There is a religious nationalist dimension to it as well, isn’t there?

Posner: Well, Christian nationalism is a movement of American superiority and American exceptionalism. There was a point in time in the not-too-distant past that the Republican Party and the evangelical movement believed that the future of their political project depended on immigrants—depended on immigrants who were evangelical or Catholic, coming from Central and South America. And there was a senator by the name of Marco Rubio who was very involved in an effort to engage in immigration reform back in the 2010s. And, I’m sure that Rubio would not want to be reminded of that now.

And so I think that the religious right has shifted. Like, they’ve gone back and forth between being an anti-immigrant movement, being a movement that pretended for a while that it was interested in bringing people of color and immigrants into their movement and making them part of the Republican Party, and to being completely committed to Donald Trump and his mass deportation policies.

So I think that the modern religious right has had an identity crisis over this. But now they’re in a place where they cannot deviate from Trump or Stephen Miller or any of his other acolytes. And so they’re all in on whatever his immigration policy is. They don’t question it.

Sargent: I think you really nailed it when you said that they’re going to essentially want women to pee in cups at airports now, because that really captures all the craziness of it—the misogyny, the hostility to women’s bodily functions and so forth.

Let’s spool this forward a little bit. Next year, JD Vance is presumably going to be starting his presidential run. He’s going to be trying to figure out how to inherit this kind of coalition that’s been created. And he’s going to have to figure out how to deal with, I guess, a major part of the coalition here, which is extremely frustrated and anxious and angry about having failed at this one fundamental thing, which is so central to their broader agenda.

How does he, do you think, handle that while at the same time appealing to the middle? It seems like this vision is so extreme and so crazy. And someone like JD Vance, whose whole kind of shtick is to be the guy who makes MAGA seem reasonable and puts an intellectual gloss on it—we’re now at a point where it’s getting so crazy that it’s going to be very hard for him to do that. How do you see him managing this?

Posner: I actually don’t see him as trying to put a more moderate gloss on MAGA. I think that that is an image that he has worked hard to promote, and some people in the press have helped him with that. But when you hear him talk, he’s not really doing anything to soften any MAGA positions. He’s typically just saying something that will position him as being maybe less of a loser, say, in the Iran war ceasefire negotiations.

I think that Vance’s biggest political problem—one of his own creation, obviously, because he’s trying to appeal to the MAGA base and the anti-immigrant base—is that the base is very distrustful of him because his wife is not white and she’s not Christian. And he has to like run in circles to try to convince them that he’s OK and he’s one of them.

But I think that for someone like him, given his track record, trying to promote the idea that they’re going to police, quote-unquote, “birth tourism” more aggressively will be super convenient, even if he knows that it’s super impractical. But I don’t see him running from this.

I mean, he’s reinvented himself numerous times, but he can’t go anywhere without the MAGA base, right? Because it’s not like he has some natural constituency other than the MAGA base. So it’s not like if you went out there tomorrow and said, I agree with the majority opinion in the birthright citizenship case, that there would be a constituency for him. So he’s stuck with trying to appeal to MAGA.

Sargent: Yeah, I have to agree with you, Sarah. I think that this is going to be extremely difficult for JD Vance to manage. But the funny thing is, you know, he helped create this monster. And if he gets devoured by it, then, you know, that’s poetic justice. Sarah Posner, always an enormous pleasure to talk to you. Thanks so much for coming on.

Posner: Thanks for having me, Greg.

“What up, Council?” said the comedian J.T. Parr, greeting the Pasadena City Council in a surfer persona. Then he got to the point: “Americans are united in our hatred of data centers. They’re big, ugly water guzzlers.”

He’s right. America the Polarized has found some agreement at last. While President Trump guns it on building data centers, 71 percent of Americans oppose them, including a majority of Republicans. In Michigan, Pennsylvania and Texas, Republicans are breaking with Trump and issuing stern warnings about the massive facilities that increasingly pock rural America. And now Humans First, a conservative group that says it supports an “America First AI policy,” is planning a nationwide data-center protest on July 18.

Data centers are also shaping up to be a rogue issue putting torque on the midterms. South Florida Representative Byron Donalds, now a Trump-endorsed gubernatorial candidate in his state, has quietly defied the big guy, pledging to “protect Florida’s families and communities from data centers.” In one ad, he even seems to support government control of electric utilities. (Welcome to the struggle, Comrade Donalds.)

So who supports data centers? Only politicians who benefit from Big Tech’s ambition to dominate global AI. Parr, who himself ran for city council in Berkeley, Calif., in 2024, further said of data centers: “We’re just supposed to accept them because we might lose a race with China. Dude, where’s China?”

That Homer Simpson-esque question might just nail it, and it should be taken seriously if not literally. It suggests just how vexed Americans are with Big Tech’s ongoing effort to sacrifice regular people to the global ambitions of billionaires.

Thus we have a mass mobilization focused squarely on protecting American hometowns from oligarchic exploitation. According to Data Center Watch, protest groups against data centers now number an eye-popping 833 across 49 states. That’s a genuine movement. For more than a year, the protests have roused corners of America that not long ago were stuck in tribal stalemates focused on the personality of Trump.

Out of these protests, a surprising, hopeful, and effective rural progressivism is emerging. Data centers, which never close, consume vast amounts of electricity. They also drain millions of gallons of local water for cooling and churn out air and noise pollution all day every day. No wonder the data-center protesters have keyed in to AI’s environmental impact. Contrary to popular belief that Americans are dismissive of climate concerns, 70 percent of Americans now worry about the ravages of data centers.

Populists of every stripe have further grown wary of the brutally expensive ruling-class projects that jeopardize our daily lives: Silicon Valley monopolies and the war in Iran. A big faction of the anti-globalist set has further turned its attention away from the right-wing bugbear of immigration and toward causes that elsewhere are derided as “communist”: working people and the climate.

And the protests are surprisingly tactical. When it comes to affecting policy, they put the bigger No Kings demonstrations, which largely exist to express anger and ideological affiliation, in the shade. According to a watchdog group, data center opponents blocked or slowed more than 75 projects nationwide, worth $130 billion, between January and March alone. What’s more, 141 moratoria have been proposed at local, county, state, and national levels. And dozens of cities have actually implemented temporary bans, including Birmingham, Alabama; New Orleans; and Tulsa, Oklahoma.

“Communities have internalized an opposition playbook,” wrote Data Center Watch. “As political resistance builds and local organizing becomes more coordinated, this is now a sustained and intensifying trend.”

If these communities keep at it, and keep notching wins, they might just show the way out of the defeatism and blind rage that have stymied American progress and policy for the better part of a decade.

“We are anti sacrifice zone,” said protester Megan McDonough at a Pennsylvania State Capitol demonstration last week. A sacrifice zone is a municipality that is thrown to the wolves of Big Tech.

“We are anti being told that billionaire tech bros deserve more protection than the people who drink the water, breathe the air, pay the taxes, and live with the consequences.”

McDonough’s speech and Parr’s what’s-China comedy spiel really point to what’s most galvanizing about the protests. The data-center opponents are ordinary Americans. They embody a national everyman type we need more of in politics: the wise child, forever underestimated, who asks Socratic questions.

This archetype is so American it should be featured in a pavilion for the 250th. Its vibe draws on centuries of unlikely American heroes: nonconformist Yankee Doodle, outlaw Huckleberry Finn, naively principled Mr. Smith, anti-authoritarian Jeff Spicoli, and, of course, skeptical realist Homer Simpson.

These fellows are friends to the obvious. They don’t like abstractions. The data centers are right in front of our faces. They’re not one of the intangible threats of technology that preoccupy anti-woke and anti-tech faddists like Jonathan Haidt. (Citing Haidt’s out-of-step philosophies and opposition to D.E.I., dozens of students booed and walked out of his commencement address at NYU last week.) Instead, the data centers are physical outposts of AI empires—ugly water-guzzlers that don’t even pretend to serve communities.

At least Homer’s nuclear plant keeps him employed. A massive data facility uses automation and, once built, rarely employs more than a few dozen people. Data centers really only benefit the Big Tech emperors, to whom, according to a growing American consensus, we are no longer willing to sacrifice our towns.

American higher education is in crisis. Changes to student loan financing, a decline in the number of international students, and a weaponized federal research apparatus are creating historic challenges for everyone. Every day, new pitfalls emerge out of Washington and state capitals across the country. Right now, for instance, the Department of Education is finalizing a rule that would limit financial aid for graduate students if the program they are enrolled in does not produce enough graduates who make enough money, threatening a large number of graduate arts programs. At stake are the jobs of thousands of people who are employed by schools across the country. Now we’re beginning to see the toll this is taking.

Layoffs have hit multiple universities. Boston University laid off more than 100 of its staff last spring, the New School laid off nearly 90 faculty and staff, the University of Maryland laid off 84 employees, and Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Science is looking at laying off 25 percent of its staff (thanks to a plan put together by McKinsey and Company). Most dramatically, Hampshire College announced the closure of its doors this past spring. It will unfortunately not be the last institution to fold.

Where faculty have jobs, they increasingly do not feel free to do their work. In Texas, the A&M and Tech systems have implemented prohibitions on teaching of race, sex, and gender—leading to the cancellation or modification of courses. At the University of Texas at Austin, departments have been merged, likely because of pressure caused by “anti DEI” bills, which also saw the closure of student services offices across the state of Texas. But it’s not just public universities in Republican states that face these pressures. At Harvard, the heads of the Center for Middle East Studies and the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights were dismissed from their roles for running programming related to Palestine.

Facing distrust from the public, hostile lawmakers, and corporate decision-making practices, what are the students, staff, and faculty of the ivory tower to do? The solution lies in what graduate students across the country have been doing for the past few years; what workers in the U.S. have done for over a hundred years—organize a union.

Both inside and outside of higher education, there has been talk for years about what ails the system and why it has seemingly become out of touch and distrusted. A core tenet of the oft-repeated arguments is that universities have become bastions of activism, rather than places where scholarship is cultivated. The lone scholar who spends years studying Plato and Aristotle is run off campus and replaced by a purple-haired student with a sticker-laden megaphone; or so we are told. At the same time, universities are critiqued for not being engaged enough with communities, for setting kids up with degrees that will not serve them in the “real world”—the bubble of scholarly pursuit is simultaneously romanticized as a lost bygone era and source of present-day weakness.

The solution to this put forward by higher education leaders is to invest millions in viewpoint diversity or civic engagement centers, like those at Tufts University and the University of North Carolina, with the goal of bringing more conservative voices to campus. At the behest of donors and lawmakers, universities have become a battleground for the culture war.

When you dig in to the polling numbers about why universities are distrusted, it is true that a vast majority of Americans believe colleges and universities are headed in the wrong direction. Within those numbers, about 45 percent of people believe that universities do not do enough to expose students to a wide range of opinions. Meanwhile, 80 percent believe that universities are doing a poor job of keeping tuition costs affordable. 

The reality is that universities have come to be operated more as businesses than as not-for-profit entities of higher education, and this has led to their having the trust that businesses are afforded. Presidents of private colleges, in particular, are paid in the millions (at public universities, so are the football coaches). Universities have amassed huge amounts of property, corporate consultants are brought in for all sorts of reasons, and tuition costs continue to skyrocket. This trend is slated to get worse as universities seek to disentangle themselves from public dollars to make them less fickle to changes in political winds.

Despite being operated like businesses, universities encourage their workers to view their pursuit of knowledge and/or labor in support of it as separate from work that would require a union: It is a privilege to be able to do scholarship or work in higher education, and therefore you don’t require a union like a coal miner or an autoworker. It is this separation of profession that encourages isolation from other working people. When graduate students across the country unionized with the United Auto Workers, they showed up on the picket line when autoworkers went on strike in 2023. Dues paid by academic workers support other industries when they are on strike, and vice versa.

I’ve seen this dynamic firsthand as a member of a graduate labor union. When workers of the local grocery store chain went on strike, in 2019, the union coordinated people to join up at the picket line. A few of us joined one rainy morning and were approached by a white guy in an NRA hat, holding a strike sign. He thanked us for being there; regardless of what he may have heard about universities, or what differences may have otherwise existed politically, here was an example of workers coming together in a material struggle.

Unions contribute to community cohesion and trust. In Rust Belt Union Blues, Lainey Newman and Theda Skocpol write about how unions in Pennsylvania integrated themselves into every facet of daily life. The union hall was a place where weddings and community functions occurred; the union itself was a source of connection—where people felt united based on their shared identity as workers. As unions dwindled due to deindustrialization, so too did this broader union infrastructure, leaving people to find social identity in other group settings, some of them more reactionary. Higher-ed unions are not going to magically solve community isolation and atomization, but considering the acute need to boost community understanding and trust for this sector, in particular, academic workers can and should be part of the solution.

Organizing a union requires having hard conversations. It requires you to talk to many different people across life and work experience, political allegiances, and other divisions. They may or may not agree with the purpose of a union. Still, this dialogue exposes you to alternative viewpoints in a more visceral way than the proposed “viewpoint diversity” centers will allow. Whether or not everyone agrees from the outset, they will ultimately be a part of your union if you succeed. And to get there, you have to do the necessary work of convincing a majority of the potential beneficiaries of labor organizing that it’s a worthwhile effort—that at the end of the day, they’ll all come out ahead.

There are many tangible material benefits that unionization can provide; it creates leverage on university governance, where faculty, staff, and students may otherwise feel they have none. But unions are not a panacea—in light of broader industry-related shifts, layoffs do happen (Harvard staff who are facing cuts are unionized). It happened to the auto industry, and it can happen to higher ed. Nevertheless, organizing makes any cuts to workers much more costly to do, and it gives workers far more benefits when parting.

For people in higher education, the last year has been spent on edge watching decisions come down the pipeline that have impacted their industry and their livelihoods, with no ability to control what happens. It is a feeling of utter and complete helplessness. Universities and professional organizations have been mostly siloed in this effort, relying on conversations with members of Congress and direct negotiations with the government, or otherwise taking legal action. As the public has been galvanized by issues of war, immigration, and the economy, the destruction of America’s research and academic institutions is not a top priority for people’s attention.

This siloing also occurs on campus. Currently, the American Association of University Professors is trying to organize faculty across different fields of study. For years, it was thought that humanities faculty were the ones primarily under threat, so they currently make up more of the AAUP’s base. Now it is science faculty who are facing the chopping block and are doing so unorganized and unprepared. While humanities faculty may be aware and sympathetic, it ultimately takes members of the scientific community to provide insight on how certain policies put forward by federal agencies may impact them. You cannot be a bystander to the saving of your field; no one else will have these conversations for you.

As nonsensical and counterproductive as these cuts are to the national interest, they are no different from what a factory worker experienced during the signing of the free trade agreements of the 1980s and 1990s. Watching the government take an ax to your industry and countless communities, with little recourse available, is depressing. Organizing can help allay the bad feelings and put those who are under the boot back on the front foot. Universities may not be able to mobilize the public or build effective coalitions as institutions, but members of the university community can—and should. 

Through the union, every street becomes the classroom; coalitions are built, picket lines are formed, and people come to understand each other across lines of division. This may seem overly idealistic and hopelessly naïve. There’s no doubt that the battle will be a hard one. All the same, it is a path forward with tangible steps and real benefit—if only because you’ll be fighting the fight together. Form the union today, protect your job tomorrow, build a better community next week.

Every nation sustains itself with mythmaking. This is why Augustus commissioned Virgil to write The Aeneid at the moment the emperor was transforming the Roman Republic into the Roman Empire, why the British monarch is crowned atop the Stone of Destiny, why Marianne looks over Paris from both the Place de la Nation and the Place de la République, and why the Mexican president emerges every September 15 around 11 p.m. onto the balcony of the National Palace in Mexico City to issue el Grito—the cry that sparked the Mexican war of independence—anew.

But perhaps no nation has been more dependent upon its stories than the United States, a country formed in the relatively recent past without the benefits of shared ethnicity, language, or custom. In the absence of the usual ties that typically hold a nation together, it is values, we are told, that make an American an American and that make this country the special place that it is. Ironically, while Americans have always bitterly disagreed about the practical implications of those values, they have largely been consistent in the story they tell about those values and thus themselves. That story goes a little something like this: The United States was founded by good men, rebelling against tyranny and dedicated to the cause of liberty. Throughout its history, the United States has sought to pursue the path of freedom and justice, although some people—often, but not always progressives—are willing to concede that it has sometimes fallen short of this ideal. What these people will not concede, however—what they almost never concede—is the fundamental assumption that the United States of America is collectively a nation striving for the good.

In any other time, this persistent bit of American Exceptionalism might be excusable, even charming. But in a moment in which it seems not only increasingly impossible, but irresponsible, to ignore the deep flaws at the heart of the American project, this is exactly the choice that has been made by a certain brand of liberal public intellectual cum influencer in the Trump era. This cohort includes figures such as Jill Lepore, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Joanne B. Freeman, and Kevin M. Kruse. Heather Cox Richardson and Timothy Snyder are arguably the two most prominent examples of a new iteration of an old trend, the historian as explainer, and perhaps more jarringly as political strategist. Credentialed historians and critics of the current regime, they promise key insight into the present via their knowledge of the past, and they have become a prominent feature of the opposition to Donald Trump.

The narrative of history and, more importantly, of the present that they offer has gone viral, offering comfort to its audience and a substantial economic benefit to its creators in the form of newsletter subscriptions and book deals. While it seems cruel to challenge anyone’s source of comfort in this very disquieting age and is certainly unkind to question academics pursuing alternate income streams, it is time we start to question the narrative of history that has been so widely adopted by many Americans and ask whether this particular fantasy of the past is providing any benefit in our increasingly dystopian present. In particular, there is an insistence among these figures that the past is something to be mined for lessons about how to survive the rising tide of authoritarianism and fascism. It’s a compelling premise. But a decade into what future historians may very well term the “Trump Era,” it’s still not precisely clear what use the past is to understanding—let alone escaping—the current predicament.

The Resist! Historians, as you might call them, would not be possible if not for the American center-left’s increasingly romantic view of expertise. It (and the Democratic Party) have over the past 30 years come to be dominated by the most well-educated: Roughly 60 percent of people with graduate degrees lean blue. The nation’s best students are now collected in one political corner utterly unwilling to question the teacher’s competence. She is, after all, the teacher.

This shift has also been catalyzed by the American right’s increasingly dangerous anti-intellectualism, which in part drove their political opponents to a sometimes exaggerated deference to credentialed authority—a deference that often ignores the fact that experts frequently disagree with each other. Take, for example, the progressive rallying cry to “Believe science.” This certainly seems to be a good idea, especially on clearly settled topics such as the efficiency of vaccines and the reality of climate change. But what about those issues where the science—and more importantly the scientists—deeply disagree? Who exactly are we trusting then? After all, there are good faith, legitimate debates occurring around issues ranging from the effects and efficiency of long-term psychiatric drug use in children to support options for autistic people to the ethics of AI. None of this is settled, and experts—credentialed experts—disagree.

This deification of expertise in and of itself has also made it somewhat portable, a fact that is on clear display among the historian influencers. Take, for example, Heather Cox Richardson—arguably the most prominent of the cohort. Richardson’s Substack Letters From an American boasts over three million subscribers and is one of the most widely read newsletters in the world. The Harvard-educated Boston College professor has nearly six million followers on social media and was a Time 100 Creator in 2025. Letters From an American began as a synopsis of the events around Trump’s first impeachment and continues as a daily commentary on current events, much of which includes Richardson’s advice on topics ranging from how to identify fascism to how resistance to the MAGA movement ought to be organized. Her blog has also built a New York Times bestselling book, Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America.

When her work is shared, and it often is, the credibility of her positions is upheld by the assurance that Richardson is an expert—which is most certainly true: She wrote her dissertation on the Republican Party’s economic policies during the Civil War. Before Richardson entered the realm of public intellectualism as the co-host of the NPR-affiliate podcast Freak Out and Carry On in 2017, all of her books were focused on nineteenth-century America, including works on Reconstruction, the Battle of Wounded Knee, and the history of the Republican Party. Although fascism does have nineteenth-century roots, albeit in Europe, much of her newsletter is devoted to what is best described as punditry: analysis of the president’s mental state, upcoming Senate elections, and the weaponization of government agencies.

Timothy Snyder, the other bright star of this constellation, has a better claim to being an expert on fascism. Snyder, who decamped from Yale to the University of Toronto last year, is a historian of Central and Eastern Europe, with a specialization in the Holocaust and the Soviet Union. But his academic work is not directly linked to his advice on what to do in twenty-first-century America. That work, for example, includes a biography of Wilhelm von Habsburg, the poet and soldier who was placed in charge of Ukrainians against the Bolsheviks in the aftermath of World War I. Moreover, perhaps even more than Richardson, Snyder has leaned into the dubious idea that the historian is really a political strategist in disguise. His 2017 book, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century, topped The New York Times bestseller list and became something like scripture among some left-leaning Americans during the first Trump administration.

The entire subdiscipline of historiography exists because historians themselves are conscious that the way history is written and interpreted does itself have a history, one that is infused by ideological and sociological (and not infrequently psychological) influence. When we try to learn lessons from history, we must first choose a version to teach us—which narratives to highlight or omit, which assumptions to accept, which voices to elevate or ignore. That is why the past is often a comforter as much as if not more than it is a teacher. This is certainly true in the case of the Resist! Historians.

The popular success of figures like Richardson and Snyder rests on the fact they are presenting a narrative that rarely challenges their audience—which is largely white, middle-class, well-educated, and progressive. It is an audience made up of people for whom, up until now, the American project has worked out very well. What many of these people want to hear is that the rise of Trump and the MAGA movement is an aberration, a fixable malfunction. The audience for Richardson and Snyder, whether on podcasts, Substack, or Threads, want to believe that the current president and his supporters are not heirs to their American legacy but have instead twisted the truth about this nation’s history for their own malign ends. In this context, not only are their detractors the real inheritors of the nation’s Founders, but there is a clear path to escaping this fraught moment: accepting the truth about the nation and following where it leads us.

When Richardson, for instance, wrote about Rededicate 250, a bizarre event held on the National Mall on May 17 that was part political rally and part evangelical revival, she wrote with confidence, “...the United States of America was not founded as a Christian nation. The Founders were quite clear about that…,” and she went on to quote the 1797 Treaty of Tripoli, which famously declared that “the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion” and “has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility [of Muslims].” It’s a bold, appealing proclamation, one that seeks to co-opt, if not to obliterate, a key trope on the right, where the Founders’ status as (almost exclusively) white Protestants and their invocations of the Almighty trump the constitutionally protected rights they enshrined, most notably in the First Amendment.

And it’s true, the Treaty of Tripoli does say exactly that. But this is not the whole story. Many states maintained a religious test for office, and an established church, well into the nineteenth century. In fact, Massachusetts, where Richardson was educated and continues to work, did not fully disestablish its state church until 1833. Moreover, institutional histories are not the only histories that count. Rededicate 250 can only be seen as an anomaly if you ignore the long history connecting evangelical revivals and American politics dating back to Colonial times—traditions that have continually reasserted themselves in figures like Billy Graham and the continued prominence of megachurches. In the lived history of the Republic, not only the Christian character, but the evangelical nature of the country, are hard to deny. It can certainly be complicated and contextualized via documents like the Treaty of Tripoli. But that is different than asserting that their existence trumps other relevant details and events in U.S. history.

Of course, the truth of some of its assertions does not mean that the contemporary brand of MAGA evangelical has the right to govern the United States unchallenged, but it is also incorrect that there is no precedent for the rise of MAGA. As in a version of the twentieth century that exists to provide “lessons” to anti-fascists in the present, the idea that there is a pure, uncontested American history available for use by those disgusted by the current regime is comforting, even inspiring. It simplifies history, creating binaries between the authentic and the opportunistic and, in many cases, between good and evil. Rather than unspooling the complexities and ambiguities of American history, it instead treats the past as raw material for punditry. The Treaty of Tripoli is not an early example of diplomacy and statecraft from a new nation struggling for legitimacy, but a tool to be used against Christian conservatives who wield history and Scripture selectively.

History is neither a teacher who rewards the best students nor a sweeping morality play. It is inconsistent, morally ambiguous, and often not especially helpful.

But history is neither a teacher who rewards the best students nor a sweeping morality play. It is inconsistent, morally ambiguous, and often not especially helpful. It is one of many forms of expertise that can provide resonant analogies and occasional lessons—but its lessons are not inherently of more use than those offered by social science or even political activism.

It is, of course, hardly unique for subject experts, particularly academics, to stray outside their areas, particularly while providing mainstream political commentary. Economics, in particular, has turned out a steady stream of pundits, from the respectable (former New York Times columnist and, yes, current Substacker Paul Krugman, for example) to the baldly ideological (such as the nationally syndicated, baldly libertarian John Stossel). But there is nothing about academic training, no matter the discipline, that translates automatically to expertise in political strategy, just as there is nothing in history that provides a clear playbook for escaping the overlapping crises brought about by the second Trump administration.

That is not to say that Richardson, Snyder, and the other historian influencers need to quit the public square, but more that their visions and approaches to historical punditry need to be challenged. There is room for more diverse and sometimes dissenting voices, who are more willing to voice facts about the United States that disquiet and disturb. There is room to question expertise, particularly when it is deployed as cover for political analysis or punditry. And there is room for more stories to be told about America, even when they are stories we may not like.

Donald Trump has a new favorite word. He’s been calling Democrats “communists” ever since a few democratic socialists won the party’s House primaries. “These are hardcore, godless communists,” he told the Faith & Freedom Coalition conference last month. “This is the most serious threat to our country since its existence.” GOP House Speaker Mike Johnson, the ever-loyal Shih Tzu on his emperor’s lap, has picked it up as well. The midterms, he said recently, will pit “common sense versus communism.”

Well. The first question here is whether Americans even know what communism is (or was) anymore. There are five countries in the world that still call themselves communist, but one of those is China, which at least in economic terms barely counts (the others are Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam, and Laos). More than that, it’s getting to be close to 40 years now since the Eastern bloc collapsed. A person would have to be at least 45 years old to have any memory of all that. Right now, 57.5 percent of Americans are under that age.

As you’d expect, young people who weren’t alive to see how cruel, corrupt, and lethargic the Soviet Union was either don’t know much about communism or don’t see it as such a bad thing. A poll released last week by the libertarian Cato Institute had some interesting numbers. Among all Americans, capitalism was viewed favorably by just 52 percent (that’s the number that would be worrying me if I were a Friedmanesque free-marketeer; it’s insanely low!). Socialism was viewed favorably by 37 percent. And communism got a thumbs up from 21 percent.

That’s overall. Among respondents under 30 years old, 38 percent said they had a favorable view of communism. But in the Queens of Donald Trump’s youth, calling someone a commie packed a real wallop, so he clearly thinks it still can.

The word doesn’t actually apply to any of these people he’s trying to condemn, of course. As I noted last week, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Zohran Mamdani, and even Bernie Sanders himself aren’t really socialists, in the proper historical sense of the word. I don’t hear any of them calling for the state to seize the means of production, which is the basic historical position of socialism. They’re social democrats.

The only one among the crop who has apparently said a few nice things about actual communism is Darializa Avila Chevalier, the 32-year-old who won the Democratic primary in an upper Manhattan district. Her leftism appears to be much more of the campus-radical variety than Mamdani’s sewer socialism; we’ll see in two years whether the voters of her district are good with that, or whether she has indeed “grown considerably” since she wrote those social media posts.

Meanwhile, on the Fourth of July, a bunch of white supremacists from something called the Patriot Front felt at home enough in Trump’s Washington to march in front of the Capitol wearing masks, sunglasses, and ballcaps with the group’s logo boldly displayed, and carrying an array of flags including the Confederate flag. (These ghouls undoubtedly went unmasked during the pandemic to protest supposedly totalitarian public health policies, and now they’re dressing like totalitarians in an attempt to terrorize regular people.)  

And that night, of course, America, or that portion of it that was interested, listened to another windy address from a president who once invited avowed white supremacist Nick Fuentes to dine with him at his house and told the extremist Proud Boys to stand by.

That same president participated back in May in Rededicate 250, a Christian nationalist prayer gathering that, whatever its organizers said, was clearly intended to pound home the idea that the United States is supposed to be a Christian nation, which of course it is not. Democratic Representative Jared Huffman of California accurately told PBS that the event “would have the founders rolling in their graves.” 

This doesn’t begin to scratch the surface of right-wing radicalism in this country, most of which Trump tacitly or sometimes explicitly endorses with rhetoric that’s clearly fascist. And beyond Trump himself, many rank-and-file Republicans are shocking extremists; remember Nazis mingling openly at the 2024 CPAC conference, or those leaked text messages by young Republicans last fall (“I love Hitler”)?

It’s crystal clear in a factual sense which party is more radical today. The Democrats could elect two dozen socialists and they still wouldn’t be anywhere near as far left as the GOP has gone far right. Oh, and by the way: For all the media attention socialist candidates get when they win, it’s still a fact that on balance, mainstream and even centrist Democrats are winning more primaries this year. The Cook Political Report revealed over the weekend that in the 22 GOP-controlled congressional districts where Democrats have held primaries so far, 14 have been won by candidates with mainstream and centrist backing. Only four have been won by candidates backed by the Progressive Caucus. So in swing districts, Democratic voters are still mainly choosing the nominees they calculate have a better shot at winning such a district.

But we’re going to be hearing all about communists for the next four months. Trump is obviously trying to make the midterms a referendum on the Democratic Party and not on him. 

History tells us this rarely works. It didn’t work for him in 2018, when he was around 40 percent in the polls and tried to make the dreaded caravan headed toward the Rio Grande from Central America the central issue. And the economy was comparatively good then, unlike now, when a soaring stock market is benefitting the rich while most Americans continue to struggle with Trump-juiced inflation.

So Democrats, who tend to freak out about things, should not freak out about this. Sure, communism is a scary word, at least to people of a certain age and ideological bent. But I’d imagine very few people who aren’t dyed in the wool MAGA believe the Democratic Party is a bunch of communists. I hope that instead of lamely denying it and moving on to gas prices, they have the guts to fight fire with fire and point out to voters who the real extremists in this country are.

Ever since the Supreme Court upheld birthright citizenship in June, MAGA personalities have really gone off the rails. Many angrily started saying it’s time for the U.S. to find new ways to bar women from coming to this country and having babies. Some are talking about pregnancy tests upon arrival. Others are discussing the possibility of unleashing federal law enforcement on women suspected of pregnancy—and unnervingly, this includes the acting Attorney General. And as a Media Matters roundup shows, some are talking about truly crackpot ideas like forced sterilization. Talking Points Memo writer Sarah Posner sums it up well: “Will every woman now have to pee in cups at airports?” We talked to Posner, a scholar of Christian Nationalism and the religious right. We discuss how all this reflects a genuine and ambitious, if vile, vision for the country, why JD Vance may take up this cause in some form when his presidential run begins next year, and what it all says about MAGA’s deeper misogyny and darkening extreme nationalism. Listen to this episode here.

The Stratos Project was supposed to be an industrial marvel for the AI age. The proposal—a massive hyperscale data center in Box Elder County, Utah—was initially slated to be more than 2.5 times the size of the island of Manhattan. Once completed, it would use more than double the state’s average electricity demand and draw power from a dedicated natural gas supply. These immense figures would allow Stratos to train cutting-edge AI models, assist in advanced manufacturing, and even help with defense-related computing.

This, at least, was the idea when the project was officially announced in March 2026. Since then, however, the project has become an encapsulation of Americans’ distrust of the AI industry at large and the structural risk that unregulated data center development creates for investors across the board.

In Utah, opposition to the Stratos Project was driven in part by predictions that it would have severe adverse effects on the environment. Utah State University professor Robert Davies calculated that the heat from the completed Stratos center would raise local daytime temperatures by five degrees Fahrenheit and a staggering 28 degrees at night, a thermal load equivalent to “23 atom bombs” worth of energy. Ben Abbott, an ecology professor at Brigham Young University, warned that these temperature spikes would transform the local environment from semiarid into something more closely resembling the Sahara Desert. There were also additional concerns that the center would be a massive water draw in a region already prone to drought and facing increasing water shortages.

Despite this, and the complaints of thousands of residents, the project was approved by the Box Elder County Commission in May 2026—barely two months after it had been announced. The relative alacrity of their decision-making was partially enabled by the fact that Stratos utilized Utah’s Military Installation Development Authority, a state entity whose involvement let it bypass ordinary county zoning and the public review such projects normally require (since the project could theoretically help improve military AI adoption and cybersecurity).

Stratos’s chief backer is Kevin O’Leary, a celebrity billionaire investor better known for his role on the TV show Shark Tank than as an AI infrastructure guru. He has claimed that Stratos would create 2,000 permanent jobs (despite the fact that Stratos is yet to have a tenant, and that data centers have historically created far fewer jobs than advocates claim).

But O’Leary’s promises have done nothing to dampen local opposition to Stratos. In fact, opposition intensified throughout the month of May until Utah Governor Spencer Cox—who had initially backed the project when O’Leary met with him in January 2026—signed an executive order on May 29 to ensure that the state properly evaluates data center proposals. While the Stratos Project was not specifically mentioned in the order, the timing of the announcement, coupled with the significant statewide pushback to the project, showed it was clearly an inflection point. Less than a week later, O’Leary agreed to significantly scale back the proposed data center from 40,000 acres to just over 20,000.

“People are concerned about data centers,” Cox said in a press conference, “they’re concerned about the lake, they’re concerned about resources, and they should be concerned.”

So, six months after the supposed “industrial marvel” of the Stratos Project was introduced, the results have been an angry local community, an embarrassed investor, and a local state government belatedly searching for a sensible framework with which to govern data center growth. The backlash has not stopped yet, either. On June 23, Utah state Senate President J. Stuart Adams, who was also the chairman of the Utah agency that initially approved Stratos, lost his Senate seat to a rival who explicitly criticized his support of O’Leary’s project.

But data center investors face a more significant problem than public embarrassment—they risk losing money. In Utah, there are now two separate lawsuits underway against O’Leary’s project, each likely to further slow the already scaled-back data center. The problem isn’t confined to the Stratos Project, either. According to a recent analysis by JPMorgan, more than 60 percent of data center capacity planned for 2027 isn’t yet under construction. The research firm Data Center Watch has claimed that in the first quarter of 2026, over $130 billion worth of data center projects were either delayed or canceled.

Together, this suggests that regulatory and community friction is already taking a significant toll on investors’ bottom lines, alerting them to the dangers of rushing headlong into new proposals. A May 2026 note from the law firm Ropes & Grey warned as much, noting that “permitting challenges and local [community] resistance are emerging as serious obstacles” and that “standstills are a real risk absent industry engagement or federal preemption.”

States have caught on to this problem. Beyond Spencer Cox’s executive order, which directs Utah agencies to protect the environment while promoting economic growth, Maine passed a bipartisan data center moratorium act in April. Initially vetoed by outgoing Governor Janet Mills, the act could come back into consideration after the November 2026 midterms. Ohio and California, meanwhile, have both passed legislation, with Ohio requiring data center operators to cover their own grid costs, and California mandating that they disclose their electricity consumption.

Big Tech firms are now keenly aware of the need for their data centers to have at least some environmental protections and community considerations built into development plans. Microsoft, for instance, announced its “Community-First” AI infrastructure plan in January 2026, shortly after it was forced to cancel a proposed data center in rural Wisconsin. The plan calls for covering the grid and electricity costs its data centers create, minimizing and replenishing local water use, and paying its full share of local property taxes rather than seeking the tax breaks data centers typically negotiate. OpenAI has called for significant investment in renewables to help modernize the U.S. electrical grid and make data center build-out more sustainable, while Anthropic has pledged to cover the grid infrastructure improvements and electricity cost increases that are generated from the data centers it uses.

These actions from both big business at one end and state actors at the other are a recognition of the problem. But they are the inverse of the kind of investment that the Stratos Project represents: rushed ad hoc investment on one side of the coin, and reactive ad hoc regulation on the flip side.

What’s more, both actors have fundamental limitations. Data centers are a footloose industry, meaning if one state is deemed to be overregulating, investors can easily shop for a friendlier jurisdiction. And while Big Tech firms might talk a good game, they are also subject to severe market pressures that could make them put their plans for equitable, environmentally friendly data centers on the back burner.

What’s needed is a concrete set of enforceable federal standards that can slow down the ad hoc gold rush in favor of equitable (and ultimately faster) long-term build-out. But here, the Trump administration is doing the exact opposite. In its July 2025 executive order, the White House moved to ease regulatory burdens on data centers costing at least $500 million, while compressing review windows and streamlining environmental evaluations meant to identify those burdens, and saying nothing about the water consumption or community frustration driving the backlash.

It’s a counterproductive way to win the AI race. On one hand, the Trump administration (as well as backers like O’Leary) insist that data centers are a strategic imperative for the United States. But the administration is blocking the one thing—a clear set of rules—that would allow for data center construction without risking a backlash in every county they touch.

The alternative is another dozen Stratoses, each one announced in the dark and built in haste, before an angry public demands concessions. That option leaves everyone on the losing end—including, it turns out, investors.

Four games into the 2026 World Cup, the French national team, which presently looks like it will cruise to a third straight final after winning all its matches by two or three goals, has started just three different white players. It only brought five of them to this World Cup. Its best players are named Mbappé, Dembélé, and Olise. They have Cameroonian-Algerian, Malian-Mauritanian-Senegalese, and British-Nigerian-Franco-Algerian ancestry, respectively. They are French.

Time has vindicated the French approach to sourcing talent for its national team. Everyone else at this World Cup is doing what the French national team started doing 30 years ago: weaponizing its multiculturalism. Or, conversely, cultivating and capitalizing on its diaspora.

Nearly a quarter of the 1,248 players in the 2026 World Cup were born in a different country from the one they represent. To wit: There are 99 French-born players at this World Cup—more than were born in any other nation—but only 26 of them are on the France roster. The rest play for other countries, which pick off the players eligible for their teams who didn’t make the grade for Les Bleus. Such is the glut of world-class players produced in France, emanating overwhelmingly from the super-diverse suburbs surrounding Paris, that the other nations contesting this tournament have eagerly gathered up the leftovers. Enough of them to fill almost three full World Cup rosters.      

And yet of the 48 teams contesting this quadrennial tournament, France seems to be having the most vociferous national discourse on how “French” the French team should be. Which is to say, how white. France alone bickers over what the racial makeup of its national team says about the nation, which, per the Institut National d’Études Démographiques, now comprises as much as 18 percent Arab or Afro-French citizens. 

Seemingly every two years, when a World Cup or European Championship comes along, another tired debate sparks off in France, which may well have the most politicized national team in soccer, clearing an extraordinarily high bar. All the more so since the French have been one of the planet’s most successful teams in the last three decades, winning the World Cup twice and the European Championship once, while making the title game of those tournaments thrice more. 

The men’s national team is the public-facing French institution that has consistently functioned the best—although you’d never know it from the way it’s spoken about.

In 1996, Jean-Marie Le Pen, then France’s far-right leader, dismissed Les Bleus as “artificial” for having to “bring in players from abroad and call them the French national team.” They very much hadn’t—all but one player was born in France.

Two years later, that team, popularly described as “black, blanc, beur” (Black, white, Arab), even though only star playmaker Zinedine Zidane actually fit the latter ethnicity—won the World Cup on home soil and was heralded as a paradigm for a new, more diverse and multicultural France. This, of course, ignored the rampant racism and substantial issues still faced by the nation’s minorities at the time, and which persist—from 2020 to 2024, the number of reported hate crimes in France more than doubled. 

Zidane and his Black teammate Lilian Thuram understood that nothing had been solved, even though many of their countrymen felt good about themselves. They remained vocal about the dangers posed by Le Pen and his movement. The National Front, Zidane said in 2002, “does not correspond to French values.” Zidane reiterated his stance on the National Front in 2017: “We have to avoid it as much as we can.”

Kylian Mbappé, the face and captain of the team today—and currently the World Cup’s co-leading scorer, along with Lionel Messi, at six goals apiece—was born in that very year, 1998. Lilian Thuram’s son, Marcus, is his teammate. Ahead of another election that threatened to elevate the rebranded National Rally in 2024, now led by Le Pen’s daughter Marine, Marcus Thuram warned the nation: “The situation is extremely serious,” he said. “As citizens, we have to fight to make sure that the National Rally doesn’t get through.”  

Mbappé agreed and said so publicly, calling the National Rally’s ascent “catastrophic.” Whereas his fellow global megastars Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo have been studiously apolitical all their careers—never mind that the latter was named for Ronald Reagan and both have taken many millions from sports-washing Gulf states—Mbappé has shown no compunction about wielding his enormous platform in opposition to the far right. Nor have the rest of the team, flouting convention in international soccer.

Unpopular centrist French president and noted soccer nut Emmanuel Macron has been in power throughout the nation’s glorious soccer run and has attached himself to the team like a barnacle. He personally and successfully lobbied Mbappé against leaving Paris Saint-Germain for Real Madrid, citing the national interest, for several years, although Mbappé eventually went in 2024. It has brought Macron little benefit; not even his association with World Cup success could make the people love him. 

With yet another round of French elections in the offing next spring, Mbappé doubled down in an interview with Vanity Fair ahead of the World Cup. “I know what it means, and what kind of consequences it can have for my country when those kinds of people take control,” he said of the National Rally. “So we are citizens. We have the right to give our opinion like anyone else.”

That word, citoyen (citizen), is meaningful in France. During the French Revolution, it was used as a greeting, not unlike comrade under Communism. “Aux armes, les citoyens,” the national anthem still impels. Arm yourselves, citizens. It is drilled into French children that good citizenship is a high virtue. 

France manager Didier Deschamps, who is white and himself a veteran of that 1998 World Cup–winning team, which he captained, lamented that his players would be asked about politics during this  World Cup. But he stopped well short of condemning them. “I’m not going to tell them not to speak,” he said. “They are well aware that there are sensitive topics. They are citizens.”

It’s unclear exactly at what point during the French Revolution the rallying cry of “liberté, egalité, fraternité” (liberty, equality, brotherhood) was adopted, eventually becoming the new republic’s national slogan. What is entirely clear is when it was bastardized into “liberté, egalité, Mbappé.” That was the 2018 World Cup, when the 19-year-old led his nation to its second world championship. 

It proved to be prophetic. As national team captain, he is so conscious of his clout that he works little digs at the far right into humdrum press conferences. A journalist trying to help Mbappé spot him in a crowded room earlier on in the World Cup waved and said, “I’m to your left, really the far left.”

“Luckily you weren’t on the other side,” Mbappé shot back with a grin, before the room broke into laughter.

He understands that the work of making the case for diversity is unfinished, both in soccer and beyond it. As recently as 2011, a scandal spilled into the open when it transpired that, in a meeting with the acquiescing national team head coach present (Deschamps’s predecessor and ’98 teammate, Laurent—wait for it—Blanc), federation officials discussed capping the number of nonwhite players in the nation’s youth academies at 30 percent. Delightfully, a 12-year-old Mbappé happened to be interviewed in the aftermath of the scandal, speaking into the camera and declaring, “If you look at history, the best ones [soccer players] were Black ones and Arab ones.”

Around that same time, the underperformance of a querulous and scandal-plagued incarnation of the national team—which went on strike at the 2010 World Cup over a falling-out with its head coach—was blamed on the team’s Black and Muslim players and those of North African descent. 

There is a creeping sense that France will win this World Cup if it decides it wants to win it. It abounds with talent. Deschamps left players at home who would have starred for just about any other team. I was at their tournament opener against Senegal, and Les Bleus were a hot mess in the first half until they decided that, actually, they could be bothered after all and cut the African champions apart in the second half. I was at their round-of-32 match with Sweden on Tuesday, a 3–0 rout that could have gotten far uglier. I watched Mbappé score four times in those two games. 

I also saw a Frenchman in a full Napoleon costume. But what struck me was the makeup of France’s fans who followed their team to New Jersey. They were almost exclusively white. Deschamps is white. His assistants are all white. And yet so few of the players are. Zidane, French-born to Algerian parents, the impeccably qualified alternative, has been lying in wait to replace Deschamps for years—he finally will after this tournament. That will make him the national team’s first nonwhite manager.

This will be noted on the far right. Nothing about the Les Bleus is apolitical. 

“You can be a player, you can be an international star, but above all that, you are a citizen,” Mbappé told Vanity Fair. 

The French team is full of citizens.

As part of its attempt to pervert America’s semiquincentennial into a partisan celebration of the most corrupt president in American history, the White House has put out, in partnership with Hillsdale College, a series of propaganda videos masquerading as history. A 13-minute piece titled “The Story of America: The Faith of Our Founders” is a paragon of the genre. The video features narration from Mark David Hall, a professor at Regent University and a member of Trump’s so-called Religious Liberty Commission. I watched it so that you don’t have to.  

Hall opens by dismissing the “popular writers who claim that America’s Founders owed something to the Enlightenment.” Historians going all the way back to the founding itself have maintained that the Founders drew heavily from the Enlightenment—but Hall, like so many in the MAGA movement, isn’t interested in serious historians and cites none during this video. His agenda is information-averse: Sure, he includes some snippets of texts and historical facts. But he’d prefer to convince viewers that the Founders were super-holy men, not learned ones. And these Founders definitely never intended to separate church and state in the first place. Apparently, the Founders inserted that pesky First Amendment prohibition on the establishment of religion in the Constitution just to ensure that conservative Christians would assume their natural right to rule the country.

Hall starts with the claim that America’s Founders cited the Bible more than any other text. By this logic, Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason—which cites scripture repeatedly in order to make the point that, as he wrote, “it is from the Bible that man has learned cruelty, rapine, and murder”—must count as an exercise in religious devotion and Christian nationalism.

Hall then dwells on comparatively minor figures such as Elias Boudinot, the director of the U.S. Mint, who resigned from that post in 1805 to found the American Bible Society, which he led for five years. Hall neglects to mention that Boudinot’s boss, President Thomas Jefferson, was in those very same years taking a razor to the Bible to separate the morsels of moral wisdom from any reference to the supernatural, miracles, and other references to the divinity of Jesus. It was like locating “diamonds in a dunghill,” Jefferson wrote in an 1813 letter to John Adams.

Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, George Washington, Ethan Allen, and other Founders were also known in their time as “infidels,” “deists,” and otherwise unorthodox in their religious views. Yet, as Hall tells us dismissively, in this video about the faith of our Founders, “that label [deism] may only be applied to only a handful of individuals.”

The narrative reaches a climactic absurdity in the treatment of the debates concerning religious freedom in Virginia. As Hall notes, the Virginia Declaration of Rights, authored principally by George Mason, declares “that religion or the duty which we owe to our Creator and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence.” According to Hall, this somehow proves that Mason never wanted to separate church and state. In fact, the point of the Declaration was to do precisely that. Mason himself was a classic Enlightenment rationalist who valued empirical inquiry and universal natural rights over blind obedience to religious dogma and clerical leaders. That’s why he put in the bit about religion being grounded on “reason and conviction”—and not revelation. Hall manages to twist this declaration of religious freedom and the values of reason and equality into pro-religious nationalist messaging.

Sure enough, by the time we arrive at the photomontage with which the video culminates, we are treated to an engraving, based on the 1866 painting by Henry Brueckner, of George Washington that shows him kneeling in the snow at Valley Forge. The alleged Valley Forge epiphany has been repeatedly debunked ever since it was invented, including by the Valley Forge Park Commission, which concluded in 1918, after a comprehensive investigation that included analysis of thousands of pages of correspondence and diaries of Washington and his staff, along with those of other officials and personnel who were at the military camp, that “in none of these were found a single paragraph that will substantiate the tradition of the ‘Prayer at Valley Forge.’” In fact, Washington was infamous among the ministers of his time for pointedly refusing to kneel in church. But as with the Christian nationalist movement’s elevation of the work of revisionist historian David Barton, the myths, contradictions, and deliberate decontextualizations are too valuable to reject simply because they are not true.

This is hardly surprising, given that Mark David Hall serves on the advisory board of lay leaders on Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission, which was established in May 2025 by executive order. The interests of the commission, which is largely comprised of conservative Christians, appears to conform to the agenda of the Christian nationalist movement, whose leaders have played a pivotal role in putting Trump in office. Its chair has called for a federal hotline with an automated recording: “There is no separation of church and state.” Another member pressed for giving a presidential medal to the baker who declined to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple. Many members of the commission, along with those on its advisory boards, are frequently featured at right-wing and Christian nationalist conferences and gatherings, such as Road to Majority, Pray Vote Stand, CPAC, NatCon, and the National Pro-Life Summit.

In its public-facing media, the commission does address several incidents of genuine religious persecution. But other action items include expanding opportunities for faith-based organizations to receive public money and for conservative religious people to practice discrimination themselves if they have a faith-based excuse.

Like the rest of the MAGA movement, Hall pretends to be standing on the side of the people against the tyranny of those liberal educational institutions that dare to report the truth about America’s Enlightenment Founders. But Hall is a professor at Regent University, itself an educational institution aligned with a partisan movement that is bankrolled by a sector of the ultrawealthy.

Maybe the defining feature of the video—as well as the commission, and the MAGA movement in general—is its divisiveness. America’s 250th anniversary might have been an opportunity to celebrate the unity that, in spite of our many setbacks and challenges, Americans have managed to achieve over the centuries in the face of so much natural diversity. The animating spirit of “e pluribus unum” might have been nice to hear at a time like this. Even at the time of America’s founding, as serious historians have long noted, America was exceptionally diverse in its forms of religious expression. What the White House has offered now, in propaganda videos just as in its daily cycle of corruption and self-dealing, is the opportunity for an aggrieved minority to hate those people it imagines to have strayed from a supposedly pure, original version of an America that has never in fact existed.

American exceptionalism is an overblown and provincial tradition, but it’s our 250th birthday, so let’s indulge. As The New Republic’s USA 250 series showed—on newsstands now!—the country has gotten a lot wrong, but it’s also gotten a lot right. Here are some of the biggest achievements we can boast about, but which, in the Trump era, are eroding or precarious.

Welcoming immigrants: In his last speech as president, more than two years after signing the biggest amnesty for undocumented immigrants in world history, Ronald Reagan expressed the political consensus on the subject by quoting from a letter he’d received, “You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German, Turk or Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American.”

Donald Trump was the first modern president to express an attitude toward immigration that was more hostile than that of the average member of his own party. Now, although the Supreme Court did at least uphold birthright citizenship this week, we have seen recent immigrants subjected to a reign of terror with violent deportations, cruel detentions, and immigration agents functioning as a fascist force.

Higher education: The U.S. has long been home to one of the best higher education systems in the world, with the greatest variety of majors, prestigious institutions that draw top talent from around the world, as well as accessible working-class schools like community colleges and regional universities. Our college sports are also unrivaled worldwide.

But it’s all falling apart. Tuition is unaffordable to many American families, and the number of college-age Americans is declining. While American higher education has long been a boon to overseas students—and vice versa, since they tend to pay full tuition—an increasingly hostile immigration regime has curbed the number of students coming here to study. Cuts in federal funding for research and student aid are also hitting schools hard and impoverishing the college experience.

Science: The U.S. has had some of the best infrastructure to support science in the world. In addition to our now-besieged universities, we have been the envy of the world with government agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which has virtually eliminated malaria and polio from the United States and is responsible for the eradication of smallpox, the only human disease totally eliminated from the world.

But with decreases in funding and attacks on foreign nationals coming to the U.S. to do research, labs are closing all over the country, scientists are relocating, and many science students are choosing other fields.

Consumer goods: Early in the Cold War, as the Americans and Soviets competed to prove whose system was superior, the latter pointed out that under communism, no one was homeless, no matter how poor. Capitalism, America’s boosters countered, could deliver better stuff: TVs, toasters, vacuum cleaners, dishwashers. Vice President Richard Nixon and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev had a famous “Kitchen Debate” during the 1959 World’s Fair, where the U.S. put shiny appliances and gadgets on display. Khrushchev played it cool, saying, “We have all these things.” While it was true that the Soviets were trying to deliver higher-quality goods, the success of that project was limited; envy of America’s designer jeans and shopping malls persisted throughout USSR communism. With the rise of globalism, consumer goods have gotten even more affordable to Americans.

The drive for cheapness has had myriad knock-on effects in the U.S. economy, especially for working-class people, and the goods we consume now aren’t as well made or durable. With Trump’s tariffs—and increased energy costs due to the Iran war—the prices are rising, too.

Innovation: Capitalist propagandists love to boast that the United States is the world capital of innovation—and they’re right. We are responsible for most major inventions, including the steamboat, cash register, air conditioner, personal computer, cell phone, the internet, and much more.

There are many ways to measure innovation, but one crude one is the number of patents. By that tally, the U.S. is still second only to Japan. But there are reasons for concern. The spread of AI may hamper people’s ability to think creatively. Less speculatively, much of the entrepreneurial energy in this country comes from recent immigrants, and Trump has made it much more difficult for people—including high-skilled workers—to come here. An even more direct blow is the Trump administration’s cuts to R&D, which an analysis by the Congressional Budget Office last year found would decrease innovation.

Gay rights: Even decades before Stonewall, the U.S. had the first organized gay rights movement and has been a beacon for LGBTQ people all over the world.

Trump, however, has made bigotry toward trans people central to his administration, and so have many of his fellow conservatives. He has erased many legal protections for LGBTQ Americans and even in some instances mandated discrimination (and in further backward moves, this week the Supreme Court upheld state bans on trans people in girls’ and women’s sports).

Feminism: American women led the world for decades in striving for full civic personhood. After winning the right to vote in 1920, they, decades later, famously disrupted the Miss America pageant, won the right to abortion, and entered the workforce en masse. Trump’s two elections reflected unease with all that, and his administration has rolled back equal rights provisions for women.

National parks: Our national park system—more than 85 million acres of land—has long been the envy of much of the world. Even the Chinese government, no slouch at public infrastructure creation, regards it as a model. We constantly celebrate our great wilderness in America, from legends about the frontier to the “purple mountains’ majesty” of our national anthem to car ads that panoramically revel in the Western landscape. But the park system is what has kept much of that glorious landscape from being turned into auto dealerships, coal mines, or strip malls, as it all would be if our oligarchs had their way. The national parks have never been more popular, in 2024 reaching a record high of 331.9 million visitors. Yet Trump’s cuts to the system have been severe, reducing the NPS workforce by 25 percent, even as he spends lavishly on his immediate environs, like the algae-plagued Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.

Pop culture: This country was the birthplace of rock and roll, soul, jazz, and rap. And Hollywood in its heyday made the best and most popular mass-market movies in the world. American pop culture has been one of our greatest exports.

There is life in our cultural production machine yet: Last year’s K-pop Demon Hunters, an American production, was a global phenomenon. But with Hollywood’s increasing dependence on IP tentpoles—superhero franchises, sequels, remakes—and the AI slop beginning to infect internet platforms like Spotify, America’s cultural dominance looks shakier every year.

Secular government: Americans have enjoyed freedom of religion, enshrined in the First Amendment, which has also—equally importantly—meant freedom from religion in our everyday interactions with the government.

To the far-right theocrats in Trump’s government, however, “there is no such thing” as separation of church and state in the Constitution. They dismiss the concept as propaganda from “the anti-God left,” and have been working to tear down the wall that our Founders erected between church and state.

Another Supreme Court term has come and gone, and civil society is once again licking its wounds. President Donald Trump has obtained new power, the lives of trans people have gotten worse, and the high court is basically winging it when it comes to its ill-fated new “history and tradition” test on guns. At the same time, things could have gone worse—at least for all of you who work at the Federal Reserve.

The biggest bullet dodged was this week’s decision in Trump v. Barbara, in which the court ruled against Trump’s executive order attempting to nullify the birthright citizenship rights explicitly granted by the Constitution. One of the grand plans of this administration has been to ethnically cleanse the United States, and had the court gone along with Trump and his aide-de-camp, Stephen Miller, millions of Americans might now be facing the end of their citizenship—including the U.S. World Cup team’s current leading scorer, Folarin Balogun. Despite this rare victory of reason over right-wing nuttery, I think we should be concerned that the conservative legal movement still has its eye on waging war on the so-called Reconstruction Amendments—especially the one that grants birthright citizenship in the first place: the Fourteenth Amendment.

I raised an alarm last year about the far right’s desire to delete the Fourteenth. The amendment is a substantial target for the MAGA movement because of the unique way it enables and extols the promise of a multiracial democracy, something that Trump and his minions have sworn to destroy. And the way the Supreme Court overrode the disqualification clause, granting Trump the right to run for office again without any concern for the Constitution’s explicit admonitions against insurrectionists holding high office, gave abundant hope to those who’d like to see the Fourteenth Amendment dismantled.

Do the court’s conservatives disdain the Reconstruction Amendments? “They definitely do, to a certain extent,” says TNR’s Matt Ford. “They’ve largely read the Fifteenth Amendment out of the Constitution, in Brnovich and Callais, by making it impossible to properly enforce the Voting Rights Act, and they more or less nullified the disqualification clause in Trump v. Anderson. There are parts they’re fine with, like the equal protection clause in some circumstances, but they’ll never interpret it as broadly as the liberals.”

Ford says that the most charitable read is along the lines of what Justice Clarence Thomas said in his dissent in Trump v. Barbara. “They generally think the Reconstruction Amendments were designed to address the specific circumstances and exigencies of the post–Civil War era,” he says, “and that while they can have plenty of applications beyond that, they aren’t meant to be used to (in their view) fundamentally restructure American society anymore or provide special treatment for anyone.”

Here’s where the biggest conflict lies, as the liberal position is generally that the Reconstruction Amendments were a second founding, not a postbellum clean-up. “In this view,” says Ford, “Congress has broad powers to ensure that there is no American underclass or subaltern population, which Jim Crow nonetheless managed to create for about 90 years.”

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson got at this in her concurring opinion, in which she took issue with Thomas’s dissent on these lines. Thomas’s “narrow vision of the Fourteenth Amendment bears little relationship to the history of its ratification,” she wrote, adding that his take on the matter “elides the entire point of the Second Founding: The Reconstruction Amendments were an anticaste, antisubordination reset for the Nation, not a mere spot treatment for the dark stain of slavery.”

Thomas didn’t win the argument this week. But the fact that these matters are being argued in the first place is cause for serious alarm, according to former Massachusetts Senate candidate Alex Rikleen. “By even considering the legitimacy of birthright citizenship, the Roberts Court, stacked with jurists ready and willing to make anti-constitutional rulings time and again, has helped transform a fringe white supremacist attack on the 14th Amendment into a question that millions of people now understand as up for debate.”

This is hardly a new or novel fear. The Supreme Court’s ruling in Trump v. Anderson—in which they essentially deleted the disqualification clause from the Constitution—was enabled by the fact that too many were willing to countenance the idea that the plain English language of the Fourteenth Amendment was, in fact, open to interpretation. I am still angry that The New York Times in 2023 referred to the disqualification clause as “an obscure clause of a constitutional amendment enacted after the Civil War,” thus injecting a derogatory bit of editorializing into what purported to be a straight news piece.

In light of the tête-à-tête between Thomas and Jackson, I’m disturbed anew by the way the Times casually denigrated the amendments “enacted after the Civil War,” as if they were some stitched-on appendage and not language that carries the same force and lawfulness as the founding-era amendments. If the paper of record is skeptical that the Reconstruction Amendments are legitimate (and they, like the court’s conservatives, do seem interested in creating a subaltern class beyond the Constitution’s protections, for what it’s worth), this will only further the right-wing project to tear those amendments out of the Constitution and undo the nation’s second founding. So be glad that the worst didn’t happen, but stay on guard—we are not out of danger yet.

For our special print issue on the country’s 250th anniversary, we asked about 100 historians and other public intellectuals to make some lists for us that summarize the nation’s high and low points: our best and worst presidents; the images that most sharply define American history; the greatest works of art; and more. The results are fun, fascinating, and give a real and true sense of the sweep of our history.

Now it’s your turn! Take this reader survey and tell us what you think the right answers are—and see where yours stack up compared to our experts and to other readers. — Editor Michael Tomasky

History—in this case, through the pen of Thomas Boswell—does not record for us the context in which Samuel Johnson offered up the famous quote that “patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” According to samueljohnson.com, the English intellectual and polymath just blurted it out on the evening of April 7, 1775, providing no context or explanation of what was on his mind. Some biographers apparently believe he was thinking of William Pitt the Elder, and the former prime minister’s frequent invocation of the term.

We do, however, have more thoughts on the matter from Johnson that have survived. The year before, Johnson—something of a mixed bag, politically, but an ardent foe of slavery long before abolitionism became a movement in Great Britain—wrote and delivered to Parliament a speech he called “The Patriot.” It was election time, and Johnson was laying out for the assembled some of his ideas about the duties of public service, and what patriotism does, and does not, mean.

Herewith, just a few choice quotes:

“To instigate the populace with rage beyond the provocation, is to suspend publick happiness, if not to destroy it. He is no lover of his country, that unnecessarily disturbs its peace.”

“Still less does the true patriot circulate opinions which he knows to be false. No man, who loves his country, fills the nation with clamorous complaints, that the protestant religion is in danger, because ‘popery is established in the extensive province of Quebec,’ a falsehood so open and shameless, that it can need no confutation among those who know that of which it is almost impossible for the most unenlightened zealot to be ignorant.”

Finally, in his closing peroration, Johnson urged the next House of Commons to “unite in a general abhorrence of those, who, by deceiving the credulous with fictitious mischiefs, overbearing the weak by audacity of falsehood, by appealing to the judgment of ignorance, and flattering the vanity of meanness … arrogate to themselves the name of patriots.”

As we watch (or avoid watching) Donald Trump trying to turn the celebration of the United States’s 250th birthday into a celebration of Donald Trump, we would do well to remember Dr. Johnson’s thoughts. In wondering what he might think of the president’s ideas and actions this week, there is very little mystery. Let’s review a couple of those actions, as reported by Politico Playbook Friday morning:

• You saw that ridiculous video of Trump “talking” with the AI Teddy Roosevelt? Well, this was meant to be part of a “living museum recreating Theodore Roosevelt’s frontier experience,” as envisioned in a “planning document” from America250, a bipartisan, congressionally chartered, decade-old plan to launch various commemorations. “It hoped to draw 250,000 visitors for a nationally televised celebration on July 1 featuring A-list performers, immersive historical programming, a drone spectacular and, ultimately, the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library’s grand opening.” Instead, it launched with a visit from Trump.
• The Smithsonian Folklife Festival, a decades-old Washington summer fixture that always takes place on the National Mall, was given the boot this year and forced inside the Smithsonian Castle to make way for Trump’s Great American State Fair, which has been drawing fewer attendees than a lot of Little League games.
• Finally, it almost goes without saying that the Trump administration stiffed America250, according to Politico. Congress appropriated $150 million to the project, but organizers have received just $25 million to date. Democrats also alleged this week that some America250 donors were tricked into donating to Trump’s personal semiquincentennial organization, Freedom 250, which is responsible for the UFC fight at the White House and the ongoing fair. (Naturally, Freedom 250 is not subject to congressional oversight, and it can keep its donors private.)

But these, of course, are minor matters that will pass. The real hallmarks of Trump’s false patriotism are the things that make his tenure such a horrific embarrassment and civic tragedy to so many millions of Americans. The constant lies meant to glorify him and his reign. The toxic hatred of so many of the people he was elected to serve. The petty and immoral pursuit of his political enemies. The operatic and open corruption.

These are venal acts. But as July 4 approaches, it behooves us to remember specifically that they are unpatriotic. Or worse: They are aggressively anti-patriotic. Real patriotism is truthful and humble; it tolerates and even welcomes dissent, and, understanding that the people rule in a democracy, it serves supporters and detractors equally; it seeks justice rather than revenge; and it understands that to seek profit from office is abhorrent.

That’s Trump. A treacherous, know-nothing anti-patriot. The image that sticks with me, the photo that made me both roll my eyes and gasp in horror when I first saw it, was the one of Trump kissing an American flag. What a grotesque act of civil idolatry; in fact, let’s throw “idolatrous” in there too. And if you don’t understand why kissing a flag is an act of grotesque civic idolatry, then you, my friend, are part of the problem.

Let’s close with a few more thoughts on patriotism from some people who actually knew it means:

George Washington: “Guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism.”

G.K. Chesterton: “‘My country, right or wrong’ is a thing no patriot would ever think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying ‘My mother, drunk or sober.’”

Albert Einstein: “Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism—how passionately I hate them!”

And maybe my favorite, from Clarence Darrow: “True patriotism hates injustice in its own land more than anywhere else.”

There is still much to celebrate about the United States of America—its art and literature and music, its scientific achievements, its physical beauty, and of course the principles of liberty it introduced to the world 250 years ago and toward which we daily and yearly strive. The anti-patriots do have the upper hand right now, but more and more people are seeing through them. In addition, they are also making real, Johnson- and Darrow-esque patriots of millions who were once disengaged. That is something to be hopeful about, and to celebrate, this weekend.

Last year, The Atlantic reported that President Donald Trump had queried advisers about putting the delicate original copy of the Declaration of Independence on display in the Oval Office. “Trump’s request alarmed some of his aides, who immediately recognized both the implausibility and the expense of moving the original,” The Atlantic’s Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer wrote. “Displayed in the rotunda at the National Archives Building in Washington, D.C., it is perhaps the most treasured historical document in the U.S. government’s possession.”

Trump eventually settled for displaying a copy, but the document has clearly been on the administration’s mind—perhaps predictably so, given the semiquincentennial celebrations Trump will soon preside over. It was announced in April, for instance, that a limited edition of passports this year would feature John Trumbull’s iconic painting of the draft declaration’s presentation to Congress alongside the text of the declaration—with Trump’s portrait overlaid on top of it, naturally.

Trump has spent much of his second term symbolically grasping for the kind of monarchical deference most Americans believe the declaration was written to reject. In February 2025, for instance, the White House posted on social media an image of Trump wearing a crown and captioned it “LONG LIVE THE KING.” But substantively, the depravity of this administration’s policies has mattered more and angered more. And in surveying them, more than a few commentators, some here at The New Republic, have noted that the transgressions of Trump’s presidency bear an uncanny resemblance to the very grievances against Britain listed in the declaration. Trump’s unilateral demolition of federal agencies and programs, the biographer Stacy Schiff and Mother Jones’s David Corn and Tim Murphy have written alike, certainly recall the declaration’s charge that King George III had “refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.” The charge that George III had “endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners” also works as a précis of the administration’s immigration policy. “Cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world,” “imposing Taxes on us without our consent,” “transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences”—as Schiff writes, “for many who read the litany today, the resonance is unmistakable.”

The text of the declaration is the arena we return to, time and again, to debate America’s purpose and American identity. In recent decades, its self-evident truths have been flattened into truisms—innocuous clichés, available to all, that commit our leaders to vanishingly little.

True as all this may be, one needn’t refer to the Declaration of Independence for reasons why Trump is unfit to govern. And the declaration did more than separate us from the impetuous king about whom it offered a handy list of complaints. Exactly how much more, of course, has been contested throughout our history—the text of the declaration, it might be said, is the arena we return to, time and again, to debate America’s purpose and American identity. In recent decades, its self-evident truths have been flattened into truisms—innocuous clichés, available to all, that commit our leaders to vanishingly little. Those who signed it 250 years ago understood the possibility that they had condemned themselves to death. Today, the Declaration of Independence is the safest, most sterile ground in American rhetoric. But it needn’t be. The declaration and its history are instructive because they offer us reasons not only to resist would-be kings, but to make our own claims against the systems that foist would-be kings upon us. The declaration, even today, can be read as an invitation to a task that presses upon us as or more urgently than the cause of independence did: to “alter or to abolish” the systems destroying our country and our world.

As the conflict that would eventually be called America’s Revolutionary War began—and as many Americans today would likely be surprised to learn—the overwhelming consensus even among America’s patriot leaders, a radical minority of the Colonial population, was that British parliamentary monarchy remained the greatest system of government ever devised, and that King George III bore little to no responsibility for the Colonial policies that had angered them. It was wayward parliamentarians, “wicked Ministers and evil Counsellors,” John Jay had written to mainland Britons on the First Continental Congress’s behalf in the fall of 1774, who had trampled on the colonists’ rights as British subjects, and the remedy was a return to the British constitutional order as the colonists understood it, not a break from it.

And in a pattern that seems to recur throughout American history, delegates were sent to the Continental Congress with explicit and futile instructions to heal the growing divide any way they could. On March 16, for instance, the Delaware Assembly told its delegates to take up whatever measures “as shall appear to them best calculated for the accommodation of the unhappy differences between Great Britain and the Colonies, on a constitutional foundation.” Just over a month later, those “unhappy differences” finally culminated in a chaotic day of skirmishes between British troops and already mobilized militiamen at Lexington and Concord, just outside British-occupied Boston.

Even as open conflict broke out, Colonial leaders still hoped for rapprochement, although attitudes were changing. By mid-January 1776, Congress and attentive colonists had learned of a royal address to Parliament where George had accused them of mounting a rebellion “for the purpose of establishing an independent Empire” and welcomed foreign assistance in the fight to suppress it. Parliament had also passed the Prohibitory Act, banning trade with the Colonies and declaring that Colonial vessels were to be treated as “the ships and effects of open enemies.” And in November 1775, Virginia’s royal governor, Lord Dunmore, had issued a proclamation promising freedom to all slaves willing to fight for the British Army—a decision, in the opinion of South Carolina Continental Congress delegate Edward Rutledge, likelier to “work an eternal separation between Great Britain and the Colonies, than any other expedient, which could possibly have been thought of.”

These were the escalations that elevated independence to serious discussion for the first time after years of clear and consistent opposition from most patriot leaders, to the delight of radicals like John Adams, who mused that the Prohibitory Act, in particular, had already amounted to an “Act of Independency.”

It nevertheless became increasingly clear to many delegates and thinkers that Congress would have to formally clarify the Colonies’ new place in the world itself—partly so that the Colonies could engage potential allies abroad as a state rather than as a mere rebellion. And though Congress wouldn’t formally take up the independence question for months, the situation across the Colonies was shifting radically as royal governments were toppled and replaced. From the winter of 1775 through the spring of 1776—with varying levels of enthusiasm, willingly or not—the leaders of a Colonial rebellion became Founders. And even in the throes of political upheaval and an intensifying war, at least some of them took it upon themselves to consider, philosophically, what the fundamental purposes of the governments they were establishing would be. “All speculative politicians will agree, that the happiness of society is the end of government, as all Divines and moral Philosophers will agree that the happiness of the individual is the end of man,” John Adams wrote in “Thoughts on Government.” And thinkers “ancient and modern, Pagan and Christian,” including Confucius, Zoroaster, Socrates, and Muhammad, had established that true happiness consisted in the pursuit of virtue. “If there is a form of government then, whose principle and foundation is virtue,” Adams wrote, “will not every sober man acknowledge it better calculated to promote the general happiness than any other form?”

On May 10, Congress passed a resolution recommending that each of the Colonies “adopt such government as shall, in the opinion of the representatives of the people, best conduce to the happiness and safety of their constituents in particular and America in general.” Five days later, it narrowly approved a preface to the resolution assigning blame for the Colonies’ woes to “his Britannic Majesty, in conjunction with the lords and commons of Great Britain” for the first time. The resolution also declared that it was “irreconcileable to reason and good Conscience, for the people of these colonies now to take the oaths and affirmations necessary for the support of any government under the crown of Great Britain.” One delegate, Adams wrote in his diary, “called it, to me, a Machine for the fabrication of Independence. I said, smiling, I thought it was independence itself: but We must have it with more formality yet.”

Soon, they would. On June 7, Richard Henry Lee offered a resolution declaring, “That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States,” and “That it is expedient forthwith to take the most effectual measures for forming foreign Alliances.”

But while conditions were more favorable for independence, the resolution was stymied by a dilemma: Many delegates weren’t allowed by their instructions to back independence, a move that, ideally, would be supported as close to unanimously as Congress could manage. So the resolution was tabled as the Colonies, localities, militias, and other groups took it upon themselves to draft not only new state constitutions, but new instructions for the congressional delegates and other resolutions backing independence, some of which are collected in the historian Pauline Maier’s American Scripture. And some of these documents justified independence in terms that would have been familiar to readers of Enlightenment-era political philosophy, including the work of John Locke. “Whensoever therefore the legislative shall ... endeavour to grasp themselves, or put into the hands of any other, an absolute power over the lives, liberties, and estates of the people,” he wrote in his Second Treatise of Government, “by this breach of trust they forfeit the power the people had put into their hands for quite contrary ends, and it devolves to the people, who have a right to resume their original liberty, and, by the establishment of a new legislative, (such as they shall think fit) provide for their own safety and security, which is the end for which they are in society.”

Meanwhile, a committee that Congress had put together in anticipation of new instructions approving independence was already at work on a declaration. Among the five men whom Congress appointed—Connecticut’s Roger Sherman, New York’s Robert R. Livingston, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson—it was Jefferson who would take the lead on the draft, given his relatively light workload (Congress was a mess of overlapping committees that drew upon everyone’s time), and perhaps because a Virginian might have been seen as a more moderate and thus legitimate voice on the question of independence relative to a figure from the tempestuous North like the already-infamous Adams.

But as it happened, the document Jefferson and the committee produced was quite grand, beginning with a preamble that framed the question of independence in elemental human terms. “When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them,” it read, “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”

Some of the declaration’s complaints, made “to a candid world,” are well-remembered, like taxation without representation and the quartering of troops. Others, like the charge that Britain had raised “the conditions of new appropriations of lands” out West and backed attacks from “the merciless Indian savages” against frontier settlers, have been decidedly less celebrated over time.

The account of Colonial history offered by Jefferson in his initial draft of the declaration is, it should be said, fascinatingly unhinged in places. In one line edited out of the final document, for instance, it is claimed that colonists had settled America “unassisted by the wealth or the strength of Great Britain.” And in one section Congress deleted altogether—one of the most extraordinary and mystifying passages Jefferson ever wrote—blame for the slave trade is laid almost entirely at George III’s feet. The king had “waged cruel war against human nature itself,” he thundered, “violating its most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people, who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death, in their transportation thither.” And attempts to abolish or restrict slavery, he alleged, had been suppressed out of a determination “to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold.”

Jefferson, like many of the men who would sign the declaration, was nonetheless a reliable customer at the market where men were bought and sold. It’s thought that he owned more than 610 slaves over the course of his lifetime, including Sally Hemings, whom he raped at the age of about 14 or 15, and the children she bore with him.

Jefferson’s character and the character of the country being written and legislated into existence would eventually be judged by the terms established in the declaration’s second paragraph. An earlier pass at the Lockean ideas it would contain had been made by fellow Virginian George Mason in his Virginia Declaration of Rights, which proclaimed, in already familiar and widely used language, “That all men are born equally free and independant, and have certain inherent natural rights, of which they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; among which are the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety,” and also declared that the people “hath an indubitable, unalienable and indefeasible right to reform, alter or abolish” bad governments.

On the whole, Jefferson and Congress’s reworking of those words was an improvement:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,—

That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

The nuances and differences in language here—between Locke’s “life, liberties, and estates,” Mason’s lengthier construction, and the declaration’s “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” for instance—have been a gift and subsidy to historians and political philosophers ever since. But whether one takes the “pursuit of happiness” to mean the pursuit of material prosperity or believes, like Jefferson’s co-draftsman Adams, that pursuing “happiness” is a matter of pursuing virtue, the declaration’s second paragraph is, plainly, about the protection and enhancement of human agency—and, as far as at least Jefferson was concerned, not merely the agency of white men either. As Harvard’s Danielle Allen has observed, the question of whether “all men are created equal” should actually be read as an assertion of universal human equality is functionally answered by Jefferson’s deleted clause about slavery, in which he unambiguously refers to slaves—“persons” whose “rights of life & liberty” had been violated, including not only nonwhite males, but women—as “MEN.”

Ultimately, those words would matter less to the American cause, in the near term anyway, than the declaration’s final proclamation—that the 13 Colonies were “Free and Independent States” with “full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do.”

On July 1, Congress returned to consideration of Lee’s resolution declaring independence, and a final vote was taken on the 2nd, with all states but New York—still waiting on instructions supporting independence that the state would approve a week later—voting in the affirmative. The American Colonies, Pennsylvania newspapers immediately reported, were now a country. “The Hopes of Reconciliation, which were fondly entertained by Multitudes of honest and well meaning tho weak and mistaken People, have been gradually and at last totally extinguished,” Adams wrote to his wife, Abigail. “The Second Day of July 1776, will be the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival.... It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.”

With the 2nd of July firmly and obviously established as the day Americans would commemorate their independence, all that remained was the issuing of an official document announcing and explaining to the world what Congress had already done. Delegates collectively and carefully edited the draft of the declaration presented to Congress. To Jefferson’s frustration, their edits were rather extensive in places—tempering or eliminating Jefferson’s most tendentious claims most of the time and making the text more rhetorically fluid and graceful. On July 4th, Congress finished its work, approved the document, and sent it off for printing and distribution.

In the following weeks, the declaration would be read up and down the new country—to legislators and troops in the field, in town squares and taverns—and independence itself would be celebrated often raucously.

The British, meanwhile, long convinced that American patriots had been bent on independence to begin with, read the document incredulously, taking particular exception to Jefferson’s listed grievances, which critics alleged had been wildly exaggerated or made up entirely, and to the hypocrisy of denouncing Dunmore’s proclamation in a document that made appeals to human equality.

Despite the declaration’s glaring contradictions and British protestations, it fulfilled Congress’s practical objectives. The French eventually lent their indispensable aid not to a mere Colonial insurrection but to an independent American state, drawing the British into war with France and allied Spain.

And Americans, naturally, began memorializing the anniversary of the nation’s arrival in the world well before the war ended. When Congress decided to commemorate the first independence day in 1777, it began its preparations belatedly. The 4th happened to be the earliest a celebration could be put together, with all the “pomp and parade” Adams had hoped Americans would take to on the 2nd. That change stuck. The declaration itself, however, would fade from public consciousness for some time—it was little read or remarked upon after the war’s end and directly referenced only rarely in state bills of rights and the discourses surrounding the Constitution.

Partisanship eventually changed things. Democratic-Republicans, hoping to lionize their founder, Jefferson, and denigrate the Anglophilia of their rival Federalists, found the declaration useful to both ends, particularly after the War of 1812. And by the 1820s, relative stability and security in the rapidly growing and expanding republic finally afforded Americans the luxury of nostalgia. As the country looked back to a founding generation whose improbable project seemed to be succeeding, the declaration became a national totem. Its text, Jefferson wrote in the last letter he sent before his—and Adams’s—deaths on July 4, 1826, had been “pregnant with our own, and the fate of the world … the Signal of arousing men to burst the chains, under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings & security of self-government.”

Many of the chains that had yet to be broken, of course—at Jefferson’s own Monticello and elsewhere—bound the limbs of American slaves. And in the deepening political and social crises of what we now call the antebellum era, the tension in the declaration between its claim that “all men are created equal” and the reality of slavery was resolved by the defenders of slavery by rejecting the claim. “Taking the proposition literally (it is in that sense it is understood), there is not a word of truth in it,” John C. Calhoun said in an 1848 Senate speech.

Abolitionists, meanwhile, inevitably found inspiration in the declaration. Even in “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”—a now much-beloved and republished jeremiad against patriotic pomp in the face of slavery—the Declaration of Independence was, to Frederick Douglass, “the RINGBOLT to the chain of your nation’s destiny,” and a document that embodied “the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice.” “It is scarcely necessary to search for new truths,” he said in another address, “till the old truths which have been uttered from the Declaration of Independence until now, shall have become recognized and reduced to practice.”

These rival perspectives on the declaration clashed most famously and significantly in the 1858 debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas, where Lincoln defended a reading of the declaration that clearly left no room for the subjugation of human beings, whatever their condition or station, while rejecting racial equality. “There is no reason in the world why the negro is not entitled to all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence, the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” he said in one exchange. “I hold that he is as much entitled to these as the white man. I agree with Judge Douglas he is not my equal in many respects–certainly not in color, perhaps not in moral or intellectual endowment. But in the right to eat the bread, without the leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, he is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living man.”

While Confederates and their sympathizers would also appeal to the declaration as the South broke from a supposedly tyrannical Union, it was Lincoln’s reading of the document that would endure. So, too, would his framing of America, in the words of the Gettysburg Address, as a nation “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” and ever striving to fulfill that founding ideal—“the unfinished work,” he said of the fallen at Gettysburg, “which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.”

There’s little evidence that Lincoln considered expanding the rights of women an especially important part of completing that “unfinished work,” and most who shared his views didn’t. But feminists and suffragists also took up the language of the declaration for their cause—the “Declaration of Sentiments” adopted by the attendees of the convention of Seneca Falls in 1848 asserted that “that all men and women are created equal” and detailed “a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her.” And although it’s passed from memory even on the left, the declaration was also an especially important symbol for the early labor movement and its supporters. The Fourth of July, the historian Philip Foner wrote in We, the Other People, his regrettably named compilation of declaration-inspired documents, “was a day of parades, banquets, and festivals—a day for renewing the Spirit of ’76, for dramatizing the demands of the working class.”

In 1883, for instance, a weekly in San Francisco went as far as to advertise that a Fourth of July event would include the reading of “a celebrated COMMUNIST manifesto entitled ‘The Declaration of Independence’” which had been “written by a certain SOCIALIST named Thomas Jefferson.” “The gist of the Declaration is contained in the ‘self-evident’ clause,” the announcement read. “It is Justice, Reason, Truth. It is Socialism. For every man having the self-evident and inalienable right to the means of living has the right to receive the FULL product of his own labor … and his proportionate equal share of all the means of life created by past and dead generations and left by them here when they died, and now held by the thieves, robbers, nobles and tyrants of the world.”

Gradually, however, the left’s deepening ties to an international workers’ movement shaped by Marxism and class-based critiques of the American founding came to discourage appeals to the declaration and nationalist rhetoric more broadly, though there have been exceptions in the last half-century.

Meanwhile, condemnations of American racism—which the left’s invocations of the founding had rarely mentioned initially—from the Civil Rights Movement and the identity movements of the late twentieth century also influenced progressive perceptions of the document in different directions, from Martin Luther King Jr.’s rendering of the declaration as part of “a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir” to Black Power writings like the National Committee of Black Churchmen’s “Black Declaration of Independence,” which proclaimed that “the history of the treatment of Black People in the United States is a history having in direct Object the Establishment and Maintenance of Racist Tyranny over this People.”

These shifts in perceptions of the declaration at the margins of American politics coincided with the deepening of a mainstream consensus around the declaration’s meaning and import. “The Declaration is the Polaris of our political order—the fixed star of freedom,” Gerald Ford said upon the bicentennial. “It is impervious to change because it states moral truths that are eternal.” Though the Constitution had changed and would continue to change over time, he added, “the Declaration will be there, exactly as it was when the Continental Congress adopted it—after eliminating and changing some of Jefferson’s draft, much to his annoyance. Jefferson’s immortal words will remain, and they will be preserved in human hearts even if this original parchment should fall victim to time and fate.”

What do those words—“impervious to change”—mean to us now, 50 years on? In April 2025, after being shown Trump’s framed copy of the declaration in the Oval Office, ABC News’ Terry Moran asked the president what the document signified to him. “Well, it means exactly what it says—it’s a declaration,” Trump replied. “A declaration of unity and love and respect, and it means a lot. And it’s something very special to our country.” These remarks were widely ridiculed; again, Trump’s conduct in office has given many Americans good reasons to revisit and resurface the grievances that inspired the declaration and the American Revolution in the first place. But Trump’s gloss on the declaration was, in truth, fairly similar to what we’ve come to hear from most politicians.

“The soul of America is defined by the sacred proposition that all are created equal in the image of God, that all are entitled to be treated with decency, dignity and respect, that all deserve justice and a shot at lives of prosperity and consequence,” Joe Biden said in a 2022 address at Independence Hall. “Democracy begins and will be preserved in we, the people’s habits of the heart—in our character … the willingness to see each other not as enemies but as fellow Americans.”

Barack Obama similarly contended during his presidency and campaigns that the declaration’s truths were no longer in question. “We, the people,” he said, “declare today that the most evident of truths—that all of us are created equal—is the star that guides us still.”

It might be reasonably protested that human equality is still not a settled question in America. What the declaration’s history tells us, however, is that the concept of human equality, as professed by abolitionists, slave owners, feminists, chauvinists, communists, and capitalists alike, itself settles very few of our differences. This is partially because the concept of human equality is inert without political commitments and acts of interpretation that put us into conflict with one another. As such, the remarkable thing about the declaration’s place in the American story isn’t the extent to which appeals to it have unified us. It’s the extent to which those appeals haven’t.

As Ford said, the declaration addresses all who read it with the same words and language. But its conflicting interpretations arise from the fact that the declaration is an invitation to participate in political philosophy—it asks its readers to consider the nature of human existence and the fundamental ends of politics. On that basis, it justifies a particular course of action in such a way that makes clear its readers—by dint of their own reason and understanding of its concepts, even in a different age and under different circumstances—may have cause to do the same.

The human right to revolution was among the self-evident truths the declaration professed and the one that made it effectual as a document. It is also the self-evident truth politicians today are likeliest to omit from their accounts of the declaration’s significance.

The human right to revolution was among the self-evident truths the declaration professed and the one that made it effectual as a document. It is also the self-evident truth politicians today are likeliest to omit from their accounts of the declaration’s significance—dropped in favor of appeals to human equality as a shared principle that might bring Americans together to solve our problems without tearing the system down. “There’s not a liberal America and a conservative America, there’s the United States of America,” as Obama put it. “We are one people.” The promise of this civic nationalism, and of the now-prevailing reading of the declaration, was its potential to unify Americans of many ideologies and no ideology—the hope of bringing parties and peoples with profoundly divergent conceptions of America’s challenges and the solutions to them into alignment with a common understanding of America’s purpose. This was a capacious vision of American identity precisely because it was empty—one that offered a triumphalist account of where America has been and what America has accomplished in lieu of a concrete, contestable, and potentially divisive vision for where America should go. In the near-decade since Obama left the presidency, fascists have asserted themselves in that vacuum.

In 1933, by contrast, around 4,000 delegates of a “Continental Congress of Workers and Farmers” convened in Washington not only to demand relief amid an economic depression but to make the case for fundamental and transformative economic reforms. In their “A New Declaration of Independence,” they rededicated themselves to the cause of freeing mankind “from the crushing and needless bonds of poverty and insecurity” in an age of plenty. “The system is collapsing before our very eyes,” they wrote. “It is destroying itself with a destruction that threatens the historic gains of human rights and the achievements of human civilization.”

Whether the stewards of our systems accept it or not, the politics of systemic collapse have returned. Last fall, CNN found that 76 percent of Americans believe the U.S. political system is in need of either “a complete overhaul” or “major reforms”; a similar poll earlier in the year from Navigator Research found 74 percent support for the assertions that America’s political and economic systems need “major changes” or need “to be torn down completely.” This past spring, nearly 60 percent of respondents to an NBC News poll reported feeling that both the American political and economic systems were stacked against them.

Much of that discontent stems from the left’s continuing efforts to make certain facts about those systems—beyond the evils and disgraces of this particular presidency—known to the American people and “a candid world” today. In lieu of a democracy, we have political institutions that work most reliably for the rich—a constitutional order that does not guarantee the American people fair or equal representation, and where the right to vote and electoral outcomes are regularly challenged by a structurally advantaged minority. Instead of an economy that delivers the American worker just returns for their labor, the American people work within and under economic institutions that squeeze them more and more, only to deliver an ever-larger share of the economy’s gains to a smaller and smaller share of the already wealthy—including the man set to be the world’s first trillionaire—even as the costs of health care, housing, and education rise and roughly 36 million Americans languish in poverty. And rather than developing technologies that expand human capacities and enrich human life, out of a belief in the limitlessness of human potential, our most prominent technological innovators have made the American people, and all humanity, the subjects of a grand experiment without precedent in human history—the project of putting the human mind itself into obsolescence so that a privileged few, whose creations, developed in contravention of established laws, have already inundated our lives with noise and nonsense, may profit from the development of superior intelligences, while tens or hundreds of millions of ordinary people, they hope, are thrown out of their vocations.

True as all this may be, societies have never been remade by the restatement of grievances alone. Those who seek change on the scale we deserve and hope for are obliged to offer the American people a particular understanding of human life, what human beings are entitled to, and, divisive and contestable as they may be, strong ideas about what specific political, social, and economic arrangements are best suited to the preservation of human life, liberty, and happiness. The manifestations of the concept that “all men are created equal” that we’ve come to take for granted—the ones the stewards of our existing political institutions now celebrate—were built from such ideas and from conceptions of the American project those who established this country would have found incomprehensible. Fortunately, they were only our first generation of Founders. Many Founders since have reenacted the declaration and given its words new life. Now it is up to us whether it will survive as a mere artifact or as an example.

The Supreme Court’s ruling this week on birthright citizenship in Trump v. Barbara totaled approximately 194 pages. I wrote earlier this week about the various positions that each of the justices took. But it is worth dwelling for an extra moment on the unusual position taken by Justice Brett Kavanaugh in just 10 strange pages.

Unlike the rest of his colleagues, Kavanaugh took the position that Trump’s executive order was constitutionally permissible but statutorily illegal. In other words, the Fourteenth Amendment’s citizenship clause did not block Trump’s effort to curtail birthright citizenship, but an act of Congress that used identical language did.

At a very superficial level, this might sound sensible and moderate by implicitly inviting Congress to address the situation. Kavanaugh certainly positions the opinion—and himself—as such. On closer inspection, it might be the most dangerous and extreme view of U.S. citizenship to be articulated by the justices this week.

To understand Kavanaugh’s position, a brief sketch of the other justices’ views is necessary. Last January, Trump issued an executive order that instructed federal agencies to not recognize the U.S. citizenship of children whose parents were undocumented immigrants or living in the United States on temporary visas. A group of plaintiffs sued, arguing that this violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s citizenship clause.

That clause reads as follows: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.” In the 1898 case United States v. Wong Kim Ark, the Supreme Court ruled that the son of two Chinese immigrants in San Francisco had acquired U.S. citizenship at birth solely by virtue of being born on American soil. The “subject to the jurisdiction” exception was narrowed to a handful of situations that rarely apply today.

In Tuesday’s ruling in Barbara, the justices essentially took four separate positions. Five of them took what can be described as the consensus view. Americans had inherited the rule of birthright citizenship from the English common law, Chief Justice John Roberts explained in his majority opinion. Dred Scott v. Sandford’s holding that people of African descent were ineligible for U.S. citizenship was a violation of that rule, and the Fourteenth Amendment’s citizenship clause restored and entrenched the original understanding.

Two of Roberts’s fellow conservatives, Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, took a different view. Thomas affirmed Wong Kim Ark as correct but argued a person’s domicile status—or, more specifically, that of their parents—also determined whether that person had U.S. citizenship at birth. Since Trump’s executive order was lawful in at least some circumstances, like birth tourism, the two justices rejected the facial challenge to its constitutionality.

At the same time, both justices signaled that even if their domicile-focused view had prevailed, it would not grant total victory to the Trump administration. Thomas and Gorsuch concluded that children of temporary visa holders would not be eligible, and their respective dissents largely focused on that aspect of the order. But both justices wrote that they would not necessarily reach the same conclusion for children of undocumented immigrants, especially if they had lived long-term in the U.S.

The third position was adopted solely by Justice Samuel Alito, who argued that the clause “confers citizenship on only those children who, at birth, owe allegiance solely to this country.” He argued that Wong Kim Ark should be read much more narrowly by the court since, in his view, it showed “little respect for precedent.” Instead, Alito leaned heavily on phrasing in the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which only extended U.S. citizenship to those “not subject to any foreign power,” a narrower phrasing than the clause that was ratified three years later.

Even then, Alito ultimately concluded that Wong Kim Ark was correctly decided. The Chinese Exclusion Acts had made it impossible for Chinese immigrants to be naturalized, so Wong’s parents faced a different threshold under the clause. “By establishing domicile, they had done everything within their power to express their desire and intent to become Americans,” Alito explained.

“Wong Kim Ark is therefore best understood as holding that people who are lawfully present here, establish the United States as their intended permanent home, and do everything within their power to become United States citizens can be seen as no longer subject to any foreign power,” Alito argued.

That brings us, at last, to Kavanaugh. He voted with the majority to strike down the order on different grounds from those of Roberts and the other four justices in the majority. Kavanaugh said that he found the constitutional issue to be “far more complicated” than the statutory one. In particular, he nodded to the “detailed account of history and precedent” laid out by Roberts, as well as the “weighty and thoughtful dissents” by the other three conservatives.

This indulgent phrasing gave the impression of a justice trying to strike a narrower, more moderate position. “The constitutional issue is not straightforward, much as we might want it to be,” he wrote. “That is another reason why, in my respectful view, the court should have decided the case on the narrow and straightforward statutory ground.”

What does that ground look like? Kavanaugh noted that the Nationality Act of 1940 had incorporated the citizenship clause’s exact text into federal immigration law. He concluded that the president’s executive order was illegal as a matter of statutory interpretation. Courts sometimes rely on a principle known as “constitutional avoidance,” where judges avoid answering constitutional questions if they can decide a case on other grounds.

If avoidance was Kavanaugh’s intent, he failed miserably. It is not possible to disentangle the statutory text from the constitutional text this time. The citizenship clause and the Nationality Act both use identical phrasing, including the “subject to the jurisdiction” exception. All sides in this litigation, including the Trump Justice Department, also stipulated to the justices that there is no daylight between the two versions.

To explain why they mean different things, one must explain what they actually mean. Kavanaugh argued that they could be distinguished because Congress passed the Nationality Act roughly 42 years after Wong Kim Ark. He suggested that what Congress had actually done was incorporate Wong Kim Ark’s interpretation of the citizenship clause into federal immigration law, including the four recognized exceptions that flow from “subject to the jurisdiction.”

This meant, in Kavanaugh’s eyes, that Congress could lawfully do what the president could not. “If Congress amends [the Nationality Act] or otherwise enacts a statute creating new exceptions along the lines of the Executive Order for children born to foreign citizens unlawfully or temporarily in the country, such a statute, as I see it, would pass constitutional muster,” he wrote.

This view is substantially more extreme than those of Roberts, Thomas, or Gorsuch. In a footnote, he assured readers that he agreed with Alito’s position that the “result in Wong Kim Ark was correct given the facts and circumstances in that case.” Even so, he claimed that the Wong Kim Ark exceptions were not a “closed set,” and additional ones could be discerned even if undreamt by the Fourteenth Amendment’s drafters.

“Considering the four exceptions as a permanently frozen or closed set as of the Fourteenth Amendment’s ratification in 1868—such that there can be no subsequent exceptions recognized based on new developments after 1868—is inconsistent with the Court’s longstanding approach to constitutional interpretation in a variety of areas,” Kavanaugh claimed.

If this sounds a little un-originalist, that’s because it is. Originalists tend to hold that the Constitution’s meaning is fixed, in contrast to the theories of living constitutionalism that originalism was created to refute. That fixed meaning is typically discerned by the text’s original public meaning when it was ratified or amended. Kavanaugh would take a different approach by adapting the citizenship clause to new situations rather than applying it as written.

To be fair to Kavanaugh, he is hardly the first or only originalist to stray from the faith in this case. Solicitor General D. John Sauer also claimed at oral arguments in Barbara that the president was responding to situations that the clause’s drafters did not anticipate. Roberts gave an originalist quip in response: “It’s a new world. It’s the same Constitution.”

Kavanaugh, perhaps anticipating this critique, argued that all of this is just normal constitutional interpretation. (Which, again, he claimed to not be doing at the outset.) “The Constitution is an enduring document, and its principles were designed to, and do, apply to modern conditions and developments,” he assured readers, before adding that it must be “faithfully applied” to “modern situations that were unknown or unanticipated by the Constitution’s Framers.”

“Therefore,” Kavanaugh concluded, “under basic tenets of constitutional interpretation, other exceptions can be recognized when the new exceptions (i) are based on subsequent developments or circumstances that are new, i.e., largely unknown or unanticipated by the Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment, and (ii) are relevantly similar to the four previously recognized Wong Kim Ark exceptions.”

One could easily apply this reasoning to uphold an assault-weapons ban, for example, by arguing that the Second Amendment’s drafters could not anticipate such an efficient killing machine in the age of muskets and cannons. If past exceptions could be found, so could new ones, as well. It will be interesting to see if Kavanaugh takes this approach next term when the court hears cases on exactly that subject.

All the same, this is not a particularly laudable constitutional interpretation. By striking down Trump’s executive order on the grounds that Congress said otherwise, he essentially transforms the citizenship clause into an Article 1 legislative power. If Congress can grant or deny exemptions to the clause, then it does not really protect a constitutional right or rule of citizenship at all. Then again, most of Kavanaugh’s opinion dwells on judicial interpretation of these exemptions, so maybe it would all be up to the Supreme Court to ultimately decide.

Kavanaugh also fundamentally misunderstood why the citizenship clause exists. Both the Roberts majority and the other three conservative dissenters agree that its purpose was to constitutionalize a rule for American citizenship. They only part ways with one another on the origins, scope, and basis of the rule that the citizenship clause defines.

All three positions also recognized that U.S. citizenship carries special significance. Roberts described it as the “right to have rights.” Thomas and Gorsuch complained that the majority’s sweeping ruling “devalue[s]” American citizenship, while Alito said that citizenship was “precious.” They also seem to implicitly understand that the clause sought to place citizenship itself beyond ordinary political debate by emphasizing the case’s high stakes.

Kavanaugh’s position, by contrast, would greatly diminish the security and integrity of citizenship for everyone. Americans’ rights to participate in their political community would be fungible, partible, and malleable depending on what Congress (and, in all likelihood, the courts) decide. Even Kavanaugh himself may not agree with the logical outcome of his reasoning, since he still presumes that birthright citizenship is the norm, even as he rejects Wong Kim Ark.

I also cannot stress enough again how strange it is, almost to the point of concern, that Kavanaugh thinks that all of this isn’t constitutional interpretation. Indeed, his opinion is at war with itself: In the concluding paragraph, he states outright that Trump’s executive order “does not violate the Fourteenth Amendment” without elaboration, as if he simply started writing the opinion and stumbled upon the conclusion along the way.

It is hard to avoid the impression that Kavanaugh wanted to join Alito’s opinion but could not bring himself to do it because of public perception. In his desire to present himself as a middle-of-the-road guy on this issue, Kavanaugh adopted a nonsensical view of the entire case and fell backward into extreme propositions that go beyond anything laid out by his colleagues. Even Alito, for example, does not propose that Congress can lay out “exceptions” to the citizenship clause.

“Nothing in this opinion is intended to suggest how birthright citizenship should be addressed as a policy matter,” Kavanaugh affirmed in a final footnote. This is likely meant to assure readers that his concurring opinion was the product of carefully considered legal reasoning. In this case, it would be more comforting if the opposite were true.

In January 2025, I received a response to a Freedom of Information Act request I’d sent to Immigration and Customs Enforcement in December—of 2020, four years earlier. The law plainly states that federal agencies have 20 business days to provide a substantive response to all FOIA requests. But ICE didn’t care.

“Before we begin the time-consuming review process,” the email stated, using the same boilerplate language I’d been given by the agency in response to other, unrelated FOIA requests, “we want to ensure that you are still interested in continuing the processing of this request.”

This Saturday is not just the 250th anniversary of the United States. It’s also the sixtieth anniversary of FOIA, one of the most critical tools for government transparency in the U.S., which has been used to uncover severe government wrongdoing. Alas, the law—or rather, the government’s adherence to it—is broken.

Over the past 15 years, in my work at the nonprofit Center for Constitutional Rights, I’ve filed and helped to litigate dozens of FOIA requests, primarily related to federal law enforcement programs run by our bureaucracy of acronyms—ICE, FBI, DHS, DOD, and many more. It has become increasingly apparent that most federal agencies don’t take these inquiries seriously unless, and until, we take them to court. This is not how it’s supposed to work.

While the Trump administration’s mass purging of federal employees and offices has created new roadblocks to filing records requests, government resistance to the law is not new. In fact, President Lyndon B. Johnson somewhat reluctantly signed the FOIA into law on July 4, 1966, hedging on how much access the public might have, especially related to “individual privacy” and “national security.” In the decades since, both Republican and Democratic administrations have eroded the ability of ordinary people to get useful and timely information via the act.

By “useful information,” I am not talking about whether alien life has escaped from Area 51 or what took place on the grassy knoll. As the manager of CCR’s Open Records Project, every month I file FOIA requests or train advocates, lawyers, and journalists on how to draft their own. The requests we file support people who desperately need individual immigration files for detained family members, grassroots organizations looking to shed light on surveillance technology Border Patrol uses, or advocates deeply concerned with how the administration’s policies threaten transgender people across the country. But law enforcement agencies have found numerous ways to delay and ultimately force requesters to give up out of sheer frustration.

For instance, an agency might simply never respond, respond years later, send a boilerplate response accusing the requester of submitting an “overly broad” request, or, if the agency actually produces documents, redact those records so severely that they are useless. A person is then typically left with only one choice—pursue legal action—but lawyers often require thousands of dollars in fees. Even if you do get into court, agencies can still find ways to delay providing records for months if not years, often making the records irrelevant by the time they are received. And federal judges typically defer to government officials, creating an increasingly immense docket of case law supporting government secrecy rather than openness the law is supposed to provide.

A few examples from FOIA requests I’ve filed show the lengths to which agencies will go to hide the most basic information. Simple data points like the number of medical staff employed at an immigration detention center have been redacted from public view due to potential “hostage taking.” A former director of ICE’s Chicago office “lost” archives of emails when he copied them onto a corrupt external hard drive, but he should have responded to the FOIA request years before then.

As it was Congress that forced the executive branch to sign FOIA into law and later expand it, Congress has the power to do so again. But our representatives need to look beyond vague reforms such as integrating AI technology or pumping more funding into the already bloated budgets of the Homeland Security or Defense departments. I asked several colleagues with over a decade of experience writing and litigating FOIA requests to imagine more specific and concrete ways of making FOIA an effective tool for transparency.

Maryland attorney Amber Qureshi suggested that if an agency fails to comply with FOIA deadlines, courts should forbid the agency from withholding certain types of discretionary information, which it might otherwise do. “Barring an agency from applying discretionary exemptions would further FOIA’s purpose of full agency disclosure and speed up processing times,” she told me.

Andrew Free, a lawyer and investigative journalist based in Georgia, also suggested accountability measures. “Congress should authorize per-day, per-record penalties for agencies that fail to substantively respond to FOIA requests.” He noted that Washington state and New Mexico already employ similar rules in their states’ open records laws.

The incredible deference many federal judges afford law enforcement officials to hide almost any material from public view also remains a major problem. For instance, so-called “Glomar” responses, where an agency refuses to acknowledge whether it even has responsive material, should be outlawed. Congress members could create a new agency to oversee and audit FOIA, similar to the Committee for Open Government in New York, which regularly promulgates advisory opinions on the law.

Recently, a government attorney alleged that a FOIA request of ours was so large it would “shut down the government.” But none of us who continue to pursue these requests should be intimidated by such hyperbole. Though broken, the FOIA still remains a useful tool, and we need its help in combating the culture of secrecy that permeates our political class while we demand that Congress strengthen the law.

Sixty years ago, despite his reservations about FOIA, President Johnson said, “I signed this measure with a deep sense of pride that the United States is an open society in which the people’s right to know is cherished and guarded.” As I’ve seen firsthand, the people’s right to know is no longer cherished by leaders in the executive branch, and it’s not being guarded by those on Capitol Hill. As the Trump administration goes to lengths to conceal its crimes and corruption, there’s never been a more critical time for the politicians who still believe in the principle of FOIA to not only defend it, but expand it.

As the United States celebrates its 250th anniversary, wealth inequality has ballooned to a historic high. Elon Musk just became the world’s first trillionaire, and a new class of billionaires is soon to be minted as AI companies prepare to go public. And while some leaders want you to believe this type of extreme wealth embodies the enduring promise of the American dream, that couldn’t be further from the truth.

In fact, the Founders were deeply worried that concentrations of wealth would corrode self-governance and hollow out the republic from within. In their study of history, they saw how wealth inequality fueled political division, class conflict, and social unrest, eroding governance and ultimately contributing to failed states like the Roman Empire.

James Madison’s Federalist, Number 10 explicitly links political instability to economic disparity, citing the inherent tension between property owners and non–property owners. Madison saw a role for government to address economic inequality in his 1792 essay Parties, noting that it should do so “by political equality of rights ... and by withholding unnecessary opportunities from a few, to increase the inequality of property, by an immoderate, and especially an unmerited, accumulation of riches.” Madison warned that if the state favors financial speculation, it creates an artificial aristocracy that distorts public policy and subverts democratic representation.

Thomas Jefferson was even more full-throated in his warnings about concentrated economic power. Jefferson worried powerful employers could coerce workers’ votes, thus limiting their democratic power. In an 1816 letter, Jefferson wrote, “I hope we shall take warning from the example [of England] and crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country.”

Jefferson believed a concentrated financial class would inevitably capture government institutions, transforming a republic of equals into a playground for the wealthy. Because of this, he championed structural limits to inequality, for instance by advocating for the abolition of laws that kept massive estates intact across generations to ensure wealth was continually broken up and redistributed through inheritance. He even authored two laws as a Virginia state legislator banning feudal inheritance practices that were in place across Europe.

Today, the Founding Fathers’ worst fears are playing out in front of our eyes.

Alongside Musk, the newly minted trillionaire, 300,000 U.S. households—those worth $50 million or more, in the top 0.2 percent—control $40 trillion, an amount comparable to the net worth of the 256 million Americans who make up the bottom 80 percent. And just as the Founders warned, this concentrated wealth is actively eroding our democracy and economy. Under our current tax code, wealth begets more wealth, and that wealth is in turn wielded to amass extraordinary power.

The American dream of working hard to get ahead looks very different for billionaires. Sure, there is an element of hard work, but it’s the system created by and for the ultrawealthy that underpins this financial success. Take Musk as an example. His companies have benefited from at least $38 billion in government contracts, subsidies, and tax breaks, with billions more guaranteed in the years ahead.

Our tax dollars built the foundation for Musk’s accomplishments, and now he owns the penthouse. And here’s the kicker: After sucking up all those public dollars, Musk can exploit our tax code to choose whether he gives anything back at all to the society that trained the scientists and built the infrastructure that enabled him to accumulate such a fortune.

That’s because under our current system, billionaires like Musk are able to pay very little—and sometimes nothing at all—in federal income taxes, while ordinary workers pay tax on every paycheck. Our current tax system largely shields wealth held in assets like stock from taxation, transferring the cost of running our society onto you and me while empowering Musk to accumulate the kind of wealth and political power that corrupts democracy itself.

That type of extreme wealth is then wielded to reshape markets and ensure policy outcomes that will protect and expand this financial and political dominance. Extreme wealth concentration has eroded the “one person, one vote” principle underpinning American democracy. In 2024, for example, Elon Musk personally financed the Trump campaign’s ground operations and gave individual Trump voters $1 million per day, a legally questionable scheme that some experts argued amounted to paying for votes.

That same year, 150 billionaires collectively spent a record-breaking $2 billion on federal races, and many have been rewarded with positions of real power in the government. Trump empowered Musk to gut essential workers and services through DOGE while securing new federal contracts and ending regulatory actions that threatened $2.3 billion in potential liabilities for his companies. Trump selected Cabinet members from the top 0.0001 percent of America, and his signature tax law will reward the richest 1 percent of Americans with $121 billion in net tax cuts in 2026 alone. Is it a surprise then, that in the first 16 months since Trump was reelected, the collective fortune of America’s 974 billionaires grew by $1.96 trillion, or 30.6 percent?

Today’s extreme wealth concentration is precisely the oligarchic threat the Founders envisioned. The American dream cannot survive when unlimited wealth for a few destroys opportunities for the rest of us.

A crisis of this scale calls on us to reflect the courage that the Founders displayed in declaring independence from the entrenched power of the British Empire. We must stop pretending that merely calling for the ultrawealthy to pay their “fair share” in order to meet certain revenue targets is sufficient within a tax system that is itself so unfair and unjust.

Instead, we must declare our own independence from the influence of the oligarchy by pursuing a set of reforms that are targeted toward reducing their power and building up our own. That means using tax policy as a way to reduce the wealth of the ultrawealthy by aggressively taxing their wealth, incomes, and estates. Doing so is essential for constructing a new system that generates the revenue we need for rebuilding the working class with programs that benefit working families, such as universal childcare, affordable housing, and climate-resilient infrastructure. We must also deploy policy tools to break up the dangerous concentrations of power threatening our economic growth, democracy, and climate.

Reining in billionaire control is incredibly popular: 77 percent of voters support raising taxes on the ultrawealthy, including 65 percent of Republicans and 75 percent of independents. Three in five (62 percent) prefer a candidate who supports raising taxes on billionaires, versus just 12 percent who prefer one who opposes it—a 50-point gap. Among Democratic primary voters, that gap widens to 79 points (83–4). This is because voters are living the consequences the Founders warned of—they cannot afford housing, health care, childcare, or other basic needs. They yearn for the upward mobility of previous generations. The American dream isn’t just fading—it is being erased by billionaires who are actively enriching themselves at the expense of the rest of us. They wield their extreme wealth as weapons, bending our democracy to their own agenda like kings—and as the Founders foretold.

Using the tax code to break up this concentrated wealth and power isn’t radical, it’s actually our founding-era orthodoxy. It’s time for our leaders to tax greed.

The sky is actually falling at the Great American State Fair.

The stage for Freedom 250’s July Fourth celebration fell apart during rehearsals Thursday, with a large component of the structure’s ceiling falling roughly two stories down and landing behind a group of dancers and musicians. Miraculously, no one appeared injured.

The stage is falling apart at the rehearsal for Freedom 250's July 4th celebration. pic.twitter.com/bPbg94hp6X

— Aaron Parnas (@AaronParnas) July 2, 2026

Online commenters were quick to flame the stage’s apparently dangerous construction.

“That’s what happens when you don’t consider merit in hiring,” wrote one X user.

“This is why you never let Trump select the subcontractor based on percentage of kickback,” commented another.

Even a lawmaker joined in on the roast.

“Feeling more and more like the Hunger Games,” wrote Kentucky Representative Thomas Massie.

Practically every component of Trump’s wildly expensive plan to celebrate America’s 250th anniversary has turned out to be a dud. The $15 million renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool failed to rid the iconic monument of algae; a multi-week lineup of music acts had to be cancelled after practically every artist pulled themselves from the program; and a fleet of buses carrying a contemporary retelling of American history have failed to make a splash in their journey across the country.

The Great American State Fair was supposed to be the centerpiece of the celebration, yet even it is more of a potemkin village than a sincere homage. The booths, which offer space for each state to represent its heritage and culture (pet a replica of a bison at the North Dakota pavilion, or walk away with a bag of chips from Maine), are ideologically pitted against the seismic presence of the federal government and Trump’s authoritarian expansion (banners featuring Trump’s grim face flank the event, while a small-scale replica of his proposed “Triumphal Arc” sits center stage). As The Atlantic’s Kelsey Ables put it, “the president is bringing down the mood.”

U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro announced Thursday that a grand jury had indicted former Olympic canoeist David Hearn on charges of vandalizing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.

The indictment seems rather flawed, as Hearn, 67, maintains that all he did was dip his hand into the pool and touch a piece of peeling paint.

“I didn’t vandalize anything,” Hearn told The Washington Post the day after his arrest last month. “I didn’t destroy or break or peel anything. By the time I realized what was going on, I was being put in handcuffs.”

At a press conference Thursday, a reporter asked Pirro why Hearn was being charged with a felony over something so small, and she struggled to explain.

Pirro: He caused damage and that damage was over $1000.

Reporter: How do you prove that?

Pirro: With an expert.

Reporter: With his bare hands?

Pirro: We believe it's his bare hands, both hands.

Reporter: Do you believe it was damaged before?

Pirro: He damaged it!… pic.twitter.com/LmtTZueKZU

— Acyn (@Acyn) July 2, 2026

“There was an effort, a violent effort, to rip up the sealant from the pool, and irrespective of whether or not we think that there is some situation that preceded it, we can state, and prove beyond a reasonable doubt, that he caused damage, and that damage is worth over a thousand dollars,” Pirro said.

When asked how she could prove that, Pirro said, “With an expert,” and urged the reporter who asked the question to come to the trial. The reporter incredulously asked if Hearn used his bare hands, to which Pirro affirmed yes, both hands. The reporter then asked if the pool wasn’t already damaged before.

“Oh, he damaged it. He damaged the pool. He damaged this pool,” Pirro repeated. When the reporter brought up videos showing that the pool’s paint was already peeling, Pirro said, “Well, good. I’m glad you got that evidence. Come on in the grand jury and you can testify.”

It all seems nuts, as the poor state of the pool, from algae growth to peeling paint, had been documented for quite some time before Hearn visited it. The paint had been peeling because hydrogen peroxide was dumped into the pool in a vain effort to kill algae growth. Hearn is clearly being made a scapegoat to satisfy President Donald Trump, who is blaming nonexistent vandals rather than admit he messed up the pool.