The New Republic

President Trump’s ballroom guy was sent to Russia for secret discussions.

The Financial Times reports that the chair of the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, Rodney Mims Cook Jr., was given a diplomatic passport before attending Russian President Vladimir Putin’s economic forum in St. Petersburg, Russia, in June. Cook, who is overseeing the White House ballroom construction, was assigned a diplomatic security detail.

While in Russia, Cook met with government officials on what he described as a “cultural visit” where he showed officials pictures of his “dacha” in Atlanta. However, Trump administration officials were hoping to make diplomatic inroads with the Russian government, and Cook met with Anton Koyakov, a senior aide to Putin.

The U.S. had boycotted the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum since 2019, following the arrest of an American businessman, and continued staying away after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Cook was the first U.S. official to attend since 2018. During his June visit, he witnessed a Ukrainian drone strike on a Russian oil refinery, telling the Financial Times it was “too close for comfort.”

Cook didn’t give the publication any details about his meetings with Russian officials, if he was there on Trump’s instructions, or whether he planned to visit Russia again, saying, “There are many requests. We’re working on that now.”

While on his visit, Cook took part in a “Russia-US: Dialogue of Cultures” panel, showing pictures of his Atlanta home that he said was built in the “Russian wooden vernacular, which has touched my heart over the decades.” He gave a presentation on Russian churches, public buildings, and homes he has helped to restore in the country, which he has been visiting since the 1990s. His fellow panelists were senior Russian officials and cultural dignitaries, some of whom are under U.S. sanctions.

“I know Russian culture, and I know most of the leadership of their cultural institutions,” Cook told the Financial Times. The panelists “included most of my old friends, which was really a great homecoming. The personal connection between all of us was very clear.”

Cook’s presentation didn’t mention the war in Ukraine until it was almost over, when he said, “My children don’t feel this anymore. We must educate them to understand this. But we must be at peace in order to achieve these goals.... Help us do this.”

He did hold a question-and-answer session with Putin the next day, where he relayed a “good hello from your friend, President Trump.”

“We have a lot of ideas to talk about between our two capital cities in the next week,” Cook said. Putin responded by thanking Cook and saying he “pushed the puck back” to Trump. Cook told the Financial Times that he got a hockey puck from a friend and put it on the Resolute Desk in the White House, “much to President Trump’s amusement.”

The whole visit, which Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in June he was “not aware” of, seems like it was designed to be under the radar to get around public criticism and scrutiny. The U.S. under Trump is still ostensibly backing Ukraine, although it isn’t funding any military aid, and it has temporarily eased some sanctions against Russia. Trump’s willingness to engage with Russia has been heavily criticized, and it’s not clear how much the administration was involved in Cook’s trip.

Disney and ABC are suing President Trump’s Federal Communications Commission, arguing that the administration’s demand that eight of their stations file their broadcast license renewals early is an attack on their free speech.

“Acting through the Federal Communications Commission, the Administration has waged a retaliatory campaign against ABC for a single reason: it disapproves of what ABC broadcasts,” the lawsuit reads. “That campaign began in this Administration’s earliest days and has only intensified since.... Again and again, the administration ​has attacked ABC’s speech — the stories its journalists report and the viewpoints its network programs air.”

This FCC’s threat to strip the ABC channels of their broadcast licenses followed a joke from late-night television host Jimmy Kimmel last spring, in which he said First Lady Melania Trump glowed “like an expectant widow” two days before the failed White House Correspondents’ Dinner attack. The joke caused a massive uproar from MAGAworld, including the president himself, who called for Kimmel’s termination. The lawsuit specifically cites Trump’s Truth Social posts calling for Kimmel’s termination as proof of the administration’s bias against him.

“The Commission issued an unprecedented order requiring the Stations to file early applications to renew their licenses—years before any of their licenses would have come up for renewal in the ordinary course and allowing only thirty days to file applications which ordinarily take months to prepare,” the suit continued.

Kimmel was also attacked by the Trump administration for joking about how Republicans responded to the death of Charlie Kirk last year. Disney briefly pulled Kimmell off the air after pressure from FCC Chair Brendan Carr.

The FCC attack came amid a probe into the daytime talk show The View for being too woke.

The lawsuit from Disney—one of the biggest and most recognizable media companies ever—is an aggressive defense of media freedom, rather than another capitulation as we’ve seen from other networks.

This story has been updated.

The Trump administration lashed out at Senator Jon Ossoff over his comments questioning the president’s close relationship with his assistant Natalie Harp because it shed national light on a dynamic the administration is already deeply insecure about.

“He golfs and trades stocks,” the Georgia senator said during a weekend rally in Atlanta. “See, he doesn’t want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the emir of Qatar.”

Harp, a former TV presenter at the far-right One America News, became an aide for Trump in 2024 and has been virtually inseparable from him since.

Semafor reported that the White House responded to Ossoff the way it did—calling him “Pee-Wee Herman,” “Jon Jackoff,” and a “feminine theatre kid cosplaying as Barack Obama”—because Harp’s closeness to President Trump is a sore subject internally. It has “unnerved” many staff members, who believe Harp “will ultimately jump the highest out of anyone in the room when [Trump] says jump,” according to an anonymous source. Another source close to the White House noted that “the first lady doesn’t like these types of things” and Trump gets “furious” when personal issues become the center of national attention.

The questioning of Harp and Trump’s close relationship is rooted in Harp’s own actions. She never leaves the president’s side, even making it onto his secret flight out of Turkey last month, while journalists and Cabinet members like Secretary of State Marco Rubio remained aboard the Air Force One gifted by Qatar that was reportedly the potential target of an Iranian strike. Harp’s estranged older brother told The Daily Mail that Harp and Trump’s relationship was “very unhealthy,” and New York Times writers Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan reported in their book Regime Change that Harp in 2023 left Trump what amounted to love letters, with one even reading, “You are all that matters to me.”

Reporter: Ossoff said you'd rather travel with your aide Natalie Harp and build the ballroom than do your job as president. What is your response?

Trump: You mean Pee-Wee Herman? pic.twitter.com/M7nPFkEpQz

— Acyn (@Acyn) August 17, 2026

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the August 18 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.

So the sixty-day deadline for Donald Trump and Iran to reach a deal has now expired, and Trump is plainly in a terrible mood over it. In an interview with Fox News, he raged over the Strait of Hormuz, claiming that he’ll bomb the shit out of the country of Oman if its talks with Iran concerning the strait get in his way. It’s not hard to see why Trump is so angry. In a series of leaks from inside the administration, officials basically admit that Trump has lost the war.

What’s really striking about this situation is that Trump seems absolutely convinced that time is on his side. Yet the opposite appears true. Literally every day that passes makes this situation worse for him, and he doesn’t seem capable of grasping this. So now what? We’re talking about all of it with Ariane Tabatabai, a former Defense Department official under Joe Biden, who’s now at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. Ari, nice to have you on again.

Ariane Tabatabai: Thanks for having me on again.

Sargent: So the sixty-day deadline for Trump and Iran to reach this deal has expired, the Strait of Hormuz remains closed, and there are these parallel talks between Iran and Oman about how to reopen the strait. Ari, can you just sum up where we are right now with all these moving parts?

Tabatabai: Yeah, we’re basically where we’ve been for quite a few months now, which is to say that there was this memorandum of understanding that was supposed to set the 60-day calendar for the United States and Iran to resolve a number of issues, among them the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, and very importantly, the fate of Iran’s nuclear program. The 60 days came and went, and we do not have a resolution on either of those issues, and we do not have a resolution on anything else.

Sargent: So maybe you can just settle this right now. Trump keeps saying that we’re in control of the Strait of Hormuz. Who’s in control of the Strait of Hormuz?

Tabatabai: Well, we have assets in the area, but Iran has effectively found a way to control the Strait of Hormuz when it comes to what vessels are able to pass. It can hold various vessels, commercial and otherwise, at risk. It can do it from the shore, where it has missiles and drones.

And it has effectively installed this, again, tolling system that I think is not going anywhere anytime soon. That is why I think that, you know, it’s pretty clear that the Iranians have the upper hand on this one.

Sargent: Right. So the short version is that we have blockaded the strait, which means that we can prevent Iran from doing certain types of business. But beyond that, Iran controls it in the sense that it decides who gets out and who doesn’t.

Tabatabai: That’s right.

Sargent: OK, so it’s in this context that Trump spoke with Fox News correspondent Trey Yingst about the whole situation. Listen to what Yingst said about that conversation.

Trey Yingst (voiceover): Now, I asked the president about these parallel talks that are taking place between Iran and Oman about control of the Strait of Hormuz. And the president told Fox News, “if Oman gets in the way, we’ll bomb the s--- out of them.” We went on to talk about a variety of different regional topics, including the U.S. stockpiles of weapons that are currently stationed in the Middle East. The president says what we’ve used so far is “peanuts.”

Sargent: So let’s take this in two pieces. First, note that Trump threatened to bomb the shit out of Oman if it gets in the way of his efforts, as if those efforts are producing such spectacular successes. What is it that he doesn’t like about Oman’s conduct right now?

Tabatabai: Well, look, he’s not been particularly specific about what it is he does not like about Oman’s conduct. What he has indicated, and what we can kind of get from his statement, is that he believes that the Omanis, by virtue of being engaged in this diplomatic process with Iran, are making it difficult for the United States to win a decisive victory against Iran and to close out the war.

The reality is that that’s not the case, right? We are not winning the war—but not because of Oman, or because there are diplomatic processes going on. By the way, the president, as I indicated earlier on, has also sought to engage in said diplomatic processes. So presumably he likes that there is an ability to reach Iran and to have negotiations with them.

So I think he is just, you know, essentially taking Oman and lashing out at them because of the fact that he is unable to close out this war. He’s unable to get the victory that he desires. And none of that has anything to do with Oman. It has to do with the poor planning that has happened in the lead-up to the war, and the fact that we do not have any clear objectives when it comes to the war.

Sargent: This is very simple, I think, from Trump’s point of view. This can’t be his failure, so it’s got to be someone else’s failure, and so it must be Oman’s today and it’ll be someone else’s tomorrow. Is that the size of it?

Tabatabai: I think that’s pretty accurate.

Sargent: OK, well, there’s the second piece of that exchange that this Fox correspondent had with Trump. What do you make of that, where Trump says we’ve only used peanuts in terms of weaponry in this war?

Tabatabai: Well, that is just not accurate. We have spent billions of dollars in this war, and this is not me opining. This is according to Trump’s own officials at the Pentagon. Then there is the fact that there are all the costs that are not where you can put a dollar amount to it. And that includes things like military readiness, morale among our service members.

Just this past week, we’ve had multiple stories about service members who have been on very long deployments, where they’re, you know, missing things like prescriptions for their contacts, where they’re running out of sanitary supplies, and morale is low. And there have been incidents of sailors trying to take their lives, or just kind of harm themselves, because they are just tired, exhausted, frustrated. And that is a cost that’s not peanuts, right?

Those are real costs that are obviously, on a human level, just extremely disheartening to hear about. But on a military level, they hurt readiness. These are the kinds of things that hurt our ability to recruit into the services, that make it more difficult for us to retain people in the service. Because why would you sign up to continue serving when you know that this is the kind of future that might await you?

And down the line, it’s something that just overall hurts our ability to compete, to deter adversaries, and to win wars when we need to fight them for real—not in the case of, you know, the Iran war, when we just choose to go blow up some things because we seem to be bored.

Sargent: Politico’s Nahal Toosi had some very good reporting on all this, in which she says we’re facing a new kind of quagmire here that is unfathomable for a lot of people. She talked to people inside the administration, and the responses she got back were really interesting. As she put it, one of the first responses she gets when she asks current and former officials what has to be done to win is like a primal scream. And it translates into something like this: quote, “We never should have started this war,” or quote, “What do you mean by win?” And then one official says to her, quote, “I don’t see a way out of this.”

And then this official says that the Trump team fundamentally misunderstands Iran’s rulers, in the sense that Trump and his aides have, quote, “always felt like they can just keep applying pain and Iran will crumble, but the regime is not going to crumble,” close quote. That is quite a portrait. These officials are basically leaking word that it’s understood inside the administration that they’ve lost.

Tabatabai: Yeah, so much to say about this. One, I think that it’s been obvious to anyone who’s had eyes and ears and has sort of read the news every now and again that we have not won this war. That much is abundantly clear. The fact that folks inside the administration are now starting to recognize it—or perhaps have recognized it for a while and are just starting to admit it—I think is pretty significant.

The thing that was striking to me from this good piece was the point about the administration doesn’t understand Iran’s leaders. And I want to be very clear that that’s not because we don’t have the capability to understand Iran’s leaders. It’s because you’ve had an administration that, for a year and a half, has waged a war of attrition against the civil service, against the intelligence community, has sidelined anyone who had any real expertise in these areas, even as they have been, you know, very active in these policy spaces.

You’ve had DOGE, you have people who’ve been RIF’d, you have Laura Loomer determining personnel policy. It’s shocking but not surprising that all of this is happening. And we’re hearing about it the same week as my colleague Julia Curley writes an essay in The Atlantic talking about being pushed out of government for being trans. So, they found all kinds of excuses to push out people. So no, of course they don’t understand Iran’s leaders, because they’re not listening to the people who could help them understand Iran’s leaders.

Sargent: I think there’s a through line that connects the story you’re talking about here, which is the complete gutting of the civil service and diplomatic corps and all that, with the other stuff involving Trump’s constant threats of force. And it’s this.

It’s that Trump doesn’t think he needs to understand Iran’s rulers. He doesn’t think he needs a diplomatic corps to tell him how Iran’s rulers, and how Iran, understand the world. He can just use force, and because he’s infinitely strong and powerful, he will always get his way by definition. So why bother understanding anybody? Isn’t that sort of the story here?

Tabatabai: Yeah, and it’s not just about adversaries, right? I mean, I think you’re exactly right that he thinks that he can pick up the phone. I mean, just this week too, we had the story about how he’s talked to Kim Jong-un—or he thinks that he has a good relationship with Kim Jong-un, so we can just not do the joint exercises we typically do with one of our closest allies, South Korea. So yeah, he thinks that he can talk to people, and then he gets them, and then he can just, you know, make policy on his own.

But it’s not just about adversaries. It’s also about the fact that he doesn’t understand, as we would say in the Department of Defense, blue, right? The U.S. side of things. He thinks about readiness as something that can be replenished, right? It’s a video game. You go in, you fight a bunch of bosses, and then you can just press this button and you get your health back, you get your weapons back, everything gets replenished, and you can continue your quest. And that’s just not how the military works in the real world.

You need to have maintenance. You need to have exercises and training. You need to—you know, you have the morale things that we’ve been talking about. And so there is just this fundamental, I think, misunderstanding, and lack of interest in understanding trade-offs, understanding, the pros and cons of different courses of action, and then making decisions based on what you have in your toolkit, instead of what you wish you had in your toolkit. And the unfortunate thing, going back to the cost, is that we’re all paying it.

Sargent: Well, I will tell you, when I was a kid, you needed to have quarters to play video games. And so he’s kind of like the kid with an infinite number of quarters, being a rich kid.

Tabatabai: Yeah, I guess that’s true.

Sargent: Right. So just as an aside here, Trump lost his temper on another front. He lost his temper with reporters while facing hard questions about foreign policy. At one point he started rebuking one of the journalists, telling her to be quiet. Listen to this.

Donald Trump (voiceover): Quiet. Who’re you with?

First Reporter (voiceover): I’m with CNN.

Trump (voiceover): Fake News. You’re fake news. You’re a loud, boisterous person. You’re fake news. Be quiet. Be quiet. Be quiet! You’re a fake reporter, and you report fake news. Go ahead.

Second Reporter (voiceover): Mr. President, is there enough food on the USS Lincoln?

Trump (voiceover): Yeah. That was a CNN fake report.

Sargent: So note at the end there, a second reporter brings up the USS Lincoln, which has been in the news because of terrible conditions on it. Trump calls it just another fake report. So there’s the source of his anger for you right there. I mean, Trump threatens to incinerate ninety-one million people, meaning the whole population of Iran—threatens to wipe out their civilization.

That doesn’t force Iran to do his bidding, even though he’s had, like, a total triumph over them or whatever. But he can, you know, viciously abuse female reporters whenever he wants to. It’s kind of like that’s MAGA’s consolation prize or something. What did you make of all that?

Tabatabai: Yeah, again, I think, you know, when you start to kind of lash out at people and say the kind of things that he’s saying, it’s because you don’t have a good argument, right? If you have a strong argument and you’re sure of your argument, you don’t need to be telling people to be quiet and to sit down and that they’re fake news. You do those things when you have nothing of substance to say. And more than six months into this war, it’s clear that that’s exactly where we are.

There is nothing of substance to be said by this administration to defend what it is they’re doing. They just don’t have an off-ramp, and they have put themselves in this situation where they’re stuck in it politically, strategically, and policy-wise. And instead of trying to figure out how to get out of it, they’re just telling everyone that, you know, what they’re seeing is not correct—to not believe the evidence of their own eyes and ears.

Sargent: Just to wrap this up, he keeps saying that time is on his side, but it’s really not on his side, in the sense that every passing day without a deal, the midterms come closer. And I’ve got to think Iran is paying attention to our political clock. Can you talk about the way Iran views our political clock, the way Iran views Trump’s long-term vulnerability, and the way they’re thinking about it?

Tabatabai: Right. And this is not unique to Trump, right. Adversaries always know that we have a political clock. And often adversaries in authoritarian systems can wait out said political clock. And that’s the case for Iran. We are just a few months away from the elections. The picture that is emerging is not a good one for this administration, for the president, and for his allies. And so Iran can just kind of hang out and wait.

Look, they have a really terrible economy, and on that point, Trump is right—which means that at some point they need to think about how they’re going to do things differently. But they have a bit of time here, number one.

Number two, I think that actually there is a benefit that they get out of being in this situation of war. And by “they,” I mean purely the regime, not obviously the people who are stuck in this situation—and it’s really awful from the perspective of just, you know, the human costs of this conflict for the Iranian people. But the regime is watching this and thinking to itself, as long as this war continues, it doesn’t have to provide real solutions to people’s problems.

They don’t have to deal with the economic challenges that were creating the protests, the mass protests that we saw just a few months ago. The second the shooting stops, the second they have a ceasefire or some sort of agreement with the United States, they will need to govern. And this is not a regime that is particularly equipped to do that—they weren’t equipped to do it before this war killed off half of their leadership, who were actually experienced, and installed instead a bunch of people who don’t actually know what they’re doing in senior positions.

So I think they can wait this out a bit longer. And by the way, they have no choice, because from the perspective of this regime, this is a war of survival. And when you have to survive, you do anything you can to do that. It is not a war that they just chose to do on the side, on the way to Cuba. So this is very different for them than it is for the United States.

And unfortunately, again, that means that I think we’re stuck in the current space, where we’re doing this thing where we’re negotiating sometimes but shooting other days. And we have these threats on and off, with, again, the people of Iran, the people of the broader region, stuck in the middle of all of this, as well as our service members who are stuck in the middle of all of this.

Sargent: So does Iran have enough time to last through the midterms and beyond? And do you think they’re going to do that? You think they’ll hold out through the midterms?

Tabatabai: I think so. I think they can. And I think that they have seen that they have an administration that is ultimately going to fold, right? The administration folded a few months ago with the memorandum of understanding, front-loading a bunch of sanctions relief to Iran, telling Iran yeah, we’ll withdraw from the bases around your country, giving Iran things that no other administration would give them.

And so they know that if they just wait it out, they will probably get more concessions from this administration, at best. And at worst, they’re just continuing things as they are. They’ve already paid the price of it. It’s not like—they have really paid the price already. So it’s a sunk cost at this point for them.

Sargent: You know, the crowning irony to all this is that Trump doesn’t think he needs to understand his adversary, but Iran has really taken a lot of steps to understand theirs. Awesome to talk to you. Thank you so much for all that.

Tabatabai: Always good to be with you. Thanks so much.

In April, Audrey Cromwell, the top cop in Gallatin County, a rugged and fast-growing part of Montana made famous by Paramount’s hit Yellowstone TV series, received a surprising phone call. It was a local reporter wondering what Cromwell thought about a press release from Austin Knudsen, the state’s hard-line Republican attorney general, accusing Cromwell of “stealthily” enacting a sanctuary city policy and demanding she rescind the policy within five days.

But Cromwell, a Democrat who ousted a 26-year Republican incumbent in a razor-thin race for county attorney in 2022, had never established such a policy. Nor had she received any direct communication from Knudsen.

The ostensible subject of the press release was a mundane question of bureaucratic procedure. In October, the Enforcement and Removal Operations division of Immigration and Customs Enforcement had requested confidential criminal justice information, or CCJI, on a Gallatin County resident. Because the request pertained to a deportation proceeding, which is a civil rather than criminal matter under federal law, the records department asked Cromwell’s office for guidance on whether to comply with the request. In response, a civil legal assistant in Cromwell’s office advised that a court order would be required to release the information.

Cromwell said her office heard nothing more until April 2, when the press release turned a routine exchange between federal and local government employees into a political powder keg—just a few months before the state’s June primaries. On April 30, after refusing multiple invitations from Cromwell to assume legal responsibility for future CCJI requests, Knudsen placed Cromwell’s office under “supervisory control,” a rarely used authority with undefined limits that allows the attorney general to oversee and overrule the actions of an elected county attorney.

As the nation speeds toward midterm elections in November, this red-state dustup over immigration enforcement offers a reminder that the most disruptive domestic policy change of Donald Trump’s second term isn’t confined to blue cities. The administration’s intolerance for disagreement and its provocative, publicity-heavy attacks on rivals are also roiling communities and shaping politics in conservative and rural states, where Trump allies are taking extraordinary measures to bring local government officials to heel.

During her first week on the job, in January 2023, Cromwell said she discovered three cardboard boxes of unprosecuted criminal cases in an office closet. Eventually, hundreds of other cases were discovered on shelves and in filing cabinets. Cromwell then expanded the number of attorneys in the chronically understaffed office from six to 46 and cleared over 600 backlogged cases—including 113 sexual assaults, 52 of which involved children—within a single year. When I visited her office in June, further evidence of a culture shift was on display. Cromwell had recently remodeled the office space, which now consisted of open doors, airy cubicles, and plenty of young attorneys.

She eagerly introduced me to each one (and several of their dogs) but turned serious as she discussed Knudsen’s decision to assume supervisory control over the office. “I was worried enough to take all my personal stuff home with me,” she said, gesturing from her desk toward the bare walls and windowsill.

Knudsen, a former county attorney and speaker of the Montana House (2015–2019), is known for his heavy hand. Elected as attorney general in 2020, he dispatched at least one Highway Patrol officer to St. Peter’s Health Hospital in Helena after a request from the family members of a Covid patient to prescribe ivermectin had been denied, among other complaints, and Cromwell wondered whether he would use similar tactics to intimidate her. (Knudsen did not respond to multiple requests for comment through the Montana Department of Justice website and to his communications director.)

Though her office’s routines have not been similarly disturbed, Cromwell petitioned the Montana Supreme Court for a declaratory judgment on the dispute over CCJI requests in May. Additionally, she requested relief from Knudsen’s supervisory control, which required her to relinquish control of CCJI requests, submit regular reports to Knudsen, and could have allowed him to impose more invasive regulations at any time.

Such confrontations between Knudsen and other elected officials, including judges, over where his power ends and others’ begins have become commonplace during his tenure. In December 2025, he was cleared of a 41-count charge by the state Office of Disciplinary Counsel that resulted from a series of disparaging statements he made about the judicial branch.

In February, he accused Helena, the capital city, of violating the state’s legislative ban on sanctuary cities when it passed a resolution that clarified existing standards for coordination with ICE and made a commitment not to sign a 287(g) agreement with the agency. A 287(g) is an optional agreement that allows ICE to deputize local law enforcement officers and utilize local facilities for detention and other purposes. Knudsen’s accusation was announced via press conference, with Governor Greg Gianforte standing by his side.

“There will be penalties,” Gianforte said. “In Montana, we don’t tolerate defiance, and we support our local law enforcement.”

The imperious tone was notable, and so was the heft of threatened penalties. Under Montana law, a local government can be fined $10,000 for every five days it remains out of compliance and can lose access to state funds for public infrastructure and other needs if it does not comply within 14 days after legal action is taken.

The Helena City Commission hired outside legal counsel to help the city attorney navigate the conflict and spent at least $17,000 on initial legal costs. Then, during a heated public meeting in March, commissioners voted to rescind the resolution, despite public affirmations of its legality by the city attorney and outside counsel.

“In a time like now, when so many people feel like their federal government is seeking influence over even the most household-level issues, it’s important for people to feel as if they have at least some control at the local level through resolutions like this,” said Melinda Reed, the only commissioner who voted both for the original resolution and against its rescission.

“To me, the risk of not standing up so far outweighs the risk of standing up,” she added. “I mean, today, it’s an immigration issue that some people may not feel is important to them. But what if next time it’s our water rights?”

Yet, the severe penalties in the anti-sanctuary cities law and Knudsen’s aggressively political brand of law enforcement both seem designed to preempt local governments from exercising the sort of self-determination that both Reed and Cromwell believe is necessary. Indeed, the goal of these penalties, which now exist in many states, may be political superiority rather than policy resolution.

“There is this culture shift within the Republican Party. This kind of aggressiveness is now equated with strength,” Rob Saldin, professor of political science and director of the Mansfield Ethics and Public Affairs Program at the University of Montana, told me. “There is almost a cruelty to it, and it’s off-putting, which is maybe the point.”

Montana isn’t the only red state where local officials have endured unprecedented threats, investigations, and lawsuits by state prosecutors to enforce Trump’s agenda.

Montana isn’t the only red state where local officials have endured unprecedented threats, investigations, and lawsuits by state prosecutors to enforce Trump’s agenda and discourage judicial review. “Republican A.G.s are using state laws and public pressure campaigns to force local jurisdictions into cooperation with ICE,” said Cassandra Charles, senior staff attorney at the National Immigration Law Center. “They’re not waiting for the federal government to act—they’re making their threats loud enough that most jurisdictions cave before even getting into court.”

As evidence of this trend, she pointed to Texas, where Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is now a candidate for U.S. Senate, recently sent a letter demanding that Dallas County Sheriff Marian Brown enter into a 287(g) agreement with ICE. When Brown did not comply, citing her department’s existing collaborative relationship with the agency, Paxton immediately launched a formal investigation, compelling Brown’s office to spend time and money responding to questions and accusations that may have no legal standing in a court of law.

“Sometimes, A.G.s don’t have to do too much heavy lifting,” Charles added. “State legislatures are also handing them new enforcement tools to use.” In Georgia, a new law empowers private-property owners to sue local governments over perceived failures to remove immigrants and unsheltered people from public spaces, essentially deputizing individual citizens to do what the attorney general can’t always do directly.

While these unusual attempts to enforce Trump’s agenda are sometimes contested by public officials from across the partisan divide, it remains to be seen whether public concern over such policies transcends that divide, particularly in red states.

“There isn’t a clean narrative here,” Charles said. “The polls seem to indicate that red-state voters continue to support the enforcement agenda, but they’d also like to see specific aggressive tactics—like raids at schools or targeting people without criminal records—toned down. The data shows some fissures, but no explicit shift.”

That analysis accurately describes Montana, a 60–40 Republican state where 59 percent of residents want local law enforcement to work with ICE, but also where the sheriff of one politically conservative town recently rallied community members to support the family of a beloved mechanic after he was detained by ICE for over 100 days.

When Knudsen first threatened supervisory control over her office, Cromwell told me, she had taken the weekend to consider the hazards of an extended fight. “I had to do an ethical analysis,” she recalled. “The attorney general has prosecutorial powers, and he could charge me with the crime of official misconduct. So, was that a risk that I was willing to take?”

As of late July, the Montana Supreme Court has yet to rule on Knudsen’s use of supervisory control, which means Cromwell is still waiting for clarity as to how her office should respond to future requests—or, for that matter, just how far the attorney general’s authority extends. The legal battle has taken a toll. The conflict and ensuing court case have required more than 80 hours of her professional time and cost taxpayers thousands of dollars.

Of course, there are political ramifications as well. In November, Gallatin County voters will decide whether to reelect Cromwell for a second four-year term or install her challenger, a Republican prosecutor who’s been endorsed by the Republican county sheriff. It was possible Knudsen had staged this act of political theater so that he could make immigration enforcement a more visible issue on Election Day. “It’s a show, in my opinion,” Cromwell told me, ahead of the primary on June 2.

“If the attorney general is willing to come after me in this way,” she added, “and I’m an elected official, an attorney, a privileged Montanan, then what is he willing to do to people who don’t have power?”

That question carries extra weight when one considers the coincidence of presidential and gubernatorial elections in 2028. Many have speculated that Knudsen will run for governor in two years, and in a state where Trump won the last three presidential elections by an average of 18.7 points, Knudsen’s path to victory likely ends with the primary rather than the general election.

If he does run for governor and wins, then he’ll almost certainly be working with a fellow partisan in the attorney general’s office, and together they might continue testing the limits of their legal authority, especially if the state’s nonpartisan Supreme Court tips further to the right between now and then. In that scenario, the possibility of the attorney general using supervisory control to make an elected county attorney do something they think is illegal would no longer represent a distant political or legal frontier.

“Both the attorney general and [county attorneys] are elected by voters,” Constance Van Kley, a constitutional law professor at the University of Montana, told me, “and what do you do when one elected official is allowed to use their powers to supersede the powers that are entrusted to a local elected official by the voters of that jurisdiction?”

Presently, that question lies at the center of constitutional conflicts in Montana and many other states across the country, and its resolution will ultimately determine whether federal and state elected officials can exercise new legal powers without judicial review or public consent.

This trend also informed Cromwell’s decision to stand her ground. In the end, however, the tipping point was a matter of principle rather than politics. “I always stand up to bullies, and I always have,” she told me. “In this position, I’m a voice for people who don’t have a voice, and I take that responsibility really seriously, and if that means putting myself on the line, then that’s OK.”

American revival movements have always contained two competing impulses: the belief that all people possess equal moral worth before God, and the belief that society must be disciplined into righteousness whether it wants to be or not. That tension runs throughout the history of American Christianity. It shaped the First and Second Great Awakenings, fueled both abolitionism and moral policing, and inspired democratic reform movements—all while simultaneously justifying social hierarchy and coercion. If you’re wondering how the MAGA movement can speak constantly in the language of Christianity while bearing intense hostility to many traditional Christian virtues themselves, we can look to this history, which is now repeating itself.

There has been a great deal of discussion on the right in recent years about whether the United States is experiencing some kind of new religious revival. Church attendance remains historically low by many measures, most notably in the mainline churches that have historically fostered religious moderation and created communities of believers from across the political spectrum. That said, religious identity is also increasingly central to American political conflict. Christianity, particularly conservative Christianity, often functions as a marker of political and cultural belonging on the American right. The result is a society that may be becoming less religious overall while simultaneously becoming more religiously polarized. To understand this moment, it helps to revisit the Great Awakenings in U.S. history, when Americans renegotiated the meaning of freedom, morality, and identity on a national scale.

The First Great Awakening of the 1730s and 1740s challenged older religious hierarchies by emphasizing direct spiritual experience and personal conversion. Revivalist preachers like George Whitefield insisted that ordinary people could experience God directly without relying on established church authority. These ideas also intensified preachers’ use of emotionalism and encouraged suspicion toward institutional authority that would echo throughout American history. The emphasis on inward spiritual experience eventually fed into later forms of American individualism, including nineteenth-century Transcendentalism and the broader tendency to treat authenticity and inner conviction as sources of moral authority.

But it was the Second Great Awakening, stretching roughly from the 1790s through the 1830s, that most profoundly shaped American political culture. Massive revival meetings swept across the early republic, with Evangelical Protestantism rapidly expanding on the frontier and in growing northern cities. Preachers such as Charles Grandison Finney taught that both individuals and society itself could be morally transformed.

Critically, revivalists during this period did not generally understand freedom in the modern liberal sense of autonomy or self-expression. Instead, true freedom was liberation from sin. A truly free person was not simply someone left alone by the state or society, but someone morally regenerated and capable of living according to God’s order free from vice. This meant that many revivalists saw moral discipline not as a restriction on liberty but as its fulfillment. To these revivalists, the purpose of society and government was to guide people toward spiritual purity.

That outlook fueled some of the most important reform movements in American history. Evangelical activism contributed to abolitionism, prison reform, women’s rights, public education campaigns, and more. Many abolitionists viewed slavery not simply as an economic or political evil but as a profound moral sin incompatible with Christian teachings about the equal worth of souls before God.

Yet the same worldview also produced deeply coercive impulses. “Moral reform” often looked like regulating alcohol consumption, policing sexuality, suppressing vice, enforcing Sabbath observance, and attempting to discipline immigrants, Catholics, and the poor into a particular vision of respectable Protestant life. Temperance campaigns frequently blurred into broader efforts at social control and anti-Catholic nativism. Southern revivalists, meanwhile, adapted the language of Christian order and hierarchy into defenses of slavery itself.

The Second Great Awakening was a diffuse, leaderless movement, and was never ideologically uniform. It contained democratic and authoritarian tendencies simultaneously, with universal moral aspirations alongside intense paternalism and social discipline. But across the movement, its conception of freedom remained fundamentally different from today’s ideal of individual autonomy. Revivalists generally believed that liberty required moral formation because people “enslaved” to vice, sin, and temptation were not truly free at all.

That tension has never disappeared from American political culture, but MAGA politics have fueled a particularly revealing transformation. The modern religious right has enthusiastically embraced the coercive side of revivalism while weakening or abandoning many of the universal moral commitments that once accompanied it. What remains is a politics deeply concerned with order, hierarchy, discipline, punishment, and cultural conformity but detached from the expansive reform movements that once gave revivalist Christianity much of its moral force.

This helps explain the right’s growing hostility toward virtues that Christianity itself has historically treated as central moral obligations. Compassion for migrants, concern for the poor, humility, mercy, and care for strangers are now portrayed by segments of the right not as virtues but as civilizational liabilities in a global, moral war. The rise of phrases like “toxic empathy” is revealing here. In some right-wing circles, empathy itself is increasingly framed as a form of weakness that prevents societies from enforcing borders, punishing enemies, maintaining hierarchy, or defending national identity. But Christian teachings focus on mercy and compassion precisely because they transcended tribe, nationality, and worldly status. The obligation to care for the vulnerable is supposed to apply even to outsiders and enemies.

See Vice President JD Vance’s feud with Pope Leo XIV for an illuminating example. For Pope Leo, Christian ethics impose universal obligations to care for migrants and the poor as a core part of Christian moral teaching. To conservative Catholic convert Vance though, the Pope should “be careful when he talks about matters of theology” with which the right disagrees. For much of the nationalist right, Christianity is more of a civilizational identity tied to borders, social cohesion, and cultural inheritance that fits with their obsession with the supremacy of “the West.”

This is one reason contemporary right-wing Christianity often feels disconnected from the teachings it claims to defend. The language of sin, order, authority, and moral decline that would be familiar to a 19th century revivalist remains central, but the moral obligations that inspired progress during the Second Great Awakening are instead seen as weaknesses.

This does not mean MAGA Christianity is somehow fake Christianity or entirely alien to American religious history. The coercive and exclusionary tendencies now visible on the right were always present within parts of American revivalism. The same religious culture that fueled abolitionism also fueled paternalistic moral regulation, anti-Catholicism, and defenses of hierarchy, but the balance has shifted. Earlier revival movements, for all their flaws, generally paired moral discipline with some broader universal vision of human redemption or social transformation. They sought not only to restore order but to redeem society. Contemporary religious nationalism is far narrower and more defensive, with its energy directed toward protecting an embattled cultural identity and recovering what it believes to be a lost social order.

This reflects a consequential reimagination of how freedom itself is understood. Earlier revivalists believed freedom required moral discipline because they understood liberty as liberation from sin. Modern liberalism, by contrast, tends to define freedom more as autonomy and self-determination. MAGA Christianity occupies an unstable position between these traditions that rejects liberal permissiveness and expressive individualism along with the universal moral obligations that accompanied older Christian visions of moral order.

This helps explain supposedly devout Christians in the Trump administration gleefully celebrating the U.S. military murdering fishermen in the Caribbean and leveling population centers in Iran. It also helps explain the administration’s embrace of mass deportation policies that treat migrants and asylum seekers not as human beings deserving dignity and compassion, but as threats to be expelled and punished. It shows why a Supreme Court dominated by right-wing Christians continuously finds freedom of religion grounds for overturning inclusive policies and essentially creating a Christian right to discriminate against people simply exercising their personal autonomy.

This shift may ultimately prove self-defeating even on religious terms. Historically, Christianity has often expanded when it presented itself as morally universal, capable of transcending tribe, nationality, and hierarchy. When religion becomes tightly fused to partisan identity and cultural resentment, it risks reducing itself to an instrument of political power rather than a source of moral authority. It is difficult to deny that this kind of identity and power politics is exactly what MAGA has embraced.

The American right increasingly speaks in the language of religious revival while simultaneously narrowing the moral scope of revivalist Christianity itself. Its version of Christianity centers cultural identity, hierarchy, discipline, and exclusion far more than moral obligation or social redemption. In this framework, conducting violent mass deportations, enforcing conformity, and legitimizing undemocratic political power are actually Christian virtues. And that may ultimately be the clearest sign that this is not a new Great Awakening at all, but the evolution of revivalist religion to support the country’s ongoing reversion to more explicitly authoritarian politics.

Even by aristocratic standards, the Marquis de Morès led a life of impressive dissipation. He was born in 1858 in the Faubourg Saint-Germain of Paris, in a grand eighteenth-century hôtel that serves today as the residence of the Russian ambassador. As a young man, he cut a rakish path through high society, racking up debts from gambling, womanizing, and consuming inordinate quantities of champagne and foie gras. He borrowed so heavily from wealthy relatives that his father eventually obtained a court order placing him under financial guardianship.

A failson of the fin-de-siècle, Morès moved to the Bad Lands of Dakota Territory at age 24 to start a cattle ranch. He poured money into a planned network of slaughterhouses and refrigerated railcars, only to be outmaneuvered by Chicago stockyard bosses and New York butchers. He had more success in achieving tabloid notoriety, by shooting a desperado and standing trial for his murder, but this did not improve his financial situation. He made another move across the world, to French colonial Indochina, and reinvented himself as the champion of a new rail system that he promised would penetrate the elusive Chinese market. This time, his grandiose ambitions fell victim to local unrest, bureaucratic foot-dragging, and sniping between political factions. He returned to France empty-handed.

It is not an inspiring tale, and might not even be an interesting one if Morès had not found a way to channel his humiliations into a political program. The politics of resentment was thriving in late nineteenth-century France, and Morès seized upon it when he stood as a candidate in the Paris municipal election of 1890. While this turned out to be another failure, the campaign cemented his habit of contrasting the goodness of the people with the corruption of the ruling class—an especially potent formula, he learned, when laced with a vicious and conspiratorial antisemitism. In the years that followed his electoral defeat, he fought two highly publicized duels—one by pistol and one by sword—against Jewish compatriots who found his insults intolerable. His relentless smear campaign against Jewish army officers played a part in the frenzied atmosphere of the Dreyfus affair which erupted in 1894.

In many ways, it is hard to imagine a more quintessentially nineteenth-century figure than Morès, the gentleman adventurer with a handlebar moustache and an unreconstructed code of honor. But in the new biography The First Fascist: The Sensational Life and Dark Legacy of the Marquis de Morès, historian Sergio Luzzatto portrays him less as an aristocratic holdover than as the progenitor of something new. The Marquis de Morès dreamed of forging the masses into a national community that would exclude only the Jews. He had at his disposal an entourage of hard men, mostly butchers, who flanked him when he made public appearances in Paris. He cast himself as the leader of a revolution destined to transcend divisions between capital and labor. He even proposed a classical Roman symbol, the bundle of rods known as the fasces, to represent the cohesive social order of the future. All this, Luzzatto argues, is enough to make Morès “a father of fascism.”

How far into the past can we see fascism? This is the counterpart to a more familiar question today: Can (or should) we describe the ascendant right-wing politics of the present as “fascist”?

As Luzzatto acknowledges, previous historians have also glimpsed fascist origins in the dark underbelly of the belle époque. The best-known, if controversial, version of this argument was made by Israeli historian Zeev Sternhell, who found an ideology of “national socialism” taking shape from the 1880s among French thinkers equally disillusioned by bourgeois individualism and proletarian militancy. Luzzatto shifts the focus from ideas to practices—from the theoretical critique of liberal democracy to the political action aimed at bringing the system down—while defending the same contentious timeline as Sternhell. Is it really possible to speak of fascism before the abyss of World War I and its consequences: before the militarization of everyday life, the collapse of empires and monarchies, and the threat of revolutionary socialism?

How far into the past can we see fascism? This is the counterpart to a more familiar question today: Can (or should) we describe the ascendant right-wing politics of the present as “fascist”? Luzzatto, who embraces a capacious understanding of the concept, sees fascism traveling easily across time, and argues that Morès’s career anticipates “so much of the twentieth century, and even—unfortunately for us—more than a few developments of the twenty-first century.” Such bold leaps are unlikely to resolve debates about where to draw the boundaries, chronological or definitional, around fascism. Where The First Fascist does succeed, however, is in challenging the complacent assumption that fascism could only have emerged from an apocalyptic crisis. This is the uneasy lesson of the Morès saga: It didn’t take a world war for unscrupulous men to try amassing power by exploiting features of the mass democracy they claimed to despise. 

Even in the interwar period, which saw explicitly fascist movements seize control of governments in Europe, there was something amorphous about the ideology they proclaimed. Benito Mussolini, who led the first self-described fascist movement and the first fascist regime in power, unleashed a flood of verbiage over the course of decades while struggling to settle on a definition of the term. While Italian fascism had obvious affinities with the Nazi regime in Germany, there were differences too: south of the Alps, a greater emphasis on the corporatist model of state economic coordination, derived from the Catholic social doctrine that also inspired Morès; to the north, a far more ruthless institutionalization of state violence and racial fanaticism. When the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, fascist and anti-fascist sympathizers everywhere rallied to the side they saw as their own. Yet historians still debate whether Francisco Franco’s counterrevolution should be deemed fascist at all, given its distinctly anti-modern, clerical, and monarchist elements.

It is almost too easy to list the characteristics of fascism because its prolific ideologues claimed so many. There is the litany of “antis”: anti-liberalism, anti-parliamentarianism, anti-individualism, and anti-socialism, as well as antisemitism and (less consistently) anti-capitalism. Fascists borrowed elements from the leftist playbook of revolution—the mobilization of the masses, the regenerative promise of violence, the utopian reimagination of the future—then subordinated them all to the ideal of a racially unified nation. At the same time, they challenged the old conservative elite of church and king with the cult of the charismatic leader. But even more than a philosophical synthesis of left and right, fascist movements were always relentlessly oriented toward the acquisition of power. As they evolved from outsiders into insiders, fascists maintained a permanent state of militarized politics: from brutal vigilantism that challenged established authority; to the police states that enforced discipline and repressed enemies; and finally to the expansionist frenzy of war and conquest. How closely does Morès fit the bill?

The Marquis began with a politics of grievance but honed it into something distinctly sharper and nastier. As a series of corruption scandals tainted the legitimacy of the Third Republic in the 1880s, the standard of living for many French people worsened. In the cities, the capitalist consolidation of distribution networks and the rise of department stores threatened to put shopkeepers and artisans out of business. In the countryside, farmers were squeezed by a worldwide agricultural depression. General Georges Boulanger nearly succeeded in toppling the state in the late 1880s by fusing the diverse grievances of the moment into a quintessentially populist campaign. In Boulangist rhetoric, the “little people,” the modest and the ordinary, represented the true and virtuous nation; they had been betrayed by their rulers, a self-serving and parasitic elite.

Morès entered politics as the backer of a Boulangist candidate who ran unsuccessfully for the Chamber of Deputies in 1889. It was around the same time that he joined forces with one of the most prominent antisemitic campaigners in France, Édouard Drumont. Morès had always been quick to blame Jews for the fiascos of his early career; he claimed, implausibly, that they predominated among the retail butchers of New York and later fixated on a colonial engineering official in Indochina who was Jewish. But the roots of his antisemitism went deeper than these grudges. His education as a young man was dominated by Jesuits who updated the ancient, sectarian tradition of Christian anti-Judaism with a new brand of “social Catholicism” that stigmatized the most assimilated and successful Jews as the bearers of a destructive global capitalism. In the press and in rallies across northern France, Morès and Drumont warned that a Jewish “plutocracy” led by the Rothschilds was crushing the working class through control of the banking system.

In Morès, the lower-born Drumont saw a promisingly charismatic frontman for a movement and employed his skills as a publicist to burnish Morès’s image. Morès, aided by his commanding physique and noble birth, could be presented as “a soldier and a Catholic,” a protector of the nation and a defender of the faith. At the same time, Morès’s commercial and political failures allowed him to pose as a victim of the same malignant forces that he claimed were afflicting humbler Frenchmen. His overseas adventures as a gunslinger, hunter, and empire-builder, meanwhile, gave him a rugged mystique that helped to close the social distance between the aristocrat and the masses. Satirical cartoons portrayed him as a towering, broad-shouldered figure, in one case wrestling Alphonse de Rothschild to the ground while shaking his fist in righteous anger. And he honed his self-presentation as a rough-and-ready man of the people with his unconventional choice of headwear: a wide-brimmed hat that became known as the chapeau Morès, a subtle homage to his cowboy days and a conspicuous renunciation of the genteel top hat.

But the case for Morès as a harbinger of fascism goes beyond his artful image-making as a populist antisemite. He was determined to divert the grievances of artisans and laborers from class conflict to ethnonationalist solidarity. He embraced the nascent ideology of corporatism, urging the extension of public credit to cooperatively owned and operated “workingmen’s companies” while emphasizing his aim of eliminating dependence on Jewish capital. He bankrolled a major strike of coachmen, and tried to jump onto the bandwagon of other labor actions, before cementing an alliance with Parisian butchers through wild accusations that Jewish suppliers were selling tainted meat. Perhaps most significant, he chipped away at the legitimacy of republican institutions by alternating between electoralism and violence. Provoking Jewish army officers into duels by leveling libelous attacks in the press, Morès orchestrated a rising tide of chaos that strained the authority of the state. 

It’s notable that later French fascists claimed Morès as one of their own. In the dark years of the German occupation and the Vichy regime, the French collaborators who saw themselves as protagonists in a long-running ideological civil war held Morès up as a prophet and a warrior for the cause. In 1942, the municipal council of Cannes named a public garden after Morès, with a resolution that honored him as a determined foe of “Anglo-Saxon and Jewish hoarding, the coalition that runs the whole game of world politics.” That same year, as the murderous deportation of Jews from French territory was getting under way, a high-ranking Vichy official, Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, noted that France had been attacking “the Jewish problem” at least since the days of “that great lord of action who was the Marquis de Morès.”

While these continuities are undoubtedly striking, other elements of the fascist claim fall short. For one thing, Morès had no ambition to supplant his beloved church with an all-powerful state. For another, dueling is a far cry from the high-tech violence celebrated by fascist aesthetics, and even Luzzatto concedes that the blue-shirted butchers of La Villette in Paris did not amount to a paramilitary force. The biggest problem with casting Morès’s life as an origin story for fascism is that it risks exoticizing what were, in their time, fairly commonplace commitments. Caesarist mass movements with authoritarian potential—notably Bonapartism, the plebiscitary dictatorship established by Napoleon III in 1851, and later Boulangism—were commonplace in this period of French history. Where exactly these phenomena end and fascism begins is not spelled out in the book.

Rather than accepting or rejecting the “first fascist” label wholesale, it might be more useful to ask: What is gained by casting Morès as a forefather of fascism?

Morès’s influence peaked in the early 1890s after a Parisian jury refused to convict him for the killing of a Jewish officer. Capitalizing on discontent with the growing numbers of Jewish immigrants driven to France from pogroms in Eastern Europe, he spoke openly of his desire to emulate the tsar and “expel the Jews.” Adding to his influence, Morès had the leading politicians of the Third Republic on the ropes because of corruption charges associated with the collapse of a canal-building venture in Central America, the Compagnie du Panama. A trio of fixers revealed to have distributed bribes to legislators were all of Jewish descent—a fact that Morès and Drumont let no one forget.

But Morès overreached. In his zeal to implicate republican leaders, he joined forces with an amateurish forger and found himself embroiled in an embarrassing fraud case. Worse still, one of his political targets, the wily Georges Clemenceau, fought back with an extraordinary revelation: Morès himself, perpetually indebted, had sought and received a loan from one of the fixers at the heart of the scandal. In short: the would-be savior of the nation was tainted by the Jewish corruption he made a cause of condemning. His reputation never recovered.

Rather than accepting or rejecting the “first fascist” label wholesale, it might be more useful to ask: What is gained by casting Morès as a forefather of fascism? Like Hannah Arendt, who made the Dreyfus affair a pivotal event in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), Luzzatto reminds us that the preconditions for fascism’s emergence were deeply and widely rooted in European history. Though details of authorship remain murky, the urtext of antisemitic conspiracism, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, was also a product of 1890s Paris, emerging from a salon where Drumont rubbed shoulders with intelligence agents of the Russian Empire. Meanwhile, a few hundred miles away in Vienna, a figure not so different than Morès, Georg Ritter von Schönerer, blended charismatic authoritarianism and hostility to Jews to appeal to a mass electorate, and achieved far more success than Morès did. A young Adolf Hitler was among those watching closely.

After World War I, freshly minted democratic electorates were at once empowered by the extension of the franchise, aggrieved by the consolidation of economic power, and buffeted by the sensationalism of popular media. This was the context in which radicalizing ideas and practices—corporatism, eugenics, leadership cults, cults of violence, and above all, antisemitism—traveled across borders and gained new adherents.  

One of the strengths of Luzzatto’s book is the attention it pays to another of those radicalizing forces: imperial expansionism. As Morès bounced from the North American frontier to India to Indochina and finally to Algeria, he achieved nothing of consequence. But he did cultivate a paranoid view of global plutocracy weaving webs around the world, which strengthened his belief in the urgency of conquest and settlement to stop it. Visiting Algiers in 1894, he absorbed a view circulating in pied noir circles that the way to thwart a supposedly imminent Anglo-Judeo takeover of Africa was for France to forge alliances with the Islamic peoples of the continent. Two years later, on a quixotic unofficial mission to do just that, he met his death in the Saharan interior of Tunisia, murdered in an ambush by Arab and Berber warriors.

This final chapter of the Morès story—the muscular adventurer seeking out new worlds for his people—underscores how much the fascism of the twentieth century drew on the imperialist hero worship of an earlier era. Both adulated the man of destiny who rewrote history by spilling blood and claiming territory. Even Morès’s fairly senseless demise added a sheen of martyrdom to his image that would figure in the Vichy-era revival. In death, as in life, Morès blended racism, violence, and egoism to dramatize the weakness of liberal democracy. As the fascist dictators who came later also knew, this was not an infallible combination. But it had the advantage of serving a double purpose: destabilizing the nation from within while pushing its boundaries outward.

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

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez isn’t the only prominent progressive distancing themselves from “Woke 1.0.” Senator Bernie Sanders and Mayor Zohran Mamdani have in recent days decried the idea of defunding police. In the latest edition of Right Now, Deva Woodly, a scholar of social movements who has extensively studied Black Lives Matter, argues that progressives and liberals who use the term woke and distance themselves from the activism of the early 2020s are making a mistake. Woodly says that they are using the language of the right and attacking allies who helped these politicians get elected in the first place. She also argued that the idea of ensuring public safety by spending money on policies other than policing is popular, even if the term defund is not. Woodly is a political science professor at Brown University and a fellow at the Kettering Foundation.

If you want to open any kind of national bank in this country you have to get permission from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, or OCC. That includes opening a national trust bank, a sort-of quasi-commercial bank whose primary function is neither to accept deposits nor make loans. National trust banks exist to hold and manage assets. Increasingly these days, that means cryptocurrency. National trust banks used to be comparatively rare, and even today there are only about 60 in the whole country. Lately, however, OCC has been inundated with applications from crypto firms looking to charter in-house national trust banks so they don’t have to rely on outside banks to hold crypto assets on their behalf.

You’ve probably heard of one crypto company that applied for a national trust bank charter earlier this year. It’s called World Liberty Financial, or WLF, and the Trump family owns a 38 percent stake in it and collects 75 percent of all of its crypto revenue. The Trumps invested not a penny in this venture, nor is any family member employed there. Yet last year President Donald Trump collected nearly $600 million from WLF, according to his financial statement.

Half a trillion may seem like a lot to give a person, even a very famous one, for doing nothing, but on Friday Trump did WLF a solid. The person Trump appointed Comptroller of the Currency, Jonathan Gould, granted conditional approval to WLF’s application to create a national trust bank. The bank’s name will be the World Liberty Trust Company. Really, though, it will be the First National Bank of Trump.

It says a lot about the routinization of Trumpian kleptocracy that a mind-bendingly corrupt transaction like this is no longer considered a political story. It’s a business story, covered in the business press. Under Trump, crypto companies have been encouraged to apply for national trust bank charters. Gould opened the door a crack with a regulatory letter he sent as OCC general counsel during Trump’s first term. Last year’s GENIUS Act opened that crack a bit wider, and so did a new OCC regulation in February. As a consequence, the number of applications to create any kind of national bank rose from no more than six per year under President Joe Biden to 18 last year and 22 this year under Trump.

Not every application passes muster. Of the 40 applications under Trump, about half have been approved. Approval for the First National Bank of Trump is not yet final, so maybe we can’t yet accuse the OCC of playing favorites. But do you doubt final approval, contingent mostly on raising sufficient capital (not a problem!) will arrive in short order?

A CNBC story carries a correction, demanded probably by some functionary at the OCC, that apologizes for initially understating the role in the selection process played by career civil servants. They are the only parties who review applications, the correction states. Well, maybe. But these career employees aren’t blind. They’ve had ample opportunity to observe what Trump and his chief enforcer, White House budget chief Russell Vought, do to civil servants who get in their way. The president wants a bank. Do you really want to be the schmuck who tells him that would violate the emoluments clauses of the United States Constitution? “If you follow the law,” Senator Elizabeth Warren warned Gouldin February, “you will reject the president’s application.” Gould did not follow the law, and neither did the civil servants who approved this application.

There’s ample reason to question whether we should let any crypto firm charter a national trust bank. The banking industry is against it because they fear regulators will allow crypto’s national trust banks to so resemble commercial banks, with latitude to in effect take in deposits and make loans, that they will pose a competitive threat. Globally, stablecoins are projected to suck $1 trillion out of bank deposits during the next two years. Commercial banks point out that crypto-owned banks have lower capital requirements than they do, and in general are regulated more lightly, even as they traffic in a riskier form of currency. They have a point! Warren has said the new national trust banks will be “effectively crypto banks that want to evade the fundamental safeguards and obligations that come with being a bank.”

The OCC’s move to let Trump charter a crypto bank lowers this regulatory discussion to a level of squalor that CNBC is not well-equipped to appreciate. This is a very sordid political scandal. Already WLF has been the venue for a pay-to-play scandal surrounding the sale of advanced AI chips to the United Arab Emirates two weeks after UAE purchased $2 billion in WLF stablecoin. That made Teapot Dome look like an anthill even before we learned further that the UAE was Trump’s business partner, having purchased a 49 percent stake in World Liberty Financial. Now Trump is giving himself a bank that he will, in effect, regulate himself.

Don’t tell me Trump will lack influence over the Comptroller of the Currency. Gould has a track record of playing Trump’s lackey. Gould called Trump Accounts—which Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, thinking he was bestowing a compliment, called “a back door for privatizing Social Security”—“one of the most impactful financial literacy tools in our country’s history.” Trump issued an executive order last year making clear that all independent agencies answer to Trump, and (excepting the Federal Reserve) the Supreme Court backed him up on that. You think Trump is going to let Gould tell him how to run his bank?

“President Trump is now the first President in history to approve, operate, and supervise his own bank,” Warren said Friday. “This is the most brazen act of self-dealing our financial system has ever seen.” She used the occasion to introduce legislation prohibiting the president or vice-president or any child or spouse from owning or controlling a bank. The Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, a crypto bill that’s cleared the House and the Senate Banking Committee, may not reach final Senate passage unless Republicans concede on this point. If the GOP refuses to bar Trump from becoming a banker/president, it will hand a great gift to the Democrats in the midterms. First, though, we need to get this story off the financial pages.

This is a lightly edited transcript of the August 17 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.

Perry Bacon: Good morning. This is Perry Bacon from Right Now on The New Republic. We have a great guest. It’s Deva Woodly. She’s a professor of politics at Brown University. She’s a fellow at the Kettering Foundation. And she’s the author of books on social movements and on Black Lives Matter. So Deva, welcome. Thanks for joining me.

Deva Woodly: Thank you. Wonderful to be here.

Bacon: So I want to ask you about the discourse of the last 10 days, which I think started off with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez being on an interview on one of the Sunday shows and talking about what she phrased Woke 1.0. Let me read what she says. I want you to react to it. Because we’re a week out from it, but I still think her actual quote was important to read in the context of what it was.

So there was some video played. They have autoplay these days. All right, so anyway, she was asked about Francesca Hong, who was running for governor of Wisconsin, as we know. “I have a local city councilman, has this saying, ‘Woke 1 was crazy.’ And I think what’s important is, we have to assess what a candidate is saying now. During this time, during COVID, there was a huge opening of the Overton window. We were shut down. There were some of the highest unemployment rates we’ve ever seen, because of those shutdowns. The doors were really open in trying to entertain any and every kind of policy that was going to get us to a better place. The discussions that we had at that time were quite fruitful. And then we talk about crime today, it’s fundamentally different than when we talked about crime and talked about bringing crime down, right? We all share the goal of having crime as low as possible. I think that during lockdown, of course, rhetoric in that time was not rhetoric we would use today, and I’m grateful these candidates have the opportunity to present who they are to the electorate and who they’re campaigning for in this moment.”

So the totality of that is, there’s a Woke 1.0 thing—she’s quoting someone else saying it’s crazy, she’s referring to that quote—and then she’s saying lockdown introduced some kind of language we don’t use today. So the totality of that, what did you make of what is said there?

Woodly: OK, so there’s a world in which we can take AOC’s comments in, I think, the spirit that she meant them. But of course, that’s not appropriate for national television, right? In a hostile political environment, there’s a way in which sometimes people say things like crazy, right? That was crazy. It’s not necessarily an insult. It means that it was something unexpected, and that it was an experience.

I think that’s what she meant, but since she said it in a national forum that is hostile to what has been dubbed woke—which again is also a terminology that I think is misplaced and should not, honestly, be used to describe a period of multiple social movements that happened back to back for reasons of persistent inequality across several different sectors, a reasonable and rational response to that inequality which was not able to be addressed through institutional pathways. That’s why you have social movements.

Social movements are a normal democratic institutional check. They’ve existed as long as there have been democratic governments, and they’re not crazy. They’re a rational response to being unable to get redress through official channels.

In addition, the movements that I assume they’re referring to as Woke 1, right—the Black Lives Matter movement and Me Too, chief among them, but also probably Marjory Stoneman Douglas kids talking about gun control. All of these movements were, at the time, popular movements, and indeed the Black Lives Matter movement is the most popular movement that has existed in American history. So the idea of diminishing its impact as Woke 1 and calling it crazy is a misremembering of history, and also the significance of that movement.

It’s also, additionally, I think, politically quite silly for someone who is on the left and claims to be trying to make significant changes, because it also paints a politics where people are making, as she said, fruitful interventions to push the perspective of what is possible and necessary for a thriving society. It makes it so that any big swing in that direction could be termed crazy, which is antithetical to the kind of politics that I think that she’d like to advance.

Bacon: You led with the, let’s be charitable and let’s say crazy was just a word meaning a lot happened. And OK, so the charitable explanation is, like, she was saying that a lot happened in that moment that was unusual in that moment. That’s what she was—and then her comment that some of the things were fruitful is saying, she can’t quite say defund the police moved us toward—she doesn’t want to say defund the police moved us in the right direction. That’s the coded way to say that, right?

Woodly: Yeah. And I think, look, I think that generally speaking AOC is more short-sighted than this in her communications. So I was actually surprised to see this slip. And I interpret it in the more charitable way, because I feel like sometimes she talks casually—which is part of her appeal—and uses kind of colloquialisms to express herself. And in this context, it just does not advance the goals of people who are interested in making significant changes from the status quo. And I assume she’s in that camp.

Bacon: Let me—I’m going to lead with some more uncharitable explanations and see what you think about them. The first might be the phrase Woke 1.0 itself, or the phrase woke, and then 1.0. Woke, I often read from people on the right and the center left who want to make fun of Black Lives Matter went too far, DEI went too far—they are hostile to a lot of the things that happened during that period. Woke 1.0 is a phrase I’ve even seen from sort of people who are socialist and leftist, and what they would say is that there’s too much focus on, quote unquote, identity politics, not enough focus on class politics.

And so even that phrasing alone makes me think she’s not reading a lot of people like Deva Woodly, and she’s reading a lot of people on Twitter, white left. My first reaction was, is she not—if you’re invoking Woke 1.0 a lot, you’re not reading a diverse enough group of people. I know she quoted a Black city councilman, but in general, that phraseology is coming from a sector of people who are generally skeptical of what happened in 2020. Do you agree with that?

Woodly: Yes, I do think that’s true, but I also think that it is one of the coups of right-wing discourse to have made that phrasing something that is popularized. So now, even though it derives from a criticism from the right, it has been taken up by other people, who—some are criticizing it from the left, some are not criticizing it at all, but think of it as a descriptor. It’s very much like Democrat for the Democratic Party—people who use that in print as though it’s not incorrect, right? That’s because it’s been a successful discursive coup by the right wing.

So yes, I think that someone who is aware of the power of language and words, and is interested in shifting the Overton window, would be careful about using a phrase like Woke 1, which in the first instance is an appropriation of the term woke, which is actually a serious term that comes from African American vernacular English and means to be aware of systemic oppression, which is important given the times. But then, additionally, styling it as Woke 1 mashes together a lot of phenomena and makes them seem trivial, when they are significant political movements that are ongoing, and the reasons for them continue and continue to intensify.

Bacon: If she had said the Black Lives Matter movement was crazy, people would’ve been like, “What?” If she had said the protests against George Floyd were crazy, people—because the phrase ended up meaning—the most frustrating about it was, like, in theory, her job is to communicate clearly, but in reality, I’ve read 10 days of think pieces about Woke 1.0, because no one can agree about what that means, meaning it wasn’t a clear phrase, right?

Woodly: Yes. It’s a catch-all phrase, but it’s also a catch-all phrase that is meant to diminish. And so I think that anyone who not only respects the movements but respects the causes that deserve ongoing redress would not use that phrasing, should not use that phrasing.

So it’s my hope that not only she but also any other office holders or decision-makers on the left or the center left would not use that phrasing, because it’s a ceding to the right wing that social and political change that is significant can only be crazy, right? That, to me—that logic itself is a logic that I think should be avoided by people who want to push toward a more democratic and egalitarian society.

Bacon: Let me be uncharitable again and say—you said a couple times, people like AOC who we assume want to push. Did AOC used to be one of those people, and is AOC now a person concerned about winning the median voter in Wisconsin in 2028, and therefore—if Pete Buttigieg said Woke 1 was crazy, I might have been like, “Oh, Pete said something he didn’t mean to say,” but he said it inartfully, because I might assume his views about Woke 1.0 are somewhat close to that.

I did not think of someone like AOC, or like Bernie Sanders, or like Zohran, or someone who I think of as being with the movement. I don’t think they would describe the movement as crazy. But is AOC someone who was formerly with the movement, and is now more Hakeem Jeffries than the movement?

Woodly: Look, AOC and the whole sort of ilk of progressive politicians, they have a different job than organizers and activists. I think that right now she’s playing around with who she needs to present herself as, in order to be a national candidate. I don’t think that her fundamental commitments are changed. We don’t have evidence of that yet. But I do think that it’s worth watching. I also do think that it’s worth pointing out that, generally speaking, it is bad politics to betray your base.

Bacon: That’s, yeah.

Woodly: It’s just, like, bad politics to betray your base, and—

Bacon: Well, that’s interesting you said that, because Hakeem Jeffries was on TV yesterday attacking the DSA. So you and I might think attacking the base—or attacking, I guess DSA is not his base, but you and I might think attacking—

Woodly: I was going to say—

Bacon: I would argue that attacking people who are likely to vote for you is not smart.

Woodly: Agreed.

Bacon: The Democratic Party establishment’s view is, attacking the left to win centrist votes is the way to do it. Bill Clinton—like that. In other words, you might think that, but is it, if you’re becoming a more mainstream Democrat, is it part of your job to attack people who vote for you?

Woodly: I hope not, because then they’ll lose. I mean that very seriously and sincerely. The Democrats won in 2020 because of movement. The Democrats won in 2022 because of people organizing for them, because of small donors giving money to them. Now they’re in a situation where they’re using fundraising tactics that have turned off their small donors, and they don’t have large donors to replace them with, and they’ve really made upset a constituency that is most likely to vote for them.

The punching-left sort of truism in the Democratic Party comes from the 1990s. It is now 2026. We are in an entirely different political environment. And in any kind of democracy that is functioning, you have the people who are possibly voting for you, the people who you might win, and the people who you need, who will work for your campaign.

It is those workers—the people who would get out there, the people who would man the phone lines, the people who are going door to door. Those are the people who are alienated by this kind of talk. And those are the people that are really necessary for winning and keeping office, and for giving them the power that they will need to actually make the changes that will make a midterm win significant.

Because guess what—because of the institutional trouble that we are in right now, just winning the offices is not significant, will not save democracy. They need to be able to wield power. And in order to wield power, they have to have support. Alienating that support right now is very silly. And it doesn’t matter what DC consultants from the 1990s say about it.

The truth is, we are in a very different political environment, and the Democratic leadership has been really slow to adapt to it. But we see that the people who are winning all over the country are people who have adapted to the new conditions. It is very unfortunate that the leadership in Washington has been slow. And it’s not only unfortunate for their party, it’s unfortunate for the country. And I certainly do hope they catch up.

Bacon: I’m going to read a second quote from another progressive. This is a different kind of progressive, in a certain way. But let me see if I can find it here. So Zohran Mamdani, asked about this discussion—he was asked about Woke 1.0 sometimes, and the controversy—said, “Sometimes what you can believe in can change. I know there are, for some, for whom they still have a belief in that. I’ve made very clear that I do not believe in defunding the police, and that to me, delivering critical public safety also looks like working with police departments, along with many other partners.”

So I think his comment—and he goes on in that—is more specific. It’s not about this, was more about, defunding the police is something I do not agree with, police are a core part of public safety. What do you think about that comment?

Woodly: I think that the way he said it is something that makes sense for a politician in his position. He’s working in a situation where the police department in New York City is very large, very well-funded, and has proven itself hostile to mayors and mayor agendas before. It makes sense to me that he says, “I’m not for defunding the police. They are one of the core public safety institutions that need to be utilized.” To me, I think that’s descriptive. And also, it’s important that he puts them in the context of not the only, not the most critical, but one of the tools that a mayor, or we, should use for public safety.

I also think that is something that is evidence-based. We see in communities like Baltimore that police are one—not the most important and not to be overfunded—one of the pieces of creating a more safe community environment. I have to say that also, in terms of policy, defund means that you make police proportional to their actual role in creating public safety. They are not the most significant factor in creating public safety.

There are other factors that are equally important, like creating green space, social services, expanding healthcare, that are evidence-based ways that we know actually create safer communities, and those are often underfunded while police are overfunded. So defunding police departments that have large budgets that increase every year, in order to—that is, taking some of that funding in order to fund other programs that are underfunded and actually contribute to safety—is rational. Now, the phrase defund has become unpopular, but that actual set of policies is very popular. People understand that you need to fund other things besides police in order to create a safe community.

Bacon: So you’re saying a politician who says, I do not support defund the police, but then does all the policies around making public safety broader than just police, is doing something pretty smart. You’re saying Zohran is not necessarily constricting the movement. He’s doing good politics, basically.

Woodly: He’s doing his job as a politician. And movement has to do their job as movement, right? And I think that the movement—

Bacon: Should movement be criticizing what he said, or say we are for—what should their role be? To say, we are still for defund? Or?

Woodly: Yes. I think movements should say, defund the police is a rational position, and this is what it means. It means that we don’t raise the budget every year. It means that we invest in non-police response. It means that we create more green spaces. It means they roll out the policy positions. And then a politician like Zohran can say, I’m not for defunding the police, and yet be holding the police budget constant, not raising—

Bacon: And putting more officers—constant, I think he did.

Woodly: And at the same time, investing in green space, investing in increased access to healthcare, right? That is actually the policy agenda that creates safety. It’s evidence-based, right? Whatever you call it. But the truth is, the slogan, the demand, defund is what has created interest in these non-police responses that actually work.

Bacon: So Senator Sanders said something on TV. He said something to the effect of, “No serious politician believes in defunding the police.” So talk about that statement, because I think that one was troubling to me, but I’d be curious what you think about it.

Woodly: Again, right? So for me, I think that that notion of serious is to try to, again, make defund seem crazy, when defund is rational, right?

Bacon: But he may be accurately describing the reality, right? There may be very few politicians who you—

Woodly: So it’s a double meaning, right? On the one hand, what he may be saying, or what he may mean, is that if you are a politician who wishes to get elected and not get pilloried on this issue, you don’t say defund the police. That’s reasonable, right? On the other hand, his meaning could be, and could be taken to be, that, quote, Woke 1 is crazy, right?

Bacon: No serious person would be for defund the police is a diminishing message, right? In other words—yeah.

Woodly: Exactly. So I think that politicians who are aligned with movements—and really just politicians who are interested in justice, right, and politicians who are interested in actually reducing violence and creating economic opportunity and creating conditions for egalitarian democracy—should avoid diminishing left movements. I will note that right-wing politicians never diminish their right flanks.

Even when they move in different ways, even when they choose different words, the worst they do is pretend they don’t know about them, right? And that is strategic. It’s because they know that their movements are doing important work for the causes that they believe in, and also that they want to have the freedom to move around in terms of what policies they want to put forward, what things they take up from their right flanks, and what things that they don’t. And it shocks me that politicians on the left have not learned this quite obvious lesson.

Bacon: So the subtext of what I’m getting at, and I’ll just drive to it now, is my sense is that the sort of left progressive part of the Democratic Party—and I’ve quoted AOC, Zohran, and Bernie Sanders, who are leaders of that—has decided that to win primaries and to gain power, post-2024, if they talk about economics and, quote-unquote, affordability, and they shuck off all the controversial stuff—all the policing, the racism, talking about white supremacy, all the woke stuff—if they shuck off that part, that’s the part that the establishment has tagged them with. So we can win primaries, we can get power. Third Way will be nice to us as long as we throw the abolish and defund people under the bus. And that’s what I think is happening, and that’s very direct.

But I think AOC, Zohran, Bernie Sanders, the people around them, the sort of Jacobins, the sort of socialist wing of the left, Democratic Party, decided, if we throw the sort of policing and anti-racism—I would argue the Black left, in a certain sense—if we throw those people under the bus, ignore them, and just talk about populism and economics, then we will win primaries, the Democratic center will like us more, and we will inherit the earth. That’s what I think is going on. How do you do that analysis?

Woodly: I do think that’s what they think.

Bacon: Yes. OK.

Woodly: But all of American history is against that interpretation, unfortunately for them, and for me.

Bacon: Will they inherit the earth, or even the Democratic Party? Will they gain power within the Democratic Party? I think that might be more true.

Woodly: They will gain power in the Democratic Party temporarily, while the Democratic Party is able to have power.

Look, here’s the point, right? These issues of inequality, including affordability, are all intersectional issues, right? Meaning that people’s race and gender are relevant to their place in the economy. You cannot address differences, systematic differences in economic outcomes, without an analysis of race and gender. And if you’re not explicit about that in the way that you argue politically, then what happens is that counterarguments and stereotypes that are common, that circulate in the discourse and also in the background doxa of American politics, will be mobilized to fracture the coalition that you’re trying to bring together.

And in terms of economic democracy, socialism, left economic policies, this is always what happens in the American case. Historically, the reason that a more democratic socialist environment did not develop in the middle 20th century was because it fractured along racial lines, right? That is why the American polity had a uniquely neoliberal economy, compared to the developed economies in Europe and elsewhere in the world—it’s because it’s on this question of race that economic populism fractures. That’s the pattern in this country.

And these folks can try again to de-racialize economic policies, but they will fail again. Because the truth is that white supremacy has to be taken on straight on. It has to be taken on straight on, especially in these times when you have the frank avowal of these opinions all over American discourse, and promoted by the richest person in the world on the app that he owns. And the whole cadre of AI billionaires, right, who are interested in these white supremacist, eugenicist, feudalist, and fascist ways of being in the world. Not addressing those things explicitly allows them to circulate unchallenged as ideas in our discourse.

There’s no way to avoid actually confronting those things. And so my advice to Democratic politicians from the center to the left would be to develop a way to actually confront the ideas that are most detrimental to the American Republic. I understand that they may be afraid that that will be more difficult than the tried and true ‘90s playbook, but it also might be more successful.

Bacon: One thing I want to add is, I don’t think this progressive cohort that says affordability actually believes what they’re saying. With Zohran Mamdani, one of the first things he did was, like, he went to a protest when the ICE director was there, and went viral for that. He talked about the Israel-Gaza issue constantly. So did Abdul El-Sayed, talked about abolishing ICE regularly.

I’m not sure Abdul or Zohran win their primaries without, A, ICE being crazy, and B, the Gaza issue, which they both talked about extensively and which their base cared about a lot. So the idea they only talked about affordability, as their consultants claimed afterward, is not even true, as far as I can tell.

Woodly: No, it’s not true. And it’s also not true in the way, at least, that Mamdani has conducted his campaign. He’s been very careful to talk to many different constituencies, where he always brings up, obviously, affordability, because it is important generally, but also addresses it in a way that is specific to the group, right? So he talks about the racial wealth gap, and he talks about what faces small vendors who are often immigrants, right, or second generation immigrants in the city, right? And he has been very careful to talk to trans constituencies, and very careful to talk, right?

The way that they’re actually doing politics—at least Mamdani, and I hope that El-Sayed does this as well, because it is the way to do it, right—is not actually to deracialize politics. It’s to interracialize politics, right? However, the way that they talk about it in the popular press differs from the actual techniques that they are using, right? And so the way they talk about it in the popular press is, All we do is talk about affordability. That’s all we do. That’s all we do.

But that’s not actually how they’re conducting their politics. What they’re actually doing is making sure that they are touching and talking to every constituency, and in Mamdani’s case, in their language, right, as much as possible. Right, let me cut another ad in a different language to address specific concerns about how people are situated socially, economically, ethnically, and racially, and how that impacts their structural position, right? The way he’s actually doing politics is quite sensitive to the ways that race, gender, ethnicity, you know, sexuality all intersect with the ability to live a good life.

Bacon: This is a good way to put this, isn’t it? It’s a complicated thing. It’s, like, on some level, to be a Democratic candidate these days, you have to campaign to actual voters who care about their identities in the full scope. You also have to campaign through this media full of, like, white centrists who are very triggered by any discussion of race and trying to ban Ibram Kendi from living and so on. And so, like, what is—so there’s a dichotomy here where you are advantaged to say, I don’t do identity politics, while doing it, right? If you’re politically on the left, right?

Woodly: Absolutely, because there’s no way to win. There’s no way to win, but guess what? All politics, including class politics, are identity politics.

Partisanship is identity politics. It’s not actually based on policy it’s based on tribalism. So there is no politics that’s not identity politics. So in order to create a constituency, you have to be sensitive to people’s identities, and you have to interweave the concerns they have because of their lived experience into the campaign that you run, and into the policies that you adopt and implement. That’s a fact. So we’re in this sort of, like, kabuki theater where people pretend that there’s some way to have politics that’s stripped of identity, right, instead of addressing head-on the most vexing challenges that we have as a democratic republic.

Bacon: All right. So let’s come back to AOC now. You’re AOC, and you have to do these two things. The two things you have to do is, one, starting next February, you have to go to South Carolina and presumably win over a lot of Black people. But two, you also probably have to win over Ezra Klein, or get him, and that cohort, not to hate you—and that cohort is very focused on identity politics is dead and it divides, blah, blah, blah.

So how do you square—if you go to South Carolina and talk about the racial wealth gap, and it’s on video, it might help; or talk about some affordability issue, or some police killings, whatever issue you want to talk about that Black people might care about in South Carolina—if you do that, you’re going to hear from the cohort of columnists that you are ruining the chances of winning in Wisconsin, and average Black men don’t care about this racial issue that they were nodding their heads on while you were in the room. So what do you do then?

Woodly: I think that you have to just make the—

Bacon: That pundit class does matter.

Woodly: I’m sorry?

Bacon: That pundit class can make it hard for you to raise money, and hard for you to—

Woodly: No. The pundit class absolutely does matter, but I think that you have to go into those environments and make the argument that, again, all politics is identity politics, right? Because what you’re trying to do—

Bacon: Which environment, the on-the-ground or the pundit space?

Woodly: In the pundit space, right?

Bacon: Yes.

Woodly: Yeah. Because what’s happening is that these candidates are letting themselves be ruled by that space, right? And the fact is that they have to be willing to go into those spaces and engage on the actual fundamental idea, on the underlying premise. Because right now, they don’t engage on the underlying premise. They take the premise, right?

Perry Bacon: That whole 1.0 is a thing that exists because they have accepted that premise—

Deva Woodly: Yes, exactly. Instead of pushing back on it. And that is really what’s necessary, because it’s actually not that hard to push back on. We have a lot of empirical evidence that the movements of the 21st century have been really not only significant in their own right, but very important for Democratic wins. And so, none of these politicians point that out, right? Imagine a discursive environment where people like Bernie Sanders and AOC and El-Sayed and Mamdani and other progressive politicians said, “I’m here because I want to serve all the people. I want to make sure that we have a politics that is democratic and egalitarian.” And that’s what these movements were working for too, have been working for. And frankly, it’s not crazy to push for equality, right? That’s a fundamental American value. And it’s not crazy to be concerned about the ways that your life chances are advantaged or diminished because of the body you happen to be born into. It is a part of democratic politics, it is a part of believing in equality, to take that seriously in our politics, and that’s what I do.

Bacon: Let me ask one final question. This makes me have concern. If they were really honest, what really AOC and Zohran could say is, I wouldn’t be sitting in this chair on this program without those movements. Because I think that’s the reality. Are they unaware of that, which is worrisome, because it’s just, they have a bad political analysis? Or are they not humble enough to admit that, which is a different problem?

Because I’m not sure. Both are bad. Do you think they’re unaware of the political environment that created them, or do you think they are aware of it but think that they—I think about the Ella Baker quote, the movement make Martin—or, none of these were Martin Luther King’s, let’s not say that. But the movement making, versus them making a movement. It feels like these people at times act like they are an entity. Like, AOC will occasionally say, Justice Democrats, meh, I got here on my own. It’s like, eh, I don’t think you became famous just on your own. And so I’m just wondering if these people appreciate that there’s a movement that they’re—yeah, that’s kind of why it bothered me, is, Woke 1.0 kind of just helped you get where you are. Maybe you should not call it crap, and just admit it.

Woodly: Without MeToo, you wouldn’t be sitting in that chair.

Bacon: Yeah. And so do they get that, or are you—

Woodly: So yes, that’s true. I think that it is—I don’t know, like a lack of awareness or a lack of humility. I think that it might be a little bit of a combination. Sometimes we know things that are not present to the front of our minds, so I think that’s one thing. The other thing is, though, that of course, during the course of their sitting in those offices, there have been ups and downs with movement, right?

Maintaining those positions is not something that movement has helped them necessarily do, even though getting access to those positions is absolutely the reason. Like, the reason is because of movement. So it’s a complicated proposition, but you’re right. If they were really honest, they would say—they could use that also as a launch. Without these movements, I wouldn’t be sitting in this chair. However, sitting in this decision-making position has made me have more nuanced views. That could be the line. That should be the line.

Bacon: Zohran certainly should say that the mayor of New York is certainly more informed than random DSA members, obviously, right?

Woodly: Yes, exactly. That’s totally fine to say. Look, organized people with these concerns are the reason that I have had access here. They’re a part of the constituency that I serve. But sitting in this decision-making position has made my view more nuanced, and I realize, in order to get things done, that I have to engage with many different parties, right? I still have my values, and I’m still working for the same thing. But when you’re sitting in the decision-making position, you realize you have to work with a lot of different kinds of people.

To me, that seems like a super reasonable position for, and a true, accurate thing for a politician to say. There’s no reason to denigrate the movements that give you access to the opportunity to hold those positions of decision-making and service.

And also, I don’t know why they have this idea that it is effective. It’s literally like the Democratic Party is still sitting in the, quote, Sister Souljah moment of 1995 or whatever, of the sort of press. That’s why they keep asking James Carville questions. It’s bizarre to me that the Democratic leadership and consultancy has not moved on from that moment, even despite their many victories since that time, and how those victories have hinged on the organization of their left flank. I don’t understand. It’s really reality-resistant to me.

Bacon: Striking you said that, because I went back and read a piece about—we’re having this question about whether progressives can win swing states. But in the time in which they ran, Sherrod Brown, Tammy Baldwin, and Barack Obama were all quite progressive. But Barack Obama himself now is pretty skeptical of progressives. And so I think everybody who wins an election in the Democratic Party seems to then get Carville brain afterward, and I’m not really sure why that happens.

Woodly: I think it’s because their left constituency still demands things from them.

Bacon: And they find that annoying?

Woodly: Yes.

Bacon: OK.

Woodly: I think that’s what it is. I think that the culture of the party is not to actually try to deliver for their left flank, which is really asymmetrical to the culture of the Republican Party, which is to try to deliver for their right flank.

Bacon: I see. Deva, thank you for joining me. Tell people what you’re working on, and where they might find more of your brilliant thoughts.

Woodly: Right now I’m working on a project called The Politics of Futurity, and it’s all about how we break out of our notions about what is probable, and instead reach for evidence-based policy, institutions, and ways of arranging society that make new things possible, right? And you can read more about what I do in the blogs that I do for the Kettering Foundation, so look me up there.

Bacon: All right. Good to see you. Thanks for joining me. Bye-bye.

Woodly: Thank you.

The 60-day deadline for a deal between Donald Trump and Iran has passed, and he’s in a lather over it. First Trump raged to Fox News of his displeasure with Oman’s negotiations with Iran over the Strait of Hormuz. “If Oman gets in the way, we’ll bomb the s--t out of them,” he fumed nonsensically. Then, under questioning over foreign policy, he erupted at a female journalist, repeatedly instructing her to “be quiet, be quiet, be quiet” in a vile and abusive tone. Meanwhile, officials leaked their pessimism about the war to Politico, saying things like “we never should have started this war” and revealingly admitting they have no idea what “winning” over Iran even means anymore. Translation: He lost. We talked to former Defense Department official Ariane Tabatabi. She explains the current standoff, why Trump’s rage at Oman is so absurd, how his megalomaniacal belief in his own limitless strength and power has backfired, and what might happen if Iran drags this out through the midterms. Listen to this episode here.

It’s not looking good for the disgraced MAGA Representative Cory Mills.

Governor Ron DeSantis told reporters Friday that he didn’t support Mills’ bid ahead of the state’s primary elections on Tuesday. Earlier this month, Florida Representatives Anna Paulina Luna and Mike Haridopolos endorsed Ryan Elijah, a former television anchor. While Donald Trump announced his endorsement for Mills in February, the president has remained quiet on the subject ever since.

An August survey found Mills only held a 6-point lead over Elijah, and also revealed that a whopping 41 percent of Republican voters were still “undecided.”

Mills’ embattled bid for reelection may be coming to an end—in what would be a clear sign that President Donald Trump’s grip is loosening on Florida Republicans.

In the past year, the scrutiny has intensified on the numerous allegations against Mills. The Florida lawmaker has been accused of sexual misconduct, harassment, campaign finance violations, financial disclosure violations, accepting inappropriate gifts, and multiple ethics violations. He has faced a months-long ethics probe and is reportedly under investigation by the Department of Justice.

And then there’s his dating history. Asked by Mother Jones about reports that he had dated a 19-year-old while he was a sitting member of Congress, Mills had this to say:

“There’s nothing illegal about two consenting adults dating. The obsession over a man’s dating life is disturbing at best. I’ve been separated from my now ex-wife years prior to our divorce finalizing. Whether in office or as a private citizen, adults are entitled to date in their attempt to find their person. Sometimes you get lucky and find that immediately, but many are not so blessed. Feel free to run your new and slanderous hit piece.”

Still, Mills has resisted calls to resign. On Tuesday, Florida Republicans will make the decision to leave for him.

President Donald Trump lashed out at a female reporter Monday for asking about his decision to significantly reduce military coordination with South Korea.

Trump had no problem ranting about his supposedly great relationship with Kim Jong Un during his photo-op with a teenage lifeguard—but had a major meltdown when CNN’s Kaitlin Holmes asked whether the North Korean leader had requested he scale back joint military exercises with South Korea.

“Quiet, quiet, quiet! You’re very disrespectful in front of this young man. Okay? Don’t you find her disrespectful? Heh. He understands. Quiet!” Trump said.

Trump scolds a reporter: Quiet! You’re very disrespectful in front of this young man. Don’t you find her disrespectful? He understands. Quiet! You’re fake news. BE QUIET! You’re a fake reporter. pic.twitter.com/AevIZXEaGp

— Acyn (@Acyn) August 17, 2026

His tantrum only got worse when the reporter revealed she was with CNN.

“Fake news. You’re fake news. You’re a loud—you’re a loud, boisterous person. You’re fake news. Be quiet. Be quiet. Be quiet!” Trump said. “You’re a fake reporter, and you report fake news.”

Trump’s shameful outburst is just the latest in a well-documented history of lashing out at female reporters. The president has called female reporters “the worst” and “second-rate,” telling them to “be quiet,” that they “know nothing about nothing,” and that he doesn’t like their “attitude.” His vitriol has only intensified during his second term. In November, he told Bloomberg reporter Catherine Lucey “Quiet, Piggy!” Last month, he targeted CNN’s Kaitlan Collins with transphobic jokes.

Separately Monday, the White House attacked Holmes for another question about criticism of the president’s cozy relationship with his aide Natalie Harp, calling the question “disgusting and inhumane” in a post on X. Clearly, it struck a nerve.

President Trump on Monday again downplayed reports of low food supply and poor conditions on the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier—which has spent a whopping nine months at sea, primarily in the Persian Gulf.

“Mr. President, is there enough food on the USS Lincoln?” a reporter asked Trump right after he finished berating a CNN reporter who asked him about North Korea.

“Yeah, it is. That was a CNN fake report. The Lincoln has been out there for a period of time … but over the years we’ve had ‘em out there much longer,” Trump said. “I was at a group meeting, and an admiral came up to see me over the weekend.... He said ‘I’ve been on ships that are out there much longer than that sir, and I know people on the Lincoln, they say it’s beautifully maintained’.… It was fake news reporting from CNN.”

Reporter: Is there enough food on the USS Lincoln?

Trump: Yeah, there is. It was a it was a CNN fake report. pic.twitter.com/l7JaCA8wKW

— Acyn (@Acyn) August 17, 2026

It wasn’t just CNN. Multiple outlets have reported extremely low morale aboard the Lincoln caused by a low supply of dismal-looking food, provisions, and contaminated water—which, combined with the nine months on the water, has caused some of the sailors on the Lincoln to literally jump ship. Family members of sailors and Marines aboard the Lincoln have detailed concerns about their mental health to various publications, including the Military Times, USA Today, and MS NOW.

The Republican response to these reports has been either flat-out denial with no evidence—like Trump—or attacking and emasculating the sailors.

“How weak are you?” Fox News contributor Joey Jones ranted on Sunday. “To sit there and say it was terrible because you had a corndog and a hotdog?… If this is a representation of who our military is now … we’re just Rome sitting here waiting to burn.”

Over half of America opposes the war on Iran. It seems like some of the people fighting it are coming around too.

President Trump is making it easier for convicted felons to regain their gun rights.

Attorney General Todd Blanche announced a new regulation Monday that allows convicted felons to apply to restore their access to guns. The Justice Department estimates that 330,000 people will attempt to take advantage of the new rule when applications open next month.

Federal law prohibits anyone from possessing a gun who commits a crime punishable by more than one year, as well as undocumented immigrants, dishonorably discharged military veterans, and people convicted of domestic violence misdemeanors. Overall, about 30 million Americans can’t legally own firearms due to criminal convictions.

“The Second Amendment is not a second-class right, and the federal government should not permanently deprive Americans of a constitutional right without regard to whether they pose a danger to public safety,” Blanche said.

Previously, only those who were pardoned for their crimes regained gun rights. Last year, pardon attorney Liz Oyer was fired from the DOJ after refusing to restore the gun rights of actor Mel Gibson, who was convicted of domestic violence in 2011. Under the new plan, registered sex offenders, violent criminals, and undocumented immigrants will still be barred from owning guns, the DOJ said.

In his second term, Trump has expanded the rights of gun owners and manufacturers, signing executive orders stretching the Second Amendment as far as he can (except for trans people) and reviving attacks on Democrats for “coming for your guns.” This new move from the president will curry favor from gun enthusiasts and organizations like the National Rifle Association, which have long fought regulations that would reduce gun violence and mass shootings. In this case, Trump only cares about making his right-wing base happy.

Recent news about Democratic National Committee has all been terrible. The author of the committee’s much-delayed autopsy of the 2024 campaign hinted that some of his criticisms of the party were censored. The committee is millions of dollars in debt, while its Republican counterpart has more than $100 million on hand. Articles in The New York Times and other publications have portrayed party chair Ken Martin as incompetent and hot-tempered, reportedly throwing a phone at one of his aides.

But over the weekend, the DNC made three decisions that showed how the party committee can be a force for progress and innovation in a party desperate for both. Thank goodness. All is not lost at party headquarters.

The official party, which is made up of 450 members from across the country, adopted a wide array of resolutions over the weekend. One was to formally approve the calendar for the upcoming Democratic presidential nomination. South Carolina’s primary will be held first on January 22, 2028 (a Saturday), then Nevada on Tuesday, February 1, New Hampshire on February 8, New Mexico on February 15, Michigan the following Tuesday, and finally Virginia on the Tuesday after that, February 29. (New Hampshire is very protective of its first-in-the-nation status and might try to be first again.) That’s a great mix. States in every region of the country. Some with large Black populations, others with large Latino populations, some very urban; some quite rural (New Hampshire). Lots of different industries and kinds of workers are in those states.

Some progressives are complaining that starting off in South Carolina gives an unfair advantage to center-left candidates, since establishment Democrats such as Representative James Clyburn have a lot of sway there. Those in the party (left and center-left) who don’t want Kamala Harris to again be the party’s nominee worry heavily Black South Carolina leading the process tips the scales too far in favor of the former vice-president. I think they’re wrong—or at least overstating their case. Close to half of the voters in South Carolina’s primary will be white, and many of the African Americans there are young, progressive, or both. I don’t think Harris (or another center-left Black candidate such as Maryland Governor Wes Moore) is automatically guaranteed to carry South Carolina, which was mostly recently won by Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden.

Even if Harris wins South Carolina, that momentum doesn’t ensure her victories in the next several states. South Carolina, Nevada, New Hampshire, and New Mexico are so different that it’s hard to imagine that a single candidate wins all four. If someone does, then that person is a really strong candidate. This combination of states requires a candidate to have a fairly broad support within the party to win lots of states consecutively. That’s how it should be.

This calendar officially ends the days when the party that is supposed to represent America’s diversity had its two most important contests, the ones where most campaign stops were held and the field winnowed, in two of the least-diverse states in the country (Iowa and New Hampshire).

Second, the full DNC rejected a proposal from the party’s Rules and Bylaws Committee that would have banned ranked-choice voting in the presidential primaries. Ranked-choice voting is the system by which people list their preferred candidates in order and the choices of the lowest-ranked candidates are discarded until one person has a majority. It’s what New York City Democrats used in their most recent mayoral primary. Several states vote this way too.

Ranked-choice is a particularly useful system for races with more than two candidates, allowing voters to both choose their favorite and then rank one of the leading candidates if their favorite isn’t among the top. A presidential primary will likely have several candidates, and sometimes hopefuls drop out after people have already voted.

According to DNC rules, a candidate doesn’t win delegates unless they win at least 15 percent of the vote in a state. So currently, if you back someone who finishes at 14 percent or below, that vote is essentially wasted. With ranked-choice, that 14 percent will be redistributed to higher-polling candidates. That won’t make much difference in the total delegate math. But it means that more voters will have gotten to select one of the top candidates.

Third, the DNC adopted a resolution calling for Democratic members of Congress “to craft legislation abolishing ICE.” Conservatives have seized on this resolution, arguing that it shows the Democrats are too liberal. But it’s important to distinguish between abolishing police and abolishing ICE, both stands adopted by some on the left. In terms of electoral politics, while abolishing police polls terribly, close to a majority of Americans favor getting rid of ICE. So this isn’t a huge political risk.

And in terms of policy, getting rid of ICE is a much more realistic goal than cutting back on police. Advocates calling for the abolition of both ICE and local police departments correctly argue that both kinds of law enforcement often ignore civilian authority, brutalize people, and discriminate against people of color. The differences are that police departments also provide a vital service of fighting local crime and report to a diffuse array of mayors and city council members across the country. In contrast, ICE has been turned into essentially a standing army for Trump, preying on liberal cities and activists. And since we have local police departments, the FBI, and numerous other agencies to enforce laws across the country, the United States does not actually need a special apparatus for interior immigration enforcement. I am not suggesting getting rid of all immigration law or personnel. The Customs and Border Patrol, for example, is still useful. But America was fine before ICE was created in 2003 and the heinous actions of the agency during both of Trump’s terms suggest we need to rethink our immigration infrastructure now.

DNC policy resolutions have no practical effect. Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer aren’t likely to demand that all the party’s candidates pledge to abolish ICE—and might even distance themselves from this idea. That’s fine. The party’s voters overwhelmingly support getting rid of ICE. So it’s great that the DNC is representing their perspective and pushing congressional Democrats in that direction.

None of these positive moves have much to do with Martin himself or the party’s lackluster fundraising under his leadership. The party should still take stock of whether Martin is the right leader ahead of a critical presidential election. His messy handling of the autopsy convinces me that Martin should be replaced.

But the DNC is bigger than Martin—and at least this weekend, better.

President Trump’s family members are dodging subpoenas in his defamation lawsuit against the BBC. 

The British network asked a U.S. federal judge for help in getting documents and testimony from Donald Trump Jr., Ivanka Trump, and her husband Jared Kushner, the Associated Press reports, citing court documents. Serving the subpoenas has posed a challenge due to all three having Secret Service agents and other security protection, the documents stated. 

Trump filed the $10 billion lawsuit in December, claiming the British network defamed him in a 2024 documentary by editing his speech on January 6, 2021 before the Capitol insurrection. He accused the BBC of “splicing together two entirely separate parts” of his  speech to “intentionally misrepresent the meaning” of what he said.

But the lawsuit has had unintended consequences for the president. The network demanded Trump turn over financial documents to demonstrate financial harm from the documentary, to which a judge agreed. The judge also approved subpoenas of his family members and close advisers, including Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon. The BBC has additionally asked for more records related to former special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into January 6. 

Trump balked at handing over any financial documents, filing an emergency motion to pause the judge’s order that was later granted. Now, though, the BBC wants to know what information the Trump children have, as they were reportedly present while the president was revising his speech that he would deliver after his supporters had stormed the Capitol. Trump’s lawyers say that “the BBC is simply trying to distract away from their own obvious liability.”

“The BBC intentionally defamed President Donald J. Trump, and now the BBC is seeking to harass him, his family, and supporters by abusing the deposition process,” Trump’s legal team said in a statement. 

Trump probably thought he could scare the BBC into a settlement payday and some favorable coverage. Now, he’s having to fight attempts to discover his internal finances and what his family knows about January 6, 2021.  

The Trump administration is lashing out after Senator John Ossoff referenced Trump’s mysteriously close relationship with his much younger assistant Natalie Harp.

Ossoff questioned the president’s relationship with Harp, 34, at an Atlanta rally on Sunday.

“He golfs and trades stocks,” he said. “See, he doesn’t want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the emir of Qatar.”

Ossoff says that Trump doesn’t want to do his job but wants to “travel with Natalie” pic.twitter.com/aDLMKFeMmR

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 16, 2026

The crowd broke into applause—and the White House took the bait.

Trump himself lashed out after being asked about Ossoff’s comments Monday afternoon.

“You mean Pee-Wee Herman? Pee-Wee Herman lookalike?” Trump replied, pulling out his recent nickname for Ossoff. “I would much rather do other things.”

“Jon Jackoff has to be the biggest cuck loser in politics,” Steven Cheung, the ever-cantankerous White House communications director, posted on X. “Instead of denigrating hard working people serving their country, Jon should look deep into his soul and ask himself why he’s a miserable person who hates this country. It’s because he’s a radical, extremist Dumocrat.”

“Jon Ossoff is a cringeworthy, feminine theatre kid cosplaying as Barack Obama. Nobody gives a shit what this lightweight loser says,” White House spokesperson Davis Ingle said on X, launching a homophobic insult at Ossoff.

Trump and Harp’s working relationship has long been the subject of scrutiny, and Ossoff calling her out by name will only intensify it.

Harp was one of the few administration members who snuck away with Trump on a secret flight out of Turkey last month, while Secretary of State Marco Rubio, other Cabinet members, and journalists remained aboard the Air Force One gifted by Qatar—amid concerns it would be the target of a potential Iranian strike.

Harp’s own brother told The Daily Mail that Harp and Trump’s relationship was “very unhealthy,” and in their book Regime Change, The New York Times writers Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan reported that Harp in 2023 left Trump what amounted to love letters, with one even reading, “You are all that matters to me.”

“Ossoff winking at the rumor that Natalie Harp is more than just Trump’s staffer,” liberal podcaster Tommy Vietor wrote on X. “The question now is whether this will kick up a round of actual reporting by news outlets.”

This story has been updated.

Over the weekend, officials at Dallas-Fort Worth Airport abandoned plans to add additional foot washing stations used for an Islamic purification ritual after Governor Greg Abbott threatened to pull federal funding over supposed “religious discrimination.”

The outrage was on its face ridiculous. Not only would the foot washing stations have been perfectly legal and accessible to all travelers, but there are already two foot-washing stations in DFW Airport. The manufactured controversy was part of a growing wave of dangerous anti-Muslim sentiment being pushed by conservative leaders in Texas, according to a sweeping report The New York Times published Monday.

Dallas-Fort Worth has become a popular destination for Muslim families looking to make their home and find community in the United States. Over the last decade, the population of immigrants from Muslim majority countries grew by an estimated 80,000 people in the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area.

Still, Texas’s Muslim population is estimated to be between 300,000 and 500,000 people, accounting for roughly 2 percent of the state’s entire population—and yet for many conservative voters in Texas, Islam has replaced the U.S. border as a major concern.

In Dallas-Fort Worth, this anti-Muslim vitriol hit a new wave in early 2025, after officials announced the construction of the East Plano Islamic Center, or EPIC City, a large housing development and mosque outside of Dallas. Governor Greg Abbott has launched an investigation into the project. In the past year, things have only gotten worse.

In November, Abbott designated the Council of American-Islamic Relations as a “terrorist” organization, just months after the group documented a surge of Islamophobic rhetoric nationally. In May, Abbott ordered the cancellation of a private “Muslims only” party at a water park to celebrate Eid al-Adha, inviting a wave of backlash against the organizers. In June, the Texas State Board of Education voted to make the Bible a permanent part of the K-12 education curriculum.

That same month, at a Texas State Republican Convention, every speaker expressed some form of Islamophobic sentiment. Multiple panels warned of a so-called “invasion.” In a post on social media, Bo French, the Republican nominee for Texas Railroad Commissioner, warned, “I know I won’t rest until every Muslim is gone.”

Looking forward, Texas Republicans are looking for ways to use state laws to ban or regulate Islamic cultural practices governed by religious rules as soon as next year. Representative Alan Schoolcraft, a Republican candidate from San Antonio, told the Times that Islam is “much more than a religion” and urged Muslims to “try to become a citizen where you’re living. Otherwise there’s going to be conflict.”

But for many Muslims, “assimilating” comes with its own risks. Dr. Farhat Shaikh, a resident of Frisco, north of Dallas, told the Times that assimilating meant being “part of the decision making,” but noted that being actively involved in institutions can get labeled as a “take over.”

Jared Kushner spent four hours in a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and still failed to get him to support the Trump administration’s peace plan for Gaza.

Kushner met with Netanyahu along with Board of Peace Director Nickolay Mladenov Monday to discuss implementing the 15-point plan, CNN reports. The president’s son-in-law, who doesn’t hold an official position with the Trump administration, asked that Netanyahu “not create obstacles,” an unnamed Israeli source told the network.

Netanyahu refused to commit to anything, telling Kushner and Mladenov that Hamas had to disarm before Israel begins withdrawing any troops from Gaza. The meeting with Netanyahu came one day Kushner met with Hamas representatives in Egypt on Sunday. Hamas said it agrees to Trump’s peace framework, but will only begin disarmament if Israel follows through on a sequenced withdrawal from Gaza at the same time.

Israel has killed more than 73,000 Palestinians in Gaza in the last three years, including at least 1,260 since a ceasefire was declared last October. But Netanyahu publicly rejected the proposed peace plan earlier this month, calling it “problematic” because of impending Israeli elections in October. The accused war criminal has tied his political fortunes to Israel’s genocide in Gaza, using the war as an excuse to evade corruption charges and rally Israeli voters. Any concessions could undermine his chances of staying in power.