The New Republic

President Trump gloated Wednesday about lifting restrictions on 90 acres of protected land so that he could help along the recently finished construction of the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in North Dakota.

“During my first term it was a privilege to sign the bill that helped get this incredible project underway, and transferring 90 acres,” Trump said at the ceremony for the library’s opening Wednesday. “We took it right out of the federal government. We ripped it away from the federal government, they don’t know it’s missing. They still haven’t figured out what the hell happened.”

The Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library Foundation bought 90.3 acres of protected land from the U.S. Forest Service in 2021, after a bill supported by President Trump triggered the sale in December 2020.

Aside from the sale, Trump has significantly rolled back environmental protections that Roosevelt championed during his tenure, weakening the Endangered Species Act and exposing 86 million previously protected acres to drilling and development.

Trump on taxpayer funds for the Roosevelt library: "We ripped it away from the federal government. They don't know it's missing. They still haven't figured out what the hell happened." pic.twitter.com/vJiwYEC4BS

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 1, 2026

President Trump has lost three legal cases in 24 hours.

First the Supreme Court struck down his executive order banning birthright citizenship on Tuesday morning because it violated the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution. Then, hours later, a federal judge dismissed the White House’s effort to acquire New Hampshire’s voter information. After that, two federal judges shut down the president’s restrictions on a student loan forgiveness program.

On New Hampshire, U.S. District Judge Joseph LaPlante found the administration’s request to get the state’s voter registration list infringed the Civil Rights Act’s provisions on federal election records. LaPlante also ruled that the Justice Department couldn’t find any real violations of the Help America Vote Act of 2002, which created standards for states’ voter registration lists and voting systems, to merit access to the voter rolls.

It’s the tenth time the DOJ has lost a case in which it sought voter information from a state government. Judges have ruled against the Trump administration in Arizona, California, Maine, Massachusetts, Maryland, Michigan, Oregon, Rhode Island, and Wisconsin, and dismissed a Georgia effort because it was filed in the wrong city.

On student loans, federal judges appointed by President Biden in Washington, D.C., and Massachusetts blocked Trump’s attempt to reshape the Public Service Loan Forgiveness, which helps those who work for the government or nonprofit organizations. Trump attempted to prevent public service workers from getting student debt relief if their work had a “substantial illegal purpose” in the eyes of the administration. A coalition of nonprofit organizations joined 20 states to file a lawsuit against the rule, claiming that Trump’s Department of Education could target organizations that go against the president’s personal views, such as those dedicated to immigrant rights and transgender health care.

“The Department cannot create new criminal prohibitions through rulemaking,” U.S. District Judge Myoung Joun ruled in Massachusetts, stating that the department didn’t have legal authority and could be violating the Constitution’s First Amendment. “Indeed, the record further demonstrates ‌that the ⁠Final Rule has already chilled protected speech.”

In Washington, U.S. District Judge Amir Ali struck down the rule in a case brought by four nonprofits that work for immigrant rights. The Trump administration’s response to the student loan rulings seemed to prove the judges’ point.

“The Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program is intended to support Americans who serve the public good, not to subsidize organizations that engage in terrorism, facilitate illegal immigration, or support the mutilation of children,” Under Secretary of Education Nicholas Kent complained in a statement.

In all, these rulings show Trump’s contempt for the Constitution and that federal courts seem to be the only branch of government willing to prevent the administration from flouting it, as Republicans in Congress are unwilling to stand up to the president. Trump will have to come to terms that some of his favorite policies aren’t backed up by U.S. law.

Donald Trump is still trying to stiff E. Jean Carroll, according to the columnist’s attorney.

Roberta Kaplan, Carroll’s lawyer, wrote in a court filing Tuesday that Trump’s legal representative had called her the day prior asking for another delay to the $5 million sum Trump owes the writer. Later Monday, Kaplan said she informed Trump’s team that “Carroll does not consent,” and asked whether Trump would comply with the immediate disbursement of funds.

Carroll has a long and unfortunate history with the president. Trump was found liable by a jury in May 2023 for having sexually assaulted Carroll in the mid-1990s, for which she was awarded $5 million in damages.

He subsequently lost his defamation case against her the following January, when a judge ruled that Trump had continued to defame the advice columnist by denying the assault on the basis that she wasn’t his “type,” and by accusing her of making up the allegations against him for the benefit of her book. A jury awarded Carroll $83.3 million in that case.

But Carroll hasn’t yet seen a dime from either case. In May, a federal appeals court allowed Trump to continue staving off his payments until the Supreme Court decided whether or not to pick up the case. The court made their decision Monday, rejecting Trump’s challenge and allowing the verdict to stand.

In a separate filing Tuesday, Kaplan asked a judge to implement an expedited payment schedule for the sum that Trump owes Carroll. She referred to a June 2023 filing in which both parties agreed that Carroll could collect if the Supreme Court refused to hear the case.

Kaplan added that, by this point, the $5 million sum had accrued an additional $779,783 in interest, raising Trump’s initial debt to nearly $5.8 million.

Nonetheless, Trump has continued to make a target out of Carroll. In May, the Justice Department opened a criminal investigation into the writer, probing whether Carroll committed perjury in her previous cases against Trump.

White House staff are reportedly concerned that Donald Trump’s Fourth of July rally is a recipe for disaster—one that will send the president into yet another meltdown. 

The remarkably low turnout for Trump’s Great American State Fair has sparked serious worries that the president’s massive rally planned for Saturday will also be a dud, multiple sources told CNN Wednesday.  

The rally is scheduled to take place outside on the National Mall, as temperatures in Washington are forecasted to reach a stifling 100 degrees. 

One official familiar with the event told CNN that there would likely be large groups of people who reserved tickets for Trump’s address but don’t end up attending. Empty seats means that viewers are likely in for another presidential temper tantrum—a sorry celebration for the country’s 250th anniversary. 

The rally will be punctuated by a massive fireworks display currently scheduled to begin at 11:00 p.m. And unlike in past years, attendees will not be able to bring coolers to help beat the heat. 

“I do not understand why we are doing this so late,” one White House official told CNN, adding there were still ongoing efforts to fix the timing. “I’m really not sure who thought this was a good idea.”

So far, Trump’s Great American State Fair has been supremely underwhelming, and beset by technical difficulties, lame programming, and disappointing weather delays. Trump has raged in the face of bad reviews and lied about the visibly low attendance.

Internally, those in Trump’s orbit have begun pointing fingers about the president’s own Fyre Festival (except people actually went to Fyre Festival). “The mistake here was not driving attendance,” one person close to the White House told CNN. “It was an ‘if you build it, they will come’ mentality that failed.”

The MAGA-verse has begun to attack pregnant women in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 5–4 ruling to uphold the birthright citizenship clause of the Constitution, which holds that nearly anyone born on U.S. soil is an American citizen, regardless of where their parents are from.

Their new suggestion: Ban all pregnant foreigners from entering the country.

“If you have birthright citizenship, it means if a person comes here nine months pregnant to go look around at some things, in a couple of weeks that is the mother of a lifetime American citizen—and a direct line into American cash and welfare for the rest of that child’s life,” White House adviser Stephen Miller hollered at Jesse Watters on Fox News Tuesday evening.

“Mr. Miller, are we banning pregnant women from America? Are we banning foreign pregnant women?” Watters asked with a laugh.

“Well, what I’m saying, Jesse, is that you have to now think very carefully about who you let into your country, even on a temporary basis, because the possibility [for] birth tourism … when people come here just to have babies on American soil.”

Watters: Are we banning pregnant women from America?

Miller: You have to think carefully on who you let into the country. There’s a lot of things we have to take a hard look at. pic.twitter.com/mazrvtLhxa

— Acyn (@Acyn) July 1, 2026

“Everybody should agree that it’s a violation of our laws if your intent in coming here if you’re pregnant is to have a child to become a United States citizen,” acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said on Wednesday, calling birth tourism a “booming industry.”

“Just saw a pregnant Haitian woman at the grocery store. Called ICE immediately,” right-wing content producer Matt Morse wrote. “Can’t take any chances, these days.”

“The State Department should IMMEDIATELY cease to give out visas to pregnant applicants,” MAGA Representative Lauren Boebert said. “Sorry, Birth Tourism cannot continue.”

Some took the suggestion to an even more extreme level, calling for sterilization of all foreign visitors.

“Several ways forward here  given the choice of Roberts/Barrett to nullify the 14th Amendment and extra-constitutionally replace it with their own language,” The Federalist co-founder Sean Davis wrote on X. “Deny entry to all pregnant foreigners.… Deny entry to all female foreigners.… Require sterilization of all foreign visitors prior to entry.”

The same party that harangues single women about the low birth rate is now threatening any pregnant woman in this country who isn’t a citizen—the consequences of which could be devastating.

Former CIA Director John Brennan is suing the Trump administration, claiming that their investigation into him is a vindictive prosecution.

Brennan, who is under investigation by the Justice Department, is seeking to make sure the administration preserves all records pertaining to that investigation. In the lawsuit, filed Wednesday in federal court, he expressed concern that the DOJ wouldn’t preserve records and communications that would allow him to take legal action in the future if the administration decides to prosecute him.

“Administration officials from the Acting Attorney General to the FBI Director and the Counselor overseeing the Brennan investigations have been publicly declaring Director Brennan a criminal, not only before securing a conviction in court but even before a full investigation and an indictment,” Brennan’s attorneys wrote. “And, certain officials in the Department of Justice are engaging in demonstrably irregular prosecutorial activity in order to gin up a case that will satisfy the President’s direction.”

Brennan wants President Trump, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, federal prosecutors in Miami who have investigated him, and intelligence officers to preserve any records related to him. The Southern District of Florida U.S. Attorney’s Office is reportedly involved in investigating Brennan and has hired John Yoo, a former DOJ official from the Bush administration famous for legally defending torture after 9/11, to consult on a case that may concern Brennan.

One DOJ prosecutor who expressed doubts about the investigation into Brennan, Maria Medetis Long, was removed from the case in April. Long is chief of the national security section for the U.S. attorney’s office in Miami, and would normally be involved in a case concerning intelligence. This suggests that Brennan may have a point about the DOJ’s interest in him having to do with Trump wanting to punish anyone he perceives as an enemy.

The White House will not renew the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement, effectively ending the country’s trilateral economic pact with its closest neighbors and allies.

“The United States did not agree to renew the USMCA in its current form,” U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said in a statement Wednesday, the deadline to renew the 16-year arrangement. Greer added that, despite the lapse, the USMCA would remain “in force pending resolution of these issues or until the Agreement’s termination.”

“The United States will continue to engage with Mexico and Canada to address the Agreement’s shortcomings and our trade deficits with these countries,” he said.

The USMCA will automatically expire July 1, 2036, unless all three member countries come to a new agreement.

Donald Trump initially lauded the deal when it was negotiated under his first administration in 2018 as a replacement for the North American Free Trade Agreement. It went into full effect on July 1, 2020, and was designed to assist North American workers, farmers, ranchers, and businesses by creating a “more balanced, reciprocal trade” that would support job growth across the continent, according to the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative.

Since then, the U.S. has exported trillions of dollars worth of goods and services through the arrangement, though that was apparently not enough to prevent Trump from souring on the trinational accord.

Trump opted instead to impose unprecedented duties and tariffs on Mexican and Canadian goods after he returned to office in 2025, tearing the deal to shreds in the process. On June 10, the president insisted that the U.S. should have a more level playing field with its trade partners, claiming that America doesn’t need its neighbors’ goods and services.

“We don’t need anything that Canada has. We don’t need anything that Mexico has, but they need everything that we have,” Trump told reporters at the time. “And they have to treat us better.”

Canada and Mexico are two of America’s top trading partners, cumulatively accounting for about a third of all U.S. exports, per the U.S. Census Bureau’s Foreign Trade statistics. Annually, the deal has provided the infrastructure for roughly $2 trillion in annual trade, according to data obtained by The Wall Street Journal.

But the lapsed trade agreement sets the stage for a larger debate over American economic relations that some economists estimate could take a long time to pin down. In the meantime, regional economies are expected to suffer from the lingering uncertainty.

Kelly Ann Shaw, who served as deputy director of the National Economic Council during Trump’s first term, told the Journal that the U.S. will likely morph the deal into something that could look much different from the USMCA.

“That process will carry on throughout the rest of the summer, if not into the end of this year,” she said.

Small towns hoping to put on celebrations for America’s 250th anniversary have had to cancel or scale back their plans after the Trump administration cut their funding.

NOTUS reports that Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency slashed funding for humanities nonprofit councils in states and territories across the country, many of whom planned to use those federal funds on history projects for the upcoming semiquincentennial. These official nonprofits were created by Congress to help make history and literature accessible to the American public.

Humanities councils in Ohio, West Virginia, Alabama, and Washington state all had to axe or scale back their anniversary plans, their leaders told NOTUS, and it had a ripple effect down to local historical organizations.

Musk’s DOGE initiative left these state organizations with just enough money to stay afloat last year. President Trump shifted millions from DOGE cuts towards his “triumphal arch” and “Garden of American Heroes,” preventing further funds from going towards local 250th anniversary projects.

Congress tried to remedy the shortfall by restoring funding for the state humanities councils to their normal levels for the 2026 fiscal year. But the Trump administration has refused to disperse that money, giving the councils less than half of what was appropriated, and told them not to expect any more.

That’s having a real impact in towns across America.

“It means that we are not able to do things that are extra, things that are bigger projects. A lot of humanities organizations would have had some incredible projects that none of us have been able to complete,” said Jessica Cyders, the executive director of the Southeast Ohio History Center. Her organization could have been a candidate for a 250th anniversary grant from Ohio Humanities, which distributes federal grants to the state’s local historical societies and community groups.

“There’s not really a lot of cultural infrastructure in West Virginia. Where most of the cultural work is done is in regional centers, community centers, small museums, county historical associations. So the people who really got hurt were those small organizations across the state,” Eric Waggoner, the head of the West Virginia Humanities Council, told NOTUS. They had planned to send their 250th anniversary funding to West Virginia University, local libraries, and small museums.

“I’m sad to say we had to scrap it,” Waggoner said. “Since we’re the only organization that does this kind of grant-making in West Virginia, without us, there’s really not much.”

“This is a pretty significant national event,” Cyders said. “Look, I’m probably not going to be alive for the 300th anniversary.”

Trump also took funding from America 250, the federal bipartisan organization that was supposed to be planning the semiquincentennial celebrations, and redirected it towards his own pet Freedom 250 projects. The president seems to have ruined what could have been amazing celebrations for the entire country with his ego, and who knows what could have been going on at the National Mall instead of a tacky “Great American State Fair.

Bill Pulte officially became the acting director of national intelligence less than two weeks ago, but already he has become the president’s battering ram.

Speaking with reporters Wednesday, Donald Trump said he saddled Pulte with the responsibility of declassifying “almost everything.”

“Bill (Pulte) is there just for a fairly short period of time. But while he’s there, I said you can declassify whatever you want,” Trump recalled. “I think that Bill will declassify. I told him you can declassify whatever you want.”

The comments followed an NBC News report that the White House task force planned to declassify thousands of documents from U.S. intelligence agencies in order to bolster Trump’s election fraud conspiracy from the 2020 presidential election.

Sources that spoke with CNN last month said that Trump views the Office of Director of National Intelligence as playing a “central role” in election security, both past and present.

Pulte, despite bringing zero national security experience to a job in which it is legally required, has impressed the president during his time in previous administration roles. In his prior role as the director of U.S. Federal Housing, Pulte found novel ways to legally pursue Trump’s political opponents.

“That’s exactly the type of stuff Trump wants in the person leading election security efforts. Bill will go there, unabashedly,” one unnamed source told CNN.

Trump noted Wednesday that Pulte will only temporarily fill the role, while his formal nominee, Jay Clayton, undergoes his confirmation process. That day could not come soon enough for some people within the Trump administration, who lament Pulte’s efforts to push his own agenda with the president.

“A lot of people absolutely detest Pulte,” one source told CNN last month.

FBI Director Kash Patel failed to properly disclose a six-figure stock purchase in a company that’s been contracted by the Justice Department, NOTUS reported Wednesday.

Federal financial records first reviewed by NOTUS showed that on November 21, Patel  purchased between $100,000 and $250,000 worth of stock in MicroStrategy, a “bitcoin treasury company” that has done millions of dollars in business with the DOJ over the past decade.

Patel failed to disclose the purchase within 45 days of the trade, in violation of the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act, also known as the STOCK Act.

In a letter to the Office of Government Ethics on May 26, Patel said the purchase had been “inadvertently omitted” from his financial disclosure. Two days later, in a letter to the Office of Government Ethics, Deputy Assistant Attorney General William Taylor said the purchase had been omitted due to a miscommunication. “I continue to believe that Director Patel is in compliance with applicable laws and regulations governing conflicts of interest,” he wrote.

An FBI official told NOTUS that Patel’s late reporting was “not realized and unintentional.” However, Dylan Hedtler-Gaudette, acting vice president of the Project on Government Oversight, told the outlet that Patel’s stock purchase disclosure is “absolutely” late under the letter of the STOCK Act.

“That’s violating the law—no other way to put it,” Hedtler-Gaudette said.

Patel has yet to face the customary $200 fine for his breach of conduct—and he probably won’t.

Centrist House Democrats are alarmed after realizing that democratic socialists can beat them in primaries outside of New York City.

On Tuesday, 29-year-old democratic socialist, lawyer, and Ethiopian immigrant Melat Kiros defeated 15-term incumbent Colorado Representative Dianna DeGette in a high-turnout election by an impressive ten-point margin, according to early results.

DeGette is a longtime member of the Democratic establishment and was a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. But even with her progressive status, her support from dark money corporate super PACs and pro-Israel PACs, as well as her staunch support for Israel, made her particularly vulnerable to an attack from a candidate like Kiros—who was fired from her job over a social media post criticizing law firms’ support for Israel. Yet establishment Democrats still seem to be stunned by DeGette’s loss.

“One more case in the growing dynamic of performative politics,” an anonymous House Democrat told Axios. “Diana was an excellent representative with seniority—but the style of someone younger and more outspoken has become more attractive to that cohort of motivated urban left voters.”

BREAKING: Rep. DeGette gets heated with a constituent pressing her on why she voted to send bombs to Israel:

"If this the only issue that you care about is this issue, then you should not vote for me"

DeGette, who's 68, is facing a primary challenge from @MelatKirosCO. pic.twitter.com/sGEiqDPfOl

— Sunrise Movement 🌅 (@sunrisemvmt) March 19, 2026

Another senior House Democrat called it a “wake-up call.”

“I told everyone that would listen in 2024, that Trump winning was like manna from heaven to DSA,” another told the publication. “That DSA is … winning some safe seat primaries with these young white college-educated voters is just no shock. It’s literally their entire playbook.”

But Kiros’s supporters point to the will of the voters, not a greater playbook.

“If DeGette didn’t deserve a primary, Denverites wouldn’t have elected Melat by 10 points,” Justice Democrats spokesperson Usamah Andrabi told Axios. “All this outrage proves is the Democratic establishment’s contempt for their own voters.… It’s time for the party to catch up to its own base who are no longer interested in politicians who call themselves progressive but are bankrolled by corporate lobbies and AIPAC while voting to fund genocide and ICE.”

Kiros’s victory comes on the heels of a clean sweep of Democratic Socialists of America victories in New York City, as Darializa Avila Chevalier defeated Representative Adriano Espaillat and Assemblymember Claire Valdez became the Democratic nominee in the 7th congressional district.

“Denver voters of all ages, of all races, of all religions, sends a clear message: We will not wait,” Kiros said in her victory speech Tuesday night. “We will not wait to take the fight to Donald Trump and the oligarchy. We will not wait. We will not wait to abolish ICE and Medicare for all. We will not wait to put an end to the politics of the past, to get big money out of our politics, and to reject corporate packs at AIPAC. And no, we will not wait to end the genocide in Palestine. We believe that fundamental change can and will happen if we fight for it.”

🎥 Recalling how she was fired from her law firm after refusing to remove a letter defending pro-Palestinian student protesters, Melat Kiros said, “I didn’t flinch because I stood by every word and I always will.”

She added: “I know that will not be the only moment where those… pic.twitter.com/iI41zQp5wn

— Drop Site (@DropSiteNews) July 1, 2026

The multi-million dollar renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool was done with highly toxic materials.

The contractor that the Trump administration hired used products by the popular truck-bed coating company Rhino Linings, according to the company’s website. But a closer examination of the materials used indicates that they could cause serious harm to the local wildlife that frequent the 6.5-million gallon basin.

A barrel of “RHINO 405 A Thixotropic High Viscosity Epoxy Resin” was spotted by the pool during the restoration process. According to an OSHA safety data sheet, the chemical is “toxic to aquatic life with long lasting effects” and is a strong irritant capable of causing allergic reactions.

It’s only been a couple of weeks since the administration finished its renovation and refilled the pool, but already visitors have noticed and documented areas of the memorial’s lining that are peeling and sloughing off.

Several dead ducks have also been spotted in and around the pool, adding to the massive brouhaha.

Records indicate that the Trump administration spent at least $14.7 million renovating the Reflecting Pool—a project that was, apparently, all for naught. (As well as a far cry from the president’s original promise of a $1.8 million price tag.) The money was spent in an apparently futile effort to rid the premises of a relentless algal bloom. That, too, has already returned to the pool, mere weeks after the monument’s reopening.

Fixing the Reflecting Pool is a headache that’s plagued pretty much every administration since its construction in 1923, because what makes the Reflecting Pool beautiful is exactly what makes it so difficult to maintain. The pool’s expansive length is possible due to the use of multiple large concrete slabs as its bottom. But those slabs are also prone to serious, structural leaks, which require the White House to replace roughly 16 million gallons of water each year. And the pool’s shallow depth—which creates its mirror-like appearance—also detracts from the pool’s health by creating a breeding ground for algae blooms that turn the water green.

President Donald Trump raked in more than $86 million last year from suing media companies.

Trump’s annual financial disclosure revealed just how lucrative the president’s pastime of lobbing lawsuits at media companies has become. In 2025, the president made a total of $86.5 million off of settlements from his lawsuits against media companies. 

His most profitable lawsuits were his First Amendment challenges against media companies that had removed him from their platforms in the wake of the January 6 riot. Trump raked in a whopping $24.5 million as part of a settlement with Meta, $22 million off a settlement with YouTube, and $8 million from a settlement with Twitter.  

Trump also also managed to turn silencing the press into a moneymaking scheme. He made $16 million from his settlement with CBS in a lawsuit over the editing of Kamala Harris’s interview on 60 Minutes in 2024. The settlement was supposedly made to ease Paramount’s sale to Skydance Media—a deal that needed approval from the president. (Months later, CBS chopped up an interview with Trump to make him sound normal.) 

Trump made another $16 million from a settlement with ABC News over a defamation lawsuit spurred by George Stephanopoulos’s use of the phrase “liable for rape” while discussing Trump’s E. Jean Carroll case. The jury in that case found Trump liable for sexual abuse, not rape. The Supreme Court rejected Trump’s plea to review the Carroll case Monday. 

Anyone who’s bought a flight, a concert or sports ticket, or a vacation stay recently knows that the price they thought they were paying is not always the price they end up paying. After settling on the desired option, you encounter the onerous and daunting process of checking out: clicking through screen after screen until suddenly, right before it’s time to hit “pay,” the price jumps—and you have to squint to read all of the fees, surcharges, and other costs that have been tacked on at the end. Consumers have to decide to either suck it up and pay or go back to the beginning and comb through other options.

Though familiar from the above examples, this practice is popping up everywhere, even when finding a place to live: A Guardian investigation last week exposed Greystar, a private equity–backed apartment building management company, for piling obscene fees on renters, who are often hooked into long-term leases and can’t escape the fees easily.

Last week, Illinois Governor JB Pritzker signed a law banning junk fees in the state, joining at least four other states—Connecticut, Colorado, Minnesota, and Virginia—in prohibiting companies from showing a cheap price up front and then surprising customers with additional costs when it comes time to buy. “We’re talking about hidden fees, about artificial scarcity, predatory lending products, ticket schemes that make it harder and more expensive for families to just enjoy a night out,” Pritzker said at the signing ceremony. “Together, those things add up to hundreds or even thousands of dollars every year for many Illinois families.”

Tackling junk fees is shaping up to be a big part of the Democrats’ affordability agenda, and it touches on a complaint many Americans have with the economy that is more complex than simply price hikes and supply chain disruptions. Prices aren’t just out of reach for families, but companies are manipulating customers to increase their profits. Americans want a fairer playing field.

President Joe Biden tried to tackle this problem in some major industries before his term ended. Notably, fans’ anger at Ticketmaster pricing during Beyoncé and Taylor Swift tours led to a congressional hearing and ultimately new Federal Trade Commission rules for event tickets and lodging. Biden’s secretary of transportation, Pete Buttigieg, also tried to ban some junk fees on flights. These fees make airlines billions, and they got the ban thrown out in court. President Donald Trump’s transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, is a former lobbyist whose clients included the airline industry, so it’s no wonder he’s been more focused on weakening passengers’ rights and protections.

Junk fees aren’t just an annoyance. They gum up the works of a competitive marketplace, making it harder for families to find affordable goods and services. And it costs them money, not just in fees but in their time. A 2024 FTC study estimated that banning these kinds of deceptive pricing practices could save Americans $11 billion over a decade.

In the wake of Biden’s efforts, some cities and states took up the cause. Mayor Zohran Mamdani has targeted some industries in New York City. New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill has directed her administration to review such fees, and Washington, D.C., Attorney General Brian Schwalb sued a large landlord in the city over junk fees. Several states are considering laws similar to Illinois’s, and even more states may ban dynamic pricing using artificial intelligence that relies on captured personal data.

“Increasingly, pricing feels deceptive, or at a minimum, it doesn’t feel transparent anymore,” said Lindsay Owens, the president and CEO of Groundwork Collaborative, a nonprofit advocacy group that has studied various aspects of the Annoyance Economy. “The lack of transparency, lack of predictability, are things that make the consumer experience in America really frustrating.”

But a lot of the tools the federal government uses to make sure customers are getting a fair shake and companies aren’t gouging them for excess profits, like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and similar agencies, have been neutered or abandoned in the Trump administration. That would presumably change under a Democratic president. In the meantime, two Democrats—Florida Representative Maxwell Frost and Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley—have introduced bills in their respective chambers to ban junk fees for renters, but neither seems likely to move forward in the GOP-controlled Congress.

Americans remain angry about the economy for a host of reasons. Prices are rising, but products are also getting worse and more annoying to buy. If you do sign up for a subscription or product, it’s harder to cancel. Workers’ wages aren’t rising as fast as profits for shareholders are, and companies do everything they can to squeeze more money out of us. “Consumers are fed up,” Owens said. In their anger lies a clear opportunity for Democrats, which some of them are finally seizing.

MAGA world is practically apoplectic over the Supreme Court’s birthright ruling.

Speaking with Fox News late Tuesday, deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller suggested that the nation’s highest court had decided to “suicide” the country by upholding the Fourteenth Amendment.

“Here’s a pretty good clue your constitutional interpretation is wrong: If your ruling requires you to suicide your civilization, your reading of the Constitution is wrong,” the Project 2025 adviser said, apparently attempting to school the nation’s highest judiciary on constitutional law.

Miller: Here's a pretty good clue your constitutional interpretation is wrong. If you are ruling requires you to suicide your civilization, your reading of the constitution is wrong. pic.twitter.com/ZNmlDs0fvg

— Acyn (@Acyn) July 1, 2026

“President [Ulysses S.] Grant … in the nineteenth century, did not want to create an automatic third-world citizenship requirement for America,” Miller argued. But that’s not exactly true.

Grant played a major role in the codification of the Fourteenth Amendment, fiercely advocating that the burgeoning concept of birthright citizenship should be granted to Native Americans, immigrants, and the millions of men, women, and children that had been recently freed from slavery.

Even then, the idea was controversial and fiercely debated. Opponents to birthright citizenship included former Confederate states, white former slave owners, and racist terrorist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan.

But the idea was popular enough that Grant won the presidency in 1868, the same year that the amendment was ratified.

Nonetheless, in Miller’s worldview, the 158-year-old legislation is “an abomination.”

“But let’s thank President Trump, because of President Trump’s courage and leadership, we are now on the precipice—yes, we were dealt a setback—but because of his courage alone, we are on the precipice as a nation of being in the position of ending this travesty once and for all,” Miller said.

Trump himself downplayed the Supreme Court decision, claiming that he and his allies could avoid the lengthy constitutional amendment process and “easily make it up in Congress through Legislation,” even though doing so would run afoul of the law.

The U.S. is not unique in granting birthright citizenship: 32 countries around the world offer unconditional, automatic citizenship to people born within their territory, according to a Pew Research Center analysis. Pretty much the entire western hemisphere permits it. Another 50 countries offer something similar. Nor was the U.S. the first to conceive of birthright citizenship: The concept originated in the United Kingdom in 1608 during a debate over whether or not a child owed allegiance to the English crown.

MAGA raged at first lady Melania Trump after she posted a statement in support of the LBGTQ+ community.

Following the Supreme Court’s decision Tuesday to uphold state laws banning transgender women and girls from competing on sports teams that align with their gender, Melania shared a strange message of support for the LBGTQ+ community on X.

“‘As many of you may know, I fully support the LGBTQIA+ community. But we must also ensure that our female athletes are protected and respected.’—MELANIA, #1 NYT Bestseller, (p. 156)” the post read, quoting her own book.

“The U.S. Supreme Court has now legally confirmed this opinion: ‘Under Title IX and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, may schools maintain women’s and girls’ sports for biological females? … The answer is yes.’

“America, we can support the rights of the LGBTQIA+ community and also protect opportunities for female athletes. Respect everyone and keep girls’ sports fair,” the post read. “Both ideals are essential.”

Far-right trolls didn’t agree.

“Enough of this virtue signaling BS and bowing to the degenerate mob. Deport her,” wrote Dissident Media, an X account posting far-right content.

“MAGA is to the left of Bill Clinton,” wrote Joel Webbon, a Texas pastor and conservative commentator.

“I support the trans community getting the mental health treatment they need to recognize they are not members of the opposite sex,” wrote X user Matt van Swol.

“What is ideal about men claiming they can become women? What in that do you actually support?” asked X user Debbie, who described herself as #MAGA.

“I’m thoroughly disappointed with this post. LGTBQ+ (alphabet soup) is an Anti-God movement. Sorry to say, but I’ve lost respect,” wrote X user Lori Smith.

It seems that even after Donald Trump campaigned to strip transgender athletes of their freedoms, members of MAGA aren’t convinced that the president and his wife are far-right enough on social issues.

Senator Mitch McConnell was found unconscious before he was rushed to the hospital last month.

Punchbowl News reports that the former Senate majority leader, who is retiring after his current term ends in January, lost consciousness at his Washington, D.C., home at 8:36 a.m. on June 14, before a dispatcher sent over an Advanced Life Support ambulance. Journalist Desiree Townsend posted a recording of the call from the emergency dispatcher Tuesday afternoon to X. 

This emergency dispatch recording was obtained from Washington, D.C. Fire and EMS dispatch and captures the call on June 14, 2026 at 8:36 a.m. requesting an Advanced Life Support (ALS) response after Senator Mitch McConnel was reported unconscious. According to the dispatch,… pic.twitter.com/ABv97WXJhz

— Desirée Townsend (@Cheering4Change) June 30, 2026

The audio has not been independently verified, and McConnell’s office has not commented on it. On that day last month, a spokesperson for the 82-year-old said that McConnell was “receiving excellent care,” but didn’t elaborate further. On June 22, his office issued a statement saying he was “working closely with staff on Senate business and Kentucky matters as he continues his recovery.” And this Tuesday, one of his staff members said that he was recovering and working with staff.  

But his office has not said anything about his condition or prognosis, nor if he is still in the hospital. Senate Majority Leader John Thune said June 15 that McConnell “is clearly dialed in to what’s going on. He’s following along with stuff we are doing this week up here. Very much so.”

Is that still the case? This is the second time McConnell has been hospitalized this year, having spent eight days in the hospital for flu-like symptoms in February. And in the past three years, McConnell’s health has severely deteriorated. 

In March 2023, McConnell fell at a dinner event at Washington’s Waldorf Astoria hotel and fractured his rib while suffering a concussion. He suffered another fall in July, and in public appearances that year, froze mid-sentence twice, dissociating for 20 to 30 seconds each time. The attending physician at the Capitol later declared that McConnell hadn’t suffered from a seizure, stroke, or movement disorder, and was likely dehydrated or experiencing the aftereffects of his concussion.

In December 2024, McConnell would fall again at a Senate Republican lunch, spraining his wrist and cutting his face. He also tripped and fell in a Senate building October 2025 while walking with an aide’s help as a reporter asked him questions.

McConnell seems determined to stay in his Senate seat until the very end, refusing to step aside early because of his health. Six more months might be too much for the former Senate leader, and his refusal to step down has drawn the ire of his Republican colleagues and critics of gerontocracy.

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.

If they regain power, it’s not enough for Democrats to pass good economic policies and focus on affordability, says Adam Gurri, publisher of Liberal Currents. Instead, he says the party needs a “Reconstruction” agenda that drastically overhauls American government. In the latest episode of Right Now, Gurri describes some of the bold ideas that are part of Liberal Currents’ newly released “Reconstruction Papers.” Gurri says that he isn’t sure if Democratic politicians should tout these exact ideas on the campaign trail. Instead, the Reconstruction Papers are a kind of a liberal version of Project 2025, a super-ambitious governing agenda that could guide a Democratic administration in office.

This is a lightly edited transcript of the June 30 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.

Perry Bacon: I’m Perry Bacon. I’m the host of Right Now on The New Republic. I’m joined by Adam Gurri. He’s the publisher of Liberal Currents, which is a great publication, a newer publication that writes about politics both in the U.S. and Britain, and a little bit abroad as well, but mainly focuses on the U.S. And we’re going to talk today about a project Liberal Currents is doing called The Reconstruction Papers. So Adam, welcome. Thanks for joining me.

Adam Gurri: Thank you for having me.

Bacon: So tell people about Liberal Currents a little bit, just because I assume that’s a publication people are not as familiar with as The New York Times or the Washington Post. So tell them about Liberal Currents and what you’re doing, first of all.

Gurri: Sure. It’s an essay publication, mostly—so more commentary than news, though occasionally we’ve done a bit of news. Our focus is obviously through a liberal perspective. One of our inspirations when we started in 2017 was Jacobin magazine, which was created on the idea that socialism had been discredited in the U.S., in its reputation. They wanted to actually say, No, this is a serious intellectual tradition, and we are its number one exponents in the U.S.

We had the reverse situation, which was that liberalism was so successful that actually people didn’t take it very seriously, in the sense that they assumed a lot. We assume that we believe in free speech, we assume that we believe in different things, in human rights and such, but not a lot of thought was actually given to why anymore.

And actually, the enemies of liberalism spent a lot more time thinking about ways to attack it than the defenders thought about how to defend it, both intellectually and otherwise. So we wanted to correct that. We wanted to be one of the foremost exponents of what liberalism is, what it should be, why the world should be more liberal, and how we should go about it.

Bacon: So talk about The Reconstruction Papers and what you’re doing.

Gurri: Yes. From our point of view—the Trump era, liberal resistance to it. The very name “resistance” implies a negative response, right? We’re trying to stop him from doing bad things. And even in talking about the extreme destruction of the second term, it’s often about, It’s bad that he’s breaking this thing. It was so great before. We need to fix it as soon as we can, or stop the destruction as much as we can.

That’s all true, but we shouldn’t fix it to be the way it was before. All of these things had problems before Trump came along. Everyone agreed, for example, that tuition was out of control in colleges and no one could quite identify the cause. That the public funding of science—which was this tremendous accomplishment in the 20th century for the U.S., and still one of the biggest ones worldwide by far, in fact I think the biggest by a wide margin—before Trump it was getting creaky, bureaucratic, sclerotic in a number of ways.

So the Reconstruction Papers is saying, we’re not just going to go back to before Trump. First of all, that’s impossible, because it’s not how things work. If you tried to do that, you would just be doing a kludge that would be worse than what we had before. But second of all, what we had before could be better. Why limit ourselves?

Now that we have this window of opportunity, where the Republicans have shot their shot—they’re trying to destroy the administrative state, the New Deal state, really and truly for the first time—let’s shoot our shot. Let’s make the best version of all of these things that we can.

And The Reconstruction Papers isn’t as comprehensive as we would like it to be in that. There’s more that we could write. We’ll continue publishing new things, obviously, on the main site—potentially a future issue of The Reconstruction Papers as well. But it covers a lot. It covers a lot of different topics.

Bacon: Do you mean to invoke Reconstruction as in the post-Civil War?

Gurri: Yeah, absolutely. So there’s a few things, right? Reconstruction, the original one, is both an inspiration and a caution, because they had the right idea. They weren’t just passing amendments to change what legal rights we had, which was obviously one thing they did do. But the whole goal of it, the whole idea of Reconstruction, was the slave power was not just a legal entity. It was an institution that had social and political power, and in order to actually destroy it, you couldn’t just outlaw slavery. You had to actually break the political arrangement, break the economic organization of the South in such a way that it wouldn’t come back.

And the caution is that they failed, right? They did accomplish a lot. But a lot of their gains were reversed, and then we had almost a century of Jim Crow. Some people—including Victor Ray, in our collection, in the Reconstruction Papers—refer to the era of civil rights reforms as the Second Reconstruction. So that would be the successful one.

The Voting Rights Act, even more than the Civil Rights Acts, I would say, being the spine of that, holding the whole thing together. That was fairly successful in actually enfranchising African Americans permanently, and other minorities as well that were disenfranchised elsewhere. And frankly, Southern whites, very disenfranchised as well. It was not just minorities that were disenfranchised there. It was also poor people, anyone that they didn’t really want having a chance at challenging the status quo.

But now we’re seeing the unwinding of that. So we need—if there are two, we need a third.

Bacon: So I read—I don’t think I read all of them, but I read many of the Reconstruction Papers. So what Liberal Currents has done is, there are, I think, dozens of people who’ve written articles—maybe four pages, maybe 15 pages, that range in length—about their subject matter. So there’s foreign policy, there’s trade, there’s higher education, there’s domestic policy. So that’s a broad sense. But give people a sense of two or three ideas that are in the document they might want to think about.

Gurri: Sure. So one to think of, in terms of what has just happened in the Supreme Court, would be Anna Law’s contribution on immigration law. I think probably even more ambitious programs are possible, but our immigration status quo is so bad right now—even before, again, the Trump second term, it was so bad—that there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit. And her approach essentially was to say, Let’s take the low-hanging fruit. And the low-hanging fruit is essentially what she calls normalizing immigration law.

Right now, Congress has failed to pass any kind of bill for 20 years. There’s a lot of things that bipartisanly they have more or less agreed on for most of that time that would make the situation better off, including for people like us who believe that immigration is good. And we should just do it. And it should be reauthorized on a regular basis through Congress, so that it will normalize the process of actually revisiting how many people are here on TPS, just the different levels and numbers of each, and—

Bacon: Just to be clear, and make sure people understand—every year Congress should intentionally think through and pass legislation about how many people are entering the country new, not as a sort of—there should be a global number, right?

Gurri: I forget the exact cadence. I don’t think it’s every single year. But for example, the Voting Rights Act itself was reauthorized multiple times.

Bacon: Yes.

Gurri: And each time they reauthorized it, one of the things they would say is, We’ll reauthorize it again in this number of years. So after the Reagan one, I think it was quite a long time. Before that, they did it a couple of times relatively close together. And this is one of those inside-baseball, Congress things that a lot of people don’t know about. Having legislation be reauthorized like that gives Congress a more central role.

I would say a theme across the Reconstruction Papers is many of the problems of our system are downstream of the dysfunction of Congress. So the more you can do to force Congress to actually step up and fill the role it’s supposed to, the more that out-of-control presidencies and out-of-control courts will be reined in, almost just by happenstance. So making Congress regularly reauthorize some basic things about immigration law, according to Anna Law, will help a lot of things.

So that’s one—tied to the TPS, because TPS itself is a kludge, right? It’s like this, Oh, presidents can discretionarily give it to some people. Maybe we don’t make it quite so discretionary for them to revoke it—though it is discretionary for them whether or not they’re going to renew it. It’s just a mess in terms of how it works.

Bacon: What are the Supreme Court reforms in the document? I’ve forgotten now. What are the Supreme Court reforms themselves?

Gurri: Yeah. We actually don’t talk about it that much. One reason being that I actually am pretty optimistic that all the ideas are out there, for the most part. This has been discussed to death, and it’s really just a matter of having the will to do it. Nick Grossman, in his first essay—which is about the short-term things we need to do to get out of the immediate crisis, rather than the long-term vision stuff—says just outright that we should just expand the Court, straight up.

In my essay, which is on federalism, I mention that any and all of the things—almost everything we’re talking about that’s in any way ambitious—is going to require a Supreme Court to go along with it, which means we should just make one that will. Whether it is through a one-time expansion or—like Senator Wyden a few years ago had a court reform plan already that would work fine. It essentially would just create a fixed number of appointments per presidential term.

In theory, you need to pass an amendment to set term limits. What they wanted to do in practice was to just create a new seniority status, where you’re on the Supreme Court still, but you’re not actually seeing any cases after a certain number of years. So even doing that, and then immediately putting the older Republican nominees on the retirement path, and making sure that the number of nominees per term is such that the first Democratic president is going to create a Democratic majority immediately—just stuff like that, I think, will be good enough.

Bacon: The federalism essay is about giving states more power. That was very striking to me, so talk about federalism.

Gurri: Yeah. It’s three things, right? So the one that I think is relevant to what’s happened the past year and a half, mostly, is the guaranteeing-the-Republican-form-of-government component. So I strongly believe that a lot of the problems in our system—and it’s not very timely to talk about right now, with the federal government going out of control, but most of the problems are local.

A lot of local governments—when we talk about police reform, for example, the worst police in our country are just random localities that aren’t very populous. They don’t have a big tax base. They engage in very predatory behavior. They’re not very professionalized. But whenever we want to do police reform, you can’t do it very systematically, because you kind of do it county by county or locality by locality.

So I’ve always believed that one path forward is: make state governments more democratic, A. B, make state governments stronger than local governments. And then C, do better fiscal federalism, the way that Canada does, for example, where we’re not putting a lot of strings attached to the block grants the federal government gives to states. We’re just trying to make sure that state budgets per person are more or less equalized, regardless of whether you have a lot of poor people in your state or a lot of rich people in your state, to summarize it very—

Bacon: I’m a little worried, because as I read what Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott each day—I’m a little worried about this idea. So talk about your idea a little bit.

Gurri: Yeah. So the Constitution, in theory, guarantees the Republican form of government for each state. We’ve never actually done anything with this. Even the Voting Rights Act has nothing to do with it. It just invokes the 14th and 15th Amendments—mainly the 15th, which is about not denying people the right to vote on the basis of race.

But I think we should actually just use that, and we should use that to authorize legislation that is very prescriptive about what is allowed as the form of government at the state level. And at minimum, that should mean one chamber—because almost every state now is bicameral, with two chambers like the federal government, and then a separately elected governor. So at minimum, the minimum-level change should be one of those chambers has to be done by proportional representation, meaning that whatever party gets 30 percent of the votes gets 30 percent of the seats, et cetera.

So that’s one thing. The other thing is, if you are going to have separately elected executives like the governor, like the attorney general in many states, a lot of these positions, they have to be either a runoff or ranked-choice vote, so that you don’t get a situation where someone has a lot less than a majority of the vote and wins. In both cases, you are pushing against minority rule.

And in the case of proportional representation specifically, you’re breaking up what a lot of people call our two-party system. I would call it a two-at-most-party system. Because most state governments are just one party. And then primaries are treated like, OK, we have primaries. You can just vote in those instead. But those rarely have the same level of turnout as a general election. Plus, they make elections a lot more expensive—you have to have two elections that you’re running in.

So proportional representation creates actual multi-partyism in every single state, actual party competition in every single state. In a state like Texas or Florida, what that probably means is the Republican Party mainly cracks up, and the different wings of it are competing with each other directly, but they’re not spoilers necessarily. Then they have to coalition with each other in the legislature to actually work. But it opens up the space.

The fact of the matter is, everyone right now is spitting mad on the liberal side of the spectrum, and many on the independent side as well—they’re spitting mad about a lot of what the administration has done. But the approval rating of the Democratic Party itself is still in the gutter, even though the Republican Party is doing so badly. And it’s because the Democratic Party brand is kind of terrible, frankly. It’s a combination of, obviously, Republicans hate them, but then Democrats feel like they’re just not doing anything. They’re not accomplishing anything, so they also don’t approve.

Having actual multi-party competition would open up the possibility of new liberal parties to run that don’t have the baggage of the Democratic Party, but can still coalition with them when they win. So in general—again, if you force it at the federal level, you say to state governments, You have to do this, or your elections don’t count under our authority implementing the Constitution—then gerrymandering is no longer a problem, and we’ve seen how big a problem that can quickly become.

Proportional representation makes that impossible. You can’t gerrymander governors, so you just make sure that there’s no spoilers where someone’s winning with 40 percent or less of the vote, or something insane like that. Or what we actually have now, which is just one party wins every single time. So you have actual multi-party competition. You don’t have minority rule in any case.

And at that point, those are the strings, in order to get the support of the federal government to consolidate power at the state government level. Because state governments, if they were actually democratically responsive, would be a far better way to govern than local governments, for the most part.

Bacon: All right. That was helpful, because that was a far-reaching idea that would be much different than... But I want to get people to understand that what you all are calling for in many areas of policy is just much different than where we are now.

Gurri: Yes. Oh, yes.

Bacon: It is reconstruction. It is not reform. It’s not tinkering. And so I wanted to get that. So now I want to talk less about the ideas and more about kind of where we are.

So I think—and a lot of people I agree with, Jamelle Bouie’s writing in this direction, you guys are doing good stuff in this direction—a lot of people who are thought leaders I think of are describing a big we need to have a big reconstruction-style of June 2029.

But the Democratic Party, I would say both wings of it, are not there. And I’m going to start with the Zohran, DSA, Bernie Sanders wing—and they might reject me framing it so directly here—but I think their agenda seems to be, If we do a lot of economic policies that help the working class, we will win elections, and that will be the way to restore democracy. I’m dubious of that, and I assume you are too. So talk about why we can’t just do working-class affordability and that’ll solve every problem.

Gurri: Yeah. I want to do those things, obviously.

I think they’re good policy and such. But for Biden, I think he did a lot of really good things, and what we just saw is he didn’t get any credit for them, right? The CHIPS Act and the IRA were both incredible policies—just great stuff that we should have been doing—and a ton of money was poured into red states, mostly because it was easier to build there, frankly. No other political reason than that. And those states all went super-majorities for Trump anyway. It didn’t matter. They voted for the guy that came in and immediately killed all that stuff.

So I just think that theory of change clearly does not work, and that we actually have to do something more fundamental. So yes, for example, the original Reconstruction Republicans in the 19th century believed that they needed to change the actual plantation economic system, but they very much believed you had to change the institutions and the incentives and all that stuff as well.

And I think it’s just clear that rural areas right now have a way disproportionate influence on our politics. If you actually were to force a lot of states, and the House, for example, to really be proportional—if you were to get us out of the two-party frequent-switching situation in the House—I think that the situation will change considerably.

I don’t necessarily think the DSA would be against it, though. I get that most of their talking points are—

Bacon: But it’s not that they’re just there. They don’t talk about it very much.

Gurri: Yeah. No, I agree, they’re not. I do think that just from a self-interest point of view, their success—I was talking to this political scientist, Jack Santucci, who’s written a lot about proportional representation in his work. And he was saying that the situation with the DSA rising right now, like in the past primaries that they had, where they were successful, is very akin to the situations where European countries that got proportional representation actually finally did it. And it is because they wanted to institutionalize the factions of their parties, rather than have this within-a-party competition thing.

The DSA—like a future DSA-type party in a multi-party system—could still coalition with the Democratic Party, but it might be better for both of them to stop competing for the same voters internally and consolidate themselves a bit, and then just coalition with whatever they get in the general election.

Bacon: All right. So you answered one part of my question, which is, for one faction, affordability will solve everything—we’re dubious of that. I think that both the center-left and the left in the Washington, the official party—they both believe that to win an election, you have to talk about economic issues. People don’t care about democracy, they don’t care about institutions. Hillary and Harris lost because they said democracy too much, and all people care about is prices.

So in a campaign sense—in other words, the question might be: do we want President Buttigiegto read your agenda and do it in office, but maybe not talk about it? Or do you think talking about it—is it bad politics, good policy? Do you think that’s the conventional wisdom in Washington, that institutions, democracy reform is good policy, bad politics? Do you agree with that?

Gurri: Yeah. So I try to be pretty humble about talking about what works in a campaign. Because I’ve never run or won one.

Bacon: Only person in the world that feels that way. Good for you.

Gurri: Yeah. No, I really just don’t like armchair doing it. What I can say, just from the sense of perceptions—again, having no authority whatsoever on the subject—is, for example, our trade proposal, Steve Randy Waldman’s trade proposal. Everyone has said, How the heck are you going to explain this to voters? It’s very technocratic. But I think it’s easy.

His trade proposal is essentially an old idea at the top level, which is free but balanced trade. And I think that’s relatively easy to sell now of all times, because Trump is just all about tariffs—and of course he’s done the worst possible version of them, but that’s a good way to discredit just bluntly doing tariffs. But no one wants to go back to the neoliberal trade regime, mostly because it resulted in deindustrialization and trade imbalances, which were very related to each other.

So I think, like, campaigning on a top level—we want free but balanced trade, the tariffs don’t work—you could say to the people who care about this stuff, which is some, it’s not no voters—you could say, Look, Trump did all these tariffs and our trade imbalance got worse, and China’s trade surplus got better, so clearly that’s not working. Here’s an alternative where we get the best of both, essentially. And that actually is true in this case, for his policy.

Not all the things we go into are like that, though. Like Moira Berstein’s essay is about climate-risk mitigation for housing, specifically. And that’s a super-detailed technocratic thing.

Bacon: This is, in other words—this is not a campaign guide.

Gurri: Exactly. It’s really not. I would like for Democrats, especially ones running for office for the next two years, to see this, have it in mind, and think about how they can position themselves so that if they implement these things, they haven’t been misleading. I want them to talk about the spirit of the thing, or the high-level public-facing elevator pitch for it. I don’t want them to just say, Oh, we won’t do that, and then do it. I don’t want that, obviously. I want honesty. The level of sheer dishonesty in the Trump era has been mind-boggling.

Not encouraging that by any means. But it’s definitely not a campaign guide. It’s more of a governing philosophy, I would say, even more than a policy document.

Bacon: And that leads me to the next question. So there are two views of the Republican Project 2025, and I think it’s worth putting both of those. One view is that it unified the party’s elite class around a set of goals. They worked out what they’re going to do, and they did it. So that’s a thing the Democrats might want to emulate.

On the other hand, if Harris won the election—and Harris almost did—it would’ve helped that the Republicans put out a bunch of radical-ish stuff in a document that she gets to run against. So in a certain sense, how do we view this enterprise itself? Is it important that the Democrats put out some detailed agendas in this, or they look at yours, look at what CAP does? Is it important that these documents are broad and ambitious, or is it important that they don’t include anything that the other side will use during the campaign?

Gurri: I think you can’t avoid the latter anyway. As we saw with the Harris campaign, she was very minimal, right? She didn’t necessarily push a bunch of big, bold plans. She was very USA is great, we stand for more than this. Frankly, she ran the campaign that everyone’s been asking Democrats to run.

Bacon: Yes.

Gurri: And some of the people who think that didn’t—who want to defend that style—will say it’s because she had history. She didn’t just appear out of nowhere that year. But every candidate is going to have history. They’ll find something, or they’ll make something up.

Bacon: In other words, she ran the populist, poll-tested, economic—move to the right on social issues—campaign these guys, the David Shor crowd, all want, and she just lost.

Gurri: Yeah. No, exactly. I don’t even think she moved to the right, right? But she was very patriotic, and she was not very divisive. She wasn’t very woke, in terms of the stuff—like, whatever. So I don’t think you can shrink from that kind of thing.

I also think part of the game with The Reconstruction Papers, and things like it, is even if it’s not a campaign document, we are sending it to people that are not just policy and media insiders. We are actually trying to make the case for a vision of liberalism that we think is good, and that we should persuade people to want to have. And I don’t necessarily think an election campaign is the place to do that, except at maybe a very high level. But we’ve got a couple of years—let’s proliferate this. Let’s try and get this as popular as it can be, or things like it.

A lot of politics is not just the campaign, but consolidating what your side is on—which, I agree, Project 2025 was probably more focused specifically on elites, but there was some broader conservative-world discourse about it as well.

Bacon: Because you said earlier that adding justices to the Supreme Court, you think, has almost been socialized enough in the party. So do you want Buttigieg, do you want Gavin Newsom or Whitmer or Slotkin to talk about that kind of reform even—adding justices to the Supreme Court? Do you think that we’re already there? Do they have to talk about that? Where do the ambitious-but-controversial ideas go, you think, during the campaign?

Gurri: I think you can’t run to do the specific reform, probably. Again, this is just speculation. But I think you probably don’t run on, I’m going to expand the Court, so much as you run on the corruption of the Court. And that’s what gives you the door to, Here’s what we’re going to do, whatever they end up deciding to do.

And if you’re going to do the Wyden plan, for example—because a one-time expansion, that’s just obviously, we’re redressing a specific wrong. But the Wyden reform, or something like it—which I think is a good idea, and we should do regardless of whether we do the one-time expansion—is saying, Look, the way we’ve been doing this isn’t working.

The stakes of every single judicial nominee have gone through the roof, especially Supreme Court ones. Often it’s not about election results, it’s about who happens to die with what timing and who happens to be in office at that time. The connection to actual elections is zero, pretty much, except that you have to win as often as possible to get your chance whenever it happens to appear.

Let’s tie it to elections. They won’t be these existential, once-in-a-generation affairs. But they’ll still have independence. They’ll still have whatever 10-year we end up giving them. So it’ll be like the Fed. The Fed gets appointed on a regular basis, not lifetime. No one thinks the Fed is not independent. We can keep the Supreme Court independent without having it be like an appointed kingship or something for life.

So I think you can run on that. Running on a Wyden-plan-type thing, I don’t think, is a bad idea. If you’re going to do the one-time expansion, I would say you probably don’t want to run on that. You just want to run on: the Supreme Court is out of control and lawless and corrupt, and we need to do something about it.

Bacon: OK. Project 2025 was done by the Heritage Foundation, a well-known conservative think tank. A lot of the things that are happening now in the Democratic Party are happening from either candidates themselves, politicians, or Center for American Progress, Roosevelt Institute. These are all think tanks that are very tight with the party.

How does Liberal Currents—you all are not trying to be really tight with, you all are not a party or affiliated think tank in a certain way. You’re not in office. How are you going to socialize your ideas in a way, the way that... Because you’re not in the party, you don’t really want to be. So how do you get your ideas moved within the party without this sort of being-inside-of-it sense?

Gurri: Yeah, we are moving into it more, I would say. So it’s, like, how—as you were implying, I would think—we need to change the party if we want them to do the right things in 2029—if they have a trifecta. Part of changing the party is not just changing the elected officials in it. It’s also changing the overall—I don’t know—the intellectual environment, the policymaking environment around it.

And we had a fundraiser at the end of last year in order to grow much larger. Part of it was to promise to produce the Reconstruction Papers as well. I’m having conversations with people like yourself to try and spread awareness of it, with people who are watched by policymakers as well. We’re reaching out to some policymakers directly, inasmuch as some of our writers are connected to that world. Long story short, just like we’re trying to transform the Democratic Party through primaries, we’re also trying to transform the media and think-tank environment around the Democratic Party. And we want to be a big part of that. That’s what we’re trying to do.

Bacon: That leads me to my last question, which will be—so talk about where you, Liberal Currents, see last week. In other words, the New York primaries—I perceive you all as being not necessarily where DSA is, but not necessarily where Hakeem Jeffries is either. And I perceive that to be a place where actually a lot of Democratic voters are, too.

My sense is the average Democrat that I talk to is not a hardcore socialist who is for Medicare for All at all times—I’m not against, I’m for that, but I’m just saying—nor are they Israel is great, we must defend Israel at all times. My sense is most of them are, “Trump is bad. We should win elections, fight him, and make sure there’s not another Trump again.” That seems to be where—now, I’m not sure they would call that liberalism. They would just call that logical. But is that where you all are, in a certain sense?

Gurri: Oh, yeah, definitely. Chance Phillips wrote something about last Tuesday for us, and he called it the Democratic Tea Party, which everyone hates. We got 100 replies that were like, Don’t call it that. The Tea Party was terrible, and they were astroturf. Fair enough. But anyway, that’s what everyone calls it.

And his point was, the DSA was, like, the single biggest winner, because they were well-organized—they’d benefited from about a decade of socialism becoming less of a terrible, scary word on the left. But also they weren’t the only ones. Outside of New York City, there were a lot of not even left, but, like you were saying, candidates—

Bacon: Outliers.

Gurri: —that were not Hakeem Jeffries, who were not strongly pro-Israel, and who just are running on, I’m pissed off about Trump, and I’ll do something about him, because I know you’re pissed off about him. And Chance lists a few of those who are not DSA. Even Lander himself—Lander used to be DSA, obviously. He’s my district, by the way. And I voted for him.

The way I interpret it is, we’re still just starting to see—so you see polls that say Trump’s approval rating is the lowest it’s ever been, but more interesting than that even is, even before it dipped that low, on the disapproval side, it’s almost 100 percent strongly disapprove, where they show disapprove or strongly disapprove. People are very mad.

And I was talking to an elected official who goes to a lot of union events. And for years, those union events always had tons of people with MAGA hats. But last year—this was like June or July last year, even, not even that late—she went to one, and none of them were. They were all pissed off. So there’s a lot of anger to channel into.

And like you said, it’s not let’s do socialism in America anger. It’s, We have to stop this. This is outrageous. And like you said, they don’t even think of it as liberalism or socialism or something. It’s just like a politics of, We reject this, and we want something better. And so candidates that come in and are like, We will make it our number one thing to reject it, are coming in.

Bacon: You said something about the media environment that intrigued me a little bit, because I worked at FiveThirtyEight, and that was a smaller publication, but at that point there was Twitter, and that was very easy. Everybody was on Twitter. You could really socialize your ideas. So I’m curious—you were talking very openly, which is rare of people, about how we want to change the idea structure, we want to change the intellectual environment in the party.

I’d be curious how you do that. Because I learned about you all through Bluesky, and that’s how I’ve come to see you all, but that is not necessarily reaching the average Democrat the way Twitter was. A lot of elite commentators will refuse Bluesky as too left or too Dem—whatever it is, they won’t join it. So is that a big barrier? What is your strategy to reach people who are not?

How do you shift the environment when—because I don’t perceive you all to be on MSNBC a ton either, and none of you have a New York Times column, as far as I know. What do you do to reach the—how do you influence the party if you’re only on Bluesky and things like that? So talk about how you’re trying to reach the party.

Gurri: Yeah. So Bluesky was very helpful, because a lot of, like you said, the left flank of the party world is in there. It also is one of the few feed-based, not video-based, sites—

Bacon: That’s a good point.

Gurri: —that will actually let you link to things—

Bacon: Yes.

Gurri: —and doesn’t tank that. We’ve done well in terms of just pure views, because you can actually link to things there still.

Perry Bacon: Because Twitter suppresses anything that has a link on it now. So does Facebook. So it’s very hard, very bad for written content.

Gurri: I’ve heard that even LinkedIn does—not that LinkedIn would be the place.

Bacon: I’ve heard that too, actually, yes.

Gurri: Yeah. So there’s that. We’re growing our email list a ton, so we do newsletters. We are seeking to grow in video a lot. We’re investing a lot in that effort on YouTube in particular, but everywhere, really. The Reconstruction Papers itself is in print. It’s not yet shipped out, but getting it out into the print world and mailing it to people, bringing it to conference events and things like that, is another channel.

And then again, conversations like I’m having with you. Again, I live in New York City. We fundraised a lot last year, partly so that I could take this all on and do a lot more media promotion of us. So, getting on MS NOW, we’re getting on other things like that. That’s the goal. We’re still getting there, but that’s certainly something we want to do.

Bacon: Because I think of Hasan Piker as having a lot of—if I was going to take up two news things that I’m reading more than I did last year—Hasan Piker’s done a really great job post-2024 in making himself prominent, and I think you guys have too. He’s more on Twitter, you guys are more on Bluesky. He’s more in video, you guys are more on text. And I know you don’t have the same policy views exactly, but the critique of the Democratic Party is similar from both outlets, I would say.

Gurri: Yeah, makes sense.

Bacon: All right. Anything else? So tell people where they can find you and where they can find Liberal Currents’s work.

Gurri: Yep. There’s liberalcurrents.com, where you can subscribe to us. You can see all our social media there. I am on Bluesky. Adam Gurri—a very easy-to-Google name. I am literally the only Adam Gurri, so it’s very easy to find me.

Bacon: Adam, thanks for joining me. And the Reconstruction Papers are on Liberal Currents’s website, obviously.

Gurri: Yep. I encourage people to check those out. There’s a big link at the top to get to them.

Bacon: Thank you for joining me. Good to see you. Take care. Bye-bye.

Gurri: Thank you. Bye.

President Donald Trump took some time out of his morning to announce his very first trip on the Qatari jet he was gifted last year, bragging about the Air Force One replacement he claims was “free” while dodging questions about how much it actually costs.

“Air Force One was 35, 36 years old. It would be parked next to the new [jets] like this, and it didn’t look appropriate for our country,” Trump told reporters outside Joint Base Andrews on Wednesday morning. “The country is very proud of it.… You can low-key it, or you can show it. And I think the country should be very proud of it.”

“What’s your favorite upgrade to the new plane, and how much did it cost American taxpayers to upgrade the plane?” a reporter asked.

“Very little relative to what it would cost if we did it a different way. This was a gift from a country that’s treated us very well, they’re an ally of us over in the Middle East—Qatar. And I went to Boeing, I said ‘who has the best one?’ Qatar, there’s never been a plane like it,” Trump replied, not actually answering the question. “The Emir [of Qatar], Tamim [bin Hamad Al Thani], who’s a great gentlemen, he said, ‘No, no, I’d like to make a contribution to the country.’ So it was very nice. We were able to do it in about five months, bring it up to the presidential standard—meaning security-wise. You’re gonna get a kick out of it.”

Q: How much did it cost American taxpayers to upgrade the plane?

TRUMP: It cost very little relative to what it would cost if we did it a different way. This was a gift from a country that's treated us very well. pic.twitter.com/JNd27YeGpR

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 1, 2026

The jet—one of the largest presidential gifts ever—is valued at $400 million. The Air Force said it spent around $400 million on renovating the plane, changing the cabin layout, communications system, and security upgrades. That doesn’t account for the taxpayer-funded, continued maintenance of the plane, either.