GOP Senator Falls for Todd Blanche’s Sneaky Ploy to Save His Job
Texas Senator John Cornyn just caved to Donald Trump’s demands.
The outgoing Lone Star lawmaker faced a barrage of criticism Sunday after he decided that acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s vague assurances against Trump’s $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund were good enough.
Cornyn had previously tasked the Justice Department chief with formally ending the slush fund altogether, predicating his support for Blanche’s tentative promotion on it. But a tricky memo released by Blanche Sunday night seemed to have tripped up Cornyn’s office—and his offer.
On its face, Blanche’s note appeared to terminate the fund, specifying that the order was “rescinded and shall have no force or effect.” However, journalists were quick to comment that the language employed in the rest of Blanche’s memo not only suggested that the honeypot fund would be preserved in some form but also failed to terminate Trump’s underlying IRS immunity arrangement.
But vague gestures at accountability were apparently all Cornyn needed to get in line.
“Senator Cornyn has reached an agreement with the Department of Justice, which will be issuing a formal order permanently terminating the anti-weaponization fund and making clear in a binding written document that the scope of the audit settlement is limited to only the plaintiffs, including the President, and the IRS,” said Cornyn spokesperson Natalie Yezbick in a statement.
The fund was the result of an unprecedented deal that Trump made with himself after he dropped his faltering $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS. The arrangement included a curious addendum from Blanche, immunizing Trump from further federal prosecution. The government of the United States, Blanche wrote, would be “forever barred and precluded” from pursuing “any and all claims” against Trump, his family, or his business. The fund itself would be used as reparations, paid for by U.S. taxpayers through the Department of Justice, to virtually any right-winger who felt impugned by the previous presidential administration.
The idea of the fund fell apart following weeks of backlash, numerous lawsuits, and opposition from even Republican lawmakers, who felt the issue had gummed up party efforts to pass a reconciliation bill.
But Trump has refused to let the topic go, repeatedly affirming his support for the supposedly defunct fund.
“It is dead, but I wish it weren’t, to be honest with you,” Trump said during a Cabinet meeting on Friday. “I think people were horribly treated, horribly abused.”
Blanche’s efforts to salvage the fund should be viewed as yet more evidence that the fund is not as dead as officials have publicly claimed.
“Let’s be clear: It’s more certain that Trump is still pursuing bounties for rioters today than when this started,” wrote legal journalist Adam Klasfeld on Monday. “Trump is openly stating that’s the goal, taking legal action to get there and refusing to do the one thing that would kill it.”
Cornyn is in the twilight years of his last term in office, a decades-long career cut short by Trump’s decision to endorse another candidate in Texas’s GOP primary in May. The cut cord has granted Cornyn the breathing room to ignore larger party directives and push back harder against the Trump administration’s off-color orders, but apparently, Cornyn is only willing to take that so far.
Monday morning traffic: Highway 9 lane closures, SR-129/152 work, animal hazards
This post is updated throughout the day to reflect the latest incidents. It was last updated at 6:31 a.m..
Here’s what’s happening on the roads this morning…
▼︎ new incidents
Road incidents as of 6:30 a.m. on August 3- Alternating lanes are closed on Highway 9 at Riverdale Park in San Lorenzo Valley because of bridge work. The closure is expected to last until 6:59 a.m. on April 30, 2027.
- Highway 9 at Cascade Avenue in San Lorenzo Valley has one-way traffic because of ongoing work. This closure will last until August 31.
- South Highway 1 at Route 129 in Watsonville and Pajaro is facing closures for guardrail work. The closure will end at 5:59 a.m. today.
- A lane is closed on eastbound and westbound SR-129 at Highway 1 in Watsonville and Pajaro because of curb, gutter, and sidewalk work. The closure will end at 2:59 p.m. today.
- A lane is closed on SR-129 at the Salsipueda Creek Bridge in the Watsonville/Pajaro area for curb, gutter, and sidewalk work. The closure is expected to end at 2:59 p.m. today.
- There is one-way traffic on SR-152 at Beck Street in Watsonville and Pajaro because of curb, gutter, and sidewalk work. The closure is expected to end at 2:59 p.m. today.
- A lane on westbound SR-129 at Harvest Drive in Watsonville / Pajaro is closed for utility work. The closure will last until 3:01 p.m. tomorrow.
- A lane is closed on North/South Highway 9 at Arboleda Way/Highland in San Lorenzo Valley for survey work. The closure will end at 3:01 p.m. today.
- An animal hazard was reported between the lanes at the intersection of Strawberry Canyon Rd and Elkhorn Rd in Watsonville / Pajaro today.
- An animal was seen wandering around Estates Dr near 780 Estates Dr in Aptos at 6:17 a.m. today because a gate was left open. Someone tried to close the gate but wasn’t sure if it was completely shut.
Disclosure: Traffic incidents are partially generated by artificial intelligence. We are constantly working to improve the accuracy and quality of our AI-generated content. However, there may still be errors or inaccuracies. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact us.
The post Monday morning traffic: Highway 9 lane closures, SR-129/152 work, animal hazards appeared first on Lookout Santa Cruz.
Online prediction markets rile up state lawmakers
They say Kalshi and Polymarket are more like sportsbooks than commodity markets. By Kevin Hardy for Stateline The escalating feud between states and online prediction markets was on full display at a summit of state lawmakers this week as legislators publicly scolded Kalshi and Polymarket, the two most prominent platforms. Prediction market platforms say they are like…
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Environmentalists Are Rolling Their Eyes at Trump’s “Ratepayer Protection Pledge”
This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Donald Trump has announced that about 200 entities have signed on to his non-binding “Ratepayer Protection Pledge,” expanding a voluntary commitment that claims to ensure US consumers will not bear the cost of the AI data center build-out.
Trump delivered remarks on Thursday at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) headquarters, alongside Lee Zeldin, the agency’s administrator, and Chris Wright, the energy secretary. Other attendees included governors who signed on to the pledge, including Brian Kemp of Georgia, Mike DeWine of Ohio, Spencer Cox of Utah, and Jeff Landry of Louisiana.
The pledge, first announced in March, was initially signed by seven tech companies: Google, Microsoft, Meta, Oracle, xAI, OpenAI, and Amazon. It will now cover companies delivering 80 percent of all power to US homes and businesses, according to the White House.
“We have kept rates down, way down,” said Trump.
“The American people … need relief from soaring energy bills month after month and real action from these companies to pay their fair share and bring down high costs.”
Twenty-three Republican governors have signed on to the scheme, Trump announced on Thursday, as have major utilities including Nextera and Duke Energy, data center developers and electricity cooperatives.
“Electricity rates for 80 percent of the power distributed in America are now being kept in check by the plan,” Trump said at a press conference.
The announcement came amid a growing backlash to the artificial intelligence boom and the data centers powering it, as electricity bills rise ahead of November’s midterm elections. In June, utility prices were up 4 percent year-over-year, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
On Thursday, Trump said “radical left communists” are the ones who “want to shut down all new development, kill our most successful industries, destroy hundreds of thousands of jobs, and surrender the AI race to China.”
Yet opposition to data centers has become a bipartisan issue, with voters concerned not only about utility rates, but also the environmental and social impacts of AI.
More than a dozen states have considered moratoria on data centers, and New York became the first US state to enact a temporary ban this month. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) have also proposed a national moratorium. And on Thursday, Greg Abbott, the Republican governor of Texas, called for a ban on data center development in rural Texas; he is now among the governors who signed on to the pledge.
“[The] pledge is a paper-thin commitment to families who are struggling to keep the lights on as bills soar.”
The pledge will “ensure everyone involved in building and powering data centers covers their own costs instead of passing them on to American families,” Taylor Rogers, a White House spokesperson, told the Guardian.
“The President’s bold action is turning data centers into engines of growth for local communities, while cementing America’s dominance in the global AI race,” Rogers said.
Green groups are largely unimpressed with the non-binding pledge.
“The American people don’t care about the weak pledges and empty promises; they need relief from soaring energy bills month after month and real action from these companies to pay their fair share and bring down high costs,” said Patrick Drupp, climate policy director at the national environmental advocacy organization Sierra Club. “[The] pledge is a paper-thin commitment to families who are struggling to keep the lights on as bills soar. The companies signing on have done nothing to show their work on how they will lower costs.”
Lena Moffitt, executive director of climate advocacy organization Evergreen Action, called Trump’s announcement a “photo op with big tech” that “won’t lower a single family’s electric bill.”
“Trump promised again and again to cut Americans’ energy costs, but instead he’s letting the same corporations driving up demand write their own rules—a voluntary pledge with no teeth and no consequences if they break it,” she said.
DHS Wants To Build A Border Wall Through Tohono O’odham Land. It’s Another Instance of The US Undermining Tribal Sovereignty.
In May, the Department of Homeland Security informed the Tohono O’odham Nation, the largest Native nation located along an international border, that it was beginning construction on a border wall that would cut through its reservation. But DHS failed to ask the Tohono O’odham’s authorization to cut through its lands, which include present-day Arizona and the northwest Mexican state of Sonora. The nation sued the Trump administration in June, seeking a preliminary injunction to block border wall construction on its lands. The border wall “would have devastating effects on the Nation’s lands and its people,” according to the complaint.
Experts say DHS’s failure to seek the tribe’s consent fits into a long history of the United States failing to honor tribal sovereignty, especially when that sovereignty conflicts with the US’s own plans. Any time the federal government tries to interfere with the borders of a Native nation, it is inherently “threatening the territorial sovereignty of a tribal nation,” said Dr. Keith Richotte, a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians and law professor at the James E. Rogers College of Law at the University of Arizona.
Since its inception, the United States has frequently flip-flopped on its understanding of tribal sovereignty. Former Justice Antonin Scalia reportedly once said the nation’s highest court was “just making it up” when it came to Indian law. It’s a remark that, years later, still best sums up the US government’s attitude toward tribal sovereignty—and DHS’s border wall plans are just the latest example.
Native nations are sovereign governments with nation-to-nation relationships with the federal government. Their sovereignty pre-dates the United States, and though Indigenous people were granted US citizenship under the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, it didn’t make tribal nations any less sovereign. Instead, it stratified Native identity, making Indigenous peoples citizens of their respective tribal nations and of the United States.
When the founding fathers wrote the US Constitution, they established treaty obligations as the “supreme law of the land,” along with the Constitution and federal law. The first treaty between the US and a Native nation was written in 1778. Over the next 93 years, the United States entered into some 368 treaties with Indigenous nations—most of which were subsequently broken. These early treaties are a sign that from its inception, the US acknowledged tribal nations’ sovereignty—even though it typically failed to honor it. In its infancy, the United States used treaty-making with Native nations as the foundation for its own sovereignty, said Caroline LaPorte, an Immediate Descendant of Little River Band of Ottawa Indians and staff attorney for the Indian Law Resource Center. “They saw [treaty making as] an inherent necessity—something that was required for them to be able to establish themselves as a sovereign power,” LaPorte told me.
Because of its 62-mile stretch of reservation land bordering Mexico, the Tohono O’odham Nation has a longstanding cooperative relationship with Homeland Security and other federal agencies like the FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration, and Bureau of Indian Affairs. In the complaint, the Nation says that it spends an average of $3 million of its own funds annually to maintain border security, but that the federal government is now crossing a line.
But Indigenous communities and the US government have different views on sovereignty. LaPorte said that the even the term “sovereignty” is a “very western word,” tied up in a western understanding of power. Early settlers viewed sovereignty in a top-down manner, in which an actual sovereign, like a king or queen, ruled over a people—it’s the exact kind of power early American colonists were fleeing. That idea of sovereignty still shapes the US’s relationship to Native nations today.
“Western understandings and their ideals make claims to not just ownership, but dominion over the land,” Richotte said. “Whereas Native communities have tended to recognize that there’s not necessarily ownership of [land], but that there’s an engagement and a participation with it.” He explained that Indigenous communities often see the land as the source of everything they need—food, water, clothing, religion. When that land is taken away, it represents a fundamental attack on how Indigenous people understand the world and their capacity for survival. For the Tohono O’odham Nation, a border wall would create a physical separation between the nation’s communities on opposite sides of the border, but it would also impede on religious rituals and practices, threaten sacred plants and animals, and destroy sacred mountain peaks, including Baboquivari Mountain—the home of the O’odham Creator I’itoi.
The Trump administration’s immigration crackdown has become just the latest excuse for the federal government to trample over tribal sovereignty.
Even with policy and treaties in place that have established reservation borders and tribal sovereignty, the US still likes to wield power against Native nations when it’s convenient. Though the US initially valued treaty-making as a means to establish its own legitimacy and acquire land, its attitude toward tribes soured as it established military dominance and economic power on the continent. When the US wanted to continue its expansion South, Congress passed the Indian Removal Act of 1830 and facilitated the forced removal of thousands of Indigenous peoples from the southeastern United States to Indian Country. And when Manifest Destiny called for US expansion West, the Dawes Act of 1887 authorized the government to take more than 90 million acres of land from Indigenous peoples. “If Native peoples are ever in the way of the collection of resources—which again is the purpose of colonialism—then there’s going to be friction,” Richotte said.
The debate over the border wall is just the latest example of the federal government choosing to ignore tribal sovereignty whenever it’s politically convenient. It also isn’t the first time the Trump administration has trampled over tribal sovereignty to enforce its immigration agenda: The recently closed Alligator Alcatraz immigrant detention center was located in Big Cypress National Preserve in the Everglades, the homelands of the Miccosukee Tribe. The detention center was built within 1,000 feet of Miccosukee villages, but despite that, the tribe was not consulted in its construction. The tribe, which has called the detention center a direct violation of its sovereignty, is now involved in a lawsuit against DHS, Florida, and Miami-Dade County.
Between Alligator Alcatraz and the border wall on Tohono O’odham lands, it seems that the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown has become just the latest excuse for the federal government to trample over tribal sovereignty. “We’re dealing with an administration right now that is not particularly conciliatory in any way…and [is] willing to move far outside of the boundaries which other administrations have been willing to operate under,” Richotte said. “What that means for Indian Country is hard to tell right now, but it is a reminder that the fight for sovereignty is constant, and one needs to be ever vigilant.”
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Transcript: Trump Rages as GOP Sen. Nukes IRS Fund in Epic Humiliation
The following is a lightly edited transcript of the August 3 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Late Sunday, Todd Blanche finally confirmed in writing that the slush fund is officially dead.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Donald Trump just unleashed two angry, explosive rants at members of his own party, and they were really revealing. It’s clear that Trump is extremely sensitive to perceptions that he’s losing control over the GOP, because he fears it makes him look weak.
And in response to all this, one GOP senator dropped a bomb, making a surprising revelation.
So here’s a big question: Can Democrats be doing more to exploit these schisms, and more to inflict pain on the GOP over Trump’s cratering public standing?
New Republic staff writer Emma Janssen has a new piece reporting on how that might happen. She’s the author of TNR’s new newsletter on D.C. politics, The Blue Book, which you should subscribe to right away. Emma, good to have you on.
Emma Janssen: Hi, Greg. Thank you so much for having me. I am a big fan of the podcast, and I’m glad I’m here.
Sargent: Thanks so much. OK, so Trump is in a fury with Senator John Cornyn and several others who are holding up Todd Blanche’s nomination to officially become attorney general.
The sticking point is that Blanche created this billion-dollar fund as a settlement of Trump’s corrupt fake lawsuit against the IRS, which is supposed to give money to supposed victims of government weaponization and gives Trump and his family tax immunity. These senators want this thing dead for good. Emma, can you just explain this situation and why it’s so important?
Janssen: Senator John Cornyn, as well as Senator Thom Tillis, are two crucial votes for pushing forward Todd Blanche as the nominee for attorney general. And they’ve been so far holding out and saying that they won’t vote for Todd Blanche because of this anti-weaponization fund, like you mentioned.
The idea behind this fund is very corrupt. It’s to provide financial benefit to January Sixers. And these two Republican senators have drawn a red line and say that unless they have it in writing that this fund will not move forward and that it’s dead, they cannot vote for Todd Blanche.
Sargent: I mean, this thing is a slush fund, right, Emma? All it is is just this huge pile of money that Trump can just hand out to his insurrectionist supporters and to other supporters if he wants. The way it was configured was extraordinarily corrupt. It gave him lots of backdoor control over it. And then the tax shield is even worse. And so these senators are actually taking something of a principled stand here, right?
Janssen: They definitely are, kind of shockingly. There are other things about Blanche that they have overlooked and say that his actions, for example, on the Epstein files have not been great, but they’re willing to sort of overlook that. This slush fund, however, is not something that they will let happen and vote for Blanche.
Sargent: So Trump unleashed this wild tirade on Truth Social targeting Cornyn. Trump absurdly claimed that this fund is necessary to reward all the January Sixers, who he painted as victims and martyrs. Then Trump tore into Cornyn and gloated over his endorsement of Ken Paxton, who defeated Cornyn in the Texas GOP primary.
Trump said this: “Millions of people agree with me, as was proven in my landslide presidential win, so did John Cornyn until he lost his election to an opponent that I endorsed. Todd Blanche, a good man, should be immediately approved as U.S. Attorney General.”
It was an epic screed, and I think what Trump meant is that millions of people agree that all this money should be handed to January Sixers. But of course, there’s no way that’s true. Emma, what did you make of all that?
Janssen: I think it’s the latest example of how Trump really uses primary elections as a way to force Republicans to comply with his agenda. As he mentioned in that Truth Social post, he endorsed Ken Paxton over John Cornyn, and Cornyn is now leaving the Senate.
Of course, that has sort of backfired on him in this situation, now that Cornyn seems to be standing up and asserting a little more independence from Trump’s agenda. But Trump has really been able to force Republicans into compliance with even these ridiculously unpopular policies, slush funds, et cetera, because of how he engages with the primaries.
Sargent: And now we’re really seeing some shifting here, where Republicans are getting less reluctant to go along with him. You did this piece for The Blue Book, which is The New Republic’s new newsletter—folks, subscribe to this, please—that stepped back and looked at what these tensions really mean. As you detailed in the piece, it’s very clear that Republicans are now at odds with Trump in a new way. There’s the anger over the IRS fund, which Republicans are holding up Blanche over. And the holdup of Blanche is itself a pretty big deal, as evidenced by Trump exploding in such rage.
Then there’s the war powers vote. Three Republicans just joined Dems to curb Trump’s war in Iran—Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and Rand Paul. That failed, but still it’s very clear Republicans are now at odds with him over the war, not least because the GOP base is splitting over it and a lot of MAGA influencers have gone their own way. Can you talk about these splits?
Janssen: With respect to the war powers resolution, this is the thirteenth time that Democrats have tried to get senators on the record about their support for the Iran war. And it has actually passed once before. Like you mentioned, it didn’t pass this time, but it feels like they’re increasingly getting more and more Republican defectors to come over and vote against the war.
When I spoke to some Democratic senators, what they really seem to be focused on are the midterms in November. Because as a minority party, there’s little that they can actually do to advance their agenda, to advance partisan legislation. But they’re hoping that by forcing Republicans to vote for an expensive and unpopular war, they can then weaponize that into electoral victory in November and actual change in the next Congress.
Sargent: Well, your piece for The Blue Book points out that Republicans really need distance on the war in particular from Trump, but Trump doesn’t want to let them. And the key here is that that’s unusual. Presidents tend to understand the needs of their own party when they’re holding their party back in a midterm, the way Trump is now. You quoted a political scientist, Seth Masket, who’s very good, saying, “He’s proven that he can end careers.”
I think the essence of this here is Trump can’t let Republicans get distanced from him, in part because it would require admitting that he’s unpopular and that his war is failing. And he can’t do that. Can you talk about your reporting on that?
Janssen: This is a deeply unpopular war. It continues to get more and more unpopular. It is incredibly expensive for average consumers when we’re talking about, obviously, gas. Farmers might be feeling it from fertilizer prices. People who play video games could feel it when the price of their regular everyday electronics go up. And there’s also kind of a humanitarian element. People don’t want to see U.S. soldiers dying in the war. They don’t want to see Iranians dying in the war, etc. But yeah, Trump has this grip on the party and cannot come to terms with the fact that he’s gotten the country into an unpopular war and forced his party to back it.
I think that there are some obvious places where we see splits here. This is over on the House side, not the Senate side, but Thomas Massie from Kentucky lost his election. This was a big uproar. When he was running for reelection—he has been a strong opponent of this war, and he’s also been against Trump on other issues, such as the Epstein files—and Trump endorsed against him. And a lot of money, including from AIPAC, was poured in to get his opponent elected, and Massie lost his election.
So this is happening in the House, this is happening in the Senate. And Trump has shown that he can get his way by just blunt-force endorsing an opponent in a Republican primary and making sure that money gets funneled into that election. And I think we’re going to keep seeing that. But on the flip side, like we’re seeing with Cornyn and Tillis to some extent, we’re also seeing a bit more independence now that they’ve lost their primaries.
Sargent: Yeah, and we should note that Trump has really gloated like crazy over ousting Thomas Massie in a really disgusting way. Trump exploded in another rant, this time at a Republican state Senate leader named Rodric Bray. Trump is still angry because Indiana refused to obey his command that they redraw congressional districts, and Trump backed primaries against all the Republicans who bucked him.
Trump gloated here again about ousting Bray, and he said this: “Rodric Bray should be ashamed of himself for costing our country, mainly the Republican Party, two U.S. House seats.” Trump went on to rip Bray as a “FOOL” in capital letters and thanked Indiana GOP voters for their loyalty in ousting Bray, meaning their loyalty to Trump.
Emma, I think this is really telling, because, you know, this whole thing with Indiana happened a good while ago already, yet Trump is bringing it up now because he’s so desperate to remind Republicans that he can oust them in primaries—precisely because he’s losing control over them now. Your thoughts on that?
Janssen: Yeah, exactly. It’s also notable that we’re getting to the end of primary season. So this major source of power for him to enforce his agenda and elect the people that he wants elected, or make sure that the people he doesn’t like don’t get elected—that might actually be the more important part. That tool for him is disappearing now that the primaries are coming to a close.
And so I think it’s exactly what you said. It’s a grip on power. And we might start seeing more resistance from his own party. I mean, I wouldn’t put a ton of money on that, but he’s losing this tool. And that could open up a space for more Republicans to jump ship on a war powers resolution, for example.
Sargent: Absolutely. I think there’s a bit of a split screen here that’s worth commenting on for a sec. On the one hand, he really does wield this iron control over Republican primary voters. His record is not a hundred percent perfect, but it’s pretty damn good when it comes to ousting whoever he wants, with whoever comes along and says, Mr. Trump, I’ll run a primary for you.
He’s just able to get Republican voters to stampede away from their own representative or senator and go back whoever Trump says they should vote for instead. So, you know, I don’t know how well that reflects on these Republican voters—not very well—but it surely shows that Trump does wield some real power over them.
But then on the other hand, he doesn’t have that kind of control over Republican legislators, senators, and even in some cases representatives. And that drives him absolutely crazy. And he can’t stand that. So he won’t let them get distance from him in order to position themselves for the midterms, which they absolutely desperately have to do. I really wonder whether Trump in his head doesn’t understand that the midterm electorate is a different thing than the Republican primary electorate. You know what I mean?
Janssen: Yeah, that is a very good point, because Trump is incredibly unpopular. And now that we’re shifting from primaries to general elections, the entire game has changed.
Sargent: You were talking to a bunch of Democrats about whether there are openings to drive these wedges and schisms a little deeper. What’s your sense of that? Is there a way to do that? And what are Democrats saying to you about it?
Janssen: When I talked to Professor Masket, he made the point that even if Democrats were able to advance a great piece of legislation on whatever—you name it—Trump would just veto it. So there’s not actually much that they can do concretely and materially right now, except just trying to push this messaging game. Trying to force Republicans to get on the record, to take a side, to split with Trump. And then hopefully we’ll see the results of that in November.
That’s kind of what I heard over and over again: we’re going to make them defend their positions on the war, we’re going to make them defend the high cost of gas. And if they can’t do it, they’re going to lose their seats.
Sargent: And it seems like Democrats have been somewhat effective at forcing Republicans to take votes that they don’t want to take. What’s your sense of that? Do you think they have been?
Janssen: Yeah, I think Democrats have been successful, particularly on the issue of the war, at getting Republicans on the record again and again and again. There was a long stretch there when they just kept bringing war powers votes to the table. This is in both chambers—the House was doing this, the Senate was doing this. And the point of it was to just get those nay votes from Republicans and be able to point to them later during midterm season, for example, and say, hey, are you upset that your gas is expensive? Well, look what your representative voted for.
Sargent: Senator Thom Tillis, who, as you mentioned, is one of the voices trying to kill this thing, really dropped a bomb on Twitter in response to Donald Trump’s crazy screeds today. Tillis said: “The president made it clear today that the so-called anti-weaponization fund is still alive, which is exactly why we are attempting to formally end it.” That’s pretty harsh language. Tillis is saying here, you just revealed, Mr. President, that you’re a corrupt shit, and we’re not going to let you get away with it, basically.
And then there’s another line in here where Tillis says that he’s been working with Blanche to end the anti-weaponization fund and praises Blanche’s work on that. But then Tillis adds this: “It’s a shame his confirmation has hit a snag only because an incompetent personal advisor to the president refuses to amend the bogus settlement.”
Emma, I mean, that’s really harsh stuff. I think what Tillis is saying here is he’s letting the world know that there’s somebody inside the White House who’s corruptly and in great depravity trying to keep this thing alive against the will of everybody else, right?
Janssen: Yeah, that’s how I’m reading it. And I think, importantly, he is definitely leaving open a path for Blanche. He’s not scorching that earth at all. Like you read, he calls Blanche forthright, thoughtful, patient. So I agree—it seems that he is putting blame squarely on someone else, who we don’t know who it is. And he’s kind of framing it as though Blanche is trying to make it work.
Trump himself doesn’t seem to want to make it work. He is not certainly being forthright, thoughtful, and patient about this. He has continued throughout the week to say that he wants the fund, even if he is sort of acknowledging that it’s likely dead. So yeah, I wonder who this incompetent personal advisor is. Trump himself doesn’t seem to want to amend the agreement, but it seems like this is a scapegoat situation.
Sargent: Yeah. And I think Tillis is sending up a flare to the media saying, look into this, people. There’s somebody in there who’s really acting in an extraordinarily corrupt way, trying to prevent us from ending this thing. And that person is who you should be focused on.
Janssen: Mm-hmm. I agree. That is definitely what it seems like he’s trying to do.
Sargent: OK, to close this out, let’s talk about what’s really at stake here, I think. Glenn Thrush of The New York Times had a really good point. Basically, what he said is that the battle is far bigger than about Blanche. What’s actually happening here is that Republicans are, for the first serious time, revolting against something much bigger, which is Trump’s effort to turn DOJ into an extension of his own will, into a corrupt instrument of presidential will, into his own personal team of lawyers who’ll extract pain and revenge on whoever he directs them to go after.
And so I think if Republicans actually do hold the line here and force an end to this fund, then something important will have been achieved. I don’t want to get too optimistic about Republicans doing that, but I really do think that if they can kill the fund, it lets Trump know that there are limits to just how much he can corrupt DOJ. What do you think of that?
Janssen: I completely agree. I think that there’s a couple of messages that could come out of this, if the line is held by Tillis and Cornyn. Like you said, there’s the message that you can’t actually go this far with the DOJ. Of course, they’re letting some things slide that Democrats certainly wouldn’t. Blanche has been a big part of the effort to conceal the Epstein files, and he spoke with Ghislaine Maxwell in prison, right?
There’s a lot that I think is still concerning about Blanche that isn’t related to this slush fund. But it sends that exact message that you mentioned. It also sends the message that Republicans can stand up against Trump and potentially win. Maybe not win their elections, but they can win some public favor and also accomplish the goals that they’re hoping to accomplish.
Sargent: Emma Janssen, well said. Folks, make sure to check out Emma’s new newsletter. It’s TNR’s new newsletter on what’s going on inside Washington. It’s good stuff. You need to subscribe. It’s called The Blue Book. Please subscribe, folks. Emma, really nice to talk to you. Thanks so much for coming on.
Janssen: Thank you, Greg. I really appreciate you having me, and this was a great conversation.
This Sleazoid MAGA Congressman May Just Have Turned a Red Seat Blue
I’m betting there’s a good chance you’ve never heard of Max Miller. Just another take-a-number MAGA Congressman. Except that he’s not. He’s a personal favorite of Donald Trump, having worked in the Trump 1.0 White House; he accompanied Trump on that cynical June 2020 stroll to St. John’s Church so he could hold a Bible in front of the cameras. He’s the soon-to-be-former son-in-law of Ohio GOP Senator Bernie Moreno, another MAGA dead-ender. That “soon-to-be-former” should have told you that there’s trouble in Trumpy paradise: Miller and the senator’s daughter, Emily, are in some extremely ugly divorce proceedings, apparently still ongoing. And oddly, he’s the nephew of the respected foreign policy analyst Aaron David Miller (our sympathies to him).
And now, he’s something else: in trouble in Ohio’s 7th congressional district, which leans Republican and which Trump carried by double digits in 2024. Stories have been popping lately that have detailed Emily Moreno’s allegations that Miller has gotten physically abusive with her—and even that Miller injured their then-two-year-old daughter, who, according to a recent Mother Jones report, returned to her mother from a night at dad’s place with a broken collarbone.
Miller denies all these charges vehemently. But they sure have roiled a race to which no one was paying a lick of attention. Indeed, the needle has nudged close enough to the red zone that Miller felt compelled on Sunday morning to release, via X, some documents that he claimed exculpated him entirely. He followed it up with a nearly 20-minute video he posted Sunday (“I have never abused our daughter,” he said, even alleging that day care workers may have harmed her).
Not to be outdone, just after Miller posted his material, Senator Moreno posted a statement on X that … well, what did he say, exactly? He didn’t explicitly call on Miller to resign. But he did say this: “As he has admitted privately, Max Miller needs serious psychological help. He is a danger to my daughter, and I hold my breath every minute he has custody of my granddaughter. If there are any basic standards of character required to hold elected office, Max Miller fails them. He should not serve in the House of Representatives.”
Umm, by the way, lest you think the good senator is holding some sort of moral trump card here, I beseech you to think again. He’s a sleazeball too. He’s an immigrant from Colombia who made a fortune in car dealerships; so far, so fine—the American dream and all that. And the pre-MAGA Moreno, while no doubt conservative, used to do things like write op-eds back in 2014, when Cleveland was awarded the Gay Games, urging businesses and philanthropic groups to support the LGBTQ community and get behind the games.
But fast forward to MAGA Moreno, who defeated Sherrod Brown in 2024. How did he win? He owes his success in some part to the fact that he was running in red Ohio in a presidential year, sure. But Moreno was also the beneficiary of a barrage of innuendo-rich and often outright false ads accusing Brown wanting boys to compete in girls’ sports and men to invade women’s locker rooms. It was the only issue he had, and his campaign and affiliated groups spent millions on it.
Oh—I almost forgot. Moreno might have a more interesting private life of his own than is standard in MAGA land. During that 2024 race, the Associated Press reported that a user profile that appeared to match Moreno’s was found on a website called Adult Friend Finder “looking for young guys to have fun with while traveling.”
As you might imagine, this was concerning to party honchos (the story hit shortly before the GOP primary), some of whom, as the AP put it, “sought a review of data to determine his potential involvement. That review, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter, linked the profile to Moreno’s work email address. The AP’s independent review reached the same conclusion.” Moreno, of course, denied it was his doing. His campaign told the AP that it was a “juvenile prank” pulled by a former intern, and they even produced the intern in question, who told the AP he was sorry about it. And, since he had Trump’s endorsement, he managed to skate his way through the primary.
So that’s who Bernie Moreno is. Gay, or whatever? (He’s married with four kids.) Fine, who cares? But if he’s gay and wins races with hateful anti-trans advertising and now opposes all things LGBTQ, which he does, well, people should care about that quite a lot.
One last thing to note on this topic. In a text message that became public during all the legal proceedings, Max Miller wrote to Moreno: “Take this however you want, everyone is going to get to know you better than your wife does. Enjoy the ride brother, I wouldn’t have to do this if you could keep your lying daughter under control.” Better than your wife does. Hmm…I’d like to think that if my son-in-law had threatened to blackmail me, I’d have the guts to call on him to resign.
But enough! Let us depart this depraved world of Republican hypocrisy and get to know Miller’s Democratic opponent, Brian Poindexter. He’s a city council member in the Cleveland suburb of Brook Park, but much more interestingly than that, he’s a union ironworker. He’s been endorsed by nearly every major union and political figures from Bernie Sanders to Tim Ryan.
I watched his two-and-a-half minute intro video, and you should too. It’s impressive. When he utters the sentence “working people like you and me,” he isn’t pretending. And when he says “we’re working harder and harder, and we’re getting less and less,” it’s clear that he is a totally legit part of that “we.”
He’s the son of a union machinist and grandson of a union auto worker. Education? No Hotchkiss School for this guy (Graham Platner’s fancy private school). He went to a normal high school and has an associate degree from Cuyahoga Community College. I have some friends in Ohio who are involved in Democratic politics, and they say that Poindexter and his campaign manager, his old best friend, are the real deal.
Ohio’s 7th is an R+5 on the Cook Partisan Voting Index. That’s not ruby red by a long shot. In a wave election, it’s very gettable. I should stipulate that I know little about Poindexter; maybe there’s some stuff clanking around in his closet, too. But he’s an actual working-class person who talks plainly and relentlessly about how working people are getting screwed. He’s exactly the kind of person the Democrats need to send to the House—I wish there were 200 Brian Poindexters.
And Max Miller is exactly the kind of person who should not be in Congress. Even if he’s innocent on all the physical abuse allegations, he’s clearly an out-of-control person who, to put it mildly, can’t devote his full energy to serving the people of the 7th district. Given what appears to be his lack of moral compass, they, and we, should be thankful for that. Meanwhile, here’s hoping the Democrats have the sense to throw money at a man who appears to be a stellar candidate in a suddenly-winnable seat.
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Greetings From Javanka-bania
In September 2021, while yachting in the Mediterranean, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner found paradise. They stopped to refuel their yacht in the Albanian port city of Durrës, around an hour’s drive from the capital, Tirana. Edi Rama, Albania’s prime minister, joined them for dinner. When they met again at Davos, Rama has said, Kushner raved about Albania.
“You are an American investor,” Rama recalled telling him. “And this country is open to every American investor.”
By 2024, Kushner had announced plans to build a luxury complex on the former military island of Sazan, off Albania’s southern coast, and on nearby beaches. The artist renderings posted to Instagram depicted villas cascading down rocky slopes, their organic facades undulating against the face of the cliff. Most of the development is intended for the mainland, rather than the island. Initial documents from 2025 sketched out more than 2,500 units of one to seven bedrooms, along with a yacht club and marina for 350 superyachts (“up to and over 100 meters,” or 328 feet), a casino, an “equestrian center,” an 18-hole golf course, a nearly one-million-square-foot water park, and a shopping and leisure hub called the “Citadel.”
Local residents heard about the project on the news. For nearly two decades, they had been caught in property disputes over the same stretch of coastline with a mysterious Miami-based developer whom prosecutors and investigators had linked to organized crime. They immediately sent a letter to Affinity Partners, Kushner’s private equity firm, requesting compensation or a halt to the project until the property disputes could be resolved. They heard nothing back.
In late January 2026, a colonnade of black cars wound through the villages on the mainland across from Sazan, where, in the ecologically protected Vjosë-Nartë delta, the construction is planned. Ivanka was conducting a site visit, during which residents were instructed to stay in their homes. Later, she dined with Rama in nearby Vlorë. In late April, trucks appeared along one of the delta’s rugged beaches. The coast at that time of year is windy and wet, and mist is common over the lagoon as migratory birds return for the spring. Soon bulldozers and excavators came to lay gravel for a new road. By May 12, local shepherds, who regularly take their sheep to the area to graze, noticed that deep holes had been dug along the perimeter of the beach. A fence suddenly appeared.
For local villagers, the fence was a clear signal that whoever put it up had no intention of grinding out property disputes in court before building. After all, this was how many projects across Albania had begun. Once the churn of development begins, it rarely stops.
By the end of the month, as the weather turned warm enough for summer tourists to begin arriving, a barbed wire perimeter replaced the fence. Residents from the surrounding area came to protest, including a man who was dragged along the road by private security and punched repeatedly in the neck. Later, he told reporters that his mouth filled with blood as he was beaten. He has since been in Greece, where he works to send money home to support his sick mother and paralyzed brother.
After a recording of the assault went viral in Albania, protesters arrived in Tirana’s streets en masse. They came from across the ideological spectrum, united by the belief that this project was an example of politically connected development that repeatedly trumped protections meant to safeguard Albanian citizens. Grievances included years of disputed land seizures, ecological destruction, corruption, crumbling public services, and poor infrastructure. Protests have since continued daily, with estimated attendance reaching as high as the tens of thousands.
Soon they were calling for a new direction for the country and a new government. The movement has been dubbed the “Flamingo Revolution,” a reference to the flamingos that feed in the protected lagoon. Conservationists say the project would sacrifice one of the Mediterranean’s last surviving untouched wetlands—largely preserved by decades of communist isolation—by loosening environmental protections to clear the way for construction. It would threaten a fragile habitat not only for flamingos but also for more than 70 other endangered species, including loggerhead sea turtles, Dalmatian pelicans, and Mediterranean monk seals.
The day after the protests in Tirana began, Ivanka Trump appeared on a YouTube channel hosted by the business influencer David Senra, extolling the virtues of the planned project. “We have five miles of beachfront directly across from the island, this beautiful peninsula with a lagoon on one side, the ocean on the other,” she said. “We developed the opportunity to help realize its potential and transform it, but with a lot of restraint and care because the land is so beautiful.”
She also spoke about plans for Sazan, Albania’s largest island, which lies at the meeting point of the Adriatic and Ionian seas. During a brief period of Italian fascist control of Albania, Benito Mussolini built a villa there. Under the communist regime that followed, it was made into a highly fortified military outpost. Closed to the public for decades, the island now receives tour boats that depart regularly from the city of Vlorë, carrying visitors past abandoned military installations and ashore among thousands of decaying “mushroom” bunkers left behind by the paranoid communist dictator Enver Hoxha. There is no running water; sanctioned trails wind through scrub, where several healthy populations of venomous Mediterranean snakes live among rusting military debris and shattered concrete. In an area known to local sailors as “Hell’s Gorge,” unexploded artillery shells and anti-submarine mines remain scattered in the surrounding waters.
“We were on a friend’s boat, and we stopped for a swim,” Ivanka told Senra. “Effectively, that’s how we found it. We swam to the island. We went on a hike, barefoot all the way, up to the top. And we were just captivated.”
Sazan Island may have entered the Kushners’ founding myth by chance. As a former military outpost, it remained public land, still patrolled by a small rotating military contingent. But the environmentally protected coastline along Vlorë Bay, around which many of the protests are centered, was sold.
The seller was Artur Shehu, who transferred the land for €110 million to Albania Land Development, a project-specific company within a byzantine multilayered holding structure linked to the Ivanka-Kushner development project. After a stint in Albania’s special forces in the 1990s, Shehu owned a hotel and built a casino in Vlorë. In 1997, the country dissolved into near anarchy when nationwide pyramid schemes collapsed and some 700,000 weapons entered civilian hands. Shehu fled the country two years later, when his uncle and brother were killed in a shoot-out at a bar he owned. He continued to conduct business from Miami, where he has lived since 2005. For years, Albanian authorities have alleged that, via an intermediary, Shehu used fraudulent documents to claim ownership of hundreds of hectares of coastal property, including land claimed by some 300 other local families.
According to documents recently obtained and analyzed by the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network, or BIRN, one of Shehu’s property claims was based on an Ottoman-language document from around 1900, at the tail end of the Ottoman period, purportedly proving that his ancestor “owned thousands of square metres of forest and grazing land.” The ownership claim, in other words, ultimately relies on a document that only a handful of modern experts familiar with a bureaucratic world that died 100 years ago could interpret. The case files say that once landownership was secured, Shehu further subdivided and transferred ownership through various means, “with the aim of obscuring their origin and making tracing more difficult.”
Shehu’s alleged intermediary in securing the land was sentenced in 2018 to three years in prison for the fraudulent acquisition of 187 hectares of land in Zvërnec, near the Ivanka-Kushner development, according to reporting in 2021 by the Miami Herald and the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, or OCCRP. The case, however, has since continued to bounce between courts; it remains hotly contested.
From the outside, determining the legitimacy of a land claim can seem like an intractable tangle of Ottoman deeds, unreliable courts, and endless litigation. For the families caught up in these claims, the questions are ancestral and personal.
I met Agron Hyseni, a contractor and developer in Vlorë who goes by Goni, and his cousin Hyrie Luzaj, who goes by Coco, at Goni’s bar in the newly reconstructed old town of Vlorë. Sitting across from them was Bareq Sadiraj, the “mayor,” or kryetar, of Kaninë, which overlooks Vlorë from the nearby mountainside. They are all from Kaninë, where Shehu is also from, and told me they had known him and his family their whole lives.
All agreed that the development promised by the Ivanka-Kushner resort was the best thing that could happen to Vlorë. Infrastructure would come in the form of developed roads and a revitalization of Vlorë’s languishing airport. Sadiraj mostly ignored my presence, except to show me an AI rendering of a glass and steel building in the shape of an enormous two-headed eagle, the national symbol of Albania, towering over the turquoise waters of what I presumed to be the Narta Lagoon, where the resort is planned. The image bore no resemblance to the renderings I’d seen, but he thought it was a cool idea.
The group believed that the land sold to the Ivanka-Kushner development indisputably belonged to Shehu. Because their families go back generations, they suggested, they simply know the property claims are correct. A question about what should happen to the families who also claim the land that Shehu sold to the Ivanka-Kushner development project elicited a groan from the table.
“Everyone knows where everyone’s land is,” Coco explained. “Everyone knows it’s Shehu’s land. It’s not a secret.” In 1991, as Albania’s communist regime was collapsing, Coco was 15. She left Albania for San Diego, where she lived for much of the past 35 years before recently returning to her birth country. She, too, is embroiled in a land dispute. Acting as an interpreter between me, Goni, and Sadiraj, she nearly exploded at the mention of Law 7501, the regulation that redistributed land previously confiscated by the state to the people living and working on it.
“It is a disgusting law,” she said. “It has meant that I haven’t been able to get back my land—my ancestral land!”
A great deal of the confusion over land disputes in Albania can be traced back to Law 7501. Under communism, private property was nationalized, and much of it converted to collective farms. Law 7501 attempted to return land to those working it rather than to its pre-communist owners, while later laws sought to compensate those expropriated by the regime. The result was a palimpsest of overlapping claims, a mess compounded by poor records, uneven enforcement, and mass emigration. A vulnerable legal system was left to answer what should be a simple question: Who owns what?
Law 7501 has meant that for Albanians like Coco, whose family were prominent landowners before the communist period, land restitution has been a question of inheritance. They see themselves not as elites but as victims and insist that their families paid dearly under the regime. Coco recollected packaging tobacco as a young child to help her mother on a collective farm and being refused a glass of milk for her ill grandmother. Goni said he had no childhood, only labor. In their view, post-communist Albania never truly broke with the country’s communist past—they believe that former communist elites simply reconstructed themselves as new political elites while denying restitution to families whose land had been confiscated. To landowning families, today’s corruption is not a recent phenomenon but the continuation of an unfinished tradition.
Goni and Coco told me that I had misunderstood Shehu and the land issue by listening to protesters and prosecutors. They offered to take me to Kaninë to show me where his land is.
Two days later, we met at the same bar. Driving through Vlorë, construction was everywhere. Cranes loomed, and it was rare to drive more than a minute or two before spotting a skeletal concrete stack of boxes that may, someday, become a usable building. This is a common sight across Albania, especially in Vlorë, which, as the gateway to a stretch of pristine beaches called the “Albanian Riviera,” has seen a massive construction boom under Rama.
Driving from Vlorë into the steep hills where Kaninë sits, I had an immense view of the city. Its patchwork construction interrupts whole neighborhoods, while skyscrapers sprout from the ground like weeds.
We stopped at a marble fountain carved into the hillside. It read SH D KANINË 12.11.1924, and Goni and Coco said it was evidence that this was Shehu land.
Driving on, we reached a castle at the top of the mountain. It sat in ruins, its stone walls crumbled to nubs. A bulldozer puttered back and forth behind us as we walked along the ramparts. Reconstruction of the castle had been ongoing for the last year.
“Whoever owned the castle owned all the land they could see in their view,” Coco said, translating for Goni. “That’s how it used to work.”
As we drove back down into Vlorë, Coco said she wanted to drive past her own family’s land. If she were able to reclaim it, she said, she would use it to build homes for her family and develop the rest. She had been navigating the issue of ownership since returning to Albania from San Diego a year and a half ago.
“Every time I pass by, I think: Oh I want to have a home here, I want to have a home there,” Coco said. “It’s such a wild beauty.”
It really was. Every view was a dream landscape unlike any I’d ever seen. Soaring mountains plunged into turquoise waters. Vines blanketed fences and walls. Despite the ubiquitous construction, so much of Albania felt remarkably untamed.
After winding down the mountain switchbacks, we were back at the gorgeous beachfront. Driving along the Lungomare, the palm-lined waterfront promenade that has become Vlorë’s showpiece for tourism and development, Goni stuck his hand out of his Land Rover. “All of this,” he said—he gestured broadly, from the water to several buildings back—“all of this is Shehu land.”
To our right, as we drove, stretched Vlorë Bay and Sazan Island, which the Kushners have acquired at zero taxes for 99 years during development while the Albanian state takes care of water, electricity, and sewage. (Rama has insisted that this project is “a private deal between private parties which the Albanian government has nothing to do [with].”) To our left, apartment buildings in varying conditions and states of construction stretched back up onto the base of the hills.
Directly abutting Shehu’s land is Coco’s family’s land. “But we cannot get it, there are other families there,” she said. “I pass by and I look at it and I see other people on my property.”
Coco showed me the parcel of land that she has been able to reclaim. It is only a small portion of what rightly belongs to her family, she said. We passed one- or two-story homes with fences made from naked brick or concrete. Satellite dishes and clotheslines with bedsheets drying in the sun covered makeshift porches, and bougainvillea spilled over walls in pink and purple cascades.
Suddenly, we arrived at a fence surrounding an enormous pit. On the fence were renderings of two sinuous towers of glass and steel labeled LUZAJ TOWERS. Luzaj is Coco’s family name. The development’s website describes the buildings as “fluid, organic forms—resembling amoeba-like silhouettes—elegantly rising above a solid, monolithic plinth.” Just a few hundred feet from the seaside, the structure’s “elevated design maximizes sea and mountain views” from the 23 stories planned.
“Imagine, we could have built 10 of those,” Coco said. “Is it fair that it is given to other people and you own none of it?”
I didn’t know the answer to that question. It doesn’t seem like anyone in Albania does.
There was another reason Albanians viewed the Ivanka-Kushner project differently from an ordinary investment. It wasn’t simply that it was foreign capital. It was that it was American.
On June 22, 1991, just a week and a half after the communist party that had ruled since 1944 officially dissolved, an American motorcade wove its way through Albania’s capital city. U.S. Secretary of State James Baker was making the first high-level official visit to the country, and as he and his team drove through the city, the streets seemed strangely empty. But soon, on the city’s outskirts, American flags began to appear. People crowded the cars, threw flowers, and kissed the windshields. Some even tried to carry Baker’s limousine toward Tirana.
An estimated 300,000 people crammed into the central Skanderbeg Square, designed to accommodate 200,000 as the principal venue for communist ceremonies. Under Enver Hoxha, Albania had been one of the most isolated countries on Earth. Foreign travel was nearly impossible, Western broadcasts were jammed, and private property long forgotten. America existed less as a country than as an idea. When Baker arrived, he was greeted by a banner draped across the Palace of Culture that featured the Statue of Liberty and read: “Welcome Mr. Baker, Albania has been waiting for you for 50 years.”
Baker responded, “America is returning to you,” as the crowd cheered for freedom, prosperity, and hope.
Many Albanians of a certain age recall the idea of Baker arriving with a “blank check” that would underwrite Albania’s reentry into the world after near total isolation. But actual aid was far more paltry than anticipated, and the transition to capitalism proved harsher than imagined. (One contemporaneous article about the visit stated that Baker ultimately signed off on just $6 million in aid, half of it in powdered milk.)
Despite the relative meagerness of that gift, for most Albanians, the United States as a symbol of competence and leadership endures. Even in the protests in Tirana today, it is common to see protesters carrying American flags alongside the Albanian double-headed eagle. According to Gallup polls, Albania has remained one of the most steadfastly pro-American places in the world, typically ranking only behind neighboring Kosovo—which is 90 percent ethnic Albanian.
Jared Kushner arrived in Albania not simply as an investor, but as the beneficiary of more than three decades of accumulated American goodwill. Many protesters I spoke to felt that Kushner’s American fame was used as a means of selling the project to Albanians.
This is all to say that Kushner arrived in Albania not simply as an investor, but as the beneficiary of more than three decades of accumulated American goodwill. Many protesters I spoke to felt that Kushner’s American fame was used as a means of selling the project to Albanians; it was seen not as an uncomfortable inconvenience but as an asset.
In other words, it’s not so much that the dream of the United States has disappeared in Albania; it’s more that it has mutated. If in 1991 Baker embodied an America of diplomacy, democratic aspiration, and public institutions, in 2026, Kushner represents an America whose primary instrument is private capital. In place of diplomacy is “dealmaking.” And Albanians no longer believe that anyone will offer aid without asking for something in return. “No one does anything for nothing,” I recall Coco telling me.
Kushner is notoriously publicity-shy, so scrying his mind is a different challenge than it is with his father-in-law. But he has quietly become one of the most revealing characters of Trump’s foreign policy, both when he was in the administration and now that he works outside it as a special adviser. And the basic idea that investment is statecraft and statecraft is investment seems to be the governing rationale of his geopolitics. Speaking at a conference in Miami earlier this year, he remarked that “all countries should have a business plan.” He added, “Why don’t countries do that?”
It is an illuminating theory of government. It also says something about why Kushner seems to be constantly shuttled off to negotiate this or that crisis, which often have wildly different histories and contexts: For Kushner, every problem boils down to business. But one obvious counter to the question he poses is that countries are not companies. Or at least democratic ones aren’t. Unlike corporations, democracies are not usually organized around a single goal; they balance them. Employees do not vote on the direction of the company or its leader the way a citizen does for their country, and governments cannot simply pursue the highest return without also asking who and what bears the cost. A coastline may be more valuable as a luxury resort than as a protected area for wildlife or the rightful land of a handful of villagers. That alone doesn’t mean it should become one.
Kushner’s vision extends well beyond Albania, and has a funny way of being regurgitated by President Donald Trump, albeit in his own idiom. Speaking at Harvard in 2024, Kushner described the Gazan waterfront as “very valuable” and suggested moving civilians to a bulldozed location in the Negev desert while developers would “clean up” the strip. A year later, at a press conference with Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump suggested that the United States would “take over” and redevelop it into “the Riviera of the Middle East.” Later, he shared a fever dream, AI-generated, rage-bait video of “Trump Gaza” that featured golden Trump heads and children dancing on a gleaming beachfront as dollars rained from the sky.
And it’s possible that Trump’s penchant for hotels has rubbed off on Kushner as well. This is the first international hotel the Kushners have publicly backed, although there was an attempt at building one in Serbia, too—on the site of the 1999 NATO bombing of the former Yugoslav Ministry of Defense, which stands in decay as an informal memorial and a reminder of U.S. interventionism in the region, albeit from the opposite political vantage of Albania’s. Kushner halted the project after several senior officials were charged with corruption.
In his first term, Trump said that he would cease inking new deals on branded resorts in foreign countries and would cede control of the Trump Organization to his sons Eric and Don Jr. He declared that legally he “didn’t have to do that,” but would anyway for the sake of optics against foreign influence. In Trump 2.0, the Trump Organization has explicitly abandoned that restriction. According to Forbes, Trump’s foreign licensing and development business has grown 900 percent.
But why hotels? Why is a luxury resort more of a nation-building project than, say, a semiconductor factory, a logistics hub, or a hospital? For Trump, the answer might be simple. To build a “big beautiful hotel” is to say something like, “This place is fixed now.” If a country can sustain a luxury resort, it signals that disorder has ended—that it has become habitable not just for those who live there, but for those wealthy enough to choose anywhere else. What does a luxury property promise if not a life of leisure, free from the friction of labor, strife, or conflict? For Kushner, the answer may be even simpler: A hotel offers the cool logic of an optimized asset.
“After Jared announced the deal, the prices of real estate in Vlorë had a visible jump,” Rama said, speaking to the Financial Times, arguing that an investment of more than €4 billion into a country with a total GDP of a little more than €29 billion was self-justifying. “We need super luxury in this country like the desert needs water. What you gain from 500 yachts is the same as from 40,000 budget tourists.”
In a July 2024 interview with Kushner, veteran Italian journalist Marzio Mian reported that Kushner said the project wasn’t exactly for everyone, despite Kushner’s business partner Asher Abehsera’s insistence that “everyone should have the opportunity to visit the island.” Kushner, according to Mian, seemed skeptical of that idea. “We’re creating a very, very high-end luxury product,” he said. “One of the most compelling points about the island is the ability to have privacy.”
Kushner, even as he remains one of Trump’s most unusually empowered advisers, certainly values his own privacy. Despite rarely explaining himself to the press, during the first Trump administration, Kushner presided over a portfolio that stretched from criminal justice reform to Covid vaccinations. But he became most closely associated with Middle East diplomacy. His “Peace to Prosperity” program, a $50 billion economic plan unveiled in Bahrain in 2019, hinged on the premise that investment in commercial and tourist infrastructure could create the conditions for peace in the Israel-Palestine conflict. In a 2021 op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, Kushner wrote that the Abraham Accords, arguably his most lauded diplomatic success, had exposed the Israel-Palestine conflict as “nothing more than a real-estate dispute.”
Beyond the Middle East and back in the Balkans, Kushner also played a role in normalizing economic relations between Serbia and Kosovo. To do so, the administration reportedly leaned heavily on the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation, or DFC, colloquially called by some in development-finance circles “the bank of Jared,” which was created in 2019 to encourage private-sector investment in developing countries.
Whether in the Middle East or the Balkans, Kushner has repeatedly treated economic development not simply as a consequence of peace but as a tool for producing it. When the American dream in the form of Baker arrived in Tirana, Albanians imagined a blank check; instead, they received a few million dollars and shipments of powdered milk. Nevertheless, Baker’s statement that “America is returning” revealed itself to be true in one sense. Three decades later, a proxy for another U.S. administration has arrived with an actual investment proposal whose scale, at least on paper, outstrips anything Washington ever contemplated.
Kushner did not have to persuade Rama that development could transform a nation. Rama had spent years advancing his own version of that vision. But Kushner’s proposal alone could not explain why it found such an enthusiastic champion in the prime minister. To understand that, I needed to better understand the city he had spent more than a decade remaking.
If there is a single fact Prime Minister Rama wants the world to know about him, it is that he is an artist. “People can lecture me on many things—economics, legal affairs, agriculture, or health care—but there is one thing no one can lecture me on, and that is beauty,” Rama said, speaking to a reporter at Deutsche Welle.
After training as a painter in Paris, Rama became Albania’s minister of culture in 1998; he was mayor of Tirana from 2000 to 2011. As mayor, Rama transformed the city. Since becoming prime minister in 2013, he has treated architecture, design, and ambitious development as a cornerstone of economic growth and as a mechanism for reimagining Albania’s place in the world.
Between 2015 and 2025, Tirana alone approved nearly 10 million square meters (107.6 million square feet) of new construction. That’s roughly the equivalent of building 30 One World Trade Centers. Meanwhile, emigration remains high, as tens of thousands of Albanians continue to leave each year to seek economic opportunities abroad. This kind of construction is happening across the country, in Vlorë as much as in Tirana. Who is all of this being built for? And how is any of it making any money?
To explore these questions, I went on a walking tour with Redi Muçi, a young MP who has been in Parliament since last year, after leaving his post as a lecturer in engineering at the Polytechnic University of Tirana. Muçi got involved in activism in 2011, when, as a newly appointed university lecturer, he stepped out of his offices to join protests against Sali Berisha, then the prime minister, who had been implicated in several corruption scandals. When protesters clashed with police outside the prime minister’s office, the police opened fire. Four people were killed and dozens more injured. Muçi is now the only elected MP out of 140 seats to represent the “Together Movement,” a leftist party formed in 2022 from people involved in student and youth activism.
We met in Tirana near two enormous 25-story towers that dwarfed the surrounding buildings. There was a café called Mr. Chef and a dental parlor. According to Muçi, the site once housed a natural history museum, which was left to decay in the 1990s and 2000s. The road in front of it, by contrast, “is the same as it was 80 years ago,” Muçi said, only with more traffic. Most of the apartments are empty because normal Albanians cannot afford them. “This is typical,” Muçi said.
Mass construction with murky financing is common across Albania. In addition to allegedly using falsified documents to obtain the land that will be used for the Ivanka-Kushner resort outside Vlorë, Shehu has been named in an ongoing investigation by Albania’s Special Prosecutor’s Office Against Corruption, or SPAK. On June 10, SPAK announced 20 arrest warrants, froze more than €128 million in assets, and ordered the seizure of properties across Tirana and the southern Albanian coast. A SPAK court filing, summarizing information gathered by Belgian authorities, cited Shehu’s direct contact with Alfredo Hamzai, who was convicted in Belgium in a narcotics-trafficking case, and Shehu’s international travel “to participate in meetings for the purpose of organizing narcotics trafficking” as evidence that Shehu holds “a leadership position” in trafficking networks. (There is no reason to believe Kushner or Ivanka had knowledge of these allegations before purchasing the land. Neither Rama, Affinity Partners, nor Abehsera, Kushner’s operating partner, responded to requests for comment. A spokesperson for the development project said that, contrary to widespread reporting, Affinity Partners is not connected to it, and that Kushner and Ivanka are involved in their personal capacities. In answer to detailed questions, Shehu’s lawyer responded, “OK.”)
As we walked toward Skanderbeg Square, where Baker had stood amid a cheering crowd 35 years before, Muçi pointed out a troubling construction project every few hundred feet. There was a 60-story, half-completed building whose construction was halted due to the project’s links with drug trafficking. Another had illegally built an additional seven stories. A national theater was demolished to make way for skyscrapers. Construction on a building meant to be the tallest in the Balkans was halted, again, due to links with drug traffickers.
“I think it’s a way to transform the city, to give the aura of wealth or progress,” Muçi said. He explained that foreign investment in Albania is “very, very low, almost zero,” and cited a long list of issues that would be concerning for an investor. “Unresolved property rights, a monopolized economy that benefits so-called strategic investors, a low workforce because young people are leaving, and a host of other issues which make it not worth it, even if you’re an investor who wants to come invest here.”
We arrived in Skanderbeg Square, where Albanians had come to protest nightly for a month. Dominating the square was a skyscraper whose balconies form a familiar outline.
“Is it a face?” I asked.
It was supposed to be Skanderbeg, the medieval nobleman who became Albania’s national hero for resisting the Ottomans in the fifteenth century. “But everybody feels that this is Edi Rama’s facial features,” Muçi explained, “who wants to immortalize himself with this building.”
We counted five cranes from our view in the square. “Will these buildings be filled with rich people who have invested?” Muçi asked. “I don’t see that happening; it is only a means of transforming the facade. It is a means of money laundering and drug trafficking, but the mere fact that all these apartments remain empty, it shows that it is not for Albanians.” For land disputes, state protection is limited. “You can go to court, but nothing comes out of it,” Muçi explained.
Much of this construction was made possible by the introduction of Rama’s “strategic investment” framework of laws in 2015, which were expanded in 2024. Rather than waiting for every dispute to be resolved before construction began, the state increasingly treated private development as a matter of public interest.
The existence of these kinds of laws is not inherently remarkable. The United States has eminent domain, and many European countries have versions of mechanisms that acquire land or expedite projects in the public interest. “In a normal property system, this might simply be a development incentive,” wrote Elton Dusha, an economist in Tirana with the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, in the magazine Peizazhe të Fjalës. “In Albania’s system, where ownership is often unresolved, it becomes much more powerful.” Once a project receives strategic status, like the Ivanka-Kushner resort, “the state … puts its weight behind the investor before land disputes have been fully resolved.” And this weight essentially flows directly from the Strategic Investment Committee, established by Rama and chaired by Rama himself.
It helps explain why fences and bulldozers typically arrive as a first step in construction projects in Albania, while hundreds of families still insist the land is theirs. Under the strategic investment framework, the existence of competing claims is no longer, by itself, enough to halt development. Because the underlying property law, 7501, is vague, and the strategic investment framework gives sweeping powers to push through large projects, “the government becomes the end-all and be-all of economic activity,” Dusha told me in a phone call. “If Kushner is just some guy with no connection to the government, he is a nobody.”
“Everything somehow functions outside the legal boundaries of what’s permissible and what’s not,” Muçi said. “Construction starts, it becomes a fact, and then the whole administration and the paperwork is in the service of what has already happened.” But serious investors generally want rule of law; they want limited risk on their investments. “If the property rights are not sold ... the only way to make it worth investing is if you contact the prime minister directly and somehow arrange it.”
“This is why it’s so hard to attract foreign investors in Albania,” he said, “because who would want to play by these rules?”
What Typically deters investment is uncertainty: disputed ownership, weak courts, and the possibility that political connections matter more than legal rights. For many investors, those conditions in Albania make it a risky place to do business. But Ivanka and Kushner are not most investors. Kushner arrives with not only private capital, but private capital backed by extraordinary political access; the prime minister has personally championed his project. The risks that might discourage an ordinary developer can look very different to someone whose relationship with the state is anything but ordinary.
The novelty is not that Kushner, as a representative of the Trump administration, mixes business and foreign policy. It is that, under Trump, business is the foreign policy.
Thirty-five years ago, the United States encouraged Albania to build institutions that could withstand the pressures of powerful individuals. Kushner has a different goal. The novelty is not that Kushner, as a representative of the Trump administration, mixes business and foreign policy. It is that, under Trump, business is the foreign policy. And it’s a business that chafes against the restraints states typically put in place to prevent the powerful from simply taking what they want.
While I was in Albania, a pink coffee-table book was released with a foreword by Rama. The Albanian Files, as it’s called, documents more than a decade of architectural projects by internationally renowned architects Rama brought in. In his foreword, Rama describes what draws the “world’s most visionary architects” to his country. It is “something alive, something unrepeatable.” But it is also that Albania is “still free from the suffocating comfort of overregulation” and offers “a freedom from ‘no’ in all its forms.”
After our tour of Kaninë, Coco and Goni took me to lunch at Shehu’s resort on the water. We walked a literal red carpet through a poolside patio to our table. The seats were tan and plush, the tables an elegant natural stone. A vanishing-edge pool looked out over the sea, Sazan Island in the middle of our view.
The chefs clearly knew us, and we were offered a lavish off-menu feast that blended old and new Albanian cuisine. I requested a glass of white wine. No one asked what kind, and the correct one simply arrived. Cubes of polenta artfully arranged with peppers, cheese, and marinated anchovies appeared, along with more courses of purple shrimp carpaccio, grilled squid in ink, black truffle pasta, ravioli with lamb ragu, and an elevated sultjash—traditional rice pudding with cinnamon. We finished the meal with an enormous plate of perfect fruits on a bed of ice, condensation pilling on their skins.
“You are sitting at the table Ivanka sat at,” Goni told me.
I asked what made them proud to be Albanian. Coco smiled as she translated. “We get down but we get back up, bigger and stronger,” she said. She took a second to laugh. “Kind of like Trump!”
Then Coco put it another way. America, she said, was Albania’s “big brother,” and the former regime looms large.
“The whole perception of the regime had a counterweight in the U.S.,” Muçi later told me. “People in Albania are not protesting because the U.S. wants to take away Sazan Island. It’s been happening across Albania for a long time. And we feel that Ivanka and Jared are there to pink-wash this typical Albanian thing.”
As of now, protests notwithstanding, the Ivanka-Kushner project is still happening. Rama has vowed to press on. “I was voted to make these things happen,” he said. “I’m not voted to be led by people that have a different idea of how to develop the country.” He has insisted that the resort could be open to visitors by the end of the decade.
At the pool, Coco and Goni told me that the allegations against Shehu were false. They said that, despite years of scrutiny from law enforcement, investigators had never been able to pin anything on Shehu. Everyone was looking, no one had found anything, and no one gets away with a crime with no traces. I didn’t know what to say. Getting away with illegal activity sounded like the definition of organized crime to me.
Goni asked me who I thought owned the pool behind us. Shehu, I presumed. “No, it belongs to the city of Vlorë,” he said. It has an entry fee, of course, but technically it is publicly owned.
I saw families lounging, speaking French, German, English, and Italian. Someone getting a scuba lesson bobbed in the water. The atmosphere was rarefied and opulent. I had a hard time imagining how locals might think the pool was accessible, let alone built for them.
Beyond the pool, a half-finished concrete structure jutted out into the sea. A fence had been put up at its entrance. As I watched, a group of teen boys casually climbed it and walked out to where the water was deeper. They took turns jumping into the clear water below. For now, I thought, this place still belonged to them.
Did Howard Zinn Tell Too Simple a Story About American History?
Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States is one of the most popular works of history ever written. Zinn thought of his book as a supplement to the traditional school curriculum. Instead of recounting the achievements of titans of politics and industry, he celebrated laborers, the leaders of social movements, those who denounced injustice and faced oppression. Each year between its publication in 1980 and 2010, it sold more copies than the last. It was, its publisher said, “the book that won’t stop selling!” Zinn’s book and its ideas made appearances in Good Will Hunting in 1997 (where Matt Damon’s character tells Robin Williams that it is a real history book that will “knock you on your ass”) and in The Sopranos in 2002, where Tony castigates his son for reading it (“so you finally read a book, and it’s bullshit”) and declares, “In this house, Christopher Columbus is a hero. End of story.” It has been taught in thousands of high school and college classrooms; it has been banned from others.
Zinn’s reputation on the political right is, unsurprisingly, very poor. In 2004, Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen tried to write a counterpart—A Patriot’s History of the United States—titled to imply that it is unpatriotic to be critical of a country’s faults. But Zinn’s most popular work also has an uneven reputation on the left. Many professional historians have found it wanting, even if they share most of Zinn’s political sensibilities. Michael Kazin, writing in Dissent in 2004, called it “bad history … gilded with virtuous intentions” that reduces the past to “a Manichean fable.” History, for Zinn, Kazin writes, “is a painful narrative about ordinary folks who keep struggling to achieve equality, democracy, and a tolerant society, yet somehow are always defeated by a tiny band of rulers whose wiles match their greed.” Kazin thought Zinn opted for an oversimplified morality tale that would, in the end, keep the left “on the margins of American political life.”
Most historians are lucky to have readers. Zinn has fans. A People’s History made him, by the standards of historians at any rate, a celebrity. In the early 2000s, he coordinated stage performances and a film featuring the voices of advocates for social change throughout history, interpreted by actors including Rosario Dawson, Morgan Freeman, Sandra Oh, and Viggo Mortensen. His autobiography was made into a documentary. Before his death in 2010, he toured the country alongside the journalist Dave Zirin, who frequently writes about sports for The Nation, who interviewed him on stage. (I was in the packed audience in what turned out to be Zinn’s final public event, in Chicago in November 2009, on behalf of the Campaign to End the Death Penalty.)
Zirin has now completed a biography of Zinn, The People’s Historian: The Outsized Life of Howard Zinn. It is a tribute to a person that Zirin deeply admires. It has much in common with Zinn’s most popular book. Zinn presented his readers with genuinely admirable dissidents, from Bartolomé de las Casas to Ida Tarbell and Langston Hughes. At a moment when the country needs effective dissidents, Zirin deservedly places Zinn, the scholar-activist, in that pantheon. But The People’s Historian also replicates one of A People’s History’s flaws: It can flatten complex problems and people into apparently simple ones.
Howard Zinn—“Howie” to friends and family—was born in Brooklyn in 1922 to Eastern European Jewish parents (his father immigrated from today’s Ukraine, his mother from Siberia). They were poor throughout his childhood, living in cold-water tenements filled with roaches. “We’d come home and they’d be all over the kitchen table and scatter when we turned on the light. I never got used to them,” Zinn remembered. The four surviving Zinn boys (an older brother died as a baby) slept head-to-toe to make the best use of space. His father worked hard at a series of odd jobs, especially when the Depression hit, but the family never achieved prosperity or even security. From experience, Zinn felt that the “if you work hard, you will get ahead” myth of American advancement was hollow for too many people.
Zinn was the one bookish member of the family. He began reading about politics and spending time with left-wing political organizers. Participating in a peaceful demonstration in 1939, he was beaten by police, which politicized him further. He says—and both Zinn’s previous biographer, Martin Duberman, and Zirin agree—that he never joined the Communist Party. An FBI file filled with inaccuracies (including inventing a nonexistent sister) would later claim that he had. It doesn’t much matter. The politics that he settled into were certainly anti-anti-Communist: defending the civil liberties of radicals of all stripes.
Duberman, whose biography Howard Zinn: A Life on the Left was published in 2012, mentions that an important political influence on the young Zinn was the publications of the Nye Committee. In the mid-1930s, Senator Gerald Nye oversaw an investigation into the causes of World War I, and particularly the claims that U.S. entry into the war had been the result of a conspiracy of arms dealers. The committee found plenty of evidence of profiteering and lobbying, and Nye accused President Woodrow Wilson of having deceived Congress.
Zinn’s historical analysis resembles this populist frame rather than, say, the class politics of Karl Marx. Writing in A People’s History more than 40 years after he read the Nye Committee’s reports, Zinn explains World War I as having arisen from the fact that “American capitalism needed international rivalry—and periodic war—to create an artificial community of interest between rich and poor, supplanting the genuine community of interest among the poor that showed itself in sporadic movements.” A conspiracy of elites. A dishonest government led to catastrophe by business interests seeking profit. The victims: common people, who otherwise are in broad agreement about how the world could be made better. That is the core of Zinn’s historical model, and Nye would have recognized it.
Zirin’s biography tells the story of Zinn’s life in a way that makes clear that many of the most important personal episodes also fit that pattern. Even World War II, for him, was in part a story in which elites took advantage of the goodness of ordinary people for their own gain. For three years, Zinn worked in the Navy Yard in Brooklyn, assembling ships. Pay was better than he had earned before, but conditions were tough, and as the United States entered the war, hours on the job kept increasing. Zinn got a good education in the importance of a union. In this period, he also met Roslyn “Roz” Shechter, who shared his interest in reading and leftist politics. They soon married, and remained partners for more than 60 years, until Roz’s death in 2008.
Though the work in the shipyard was important, and Zinn had initially opposed the war, a 21-year-old Zinn eventually decided that he should join the fight against fascism as an airman. He was trained as a bombardier and deployed to the European theater. He lost friends and flew many missions, dropping bombs over targets he couldn’t see. At the very end of the war, two weeks before Germany’s surrender, he was ordered to bomb the German-occupied French resort town of Royan, using “jellied gasoline”—napalm, as it would be known in Vietnam. Thinking about his experiences, Zinn concluded that there could be just causes, but no just wars. He labeled his box of files on the missions he ran “Never Again.”
At the end of the war, the G.I. Bill made it possible for Zinn to finally enroll in college: at Washington Square College (now NYU). After hearing a song by Woody Guthrie about the Ludlow Massacre—an episode in 1914 in which Colorado militias killed striking workers from a Rockefeller-owned mining operation and their families—Zinn concluded that the teaching of history contained many gaps. He wrote about the episode for his M.A. at Columbia.
In 1956, having earned a Ph.D., Zinn was hired at Spelman College in Atlanta. Spelman’s students were exclusively Black women; the school environment imposed strict curfews and insisted on a high level of decorum. The college president, Albert Manley, was a Black pioneer navigating a hostile white establishment. But in a microcosm of Zinn’s theory of history, Zinn found himself in frequent clashes with Manley, with Zinn supporting student participation in the burgeoning civil rights movement. Zinn was a beloved teacher; his students included Alice Walker and Marian Wright Edelman. He admired it when students protested, picketed, and challenged authority both within and outside of the college, as he did, too. The students’ “urge to organize,” writes Zirin, “shaped Zinn’s expectations about this new pace of social change.” It became too much for Manley, who perceived Zinn as an outside agitator. Although he had tenure, he was fired from Spelman in 1963.
Zinn found a new job at Boston University and moved his family north. In the summers, he went back to the South, continuing his involvement in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, organizing Freedom Schools in 1964 to give young people a more liberatory educational experience. He returned again in 1965 to join the march from Selma to Montgomery. In 1965, he also appeared before a small crowd in Boston Commons, speaking out against growing U.S. involvement in Vietnam. In the years to come, antiwar activism would occupy more and more of his energy.
The atmosphere at Boston University was even more oppressive than that of Spelman, especially after the appointment in 1971 of the conservative John Silber as president, who held the view, “The more democratic a university is, the lousier it is.” He repeatedly clashed with the faculty, but with Zinn most of all. Zinn called him an “intellectual bully”; Silber called Zinn “barbarous” and “uncivilized.” He blocked Zinn’s raises as part of his broader conflicts with the university’s workers. The students were, once again, with Zinn.
Zinn also continued to take admirable personal risks in defense of his political convictions. Zinn helped the Roman Catholic activist Daniel Berrigan hide when he was wanted by the FBI for burning draft cards. He helped the former defense analyst Daniel Ellsberg store the Pentagon Papers, the explosive internal reports that showed that the U.S. government had known for years that it would not win the war in Vietnam. Aware that poor grades were taken into consideration by the military draft, Zinn gave out high marks in his classes. His lectures at BU were regularly attended by between 200 and 300 students.
Many people received a history education that supposes the benevolence of U.S. leadership. A People’s History is a kind of incantation that dispels that illusion.
He shaped those lectures, at the end of the 1970s, into A People’s History of the United States, which launched him to a new level of fame—and controversy. It is easy to understand why A People’s History felt like such an advance to many people over a traditional U.S. history education. More people received then, and many still receive now, a history education that supposes the benevolence of U.S. leadership and U.S. elites. For many readers, A People’s History is a kind of incantation that dispels that illusion, and that is its enduring contribution. If the significance of this achievement is more difficult to perceive in our time, when Zinn’s work has been absorbed, it might be well to remember that the president of the American Historical Association, as late as 1961, declared that “too much self-criticism is weakening to a people.... A great people’s culture ... begins to decay when it commences to examine itself.” Most history teachers and historians reject that view now, and that is part of Zinn’s achievement.
But that is not to say that Zinn’s substitution is without weaknesses of its own. Zinn has a formula: corrupt elites, virtuous activists standing with ordinary people, who, he assumes, have common interests. (There is “common ground for people all over the world…,” Zinn once jotted in a notebook, “All of us want the same thing.”) Zirin’s biography, precisely because it is so influenced by Zinn’s models, helps make clear that it is possible to narrate important parts of Zinn’s life according to that same model, including his time at Spelman and at BU, in the civil rights and antiwar movements. No wonder it made sense to Zinn.
It also leaves a lot out. In any survey text there are inevitable absences. But, for example, A People’s History makes virtually no mention of religion—surely an important part of the national experience. It doesn’t discuss conservatism in any serious way. Geopolitics is scarce. Zinn’s Nye-inflected explanation for World War I, for example, replaces ideology with interests, and assumes them to be the same. If the goal is to understand Woodrow Wilson’s thinking about entry into World War I, for example, A People’s History is a very poor guide.
That same pattern of analysis, shoehorned in again and again, is responsible for what is probably the worst passage in A People’s History: his account of the U.S. Civil War. Zinn calls the Civil War “not a clash of peoples … but of elites.” It was “not over slavery as a moral institution … the northern elite wanted economic expansion … the slave interests opposed all this; they saw Lincoln and the Republicans as making continuation of their pleasant and prosperous way of life impossible in the future.” There are elements of truth here, of course. The North was also racist, it had businessmen with interests, it was not merely waging a war of righteous emancipation. But, again, Zinn is too reductive. There was moral and political outrage about slavery in the North. Troops, Northern and Southern, understood what the war was about. The Thirteenth Wisconsin Infantry, in 1862, declared that it was “as plain as the noon-day sun” that the South’s “infamous rebellion” was “a war of, by, and for Slavery,” and a Confederate Brigade agreed: “any man who pretends to believe that this is not a war for the emancipation of the blacks … is either a fool or a liar.” There are times when Zinn should have listened more to “the people.”
Zinn is at his best when describing the activists and dissidents who recognized the flaws in their own times, and who organized to make the country better. Zirin is at his best when he is presenting the story of Zinn in that same light. But Zirin also replicates some of Zinn’s flaws. Zirin glosses the Cold War, as Zinn does: American elites needed an enemy, they found it in the USSR, and “the war business was booming.” This is too simple; and the problem with this narrative when applied to political action is that it turns hard problems into apparently easy ones. The task of understanding other perspectives, other ways of thinking, perhaps even the reasons that people take pride in traditions other than the dissident one, is not taken seriously.
Zirin’s weakest chapter is the one on A People’s History itself. He has assigned himself the task of defending Zinn from criticisms, even relatively friendly ones. He quotes Duberman’s correct observation that Zinn “wasn’t much interested in political theory” to deem it “dizzying, derisive, and confusing.” (Duberman, who also admires Zinn, is more generous to Zinn’s critics in his biography.) Zirin decries the “cottage industry of vicious critiques” against Zinn. Zirin approvingly quotes Zinn’s friend Anthony Arnove, who says that the critiques are “not based on good-faith political conversation,” but are the result of “guild consciousness.” The Zinn framework repeats itself: The corrupt elite defends its own interests once again.
This sort of argument is where one ends up at an impasse with someone who has used Zinn as a brick in the wall around their historical imagination, rather than as one of a number of ways of opening that imagination up. Praise from the great historian Eric Foner, who shared Zinn’s democratic socialist politics, appears on covers of most copies of A People’s History: “Historians may well view it as a step toward a coherent new version of American history.” But Zirin doesn’t like that Foner also found the book potentially “disempowering,” as when Foner notes that “Blacks, Indians, women, and laborers appear either as rebels or victims,” while “less dramatic but more typical lives … receive little attention.” Foner, by contrast, paid Zinn the ultimate compliment when he wrote his own single-volume history of the United States. The Story of American Freedom, from 1998, does discuss religion and conservatism. It takes the ideas and motives of people Foner disagrees with seriously. It lets people be complex and flawed, rather than good or evil. It lets hard problems be hard problems. As a single-volume survey of U.S. history, I don’t think Foner’s work has been surpassed. That’s not an affront to Zinn, but a tribute.
Duberman notes that Zinn, toward the end of his life, destroyed the elements of his personal archive that reflected on his inner life. He wanted to be known for his public deeds, not his private thoughts. He was not a perfect man. Duberman writes about serial affairs that nonetheless co-existed with real commitment to Roz. Zirin, the journalist, interviewed Zinn’s children and allows them to speak about the challenges of having a famous father. But neither Duberman nor Zirin had access to material that might have allowed them to see any doubts, missteps, or self-criticisms Zinn might have contemplated.
In this focus, too, there is a curious overlap with Zinn’s own historical method: Zinn cares more about where historical actors are on the chessboard than how they are thinking about their next moves. Rendering interiority was not his strength as a historian, and he did not want it for himself. Did he wrestle with the questions that don’t have clear answers? It’s easy to draw a line from his support for the third-party campaign of Henry Wallace in 1948 to that of Ralph Nader in 2000. But were those good strategies for the left? On the predations of U.S. power, Zinn was clear-eyed, and he knew other empires did the same. But what should be done about it? It’s hard to say. Good societies need good social critics; but they are not made of critics alone.
Zinn remains a touchstone for millions of Americans. As a work of scholar-activism, A People’s History is an extraordinary achievement. As historical analysis, it has real flaws. But it connects readers to an inspiring legacy, and that has real value, too. As Zirin’s admiring biography makes clear, it arose from a life of deep and admirable commitment. If you are one of its new readers, you will be shocked, outraged. You will learn. Take that first step. Then take another.
The Death of Middle-Class Tax Cuts as a Bulletproof Idea
In April, New Jersey Senator Cory Booker and Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen separately introduced legislation that they promised would help with the affordability crisis. Booker’s bill, the Keep Your Pay Act, would erase income taxes for taxpayers who make less than $75,000; Van Hollen’s bill, which Booker has co-sponsored, would do the same but only for incomes below $46,000. The two Democrats, both of whom are rumored to be considering presidential runs, probably figured their legislation was a slam-dunk idea. After all, who doesn’t love a tax cut?
But then something possibly unexpected happened: The left pushed back. “Tax cuts are a Band-Aid, not a solution,” Natasha Sarin, a professor at Yale Law School and the president of the Budget Lab at Yale, wrote in The New York Times. Kristen Crowell, the executive director of Families Over Billionaires, argued at Rolling Stone that voters in town halls across the country aren’t demanding tax cuts—they want to see taxes raised, specifically on corporations and the wealthy. The American Prospect accused the senators of playing on Republican turf. Likewise, a rebuttal in Democracy, which is edited by TNR editor Michael Tomasky, said these proposals risk “feeding into anti-tax narratives”—and if enacted, would do serious damage to the government’s revenue base, thus undermining the safety net and other progressive priorities. Jamelle Bouie, a Times opinion writer (and personal friend of this author), didn’t pull punches on his YouTube channel. “I think it’s very dumb,” he said, explaining that the financial challenges people face aren’t really caused by income taxes, and cutting them reinforces the idea that taxes are bad.
And that was pretty much that. The debate was over, the verdict in: Booker’s and Van Hollen’s bills were bad as policy, and indeed bad even as messaging bills. The question is whether that overwhelming consensus augurs a new era. Are tax cuts now dead in the Democratic Party?
Booker’s and Van Hollen’s legislation never stood a chance of advancing in the Republican-controlled Senate, but they’ve been positioning themselves as national leaders and surely will resurface these ideas if they decide next year to run for the party’s nomination. “I believe Democrats need big, bold ideas that really speak directly to the pain points of Americans who are feeling more and more that our party and government and government officials in general are feckless in finding real solutions that affect their lives,” Booker told me. “It’s a massive step forward to creating economic justice in our country, by unrigging the system that allows Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos to pay less than a 5 percent effective tax rate, and has teachers and firefighters and nurses paying such a much higher tax rate.”
The left commentariat’s pushback to the tax-cut proposals surprised the senators and some of the groups that helped promote them—like Patriotic Millionaires, which advocates for higher taxes on the rich and helped write Van Hollen’s legislation. “As we stand here today, [the Working Americans’ Tax Cut Act] is the single most important economic idea that has been introduced in the United States Congress in 50 years, in my humble opinion,” Erica Payne, the group’s founder, told me, arguing that the bill would fix an unfair tax system by shifting the tax burden to higher incomes. “I do not understand the motivations or the intellectual labyrinth in the minds of the people who are advocating against this idea, and I find their opposition confusing at best.”
One of the most common criticisms of the proposals is that income taxes aren’t why Americans are struggling. A single person with no dependents making $46,000 might pay a little over $3,000 in income taxes—and any qualifying deductions would lower that amount. Cutting that tax would only add, at most, about $250 a month to their budgets, or $115 to a biweekly paycheck. That would quickly be eaten up by the rising food and gas costs under President Trump, and absolutely swamped by big-ticket items like health care. The proposals also provide more targeted help, like expanding the child tax credit, but overall the people targeted for help in these bills don’t pay a lot of federal income taxes already, so the savings are limited.
Patriotic Millionaires’ response to this criticism is that every little bit helps when families are crunched the way they are now. “It’s a significant amount of relief,” she said of Van Hollen’s bill. More important, it establishes a living wage of $46,000 in tax law, where the concept doesn’t exist now. “From a political point of view, it forces Democrats who have historically refused to raise taxes on the donor class to make a choice. Who’s going to pay, working people or the donor class? It is a very simple choice, and it is one that we need these politicians to be forced to make.”
While the savings to each person are small relative to their family’s expenses, it could cost the government trillions in revenue. Booker’s bill is estimated to erase $6.4 trillion, versus $1.6 trillion for Van Hollen’s. (Payne says that Booker’s higher price tag was unfairly conflated with Van Hollen’s proposal.) Each bill proposes offsetting those losses by taxing the wealthy more. But there are numerous other proposals to tax the wealthy more, both at the state and federal level, without also cutting middle-class taxes—the goal being to create additional revenue to accomplish more, like establishing universal childcare or expanding access to health care.
The bills’ proponents argue that those considerations are separate—that deciding how to spend government revenue is a topic for later, after making the tax code more fair. Van Hollen says that passing his proposal shouldn’t crowd out the potential for other solutions. “I think this is a critical piece of a tax plan that speaks to working people,” he said. “I support other sources of revenue. There are many other corporate tax loopholes that we need to close, and I’ve been pushing to do that for a very long time. But I think this is essential.… If we believe in a living wage, which I do, then if someone’s making a living wage, we should not tax it away. In other words, if someone’s making a living wage, they should be able to live on it.”
His critics argue that any reduction of government revenue, even if it is replaced elsewhere, undercuts progressives’ goal of expanding government services—which will require the government to bring in more money overall than it does now. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, for example, wants to tax the rich to fund universal childcare, free and faster city buses, and affordable, city-run grocery stores; that would be much harder to accomplish if he also handed out a middle-class tax cut. Nationally, if would be nigh impossible to fund Medicare for All without the same approach of taxing the rich but otherwise keeping the tax base the same.
Michael Konczal, the vice president of policy and research at the Economic Security Project, said a tax cut won’t help people “with the fundamental challenges they face on affordability, which are in large part things like health care and housing, which need a much different kind of government response”—a more ambitious response, that is, like a public option for health care and public funding for childcare. The government already doesn’t have enough resources for its current programs, he said, and the idea that a well-funded government can help solve problems is a core tenet of the Democratic Party.
“I don’t think we can win an argument where we’re arguing taxes are fundamentally a punishment, as opposed to the idea that these are a necessary component to make sure that we have good things in life and that we’re economically secure, and that we can fund the programs that help a market economy, make sure that people can find jobs and are taken care of with health care, and have good schools, and have safe communities, and have a secure retirement, and so forth,” he said.
If you consider that Booker’s and Van Hollen’s tax-cut bills are actually messaging tests for potential 2028 campaigns, then the most convincing argument against them may be that working- and middle-class voters aren’t exactly clamoring for a tax cut. “People are deeply, deeply concerned about cost of living, but their primary understanding of cost of living is the price of consumer goods, and then kind of more expensive fixed costs like housing, like health care,” said Anat Shenker-Osorio, a progressive strategist and messaging consultant.
There also isn’t much evidence that people notice tax cuts when they’re there, according to Alex Jacquez, a senior vice president at Groundwork Collaborative, a D.C.-based nonprofit think tank. “The Republican tax cuts of Bush, Trump, and Trump 2 all proved to be very unpopular, despite delivering cuts for middle-class filers,” he said. “You could argue that that is because most of the benefits went to the wealthy, but the Obama tax cuts of 2009 similarly not only didn’t move the needle—more people thought Obama raised taxes than lowered them.”
Tax cuts, in other words, are far from a slam-dunk idea. The voters aren’t demanding it, and they wouldn’t even give Democrats credit if they enacted a cut. Perhaps we’re seeing, in the response to Booker’s and Van Hollen’s proposals, a turning of the page in the party toward a focus on a bigger, better government that truly delivers for working people by providing more services while also lowering costs. That’s clearly what an increasing number of Americans want, and any serious contender for the Democratic nomination for president ought to know that.
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