A terrarium iPhone case that houses actual growing plants and moss.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s confirmation is stalled.

A meeting that was scheduled to take place between Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) and Blanche was cancelled abruptly Wednesday morning — just a day before the Senate Judiciary Committee was scheduled to vote to move Blanche’s nomination for Attorney General out of committee. 

“Zugunruhe is a German term describing the restless, twitching urge migratory birds feel when caged — and the same primal restlessness humans feel when trapped.”

Something that still blows my mind is that every apple seed produces a new variety. Every single one.

This is a lovely short documentary about a project called Some Interesting Apples, which aims to find apples growing in unusual places (i.e. not commercial orchards but in places where people tend to discard apple cores):

The last three years I have been involved with a project called ‘Some Interesting Apples’, the primary aim of which is to record and, where characteristics make desirable (and sometimes where they don’t), preserve wilding apples, i.e., domestic apples growing on their own roots as the result of a discarded core.

Some of the best apples are then cultivated in an orchard dedicated to wild apples:

The ‘Some Interesting Apples’ project collects apples from wild trees that have been grown using cores thrown away — many from car windows or dropped from walkers and animals.

The wild trees or ‘wildlings’ are trees that grow from those apple cores discarded in hedges and along train tracks, footpaths and roadsides.

Their fruit often goes uneaten or rots — but have now instead be used to create a unique orchard.

The orchard has been developed from dropped fruit from more than 600 apple wildings in Cornwall.

It has now created Wilding Mother Orchard - the first ever orchard in the UK solely dedicated to cultivating wild-grown, chance-seedling apples.

The discovered apple varieties are named for their what3words locations; they have names like Horse Wish Gossip, Panes House Taxi, and Autumn Mushroom Spoke.

Apples are super interesting. I read it years ago now, but I still often think of Michael Pollan’s chapter on apples in The Botany of Desire.

Tags: apples · botany · food · science

Participants in a recently published study spoke 28% fewer words per day in 2019 than they did in 2005. (People are spending more time alone and more time digitally communicating.)

For an hour and four minutes on Friday night, the president stood at a podium in a hotel he used to own and used the White House press corps as a prop. The irony of staging a White House Correspondents’ Dinner in the presence of a man actively working to dismantle the First Amendment protections of the very press he was ostensibly there to honor is almost too thick. To no one’s surprise, Donald Trump used the event as a campaign rally and personal vendetta, targeting CNN’s chief White House correspondent and anchor Kaitlan Collins with misogynistic, transphobic “jokes,” and capping the night with a “Trump 2028” hat — an authoritarian flourish masquerading as humor. 

The press stayed seated and silent. 

A press corps with any genuine values would have walked out. They would have recognized that attention is what fuels Trump’s authoritarian political strategy. Instead, reporters sat in their black-tie attire and behaved like sycophants. For an institution that loves to preen about its courage, the WHCD was a profile in cowardice. The people in that ballroom knew that Trump and administration officials have barred reporters from briefings, pursued subpoenas against journalists and threatened outlets with legal action, and that he routinely labels unfavorable coverage “fake news” to discredit any check on his power. It would have been absurdly simple for the White House Correspondents’ Association to issue a straightforward, principled declaration: “We cannot in good conscience allow a president who does not believe in the First Amendment protections this night celebrates to attend this event. Accordingly, we have rescinded our invitation.” But they refused to make a stand, apparently terrified of losing their access.

Even some of the president’s usual sympathizers on television couldn’t pretend the choice made sense. The hosts of MS NOW’s “Morning Joe,” who once sprinted to Mar‑a‑Lago in the early days of Trump’s presidency, called the decision to host him “tone‑deaf,” saying the event should never have been held in its current form and highlighting the absurdity of platforming him while his Justice Department subpoenas New York Times journalists for doing their jobs. (On July 23, the department rescinded the subpoenas after a federal judge said it hadn’t followed appropriate procedures in its investigation of how reporters obtained information on the new Air Force One’s security capabilities.) The television hosts were right about the tone‑deafness, but wrong about the scale. This wasn’t merely tone‑deaf; it was a dereliction of duty.

CNN’s Kaitlan Collins had won the WHCA’s Award for Excellence in Presidential News Coverage Under Deadline Pressure for her reporting on the tense February 2025 Oval Office confrontation between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. In his address, Trump could not let the opportunity pass. “I want to personally congratulate CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on receiving her award,” he told the room, then spent the next several minutes insisting the award was “fake,” that she “shouldn’t get” it, and that she “never smiles.” Trump told her to smile. Then he built to the joke he’d clearly been saving: that he thought Collins had landed a lucrative new endorsement deal with Bud Light, only to learn the face on the beer can actually belonged to Dylan Mulvaney, the transgender actress whose 2023 partnership with the brand triggered a right-wing boycott. 

It’s an old joke often shared by conservatives on X. The only problem is that there was no Bud Light commercial starring Mulvaney. But factual accuracy was never really the point. The point was to shame a reporter by misidentifying and weaponizing a person’s identity, using two women’s faces to deliver one insult: that neither of them is quite what she claims to be, and neither is pretty, feminine or smiley enough to matter. 

Multiple reports described the room’s reaction to that bit as silence. Even a post-event panel on CNN’s “State of the Union,” which featured a Republican congressman and a former Trump administration aide, unanimously agreed the president had bombed with his speech. It did not stop Trump. On Truth Social over the weekend, he had a second try at delivering his joke, using an image generated by artificial intelligence that placed Collins’ face onto Mulvaney’s body on a mock Bud Light can. 

Collins didn’t take the bait. On Instagram, she posted an Eleanor Roosevelt line about nobody being able to make you feel inferior without your consent, alongside a note thanking her mentor Wolf Blitzer for the award with a reminder of why asking uncomfortable questions matters. On Monday’s “Daily Show,” she told host Jon Stewart she’d rather keep the focus on the reporting than on her own reaction, because turning it into a personal feud with the president is exactly the trap he wants her to fall into.

Collins has long been known for getting under his skin. During his first term, Trump clashed with her on numerous occasions in the briefing room and on social media, almost always after she challenged him for dodging questions or making false statements. In 2018, Collins was famously barred from attending an open-press event in the Rose Garden after daring to ask pointed questions about Michael Cohen and Russian President Vladimir Putin while serving as the pool reporter.

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When Stewart pressed her on the president’s fixation, Collins defended her record, emphasizing that she refuses to serve only one political audience. “I want anyone, from my family in Alabama to people in the White House to people in Washington, to be able to hear that answer or hear that question and think, ‘What is the answer to that?’” she said. “In terms of my reaction . . . it’s really not about me. And I don’t want it to be about my reaction. If you let it become about that, then it becomes a back-and-forth between the two of us. Instead, I think it’s more effective to remind people in those moments, when he is insulting me or when he is criticizing me, about the question I asked or the reporting that I did that he was so angry about. And the fact that I got an award for it really bothered him, clearly.”

On one level, watching Collins navigate these attacks offers a masterclass in professional composure. Regardless of political perspective, one has to acknowledge she is remarkably unflappable. Yet beneath this narrative of journalistic fortitude lies a far more transactional reality that defines modern Washington media. Collins has profited quite handsomely from her singular access to and conflict with power. In the mutually beneficial ecosystem of outrage that has come to define Donald Trump’s Washington, one hand washes the other.

Collins did not enter the dinner unaware of what was coming. In truth, from a brand-building perspective, such attacks are pure gold. She emerged from the weekend with half the media world and a chorus of Hollywood celebrities wildly applauding her bravery. This dynamic highlights the core problem with the era of the celebrity reporter, one of the most paradoxical developments in modern political media. We have built an ecosystem where personal confrontation with authority is parlayed into network stardom and lucrative contracts, all while the systemic threat to democratic norms continues unabated.

Look no further than Megyn Kelly, who famously parlayed a high-profile clash with Trump in 2016 as a Fox News reporter into a massive, multi-million-dollar (and short-lived) NBC contract only months later. Now a right-wing podcaster, Kelly went on her podcast this week and rationalized the attacks on Collins while complaining that the CNN star is “never nice to the president.” Using Trumpian language, Kelly argued that Collins is “always nasty” and that her questions carry “the most negative bent you could possibly go into the questioning with,” dismissing the president’s vulgar insults as mere “jazz” that all leaders throw around. 

Then there is Collins’ own network. Semafor’s Max Tani reported that CNN leadership was “furious” over the president’s remarks and has discussed scaling back its footprint at next year’s dinner, or skipping it altogether — with one internal conversation reportedly framing the event as having become “a platform for making crude remarks at their employees’ expense.”

Such a move would be a step in the right direction. But where was that fury in the room, when it could have mattered? Where was the immediate pronouncement that they will not sit quietly while their journalists are demeaned in front of their colleagues?

Far from defending one of their own, they sat as participants.

The post Kaitlan Collins and CNN are complicit in the Trump circus appeared first on Salon.com.

A court case involving President Donald Trump’s efforts to sabotage voting by mail reached the Supreme Court on Monday. The executive order at the heart of Trump v. California is one of many attempts by Trump and his Republican Party to make it harder for voters to mail their ballots and to potentially invalidate lawfully cast ballots that are submitted by mail. 

The executive order is particularly significant, because, with it, Trump is claiming the unilateral authority to change US election policy in ways that, at least according to the Constitution, can only be done by Congress or by state governments. Trump and many of his Republican allies have previously urged other institutions, such as Congress or the Supreme Court, to shift US election rules to benefit the GOP. But now, he’s claiming the power to rewrite those rules himself.

The March executive order at issue in California claims to be an effort to prevent noncitizens from voting in federal elections. But several provisions of the order seem designed to intimidate state and local election officials by threatening them with illegal prosecutions. Another provision would forbid the US Postal Service (USPS) from delivering many mailed ballots, which would have political benefits for Trump. 

Democrats have been more likely to vote by mail than Republicans since at least the Covid-era 2020 election, and this trend has continued post pandemic. So, any election policy that suppresses mailed ballots will harm Democrats and help Republicans.

In late June, a federal district court determined that several provisions of Trump’s executive order exceed his authority and must be struck down. 

The issue before the Supreme Court in California, however, does not concern whether the executive order is legal or not. Instead, Trump’s lawyers claim that the district court acted prematurely by invalidating the executive order before it was fully implemented and before several federal agencies have an opportunity to flesh out how its provisions will actually work. Those lawyers, in other words, want to buy time for federal agencies to implement parts of the order before it can be challenged in court.

This is actually a plausible argument, as Trump’s brief to the justices makes several significant concessions that, if embraced by the justices, would significantly weaken Trump’s order at least for the time being. As Trump’s lawyers now characterize his order, it doesn’t do much of anything until several federal agencies take additional steps.

Still, the stakes in this case, which arises on the Court’s “shadow docket,” a mix of emergency motions and other matters that the justices often decide very quickly, are quite high. Even if the justices do hold Trump to the promises his lawyers made in their brief and issue an opinion explicitly stating that the order currently imposes no obligations on anyone, that will still set up a future reckoning on whether Trump’s efforts to suppress voting by mail are valid. Eventually, those agencies will act, and several of them are likely to do so before the midterms, and, then, the question of whether Trump can fundamentally alter how US elections are conducted will have to be decided by the courts.

Trump’s executive order, if fully implemented, could potentially change the results of federal elections and place Republicans who did not win in office. It also matters because Trump claims the power to decide how states conduct federal elections, despite no statute that authorizes his order — thus, potentially expanding his own powers and the power of all future presidents.

So, what does Trump’s executive order do?

Trump v. California primarily concerns two sections of Trump’s executive order.

Section 2 of the order includes a thinly veiled threat that state and local election officials will face prosecution if they allow voters who aren’t pre-approved by the Trump administration to vote by mail. 

On the surface, the first part of this section seems innocuous. It requires the Department of Homeland Security “compile and transmit to the chief election official of each State a list of individuals confirmed to be United States citizens who will be above the age of 18 at the time of an upcoming Federal election and who maintain a residence in the subject State.” During a lower court proceeding in California, Trump’s Justice Department conceded that any such list would “necessarily be incomplete.” But the federal government’s decision to compile a partial list of eligible voters does not actually prevent anyone from voting.

The problem with Section 2 is that Trump’s call for DHS to compile this list is coupled with a statement that “the Attorney General shall prioritize the investigation and, as appropriate, the prosecution of State and local officials or any others involved in the administration of Federal elections who issue Federal ballots to individuals not eligible to vote in a Federal election.” 

Thus, as Judge Indira Talwani determined in her order blocking this provision, Section 2 “implicitly threatens enforcement…against election officials who furnish ballots to voters excluded” from the Trump administration’s incomplete lists. While the order does not explicitly state that an election official who mails a ballot to a lawful voter whose name does not appear on the Trump administration’s list will be prosecuted, Trump’s decision to couple his demand that the list be created with a threat of prosecution sends a clear message to election officials that they allow voters who are not on the list to vote at their own risk.

Moreover, as Talwani wrote in her opinion, one major reason why the federal government cannot compile an accurate list of all eligible voters is because the federal government’s records “do not necessarily track name changes (such as when a woman changes her name at marriage).” Women are more likely to vote for Democrats than men.

Additionally, Section 3 orders USPS to come up with new rules that require states to provide the federal government with a list of all voters who will receive a mailed ballot “no fewer than 60 days before the election,” and it forbids the post office from delivering ballots from voters whose names do not appear on the list. This section also outlines requirements for a specific kind of envelope for mail voting with certain design features — which, at the very least, creates a problem for states that have already purchased envelopes that do not comply with these new design requirements.

The Constitution gives states and Congress, not the president, the power to decide how federal elections are conducted

The Constitution provides that states, and not the federal government, get to decide who is eligible to vote in a federal election. Article I of the Constitution, for example, provides that voters who possess “the Qualifications requisite for Electors of the most numerous Branch of the State Legislature” may vote for members of the US House. And the 17th Amendment uses similar language to describe who may vote for US senators.

Thus, because each state gets to determine who may vote in its state legislative races, states also have the power to determine who can vote for members of Congress.

The Constitution’s language governing presidential elections, meanwhile, is even more explicit that states — and not Trump — get to decide who is an eligible voter. That language provides that “each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct,” its presidential electors.

Thus, as Talwani concluded, no federal official, including the president, has the power to determine that only “United States citizens who will be above the age of 18” may vote in a particular federal election; only states have the authority to decide who may vote for members of Congress or the president. And the federal government certainly does not have the power to compile a list of eligible voters and threaten prosecution of any state official who provides a ballot to someone not on that list.

A separate provision of the Constitution lets states determine the “Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives,” while also permitting Congress to “make or alter such Regulations.” Thus, while the federal government cannot determine who is eligible to vote in federal elections (except through constitutional provisions such as the 15th or 19th Amendments), Congress could conceivably pass a law regulating voting by mail.

But Trump is not Congress. And, according to Judge Talwani, “no law enacted by Congress delegates authority to control mail-in voting to USPS.”

Trump’s lawyers defend his executive order by claiming that it doesn’t do anything…yet

In their brief to the justices, Trump’s Justice Department did not actually argue that the executive order is legal (although they will likely do so in a later stage of this lawsuit). Instead, they argued that Judge Talwani’s decision blocking the executive order was “premature.” 

The thrust of DOJ’s argument is that, while the executive order announces several new election-related policies, it does not actually implement any of those policies. The executive order tasks DHS with compiling the incomplete list of eligible voters, it tasks DOJ with prosecuting state officials, and it tasks the Postal Service with coming up with the specific rules governing mailed ballots.

The Constitution does not permit anyone to file a lawsuit challenging a federal policy unless they can show they were injured in some way by that policy. Trump’s lawyers argue that, until the new election policies are fully implemented, none of the California plaintiffs can know whether they will be harmed by these policies or not.

It’s a plausible argument, but largely because DOJ’s brief makes a number of concessions that strip the executive order of any real vitality, at least until it is fully implemented by federal agencies.

The brief insisted, for example, that Section 2 should not be read to authorize prosecutions against state officials who send a ballot to someone who is not on Trump’s approved list of voters. “The Order does not deem it a crime, or even evidence of a crime, for States not to use the Lists when determining voter eligibility, and it does not direct the Attorney General to bring charges on such a theory,” it read.

Similarly, it denied that any of the executive order’s new policies governing envelopes and pre-approved voters who may vote by mail must actually be implemented, at least before the postal service issues its own rules regarding Trump’s new policies. According to the brief, “the Order does not ‘direct various changes to the voting-by-mail process,’” it merely “directs the President’s Executive Branch subordinates at the Postal Service to begin a deliberative policymaking process that may ultimately include some changes.”

While at least some of these concessions take liberties with the language of the executive order, they do potentially give the justices a third option to consider before they decide the California case. The justices could leave Talwani’s decision in full effect, or they could allow Trump to implement his new restrictions on voting. But they could also block Talwani’s order while simultaneously pointing to DOJ’s concessions and indicating that they expect Trump to honor those concessions.

If the justices take this third option, that would mean that the order would impose no obligations on the states for the time being and would similarly impose no new restrictions on voters until the agencies act. Litigation over the executive order would pause, and it would resume once the order is implemented by further agency action.

The Justice Department’s concessions in this case are fairly extraordinary, and they suggest that even Trump’s own legal team recognizes that it will be easier to persuade the courts to delay a reckoning over the executive order than it will be to convince them that the order is lawful. It remains to be seen, however, whether this Supreme Court will actually enforce the Constitution in this case — and whether they will do so right away or at some future date.

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In this week’s episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum opens with his reaction to President Trump’s latest round of tariffs and explains why he believes they are weakening America’s economy and its alliances.

Then, David is joined by his Atlantic colleague Jonathan Chait for a wide-ranging discussion on the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, whether presidents should be funny, the growing attacks on Barack Obama’s legacy, and the battle in Michigan between moderates and the progressive left that could shape the Democratic Party’s future.

Finally, David closes the show with a discussion of Eric Cline’s 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed and the Bronze Age collapse.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

David Frum: You are kind of an immoderate centrist. You’re ready to—you have centrist views, but you’re ready to brawl. But do you see, as you look at the Democratic Party, that there’s something about the moderate—they will not fight back? And therefore, they’re abdicating by default to people who are going to end up empowering Trump. And whoever Trump’s successor is, probably J. D. Vance, and all that J. D. Vance means for the future of American democracy.

Chait: Absolutely. Look, it’s, it’s an old problem, right? The definition of a liberal is someone who’s too broad-minded to take his own side in an argument. This has been something that liberals have noticed about ourselves and have been complaining about ourselves, without doing anything to change, for generations.

[Music]

David Frum: Welcome to The David Frum Show. I’m David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. My guest this week will be my Atlantic colleague Jonathan Chait, and we’ll be talking about Obama’s legacy and what it means for the future of American politics. The book this week will be 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed by Eric Cline, a study of the end of the Bronze Age.

But before either my dialogue with Jonathan Chait or the book discussion, some opening thoughts on the most recent rounds of tariff announcements by President Trump. Last Friday, President Trump announced his latest tariffs to go into effect. He targeted 60 economies. I say “60 economies,” because one of the 60 targeted was Taiwan, which is not regarded by the United States as a country but only as an economy. So, 60 economies including Taiwan; 59 countries plus Taiwan.

The ostensible basis of this new round of tariff increases was to combat forced labor. President Trump used a provision in American law that allows the president power to impose tariffs on countries that use forced or slave labor, and he said: That’s it. In order to fight forced or slave labor, these 60 economies, including Taiwan, are going to be targeted by a new round of tariff increases.

The grounds given for the tariffs are not really very plausible. There is no or barely any factual showing that all of these 60 were engaged in some way in forced labor. The United States, after all, is not completely clean on this question either, and there’s no graduation of the tariff to the alleged cause. There’s no saying: Such-and-such country has more forced labor or more openness to forced labor, such-and-such has less; therefore they have different tariff rates. No. It’s just—we accuse these 60 economies, we target them with tariffs, and we’re doing this even though our own hands are not clean. The United States economy is open in many ways to forced labor.

Pretty obviously, what is going on here is that Trump is looking for some legal basis to reinstate the tariffs that he has had struck down in the past. President Trump originally used an emergency economic authority from the 1970s. The Supreme Court told him he couldn’t do it. Then he fell back on a temporary provision that allowed him to impose tariffs for a period of time, I think 150 days, and that time has run out. So now he’s looking for what he can get.

As the president returns again and again and again to imposing tariffs on the world, a question has to be asked: What on earth could any Trump supporter imagine the president is possibly doing that is, in any way, in the American national interest? The emotional basis, the argumentative basis, the intellectual basis for tariffs is that we are supposedly reindustrializing the United States. But since Donald Trump has become president, manufacturing jobs in the United States have declined by the tens of thousands, probably somewhere between 80,000 and 100,000 net manufacturing jobs fewer as I record in the summer of 2026 than when Donald Trump became president at the beginning of 2025.

Because other sectors other employment sectors are continuing to grow, especially health care, this loss of a net 100,000 manufacturing jobs means that manufacturing as a share of nonfarm payrolls has now dipped below 8 percent, which is the lowest level that manufacturing has had in American employment since figures began. Maybe it was lower in 1776 than it is now, but since good figures began, this is the lowest. It’s a record. So obviously, it’s not working. And it’s not just jobs that are being lost. Manufacturing output and manufacturing investment also seem to be in decline. This is a little harder to calculate because there’s a huge capital-investment boom going on because of artificial-intelligence data centers. A lot of money is being committed to these data centers, and the question is: To what extent does this get counted as manufacturing investment and whatnot? But private economists who have tried to separate out seem to be in some kind of agreement that, at best, manufacturing investment is flat in the Trump year and a half, maybe down a little bit, because of the problem of the Trump tariffs.

The thing I wish I could pound into the head of tariff supporters is that every tariffed item is not only a product that you sell to consumers; it’s also an input into something else. When you impose tariffs on goods, you make not just things more expensive for American consumers—you make things more expensive for the American companies that buy those things and put them into other things. It’s a house-that-Jack-built problem. Every time you make an input more expensive, you make the ultimate product more expensive and make the final American product that much less competitive on world markets. And the result is: You can’t compete, so you sell less, so you invest less, so you employ less.

A large part of the attraction of tariffs to Donald Trump seems to be that they appeal to his desire for dominance. His perception of the world is divided into subjects and into enemies, and if you’re not a subject, then you’re an enemy. And if you’re an enemy, then there are no rules. And if you’re a subject, for that matter, there aren’t any rules either. That everything is an expression of will and ego, and all economics is a matter of I win, you lose, and if I don’t feel I’m winning, then I must be losing.

This has become the signature political and economic philosophy of an entire political party under Donald Trump. The party that used to stand for markets and enterprise, the Republican Party, the party of Reagan and Romney. We’re on a bad track here, and these latest tariffs mark another bad milestone on that bad track. We need to get off this, and we need to start creating in freedom and with rules.

That doesn’t mean that we pretend that China is not a problem. China is a problem, and there’s forced labor in China. And China is a rule-breaker and steals intellectual property. You need a China-specific solution to the problem of trade, not a solution that destroys the whole apparatus of trade with all of America’s friends and, increasingly, former friends.

The United States is now bound in a grinding and frustrating war with Iran. It needs all the friends it can get. The idea that it is waging economic aggression on all of its partners and then acting baffled and befuddled that these partners don’t help out on the Iran problem—a war that the United States started and that it did not have to start and that now it can’t get out of—that just, again, seems to be another bad milestone on another bad path.

The way out of all of America’s problems—it’s not the whole solution, but it’s the beginning of a solution—is to return to the path of free and fair trade with friendly-minded nations, bracketing China as a special problem, and otherwise dropping tariffs to the lowest rates possible and returning to the days when the United States negotiated agreements with its friends to trade in freedom and prosperity with mutual benefit and understanding that true trade makes all those who participate in it better off.

And now my dialogue with Jonathan Chait.

[Music]

Frum: Jonathan Chait has dedicated 30 years as one of this country’s sharpest, wittiest, and most ornery advocates for liberalism, first at The New Republic, then at New York magazine, and since 2024 at The Atlantic. It’s a remarkable career made more impressive by the fact that journalism was always his second choice of avocation, adopted only after the involuntary abandonment of his true ambition: head coach of the University of Michigan football team.

Jonathan Chait is the author of Audacity: How Barack Obama Defied His Critics and Created a Legacy That Will Prevail. And Jonathan is a continuing reminder that liberalism doesn’t have to be apologetic or bashful about itself. Jonathan, welcome to The David Frum Show.

Jonathan Chait: Thank you, David.

Frum: Okay, so we have a number of things to talk about today. I want to start—I know this is a topic that’s maybe a little more interesting to me than to you—but to start by looking back at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner that was recorded on Saturday night, just a few days before you and I record. This has always been a kind of troublesome event from a point of view of Washington journalism. There are big advantages to being close to politicians, and big hazards as well. So I know you worked at the glory days of The New Republic when there was a lot of intimacy between The New Republic and the politicians it liked. How do you think about events like the White House Correspondents’ Dinner? And do you think about them differently in the age of Trump from the way you thought about them before?

Chait: I was always very skeptical of these events. I went to one to see what it was like, but I felt like if you go to more than one, then you’re no longer going anthropologically; you’re actually part of the thing. And I didn’t want to be part of the thing, because I think it’s a little bit gross. Part of it, just mechanically, is journalistic outlets using themselves as intermediaries for their advertisers to give them access to politicians and to celebrities. The celebrities come because they get some cachet for being at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. The politicians get access to donors and to celebrities and to journalists. And I feel like it’s cozy for everyone, but I don’t think it’s really good for the journalism profession at all, and never has been.

In the Trump era, people have started to question it more than they have, but I feel like The New York Times was correct 20-some years ago to pull out of the event, and I wish everyone else would too.

Frum: Trump has changed the ritual in one very noticeable way—which was, in the past, the president’s speech always followed a strict form. Which was a series of gentle jibes at the press, somewhat tougher jibes at himself, occasional jibes at political opponents. That was handled with extreme care. Obama did them more than others, but that was always a little dangerous to do because it sort of violated the treaty of the evening. Followed, of course, by the moment at the end where the politician switches from humor to seriousness and pays tribute to the important role of the press, and everyone likes hearing him say it, whatever the politician may think in the recesses of the politician’s heart.

Trump just goes on pure aggression, pure attack. And that may make it easier for journalists to disavow or disconnect themselves from something that was troublesome before.

Chait: I think that’s right. What was the most revealing joke he made was actually a decent joke, at least on paper. His delivery was horrible, because he can’t deliver written text. But he made a joke about how he’s basically taken control of CBS News, how he effectuated regime change there and installed Bari Weiss. And that’s actually pretty chilling, right? I mean, that’s the [Viktor] Orbán playbook that we were all warning about in action, and he’s just boasting about it to the faces of the journalists.

Frum: It’s also, by the way, self-defeating in a way that Trump’s speeches are often not very strategic. But if it were true that Bari Weiss was the person you had installed at CBS, that is the last joke in the world that a president should make, because it only detracts from the effectiveness of your supposed ally. Which I, again, I don’t think she is. But if she were, it detracts from your effectiveness. It undercuts her. It puts her in an untenable situation. Why would you say such a thing? Trump doesn’t seem always to think those things through

Chait: Well, he doesn’t think them through. But I think at some level he’s acting from some instinct to dominate and to make everyone acknowledge the domination, right? He doesn’t work with any subtlety. He actually has to tell people what he’s done and force them to wear the hat on their head.

We may not want to go down this path of debating what’s happened at CBS, but I think it’s pretty clear that Trump believes he has done this at CBS. Now, whether Bari Weiss thinks that’s what she’s doing is a different question.

Frum: I think you make a very shrewd point. Which is that Trump, even when he would do better to allow dignity to people whom he thinks of as allies—he can’t do it. He has to humiliate; he has to dominate. He has to actually take his friend’s head and dump it in the bucket of shit, and pull the friend’s head out again and say, See, my friend is now covered in shit thanks to me. That’s the kind of guy I am, and this is the kind of low-grade character my friend is.

Chait: That’s right. That’s right. I mean, bending the knee is a metaphor people often use, but there’s a visual strikingness to it, right? I mean, an actual sign of submission is what he requires of people who submit to him.

David Frum: Now, let me pivot here to the Barack Obama first White House correspondent dinners, and then his presidency. When I wrote speeches for President [George] W. Bush, I occasionally tried to introduce jokes into them. I have this especially vivid memory of writing a joke that—I’m now going to forget what the joke is, unfortunately. But I remember thinking it was quite good, and putting it into a speech, and having the joke be struck by [senior adviser] Karl Rove personally. And when I went to Karl Rove to complain and say the joke was funny, Rove said—and I thought this was very wise—he said, The joke was funny. That’s why I killed it. It was too funny. Presidents shouldn’t be that funny.

And one of the things that was very striking when Obama spoke at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner was he was that funny. He said the thing you couldn’t believe a president had said. They were often hilarious, but often sometimes too funny. Did you have qualms about that?

Chait: No, I don’t. I think there’s a belief that some people have that humor and insight and dignity are in tension with each other, and I’ve just never thought that. I’ve always thought of humor as an aspect of intelligence. When someone can say something funny, to me that’s a sign that they have some insight that they’re able to express into the world. And I’ve never objected to any figure of any persuasion being funny. [Senator] Ted Cruz, with whom I disagree on almost everything, can often be very, very funny, and I appreciate that about him. I think we need more of it.

Frum: Well, let me quote the Obama joke that made me most uncomfortable, but that was very funny.

So I believe this was the White House Correspondents’ Dinner just after he had been reelected in 2012, and he was taking a bit of a victory lap, and he mentioned that one particular donor, I think it was Sheldon Adelson, had spent the then-astonishing sum of $100 million to defeat him. And Obama, sort of exulting that it hadn’t worked, said: If he felt that strongly about it, why didn’t he just offer the $100 million to me and ask me to leave politics altogether? I’m not saying I would’ve done it, but I would’ve thought about it. And that was really funny, but it’s—

Chait: It’s a great joke.

Frum: It’s a great joke, but why is it a great joke? So, there’s a theory that humor is how we adjust discomfort. It’s how we deal with the taboo and discuss the taboo in a way that’s socially acceptable.

And so the taboo there is, yeah, politicians could bribe rich people. We’ve reached a degree of wealth in American society where a rich man could say: You know, I don’t like your views. Here’s $10 million. Go to an island. I want you never to be heard from again. And there are politicians who might say, Satchel full of money, airplane ticket in hand, off I go. And when you joke about it, you remind people of that reality. Which we all know, but it’s a little uncomfortable to face.

Chait: Or that we’re still banning bribery—at the time, we were still banning bribery. We no longer are banning bribery anymore. But you can spend $100 million. So there’s this last barrier against a rich man’s influence that we can’t cross. So he can go all this way, but he can’t just take the most direct possible route to his ambition.

Frum: So you wrote this book about Obama at the very end of the Obama presidency. Trump came to office. You attracted a lot of attack for the book, because how could you say Obama was effective when he was immediately followed by Trump? You spent a lot of the 2010s defending Obama from critics on the right who said he was a communist and a Kenyan, or a Kenyan communist, or a communist Kenyan. Now the attacks seem to come from the left. I know you’re not a person of tender sensibility, but how do you deal with this?

Chait: You know, it is interesting, and I have reflected on this, because I would say 75 to 80 percent of the argument I make in the book is against those critics on the right, and maybe 20 percent is against the criticisms of the left. And there were criticisms from the left of Obama at the time, but they were just much, much less important.

And what’s interesting in retrospect, as you sort of indicated, is that the conservative critiques have mostly been forgotten, dropped altogether. They’ve just moved on to other things to anger them at the moment. Whereas the left-wing criticisms have survived. They’ve just been repeated over and over again and have established themselves as kind of official histories of that era and are widely believed, even if they weren’t widely believed at the time. And it’s really been fascinating, and I don’t quite have a full handle on how that happened other than just the sheer power of repetition at the time.

In other words, to listen to people talk about Obama now, you would think that Obama was just leaving on the table all these left-wing victories he could have been taking because he was just such a neoliberal shill. That he, out of cussedness, just hated Medicare for All and loved Wall Street.

But at the time, he was seen as a socialist. And it wasn’t just by the Republican Party. The mainstream media was portraying him as a radical. Let me just give you one example—and there are many examples of this—but the kind of official history we have now of the stimulus is that Obama held down the size of the stimulus because he didn’t want to spend more money on stimulus, because he was worried about the deficit. The truth is that Obama, rightly or wrongly, was trying a strategy to get the maximum stimulus sum he thought he could get out of Congress. And Obama was being seen at the time as being completely irresponsible in pursuing stimulus. The New York Times was treating the deficit as the big crisis and the economic crisis as a secondary problem. It was treating his attempt to stimulate the economy in the face of these deficits as perverse. It was basically running stories saying: We are looking at $100 trillion dollar deficits down the road, and nonetheless, Barack Obama wants to spend even more money. Which is such a hard sell. That was the mainstream narrative that he was fighting against, and the whole context in which he was operating has been completely forgotten.

Frum: Well, we were there. And it is true that Obama’s first job as president was saving the banking system and the larger American free-enterprise economy. And maybe he didn’t love that job, but that was the job that history gave him, and that’s what he did.

I have a very unusual view on this, which is I actually think that the period from October 2008 to March of 2009—the Bush-Obama transition—is actually one of the finest hours in the history of U.S. government and the finest hours in the history of the presidency. And a remarkable testimony to two men of different backgrounds working together on a common enterprise in ways that were very generous.

And the one I think about the most was one of the questions that George W. Bush faced in the fall of 2008 was: Should he save General Motors or not? And there were two obvious choices. One was save General Motors, and do it, and then your predecessor would have to live with it. And the other was, kill General Motors, and then your predecessor would have to live with it. And Bush instead made the decision, save them for 90 days, or prob—well, I would forget the exact number of days, but save them for enough of a period that your successor would have full autonomy to decide for himself whether to save General Motors or not. And indeed, we didn’t have a Great Depression, and we didn’t have the collapse of democratic systems all over the world, and we didn’t have a collapse of world communism, er, world capitalism. We didn’t have global communism. I think of those as good things.

Chait: And do you remember the phrase that conservatives applied to the bailout of GM? Gangster. Gangster government was the most common one. Gangster government. This was them indicating that he had gone beyond—they’d already called him a socialist. Now he had gone so far beyond socialism they needed an even viler epithet to describe what he was doing. That these dangerous methods he would use to leverage control of the private sector and basically put us on the road toward communism and improper uses of government power.

Frum: I remember very vividly a conversation I had sometime in the spring of 2009 with a group of young, I think they were Koch fellows or some kind of group funded by conservative projects. And I was much more in the conservative world in those days than I am now, although well on my way out because of this. I remember talking to this group of four or five young people, and they were explaining that if it had been up to them, they would’ve allowed the banks to liquidate themselves.

So I said, Let’s play that out. And I walked them through—I won’t take time here to do it—but, what happens if you allow a bank liquidation? And that means all kinds of people who had good assets suddenly find they don’t have liquidity sufficient to cover their assets. So even though the assets are perfectly fine, they have to be liquidated hastily to raise capital. And you have this accelerating crisis through the whole economy, which is the story of 1931, ’33. But I played it out for them in very vivid terms. And I remember one of them, as I described this nightmare scenario, getting quite ashen and saying: Well, I guess it’s a good thing we weren’t in power then, because our ideas wouldn’t have worked in an emergency.

Chait: Right.

Frum: Well, if your ideas don’t work in an emergency—all the ideas work in nonemergency. (Laughs.) Everything works when it’s not an emergency. The test of your ideas: Does it work when it is an emergency?

Chait: No; I’ve always been taken by that comment because what it’s saying is that our ideas are just a theological commitment. More of an aspiration and not something that you can actually trust to work in the real world. But nonetheless, that we should be guided by them for theological reasons and not for practical ones.

Frum: One of the legacies of that Obama experience was—so the Obama stimulus was about $800 billion, if I remember correctly. About half of it in the form of immediate cash relief and about half of it in the form of spending, which was a big number at the time.

In the Democratic world, that experience was remembered as: Obama didn’t do enough. And so Biden, who was confronting not a deflationary crisis the way Obama was, but an inflationary crisis, he spent much more and ran even bigger deficits—well, maybe they weren’t bigger deficits to the economy, because the government’s revenue hadn’t collapsed as much. But he ran very big deficits. And of course, this time the voices of conventional wisdom were correct; that Biden was spending too much, and he had overlearned the Obama experience that Obama had handled successfully and Biden handled less successfully.

Chait: Obama understood that he needed to stimulate the economy more. I mean, as soon as he got the stimulus, he tried to get more stimulus. He got every dollar he could get out of Congress. You could make an argument that he could have gotten more if he tried different methods, but he was trying to get—he understood, first of all, the recession was deeper than they grasped at the time they passed the stimulus. So they calculated the size of the hole, and they figured out, Okay, so how close to filling up the hole can we get? And then it turns out the hole was even deeper than they thought. So then, they immediately were trying to get more money, and they did get more money. They got more tax credits; they pulled out more stimulus here and there. But they did not get enough stimulus, and the recovery was too slow. And that was the main lesson, that they needed to not repeat that mistake. But the problem is they just erred in the opposite direction under Biden.

Frum: So the left theory of the Obama presidency is: Obama didn’t do enough, and therefore the working class got mad, and they voted for Trump, and it’s Obama’s fault.

Chait: I mean, you can explain Trump’s victory through normal political arguments. You don’t need to summon this crisis of capitalism that produced Trump. It’s hard to win a third consecutive term for any party.

Hillary Clinton was a less talented politician than Obama. She was challenged from the left by Bernie Sanders, and her response to that challenge was for herself to move leftward still. So the candidate who ran in 2016 under difficult conditions for any candidate was not running as Obama’s third term. But she was running significantly to the left of Obama’s third term with less political skills.

Obama left office with a 60 percent approval rating. Obama, had he been able to run for president for a third time, would’ve wiped the floor with Donald Trump. There’s just no reason to believe that Donald Trump was a repudiation of Obama, who was and is very popular, and far more popular than Trump.

Frum: I have a really brain-dead theory of what happened that ignores all the personalities and so on.

Which: This is my theory of how Obama led to Trump. The economy returns to precrisis levels of output and employment in 2014. Pre the crisis of 2007, ’08. So we’re back at 2014 to where we were in 2007, although the growth trajectory is lower. At that point, respectable opinion says: Right; Obama’s been running these big deficits. This could lead to inflation if unchecked. Now is the time for the Federal Reserve to tighten interest rates. And that was not a crazy decision. That’s a very conventional, normal decision. The crisis is over. I mean, we’re back to where we were. Tighten now.

And it turns out the economy was still, in 2014, not healthy yet. And when you tightened in 2014, instead of saying, Okay, the growth continues, as it did when you tightened in the middle ’80s, instead what happened is: The employment growth slows. And so you have very not-recessionary conditions in 2015, 2016, but disappointing conditions. People do not feel continuing improvement, and they weren’t just grateful to be pulled from the sea to the shore. They wanted to resume the normal, you know, trajectory from the shore. And that didn’t happen. And so the incumbent party lost, and then the Federal Reserve recognized its mistake, loosened in 2016, and the economy accelerated in 2017, 2018, 2019. We had three good years before the COVID pandemic.

Chait: Right. They thought we were at capacity. There was a debate about: Are we at capacity? Are we about to hit the point of accelerating inflation in 2014? And we weren’t, and we found that out in Trump’s first term that there was actually plenty of slack left in the labor market, plenty of room to grow.

You’re right. That was an important moment. And that could well have made the difference, because the 2016 election was so close. Just a little bit more growth in those last two [years] could have made the difference. A lot of things could have made the difference.

But I would just point out in the overall macro-situation, Obama was popular. Obama’s popularity was not the problem. I mean, if he was even more popular, it would’ve helped more, but he was overall popular.

Frum: Now in 2026, we have this attack on Obama from the left. He’s now become quite a demon figure. And explain to me—what is the left case in 2026 against Obama? Why is Obama now bad?

Chait: Well, the main thing that they will say that Obama did badly was bailing out the banks in 2008. Obama’s 2008 bank bailout—

Frum: 2009. 2009.

Chait: No, no, no; 2008. Now, of course, the bank bailout did occur in 2008.

Frum: Yeah.

Chait: But Obama did not become president ’til 2009. But when I point this out, people will never believe me. I’ve been pointing this out for 15 years, and no one will believe me. So I think I just have to accept that I’m wrong, and that Barack Obama actually was president in 2008, and he’s therefore responsible for the bank bailout that occurred in 2008.

Frum: I think the bank bailout was good. And whoever was president in 2008—which turns out to be maybe a more difficult question than … I’m sorry to have interrupted you, because I thought it was an easy question. But as you say—as with the question, Who was president in 2020?—it turns out to be quite hard.

Chait: Yes. (Chuckles.)

Frum: So leaving aside the mysterious question of who was president in 2008, why is it, if you’re the left and you love [President] Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who saved the banks, why do you hate whoever was president in 2008, who saved the banks?

Chait: Yeah. I’ve brought up this point many times. It’s very hard for me. I want to faithfully reproduce their criticisms; I don’t want to just be battling straw men. But it’s very hard for me on this point, because I feel like so little sense can be drawn from the criticisms they make. Like I said, the No. 1 point they make is the bank bailout. That’s by far the most common critique they make of Obama. The second most common they make is failing to jail anyone for the crimes of the financial crisis.

What actually happened was, [the Obama administration] looked at it and said: Well, they didn’t commit any crimes. The problem is all this stuff was legal, so we need to change the laws. And so they passed the Dodd-Frank financial reforms, which were the strongest regulations of Wall Street since the 1930s. At the time, those reforms were celebrated by progressives. If you ask any of the progressive experts in financial regulation, they will say that’s a very powerful law; a set of reforms that were formative. It looked at all the problems of the financial crisis, really regulated all of them. It also created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. But [critics] blame Obama for not imprisoning anyone for activity that was only subsequently made illegal. So again, I’m sort of attacking arguments that sound like straw men, but these really are the most common attacks made on Obama.

Frum: Go, take a step beyond the attacks. Because often when people say things, they are applying imperfect words to deep feelings. Okay, so maybe they don’t have good rationalizations, but where does it come from? What is the mentality that says, I revere Franklin Delano Roosevelt, but I hate Barack Obama? Where does that mood come from? Where does, where does Bernie Sanders-ism, what is the emotional need that it meets?

Chait: I think there was significant difference between Obama and the organized progressive movement. Do you remember when Obama’s spokesman derided the professional left? That was a somewhat notorious comment, but it really did capture a hostile relationship between the organized progressive movement and the Obama administration. And he thought that these organized progressive lobbies were unrealistic, didn’t have good ideas, and he had better ideas for messaging and for policy strategy. So they were always on the outs with him, and they resented that.

Biden, by contrast, was so deeply enmeshed with the progressive movement—the “professional left,” as they were called under the Obama era—that it was almost impossible to draw any distance between them at all. Biden did whatever they wanted. And so even though Biden had dramatically less legislative success, the progressive movement really celebrated Biden’s administration all the way ’til the end, when they decided that now Gaza was the only thing that mattered, and Gaza was the reason that he was a failure. But really, up until that moment they were celebrating Biden as the heir to Roosevelt. Biden as the progressive hero, and Obama as the sad, weak appendage to the Reagan era.

Frum: Is there something going on, too, that if you’re on the real left that you regard Trump as not the worst possible outcome? Because if you’re on the real left, Trump is obviously—it isn’t that they like him, but they know the working class, they will sooner or later see through the folly of Trump.

So all we have to do is eliminate the false messiahs and then give them our true messiah, and then they will see through the right and turn to the true messiah. And in fact, an interval of right-wing government maybe—or a Trump government, whether you call it right wing—is a necessary step in the process. Just as Hitler led to the triumph of communism in Germany, so—not to compare Trump to Hitler—but this is the thinking. The far right gets its turn; then we get our turn. We just need to exclude the middle, and then we win.

Chait: This was also the thinking of the communist left in Weimar Germany, right? They saw Hitler’s constituency as their own constituency. They really thought that there was this fluidity between the far left and the far right. I don’t think that was correct at all.

Frum: But at the intellectual level, there’s something to that. I mean, we all know people, and we could name them if we wanted to, who do seem to move very easily between far left and far right. And these are people who are very well educated, who care a lot about politics, care a lot about ideas. You’ll hear them say: I’m a progressive, but I feel at home when I talk to these ultra-MAGA people. We both hate bankers, we both hate Ukraine, we both hate Israel. We have so much in common. And they think, and that must apply at the voting level, where people vote for reasons that are less ideological.

Chait: That’s right. It’s the same error. And that’s why in some level, you’re right that Trump’s election filled them with hope. That they really saw this proletarian uprising that they’ve been longing for but were dejected that was not happening, finally glimmers of it happening. Because you could see elements of Trump’s populist rhetoric as reflecting their own. So I think you’re spot on on that observation.

Frum: So how much of your life do you spend defending the Obama legacy to people who want to detract it, from the left?

Jonathan Chait: Too much. Too much. I’m planning to write something maybe early next year. I’ve gotta just put it all in one place. But It’s gotten to the point where I have this alternate history that only I and a handful of deranged lunatics are aware of. And we’re living in an alternate universe in which everyone else has settled on a completely different interpretation of what happened during those years.

So I’ve gotta just put it all in one place, I think.

Frum: Well, let me ask you about your native Michigan now, because these issues are being played out in real time. Why is the Michigan Senate race, in your view—so much attention was focused on Maine. Now Maine is fading from the center of the discourse. The camera is swiveling to Michigan. Why is that Senate race so important?

Chait: There’s a Democratic Senate primary. Abdul El-Sayed is the left-wing candidate. Haley Stevens is sort of the mainstream center-left candidate. They’re both—

Frum: And is there an incumbent senator in Michigan?

Chait: No. Gary Peters is the incumbent Democrat who’s retiring, so there’s an open seat.

Frum: How competitive a state is Michigan?

Chait: It’s a slightly blue state, although Trump won it in 2024 and in 2016. So it’s very close at the presidential level. Democrats have usually won the Senate races and have usually won the gubernatorial races most of the time, but Donald Trump did win it a couple times. And it’s close enough that the Democrats could lose a Senate seat even in a wave year if they really screw things up. And they seem to at least be putting that possibility on the table.

Frum: So now there’s an open Democratic nomination. There is a Republican candidate who’s competed before, who’s a strong candidate, who’s not a loony at all.

Chait: Right.

Frum: And the Democrats will soon vote to choose one of two candidates. So tell us about the two Democratic choices.

Chait: There’s Haley Stevens, who’s a kind of center-left traditional Democrat. Who would basically—if you took all the Democrats who have won Senate races in Michigan in the last 30 years and put them in a blender and poured them out, you know, you would get Haley Stevens. She’s just an amalgamation of the traditional center-left Democratic Party in the state of Michigan.

Abdul El-Sayed is very left wing for the Democratic Party. He would be the most left-wing Democrat in the Senate, I think even to the left of Bernie Sanders. He would be as far left maybe as people like [U.S. Representatives] Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib. He’s just across-the-board left on every issue, and has really emphasized opposition to Israel as a campaign theme. But he’s trying to do what [former Senate candidate] Graham Platner seemed to be on the road to doing in Maine. But I think he’s even doing it in a more confident, ideologically confident fashion. And he said that if he wins the primary and wins the general election, he is going to start carrying out purges of other Democrats who he thinks can be beaten in primaries.

Frum: And he seems to be a less psychologically troubled person than Graham Platner. And although this is maybe invidious to say, probably more intelligent than Graham Platner.

Chait: I actually have come to question some of his political judgment recently. I feel like he’s played this shrewdly but aggressively, really pushing up against the edge of how much he can get away with. But I feel like recently, it’s like a gambler who’s on a winning streak and is just overplaying his hands.

I’ll give you an example. Gretchen Whitmer endorsed Haley Stevens over the weekend.

Frum: Gretchen Whitmer is the governor.

Chait: The popular governor of the state of Michigan. Popular with Democrats and popular with voters on the whole. If you’re El-Sayed, you just want to just take your lump and walk away from it, right? You want to minimize the impact of this. This is not going to be a good story for you. The only question is how much attention it’s going to get.

But then he goes and attacks Gretchen Whitmer. He takes a shot at her management of the roads, which was one of her original campaign slogans, just fixing the roads, and says the roads haven’t been fixed. So now you’ve given every reporter covering this race a license to extend the story and write about El-Sayed’s vendetta against Whitmer, and you’ve invited Whitmer to weigh into the race once again on Stevens’s behalf. And her approval rating among Democrats, I think, is 88 percent. So you have a tiny number of Democrats who agree with El-Sayed that Gretchen Whitmer is a corporate sellout, which he also thinks and has been saying. But the vast majority love her.

So he’s managed to skate by without really bringing to the surface the degree to which he rejects the entire Democratic Party and its entire philosophy. And he’s trying to get a lot of loyal Democrats to his side, who just want someone who will fight harder against the Republicans and don’t fully understand the ideological extremism that he is bringing to the table.

Frum: Why is this a story outside Michigan? So Democrats may be about to nominate someone who’s more to the left and has a high level of personal aggression and really, really, really hates Israel. And that’s issue No. 1 for him, how much he hates Israel. So suppose he wins. Why is this a story outside Michigan?

Chait: His plan is he will then become the leader of the left. And he said this, and a lot of other leftists have said this, that he will become their standard-bearer. Bernie Sanders is getting old now. And if [El-Sayed] can win, he will prove something that they’ve never been able to demonstrate before—that a left-wing candidate can win in a purple state. You’ve had DSA candidates winning in New York City. You have Bernie Sanders up in Vermont, which is a little bit idiosyncratic. And you have some other House candidates, you have some mayors, but you’ve never had anyone in a purple state winning on a platform this far left. And while El-Sayed is not in the DSA, he is supported by the DSA and he is aligned with the positions of a lot of DSA candidates. So that will completely change the perception of what is electable within the Democratic Party.

Frum: One of the things that matters outside Michigan is the left has probably given away the Maine Senate seat. Susan Collins looks like, at this point, if you had had to guess, she’d probably survive even in Maine, a mostly blue state, even in—

Chait: I’m not sure I agree. It’s a chance. There’s a chance. It’s at risk.

Frum: But something that should’ve been an easy pickup is now very contested.

Michigan is also very—again, as you say, a blue state, but one that does elect Republicans—also could be at risk. Is there any way to a Democratic Senate majority without both Maine and Michigan?

Chait: No. No, I don’t think there is. And the truth is, if you want to think about it from a politically sophisticated perspective, Michigan should have been an easy, easy hold, right? In a blue wave, off-year election, a state that almost always elects Democrats to the Senate—not by huge margins, but pretty reliably by three or four points—should have been an easy hold. And the outcome that I think a lot of moderates are afraid of is that El-Sayed runs, say, four points behind the national Democratic Party. Underperforms due to his extremism, but still gets in because it’s such a huge wave. And then the left turns around and says, See? This shows that our agenda is popular, and we need to implement it everywhere all the time.

Frum: And so then the Democrats lose in 2028 to J. D. Vance and his program of Orbánism in the English language.

Chait: Right. This is going to become the main proof point that’s being used in this interfactional war within the Democratic Party. So if El-Sayed wins, it will be the proof point that the Democratic Party needs to run as far as it can to the left, and that will not impair their ability to win the election in 2028. And I think actually is going to be quite important in terms of the presidential outcome in 2028. In fact, it might even be El-Sayed himself, because they are so enthusiastic about his candidacy. He could, like Obama, [who] went from a first-year senator to presidential candidate, El-Sayed could easily be on that trajectory. That’s how powerful he’s become within the movement so quickly.

Frum: Well, you know, people worry about the loss of consensus in American life and the polarization. But if you have an “El-Sayed versus J. D. Vance” ticket in 2028, at least we can have a consensus about the danger of the Jews. That would be—

Chait: (Laughs.) That’s right.

Frum: America could be united. The two parties could agree on something.

Chait: Right. And then Bloomberg will run a third-party race and get 2 percent, all Jewish vote.

Frum: So what’s at stake here is not just the 2026 outcome but the 2028 outcome as well.

Chait: I think that’s correct; yeah. Yeah, so it’s tremendously consequential.

Frum: So I’m gonna ask you a somewhat personal question, and forgive me if I overstep here. But one of the reasons why Republican moderates lost first to the Tea Party and then to Trump—and there was very little resistance to the Tea Party; there was a lot of resistance to Trump, but it was overwhelmed—was that people of moderate views understandably have moderate personalities. They don’t like conflict. They don’t like trouble. They always believe in compromise, that you can work things out.

And so you get these kinds of soft—you have moderate ideas backed by soft personalities. Fred Siegel—who is a great urbanist, used to be at the Manhattan Institute—had this praise of Rudy Giuliani. And whatever you think of Rudy Giuliani personally, this is, I think, a great phrase. He described Giuliani as “an immoderate centrist.” Which is: He had centrist views, but he was just, he was full of aggression.

Chait: Which eventually won out over the centrism.

Frum: Yeah. So that I think you’ve—this is the part that I was going to put you in. I mean, you are kind of an immoderate centrist. You’re ready to—you have centrist views, but you’re ready to brawl.

Chait: Pugilistic.

Frum: But do you see, as you look at the Democratic Party, that there’s something about the moderate—they will not fight back? And therefore, they’re abdicating by default to people who are going to end up empowering Trump. And whoever Trump’s successor is, probably J. D. Vance, and all that J. D. Vance means for the future of American democracy.

Chait: Absolutely. Look, it’s, it’s an old problem, right? The definition of a liberal is someone who’s too broad-minded to take his own side in an argument. This has been something that liberals have noticed about ourselves and have been complaining about ourselves, without doing anything to change, for generations.

You know, you can find historical exceptions. Sometimes we point to the post–World War II moves by Arthur Schlesinger and Walter Reuther to form Americans for Democratic Action, to exclude the communists, to keep the communists out of the New Deal coalition. And to fight for civil rights and fight for the New Deal values.

But that’s maybe more the exception than the rule in some ways. I mean, there really is something inherent to liberalism, that’s necessary to liberalism. Which is an openness to critique—to not want to become so confident in yourself that you shut out all challenges, right? So I think there is a strength to that quality of liberalism that allows us to be supple, to change our positions with new facts. And I think has made liberalism enduring.

Frum: Where is Obama in all of this? It’s his legacy that is under attack. Both institutionally, but also quite personally. Will he stand up for himself in an argument? Why doesn’t he make himself heard? In a lot of these states, if the choice is Bernie Sanders versus random local Democratic official, Bernie Sanders may win. If it’s Bernie Sanders versus Obama, we know how that fight goes. Is it because he’s an ex-president and doesn’t want to return to the muck and mire of politics? Where is he?

Chait: I think he’s calculated that he can have the most influence by operating behind the scenes. And you’ll notice that the Bernie people absolutely despise Obama, specifically not just for his presidency, but for his role in 2020, right? When you had this sudden coordination of the non-Bernie opposition. The Bernie Sanders strategy in 2020 was to win the Democratic nomination with under 50 percent, by just having his opponents stay divided all the way through the convention. And he would never have to win a Democratic Party majority, and he could get the nomination anyway. And then all of a sudden, just everyone realized they couldn’t win and dropped out and endorsed Biden. And Obama played a role there, and they hate him for that.

So Obama will take an active role, but he doesn’t want to play this factional leadership role that Bernie Sanders plays, where he goes into every contested primary and endorses the most left-wing candidate. I think he’s calculated that will reduce his ability to influence people across the party. That will just make him a much more narrow factional figure. That doesn’t seem like a crazy calculation to me. I can’t say for sure it’s right, though.

Frum: I’m reading, this summer, Kai Bird’s new biography of Roy Cohn, which is—

Chait: Oh, so am I.

Frum: Oh, okay. so if you’re reading the book, you’ll know what I mean. And one of the anecdotes that Bird tells in this book is how President Eisenhower kept coming up with very convincing, very ingenious, plausible arguments for not taking on [Senator] Joe McCarthy directly.

And the first time he says it, and the second time he says it, you think, You make a point. The third and fourth time, you begin to think: You’re just unwilling—possibly you’re scared, but you’re unwilling to take the risk. And actually you’re not acting for good statesmanlike motives. You’re acting for self-preservationist and maybe unworthy motives. When McCarthy starts to attack the Army and to attack Eisenhower’s friends—not just George Marshall, whom he attacked in ’52—but he attacks John J. McCloy in ’53 and ’54. And Eisenhower keeps trying to do things indirectly and has some success. Partly because McCarthy is a desperate alcoholic and becoming very sick. But if McCarthy had not been a desperate alcoholic, it’s not clear that Eisenhower’s methods would’ve worked so well, and he just was making things easy for himself. And I wonder whether with all the subtlety and ingenuity you attribute to Barack Obama, whether he’s also just trying to make things easy for himself.

Chait: You might be right. I’m trying to explain what I think his calculation is. I can’t say for sure that the alternative course of action wouldn’t work, that if he really was willing to fight back and defend his legacy. You know, he does do it in bits and pieces. But he really has allowed the left to win this argument about his legacy, and he hasn’t put up much of a fight.

I mean, I was making the point during his presidency that his support for education reform, which was really something he cherished, began to disintegrate when the teachers’ unions and the left fought back against it, and he just kind of let them do it. And he didn’t defend it, and by the time Hillary Clinton came along, it was really no longer viable ground or defended in the Democratic Party. So I think you’re right that there is this passivity.

Frum: When you say, That’s what he thinks will work. One of my rules of politics is, in fact, none of us know what, what will work. We are always guessing, and we’re usually looking in the mirror and projecting our own wishes. We’re very poor judges of what will work.

But we can be very good judges of what’s the right thing to do. And we also can be, if we really look inward—we know when our reluctance to take a risky action is prompted by truly a prudential calculation. And when there’s just a certain element of, Oh, it’ll be a lot of trouble, a lot of hardship. It’ll be easier for me if I take the softer course. And now I will talk, persuade myself, well—the softer course is also the smart decision. But we never know what the smart decision is. We only know what the right decision is.

Chait: I can’t improve on that.

Frum: Wow. Well, that’s very collegial. (Laughs.)

Jonathan Chait, thank you so much. I’ve got to pocket the rare Chait positive review and put it into my pocket.

Chait: Thank you. I’ll find something to criticize you. Don’t worry. (Laughs.)

Frum: Okay. I know. (Laughs.) Thanks so much for joining me today.

Chait: Thank you, David.

Frum: Bye-bye.

[Music]

Frum: Thanks so much to Jonathan Chait for joining me today on The David Frum Show. As I mentioned at the top of the program, my book this week is a work of history—1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed, by Eric Cline. Published in 2014 by Princeton University Press.

Now, I have not yet seen The Odyssey. I may be alone on my block. It sounds wonderful, and I’m keen to get to it. But one of the things that I am remarking with admiration is that as people have gone to see The Odyssey, they have become fascinated by this question of the transition from one period of civilization to another. A character, I think it’s Odysseus himself, says in the movie, “Our age of bronze is collapsing.” Which is maybe a little on the nose for movie dialogue, but is right.

The Odyssey is a story set in the Bronze Age, written in the Iron Age, measured by which metal was the predominant metal that went into weapons of war and other kinds of tools. And there was a big collapse in between the two. And Eric Cline’s book 1177: The Year Civilization Collapsed is a study of the collapse and an attempt to explain why it happened.

As I understand, and again, I haven’t seen the movie, but the great theme of Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey is that this collapse is, first and foremost, a moral collapse. One civilization has had the kind of life energy seep out of it and is giving way to a new and successor civilization that will be guided by different rules and different values.

And indeed, there really was, across the eastern Mediterranean, a remarkable collapse around the year 1177 B.C. The Hittite Empire—which was the superpower of the time based in what is now southern Turkey—that vanished entirely, and its capital disappeared. Across the Mediterranean, city-states vanished. The Minoan civilization vanished. The New Kingdom in Egypt didn’t quite vanish, but it lost a lot of its military power and never again exerted the kind of power over the region that it had before about the year 1200. Mycenaean Greece, which is where the the characters in The Iliad and The Odyssey supposedly come from, that civilization utterly collapsed. It even lost the ability to read and to write for hundreds of years, only to reemerge later as an Iron Age civilization. And so it is, through up and down the Levant, into the islands, Cyprus.

So what happened? Eric Cline tries to give us an answer. But the key thing to keep in mind, as to the background that enabled all this is that bronze, which is the weapon that the heroes of The Iliad and The Odyssey used for, the metal that they used for their weapons. And that was the main form of armor and tools.

Bronze is a compound of copper and tin. So copper was relatively abundant in the Mediterranean world. There were copper mines in Cyprus and in other places. But tin was scarce in that part of the world and had to be brought to be united with the copper from very far-flung places—as far as Cornwall in Great Britain and Afghanistan in the center of Asia.

So when you’re committed to bronze, you’re committed to very global trade routes. And because the trade routes are so extended, you build large states. Because you have large states, you need ways to manage the states, including organized religion and reading and writing and some kind of numbering system. How do you keep track of how much tin has moved from Afghanistan to Babylonia, and when it moved, and who moved it? You need some form of writing. And you need a bureaucracy. You need comparably sophisticated and elaborated states.

Something happened around the year 1177 [B.C.E.], and Cline makes a good case that it’s a compound of ecological effects. Droughts and earthquakes that weakened the states, ended their ability to import tin, reduced the availability of the bronze alloy made from copper and tin, and set these states reeling backward and made them militarily vulnerable to invaders and small bands that otherwise they would’ve just brushed off with superior strength.

Through the Bronze Age, people knew about iron. But iron was a more difficult material to work. In particular, it required a lot of heat. And it just seemed that bronze—which was easier to work with and had a lot of prestige attached to it—that that was the natural metal of choice. But once the bronze is no longer available because the tin has become hard to get, people are forced back to figure out ways to work with the iron. And once they do so, they find that iron is a dramatically superior weapon of war. Makes sharper, stronger swords, spears, and arrowheads. And so iron replaces it, and the world never looks backward to bronze. Bronze is from then on used primarily for statuary and art, because it remains a prestige material, but it’s not a workable material.

But the Cline story is one of environmental change leading to material innovation, not a story of moral decay. It wasn’t that people somehow lost faith in themselves and therefore turned away from bronze, and then found a new faith and therefore turned to iron. They had very practical problems. Now, I don’t want to dispute the importance to art of telling stories about moral decay and moral regeneration. But as we’re trying to understand why civilizations actually change, I mean, morality surely plays a part in it. Anyone watching the crisis of American democracy right now has to face that the greatness of a society and the ebb of greatness can be attributed to moral defects in that society.

But we also need to pay a lot of attention to ecological changes that force change upon society, and to the material responses to environmental change. Because while we’re not doing a great job in 21st-century America to adapting to our moral challenges, we’re doing an even worse job of adapting to climate changes. And if climate is what felled the Hittites, and as other historians will tell us, if climate is what felled the Romans, and if climate is what, as other historians again tell, felled the Ming Empire and led to the rise of new civilizations in China—then climate, if we don’t pay attention to it, it could be the falling of us.

So as we enjoy the movie, as we absorb its powerful moral lessons, we also need to keep our eye on the material world, the world of climate and weather. Maybe we can’t control it, but we’d best learn to adapt to it. Because if we don’t, it will be the end of us.

Thanks so much for watching The David Frum Show this week. I hope you will share the program and like it on whatever platform you use. As ever, if you’re minded to support the program, the best way to do so is by subscribing to The Atlantic and support all of my colleagues, including my colleague Jonathan Chait. See you next week on The David Frum Show.

Bye-bye.

Comey Offers Judge an Easy Way Out

In new court filings last evening, James Comey unloaded a triple shotgun blast at the bogus “86 47” seashells prosecution against him.

I’ll get into the trio of filings — which include a cameo by Sammy the Bull Gravano and juicy details about President Trump’s intense personal interest in the case as relayed through internal Secret Service communications — in a moment. I promise.

But first let me orient you briefly to what I suspect is Comey’s strategy here.

As we discussed here yesterday, Comey had already filed another motion to dismiss the indictment on Monday before last evening’s flurry. That motion is the most straightforward, direct, least messy way for the judge to end this case, arguing (quite reasonably) that posting to Instagram a photo of an arrangement of seashells that spells out “86 47” is in no way a true threat to President Trump and in any event is constitutionally protected free speech.

Still, it’s a big step for a judge to dismiss an indictment — especially in a high-profile case like this — based solely on the indictment being facially insufficient. But the choice Comey is giving the judge makes that option seem like the easy way out compared to donning hip waders and venturing into the muck of a vindictive prosecution analysis, which involves peeling back the curtain on the rotten Trump DOJ, the over-involved Trump White House, and now the role of the Secret Service in this whole mess.

While Comey is clearly exalting in exposing some of the depredations of the Trump II presidency and its corrupt misuse of the Justice Department, he first and foremost wants to get out from under this indictment and spare himself and his family the risks of a conviction. And so the sequencing of the filings makes the judge’s hard lift of straight-up dismissing the indictment for failure to allege an actual crime seem a whole lot less heavy considering the alternative path this case could go down.

In one sense, this strategy could produce a disappointing result in a civics and democracy sense. Trump’s pursuit of Comey is a classic case of vindictive prosecution without precedent in American history. Yet, the corrupt and bumbling efforts are so inept that Comey may prevail in getting a prosecution thrown out for a second time without a judge even getting to the vindictive prosecution allegations.

In the Virginia case against him, Comey successfully disqualified Lindsey Halligan as interim U.S. attorney, which meant the indictment she obtained was no good. In this case, the indictment itself may also be so flawed that the case goes no farther. But probably the better way to view this is that corruptly predicated prosecutions produce corrupt investigations and shoddy lawyering. It’s all part of the same package of retributive conduct.

The New Filings

With the above framework in mind, here are the three new filings (for diehards, I’m linking to the substantive legal memoranda rather than the barebones motions themselves):

• Motion to Dismiss Indictment for Vindictive and Selective Prosecution: This motion covers a lot of familiar ground regarding Trump’s crusade of retribution against Comey, including the first failed prosecution in Virginia.
• Motion for Disclosure of Grand Jury Proceedings: This motion takes the known grand jury irregularities that judges found in the Virginia case and combines them with irregularities in the North Carolina case (including public statements by FBI Director Kash Patel and other acts and omissions revealed in discovery) to urge the judge to suspend the presumption of regularity and allow Comey access to the grand jury transcripts.
• Motion to Suppress and for Franks Hearing: Comey alleges that the FBI case agent made false statements and omitted material facts in the applications for two digital search warrants — one before the indictment to Apple and one after the indictment to Google — about the evidence gathered in the case, including exculpatory evidence.

There is a key fourth filing: a 21-page affidavit from Comey attorney Patrick Fitzgerald (the former Chicago U.S. attorney) with a whopping 43 attached exhibits that is filed in support of all three motions and offers a narration of the discovery Comey has obtained from the government thus far that is relevant to the three motions.

Rather than analyze each motion separately, I’m pulling out some of the key themes from all three motions, which are also separately narrated by Fitzgerald, who provides specific citations to the supporting documents obtained in discovery.

If you’re still with me, this is where we get into the good stuff.

Trump’s Keen Interest in the Case

Some of the juiciest details from the discovery in the case offer a glimpse of President Trump tracking the Secret Service investigation in real time from Air Force One.

Internal Secret Service communications describe the head of Trump’s protective detail, Special Agent in Charge John Bush, “expecting to have to brief POTUS. He has since briefed the Chief of Staff on the below updates….”

Later, Bush emailed from Air Force One seeking a “readout” of the Secret Service’s imminent interview of Comey at headquarters: “As I am getting LOTS of questions, is it possible for me to get an immediate readout (call) of the interview?”

Another document obtained by Comey noted that “POTUS was requesting a copy of the interview notes to use in his 6 pm press conference.”

Bush responded: “It is a hot topic on the plane and [redacted code name for President Trump] is very interested.”

At one point, Bush asked about any further updates noting “the COS just asked me.”

Another document relays that a Secret Service official was told by the Protective Intelligence Operations Center “that they received a request from SAIC Bush who received a direct request from [Secret Service code name for the President] for a summary of the interview when available.”

Ultimately, an executive summary of the Comey interview was sent to Bush on Air Force One, according to the filings.

Illegal Surveillance of Comey

After Comey arranged to talk to the Secret Service in person when he returned from the beach in North Carolina to his home in Virginia, the Secret Service tracked his cell phone despite doubts revealed in internal communications that they had the proper legal justification to do so, according to the filings.

When a senior Secret Service official said it was a “bad idea” to ping Comey’s cellphone, Bush agreed it was “legally questionable” but indicated “we might anyway.”

The Secret Service agent who signed the emergency request to Verizon to ping Comey’s cellphone said he did so “with hesitation.” Another senior Secret Service official said that “the # 3 guy at DOJ ‘wanted to ping the cellphone via an exigency request.’” It’s not clear to whom at DOJ he was referring because there was not a No. 3 official in place at that time.

Once the Secret Service pinged Comey’s cellphone, they tracked him electronically and in person on his return trip from North Carolina to Virginia, although the agents surveilling him physically lost track of him when Comey and his wife stopped at the gravesite of their infant son. The electronic surveillance continued during the cemetery visit. In a striking parenthetical, Fitzgerald writes: “(The Government later seized—pursuant to the challenged March 2026 search warrant—a photo Mr. Comey took of the flowers at his son’s grave that day.)”

A Rudy Giuliani Cameo

A recurring character in the filings identified only as Person-1 apparently knew the Comeys but had come to hold Comey in low regard. Person-1 texted Comey’s wife shortly after the Instagram post went up warning that “86” could be construed a violent term, according to the filings.

Person-1 said they initially thought “86” was a benign reference to the restaurant term but then heard a Rudy Giuliani media appearance and became convinced that Comey’s use of the term was nefarious and told the Secret Service as much when interviewed the day after hearing Giuliani.

Giuliani seems to have improbably kicked off an entire absurdist thread of the investigation when he claimed publicly that Comey had worked on organized crime cases where the term “86” was used to mean “kill.”

Trying Desperately to Find Mob Usage of ’86’ … and Failing

The most vivid scene that emerges from the slew of new filings, is a May 13, 2026, trip by the first assistant U.S. attorney and an FBI agent to the home of the notorious former mobster Salvatore “Sammy the Bull” Gravano to try to establish that the mob regularly used “86” in a violent sense.

Gravano is the former Gambino underboss who famously testified against John Gotti, admitted to participating in 19 murders, entered then left the witness protection program, and was subsequently convicted again. “He is now a podcaster,” Fitzgerald dryly observes in a footnote.

Gravano said he was convinced Comey had to know the violent connotation for “86,” but Gravano had no memory of talking about it with Comey, who as a young prosecutor was involved in the Gambino case. While mobsters did use the term “86,” Gravano told investigators, they were careful not to use it in the presence of law enforcement.

That set off an astounding search by Comey investigators for references to “86” in decades of FBI files. After searching the entirety of the FBI’s Sentinel database, an agent reported:

These searches produced inconclusive results regarding the use of “86” or “eighty-six” as a slang term. Additionally, the searcher was unable to determine if the subject would have had access or been exposed to any potential files meeting the search parameters.

Investigators did a separate search of the Gambino case file: The case file contained no references to the term “86.” Same with the trial transcript: nada. They also talked to two former FBI agents who investigated the mob who had never heard “86” used to mean “kill.”

Secret Service Seemed Satisfied There Was No Crime

The discovery in the case leaves the strong impression that after its initial investigation into Comey’s Instagram post, the Secret Service — which has a unit dedicated to the nonstop stream of threats directed towards its protectees — was satisfied there was no crime here.

After leading the May 2025 interview of Comey in person at Secret Service headquarters, a senior official emailed a group of other Secret Service personnel, suggesting that the case was “resolved,” as so many initial threat investigations are: “You all contributed, some in non-traditional ways, to this issue being resolved in a professional and efficient manner.”

Discovery shows the Secret Service treated the Comey investigation as a “non-referred” matter meaning under internal policy “the determination can be made based upon initial investigation that there is no risk of an unwanted outcome and there is no judicial outcome.”

The Secret Service investigation, after the initial flurry, went nowhere and by the fall of 2025 it seemed like it had died. But in October, it was revived by the FBI out of its Charlotte office.

Comey Attorney-Client Privilege Violated AGAIN

The violation of Comey’s attorney-client privilege had already been an issue in the Virginia case and spawned an entire separate case involving Daniel Richman, the Comey attorney who is also a Columbia University law professor, who prevailed against the Justice Department.

But stunningly it happened again in the “86” investigation, Comey claims.

In the search warrant for Apple, “the government made no provision whatsoever to screen Mr. Richman’s communications,” Fitzgerald alleged. In addition, investigators only filtered for office landline numbers of another Comey attorney, and not his cellphone number.

Last month, prosecutors agreed to “quarantine” two text conversations Comey had with the second lawyer, according to Fitzgerald, but only after those communications had already been reviewed by the first assistant U.S. attorney, two other assistant U.S. attorneys, the FBI case agent and an FBI supervisor. They told Fitzgerald last month they had looked at the text thread only after they had obtained the indictment against Comey.

News? Tips? Feedback? Please let me know. For sensitive information, use the encrypted methods here.

The Thomas Crown Affair? Directed by and starring Michael B. Jordan? Ok, I’m in.

This is an extremely 2026 story (derogatory): because of the Trump regime’s assualt on scientific funding, a group of scientists who has been studying marmot populations in Colorado since 1962 turned to OnlyFans to fund their research this year.

From The NY Times:

In June, Daniel Blumstein, a biologist, sat in a field in Gothic, Colo., waiting to see a marmot. The rodent was elusive, leaving his thoughts to wander.

He lamented a lack of funding for his work amid federal cuts to scientific research. Then he alighted on the television show “Margo’s Got Money Troubles” and that’s when the epiphany came.

Perhaps the show’s plot, about a single mother who, unable to find conventional work, turns to the adult-content site OnlyFans to support herself, could be applied to marmots and research funding.

Back at his lab, Dr. Blumstein pitched the idea (with a wholesome spin) to his colleagues, who offered mixed feedback. But then one of his graduate students suggested naming the profile OnlyMarms.

Here’s the G-rated OnlyMarms account on OnlyFans; you can also donate to the project directly. More from Live Science:

OnlyFans is a subscription platform that allows users to pay creators to see exclusive photos and videos. The platform has become popular with adult-only content creators, but it hosts others too, including musicians, athletes and celebrities — and now marmots.

“We’re trying this out of frustration with an extremely challenging funding environment,” Blumstein said. “If we’re lucky, it can help raise money for supplies and some expenses. But unless we are very lucky, it won’t replace the federal funding that has driven discovery in the US since the 1950s.”

We’ve got GoFundMe for healthcare and now OnlyFans for science funding. The privatization of the United States is coming along nicely and the future looks bright!

Tags: Donald Trump · OnlyFans · politics · science · video

Study: Dinosaurs Were Charbroiled After Chicxulub Impact. “The impact would have produced an immense cloud of dust that superheated the upper atmosphere, charbroiling living organisms unable to take shelter and igniting widespread wildfires.”

Why Do We Tolerate Elon Musk’s Racist Commentary? “Musk’s virulent racism and vicious, disturbing views are no secret. He does not hide them. They sit in plain view, easily accessible on the social media website he owns…”

This story was originally published by ProPublica

In a private ceremony on Sept. 17, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth stood at a podium inside the National Archives building in Washington, D.C., and praised a Florida nonprofit for what he called a singular achievement in American education. The attendees were celebrating the Foundation for Liberty and American Greatness, which announced that it had reached 2 million children with civics education since its founding in 2016.

“I hope you understand how important this is,” Hegseth told the room. “What we pour into the next generation will determine whether we keep our republic or not.”

FLAG’s founder, Nick Adams, had spent nearly a decade building toward this moment. An Australian-born conservative commentator and MAGA influencer, Adams had created the nonprofit, raised $7.7 million for it over 10 years, and garnered repeated praise from President Donald Trump. In March, Trump appointed Adams as the special presidential envoy for American tourism, exceptionalism and values — a position created for him after his nomination as ambassador to Malaysia stalled the previous year.

But a review of FLAG’s finances, donor operations and online donation network reveals a less celebratory picture. There is little evidence that the nonprofit has provided the civics education it claims. And Adams and his nonprofit have engaged in a pattern of questionable financial arrangements, including paying Adams and his mother more than half its recent annual revenue, while raising much of its money through a sweepstakes operation that has promised donors a chance to win $1,000,000 — a prize FLAG’s records show no evidence of ever paying.

Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling (Ret.), Ben Parker and special guest Ret. Rear Adm. John Kirby went live to discuss the U.S. intercepting an attack by Iran, Trump’s response to the attacks, and the concern on U.S. missile stockpiles as the war drags on.

Drawing on his own experience in the Navy, John breaks down what it’s really like to defend the Strait of Hormuz, why Iran continues to threaten global shipping despite months of U.S. strikes, and how a lack of clear strategy is putting American readiness at risk.

Plus, a look at how the Pentagon’s silence and the White House’s inconsistent public statements are undermining public trust at a moment when Americans deserve honest answers about the war.

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Donald Trump’s legal apparatchiks at the Justice Department have insisted for months that the criminal indictment against former FBI Director James Comey—one of the personal enemies Trump most longs to see punished—goes beyond the “86 47” Instagram post they ludicrously insist constituted an imminent threat on the president’s life.

“Rest assured that it’s not just the Instagram post that leads somebody to get indicted,” Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said on Meet the Press in May. There had been a full investigation by “the career FBI agents, the career Secret Service agents,” and who knows what damning evidence they might have found?

Now, thanks to a series of court filings last night from Comey’s lawyers, we finally know what that investigation entailed: a ludicrous snipe hunt in which federal officials sought high and low to find people who would testify that “86” is an old mob threat, interviewing old mobsters and Comey associates to prove he should have known as much—because after all, hadn’t he prosecuted organized crime? They’ve got him on the ropes now! Happy Wednesday.

Join Mark Hertling and Ben Parker—with special guest Rear Adm. John Kirby—for Command Post at 10:00 a.m. EDT today. Watch on Substack or YouTube.

Bomb, Rinse, Repeat

by Andrew Egger

Yesterday morning, after Donald Trump called in to Fox & Friends to show off his latest peacenik turn—insisting implausibly that the late Sen. Lindsey Graham’s dying wish was a peace deal with Iran, grousing at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for stating publicly that Iran seemed ready to start rebuilding its nuclear facilities—I messaged the Morning Shots editors that I had a headline for today’s newsletter: “Trump, Iran, and the Definition of Insanity.”

Ben Parker wrote back, confused: Hadn’t we used that exact phrase before? And yeah, pretty much:

Such is life for the poor put-upon newsletter grinder in the dog days of Donald Trump’s endless Iran war. While Iran presents a steady, ironclad negotiating front—your sanctions must go, your troops must go, your nuclear demands must go, and we get the Strait of Hormuz—Trump finds himself trapped in an endless reboot loop, orbiting hopelessly around two demonstrably failed positions: If we bomb the hell out of them, they’ll give us what we want. If we stop bombing them, they’ll give us what we want. And we find ourselves scrabbling for something new to say about the same old grotesque status quo of America’s slow-motion pantsing on the world stage.

This morning, the New York Times wrote up a short history of Trump’s “Whiplash War” in Iran, laying out in stark data-viz form just how erratically Trump has toggled between his two strategic modes. In late March, just weeks after the war began, he was already threatening to blow up Iranian power plants. By early April, he was threatening genocide. Those threats gave way to a two-week ceasefire—which fell apart nearly at once after Iran continued to fire on ships in the Strait of Hormuz, leading Trump to declare an economic blockade of his own.

After a May marked by periodic bursts of attacks, June brought the vague “Memorandum of Understanding” that led Trump to declare the mission accomplished: “The Deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran is now complete. Congratulations to all!” he exulted on June 14. “Ships of the World, start your engines. Let the oil flow!”

Days later, missiles were flying again. The ceasefire was momentarily resumed on June 28—before Trump declared it truly dead July 8, leading to the heaviest period of bombardment since the opening days of the war. Then came the brief respite beginning this past weekend, which now appears to be over after Iran launched missiles at a U.S. base last night: “We are going to beat the fucking shit out of them,” Trump told Fox News this morning. “We’ll be hitting them hard. They’re going to get a beating.”

The definition of insanity, per the bumper sticker, is supposed to be doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome. But I’m worried that watching Trump do the same thing over and over, fully aware the outcome will be no different, is a recipe for insanity, too.

“I could knock out the power plants within one day,” Trump said yesterday, reiterating a threat he first made on March 21, more than four months ago. “All of their power plants would be gone. And I let ‘em know that, you know, with negotiations. . . . So I think we have a very strong position right now. They know I’m going to do that if they don’t make a deal.”

I challenge anyone to spend so many months submerged in this sort of suspended reality without feeling like they’re losing their mind.

The basic problem is that while Trump’s approach to the war is cyclical, its damage is cumulative. Petroleum reserves, missile stockpiles, global trust in the U.S.-led world order—these are finite resources that are all being spent down at alarming rates.

More happily, American confidence in this utterly incompetent con artist turns out to be a finite resource too. Trump continues to plumb new depths in his popularity at home. And as Republicans grimly pivot their political messaging from fantasies about a Trump GOLDEN AGE to trite rabble-rousing about the threat of Democratic communism, it’s plain they too are losing hope that Trump will pull off some unexpected miracle to win the war—much less restore Americans’ confidence in his leadership.

Somehow, someday, I believe that the war will come to some sort of end. It’s all but guaranteed to be a bad end for America, but at least we can look forward to getting off the interminable psychic treadmill. It is extremely unlikely, I keep telling myself, that—as I keep suffering in dreams—I will wind down my last days on this earth decades hence hearing regular updates on President Barron Trump’s insistence that the Sixty Years’ War will be over any day now—because, after all, Iran knows we could just knock out their power plants. Forever wars only happen to stupid presidents.

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Dispatch from a Hopeless Campaign

by Brendan Hartnett

BUCKS COUNTY, Pa.—Before Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro can run for president, he must win re-election against Republican Stacy Garrity, the current state treasurer who claimed Trump won the 2020 election and even pushed the Big Lie at a January 5, 2021 rally in Harrisburg.

Despite her MAGA bona fides, Garrity was not Trump’s first choice to take on Shapiro. He initially backed Rep. Dan Meuser, who declined to run. While Trump eventually endorsed Garrity, he has continued to humiliate her. At a recent rally in the Lehigh Valley, he neglected to give Garrity a shout out—even though she had addressed the crowd shortly before he did.

Garrity is almost certainly headed toward an electoral calamity. Recent polling shows her getting trounced by double digits. She raised only $1 million in the first quarter of 2025, leaving her with just $1.5 million cash on hand. Shapiro has $50 million.

To see what the energy around the doomed campaign was like I went to a Veterans for Garrity campaign event here on Monday. An older crowd of about fifty was greeted in a humid firehouse by speeches from local party leaders and a playlist of the most popular songs played at Trump rallies.

Garrity herself was not an impressive orator, but she knew her audience. Her speech lasted about fifteen minutes and focused primarily on veterans’ issues. She only attacked her opponent once—possibly a tacit acknowledgment of the futility of trying to drive down Shapiro’s high favorability ratings.

“Wasn’t it disgraceful when our governor didn’t want to celebrate at the Great American State Fair?” Garrity asked the crowd, referring to Shapiro’s decision not to participate in Trump’s disastrous state fair earlier this month. Not exactly hard hitting.

Trump clearly values his endorsements highly as a political weapon—and he likes to keep it sharp by not wasting it on sure losers. I won’t be too shocked if he finds a reason to un-endorse Garrity between now and November.

—Brendan Hartnett is a rapid response editor at The Bulwark.

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AROUND THE BULWARK

• Character Is Countercultural… MARK HERTLING reflects on virtue, politics, and public service.

• Trump Is Making Government Worse on Purpose Instead of seeking to simplify and improve citizens’ lives, this administration keeps creating new obstacles and burdens, JILL LAWRENCE writes.

• How Old-School Race Animus Could Shake Up the Michigan Senate Race… In The Breakdown, JONATHAN COHN shares dispatches from a weekend with Abdul El-Sayed and Haley Stevens and their efforts to win over black Democratic voters.

• The Groypers Have Taken over Trumpland… On the flagship pod, ASAWIN SUEBSAENG joins guest host WILL SOMMER to discuss how MAGA is now all about openly embracing bigotry and why the right has no insurgents to stop it.

Quick Hits

NO DISASTER AID FOR YOU: Unequal treatment of red and blue states has been a consistent story of Donald Trump’s second term; just yesterday, we noted how the government had admitted to canceling more than $8 billion in clean energy grants last year based solely on the fact that those grants were headed to states that voted for Kamala Harris. This hasn’t stopped. Just this month, Trump blocked petitions to FEMA for disaster aid from four blue states: New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island. In at least three of these cases, the denials came despite FEMA determining the states should qualify for aid under law. Here’s Politico, which broke the story:

Trump’s rejections came after regional offices of the Federal Emergency Management Agency and NOAA determined that the states met government thresholds for receiving aid following a record-breaking snowstorm in February. . . .

Presidents since George W. Bush approved all 69 state requests for snow assistance that met FEMA standards except for a 2016 request from New Mexico, which was being investigated for mishandling FEMA funds, according to a POLITICO analysis of agency records. . . .

“If the federal government is paying for regular operations like snow removal, what next? Garbage removal?” a FEMA spokesperson said in a statement about the recent denials. “The federal government’s role is not to fund routine functions.”

Read the whole thing.

UGLY NUMBERS: The polling clunkers just keep piling up for Donald Trump. Although the long Spring slide of his approval numbers had stabilized somewhat in recent weeks, he’s back to finding new depths as Americans come to terms with the disastrous effects of his Iran war. This week’s Economist/YouGov poll put his net approval rating at an astonishing -28 percent—a record low for either Trump term. Only 34 percent of Americans either strongly or somewhat approve of the president’s second-term performance.

Here’s an equally astonishing way to slice the numbers: In the past two weeks of YouGov polling, Trump has recorded his lowest-ever approval ratings from his core demographic: white Americans without college degrees. Last week, the poll found him at -10 among this group; this week, he was at -9.

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Cheap Shots

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DOES CHARACTER COUNT FOR ANYTHING in public life anymore? It’s a question that’s come up, it seems, more and more frequently in the past decade, as almost every politician seems eventually to face one kind of scandal or another. Ditto celebrities, professional athletes, leading scholars and scientists, business leaders, and other prominent people. As David French recently summed it up on an episode of The Focus Group Podcast: “Do American voters really care about character? No. . . . Does character really matter? Yes.”

I’ll leave it to David and others to analyze the priorities and virtues of the American voter. But I think, when considering the role of character in our society and politics, it’s important to keep in mind that good character isn’t a finite natural resource, but something that can be—and must be—developed intentionally in every person.

Character is easy to admire when it appears and easy to condemn when it fails. But it does not suddenly emerge when an individual runs for office. It is not conferred by elections, and it should not be judged because of promotions, uniforms, titles, wealth, or fame. It is, rather, built patiently over years, long before it is ever tested. The real question may not be whether we still value character, but whether we still understand what it is and how it is formed.

For me—like, I think, for many Americans of my generation—character formation started at home and continued at school, in athletics, in church, and in other civic institutions (in my case, the Boy Scouts). By the time I entered West Point in the summer of 1971, my family and a whole series of institutions had already imprinted themselves on me. The United States Military Academy did not begin the work of building my character; it assumed that work had already started and deliberately sought to deepen it.

WEST POINT’S MISSION WAS NEVER simply to educate engineers or produce tactically proficient Army officers. Its larger purpose was to prepare young men—and, beginning soon after my graduation, young women—to bear extraordinary responsibility for the lives of others and the trust of the nation.

What distinguished West Point is not that it claimed a monopoly on character development, but that it recognized that technical competence without moral development can become dangerous. The academy could teach engineering and history, the proper employment of artillery, and how to write a clear operations order. But none of those skills matter if the person exercising them lacks integrity, humility, and an unwavering sense of duty.

Nowhere was that pedagogical philosophy clearer than in the Honor Code: “A cadet will not lie, cheat, steal, or tolerate those who do.”

Those words establish that trust is the currency of leadership. A leader who cannot be trusted with the truth can never be trusted with soldiers’ lives. Every future decision—reporting casualties honestly, assessing an enemy accurately, advising a superior candidly, accepting responsibility for failure—rests upon that foundation.

The academy reinforced that lesson through its motto: “Duty, Honor, Country.” Those three words described an order of priorities. Duty came before personal ambition. Honor governed how duty was carried out. Country reminded future officers of the purpose that was larger than themselves.

There was one more influence that has remained with me for more than five decades. When I entered West Point, chapel attendance was still mandatory. A federal court later ended that practice on the grounds that it violated the Constitution, but to me, the lasting lesson was never about compulsory worship. It was the academy’s belief that officers entrusted with the lives of others should regularly reflect upon questions larger than themselves. They should wrestle with humility, conscience, courage, and moral responsibility long before confronting those challenges in combat.

That conviction found its clearest expression in the Cadet Prayer:

Strengthen and increase our admiration for honest dealing and clean thinking and suffer not our hatred of hypocrisy and pretense ever to diminish.

Make us choose the harder right instead of the easier wrong and never be content with a half-truth when the whole truth can be won.

Endow us with courage that is born of loyalty to all that is noble and worthy . . .

Written by Chaplain Colonel Clayton Wheat in 1920, those words have stayed with me far longer than engineering equations or military history lessons. They endure because they speak not to what a leader knows, but to who a leader is.

West Point isn’t the only institution of higher education that seeks to develop the character of its students in addition to their minds, nor is it always successful—either in forming good leaders or in living up to its own standards. No institution composed of human beings ever reaches perfection. But the academy’s expectation, its aspiration, is unmistakable: Leadership begins not with authority but with trustworthiness. I now realize that West Point was not replacing the lessons I learned from parents, teachers, coaches, or scoutmasters. It was building upon the foundations others laid. The academy assumed that character formation had already begun and sought to deepen it for a greater purpose.

In the 1970s, this was somewhat countercultural. So much of that era was about self-expression and psychological authenticity—much like today. When so much of society urges, Be true to yourself, West Point demands, Improve yourself. It’s still countercultural. And it’s still, to my mind, better advice.

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THE ARMY HAS LONG DESCRIBED ITSELF as a profession of arms, and rightly so. Like medicine, law, education, journalism, or the ministry, it is a profession because society entrusts it with responsibilities carrying profound consequences for others. Technical competence is indispensable, but character ultimately determines how that competence is exercised. That is why I have come to believe that service in the military does not create character, but tests it.

Sometimes those tests appear in quiet, almost invisible moments: admitting a mistake no one else noticed, giving honest advice when a superior hopes for a different answer, accepting responsibility for a failed mission instead of blaming a subordinate. Those decisions seldom attract attention, but they shape organizations and establish trust.

Occasionally the tests become far more demanding. Combat strips away pretense with remarkable efficiency. Exhaustion, fear, uncertainty, and grief have little patience for carefully constructed public personas. Soldiers quickly discover whether their leaders possess moral courage to match their physical courage. They watch to see whether leaders share risk, tell the truth when the news is bad, care for the wounded before themselves, write the letters no commander wishes to write, and remember that every casualty report represents a family whose life has changed forever. Those moments do not suddenly produce character. They reveal whether it was there all along.

Thinking back across nearly four decades in uniform, the officers and noncommissioned officers I admired most were rarely remembered for dramatic speeches or outsized personalities. They earned confidence through consistency. They treated people with dignity regardless of rank. They accepted responsibility without hesitation. They remained calm in crises because their values had already been settled long before a crisis arrived. Soldiers followed them not because regulations required it, but because experience had convinced them those leaders could be trusted.

Only after leaving active military service did I fully appreciate that those lessons extend well beyond the Army. For more than a decade after leaving active military service, I spoke about leadership to a variety of audiences, initially healthcare providers, now graduate business students. The dean of a business school invited me to join their faculty because he believed that modern MBA programs devoted enormous attention to finance, strategy, and management while spending far too little time discussing ethical leadership and character. He wanted me to help change that, and that is a worthy mission.

The private sector “uniforms” are different, the language is different, and the tasks are different. But the essential requirements of character and leadership remain unchanged. Competence is expected in every profession, in every industry. Great organizations define what competence looks like and usually train and teach it well. What separates good organizations from exceptional ones is their understanding that competence alone is insufficient. Character—one of the key attributes of any leader—determines whether knowledge is used with wisdom, whether authority is exercised with humility, and whether success is measured not only by achievement but also by service.

Looking back across that journey—from family and school to coaches and scoutmasters, from West Point to the Army and eventually the private sector—I realize that none of those institutions believed character development was someone else’s responsibility. Each accepted a share of the task. Each expected young people to become a little more than they had been the year before. Most importantly, each reinforced lessons that had begun elsewhere.

Most Americans, regardless of political affiliation, still admire leaders whose actions consistently match their words, whose integrity survives public pressure, and whose decisions reflect something larger than personal ambition. We may disagree passionately about policy or ideology, but few would argue that honesty, humility, courage, and responsibility are obsolete virtues.

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FOR GENERATIONS, AMERICANS BENEFITED from an informal partnership among families, schools, faith communities, youth organizations, athletic programs, neighborhoods, professions, and military service. Together, they created countless opportunities for young people to practice responsibility, to show their character, before being entrusted with a leadership role. Some of those institutions remain vibrant today. Others struggle. Technology, social media, and cultural change have transformed the environment in which young people mature.

I’m not suggesting we can—or should—recreate the America of my youth. Every generation must prepare its citizens for the world they will inherit, not the one their parents knew. But one principle has not changed: Character development doesn’t just happen. It grows where families, schools, coaches, employers, congregations, professions, and communities intentionally cultivate it and then expect it. Parents who insist that integrity matters when no one is watching. Teachers who refuse to lower standards. Coaches who value sportsmanship as highly as championships. Mentors who teach service before recognition. Employers who reward honesty as much as performance. Professionals who understand that authority is ultimately an act of stewardship.

Am I living in a dream world to think we can somehow recreate or strengthen all of these? Not for a minute. But if we want character to matter, and I think we do, we all need to contribute to its growth in others. If we want better character in our leaders, there is only one solution: to promote better character in each other, especially young people. If each person sees teaching others, especially the next generation, wisdom, humility, respect, conscientiousness, duty, and service as part of their basic responsibility as a citizen—as a person—then we will end up with fewer individuals of low character seeking positions of power. And those who do will have smaller constituencies.

Character is rarely noticed while it is being formed. But it becomes unmistakable when it stands before us—and its presence is every bit as obvious as its absence. And that matters. Forming character has always been the quiet work of a free society. It’s necessary work if we are to remain a free society.

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