The top U.S. military commander in the Middle East visited the USS Abraham Lincoln on Saturday as the aircraft carrier’s exhausted crew nears the end of a nearly nine-month deployment marked by reports of deteriorating living conditions and mental health concerns.
Adm. Brad Cooper, commander of U.S. Central Command, spent several hours aboard the Lincoln meeting with sailors and Marines during a 10-day tour of the region. It was the only ship Cooper visited during the trip.
The visit comes as scrutiny grows over conditions aboard the carrier, which left San Diego in November and has now been deployed for more than 260 days. The Lincoln has gone more than 200 days without a port call while supporting U.S. operations in the war with Iran.
Families have reported food shortages, problems with drinking water, broken showers and laundry facilities and growing psychological strain among the roughly 5,000 sailors and Marines aboard. Reports of sailors attempting to go overboard have further raised concerns about the crew’s mental health. The Navy has acknowledged mental health cases but disputed reports that the ship is experiencing a broader crisis.
The administration has largely dismissed the criticism.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has said reports about conditions aboard the Lincoln have been misrepresented. President Donald Trump went further Friday, telling reporters that the carrier’s record-setting stretch at sea was “not nearly long enough.”
Families of deployed sailors have pushed back, accusing Trump and Hegseth of dismissing what their loved ones have experienced aboard the ship.
Sen. Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz., a Marine Corps veteran, blamed the administration Sunday for what he called a “true lack of leadership.”
Retired Adm. Mike Mullen, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told ABC’s “This Week” that morale aboard the Lincoln has improved since sailors learned they will finally be coming home.
The USS George Washington, the Navy’s only forward-deployed aircraft carrier, is being pulled from the western Pacific and sent toward the Middle East to replace the Lincoln. The move will temporarily leave the western Pacific without a U.S. aircraft carrier even as China increases military activity in the region.
The Lincoln’s return date has not yet been announced.
Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., offered a blunt assessment Sunday of President Donald Trump‘s new childhood vaccine policy: It could mean more shots, more doctor’s visits, higher costs and more sick children.
“If it wasn’t so potentially tragic, you would break out laughing at a comment like that,” Cassidy, a physician and chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, told CNN’s Jake Tapper on “State of the Union.”
Cassidy was responding to Trump’s assertion that “nothing bad can happen” from his administration’s plan to overhaul the childhood vaccination schedule.
Cassidy also warned that requiring families to return repeatedly increases the chance children will miss doses, leaving them — and others — vulnerable to preventable illnesses.
“If you’re pro-life, you should be pro-vaccine,” Cassidy said.
The Louisiana Republican pointed to a recent case involving a pregnant woman who contracted a vaccine-preventable illness after exposure to an unvaccinated person and subsequently lost her pregnancy. Cassidy noted that immunity can decline during pregnancy, making community vaccination particularly important for protecting pregnant women.
“That is being pro-life,” he said.
In addition, Cassidy argued that the changes could turn two MMR shots into six individual injections — while requiring additional trips to the doctor’s office.
Trump has called for separating the combined measles, mumps and rubella vaccine into individual shots and spacing out childhood vaccinations across additional medical visits, despite opposition from major medical organizations.
“Instead of mom or dad missing work twice,” Cassidy said, parents could have to “miss work or take vacation or personal leave six times.” More office visits would also increase costs for insurers and potentially premiums, he argued.
“This is working backwards on affordability,” Cassidy said.
The physician also warned that requiring families to return repeatedly increases the chance children will miss doses, leaving them vulnerable to preventable illnesses.
Trump has called the combined MMR vaccine potentially “lethal” and compared administering multiple vaccines to a “nuclear weapon.” Tapper reminded Cassidy that the senator previously called for someone to challenge “crazy stupid things” that undermine confidence in immunization and asked whether Trump’s statements qualified.
“Yeah, that’s a crazy stupid thing,” Cassidy replied.
Cassidy’s criticism carries additional political weight because he provided a crucial Republican vote to confirm Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime vaccine skeptic. Cassidy initially expressed concerns before supporting Kennedy after receiving assurances about vaccine policy, which he has since accused Kennedy of breaking.
Tapper pressed Cassidy on whether Kennedy’s history should have been warning enough.
Cassidy declined to revisit his vote, instead arguing that Trump’s policy will “decrease immunization rates” while being “less convenient and costing families more.”
Trump spent part of his weekend sharing a series of seemingly AI-generated images depicting himself alongside the nation’s first president, including one showing the pair writing with quill pens, another riding horses together and a short video in which Trump and Washington stroll through the still-unbuilt ballroom.
“Thank you, George, for some of your brilliant ideas on this great Military Complex/Ballroom!” Trump captioned the 10-second video.
Washington’s newfound role as Trump’s 18th-century architectural consultant comes as the president fights to continue construction on the $400 million White House project. The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court on Friday to intervene after a federal appeals court ruled that aboveground construction could not proceed without congressional approval.
The imaginary collaboration also contains a historical wrinkle: Washington never actually lived in the White House.
Washington selected the site for the President’s House and oversaw aspects of its planning and construction, but left office in 1797 and died in 1799. John Adams became the first president to live in the still-unfinished building when he moved in the following year.
Trump’s Washington posts arrive amid an increasingly public effort to shape his own presidential legacy. His administration is simultaneously fighting over the ballroom and efforts to place his name on the Kennedy Center, while Trump has repeatedly shared heroic and AI-generated depictions of himself online.
On Saturday, he added another image to the collection: a photograph of himself wearing a “Trump 2028” hat accompanied by the declaration, “WE ARE GOING TO WIN.”
The 22nd Amendment prohibits anyone from being elected president more than twice, something Trump acknowledged earlier this month when he conceded that the law on presidential term limits is “very strong.”
Washington, meanwhile, famously made relinquishing power part of his own legacy.
After commanding the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War, Washington voluntarily surrendered his military commission to Congress rather than retaining control of the army. He later declined to seek a third presidential term, establishing the two-term tradition eventually written into the Constitution.
Washington’s legacy has hardly escaped historical scrutiny. He enslaved more than 100 people at Mount Vernon, and historians continue to grapple with the contradiction between the nation’s founding ideals and the human bondage practiced by its first president, among his strong mythology.
But Trump’s latest posts appear less interested in interrogating Washington than in imagining him as a collaborator — writing, riding and offering design tips to his 21st-century successor.
Whether Washington would have approved of Trump’s ballroom is impossible to know. In Trump’s AI-generated version of history, however, George has apparently already signed off.
As you may have noticed, many members of the American media and political classes are currently rending their garments in terror and despair at the perceived threat of “socialism.” It’s not at all clear what that word means in 2026, in this context or any other.
It only helps a little to observe that whatever “socialism” is supposed to refer to these days, it doesn’t have much to do with an economic or political system where the state or the working class control the means of production. I’m sure we could find people out there who advocate that. Hell, I might be among them, if it were a remotely realistic possibility. But none of those people are prominent in the current (and long overdue!) internal power struggle within the Democratic Party and the American left writ large.
Come to think of it, you know who really wants state control of the economy, if only in an incoherent, ass-backward, “Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler” kind of way? Donald Trump, that’s who. For all his extended excoriations of Democrats as woke America-hating Marxist radical traitors, Trump has meddled more extensively and more directly in the economy than any Democratic president since Franklin D. Roosevelt.
It’s clearly going too far to call Trump a socialist, largely because profoundly corrupt autocratic or oligarchic regimes like his cannot easily be captured in ideological categories. He’s definitely not a democratic socialist (or a constitutional democrat of any other variety). But there’s no way around the fact that his fantastical DIY presidency has consigned conventional right-wing ideology about the sacredness of free-market capitalism to the proverbial dustbin. Let’s put it this way: Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu called himself a socialist; legendary Argentinian president Juan Perón did not. Trump belongs on the same historical shelf as those guys, if only as a wannabe.
Almost everything about Trump’s management of the economy during his second term, and pretty much everything else, has been disastrous. But even if we assume that the epic personal and institutional graft of his presidency will not survive his departure, he has created a haphazard regime that’s so deeply enmeshed in fossil fuels, Big Tech and AI, rare earths, pharmaceuticals, shipbuilding, semiconductors and the weapons industries that no one will be able to disentangle it anytime soon.
It’s going too far to call Trump a socialist. But his fantastical DIY presidency has consigned conventional right-wing ideology about the sacredness of free-market capitalism to the proverbial dustbin.
As Indiana University scholar Sarah Bauerle Danzman told Foreign Policy in 2025, it’s “jarring” to encounter “a Republican administration embracing state capitalism in a way we haven’t seen in a long time, while all the time decrying ‘socialism.’” According to more recent reporting in Forbes, the federal government now holds equity stakes in roughly 30 different companies across a range of industries. “What started with a ‘golden share‘ in U.S. Steel,” writes Keith Johnson of Foreign Policy, “has morphed into a government takeover of vast swathes of the economy,” best exemplified by capricious tariff policies that seem motivated by the president’s personal whims and grievances. As libertarian economist Tad DeHaven tells Johnson, since all this “is driven by one man’s personal desires, there is no plan and no strategy. It changes by the day.”
Fanatical Republicans from deep-red districts can keep staging government shutdowns and preaching the defeated gospels of Milton Friedman as much as they like. But it’s difficult to imagine any future GOP putting the genie all the way back in the bottle and entirely undoing this unexpected turn to oligarcho-socialism or state capitalism or, ahem, national socialism or whatever else it might be called. The Econ 101 term would be “dirigisme,” which was coined to describe the highly interventionist, quasi-socialist economy that rebuilt France after World War II and has more recently been applied to China, Singapore, South Korea and so on.
This raises the amusing possibility that the mainstream Democratic Party — always ready to turn itself into the punchline of historical irony — will once again end up holding the bag for a set of policies supported by their donor class and literally no one else. More than 70% of registered Democrats, according to a Fox News poll taken in March, say that capitalism is “not working very well or not working at all.” So naturally the party leadership seems prepared to go to the barricades to defend it.
To be entirely fair, in some cases the centrist moral panic over “socialism” seems to refer to rational or at least straightforward electoral concerns. Fairly or otherwise, mainstream Democrats convinced a tiny plurality of Wisconsin voters that gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong was too much of a humorless leftist to survive exposure to the mythical but coveted “median voter” in November. They may well have been correct; we don’t get to re-run the experiment and find out.
But in other instances, such as Zohran Mamdani’s historic victory in New York in 2025 and a series of Democratic primary wins by progressive or socialist-aligned candidates in that city and across the country, the hysteria has more to do with generational and attitudinal change — yeah, I’m sorry, with a vibe shift — than with specific policy proposals or ideological labels.
On one level, it seems incredible that deep-dyed Democratic insiders like James Carville or former DNC chair Jaime Harrison are surprised that their party, which collectively decided to “resist” the second coming of Trump by doing absolutely nothing and steadfastly ignored the scale of Israel’s war crimes in Gaza for as long as possible, is seen as hopelessly weak by its own voters. Carville recently called for a “schism” (a delightfully old-fashioned word) within the Democratic Party, and Harrison has urged the so-called socialists to leave the Demo-normies alone and “focus on building the party you actually support.” That old saw about being careful what you wish for comes to mind.
Guys like James Carville and Jaime Harrison were raised on ancient fables of the ideological excesses of the 1960s and ‘70s, and no doubt still get misty-eyed over Bill Clinton and the “New Democrats” of 1992.
On the other hand, there’s nothing especially mysterious about those attitudes. Those guys and others like them were raised on ancient fables of the ideological excesses of the 1960s and ‘70s, and no doubt still get a bit misty-eyed over Bill Clinton and the “New Democrats” of 1992. Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow!
Their version of the Democratic Party eagerly devoured the devil’s candy, in the form of unbreakable partnerships with Madison Avenue, Wall Street and Silicon Valley and closed-door, $10,000 fundraising dinners in East Hampton and the Napa Valley. There’s no escape from that kind of political bargain on this side of the apocalypse.
They have always viewed left-wing opposition as childish and contemptible, but not far below the surface they have dreaded the day it rises up to bite them in the ass and destroy their glorious temples of political triangulation. That day has now come, and they are in danger of becoming the last advocates of a faith that both the right and left have abandoned. They can only hope that Donald Trump’s corruption and incompetence will save them from their own.
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from Andrew O’Hehir on our dazed and confused world
Stop us if you’ve heard this one before: The man is lost. A desperate ploy to end a long-running war took more from him than he could bear. While working his way back home, he’s forced to outsmart a vicious beast at close quarters, and he takes up residence with a suitor. His offspring are made of lesser stuff than him, but our hero manages to earn redemption by flinging a stockcar around a tri-oval racetrack 180 times at 200 miles per hour.
Don’t worry, you didn’t miss a super-secret cut of Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” that’s only projected on the side of Buc-ee’s locations nationwide. This deep-fried Ulysses is Will Ferrell in “Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby,” which turns 20 years old this month. Part of Ferrell’s man-child trilogy with Adam McKay, the film follows a blowhard racecar driver as he works his way back to the winner’s circle following a dramatic and embarrassing wreck.
But Ricky Bobby’s return to glory was about more than the importance of humility and friendship. To anyone watching this free-wheeling gag showcase in theaters in 2006, it was obvious this high-speed hick was a stand-in for President George W. Bush. Now, 20 years on, it has a lot to teach us about life in Donald Trump’s America.
The film introduces us to Ricky Bobby’s family with a gross-out splat, implying the soon-to-be stock car racer was born in the back of a speeding Chevelle driven by his reprobate father. We jump ahead in time and see a grade-school-aged Ricky Bobby on Career Day, let down again by his dad’s absence. His father appears for the first time in over a decade and is quickly tossed out of Ricky Bobby’s school for inappropriate behavior, leaving his son with a bit of parting wisdom that may or may not have been the ramblings of an inebriated fool.
Ricky Bobby spends the rest of his life attempting to follow in his father’s tire tracks, working his way up to be in the big show but not a star. Dumb luck and a last-minute assist from his less charismatic, bumbling pseudo-sibling finally get him into the spotlight. He develops a reputation for aggression, seemingly fighting a war against everyone on the asphalt that spins out when he attempts to bully a cosmopolitan French driver into submission. His buffoonish bravado and frequent failures alienate everyone who is not completely in his camp. The movie ends with Ricky Bobby speeding in a car without sponsors, a massive “ME” splashed on the hood. For anyone who lived through eight years of Bush and saw Ferrell’s impression of him on “Saturday Night Live,” the real star’s identity is obvious.
“Talladega Nights” was reacting to its immediate surroundings, rubbing and racing against America’s political currents only three years after Bush’s invasion of Iraq.
“Talladega Nights” was reacting to its immediate surroundings, rubbing and racing against America’s political currents only three years after Bush’s invasion of Iraq. The film saw that the future was in the sprawling boomtowns of the Sunbelt, that making a movie about America in 2006 required taking a hard-left into Southern culture — and that there was no better avatar for the country’s anti-intellectual and anti-coastal skid than Bush-via-Ferrell.
Bush’s brand and accent were Texan, with the hat to match, but his roots are in the WASPy New England. His father followed the money south in the 1950s and stayed there, but George H.W. Bush never quite lost his boarding school bearing. The younger Bush was different, leaning into his sun-baked upbringing while keeping one boot firmly back East. When the time came to get an education, he skipped College Station for stints in New Haven and Cambridge. “Talladega Nights” pegs this missing link between America’s urban past and its exurban future from its opening seconds, putting a quote about “hot, nasty, badass speed” in the mouth of New York Swell Eleanor Roosevelt. The future was coming on fast, and it was dumb as a brick.
We’re now living in Ricky Bobby’s world. The culture and politics of the Sunbelt — sometimes called “America B” by people who spend too much time online — is now inescapable. From Stanley cups to dirty soda franchises, everything’s a little bit more SEC and a little less Ivy in 2026. Where Tumblr-ites dreamed of the cloistered quads and moody libraries of Princeton in the 2010s, TikTok-ers now obsess over the elaborate rituals of University of Alabama sororities.
This reality operates on zero-sum logic. Following his father’s maxim that “if you ain’t first, you’re last,” Ricky Bobby can’t imagine a win for anyone else as anything less than something stolen from him. If you’re at all up on the paranoid and protective stance of major right-wing media, this sounds awfully familiar. That pitch – they’re stealing from you – helped the nation elect Donald Trump in 2016, himself a late-in-life Sunbelter, and following his election loss four years later, it drove him to accuse Democrats of rigging the outcome in Joe Biden’s favor.
The film is littered with nods to the new normal. Ricky Bobby lives in a McMansion in some isolated North Carolina community. His sons are given tough names, lifted from a cut-rate Chuck Norris television show, in the same way conservatives today tend to name their sons after firearms manufacturers. Fast-food branding and half-hearted evangelicalism are a constant presence.
The film feels spooky in its prescience, but Ferrell and McKay were far from alone in noticing the culture was heading out of the cities. Mere months before Rickky Bobby ran around an infield in his underwear swatting at imagined flames, Bravo debuted the first season of their juggernaut “Real Housewives” series, which focused on the comings-and-goings of women living in palatial homes in master-planned communities outside Los Angeles.
The franchise fled further and further from coastal cultural centers, shifting from the “Real World” of New York City and Chicago to the air-conditioned enclaves of New Jersey and the suburbs of Washington, D.C. In 2026, no one questions a reality show set 20 minutes from Park City, Utah, or wonders why Netflix dating shows host their casting calls in exurban Charlotte. That this is a reflection of America is taken as a given, the same way “Love Is Blind” contestants don’t feel the need to mention their evangelical beliefs.
One hundred fifty years after Union Gen. William T. Sherman stormed from Atlanta to Savannah, the Savannah Bananas, an independent baseball team, took the greater United States by storm, capturing algorithms and filling stadiums with coordinated dance routines.
It’s odd to revisit “Talladega Nights” now. The Bushes and the Ricky Bobbys of the world have spent the interceding 20 years winning battle after battle in the political and cultural war. For those of us who actually do like crepes, though, there are some glimmers of hope.
For one, Donald Trump bringing the Sunbelt into the White House has been a disaster. A Democratic wave is expected in the coming midterms, one that may well carry on into 2028. For another, Formula 1 and soccer, sports frequently coded as elite and coastal, are experiencing booms of popularity across the country. Gen Z is pushing back against influencers, delighting in Obama-era signifiers like frozen yogurt and fighting off the “tradwife” trend.
While we’ve been racing on a closed loop for the last two decades, the cyclical nature of politics and culture will bring us back to the starting line faster than you might expect.
By now most of us have heard the acronym TACO, for Trump Always Chickens Out, but I was recently introduced to NACHO, which means Not a Chance Hormuz Opens. I’m not entirely sure how I feel about these cutesy insults — Donald Trump surely enjoys them, given his apparent enthusiasm for Mexican food — but appropriate or not, the labels seem accurate.
On Monday, Iran announced the strait will remain closed until Trump gives in to their demands, which include, according to the New York Times, “the lifting of the U.S. naval blockade and sanctions on Iran, the withdrawal of American forces from around the country, the payment of war reparations, the release of frozen Iranian assets, and the end of attacks on Iran’s allies in the region.”
Trump is so eager to claim victory in the war he started alongside Israel that he might even be willing to walk away without a nuclear deal, unnamed U.S. officials told the Wall Street Journal. The president has also made his own list of demands, not all of which are coherent, that includes compensation for the 18 U.S. service members killed since the war began. In a Truth Social post, he also demanded that “compensation should be paid to the families of the hundreds of thousands of innocent protestors that Iran has killed over the last 50 years, not to mention the 52,000 that have been killed in the last five months.”
Iran’s timetable of negotiations is reportedly designed to drag out past the midterms, with the expectation being Republicans will get clobbered in elections over high gas prices and the deeply unpopular war.
Let’s not pretend Trump truly cares about dead Iranian citizens, given how many have been killed by U.S. and Israeli bombs. But even if Trump were to agree to the Islamic Republic’s terms tomorrow, Tehran seems unlikely to serve up the victory he so badly craves. Iran’s timetable of negotiations is reportedly designed to drag out past the midterms, with the expectation being Republicans will get clobbered in elections over high gas prices and the deeply unpopular war. Such a loss could lead to Trump’s third impeachment — a very big if! — or at least hobble any further funding for the conflict.
But failing that, Tehran’s Plan C could already be coming clear: Just wait till Trump is gone. As reported by the International Business Times, Majid Shakeri, a senior adviser linked to Iran’s parliament, has urged the nation’s leaders to avoid both open war and a definitive agreement with Trump. The best strategy, he argues, is simply to wait until the end of Trump’s term, writing on X, “The path to victory in this war is neither just fighting nor just reaching an understanding. The path to victory is ‘managing the process of neither war nor peace, up to the point of victory.’”
Similarly, Brig. Gen. Mohammad Reza Naqdi told PBS NewsHour on Tuesday that “One way is to prolong this war until we get to the next term of the presidency and cause attrition, so that if anyone else wants to attack Iran, they will know there is a cost.”
While such a pathway is not Iran’s official policy, it nonetheless seems like a plausible outcome. But waiting until Jan. 20, 2029, when Trump’s second term will end — assuming he doesn’t die first, get impeached and removed from office, or try to break the Constitution badly enough to somehow serve a third term — could backfire. (That might mean an end to Iran’s problems, but it certainly wouldn’t be for Americans. A Tucker Carlson win in 2028 might sound like a joke now, but so did Trump in 2015.)
At any rate, the president’s war with Iran is clearly unsustainable in the long-term, and the U.S. may have to bow out sooner rather than later. Since attacking Iran, the U.S. has increasingly run low on weapons stockpiles. A recent report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies details why this is happening; it’s not just the Iran war, but the entire spectrum of how the military operates, including the Pentagon’s budget process and how the U.S. has engaged in recent wars, including under the Biden administration. While I’m skeptical of such reports being used to further inflate the military-industrial complex — look no further than Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s demands for a $1.5 trillion Pentagon budget — numbers are numbers, and you can’t bomb something with what you don’t have.
Meanwhile, the Department of Energy announced Monday that the Strategic Petroleum Reserve fell by 6.1 million barrels to just under 300 million barrels last week. That’s the lowest the SPR has been since 1983. For this and numerous other reasons, such as the recent jobs report that shows how badly the economy is faring under Trumponomics, many folks are comparing the president to Jimmy Carter, who famously faced his own economic challenges and stalemate with Iran during the 1979-1980 hostage crisis. But really, this level of incompetence is in a league of its own.
There are other dumb acronyms for the Trump administration, continuing the taqueria theme, such as EMPANADA, for Everybody Makes Promises and Nobody Actually Delivers Anything, and TAMALES, for Trump Always Messes Around, Leaves Everybody Shafted. I have my own feelings about this era, steeped in euphemism, but whatever people decide to brand it, there’s no denying reality: As we should’ve learned with Vietnam, Korea, Iraq, Afghanistan and so on, you can’t just drop bombs on countries and expect them to do your bidding. Or as I might put it, SALSA: Someone Always Loses to Stupid Aggression. That someone is inevitably us.
President Donald Trumplashed out Friday night at the preservation group challenging his White House ballroom project, calling its members “TREASONISTS” just hours after his administration asked the Supreme Court to let construction continue.
“These are the TREASONISTS that brought the suit against the Military Complex,” Trump wrote in a lengthy Truth Social post targeting the National Trust for Historic Preservation. “They revealed Top Military Secrets!”
The administration filed an emergency application with the Supreme Court on Friday after a divided federal appeals court ruled that Trump lacked congressional authorization to continue aboveground construction on the $400 million, 90,000-square-foot project. The appeals court temporarily paused its ruling, giving the administration time to seek relief from the high court. Chief Justice John Roberts has asked the National Trust to respond by Tuesday.
The administration has increasingly characterized the ballroom not simply as an event space but as part of an integrated national security complex. Solicitor General D. John Sauer told the court the project is already 65% complete and argued that stopping construction would interfere with security improvements at the White House.
Trump reinforced that argument Friday night by posting — and then reposting — statements from senior officials defending the project.
Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine called it a “valid military requirement” necessary to protect the president and provide command-and-control capabilities. Trump also shared a statement attributed to Secretary of State Marco Rubio arguing that the project is necessary both for security and diplomacy, noting that the United States currently hosts major foreign dignitaries in temporary tents with “unsafe and unsanitary portable bathrooms.”
Trump’s fury comes amid another battle over his efforts to remake Washington’s landmarks.
On Thursday, the Trump-controlled Kennedy Center board again voted to put Trump’s name on the performing arts complex and approved plans to close most of the center for two years of renovations. A federal judge previously ruled that the board could not rename the Kennedy Center without congressional approval and blocked an earlier closure plan. The latest proposal would instead add “Restored and Renovated By President Donald J. Trump” to the facade and name the surrounding grounds “President Donald J. Trump Plaza.”
The new Kennedy Center plans must still be presented to the judge who blocked the earlier proposal.
It’s 1920, Republicans feel their government trifecta melting away. They’ve decided forcing a constitutional crisis is the only way to maintain that stronghold.
A bulldozer clears a pathway in Big Bend National Park, Texas, on August 12, 2026. | Kaylee Greenlee/Bloomberg via Getty Images
This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.
Welcome to The Logoff: Remember President Donald Trump’s first-term border wall? It’s still being built — through a pristine Texas national park.
What’s happening? The Trump administration is preparing to build hundreds of miles of roads through Big Bend National Park in southwest Texas as part of its latest border security project, despite a bipartisan outcry over damage to the beloved park.
Starting last week, bulldozers and heavy machinery began to clear land for the construction of about 200 miles of patrol road, new border barriers, and electronic surveillance measures to cover the park’s 118 miles of shared border with Mexico. The construction is proceeding after the administration overrode environmental laws intended to protect places like Big Bend earlier this year.
What does a border wall look like in 2026? In this case, “wall” is a bit of a misnomer. Despite Trump’s fixation with an actual, physical wall circa 2016, the Trump administration’s current project isn’t always 30 feet high and topped with concertina wire.
Instead, the Big Bend project is part of what the administration has described as a “smart wall,” which will combine stretches of traditional wall elsewhere along the US-Mexico border with patrol roads and vehicle barriers like those planned for the park, all blanketed with surveillance.
It’s a small retreat from the administration’s original plan for a border wall through Big Bend, which sparked outrage earlier this year. Still, the administration intends to build about 700 additional miles of “primary” wall, spanning all four border states. The whole project is slated to cost around $47 billion.
Why Big Bend? It’s hard to say. As the New York Times reported earlier this year, the park has long been considered low-priority given its remote location and inhospitable weather. Only about 1 percent of those apprehended for crossing the US-Mexico border have been detained in Big Bend.
And with that, it’s time to log off…
Hi readers, happy Friday! Before we log off today, here’s a story from my colleague Allie Volpe about how to bring some playfulness back into your life and why we’d all stand to benefit from it. You can read it here with a gift link.
Have a good weekend, and we’ll see you back here on Monday!
A follow up to last night’s post on Mike Huckabee, now U.S. Ambassador to Israel. Axios reports that Donald Trump is pretty conspicuously declining to endorse Benjamin Netanyahu for Israel’s October election. I would be remiss I didn’t explicitly note that it is unprecedented and outrageous that a U.S. president is even considering a formal endorsement in the election of an allied country. They’ve often had preferences of course. But we used to have respect for the internal affairs of foreign governments, especially allied ones. In any case, we don’t now. And here we are.
This appears to be part of Trump’s deliberate move away from Israel and the closely related annoyance that Israel continues to complicate his other priorities, which are one part conventional geopolitics and one part corrupt deals with various Gulf States. But there’s another factor Axios points to which we’re familiar with from the U.S. endorsement game. Netanyahu’s polls look bad. And Trump doesn’t want to back a loser.
On most days in what many people still call the “United” States of America, our president sets the daily national news agenda with noxious blasts from his favorite media platform — the one, of course, that he owns and operates.
To put it another way, our president is making money selling us information we are due as members of what’s supposed to be an open democratic society. Reporting to us is in the job description. Donald Trump simply doesn’t care.
For Trump, this proposition is a win-win. Those who need or want to hear what he has to say keep him in business. Those who disapprove or try to ignore him have no effect. Trump has been impeached twice, is a convicted felon and publicly defends insider trading. You think he gives a squat about what you think? Honestly, he doesn’t care what he thinks. He only cares about the money.
I must confess that I long ago lost interest in what he was selling. Since it is a professional necessity for me to stay tuned in, I also must confess that I can only do so now by envisioning Trump as a failed standup comic, or a Hallmark movie watched while on bad hallucinogens and cheap speed — the kind we used to call a “greenie.”
I find it difficult to stomach people who are only half as annoying as Trump. Who wants to watch the dozing Mad Hatter, doped up on stimulants, while his cursed kitchen demons poke and prod him through another “Weekend at Bernie’s” moment in the Oval Office? Sometimes I wonder what would happen if he didn’t wake up. Would he find a way to make money off that?
If he could, he would, and Truth Social would be involved somehow. After all, that platform remains Trump’s trumpet for his “Darwin Mayflower” agenda of total world domination.
On Wednesday, by way of this gateway to his shallow soul, the president told us that one of his “most trusted aides” was leaving the White House. Did Secretary of State Marco Rubio or Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent offer their resignation? After all, he’d left them holding the bag on Air Force One while he snuck away in a catering truck before being evacuated on a military jet from Turkey last month.
No. So far both Rubio and Bessent are still around. But we’ll see. Rubio didn’t look happy on Wednesday, as he stood before a group of reporters and was asked about Trump using him as a human shield. He smiled weakly and quickly turned away.
The person actually leaving, of course, is White House “pep secretary” Karoline Leavitt, who returned from paid maternity leave about a month ago and has only briefed the press corps twice since returning.
Did I miss anything?
Trump said on Truth Social that Leavitt is departing her role at the end of the month so she can spend more time with her children and family: “A decision I totally understand and respect!”
Leavitt, with her cheerful brand of obfuscation, lies and propaganda, has the potential to go much further than Sarah Sanders did. In today’s politics, the bar is so low that the sky is unlimited for someone like her.
That’s almost word for word the same explanation Sarah Sanders gave when she left Trump’s first administration. Trump’s response was also similar. Then, a few short breaths later, Sanders was running for, and winning, the Arkansas governor’s office once occupied by Bill Clinton.
Leavitt, with her cheerful brand of obfuscation, lies and propaganda, has the potential to go much further than Sanders did. In today’s politics, the bar is so low that the sky is unlimited for someone like her.
In fact, Leavitt may well become the gold standard for press secretaries into the foreseeable future. In politics, success creates imitators. Leavitt, by never failing to placate, flatter and worship her boss, has displayed a singular and decisive pathway, although not a very original one, to political success. And she has a singular talent for it.
In Leavitt’s world, Trump is always right. He has won every election by a landslide, slayed the dragons, corraled the wild beasts and brought peace, tranquility and a great economy to his kingdom. Don’t worry about Jeffrey Epstein, the Iran war or anything else. All is well, except that the Democrats are communists and ravenous beasts who probably eat their young. The price of eggs is down, and the price of gas will be, any day now
In reality, Leavitt is without a doubt the worst White House press secretary that I’ve ever had the displeasure of encountering since the day I first met Larry Speakes during the Reagan administration. Larry was polite and professional. I never had a problem getting access to ask a question. In this administration, reporters aren’t allowed access to the press secretary’s office. So much for transparency.
Trump’s escape from Ankara was a huge embarrassment, exacerbated by a floundering and incompetent press secretary. When the Secret Service devised a plan to transport Bill Clinton from India to Pakistan in 2000, it was similar to the plan that Trump employed on July 8. But back then, press secretary Joe Lockhart got the Secret Service to change the plan.
“Protecting the president is important, but there was a way we could protect the president without putting other lives at risk. We didn’t want to use the press and staffers as decoys,” Lockhart explained.
He worked with the Secret Service to develop a strategy whereby people who were present or watching on television could see that Clinton did not board the same plane as the staff and press. Three smaller military jets were nearby and was impossible to tell which plane Clinton had actually boarded. “That’s the difference between a public servant who serves the public and a monarch who believes the public serves him,” Lockhart said. “We didn’t lie, we included the press and we kept everyone safe. In Trump’s case it isn’t that they didn’t know the protocol. They didn’t care.”
In 2026 in Turkey, Trump ditched us and didn’t bother to tell us about a threat that could have gotten us all killed. Later, he said, “If I go, you go,” when apparently, he already went. Leavitt lacked the understanding, intelligence or inclination to manage the situation. Her value does not lie in critical thinking. The planning, and consideration employed by someone with Lockhart’s experience is simply beyond her capabilities, although the required empathy really shouldn’t be.
Trump lavished more effusive praise on Leavitt than anything he has recently said about Jeanine Pirro, Pete Hegseth or Kash Patel. Of course, they still fared better than Bessent and Rubio, who were offered up as a potential sacrifice on Air Force One.
Ironically, Bessent and Rubio are among the most experienced and professional of Trump’s closest advisers and top officials. Sure, that’s a low bar, but nothing Trump does encourages deep thought and professionalism. He favors those like Leavitt.
It’s all part of his “simple approach” to life, as exemplified in his so-called Patriot Games, conducted on Tuesday. Some compared this event to the fictional Hunger Games, but according to reporter John Bennett from CQ/Roll Call in a Tuesday pool report, it was “more like American Ninja Warrior.”
Trump lavished more effusive praise on Leavitt than anything he has recently said about Jeanine Pirro, Pete Hegseth or Kash Patel. They still fared better than Bessent and Rubio, who were offered up as a potential sacrifice on Air Force One.
Trump, regarding the final competition with the air of a Caesar, praised the teenage competitors’ “deep love for the country,” and went on to say that, “love of … our great country has never been better.”
All I know is that this event, which was supposed to represent one male and female from every high school in the United States, looked suspiciously monochromatic.
The reporting was colorless too. Here’s what passed as a pool report from the event: “’I knew what I wanted to do so I just did that,’ the kid from Utah told a camera afterward. It was aired on the screen here.” A reminder for those who didn’t know or had forgotten: The White House press pool is in place to report on the president, not write P.R. copy on a teenage athlete from Utah.
What was the president’s goal with this event? Who knows. Don’t look for his communication staff, or his press secretary, to provide useful information. On the other hand, if you want to insult the press, obfuscate the facts, ignore important questions and call the media people “fake news” and the “enemy of the people,” you want Karoline Leavitt.
If you want facts, here’s one they’ll probably miss: The term “Patriot Games” may be a weak callback to an inferior Harrison Ford political thriller, but at root it is a reference to an Irish folk ballad about a teen going to war that satirizes and questions the political fervor of people like Trump. As I recently learned, Bob Dylan once considered recording it.
Some press secretaries have bucked their boss, understanding that their true audience isn’t the audience of one in the White House but hundreds of millions of people across the United States, and billions more around the world, whatever their political views.
It’s been a long time since we’ve seen anything like that from a press secretary, but no one has mastered the dark art of hucksterism with Leavitt’s aplomb. She has been the cheering cherub of disinformation, the bright face and upbeat smile of divisiveness and the wholesome All-American grin of hate, death and destruction.
She fits in well with the phony Patriot Games, the potentially disastrous escape from Turkey and the monotonous daily march into madness this administration represents. Trump will miss her, but the rest of us shouldn’t.
If Leavitt is being honest about her reasons for leaving, which few people in the Trump administration ever are, then I wish her well. You only get one chance to raise your kids, and if more of us took that seriously, the world would be in far better shape.
But Leavitt rarely tells the truth, so we’ll probably soon find her anchoring a Fox News show or running for office in her home state of New Hampshire, where she lost a congressional race in 2022. One could certainly lead to the other.
After all, the sky is the limit for this new breed of press secretary, an unabashed public worshipper of the king who is more like a court jester than an information node; one who is wholly ignorant of the commitment, fortitude and intelligence the job requires, but entirely devoted to the art of covering their boss’s exposed rear end.
Welcome to the Brave New World. Join us at the Patriot Games.
The US Treasury sold $25 billion of 30-year bonds at a 5.22 percent yield, the most it has paid to borrow that far out since 2001, reports the Financial Times.
That's up from 5.06 percent at July's sale, and 4.91 percent just before Trump's second term began. — Read the rest
The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) put out a new opinion earlier this week arguing that President Donald Trump can assert executive privilege over communications with advisors even if they do not work at the White House or within the government at all.
Experts tell TPM that the legal opinion is likely an effort from the Trump administration and his DOJ to preemptively interfere with congressional investigations that Democrats plan to launch if they manage to take control of one or both chambers after the 2026 midterms.
For much of the 20th century, there were two relatively straightforward ways to win elections in the United States. Conservatives espoused their belief in traditional family values and getting out of the way of the wealthy. They defended the status quo against various liberation movements and labor coalitions, fighting to keep everything as it had always been in service of the people who most benefited from the old arrangement. With their natural orientation toward the past, conservatives would run on the good old days and attack anything that read as newfangled, trusting voters who thought similarly to show up at the polls in defense of American values.
Liberals did the same, but in reverse. They fought for the rights of all people and defended the working class from the attempts of the wealthy to claw back hard-won protections. They pushed a larger, protective federal government that held back retrograde currents looking to lock people of color, women and other minorities into a permanent underclass. They ran on these values, trusting unions and activists to back them at the ballot box.
But in the late 1980s, a new path to electoral victory emerged, blazed by people who pushed left-leaning politicians to erode labor victories and sell out loyal constituencies, creating a tacked-together centrist position that left almost everyone a little bit unhappy. This “Third Way” urged Democratic politicians to adopt the hands-off economic policies of their rivals while making welfare programs more punitive, all in the hopes of netting a few wishy-washy right-wingers come election time. For nearly four decades, this thinking has birthed a seemingly endless parade of candidates, political strategists and columnists pushing the idea that the ideologues are wrong. “Shut up,” they have said to anyone believing a better world is possible, “the adults are talking.”
Outside the masthead of The Atlantic, no one better represents this political tendency better than James Carville. The “Ragin’ Cajun” first rose to national prominence in 1991 by encouraging Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, who had just announced his presidential bid, to point out to a strapped country that the economy wasn’t doing so hot. At the same time, Carville encouraged Democrats to carve up the welfare state that was buoying Americans taking the brunt of the economic downturn. Democrats had been locked out of the White House since 1980, and they were willing to try anything to win. These counterintuitive policy solutions were assumed to be smart, and Clinton’s victory in November 1992 proved it. Carville was a kingmaker, and his “please nobody” politics were the Democratic Party’s future.
A congressional wash-out just two years later couldn’t knock the bloom off the Third Way rose among Washington’s Democratic consultant class. Carville’s reputation for colorful turns of phrase, and his tendency to stomp on any calls for the party to move left, made him a favorite of cable news programmers looking to make entertaining television.
As progressives and democratic socialists have notched recent wins across the country, Carville has been there to tell the activist wing of the Democratic Party to pipe down and tack toward Republican stances on issues like transgender rights and police reform.
Now 81, Carville has remained a stock choice for cheap heat, even as his positions became more predictable, such as a recent slam on left-wing media personality Hasan Piker in which he called the streamer a “raving antisemite” due to Piker’s opposition to America’s support of Israel and his comment that he would “vote for Hamas over Israel every single time.” As progressives and democratic socialists have notched recent wins across the country, Carville has been there to tell the activist wing of the Democratic Party to pipe down and tack toward Republican stances on issues like transgender rights and police reform.
“I actually do think it’s time for Democrats to talk the ‘s’ word: schism,” he said. “I really do. Everybody’s always said, ‘No, no. We’re a coalition. We’re a big tent.’ There’s just some s**t I can’t be in the same tent with.”
All this wouldn’t grate quite so much if it were coming from someone else, someone who could point to real, sustained political wins outside of a few choice Novembers. To borrow Carville’s folksy schtick, the Ragin’ Cajun was born on third base and has spent his whole life telling network anchors he hit a triple. Tagged by the Clinton campaign and a fascinated media as a strategic genius, his standard strategy of tacking toward the center has been taken as gospel by many in the Democratic Party ever since. In truth, Clinton was a neutron bomb of charisma running against an unpopular president in a bad economy. If you need proof that the tactic doesn’t work without a generational schmoozer as its face, just look at the presidential elections since Clinton term-limited out.
Extenuating circumstances in Florida provided useful cover for the Democrats’ 2000 loss in an election that never should have been close. John Kerry blew it against George W. Bush’s 40% approval rating. It took Barack Obama, another hall-of-fame charmer, to win back the White House in 2008. Then came 2016.
Trump’s win should have forced reflection among Carville and his ilk, some admission that the project of the New Democrats had ended in obvious failure. Kamala Harris’s Liz Cheney-boosting, Glock-boasting campaign should have erected the tombstone on Third Way’s grave. Instead, Carville can still be counted on to punch left for the cameras while his ideological allies fill out the opinion pages of most major American newspapers.
He defended Graham Platner, the former Maine Senate candidate who ended his campaign in disgrace following allegations of sexual misconduct, seemingly because of an innate need to be on the opposite side of every issue from Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who recently told TMZ, “James Carville has an opinion on everything, and I pay attention to almost one out of 10.”
You don’t need to look at Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s approval ratings to know the centrist wing of the Democratic Party is clearly out of gas. The energy of the party is now with progressives like El-Sayed, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Ocasio-Cortez’s early wins proved that Democratic voters had an appetite for left-leaning solutions to the ongoing economic crises. Mamdani offered an amiable leftist alternative to “making the trains run on time,” flexing state power to make life easier and more affordable for average citizens. In his recent primary election, El-Sayed showed that centrists’ belief in playing nice with the opposition was played out.
Recent progressive wins have shown that there’s no need to accept the framing of conservatives on issues like reeling in corporations and the war in Gaza. Allowing debate about the party’s supposed core beliefs on Republican terms is the sort of milquetoast politics that led us to where we are now: constantly fighting against whatever fantasy Carville’s counterparts on cable news have cooked up instead of talking about substantive issues.
The USS Abraham Lincoln deployed in the Arabian Sea on April 16, 2026. | US Navy via Getty Images
This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.
Welcome to The Logoff: The cracks are starting to show in President Donald Trump’s Iran campaign.
What’s happening? Conditions on a US warship deployed in the Middle East have grown so dire, multiple sailors have reportedly tried to go overboard (at least one did so but was rescued safely, according to CNN).
The USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier has been deployed for more than 250 days, starting last November, including a stretch of more than 200 days at sea — a modern record. Its deployment was supposed to end months ago, in May, but has continued as Trump’s Iran war stretches on.
How is the administration responding? Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Thursday that reports about conditions on the Lincoln are “completely misrepresented.” Help is on the way for the Lincoln, though, with another US aircraft carrier en route to the area to replace it (according to the Wall Street Journal, the replacement was already planned, and not in response to deteriorating conditions on the Lincoln).
Why does this matter? Conditions on the Lincoln are not the only recent stumbling block for the US war with Iran. Earlier this month, we learned more about the US’s increasingly serious shortages of key offensive and defensive missiles, including THAAD and Patriot interceptors used to protect US troops and allies. On top of that, the Washington Post reported Thursday that the US has run through around a quarter of its Reaper drones, which cost tens of millions of dollars apiece.
It’s the latest example of how the math of the war is starting to slant against the US: Reaper drones and Patriot missiles are incredibly expensive, while Iran has figured out how to mass-produce attack drones on the cheap. And with no end in sight, shortages and situations like the Lincoln will only become a larger problem.
And with that, it’s time to log off…
Here’s some good news from my colleague Adam Clark Estes: As wrecked as your attention span may feel, it’s not permanently degraded. He talked with attention experts to figure out how to repair his, and how we can all do the same. You can read his full story here with a gift link — and then, for all of our brains’ sake, let’s log off. We’ll see you back here tomorrow.
President Donald Trump and press secretary Karoline Leavitt, among others, attend an event on July 22, 2026, for US service members killed during operations in the Middle East. | Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images
This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.
Karoline Leavitt, the 28-year-old firebrand who became the nation’s youngest-ever press secretary in 2024, is stepping down to “spend more time with her beautiful young children.”
President Donald Trump announced the news on Wednesday night in a Truth Social post, adding that Leavitt would remain an adviser and “an influential voice within the Republican Party.”
It feels fitting that Leavitt — whose public persona required her to perform both her job and her role as a wife and mom — is stepping down to parent. In MAGA’s conception of womanhood, there can be no higher calling. Not even serving the president.
For more than two years, however, Leavitt made a show of trying to do both. She returned to work on Trump’s reelection campaign only days after the birth of her first child and regularly shared photos of herself working while holding her son.
Leavitt also welcomed a daughter over the spring, amid what Fox News dubbed a White House “baby boom.” Officials and conservative media quickly turned the new mothers into advertisements for the pro-natalist movement: Proof that women could, and should, have both careers and children.
Leavitt is still being held up that way, even — perhaps especially — as she departs. “She’s been a role model to millions and millions of young women,” deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller told Fox News on Wednesday. “A mother, a family woman, a press secretary, a patriot.”
The MAGA movement tends to glorify traditional female roles — wife, mother, homemaker — while simultaneously (and confusingly) elevating ambitious, career-driven women like Leavitt.
At first glance, her prominence — and that of other women in Trump’s administration — would seem to rebut the charge that the movement is misogynist. In fact, that’s a line of defense that Trump himself has advanced.
But look a little closer, and you’ll see the structural contradiction at the heart of MAGA femininity: Female power is only legitimate when it’s exercised on behalf of Trump, and by women who conform to traditional expectations around gender, marriage, motherhood, and physical appearance.
To Trump, a female White House correspondent was a “piggy,” for instance. But a female press secretary who defended the slur was “knocking them dead.”
A female employee at a Trump golf course was asked to sign an NDA after reporting harassment. But the female attorney who allegedly pressured her to sign it was, according to Trump, “a rocket ship.”
A female politician rose to prominence championing the president’s deportation agenda. But to get there, she had to find her “Mar-a-Lago face” — and she was ousted after showing signs of personal ambition. (In fairness, she was also very bad at her job.)
It’s a very tricky little tightrope to walk. And lately, that strain has begun to show. While Trump began his second term with an unusually high number of female Cabinet members for a Republican president, women now hold only four of 23 Cabinet or Cabinet-level positions.
Trump’s support is also down among young women. In Congress, a bloc of prominent conservative female lawmakers recently broke from their party to censure Republicans accused of misconduct. Now, the MAGA movement is losing one of its fiercest female proxies in Leavitt.
Even at the height of her powers, however, Leavitt never really got her due. The luxurious office traditionally reserved for the White House press secretary instead went to another White House staffer. A dude.
One link for later
➨ Meet the latest and greatest exercise cult. It’s called HYROX — yes, in all caps — and it’s an eight-round agility and strength competition. Participants spend thousands of dollars on training, registration, and travel for these events, which tend to “subsume your entire existence.” That’s a very hard no for me, personally…but a lot of very fit and competitive people are apparently into it.
Before you go…
Did you know…that the US attempted to assassinate longtime Cuban dictator Fidel Castro by poisoning his ice cream? And that’s somehow not even the weirdest or most far-fetched Castro assassination scheme.
Today’s trivia: Who was the first woman to perform hip hop at the White House? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday we asked you for the German philosopher who wrote Critique of Practical Reason. That would be Immanuel Kant, whose work also arguably inspired one of the core conflicts in the Avengers films.
This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.It was originally published at Balls and Strikes.
Earlier this week, Todd Blanche was sworn in as the newest attorney general of the United States. Administering the oath of office to Blanche, who previously served as President Donald Trump’s criminal defense lawyer, was another former member of Trump’s legal team: Judge Emil Bove, whom Trump nominated in 2025 to a life-tenured seat on the Third Circuit.
For both Blanche and Bove, the reunion must have been a real treat. Three years ago, they were unknown New York City-area law firm partners taking a long-shot bet on a disgraced ex-president who stood accused of, among other things, sexually assaulting a magazine writer, storing classified government documents in a Mar-a-Lago bathroom, making illegal hush money payments to kill an unflattering news story about his philandering, and trying to fraudulently overturn his loss in the 2020 election in Georgia. (That last list item should not be confused with separate federal charges stemming from Trump’s involvement in efforts to foment a violent insurrection and overthrow the government on January 6.)
Thanks in part to the work of Blanche and Bove, though, none of those cases resulted in meaningful consequences for Trump. And now that he is president again, their respective appointments are best understood as hard-earned rewards for their troubles. After Bove finished conducting Blanche’s swearing-in ceremony Monday, the two former colleagues got to hug it out in the Oval Office as their bored-looking benefactor clapped politely.
The most notorious press conference Donald Trump ever held was the one in which he told a scientist in attendance to look into the possibility of using household disinfectant inside the human body to kill the Covid-19 virus. He had watched a demonstration of how the product worked on surfaces, you see, and he thought they hadn’t considered the possibility that humans could ingest it and achieve similar effects. That day, April 23, 2020, marked the last of Trump’s daily televised pandemic press briefings, and it may very well have been the last straw for many of those who voted against him just a few months later.
At the beginning of the pandemic, Trump told the public that everyone at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was astonished at how well he understood the science. He mused that he probably could have been a doctor. Despite the utter humiliation of that famous press conference, the president remains undeterred in that fantasy in his second term.
In September, Trump announced that pregnant women should not take Tylenol during pregnancy, claiming without evidence the drug is linked to an increased risk of autism. On Monday he donned his imaginary white coat again to issue an executive order changing the U.S. government’s recommendation for the childhood vaccine schedule — because he is convinced that the vaccines cause autism.
Neither of those assertions is grounded in scientific fact, and both have negative ramifications for women and children if they are followed. The recommendations to break up the combined measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccines into individual doses because today they “look like the size of a bottle of soda poured into a little child’s body,” as Trump stated, are plainly absurd. Any association between these vaccines and autism has been thoroughly debunked, and all the major medical and scientific associations immediately issued statements that they would not follow these recommendations.
Trump is aided in his crusade to personally cure autism by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., his loyal health and human services secretary and anti-vaccine crusader, who dutifully stood by his side on Monday and parroted the same nonsense. The new recommendations will likely be followed by millions of MAHA moms who have fallen down the rabbit hole of misinformation and disinformation that Kennedy and Trump have been digging. But the pair are just the latest in the long line of hustlers, fraudsters and canny opportunists who have been working to undermine science in this country for more than a century. In fact, doing so is an all-American tradition.
Two groups have long been especially successful in challenging the public’s confidence in science: Christian fundamentalists, a religious force that grew into a political juggernaut, and Big Business.
Two groups have long been especially successful in challenging the public’s confidence in science: Christian fundamentalists, a religious force that grew into a political juggernaut, and Big Business. While neither has openly colluded with the other, they have both furthered each other’s goals and ended up in a political alliance. One wouldn’t think these two disparate institutions would have much in common. But they share similar tactics: lying to their followers and customers for power and profit. And both have their reasons for rejecting science that interferes with their own interests.
Christianity and science have been in tension ever since the Catholic Church placed Galileo under house arrest for suggesting that the earth wasn’t the center of the universe. But for the most part, the tension was at least somewhat manageable, and both carried on in their own spheres. In the early 20th century, however, a new Christian movement formed that took direct aim at science on the grounds it constituted a threat to the belief in the Bible’s inerrancy, and the modern war began.
In the beginning, this new movement was largely financed by a pair of Los Angeles oil magnates. Milton and Lyman Stewart were religious zealots who were horrified by the encroachment of modernist ideas on society. The Stewarts published a book called “The Fundamentals,” giving the movement its name, and shipped copies all over North America at their own expense, literally spreading the fundamentalist gospel and influencing massive numbers of Americans to reject scientific knowledge wherever it conflicted with literal biblical interpretations.
Fast forward to the 1980s, and Christian fundamentalism had become a powerful political force as evangelical organizations like the Moral Majority and Focus on the Family aligned directly with the Republican Party, wielding huge influence on right-wing politics. In doing so, they signed on with the most powerful GOP faction, Big Business. Using their influence with their followers, they managed to help convince millions to doubt any science that interferes with the interests of huge corporations, and reject regulations and taxation to mitigate the problems that came with their products.
Once again, the fossil fuel industry led the way. Another pair of brothers, Charles and David Koch, zealous libertarians rather than fundamentalist Christians, ran a global conglomerate that dealt in energy and chemicals, and they were determined to stop the growing consensus that fossil fuels were warming the planet. Like the Stewarts before them, the Koch brothers financed a massive campaign to convince people that the science was wrong, and they brought a lot of their friends in the industries along with them.
In the 2000s, a tsunami of money was released into the political system to block climate legislation, particularly during Barack Obama’s presidency. This has shown no signs of stopping, despite mounting evidence every day that the planet is under increasing stress and people are starting to suffer in vast numbers. The result of these efforts is obvious: Less than half of all Americans now believe climate change is caused by human activity. Only 21% of Republicans do.
Science denialism comes from many directions, and unfortunately we are in a period where it’s flourishing. There have always been hustlers and snake oil salesmen, but today the internet provides endless opportunities for people to “do their own research” and find whatever feels right to them, so conspiracy theories have become the lingua franca of our society. Delusional narcissists like Trump and Kennedy, occupying powerful positions and spreading nutty medical advice, are now just par for the course.
Some of the medical and scientific skepticism is a result of people feeling adrift in a rapidly changing world and drowning in competing information. But make no mistake: Powerful societal interests are also benefiting from all this, and it’s not by accident. They have spent a lot of time and a whole lot of money creating this environment of mistrust and suspicion, each for their own purposes but sharing the same goal, and it’s paid off handsomely.
Amid weeks of compounding foreign policy failures and an economy that lost a revised 103,000 jobs across May and June, conservatives are grappling online with a brutal realization that the Republican Party as a whole is desperate to ignore: What do you tell working-class voters who are drowning under the weight of unrelenting inflation and sluggish job growth, when your entire economic platform is built on a foundation of gaslighting?
The GOP has spent the better part of the last decade telling Americans it is the party of economic populism. Donald Trump was supposed to be the politician who understood the frustration of people who felt left behind by globalization and stagnant wages. But 18 months into the president’s second term, Republicans have arrived at a remarkable place: running the Biden administrations’ failed playbook on inflation. Now conservatives are fighting with one another over whether a $20 burrito is actually too expensive.
The current food discourse is not about the price of avocado toast or organic eggs, but it is a similarly mundane symbol of a much larger problem confronting Trump and the Republican Party heading into the November midterms. It started, as these things do now, with a tweet.
Last week, Daily Wire host Matt Walsh complained that grocery prices were “insane” and still rising. Then Turning Point USA spokesman Andrew Kolvet relayed a comment from one of the organization’s college students: “A burrito shouldn’t cost $20.” Kolvet added his own gloss — that it’s “a hangover from Covid and Biden-era inflation” — but he noted that “the lived experience is the same: It just feels like basic things cost too much.”
Inflationary pressures on grocery prices and supply chains have caused the cost of a standard beef burrito to climb 50% since 2020. For workers at the 50th percentile — the middle class, in other words — wages have not kept pace with fast-food prices, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics price index for limited-service meals and snacks. Rather than reading the room, conservative politicians and pundits immediately rushed to echo the White House line that affordability concerns are a Democratic hoax, and then pivoted to calling young people lazy and irresponsible. This is a remix of the lecture supposedly spoiled millennials, who refused to sacrifice every small pleasure on the altar of homeownership, heard for years about $7 lattes.
In response to what he called the “burrito debate,” Rep. Dan Crenshaw, R-Texas, told people to “get a job” and “eat Ramen.” Ben Shapiro responded as if the student had demanded that the federal government provide what he curiously described as gourmet burritos. Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen reminisced about working two jobs, living with roommates and eating ramen after college. When he reminded college students that burritos are covered by their meal plans, he got fat shamed by Vice President JD Vance. Fox Business blamed the commotion on young people and their supposed addiction to “little treats.”
What these responses revealed is that a large segment of right-wing media would rather lecture struggling families — cook at home, get a roommate, eat ramen, skip Starbucks — and condemn their lifestyles than acknowledge the obvious reality about out of control prices.
What these responses revealed is that a large segment of right-wing media would rather lecture struggling families — cook at home, get a roommate, eat ramen, skip Starbucks — and condemn their lifestyles than acknowledge the obvious reality about out of control prices. Babylon Bee editor Joel Berry generated a pile on after he suggested in a viral post that he could feed a family of eight for under $20, only to admit he was entirely skimping on meat and loading up on beans.
Trump has called affordability concerns a Democratic “con job” and “hoax,” and a meaningful chunk of MAGA media’s older guard will not, under any circumstances, hear a complaint about the cost of living. But by engaging in the burrito debate, many of them unintentionally exposed the fact that despite their comments on the youth, they have not actually spoken to a young person in years. The pushback they experienced from Trump’s younger supporters was swift — and remarkable.
Far-right activist and conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec questioned how Trump could claim this is a “Golden Age” with the disappearance of McDonald’s Dollar Menu. “Let’s be frank about it,” Fox News host Tomi Lahren wrote on X, “some Americans are turning to socialism because Republicans have failed us so dismally that even the most destructive economic model imaginable feels palatable to people who are struggling to make ends meet and buy groceries.”
Even as Trump’s own base was arguing about burritos, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent went on CNBC and announced he was “sick” of hearing about the so-called K-shaped economy, the idea that gains are flowing overwhelmingly to the wealthy while everyone else stagnates or falls behind, and declared it flatly over. In its place, Bessent said, America now has a “C economy,” in which lower wage earners are, in his telling, finally clawing their way back.
The secretary cited a 2% wage gain for the bottom quarter of earners as proof. But the Atlanta Fed’s own wage tracker showed the bottom quarter of earners had the lowest median wage growth of any income group, a pattern that has held every month since October 2024. Bessent, in other words, picked the one statistic that told a happy story and built a press appearance around it, while the broader data he was being asked about pointed the other way.
But if Chipotle has genuinely become a luxury good in just a couple of years, the administration’s economic policy is a complete and utter failure. A reliable indicator of economic health is real disposable income, which tracks how much extra money people actually have after essentials are paid for. Since February 2025, the month after Trump returned to office, it has remained completely flat. Every other time in modern history that real disposable income has flattened out for that long, the nation has been stuck in a recession.
Pocketbook issues have always been the single strongest motivator for the electorate. During a 1980 debate against the incumbent Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan famously asked voters if they were better off now than they were four years ago. Trump can obfuscate, lie or blame the media for only so long before even his most ardent supporters look at the empty space in their wallets after a trip to the grocery store and realize the truth. While they aren’t suddenly going to vote for Democrats, many of his MAGA followers will simply sit on their hands and stay home in November after concluding they are definitively worse off.
The split in MAGAland is not really over burritos. It is over whether MAGA can admit that the economic anger which carried Trump back to power was real, whether it persists under his administration and whether working people deserve anything better than a lecture on personal responsibility. The conservative scolds are not offering a solution because they do not believe there is a social problem to solve. In their worldview, a family’s shrinking purchasing power is primarily evidence of bad character.
The structural depression is looming large, and as the administration prepares to slash welfare programs further, the online rhetoric from the right will inevitably paint anyone hurt by safety net cuts as a lazy loser. Already, an estimated four million people have lost critical food assistance through SNAP benefits. In any normal political climate, mocking average Americans for being anxious about the economy by calling them lazy or entitled would be immediate political suicide. Imagine Republicans trying that stunt in August 2006 when they were already facing a brewing blue wave in November. But in today’s hyperpartisan and media-fragmented ecosystem, millions of voters are expected to fall in line and vote for the ruling party — regardless of how badly they are squeezed at the checkout counter.
Rep. Tom Tiffany (R-WI) participates in a ceremonial swearing-in at the US Capitol on May 19, 2020, in Washington, DC. | Drew Angerer/Getty Images
Tom Tiffany, the new Republican nominee for governor in Wisconsin, is not just a passive supporter of President Donald Trump’s lies about the 2020 presidential election. He is an active promoter of them.
In December 2020, when he was a member of Congress, he signed on to a Texas lawsuit seeking to invalidate Joe Biden’s victory. On January 6, 2021, he voted against certifying the results in Pennsylvania and Texas just hours after rioters threatened to kill his colleagues. He has stated he would have overturned Wisconsin’s results too, and just this year endorsed an FBI investigation into the state’s elections. And though the national climate in 2026 favors Democrats, Wisconsin is a closely divided state: Tiffany could beat the odds and win the general.
There is, in short, a very real chance that someone who doesn’t believe American elections are legitimate may soon be supervising them in one of the 2028 presidential cycle’s most important swing states.
It’s not just Wisconsin. In each of the other most critical 2028 states — Michigan, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Nevada — Republicans have chosen an election denier as their nominee for governor, secretary of state, or both. If any of these candidates win, they will have at least some degree of authority over the administration of elections in a state that could determine the outcome of the next presidential election.
So could the outcome of the 2026 midterms ultimately lead to a stolen election in 2028, as some are alreadywarning? Election experts say it’s very unlikely.
State election laws contain numerous overlapping checks on interference from top officials. The judiciary has a pretty strong track record in stopping election malfeasance. A reform to the Electoral Count Act, passed quietly during the Biden presidency, significantly improved federal protections against election interference. And in 2028, the man uniquely responsible for previous pushes to invalidate the 2020 election won’t be on the ballot.
“[There are many] reasons why one should not be concerned,” said Rebecca Green, the co-director of the Election Law Program at the College of William and Mary. “Even in circumstances where there is a single partisan in control of a state’s election process, there are numerous checks on that power.”
That said, the risk isn’t zero. There is a remote chance, if the election is extremely close, that a well-placed election denier could swing the outcome. And even if they don’t outright steal an election, someone like Tiffany could still use their office to damage the electoral system in some pretty important ways.
“We have to be walking between complacency and alarmism,” said Rick Hasen, an expert on election law at UCLA. “Both of those are bad.”
Why the 2028 election is more secure than you think
Election law varies from state to state. Most of the time, the state’s secretary of state (SOS) is in charge of elections, but sometimes it’s the state board of elections. Sometimes the SOS is directly elected, and sometimes they’re appointed by the governor.
But in broad strokes, there are three ways for governors or an allied SOS to attack an election. They can try to suppress opposition voters before the voting starts, by (for example) purging them from the rolls or putting insufficient polling stations in their neighborhoods. They can try to interfere during the vote count, by trying to disqualify outparty ballots or even falsifying the vote count. Or they can try to interfere afterward, by refusing to certify election results.
“Courts have shown themselves to be pretty good against election denialism. That’s true of both Democratic and Republican appointed and elected judges.”
Rick Hasen, UCLA election expert
Each of those is exceptionally, perhaps even prohibitively, difficult to pull off — even for a committed election denier.
Voter suppression is hard because the tactics are legally limited. Current federal law bans voter roll purges within 90 days of the election, which allowed Democrats to simply re-register voters disqualified in previous Republican purges (though the Supreme Court may overturn this provision in an upcoming case). Impediments like polling station placement are, per Hasen, hard to target; they are most likely to affect low-income and low-propensity voters, who have trended Republican in recent elections.
Interfering with the counting of votes is made difficult by what Green terms “adversarial election administration”: basically, the fact that partisans from both parties are involved in multiple different stages of the counting process. Every state has strict rules governing the counting process, and observers from both parties can see if they’re being breached in the other party’s favor. If there is an irregularity, courts are empowered to step in and correct it.
And it is simply illegal for governors or secretaries of state to refuse to certify legitimate elections. State laws in all relevant battleground states allow courts to issue a writ of mandamus requiring officials to certify duly counted results, which they have done repeatedly since 2020 when Republican-controlled county election boards withheld certification.
“Courts have shown themselves to be pretty good against election denialism,” Hasen said. “That’s true of both Democratic and Republican appointed and elected judges.”
And all of that assumes that a Republican who denied the result of the 2020 election would necessarily attempt to steal future elections. That may not be the case.
“Just because you have partisan control of an election, and just because that person has cast doubt on previous elections, doesn’t mean that person is not going to be committed to running a fair election,” Green said.
Such a sentiment may sound naive, but it also may reflect the reality of post-Trump politics. The president was the driving force behind the attempt to overturn the 2020 election; his insistence that he did not lose, and his iron grip on the hearts and minds of the GOP base, pushed the party onto grounds that its other leaders clearly feared to tread.
While Republicans certainly attempted to stack the electoral deck in their favor prior to Trump, these brazen attempts to overturn or steal legitimate elections are a product of his time in office. Whether he has permanently changed the Republican Party into an entity that will regularly reject elections they lose is very much an open question.
Why electing election deniers could still matter
All of this should give us some comfort about the upcoming state-level races: It is simply very hard for a governor or SOS to steal a presidential election even if they want to. While American democracy is weak in many different ways, the security of its election architecture specifically is actually one of its strong points.
But even the most impregnable-seeming fortresses can be breached. And there are reasons to worry that, in an extreme case, an election denier in key positions could well damage the integrity of the 2028 presidential election.
In a 2022 paper, the law professor Lisa Marshall Manheim argued that conventional legal analysis has proven inadequate for addressing the threat of election subversion. While legal experts are correct to say that the law makes stealing an election hard, the most dangerous threat to US elections — Trump’s 2020 campaign — was essentially extra-legal in character.
While American democracy is weak in many different ways, the security of its election architecture specifically is actually one of its strong points.
While “superficially” operating through the legal system, Trump was actually asking officials from Congress on down to engage in obviously unlawful behavior. When Trump asked Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” just enough votes to overturn the state’s results, or for Mike Pence to find the “courage” to nullify the results on January 6, he wasn’t asking these two men to act according to their legal duties. He was asking them to step beyond law, to embrace a reading of their office’s powers so obviously absurd that it amounts to declaring the text of the law to be no limit at all.
This is the nightmare scenario: one in which officials in key positions simply decide that they no longer have to follow a good-faith reading of the law. If enough officials in the right places decide to cast off legal shackles, no carefully crafted statute can stop them. We will, as Hasen put it, exit the domain of law into “something else”: the politics of raw power.
Anyone who endorsed Trump’s lies about the 2020 election — let alone actively attempted to act on them — has already shown a degree of contempt for election law. That means that one can’t rule out a similar display of contempt in the future, only this time with the power to turn that into impactful defiance of law.
It’s vastly too early to say the conditions under which such a radical breach might occur, in 2028 or in the future. A lot depends on the makeup of the Republican Party; whether leaders after Trump embrace or downplay his hostility to the electoral system itself. But we now know that the risk is there. And the more election deniers we have in key positions, the greater the odds are that the risk becomes real — even if the baseline probability remains low in absolute terms.
This connects to another, more insidious risk: that electing election deniers could exacerbate the ongoing crisis of electoral confidence since 2020.
Even if Tiffany or someone like him doesn’t try to outright prevent or nullify Democratic victories in their state, they could still declare that they lack confidence in the result’s integrity. That they tried to run a fair election, but that Democrats or the courts prevented them from doing so — and thus, despite their lack of legal powers to stop it, that they believe the election to have been compromised or even stolen.
This may not lead to a series of January 6s across the country. But even if it didn’t, it would deepen the lack of trust Republican voters have in the electoral system. If Republicans post-Trump continue to believe that Democrats are engaged in widespread cheating, that could contribute to an environment where the kind of extra-legal shenanigans Manheim warned of could look more tempting.
So while it is quite unlikely that the 2026 elections will lead to a crisis in 2028, it could play a role in dashing the possibility that American democracy moves on from the dangerous Trump-era fighting over elections. And as long as that fighting persists, another 2020-style crisis will remain a live possibility.
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