A new political ad airing this week features clips of President Donald Trump pledging to defeat “communism, socialism and Marxism in America,” and promising “America will never be a communist country.” It cuts to flashing text reading the “largest tax cuts in history” and “reigniting American manufacturing” while a choir repeatedly sings “love me” in the background. The sample is from JMSN’s song “Love Me,” who said on X that he did not authorize license of the song. The UFC’s Dana White chimes in, saying Trump “is the toughest, most resilient person that I’ve ever met, and nothing was going to stop him from fighting so hard for the country he loves.”
The 30-second spot seems like any other campaign ad, designed to use emotion to sway voters, but it turns out that taxpayers actually paid for the whole thing, which may not be legal. That’s sparked considerable controversy on Capitol Hill, with both Republicans and Democrats criticizing the ads. The cost of the ad is $430,000 and is running across multiple network TV channels across the country, though the Associated Press reports “The actual amount spent could be significantly more, depending on whether networks classified the ad as a political ad.”
Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., who is not running for reelection, called the ad “inappropriate” and compared it to messaging from former right-wing Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban.
“This may be felony criminal theft and conversion of government property for political campaign purposes,” Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., said on X. “It is a Hatch Act violation for any government employees who worked on it or used government resources to make it. It is blatantly unethical under numerous federal ethics provisions proscribing the use of government resources for political campaigns.”
As a result, Public Citizen, a consumer rights advocacy group, filed a complaint with the Government Accountability Office and Office of Special Counsel, alleging “The TV ad boosting the image and character of Donald Trump as well as reiterating Trump’s campaign rhetoric, paid for by taxpayer dollars, and produced and distributed by Trump’s White House staff, appears to be a clear violation of the laws prohibiting the use of taxpayer dollars for propaganda purpose as well as a violation of the Hatch Act.” Public Citizen also noted that they have filed a dozen Hatch Act complaints with OSC over the past year, all of which have been ignored by the agency.
The White House defended the ad and said it is “educational and unapologetically patriotic,” according to AP.
The White House is currently airing this video as an ad during commercial breaks on Fox News.
It looks and sounds like a political spot and includes a disclaimer stating that it is paid for by the U.S. government.
The Democratic senator from Massachusetts is leading a cadre of largely left-of-center lawmakers in reviving the Stop Wall Street Looting Act, legislation that would curtail the worst tendencies of private equity firms. These investment firms frequently buy struggling companies in leveraged buyouts, foisting the debt of the purchase back onto the business being bought. The firms downsize staff and sell off parts of the purchased company to create dividends, all while charging the purchased corporation management fees for their trouble. When the companies frequently fail to service all this new debt, they are forced into bankruptcies that allow the private equity ownership group to walk away.
Warren has been fighting for a while to hold private equity firms responsible for the well-being of the companies they own. In fact, this is her third attempt at pushing the legislation, which she first introduced in 2019. The act would close loopholes that shield these investment companies from the debts of the newspapers, hospitals and department stores they purchase, and would also limit the amount that could be extracted from a private equity-owned company.
“Private equity takeovers are legal looting that make a handful of Wall Street executives very rich while costing thousands of people their jobs, putting valuable companies out of business, and in the case of health care, is literally a matter of life and death,” Warren said in a statement of an earlier version of the bill.
Facing one of the most money-friendly presidencies in history and Republican control of the White House and Congress, the bill starts to look like a hard sell. Add in the public’s aversion to barring businesses from doing anything, along with the fond feelings many Americans have for the words “private” and “equity,” and it’s easy to feel hopeless.
But there is a way to shape public opinion on this issue: Warren and her allies in Congress could simply point Americans toward an iconic redhead with pigtails. In recent years, Wendy’s has taken heat for an alleged decline in food quality. The flood of negative reviews of the fast-food chain, coupled with widespread closures of its restaurants, led Slate to ask in April “What the Hell Happened to Wendy’s?”
Citizens who aren’t likely to notice when their local newspaper becomes a bit more bare-bones, or that the already byzantine healthcare system becomes slightly harder to navigate, will definitely notice when their lunch gets worse.
The logic behind connecting fast food to private equity takeovers is straightforward. Citizens who aren’t likely to notice when their local newspaper becomes a bit more bare-bones, or that the already byzantine healthcare system becomes slightly harder to navigate, will definitely notice when their lunch gets worse — and could well inspire widespread pushback against murky financial operators.
At least that’s what Stavros Halkias believes. The comedian and actor who made his name on an unprintable dirtbag-left-adjacent podcast made the case for tying private equity to bad sandwiches during a recent interview with sports journalist Pablo Torre.
“I think it’s clear that what’s f**king us up is private equity . . . taking over products that are awesome,” he said. “The one that I’ve actually latched onto recently . . . is fast food.”
Halkias pointed to the fast food chain’s recent adoption of shredded lettuce on its chicken sandwiches as a cost-slashing maneuver typical of private equity-owned restaurants.
“Everybody understands that Wendy’s has gotten s**ttier,” he said. “The spicy chicken sandwich now uses shredded lettuce. Right there, that is private equity. That is someone saying ‘We don’t want a fresh head of lettuce that costs more money. So, we’re going to give you bagged sh**ty lettuce. I know in the grand scheme of things it’s not a big deal, but people will notice.”
Wendy’s is not fully owned by a private equity fund, but Trian Fund Management and its CEO, Nelson Peltz, own nearly a quarter of the chain restaurant’s stock. Peltz has launched multiple bids to take over the chain, most recently in February and August, before deciding he would wait to see if Wendy’s newest CEO, Bob Wright, could turn the flagging operation around. Still, with a buyout looming over the company’s head and its largest investor grumbling, it’s hard to see cost-cutting measures as entirely free from the influence of private equity firms.
Another fast-food chain, Jersey Mike’s, offers a more straightforward example. After the sandwich company was purchased by Blackstone in January 2025, customer complaints about declining quality and rising prices have dogged it ever since.
“Some f**khead who’s never spread mayo in his life decided instead of a sandwich this is now a commodity,” Halkias said. “By turning the consumer experience shittier, some d**khead who’s never made a sandwich gets a billion extra dollars.”
Halkias sees fast food and professional sports as the two arenas most likely to turn opinion against private equity and investment firms more generally. “I do think if one of these billionaires ruins a franchise, you might have goombah football fans reading Karl Marx,” he said. “If they destroy the Lakers, guys with Kobe back tattoos are going to start the proletariat revolution. I think that the closest we’re getting to class consciousness is fast food and sports teams.”
Halkias gets paid to be funny, and his stand-up career was boosted by a YouTube algorithm that appreciated his talent for crowd work. While Warren and the bill’s co-sponsors shouldn’t lean too hard on an extemporaneous riff from a podcaster, the germ of a promising strategy is there.
Private equity is abstract by design; the role of these firms is hard to figure for anyone outside of the C-suite. To draw the line between funds with boring names and the everyday services that have been eviscerated by bean-counters, Warren and the supporters of the Stop Wall Street Looting Act will first have to first meet people where they are. And where they are is eating lunch in their cars.
A man wearing a "Latinos for America" t-shirt attends a Republican campaign event on October 10, 2022 at the University Drafthouse in Mcallen, Texas. (Photo by ALLISON DINNER/AFP via Getty Images) | Allison Dinner/AFP via Getty Images
Welcome to The Midterms, Actually. Every week I’ll be writing about two things: one big idea or trend I see forming across the 2026 primaries, and one thing I’m hearing from a voice on the ground. Let’s get into it. You can sign up here to get it in your inbox every week. Let’s get into it.
One big idea: Latinos didn’t come home. They’re just in motion.
In the last presidential election, President Donald Trump’s strong support with Latino voters ended up one of the biggest stories of the night. After years of Democrats telling themselves that the growing number of Hispanic Americans would help lead to a permanent liberal majority, their dreams were first dashed in 2016 (when many of those voters stayed home) and then buried in 2024 (when they, and other nonwhite voters, swung toward Trump).
But just as Democrats have at times been too confident that minority voters would fall in line, it now seems Republicans have replicated their mistake. Poll after poll shows a historic reversal among Latino voters in Trump’s second term, and these days even Republican members of Congress are beginning to call Trump out on his deportation efforts.
Why? It comes back to the numbers.
As Nate Cohn observed in the New York Times this week, Democrats now lead Republicans among Hispanic likely voters by 35 percentage points on the generic congressional ballot, 64-29 — a 28-point swing from 2024, when Kamala Harris carried Hispanic voters by just 7 points. The shift is a big reason the polling has Democrats in “blue wave” territory this November.
Last week on America, Actually I explored this shift in detail — by talking to Stephanie Valencia, co-founder and president of Equis, the research firm that has spent a decade digging into the Latino electorate. And the first thing she wanted us all to know: Get rid of the idea that Latinos will ever be permanently Democratic or permanently Republican. Part of the electoral power is that a larger section of the electorate defines itself more independently.
“Latinos often get given the title, the sleeping giant, which I just want to rid that out of everybody’s vocabulary. We should be called the swinging giant based on how much shift we have seen election to election. A third of Latinos consider themselves kind of independent or apolitical nonpartisan, and that’s that swinging middle that really is deciding every single election.”
Here are three more trends Valencia pointed out, which help explain why this all-important voting group has done such a drastic 180 on Trump in his second term.
1. It’s the economy (again)
As with all things in Trump’s second term, it starts with the fundamental problem of his second term: He has not delivered on lower prices. Equis found that Trump’s net approval with Latinos on cost of living sits at -52 — and his number on the economy (-45) is worse than his overall approval with the group (-31). Both are dramatically worse than where he sits with non-Latinos, who put him at -39 on cost of living and -25 on the economy. Among Latino men 18 to 39, cost of living hits a stunning -63.
Here’s what Valencia said:
“Latinos make up more of the wage workforce than any other racial subgroup. And so what that means is when wages are down and inflation is high, Latinos feel it more. We have less savings. We have less rates of home ownership. So the kind of safety nets that other people might have, we just don’t have.”
She also pointed this out:
“In Trump 1.0, his approval on the economy and the cost of living was actually better than his everyday approval… And he has been underwater with Latinos almost this entire term so far on the cost of living and the economy. It’s almost been a complete and total reversal.”
One of the arguments Trump made to Hispanic communities (and other groups also) was that he’d economically empower them, and that this was more important than prioritizing social causes that didn’t have a material benefit. That’s also been his fundamental flaw. From tariffs to rising gas prices, he has not only not delivered — people also feel worse off than before.
2. The immigration backlash
Valencia’s data was undeniable: More and more Latinos turned on Trump as he broadened his deportation efforts, which were broadly unpopular. But what I didn’t understand is why it took until Trump’s second term for people to realize those threats were legitimate, considering they were so front and center during his campaign. (They held up “Mass Deportation Now!” signs at the Republican National Convention!)
Here’s what Valencia said:
“I think this is really important for us as avid news consumers to understand what it is that the average voter, and especially that voter who’s coming in and out of elections, the kind of news they’re consuming. What they were seeing on mainstream media, perhaps even Fox News at the time, was a focus on Trump surrogates who said he’s gonna focus on serious criminals, securing the border, and violent criminals. And so that’s what people bought.”
“Fast-forward to 2026, the people who feel most regretful who voted for Trump in 2024 are most regretful because of immigration. They feel like there was a broken promise there. Like, they were told he was gonna focus on the border, which everybody agreed was chaos, and he was gonna focus on violent criminals and serious threats, and at the end of the day, he has not complied with that.”
There’s also an element of disbelief. When Trump said he would deport “bad people,” a lot of people thought he was only talking about people in other communities — or immigrants with criminal legal histories — not the more far-reaching immigration sweeps we’ve seen since he’s been in office. A striking ad from Rep. María Elvira Salazar (R-FL) this week where she directly criticizes Trump’s immigration policy explicitly made this distinction.
The Equis numbers track that shift almost perfectly. In December 2024, 65 percent of Latino Trump voters believed he would target only criminals and recent arrivals. Today, 62 percent of Latinos overall say he’s going after undocumented immigrants broadly — and among his own Latino voters, the share who say that has jumped from 26 percent to 37 percent. That perception is the whole ballgame: Latino Trump voters who still believe he’s targeting only criminals give him +84 net approval. Among those who’ve concluded he’s targeting everyone, it collapses to +31.
The backlash isn’t about the border. It’s about what’s happening in the interior — the raids, the family separations, the citizens and legal residents swept up.
Equis finds 68 percent of Latinos say Republicans promised to deport criminals and deported hardworking people instead — and 67 percent say Democrats promise immigration reform and never deliver. Forty-two percent say both parties broke their promises.
“I think it is a huge mistake for Democrats to assume or to rest on their laurels and think that because of what people are feeling around Trump and Republicans and the sense of disappointment and broken promises, that that is automatically going to translate to them as a party and as a brand. Right now, the Democratic brand has suffered a repeated set of blows among Latino voters. 20 years of comprehensive immigration reform that hasn’t been delivered. It’s a thing that comes up in almost every focus group.”
3. Meeting voters where they are
The third trend isn’t about persuasion at all. It’s about the fact that a lot of campaigns are still bad at the mechanics of reaching this electorate — and Valencia’s examples were almost comically basic.
Their testing found that more than 70 percent of Latinos who see an ad in Spanish come away thinking that candidate or party cares more about Latinos. That’s not a persuasion effect. That’s a respect effect, and it’s enormous for the price of one ad buy.
So how do campaigns blow it? Some examples, according to Valencia: translating English ads directly into Spanish, rather than tailoring them to the language and culture; and assuming English speakers and Spanish speakers are separate categories when voters often shift between media in both languages.
The deeper error is the monolith problem — the group is still treated as a voting bloc that moves in unison, rather than a diverse set of people from varying countries of origin and contexts. And the fastest-moving division isn’t the country of origin at all. It’s age — an electorate replenishing itself faster than either party’s model of it.
“There are a million Latinos who turn 18 every single year, and an 18-year-old who turns 18 this year and will vote in this year’s election was born the year Barack Obama was elected president. … The era of politics for an 18-year-old today is chaos, Covid, and corruption. They do not remember the hopium of Obama and the beautiful coalition that we built. That is all ancient history to them.”
A million new voters a year, completely up for grabs. Nobody is inheriting these voters. Neither party owns them. Because as Valencia put it: Demographics have proven not to be destiny — effort and intention matter more.
What I’m hearing
This week I called Matthew Eadie, a reporter at Evanston Now, who has been covering an ICE stop in Evanston, Illinois that has since attracted national attention. On the morning of Sunday, September 20, federal agents stopped a man walking on Howard Street. He turned out to be a US citizen, and not the person they were looking for. Agents reportedly left him on the ground with injuries to his head, neck, and teeth. DHS says he “refused to identify himself. Now the community is demanding answers.”
What’s the community reaction been?
People are really furious. If you remember the fall here — Operation Midway Blitz, the heightened Border Patrol enforcement across the Chicago area, Gregory Bovino parading around the streets with camera crews, the protests at the Broadview processing center — people here were very aware of how impactful it was. It was also happening around the elections, so it was prominent news everywhere and everybody was talking about it.
Over the summer it really died down, and I don’t think people have paid much attention since. ICE has been around all year, but they haven’t been as flashy about it, which has been talked about nationally too. This was a flare-up, and it’s a reminder that it’s still going on even after Bovino left. There have been protests at Broadview this week unrelated to the Evanston incident. So either people are starting to pay more attention as the election gets closer, or the incidents are actually picking up again.
What are the unanswered questions you’re still chasing?
Who were they looking for? Were they actually looking for somebody? That’s been their story — a specific individual — and a lot of people I’ve talked to are really skeptical that’s the case. One witness at the scene told me he felt like they just picked him and drove up on him. Essentially what’s been called a“Kavanaugh stop” — if they’re suspicious of you, they can pretty much find a reason to detain you. And then they dropped it once they realized either that he was a US citizen, which he says he is, or that there were too many people around taking videos for it to be worth their time.
So: What happened in the lead-up, and who specifically were they looking for?
Afterward, the agents talked to Evanston police — that’s an Evanston police policy; they’re supposed to try to get information from ICE officers. I’ve FOIAed all the body cam footage. I want to see what those conversations were like, and what exactly the agents told police officers when they talked privately.
Part of what we’re trying to do is see the issues that play out from the bottom up rather than the way they get framed nationally. Beyond immigration, is there anything in your coverage that’s shaping local politics more than the national conversation reflects?
The national issues matter to everybody, but they hit communities in completely different ways. Evanston is affluent — college town, Northwestern, wealthier than most suburbs. Affordability is a buzzword that comes up everywhere, but people here talk about it differently.
This is an overwhelmingly progressive Democratic city. Some people in Evanston certainly need it to be more affordable for themselves. But you also have progressive voters saying we want to make Evanston more affordable and more inclusive for other people. Sometimes the affordability conversation gets framed as “life is too expensive for me and we need to make it cheaper for me,” which is true in a lot of places. In somewhere like Evanston, where there are a lot of affluent people who are also very progressive voters, it’s more: If we actually want to say we’re a progressive community, we have to show it. And showing it maybe means building affordable housing.
It’s also a city that passed reparations, which the federal government is challenging right now. That’s going to be a federal court case through the end of this year and probably into next year — the feds challenging the city’s reparations program. That’s something the city prides itself on. Those are big issues here that come out of the national conversation but sound different than how we hear them in national media.
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I had worked late the night before, and dinner was still several hours away, and I had achieved that particular state of adult exhaustion in which closing your eyes for 20 minutes begins to seem less like a luxury than a medically indicated procedure. Unfortunately, the universe had other plans.
First came the whippet who lives down the hall, galloping outside my apartment and then, as he often does, failing to account for the slickness of the linoleum. There was a skid, followed by the unmistakable sound of dog meeting trash cans: bowling ball, pins. Then two neighbors began, ironically, shouting outside my window about which of them was less considerate about the amount of noise they made. Then I remembered that the ceiling fan has one speed at which it rattles faintly but insistently, so I got out of bed, yanked the chain and sent the blades spinning faster.
Finally, I lay back down. The apartment quieted. My breathing slowed. I had just begun to lilt toward sleep when my phone buzzed.
There is something uniquely irritating about being emotionally pursued by a corporation that has also failed to notice you moved away. I lay flat on my back and began rage-unsubscribing from every company that had recently texted me in the voice of a human being. We miss you. STOP. Treat yourself. STOP. Your favorites are waiting. STOP. I continued until my phone was quiet and, eventually, so was my brain.
A few days later, rifling through my wallet, I passed a small red-and-gold card decorated with lucky cats and a rising sun. Across the top, in chunky yellow letters, it reads “Phodega.” On the back are ten little boxes. Collect ten stamps, get a free entree.
I have three.
Phodega is an Asian-American noodle and snack shop in Chicago’s West Town, a few blocks from a house where my partner and I stay when we’re house-sitting for family — a little borrowed-neighborhood life we slip into for a couple of weeks at a time, usually twice a year. Inside, a neon sign reading SEND NOODS hangs above a pyramid of Café Bustelo cans. Over the counter, another sign cheekily warns: “Don’t Try It. You Won’t Like It.” The menu includes salt-and-pepper chicken skins with sweet-and-sour sauce and something called the Viet Dip, a sandwich served with a little cup of pho jus.
The punch card is almost comically unsophisticated. It cannot send a push notification. It does not know where I live, what time I usually eat lunch or whether I have recently been searching for sandwiches. If I neglect it for six months, it will not announce that it misses me.
Every so often, while looking for a credit or business card, I flip past it and think about Phodega Fries — ribeye, cilantro, onion, jalapeños and gravy piled over seasoned fries — and decide that perhaps it is time to acquire punch number four.
During those house-sitting stretches in the neighborhood, I started feeling, embarrassingly quickly, like something of a local. The third time I walked into Phodega in about two weeks, the woman behind the counter looked up, smiled broadly and asked whether I wanted what I’d gotten last time (the Viet Dip) or wanted to try something new.
Something new, I decided. I ordered the Hainan-style chicken rice.
This is, of course, exactly the sort of interaction that restaurant apps are forever attempting to imitate. They remember what we ordered. They remind us of our favorites. They greet us by name. They offer suggestions based on what we liked last time. But there was a crucial difference in that question from behind the counter: The same thing, or something new?
She remembered me without assuming that remembering me meant she knew what I wanted.
“We know your favorites”
I like being known in restaurants. I like going to the coffee shop where the barista remembers that I take my mint tea iced and unsweetened, and I remember that she has a puppet showcase coming up. I like the brunch place where a waiter knows I want blackberry jam with my Texas toast, and I know what his nieces have been reading lately. This kind of familiarity is one of the pleasures of becoming a regular somewhere: over time, without really deciding to, two people accumulate small pieces of information about each other.
The information goes both ways.
This, increasingly, is what feels strange about the language of food apps. They borrow the vocabulary of that relationship — we remember you; we know your favorites; we missed you — while removing the reciprocal part entirely. They may know precisely what I ordered at 9:43 p.m. on a Wednesday six months ago, but there is nobody on the other side for me to know in return.
And increasingly, there is an app for almost every place we eat. The fast-food standards have them, of course, but so do regional chains and neighborhood coffee shops: download this, order ahead, skip the line, collect points, save your usual. The bargain is convenience, and often it genuinely is convenient. But increasingly, buying a sandwich or a cup of coffee also means initiating an ongoing relationship — one in which the restaurant gets a permanent little doorway into your attention long after the transaction is over.
And lately, simply remembering what we bought is beginning to look almost quaint. The next frontier is not merely knowing what we have wanted before.
It is trying to decide what we are going to want next.
A few weeks ago, I opened GoPuff, a grocery delivery app, and noticed a button I hadn’t seen before: a black square with a blue-and-white “go” glowing in the center. I tapped it.
CURATED FOR YOU.
“Pulled your late-night comfort picks,” it explained, “the usual craving fix when you order after dark.”
The screen looked almost like a cheerful kitchen-table flat-lay: products arranged over a wood-grain background, hovering around a GoPuff bag as though someone had just come home and emptied the evening’s provisions onto the table. Some were plausible: grape Uncrustables, chocolate-covered raspberries. Then came paper towels, Method cleaner, dish soap, lime sparkling water and grapefruit-scented antibacterial wipes. Apparently my 2 a.m. self is part snack-seeking raccoon, part conscientious housekeeper.
Only then did I realize this wasn’t simply a recommendation screen. GoPuff had already put every item in my cart.
The price wasn’t displayed there. I had to navigate into the cart to discover the total: $50.30.
There was an “undo auto-add” option, but it appeared in smaller, considerably less enthusiastic type. The phrase itself got me. Auto-add. The assumption was built into the feature: We have already begun shopping for you. Correct us if necessary.
I removed everything one item at a time and haven’t used the app since. I was already in the process of thinning out my reliance on delivery apps, mostly because I’ve been thinking more carefully about the cost of all that frictionless convenience — not only in money, but in how quickly every minor want can become immediately fulfillable. I haven’t sworn off delivery, nor do I particularly want to. But GoPuff made another part of the bargain newly explicit: convenience was beginning to include having my wants interpreted for me.
If a company is going to behave like a friend, eventually the friend can become presumptuous.
That is the distinction I keep returning to.
I don’t mind recommendations. Sometimes I want help deciding. But “Would you like help?” is different from “We went ahead and decided.”
Perhaps I’m protective of that difference because, of course, companies have always tried to stoke and steer desire. What feels different now is how easily they can follow us while doing it, often in the faux-friendly voice of someone who knows us — popping up on the little televisions in the backs of taxi cabs, slipping into the social media feeds in our pockets, texting us that they miss us while we’re trying to take a nap. The sales pitch has become harder to escape precisely as it has become more intimate.
Appetite, though, is not always something we know in advance.
Recently, I went to the grocery store intending, more or less, to buy ingredients for spaghetti with a weeknight Bolognese. I had already picked up a white onion, although an onion is hardly a binding commitment; so many good dinners begin that way.
The sales pitch has become harder to escape precisely as it has become more intimate.
Then I saw a jar of sun-dried tomatoes I’d never noticed before, packed with dark, jewel-like fruit. A pile of particularly good-looking spinach caught my eye. One decision tugged at another, and by the time I checked out, dinner had become rigatoni with chicken, spinach and sun-dried tomato sauce.
This is not an earth-shattering example of the mysterious contours of human desire. Dinner simply changed. But food is full of these tiny departures: the dish ordered on a whim that becomes the thing you return for; the ingredient you taste for the first time and immediately begin imagining in everything; the afternoon when what sounded good yesterday suddenly sounds terrible today.
That is one of the pleasures of appetite. Sometimes you enter the store with an idea and let yourself be talked out of it by a vegetable. Sometimes you only discover what you want as you go.
Food companies are increasingly interested in that interval, too. As Cris Tolomia reported this week at Quartz, Nestlé is piloting AI-powered simulations designed to model how shoppers might react to new products before they launch, while a separate AI system scans social media for shifts in what consumers want. The tools are part of a broader push into AI-assisted product development, including Nestlé’s work on foods for people taking GLP-1 drugs.
That is obviously several steps removed from GoPuff loading antibacterial wipes into my late-night cart. Nestlé is looking for signals across markets, not deciding what one particular shopper should eat at 2 a.m. But both illustrate how valuable it has become for food companies to arrive earlier — to understand appetite not merely after a preference has been expressed, but while it is still taking shape.
Which makes the moment when we still have to ask ourselves what sounds good feel increasingly precious: a little unoptimized space before something has been recommended, queued or dropped into a cart for us.
Maybe that is why I like that little Phodega card so much. It will wait in my wallet until I decide I want another sandwich, and when I do, someone will punch another square.
It rewards the wanting after it happens. It leaves the wanting itself to me.
My grandmother’s baked spaghetti came in slabs, which was part of its charm. Hot from the oven, they sagged dramatically over the edge of a spatula, held together mainly by a web of browned mozzarella; cold from the refrigerator the next day, they cut much more cleanly and were arguably better. Underneath the cheese were snapped spaghetti, ground chuck and a generous pour of Ragu, and as the casserole disappeared over the course of a weekend, red sauce and rendered beef fat collected in iridescent pools at the exposed corners of the dish.
This was one of two dinners I could reliably expect when we visited her in West Virginia. My grandmother, the daughter of a coal miner and a master of the frugal feast, made either baked spaghetti or steak and gravy with mashed potatoes, green beans and biscuits with blackberry jam; stay long enough and you got leftovers of both. She passed the spaghetti recipe to my mother early in my parents’ marriage, and Mom changed almost nothing. The noodles were still snapped. The beef was still beef. The mozzarella still went on with a heavy hand.
What changed, slowly enough that nobody announced it, was the jar.
First there was Ragu. Then Bertolli. And then there was Rao’s.
I remember the first time my mother took me to The Fresh Market. It was fall, and the entryway smelled aggressively of cinnamon brooms. Just inside was a coffee station — “Complimentary,” an employee in a green apron told us — where I, a preteen with no particular business drinking coffee, poured myself something hazelnut-flavored and carried it solemnly through the aisles. Classical music played overhead. My mother remarked, approvingly, that the lighting didn’t give her a migraine.
Looking back, I suspect my father had recently begun making a little more money, because that afternoon we bought two things I distinctly remember never having had before: Kerrygold butter and a jar of Rao’s.
That night, Mom used the Rao’s in my grandmother’s baked spaghetti. On the side were little wheat rolls from The Fresh Market bakery, spread with pats of Kerrygold — a small but perceptible upgrade from the Bunny Bread and Country Crock of a few years earlier. Nothing about the occasion had changed. It was still spaghetti night. But I remember that dinner in my bones for how special it felt.
By the time I was in college, Rao’s had undergone another transformation. It started appearing in my parents’ pantry in Costco two-packs, usually beside gigantic cases of bottled water, enough paper towels to absorb a malfunctioning sprinkler system and gallon-sized jugs of olive oil. At $12.99 for two jars, it had stopped being the sauce from the fancy grocery store and become simply the sauce my mother bought. She has never gone back.
This past January, deep in winter pasta mode, I realized the supermarket had followed her. There were suddenly what looked like two additional feet of shelf space devoted to sauces with labels I would happily frame and ingredient lists apparently designed to seduce me personally: no added sugar, good olive oil, whole tomatoes, actual garlic. The average supermarket now has top-shelf pasta sauce in both senses of the phrase.
I should disclose that I am helpless in the face of good food packaging. Give me an embossed jar with a hand-drawn garlic bulb, a wobbly little restaurant façade and typography that looks like it was commissioned by someone who owns several linen aprons, and I go full Tex Avery wolf: eyes out, tongue unspooled, all higher reasoning suspended.
My first step beyond Rao’s was Carbone’s vodka sauce, which asks for a splash of fresh cream — a sentence that has probably already caused several restaurant acolytes to sit bolt upright and announce that IT IS NOT THE SAME AS CARBONE. Fine. Nobody said it was. But the jar that really got me was Sauz’s lemon-pepper pesto. I tossed it with store-bought ravioli and shredded rotisserie chicken warmed in olive oil, put peas on the side, and waited for the part where I needed to fix something. It never came.
Nothing.
Yet it was surprisingly complex: bright with lemon juice and fresh peel, nutty with almonds and Parmigiano Reggiano, savory with garlic and olive oil. It was the sort of flavor I could reproduce if sufficiently motivated. On a Tuesday, I was not.
And now we have arrived at Alison Roman selling “A Very Good Sauce,” including a jar inspired by the caramelized-shallot-and-anchovy pasta that once briefly seemed to occupy half the internet. A generous three-pack runs $30, or $10 a jar.
I made that pasta when everyone else did, and kept making it after everyone stopped posting about it. For years I’ve had deli containers of the gorgeous, sticky umami tangle rotating in and out of my refrigerator. So the ability to simply buy a jar descended from it feels like an almost comically specific luxury: somebody else has already done the sticky part.
For a dedicated home cook, this is part of the appeal. Eventually you discover that certain chefs and recipe developers simply share your tastes: their pantry looks like your pantry, their idea of enough acid is your idea of enough acid. Their recipes acquire a little micro-mythology in your kitchen. By the time they put something in a jar, you aren’t exactly starting from scratch. The product arrives pre-endorsed by your own past dinners.
Chef Scott Conant is playing in the same sandbox: his Martone Street sauces run about $10 a jar, or just under $40 for a four-pack, which is less “generic red sauce” than “Scott Conant would like to handle this part of dinner for you.”
There are, meanwhile, levels to this.
Bio Orto makes an organic butternut-squash cream sauce that I bought at Eataly for $18.49 and desperately wanted to find merely fine. It was not merely fine. Eataly itself sells a $25.99 Alfredo that, unlike so many jarred Alfredo sauces, does not taste as though someone dissolved Parmesan into wallpaper paste. There is also a $29.99 mushroom pasta sauce with white truffle flavoring.
Twenty-nine dollars and ninety-nine cents. For sauce.
I can hear the objections from here.
The problem is that these, too, are very good.
Of course, there is another possible ending for a beloved sauce: it gets very, very big. Campbell’s acquired Rao’s, and there are armies of people online who remain convinced that something must have changed, despite Rao’s FAQ explicitly assuring worried customers that the company won’t “touch the sauce.” I haven’t eaten enough Rao’s lately to join the prosecution. What interests me is the anxiety itself. Once people love a jar rather than merely use it, corporate ownership can start to feel less like a business transaction than someone acquiring custody of a family recipe.
Then again, sometimes an expensive jar is simply an expensive jar. The $18.49 Bio Orto remains, emphatically, an $18.49 jar of pasta sauce. I am not here to argue that this constitutes thrift.
But lately the comparison I make in my head is less often fancy sauce versus Ragu than grocery-store splurge versus going out. Dinner for two at a neighborhood trattoria recently ran us $86 with appetizers, one cocktail and no dessert. Delivery can wander toward $60 before tip with insulting ease. Against that backdrop, an $18 sauce, seven dollars’ worth of Italian sausage, a two-dollar pound of pasta, a Caesar salad kit and some good bakery focaccia occupy a strange but useful category: not a cheap dinner, exactly, but a comparatively inexpensive special one.
Sometimes what I’m buying is 20 minutes of my own attention.
If the sauce needs nothing from me, I can spend that energy making dessert, mixing a cocktail for guests, warming bread — or simply deciding which sparkling water sounds good. I can also happily spend another night softening onions in butter and doctoring $2.62 Ragu Kettle Cooked Tomato Basil (one of the best of the budget sauces) with garlic powder, onion powder, red-pepper flakes and whatever umami booster is closest: anchovy, miso, soy.
Sometimes I want to futz. It is simply nice not to have to.
Which is why I have trouble getting particularly worked up about the expensive-sauce aisle. Sure, sometimes the beautiful jar is bought by someone who simply enjoys beautiful jars. But it might also be dinner for an exhausted parent who wants twenty minutes back and misses what the inside of a restaurant tastes like. Or it might be the thing that gets a couple through a no-takeout month while they save for their wedding without making every Wednesday night feel like financial punishment.
Convenience food has always existed to solve problems. We’ve simply gotten more specific about which problems we would like it to solve.
As for that $18.49 squash sauce, I browned some Italian sausage, boiled pasta, warmed the sauce and put a Caesar salad and good focaccia on the table. I had not roasted a squash. I had not grated cheese into a saucepan. I had not dirtied anything requiring an overnight soak. Dinner tasted rich and savory and faintly sweet, the sort of thing I would have been delighted to order at a neighborhood restaurant.
By the end, I was dragging pieces of focaccia through the last orange streaks left in the pan.
America and Israel’s ongoing war against Iran has sunk the global economy so deeply in the mire that economists are now seemingly throwing down their pencils in frustration. On Thursday, for the first time since the start of the conflict, analysts at JPMorgan said they don’t have a baseline view of oil markets.
“We simply don’t know how to model the endgame,” Natasha Kaneva, head of the company’s global commodities strategy, said in a note. According to CNBC, analysts at JPMorgan assumed there were some economic red lines the U.S. simply would not cross in the conflict, and that President Donald Trump would eventually be forced to reach a deal with Iran. But close to seven months after the war began, most of those red lines — including oil hitting more than $100 a barrel, gasoline nearing $5 a gallon at the pump or 10-year Treasury yields rising above 5% — have already been crossed, and “the exit strategy is less clear, not more,” in Kaneva’s words.
Earlier this month, diesel prices climbed above $6 per gallon in the U.S. for the first time ever, and continues to climb. Costs are expected to rise as winter approaches, a season of peak demand for the fuel. Meanwhile, oil stockpiles continue dropping toward record lows, as highlighted by a new analysis from the S&P Global Energy Fuels and Refining team, which warned “winter is coming for diesel markets.”
Karim Fawaz, executive director at S&P Global Energy, warned in the analysis that “Inventories are low, spare refining capacity is scarce, and seasonal demand is about to strengthen at exactly the wrong moment.”
Maybe it’s bad news when even the economists have quit pretending that everything will be fine. The Iran war continues to be a disaster, yet Trump has refused to stop bombing the Islamic Republic. On Thursday he indicated he might even double down, telling Axios, “I have a big decision coming up. Do I want to go in and annihilate them [the Iranian regime] or do I not? It’s a big decision. Anything could happen with me.”
Anything but peace, I imagine. The previous day, the president recycled an old line, claiming that the Iranians “want to make a deal.” Given how many times we’ve heard that one before, I’m just not convinced. Economic forecasts for the coming months continue to be grim as fighting in the Middle East intensifies. A drone attack that heavily damaged one of Saudi Arabia’s pipelines is expected to cause crude oil exports to fall by 400,000 barrels per day this month alone. That’s just one of countless reasons why energy prices are predicted to keep spiking. Although more war clearly isn’t helping, Trump is now promising to sell 48 F-35 fighter jets to Saudi Arabia. Just what everyone needs.
Earlier this week, the Pentagon told Congress that the cost of the war has climbed to $42 billion, a bit over the most recent estimates of $38 billion from the Congressional Budget Office. Some experts have estimated the cost to be even higher, such as Linda J. Bilmes, the Daniel Patrick Moynihan senior lecturer in public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, who told The Hill it could be as much as $100 billion — and that was back in July.
But honestly, who cares about gas prices and grocery bills? The most severe cost in war is always human, and Trump’s aggression in the Middle East has resulted in an estimated 1,800 to 3,800 civilian deaths. The Washington Post reported Friday that the Pentagon is also not disclosing the true number of U.S. soldiers who have died in the war. The Pentagon’s public database cites 18 servicemember deaths, but officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the figures, said the true number could be as high as 23, plus three U.S. contractors based in the region have died since Feb. 28. Meanwhile, Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels have attracted significant attention for their attacks along the Red Sea coast, threatening Saudi Arabia’s oil exports, but less attention is being paid to the more than 100,000 people who have fled the renewed fighting.
On Thursday, the U.N.’s top human rights body reported “reasonable grounds” to believe that the U.S. has committed war crimes in Iran, citing two strikes, including one on a school in the southern city of Minab that killed 150 people, including 120 children. A White House spokesperson responded that the human rights body has “accomplished nothing for human rights while spouting unserious nonsense for decades.” While the focus on bottom lines and costs at the pump is understandable, I don’t need baffled economists to know that Trump’s war is born of absolute insanity.
Attendees wear "Billionaire Tax Now" shirts during a campaign kickoff event for the California Billionaire Tax Act on February 18, 2026, in Los Angeles, California. | Tim Rue/Bloomberg via Getty Images
If there is one thing Democratic politicians can agree on right now it’s this: Rich people should pay more in taxes.
But only in California is a billionaire tax actually on the ballot.
This November, voters in the Golden State will decide whether to levy a first-of-its-kind, onetime tax on the roughly 250 billionaires who live in the state, equal to 5 percent of their total assets. Many of the state’s billionaires are furious — and a few have already moved away.
The tax is supported by labor unions and some populist lawmakers like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), but it’s less popular with moderate Democrats.
Some experts, like Cornell University sociology professor Cristobal Young, are leery too.
“It’s a onetime tax, but this is not a onetime problem,” Young, who also wrote the 2017 book The Myth of Millionaire Tax Flight: How Place Still Matters for the Rich, told Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram. “So why are we talking about a onetime sort of Band-Aid over this?”
Sean spoke with Young about what Young’s research shows about whether the wealthy move away from higher taxes, why this tax proposal may be different, and the right way to tax the very rich.
Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full episode, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
Are you open to taxing the billionaires?
Yeah, certainly. There’s a fundamental loophole in the tax system. Every paycheck, I’m paying taxes straight out of that, and so are all your listeners. But if you make your money from holding corporate stock that’s appreciating in value dramatically over time, you don’t pay any tax on that until you sell it. That leads to a situation where people are accumulating vast fortunes essentially without paying any tax on it at all. It’s a huge inequality in the tax system and it’s especially apparent at the very top. I think it’s just a question of what we are going to do about it.
“This is an ongoing problem, year in and year out. Why are we talking about a onetime Band-Aid?”
I’ve been studying the policies currently in place. There are states today that have taxes on millionaire incomes and we have a really good sense of the impacts of that. They raise a lot of revenue, and they don’t have very much effect on migration. Maybe a few people move, but generally not. My research contribution to this is tracking where millionaires live before and after these tax increases. I found between no to very little tax migration in response.
One of the biggest arguments against this billionaire tax in California is that you’re going to chase all the billionaires away. Sergey Brin has already left, but you’re saying the research doesn’t show that effect?
That’s right. But the important point I want to make is that none of these previous tax proposals have suggested that a small number of people would get tax bills up to $10, $12, or $13 billion. We’ve been talking about significantly smaller tax policies.
I’ve always been cautious and clear about what the research has shown to date: Our experience with taxing millionaires at the state level has been very successful. Many states over the years have adopted it after watching their neighbors to see how it plays out. How it plays out is you get extra revenue and people aren’t really moving away.
But this tax proposal is a completely different tax instrument. Firstly, it’s a onetime tax, but this is not a onetime problem. This is an ongoing problem, year in and year out. Why are we talking about a onetime Band-Aid?
There are good proposals for an ongoing solution that wouldn’t be this large. For the people that are affected, this is going to be an unprecedented tax bill. I don’t want to say “poor them, they can’t pay it,” but we’re talking about enormous amounts of money.
I believe you have a different proposal on how to [institute a wealth tax], and it has to do with unrealized capital gains. Can you help people who don’t have unrealized capital gains understand what those are?
For sure. Say you hold stock in Google, and over the years, the value of that stock has appreciated enormously, such that you’re now one of the richest people in the world. But none of that was ever paid out as a paycheck. It’s essentially sitting in a capital account and therefore it doesn’t trigger a tax bill unless it gets sold. It rarely gets sold, so effectively it just goes untaxed, potentially forever.
In the meantime, it’s not like these folks are living in a monastery somewhere. They’re living like they’re the richest people in the world. They do this by borrowing against their assets. Borrowing doesn’t trigger a tax liability because borrowing is not income in the tax code.
There are existing proposals at the federal level, which have been worked out in great detail, like the Billionaires Income Tax Act. It’s not a tax on all billionaire wealth; it’s a tax on year-to-year increments in billionaire fortunes.
If you have $200 billion in Google stock and the next year it’s worth $220 billion, you owe taxes on the $20 billion, not the $220 billion. It’s just on the increment year-to-year and not everything that’s ever happened in the past. That switches it from being a wealth tax to being an income tax. A lot of things count as income, and increases in billionaire fortunes should be treated and taxed as income.
California’s billionaire wealth tax proposal is flawed in many ways, but it is raising a very important conversation about how we are going to address deep loopholes in our tax system. This is a conversation we need to be having.
Due partly to these trends, Republicans are poorly positioned to win an argument about inflation — and are only growing more so, as Election Day nears. This was apparent before President Donald Trump convened the first-ever Republican midterm convention in Dallas this week. But the festivities underscored the GOP’s predicament and the many ways that Trump is personally exacerbating it.
Many Republican speakers did address the subject of affordability in Dallas. And the party’s broad narrative is straightforward enough: Democrats created the cost-of-living crisis, Republicans alleviated it by cutting your taxes.
But this is a tough line to sell. Americans might still disdain President Joe Biden’s economic management. Yet they’re far more likely to blame high prices on the current president than the previous one, according to polls.
And not without reason. After all, it was Trump — not Biden — who engineered an oil shock and global trade war. Tellingly, on Wednesday night, all four battleground state Senate candidates — Ken Paxton, Jon Husted, Michael Whatley, and Mike Collins — made no mention of the Iran war or of Trump’s tariffs.
If Republican frontliners are clear-eyed about their party’s liabilities, Trump seems largely indifferent to them. Historically, presidents have often made an effort to limit election-year price increases — and/or, to reduce the salience of their party’s worst issues. Yet Trump has been doing the very opposite.
In recent weeks, the president has escalated his conflict with Iran and his trade war with US allies, driving up Americans’ costs in the process. And he’s been remarkably frank about his refusal to prioritize affordability.
In his remarks to the convention Wednesday, Trump impersonated a disaffected constituent, saying, “You know, I wish you didn’t do the war in Iran. Gasoline’s up, ba ba ba” — before explaining to this critic that preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon took precedence over their energy costs.
Republicans may still weather a midterm backlash. The party remains narrowly favored to retain the Senate, while gerrymandered maps should limit its losses in the House. But if this year’s “blue wave” proves less than tidal, it will be in spite of Trump’s efforts, not because of them.
The GOP’s very simple problem
The Republican Party’s fundamental problem is simple: Voters’ top concern is the cost of living — and American purchasing power has fallen sharply in 2026, as a direct result of the president’s policies.
In virtually every poll, a plurality of voters name “inflation,” “the cost of living,” or “affordability” as their most important issue. And they are not impressed with Trump’s record on that front. In a recent Ipsos survey, 74 percent of respondents said that their cost of living is “off on the wrong track.” Meanwhile, in Nate Silver’s poll tracker, more than 70 percent of Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of inflation, up from just 41 percent when he took office.
During his first year in office, Trump could have reasonably argued that voters were giving him a bad rap on the economy. After all, real wages — how much Americans earn per hour, adjusted for inflation — actually rose in 2025, even as disapproval of the president’s economic record surged.
But in February 2026, Trump brought nearly three years of real wage growth to a screeching halt: By launching a war with Iran — and thus, triggering its closure of the Strait of Hormuz — Trump triggered the first sustained decline in Americans’ purchasing power since 2022.
According to an estimate from Brown’s Watson School, the Iran war has cost the average US household more than $780 through elevated energy prices.
Politically, this seems to have made a real difference. At the beginning of March, Trump’s net approval rating on inflation was -28, according to Nate Silver’s polling average; as of this writing, it is -45.9.
At this point, there may be little Trump can do to gain broad public trust on the cost of living. But political science research suggests that economic trends in the runup to Election Day can shift votes at the margin. And precisely because this year’s price spike is largely self-inflicted, Trump has an unusual amount of power to increase affordability before Americans head to the polls. All he’d need to do is reach a ceasefire (or, ideally, peace deal) with Iran.
We know Trump could bring down energy costs by pursuing peace because he already has. Throughout 2026, oil prices have consistently fallen whenever the US-Iran war has cooled off — and risen whenever it has intensified.
Hostilities resumed over the ensuing months. But Tehran appeared to offer Trump a preelection off-ramp on September 1, when Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said that his country would be willing to restore June’s memorandum of understanding — a deal that had temporarily eased restrictions on shipping in the Strait of Hormuz.
The Iranian regime’s good faith cannot be assumed. And peace negotiations are doubtlessly complex. At the very least, however, Trump had an opportunity to try to reduce fuel prices ahead of November’s elections earlier this month. Embracing a ceasefire would not have prevented the US from resuming attacks after Election Day (Trump is manifestly comfortable with reneging on agreements with Iran). Nevertheless, Trump opted instead to launch a new round of strikes against Iranian military targets and oil tankers, sending crude prices hurtling past $100 a barrel.
Americans have paid a price for Trump’s trade war
The Iran war has been by far the biggest drag on American living standards since Trump took office. But his trade policies certainly haven’t helped.
Back in May, the Dallas Federal Reserve released an analysis of how Trump’s tariffs had impacted consumer prices. In its report, the bank compared America’s core inflation rate to what that rate would have been, if the US charged no tariffs. The two lines diverged sharply after “Liberation Day,” when Trump imposed large tariffs on nearly all of America’s trade partners.
Of course, Trump backed off his most gargantuan Liberation Day tariffs. And in February, the Supreme Court gave Trump a chance to abandon much of his inflationary trade agenda by ruling that the bulk of his tariffs were unconstitutionally enacted. At that point, he could have insisted that his overturned import taxes had been brilliant, but that the courts had left him no choice but to withdraw them (thereby easing price pressures in an election year). Instead, Trump immediately enacted temporary 10 percent across-the-board tariffs with alternative legal authorities. Then, when those were set to expire in late July, he replaced them with nearly identical levies, now legally justified as a means of combatting forced labor abroad.
More recently, Trump escalated commercial tensions with Canada into an all-out trade war. In late August, Trump imposed a 50 percent tariff on $20 billion worth of Canadian imports, declared that Lake Ontario was now “Lake America,” and threatened to extend that levy to Canadian trucks, cars, and auto parts in the new year. Ottawa hit back with up to 50 percent tariffs on $20 billion in US goods. This week, Trump upped the ante again, announcing outright import bans on some Canadian alcohol, dairy, and motorcycle products.
On Wednesday night, Trump signaled that he’s in no rush to reach a compromise with our neighbors to the north, saying that Canada was “dying to make a deal.”
The trade war with Canada is unlikely to have a huge impact on the American economy nationally. But it will be felt in regions heavily integrated with the Canadian economy, including much of Maine, where Republican Sen. Susan Collins is fighting to hold onto her seat.
And the political costs of Trump’s trade actions may be as much optical as economic. When Trump deliberately increases the price of various imported goods by 50 percent, he sends voters a clear message: The GOP’s leader simply does not care very much about lowering the cost of living.
The connection between tariffs and prices is not lost on voters. In a Guardian poll taken earlier this year, seven in 10 Americans said that the Trump’s tariffs had forced them to pay higher prices.
And even Trump understands that his trade agenda is bad for affordability. While he has been enacting new trade restrictions willy-nilly for months, he did pause plans to dramatically raise ground beef tariffs last month, in order to ease meat costs for consumers. Still, Trump has refused to apply the logic of his hamburger policy to broader realms of international commerce.
Crass pandering has its upsides
On one level, Trump’s deprioritization of his party’s short-term political interests might seem noble. As a general matter, we want presidents to put America’s long-term well-being above immediate electoral considerations. If seeking a ceasefire with Tehran would jeopardize American national security — or if allowing imports of Crown Royal whiskey would condemn our grandchildren to Canadian economic tyranny — then it would be bad for Trump to do those things, just to help Susan Collins.
In reality, however, Trump’s war with Iran doesn’t seem to be furthering any of America’s geopolitical goals. Nor has his trade war been a boon to US industry. Whatever Trump is prioritizing over Americans’ purchasing power and Republicans’ midterm odds, it doesn’t seem to be a robust theory of foreign policy or international economics.
To be sure, Trump has not wholly forsworn pandering to voters’ pocketbook concerns. On Wednesday night, the president promised to deliver a $5,000 check to every American adult, if Republicans retain control of Congress in November. But Trump’s audacious giveaway boasts little support on Capitol Hill, in part because high deficits are already putting upward pressure on inflation and interest rates — yet another cost-of-living issue his own policies have exacerbated.
For now, ordinary shoppers are bearing the brunt of Trump’s eccentric and counterproductive priorities. But come November, Republican battleground candidates may also find themselves paying the price.
An electronic billboard on a bus stop in Washington, DC, displays the current US national debt on August 30, 2026. | Jemal Countess/Getty Images for the Peter G. Peterson Foundation
The national debt hasn’t been a major issue in the 2026 midterms. But perhaps it should be. As of last month, the United States is in debt to the tune of $40 trillion. That’s 12 zeros, which averages out to about $116,000 per American.
It’s enough that even economists like Jared Bernstein, the chair of the US Council of Economic Advisers under President Joe Biden, is starting to worry. Bernstein has long argued that the national debt is nothing to worry about too seriously as long as servicing it — that is, paying the interest on it — remains manageable.
Bernstein has since changed his tune. He told Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram after last month’s debt milestone that while the number itself is “a big distraction,” two factors have him worried: Congress’s inaction and rising interest rates. But is it well and truly time to panic? Are we in a moment of no return?
Below is an excerpt of Sean’s conversation with Bernstein, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
Have you now or ever been wrong about the national debt?
Yes. Who hasn’t?
Tell me what your position was and why you think it maybe was wrong.
A lot of the economic work on the national debt involves forecasting, predicting where things are going. And nobody can really forecast things like interest rates or when there’s going to be another recession or a war or a pandemic, so nobody could honestly answer that question with, “I’ve been right about everything.”
But I feel good in the sense of being intellectually honest about how I’ve thought about this. When the numbers were pointing to a level of calmness about our fiscal outlook, even though lots of people had their hair on fire, I didn’t go there. I was pretty adamant that there wasn’t anything to be overly worried about at this point, for reasons that we can get into.
When the numbers changed, and the outlook changed, and the politics changed, I changed.
Let’s start with why you thought it was okay to carry loads of debt in the first place, because that was your position for some time, right?
Correct. When you say loads of debt, the important thing is not just this load of debt or the stock of debt. Think of the debt as the water in the bathtub and think of the flow. Every year, you get a deficit or a surplus. That’s the water coming into the bathtub.
If you have a large stock of debt or loads of debt, as you say, which we were carrying, what you really want to look at is: What’s the rate of interest? How much debt service do you have to pay to your creditors on that stock of debt? And as long as the interest rate stays pretty low and the country’s ability to service its debt is manageable, there’s no obvious reason to break out a sweat, even if there’s a lot of water in the bathtub.
As long as you’re growing faster than your interest rate payments, as long as you’re not adding too much to the debt every year, underlying economic growth can allow you to service that debt without breaking a big economic sweat. And that’s where we were for a bunch of years. So that was the calm part.
Would you say you were part of an economic consensus in this country?
I would say yes, with an asterisk that maybe it was 50-50. Half of us who were watching it had hair that wasn’t burning up and the others had smoke coming out of their hats.
By the way, there’s an interesting strain here that we shouldn’t miss because it becomes more and more relevant over time. Of the hair-on-fire group, there were two classes. One was genuinely freaked out, incorrectly in my view, and the other was a bunch of politicians who pretended to have their hair on fire, but really didn’t.
“Don’t get hung up on the big, round number. It’s okay if your debt grows. It’s just not okay if your debt grows faster than your economy.”
These were — I used to call them chicken hawks. They were budget hawks, but they didn’t really want to do anything about it. And in fact, they consistently pushed in the wrong direction, which turned out to be kind of an important component of my apotheosis in this space.
Now, the big moment. Something happens at some point during this Trump administration that changes your mind. Tell us about it.
It wasn’t like at 2:37 pm on a particular day, just to be clear. I saw a number of things eroding and it wasn’t just during the Trump administration.
Something flipped in my head a little bit because any kind of what we call a reaction function by Congress, to react to these unsustainable forecasts, looked dead to me. And then I started seeing some academic work that actually measured this and showed, lo and behold, Congress was no longer reacting to the budget outlook. That was part one.
Part two is I started to see interest rates drift up. And if you’ll recall earlier, as I think you put it, interest rates found their way into the conversation.
[Part three], we saw budget deficits that in normal times — the budget deficit, which again, that’s the water flowing into the tub — should be negative 2 to 3 percent. They’re 4, 5, and 6 percent. That’s almost a recessionary-level deficit. So you put those three things together and my head broke.
Do you think this congressional inaction or indifference to the debt was somehow seeded by decades of economists like yourself, saying, “This is okay”?
Let me flip that on you, because I don’t want to hold myself or my colleagues unaccountable, but I actually think the other side may be even more to blame or equally to blame in the sense of, they were saying the economy is about to explode for 30 years. And it didn’t.
Now it is true that those of us — speaking for myself, I was saying, “We really ought to get our fiscal house in order, but we don’t need to worry about an immediate crisis. We have time to fix this.”
I was trying to be nuanced, but American politics doesn’t do nuance, so you can blame me for that.
Is the economy about to explode?
No. We still have time to fix this and the sooner we start, the better.
When I talk about debt unsustainability and the potential for a debt spiral, I’m talking about over the next decade. I’m not talking about next week. The good news, Sean, is that there are ways to start repairing the damage. We can’t fill up the hole, but we can stop digging the hole.
There are ways to stop digging the hole that are both good politics and good policy, and it has to do with reversing a bunch of tax cuts on the upper end of the income and wealth scale.
So what do we do? Do we just wait for a different administration?
That’s the answer for almost any good thing you want to do economically. I’m not saying this as a partisan: It’s very clear that this administration has caused all kinds of economic problems, but when you talk about the debt and deficit, I’ve tried to be pretty balanced in this conversation.
It’s not just the [Republicans]. They’ve definitely made the biggest contribution to the unsustainable path through their relentless tax-cutting. But there was a time when I was in the Obama administration that we basically made permanent 80 percent of the Bush tax cuts. Republicans have been the lead flank in taking us to this unsustainable place, but too often the Democrats have not reversed those measures and in fact have, in some cases, endorsed them.
And you seem to think that this is within reach, that we’re just a few steps away from making $40 trillion look more like $30 trillion or $20 trillion?
That’s an interesting question, because it’s probably making $40 trillion look more like $41 or $42 [trillion] rather than $44 or $45 trillion.
But again, Sean, don’t get hung up on the big, round number. It’s okay if your debt grows. It’s just not okay if your debt grows faster than your economy.
As long as the economy’s growing faster than the debt, which used to be the case, then that ratio’s going to come down. So it’s okay if the debt accumulates a little bit more. What’s not okay is if it just keeps spiraling and the growth rate decelerates.
So let’s keep it around $40 trillion. That’s the takeaway.
No, that’s not the takeaway. Sorry. I think $40 trillion is a big distraction. I’m not glad we’re there, but at least we’re talking about it.
I think the key thing is the debt ratio, the debt relative to the economy. I think we can get back on a path where debt to GDP doesn’t just keep growing in good times and bad. It stabilizes in good times, maybe even comes down a little bit in good times because the economy’s growing faster than the debt — the denominator’s growing faster than the numerator, if you will.
I think it’s plausible, but it would mean very different people, a very different composition of people in Congress and the White House.
This Supreme Court, with its 6-3 Republican majority, will likely give the Republican Party what it’s asking for. | Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images
The Republican Party is once again asking the Supreme Court to change the rules governing US elections in order to make it easier for GOP candidates to prevail in future elections. And this Court, with its 6-3 Republican majority, will likely give the GOP what it is asking for.
The question in Brown is whether political party committees such as the DNC or the RNC are also entitled to this discounted rate. A federal appeals court determined that they are not, as the relevant statute only extends this rate to “a legally qualified candidate for any public office,” and not to that candidate’s political party. The GOP now wants the justices to give its party committees this discounted rate anyway. If the justices agree, that would give Republicans an advantage in future elections, because the GOP tends to raise more money through its party organizations than Democrats do.
While individual Democratic candidates often outraise their Republican opponents, Republican donors tend to be much more generous to party committees than their Democratic counterparts. As of late June, for example, the RNC had nearly $130 million in cash, while the DNC was in debt.
A Republican victory in the case would also increase the significance of another win the Supreme Court handed the GOP in June 2025, in National Republican Senatorial Committee v. FEC (2026).Federal law previously placed strict limits on a party organization’s ability to coordinate with candidates on messaging, ad placement, and similar tactical decisions. NRSC abolished many of those limits, thus making money raised by party committees more potent because those committees may now work closely with candidates to plan how that money is spent.
Brown, meanwhile, could make any dollar that a party committee spends on ads stretch much further than it otherwise would.
The GOP’s argument that federal law allows party committees to buy ads at a discount is not persuasive. Again, the relevant federal statute gives a discount to candidates and not to parties.
But that’s unlikely to matter because the GOP’s brief to the Court does make a plausible procedural argument that would allow the justices to wipe away the lower court decision ruling against the Republican Party. If that happens, it would leave the question of whether parties may buy ads at a discount to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which Republicans control.
It will be fairly easy, in other words, for the Court’s Republican majority to rule in favor of their political party in Brown, in the likely event that those six justices are inclined to do so.And that means that the RNC’s money advantage over Democratic groups is about to matter a whole lot more.
A GOP victory in Brown would augment the party’s recent victory in NRSC
Brown is part of a broader Republican Party legal strategy, which seeks to make money donated to the party itself as fungible as possible with money given to individual Republican candidates. The GOP’s recent victory in NRSC is also part of this strategy.
Federal law limits the amount of money donors may give directly to candidates — the cap on these donations is currently $3,500. It also restricts how much money donors may give to party committees such as the DNC or the RNC, but that cap is much higher. It is $44,300 per donor per year in the current election cycle.
Campaign finance law also used to prevent party committees from coordinating their political spending with individual campaigns — the idea was to prevent big donors from laundering donations that exceed the $3,500 cap on donations to candidates through party committees like the RNC. But, in NRSC, the Republican justices repealed most of the restrictions on coordination between party committees and individual candidates.
So the upshot of that decision is that party organizations may still seek donations from wealthy donors that are an order of magnitude larger than what candidates may raise from those same donors. But now, there are far fewer restrictions on these party organizations’ ability to work with candidates to devise a joint strategy for spending their combined funds.
But, because party organizations are not themselves candidates, the language of the statute at issue in Brown indicates that these organizations must pay significantly higher rates to run these ads than the campaigns the party hopes to coordinate with.
This statute essentially requires broadcast stations to charge their lowest ad rate to candidates. Often, major advertisers buy ads in bulk, and receive a significant discount for doing so. By law, broadcast stations must give the same discount to candidates for public office that they give to advertisers who buy ads at the cheapest rate offered by that station.So, if a local TV station allows Budweiser to buy ads at a 50 percent discount because the beer maker runs hundreds of ads on that station, then it must give this same 50 percent discount to political candidates, even if those candidates only run a handful of ads.
The legal term for this discounted rate is the “lowest unit charge” or “LUC rate,” and these discounts can be quite substantial. A somewhat dated report by the Congressional Research Service estimates that bulk ad discounts are as high as 30 percent, while a more recent news article by the congressional newspaper Roll Call estimates that occasional ad buyers may pay “two or three times” as much per ad as an advertiser who secures the best discount.
So, the Supreme Court has already given the GOP greater ability to coordinate strategy and tactics with individual campaigns. And now it wants the much-larger donations that party committees can raise from wealthy donors to go even further than they already do.
Republicans want Trump’s FCC, and not the courts, to decide who gets the discounted rate
The Republican Party’s primary argument in Brown is that two procedural quirks in this case work together to prevent federal courts from enforcing the statute as it is written (although the GOP does also argue that the statute gives party committees the same discounted rate as candidates).
Last March, while NRSC was still pending before the justices, Trump’s FCC issued a “Public Notice” declaring that political parties are, in fact, entitled to the discounted ad rates that federal law guarantees to candidates. Four Democratic candidates, including US Senate candidates Sherrod Brown, Roy Cooper, and Jon Ossoff formally asked the FCC to reverse that policy in April, but the FCC sat on their request without acting on it.
With the 2026 election looming and no action from the FCC, these candidates then asked the US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit to intervene in late June, and, in a late August decision, the Fourth Circuit agreed with the Democratic candidates that the FCC’s interpretation of the law governing ad rates is wrong.
Republicans, meanwhile, argue that the Fourth Circuit decided this case prematurely.If the Supreme Court agrees with the GOP’s argument, that would mean that the FCC’s interpretation of the statute would go back into effect — and party committees would be allowed to buy ads at a discount, at least during the 2026 election.
The Republican Party’s jurisdictional argument is plausible, but far from airtight. While a federal law does permit the Fourth Circuit to review the FCC’s “final orders,” the GOP argues that the FCC’s Public Notice does not count as a final order, and the Fourth Circuit cannot hear this case until after the FCC rules on the Democratic candidates’ April request to reverse the policy announced in that notice.
There is some legal support for the Republican Party’s position. Among other things, a different federal appeals court, the DC Circuit, said in a 2013 opinion that a federal agency’s “statements of policy” that do not go through the rigorous rulemaking process that agencies must conduct before they issue a new regulation are typically not subject to judicial review. So that decision cuts in favor of the Republican Party’s position, even though a DC Circuit decision is not binding on the Supreme Court.
If this rule did not exist, then the GOP-led FCC could effectively prevent courts from hearing Brown forever, simply by refusing to take any action at all on the Democratic candidates’ April filing.
In any event, it is safe to say that the question of whether these Democratic candidates must wait until the FCC acts before they can seek relief in federal court is not definitively resolved by prior precedents. Both the Republican Party and the Democratic candidates can cite court decisions that favor their position, and that means that the justices can choose whichever outcome they prefer.
The Supreme Court’s Republican majority, moreover, often hands down dubious jurisdictional rulings that benefit Republicans or other conservative causes. Just this week, for example, five of the Republican justices ruled that Trump may build his White House ballroom — even though a federal statute prohibits Trump from doing so. They reached this result by claiming, on far-fetched legal grounds, that federal courts lacked jurisdiction to hear the challenge to Trump’s ballroom in the first place.
The Republican Party’s jurisdictional argument in Brown is hardly a slam dunk, but it is much stronger than the argument the Court just used to deny jurisdiction in the ballroom case. So, if the Court’s Republican majority wants to let Republican organizations buy ads at a discounted rate, they’ll probably find it easy to write an opinion that reaches their preferred outcome.
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