I suppose a Richard Nixon revival was inevitable. After all, the 37th president was the modern model of the corrupt, abusive presidency that is currently being perfected by Donald Trump and his corrupt administration. In fact, much of the legal theory of the unitary executive under which the current administration operates sprang from the bowels of right-wing think tanks smarting from Nixon’s fall from grace.
Many of the norms, rules and laws that governed the executive branch until Trump and his loyalists systematically threw them in the White House dumpster originated in the aftermath of Watergate, so reimagining Nixon as the first victim of the so-called deep state serves as a perfect rationale for what is happening today. For conservatives, the long-awaited historical payback has finally come.
In July, the Wall Street Journal reported that Nixon is suddenly all the rage among young conservatives who are “Nixonmaxxing” all over social media and sporting merch with sayings like “Nixon now, more than ever” and “Pretty girls for Nixon.” One young fan mused, “Is Nixon pulling off the greatest posthumous political comeback in history?”
Maybe so. This new interest among the Gen Z crowd is actually a well-designed public relations campaign by The Nixon Foundation, which used social media in 2018 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of his presidency. Short-form videos featuring Nixon saying “I am not a crook” over gangster rap, along with clips from “Mad Men” showing Jon Hamm-as-Don Draper saying, “Kennedy, I see a silver spoon, Nixon, I see myself,” went viral.
But the fandom is more than just vibes. Podcasters like Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson have both recently called Watergate a setup, never mind the evidence or admissions by Nixon’s accomplices like H.R. Haldeman in his diary. Even Vice President JD Vance is in on the act, comparing himself to Nixon in June during an event to promote his memoir at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum: “Young senator, vice president, writes some bestselling books, is hated by the media.” (He’s not wrong.)
“I’ve always liked Richard Nixon,” Vance said, calling him a political genius. The vice president praised Nixon’s foreign policy acumen, giving him props for the opening of China and the Vietnam peace process, while conveniently leaving out the part about bombing Cambodia. Vance also denigrated the Watergate hearings and investigations that eventually brought Nixon down, saying, “If Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be a 12-hour news story. The idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy.”
Nixon didn’t have the right-wing media machinery that now excuses Trump’s criminality and spreads conspiracy theories — like the trope that the “deep state” is out to get the president. That alone has managed to keep the MAGA base and Republican officials on board with Trump.
Sadly, he’s probably right. Nixon didn’t have the right-wing media machinery that now excuses Trump’s criminality and spreads conspiracy theories — like the trope that the “deep state” is out to get the president. That alone has managed to keep the MAGA base and Republican officials on board with Trump, which is why he was acquitted in two impeachment trials during his first term. After all, Nixon didn’t resign until he was told that he had lost his base in the Senate and faced certain conviction and removal from office. That wasn’t the case in February 2021, of course, when the Senate refused to convict Trump for “Incitement of Insurrection.”
But there is also evidence that even Nixon had his limits. Yes, he grossly abused the office of the presidency, treating the executive branch like his private fiefdom. He ordered the FBI and the CIA to commit crimes. He bribed, blackmailed and paid off potential witnesses against him. But he didn’t burn the tapes, and he dutifully turned them over when the Supreme Court ordered him to do so. And although there was that infamous “19-minute gap” on one of the tapes that would have sealed his fate, many of the conversations revealed a profane, corrupt president.
But even as Nixon’s overall approval rating sank to 24% during the week before his resignation on Aug. 9, 1974, Republicans — 62% of them — still supported him. These were undoubtedly some of the die-hards who eventually began pushing to roll back the reforms that were enacted in Nixon’s wake.
During a post-presidency with British television presenter David Frost, Nixon famously said, “When the president does it, it’s not illegal.” Those words sounded then — and sound now — like an authoritarian gaffe. But in reality, the idea was based on a very real concept popular among right-wing Republicans, who believed that the president should have unfettered power to enact policies to “protect” the nation.
After that interview, Nixon penned a 2,500-word essay explaining he didn’t believe the president is above the law, but that the nation’s executive must be granted “some faith in his judgment” and given “room for maneuver.”
“His powers are not unlimited,” Nixon wrote. “But neither can be existing law — in a limited way, and at times of special need — and still meet these larger responsibilities.” Apparently, “special need” could be defined as whatever the president says it is, and therein lies the unlimited power.
This notion forms much of the logic of the unitary executive theory that has been growing among thinkers on the right for decades, and with court cases beginning in the early 1980s, the presidency has been granted more and more such power. This, of course, culminated in Trump v. United States, the 2024 Supreme Court ruling that gave the president near total immunity from prosecution for anything done in office. (The president had already been granted immunity from civil liability by the Court in Nixon v. Fitzgerald in 1982.) Now, the idea that presidents are above the law is gaining steam with yet another “investigation of the investigation,” this time into the special prosecutors who scrutinized Nixon back in 1974.
The Wall Street Journal reports that the Trump Justice Department is now officially looking into that case based upon the conspiracy theories promulgated by Geoff Shepard, a former Nixon aide turned historical revisionist and conspiracy theorist who presented “a two-hour presentation at Justice Department headquarters called ‘Watergate As Lawfare,’” making the argument that, you guessed it, the deep state took down Richard Nixon.
There’s a method to all this madness, and it’s best illustrated by the fact that Vance is the one leading the charge. Any ambitious Republican official thinking about the future has to find some way to excuse their complicity in Trump’s corrupt — and likely illegal — behavior. If they have any hope of being elected to national office, their only choice is to try to maintain these MAGA fictions and arcane conspiracy theories after Trump is gone by continuing to deny the reality of what he’s done. One way to do that is to convince people that it was never just about Trump; the deep state has been out to get Republicans ever since Nixon.
If they can’t convince people that their complicity was actually righteous resistance to a secret cabal of bureaucrats and dirty cops fighting to keep Republicans from enacting their righteous agenda, then potential GOP presidential candidates like Vance are likely going to have a hard time overcoming what is likely to be a massive revolt against Trumpism once he is out of office.
We’re seeing the edge of it now — and it’s not just about the price of gas. The air is finally going out of MAGA, and every single Republican politician who took advantage of it will be held accountable by the voters for what they have done. The GOP’s only hope is to find a Republican somewhere who hasn’t been touched by Trump and MAGA.
On Thursday afternoon in Dallas, in what looked like a farewell tour, the president of the United States told his Texas followers to “Hold your nose” and vote for Republican Senate candidate Ken Paxton, a man he also described as a “pain in the ass.”
Donald Trump then sped off in the presidential limo known as the Beast — at nearly 100 mph, according to pool reports — and headed for an event in Oklahoma. Republicans gazed in mock wild wonder, palms outstretched, claiming they have no idea why they’re staring at potentially historic losses in the midterm elections next month.
Afterwards a MAGA supporter told me that Trump’s performance was just “presidential humor.” And fair enough. Donald Trump has spent a lifetime being, in effect, the Wednesday night open-mic comic at a backroom bar in some college town in Missouri.
Neither capable of growth nor understanding, he’s that guy with just one punchline. He’s a one-trick pony: “Sir, she said. Sir.” He’s the most talentless man ever caught in the bright glare of the light he demanded from the world.
But he is persistent. That’s his superpower. The grift? Oh, that part he learned from experience. But he’s naturally persistent, and out of that grew the corruption, fearmongering and boundless anger — all driven by his superpower. He learned to be transactional. Every failure is fuel for the next fiasco.
The first Trump administration was an accident, largely brought about by the split I witnessed firsthand between Hillary Clinton’s and Bernie Sanders’ supporters at the Democratic convention in Philadelphia during the last week of July 2016. What a shock: The Democrats destroyed their chances through infighting. Who knew?
Trump never thought he’d win that election. Some Republicans, who later fled the party, never accepted him as a legitimate heir to the GOP’s legacy when he did. Now, critics and fans alike have pointed out that there’s no doubt he’s the rightful heir to the Republican Party of Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush; more corrupt than Nixon, a happy practitioner of Reagan’s economics and more of a mean-spirited-wimp than Hunter S. Thompson ever thought Bush could be.
Trump’s refusal to bust up monopolies while cutting staff to the National Park Service and selling off public lands has removed any illusions that he might be a Teddy Roosevelt Republican. His lack of military service takes him out of the realm of being a Dwight Eisenhower Republican. As for Abraham Lincoln, Trump has tried his best to divide a nation, not unite one.
Since Trump never thought he’d win in 2016, he never really planned anything; he let the Republican establishment run things until he got comfortable sleeping in the big chair in the Oval Office and declaring each week “infrastructure week” while doing nothing about it.
The former East Room of the White House looks like Dresden during postwar reconstruction; the Kennedy Center resembles a Greek ruin; the Reflecting Pool is empty and broken, and for some reason Trump wants to build a triumphal arch and stuff it with weapons.
Then came COVID, and in 2021 Trump found himself out of power after, of course, refusing to concede the election and inciting a failed insurrection. That failure fueled his persistence and led to his 2024 re-election. The failure also fueled his anger. His subsequent 34 felony convictions in New York and the federal investigations into his actions became motives for Trump to seek and destroy all who tried to bring him to justice.
His persistent greed, anger and need for revenge empowered him during his first 100 days back in office in 2025, leading to sweeping, Nazi-esque changes sold to the public by discrediting or co-opting the media.
Meanwhile, the former East Room of the White House looks like Dresden during postwar reconstruction; the Kennedy Center is starting to resemble a Greek ruin; the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool is empty and broken, and for some reason that can only be understood under the influence of hallucinogens and Red Bull, he now wants to build a triumphal arch and stuff it with weapons.
We have no idea why we’re at war with Iran and no idea how to negotiate a peace. Trump’s latest attempt at that answer came in the Oval Office on Wednesday when he said, for what must be the fifth or sixth time, that he could just blow Iran up.
At least 58 people have died after being remanded to ICE facilities. Homeland Security chief Markwayne Mullin shrugs that off and says nothing ICE does is controversial and he’s not running “Holiday Inns — these people broke the law.” His superpower seems to be life-ending, militant ignorance.
Then there’s Russia, Ukraine, China and a host of other scandals. Those include but aren’t limited to spending taxpayer money on political ads, the price of diesel fuel, the slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza, antisemitism, misogyny and the L.A. mayor’s race.
While covering Trump is always a challenge, covering his minions is another story. Sen. Eric Schmitt of Missouri, who made his bones trying to kill the Affordable Care Act and challenging the results of the 2020 election, made a complete fool of himself this week in the Senate while attacking former special counsel Jack Smith.
Schmitt’s superpower is apparently making an ass of himself in public. By misrepresenting nonsensical evidence, he accused Smith of perjury. When called out for his sophomoric display, he then went on right-wing media and lied some more.
Smith, who still reminds me of Coach Beard in “Ted Lasso,” explained that his prosecution wasn’t politically inspired. It was driven by facts. “My service has spanned both Republican and Democratic administrations. I am not a politician, and I have no partisan loyalties,” he said. “My career has been dedicated to serving our country by upholding the rule of law and the core principles on which our country was founded,” Being driven by facts and principles is a pretty decent superpower and should describe most people, including reporters, lawyers, scientists, politicians and clerics.
“The charges against President Trump were the result of the evidence,” Smith said. “Grand juries in two separate districts reached this conclusion based on his actions. Rather than accept his defeat in the 2020 presidential election, President Trump engaged in a criminal scheme to overturn the results and prevent the lawful transfer of power.”
That conclusion shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone after all this time. Trump told me in the Brady Briefing Room, six weeks before the 2020 election, that “If you stop counting the votes” there wouldn’t need to be a peaceful transfer of power. He’d just stay on indefinitely.
Trump thus teaches us that persistence pays off even if the proposition is criminal and the facts aren’t in your favor. That’s why he currently commands the center ring of the circus.
Meanwhile, down in Texas, we have the aforementioned Sideshow Ken Paxton, one of the most loathsome individuals ever to climb out of the primordial ooze and declare himself a human being. This is a man so vile that even Trump hates him, and so do the Trump-happy Texas Republicans who have been known to embrace faith healers and hunt snakes in shorts and cowboy boots. They tried to rid themselves of Paxton, but he somehow slipped away.
Paxton’s superpower is his lack of spine and his greasy nature. That, combined with Trump’s (ahem) support, is the reason Paxton isn’t in prison.
But time has its way with everyone. After more than a decade of deploying his superpower, Trump is noticeably faltering, even conceding from the Oval Office this week that his party may lose the midterms. The man who has traded on fear, corruption and grift for so long that he looks like a cartoon Tasmanian devil without the charm has now come to resemble Otis, the sleepy town drunk in “The Andy Griffith Show” (look it up, for heaven’s sake).
Waiting in the wings is “Hillbilly Elegy” JD Vance, worming his way through the crowd. That’s his superpower: He’s a bearded human worm. If you don’t like him, you might place a bet on Marco “The Juggler” Rubio. His superpower is handling a variety of tasks without the loud explosive thud of total failure often seen from Trump, Vance and Pete Hegseth, who’s more like the the secretary of fashion than the “secretary of war.” That makes “Li’l Marco” a bright star in Trump’s dark firmament, even if it’s evident nobody likes him.
Hegseth, on the other hand, is among the dimmest. His superpower seems to be the ability to cosplay a vain summer camp counselor in the Adirondacks from a bad Hallmark comedy.
For the comic book fans out there, the Republicans are led by a Yellow Lantern with fading powers, delusional in his beliefs and actions, too fearful to change and faced with the overpowering realization that his time in power is quickly coming to an end.
He even sent an email to supporters Thursday claiming “This could be my final four weeks as president.” Sure, it was another grift, as well as fatalistic and totally disingenuous.
For the comic book fans out there, the Republicans are led by a Yellow Lantern with fading powers, delusional in his beliefs and actions, too fearful to change and faced with the overpowering realization that his time in power is quickly coming to an end.
They may have to pry Trump out of the Oval Office with a crowbar and a handful of sedatives in 2029, if he lasts that long. But next month’s midterm elections, should they go as badly as Trump obviously fears, will mean the effective end of his presidency. What comes after that could be chaos. Don’t expect mature or professional behavior from a party that can’t tell the difference between an NBA game in Atlanta and a women’s college basketball game in Silver Spring. Just realize it’s the same party that wants to punish transgender Americans while rewarding the ultra-rich.
The only question that matters is this; Does Trump have enough juice left in his Yellow Lantern ring for one last fearful victory? At his mini-convention in Dallas he told his followers to “cheat like hell.” At the same time Trump asked everyone to vote as if he were on the ballot; unfortunately for the Republicans, many will do just that. At this point, it’s almost as if Trump is campaigning for the Democrats.
Seems appropriate. Most of the Democrats are counting on winning by simply saying, “I’m not Trump.”
Folks, they’re not putting Vance out in the field for the Donald’s sake. He’s there for the same reason: Because he’s not Trump. Soon enough, JD could graduate from the sideshow to the center ring.
Should Trump and the Republicans suffer the historic midterm blowout everyone sees coming — barring armed confiscation of ballot boxes — the president will play the victim, a martyred hero who will claim the elections were rigged and blame Joe Biden, China, Canada, our NATO allies and Iran. If he somehow finds a miraculous recharge for his ring, he will use his superpower to foment further revenge and retribution. Every failure is fuel for the next fiasco.
I’ve been told that everyone has a superpower. If so, I’ll defer to what my father told me was mine: asking annoying questions. I still have a few for you, Mr. President.
Jane Doe, a former Cornell University student who has filed a civil lawsuit alleging gang rape at the hands of seven Chi Phi fraternity members, has struggled since she first reported the incident to the police in November 2024, a few weeks after night a frat party turned ugly. “Her life has been destroyed,” her attorney Thomas Giuffra told CNN’s Jake Tapper. Unlike most of the alleged assailants, Doe left college after what Giuffra has described as a “horrifying” semester in which she had to attend classes “where she saw these guys on a fairly regular basis.”
She was not from “a wealthy family,” he said. “This was her dream and it was taken away from her at a young age in just a horrific fashion.”
But according to some on the right, Doe has not suffered enough for reporting her alleged assault to the police and then later suing the accused, the university and the fraternity. It’s not enough that she saw no charges filed, or that reportedly only two of the accused were expelled from campus. On top of her existing pain, therefore, many of the MAGA faithful are punishing her further by calling her a liar, implying she’s a slut and even threatening to out her, which would put her personal safety at risk. Whatever their intent, by doing this, they are sending a strong message to any victim of rape who might feel tempted to seek justice: Stay silent, or you’ll be next.
In 2017, the #MeToo movement took the nation by storm. A veritable flood of women, and some men, spoke out about their own experiences with sexual abuse, leading to a slew of firings, lawsuits, arrests and social opprobrium of the accused, especially since so many accusers produced compelling evidence. Despite this, it was barely weeks before the backlash began, with countless articles about how #MeToo had gone “too far,” despite scant evidence that innocent men were getting entangled. That response swelled until it overcame #MeToo, which has largely faded into the background.
Much — if not most — of the time, alleged victims still face far more serious consequences than their accused assailants, and for many people and institutions, it still feels much easier to make the issue go away by suppressing accusations than dealing with these cases which are, admittedly, often complex.
The Cornell case shows, though, that far from going too far, the #MeToo movement didn’t go far enough. Much — if not most — of the time, alleged victims still face far more serious consequences than their accused assailants, and for many people and institutions, it still feels much easier to make the issue go away by suppressing accusations than dealing with these cases which are, admittedly, often complex.
There is no doubt that the Cornell case is messy. By her own account, the victim was initially consenting, though perhaps not enthusiastically, to a threesome with two fraternity members. But the situation apparently took a turn when she took ketamine during the encounter and more fraternity members joined in, even communicating about “free p—y” on Snapchat. She describes hiding and swatting the new men away, but being too incapacitated to fight back.
“I can say with 100% confidence I was raped,” she told police during a November 2024 interview.
It took time for the alleged victim to get to the point where she was ready to file a report, which right-wing pundits have seized on as evidence that she was not really raped. The New York Times, using campus police documents and witness statements, laid out the timeline showing that she initially reacted with confusion and shame. While she didn’t call it “rape,” she was clearly unhappy about what had happened. Over the course of a few weeks, she came around to first texting one of the accused that “90% of what happened that night was not consensual,” and then filing a police report.
“After rape, it’s common that victims don’t realize what happened was rape,” explained Anne DePrince, a psychology professor at the University of Denver and author of “Every 90 Seconds: Our Common Cause Ending Violence Against Women.”
Victims “feel some shame about reporting it,” especially if they initially “liked the boy or they wanted to go to an event,” Sharon Gandarilla-Javier, an assistant professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, told me. She noted that it’s also common for someone to initially consent to one activity that then becomes “totally different than what they expected.”
Journalists and feminist writers have been cautious in addressing this case, making it clear that the claims haven’t been tested in court and that New York’s rape laws may not be enough to secure an indictment, much less a conviction. Tompkins County District Attorney Matthew Van Houten has reopened the case, arguing that this new lawsuit presents evidence he didn’t have when he initially made the decision to not charge the accused. New reporting also shows that Van Houten was given a condensed version of Doe’s report to Cornell police, one that omitted her use of the word “raped.”
But on the right, there appears to be no similar care when lobbing unproven — and unevidenced — accusations that Doe is lying.
“Her account has radically changed,” The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro said on Tuesday’s episode of his podcast, insisting “it turned out that the details of the police report did not amount to anything like rape.”
While he may be proven right if prosecutors can’t secure an indictment, this is not the same thing as saying that all Doe reported was “bad things happening with consent,” as Shapiro claimed. She herself said she was “raped,” and as many have pointed out, the very fact that she filed a police report is relevant. Calling the police suggests that a person believes they are reporting a crime.
Matt Walsh, also of the Daily Wire, accused feminists of “rushing into the next Duke lacrosse/UVA-style hoax” and argued on X that the situation was nothing more than “a disgusting drug and alcohol fueled orgy,” where “the drunk men have just as valid a claim to being raped.” This, of course, ignores the fact that the alleged victim did not get on Snapchat to advertise “free p—y” to strangers, as well as her own testimony that she pushed them away and tried to hide.
The story “gets transformed from a night of regrets that the young woman is ashamed of into a night in which she’s a victim,” former Fox News host Megyn Kelly said on her podcast, where she also threatened to release the accuser’s name.
Feminists and journalists are wise to use words like “alleged” and to be clear that the evidence has not been fully evaluated in a court of law, and it is true that there remains much about this case that is unknown. Still, there are the Snapchats and text messages, including one where the alleged victim uses the word “nonconsensual” and another where the accused wrote “I just wanted to apologize for how things went down the other night.” This alone makes it hard to believe the accusations are a “hoax,” as Walsh suggested, even if there are outstanding legal questions about whether a consensual encounter turned into something illegal.
For people who insist on the principle of “innocent until proven guilty,” many on the right have proven themselves quick to make claims about the alleged victim’s motives. It’s worth remembering that E. Jean Carroll won a defamation civil suit against Donald Trump after he accused her of lying when she claimed he sexually assaulted her in the dressing room of a Manhattan department store in the 1990s. There is a demonstrable psychological and reputational toll on alleged victims when they face public accusations that they are lying, especially when they come from high-profile people who also insinuate that the victim is an immoral person because of their sexual history.
In this case, no one is required to have an opinion about the accuser’s character. They don’t know her history or her life or why she was even at the party, beyond her stated desire to have some fun . . . Shutting up is free.
In this case, no one is required to have an opinion about the accuser’s character. They don’t know her history or her life or why she was even at the party, beyond her stated desire to have some fun. They could, like most decent people, consider the allegations and assume that, even if there is not a crime here, what is described should never happen to anyone. Shutting up is free.
But the past decade of Trumpism has largely been built on stirring up male anger at women’s growing equality. Paranoid and unsupported claims that women have immense power to ruin men with false accusations have been the bread-and-butter of a MAGA media industry designed to exploit men’s resentment for profit. Their audiences yearn to hear that Jane Doe is the real bad guy here, and so attacking her without a single shred of real evidence against her is an opportunity that many right-wing pundits can’t seem to pass up.
Despite the hysterical claims of its critics, #MeToo was never about ruining the lives of innocent men. In a very real sense, the movement was about leveling the playing field, which is so dramatically tilted against victims that it makes justice nearly impossible to achieve. No one truly disputes the importance of due process to handle accusations of sexual violence. That’s why Jane Doe is going through the court system. It’s also why it’s good that, in light of new information, the district attorney is re-opening the case.
But due process is endangered if victims can’t report allegations without facing public abuse and threats of being falsely accused themselves that it becomes psychologically impossible to live their lives. As its name suggested, that was the whole point of #MeToo: to create enough solidarity between victims and allies to make it safe for victims to speak out without their lives being destroyed. If the right really believes in the value of due process, then they would let it play out, instead of dogpiling and harassing accusers so that future victims are too scared to report crimes.
America's most boring sycophant, JD Vance, was mercilessly heckled at a rally for Byron Donalds and Sen. Ashley Moody (R-FL), and he created some interesting backstories for them.
While good ol' Just Dance, Vance didn't know the protesters' names, where they were from, or what brought them to a place where heckling a credibilityless, self-professed liar seemed like a good use of time—he was willing to imagine political positions and opinions for them. — Read the rest
President Donald Trump’s war against Iran, which just passed its seven month mark, is deeply unpopular among Americans, new polling continues to suggest. A survey from the Associated Press/NORC Research Center published Thursday reports that 71% of adults disapprove of how Trump is handling the Iran war, started alongside Israel in late February, while 69% say the war has not been worth fighting.
“More than half of adults say the country as a whole, the national economy, and their local economy are worse off since Trump was reelected in 2025,” the survey reports. “Most Americans (73%) say the country is heading in the wrong direction, including 92% of Democrats and 47% of Republicans.”
The president seems to realize this growing frustration could cost Republicans dearly in the midterm elections next month, possibly losing GOP control of the House, Senate or both. “It’s possible,” Trump mused to reporters outside the White House Thursday. But he continues to insist that the Iran war is worth it — ostensibly to prevent the nation from obtaining a nuclear weapon, despite the nuclear stockpiles of both the U.S. and Israel — while doubling down on threats and deploying even more troops to the region.
On Thursday, officials told the Wall Street Journal the Pentagon is sending a third aircraft-carrier strike group and additional Marine Corps ships to the Middle East, expected to arrive at the end of November. It would add around 10,000 more troops to the region, putting further strain on the Navy, which has been under pressure from near-record deployments and supply shortages.
But it does seem like Trump is waiting until after the voting to renew bombing Iran, as the Journal reported in late September. In a sprawling interview with Time published Thursday, the president said as much. “Because by annihilating Iran, we’ve created peace in the world,” he said. “With Iran, I don’t think you could ever have peace.”
Republicans are often very good at converting an event into a scandal, even when there is none to be found. They keenly understand the basic mechanics of a contemporary political media that rewards conflict. The modern conservative machine often operates in unison to manufacture a reality-TV confrontation designed to thrill the GOP base.
First, a Republican makes a dramatic accusation. Then, conservative influencers and right-wing media outlets duly amplify the charge until it becomes a viral “gotcha” moment. GOP politicians and operatives then go on podcasts and Fox News to repeat the accusation. By the time anyone checks the underlying evidence, the original allegation has become canon to conservatives.
That was plainly the ambition behind Missouri Republican Sen. Eric Schmitt’s performance on Tuesday at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing with former special counsel Jack Smith. It was even there in the hearing’s title: “Oversight of Jack Smith’s Abuse of Authority and the Targeting of Republicans and Related Matters.” Convened by 93-year-old committee chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, it aimed to recast Smith, the prosecutor who indicted Trump over his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election and alleged mishandling of classified documents, as the villain of a weaponized Justice Department. Smith, for his part, stood behind his case, stating emphatically, “Our investigation developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in serious crimes against our nation.”
But with the midterm elections barely a month away, Republican senators made the calculated decision to relitigate Jan. 6 by fishing through Smith’s records in a desperate bid to find something — anything — to excite their base. What they found was confusion about a basketball game.
Before Tuesday’s hearing started, Schmitt looked like a man whose plan was coming together. Earlier that morning, Axios co-founder Jim VandeHei published a flattering bulletin placing Schmitt atop the speculative short list to be Vice President JD Vance’s 2028 running mate, quoting admirers of the senator. “We hear the VP views Schmitt as trustworthy, intelligent, articulate and a deft political operator,” VandeHei wrote. The rollout appeared designed to elevate Schmitt’s national profile just as a splashy televised grilling of MAGA’s public enemy No. 1 was set to unfold. What happened instead was one of the most embarrassing misfires of any recent Senate hearing.
Near the end of his questioning, Schmitt asked Smith whether he had attended an NBA game between the Golden State Warriors and the Atlanta Hawks on Feb. 3, 2024. Smith looked genuinely confused and asked what city that would be in. Atlanta, Schmitt said. No, Smith replied. Schmitt then supplied the innuendo, noting that the day before, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis had acknowledged her intimate relationship with special prosecutor Nathan Wade, who was helping lead her Georgia racketeering case against Trump. The unstated suggestion was that Smith had slipped into Georgia under the cover of a basketball game to coordinate with Willis.
Schmitt said he had a series of text messages from Smith’s team placing the prosecutor at the game, then he gave the former special counsel a beat to think it over: “I’ll give you a second to process it so you don’t, you know, perjure yourself.” A staffer hoisted a poster board showing purported texts alongside images of Smith, Willis and Wade and a photo of State Farm Arena, then yanked it back down with remarkable speed. Schmitt declared Smith had probably already perjured himself and blasted him as a “total dirtbag.”
The texts did not mention Atlanta at all. They mentioned a Hawks game. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., circled back later in the hearing and methodically dismantled the exchange. The whole thing collapsed because Schmitt, or someone working for him, apparently never considered the possibility that Smith might have attended a women’s basketball game, and only found one corresponding men’s game for the date in question. The game Smith attended was, in fact, a women’s college basketball game in College Park, Maryland between the Maryland Terrapins and the Iowa Hawkeyes, the team then led by Caitlin Clark. Schmitt’s entire conspiracy theory was built on basic factual incompetence.
It’s tempting to treat this episode as merely humorous. There is something inherently ridiculous about a United States senator arriving at a televised hearing convinced he has caught a former special counsel in perjury, only to learn that the central clue in his conspiracy theory was just a shared bird mascot. The speed with which the poster was yanked down by Schmitt’s staffers told the entire story before the cameras. Realizing in real-time that they had walked straight into a trap, the senator’s team tried to bury the evidence and move on before anyone noticed.
An apparently pre-planned chorus of right-wing influencers had their talking points ready to deploy the second Schmitt’s gotcha dropped. Fox News’ Sean Hannity initially applauded Schmitt before deleting his post on X.
But an apparently pre-planned chorus of right-wing influencers had their talking points ready to deploy the second Schmitt’s gotcha dropped. Fox News’ Sean Hannity initially applauded Schmitt before deleting his post on X. Benny Johnson declared that Schmitt had caught Smith perjuring himself. Other conservative commentators circulated the clip as proof that Smith had been caught in a lie — and then quietly abandoned the claim.
Instead of owning the blunder, Schmitt doubled down. Appearing afterward on “The Charlie Kirk Show,” where the hosts, Andrew Kolvet and Blake Neff, prompted him with the fiction intact, the senator continued to insist that he had been justified in asking the question. When confronted later by TMZ with the fact that Smith had actually been at the Iowa-Maryland game, Schmitt responded: “My job is to ask the question.”
It was an extraordinary accusation to make on the strength of material that was, according to a report by MS NOW, explicitly described by Republican Judiciary Committee staff as “unvetted.” The political editor of KSDK-TV in St. Louis, Schmitt’s home market, mocked him openly for the mistake.
Even within the senator’s own party, the embarrassment was palpable. A video of Sen. Katie Britt, R-Ala., looking on with a mask of utter horror quickly circulated online. “There’s something to be said about the staff work, and verifying before we do something like that publicly,” Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst told Raw Story. One unnamed Republican senator suggested the bad intel came directly from the White House. Reports soon surfaced that Schmitt’s general counsel Ethan Harper, who stood behind him holding the infamous poster, saw his potential White House staff position being placed into immediate jeopardy.
But since many conservatives will never let a thing like the truth get in the way of self-promotion, Schmitt took his victory lap after standing on a rake.
There is a familiar pattern in the refusal to feel shame. When Vance was caught spreading the false claim about immigrants eating pets in Ohio, he argued he would create and repeat fiction in service of a larger truth. Schmitt’s defenders are doing the same, treating a false perjury accusation as acceptable because it aimed at exposing supposed corruption.
Step back, and the strategic picture is bleak for the people who planned this misfire. Senate Republicans chose to relitigate Jan. 6, embarrass themselves on national television and then double down rather than move on. It was propaganda and lawfare generation. The incompetence of the execution does not change the intent.
Before it became reality, the biggest fear around a second Donald Trump administration was an increased level of competence. The candidate and his team displayed shocking measures of discipline and consistent messaging throughout the 2024 race, with much of the credit going to campaign manager Susie Wiles, who became his White House chief of staff. As a result, some feared that the shambling jankiness of his first term would be replaced by an efficient, experienced administration that would carry out a ruthless, quasi-fascist platform with few hiccups.
That hasn’t happened. Once in office, Trump replaced the GOP’s establishment scolds who curtailed his worst impulses in his first term with loyalists who were just as green as him. The result has been constant outrage over blatant graft and executive overreach, as Trump is unable to stop blabbing about his — possibly illegal — dealmaking and unconstitutional policy goals. But look to the Republican Party’s backbenchers: You’ll see what MAGA could do with a figurehead who can keep their trap shut.
A loyal Trump acolyte, Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry has happily deployed bored-looking National Guard troops to New Orleans and the U.S.-Mexico border for little more reason than pleasing the president. He has successfully pushed a law to require the display of the Ten Commandments in schools, and he rarely shies away from red meat conflicts with his state’s few Democratic strongholds. Little surprise, then, that Landry was hailed as MAGA’s next-generation hero by Rolling Stone in 2024.
Unlike Trump’s premature crowing over his massive ballroom or countless would-be Iran ceasefires, the governor has a tendency to let his work speak for itself.
But when the time comes to pass Republican policies he truly cares about, or to hand out contracts and favors to his preferred businesses, Landry goes eerily quiet. Unlike Trump’s premature crowing over his massive ballroom or countless would-be Iran ceasefires, the governor has a tendency to let his work speak for itself.
When it was published, Landry’s profile in Rolling Stone made hay out of his ability to go dark. Lately, though, when he gets quiet, it’s out of legal necessity. His administration has proven remarkably open to signing non-disclosure agreements while working out public deals with megacorporations.
According to a report from the New Orleans Times-Picayune, the Landry administration has signed nearly 300 NDAs since he took office in 2024. The Gulf States Newsroom uncovered a further 100 NDAs between the governor’s office and its employees, restricting what they can share about their time on the job. Reporter Drew Hawkins, who spoke to employees of former Louisiana gubernatorial administrations, said the broad gag orders on public employees was unprecedented.
“[T]hey’ve never seen anything like this,” Hawkins told New Orleans television station WWL. “They don’t know about anybody else signing them. They never signed them, and then you know one of them reviewed it and went through it point by point and talked about just how wild this would be to enforce.”
The result of all these hush-hush agreements is most noticeable in recent headline deals with SpaceX and Meta. The former was given the OK to build a massive spaceport in coastal Louisiana in between two wildlife refuges. While the under-wraps deal was being worked out, Landry signed laws exempting aerospace operations from property taxes, nuisance liabilities and public records requests. The final deal, approved in a public meeting of a new development board announced just 24 hours before, granted SpaceX more than $24 billion in tax breaks to build a rocket-launching facility no locals had even heard about.
A similarly tight-lipped dealmaking process led to Meta’s announcement of its largest data center to date in rural Northeast Louisiana. The project, dubbed Hyperion, will cover six square miles of Richland Parish. The tax breaks granted to Meta, again without public input, total more than $3 billion.
For his part, Landry kept quiet about the agreements until the last possible moment. But once the ink was dry, he was downright boastful about them. “I have no problem letting the people in the state of Louisiana decide whether what we put together was worth it,” he said, telling the Times-Picayune that he was motivated by pragmatism and a desire to drag his economically underperforming state into the future. “You don’t do these deals in the public,. At some point, you have to give the people elected to lead this state the opportunity to lead.”
Since Louisiana’s have a habit of ending up in prison, some level of backroom chicanery is to be expected in the Bayou State. At the moment, Landry’s NDA-heavy approach is largely a Louisiana phenomenon. But the ethically dubious practice of burying public-private deals under NDAs could be put to use elsewhere.
Landry’s down-low dealmaking offers a blueprint for post-Trump Republicans looking to push through potentially unpopular agreements and policies, including those involving data centers and artificial intelligence. While the president may no longer be able to harness the support he enjoyed by virtue of being loud-mouthed himself, his followers can work quietly to carry on his project under a blanket of keep-quiet agreements — springing them on the public when the deals have already been made.
It was a bit tense watching Jack Smith get grilled before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday. During his testimony, the former special counsel defended himself against accusations of partisanship in his failed effort to prosecute President Donald Trump two years ago. The chaos of the current era has made the 2024 presidential campaign feel like it was a decade ago, but it’s important to recall that Smith secured indictments on Trump’s role in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, and the other on his alleged mishandling of government records, including the classified documents he had stored at Mar-a-Lago. Both cases fell apart as Trump was elected to a second term.
Now Republicans, including Trump, are pushing for Smith himself to be prosecuted. This wasn’t the first time he has been dragged before Congress so lawmakers could get the soundbites needed for Fox News hits. But to his credit, Smith doubled down and said he would prosecute the president all over again.
“Our investigation developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in serious crimes against our nation,” Smith said during the hearing, adding, “If asked whether to prosecute a former president today, based on the same facts, I would do so regardless of whether that president was a Republican or a Democrat.”
Republicans took the opportunity to lob insults and accusations at Smith for hours. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz accused him of bringing “the Department of Justice into disrepute,” while Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy was more graphic, telling Smith “You make me want to throw up in my mouth.”
Sen. Eric Schmitt of Missouri claimed Smith “will go down as a total dirtbag” and also attempted to corner the former special prosecutor into possible perjury, accusing him of attending an Atlanta Hawks game in 2024 as a pretext for meeting with Fani Willis, the local district attorney who prosecuted Trump in Georgia. But Schmitt — or some staffers who will soon be looking for employment — apparently confused the Hawks and the Iowa Hawkeyes — which are different teams, as it turns out. Smith had watched the Hawkeyes play in Maryland. (As a non-sports person, I confess I might have made the same mistake, except I check my facts.) Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., did Schmitt the favor of pointing out his error, quipping “Perhaps you should have looked at it more carefully.”
This only seemed to further anger Schmitt, who is reportedly angling to be Vice President JD Vance’s running mate in 2028.
The whole bit, including a poster board of Smith’s blown-up text messages, was amazingly lazy, even for this Congress. It seemed as if some aide suffering from conspiracy-brain didn’t bother to check the details, or maybe they asked ChatGPT for help. Still, getting the facts wrong probably won’t hurt Schmitt. He got in the abusive remarks that will earn him MAGA’s seal of approval.
Not surprisingly, Democrats also defended Smith. “The aspersions cast on Mr. Smith nonstop are petty, personal and political,” Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin said. Cory Booker of New Jersey claimed “This is gaslighting of the American people,” telling Smith, “I am so sorry that they’re attempting to put investigators on trial while ignoring the extraordinary conduct that that they are duty bound to really investigate.”
Maybe this all seems like theatrics, more fodder for the cable news spectacle. But the stakes for Smith are real, and this charade could also carry severe consequences for Americans. Since the moment he returned to office, Trump has worked overtime to take down his enemies. That hasn’t been too successful yet — emphasis on yet — but this is about much more than potentially putting Smith behind bars. By playing the victim, the president benefits from controlling the narrative, and perhaps rewriting history, which becomes even more critical as we approach the midterms and he continues promoting the lie he won the 2020 election. So Smith continuing to give the president and his MAGA trolls the proverbial finger isn’t just satisfying — it’s necessary.
I’m not a Smith fanboy, though I certainly admire him for serving as a specialist prosecutor investigating war crimes in the Kosovo War. It feels misguided to turn public figures like Dr. Anthony Fauci or Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga., into heroes or thirst traps just for doing their jobs. Still, it’s worth noticing when someone in the hot seat does more than pay lip service to the idea of a just and accountable society, knowing that the consequences extend much further than their own personal freedom.
Speaking to a crowd of supporters in central Florida in August, U.S. Rep. Byron Donalds denounced his soon-to-be general election opponent for governor, Democrat David Jolly, as a “Trojan horse” for progressive politics in the reliably red state.
“David Jolly is somebody who thinks it’s still OK for boys to be in girls’ sports,” said Donalds, purposefully misgendering transgender girls. “Just pure insanity.” A day later, he secured the Republican nomination.
In a Facebook post earlier that week, the Republican Party of Florida had claimed “boys WILL be allowed to compete in girls’ sports” if Jolly, a former Republican congressman who has objected to sweeping state bans on trans student-athletes, is elected in November. The group shared a video of an AI-generated brawny, masculine figure in a women’s bathing suit smirking on a winner’s podium, strutting through a women’s locker room and ripping open a shower curtain.
“Will I have to race someone like that one day?” a young girl asks in the video. “David Jolly says we have to let them play,” her mother replies.
But Jolly, who secured the Democratic nomination for governor last month, would not have the authority to do so: Florida law has prohibited trans student-athletes from joining sports teams that match their gender identity for more than five years. Jolly has said he has “no plans” to change the current law.
By now, I assume you’ve read about what happened. Maybe you’ve seen the video. But yesterday was one of those rare days we used to have often maybe 15 years ago, when the political media world, and social media sites — even the site formerly known as Twitter — were all having fun with the same thing. That thing, in this case, was the way in which Missouri Senator Eric Schmitt (R) totally and thoroughly beclowned himself.
Schmitt, during a Tuesday Senate hearing set up by Senate Judiciary Republicans so they could yell at Jack Smith, lobbed an accusation of perjury at the former special counsel. Schmitt accused Smith of attending an Atlanta Hawks game, where, he suggested, Smith met with Fulton County DA Fani Willis, who was pursuing her own investigation into Trump. This, for Schmitt, would be evidence of … something.
Smith was bemused. He had never seen the Atlanta Hawks play, he said. Schmitt accused him of committing perjury and called him a “dirtbag.” But after Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) intervened, it gradually became clear what might be going on. Smith had gone to an Iowa Hawkeyes game to see Caitlin Clark play. He had not gone to any sporting event in Atlanta.
And indeed that seemed to be the explanation. Schmitt had as evidence shown texts from Smith’s colleagues saying the special counsel would be sitting in seat “109 Row 1.” TPM’s Hunter Walker noticed that the venue where the Hawks played did not have such a seat, but the venue where the Hawkeyes played did. Soon, a video surfaced of a man that appeared to be Smith at the Hawkeyes game.
Here's footage of Jack Smith at the Iowa vs. Maryland game on February 3rd, 2024 btw pic.twitter.com/yItxkEbbTz
Was this all part of a coordinated media moment for Schmitt?
Immediately after Schmitt exited the hearing, Benny Johnson, an omnipresent right-wing poster who is part of the Turning Point USA world, wrote on X that Schmitt had “CAUGHT Jack Smith perjuring himself on the stand in his testimony.” Sean Hannity, the Fox News host, posted on X celebrating how Schmitt had put Smith “on the spot.” Neither man apparently caught what happened moments later, when those claims began to fall apart.
As Hunter noted, Schmitt was soon on a Turning Point USA broadcast where the host declared, “Jack Smith is a total dirtbag and you caught him out on this NBA game … in Atlanta … It was a great moment. Good for you on that.”
Schmitt, for his part, seemed to be aware by this point that things had not gone to plan.
“I don’t — you know here’s the thing — my job is to ask the questions. He’s already — and if that’s what his answer is — then that’s what his answer is,” he said. Hard to argue with that.
Schmitt’s icarus moment also came on the same day Axios ran a piece headlined “Sen. Eric Schmitt is drawing buzz as a possible Vance VP in 2028,” written by the site’s co-founder and CEO Jim VandeHei.
Schmitt’s staff may have set their boss up for a big day around his big moment. But, to echo another famous conspiracy theorist, the intel on this wasn’t 100%.
Republicans tried to capitalize on our siloed media ecosystem.
Johnson and Hannity eventually deleted their tweets about Schmitt’s failed effort to do a gotcha, but only after they garnered many thousands of impressions. Their feeds remain full of other, similar posts about the hearing. Many pivoted to posting about questioning of Smith by Schmitt’s Missouri colleague, Senator Josh Hawley (R). Hawley, for his part, found his own reasons to accuse Smith of perjury.
There’s something very of this moment — and of the right-wing media in particular — in how these figures swung into action to celebrate Schmitt’s new conspiracy theory, without noticing or caring that it had fallen apart within minutes of it being floated.
As we know from years of experience, if a claim doesn’t implode quite as spectacularly as this one did, it’s easy enough for these influencers to brazen it out for audiences who may never make contact with reality. Initially, that seemed to be the plan.
Did Schmitt just forget women’s sports exist?
One provocative question I saw raised: was this whole thing the product of Schmitt totally overlooking a topic about which the GOP professes to care quite a bit, women’s sports? “It was the only NBA or NCAA men’s game going on at that time in Atlanta,” Schmitt confusedly told the Turning Point broadcast. The possibility of WNBA or NCAA women’s games went unmentioned.
Relatedly, enjoy Sen. Katie Britt’s (R-AL) stunned expression as Smith explained he attended a Hawkeyes, not Hawks’, game.
The moment Sen. Katie Britt realized Schmitt’s mistake.
You heard it here first: The Government Accountability Office, an independent watchdog agency within the legislative branch, has found Russ Vought’s latest “pocket rescissions” scheme to be illegal.
The U.S. has joined Russia and Belarus, the only three countries to withdraw from Group of States against Corruption, a European anti-corruption body, the AP reports.
As AI bosses beg government to make them stop doing what they’re doing, Trump has responded with a rebranding exercise, changing government descriptions of “artificial intelligence” to refer to “super intelligence,” a shift that I am not sure does anything for anyone. The executives also committed to self-regulating, which wasn’t what they had asked for. Mike Johnson, meanwhile, will support some regulations on these companies, he said, but only if they are voluntary.
Man of the Hour
Senate Judiciary Committee member Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO) (L) and Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) display a sign accusing former Special Counsel Jack Smith of meeting with Fulton County, Georgia, District Attorney Fani Willis. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)
It’s Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA), seen here on the right with a sly grin as he assists Schmitt in floating his conspiracy theory by gripping the corner of this posterboard Schmitt’s staff seems to have made.
Andy Beshear has a favorite song: “Universal Sound” by Tyler Childers, the Grammy-winning country artist with a special place in the Kentucky governor’s heart. That title is something of a metaphor, about connecting to a deep, abiding spirituality accessible to us all. It’s meant to be an ecumenical message — just like the one Beshear hopes to deliver.
“Universal Sound” carried him through a “nasty” reelection campaign in 2023, which ended with a comfortable victory over his GOP opponent, state Attorney General Daniel Cameron, who had been hand-picked for the race by Sen. Mitch McConnell. Amid mounting speculation that Beshear could become a leading contender in the 2028 Democratic presidential primary, “Universal Sound” may well become familiar to more voters.
Beshear’s newly published book, which is de rigueur for potential candidates seeking to raise their political profile and lay out a vision, is also stoking talk of 2028. With its title taken from the biblical parable of the Good Samaritan, “Go and Do Likewise: How We Heal a Broken Country” explores how President Donald Trump and his administration have, in Beshear’s words, “hijacked” Christianity, and how the governor’s brand of inclusive faith underpins his political life, offering readers a blueprint for governing with compassion.
I interviewed Beshear last week on the sidelines of Bourbon & Beyond, the music festival held annually in Louisville, Kentucky. He spoke about a reinvigorated religious left, addressed the tricky question of whether Trump should be considered a Christian, discussed his willingness to take unpopular stands in a red state, hinted at his plans for 2028 and explained why, as a politician often compared to Mr. Rogers, his kindness shouldn’t be mistaken for weakness. (Full disclosure: My husband, the novelist Silas House, served as Kentucky poet laureate under Beshear, and I once briefly assisted the governor on a writing project.)
This conversation, which took place in a backstage trailer vibrating from the country and hip-hop tunes emanating from nearby stages, has been edited for length and clarity.
Governor, thank you for taking the time to talk. “Go and Do Likewise” is centered around the parable of the Good Samaritan from the Bible. What do you think that story has to tell us and teach us today?
Well, it’s a perfect story for a moment of division. So the parable of the Good Samaritan is about a man lying bloodied and naked on the side of the road, and everybody that looks like him and thinks like him and votes like him and prays like him and loves like him goes to the other side of the road, ignores him and walks on. But Jesus chooses someone who’s raised to hate that man on the side of the road — the man on the side of the road was raised to hate the Samaritan — and that’s the person he has come over, not kick the man while he’s down, but lift him up, carry him to safety and, if you read it carefully, pay for his healthcare moving forward.
But the parable of the Good Samaritan is more than just a story to emulate; it’s an instruction, because Jesus then looks at the crowd and says, “Now go and do likewise” . . . This is one of the fundamental — not teachings but instructions of the Bible. It’s for us to be good, especially when it’s hard. For us not to judge people, and at people’s worst moments, to just be good to each other.
Faith is obviously so important to you, and I’ve heard you many times refer to it as your “authentic why.” What do you mean by that?
“In an age of authenticity — when your Instagram video is important and your TikTok video is important — people want to know you, what drives you. They don’t have to agree with what drives you. They just want to see that it drives you to do good. And for me, that is my faith.”
Well, first, I would never impose my faith on anyone. I’m not somebody who thinks that my faith needs to be written directly into law. That’s Christian nationalism, and I’m against that. But I do think in an age of authenticity — when your Instagram video is important and your TikTok video is important — people want to know you, what drives you. They don’t have to agree with what drives you. They just want to see that it drives you to do good. And for me, that is my faith.
It tells me I’m supposed to leave this world a little better than I found it, and that’s one of the reasons I’m still [here]. You know, I thought that two terms as governor would be enough, and they still may be. But I see a world now that’s moving backward and not forward. And doesn’t faith call you to stand up and to speak out at that moment?
What do you think being in that position — I imagine you sitting there in Frankfort at night, weighing this [calculus] — has taught you?
First, I believe in any job that I’ve taken on. I am fully dedicated to the people of Kentucky, and when I fight with the president, it’s not because I’m a Democratic governor and he’s a Republican president. It’s because he’s doing something that hurts the people of Kentucky, and whether it’s popular or not, that was the job I took on to do my very best to move us not right, not left, but forward.
But you know, [the COVID pandemic] taught me a lot of lessons. I did what I thought was the right thing, that might not be the popular thing, the thing that would save the most lives. And you know what I found? As long as you’re willing to respect people enough to explain your why and not just your what, doing the right thing is oftentimes the politically popular thing, even if it wasn’t beforehand. People respect conviction, even if they don’t necessarily agree with it. And when you’re willing to explain why you did something, people can disagree with you but still believe you’re coming from a good place.
One thing I’ve been thinking about as I read your book is that the religious left used to be such a strong force in American politics. You know, Bobby Kennedy, all of his work —
All of the War on Poverty, even if notcouched in those terms —
Yes. Bobby Kennedy’s work for social justice was rooted in his Catholicism. Jimmy Carter, famously a Sunday school teacher, spoke about his faith a lot. Even Hillary Clinton, in her husband’s 1992 presidential campaign and administration, talked about her faith and took a lot of flak from establishment media. What happened to the religious left? Why do you think it declined, or kind of went underground?
Well, what I think we’re seeing now, when you see the James Talaricos of the world, our Kansas Senate candidate [Democrat Adam Hamilton] who’s a Methodist minister and others . . . you know, the media will always try to take something as a tactic. They’re like, “Why are Democrats talking more about faith right now?” instead of “Why are people of faith running as Democrats right now?” And I think it’s because there is such a manipulation and a hijacking of faith going on, in such a transparent manner, that people of faith are saying, “I’ve had enough.”
When you see Donald Trump hold a Bible in a way that you’re pretty sure he’s never held it, much less never read it; when he says he doesn’t think there’s any way he’s going to heaven, he doesn’t seem to be worried about it; when he walks out after Erika Kirk gives voice to the Golden Rule in such a beautiful way, and says, No, no, I believe in the exact opposite; when you see JD Vance using faith to kick people while they’re down instead of lift them up, and to judge as many people as possible — then I think people of real faith want to stand up and take that back. Or at least to provide the counterexample. I think people are tired of seeing faith used for bad in public life instead of for good, and that’s the core of why I wrote the book.
You don’t shy away from going after President Trump. You write that he “makes people feel good about themselves by telling them it’s okay to be the worst version of themselves.” At another point you say, “Trump may occasionally talk about Jesus (or ‘Two Corinthians’), but he has missed the point. Jesus lifted up the very people this Republican administration pushes down . . . Trump throws Gatsby parties with his billionaire friends, while Jesus hung out with the exact opposite. Trump clears the very people out of city parks that Jesus would minister to.”
That’s a powerful indictment. You’re saying that the president doesn’t love his neighbor as himself.
No, he calls his neighbor “the enemy from within.” It is the most stark contrast. I think about “love your neighbor as yourself” versus the president [characterizing] your neighbor as the enemy from within. I also think about Erika Kirk saying, I forgive my enemies, and Donald Trump saying, no, I hate my enemies . . . It’s just the exact opposite of what the Bible is supposed to teach us.
At one point, you question if he even knows the story of the Good Samaritan.
I’m not sure he does.
Christ said, “You will know them by their fruits,” right? Do you think President Trump is a Christian?
I try not to question people’s faith, because I admit that that is judging. But he is not living and he is not governing like a Christian. Now, when you think about the miracle of the fishes and the loaves in each of the four first books of the New Testament, it’s that important. Jesus, in a time of scarcity, makes sure everybody has enough. Donald Trump has repeatedly tried to take food off kids and seniors’ table [and] was willing to use starving Americans as leverage during a government shutdown. That is not living or governing like a Christian, and I doubt they ever run out of food at the White House.
“Jesus, in a time of scarcity, makes sure everybody has enough. Donald Trump has repeatedly tried to take food off kids’ and seniors’ tables [and] was willing to use starving Americans as leverage during a government shutdown. That is not living or governing like a Christian.”
I think about the “Big Ugly Bill,” and it’s causing kids to lose having enough food, but it’s also taking doctors away from the sick. And while I think he was talking about spirituality, the actual words of the Bible — which many people believe is the direct word of God — is that Jesus said a doctor is for the sick. Yet there’s a lot of sick [people] that aren’t going to have a doctor. So Donald Trump certainly isn’t living out faith. And for those that preach that he is a person of faith, my granddad, a lay Baptist minister, always said, you know, faith without action —
Yeah, is “dead.” In the book you call for a “Great American Reset.” What do you mean by that? How would you define that?
I did not live through McCarthyism, but we have read about McCarthyism — about attacking and othering people, throwing them in jail — and Donald Trump’s doing it right now. He’s so desperate, he’s calling people communists. I mean, just blatantly ripping off Joseph McCarthy. But the president himself is doing it. But we reached a point where people said enough, and they took a breath, and we came back together and did not repeat it — at least until now.
I don’t want to leave a broken country to my kids or to anyone else’s. I don’t want to leave this divided of a country to anyone else. I don’t want to leave a country where we are told it’s OK to hate each other and that your neighbor is the enemy. And so while I judge MAGA politicians, I don’t judge MAGA voters — and I don’t even use that phrase. Why? Because I want them to take a breath and to say, “OK, you know, let’s do something better. You know, this went too far. Let’s repair the wounds that we have,” so that we don’t move from retribution from one side to retribution to another side, and back and forth and back and forth, but that we get something more like what we had growing up.
When you were talking, I thought of another scripture — “the repairer of the breach” from the Book of Isaiah, which Bill Clinton used quite a bit. That’s kind of what you’re talking about, bringing people back together, healing divides.
I feel like we’ve done that better in Kentucky than most places. I still don’t always agree with the way people vote, but if you look at where we were with [my predecessor as governor] Matt Bevin, [who was] going after everybody who is different, othering anyone and everyone, judging everyone . . . Look at where we are now. That last [presidential] election, you didn’t see nearly the signs or the flags or anything else. You saw people who, in the very least, wanted to genuinely respect their neighbors.
You talk about that happening here in Kentucky. How do you think that can begin nationally, though, when a lot of MAGA Republicans out there think, as you write in the book, that “Democrats are Satan in the flesh”?
Well, Republicans right now are costing them about $4,500 extra a year in tariffs, about $800 extra a year in gas. If they need diesel, it’s even worse. So they might think that Democrats are Satan in the flesh, but Republicans are bankrupting them. If you want to eat, to be able to afford groceries for yourself or your kid, if you want to be able to see a pediatrician for your child in your own community, you’re going to think about things a little bit different. Democrats have the chance to grab that lane. And we should be. That’s where we should want to be. That’s certainly where I’ve always governed.
Think about a soybean farmer, and you and I both know we got a lot in Kentucky, and I’m not sure if any of them voted for Kamala Harris. But look at what’s happened to them. First, the USAID program’s eliminated. That’s one of their major clients, because if you feed starving nations, people like the United States better. Then [Education Secretary] Linda McMahon comes in, using her wrestling knowledge, to end the farm-to-cafeteria program. Then Donald Trump — and he alone decides on tariffs — throws them on China, and they stop buying our soybeans. They’re the largest purchaser in the world. They move to Brazil and Argentina.
Then he decides to get in a war with Iran that he doesn’t even explain to the American people a couple days before in his State of the Union. And now the price of diesel, which runs all farm equipment, is at an all-time high. If that’s not enough, a third of the world’s fertilizer runs through the Strait of Hormuz. So, a soybean farmer that voted for Donald Trump, who believed that was their guy, is totally betrayed, trying to decide if they’re going to plant crops at all, or if Donald Trump has bankrupted their family farm.
You’re the most popular Democratic governor in the country, according to the polls, and this book is introducing you and your beliefs to a whole other set of people, of potential voters. What are your plans for 2028?
Well, I haven’t made any final decisions, but I will say when I walked off the stage in 2023 . . . I looked at [my wife] Britainy, and I said, “Hoo, I’ll never have to run for anything ever again.” As I’m here today, I’m not sure that’s the case anymore. And I’ll make that decision later.
But I think about two core tenets of my faith. Number one, that I am made by a loving God that calls me to love other people, and that ought to be the baseline. And number two, I ought to leave things better than I found them.
Listen: When you’re governor of a place you love, it’s enough. It’s special. What we’ve done in Kentucky together, all of us, people of all different parties over the last seven years, [has] been transformational, and I couldn’t be more proud — and I was willing to go out on top . . . But I can’t watch a country slide back. I can’t see progress that folks in Selma marched for 60 years ago, undone by a rogue Supreme Court. So I don’t know exactly what my role will be in the future, but I just will not leave a broken country to my kids or anyone else’s. I will not.
I want to ask you sort of a different question. Let’s say that a popular Democratic governor, who has been elected twice to that job in what many see as one of the reddest states in the country, decides to run for president. What would they offer the American people?
Well, a vision of both reviving the American dream, of proving to people [who] believe the economy is broken that it can work again. That if you work hard and play by the rules that you can get ahead — that you can take your kids on the same vacation that you went on, that you can leave your family better off. That we can fix the darn government that people look at as corrupt right now, and we can heal this divide that is such a threat to our future as Americans. And none of us enjoy — none of us wants to be mad at the person that lives across from us. I think we can get back to being, yes, an imperfect nation, but one that’s stable, [where] at least we are moving toward progress each and every day.
“Don’t mistake kindness for weakness. If I’m Kentucky’s ‘Mister Rogers’ — he went up against Trump before Trump. He went up against a Republican incumbent governor that attacked him every day for four years, and the ‘Mister Rogers’ is the one still standing.”
Right now, polls are showing that Democratic voters want fighters, leaders who are unafraid of punching back against corrupt and MAGA politicians. Some Democratic politicians are resorting to using strong language, dropping F-bombs to get their point across. You, by contrast, have built your political identity on leading with kindness. “Kentucky’s Mister Rogers” is how many people see you. One of your book’s chapters is titled “Be the Adult in the Room.” So I wonder if you think there’s room for that kind of politics in the party and America today, coming in the wake of Donald Trump.
Don’t mistake kindness for weakness. If I’m Kentucky’s “Mister Rogers” — he went up against Trump before Trump. He went up against a Republican incumbent governor that attacked him every day for four years, and the “Mister Rogers” is the one still standing. A lot of people can claim they’re fighting in different ways from the bluest of states. How many people have sued [Trump] 30-plus times from the reddest of states? How many people speak out against him when it could negatively impact their approval rating instead of positively impact their approval rating?
You know, every day that I stand up for Kentuckians and Americans, every day that I fight back against this administration, I have more to lose than anybody else. But what’s an approval rating worth if you’re not going to use it for something? So there are different ways to fight, and here’s what I’d say to a lot of people: If somebody’s yelling, and you yell back, then nobody can hear a thing. There’s effective ways to defeat that person to fight and win. But shouldn’t we want one that will actually win in the end? And so I think that when people look at who’s fighting in the hardest of places, they see this governor.
The midterms are about six weeks away. What do you think the Democratic Party is getting right, and where do you think it’s falling short?
“What’s an approval rating worth if you’re not going to use it for something? There are different ways to fight, and here’s what I’d say to a lot of people: If somebody’s yelling, and you yell back, then nobody can hear a thing. There’s effective ways to defeat that person, to fight and win.”
I think that they are getting right how hard the world is on American families right now. I hate to use the “affordability” word, because I believe it’s becoming like a political science term. What it really [means] is that your medical bills cost too much. That’s why we forgave $250 million in medical debt here in Kentucky [via executive order]. It’s that your utility bill is going up. It’s that groceries are too much, and my goodness, gas is through the roof. We need to make sure that we’re communicating in terms that the American people communicate in.
You said something at a recent book event that caught my ear, that the Democrats have gone too far on a few things. I’m wondering what those might be.
We went too far on overregulation. We’ve got to protect our environment, we’ve got to protect our workers. But if we make things so onerous, then it takes a long time to accomplish anything. If you believe we need more housing, and it takes that much longer to build housing, then people lose out. If it takes too long to build a factory, you don’t have those jobs that pay the good wages. So we’ve got to have a sense of urgency . . . Democrats have to design our policies in a way to get results, and if we believe truly in something, even if we’re only 80% right on what the policy looks like, understanding if we get it done faster, it benefits more people.
You come from what many observers would call the party’s more traditional wing. Right now, there’s a lot of energy behind progressives like Dr. Abdul El-Sayed of Michigan, and democratic socialists like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Zohran Mamdani. Do you think there’s room in the party for this wide range of political identities?
I think — and you’re not doing it — but I think that the media tries to put everybody in a box to have a narrative. How many people in a Trump plus-30 state that have vetoed every anti-LGBTQ+ bill that [has reached] their desk would suddenly be lumped in as a moderate? And that’s not to suggest I view myself as a progressive. I just — I don’t view myself as either. I view myself as pragmatic.
My job is to stand up for my people and all their rights, live out my faith and to see everyone as a child of God, but [also] to solve problems. And that’s where Democratic governors are. You know, I think that this debate can play out in the House and in the U.S. Senate, where they might have different caucuses. But governors aren’t one of 50 or one of 24 in a party. You’re one of one, and your job, if you’re doing it right, is to get things done, to actually improve people’s lives. So, I can’t be as ideological as someone who votes on the amendment to the rule, right? My job has to be to figure out how to get the best results for our people on each and every day.
Are you worried that Republican attempts to deploy terms like “communist” across the board will hurt the Democratic brand overall?
Oh, I think what the president’s doing is so hyperbolic and so transparent that people see right through it. There is only one elected official in the entire country actively engaged in socialism, and his name is Donald J. Trump.
The definition of socialism is government ownership of the means of production, and he is the only person negotiating a U.S. government interest in a private company. But, you know, what you do is you call people the name that you’re worrying that you are, and so he’s calling people “communist.” So now that he’s engaged in socialism, which he is, what is the difference between that and communism? It is the people in charge enriching themselves, which he and his family are doing. It’s turning the police and the justice system into your own personal force, which is what he’s doing. You see in each and every one of these that the things that Trump is calling people is what he’s actively engaged in.
The House has already left town. The Senate is heading home this week. With the midterms just around the corner, GOP lawmakers are giving up on doing any more legislating and skipping town to try to mobilize their demoralized voters.
TPM’s congressional reporter Emine Yücel has chronicled all the drama for us. Emine joined publisher Joe Ragazzo on YouTube Live at 2 p.m. ET to talk through what Congress has actually done — and failed to do — this session.
This article is part of Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.
As insurgent candidates offering critiques of the Democratic Party won primary after primary in 2025 and 2026, pundits were left wondering: were the Democrats having their own “Tea Party moment”? Back in 2010, the Tea Party was key to securing massive GOP legislative gains, even as its reactionary edge cost the GOP winnable senate seats in places like Delaware and Nevada.
Progressive triumphs in Democratic primaries during president Trump’s second administration might suggest something similar is on the way. Zohran Mamdani beat Andrew Cuomo in the race for New York’s mayoralty, Abdul El-Sayed’s triumphed against establishment pick Haley Stevens in the Michigan Senate primary, and Graham Platner easily dispatched — despite scandals of such magnitude he would ultimately have to withdraw as the party’s general election candidate — Gov. Janet Mills in the Maine Senate primary. Each candidate offered fresher rhetoric, more ambitious politics, and a critique of the Democratic Party, allowing them to edge out — or in some cases destroy — their opponents. Cue the invocations of the Tea Party and questions about whether or not “the Democratic Party might very well be about to explode.”
But comparisons between the Democratic Party’s fresh crop of candidates and the Tea Party do not really stand up to scrutiny. Tea Partiers were motivated by an anti-systemic energy that had deeper roots than the current ire of Democratic voters, and the demographics of the GOP meant the party ultimately embraced a “burn it down” approach to governance. The insurgent left within the Democratic coalition remains focused on conventional liberal issues like human rights, affordability, and taxing the wealthy. New, animating issues for voters — such as ending military funding for Israel and harsher regulation of data centers — still do not see voters anywhere close to the Tea Party’s reactionary fervor to remake, or remove, much of the U.S. government. Democratic voters — and the candidates they elect — may find that current leadership is not fit for their objectives, but replacing a few key stakeholders is a different dynamic from the Tea Party’s anathema towards any Republican interested in “normal” governance.
Susan Collins is very concerned — and she should be. As a politician who has only run for one office in her life and held the same seat for nearly 30 years, the Maine senator is facing a possible loss in what looks more and more like a big blue wave coming in November’s midterm elections. As the rare GOP senator representing a blue state, she should be the first one caught in that undertow. But Collins is a rare creature: a virtual Houdini who has always managed to fend off defeat during tough elections. Whether she will somehow work her magic again is one of the biggest questions of 2026.
At the start of this election cycle, Democrats had two competing strategies about how to beat her. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer was convinced that because more women than men vote in the state and Collins wins most of them, the answer was to find a Democratic woman that closely matched Collins’ profile. So he persuaded the popular Democratic Gov. Janet Mills, 79, to run for the seat. A progressive faction took the opposite approach, believing that a younger, male populist outsider would provide the contrast Mainers were looking for. So they recruited a oyster farmer, Graham Platner. It soon became clear that Schumer’s bet was the wrong one, and that Platner’s persona and message were more appealing. Mills’ heart wasn’t really in the race, and she dropped out fairly quickly. But then, after Platner was forced to withdraw from the race due to credible allegations of sexual assault, he was replaced with another salt-of-the-earth working man type. Troy Jackson, a fifth-generation logger who once served as president of the Main Senate, was well-known in the state and became something of a compromise candidate. Collins is currently trailing Jackson in most polls, although the revered New York Times/Portland Press/Siena poll, released Thursday, showed her with a small lead.
While no one is counting their chickens, the environment appears to favor Democrats. This is the first election for Collins since the Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling, which overturned Roe v. Wade and decades of access to abortion. Since the senator had effectively cast the deciding vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court in 2018, vouching for his mainstream credentials and assuring Americans he considered Roe “settled law,” the case also severely damaged her reputation as a moderate among many Maine voters, most of whom — remember — are women. Collins has since claimed she was “misled” by Kavanaugh, but she has refused to repudiate her vote.
What had once been one of the senator’s selling points — her position on choice — is now a liability. But it doesn’t stop there. According to analysis by Planned Parenthood, Collins has subsequently supported 95% of Trump’s judicial nominees — to be fair, that percentage is roughly on par with her votes in previous administrations — including for anti-choice judges. She has also voted against the Equality Act, which would add sexual orientation and gender identity to civil rights laws, legislation she had previously co-sponsored. For some voters who backed her before, this is a deal breaker.
Collins’ other selling point to Mainers of all political stripes has been her dedication to bringing home pork for the state as the chair of the powerful Appropriations Committee. While that power has been somewhat curtailed by both parties in recent years after revelations of such schemes as former GOP Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens’ infamous “bridge to nowhere,” Collins has managed to keep the tradition going, albeit with a more subtle application.
Throughout the campaign, Jackson has portrayed Collins as a tool of the corrupt GOP swamp, tying her to Trump and the party’s overwhelming corruption. While it’s hard to know how much traction Jackson has been getting on that issue, last week he was handed a gift in the form of a Pro Publica story alleging that Collins engaged in suspicious pay-to-play arrangements via a high-powered Washington lobbyist who is close to her and her husband. (Reporting by the New York Times supported the claim.)
In a nutshell, the former CEO of a defense contractor told the FBI that he created a shell company to hide a $150,000 donation to a super PAC supporting Collins in exchange for her help in obtaining millions in contracts, which he received. There is evidence that she not only knew about it, but worked with others to make it happen. After a preliminary FBI investigation in 2023 didn’t lead to any charges, new evidence was apparently leading the bureau to a larger investigation when the Trump Justice Department quashed it as part of their purge of the agents and lawyers who were working political corruption cases.
Collins maintains she was cleared of any wrongdoing, but there is a big cloud over her head at the exact moment voters are increasingly concerned about government corruption writ large. It doesn’t help that she has enabled Trump and his administration all along the way. She might vote with him less than other Republican senators, but that’s not saying much, since many of them are barely sentient rubber stamps. And Collins certainly hasn’t been a crusader against his unconstitutional usurpation of Congress’ power of the purse, which is only going to get worse now that the president is entering his lame duck period. Among her confirmation votes was one in favor of budget director Russell Vought, the main author of Project 2025, who continues to make the case that Trump has the power and right to cancel congressional appropriations he doesn’t like.
Collins’ big pitch to the people of Maine is her perennial favorite — that she has seniority and power, and that she will use it for their benefit. But she has shown little appetite for using any of it to stop the worst consequences for Maine and the country-at-large. In the end, it may come down to whether Mainers care more about Collins’ record of bringing home the bacon or about saving the country from a malignant administration.
UPDATE: This column has been updated to reflect Graham Platner’s job as an oyster farmer.
The big story coming out of the 2024 election was how Donald Trump orchestrated a realignment of American politics, bringing demographic groups that had long eschewed the Republican Party into the tent. Latinos, Black voters and young people, mostly males, had voted for him and the GOP in larger numbers than anyone could remember, and it was seen in some quarters as a sign that the party was embarking on a thousand-year reign. Conventional wisdom held that Trump was something of a magical figure who had defied the odds, defeated the majority of the legal and political efforts to hold him accountable, and triumphantly returned to power.
Many attributed the president’s success to a new political power on the block — the so-called manosphere, consisting of male podcasters with millions of followers who had enthusiastically endorsed Trump. Many pundits said that Kamala Harris lost the race because she didn’t try hard enough to appeal to these influencers, even though many are heavily misogynistic and wouldn’t have been open to her candidacy in any case. Their juvenile humor and oppositional defiance also happened, incidentally, to be perfectly matched to Trump’s sophomoric style.
However, like transgressive boys everywhere, they have a short attention span; Trump has not turned out to be as fun as they thought he would be. Although anecdotal evidence suggests they have been less fervent followers of the president for several months now, The Wall Street Journal analyzed nearly 70,000 hours of podcasts to see if it was true. What they found was revealing: “Mentions of Trump’s name per hour on conservative podcasts have fallen nearly 70% from their peak in the run-up to the 2024 election.” Many are publicly unhappy with the economy and the war, both of which are seen as broken promises and could account for the decline in mentions, but the hosts are mostly spending their time trashing Democrats like James Talarico, the Texas state representative who is running for the Senate and may just win. (Significantly, the king of the manosphere, podcaster Joe Rogan, is actually a fan of Talarico.)
There are some other big names in the podcasting world, like Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly, who are now openly antagonistic toward Trump, mostly for opportunistic reasons. The pair are among the early crowd jostling for power within the post-Trump right-wing ecosystem. Kelly has railed against the Trump family’s alleged corruption, while Carlson appears to be positioning himself as a presidential candidate, with his iconoclastic takes on a number of issues and increasing talk of a third-party bid. He recently told NPR that Trump should be removed from office.
But mainstream conservative media is still largely on board the Trump train, although Fox News’ firing of Maria Bartiromo for coordinating with the White House — hilarious as the network’s outrage is, considering the cozy relationships between the president and Fox hosts Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham — and its decision to stand against Trump in support of CNN, MS NOW and POLITICO has revealed a schism. The Rupert Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal has also been pulling no punches throughout the second term.
But what of the Republican establishment? Since Trump’s exultant victory in 2024, they have behaved as if he were ordained by God to be America’s reigning monarch, omnipotent and infallible. Republican governors have largely abdicated their own roles as one of the Constitution’s checks and balances, agreeing to give up their own sovereignty to serve his agenda, while the GOP majorities in Congress have proven to be nothing more than trained seals happily signing on to the president’s usurpation of their own power.
Until quite recently, there was no shaking the hold Trump had on the GOP base. They were willing to believe that everything wrong in the country was the fault of former president Joe Biden, and that Trump was left with a massive disaster he had to clean up. The truth, of course, was the opposite.
But you can’t really blame them. Until quite recently, there was no shaking the hold Trump had on the GOP base. They were willing to believe that everything wrong in the country was the fault of former president Joe Biden, and that Trump was left with a massive disaster he had to clean up. The truth, of course, was the opposite. He actually inherited a recovering economy — dubbed “the envy of the world” in 2024 by The Economist — and newfound global respect. If Trump had done nothing and simply continued the policies that were already in place — and then taken credit for them, as he is wont to do — he would be in a different position today. But he surrounded himself with radicals and sycophants, and he believed his own hype. The results have been a disaster.
As Republicans prepare to face the voters in the November midterms, they are finding out that the “magical” Trump mystique was actually luck and hot air. Reality still exists, and it bites. Hard.
As we head into the final month before the election, the polls appear very bad for Republicans. The House majority is almost certainly gone, and the Senate is increasingly in play, something that wasn’t seriously contemplated six months ago. The president’s approval ratings are in the low to mid-30s, and his ratings on the most important issues of the economy and the Iran war are even worse. Gasoline and diesel prices have turned the two big promises Trump made — to lower prices and keep the nation out of wars — into epic failures, and voters are livid.
Suddenly, GOP candidates are running for the hills. Candidates in tight races in battleground and red states — including Mike Rogers, who is running for the Senate in Michigan against Democratic nominee Dr. Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, and Rep. Ashley Hinson, who faces Josh Turek, a Democrat, in Iowa — are saying the Iran war must end. (As the New York Times pointed out, Hinson was among seven House Republicans who recently supported a resolution calling on the president to stop or seek congressional approval for military action in Iran.) Others are scrubbing or downplaying endorsements by or mentions of the presidents on their campaign websites. According to The Washington Post, Mike Beltran, the Republican nominee running against Rep. Kathy Castor, D-Fla., touted on his website earlier this year how he had “stood with President Trump every step of the way.” That language has now vanished, along with photos of Trump and references to “America First.” At least seven other GOP congressional candidates, reported the Post, are doing the same. One Florida Republican. Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar, has even publicly condemned the president for elements of his radical deportation policy.
Historically, this is common. Midterms are notoriously hard on the party in power, and presidents usually take the blame. Often, the approved strategy is for candidates to go ahead and distance themselves from the president, and try to win their races by portraying themselves as independent thinkers who will not rubber-stamp the unpopular majority’s agenda. Whether it’s Bush in 2006 or Obama in 2014, close midterm races almost always feature some version of that same sales pitch. The only exception in recent years I can think of is 1998, when the GOP’s threats to impeach President Bill Clinton over the findings of the Starr Report with regard to his relationship with Monica Lewinsky blew back on them, costing them seats and resulting in the resignation of the House Speaker Newt Gingrich in disgrace.
But this time it is especially jarring considering the fealty Republicans have been required to show their leader — and have willingly given him — until now. That loyalty ended up not helping Texas Sen. John Cornyn, who lost his primary just a few months ago when Trump endorsed his opponent in retribution after Cornyn waited too long to endorse him in 2024. As the midterm campaign has unfolded, it’s belatedly become clear to many Republicans that standing with Trump may be riskier, even among the party’s base, than standing against him.
But they have a problem. The president won’t shut up. To the chagrin of most of his own party, he is insisting on making the midterms all about him. A narcissist to the core, Trump believes that the only way Republicans win in November is if he is out there bragging and blaming and lying as he always does, because that has been the secret sauce that brings out MAGA voters. He has even released a taxpayer-funded propaganda ad — which is illegal — touting his alleged accomplishments.
No one should mistake the Republican retreat from Trump as a full-scale rebellion. Instead, it’s a tepid, last-minute attempt on the part of some desperate candidates to show independence, knowing they may lose anyway — and that the president will say it’s because they didn’t support him enough anyway. The Republican Senate had a chance to take a stand on one of the biggest issues in the campaign, and the one that’s causing the most pain for average voters: Iran. On Thursday they voted down a resolution to end the war. The tally was 50-49. When it comes to putting their votes where their mouths are, it’s clear they will default to Trump as always. Voters, though, are finally seeing through them.
Breaking Down the Different Flavors of GOP Midterms Cope
It’s never a good sign when the Senate Majority Leader suggests the election prospects for his own party look grim. Sen. John Thune (R-SD) admitted in a recent interview that he believes even losing Senate control in the midterms to be a real possibility for the GOP, saying, “I worry about that, for sure.”
Donald Trump is largely responsible for this situation. He’s fully leaned into unpopular policies (building AI data centers, going to war in Iran, launching trade wars with allies, etc.) that have driven up prices, and, despite his dismal approval rating, is insisting there’s no daylight between himself and the rest of the party. As he said at his weird fake midterms convention in Dallas, “Pretend that I am on the ballot.”
Even accounting for all the usual caveats about poll margins, it does seem like the Democrats are on track to have a strong midterms cycle. So Republican candidates are experimenting with different flavors of cope as they look towards Election Day. Nicole and John have tracked some of this in Where Things Stand and The Brief, respectively, so we tried to come up with some handy categorizations. Here’s what we’ve got.
All Aboard the Islamophobia and Red Scare Express
Some red state MAGA loyalists are playing the culture war hits, trying to keep the focus on nonexistent crises rather than any of the issues actually affecting their voters. We’re talking Sharia takeovers, communist creep, and stolen elections. As Josh Kovensky reported earlier this year, Texas Republicans Gov. Greg Abbott, who is running for reelection, and Attorney General Ken Paxton, the Senate nominee, pioneered the strategy of targeting the local Muslim community in their midterms messaging. Abbott spent the summer fighting “a proposed mosque-anchored housing development outside Dallas” and “campaigning against what he calls the imposition of Islamic law,” per The Guardian.
Sen. Tommy Tuberville, the gubernatorial nominee in Alabama, has taken it upon himself to become a foremost critic of Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed, calling him a “TERRORIST” and “RADICAL ISLAMIST” who would “do everything he can to destroy America.”
Other Republicans are red-baiting their hearts out, with Rep. Greg Steube (R-FL) claiming that Medicare for All is a “communist” policy and Rep. John McGuire (R-VA) labeling Democratic immigration policies “crazy communism.”
Self-proclaimed “MAGA warrior” Mike Collins is going for an “all of the above” approach in his Georgia Senate race, promoting xenophobia; pushing 2020 Big Lie conspiracies; and advocating to compensate some people prosecuted for Jan. 6. (Meanwhile, he’s doing little to distance himself from the many racist extremists in his orbit — including in his family.)
Flirting With Criticism
Republicans in swing states and seats are trying to toe the line, breaking with Trump on specific issues, particularly ones germane to their states or districts. They’re leveling targeted criticism and trying to display independence.
So you’ve got midwestern Senate nominees Mike Rogers in Michigan and Rep. Ashley Hinson in Iowa calling for an end to the Iran War, saying soaring gas and grocery prices are harming their voters. Both previously supported the war. Last week, Iowa Reps. Zach Nunn and Mariannette Miller-Meeks even voted to support removing U.S. forces from Iran.
Rogers has also bucked Trump’s AI boosterism, calling for a “national security framework” on the technology and for a one-year moratorium on new construction in Michigan. Sen. Jon Husted (R-OH) has gone further in his reelection campaign, sponsoring legislation to make data centers pay their own utility bills.
In Florida, Rep. María Elvira Salazar used her first TV ad of the general election to warn that Trump will lose Latino voters thanks to his overly aggressive immigration enforcement and mass deportation policies. Salazar, who serves as assistant whip, claims that she risks losing her seat in a district Trump won by 15 points.
Trump Will Always Be Daddy
While most vulnerable Republicans are trying to distance themselves from Trump, a brave few are hugging him tight. Take Eric Flores, who is running in a South Texas district currently represented by a Democrat, and where Latino voters will determine the result. Praising Trump’s immigration policies, Flores told Fox, “When people say that folks are running away from President Trump, I’ll tell you, I’m certainly not doing that. And let me tell you why: Because he has made promises to South Texas, and he has kept them, especially when we look at border security.”
We Don’t Know Him
Probably the funniest genre of response comes from Republicans pretending that Trump straight-up doesn’t exist. As John noted in the Brief this week, several Republicans have stripped mentions of Trump from their campaign websites, including Florida congressional candidate Mike Beltran, Iowa congressional candidate Joe Mitchell, and, most recently and notably, Florida gubernatorial nominee Byron Daniels.
Team ‘We’ll Defy Expectations!’
Despite all indications that Democrats seem likely to take back the House, Speaker Mike Johnson insists Republicans are going to defy history and “grow the majority.”
“It’s a contrast election, and people are making a contrast between common-sense solutions and candidates, and really crazy, which is represented by the other side,” Johnson told Fox News Digital in September. “I am very bullish about the outcome on election night.”
Rep. Ryan McKenzie (R-PA), who spoke at the GOP convention, also predicted Republicans are “actually going to defy the historic trends. Why is that? Because the Democrats are so far left they are totally out of touch.”
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By Allegra Kirkland
[Report]
GOPers Blame Americans’ Data Center Opposition on China
Watching the Super Bowl last winter, I saw a commercial from my local electricity company that seemed a little… political.
Baltimore Gas & Electric (BGE) was trying to convey something to me that seemed tangentially related to bipartisan data center opposition that has been rising nationwide and is especially poignant in the D.C., Maryland, Virginia corridor also known as “Data Center Alley.”
“Private power plant companies that control our power supply are failing to meet demand,” the ad said, with PRIVATE POWER PLANT and CONTROL OUR SUPPLY in capital, neon letters. “When there’s a shortage, prices go up.”
The ad was indirect but — and without speaking to the merit of its intentions — the vibe was pretty obviously trying to leverage public outrage about skyrocketing electricity bills related to energy demands from AI data centers. I was struck by the idea that my electric company would wade in any way into such a charged political issue — a self-interested energy corporation joining hands with riled-up townspeople and climate activists against a common enemy.
If you ask Reps. Jason Smith (R-MO) and John Moolenaar (R-MI), that enemy is the Chinese Communist Party.
Smith, chair of the House Ways and Means committee, and Moolenaar, chair of the House Select Committee on China, sent a letter Tuesday to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and IRS CEO Frank Bisignano blaming American data center opposition on an orchestrated disinformation campaign supported by the Chinese government. Yes, you did read that right.
“This is not an organic grassroots movement,” Smith said of data center opposition. Instead, Chinese-backed nonprofits are being used to “manipulate public discourse surrounding the technological infrastructure necessary to win the AI race.”
Smith and Moolenaar’s proof? An OpenAI report which found Chinese-linked influence over social media content “claiming that data center construction was raising electricity prices.” (It is.) And a report that X, owned by AI mogul Elon Musk, identified 200 bots posting anti-AI stuff on the site. OpenAI found no evidence that the campaign it uncovered influenced public opinion.
Instead, data shows that 58% of registered voters believe data center construction by big companies will do more harm than good, according to a September NPR/PBS News/Marist poll released Wednesday.
Data centers are even more unattractive when they’re local, with 60% of Americans, including 54% of Republicans, responding that they would not be comfortable with a data center in their communities, according to a Pew Research survey published Tuesday. And Pew’s survey also found negative sentiment about data centers increased by 16 points among Republicans between January and August.
This feels like an issue uniting Americans across party lines in grassroots opposition, driven not only by NIMBYism, or even by the documented harms to climate posed by energy-sucking super computers, but also by the desire of the everyman to stand up against entities they believe pose a direct risk to their immediate communities and their pockets.
In attempting to blame anti-AI sentiment on a foreign adversary, Smith and Moolenaar have opted to follow their leader, President Donald Trump, off the “AI opposition is a hoax” cliff.
The president’s contrary positions on AI and data center construction have pushed Republican politicians, especially those facing competitive midterms, to split from Trump.
While Smith and Moolenaar are both up for reelection, they’re in uncompetitive districts ranked by Cook Political Report as solidly Republican. But Ohio Republican Jon Husted is facing backlash to his once-strong support for data centers as he’s locked in a dead heat with former Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH). Other Senate Republicans are pushing to support Husted’s bill focused on shielding people’s electricity bills from data center energy usage hikes. In Texas, Democrats are hoping their early opposition to data centers can help them win statewide office for the first time in more than two decades. And at least 27 states have passed legislation that datacentertracker.com categorizes as “favorable for communities.”
For what it’s worth, Twitter’s former head of corporate communications told Axios all evidence points to data center gripes being authentic, not the product of a “Chinese psyop.”
“If you can get both Greg Abbott and Kathy Hochul agreeing on something,” communications consultant Jim Prosser told Axios, “it’s probably not a Chinese psyop. It’s probably not a mass delusion people are having on these issues.”
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By Layla A. Jones
[Good Posts]
5 Year Plans
no dad, owning a successful lesbian covid conscious bar in western mass was YOUR dream. I’M going to clown school
Who was the anonymous White House source cited in the Politico story Trump is using to justify denying the publication access because the reporting “threatened national security and/or spread falsehoods”?
After effectively shutting down the Kennedy Center when he wasn’t allowed to put his name on it, which culturally significant national landmark is Trump apparently trying to slap his name on next?
Which musician was scheduled to headline a MAGA music festival that ended up getting canceled because it failed to sell more than a handful of VIP tickets?
Answers below
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[Galaxy Brain]
Anti-Vax or Pro Rock?
Campaigning for state auditor in Minnesota, failed gubernatorial candidate and real-life doctor Scott Jensen wants to know why western medicine keeps ignoring the science — from hundreds of years ago. Jensen’s medical license has been challenged for spreading COVID-19 misinformation and he has admitted to “quietly” being a member of America’s Frontline Doctors (AFLDS/AFD), known for its anti-vaccine activism and for its founder, Simone Gold, being involved in Jan. 6. As Jensen told an interviewer, “The notion of electromagnetic powers, of minerals, and rocks, and things like that, that could have curative capabilities, we’ve ignored.”
Given the widespread use of magnetic resonance imaging machines and the countless rock and mineral-derived chemicals used in modern medicine, we’re uncertain who the “we” is here. But sure, Dr. Jensen, go on. “We” would recommend a bong hit first, but know that your views on legalized weed have changed, despite co-authoring a bill supporting legalization in 2019. Not sure what you have against plants, but good luck with your rocks.
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[Words of Wisdom]
Knowing Where You Live is the Robot’s Job Now
“There are a lot of skills that don’t matter. My first confession, I actually don’t know my address.” — Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, the world’s most valuable company
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[No Words]
Maybe This Should Have Been the Strategy All Along
WASHINGTON, DC – SEPTEMBER 19: The White House Briefing room, on September 19, 2026 in Washington, DC. Reporters from MS NOW, CNN and Politico were barred from the White House a day after President Trump said he was banning the three outlets from the property. (Photo by Graeme Sloan/Getty Images)
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Trivia answers: 1) JD Vance 2) The Ford Theatre 3) Kid Rock, of course
This article was originally published by ProPublica, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive their biggest stories as soon as they’re published.
In November 2021, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History opened an exhibit called “The Electric Dr. Franklin,” describing “Benjamin Franklin’s pioneering contributions to electrical science.” The exhibit explained that, prior to becoming an abolitionist, he had enslaved people in his household. “Benjamin Franklin’s remarkable scientific accomplishments were, in part, enabled by slavery,” it declared.
The exhibit speculated that Franklin may have used enslaved people in his electrical research. “Franklin wrote about experiments in which he took shocks and used family and friends in these ways, although he seldom identified who in particular assisted him,” stated the exhibit, which closed in 2025 but can still be found online. “Indentured servants and enslaved people in his household could also have been used, although we may never know for certain.”
It was an eye-catching conjecture: one of the most revered of the Founding Fathers subjecting people held against their will to possibly painful shocks. And it was one of many details singled out for criticism in a blistering 162-page White House report released in July that argued that the museum had fallen victim to an “ideological capture” that “moved the Museum’s mission away from straightforward historical education and scholarship toward an extreme political activism that seeks to transform our country.”
Former President Barack Obama made the remarks Monday at Salem State University, after Trump barred CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from White House grounds because of coverage he described as "fake news."
Speaking with historian Doris Kearns Goodwin at Massachusetts' Salem State University, Obama called freedom from government retaliation against critical journalism a "foundational" issue. — Read the rest
When MS NOW heads to Arlington, Texas, on Saturday, Sept. 26, for “MS NOW Live: Together in Texas,” host Chris Hayes will be stepping into an environment he finds both familiar and necessary. For Hayes, host of “All In with Chris Hayes” and author of “The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource,” gathering face-to-face with his audience isn’t just network promotion — it’s nurturing the one thing he has left in a media environment defined by change.
“I love live events,” he told me in an interview ahead of the event, describing having “a head start” on the live-events model with book tours and podcast live shows. “There’s a great energy that comes from being in a room with people. I think it’s a different energy than anything else, particularly true and truer every day in the increasingly screen-based and mediated world.”
Held at the College Park Center at the University of Texas at Arlington, MS NOW’s day-long fan event brings together 15 of the network’s top anchors — including Rachel Maddow, Lawrence O’Donnell and Jen Psaki — for in-depth conversations with thousands of Texas viewers ahead of the November midterms.
Hayes will arrive in Texas with a deep respect for his viewers, whom he calls “sophisticated and informed” about the issues — from Democratic hopes surrounding state Rep. James Talarico’s Senate campaign to fights over data centers, development and the future of Texas communities. But he will also be bringing a theory of what’s been happening in the Lone Star State over the past several years. Describing the state as, “on its own terms,” perhaps the country’s most successful laboratory for right-wing policy, Hayes said that Texas’ long-running Republican experiment has produced a contradiction: Policies that helped make Texas affordable, fast-growing and attractive to newcomers are also changing the electorate and straining the coalition that built the model in the first place.
Hayes said that Texas’ long-running Republican experiment has produced a contradiction: Policies that helped make Texas affordable, fast-growing and attractive to newcomers are also changing the electorate and straining the coalition that built the model in the first place.
“There [are] certain parts about the Texas model that have genuinely been successful,” Hayes conceded. “Housing is pretty cheap. It’s been pretty fast-growing, and in that cheap housing and fast-growing, it’s a place that’s diversifying, and a lot of immigrants have made a life there.”
But the state’s Republican leadership has to face reality: “If people want to move to Texas, which a lot of people do, then the state’s composition is going to change,” he said. The same in-migration fueling the Texas boom is also, in some measure, quietly padding the GOP’s own coalition. “[The state GOP] have a very ambiguous, ambivalent relationship to that.”
This tension surfaced most recently in the backlash to social-media posts by former Tarrant County GOP Chair Bo French, a candidate for the Texas Railroad Commission, a state agency with a remit that goes beyond its name, regulating oil, gas, alternative fuels, pipeline safety, and surface mining and reclamation. French posted a photo on X after Texas’ upset win over Ohio State showing University of Texas students — many of them South Asian — in the stands, and appeared to condemn a changing, more diverse Texas. Hayes said the response from prominent Texas Republicans, including Sen. John Cornyn and former George W. Bush adviser Karl Rove, was partly about the political consequences of alienating the growing number of South Asian Texans, some of whom may already be conservative or Republican-leaning.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if the people in the photo are Republicans,” Hayes said, referring to the image French criticized. “This is Texas.”
Hayes sees Talarico as a serious test of whether that opening can be exploited into statewide electoral gains for Democrats. “Talarico, I think, is a strong candidate, and I think he’s got a real shot,” he said. Texas Democrats still need “a whole bunch of things to break the right way” to win statewide, he cautioned, calling Texas “the great white whale” of statewide Democratic politics — a state the party hasn’t won in three decades. But this cycle, Hayes argued, offers real structural openings. Ken Paxton, he said, is “a worse candidate” than even Sen. Ted Cruz; he isn’t an incumbent and lacks basic retail political skills. “He’s a real dud on the campaign trail,” Hayes noted, adding that Trump himself may be reassessing his endorsement calculus in real time.
Against that backdrop, Hayes was direct about Republican efforts to turn Talarico’s faith and masculinity into political liabilities. “They are all but calling him a gay slur,” he said of the GOP’s campaign against him, adding that the assault on Talarico’s masculinity “reeks of desperation.”
Hayes did not dismiss the possibility that Paxton and the GOP’s attacks on Talarico could work with some voters, particularly in a polarized environment where campaigns often seek less to persuade than to cement partisan loyalties. “You just need to snap people back to their fundamental, their partisan fundamentals,” he said. A Republican voter who may have doubts about a candidate can still be nudged toward the familiar conclusion: “I don’t really like the Democrat. Those aren’t my people.’”
But Talarico, Hayes suggested, may be better positioned than past Democratic efforts to resist that hyper-partisan reflex. What makes Talarico’s race worth watching this cycle, in Hayes’ framing, is less about the candidate himself than about the structural gap that’s opened up on the other side. He noted that Democrats haven’t come this close in decades: Beto O’Rourke’s 2018 run against Cruz, he noted, came down to roughly “2.3 points” — the modern high-water mark for a statewide Texas Democrat. “Talarico has run a phenomenal race, and he’s a really good candidate.”
While Hayes expects the midterms to dominate the conversation in Arlington this weekend, audience members, he said, often arrive with their own closely held theories about what messages Democrats should use — and what could stop what he called “the desecration of our country” by Donald Trump. He anticipates intense interest in artificial intelligence and the infrastructure behind it, particularly data centers. The issue, Hayes said, has become more salient to his audience in recent weeks as AI tools have visibly improved and communities are increasingly confronting the land, water, power and development demands associated with data center construction.
“The data center issue really gets something deep in people,” he said. “I think Texas is an interesting place for it.”
Along with Georgia and Virginia, the Lone Star State has become central to the national conversation around data centers. It’s become a wedge issue in at least one Texas congressional race — alongside anger over the Trump administration’s attempt, which has been temporarily halted, to build a border wall in Big Bend National Park, and broader frustration with Republican Gov. Greg Abbott. (On Monday, Abbott ordered the state’s environmental regulators to stop approving permits for the construction of new data centers pending an electrical audit.) Hayes compared the reaction to a form of territorial politics. “It’s territorial in a literal physical sense — the ground, your backyard, your community, the park that you love.”
For Hayes, the Texas event is a chance to hear directly from people confronting the physical consequences of the state’s rapid development. The event also offers Hayes an opportunity to put into practice the central concern of his book, “The Sirens’ Call,” which examines how digital platforms commodify attention. MS NOW’s live event asks whether journalism can build something more durable than a click or a fleeting social-media interaction.
“I like people,” Hayes said. “I feel energized by them.” Such direct relationships, he stressed, are the core asset of modern journalism, even as tech platforms continually insert themselves between news outlets and their readers and viewers through algorithm tweaks. “As everything gets kind of disintermediated and chopped and screwed, and the platforms insert themselves between you and the audience,” he said, “what do you have? You have the people that like and respect your work . . . Nurturing that is pretty darn important.”
Last week, we shared news of allegations that Colorado's hands-on congressperson Lauren Boebert was involved in yet another scandal. Both she and one of the three named staffers she was supposedly involved with have denied it.
Boebert calls the accusations "filthy garbage," and she is the expert. — Read the rest
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