In early October, Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican candidate for governor of Ohio, went for a classic “politician on the stump” move: He picked up a kid. Or at least he tried to. Ramaswamy fumbled the boy a bit, producing a clip that quickly went viral on social media. 

The next day, Ramaswamy posted a picture of himself with his son in his arms on social media. It was a cute retort. But many of the responses were ugly — racist attacks against Ramaswamy that drew on anti-Indian stereotypes.

It was the latest example of a broader shift on the right, where Indian Americans and Indian immigrants have become a conspicuous target of online conservative anger.

“The people who had negative stereotypes about Indians in their mind said, ‘Hey, look, the guy can’t even pick up a kid…he can’t even act like a normal American family man,’” freelance journalist Zaid Jilani told Today, Explained co-host Noel King.

Jilani, who recently wrote about the surge in anti-Indian racism for Vox, joined the podcast for a conversation about how he sees the bigotry as rooted in status envy, how Indian Americans and Indian immigrants are responding, and his surprisingly hopeful outlook for the future. 

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

American racism is very interesting, always has been. And there is a type that says, immigrants are dirty, they come here, they’re uneducated, they leach off the government, they’re taking our resources. 

The stereotype of Indian immigrants to America and Indian Americans is people who go to college, people who often have advanced degrees, people who often live in nice neighborhoods, make good money, are family-values people. 

Why do you think these values that seem as if they mesh with what Republicans want are so triggering to people these days? Is it just yes, but they’re brown?

I think that is a component of it. I spoke to one Indian American advocate who told me that Indians and South Asians more broadly are visible minorities, right? If you think about other minorities who are highly successful, that’s not always the case. 

For instance, I think that Jewish Americans have been known since the late 20th century as being a successful minority group, but they’re not necessarily highly visible. You can’t always identify someone. If [Texas Railroad Commissioner candidate] Bo French saw a bunch of white people in the stadium with the Longhorns, I’m not sure he would be picking out who’s Protestant, who’s Catholic, who’s Jewish. But with Indian Americans, they are highly visible.

That being said, I think you have to think about where Indian Americans are in society and the kind of feelings that can create among everyone else. If you look, for instance, at Silicon Valley, the major tech companies, Microsoft, Google — the head of [Microsoft’s] Xbox division is an Indian American woman now.

You have a group of people who I think are in many ways a very micro minority — we’re talking about 1 percent to 2 percent of the United States — visibly rising into so many positions that I think a lot of people have typically associated with white folks. White people generally run the Fortune 500, white folks run the universities, white folks are the most successful doctors and engineers. And that was true for the 20th century. 

But when you start seeing a much larger influx of Asian immigrants, starting with liberalization of immigration laws in the ’60s, but also when there was a rapid growth of the technology sector in the early 2000s, you start to understand a little bit more where the resentment comes from because it’s more, I would say, analogically similar to antisemitism than it is to the racism that Mexican Americans face or the racism that Black Americans face. 

“It’s a much larger anti-globalization backlash on the right, not only when it comes to things like immigration, but also trade and tariffs and restrictions like that.”

It’s not that Indian Americans are necessarily being stereotyped as antisocial, criminal, coming here illegally, so on and so forth. It’s more that they’re being seen as a status threat to a lot of particularly middle-class Americans, people who want their kids to rise to the top of their school, who want their kids to have the corner office. They want their kids to be able to get the most prestigious positions. 

I think in the minds of a lot of these people, not only now does their kid have to compete with all the other normal white kids in their community, they have to compete against the entire world. It’s a much larger anti-globalization backlash on the right, not only when it comes to things like immigration, but also trade and tariffs and restrictions like that.

When you talked to Indian Americans for this piece, what did you hear from them that surprised you?

Probably the most surprising thing was how much pragmatism they responded to all of this with. Nine times out of 10, when you have stories about racism, the victims of racism are outraged — understandably and justifiably outraged. Nobody wants to be mistreated. Nobody wants to be denigrated. They certainly don’t want to see restrictions on the right to immigration, or other things to limit their numbers, which is the end point of a lot of this.

At the same time, I think a lot of the people I spoke to were very upfront. They’re like, “Hey, look, we have found a lot of success in America. We got the golden ticket to be able to come here, for our kids to study here, to be able to really seek these opportunities, but we understand what’s happening in the economy. We understand there’s a lot of people who are struggling and then they see us rising to the top of all these organizations. They see us with our kind of well-ensconced place in the economy. And I think it’s important for us not to flaunt our success that much.” At least a couple people said something to that respect. They almost empathize with the people who were hating on them.

It struck me as such a classic immigrant pragmatism that you see from the first or second wave of immigrants: people who realize that they are newcomers to a society or maybe their parents were newcomers to a society, and that there is a certain level of grappling they have to do with, “Hey, how can we continue to have success? How can we continue to grind and resist this racism, but also not rub it in people’s faces that we’re doing well because the more they do that, the tougher it can be?”

A number brought up Vivek Ramaswamy in the sense that Vivek happened to go on social media and talk about what he felt like were deficiencies in American culture when it comes to studying, when it comes to working hard.

I think that in bringing that up, they were saying that that wasn’t particularly helpful because whatever positive aspects there may be to Indian immigrant culture, we shouldn’t talk about them in ways that denigrate other people because that’s obviously going to rub people the wrong way.

You’re making the point that some of the surge in anti-Indian racism on the right is about status anxiety. I was listening to this podcast that Chris Rufo and Jonathan Keeperman did. These are two influential right-wing activists. They called it “The Indian Question” — a lot of people’s eyebrows shot up — and they seem to be making the argument that it is about status anxiety. 

They also were making less coherent arguments about how it’s un-American to study for the spelling bee, which is what South Asian kids do, and that white kids are more American because they play football, then they go to a party and get drunk, and then they get 1,500 on the SAT. 

I’m not saying any of this makes sense. I’m saying it was fascinating. I’m assuming you watched that exchange. What did you make of that?

There’s a certain level of coping mechanism being deployed there in the sense that they are trying to explain the success of Indian Americans as a deficiency: “Maybe they’re getting to the top schools, but that’s because they’re shut in all day studying.”

But it’s not really true that Indian Americans are necessarily cloistered into unhealthy habits. They’re actually finding success across society. For instance, I’ve tutored kids for five, six years. I just really enjoy working with kids. And something you’ll find with a lot of the Indian American kids, they are actually getting increasingly well-rounded. 

Part of that is because you have to, to have success, to get college admissions and so on and so forth. They almost always play sports. They’re involved in extracurriculars. You’re seeing a lot more Indian Americans go into the arts, into cultural fields, into Hollywood. I think that’s actually a very normal path for immigrants.

I think the first or second wave of immigrants has to be very pragmatic. They have to keep their heads down. They have to grind, study, and their parents encourage them to do the same thing. Indian American parents are always like, “You got to be a doctor. You got to be an engineer. Don’t be foolish and try to be a journalist or go to Hollywood.”

But as they establish themselves, as they build nest eggs, they have a little more breathing room, and so they can do different things. I know that Christopher Rufo, for instance, is an Italian American, and I believe I read one time that he even speaks Italian at home because he really values that culture so much and he wants to raise his kids in that. The first wave of Italian immigrants were no different than that. They cloistered into a few sectors where they felt they could find success that was necessary for their integration into the economy and to get their footing. But now we don’t think of Italian Americans as stereotyped into just a few parts of the country or a few parts of society — we barely notice, unless maybe you notice from someone’s name that there even are Italian Americans. 

What they’re describing about Indian Americans is very normal. It’s actually very normal for first waves of immigrants to cluster in a few areas and then they spread themselves out as they’re able to get that a little bit of breathing room and room to ground to stand on.

Barring a catastrophic midterm polling miss, Democrats are on track to win a majority in the House of Representatives next month. Come the new Congress in January, that will mean a new House speaker — and if all goes to plan, that will be current House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. 

If elected, Jeffries, from New York, will be the first Black speaker of the House. Though Jeffries has been in Congress for nearly 14 years now — and many of those years have been spent in Democratic leadership — he also remains something of an enigma. 

The New Yorker’s Jason Zengerle profiled Jeffries back in May. He spoke with Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram about who Jeffries really is, his path to what would be a historic speakership, and what he really stands for.  

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

In your profile of potential future Speaker of the House Hakeem Jeffries, you start with a story that people might find surprising. And I was wondering if you could tell us said story.

[Jeffries] was in Florida, raising money, which is one of his central responsibilities as a minority leader. And he was being driven to a Democratic donor’s house in Palm Beach. And while he was being driven there, he got an alert on his phone letting him know that Donald Trump had posted a message to Truth Social in which he rehashed a bunch of the 2020 election conspiracies. More significantly, [Trump] had included a depiction of Barack Obama and Michelle Obama as apes. 

Jeffries has this reputation for being a very calm, deliberate, not angry person, oftentimes to his detriment. I think a lot of Democratic partisans wish he would be more angry. But the way he told me the story, he was legitimately pissed off. And he realized that he needed to respond in some way. And he didn’t think that a tweet would be sufficient. 

He wanted to do an Instagram post, and he looked into his aide’s iPhone, and he said, “Fuck Donald Trump.” And as soon as he was done recording the video, I think he started to have second thoughts. And they sent the video up to Washington for a social media team to edit, and he told them, “Let’s bleep out the word fuck.” And for him, it was a smashing social media success.

I was in his office in the Capitol six days later, and he was telling me this story and basking in some of the reflected glory and talking about all the social media love and talking about the real-world love. But then he kind of paused, and he said something like, “You know, but I still haven’t heard from my mom, and I’m a little worried about that.” Which I thought captured him pretty well.

“I don’t think you’re going to see a new Hakeem Jeffries if he’s speaker. I think he’s going to, especially rhetorically, perform the same way he has before.”

Why did you want to start your profile of him with that story? What does it tell us about who this individual is?

I thought it captured the dilemma he faces in some ways, just in the sense that he is this very deliberate, calculated political figure, very conventional. And he is operating in a political space these days that doesn’t really reward or appreciate that approach. 

Oftentimes that approach is not successful. I think he’s trying to adapt to the new rules of the road, and he’s kind of doing it in fits and starts, and sometimes he’s more successful than others. But I still think, even when he is successful, he has some qualms about it. 

How long has Hakeem Jeffries wanted to be speaker of the House?

When he got to Congress, in 2012, he definitely wanted to become a player. He wanted to be in leadership, chair a committee, whatever. He was someone who had his eye on that. 

But at the same time, the Congressional Black Caucus had started to think a little bit differently about what they could achieve in Congress. For a long time, they wanted their members to get chairmanships and things like that, or maybe be majority whip. But by the time Jeffries got there, they started to think that we could actually get a speaker. And his arrival kind of coincided with this realization on the part of the CBC. And I think a lot of CBC members viewed Jeffries as a potential future speaker, and they started to groom him for that. 

Pretty soon after that, Nancy Pelosi started to think of him as someone who would be a good member of her leadership team. And I think by 2018, that’s when it really became apparent that he was going to be someone who could potentially be speaker. 

What does he actually stand for as the most powerful Democrat in the House?

I think, quite intentionally, he doesn’t stand for anything. I think that in some ways has been key to his success. He has managed for the most part to avoid being kind of pigeonholed or put anywhere on the ideological spectrum. He is very critical of the far left of the party, especially the DSA. He views the DSA as college-educated young white people who are coming to Brooklyn and displacing older Black working-class people. 

I was talking to this former Democratic congressional aide and basically asking this person the question you’re asking me: What does he stand for? And this person was trying to explain it and finally just was sort of exasperated, and he said he’s intentionally trying not to stand for anything. He’s sort of like hotel art. He just is, and it’s satisfactory.

We don’t have a lot of case studies for how he manages his caucus because they haven’t been in power. But I think maybe one of the most telling examples was the shutdown, because Democrats were, in a way, the power brokers there. Tell us how Hakeem Jeffries managed that.

That was probably his greatest success as minority leader.  When Trump took office for the second time, especially for those first few months, I think all of the congressional Democrats, and Jeffries especially, were really on their heels. They could not figure out how to deal with this guy and what they were going to do to stop him. Jeffries was even complaining that he didn’t have any leverage. But then he eventually realized that a shutdown would be at least a little bit of leverage. 

The real question was, what was the shutdown going to be about? And there were a lot of Democratic members of Congress who wanted it to be about authoritarianism or corruption. They wanted it to be at all these different issues. And Jeffries was really insistent that we need to make this about one issue, and we need to make it about healthcare. 

The Democrats were the ones who caused the shutdown. And normally, the way shutdowns have worked in the past, it’s the party that causes the shutdown that gets the heat from the public. But this time around, I think because Democrats were so consistent in saying that this is about healthcare, and Republicans were so scattered in their own messaging and their own explanations of what was going on, Democrats’ polling numbers went up, Trump’s and Republicans’ went down, and that was a real victory for Jeffries.

Did that whole incident put Jeffries on the president’s radar in a way that he wasn’t? 

It comes, and it goes. For a long time, he wouldn’t mention Jeffries at all. 

I guess the way to tell if Trump is thinking about you is if he posts about you on Truth Social, and he started to post about Jeffries a lot — all the usual kind of insults he lobs, especially at Black politicians, that Jeffries was low IQ and a thug. But yeah, he does seem to be paying a little bit more to Jeffries now than he was before.

And do we think Jeffries is ready to go toe to toe with the president of the United States if that’s what voters decide he’s to do this November?

In his mind, he’s ready. And I think in his own stilted, rehearsed, steady fashion, he will go toe to toe with Donald Trump. He will talk about affordability, and he’ll talk about corruption, and he’ll talk about the “so-called president.” 

I don’t think it will necessarily be satisfying for a lot of Democratic voters out there and Democratic partisans, but I don’t think you’re going to see a new Hakeem Jeffries if he’s speaker. I think he’s going to, especially rhetorically, perform the same way he has before. But I think it’s going to take him a little while to figure out how to do the job.

Germany has rejected Ireland’s proposal for the EU’s next seven-year budget, despite €159 billion in cuts. And it’s not alone: Governments are divided over where the cuts should fall, while the European Parliament is threatening to block the deal.

Zoya Sheftalovich and Nick Vinocur unpack the backlash and what it means for this week’s EU leaders’ summit.

Plus, Zoya interviews Migration Commissioner Magnus Brunner about Europe’s efforts to curb irregular migration and plans to tighten restrictions on Russian visitors and former soldiers.

And why the influencers expected at this week’s EU summit won’t be showing up after all.

Questions? Comments? Let us know on our WhatsApp here or at +32 491 05 06 29.

Donald Trump verkündet eine „Energie-Waffenruhe“ zwischen der Ukraine und Russland an. Fraglich allerdings ist, was die beiden Länder davon wirklich wissen. Um den heimischen Druck durch steigende Ölpreise abzufedern, lockert Trump zuvor die Sanktionen gegen Russland. Weil er dafür von Wolodymyr Selenskyj kritisiert wird, fordert er, die Ukraine brauche einen neuen Präsidenten. Währenddessen ringen die EU-Außenminister in Luxemburg um ein neues Sanktionspaket gegen Russland. Hans von der Burchard ordnet zusammen mit Rixa Fürsen ein, wie Europa die russische Schattenflotte stoppen will und welche Konsequenzen der Drohnenangriff von Leipzig wirklich hat.

Im Konrad-Adenauer-Haus herrscht derweil Krisenstimmung bei herbstlichem Wetter. Angesichts verheerender Umfragewerte sucht die CDU-Spitze nach einem Ausweg aus dem Tief. Rasmus Buchsteiner analysiert die Strategie des CDU-Präsidiums, das sich in Klausur befindet, und wie Parteichef Friedrich Merz in seiner Position stabilisiert werden soll.

Im 200-Sekunden-Interview warnt Dennis Radtke, Vorsitzender der Christlich-Demokratischen Arbeitnehmerschaft (CDA), vor einer inhaltlichen Schieflage seiner Partei. Er fordert echte Strukturreformen bei Rente und Gesundheit statt reiner Sparprogramme und erklärt, warum die Union dringend Antworten auf die alltäglichen Sorgen der Menschen finden muss.

Das Berlin Playbook als Podcast gibt es jeden Morgen ab 5 Uhr. Rixa Fürsen, Maximilian Stascheit und das POLITICO-Team liefern Politik zum Hören – kompakt, international, hintergründig.

Für alle Hauptstadt-Profis: Der Berlin Playbook-Newsletter bietet jeden Morgen die wichtigsten Themen und Einordnungen. Jetzt kostenlos abonnieren.

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This week on my podcast, I read Swapping money for expertise, a recent essay from my Pluralistic blog about the political economy of “AI” based on theory-free inference.

The need to understand and describe a thing before you could apply “AI” to it is a bottleneck, because it requires programmers to understand how a thing works before they can incorporate it into an “AI” system. Lots of programmers know how to play chess, but far fewer understand the human pancreas, planetary weather systems, or patterns of mineral deposition in the Earth’s crust.

For programmers to apply machine learning to these domains, they need to collaborate with experts who do understand them, who furthermore expect to be paid for this work. The need for expert input into this kind of “AI” represents a significant increase in the wage-bill paid by the programmer’s employer: it means they have to pay for programmers and experts.

Even worse: this kind of “AI” can’t be applied to systems we don’t understand. We can observe far more causal relationships – instances in which A reliably causes B – in the universe than we can explain. There are lots of examples of us operationalizing these observations without understanding them. If you get sick today, your doctor might well prescribe one of the many medicines whose method of action is either incompletely understood or not understood at all. We know that molecule A reliably treats pathology B, but not why, and while that why is the subject of ongoing research, it’s not necessary that the why be known before the molecule can be given to ailing patients.

MP3

On Equity, we debate the impact of data center moratoriums and whether the AI industry has a communication problem.

Fast jede Nacht überzieht Russland die Ukraine mit Drohnen- und Raketenangriffen, um die Zivilbevölkerung zu zermürben. Doch abseits des Terrors aus der Luft kommt Moskau militärisch kaum voran. Die wahre Strategie des Kremls zielt längst auf ein anderes Schlachtfeld: die politische Erschöpfung Europas und der USA.

Im Gespräch mit POLITICO-Reporterin Rixa Fürsen teilt Nico Lange, Direktor des Instituts für Risikoanalysen und Internationale Sicherheit (IRIS), seine aktuellen Eindrücke aus dem Kriegsgebiet. Er analysiert, warum Putin trotz militärischer Stagnation auf einen politischen Sieg hofft und wie die deutsche Furcht vor Eskalation diesen Plan unfreiwillig begünstigt.

Die Folge offenbart die konkreten Konsequenzen westlicher Zögerlichkeit – von verweigerten Waffensystemen bis zum passiven Umgang mit der russischen Schattenflotte in der Ostsee. Ein ungeschönter Blick auf die strategischen Fehler der Bundesregierung und die reale Gefahr, dass mangelnde Entschlossenheit den Krieg am Ende für ganz Europa gefährlicher macht.

Das Berlin Playbook als Podcast gibt es jeden Morgen ab 5 Uhr. Rixa Fürsen, Maximilian Stascheit und das POLITICO-Team liefern Politik zum Hören – kompakt, international, hintergründig.

Für alle Hauptstadt-Profis: Der Berlin Playbook-Newsletter bietet jeden Morgen die wichtigsten Themen und Einordnungen. Jetzt kostenlos abonnieren.

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On his first day back in office in January 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order “restoring freedom of speech and ending federal censorship.” More than a year and a half later, his administration is instead busy using government power to go after speech it dislikes. 

Last year, Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr urged broadcasters to take action against Jimmy Kimmel over his comments following Charlie Kirk’s killing, and in September, Kimmel said the FCC again intervened to stop Kimmel’s late-night show from airing an interview with James Talarico, Democratic Senate candidate for Texas.

Also last month, Trump barred three news outlets — CNN, MS NOW, and Politico — from the White House over their coverage. That ban was quickly blocked by a federal judge, but both CNN and Politico have since been banned from traveling with the press pool on Trump trips.

Outside of the White House, the fight over free speech is also raging on college campuses. In states like Texas, Republican lawmakers have restricted when students can protest and given governor-appointed university boards more say over what gets taught. In 2025, 15 states passed laws that restrict what can be taught or weaken protections for free expression on college campuses.

To break down what all of this means for the state of free speech in the US — and the future of our First Amendment rights — Today, Explained co-host Noel King spoke with Greg Lukianoff, president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE).

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify. 

How would you describe the kind of status of free speech on campus these days?

The status of free speech is in great peril, both on and off campus. I’ve been doing this for 25 years, and it’s about as bad as I’ve ever seen it. 

When it comes to the Charlie Kirk backlash cases, we saw about 90 of them. It’s a remarkably high number. We saw an ex-cop go to jail for 37 days just for forwarding a Trump meme in response to a request to go to a candlelight vigil for Charlie Kirk. It’s not good.

If you look at the last two years, we’ve done so many episodes about free speech concerns. There was Jimmy Kimmel; there’s CNN being banned from the White House. 

There’s student protesters who are protesting what’s going on in Gaza. 

It really does seem like we’re at a moment where so many different types of people claim that their speech is being restricted in so many different types of ways. What is happening in the country?

My worry is I’m very much a small-L liberal. I come from an old ACLU background. That’s where I interned in law school. I went to law school to do First Amendment law. I hyper-specialize in it. This is my passion. 

For most of my 25-year career, you could rely on a civil libertarian aspect of the left and a libertarian aspect of the right that would often agree on almost nothing except for things like freedom of speech. And right now, I think we’ve become all culture war all the time, and we have more of a progressive left and more of a populist right. 

The only way that you show you believe in freedom of speech is by saying, “I hate that guy, but I think you should have freedom of speech.” If you’re saying, “I think my side should have freedom of speech,” that’s just self-interest. That doesn’t even count. 

All the worst people in history wanted free speech for their side. So I’m afraid we’re losing — or maybe even, I hate to say this dramatically, but maybe even have lost it as a shared value as a society.

Well, that’s quite grim.

Yeah. I’m feeling a little grim. 

The Trump administration came into office with a promise. And I remember it sounding something like this: “The woke left went too far. They canceled people. They restricted speech. They got out of control. President Trump is going to come back in, and we are going to restore sanity to the country. And as part of sanity, that will include your right to freely express yourself.” 

How do you square the promise versus what we’ve seen?

I think Trump is constantly frustrating everyone around him by being Trump. I think there probably were people in the administration who were like, “Yeah, we’re going to be pro-free speech.” And then Trump decides to declare — I mean, I think the recent White House press pool case is hysterical in a lot of ways because he had to get his team to give a sort of constitutional justification for why he was kicking out the press pool. But on Truth Social, he’s like, “It’s because of their viewpoint,” which is, by the way, something you can’t do under the Constitution. 

“I’m hopeful for the long-term future of free speech, but in the short term, I’m worried.”

His instincts are very authoritarian. They’re very top-down. So maybe there were people in the administration who, in their heart of hearts, are good on free speech, but Trump isn’t. And it’s the reason why when it came to the new administration, there were a lot of people on the right, but also people on the sort of heterodox left who were like, “Oh, this is going to be good for free speech.”

I was like, “Don’t kid yourself, guys. This is going to be bad.” Although I will say, it’s even worse than I was expecting.

President Trump at some point will be out of office. And what happens then? What do you think? Is there an optimistic scenario where we’re like, “Okay, we’re kind of tired of this crap. Let’s just go back to the way it was in the ’90s”?

It has been cyclical, to a degree. American society gets out of whack, and usually one of the things that does bring us together is that we were lucky enough to have…I’ll just say it, we have a brilliant Constitution. It is unusually clever about human nature, and the Constitution itself — you can have whatever opinion you want about the founders, but it is something to be proud of. And a lot of times those values kind of bring us back together. 

That’s my hope. But another thing I will say about Trump: He has played havoc with my ability to predict anything. So what it’s going to look like over the event horizon of 2028, I hope it will be better, and we will fight like hell to make sure it’s better here at FIRE, but will it be better? I’m not sure, and it definitely won’t be better if we think of free speech as something that belongs to my side, not yours.

One of the reasons why I do have hope for free speech in the long term is that free speech works really well. It’s how you know what your fellow citizens think. It’s how you get ideas out there. It’s how you actually be your authentic self. 

Societies that actually have freedom of speech are always going to have advantages, real and serious advantages, over ones that don’t. So I’m hopeful for the long-term future of free speech, but in the short term, I’m worried.

50.000 bedrohte Stellen bei Volkswagen stehen als Symbol für eine tiefe Wirtschaftskrise in Niedersachsen und der gesamten Republik. Wie lässt sich der industrielle Kern des Landes retten, bevor die internationale Wettbewerbsfähigkeit endgültig wegbricht? Der niedersächsische SPD-Ministerpräsident Olaf Lies liefert in der Talk-Reihe „Let’s find common ground“ von POLITICO die Bestandsaufnahme einer Industrie am Scheideweg.

Im Gespräch mit Gordon Repinski in Hannover warnt Lies vor dem fatalen Druck der Berliner Koalition, in der Krise nur noch auf Umfragewerte zu schielen. Er erklärt, warum das europäische Lieferkettengesetz jetzt zwingend ausgesetzt werden muss und weshalb der ständige Streit um kurzfristige Erfolge das Vertrauen in die demokratische Mitte zermürbt.

Gleichzeitig wächst der Druck von allen Seiten:
Die chinesische Übermacht auf dem Elektroauto-Markt zwingt Europa zu einer strategischen Neuausrichtung jenseits von reinen Strafzöllen. Zudem zeigt der Blick auf den parlamentarischen Umgang mit AfD-Politikern wie Ulrich Siegmund, wie fragil die demokratische Normalität in den Landesparlamenten bereits geworden ist.

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Das Berlin Playbook als Podcast gibt es jeden Morgen ab 5 Uhr. Rixa Fürsen, Maximilian Stascheit und das POLITICO-Team liefern Politik zum Hören – kompakt, international, hintergründig.

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POLITICO Deutschland – ein Angebot der Axel Springer Deutschland GmbH
Axel-Springer-Straße 65, 10888 Berlin
Tel: +49 (30) 2591 0
information@axelspringer.de
Sitz: Amtsgericht Berlin-Charlottenburg, HRB 196159 B
USt-IdNr: DE 214 852 390
Geschäftsführer: Christoph Eck-Schmidt, Carolin Hulshoff Pol, Mathias Sanchez Luna

The President’s self-dealing has been well documented. Do voters care—and will anyone ever pay?

Canadians think America “is toxic and broken and can never be trusted again,” Chrystia Freeland, the former Deputy Prime Minister, tells David Remnick, and they’re seeking allies abroad.

In the weeks and months following Hamas’s brutal October 7, 2023, attack on Israel, and Israel’s devastating campaign in Gaza that followed, the world’s attention turned away from the West Bank. 

Over the past three years, however, the situation in the Israel-occupied territory has worsened as Israeli settlers have carried out more violent attacks on Palestinians.

The attacks can range from acts of daily harassment and trespassing to a major mob assault in the West Bank village of Jalud that overwhelmed Israeli security forces and blocked a displaced Palestinian family from returning home. Last week, Israeli settlers shot and killed a Palestinian man.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has largely dismissed violent West Bank settlers as an issue, blaming the Jalud attack on a “handful of rioters” and referring to settlers as “juvenile delinquents” in a speech to the UN last month, in which he argued that the world should focus on violence committed by Palestinians instead.

But even as he downplays the problem, human rights organizations have documented a record level of Israeli settler violence in the West Bank. The International Committee of the Red Cross has said that such attacks have made everyday life “untenable” for the more than 3 million Palestinians living in the West Bank.

The Israeli settlements are also clearly illegal, as Vox’s Zack Beauchamp explained in September — but that hasn’t stopped them from expanding. 

Ahead of Israel’s elections later this month, settlers have accelerated a campaign of ethnic cleansing with the explicit backing of some Israeli cabinet ministers, led by young militant Jewish settlers that are part of a loose network known as the Hilltop Youth. 

The Wall Street Journal’s Feliz Solomon reported on the Jalud attack and has written about the role of Hilltop Youth in worsening settler violence. She spoke with Today, Explained co-host Noel King about the reality on the ground in the West Bank, the settler groups behind it, and how Israeli officials are responding.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

Tell me about the last three years in the West Bank. What’s been happening?

The October 7 attack really hardened a lot of people’s views in Israel, and that’s played out in the West Bank in a number of ways. 

One is that the government of Benjamin Netanyahu, which has some powerful members who are settlers themselves, became much more overtly supportive of expanding the Jewish settlements. 

The second thing that changed was basically a total breakdown of trust, both between Jews and Arabs, and also between Jews and the state, because a lot of people felt that they were really on their own in terms of security. 

All of this created a really combustible environment. There are more settlers there now. They’re behaving more brazenly, and there’s what a lot of people would describe as a permissive environment of almost total impunity.

What does that total impunity look like? We often hear the term “settler violence.” What does that mean?

There’s really a whole spectrum of violent actions. It’s mostly by younger male settlers. There are some acts of daily harassment, like trespassing on Palestinian property, vandalism, stalking people, blocking roads, and preventing access to resources like water wells. And then on the other end of the spectrum, there are also acts of extreme violence. 

There have been some very serious physical assaults. Settlers throwing rocks with slingshots. Last year, there was a viral video of an elderly woman who was beaten with a stick. She was hospitalized for days. And lately, we’ve been seeing more mob violence where a large group of settlers will raid a Palestinian village. They’ve set mosques and other property on fire. 

Just to be clear, there’s violence by Palestinians too, but we’re really seeing an alarming surge of violence by settlers that’s often unpunished, and increasingly it’s happening when settlers go into Palestinian areas where they’re not supposed to be.

You reported on an attack that happened last week in the West Bank near the Palestinian village of Jalud. Tell me what happened.

Over the summer, some young settlers who are associated with a group called the Hilltop Youth set up an encampment around three houses on the outskirts of the Palestinian village, Jalud, and essentially besieged the houses. They blocked their access to essential goods and harassed the residents until, in late July, they felt so unsafe that they fled.

Two of those houses belonged to the Tubasi family. In early September, Israel’s high court ordered the state to ensure their safe return, and in late September, they tried to go back. We spoke with Wael, who’s one member of the family, and also with their lawyer about what happened when they tried to go back. 

A few dozen [Israeli] security forces were deployed to escort them home in the middle of the night, and when they got there, they found that the house was totally ransacked. They showed us before and after pictures, and the windows were smashed, the doors were broken, electrical wires were cut, and there was just debris all over the place.

When they came inside for the first time in about two months, they were walking through the property looking at the damage with flashlights, and they’d only been there for a few minutes when suddenly they were surrounded by a mob of settlers. They said at first that there were about 50 settlers around the house, and the military later said that there were more than a hundred people that took part in what they called a riot. 

The authorities told the family to take cover deeper inside the house, and they hid inside a stairwell as the soldiers tried to force these settlers to retreat, but they were shouting and throwing rocks at the house, and then, according to Wael, they even started climbing in through the windows. At that point, the authorities told the family to go upstairs, all the way up to the roof and to hide in a corner of the rooftop. 

Wael explained what he saw up there. He was looking down and he saw the soldiers battling it out with this large group of settlers and this thick cloud of tear gas and loud bangs from stun grenades.

“There are more settlers there now. They’re behaving more brazenly, and there’s what a lot of people would describe as a permissive environment of almost total impunity.”

Eventually, the security forces realized that they weren’t getting the situation under control. They had to get this family out of there. They took them back downstairs and outside and put them in a military vehicle, but then the settlers surrounded the vehicle and they were rocking the car. They slashed the tires so that [the family] couldn’t leave. Then the soldiers had to move them into an armored military vehicle and eventually they got them out. 

A short while later, not long after they had escaped, they started receiving video messages from some of their neighbors that showed what happened after they left, which was that their car and their house had been set on fire.

All right, so the Israeli authorities in the form of soldiers were trying to help this Palestinian family legally return and settlers violently blocked them. This is settlers versus the authorities. What do we know about who these settlers are and what is motivating them?

This was a very large group. We know of three people who were detained in this incident. All of them were teenagers. The youngest one I believe was 15 years old. 

A lot of the harassment in this area comes out of a nearby settlement called Esh Kodesh and smaller, more informal settlements around it that are called outposts. And these outposts are usually pretty crude encampments. They often start with just tents or a camper van or a trailer with no electricity and no water. And the people who choose to live in these places tend to be very young, very extreme ideological settlers.

You mentioned something called the Hilltop Youth. Who are they?

The Hilltop Youth is a loose network of settlers that live outside the mainstream, and they often have much more extremist views than the mainstream settler movement. It’s an offshoot of religious Zionism, which is one of the main ideologies of the settler movement, and it sort of fuses the ideas of Orthodox Judaism with ultranationalism. 

The Hilltop Youth take these ideas to the extreme, and I’ve spoken with a bunch of them myself. They believe that they’re on a divine mission to reclaim the Holy Land for Jews, and they’ll cite parts of the Torah and other religious texts that they interpret as empowering them to take the land back and even to use violence. They see it as a preventive type of self-defense, and they see themselves as protecting all other Jews.

These are young people, some of them teenagers. Where are they coming from? Why are their parents not grounding them? How has this been allowed to unfold the way it has?

It’s a good question, and I should say also that not all Hilltop Youth are violent, but a lot of the violence that’s committed by Jews in the West Bank does come from this group, and they come from all over the place. Some of them grew up in the settlements, and then as teenagers, they kind of wandered and they struck out on their own. And then there are others who come from all over Israel. 

A lot of the Hilltop Youth, we’re finding, are kind of troubled kids. Sometimes they’re dropouts from strict religious schools, sometimes they have behavioral issues or ADHD, and they just didn’t really fit in. We heard from some kids who said that they found out about the outposts by word of mouth, like someone at their school had invited them to come for the weekend and they’d come and they’d stay a few days and eventually they’d start spending more and more time there until at some point they’re just living there. 

There are a number of NGOs that recruit young kids to come work as farm hands on agricultural outposts in the West Bank, and some of those are in these areas that are more prone to radicalization. These organizations present themselves as very innocent in that they’re identifying kids that need help and are bringing them to a place where they will learn some discipline and they will have a purpose and they’ll have something to do. But that often puts them into a more extreme environment.

In the case of the family you profiled in Jalud, it’s clear that the Israeli authorities, in the form of soldiers, attempted to help the family get back to their home. How does this typically play out, though? How do Israeli soldiers typically respond when settlers attack Palestinians?

There have been a number of high-profile examples of video footage circulating that appears to show Israeli soldiers either standing idly by or even, some would argue, siding with the settlers. 

In one recent example, there was a video that showed some soldiers praying alongside settlers who had besieged the home of a Palestinian American man, and that was actually not very far from where the Tubasi house is. The military said that it was looking into it to determine whether disciplinary action needed to be taken. 

In general, military officials acknowledge that this violence by settlers is a big problem, and the security establishment definitely does not support what’s happening here. They see it as getting in the way of counter-terrorism efforts and overall efforts to bring stability to this very volatile area. 

I’ve heard this directly from military officers, but on the ground there does seem to be a breakdown of discipline in some cases and a lack of clear instruction in other cases. Some soldiers simply don’t know how to deal with threats from other Israelis, especially really young ones, as you pointed out. It’s just not what they’re trained to do.

Do you think the government could put a stop to these attacks by settlers if it wanted to, or has the government lost control?

This problem has gotten so big that it’s going to be very difficult to solve without significant backlash, but I have spoken with a number of former Israeli security officials who say yes, much more could be done — starting with a more frank acknowledgement of what’s happening, clearer law enforcement procedures, and more disciplinary actions.

Ein drohender Linksruck in der Hauptstadt sorgt für handfesten Ärger auf Bundesebene. Während SPD und Grüne in Berlin ernsthaft mit der Linkspartei sondieren, blickt Friedrich Merz mit Sorge auf eine mögliche Regierende Bürgermeisterin Elif Eralp. Welche radikalen Forderungen im Raum stehen und warum der Antisemitismus-Streit in der Linken die Regierungsbildung zur Zerreißprobe macht, analysiert Maximilian Heimerzheim.

Beim Dauerbrenner Rentenreform verhärten sich die Fronten zwischen Union und SPD zusehends. Ein neues Sherpa-Treffen soll nun klären, ob das Rentenpaket aufgespalten wird oder langfristig gar ein Renteneintrittsalter von 70 Jahren droht. Rasmus Buchsteiner ordnet ein, welche Kompromisse der Kanzler bis Weihnachten erwartet und wer in den Verhandlungen auf der Bremse steht.

Im 200-Sekunden-Interview spricht CSU-Forschungsministerin Dorothee Bär über das europäische Kräftemessen im All. Parallel zum Staatsbesuch von Bundespräsident Frank-Walter Steinmeier und Emmanuel Macron in Bordeaux erklärt sie, wie sich Deutschland in der Raumfahrt behaupten will und warum Europa beim Flug zum Mond mehr Selbstbewusstsein gegenüber der NASA braucht.

Das Berlin Playbook als Podcast gibt es jeden Morgen ab 5 Uhr. Rixa Fürsen, Maximilian Stascheit und das POLITICO-Team liefern Politik zum Hören – kompakt, international, hintergründig.

Für alle Hauptstadt-Profis: Der Berlin Playbook-Newsletter bietet jeden Morgen die wichtigsten Themen und Einordnungen. Jetzt kostenlos abonnieren.

POLITICO Deutschland – ein Angebot der Axel Springer Deutschland GmbH
Axel-Springer-Straße 65, 10888 Berlin
Tel: +49 (30) 2591 0
information@axelspringer.de
Sitz: Amtsgericht Berlin-Charlottenburg, HRB 196159 B
USt-IdNr: DE 214 852 390
Geschäftsführer: Christoph Eck-Schmidt, Carolin Hulshoff Pol, Mathias Sanchez Luna

Five years after the height of the Covid pandemic, how much better prepared is the EU for the next health crisis?

Host Sarah Wheaton is joined by POLITICO health reporter Helen Collis and global health expert Michel Kazatchkine to discuss the mysterious death of a worker at a Russian anti-plague institute, and what it tells us about international health cooperation and transparency.

They look at what became of Brussels’ post-Covid ambitions — from the EU’s HERA health-emergency authority to better coordination of research — and at Donald Trump’s push to bring down US drug prices by putting pressure on Europe to pay more.

Plus: As Brussels tries to compete with the U.S. and China on biotech and new medicines, is it focusing on the innovation patients actually need?

Questions? Comments? Let us know on our WhatsApp here or at +32 491 05 06 29.

They have fun names like Feel Free, Smurphs, and Hazy Tabz. They come in colorful packages and in gummy form. They’re widely available at gas stations, corner stores, and smoke shops across the country.

They’re also highly addictive, largely unregulated, and in the news after they were found near the bodies of two dead University of Mississippi students.

The drugs are called Kratom and 7-OH. The first, kratom, is derived from the leaves of a coffee-like plant in Southeast Asia. When taken in small doses, kratom causes a low-key buzz. In higher doses, the high is described as euphoric. It operates like an opioid — a chemical in kratom called mitragynine binds to opioid receptors in the brain, which leads to that euphoric high. It also can lead to addiction and overdose. 

Social media is full of videos of people trying to kick the drug, with harrowing stories of dependence and withdrawal. 

7-OH is a highly concentrated compound derived from kratom, which dials up both the high and the danger. The drug has caught the attention of US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who warned in a press conference last year that 7-OH was “marketed for children.” 

“They’re gummy bears, they’re bright colors, they’re candy-flavored,” Kennedy said. “This is really a sinister, sinister industry.” In August, federal agencies announced they were taking steps to effectively ban 7-OH nationwide. 

To break down the increasing prevalence of both kratom and 7-OH, what the drugs do, and what to do about them, Today, Explained spoke with Mattha Busby, a freelance journalist who covers drugs and drug policy and who wrote about kratom earlier this year. 

As Busby explains, kratom and 7-OH are “definitely in the zeitgeist. It’s in the news and for good reason. To have these 7-OH gummies just in gas stations is a really potentially problematic thing. Without the drug education alongside it, this drug has just popped up out of nowhere.”

Busby also talked with Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram about the business interests behind the drugs, why they’re a complicated topic for the Make America Healthy Again movement, and how industry lobbyists have teamed up with several Trump administration officials to try to sway the results of regulatory decisions. 

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

Is there an important distinction between kratom and 7-OH? Is 7-OH found in kratom?

7-OH is found in relatively small quantities within kratom, but this businessman, Vince Saunders, who is the self-styled American shaman out of Kansas City, basically figured out how to extract the 7-OH and blow it up into entire pills.

I’ve never tried 7-OH and I’m not interested, just for the record, since I’ve been talking about how I don’t mind kratom, but these 7-OH tablets are uber, uber strong. I think the large number of people that are taking it are using it instead of opioids. And maybe it’s better, maybe it’s not. 

Is 7-OH something you can also easily find at your neighborhood gas station?

Yeah. It’s much the same as the kratom formulations, so you’re talking gummies, little shots, capsules, and the brand names for the 7-OH companies are perhaps even more kind of out there — 7-OHeaven is one. 

It’s certainly not heaven when you’re going into withdrawals.

And do we know that people are? Are people becoming addicted to 7-OH?

People are becoming addicted to kratom and 7-OH. I think the whole thing, the concern originally sprung up with the Feel Free tonics that are like a mix of kava and kratom. And people just got habituated into drinking several of them per day and realized that it’s very unpleasant if they don’t continue to do that on a daily basis.

We have a federal government that loves to police drugs of all sorts. What are they doing about 7-OH? 

It’s this MAHA dilemma, right? Because their ethos is very “natural medicines and freedom.” The idea that this Feel Free tonic, whose owner JW Ross recently gave, or a company related to him recently gave, like $500,000 to the MAHA PAC, and he’s been photographed next to RFK Jr. — he’s perhaps predictably come out on the side of the kratom industry, which is lobbying for a ban of 7-OH. 

RFK Jr. called it sinister and said that it targets children, which it appears to do in some cases with the gummies. There’s kratom gummies too and clearly gummies are an easier way, especially for older people, to ingest the medicine or substance, so we shouldn’t just blame the gummies here. 

But clearly, when you’ve just got packets of these gummies that are called like 7-OHeaven just on the shelf or indeed behind the counter at the gas station, there’s going to be concern about that. 

There are other MAGA figures like Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, who’s got a million-dollar investment in the parent company of Feel Free. There’s definitely this nexus of figures in the government that have got some interest, potentially, or relationships with the kratom industry. And indeed the department when I was writing my Wired story reminded us and readers that everything he’s done is ethical and I’m sure it has been.

We usually think of liberal drug policies as a lefty thing. Markwayne Mullin’s about as right as they come. Are kratom and 7-OH making friends across the political spectrum because there’s a big business opportunity here?

You look at Trump’s executive order on psychedelics and then rescheduling cannabis, and it seems that the right has really seized the mantle and is looking at it from a more libertarian perspective of, “Hey, what happens in a man’s head is his own business.” 

They’re also being probably more business friendly than people on the left would be, so it’s a really interesting moment, especially with RFK Jr. as health secretary.

Trump has spoken at length about the opioid crisis in the United States and how it’s tearing our communities apart and whatnot. Here we have readily accessible opioids at our gas stations. 

Yes, they’re not killing nearly as many people as prescription drugs are. However, they’re a lot easier to get than prescription drugs. Help me understand this administration’s position in relation to what could be a real terror for some people.

They are in the process of banning 7-OH. Last month, the Department of Justice set out an emergency scheduling, so that’s open for comments at the moment. When they ban something, it doesn’t just happen overnight. 

I think by the beginning of next year, it’s quite possible that these 7-OH products won’t be in gas stations and indeed some states have already taken action.

And just to get ahead of any confusion here, 7-OH may be banned from gas stations and probably other convenience stores, but not kratom?

Exactly.

Why one and not the other? Obviously 7-OH is stronger, but you could take a lot of kratom and it might feel like taking a little 7-OH, no?

Absolutely. You just need to take a lot and it’s in powder form. So you need to consume a prodigious quantity of it or drink a bunch of these seltzers. 

I think that they’re not going to ban kratom because there’s an obvious recognition of the good it does for people that are recovering from opiate addictions and that they do have a kind of natural off-ramp, [which] is very unlikely to kill you even though you might take a huge amount. Whereas, if you’re taking like 26 different medications, including a bunch of opioids for your chronic pain, you might die. 

Who do you think wins the argument at the end of the day? We have some strong lobbying forces involved here. You’ve got a lot of people who have come to enjoy or depend on these substances that are, as we’ve established many times now, readily available all over the country. 

Do you think we see fewer or more kratom products in our gas stations and convenience stores in the years to come?

The kratom advocates are a lot more eloquent and suited and booted than the 7-OH folks. What I see is that 7-OH will be forced underground and that kratom will continue its long and illustrious ascent in American culture. 

We do really have a gas station culture in this country, and I wonder if these substances being so available in them is a particularly American thing. You live in the UK. Are gas station drugs a US thing?

It’s an American thing for sure. But you guys take a lot of drugs!

Trade Commissioner Maroš Šefčovič is kicking off his visit to China today — and the stakes are high.

On today’s show, Zoya Sheftalovich and Sarah Wheaton discuss the most important topic on the agenda: Europe’s trade deficit with China. France and Germany are finally on the same page and want Brussels to get tougher on unfair trade. So can we expect results from the meeting?

Next, EU development ministers are meeting in Dublin to discuss the future of Europe’s development policy. But the timing is unfortunate, as governments prepare another round of cuts to the next long-term budget.

Finally, a mysterious death at a Russian anti-plague lab has an unexpected connection to Zoya’s own family.

Questions? Comments? Let us know on our WhatsApp here or at +32 491 05 06 29.

Articles mentioned in this episode:

• EU toughens China stance ahead of Šefčovič’s Beijing visit.
• EU-China trade talks zero in on cars.
• WHO seeks clarity on second pneumonia case in Russia amid plague fears.

Die Brandmauer bröckelt weiter und bringt Friedrich Merz in Bedrängnis. Nach der Wahl von Tobias Rausch von der AfD zum Landtagspräsidenten in Sachsen-Anhalt womöglich mit CDU-Stimmen wächst die parteiinterne Nervosität. Rasmus Buchsteiner analysiert, warum der CDU-Chef die Kontrolle über die Debatte verliert und wie SPD-Verteidigungsminister Boris Pistorius die Situation mit seinem historischen Vergleich anheizt.

Außenpolitisch sucht der Kanzler den Schulterschluss mit dem noch recht neuen britischen Premierminister Andy Burnham. Während er wie ein Auslaufmodell wirkt, reitet der Labour-Politiker auf einer Popularitätswelle und stellt den Brexit offen infrage. Hans von der Burchard ordnet ein, was das Treffen für die europäische Sicherheitsarchitektur und eine mögliche Wiederbelebung des E3-Formats bedeutet.

Im 200-Sekunden-Interview steht die europäische Luftverteidigung auf dem Prüfstand. Nach dem Scheitern des deutsch-französischen Kampfjet-Projekts FCAS sucht die Bundesregierung nach Alternativen. Die grüne Verteidigungspolitikerin Jeanne Dillschneider erklärt, ob ein Einstieg in das Konkurrenzmodell GCAP die Lösung ist und warum die Zeit für eine europäische Eigenständigkeit drängt.

Das Berlin Playbook als Podcast gibt es jeden Morgen ab 5 Uhr. Rixa Fürsen, Maximilian Stascheit und das POLITICO-Team liefern Politik zum Hören – kompakt, international, hintergründig.

Für alle Hauptstadt-Profis: Der Berlin Playbook-Newsletter bietet jeden Morgen die wichtigsten Themen und Einordnungen. Jetzt kostenlos abonnieren.

POLITICO Deutschland – ein Angebot der Axel Springer Deutschland GmbH
Axel-Springer-Straße 65, 10888 Berlin
Tel: +49 (30) 2591 0
information@axelspringer.de
Sitz: Amtsgericht Berlin-Charlottenburg, HRB 196159 B
USt-IdNr: DE 214 852 390
Geschäftsführer: Christoph Eck-Schmidt, Carolin Hulshoff Pol, Mathias Sanchez Luna

The President’s delay in ending Temporary Protected Status for Salvadorans highlights a tension between his nativist agenda and the industries that rely on immigrant labor.

With 28 days until the midterms, polling suggests that Democrats have an excellent chance of taking back the House in November. Flipping the Senate, once considered a long shot, is starting to look realistic. Come November, the party may have majorities in both chambers that will give it far more leverage than in the first half of this Donald Trump presidency. 

If voters entrust them with power, though, how will Democrats use it? Their legislative options will be limited, with Trump still in the White House, but party leadership has gestured at a platform focusing on affordability, healthcare, and investigations into the Trump administration. 

Still, many of the particulars are missing — which Puck News congressional correspondent Marianna Sotomayor says is by design. As Sotomayor explains, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the likely next speaker of the House, will want to present a unified front ahead of the election, which means no infighting over the messy details of policy. The real work can start after they take the House.

To break it all down, Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram spoke with Sotomayor about how Democrats are feeling ahead of the midterms, the prospect of a Speaker Jeffries, and the Democratic to-do list.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

What are the vibes in the House around these midterms?

The vibes, if you ask Democrats, are incredibly strong. If anything, it’s mostly Democrats trying to tell each other, “Don’t oversell how amazing of a night we’re going to have.” Genuinely, in the number of conversations that I’ve been having with strategists, lawmakers, those seeking office themselves, the question isn’t, “Will Democrats flip the House majority?” anymore. It’s “Democrats will flip the House majority. How big is that majority going to be?”

They want to play in deep Trump districts, and they’ve been doing that in Trump +5, Trump +10 districts that he won in ’24. Now they’re like, “What about Trump +21 districts?” And some people are like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, guys, let’s not get too overly excited” because everybody kind of has some PTSD from the ’22 midterms — that’s when Republicans ended up taking up the House. 

[In 2022], Republicans were in the same place around this time where they were like, “Oh my gosh, we’re going to flip 30-plus seats.” And then they only gained a five-seat majority. And we saw how difficult that [majority] was for Republicans, and frankly, it continues to be.

You would think that the Democrats would be trying to sell themselves based on, “Here’s what we’re going to do if we flip the House and the Senate.” But I don’t hear a ton of that. What are this party’s priorities if they take back the House?

You’re totally spot-on. It’s more or less vague. I’m sure Democrats would argue, no, we’re being really specific. And sure, we do know that if they take the majority, there’s three planks, and this is what Jeffries outlined even a year ago, and [Senate Minority Leader Chuck] Schumer, to some extent, has also adopted these planks. They want to tackle affordability, healthcare, and corruption.

Affordability means a number of different things. And the way that Jeffries is looking at it is you have your first 100 hours, your 100 days, and then your first year. And we don’t really know what is going to come up in those 100 days and in the first year, but within those 100 hours, he’s starting to give us some hints. 

There are some issues where they could easily, probably very quickly, pass. Those Medicaid tax credits that are going to expire just in the next couple of months because of the one Big Beautiful Bill, [for example].

You also have the corruption part of this where a number of committee Democrats have been taking notes. It’s like, oh, the Trump admin did that? Okay, going to write that down so I can remember to circle back when we have the majority. 

I’ve been told to expect subpoenas to start being sent out to administration officials, to Cabinet officials, to potential corporations that have cozied up too close to the Trump administration, pretty much after the House majority is declared.

Is it all but certain that Hakeem Jeffries will be Speaker if the Democrats win?

From inside of the Capitol, all that I’ve heard is that he is going to be speaker.

That being said, a number of progressives like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Delia Ramirez, a number of those members are already talking to a number of the progressives who are coming in, who are kind of being a little coy with whether they’re going to vote for Jeffries. 

Their message has been, look, Democrats need to stay united. We have differences of opinions on a number of fronts, but we need to be united, we need to govern, and we can’t get to any of that until we elect a speaker.

I remember Nancy Pelosi didn’t really want to spend the years of Trump’s first term investigating and impeaching, but the nature of Trump forced her to ultimately do that. Do you think Jeffries has learned anything from how his predecessor approached the president? 

To your question about impeachment, it is fascinating to see where House Democrats are right now versus where they were back then. I do not hear “let’s impeach Trump” that much from the 200 and something Democrats that are currently in office. And the reason why is because, one, there is the thinking that, okay, the Constitution says he can only be a two-term president, and probably the Supreme Court’s going to rule that he can’t run again [if he tries]. So let’s not get into that. 

But because Democrats are already thinking, planning, strategizing all of their investigations, I think we should expect possible impeachments against Cabinet officials. [Defense Secretary] Pete Hegseth is a name I keep hearing a lot, because there’s a number of Republicans who are incredibly upset with him. 

Democrats are thinking a little bit more strategically in terms of if we are going to impeach, or if we’re really going to try to subpoena or hold people in contempt of Congress, will we have Republicans backing us up in those certain cases? 

These three planks — affordability, healthcare, and holding the crooks accountable — those could have been the planks in month one or month two of the second Trump term. 

I wonder how much motivation there is in the caucus to take on some of the issues that have come up in the last year or so. ICE comes to mind, Iran, spending billions of dollars on vanity projects around DC, making billions of dollars off of his own name and brand while in office. How much are Democrats pushing for the issues that maybe have struck a chord more recently?

Behind the scenes, actually, they’ve been pushing those things a lot. But my understanding is that Jeffries doesn’t necessarily want to broadcast anything that could show any divisions among Democrats right now. He really just wants to project that Democrats are united on these three issues. 

Everybody else is like, okay, but there’s so many more things that we have to prove, and we should get done and we should show contrast with Republicans moving forward. And my understanding is his idea of it is we will get to those issues after the election. They’re not even worth debating pre-election because first we have to win.

No one is trying to sugarcoat how hard it is going to be to tackle a number of these issues where Democrats aren’t united. And there’s conversations about how the size of the majority affects that, right? Because if you have a bigger majority, that means Democrats flip seats in districts that Trump won by a whole lot. So you’re going to get a lot more centrist Democrats in the caucus. If it’s a smaller majority, that’s really going to help a number of those Democratic socialist candidates coming in have a much stronger voice. 

All of those dynamics are going to be on full display and it all, again, is determinative on what happens in November.

On Equity, we discussed the Trump administration's attempts to rebrand AI.