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.
Fox News is confronting an awkward problem of its own making. Conservative media has spent years teaching its audience to distrust the institutions building artificial intelligence, but now those same institutions are working with Donald Trump and Republicans nationwide to secure billions of dollars in public infrastructure, regulatory favors and political protection to build the physical machinery that makes AI possible. So the network is now trying to discipline a conservative backlash it helped build by recasting public anger as a threat to Trump’s economic agenda and America’s rivalry with China.
The shift was gradual. The network did not simply move from being skeptical of AI to becoming enthusiastic about it. Instead, it changed the question. What began as a story about whether AI was “woke” became a story about whether the U.S. could afford to not dominate its development.
Over the past three years, as Trump’s alliance with tech oligarchs deepened, network hosts have seemingly dropped their culture war suspicion of AI, which at first centered on ChatGPT and accusations that the chatbot, produced by OpenAI, was “woke” and exhibited an “anti-Trump bias.” They have now adopted an aggressive defense of the industrial buildout behind the technology. What began as a moral panic over Silicon Valley chatbots and censorship has turned into a desperate campaign to douse the flames of a conservative grassroots rebellion against AI data centers.
What began as a moral panic over Silicon Valley chatbots and censorship has turned into a desperate campaign to douse the flames of a conservative grassroots rebellion against AI data centers.
When ChatGPT exploded into public consciousness in early 2023, network hosts used its standard culture war playbook to raise the alarm against generative AI. Jesse Watters complained on “The Five” that AI would discriminate against conservatives and said he feared machines would become another mechanism for censorship. Laura Ingraham held up the news that Vanderbilt administrators had used the chatbot to draft a message after the Michigan State shooting as proof that intellectual standards were collapsing. Tucker Carlson, then still on the air, gave Elon Musk a platform to voice apocalyptic warnings about where the field was heading.
For a moment, the right-wing media apparatus seemed positioned to critique AI as an anti-human concentration of corporate power. But when Carlson was ousted only days after the April 2023 interview, he took that strain of populism with him to the political periphery, joining voices like former Trump adviser and podcast host Steve Bannon in expressing sustained alarm over AI from the right.
But as Salon’s Amanda Marcotte has documented, the politics surrounding the technology changed as the money got bigger. Tech companies began pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into data centers. After the federal government’s own assessment estimated that data centers consumed about 4.4% of total U.S. electricity in 2023, and could consume between 6.7% and 12% by 2028, conservative voters who distrust Silicon Valley and resent rising utility bills collided with Trump-aligned officials who want to build the technology and its data centers at breakneck speed. A July Fox News poll found that 70% of Americans opposed data centers being built in their communities. Faced with a genuine populist uprising against corporate extraction, the network seems to have stepped in to perform damage control for Big Tech and the Trump administration.
By August 2026, “Fox & Friends” began reassuring viewers that local opposition was not an authentic community defense but rather a deceptive plot orchestrated by the “far left.” Host Brian Kilmeade suggested that calls to slow down AI expansion could “tank” the economy ahead of the midterms, effectively warning viewers that defending their local water source was an act of economic sabotage. On “The Five,” Greg Gutfeld picked up the same talking point, arguing that Democrats were weaponizing local opposition to AI development as a sneaky way to undermine Trump’s economic numbers. Will Cain’s program has similarly cast local opposition as a Democratic weapon for stirring outrage in swing districts.
Fox reached for establishment gravitas and deployed heavyweights from the national security state like former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to sell the data centers buildout under the banner of “techno-optimism.” Dismissing concerns over sweeping job losses on Monday, Rice framed the issue around international competition. On Fox Business, Larry Kudlow has argued that opposing data centers amounts to promoting China, and Charles Payne has described a New York moratorium as part of a Democratic war on AI. In May, Payne went further on “Jesse Watters Primetime” when he accused Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., of working with the Chinese to kill the American AI industry.
An incident involving businessman and television personality Kevin O’Leary is the classic cautionary tale taught in journalism schools. In May, the “Shark Tank” investor appeared on former Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo’s show promoting his proposed Utah data center when he claimed that local groups and residents opposing it were proxies for the Chinese government. The allegation was subsequently repeated across Fox programming. O’Leary later acknowledged that he had no evidence that the organizations or individuals he identified were funded by China or the Chinese Communist Party. Fox News Media eventually issued an on-air apology.
This campaign to pacify the conservative base culminated in Trump’s direct intervention. Characterizing fears of existential risk from AI as a “hoax,” Trump made it clear that corporate expansion would take priority over local or environmental concerns. After returning from a golf tournament in Illinois over the weekend, Trump openly boasted to reporters at Joint Base Andrews about his late-night dinner with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, illustrating the strange politics of this moment. Anthropic has become one of the most prominent companies arguing that powerful AI systems require safety measures and public oversight. Amodei himself has warned that AI could pose a risk to humanity if developed badly.
On Tuesday, ahead of a scheduled lunch with industry executives to discuss the technology, Trump announced the launch of America.gov, a government chatbot billed as a research tool for public services. “We do not surrender to fears about what technologies will do to us,” he said. “We decide that those technologies will do for us some very, very incredible things.” Using his preferred moniker for AI, the president added. “This kind of innovation in government is just a preview of what is possible with super intelligence.”
Trump’s rhetoric and actions underscore that his role in selling AI to a skeptical public is central. He has dismissed existential AI fears as a “hoax” and made expanding data centers a centerpiece of his agenda. That is why Fox was so quick to abandon the rural and suburban communities facing the real-world fallout from data centers, choosing instead to lecture its audience on the national security duty of surrendering their power grids and backyards to Big Tech.
UPDATE: This column has been updated to include President Donald Trump’s announcement that the government is launching its own chatbot, America.gov.
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.
Earlier this month, the Supreme Court blocked an executive order from President Donald Trump restricting voting by mail in ways that could have thrown the upcoming midterms into chaos. But the White House originally had far more disruptive plans, ProPublica has learned.
According to several people knowledgeable about the discussions, the administration initially floated an idea that would have virtually shut down mail voting: requiring all ballots to be delivered exclusively through certified mail. The proposal — which would have required voters to be home and sign for delivery of their ballots — was ultimately abandoned, after vehement Postal Service objections that it would have been impossible to execute.
Even after the idea fizzled, Postal Service officials were cut out of crucial conversations as the Trump administration moved forward with what became the final executive order, two people familiar with the matter said. Issued in March, its contents came as a shock even to the Postal Service’s lawyers.
Trump’s order would have forced postal workers to serve as gatekeepers, deciding which ballots would be delivered and which wouldn’t. Beyond that, it would have inexplicably handed authority over the plan’s execution to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who has no formal oversight over the Postal Service.
Inside the Postal Service, which is overseen by a bipartisan Board of Governors, deliberations on whether to comply with the order stretched on for weeks. Some board members found it alarming but feared Trump would respond to a direct challenge by trying to fire them, sources familiar with their concerns told ProPublica. Instead, they remained silent, counting on the courts to block the measure.
“The board was being careful how or when it took action, knowing that it might be its last action,” one source said.
ProPublica previously detailed postal officials’ deep concerns with the Trump order. Now our reporting reveals how the order came to be and who was involved in crafting it, as well as the extent to which the White House tried to dictate how mail-in ballots would be processed.
The White House team leading the mail-in voting discussions included J. Brian Sikma, a special presidential assistant who has been involved in other administration election initiatives,
The commerce secretary, Lutnick, served in “an advisory and coordination capacity” in drafting the order, a department spokesperson confirmed to ProPublica.
“President Trump values Secretary Lutnick’s advice on many matters,” the spokesperson said.
In an emailed statement, White House spokesperson Lauren Bis denied the administration had interfered improperly with the Postal Service, an independent agency whose governance structure is specifically designed to protect it from political influence. She said the executive order “added important safeguards to vote-by-mail. These were commonsense measures to protect the security of mail-in ballots and to ensure only Americans vote in American elections.”
Bis also rejected the idea that the certified-mail proposal was “unworkable,” saying this played no part in the administration’s decision “to go in another direction.”
A Postal Service spokesperson declined to comment on the agency’s internal deliberations about the executive order and said it was the Board of Governors’ policy not to discuss them.
He referred ProPublica to an earlier statement by Postmaster General David Steiner that said: “Postal employees take great pride in their responsibility to support the democratic process. We will continue to approach that responsibility with the care, professionalism, and dedication that voters and election officials expect from the United States Postal Service.”
In an interview, Jonathan Smith, president of the American Postal Workers Union, called the Trump administration’s push to revamp mail voting problematic and baseless.
“The ultimate goal was to create chaos and doubt in the vote-by-mail process,” he said. “You’re creating a rule to solve a problem that doesn’t exist.”
The White House first reached out to the Postal Service in the fall of 2025, saying the administration wanted to explore how to improve mail voting.
Trump has long claimed without evidence that mail voting is riddled with fraud, though he frequently votes by mail himself. He’s said the process is “inherently corrupt” and contributed to his defeat in the 2020 presidential election.
Postal Service leaders responded to the administration’s late 2025 overture with recommendations they had been making to local election officials for years. Nearly a third of all ballots in the 2022 and 2024 elections were cast through the mail. Mostly, independent audits showed, the system worked reliably. But at times, ballots got lost or delayed.
Officials with the Postal Service had long wanted election offices to use standardized ballot envelopes with scannable barcodes, logos and other features that would make it easier to separate election mail from other first-class mail. In 2024, a bipartisan bill to turn those recommendations into requirements stalled in the Senate.
When Trump retook the Oval Office, it soon became obvious the White House had other ideas, including requiring ballots to be sent by certified mail.
Doing this could, in theory, erase some security concerns, but local governments would have to pay a higher fee to send each envelope and postal workers would have to conduct millions of identity checks, crippling timely delivery.
“It was just, for many reasons, a terrible idea,” one top Postal Service official said.
The White House backed down, but when the final order was unveiled, postal officials said they were surprised to see it demanded that they implement the envelope changes and ballot-tracking measures they’d recommended in time for the midterms.
The directive also required states to provide the Postal Service with lists of eligible mail voters, which workers would then try to match with ballots before sending them out. Designing a new ballot-tracking system would normally take about a year, postal officials said.
They were particularly concerned with the order’s requirement that Postal Service workers reject ballots for an array of reasons, ranging from outdated voter information to unscannable bar codes. All mail ballots from a state could be rejected if the state refused to provide its voter list.
“That’s not what we do,” a former official involved with the discussions said. “We deliver mail. We don’t decide what goes and what doesn’t.”
Postal Service officials were taken aback that the final order put Lutnick in charge of coordinating with other agencies and the postmaster general in “effectuating all relevant aspects of the implementation.”
Lutnick’s involvement came after Trump had discussed putting the Postal Service under the Commerce Department. At Lutnick’s February 2025 swearing-in, Trump said he thought Lutnick’s “great business instinct” was just what the Postal Service needed. (The postal board fought back, and Trump’s idea of merging the agency into the Commerce Department is apparently no longer on the table.)
Steiner, appointed at Trump’s behest in mid-2025, directed Postal Service leaders to prepare to implement the order. In public statements, he defended the measure and said he would leave it for the courts to decide. At his direction, postal officials began establishing procedures to comply with Trump’s order.
As they started to craft rules, career postal officials, concerned about voter privacy and disenfranchising legitimate voters, attempted to do as little as they could to comply, three people knowledgeable about their deliberations said. They looked for ways to protect workers from having to step out of their traditional lanes.
For example, they proposed having states turn over their voter lists but not requiring Postal Service workers to use them to decide which ballots to send out. When the Postal Service’s lawyer took the idea to the White House counsel, however, it was rebuffed as “not enough,” the former official said.
The White House team made clear that if even one ballot envelope in a batch mailing didn’t match the state list, the entire mailing should be rejected and election officials should be notified. “That means if four addresses don’t align in a mailing of one million, 999,996 other people don’t get their ballot tomorrow,” the former official said.
As ProPublica has reported, staffers found these issues highly troubling. A whistleblower complaint released in August warned that the system designed to carry out the executive order was rushed into being, untested and error-prone.
The final rule — 95 pages spelling out how the agency would carry out Trump’s order — was issued on Aug. 21, less than a month before the first mail ballots were due to go out.
It left many questions unanswered: How would lists of voters be kept updated? How would the Postal Service ensure local officials were able to upload voter information to the agency’s new portal? How could postal officials approve the new ballot envelope designs required by nearly 10,000 voting jurisdictions in just weeks?
“This was going to be a disaster,” the former postal official said.
The Sept. 14 Supreme Court ruling provided a reprieve, but Smith, the postal union president, criticized agency leadership for not stepping in more forcefully. Counting on the courts to halt the order, said Smith, was “a dangerous calculation, and showed a clear lack of courage and integrity.”
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