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To hear President Trump tell it, all Democrats are evil communists. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is fighting against an imaginary Marxist movement. House Speaker Mike Johnson claims America is in an existential battle against communism and that if Republicans don’t win in November, the means of production will surely be nationalized. (Never mind that Trump is literally doing that right now!)

Everywhere they look, Republicans see nothing but radical Marxist socialist communists. It’s like 1954 all over again.

This sort of rhetoric isn’t exactly new — it was popularized during previous generations by the John Birch Society. They’ve long been seen as a fringe, far-right group, but their tactics are making a comeback as Republicans flail to find a message ahead of a midterm cycle that’s shaping up to be pretty grim for them.

Seth Cotlar, a professor of history at Willamette University, studies the history of the right. We connected with him to discuss MAGA’s new Red Scare and how conspiracism has “become a dominant gene” of today’s GOP.

“For me, the problem is when it gets wedded with state power — local or state or federal power,” Cotlar told us.

“If your neighbor thinks some kooky things about communists, that probably doesn’t really have power to harm you,” he added. “It might make them kind of an intolerable jerk, but they don’t have any power to do anything. But when the FBI or the CIA or other institutions that have power think this way, then it starts to have real implications.”

“It’s what Chris Ruffo did with Critical Race Theory, right? ‘If anybody is teaching these books or using these terms, obviously that’s a sign that they are part of some Marxist, international, anti-American, anti-Christian movement. We can’t have people teaching it or assigning these books or using these terms in their classes.’ That’s a big problem.”

A transcript of Cotlar’s conversation with Public Notice contributors Thor Benson, lightly edited for length and clarity, follows. If you’d like to read all of it and aren’t already a paid subscriber, please consider becoming one. This newsletter (and my work in general) is entirely funded by readers, and paid subscribers are why we’re able to keep almost everything we publish Monday through Friday free for everyone.

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Thor Benson

You’ve called out the John Birch Society rhetoric that Republicans have embraced. When did you start seeing this stuff being mainstreamed again?

Seth Cotlar

It’s always been there under the surface. The stuff about communism or socialism is such a standard piece of Republican rhetoric. But the notable thing now is the idea that somehow there’s a real, substantive communist menace secretly embedded inside the federal government, academia, and the churches.

I mean, the Birchers looked at Dwight Eisenhower in 1958 and were like, “I think he’s a commie.” Are you serious? Yeah, they were. But it’s the absurd levels of conspiratorial fantasizing that is the dividing line. Republicans calling people on the left communists or socialists is the oldest kind of rhetorical trick in the book. But it’s this kind of “well-organized, coordinated enemy within” rhetoric that stands out now.

So it’s not just that we don’t like your ideas about the regulation of businesses because we think that can get out of hand and can lead to forms of tyranny. It’s that the reason the Department of Education under Joe Biden was implementing regulations around trans students is that they are part of a global conspiracy to destroy gender and impose communism.

I saw one estimate that at the 1964 GOP convention, maybe 10 percent of the delegates for Goldwater were associated with the John Birch Society. It’s been a component of the Republican coalition for quite a while. It’s just a question of whether it’s a recessive gene or dominant gene.

The way that it’s become a dominant gene, I think, is connected to the generalized conspiracism that has become the predominant rhetorical strategy of the Republican Party today in a way that it really hasn’t been before.

Thor Benson

The level of conspiracism during Trump 2.0 has definitely gotten out of control. Prominent conservative influencers and even members of Congress were talking about how the birthright citizenship decision was going to lead to the end of civilization, for example.

Seth Cotlar

You’re touching on something that is connected to the conspiratorial thinking, which is the apocalypticism of it.

“This one ruling by a court, or the passage of this one bill — all of American civilization and the future of American freedom hinges on it!” As you might remember about Reagan and Medicare, he said we would spend our old age telling our children about what it was like to be free if it passed.

It’s this idea that every single new program or policy implemented by the Democrats, any form of liberalism, is basically just a slippery slope to full on Stalinist gulags. That’s very much a Bircher strategy, where you just collapse all of the complexity around policymaking and the role of the state and make it look like a civilization-destroying force.

They’ve been saying that civilization is on the verge of being destroyed by liberalism since the 1950s. Somehow no one inside the organization ever stops and thinks, “Gosh, it’s been 70 years and civilization hasn’t ended yet. I wonder if we’re wrong.” That thought process never occurs — it’s memory-holed much like apocalyptic religious cults do.

Thor Benson

Is there an explanation as to why this kind of thinking becomes more prominent during certain periods over the last 60 or 70 years? Does it coincide with times when Republicans start to feel desperate? It certainly seems like the party isn’t in a good place right now.

Seth Cotlar

Read more

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The Trump regime is trying to usher in a “Golden Age in Science” where scientific research is run like a Trump family business, artificial intelligence is all that matters, profit is everything, and expertise is for chumps.

Or at least that’s the vision emerging from a new 123-page “Report to the President” from Michael Kratsios, the Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

In a normal administration, you could probably skip over learning about a science policy document — but this is no normal administration, and this is no normal science policy document. Instead, it’s Trump’s attempt to end the actual golden age of science that was kicked off in 1945 with the publication of '“The Endless Frontier” by Vannevar Bush.

Bush, at President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s request, laid out a vision of federal support for science that centered on funding universities to do basic research, saying that as long as those institutions were “vigorous and healthy and their scientists are free to pursue the truth wherever it may lead, there will be a flow of new scientific knowledge to those who can apply it to practical problems in Government, in industry, or elsewhere.”

Kratsios’s report is supposed to be the successor to Bush’s, and even apes the format, but this isn’t really a document about science policy. It’s one about ending science research as we know it in favor of shoveling cash at big tech companies.

While it might be temping to wave this away as an aspirational policy document, Trump has already begun to shift billions in research funds to AI projects and has taken a hatchet to science funding across the board. He’s teed up the shift Kratsios proposes here, and since neither Congress nor the Supreme Court seem inclined to stop him from doing whatever he wants with taxpayer money, it isn’t doomering or hyperbole to say we are staring down the barrel of a world where the only “science” the government intends to support is for-profit tech and defense advancements.

Science for dummies

Part of how you can tell this isn’t a document about science is that you are immediately faced with an absolute wall of business-speak of the worst sort. Did you know we must “tightly couple our science and technology enterprises to ensure that groundbreaking ideas invented in the United States are rapidly prototyped, tested, manufactured, and scaled domestically”? You do now!

That tone isn’t surprising, because Kratsios has no background in science or research. He has a bachelor’s in political science and spent most of his career working for Peter Thiel at Thiel Capital. After a stint in the first Trump administration as Chief Technology Officer, where he also did not do any science, Kratsios was tasked in 2020 with overseeing the Pentagon’s research budget for a brief time, a position that, as the Wall Street Journal put it, “carries a great deal of power in terms of dictating investment allocations.”

He spent the Biden years at Scale AI as “head of strategy,” which you will also note is neither a science nor a research job. But Scale AI has contracts with the Department of Defense and, as the Washington Post wrote in 2023, “has been aggressively pitching itself as the company that will help the US military in its existential battle with China.”

And now you have the necessary background for our new golden age, which is going to be a golden age of taking money away from scientists and universities and giving it to companies like Scale AI.

In a genuinely galling move, Katsios spends a lot of time slamming universities because of “administrative burdens on researchers” and the “well-documented inefficiencies” in academia, the message being that those damn universities waste the time of amazing researchers with paperwork.

Except it’s the administration that is attempting to impose inefficient, unnecessary burdens on those researchers with a proposed Office of Management and Budget rule that would require senior political appointees to approve every science grant and ensure it aligns with Trump’s personal priorities. Researchers would also have to seek prior government approval to attend conferences or publicize their research. And political appointees could terminate any grant at any time if they feel like it.

But when it comes to AI, we’re going to “restore permissionless innovation.” The report proposes to give lucky ducky innovators a pile of cash up front for grants lasting five years or longer, saying “awards should be fully-funded in year one, with all resources earmarked upfront, to minimize administrative burdens and reduce pressure for researchers to generate intermediate results to secure continued funding.”

Yeah, wouldn’t want to have to make the Very Special Tech Bros show results or get money parceled out year by year like the plebes at universities.

The report also proposes that we should have “fast grants” with “simplified applications requiring just a few pages of writing” because that is definitely how science works, just writing a bit off the dome and getting some cash.

Oh, and we should have prizes and challenges, where multiple teams compete. The proposed prizes include incentives like “advance procurement commitments,” which means the federal government agrees to buy whatever is being developed. There’s also “regulatory fast-tracking,” making sure all those great AI thingies don’t have to wait too long to be unleashed on a market.

These aren’t incentives to do science. These are incentives to develop things with tax dollars that you can then sell to the government for more tax dollars.

In the suggestion that might be the most unhinged, the most very opposite of how both government and research work, our new age will include “golden tickets.” That’s where an individual reviewer in an agency — yes, just one person — can “recommend unconventional proposals that may not pass consensus-driven review panels” because somehow this will “surface valuable ideas too divisive for committees and attract higher quality reviewers by empowering them to exercise independent scientific judgment.”

Yes, that’s saying that a random person in an agency should be able to shovel money at some idea even if it can’t pass a review panel, and that the opportunity to do so will attract better employees because apparently all the best minds in science are chomping at the bit to be allowed to unilaterally fund AI research based on their personal vibes.

But that isn’t at all how actual science works, and actual scientists aren’t unhappy about review panels. They work collaboratively, not siloed in some secret race to create the next AI chatbot. A 2020 study by the National Bureau of Economic Research examined whether peer review panels succeed in helping agencies predict which research ideas will best advance science. Peer review was better at finding “diamond in the rough” applicants than a single government program official.

How about that.

Trump always wants a taste

It’s painfully clear that what Katsios is trying to do here is turn the whole of government science research and funding into the sort of “move fast and break things” paradigm that is the hallmark of big tech. That method works to line the pockets of tech executives, but it isn’t science.

There’s a reason the government funds different kinds of research than private tech companies do. What Katsios either fails to understand or deliberately ignores is that the federal government is the main funder of basic research precisely because it can take a long time for it to bear fruit and is not intended to be profitable as such.

“Basic” here does not mean rudimentary or simple, but rather research that is designed to advance scientific knowledge instead of achieving a specific outcome or product. Big tech companies don’t widely fund that sort of research, because it doesn’t make them money. Industry dollars account for only about 20 percent of basic research funding, while the government contributes around 60 percent.

Big tech companies and startups do, however, rely on and benefit from that basic research. A 2019 study found that 35 percent of all patents obtained by venture-backed startups from 1976 to 2016 cited federally supported research. Basic research funded by the NIH contributed to every single drug the FDA approved from 2010 to 2016.

Unlike inventing the next ChatGPT, actual science is slow and iterative. Government funding of research that, on its face, would not appear to lead to any big new invention is actually what underpins those big new inventions.

If the government hadn’t funded research into desert lizard venom, we wouldn’t know about semaglutide, and we wouldn’t have Ozempic. If research scientists hadn’t studied how bees optimize nectar foraging within a colony, we wouldn’t have the algorithm that assigns internet traffic across computer servers.

The report assiduously ignores that a symbiotic, profitable relationship between the federal government, universities, and private companies already exists. Each federal research dollar generates about $1.50 to $3.00 in long-term economic benefits. The $36 billion the government awarded in NIH research funding in fiscal year 2025 generated $94 billion in new economic activity.

Trump’s proposed new golden age is intended to strip those billions from universities, resulting in the dismantling of departments and the shuttering of labs. But Katsios has a plan for that: Universities should just become trade schools to churn out no-show STEM degrees!

“Require universities and community colleges to embed practical technical training and externships into STEM curricula. Let hands-on experience and industry credentials count toward degrees.”

It’s quite the feat to, on the one hand, strip schools of funding for scientific research while simultaneously demanding to control what is taught and, oh, also, colleges need to give degrees to employees at big tech companies just for being employees at big tech companies.

The new golden age would also exacerbate the brain drain Trump’s policies have already caused. Nature found that in the first quarter of 2025, US scientists submitted 32 percent more job applications abroad than in 2024. A March 2025 poll by Nature of roughly 1,600 scientists found that over 1,200 said they were considering leaving the country. Europe is investing $565 million to make it a “magnet for researchers” and provide funding for scientists who relocate.

The new golden age is also about embedding Trump’s xenophobia into the fabric of American science. The report complains of an “over-reliance on foreign students” that “creates a security challenge our institutions are ill-equipped to address” and that a “reliance on foreign talent sidelines American students.”

This is, to put it mildly, nonsense. International students pay far higher tuition and often receive no financial aid. Their tuition dollars are what make it possible for American students to get financial aid.

In the 2023-2024 school year alone, international students contributed $43.8 billion to the US economy and supported over 378,000 jobs. Those 1.1 million international students accounted for only six percent of the total number of students in higher education that year, but were such an economic engine that for every three international students, one job was created or supported.

It’s impossible not to wonder whether part of Trump’s loathing for universities and their leading role in scientific research is that there is no way for him to corrupt the process and make money off it in the same way he can by giving millions and billions to Silicon Valley types who, in turn, give him millions in cash. There’s no way for his children to invest in universities that the government then gives no-bid contracts to, fattening the family’s bottom line, which is pretty much the Trump sons’ current venture capital practice.

Trump and Katsios’s view of science is narrow, cramped, and wrong. We’re not in a crisis, we’re not a failed state. We’ve been a science superpower for decades, and the only thing that threatens that is Donald Trump.

Tech bros are already living high off the hog in this administration. They don’t need any more of our tax dollars. Hopefully this new golden age never comes to pass.

That’s it for today

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"Portland: It's FO time. Buckle up."

On October 3, Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, vowed to avenge a right-wing activist who’d been arrested there the night before. She accused police of discriminating against him based on his “conservative” viewpoint.

But last week Judge Michael Simon called her out for her ”threat and attempted intimidation” of officials in Portland, Oregon, refusing to allow his court to be used as a vehicle to punish a blue state for daring to stare down the Trump administration.

The case highlights the abject disintegration of the Justice Department under the leadership of internet-poisoned ideologues who think Elon Musk’s house of horrors is real life. And yet being terminally online is their Achilles heel, constantly undermining their quest to weaponize government against their so-called enemies.

Civil rights are woke

Under Dhillon’s leadership, the Civil Rights Division has shrunk by about 75 percent and now devotes most of its energy to harassing trans students and attempting to bully election officials into handing over state voter rolls.

But back in 2012, when it was run by people who actually cared about doing the job, the Civil Rights Division sued Portland, alleging a “pattern or practice” of excessive force by local police against people with mental illness.

That lawsuit resulted in a 2014 settlement agreement in which the Portland Police Bureau committed to a set of reforms and ongoing monitoring, supervised by the court.

It was one of many such consent decrees entered into by the Obama and Biden Justice Departments. But during both of his terms in office, Trump has worked to dismantle them. One of then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s first orders of business was attempting to end the consent decree in Baltimore inked after police killed Freddy Gray. And in 2025, Bondi tore up consent decrees with Minneapolis and Louisville entered into after police murdered Breonna Taylor and George Floyd.

“The weaponization of consent decrees ended when I took over this @CivilRights Division,” Dhillon crowed on social media. “Under @AGPanBondi’s leadership, we support our law enforcement and we are terminating outdated consent decrees. Less red tape, more safety!”

But after Trump’s immigration surge, she took a different tack with Portland.

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Crisis monetization

Last summer and fall, the Department of Homeland Security descended on city after city, grabbing non-white people off the streets and deliberately antagonizing residents. The widespread protests were almost uniformly peaceful, but Trump cited sporadic violence as a reason to unleash the military on America’s streets.

On September 27, he announced he was sending troops to "War ravaged Portland" to deal with the massive protests against his deportation dragnet. Over the governor’s objection, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth issued an order to federalize 200 Oregon National Guard troops the next day.

The protests were a magnet for right-wing influencers looking to monetize the conflict by making incendiary online content. One such interloper was Nick Sortor, a self described “conservative journalist” whose entire schtick is to show up and provoke the antifa/Somalis/leftists and then play the victim.

On October 2, he got what he was looking for in Portland, and was arrested after a scuffle with a woman in a chicken costume. The following week he was a guest at the White House, where he brought a flag he claimed to have rescued from the “violence.”

Although Sortor was never charged, his case became an immediate rallying cry for the right … and for the DOJ.

Dhillon’s “FO” post was a retweet of Sortor boasting that Attorney General Bondi had personally called him to guarantee that “The Trump DOJ WILL NOT allow Portland Police to continue to do the bidding of Antifa.”

The suggestion that cops in Portland are taking instruction from antifa is beyond ridiculous. For years protesters have complained about police brutality and PPB’s refusal to block marauding gangs of Proud Boys rampaging in the streets.

Nonetheless, just three hours later, Dhillon posted a letter she’d sent to officials in Portland demanding details of Sortor’s arrest and accusing PPB of viewpoint discrimination in violation of the 2014 settlement agreement.

“Portland: Signed, sealed, delivered!” she tweeted.

By coincidence — or not — that very same day, Judge Karin Immergut was holding a hearing on the federalization of Oregon’s guardsmen. Relying in part on sworn declarations from PPB’s assistant chief and a commander that there was no actual breakdown of the law necessitating federal intervention, she enjoined Hegseth from calling up Oregon’s militia. That injunction was later blocked by the Ninth Circuit, but not before Dhillon had endorsed a call to impeach Judge Immergut, a Trump appointee.

On October 29, the DOJ sent a second letter to Portland with another 22 intrusive demands, such as “staffing data by shift and district since June 1, 2025” and “arrests, stops, and calls data and reports by shift and district since June 1, 2025.” When Portland failed to comply, Dhillon filed a motion to enforce the settlement agreement in Judge Simon’s court on November 24.

Twelve days later, she posted a video of herself denouncing “woke” settlement agreements. (Watch below.)

Trying to force a city to send social workers instead of cops when a mentally ill person creates a ruckus or threatens somebody? This is all nonsense. This is not how we should be making our laws in this country, from DC, from a bunch of woke, liberal law school graduates sitting in offices having not confronted the facts on the ground. And so, whenever we’re dismissing these types of cases, it’s really met with a lot of relief and gratitude from local and state law enforcement.

Irony is truly dead.

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Unclean hands

Portland and the PPB opposed the government’s effort to weaponize the consent decree in support of a conservative “journalist,” and obviously Dhillon’s X account featured heavily in their pleadings.

“DOJ does not have a good faith concern that the City has engaged in a pattern or practice of viewpoint discrimination against journalists. The federal government is the one providing preferential treatment and access to journalists and influencers who share its viewpoints,” the city argued. “The Court need only look to AAG Dhillon’s many social media posts to see DOJ’s true motivation.”

They point out that the settlement agreement only covers police interactions with people having mental health crises, and that when outside groups sought to expand it to cover racial disparities in policing, the government successfully argued that this was outside the scope of the case. But now Dhillon, who scorns the very idea of consent decrees, is trying to leverage the one in Portland to pry loose state police records.

The hypocrisy was too much for Judge Simon.

“The Court denies the United States’ motion to enforce on the grounds that the Court finds by clear and convincing evidence that the United States has brought this motion in bad faith and with unclean hands,” he wrote on Friday.

He pointed to the coincidence of timing with the National Guard case: “To the Court, this reasonably appears to be a not-so-subtle signal from the United States Department of Justice to the Portland Police Bureau that if it continued to assist the plaintiffs in the case of Oregon v. Trump, the United States Department of Justice could make matters quite difficult, burdensome, and expensive for the Portland Police Bureau.”

And he called out Dhillon’s demand to impeach Judge Immergut and her “FO” tweet.

“That is neither language nor tone of a good faith investigation by the United States Department of Justice. Instead, it exhibits all the hallmarks of a threat and attempted intimidation,” he wrote.

In a long footnote, Judge Simon points out that he’s far from the only judge to conclude that, under Trump, the Justice Department has forfeited the presumption of regularity it enjoyed for generations. Court after court has called out the DOJ for its brazen mendacity and lack of candor. Dhillon live-tweeting her every retaliatory move on social media is just the cherry on top.

The judge refused to allow the consent decree, which was meant to protect individuals with mental health issues from police violence, to be perverted to punish the Portland Police Bureau for “discriminating” against a conservative agitator. He accused the head of the Civil Division of seeking to intimidate a federal judge. And, in an order which will certainly become a touchstone for his fellow jurists, he cited the government’s own social media posts as dispositive evidence undermining its in-court claims.

FO time, indeed.

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When Democrats running for office saw a poll released by Politico last week finding that “three in five Americans believe gas prices in their area have risen by more than they actually have,” they surely couldn’t help but smile.

Ignorance and misperception about basic facts have always been a fundamental part of American politics, but now it’s working to the advantage of Democrats for a change.

Not that they need to exaggerate on that score, since the national average for regular gas is now over $4 a gallon — not as high as it was in May, but about a dollar more than it was for most of 2025. After prices fell a bit over the last couple of months, they’ve spiked again, just in time for the home stretch of the midterm election campaign.

Even Republican voters are mad, and they’re blaming the president.

The Washington Post interviewed one man who said voting for Trump was “the worst three mistakes I’ve ever made in my life.” Trump hasn’t kept his promise to lower gas prices, which “have been costing his family an extra $300 to $500 every month for their motorcycle and four cars,” the paper reported. While that may be more than most, the increase since the start of the war has meant tens of billions of dollars in increased costs for consumers.

Even if people are justified in being mad, the politics of gas prices don’t exactly bring out the best in America, either its politicians or its voters. The issue is full of misunderstanding, unfair blame-placing, foolish policymaking, and absurd posturing.

Nevertheless, no president has ever deserved to be hoisted on the petard of gas prices more than Donald Trump. That’s not only because of how he weaponized the issue against his opponents before, but because unlike almost every other president, Trump is actually responsible for where the price of gas is right now.

Signs, signs, everywhere a sign

Gas prices are a unique economic indicator because not only do most Americans have direct experience with them, street corners in every city and town feature giant signs telling all who pass by what the price is.

The price of no other product is advertised so heavily and invasively, and as a nation that loves its gas-guzzling SUVs and pickups, we can’t help but notice when the cost of a fillup goes up.

Voters blame the president, even though he usually has little or no control over the what gas costs. Oil is sold on global markets; though the US is the world’s largest producer (and has been since 2018), the decisions of foreign countries, as well as disruptions from war or natural disaster, will affect the price we pay.

But whenever the price goes up, a few things usually happen.

Immediately, the opposition party blames the president. Candidates start airing ads in which they pretend to fill up their pickups, lamenting the high prices. The public demands that politicians do something to bring the price down. The president claims he’s moving boldly to address the problem. And because he has so few tools at his disposal, he often orders the release of millions of barrels from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, a stockpile that is supposed to be held in reserve should the country face a genuine emergency.

Every president since Ronald Reagan has released oil from the reserve at one time or another in an attempt to bring down prices by increasing supply. Trump released oil from the SPR to counter the supply shock caused by Hurricane Harvey in 2017; then gas prices plunged when the world went into lockdown during covid; then when everyone went back to work, the price spiked again, so Joe Biden released oil from the reserve; and now Trump has been releasing more.

Today, the stockpile is at its lowest level since 1983, and the same lesson goes unlearned at every release: While injecting some supply onto the market can bump gas prices down a bit, the decline is inevitably small, and prices soon return to where they were beforehand.

That’s a story of presidential futility in the face of global market forces. In a better world, the electorate would understand that the president is almost never to blame when gas prices go up, and shouldn’t get credit when the price comes down. But because voter outrage at high prices is so potent — and will inevitably be aimed at the party in power — both parties have an incentive to pretend that gas prices are in the president’s control.

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Trump’s chickens are roosting

There is one exception to the general rule that presidents don’t have much control over gas prices: Donald Trump. He can’t bring them down, but he certainly sent them up.

When he ran for president in 2024, Trump relentlessly blamed Biden for the post-covid price spike. Conservatives slapped stickers on gas pumps with a picture of Biden reading “I did that!”, the Republican Party called it “Joe Biden’s gas hike,” and Trump promised that if he were elected, the price would fall to under $2 a gallon.

Prices did stay low during 2025, following the trend they were already on — and the fact that Trump had nothing to do with it didn’t stop him from taking credit (or claiming that prices were even lower than they were).

But then he made a fateful decision: starting a war with Iran.

Despite being warned by his aides that Iran would respond to his attack by making it impossible for tankers to traverse the Strait of Hormuz, he went ahead anyway. The result was a predictable supply disruption that plunged the entire world into an energy crisis.

Even so, it wasn’t quite as bad as many had predicted. While prices jumped in the first months of the war, oil never topped $200 a barrel as the most dire warnings had it, for a number of reasons including China’s decision to slash its oil imports, reducing pressure on world markets. But now, after a dip following the temporary ceasefire, not only have prices gone back up, but some experts are warning that unless the war comes to a complete end soon, we could be headed for a prolonged period of high prices.

But will the war come to an end soon — say, before November 3? We can’t know for sure, but it looks like Trump is still convinced that if he just keeps bombing, the Iranian government will eventually capitulate. Which means the war will go on, the strait will remain mostly closed, and the energy crisis will continue.

[At this point we should acknowledge that there is one group of Americans who doesn’t care about high gas prices: people who drive EVs, an industry Trump has attempted to destroy. It’s also worth remembering that widespread EV adoption would bring down the price of gas for everyone by reducing demand.]

Unlike at prior times of high gas prices, there is little ambiguity about who is to blame. You don’t have to understand global markets or know the difference between Brent Crude and West Texas Intermediate. There’s a simple story to tell about the price at the pump: Gas prices were pretty low, then Trump started a war, and now they’re high.

That story may not be particularly nuanced, but it’s mostly true. Crucially, even Republicans believe it. In a recent Politico poll, 57 percent of self-identified MAGA voters, along with 63 percent of all voters, said the Iran war is responsible for the increase in gas prices.

There aren’t going to be too many voters who call themselves MAGA and will vote for Democrats because Trump made gas prices go up. But Democrats don’t need them to. It’s enough if the persuadable voters who believed Trump when he told them that he’d bring down the price of everything — including gas — are mad that he broke his promise and decide to send him and his party a message.

In fact, if the Iran war drags on and gas prices stay high, this could wind up being as decisive a campaign issue as Trump’s misbegotten tariffs, his parade of idiotic construction projects, his rampaging incompetence, or his boundless corruption.

Of all the ways a president could tank his political standing and sabotage his party’s chances of success in an upcoming election, few are as straightforward as directly causing an increase in the price of gasoline at the pump. Yet Trump has managed it. He truly is a president like no other.

That’s it for today

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Last Wednesday, the United States announced it had reached an agreement to allow Saudi Arabia to enrich uranium for civilian nuclear use.

Less than 24 hours later, however, Trump repudiated the deal, insisting that Saudi Arabia would first have to normalize relations with Israel. By the end of the week, the administration was in chaos and the agreement was in limbo.

This is hardly the first time that the left hand in the Trump administration hasn’t known what the right hand — or even the left hand — was doing. Trump also last week unilaterally claimed he was reneging on a revenue deal with Canada involving the Gordie Howe bridge between Michigan and Ontario. And earlier this month, after ICE murdered multiple people, the administration said it was halting ICE traffic stops, only to almost immediately reverse the decision at Trump’s behest.

This erratic approach to decision-making is what you’d expect in a personalist dictatorship. Republicans love to tout the unitary executive theory, holding that the president has expansive and unchecked power. But they have implemented that theory under the reign of a man who is bored by policy, violently opposed to listening to anyone who isn’t fluffing him, and lives in a self-contained narcissistic fugue of grievance and ego-wounds.

The result is a regime that is constantly tripping over its own bloated mushroom-like appendages — and a global order in which absolutely no one can trust that the United States will do tomorrow what it promises today.

Betraying the Saudis

The United States and Saudi Arabia have been working on some sort of nuclear deal since 2008. A sticking point has been US objections to allowing Saudi Arabia to enrich its own uranium. President Biden also demanded that Saudi Arabia agree to join the (Trump-launched) Abraham Accords, which would normalize relationships with Israel.

But Saudi Arabia has refused to join the Abraham Accords without a path to Palestinian statehood. And when Energy Secretary Chris Wright announced the final deal last week, recognition of Israel was not in the agreement.

The agreement was a major coup for Saudi Arabia, who received everything they wanted and had to give up little in return. The only thing the US gained, arguably, was boxing Russia and China out of a role in a potential Saudi nuclear program.

Unsurprisingly, many people objected to the agreement. Experts worried the deal would lead eventually to the Saudis developing nuclear weapons, and to a potential arms race in the Middle East.

Trump despises expertise, but he does listen to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has spent his entire career fighting to prevent Arab nations from counterbalancing Israel by developing their own nuclear weapons. And even more than Netanyahu, Trump listens to Fox News, where hosts Brian Kilmeade and Kayleigh McEnany questioned the deal, suggesting Trump had been weaker than (gasp!) Joe Biden.

Stung, Trump rushed to social media to say that the Saudis had to join the Abraham Accords. He additionally insisted that the enrichment deal would somehow involve “no enrichment of material.”

The administration has said on the record that this confused bumbling was not in fact confused or bumbling, and that Trump was always demanding the Saudis join the Abraham Accords. Off the record, White House officials have blamed Energy Secretary Wright for moving ahead without Trump’s authorization.

But the real fault has to lie with the person in charge. Trump does not seem to know or fully understand what his diplomats and cabinet secretaries are doing. More, he doesn’t seem to know or understand what the political ramifications of those actions might be.

Normally, a president would try to gather information from key allies — and ideally from key opponents! — about their views and concerns before taking a huge step like okaying a major treaty or, say, going to war. But Trump is too lazy to bother with any of that. He just blunders ahead, and then, when he gets pushback, he blunders back, or sideways.

That’s how we ended up losing the war with Iran. And it’s how Trump ended up only learning about downsides of his Saudi Arabia deal from Fox News.

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Betraying Susan Collins

There’s a similarly predictable sad shuffle of failure happening with domestic policy.

Earlier this month, ICE thugs hit the streets bloated with new congressional funds and desperate to meet their 2,000 arrest-a-day quota. So incentivized, they killed two men during traffic stops within days of each other: Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston and Joan Sebastian Durán Guerrero in Maine.

Former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem was sacked earlier this year after a series of horrific high-profile ICE murders. Her successor, Markwayne Mullin, told Congress he would approach things differently, with less murder.

“My goal in six months is that we’re not in the lead story every single day,” he initially insisted.

Maine Republican Sen. Susan Collins, facing a tough reelection bid, wanted to be seen as fighting for less ICE murder in Maine too. After the ICE killing in her state, she called for a pause to “non-urgent vehicle stops” — stops which repeatedly across the country have led to ICE agents escalating and shooting people.

Mullin consulted with Collins, and then did as she suggested, pausing vehicle stops until ICE agents received more training. This was not an especially impressive step, and did not address the main problem, which is that ICE agents are an out of control and unaccountable militia whose purpose is to terrorize and dehumanize immigrants and people of color. But Mullin and Collins obviously felt they could claim to have done something.

MAGA, though, wasn’t having it.

Rabid anti-immigrant goons like former Trump advisor Steve Bannon and demoted-for-murderous-incompetence former Border Patrol Commander Greg Bovino whined that Mullin was weak. An immigration enforcement official told the Daily Wire that because of the order ending traffic stops “numbers are down [and] we can’t do shit.”

Mullin reportedly did not tell Trump about the traffic stop pause beforehand — though it certainly doesn’t seem like Trump encourages much policy discussion with his cabinet officers at the best of times. In any case, Trump was enraged that MAGA media was calling him a weak immigrant-coddler, and he rushed to make his tiny fingers tap out his policy pronouncements on social media as usual.

“We CANNOT give up one of I.C.E.’s most important and effective Crime Fighting tools, THE TRAFFIC STOP!” he blared. “Once we do, we are playing right into the criminal’s hands. I.C.E., be judicious, fair and smart, and go back and do your very important job.”

Did Trump know how ICE used traffic stops before Steve Bannon told him they were essential? Does Trump actually care about ICE being judicious or fair? Why does he put periods after each letter of ICE? Some of those questions are easier to answer than others.

One thing is clear, though — ICE policy is chaotic and confused. Some reporting suggests that the agency did not in fact resume traffic stops. One ICE official The Intercept spoke to said, “I follow policy that comes down the appropriate channels … the president says one thing but in reality we all follow established policy.”

On the one hand, if there are fewer vehicle stops and fewer people murdered by ICE agents in vehicle stops, that would be good. But it is not great to know that the armed masked gunmen flooding the streets are being given conflicting commands and then picking the ones they want to follow.

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Governing by meme

Whether looking at Saudi Arabia nuclear policy or ICE traffic stops, it’s clear that Trump is not, to put it mildly, making informed decisions. Instead, political scientist Henry Farrell has argued that Trump’s chaotic governing style is analogous to Hitler’s in the sense that his minions attempt to anticipate his (often contradictory and poorly articulated) whims.

But one major difference, Farrell suggests, is that Trump’s whims are expressed through, and shaped by, garbage social media agitprop.

“Propaganda and policy making [in the Trump administration] are blurred so that one can’t tell where the one ends and the other begins,” Farrell explains. “One of the aspects of Trumpism that is most difficult for people to wrap their heads around is the degree of overlap between the channels that the regime uses to communicate with the public, and the channels that the regime uses to communicate with itself.”

What this means in practice is that policy decisions are planned out and delivered in terms of social media dunks. Thus, Trump’s current trade war with Canada reads like someone trying to win an argument on social media. After Trump imposed preposterous 50 percent tariffs on a range of Canadian goods, officials in Canada revoked an invitation to the opening of the Gordon-Howe bridge between Ontario and Michigan.

Trump responded with a belligerent Truth Social post. “Canada disinvited the United States of America to the opening of the Gordie Howe Bridge, which is fine, considering they are paying substantial TARIFFS to the United States,” he snarked, before stating that he was unilaterally changing the revenue allocation from the bridge.

Originally, the agreement was that Canada would pay for the bridge and then receive all tolls until it had paid back its original investment. But now, Trump declares, “we changed the terms of the Deal so that the United States of America now gets 50 percent of the Profit.”

This is childish and ugly and a disgusting way to treat our neighbors. Farrell’s point, though, is that Trump’s hyperfocus on winning the cheers of right-wing trolls doesn’t just affect his approach to those he sees as enemies or rivals. It also sets the terms for his interactions with his own allies, his own bureaucracy, and his own officials. Cabinet secretaries don’t know what Trump wants because Trump doesn’t know what Trump wants until the administration has done something and right-wing trolls have responded.

The policy-making structure is effectively posting to Truth Social and seeing if the gathered Nazis reply with likes or jeers. If the first, leave the post up. If the second, reverse the policy and chastise your cabinet officials. If you can do neither of those things because losing a war with Iran is not something you can put back in the bottle, bluster and whine about how everyone is unfair to you and how it’s all really Joe Biden’s fault.

This approach means that every commitment, every treaty, every promise, has to be ratified, not by Congress, but by Brian Kilmeade and/or Steve Bannon and/or X’s vile underbelly. No one can trust us — and indeed, as Susan Collins discovered, Republicans cannot even trust each other .

Trump lurches this way and that, committing gross evils through malevolence or negligence or the combination of the two, always insisting he has never changed his mind as he turns on Fox News to find out from some vapid reactionary talking head what he should do in the Middle East today.

The result has been plague, war, murders in the streets, the alienation of core allies, and hundreds of thousands of unnecessary global deaths. It’s clear that Trump will never learn, or attempt to learn, from these past errors. The ludicrous, grotesque, violent failures and evils will continue until he and his band of corrupt meme-ing fascists are at last forced from power.

That’s it for today

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What if I told you that everything that you have been told about transgender issues was a lie? That none of the “just asking questions,” “protecting women’s sports,” and “we can’t afford to pay for their care” arguments were made in good faith?

You were used. Duped. Played for patsies by fascists to get you to hand power to them to deal with a phantom menace that they invented in the first place.

Pete Hegseth’s Department of Defense has argued in federal court that transgender care is an excessive financial burden, citing approximately $5.2 million in annual spending on treatments. Then last week Hegseth issued a directive that all cisgender men 30 and older in the military be tested for “low testosterone” and have access to “testosterone therapy.”

Hegseth’s announcement came in a video on X titled “High-T Department of War” where he promised to ensure “you have the right testosterone levels to operate at your absolute best.” The delivery and tone of the video would have been perfectly appropriate for a 2 a.m. informercial in between Fox News reruns, but it was completely out of place in an address to serious-minded troops.

Hegseth claimed we have “a sacred duty to maintain that [testosterone] advantage,” which raises some questions.

Can only people with high testosterone be lethal? It seems like that would entirely exclude women in the military, which is probably the point. But it also ignores that up to 90 percent of the thousand-plus Russians dying per day in Ukraine are taken out by drones. There are thousands of videos on the internet of Ukrainian first-person-view drones killing Russians, and nobody would ever think of asking about the testosterone levels of the people flying them. For all anyone knows, they could be transgender catgirls with cute little whiskers drawn on their noses sitting in air-conditioned trailers with a game controller a hundred miles from the front.

Then there’s the fact that Hegseth’s new policy sounds suspiciously like gender affirming care — you know, giving hormones to people so their bodies match how they feel about their gender. But that’s something the DoD definitely couldn’t afford for trans people.

There’s also the pesky problem of the DoD testifying in court that transgender people have a serious medical condition that requires them to take hormones, which the military absolutely cannot support logistically or medically. But now, according to Hegseth, he wants guys to be jacked up on testosterone when they’re deployed.

Here’s a little secret: the testosterone Hegseth wants to give to cisgender troops is the same stuff they give to transgender men. And the estrogen tablets they give to transgender women are the exact same ones given to women who have had hysterectomies, menopause, perimenopause, or just want to stop their periods while they’re in the field. So, which is it: taking hormones renders you non-deployable and therefore unfit for military service, or they make you the perfect killing machine?

Oddly enough, Judge Reyes in Talbott v. USA also noticed these contradictions. Last Wednesday, she issued a minute order that both parties must brief her on “the similarities and differences in administering TRT, both medically and logistically, for trans men compared to other service members, including cis individuals.” She also wanted to know how much it was going to cost to give cisgender soldiers this treatment, and “the Department’s basis for treating trans men and other service members differently between this new policy and the Military Ban.”

The bottom line is that if Hegseth didn’t think trans people were icky in general, he would be fine having transgender men in the service. If someone wanted to take his magical super-soldier serum that makes people into muscle-bound roid-raging he-men straight out Warhammer 40k Space Marines, he’d be happy to have a bunch of otherwise “useless” women saying, “Yo, sign me up.”

Then there’s the side effects of taking too much testosterone, which you just know they’ll be over-prescribing. These include infertility and small testicles due to the extra testosterone suppressing sperm production, and gynecomastia (breast development) due to the excess testosterone being converted to estrogen. Which bring up the next logical question: will the military provide chest reconstruction to all the cis guys who developed moobs, but still tell the courts they absolutely can’t afford the same reconstruction for trans men?

Of course they would, and the courts would buy it.

Most transgender people in the military have already been pushed out or are on permanent administrative leave awaiting a hearing. The reason for this state of affairs is that the Supreme Court overturned the injunctions on the ban on their service basically on the basis of “we don’t want to get in the way of the Lord Trump.”

None of the arguments made against transgender people, including those in the military, were made in good faith. They were always designed to ultimately remove transgender people from public life. Conservatives and supposed “moderates” who mask their opinions about trans people in platitudes show us this over and over again now that they believe the demise of the trans community is fait accompli.

Now, with the right merely conducting mopping up operations, some Democratic candidates are echoing the talking points of people who were never well intentioned. With Republicans, you know what you are getting. But it’s hard to tell whether these Democrats are useful idiots or hypocrites who would claim power over the bodies of people who looked to them for protection.

Just this week, five Democratic members of the House voted with Nancy Mace to bar service members and their families from receiving any transition-related healthcare through the military system (known as Tricare). And Ohio Democratic gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton recently said she agreed with a ban on transgender people in sports.

At a minimum, these Democrats seem incurious about whether they have been lied to all along, and unwilling to consider the possibility they’re doing the fascists’ work for them.

That’s it for this week

Have a great weekend and we’ll be back with more Monday.

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It looks like Republicans settled on a talking point about why the SAVE America Act is totally necessary to stop non-citizens from fraudulently voting by the millions and zillions — and you will not be surprised to learn that it is hilariously stupid.

Yes, it’s time to talk about the Olive Garden’s Never-Ending Pasta Pass, the latest thing that Republicans have settled on as justification for the voter ID requirements in President Trump’s signature election suppression bill.

Ground zero for this nonsense seems to have been White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson going on Newsmax last week to discuss how she saw a tweet from Olive Garden about their never-ending pasta deal and that you need ID for it, and she just got to thinking, “Olive Garden takes pasta pass security more seriously than Democrats take election security.”

Republican House members dutifully picked up and parroted this nonsense, with Rep. Steve Scalise appearing on CNBC to give his deep thoughts, Rep. David Kustoff racing to Newsmax to share the good news about pasta security, and Rep. Virginia Foxx going on the House floor to push this as a reason to vote in favor of the bill.

This isn’t new, of course — well, the pasta part is, but not Republicans alighting on some random thing they think you need ID to buy and then declaring that should mean you need one to vote.

Trump has spent several years telling people that because you need an ID to go to the grocery store, you should need an ID to vote, and he recently expanded this keen analysis: “All we want is voter ID. You go to a grocery store, you have to give ID. You go to a gas station, you give ID.”

Of course, you do not need an ID to go to a grocery store or get gas, but you can understand Trump’s confusion given that he’s probably never done either of these things for himself.

Rep. Bryan Steil no doubt thought he’d hit on a big old gotcha by sharing, during a floor debate on the SAVE Act earlier this year, that he went to buy beer and the clerk carded him, even though she knew him and even though he is 44, so therefore we need voter ID: “I think it’s nuts that we protect our beer in this country more than our ballots in jurisdictions.”

The problem for Steil, of course, is that laws vary widely across the country as to how we “protect our beer,” just as they do for our ballots.

There are so many ways these arguments are wrongheaded that it is impossible to know where to start. But we’ll give it a shot.

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There’s no constitutional right to penne

The simplest — and biggest — reason that requiring an ID to buy pasta or groceries or gas or beer, or anything really, is not the same as requiring an ID to vote is that buying pasta or groceries or gas or beer is not a sacred Constitutional right that shall not be abridged. Voting, however, is. We have, like, multiple constitutional amendments about it.

The Fifteenth Amendment, passed after the Civil War, extended the right to vote to Black men, though that right was largely theoretical until the modern civil rights era abolished the many strategies states used to keep Black people out of the voting booth. The Nineteenth Amendment extended the vote to women. The Twenty-Fourth Amendment banned poll taxes — one of those many voter suppression strategies. The Twenty-Sixth Amendment lowered the voting age to 18.

The government can’t impose conditions that severely burden your right to vote. In contrast, Olive Garden is allowed to deny or abridge or entirely cancel your access to pasta.

However, in 2008, the Supreme Court upheld an Indiana voter identification law as constitutional, opening the floodgates for similar laws, with 36 states now requiring some form of identification. Put another way, that ruling stands for the idea that at least some ID requirements are not too burdensome on the voter.

So with that, why can’t Trump, via the SAVE America Act, impose a nationwide voter ID requirement?

Republicans who are pushing pasta pass arguments deliberately avoid saying what types of identification are acceptable under the SAVE America Act or what the Act really does. Instead, they do everything to make it sound like as long as you have your driver’s license in your pocket — the same license you’d whip out to get unlimited pasta — you’re totally fine for voting.

Except that is very much not the case. The SAVE America Act isn’t just a voter ID law. It’s also a “documented proof of citizenship” law. The former has to do with what you bring to the polls, but the latter is much more complicated and is about how you register or re-register to vote.

The SAVE America Act does not seem to require mass re-registration, so if you are already registered and haven’t moved, you would just be subject to the photo ID requirement at the polls. But even if you already live in a state with a voter ID law, it would override what types of identification you could present at the polls.

Some states currently accept things like hunting licenses or student IDs or concealed carry permits or government employee IDs as proof of identity at the polls, along with the more typical things like driver’s licenses and passports. But under the SAVE America Act, only a driver’s license, state identification card, passport, military ID, or tribal ID would be allowed, period.

The real problem comes in at the registration stage. A huge number of people register or re-register each election period. In the two years prior to the 2020 election, 91 million people registered or updated their voter registration. In the two-year period before the 2022 midterms, 70 million did, and there’s no reason to think there wouldn’t be similar numbers for the 2026 midterms and the 2028 presidential election.

So let’s say you kept your driver’s license in your pocket after going to Olive Garden and decide to trundle on down to your local election office and update your registration because you moved since the last election. Were the SAVE America Act to pass, when you get there, you’ll find that your license alone doesn’t work, because your license doesn’t prove you are a citizen.

So along with your license or other government-issued photo ID, you also have to provide a citizenship document: a certified birth certificate, a record of birth extract, an adoption decree showing you were born in the United States, a consular report showing you were born abroad, a naturalization certificate, or an American Indian Card.

Not only that, but your government-issued photo ID and birth certificate or similar document must match, so if you changed your name upon marriage, as 84 percent of women do, you’re out of luck. The proposed law doesn’t really say what people are supposed to do in that situation, save for vaguely leaving that bit up to the states. So, one state could decide that if you bring your license, your birth certificate, and your marriage certificate showing the name change, you’re good, and another could decide that isn’t enough to prove citizenship.

But surely if you have a Real ID, that would be fine, right? Nope. Only five states issue Real IDs that show proof of citizenship. Military ID? Only with service records showing you were born here. Valid, unexpired US passports can be used, but 149 million American citizens don’t have a passport.

Additionally, the bill would functionally eliminate most of the existing ways people can register or update their registration. Depending on the state, people can currently register or update their registration online, via mail, or in person. People also get registered via voter registration drives. The bill mentions only mail registration and explains that those who register by mail still have to bring proof of citizenship documents in person to finalize their registration. It’s likely that would also apply to online registration and registration drives. States that automatically register people to vote when they obtain driver’s licenses would be required to have election officials verify citizenship separately, which is pretty much the opposite of automatic registration.

You can quickly see what a mess this would be, not just at the start but during every election cycle. People move. They get divorced and change their name. They don’t vote in a couple of cycles and fall off the voter rolls. Every election cycle would include tens of millions of people needing to show up in person at election offices with their citizenship documents and have underfunded election staff verify their citizenship.

But your friendly local election staff are likely not secret citizenship document experts. What happens when you show up with your license and your certified birth certificate from a different state than you are currently registering in? Will all election workers have some sort of comprehensive understanding of what certified birth certificates look like in all 50 states? How about determining whether an adoption decree is real or valid or even what it is supposed to look like?

And for states that have same-day registration? Poll workers would have to verify citizenship documents on the fly in the midst of a busy election day. Poll workers, however, are not generally full-time election officials, but rather people hired just for the election itself. In Minnesota, which is a same-day registration state, it takes 30,000 election judges for each election.

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The hassle is the point

What the SAVE America Act won’t do is solve the problem of noncitizen voting, because that is not really a thing. Study after study after study shows it is vanishingly rare. Even the Heritage Project database of “election fraud,” which pretty much exists to get bills like SAVE passed, only shows 100 instances of non-citizens voting — no, not per year, or even per election. One hundred total instances in the last 25 years. There’s no problem to be fixed.

What the SAVE America Act actually would accomplish is deterring eligible voters, as we saw when Kansas passed a proof-of-citizenship law in 2011 and, when it went into effect in 2013, over 31,000 eligible voters were barred from registering.

There is no question this is designed to suppress the votes of those who tend to vote for Democrats. Roughly 26 percent of young people (ages 18-29) move each year, versus 13 percent for the population overall. Almost half of Black voters under 30 do not have an ID reflecting a current name and address. Only about 20 percent of Americans who make under $50,000 have a passport. About 69 million women who changed their names upon marriage don’t have a birth certificate that would match the name on their current government photo ID.

But the bill would also affect people who tend to vote Republican. Rural voters who once were able to register by mail would have to trek to an election office, which might be significantly far away (this is the reason Alaska Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski opposes the bill). Blue state residents are more likely than their red state counterparts to have a passport, and Republican women change their name upon marriage at much higher rates than Democrats.

In reality, however, this discussion misses the point.

In making it vastly harder to register or re-register, the SAVE America Act makes civic participation something that feels onerous and complicated, and that is intended. The Trumpian project relies on people not caring what happens to the country, on them feeling like their vote doesn’t matter.

It’s tempting to characterize the SAVE America Act as a solution in search of a problem, but it is far more insidious. It’s meant to be the problem.

An overall sense of voter apathy is the desired outcome here, in both red and blue states. It’s an attempt to devalue one of our most important civic acts, to send the message that voting simply isn’t worth the hassle.

Additionally, by placing a huge burden on state and local election officials, one that will inevitably result in long lines and infinite frustration, it sends a message that the government can’t do anything right, can’t get things done.

In the end, Republicans are right about only one thing: voting should actually be as easy as going to the Olive Garden.

That’s it for now

We’ll be back this afternoon with a new episode of the PN Pod, and a special Saturday edition of the newsletter will drop tomorrow.

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“We are holding Canada responsible for the fact that they are not properly maintaining their Forests, and Brush therein, and the United States is being unnecessarily invaded by filthy, polluted, and unhealthy air, the quality of which is dangerous, and totally unacceptable!” Trump screeched on social media Friday afternoon.

If only Canada knew how to rake the forests like the Finns!

It was a typical Trump post, signifying nothing … or possibly a new trade war.

Two days later, Trump watched the World Cup finals in New Jersey along with his co-hosts, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney — both of whom managed not to photobomb the winning Spanish team. En route home, Trump stopped to insult the nation that routinely sends firefighters to the US during wildfire season, along with their leader.

“It went good, but I told him, you got to stop these fires from coming in and poisoning our air,” he told reporters at Joint Base Andrews, adding that “maybe they should pay us some damages or something, or we should do some tariffs. But it was terrible. I mean, you had businesses closing.”

On Monday, he announced a new round of tariffs on Canadian exports … but said they had nothing to do with the wildfires.

The White House put out three proclamations imposing an additional 50 percent tariff on a sprawling list of Canadian goods, citing our northern neighbor’s "discrimination" against American cars, alcohol, and cheese.

The legal basis is a hundred-year-old statute most commonly associated with the movie Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and, before that, the Great Depression. And if courts let him use it the way he’s threatening, he’ll be free to wreak havoc on the global economy.

Anyone, anyone …

Last year, Trump careened back into office erratically barking out tariff commands.

The Constitution vests the tariff power in Congress, but the president insisted it had actually been permanently delegated to him by the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, better known as IEEPA. In February, the Supreme Court finally said he didn’t — although not before letting him illegally collect upwards of $100 billion from American businesses.

In dissent, Justice Kavanaugh sniffed that there were plenty of other statutes Trump could use instead of IEEPA, such as Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, Sections 122, 201, and 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, and Section 338 of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930.

“The supreme court (will be using lower case letters for a while based on a complete lack of respect!) of the United States accidentally and unwittingly gave me, as President of the United States, far more powers and strength than I had prior to their ridiculous, dumb, and very internationally divisive ruling,” Trump responded.

That very same day he announced a raft of new tariffs under Section 122, a law which refers to “balance of payment deficits,” something which was only possible in an era when other countries pegged their currencies to the dollar and the dollar was pegged to gold — which ended in 1971.

Trump gamely pretended that “balance of payment deficit” and “trade deficit” were exactly the same thing, but in May the Court of International Trade ruled that his tariff scheme under Section 122 was also illegal. The Federal Circuit Court has once again allowed Trump to keep collecting these tariffs during the appeal process, even as the administration is still working through the backlog to grudgingly refund all the illegal IEEPA levies.

Meanwhile, Trump’s aides have moved down the list to the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, the one that bored Ferris Bueller’s classmates and which is widely blamed for turning a bad recession into the Great Depression.

The law was named for Republican Sens. Reed Smoot and Willis Hawley and signed into law by Republican President Herbert Hoover, despite a petition from more than a thousand economists warning that it would damage the US economy. Which it did. But, among the congressional delegations of tariff power, it’s the one that comes with the fewest constraints.

Where Section 301 requires an actual investigation with findings on the record by the US Trade Representative, Section 338 merely requires the president to “find as a fact” that a foreign country is discriminating against US commerce. And, unlike Section 122, which caps out at 15 percent and 150 days, Section 338 has a 50 percent ceiling and no time limit.

Some legal scholars have suggested that Section 338 was effectively superseded by trade legislation Congress passed in 1962 and 1974 and is therefore defunct — which would explain why it hasn’t been touched since 1949. That question was never tested in court, though, because nobody tried to invoke this cursed provision for more than 70 years. Presumably the Supreme Court will weigh in with its signature alacrity, possibly in time for the 2028 election.

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What the tariffs actually do

When Trump’s illegal “Liberation Day” tariffs under IEEPA went into effect, only two countries passed retaliatory tariffs of their own: Canada and China. In 2025, US automobile exports to Canada dropped by 22 percent, and provincial governments in Canada yanked American liquor off the shelves.

Ottawa’s defensive maneuvers in the last trade war are now being used to justify the US attack in the current round. The motor vehicles proclamation points to Canada's own retaliatory surtax on US cars as proof of “discrimination” against US exports, and then uses it as justification for levies on a basket of totally unrelated goods.

The new tariff scheme imposes an additional 50 percent import duty on a vast array of Canadian products — everything from whisky and cheddar to cement, hockey sticks and skates, furniture, jewelry, and industrial electronics. And unlike the previous levies, there’s no carve-out for products covered by the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA).

In his first term, Trump tore up the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which had the whiff of Bill Clinton on it, and negotiated the USMCA in 2020. The delta between the two treaties wasn’t huge, but Trump called his "the fairest, most balanced, and beneficial trade agreement we have ever signed into law."

Six years later, Trump’s assessment has soured, and earlier this month he declined to renew USMCA, kicking off a decade of rolling annual reviews instead. But, throughout the tariff chaos of the last two years, Trump largely included fine print exempting USMCA-compliant goods from the duty du jour. Not so with the latest levies, which are slated to take effect on August 19.

Talks with Mexico are reportedly going well, but negotiations with Canada were stalled. Most trade watchers view the new tariffs as a cudgel to force Canada to make trade concessions, rather than something that will actually take effect — it seems unlikely that Trump will impose massive levies less than three months before the midterms. And while Small Business Administrator Kelly Loeffler will dutifully pretend to be an idiot in public, you can’t fool Americans at the cash register.

The threat appears to be working, at least nominally. Carney told reporters Tuesday he’d spoken with Trump that morning and the two had agreed to “intensify negotiations in the coming weeks.” But Canadians are furious at the US’s treatment.

"We are an energy powerhouse and we can dismantle the US if we wanted to, if we all work together," Ontario Premier Doug Ford railed Tuesday. "No matter if it's the electricity … the potash, the oil — we're their number one customer in the world. They need to feel the pain rather than us constantly feeling the pain."

“We do sell a lot of energy products to New England. We put gas in their cars, we put jet fuel in their fighter jets and we heat and cool their homes. And so we knew that we have those kinds of tools at our disposal should we need them,” New Brunswick Premier Susan Holt agreed.

Canada’s provincial premiers convened an emergency meeting with Carney this week. Ottawa also pulled out of a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the new Gordie Howe International Bridge, calling a celebratory event “inappropriate” given the tariff threat, although the bridge itself is still opening on schedule.

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Credibility gap

Trump has mostly knocked off his “jokes” about Canada as the “51st state.” But his rhetoric about our closest ally remains deeply offensive.

“In all fairness to them, they need us to survive. Without us, there’s no way they can survive,” he said Tuesday.

Carney has been making the opposite case, most forcefully at Davos in January where he gave a landmark speech exhorting the “middle powers” to band together in a world where the US is tearing down the post-war order that lasted for 75 years.

We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.

Over the past two decades, a series of crises in finance, health, energy and geopolitics have laid bare the risks of extreme global integration. But more recently, great powers have begun using economic integration as weapons, tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as coercion, supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited.

You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration, when integration becomes the source of your subordination.

Pentagon policy chief Elbridge Colby snorted in derision at these upstart nations daring to challenge US hegemony.

Obviously Trump just freestyles much of the time, but here there’s discernible signal in the noise.

The United States is punching the one “middle power” that had the temerity to fight back war squarely in the nose. This is a warning to other countries that might be considering a challenge to US hegemony in trade or anything else: retaliate, and we will destroy you. Whatever the actual merits of the dairy or alcohol complaints, the audience for these new tariff announcements goes far beyond Ottawa.

But brandishing this cudgel is not without costs for the US. Trump has now blown up or threatened to blow up three trade relationships with major partners inside of six months, and the pattern is the same each time: negotiate a deal, call it the best deal ever made, then treat its existence as a grievance a few years later. That’s not really a trade strategy so much as a demonstration that no American commitment is durable past the next mood swing — which is its own kind of cost, distinct from whatever the tariffs themselves do to the price of Canadian whisky.

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CAMDEN, Me. — Here in Maine, Susan Collins yard signs are rare. Over the course of three days, driving about 150 miles, I saw just one featuring her simple, patented appeal: “Susan Collins: Our Senator.”

But don’t assume the dearth of pro-Collins signage means she’s doomed for defeat this November.

Yes, Collins is especially vulnerable to a potential 2026 blue wave election. Yes, the five-term senator who promised during her first campaign that she would retire after two terms is pushing her luck by seeking a sixth one. Yes, she’s taking heat in America’s bluest rural state for, among other votes, confirming Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Yes, she’s receiving increased scrutiny because some of her donors are connected to the Epstein scandal.

But the Democrats — who must defeat Collins to have any chance of flipping control of the Senate — should not underestimate her.

Can the most endangered incumbent senator this cycle overcome an inhospitable political environment to win a sixth term?

Senate unicorn

First elected in 1996, Collins is Maine’s longest-serving member of Congress. Of the mere 25 Republican women ever appointed or elected to the Senate, none has served longer than Collins’s nearly 30 years. For 16 of those years, alongside former Sen. Olympia Snowe, Collins formed half of a small group of same-state, female senator pairs — and the only Republican female pair in Senate history.

If nothing else, Collins is an electoral survivor. She won twice during two Republican wave elections, 2002 and 2014, as might be expected. But she also won in her three presidential-year cycles, all of which elected Democratic presidents both in Maine and nationally: 1996, 2008, and 2020.

Six years ago, forecasters thought she was doomed for defeat in the 2020 pandemic election that swept Joe Biden into office. Outspent more than two-to-one by tough and talented Democratic Maine State House Speaker Sara Gideon — and despite Biden comfortably carrying Maine by nine points — Collins won her fifth term, and by a solid, eight-point margin.

A protégé of former Sen. William Cohen, whom she succeeded in 1996, Collins currently chairs the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee — only the third woman, and sole Republican woman, to hold that position.

Love her or hate her, Susan Collins is a political and electoral unicorn. But what makes her truly unique is how her ideology and policy positions manage to infuriate almost everyone.

Ideological irritant

Liberals and Democrats fume that Collins masks her partisan identity with moderate talk and performative hang-wringing. She makes a public show of expressing her “concerns” about some controversial policy or appointment made by President Trump — then inevitably casts her votes along party lines.

Before she withdrew in late April from the Democratic Senate primary, Maine Gov. Janet Mills pilloried Collins with a scathing “concerned” meme ad.

Disgraced former Democratic Senate nominee Graham Platner repeatedly chided Collins for supporting Trump 95 percent of the time. Indeed, an analysis of CQ Roll Call data conducted by Portland’s WMTW confirmed that Collins’s Senate floor votes aligned 95 percent with Trump’s 2025 positions. And yet, only Rand Paul and Lisa Murkowski supported Trump at lower rates among Republicans than Collins. (Collins’s support for Trump was slightly lower during his first term at a mere 90 percent.)

Meanwhile, hardcore MAGAs fume that she’s a Republican-in-Name-Only sellout because she refuses to back Trump without exception, as almost all of her Senate Republican colleagues do. To Trump loyalists, Collins can never be forgiven for joining six other Republican senators to vote for Trump’s impeachment after he instigating the January 6 domestic terrorist attack on the US Capitol. Trump often chides her publicly for disloyalty.

Some of her supporters defend Collins precisely because she has so many detractors.

At a church yard sale along Route 1 in Wiscasset Saturday, I met Collins supporters Sean and Pam, a married couple from Albion, a small, rural Maine town of about 2,000 people 25 miles northeast of Augusta, the state capital. Neither identifies with the state’s MAGA Republican wing. I asked them what they like about Collins, and what they thought about her prospects for winning a sixth term.

“We appreciate that she shows up for every single vote. She will always be there even if it’s a tough vote,” Sean, a 61-year-old schoolteacher, told me. “In a day and age when we hear people talking about bipartisanship, she’s one of the few senators or congresspeople who will actually vote on an issue that the Republican Party doesn’t want — she’ll vote with the Democrats on occasion. We feel that she gets vilified for that, takes grief for that [but] we admire her conviction.”

Pam echoed her husband’s statement, calling Collins “humble,” “the real deal,” and a politician the couple trusts.

Two days later I met Connie, a 73-year-old lawyer from Eliot, in the southwestern corner of the state along the New Hampshire border, at a blueberry picking excursion on Beech Hill Preserve in Rockport. (The scene was so quintessentially Maine it seems contrived, but I have the photos — and blueberries — to prove it.)

I asked Connie, a self-described progressive, the same two questions I posed to the Albion couple. She considers Collins self-serving.

“She doesn’t think for herself or for Maine, she only thinks about Trump,” Connie told me. “She’s a faker and why would anybody vote for her? And people believe her. Hello?”

Connie also thinks Collins, who is her same age, is “too old” and that America needs age limits (not term limits) to retire the gerontocracy and make room for a younger generation of politicians.

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Electoral headwinds

When she last won reelection, in 2020, the 17-point net difference between Collins’s eight-point victory margin and Joe Biden’s nine-point win confirmed that at least one-sixth of Mainers are willing to split their tickets to vote for Collins. In fact, not only did she win all but two of the state’s 16 counties, she carried five that Biden simultaneously won: Hancock, Kennebec, Lincoln, Sagadahoc, and Waldo. Collins has crossover appeal few senators of either party in this partisan polarized era do.

To win a sixth term, Collins will need those cross-pressured independents and moderates to back her again. But will they show up in sufficient numbers for her this time?

Although she won three times during presidential cycles that elected Democrats, Collins’s two midterm cycle victories, in 2002 and 2014, happened in strong Republican years. In 2002, she defeated then-state senate majority leader and current First District US Rep. Chellie Pingree by 17 points. Twelve years later, Collins crushed former ACLU executive director Shenna Bellows by 37 points, carrying all 16 counties, including Cumberland and Knox — the last time any Republican statewide candidate won these two liberal, southern Maine strongholds.

But 2026 will be Collins’s first midterm cycle reelection bid during which Democrats enjoy a distinct edge in generic ballot and voter enthusiasm polls. And 2026 is also the only of her three midterm reelection bids where the GOP has unified control of the national government, a situation that historically generates a “thermostatic” backlash against the incumbent presidential party’s candidates.

Worse, Collins is running headlong into fellow Trump’s abysmal approval ratings, especially on the economy, a partisan liability we covered in detail at Public Notice. In a NYT/Siena poll taken in late July before Platner exited the race, Trump’s net approval-minus-disapproval rating in Maine was -24, with 60 percent disapproving — including 57 percent strongly disapproving.

Although far smaller than Trump’s deficit, Collins is burdened by a rare net disapproval problem of her own: the same NYT/Siena poll reported her at net -3 disapproval, with 48 percent of Mainers somewhat or strongly approving, but 51 percent somewhat or strongly disapproving. A late June poll by Fox News found an identical, 3-point deficit, with 47 percent of respondents approving and 50 percent disapproving her performance.

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Will Susan survive?

Of the more than 2,000 senators in American history, only 42 have served six or more terms — and some were chosen by state legislatures before passage of the 17th Amendment required popular elections. If she wins again, Collins will join that elite group and extend her record as the chamber’s longest tenured female Republican. Democrats — in Maine or elsewhere — who think she’ll be an easy out this November are deluding themselves.

With Graham Platner gone, a statewide caucus of Democrats is almost certain to select Troy Jackson to be Collins’s general election opponent. Jackson is a plainspoken logger and former state senate president from a rural district — in effect, a more authentic version of Platner, but with deeper union ties and minus the personal baggage.

Jackson will be formidable: A Wedgewood poll conducted the first week of July — before Platner dropped out — showed Collins with a four-point edge over Platner but trailing Jackson by five points, 48 percent to 43 percent, in a hypothetical matchup. Platner’s implosion hurt, not helped, Collins’s reelection prospects.

The electoral time clock may have finally run out on Collins. Many voters are tired of the gerontocracy that has delivered old and infirm presidents and members of Congress, from Biden to Trump, Diane Feinstein to Mitch McConnell. And Collins’s ideological fence-straddling may also be wearing thin.

Meanwhile, and despite the Platner setback, state Democrats are energized to defeat Collins, and the recent ICE shooting in Biddeford provides extra incentive to mobilize the liberal base. Democrats have carried Maine in every presidential election from 1992 onward, and Rep. Pingree’s daughter, Hannah, appears to be a lock to succeed fellow Democrat Mills in the governor’s office. A statewide coalition to defeat Collins is easy to imagine.

Only November will reveal whether such a coalition, like a unicorn, is more imagined than real.

That’s it for today

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Donald Trump is the face of hate. He is the face of war. He is the face of a pandemic. And now he is the orange, sagging face of explosive diarrhea.

This month, there has been a major outbreak of cyclosporiasis, a relatively rare food-borne illness caused by a microscopic single celled parasite. Cases have been reported in 30 states, with a record shattering 4,300 instances in Michigan alone.

The CDC identified shredded iceberg lettuce at Taco Bell as one cause of infection in Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and West Virginia. The restaurant took swift action to remove the produce, but there may well be other sources. Initially the FDA said the Taco Bell lettuce came from Taylor Farms; this week though it said the test was a false positive — a mistake that doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence.

Not coincidentally, it has been about a year since Trump’s indefatigably pro-disease HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. took cyclosporiasis and a range of other foodborne illnesses off a mandatory reporting list while instituting draconian cuts at the Center for Disease Control.

Slashing government capacity makes it harder to identify outbreaks early and harder to end them quickly. Cyclosporiasis is teaching us a painful, embarrassing, and fairly obvious lesson: when you launch an all-out assault on public health, you get explosive diarrhea — and worse than explosive diarrhea.

Spreading misery

Fortunately, cyclosporiasis is very rarely fatal. But it is extremely unpleasant, and can lead to serious complications for the young, the elderly, or those with disabilities.

People who are infected experience cramps, nausea, fever, and vomiting. The “signature symptom,” though, according to Stanford’s David Relman, is “copious, watery diarrhea.” This can lead to dehydration, kidney damage, and hospitalization; some patients experience an up to a 10 percent loss in body weight.

In the US, cyclosporiasis outbreaks often start because of poor sanitation on farms or in food processing, especially when farmers “refuse to provide adequate toilet or handwashing facilities for their workers,” according to Ryan Cooper at The Prospect. When feces containing disease spores get on vegetables and fruits, people ingest it and become sick. It is very difficult to wash off the parasites; the only surefire way to get rid of them is to cook produce to 158˚F.

Symptoms of cyclosporiasis take a week to develop. That makes tracing outbreaks difficult since it requires lengthy interviews with all those affected. Local and state health departments do not always have the resources for such interviews, which is where the federal government is supposed to come in.

But unfortunately, Trump and RFK Jr. have spent a year and a half doing everything they can to destroy federal capacity.

Again, RFK Jr. and Trump removed cyclosporiasis from the FoodNet mandatory food surveillance program. In the past, FoodNet would be testing for cyclosporiasis and monitoring cases on an ongoing basis in order to find and contain outbreaks early. But now, former FoodNet epidemiologist Jodie Guest told the BBC, “we don’t have the data we normally expect to go back to use to help us … you’re starting in the dark.”

But this is just a part of Trump and RFK’s brave, lonely fight to spread explosive diarrhea from coast to coast.

In February, just weeks after Trump’s inauguration, the administration eliminated the 38-year-old USDA National Advisory Committee on Microbiological Criteria for Foods, which was developing advice on foodborne illness outbreaks. It also cut 20,000 workers from the FDA and 913 from its Food Safety Inspection Service. The CDC lost 3,000 workers in a chaotic and confusing process. One former CDC official said afterwards that “now, there’s nobody to answer the phone.”

It’s impossible to know for certain whether having someone to answer the phone or conduct mandatory testing for cyclosporiasis could have prevented our current ongoing explosive disaster. Maybe it’s an extraordinary coincidence that the government gutted its capacity to monitor and prevent foodborne illness, and then a year later the US experienced a titanic cyclosporiasis outbreak. But probably not.

We still don’t know the exact scale of the illness, nor how many people will end up being affected. But it is already the largest outbreak in 20 years. In 1996, 1,500 people contracted cyclosporiasis from Guatemalan raspberries, and in 2018, around 2,400 people in the US and Canada became ill from contamination of Mexican basil. This year, the CDC has already confirmed 1,600 cases and is investigating almost 7,000.

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Trump is a disease vector

Explosive diarrhea is a dramatic consequence of Trump’s hatred of public health. It’s not the first consequence, though, nor the worst.

Researchers estimate that Trump’s attack on health infrastructure and capacity led to 461,000 excess deaths in the US in his first term before the covid pandemic. His poor public health response during the pandemic cost the US at least 57,800 additional lives according to one comparative analysis with Europe.

In his second term, Trump has gone even further to wreck the nation’s capacity to respond to disease — most directly by appointing ignorant and malevolent anti-vax ghoul RFK Jr. to head HHS. The Orwellian “Make America Healthy Again” agenda is dedicated to the precise opposite — and in its goal of making the US sicker, it already has a list of accomplishment to its credit.

There is currently a dangerous global measles surge that’s hitting America especially hard because of increased vaccine hesitancy being promoted by Kennedy and the hacks he keeps installing at the CDC.

Kennedy claims he’s doing a good job of containing the measles outbreak, but that’s nonsense. He has spent years of his life attacking measles vaccines; his personal anti-vaccine interventions helped create conditions for a horrific outbreak in Samoa in 2019 in which 83 children died. True to form, in response to our current crisis, he’s dragged his feet in promoting the measles vaccine even after children in the US died. He’s also spread dangerous misinformation to scare people about vaccine safety.

As with diarrhea, it is difficult to make causal claims with absolute certainty. But when the top health official in the country is one of the greatest advocates for measles in the world, and you have a hideous historic measles outbreak, it seems reasonable to suggest there might be a link.

Along similar lines, the US cut funding to study hantavirus, a disease which led to three deaths and many more illnesses on a cruise ship this May. We would be in a better position to manage such outbreaks if Trump was not laser focused on eliminating our ability to do so.

Other Trump officials have, apparently, been envious of Kennedy’s success in spreading sickness and misery, and have tried to show Trump that they too are on the side of pathogens. Defense secretary and murderous clown Pete Hegseth burbled about religious freedom and bodily autonomy and ended a mandatory military vaccine policy on April 21. Flu vaccine uptake cratered as 60 percent of Air Force trainees opted out of the shot.

The result was a predictable disaster. At Lackland Air Force Base where service members eat at large tables and sleep together in bunk beds, the flu ripped through the ranks; 160 people fell ill in less than two months. Hegseth had to take a break from preening for cameras to order emergency vaccinations. One trainee died.

The most horrific attack on public health in Trump’s second term, however, has been aimed overseas. Elon Musk’s gutting of USAID created an explosion in HIV, disease, and malnutrition; experts estimate that more than 762,000 people have already died, including more than 500,000 children. Trump cuts also delayed detection of an ebola outbreak which has killed 700 people. So far, the risk to Americans is low, but the growing crisis demonstrates how Trump’s attack on global health infrastructure puts everyone, including Americans, at risk.

Covid, flu, measles, cyclosporiasis — if it is a disease, Trump and his hench-vectors want to see it flourish and spread through the land, sowing death and nausea.

The regime longs for an America in which government is too small and hobbled to help as the public grows weaker and sicker and more alienated from the solidarity and public action which could provide us all with a better life. Trump and Kennedy and Hegseth are grotesque cranks who hate us, and they should be removed from power immediately. It shouldn’t take explosive diarrhea for anyone to figure that out.

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Whenever President Trump does something alarming, disturbing, or seemingly ill-considered, his opponents immediately begin trading theories about what his true motivations are.

Is today’s crazy statement or decision just a ruse to distract the public from something else, probably Jeffrey Epstein? Is he laying the groundwork for future actions that are even worse?

The assumption underlying this kind of speculation is that when Trump seems at his most deranged, he actually has a plan. But these days, when it comes to the only subject that occupies Trump’s mind as much as his ballroom or the Reflecting Pool — his obsession with phantom voter fraud — we should stop looking for the hidden strategy. Because there is none.

Last week’s speech revealed Trump’s impotence

In advance of the primetime address he delivered last Thursday, Trump went through the usual motions, promoting it as an earth-shaking speech that would alter the American political landscape.

“It doesn’t get bigger,” he said beforehand. “It’s going to be a very big announcement.” White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt tried to tamp down speculation about the content of the speech while heightening the dramatic tension, saying “nobody knows yet what President Trump will ultimately say, which is why everyone should tune in.”

But nobody was fooled.

Just as there are only so many times you can hear Trump say “It’s like nothing anyone has seen before” before the hyperbole loses all meaning, yet another allegation that elections are being stolen no longer registers as revelatory or urgent. That’s especially true when Republicans have worked so hard for so many years to prove that voter fraud is organized and widespread, with an enormous amount of time, effort, and money spent by the entire conservative movement, yet have come up with essentially nothing.

Everyone knew what Trump would deliver — some lies, some innuendo, some banal facts portrayed as deeply sinister. And no one was less enthusiastic about the speech than the Republicans actually trying to win elections this November.

“The people I talk to are scared shitless,” one unnamed former Trump administration official told Politico in advance of the speech. Trump’s 2020 obsession only served to remind voters that the president is unconcerned about the genuine problems they face.

The lack of support from the conservative propaganda machine was obvious in the response afterward. One might expect a dramatic White House address to be followed by a push to spread its message and multiply its effect — GOP candidates for office touting its importance, segment after segment on Fox News about it — but instead there was a deafening silence.

Fox could barely bring itself to discuss the speech afterward, mentioning it briefly on a couple of shows before moving on to more urgent culture war subjects like whether Caitlin Clark is being targeted for hard fouls by Black players.

“The unkindest cut came the next morning from Fox & Friends, long Trump’s media home and favorite program,” reported Media Matters’ Matt Gertz, “which did not discuss the speech at all — not even in a news brief.”

They know something Trump doesn’t: This isn’t helping him. In fact, it would be just about the worst strategy he could have come up with, if there were a strategy at all.

Yes, he’s still trying to steal the election

One could argue that complaining about 2020 had a strategic purpose between then and 2024 — to maintain Trump’s legitimacy within the Republican Party so he could become its nominee again, and justify his attempts to overturn the election that culminated in the January 6 insurrection. But what purpose does it serve today, apart from massaging his wounded ego?

That is the real driver behind his ongoing 2020 obsession: It’s about him, not about any future election or the interests of the Republican Party. And much of the federal government’s time and attention is organized around turning Trump’s personal bugaboos into government policy, whether it’s prosecuting those who have insulted him, waging a war on wind power, or taxing American consumers through tariffs.

It’s important, however, to distinguish between the practical steps the administration is taking to suppress votes and make election administration more difficult, and Trump’s efforts to convince the public that voter fraud is an ongoing crisis. The common explanation for his rhetoric is that Trump is “laying the groundwork” for some kind of all-out assault on the November elections — but that assumes that he is actually persuading anyone that whatever he might be planning would be justified, and when it happens the public won’t object.

Or to put a more benign gloss on things, Trump may just want to keep his base riled up and convinced of its own victimization. Nearly two-thirds of Republicans may still believe that Trump won the 2020 election. But so what? Any Trump voter who’s still mad about 2020 is probably going to vote anyway; what Republicans need to stave off disaster is to turn out not the MAGA-hat-wearing conspiracy theorists but the casual Trump voters, the ones who voted for him in 2016 and 2024 because they hoped he’d be good for the economy.

What Trump doesn’t appear to see, but other Republicans do, is that repeating over and over that the system is rigged may actually demobilize Republican voters. If you believed Trump that every election is a scam, what would be the point in voting? Especially when he himself is not on the ballot. At the same time, the rhetoric can mobilize Democrats, increasing their disgust with Trump and their desire to strike a blow against him.

Nevertheless, the Trump administration is taking practical steps in response to Trump’s personal fixations, including the lie that huge numbers of non-citizens are voting and his hatred of mail voting. Some of them, like the release of the kind of raw intelligence information he touted in his speech last week, are fundamentally propagandistic. Others, like FEMA threatening to withhold terrorism prevention funds from states that don’t change voting procedures, or the Postal Service threatening not to deliver mail ballots in states that have declined to provide voter data to the administration, could have an impact — but so far they are only threats.

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Trump is thwarted by decentralization

Such actions keep running into the same problem: American elections are designed to be administered by states and localities, not the federal government. Our election system is actually thousands of separate systems, hopefully operating in concert but without centralized control.

That system isn’t particularly efficient, but in the same way that it makes it difficult for foreign adversaries to hack an American election, it makes it hard for a president with authoritarian ambitions to seize control of them. Which is why courts keep striking down the Trump administration’s attempts to strong-arm states into doing what it wants.

The administration faces another problem, too: It’s run by a bunch of incompetents forced to react to Trump’s irrational whims. So for instance, Kash Patel assigned a remarkable 260 FBI agents to pore over election records from 2020 in Fulton County, Georgia, where ballots have been counted, recounted, and audited, and showed every time that Trump lost. They won’t find what Trump is looking for, but because he continues to be obsessed with the idea that the Republican governor and Republican secretary of state there allowed the election to be stolen from him, the government has to waste its time and resources chasing his delusions.

The most profound danger Trump poses for this election is not what he has done so far, but that right around the election — just before, during or after — he would take far more radical steps. He could, for instance, order his army of ICE and Border Patrol thugs to storm into vote counting centers in Detroit, Philadelphia, and Phoenix, seizing ballots and beating any election officials who got in their way, so Trump could then declare that it was all fraudulent and Republicans are the true winners of every election.

There’s no doubt that he’d like to do that, but his freedom to do so depends on how much support he can get from his party and the public at large. If the point of things like the speech he gave last week is to convince the public that the election system is so deeply corrupted that it’s okay for Trump to take it over by force, he won’t succeed.

That’s apparent to anyone who watched the speech. Not only did it contain nothing but the same old collection of lies and complaints, but when Trump tried to introduce supposedly new information, he was incoherent. Here was his summary of China’s supposed meddling in the 2020 election: “In mid-2019, the Chinese government’s strategy against the United States was focused on undermining domestic confidence in the U.S. president. They wanted to just make you sound like your president wasn’t so hot, when actually your president has done a great job and they did everything possible to do exactly that.”

Umm … what?

There was a point late in Joe Biden’s term in office when Democrats came to realize that whatever the accomplishments of his presidency, he was no longer capable of being an effective spokesperson for his own cause. He couldn’t persuade people that his achievements were meaningful, that a new proposal would be worthwhile, or that his opponents were dangerous; his communication skills had deteriorated so much that there was a yawning void where the bully pulpit used to be.

Donald Trump has reached that same point. He can still command attention, but he can no longer convince anyone who isn’t part of his cult of anything — not that the Iran war is a great victory, not that the economy is better than ever, not that we’re respected around the world, and not that when Republicans lose this election, it was stolen from them. And the fact that he has lost whatever power of persuasion he once had will go a long way to keep the election safe from his attempts to undermine it.

That’s it for today

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As a weekend bonus, I connected this week with my friend Brian Tyler Cohen to discuss his new and highly recommended book, “The Day After: How to Wield Power in a Post-Trump World.”

Brian needs no introduction to readers of this newsletter. But suffice it to say that on top of being one of the most influential left-wing creators on YouTube and TikTok, he’s a fantastic author. “The Day After” not only makes an argument about the need for Democrats to govern more forcefully the next time they have a chance, but also provides a deeply researched account of the political failures that led to the disaster of November 2024 and the party being locked out of power.

We chatted on Wednesday when Brian was fresh off a flight to New York from DC ahead of an event he had that night with Don Lemon. In addition to his book, we got into his inclusion on the White House’s “media offenders list,” talked about which Democrats he thinks are standing out right now, and much more.

Without further ado, here’s the Q&A.

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Aaron Rupar

We’ll get to the book, but I wanted to ask you first about being included in the White House’s “Media Offenders List.” What “offense” did you allegedly commit, and did it resulted in an increase in harassment?

Brian Tyler Cohen

I think the specific offense was some banal post about the Park Service, which certainly didn’t warrant inclusion on any “media offenders” list.

But alas, I guess they have a low threshold for what they view as dishonesty from the left, and no threshold for dishonesty from the White House itself.

In terms of fallout, yes, I saw an uptick in harassment. It was nothing that dissuaded me from doing the work I do, but the point of course is the harassment itself. The Trump administration knew that would be the consequence and used a tool of the federal government as a cudgel against a political foe.

But the interesting thing from my part is that after seeing how law firms and universities and tech companies and legacy media outlets have all capitulated to Trump when they’ve been in his crosshairs, I wanted to make sure I used this moment to not do what they’ve done even if it would’ve been easier and frankly safer for me to have just quieted down. Capitulation begets more capitulation and cowardice begets more cowardice.

So I wanted to use the opportunity to show that the gut reaction doesn’t have to be cowardice. I wore it as a badge of honor and talked about it every day. I amplified it. I even put it on t-shirts. I embraced it to show this administration that they weren’t going to be successful in trying to quell me into submission or silence.

In the aftermath of that, so many other creators saw it and said, “I want inclusion on this list, how do I get onto it?” Interestingly, they still haven’t added anybody else to it. I think that’s because it backfired, and that’s the beauty of independent media.

All these big companies and rich executives need something from the federal government. They need approvals for mergers or acquisitions or whatever it may be. But independent media has no reason to kowtow or pander to these people. And so in a way it put on full display why independent media is so important in this moment.

Aaron Rupar

We know that if there’s one thing Trump is good at, it’s the “Streisand effect” of accidentally bringing attention to things he wants people to ignore.

But let’s talk about your new book. At one point, you write that Biden and Harris “weren't wrong about Donald Trump and his MAGA mob; they were wrong about the voters.” What did you mean by that?

Brian Tyler Cohen

In large part, Trump and Republicans ran against the system, and the reflexive response by Democrats was that if Trump is tearing it all down, we have to be the de facto defenders of the status quo and our institutions. But there was no appetite for that in the country.

These are institutions that don’t work for the vast majority of people. I mean, you’ve heard the statistic that 40 percent of Americans can’t afford a $400 emergency. But I think it’s instructive more broadly because Democrats’ blind deference to institutions is in large part what holds us back from really getting stuff done. Trump doesn’t let any institution stand in his way. If he wants to do something, he’ll do it — courts be damned, other branches of government be damned, judges be damned, attorneys be damned.

Meanwhile, Democrats will let the smallest obstacle prevent us from delivering. So in this moment, we can learn from the fact that these institutions are not as sacrosanct as we’ve been led to believe. We have to be okay tearing them down if it means it helps us deliver for people on all of the things that we claim to support, like healthcare, voting rights, climate, and on and on.

Aaron Rupar

Another case you make in the book is for Democrats to tap into frustrations that people have. You write in the epilogue about how voters are deeply unhappy with the status quo and “the Trumpian revolution.”

As we head toward a critical midterm cycle, are you satisfied that Democrats are internalizing some of these lessons and are perhaps more willing now to do what Trump did and campaign against the whole system, especially since he and his party control the entire federal government?

Brian Tyler Cohen

I think Democrats are understanding where voters are at. Whether they act on it remains to be seen.

The whole point of this book is to push them in that direction. We won’t know what they’ll do until they’re in a position of power, but my warning to them is you’ve already got a very disaffected and disillusioned electorate, which is what pushed a broad swath of Americans to Trump and Republicans in 2024. Now you’ve got an even more disillusioned electorate because Trump outright refuses to deliver on his promises.

Voters are disillusioned with the right and the left. And so we have a rare second bite of the apple here where we can either deliver for these people or risk losing them forever. And if that’s the case, if we have just a whole generation of Americans who are disaffected with politics, those are the conditions where autocracy really thrives.

Aaron Rupar

How do you make sense of the fact that while Democrats have had a very impressive string of electoral victories since November 2024, the party still polls so poorly when surveyed in isolation?

Brian Tyler Cohen

Democrats have been able to coast off anti-Trump sentiment, but this is going to be the last election where he remains in office. We need a longer term strategy. If we want to make sure we can have a durable coalition, we have to have a plan beyond “Trump is bad.”

Aaron Rupar

Of course, to get to the “day after” when Democrats are able to wield power again, they need to win elections first. And as soon as these midterms come and go, we’ll be talking about the 2028 presidential primary.

The last time there was a serious Democratic presidential primary back in 2019 and ‘20, candidates fixated a lot on plans and policies, sometimes to their detriment — I’m thinking of Kamala Harris’s comments about trans inmates that were all over Trump ads in 2024. If Democrats internalize some of the lessons from your book, what do you think the broad contours of a successful presidential campaign will look like two years from now?

Brian Tyler Cohen

We don’t even need to talk theoretically. I think Mamdani and Ossoff are examples of Democrats who are doing it really well right now.

Mamdani during his campaign stayed focused on his message of delivering for people despite the best efforts of reporters to bait him with the usual politics bullshit, and he’s governing that way too. Ossoff doesn’t get distracted from his message of amplifying the corruption of this administration. It’s a lesson that I think Bernie Sanders imparted on this new generation of politicians — building up credibility by being relentlessly on message so people know what you’re about.

Even if you don’t agree with Bernie, there’s no doubt that he has credibility. So I think these politicians who refuse to allow themselves to fall into a lot of the culture war bullshit that has really driven campaigns in the past are offering a great blueprint.

Aaron Rupar

In terms of the “day after,” given how polarized the country is and Republican efforts to rig elections in a variety of ways, it’s unlikely that Democrats will have anything but a narrow trifecta in 2029 if they’re lucky enough to have one at all. You talked earlier about how one of the lessons of Trump is that it’s possible to just do things and ask questions later. I don’t think we’d necessarily want to endorse a Democratic president taking that approach, but what would effective and durable governance look like under these conditions?

Brian Tyler Cohen

It certainly wouldn’t look like trying to curry favor or compromise with a Republican Party that doesn’t reciprocate and has frankly never reciprocated. Practically, it’s about eliminating the filibuster and starting to pass the legislation that Democrats claim to have supported for years and years and years. We need a new Freedom to Vote Act, Voting Rights Act, an increase in the minimum wage, and real, durable climate legislation. Frankly, I think the time for Medicare for All has come as well. The notion that we’re the wealthiest country in the world and don’t have universal healthcare for our citizens is crazy.

Aaron Rupar

Lastly, I’m curious about what inspired you to write this book. Obviously, putting something like this together, with all the research you did, is a Herculean task on top of all the day-to-day work you do. I know it’s not your first book, so you have experience, but given the timing, I’m wondering if it was a way to process the 2024 election results or how off the rails the first year of Trump 2.0 was, or some combination thereof.

Brian Tyler Cohen

I think it’s more the former. I’m fortunate enough to be in a position where I have access to a lot of these politicians and host interviews with them almost on a daily basis on my channels. And so if I can be helpful from my position, especially in a moment where we do feel a little bit rudderless and the media landscape is rapidly changing, then I feel like I need to do my part.

Look, I can see very plainly that there is a hunger for Democrats to not be feckless, not be the party of strongly worded letters. And if I can be one of a whole litany of voices demanding they start to embrace a more aggressive mentality, a willingness to fight, then I think I have an obligation given my position in this ecosystem to say it.

That’s it for this week

We’ll be back with more Monday. If you appreciate today’s PN, please do your part to keep us free by signing up for a paid subscription.

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The nation is suffering through another spasm of shootings by ICE agents. It feels like we’re right back where we were in January, when federal agents went on a lawless, deadly tear in Minnesota.

This time, however, the violence is more diffuse, spread out across multiple states. But the aftermath of all of it remains the same: a sick, lurching knowledge that you are under assault from your own government.

And just as we saw in Minneapolis and Chicago, the government’s so-called justification for murderous ICE violence falls apart under the slightest scrutiny, and “weaponized vehicles” is still being used by DHS as an all-purpose get-out-of-jail-free card.

On July 7, an ICE officer shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican national who had been here for decades. His children were born and raised here, and they flourished, with one becoming a teacher, another an engineer. A third is still in college. He built a thriving small business constructing houses in the Houston suburbs.

That sounds a lot like the American dream, doesn’t it? People come here looking for a better life, a place to raise a family in safety, a place to succeed financially, a place to weave oneself into the fabric of a community and of the nation.

Instead, Salgado Araujo and his family became trapped in the dystopic, deadly nightmare that is America for immigrants these days.

Salgado Araujo was, by no metric, the supposed “worst of the worst” that ICE claims to be protecting us from. Even if he had been, however, that wouldn’t have justified his summary execution in the early morning hours on a Houston street as he drove his crew to a construction site.

From there, the story unfolded in the same fashion as earlier ICE shootings. The Department of Homeland Security nearly immediately claimed Salgado Araujo “rammed an ICE law enforcement vehicle, refused to follow multiple verbal commands, and weaponized his vehicle in an attempt to run over an ICE law enforcement officer, resulting in our officer firing his weapon in self-defense.”

That story didn’t hold up for very long, though. Three other migrants in the van with Salgado Araujo gave statements that the ICE officer fired at the van right after getting out of his vehicle, and said Salgado Araujo never drove his van at the officers.

It sounds an awful lot like the initial explanation of the murder of Renee Good in Minneapolis, where the government claimed Good had literally run over Jonathan Ross, the ICE agent who murdered her. Video, of course, did not bear that out, and ICE’s claims soon collapsed.

In Salgado Araujo’s case, videos do not at all show him “weaponizing” his vehicle in an attempt to murder ICE agents, but rather ICE vehicles attempting to box in his van. Indeed, only two days after the shooting, DHS began an oblique walkback of that claim, saying that Salgado Araujo was not a target, but instead they were on the way to the house of their target, spotted Salgado Araujo’s van, and decided to just go for it and “initiated a vehicle stop.”

Also as with Renee Good, the government is continuing to smear its victim and torment the survivors by opening an investigation into Salgado Araujo’s alleged assault of a federal law enforcement officer. It isn’t enough to literally kill Salgado Araujo, to remove him from the face of the earth, for no reason save for an unbridled enthusiasm for violence against immigrants and their supporters. The government also has to attack the memory of Salgado Araujo.

What other explanation could there be for the latest development in Salgado Araujo’s case, where, as the whole ramming the vehicle story started to collapse, the government’s story shifted radically? Now, it’s that the FBI has to “investigate” whether Salgado Araujo was a drug dealer, complete with a warrant application showing random photos of tiny bags inside Salgado Araujo’s work van. Somehow, this will help the government determine “what may have caused the occupants of the vehicle to flee.”

Let’s suspend our disbelief for a moment and pretend that yes, somehow this father of three and upstanding citizen wasn’t transporting his work crew to a building site, just as he’d done for years, but was instead a secret drug kingpin ferrying narcotics around Houston. It’s unclear how that would support ICE shooting Salgado Araujo as he attempted to avoid their unmarked SUVs cutting him off. Just as the government has no right to summarily execute someone for being an immigrant or for observing ICE’s murderous violence, there’s no right to summarily execute someone because they have drugs in their car.

Except come on. We know full well this is a post hoc attempt to rewrite history, to turn the ICE thugs into heroes, protectors of the community.

But that never, ever works. Because ICE thugs are just that: goons terrorizing every community in which they’re deployed.

The aftermath of Salgado Araujo’s murder has echoed that of Good and Alex Pretti in another way: the administration’s refusal to allow state and local law enforcement to investigate the murder, though somehow Texas Gov. Greg Abbott thinks that the Texas Rangers will have a meaningful role. Meanwhile, the administration is refusing to name the ICE shooters, an all-too common tactic.

And yet even as we reeled from the murder of Salgado Araujo, ICE was already pivoting to another murder, just six days later, this time in Maine.

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Trump’s death squads

Tell us, DHS, was 26-year-old Joan Sebastian Guerrero the “worst of the worst”?

A Colombian national who was authorized to work in the United States. Guerrero was a father who, like Salgado Araujo, moved here for a better life, only to be murdered at the hands of the state.

As with Salgado Araujo, Guerrero wasn’t ICE’s target — he was simply collateral damage in the administration’s war on immigrants. And as with Salgado Araujo and Renee Good before him, DHS initially claimed, when talking to Maine Sen. Angus King, that Guerroro had “weaponized” his vehicle.

But video didn’t bear that out. Indeed, it showed Guerrero trying to leave, a perfectly normal reaction when unidentified armed men start attacking you. (ICE claims the agents were attempting “to conduct a vehicle stop” when they blocked Guerrero in and then shot him.)

And again, as with Salgado Araujo, Renee Good, Alex Pretti, and everyone else who has been murdered in the street by ICE, the administration is slandering Guerrero, even in death. You see, they simply had to shoot him even though they knew nothing about him, because the officer was “fearing for public safety.”

So now the government is essentially saying it can summarily execute anyone who they’ve singlehandedly determined is a threat to “public safety.” And given that the administration has also made clear that it believes all immigrants and all of those who oppose ICE are threats to public safety, you can see where this is going.

This isn’t an officer saying he feared for his own safety, a situation in which there is sometimes authorization for use of force. This is an officer determining that he gets to be judge, jury, and executioner as long as he can say he is protecting us.

There’s nothing at all to indicate that Guerrero was a threat and that letting him drive away instead of murdering him would have put anyone at risk. But post facto, the administration came up with the claim that he “illegally entered the United States on Sept. 1, 2023, via the southern border and was released into the country under the Biden Administration.”

Ah, got it. So someone who entered the country, was legally released into the country, and had authorization to work here had no right to be here, and therefore, presumably, had to be murdered. Indeed, they made sure to let everyone know in their official statement that “work authorization does not confer legal status in the United States.”

The administration hasn’t tried to pivot and insinuate that Guerrero was a drug runner or whatever, but give it time.

ICE has, of course, declined to give the name of this brave public safety-protecting agent, with a spokesperson declaring, “I will never share an officer’s name.”

Well, yeah. The secret police can’t really be secret police if we know their names and can see their faces.

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The Minnesota model

Of course, ICE doesn’t always murder people. Sometimes, they only manage to grievously wound them after shooting them for no reason.

That was the case earlier this month for Clemente Lara-Hernandez in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. After being surrounded by ICE agents who broke his window, Lara-Hernandez tried to flee, so an agent shot him. Of course, the administration immediately let us all know that Lara-Hernandez actually had “weaponized” his vehicle and rammed it into the ICE sedan.

You will not be surprised to learn that of course, Lara-Hernandez did no such thing, and the whole event is on video. And, as Dauphin County Commissioner Justin Douglas pointed out, “fleeing is not punishable by death.”

Except ICE clearly thinks it is.

In January, ICE agent Christian Castro shot Julio Sosa-Celis through the door of his home in North Minneapolis as Sosa-Celis attempted to get away from an armed-to-the-teeth thug chasing and assaulting his housemate, Alfredo Aljorna. Castro and ICE then spun a tale of how Castro was the real victim here, attacked by vicious immigrants and fearing for his life, but when video emerged, it showed something entirely different: Castro shot Sosa-Celis only 24 seconds after getting out of his car, recklessly firing into a house as Sosa-Celis committed the possibly capital crime of trying not to get shot.

It’s deeply distressing and wearying to see the violent excesses of ICE in Minnesota exported to other blue cities, but it was always inevitable. ICE suffered no consequences whatsoever for the murders of Good and Pretti. Hennepin County has criminally charged Castro for shooting Sosa-Celis. Still, it’s a long, hard, often unsuccessful road from state charges to actual justice when a federal law enforcement officer is involved.

ICE agents are violently raging, unchecked across the country, and the administration is making no secret of the fact that it is going to keep killing people unless they bow down and agree to let ICE kidnap and murder people with impunity.

But the residents of Minnesota, the residents of Maine, the residents of Houston, the residents of Los Angeles, the residents of Chicago, the residents of New York, the good people everywhere in the country, are not going to back down. We’re fueled by love of our neighbors and a belief in the promise and possibility of an American dream and of people coming here to build a life. ICE has infinite money and unbridled hate, but it’s no match for the rest of us whatsoever.

That’s it for today

Aaron is taking a vacation this weekend, so no new episode of PN Pod this afternoon, but he’ll be back with a special edition tomorrow.

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Depending on when you read this, Trump may be bombing Iran, claiming a peace deal is imminent, threatening to commit more war crimes against the civilian population, teasing a ground invasion, or some combination thereof.

Nothing, though, has really changed.

Nearly five months out from Trump’s unprovoked and disastrous attack, the bottom line is that he’s lost the war but still can’t bring himself to admit it. So we’re trapped in a seemingly endless cycle of vacillating between belligerence and fake peace deals while gas prices spike, bombs fall, and people die.

Off to the side of that debacle, Trump last week reiterated that he wants to seize Greenland in his sweaty short-fingered appendages.

Greenland, he blustered, “should be controlled by the United States, not Denmark.” He added, “that’s what hurt my relationship with NATO, because Greenland doesn’t help Denmark”— which is both nonsensical and a lie, inasmuch as Trump’s been attacking NATO for at least a decade.

Trump’s gaseous blather about invading Greenland seems like a minor monstrosity compared to his actual murderous bombing of, and ongoing humiliation by, Iran. But they’re part of the same phenomenon — a foreign policy driven by ego, ignorance, and inflamed colonial malice, in which the US sees no allies and really no other sentient human beings, just territory to be won and glorious carnage to commit.

The renewed threats against Greenland are serious because they signal once again how untrustworthy, erratic, selfish, and cruel US foreign policy has become. Neither allies, rivals, nor enemies can trust us. Which means everyone, definitely including us, is poorer, less secure, and less safe.

Threatening allies has costs

Trump first began braying about buying Greenland in his first term. Why he became fixated on it is a bit unclear, but the obsession seems to have started after Puerto Rican officials and the media criticized Trump for his (failed, racist) response to Hurricane Maria.

In a snit, Trump began to talk about trading Puerto Rico to Denmark for its autonomous territory Greenland. His rationale, according to former DHS Chief of Staff Miles Taylor, was that “Puerto Rico was dirty and the people were poor.”

Why does Trump want Greenland in particular? He’s floated a range of nonsensical rationales over the years, from security to mineral wealth. Recently his administration has even argued that Greenland’s fisheries could save the Red Lobster seafood chain.

All of these explanations are nonsense. Greenland is (or was) an ally and already works with us on security; it has little in the way of minerals we need. And Red Lobster’s problems have nothing to do with Greenland, for christ’s sake. The truth seems to be that Trump wants to seize Greenland because it looks enormous on maps and he thinks it is cool to put his name on big things.

Trump, then, is motivated not by security, nor by economics, but by ego, spite, and malice.

All this would be ludicrous except for the fact that the US electorate decided to make Trump the most powerful person in the world again, which means that his confused bigot whims are now the problem of every single person in the world.

First, of course, Trump’s threats are a serious danger to Greenland. Polls show that the populace overwhelming opposes US control, with 85 percent against and only 6 percent for. Greenland’s Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen put it as plainly as possible in January: “Greenland does not want to be owned by the United States. Greenland does not want to be governed by the United States. Greenland does not want to be part of the United States.” He added that an invasion by Trump would destroy NATO.

And indeed Trump’s threats have put massive strain on NATO, not least because NATO countries have had to spend significant time, money, and effort to dissuade Trump from actually invading. France, Norway, Sweden, Germany, the UK, the Netherlands, Finland and of course Denmark all sent troops to Greenland to engage in military exercises in January. The cost was not made public, but it was undoubtedly a lot of money to spend to defend against your supposed ally. And Trump compounded the insult and expense by leveling retaliatory tariffs on all the nations involved.

This is not just a one and done problem. American untrustworthiness creates massive longterm difficulties for everyone in the world, and certainly for our onetime closest allies. Canada — which Trump has also threatened to annex — is pushing a huge $60 billion military buildup since it can no longer rely on the US not to attack it, much less to defend it.

Europe is also rearming with its biggest defense push since the end of the Cold War. This is money that could be spent on social programs, on green tech, on making a better world — now dumped into defending against, among other things, an unhinged, belligerent United States.

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It’s not good when everyone hates you

Trump would insist that forcing Europe and Canada to pay more for defense is somehow in our interest. But the fact is that alienating allies and neighbors hurts us too, in a whole range of ways.

First, fighting your allies is expensive. Trump’s trade wars — which again, have been fueled in part by his efforts to bully NATO — are estimated to have cost the US some $317 billion. More, when people in foreign countries see you as a danger and enemy, they make travel plans elsewhere. Unsurprisingly, now that Trump is insulting and attacking Canadians and Europeans, US tourism has cratered. The industry dropped $16.6 billion in 2025 and is heading for another $21 billion drop in 2026.

Part of that is because of Trump’s horrific nativist border policies which have led to the arrest and torture of some tourists. But part of it is simply that people like Canadians — a huge part of the US tourism market — simply don’t want to spend money in a country that is actively threatening them.

Second, when you bully your allies over and over, they no longer have much incentive to help you on issues of mutual security. In fact, they have reason to believe that your security is not mutual and that they are better off when you are weaker than when you are stronger.

You can see this in Iran. After Trump blundered into the war and Iran retaliated by closing the Strait of Hormuz, very serious NYT foreign policy columnist Thomas Friedman argued that NATO should bail him out. Friedman pointed out, correctly, that for NATO “to sit on the sidelines and let Iran’s malign regime, with its poisonous ideology, take hostage the Strait of Hormuz … would keep the world’s most critical oil lifeline in a state of permanent instability.”

What Friedman doesn’t seem to consider, though, is that the US under Trump is also a malign regime with a poisonous ideology, and that, given its size and power, the US has a lot more potential for creating global instability than Iran does. Iran can threaten global oil supplies, but it can’t credibly threaten to invade Canada or fight NATO countries over Greenland.

If you are France, or the UK, or Denmark, or Germany, you have to consider what happens if you rush in to help Trump take the strait back from Iran. At best, if you succeed, you’ve empowered Trump, and what would an empowered Trump do next? It seems likely he’d invade someone else — and again, at least two of the countries on his list are NATO members.

Letting Iran open and close the strait at will is not ideal. But neither is letting Trump attack anyone in the world he wants. You can hardly blame NATO for deciding its best move is to step back and let their enemies beat the snot out of each other.

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We’re no one’s ally

Trump has made it clear over the last decade, and especially in his second term, that he wants no alliances based on mutual interest and respect. He wants to be the biggest bully on earth, and force everyone to genuflect before him like he’s an uglier, more orange Vito Corleone.

In this goal he has succeeded. He has no allies. He is powerful enough that people like NATO Secretary Mark Rutte will humor him and sit placidly by as he threatens Greenland in their presence …

… but when Trump needs help — as he does in Iran — no one will provide it. He’s shown that he considers his success to be everyone else’s failure, and so everyone wants him to fail.

Hopefully at some point we have a more responsible government which does not want to invade Greenland. But even then, how can Greenland, or Canada, or France, or anyone, trust a US in which voters might choose to give the nuclear codes to a Trump, or a Vance, or a Rubio?

Republicans, in backing Trump, have shown that, in the name of marginal and imaginary political gains at home, they will honor no treaties and protect no allies abroad. It is not just Trump who is the enemy. It is his party — and unfortunately also the voters who gave that party power once, and may well do so again.

Perhaps if Democrats convincingly crush fascism and transform the US political landscape someone, somewhere, might trust us again at some point. For now, though, and for the foreseeable future, no other country is going to defend us or fight for our security. They would be fools if they did. We want to conquer Greenland. What more is there to say?

That’s it for today

We’ll be back with more tomorrow. If you appreciate today’s PN, please do your part to keep us free by signing up for a paid subscription.

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“Where’s my Roy Cohn?” Trump wailed in 2017, after Jeff Sessions heeded his ethical obligation to recuse himself from the Russia investigation.

The president demanded an attorney general in the mold of Sen. Joe McCarthy’s famously ruthless sidekick, one who would subordinate every professional, moral, and legal obligation to his boss’s needs. All his predecessors had enjoyed this privilege, Trump insisted, conveniently ignoring the fact that Attorney General Janet Reno let independent counsel Ken Starr run roughshod over Bill Clinton, and Trump would likely have lost in 2016 if FBI Director James Comey had been on any kind of presidential leash.

Nine years later, Trump has finally found his Roy Cohn, but with a prodigious aptitude for sycophancy substituted for the personal demons.

“I love working for President Trump. It’s the greatest honor of a lifetime,” Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche simpered in April after his predecessor Pam Bondi got pushed out. “And if President Trump chooses to nominate somebody else and asks me to go do something else, I’ll say, ‘Thank you very much, I love you, sir.’”

Roy Cohn never got to run a federal law enforcement agency, but the degradation of the Justice Department that began during Bondi’s tenure has only accelerated under Blanche’s leadership. The organization has shrunk in both numbers and esteem, as competent prosecutors are pushed out and judges decry the flagrant abuse of the judicial process perpetrated by the government.

This week, the Senate will get a chance to weigh in on Blanche’s performance, with hearings today and Thursday before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Barring something very unexpected, they will vote to confirm Blanche as permanent attorney general, blessing the chaos that will follow.

Republicans order the shit sandwich

As they typically do when the president serves up a shit sandwich of corruption seasoned with a healthy schmear of self-dealing, a handful of Republican senators are pretending that they might not give Trump what he wants.

Sen. Thom Tillis, who is retiring next year, has the power to sink Blanche by deadlocking the vote to advance him out of the Judiciary Committee.

Last month, Tillis made some mouth noises about requiring Blanche to hold firm on January 6 rioters. In fact, the DOJ has been working assiduously to do the opposite. Just last week, they forced a federal judge to vacate the seditious conspiracy convictions of several Proud Boys gang members.

Tillis still hasn’t said how he’ll vote, but after meeting one-on-one with Blanche in June, he announced he had “a positive predisposition” toward the nominee. His only reservation is about the “Anti-Weaponization” slush fund that Trump and Blanche cooked up to “settle” a lawsuit against the IRS.

Blanche claims the slush fund, which earmarked $1.8 billion in taxpayer money for Trump’s supporters, is DOA, although he refuses to put it in writing. But an immunity deal to protect Trump and his family from prosecution for tax crimes, worth perhaps $100 million to Trump personally, remains in force.

Texas Sen. John Cornyn, who lost his primary after Trump endorsed his opponent Ken Paxton, is grumbling about the Get Out of Tax Jail Free card. And Sen. Josh Hawley howls performatively about the need for the DOJ to prosecute anyone who uses the mail to send abortion medications every time someone puts a microphone near him.

But ultimately this is all for show. Republicans might let Sen. Susan Collins withhold her blessing, but they wouldn’t be holding the hearing if they didn’t have the votes.

Republicans are going to confirm Todd Blanche as attorney general, and they own everything that comes after that.

Witch hunts … but for real

If past is prologue, what comes after will be a steady stream of political prosecutions.

Blanche’s tenure started with an indictment of Comey, Trump’s longtime nemesis, for posting a photo of seashells arranged to spell "86 47." Other political enemies include California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who said in June that the DOJ had subpoenaed his family's financial records, and Virginia state Sen. Louise Lucas, the 82-year-old president pro tempore of the Virginia Senate, whose office and business were raided just two weeks after she spearheaded a redistricting referendum.

The DOJ’s subpoena of former Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell was blocked by the courts, and the prosecution of New York Attorney General Letitia James seems to have run aground. But Blanche knows that the only way to hang onto this job is to produce a steady stream of arrests of his boss’s enemies.

He’s currently parked a squad of lawyers in Florida and convened a grand jury in the Fort Pierce courthouse supervised by Judge Aileen Cannon. They’re investigating everything from the FBI’s inquiries into Russian election interference in 2016 to Trump’s election interference and stolen documents prosecutions.

Under the aegis of right-wing commentator Joe diGenova, who hasn’t prosecuted a case since the mid-’90s, they’ve fired off subpoenas to Comey, former DNI James Clapper, and former CIA director John Brennan. The theory undergirding this operation is that all of these disparate events are part of one, vast, ongoing conspiracy to get Trump, and thus the statute of limitations, which would normally bar prosecutions of 10-year-old “crimes,” does not apply.

Meanwhile Blanche’s deputies crack the whip on local US Attorneys Offices, demanding indictments of protesters, dissidents, and other enemies of the regime.

In Tennessee, that led to the indictment of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who dared to embarrass the Trump administration by fighting his rendition to CECOT. It also led to the dismissal of all charges when the judge found that the case was brought for vindictive purposes under pressure from Blanche’s henchmen.

In DC, US Attorney Jeanine Pirro suffered a string of embarrassing failures, as juries refused to indict or convict defendants she claims are hardened criminals. She’s now managed to indict David Hearn, a former Olympian, for vandalizing the Reflecting Pool — a case which is virtually guaranteed to fall apart faster than a plastic pool liner doused with hydrogen peroxide.

The US Attorney’s Office in Chicago has been the scene of the most embarrassing public disintegration, culminating in the dismissal of all charges against the “Broadview Six” amid revelations of gross prosecutorial misconduct.

US Attorney Andrew Boutros was forced to admit that he’d known for months about the tainted grand jury presentations, and has since had to drop at least three more cases tied to the same prosecutor. And yet, Boutros managed to step in it again last week, appearing at a press conference with Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel at which he disclosed details of a sealed criminal complaint.

For at least the third time in a month, Boutros was summoned to the courtroom and ordered to explain his “clear violation” of a judicial order.

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Slush fund melts

Blanche’s most scandalous act of corruption was the “settlement” he cooked up to create the “Anti-Weaponization” slush fund.

In January, Donald Trump and his sons sued the IRS over the wrongful disclosure of their tax returns by a federal contractor in 2020. Instead of moving to dismiss the case for being outside the statute of limitations, the DOJ studiously avoided entering an appearance.

Trump’s lawyers secured multiple delays and eventually informed the court that the case had been “settled.” The Justice Department announced that it was creating a settlement fund to disburse almost $1.8 billion to compensate people harmed by the Biden administration. The Proud Boys and their allies rejoiced, anticipating seven- or eight-figure payouts. The next day, Blanche alone signed an “addendum” purporting to immunize Trump, his family, and his businesses from future IRS audits.

This prospect of the government handing tax dollars over to people who beat cops was too much for Senate Republicans, and eventually Blanche agreed to drop the plan — although he wasn’t willing to put that in writing, or to let go of the deal to protect Trump from future audits.

But Judge Kathleen Williams, who presided over the IRS case, wasn’t finished either. Last week, she produced a scathing order calling the DOJ out for colluding with Trump’s personal lawyers to gin up a fake lawsuit and then a fake settlement. Courts can only adjudicate actual controversies, and there’s no live dispute when the president is both the plaintiff and the defendant — a point Trump has effectively conceded by insisting in court and on social media that he has the right to control every inch of the executive branch.

Judge Williams barred the parties from citing the “settlement” as evidence that Trump is immune from future prosecution for tax crimes. She excoriated Blanche and Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward for violating their ethical duty to recuse themselves from cases involving their former clients — by which she meant Trump, of course, as well as multiple January 6 defendants who were represented by Woodward. She referred Trump’s current personal lawyer, Alejandro Brito, to the Florida Bar, and directed that a copy of her ruling be sent to the New York and DC Bars, where there are pending ethics complaints against Blanche and Woodward.

Presumption of irregularity

Blanche and Woodward are the highest-ranking DOJ lawyers to be referred for professional discipline — but they’re not the only ones! Blanche’s tenure has seen multiple lawyers in his employ held in contempt and cited for professional misconduct.

This is an astonishing erosion of credibility for an agency which formerly enjoyed total respect from the courts.

In February, a federal judge in Oregon tossed the DOJ’s demand to seize the state’s voter rolls, writing that “the presumption of regularity that has been previously extended to Plaintiff that it could be taken at its word — with little doubt about its intentions and stated purposes — no longer holds.” In March, a judge in New Jersey railed that “generations of Assistant US Attorneys had built the goodwill of that office for your generation to destroy it within a year.”

In May, a federal judge in Rhode Island excoriated lawyers from the Enforcement and Affirmative Litigation Branch at Main Justice in DC for their “appalling lack of candor.” This is a flashing red light that the institution Blanche leads is in crisis. And that crisis has made it impossible to hire and retain competent lawyers.

The Justice Department used to be the most prestigious law firm in America, able to recruit mid-career professionals from white shoe law firms. Now its been reduced to recruiting on social media after waiving the grade and experience requirements for new hires. Roughly 16,000 employees have left since Trump’s second term began, including nearly a thousand Assistant US Attorneys and the vast majority of the Civil Rights Division’s roughly 600-person career staff.

Several US Attorney’s offices now require nothing beyond a law degree and a bar card — plus a willingness to make terrible legal arguments in support of the president’s agenda.

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Ballot tampering

Perhaps most alarming is Blanche’s willingness to interfere with the upcoming midterms.

In May, he endorsed Trump’s claims about election fraud in 2020, citing a “ton of evidence” that has somehow eluded every court and independent expert for the past six years.

Blanche’s department is suing states for full access to their voter rolls, thus far without success.

In Fulton County, Georgia, a court quashed a subpoena for poll workers’ personal information, found the statute of limitations on DOJ’s pet 2020-fraud theory had “long expired” and that the prosecutors pursuing it were “now unquestionably under the current President’s control” — after which the FBI fired two analysts who’d flagged the same investigation as thin and political. The Civil Rights Division sent election officials in all 50 states a letter threatening criminal prosecution over noncitizen voting. Blanche has even floated sending ICE agents to polling places (although he later denied it).

By voting to confirm him, Republicans are endorsing all of this. They are putting their stamp of approval on a Justice Department that investigates the president’s enemies, protects his friends, and treats every question of law as a question of loyalty first. It’s a grotesque perversion of America’s legal system, and it’s frankly beyond anything Roy Cohn could have imagined.

That’s it for today

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As of this writing, Mitch McConnell is still among the living.

It’s been a month since the 84-year-old senator from Kentucky was taken from his Washington home in an ambulance, and he was finally heard from on Sunday, releasing a statement and photograph that left most questions about his health unanswered.

At this point, it wouldn’t be surprising if McConnell doesn’t return to the Senate before his term ends in January; unlike the rest of us, members of Congress enjoy unlimited paid medical leave to take at their leisure. But even if he recovers, this is a good time to take stock of the legacy McConnell leaves behind as one of the most influential congressional leaders of the modern era.

McConnell was an extremely shrewd and effective backroom operator, especially when he was in the opposition and deployed his considerable skills and creativity to the project of obstruction. In fact, almost everything about how the contemporary Republican Party operates in Congress — its aversion to solving problems, its destruction of the norms that used to allow the institution to operate, its embrace of chaos and dysfunction — can be at least partly attributed to McConnell.

To be generous, there were moments when he displayed glimmers of morality, especially when offering criticisms of Donald Trump’s worst abuses. It’s to his credit that Trump never liked him. But again and again, those moments proved fleeting, and McConnell became Trump’s most important enabler.

Unlike the backbench MAGA cheerleaders whose enthusiasm never waned, McConnell actually had the power to determine whether Trump’s corruption and attack on American democracy would continue — and he always made the wrong choice.

A one-man assault on the system

Political scientists often describe how the last few decades have been characterized by asymmetric polarization: While both parties have moved away from the center ideologically, Republicans have moved farther and faster. But alongside the evolution of its ideas about policy, the GOP underwent a striking shift in its beliefs about how policy should be made.

Mitch McConnell was the architect of that change.

McConnell became minority leader after Republicans lost control of the chamber in 2006, and would stay in charge of his caucus for 18 years, longer than any Republican in the Senate’s history. While he may not have been the first to push against established norms — his longtime Democratic counterpart, Harry Reid, was a bare-knuckle partisan brawler who was not averse to bending the rules — McConnell took things farther than anyone had before.

The first key moment came when Barack Obama was elected in 2008. Though Obama had won a sweeping victory and the country was in the midst of a catastrophic economic crisis, McConnell told his caucus they had a path back to power: Obstruct everything Obama tried to do, regardless of whether Republicans had any substantive objections to it. Only if they forced Obama to fail could they retake power.

If it seemed like the parties were working together, he explained, Obama would get the credit; if all the public saw was gridlock and nasty infighting, the president would get the blame.

“If [Obama] was for it,” said former Ohio Sen. George Voinovich about McConnell’s strategy, “we had to be against it.” Every procedural tactic would be deployed, including turning the filibuster from an occasional tool used to stop major legislation to a weapon fired at almost any legislation the majority party proposed.

At every point, McConnell went farther than congressional leaders had before.

When Republicans took control of the Senate following the 2014 election, he instituted a virtual blockade of Obama’s judicial nominations; while the Senate had confirmed 132 judges in the previous two years, that number fell to just 20 in the final two years of Obama’s term.

Which brings us to the signature episode of McConnell’s tenure: what he did when Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died in early 2016.

Faced with the possibility that the balance of the court could shift from 5-4 in conservatives’ favor to 5-4 liberal, McConnell had to act fast. So “without consulting his colleagues,” the Washington Post reported in 2017, “McConnell declared that no Supreme Court nominee from then-President Barack Obama would ever be considered.”

It was unprecedented in American history: By simply refusing to hear Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland, McConnell effectively changed the size of the court from nine justices to eight. He then gave Republicans a shamelessly disingenuous talking point to repeat in order to justify their power grab — that no justice should ever be appointed in an election year so the voters could weigh in.

Just as everyone knew he would, McConnell reversed himself four years later when Ruth Bader Ginsburg died less than two months before the 2020 election. Though McConnell had held open Scalia’s seat for over a year, he made sure Amy Coney Barrett would be confirmed to fill Ginsburg’s seat in just 39 days. He said later, “one of my proudest moments was when I looked Barack Obama in the eye and I said, ‘Mr. President, you will not fill the Supreme Court vacancy.’”

To be that cynical and hypocritical took gall. But it also took an awareness of something McConnell understood when many others didn’t: There is no political cost for procedural radicalism.

To work in Washington is to be keenly aware of the norms, habits, and procedures that make the federal government work. McConnell realized that while behavior that violates those norms and habits might generate outrage within the political world — stern editorials from the Post and the Times, pressing questions on the Sunday shows, Brookings Institution reports about the degradation of democracy — the overwhelming majority of voters either couldn’t care less, or would forget all about it before long.

In other words, playing by the rules is for suckers; what matters is power, and winning, and getting what you want.

And win he did: Republicans got those Supreme Court seats, and now they enjoy a 6-3 supermajority that has overturned Roe v. Wade, given Trump the powers of a dictator (and permission to commit crimes while in office), dismantled the Voting Rights Act, and so much more.

Every time another appalling decision comes down, you can almost hear Mitch McConnell smirking.

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Trump’s most important enabler

McConnell’s relationship with Donald Trump went through enough ups and downs to fill an entire book, but in the end, it comes down to this: Not only was McConnell there for Trump again and again when it counted, he was the one person who could have forestalled Trump’s disastrous return to the White House. He chose not to, despite having condemned Trump’s actions in fomenting the January 6 insurrection.

Like some other Republicans in the immediate aftermath of that horror, having cowered in fear of their lives from the mob Trump sent their way, McConnell was critical of Trump and dismissed the conspiracy theory of a stolen election. But then he stepped in to ensure that Trump would be able to make his ultimate return.

Had Trump been convicted in his second impeachment, he would have been barred from running for president again. McConnell made sure that wouldn’t happen, first by insisting that the impeachment trial had to be delayed until after the president left office. Given how raw emotions were immediately after the insurrection, it’s entirely possible that Trump would have lost that vote if the impeachment had happened quickly. By putting off the process, McConnell gave Trump’s allies time to put pressure on Republican senators to get behind him again.

Then when the vote finally took place after Joe Biden’s inauguration, McConnell voted to acquit — on the grounds that a president can’t be convicted once he has left office (which is nowhere in the Constitution).

The final vote was 57-43 in favor of conviction, 10 votes short of the two-thirds majority necessary. There is little question that if McConnell had told his caucus to convict Trump — and voted for conviction himself — there would have been more than enough votes, and Trump would never have returned to the White House.

Yet right after the vote, McConnell gave a speech on the Senate floor calling Trump “practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day” — this after he made sure he would be acquitted. It was as if a juror walked out of court and said, “The defendant definitely committed the murder. But we decided to let him go anyway.”

It was a microcosm of McConnell’s entire relationship with Trump: He let everyone know that he found Trump personally distasteful, but made sure Trump could get away with anything.

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What McConnell’s legacy adds up to

McConnell never minded playing the villain; with a secure Senate seat, he was happy to take incoming fire if he got what he wanted. For many years, he was the most unpopular politician in America, because all Democrats hated him and plenty of tea party Republicans did, too. The latter group were largely mistaken, however; they saw him as a representative of the establishment, but didn’t credit him for how he was dragging government policy to the right.

In 2020, the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer wrote that “for months, I searched for the larger principles or sense of purpose that animates McConnell … finally, someone who knows him very well told me, ‘Give up. You can look and look for something more in him, but it isn’t there. I wish I could tell you that there is some secret thing that he really believes in, but he doesn’t.’”

That’s only partly true; it’s more accurate to say that McConnell believed in whatever would maximize his own power and that of his party. His cynicism and even contempt for voters were boundless. No one fought harder to expand the ability of corporations and the ultrawealthy to spend all they want to influence politics; when your TV screen and inbox are filled with negative ads every two years, you can thank Mitch McConnell. Was that because he sincerely preferred a system in which the rich can buy elections, or just that he knew that the more the rich are in control, the better it would be for Republicans?

In the end, it’s hard to know for sure, and what matters is this: The United States government is profoundly worse for Mitch McConnell having had so much sway over it for so long — less efficient, less effective, less humane, and more corrupt.

As they start preparing for the massive reconstruction project that faces them when they take back power, Democrats should learn this important lesson from McConnell: while the public may recoil at certain kinds of substantive radicalism, they will barely notice procedural radicalism.

That’s what they’ll need to exercise if they are to undo the damage that Trump and McConnell have wrought. If they don’t, they’ll find themselves stymied and forced into half-measures — and that would be Mitch McConnell’s final triumph.

That’s it for today

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The sudden death this weekend of Lindsey Graham at age 71 — young, by today’s gerontocratic standards — is a personal parable for the changes within the conservative movement and modern Republican Party during Graham’s political career.

Indeed, few national elected officials so perfectly bridge the rapid rise of the Newt Gingrich-led GOP to the steady gutting of American conservatism by Donald Trump over the past decade.

Graham is not the sole member of that bridge generation; the career of fellow Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley, for example, spans back further, to the days when Barry Goldwater remained conservatism’s intellectual beacon. But Graham perfectly embodies the post-1990s morphing of conservatism into the malignant force that, today, animates Eric Hoffer’s famous observation that every great cause “begins as a movement, becomes as business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.”

Southern prosecutor stands out

Fittingly, Graham was first elected to the House in the 1994 “Republican Revolution” cycle.

The 73 Republican freshmen whom Gingrich helped recruit, fund, and train included a number of ambitious members. Some, like Mark Foley and Mark Sanford, later disgraced themselves via sex scandals; Joe Scarborough, the future talk show host and Trump critic, later built a career as a crossover moderate and party defector.

“They came in with such high ambition and on such a self-proclaimed moral high ground. Especially for guys who professed that they were setting a higher standard, they failed at the benchmark they set for themselves,” wrote Linda Killian, author of the definite book on the 1994 GOP class, “The Freshmen: What Happened to the Republican Revolution?”

To answer the rhetorical question posed by Killian’s book subtitle, Lindsey Graham is what happened.

Four years after his arrival in Washington, Graham got a rare, early-career opportunity to separate himself from that famed “revolutionary” class: He was appointed to serve as one of 13 House managers for Bill Clinton’s impeachment. A graduate of University of South Carolina’s law school, Graham argued that Clinton’s “process” crimes — perjury, obstruction of justice — rose to the Constitution’s “high crimes and misdemeanors” standard for impeachment, which he and the other dozen GOP House impeachment managers recommended to the full chamber.

Like future Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh and media firebrand Ann Coulter, Graham quickly realized that Gingrich’s slash-and-burn attack style rewarded those willing to destroy opponents. An entire generation of Republicans, including Darrell Issa, Jim Jordan and James Comer, later emerged as aggressive avatars of the same approach to political power and attention that Graham, Gingrich, and their mid-’90s cohorts introduced.

Some paid a price for their aggressions. One of only two Republican impeachment managers more junior than Graham, California’s James Rogan, first elected in 1996, lost his seat in 2000 to none other than Adam Schiff. Most notably, after his impeachment crusade and his unforced policy errors on Medicare backfired on him, Speaker Gingrich resigned in failure after just four years leading the House.

Graham, by contrast, shrewdly combined his impeachment bona fides, his emergent friendship with veteran Arizona Sen. John McCain during the 2000 presidential campaign, and his facility on radio and television in the early years of Fox News to catapult himself from unknown backbencher into a solid, second-tier national party fixture. Alongside conservative Democrat and defeated 2000 Democratic VP nominee Joe Lieberman, Graham became one of the McCain-led troika of free-thinking “mavericks.”

It was not the last time Graham, the chameleon, would change his political spots to fit what he believed — often wrongly — was the Republican zeitgeist.

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The war monger

Whatever lingering tensions existed between the Republican Party’s Bush and McCain factions largely disappeared after September 11 and the start of Bush’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. As did almost every congressional Republican, Graham rallied behind Bush’s decisions and rhetoric. At the time, the party’s isolationist wing was so small it could fit inside an SUV.

Graham thundered on behalf of Bush’s “war of choice” in Iraq. He established himself as a foreign policy interventionist who parroted McCain’s calls to support Bush’s “stay the course” plan — including the ill-fated 2007 troop “surge” that Bush’s Pentagon believed would finally deliver an American victory in Iraq.

When he and 16 other Republicans ran against Donald Trump for the 2016 presidential nomination, Graham dismissed Trump as a dangerous kook who would destroy the Republican Party.

Yes, some of Graham’s critiques stemmed from Trump’s policy ignorance, reckless financial and personal history, and crass behavior and language. But he also mocked Trump as an unserious foreign policy and military isolationist best relegated to the GOP’s kiddie table with the likes of Ron Paul.

Graham decried Trump’s major April 2016 foreign policy speech as unserious: “This speech was unnerving. It was pathetic in its content, and it was scary in terms of its construct. If you had any doubt that Donald Trump is not fit to be commander in chief, this speech should’ve removed it.”

Unnerving, pathetic, scary — powerful words. But Trump shocked Graham and the crowded field of 2016 Republican presidential wannabes by vanquishing them in surprisingly easy fashion. Although Graham may have secretly hoped that Hillary Clinton — whose foreign policy instincts and policy command far better matched his own — would win that November, Trump eked out a narrow Electoral College victory.

It was time for Lindsey to change his colors again.

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Lindsey ❤️s Donny

Has America ever witnessed a capitulation on policy, politics, and personal integrity so completely self-abnegating as Graham’s conversion from snarling Trump critic into swooning Trump cheerleader and apologist?

His reversal was — to borrow the late senator’s preferred adjectives — unnerving, pathetic, and scary.

The same Graham who used mere process crimes to impeach Bill Clinton turned a blind eye to Trump’s far more numerous actual crimes, constitutional violations, and self-dealing corruption. The same Graham who loathed Trump for mocking his close friend McCain’s service as a prisoner of war turned tail and praised Trump’s toughness as commander in chief. The same Graham who dismissed Trump as a fool and kook turned into an eyelash-batting, sacrilegious fanboy who, in front of Trump, recently told him “you’re not far behind God.”

For a brief moment on January 6, 2021, after he and his Republican colleagues survived a Trump-instigated attack on the Capitol, Graham seemed to come to his senses.

“Trump and I, we had a hell of a journey,” he pronounced from the well of the Senate, sounding like the Graham of 2016 again. “I hate it being this way. All I can say is count me out. Enough is enough.”

But just two weeks later, Graham could not muster the courage to join seven of his fellow Republican senators to vote to convict Trump during his second Senate impeachment trial.

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Dying of shame

Lindsey Graham died a coward. His three-decade career in national politics should be remembered for more than his shameless, pusillanimous capitulations — but not, unfortunately, for some noble pursuit or purpose he used his chameleon-like political skills to secure. He should instead be remembered for using his power to bow and scrape, to change his political colors, largely if not solely in service to himself.

Conservative figures like the deathly-ill Mitch McConnell or Chief Justice John Roberts have been described as destroyers and “gravediggers” of American democracy. But at least they have wielded their shovels to bury America’s constitutional traditions and safeguards in pursuit of their own pinched and petty political philosophies.

Lindsey Graham, American chameleon, did nothing of the sort. He cowered and capitulated for three decades in Congress merely to be at the center of power. From 1994 revolutionary to 2026 poltroon, he embodies the movement-to-business-to-racket transformation of modern conservatism. He lived for nothing and died the same way.

May he rest in pusillanimity.

That’s it for today

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The PN Pod goes live every Friday at around 2pm Eastern. We’re off next week because Aaron will be on vacation, but will be back on July 24. Until then, we hope you enjoy the show!